The last week has seen Google going even more ‘social’ with the introduction of the +1 button, where people searching can effectively ‘like’ sites in the search results (a bit like Facebook’s like button) and Google+ – a new type of social network (just to make it even more confusing)!

So here’s a quick summary of the changes and what it means for your website:

Content
Create unique, useful content for your site visitors on a regular basis. This is usually done via a blog. There are a number of benefits of doing this:

i. It provides fresh, up to date content on your site.

ii. Shows off expertise and credibility in your industry sector.

iii. Encourages the search engines to visit your site more often.

iv. Encourages interactivity with visitors on your website.

v. Encourages distribution of your content via the social networks (so it’s important people can easily share your blog posts or content)

vi. Useful, unique content will enable you to prove that your site is worthy of higher rankings.

Social Signals
This means that participating in the social networks is no longer just an option, but an important part of your online marketing. The search engines are looking at how your content is distributed, if people like it and how influential those people are who share it. To help your site benefit from social signals, you need to:

i. Participate in the major social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook (although you don’t need to do all three)

ii. Plan how you will use the social networks and what your objectives are.

iii. Connect with other people and encourage distribution of your content from your blog/website and also by sharing your own links and other people’s links in your social networks.

iv. Be aware that people can now ‘+1’ your website in Google’s search results (if they have a Google profile), so your listing needs to be relevant to their search and serve their needs when clicking through. This could ultimately affect rankings and influence whether or not people click through to your site or another site that may have been +1’d by people in their network.

v. Be proactive within the social networks – it may help to share this task with a few staff members.

Analytics Data
Finally, how people interact with your site is becoming increasingly significant in the way search engines rank websites too. Google knows a huge amount about most sites on the web from people clicking on a site’s link from the search results, whether people click through and leave immediately (this is taken into account in the bounce rate stats in Google Analytics) and if people stay to browse your website.

This means that the information on your site needs to be relevant to people searching, useful when they arrive on it and encourage people to stay on your site. Useful, fresh, relevant and linkable content again is what people and the search engines are looking for.

Have you adapted your online marketing strategy to take into account the recent changes in search and social media? Have you seen any effects on rankings for your website? Please share your experiences here.

However, Google has announced that they are starting to personalize search outside of Google accounts, so now you don’t even have to be logged into your iGoogle page or account to be served personalized search results. For more information about this, you can read the post on the official Google Blog and don’t forget to take a look at the short video which explains it in a bit more detail.

So what does this mean for website owners? Well for a while I’ve been saying that running ranking reports to see how your keywords are faring in the search engines is just a guide and now this means they’re even more so. What results you may see when querying Google to see how your keywords are performing could be completely different from what someone else sees, so judging the performance of your optimization on rankings actually gives no real insight into the success of your SEO efforts.

There’s no harm in typing the odd query into Google, but the real results are seen in your web stats, such as Google Analytics. If you’re not looking at them on a regular basis, then you’re missing out on important information and how your site is really performing. Reviewing the trends over a period of time will give you a much better indication as to the performance of your SEO then just checking rankings and obsessing over the position of your keywords.

So make it your new years resolution to worry less about rankings but more about what visitors are doing on your site and where they’re coming from!

Actually, you should be very wary of anyone who guarantees you’ll get first page rankings on Google and any other search engine. Most likely it’s a scam or the company offering the guarantee will be using dodgy techniques to say the least.

Here’s a few reasons why first page rankings can’t be guaranteed:

• No search specialist can control the search results in the search engines, so it would be impossible to predict results.
• No other form of advertising or marketing would ever give a guarantee – would you expect a magazine to guarantee a certain number of people contacting you after placing an ad?
• Search results can fluctuate hugely and even if you did gain high rankings for your chosen keywords, it doesn’t mean you’ll stay there.
• High rankings don’t equate to leads, enquiries or sales, which at the end of the day, are more important than top rankings which never convert.
• Search engines use different data centres so your site may appear high in results from one data centre but not another – and surfers often don’t always get results from the same data centres.
• People often search within their personalized login, e.g within their iGoogle account and again, Google can display different searches to those logged into their accounts than within a regular search.
• Obsessing over first page rankings won’t help you to make your site the best it can be, or ensure you target the activities which lead to the highest conversions.

It can be very tempting to use a service that offers guarantees, but more often than not the techniques they use could cause more harm than good in the long run, and if you decide to stop using the service, you could end up starting again from scratch. You have been warned!

But, rankings are not a good measure of success. You shouldn’t be using rankings to work out if your online marketing efforts are working and there are a few good reasons for this:

1. Personalised search – many people search in Google within their ‘iGoogle’ account. Google personalises searches based on search history and people can even personalise the listings themselves while logged in, so what you see isn’t necessarily what someone else sees.
2. Data Centres – Google has several data centres in different locations which deliver search results, so again, you may be looking at results from a different data centre to someone else.
3. Rankings do not reflect whether a visitor thinks your website or your offering is any good. If visitors arrive on your site and immediately surf away again, your site may not be doing its job.
4. A website’s rankings are not static – the search engines often change the way they rank sites to get rid of spam and inappropriate results and to keep results fresh. 
5. Rankings are no indication of traffic, your keywords may not be targeted properly or the way your website is displayed in the results (title and meta description tag) may not incentivise anyone to click on it.

If you really want to know how effective your SEO campaigns are then you should be studying your web stats much more closely and working out which key performance indicators are the most appropriate for you and your business. We’ll cover this more in future posts!