As high speed internet continues to penetrate other countries, many U.S. companies are now focusing their efforts on this world wide market. Google’s India site is now the twelfth most popular site in the world, and Baidu.com, a search engine in China, is even better at number nine. Companies can see huge sale increases from people buying their products from all over the world. Problems are created, for internet marketers, like TK, as people from various countries search quite differently.
Andy Atkins-Krüger explains some of these differences and there importance to SEO experts, in a Sept. 23, 2009 article, “Do Accents Really Matter in International SEO?” . He points out that in German and French searches many words require “diatrics”, the little accent marks above or below some words. International search engines treat these words differently. Some ignore them all together, but most have to take them into account as many will actually change the meaning of the query. Also, many searchers will not use the required diatrics in their search words, creating some often missed opportunities for marketers. Many marketers will make the mistake of ignoring the diatric, or ignoring the word without the diatric, hence, missing out on placing their website in front of potential clients.
The author is now hiring employees from diverse backgrounds, or educating current employees on international search trends, so these opportunities are not missed. TK sees the same trend of international search engine marketing increasing over time, and will now consider the cultural background and linguistic ability of the next person we hire. Many of our current clients are already starting to request more international search engine optimization, and these are rather small companies. They see the potential of worldwide customers, and as a business owner, increasing my knowledge of the online searching trends will become increasingly important.
Google dispels the myth that they use the Keywords meta tag. They use the description tag for snippets in search engines results pages, but that’s about it. Great summary by Mr. Cutts.
Several clients, recently, have specifically asked about the many factors that go into helping a website show up higher is search engines. Particularly, on-page factors. The best resource I’ve found in a long time is SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors resource.
One of the reasons this resource is so helpful, is that it’s from a survey they do of SEO professionals. So, you get a true view of SEO…simply a bunch of smart people trying to reverse engineer Google and other search engines. So many of these SEO’s have differing opinions, that it’s nice to get a collection of all of them in one single summary. It helps one understand that many techniques that SEO’s go on and on about are simply their opinion…rather than a hard and fast rule. So, looking over the survey results, one can take what ‘most’ seo’s think, and generally bank on the ones that they all agree on.
Google’s Matt Cutts explains what Google is doing to try and communicate with webmasters. No, they are not about to offer a customer support hotline, but they are trying to do a little more. It’s not much, really, but at least they know we want more information and contact- especially if we’ve inadvertently done something wrong. It’s a step in the right direction, to acknowledge the need, I guess.
A few days ago we posted about Bing going visual with their visual search, well Google is getting into the game as well. CNN posts a nice video that gives you a sample.
I like the direction this leads. The more visual search becomes, even more people will use it. Search engine marketing will just continue to grow in importance and complexity…but with it, will be a more enjoyable, effective experience for the end user.
Google is buying reCaptcha, to help with their book scanning initiative. reCaptcha specializes in those captcha’s you see on forms, that prevent spam bots from inundating a site with information requests. The company uses robust scanning technology to get the images from old books. Google is also in the business of scanning old books, so the two made (or are making) a deal.
Will Cathcart, a Google product manager, in a blog post, explains.
“…reCaptcha’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. We’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.”
Google’s noble quest to get all information in the world indexed and easily searchable (and make billions in advertising next to it) continues…
Greg Grothaus of Google explains very well Google’s philosophy of duplicate content. They realize that a lot of duplicate content is not manipulative but simply webmasters trying to take the same content and make is useful in different formats.
For example, if you have content on a page about “10 tips on package fragile glass for your move”, and want to include it in print format as well. Google doesn’t penalize you for the duplicate content. They just include one of the sources and not the other. We’ve been telling our clients for a long time that Google doesn’t penalize duplicate like people think, it’s nice hearing the explanation to how and why they even recognize it. Spam on the other hand, they attach pretty aggressively.
Greg then shares a simple explanation on how to prevent issues that may arise by utilizing the 301 redirect and the new rel= “canonical” tag. I highly recommend viewing the information directly from the horses (Googles) mouth.
We at TK have long mused wither Facebook would ever really try and get into the search business. Imagine, if you will, doing a search on FB for a local plumber and getting web results that integrate with your friends from FB. It could deliver results that had your friends searches and input as a display factor. So, if 10 of your friends had clicked on Action Plumbing and given it a thumbs up (or Google’s Digg like placement button) then it will show up more prevalently on your Facebook search. That way, your friends kinda recommend what you see as search results…helping you make decisions based off their digital recommendations. Phew!
Well, if that scenario where to play out…the beginning steps may have been taken.
Facebook is now showing Bing results at the bottom of each search (has been for awhile, I know), beneath their stuff. Does it mean Facebook and Bing and going aggressively after Google (Bing already is)…well, not necessarily as we’ve described above. But it could be the start…we’re just saying…
Bing continues it’s steady and healthy adoption rate. It has just improved to over 10% by itself. If you include it with Yahoo, it’s recent search partner, it has over 26% of the total market share. Google is still the strong leader with over 64%, but the competition and with Bing bringing on cool new features like their recent Visual Search, it’s getting a little more interesting.
Bing is bringing in the cool features with their new Beta of Visual Search. As one who is always looking for the next best thing on the horizon, this may have some potential.
Essentially, you start your search with a page that shows you the main categories, hot topics, ect.
You can start with one of the pictures on display or use the category menu on the left. For instance, if you click on ‘Shopping’ (one of the sections that will really benefit from this, IMHO) you see a display of shopping categories. Click on ‘Books’ and you are shown a really cool display (cover-flow style, almost) that you can scroll through.
With lots of additional features, I’m excited to see if the new look and feel will catch on. I think with new internet adopters, they will be pleased with the clean, futuristic feel of search. Those that have been using Google for a long time will probably find it cumbersome and ‘trinket’ feeling. Either way, I’m excited for the different approach and hopes it gets Google thinking about better ways to display their results.
