On Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012, Google made its most radical and forward step into true Social Search with the launch of Search, plus Your World. Your World, as described in the official Google blog post, changes search results for individual users in three key ways:

Google Makes Search Secret

On October 18^th, Google announced that they were going to start using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Encryption – most easily recognized by the “s” which is added to the “http” at the start of the URL and often a “padlock” symbol indicating that you are accessing a secure server – to serve their search results to logged in users.  This change will impact several different areas within the search arena, most notably, as brands look to extract data from their website analytics to help them make smart SEO decisions.

What the change means for brands

With this change from Google, a brand will no longer have visibility into the keyword phrase that generated any given click through.  This is very valuable information for SEOs and online marketers alike, as it is used to inform the website owner which keywords are driving successful interactions with their clients, rather than just driving traffic.  Google is not planning on restricting this data on the paid search side – and most online marketers should be tracking these clicks with a third party tool which would deliver this information anyway – but this will allow Google to show it’s paying customers that the product they are paying for is working – or not working – for them and optimize accordingly.  While Google mention that websites will still be able to get “an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries” from the Google Webmaster Tools, this does not allow them to focus their efforts on those terms within the top 1,000 that actually drive positive customer interaction.

We often find ourselves working with brands that have a real concern about using coupons due to coupon frauds. The challenge is that traditional coupons are difficult to track which makes them hard to measure.

That was then. Today, electronic coupons can be an answer, specifically through QR-codes.

What is QR-Code?

Mobile and smartphone usage has been growing very rapidly merging the gap between physical and digital work. Customers use their phones for everything from price comparison to coupon and deal hunting. A QR-Code is a bar code that can contain any text, numbers or URL. It can be placed on product labels, billboards, tags, websites, etc. By using a smart phone and QR-code reader, a user can uncover the encoded information that is linked in that code. The code can be placed everywhere and be used for a variety of reasons.

If you are a marketer of a product or service with great demand, and at this time of the year you still haven’t considered optimizing your website for visits from mobile devices, you are missing a lot, in other words, you’re losing customers to competitors by the minute.

In 2012 mobile searches are projected to grow some 20% in relation to those 14.4M searches made in 2010. We recently released a POV on Mobile SEO with this and other interesting data. One of the best ways to leverage that traffic volume, as we stated in our POV is to offer a unique experience that engages searchers for higher conversions.

In this post we’re not going to tell you the power of mobile marketing is, but we want to present a situation that exemplifies how your abandonment rates on mobile visits may increase, when your visitors can’t find the information using a mobile device because it’s not presented in a format that answers to the channel demands in terms of usability.

Situation: Daniel left his house on a Saturday morning for some tennis match with his friends. He forgets to order a cheese table for a family gathering on Sunday. After the game, at 2:00pm, it’s too late for him to order by phone for next-day pick up at a local business.

“Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow,” -Aesop

According to Wikipedia “Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used by humans to express themselves through language.” As our entire business is based on language, this is something us search engine folks should be interested in.  The search engines certainly are.

Google’s first attempt at utilizing the semantics of keywords and terms in their algorithm came in March of 2009, when they announced that they were going to be using new technology which would allow them to make associations and correlations between words.  Bing made a similar attempt at adding semantics by acquiring Powerset which was supposed to add semantic capabilities to their search engine as well.

If you had a chance to read my last post on SocialRank, you’d know that SocialRank is the new PageRank. Not in the sense that PageRank is dead, but rather that SocialRank is what PageRank was meant to do – measure content authority and creditability.

The difference between the two is that PageRank is the measurement of URL popularity. It started out with Google seeding a few authoritative URL’s which then they passed a portion of it’s rank to other urls through links. SocialRank is the measurement of human popularity. It too must be seeded, then passed through social interactions such as follows, comments, tweets, likes, etc. SocialRank likely won’t fully replace PageRank, but rather it will overlay a social graph on top of the link graph to personalize results and reduce spam.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the governing body for internet domain names, recently approved the release of generic top level domains (gTLDs) from its current number of 22. Slated to be released in January of 2012, ICANN’s decision will allow the creation of TLDs in any language or script. So how does ICANN’s decision affect SEO? Probably not as much as we might think. Search engines like Google and Bing do not differentiate between a .com and a .net suffix, and certainly do not give a .com any additional ranking power because of it. Where there might be a bit of opportunity would be the use of keywords within the URL itself, however, keyword rich URLs is only one of many organic ranking factors and are less significant than in the past. SEO requires more than just a great domain name and more TLDs doesn’t necessarily equal more rankings.

We all know that with SEO, content is king. The fact is that if it’s not explicit on your site, you don’t have a chance to rank for it.  That being said, creating a mass amount of content that is both engaging and central to your product is often a difficult, time consuming and expensive task.  A common content creation recommendation is to add a blog to your site, but again, blogging requires an ongoing commitment and leaves the burden of topic creation to one person or a small group. A great way to let your target audience help relieve this burden is to open a public onsite forum.

What is a Forum?

A forum allows people to hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Unlike a blog, where the blogger broadcasts a message and waits for comments, a forum lets users create the initial topic or thread. Then, moderators and participants alike can address the topic with answers or suggestions of their own. Allowing your customers to initiate interaction on your site essentially shifts the responsibility of content creation away from you and onto your most interested consumers. They can ask questions, request advice, post interesting ways they have used your product and get answers or comments from the company and from their peers.

Why are Forums Good for Search?

In most forum applications, each new thread expands the site by a page and all subsequent responses are added as content to that page. This expands the size of the site and gives each new page the opportunity to contain keyword-rich content in your consumers’ voice. Search engines also give merit to pages that are updated frequently. Without a forum or blog, this becomes a very difficult task. Google even recently started to call out these dynamic pages with a ‘Blogs’ and a ‘Discussions’ logo in their left navigation and within their search results pages.