HOW TO: Use Twitter’s Advanced Search [VIDEO]

For the past few years, online search has been dominated by Google and Yahoo. Bing, Microsoft’s revamped search engine is slowly gaining traction as well. But in a world of carefully controlled algorithms, your results will most likely be determined by popularity, rather than personality. That is, until now.

Twitter’s advanced search feature takes your query and sends back data that’s based on what the community’s tweeting about it right now. And the results can be pretty insightful. Would you use it to plan a vacation… or perhaps a pub crawl? Check out the video and tell us, in the comments section below, what you think of this feature.

For Vedio clike on the link

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Why the Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish

Type a query into Google and, nine times out of ten, you’ll find a result that does not seem right. It’s not a bug or a website getting a lucky break from the Google gods — it’s the result of savvy manipulation by a group of Internet hustlers known as search engine optimizers (SEOs).

I know because I am one. For the last few years, I’ve been pushing websites to the top of search engine results — websites that don’t necessarily belong there in the eyes of Google. SEOs like to call their tactics making a site “search engine friendly,” but what we’re really doing is gaming the system and getting inside the algorithm that powers Google. It’s what we are paid to do.

As of recently, Google’s algorithms are on the move. While there’s no doubt that some of the current manipulation tactics will still play a role in shaping search results, the newest component of search comes from a new (but important) source: You.

A Brief History

Over the last decade, search engines have evolved at a rapid pace for two reasons: To provide higher quality results to a given search query, and to keep SEO spammers from manipulating search results. But despite all attempts, the basic concepts behind search have remained consistent, and good SEOs have always come out on top regardless of minor algorithmic tweaks.

In the early days, Google would scrape a webpage looking for keywords on the actual site to determine its ranking. Search marketers came up with the clever idea of stuffing their page full of the keywords they wanted to rank for. After some time, Google caught up with the clever tactics and brought out the ban hammer.

Not all marketers are able to keep up with the rapidly changing algorithm. They continue to suggest that clients adopt mundane optimization techniques such as meta tags, keyword density, and directory submissions that, at the end of the day, won’t get you anywhere near the top of a search engine ranking page.

A New Model

More recently, the search engine’s algorithm has put most of its weight towards links around the web. To the search engines, a link is a vote of confidence. But not all links are created equal. A vote of confidence from someone influential in society is much more powerful than that of an Average Joe. A link from NYTimes.com is much more powerful than one from “JoesHardwareShopInNYC.com.”

SEOs figured this out too. It’s called “link building.” We either create high quality content (which is what Google likes) and hand it off to websites in return for a link (white hat SEO) or pay for a link without providing any content (black hat SEO).

With the proper techniques, good SEOs can take a website and, with good link building techniques, put them in the top 10 to 20 results for a term that gets millions of searches a month. And as of right now, it still works.

But as SEOs look around the field, it’s obvious that the engines are changing. Their most recent update, focused on killing content farms, saw had a nearly 12% change in their algorithm.

There is no doubt that the keywords on your pages and the inbound links to your site will still play a major role in rankings, but the next big change is the”you” factor.

The “You” Factor

In 2009, Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post titled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines.” I think if he wrote the post today, he might reconsider that first adjective.

As recent changes to Google have illustrated, search engines are moving towards a more user-focused algorithm. Most Internet marketers would agree that humans are much harder to manipulate than a computer-based algorithm. While there are certain aspects of life that are consistent for all people — eating, sleeping, and so on — everyone has their own unique set of preferences that define them as an individual.

So why hasn’t Google been taking these unique preferences into account in its search rankings? Well, it has, but not to the same extent that it has been changing its algorithm. In the past, links (which were often created by humans) were the most natural way to determine relevancy and popularity. As the Internet has evolved over the last decade, links aren’t controlled by human placement to the extent they were years ago. But, as the Internet has evolved, so has the way humans can express themselves. Online behavior isn’t limited to e-mail and stand-alone blogs anymore.

Social Media

According to a 2011 Marketing Sherpa Report, 64% of marketers have begun integrating social media into their search marketing efforts. And there is reason to do so.

In December of 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that links shared through Facebook or Twitter have a direct effect on search engine rankings. But one word that was continually brought up through the entire interview with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land was “Author/Social Authority,” suggesting that it’s not the quantity, but rather the quality of a tweet or share that has an impact on SEO rankings.

In another recent post by Jen Lopez at SEOmoz, she presents an accidental case study that proves the correlation between a powerful Twitter account and search rankings. After being tweeted out by @smashingmag, SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” ranked number four for “Beginner’s Guide” on Google.

But if you’re one of “those” Twitter users — one who follows all of the other marketers who follow you, who also follow your other account, which follows them — don’t expect to get anywhere. Initial results indicate that the engines can easily weed out the Internet marketers and see true influencers in social media.

Despite the fact that Google can filter out Internet marketers and spammers, there are still problems. What prevents me from buying a tweet from an influential person in the social space?

Google’s New “Personal Blocklist” Chrome Extension

If there was ever an incredible opportunity for Google to really crack down on spam without having to manually intervene, their new Chrome extension for search is the answer.

The extension allows users to block websites within results — which is a good indication of content that doesn’t deserve to be there.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, explained the extension in greater detail on the Google Blog, saying it aimed to weed out shallow or low-quality content from suspected content farms. To do so, it allowed users to report or block sites from their web results. Those choices were then sent back to Google for analysis.

Links are easy to manipulate. Social media will most likely be easy to manipulate, unless quantity becomes a larger factor. But if tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people using the extension? That won’t be so easy to game.

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Why Websites Are Slow & Why Speed Really Matters [INFOGRAPHIC]

What a difference a millisecond can make. When it comes to browsing the web, every tiny moment counts — and the fewer moments that pass between a mouse click and a fully loaded page, the better.

Speed is a bit of an obsession for most web users. We fret over our Internet connections’ and mobile connections’ perceived slowness, and we go bananas for a faster web browser.

Given this better-faster mentality, the consequences for slow-loading pages can be dire for site owners; most users are willing to navigate away after waiting just three seconds, for example. And quite a few of these dissatisfied users will tell others about the experience.

What’s more, our entire perception of how fast or slow a page loads is a bit skewed. While we’re waiting for a site to materialize in a browser tab, pages seem to load about 15% slower than they actually do load. The perception gap increases to 35% once we’re away from a computer.

But for the precious milliseconds site owners can shave off page load times, they can see huge returns. For example, Amazon.com increased its revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of load time improvement. And Aol said its users in the top 10% of site speed viewed around 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10%.

Site optimization firm Strangeloop has provided us with a slew of graphically organized stats on just how long pages take to load, why they take as long as they do, and just how long the average Joe or Jane is willing to wait around for your site.

Check out the infographic below (click to see it at full size), and in the comments, let us know about your experiences with site speed.

And site owners, if you’re worried about speed, do a quick pulse-check with Google’s free and easy page speed tool, Page Speed Online.

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HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for Social Discovery

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Since the rise of search over the past decade, few obsessions have run deeper in the world of online publishing than search engine optimization (SEO). In an attempt to grow their audience and gain exposure for their content, publishers have increasingly focused on keeping Google’s crawlers well fed with tasty morsels of meta data, keyword repetitions, internal linking and more. But designing websites for crawlers often has a downside; namely, it can lead to a poor experience for flesh-and-blood users. How often have you actually used a keyword tag like the one below to navigate a site and discover new content?

Probably never. It’s wasted space cluttering the page, used only to help Google instead of actual readers.

Luckily, this mentality is beginning to change as the sources of traffic into publisher content diversify. While search may have constituted the majority of referrals to a publisher five years ago, we now see it giving up ground in favor of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and through the recommendation of other content creators and curators who link out more frequently than ever before.

This development is great for publishers. Not only does it mean they can return to their emphasis on structuring content for humans instead of crawlers, but the audience engagement levels from these sources is much higher. For instance, across the hundreds of major publisher sites where my company operates, we see that bounce rates (meaning people who consume only one page on a site before surfing elsewhere) from search traffic is generally 14% higher than from other sources. Similarly, time spent on site from search traffic is lower by about 16%.

These changes aren’t totally surprising. After all, someone accessing content from search is usually looking for an answer to a question. If Google does its job perfectly, then the person should never need to go deep into a publisher’s site to get what they came for. Meanwhile, how do people find great, original content using a search engine if they don’t even know it exists? They can’t. Search provides wonderful answers to directed inquiries, but it is not the natural starting point for discovering new, interesting content.

This changing landscape, however, means that publishers need to refocus on the larger question of content discovery: How do you create content that will find its way to people who are in browse mode? And equally important, once people come to your site, how do you help them discover great additional stories so they stick around longer? Fortunately, a lot of the tactics required to improve discoverability are a return to common sense principles.

1. Write Better Headlines

Your headlines need to be interesting and feed people’s curiosity, not simply focused on keyword density and repetitions. Good titling boosts clicks, especially from social networks like Twitter where users won’t see a blurb or image.

For example, print publishers like Cosmo have known for years that people love lists. This translates to digital, too: “The 9 Reasons We Love Fatty Foods” will pull in audiences, even if you’re boxed out on Google for the keyword “foods.” (Interesting tidbit: Research on the publishers in my company’s network indicate that odd-numbered lists will net you a 20% increase in headline click-through rates vs. even numbers.)

2. Make It Visual

Add an engaging thumbnail image representing your story. Just as photos draw people into content in newspapers and magazines, a great image goes a long way online. Now that sites like Facebook automatically pull in your thumbnail when people share your story, it’s more important than ever to designate engaging images in your page structure in order to capture audience attention from outside and within your site. At my company, we find that when we add thumbnail images as part of an article headline, we see a 27% increase in click engagement and content discovery.

3. Hold On to the Readers You Have

Use your page’s real estate wisely. We tend to focus on tactics for drawing new audiences into our content, but it’s equally important to think about how to ensure those people quickly find additional great reading material once they arrive. This means analyzing the real value you’re getting from each navigational device on the page. Are people using them and clicking deeper into your site? Or are you simply cluttering the page with links that have diminishing returns? Avoid the notion that you can spray paint your way to a work of art. If you’re not getting at least 1% engagement on a navigational module, junk it and keep the page clean.

4. Create the Best Possible Content in the First Place

Write great, original pieces. Easier said than done, of course. But now that content discovery is moving more and more into the hands of real people who are sharing it, recommending it and reading more of it once they come to your site, there’s a limit to how far you can get through repurposed or aggregated content.

The tactics used to optimize for overall content discovery continue to evolve. While making sure your content is well represented in search will always play a role, SEO should be seen as just one piece in a much larger puzzle. It’s now more important than ever to design your content for humans, not just crawlers.

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