Google Forces Personalised Search Results on an Unsuspecting Public

So Google has rolled out it's personalised search to everyone - like it or not!



The two geeks have been employed by Google to quietly tell the world that what they see when they search, is not the same as anyone else.
Moreover, unless you are in the 5% of users who change their browser settings, you will have no choice, as Google has taken to dropping more spyware in the shape of an anonymous cookie onto your machine in order to monitor your behaviour!

So how does this affect SEO?

It depends how you look at it. In theory more weight might be given to local results for example, however Google will make decisions based upon things like your previous bounce rates etc.

So what can you do to see the real results of your marketing efforts? Well for starters clear down web history and remove cookies. Also don't just check Google.co.uk if you live in the UK - have a look at Google.com as well.

This move has some very worrying trends.
Firstly it assumes that everyone using the machine is the same person. In many households multiple sign on accounts are not created.
Secondly it is an open invitation to black hat cookie droppers to influence SERPS.
More importantly when taken in context with all the other moves Google is making at the moment to profile every user, for example Google Mobile, the worry of privacy and 'big brother' style corporations becomes ever more real

Beat The System

Google Mobile Web - Nothing for SEO'rs to worry about?

Here's a very interesting clip from CNBC about Google and mobile web



What Sergey Brin did not tell you was...... that with this app on your phone Google will be able to serve up LOCAL results based on GPS and personal search based on your profiles and usage habits.....

And what is more personal than a mobile phone?

This has massive implications for SEO and Internet Marketing!

The first move by Google SKYLAB to track our lives?

Beat The System

Through the pain barrier with the King of Content

EzineArticles.com were kind enough to send us ythis email which we think is worth redistributing here.
Ezinearticles.com is arguably the most important of all the article directories, it's only failure being it's Rss distribtion services are fairly non existant

This new article template is the perfect cure for your ideal customer's pain.

This template is based on the concept of pain. More specifically, the pain your ideal customers may experience and the pain reliever you can provide. Two simple questions form the backbone of this template:

1. What are some PAIN points that your ideal customers experience?


2. What are some STRENGTHS/BENEFITS your company delivers to remove or prevent those pain points?

Let's imagine you're going to write an article using this template. The article is targeted at small business owners who are curious about article marketing. Some pain points you might consider addressing would be:

• Pain of losing a competitive advantage


• Pain of not having traffic


• Pain of not being recognized


• Pain of not knowing how to get your articles & message out to the market


• Pain of not wanting to screw up when trying the article marketing process


• Etc...

You'd want to pick only (1) pain point for each article. For this particular example, let's say you pick the first one, "Pain of losing a competitive advantage." With that in mind, you then identify the specific ingredients (strengths/benefits) of article marketing that would help relieve this particular pain. Some ingredients (strengths/benefits) might include:

• Worldwide exposure of your articles, and hence your products or services


• Scalable marketing


• Combined benefits of increased website traffic and improved credibility


• Zero up-front cash investment


• Highly targeted

The next step is to build your article around the pain point and the prescribed pain reliever ingredients. Each of the ingredients is explained in terms of how it can help alleviate the reader's particular pain.

The article wraps up by summarizing how your suggested pain reliever has many of the ingredients necessary to cure your reader's pain. Then of course your Resource Box gives them a link to obtaining your suggested pain reliever. In the case of this example, that link would probably be http://EzineArticles.com/submit/ or perhaps to the EzineArticles home page.

In a nutshell, the Pain Points article template works like this:

1. Choose (1) pain point of your ideal customer.


2. In the first paragraph or two clearly describe the target niche and identify with their specific pain point.


3. The next paragraph introduces your particular brand of pain reliever and an overview of the ingredients (strengths/benefits) that pertain directly to the reader's pain.


4. In the following paragraphs, these ingredients are explained in-depth in terms of how each can help alleviate the reader's particular pain.


5. Before closing the article, be sure to give an example or two of how others have gotten relief from their pain by following this prescription.


6. The closing paragraphs pull all of the ingredients back together to reinforce your pain reliever as the right one.


7. Finally, it's important that your Resource Box provides the reader access to your suggested solution for their pain.

At the risk of totally overdoing our medicine metaphor... this particular article template should be an easy pill to swallow. It's targeted, fairly simple to understand and it shows empathy for your niche customers. Best of all, this one template can provide many, many articles. How many is only limited to the number of pain points you can identify.

Set a goal for yourself to write at least (5) articles this week using this template. Then leave a comment here about what you discovered along the way:
http://blog.EzineArticles.com/2009/06/pain-points-article-template.html

Optimising Image Search on Google

If you sell products that people desire by the way they look - especially in comparison to others, then you must take image search seriously!

Images are very important if you want to practice conversation domination through universal search. Google treats images in various ways, most are tied into their analysis of the source of the image webpage and it relevancy to the search string.

The Google image search teamhave just released an interesting video on how to optimise images for Google Image search ranking:



These are the salient points from the video!

It explains how images are sorted - search intent of the user is matched to image

Images are clustered and canonicalised (weighted) for duplicate content towards what google thinks is the origin!

At query time they apply image to web page quality scores! They then apply origin relevance score to query

Image ranking uses multi-variate sorting 'signal' to rank!

Query trails from images are measured for 'Bounce rate'!

HQ is given priority (large images - google doesn't like thumbnails unless they are links), above the fold and image text on topic (same as video optimisation) Title Description (including links!) etc

Google Analytics- query and image strings are analysed

New features are regularly being added to Googles blog

Try and get your images on Flickr.com - its owned by Yahoo and is effectively Yahoo's youtube for alternative traffic. Yahoo and Goog have recently started sleeping together - again!

Internet Marketing - IM Leadership re-opens- Dominate Google Local Search

Howie Schwartz - IM Leadership Local Search Marketing Course re-opens - Dominate Google Local Search

Web 2.0 traffic guru Howie Schwartz has re-opened his very popular Internet Marketing IM Leadership course. The course was so successful when launched earlier this year that there was a wauing list to get on it

Internet Marketing leadership is a course for newbies and old hatters alike as step by step you are led through the amazing free link building exercises and SERPs traffic domination methods that have become Howie's speciality for extracting thousands of high page rank links for free from wjavascript:void(0)eb 2.0 authority sites.

The emphasis of IM Leadership is to use the above techniques for obtaining and keeping clients who will pay a few thousand dollars a month to appear at the top of Google for their local niche search.

Howie takes you through the whole process of local marketing and Google conversation domination and shows you how to extract massive link power from web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo or Hubpages.

If you are a local business and you want your site to TOTALLY dominate page 1 of google for keywords such 'New York Medical Centre' or 'Chicago Restaurants' or florida estae Agent, for example, though it could easily be London Stockbrokers as the location doesn't matter, then the £1200 dollars for this course is well worth it!

If you are a consultant and want to dominate Google for your clients and easily earn 10,000 dollars per month in retainers then JUMP in Quick

Places to IM leadership are very limited



Watch lots of Howies live calls to the last group who signed up to IM leadership at http://www.ustream.tv/Howie-Live/videos

FIND OUT MORE IM Leadership

SEO for Universal Search - Korean War?

We've talked about convergence of platforms and personalisation before but here's a quick recap

"Google is clever and has seen the future, and just like all the major TV networks, media corporations, phone companies, cable companies, broadband suppliers, phone makers, flat screen manufacturers, personal data devices, GPS and of course Microsoft all know that one thing is coming....

CONVERGENCE

Convergence means that you'll have your own personal preferred desktop displaying universal search items for your personality (determined by your search patterns, your buying patterns your social networking and your bookmarking or approving of STUFF), and you'll carry it or have access to it everywhere in the world with you, using any or all of those devices mentioned above and many many more!"

We've just stumbled across a very interesting film of Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaking a while ago in Korea.

Korea is one of the most technologically converged nations and is a testing ground for future Google multi level platforms.

What struck us was the message that nobody will own their personal data but it will all be hosted remotely in this 'amazing cloud' of information services, that will decide for you what you want to see and hear... and of course... Google will provide all this wonderful stuff for you... because it knows what time you visited the bathroom yesterday...and of course Schmidt Knows that the majority of the sheep around the world will buy into the Big Brother scenario.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the 26 minute talk regarding using and exploiting social networks, which are a major Google testbed in Korea.

We checked out Schmidts background on Wikipedia and the interesting thing is that he has major background knowledge of distributed systems i.e. client server applications and now he's espousing the ultimate model of thin client with Google at the helm.

One strange commment which needs some thought and analysis is the fact that Schmidt sees all content as advertising - this is a lesson for all marketteers new and old.

Watch Eric Schmidt and listen carefully to get a top down view of the structures your marketing effort MUST include:-