Yet another announcement from Google has got my head ticking overtime. Yesterday Google published their “Invitation to social sites to integrate with Google Analytics”. Basically they plan to launch a social data hub within Analytics next year, which is going to show sharing, commenting and voting stats from various social networks. In theory this should allow marketers to measure their social engagement much better as it’s all going to be about seeing social activity on other networks, not just the activity that happens on a website itself.

What intrigues me is the reason for Google doing this when Google Analytics has to date been all about onsite activity. I suppose the first reason is because they need to provide good social stats for Google + anyway, and they’ve realised that the only way one set of stats is useful is if you can get the whole picture – a bit like the way Google Analytics shows all traffic sources so you can benchmark Google against Bing for example. I guess it makes sense for them to integrate other social networks into Analytics when looking at it this way. Which leads me onto the next point which I think will be the main talking point of this announcement – the social networks that are already working with Google.

Or should I say the social networks that aren’t already working with Google… Facebook and Twitter. Why aren’t they included in this? Is it because Google haven’t ‘invited’ them until now, or is it because Facebook and Twitter don’t want to be included? Surely Google will include the two biggest networks if they know what’s good for them. It’s a bit like saying that they’ll show traffic from AOL and Alta Vista, but not Bing and Yahoo!

I have to admit that although I do take interest in the happenings and developments of social networks other than Facebook and Twitter, I don’t spend too much time on other sites such as Digg and Reddit, I leave that to the social media folks or content writers, with the knowledge that sharing helps but .

From my point of view, most SEO’s would rather spend more time on link building than on social networks as they feel it adds more direct value to SEO than sharing signals. However this is something else that’s got me thinking about Google’s reasoning behind this development – does this indicate something for SEO? We know that social signals are becoming more important in ranking factors and Google should take all activity into account, not just Google +, and not just social activity within a site itself. It also makes sense for Google to rank sites that create sharable content, not just sites with content that links back to their site from a page with high PR, which seems to be part of their plan to get rid of bad content.

If this means that we’ll be more able to track the social signals that’ll have an impact on rankings then I’m looking forward to seeing the stats.

What are your thoughts? How many questions marks have I used in this blog post? (!)

By now, most of us that are involved in SEO to any reasonable level should know that the speed of a site is having an effect on a site’s rankings. Whether it’s the speed of the server, more streamlined code or the use of optimised images it all matters and Google has just confirmed this to us once again by incorporating site speed into Google Analytics.

If releasing a page load analysis tool and adding a sub-section dedicated to site speed within Webmaster Tools wasn’t enough, this is surely a step to make any good SEO pay attention and start looking at everything they can to make a site run as fast and effectively as possible.

In many ways it comes down to user experience. It makes sense that Google rewards sites that provide the best user experience possible and can be measured partly through the speed of a site.

A fast-loading site suggests that the site owner has spent money on a good hosting account or server, has optimised all images and only included them where necessary and has optimised their code to run as streamlined as possible in order to give their visitors what they want quickly and effectively.

Not only that but it also benefits you directly in the way of reducing disk space on your hosting account as well as bandwidth costs which, depending on your host, can be costly if you use more of your allocated ‘allowance’.

Site speed is only available in the new Beta version of Google Analytics and we’re seeing some results trickling in.

So if everything else wasn’t enough to make you want to speed up your site, now is the perfect time to do what you can to help your site perform better within the search engines as well as give your current visitors the best user experience possible while they’re on your site and get the most out of each and every hit.

It has been noted for a little while that search is becoming more and more customised to the user, particularly if signed in – it is a continued effort to make search more secure. The use of their encryption protocol known as SSL was developed to protect personalised search results, and has encouraged people within the industry to adopt similar security methods. All of which ties in with Google placing high priority and security on the customised experience.

Google are rolling out changes for the http://www.google.com/ as follows. The changes to their default search experience for signed in users will, over the next few weeks, result in being redirected to https://www.google.com/ (please note the extra S). This will then somehow encrypt our search queries and the results page.

What this will mean is… searching from http(s), will show visits in the analytics came from an organic search, but it will not provide each individual query. This will mean keyword information in traffic sources will not show a true picture of the phrases people have used to get to the website. It will still be possible to see an aggregated list of the top 100 search queries through webmaster tools. However, ‘signed in’ organic traffic will appear as ‘not provided’. Referring sites and CPC will remain unaffected.

As stated, this has not rolled out elsewhere but Google do suggest that they will be adding more support for SSL across many more of their products and services in due course. I would be interested to know how the future changes are going to affect the metrics and statistics we SEO’s rely on to measure the performance and effectiveness of our internet marketing.

Google`s Dominance

These days if you are working in SEO then you work with Google. Whether it`s using the search engine for checking rankings, looking at trend and analytic reports or just utilising it`s fast browser Chrome, at some point you can`t escape coming into contact with Google. Is this a bad thing?

No. In my view there is always going to be a dominant force within most industries so why not ours? Also, the fact that we rely heavily on the search engine for a large percentage of our job and with Google launching with the search engine in the late nineties, it was inevitable we were going to be influenced by it. As with operating systems there has to be a leader, Microsoft, Facebook and Google are prime examples of this. Dominance doesn’t necessarily have to be negative and in Google`s case it`s a positive that we have one point of focus and technically one set of guidelines to follow in order to be successful at SEO. We cannot discount Bing, especially now that they are pulling more and more users every day but for the foreseeable future Google are the primary engine that we use to gauge our SEO results by and therefore it is only common sense to follow advice and guidelines from them in order to rank high for our clients. Most SEO firms will follow the techniques and rules to adhere to Google`s ranking algorithm for better results and this does result in a more structured, organised way of succeeding in SEO. Bing do have their own ranking rules but compared to Google it is not as established.

Not just a search engine

Google`s dominance is not just in their search engine but also in their alternative products and other software applications. When they created the Chrome browser, which would go in direct competition to Firefox and Internet Explorer, I myself was not sure whether I would bother with it for casual use or for SEO. However, although I admit to using it more at home than in the office I will say it is competent on both sides and the SEO additional open source tools that are being created are now compatible with Google Chrome making it ideal for our work and resulting in less reliance on Firefox.
Of course it`s not just Chrome they have released.

Amidst the various tools such as Google Instant and Wonder Wheel, Analytics, Trends and Insight (although still in Beta) they have now announced a Google laptop called the Google ChromeBook. Manufactured with Acer, this will be released in the US in June with a later release for the UK no doubt. The key point on the product is that information and data is stored wirelessly on servers, requiring no on-board storage space, instead giving you an 16GB SSD drive, the idea meant to encourage server storage rather than locally on the machine. This indicates that they mean to launch other competitive products as well as services in the future to take on the likes of Microsoft and Sony.

So although we could look at Google`s dominance with frustration or dislike sometimes, it`s good to know that such a professional and capable company are involved heavily with a large element of our industry and that they welcome user feedback and engage in open dialogue with consumers. With Google now branching out to phones, laptops and devices as well as its search engine and related tools, the future looks like it will still be Google leading the way for SEO for a long time to come but that is definitely not a bad prospect.

Within SEO and the use of Google Analytics, The figure given as the percentage of visits resulting in what is known as a ‘Bounce’. In this post I would like to use some recent experiences to illustrate several reasons why ‘Bounce Rate’ is not the bleak figure we believe it to be. I have been able to use this to help clients see that a seemingly high bounce rate does not mean that their website is not performing well and generating business. It does not suggest without equivocation, that they are getting no return on investment.

First of all, to clarify, a ‘bounce’ is simply a single page visit or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. It is no more complicated than that, just the percentage of visitors who only visited one page.
Recently, I had a client who was concerned with reducing bounce rate and improving his conversions, specifically online enquiries. The problem was, the nature of the business suggested to me that people would rather call and speak to someone in person or even visit. The business was medical in nature and I tried to advise the client that there is only so much that visitors can gain from an online enquiry. Ultimately, it would be necessary for them to call and register or just visit the premises.

In terms of his bounce rate, I tried to advise that this doesn’t mean his visitors didn’t find what they were looking for. The phone number appears on all pages in the top right corner so it is entirely possible that the information was there on the landing page and they need go no further. My client suggested a pop up appear asking the user to fill in maybe 3 questions to improve his site such as ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

I did try to advise that there is nothing wrong with trying to improve the site and it’s usability, but it is perfectly possible that people did find what they are looking for. It must be considered that people will find it off putting, especially if they found what they wanted and wish to just move. Also it must be considered that people may not be willing to spend time filling in pop ups. I just asked him to consider that the bounce rate was not a set percentage of people who didn’t use his site, just people who only visited one page, it might in many cases have been exactly the page they were looking for.

As such, the client now uses many other aspects to measure the success of the website such as the number of phone calls, the number of new members joining and the team also just generally ask by which source their new clients have found their business. This has proven enough to give the client faith and reassurance that the website and keywords chosen have brought traffic, new visitors and therefore new custom. I have been able to use this experience to demonstrate to other clients that a bounce does not mean what they believe it to. It can actually be viewed in a very positive way.