Google Stars

Today's blog post over at google relays yet another improvement to the Webmaster Tools interface which has seen some steady improvements over the past few weeks.



Today's post includes average positions of the keywords you're tracking, and interestingly, a tab showing starred results form your logged in starred pages. Oh, and they've taken off the word "top" from your search queries. This information (although remember not 100% accurate) can help with checking some of your keywords that you're targeting. You can see the number of impressions, the clickthrough rate and then the average position. Maybe you're stressing to be top 3 for a certain keyword which isn't actually receiving as many impressions as you think it would. And maybe even then, the clickthrough rate is poor.

What's interesting to me, is that they've dedicated a whole tab to starred results. I'm not sure exactly how many people use this feature - you have to be logged in to star a page - and many people who are logged in and know what the star is are savvy enough to remember a particular site anyway. The implications are of course with personalised search, which is default nowadays.

Patrick over at Blogstorm has been testing this method recently to find out whether this starred method could affect organic results, and if you haven't already taken part in his little experiment, I suggest you do - the more results the better we can understand if there might be a small impact. Unless (as a couple of comments have suggested) Google gets wind, and scuppers the plans just to annoy us all!!

I remember thinking that when searchwiki was launched, if it was that easy to game, people would create bots and programs to mark up results. I can't see the star system being much different (Google just want's to be seen as fresh as Facebook's "I like this" buttons?), but we'll have to wait and see.

Are you looking to improve rankings in the search results? I can help. Get in tough with me at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about the possibilities. If you're looking for instant traffic, then I can also help with AdWords managment and training (or other pay per click campaigns).

Advanced Search Queries in Google

Google is making things easier for you to search. Apparently they continuously test the home page (some 41 shades of blue have been tested according to Marissa Mayer) and also this year the search box has been widened, and larger font is used when you type. More recently they've introduced a "fade-in" background (which I'll be honest is a bit odd, but there you go) so as to not distract from the already minimilistic page.



The majority of people simply type their query in the search box or toolbar, and then google even cleverly suggests the end of the query for you - all to make things easier. However, it can still take a bit of refining before you satify your needs. This is where the advanced paramenters can come in handy. There are a few extra things you can type into the search box to refine your search. Anyone familiar with Google's Adwords will probably know.

For example, using [] to bracket your search gives a broad match to the keywords. It's kind of like the same words you type with no extra symbols before or after, but can often change if you compare both.

Using "" around your search means you want an exact match of the keywords in that order. You can also use the - sign to denote negative keywords you want google to remove from the search results. The minus sign always needs to have a space before and be joined to the word, like this: "Turkey Recipies -Christmas" if you want some great recipies for cooking turkey but not a christmas turkey!! This is good if you know exactly what you're looking for, but can sometimes omit results. Think if you type "George Bush" into google, it won't display any pages where "George W Bush" appears. Get it?

If you want to search a particular website for information, then you can add site: to the query. For example if you want to see news about how Bing is doing in the UK, you can type Bing site:bbc.co.uk into the search box, and you'll be only given results from the BBC website. Simiarly, if you only want websites from the UK, then you can type site:.co.uk or government pages type site:.gov and so on.

The * key is a great little tool to use. This is what google calls a "wild card" and will basically fill in the blank for you if you don't know the word you're looking for. Sounds daft? Well, think of something like a football score. If you know the teams playing or who played, then you could type in FC Barcelona * Bayern Munich * which will remind you that the score was 4-0 to Barcelona.

There are more additions to your search query terms you may need to know for SEO, so I might touch on a few more of those in another post, but I think these are a good introduction for the moment. If you're not happy with your website's rankings in the Search Engines, then contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat. Or if you'd like some one-to-one SEO Training in Barcelona, then I can also help.

Search with a Bing

Microsoft recently released Bing, it's new Beta search engine, with a fairly powerful advertising campaign, and email campaign.



I have to say that compared to MSN search and Live! search, it's much much better. They've managed to clean out a lot of the spam from the listings, and there's a handy pop-up box to the right of the search results which displays what is on the page and other links on the page, too. It also looks more like a search engine home page, with no distractions apart from the search box (no news, no tabs, no other images) which is where Google has always steered clear from.

I can also say from the web analytics from my sites and some of the sites I manage that people are using Bing, or at least experimenting with it. It's not all just Google, which is good news I think. If people find the right information within Bing's results, they'll come back.

If you want to know how to optimise your site for the search engines like Bing, drop me a line at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about your site. Or if you're looking for instant traffic to your site, I can help set up and maintain your AdWords Barcelona Account, too.

Social Media for Search

Traditional search has changed dramatically over the last few years, and it looks to be on the brink of (or it's already happening) another shift, a quite important one.

After the introduction of Google's Universal Search SEOs needed to prepare for visibility in what was essentially going to become a Vertical Search for a product. However, it's well known that search results can be manipulated, and despite Google doing it's utmost to deliver the best results, it can still fall short - and that's because it's SERPs are dependent on Mathematical algorithms, not people (obviously that would be impossible!).


So here's where the shift is going. The rise of Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter mean that as long as you have a certain community established within those websites, you can get your answers a lot quicker. Let me give you an example. Let's say your printer breaks down on you. So you send a quick tweet on Twitter - which updates your facebook page - about how your printer just broke and you're on the lookout for a new one. No more than 90 Euros.



Within a couple of hours, you might have some replies from friends or colleagues, or hell, even PC City if they're SEOs are savvy enough to use things like backtweet. These can range from "wow, don't get an Epson" to "I'm sure XX store has got a special on this week" to "I'm selling mine, only 2 weeks old, cos I got it free with my new laptop" etc. etc.

Now if you compare that with a normal SERP, you would likely get a couple of review sites, some branded pages like HP, Epson, etc. but nothing "REAL TIME". It is this freshness of having real people to talk to which can make us think twice about rushing straight to Google, Yahoo! or MSN for something we need. User Generated Content (or UGC) is going to become huge and Content is always King.

Like what you're reading? Please feel free to leave a comment or if you have anything specific to share about your social search, I'd love to hear from you.

For more information about social search, contact me at Barcelona SEO or if you'd like some SEO Training in Barcelona I can come into your office or workplace and teach you.