Google highlights the snippet in orange on the instant preview

In this example, Google is smart enough to bold the headline but the subheading–which doesn’t even show in the traditional snippet on the left–is treated as text. Since it doesn’t have punctuation, readability suffers.

In this case you need to consider altering subheadings – if they negatively impact your SERP. You can remove them or add punctuation.

The new snippet in the preview includes the subheading which is not shown in the non preview snippet

Instant Preview Snippets Need Optimizing

You must check how your snippets look on instant previews for important keywords.  In the same way that you optimize your snippets in the SERPS to improve SEO results you must now optimize instant preview snippets.

Instant Previews and Flash

Flash elements don’t preview. If you have two versions of your website it is now even more important that you have the search engine bots go to the non flash version.

Flash websites need to provide an alternative page for the Google bot

Bing’s Version of Instant Previews

Bing has had a version of Instant Previews for a long time. There is no preview of the page but there is a much bigger snippet. Popular links are also shown in many instances.

Although it is not as descriptive as a visual snapshot it seems to work a lot faster. Don’t be surprised if they try and develop a better preview than Google.

In the meantime they are integrating with Facebook which is why you see a photo of me in the upper right corner.

Bing’s “More on This Page” feature shows more text than Google’s Instant Previews

Optimizing Instant Previews in the Search Engines

In order to maximize visitors to your website you must now optimize:

• How your site looks in Google Instant Previews
• The  snippet that shows in Instant Previews
• The “More on This Page” snippet in Bing

We recently started working with a company that asked us to start by optimizing their Google Adwords campaign. This made sense since almost all of their sales were coming from Adwords. However we recommended that we work on SEO as well. We saw a great opportunity for them.

Bottom line is that their Google Adwords sales increased, but more surprisingly to them, their SEO sales increased even more. After working with them for just 3 months, SEO sales are 37% more than their Adwords sales.

Our experience shows that companies typically under spend on SEO. A recent Forrester Research study shows that in 2009, PPC spend was more than 5 times the SEO spend. This same study shows almost no change in the relationship for the next 5 years.

PPC spend is 5x more than SEO spend in 2009. Source: Forrester Research’s Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014

Why do people spend more on PPC than SEO?

• PPC is more predictable than SEO
• SEO is riskier
• PPC is easier to do than SEO
• You get results faster with PPC

The truth is that both PPC and SEO have their place but make sure you are putting enough resources into your SEO campaign.

Google Instant Search doesn’t mean the end of SEO – as some people are claiming. It does make it more complicated. But that should not faze anyone who works in Internet marketing. When we started in 1998 everything was much simpler. Now it is more interesting.

When Google Suggest started it became more important to optimize for the keywords that Google was suggesting. Google was in effect influencing keyword searches by providing suggestions based on others searches.

Get more traffic with Google Instant

Now with Google instant search, this is happening in real time. Therefore if you optimize your site for a keyword fragment you will appear before your competitors.

For example if you wanted to optimize your site for the keyword SEO, you can get your site to show before the competition by optimizing for the word “Sears” as this result appears as soon as S is typed in. Different locations may not show Sears as the first keyword so be sure to localize your searches.

Google Instant Search will influence SEO by showing results for word fragments and the 1st words of keyword phrases

Optimizing for “Sears” may not be easy and it is an open question as to how many people will look down at the results if it is clear that the keyword is not relevant. Usability studies will shed light on this.

However for other searches where the search engine results are on subject and the keyword is easy to optimize for this is a good strategy.

If Google Instant Search is not available in your location you can try Instant Search here.

Recently, SEO companies and web designers have been complaining that Google eliminated Local results for their business segment as you can see in the screen shots below.

SEO Companies don’t have local listings (right screen shot) whereas plumbers have local listings complete with map and phone numbers.

A Google employee, Joel, H. explained this new policy in Google’s support forums

“Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham].

I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today”.

I am sure that Google is basing this decision on the analysis of users’ click actions. It makes sense that for plumbers the location is critical because they have to come to your house. However for SEO companies it is not important at all.

For example, most of my SEO Company’s clients are in the USA, Europe and the Far East—only a small number are in Israel. The same can be said for many businesses and if you do a search for financial analysts you can see that there are no local search results.

No local search for financial analysts.

If There are No Local Results in Google Should You Optimize Your Site for Localization?

In many cases you should for the following reasons:

• Even though location may not be important, all things being equal there are some people who prefer to work with a company that is close by.
• Google’s results page is localized, even if local results are not shown. All things being equal, an Israeli SEO company will appear higher in Israel than outside of Israel.
• Google changes their algorithms frequently. Today they may not show local results for your business segment and tomorrow they may put it back in as mentioned in the forum post above.

Chris Anderson’s new Book about Free is not free anymore. If you try to download  it  at www.scribd.com/doc/17135767/FREE-by-Chris-Anderson and you are not in the USA you will get the screen below.

Free is geographically restricted.

If you are lucky enough to be in the USA you still can’t get the free edition as it is no longer available.  Seems like free is free only if you are in the right place at the right time.

Free is time restricted

But what does this have to do with SEO?

Well, actually everything. Even though Chris has removed his free version from the Internet he is still rated no. 2 for Free Book on Google. That should help him drive sales and make some real money.

High ranking for Free Book even though it is not free anymore

Seems like free works for SEO even if it is not free.

Internet marketing company pushes the envelope by recycling fruit and vegetables to produce eggs.

It is very fashionable to go green today and Internet marketing offices are jumping on the bandwagon. A search for Green SEO brings up over 20 million results according to Google. A clean environment is a great thing to work for but we do have to be careful of little green lies.

Green SEO brings up over 20 million results

There is isn’t too much an SEO company can do that is different than any other company – recycling, saving energy and the like. However that didn’t stop me from writing a Green SEO article. I did think of a couple of things the SEO crowd can do.

And I think that our office is pushing the envelope by recycling apple cores and other organic remains to feed my son’s chickens which we expect will start laying eggs soon. Every weekend I take the leftover fruit and vegetables to the chicken coop in our backyard.

Read more about Green SEO….

With the release of Chrome, I automatically started to think about how the new Google web browser will affect search engine optimization. After using it for a few minutes it became obvious.

Chrome has a built in default feature which suggests alternative and refined search terms. For example, when I searched for “Jerusalem Hotels” I got the alternatives shown below.

This search for “Jerusalem Hotels”, illustrates how Chrome will influence the importance of certain search phrases.

Chrome will influence searches in 2 ways

1. The alternative suggestions offered by Chrome will no doubt become more important keywords since they are now getting added exposure
2. Misspellings of keywords will become less important since Chrome automatically corrects spelling and some people will click on the suggestions.

How can Chrome influence the search space if it has so few users now?

I can think of 2 reasons:

1. The number of Chrome users will likely increase
2. The alternative suggestion Chrome feature just became a default on Google search called Google Suggest

After 4 years in Google Labs, my guess is that Google decided to make Google Suggest the default in order to make sure it worked properly before making it part of Chrome.

It is interesting to compare the feature on Chrome to the Google Suggest feature shown below. Google Suggest has the same first 3 suggestions as the Chrome browser. However it has more suggestions and also shows the number of results available.

Google Suggest has graduated and is now part of Google Search

For some reason it doesn’t show the number of results for the original search term typed in by the user. In many cases the number of results is not useful. Does it matter if there are 591,000 results or 367,000 results?

On a local note, it is interesting to note that even though the Google development team that worked on Google Suggest is located a few minutes from my office in Haifa, Israel, it doesn’t work on the local interface — Google.co.il – in Hebrew or English

The headline of a recent article in the Atlantic monthly is very provocative and has caused a lot of discussion on the internet. An exact search for “Is Google making us Stupid” brings up 172, 000 Google matches. However if I search the way the title was originally written: “Is Google making us Stoopid”, Google only brings up 17,900 matches. Why is this?

Only 17,900 search results for ‘Is Google Making us Stoopid” compared to 172,000 for “Is Google Making us Stupid” Note that Google failed to correct my misspelling. Apparently Stoopid is beyond even Google’s power to correct spelling mistakes.

It could be that people who want traffic on their blogs know that no one searches on Stoopid–most people spelled Stupid correctly. Even Google was not smart enough to correct me when I searched using Stoopid. What is even more telling is that even the Atlantic Monthly which wrote Stoopid in the printed magazine—has changed its online title to the correct spelling as you can see below.

So at least in this case we can argue that Google is making us smarter.

Original title in print version: Is Google Making us Stoopid?

The Atlantic web editors changed the heading from Stoopid to Stupid

But what do we learn about Internet marketing from the article?

Mr. Carr basically says we are losing our ability to read longer articles and books when we spend years searching on Google. Although I don’t agree with his offline conclusions I do agree that when people search on the web they don’t read. They are on a hunt for answers. Since there is a lot of information they may have to wade through–they go through web pages fast by:

• Skimming
• Reading headlines
• Moving down the left side of the page fast
• Ignoring anything that looks like an ad

There has been a lot of research on this—all you have to do is search on “skimming on the web”—to see the articles. That is why I have bullets, captions, subheadings and links in this blog post—so you can skim.

The Atlantic Monthly doesn’t make their printed magazine articles skimmable when they repurpose them to post on the web.

What is ironic is that the article itself, when it was posted on the web, is basically a copy of the printed version—not made for skimming. No subheadings, bullets or even a caption for the nice illustration. To be fair, they did add something the printed version did not have—links. It is no wonder that people complained that they couldn’t get through the article on the Internet.

The creation of an online Internet marketing test where anyone can contribute is an interesting experiment.

We all know the jokes about how groups are incompetent and this is reinforced by our experience in meetings where a lot of time is wasted. The other side of the coin is eloquently supported by James Surowiecki who wrote a book called The “Wisdom of Crowds”.

Social Media Internet Marketing Test
Ths Internet Marketing Test is a different kind of wisdom that I don’t think was mentioned in James Surowiecki‘s book as we are not just looking for answers. In this case we are asking people to contribute the questions as well as the answer.

It will be interesting to see if the Social Media Internet Marketing Test brings good results.

More…

Today we posted our SEO Cartoon Quiz. I hope it will create a lot of smiles in the Internet marketing community (I don’t think regular people will get the jokes). As soon as we finished setting up the quiz a lot more ideas started to come to us. Maybe we will have to put out another edition one day.