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.

Before we answer that, let’s see what is going on. Below you can see that when I searched for PDF files on Google’s search engine with the word technology you can see the file I was looking for as the 2^nd result. Where does the title (the first line in purple) come from?

By clicking on the link I get the PDF file shown below. You can see that the title shown in the search engine was taken from the heading on the first page.

Google didn’t bother to fill out the title field in the PDF. The title field is shown below.

Google can get away with doing this because they are careful about using good headings. Can you also get by without bothering to fill out the title field?

It depends. If you have a good heading then you can skip the title field. However, if the title is a graphic, or if it doesn’t accurately describe the content, or if you are missing keywords you can do one of two things to rectify the situation:

1. Change the heading to reflect the content, add your keywords and make sure the heading is not a graphic
2. Add a title tag to the PDF. This is easily done if you have the proper software (Adobe Acrobat for example)

Most people realize that different languages demand different keywords and strategies. However, English is a special case. It is now the de facto international language leaving Esperanto in the dust.

Not everyone pays enough attention to the fact that English is used differently by different users. There are more second language English speakers than native English speakers in the world Their use of English is different than native English speakers. There are also many different English dialects. North American English and British English are the most well known. Consider these examples where the first term is used by Americans and the second by the English:

• Diapers vs. Nappies
• Apartment vs Flat
• Elevator vs. Lift
• Uterine Fibroids vs. Myoma

Consider the following factors when working on an English Global Search Engine Marketing Strategy

• Use of different words to describe the same thing by different people
• People who know English as a second language have a tendency to make more typos and spelling mistakes when they search for keywords.
• People who know English as a second language use less sophisticated searches – fewer keywords in the string and simpler words

All these factors should be taken into account when starting a Search Engine Marketing Strategy. Also, don’t forget to make sure your landing pages use simpler language for your visitors who use English as a second language.

Before the advent of the Internet, one of advertising’s most famous sayings was:

“I know I waste half the money I spend on advertising,” department store pioneer John Wanamaker said. “The problem is, I don’t know which half.”

Many times I use this to demonstrate the advantages of internet marketing over the old methods. By analyzing log files it is relatively easy to find out which advertising campaigns are working. However I now have a new saying:

“I know that only half of what is written about search engine optimization is correct. The only problem is that most people don’t know which half”.

Can You Believe What You Read About the Keyword Metatag?

I recently ran across an interesting report on SEO ranking factors. Here you can see that many SEO leaders don’t agree on basic issues. However, one subject where there is high agreement is regarding the Keyword Metatag. – it is of slight importance.

However, when you read the comments it becomes obvious that there isn’t much agreement about anything except for the slight importance. Many people are not really sure how Google relates to the Keyword Metatag and say: I think…, Probably.., I don’t think…

Others are sure that Google does not look at them at all. However, I know for a fact that Google does look at them because I have seen them in the SERPs (search engine results page). This is a rare occurrence but it does show that this tag is not ignored.

What Can We Believe?

This just goes to show that the best approach is to test things for yourself. And realize that for different keyword spaces and competition levels, you need different strategies.