Searching just got faster, Google rolls out Instant

Published | 10.54, 9th of September 2010, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

Google Instant is rolling out its search enhancement that shows results as you type. The ethos behind Google Instant is they are always looking to improve the speed and quality of the search results.

Instant does not effect page rank or position within certain results, but over time it may well affect the way in which people search and choose results. In future it may well be time to recognise these changes, adapt and flourish.

 

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Another very useful tool from Google

Published | 14.55, 25th of May 2010, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

I came across this tool, after talking to a friend of mine in PR, it has been around quite a while, but has only just come to my attention. Google alerts allows you to be sent results for key search terms, a very useful tool for SEO, PR or a companies marketing department.

See more information from Google below:

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

http://www.google.com/alerts

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The value of Bounce Rates

Published | 14.09, 27th of April 2010, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

Many people only ever focus on link strategies and keywords when they talk about search engine optimisation. There are so many elements to what makes a full campaign work. Often people only think that the design of the site is the pretty bit at the front. People should not be so quick to judge. Having a site that is engaging and well designed can be as influential as the content, keywords and links it can establish.

Google looks at how people interact with websites and how long they stay. If people leave your site straight away once arriving (this is know as the Bounce Rate) it means they are not happy with the results they have found. Google has its place within the market by delivering relevant, interesting content and results. To sum up, search engines want good search results, they move sites with low bounce rates up and sites with high bounce rates down. Users are far more likely to stay on your site and look around if it looks good. This will then in turn have a positive effect on your search position.

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Google incorporates site speed in search rankings

Published | 13.05, 13th of April 2010, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

Working on search engine optimisation things are always changing, so I thought I would share some information, Google are now using the speed of your site's delivery as a factor in search results and the amount of pages it will index. See the official post below.

Google Says

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Summary

The site speed is only one element that will affect your ongoing SEO strategy but key things worth looking at are:

• quality of build
• site architecture
• accessibility
• good web hosting
• duplicated content
• quality inbound links

You can see from the test results of this page (image above), we take all of the above very seriously.

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Current UK search engine market share

Published | 13.10, 15th of September 2009, by Chris van Aurich | SEO

Top UK search engine visits:

1. Google UK - 64.89%
2. Google - 16.29%
3. Google UK Image Search - 4.69%
4. Bing - 3.11%
5. Yahoo! Search - UK & Ireland - 2.41%
6. Ask.com UK - 1.58%
7. Google Image Search - 0.72%
8. Ask.com - 0.35%
9. Google Poland - 0.34%
10. Tiscali UK Search - 0.32%

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