One of the current subjects of discussion in the web marketing community is Google’s addition of the Google+ social networking service to its tool chest of products. Google+ is of interest to web marketing, and particularly SEO practitioners, because of Google’s apparent intention to include the Google+ ‘likes’ directly into its organic search ranking algorithm, which will shift the search ranking results away from general internet relevancy towards a more Google proprietary relevancy. It also means that the determination of whether a website ranks well or not will directly relate to the number of people using the Google+ service, and what kind of people they are, ie, what age are they, what social background, and what they think about Google.
This is a concern not just because of the discrimination involved, but also because, in spite of Google’s attempts to fend off anti-trust actions against it with its ‘consolidation’ of its privacy policy over the last week, to join Google+ you basically have to entirely open up your life to Google. Google says that by letting them know every search you do, every person, phone number and email account of everyone you know, it will be able to provide an increasingly personalised service, anticipating for you what you are really interested in, and skewing the information Google decides you want to see. Anyone who has read George Orwell will now be screaming ‘1984!’ (it could also be Fahrenheit 451?). In Google’s new terms and conditions, they say using any of their products will become subject to their new privacy policy, which basically means you are allowing them to know literally everything about you. If you don’t want that, you won’t be able to join Google+. (more…)
Another of our success stories, the Garagedoorsonline.co.uk (GDO) ecommerce website is surging ahead with record visit and page view rates in January 2012, as well as with its Google organic search rankings. Visit rates look to top 52,000, with over 400,000 page views (a 7.7:1 ratio) and 2.7 million hits. Freetimers works its SEO and web marketing on a continuous improvement basis with this client, and not only does it have the most sophisticated ecommerce site in its field, it also has a huge admin system that is best in its class and offers our client unrivaled functionality to manage their business. Our continuous improvement has also worked a treat with the visits up 117% and page view stats 146% increased over this time last year, even in the current economic climate.
The site currently achieves top 5 rankings for its products in just about every location in the uk (for some 30,000 search phrases), in addition to having some 80% of its more generic search phrases ranking in the top 10, in a hugely competitive and cut-throat market. The site is one of 10 for this client, and the other major sites are all improving to similar extents.
If these are the sorts of results you need from your SEO or Web Marketing, then you should be speaking to us (as long as you are not a competitor to GDO!).