• Google: Apart from showing the disappointing financial results for Q1, Google changed its algorithm as usual but for once, it made the changes public. First, site links are now widespread on the search engine result pages. The main impact will be that each website has more space and more links in the Search Engine Result Page  (SERP). This would surely lead to a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for websites whose content matches better what internet users look for. Secondly, SERP are now more local and geolocalised. Indeed, Google may use your latest local queries typed in the Google toolbar and responds to queries such as “japanese restaurant” with a map from Google Maps.  This is indeed very interesting because Google goes one step further into personalised results. It also shows that optimising your website into Local Business ads is  a must now more than ever. Finally, on top of offering the geocalised suggest feature and local news feature, which recently expanded to the UK, India and Canada, Google changed its URLs in the SERP. It means that more parameters will be available. Here is the example presented in the Google blog:

Old URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
New URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The difference in parameters is the following:

——- old

http://www.google.com/search

hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

——- new

http://www.google.com/url

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge, as now, one can track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how you can do it here (in French) or here (in English).

• Mobile Search: Google released its latest Gmail version. This is a pretty good one as it is faster and uses the Gears technology (yep, you can access your mails even when you have no signal). Google Maps is getting closer and closer from Maps Quest. It seems that Google will already be number one for all vertical search features by the time the internet is available on each and every mobile device.
  

  Google Maps gets closer from Mapquest

• SMO and Twitter: It seems that Twitter makes most of the news for the SMO world. To follow the latest news, follow my bookmarks on the topic: Delicious/twitter

Voila! To stay updated on the latest news, you may want to follow me on twitter, or follow my rss, my delicious or all my feeds on friendfeed.

Have a fruitful week!

The year or 2008 was undoubtly content-oriented. In addition to simply creating content for users, the year witnessed more usage of rich media (optimised images, news, videos, products, etc).   It was also linkbuilding-oriented. We all promoted websites through partnerships and Social Media Optimisation in addition to on-page optimisations. The year 2009 will probably be all the same. Specificaly, you may want to get ready for Audio indexing by optimising the audio content of your videos. Well, we should actually be ready, because audio content will probably be very hard to optimise when Google decides to include it in its universal search. Nevertheless, I want to point out today that there is something new to take into account: local search marketing. Although it’s still in its early phase, advertisers are expected to triple the money they spend in local search marketing within 2 years, according to the Marketing Sherpa latest release.

Local search marketing can be divided into local search, geolocalisation and mobile search. The difference between geolocalisation and local search is about who excludes content based on geographical location. For geolocalisation, advertisers choose to promote content that is in relation with where the targeted internet user lives. The variable is the IP address of the internet user’s computer. Local search is different, in the sense that internet users are the ones deciding to add the name of a location in the query. For instance, I actively search locally when I Google pizza paris. Finally, mobile search comes into play through GPS – most mobile search engines now include GPS tracking and serve results based on your localisation – and the behaviour of users of mobile devices – they intend to search more local stuff surrounding them vs. internet users behind the screen of their pc’s.

I’ll go in depth into each of these 3 elements in the next posts   Happy new year to all of you and do not hesitate to post comments on local search marketing if you feel like it!