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Google has recently announced a way of making searches more personal. What impact is this going to have on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

When you perform a search on your computer, the search engine results pages (SERPs) that Google gives you are “organic”. In other words, the terms that appear highest on the list are the ones that Google judges to be of greatest interest for everyone in general.

In the SERPs, Google is determined to preserve the impartiality of its rankings. Yet in other situations, Google will try to provide you with what it thinks is going to be of most interest to you personally.

The latest innovation announced by Google will allow you to personalise your web search with stars. If you bookmark a page using the bookmark or star icon, then the next time you perform the search, the item will appear at the top of your results.

Here's where you find the bookmark/star icons:

This is what the results would look like (using Google’s own example):
 

What impact might this have on SEO? The point of SEO is to get your company to the top of the page for a term that is relevant to your business. Will stars affect how Google perceives your site? Google has promised that the star search will leave Google’s organic search results unchanged. However, the stars will occupy the top position of search results on the page. 

Businesses already ask their website visitors to “Bookmark this page” or “Add to favourites”. I suggest you make sure that you include Google Bookmarks in the options of bookmarks for your site.

You can see Google’s article here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/stars-make-search-more-personal.html

 Search Engine Optimisation: The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Working in the Search marketing industry for the past 7 years I have come across a variety of opinions and methods of implementing optimisation for websites. To be honest there generally isn’t much difference between two good search engine optimisation people. The ideas, theories and opinions might differ, but the basics (The Good) are always the same.

The Good

What do I mean by basics?
To start off with all optimisation starts with a good and thorough keyword research campaign, followed by a full review of the website in question and then a list of on-page changes. On-page changes referring to content within the relevant tags as well as the body content of the pages. The technical aspects of the sites are reviewed and suggestions are made on navigation, linking structures and so forth. Then the more complex optimisation (The Bad) has to take place, unfortunately in today’s world the complex pieces are also the most influential in terms of impact

The Bad

What do I mean by complex?
Well, if it was that easy to explain it wouldn’t be complex! In essence for a site to be found and ranked in Google there needs to be a clear reason to the search engine, which I have to state is a robot, a machine without any feelings or any ability to make obvious connections, to rank one page above any other. One of the biggest factors in this is a ‘voting system’. The system is simply based on what other people, institutions and companies think of you, and this is picked up by Google via links into your site. Google view links coming into your site as votes of confidence, the more relevant a link is into your site, the better it is. Relevance is based on 2 main aspects, Why people are linking to the site and Who is linking to the site.

The Ugly

Why are people linking to your site?
If a website contains content on farming equipment and then has a link to a computer manufacturer’s website, Google will view this with scepticism, simply because there is no relation and will probably view this as low relevancy link. However if the same farming equipment website has a page dedicated to the computer equipment necessary to manage the farming equipment electronics, the link could be deemed as more relevant.  Hence the question, why are people linking to your site? If a page with relevant content links to the site, Google will see this as a relevant link and will mark this up in terms of trust. If Google views a link as less relevant, it will mark the link down.
Who is linking to the site?
The bigger the site, the more relevance it will pass along when it links. If a site the size of the BBC decides to link to you, Google knows that the link comes from a reputable site and it will automatically score the links from this site higher. Unfortunately in this instance an old saying of “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” comes into play. It is completely possible for a website with minimal optimisation to rank highly just because they have gained strong inbound links from big reputable websites.

The whole process as laid out is part of the Search Engine Optimisers remit. Everything has to be looked at, analysed and planned, simply because none of this is easy. From the very basic to the most complex a clear strategy has to be in place, what am I trying to achieve, how will I achieve this , who will I target, how will I target them. This only comes with experience, trial and error and a little bit of luck. But as Gary Player once said, “The more I practice, the luckier I get”

As the Managing Director of an online marketing agency, you might expect me to be unreservedly enthusiastic about the possibilities of the Internet. I can certainly get very excited about what the intelligent use of the Internet can do for a business. But even if you don’t find the Internet inspiring, you’d have to admit that it is hard to manage without it if you want to stay competitive. For most people, the Internet no longer feels like something new. There’s a younger generation now already in work that has no memory of the day their company “went online”. Instead, for these people, the Internet is something they’ve grown up with and take for granted. This generation was sending emails almost as soon as it learned to read and write.

The Internet has changed people’s habits. People who would once have kept a diary now write a blog. Facebook and other social media sites have led to the creation of online communities. There is a vast pool of opinions and ideas from user generated content that companies now want to tap into as a way of gauging customer responses to their products. You don’t have to listen in to pub conversations to find out about what petrol-heads think about the new gearbox on the 1.6 GLS, because you can read their views on a forum site.

But employers know that not every new habit is a good habit to get into. Businesses know how easy it is for “checking something on the Internet” to become an excuse for aimlessly surfing the Internet in the company time. Employers want to hire staff with good computer skills, but they don’t want to hire someone who’s going to waste time on Facebook or instant messaging. It’s easy for someone to pretend he’s working if he’s typing something at the computer screen, but what he’s actually doing is as bad as chatting to a friend for hours on the phone. It’s just silent, so the offending behaviour is less obvious.

And there are more serious concerns than the damage this sort of thing does to productivity. The main one is the threat to security. Issues of commercial confidentially are especially important in a country like Britain, where increasingly information itself is the product. Businesses are becoming more and more worried about employees revealing commercially sensitive information, whether in emails, or, worse still, on social media sites, where many more people can read it.

None of this is to suggest that social media is a bad thing, or that we should get busy trying to put a stop to it. Because, obviously, you can’t. It would be as self-defeating as trying to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube. Instead, from a business perspective, it’s more sensible to embrace the potential of social media. Social media sites allow for market research using comments that are unprompted. And businesses can access an online audience of potential customers through their blogs. If the Internet has brought with it some new challenges, it also offers the employer new opportunities as well. Provided a business knows how to protect itself from the risk, most companies can still benefit from embracing the opportunities they represent.