Following on from my rant about never having to leave Google.  Where I commented on on the recent changes in PPC where you can Compare products such as Loans.   Now you can see prices and pictures for commodities/every day shopping items.  On the Google blog they give a screen grab and examples for stand alone as below and inline on the right hand side.  As this is on a PPC basis it will make sure that all serious competitors are spending as much as possible in this One-up-man-ship-advert-arms-race. And my only concern is about my beloved SEO.  Why would you click on the boring SERPs when the information is available like this to the side.  Mixed with the movement of the adwords from absolute right to right aligned to SERPs – the classic Pareto rule of PPC Versus SEO Click from SERPs is moving to more in favour of the paid stuff.  Well, they are a media company with targets of growth like the rest of us!

Product Ads on Google

Its another move into supply chain integration and control demand!

When Google starts to have its own warehouse and fulfilment team. You really won’t need to leave Google!

Still love them and hate them in equal measures. Or is this just jealousy that I didn’t think of it first?

Tags: General Comment, google, Shopping

Here are some definitions of the 3 main kinds of searches that a user might do. They are important as they hold the intent of the users and if you believe this, might influence the response and what is relevant results from a search engine!.

Navigational Search
A navigational search is a specified search and is successful if your product is a specific brand name. Searches like ‘Tesco’ or ‘Diesel Jeans’ means that that those websites optimising for that brand would appear above all the others so for smaller companies it is not necessarily the best way to optimise your site as it is highly competitive against other more commercial companies.

If you are selling or are the owner of a brand, people are effectively looking for you, but may end up on a site that is optimised for your product. Affiliates and domain squatters can do very well here. This can also apply to events, generics, news items or popular culture.

Informational Search
This is a better way for small businesses to optimise their site. They can aim to rank highly for a simple phrase and make it more plausible. A couple of words creating a generic phrase are far more successful than depending on brand names to get traffic to a site. Phrases such as “tyres Chiswick” can be far more effective for businesses rather than a brand of tyres. The risk of using a brand is that it is likely to be supplied by big chain stores nationwide that already have a good amount of traffic to their site.

This could be a bit of a leveler on the internet.  The internet was meant to allow small businesses to compete with anyone, anywhere.  In practice this is not the case, but especially on local search or map searches smaller players can win and from my hunt for new car tyres yesterday, small businesses who register for local business on Google appeared on a map in the no1 slot and did very well in the map channel.

Transactional Search
These searches are far more specific and contain a lot of words that identify what a consumer wants in finer detail. For example “cheap tyres Hammersmith London (& maybe brand).” All of the sites that contain these words will come up in the search engine results and your company may be there but the amount of people using this method of searching are fewer than the others.

Fewer in quantity, but fairly precise.  The longest keyword phrase I have seen that has come to a site I have worked on was 18 words in length.  Funnily enough, 100% conversion rate to transaction.  Now the quantity of unique long tail terms can be big, but may only happen once or twice per year.  But you might be lucky and if you are in the right business the total volume might be huge!

To conclude
Keywords definitely vary by industry and country.  And depending on your industry, and your type of product, the age/demographics or sophistication levels of your customers and potential customers will depend on your keyword usage.

You will need to understand your customers (marketing 101 don’t forget all that you know from the old world order) and enough you optimise your business and your site to make sure you are found ahead of the competition.

Look at your keyword reports, ask you customers virtually or face-to-face if you can how they found you, how they want to find your service or product.

This is part science, part human skills and a bit of luck.  If you kind of understand your customer you have a chance to satisfy their needs.

Good luck.

Tags: Definitions, General Comment, How-to, Reading, Search Engines, SEO, Usability

Hotels.com Nanobreaks new trend

Did you know the new thing in travel if you don’t have time for a weekend break? Try a  ”Nanobreak”.

In a recent press release from Hotels.com they explain from their extensive data that people are not cancelling their holidays, but instead are changing where they go, and for how long for.  In the Nanobreaks release they talk about a 29% Year on Year increase in people looking for a single night stay. Previously people would go Friday and come back on a Sunday.  Now people are going early Saturday til late on Sunday to squeeze the most out of their trip.

From a UK perspective, the winners are cities like Bournemouth, Brighton, Edingburgh and London.  But also people are taking advantage of some great airfares and travelling to Marrekesch, Venice, Rome, Copenhagen and Nice.

So much so, Hotels.com are currently running a social media campaign around “Nanobreaks” and their onsite page explains it here.

Nanobreaks – the Nanolog campaign from Hotels.com >>

It seems that people are resilent and wont give up on holidays, but will just change where and when they go.

Tags: General Comment, Nanobreaks, Travel, Travel Industry

I only went to day 2 of the conference this year.  And I was pleasantly surprised at some of the great discussions.

4 out of the 5 sessions I went to were useful and the ‘Give it up session’ was fun to close the day.

Over the coming days, and after my holiday I iwll try to be inspired from the talks, apply my own opinions and experience and make some more notes for this site.

Tags: Add new tag, audit, Conferences, Duplicate content, General Comment, London, Pet Hates, Search Engines, SEO, SMX

On a new in my reader is Thats SEO.  Today this post about the role of your IP address in your SEO efforts.  It defines the usual why you need to know where you site is going to reside e.g. “bad neighbourhood” etc etc.  But continues with some explanations of what this actually means.  Too many posts these days, including mine are too brief and dont lay out the context!!  A good read, thank you Raghaven. Oh, and if you want to check to see if your IP is blocked on a number of bad site lists check out what  is my IP address.

If you are ever considering going solo, then reading 10 lessions from a failed start up would be negligent.

On SEOMoz there is some detail, although a pseudo sales pitch, but some interesting facts about what they have seen with their crawl of the web.  Some highlight numbers.  That 2.7% of links are NoFollowed, 73% of these were internal, so site scultping is popular.  I do it.  And 16million pages have the new canonical tag. 

On black hat seo, link to a digest page on recent popular articles, such as “why spam works” ; “How to break captchas”, and more. All in very simple to read articles with a ‘can-do’ attitude.

We all like a good list.  On SEO Optimise they have a non-Google focused list of resources for social meda. Worth checking out.

And as mine are all broken (work ones), its good to look at sitemaps. SEL have published a casestudy. See it here.

Tags: Articles, Business, crawl, General Comment, Industry, IP, SEO, Social Media, Spiders, Tools, Twitter, Widgets

Trying to keep on top of the rss reader is near on impossible.  I have articles bookmarked and I will get to them.  I hope they are not out of date before I get to them !!

A slightly different tack from my normal straight SEO, but believe it or not I know a fair bit about PPC too.  Jennifer Slegg is showing how to stop your competitor from seeing (for competition reasons) or them burning your budget.  See her post called “How to prevent competitors from seeing your Adword ads“.

Once again the MSN Live people have another quality post.  This time they are talking about considerations international sites. The articles lays out some of the issues people have when doing international. They actually very helpfully spell out their criteria for deciding the intended audience of your site.  They list these in this order.  1) ccTLDs 2) Hosting, server location especially for .com .org etc. 3) the language of the body text on the page, 4) the locale of pages that link to the page.  This fits observations made in Google recently.  Thank you MSN.

On SEO theory is an article about duplicate content, causes and the new canonical url tag.  It lays out some things that I haven spouting for a while and is nice to read.  How duplicate content can dilute inbound link benefit, can ruin onsite search and if you are very unlucky a penalty.  But as we know it is more likely to be ignored.

Yahoo have another article about this canonical URL. Ysearch blog.

There were a couple of posts from Matt Cutts that caught my eye this week.  The first is about paid or sponsored links.  And he lays it out quite clearly that they are bad ! And the 2nd is about the number of links on a page.  There is a brief history lesson of why, when processors stopped around 100kb ! And how the rule-of-thumb should be for usability reasons as too many links are hard for users.  It acknowledges that it may follow more than a hundred (which we know from monitoring spiders onsite) but may not! and you will dilute page rank.

There have been in recent weeks many article about how social media is creeping into every day life and can be form an Twitdiction (trying to coin a phrase) and Business Week’s angle is about time management and how sites such as Twitter can actually help productivity.  Today, I posted a tech question and got an answer before I could leave the site !

We all love a classic what not to do to you site.  Here is one one Marketing Pilgram that is fairly good.  Take a look and enjoy.

Tags: Articles, General Comment, International, msn, PPC, PPC. adwords, SEO