A recent site redesign, undoubtedly motivated by the arrival of a competitor, Italo, was an opportunity for Italy’s Trenitalia to improve their booking process, key to the passenger revenue stream, and indeed there are some nice new features. If a trip includes one of the profitable trains Trenitala wants to promote, there is a nice flexible date bargain finder. If a user completes the booking process, Trenitalia will provide trip information in the .ics calendar format, enabling easy import into many calendaring applications. Nice indeed.

Effortless booking should be a Trenitalia business priority

The logistics of managing a rail network across the Italian peninsula are undoubtedly daunting. A fair assumption is that most customers will judge a railway primarily on how successful the company was in getting the passenger from point A to point B on-time for a reasonable price in a clean and safe environment. From a business point of view, it is critical that potential customers are able to easily purchase tickets. The more complicated this process, the greater the chance a person will board a train without a ticket or choose an alternate means of transport, both representing a potential revenue loss.

In an ongoing series, Google has just announced their most recent search algorithm changes for April 2012. Google is often cryptic when describing their changes, so the exact impact will be clearer over time. From an initial reading, many changes will impact international issues. It also appears there may be even less use of a page’s own title tag for the snippet title (More concise and/or informative titles).

Supplemental index is now called index tiers and there’s a new index tier

In the past Google would label some results as coming from a supplemental index, a type of secondary index. There are pages that Google generally values less and will turn to for results only after searching the primary index. We know now that Google calls secondary indexes “tiers”.

If you’ve ever used delicious to organize bookmarks to authoritative web content, you can appreciate its value. Sometimes you may actually want to search though the bookmark’s content – and just that content – yet that’s not possible.

A few guys from Florence decided to do something about it, launching Attrakt, a tool to create curated search engines. Learn more in my latest Search Engine Land column.

If you try reading Google’s search updates, it might seem as if they’re speaking another language. Reading between the lines, here’s one quick interpretation as to what the main changes are:

• Google will now support a limited set of characters besides letters and numbers in search queries and search suggestions. This is primarily driven, I suspect, by the introduction of Google+, but will be very useful for anyone who has tried to search for an email address including the @ sign.
• Ranking of news articles may change in the main search results. News results may be more prominent.
• Searches for names (vanity, reputation management) will return profiles from a greater number of sources (two-hundred social sites), especially if you’re a celebrity.
• More Sports rich snippets, including the Russian Hockey League (Yandex anyone?)
• Less porn when you’re not looking for it

Birthday Greetings Distribution in the Digital Age

There’s one day a year where we all feel kind of special… our day, if you will. Well sure, perhaps we do have to share it with others, but its more or less our day.

As an analog native who still remembers receiving birthday cards delivered by the postman, I’m really impressed by how efficiently digital communications tools like Facebook and Skype enable people to acknowledge another person on their special day with a birthday greeting.

So how do people prefer to send greetings today? In what is admittedly a very unscientific survey, it seems most use Facebook’s post to wall or timeline feature – at 77%, Facebook knows how to engage people and it shows. A few, 3.6%, used Facebook’s chat feature, a more private way to send greetings.

In my original look at Google’s authorship attribution markup, I mentioned that I would like to have seen support for the less invasive <link> syntax as an alternative to having to promote Google+ with active clickable links on our own web pages (I love Google+, but that is another story).

Google did actually support this feature when they later introduced Google+ Pages and the associated rel=publisher markup for Google’s Direct Connect, excellent!

A Google employee reached out to call my attention the fact that several of the points I made in a November authorship article are no longer true. In the process of updating the article, I wanted to see if anything had changed regarding support for linking from an author’s site to Google+ using <link> instead of <a>… and I find that Google seems to have taken a step backwards on this front.

SEO and Schema.org presentation at SMX München, 29 March 2012 (Photo: Jan Kutschera)

Note: this article is based on my SEO and Schema.org presentation at SMX München, 29 March 2012. It is also available in Italian and German.

For all too long search results have comprised 10 sad blue links together with a summary and an URL. Over time search engines began to display other types of objects, such as images and videos, in search results, but web document display remained neglected.

Now what if a search engine could display additional information from a web page to help a user better decide if a particular search result is the right one for them? Well actually, they can.

Figure 1: SEO For Google+ & Google Search panel @ SMX West 2012: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land; Sean Carlos, Antezeta Web Marketing; Janet Driscoll Miller, Search Mojo; Daniel Dulitz, Google; Monica Wright, Search Engine Land & Marketing Land (Photo: SMX)

The article that follows is based on a speech I gave at the web marketing conference SMX West. Jump to the slides.

Since Google+ launched in the summer of 2011, Google+ has become increasingly integrated into Google Search. This integration, what some might term an invasion of Google Search by Google+, has significant implications for the promotion of people, products and services.

Let’s take a look at the current state of Google+ / Google Search integration to better understand both the opportunities, as well as the risks, this presents us as web marketers.

With a 100 million active users worldwide, twitter has earned its place along with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as one of the ignore at your own peril social networks.

Twitter has many strengths as a communications tool, but one of its great weaknesses has been in the area of an ability to search its rich archives for anything that may have been said about a product or prominent person more than a few minutes ago. Search just hasn’t been a priority for twitter management, despite their 2008 acquisition of twitter search engine Summize.

In 2009 twitter signed deals with both Bing and Google to provide privileged access to twitter tweets in real time, the so-called twitter firehose. Bing provides its own dedicated social search, but they only return results for the last week of social activity. Google offered realtime search, but shut it down after two years when they weren’t able to reach new terms with Twitter. Those looking to do ad-hoc analysis of their own conversations, or those of competitors, have had to turn to lessor known twitter search tools like Topsy and Snap Bird.

A year has already passed since search engine blekko launched and while Google and Bing aren’t trembling yet, others have shown significant confidence in blekko’s prospects. For marketers who keep an eye on keyword driven web traffic, a significant question arises: where’s the blekko keyword data?

By default, web analytics measurement systems like Google Analytics aren’t able to correctly recognize blekko as a search engine, but it is possible to configure digital media measurement tools to properly attribute site visitors to the keyword searches they performed using blekko. My new Search Engine Land article shows how and explains why the data isn’t available by default. Happy measuring!