Google recently announced that it will now use the encryption protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt all the searches that people do using the Google Search Engine if they are signed-in using their Google Account login.

This means that these logged-in Google users will be redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra’s’) from http://www.google.com (non SSL) once they are signed-in with their Google account. This switch to SSL encrypts your search query which means that the sites the user visits after clicking on the results from Google will no longer contain the “Referrer data” (data which tells the destination site how it was found, whether from a search term entered into a search engine or from an external link) except in the case of ads.

Only Google and your web browser will see your searches and a third party (not even Google Analytics) will not know what is being searched. The new encryption will block referrer data, which means site owners will know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information on what the exact search was.

How does this affect SEO?

With the new system in place, Organic Traffic can still be tracked, but it will not be possible to drill down to the keywords from which the website visit was derived. Even Google Analytics isn’t spared, one will no longer be able to isolate the search term associated with the visit in GA.

However the keywords or terms Google search engine users use to find their websites will still be offered on Google Webmaster Central. Presently, Google Webmaster Central shows the top 1,000 queries that a site appeared for at Google – as well as was selected for – over a 30 day period.

Referrer Data for Ads:

However referrer data will be passed into the advertiser’s site, which means they (ad sites), will still receive information that they currently get with unencrypted search. The main reason stated by Google being that advertisers need the referrer data to evaluate their ad campaigns, to know which keywords or search terms are driving traffic in order to improve the ads which we believe is to keep the advertisers happy.

However, when the user is signed-in and clicks on an ad with the advertiser’s website being HTTP rather than HTTPS, Google will send the search term for that specific search to the advertiser over HTTP.

The encryption change as per Google will impact only the single digit percentage of search users, anyone who hasn’t signed-in will still send referrer data to the websites he/she visits which means lots of data for SEOs to do a conversion analysis to the keyword level.

With the move to SSL, Google has taken web search security to the next level; the trick is to balance data security for the web users and to keep advertisers happy.

Is your software-selling website really optimized for search engines? Because -from our experience- sometimes even skilled webmasters fail to notice certain SEO issues that can severely impact their rankings.

So let’s take a closer look and find out what mistakes you should avoid at all costs – and some quick tips on how to repair the damage, if it’s already been done!

SEO Strategy

Mistake #1: You do not include SEO into site development specs

Outcome: Search engines may not be able to crawl your site, index its content and rank it accordingly. This can happen because of content included in images or Flash files, JavaScript links, too many variables in URLs and poor architecture (lack of topic categories, sub-categories and product pages).

• First and foremost, make sure your content is visible to search engines: use HTML to display important content and links throughout the site. For Flash sites it’s best to create a HTML version with a robots.txt which disallows the Flash pages, so that you don’t have duplicates.

When William Gibson said “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet“, he could have been talking about how Google is reinventing its search results right now and incidentally altering the likelihood your software company will be found in 2010 Q1 by prospective customers worldwide.

There are three big changes confirmed and now being rolled out:

1. Adding real time search results to your Google results,
2. personalizing those results like never before and
3. giving every Google user a sidebar of options controlling the freshness of their results.

And there’s two other changes – Page Preview in results and the Wonder Wheel (no, I didn’t make this up) – that are not confirmed, but are also getting rolled out piecemeal at least in the United States and are strong bets for next quarter worldwide.

So you’ve tried endlessly tweaking your AdWords, starting a blog and even begun Twittering this year, and you’re still on the second or worse page of Google results for the keywords that matter most. How are you going to change this for 2010? Consider creating and maintaining a microsite.

A microsite (at least for the length of this post) isn’t a brochure-like static page about your product, or a shady way to generate inbound links. In fact, it only just touches your product and does everyone in your market a valuable service. A microsite is a way to monetize for reputation/attention a chunk of all that expertise you’ve built up, in the same way your software monetizes that expertise for money.

How would you like to be able to say this?

“Just a week after launching the sites they got to the first page of Google results for the main keywords… the .NET microsite ranks #1 for .NET logging as of today“.

How to optimize website images from a SEO perspective.

Product images, screenshots, your beautiful team members, catchy images for your website content, corporate images, logos, icons, you name it – all your online images should join forces and work for your website success, rigorously planning to embrace the new era of universal search.

If you want to get the most out your images though, just sitting and watching how pretty they are won’t help you too much. You need to optimize your images to get faster loading times and attract more traffic to your website. You can do that by paying your highest respects to search engines rules. This article presents most common techniques of optimizing images for image search engines like Google Images, Yahoo Images or Live.

After so much work you’ve done redesigning your website, adding all those cool features and getting rid of all annoying bugs, it would be a pity to ruin everything because you forget the small but essential details.

You cannot afford to lose page rank, valuable links or loyal visitors, in a word, you should not lose more than you win with the new version of the website.

If you’re reading this, I know that you are in a hurry, because deadline is probably pretty short ahead of you, so make sure you go through this checklist before the commit of the new website:

1. No broken links, no 404 errors

Let XENU be your best friend today. Download it, install it, just enter the URL of your site and let Xenu do his job (it’s free). Fix all the 404 errors, do as many 301 redirects as you need to, and then do the checking again and again, until Xenu says it’s ok :). Also, the mod rewrite should be made in a user friendly manner, so as to generate readable URLs. Just to make sure, don’t forget to create a user friendly customized 404 page.