The marketing has always been about customer’s psychology – learning the specific needs of a potential client and trying to satisfy them. Google has demonstrated once again that targeting certain audience is mandatory. And if you are into SEO, you should be aware of it.

According to one recently published study, Google Search results on a smartphone will vary by over 80% from those produced by a desktop computer query. If you think about it – this is actually quite logical to have a slightly different search algorithm for smartphones. For example, smartphone users like downloading various applications. Thus the mobile Google Search presents many results that include the word “app” or “download”. Brand filters and store filters cannot be applied to mobile Google search and it is even more biased towards “local” domains, with Google places usually appearing higher in the vertical results list.

With the smartphone market growing quickly, it seems as only a matter of time when “SEO for mobile” will become a separate branch in the industry.

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Google has recently announced that Google Instant Mobile is now available “globally”. This means that the tool is released for all countries that have Google Mobile access (there are several dozens of those) and supports almost thirty languages.

The product, similarly to Google Instant Mobile, is integrated into search features for any Android browser (built-in for Android OS 2.2 and up) , and features various algorithms that allow faster dynamic search results.

Although this release was expected (shortly after releasing Google Instant Mobile in English, the company had announced that international support is on its way) – nobody anticipated that this would happen so quickly. The roll-out took Google slightly over one month time – an incredible figure, considering the complexity of the product. Of course, this simply means that Google had been working on globalization of Google Instant Mobile simultaneously with the product itself. That is no wonder – Google had always emphasized the importance of international marketing and global support.

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Everybody knows that since the introduction of the new Caffeine index, Google is able to update its site indexing within hours and even minutes. Long gone are the days when we were shown some outdated “caption” of the website content that turned out as no longer present on the page. Different was the case with images, as Google Image Search indexing was still lagging behind. It could take a month or so for the recently added image to appear in Google Image Search results.

It appears Google, in its efforts to produce real time results, is now addressing this “problem”. Several users, who are following Google image indexing closely, have reported a major improvement in this field, stating that the new images are being indexed more fluently, appearing in Google Image Search results with a delay of several days only. This is yet another proof that non-textual content is becoming more and more popular among users, making it essential for proper SEO.

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google website optimizer guide for wordpress

Having used Google’s Website Optimizer for client’s before, I thought we would share our experience from this week when we decided to run some experiments for the li’l engine blog -  running WordPress version 2.8.

A quick intro

Google Website Optimizer is a free hosted service by Google that allows SEO’s and webmasters to perform content / layout tests on their website. For example, you may have a button on your website that reads “sign up” but would like to know if “Sign up Now” or “Join Now” would convert better. Using website optimizer one can setup an experiment using Google’s javascript to test the conversion rate of each button. There are two types of experiment available in website optimizer; Multivariate experiments – which runs up to 8 different sections / parts on the same page and A/B experiments which simply serves up different versions of the entire page.

Getting back to our WordPress experiment

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In a previous article I discussed the importance of niches for a site or blog’s success. However, many people build their sites without having a niche in mind, because they either don’t know any better or they simply don’t care much for the consequences. While some of them will eventually modify their content in order to fit it in a niche, others will still prefer having a general/miscellaneous site. If you belong in the latter category, you may be wondering what you can do to drive traffic to your pages.

Well, all is not lost. Here are some tips to help you get some search engine love, retain visitors and increase pageviews:

1. Pretend that each page on your site is a sort of mini site on a specific niche — and optimise it accordingly. Make sure that the page’s title is highly optimised and relevant to its topic. The description meta tag, the alt tags and the written content should all contain related keywords. If you want to cover a different subject, create a new page for it, instead of cramming it into an existing one. Read the rest of this entry »

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