Google this week released its Instant Search feature, which displays live search results as soon as you begin typing.  By providing results before a query is complete and removing the need to hit the “enter” key, Google claims users will save two to five seconds per search.

Are we too impatient to wait a matter of seconds for our search results? What’s feeding our new-found need for speed? And why does Google feel the need to answer our questions before we’ve even asked them?

Faster connections

The flow of information around the Web has accelerated rapidly over recent years. The most obvious cause is that our Web connections have become significantly faster over time.

This isn’t merely a result of greater broadband penetration, but also the near-ubiquity of 3G networks. Not only have we become accustomed to fast connections in our homes, but we’ve become conditioned to a similar experience on the go.

The real-time Web

To Web users, however, this trend has been most evident in the “real-time Web” movement. Services like Twitter and Facebook now deliver messages from our friends in seconds.

And while most breaking news stories were previously sourced from mainstream media outlets — taking hours to propagate via blog posts and emailed links — significant news events can now spread through Twitter in a matter of minutes.

Often, stories also enter the news cycle via on-the-ground reports posted to social networks. This significantly accelerates the news-gathering process and the speed at which important information reaches consumers.

In short, these quick status updates between friends have conditioned us to expect immediate access to information — whether that’s breaking news or simply knowing what our friends are up to. Why should we expect anything less from search engines?

Enabling discovery

Social networking services have fostered another change in consumer behavior; one that puts Google at a real disadvantage. As a greater volume of timely, relevant information is delivered to us via status updates from friends, we spend less time searching.

What’s more, many social sites now use our social connections to recommend content to us without the need to seek it out.

This so-called “discovery” trend, of which iTunes Ping is the most recent example, threatens to usurp the search box. If relevant information is delivered to us without extra effort, why type words into a box?

Google Instant Search is tackling the discovery problem, too: With every letter you type, Google serves up suggestions of what you may be looking for. Search for “tech company,” and Google provides suggestions for “tech company news,” “tech company valuation,” and “tech company names.”

What’s more, this feature enables truly personalized discovery by taking into account your search history, location and other factors — Google is essentially emulating social networks by trying to predict what we’re looking for without the need to submit a fully-formed search.

Next up: Google Predictive Search?

Google is unlikely to rest on its laurels now that Instant Search has been released. The only way the company can truly compete with social discovery is by going one step further.

What if instead of guessing your intent while you search, Google could predict your needs before you search? That’s likely the next evolution of Google search, according to statements from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“The next step of search is doing this automatically. When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly: ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ” Schmidt said at the IFA consumer electronics event in Berlin, Germany, this week.

“This notion of autonomous search — to tell me things I didn’t know but am probably interested in — is the next great stage, in my view, of search.”

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Online marketers understand the importance of getting top search engine rankings in major search engines. Therefore, they spend many time in optimizing website content. However, many of them ignore the fact that web design structure has a role in search engine optimization (SEO). To acquire top search engine ranking, you cannot totally rely on web designers because they could be good at web design but not good at SEO.

This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process.

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is recommended to use CSS stylesheet to format your website layout because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS. It is no good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes consise, and mainly compose of your website content. It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management Software (CMS)

If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

a. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content.

b. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.

c. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine ranking.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use Javascript to build multiple-level navigation menu. However, the Javascript code usually leaves in the HTML body, it makes the HTML coding becomes bulky. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file.

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some redirect pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and redirect visitors from one page to another content pages. Search engines do not welcome these techniques due to the potential of spamming.

7. Full Flash Site

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it will improve effectiveness of your website. However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website very slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website. In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.

Conclusion:

For small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot give you any business as no one can find your website from search engines and the “entertaining” elements sometimes annoy your visitors.

Source:  Provided by SEO expert from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy.

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If you have an AdWords campaign set up to reach searchers using Google’s mobile search, you’ve got a new feature to enhance your efforts. Google is enabling click-to-call phone numbers in the ads that appear on mobile web browsers.

Google Jan. 28 took its AdWords click-to-call ad program out of beta, offering advertisers a potentially lucrative new way to connect with their target audiences through high-end smartphones with HTML Web browsers.

Click-to-call ads let advertisers add local business numbers alongside their destination URLs in mobile search ads. When users of smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Nexus One, search for a local business from their mobile phone and stumble upon ads that have these numbers, smartphone users can click on the ads’ phone numbers and a call is automatically generated. If a smartphone user is searching for a local pizza place on their mobile device, then they can now simply click on the ads phone number and order up their favorite pie.

Since Google’s mobile click-to-call ads are generated based on location, if your company is a chain, an ad will be served up with the closest location to a user – and will contain the appropriate phone number. This Adword feature is important because it allows users to find out the most approriate phone number when the company has multiple shops.

How to utilize this Adwords feature?  To add click-to-call in mobile AdWords ads, simply set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Then make sure your campaign is set up to appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers.

Google explained its rationale for offering such ads, and how searches made on mobile devices differ from those on computers, in a blog post:

“When people search for goods or services using their mobile phones, they often prefer to call a store rather than visit that store’s Website. Whether they’re placing a direct order, making a reservation or inquiring about services, the ability for prospective customers to easily call your business is a key distinguishing feature of searches made on mobile phones versus computers.”

BroadPoint AmTech analyst Benjamin Schachter said in a research note advertisers pay the same cost-per-click for a call as they would for a “click-through” to the destination URL.

Schachter added that a meaningful percentage of mobile queries are for phone numbers or local information, making a phone number associated with an ad a highly relevant component on a search engine results page.

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Webmasters perform search engine optimization (SEO) and want to get high search engine ranking in Google because it is the most popular search engine in the world. However, you must aware that Google is very strict in fighting against unethical manipulation of search engine ranking.

To  optimize for top Google ranking, your SEO effort must alert the following:

Basic Google Optimization Principle

SEO means to make your website appealing to visitors and search engines through proper practices, and your Google optimization effort must not involve tricks to manipulate search engine ranking.

Website Structure and Content Development

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. The key point is a clear hierarchy, and reachable from static text link.
2. Offer a site map. It is a very important SEO element for Google to index your web pages and assign appropriate search engine popularity scores (link popularity) to your web pages. It is particularly useful for large websites.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content with words users would type to find your pages . Google clearly states that they love information-rich website. So, SEO should emphasize on content development, and not SEO tricks. Of course, it is important to optimize webpage content.
4. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you use images, make sure you provide descriptive and accurate ALT tags.

Avoiding SEO Spam

The fundamental works for SEO or Google optimization is to ensure only search engine acceptable practices are used, that is, make pages for users, not for search engines.

If you or your SEO company implements unacceptable SEO practices or tricks, your website can be banned and removed from search engine index. This is especially true for Google. From experience, they are very determined to fight against search engine spam.

Therefore, you must alert that your optimization efforts do not commit in unacceptable SEO practices listed below:

1. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.” Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines , for example, showing different content to search engines than to users, or present HTML version to search engines and present Flash pages to users . Serving up different results based on user agent can be perceived as cloaking.

2. Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques : white text on white background, use of CSS display:none or display: hidden to hide text, including text behind an image via DIV tag or layering techniques, small font size such as setting font size to 0. Some SEO companies believe that Google cannot detect spam if CSS tricks are used. Unfortunately, this is wrong.

Links can be hidden including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques: link consists of hidden text, use of CSS to make tiny hyperlink such as text with one pixel high, link hidden in a small character such as hyperlink a hyphen in middle of a web page.

3. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Excessive keywords in a meaningful web page can be perceived as keyword stuffing. Proper SEO must take care of this element.

4. Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, Google will choose one of them to list.

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, Google also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. Google implies that your website or whole network of websites can be penalized with low search engine rankings or removed from their index. Are you willing to take this risks and continue to build shadow websites?

For some reasons, if you cannot avoid duplicate content, Google suggests you can make use of robots.txt file to avoid Google indexing duplicated web pages or websites.

Alternatively, you can re-think of consolidate duplicated pages into 1 or expand each page to contain unique content.

Conclusion

SEO is not meaning of applying tricks to manipulate search engine ranking. SEO is about making a website search engine friendly and trustworthy, and building reputation to your website. To be search engine friendly and trustworthy, you must avoid unacceptable search engine optimization practices described above. If your SEO service provider is committing to those practices, stop to use them now and remove all spammy elements before your site get banned.

Information is provided by Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd, a SEO service provider.

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Notes: Is this a new trend for search?  If this is a trend,  search engine optimization firms have lots of thought.  Do search engine optimization firms need to get their clients listed in those vertical portals?  and different clients should get listed in different vertical portals?  How search engine optimization firms ensure clients with local focus get top rankings?  Please read on.

We’ve noted before how the Seattle area — for whatever reason — has become a hotbed of innovation when it comes to finding recipes on the Internet. And now one of the region’s tech giants is entering the virtual kitchen, looking to help consumers cook up everything from chili to cheese tortellini.

The Microsoft search engine Bing unveiled a new way for people to search for recipes, pulling those creations and more from sites such as MyRecipes.com and Microsoft’s own Delish.com. The search results include photos, ratings and nutritional information. They also allow cooks to search recipes by season or special occasion, allowing someone to find green chili cornbread stuffing for Thanksgiving or a deep dish apple pie for Fourth of July. If someone actually wants to locate the instructions to make a specific dish, they must click through to the partner Web sites.

The move is yet another example of how Microsoft is looking to segment search results by trying to go deeper than Google in certain niche categories. (Travel and shopping are two other examples).

I asked Steve Murch — a former Microsoft marketing executive and current CEO of online recipe site BigOven.com — for his take on the move. BigOven’s 170,000 recipes are not yet indexed in Bing, though Murch said he’d welcome the opportunity to distribute his recipes through the search engine.

“It’s great that Bing is focusing additional resources on helping cooks find great recipes faster and in a more consistent manner,” said Murch. “It’s one of many examples of various key verticals in search getting more structured over time.”

Of course, having so much recipe information residing in Bing could prevent cooks from clicking through to the partner recipe sites.That means a cook could spend more time perusing Bing than say AllRecipes or other recipe sites.

“While that trend will adjust the economics a bit for those companies that rely exclusively on advertising revenue, those that have structured data and productivity, publishing and grocery list tools like BigOven.com end up with a great vehicle for awareness and search engine optimization,” he said.

That’s good news for companies like BigOven, which last November became the first major cooking site to open the vault on its recipe database to outside developers. But Murch also noted that the move could challenge food writers and old media content producers.

“Over time, it’s our belief that those who take a more platform-based approach, that have the most comprehensive data, let users put data into the platform and then fetch it from anywhere and manage it using complementary productivity tools, generally stand to benefit as the search engines continue to structure their search,” he said.

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To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web–such as seconds-old Twitter “tweets” reporting traffic jams–Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters to keep returns relevant, according to a leading Google engineer.

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