In recent years doctors have warned against relying too much on Google when researching ailments, symptoms or self diagnosing.

A study by Phsyorg states that “patients who use the Internet to help make medical decisions need to know that the web may not be giving the whole picture.”

There definitely needs to be an element of common sense when it comes to researching ailments online and it is worth noting also that not everything you read is reliable and trustworthy for numerous reasons.

Some articles may be biased in view of gaining an enquiry for their own products and/or services and with industry and technological developments happening all the time, information can quickly become out of date and inaccurate as well as opinions and best practices changing.

Google sees on a regular basis the types of search queries that are put through on a regular basis up close and as such are able to analyse these in some detail. Up to now they haven’t serviced these search queries very well – until recently.

According to Google Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger, MD, Google sees people search for health symptoms and almost immediately jump back and search for conditions they found in their initial search. Zeiger wants to make the process much easier and turn these two or three steps into just one.

Zeiger announced last week the following:

To make the process easier, now when you search for a symptom or set of symptoms, you’ll often see a list of possibly related health conditions that you can use to refine your search. The list is generated by our algorithms that analyze data from pages across the web and surface the health conditions that appear to be related to your search.

Apparently the AdWords side of things will not change and that they are being quite careful about how and when these new results will be triggered, even though it will be a completely automated process controlled by their algorithm.

I’ve had a quick play with some search queries and haven’t been able to bring up any such phrases on Google UK or google.com, although some examples have been posted at Search Engine Land.

One thing I need to explain to clients on a regular basis is the concept of link building and why it is such a big (and important) part of my job as their SEO consultant, so I thought I’d write a quick blog post on why it is part of every SEO campaign, it’s importance in gaining high rankings and the work that’s involved. Firstly, what is a link?

A link is a clickable piece of text or an image that when clicked sends the user to another page, website or file. But why is it important for SEO?

Each time somebody links to your website it is essentially saying that the information, file or image you published is worthy of being shared by another person, site, blog, company or organisation.

In Google‘s eyes (if it had them) this link pointing to your site is similar to a vote of confidence in the quality of your content. The more links you have the more votes of confidence your site gets and Google starts to trust your site in being a reliable source of information. With this trust, Google becomes more confident in ranking your site higher in the search results in order to send more people to it.

Link building isn’t quite as simple as that, though. There is a lot more taken into consideration. The authority of links and the context of the links are both important factors, similar to the judging of a competition, in that the judges – who have the highest authority and are placed closely within a similar industry (contextually-related) – have a much higher say in who goes ‘through’ (assuming your thinking about an X Factor or Britain’s Got talent style competition).

In terms of the types of links available to build, these include – with varying effectiveness – links within blog posts, blog comments and on blog sites, sponsored adverts, directory listings, press releases, articles and other content distributed on external sites including article directories, creating link bait and viral content, videos, creating links with governing bodies or suppliers, creating alliances with related organisations or bodies, creating compelling content… the list goes on.

It is worth mentioning that link velocity is also key, in that links built too quickly over a short period of time looks unnatural and causes Google to ‘shy away’ from your site more than trust it. There are also ideas of link maturity being taken into consideration, in that a links full value isn’t released until it has been in place for a period of time.

For those that are keen to get involved with the link building process I wrote a post recently on how to build links indirectly, which discusses a few ideas that anybody can easily implement to help them gain valuable relationships with people that are active online, which you can then turn into a mass link building campaign.

I hope this helps explain the importance (and complexities) of link building, why it is currently such a big part of any campaign and why Google needs to be able to see that your site is as trustworthy as possible before they can start to reward you by sending you visitors.

I think sometimes it’s nice to be able to have something technical explained in non-technical terms, so that those people that are not so technically minded can start to understand the technical thing that is being explained… in a less technical way.

It almost always helps and I recently saw a difference in how I approach a situation compared to how somebody else would. Someone that had a completely different mindset and technical background – my Dad. Let me explain.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a new car. Nothing new – in fact it’s just as old as the car that’s about to fail its MOT for the very last time, but it’s well looked after. It’s a retro little thing that I can’t wait to get onto the road at the end of this month and is perfect for the summer… if it actually happens this year, that is!

Anyway, my Dad came with me to see the car and take it for a drive as he knows cars much better than I do and he looks for things that I wouldn’t even think of checking. It was interesting – he checked everything… meticulously.

We put it through tests – speed bumps at 30mph, emergency stops, checking the soft roof didn’t leak, checking the modifications to see if we could work out the kind of driver that owned it previously. We even narrowed it down to ‘young’ and ‘female’. This kind of analysis was new to me when it came to buying a used car and was really interesting – enlightening, even.

It reminded me a lot of how I objectively look at sites that come into our department and the ones we look after every day to make sure they are going to perform as best as they can, which I know is very different to how a designer would look at a website and again very different to how a typical surfer would look at the same site.

It’s not a case of getting a website designed and hoping for the best (which I knew), just as you don’t buy a car and hope for the best (which I now know). It needs going over with a fine-toothed comb.

You check everything to make sure there are no small problems that could become major, expensive issues later down the line when you’ve sold your old car and don’t have anything else as a backup – or when your site goes live and you’re depending on it to bring in regular income so you’re not paying out of your own pocket while the site gains momentum and starts making a return.

You want both to work the best they possibly can so you get the most out of it with as few problems as possible. You want something that just ‘works’.

I consistently run sites through a myriad of different standards, checks and tools to ensure everything is as well-tuned and streamlined as possible to keep Google happy along with the visitors that it sends. Speed tests, diagnostics, effectiveness tests, trying different configurations… the list goes on.

I also always make small tweaks to the site itself to make sure it works as best as it can, whether it’s to aid the optimisation itself, to improve the load speed, to help a site convert better or tailor it to suit the audience they want to attract, just as a mechanic would set tappets and fine-tune the engine to perform work how they want it to perform – it’s best.

There are a lot of similarities… I could go on but I can imagine it getting pretty tedious. I think it’s nice to have a real-world example of something that relates to what we do that a less technical person can start to understand what we do and why we do it and what it compares to.

I know that through running such comprehensive tests and making ongoing tweaks to streamline a site and rule out as many potential problems as possible through meticulous analysis it will work well in the search engines and be great for visitors. As for the car… let’s just see how it goes once I get it on the road in March.

Ok, so your trusty SEO company has got you onto page 1 for your search phrase. Competitive or not, it’s an achievement that places you right in front of the eyes of people looking for your products and/or services and allows you to grab potential sales or leads from being visible in the right areas. But is Page 1 really considered a success?

For some campaigns, it definitely is a major achievement to get a competitive keyword onto page 1 – I have a few! But the campaign really doesn’t stop there.

Research from a study by Optify recently shows that almost 60% of people click on positions 1-3. Position 4 only sees 7.9% of clicks while position 10 gets a measly 2.2%. Positions 1 really is the place to be with 36.4% of all clicks.

With this information we know that to get the most of being on page one you really have push hard to be to be in position 1-3, although there are other attributes that may skew this information. Things such as video and image listings, or non-blended and blended places results.

It’s also worth noting that positions 1 on page 2 actually gets more clicks that the bottom of page 2.

The information was taken in December 2010 and based on the US version of Google‘s search results pages, analysing 250 randomly selected sites for keyword visits to sites within the B2C and B2B.

Optify noted that ranking beyond the top 20 results (2 pages) has almost no business value and concluded that that you won’t see “huge benefits until you get to the top few positions”.

From our perspective it shows that there are two distinct goals, particularly for bigger campaigns; one to get the site onto page 1 and another to work our way up page 1 to get to position 1-3. Do they have different strategies? Potentially.

It’s something that needs more thought and analysis but clearly there are two different – and easily measurable – goals and, although the overall goal is very similar, allows us to set smaller goals within this that can be tackled individually.

After all, if you’re consistently taking small baby steps one day you’ll look back and see that you’ve not just pottered forwards but you’ve actually taken a giant leap towards achieving a much larger goal!

A/B testing is a way of testing different versions of a site or a page to work out which one achieves a particular goal at a more effective rate, with a view to rolling out the version that performs better for good or for further A/B testing.

For example, a sites home page layout can be altered by including more or less images or text and the test could be to track which results in the user visiting the contact page or actually putting an enquiry through.

It’s best to make small changes to the version you are testing, rather than many, so you can track what works and what doesn’t. If you make too many changes and you see an improvement in goals being reached it is going to be almost impossible to attribute the success to any one thing in particular.

Some changes you should consider making to your site include:

• Making the phone numbers stand out more
• Including full contact details including physical address more prominently
• Including accepted payment methods
• Adding testimonials to the site
• Trying a cleaner, more modern website design or layout
• Adding a video presenter or slideshow to the site to introduce your product or service quickly
• Moving the sidebar to the other side of the page
• Making the main navigation menu system more prominent
• Displaying prices on your pages
• Comparing your prices to well-known brands of a similar industry

There are endless small tweaks you can make to the site that may help or hinder a sites conversion rate, but with a few tests run over a period of several months you can increase your sites success and potentially your business as a whole.