Visibility in universal search

I attended an interesting presentation on ‘The next step for search’, from a search marketing perspective at internetworld.

Andrew Girdwood and others talked about brand and trade names, social graph driven search and more, but what interested me most was the challenges and opportunities with universal/blended search, where the major search engines are increasingly displaying other content formats - maps, images and especially video within the main search engine results.

So there is a challenge and, of course, an opportunity to get relevant videos etc. displayed in the main SERPs in addition to the regular text link. Perceived wisdom was that its relatively easy to rank well with video for relevant terms and, of course, Google loves YouTube.

Act on CO2 campaign

Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, blogged about the surge in searches for ‘act on CO2′ at the turn of the year. As he says, it’s a timely push by the Department for Transport’s CO2 and transport campaign.

He notes that there were a lot more searches for ‘Act on CO2′ than ‘CO2′ in the last four weeks and the “top three sites receiving traffic from ‘act on co2’ were all UK government sites: the Department of Transport (66.5% of searches ended up there), Directgov (27.7%) and www.actonco2.direct.gov.uk (4.6%).” Which reflects the fact there are two UK government ‘Act on CO2′ campaigns - the DfT’s car/driving one and the Defra CO2 Carbon Calculator.

Internet World

I attended Internet World at Earl’s Court 2 on 1 May. The attraction was the free seminars across wide variety of subjects. The reality was a trifle disappointing - clashing events on similar subjects, rather basic presentations and a bit crowded. Did I learn much, well not too much, but I came away with some ideas. I attended these seminars:

Using Google Website optimiser to improve site search
A Google salesman talking about Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer .

Website Optimizer, Google’s free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).

London Borough of Southwark: enterprise search in the real world with Google
Alison Leahy and Stephen D’Arcy wanted one place to search across repositories, including public site and intranet.

Working with Jadu, they implementing Jadu Rupa for Google. Allows user to set and save preferences for scopes. They called this clustering…

Implemented IPSV as a thesaurus for preferred and non-preferred terms. Planning iterative addition of new collections.

Using a content management system to achieve effective search engine marketing
Nigel Jackson from Immediacy did a SEM 101:

CMS should deliver:

• W3C XHTML compliance
• clean uncluttered code
• friendly URLs
• autogeneration of site maps
• accessible navigation (text based)
• mandated actions for editors - e.g. mandatory metadata
• link checker

CMS lets user do:

• optimisation of titles (allows short titles for nav pages)
• summaries
• manage links
• encourage back links
• easily create landing pages, targetting keywords

Useful links:
www.highrankings.com
www.longtail.com

Maximising customer catch points in natural search
Your Amigo which has a technology that spiders sites, identifies important keywords and gaps and creates loads of extra pages optimised around these terms.

Managing huge paid search campaigns
The most interesting presentation of the day. Efficient Frontier use algorithms developed for financial markets to plan SEM campaigns in the increasingly opaque markets where paid position is now determined by click through rates and quality as well as cost per click. The algorithms handle lots of parameters that help optimise your ROI.