What you’re no doubt interested in is this.  When you have something to tell the world about – a new page, an offer, company news, a blog post – how can you get that message out to as many people as possible, in the least amount of time?  Let me introduce you to a tool that’s going to make your life a whole lot easier.

So you’re probably looking for some social networking software or social bookmarking software to automate the tedious process of updating and bookmarking your new content across a huge number of sites.

We’ve tried and tested to death a lot of software in the office.  As free software goes, we like Amplify a lot.  Amplify pushes out to a bunch of places, including ping.fm which pushes out to a whole bunch more places.  It’s pretty good to say it’s free.  The downside is that (a) Amplify (and Ping) don’t support a huge number of social networking/bookmarking sites between them, and (b) the ones they support don’t always work i.e. you can’t always link up your accounts (it fails) and when you do manage, the post you made doesn’t always appear on the account you’ve tried to link up.  It’s an absolute arse trying to get your accounts working with ping.  Last time we tried, we set up Amplify and successfully got it working with Blogger, Flickr, Friendfeed, Plurk, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress (hosted), and Google Buzz.  We then added Ping.fm to Amplify and we’d successfully got THAT working (through Amplify) with Jaiku, Multiply, Myspace, Photobucket, Status.net and Streetmavens.  Which is good, one post on Amplify = a post in 15 places (including the Amplog itself) or 13 if it’s not a photo.  But it isn’t many out of the huge list they claim to work with.  But, then, it’s free.  Maybe the individual platforms change to avoid people using software like this – who knows.

So bear with me here because Amplify and Ping.fm are great as free stuff goes but Onlywire .. Onlywire is AWESOME.  Onlywire claims to work with 51 services and by god, it does work.  There IS a free version and if you’ve not used it before, at least give this a try – but, it only allows 300 submissions per month and 1 service = 1 submission.  So if like me you’re set up with nearly all 51, you’ve got about 6 free submissions a month (with slightly irritating CAPTCHA codes to complete).  After that you’ve got to pay, with prices starting at $99 for 5,000 submissions.  So that’s about 100 pages of your content or your client’s content you can post through this awesome network you’ve set up, for about £63 and NO irritating capture codes with the paid version.  I consider that to be awesome value.  One post = costs you less than a pound -  what can you resell that service for?

How it works, briefly, is that you download the software.  You put the details of what you want to post through the website.  Those are sent to your software. Then, your software posts out your content.  After that, you can access a nice report on the website to confirm whether your posts were actually successful – something you don’t get with other tools.  If you’re an SEO you can use this to report to your clients as it is accurate – I’ve carefully checked my last few posts and the ones that are successful, really are successful – the ones that fail, really do fail (and you can just click resubmit).

We love Onlywire and think it offers great value for money. Click here to get it.

ps. Yes, I’ve tried Hootsuite.  It only updates 9 networks and I don’t like the interface.  Just in case you were wondering!

Back in August we wrote a post that compares user-generated content to gold dust. We explained that high-quality user-generated content (UGC) is hard to come by and we gave you several simple tips for increasing the UGC on your website.

In this post, we’re going to expand on those ideas and present you with some more specific examples. So let’s get stuck in:

Providing a good platform to generate the content

First, if you haven’t already, you must provide a platform for your website users to generate content. You’ll need to think about what type of platform you’ll need, there are lots of choices, for example: you could use simple commenting box? A forum board? A wiki area?

Remember, it’s worth keeping things simple: try looking for a technology that allows your users to generate content using an existing log-in for another website. For example, allowing your users to generate content using an existing Facebook, Open ID or Twitter identity. This prevents users from having to sign up to too many services, which can often be a bit of a hurdle.

Here are some great examples of platforms you could use:

Disqus comments: Their tagline is: “bring out the best discussion on your site”, which sums up what this tool is all about. Your website users can have debates instantly using this easy-to-use commenting box. This tool supports both Twitter and Facebook login, which reduces your chances of being spammed and allows users to sign in with an existing identify.

Facebook Social comments box: A simple Facebook box that allow users to comment on your site’s content. The user can also post their comment to their own Facebook wall, which could initiate further discussion.

Another great tool is Nabble: It’s a free tool that allows you to create free forums and other embeddable apps, which you can paste straight into your website without much fuss. Sadly, this does not support any social log-ins, but it does make the process of getting UGC pretty easy.

Creating debate: ask your readers the right questions

If you’ve provided your readers with a place to comment/debate on your site, but nobody is bothering, you’re probably not asking enough of the right questions.

At the ends of your blog posts, try writing emotive, thought provoking questions that compel the reader to post an answer. For example, you could ask your readers to share a memory or recall an experience about a particular theme.

If nobody is participating in your forum, try posting interesting questions, games or ‘memes.’ The most popular threads in forums are those that are quick and easy to join in: for example ‘what are you listening to right now’ or ‘post your favourite photo’.

You should think of similar threads for your forum that fit your topic or theme.

Other types of user-generated content

Photos and videos: If users upload photos and videos to your website, they’re likely to start showing up in Google searches under the image and video tabs respectively. These are great alternate ways to get people onto your website.

Social networks: Get fans to interact with your Facebook page, generating content (pictures, videos, notes and links), which will help increase the popularity of your brand. Your users’ interactions will spread virally through Facebook, which means you’re likely to see an increase in traffic to your website as a result.

Reviews: There are hundreds of different reviewing websites out there, are you taking advantage of them? For example, Tesco import scores and comments from REEVOO.com in their furniture catalogue. And take Amazon for example, they allow users to review their products. This generates pages and pages of free content for them. You should do the same on your website.

Finally….

How do you generate content, do you have any tips that you’d like to share?

How do you feel about generating content for other websites, for free?

Let us know in the comments section below:

You’ve just spent hours configuring, designing and writing in preparation of your new blog launch. You hit the magic ‘publish’ button, but so far you’ve had no readers. Where is everybody?

Well, to attract readers you need to ensure you posts have been crawled by the almighty Google. This means your posts will feature in its search engine for key phrases. In order to entice Google to your blog, you’re going to need to build some links to it from other websites.

Those who are new to blogging can find it hard to build links right away; new bloggers typically have very little influence in their niche, few friends on the scene and very little content, which means they’re not considered an ‘authority.’ This, ultimately, leads to slow progress in gaining those all-important links.

So, here’s a solution: four tips that will help you give your site a backlink boost and get the ball rolling, meaning your brand new content WILL be found:

1) Register with virtual business card websites

There are several services that offer you a free ‘virtual business card’ profile.

All you need to do is sign up and fill in all of your details (including your website). It really is that simple!

TIP: If you’re able to add lots of profile links, cross-promote your new virtual business cards, creating a link ‘funnel’ from one to another, giving you extra SEO benefits.

Try:  retaggr.com | card.ly | chi.mp | about.me | myonepage.com

2) Sign up to blog aggregation sites

Look for blogging communities that allow you to import, clip and aggregate all of your blog content onto another profile. On some sites, you can categorize your blog posts, and add them into groups with other posts along similar lines – this tactic is great to get your content spotted by bloggers with similar interests.

Some blog aggregation sites are automatic, so your content is retrieved by the aggregator and posted to your profile. On others you’ll need to manually ‘clip’ your content and publish it.

Try: zimbio.com | yousaytoo.com | digg.com (new!)

3) Join blog networking communities / directories

Joining a blog network is a great way to increase pageviews and to get backlinks. These websites allow bloggers to sign up, assign their blogs to a category/directory and network with other people with similar interests.

Try: bloggers.com | blogcatalog.com | bloghub.com

4) Submit guest blog posts

Guest blogging is a GREAT way to build links; everybody loves to get free content for their blogs, so offer to write some for other webmasters!

Simply contact a couple of webmasters with established blogs and give an outline of the article you intend to write. If they approve your submission, your article will be published, which will give you a good link back to blog.

Try:  Asking webmasters | MyBlogGuest.com

It starts with a plan…

As with any marketing activity it is important to plan your email campaign. You need to give yourself enough time to design it, create the content and run test sends all before the official send date.

During the early planning process you need to consider the following:

Who you are targeting – make your email relevant to your receiver, identify and understand their needs and tailor your design and content to meet them. Your email design needs to be created in a way that will encourage them to engage and respond. If you identify that you have more than one target audience because of their different needs you may need to design different emails to meet their different needs.

What your objectives are for sending emails – identify your main aim for sending your emails. Examples of aims are: to increase your website traffic, to increase your Facebook fans, to increase awareness of your products/services or brand, to increase enquiries and/or sales.

What your budget is – consider how much you have to spend. If you have agreed a budget it is important to stay within it. Work out your campaign budget, consider your expected return – is it worth you undertaking a large campaign, if a small campaign brings you the same return?

How you’ll develop and track the campaign – consider the time and skills needed to design your email campaign. You may need to contact outside sources – this could be to design, send or track your emails. Angel SEO can help you with all of these things.

Some tips to consider when creating your email:

• Avoid spam filters stay away from spam words including ‘Free’, ‘discount’, ‘coupon’, etc.
• Avoid using one big image – this can be seen as spam and can reduce your delivery rate.
• Help maximise your click-through rates, by including terms relating to the reader’s interest/industry.
• Personalise your emails, so the receiver doesn’t feel like they are getting the same one as everyone else – including their name goes along way and it is simple to do.
• When someone has signed up, send them a confirmation email/welcome email
• Send on time, every time – if you send your emails out on a Wednesday at 2pm, then send them every Wednesday at 2pm – your receiver will be expecting it.
• Past studies have proven that emails sent on Tuesday and Wednesday have an increased chance of being opened or getting a response than other days of the week. It’s worth testing a little though – for example by sending out batches on different days of the week – because your open rates and response rates may relate to your target audience and their lifestyle.
• Consistency – use the same design, logo, colours each time (and preferably as your website) so your receiver knows it is from you.
• Remember the few seconds rule, make your title line catch your receiver in a few seconds, otherwise your email will end up in the deleted box, just like all the rest.

Moving on to branding and design…

Branding

It is important to keep your branding consistent, not just throughout your email campaigns but for your business in general. So, if your company colours are blue and white, have blue and white as your email colours as well. Every email you send out need to have the same brand identity, with standard company info, logos, slogan, contact details, etc. This makes it easy for the receiver to identify that the email is from you.

Your email needs to have a proposal, a reason for sending. Don’t use emails to just push products – your emails will end up in the junk folder very quickly . Give away free information, free postage, etc (something of value to the reader) in your emails, make it worth their time to read your emails.

Branding points to consider:

• Always include your brand identity – logo, slogan etc
• Consider using or integrating your company colours, for brand consistency
• Simple and clean is always best

Remember branding doesn’t just come in the form of colours and style – it all comes in the form of writing style as well. If you are a fun, funky company, come across this way in how you promote your company – sometimes corporate is not the best way to get your message across.

Design

When designing your email template it is best to stick to conventions with the main elements, like the header, main content and calls to action. Give the customer what they expect to see – don’t mess with the design formats that people expect. They like things to stay the same.

Design elements to think about:

• Keep the branding consistent, so the receiver knows it is from you and can instantly recognise your business.
• Ideally keep the same sort of format, i.e. if you include a promotional offer every time, keep it in the same place so the receiver knows where to look.
• Don’t use lots of different colours and fonts – ideally keep to company colours and styles.
• Make both images and text clickable.
• Don’t use one big image – this can be seen as spam and can impact the number of mails delivered to peoples’ inboxes.
• Make your email is scannable – users don’t want to have to read every word. A good way is to ensure that your headings tell a story on their own.
• Make title stand out and include descriptive and interesting copy.

Design order to follow –

Unsubscribe link – have an unsubscribe link at the start of your email, make it prominent enough so users can find it easily. You don’t want to be seen to hide it, as this makes users more likely look for it and more than likely use it.

Subject line – most say this is the most important part of your email – these few words are the key to getting users to read you email. Remember this is the part that readers see before even clicking on your email. You need your subject engaging and enticing to make the receiver open your email.  If you spell out the offer too clearly, they may reject it before they open the mail and get chance to read your pitch – but make sure they know there is an offer!

Logo – easily visible. Convention says to have your company logo in the top left of your emails – this is a prominent position and always seen by the reader.  You don’t need to stick to this but do ensure it’s ‘above the fold’, i.e. high up and therefore easily visible in the preview pane of the reader’s email software.

Header – one of the most important parts of your email after the subject line.  In this section your own company branding needs to be prominent so that it’s clear to the reader who you are, what you do and why they need to remain on your mailing list.

Introduction – brief of the email content.  This is the section that enables the reader to decide if they wish to carry on reading or delete your email. You could list the titles of each section of the email and make them clickable, so the reader can jump to sections they are interested in.

Main story – copy and image – this is your main story/promotion, i.e. your reason for sending out the email. You may want to have a bit of text, some bullet points and a click through. Keep your message short (minimum scrolling is appealing).

Call to action – this call to action relates to your main story/promotion – you may wish to include this in the main story section.

Secondary and third stories/promotions – in this part of the email you may wish to include monthly promotions, seasonal specials, etc. You need some text and an image, and clear calls to action buttons.

Footer – this is the last part readers will see of your email, so a common convention is to have a call to action to your website, which goes directly to your home page.  You also need to ensure any legal requirements are met, and this is usually in the footer.  Here’s an example of these:

“You received this email because you registered and opted to receive mailings from [COMPANY NAME] through one of its websites such as [MAIN COMPANY WEBSITE].  If you prefer not to receive emails from [COMPANY NAME] please click here to unsubscibe. If you wish to speak to a Customer Services Representative, please call [TELEPHONE NUMBER]. [TRADING NAMES] are trading names of [COMPANY NAME], a company registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No: XXXXXXX, VAT Registration No: XXXXXXXXX. Licensed under the Consumer Credit Act under Licence No: XXXXXXX. Registered Data Controller No: XXXXXXXX. Registered office: [REGISTERED OFFICE ADDRESS]“.

Obviously this would need to be adjusted to apply to your company – you may not have trading names, a VAT number and so on.

Subject line strategy

When crafting your subject line, consider that subject lines which increase open rates:

• Show value within the first few words. e.g. 10 tips to increase your website traffic, How to use Twitter for Business
• Find the right trigger words for your target audience e.g. Business, Google, etc.
• Avoid the hard sell i.e. You must do this to increase your website traffic
• Include hot brands – they work across sectors e.g. Google, Facebook.

Testing

When you have finished creating your email it is important to test it.

Elements you need to test include:

View – you should always check what your email looks like in the most favoured email clients e.g. Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Thunderbird.

Links – make sure they go to the right landing pages and are properly tracked.

Images – make sure they show when you have sent the email or if the receiver has to download them check how long it takes.

Spam – make sure your email will not be considered as spam/junk and doesn’t filter straight to the junk folder.

Unsubscribe link – make sure it works and does delete the receiver from your list.

At Angel we use specialist software to ensure maximum deliverability and all of our emails are fully tracked so we can see open rates, click through rates and bounce rates. We carefully test campaigns and monitor results for Angel clients.

Results

After sending your email campaign, it is important to track and view your results.

Find out how many people have opened your email, how many people clicked on one of the links – which links proved popular.

Did you receive any enquiries or sales as a result of the email campaign?

Things to measure:

• Number of emails delivered
• v Number opened
• v Number of click-through
• v Number of enquiries /sign-ups

As with everything new you aren’t going to get things right first time – it is important you use your results to improve your campaign for next time. Analyse your findings and see if you notice any parts that can be/need to be improved.

So, there you have it, the steps to follow to create a successful email campaign. Don’t forget that the Angel team can help you with everything from planning and designing your campaign, through to building, testing, delivering and tracking.

Are you planning an email campaign?  Here are some simple email marketing tips that can help you increase your open and click through rates.

1. Know your target audience – understand your reader.  What do they like? What are they interested in?
2. Personalise – add personal touches to your emails, e.g. ‘Hello Sarah!’, instead of just ‘Hello’.
3. Have an eye catching subject line – make sure it is appealing to your target audience.  Slightly cryptic lines that intrigue the reader bring better open rates.
4. Be clear – say it as it is, right from the start.  Don’t make your reader hunt for the point of your email!
5. Offer versions – provide a plain text as well as a HTML version.  This will mean more people have access to your content e.g. screen readers.
6. Include an unsubscribe link – have a prominent unsubscribe link, don’t hide it in the hope no-one will unsubscribe – they are more likely to want to unsubscribe when you hide it from them.
7. Be consistent – with your style, design, and when you send your emails out. If you send them out on a certain day, at a certain time, keep to it – your readers will be waiting for your email.
8. Creativity is key – be creative when designing your emails and your content. Make your email’s a ‘must read’. If you start as you mean to go on with great content, stylish looking emails. You will see the rewards in your open and click through rates.
9. Keep it concise – say what needs to be said.  Don’t make your email thousands of words long, no one will read them. The aim of your email is to get them to visit your website or contact you, and hopefully that shouldn’t take a thousand words of convincing.
10. Include calls to action (e.g. ‘click here to sign up’) and get a good balance – don’t just limit it to one, but don’t litter your text with them either.

I said 10 email marketing tips but there’s one piece of advice that shouldn’t be left out – make sure you’re delivering some value with your email.  Offers and free gifts work well e.g. spend over £50 today and receive a free company reusable bag, or whatever would be appealing to your customers.  Free knowledge – exclusive industry reports, tips, ‘find out how I did this’ etc also works well.  Of course, it does depend on your industry and target audience, so tailor to your market sector.

There you have it, ten (+1) great tips to improve your emails. Let us know how you get on. Do you have any more tips that you want to share with us and our readers? Feel free to comment below.

Social media celebrity – does your company want or need one? Could you handle one?

The social media phenomenon just keeps rolling and changing how we communicate with friends and family, and in a business context, it is impacting how we communicate with our customers.

Social media has really opened up the publishing channels, meaning that now, anyone can grab their “15 megabytes” of fame. This is mainly because of how easy access and cheap to use social media tools are – for a lot of people there is no cost, just their time. This means we can all have a go at gaining ourselves our “15 megabytes” of frame.

The effect of influencers online can be staggering.  Take Steven Holmes as a example.  He was the ‘chosen one’ by rapper and Def Jam creator Kayne West. Steven, a normal student from Coventry, saw his status change into that of a social media celebrity overnight, just because he was the only one that the rapper was following. Steven’s story clearly shows how things move fast on social media networks.

Is it same for businesses? Social media does offer businesses a vast amount of opportunities. Businesses worldwide are now taking advantage of social media and the opportunities it brings.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc have opened up new communication channels that bring businesses and customers together without the customer being in the business’ store or on their website.

What is a social media celebrity?

In the context of your business, a social media celebrity is someone you employee to represent your brand through social media channels.  They become the face of your business through those channels, building relationships with your customers, educating people on your business and adding to your brand.  Because people are dealing with a real person and not a faceless company, it’s easier for a relationship to form.

A social media celebrity doesn’t have to be a celebrity already (although sometimes they are!). The important thing is that they become the public face of your company.

How does a business deal with an employee that is social media celebrity?

When deciding if your company wants a social media celebrity, you need to look at it from both positive and negative points for the company and your social media celebrity.

Opportunities for celebrity employees:

• A real person, not just brand – customers get to identify your brand with someone
• Better insight - your celebrity employee gives a better insight into your market sector, they know your customers will react if you make changes, add new products, etc
• Enhanced credibility – your celebrity employee gives the company additional credibility, along with a human face, which also adds trust.
• Enhanced influence – because your celebrity employee has built up an engaging relationship with your potential and current customers, they have the power to influence them.
• Invaluable in a crisis – due to their trusted relationship, your celebrity employee can set the record straight when a PR crisis occurs due to the relationship they have already created. They will be more trusted than other members of the company.

Negative points of a social media celebrity:

• Celebrity, not company – your celebrity employee may develop more of a following than your brand
• Bad reputation - your celebrity employee makes a mistake or upsets followers with an idea or opinion. In turn creating their own PR crisis.
• Leaked information – during building their relationship with followers they reveal your company/trade secrets, giving your competition added advantage.
• Jumping ship – your celebrity employee decides to leave for a new job, taking all their followers with them.
• Starry eyed – they become too focused on being a “celebrity” and don’t remain focused on the task in hand, which is to build your brand and add a human element to your brand.

Well known social media celebrities

There are plenty of well known social media celebrities – some might say they’re well known enough not to have to do it, but that shows the power of having a well-known user and giving your brand a face. Customers like the human side of brands, they like to know who they are talking too and to know that it’s not just a corporate machine.

Richard Banson (@richardbranson) founder and owner of the Virgin group, activity uses Twitter to promote himself and his various business ventures.

Peter Jones (@dragonjones) is well know as an investor and entrepenuer – he shares info about his latest ventures through Twitter.

Rand Fishkin (@randfish) is a favourite in our office – he tweets 15-20 times a week on SEO, internet marketing and business.  He’s the face of SEO Moz, the world’s leading SEO tools company.

Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) is a well known professional skateboarder and CEO of 900 films production.

Social Media celebrity – who do you choose?

As noted, you don’t need someone who’s famous – your social media celebrity could be anyone from within your company. Typically they tend to be someone from the marketing/communications team.

Create them an account on Twitter using both their name and the company name e.g. @ZoeAngelSEO, @SharonAngelSEO, so that both their name and the company name gets known on the platform. By creating an account you need to give your chosen employee the time every day to tweet and engage with their following – this will help your brand in the future.

Some ideas of things to tweet about include:

• Company activities
• New products, new staff, etc
• Industry information/stories that are relevant to your business
• Local activities, promote them, say if you are going to be there
• National news, have a plan in place of how you as a company will cover national events

If your future social media celebrity needs some help getting to know Twitter, get them to read this – A Tweeting Guide to Twitter.

You and your “celebrity” employee

You need each other in order to be a success, you need your celebrity employee to build a level of trust that the company can’t do without a human aspect and your employee needs the company brand to build on to start with. The company name is what engaged them and gave them immediate authority in the public arena.

The celebrity employee however, engages the following and level of trust that the company couldn’t of done on it is own. By doing this the celebrity employee has made the relationship truly beneficial for both parties. By this stage you and your “celebrity” employee do need each other more than you think.

Although there are negatives to having a celebrity employee, as stated before, the pressures social media and the celebrity employee bring is mostly positive. Although the company’s role will change from human resources to talent management, as the “celebrity” employee and company grow together.

Due the exposure the company will gain a better level of respect within the market, employees will be more engaged by the company and its activities and in terms of customers gaining the rewards and benefits of the operation. In some companies “celebrity” employees are treated as a threat, yet in others they are viewed as rock stars.

and finally…

Look over the good and bad points, look at your company’s strategy – do you need a social media celebrity? Does the benefit of a “celebrity” employee outweigh the potential detriments? Consider these points carefully before taking someone on or assigning them to this role.

Do you have a celebrity employee that you want to tell us about? We’d love to hear about your experiences!

If you’re not yet convinced by Twitter, here are fifteen reasons why your business needs to be on the micro-blogging site.

1. Customers are talking about your product, service, company or brand on Twitter – you need to be listening.
2. Twitter has the potential to drive traffic to your website.
3. Twitter enables you to share links to your website, blog posts, product reviews, etc.
4. Twitter increases your brand awareness.
5. Twitter gives you the ability to spread your content virally.
6. Customers want to interact with your business directly – Twitter enables them to do so.
7. Twitter enables customers to give you product/service feedback.
8. Twitter allows you to extend your brand’s reach.
9. Through Twitter, you can influence people in your network.
10. Now that Twitter’s live feed appears in Google’s search lists, it can gain you more coverage in the search engines.
11. Twitter allows you to gain an insight on fellow professionals and similar companies.
12. Twitter allows you to give your brand a personality – a face for your company – customers feel they know and trust your brand more because of your Twitter activities.
13. You can create a network of influence if everyone within it has power within your market sector or industry.
14. Brands can be rewarded by Twitter activities in a number of ways e.g. positive comments, click throughs, etc.
15. And finally the big one…your competition is already there!!!

Marketing a telecoms company online brings a number of challenges and requires special consideration.

Firstly, the competition is extremely high. The term ‘telephone system’ in Google.co.uk gives about 61,200,000 results. This is high, compared to many other business products like a ‘door entry system’ (7,790,000), ‘fax machine’ (17,100,000) or ‘accounting software’ (18,000,000). Given that less than 8% of Google users click past the first page of results, that’s where you want to be. But with so many websites competing for key phrases like ‘telephone system’, getting onto the first page of Google seems impossible.

Should you use Adwords?

You might trialled using Google Adwords as a strategy to get your company at the top of Google, since getting a decent listing is so hard. If so, you’ll know that for terms like ‘telephone system’, each click will cost you around £3.50. And did you know that less than 10% of Google users click on paid ads?  What’s more, a recent study has shown that they produce 25% less conversions than visits obtained through organic listings.  They’re not such an attractive option, as your telecoms company may have found out, and gaining a good search engine position in Google’s main listings is likely to be a more cost effective solution.

A case study: Best4Systems

So how can you use the internet to generate interest in your website and bring you leads?  Let’s look at a company that has made it to the top of the results for a key term, and examine what they’ve done to get them there.

An overview of the competition

At the time of writing (6^th October 2010), http://www.best4systems.co.uk/ is occupying the top slot for ‘telephone system’ in the UK (they also hold a number of other good number one spots).  What are they doing right?

Choice of domain

Their domain includes part of the keyword, i.e. ‘systems’ – it’s not essential that you do the same but it’s thought to be a contributing factor, as Google adds weight to keywords in the domain name. 

Domain age

Google seems to trust older domains as a general rule, and new domains can suffer from a dampening effect where it takes some time for their content to get ranked.  For co.uk domains like this one, you can check the domain age using Nominet’s whois service: http://www.nic.uk/ which is free.  I had a check of the domain age and it was registered in 2001 – that’s good as Google likes older domains, they’re likely to rank better.

• Registered on: 09-Aug-2001
• Renewal date: 09-Aug-2011
• Last updated: 06-Aug-2009

Tip: Consider choosing and buying a domain that includes one of your main target key words or phrases, if you haven’t got one already. A lot of domains have already been taken for this industry so you might struggle – don’t worry too much if one isn’t available as this isn’t the be all and end all. Try and pick a co.uk, net or com domain as these tend to be trusted by users (some experts say they rank better too). Also pick something memorable for your users that doesn’t look spammy (they’re then more likely to click on your listing).  If you already have a domain that is appropriate and it’s been registered a while (e.g. over 6 months) consider using this because of Google’s preference for older domains.

Content

Google looks for sites that deliver a good user experience and this means you need to have good quality, unique and relevant content on your site.  Best4Systems has a good amount of relevant content in Google’s index – 1,610 pages (you can find out how many pages from a site are included in Google’s index by typing site:http://www.yourdomain.com into Google).

The content on the site doesn’t change very often. How do I know that? I’m looking at the site on the 6^th October and Google hasn’t crawled it since the 26^th September. You can check how often Google is crawling your site clicking the ‘cached’ link underneath your listing in Google. You need to check it every day for a couple of weeks or more to get a true picture, i.e. to work out the frequency of crawl. Anyway, what these guys need to do is consider setting up a blog or news area – something like Wordpress would be great for them as they can customise it to look exactly like the rest of the site. They can then add new content – ideally 2-3 times a week. Posting on telecoms related news could be a good approach.

Tip: Have plenty of relevant content – and update it regularly (a blog or news section is good for this – consider using Wordpress to manage it).  Remember that your content is an opportunity to show people you know your stuff – make sure you show off your industry expertise! Finally, keep your content fresh so Google visits your site regularly – you don’t need to change your pages every day but do add to your site regularly.  Again, using Wordpress to create a blog or news area is a really easy way to do this.

Link building

One of the factors that Google considers to help them determine how valuable a website is, is how many other websites link to the site, and the quality of those websites. I’ve used a professional tool to look at more aspects of Best4System’s domain in relation to link building efforts. According this tool:

• They have a front page authority of 48/100 and domain authority of 39/100. This is a best guess of how authoritative Google views their site to be.
• They have 92 different sites linking to their home page.
• They have 3,849 total links to their home page (these include more than one link from the same domain, links which count for something in Google’s view and links which don’t). 2,159 of these are links from other sites that Google counts as a ‘vote’ for their site (‘follow’ links).
• They also have ‘no follow’ links. I can’t tell if these are paid or built naturally but just keep in mind that any paid links are fine according to Google’s head engineer of their spam team, as long as they are marked ‘no follow’. On this topic, Matt Cutts says: “As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings [i.e. ‘follow links’]. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines [i.e. ‘no follow links’]. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.” (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ – also see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569 and http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736 on this topic).
• Other pages of their site have links pointing to them as well – altogether, there are 4,174 ‘follow’ links pointing to the domain (all pages), from 114 different sites.
• They have many links from domains that have high authority. These include a link from Google’s Directory (http://www.google.com/dirhp) which is based on listings in the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org/about.html). A listing like this is really valuable.
• A lot of their links are from sites that are directly relevant to their site.
• They have some good anchor text in the links – this is the part of the link people click on, so some anchor text will say ‘click here’ but it’s better if you can get it to say ‘telephone system’ or whatever keyword you’re going for.

In short, they’re employing a good linking strategy which will have been the major contributing factor to getting their site ranked well in Google. You can use Yahoo’s free site explorer to get some similar information: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Tip: Try and write content that people will find interesting, unique and useful, so that they share it and link to it – this will boost your search engine rankings.   Create a plan to get quality links to your website from other relevant and trusted websites – there are many ways – check out the link building articles here: http://www.angelseo.co.uk/seo/link-building. Don’t pay for your links unless you ensure they are marked as ‘no follow’ – Google is happy for you to buy ‘no follow’ links.

Keywords

You want your site to rank well for key words and phrases that people will use when they search Google for products and services like yours.  I’ve used another professional tool to see what terms Best4System’s website is likely to be targeting from the way they have built and arranged their content.

Most targeted:

• telephone
• systems
• headsets
• accessories
• recording
• conferencing
• answering
• equipment
• best4systems
• voice

Phrases:

• telephone systems
• telephone headsets
• telephone accessories
• uk business
• answering machines
• voice mail
• mail systems
• conference phones
• way radios
• voice recording

Further targeted terms:

• voice mail systems
• video conferencing equipment
• two way radios
• cordless telephone headsets
• gn netcom jabra
• soundstation 2 lcd
• monaural nc headset
• lcd audio conference
• wideband monaural headset
• wideband binaural headset

These lists suggest that the company has effectively arranged its content to rank well for these very important phrases. There are no phrases on here that I’d imagine they didn’t want to rank for so in that respect, they’re doing a good job.

Tip: Research all possible combinations of keywords that people look for when trying to find a telephone system. Use Google’s free keyword tool to get suggestions: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Look for long tail keywords i.e. rather than ‘telephone systems’, you could consider ‘telephone systems Nottingham’ which will be easier to rank for.  Include relevant keywords in your titles and descriptions – the earlier your targeted keyword appears in the title/description, the better.  Make sure your content makes use of your target keywords but don’t ‘keyword stuff’.  Just write naturally and include key words and phrases where appropriate.

What could they do better?

Even though these guys are number one for ‘telephone systems’ right now, it doesn’t mean they rank for every term – and I’ve found room for improvement.

Friendly URLS

Using appropriate keywords in your page names and folder names helps Google understand further what your page is about.  Many of Best4System’s URLs (the addresses to their web pages) aren’t search engine friendly. Click on ‘voice mail systems’ and you get http://www.best4systems.co.uk/_Voice_Mail_Systems.asp?CtgID=1035 – that’s not too bad but then click on ‘retell music on hold’ and you get http://www.best4systems.co.uk/category.asp?CtgID=7100 – this URL tells Google nothing about the page. They’re still on the first page for ‘retell music on hold’ impressively, but they could rank better by improving the friendliness of the URLs for this and other pages. It’s probably because they’ve used a canned ecommerce system – lots of these result in unfriendly URLs – the good news for them is, the one they’ve used is ‘open source’ so they could do something about it.

Tip: Use file and folder names that include keywords, where relevant. E.g. ‘avaya-systems.html’ rather than ‘page1.html’.  This will help Google understand more about your pages and your site structure.

Titles and descriptions

Google uses the <title> and <meta name=”description” tag to find out more about your page.  Keeping your title and description relevant is a key aspect of making your site search engine friendly.  But check out the page title of Best4System’s home page – http://www.best4systems.co.uk/ – it’s a huge list of keywords. Google won’t read all of these characters anyway, and may frown on this as a spammy technique. The lengthy title and description – 33 words in the title alone – which you can’t see as a user is:

• Page Title: Telephone Systems, Conference Phones, Phone Terminals, Telephone Headsets, Fax Machines, Video Conferencing Equipment, Voice Mail Systems, Voice Recording, Answering Machines, Two Way Radios and Telephone Accessories for UK Business and Offices – Best4Systems
• Page Description: We supply Telephone Systems, Phones & Terminals, Telephone Headsets, Fax Machines, Conference Phones , Video Conferencing Equipment & Phones, Voice Mail Systems, Voice Recording, Answering Machines, Two Way Radios & Telephone Accessories throughout the UK

A further knock on effect of this is that Google won’t like the title and instead will display an extract of your page instead (which can affect your click through rates). Other pages on the site don’t seem to use this tactic, fortunately.

Tip: Keep your titles and descriptions unique for each page and concise – no more than 60 characters for the title and 160 for the description (here, we try and stick to 120 for our main content).  Put the most important (but relevant) key words and phrases early on in the title and description.  If you insist on adding your company name, put it right on the end.

Product listings

Best4systems has a lot of products and services, and by creating individual pages for each of these, they stand to gain better search engine exposure for many different keywords.  The content is logically organised and there is a product search. Unlike most telecoms web sites, these guys do offer prices which is a personal preference of mine, as I’m always sceptical about phoning people for quotes without having a clue what they might charge.

So what could be done better? Google recognises ‘RDFa’ mark up which allows you to mark certain information within your web pages so that Google knows what that information is.  I’ve had a look through a few sample web pages and I don’t think Best4Systems are using RDFa.  This is a missed opportunity to gain better search engine exposure for a wider range of their products.

Tip: Really, a database driven site is the best solution if you want to showcase lots of products. Best4Systems are using an ecommerce system which likely makes it easy for them to add and amend products.  It’s an open source system too, so it’s likely to be modifiable to meet your company’s specific needs.  Create different pages for each of your products, categories and brands. So you might have both a ‘Plantronics’ category and a ‘Headsets’ category. Your products could be listed under both but don’t have duplicate content.  Mark specific products up with RDFa – http://www.angelseo.co.uk/seo/google/using-rdfa-for-a-better-google-presence/

Images and speed

Using images on your page makes your site more attractive – and people link more to attractive sites.  It helps people visualise your products and can be an opportunity for some extra search engine traffic.

Overall, Best4System’s site is professionally designed.  Some of Best4System’s images don’t have alt tags – this is a missed opportunity for additional traffic. There are a lot of images on the page – 27! Google (and your site visitors) really care about site speed so you need to try and make your site as fast as possible. Lots of images slows the site down – each image is a ‘http request’ – so if you combine the images and use CSS to display the bit of the image you want, you’ll speed the site up.

I had a look at the speed of the website overall – you can analyse yours for free here: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ – as mentioned above, speed is really important to Google, which tries to maximise the user experience. The speed of the site is slow – 56.6 seconds on a slow connection, that’s nearly a minute! There are improvements that could be made here:

• Reducing the number of objects on the page to speed it up.
• Reducing the number of images or combining them.
• Reducing the number of external scripts / combining them.
• Optimising images, scripts etc. The images come to over 140k and the scripts are over 20k.

Finally, although the company gives some info about itself on the about page, there’s no staff profiles that I can find, and in my opinion, the images used in the header look like actors (like the one on the right). A lot of telecoms sites seem to go down this route.  Making the site more personable and introducing company profiles could potentially increase the conversion rates.

Tip: Make sure your images are descriptively named to help Google understand what they’re about.  You’ll get more listings in Google’s image search which can bring you extra traffic.  Use Website Optimiser to check your site speed and identify areas for improvement.  Consider adding staff profiles so visitors can really get a feel for the personality of your company.

More observations and tips…

• Social networking: Social networking is a good way to build more links to your site and get customers interacting with your company.  Best4Systems aren’t making use of it at all as far as I can see.  This is a missed opportunity to tell customers what’s going on at your company, to let them know about new products and services, and to get their feedback which can help you shape your business.

• Navigation: Although the site has a search box, it is a search box for products, not for company information. That’s not a disaster though, as contact info is easy to locate through a clear navigation structure. Create a clear menu that both Google and your users can use to find all of your pages. Avoid using flash or javascript as (generally speaking) Google can’t read these menus.

• Website law: I don’t think the site complies with UK website law at the time of writing. The about page confirms that they are owned by Media and Communications Limited but there’s no company number to be seen, for a start. This would usually go in the footer or on the contact page.  Make sure your website complies with  UK law – aside from avoiding the legal consequences, the requirements are designed to give your visitors confidence in your company.

• Usability: When designing your site, it’s important to consider usability factors. The text looks very small on my screen throughout the site – I’m a little short sighted so I find it rather hard to read.  There are plenty of great articles on the web to help you improve your usability and accessibility.

• Audience: When building your site, you need to consider your audience.  There’s a huge amount of information on this site. I imagine few businesses really know what they want – more likely, they know what problems they have. Although the site offers phone support, there’s a really interesting opportunity to create some sort of wizard or ‘solution picker’ based on a customer’s needs, so they can see a custom package come together for them on the screen.

I’ve really enjoyed looking at Best4System’s site.  Although my background is law, business and marketing, telecoms is my family’s business and it’s really interesting to see how, in the space of a few short years, the industry has gone from attracting customers primarily through word of mouth recommendation, through to using the web to generate leads. Certainly, with a fantastic number one ranking for a great term, a lot of what Best4Systems has done so far has worked really well.  It’s a great demonstration of good search engine optimisation techniques that have been proven to work.  With a little extra work, Best4Systems could achieve even more number one rankings for their products and services.

What next for your telecoms business?

The advice on this page is very tailored to the site I’ve looked at – one size never fits all when it comes to SEO. If you’re a telecoms company and you’re looking for ways to make your site work harder for you online, why not drop us a line.  With our team of SEO and conversion experts, I’d love to help you put together a plan to improve your rankings and make your telecoms website work harder for you.

When most small businesses turn to the internet with a small budget and high hopes for their website, it can be a bit daunting – where do you start?  There are so many kinds of internet advertising – should you buy banners?  Should you buy links?  What will get you the best results for the lowest possible cost?  Read on to explore a selection of the different internet advertising options…

Pay per click (PPC)

PPC is one of the most widely used forms of internet advertising. Using PPC you bid on key words and phrases relevant to your website.  Websites who have bid the most for a particular key word or phrase, appear in a special highlighted box at the top of the search engine (e.g. Google).  You can set the amount you’re willing to pay for someone clicking on your link, and a daily budget.  If nobody clicks you don’t pay.  PPC offers good short term boost for targetted traffic.  One of the most popular PPC schemes is Google Adwords – and Google provide a complete guide to setting up and using pay per click which you can download here. 

There are two downsides to PPC.  First, it’s very easy to spend a lot of money and get no results.  That’s because there are loads of potential pitfalls in running a PPC campaign, from choosing the wrong keywords to writing an ad which will get you the wrong kind of visitors.  Here at Angel, we offer affordable PPC management, which helps you get the absolute best value out of your campaign. 

The other downside is that 10% or less of Google visitors click on PPC adverts so whilst it’ll bring you some traffic, it doesn’t have the potential of SEO.  The best choice is to run a PPC campaign alongside your SEO campaign while you wait for SEO results – the PPC campaign, if managed properly, will bring you that extra revenue you need to fund your SEO.

Banners

You can buy banners on other peoples’ websites (perhaps with a similar topic to yours) but they’re a less popular kind of internet advertising due to the theory of ‘banner blindness’.  This theory says we’re so inundated with banners that we just ignore them.  It’s actually based on usability testing (Benway, J. P., Lane, D. M., Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss “Obvious” Links, 1998, Internet Technical Group, Rice University).

Affiliate schemes

You pay to be included in a directory of websites.  Other people who have websites join the directory as an ‘affiliate’ and promote your website.  You pay them a small fee for either visits to your site or sales.  Affiliate Window is a popular choice for such schemes in the UK.  It’s not cheap to join these types of schemes – expect to pay around £5,000 a year – but it works well for companies like Play.com and Boots, who only pay commission on confirmed sales.

Emails

Building an email list from visitors to your website is a great way to create a relationship with potential customers (we can help you add this feature to your website).  By contrast, buying an email list from an email list broker can be riddled with difficulties.  You need to be sure that the people on the list have truly ‘opted in’ to being contacted for marketing purposes and, let’s face it, how many people genuinely opt in to be contacted by a random company they’ve never heard of?  Many lists are out of date or sold over and over to different people, reducing or diminishing their value.  It’s far better to build up your own email list and send out quality emails with content of real value to your visitors. 

Of course, getting past Hotmail, Gmail and other email spam filters is a difficult process.  We can also assist with designing, building and sending out attractive emails to your opt in email list that are tested and confirmed to get through the spam filters – and we can track open rates and click through rates for you.  We can also add tracking to your website to enable you to monitor exactly how many sales result from your email campaign.

Viral marketing

Viral marketing or advertising is a fresh and sexy way of getting your brand around, if it’s done properly.  It makes use of viral content – videos, emails, stories, or other stuff people like to share.  This is passed round from friend to friend, colleague to colleague, just like a virus.  It sounds great but it’s easy to get wrong and viral campaigns that go wrong can backfire on the brand.  Talk to us about a viral campaign for your brand.

Behavioural targeting

This form of internet advertising looks at displaying adverts and offers to the user based on their online habits.  It can be marketing – this is something that can be rolled out on your website for more effective targetting.  For example, a cosmetic site could quickly establish from a visitor’s behaviour if they are male or female and display appropriate offers and content on that basis.   This is something Angel can set up for you.

Buying links, listings and reviews

Here’s a form of internet advertising you need to be careful about.  Google’s webmaster guidelines do not allow you to buy any link or type of promotion that passes ‘link juice’.  If you’re not familiar with this term, don’t worry – it just means that if you do pay for a link, listing or review, you need to ensure it is marked as ‘no follow’.  If you’re not given this option, steer clear of making a purchase.  Of course, paying to be considered for inclusion in a directory (like Yahoo) is not the same as buying a link – because you may not actually be included.  When your site is looking good, paying the fee to be considered for inclusion in Yahoo is a good thing.

These are just a few types of internet advertising that you may consider when looking to promote your business.  If you have a limited budget and want to see the best results, give us a call at Angel and talk through your ideas – we’ve got years of experience between us in internet advertising and know all the tips and tricks to make your budget go a lot further – 0115 966 7984.

In this video Dave grills Will about what customers should expect from an SEO company and why companies should be interested in search engine reputation management (SERM).

About Will Critchlow…

Will Critchlow co-founded Distilled in 2005 with Duncan Morris. Distilled provides natural and paid search, online reputation consulting and web design services to businesses of all sizes from start-ups to multinational corporations.

The other sections of the video will be coming over the next few weeks.

Also get your tickets for Distilled’s Pro SEO Seminar – tickets are selling fast so get yours now…

1. Target: First, let’s do some smart keyword picking.  Visit Google’s Keyword Tool and type in a few words related to your site.  Look for key words and phrases that don’t have a lot of advertiser competition (measured by the green bar headed ‘competition’) as this is a good indication people aren’t targetting them so heavily.  Check.  Go to Google.co.uk and type in your key term in “quotes”.  Look for low competition in the results (e.g. 100,000 or less) and a lack of exact matches in the page titles, descriptions and URL.
2. Content: Next, write an article of at least 300 words on this topic (it’s hard to do any topic justice in 300 words but I’m including this figure because, in our experience, Google pays little attention to pages shorter than this).  Try and make it factual, interesting and unique – something people would share and link to.
3. Keywords: Do a bit of keyword optimisation:
   1. Put your exact key word/phrase at the beginning of the title
   2. Put your exact key word/phrase at the beginning of your H1 (if it makes sense)
   3. Name your page using your exact key word/phrase (e.g. seo.html)
   4. Put your exact key word/phrase in your meta description
   5. Put your exact key word/phrase in your body tag (i.e. in the main content), at least once, early on if poss (don’t worry about repeating it over and over, that technique died a death in the 1980s)
4. Images: Add a relevant image, or two, to your page.  Keep the file sizes small so your page speed isn’t affected.  Name the image files by your key word or phrase (but do make sure it’s relevant!).  Add alt text that includes your key word or phrase (as long as it’s relevant).
5. Sitemaps: Add your page to your user and XML sitemaps.  Resubmit your XML sitemap to Google via Webmaster tools.
6. Interlink: Link up your article from other pages on your site, particularly if you use the key word/phrase on other pages.  If you have a blog, mention it in your blog.  Wherever you link up to your article, use the keyword as anchor text (e.g. <a href=”yourarticle.html”>Your keyword</a> rather than <a href=”yourarticle.html”>Click here</a>).  This may impact how Google views your page in terms of relevance for that keyword, and it will help Google find and index your page faster.
7. Promotion: Write a short original version of your article, minimum 250 words.  Submit it to the article directories (you’ll have to sign up for accounts but once you’ve done this one time, you’ll be able to submit easily in future).  Make sure your ‘author box’ or ‘resource box’ has a link back to your article, with your key word or phrase in the anchor text. Tip: If you submit 25+ decent articles to Ezine, you’ll be considered for platinum status.  If you obtain this, your articles go on their home page when they are approved.  This is great because sites like that get indexed by Google very frequently and Google is therefore very likely find your article and index it a lot faster too.
8. Social sharing: Bookmark your article on StumbleUpon, share it on Twitter, and link to it on Facebook.  If you have time, share it on other social media sites.  If you have the time, do this every day for a few days to make sure Google picks up on the ‘buzz’.
9. Fast links: Have a surf around for articles that allow comments on your topic (try typing things like your keyword +”add a comment” into Google to find these).  Add a comment to a few of these pages – make sure your comment is genuinely useful and include a couple of relevant tips, not just a link to your article, as you’ll likely be deleted for spam otherwise.  Most allow a link back to your site – if possible try and get the anchor text to be your key word or phrase (rather than ‘click here’ to read my article).
10. Friendly boost: Use your friends, family and colleagues for a boost.  Send them a link to your article and ask them to Digg it, Stumble it, Twitter it etc.  Make sure they do this from home, as if your colleagues all do it from the same IP as you, you might find your stumble account gets blocked! Pop it in your email signature for a few days.

There you have it – when time is short, use what little you have to achieve a ranking for a realistic key word or phrase with these 10 search engine optimisation techniques.

• The SEOMoz free relevance tool helps you figure out how relevant a page is to a keyword.  Paste your text in or provide a URL and get an approximate relevance as a percentage.
• Yahoo Site Exporer allows you to see links to your website – or to other peoples’ websites.  Great for competitor research and keeping an eye on your own link profile.  Open Site Explorer also provides some data although it’s limited if you have a free account.
• XML sitemaps lets you build your sitemap online – up to 500 pages on the free version.
• Xenu is a free broken link checker. It can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors), you can email the reports, it supports SSL websites, you can conduct partial testing of ftp and gopher sites, it detects and reports redirected URLs, and builds a user site map for you.
• Website analyser is a great tool for checking the speed of your website – it gives you practical suggestions on speeding up your site.
• Google’s webmaster tools gives you data on your site, including crawl errors and number of pages indexed.  It lets you submit a sitemap and check it.
• Google’s analytics lets you monitor your website traffic.
• Google’s website optimiser is a tool for increasing your conversions.
• Doubleclick Ad Planner lets you define audiences by demographics and interests,  search for websites relevant to your target audience and access unique users, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.  Brilliant for SEO competitor research.
• Alexa’s site info gives you some idea of a website’s traffic, demographics, etc.
• For a quick free plagiarism check, try copyscape – for a more comprehensive check, use Viper (a tool meant for essay checking but works fine for checking your content) – both are free.

Do you have other favourite free SEO tools? Why not link to them below!

In order to understand what attracts website traffic and, eventually, customers who close the sale, it is important to conduct tests or experiments to pinpoint the content and design that influences the purchase decision. Further complicating this understanding of customers and what they want is the fact that there are clearly segments of consumers who want different things. Then, the tests become even more complicated because there has to be a series of tests in order to find what each segment will like the most.

And, if that’s not challenging enough, finding the test audience to run the experiment may be even tougher, especially if your website is not as popular as Facebook or gets the same level of traffic as YouTube. If you could gather some of this necessary intelligence, you could then more effectively undertake targeted test develop with another Google tool, its Website Optimizer experiment where you can determine which elements will most likely optimise your website for the highest levels of traffic and increased conversion rates.

Google’s DoubleClick AdPlanner Audience Segmentation Ideas

That’s when you can turn to DoubleClick Ad Planner to find testing ideas that fit your ideal market segments that you want to target with your website. This company is on a mission to help its clients find the most accurate and telling insights into the demographics, personal tastes, website preferences, and purchase motivations of the online audience segments.

This tool will help you define what types of websites your target audience will most likely visit, identify and look at websites that are relevant to them, and access unique page views and other data for millions of websites that are found across 40 countries. This tool truly offers some valuable intelligence that can help you target your test development for an optimised website.

To get started, simply sign into DoubleClick Ad Planner using an existing account or create a new one if you have never had any type of Google account before. From there, step one involves creating a new media plan by going to the research tab and then selecting the research by audience tab, which gives you options by geography (country and then state or province), demographics (gender, age, education, and household income), online activity, interests, and ranking method.

Benchmarking the Favourite Websites

The results are what Google calls a Website Testing Inspiration table. This is a list of the websites that your intended target audience looks at and likes to revisit regularly. Take 10-20 of these sites and begin analysing them for what seems to be similar amongst all them. For example, it could be the colour, the layout, the structure of the pages, the content, or any combination of these elements.

Next Steps: Begin Preparing for Google Website Optimizer Experiment

The various standout differences from these websites can serve as the basis for your variables testing that will be undertaken within the Google Website Optimizer experiment. Here, you will create a number of variable pages from which you can test various reactions in order to ascertain which variables maximize audience attraction and conversion.

• Part 1: Planning Your Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser Tool
• Part 2: Conducting an A/B Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 3: Undertaking a Multivariate Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

With the Google Website Optimiser experiment underway, it’s now time to view reports. This article will also provide some insights into how to pause or even stop an experiment.

Results in the form of impressions and conversions will be sent back almost immediately after you’ve launched the experiment. The data can be found by selecting the View Reports link on the experiment dashboard under the Experiment List. It’s a good idea to check these results fairly soon after starting the experiment in case some tagging errors need to be addressed.

Reading the Reports

The report is easy-to-read because all the data is displayed as a graph or a table so the performance of each variation can be quickly identified and analysed. Google provides specific instructions on how to read the reports as well as how they create the results by checking out the technical overview found on their Website Optimizer Guide. Here are some key tips to remember about viewing reports:

• Page Section results usually appear much earlier than Combination results because of not requiring as many visits before meaningful data can be collected.
• Waiting for the Combinations report will most likely provide more comprehensive information that you were looking for so it’s worth the wait!
• You will receive some final analysis from Google Website Optimizer in the form of a final recommendation on the best combination possible, i.e. the combination of variables that most optimises your site.
• All the results are entirely dependent on how much traffic you receive and the number of variations you have created.

Re-working and Re-developing Content Variations

If you begin to get results back that you are not satisfied with, it means you will need to go back to the drawing board and create some more dramatic variations that will yield more effective reactions from your visitors. This is where it may be a good time to pause or stop the experiment and rework your content so that you can continue experimenting to find those optimum results.

Pressing the Pause Button

It is possible to temporarily stop the Google Website Optimizer test by selecting the Pause link that is found on the report page. You can even permanently stop the experiment by selecting the Stop link also found in the same location. When ending the experiment, the tool will still provide the results up to that point so that you can choose the best possible variations to use on your website as determined by the data gathered to that point in the experiment. If you do choose to stop the experiment, it’s important to remember that it cannot be restarted. Instead, you will have to go back to the very beginning as outline in previous articles and start an entirely new experiment within Google Website Optimizer.

Final Thoughts

This series of articles has walked you through the process of using Google’s Website Optimizer tool from start to finish, illustrating just how easy and valuable it is to help you optimise your website by understanding what elements garner more attention and higher traffic. Now, it’s time for you to go get started!

Links to other sections:

• Intro: Using Web Optimiser to increase traffic and optimise content
• Part 1: Planning Your Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser Tool
• Part 2: Conducting an A/B Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 3: Undertaking a Multivariate Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

Many of the steps used for conducting an A/B experiment are also used to establish the multivariate experiment used within Google’s Website Optimizer.

Step 1: Go to Website Optimizer and Sign-In

To get started, go to Google’s landing page for its Website Optimizer Tool. Again, if you haven’t worked with this tool, the link is: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/splash?hl=en. If you have AdWords, you can also access the Website Optimizer tool there through Reporting>Website Optimizer.

To start a new experiment, you will need to click on the button that says: Create New Experiment and then click on the Multivariate Experiment link.

Step 2: Detail Experiment Pages

Like the A/B test, there are specific pieces of information that are necessary to input in order to identify the experiment pages so that the Website Optimizer tool can do its test:

• Pick experiment name: The name of the first test is not as important as future names, so go for something basic and then add detail with each future test you conduct.
• Submit the URL for the test pages: This is where you will need the URL of the original test page that was selected in the planning stages as explained in part one of this article series. Be sure to leave out other information from the URL like any query parameters as this is not essential.
• Enter the URL of the conversion page: This is the URL of the conversion page that was also selected during the planning stages of this experiment. Also leave out any extra information and just focus on the URL.

At this point, the Website Optimizer will check the URLs for validity. If there are any problems, an error message will be returned and corrections will be made before the experiment can continue.  It’s important to get these URLs right to ensure the best possible results from the experiment.

Step 3: Insert Tags on the Experiment Pages

Depending on your level of expertise, you can either choose to install the HTML script tags on the experiment pages or pass this off to someone with more knowledge in this particular area. It’s important to provide all the necessary information, including the URLs, to the person who may be handling this aspect of the Website Optimizer experiment. In fact, there is an actual button where you can pick an option that says: “Your webmaster will install and validate JavaScript tags.” Selecting this option will prompt the Website Optimizer to give you a URL. Along with this URL, you need to give the following information to the person responsible for the tags:

• Elements on the test page that will be varied so that these can be marked with page section tags.
• A name for each element to help identify these elements later on in the test.

There are four types of tags that will need to be installed before the multivariate test can continue:

• Control script: Put this on your test page as a way to ensure that the experiment variations are switched randomly and that these variables are displayed equally. The control script should be placed immediately after the <head> tag.
• Tracking script: Place this tag on your test page to record visits to that page. It should go immediately before the closing </body> tag.
• Page sections script: Use the page sections script to mark the elements that will be varied as part of the test. For each element, the page section must be named in the script.
• Conversion script: Install the conversion script to track visits to the conversion page. Put it immediately before the closing </body> tags on the conversion page.

Once these tags are completed, Google’s Website Optimizer tool will again validate these actions to verify that the tags have been installed correctly. Any errors will need to be fixed before the test can continue. If everything is correct, you can proceed to the next step.

Step 4: Develop the Variations

The next step in the experiment process is to select the content variations for the experiment. To add a variation, you must do the following:

1. Select the “Add new variation” link.
2. Type in a name for your variation to differentiate it from the original content and other variations that you plan to test.
3. Change the original content that is found in the variation content window to make the variation content for testing.
4. Save the variation content.
5. Continue these steps until you achieve the number of variations that you want to test.

The number of variations created will also lead to an incremental increase in the total combinations that are analysed within the Website Optimizer tool, testing both the individual variations that were developed and the combined effect of all the variations that had been created. For example, if there were two image variations and two headline variations that were to be tested, then there would be a number of combinations, such as original image and original headline, original image and new headline, original headline and new image, new image and new headline. With even more variations, there are exponentially increasing combinations that can be analysed.

When you are finished with all the variations you want to test, then it’s time to save and continue onto the next phase of the Google Website Optimizer experiment.

Step 5: Preview and Begin the Experiment

Before the experiment begins, you have one last chance to preview each of the potential content and page variations that you have created through the Preview link to make some decisions:

• This link opens a new window where you can see your original test page along with a preview control bar that lets you check out each of the combinations before starting the experiment.
• This is the place where you can limit how many people can participate in this experiment. The Total Traffic Sent through this Experiment prompt allows you to enter a percentage of people who will be allowed to view the page variations.
• This is where you can opt to delete any poorly performing page variations by choosing the Auto-disable losing variations prompt.
• This is where you can hit the Back button and return to earlier steps if the variation pages need to be updated. You may also need to change the tags if any of the changes involve page URL updates.

When you are ready to get the experiment underway, it’s time to hit the Launch Now button. This takes you to the experiment dashboard. From there, you can track how the experiment is going and view a report with data on each of the variations. The amount and quality of the experiment results are based on the amount of traffic that goes to the test variation and conversion pages.

The next article in this series will discuss how to view reports as well as monitor or end a Google Website Optimizer experiment.

• Next … Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

Other sections:

• Intro: Using Web Optimiser to increase traffic and optimise content
• Part 1: Planning Your Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser Tool
• Part 2: Conducting an A/B Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

Now that some crucial decisions have been made in regards to running an optimisation experiment on your web pages with Google’s Website Optimizer tool, the next part of the testing process can also be laid out with some very simple steps to follow as outlined below:

Step 1: Sign in to Google’s Website Optimizer Tool

To get started, you’ll need to get to Google’s landing page for its Website Optimizer Tool. If you haven’t yet been there, the link is: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/splash?hl=en. You can also use this tool within AdWords and access it there by signing into your AdWords account and selecting the tab: Reporting>Website Optimizer.

• If this is your first time using this particular Google tool, you’ll need to select the button that says: Get Started.
• From here, you’ll be sent to the Experiment List page where Google tracks previous experiments that you have conducted.
• To start a new experiment, you will need to click on the button that says: Create New Experiment. From there, you then select the A/B Experiment tab.
  Follow the A/B Experiment Checklist that is user-friendly and guides your through the new experiment set-up phase.

Step 2: Gather Experiment Page Information

After setting up the experiment, the next step involves gathering some information that the Website Optimizer Tool needs to conduct the experiment on your behalf:

• Pick an experiment name: The first experiment may not need a descriptive name, but future experiments should have a name that distinguishes them from the others that have been previously conducted and located on the Experiment List page.
• Enter the URL for each test page: During this process, make sure that the URL for each test page, including the original test page and the variable test pages, do not have any information after the page’s file name. Each one that you enter should have a unique URL so that it can be tested within the A/B test process.
• Submit the URL for the conversion page: Like the process for entering the URLs for each test page, this URL should also not contain anything after the page’s file name.

After these steps are finished, Google’s tool will check each for validity and send error messages if there are any blank fields or the URLs cannot be accessed. The tool will not waste time testing invalid URLs and neither should you! Once the validation process is complete, it’s on to the next step.

Step 3: Include Tags on the Test Pages

If you are have the knowledge to handle this next task, then you can proceed with installing the HTML script tags on each of the test pages. If not, don’t be afraid to hand this step off to someone who knows the ins and outs of HTML and has a working knowledge of your website’s architecture. The person in charge of installing these tags will need the URLs for the original page, the test pages, and the conversion pages. The following tags will need to be installed on each of these pages:

• Original page: Add the control script to ensure that experiment variations are changed randomly and that all variations are displayed equally. This should be placed immediately after the tag. Also install the tracking script to make sure that visits to the original page are recorded as part of the experiment. This script would be put immediately before the closing tag.
• Variation pages: The corresponding tracking script from the original page should be inserted immediately before the closing tag for each variation page that was created from the original page.
• Conversion page: The corresponding tracking script from the original page should be inserted immediately before the closing tags on the conversion page.

After these tags are installed, the Google Website Optimization tool will again validate the pages and make sure that all tags were installed their proper place. Any problems must be fixed because the tool will not let you proceed otherwise.

Step 4: Begin the Experiment

Now, it’s time to begin the experiment. As a last-minute check to ensure you are satisfied with your test pages, you can always select the Preview link and update pages by clicking the back button and returning as far back as you need in the aforementioned steps. Once the experiment begins, the parameters of the test must remain the same, so this is the last chance to make any changes, including potentially reinstalling control or tracking tags and undertaking the validation process again.

Now, the experiment begins and there are some parameters that you will need to select as the test gets underway:

• Select a percentage of people you would like to participate in the test when you are given the Total Traffic Sent through This Experiment prompt.
• Choose to eliminate any of the poorly performing page variations by selecting the “On” button located next to the Auto-Disable Losing Variations prompt or speed up this process by picking the Aggressive option or slow it down by picking the Conservative option found on the pull-down menu.
• After these testing parameters are in place, it’s time to select the Get Started button and let Google’s Website Optimizer Tool do the work. The experiment’s progress can be checked through a link to the experiment’s dashboard where you can view where the test stands under the View Report link. Progress and the duration of the test are related directly to the amount of traffic on both the test and conversion pages.

The next article will outline a multivariate experiment for those more interested in this type of test often viewed as the more results-oriented of the two testing mechanisms.

• NEXT … Part 3: Undertaking a Multivariate Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser

Other sections:

• Intro: Using Web Optimiser to increase traffic and optimise content
• Part 1: Planning Your Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser Tool
• Part 3: Undertaking a Multivariate Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

In the first article of a series on the Google Website Optimizer Tool, the design and scope of the very necessary experiment and testing phase of using this tool is outlined with a straightforward strategy.

The test results are intended to conceptualise the most optimised page for a website that will yield the highest traffic and conversion rate by taking one page and testing multiple versions of that same page with slight variations.

The testing phase consists of a number of crucial decisions that will impact the final outcome of this experiment. Follow this recipe and you can’t go wrong with determining the most appropriate optimisation strategy:

Step 1: Select the Test Page

Think about a web page that you would like to use as an experiment for making changes with Website Optimizer.

• It has to be a web page that has some call to action associated with it, such as buying something, downloading information, or signing up for a newsletter.
• This page would then have an internal link where a site visitor can continue that action by being moved to another page on the same site where it is hoped that they complete the action.
• Even better is to have this type of call to action on a high traffic page so that the test can deliver fast and helpful results.
• Another alternative is to test a page that you drive traffic toward through strategies like AdWords.
• Also considering testing a page that currently has a low converting rate so that you can work on improving results.

Step 2: Pick the Conversion Page

The conversion page is, in essence, the representation of all your optimisation results because it’s where the purchase happens or where the visitor receives information from you.

• If you selected a test page that already includes an internal link, then picking the conversion page is a no-brainer as it is the page where the visitors goes to once they select the link.
• If you selected a test page that has more than one internal link, then narrow the experiment down to the one that tends to be more traffic-friendly.

Step 3: Determine the Most Appropriate Test

Google Website Optimiser has two types of tests to consider:

• A/B: The advantages of A/B tests are that you can compare page performance on two different pages to better understand the impact of layouts and design. Other benefits are that this test is easy and takes less time to reach results.
• Multivariate: The advantages of multivariate tests is their robustness and flexibility in terms of being able to conduct simultaneous tests on the content variations, such as headlines, images, or product descriptions, of different sections of site pages.

Step 4: Choose Content for Testing

The content you select is based on the type of test that you decide to use for this experiment:

• A/B test: Simply pick a specific page rather than content. The image below shows this test.

• Multivariate test: Be sure to select several types of content to compare, such as headlines, images, etc. The image below also illustrates this type of test:

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielwaisberg/3979873841/ – Daniel Waisberg, 2009

Step 5: Develop Content or Page Variations to Test

Once again, this step involves two pathways, depending on the type of experiment that you are doing:

• Multivariate testing and content variations: After selecting the content to be tested, it is then time to develop at least one significantly different variation for each type of content in which visitors will see the original content or the variation of this original content, which should be more unique or interesting than anything used previously that had been somewhat bland. This will help you hone in on what type of content creates various reactions and then delivers the most attractive type of action, which would involve convincing the visitor to take the next step and visit the conversion page.
• A/B testing and page variations: After choosing your test page and this testing method, it’s then time to develop the alternative versions of that test page by changing the graphics, layout design, and text. Like the other variation testing on content, visitors will either see the original test page or one of the variation test pages (and it is recommended that you do at least two or three different ones to better gauge the response). From there, Google’s Website Optimizer can gauge the results of each of these page variations to see what influences visitors to click through to the conversion page.

Step 6: Assess Traffic Numbers for Experiment

It’s important to know what level of traffic you want to participate in the experiment in terms of the number that see the original content or pages and the quantity that view the variations of either the content or the pages.

A good measuring stick is the amount of time you are willing to put into the experiment. The more traffic you allow to participate in the test, the longer it’s going to take to get the results. However, if the test page you opted for tends to get small amounts of traffic, then it is worth opening up the test to all our visitors in order to get some meaningful results from all the effort you put into the development of the variations for testing.

Step 7: Begin the Testing Process with Google’s Website Optimiser

Now that you have picked your test page and developed the variables as well as picked the traffic level for testing, it’s time to begin the testing process. The next article will tell you how to start your experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser.

• NEXT… Part 2: Conducting an A/B Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser

Other sections:

• Intro: Using Web Optimiser to increase traffic and optimise content
• Part 3: Undertaking a Multivariate Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

What is Website Optimiser?  It is Google’s free website testing and optimisation tool that allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending any money on advertising. Using Google’s Website Optimiser to test and optimise your website content and design, you can quickly and easily increase revenue and return on investment.

Our four part guide to using Google’s Website Optimiser is written by our special guest author Nina Gass.  Nina Gass is a writer, editor, and ghost author for the likes of Orbitz, Wal-Mart, Idea Launch and KMGi.  Her areas of expertise include social media marketing, SEO, and online writing techniques.

Nina walks you through the process of planning and setting up a test using Google’s website optimiser, and evaluating the results.  If you want to use Google’s Ad Planner for a more targetted experiment, read ‘Using Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner‘ first.

• Part 1: Planning Your Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser Tool
• Part 2: Conducting an A/B Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 3: Undertaking a Multivariate Experiment with Google’s Website Optimiser
• Part 4: Completing a Google Website Optimiser Experiment and Understand the Results

Growing your Facebook page from nothing – can it be done quickly?

This is a question asked a lot by business leaders  The simple answer is that it takes time to grow a dedicated following, it is not something that happens overnight. If it does, you can be sure they will disappear just as quick (why? read this: Facebook Fans – it’s about quality not quantity).

From the start when you create a Facebook business page, it requires commitment from you and your company. It is not something that is just going to work quickly and have a huge impact on your orders; but given time and dedication, it could have a big impact on your company’s turnover. You have to give it time to develop and be willing to spend time engaging, monitoring and networking. Facebook is not just another platform to push your products/services – it provides so much more, if you’re willing to spend time communicating and building a relationship with your followers.  Remember, they are potential customers!

Due to the power of Facebook  and user numbers (over 500 million active users), it is a great way share your news, products/services and gain feedback, without it costing your anything apart from time. Facebook allows you to get your message direct to your target audience, without them having hunt for you on the internet and find your website. Every time you update your Facebook pages status, it automatically appears in every follower news feed.

To gain the most from your business page, spend time getting to know what it can do for you and your business, what you can add, etc. You can add photos, videos, music, to name a few things. You can even poll your followers to find out their opinions on your products/services.

A successful Facebook page needs to -

• Reward loyalty - if you’re seen as loyal to your followers i.e. responding to them when they ask questions about your products or ask for help when something goes wrong, they will be loyal back to you and get involved when you ask for their feedback.
• Have quality posts – you need to provide quality content to get people willing to comment and engage with you – they don’t just comment on anything. It needs to be appealing and interesting to them.
• Target your audience – for your page to be a success you need to appeal to the right audience, i.e. if you are a trendy fashion brand aimed at young people, that’s who your page needs to appeal to.
• Use tagging and acknowledgements – to showing your appreciation for your followers comments, shares and likes. Show your followers their interest hasn’t gone unnoticed.
• Ask followers/friends to help spread the word about your activities. Get them talking on different forums and/or platforms – e.g. get them talking about you on Twitter and spreading your message even further than Facebook.

Things you can do to help increase your Facebook following include:

• Invite your work colleagues and industry friends; get them spreading the word to their friends.
• Encourage your current followers to like and share your page and posts, this will spread your message to more people.
• Include a link to your Facebook page on your website
• Include a link in your email footer, so that every time you send an email to a potential or new customer, they have the chance to check out your Facebook, and like it if they wish to continue following you.
• Include a link in your email campaigns – create a call to action button to include in every email campaign you send out.
• Talk about your Facebook page on forums and membership sites – this could be industry specific sites or ones you use in your personal time. If you think your business offers products or services that users will be interested in create a post and talk about it and include your Facebook page for their reference.  Also include a link in your signature.
• You may want to create a group and encourage users to share their experiences of your product/service in the group.

Bear in mind Facebook is a great platform to showcase your business and its activities. You can promote your products and services, but don’t push them; you don’t want to scare off your followers/friends. Build a community to be proud of – make a place people want to be part of it. Encourage active participation; ask questions, give answers, give away free information, even free gifts (depending on your industry.

Example: Free gifts – beauty brand Lush does this with great effect on their Facebook and Twitter page. They encourage followers to share or RT their message and if the user does so, they get entered into a draw to win some of their products.

It’s all about sharing information freely between you (the business) and your current and potential customers. It has been shown that the more open and honest you are on social networks the more people are likely to get involved and purchase from you in the future – all because you have spent time building up a relationship and gaining trust.

…and finally…

When creating your page and building your following, remember – it will not happen overnight, and if it does, chances are, they will disappear quickly. You need to spend time actively engaging with followers, asking questions, inviting them to leave you feedback. Facebook is not a one way communication channel, it is a community – one where everyone can have their say, engage and develop together.

Remember quality networking begins with effort from the Company – put in some time and effort and the returns will be worthwhile.

One of the key strategies for a higher Google ranking is to receive a TrustRank validation in which your page has earned links from trusted sources.

Although it has not been confirmed, TrustRank is thought to have been developed by Google to rank the trustworthiness of pages, meaning that those who receive this validation are not using blackhat or spam techniques to earn their search engine ranking. TrustRank is a way to analyse the links on various pages by using specific types of algorithms to determine relevance and quality, which is a way to cut down on those who seek to improve their rankings through artificial and unreliable links.

As such, there are a number of factors that can affect a website’s TrustRank:

• Domain Age: Older websites are deemed more trustworthy than newer ones.
• Length of Domain Registration: Registering your domain for a longer period of time indicates that the business is more likely to be valid for that website than be a shyster.
• Regular updates: This shows the site is being cared for and the business behind the site has a long-term marketing focus to build relationships.
• Quality and Relevant Backlinks: It’s important that these are relevant, reliable, and deliver value for the visitor.
• Sitemaps: Having a sitemap is a valuable tool for the spiderbots that search your site and sends the message that you have a high-quality site.
• Spam Free: Staying away from any type of spamming techniques, such as cloaking, duplicate content, hidden text and links, and keyword stuffing, helps improve your TrustRank.
• Content Topic: Keep the content topics unique and relevant to your business and site.

These are just some of the ideas to keep in mind when planning and managing your site to earn the TrustRank you want to achieve in order to enhance your search engine ranking, increase traffic to your site, and build your online business.

In first describing PageRank (also known as PR), this is the numeric value that is assigned to a certain page on the Web by Google. It is calculated when one page is linked to another and then a vote is given to the other page in relation to that link. Therefore, in very basic terms, the more votes that a page gains, the more important that particular page is within the Google rankings.

This very definition alone illustrates why gaining links with a high PageRank attached to it is so important for a site in terms rankings. Although it is clearly not the only factor that Google uses in its algorithm, it “ranks” high on the list of factors and, therefore, needs to become a key component of your search engine ranking strategy for your site.

One of the first things you can do is to check the PageRank of any page or pages by using some of the many free online tools that are available, such as PRChecker.info and PageRankBar.com.

Some of the top ways by which to increase your PageRank include:

• Trade links with other websites that are in similar niches or may have a demographic base that would be interested in your site, one way links are far better than reciprocal.
• Regularly update your pages and site with unique and relevant content that is balanced with keywords and try to obtain links to these pages. Having great content on your website can result in hundreds of people bookmarking the content which then contents towards better rankings in Google.
• Check out the many tips and tricks we’ve included in our link building section.

One thing to remember is, if you have a high PageRank, this doesn’t automatically mean you will rank well in Google – time and time again I’ve seen websites with a PageRank 1 out rank a website with a PageRank 4 or higher.

On the other side of the coin, gaining links from websites with a high PageRank can be advantageous as these can give a website a real boost up the rankings, especially in Google.

Overview

CSS has become an integral part of modern web design and brings with it many inherent benefits. CSS (aka Cascading Styles Sheets) can dramatically improve a websites manageability, SEO and accessibility. What’s more is that CSS can work together with several additional technologies to help support a valuable user experience.

CSS can be a web developer’s best friend, but can also reduce maintenance costs for website owners.   These days, the majority of professional web designers & developers favour CSS design over table based design (if not they should do). However, there are still a surprising amount of sites built in tables. Admittedly, several of these may be legacy sites – nevertheless website owners should know that this is not best practice and may cause problems for certain user groups and search engines.

This article aims to briefly discuss the benefits of CSS over table based layouts, and offers best practice CSS tips to improve SEO, accessibility & manageability.

A bit of history

In the early days, most websites were created using tables and HTML for layout and appearance.  The majority of content, code and presentation elements were embedded and duplicated within every HTML document.  For that reason, web pages did not adopt a semantic flow due to ‘junk’ mark-up.  Table based design was notorious for taking an age to maintain, and for being largely inaccessible to many users and technologies.  Pages were often code heavy, which resulted in slow page loads and frustrated users.

As websites & functionality became more complex, and audiences more demanding – table based design proved beyond impracticable and far more time consuming to manage.   Tables also raised barriers for evolving search engines and many assistive technologies,

Step forward CSS…

Firstly let’s define CSS as quoted by the W3C…

“Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. “

The key principle of CSS design is to enhance web accessibility and improve page mark up by using HTML for semantic purposes only. The presentational elements are no longer embedded within the HTML, but are controlled by the external CSS.

There are three types of CSS styles:

• inline styles
• embedded styles
• External

For this article, I will only refer to external styles sheets since this is best practice for reasons you will see below.

External CSS documents can be shared site wide by a including a simple line of code in the head of a HTML page.  The CSS document provides a set of presentational rules that relate to elements within a HTML document. The two distinct documents separate web content from formatting and presentation – this can vastly improve website manageability, accessibility and SEO (search engine Optimisation).

Main benefits of best practice CSS

• Faster and more efficient to code and maintain due to modular code.
• Better for Search engine rankings. Google favours lightweight web pages and gives priority to content with less extraneous mark-up code. Making it easier for Google to differentiate between content code ratio.
• Improved audience reach and more accessible to people with disabilities
• Compatible across a wider variety of devices and assistive technologies
• Reduces bandwidth allowing for faster download speeds for users
• Cheaper hosting costs due to smaller file sizes and bandwidth reduction
• Site wide visual consistency due to one style sheet
• Enhanced print and customisation options
• Competitive edge and moral obligation to certain user groups

Some tips to improve Accessibility using CSS

• Contrast is Key: Create sufficient contrast between text and background. Text should always be clear and legible. Try using this tool to test the contrast between colours http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html
• Make use of non-fixed units: For relative, ‘%’ and ‘em’ are equally good. For absolute, always use ‘px’. Never use ‘pt’ for on-screen use. ‘Pt’ should only be used to fix font sizes for print style sheets.
• Keep your focus: Use the: focus element to accommodate and highlight user tabbing.  Some users simply tab through a web page. This may apply to navigation lists, body links, form elements   etc.
• Offer print style sheets: include CSS print styles sheets in the head of your document.  There is often no need to offer a separate ‘print link’ for users unless the content necessitates.  Remove most presentational elements and only include images that are relevant to the content.
• Make all links and visited links obvious: Make all hyperlinks visually prominent and obvious to the user.
• Keep non content images external: Images that do not represent actual content and do not require an alt tag should be kept in the external CSS document.
• Space elements & content: Ensure your content is sufficiently spaced out so readability is good and elements are not cluttered.

CSS best practice to improve SEO

• Use external CSS:  Always try to use External CSS. Google much prefers lighter (less code) web pages with no unnecessary code. External CSS is not embedded as it’s stored in a separate file, therefore size is reduced.
• Leverage important keywords with CSS: Position significant content at the top of a document to leverage keywords and important HTML tags.
• Enhance Headings (h1-h6): anchor text and targeted keywords using CSS with bold, colours and font size.
• Position accordingly: Utilise absolute positioning for gimmicks and insignificant content.
• Paginate content with CSS:  Separate long pieces of content into multiple pages and use CSS for visual pagination cues.
• Utilise Lists: Make good use of the list (ul, li) element.  Google loves semantics! Structure elements such as navigation using css.
• Use CSS to build Navigation:  Following on from above, make your webpages more crawlable by using CSS to create eye catching navigation in favour of JS.

CSS best practice to improve manageability

• Keep your CSS and inheritance organised. Try to avoid casually adding classes and IDs.  Always try to declare universal items as paramount, followed by the singular items (if required).  Utilise inheritance and try to stick to this pattern.
• Author the document: Record dates, versions, titles and amendments.  This will help future proof your document and assist future developers to understand your design.
• Create libraries and Snippets: If you have a great layout that works cross browser, strip it down to its bare essentials, save and reuse it.  This could apply to CSS fixed, liquid and hybrid layouts. As well as simple rollovers and so forth. Why reinvent the wheel!
• Avoid over-using classes to style common tags. Always attempt to group elements and try not repeat yourself to save time coding and compiling. Take advantage of the inheritance potential and try to utilise shorthand to reduce file size, speed up coding and boost your efficiency.
• Keep it clean!  If you need to use browser specific styles sheets, keep them separate and appropriating named. Use a conditional statement to call the specific files when needed.
• Optimise for lightweight code.   Do as above and save valuable bytes/kilobytes and bandwidth consumption.  The fewer lines of code the faster the page loads.   Loose what is unneeded, and remember white space also effects the size fo the document.
• Utilise naming conventions:  A good naming convention system can dramatically improve productivity when adapting a design. Try to use names that have meaning to semantic elements and can be rolled across the design.
• Use hyphens in favour of underscores.  Applying underscores to CSS can cause backward compatibility issues. Save valuable time when modifying code for older browsers and get in the habit of using hyphens to describe your selectors.
• Use a validator.  If your CSS is giving you a headache and you cannot spot the problem, try using a validator.  A validator can help detect issues such as syntax errors that are sometimes difficult to see (especially after staring at it for hours).

And finally…

So there you have it – CSS can positively influence a website on many levels. If managed and executed properly, CSS can especially reduce production costs, improve accessibility and help maximise SEO.

It makes good sense to focus on relevant links from related websites because you will attract traffic that is interested in what you do or offer. Otherwise, they would not have been visiting a related site. However, that is not to say that someone on a site that is not directly related would not be interested, so it makes sense to expand your definition of relevant links to include some indirectly related sites that are based on the idea that a person visiting that site could share similar interests that connect to what your site offers.  From Google’s point of view, these are still votes for your site but they won’t count as much as a relevant link.

Think about what Amazon does in terms of making recommendations for its customers. Whenever you buy something on Amazon or click on certain products, you often see what products customers bought that also looked at the same item purchased or you get new products added to your recommendations list. This is all made possible on Amazon because of their use of analytics to assess and calculate the probability of a customer being interested in a similar item or product niche. Likewise, your site links should be constructed the same way.

Overall, collecting relevant links and incorporating them in your site or trading with another site will help with search engine optimisation as well as PageRank and TrustRank based on the quality and relevance of those links, thereby raising your search engine ranking. Also, you may find that you attract new visitors to your site who may not have found you if it hadn’t been for that link on another site. These links essentially help guide visitors to chart new territory in terms of discovering what you had to offer from a site they already trust within a niche or group of niches that they are interested in. This is also a helpful way to be found just in case your Google ranking was too many pages away from a visitor reaching you via search. Overall, this creates a win-win-win for the two websites linked together and the  visitor who checks these links out.

You may already know that you want to get inbound links to your site because Google uses this as a vote of confidence in terms of trustworthiness, reliability, and quality as part of its PageRank assessment. Therefore, it’s important to attract these reputable sites and get linked!

From there, how the linking occurs and around what anchor text becomes very important. Hence, one of the key actions to take when having someone create links to your site is to ensure that keywords are used in the anchor text. This is because these keywords tell Google what your site is all about so that they can index it properly and, therefore, be able to more likely rank it well for those keywords being used in the anchor text.

When working on growing your inbound links to your site, make sure those other sites are not always relying on placing site links on such words as, “click here” or, even worse, phrases like “part one” and “part two”.  These links won’t harm you (and indeed we’d expect them as part of a natural link profile) but they won’t help you as much either. Google’s spiderbots are not going to see any relevance or importance to such anchor text because it has most likely been used on thousands of sites and it does not explain what product, service, or information you are offering on your website.

Instead, help them select the appropriate keywords that will help both sites get the best possible search engine ranking. Working with the site on a list of keywords to incorporate in their content and use as anchor text will help to enhance the results of using inbound links as part of your search engine ranking and optimisation strategy. Also, to leverage more from this linking strategy, also consider carefully placing keywords before and after the anchor text for the inbound link as Google scans this content as well. Just be careful to not overdo it on the keyword factor!

Some web owners wonder, “Does it matter for SEO where in my site’s architecture I place my pages?” The answer is that this is important because it again helps Google to understand what your page and site are all about. The more you can help shape Google’s assessment about the uniqueness and value of your site, the better it will rank. Essentially, help them do their job and they’ll help you in return!

As such, it helps to be very organised and strategic in terms of how you approach labelling all aspects of your site—from folders to pages—to further spell out the definition to Google. Site architecture is what many SEO experts call one of the three pillars that are needed to build a successful SEO strategy (with the other two being content and links).

Here are some other tips related to creating and managing site architecture and labelling for SEO success:

• Use descriptive file and directory names based on the user experience (not to mention the spiderbot!) and related to page and site content. Do not use underscores as word separators when labeling; instead, use hyphens so that the spiderbot can parse the long file or directory name.
• Limit the directory depth so the spiderbot does not get worn out, gives up, and moves on. Try to stick to four child directories from the root as the absolute maximu.
• Externalize on-page JavaScript and CSS code if your pages use these to not drag down website performance and slow down the spiderbot’s analysis.  Combine as many external files as possible to reduce the number of http requests.
• Use 301 redirects for moved pages when you are moving your site to new domain name or changing folder and file names within your site so that you don’t lose the site ranking you had previously enjoyed.
• Stay away from JavaScript or meta refresh redirects because search engines do not view these methods in a positive light due to past misuse.
• Use custom 404 pages to keep users from getting away and losing business opportunity not to mention discouraging the search engine spiders.

Lastly, be sure to regularly re-examine your labeling techniques and make any adjustments that may be necessary as you re-organise or re-write content and/or add or delete pages to maintain SEO momentum.

In looking for technical tactics that might increase a site’s Google ranking, some have turned to the idea that ranking can be enhanced by using HTML coding that has been validated to the W3C Standard.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was started in the mid-1990s as a way to bring a range of common protocols to the Internet as a way to ensure that the Web operates at a certain quality standard. Included in these protocols were standards for coding Web pages.

However, it is believed that this tactic will not necessarily have a direct impact on ranking. This is because Google includes numerous browsers and ranks many sites that do not adhere to the W3C code protocols at all. As one SEO expert noted, if Google were to use the W3C standard as a measure for ranking, it could discount some very important and relevant sites that Web users may be looking for but cannot find because the site does not necessarily meet some technical standard.

Yet, in a somewhat indirect way, it might be said that coding does have a role to play in terms of affecting ranking. For example, if web pages are poorly coded and do not adhere to a certain coding standard, then they may be slower in terms of loading and overall operation. This may cause the spiderbots to not properly index your site because they are not going to hang around and analyse pages that do not function properly.

On the other hand, if these same spiderbots come across fast sites that are smooth to navigate and have been clearly coded through the use of a much higher standard, these are more likely to rank better as they are easier to analyse. So there is much to say for quality HTML code that has fewer bytes per page so that pages can be retrieved faster and less time is wasted by spiderbots who have a lot of work to do. This just proves that all strategies must contain a balanced measure of technical prowess and intelligent content development.

Resources:

• W3C coding standards website
• W3C coding validator

If your website has a lot of content, chances are, it’s database driven.  You might have a fair amount of code, perhaps php, scattered around your pages, for connecting to the database and retrieving content.  That’s the beauty of languages like php – you can drop the code directly into your HTML wherever you want to code some functionality.  But as your site gets larger, this becomes a bit of a problem.  If you want to do anything – change your database, add tables or fields, or delete them – you have to trawl through your pages and find every single instance of code to ensure you update it accordingly.  It all gets a bit messy.

This is where a template system comes in.  It allows you to separate the presentation of your website (sometimes called ‘display logic’ or simply ‘view’) from your application logic (the code that does stuff, like processing forms).  With your code all safely in one place and your presentation in a different place, maintaining your website suddenly gets a lot easier.  What’s more, you can have two teams working on the site – the coders doing the coding and the front end developers working on how the site looks, SEO and so on.  The coders don’t break the front end developers’ work and vice versa. Everyone’s much happier.

So what templating system should you use? There are many available options – we’ll start with SMARTY which is a popular choice.

SMARTY templates

With smarty, what the user sees is stored in a template file (which has the extension ‘tpl’). Inside that template file, there are placeholders which are bits of dynamic information – for example, a customer’s details pulled from a database.    They might look something like this:

<p>Your name: {$name}</p>
<p>Your address: {$address}</p>

Front end web developers can easily drop these in place and move them around the template without breaking anything. If they accidentally delete a bracket or mispell something, the worse thing that can happen is that part of the placeholder is printed.  Contrast this with errors in php which can result in a blank page or unfriendly error displayed to the user.

The resulting web pages are easy to maintain and even more easy to understand.  Other benefits include:

• In built security features (optional) allowing control over what can and cannot be done in a template.  This has benefits in situations where the page is to take user-submitted data.
• The templates are easy for non-coders to create and manipulate.

Smarty sounds brilliant!  So why don’t more people use it?  Isn’t it okay for SEO?

The first and main concern that people have is that the smarty code is large – there’s approximately 150kb of code for the required files smarty.class.php and smarty_compiler.class.php in total.  In terms of processing power, it’s thought these are quite heavy if they are used for every request on your site.  Instantly, you start to think about servers slowing down and site speed being affected – a genuine concern for us SEO experts.

In answer to these concerns, smarty users will tell you that unless you have a high traffic site with a slow server, any impact of using smarty is practically unnoticeable.  The biggest overhead is when templates are changed – smarty will compile templates into native php code each time they are changed.  But this is done behind the scenes, not at run time.  Once a site goes into production, your templates likely won’t be changed and so won’t be recompiled.  So, smarty_compiler.class.php won’t be loaded and the amount of code to be parsed is reduced to about 60kb.

There are things that you can do to improve smarty’s performance as well:

• You can use code accelerators like APC or PHP accelerator to decrease the overhead of loading the smarty library.  APC is a free download used for caching and optimising PHP code on the server to improve server performance.
• You can cache the output from any or all of your web pages using Smarty’s caching functionality*.  By doing this, you have an SEO benefit rather than detriment (as you’re making your pages faster).

*These suggestions appear in Quentin Zervaas’ book, ‘Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP’.

More benefits of using smarty can be found here.  When you consider the benefits of using smarty or another templating system for more efficient website development, smarty seems like the natural choice.   Of course, smarty isn’t the only templating system – there are many more good systems available. There’s 10 more listed here for you to consider, each having its own advantages and disadvantages to weigh up depending on what you want to use them for.

Separation of code

Going back to my initial comments on separation, developers may have noticed that I’ve advocated separation of code from view here and not considered whether the code itself needs better organisation.  I think this is a whole topic in itself outside of whether you should use a templating system – but something that you ought to consider if you’re looking at building a new site and introducing a templating system.  Very briefly, for database driven sites, best practice denotes that you implement an architectural pattern called ‘MVC’ (model-view-controller). Your models are the bits of code that manage your information, perhaps performing calculations and reporting to the view if there is a change of state. Your view is what we have described already – the part of the system that the user sees – it doesn’t do anything, it’s purely concerned with presentation. Finally, your controllers are the bits of code that process things – they receive input (perhaps from the view) and send that input off to the right model. The three kinds of code are kept separately and this makes maintenance of large database driven websites much easier.

The code accessing your data is outside of this MVC pattern. Practically this means that you should keep all code that accesses your database separate from other models. Again this makes things very easy to change if you make changes to your database.

There are plenty more good articles on separation of concerns and the MVC pattern on the web if you’d like to read up on this further.

Some companies may wonder if they can get more attention from Google in terms of ranking by regularly creating new pages that may grab the search engine’s attention.  Does Google rank new sites and/or new content better or worse than more established sites/content?

While there are many factors involved in how Google indexes your content, some subscribe to the Google Sandbox Effect Theory. The Sandbox theory, also known as the Sandbox Effect, is defined as a dampening filter that is applied to new websites. The observation was made following an update of Google’s algorithms in 2004, after which many SEO experts observed that there was an observable difficulty in getting new sites ranked.  This effect seemed to apply for about two to six months from the site’s launch date, depending on the type of industry featured on the website.  It’s thought that the effect might have been introduced as an attempt to stop SEO experts trying to manipulate Google’s page ranking by building lots of inbound links to the new site from websites they already own.

Another effect, the ‘reverse sandbox’ effect has also been reported.  This suggests new content without any inbound links gets temporarily boosted in the search engines.  The rational for this is to encourage organic SEO, i.e. people naturally linking to new good articles.

Numerous SEO experts have weighed in on the topic as well. Here are some insights from two experts on the subject:

• SEO expert Russell Jones said, “If Google only ranked the ‘tried and true,’ their results would be old and outdated. The more recent the content, the more valuable that SEO content as an asset is when links are so hard to come by.”
• SEO expert Peter Meyers noted, “Anecdotally, it feels like freshness is more important than ever. I’m amazed how often a blog post ranks within the first day, holding a top-10 position before finally settling a few spots (or even pages) lower.”

Rand Fishkin’s blog post in March 2009 reported on how four domains – Twitter.Grader.com, PressRelease.Grader.com, Website.Grader.com & Facebook.Grader.com – all showed noticable effects further providing evidence that an algorithm existed to create this effect.

Some experts have pointed to the fact that more weight is placed on the domain age.  They say that the age before ranking is what was mistaken for a filter on newly registered domains.  Certainly, our team believe that an older domain will rank better, and we also believe that if a domain is registered for more than a year, this is a positive indication to Google – because many search engine spammers buy up cheap domains (e.g. .info) for just a year.  Sites like GoDaddy offer registration for the first year for less than a pound.

So where does this leave us?  Whether or not the sandbox (and reverse sandbox) effect exists, creating new pages of content, such as regular blog posts or other types of content refreshment certainly does not hurt your ranking. It may even give it a short boost in rankings that can drive more traffic during that time, which could have a positive residual effect over the long term. Creating new content on a regular basis not only helps with search engine ranking, but it also keeps site visitors and customers interested so that they return again and again, converting into additional sales.

So you understand what sitemaps are and why you need one (if not, read our guide to XML sitemaps first!) – sitemaps help Google find more of your content.  Let’s look a bit more at the tags in your sitemap.  The tags here are for general content (i.e. static web pages of text).  There are more tags that can be used to mark videos, news, images and so on.

<urlset>

The first tag in your sitemap is urlset.  This is a required tag.  It tells the search engine you’re about to give it a set of URLs because within this tag you include all of the URLs that are to be included in your sitemap.

Within the URL you need to specify a schema. This tells the search engine how to read your sitemap.  The schema you specify depends on the kind of content that you’re including in your sitemap. So for regular content you might specify:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

For video content, you might specify:

<urlset xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">

You can specify both schemas to include mixed content, e.g:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">

<url>

Each URL begins with the <URL> tag, which is mandatory.  This tells the search engine that you’re about to give it information about a particular URL.  Inside this tag you’ll put more detail about the URL.

<loc>

This mandatory tag is whereyou specify the URL, e.g. http://www.angelseo.co.uk/seo/.  If you’re including images or videos in your sitemap, specify the play page or referrer page here.

<lastmod>

The lastmod tag tells the search engine when your page was last modified.  This data is presented in YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD format although including the time is optional.

<changefreq>

The changefreq is an optional tag to suggest how often you will modify the page.  You can specify:

• always
• hourly
• daily
• weekly
• monthly
• yearly
• never.

Use the ‘always’ value for pages that change every time they are accessed.  Use the ‘never’ value for archived URLs.

<priority>

Priority is an optional tag which tells the search engine how you value the page in relation to other pages on the website.  You specify a value between 0.1 (not very important) and 1.0 (most important).  In relation to the priority tag, it is important to understand that this does not affect your search engine rankings, so tactics like setting all of the pages to 1.0 won’t have any effect.  The reason for this is because the value is relative to all other pages on your website.  It’s better to specify that certain really important pages have a high value and other less important pages (like category and tag pages in your blog) have a lower value.

Once you’ve created your XML sitemap, submit it to Webmaster Tools and don’t forget to check back after a few minutes to ensure that it has been read okay.  You’ll see if there were any errors.  Webmaster tools lets you see how many of the URLs from your sitemap are included in Google’s index, although some SEO experts have complained that this data isn’t all that accurate.  A good way of getting an up-to-date idea of the number of URLs included is to simply type site:http://www.yourdomain.com into Google and look at the number of results.

Video content in site maps

Google allows you to specify some additional information for video content.  We’ll cover that in a separate article as there’s quite a few tags to explain, and some rules to keep in mind!

When most home net connections were typically 56k, watching videos online was a painful process.  Now, connections are so good that watching your favourite TV show live on the net is a real possibility.  Offering video content on your website is a user benefit rather than an annoyance nowadays. It enhances the user experience and gives them a better feel for what you offer.

This is particularly true for ecommerce sites – more and more ecommerce sites are creating videos of their products.  The use of videos for this purpose is exploding in the US.

The table below shows the estimated number of videos online in the US per retailer.

Source: State of Video in E-Commerce
Quarterly Research Report, Q2 2010, http://www.sundaysky.com/resources/download-q210-report.html

The first and most obvious benefit of video content is that it enhances the user experience.  A user searching for a product who gets a video result from your website is more likely to click on that result, than a text link.  They can see and experience the product and make a better decision about whether to buy it or not.  The second benefit of video is that it can help establish you as an authority.  Producing regular videos on a particular topic helps get your name, face and company linked to that topic.

But aren’t videos expensive to produce? Certainly a professional quality video can be – but you can make your videos look professional by commissioning a custom intro and outro, and using a simple decent quality video camera for the middle section. In the UK, Vpoint.tv provide such intros and outros at a reasonable cost and can also do your video shooting/editing for what I think is an unbeatable price, if you don’t want to do your own.

So once you’ve got your videos, how can you optimise your video content for better results? Here are some tips…

Offer multiple formats

Try and offer your videos in as many formats as possible, clearly labelled so your user knows exactly which to pick.  Your users undoubtedly will have a variety of operating systems and offering multiple formats allows them to choose the one that best suits their system and their connection.  It’s good practice to mark download times based on connection speed so they can decide, for example, if they want a high quality file (which will take longer to download) or a low quality file (which will play faster).  Don’t worry about duplicate content as Google can’t read your video files in the same way that it reads text files.

Include company branding

Your videos are a great opportunity to advertise, spread and enhance your brand.  Commission a custom introduction with your company name and tagline.  Don’t forget to offer contact details, at the start and end (you could include a discrete contact panel as an overlay that is visible throughout the video too).  As your videos are shared and passed around, your company information is too.

Name your files appropriately

It might sound rather obvious  but don’t forget that Google can’t watch your videos – so doesn’t know what your video is about.  Everything Google knows is taken from context and this includes your file name. Long tail keyword usage is likely to score far higher – so for example a video entitled ‘Vauxhall-Astra’ will do better in the rankings than a video entitled ‘Car’.

You can also include appropriate keywords elsewhere in the URL – for example, you could place some of your videos inside a folder /car-videos/ and others inside a folder /motorbike-videos/ to help Google better understand that the videos are about cars or motorbikes respectively.

Optimise the pages on which your video files are placed

If you can, ensure that the page contains relevant content to the video, to help Google understand further what the video is about.  Set up your own video channel on sites like YouTube, enabling you to add more information to the page and adjust the content.  On your site pages, optimise titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords (the latter is probably irrelevant but may still be useful for older search engines).  Ensure you use H1, H2 etc heading mark up appropriately.

Optimise your anchor text

When linking to your video either on your website or elsewhere, make sure you use a good choice of anchor text.  So for example, use ‘Vauxhall Astra Video’ rather than ‘Click here’ in the link text.  This again tells Google more about what the video is about.

Offer a transcript of the video

Not only is this a great usability factor for people who can’t watch the video (for example, because they have a slow connection) but it’s also great content for SEO.

Mark up your video using RDFa

Using RDFa mark up, you can pass specific information to Google about your video. Google also allows you to use Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa format and/or Facebook Share to mark up your video. Read our intro to RDFa and our guide to creating video sitemaps which includes a discussion on the merits of using XML sitemaps vs. RDFa and Facebook Share.

Get your video out there!

Once you’ve optimised your video content, you need to make sure search engines can find it. Since they can’t easily read video formats, this requires a bit of extra effort. As well as optimising your page, create a video sitemap. This is a special kind of sitemap for Google to understand what videos you have.  Mark up your content with RDFa as well.

There are hundreds of video websites and search engines that you can submit your videos to – this site has a good list.

So you realise the power of video content and you’ve got videos on your website (read using video as an effective SEO tool if you’re not quite there yet) – what now? You need to make sure Google understands your video content.  Google can’t read videos like it can read ordinary content so providing additional information will help it better understand what your videos are about.  Fortunately Google accepts a lot of information through video sitemaps which extend the standard sitemap notation.

Here’s an example:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
   <url>
     <loc>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/videos/seo-in-a-nutshell-seminar.php</loc>
     <video:video>
       <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/images/videolarge-seo-nutshell.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
       <video:title>SEO in a Nutshell</video:title>
       <video:description>Dave Cain of Angel SEO describes SEO basics at the Business Startup Show May 2010</video:description>
       <video:content_loc>http://www.startuptv.co.uk/dynamicimages/videofiles/Angel-Seminar.flv</video:content_loc>
       <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.startuptv.co.uk/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.1.5.swf</video:player_loc>
       <video:duration>800</video:duration>
       <video:expiration_date>2011-06-01T14:16:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
       <video:rating>5.2</video:rating>
       <video:view_count>15000</video:view_count>
       <video:publication_date>2010-06-01T14:30:30+08:00</video:publication_date>
       <video:tag>seo</video:tag>
       <video:tag>search</video:tag>
       <video:tag>marketing</video:tag>
       <video:category>Marketing</video:category>
       <video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
       <video:restriction relationship="allow">GB US CA IE</video:restriction>
       <video:gallery_loc title="Angel SEO">http://www.angelseo.co.uk/example/</video:gallery_loc>
       <video:price currency="GBP">5.00</video:price>
       <video:requires_subscription>yes</video:requires_subscription>
       <video:uploader info="http://www.angelseo.co.uk/user/davecain">Dave Cain
         </video:uploader>
     </video:video>
   </url>
</urlset>

Let’s walk through all of the elements of the video sitemap above.

<urlset> and <url>

You’ll be familiar with these tags from regular XML sitemaps.  URL set specifies a schema so Google and other search engines know how to read the content of the sitemap.  URL is a tag to tell the search engine that you’re going to give it information about a particular URL.  Both tags are required.

<loc>

As for a regular sitemap, this is required.  The loc tag in a video sitemap tells the search engine what the landing page for the video is.  In our example, we’ve got a page that has Dave’s video of his talk at the Business Start Up Show 2010, and that page will have the video and other content (e.g. a description of the video for users to see).

<video:video>

This tells the search engine that you’re going to tell it about video content.  It’s a required tag.

<video:thumbnail_loc>

This is a required tag that tells the search engine where it can find an image file to display as part of its search results.  Although Google is quite flexible on the sizes and types of image it accepts, it does recommend in its guidelines that you provide an image that is at least 160 x 120 pixels, and in jpg, png or gif format.

<video:title>

This is a required tag and tells Google the title of your video.  You should limit your title to 100 characters.

<video:description>

This is a required tag and provides Google with a description of your video.  Google allows a generous 2,048 characters for this description and states that descriptions longer than that figure will be truncated. Make good use of your description, ensuring it contains relevant keywords that a user might type in if they were searching for your video content.

<video:content_loc> and <video:player_loc>

You must provide at least one of these tags.  If you provide content_loc, this should point to a video in one of the required formats – make sure you point to the actual video file itself, not the page it sits on.  Google can crawl these video formats: mpg, mpeg, mp4, m4v, mov, wmv, asf, avi, ra, ram, rm, flv, swf.

You can leave out this tag if <video:player_loc> is included, although it’s best to include both.

Google recommend that you do a reverse DNS lookup to ensure that only Googlebot accesses your content.  You would do the reverse DNS lookup, then verify that the name is in the googlebot.com domain, and then perform a corresponding forward DNS->IP lookup using that googlebot.com name.  This is just recommended though and not essential.

The video:player_loc tag specifies a URL that points to a flash player for the video.  You can usually find this info by looking at your page source code and looking specifically at the src element of the embed tag for your video.

Make sure you include one tag or the other though (player_loc or content_loc).  Your videos are identified to Google by their content URL or player URL so if you provide neither, your content simply won’t get indexed by Google.

allow_embed

This additional attribute allows you to provide Google with permission to embed your video in its search results.  You can set the value to ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

autoplay

This is another optional attribute – if you specify it (as in the example), Google will add it as a parameter to enable autoplay of your video.

<video:duration>

This is an optional tag but it’s recommended that you include it.  The duration is specified in seconds, using a value of 0 and 28800.

<video:expiration_date>

This is an optional tag to allow you to specify when the video will no longer be available.  You would only set this if your video is going to expire.  If the video, for example, is a build up to an event that’s going to happen, you may want your video to expire after the event.

The format for this tag is YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD (year, month, day, time and time zone).

<video:rating>

This is an optional tag for you to be able to specify the rating of the video, within the range 0.0 – 5.0.  You must include the decimal point.

<video:content_segment_loc>

This is an optional tag that you can use with <video:player_loc>.  You would use this tag if you wanted to provide a series of videos that make up one longer video.  You tell Google through this tag that the shorter videos can be concatenated to create one long video.  A series of URLs is provided and these must point to the actual videos, not to flash content.  You can add a duration attribute to each URL, optionally.

Example:

<video:content_segment_loc duration=”150″>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/url1</video:content_segment_loc>
<video:content_segment_loc duration=”300″>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/url2</video:content_segment_loc>
<video:content_segment_loc duration=”450″>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/url3</video:content_segment_loc>

<video:view_count>

You can use this tag optionally to provide the number of times that the video has been viewed.

<video:publication_date>

This is an optional tag that allows you to specify when the video was published.  The format for this is YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD (as above, year, month, date, time and time zone).

<video:tag>

These tags are optional but valuable as they allow you to give a short description of the content. You can provide more than one tag – the maximum number of tags allowed is 32.  Make sure you keep them relevant and concise as Google does check against your page content.

<video:category>

This optional tag allows you to specify a category for your video such as ‘marketing’ or ‘advertising’.  You can use no more than 256 characters. Google suggest that you give each video just one category.

<video:family_friendly>

This is an optional tag to allow you to specify whether all users should be able to see your video, or only adults.  Set it to ‘yes’ if it’s family friendly or ‘no’ if it should only be available when a parental control or safe search is not enabled.

<video:restriction>

This allows you to specify countries that the video can or cannot be played.  You need to use space-delimited ISO 3166 format.

The relationship attribute allows you to specify whether the video is permitted or not in the countries you have specified. So in this example:

<video:restriction relationship="allow">GB US CA IE IM</video:restriction>

Countries with ISO 3166 country codes GB, US, CA, IE and IM (Britain, the US, Canada, Ireland and the Isle of Man) have permission to watch this video.  If you set relationship to “deny” the opposite would be true.

<video:gallery_loc>

This allows you to optionally provide a link to a gallery (collection) of videos that this video belongs to.  It’s useful if you have a series of related videos.  You can only use this tag once for each video.

<video:price>

This is an optional tag allowing you to specify if there is a fee for downloading or viewing the video.  You specify the currency in ISO 4217 format.  You can therefore provide more than one price in order to specify different currencies.

<video:requires_subscription>

This is another optional tag to enable you to specify if a subscription is required to view the video.  You can specify ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

<video:uploader>

This is an optional tag that lets you specify either a name or handle for the video’s uploader.  You can include a URL to a webpage that contains additional information as an attribute, as in the above example but this must be on the same domain as the <loc> tag.

Summary of required tags

As you can see, there are a lot of optional tags above – so which ones do you really need to include?  As a minimum, include:

• The video’s title (max 100 characters)
• A descriptionof the video (max 2,048 characters)
• The URL of the page on which the video is located
• A URL for a thumbnail image for the video (160 x 120 pixels, jpg/png/gif format)
• The location of the video file itself or the SWF player URL.

Video sitemap tips

Your sitemap should never have more than 50,000 entries, as for a regular sitemap.  If you have more than this, create multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file.

Here’s an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.angelseo.co.uk/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
   </sitemap>
   </sitemapindex>

In the above example, two sitemaps are submitted.

Although Google’s limits are generous for the description, don’t be tempted to keyword stuff or do anything else to gain an unfair advantage.  Firstly, Google does check your site to ensure the title and description are consistent with your content.  Secondly, providing concise, descriptive and accurate information is likely to get you much better results.

Don’t forget to submit your completed sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools.  Every time you update your sitemap you can also easily ping Google by entering this URL:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/yourvideositemap.xml

Other ways to tell Google about your videos

XML video sitemaps aren’t the only way to tell Google about your vids.  Google also supports MediaRSS tags in your RSS feed (which you can submit to Google as a sitemap). This works for other kinds of media too, like images.  You can also add RDFa tags (based on Yahoo’s SearchMonkey standard) to your pages directly (learn about RDFa | learn specifically about RDFa video tags) to your pages directly – although then you need to count on Google finding your page, so I’d recommend as a minimum including the page in a sitemap too.

A final simple way to tell Google about your videos is using Facebook Share.  You include meta elements in the head of your page that point to the video file.  Here’s an example:

<meta name="title" content="SEO in a Nutshell" />
<meta name="description" content="Dave Cain of Angel SEO describes SEO basics at the Business Startup Show May 2010" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.angelseo.co.uk/images/videolarge-seo-nutshell.jpg" />
<link rel="video_src" href="http://www.startuptv.co.uk/dynamicimages/videofiles/Angel-Seminar.flv"/>
<meta name="video_height" content="250" />
<meta name="video_width" content="500" />
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

Some of the elements are optional like video_type, video_height and video_width.  The disadvantage of doing this is that you’re again relying on Google finding your page so as for using RDFa, I’d recommend including the page in a regular sitemap as a minimum too.  You’ve also got less scope to include extra details like tags which you can include with Google’s XML sitemaps.  The benefit of using Facebook share is, not only is it quick and simple, but sometimes people can share your video through Facebook as well as play it directly on Facebook.

Which of the three methods (Google XML sitemaps, RDFa and Facebook Share) are preferable then?  I’d say for optimum effect (if you have the time), use all three.  You’ll get the benefits of each.  But as noted above, if you do choose RDFa or Facebook Share, do include your page in your regular XML sitemap too.

What’s Googlebot? Googlebot is Google’s ’spider’.  We call it a spider because it’s a little bit of software that crawls through the web looking for new websites, pages and updates that it can add to Google’s index.  This is all automated – so Googlebot can’t really ‘see’ your pages.  However, the bot is programmed using different algorithms that tell is which websites to look at, how often to crawl them and how many pages it should look over, as well as helping it to detect various factors about your site.

Googlebot starts its journey from a list of website URLs that it found on previous ‘crawls’, together with data submitted by webmasters in sitemaps.  As it crawls through each website, it compiles further lists of links to visit on present and future crawls.  It also detects broken links and uses this data to help keep Google’s index accurate.

How often does Googlebot visit my website?

This depends very much on how often your content is updated, how popular your site is and so on.  There’s no hard and fast answer – some sites are visited every few seconds, others may be visited just once a week or even once a month.  Your website logs, saved on your server, will be able to tell you how often Google visited your website.

These web logs for a small website show 8 visits from Googlebot.

When Googlebot does access your site, it normally will download just one copy of each page of the site at a time.  If you notice Googlebot downloading a particular page more than once, it’s likely just because the program was stopped and restarted, so is nothing to worry about.

You’ll notice on the above web log example that the spider has visited the site from more than one machine.  Googlebot runs on several machines for better performance and scalability.

You can request a change in crawl rate from Google – this is generally used when you feel that Google is indexing your site too often.

Restricting Googlebot

It’s very difficult to keep search engine bots away from parts of your website.  They’re nosey!  The best way to do it is to edit your robots.txt file, blocking access to whichever pages or folders you’ve decided.

You can add quite a bit of information into your robots file but not all search engines will follow every instruction.  An asterisk is used as a wildcard to specify all search engine bots.  Here are some common modifications you might want to make:

To keep all search engine bots out of your site:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

To keep all search engine bots out of a specific folder:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /myfolder/

To keep just Googlebot out of a specific directory:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /myfolder/

To keep all search engines out of a specific file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /myfolder/myfile.html

When you create or make changes to a robots.txt file, it takes a little while for Googlebot to discover those changes, in some cases.

There are two tools in Webmaster tools that can help you figure out if your robots.txt is working as planned.

“Fetch as Googlebot”, found under ‘Labs’ in the left menu (see above image), allows you to see how your site appears to Googlebot.

The “Test Robots.txt” tool, found under Site Configuration > Crawler Access (see above image), allows you to see how Googlebot will read your robots.txt file.

If you find that Googlebot has crawled a page and added it to Google’s index that you didn’t want to be crawled, you can use the ‘remove URL’ tool in Webmaster tools to fix this.

This is found under Site Configuration > Crawler Access and then under the ‘Remove URL’ tab, the far right tab of the three choices (see image above).

Ensuring that your website is crawlable

You can use ‘crawl errors’ in Webmaster tools to ensure there are no problems with crawling your website.

This is found under the ‘Diagnostics’ menu (see above image).

Googlebot’s user agent

Googlebot will show in your site logs as ‘Googlebot’ so it’s easy to identify.  As explained above, the IP may vary because Googlebot uses more than one machine.  You also may see ‘Feedfetcher-Google’ in your logs – these result from users adding feeds to their Google home page or to their Google Reader.  Feedfetcher does not respect robots.txt so if you want to block it from crawling your site, you can configure your server to display a 404 message to user-agent Feedfetcher Google.  There’s more information on Feedfetcher on Google’s website help: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178852.

Firstly, what is RDFa?  RDFa stands for ‘Resource Description Framework in attributes’.  It allows you to mark certain information within your web pages so that Google knows what that information is. The results are called ‘rich snippets’.

Let’s start with an example:

<div xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" typeof="v:Person">
My name is <span>Dave Cain</span>,  although some people call me <span>Davey</span>.  Here's my website:  <a rel="v:url" href="http://www.angelseo.co.uk">www.angelseo.co.uk</a>.  I live in Nottingham and work as an <span>SEO expert</span>  at <span>Angel SEO</span>.</div>

In this example, we start with a namespace declaration using xmlns. This is a bit like declaring your http doc type – it tells Google where it can find a vocabulary to understand what you’ve marked up your content with. The xmlns:v=”http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#” namespace declaration can be used any time you’re marking up pages that include data you want to specify as a person, review, product or place.

Moving on in our example, typeof=”v:Person” tells Google that the content you’ve marked up is a person. Nickname is labelled separately as well. Each piece of data is labelled as property = and prefixed with a v: except url, for which you should use rel = (as in the above example).

So why would you want to use RDFa? RDFa tells Google more about your data, for example, denoting that information is definitely an address or contact details or a review. This means Google doesn’t have to figure it out for itself and can be confident enough to display that data to users who are looking for it. How does the data appear to the user?

Suddenly, the user’s search result includes reviews, prices and data that they were looking for (those ‘rich snippets’ we mentioned). Above, the user knows that on this website, 85 reviews are available for the restaurant they are searching for. Knowing that this additional information is available is likely to mean more click throughs to that page.  In fact, sites report increases of 15-30% in click throughs from using RDFa.

When launching support for RDFa, Google said:

“It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through”.

As accuracy becomes more and more important to users, these additional snippets of information are likely to attract more visitors.

Limitations of RDFa

It’s important to remember that RDFa is available to everyone – genuine sites and spammers alike. Consequently, Google isn’t going to take your marked up content as the be-all-and-end-all – in fact, Google won’t display rich snippets for your website unless it trusts your website, logically.

You also need to remember that recognition of RDFa does not suddenly mean all the other factors in relation to your website are suddenly invalid. For example, relevancy is still one of the most important factors – your whole site could be on one topic, with a few listings marked up using RDFa that are on another topic – these aren’t going to convince Google that your site is actually about the second topic. You need to keep your marked up content entirely relevant, the same for any other content. Most SEO experts seem to agree that RDFa helps websites gain more trust rather than impacts relevancy, since RDFa is just mark up and doesn’t change the site’s content.

More help with RDFa

Wikipedia provides a good overview of RDFa with examples and further resources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa

Google provides specific guidance on marking up information in the required format here:

• Recipes
• Reviews
• Review ratings
• People
• Events
• Businesses and organisations
• Products

Google also provides a testing tool to help you ensure you’ve got your mark up right:

• Rich snippets testing tool

W3.org also provides an excellent tutorial on using RDFa:

• http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

To find out about marking video content with RDFa (Yahoo SearchMonkey standard) try this guide:

• http://developer.search.yahoo.com/help/objects/video

Google has launched ‘instant search’ which returns results for each letter that the searcher types.  What is the purpose of this?  Google note that people type slowly but read quickly – the average person typically takes 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but just 30 milliseconds to look at another part of the page.  So with Google instant search, you can glance at results as you type, and since results are generated by predicting what you’ll type, you may not even have to bother typing in the full word.  Google estimates that you’ll save 2-5 seconds per search.

Since launch, search engine marketers have been concerned that they will need to change their strategy in Google Adwords to include part-typed keywords so that adverts for their websites are still visible to users in results pages.  For example, a website selling flowers might consider advertising on the partially typed word ‘flow’ so that their ads show up if a user only partly types in the word ‘flower’ and Google starts to make suggestions based on this.

Google analytics team member Alden DeSoto has stated that changing your strategy based on Google’s launch of instant search would not be a productive strategy.  This is because ads are triggered based on ‘the predicted query and not the stem that the user types in’.  For example, the query ‘flow’ triggers results for a predicted query of ‘flowers’.  As they type ‘flow’, the advert for ‘flowers’ appears underneath (see example image on the right).  Of course, they would only click on this advert if they were actually interested in flowers – if they carry on typing and change the word into something else, the adverts disappear.

One thing that Adwords users should be aware of is how impressions are counted.  Obviously as Google is serving ads based on predicted words, the prediction may be incorrect and the ads shown to the user may change several times.  For Adwords purposes, an impression will be counted if the user types a query into Google and then clicks anywhere on the page where the advert is shown (e.g. an ad, a search result, a related search, one of the predicted search terms etc).  This shows that Google’s auto suggestion was the correct search term the user wanted to enter.  More importantly, if the user stops typing and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds, this will also count as an impression.  Arguably, this could distort your CTR (click through rate) data in your Adwords stats because it’s entirely feasible users could take a few moments to think about their search term without this being an indication that they have already found what they are looking for.

Google has clarified that ‘Instant Search’ won’t have an impact on SEO generally and queries would be tracked as they have been previously.  However, Matt Cutts wrote in his blog about the effect on the long tail of results:

“The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

Before you panic though, bear in mind that Google Instant currently only works if you’re signed in to an account, and currently only works if you’re accessing Google through the search box on its home page. If you use the top right hand corner of your browser (so a huge majority of people then), you won’t get the Google Instant effect.  But it’s impossible to know at this stage how many people will actually be impacted.

The debate carries on about the effectiveness of certain SEO strategies associated with keyword placement. One such debate centres on the issue of whether it is helpful for SEO strategies to use a keyword in a subdomain name.

First, to better understand what a subdomain name is, it is simply a domain that is attached to a larger domain. Subdomains are often used by organisations that want to designate a domain to a particular department, such as www.humanresources.angelseo.co.uk or www.computerscience.nottinghamuniversity.edu.

In the past, Google would show up to 2 results per domain (and therefore, also, per subdomain) so it was advantageous to organise your content into subdomains as you stood a higher chance of having more pages from your site show in the top results.  From around 2007, Google stopped doing this and paid more attention to the fact that an assocation existed between domain and subdomain (i.e. they could be simply sections of the same site).  As a result, if you want Google to show more than two results from your website as a whole, you’ve got to work a lot harder.

Despite this, subdomains can be an effective way of organising your content if an organisation has enough content to support a standalone web site on that topic.  The use of subdomains helps the user understands the difference between the main domain and subdomain from the URL, although the same argument could be made for using subdirectories. Arguably, these subdomain sites can also take advantage of traffic, links and momentum to the root, or parent, domain more effectively than if the organisation was to purchase a new domain. In this way, there is some additional SEO value to be gained.

However, it is important to note that keywords used in a subdomain name do not necessarily add effectiveness so far as Google is concerned, according to a wide audience of SEO experts. The reason for this is that it is thought Google search engine still places more focus on the root, or parent, domain when users are searching for specific keywords, so the value of keywords still lies in the home, or landing page, of the root domain.  Some SEO experts have suggested that the impact of keywords in the subdomain name has more impact for other search engines such as Yahoo.

When looking for some extra SEO value, there can be some gained by breaking your site into subdomains or sub directories (e.g. www.rootdomain.com/subdirectory) if you have the type of business model that lends itself to a web site where this structure would be beneficial. A good example would be a business that looks to gain business in a number of regional or local markets by city or demographic area. The content would contain city or demographic area keywords and each page would be different. A different SEO campaign can be used for each subdirectory or domain, and submissions of that specific subdomain or directory could be made to regional sites and search engines.  This is where it makes sense to use keywords and utilise subdirectories or subdomains.

Firstly, what do we mean by internal linking? This means that your content references another page, such as the ‘contact us’ page or another page that will lead visitors to specific information that may be of interest.  Does having a lot of internal links to a page indicate to Google that the page is more important?

To help answer this question, I’ve looked over data relating to a friend’s website (www.lawofcontract.co.uk).  I’ve  considered the pages that have the most interlinks, i.e. internal links from other pages.  This site doesn’t employ good SEO techniques but does interlink a huge number of its pages, so provides a great case study on this point. Many of the pages are linked from the sidebar (which has a total of 33 pages linked).  Others are interlinked in the text itself.  The site is well visited, pulling in around 1,000 visits a day.  So which pages are most popular?  Is it the ones with the most internal links? No.  Three factors stand out:

• There are pages with a huge number of internal links which aren’t popular at all.
• There are pages with a huge number of internal links which are very popular.  These tend to be linked from the sidebar (the most popular page is the first page in the sidebar).
• There are pages with few internal links that are very popular.  These are ranked well and getting their traffic through the search engines.

This is, of course, just one case study and there are many factors that could be at work here – but it strongly suggests that the fact of having a lot of internal links to your page doesn’t mean Google will treat that page as more important.  Of course, having a lot of relevant internal links may help visitors (and search engines) find your pages.  While it may seem simple enough, internal links are a great way to get site visitors to visit other pages on your website and keep them there longer. On this basis at least, internal linking is a highly effective optimisation strategy.

When making links between your pages, an important point to consider is the anchor text used for your internal links.  Anchor text is imperative to becoming more SEO competitive because it is a way to define to visitors what they will find if they point and click on a text link and it is used by search engine algorithms to calculate the relevance factor in relation to the URL for various sets of keywords or keyword phrases that are part of the anchor text.  Remember, we’re talking about internal links establishing relevance here – not boosting rankings.

With so much weight being placed on anchor text by search engines, it illustrates the importance of making sure your internal links are enhanced and relevant to the entire SEO strategy you are undertaking. This is an excellent way to point visitors to pages on a website that may not be visited as often because they are not the pages listed on the search engine.

Here are two examples to illustrate the difference in effective anchor text strategies.

Example #1:
Read more about <a href=”../search-engine-optimisation”>anchor text</a>.

Example #2:
Read more on the subject of anchor text <a href=”../search-engine-optimisation/”>here</a>.

Example #1 is making use of a keyword in the anchor text link whilst example #2 is a missed opportunity to leverage a keyword as part of an anchor text and internal linking SEO strategy.

There are some important tips to remember when employing this tactical endeavour.

• Be relevant with your message and choice of keywords.
• Focus on your strongest keywords.
• Keep your links short, succinct and relevant.
• Consider adding the keyword anchor text for internal linking at the beginning of a sentence to better attract attention.
• Avoid keyword stuffing. It’s bad SEO behaviour and can ruin your reputation, especially when penalised by Google.
• Use this strategy to return visitors to older content, such as articles and blogs, which may not be getting as much attention in the search engines or by visitors to the site.

Be sure to also re-examine your internal linking structure within your website. This is an essential way to further optimise your efforts and inform visitors of what to expect whilst attracting search engines for a higher ranking.

StumbleUpon opens up whole new markets that you may never have previously connected too. It has over 11 million users – yes, more than double its social networking counterpart Facebook. StumbleUpon has been slowly gaining momentum and users since its birth back in 2001.

So what is StumbleUpon?  This social site enables you to discover and share web pages, videos and photos. When users, referred to as ’stumblers’, stumble pages, they are shared by like-minded stumblers.  If they then like the page that has been shared, they also ’stumble’ the page – the stumble train just goes on and on.

Guide to using StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is pretty simple to use once you know how and why the main elements work.

Signing up

Sign up for an account on StumbleUpon by going to www.stumbleupon.com and selecting sign up.

Tip – From a business point of view I would say it is better to have an account in an employee’s name and stumble company pages as well as other pages/photos that are of interest – these could be websites about their favorite bands, sport, favourite articles they have read, etc.  Otherwise, your activities may be considered ‘commercial spamming’ and your account may be closed.  It’s a good idea to have a read of StumbleUpon’s community rules before you get started.

Stumbling and reviewing other content regularly also seems to get you more stumbles.  If you’re less active, you’ll see less results for your content.

Creating a profile

Go to the StumbleUpon website (www.stumbleupon.com) and follow the steps to creating an account. There’s an example of the sign up screen below.

When you have created your account, you need to create your profile. To create your profile, go to settings then account settings. In account settings you will see you need to fill out personal information i.e. name, location, etc – and you will also find your username and email in this section.

Still in settings, you will see ‘customise profile’ – this is where you can change the colour of your profile and add other information about you and things you like, i.e. music.

Also within setting, you can manage your interests. These are the categories that StumbleUpon places your stumbles in to. StumbleUpon shows you information from other like minded users who stumble pages of interest from the same category. You don’t set these up, StumbleUpon automatically sets them when you start stumbling pages. When your stumbles are placed in categories, this is how they potentially get seen by other users who also like the same category.

Using the Stumble bar

When you sign up to StumbleUpon you get the option to download/install the stumble bar. I would strongly suggest you do this, as it makes it a lot easier to stumble posts without going to the StumbleUpon website.

The image above is StumbleUpon’s stumble bar – from here, you can like or dislike web pages, blog posts, photos etc by clicking on the thumbs up or down icons.

Stumbling

When stumbling your favourite websites, web pages, video, photos you like etc, as said before, the quickest and easiest way is to use the stumble bar. In some cases you can stumble blog posts and web pages from the website you are on if the web page in question has social media links or social media share bar.

The example above is a really good social media share bar – as you can see, the second on the list is StumbleUpon – so when you click on it takes you to a login section and when you have entered your password it enables you to stumble the page or article.

Consider using  a shortened url tool like http://www.su.pr/ which allows you to post to StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter all in one go.

Following

Start following like-minded people, people who are interested the same subjects, topics and markets as you.

How do you find them? Follow your favourite categories, e.g. Motorsport, SEO, Internet, Fashion, etc. Follow people who like the same posts as you. Only follow fellow stumblers when you like their previous stumble because there is a maximum amount of stumblers you can follow (capped at 500 members).

Followers

Do you want followers? Yes! Remember, posts that are stumbled need to contain great content and information that the user will find useful.  You’ll also get better results from coming up with eye catching and intriguing titles – you need to stand out from the millions of others. When you get followers who like your stumbles, your posts get wide coverage and spread faster. This is a great way to get more traffic to your website and the increase in traffic can also help your rankings in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Another good tip is to not only stumble your content but also give it a review – this will get you more stumbles than just stumbling it alone.

…and finally…..

Remember when creating a StumbleUpon account that it is better to have the account set up in a person’s name rather than the company name. Stumble any web pages of interest, not just company posts.

StumbleUpon provides a company with lots of opportunities to gain more traffic to their website.

Time to get stumbling … happy stumbling

They say timing is everything, but there is a lot of relevance in the old adage, “location, location, location,” when it comes to keyword placement on a web page and SEO results.

The earlier, the better is the response to the question of where to put keywords in the content found on a web page, in order to maximise SEO efforts. When it comes to keyword placement, consider these ideas for packing a powerful punch without bogging down the content with obvious attempts at search engine optimisation:

• Go for the title. Whether it is a blog entry title or the title to an article, put keywords there. It’s the first content on the page and potentially the first contact reached by the search engine spiders. The same rules about keeping it simple and succinct apply. No one likes a title that seems longer than the rest of the content on the page.
• Start at the beginning. Many search engine experts note that it is most effective when keywords are used within the first 50 to 100 words of the content, including the use of both primary and secondary keywords.
• Take advantage of content in every form. Don’t forget that keywords can be cleverly worked into text that may be part of your logo, such as a tagline, or as image titles and part of tags (meta, heading, anchor and title to name a few).
• Focus on relevance. Don’t try so hard to be creative at working the keywords into titles and content that you lose your ability to make any sense. Good writing should not be sacrificed just to appease the SEO gods. Search engines are primed to catch keyword stuffing con-artists and visitors that happen to find the site will be repulsed by the hideous and confusing content.

So, although early is best, balance is even better. Be sure to keep keyword density within acceptable levels and sprinkle the keywords throughout the content to allow for the information visitors are seeking to still make sense and to keep the search engines content that you are playing by the rules.

Don’t forget to check out Google’s keyword tool (pictured above) to figure out more versions of the key words or phrases you’re targetting.

Wondering what this twitter, tweeting, retweeting business is all about? Here is your tweeting guide to Twitter. During this guide, I will walk you through how to set up a business account and building your followers to spread your business message.

Twitter making connections

Every day, millions of people use Twitter. They create and share ideas, images, news and opinions with each other. Now even businesses are using Twitter to spread their message and share their information. Everyone is using Twitter, from your best mate wanting to share her weekend images from the latest festival, to local ice cream stalls, from national companies to international brands. Twitter is connecting people across the world enabling them to share their message more than ever before.

Twitter history

Looking at a brief history of Twitter, Twitter was first known as Twttr way back in 2006. Twitter began as a simple SMS-text service and has grown to what it is today in only a few short years. Today, there are more than 110 million users worldwide who carry out more than 600 million searches on Twitter every day. It has been reported that 75% of users access their Twitter accounts via third party applications -  examples include Tweetie for iPhone and TweetDeck which works on computers and the iPhone.  Today, more than a third of users access their accounts by mobile phone.  Allowing access from third party applications and devices has helped increase Twitter’s traffic because users no longer have to be at a computer to access their accounts and spread their news.

Twitter for business

Twitter is a communication platform. It enables businesses to communicate with their customers directly. It enables businesses to share information quickly with customers who want to know what the company is up to. Twitter enables businesses to build and maintain relationships with customers and create a community where they can both share information and learn from what customers have to say about them.

From a user’s prospective Twitter means you can connect direct with the company in question and tell them about your experiences of their company/products/services whether good or bad. You can also learn about the Company, their products and offers.

Twitter also enables you to follow the conversation of others who are tweeting about your own Company/products/services. This means you can see what is being said about you or your market sector. This therefore means you can gain information, helping you, for example, to find a gap in the market or an idea for further development/improvements to your current range.

Twitter for personal users

You maybe asking, why do I need to be on Twitter? First and foremost, you can get a lot from Twitter. It is a great way to get news/information from all your favorite websites/tv shows and even celebrities all in one place. You would be surprised who you find on Twitter: everyone from television personality Johnathan Ross aka @wossy  to Tour da France Legend Lance Armstrong @lancearmstrong, along with tweets from 10 Downing Street and the Prime Minster @number10gov and popstar Lady Gaga @ladygaga.  Twitter users typically grow by 300,000 per day so even if your favorite music or sports star isn’t tweeting now, it will not be long before they get the twitter bug, so the number of people you follow will increase over time. This further increases with Twitter’s new follower suggestions of who to follow –  where Twitter suggests fellow users to follow based on who you already follow.

Using Twitter

First things first, signing up – if you already have a twitter account go to the next stage (‘Twitter Speak’).

Signing up

If you’re a twitter newbie , jump in and get started -  go to www.twitter.com and click on sign up, and this will then take you to a page where you will see four boxes – full name, username, password and email. If you are setting up a company account, put the company name in both the full name and username boxes. ‘Username’ is the name you will be known as on twitter so this will promote your company on Twitter. After completing the four boxes, hit ‘create my account’ and your Twitter journey will begin.

Now you have your Twitter account, what you first see isn’t very exciting, but don’t be put off by this. The next stage is to start building your profile. You do this by completing your company information. To start adding your company information go to settings (top, right of your Twitter page). From there you will be able to add a profile picture, which in the case of a company could be a company logo, information about the company, bio, location, website etc. Remember all this information is how your customers identify you so use the information they are used to be seeing on your website, in your stores and so on.

Tip - If you have key staff members with accounts as well you can add them at the bottom of your company bio. e.g. @AngelSEO is the company account but MD and SEO expert Dave Cain can be found @SEODaveCain, usability and SEO expert Sharon Saxton can be found @SharonAngelSEO and myself, Zoe Short, Social Media Socialite can be found at @ZoeAngelSEO (come say hello to us!)

You can also change your background layout to match company colours – again this helps your customers identify your company is really you and not just somebody pretending to be you (if you find someone is using your business name falsely, inform Twitter’s administrators – they don’t like people having false profiles so will happily sort it out for you).

Twitter speak

As you will soon learn, Twitter has its own language and you will pick this up really quickly. I have include the main terms and what they mean to help you during your first steps on the Twitter treadmill.

Tweet

When a message is placed on twitter it is know as a tweet. Tweets can be a maximum of 140 characters, the length of a typical sentence.

When you want to tweet to someone you type @ and their twitter name (example @twittername or @AngelSEO) and then type your message. This means your message will appear in their  @twittername section and your other followers will see that you have sent them a message if they view your profile or if they follow you both.

Example of a tweet sent to me

When posting links you may need to uses a shortening URL service like bit.ly . Bit.ly enables you to shorten and share you links. Bit.ly turns this link  - http://www.angelseo.co.uk/seo/beginners/facebook-v-twitter-which-is-better-for-business/ – into this http://bit.ly/bcsHi7. Which as you can see is a lot shorter making it possible to post it on Twitter without exceeding the 140 character limit.

Example of a tweet with a shortened link:

Retweet or RT

A Retweet is created when a Twitter user chooses to forward a tweet from one of the Twitter users they follow, when it is forwarded it becomes a retweet.  A retweet is also called retweeting, retweeted. A re-tweet is when you send a tweet from another user to your followers.

When a message has been retweeted it shown with the retweet symbol. The symbol is the two little arrows before the message starts, as can be seen in the example below.

Direct message or DM

Direct messages are private messages on Twitter. Only the user of the @twittername account can see direct messages. To send a direct message you need to need to click on direct messages and then either type in the @twittername you wish to send a direct message to, or select the name from the drop down list (see image below) and then type your message and cick send, this message will then appear in your sent box which can be found just below the text box that you write your direct message in.

Hashtag

Moving on to Hashtaging (hashtag). Due to Twitter not having an easy way to group or categorise tweets, web savvy Twitter users came up with their own way and it is simple and easy meaning any user, novice or expert can do it. If you want to tag/categorise a tweet simple hashtag (#) and then write the letters or word you wish to tag. Examples would be #SEO #SocialMedia #Twitter

Here are some examples…

Example 1: hashtag during a sentence:

Example 2: hashtag after a sentence: (this is also a retweet as you can see from the arrow icon)

As you will notice from the images, people tag during sentences or at the end depending on what they have written. Try both out and see what works for you.

Trending topics

Trending topics are the hot topics on Twitter at that moment in time – they are changing all the time depending on what people are discussing and tweeting about. Topics appear in the trending section by having a name/place/tv show tweeting about by thousands if not millions of users at the same time. Topics appear by having the same thing, e.g. SEO, spoken about in messages or by hashtagging SEO i.e. #SEO.

As you can see from the image here, you will notice that things with hashtags do appear in the trending list. As you can see, the hot trending topic when I was producing this post was British Professor Stephen Hawking.

Twitter errors

Some things you may experience from time to time when using Twitter are Twitter error pages, the infamous fail whale and the robot.

Fail whale – You see fail whale when twitter is not available or is over capacity.

Robot – You see the twitter robot when something is not working or a technical error has occurred.

Following

Find relevant people to follow – also bear in mind who you would like to follow you back and engage with.  Remember, you are also trying to create a community.

Some ideas of who you may want to start following include industry professionals, companies and professional magazines, to name a few.

Getting followers

Let’s look at how to go about getting followers – the right kind of followers. You may get some followers because you already follow them (some users follow whoever follows them). Some places to start looking for followers and getting your name known would be:

• Industry bodies
• Professional groups
• Well known professionals
• Industry magazines.

Some things to do to increase your followers:

• Have a link to your Twitter page on your website
• Point your followers/friends on other social networks to your Twitter page
• Have a link at the bottom of your email signature to your Twitter page
• Have a direct link in your email promotions/newsletters to your Twitter page
• Tweet regulary -  daily would be good. This also engages your followers.
• Have your Twitter feed on your company blogs
• If you are a well known brand, get your account verified by the Twitter developers – this will show people who search for your business that you are the real business and not a fake account using your business’s name
• Post links to great articles – produced by yourself or other industry professionals
• Inform your followers of what is happening at the Company, e.g. new products/services/staff
• Encourage engagement with followers – ask their opinions/views

Once you have followers, you need to keep them – yes Twitter users can be very fickle.  If you don’t actively tweet for a day, some of them will unfollow you – yes really!  When you are deciding what to tweet about, make sure it is relevant to your target audience, market sector or interest.

…and finally…

Remember the reason you want to create a Twitter account – it maybe because you want to spread your message, connect with your customers more, etc. Bear in mind your reasons why, when you are looking for followers and following other users.

In the past, keyword density, defined as the number of times a particular keyword or keyword phrase is used, was the focus of any SEO content projects. Each keyword was analysed in terms of which one seemed to be the most important and then how many times it should be mentioned as a percentage of the overall word count. The thought process was that keyword density was essential to the analytics being used by search engines.

According to some SEO analysts, keyword density is a strategy of the past – four to five years ago, that is – now that analytics have grown up and sought other means of ranking content and web sites. The result of this older strategy was that much of the content became very awkward and uncomfortable to read. Often, web sites did not make much sense and certainly did not provide any interesting or relevant information. Frustration abounded and the result was that many people were turned off of even trying to read online content. As Google’s primary focus is delivering quality results, naturally, Google gave less weight to this factor.

The new keyword strategy is more concerned with proper targeting in terms of the specific words and phrases that a certain type of person would use to look for your information or information about the product and service you may offer. Hence, keywords are now about quality versus quantity. Simply repeating keywords for the sake of using them is unnatural and no longer will improve your search engine ranking.

Besides improving the value of the information you are offering on your website and still incorporating some targeted keywords, there are other factors that have become more important than keyword density. These factors include link reputation, link popularity, supporting phrases and latent semantic indexing. Density is still relevant to some degree – it would be ridiculous to say that a site about seo that only mentions the term ’seo’ once would rank well for that term, and Google’s guidelines actually state:

“Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it”.

But the factors are most successful when they are combined into a strategy that offers multiple SEO tactics based on quality and relevancy versus a high number of random keywords.

I’ll leave you with two quotes from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team:

“…we tend not to think much about KW density here at Google, b/c our algorithms handle it pretty well. My advice is to pull in an innocent/non-search friend and have them read the text. If they raise their eyebrow …”

“…in the on-page space, I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases”.

Some webmasters have considered putting a keyword in <strong> or <b> tags to help with SEO results. For example:

This website is about <strong>search engine optimisation</strong>.

or

This website is about <b>search engine optimisation</b>.

which results in…

This website is about search engine optimisation.

Unfortunately, there is no real bold impact that is made by this tactical move.  Essentially this is because the bold and strong tags that create a bold font for the keyword do not change the semantic meaning behind the keyword – so the spiderbots don’t see anything more important or of value in these emphasised words than any other that appear on the web site or blog. The tags are therefore something that only a human reader would benefit from rather than a search engine spiderbot -  they are a visual aid for users to be able to better read your content.  Putting your keywords in such tags doesn’t automatically increase the relevance of the page for that keyword, in Google’s eyes.

Here are some tips to think about when using strong tags:

• Don’t use a bold or strong tag on a whole page or a whole paragraph. Readers of your content will not have any idea what you are trying to emphasise. It therefore slows the reader down and frustrates them.
• Don’t just bold every instance of the keyword – how would this be helpful to your reader?  Bold important words or points to help break up blocks of text and emphasise what’s most important.
• Do use bold for keywords or links that have relevance and that emphasise what you want your readers to focus on. This is effective for attracting the readers’ attention to internal linking strategies you have put in place, guiding them to other pages you want them to read.

And so it would seem that the use of strong tags and tags are more about style, format and usability, rather than about SEO effectiveness.

It is a commonly held belief that putting keywords in italics by using <em></em> or <i></i> tags can help with your search engine ranking.  For example:

This website is about <em>search engine optimisation</em>.

or

This website is about <i>search engine optimisation</i>.

which generates:

This website is about search engine optimisation.

This is because the use of italics creates emphasis within the semantic transmission of the keyword, and people believed that this will work with spiderbots that may be crawling around your content. Of course, those who take this viewpoint agree that not everything on a page should use these tags but would be effective for specific keywords or phrases found in quotations.

However, this belief, whilst well-intentioned, has not been proven. (To our knowledge!) there have not been any case studies that illustrate that spiderbots have found italics tags or emphasis tags to be more helpful in gaining the essence and significance of the content so that the search results are improved. Essentially, since no valid proof of this fact has been established, it is best to assume that there is no real impact with this strategy – and this view is shared with many SEO experts.

That’s not to say that italics tags <i> or emphasis tags <em> should not be used in your content and to highlight specific relevant keywords. There is certainly an incentive in terms of emphasising specific ideas and messages for site visitors. Italics tags are also useful when using quotations on your blog or website content whilst also befitting pronunciation explanations, symbols or colloquial terms.  They are a visual aid to the user.  Another very good reason to use <em> tags is that an emphasis is given to the words while being read by a speech synthesiser – so if used properly, they can greatly assist visually impaired site visitors.

The decision to use italics tags for online content always returns to the concept of relevance and thoughtful placement. Overusing italics will backfire just like any other tactic that is used too often. Optimising anything is purely about using it in the right way (quality) and the most appropriate number of times (quantity). Using italics sparingly will help increase emphasis where needed, improving your user experience. The most important thing to remember is that simply using italics tags will not drive up your SEO rankings; it still takes the and effort required to develop a quality website, to gain the attention you seek.

Well, we’ll start with the bottom line: putting keywords in a page’s file extension will not provide any SEO advantages and is generally considered by SEO experts to be a waste of time and effort.

First off, a file extension is a letter code that is found at the end of a file name and indicates the file’s type. For example, .txt, indicates that a file that has this extension is a text document. On the web, common file extensions include:

• mypage.html – tells the browser (like IE, Firefox) to read the page as if it is a HTML file
• mypage.php – usually a HTML file that contains some php (scripting language) which the browser will process instead of just displaying it.
• mypage.aspx – usually a HTML file that contains some aspx (scripting language) which the browser will process instead of just displaying it.

So how could you add a keyword to a file extension? Surely this would confuse the browser?  What you can do is use your htaccess file to tell the browser that when it gets a request for any file other than some specific file types (e.g. jpg, gif, png – images), it should treat that file as, say, a html file.  You can then name your files something like this:

• mypage.seo
• mypage.optimisation
• mypage.cro

(where seo, optimisation and cro are your primary keywords for their respective pages).

• SEO experts generally agree that doing this has no impact for SEO.
• It may confuse your users
• Users may be less likely to click on a link to a page with an unusual file extension as in their eyes it could contain a virus or something that harms their pc
• SEO experts are usually in favour of keeping the URL length short, rather than extending it – because it’s thought that Google tends to more highly rank short URLs over longer ones.
• It may be viewed by some search engines as keyword stuffing

You can however name your files to include keywords and this is a legitimate practice as long as you’re not keyword stuffing i.e. you’re genuinely trying to help users and search engines understand what your page is about.

When you do name a file like this, remember these ideas:

• It’s worth keeping your page name short and concise, and descriptive for the user and search engine, rather than focusing on adding keywords
• Don’t have file names with 10-15 words all strong together with hyphens. No one, including search engines, like dealing with unruly file extension names. If it looks like spam, it could possibly be spam. This makes your efforts to improve your search engine ranking open to a spam report and keyword stuffing penalty.

Another place webmasters try and slip in keywords is in comment tags in hope of improving SEO effort results. Unfortunately, this is another misguided tactic that has no bearing at all on search engine ranking. In fact, keywords in comment tags are completely ignored. A number of SEO tests conducted on keywords in comment tags have proved this to be an unwise use of time and pointless for any keyword strategy.

Comment tags are simply HTML comments that discuss the HTML/XHTML being used on a particular page. The comments only exist for webmasters and web developers to communicate information about specific HTML content blocks. Comment tags are primarily used as part of the Web design process to also illustrate where there should be start tags and end tags throughout a document.  For example:

<!– Beginning of main content section –>

<!– End of main content section –>

As in the above example, you might mark different sections of the document to help with editing it later.  Comment tags are viewed as HTML markups only. There is no special meaning that can be derived from comment tags and the search engines are already aware of the lack of emphasis.

With all these reasons for why comment tags are used, it is clear why they are not effective for keywords and keyword phrases, let alone any attempts at keyword stuffing. There is no real SEO/SEM value at all. Even worse, if keywords were used in comment tags, the extra code that would then be added could tip the intended results in the wrong direction. This could cause other page factors to be negated that might have been essential for certain results.

As such, it is best to leave keyword placement to other locations on the website or blog and leave comment tags for the purpose they were intended.

Summary: This article considers whether or not placing keywords in your tag is beneficial for SEO and for your rankings in Google at all.

What are meta keywords?  They are one of the meta tags you can insert in the head of your document.  They’re not visible to people visiting your web page but instead are placed there by web developers for search engines to see.  Here’s an example:

<meta name="keywords" content="search engine optimisation, seo, web design" />

It would seem as though having a name like ‘META keyword tags’ would mean that keyword placement within this tag would help with SEO efforts.

The purpose of the META keyword tag is to tell the search engine what keywords are important to your page so that users can find you when they search.

Whilst seeming like a good idea and once seen as a way to highlight keywords, surprise, surprise, it actually does nothing. In fact, this tag is now totally ignored by Google and most other search engines that have any pull whatsoever. Within the analytics now used by search engines, the META keyword tag has become irrelevant.

It all goes back to the notion that sticking keywords in anywhere and everywhere does not produce results. What can make a difference is carefully selecting keywords and using them effectively throughout your website – content and some tags – on a balanced basis.  The aim is to use words that you know a user would search for when looking for content that you have.

So is the tag totally redundant? Almost, yes.  There may be a few lesser known search engines that use it and so there’s certainly no harm in specifying keywords in there (we do!).  Include the specific or primary keyword that describes your site and a couple of general keywords within a META keyword tag, including one that might be a common misspelling of something associated with your site’s theme or business. It’s still not a good idea to repeat the same word or use it more than three times because the spam police will get onto you quick!

There’s one place where keyword placement in META keyword tags might do something with regards to SEO – and that’s when you’re using a blogging platform like Wordpress for or on your website. These platforms sometimes use the same keywords as tags.  So naturally, keep your keywords concise – or you’ll end up with hundreds of useless tag pages that have no SEO value – plus, limitations on characters will likely be in place for any search engines that do pay attention to the tag.

Don’t forget that keywords in the keywords meta tag should be comma-delimited, e.g. ’search engine optimisation, seo, web design’, not ’search engine optimisation seo web design’.

Despite some belief that H1 and H2 tags are “old school,” Google still considers these tags, so having a good strategy for keywords that do not get labelled as spam is very important.  After all, you want to get the right attention from Google and not be marked or blacklisted as a spammer!

H1, H2, and H3 tags are essentially used for the major sections of your online document to define what is found on each web page. The accompanying number indicates the level of importance for each headline with ‘1’ being the most important.

These tags have also become one component of a SEO/SEM strategy. Consider these strategies for relevant keyword selection for H1 tags:

• Stick to one H1 tag per page. Multiples send out the wrong type of attention from search engines unless, of course, it’s a landing page and then it is somewhat acceptable to have multiple H1 tags. This may because you are setting the page to appear in multiple languages to attract an audience from around the world.
• Use them to set the expectation levels so visitors have a good idea of what will be on that particular page. Hence, keywords help to add description and precision to your H1 tag’s definition.
• Place the keyword early on in the H1 tag or H2 tag to assist with SEO/SEM strategies.
• Don’t resort to keyword stuffing as this will soon be noted by search engines.
• Just because H1 is the top priority doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put attention to keywords in H2 tags and H3 tags. They count too when it comes to search engine analysis.
• Be selective with your keywords to ensure that you can differentiate your site from others and be ranked well due to your uniqueness and niche offering.

Many search engine experts also believe that you should use a hierarchy in header tags.  Our preferred hierarchy and the one that we use most often is:

• One H1 tag (first)
• No more than one H2 tag (second)
• H3, H4, H5 tags after that, as necessary, but in that order.  So H4 never appears before H3 and so on.

As you know from other articles, the Priority Opportunity Score, Key Opportunity Scores, Priority Value Factor and Key Value Factors are called the famous 4.

I call them this, because focus on them and they’ll have the potential to make you and your business famous. Bold, but true!

Now you need to turn an eye on what you want to do – in other words the opportunity that you want to focus on

• Jobs/Outcomes of current solutions – improve current solutions
• Jobs/Outcomes vs. consumers ideal solutions – meet consumers ideal solutions
• Jobs/Outcomes vs. ideal proposed solutions from within the company – surpass consumers’ ideal solutions and move closer to the Ultimate Solution.
• Jobs/Outcomes vs. Consumer Value Line – improve use of current Value Line.
• Jobs/Outcomes vs. Consumers Ideal Value Line – improve and change Value Line in line with consumers ideals.
• Jobs/Outcomes vs. Ideal Consumer Value Line from within the company – improve and change Value Line outside of what consumers can imagine.

This for each idea from the above there will be a different set of famous 4.

There’s no reason at this stage why you can’t focus on all six, with an eye to choosing the best options later on. Therefore each idea will have its own famous 4 – in other words each idea will have a different set of Priority Opportunity Score, Key Opportunity Scores, Priority Value Factor and Key Value Factors.

In plain English the famous 4 are

• Priority Opportunity Score – the most important and least satisfied jobs/outcomes – need to provide a lot better
• Key Opportunity Scores – the 5 next most important and least satisfied jobs/outcomes – need to provide a lot better
• Priority Value Factor – the most important job/outcome (may or may not be well satisfied) – need to provide slightly better/same or less depending on satisfaction level
• Key Value Factors – the 5 next most important jobs/outcomes (may or may not be well satisfied) – need to provide slightly better/same or less depending on satisfaction level

When deciding on a domain name, many business owners wonder if it is really necessary that it contains their main target keyword.

Well, the answer is yes and here’s why: having keywords in your domain name will improve your chances of moving up the search engine ranking quickly so that current and prospective clients can find your website before they find your competitor.

Before dashing off in a panic to snap up that domain name from a domain auction or registrar, put some strategic thought into the domain name you want to have for your business:

1. Your domain name does not have to be your company name, especially if the company name does contain a keyword that reflects your product or service, such as copywriting or car sales, for example.
2. If your company name does not contain a keyword, then it might be better to select a domain name that can include at least one keyword about the type of products or services you offer. For example, let’s go back to the copywriting example. If you are a small business owner who simply goes by their name, it might be better to add copywriting to the domain name alongside your name or pick something like “TheGlobalCopywritingExperts.com.” If you teach children how to play drums, maybe you pick something like “DrumLessonsForKids.com.”
3. In case you find that the domain name you want that contains your primary keyword is already reserved, then it is best to have some other domain names ready to go. Brainstorming with keywords is always a good way of finding a great domain. Try different keyword combinations but be sure to minimize the number of words in the domain name. The two examples above have four words, which can be long, but were only used to illustrate how a domain can utilize primary keywords. A better option might be “CopywritingExperts.com” or “DrummingLessons.com” if they were still available.

TIP: Try using Google’s keyword tool to see what people actually search for when looking for products, services and businesses like yours.

Even if someone already owns the .com version of the domain name you want with your primary keyword, there are so many possible extensions (.tv, .info, .net, etc.) that you can still get what you want and be found on search engines quite easily.  However, many SEO experts recommend you steer clear of .info domains – because companies like GoDaddy sell them for less than a pound each, many spammers have snapped these up and it’s thought that Google may take this into account when analysing your website and deciding where to rank it.

Before we go on to how exactly to segment a market let’s look at some examples of segmentation in action to discover the famous 4.

Remember, the aim of segmentation is to allow you to know a market in different ways from your competitors and then closer match the jobs and outcomes people want with different or tailored products and services. It may also allow the marketing of products to specific types of consumers as a specialist, and for you to concentrate resources in markets where competitive advantage and returns are highest. It is to that we come in Step 2. It also, very importantly, allows the measurement of customer retention and profit within each segment.

Let’s take a look at how response variables and identifier variables are used in jobs and outcomes based segmentation in practice.

Electrolux’s story of its food service equipment industry is a good example of how powerful the correct use of response variables and identifier variables can be.

Its brands were fragmented, with 15 weak national based brands making up its portfolio. This greatly increased its marketing costs and lead to inefficiency because economies of scale were hindered. In addition, brand equity was also being diluted through lack of focus and reducing the possibility of charging a greater premium for the brand. The company was making a loss in these areas of 1.3%. After the plans that follow were executed, it turned this around to a profit of 8.1% after just five years.

Electrolux had up until now followed segmentation strategy based upon low, medium and high price and on product specifications (good, better, or best) – all of which were response variables. Then it had segmented further from these tree tiers across specific customer profiles – hospital, canteen, bar, school, convenience store, restaurant and hotel – so called identifier variables.

Yet, despite following the correct response and then identifier variable approach it still found two problems –

1)  Further segmenting on customer type was not productive. Prioritisation and importance of differing jobs and outcomes actually transcended these boundaries across the types of institution.  Therefore identifier variables had been grossly misused and had separated consumers who actually wanted to do the same jobs and achieve the same outcomes regardless of who they actually where. More jobs and outcomes (response variables) should have been used to better identify what these customers were really trying to achieve.

2)  Each customer sought the best solution for those customers’ jobs and outcomes – the good, better, and best variables were a false paradigm. Why would a customer want a “good”, or “better brand”, rather than the best for their purposes? The use of good, better, and best response variables approach was therefore faulty. What mattered was the jobs and outcomes to be performed.

Electrolux realised that the best solution for each customer required starting from customer jobs and outcomes to identify the most important response variables, and that these transcended through customer types which were largely irrelevant until the final analysis – finding where people were. Its Europe-wide new approach to segmentation research revealed four segments which each had different customer types, product specs, pricing indexes, distribution needs and contexts in which the equipment was used.

These segments and a few of the famous 4 -

1) Performance specialisation segment – The Ultimate Goal was to produce large volumes of meals under circumstances that involved complicated logistics. Other high priority jobs included high performance and well integrated systems. There was  a price index of 100 compared to other segments. Airlines, five star hotels, hospitals and so on made up this group.

2) Basic solution fast return on investment segment – Those with the Ultimate Goal of using catering as an auxiliary service to generate fast ROI through basic menus – conformity with legal and sanitary regulation was an important job as well as very low prices being an important need giving a price index of 25. This segment mainly contained pubs and convenience stores.

3) Gastronomy partnership segment – Those whose Ultimate Goal was producing under 200 meals a day and doing it with a low technical competence. Jobs and outcomes they valued most were the ability to move solutions about, solutions being easy and simple use, good customer support, plus proven technology at reasonable prices. They had a price index of 50 – 75. Staff canteens, family restaurants and elderly homes made up the most of this segment.

4) The prestige gourmet segment was made up of the very best gourmet and celebrity chef owned restaurants. They required a prestigious kitchen, feature packed, with a very reliable stove as a status symbol. Price index of 200 – 300.

Note how the response variables were used first – a focus on Ultimate Goals, jobs and outcomes. Once these had been identified, identifier variables were then used to see who most of these customers were.

For now Electrolux decided it would forgo the basic solution segment due to low prices, and then chose three brands from its current 15 to position. It settled upon Electrolux, Zanussi and Molteni to target the others 3 segments.  Brand images appropriate to each segment where then built, with personality, values, rewards, functional benefits and features being built for each. 10 of its other brands were eliminated; the remaining two were kept on as they had pockets of strength.

(This worked, I took a look at Molteni and they are known as the Ferrari of stoves! They have a cult following and many of the very best restaurants use them!)

A better understanding of each jobs and outcomes based segment led to fewer but more appropriate products for customers because in reality, customers across many different roles, professions and businesses shared a lot more in common that first thought – a small set of only 4 different jobs and outcomes. Now Electrolux insists that all divisions use the same segmentation approach to new product development.

Electrolux now visits consumers to learn how, when and why these use appliances. They from this develop distinct personas to represent segments based on personality and lifestyle, jobs done and outcomes expected, usage patterns, and similar elements. One interesting thing that have found is that consumers often want their personalities reflected by their appliances, with aesthetics and functionality key in meeting this requirement.

Another example is how supermarkets have begun to segment their markets – e.g. Sainsbury’s – Be Good to Yourself (health), Organics, Taste the Difference (premium) and Basics (low cost). It is also wise to realise that one customer could be all segments over a week depending on he job to done on that usage occasion.

For example they could use “Basics” for unimportant staples, “Good to Yourself” during the week and “Taste the Difference” for a weekend treat or just items of particular importance to the user e.g. desserts. These different jobs may be classified – for example – ‘indulge me’, ‘healthy me’, ‘budget me’, ‘sophisticated me’ and change to meet specific jobs at specific times. An EasyJet user for family holidays may always fly BA first class for business.  So people can be part of many segments based on their specific job they want to do right there and then – their usage occasion. Therefore brand loyalty across a category can switch and change depending on the situation, and often consumers will be loyal to different brands in the same product category, based on the job they want to do– their loyalty may however firmly lie with one brand per usage occasion.

Another example is how Porsche sub-segments its core segment – over forty, male, college graduate, with income over £100,000 pa/a using psychographics.

• Top guns are driven ambitious types who expect to be noticed and care about power and control.
• Elitists are old money blue bloods who consider a car to be transportation not an extension of their personality.
• Fantasists want to escape through their cars and feel guilty about owning one.
• Proud Patrons consider ownership an end in itself a trophy for hard work.
• Bon Vivants are worldly jetsetters and thrill seeks whose cars heighten the excitement in their already passionate lives.

Notice how all 5 segments have a different Ultimate Goal to be achieved by their Porsche.

A final simple example of segments based on Ultimate Goals is for the users of tooth paste. Some buy to stop decay, some to attract attention, and some for nice taste. Matches for characteristics in demographics, psychographics, etc within those groups would then be looked at afterwards for trends and similarities.

A good way to think of segmentation is as the ultimate customisation of offerings to individual’s jobs and outcomes. In line with how we see all markets moving, the winners will be those that are able to give more power to buyers by giving them the package that best meets their required jobs and outcomes at the right price.

Many firms try and customise their offerings, such customisation can be collaborative  – by involving customers, transparent customisation – customised to unique needs without letting them know how, adaptive customisation – using one standard product that users can customise themselves and cosmetic customisation – where the product stays the same but only the solution changes.

As part of any search engine marketing campaign, title tags play an important role in generating successful results. Considered to be one of the most important meta tags used (although not strictly a meta tag but usually discussed in the same context), it’s the go-to source for search engines that put out spiders to crawl through the Internet to find and analyse websites. To use title tags and catch the spiders’ attention requires a little know-how and some simple tips to keep you on the right format framework.

There are some easy steps to follow to format the very necessary title tags that help the little SEO engine that could drive traffic from search engines to your website. Here are some handy tips to help you get the most out of title tags.

Let’s start with the ingredients that need formatting in a title tag:

• Company or website name
• Site architecture location
• Keyword(s)

The format for titles tags must fit the situation it is being used for as some websites may want to highlight keywords whilst others are not concerned about architectural location.

For most title tags, there are some common format techniques to employ regardless of your site situation:

• Put the keyword(s) anywhere in the title tag.
• Stay light on the keywords. No stuffing!
• List the company name after the page title.
• Focus on one theme. Take the “less is more” philosophy to heart.
• While you can use your company name, it may not be necessary, especially if it is not a well-known brand.

Here’s an example:

<title>Keyword and Keyword at Company Name[or Website]</title>

Just like some general “dos” when it comes to title tag formatting, there are also some things to avoid in order to not appear unprofessional or be penalised/blacklisted by search engines:

• Don’t use anymore than 60 characters in the title tag. Keep it succinct!
• Don’t use run-ons.
• Don’t make the title tag sound unnatural just to try and make it work for search engines. Spam alerts will go up!
• Don’t rely on non-letter characters.

Now that you have the dos and don’ts of formatting title tags, put it into action on your website as part of your overall SEM/SEO strategy.