Ask Enquiro » SEO

Local Search: Let’s find a restaurant with a great patio

Guest — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:36:53 +0000

With a forgettable round of golf complete it was time for phase two of my brilliant Labour Day plans… Finding a restaurant with an amazing patio to relax on with a drink.
Read the full article at The Results People blog.

9 Basic Rules Your Web Developer Needs to Know About SEO

Karl Hourigan — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:12:51 +0000

During our webinar SEO for Website Redesign, we received lots of questions and we didn’t have time to answer them all. One of the questions we didn’t get to was “Is there a good set of basic rules for SEO considerations that I could give to my Web Developers for their education?” That’s a great question.

Read the answer at TheResultsPeople.com…

Drive Traffic to Your Website

Karl Hourigan — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:08:50 +0000

After going through the time, effort and expense of creating a corporate web site, the success of the website as a market ing tool depends on three things:
1. Are people coming to the web site?
2. What can they do when they get there?
3. What’s in it for them to do business with you?

Read the full story at TheResultsPeople.com…

10 SEO Considerations for Website Redesign

Karl Hourigan — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:48:33 +0000

Website redesigns carry a significant level of risk to existing organic rankings and revenue. If the website redesign is not built in an SEO friendly manner, the new website can experience a dramatic drop in rankings and site traffic. You can reduce the risk associated with a website redesign by taking these key factors into consideration…Read more at our new blog, TheResultsPeople.com

SEO 101 – What is Search Engine Optimization?

Karl Hourigan — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:33:00 +0000

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines like Google and Bing constantly “crawl” the web and catalogue the web pages and information they come across. When someone tries searching for something, the search engine dips into its database and applies a proprietary algorithm (one of the key ingredients that dictates what results the search engine will show you in response to your search) to serve up what it thinks will be the most relevant results to satisfy the searcher.

Read the full story on our new blog…

Network Analysis for SEO

Charlotte Bourne — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:28:52 +0000

Network analysis is defined, simply, as the analysis of the relationships between objects. It’s a field based on both graph theory (a branch of mathematics) and sociology. The final output of network analysis is a network graph, which visually maps the relationships that exist between objects. These relationships can then be expressed mathematically based on an object’s position on the graph and the number of relationships they have.

Read the full story on our new blog…

Traffic is Flowing. Make Sure Your Website Isn’t a Ten Car Pileup!

Karl Hourigan — Mon, 02 May 2011 22:20:02 +0000

Our latest webinar featured Mediative’s Usability Consultant, Ian Everdell, and guest presenter Lance Loveday of Closed Loop Marketing, in an information-packed 45-minute webinar. You can watch the webinar in its entirety now, on-demand.

Read the summary now on our new blog.

Significant new features from Bing

Charlotte Bourne — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:20:24 +0000

The Bing Search Summit was held yesterday in San Fransisco, and Bing announced a significant list of new features. Much of Bing’s strategy builds on the same principles as those presented during their 2009 Search Summit. In this post we’ll review the highlights of last year’s Bing Search Summit and take a look at the new features introduced this year.

The keynote for the 2009 Bing Search Summit was Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Division. At the time, Bing demonstrated its current state of search through the following graph, highlighting the problems people were having with Bing search (and even being apologetic for it):

This data comes from Bing search and toolbar logs. Search sessions can also be quite intensive, with 5% of search sessions lasting longer than 30 minutes. Knowing this information means Bing knows it needs to improve. In its role as a decision engine, Bing’s job is to make a variety of information available in as few clicks as possible. Current features on the search engine, such as related searches and authoritative answers, are all ways the engine is trying to surface a variety of information in order to broadly meet searcher intent. This, along with Bing’s stated focus on the verticals of product purchases, local, travel, and healthcare, form the basis for Bing’s focus on improvements.

Turn to 2010. Bing has kept its focus on its key verticals by introducing new features that assist with all except for healthcare. There are improvements to Bing Maps so that local landmarks and local transit information are improved, in addition to interface improvements. Functionality features for local tickets and from local restaurants helps to assist in purchasing those products. Bing has really improved the amount of information available around travel, providing flight details, airfares and destination pages for various cities within the SERPs, depending on your search query. There’s also been a strong focus on mobile; many of the new mobile features have specific local functionality, which makes sense as Microsoft has found that 53% of mobile searches have a local interest. And Bing has not just kept social in mind: new features allow for greater integration with Facebook, including seeing what search results your friends have liked on the Bing SERP. With the recent information that social can influence organic search results, expect to see more SEOs paying greater attention to the integration of search and social in the upcoming year. Plus, with such a strong focus on a few key verticals, it will make sense for businesses affected by those verticals to keep a close eye on Bing – it may not have the same market share as Google, but its functionality may help to draw in more customers in those particular areas.

Charlotte Bourne is a Search Marketing Strategist with Mediative.

Google Instant Impacts on SEO Measured

Charlotte Bourne — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:20:48 +0000

We’ve been keeping an eye on the impacts of Google Instant for our SEO clients, monitoring both the changes in the length of keyword queries driving traffic to sites and the change in the number of impressions in the Google search engine.

We recently ran an analysis for one of our clients of the length of keyword query (whether it is one-word queries such as “dog” or two-word queries such as “dog catcher”, etc.) for the two weeks leading up to Google Instant compared to the two weeks prior. For this particular client, three-word search queries are the main driver of traffic to their site followed by two-word and four-word queries.

Here are the results:

We conducted a statistical analysis (thanks, Ian) to determine if the changes we saw pre and post Google Instant launch were actually statistically significant. Using a 95% confidence interval, only the change in one-word search queries could be considered statistically different (a decrease from before Google Instant to after). Interestingly, the vast majority of those one-word search queries were for branded terms. Given our knowledge of our client, we know that they released a new product in August which generated additional traffic to their site. The decrease in search volume could be attributed to falling off interest as people looking for their new product have already had the time to search it out and learn about it.

Our next areas for further analysis are:

- looking at clients of ours who are more dependent on one and two-word queries as a driver of traffic to their sites to see if people are increasing using Google auto-suggested search queries

- looking at the change in the number of impressions for client sites, which we’ll be doing for our clients once that data becomes available in Google Webmaster Tools.

Ranking in Google News

Charlotte Bourne — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:50:42 +0000

If you are a publisher looking to get your content surfaced in the search results page, you may want to consider using Google News. Unlike web results, which use the number of incoming links (among other factors) to judge the value of a website, news articles are more recent and haven’t had the same amount of time to generate incoming links. Therefore, optimizing for Google News is a bit different that traditional web SEO. There’s a three stage process in ranking in Google News.

First, Google must crawl your news articles. There are two ways Googlebot can find your article: either through a discovery crawl or by visiting your news sitemap. A news sitemap is recommended as it allows you to provide greater control about the meta data you provide to Google about a topic. If you want any articles omitted from Google News, you can omit the article using your robots.txt file or through a noindex tag on your website. Google will also recrawl articles after 12 hours to check for updates to stories. Ideally, your articles will have unique URLs with at least three digits. If this isn’t possible, a news sitemap will tell Google what articles should be indexed.

Second, Google groups your article with others of related content. After articles have been discovered by Google, they are classified into topics (such as business, sports, or entertainment) and by region such as US, Canada, or Australia. Google is using words found within the text of your article to group your article. To help Google scan your article for content and understand what your article is about, don’t break up your article into different sections. Plant keywords in your title. Keep press releases and satire separate from your articles so the distinction between the two is clear – Google is not looking to rank press releases in Google News. And put dates between the title and body of the article so Google understands the date range.

Finally, Google ranks articles. PageRank is not as important a factor for Google as new articles will not have had time to develop incoming links. When ranking articles, Google News handles two different types of rankings.

One aspect of ranking is story ranking. When you visit Google news, you will see that all articles about one topic are grouped into a ‘cluster’ or topic. How highly a group of stories ranks is based on “aggregate editorial interest”, that is, the number of different publication issuing articles on a topic along with wire distribution, op/eds and follow up articles. Google is using the amount of material published on a topic to determine where the most public interest is.

Then there is article ranking – the ranking of each story within the story cluster. Many signals determine article ranking, but here are a few significant factors:

- Fresh and New: Recent and original content will rank higher within a story cluster than older stories will, so the public can find the most recent information on a topic easily.

- Duplication of Information: A story that has been cited by other publications is likely to rank higher.

- Personalization: Google will return customized results for users including more local sources and based on your previous content preferences.

- Trusted Sources: Google monitors click through rate to determine which sources are frequently clicked on and are therefore trusted by users. This is also dependent on geographical region and topic area.

If you are using images that you want to show up in Google News results, use a large, in-line .jpeg image with descriptive captions and text. Keep images near the title of an article to ensure it is associated with the article topic.

XML sitemaps are one way to assist Google in finding your content. For more information, see our related post on Google News Sitemaps.