Lee Kantor (Atlanta Business RadioX), Dawn Ely (Corporate Conversations Host & President of Palladium Chief Legal Officers) & Christian Griffith (VP Digital Strategy, Freebairn & Co.)
Lee Kantor (Atlanta Business RadioX), Dawn Ely (Corporate Conversations Host & President of Palladium Chief Legal Officers) & Stacy Williams (Prominent Placement))
If you weren’t able to tune in to hear the livestream of “Corporate Conversations” last Tuesday, here’s an audio clip of just my portion of the show, and here’s a longer clip including the first half with Christian Griffith of Freebairn & Company.
Not always seeing your title tags in Google SERPs? Last week there was a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog entitled Better page titles in search results where the blogger, Pierre Farr, explained how Google chooses the title tags to show in their search results. He says Google may choose to display an alternate title for your page using algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for users to recognize relevant pages in the search results.
As with most things related to Google’s search results, it all comes back to relevancy. Read more…
In what was reportedly the biggest search marketing story last year, the launch of Google+ had much written about it: Will it overtake Facebook? Will Google use the data in their algorithm? What’s the deal with the Google+ button? The jury may still be out on its true impact, but one thing is for sure, Google is working hard to make sure Google+ doesn’t end up being just another 2011 trivia question. Read more…
According to Google, “… rich snippets provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page. Whether your site contains information about products, recipes, events or apps, a few simple additions to your markup can result in more engagement with your content — and potentially more traffic to your site.” Most of us are familiar with rich snippets and know they can increase click through rates for search results.
We know rich snippets are important, but implementation can be daunting and confusing. I’m not going to attempt to discuss the technical aspects of rich snippets or go into a how-to lesson — I’ll leave that to the experts. Google Webmaster Tools recently published a series of instructional videos about rich snippets. Video topics include a general introduction, types of rich snippets, product searches and troubleshooting, among others.
Not sure if you have rich snippets? Google also has a rich snippet testing tool that allows you to see if a web page contains a rich snippet markup, and, if so, preview the search result for that page.
Does your site contain rich snippets? Use the tool and find out (it’s painless, I promise). Yes? Good for you! No? Try them out and see whether rich snippets have an impact on your click-through-rates.
As millions of us are furiously jotting down ideas for our personal New Year’s Resolutions, here’s one resolution corporate communicators and marketers ought to include: adding an online newsroom to their websites. Consider this fact for a moment: less than half of all businesses even have an online newsroom. The intent to develop one is pending, however. And 2012 is almost here. But for now, this means that the majority of PR folks, corporate communicators, and marketers lack any sort of online newsroom presence. Talk about an untapped market! Given the recent Freshness updates – where preference is heavily tilted towards breaking news, such as the upcoming Presidential primaries or Occupy Wall Street, and frequently updated customer reviews on new products, like Amazon’s Kindle Fire – it’s clear that Google is increasingly relying on a website’s online newsroom as the primary source of trending, newsworthy, and up-to-date content. Read more…
After performing a search, Google offers a new option to narrow down search results. Under “More search tools”, you can now select “Verbatim” to limit traffic to just what you literally searched. Google has a short explanation here which suggests that the tool eliminates spelling corrections, personalized search based on your search history, synonyms, similar terms, and words with the same stem. Basically, you just get what you’re looking for without Google’s search suggestions.
The buzz is that Verbatim search is Google’s substitute for the phased out “+”operator. Previously, this could be utilized to make sure that a specific word in a specific form appeared in the search results. Google’s intentions might be to now utilize “+” to perform some function related to Google+. Only time will tell! Read more…
If it seems like we and other blogs are constantly posting about how Google is changing their search algorithm, there’s a good reason for it: Google is constantly changing their search algorithm. The change they announced last week is a significant one, affecting 35% of all searches.
Google has updated its ranking algorithm to give more weight to “freshness” for appropriate searches. The example they use to illustrate this is the search term “olympics.” Someone searching for “olympics” is most likely looking for information about the upcoming Olympic games in 2012, not a history of the games or an account of the 1900 occurrence of the Olympics in Paris. So, for searches on terms that periodically recur like that (“NFL scores” and “presidential election” are some more examples), Google will assume that the searcher wants relevant, recent information and will provide that without additional keywords.
Read more…
Google recently announced a significant change in how it handles search privacy. It has begun encrypting search queries for anyone who is signed in to a Google account, such as Gmail.
This means that when you are signed in and run a search on www.google.com, you will be automatically redirected to https://www.google.com. So the terms you search on and the search results page will be encrypted.
Google explains the reason for this change:
As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users.
Read more…
