Omar Kattan

With the anticipated launch of Google ’s Caffeine in the New Year and the focus on real time  and personalised search, 2010 is promising to be a nail biting  time for webmasters.  Here are a few tips to maintain your rankings in 2010:

1) Website load time.  In 2010 website load time will be a critical factor in determining which sites rank at the top of Google’s search results.  Ensure your site loads quickly and that it does not have any broken links.  Use tools such as  this and check against the top sites ranking for your keyword.  Ensure that your site’s loadtime is better than theirs.

2) Brank visibility.  2010 will also take into account your brand’s visibility on the net.  Make sure you optimise your social media assets such as your Twitter profile, your Facbook page , Flickr , LinkedIn and YouTube.

3) Real Time search.  Google and Bing recently paid 15 and 10 million dollars to index Twitter.  This was done primarily due to the fact that real time search will be an important factor in 2010.  Ensure that you produce enough content that can keep your social profiles active.

4) Universal Search.  Universal results or bleneded results will become even more prominent in 2010.  We’ve already started seeing the effect of Universal results in 2009 but 2010 promises to be the year when these results will become more of the norm.  Ensure you invest in multimedia content such as images, videos and news.

5) Personalised Search.  Google recently announced that it has switched it’s default search results to “personalised”.  With this being the case, ensure that your site is optimised to rank for the various keywords in your consumers buying cycle.  Also ensure that your site is user friendly in order to decrease bounce rates.  Google will be keeping an eye on bounce/click through rates in 2010.

In addition to the above, make sure that you follow all the basic SEO best practice techniques as recommended by the main search engines.

Happy Holidays!

So Google recently announced that it has defaulted it’s search results to “personalised”.  What does this mean in terms of the future of SEO?  I’ll try to explain.

Before I do, let me explain how Google’s new personalised results work. 

Google personalised results have always been available however previously, these results could only be viewed when a user was logged into a Google account.   Google has now defaulted to an opt out  if you don’t want personalised personalised results, ie they will serve personalised results unless you opt out by clicking on “Web History” in the top right hand corner of the results pages and opting out.

How do personalised results work?  Basically, Google stores a cookie on your computer and tracks your search behaviour including which sites you visit for up to 180 days.  Now, when you search for a certain keyword, Google queries your past search history and comes back with sites that match your past searches.

Here’s Google’s official video announcement

YouTube Direkt

For instance if you’re searching for “golf” in the past Google could either serve you a site related to Golf the car or Golf the sport.  Now, with personalised search, Google knows if you’re a sports fan or a car enthusiast and would serve you results based on your preference.

Now that you’re clearer on what personalised search is (I hope), how will these results affect SEO?

To put it mildly, the rules of the game have changed!  In the past, SEOs were able to follow basic SEO best practices such as code optimisation, keyword usage, site architecture and link building and have a very good chance of ranking for target terms.  This is still the case today however another factor has been pushed into the mix, personalisation.

This means that by following SEO best practices, you might rank for your target keywords but this is not guaranteed to be the case on every computer.  Some computers with Google web history enabled and a Google cookie residing in the hard drive might get results based on the user’s web history,  This web history as mentioned above is based on some of the sites they’ve visited before.

So while the rules of the SEO game have changed, SEOs can still achieve results by taking into account a user’s journey when purchasing a product or service (for instance) and ensure that a client’s site appears for searches at various parts of the journey.  

As an example, if a user is interested in purchasing a car and your client is Golf,  you will need to ensure that your client’s sites is visible not only for buying stages of the purchase cycle, but also during the research stage.  If Google registers that you’ve clicked on the Golf site early on in the process, then there is a good chance that the Golf site will outrank any other site in this niche.

I hope the above explains personalised search and what SEOs can do to ensure they do not lose out from this fundamental change in Google’s algorithm.