It’s a matter of opinion whether this new feature is a good or bad thing but I’ll look at some factors which come into play when using Google now.

Callouts

On some of the preview images a piece of text from the web page is enlarged and highlighted in an orange box.  What effect does this have on your site visit rate? Maybe none, depending on the content of your site or on the search query used. For specific questions this may have a massive knock on effect to the amount of visitors going to your site, for example if I enter “what size is a football pitch?” I no longer have to click on to a page. I can now hover over the result and view the callout text on the preview image.

Some preview images do not have this callout text. This gives a clear preview of the layout of the site without the callout covering a section of the webpage. This generally occurs when the Meta description is deemed suitable enough to use as the SERP description.

Google ads

The new preview function obscures the ads on the right hand side of the screen. This is not good for customers paying for their ads to rank highly as you can now see lower ranked ads better due to their position on the screen, a lot of new features used by Google have had a knock on effect on how the ads are seen, interesting development for those who avail of the ads to generate visitors.

How image preview is displayed.

On top of the callout changing how your page is previewed, the length of your page will also be a determining factor. The page will appear torn if it’s deemed too long for the preview image or will appear with white space at the bottom if it is deemed too short. Blog home pages will generally appear with a tear in the preview if there is enough blog posts while sites such as Wet Room Materials will appear with some white spacing beneath. A work around for shorter sites would be to apply some css which would stick your footer to the bottom of the page, you can find a tutorial for this here

Flash

Another issue that is providing some discussion on blogs across the web is how flash applications show up in these previews or don’t show up as the case may be. At the moment if you do not have a placeholder image under the flash application you will be met with a gray question mark on your preview image. An example can be seen below from Lifescience recruitment .

You can see from the image how the flash application on the right hand side of the preview is displayed. As I said this issues is causing flash designers a lot of panic, but the Google guys have their eyes on ball here and have promised a fix for this.

Timing

Another issue that I have come across is the timing of Google’s crawl on your site for the image. A site we launched recently Supply Chain Management had the web host holding image on the domain before we put the new site up. As luck would have it Google crawled the site for the preview image during this time and now we have been left with the web host holding image as the preview since Google rolled this functionality out. When it will change is anyone’s guess!

As is always the case with new functionality people will find holes with it! But it’s providing a more transparent search for web user and rams home the point that sites should be designed for users as opposed to search engines. These are just a few issues you may want to keep in mind when designing sites, has anyone else come across any other issues worth mentioning?

UPDATE – The image on our Supply Chain jobs site has been updated, so it’s no longer the host holding page preview anymore.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Don’t send automated queries to Google
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phising or installing viruses, or Trojans or other bad ware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking”.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s rankings or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighbourhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate the Terms of Service of search engines. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

All of the topics covered in our latest series of post can be found in the Help Pages of Google but they can sometimes be a hard read if you are not familiar with the terminology. If you would like to read our previous post explaining Google SEO guidelines check out:

• SEO Basics
• SEO Design & Content Guidelines
• SEO Advanced

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• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser , then chances are that the search engine spiders may have trouble crawling/seeing your site as well.
• Allow search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behaviour, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may or may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since it last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the search engine crawler. Go to http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
• Make sure that your content management system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages to other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

So far in this series of posts we’ve covered How Google Ranks Your Site, SEO Basics, and SEO Design & Content Guidelines.  This post gives you some more advanced SEO insights to consider during the design & development stage of your website. In the next post I’ll discuss SEO quality guidelines basic & advanced.

Design & Content Guidelines from Google

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesnt recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character). be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Google has several other guidelines related to site content and good SEO which we will be discussing over the next few days.

Doing business on the web is no longer about having one web presence, it’s no longer enough to just get eyeballs to your site with little or no interaction. To do business on the web, be competitive and get your message out to as many people as possible you need to have several “homepages”, www.mybusiness.com – www.facebook.com/mybusiness – www.twitter.com/mybusiness. If there is one thing that is going to increase your site traffic, leads and sales it’s interaction. Obviously the more people that are interacting with your sites, leaving comments on your blog or replying to your Facebook updates the easier it will be to convert these interested users into customers in the future.

Although not as advanced as Google Analytics Facebook does provide you with some details about how your Fan Page is interacting with it’s audience.

Weekly interactions:

Fans who interact with your page:

Total fans:

Top countries/cities/languages:

The average person on Facebook has 120 friends and when you consider that almost everyone in your organization will certainly have a personal Facebook page with around 120 friends your Facebook business page can reach a lot of people in a very short space of time. Another excellent thing to remember about Facebook is that when someone receives one of your updates it’s because they have become a fan or a friend has forwarded it on to them, it’s word of mouth online and as such trusted.

Below are some Facebook Fan Pages that have helped their owners increase sales, brand awareness and site interactions.

• Decisions for Heros
• Dorans Seafood

Big Brands

• Guinness Ireland
• U2
• Coca-Cola
• Starbucks