Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

10.29

Setting up for How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography #smx #12D

10.53

Personalization is done by where you are and how you search, Next session on #SMX

10.54

Google Guy showing the same slides from the last session #smx. Talk more about contextual

10.56

Context Search is considered:  #smx

• Geography
• Language
• Context from previous queries

10.58

Try to get the best results down to the city level #smx You don’t have to keep restating yourself to Google

11.07

More personal to you, tries to get you to the sites that you like. Google puts those results higher #smx

How can webmasters help?

• Make content that users want
• Claim your place on Google Places and made sure that all info is correct. Let them know about all your locations.
• No phone numbers, address in images. Make it all readable
• Make your site work on mobile
• Lots of Geos and different languages. There are guidelines you should follow. Read through best practices.
• Use Geotargeting in Webmaster tools
• You can turn personalization on or off. Toggle on the results page.

Make sure people are getting things in the right language and geography.

11.10

Rangan Majumder from Bing also funny. first time speaking at #smx

Personal history and geo at Bing.

10  blue links on the left, he decides the ranking of those links

11.13

Bing: What is context, set of circumstances or facts around a particular event, situation

• Social
• Personal- long and short term
• Location – where are you

Never abuse a user’s trust they take this very seriously. They give you controls

11.22

Per Bing Rank=Authority + Quality of keyword match + personal and social preference #smx
Demo for auto suggest,
Change location:
Hit settings button and type in where you are from that will change where your results are from

use brackets around ambiguous search results ie radio station: {98.5} San Jose {98.5} Seattle
Help us understand who your page is for:

• Keywords, anchor text.
• Add a location to your page make sure it is very clear, city and state

11.48

Both engines want to get you very local maybe even to the block you are on if they can #smx #12b

How do you decide when to make it local:

• Google: do their best to make it local, depends on the query. It is not just a game of local words
• Bing: there are some words that will trigger local more than others.

• If you are signed out of Google, they keep track of your searches for 180 days, cookies. If you are signed in then they use your web history. If I am logged out can I see my recent search history – NO
  Bing: does not know the number of days they go back for cookies. Logged in search history very similar to how it is done on Google

General Questions:

If you were an ecommerce company how does geo hurt. Google: don’t do weird unnatural things. If your biz is international you don’t have to do anything bazaar to be found (My note: I am not sure about this) Have a page in the language people are querying for.
Bing: Trying to figure out if you want international. There seems to be questions here.

How does anyone discover new stuff? No good answers

Don’t have access to peoples Geo data because it is private.
Bing: this is in the future

I am national and I can’t compete with the local. What do I do:

• Google: Tries to balance global popularity. Not our goal to knock out buying things on line. Try to bring in the online presence
• Bing: This is a problem and still trying to figure it out. Maybe this is good for schema.org
• Danny asked if anyone in the audience has a solution to this  and no one had the answer

What is the % of personalization?

• Google: There is no target %. We do analysis to figure what % of these searches are local or personal. Varies a lot by query and ability to do it.
• Bing: We are still showing there is a lot of opportunity. There is more today than in the past and there is a lot of opportunity.

Bounce rate how does this impact a site?

• Google: Try to figure out if searches are good. Not just bounce but lots of factors
• Bing: You should look at these things as a person. If you bounce from it then it must not be a good site. Was this user satisfied. There are other things also considered

Mobile -

• Google, even customize a little bit for mobile. Is his word of recommendation. There are differences with mobile search
• Bing: Mobile is a context. If your pages are good on mobile then they will rank better.

11.58

Q&A on Personlized Search History and Geography. #smx #12B

Personalized results is different between the sizes of an actual city. Larger cities are getting the priority.

• Google: Tries to give you the best results
• Bing: If an area is more dense then you need to be more precise on the location

Ranking reports, how do you do this with personal search:

• Google: trying to get users to the content they want We know how difficult it is to measure
• Bing: Complexity, but users are more important
• Danny: ranking reports should have been thrown out long ago. You should be looking at your traffic