Google recently expanded the listings in its search results, so that organic search results will now include full-size links, display URL and a one line description below their listing from the pages meta description tags.

So, how can you take advantage of this change?

The first place to start with is your content. Basically, Google is now displaying around 30-35 characters from your meta description tag in each sitelink. While this is not a lot of room to work with, you need to ensure that those opening words result in a meaningful, relevant snippet. You can do this by having well written and concise meta descriptions across all pages on your website.

If each of the pages on your website doesn’t have a meta description tag, then its time to get busy creating them. Otherwise this is how your listing could look in the Google SERP’s:

Copywriting expert Heather Lloyd-Martin has been quick to jump on the idea of optimising content specifically for these expanded sitelinks through a video which you can view below.

Heathers advice includes examples of what you should and shouldn’t do with your meta description tags and is well worth a look.

So only with a few changes in the meta description tags, you can now expect to see an increase in your organic click through rate (CTR).

Google and Bing both just confirmed that both Twitter and Facebook do impact SEO rankings! It’s been suspected for some time but now they’ve both announced how!

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: We do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

You need to be on Twitter and sharing content that gets retweeted!

Bing: We calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are.

Google: We do compute and use author quality.

Bing: We calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it.

Google: We also use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search].

You need to be actively building your follower base and improve your “author authority” (so your tweets and retweets of your tweets help you more and carry more weight).

Thanks to these comments, we now know that those link sharing activities on Twitter + Facebook are evaluated based on the person/entity sharing them through a score Google calls “Author Authority,” and Bing calls “Social Authority.”

If you aren’t yet on Twitter or Facebook (with a Fan Page) you need to get going – it’s only going to become more important as time goes on.

Facebook is officially the most-visited website in the US this week, according to Experian Hitwise, knocking Google off of the top spot – where it has been since 2007.

http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=152595476

Interestingly, the last site to nab the number one spot from Google was MySpace back in 2007. Facebook will be hoping that this isn’t an ominous sign of things to come. Personally I don’t think so; I never liked My Space – it was always such a mess, but Facebook seems to have the right amount of order & organisation in its structure, whilst allowing people to still do whatever they want with it.

I currently have an ad for Cashback Shopper running on Facebook, targeting the UK only, but will definitely be using it to promote the American version of Cashback Shopper when it launches!

Happy New Year everyone! How can you improve the rankings of your website in 2010?

It seems that a lot of people have HEARD about Social Bookmarking and they’ve HEARD that it can do wonders for your traffic and positioning, BUT many may still be asking : “What exactly IS Social Bookmarking?”

The most common “Social Bookmarking” sites are Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Dropjack and others… But there are dozens, even hundreds more.

They are websites where you can create a user account and then submit links that you find interesting to share with your friends, or the entire web.

If others like the links you submit, they vote for them, or they tag them, or they save them to their own bookmarks. Either way, the more activity there is surrounding a link, the more popular it gets on the site.

Now, the beautiful part is that most of this social bookmarking and voting is “public” for all the web to see and guess who loves sites that get social bookmarked?

The search engines.

In fact, with the rise of social web, search engines like Google are placing a larger importance on sites that they see are being socially bookmarked on these sites.

The result is simple: if they see your site being social bookmarked, your search engines rankings tend to rise.

So how do you get your site social bookmarked?

Well, you could spend hours/days/months listing your site and any relevant internal pages on all the social bookmarking sites yourself. Or you could try using a social bookmarking service!! Social Bookmarking has become one of the most important methods to getting traffic to your site. In Social Bookmarking, we bookmark your site with 311 bookmarking sites including all the major bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. Once submitted, these bookmarks can be viewed and shared by others.

Social Bookmarks can offer your website all of this:

• Build Permanent Web Site Links
• Get your web site exposed in more areas on the internet
• Get your site indexed by the major search engines easier
• Receive more targeted traffic to your web site
• Uses Manual social bookmarking process for best results
• Creates Text Links Using Your Important Keywords
• Uses the optimal number & highest quality social bookmarking sites
• Boost Your Search Engine Rankings and Position

And unlike many web directories, deeplinking is positively encouraged by the social bookmarking sites!!

Mr Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at PubCon recently that there are over 200 variables in the Google algorithm & although no-one but Google knows what they are exactly, we can have a reasonably good guess at many of them. In fact, WebmasterWorld have set themselves a challenge to list them all!

Here is what has been included so far:

Domain

• Age of domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name
• IP address of domain
• Location of IP address / Server

Architecture

• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags
• URL path
• Use of external CSS / JavaScript files

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keywords in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keywords in body text
• Freshness of content

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website inbound linking
• Quality of web page inbound linking
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content
• Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
• Anchor text of link
• Title attribute of link
• ALT tag of images linking
• Country specific top level domain
• Authority of top level domain (.edu, .gov)
• Location of server
• Authority links (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

• Uniqueness of class C IP address

Internal Cross Linking

• Number of internal links to page
• Location of link on page
• Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

• Over optimisation
• Purchasing links
• Selling links
• Comment spamming
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Manual penalties

Miscellaneous

• JavaScript links
• No follow links

Pending

• Performance / Load of a website
• Speed of Javascript

Not included, but often focussed upon

• XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
• PageRank (General indicator of page’s performance)

It’s easy for everyone to get caught up in obsessing about how to optimise your site & build links for Google, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google totally dominates the search market. But, there are still other search engines that some people are using, so it is wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too!

Obviously the other two engines are Yahoo and Bing and whilst Yahoo is seemingly declining fast, Bing is actually gaining a market share. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway. With the muscle of Microsoft behind Bing, you can be sure the search engine won’t be prepared to play second fiddle to Google for long!

However, unlike Google, we don’t hear much about what Bing wants out of a site for decent rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for complying with Bing’s policies, does not differ too much from the advice that Google would give you. It is however, still always nice to hear what they think, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”

What You Should Do!

DeJarnette shared some tips for getting more quality links. The following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

What You Should Not Do!

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction,” says DeJarnette. “If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalised with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any experienced search marketer is not already aware of, but it can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and not to do, to help webmasters get better rankings.

Why not use one of our link building or Bing Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site.

Google have given webmasters a strong indication that the speed of a website may become an organic ranking factor in 2010!

Here’s what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the issue:

“Historically we haven’t used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience and so it’s fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have an awfully slow site, maybe users don’t want that as much.”

Google already considers page load times as part of the AdWords quality score, so it’s a logical step for this to be included in organic listings too.

While it’s unlikely to have a huge impact on rankings (there are over 200 other factors) it would be worth preparing for its introduction ahead of time and get your site loading as fast as possible. Here are a couple of tools which can help you get started:

• Google’s Page Speed Tool – This is a firefox plugin from Google that enables you to see which areas of your site need improvement.
• WebPageTest.org – Another speed tool which provides optimization recommendations and other interesting stats.

I still hear a number of people talking about page rank, page rank, page rank, when discussing whether their website is doing well, or trying to assess the results of their search engine optimisation efforts. However, page rank became less relevant when Google removed PageRank values from their webmaster centre!

Here’s the statement Google made when they did it:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

However, if this is Google’s position, then why bother updating their toolbar PageRank values? Doing so is only going to create a stir in the webmaster community & cause confusion as to it’s relevance. Surely it would’ve been much mbetter to remove it from both webmaster tools and the Google toolbar at the same time.

It’s also important to remember that the toolbar Page Rank values can be a couple of month’s old, so they’re out of date even after the update & therefore not really relevant to your current ranking position. The recent PageRank update has left many webmasters confused with most reporting major decreases in their website’s ranking in the search results. But if Google’s statement is to be believed, should you really be concerned about it?

If you have a search engine friendly site, the most important issue for your Google search engine rankings are quality inbound links!

Use one of our link building or Google Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site

I’m currently running a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Yahoo (can’t afford Google!) for my new cheap theatre ticket site, which is themed from the main Cheap Event Tickets site.

September is apparently peak booking time for theatre tickets in the UK, so I decided to go for a big push on some of the most popular & well known London shows.

I’ve set up targeted ad groups – for these shows, containing well researched long tail keywords (which all have a decent KEI) and have carefully worded the ads, drawing on existing ads by well established companies in this sector. Most of the ads are displaying ticket prices, so the “clicker” knows what to expect & won’t click just to see what the price is.

Most of the ads are displaying in position 1 on Yahoo (these bids are around £1, on Google you are looking at around £3 for these keywords!!!) & the click through rates are currently between 3.5% & 14%, which I believe is not bad.

So, following all the rules & strategies I’ve read over the last couple of years for successful PPC advertising & marketing, how are the ads doing?

Well, I’ve had ONE SALE, from 44 clicks! Admittedly it was a decent sale & my commission will be £12 from it, but it has cost me £25 to get it!!!! On Google, I’d have paid triple that, without any guarantee of more sales. The companies that advertise theatre tickets on Google presumably make more money per sale than I do, but I still don’t see how they can make a profit when they’re paying such huge amounts for clicks!

It doesn’t seem possible to make a profit from affiliate marketing using Google (or even Yahoo), unless you’re using such obscure terms, that you then really should be able to obtain natural search engine positions for if they’re THAT obscure.

So, once again I’ll be grateful to break even on PPC & would love to know if any other affiliate marketers makes a profit from Google Adwords/Yahoo Search Marketing?!

I’ve been using IBP for a few years now & have found it a very useful tool to assess the search engine optimisation of both my own sites & those of clients.

A new version has just been released by Axandra – IBP 11.5, with a much improved keyword tool.

Finding the best keywords for search engine optimization is crucial if you want to succeed with your website. For this reason, they have completely revamped the keyword tool in the new IBP version.

The new keyword tool in IBP helps you to find good keywords as quickly as possible:

Just enter a keyword and IBP will quickly return the following information:

• keyword suggestions for the entered keyword
• the estimated number of monthly searches for the keywords on Google
• the number of search results for the keywords on Google
• the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) for these keywords

A unique keyword database + support of the official Google keyword tool!

IBP’s keyword tool uses the unique keyword database of KeywordIndex.com. KeywordIndex offers you a unique database that cannot be accessed through any other keyword tool on the Internet. KeywordIndex.com provides you with 38 million unique English keywords, and 20 million unique German keywords.

The quality of the KeywordIndex database enables you to find keywords that are really used on the Internet.

Find keywords in 13 different languages

IBP’s new keyword tool will also help you if you’re looking for keywords in other languages. In addition to the keyword database of KeywordIndex.com, IBP’s keyword tool can also access keyword suggestions of Google, Amazon and YouTube. You can even access the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool without entering a captcha.

You can use IBP’s keyword tool to find keywords in thirteen languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish, Swedish and Turkish.

The new IBP version also creates targeted keyword lists for Google AdWords, long tail keywords and much more. It even shows you the Google AdWords adgroup score while collecting your keywords to make it as easy as possible to get a high Google AdWords QualityScore.

Top 10 rankings or your money back

Fact: If you want to get high rankings on Google and other major search engines then you need optimized web page content and high quality inbound links. IBP helps you get both. Download the latest version For FREE now!