As of November 20, 2008 Google have introduced a new feature to their organic results. If you have a Google account and you are logged into it, when searching you will see some new icons against each of the search results. Google are calling it SearchWiki. It is Google’s way of letting the user customize their search results.

At this stage I don’t think it is working for all accounts. When I log in using one email account and search I don’t see the new features but logging in with another seems to work.

As you can see from the image, next to each search result are three new icons. A promote icon (which is the one with the up arrow); a remove icon (the one with the cross) and a comment icon.

Clicking the Promote icon moves the site in question to the top of the search results.

Clicking the Remove icon removes it from your search results. If for some reason you want to get the deleted one back, you can do so by scrolling down to the bottom of the search results screen and click the ADD A RESULT link. Of course, you will need to know the URL of the site you removed as from what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a way of seeing the sites that you have deleted. You can also add any other site using this option.

You can also add comments for each search result which is a handy little feature.

I think this is great for the user but how will this affect SEO? This remains to be seen, but providing good quality content is going to be even more important as who is going to promote your blog or website if it is just a spammy piece of work?

Google emphasizes that this won’t affect other people’s search results but you would have to think that this is a great way for them to see what is popular and what isn’t and at some stage they may incorporate it into their search algorithm.

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When you are starting out in affiliate marketing, you will read all about finding the right keywords for the content on your website. You might also be told to make sure that the keywords appear often throughout your content articles.
 
Unfortunately however, this can be taken too far as new web publishers load the article content with way too many keywords.
 
This practice was acceptable in the past, well actually, maybe it wasn’t ever acceptable as nobody wants to read an article that is so overloaded with keywords that the whole context is lost.
 
The emphasis today is to write natural content. If you write naturally, you will find that the keywords slot nicely into the article. Your visitors will want to read what you have to say and hopefully they will be encouraged to go through to one of your merchants to make a purchase.
 
By writing naturally you may find that a number of different keywords will fit into the article. 
 
A good thing to know is that search engines ignore punctuation marks, so you can break up your keywords with a comma or full stop and the search engines will still read the keywords as one continuous stream.
 
So rather than write….

My outdoor fireplace is an outdoor fireplace of remarkable design. My outdoor fireplace means I can entertain outside in winter as an outdoor fireplace keeps the outdoor area cozy.
 
… a more acceptable way would be to write:
 
My outdoor fireplace allows me to entertain my friends and family, all year round. The remarkable design ensures that the smoke is positioned away from the entertainment area.

Write naturally and the keywords will fall into place without any effort on your part.

Our little experiment to increase our blog traffic and sales is still ongoing and it seems to be starting to pay off.

Just an update for those who missed my first post on this, we have taken one of our niche blogs and increased our blog posting frequency to see how it would affect traffic and sales. We are currently posting 50 posts a week to that blog. This usually means a blog post goes up every 3 or 4 hours.

We don’t seem to have too much of a problem getting this many posts up. The more we do, the better we get at it and the easier and quicker we can churn them out. We generally spend a couple of days gettng as many done as possible and post them to WordPress with a future date and time. This means that they go up automatically over the week.

The Results

As of this week, traffic is starting to increase dramatically. This could be due to the fact that the holiday season is fast approaching but at the same time last year we didn’t see this much of a traffic increase. It is also the most traffic we have ever had to that blog.

Sales are also increasing but not as much as I would have expected. We are definitely making more on that particular niche blog than we have ever made but I would have expected more at this point.

With this in mind, we have started to focus a little more on click through rates, conversion rates, merchant performance and the basic structure of that website. Our current click through rate for that website is around 5% which is pathetic really when we have other sites getting as much as a 60% CTR. There is so much more room for improvement here.

So the first thing we are doing is completely overhauling the site. We have found a new template that allows us to better promote products and is more appealing to the viewer and are structuring it in a way that is more likely to get the reader to click through to the merchant.

This should be ready to be published within the next couple of weeks so it will be interesting to see if it makes a difference.