When you’re busy at your computer, or even just taking some downtime and cruising around on Facebook connecting with your friends and family, have you ever wondered how the one of the two largest online properties continue to operate? They offer their services for free access, and you don’t even need to sign up to use it, at least in Googles case. If you’ve found that when you think about it, you really don’t know where their money comes from, you’re not alone.

In a survey conducted in August of last year it turns out that just over a third of internet users out there believe that search engines sell their data to marketers. Another third thought that maybe other companies pay annual dues to use those websites and even 20% of respondents thought that the sites offered premium features. While Google is somewhat transparent about how they make their dough, adwords and ad placements via adsense, Facebook is still working on fleshing out a clear revenue model. They have ads that are on every sidebar and profile page on the site, but with metrics showing that interaction on those ads being rather low, and with costs still high, it hadn’t fleshed out as reliable as of yet. At least in Googles court they’re not selling your information to marketers, still haven’t seen a clear answer from the Facebook side of the web however.

It’s been a number of years now, I think most who work full time on the web have stopped counting, but Google is the dominant force in the search world. Globally rocking somewhere around an 80% share with desktop users and where mobile is concerned, there really isn’t anyone else in the game. It’s no wonder that with the way the last year has gone with Panda/Penguin updates that some businesses have found themselves floundering, as it looks like they put all of their eggs into one, big, Google basket. Most analytic software can tell you where your traffic came from, whether it be Google, Bing, Facebook, or even from a referral link of sorts from a community driven site like Reddit. Using that information you can build a chart of sorts to get an idea of where your traffic is coming from. It’s likely you’ll find that a high percentage of your traffic, 65% and up does indeed come from Google, but if it starts getting higher than that you need to take a look at your website, and about diversifying your online position. In an ideal world, you’ll be getting almost an equal share of traffic from different sites, with Google making up the largest portion of the pie, say 50% or so, and the rest from other online sources. Because just like those who found themselves at the mercy of Panda and Penguin, if you’re relying too heavily on Google traffic, you’ll be in the dumps if you break any rules.

The decision was handed out yesterday from the FTC with Google versus everyone else basically, and while some people were happy with the decision, others obviously were not. In case you’ve missed any of the news surrounding the case, the very basic gist of what the complaint was that Google was controlling their monopoly of online search and marketing using anti-competitive practices.

There were a couple of good points made in the ruling, the main point being that a monopoly in a given market is not, by itself, illegal. In order to make a monopoly illegal, you need to gain, or maintain that hold using anti-competitive practices. This has been a long ongoing case in which the FTC poured over 9 million pages of documents after the charges were initially laid. And after all of that work, all of the discussions and meetings – Google has not violated any U.S. antitrust law.

It’s no real surprise that Google would be the target of such a case, they’re supremely dominant in the search industry. The Mountain View based giant accounted for 74.5% of all U.S. search advertising revenues in 2012. Microsoft on the other hand took in a significantly smaller share at 8% in the past year. The argument has long been that Google has been demoting or removing it’s rivals in their results pages in order to drive users to their own properties. And yet, after an investigation that nearly lasted for two years, and after what FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz described as “an incredibly thorough and careful investigation,” the FTC concluded unanimously that the evidence was lacking to charge Google.

While Google is going to make some changes in the way they do business, they’ve been cleared of any wrong doing where search is concerned, as it turns out they’re just better at it than the other options. From Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

America’s antitrust laws are designed not to punish companies for growing too big or too unpopular, but to ensure no company stifles competition itself… The thriving Internet sector — a bright spot in America’s otherwise lackluster economy — shows no signs of suffering from too little competition.

There seems to be a fair amount of change coming on the search horizon, all of the previous updates over 2012 helped clean up the search results and with the growing acceptance of Google+ as a social network online marketing is set to make a transition. What exactly that transition will be, no one knows for sure in the search market, aside from the search engines that is. Just what Google and Microsoft have up their sleeves is anyones guess.

There have been the prediction blogs of what is to come in 2013, there have been the blogs reminiscing lost, or gained search rankings for 2012. But on the whole there seems to be two facets which are greatly worth considering for the coming search year. The first would be the social arena, if you don’t have a presence already it’s not too late to get in, but it will be a good bit of work, and the second is in the semantic side of search.

Social is easily described, having a Facebook, Google+ or Twitter page, as well as a blog all helps to draw your customers to your website. You can use the social side of the web in order to introduce sales, specials, or even the addition of a new product or service that you never previously offered in your business. The immediate benefit to using the social web is viewership, anyone and everyone who has subscribed to your feed has your new information the second you press that share button, instant traction. The barrier for entry as well, is extremely low, it’s your time. The more time you are able to put into your social pages and sites, the more potential traffic and news you can generate as a result. Google and Microsoft (Bing) haven’t fully taken on social signals as a heavy ranking factor, although they’re slowly getting there. Just how they will decide to leverage the social signals with other SEO efforts is yet to be seen however. 2013 could be another year of swings up and down the search results.

The other topic which bears some consideration is in the semantic side of search. Using proper markup in your webpages allows the search engines to easily and rapidly generate rich snippets for your website, increasing organic visibility and as a likely result generating more traffic to your site. One of the most basic forms of a rich snippet for example are the breadcrumbs which can be generated by search engine bots visiting your website. Take the search result for Facebook as an example, with only 10 results displayed on a search page, when the top 20% of the page is dominated with internal pages to your search query it definitely helps influence your clicks.

As always at this time of year we give our predictions for SEO for the following year, this year we have gathered some help from our friends & other search experts in the field who have given there twist on things to come.

In 2013, the SEO Role must go above and beyond. For example, a basic SEO strategy would obviously include some amount of reporting (for keyword rankings and traffic numbers at the least); however, I find myself analyzing the data to help my client better understand their demographic. Where are visitors accessing the site from, when do they access the site, and what are they specifically looking for when they are on the site?
All of these questions—and more—are in hopes of helping them identify new ways to effectively reach their customer base and ultimately make them more successful. It is SEO’s job to provide meaningful help.

Rand says links and rankings are just means to an end, not the end itself.

What clients really want is not better rankings and more links; they want to make more money.

The SEOs who understood and understand where Google is going and what their clients really want are the ones who are still in business and doing well. For them, the job of a SEO is content relevancy (public relations), user experience, web design, conversions, traffic segmentation, call tracking, research, writing, and anything else that sells products and services and leads to more profits for the client not just short-term, but long-term as well.

Most of all, the job of an SEO is to see the future. Those who can’t will go out of business and take their clients with them.

In conclusion, each of these experts—coming from multiple perspectives–agree that SEO will become a much broader and more complex function in 2013. Yet it will also become more vital than ever before, as it converges with every variety of online presence and marketing.

SEO 2013 predictions

Not that it should be any great surprise, but when comScore released the the search data they’ve compiled for the November 2012 search volumes, Google was at the top of the pack. The search giant is still sitting neatly and strongly at the head of the marketplace with more than two thirds of the monthly search volume, with Bing and Yahoo (powered by Bing) search taking up just over a quarter of the search market.

It should be a rather pointed argument against the hype Bing enjoys conjuring up in the news, both search and technological, that even with their Bing it on challenge and the fuss that they made about the Google shopping services, public usage of Google actually went up from Octobers numbers. It doesn’t sound like much, it was 0.1% increase, but when you’re talking about billions of searches, even that small of a number means a massive amount of search data.

Last month there was somwhere in the neighborhood of 17 billion searches performed, and that was just in the U.S., so where did you and your website come up? If you find that you’re not able to easily answer that question without talking to your website administrators, there are a few basic steps you can look into. You won’t end up with a definite numbered position where you ranked in search, but it will give you an idea as to the kind of chances you’ve given your brand online to rank.

When you approved your site design, did you make sure to stay away from an all graphic, or highly graphic website with little to no textual content on your home page? Your home page is your primary bait which you use to display yourself online. Is your information relevant to your business, and are you an authority in your space? It’s incredibly important to make sure you have your content well written, and at the same time try and stay away from industry specific terms as you can cut yourself off from potential leads. Occasionally it’s a good idea to just read your website through, clicking on all of your navigation points to see if everything is in order and makes sense. Sometimes, you might give your own content a once over and realize that some information you’ve included is no longer applicable to your niche and instead of helping your visibility online, it’s hampering your position. Lastly, talk to your online branding associate and try and keep an open line of communication. Nothing can slow down your online growth like leaving emails and phone calls unanswered.

Online branding and marketing techniques will always be changing and evolving to match the ebb and flow of the web and those who use it. This year especially saw a wide range of changes with the search industry and how Google in particular indexes the web. Major changes such as Panda, Penguin and the EMD (exact match domain) update put some webmasters in the unsavory position of having lost rankings and traffic. Depending on how badly they were affected, some still haven’t recovered lost traffic and potential income.

It hasn’t been all bad though, it’s been a good year in the sense that the word has spread of the differences in the quality of service that some companies can provide you. It’s a fairly safe bet for example, if a search marketing company has pitched working on your companies site, while extoling the dangers and pitfalls of Panda and Penguin, that they’ve been caught and penalized by the system. Call it once bitten twice shy, but it’s safe to say thhat they’ve been shown they’re not doing things quite right, and have have been slapped with a penalty as a result. With the growth of awareness where the quality of your site and how it’s constructed overall, a fair amount of the fly by night experts have disappeared from the playing field, and as an added bonus, there has been an all around increase in online marketing budgets for the coming year. So as we have written in the past, the wheat has been separated from the chaff and as an added bonus – budgets have increased!

Hopefully the changes in the search industry haven’t scared you off from building or promoting your website, the key element we’ve always focused on helping our clients with is by focusing on the content. While a great deal of pretenders have lost position and relevance in the industry with Panada and Penguin, working the quality content angle as we always have proved to be a strong element to remaining at the top of the results page. Going forward into 2013 we’ll continue to deliver strong positioning for our clients, and help them dominate the SERPs for their desired terms. With the loss of some of the local ‘experts’ it’s only made our job easier in the coming year.

Using the web to find the information and services isn’t a difficult task, most of the time it can be a mundane process to tell the truth. You visit your preferred search provider, type in your terms and go from there. So why such the big deal about who stole what idea from whom, and the fuss over having social results in our search results when they’re entirely different pieces of information?

Because after all, that’s all the web is, a cluster of information which you cherry pick what you want from it. Google has their knowledge graph, which is like looking at a Coles notes version of what you’ve searched for, and Bing has recently adopted the idea and called it Snapshots. It provides the same brief information delivery niche, and likely doesn’t get noticed a good 70% of the time. It’s not because Googles version is just that much better, they’re virtually identical in how they display and offer data, and it likely gets passed over just as much as the Bing variation. It’s just another method to getting the information out there when you search.

How about the social side of the web, there’s Facebook, the dinosaur of Myspace and Google+. Facebook is the monster on the web, with more than a billion accounts passed this year, if they can just figure out what to do with all of the noise that the site generates, perhaps it can come out with some useable information at some point. Because Facebook doesn’t really have a way to generate money, it has it’s few ads that it runs and preferred postings, but that’s been done before and as much as people on the web like change, the ad spaces on Facebook don’t get used anywhere near the same level as the spaces on Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Bing and Google both have their own ideas for meshing the social side of the web into the informative side, but neither has found that magic formula that delivers what the users of today are looking for. On average when someone completes a search, they’re already 50% of the way qualified, either as a buyer or a subscriber – they were prompted by something outside the web in the first place. Facebook doesn’t have the search fomula nailed down to provide any kind of search results page, and the search engines haven’t worked out how to weave the social side of the web into the informational. Yet.

We’ve seen the web grow in leaps and bounds over the last year, the search algorithms have taken the results pages through dips, dives, ducks and doges, and 2013 will likely continue more of the same. The year is likely going to start out fast and who knows, maybe the world will finally see the ideal implementation of a social and search mix on a results page.

An interesting point to notice about a search engine, is just how many results are returned when performing a search. Google and Bing have indexed trillions of pages if you mixed them together, an always increasing amount. Some written articles have called it a problem, but Google and Bing rarely display any results passed the 1000 range, even if it says that it found 25,000,000 results for your query.

It isn’t so much a problem that they don’t display a value larger than 1000 results, the question should really be ‘Do they need to?’ The search engines like to pride themselves on delivering the most relevant results, based on what you’ve searched for, your past history and so on. If you’re a fan of having a no strings attached type search, using a search engine like DuckDuckGo may be more up your alley, but the first point still remains. What point does it serve if a search engine tells you it finds millions of results, and doesn’t show you them.

Let’s take the following quick search from Google, for ice cream. We’re in Winnipeg, so we were returned the results for the Wikipedia entry, and then we got into the local restaurants and dessert places that purvey ice cream. But when you look at how many results are returned, 463,000,000.. is that entirely relevant? I don’t need that many results about ice cream, it’s not that wide of a variable product, but Google has said they have that many results. This is where some written pieces have said that there is a problem, even though it says that it has 463,000,000 results, I can’t browse passed the first 1,000 results even though there’s been so many returned. It’s more a personal preference, but some very basic math (default search results pages show 10 results) says, why would I be looking on page 46 million to see what has been indexed about ice cream?

Where online marketing and your brand are concerned, you shouldn’t worry about what is showing in terms of how many pages have been returned that have been indexed. There are some sites and pages from the early 90s that can still be found, which are horrid where aesthetics and usability are concerned if you’d really like to find them. The vast majority of search users don’t go to page 2, let alone page 3 or 4, chances are if their result hasn’t been found on their first search they’re going to revise their terms and try again. Focus on your content, focus on being relevant, and focus on the basics. Don’t worry about the other 463 million results.

Typically when you want to learn the answer to a question, or you want to find the name of that actor in the show you saw, you turn to the internet. Most of the time you have an idea on what site you need to visit to learn your answers, but when you’re not entirely sure where to start you always go back to the beginning of the web. While it’s not really the beginning of the web, search engines do a great job of being a front page, which you can use to access the information you’re looking for.

The web, the way that we interact with it, websites, and search engines have all changed a great deal since this whole thing began. At first the web was just some random websites, that in order to access you needed the IP to get to them. Primarily text based and only informational, it was no where near what we have today. Search engines, Google especially so, have caught the attention of the world. Privacy issues, defamation cases, anti-trust lawsuits, all of them pointed at the largest web index out there, mostly because they’re number one. There is absolute truth about the way Google shares your account information with any devices you use while signed in, it’s how the service learns to deliver you results which you might be interested in. Anti-trust suits are growing mostly for the same reasons that they did against Microsoft a while back with their Internet Explorer browser and how EU users felt they weren’t given a choice with the Windows OS (largely paraphrased). And defamation suits may pick up steam with the recent ruling in Australia, that Google can be viewed as a publisher of the search results page, making them liable for the links they post. In all of these cases the thinking is fairly basic, if you can make the biggest fish in the sea change the way it operates, everyone else will likely follow suit.

A point it seems that lawyers and judges seem to forget however, is that the web is a much bigger place than it was even a few years ago. With somewhere in excess of 2 billion connected users, websites, search engines, and every online resource has had to rapidly change to serve their visitors needs. Search engines like Google and Bing, developed an instant answer service which immediately displays results based on what you’re searching for, based on the most searched terms currently. Instant results vary a fair amount every couple of weeks and often more frequently, but the key point that seems to be ignored: the terms used in autocomplete are the most popular terms that have been searched so far. Your autocomplete searches will vary greatly depending on your search history, the top search trends and the your local search activity. Unfortunately for Google and any other search engine that uses a results page of any kind, the mantra of ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ is still largely unheeded in current court cases.

There’s a lot of noise being made lately from the Bing side of the web about how Google isn’t playing by the good old search rules and they’ve coined their term ‘Scrooogled’. I find the term a bit of comedy, as Scroogle used to be an anonymous way to search via Google by blocking cookies and not using log files, but instead of focusing on a service that no longer exists I had a read of Bings press release on the matter.

The title: “Don’t get Scroogled: Bing Launches Campaign for Honest Search..” I shortened it a bit as it’s rather long, but it sounds like they want to help search engine users find relevant results. It didn’t take long for Bing to get into the numbers of things, a projected $96 billion in online shopping this year, but perhaps a little generous when saying half of that comes from search engines. That number is likely lower than that, but, let’s disregard that for the moment – most online shoppers use a site like Amazon to find their deals online. It didn’t take very long for Bing to start comparing apples to oranges though, because very quickly in their blog posting they talk about how the Google Shopping results are based partially on paid inclusion – much like you would do with running an profitable Adwords campaign. For those who have never seen the admin side of the Adwords platform, once you’ve set your bid and ad, Google gives you a projection of where they think you’ll place within the results. They’re by no means set in stone and change day to day based on bid, competition on your terms, and so on.

Why I use the apples to oranges comparison however is because Bing is comparing search results, to shopping results, and saying that Bing is playing by the “old search rules” where Google Shopping is not. you can’t really compare Bing web search to Google Shopping search, as it would be like comparing Google web search to Amazon shopping search, they serve different functions and as a result, function completely different. In May of this year Google Commerce published a blog describing how the change to the shopping side of their product was going to begin to use a paid metric to help build on the relevance of the results, because a retailer wouldn’t pay for an ad to list a fake product. It is like advertising using billboards or radio ads to try and reach more consumers, it’s just another marketing medium to get your product out there. So to skip ahead just a little, Bing is comparing their organic web search, to Google’s Shopping search results – an apples to oranges comparison.

In the interest of fairness, I decided to have a look at the Bing shopping results, versus the Google shopping results. Being that we’re now comparing apples to apples, if there is a disparity it shouldn’t be too difficult to spot. I searched for the likeliest top sellers for the holiday shopping season, and was surprised at every turn. Not by the results that Google served me, but by the lack of results Bing returned. Each results page was sorted by relevance, and I’ll just let the screenshots speak for themselves.