Author Archives: tim

Google are continually looking to serve more relevant results as quickly as possible. Leveraging information from people you know, to customise and improve your search engine results.

The new talking point from Google is the launch of the +1 button on search pages. Launched in the US yesterday, it’s only a matter of time before we start to see it on search results in Australia. The new feature allows users to click to recommend your ads, search results and webpage’s.

The purpose of the button is for users to recommend websites which their Google account friends and contacts can view, delivering more customised results based on personal and friend preferences. Over the next few weeks, for English searches on Google.com, the +1 button will be rolled out.

To be able to see the new button, you must be logged into a Google account in order for Google to identify you and your likes, as well as taking into consideration the recommendations of your friends with Google accounts. This will become more powerful as more users sign in or register Google accounts and use them regularly.

Eventually you will be able to add the +1 button to your webpages, similar to a Facebook “Like” button to allow your user to recommend content through their Google account. Thus expanding on their profile and helping Google determine in future the best results based on your profile and recommendations.
See Google’s video for more information:

Jumping quickly on this new feature, a new plugin extension that potentially competes with +1 for Firefox, Safari and Chrome called “+Like”. The extension leverages the Facebook “like” functionality in the Google search results. Google +1 however will be available to all who have a Google account. “+Like” requires a plugin that won’t be a default for users and would need to be voluntarily installed, but with the number of people already logged into Facebook, there could potentially be more traction here.

Will this impact on my SEM ads or SEO results?

At this stage it is hard to tell what impact the +1 Button will have on the search results. The idea of impression traffic decreasing if Google deems a site irrelevant to a particular user is unknown. Google are anticipating that +1 will drive more qualified traffic to the site, which is great for site owners and advertisers who should see an improvement on engagement and quality of visitors.

Keep an eye out for when the +1 button hits a search results page near you.

Google are placing a greater emphasis on the location aspect of their search results and increasing relevance to the user. Place Search and Google Places is becoming one of the fastest growing commodities in search. Developed to deliver highly relevant results which lead to quality clicks and improvement in site engagement, as well as improving the overall user experience to help locate the best results and save time.

One of the newer innovations from Google is HotPot. Defined as a “location based recommendation engine” for Google Places, HotPot is powered by the user and their friends. HotPot personalises the search results to leverage your reviews of businesses or services and tailor your search results to “match what you like”.

Currently place pages aggregate external review data from sources such as Yelp, Eatability and TrueLocal. HotPot will encourage engagement with rating and reviewing businesses directly from your Google profile with preferences of likes and dislikes being stored and used by the recommendation engine.

HotPot leverages a large database of places. Google’s algorithm takes your ratings and recommends other places similar to the ones you already like. The idea of being able to rate a place on the go has not been neglected.  Integration to rate and review is enabled through Mobile Maps on the Android.

Sharing ratings with your friends personalises the results further displaying to you recommendations of a place or places your friend likes within the search results page.

Has this been done before?

HotPot does not seem to have any check-in functionality which leaves it separate from the likes of Foursquare and Facebook Places. HotPot is focused on the review and ratings side of the coin at this stage, though this is an area they may move into or make partnership with another brand to try and increase participation.

HotPot looks to move along the lines of socialising places like Facebook but with more information which is highly relevant. Interestingly Facebook have been making updates with their Places feature with “Popular Places” linking your friends with places they have visited. So far it is limited to “Likes” with no review or rating functionality.

What should you do?

Similar to Google Places, HotPot uses photo, review and location information from other sites. Businesses will need to look at gaining a strong presence on review sites; business contact details must be prominent on their website.

Ensure your site in particular the infrastructure is optimised, and that your pages are crawlable for Google to include relevant information in their HotPot results.

Over the last few months we’ve watched Google roll out a host of innovative changes to their organic search results including Google Instant, Places (local results) and Preview.  In their continued effort to enhance the user experience (and we suspect keep visitors at their site longer), they have now started to expand the type of rich information (also referred to as rich snippets) they show visitors in their organic search results.

Live Results

The next time you’re dying to know how your team is doing with the latest scores from an NBA or NHL game, jump onto Google to access this information instantly through the search results page. Google is providing live scores and results streamed from the NBA and NHL official websites.

Doing a search for “NBA” or “NHL” now provides a search result for the official website with rich information snippets of live scores, deep links to highlights, standings, news and even ticket information. The user journey is now made quicker and easier to locate the most relevant webpage in a timely manner.

See below the NBA’s version of rich information snippets in search:

Google’s partnerships with these sports associations change the way we see an organic results for Brand terms. This rich information is too hard to ignore where the first result bears a stronger presence on the page than any other result. What makes this more intriguing is clicking on the “show more” link at the bottom of the organic result. The rich snippet drops down revealing the rest of the results and upcoming fixtures in to near future. See below the “NBA” example where the extended version of the rich information snippet drops the other results below the fold leaving only 2 other organic results to compete.

Keeping in line with Google’s algorithm changes and search enhancements to improve the search experience, Google has placed a strong emphasis and importance on brand searches to deliver relevant results to the user. The search landscape continues to evolve and incorporating rich information in a search result gives brands an opportunity to truly stand alone from its search competition.

What this means for businesses?

The rich snippets would help business to dominate their brand presence within the search results. Businesses should expect to find many new applications for rich snippets within the search engines in the future.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup format, microformats or RDFa markups by wrapping existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. It is important to ensure your site is tagged to utilise rich information. As Google builds and learns how this new information is helpful to users, they will expand on the application and coverage across more sites.

Youtube is the largest hub of videos on the Internet today and allows viewers to watch almost anything, from sports highlights to one of Will Smith’s music videos. Making sure your video can be found is the difference between getting a couple of hundred views and reaching millions. Similarly to a website, video page content can be optimised to help search engines index and rank them based on relevance to particular keywords.

Tagging your video with keyword rich titles, descriptions and tags is a good way to improve your videos presence from a search perspective. Now the actual video content will become increasingly important to the way a video is indexed.

Youtube recently launched a new feature that allows you to upload a transcript of your video, which is then synched with the audio in the video. This transcript not only assists with indexing the video, but more importantly it allows deaf users to read through the video content captions and provides language support.

The example video below leverages this new feature:

The transcript of the video content is turned into timed captions on Youtube which are clickable and take the user directly to the position in the video where the caption of speech takes place. This feature enhances the user’s ability to skip to certain points in the video, rather than blindly guessing where the best moments exist.

Video Optimisation

This technology also emphasises the importance of optimising video content. While it is still important to optimise the headings, tags and descriptions, the captioned content provides yet another area for content producers to further optimise the video. While I have yet to conduct any tests I can only imagine that the words you use, especially within the first few minutes, will eventually have an impact on where your video shows for a particular search query.

Youtube has hinted that there is an automatic transcript tool in the pipeline that will decipher and generate a transcript on Youtube. Once this is in place, there will be no need to post your own transcript, although depending on accuracy, some may find writing their own transcripts to be more accurate than relying on the technology.

Whether your goal is to improve the accessibility of your video for the hearing impaired or garner a wider audience the words you use are now more important than ever and when combined with the right video tags, titles and descriptions should help bring you one more step closer to becoming a Youtube star.