“Google Instant changes the way we think about impressions. With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.

It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels. However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need.”

Quote from Inside Adwords: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-more-innovative-approach.html

Also read more at Google Webmaster Tools: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-impact-on-search-queries.html

Tell us how you think it will change Search Engine Optimization?

Analytics App and Analytics HD

Available for the iPhone and the iPad, these two apps give you a preview of your data at a moments glance. Both apps allow you to load up multiple Google Accounts so you can track both work and personal sites. The iPhone app is very convenient for tracking on the go, and the iPad version gives you a bigger perspective and is a bit easier to navigate. One of my favorite parts about these apps are the Today and Yesterday reports which can be useful for checking traffic from recent content. The only downside I’ve seen thus far is the iPad version (Analytics HD) seems to be slower to load. This could be the app, or the fact that I monitor over 200 sites. Hopefully this will be improved in a future version.

Analyticator

This WordPress plugin shows your Google Analytics data within the WordPress back end interface. This is probably a great fit for publishers who aren’t interested in all that the web interface offers while still wanting to know basic things like visitor and pageview counts, keywords, and traffic sources. If you run a WordPress blog (like this one) or a WordPress website, this plugin is a great addition.

Link Tagger

Ever wanted to track downloads or external clicks but didn’t know how to do so in Google Analytics? Link Tagger can help with that. This is a javascript script you can download and include on your site pages that will automate the process of attaching the required Analytics code to track outgoing links and downloaded files. It works across all browsers with javascript support, so that should cover all users that analytics can track.

Ego

This is a personal favorite of mine. Ego allows you to view stats at a quick glance for Google Analytics as well as Mint tracking and other sites like Twitter, Vimeo, Tumblr, Feedburner, Squarespace, and Ember. At a quick glance you can tap through and see your stats for today, yesterday, the week, month, and year. The full iPad app allows you to swipe and load up the full statistics in the middle of the screen. I’ve yet to test that one, but I can attest to the iPhone version.

Be sure to check out the entire Google Analytics Application Gallery to see the other things like phone tracking, reporting tools, and site analytics auditing.

Google uses site speed in rankings – we’ve known for a while that Google was headed in this direction, and they finally made it official. Site speed is now counted, though it’s more of a tie-breaker than anything. Check out the full article. There, Matt Cutts points out that in addition to helping you in the rankings, speeding up your site will also please your visitors. Win-Win.

Google Analytics browser-based opt-out – Google takes privacy seriously and is working on some browser plugins that will allow people to opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics. As a site owner, don’t let this frighten you. Web users have always had the choice to opt out of many tracking tools by turning off javascript (though many don’t as it affects their overall web experience). Chances are you will not see any major dip in your statistics, and your users will have an additional tool to control their privacy online.

The So What test to Analytics reporting – This is a favorite topic of mine. While Google Analytics and other tools offer you a sea of reporting options, very few of those give you actionable steps to improve your site’s KPIs. Avinash Kaushik offers a few examples of how asking “So What?” can improve your reporting efficiency and save you time, energy, and help move you closer to your online goals. Take some time to read it and then look at the reports you usually review and ask, So What?

To stay up-to-date on the important news in the SEM world, you can Subscribe to The SEM Blog and receive all of our updates in your favorite RSS reader.

IPED and IPEDS are acronyms that have quite a few results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, the other spelling brethren to the iPod do not have much meaning. Because of this, all three search engines show spelling corrections for those words and typically include “iPod” search results as well. Today, we still see this for iPud and iPid. And, immediately after the Apple announcement, we saw it for iPad, too.

This was soon corrected, whether naturally or through intervention, in Yahoo and Google. Bing is still showing results for iPod when you search for the new iPad. This instance appears to show a small flaw in the search engine algorithms. How do you quickly add a new term when it had been written off as a typo?

The iPad announcement is the most recent example of this, but many web 2.0 companies experienced the same problem. When companies began to emulate Flickr’s naming convention of adding an ‘r’ to the end of their name, it also confused search engines. Is Snappr a service, or is someone looking for a lawn mower. This is especially apparent when services first launch, which is exactly what we witnessed with the launch of the iPad.

What does that mean for Search Engine Marketers? It means that Google may have a bit more to say about brand names then we would like to think. Is the new product you are launching or marketing a typo for something else? Then you may want to think about a name change. Of course, a strong product can overtake the ‘typo’ designation as they iPad has done in Google and Yahoo, but you may not have the marketing gusto and hype power that Apple carries. If you have flexibility in the name, then do your homework.

It may be time to add “Googleability” to the traditional product naming guidelines. Not only do you need to distinguish your brand from others, but you need to have a brand that isn’t even a close spelling of another product. If I sold a product called a “pespi,” I would be in a world of pain trying to market it online.

We would like to keep the search engines out of these types of processes, and they want to stay out of them as well. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information.” No part of that says anything about governing or changing that information. The unfortunate truth is that online marketing is growing rapidly, and to keep up you need to capitalize on the traffic that Google and the others can drive. So, pick your product names carefully, and market the heck out of them.

SEO Drupal Modules

Pathauto – Creates automatic URL aliases based on patterns created by the Token module. Includes options for taxonomy, user, content types, and others.  This module is very flexible and allows you to modify the URLs for any page on the site.

XML Sitemap – Creates a sitemap based on the sitemaps.org spec.  Also allows for submission to search engines with the required api keys. An XML Sitemap is the best way to show the search engines of new content on your site and this module can create that sitemap very easily for you.

Google Analytics – This is a fully loaded analytics tracking solution.  Just imput the UA number for your site and the tracking code will be included on every page. Allows for blocking tracking on certain pages, tracking by role, downloads, and other metrics.

Page Title – Similar to Pathauto, but for meta Title Tags.  You can setup patterns for different pieces of content. It also allows the option for a user to override and individual page’s Title Tag.

Global Redirect – Creates 301 redirects for different urls on the same site, like node/1, node?q=1, and /about-us/. This is great for making sure you aren’t splitting your rank between different URLs for the same page. Global Redirect also makes sure your URLs are all uniform by stripping the final “/”. This is a great help in Google Analytics reports so you know that every pageview is counted appropriately.

Nodewords – This allows you set meta description and keywords for individual nodes and views. Newer beta versions also include the ability to add a meta confirmation tag for Google Webmaster Tools. This way you do not need to edit your templates or upload a file.

SEO Checklist – This module is a great place to help keep track of all of the above modules and more. There are quite a few things that can be setup to automate your site’s SEO performance. SEO Checklist helps you keep all of these things straight.

Drupal SEO Performance

Because of these wonderful modules, Drupal is regarded as one of the top performing CMS platforms for SEO. With the tools above, you are able to configure everything to run in the background, so you can focus on your pages and your content and not have to worry too much about the technical details.

Other CMS platforms are able to accomplish some of these things, but very few if any are able to do everything for CMS that Drupal does with these modules. The other SEO benefit is that as search engine optimization changes, the Drupal community can adapt and quickly update the modules. The Drupal admin system can notify you of updates to you modules to make sure your site is kept up-to-date.

Schipul offers custom Drupal designs and is also able to do Drupal development for the site of your dreams. And of course, all of this great SEO configuration is included.

Below is a screen shot of a search for the term Schipul. Much like the Google News search results you are now given a link to ‘Show options’

Clicking on that link opens up a few options on the left side of the screen

This will allow you to see recent content related to that term based on the time criteria. You can even sort by date or even related searches.

Ok, this is really cool BUT I want to check to the Wonder Wheel option.

Google Wonder Wheel

Oh sure its been out since May but it hasn’t shown up on the regular search page until this week. So what is Google Wonder Wheel? It is visual wheel image that shows you related search terms based on your term. Below is a screenshot of Schipul again.

Click on another term and you get another wheel

Google Wonder Wheel, Well So What?

I know you’re probably thinking to yourself ‘Well, Jason I really have no need for more graphs in my life so why is this important?’ Well I’m glad you didn’t really ask. If you’ve ever wondered what Google thinks about your site and its content this will give you a quick idea on that.

If you’ve built your site and you haven’t optimized your content you might be telling the search engines something completely different than you want. Run a simple search on your company and or keyterms and see what Google thinks is related to that. If you don’t show up your web presence might not be big enough or your site isn’t optimized. One way or the other you need to get that fixed.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

What does this mean to you?

Well for one thing each person in your audience now has the ability to easily connect with each other. That means that every person that uses your product or service now has the tools to easily influence other people about you and your brand. This is a good thing and also a bad thing. If your brand is well received you are in a position to help your raving fans turn other users into raving fans. If your brand isn’t then you’re going to need to monitor your online PR.

Neilsen reports that ’90% of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.’

In the past you needed to engage a PR firm to see what people were saying about you and/or your brand. You’ll still need to do that but now with some cool online tools you can do it yourself, to some degree, if you have the time. There’s a lot of data out there so you might still want to engage a PR firm.

Monitoring Your Brand Online – Websites

No matter what the scenario you fall into above you’re going to want to know what people are saying about you and below are some great tools to get started

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great tool that allows you to receive alerts whenever your brand is mentioned in a search result. From Google ‘Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.’

Twitter Search

http://search.twitter.com If you don’t know what Twitter is you are doing it wrong. Run a search on Twitter to see what people are talking about. Plug in your name, your brand name or your keywords and see what people are saying right now.

Social Mention

This is a go-to site for me. If I need to track terms or brand names I run a search on Social Mention and I can see recent activity around the web. Much like Technorati’s search engine it gives you an overview of recent content on the web.

BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another tool you need in your arsenal. Brought to you by the folks at Nielsen BlogPulse ‘is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.’ It allows you to search trends and track conversations amongst other things. You need to bookmark this site, become friends with it.

Monitoring Your Brand Online – Desktop Applications

With advent of tools like Adobe’s Air you can now use desktop applications to monitor your brand or yourself online

Social Seek

This brand new app that lets you see, much like Social Mention, what is happening around the web without having to open a browser. Type in a term and a location and Social Seek will give you results from Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Eventful.

Just download SocialSeek and search for various terms and locations to see what people are saying about you around the world. A great tool indeed!

PeopleBrowsr

This is a very robust platform so make sure you put on your big boy pants when you jump into this one. PeopleBrowsr offers a host of tools for you to use that include Live Search, Marketers, My PB, Industry Billboard, News and even a Conference tracker.

It’s a little overwhelming the amount of information you have at your finger tips with PeopleBroswer but quite frankly these kinds of things put a big smile on my face. Jump and give it a try. Sign up and click on the ‘PBAir Download’ link at the bottom of your browser. I know, I know very vague instructions but I cannot find any clear link to give you. Maybe the good folks at PeopleBrowser will read this and comment on how to easily find the desktop AIR app. Hint hint.

What Are Some Tools You Are Using?

Obviously this isn’t a complete list, there are literally tons and tons of tools to use, what are some cool ones that you have been using to monitor your site?

Drop us a comment and let us know how you are monitoring you and/or your brand online

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

We do recognize that Search is improving and changing. Bing as being billed as a Decision Engine and you can see short presentation about it at www.decisionengine.com.

In the first versions, Bing will focus on four areas:

1. Making a purchase decision
2. Planning a trip
3. Researching a heath condition
4. Finding a local business

This new view of search engines is very much about comparing information. People using search engines for finding information are often looking for a one best answer. But decisions are more focused on reviews, trust, location and sometimes filtering out what you don’t need. This is where we see search taking on the role of negotiation. Bing seems to take a first stab at search as a negotiation in each of the four verticals. Bing will be revealing results based on Best Match, Deep Links and Quick Preview to provide relevancy and minimize the need for additional clicks. They will provide customer insight built in pages to provide comparisons, reviews and even price predictors in some cases. Really, the market share is open for improvements.

Bing’s advertising campaign will begin to sell the idea that today’s search engines don’t really work as well as thought to solve problems. Even if this turns out to be a better version of search/decision, they will have to compete with the Google brand. Tests showed people still preferred search results with the Google Brand logo, even if the results were not Google results. Positioning may be their biggest hurdle. Oh yeah… the name?

Branding shop Interbrand helped conceive the name Bing, which was chosen because it was memorable, easy to spell around the world and could be used as a verb, as Microsoft hopes to convert people from "Google it" to "Bing it."

Finding words like that these days "is getting harder and harder," said Paola Norambuena, senior director-head of verbal identity at Interbrand. She added that linguistically Bing had a lot of applications. "It's the sound of found."

from Advertising Age

Jonti Bolles

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

and follow us on Twitter.

Twitter Search is about to change. CNET notes Twitter will start indexing not just the contents of the 140 character microblogs, but also crawling and indexing the content of pages sent in shortened URLs. This will provide a much clearer indication of what people are interested in and how topics are ranking. This could be a great tool to organize data and filter some of the recent spam clutter on Twitter. Twitter may be positioning for a run at part of Google’s pie in the Search community. Delivering relevant real-time results based on rank, reputation and relevance would be valuable in the semantic search development.

What does this mean to the business user getting started with Twitter? Building a effective profile in now becomes more important than ever. Many small businesses are aware of the impact of Twitter, followers and reputation in their community. Now, reputation could be ranked and the content of websites will be measured via retweets, shortened URLs and quality vs. quantity. This isn’t anything new, we have known good content is the best way to develop followers and build a community, now Twitter will begin to follow the same rules. It is conceivable to realize Twitter accounts with good followers, retweets and good reputation will be ranked higher in Twitter search results.

What can you do? Continue to learn the best tools and etiquette for using Twitter.  For example, Twitter just switched its default link shortener to Bit.ly. Bit.ly offers real-time stats on the most clicked links, clickthrough and where users are coming from. You can link to your own website and announce new blog posts and website updates, but more importantly, share the link love to good content beyond your site and contribute to the community. Use Twitter Search to find others in your community who share similar interests. Follow them and listen, then participate in the community. Finally, monitor how well you are doing compared to others using Twitalyzer to measure Influence and other new metrics.

Jonti Bolles

For more information about this article, learning to effectively use Twitter and other Social Media tools, or learning how to manage analytics, please contact our Business Development Team at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

Use Value related keywords: Review your keyword list and top phrases driving traffic to your site. Google Trends clearly shows a trend for the word Coupon in  rising trend for the past twelve months. Can you incorporate price and discount related words? Add discount, savings, coupon, sale to phrases when relevant. Make sure to incorporate negative keywords such as –free to prevent paying for irrelevant clicks or bringing unwanted traffic. Use a Search Based Keyword Tool to both expand and target your list.

Low prices and savings in Display Ads: Customers both new and repeat are looking for values. Let them know about a sale, bundle pricing or a special promotional code. This text can be used in Display Ads and should be reinforced with the same message on the landing page. Can you promote a Sale, offer a bundle or discount for 10% off your web order? From Forrester research in late 2008, half of consumers believe they find the best deals online. Take advantage and market to the savvy shopper.

Market to existing clients: Let people know you have a new offer. Send an email to your house list with the latest coupon or discount code. Examples may include“Mention this email and receive 10% off your entire purchase” or “Print this coupon.” Include a discount code or free shipping if your ecommerce cart provides that option. Create your newsletter with text and graphics incorporating your special offer and keywords. Look at your email list and segment them based on what offer or target goal you are trying to achieve. It may be different offers resonant with different groups. Now, post that same newsletter as an article or page on your website to build traffic and attract additional readers.  Please make sure you have permission to send your email so you will not be flagged as SPAM. Watching your web analytics program, track visitors after sending an email to help measure success of your different target markets. Focus your efforts on the high-performing groups and consider allocating resources accordingly.

Jonti Bolles

For more information about this article or Web Marketing, please contact our Search Engine Marketing Team or Business Development Team at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.