Google Plus

Google plus is here to say. If you haven't heard Plus has so far been the quickest uptake of an online social service, faster than Twitter and Facebook. We should make two clear points on that, both Facebook and Twitter have paved the way so that Plus has been able to achieve success on the pioneering change both have made. Second Google have an enormous amount of users to directly market at.

However Google have always had a huge number and after many attempts plus looks like being the social attempt which finally works even if it's only in its' infancy it's still the most successful effort so far therefore we have to start thinking it is here to stay and take it seriously, even if its' nearest competitor in terms of market share is something like MySpace at the moment. If you've not looked at plus I suggest you take a look, it has some neat functionality such as Ripples which ultimately may just be the thing that makes it very successful.

Big Companies to wake up in 2012

I don't get to too many SEO conferences, I often just buy one or two videos based on social buzz or recommendation. The best conference, from the videos anyway, of 2011 was Seomoz's Mozcon. In one of the sessions it was mentioned that Blue Chips are happy to pay for advertising slots everywhere for branding purposes. The example given were McDonalds advertising around healthy eating and Coca Cola's slogan the real thing. The point was made if you Google 'healthy eating' or 'real thing' neither come up anywhere on the first page. The point was made firstly if you do some research people do search for both. Secondly that what has the most impact a billboard or a SERPs page? So why are big companies who clearly want to make an impact ignoring search when they can make an impact?

Businesses, even big businesses suck at making good marketing decisions and still largely the whole business world has to wake up to the possibilities of not just those SEO but online marketing. Those who dislike SEO have not tried it properly, maybe this year is the year that finally companies wake up to online marketing.

Link profiling

It's time we as SEO's took much more attention to what I call our 'Link Profile' and stopped chasing pure links. I personally would like to see this reflected more evenly in changes to the algorithm though I doubt this would happen. I would like to see more spammy attempts at link building penalised rather than just ignored. The company where I work for as Head of Search has a sister web development company and one of our prime keyword targets the company that ranks number one for their links has spammy posts from forums which saynothing more than 'good post', paid for links and links from copied content. Clearly as they rank no 1 the worst penalty they are getting for these crimes is the spammy links are being ignored.

What is the fear of getting caught when the penalties administered are poor. I believe sooner or later there will come a point where some of the more traditional methods of link building that are today considered spammy will be more heavily penalised than currently seems the case. For me this should include a link profile that looks unnatural.

New Stumbling blocks

Two new stumbling blocks arrived last year of the bigger kind that actually the market is not quite used to.

Firstly we had the privacy issues with some keyword term data passed to Google Analytics now showing as '(not set).' A mild inconvenience for most that Google said would only effect up to 10% of data. Clearly in the last few months of 2011 this was going up month by month affecting on average 25% of search users with some reporting much higher figures.

This is caused because the user is logged into their Google account. A new privacy option, though apparently it doesn't apply to Google Adwords data for some reason, which is just peachy if you don't use Adwords.

The second is the closure of Yahoo Webmaster Tools. With the purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft, Yahoo is now powered by Bing's Index which obviously leaves no reason to keep YWT running as the data is in Bing's own Adlabs features. This is potentially a rather dangerous trend if you look at the fact that month on month Yahoo is losing share to Bing. Is this deliberately being manufactured by Microsoft.

This includes the now legendary linking data tool, the only authoritative place on the web to research competitor backlinks for free. If this is a problem for you I'd advise switching to Seomoz's awesome Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO. Both provide some form of backlink data for free. Alternatively something like Raven may be ok? OLE will let you do a few searches every now and then which maybe just doable if your in house otherwise pay you will have to. Raven is a cheaper alternative.

Both these changes represent challenges to the whole Search Community but we are all in the same boat.

Bing and Yahoo joining forces

Nothing has changed at all on the Bing score in terms of market share. I recently read an article on Mashable from last year predicting that Bing would overtake Google as the number one search engine in America (or was it the world?). Anyway fat chance of either even if Yahoo's market share is included though the article failed to state that it did so, but the figures clearly did which was somewhat of an anomaly. About the only change really is now we have two commercial entities owning 95% of the world's search market rather than three.

Yahoo has regularly been losing market share to Bing and probably I imagine in the end will lose some to Google but combined they have about a 30% market share, less than half Google's 65%. Personally I would enjoy the added challenge of having to strategize across two big players rather than just one and the added options and decisions that would need to be made if that were to happen but I don't see this happening, certainly not in 2012.

Blended Search

Something which has barely made a news impact this year is there has been a major change in the way Google are displaying search results. I've seen an obvious trend this year for very commercial or generic phrases like flowers or car rentals Google is displaying local listings instead of the classic bog standard one to ten rankings. For most of the projects I've run this year there has been a shift from doing more traditional SEO for keywords to getting listings via Google Places. Whereas before these keywords would have been seen as long term targets now many of them are short term and we're having to focus a lot less resources to achieve visibility with this change which allows us to adopt a more successful and flexible strategy as we can chase the possibility of ranking either generically, locally or both. 

One of the reasons why I think this is so is there is virtually no competition for quite a few of these terms this is partly because this type of Search is far more nichey anyway but also SEO's are still to wake up to the possibilities of Blended Search, it is there for everybody to see how important it is to search today.

Off Page v's On Page Optimisation

We all know the power of link building, we all know the power of getting your on page optimisation right or at least most of us should. It's still surprising today to find some still arguing one against the other. Despite the fact presumably we do know that both have more than a pretty little part to play in getting our rankings up those listings.

Some of the lessons of this year are about time lessons, so for starters it's about time we don't throw all our eggs into one basket. Today we very much have a convergent and more digital web we can no longer just rely on SEO alone. All the big players in Search no longer call themselves SEO or SEM Companies they are digital marketing companies. There is a good reason for that firstly it's a competitive market where big companies in a time of financial crisis are willing to pay millions on online marketing, secondly in such a competitive market the better companies have realised that to gain that competitive, sometimes bleeding edge they have to be on top of social, CRO, video, blogging, etc. It's this competitive edge that today delivers results.

The perfection some SEOs dedicate to link building just doesn't make common sense. In analysing sites last year I've found enough that are close to perfect. But you look at the on page factors and you find basic SEO errors like keyword stuffing, duplicated title tags and spammy content. What's the point in your link building scoring 10 out of 10 if your off page doesn't even make a 5. You visit their facebook business page and only them and a few mates like them.

It's better to score 7 or 8 out of 10 for different elements of SEO that help your ranking than relying on having a one element with a high score. If Google changes the algorithm and that one change just happens to be where you've put all your eggs in one basket you're in trouble, serious trouble. If you're not an in house SEO but run your own SEO Company that may just be it for your company!

Meta Keywords

Everyone knows what I'm talking about when I mention Meta Keywords. I don't understand why this ever gets mentioned any more. Ironically I am only mentioning it to say that in 2012 let's hope it never gets mentioned again. However I keep reading articles where it is mentioned that it's no longer a factor. What is not pointed out it is only back in the day where it even was a factor, before Page and Brin even decided to name their new company a misspelling of goggleplex. Exactly so why is anyone even bothering to talk it about it anyway, particularly to infer that they are an authority on SEO? No-one has a floppy disc in their computer do they? Yet they did when Meta Keywords became irrelevant! It's about time we stopped talking about SEO factors from way back when that are obsolete.

Content is still king

This has been a long held belief in the SEO world for a good long time but not only holds true today it will hold true forever. Content Quality should always be a marketer's prime concern. With all the sensationalist claims about online marketing being 'simple' we forget that yes there may be simpler methods of marketing for generating traffic but if your content is not engaging or interesting then that traffic is not providing you enough sales or leads as it should.

Ultimately let's not forget Google ranks content. I saw a great headline on a blog last year that read If Content is King then Quality is Queen. With the leaked Google Quality Guidelines PDF we know understand exactly what Google regard as Quality and Spam.

Quality was the number one search issue of last year because of the Panda fiasco, highlighting some of the quality issues of Google's Index with the Overstock and JC Penney incidents, this was made a branding nightmare by the New York Times article 'The Dirty Little Secrets of Search'. If ever Google needed to react then no-one can accuse them of not doing that, over react maybe. Today the index is certainly improved and we certainly have a more aware and sensitive Google to the issues surrounding quality.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Last year was supposed to be the year of CRO but it never quite made it. What we should have is a more aware marketing community which begins to understand how to use Analytics Packages. Take Google Analytics for example, there are not many who actually understand how to use it as more than just a reporting tool that can track performance but as useful tool to increase performance.

Split Testing is so simple to do too. When I'm pitching for clients there are not many competitors who mention CRO, which usually gets a very puzzled look that translates to something like why haven't I heard of that before. When I show them a case study of Split Test we've done it generally has them salivating at the mouth, not just because of the results but they see how simple it is to do.

Personally CRO for me is the most important element of Online Marketing, it's certainly a winner as far as winning new work.

To recap:

1. Check out Google plus if you've yet to do.  
2. Big companies to wake up in 2012.
3. Link profile - we should be more fussy about our link profiles this year.
4. Find a good link building tool and watch out for the not set data in analytics
5. Bing and Yahoo joining has so far not changed the market, expect this to continue
6. Take Blended search far more seriously
7. Make sure your on page is as good as your off page
8. Meta Keywords - lets make sure in 2012 it's meta what.
9. Leaked Google document still proves content is king.
10. Finally do some split testing and propert CRO analysis