It’s great to have everything customized to suit just you, right? You like your bed a certain stiffness, your oatmeal a certain thick and your coffee a certain sweet. How about your search results? According to an article by The Register, Google is working to “‘personalize’ as much as 20 percent of your web searches”.

While this might be good for some things, we’re thinking it could also be like formulating an answer before someone even finishes asking the question.

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The Register quotes Google software engineer Bryan Horling, who spoke this afternoon at the Search Marketing Expo, as saying that one in five searches are customized using a user’s location, web history or online contacts. “Between these three techniques,” Horling said, “just about every user who’s engaging with Google search today is affected.”

Horling explains that many of the changes, however, are rather subtle and usually involve rearranging a few results on a page and not providing an entirely different set of results. Google has tailored results on a large scale, such as by country, for years, Horling explains, but is now “applying it at a finer granularity.”

While people we are in contact with are often of the same mindset and our location comprises much of our interaction with the world, do we really want Google to assume this for us? If we are researching a topic that is normally completely out of our realm, do we really want the search engine to pull us back in, however subtly? Take Google’s “social search” for example.

“The idea behind social search is that we surface content from your social circle,” he said. If you know a particular person, for instance, Google may ensure that a document they wrote receives particular prominence on the results page.

Customizing search results, it would seem, can be like putting us in an echo chamber of similar ideas and opinions. If we look up technology related topics in Google, suddenly we are fed links from our tech savvy contacts that Google pulls from our Buzz stream. But what if we are looking for the outside perspective? Even if we aren’t intentionally looking for the outside perspective, we’re suddenly being subtly driven back to our own world view, as repeated by our peers.

While some examples, like searching for a bus schedule or searching for the words “coffee shop” seem self evident, we have to wonder how these one in five results are changing the way we search the Web.

And if nothing else, we’d rather be able to opt-out if we need, without having to sign out, delete our cookies, clear our cache and reboot the system.

Discuss

LinkedIn has launched new custom company profiles. These let companies and other organizations create rich, multimedia overviews of what they are all about for prospects to view and engage with.

The custom company profile displays content that company’s can easily tailor and update, and the content dynamically adapts to the viewers, based on their industry, job function, location, and seniority. This is good for targeting.

 "Customers can target multiple groups with differing content, and refresh the content periodically (up to 12 times a year), says LinkedIn’s Prasad Gune. "The product offering also provides ways to drive users to the company profile. Companies can also receive monthly usage reports indicating ‘demographic’ information on visitors to the profile."

Here’s an example of what a custom company profile could look like:

The custom profile creates increased visibility for a company’s employment brand. A second tab appears on the company page for "careers," a Career Center module takes prominence, and it links to the company’s custom content on the Career Tab.

Company’s can include items like recruitment messaging that appeals to prospects on a personal level, employee spotlights, a polling feature, video clips, who to get in touch with, and links to the career site to help a candidate take action.

As your website grows, your grasp and understanding of SEO should also. The tendency for search engines is, the more content you have, the more keywords and topicality can overlap which may leave search engine algorithms in a quandary attempting to parse and identify which pages have priority over others.

Although phrase based indexing and retrieval is a prime method for extracting relevance and context, there are multiple layers involved ranging from site architecture, internal links, external deep links and accessibility that all contribute to the formula that decides (based on the least common denominator) which pages are the best match for any given query.

To Assist Search Engines We Suggest that You:

• Define Ranking Objectives.
• Plant Seedling Keywords.
• Determine Preferred Landing Pages
• Reinforce Competitive Keyword Categories.
• Strengthen Internal Linking, Consistently.
• Use Succinct Titles and Meta descriptions (as they can pull their own rankings alone).
• Manage Site Wide Duplicate Content (Custom templates, Noindex, Follow, 301 Redirects, XML Sitemaps).

Define Ranking Objectives – Depending on your keyword positioning and ranking objectives, you will need to select the best method to accomplish them. For example, if your focus is on the Long-Tail of search (meaning less competitive keyword combinations), then link prominence (links from other sites only to the homepage) and flat site architecture (all the pages in the root folder) will work just fine for accomplishing this type of result.

If the market were more specialized and you had less competition (like a high ticket item like MRI equipment), then you could elect for a smaller site with key nodes of relevance (like tips of an iceberg) to wrap up singular, plural and other popular keyword combinations over time.

By adding a series of keyword rich naming conventions and using pagination such as breadcrumb navigation you would reinforce 2 out of the 3 primary metrics search engines assess for relevance (url naming conventions and anchor text) within your own site to subsidize off page ranking factor.

The more work or more streamlined and granular your layers are optimized the less dependent the site becomes on getting a jump-start from other sites and the faster it develops its own authority (to rank on its own coherence/merit).

This strategy would differ from a large ecommerce site with thousands of SKU’s (stock kept units) which means that the model numbers would be the keywords and there would be a large degree of duplicity across the website due to generic mfg. descriptions, etc.

Each keyword has a threshold and tipping point and term frequency within a document, how clearly the hierarchy is promoted within your own website and how large of a footprint your website and link profile make (compared to your competitors) all determines how buoyant your rankings will become.

Plant Seedling Keywords – With keywords, keyword research, modifiers and action words the last thing you want to do is work backwards after the fact. Keywords are the foundation of organic optimization and are the wireframes that eventually support the schema of what a strategic page acting as a piece of the puzzle can accomplish based on its position in the pyramid of relevance.

That pyramid is (1) stable site architecture (2) relevant landing pages based on keyword continuity and (3) a strong internal and external link profile. However, before you can progress to stage 2 or 3, you need to have your hit list of keywords ready to engage the market and search engines alike.

There is no need to recreate the wheel, just look at search trends, related searches (in Google in the footer), keyword research tools and common sense to find a nice cross-section of relevance to use as your blueprint to frame out the site.

If you have a site that lacks coherence, it is not too late to add a new segment to consolidate the ranking factor, execute 301 redirects, add new naming conventions and implement a clear structure that implies a hierarchical method of consistency.

We often implement a an optimized blog on clients sites to concentrate ranking factors that allow us to bypass poorly implemented errors or dated site structures which omit crucial metrics for search engines (such as meta tags, internal links, a one size fits all template, etc).

By baking SEO into the template or new section, you know it is only a matter of time if you manage the areas which impact relevance over time. A stable search engine ranking for a competitive keyword can take anywhere from 4-12 months, but you have to remain focused on the ranking objective over time.

It is not uncommon that when you finally give up and think you have done everything possible to acquire a competitive position (and just relax) that it takes a top 5 or #1 position. The main thing is not to get frustrated or abort inadvertently since you may not see the real result without patience.

So, instead of targeting a handful of keywords, target an entire set of keywords to build the relevance for that subject/topic. By adding internal links to reinforce each other, your pages can implement the buddy system to feed off each other and steamroll the competition since you are using a tight niche of keywords.

Stay tuned for more from SEO Design Solutions Blog, where we share free search engine optimization tips, tactics and strategies that you can actually use to get ranked.

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Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

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SEO for Large Websites Part 1