With their new “Search Plus Your World” feature, Google’s search results are undergoing a transformation that will drastically change the way search results appear to users.  The feature is now live on the Google Network, and will be fully rolled out to all users that are logged in to Google and searching in the English language.

What does the “Search Plus Your World” feature do?

The new “Search Plus Your world” combines Public, Personal, Social (Google+ only), and Private search all into one algorithm. Public results are just regular Google searches, while the new Personal feature compiles results based both on your past search behavior and social connections. The feature will also feed in relevant content that his been shared within your circles on Google+.

Here’s an image provided by Google that shows an example of the Personal Results feature. (Note: if you select the globe icon on the right it will hide personal results, and when the person icon is selected, personal results will be turned on.)

The left arrow above points to the section that states there are 50 personal results out of the 419,000 found for the search. Some of these 50 personal results will be blended into the first page of your search results.

Personal Results are compiled from these existing areas:

• Regular Web Listings
• Regular Web Listings  (boosted because of social behavior and social connections)
• Public & Private Google+ posts, photos, and Google Picasa Photos

In the image below (again provided by Google) we see more of the results for a search for “Chikoo,” the name of a Google developer’s dog. Chikoo is also the name of a fruit, and before the “Search Plus Your World” feature was implemented nothing related to his dog would have ever shown up in the search results. But with the new feature…

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Google says that there are 151,000,000 searches a month for the word “car.” Question…Is it more important to therefore try to rank organically for the word “car,” to try and capture traffic from those hundreds of millions of searches and compete against every other website going after “car” searches? Or should you focus your efforts on other more specific keywords that are more relevant to your brand and you have greater potential to rank for?

Below are some thoughts and questions you should ask yourself about keywords when you are building a site, adding a page, or even naming a product:

1. Just because you call your product something, doesn’t mean that a consumer is searching for your product that way
   • A car can be searched for many different ways: sedan, coupe, Ferrari, sports car, two door sedan, red car, best sports car, which car is better, Ferrari that was in Ferris Bueller’s Day off

   When trying to find keywords for your site, make sure that the keywords make sense for your brand and what the product actually is; this will help them rank better in the long run.

2. Make sure to check out how competitive the search landscape is
   • If you are a smaller website, it might be better to focus less on the broad, very high traffic keyword “cars” and put more effort into the “red four-door sedan” keyword which doesn’t have big companies competing for that space.

   Just because consumers conduct 1,000,000 searches a month for a specific keyword, doesn’t mean you will get any traffic from it, if you are not ranking on the first page or second page of the results. So do your competitive landscape analysis and find the right keyword.

3. Map Your Keywords across your site
   • Why cannibalize your own keywords? Find unique keywords per page that you can optimize and have the possibility of ranking for all of them

   Make sure to focus each page to two or three specific keywords and use each keyword two to three times in the content.

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The web marketing team here at EIM often gets asked casual questions about search engine optimization, be it at the office or even out at a social event. A client might ask about the newest tactic they happened to read about or how social media impacts organic search results. A family member might ask for an explanation of what exactly SEO means (this is a very common one). And we still get people wondering if you can pay for the top spot in the organic results of Google (you can’t).

With all these questions and varying levels of understanding, and with the almost daily changes in the search and social marketing industry, I thought it would be good to take a look at some basics in SEO philosophy.

5 simple SEO philosophy reminders:

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1. Discipline yourself to stay focused. Content structured smartly and targeted tightly around your product or service offering will attract a more valuable corner of the search engine market and generate higher conversion rates once your visitors arrive on your site.
2. Think about your consumer. Content they want to see and anything that makes their experience on your site more engaging, more pleasant and more productive will lead to them talking about you and linking to you.
3. There are very few quick fixes when it comes to SEO. Search Engines are looking for who’s growing a following, developing quality content, and building a solid reputation within their respective space. The way a business would ideally gain attention and increase sales over time organically is exactly what SEO professionals are trying to emulate. So yes, the very nature of SEO is a manipulation of that organic growth, but it still needs to in fact emulate it. Any tricks that someone might suggest for “sneaking” your site up the results pages is bad business and will likely end up hurting you.

It’s time to get reacquainted with an old web marketing friend: Google AdWords. In case a recap is needed, this is the platform through which ads are developed and managed for display on Google’s search engine results pages (the listings you see at the very top of the page, above the organic listings, and stacked along the right side of the page).

With new social media tools constantly being introduced and ever-evolving mobile marketing technologies to stay on top of, AdWords is really a breath of fresh not-so-traditional-advertising-but-more-traditional-than-social-media-and-stuff air.

Yes, a good marketing strategy includes a combination of tactics designed to work together to achieve a common goal, and that may mean introducing some newer options. But in all the excitement of what’s new and popular, have you forgotten about some “older” standbys? Paid search advertising through AdWords might be just what you need to pump some new (old) life into your online marketing.

Let’s look at a few benefits of Google AdWords to remind ourselves why this is:

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1. First things first: Bing is out there and growing. It’s an important search engine to many and should be considered in your interactive marketing plans. But Google still has the much larger market share, so that’s why we’re focusing on it.
2. Adwords’ paid search ads allow you to target an Internet user at precisely the moment they are searching for what you sell. And if you optimize your ad, campaign settings, and landing page well, your ad should gain optimal exposure to this target audience member. You don’t have that kind of control within the organic side of the search engine listings.

This month Google released “Adwords Call Metrics,” a call tracking service for Adwords campaigns. The service is free for Adwords account holders and integrates a Google Voice number into ads on both computers and mobile devices. Google Voice is the free service that allows Google account holders set-up a phone number from any area code in the United States. For the purpose of Adwords, users can set up either a local phone number or a toll-free number. Users are then able redirect the number to any phone. The total number of calls and average duration of the calls can be tracked in the Adwords dashboard.

The same Google Voice number used in Adwords can also be used on other marketing materials or a website for increased tracking through Adwords, although we recommend setting up a separate Google Voice number for each campaign. Separate numbers allow for more targeted conversion tracking.

Although this service is still in BETA, there is an incredible amount of potential for the Google Voice/Adwords integration. First, “Adwords Call Metrics” creates another way for Adwords users to reach customers, track offline conversions, and measure the success of their ads. Also, there is a lot of speculation that Google will introduce a pay per call metric, very similar to the pay per click metric. In the future Google might also offer increased call metric capabilities for Adwords, such as recording, transcription, and enhanced analytics capabilities.

Currently Google is offering the service to a limited number of customers, but as they test the service and refine the features it will be released to more customers. You can tell if you have the option of “Adwords Call Metrics” by looking under the Ad Extensions tab in your Adwords account.

To read more about “Adwords Call Metrics” from Google click here or here.

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Here at EIM, we are launching new websites on a regular basis. Some of these websites are new clients while other are past clients that are ready for a site refresh or new and improved functionality. Obviously clients each have their own unique goals. One consideration in developing any website is identifying what techniques to utilize to ensure search-engine friendliness. That can meet a lot of different things to different companies depending on their knowledge of  SEO.

For my post this week, I thought I’d share some of the techniques we utilize to ensure a website is developed “search-engine friendly”. Without giving away all of our secrets Below is a checklist that you can use or share with your agency or developers, to verify that your new site is being set up well. And if it’s not, well, you know where to find us!

SEO Set-Up Checklist:

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1. Make sure your Google Analytics code is transferred to the new site so you don’t lose any data with the new launch.
2. Add Google, Bing, and Yahoo Webmaster Codes to your site to alert the search engines of the changes and new/removed pages. For new Google Analytics accounts, this can now be done right in GA for Google Webmaster Codes.
3. Create unique thank you pages for any actions you request of a visitor where they have to give you any information. This helps you to track it better in Google Analytics and view see what keywords are attributing to website conversions.
4. When creating your website pages, ensure your URLs are keyword-friendly. This doesn’t mean creating super-long and drawn out URLs, but try to fit a key phrase in there if you can.
5. Don’t build your website in all Flash! (yes, we still have this obvious rule on our checklist…)

Once the year starts winding down and the months begin to get closer to the holiday season, there’s one thing lurking in the back of everyone’s mind (whether they like it or not), and that one thing is, you guessed it, shopping for the holidays. The feeling of the season-of-giving creeping up might give you a warm tingly feeling inside, or on the other hand completely stress you out. But in the end, the bitter realization is, that when this time comes around people will be spending money, and lots of it (no matter the state of the economy).  The big difference these days is (with the economy in its current state), consumers are going to use every resource possible to find the best deal out there.

Although lots of people still do their shopping in stores, there is one resource that almost everyone utilizes. Yep, you said it, the Internet! I know this is a big surprise to everyone, but the important thing to focus on isn’t the fact that people use the Internet to do their shopping, but HOW they use it to shop.

There are a cornucopia of different resources (blogs, social networks, email services, rewards & directories, cross-shopping) that can be used to find information about products/deals, but one resource that single-handedly dominates all of them is, search engines. Take a peak at this graph from Hitwise -

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With the launch of Google Caffeine and after talk at SMX Advanced 2010 in Seattle, Google’s made it clear that they will start looking more at video sitemaps when indexing websites. Why? Because they’re sexy! Videos are slick, compelling and fun, and people like them. And what does Google like? Things that people like.

Videos and Video Sitemaps themselves are not brand new, but there are related changes in the Google landscape that make them more important.

Universal Search
This actually isn’t brand new either, but many people probably still don’t really know about it. I’ll guess you have noticed over the last several years that pretty pictures and such have been popping up on the Google results pages. This is Google intuitively guessing what kind of content you’re looking for, and pulling the appropriate rich media or other targeted results right into their main search results (see the results snapshot below for “monkeys jumping on the bed”). This is in contrast to a user clicking on what Google calls their “vertical search” options, like Videos, Maps, or Books, to only search that type of content.

Soul Search before Universal Search
This was actually a popular point at this year’s SMX Advanced: Before making yourself crazy trying to get your videos listed in universal search, examine your video pages. It would be a shame to nab a top spot in Google for a page that doesn’t work for you, especially if you had another page on your site already listed prominently in the search results. So just consider: Does this video represent my brand well? Does this video page have supporting copy and calls to action that encourage further engagement with my brand? Am I making it easy for people to share my video with friends or on their social media networks?

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