The year 2010 so far in search and digital marketing

Structured data and social media are the two major trends (in my humble opinion) to impact upon search and digital marketing so far this year.

I've posted just the once this year, I'm not proud about it, so i thought, 'what have i missed in online marketing and SEO this year?' and was it anything important?

So I've had a look, and put together my highlights of the first six months of 2010, this is in NO way comprehensive.

22nd Jan - 'Event' markup in Google's Rich Snippets. This was also followed by 'microdata' in March and 'recipes' in April. My only blog post this year explains what rich snippets are - and although these three updates are not mind-blowing the continued use and expansion of structured data in search is my first trend of 2010 and a big change that websites need to embrace.

28th Feb - Facebook was added to Google's real-time search. This relates to the second major trend of 2010, not real-time search but the rise of social media in digital marketing. Originally launched using Twitter (of course) amongst others, Google's and Bing's real-time search pushes social media further to the forefront of digital marketing. Watch a good video about real-time search and the history of SEO on SEOmoz.

8th April - Digital Economy Act 2010. Hastily whizzed through parliament before government was dissolved for the general election, this is about regulating digital media. Specifically this covers how internet service providers (ISPs) must provide a list of people believed to have infringed copyright seemingly based on self certification by the copyright owner and ISP. There is no clear indication of checking the validity of evidence against these infringements so leaving the act open to potential abuse and limitation of civil liberty.

Do you feel represented?
(img source - bitter wallet)

7th May - New look Google. On a lighter note, Google has had a spring clean. Amongst other things what this may do is expose the extent of universal search to more people, making it all the more important to sort out those blogs, news articles, images, products. Like with the rise of social media, digital marketers have just been given more reasons why they should have their search fingers (that's the index on the left hand) in many pies.

11th June - Caffeine indexing system. Caffeine is Google's new search index. This is what it looks at when you type a keyword in and press 'search'. Caffeine apparently searches everything quicker through it's novel structure including real-time web, video, images, news. It will be a few months before we see if there's any direct impact on SEO but it does seem to back up the importance of the trends I mentioned earlier of structured data and social media.

15th July - iPad released. Could this reinvent the world as we know it? No. But i thought I'd mention it as websites race to get themselves iPad ready and EVERY competition at the moment offers one as a prize.

Soon - Google image search update. This doesn't seem to have taken effect yet for me, but apparently was launched recently and is "more intuitive and gets the user the answer a lot quicker". I know a number of sites where images are as important to their users as the text, but this has never been reflected in search. I hope this changes that, but we'll have to wait and see.

And let's not forget - The mobile web. Everyone i know (apart from me) has an iPhone or an Android powered phone. The mobile web is coming of age (sorry for the oft-repeated cliche but i honestly think it's justified this time) and those sites that cater for mobile users are going to have the edge. Especially sites which provide content relevant to those of us on the move - like sport results, restaurant listings, pub quiz answers etc.

With all this excitement and technological invention it sounds like SEO just got complicated. But i don't think it has, all these things are just important to bear in mind. A firm SEO footing is still good content, quality and quantity of links, relevance to your users and then you can look at reaching your audience in as many ways as possible.

Is structured data the future of search?

Rich snippets are increasingly used by Google to present searchers with information above and beyond the site title and meta description - such as reviews, prices, addresses - any data that is 'structured'.

This is nothing new, which is why it's such an appropriate subject for a cutting edge blog such as this to write about after over 4 months of total silence.

An example would be review and price range information for a restaurant. Something Google currently provides on Yelp search results - one of their partners when they initially embarked on rich snippets.

How this works is Yelp.co.uk presents the review and price information on each restaurant page in a format that Google can understand using 'microformats' or RDFa markup.

In English that last sentence translates as; Google knows that the two dollar signs refer to the 'pricerange' and the 15 reviews refers to the amount of reviews (or 'count').

By defining the content of a website into principle parts (such as 'pricerange' and 'count') it allows for easy comparison across websites.

Instead of having to go into a website to see that Yelp has 15 reviews and Toptable has 20 reviews you can see this in the search results, such as in the screenshot above.

This could potentially work for any data. Imagine searching on Google and instead of just titles and descriptions you get a summary of a site page - so if it's a product, you see the price, if it's a restaurant it gives a rating, if it's an event, it gives a date.

This would make it easier for you to know the content of a website and quicker for you to search and surf.

Personally i think this is a direction the web could take IF websites catch on to this method of coding and agree specific microformats - for example everyone uses 'price' for prices as opposed to 'cost', 'amount', 'payment' etc.

The well established Google product search (previously Froogle) is making good use of microformats and Wolfram Alpha had a good bash at it last year (what happened to them?!*) - i definitely think it's an area to keep an eye on.

*Update: They are providing factual answers to Apple's Siri software amongst other things...

The only thing standing in the way would be cleverer search algorithms that can figure out which part of web page is the price, the review, the date without the need for it to be hard coded as such. I'm sure the magical web boffins are thinking about this as we speak. Shh, they can't be disturbed...

Related posts
Search images by the colours within them (Feb 09)
What content types can Google Search? (Dec 08)

The ultimate SEO link building strategy from Blog Action Day

It was Blog Action Day '09 yesterday and to take part bloggers are asked to write a post about, in this case Climate Change, including the words "Blog Action Day" and a link somewhere to www.blogactionday.org.

However as an internet marketing blog I’m writing a post about how change.org (the company behind Blog Action Day) has created the ultimate link building SEO technique.

Backlinks from authority sites

In one single day they are getting 12,023 (as of 08:30 16/10/2009) backlinks from a variety of blogs. And not just any blogs, they include Number10, Google Blog, Mashable - "12 of the world's Top 100 Blogs" according to their website.

In terms of the power of those links, they are hitting both quantity and quality.


Links in context

Blog Action Day are specifying that you write a post on climate change. So most of those links will be from sites talking about different aspects of climate change.

The context of the copy around a link is an important factor in search engine ranking of keywords so this will help blogactionday.org appear higher for "climate change". In fact at the moment they are at the 6th result on page 2 of Google - which is good for what I imagine is a hugely competitive keyword (and they were the 10th result on page 2 yesterday so moving up).


What have they missed?

Link anchor text

They could have done even better with this SEO technique by specifying the link anchor text. Anchor text is used by search engines to define the content of your site - you only have to do the old "click here" trick to find Adobe Reader listed at the top of Google (because most people link to Adobe with "If you need a PDF reader, click here").

They could have even provided a selection of options. For example:

Please help Blog Action Day conquer Google for all the most important Climate Change keywords. Please make your link to this site consist of the words "Climate change" "Carbon Footprint", "Environment" or "Sustainability".

Unique URLs

The URL blogactionday.com will move on next year and push a different subject, in the past it's looked at the Environment and Poverty.

So all this association of subject, anchor text and context mentioned above will vary each year. This means that blogactionday.com will start to list in the search engines for "poverty", "climate change" etc. The unique pages on blogactionday.com devoted to that year's subject will be deleted or updated with the next year's topic.

If instead each year they were to create a unique sub-domain, i.e. climatechange.blogactionday.org, and then push links to this, they would have a site devoted to climate change that would continue to exist even when blog action day had moved on.

It would also have keywords in the URL - another important SEO factor. Both the uniqueness of the URL and the specific focus of each sub-domain would help to propel the site to number one in Google for ALL keywords as opposed to doing reasonably well for most but not amazingly for any and to start to lose all that power the year after when they change their website.

I do realise however that Blog action day isn't just about their website though, but the discussion (or dare I say 'wave') ALL OVER the blogosphere, and for that it's an awesome idea.

If you would like to read similar posts actually about Climate Change, as opposed to a ramble about their internet marketing strategy, from some of my colleagues at UBM, please click on any of the links below:
Brian Sims, John Welsh, Ron Alalouff, Phil Clark, Grahame Morrison, Rob Enslin

Related posts
Monitor the online buzz around your brand (May 2009)
5 steps to improve your online presence (Feb 2009)
How to measure the effectiveness of your SEO (Jan 2008)

Introduction to WolframAlpha search engine

Launching soon is WolframAlpha, a search engine which is doing what Ask Jeeves tried to do in the late 90s - answer questions, sort of.

Get a good understanding of how it works with this introduction screencast.

Unlike last year's launches of Cuil and Wikia Search i'm far more excited about WolframAlpha as they are focusing on a part of search that isn't currently serviced sufficiently. The more factual infosheet side rather than a method of redirection to other websites (which is what Google does).

For me, it could take over from Wikipedia for provision of immediate-response factual based information (i'm not suggesting it will usurp Wikipedia, just for those times i need straight facts).

Queries such as, "What's the GDP of Germany?" or "Where is the ISS at?". Neither questions i ask as often as i type in "BBC football" into Google mind.

Relevant web links
Web tool 'as important as Google' - BBC News

Search images by the colours within them

My colleague showed me a really fascinating image search by colour that indexes 10 million Flickr images and allows search based on colour.

For example here are the results for the colour blue:


And I can break down these results even more by adding the colour red:


The people who made this Flickr image search are "developers of advanced image recognition and visual search software" and i've also discovered another search engine they have called TinEye which searches for copies of an image you give it. Handy for copyright checking.

Image search is a fascinating subject and one that hasn't really grown up as much as text search. Things like Google Image Search are very much based on titles of images, related text, alt tags and link anchor text because of course search engine spiders traditionally only read text and can't 'view' images like a human can. STOP PRESS - Update: Google have just launched search by colour on Google Image Search.

Google Image Labeler is one method of getting round this problem - using humans to tell the computer what things are through the use of a simple game. Using humans to categorise images is a simple way to better search - Wikimedia Commons has a nice tidy pile of multimedia all categorised and named up as appropriate.

However I do like the idea of trying to search images in different ways - by using colours like the above example is one way - perhaps by the angles contained within the picture? Perhaps a search could be created that 'recognises' commonly seen shapes - such as buildings, cars, people, animals, hair, pornography!

Related posts
Is structured data the future of search? (Mar 2010)
Don't just have alt tags on images, include height and width too (Nov 2007)
Give images rounded edges using Photoshop (Nov 2007)