HTML5 is already rocking the design and development worlds with people clambering to experiment with new functionality, APIs and more but we should always look at all the potential affects of such large shifts in our behaviour and this post aims to address some potential implications the new mark-up will have for SEO.

The first thing to consider is that HTML5 is still a baby really, most browsers have some level of support but few have total support and even then many functions are yet to be completed or fully tested. Because of this any SEO issues or benefits are very much speculation at this stage, while we are running multiple tests to help discover search engine reactions to HTML5 code until it is more mainstream I do not believe these will be definite.

Being prepared never hurt anyone though so lets take a look at some of the more important changes and how they could affect your SEM strategy.

HTML5 introduces new elements designed specifically for showing the different parts of a web page, these new elements are;

• section
• article
• footer
• audio
• video
• nav
• canvas
• progress
• time
• aside
• hgroup
• meter

Page Elements

I believe this is going to be one of the most important changes for SEO.

The first important thing the tags allow is the ability for Google to extract sections of a site for different purposes. What many refer to as “Boilerplate” text in footers, headers and navigation can now be easily found and dealt with by Google. This brings positive and negative implications. It’s likely less emphasis will be placed on links in the footer section however Google already claim to be able to identify and do this so marking up your Footer could help with PR control through the rest of the links on your site.

Secondly identifying your navigation could be very valuable for breadcrumb and site-link inclusion. If search engines like Google know that a specific list of links on your site are your top level navigation then they are clearly a lot more use as site-links than 5 random pages from your site. Since Google claims it focuses on the user it would make perfect sense for them to take this info.

Media

Elements like audio and video have immediate advantages. Firstly they non longer require plug ins and therefore search engines can work with standard sets of API’s to easily crawl and identify media content and include it within the index. This means more content in the index and hopefully more users to your site.

Additionally we can also assume that the search engines would want to give users more “compatible” media since more users would have access to it (the ones without the plug-ins). We know that Google are trialling HTML5 on YouTube right now and in the long run it is likely to become a standard for them.

I would also expect improved loading times and more advanced functionality in the future as the HTML5 video and audio API evolve.

Content

The article and section elements may become very important for on-site SEO content. Correctly using them will help Google identify stolen or duplicate content and may also encourage the future use of rich snippets in search results.

The different elements should also integrate well with RDFa and Dublin Core protocol giving us lots of opportunity to format the semantic web without the use of too many of those nasty spans. Much discussion of microdata and HTML5 is still up in the air, so this is one to watch as it develops.

Well that’s all we have for now, remember the biggest change is that you are going to start telling search engines what each part of your document is, this is going to have positive and negative effects but if your are a real user focused SEO then none of it should be a problem.

The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

So what effect is this update going to have on Google’s SERP’s?

Well, I did a few tests to see if there are any significant changes, I chose to search for my favourite social media girly Julia Roy, as after doing a few test searches – her’s was the one that yielded the most noticeable differences.

Speed

Caffeine allows Google to index the web at a higher pace – gathering more information and doing it faster with most searches taking half the time compared to the current version.

As you can see, Google Caffeine returned 6,840,000 results in 0.08 seconds compared to the current Google, which returned 5,740,000 in 0.45 seconds.

Real Time Search

The number of pages being indexed could be due to Google’s interest in integrating real time search in this update. There is definitely more weight being given to social media profiles. This is apparent in the results below – juliaroy.com was 1st in the old Google, whereas in the Caffeine update it has been relegated to 6th in favour of some of her social media profiles.

What Else?

There are many more speculations as to what the update will mean for SEO – from 301 redirects being treated differently, to it favouring non hyphenated domains – but we will not know for sure until it goes live. I do however think one of the main issues facing Google is making sure that it’s results aren’t skewed in favour of real time social media content at the expense of non time-sensitive SERPs. We may want the most up to date information, but we still want it to be quality authoritative content.

You can find out more about the Caffeine update (as well as why Matt Cutts is suddenly bald!) in the video below.

Chitika looked through 32 million ad impressions across its 50,000 strong network during a week in July to generate its findings, which has raised some eyebrows and caused a lot of discussion in the search community.

So does this mean you should drop what you’re doing with Google and move all your PPC over to Bing because users are 55% more likely to click through to your site? I don’t think so. The main reason being that Google still provides 65% of search traffic – I would take 0.97% of 26,929,367 over 1.50% of 2,236,366 any day. (I love statistics)

There have been a lot of theories flying round as to why Bing’s click through rate is so much greater including:

Type of User

Are Bing users more trusting that Google and Yahoo users? Considering Microsoft’s $100 million ad campaign to win users, it makes sense that Bing would attract consumers susceptible to advertising. It also makes sense that the users coming to Bing from a display ad elsewhere would also be more susceptible to paid ad’s on their search engine of choice. However this then raises the question of how they are going to continue to grow their user base when the initial advertising budget goes away? Remember ASK anyone?

Law of Large Numbers

One idea that’s been put forward as a possible explanation is the law of large numbers – although I think people quoting this don’t really understand the meaning of the theory – this suggests that because more people use Google it causes fewer of them to click through to ads – which is simply not true (nor an accurate portrayal of the law of large numbers BTW).

I think it’s more to do with the quality of the organic search results returned by Bing.

To me it suggests that Bing users who navigate to pages returned in Bing’s organic search results, navigate away from the pages that Bing has identified as being “most relevant” by clicking on ads for other websites once the destination page is reached.

This suggests the page the the user clicked on, was not what they were looking for, ergo Bing’s organic search results are not as relevant as Google’s.

What do you think?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Future of SEO, there has always been the “SEO is dead/going to die” side of discussions which obviously we don’t agree with, i’ve never seen a half compelling argument for this and while ever search exist search optimisation will be needed.

This isn’t to say changes are in store however, Rand did a post Friday over at SEOMoz looking at his opinion of the future of SEO and I thought I would give my professional response to Rand’s ideas as well as some of my own.

Here’s the video for you to watch first, it’s less than 10 minutes long so don’t worry about a lecture.

Let’s look at the points Rand raises first.

Content and Accessibility will Remain Important

I am confident Rand is right about this one. Controlling quality ocntent and managing site accessability is one of the most important roles in SEO, increasingly websites are become very large and complex and it takes a lot of time, planning and expierence to correctly structure sites and keep them accessible to everyone (and bots).

As new trends develop site maintenance will become a larger task and things such as semantic tagging (not LSI) more advanced sitemaps and robots control will be important.

Content will remain an important part of SEO but I expect we will begin to see a more vaired base of content being important. The changes in the last year alone with Google now indexing Flash and Java has shown SEO’s we don’t just have plain text to play with. This technology will only become more capable and accurate meaning web technologies like Flash much more accepted by SEO.

As Rand mentions this has to be an important part of SEO as it’s an imoprtant part of internet marketing in general and the future of the web.

Social Graph Metrics

Rand moves on to discuss social graph metrics and the potential impact it will have on search. Again I agree with Rand on this one on the basic point that it will be something search giants are interested in but the overall effect on queries and results will be small.

The value in presenting people with “super personalised” results is minimal and just like in Rand’s example you are not always going to want to see the thing people around you are talking about top of the SERPs. Rand is also correct in the fact the system is too easy to game, if SE relied solely on community interaction to predict what people want in the SERPs quality would plummet for both them and the communiteis themselves.

I personally see this evolving more as a supplementary search option, similar to “images” or “video” a section almost themed “what my peers think” is a possibility. I’m not sure how this will be presented but i’m confident it will not encrouch into the main algorythm.

User Metrics

User Metrics is more of a complicated point. There are a lot of theories stating these already have an impact on ranking. Rand suggests that they will be incorporated into SEO and ranking algorithms more in the future.

I think while this makes sense and it is likely Google will use Analytics data to influence rankings it will never be a major factor for one reason, not everyone use analytics.

It would be impossible for Google to sort out all the websites into ranked order if only 30-40% are giving the the data they need. It would also mean that “having analytics” would give you a statistical advantage or disadvantage in the SERPS (depending on your site and how they work it) and therefore people would have alternative motives to using it.

User metrics can be valuable however and I think that in the long run you may at least start to get WMT feedback on issues that can harm site rankings.

Verticalis

The major point Rand ends on is the concept of verticals developing in the SEO world or at least becoming much more prominent.

This is something a lot of people in our office have been discussing recently, we are increasingly seeing people waver away from Google on long tail industry specific searches and move to websites that are almost guaranteed to answer their query.

This means that businesses are now wanting to appear in new searches, not just Google, Yahoo and Bing. With this new trend developing it easy to see that it will become competitive however I am sceptical at how much some of these sites can actually have optimisation done for them. Many work on exact matching or showing the oldest/newest entries and you can’t actually do much about the way it brings results back.

Of course manipulating titles and putting the right “tags” will have positive effects but each site is it’s own ball game and it could become very hectic very fast.

There is also Googles reaction to consider. They are not going to let all those searches go without a fight and with there increased range of search projects (such as books, base, etc) will be challenging people for these customers.

Conclusion

SEO is going through a lot of changes at the moment, we can expect the next year to be a very interesting time for everyone in the search marketing industry but the practice is far from dead and is actually growing way beyond the “search engine” barrier to become just “search”.

This story is a little different however; this is about the United Airlines handling of a complaint made by a guy called Dave Carroll that UA damage his guitar while on a short internal flight. This I am sure has happened to a lot of people but guitars are particularly expensive as well as obviously fragile and the baggage handlers really should have known better.

Anyway after a year of chasing them Dave decided that he world should know of his problems, so he and his band put together a song and video and put it on YouTube.  It’s embedded below.

It’s really funny and well put together and a deeper background of the song is available on his own blog.

Obviously this is a huge embarrassment for UA, they have a company Twitter profile that was basically bombed with RT of this video and the video itself has thousands of comments and a full 5 star rating.

At this point SEOMoz featured a post about management of this type of problem and how so many companies don’t take social media seriously etc. It’s a very good post which I recommend you read but the crux was that UA should take this as a marketing opportunity, get in touch with him and make sure everyone knows you are doing what you can to rectify it.

Well it seems someone paid attention because shortly after they did contact him and since then have taken several positive steps for both themselves and customers.  Dave did a video response here .

The company offered a decent amount of compensation which Dave has diverted to charity and the company have gone as far to actually use the song as a training video according to Twitter. There are also talks of a follow-up song made in co-operation with the two.

Fantastic move by UA and great initial effort from Dave and his friends. Social media management si becoming a necessity in todays business world and case studies like this should be shown to all the “savvy” marketing guys heading up multinationals.

Before I start looking at how Real Time Search will effect SEO’s, I wanted to clear up a few issues with the statement before I start – Firstly, there is currently NO real time search engine – Twitter isn’t real time, FriendFeed isn’t real time and Bing just uses Twitter – there’s still a lag between posting, crawling and appearing in search results. Secondly, a lot of these so called real time search engines are just seeking out social mentions NOT crawling the web and indexing it, more akin to buzz and trend monitoring tools than search engines.

The issue with real time search is it lacks authority and diversity, indexing and ranking a brand new piece of infomation without being able to check it’s authenticity would result in the SERP’s being filled with spammy posts with little or no high quality useful content. A lot of these real time searches rely on social media recognition, however the vast majority of online content is not content that the social media masses would find worthy of ‘Digging’ and therefore is not included in the results. I mean let’s face it – if real time search was as simple as the new engines are making out – Google would already be doing it.

So should SEO’s be worried? Not yet – real time search is still in it’s infancy, and until one of the serious traffic driving search engines manages to eliminate the issues related to real time search (spam, authority ranking and social media dependency) it won’t have a massive impact on the way standard users search the web.

That’s because I usually have a phone with an MP3 player, why would I buy another? Well I needed a new phone and after all the hype I decided to go headfirst into the world of Apple and choose the iPhone 3GS.

As you have guessed this is a review post however the difference is that I am presenting it from two unique angles, firstly my view of the product as someone who typically would never spend £500 on a phone and secondly from the SEM professionals point of view.

Top 5 Things My Anti-Apple Side Likes About the iPhone

App Prices are great, most good apps are free and even the games and apps that do cost are generally worth it. Well done Apple for vetting entries and well done developers for making them worth downloading.

Battery Life is better than I expect. Maybe it’s because I have 3GS or maybe it’s because I turned no essential service off but it easy lasts a day and I had heard stories of 8 hour lifespan and worse.

Keyboard is nowhere near as hard to get used to as I expected. Sure for the first 60 seconds I was pressing things I didn’t mean too and taking half an hour to send an SMS but I have adapted to the interface very quickly. That’s when you know it has been designed well.

Gaming is fantastic on the iPhone. It’s like a cross between a PSP and a DS, that’s the good sides of each too, great graphic and sound on addictive, small but great games. Crystal Defenders Vanguard, Field Runners and Tap Tap Revenge are my current favourites.

Build Quality is what surprised me most, because it’s amazing. The iPhone is solid. I had tinkered with them before but you always hold you own things differently to others. Yes it’s kind of heavy and big but it still fits in my pocket and it feels like it’s worth that bit extra. When I pick up my old phone it now feels cheap, really cheap.

Top 5 Things about the iPhone as an SEM

E-Mails are pretty much an essential part of being an SEM, now I can access them on the move without having to pay £2 per MB downloaded. Yay.

Twitter Apps are amazing, now I can keep up to date with all the latest SEM news (and my mates of course) without being near any other form of tech. Great for knowing everything that changed while you were out of the office!

WordPress App is pretty cool, I can update blogs, send pictures etc from my little iPhone. Obviously it’s not as easy as from a keyboard but when you are on the move it’s a real useful app to have.

Google App is ace too, check my rankings from a different perspective, find what I’m looking for news wise, pretty much the whole package converted for easy use on the iPhone. I hear the docs stuff is good too but I don’t use them.

Notes are really useful. Voice Memos are pretty much the same thing but equally as useful. In the hustle and bustle of everyday office work these can be so useful to keep you on top of stuff. I know that even my old phone has this functionality but the iPhone makes it so much easier and more fun.

So there you go, I’m converted. OK so I won’t be rushing out and buying a MacBook Air quite yet but I have taken a big step and no matter how much it costs, I really like my iPhone, lets just hope o2 can deliver some semi-decent service.

This post from Matt Cutts kind of starting everything off and there has been quite a lot of discussion on the blogsphere since then, as well as in Matts Comments.

In summary Matt revealed that Google changed it policy and handling of the Nofollow tag over a year ago but never bothered to update webmaster.

What does this mean, well essentially many Webmasters believed they were controlling PR by Nofollowing selected links in their site, they were “sculpturing” PR by making sure it didn’t go out to bad pages or worthless internal pages. It turns out that they weren’t.

Understandably some webmaster were upset, some SEM companies were too, after all people have been preaching the PR Sculpting angle as “guaranteed rankings” for months.  SEM’s who work with reliable strategies were probably more concerned about the wider issue of sites, specifically blogs now “leaking” PR. Cutts’ did address this issue but many bloggers have hit this one themselves.

Both SEOMoz and HuoMah had posts about potential tactics and both raise interesting ideas but in my own opinion it shouldn’t be something you’re worried about.

Yes, maybe PR will leak from the site a little, yes maybe Google should have let people know soon but as many good SEO’s acknowledge, Google owes us nothing; they are a company and can keep whatever secrets about their internal process they like.

So what action do you actually need to take? My advice is nothing; the critical thing to remember is that it has been like this for a year already, unless you PR score has been consistently falling across that time I wouldn’t even think twice about changing your site.

Futureproofing is a different matter, some great ideas include collapsing unimportant apges into one (i.e. Contact, Ts & Cs and About), managing navigation and footer links as efficiently as possible and making sure you have external PR flowing into some of the deeper pages of your site.

The matter is very much still in the air so keep your eyes peeled for another update soon!

There have been numerous examples of digital identity fraud in recent months e.g. Phil Spector was allegedly Tweeting from his jail cell; Tony La Russa, manager of baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, successfully sued Twitter for an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation; Kanye West wrote an amusingly irate blog entry about being misrepresented on Twitter.

Brandjacking is prevalent in social media because it’s easy to set up accounts and find an audience. Couple this with the social media boom and downturn in the economy and people have both the resources and the increased motivation to participate in such practices. The sheer reach of online marketing is enough of a lure. Last year’s BrandJacking Index from MarkMonitor.com illustrated that not only is cybersquatting continuing to dominate methods used by online fraudsters but it also rose by 18% over the year with the outlook for 2009 being even worse.

You can read the report in full here.

So what can an online marketer do about brandjacking?

1) Run an online audit of your brand :: Use a site such as knowem.com to see if your username is taken across a multitude of sites, who by and what they are using it for. If you have only one brand which is also your company name then this should be a fairly simple task – if you have a multitude of brands then it may be a bit more lengthy.

2) Prioritize your Username :: Think about your clients – what do they call you? What would they search for if they were looking for you on their social network? Then grab that username – If your brand has already been registered then look at who has it and what they are doing with it. All of the major social networks such as Myspace, Facebook and more recently Twitter have a good track record at returning banded domains to their rightful owners, so don’t be afraid to contact them if your brand is being misrepresented.

3) Prioritize Your Network Selection :: Although it is a good thing to have brand presence on each social network, especially to hinder brandjackers, having an incomplete or unused profile on an active comunity can be almost as detrimental as having a fake one or none at all. Using a tool such as Quantcast can help you find the most relevant sites for you based on user demographics. Whatever you do ALWAYS leave a link back to your homepage on every profile you create. This will not only help visitors who find you get to your main site, but will also help with search engine rankings by providing high page rank backlinks to your site.

4) Stalk Your Competitors :: Choose a few competitors who’s success you want to emulate and find out where their online presence is. What sites are they active on? What sort of content are they posting? Then consider weather or not it’s worth you joining them on that community if you aren’t already a member.

5) Don’t Overthink It :: It may seem an obvious thing to say, but social media and social networks are first and foremost – Social. If what you’re saying isn’t interesting or useful to the end user/’follower’/'buddy’ then you will simply be ignored/unfollowed.

Finally a little note about the power of social networks – @StephenFry may be able to drive 1000′s visitors to a site just by sending a tweet out, but that’s because he’s Stephen Fry – Don’t base your whole marketing strategy around setting up a Twitter profile and sending out one tweet. Social networking is just another string to the online marketing bow – not a substitute.

We all know creating sitemaps is an essential part of any webmasters jobs these days but as time goes on they become more and more important. Aside from just supporting them Google made a series of changes last week (here’s their post) to give you even more reason to use them.

The most important update is that Google now support a much bigger sitemap than before, the previous 1,000 child limit has been raised to 50,000. That means size is no longer an excuse for not submitting!

A few smaller updates have rolled out including more accurate URL counting, additional support for XSD schemas and increased speed on sitemap processing. Hopefully this is going to be useful since I have genuinely waited days for Google to even notice my sitemap before.

Wondering how to create a sitemap on your site? Well it’s pretty easily actually you get some software to do it!

My recommended choice is the script available at XML-Sitemaps. It works well, is easy to install and well worth the low asking price. If you have a small site you don’t have to pay anything at all as they have a free tool for sites less than 500 pages.

Not hooked on web based apps? The GSiteCrawler is available for free and does a pretty good job of making sitemaps too.

Once you have followed the instructions for your chosen software all you need to do is upload the file and submit inside Google WMT/Yahoo/Bing and easy peasy all 3 major players have your sitemap ready to crawl. If you don’t already have them here are the places to submit sitemaps to;

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bing