Those familiar with the search engine landscape have probably noticed that in most cases only one or two lines per website will display in the search engine results pages of Google.  Well, the days of having only one or two listing per website has come to an end… for specific keyword phrases at least.

Google recently announced on their Webmaster Central blog that they will now be showing more results per domain.  Google has always stated that their goal is to provide relevant results as quickly as possible to a searcher.  With this recent update, they hope that users will now be able to find what they are looking for faster than before.

A handful of listings for one domain will appear for a single search query when the user searches for a keyword or phrase that indicates that they have a strong interest in a particular domain. For example, if you conduct a search for “Search Engine Land”, you will likely see a results page similar to the one below.  (Notice how many listings lead you to the Search Engine Land website.)

This change has some pros and cons for marketers.  If you want to capture traffic from a competitor and someone specifies in a search your competitor’s name, it could possibly be harder than before to capture visits to your website via organic search from these types of search queries.  This could be good, on the other hand, when users are searching for keywords that are specific to your website.  In this case, you have even greater potential to capture this traffic, as your domain will be able to practically own the first page of listings! 

We’ll be keeping an eye on how this impacts clients and we encourage you to do the same for you own website!

Meta data is a critical component of SEO. Meta data consists of primarily the title tag, the description tag and the keyowrd tag of a page.  This information, when properly used for SEO, can help to tell the search engine spiders and the searcher a bit more about what they will find on the page.

Let’s start by breaking down a listing in a search engine results page.

The clickable, blue link in Google’s search engine results pages is the title tag.  This is usually the actual title tag of your page, which is also visible when viewing the page (shown in the top of your browser).  As you can imagine, since this is the clickable link, it’s important to make sure that it includes keywords.  This can help with rankings and it can also encourage someone to click through to the page of your site listed.

The snippet of text just below the title is displayed to show a bit more information about the page to the searcher. This text can be pulled from a few places.  If Google’s spiders are not able to crawl the page or if they are not finding text that they think will be valuable to the searcher, they may rely on the Open Directory Project for this information.  Other times they may use the description tag that you assign to the page.  Lastly, Google may pull this text from a place within the page’s content.  For instance, if the specific search query is most related to a piece of the content located at the bottom of the page, Google may display content from the bottom of the page as the search snippet.

One bit of confusion is that Google will not always display the description tag that you have assigned to the page.  As mentioned earlier, if a piece of content on the page is more relevant to the search query, the search engine may choose to display that instead of your description tag.  This does not mean you should ignore the description tag by any means.  It can still add weight to your page. As Google is trying to create the best experience for the searcher, there are some elements such as the descriptive snippet, that they will tweak in order to create what they believe makes best search experience.  The next question that usually arises is: can I tell Google to only use my description tag?  Since it’s an algorithm that determines this, you can’t. However, if the text pulled is from the Open Directory Project, you can use the META NODP tag, which essentially lets you opt out of the Open Directory Project title and description.

Other elements of a snippet that are within the search engine results page are the URL and sometimes site links. The URL is pretty self explanatory – it is the destination URL of the page listed in the search engine results page. The site links are additional non-paid links into a few other pages on your site that Google feels is relevant for searchers.

Review your website’s meta data and be sure that the content on your page and meta data are in sync.  Even conduct searches for your keywords and see what displays in the search results. This can help you to find out what Google is telling searchers about your pages.

There is no doubt that mobile phones, particularly smartphones, are becoming more popular. According to IDC, sales of smartphones grew 56.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, far exceeding the growth of the overall mobile market, which grew by 21.7 percent.

As the mobile market continues to grow, marketers are presented with greater opportunities to reach customers.  When considering mobile marketing opportunities for your business, there are few things to take into consideration.

First, think about what the goals of your mobile marketing initiatives will be.  Will someone using a mobile device be interested in what you have to offer, and more importantly, will they be able to complete the desired action?  For instance, if you are a locksmith or are selling ring tones, there could certainly be opportunities for you to have a mobile presence.  However, if you offer something that has an in depth conversion process, such as a form with multiple steps, mobile may be a bit more difficult to justify.

If you have decided that a mobile strategy is appropriate for your business, be sure to set your mobile campaigns separately from your other campaigns. This way you can have targeting flexibility and can tailor the message, and possibly the landing page, specifically to mobile users.   You can even select which types of mobile carriers and/or devices where you want your ads to appear.  For instance, a marketer selling only iPhone accessories my not wish to have their ads appear on Blackberry devices.  Keep in mind that the iPad, while not a phone, can be targeted separately as a mobile device.

You will also want to think about how users will find your ads.  Long tail queries are not as common on mobile devices.  A mobile user is less likely to type out a long search term on their mobile device as they would on a desktop or laptop. Many of us who are smartphone owners know how typing on a tiny or virtual keyboard is still difficult.

Where will you drive traffic to?  Will it be to your website?  How does your website look on a mobile device?  If you plan on driving mobile traffic to your website, it is highly recommended to have a mobile version.  While smartphones can render full websites (with the exception of flash-based sites), mobile websites are much easier to navigate. Check out our website, www.morevisibility.com, from an iPhone or Blackberry and you will see an example of how much simpler it is to get around.

Lastly, bid aggressively to make sure that your visibility is prominent on mobile devices. There is limited space so you will want to beat the competition to get those valuable spots.  This can lead to more visibility for branding purposes and more clicks to lead to conversions.