After many months trawling through hundreds of WordPress themes, I settled on this one. I really liked the simplicity of the last one but it was time for a change and I wanted more flexibility have a little play.
A big shout out to all the talented folk at DailyBlogTips for creating this theme. Really love it – easy to use and lots of useful features – and SEO ready
I also wanted integrate Twitter so my tweets were published here and my blog posts are alerted over there. Twitter is deffintely more conversation, something I find difficult to do with the blog, so this seemed perfect. I’m using Alex King’s Twitter Tools for this – there’s the added bonus of a Twitter digest published on my blog for those really lazy blogging days.
It feels more like new house more than just a paint job.
Let’s play!
Powered by Twitter Tools.
On a search for ‘Holiday in Paris’ I got this map box filled entirely with links to various Holiday Inn local listings.
A few days ago I blogged about a Kevin Bacon YouTube video which was mentioned on the Graham Norton show. The video had 1800 views prior to the TV show, and the following morning it had 8000+ views.
Now five days later it has just under 30,000 views. We can assume that the first jump was mainly just from the TV show. Old school push media to kick-start the viral effect. Usually the impact of TV on online after a few hours is very limited. So the biggest growth must have come from the WOM effect – people recommending the video either in conversation in the pub or online through, IM, email and social networks
None of this is going to surprise any marketers connecting their online and offline strategies – for those that haven’t I think this provides a fairly compelling argument. While TV viewers may have a short attention span, if you use TV to drive an online exploration you can get more bang for your buck.
Somehow managed to miss this when Danny Sullivan mentioned it a few days ago. But the rumour is Google is going to start personalising results based on the previous query. This is something that’s been going on in paid for many months, but I think the implications are much greater for natural search.
With personalised results a user has to be logged in and turn on their search history, for Google to produce results based on your previous searches. But this data is mainly used to disambiguate broad topics with some favour for sites that you commonly visit.
The ‘Previous Query’ feature will be the norm for everyone and will work on just the previous query. So a search for ’Paris’ then’ Holiday’ will return results as if you’d type in ‘Paris Holidays’. The implications for searches and search marketers are huge. For searches, results that stay on topic should be easier to come by, providing you’re not a topic switcher – though, it should be fairly easy to switch with a more specific query.
For SEO, there’s much greater opportunity for delivering more focussed traffic. Just need to understand user behaviour. Looking at related queries is a good starting point.
This is a really great move, which gets around some of the issues with a pure link based algorithms – using user data was inevitable.
On Graham Norton last night Kevin Bacon pointed out this video of him on YouTube
As the TV program ended there were 1800 views. Today there’s over 8000. Was expecting more from TV, but not bad
According to a Google representative in the UK, they plan to allow an option in your webmaster tools which will give you control over the secondary search box.
This has been debated to death ever since it appeared with little consensus. So, an opt out seems to be the best option
If you haven’t seen it then it looks like this
At first glance seems like another useful addition by Google. Except on closer inspection this is not a search box for products or holidays in this case provided by Virgin, but a search box for other pages on the site. Same as the one in the Google toolbar – quite handy if the search functionality of the website is a bit crap. But for specialist vertical searches like travel where Google has managed to fail so far, I’m not sure.
When it’s bought out into the results like this, I start to question the motive. On the one hand it’s great that a user can search deeper into the site, but the problem I have is the way these new results are displayed, back into a normal results page, but this time you have to compete against all the paid search ads.
To demonstrate –
If you wanted to find a holiday in Antigua from Virgin, you’d ordinarily search for Virgin Holidays, and then go to the site and search for Antigua using their holiday search functionality. The chances are you’d find one.
But now, instead of going to the site, you could be persuaded to search for Antigua using the additional search box provided by Google. And this is what you’d get
So now virgin has to compete with all the paid search ads from competitors and if they’re lucky the user may click on their own PPC ad. You may be able protect your trademark for a brand search, but not for the generic term.
Let’s hope this never comes out properly without the option to turn it off from your Google webmaster tools console.