Script: Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Tutorial, we are going to take a look at Google Analytics site search settings. This includes how to set it up, what the results look like and how it can help your organic SEO campaign.

The first step is to identify what search functionality you have on your website, this may include Google’s site search it’s self, a blog search, eCommerce search, CMS search of even the 404 widget supplied by Google.

The process is relativity simple..

Once you have completed the analytic site search set up, you can start to see results under the content tab within your Google analytics dashboard.

Now you have all the pieces in place and the ’site search’ is returning data, you can analysis the information to identify what users are searching on your website. This could show on an eCommerce shop that users are searching for a product that you currently don’t stock creating a sales opportunity or on a regular website a particular service that relates to your industry.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comments, please leave them on the supporting blog post.

Script:

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a look at Google custom search applications and find out how it gathers information about your search patterns and interests:

Search History - This can be done in two separate ways, either when your logged into your Google account or using cookies via your web browser.

If you are signed into your Google account, it automatically customises your search results based on your past search activity. This could be recent search queries in Google or websites you have visited previously. This service is called ‘Web History’ and is enabled by default, you can of course turn this functionality off or personalise this service.

You can turn the service off by simply logging in and by going to the top right hand corner of the screen, click ‘web history’. You can see it has stored information based on my previous search queries. You can can stop it tracking your history by clicking ‘pause’ or personalise the service from the options on the left hand side.

If you are not signed into your Google Account, your browser stores information using Cookies, this remembers previous search activity on the particular machine you are using. You can again turn this functionality by doing the following.

Log out, click ‘web history’ again and click the ‘Disable customisations based on search activity.’ link.

Google also use a tracking cookies to monitor your interest in a particular product or service and then serve adverts via adwords on sites that run Google Adsense.

So if  I was reading a review of a newly released video game and this site used adsense, it would store a cookie and my IP address. Then if I continued to read up on the video game and another review site had Google adsense; it would recommend related adverts such as ‘buy video game title’ or ‘video game price comparison’.

The second personalised search application is based on location. Google use your physical location to help customise your search results. This is done one of two ways, either your profile or account address details  when logged into your Google account provide Google with a location.

or an approximation of your location is made based on the location of your IP address, The location application also helps enhance Google maps or local business center listings to suit your location.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comments please leave them on the you tube channel or supporting blog post.

I’ve held off writing about Microsoft’s new search engine because when it was first released in June it seemed to be premature to write an article about something that I’d not used myself.

My first impressions of Bing were (and still are) “Wow, the photos look amazing”. The cleanness of the interface is great; I like the simplicity of it. However upon further inspection I can’t help thinking Bing has a long way to go before it takes over from Google.

The search results for simple queries such as ‘Plumber Leicester’ give results that seem to be based on domain name rather than the content of the site. The number 1 site has almost no content whatsoever, except a bit of spammy stuff in the footer and some lists about what the company do. The second listing has been suspended by BT (or hacked?), the third listing is Freeindex (a directory). All pretty useless.

search results in Bing

Compared to Google’s results for the same query this seems like stepping back in time. Yes, there are some of the same search results in both lists, but the first search result in Google has more copy on the page, and although the site isn’t a complicated one, it tells a potential customer far more about the company and what they do that Bing’s number one listing.

Search Results in Google

All this leads me to believe that Microsoft needs to work a lot harder to get the core of their service right before rolling out extras such as the shopping search and xRank.  Google have built up their products over time, and their search results are on the whole the best. I really want Bing to do well, because it is unhealthy for any industry to have just one major player, as we have at the moment with Google. But, until the competition bring out something that works as well as Google, or even better than them, then I don’t really think Google have much to worry about just yet.

With the SEO industry expanding their are lots of companies that can offer their services, Creare included. Some websites perform better in search engines than others, this is often due to the sites architecture. Static pages, domain age, backward links and domain name can all help towards an SEO campaign. I have complied a list below of things that will set you in good shape for an SEO campaign as well as things that may mean that your website will need to be re-build from your search engine optimisation company.

Things to look for:

• ? marks in URL’s, This means that the page is a DB (database) query and can often restrict the performance of your site, Google and other major search engines do not rank these types of pages very highly. This can be fixed by converting them to permalinked (SEO friendly) extension. Most developers would provide this functionality, but otherwise it may have to be a rebuild.
• Automated Meta Data & Page Titles, If your site automatically generates Meta data via a CMS (content management system) it can often cause issues, Search engines will see them as unusable and not accurate. This can also be fixed via certain development techniques.
• Domain Age, if you have a brand new site and you want to optimise for a hugely competitive phrase you can often run the risk of the ‘sandbox‘. If Google thinks a site has been unnatural with its development and growth (i.e. an SEO company building pages and links) you can be removed from the search results. The older the domain the better, but nothing is impossible you just have to consider the time scales.
• Flash Websites, flash websites can look great but the content will not be correctly read by search engines, you firstly have to ensure that your flash website is coded properly and that google can find a text based version of your site, otherwise it will not find anything. Also flash websites are usually based on 1 page, meaning as far as Google can see your site has no depth or additional content.
• Frames, if you have a HTML site (not flash) and you browse through your site you can usually see the URL extension changing as you go, if it remains the root URL on everypage, the site has been set up using frames and the search engine will not be able to define your specified sitemap.
• Domain names, A keyword rich domain name is great, but a domain that is 100 characters long full of keywords isn’t.

When considering SEO, a link building strategy is one of the many options that should be considered.

When deciding on the ranking of a website, the amount of links coming into a site is a major factor that influences the decision that Google makes.
So, how does this work in practice? When Google uses its robots to check through the websites on the internet, it recognises links on the sites pointing to other web pages. As an example, say you put a link on your website to www.crearecommunications.co.uk .

When Google checks the sites it would notice this link and would see this link as a “vote” for this site. Simply put, the more “votes” a site has, the more relevant it is seen as, and the higher the page ranking. This is a fairly simplistic view, as there are other factors to consider, but it still holds true.
So, are all these “votes” given the same weight by Google? The simple answer is no. Links from sites that have a high ranking are deemed to have more influence. A link from www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk (a page rank of 4) to www.crearecommunications.co.uk  would not be given as much weight as a link from www.bbc.co.uk (a page rank of 9) for example.

From this you can see that the link system does have to take vote strength into account. The number of links coming into a site can still be a good indicator of the relevance of a particular page, but its important to consider that one hundred low quality links to a site may not have the same influence as one or two very high quality ones.

So, when embarking upon a programme of search engine optimisation, take these factors into account if you wish to give your site the best start possible.