Tag Archives: Google+

Getting the best of Google’s search results

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We all want to rank well within Google’s search engine listings and get our websites to the top of the rankings for as many keywords as possible, but from the point-of-view of a user, how can you get the most relevant search results?

There are many different tips and tricks that can be used to get very specific results and flush out all of the unwanted results to only give you the most relevant and up-to-date information. A lot of users don’t take advantage of the use of the different search operators that can be used and many users don’t even know about them so we have detailed a few of them below:

The Minus Sign (-)

Using the minus sign (-) as a prefix to a keyword that you type will remove any results from the listings that are related to this word. For example, if we were to type ‘SEO Birmingham -wowinternet’ then this would show all the results for SEO Birmingham without our website showing in the listings. This can be really handy when returning large amounts of data with a very open subject.

Specific Website Searching

If you would like to search for results only within a certain website then you can use the ‘site:’ operator to do this. For example, if you wanted to only find pages on web design within our website then you would search: ‘web design site:www.wowinternet.co.uk’. This can be extremely useful when looking for something specific to do with a certain company or site.

You can also search for certain types of websites using this same method, for example, if you were looking for results from educational or government bodies you could use ‘site:edu’ or ‘site:gov’ and it will only bring results from sites that have .gov or .edu domains.

File Type Specific Searching

One of the most useful search operators is the ‘filetype:’ operator that allows you to specify exactly what type of file you want to return in the search results, whether it be a PDF, HTML, PHP, DOC, etc. For example, if you wanted to find a PDF report that is about SEO then you could do the following search: ‘seo filetype:pdf’.

Using Multiple Operators

By incorporating a range of different operators you are able to create very specific and advanced search criteria. An example of a very advanced search query would be:

‘facebook page site:www.wowinternet.co.uk filetype:html’

This would search for all HTML pages on our website that are related to Facebook pages; the results are shown below:

SEO Birmingham

As you can see, using these little tips, you can get some really specific results so try it out and hopefully this will help you out!

How Relevant is Google’s New Search?

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SEO BirminghamMany users of Google, ourselves included, were very excited to here of Google’s integrated social searching options that have recently been implemented. In fact, we wrote a blog not long about it and we were eager to see what it was like and were very positive about its’ introduction. Now what we have started to ask is exactly how relevant the search results that we are getting really are?

One of the most noticeable facets of the new search is the bias toward Google+. Now, you might be saying that they are well within their right to do this as it is there product and they have every right to promote it. On the other hand, Google dominates the search engine market and equates for over 80% of all searches made on the web, therefore, if they are placing higher importance on all of their products over any competition then isn’t this a bit monopolistic?

We have seen many cases of companies having action taken against them for pushing products upon their customers unfairly and Microsoft is a prime example with their Internet Explorer web browser. So what is there to stop Google to have such action taken upon them.

There has been quite a few bits of bad publicity surrounding Google recently with their dubious Adwords campaigns and many other companies and users not being happy with the new search options, so we wouldn’t be surprised if Google starts to lose some of its immaculate image over the coming months.

The most important thing for any user, no matter what they use Google’s search engine for is to be able to have the most relevant search results appear for whatever they are searching for. We understand what the search engine giant was trying to achieve by integrating social searches but in reality, it just isn’t working. Maybe we are being a bit too critical at the moment and maybe Google will come good (as they normally do!) but until then we will have to bear the frustration a little longer before we think about moving to Microsoft’s Bing!

Google Search Plus, a New Personalised Experience

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Google has announced that it will be adding a whole new feature to their search engine that looks like it could have a huge effect on the way that we that we interact with Google and find the results that we want.

The Google search plus will now incorporate your social circles into the results that you see, for example, if you were trying to find an SEO company and searched the term ‘SEO company’ into Google, you would get all of the standard results plus you will now see any particular websites that your friends have interacted with or ‘+1′d’ so that you can have a much more personalised experience.

Google said in their blog: “Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web.”

Personal Results

The search engine giant has added three major features to the new searching system which are; personal results (as seen in the above image), profiles in search, and people and pages.

The ‘profiles in search’ will now allow you to search for a friend’s name in the search box and it will provide you with personalised search results related to their interests and give a link to their social accounts.

The ‘people and pages’ feature will show up results in a separate section on the results page that resemble that of the PPC ads to the right hand side of the result listings. For example, if you searched for ‘football’ you will get a section that contains football clubs and professional footballers’ Google+ profiles and pages so that you can instantly discover new people to interact with.

The changes that have been made haven’t been openly welcomed by all though, and ex-Google employee and now Twitter general council, Alex Macgillivray said in one of his tweets that it was a ”bad day for the Internet,” and went on to comment, “having been there, I can imagine the dissension at Google to search being warped this way.”

Top 3 Things That Search Engines Hate

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web designers BirmminghamIf you’re just started to dip your toes into the waters of search engine optimisation (SEO) then you’re probably starting to realise that there are quite a few things that search engines are really not too fond of. Here we have listed three of the many bad examples of SEO that will severely affect your search engine listing.

First up is keyword stuffing. Our favourite. It seems that some webmasters believe that the more of a specific keyword or phrase that is put into your website, the higher you will rank in the search engine listings… wrong. If you were using the keyword ‘SEO Birmingham‘ and placed this within your meta data and maybe once or twice within the page content then yes, this will benefit your search engine optimisation. However, placing ‘SEO Birmingham’ more than 7 or 8 times will cause the search engine to spot that you are simply keyword stuffing and penalise you for this. One of the quickest and easiest ways to get caught out keyword stuffing is when you’re trying to be clever and place the keywords as ‘invisible text’ (i.e, the same colour as your background) or in an obscure part of the website. Google especially hates this so be sure to avoid doing this at any cost!

Next on the list is duplicate content. We have seen time and time again where a website has ‘its own blog’ which really isn’t its own blog as they have just copied and pasted someone else’s work (i.e, an article on the BBC news website) and published it on their blog as their own. This doesn’t bode well for your SEO and not only that but it is technically copyright infringement so be aware.

Last but most certainly not least is link swapping. All the time we get emails that are normally written with terrible grammar and it often takes a while for us to decipher what the sender is trying to say (a tell tale sign that it has come from a software bot) and it asks us if we would like to have a link to our website put on the sender’s website. All we have to do is reciprocate the link and hey presto… an extra point of entry to our website right? Unfortunately, things that often seem too good to be true often are. Search engines pick up on link swapping and they really don’t like this at all so it will only be to the detriment of your SEO efforts.

Hopefully you have picked up on a few things to avoid in the future and are able to carry out your SEO much more effectively.

YouTube Creates School-Friendly Service

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SEO BirminghamGoogle’s video sharing service, YouTube, has recently launched its new service called ‘YouTube for Schools’. The service will include set video playlists that are aimed specifically at certain age ranges so that teachers can use them within classrooms without students being distracted by the general content of the YouTube service.

Schools are able to sign up for free to the service and enjoy thousands of different educational videos that can be used to teach within class. Already the likes of TED Talks and MIT have started creating content for the service and many more will soon follow suit.

YouTube have said that the service will allow students to be able to view these educational videos without being ”distracted by the latest music video or cute cat”.

YouTube have also been giving advice to teachers who have signed up to the service in order to show them how it is to be used correctly and how to really get the best out of it. It will be interesting to see how many schools start using the new service and if they find it helpful as a new teaching tool.

Three Quick Tips for Moving up the Google Search Listings

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SEO BirminghamThere are many different tips and tricks that so called ‘experts’ give out all the time on the web promising that they will get you to the top of Google in a few days. In reality, you have to be either extremely lucky, a huge organisation, or be targeting a very niche search term that barely anyone searches for. What we suggest is that you follow these three tips and it will get you on your way to rising through the listings. We’re not saying that you’re going to jump straight to page one (however it is possible) but you will at a minimum see a just up of a page or so.

Tip 1: Take time to decide what your target market will search for in Google to eventually get to your website. If your company was called something that isn’t really related to what you do, for example ‘Vision’, it is wise to understand that the majority of people won’t search the term ‘Vision’ on Google to end up at your website. Let’s say that ‘Vision’ were a web design company based in central Birmingham. Users would find the company’s website by searching for terms such as ‘web designers Birmingham’ or ‘web design Birmingham’ so it would be wise to target such terms in your SEO plans.

Tip 2: Place your keywords within your HTML title tags and H1 headers, for example, the website home page could be titled ‘Vision – Web Designers Birmingham | Web Design Birmingham’. It is also important to remember that Google only shows the first 60 characters of your website title so don’t make it too long. With the H1 tags you could have the title on your homepage as ‘Vision Web Designers in Birmingham’ and this will immediately allow Google to recognise that the ‘web designers Birmingham’ keyphrase is related to the company ‘Vision’.

Tip 3: Submit a sitemap for your website into Google’s webmaster tools and submit your website URL so that it the search engine knows that it must crawl through your site.

Last of all…. be patient! Don’t expect results straight away as Google often takes some time to re-index all of the webpages so all you can do is keep creating fresh content with your keywords in (be sure not to put in too many instances of your keyword as this is called keyword stuffing) and in time your website will rise through the listings.

Give it a try…

Getting to the first page of Google

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SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of improving ranking in search engine results.

How do you look for a particular product/service/contact?  We bet you go on to a search engine (normally Google)!  So, common sense says that the best way for you to get the traffic to your website is to appear on the first page of the Search Engine results.  Simples!  So…how do you get there?

Getting a high ranking is the goal of most websites.  In years gone by, “experts” have tried to trick the system only to find this doesn’t work when search engines change their algorithms which they constantly do to avoid this from happening!

In as simple terms as we can make it, one purpose of search engines is to determine the relevancy of keywords to the content of your web pages. They do this by using software robots to index all the words on billions of pages. Then, they analyze these indexes according to a set of secret algorithms.  Once that page is found, the ideal scenario is for that page to contain links that take you to more information which contains more links and so on.

To keep the business of the person searching, every search engine will do what it can to make the sites it suggests relevant to that search. Search engines do not have people looking through every page of every site and then associating that page with different search terms! They use “spiders” or “robots” that follow the link trails.

So…you type in “sofas” into a search engine and your site may be listed as Number 2 on page 1 or Number 602 on page 60, but those 600 places make a huge difference!  Search Engines will place the sites that they think are the most relevant at the top of the list.

So how is relevance calculated?

There are three big factors that the search engines look at to determine how relevant your site is to the search: quality of the site, text, and links.

Site – how quickly it loads – people will not wait 60 seconds for a site to load!  How often it is updated and the coding behind it is also key.

Text – we could go on forever!  However the more relevant text your website has the better.  Text in the title of the page gets more weight than in the body of the page because the Search Engines figure that the title is most likely showing what the page is about!

Links – It is important to have both inbound and outbound links.  Think of links as “fans” or “supporters”.  More people that link to your site, the more your site has credibility.  It is obviously good to have a site linked to you that shares something in common where possible!  Again, we could talk about this all day!

So…..now you know the basics of SEO, why not give us a call and we can grab a coffee with you to tell you about this in more detail.

Click here to find out more…

How Important is Social Media within your SEO efforts?

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A question that has been surrounded with many different views is the impact that a social media presence actually has on improving your SEO and whether it is even worth it at all. Well I can tell you that is most definitely has a large part to play on search engine optimisation and that it can be vitally important online tool for firms to utilise.

Looking at Google+ as a fine example of the changing trends in which search engines look at our online behaviour and habits, then link this in with our search engine results t give a much more personalised web experience. Google+ is not just a social media platform, but it is almost a search tool in itself. Many users that are logged into their Google+ account all the time (myself included) will find that the search engine results page (SERP) will be completely different to when they are not logged into their account. This is because Google recalls which pages you have given a ‘+1′ or linked to on your profile and give these website preference in where they place in the SERP in the understanding that they have more relevance to you. For example, when we search for local web designers Birmingham or SEO Birmingham and then +1 a couple of the websites showing up in say page 8, the next time we search the terms ‘web designers Birmingham‘ and ‘SEO Birmingham‘ these websites will now appear on the first couple of pages. This can be a hugely influential tool toward gaining instant SEO.

Web Designers BirminghamGoogle itself have also been building whats known as a social graph which goes through all of a user’s associated and linked to social accounts and platforms to develop a kind of map that interlinks all of the activities and enables Google to understand exactly which accounts are relevant to which websites, etc. This is important to understand and by using various different social accounts such as Facebook and Twitter, you can create this network of backlinks to your website and increase traffic and your overall SEO.

One other fine example of the importance that Google, along with other search engines places upon social media is with YouTube. YouTube is seen by the average user as a place where they can watch videos and engage socially with others on the site, however, in reality, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and Google hides no secret to the fact that it actively encourages video content to rank higher in the search algorithms.

These are just a few example of how important social media is to your SEO and online marketing, but the possibilities really are endless. The main thing to take away from this is that if you don’t have a social presence, get one!