If you hadn’t heard, Google introduced a highly significant enhancement to its service a week or so back, called SearchWiki. This enables users to edit their search results - that is, reorder, remove, or add web pages to the results for any query. You can add notes to listings too. There’s a good summary of the implications of this in Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide on Search Engine Land which you might like to read.

If that looks daunting, I’ll highlight the bits you need to know, before any myths start to spring up. Firstly, changes you make by “voting up” sites won’t have any effect generally. Only you will see the impact of what you’ve done. However, notes you make on a page will be available for public perusal. But might the “votes of confidence” in a page be taken into consideration by Google one day when ranking a page? Maybe. For now though, don’t start any massive exercise of “voting up” all your pages for marketing purposes, you’ll be wasting your time.

This is quite an advanced article today, but it’s the sort of thing you’ll be taking in your stride after you’ve been on our Insider Programme for a while (and please think about joining, it’s a genuinely great investment). In Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search, Search Engine Land takes you past elementary “optimisation” of a website for search engines, and looks at the things many people continue to get wrong even after they think they’ve got their site all sorted. Likely errors include not having tailored landing pages for important search terms, and slapping printed material up on the web rather than rewriting it for online consumption. This is a very good set of tips.

A good article on Search Engine Land, called Why You Need To Know SEO Basics, Even If You Outsource, is something you should read if you’re planning to improve your company’s web site performance but know you’ll be subcontracting the task. SEO is the specific science of “search engine optimisation”, but the principles in the article apply to other aspects of web site and online marketing development. You can only give a task to someone else if you actually understand what the task involves - we all know that - so education should be your priority at the moment. (more…)