If you’re not aware of Google Instant, here’s a summary:

Google Instant is being rolled out in the US this week and will come to the rest of the world in the coming months. This new way of searching is causing rather a lot of stir at the moment. Many people are saying that this is the closest any search engine has come to reading searcher’s minds! It’s goal it to provide you with the results the moment you begin typing!

“I think it’s a little bit of a new dawn in computing,”Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated during a press conference on Wednesday.

So what does it mean to you and your business website? Well, you will soon start to see evolving search results that can change -potentially even as often as you type each additional character, into the search box.

Google will (try to) guess exactly what you’re searching for by filling out the predicted search term in grey. Underneath that that there will be a dropdown box where Google will supply you with some additional suggested queries.

By speeding up the delivery of search results, Google believes it will keep its users happier and if they are happier, they hope they are more likely to search even more (which is good for Google because they get to serve ads on each query, which means potential for them to increase their revenue)

During the release, they announced that they expect to reduce the time that people collectively spend on its search engine by about 350 million hours annually – all due to Google Instant!

Google outlined what they felt the benefits to Google Instant would be to a searcher:

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.”

You can find out more about Google Instant here: www.google.com/instant/.

So a lot of people in the world of search engine optimisation are worried by this new development. Any changes Google makes to its search function can cause issues to those marketing websites, but these are unlikely to ever kill off SEO for good!

No matter what Google does with the way it delivers search results, a good website needs to be optimised in order to be one of the sites it presents. You need to have a search engine friendly site – that’s the bottom line. It’s that simple.

Google associate Matt Cutts has commented on these new changes and the impact this will have for website owners: “The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time, For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

So Google have clearly stated that rankings will stay the same with Google Instant.

We should also remember that Google Instant is not going to be mandatory; this is going to be something that people will be able to switch off. In doing so, they will leave themselves open to Google’s standard results.

If you want to learn more about Google Instant, you can view this official video:

We’re interested to see how popular Google Instant will be. We often say that online marketing is all about making sure you make it as easy and simple for your website visitors as possible. We often refer to searchers (ourselves included) as ‘lazy’.

People don’t want to have to work hard when they’re surfing – they want to:

• Type a search query that takes them straight to a relevant result,
• Once they click on that result they want to see instantly that yes, this is what they’re looking for
• They then want to have the information presented to them in a clear and obvious way
• Finally they then want to be told what action to take next

So people are lazy (or just very spoilt nowadays when it comes to the rich resource of information we have via the Internet). At SMEketing, we feel that Google Instant is just another way to make it a bit easier for us lazy searchers! So things could be getting faster and easier for us Googlers.

However, another bonus of Google Instant is that it’ll open us up to new ideas for search queries relating to our search. What this means for businesses is that you’ll need to have regular, unique content on your site, full of up-to-date information and jam packed full of long and short tail keywords.

If you are considering employing some SEO for your site, now is actually the perfect time. Whenever Google makes a change businesses often scramble to update and optimise their website; this bout of activity could either be an opportunity for you to join in and get some optimisation done or it could be what causes your rankings to potentially drop. Please note Google Instant won’t cause your rankings to drop on its own – it’s the flurry of optimisation by others whenever Google makes a change. Don’t let your competitors out-rank you on Google!

Not sure if SEO is for you? Request an SEO consultation to find out!

Happy Googling!

In order to get the benefits of Google Webmaster, you first need to register and verify your site with Google Webmaster. It’s a very quick and easy process. To find out how to do it, watch the video below:

The next blog post will outline what information you can get from Google Webmaster and how to use it to make your site perform better in Google.

Social Media Revolution

Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

JESS3 – The State of The Internet

JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010

• 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
• 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
• 81% of Emails were Spam
• 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
• 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
• Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
• 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
• 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)

If you’ve not heard of Google Alerts, then I recommend you have a bit of an experiment with them today.

Simply put (by Google themselves):

“Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams”

You can start creating some Google Alerts here: http://www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts are brilliant for keeping up to date with the various things – your business, competitors, keyphrases etc. Basically you tell Google that on a daily, weekly or ‘as it happens’ basis, they will send you a list of all the new entries for a particular term. So for example you can create one (all of ours are set to ‘weekly’ otherwise you get inundated with alerts!), for “SMEketing” and it will send you a list of links of where the word “SMEketing” has cropped up online that week.

They’re also a great way of keeping an eye on your competitors, as it shows information that you might not normally be able to find. Since they inform you of when they’re name has popped up online, you can get access to a host of information that isn’t kept on their website; for example, in the past I’ve found online price lists and competitor strategies which is always a good thing to find!

We also create them Google Alerts for keyphrases, such as ‘small business marketing’ so that we get a long list of new articles and other things that contain that phrase – then if there are any good ones in there, we tweet about them! It just makes it a bit easier to do research as it’s all delivered to your inbox and it’s a useful way of providing content to your Twitter community.

It’s very easy to set up – just go to ‘Google Alerts’ and enter your email and the alerts you want. I recommend putting any phrases into quotes, otherwise you’ll get a mismatch of alerts. Also set it to ‘Comprehensive’, which means you’ll get information on everything on the web (blogs, videos, articles etc), rather than just web articles and copy.

If you’ve got any questions about creating Google Alerts, give us an email - we’re more than happy to help!

But now Twitter have released the latest update – Twitter lists. What are these, and why are they so good for your small business Twitter account? Below are some bullet points highlighting the main areas you need to know about Twitter lists:

• Twitter lists are groups of fellow tweeters that you create yourself
• These lists can be public or private
• You can be added to anyones list
• Anyone can follow any of your public lists – which means they can follow the list without having to follow all the users within that list
• The number of followers you have will soon no longer be the gauge of the quality/success of your Twitter account – it’s all about the number of lists you are on
• If you want to follow a particular group of people/companies, such as small businesses, you can find a small business Twitter list and either follow that, or look at the Twitter accounts included in that list and follow those who you think are relevant to you

If you want to see exactly what Twitter lists are and how to use them, watch the video below (apologies for the very, very poor spelling of Philip Schofield’s name!!):

The reason why links are so important, is because it helps to build up the ‘trust’ value of your website. In order to be ranked high, the search engines need to have trust in your site. Many factors affect this trust issue, such as domain age, site size, freshness of content, but most of all it is the number of good quality links pointing to it. Each of these links are like a vote – a vote from one website saying that they trust and value your site enough to mention it on their site.

So how can you increase the number of inbound links? Well like most things, there are many ways – here are a few summarised within three areas:

• Link baiting: Generating such great content, that people can’t help but link to it
• PR: Creating press releases that link to your site
• Manual Link Building: Finding sites that are relevant to yours where you can submit your link to – such as directories, community organisations, as well as bloggers and industry sites.

Yahoo LinkDomain Search

To find out more about generating some links to your site, view the video below. This will show you a way in which you can not only generate some links to your site, but also keep an eye on what your competitors are doing using the Yahoo LinkDomain search query. It is also a good way of keeping track of who is linking to your small business website.

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If you want to know more about link building strategies, or about other ways in which you can increase your online presence, please get in touch with us at SMEketing. Call us, email us or complete our Contact Us form!