Google Increases Search Experience with New Improvements

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , , , — Felipe @ 26 Mar,09

A couple of days ago Google officially announced two new improvements to its results pages, both aimed to deliver and guide users to the exact information they are searching for.

The first improvement involves the use of longer snippets for queries with 3 or more words, a “snippet” is the text you see below the link on Google’s search results pages. Google’s intention is to deliver as much information as possible to help the user decide what site is more relevant to his or her query.

Snippet2

Google say that for longer queries they want to show more information in the search engine results but there are a few areas where what Google has done is unclear.

How is Google formulating these longer snippets? Blending the meta descriptions tag with some relevant text within the page?

Do webmasters need to start creating bigger meta description tags for our pages? Or risk leaving to Google to decide what is more relevant?

We haven’t seen any of these longer snippets besides the examples given by Google’s official blog. So here is an image extracted from Google’s Official Blog.

Picture 8

Some people were worried that Google would show seven and not 10 results on a page but this appears not to be the case.

The second and possibly more  significant improvement is the implementation of a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to the search query and then deliver more and better search refinements.

Search refinements are the suggestions made by Google related to your search query and can be found at the bottom or sometimes at the top of the results pages. Google has been trialing this in medical areas for quite a while now a search for “eczema” or “incontinence” has been showing refinements for a few months.

If you search for Kangaroo Leather Football Boots you will notice that at the bottom Google gives 8 suggestions to different football boots and by looking at the top two results for each of the suggestions made by Google nearly all of them don’t emphasize that the football boots are made with Kangaroo Leather and in some cases the term is not even on the page.

search-refinements

Jump On the Social Networking Bandwagon

Filed under: hedgehog digital — Tags: , , , — Felipe @ 20 Mar,09

Social Networking and Social Media Optimisation are here to stay. With thousands, maybe millions, of internet users engaging in some sort of social networking activity every day, it is easy to understand why it is becoming such a powerful online marketing tool.

Many companies are jumping on the social networking bandwagon for numerous reasons, some with the intention to build a bigger network of prospects others to increase their brand awareness. Whatever the reason might be, social networking sites are becoming so popular that companies who do not take advantage from it are missing out big time.

Small companies with a well-planned online marketing campaign are increasing their revenue year by year and are gaining advantage over big organisations that failed or were too slow to predict the potential of social networking.

Take the bakery trade for instance. More and more bakeries around the country are investing part of their marketing budget on social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook, and they are receiving great feedback from it.

In one of these bakeries based in London, clients can order the products online and have it delivered to any address in Greater London. Besides the website, the company has a Facebook Page, a blog and accounts in other social networking sites like YouTube and Flickr.

What is so great about social media marketing is that there is no need to spend rivers of money or many hours of work to achieve good results.

So, what are you waiting for? Jump on the Social Networking Bandwagon!

Social Media Round Up

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital,social media optimisation — Tags: , , — Felipe @ 19 Mar,09

Over the past few weeks a lot of buzz has being going on in the Social Networking world, with sites like StumbleUpon releasing a new sharing tool and Digg removing user’s profile links and then putting them back, in this post I’ll give you a quick round up of what’s being happening.

Lets start with Digg, as usual Digg continues to generate a lot of buzz with some of the actions they undertake, first it was the power users banning spree with the accusation of script usage, then the confirmation of the “Auto Burying” and imposing a limit of daily diggs per users (200 max), go over it and you will see a message like this one appear on your screen.

no-more-diggs

The latest and most outrageous of them all was removing personal links from users profiles, that had such a bad repercussion that Digg had to go back on their decision, first time I’ve seen Digg do such a thing in a short period of time.

Meanwhile social bookmarking site Furl has been acquired by Diigo, another social bookmarking site that has been around since 2006. Diigo labels itself as a research and knowledge sharing tool, with the acquisition of Furl and the TwitterThis feature that allows users to share their finds on Twitter while still browsing the net, Diigo aims to take social bookmarking to new heights. More about Diigo coming up in future posts!

Talk about social networking sites and not mention Twitter is like playing football without a ball, impossible. This past week Kevin Rose launched a new Twitter Directory called WeFollow.

WeFollow lists top twitters in various categories including Celebrity, Tech, Music, News, Actor, Social Media and hundreds more. To get yourself listed all you need to do is send a @ message to @wefollow like this @wefollow #cat1 #cat2 #cat3, where cat represents the category where you want to be listed.

And last but not least, StumbleUpon’s new sharing tool; finally the social bookmarking site has added this handy feature that allows users to share their finds with all their friends at once. All you have to do is hover over an image on your favourite bookmarks page and the share button will appear on the bottom right hand corner.

sharethis-stumbleupon

Click on it, select as many friends as you want, add a personal message if you like and hit Share now. Couldn’t be much easier, eh?

This has turned into a really long post but there you have it, all the latest buzz from the top social networking sites!

SEO; It is not as Easy as it Seems

Filed under: Blogs,SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , — Felipe @ 03 Mar,09

Continuing from where we left off in our last post with Google starting to dominate the search market and, setting the rules to how webmasters and SEOs should optimise their sites to be indexed, gain visibility and ranking their sites high on the SERPs.

The job of an Search Engine Optimiser it not only knowing how the Search Engines algorithms work, that in fact nobody knows, except the Search Engines themselves; a good SEO must have knowledge in a variety of subjects.

In my opinion, it is of great importance to the SEO to have basic to intermediate knowledge in coding, when I say coding I’m referring to HTML, PHP, CSS and other coding languages used to build websites, because the SEO needs to know how to identify and change tags in websites’ codes.

Going back to the second paragraph, as nobody knows the exact formula to rank high in the SERPs, the job of a SEO is based on tests and experiments to understand the formula of these algorithms, not only the results to these experiments take time to show up, SEs (search engines) are regularly updating their algorithms, so what works today might not be so important tomorrow.

Writing skills are a must have, as SEOs are constantly creating new content by writing articles, blog posts, meta descriptions and new pages to their client’s websites, this takes us to another obstacle in a SEO’s career.

Most search engine optimisation agencies/companies have diverse clients in a variety of different fields which forces SEOs to be tuned in on the latest trends and news regarding their clients industry to write authoritative and appealing content to their client’s website or blog.

Blogs and social networking sites are becoming more and more popular, not to mention that SEs are giving more importance to links posted on these sites and the extremely high potential to drive traffic, the SEO that has or is building a reputation online will stand out in the crowd, to prove a point here there is already another faction of search engine optimisation called Social Media Optimisation.

All this is what makes search engine optimisation such an interesting, challenging an exciting career.