In terms of Profiles appearing in search, Google is demonstrating why it can pay off in search visibility to be active on Google+ and develop a substantial following. Before it was clear that this was beneficial, but now, you can see directly where this will help you. Not only will Google show people you are friends with, but it will show people it thinks you would be interested in.

Google says it will show autocomplete predictions for “various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program”. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html

People can click on these results and easily add the person to their circles on Google+.  It doesn’t look like brand pages will be showing up as autocomplete predictions. When asked about this, a Google spokesperson said,

“For profiles in search, you will see an autocomplete prediction for people who have Google+ profiles. These are people you’re connected to or popular people related to the query. For Google+ Pages, there’s Direct Connect (launched back in Nov).”

 ”As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.”

The update, which seeks to build on the Caffeine web indexing system, has said to be affecting approximately 35% of all search queries. For example, if you search for “upcoming Brooklyn theater shows” Google understands that the search results should not include shows from last year.

The freshness update follows on from what Google started last year with “Caffeine”. The new search algorithm determines when certain search queries should return more timely content, instead of older pages that might rank higher. So content freshness is given more importance.

Google Engineer, Amit Singhal, announced the update on The Official Google Blog:

Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

Which 35% of searches will be impacted? Here are the examples Google has provided:

• Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.
• Regularly recurring events.Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.
• Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

With internet users looking to Facebook and Twitter for more timely and relevant updates, this “fresh” update by Google is a good move.

Ads Above The Fold

Matt Cutts said that Google was testing algorithms that determine how much content is available above the fold on your web pages.  He cautioned that sites that have ads that obscure content could be in trouble.  Check your site – do your website visitors see the content easily and readily on your site or is it obstructed by ads and other distractions?

10 Algorithm Updates

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

23 questions to ask yourself about your content quality

While Google has dropped some hints here and there on what it considers to be a low quality page or article, Google has now been clearer than ever as to what it’s looking at.

“Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year,” writes Google Fellow Amit Singhal on the Google Webmaster Central blog. “In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

Google lists the following as “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article”:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

The company is careful to note that it’s not disclosing actual ranking signals used in its algorithms, but these questions will help you “step into Google’s mindset.” These questions are things that Google says it asks itself as it writes algorithms.

Singhal also reminds webmasters, “One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”

The Google Quality Rating Guidelines is a handbook used by Google Search Quality Raters from around the world to rate the quality of results from specific searches. URL Raters are given a URL and a search query and instructed to visit the landing page and assign a rating based on guidelines from the handbook.

The latest update for 201 1 of Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines was leaked online a couple of weeks ago, in this video SEO London Rod Gardner London takes a look at the Google Quality Guidelines Handbook issued to users of Google’s Human Rating System. The video highlights what makes a bad website and how they rate usefull content.

Google’s Criteria for a “Useful” Webpage is rather broad and states that a single query can have many useful webpages. As with any manual rating system the answers will be subjective, however raters are asked to decide if the webpage is a “good fit” for the query. Some examples state that the page may be “highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (such as breaking news on a topic).”

Pages earning the “relevant” rating will still need to fit the query but will have less helpful information compared to useful pages. This may include information that is older or only addresses one part of the query.

The “slightly relevant” or “off topic” ratings are saved for web pages which Google wants to avoid. In these sections Google asks raters to look past tricks tricks like including search terms in the URL, page title and copied or repeated keywords when assigning a rating to the page.

Finally, the document also discusses what makes a page bad enough to be marked as “spam”.

Google Indexed Content In Less Than 3 Minutes

In this video I show you how I submit a post to my SEO Blog and within three minutes the same post showing up in Google’s search results. I show you around WordPress admin dashboard, the SEO plugin im using and post the content, wait for just 2 minutes and search Google.

The post demonstrates how efficient Google is at crawling the web and also just how quickly you can start getting free traffic from Google’s organic search results.

Catch the attention of search engine users, gear them to your website and convert them into long-term clients!

• Grow your contact list, add BIG INDUSTRY NAMES to your client list.

Learn some crucial tricks and tips and give a massive boost to your marketing career.

• Use Google sitemaps to instantly place newly-created pages on the website in the Google Search Index

• Learn Google Analytics, determine the direction  of your visitor flow and design successful online campaigns

• Do not remain dependent on SEO companies to generate revenues for you. Plan your SEO strategies that work best for your online business.

• Get notified by Google Alerts, keep track of your online activities and monitor your Internet business interest

• Promote your products, study your market and analyze the price structure offered by your competitor…all this through Google
  Froogle

• Log on to Google eBlogger, offer detailed information of your product or service, interact with people and attract qualified traffic to your website.

• Use Google Groups to create business networks with targeted customers

• Monetize your website content, keep yourself up-to-date about keywords being bid upon and find out the limit to which
  advertisers are ready to pay by participating in Google Adsense program

• Optimize your adwords cost with relevant, targeted ad campaigns and achieve an above-normal visitor conversion ratio

• Get a deeper insight into techniques of generating search engine optimized content

• Enjoy huge volumes of traffic, increase your sales and quickly become a competitor to reckon with

Get your FREE copy now! Try it out yourself!

http://www.seogoogle.biz/get-your-website-listed-on-the-first-page-of-google/

Do you think you will have a similar opportunity of checking out a book with as much ease?

If Google moves to this kind of user experience, which it very well could, given that it’s already in place on Image Search, it could be good news for sites that rank beyond the first page of search results. Most people probably don’t click through to very many second, third (and beyond) pages when they’re searching. At least not most of the time. They may, however, be more inclined to do a little more scrolling. Granted, they may have to click to show more results (as seen in the video).

It’s a pretty nice user experience in my opinion. They don’t make you click at all though. It’s more like scrolling through your Facebook News Feed or Twitter timeline (both of which are pretty popular activities).

Google is always talking about improving the user experience, and I think this would do just that. Another reason why I believe they may end up going forward with this is the speed factor. Google has been all about speeding things up lately. The most notable examples of this include the launches of Google Instant and Instant Pages, which loads the result Google thinks you’re going to click on before you actually click on it.

Tell us what you think and leave a comment on this discussion below

The standards of SEO have changed drastically. Getting high ranking is just not enough now. Getting hordes of traffic is not enough. What you need is conversion. The number of people visiting your site should change to leads or sales. Google Analytics can help you in analysing the traffic trends on your website, and direct you in making the right changes in your SEO techniques.

Creating Filters:
With filters, you can weed out the data you don’t want in your reports. For multiple filters, you can create multiple profiles to track different filtered data. However, have one master profile that has all your data. You must create filters within your Profile Settings page. Here is more on creating multiple profiles. Andre Scholten of Yoast.com also stresses that in order to get the right ranking in Google Analytics report, a new filter is needed. He says, “Well, you can’t specifically track the exact position of the keyword that was clicked like you can do with AdWords. But it is possible to determine the page he was on. A ranking tool can tell you over and over again that a certain keyword is around position 15 in Google while Google Analytics claims he is on page 1 (position 1 to 10). This effect can come from ‘personalized search’ or ‘local results’ that can influence the Google rankings dramatically. ” See his tutorial on how to use and understand the filtered data here.

Advanced Segments:
Advanced Segmentation is a tool with which you can filter the Analytics data in a report, without having to create separate profiles. You can then keep track of different groups and traffic sources and also analyse their behaviour. These segments can be created from the control bar at the top of any report, or the Advanced Segmentation section underneath the list of your reports. To set them up, click on “Advanced Segments”, click “Create new custom segment” and then you can add your dimensions and metrics. You can segment organic visits including your brand name, or visits that are made after words like – ‘help’ or ‘ways’ or ‘buy’. You can go in depth, analyse for instance the referral traffic that you are getting and their conversions. Here is a very helpful blog on Advanced Segmentation.

Custom Reports:
It is of prime importance to customise your Analytics. You should know what works for you. Now, you may be happy by knowing general stuff about number of visits, from where, bounce rate etc. But how does all this relate to the most important word- conversions? This you can gather from ordering a customised report. On the dashboard- Follow these steps:

Custom Reporting–>Manage Custom Reports–> Create new custom report–>

At this stage, you can drag and drop your metrics and dimensions. You can always, save the report and modify the metrics to see further insights.

Creating Goals:
Setting up goals is the best way to achieve conversion. Google Analytics helps you evaluate how well your site is moving towards the goal in your mind. A goal varies for every site- and so does the funnel. This is the process of setting up a goal:

Overview section–>Edit–>Add Goal ( in the Goals section).

Now you can set the sales as a goal for an e-commerce site and time spent on a page for a publishing site as your goal.

After that Name the Goal–> define URL Destination as the Goal Type–> For Goal Details select Head Match for match type, and /feeds as the Goal URL

Here is the detailed process of setting up and analysing goals.

Google Analytics looks simple but has has many layers and provides data that you can filter-segment and then customise it to set better goals that lead to conversion. Being an SEO, reviewing these customised reports will help you work better on your site and convert every visit into something profitable. The conclusion is simple- Get more out of Google Analytics.

Social search has been adding annotations to search results when content from your social connections (not to be confused with your Google+ Circles) was shared on services such as Twitter, LinkedIn and others. – Soon you may start seeing annotations that mention Google’s own social service, and these will come from people in your Google+ circles… Google Social Search continues to operate as before. Things shared socially at places like Twitter and Facebook by those you’re connected with may appear with annotations and rank better in results. – The main difference is, as Google’s post says, is that things you share on Google+ itself are now part of the mix.”

Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. For example, if I share an article about Google+ eliminating pseudonyms publicly on my Google+ page, users who have added me to their circles will see a note that I shared that link if they stumble upon it in Google Search.

Google+ now joins Flickr, Twitter, Quora and Google Buzz as other inputs for Google’s Social Search product. Social Search debuted in 2009 at the Web 2.0 Summit, partly as a response to Bing’s integration with Facebook and Twitter. Social Search highlights what links your friends are sharing on the web and returns results it believes are relevant based on your friends’ interests.

Social Search integration is only the beginning for Google’s plans for combining its search engine and social network. Google intends to revive real-time search with Google+ data and will launch a search engine for Google+ posts. Of course, the tech giant did the same thing with Google Buzz, and we all know what happened to that product.

Do you think Google+ makes Google Search a better product? Let us know what you think in the comments.