The speculation needs to stop. Caffeine is almost certainly live right now—the next query you type into Google will probably reflect Caffeine’s changes.

Google claims that the Caffeine update is about “under the hood” changes to the architecture of the search engine. As Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains, Caffeine is an attempt at “rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Though, he goes on to admit that “some of the search results do change.”

But does this minor “under the hood” tweak really update Google to where it needs to be?

Google regularly tweaks and updates their search engine. But Google announced a sort of “cease fire” over the holiday period, where they held back any changes to the search engine. This was to avoid further stressing webmasters during the busy holiday ecommerce season, as happened in 2003.

Caffeine Probably Already Went Live

So Google Caffeine was set to be launched sometime after the holidays. Well, it’s nearly three weeks after the holidays and we haven’t seen much. Perhaps Caffeine has already launched. Google doesn’t usually give advanced previews of their products before they’re released, but that’s what they did with Caffeine. Perhaps they were putting it out there to see if anyone noticed big discrepancies so that they could be corrected and brought more in line with existing Google results. Google has always favored an incremental approach to their products, releasing them and then making tweaks over a long period of time. They don’t like to make major updates all at once. Just look at the development process behind gMail (which was in Beta for years).

If it hasn’t gone live yet, it will soon. And when it does, don’t expect too much to happen.

More Important Than Caffeine: New Realities on the Web

So, Google Caffeine may have already launched. But that’s not what really matters. What matters are the changes that Google has made and will continue to make over the next few weeks and months. Google is moving from results based on frequent updates to results that are live. This is a huge undertaking, and is likely a large part of the reason that Google has had to implement Caffeine.

NoFollow Isn’t What It Used To Be

The idea that NoFollow links don’t influence the target’s ranking in Google (and other search engines) is laughable. Google has built it’s reputation on serving up the best search results. And being the best means returning the most relevant results. Twitter is the proof: Links shared in twitter are NoFollow. But that doesn’t stop Google from displaying them near the very top of their search engine.

Google invented NoFollow as a way to help prevent spam. But the web has gone overboard and NoFollow is on the brink of irrelevance. As more and more of the links on the web become NoFollow, Google has been forced to figure out some sort of way to count these links. One innovation might be follower ratio: Google may be looking at your social graph as a way to weigh your links. For example, Google might be giving more weight to links in tweets from users who have more followers or users who have a better follower to following ratio.

A large portion of the web’s conversation is taking place on Twitter. Simply put: Google cannot afford to ignore links on Twitter.

Bigger Changes

Caffeine is about the underlying system. There are more important changes that will affect the front end.

Site Speed

Google is going to start taking into account how fast pages load. Just look at this video interview with Google’s Matt Cutts. Google will start taking site loading time into account in search rankings. Of course, Google’s top priority will remain returning the most relevant results for the user. But the very soon, Google will give a little bit of an edge to sites that load quickly and a slight penalization to sites that load slowly.

To help the web prepare for this, Google offers a tool to help analyze your site speed. There’s also Google’s Closure Tool to help you optimize your JavaScript. Matt Cutts also recommends checking out webpagetest.org

Fresh Content Bias

Time moves faster on the internet. While Google includes a OneBox for breaking news and relevant Tweets, there is a clear need to more thoroughly integrate fresh content into Google results. In the future, Google will certainly be giving a bump to new articles. Instead of relevancy and importance being the big factors in who ranks, it will probably become a trinity of relevancy, importance, and freshness. Think of how many times you’ve researched a topic only to find that the top result is an outdated article or blog post that is virtually useless. Caffeine fixes that.

Next time you use Google, take a second look at the results: are they timely? Are they relevant? Are they weighting the conversation, as well as the link-graph?

In other words: are they caffeinated?

(photo source: Nima Badiey)

Mistakes are bound to happen! We all make them – but in life we try to avoid them. Sigmund Freud was once quoted:

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”

But when businesses are hard-pressed for time and money, mistakes are not an option. Even if you are a Fortune 50 company, you may be in greater danger to succumbing to SEO ignorance. Upper-level management may not understand what it is or why it’s even important. Here are five common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

1. Self-centered Marketing

Just because a landing page looks nice and has a lot of content doesn’t mean that it has any relevance. If your homepage is full of your “company”, chances are that relevance for your consumers as well as search engines is lost. Many companies make the mistake of adding too much of themselves on a landing page, without explaining to the user what they do, and how that will help the user. Make content relevant and straight-forward.

2. URL Structure

A lot of website have URL problems, but one mistake that has to be avoided at all times is long and irrelevant URL structures. Why are you making it harder for crawlers and users to see your information? Recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. So by sticking to short URLs you get both better rankings and better click-through. Avoid underscores, capital letters, spam words, and digits. Use static URLs, and 301 redirects for permanently moved pages.

(photo source: frankfarm)

3. Lack of Substance

Create meaningful content and deliver it in a way that people can find it. Remember that Google’s job is to get meaningful content to their users, and the best way to do that is to produce and deliver meaningful content. Adding a few “well-placed”  keywords is not going to do that. Remember to update your blog frequently with well-written content that display thought-leadership! Keep in mind to write for a human audience, not Googlebot. Keyword-heavy content might have produced results in the past, but will definitely not work for the long-term. The priority shouldn’t just be making your site #1 on Google, but to get people to engage with your company through your website. Keep in mind that an interactive experience that is boring, frustrating and inhuman will drive your potential customers away and will hurt your search results in the long run.

4. Links for Their Own Sake

Just because you have a lot inbound links doesn’t mean that they are relevant. Since Google is trying to provide the best information available for their users, having too many links for questionable sources, especially if they’re acquired in a short period of time, can get your site “penalized” by Google.

5.  Ignoring Social Media

Social media is not optional–integrating RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace to your consumers. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to attract links for improved SEO. Staying relevant in consumers’ minds and creating a conversation is key.

Currently, RAG NY is not running any sort of digital marketing campaign except through it’s brick and mortar stores in NYC. In the month of of July (almost a year after our SEO work stopped) they broke all previous records for traffic from search engines.

We often see record-breaking results from our clients, months after our work is done–this goes to show how important SEO is for any online businesses, especially e-commerce. SEO makes the content of your site more relevant, more attractive, and more easily accessible by search engines and potential customers.

With a dedicated team of specialized individuals that will bring your extraordinary results through constant communication, we are here to help your business succeed.

It’s amazing how many poorly researched, poorly written, and poorly targeted paid search campaigns I’ve come across on the major search engines without even really looking for them. It’s obvious why Google runs those $25 free AdWords credit promotions for new users; if you don’t know what you’re doing, that money goes pretty quickly.

Whether they’re using Google AdWords, Yahoo! SEM, or Microsoft adCenter, here are some of the dangerous thoughts that seem to go through the minds of PPC users:

1. I know the keywords that best describe my products/services; those are the ones I’ll target.

Standardizing the terms you use to refer to your products and services is part of effective branding. Search, however, is not done on your terms. It’s by definition on the terms of the user. Starbucks doesn’t refuse service to people who come in and order a “large”. Nor should you ignore users just because they don’t use specialized terminology in their search query.

2. I don’t want to leave any users out; I’ll use broad match keywords.

This is the flip-side of the above: While doing broad match for competitive keywords increases your brand’s exposure in theory, it will probably cost you more than it’s worth.
Use common sense. Targeting a broader range of phrase and exact match keywords that are more specific to what you provide will appeal to more qualified users who know they want, and are therefore more likely to convert.

3. My company name is the most important thing; I’ll make that my ad headline.

Search isn’t about you. It’s about whoever entered the search query, and most often, relevancy is what is most important. Anyway, your company name will hopefully show up in the display URL, if you chose your domain name wisely.

4. One of my ads is not performing well; I’ll try out a new one with a different headline, description, display URL, landing page.

No two PPC campagins are the same, so testing out lots of options is fundamental. However if you change everything about every test subject, how are you going to know what’s making a difference?
Instead, test combinations of different elements; that way, the elements that are common across multiple ads serves as a “control” for the experiment.

5. The user knows what they just searched for; why should I repeat it in my ad copy?

Not only does using keywords in the ad copy help reassure users that you’re speaking the same language, this practice also improves quality score in AdWords, which means higher placements and lower cost-per-click.

6. My homepage is the best source of information about my products/services; I want all my traffic going there.

Your home page might be a great resource for learning about your company and the different services you provide, but unless the keyword was your company name, or unless you only do one thing, the user is probably looking for something more specific. Why not give it to them?
Traffic to specialized landing pages is much more likely to convert (obviously other factors, like design, matter here too), and keyword relevancy on the landing page increases quality score, which again means – you guessed it – higher placements with lower cost-per-click.

7. I just need to increase my maximum cost-per-click.

PPC managers and the programs themselves will often recommend that you just need to put more money into your campaigns and it will pay off. This is the simplest way to get more clicks, but it’s also the most expensive and unless you improve other aspects of your campaigns, it will lower your ROI.

8. Once I have my campaigns optimized, I can leave them alone.

Ignoring zeitgeist can be a costly mistake for online businesses. Even the same customers might be using different language to search for the same things two months from now. Any number of political, social, or economic factors, while not affecting your business directly, can have an effect on mindset.
It’s not so important to know the “why” behind searcher behavior, as long as you monitor it and adjust your behavior accordingly.

9. I’m getting “hits”. AdWords is working.

For Google, anyway; they get paid every time you get a click.
The only way to know for sure if your AdWords account is working to its potential if by measuring the rate at which visitors to your site turn into customers or clients. This is your conversion rate, and most major PPC programs give you tools for measuring it. Use them.

10. I only need one campaign, one ad group, one ad.

Amazingly, I still see PPC accounts set up this way. The mindset behind this seems to be that your website and your company are what matters, so you come up with the best possible description of your website that will appeal to the broadest audience possible, and then put it in front of as many people as possible, as often as possible.

In paid search, the most important thing is to match up, in the user’s mind, the user’s lack with a product or service you provide. You have four lines of text to demonstrate this link.

When Google started increasing minimum Adwords bids, the jig was up for Savage. His Adwords placements fell and he got fewer visitors at the same price he used to pay (10 cents according to the Times). The website that was once an “Adsense site of the week,” was disgruntled with the service.  So Savage had his lawyer craft this thick document, which was sent to the Justice Department two weeks ago.

The only thought that came to my mind was “Why isn’t Savage doing SEO?” He was spending upwards of $500,000 on Adwords while making little effort (or so it appears) to have his website come up in the organic search results. With that kind of a budget and especially with the profit he was making, he could have easily spent some money on SEO consulting (or hire an in-house employee) to bring his site up naturally and “beat” Google at its own game.

Of course there would be a lot of SEO work to do. Before even getting into the details, here are five quick no-brainer suggestions for Savage:

Mr. Savage, instead of paying your lawyer or Adwords, do a little SEO to help your reduce your costs. Here is where you can start:

1.) Improve the content of your website. You need to increase your link-worthy content. Find experts to create content that people want to read. Make your website a true online resource with links to sites that only merit your attention.

2.) Fix title tags to make them more descriptive (and keyword rich).

3.) Get rid of your subdomains that are acting as sub-categories in the directory. They aren’t helping with SEO. And if that is not an option, then don’t link to their index pages (/index.php). Use “/” instead.

4.) Clean up the links to nowhere (i.e. http://www.directory.sourcetool.com).

5.) Make effective use of CSS. The entire first paragraph on your homepage is in an H1 tag. Place your main header in an H1 instead.

With SEO, you could start charging for “featured placement” and the free submission area could become more popular as SEO’s get drawn in by your PageRank for their client sites.  And Sourcetool is halfway there already. With years of Adwords analytics, there is already plenty of data to target the right keywords.  And according to SEOMoz’s Page Strength tool you have a strong domain (plenty of inbound links).

You have a directory that is not completely full of spam that now has links to it from various news websites – most importantly The New York Times! What better time to start an SEO campaign?

The NBC-MSN association bore its fruit for Live Search during the Olympics. Final Score: Google 1, Yahoo 2, Live Search 2. Live Search wins by judge’s decision.

When searching for Jason Lezak, below is what Yahoo delivers. Google only provides news results in the one box area.

1 point for Yahoo and Live Search, Google 0. Score: Yahoo 1, Google 1, Live Search 1.

Then I noticed that Yahoo had followed suit. Of course there was a paid advertising above Yahoo’s one box, making is a big less attractive to click on, especially since the events listed were not clickable. Score: Google 1-0 Yahoo.