1. Ranking Report – Google is now providing webmasters with an accurate and up to date (at least up to 48 hours) idea of where they are ranking for their top search queries, along with historical data. By setting a date range to different time frames, you can see what position you are most often showing up in by finding the position with the highest number of impressions for that time period. You can do with this data what you normally do with ranking data (find low hanging fruit on page 2 and 3 and optimize to get to page 1, watch trends of broad and new trending keywords, etc.)

2. Enhance your clickthrough rate through Title and Snippet optimization – This new feature set gives us the unique opportunity to test making changes to our title not just for SEO purposes, but for marketability. Does having a call to action in your title or description increase your clickthrough percentage? Does putting your company name first vs last vs at all? What about non-alpha-numeric characters? Is a pipe better than a dash? Does an exclamation mark or a question mark change things? or does it even matter? Does mention of your keyword more times in either your title or description increase clickthrough because they are bolded? These are all very good questions that, with some smart testing, each of us can have answers to.

3. Model out position share for a particular niche – We’ve all wondered what the clickthrough rate difference is between the top 10 rankings. Does the number one ranking really get ~50% of all SERP clicks? Obviously there are multiple variables that go into the SERP clickthrough percentage (title, description, relevancy, etc), but I believe that there is a possibility to model out a general position share based on particular niches and keywords. Do broad informational keywords have a higher clickthrough rate on the #1 position? If I search for the keyword “Angioplasty”, for example, I’m most likely just looking for information and or a definition of the word, so the fact that wikipedia shows up #1 for that search is probably best and I bet the clickthrough percentage for that keyword for wikipedia is in the 60-70% range (anyone with access to wikipedia GWT care to verify?). Whereas, a search for “Best laptop Deals” most likely has a more even spread of clickthrough because of the type of search. Also, what about industries? Does the SEO industry have a general clickthrough position share that is different than the real estate industry? We now have access to find out.

4. PPC and SEO Co-Optimization – This is a big one in my eyes. So far it has proven somewhat difficult to co-optimize PPC and SEO together. Testing is tedious, difficult and results vary greatly on whether the different mediums cannibalize or compliment each other. Now we have some incredibly helpful information to assist in testing. Here’s an example: Say you’re showing up number 1 for a keyword organically. You also show up #1 in the PPC listings. Is your PPC listing cannibalizing your organic listing? (are you paying for traffic that would otherwise be free?).  Test it with credible data! Now you know your clickthrough rate for your #1 organic listing AND you know your clickthrough rate for your #1 PPC listing. Put your PPC listing into position 2. What happens with your organic clickthrough rate?  What about position 3? 4? 5? Now you can test to see where you get maximum value from both campaigns.

I think there is much more that could be written here so I promise to have a follow up post down the road, but I also expect to see a lot of other posts with testing and proving coming up in the future.

Bottom line, this is very exciting data to have. Get in, get dirty. And let’s all thank Google for giving us what we want!

This first one is a preview of me 20 years down the road (hopefully at LEAST 20):

I spent some time on the site and the more I read, the more it sounded like this company had accomplished creating the perfect white diamond. And the best part was they were incredibly inexpensive! Paying hundreds of dollars in comparison to thousands of dollars made me think I could upgrade my wife’s wedding ring for our anniversary without breaking the bank. I was ecstatic! I did a quick search on the company name to double check its legitimacy and a scan of the first page of results only gave me more confidence. It even looked like they were doing some SEO because their Facebook and Twitter pages were on the first page. Good for them!

Because I was in a consumer mindset (and it was very late at night), I felt like I had done enough research on the industry and the company and I started to seriously consider purchasing. Luckily, something inside of me forced me to sleep on it. The next morning a thought occurred to me: If this company was doing SEO or having someone do it for them, they may have been doing some reputation management on their company name. I checked on it, this time doing a more thorough search on the company name, and lo and behold, every SERP but page 1 made it very apparent that reputation management was being performed for this company. I found hundreds of comments about the company being deceptive, fraudulent, and even illegal in their claims. According to most, the company was simply a reseller of CZ diamonds that can be found for $10-20 regularly. Now, if you want to sell CZ diamonds for exhorbitant prices to uneducated shoppers, that’s one thing, but when your site appears to claim that you’re selling something very different than what you actually are, that’s a big problem in my book.

In addition, every time I found a negative comment about the company, the very next post was someone who was extremely pleased with their purchase and took the diamond to jewelers who couldn’t tell the difference between it and a real diamond. Odd? I thought so.

What really hurt me most about this experience was that with the exception of the last practice, the marketing that had been done seemed to be fairly white hat. Someone was using good for evil. I know this isn’t the first time this has happened in the SEO industry, but it was definitely the closest I have been to it.

This experience brings up a very difficult question that SEO companies have to face. Even though you may perform transparent white hat techniques for clients, the business model of the client may be “black” or even “grey”. Do you still perform the work? Do you make a company successful in Google who doesn’t deserve it?

Hopefully it’s obvious where I stand.

I’m all about the universal search revolution and giving people more than just 10 blue links. I think video, images, news results, blog results, audio, and whatever else people think is most relevant to the keyword they are searching for should be included in the first page of results. And if 2 videos are relevant or if 10 videos are most relevant, they should be there. However, I find it extremely hard to believe that people searching on the keyword “Laptops” are looking for battery fires, battery hacks, or how to build a cool laptop bag. I think when people search on “laptops”, they are probably looking for…well…you know…Laptops!

– Starting out with a good URL structure is obviously important to both the search engines and users. There were a couple of things Matt mentioned that were intruiging. (1) Make sure your structure is very clean. (2) Matt mentioned DMOZ as a great example of good site architecture

– Make your titles relevant to the content on the page and make them compelling.

– Obviously important. If you don’t have keywords in your content, why should you show up? Also, it’s always good to have your keyword in the URL of the page.

– You can spend all day in your log files and analytics finding great ways to optimize, but today Matt mentioned finding the keywords you are currently on page 2 for and get them to page 1

– A great idea. Google loves fresh content. Matt said that fresh content isn’t part of the algorithm, but it almost always gets you more links than if your site is stale.

There is nothing new here, but it’s always nice to know that you have the same priorities for your site optimization as Matt Cutts does.

Incredible! I wish I had that kind of talent. Now onto the post:

There is constantly talk about SEO dying.

In years past, there have been many people who have predicted that SEO would be dead by now. Many others think SEO is dying out as I write this post. I really hope these people didn’t quit their SEO jobs and get into a career that has anything to do with forecasting. At this point in time, SEO is as alive and well as it has ever been. With the downturn in the economy, companies are flocking to SEO agencies desperately seeking for a medium that brings results for a fraction of the price of other marketing mediums…and they’re finding it.

But this post isn’t about what’s going on now. It’s about the future of SEO and why it will never die…that’s right…never.

In order to explain this, it is imperative that the value of search engines is understood. Due to the development of the internet and other technologies, it is extremely easy to globally communicate and share information. So easy that our society is experiencing an information overload. A quick example: Over 10 million new books are written every year. If you think of the time it takes to write a book (I would assume an average of 1-5 years) that’s pretty astounding. Now think of how many new websites are created every year…new web pages!..new blog posts!

If you were looking to buy the book Vita di Alberto Pisani by Carlo Dossi in Italian, and you didn’t have the internet, how would you find and purchase it? Perhaps I’m naive, but I think accomplishing this task would be quite difficult and take days, if not weeks or months to complete. Now think of how you would accomplish this same task with the internet as a tool. How would you do it? Amazon? Google? Ebay? Regardless of how you find it, I can almost guarantee you would use a search engine.

My point is that as we see an exponential growth in information, we will see a similar growth for the need of high quality search engines that can sort through the infollution and serve you the results you are looking for. Therefore, search engines will never die.

Now that I’ve done some sufficient marketing for the search engines (you’re welcome Google), I’m going to expose their two big secrets:

First, search engines are not perfect and they never will be (okay, not really a secret). They will continue to improve and become more relevant, but I don’t believe they will ever be able to serve up 100% relevant results to every user 100% of the time. There are simply too many variables, including human factors that can not be mathematically factored into an algorithm, that will force search engines to remain imperfect. One quick example: if I am a developer and do a search on “Java”, Google will serve me results about the Java programming language where Google may serve someone else results for Java the island or Java the drink. While it is incredible that Google can do this, what about the programmer who one day does a search for Java and is instead looking for the island or the drink?

The second secret of the search engines is that they need SEO’s and they always will. I’m not talking about black hat SEO’s who use manipulative tactics to get irrelevant results to rank higher in the search engines. I’m talking about SEO’s who help sites to abide by search engine policies and create and serve up clean, compelling, and relevant content. The search engines can’t do that themselves. They need people to do that for them and they always will.

Some people may contest that what I am describing here is not SEO, but that SEO is link building, changing title tags, code clean-up, etc.. I would strongly disagree. Those are simply the current SEO tactics. Like hundreds of other tactics, each of these may eventually disappear and be replaced by new tactics, but the practice of SEO will never die. As long as search engines are around—and they always will be—search engine optimization will be around.

So, to all those who are restlessly anticipating the death of SEO, I use the words of the masterfully depicted grim reaper: “Face it guys…SEO isn’t coming.”

Based on our previous analysis of Google Trends leading up to Super Tuesday, we predicted Obama and McCain would come out on top after Super Tuesday. As it ended up, Google Trends was only about 70% correct in a state-by-state comparison and Hillary Clinton was actually on top with a slight lead after Super Tuesday. However, Obama has since pulled ahead in the delegate count in the close Democratic race and he is gaining momentum. It appears that Google Trends may be an accurate indicator of how people will vote after all.

The graph below from Google Trends shows the amount of search traffic on the top four presidential candidates’ last names, Google Trends data shows “Obama” is searched on more than any other candidate, with “Clinton” a distant second.

For the Republican nomination, McCain has been searched on most often, thus predicting his nomination as the Republican candidate. However, the disparity between searches for Republican and Democratic nominees predicts there will be a Democrat in the White House after the 2008 Election, and it looks like that person will be Barack Obama.

Based on Obama’s huge lead in Google Trends, the possibility of McCain beating out Obama in the 2008 General Election seems next to impossible.

From the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd to Maine’s Caucus on February 1st, the search trends for the candidates last names have directly correlated with their wins. So far, with our methodology we have been 100% accurate in determining the winner. We think we have a good chance of accurately predicting Today’s Results.

Here are the predictions:

Note: “Not Enough Data” indicates that there was not enough search data in Google Trends to create a graph. “NA” means the primary will take place at another date.

Does Page Rank Matter?

It’s safe to say that Google didn’t arbitrarily assign a number from one to ten to every site on the web for the sole purpose of getting all of us techies to download a small green bar to their browser. To the contrary, Page Rank has been the heart of Google’s software from the beginning and there is plenty of documentation our there to prove it. That’s right. I’m saying that Page Rank is real and alive in Google’s search algorithm today and plays a significant role in your site’s rankings. However, there is one thing I would like to point out about Page Rank before we go any further:

The Difference Between the Page Rank Algorithm and the Page Rank Toolbar

The Page Rank algorithm is the complex link analysis function that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. Google recalculates it’s Page Rank scores every time it crawls the web which is very frequent.

The Page Rank Toolbar displays a visited page’s PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10. Its the little green bar discussed previously. However, this Page Rank is only republished every three months giving the public a view of the historical value of the site. So for all of you out there who are frantically getting online every day to check the Page Rank of your site, I recommend doing something better with your time.

How Important is Page Rank?

Because of the widespread misuse and manipulation of the logarithmic function through spamdexing and link farms, Google has been forced to place less significance on Page Rank and introduce other factors into your site’s ranking. The Page Rank of your site (at least the Page Rank that you see), therefore, is still crucial, but not the end all say all. Let me prove that to you with some great examples:

Proof That Page Rank Isn’t Everything

Just today, I conducted 10 different searches on Google for highly popular and highly searched on keywords. I then checked the Page Rank of all 10 results for each query I performed (100 different results). What I found may come as quite a surprise to many and may not be surprising at all to others:

Findings:

16.67% of the results under the number 1 ranking have a better Page Rank than the number 1 ranking itself

23.75% of the results under the number 2 ranking have a better Page Rank than the number 2 ranking itself

15.71% of the results under the number 3 ranking have a better Page Rank than the number 3 ranking itself

33.33% of the results under the number 4 ranking have a better Page Rank than the number 4 ranking itself

26.00% of the results under the number 5 ranking have a better Page Rank than the number 5 ranking itself

This means that an average of 23% of the time, results 5-10 actually have a better Page Rank than the top 5 results.

Conclusion

I’m sure you can come to your own conclusion based on the research and the facts, but the real conclusion is that Page Rank does matter (keep reading!). An intelligent link building campaign is crucial to your site’s rankings (whether your link building is from link bait or from relevant sites linking to yours). However, Page Rank is not everything. It doesn’t guarantee you the top position in Google. It doesn’t single-handedly get you more monthly search traffic, better conversion rates, or more sales. So the next time Page Rank updates, if your ranking stayed the same or even dropped to 0 (heaven forbid), don’t think the world is ending. Remember what really matters is that you’re ranking well, you’re getting organic search traffic, and your website is successfully converting that traffic to leads or sales.