Microformats

Microformats have been around for a while, previously it’s been a case of using a browser plugin to get anything out of them, but now Google has decided to use the standard (along with RDF) to enhance search results.

About time this type of semantic mark-up came out from under the stairs.

So, if you aren’t using them head over to the Microformats site and use their nifty generators.

Here’s a quick run down on the main Microformat standards

hCard

This is used to mark-up your personal details, such as name, address, email, telephone. There is a hCard creator online.

hCalendar

Used to mark-up events by date and location.

hReview

Used to give ratings to content, products or just about anything.

Google has done more tinkering with the algorithm so far this year than ever before. This is mainly due to playing catch up to what’s actually happening online. Whereas Google once gave credit and authority to valued, aged content that attracted lots of links over a period of time and hosted on a well established site, it now has to consider the speed at which stories go viral.

Two major changes that have happened is a leaning towards ‘freshness’ and ‘link velocity’. My recent story on Ashton Kutcher and Twitter quickly went to the top positions for a variety of keywords, I still hold two positions for ‘oprah twitter episode’. It was purely freshness and relevance that had helped.

Not so long ago quickly getting links into a page would have signalled something strange to Google, but now Google has seen the light, they realise that a breaking story will get syndicated and mentioned around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

So, the more conversations you join, the more likely your fresh content will gain links quickly and climb the rankings. In essence you need to:

• Have constantly fresh content
• Attract links quickly – Link velocity
• Get those links from trusted sites with a social element

The down side to this of course is what happened to certain car keywords, where spammers used it to build ranking to sell phony security software. Google have created some big holes with these changes that Blackhatters are exploiting, which means more changes to come.

It wasn’t that long ago when a small website, run from a spare room, could take a foothold in natural search results. But have things changed? As more big brands start to grasp SEO the day of the one man website may be numbered.

For years big brands have not fully utilised the assets they have in a strategic sense to gain advantage in natural search results. They relied on brand terms to drive traffic. As the economy squeezes every last drop from their marketing budgets so they are now seriously looking at the long term efficiencies SEO has to offer.

They now build sites that get indexed, optimise their content to be relevant for key terms across the user journey and syndicate content to gain precious authority from inbound links. They are learning how universal search can open the door to traffic from images, video, maps, blogs and news. They have rallied around social networks to build followers who talk about them gently nudging sentiment in their favour while increasing their share of voice.

The sleeping giant is awake and its optimising the hell out of its website.

The resources these companies can move to influence rankings is way beyond the spare room start-up. If they apply the right techniques on an ongoing basis they could leverage economies of scale that could change the face of search. Many have seen the light, boardrooms now know what SEO stands for and like the idea of ‘free’ traffic.

The realm of search is changing, however, the keeper of the keys (Google) likes to keep the landscape fluid, Google likes the PPC income, it may change the rules more frequently to keep brands investment in SEO high to try and guard against a drop in income. Last year saw over 400 changes to the algorithm, how many this year? And next year?

The key capability big brands need is agility, the ability to keep moving as the rules of the game change. Natural search marketing is like trying to make a boat out of a car and just when you have you realise you need to build a train out of a boat.

One thing I’ve learnt running this video blog is that video can have a huge impact on your search results.

Taking into account velocity, the speed at which a new article can rank in results due to its freshness and universal search, the blending of video, images, news etc into web results you can easily dominate a keyword.

This blog is just a few weeks old but already I’m seeing the effects, take this key term “oprah twitter episode” this is the results page.

Oprah twitter episode key term

I have 3 results on the first page, admittedly it’s not a competitive keyword, but getting 3 positions is pretty good going.

For “Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Oprah” I grab the places just below Techcrunch

twitter ashton kutcher cnn and oprah

The page/blog doesn’t have any real authority but is piggy backing on the video sites, not only that, the results become much more noticeable.

So, if you aren’t using video or you aren’t optimising your videos then you could be missing a big opportunity.

It is fair to say that while Google’s domination of search is generally frowned upon it probably is slightly better than a highly fragmented market with lots of players, especially if this is verticality structured. However, one thing that is a pretty safe bet is that AOL and ESPN’s new services won’t kill Google’s dominance of search.

Why? Because they rely on users adding things into the address bar. Steve Rubel reports on Love.com and ESPN’s latest foray into search.

Several sites, however, are now looking to snatch their traffic back from Google by letting consumers easily execute searches from and curate content on the fly, all from the address bar. Three such sites include AOL’s newly relaunched Love.com, ESPN and IceRocket. The goal is to make it easy to search from the address bar by tacking on a word to the domain.

Although it sounds like a great idea it has been noted for sometime that users have simply stopped using the address bar, the fact that search terms such as Google and Yahoo rank as some of the top searches on Google itself just shows what’s happening. We type into Google and expect the result, even if we misspell Google will ask ‘did you mean’.

That said, the services are quite good, mixing different source material together in groups, such as video, Twitter, web etc. Similar to Cuil.

It looks like Google UK are doing some funny stuff with sitelinks. Early in march a few people noticed that the typical site links, two columns of up to 8 extra links under the top listing for a search result, which looks like this

Google Site Links

They changed this to a single line for some results, in fact it seems for results in position two, here’s 2 examples.

One Line Site Links When no Sitelinks for position 1

And this where there are sitelinks for position one and two.

Sitelinks for position 1 and 2

If you are wondering if you like either, none or have no opinion think again, you really should like having both, big sitelinks and single line sitelinks for position 1 and 2, as in the last example.

Why? Because it takes up more browser real estate and as they only appear if you are the absolute result for a search term, such as your brand name, then this helps you dominate the results page, this is good, as it equals more clicks.

However, it is interesting that the middle screen grab above shows sitelinks for position 2 but not for position 1. Lets put this down to testing.

A look at which social media sites do and don’t use nofollow tags on profile links such as Linkedin, Seesmic, Furl and Technorati and questioning why some social networks place nofollow on profile links.

I can see why nofollow is used on comments, but, your social network profile is yours, you are the editor, so a link to your own site shouldn’t have nofollow on it.

Some social media sites don’t add the nofollow tag, LinkedIn is probably the best and most under utilised. Instead of acepting the default My Company text for your link chose ‘other’ this allows you to enter the anchor text for the link.

Obviously if this gets abused I’m sure they will add nofollow, but for now, link away…

iGary Podcast Episode 7 from Gary Reid on Vimeo.

I was speaking at the IAB Engage for Search conference on Tuesday and one statistic that stood out for me was from Charles Sword (Head of Mobile Advertising Yahoo). It was

40 Percent of Mobile search comes from just 200 Keywords

Here’s my take on it in my latest podcast.

I wasn’t just sat on stage…

iGary at IAB Engage for Search

But, I was also Twittering the event, when I sent out the stat that just 200 keywords make up 40% of search on mobile phones it started a conversation instantly.

Twitter IAB

To fill in some other stats

• Smartphones account for 12% of the market
• The iPhone 3%
• Over 30% of mobile search is from smartphones

Charles commented that although th hardware limits what you want to type in the driving force is behavioural, we use mobile search when we are out and about, such as food, movies etc.

I was speaking at the IAB conference today and an interesting stat from Yahoo! Just 200 keywords account for over 40% of all searches on mobile phones here in the UK.

Will update late with more detailed stats. In the meantime here is a snippet from my talk on SEO.