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!

Google has created a font API that allows a range of fonts to be use in websites. The types of fonts available can really transform a site and make it more attractive to users.

Google also provides a font previewer, where you can test how a font will look and help you decide if any of the fonts available in font previewer will work on your site, as well as customizing it. To implement one of these fonts all you need to add is a link to an external stylesheet and customize your site’s styles with the new font. You can view an example of how to set it up here.

Even though this API is still in Beta testing, it shows how impressive it’s use is, and how easily it is to set up. The only problem that will need to be faced is how fonts that are not open source, fonts you need to pay to use, will be considered in this API.  Buying once, will allow anyone visiting the site to view that font and this could create a problem. Google only provides open source fonts, and they seem to work fine in most browsers, but questions about fonts that are not open source will soon be raised. Below you can view a font called tangerine, added using the Google fonts API and how it renders in 4 different browsers IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

The flexibility allowed from this API can create sites with a more distinguished look and feel and also allow older sites currently using images to change those images and replace them with text, especially navigation items. This will improve the site’s SEO ranking as well as making any updates to the site easier and a lot faster.

On June 8th, Google officially stated, “Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine.” The ramifications are obviously not being felt yet, but what should marketers do from an SEO perspective to prepare for what is one of the biggest updates to the Google algorithm in a good while?

In essence, Google Caffeine will facilitate faster indexing of much more relevant information. Now, more than ever, it is important to focus on adding as much new, unique and relevant content to your site in the hopes that it will have a chance of competing with the multitude of websites out there. Webmasters, in general, are much savvier at making sure their sites load faster and provide up to date information. Keeping your ear to the ground and optimizing for real-time search is imperative.

In general though, Google is still doing what they have always done which is to provide the most relevant information for a user’s search queries. The tried and tested methods of SEO are still firmly in place
(well-written, original and relevant content and quality inbound links) but even more tweaking is required now.