Benedict Hayes

VP Strategy, Communicate 2

• GOOGLE

• SEO

• INFORMATION

• ORGANISED

• USEFUL

• SOCIAL MEDIA VERY USEFUL?

• UNIVERSALLY ACCESSIBLE

Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s

information and make it universally accessible and useful.

*Source: www.google.com/about/corporate/company/

• Originally developed in 1998

• 100s of top PHDs have since spent 14 years to hone, refine and firewall

• 500+ updates a year

• Do you think we have intelligence to crack it?

• Google crawls content • Gives a unique docID to each page as

well as wordID’s • Breaks page into wordID ‘hits’ and

stores in index • Word ‘hits’

– Link anchors – Big font – Plain text – Small font – Title – URL

• Algorithm uses ‘hits’, Pagerank and a user feedback mechanism to spawn final result

*Source: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

• Original construct has not changed, the method of ‘hit’ calculation and user feedback mechanism has

• Google has many server clusters globally

• Your response is handled locally hence there are often differences in results dependent on which IP

• Localised filters and algos are also overlaid on the original result set

• The old Googlebot was very simple

• It harvested URLs for indexing if it did not understand what it was looking at it would give up and go home

• Hence Flash/Javascripts, non w3c standard code would cause a whole host of problems

• Things have changed….

• The dawn of headless browsers…

• How long has Google been doing this?

*source: www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots

• Just launched… Dec 10 pack – Park domains, content ownership & scraper

sites, rare words, fresher results, tablet tweaks

• Freshness Update • Expanded sitelinks • Query Encryption • Panda 2.0, 2.1, 2.2…. 3.1 etc… • Pagination Elements

– rel="next" rel="previous"

• Schema.org • Farmer (ad to content ratios) • Attribution update

Whilst addressing the US congress Eric Schmit (Google CEO) stated that there were 516 algorithmic updates committed live in 2010, what was really scary is that he also said that they tested

13,000

Does SEO as we know it have a future?

Black break Google?

White help Google?

• Links, links, links

• Content, content, content

• Keywords, keywords, keywords

• Cloak, manipulate, deceive

• Oh I forgot to say…

• Links, links, links

In short…

no!

Compliment and help Google to achieve it’s mission

…to organize the world‘s information,

make it universally accessible and

useful. …so create Information that is:

– Organized – Useful – Universally accessible simple!

Lets ask Google:

Are these forms of content?

• Text

• Visuals

• Sounds

• In code

• Through learning or interaction

If we have to take Google seriously we have to think of all of these…

• Content is king!

• Forms of content: – Text (News, PR, How to guides, Knowledge, Product

info)

– Interactive / UGC (User Generated Content)

– Images

– Video

– Audio / Music / Podcasts

– Applications / Widgets / Games

• Site structure

• Content structure

• Location settings

• Sign posting

• Clear text based navigation • Logical organised parent/child

hierarchical structure • Matching URL paths and

navigation breadcrumbs Breadcrumb Path: Home > News > 2008 > Article name URL path: mysite.com/news/2008/article-name.html Use Mircoformats to mark up breadcrumb

Parent

Child

• Clear addressing: – XML sitemaps (news, mobile, video, images, blog etc.) – HTML sitemaps – robots.txt

• Content duplication: – Domain/page canonicalisation (301) – Content canonicalisation (rel="canonical")

• Site search functionality • Use Webmaster Tools! • Error handling (404/500)

• Content must be indexable

• Content should be semantically marked up

– <title>, meta="description", <H1>, alt="",title=""

• Use microdata, microformats or RDFa:

• Consolidate local content:

– www.mysite.com/us

– us.mysite.com/

• Inform Google through WMT

• Submit for local search results, Google places

• If you want to have your content found you need to sign the way

• Clearly link internally and externally with the context and signposts you wish to be found for:

– Pizza in Bandra… more

– Find great pizza in Bandra

• Navigational links should follow your content structure as well as carry the context of the content

• Simple, create content that is useful!

• Content is not only text it can be of all types:

– Video, applications, news, reviews, articles, games etc.

• So why limit yourself?

• If your users find you useful so will Google!

• Google is the closest thing to a mind reader

• It is an intent engine that wants to deliver the content that best answers a users intent

• As such you must create content that answers this intent…

• User could be researching to buy a camera • User may want to know how a camera works • User may be wanting to know the history of cameras • User may want to understand the definition • User may want to know what types of cameras there are • Looking for images or even a video • User may want to know if the camera in McDonalds was actually

working…

Will your content answer all of these intents?

Probably not.

• A bounce from your content is a definite sign that your webpage did not answer the intent of the user

• Bounce rate is therefore a definite sign that Google can use to understand that

your content is therefore not usable for the user

• The first 2 seconds that the user sees your page are the most important. If you do not engage you lose the user and get a bounce

• Google personalizes results so if you didn’t do a good job the first time you won’t get a second chance!

• Web pages therefore must be crafted to be superfast and clearly map a users intent

• Search engine needs the content so… cut the crap! – Javascript, css, jquery get it out of the page!

• Reduce server calls – Merge .ccs/.js files – make images css sprites

• Control caching – Expiry headers – Entity tags

• Compress files through gzip • If you got the dough…

– Deploy on a CDN or a super fast server

• Show the user what he wants, answer his intent

• Do so in the format that he wants where he wants

• Give a clear signpost of what you want the user to do next never assume he knows

• If he clicks and engages you have succeeding in some way to answering user intent

• Give all the information and answers in clear logical fashion that user can easily navigate

• LINKS MUST BE USEFUL!

• Good links: – Should be within context and relevant – They should lead users to related information – Navigate users to a next phase – Should come from good content – Should endorse content – Give value to content – But above all be useful

• If they are not useful the are SPAM (period)

• Links should be all of the previous but there is no harm in also being…

– Separate unique class-c subnets

– Carry PageRank

– Be one of few links leaving a page (externally)

– Anchored with context that you want to rank for

– Not in footers but in body content or navigational structures

• A very good gauge of how useful or not your content is, is if you are being clicked on or not

• If you’re being shown but you are not being clicked… what’s Google going think?

USELESS!

• Meta content is key to making your content useful – <title><title/> – <meta name="description" content=""/>

• It’s the only tool you have to sell your content • Google has been mapping CTR in Adwords since

2002 don’t think for a second that this does not apply in SEO

• Do not think of keyword spamming think engagement / map intent, write something people will want to click on

• Google has been using social media to gauge how useful content is for a long time

• After all you can’t beat human sentiment to understand if something is good or bad

• Social Media gives you this

• Social interaction such as like, shares, tweets, +1 are effectively endorsements

• More so reviews with integrated microdata these are extremely good for giving weight and value to content

• After all these are real endorsements of content as opposed to your easily manipulated or contrived links

• SEOmoz investigations found that Google used to use twitter and facebook as a direct measure of sentiment… Google denied…

• It was true there was a time you could use twitter to generate instant results in Google… but not anymore

The principle is simple - what could be better for Google than an actually person endorsing content?

…you own the person!

Twitter and Facebook would not play with Google

So Google did it alone..

• Through Google+ Google will deliver 100 times better results

• If they truly know you, your friends, what you like, what you don’t like, they can advertise and personalise information for you and only…

YOU!

• Simplistically if my friends like it surely I will like it….

• If you do not begin to build a sentiment graph for your content where influencers share and like your content and link back to you, you will not be the most useful popular guy in town someone else will

• Not possible…

• Google controls

– The people

– The content

• They can see

– The intricacies of the connections

– The IPs of the users the types and places of the +1s, the frequency and from where

• Universal Accessibility primarily means your content being access by anyone, anyhow, anywhere

• Google has broadened its reach to mobile, social media it won’t be long before Google TV arrives although you could argue it already has through Youtube

• So we know that Google are going universal

• Mobile is the first step on this ladder – HTC / Motorola

• TV will be next • Before you know it Google will

be on your watch! • Is your content universally

accessible?

• For India especially this is a huge growth area

• Internet enabled handsets for only 4,000 INR/-

• What to do…

• Create organised, useful, accessible information!

• Create sites that function effectively on multiple platforms

• Organise them in much the same way you would your main site

• Optimise the user experience, simplify things and give the consumers what they want

• Design content that is navigable and engages on small screens • Keep it very light… shy away from heavy images • Link mobile content to mobile content • Link directly from your site • HTML5 • Use standard naming convention for mobile content:

– m.mysite.com – mobile.mysite.com – www.mysite.com/mobile/

• Build for unique operating platforms • Use user Agent switching for mobile user-agents

– Remember whatever the user sees ensure the googlebot sees!!

• Universally accessible could also be construed to all things web

• Can you be found universally? – Youtube

– Facebook

– Twitter

– LinkedIn

– Images

• Are you there?

Will this make my information organized, universally available and useful?

If the answer’s yes then do it!