Search Engine Tips – Protect your SERP
Nov.15.2009 
Whenever someone searches for your brand name using a search engine, they are also being shown 9 organic results on the search engine results page (SERP) that may not be your site and maybe even another 9 paid results for competitors bidding on your brand name, which means you could be competing with a total of 18 other results that aren’t your site!
To ensure the searcher a) comes directly to your website and b) doesn’t see any negative entries that can creep in to the top 10 results, it is important that you use as wide a range of branded content as possible for the search engines to spider and rank. Taking your position at number one in the SERP organic section as red, below are other methods to ensure you dominate your brand searches.
Paid search top result
It may seem strange to bid on your own brand name when you already have top organic position but with clicks likely to be as low as 5p to 20p per click you should view it as an investment in online real estate. Eye tracking research shows that people’s eyes start at the top of the SERP and as you go down the page fewer and fewer people look at that area (see the research here). By having two entries at the top you are increasing the likelihood of a click and forcing other results further below the fold. You are also blocking anyone else bidding for the top paid spot on your brand name.
Put your blog on a sub domain
Google views sub-domains as separate entities to the main site which gives you a great opportunity to get a 2nd entry in the organic results by naming your blog something along the lines of http://blog.domain.com
Create a Facebook page
A well populated and linked to (e.g. from your main website) Facebook company profile should see your Facebook profile be shown high in the rankings. To set up a business profile go here http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Wikipedia page
Although the terms state that you are not allowed to write an entry about an organisation you are associated with, let’s be honest, it happens all the time. There are too many corporate entries for it no to! Google loves Wikipedia and ranks it’s page in the top 5 for countless search terms. Set up your own page to benefit from this love! Go to the home page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and click on ‘create account’ in the top right to get started.
Google Universal Search
Google is always trying new ways at presenting the web’s information, and it is rare to be shown a SERP that doesn’t have either some results from Google News, Product search, blog search or all three! If you don’t have one, get a Google account and start using the submission and feed features to make sure Google is picking up your press releases, blog posts and displaying your products.
As we touched on in a previous post about Twitter’s integration in to the fabric of search, Twitter accounts are only going to become more prominent in the SERP, not less. Make sure you have an account and link to it from your home page to show Google how important it is.
YouTube channel
Following the same theory as Facebook and Twitter, a profile on such a large and heavily linked website will be shown highly in searches for your brand name if combined with a respectable amount of content and a little linking from your own site to the channel’s home page. Create an account here http://www.youtube.com/create_account?next=None
What about page 2?
How often do you go beyond the first page of Google? Probably rarely if ever, and that’s the same for the majority of searchers. The truth is, if you’re in position 11 to 20, you’re going to get crumbs, if you’re not in the top 20, you’re nowhere!
Twitter, the flawed genius? You decide
Twitter is becoming part of the fabric of search
Deals announced in the past couple of days will soon see status updates/ tweets added to the search results of both Microsoft’s Bing and Google search result pages (SERP). The sheer volume of information being entered in to twitter every minute has long been eyed up by the likes of Microsoft and Google as it offers them ‘real time’ search through topic trends, an area that even Google has publicly admitted it is lagging behind. This deal with twitter will give them access to instant and constantly evolving information their spiders could never hope to compete with, and it gives twitter its first major source of revenue!
It has its own eco-system
An entire eco-system has sprung up using the twitter platform such as twitter alerts, tweet scheduling, back tweet analysis, polls, group tweets, pictures, backgrounds, advertising… the list goes on. The more developers that come on board to create new tools and applications based upon Twitter’s platform the more likely people are going to find a use for it.
The sheer size of its user base
When it comes down to it, the number of people who use Twitter is massive! Although growth has started to slow down, it still pulls in close to 25 million unique visitors from the USA alone, as shown by compete.com’s unique visitor statistics.
Should you be on Twitter?
A lot of webmasters and business have jumped on board Twitter without really asking why? As with any form of marketing, be it newspapers, Email marketing, or paid search, Twitter is not suitable for everyone. But the reasons why you should not be on Twitter should be based upon those factors and not because you think it will have gone by 2010. It is important to understand Twitter is now firmly established as a major source of traffic for websites, a revenue generator for supporting businesses and is soon to become a vital source of data for the search engines so any question of whether it is simply a short term fad should be dismissed.
Or Is It?
Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.
‘Twas always thus. Twitter was never really a company; it was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter’s better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved.
Despite Williams’ seeming indifference, Twitter took off — so much so that a crush of new users strained its servers, to the point that the service became famous for its technical incompetence. (The “fail whale,” a cheery cetacean icon displayed when Twitter’s website was unavailable, now appears on T-shirts in San Francisco and Brooklyn.)
In its business affairs, too, Twitter is proving incompetent. Most Web 2.0 startups run cheaply, but Twitter faces large bills from mobile-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to mobile phones; the more it grows, the more it pays. And it has yet to announce publicly a way to make money.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have a scheme. The latest one we’ve heard floated: Twitter would charge companies to have verified Twitter feeds, so users would know that a message from, say, ExxonMobil really came from the oil company. (It’s not as hypothetical as it sounds; a Twitter user inexplicably impersonated ExxonMobil this summer.) Verified accounts might then pay Twitter for every message they send, and also get prominent listing in a Twitter directory.
If that sounds like utter nonsense, the fever-dream imaginings of a desperate business-development executive high on whiteboard-marker fumes, that’s because it is.
With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter’s best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn’t even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn’t require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.
So this apparently “Mickey Mouse ” operation is the future of news? That’s not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks, most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter’s length limit was zero characters, not 140.
As more users join, the Twitter feed becomes filled with more and more noise; repetitive retweetings, back-scratching praise, and self-congratulation. A set of amateurs celebrating each other not for the quality or insight of their reporting, but its brevity, swiftness, and modish form of delivery.
