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.

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.