The days of “normalized” search results that everyone sees in the search engine results pages are over. Personalized search engine result pages are the “new norm,” and like climate change it is going to shift people’s perception of search in directions that may become as unpredictable as the weather.
With little fan fare at the beginning of December 2009 Google released what is called Personalized Search and like ships passing in the night most people did not pay much attention to it. Maybe Google wanted to it this way. Whatever the reason, we must take it very seriously and it deserves a lot more of attention then the press are giving it and here is the reason why;
Up to now, search engines have mostly delivered the same results to everyone if you were just using regular search queries and not actively using Google applications like Gmail, Picasa and many other apps offered by Google. Two people would enter the same keyword for “ Tiger Woods ” and get back the same search engine result page with the same set of results. In fact, there so much the same across the search engines that people have used them as their navigation tool of choice up to now.
In a personalized search environment Google is aware of your unique IP address, location and has created a personalized cookie that stays embedded in your browser when using Google applications to due searches. Over time Google uses this data in an anonymous way to refine the page results that are sent back to you in near real time.

Google cannot read our minds, but they can adapt to the keywords we are searching for when we make a query using what is now called “Web History”. If your political views are conservative you may not start to see conservative results coming back to you, but if you spend 180 days on conservative web sites Google will store that history on their servers and in turn you may see your personalized result pages take a more conservative flavour over this time period including all the ads in the sidebar for donations to your local politician.

Personalized Search may be a good thing for many of us. As our result pages will become more adaptive to our personal search habits and needs. My greatest concern is how Google is using this data to create highly targeted advertising that goes well beyond what we are used to seeing in our current modern day browsers. If you are a online business owner who spends a great deal of time monitoring and checking the results of your website while having Personalized Search and Web History active you maybe influencing you own results thinking that your site is doing better than you think. If you’re keyword is ranking in the top results for a term that’s important to you? Look again. Turn off personalized search, and you might discover that your top ranked term is due to the way your active personalized system is a adjusting itself to meet your needs. If you visit your own site too often, your own site ranks better in your own results — but not for everyone else.

How will Personalized Search affect Search Engine Optimization? Does this mean that Search Engine Optimization is finished? No, we have been aware for some time now that we are moving in the direction of personalization amongst the big search engines. As Google crops more data from us to personalize it to our needs. SEO will continue to be an important consideration to the search engines as long as we use good web standards, Meta Titles and Descriptions to make a good first impression to the people searching for our sites and robots that the search engines use to understand our relevant content in the search result pages.

We have moved from Global search, Country search, Regional search, Localized Search and down to what could be the holy grail of search “Personalized Search” or least that is what Google is hoping will all believe. A person who lives in Montreal may get a different result in the search engine when they due a search for “Bagels” then a searcher in Toronto who types in the same search query. Say you live on St-Viateur Street in the Mile End district of Montreal and you do a search for “Bagels” and the result that comes back is “Saint Viateur bagels”. I sincerely believe that this is what Google is hoping for with Personalized Search. Here is another example scenario;

Imagine you’re in a Grocery Store — you walk-up to the nearest clerk and ask where can I find the flour. The clerk would say on aisle 12 near the sugar. You would get to Aisle 12 near the sugar and find the flour you were looking for and thank the clerk for being as helpful as you leave the store.
But would you expect that same store clerk to help you by remembering everything you’d asked for over a half-year period? That might be helpful, sure, but it might also be spooky. But this is what Google is doing now. It remembers everything you’ve searched for over 180 days, and it uses that information to customize your results.

Google in their wisdom has offered us the ability to pause this service or opt-out completely if we deem it necessary. They have also given us the ability to edit our web history. I just wish Google could have given us a little more warning and made it easier for everyone to have a choice. Privacy advocates will not be happy by the fact that this is an opt-out feature rather than opt-in service. Google has addressed this by anonymizing search records to protect user privacy. Keep in mind that Google wants us to see diversity in the search results. It is still very important to Google to present a variety of sources and opinions in the Google results. As millions of Google users get automatically signed up for this service natural search rankings will become more and more distorted. The ultimate concern should be on how Google plans to monetize this new arrangement it has made with all of its application users. Google will only give us hints on what direction they will take next just like they gave us about Personalized Search back in December on a blog posting.

When you sign-up for the first time for a Gmail account you may not even notice the default opt-in option that Google has so kindly ticked off for you. Google will automatically sign you up for three distinct services;

• Web History
• Personalized Search
• Personalized home page

I just want to make you aware that I love Google applications in general and I use them every day in both my personal and professional life. I just believe that anything that is given to you for free comes at a price and Google should of done a better job at allowing it users to have the rights to make a informed decision to accept a service on their own terms.

Be cautious next time you opt-in to a service by taking the extra time to read all of the available information before clicking through. If this all sounds scary to you then you do have the right to opt-out by following the source link in this article. Google has clear instructions on their site on how to address this option should you want to exercise it.

Postscript:
Here is what you will see when you go to the web history page of Google.
Personalized Search
“When you search using Google, you get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features. By personalizing your results, we hope to deliver you the most useful, relevant information on the Internet.

In the past, the only way to receive better results was to sign up for personalized search. Now, you can get customized results whenever you use Google. Depending upon whether or not you’re signed in to a Google Account when you search, the information we use for customizing your experience will be different:

Signed-in personalization: When you’re signed in, Google personalizes your search experience based on your Web History. If you don’t want to receive personalized results while you’re signed in, you can turn off Web History and remove it from your Google Account. You can also view and remove individual items from your Web History.

Signed-out customization: When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie. Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.
Because many people might search from a single computer, the browser cookie may be associated with more than one person’s search activity. For this reason, we don’t provide a method for viewing this signed-out search activity. If you don’t want to receive customized results while you are signed out, you can turn off these search customizations.

Here’s an illustration of the information we use in each case:
Signed-in Personalized Search Signed-out Personalized Search
Where the data we use to customize is stored In Web History, linked to your Google Account On Google’s servers, linked to an anonymous browser cookie
How far back we use search history Indefinitely or until you remove it Up to 180 days
What searches are used to customize Only signed-in search activity, and only if you are signed up for Web History Only signed-out search activity

Some of the terminology that you might not be acquainted with;
Cookie
A “cookie” is a small file containing a string of characters that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. When you visit the website again, the cookie allows that site to recognize your browser. Cookies may store user preferences and other information. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some website features or services may not function properly without cookies.
IP address
Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned a unique number known as an Internet protocol (IP) address. Since these numbers are usually assigned in country-based blocks, an IP address can often be used to identify the country from which a computer is connecting to the Internet.”
Source: http://www.google.com/webhistory

Content is still king and one of the things that is little known about in search engine circles is that most of the major search engines rely on what is called silo architecture to support their search engine ranking pages. By clustering supporting keywords around the parent search term they can help users find their results more efficiently.

So, What does this all mean for your website and how can you keep your Ad spent costs down.

By researching not just the keyword but what we call in search marketing terms the seed term that people are looking for we can flush out the supporting keywords which we call clusters to support a prop up our parent keyword phrase. By using these supporting keywords in our highly relevant content and containing the content to a specific silo with a parent term at the top of it we can see increased authority from the search engine. We also want to drive traffic to articles within that sio structure that support the top level keyword.

Bottom line by giving your site more authority for the supporting and parent term keywords and by internally linking those articles in each silo you will attain authority which will lift your rankings and increase your page rank score, quality score which will lead to lower costs for PPC ads.

Next week i will discuss how to set this up on your site and which tools, frameworks and effort is required to put this type of program into effect.

First out of the gate is creating a unique selling proposition (USP) for your online product or service and then following up with some market research, follow me home interviews with users. This will create valuable insights into the way your users interact with your site and will lead to a better market understanding that will help you map out a content strategy that will attract, create interest, desire which will lead to actionable results on your site.

The next task is to start the keyword research task. In which you need to find the best possible set of keywords for your website and find those that are less competitive but still receive a large amount of traffic. Sounds simple right. Just grab some keywords that are geared toward the USP, write some marketing copy and throw up a website, right?

Wrong. We cannot just focus on keywords any more. Search engines look at the bigger picture, so in order to keep up, and keep your rankings and traffic up, you will need to understand your vertical and horizontal markets and what the right keyword choices fit into the content and media that customer centric.

Here are a few insights to get you on the right path;
There are many free keyword research tools available. The SEO book keyword tool The microsoft ad labs keyword tool are great for keyword ideas. Another tool I like very much is Gladius from themezoom these will all help you with the keyword research phase.

On-Page optmization is the next step. Unique Title/Meta Description tags, keywords in headings, optimized content for targeted keywords, internal link structure, etc. Are all tasks you need to perform.

Content creation and strategies is the next step after the on-page factors are in place. You may need a talented web copy writer whether outsourced or on your staff.

Last thing to keep in mind is that everything, from hosting, registration of your domain, web analytics, to web design, public relations and Social Media Marketing have to be considered with SEO.

On the Video Marketing side of things one company really stands out in the crowd.

Many of us have videos that we would like to upload to the various video syndication services like youtube, vimeo, ustream, etc. A company called Traffic Geyser has come up with a way to syndicate all your videos and help you to rank for them in all the search engines in a matter of days, which leads to even better rankings for your website because you have put in tags, keywords and backlinks that lead your potential visitor back to your highly relevant and targeted content on your site. You really want to have at least ten touch points that people who are searching for keywords, content, videos, blogs ,RSS feeds, etc., that increase your chances of being found in the forest of millions of websites around the globe.

May you have all the success with your online marketing endeavours

We have seen mixed results with some keywords up in the rankings and others down even in the early versions of the release.

According to Matt Cutts and other engineers from Google:

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

source: Google webmaster blog, Aug 10, 2009

The takeaway from the above statement is that the changes they are wanting to implement are broad and all encompassing; size, speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions – every aspect of search will feel the adjustment of these changes.

I have seen alot of fear mungering in the blog community over the latest updates. Keep in mind that google is always tweeking things and the search engines never sleep. So, their will be a ripple effect in the web community and we will adjust as we always do to the new and improved Google Search.

Foremost in the debate is the fact that Google has done a serious rewrite so, if we craft web standard, search friendly sites with highly relevant content we should not encounter much change to our rankings.

A few of the sites we have worked on saw minor losses in rankings. Social conversation seems to be carrying a little more wait than domain age with this recent change to Google. This just seems to be a no brainer as many of the search engines are integrating social platforms into their long term goals. This leads me to the fact that thematically siloed based architectures of web sites are getting better ranked than non-themed sites. Just for the record Google is built on a themed based silo architecture, go figure…

Let me try explaining it this way. The more pages that reinforce the theme, through relevant content and linking, the better it will do. The more we get involved in a conversion about a particular topic, the better our ranking or quality score with Google will be when those pages are internal linking is done properly.

My point here is that alot of these roads are leading to some basic principals in site design structure that leads to a parent theme linked to at least 5 well written articles that contain supporting keyword to the parent theme and are linked by a comb style navigation that leads from the bottom of that article trail to the next parent theme and so on ending in a link back to the principal main page. This will insure that all roads will lead to creating a bouyant page ranking for your site and a improved quality score and rankings with Google and other search engines. Long story short less money to be spent on google adwords to keep you at the top of those rankings.

I have to admit I love Google because without them i would not be able to make a good living in the Search Marketing Marketplace without them. Google is doing everything in its power to help people find what they are looking for in a few milliseconds with increased accuracy and relevancy. What more can you ask for from a search engine.

Insure that you have at least three different media types on your site that address the unique values that your searchers are needing. Video, Relevant Content, Widgets that impress and are easy to interact with and are engaging people to take action on your site.

What Google is doing now is making it easier for those sites that follow the google webmaster tips and suggestions in a ethical way and build sites that will that will attract, create interest, and desire to take action and engage the audience of visitors in a compelling and relevant way.

If you have been writing creative inspiring well written original content than with relevant keywords blended in to your text in moderation then you have really nothing to fear with Google. They love this content and will match the appropriate reader to your article, blog post eventually.

The people who worry the most about new changes at Google are the one’s who are using covert or spammy content that has been spit out by a computer and not a compassionate human will eventually feel the wrath of these changes.

Like new car designs that start out in the computer many years before release to the showrooms of the world. Google has been working carefully in the background with their engineers in refining its search engine under the hood to give us more speed, better results and more comfort to the end users.

Follow the web consortium standards (WC3)+Silo architectured sites+Parent themes + Relevant supporting articles +Strong internal linking = Consistently better results in the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).

Keep in mind this is just the start of the caffiene roll-out expect this to kick in just before christmas.

I will share more ideas with you on my next blog posting titled “The well themed website”