Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, Recently Google integrated it’s privacy policy for all of its products including mail, search, social and youtube.

The reasoning behind the change is to improve the usability and user experience of their core products and will effect PPC, Organic, Social and Video results.

So with ‘James and I’ living and working in the SEO world how will this effect us?

Some key points are:

• Targeted Advertising
• Personalized organic results
• Suggested Videos & Interests
• Suggested Social Media Profiles

The data that is now passed between the Google products identifies your past search history, demographic and Google + profile details to decide which results suit you most.

One important thing to consider moving forward is your keyword choice and target demographic, think objectively to ensure your website suits your audience and the type of serp you want to appear in.

This sounds obvious, but consider the following keyword ‘SEO’, a marketing manager or business owner may understand the term but is looking for company like ‘Creare’ to take on their website.

hypothetically if we consider this is the first time this imaginary user has searched SEO this is what they will see. Essentially a list of businesses selling SEO.

<screen shot>

Where as if we ‘log in’ to My Google account we see a huge difference in the type of results, gone are the companies and instead we have social recommendations with Google +, Videos, Images, Blogs and Research Sites. The only company left in the SERP is Creare as Google knows through Google + I am a contributor to the blog.

<screen shot 2>

So if i wanted to target people specifically in the SEO industry to our site, we would have to set up our strategy in a different way.

We could look at guest authors from the SEO industry that have authoritative Google + accounts, be set up to deliver resources, industry information or guidelines. All to help encourage other industry experts to +1 your site to improve social signals and to link to you from sites within the industry.

We would recommend that ideally you would integrate all these methods in your SEO campaign anyway, but we believe you would have to increase this investment to target industry users and not joes bloggs the small business owner, especially in the world of SEO.

We are well aware that its a tough topic this week, if you feel that Google’s new privacy policy will be deterimental or beneficial to your campaign, please add any comments to the supporting blog post.

Thank for watching.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, today we’re discussing more on schema micro formatting and looking at the postal address code.

Previously we mentioned that having micro formatting helps the search engine bots understand the content displayed on your webpage and how potentially it ‘could’ help a site local SEO campaign if you address supports your target area.

Lets take a look at the code and talk through the different elements:

<div id=”address” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization”>

Let Google know what ‘type’ of mark-up tags you are using. Put this in your <ul>, <div>, <p> tags

<ul itemprop=”address” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>

Link to Schema’s address mark-up tags, again put this in your <ul>, <div>, <p> tags

<li itemprop=”name”>Creare Communications</li>

References your company name, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”streetAddress”>Boughton Leigh House</li>

References your Street/First line of your address, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”addressLocality”>Rugby</li>

References your Locality/City, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”addressRegion”>Warwickshire </li>

References your Region/County, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”postalCode”>CV21 1HL</li>

References your postcode, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”telephone”><strong>0800 01 999 06</strong></li>

References your phone number, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

</ul>
</div>

So that is it, a simple method of unsuring that Google and other mahor search engines can read you business address.

Make sure once you have added the formatting you double check it using the Google rich snippet tool.

We have added the all the code to supporting blog post, if you have any question or comments please leave them on the blog also.

Thanks for watching.

schema – download test page

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, last week we introduced Schema mirco formatting and how it allows more information being filtered through into the SERP results. We have linked last weeks video on Google, Schema and SEO from the supporting blog post.

This week we are going to look in more detail how to add the star ratings to your search listings, there are several ways of displaying the same information. You can do it with a percentages or a ‘out of’ score and different variation of the schema standards.

All the code for any type of micro formatting code can be found from schema.org, but we have used the following code on www.seo-creare.co.uk for this weeks example. As you can see a few of our competitors have also installed the code on their sites:

<span itemtype="http://schema.org/Product" itemscope="" class="normal">
<span itemprop="name" class="normal"><strong>SEO</strong></span> Services
<span itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemscope="" itemprop="aggregateRating" class="normal">
rated <span itemprop="ratingValue" class="normal">4.9</span> / 5
based on <span itemprop="reviewCount" class="normal">7</span> customer reviews</span></span>

The key pieces of information needed for the search engines to understand this code are the itemprop elements which are referenced from the item type at http: // schema.org/product and http://schema.org/AggregateRating

The four itemprops tell the search engines the ‘name’ of the service. the ‘aggregaterating’ for the site or webpage, the ‘ratingvalue’ i.e. whats displayed in the SERP and the count of reviews that have been made using ‘reviewcount’ also displayed in the SERP.

You can then integrate these itemprops into normal HTML code, in this case span classes. It is important that you display them on your site so Google can find them when it crawls your site.

You can visit the rich snippets tool to check if you code has been correctly installed, also linked form the video blog. As a side note Google do not guarantee that all micro formatting will be displayed. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Thanks for watching, if you have any problems installing the code or a variation of the code, please leave a comment on  the supporting blog post and we’ll try and help you out.

byeeeee.

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video blog, Last week we looked at the rise of aggressive PPC adverts in the Google results pages. We did however mention schema micro-formatting, this could help balance the listings and improve click through rates for organic rankings.

Schema for those who don’t know is a selection of markup language supported by Google, it provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers http://schema.org/

The advantages of using micro-formatting is to aid the search engines to understand what elements are being discussed on a web page via HTML. These ‘tags’ can describe ratings, addresses, movies, places, people, videos and much much more.

So… I hear you ask how can this help my organic rankings, well directly we wouldn’t want to suggest that it will improve actual SERPs. But we can say there is opportunity to improve CTR by adding extra value to the listings displayed. For example:

Ratings – these can be referenced from credible sources for your industry.

<Screen Shot 1>

Recipe Cooking Times -Does what is says on the tin, by illustrating how long the dish takes to cook before having to click the ranking.

<Screen Shot 2>

Movies – Shows director, cast and ratings.

<Screen Shot 3>

You can also add micro formatting to your address in the footer or contact page, this will help Google identify your location and could ‘could’ help your regional SEO performance.

Our friends over at SEOmoz have done a comprehensive blog post previously which is worth taking at look at and linked from the supporting blog post. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29

Thanks for watching, any questions or queries add them to the comments.

Hello, Happy New Year and welcome to the first SEO video blog of 2012! My name’s Nick and today I’m joined once again by Joel from the SEO department. So today we’ve decided to take a look at the increase in the number of search ads displayed in many Google search results, and what impact this could have on SEO.

Yes, like the guys over at SEOMoz, who discussed this very issue this week, many of us in the office have noticed over recent months that Google has become more and more aggressive in their paid ad strategy.

Remember the introduction of paid ads at the bottom of search as well as the top? These gave the SERPs a much more crowded appearance, and hemmed our organic listings into a small space in the middle. The increase in the popularity of star reviews has also meant that the SERPs now have a much more promotional theme for many search terms.

Finally, while a few Google shopping results in search is nothing new, there now seems to be more, especially in the paid advertising area of the page. Google has also been testing the ability for a searcher to insert their email address directly into a PPC ad, demonstrating their focus upon increasing the usability and CTR of paid ads rather than concentrating on organic search.

So what does this all mean for traditional SEO? Well, although organic search listings currently get the most clicks of most SERPs, this lion’s share could decline if Google continues to push paid advertising. Organic search listings could become so plain and unappealing in comparison that users go for the more colourful, interactive paid listings which are often accompanied by images. Maybe schema mirco formatting can save the organic listings appearance, we will cover more on this in the coming weeks.

Alternatively, the increase in paid ads could have the opposite effect, which is also bad for organic SEO. As a rule people don’t like ads and promotional material being forced upon them in an aggressive way, so as SEOmoz suggest in their blog post, this could lead to enhanced bad feeling toward Google.

If extreme, this could lead to searchers abandoning Google search in droves to make a point, which would likely enhance Bing’s market share and force us in SEO to review our strategies so that bing’s alien ranking factors are taken into account more.

As the both the number and aggressiveness of Google’s paid ads increase, it will be interesting to see whether your listings gain you more traffic or less in 2012. What do you think, is less more? Do more paid ads have any positive effect on organic SEO? If you do notice a difference, or have anything to add please don’t hesitate to do so in the comments below.

Thanks for watching!

Thanks to SEOmoz.org who’s images we used in this blog post from their 8 predictions for SEO in 2012 post.