Google Keywords Tool Now Shows Mobile Search Keywords
As I mentioned in my 7 Notable points for Internet marketers in 2011, Mobile is going to get bigger this year and it seems Google is doing everything possible to help the search marketers to target this growing mobile audience.
Google Adwords campaign by default includes desktop as well as mobile devices to run
your ads, however, over the last year we have seen further fine tuning of this capabilities, which now allows paid search professionals to target their mobile ads through Google Adwords to users on specific mobile devices and on specific carriers.
Google mentions that in the third quarter of 2010, Google mobile searches jumped 130% year over year, which indicates that more and more advertisers would be interested in mobile ads.Now to further help Adwords consultants Google has enhanced its Keyword research tool to show mobile specific data. The Google keyword tool now offers options for users to see keyword ideas and statistics for various types of mobile devices under “Advanced Options”.
The tool is pretty detailed and there are multiple options to choose from, you can choose to view keyword ideas for -
- Mobile device with full internet browsers ( iPhone, Android and similar smart phones)
- Mobile WAP devices ( most Internet enabled phones)
- All Mobile browsers
- Besides, desktop and laptop devices
This could be a fantastic addition for search marketers to understand which queries are specific to or are more common on which type of device. It’s a good idea to search for your target keywords using the keyword research tool, set once for “Desktop and Laptop Devices” and once for mobile. Export both the options in Excel and the compare the volume for common keywords across platforms to better understand the search trends by device.
Also, I would strongly recommend keeping a close eye on your analytics to see if you are getting a sizable traffic volume from mobile devices. Based on this consider setting up separate “mobile only” campaigns, so you can further experiment with these platforms.
It would not be surprising if Bing also beefs up its mobile user targeting options and starts offering new tools of similar nature. This enhancement to Google’s keyword research tool is definitely a great addition for all SEO and Adwords consultants in the New Year and I am sure there would be a lot more new stuff happening in the mobile marketing space this year.
Read more on SEO at SEO Consultant India Blog
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SEO Consultant India – SEO Kolkata
Five things Mark Lopez should do at Google
Last week, Google made a really smart move and hired Mark Lopez to head its US Hispanic efforts. I was thrilled when I saw the announcement. I was not only happy for a good friend, but I also felt like the US Hispanic online market had finally come of age. By hiring one of us to spearhead its Hispanic efforts, the Internet giant has officially recognized the importance of the Hispanic market.
During the past ten years, I have often reflected on the opportunity that Google was missing in the Hispanic market. Google enjoys unprecedented reach and proprietary insights about the US Hispanic online market that I am sure Mark will leverage to the benefit of both marketers and Google.
According to comScore Media Metrix, in January 2010, Google was the most popular online property among Hispanics, reaching 18.5 million Hispanics or 78% of the US Hispanic online market. What’s more, Google’s partnerships with popular Spanish-language websites such as Univision, AOL Latino, Terra and Starmedia firmly embed them into the browsers of Hispanics. Millions of Hispanics interact with Google’s products and services every day, giving Google access to insights about their unique online behavior.
Marketers looking to reach the growing Hispanic market should be excited about Mark joining Google. His experience and relationships in the space combined with Google’s enormous potential are sure to be an exitazo (huge success).
Here are five things Mark should consider as he begins his new adventure with Google later this month.
1. Bridge the Hispanic digital divide
Hispanics (and other minorities) lag the general market when it comes to technology access. Google should invest in programs that get technology into the hands of Hispanics. This will not only be a solid PR move, but it will also create a new, extremely brand-loyal user base for Google’s products and services.
2. Provide insights on Hispanic online behavior
Google should leverage its wealth of data on US Hispanic online behavior and publisher insights so that marketers can better understand this dynamic and diverse market segment. Mark spearheaded similar efforts at AOL and Terra and it will be exciting to see what he does with Google’s resources.
3. Develop a reliable mechanism for targeting Hispanics on English sites
Most online Hispanics, regardless of language preference, use English language websites. But targeting them is relatively cumbersome. Google is well positioned to provide marketers with a powerful and reliable option for reaching Hispanics on English-language websites, including on Google itself.
4. Improve the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for Hispanic marketers
For those of us who use Google Adwords to target US Hispanics, Google’s Keyword Tool can be frustrating at times. True, you can use the tool and filter users by location = United States and language = Spanish, but the data is typically inconsistent, making Hispanic keyword research difficult and inconclusive.
5. Make sure Google understands that Hispanics expect more than just a translation
Perhaps most importantly, Mark should be passionate about educating Google’s leadership on the wonderful nuances of the US Hispanic market. By leveraging Mark’s deep knowledge of the Hispanic online market, Google will be well positioned to capitalize on the opportunity.
Mark, ¡felicidades y buena suerte!
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Hispanic Online Marketing
Thoughts on what the Google +1 button means for SEO
Google has announced the +1 button which allows users to vote for specific search results, AdWords ads and (in a few months) pages on your website. The button is a vote to say you like the page, think it’s cool and would want to recommend it to your friends.
The key about this button is that your friends only see the recommendations when they are searching for the same thing you were searching for. This is in sharp contrast to Twitter and Facebook where you have to send the link when you are interested in it rather than when your friend is looking for the same thing. For news and current topical results Twitter & Facebook sharing is great, for ecommerce sites and non-topical content it doesn’t really work as well.
Google has built a business around showing users adverts and search results relevant to what they are searching for right now and this is why they have been able to monetise so much better than social networks.
There is a long standing argument that user data is easy to fake. It isn’t. Google has over 200 million Gmail users around the world and 133,000 people are using the Chrome extension to block sites from search results just 6 weeks after it launched.
In the tech community a lot of people have complained about the poor quality of Googles results but the vast majority of the complaints were constructive criticism – people want Google to get this right. If these people are willing to complain about things & download Chrome extensions then they will also be willing to give a quick +1 for pages and search results they find useful.
Our recommendation is for all sites to add the +1 button when it’s available in just the same way they would add Facebook and Twitter buttons.
Google has failed at adding social layers before with Bookmarks, Searchwiki and Buzz but something tells me this time they might just have got it right. Even if the results are only used for testing algorithms (like the Chrome extension was) rather than actually influencing results this is clearly an important step forwards.
Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation
Thoughts on what the Google +1 button means for SEO
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Blogstorm
Google Test: Multiple Meta Descriptions Work as Expected, Social Search Does Not
A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions. To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag.
One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service. Thus it would be an advantage to serve all of them the perfect meta description.
Expanding on this concept, I wanted to test whether you can add more than one or multiple meta description tags.
I wondered whether Google would accept more than one meta description tag. Also, I wanted to find out which one it would take – the first one?
In the test performed by Shark SEO, both descriptions contained in one tag could be triggered to appear in the search snippet depending on the keyphrase used in the search query. Would it be the case here as well?
To test, I used three different meta descriptions of the same length each. I also added a unique series of characters and digits to the page. This combination did not appear in the Google index before the test. I made sure that the text appearing on the page itself did not match the meta descriptions, and that at least one unique term did appear in each description.
So what did I find out?
- Only the first meta description gets shown
- Some of the words contained in the first meta description will get highlighted
- Terms contained only in the meta description won’t show up in search
So it’s everything as expected. The outcome does not contradict what we know or what Google has said for years.
- Google ignores the additional meta description tags. There is no way to make them appear in search results.
- Even the first one that gets indexed does not appear in the search results beyond the search snippet.
- It’s not a ranking factor. So in a way you can’t even say it’s indexed. Google is just aware of it but it doesn’t count.
Google Social Search
On the other hand I was quite surprised about the way (Google) social search does work or not.
I tweeted the links from my ”power account” and expected it to get indexed immediately these days. What happened instead?
It took Google several minutes or maybe even a quarter of an hour; I didn’t check every minute to find it and it only showed up in “social search” results, not in regular Google results:
OK, I expected that the link would get indexed a bit later, but instead it not only didn’t, but it even vanished from my social search results as well after approx. a day.
After a week I gave up, and as the page still wasn’t in the main Google index I tweeted it again, and this time I asked for retweets from my followers. A few of them, I think five exactly because no tool has counted them, helped and retweeted it. After that, the URL appeared instantly in the main Google index, not just in the social search results.
So you need at least a bunch of retweets to get indexed by Google if your link solely appeared on Twitter, as was the case here. There may be a few reasons why my first link wasn’t used to index it at once:
- Google knows that I’m the proprietor and webmaster of onreact.com, so they don’t count my own Twitter mention of it.
- Google does not consider my Twitter account to be reliable and authoritative enough to show up new pages in Google results.
- Google has a “first link does not count” rule when it comes to indexation of pages mentioned on Twitter, no matter who tweets it.
To be honest all three options sound realistic, but I’d rather expect a more complex combination of all three and some additional factors to play a role here. Nonetheless, the outcome is clear: just tweeting a link once is not necessarily enough for the page to appear in Google’s results.
It’s also worth mentioning that neither Bing nor Ask have been able to index the page at all. Even Twitter can’t find, it while at the same time some of the users who tweeted show up in the people search for the unique phrase.
So the good old link is still important when it comes to indexation. Don’t rely solely on tweets to succeed in search engines.
Visit http://onreact.com/mmdst1.html to take a look at the page I used for this SEO test.
© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Google Test: Multiple Meta Descriptions Work as Expected, Social Search Does Not
Related posts:
- 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users
- SERPd Review – The New Search Marketing Social News Community
- 10 Tips to Improve Your Social Graph for Google
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SEOptimise » Blog
Why Google +1 won’t work!
Here's we go again. Despite the recent debacles of Wave and Buzz, Google is back on the social bandwagon with the new '+1' button. And you've just got to admire their persistence. If there's one thing Google is not afraid to do, it's fail. Which is a good thing. I'd love to work for a company with that sort of courage. Nevertheless, their latest social product seems destined to become another punch line for nerds and search geeks.
To find out why, you'll need to head over to Search Engine People for my latest guest post – Why Google +1 (probably) won't work
Enjoy!
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Online Marketing Banter
30+ Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners
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After watching the SEO industry debating the Google Panda or Content Farmer update as it was initially dubbed for weeks and now that the update has hit the UK as well I decided to compile a list of the most important resources on it.
This update seems to have hit far more SEO practicioners than average webmasters, that might be one of the reasons for the popularity of the topic.
Google itself says that 12% of search results have been impacted initially while in a survey 40% of US SEO practicioners admitted they have lost traffic in the update aftermath.
Content farmers have been hit but not all of them, the content farm that was the reason for the discussion on content farms got away unscathed. Demand Media’s eHow thrives even better than before. Why? It wasn’t really a content farms update.
It was a quality update as Google itself refers to it. Thus all kinds of sites have been affected even legit sites not following the content farm business model at all. Some of them have been reinstated after a public outcry though so it seems to be a good idea to ask your PR department for help when your rankings plummeted.
On the flip side it’s quite obvious what leads to rankings drops and what not do in order to stay on top in Google’s results in 2011.
- Do not scrape or copy content from other websites.
- Do not “spin” content using automated software that garbles it to the point where it’s understandable anymore.
- Do not let ads dominate your site visually
- Focus on quality content not quantity or sheer size.
Additionally I have already written how not to appear like a content farm.
OK, most of these aspects of this update have been covered already so I don’t have to repeat it. Instead check out these 30+ Google quality/panda update resources for content farmers and SEO practitioners.
Make sure not to miss the links to the UK specific statistics at the bottom.
Definition and overview
- Official Google Blog: Finding more high-quality sites in search
- Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update
- TED 2011: The ‘Panda’ That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google’s Top Search Engineers
- SES NY | Panda: The Aftermath
- Panda, Google’s High Quality Sites Algorithm, Officially Adopts User Feedback As Search Signal
- Google Rolls Out Its Panda Update Internationally And Begins Incorporating Searcher Blocking Data
Reasons for ranking losses
- The Slippery Slope of SEO
- Article Marketing for SEO
- Google Slaps Webmaster Who Complained About Panda Update
- Google’s Panda Update—the Lessons I Learned
- The Farmer Panda Impact Nobody Is Talking About
Techniques to deal with the update
- Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building
- Update: Demand Media ‘Taking Immediate Steps’ on Plagiarism
- Weed Out Your Lowest Performing Pages [Panda Strategies]
- The Farmer/Panda Update: New Information From Google
- 404 vs NoIndex vs 301 With Google’s Farmer Update
- Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Update
Issues apparent after the update
- How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors
- Content Farm Update Conspiracy?
- British Medical Journal and Technorati among sites hit by Google downranking
Analysis
- Dear Google…THAT was a content farm update?
- Google’s Farmer update and the squeezed middle
- The Google Farmer Update Was About Sites, Not Content
- My Thoughts on the Newest Google Algorithm Update
Statistics and analytics
- Google Panda – Winners and Losers analysed (UK)
- Google’s Panda Update Hits the UK: Early Winners & Losers
- Google Farmer Update – Self Diagnostic Kit
- Google algorithm change shifts billions in ad spending – Mar. 8, 2011
- Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?
- Post Panda Social Engagement Measurements
- 40% Say Google’s Farmer/Panda Update Hurt Their Sites
- Google Algorithm Change Increases Publisher Search Traffic, Outbrain Data Shows
So you see, not only content farmers should care but those who defined the term weren’t affected as expected. So the Demand Media business model of content farming is far from gone. It just entered the next phase. More importantly
- article directories
- pseudo-search engines
- thin content sites
have been hit far more obviously.
Have you been affected by the recent quality update? How? Did you lose or gain rankings and traffic? Tell us in the comment section!
* Panda image by Scott Ableman.
© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30+ Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners
Related posts:
- Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size
- How to Avoid Being Labelled as a Content Farm
- 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users
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SEOptimise » Blog
Still a Runaway Leader, Google Drops Below 90% Globally
According to latest StatCounter data, Goolge has dropped below 90% of search engine market share – for the first time since July 2009. The presented figure of 89.94%, though is still a major headache for its competitors, Yahoo and Bing that combine to just over 8% of global search… In the European market the domination is even greater – Google has about 94% of market share.
Although Bing has surpassed Yahoo globally in January, in the US market Yahoo! is still a number two search engine, with 9.74% share compared to Bing’s 9.03%. Google has dropped below 80% once again, with 79.63%.
In Asia, Baidu has once again beaten Bing for the number three spot (Yahoo! is second). It must be noted however, that StatCounter only considers English searches so the results have to be viewed with care. For example, in Russia Google is reported as the market leader with 52% with Yandex having a figure of 46%, and in Czech Republic the picture looks even brighter for Google, which beats local Seznam 79% to 19%. Of course, when native language searches are considered, both Yandex and Seznam are more popular than Google in their local market.
But even so, in China, Baidu is a clear number one, with almost 70% of the market (compared to Google’s 29%) and in South Korea Naver is back to absolute majority (55.15%), with both Google and recently launched Daum both loosing ground (31.7% and 7.85% respectively).
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Search Engine Optimization, SEO, & Other Online Marketing Strategies
Google Throws the Book at Competitors
You can learn a lot about how search has improved over the years by reading Matt Cutts. Recently he highlighted how search was irrelevant in the past due to a lack of diversity:
Seven of the top 10 results all came from one domain, and the urls look a little… well, let’s say fishy. In 1999 and early 2000, search engines would often return 50 results from the same domain in the search results. One nice change that Google introduced in February 2000 was “host crowding,” which only showed two results from each hostname. … Suddenly, Google’s search results were much cleaner and more diverse! It was a really nice win–we even got email fan letters.
Thanks to those kinds of improvements, in 2011 we never have to look at search results like this.*
* And by never, I mean, unless the results are linking to fraternal Google pages, in which case, game on!
Why should Google result crowding not apply to Google.com? Sure they can say those books are from different authors, but many websites are ran by organizations with multiple authors. Some websites are even built through the partnerships of multiple different business organizations. Who knows, maybe some searchers are uncomfortable with every other listing being an out of context book highlight.
In the past I have been called cynical for highlighting stuff like the following image
I saw it as part of a trend toward home cooking promotions. And I still view it that way. The above books promotion is simply further proof of concept.
Outside of…
- Youtube
- other Google owned and operated sites
- a branded website ranking for its own brand
Can you show me *any* occurrence of a result where a site is listed 5 times in the search result? Bonus points if you can find it where the 5 times are not grouped into 1 bunch via result crowding.
Other than a home cooking override, how is it possible that this problem fixed years ago suddenly re-appears?
As a thought experiment, ask yourself if that Google ranking accident would happen if the content archive being served up was promoting media hosted on Microsoft servers.
A friend of mine summed it up nicely with:
well, it’s not everyday you see that kind of power and the fact that other sites aren’t afforded the same opportunity makes me think that they are being anti-competitive. Google literally wrote the book (ok scraped it) on anti-competitive practices.
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SEO Book.com
Google Wants to Act Like a Start Up
I just saw this Google snippet while trying to fine one of our old posts and it was *so* awful that I had to share it.
This is an area where Bing was out in front of Google & used a more refined strategy for years now before Google started playing catch up last fall.
Google ignored our page title, ignored our on-page header, and then use the ‘comments’ count as the lead in the clickable link. Then they follow it with the site’s homepage page title. The problem here is if the eye is scanning the results for a discriminating factor to re-locate a vital piece of information, there is no discrimination factor, nothing memorable stands out. Luckily we are not using breadcrumbs & that post at least had a somewhat memorable page URL, otherwise I would not have been able to find it.
For what it is worth, the search I was doing didn’t have the words comments in it & Google just flat out missed on this one. Given that some huge % of the web’s pages has the word “comments” on it (according to the number of search results returned for “comments” it is about 1/6th as popular online as the word “the”) one might think that they could have programmed their page title modification feature to never select ‘comments’ as the lead.
Google has also been using link anchor text sometimes with this new feature, so it may be a brutal way to Google-bomb someone. It is sure be fun when the political bloggers give it a play. 
But just like the relevancy algorithms these days, it seems like this is one more feature where Google ships & then leaves it up to the SEOs to tell them what they did wrong.
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SEO Book.com
Google changes it’s algorithm-Yet again!
Google is constantly refining it’s search algorithm to improve searcher experience. This time it has cracked down on content farms, who have been putting heaps of duplicate or low quality content on the web. These sites have been showing up for a number of search results. It is very frustrating when we are looking for a product on Google and we come across websites which have just given us theoretical definitions of the product instead of providing us the product or some useful information about where and how to get it. Content farms have been made by people who want to monetise the traffic coming to the website through advertising etc.
Even websites with poor search engine optimisation, which have multiple variants of the same content to get rankings artificially will be impacted as a result of this change, bringing up high quality websites which have quality and unique content.
Find out more about this in our SEO Workshops. To check how your website will get impacted as a result of this change, talk to us!
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Arrow Internet Marketing SEO Blog