For a month or two, there has been a new addition to the search engine results pages (SERP’s). This addition is the inclusion of breadcrumbs.

Let’s start with an explanation of what breadcrumbs are. Breadcrumbs are a form of navigation that shows the users path that got them to their current location. It allows for a user to easily return to the page they just left if they landed somewhere they didn’t want to. In addition to being very useful for the user, it turns out it is also very search engine friendly! (more…)

As promised, Google is starting to roll out “Real-Time” Search from sources like Twitter, News articles, fresh web pages, Yahoo Answers, etc… and is integrating them into their search results (Facebook and MySpace will soon be joining as Google has inked deals with both). Results will be displayed at the top of Page 1 in a block titled, “Latest Results from keyword phrase“.

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Back in 2007, Google announced that they were introducing personalized search results to anyone signed into their Google Account. So for Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, Adsense users and for ALL of the other Google products… as long as you remained signed in to your account, your Google search results conformed to your past search history.

At the time, I remember wondering (worrying) what chaos this would bring to the SEO world if that personalization were at everyone’s fingertips… if any given search phrase resulted in a slightly different position based on individuals’ search history.  I pictured clients calling me up complaining that they did a search at home and were #2 and now that they’re at work they’ve suddenly dropped to #8… Oh, and by the way, they called to verify with a buddy and he couldn’t find them at all. Well, Google was pretty serious about these personalized results. I didn’t realize how serious until they extended Personalized Search to everyone! (more…)

The Google Ten Pack is considered “prime real estate”. But what is it that those ten sites have that your site might not have? Today we’ll explore some simple changes that will help catapult your site into this section. If these simple changes don’t do the trick, give us a call and we can provide a deeper analysis for you.

In this image, you can see where the Ten Pack is located on the Google Search Results Page. If your site is not listed, it is worth the effort to make some adjustments to your Google Local account to try to get it there. (more…)

As announced by Google, they have rolled out two new result page improvements. The one we will focus on today is their LONGER SNIPPETS improvement.

Typically, when you search in Google, your results page will return a Title with about a line and a half description from which you will make the decision if this is a click worthy site or not.  The words utilized in your search query are bolded to accentuate the relevancy of the results to you and in most cases have been pulled from your meta description.

Google felt like queries with more than three words deserved more of a snippet explanation. A longer description in these cases will allow enough information for you to determine whether or not this is the site you want to explore. The increase in the number of lines in the snippet allows for more text and shows more of the words you queried in the context of the page.

Try it out! Make sure to use a long, detailed query.

What does this mean for you and your SEO campaign? (more…)