Fifteen hundred search engine fanatics are currently gathering in London in the midst of a three-day conference, Search Engine Strategies (SES). As the digital marketing expert, Guy Levine, put it on Twitter they are all in "Geek Heaven". They are devouring the nitty-gritty of search and how the finest changes to your website can bring about better ranking, more links and thereby more money.

 

That's all noble stuff, of course. Many of the delegates at SES are businesses themselves; quite a few are in the search marketing world who sell  their services to the rest of the business world who are not interested in the geeky stuff. SES performs a valuable service, of course, by sharing knowledge and updating the experts. But therein lies the problem.

When you gather together a group of experts and focus on a topic a psychological phenomenon called "social acceptance theory" comes in to play. What that means is that everyone will agree on the importance of their industry, the fundamental value of search and that the whole arena of search is just brilliant. Yes, they will argue and debate the tiny fragments of detail; but no-one will step out of line and say that search is nonsense.

So I'll do it for them; search is nonsense. There, I've said it. Of course, I'm using the word in its most literal sense, suggesting that the search industry has "no intelligible meaning". It all makes sense to those geeks in London this week, but to the rest of us it may as well be in Ancient Greek for the sense it makes. It's rather like a bunch of doctors getting together at a conference. They would be chatting away about the importance of "probiotics in the prevention of rhinoviral URTI". Got that? Er? OK, I'll get my doctor friend to translate...! What that means is if you give your kids a balanced diet they are less likely to get a cold.

It's the same at SES. Put a bunch of experts together, bung in some social acceptance theory and within minutes they are all talking in lingo the rest of the world doesn't understand. The point of doctors, for example, is to help us maintain our health. So talking in language that separates them fails to do that. The point of search is to enable people to find our online offering. The point of search is not to make it into some great big mystery. And that's what happens when you "expert-ize" it. The result is language that doesn't connect with the rest of us - "SSIs for information architecture" is up for grabs today at SES London, for instance.

What we need are search specialists who don't get too hung up on the nitty-gritty, but tell it to us like it is. In fact, search is so much simpler than the experts might like us to think it is. In just the same way, medicine is much more straightforward than people on £150,000 a year as a GP might like us to believe; most people who visit their doctor get better naturally, with no intervention by their GP other than "let's keep an eye on it and come back to me in a couple of weeks". Search is similar; do the right thing and people will find you.

But what is the "right thing"? What you need to find out are the terms people associate with your company or organisation. Then you create web content that matches exactly what they are looking for. That's it. Google, Bing and Yahoo! do the rest for you.

No doubt SES London will help the specialists find extra ways of helping you; but they will focus on the nitty gritty when all you need to do is concentrate on the big picture. And whatever happens at the Business Design Centre in Islington before the end of the week, one thing is for sure, if you were to produce a one-line summary of the whole event it would be "create exactly the right content for your users".The SES delegates will "dress that up" as "information architecture", "keyword analysis" and "analytics", but it all boils down to the simple fact - EXACTLY the right content is what you need to produce.

As the psychologist Edward de Bono said:

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

Those nitty-gritty details being discussed in London are not the problem. The search engine "problem" of being ranked highly and found by potential customers only arises because so many businesses fail to create the content that people are actually looking for. Do that and the search "problem" disappears. Unless, of course, you're a search geek, influenced by social acceptance who uses language that separates you from the rest of us. To you it's much more complicated; personally, I prefer simplicity.

In a blaze of headlines Google has launched Buzz, its much-hyped "status" application. Let us set aside, for the moment, that Yahoo also has a service called Buzz and consider what the Google service is all about. It is no more than an "integrator". And it is only doing that if you have a Google Mail account. If you don't have a Google Mail account or don't want one, you can't use Google Buzz. And therein lies Google's first problem.

Corporates don't like Google Mail. For a start there are security issues. Then there are legal issues; companies need an auditable trail of emails and that's much easier when everything is on your own servers. Microsoft Exchange and other similar email platforms rule in the corporate world. If corporates want to use status updates or quickly share information they will continue to use either Twitter, or in-house status sharing applications, such as the market leader, Yammer.

In other businesses the simplicity of having computer-based email applications or CRM programs like ACT mean that Google Mail ends up being restricted to personal email, or other non-business stuff. Many Google Mail accounts are secondary accounts - there for backup or for use when dealing with online services your are not sure about when signing up. Google Mail is a perfect way of diverting those non-core emails away from busy inboxes. That means for many people they'll need to use Twitter to keep up-to-date with their business colleagues and then Google is hoping they will also use Buzz to keep up to date with their Google Mail contacts. It won't happen; simplicity is what people want.

Google, of course, is betting on the fact that its application is simple; that it puts in one place everything people will need - microblogging, email, link sharing and so on. That's a great idea, but fails to take into account the way people actually use Google Mail now and the way people are currently behaving online. Remember, the heaviest users of Google Mail are technophiles; they are online geeks who just love using the technology. The rest of the world - most of us- behave very differently. Don't judge the likely success of Google Buzz on the technophiles.

Google is admitting that they can't compete with Twitter anyway. Google search results now include the latest Tweets; and Google Buzz allows you to use Twitter as well. The result of Google Buzz will be that those people who are fans of Google Mail (and most internet users are not) will be Tweeting inside Google. Round one to Twitter.

On top of all this, Microsoft's webmail service, Windows Live, has twice as many visits as Gmail. Google's webmail system is not as popular as they would like you to believe. Indeed, Yahoo Mail gets almost five times as much traffic. Google may have created a lot of buzz about its service, but the reality is that it will only affect a small proportion of the online world. For it to truly succeed , Google will need millions of people to give up Yahoo Mail and Windows Live. It will also need corporate America to change policy and switch to external webmail applications instead of legally secure internal servers. And it will need millions of people to accept an increasingly complex online life - using Twitter for some things and Google Buzz for others.

There is no doubt that Google Buzz will be a success, but not as big as Google would like us to think. And even if it does achieve multimillion levels of usage, much of it will be Tweets anyway.

One other thing; how do you think Google will pay for it? Yes; that's right. It will load it with adverts. And that's precisely what people do not like in social networking sites. Ask Facebook, where almost no adverts get clicked on at all. Ask Twitter users who balk at the advertising Tweets in their droves. Google Buzz will undoubtedly be big, but that's simply because of Google's size and impact. In reality, Buzz will be an also-ran.

Rafael Benitez has apologised to the fans at Liverpool Football Club for the current poor performance of the team. They are 7th in the Premier League and apparently that's not good enough. To make matters worse they were beaten this week by Reading - who are near the bottom of the Championship (one league below Liverpool). But hang on a minute, shouldn't we put things in perspective?

The Premier League is the foremost football league in the world; it has the richest teams, the best players and the biggest TV audience worldwide, bar none. So, being 7th in the top league in the world is rather excellent, is it not? After all there are 13 teams worse than Liverpool in that top league in the world. There are thousands of professional soccer clubs around the world who are much, much worse than Liverpool. Fans of positive thinking would be encouraging Liverpool to "look on the bright side" and to see that being 7th is not negative at all - but something to be proud of. After all, are you 7th in the world in your profession? You'd love it if you were...!

Yet, in the world of the Premier League being 7th is nothing; it's not noticeable in Europe, the sponsors will pay you less and you'll even lose fans whose loyalty cannot be guaranteed if you are not in the top three or four of the league. Indeed, there is a chasm between the top four clubs in the UK Premier League and the rest of professional football. And in your business world it's exactly the same.

Over at Google, if you are not in the top four positions of the search results page for any given keyword search you are nowhere. Studies have consistently shown that 80% of all clicks on a Google search results page go to the top four results. So, rather like Liverpool Football Club, you are nowhere if you are not one of the Four Tops. So, how can you deal with that?

Some people may suggest that going for "pay per click" (advertising) is a short-term fix. Pay for attention, they say, while you sort out your website and get its ranking improved. But when you analyse the adverts on Google and other search engines you find similar data; if you are not in the Top Four adverts, you are nowhere. So, the PPC route could end up being very expensive.

Of course, you could try "search engine optimisation"; that's a fancy name for "doing the right thing". Many so-called SEO experts have made this a rather black art and brought the whole field into disrepute. All you have to do is find out for yourself the differences between the websites that get ranked at Number One for any search term and those that rank Number Five. If, for instance, you search for "Liverpool Football Club" you discover the usual mix of results. Top of the table here is the Premier League itself, closely followed by the Dallas Morning News, the Liverpool site itself and then the main fan site. Check out some of the data from these website and you'll find several common features shared by these sites, that are not the same for the sites lower down the Google results.

1. The sites high up search engine rankings tend to have large numbers of pages. Google "weighs things by the pound"; the more pages you have, the more valuable you are perceived to be.
2. The top results also have large numbers of links, with the greatest proportion of those links being "anchored" by the phrase that was searched for. Others, down the results page may have more links overall, but fewer of those links, in this example, will be for "Liverpool Football Club".
3. At the highest positions you also find sites that are updated most frequently; regular updates - and several of them - gets Google's attention.

You can repeat the exercise for any search phrase and you find a common theme. In order to get into the top four results - and be noticed - for your search terms you need:

• A large site with hundreds, if not thousands, of pages - and more pages than your competitors;
• A site that has as many links of possible where the link uses the keyword you want ranking for (not just "click here");
• Regular updates of your website - add content more frequently than your competitors.

So, what does this mean in reality? It means you can win the search engine battle by adding to content to your website constantly and then share that content with social networking sites. In return you get a site that has loads of pages and which grows every week - and you'll get loads of keyword-related links.

The answer to your search engine woes is simple. The answer to Liverpool's woes is simple too - just play better than their competitors. And in reality that's all you have to do to get into the Top Four on Google.

 

 

Two-thirds of  people who are searching for local businesses have no intention of buying anything from them online. That's the startling statistic from new research conducted on why people search. The study of search intentions shows that 66% of people are merely trying to find a business location, phone number or driving directions. This has important implications for any business web site.

Indeed, the research found that only one in ten people actually went on to contact the business using the internet, having completed a search. Some 89% of people went on to use offline methods of connection or to conduct further searches. It suggests that even after 20 years of web activity, the offline world is still highly important to people. Companies who concentrate their efforts on being "virtual" or entirely online are clearly losing out.

People want to speak to you on the phone, visit your premises and meet you in the "real world". It is increasingly evident that many businesses are neglecting the need for "offline" activity in a bid to do everything online. Clearly that's not what people like. Indeed, the figures show a slight increase in the desire for offline connections, instead of online methods.

So, what does this all suggest for your website? It means that your phone number, address, directions to shops and offices and so on, must all be visible for everyone who lands anywhere on your website. That means on EVERY page. Making people locate this information within your site will slow them down and increase their level of frustration with you, producing negative thoughts about your company.

It's also a good idea to have all your contact information on every page, since studies have shown that when you identify your business as "real" you increase levels of trust in your website visitors. Companies who effectively hide their contact information are perceived as less trustworthy. So, there is a "double whammy" impact of having full contact details on every page - you increase levels of trust AND you immediately provide the offline information most searchers are actually looking for.

But whatever you do in terms of providing those offline points of contact, what is clear from this new research is that the online world is actually only of marginal importance to people. We all live in a physical, three-dimensional world - and that's the world your customers expect you to inhabit. Ignore it at your peril.

Search engine users - that's you and me, amongst millions of others - are being fooled. The likes of Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL and others have helped us believe that search is fantastic, that it is productive and that it really helps us in ways that were not possible without the internet. True, we can find information through search engines very easily - but at what price?

 

There is a psychological phenomenon known as "social acceptance theory". If something becomes accepted wisdom by a large enough group of people, we all believe it because to do otherwise would mean falling out of line, being too different. Millions of people believe, avidly, that search has changed their lives. And they are right. Google and their competitors have revolutionised the way we get information making it faster, easier and more convenient than ever before.

But because we are so convinced by the positives, we ignore the negatives about search engines. What we don't see - even though it is staring us in the face - is the abject failure of search engines to find what we want. Take one search as an example. I want to find a project manager based in Reading. So I pop off to Google and type in "project manager reading uk". What do I get? A list of sites with job adverts - people who are advertising for a project manager's job in reading. That's not what I wanted. You might say I failed to give Google a detailed enough search term but equally it failed to interpret my keywords accurately enough.

This is a common problem. Indeed, most of the time Google fails to produce what we want. According to the latest figures from Keyword Discovery, only 48% of people click through to a search result having typed something into Google. You know as well as anyone else that often when you type in something to Google, you can see that the results presented were not what you were looking for, so you try another search phrase. With 52% of our searches failing to produce what we want, this means that more than half of your time on Google is completely unproductive.

Traditional wisdom has it that we go back to Google and type in a longer phrase, but the latest data on search phrase shows that we are actually reducing the number of words we type in - not increasing them. A year ago only 30% of our searches were a single word, now that's risen to 46%. This suggests that we have given up trying to be specific with our searches because we know that what we get is still not what we want, so we may as well save a bit of time and only type in one word and still get a bunch of rubbish.

For instance, if I type in just "project manager" into Google, the first handful of results are not about jobs but about being a project manager and project management. Plus there are useful sites such as Wikipedia in the list which might help provide links to other sources of information in my hunt for a project manager in Reading. In other words, Google has been more accurate with the shorter keyword phrase than with the longer one; it has provided me with leads that could help, whereas the longer, seemingly more accurate phrase, led me in the wrong direction.

Worse than all this is the fact that 40% of searches we make are for stuff we have already previously searched for. In other words we are not actually "searching" but instead we are simply "re-finding" something - using Google rather like a telephone directory instead of a "sophisticated" search engine. Yet, the fact we use Google constantly throughout the day means we are so familiar with it we don't see its faults. Combine that with the need to be seen to be part of the group - social acceptance - claiming that Google really helps, and you have a potent mixture for missing the obvious.

Google is wasting your time. This is especially true if you are in business. If you spend around an hour a day on Google, half that time is unproductive. Multiply that by 10 employees, say, and you've lost five hours of work a day - every day. Add to this the fact that because search marketing is seen as important, you now spend even more hours planning, analysing and working on pay per click campaigns for instance. All to produce adverts in a system that mostly fails to deliver what your potential audience actually wants and which we all spend unnecessary hours using.

Now it's true that people can demonstrate increased business as a result of search marketing and it's also true that with the right kind of good SEO you can show more traffic to websites via the search engines. But if I put a big yellow bucket on every street corner in town with copies of my ebooks in it, people would take them and I'd be able to "prove" that "yellow bucket marketing" is the way to go. In other words, you are bound to find that search marketing works because that is what you are doing. Do something else and that too will work. Just because search marketing succeeds does not mean that an alternative will not be better. There is a real possibility that people have become so hooked on search dues to familiarity and social acceptance theory that they are missing a better alternative.

And it looks like Google - as well as the other search companies - have also had their eyes closed to an alternative to search which is now biting them on the rear end. Asking people.

Before search engines were invented that's what you did when you needed help, a solution to a problem, information or advice. You simply asked someone who you thought would know the answer or would know someone who would know. But along came search and we all fell into the trap of thinking it is marvellous. But now, as social network search facilities improve we are discovering in our millions that we can do what we are naturally inclined to do, and that is ask someone. So you can go on to Twitter or LinkedIn and ask people for an answer to your particular problem. Within moments you have an answer and often a link to the very site you need to go to.

People on social networking sites are more accurate than any algorithm fancy engineers can produce at working out what you really mean. You ask a question, say, on Twitter. You get several answers and useful links which you can then go to. No wasting time with useless searches, no wasting time with having to type in different words and no wasting time going to sites that didn't fulfil their pay per click promise. Asking other people is what we prefer to do, it's what works and it's faster and therefore increases our productivity.

Search engines have their place. They certainly do help us and have enabled many businesses to thrive, including mine. Yet we might be missing the obvious because we are all facing in the wrong direction. Search may not be as great as we think it is. Social search may well be the future because it is the past.

Raise your hands brothers and sisters if you believe. Say "I believe"...again, say "I believe"...one more time brothers and sisters...say "I believe - I believe in the greatness that is SEO". For many people who are running an online business, search engine optimization (SEO) has taken on almost religious levels of faith. Tell people that SEO is nonsense and they look at you like you are a devil worshipper.

 

But new sociology research from the University at Buffalo in New York State suggests we may believe in the power of SEO because we only seek information that confirms our thinking. As soon as we find data or information that makes it possible that an alternative viewpoint exists, we mentally head for the hills, denying the new material. In fact the study shows that people essentially ignore any information that presents a contrary view to the one they already hold.

Although this study was focused upon political views, it shows that once a group of people get an idea in their head, it is very difficult to shift that notion - even if the view is confirmed as false. The study showed that the false belief that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 9/11 atrocity still persists - in spite of evidence showing that this could not be the case.

Consider then the whole area of "search engine optimisation" - SEO. Wherever you look there is simply tons of support for it. Indeed, Google serves up more than 31m indexed pages for it and if you check on keyword monitoring services, such as Wordtracker, you'll find hundreds of variations of phrases using SEO, search engine optimization and so on. Clearly, it is a hugely popular topic.

But this new research raises the possibility that it is all bunkum, that we have a false belief in the goodness of SEO, which is merely constantly confirmed because we deny the existence of any information which dares to suggest that SEO might not work. In other words, we think that SEO is wonderful because we only see the "evidence" that confirms that belief.

Whenever you dare to criticise any aspect of internet technology, along comes someone to tell you that you don't know what you are talking about and that it certainly worked for them. Maybe. But maybe something else could have worked better. That's the problem with SEO; it's relatively easy to get good results, which only then "confirms" that it works - further helping us have faith in what may well be a falsehood. And, as a result, endless numbers of people can tell you it works. But maybe something else could work better.

Search engines, of course, have an interest in indexing stuff that promotes the apparent value of SEO. This leads to us seeing a considerable amount of information supporting the view that SEO is excellent, which in turn helps confirm our belief that it works. In other words, just as with many other popular ideas, the ever circular arrangement of supporting material, confirming our view, which then creates more supportive material is simply a way of helping us believe in something that is false.

The essential thing to always have in mind is whether or not SEO works for you, your marketplace, your customers, your products and your specific circumstances. Because it works for one of your products or services does not mean it will work for another. Just because SEO works for one of your networking contacts, doesn't mean it will work for you.

In other words, don't have blind faith in SEO - question it, test it and analyse it. If you don't, you could well end up believing it is working, when in fact it isn't. And as this New York State study shows, you will never even know it isn't working because you will shut your mind to the evidence that it is failing.

The only way out of this conundrum is to test every aspect of your web site, to analyse the data and act on the information you glean from evidence. Mere faith will get you nowhere online.

Google is no longer a search engine. Instead, it is fast becoming a "short cut" engine to get to content we already know about. The fact that "Michael Jackson" is the current number-one search term on Google should not amaze us. But the remaining "searches" show a surprising trend.

The second search term on Google is "facebook". That means you can click on the first result to get straight to the Facebook home page. It's much quicker than typing "http://www.facebook.com", plus it is less prone to typing errors. And even if you do make a mistake, such as typing "facebok", Google picks up the mistake and presents what you were really looking for. As a result, the "search" engine is merely acting as a tool to get you to where you want to go, quickly.

True enough, you could achieve the same "shortcut" using a "Favorite" or a "Bookmark", even using a desktop icon. However, it appears that relatively small proportions of people actually do this, preferring instead to type the name of the service they want into Google, because it is quicker and easier to do that.

The Internet Examiner raises this very issue and asks "How lazy are we?". Well, the answer is quite lazy. Of the current Top 10 search terms on Google, five are for places that we already know about - Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo and Google. Yes, that's right, the 10th most popular search term in Google is "google"...! That might seem strange, but it's a quirk of browsers. Most people leave their browsers on default settings which means that if you type the word Google into the address bar (which by rights should also have the http://www.) the browser does a search for the word you have typed in and takes you to the nearest matching site. In other words, the fact that "google" is the 10th most popular "search" term indicates that people are just typing this single word into their address bar as a shortcut.

People are lazy; it is built in to our very nature. Slowness helps survival - reduce your metabolic rate and you live longer. Contrary to what we might expect, athletic people tend to die younger than non-athletes, for instance. Deep inside us there is some kind of "instinct" which helps us take the short cuts, in order to help boost our survival. So it is no surprise that we are lazy when using Google.

But this has two serious implications for anyone running an online business. Firstly, it means that the Google data about what people searched for has an inbuilt inaccuracy; they may not have been "searching" at all, instead using what they thought was a short cut. And that means your site analytics may not be all their cracked up to be. Secondly, it suggests that if you can provide "short cuts" to getting to your web site, you could get more traffic than you might from "search".

To do this you firstly need to generate links to your site. Spread these across the web and you will get the lazy, short cut lovers to click on a link, rather than have to search for you or type anything in. Concentrating on gaining links should be a fundamental strategy - and by links I mean thousands of them. You can easily achieve this using software that finds relevant, quality sites you can ask for links. Not enough time is spent by web site owners trying to generate valuable links.

Next, make it easy for people to bookmark your site, or make a favorite of it. You can do that for this site by clicking this link:

You need to add a bookmarking script to your site or content management system to enable visitors to have a short cut back to your pages. Also, have a "Recommend to friends" option so that people can quickly send a link to your site to their contacts - even to themselves.

In short, the easier you make it for people to click to your site, the better. That way, you provide the lazy person's way of reaching your content. Google has its place, but it's worthwhile remembering that for many people it is no longer a "search" engine,  but a "short cut" engine. It shows that your web site visitors need the easy way to get to you - and therefore you need to do everything you can to help them be as lazy as possible. And just think about it - by doing so you'll probably be helping them to live longer...!