Further Search Marketing - Blog

My work experience at Further

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:35:20 GMT

Note from Mark: Kate Tilbrook did one week work experience with us at the end of October and we invited her to write up her feelings on the week for the blog. No, it wasn't written under duress - but she might be approximately 10% over-generous with praise...

As a frequent, obsessive internet user, I would have labelled myself an experienced user of Google, a person who understands how it works, what it involves and how it seems I always obtain exactly what I search for. Yet, my week at Further proved my naivety. What this company do could almost be said as saintly to struggling businesses who have realised the rapidly increasing popularity of online marketing.

I found the hard work, determination and raw tenacity of the individuals at Further to be awe inspiring. To pursue a career in this, admittedly previously unknown, area of marketing would be a dream for me. The creativity of the designers combined with the incredible efficiency of client services and the genius' working on web development as well as the talent and knowledge within the marketing team, is fantastic. It is almost an honour to make tea and coffee for them all.

I found the atmosphere in the office to be extremely relaxed, light-hearted, yet still maintaining that professionalism and creativity. I discovered the people at Further were not as frightening as they look, in fact they are all friendly, happy people who genuinely want to help businesses drive site traffic, become noticed on internet search engines and ultimately, generate more popularity and success for that business.

It is obvious to me that Further is a success as I have seen the results they have produced and the gratitude and respect they have earnt from companies great and small. My week at Further has, basically, changed my outlook on future courses and careers.

Unfortunately, I will never look at another website without finding something to critic upon or see what could have been done better. It has been an unbelievable, opportunity, experience and honour to have spent even a week with them.

SEO Tip #40: Monitor your own site with Google Alerts

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:01:04 GMT

Today's SEO Tip:

"Monitor your own site with Google Alerts to watch out for hack attempts."

It is quite possible to pick up a nasty Google penalty if your site is hacked and either malware is installed or links are injected. Malware is generally fairly easy to spot as Google uses stopmalware.org and will give you a "This Site May Harm Your Computer" warning.

Injected links, can sometimes be harder to spot. One easy way is to use Google Alerts to monitor your own site for keywords that shouldn't be there such as "viagra" and "cialis" - popular pharma spam words.

To do this, setup a basic Google alert with the search term:

site:www.mysite.com viaga cialis

This will restrict Google Alerts to watching your own site for these keyphrases and you'll get pinged an e-mail if they crop up.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #39: Vary your incoming anchor text
SEO Tip #38: Don't forget link velocity
SEO Tip #37: Don't get hung up on Page Rank
SEO Tip #36: Rank through universal results
SEO Tip #35: RSS feeds can get you links
SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools
SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Identifying why your site is penalised in Google

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:53:41 GMT

In a follow up to our guide to what to do if you're banned in Google, this video from Google Webmaster Central went up today, explaining what to do if your site has been penalised, but you don't know why.

Another great tip is to use Google Alerts to monitor your own site for hack attempts.

Are you wasting money on search marketing?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:59:36 GMT

This blog post could massively increase your online profits. Read on to find out why!

First, let’s talk a little about the history of marketing on the web. Search engine marketing has been around in one form or another since the mid 1990’s. The term ‘search engine optimisation’ was coined some time in 1997 and the AdWords pay-per-click platform celebrates its 9th birthday this month. These dates are probably surprising to a majority of readers, as it has only been in the last few years that search marketing has really been ‘on the radar’ for many as a viable way of increasing brand awareness and online revenue.

With the exception of a small number of ill-informed detractors still stating SEO is ‘snake oil’ sold by scammers, the benefits and cost effectiveness of ethical search marketing are now understood by most savvy businesses. The last few years have seen an explosion in online marketing spend by companies who are seeing a return on investment far exceeding that seen from ‘traditional’ marketing channels such as TV and newspaper advertising, and search engine marketing (SEM) is now a respectable and essential part of the marketing mix.

Now let’s take a look at conversion rate optimisation (CRO). If you’ve not heard the term before, I’m (unfortunately) not surprised. Conversion rate optimisation doesn’t even register on Google trends for search when compared against search engine optimisation, and yet it is one of the most important aspects of any online business.

Conversion rate optimisation is, as the name suggests, using various techniques to help make a website convert visitors as effectively as possible. It’s a concept that is fundamental to offline sales – every retailer understands the importance of presenting products in the best light and making them easy to purchase – and yet it is routinely overlooked online.

So why is search marketing so well known and conversion optimisation isn't? Your guess is as good as mine. Things are changing though, and as much as 2005-6 was the start of the boom period for SEO/SEM, for conversion optimisation that time is coming fast. Here's your chance to get ahead of your competition now, by making best use of every visitor your website receives.

If you’re investing in search marketing and aren’t optimising for conversion, you’re wasting money.

To illustrate my point, and to show exactly how much money you could be leaving on the table, let’s run though an example case study.

WidgetCo (our imaginary company) only sell one product, the Blue Widget. This product costs £60 and WidgetCo offer free shipping and a three year warranty.

WidgetCo have online overheads of £5000 a month for the cost of running a website and staff to manage it, and the website currently attracts 10,000 visitors a month. They currently sell 100 Blue Widgets a month (a conversion rate of 1%)

Without search marketing or conversion optimisation:

• £5000 overheads
• 100 units sold at £60 per unit
• £6000 revenue
• £1000 profit

Not hugely impressive figures. Realising that there are a lot more potential customers out there, WidgetCo invest £2000 a month for a search marketing campaign which, through organic and paid search, doubles their traffic to 20,000 visitors a month, and sales increase accordingly.

With search marketing:

• £7000 overheads
• 200 units sold at £60 per unit
• £12,000 revenue
• £5000 profit - an increase of 500%

Not bad! By commissioning an effective search agency, WidgetCo have increased their online profits by 500%, which has made the website an important part of the business. Realising that the website may not be performing as well as it could, WidgetCo now work with their agency to implement a conversion optimisation campaign, which involves design changes along with optimised copy and user testing. The investment of a further £2000 a month doubles the conversion rate of the website from 1% to 2%.

With search marketing and conversion optimisation:

• £9000 overheads
• 400 units sold at £60 per unit
• £24,000 revenue
• £15,000 profit - an increase of 1500%!

By implementing both search marketing and a conversion optimisation campaign, WidgetCo have increased online profits 15 fold without increasing prices or having to cut costs. By improving the website conversion rate, less site traffic was 'wasted' to people not converting to a sale, and WidgetCo can now work to continue growth of search traffic and conversion rate to become even more profitable.

As an extra benefit, the improved website and easier purchase reduces the need for pre-sales support by WidgetCo, not to mention happier customers who are far more likely to repeat order or recommend WidgetCo to a friend!

Fictional companies aside, I hope this blog post has inspired readers to consider the benefits of conversion optimisation. As well as being an essential partner to any search marketing campaign, it can improve your customer loyalty, reduce support costs, increase long term profitability and equally as importantly improve customer satisfaction with your brand.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments below, or contact us for more information on conversion optimisation!

Democracy 2.0?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:49:08 GMT

I should really whisper this sort of thing around here, but I've never really been a fan of Twitter. It always struck me as a phenomenal waste of time. Surely everyday tasks would take twice as long if you document them afterwards in 140 characters or less? I dismissed it as a publishing tool for navel gazers and the easily distracted.

I had been reliably informed that it's great for networking and for link building. Perhaps that was true, but I just couldn't be bothered to wade through all minutae of other people's lives to get to the good bits. I struggle as it is to keep up with all the useless information my brain chucks at me – let alone having to deal with everyone else's.

In case any loyal Twits (is that the right word?) are about to switch off, I should say at this point that this post isn't really about knocking microblogging. In fact, a few recent events have convinced me that there might be something of significance in the Twittersphere.

You may have recently come across a news item about a previously little know company called Trafigura. For those that haven't, I'll attempt to summarise it without being too political/libellous about the whole thing. Try rearranging the following words: oil trading company, bit naughty, carpet, sweep, under, thousands, people, injured, toxic, waste.

Obviously said company, worried about its reputation, would not want a report about the above to enter the public domain. So said company, following normal protocol, employs their usual law firm to get an injunction against publication of the report. So far, so simple.

Things get a litlle more complicated when they also attempt to get an injunction against publication of the fact of the original injunction (a so-called 'super injunction'). This means that all newspapers could report was along the lines of 'we know something about something that we can't tell you about'.

It would seem that Trafigura had succeeding in protecting the reputation of their brand. Handshakes and pats on backs all round.

The fact an MP had tabled a parliamentary question about the report didn't in itself appear to challenge the robustness of the injunction. All the law firm had to do was remind the newspapers of their duty not to report the question as this would constitute a breach of the injunction. All very well and good, except they had forgotten the small fact of parliamentary supremacy and the freedom of the press to report on proceedings therein.

It would seem that the press had been denied a right protected in English common law since the Nineteenth century. Normally this would result in a trip to the High Court and however many thousands of pounds in legal fees to challenge the terms of the injunction.

What they hadn't banked on was the power of the Twittersphere. With some prompting from the Guardian newspaper, Twitter was soon abuzz with the story and microbloggers everywhere were either expressing outrage, contacting MPs, or even releasing details of the report contrary to the injunctions.

Faced with such a tide of public opinion and the publication of the very details that it had sought to repress, Trafigura caved in. I don't think it's going too far to say that the Twitttersphere played a vital role in highlighting and protecting a fundamental freedom. What previously may have taken weeks of protests, strongly worded letters, and High Court proceedings was accomplished in hours by ordinary folk at home on their laptops.

But it's not just the political and legal establishment who should take note of the potential power of Twitter. Anyone can be a target, even newspapers themselves. The outrage expressed at opinion piece written by Jan Moir of the Daily Mail about the death of Stephen Gately is revelatory in this respect.

Ms Moir published an article on the Daily Mail website about the death of Stephen Gately that was, at the very least tasteless and badly timed, and at worst more than just a bit homophobic. Lots of people who read the article were upset at its content and duly submitted disapproving comments on the site. Previously this, a complaint from the family, and perhaps a subsequent apology in somewhere in the paper would have been the end of the matter.

That was until SuperTwits (sorry, but it just sounds so good) such as Stephen Fry picked up on the story and engaged the Twittersphere in protest. The Press Complaints Commission website crashed under the weight of traffic from the public wanting to complain about the article. The story became headline news on the BBC and Jan Moir was forced into releasing a statement that afternoon defending her piece. There has even been a complaint to the police on the grounds of inciting homophobia.

More troubling for the Mail was the immediate response from advertisers. Those companies with adverts appearing the same page as the article were quick to request their removal. Marks & Spencer publically demanded this, whilst at the same time distancing themselves from the opinions expressed by Moir.

By the afternoon the article was still live, with all advertising removed. This would be of great concern to the owners of the Daily Mail. Newspapers are struggling with dwindling advertising revenue as it is. It would seem the article has now been removed from the site. We'll wait to see what happens to Moir.

Does this herald a new era for democracy or just increased power to the mob? Whatever your opinion, it wouldn't be going overboard to say that there has been a detectable shift in the balance of power between the traditional establishment and the public at large.

One fact is indisputable; it's more important than ever to be aware of what is being said about your organisation online. It's really worth considering Online PR and reputation management as an integral part of your Marketing and PR spend, not only for the crisis management of events like these, but to raise your online brand profile and drive traffic to your site.

Meta Tag Optimisation - Pete's SEO Corner

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:37:03 GMT

This month we will be looking at those funny tags with “meta” in them that you see so often at the top of most website code. You may hear conflicting information regarding these meta tags so I’m going to clear that up.

Meta tags are basically (X)HTML elements which describe what a certain webpage is about. There are several different meta tags, and each serves a different purpose.

Keyword Tag

The first we’re going to look at is the “keywords” meta tag. You will see most webpages using this, and it’s presented in this format:

<meta name="keywords" content="felt tip pens " />

In the above keywords meta tag, the term “felt tip pens” is targeted, meaning the website author is telling search engines that that’s what the particular page is about.

Keyword meta tags were used widely back in the 90s to help search engines ascertain what a page was about. Back then, the boffins working for the search engines wrongly assumed that internet users were honest and wouldn’t try to cheat the system for their own profit.

Unfortunately, people started realising that you didn’t need to be honest about reporting what your website was about. In fact, by stuffing the keyword meta tag full of unrelated keywords you could quickly rank for all sorts of search terms. It started to become a problem when people were typing in “holidays in Istanbul” and were being presented with a gambling site.

Gambling sites: making you a compulsive hair puller

An example of the keyword meta tag being in use is the Amazon.co.uk homepage.

<meta name="keywords" content="digital camera, LCD TV, books, DVD, low prices, video games, pc games, software, electronics, home, garden, video, amazon" />

In the above example, amazon.co.uk is targeting among other terms, “digital camera” and “amazon”.

Nowadays, support for the keyword meta tag is very minimal. The major search engine Google has explicitly said that ignores the keyword meta tag when ranking sites in the SERPs. While there have been conflicting reports about whether Yahoo still uses the keyword meta tag, recent tests and a statement from Yahoo have suggested that the search engine still takes the meta tag into account, although it receives the lowest ranking strength out of all the other factors (title, H1 tags etc).

Generally, it is still useful not to ignore the keyword meta tag so you can get that extra ranking factor for Yahoo.

Description Tag

Another well-used tag is the description tag. Search engines will use this tag to provide a small description of what a particular webpage is about in the SERPs. If you enter “amazon” into the search bar, you’ll be presented with the homepage of amazon.co.uk in 1st place.

The sub-text that follows after the website title is specified in the description meta tag for the amazon.co.uk homepage:

<meta name="description" content="Low prices on digital cameras, MP3, LCD TVs, books, music, DVDs, video games, software, home & garden and much, much more. Free UK delivery on Amazon orders." />

While the description tag is not used by the major search engines as a ranking factor, it is still useful for getting your website noticed in the SERPs since the keyword being searched for becomes bolded in the description. Google will also bold other keyterms it thinks you may also be searching for.

In this example, a search for the term “CDS” also yields “credit default swap”.

This is likely to catch the attention of the searcher and will get your website noticed easier. Another good way to get more clickthroughs to your site is to write a compelling description in your description tag.

Description meta tags are also useful for distinguishing between two very similar pages.

Duplicate description tags meant that hair dye was the only option

If you don’t include a description meta tag then Google will simply use a small snippet of text on the page related to the search result.

Other Meta Tags

These are the two most useful meta tags you will come across. Other meta tags which may be useful to you are:

Language – Although Google is generally quite good at identifying what language your website is using, it’s sometimes good to give it a helping hand.

Robots – This tag functions as an alternative to robots.txt, which tells search engine spiders how to treat webpages on your site. Using “noindex” will tell Google not to index the page while “nofollow” will add the “nofollow” attribute to all the links on the page. You’re better off using robots.txt first though and only use this if for some reason you can’t access the robots.txt on your server.

The features that make Fireworks the application of choice for web designers

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:09:04 GMT

Amongst the web design community there is an ongoing debate over the relative merits of Photoshop and Fireworks for creating web graphics and mock-ups. There shouldn't be – Fireworks is king. There, I said it.

Fireworks has been built from the ground up as a web publishing tool. Photoshop has been built from the ground up as photo manipulation tool. Simple as that.

I'm not knocking the power of photoshop for image manipulation – I'd never do a cutout in Fireworks for example. However, if you're designing websites of more than about five pages the difference in the efficiency of the relative work flows is enormous.

There are many reasons why Fireworks is a more powerful tool for creating web mock-ups than Photoshop. I'll try to summarise the most significant here:

Pages, Frames & Layers

Whilst Photoshop allows you to work only in layers, Fireworks (from CS3 onwards) allows you to create multiple web pages within a single png file. Each of these pages will have its own set of layers and additionally can have any number of frames (great for rollover states – more on these later).

Master pages

To streamline workflow on site-wide features (eg top nav) Fireworks allows you to create master pages. Any changes/amends can then be implemented across all pages in the png, a lovely.

Pixel perfect positioning and sizing

Much like the measurements panels/toolbar in Quark and InDesign, Fireworks' 'Properties panel' allows you to place and size objects with pixel precision. No more guess work when working with grid systems or maintaining consistency generally.

Symbols

What would you do if your lovingly created buttton (which appears 30 times across 15 different pages) is rejected by the client on the basis that the text should be in Georgia rather than Arial? Do your curse the fact the your next hour will be spent changing all the buttons on the mock-ups, or do you rejoice in the fact that you created them as a symbol and can make the change with a couple of clicks of the mouse?

Rapid slicing

Select object, Shift+alt+p, done.

Clickable Prototypes

Its really easy to export the pages within the png as html. This is where the slices and frames come in very handy. In the 'Properties' pane' you can give make the slice a link, either to an external url, or more importantly for prototyping, to another page within the png.

Now all you need to do is export to 'html and images' and hey presto, clickable prototypes.

What's more, with the 'Behaviors' panel you can add rollover effects using the rollover states in the other frames you created earlier.

Paste attributes

A simple, hidden gem of a feature that will increase your workflow. it allows you to quickly copy styles (text, gradients etc) from one object to another.

Select the item (eg vector shape with a gradient applied) and hit command+c. Then select the object you want to apply the style to (the gradient) and hit shift+alt+command+v.

Common Library

Fireworks has a library of commonly used interface elements, such as radio buttons, check boxes and drop downs for rapid use in mock-ups. You can add your own elements here to further speed up your workflow.

Stroke control

Settle down at the back. Control over paths and strokes is a major strong point of Fireworks. Not convinced? Then open Photoshop and try making a one pixel weight path, 750 pixels long, colour it # 333333 and place it at x 340px and y 500px – shall I put the kettle on?

Select behind

Anyone who has spent time trawling through the layers panel looking for that layer will love this tool.

Search Query Conversion Analysis

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:45:05 GMT

One of the most useful ways of optimising Pay Per Click (PPC) activity is through search query conversion analysis. You really cannot be more accurate than to establish which keywords are driving profitable conversions on your site.

Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft Adcenter) only offer Keyword Performance reports, so you cannot be quite as precise with these engines at present, but if you apply the same principles of analysis to keyword performance you will still be able to refine your campaign for better performance and return on investment.

But yes, you guessed it, Google is way ahead on this and has made the process of search query conversion analysis remarkably simple; it has its own Search Query report, and even allows you to see this data on the fly within the Adwords interface.

In writing this article I am making an assumption that you have previously implemented conversion tracking successfully and accurately, and have mature data from which to make this analysis.

NB. Just so we are absolutely straight on what we are talking about, below is a quick glossary of the terminology that comes into play for this reporting:

Keyword
The word or phrase that you are bidding on in your account
e.g. flights to france

Long Tail Keyword
Describes longer, very specific keywords
e.g. cheap flights to france from stansted

Search Query
The keyword phrase a user actually types into the search engine, which your ads get matched to, if you are using phrase or broad matching.
e.g. the keyword you are bidding on is flights to france

the user types in cheap flights to france from stansted, and your advert is delivered for this search because it is set to broad match.

Setting up a Search Query Report in Adwords

For those who haven’t discovered this report yet, log in to your Google Adwords account, select the green ‘Reporting’ tab and on the drop down select ‘Reports’. Select ‘Create a new report »’ and ‘Search Query Performance’ is listed as one of the report types.

If you don’t want to blind yourself with a haze of numbers on your first time looking at this report, make it easy on yourself by applying the following attributes to the report you are creating. The default settings for Level of Detail and View (Unit of Time) are fine to leave as is, for date range you want to see a decent amount of data, so why not look at ‘Last Month’. If you have many campaigns, just look at one to start with (select ‘Manually select from a list’ under the Campaigns and Ad Groups option and pick one of your campaigns to look at).

Under the Advanced Settings (Optional) area, click on the Add or Remove Columns; very often you don’t need all these pieces of data to optimise your campaign, all you need to look at are the key performance indicators (KPI’s... a lot of people in marketing love this acronym).

I quite like to look at keyword conversion reports with enough data as will be meaningful, but not all, as I can’t stand seeing twenty columns of data swimming before my eyes...so how about this to start you off...

Leave these attributes ticked:

Campaign
Ad Group
Ad Id (this one isn’t optional for some reason, so you have no choice here)
Search Query
Search Query Match Type
Clicks
Cost
Conversions
Conv. Rate (1-per-click)
Cost/Conv. (1-per-click)

Click ‘Save and Run Report’ to generate the data, and for the purposes of slicing and dicing it, exporting into Excel is always favourite with me.

Analysing the data

Once you have the report in excel, it will make it easier if you take out the automated title that Google includes, and the totals at the bottom. You are now ready to sort to sort the data.

Segregate Brand Terms

If you are making use of brand terms (literally...keywords which have your brand name in them) it is a wise idea to analyse these separately, as they will inevitably produce a greater rate of return and can skew results making overall performance look as if it is far better than it really is.

Remember, if you are bidding on any terms which you appear for high up in the natural search listings, you may want to remove or reduce spend on these terms as it is possible you are paying for clicks that you could be getting for free. This is true of non brand terms as well.

Identify Wasted Clicks

Sort the data by cost per conversion, and sub-total figures and averages for the converting and non converting search query terms. This will very quickly show you what percentage of your budget is being spent on wasted clicks.

For all search queries that have not generated conversions, sort the data and establish which ones are costing the most. Keywords that are costing a lot of money without generating conversions can be manipulated for better performance (reduce bid price, change match type, change landing page, create new adverts more specific to the term, etc) or can be removed from the account.

Keywords which are generating conversions, but whose cost per conversion is too high can be also be optimised – using the same tools and techniques mentioned above - to see if effective conversions can be achieved at a lower cost.

Be aware that sometimes you may find that you end up steering away from terms that seem highly relevant, don’t be precious over this process, ‘the numbers don’t lie’ as they say.

Find Negative Keywords

Search query analysis will also highlight traffic you are receiving off the back of keywords set to broad or phrase match, which are not relevant to your business. If you find phrases that describe something you do not offer, start building a list of negative terms to add into your account. Bear in mind that this does not mean taking the entire phrase and adding it as a negative keyword, it means taking the individual work in the phrase that denotes its irrelevance on its own, and adding it e.g.

Scenario - You sell fine quality pine bedroom cabinets and your search query list looks like this:

white bedroom cabinet¹
bedroom wall cabinet
bedroom storage cabinet
cheap bedroom cabinets²
oak bedroom cabinet³
cabinet for bedroom
bedroom wall cabinets
bedroom cabinets uk
bedroom side cabinets
cabinets for bedroom

The phrases in bold are not relevant to your site because 1) you don’t sell painted furniture 2) your products are not cheap and 3) your products are only pine, not oak. If you add each of the entire phrases as your negative you will only block traffic for phrases they relate to. However, if you add the words white, cheap and oak as individual negative keywords on broad match you can eradicate any searches that include those words.

Find New Keywords

Search query data can also help you identify new keywords which are generating sales, again through searches that you are not at present specifically bidding on, but that are being generated as the result of long tail searches against broad match/phrase match terms. By adding these into the account you can start being more efficient in targeting precisely the right phrases that will get you great return on investment.

Optimise carefully, and across smaller selections of terms at a time until you get used to the process and it becomes more intuitive. Also, make sure you do not make significant en-masse changes as it will not make it easy to track the success of your work, you may detrimentally impact the performance of the campaign as a whole by doing too much at once.

NB. If your advertising also drives significant offline conversions (e.g. telephone calls) you will have to be mindful of this with your optimisation. You may find that whilst keyword conversion analysis improves online results, the number of phone calls you receive drops. At present telephone call tracking has not reached keyword level, so your changes will have to be influenced by a qualitative assessment of the calls coming through.
Conclusion

You will never be able to eradicate all wasted traffic from your account, because there will always be fluctuations in the account, and over different time periods, which cause performance to change, but you should find that you can radically reduce wastage by making a few simple changes.

SEO Tip #39: Vary your incoming anchor text

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:02:40 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Gareth James from SEO Doctor:

"You will not find many keyword anchor text backlinks with sites that have a 100% organic link profile. Use wisely when linkbuilding."

There's a pretty easy way to spot if something has an SEO on the case - looking at backlink anchor text. As Gareth rightly points out, organic backlink profiles usually contain just the domain URL, with people (except kind bloggers) rarely bothering to use keywords when linking (this is one argument for exact match domains).

Google, having a vast amount of link data, can quite easily spot unnatural anchor text linking activities, although Google penalties are seemingly fairly rare. To be sure you're doing the best possible job, make sure you vary your anchor text in your link building campaigns.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #38: Don't forget link velocity
SEO Tip #37: Don't get hung up on Page Rank
SEO Tip #36: Rank through universal results
SEO Tip #35: RSS feeds can get you links
SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools
SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Design blogs for inspiration and information

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:46:19 GMT

As we are a caring and sharing bunch in the design team at Further, we thought we would take this opportunity to serve up a taste of our favourite blogs and online resources for your delectation.

Whether as a means of finding inspiration, food for thought or for assisting directly with the design process, we hope you will find the following list useful.

1. Food for thought

Design Observer www.designobserver.com

A recent (and somewhat perplexing) re-design of this much-loved design blog has not altered its position at the forefront of writing for design on the web. Several Webby nominations and awards testify to the quality of the content provided here. Design Observer is a effectively a hub for all things design (no matter how niche or obscure) and will often champion projects that use design in socially responsible/positive way.

Boxes and arrows www.boxesandarrows.com

A peer-written journal broadly based on the subject of information architecture. Although sometimes a little dry in content and presentation, there is some really intelligent and thought provoking writing on this site. A good place for challenging our own conventions in user interface and design process. Boxes and arrows reminds us that innovation and debate are the principle drivers for design (rather than an over reliance on AB testing – Google look away now).

Noisy decent graphics www.noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com

The blog of Ben Terret (of the Really Interesting Group). Always interesting, often very funny – and quite often controversial. This blog is opinionated, but not in the Jeremy Clarkson sense of that word, if you know what we mean.

Business guys on business trips businessguysonbusinesstrips.com

More of a lunch-break distraction than any deep food for thought, but all the more entertaining for that. You'll laugh like a drain.

2. Inspiration/creative block breakers

At Further, we're not really a huge fan of those CSS galleries as a means of inspiration. They have their place but we find that they tend to have an over reliance on fancy photoshop header illustrations and '2.0' styling.

The following represent a taster of where we like to head for creative re-fuelling

Behance Network www.behance.net

Not a great deal of web-design on offer, but that's no bad thing when it comes to sourcing inspiration. Some really high quality work here.

Ffffound! ffffound.com

Random images of loveliness and weirdness.

Design Sponge www.designspongeonline.com

Some beautiful interior design here (hence Annette spends a lot of time on this site!). Great for colour palettes and some lovely vintage graphic design.

It's Nice That itsnicethat.com

A collection of images and inspiration, gathered from all creative disciplines. Simply presented and great for a quick delve.

3. Tools and resources

Grid designer grid.mindplay.dk

Before we happened upon this tool, designing grids for the web was often a laborious task involving a calculator and much swearing.

What the font? new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont

Genius. Simple as that. Upload a screengrab of a font and this tool will (more often than not) tell you what it is. The better the quality of the image uploaded, the better the chance that MyFonts will guess right.

Adobe® BrowserLab browserlab.adobe.com

Simple, quick, cross-platform, cross-browser testing – need we say more?

Typetester www.typetester.org

Compare type styles for projects with this simple tool which even gives you the CSS for each style as a bonus gift.

iPlotz iplotz.com

A really useful tool for creating and sharing 'clickable' prototypes for web projects. A bit clunky in the online version, worth investing in the desktop version to reduce lag.

Optimising Links - Pete's SEO Corner

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:52:33 GMT

Welcome, dear readers to another instalment of Pete’s SEO corner. So far, we’ve covered optimising your site with title tags, content and exact match domains. In this article, we will be examining links – why you need them, and how you can make them work for you.

Why Links are Important

Google works on the belief that sites with more links are more popular and authoritative and are thus more likely to rank higher. The theory comes from the fact that if you find a useful resource on the web, you are likely to link to it from your own website.

One thing you can do to make your links pack more punch is to make sure your link has keyword targeted anchor text. This is the crucial factor in determining what keywords Google ranks your site for.

Keyword Targeted Links

For example, a link which points to your felt tip pen site, CoolFeltz at http://www.coolfeltz.com will pass link juice and benefit your site but in order to get the full benefit of the link the anchor text should be a keyword which your site is targeting.

Anchor text is the link text you use for a link so the following code:

<a href=”http://www.coolfeltz.com”>Felt tip pens</a>

has the anchor text “Felt tip pens” which Google will count when ranking your site for that term.

There are many sites with a decent amount of good links pointing to them but still do not rank highly for their terms. On closer inspection of their link profile, many of their links are not keyword optimised, only having the domain name as the anchor text.

Make links look natural

One thing Google wants to see is that the anchor text in your links to the site looks natural. By natural, I mean that if you have 1000 links pointing to your site and they all contain the anchor text “felt tip pens” then Google is likely to see this as an unnatural link profile

So, even though you may be targeting the keywords “felt tip pens”, “felt tip pen”, “black pen” and “marker pen” to your homepage you should also use anchor text for keywords you may not actively be targeting. A good tactic to use is to include the long-tail terms that don’t garner you much traffic, but are rich in variety.

Internal linking

Internal linking within your site will also benefit your site. You can increase the relevance of internal pages by changing non-descriptive links such as "click here" or "read more" to containing anchor text that is relevant to the following page.

As well as providing benefits for search engines, there are advantages for the user as well. Studying how people interact with web pages shows they scan read and the eye is naturally drawn to hyperlinks. Accurately labelled hyperlinks can help your users quickly identify which page it is they are looking for.

Good luck and happy linking!

Come see us at Norwich Twestival

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:30:03 GMT

Twestival Norwich is being held this Friday 11th September and is a great opportunity for businesses to learn more about the social side of the web. Apart from getting to talk to specialists such as Azlan Raj from StickyPanda and Kate Abboy from JunglePR, the entire event is aimed at raising money for the East Anglian Air Ambulance - a cause selected by users from an online poll.

We'll be doing our piece and I'll give a hopefully entertaining and educating look into some misconceptions of social media as well as an open Q&A panel afterwards.

The event starts at 1:30pm, but if you can't make it you can always come by just for the after party, which has live bands, drinks and some competitions including a chance to win a helicopter ride for four people.

The venue (known as "the old Barclay's building", has just finished a £12million overhaul and is an impressive sight on its own with some of the best architecture in Norwich.

You can buy tickets online from the UEA Box office, which are a snip at £4.50 (£3.50 at the moment) and even make a voluntary extra donation if you're feeling generous.

Visit the Twestival Norwich site for more info or follow them on Twitter.

Hopefully see you there!

9/10 Voucher Code Sites Still Breaking The Rules

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:50:15 GMT

I did a post back in March, bringing up the discussion on the IAB's updates guidelines for voucher code affiliate sites. In a nutshell, the IAB guideless are set out "..to ensure that traffic from affiliate sites sent to merchants is not done in a misleading or confusing way and that consumers receive a good user experience."

Central to this is:

"Affiliates must not use a mechanism whereby users are encouraged to click to interact with content where it is unclear or confusing what the outcome will be"

Essentially, don't force the user to click your affiliate link before you give them (an active!) voucher code, I think this would satisfy as a good user experience.

My post back in March, got some angry (albeit anonymous) replies stating, "96% of affiliates generating revenue are now compliant with these rules" and the IAB had wanted 100% compliance by April 2009.

I thought it would be interesting to do a search for voucher codes. Google estimates monthly, exact searches for this term at 165,000 per month in the UK. I think it would be fair to say, ranking for this term would give you a good stab at generating revenue.

Rather than going through every IAB guideline, I'm just going to see which sites are still requiring me to "click" before I can access the voucher code.

#1 & #2 Vouchercodes.co.uk - Click to reveal: Uses a "get code and open site" button. While you can view the code by hovering, attempting to copy the code (by clicking) opens the affiliate site. They are kind enough however to let you view expired voucher codes, without this convoluted system.

#3 Myvouchercodes.co.uk - Click to reveal: All codes are tied in with the "visit site" link to reveal codes.

#4 Vouchercodes.com - Click to reveal: Standard text link that will only reveal codes (some expired) when you click the affiliate link.

#5 Voucherseeker.co.uk - Click to reveal: Tempts you with half a code until, you guessed it - you click the affiliate link.

#6 Wowvouchercodes.co.uk - Click to reveal: All voucher codes are scrambled until you click the affiliate link

#7 Vouchersmarter.co.uk - Click to reveal: Seen this graphic before? A universal click to reveal system in place, similar to myvouchercodes.co.uk.

#8 Promotionalcodes.org.uk - Click to reveal: Despite claiming on the button to see "active" codes, the site simply lists most expiry dates as "unknown" - and you can see from the user feedback, there are a large number of expired codes.

#9 Ukvouchercode.com - We have a winner!: UKvouchercode.com (disclosure: which I or Further is not affiliated with in anyway) appears to be the only site within the first page of results that gives you active voucher codes, without the need to show, reveal hide, or otherwise jump through virtual flaming hoops. Well done, I hope you rank even better for voucher codes :)

#10 Vouchersave.co.uk - Click to reveal: Exactly the same system as vouchercodes.co.uk, with a slippery rollover system, that while straddling the guidelines, doesn't allow you just to "copy and paste" the voucher code.

Conclusion: I guess it's up for debate whether the majority of these sites fall within the IAB guidelines. Personally, I think one of the basic requirements for a good and easy user experience, is for the website not to disable any of my browser/OS "innate" features, such as back button, copy & paste and the like.

From what I've seen, most of these sites still provide an experience that is far too heavily weighed on gaining the click, rather than providing the voucher.

So I ask you, what are your thoughts on these sites - acceptable? Or should there be tighter control?

After thought: I wonder how many people are already at the basket stage when they look for a voucher code. Do any voucher toolbars exist to find voucher codes automatically at this stage of the process?

Googling the Future

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:00:38 GMT

I'm going to give you some search-based food for thought for this weekend.

Search as a Science

Almost every year I hear the bell-ringing doomsayers that are predicting, "the end of SEO". It never happens. There's a lot of talk about the search market "coming to maturity", with universal search, better results, tracking, stable business models and the like.

I think a closer comparison would be that a lot of businesses struck gold with search and now we've got a few spades and pans and think we're near maturity, blissfully unaware of the impending rise of colossal mining machines covering the landscape.

To put a finer point on it, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt recently said in a Techcrunch interview:

"Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting."

Google trumpeted the release of Google Squared at around the same time Wolfram Alpha, the "answers engine" hit the public domain. This wave of thinking, providing "answers" rather than websites is one of Google's next greatest challenges. Broadly speaking, you have 3 types of search query: Informational, navigational and transactional and for many of these queries, there exists a "correct answer".

While "words to meaning" is the staging point, this goal possibly gives light on the next decade of Google development.

Sci-Fi(act?) Time

Depending on how you're inclined, this is where the scary stuff starts to happen. Brain implants. While it sounds similar to the predictions of flying cars by the year 2000, the fact is research into brain - computer connections has been going since the early 1970s and have recently enjoyed a degree of success, from controlling other electrical devices by thought, to recovering the ability to use paralysed limbs.

The need to "remember" information and facts has also become a topic for debate, are computers making us more stupid? With my iphone on me, what need to do I have to try and remember trivial information that can instantly and accurately be brought up within a few seconds? Or is this simply giving me spare brain capacity to work on the bigger challenges?

In a recent inteview with Wired.co.uk, Schmidt describes Google as the third part of the human brain:

"..you know, there’s a left brain, a right brain and there’s a third part where that collective intelligence that Google can help bring to you really helps you get through every day: the history of places, what you should do, collecting things for you, telling you what’s relevant – the things that computers do best that humans are not good at. And that will leave humans to spend more time doing what humans do best, the things computers are not very good at"

There's no doubt that Google is helping people educate themselves, when lost for an answer, I no longer have to make a trip to the library, or ask around for answer, I can find it myself in minutes. One thing did stick in my mind though. A couple of years ago I saw the BT future predictions timeline. A brief look into what the telecomms giant thinks may be happening over the next 50 years.

Aside from "Terminator 3 style robots", one thing worried me: "2026 - 2030: Virus crosses over from machine to human".

I take all of these predictions with a handful of salt and I'm not one to worry about the future doom of man, but this one did make sense to me. If we've established an effective link whereby computers can read (or more likely, predict) the mind, it makes sense this might be a two-way deal.

I really don't want to think about installing anti-virus software in my brain. Or cross-human-scripting.

Lots of worry about Google

While Google has generally good spin within the UK media, there have been several backlashes with their agenda of "collecting and sorting the world's information", from their street mapping to the even more controversial hosting of UK medical records.

Compared to a search giant directly connecting with peoples' brains (indexing thoughts?), some of these worries seem trivial. The fact is, they aren't trivial. The worries stem from the possibility of one company being able to own and manipulate the world's data.

Something to think about this weekend :)

SEO Tip #37: Don't get hung up on Page Rank

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:54:38 GMT

"Page Rank should not be the primary identifier of a good or bad link"

It is a common misconception that a page with low Page Rank is not worth getting a link from. However, there are many other things to consider when building links including domain trust and authority, content relevance and position of your link on a page.

Similarly pages with high Page Rank may not be what they first seem. Try checking the page's back link profile for any deceptive tactics or evidence of link buying or blackhat before you dive into getting a link from it.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #36: Rank through universal results
SEO Tip #35: RSS feeds can get you links
SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools
SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #38: Don't forget link velocity

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:34:29 GMT

"For new domains, spread your link building over the month for a natural link velocity"

This is a very straight forward, but often overlooked bit of advice. Search engines look for unnatural linking patterns to determine spammy tactics. If you are always building links between the 4th and 7th of the month for your client, this is going to start looking very odd to search engines.

Try spreading your link building over the month for a more natural link profile and consistent link velocity.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #37: Don't get hung up on Page Rank
SEO Tip #36: Rank through universal results
SEO Tip #35: RSS feeds can get you links
SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools
SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #36: Rank through universal results

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:20:08 GMT

"Can't rank organically for a highly competitive term? Try ranking for a universal result instead!"

This is a great way to gain rankings in very competitive sectors where competition may be too great to rank organically or sectors buying links. The idea is simple. Submit a video to YouTube, get a picture ranked in Google images, or get a piece of news on Google News and build links and traffic to these rather than your own site.

Youtube: Make sure your YouTube pages are optimised for search with good titles and descriptions containing the keyterms you wish to rank for.

Google images: Make sure you use good alt text for you images and filenames containing the terms you wish to rank well for. Also surrounding text can help.

Google News: Make sure your news article has a good title and content containing the terms you wish to rank for.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #35: RSS feeds can get you links
SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools
SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #35: RSS feeds can get you links

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:56:59 GMT

"Submit your RSS feeds to quality RSS directories for links"

Make your RSS feeds work harder for you by submitting them to manual review RSS directory sites. Make sure you link back to your site in relevant content from your feeds for maximum affect.

Sub tip: Make sure your RSS feeds are regularly submitted to a trusted ping list so your content gets syndicated around the web.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools
SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #34: Build links with Webmaster Tools

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:37:08 GMT

"Find broken pages on your site which have inbound links with Webmaster Tools"

This is a very easy, and very often overlooked way of clawing back some of those hard earned back links. Get logged into Google Webmaster Tools and check the "Crawl errors" section. Then drill down to the "not found" results and next to each one Google will tell you how many links are pointing to that page. 301 the 404ing pages to a current page on your site to pass the link juice.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data
SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #33: Optimise with E-Commerce data

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:20:04 GMT

"Using e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics can be an invaluable source of keyword data for your search campaign."

Clicking on the E-Commerce tab and then drilling down to "non paid keywords" will reveal what keyterms are bringing in revenue and which ones are not performing. From this data you can shape a successful SEO campaign around the terms that actually convert, rather than terms you think will convert or have large amounts of search traffic.

Advanced tip: Use e-commerce tracking code on forms where goal tacking is not possible (those that send using javascript or Ajax and do not change the URL). The tracking code can be slipped in once the page is reloaded.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites
SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Why success online doesnt start with a website.

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:12:10 GMT

For any business wanting to take advantage of the online revolution, the obvious place to start would be to get a website up and running.

Surely, everything else will follow on from there, won’t it?

Sadly, no it won’t, and this is where many organisations have got it all wrong when planning their assault on the online consumer. Not just small businesses, but often large brands, too, who should know better.

It is akin to building a house without any foundations - destined to fall down before too long.

Rather than being the top priority, the website should be just one of the resultant activities borne out of the most important thing of all – your digital marketing strategy.

By creating your strategy, you can identify your aims and objectives of your online presence from the outset and plan a route to achieving those goals whether they happen to be sales, leads, enquiries or purely user interaction.

After all, your web activity shouldn’t be seen as a cost, but as a method of delivering you a return on your investment. If it can’t deliver this, then you seriously have to ask yourself why you are doing it in the first place.

Once you have the strategy, which should be unique to your brand or organisation, you have a means by which all other decisions can be made - from the creation of the website to the methods of attracting potential customers to it.

Without a strategy in place, you are literally shooting in the dark. Yet so often we see organisations having websites created that are not even designed with the intention of signposting users through the site to reach the conversion goals. It is like hiding your contact telephone number away in your press ad in 5pt type. Not a good start on your route to online fortunes !

More disturbing still is the fact that little thought has been given in the design and build process to the needs of search engine visibility, which should really be very high on your list of ‘must do’s’ when briefing your web build agency.

If not, then any decent search agency will carry out a site audit and recommend what needs changing to ensure the site can be indexed, crawled and ranked by the search engines. Obviously the more work that needs to be done, the higher the cost can become – and your level of frustration. Suddenly that great value website you’ve had built doesn’t look such a bargain anymore.

This can be avoided, of course. You can find a web or search agency that can build you a ‘marketing-led’ site in the first place. Further is one such agency that creates sites for clients who desire a seamless service from strategy to site to search.

Alternatively, if you are intent on using separate providers for your site and your search marketing, then engage the search agency to provide consultancy at the build stage to ensure the site will be ‘fit for search’. This can save a lot of time and money – and gives you the reassurance of knowing that your site is maximising your chances of success from day one.

Naturally, you cannot expect the site, however well developed, to perform without a dedicated ongoing online marketing strategy, but at least by getting these basic building blocks in place you have a springboard for your activity.

Going back to the digital marketing strategy, it should apply to even the smallest business looking to go online, however simple you believe your offering is. You still have goals you need to achieve from your investment. Why waste the opportunity to make it work?

Beyond the site itself, a strategy will dictate the right marketing tools (SEO, PPC, social media, online PR) you require to reach your audience and traffic targets because this should be carefully considered and tailor made to meet your sector, product and goals.

While it is easy to find fault and criticise with 'strategy-less' sites, we sense that the wind of change is starting to blow. More and more clients who have gone down this route as their first taste of internet experience are now recognising that, although online has not worked for them to date, the web revolution is here to stay and grow. They are witnessing success stories in their own sectors, know that second time around they need to ‘do things properly’, and as a result are seeking a more carefully considered strategic approach.

It may cost them a little more in the first place, but the longer term ROI benefits are obvious, and in many sectors, enormous.

So, as with all things in life, you have a choice. You can hurtle yourself headlong into a new site and hope for the best. Or you can plan a profitable return. Now, which is it going to be?

END

If you’d like to talk to Further about creating and implementing a digital marketing strategy for your organisation, please call Steve Jaggard on 01603 878240 or email steve@further.co.uk

Twitter: Fad or fundamental communication tool?

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:12:01 GMT

Unless you’ve spent the last few months with your head in the sand, you’ll have noticed the rapidly growing popularity of Twitter. But is it here to stay, and can it really be good for business?

From film star Ashton Kutcher racing CNN to achieve one million followers (http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/15/ashton.cnn.twitter.battle/) to Habitat getting rapped on the knuckles for capitalising on coverage of the Iranian elections, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8116869.stm) Twitter has wormed its way into daily news. Celebrity ‘tweets’ are hitting the headlines as are campaigns and offers from big brands. But is this a fad which will pass into obscurity or is Twitter here to stay?

Twitter’s rate of growth has propelled it into the limelight, and the site has achieved alarming popularity – at a startlingly fast rate.

But is Twitter for everyone? Some people rely on it for their daily news feed and as a way of communicating and networking. But others are simply following the flock, and joining Twitter because it’s the latest thing to do. As more people sign up and realise that it might not be for them, Twitter will inevitably reach a peak of popularity and new users will start to fall.

Surprisingly, over 20%* of Twitter members (http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/) have never even posted an update, and the majority (85%) post less than once a day, indicating that for the majority of Tweeters, it’s not entered into as a long term commitment.

But if the current Twitter boom doesn’t last, what does this mean for businesses that are using the site as a primary communication channel? We all know of a company that has joined the site and is frantically trying to attract as many followers as possible, but are they really making the most of Twitter and, more importantly, are they using it well?

Habitat obviously got their Twitter tactics completely wrong, by linking their sale announcements to unrelated, but popular, trending topics. Habitat thought tagging their tweets with topics related to the crisis in Iran, as the nation rioted in the streets against President Ahmadinejad’s re-election, was a good idea. It wasn’t. Using a non-related, populist political story to attract attention to their latest sale brought nothing but negative responses from angry Twitter users, and harks back to unsolicited spam emails.

However, there’s some fantastic Twitter practice happening in the social media world. Dell, for example, has had far more success. By creating Twitter accounts for each arm of the business, including @DellOutlet (http://twitter.com/dellOutlet), they keep an existing loyal customer base aware of clearance events. With more than 600,000 followers, all of whom have the potential to ‘re-tweet’ (re-post) the messages, Dell has attributed over $3 million in sales to their Twitter campaign.

Using Twitter to engage an existing loyal customer base is the key to successful use of the site without risking the wrath of Tweeters annoyed with spam and unsolicited messages. Dell already had a large, loyal customer base pre-Twitter. And by using the service to send information and offers to those who wanted to read it, they managed to build an even more impressive following.

At Further we’re encouraging clients to use Twitter in a similar way. Our client Adnams (http://twitter.com/Adnams) is a great example. They’re a fantastic brand name, with an existing loyal customer base – and they are now talking to their fans on Twitter. We use their Twitter account in two ways; firstly to share industry and new product news and secondly, to respond to others on Twitter who are talking about Adnams online. (http://adnams.co.uk/)

One of the many benefits of Twitter is being able to see what other members are saying about you as a company or your products. It’s a great monitoring tool. By responding to compliments, complaints and relevant discussions posted by other members, you’re engaging with existing customers and attracting new ones, by showing you are an approachable and informative company. This can only work to attract more followers.

Twitter may well be reaching the peak of its popularity. But of the millions of users, it will retain a high number of loyal members which means Twitter is a self-sustaining and valuable tool for businesses who know how to use it, and use it well.

Starter for 10 - Twitter Tips:

1. Your website is your shop window for new and existing customers. To attract them to your Twitter account, make sure you badge up your website with ‘follow us on Twitter’ and link to your Twitter account
2. Only Tweet if you have something interesting or informative to say
3. Bring Tweets to life with links and pictures – the most read Tweets direct followers to other sources of information on the web
4. If you announce company news on your website, then Tweet the headline and link it back to your site.
5. Use sites like www.tinyurl.com to create small URL addresses to links, so you don’t waste your 140 characters
6. If someone follows you – follow them back, its Twitter etiquette
7. If you’re tagging your Tweet to link it to a current trending topic, it has to be relevant and related – don’t risk becoming a spammer
8. Check Twitter for mentions of your company regularly, the @ tool means you can see mentions and gives you a chance to respond
9. Offer exclusive discounts or give your Twitter followers the chance to preview products, and reward their loyalty
10. Follow other companies, bloggers and experts in your sector to get unique and varying views on industry news

If you’d like to find out more about our social media services, follow us at http://twitter.com/furthersearch or look at the social media case studies on this site.

*Sysomos Inc study, June 2009

Ends

SEO Tip #32: Grab links to broken sites

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:00:52 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Shaun Anderson

"Linkbuilding for me is all about opportunity – spotting it and actioning it to get real backlinks from real sites. If you can see a win-win (something as simple as links in return for pointing out another site has broken links on it) jump on it"

I love this tip. Shaun explains how by finding a suspended site that was ranking, he managed to acquire (see: steal) a good portion of their inbound links just by alerting linking webmasters to the site being down.

Simple and highly effective.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content
SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #31: E-commerce with content

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:52:07 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Search This

"Creating a blog / e-commerce tandem allows you to become an authority on your subject. It allows you to demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about your product and even passionate about it."

When creating an e-commerce site, it can be hard to find that hook to get people to give you the link you need. What is so interesting about an individual product that would produce a link?

Creating a blog, or adding more research related content (how to use the product for example) can add a lot more value and vastly increase your chances of a link.

Failing that, you can just add something crazy to attract links.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems
SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #30: Avoid canonicalisation problems

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:43:17 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Google Webmaster Central

"Unless this duplication is intended to manipulate Google and/or users, the duplication is not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines."

The much misunderstood "duplicate content penalty", as we've previously discussed merely acts as a filter. However, it is possible you are creating duplicate content on your website, with your own content by having multiple URLs for the same pages.

Google Webmaster Central has provided a guide to dealing with canonicalisation issues such as this.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks
SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #29: Finding the right social networks

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:27:57 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via DoshDosh

"You want something that sends prospects and traffic while branding your website or business. You want a social news site with a long term returns on investment."

Maki has provided an excellent list of worthwhile social news websites which can make for a great starting point to find news related to your niche, start conversations, improve your business karma and promote your brand.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting
SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #28: Optimise after posting

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:20:08 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Marketing Pilgrim

"When you first publish your blog posts, you’ll likely want your TITLE (aka title tag) to match your actual post title. Once you start focusing on your Google audience, it might make sense to tweak your page TITLE so that it’s even more optimized than your post title"

Optimising title tags is something we've covered before, but there's no need to stop there. If you're keeping an eye on your analytics, it is possible to further optimise your title grab even more traffic.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #27: Live in your network
SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #27: Live in your network

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:10:16 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Tim Aldiss from Aldiss and More

"'Live' in your network by comment/reply/share-ing where appropriate + providing useful content based on conversation"

Social Media plays a greater part of SEO as the web becomes a far more interactive, user-generated experience. Having honest engagement with customers, other websites and communities will bring genuine interaction and brand affinity. If you back this up with great content and you're going to naturally attract links. Becoming known within your niche as a value-provider will make you the first stop for citation.

Good content takes time, building real relationships takes time but the rewards are far-reaching. You can't pay for the coverage and links that true evangelists provide.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience
SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #26: Don't sacrifice user experience

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:01:42 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Leapfrogg

"Optimise your site for both search engines AND site users. Conversion is key. If it won’t make sense to visitor, don’t do it."

Great tip from Leapfrogg and one we hold close to our hearts at Further. If you're making "SEO changes" which have a negative impact on user experience, you shouldn't be doing them. The hallmark of a great SEO agency is making your site great for search engines and improving the user experience at the same time. Something which we go into in great detail in our SEO seminars.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources
SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #25: Integrate news sources

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:56:23 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Cloud Backup

"Use RSS to show our tweets in the news section of our website. And auto tweet when we make a new post on the website"

Integrating news sources, whether it's your online news section or other syndicated content can help you build links via syndication, enhance your on-site content value and get your content in front of more eyeballs.

Cloud Backup suggests linking Twitter with your onsite news, which is really easy to do (each Twitter timeline has an RSS feed) or even vice versa.

If you don't know how to link up your site news with Twitter, you can use an easy service such as TwitterFeed.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions
SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #24: Collaborate and track SEO actions

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:25:31 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Steve Wiideman

"Use a Google Docs spreadsheet to track and collaborate on website-level, webpage-level and off-page SEO action items"

As you can see from the growing list of tips, there is so much to do within the realm of SEO, it can get difficult to track, especially when you have different people working on different things at different times.

Steve shares a tip (that we at Further already do), which is to use a collaborative documents (such as Google Docs) to centrally manage and track SEO activity. So no matter where anybody is, they should know what they're doing, what's been done and what's left to do.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships
SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Optimising Site Text - Pete's SEO Corner

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:08:18 GMT

Welcome to yet another instalment of Pete’s SEO Corner. In the last two articles, we covered the importance of optimising the title tags and the merits of having an exact match domain name. This month, we will continue to look at optimising your site for keywords.

As you will know, in order to rank in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages), you basically need to let Google know that your particular site or webpage is highly relevant to the particular search term you are targeting. So, if we use the analogy of books in a library, the URL of a site would be the name on the book’s cover while the title tag would be the chapter names.

Picture books never fail to amuse

Another big factor is content. Without it, your site would have a hard time ranking. So imagine if Google found your book and leafed through the pages to find your chapter only to be presented with a blank page with some doodles in a corner (Google isn’t advanced enough yet to interpret images fully), it would think that your page is less relevant than other pages on the web.

So is it enough to just slap on some content on a page? In a word, no. While content is important, there are some things you can do to help Google along the way.

The first is putting your keywords in the H1 and H2 tags. H1 tags, being larger naturally have more weighting. The other H tags get progressively less weighting as they get smaller but for SEO reasons, it’s only worth it concentrating on H1 and H2 tags.

In this example, the Wikipedia page for marker pens has the keyterm in the H1 tag. Their optimisation of the H2 tag is not as ideal however, as just displaying “Types” is non-keyword specific. A better solution would be “Types of marker pens”.

The body of content which makes up the bulk of the volume of text on a page, should contain the main keyterms you are trying to target as well as related keywords. While it may be tempting to insert your keyterm in every three or four words, you shouldn’t do that because it’s viewed as keyword stuffing in Google and will get your site penalised. The best option is just to write your content as naturally as possible – chances are the keyterms will appear frequently anyway.

It’s also good practice to strong tag (<strong>) the relevant keyterms throughout the page. Bolding keyterms lets Google know that these keyterms are important. Again, don’t do it too much or it will just look unnatural.

Note from Mark: As Peter mentioned, stuffing a keyphrase into a page isn't really going to help you that much. I think it's really interesting to explore Google's understanding of word relationship and how writing naturally can actually increase your chance of ranking.

SEO Tip #23: Build personal relationships

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:22:08 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Dan Perry at danperry.com

"The larger the company, the more personal relationships matter when it comes to being successful with SEO"

I'm sure this tip could be construed in many different ways, so I'll have a stab at it and Dan can comment if it's not what he meant.

We've worked with some large companies on SEO campaigns and generally, larger companies are far more complicated beasts, with many plates spinning on many different sticks, with even more teams managing each plate, sometimes with different agendas.

The key to great SEO campaigns is delivering ROI, which requires getting under the skin of a company. Understanding what makes money in their company, what actions they are currently taking, what metrics you need to track and sometimes changing your reporting to tailor the data to that company's individual requirements.

Without a doubt, you will be working alongside other members of their internal team, sometimes other agencies, all with their own timescales and objectives. This means to implement changes in the most efficient way possible, you're going to need to be on the phone, or better yet face-to-face with these people and communicating with them on a regular basis.

It is not uncommon for companies (certainly at the start of a relationship), to be cagey with the information they provide with external agencies. Fostering personal relationships within companies and really caring about results can give you the inside track on the internal workings of a company, which will allow you to be more reactive, precise and ultimately successful with your campaigns.

So I guess there's a tip for companies that are hiring SEO agencies too - once you've made your choice, make sure you are giving them all the information (no sugar coating needed!) so they can perform the best job possible.

I suppose this would be an opportune moment to mention our not-so-often-mentioned Louisa, our client services director. Louisa manages our client relationships, making sure we have regular contact, meetings and both the technical side and client side know exactly what's going on.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build
SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #22: Don't be lazy during build

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:21:19 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via 360innovate

"Don't be lazy in SEO efforts, take a bottom up approach getting structure right rather than sticking plasters over your website."

There's a lot you can do during the development of a website to give yourself the best chance of ranking, whether it's in design, navigation, content markup or URLs.

It may all seem like a lot of work and taking the approach of "just getting the site live and making amends later" may seem appealing, but overall will cost you time and money. I've put our views on how much an SEO audit is worth before, but if you can nail issues before they become problems, you're going to be in an even better position.

In short, if the design/dev team aren't comfortable with search team standards, find someone that is!

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content
SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Pirates raid Twitter

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:49:05 GMT

Halfway through their competition, the #moonfruit hashtag was blocked from Twitter trending topics. The opinions I read on Twitter were split, some people thought the moonfruit campaign was spammy and glad it was gone, others thought Twitter were being killjoys.

So was the block manual or part of a Twitter anti-spam system?

Today, I saw the trending topic of "pirates" on Twitter. Being a fan of both pirates and ninjas, I thought I'd see what all of the buzz was about.

Oh dear.

Lazily created sequential spam usernames, all tweeting an online TV channel site. Probably getting a whole load of traffic too.

This to me, would indicate Twitter's spam filters are pretty poor. Although "spam" on Twitter is fairly self-regulating (you can choose who you follow), they really need to get a grip of people gaming the trending topics.

So who would win in a fight Pirates vs Twitter? Pirates it seems at the moment.

edit:
Ryan (with his suspicious up to date knowledge of spambots) has pointed out this may be a bot hooking onto an already trending topic to gain exposure. (There is a pirates game on Twitter & a sports team named Pirates)

Colin has suggested filtering out trending topics by looking at ratio of brand new Twitter accounts associated with a trending topic.

SEO Tip #21: Use old URLs for new content

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:07:20 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz

"Re-create new versions of old products/events on the same URL to inherit ranking ability. Move old content instead."

Probably takes a little explaining, so let's use an example. I'm promoting a fictional event called "Book Club Show 2009" which I want to rank for "book club".

To achieve this I am going to be building links to the page about this years book show. If I didn't have my SEO head on, I might do something like this:

www.mybookwebsite.com/book-show-2009

So, after weeks and weeks of hard craft, I finally rank for "book show". The problem is, next year I want to do the same thing and I have to start from scratch with my new URL:

www.mybookwebsite.com/book-show-2010

Not great, as even using a 301 redirect won't pass all of the link equity neatly that I worked so hard to gain.

How to get around this? As Rand suggests, put new content on your old URLs and stick the old content on new "archive URLs".

Looking at this problem again, I would say start off with:

www.mybookwebsite.com/book-show

and use this URL every year to promote your current book show. When 2010 comes, you can also run and build links to this URL, which has details of the current year. You can take the old 2009 content and put it on:

www.mybookwebsite.com/book-show-2009

As you'd expect from SEOMoz, that tip is an absolute gem.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain
SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #20: Use an existing domain

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:46:48 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Ran Nir at E-Consultancy

"The domain age is very important to Google, so when starting a new online business consider purchasing an existing domain rather than registering a new domain. Sedo is a great place to start your search."

Building links is a time consuming and expensive process. Waiting for domains to age and get trust, is nothing short of frustrating, as all you can do is.... Wait.

Despite there being rumours that domain trust gets "reset" when it expires or changes hands, most SEOs will admit to seeing rankings develop at much faster rates on established and linked domains when compared to freshly registered ones.

When launching a new website, if you can find a related domain (one that currently carries similar subject matter), with some links and age, you could be saving yourself a packet.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links
SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Introducing Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:06:55 GMT

Here at Further we’re proud of delivering great search marketing results backed up by impressive and effective web design & build. It’s something we’ve been doing well for the last 3 years (happy birthday, Further!), and if you ask any of our clients about our strengths, one of them would certainly be the ability to deliver traffic to their site, and buckets of it.

There is however, a gap in our service offering which has been bugging us for some time. The missing link between website development and search marketing, and the reason our clients are so keen on high rankings to deliver visitors by the truck-load.

I’m talking about conversions. Whether your business is an ecommerce retailer, a B2B site looking for leads or even an entertainment site looking for visitor engagement, conversions are the most important metric for your website as they represent your business profits.

According to latest figures by Fireclick, average ecommerce conversion rates hover around the 4% mark, but this figure varies by industry. Typical conversion rates can vary between 0.5 and 8% depending on sector, target audience and also on the quality and competitiveness of the offering. We feel these figures represent a lot of money lost by businesses due to underperforming websites. Amazon and other top online retailers commonly achieve conversion rates over 10% - how do they manage that? Apart from raw brand strength (which admittedly helps), the common factor is that they all invest in conversion optimisation in order to make the best of their existing traffic.

Unfortunately, 20% of website owners have no idea what the conversion rate of their website is, and the majority of websites are not performing nearly as well as they should. If you’re promoting your website via advertising or search marketing, why not make sure that those hard earned visitors are turning into customers as efficiently as possible!

On this note, I’m very proud to announce that Further will now be offering Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) as a core service to clients existing and new. I’ll be gradually hanging up my spurs as a search marketing consultant and heading up a new department with the sole objective of generating more profit for our clients from their web traffic. I’ll still be dipping my toe into the search marketing world and offering assistance to the stellar team involved with traffic generation, but my focus will be on working closely with clients to maximise the performance of their web presence.

By using a variety of techniques to identify potential issues, including user testing; web analytics; accessibility testing; click tracking and funnel analysis, potential improvements to website effectiveness can be proposed. By testing these changes scientifically using tools such as Google Website Optimizer, accurate performance gains can be measured and then rolled out onto the live website. Industry figures and early results in-house suggest that a conversion optimisation campaign can result in a 30-50% increase in online revenue! It’s worth noting that a 10% increase in conversion rate can, for some businesses, mean a 50% increase in profit, as your cost of traffic generation and other online costs remain the same.

I’ll be blogging regularly offering tips and advice on conversion rate optimisation, but in the meantime please get in contact if you’re as excited about the potential benefits of conversion optimisation as we are!

SEO Tip #19: Optimise internal links

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:29:36 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Richard Shove at Dog Digital

"Do not underestimate the power of internal linking, it can increase the relevance of your pages and even improve usability!"

Internal linking would definitely make it in my "top 3 common mistakes" on client sites. It's not uncommon to see "read more" or "click here" links, which don't benefit search engines or users.

Having related anchor text on internal links, does 2 things:

1) Helps "tag" the linked to page for search engines with that keyphrase, giving it a higher chance of ranking.

2) Makes it easier for users to scan read where links are going to send them.

Assuming are links are in bold, which is easier to read?

Example One:

"Our company is proud to annouce the release of our new red widget. Click here to read more"

or Example Two:

"Our company is proud to annouce the release of our new red widget"

Makes sense, doesn't it?

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases
SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #18: Rewrite offline press releases

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:46:10 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via our very own Rob Welsby

"Re-write offline Press Releases for an online audience and dist. through PRWeb & PRWire for instant backlinks and authority"

If you've got interesting news your doing press releases for, you should be distributing them online as well. Rewriting your press releases to contain anchor text targeted links affords you the extra benefit of the links when they are published on trusted and moderated hubs as as PRWeb.

The added bonus of course, is that you can have your release syndicated to hundreds of journalists and writers within your niche, increasing the chances your release will be republished on many sites, links and all!

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns
SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #17: Create rewarding campaigns

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:39:08 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Neil Goddard

"Create informative and rewarding social media campaigns to increase brand awareness and traffic to your site agood example: #fseo"

Rather than tooting our own trumpet, I'll say use the recent storming example of the Moonfruit MacBook campaign. Aside from the massive brand awareness and traffic benefits that a good social media buzz marketing campaign can produce, the effect is reflected within the SEO sphere as well.

Create something of enough value and seed it within social channels and the work is done for you. You'll get talked about, you'll get traffic and importantly for SEO, you'll get natural links. Creating that social media linkbait is a huge topic in itself, but don't overlook the multitude of "fringe" benefits it provides.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture
SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #16: Information Architecture

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:32:07 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Adrian Land from Hotels.co.uk / adrianland.co.uk

"Ensure your site has a logical and hierarchal IA"

Apart from being essential to a good user experience, a logical and hierachal architecture to your site will insure that link equity flows first to the most important pages and filters down to your deeper (lower traffic pages).

Generally, pages higher up the food chain will have broader keywords, more monthly searches and be harder to rank for. Pointing more link equity at these pages will increase the chances of them ranking competively and act as a great base to pass link relevance down to longtail targeted pages.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches
SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #15: Check logs for longtail searches

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:24:23 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Chris Boggs from SearchEngineWatch

"Always check your long tail referrals for trends in modifiers and pages ranking for unexpectedly connected keywords."

Checking through your search traffic referrals can often reveal your getting traffic on keywords you haven't intentionally been targeting. These terms can be considered low-hanging fruit - Google has already decided your relevant for these terms, so why not capitalise on this?

Have a look at where you're currently ranking and see if you can optimise the page further for this term (whether it's making on-page tweaks or building a couple of links).

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats
SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #14: Use full-text date formats

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:29:31 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Dave Naylor from Dave Naylor Search Marketing

"Use dates like "11th December 2009", stops confusion in google news 11/12/09 or 12/11/09 confusing to date driven apps"

Dave points out the confusion that can be caused when not all coders, designers and webbots are conforming to the same standards. With many search verticals such as Google News and Google Blog Search being heavily chronologically driven, it's important that there's no confusion about your dating format.

As Dave rightly points out, using a full-text date will stop these hiccups and ensure you get the listing you deserve.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!
SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Happy 3rd Birthday Further!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:06:36 GMT

Iphone cupcakes

There's quite a buzz in the office this morning, as today we are going to be celebrating Further's 3rd Birthday. This morning we'll be having presentations from Further founders Steve and Zak, sharing with us details of our successes and what we've learnt so far this year, as well as the exciting changes coming over the next 6 months.

Then, in the afternoon, we are taking everybody out for some activites of:

Archery

Climbing

Off-road Karting

Clay pigeon shooting

Followed up by a meal and drinks. So we'll see you all Monday and wish everyone a fun weekend :)

SEO Tip #13: Don't be a link scrooge!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:41:01 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Malcolm Coles from malcolmcoles.co.uk

"Be generous with links out. Sites you link to will notice traffic / pingbacks. If your content's any good, they'll link back one day."

Malcolm touches on an important aspect of taking part with the blogosphere / web communities in general. You need to give before you receive (oo-er).

Any webmaster worth their salt will notice incoming traffic sources, or when their blog is pinged and follow it upstream to your website / article. Having given someone credit and referenced them, you've extended the olive branch and put yourself in an excellent position to get links from them in the future.

Don't be a link scrooge!

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing
SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #12: Use Google Local Business Listing

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:36:06 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Frank Watson from Kangamurra Media.

"Use Google Local business to get included in Google maps for strategic keywords."

I really like tips that give instant rankings and results, which is pretty much what you can achieve by adding your business to Google Local.

You can get instant exposure when a geographically targeted search kicks out a Google one-box result:

A one-box result

By adding key phrases to your title and looking at other Google Local ranking factors, you can secure yourself some quick, easy and free search visibility.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions
SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #11: Write your own product descriptions

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:34:08 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via NetBlazin

"Write your own product descriptions. Don't reuse the same canned copy from vendors that every other reseller is using."

It's a tempting solution when you get a nice new XML datafeed, CSV or database of products. We could save hours of time just my using the out of the can descriptions!

Before you do however, pause a moment and ask yourself:

If a customer is searching for this product, why would Google show your (identical) page, rather than the official (source) website? Which likely was there first, as more links and authority.

This ties in with one of Google's primary search goals of delivering relevant results to users as quickly as possible, what possible use would there be returning what is essentially the same page twice? If the first one wasn't useful, the second one isn't going to be either, it's wasted real-esate, hence the duplicate content filter.

Possible solutions? You could rewrite the descriptions, you could even get creative with some searching and replacing, but it's a little narrow-minded. Where's the added-value? Why does your site exist? Either inject something of your own creation or see if you can harness user-generated content?

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research
SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #10: Competitor Link Research

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:14:36 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility

"Look at who's linking to your competitors and see if they'll link to you, hard work and not particularly fashionable but it still works"

I'm fully with Kelvin on this one. Yes, checking through hundreds, or thousands of competitor links can be tedious but if you don't do it you could be missing out on a potential gold mine of links.

You can use tools such as Yahoo Site Explorer to view the backlinks of other websites, or even push the boat out and download a Firefox plugin like SEOquake to give you a bit more information. Have a browse through the sites that are linking to your competitors and ask yourself:

1) Why are these sites linking to my competitor?

2) Would they link to me?

3) Is there anything I can do to get them to link to me? (e.g. produce specific content, not blackmail).

It makes sense, try and get yourself as many of your competitor's links as possible, then outrank them off with some more creative link building and your own SEO techniques.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO
SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #9: Good usability means good SEO

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:31:16 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via kesphelps from kesphelps.co.uk

"Good SEO is usually just good usability. "

A short and sweet point that we usually try and get over in our SEO training seminars. The mark of a good SEO Agency is not having to make usability sacrifices for SEO, they go hand in hand.

Following basic accessibility standards insures that your site can be crawled and indexed by search engines, but as we know - that isn't enough. Taking usability principles, such as good page markup, use of headers, titles and information architecture can give you a boost in search visibility.

In fact, when it comes down to a lot of the things search engines look for, even off-site, you can relate them to end user needs.

Slide from our SEO Training Seminar

Having a foundation of understand as to why search engines do things, rather than mechanically how can help you make better, more informed decisions about your website and business.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings
SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

FOWA Conference Review, Cambridge

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:16:03 GMT

I had been looking forward to FOWA – The Future of Web Apps conference for some time. Having attended the FOWD – Future of Web Design conference in London last year, I had high expectations that only a highly technical conference could satisfy due to the FOWD being aimed primarily at designers so 90% of content was about user interface and usability.

This was to be the first time the FOWA would be hosted in Cambridge and by reading various blogs I had gathered information that it would be a smaller audience compared to that of FOWA London.

First up was Microsoft's very own Mark Quirk who presented a workshop on implementing a very small 'hello world' application on Microsoft's new 'Windows Azure' cloud services operating system. According to Mark, it will provide developers with a platform for computing and storage to host, scale and manage web applications on the Internet.

In the previous years Microsoft have been renowned for developing their own technology and “sticking” to their own technology which has caused a “San Andreas”-like fault through the development world, steering developers off down different language routes but it appears that with the new Azure OS, Microsoft say it will also support non-Microsoft languages and environments.

Essentially the way this new 'Pie in the Sky' idea works, is that everything needed to run your developed application resides on-line including .NET services and SQL services. Microsoft also host your application on one of their data centres so all you need to do is develop your application and upload it along with your chosen storage utility and hey presto, you have your application running independently in the 'Cloud'.

“Does development of a cloud application require on-line Azure services or can it be compiled locally and uploaded at a later date” I asked as the first question from the audience; to which Mark responded positively that it will be possible for applications to be developed without an Internet connection and uploaded when one is present using the API shipped with the distribution.

Next up was Simon Wheeldon from SalesForce with a discussion on cloud computing in the enterprise sector and how businesses are taking advantage of this. Unfortunately there were a couple of presentations in the day that came across more as sales pitches and this was one of them.

After lunch Will Harris from ChannelFlip Media gave a talk on starting up a business with no budget, no technology and no idea. Will presented some good concepts that he has learned first hand from starting up a successful media publication ChannelFlip Media. ChannelFlip is an interesting company that offers an on-line video magazine for “switched on men”. They create all of their own content which range from cars, film and music to web, girls and snacks and distribute it to over 40 websites. Will's main point was that if you have an idea you should start sketching it out immediately, the great thing about the beginning of a concept is that you are not limited by boundaries, if you are not familiar with the market, budget costs or many other tangible restraints then you can be as creative as you like which is when some of the best ideas are born. 6 months physically working on a project is better than 6 months thinking about it.

Up next were some more concepts and insightful information on starting up a web business from the CEO of Moo, Richard Moross, Unfortunately Richard could not make the conference but instead his colleague and CTO of Moo Stefan Magdalinski gave the talk. Stefan's card throwing introduction and articulate choice of wording meant there was not a developer yawn in sight and helped portray the relaxed working environment that Moo have created. For those of you that have not heard of Moo, they are an on-line printing company that print a range of products from business cards and mini cards to stickers and Christmas cards and have successfully adopted the web 2.0 method to allow customers to purchase and spec-out their product in a more interactive way.

Due to exceptional sales figures they have recently opened up an office in the states due to a high percentage of their customers being based in the USA. Stefan pointed out that by also being situated in the USA they could reduce a recorded delivery package from 11 days postage from the UK to the USA to 2 days, which would meet the expectations of their customers. Stefan explained that he and the development team had come across multiple problems after deploying the website due to the web 2.0 technology but of course this was expected. His outlook was very similar to the previous speaker's – Will Harris - in that the best testing system is the general public. You will always have errors with a new product, its very hard to eradicate them all with a tight deadline, as long as you have fixed the major issues, you can iron out the minor ones later.

After Stefan’s interesting yet sometimes comical speech, we headed for lunch, recharged the batteries with some more caffeine and headed back to the theatre for Dorothy Briggs presentation on building a web 2.0 solution that's fit for the enterprise. Apologies to Dorothy as I would like to write a bit more on this but I can honestly say by the end of the 30 minute slot I had no idea of what she was talking about, whether it was extreme lighting glare due to the different area of seating we had chosen or the humidity that was rapidly increasing due to the air conditioning slowly packing up, I know the word enterprise was mentioned a lot.

Finally, what was to be the most anticipated speech of the day, that of Christian Heilmann from the Yahoo Developer Network with his presentation on remixing and distribution of web content made easy. Christian’s point of view was that the Internet is an evolutionary process which is constantly changing and forming into something new and as humans we are predestined to collect too many things due to our hunter-gatherer like instincts - which is precisely why there is so much outdated information on the Internet. The more information you have the harder it is to manage and rather than deleting old information and updating it with the new, we create another version which is added alongside the old. There is so much information available on the Internet that search engines are finding it increasingly hard to index it all. Christian then explained that in order to stop increasing obsolete information we need to find a way of using information from other sources and combining it with our own information. To do this we can use API's (Application Programming Interface) but there are so many out there written in various languages, it can take long enough to learn how to implement one API let alone multiple versions in various languages. His solution... YQL.

YQL (Yahoo Query Language) is a SQL (Structured Query Language) style query language for the web. It allows you to perform simple query commands to gain access to huge amounts of information via services such as upcoming, twitter and flickr. Not only does YQL allow you to mashup multiple API's in a few queries but it allows you to filter the results, requires minimal research, the results are cached for you and its also proxied on Yahoo servers, meaning the connectivity from a Yahoo server to another server is probably faster than from your server to a another server. Because of this Yahoo do all the hard work and all you need to do it pull down the information in one request. You can also add your own services if you wish to do so via submitting an XML schema to YQL.

All in all, there were some interesting ideas throughout the day put forward by people within the industry who are obviously are highly credible and successful in one way or another. I would have like to have come away feeling more assured as to what to expect in the future of web applications but I still feel slightly uncertain. (I guess things change and evolve daily!) Knowing that companies are investing in breaking the barrier to a more interactive web 2.0 world makes me feel like there is a major change happening. And one thing for certain is that we will be hearing a lot more about 'The Cloud' which I have a feeling will be the next buzz word.

Unfortunately not a lot was said about mobile applications but I did hear that Carsonified are throwing a FOM (Future of Mobile) conference in London in November.

My favourite talk of the day goes to Christian Heilmann on YQL. Developing a query language which allows access to such vast amounts of information via different services, making it simple enough for basic developers to use and doing all the hard work on Yahoo servers will definitely gain a lot of attention from around the world. I think technology such as this, which brings current information together in a single more accessible format is the future of the web and I would not be surprised if we start seeing some very exciting and powerful services developed very soon as a result of it.

SEO Tip #8: SEO Success = ROI not rankings

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:53:59 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via tokyito from Mercury Thread.

"SEO is about money not positions - follow the money not the rankings!"

While early judgement of SEO effectiveness can come from watching the net movement of various rankings, your campaign should be focused on ROI. There are a lot of companies that still chase "vanity" rankings: those that they'd like to have, but have no real business value.

Set your sights, your KPIs and your targets for the bottom line impact of your SEO campaign. How do you do this? Integrate your PPC and SEO campaigns and try to estimate the value of keywords before you start off, this will give you a much better idea how much you should invest into SEO to get a return over your campaign period.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate
SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #7: Localise, don't just translate

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:20:35 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via BigMouthMedia Norway.

"Always do a thorough keyword and market analysis before starting SEO work. Localize, not just translate"

Google doesn't have the lionshare in every country, cultural differences mean difference emotional triggers and different searches. If you're running an international campaign and all you've done is paid a translator to to cater for other countries, you've probably made a mistake.

I don't think this is a mistake made by laziness, more the fact I think there are a lot of great search marketers about without any traditional marketing support or experience. There are a lot of "classic" marketing skills which are still hugely important to the search space (and this will become more the case in the future).

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right
SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #6: Get the on-page basics right

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:54:26 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Anthony Hook at EonicWeb.

"Pay attention to on-page basics such as Title, Meta, Heading and P content for a fool proof start in SEO."

Showing search engines your pages are relevant for the search terms you want to rank for is one of the most basic and yet effective aspects of SEO.

The title tag (in the <head> area of your page code) is, as the name suggests, the title of your web document and therefore is seen as very important by search engines. Make sure that once you have done your keyword research that you use these keywords in your title tag where appropriate.

Both title tags and meta descriptions are elements of your page which are presented in search results, so here is your opportunity to increase your click-through rate from search results by crafting compelling wording. Don't neglect your meta descriptions just because they don't directly effect rankings - a high click through rate from SERPs may well boost your position!

Heading tags (<h1>, <h2 etc) are your on page titles, and as such are also seen as important by search engines. Reinforce the keywords you are targetting with your title tag in your H1, and use lesser heading tags appropriately to create a semantic page structure which is good for users and for search engines.

Ensure you have enough text content on the page that search engines will deem your page worthy of being indexed, and write copy which naturally uses your core keywords as well as long tail phrases which may be relevant to your page.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #5: Check the use before date
SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #5: Check The Use Before Date

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:05:13 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Richard Kelly at Dog Digital.

"Always check the publication dates of SEO Tip blog posts."

Reading blogs and forums is essential to staying up to date and researching others opinions, theories and studies on search. Especially if you're a newcomer to the search field, it's important to check the date of the information you're reading!

As a timely example there's thousands of posts about the effective use of nofollow pagerank sculpting, which is now out of date. Check that label!

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Using NoFollow for SEO: The Quick Facts

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:47:26 GMT

If you follow any SEO blog it's very unlikely you've missed the storm of posts about nofollow over the last 48 hours in the wake of Matt Cutt's revelations on PageRank Sculpting.

For the uninitiated, PageRank Sculpting is an SEO technique that aims to "sculpt" the flow of link equity around a website, pushing greater PageRank to pages deemed important, thus increasing their chance of ranking. Until now, it has been common "best practise" for SEOs to advise that sites use the nofollow attribute on links to pages they had no wish to rank or contain links they could not vouch for, such as basket pages, T&Cs, Privacy Policy, Comments and some UGC.

We heard last week from SMX Advanced 2009 that the NoFollow rules had changed and there have been some excellent write-ups explaining this change. Matt's post however, gives us the first confirmation of these changes.

NoFollow a Nutshell

Change: Using the NoFollow attribute will no longer "save" PageRank for other links on the same page.

Confirmation: NoFollow links do not pass PageRank, anchor text or help your rankings in any way (any cases where anchor text was passed was considered a bug and fixed).

Clarification: The more links you have on a page, the smaller the amount of PageRank passed to links on this page

Clarification: You should not attempt to sculpt PageRank on your site.

Bonus Confirmation: Linking out to trusted sites can have a positive impact on your rankings*

*Much discussed in our office and pretty much what we suspected - a post coming on this shortly.

What do the NoFollow changes mean?

There's been a lot of discussions about the impact of the NoFollow changes, especially in regard to the "balance" of protecting yourself from search penalties and losing PageRank.

For instance, when writing a blog post, I may have previously decided to link to a source relevant to my article that wasn't a major player, you know, help the little guys. I could have given that site a little boost in traffic and protected my own site by using the NoFollow attribute.

Unfortunately, with the recent changes I now have two rather unappealing options:

1) Link as before with nofollow, except this time I'm indirectly detracting from my own site's link equity.

2) Might as well just give them a followed link then? Well, unless you're going to audit every site you link to, you run the risk of linking to a bad neighbourhood / paid links etc.

Why bother linking at all? Why even allow NoFollowed comment links on your blog for that matter? A thought echoed by Danny Sullivan:

"I’m encouraged to reduce the number of links rather than let them be on the page period, nofollow regardless. If I’m worried my page won’t seem “natural” enough to Google without them, maybe I allow 5 comments through and lock them down after that."

What can I do? Can I still sculpt PageRank?

This is where I think there is some ambiguity.

SEOMoz says: "Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow"

Matt Cutts says: "I wouldn’t recommend it"

I think this is a tricky area - does Google now consider PageRank sculpting to be blackhat? My gut reaction would be "no", but consider this:

The only way to "sculpt" PageRank now would be to:

1) Use Flash links (probably will be followed soon anyway)

2) Use iFrames (probably will be followed soon anyway)

3) Use Named Anchors (a bit better, as Google seems to ignore things after "#")

4) Use obfusticated Javascript / Javascript redirects through noindexed pages (probably the best solution)

Okay, so let's go with number 4 and we've set up all of our old NoFollows links to nasty unGoogleable Javascript, sweet - the PageRank is flowing where we want it again.

What I'm about to suggest will no doubt get some flak, but I think it's worth thinking about, so I'll just throw it out there...

In my experience the treatment of "blackhat" sometimes boils down to intent. Sometimes regardless of how successful the webmaster was in applying a technique, the intent of what he/she was doing can be used in the consideration of penalties.

Now, we all know that cloaking is the delivery of different content to search engines to that of users, a well-known blackhat technique.

My question to the SEO community is this: If you're going to the lengths of purposely exploiting technical limitations in of Google to hide links that will be visible to users, how is that morally/intent-wise different to cloaking?

The intent is the same: "Here is what I want users to see, here is what I want search engines to think they see".

Matt Cutts: "I wouldn’t recommend it"

Worth a thought at least.

Making big structural changes now will do one thing though: make you stick out as an SEO who is intent on fiddling with PageRank.

Exact Match Domains - Pete's SEO Corner

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:54:06 GMT

Welcome to yet another installment of Pete’s SEO Corner. While last month we looked at title tag optimisation, today we will be looking at exact match domains, something we get asked about frequently.

Last month, we covered how to optimise the title tag for the keywords you’d like to target. This time, we’ll look at the benefits (and pitfalls) of choosing a domain based on your keywords. Having the keyterm you want to target in the domain is hugely beneficial to your SERP rankings, especially if it’s an exact match domain.

The reason why having keywords in your domain name works so well is due to the fact that the search engine has to figure out what the intent behind your search is. If you search for say, “felt tip pens”, the search engine has to figure out whether you are just searching for sites related to felt tip pens or specifically the brand/company called “Felt tip pens”. This is called a navigational query and if your domain happens to match the keyword in question, the search engine will most likely assume that you are searching for the brand name and favour that particular site much more highly in the SERPs. So, if you have a particular keyterm you’d like to rank for, you can consider this when choosing a domain name.

What if your domain name had other words in addition to the keyterm you’re targeting? So if for example, your domain was www.bobsfelttippens.com you would still benefit from having the keyterm in your domain but not half as much as if it was exact. Google also bolds keywords in the searches so having part of your domain name bolded can result in a higher click through rate (CTR).

But before we do any of that, first of all, you’ll need to think about the merits of SEO vs branding.

Let’s say you had a felt tip pen website called Cool Feltz and the term you wanted to target was “felt tip pens”. Now, you could go for the domain name www.felttippens.com, which will be a great boon to your SEO efforts for the term “felt tip pens”. But you will also need to consider the fact that as your business grows and the general public starts to know the name “Cool feltz”, do you want your brand name to be represented in your URL or not? You’ll need to make a judgement call on this one, but either way, you should try and get both www.felttippens.com and www.coolfeltz.com and 301 redirect one domain to the other.

Some of you may be wondering whether you should consider getting a domain with the singular keyword www.felttippen.com. In general, both the singular and plural versions of the same keyterm get a considerable volume of searches. So, in targeting www.felttippens.com, you’ve essentially got both bases covered. (Since “felttippen” is also in “felttippens”)

Some people advocate placing hyphens between each word to help the search engine robot to read your domain. This is generally unnecessary unless you’ve got a keyterm with ambiguous spelling. The humorously circulated “pen island” is one example. Also, it’s often speculated among SEO circles that more than two hypens in a domain name may result in Google not trusting your domain name as much (can you name a great website with more than two hyphens in the URL? :)

You can see multiple examples of exact match domains ranking competitively, with much weaker link profiles than other competitors on the first page.

Note from Mark: Exact match domains can also rank well because of the benefit of the naturally gaining links with optimised anchor text from directories, blogs etc.

SEO Tip #4: Integrate SEO and PPC Campaigns

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:29:21 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via BigMouthMedia.

"Integrate your SEO and PPC campaigns, learn which keywords work best and where."

This is an absolute gem of a tip. BigMouth are rightly pointing out that the value of keywords is not just how many searches they have per month, but how well the traffic they send performs and what returns those keywords give.

BigMouth are suggesting that you can save yourself time (and a whole heap of cash), by finding out the answers to these important questions, before spending months investing in organic rankings only to find out you made a bad decision early on.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter
SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Changing Domains and SEO Implications (Part 5)

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:20:22 GMT

This post is a part 5 update of Changing Domains and SEO Implications.

Over the weekend, we saw a jump in indexed pages for further.co.uk, taking them above that of the old domain.

So it looks like updating webmaster tools and informing Google of the domain change was a good idea. Or was it? The indexed pages do not reflect rankings, as can be seen with the old furtheronline.co.uk domain taking back ranking:

further.co.uk position #17 (position #4 & #5 Friday)
furtheronline.co.uk position #7 (position #9 Friday)

The amount of links Further.co.uk is credited for is slowing increasing and my hypothesis would be as existing links for furtheronline.co.uk are crawled and credited to Further.co.uk, this domain will take dominance. However, Google does suggest e-mailing webmasters to update their links, an open admission that 301s do not pass full link equity / trust?

SEO Tip #3: Using Twitter

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:45:39 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Aaron Hall at AaronHall.com.

"Links in Twitter are no-follow, offering little search engine benefit. But people still click them, helping build a site's readership."

Aaron rightly points out that while Twitter links are nofollowed, you have an opportunity to get your content in front of the eyeballs of potential linkers. Reaching out to new(ish) platorms can get you in front of early adopters/adapters, who are likely tech-savvy and interact with blogs, forums and various social media platforms. If you've written good unique content, this powerful combination means you're highly likely to attract links and as we all know, links are a vital step in achieving competitive rankings.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content
SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

SEO Tip #2: Create Unique Content

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:50:11 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via Colin Richardson at Datadrum.

"Create unique content! Beware the copypaste my son, the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!"

A rather colourful submission on the benefits (or rather dangers of not having) unique content. Duplicate content is something that gets discussed a lot within the SEO community, commonly it's incorrectly referred to as a "duplicate content penalty", more accurately it would be described as a filter, rather than a penalty. This means rather than a page or site being actively penalised in the SERPs, it is just filtered out for a specific request.

The logical reason for duplicate content filters is tied to Google's goal of returning the most relevant results as quickly as possible for the searcher; meaning there is no point in showing two identical (or near enough) pages for the same search term, if the first one wasn't helpful, it's highly likely the duplicate won't be either.

Creating unique content will provide you, at the very worst, more possible long-tail terms to have your site ranking for. So, as Colin suggests, resist the temptation of copying and pasting (or scraping for that matter), as you won't be doing yourself any favours for search engines, or adding value for users (another discussion in itself).

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Previous SEO Tips:

SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Changing Domains and SEO Implications (Part 4)

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:45:07 GMT

This post is a part 4 update of Changing Domains and SEO Implications.

So logging into Webmaster Tools last night, I saw they'd released a new feature:

Change of address feature

Google says, "If you're planning to move your site to a new domain, use the Change of Address tool to tell Google about your new URL. This will help us update our index faster and smooth the transition for your users.

Since yesterday, Google has dropped 11 more pages from our old domain and indexed 35 more on the new domain (albeit a lot of new pages that were not present on the old site).

So, still heading in the right direction without officially informing Google of the change. However, I couldn't resist trying to speed up the process, so I entered the old furtheronline.co.uk domain back into Webmaster Tools (it actually popped up with the old historical data when I did so, interestingly) and initiated a change of address.

Although I wouldn't have enough data to accurately measure the difference in indexation speed, it will still be interesting to see how quickly Google tackles the move.

Google also offers some advice on moving domains, which is very similar to the checklist included in our original move post.

1) Set up the new site

Review our guidelines for moving your site to a new domain. Set up your content on your new domain, then make sure all internal links point to the new domain.

2) Redirect all traffic from the old site

Use a 301 redirect to permanently redirect the pages on your old site to your new site. This tells users and search engines that your site has permanently moved. Ask webmasters to update their links to point to your new domain and make sure incoming links to your old site are redirected correctly using the 301 redirects.

3) Add your new site to Webmaster Tools

Make sure you have added and verified your new domain.

Lastly, the update on our watch of the term "Further Blog":

further.co.uk position #4 & #5 (position #6 yesterday)
furtheronline.co.uk position #9 (position #10 yesterday)

The Google Webmaster Central blog also has some useful information on the new Webmaster Tools Interface.

SEO Tip #1: Stop! Keyword Research

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:16:26 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via James at Coast Digital.

"Don't do anything until you've done proper keyword research. Use multiple sources such as Google Keyword Tool, Google Trends and Insights for Search. If available, use PPC broad match and Google Analytics filters to see what short & long tail key phrases people are actually searching for."

James makes a great point about not rushing straight into an SEO campaign. It is quite possible to estimate keyword value before you start investing money in link building campaigns and on-site optimisation, only to realise you've missed out on opportunities and have to back track.

If you'd like your SEO Tips featured on the Further blog, just Tweet your SEO tip to the #fseo hashtag.

Changing Domains and SEO Implications (Part 3)

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

This post is a part 3 update of Changing Domains and SEO Implications.

So today we've seen another shift in results. We confirmed yesterday that the new domain was showing for a main brand search, whereas searching for internal pages produced the old domain.

A search now for "Further blog" produces:

further.co.uk position #6 (position #9 yesterday)
furtheronline.co.uk position #10 (position #2 yesterday)*

*Google has removed the /blog category and is now displaying the 5th paginated page of the blog.

So things are definitely heading the right way, with the new domain climbing rankings and old URLs dropping out of the index.

Looking at the number of pages currently indexed for both sites:

Further.co.uk indexed pages: 54
Furtheronline.co.uk indexed pages: 226

So we're not quite out of the woods yet, with the new domain having just under 25% of the pages indexed of the old domain.

One good thing to see is that (probably due to a natural side effect of how the site is crawled), pages seem to be moving over in a phased/staggered approach and individual pages are dropping/getting re-ranked at an impressive rate.

Looking at our Analytics data (which I'll share if anything really interesting happens), we have not had a drop in organic search traffic since the move. Good job so far, Google!

Tweet SEO Tips - Get A Link From Us

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:00:00 GMT

I've seen lots of top 10, 20, top 50 SEO Tips lists on the web. I thought it would be neat to try and compile a really comprehensive list, say 100 as a target? Is that possible? Are there 100 worthwhile SEO Tips?

Help us find out and get a link from the further.co.uk blog. I'd like any SEO agencies, companies, individuals, webmasters to submit their SEO tips via our #fseo hashtag on Twitter. Keep it short and we'll expand on your idea, if you really can't get your idea over in a tweet, you can send them to seotips@further.co.uk

I'll take any SEO Tips from #fseo and write them up, one per day on our blog and provide a link to the contributor’s website.

Sound fair? Just tweet your SEO Tip on #fseo or email. Please RT this post too :)

See the full list of submitted SEO Tips

Google Search Feature Tricks

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Google’s new search options are great. It saves me a few clicks when I want to refine my search a bit.

With just two clicks, I can refine my search to only show me pages published in the last day, week, year. There is definitely something missing there. I’d love to be able to refine my search to only show pages from a period slightly larger than a week, but not as long as a year. About the length of a moon cycle perhaps? Thankfully, playing with the URL can yield you results for just the past month.

To achieve this feat, you need to edit the “&tds=qdr:w” (or “&tds=qdr:y”, “&tds=qdr:d”) to “&tds=qdr:m”, so you end up with something like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=why%20are%20you%20hiding%20all%20the%20features,%20Google%3F&hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enGB291GB331&sa=G&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:m

Sadly, it seems I was beaten to this discovery by almost a full moon cycle. There is talk of this workaround in a Google help thread. The thread also reveals some pretty cool features. Adding “&tds=qdr:m3”, will return all results in the last 3 months.

BONUS: As I’m feeling so generous, I’m going to give away my biggest secret. Adding “&tds=qdr:s10” will return any pages from the last 10 seconds. Scale that up and you can get minutes. Also, as a special treat, you can use “h” for hours.

Changing Domains and SEO Implications (Part 2)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:00:00 GMT

This post is a part 2 update of Changing Domains and SEO Implications.

Joe kindly alerted me today that further.co.uk was appearing within Google.co.uk searches. On investigation, it appears we are currently in a halfway-house situation with Google.

Yesterday's search for "Further Search" within Google, does indeed show our new domain further.co.uk. However, it seems Google hasn't quite made its mind up yet, as a search for "Further Blog" now instead of giving a #1 result for furtheronline.co.uk gives a weaker result of furtheronline.co.uk positioned at #2 and further.co.uk positioned #9. The original furtheronline.co.uk was last crawled on the 4th June, the day before the move - so we're still confident Google will resolve his SERP itself.

So one small thing that has been observed so far: When moving domain, Google will index the new site and leave the old domain indexed, regardless of a permanent redirect and sometimes show both within SERPs, albeit with weaker positions.

Title Tag SEO Made Easy (Video)

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In response to Pete's popular SEO Basics Title Tag Optimisation post, we thought we'd throw together a short video that sums up SEO for title tags, in 3 minutes. Enjoy.

Google NoFollow Rules Change

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The SEO blogosphere in the past few days has been dominated by one story. Matt Cutts announced a rather significant change to Google’s stance on nofollow.

So what actually changed? Previously, if you wanted to push more link equity to important pages and sacrifice your less important pages, you could implement a system known as ‘PageRank sculpting’. The basic idea was that if your page had a value of 10 and you had 10 links on your page, instead of passing a value of 1 to each of those pages, you could selectively place the nofollow attribute on 5 less important links and channel your PageRank equity to flow into your more important pages. This would mean the 5 nofollowed pages would get zero value, but the 5 pages without nofollowed links would receive a value of 2. The new stance on nofollow is that link equity can’t be conserved with nofollow and channelled to important pages. Instead, the 5 followed pages will receive a value of 1 each, but the 5 nofollowed pages will receive nothing and that other ‘spare equity’ of 5 will simply disappear.

The reality of this situation is that the effects may not be as horrifying as they sound. Some simple math will hopefully cheer up the PageRank sculptors out there. As the amount of link equity you are passing decreases, so too does the overall PageRank pool. Effectively, you have lost the advantage you had on your competitors, but the losses stop there. Well kind of. Whilst you are back on par with your competitors in terms of a single page’s PageRank, you don’t get the chances they do of passing PageRank around your site from the unimportant pages. Nevertheless, it seems much less scary then the ‘evaporating juice’ Matt Cutts was talking about.

Of course, you could just use some different technology to conceal the links from Google’s view whilst maintaining the code for users and bots. Changing all the links you want nofollowed to JavaScript would work perfectly. Ah, yeah...Slight problem there. Google happened to make another big announcement at SMX Advanced. Google has improved its ability to follow JavaScript links and will now be officially indexing and passing equity to pages that are linked to using JavaScript. Interesting coincidence, that. Now, you could do some nifty flash linking, but that has the potential to ruin user experience. So what’s left? Cloaking? Can you afford to take that risk (or, can you afford to pay someone to reduce that risk)?

It seems that Google feels they have given excessive freedom to webmasters and want to pull in the reigns. In reality, as Andrew Girdwood said, (on the face of it) it was good of Matt Cutts to let us know what was changing; though I’ve yet to see reports of anybody seeing changes. Now I’m not accusing Matt Cutts of lying, but Google have been known to word things in interesting ways. Now, before I run off into a conspiracy theory rant, I’ll wrap this post up with some advice.

My advice would be, as long as your site is performing well, hold back on reacting to this announcement until further details surface. If you are looking to create a brand new site, you may want to just nofollow the minimum amount of pages (privacy policy, terms and conditions), or look into more advanced tactics.

Changing Domains and SEO Implications

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A common but fairly difficult question to answer is, "I want to change my domain name, will I lose my rankings?". The answer is, "it depends".

There are a lot of factors that come into play when changing domain names and how successfully you manage to rescue existing search traffic. Sometimes things don't go so well.

I thought it would be interesting to log changes we've made and determine how positively / negatively the move from furtheronline.co.uk to further.co.uk has impacted us.

The action we have taken so far:

Domain moving checklist

1) The URL structure was kept the same, so we have used wildcard 301 Redirects from old pages to new.

2) Internal links were initially set up as relational, so there was no need to change these.

3) Removed the old URL from Google Webmaster Console and added new domain.

4) Removed old XML sitemap and recrawled site with new domain, uploaded and verified.

5) Changed domain over in Google Analytics.

6) Changed domain over on Feedburner.

7) Remembered to repoint the e-mail.

8) Tested and fixed a few URL dependent things (such as our search position check tool).

Current situation

Currently when searching on Google, the old URL www.furtheronline.co.uk is still being displayed. However, using a site: query we can see that the new www.further.co.uk is indeed, indexed.

With the amount of trickery, tom-foolery and general nasty tricks SEOs have played on Google using 301s and 302s, it is not surprising that Google is very cautious when changing over search results.

So far, no traffic change / disasters. I'll keep you updated.

How Much Is An SEO Site Audit Worth?

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I still only use my LinkedIn account on occassion. While I find it fascinating to see which of my business contacts know each other (6 degrees eat your heart out), I normally try to give more than I take with LinkedIn.

One question that caught my interest a few weeks back was somebody asking "How much would you pay for a professional Search engine Optimisation audit of your website?".

The answers were incredibly varied, with some people saying absolutely nothing, others saying it's fine just to use auomated SEO Tools and some suggesting writing a blank cheque was the way to go.

Working in the search field, I felt obliged to chime in on answers. In a nutshell, I believe the answer is very much similar to hiring an accountant:

An SEO Audit is worth what it will save you. No more, no less.

Skimping on an SEO Audit may mean the effort you're putting into link building may not be being used effectively, or you have to go through various iterations of your site as you slowly pick up on optimisation barriers down the line.

The long answer was:

"As with many things, you certainly get what you pay for with SEO audits. You have rightly pointed out that there are vast limitations to "SEO Tools" which will automate the process, human intelligence is absolutely required to provide a useful audit.

Working at a search agency, I can tell you that we use a mix: We have developed our own bespoke tools for finding out the basics of a website, for instance: Looking for duplicate pages, checking for optimised title tags, h1s, h2s, image navigation, redirects etc. However, this is only part of the story.

The complexity of an audit, I would suggest should not be looked at by the number of pages on a website. You'll find in most cases, websites only have maybe 5-10 different templates for pages, you may have a home page, a category level page, a product level page and various basket/sign up/policy pages. For this reason, I would say it may be more efficient to look at the SEO of these templates, as they will have common elements.

How much do we charge for audits then? It does depend on the complexity of the site. If you're dealing with a site that dynamically generates URLs and page content, it can be a lot trickier than a simple site.

It will also depend on how many problems there are with a site. If a site is mostly search engine friendly, we'll usually make some suggestions for free, however if the site does require a serious overhaul - this is going to be an investment for the client.

I would argue that the people that say they would pay "nothing" for an SEO audit, may be the same people that end up redesigning/structuring their site several times as various SEO issues crop up, which will turn out to be a much more expensive process than having an audit completed properly in the first instance.

Hiring an SEO is a bit like hiring an accountant, ask yourself the question, how much can they save/make me vs. cost.

As a guideline, I would look for the following things in an SEO audit:

1) Keyphrase strategy - Is there a definite plan for selecting high performing/high traffic key phrases and a matching content strategy to provide pages to rank for these terms?

2) A priority overview of all barriers to SEO, how severe is the problem, what exactly is the problem and how do you overcome it?

3) Look at URL structure of site

4) Look at internal linking of site

5) Look at link equity flow on site

6) Look at optimised HTML elements: titles, h1s, h2s etc

7) Look at navigation / image / text based

8) Look for redirects / header issues

9) Look at server response times

10) Robots.txt / rel=nofollow usage

11) Check for canonicalisation issues

12) Check error pages

13) Indexed pages / dupes

14) Backlink profile

15) Compare all of above to competitors

That's off the top of my head. Good luck! "

The Rise of Social Search

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

When you're looking online for information or news about a current event, where do you go? Google usually disappoints in its ability to return fresh results when the events are happening *right now*. Even major news sites such as the BBC or CNN are not meeting our demand for virtually real-time updates, not to mention that many now distrust the media in general and would much prefer to gain insight from other members of the public who may have inside knowledge or an interesting point of view.

According to an article in the Guardian last week, Google have come out and admitted that Twitter is doing a better job of covering real-time events and information than the world's largest search engine. To those of us already embracing Twitter, this comes as no surprise - it has already become my default bookmark for finding out the latest goings on within the search industry, trending topics online and even current local and world news.

There are many examples of Twitter being at the forefront of providing updates on breaking news, to the extent that several news organisations have now specifically assigned journalists to the social website in order to gain the upper hand in coverage.

The problem search engines like Google face is providing this real-time information without wanting to restructure the fundamental way that search works. Under the current model, websites are crawled and indexed by search engines which by its nature means that information will be out of date, even in the case of large news sites which are indexed by Google many times an hour. Partnerships like the potential one between Twitter and Google are a good way of supplementing search results, and a great win for Google who are surely worried about losing visitors and thus revenue to these emerging social search alternatives.

But what about the longer term? Can search engines keep up with our voracious appetite for the very latest information about the most niche of topics? It's unlikely that these sort of problems can be solved by search engines without changing their technology fundamentally, and the possibility of Google snapping up a partnership with Twitter to at least 'buy in' a solution means that once again Yahoo and Microsoft are left with a less attractive offering.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I've used Twitter to ask local 'tweeps' about the cause of a large amount of emergency services activity around my city on a particular day, and to keep up to date on a bomb threat in my parent's town which had caused the main shopping street to be closed down. I got all the information I wanted from multiple sources, along with opinion and even pictures uploaded from a mobile phone. This is the power of social search, and is a level of 'personalised search' that local news websites cannot seem to provide yet, let alone international search giants.

Title Tag Optimisation - Pete's SEO Corner

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the first instalment of Peter’s SEO 101! In my monthly column, I will be going over the 101’s of SEO and also sharing with you various tips and tricks in the SEO world.

Today we will be talking about Title Tag optimisation.

What’s a “Title Tag”?

Cast your eyes to the top left of your browser. The area where it shows the webpage title. Yep, you guessed it, that’s the title tag.

Youtube Title Tag

Why is a title tag so important?

Well, it is one of the ways Google can tell what that particular page is about. So for example, if the page was about felt tip pens you wouldn’t put “mature cheeses” because that’s not what the page is about.

Imagine you’re leafing through a thick book on human anatomy trying to find the page you want. If each of the chapters in the book were just labeled “Human Anatomy” followed by the chapter number, I’m sure you’d have a pretty hard time searching for your page. But if each chapter or sub-chapter were labelled with relevant text such as “The Hand” or “The Liver – a fava bean accompaniment” you would know which page to turn to.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lfabresm/

It’s the same with the search engines. Without properly specifying the title tag, the search engines will have no way of telling what words they should rank your page for.

Making sure the title tag for a particular page is keyword optimised is one of the ways you can help in rank for the keyterms you want.

Keyword targeting

It’s not enough just to write what you think the page is about in the title tag though. You need to think about what keyterms to target. For example, even if your site is about “cool felt tip pens” and you put that term in the title tag, which Google then ranks your page in the top 10 search results for. If there aren’t any searches for that term in the first place, you won’t get much increase in traffic.

So if we use the Google keyword tool to find the number of searches for “felt tip pens” and related terms we get:

Keyterm	Number of Searches per month (G UK)
felt tip pens	2900
marker pens	1900
magic markers	880
felt tip pen	720
magic marker	590
felt tip marker	46
black felt tip pen	22
cool felt tip pens	No data

As can be seen from the table above, “felt tip pens” gets the greatest number of searches at 2900 per month, followed by “marker pens” at 1900. Both terms are alternative names for the same product. Note that the number of searches for “felt tip pens” contrasts sharply with the singular term “felt tip pen”. I guess this is because people buy felt tip pens in a set rather than individually. Depending on the search term, the plural or singular versions of the same term will get a different volume of searches so it’s worth checking the number of searches for each keyterm rather than going with what you think might be popular.

Interestingly enough, the only felt tip pen colour people have been searching for which is of note is “black felt tip pen”. I guess as far as felt tip pens go, black is still in vogue.

The Search Engine

The search engine will assign a greater weighting to keywords which come first in the title tag. Let’s say you want your felt tip pen company – Cool Feltz to rank for it’s own name, you would give it precedence the title tag. So the title tag will be written like this: “Cool Feltz – Felt Tip Pens, Marker Pens”

Note we’re giving “Felt Tip Pens” priority over “Marker Pens” because it’s got more searches.

Make sure however, that when you’re optimising the title tags that you don’t repeat the same keyterms over multiple pages. This is called keyword cannibalisation and will confuse the search engines on which page to rank for that particular keyterm.

Another common mistake people sometimes make is placing all the keyterms they want to rank for on the same page. In this case, the weighting each keyterm is given is diluted since it is shared between all the keyterms. In addition, it tends to look spammy. Try to limit the number of keyterms to just several per page.

So that’s the basics as far as title tag optimisation is concerned. Tune in next time for another episode of Peter’s SEO Corner.

New Google Search Options

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

If you're outside of the search world you may well not have noticed Google's "Show Options" has been rolled out for widespread usage.

Google Search presents "Show Options"

Aside from the usual vertical options (in red), a subtle but very noteworthy "Show Options" link has appear (highlighted in green).

Clicking on these options gives you a whole host of filtering options.

"More Options" Explored: Further filtering

There's some really interesting stuff in there ("ooh, Wonder Wheel!"), such as the Timeline and Reviews filtering. Rather than explain each feature in detail, I'd rather talk about the potential impact on users and businesses (especially SEOs). I'll leave the explaining to Google, who put this video together:

Why are these options here?
As our Google chums make clear in the demonstration, their stated aim is to increase the ease of finding specific information from searches. It's quite clear that we've seen a shift in user search behaviour over the last 5 years, with users become smarter at using search engines. Can't find what you're looking for? Most users will now go back and refine their search query, rather than trawl through several pages of results. Research also shows that searchers use more words on average than ever before when performing a search. Why? Because they know they're more likely to get relevant results.

Despite Google making these changes to aid its users, I would be surprised if the extra filter options have a wide adoption for a while. Google do a good job of making a search quick and painless task, great - but it means a small text link is unlikely to catch the eye of a web user speeding past on their way to the next site.

I'm certainly not writing off these new features, as I've already had some interesting results. As Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer says;

"The race in search is far from over and innovation and continued improvement is absolutely pivotal,"

Which couldn't be more true. Despite Google having its very vocal critics, they are pressing their advantage (rightly or wrongly) to widen the gap between them and other search engines.

What's cool about Google's new search options?
Looking through some of the results provided, Google has done a moderately good job on introducing more intelligent snippets. For instance, if we are search for reviews of the Apple iPhone, Google has started showing snippets such as;

Apple iPhone review snippet on Google Review Search

Which instantly gives you a summary of the review. From the random results I've been experimenting with, the quality of these intelligent snippets is varied, but overall heading in the right direction.

For quite a while Google has been offering "dynamic" meta description data, trying to pull a piece of content from your site that is related to the search query used to display in the SERP snippet. Rather than having a "one size fits all" approach to meta descriptions (which can determine how many people click on your search result), I've had some success with increasing click-throughs just using these feature.

At the moment, it would appear Google is using their own semantic indexing to try and figure out the content on page and bring into these intelligent snippets, which is giving less-than-perfect results in many cases. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if the SEO world turns to The Resource Description Framework to start providing Google with more data about the type of content on the site, rather than letting it guess. Ensuring Google knows exactly what type of data you are providing will increase your chances of appearing prominently in these listings.

I think it's a pretty neat advancement from both a user and SEO community point of view. As a user, I spent this weekend doing a specific search and having dozens of unwanted directory sites thrown back at me. Being an experienced searcher, I started using advanced operands to specifically start weeding out sites from my search. It took me almost 15 minutes to find the sites I wanted and I had a search query string that could have been the introduction to a mad-lib novel. Not pleasant. As a user, if search options can relieve some of this manual process, then it's fine with me.

As an SEO, I also see the search options as a blessing. Further refinement gives us all "more room" to be listed. Rather than your e-commerce website competing with informational sites and news sites for a top 3 spot, having users specify what kind of information they're after, e..g "I want to buy", "I want reviews", "I want to see recent media coverage" can only help you attract more relevant (the key!) traffic.

The Wonder Wheel, as it is so joyfully named is more of a play thing (to me at least!), but I can actually see a legimate use for it.

The Google Wonder Wheel on "Scuba Diving"

If I was running a website, I would let my content writers / editors / contributors loose on the Wonder Wheel. Exploring the Wonder Wheel gives you topics, ideas and potential titles for content. These are searches and related terms - does your website cover all of these topics?

I could see it has a great tool for planning content structure and brainstorming meetings. Any chance to use a whizzy graphic....

In short...

1) The SEO community has known about universal search since 2007, it's not something that's crept up on us (or something to worry about!)

2) I would expect emergence of more techniques SEOs can use to help Google classify the context of content.

3) User search behaviour will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated.

Sharing Google Analytics Customisations

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For those that use Google Analytics, you'll be interested to see the GA team launched a new feature last week that allows you to share customisations you've made using Custom Reports and Advanced Segmentation.

While custom reports and advanced segmentation were both excellent tools to get the most useful data out of your reports, it was always a pain trying to set up similar accounts or marry together two sets of analytics; a problem no more.

Sharing Customisations (Click to enlarge)

Google Analytics now provides you with an easy "share" URL that you can provide to friends and co-workers which will allow you to share your report structure. Essentially, they can see their own data within your reporting structure.

One level further down, if you manage multiple profiles you can also select which ones of these profiles are able to view customisations associated with your account.

'Future Of Web Design 2009' conference - our review

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Last Thursday Annette and I were up at the crack of dawn to attend this year’s Future Of Web Design conference (FOWD 09), which is an annual event brought to us by the lovely people at Carsonified in London’s Kensington town hall. Each year they bring together leading figures in the industry to speak about the current trending subjects in their fields of expertise. The events are always well attended by enthusiastic web designers and developers alike, keen to collaborate ideas and opinion regarding the web and how possible to better it.

The first presentation of note came courtesy of Jim Coudal. He gave us an entertaining, “off the cuff”, insight into some of the creative processes that they employ to great success at his Chicago based design studio, Coudal Partners. He explored (among other things) the idea of finding the constant within a creative problem and then determining the best combination of variables to go with it. Jim also shared with us this very funny short film which plays on the common trait among web developers for a short attention span and their associated flux of enthusiasm.

Mark Boulton later gave a fantastic, thought provoking talk on the current state of typography on the web. In a time where CSS workgroups and browser vendors are discussing how best to implement custom fonts into web pages; he was arguing that by having the restricted choice we currently face you are intrinsically helped into making a good decision. The fontset universally available to web developers has been purposely designed for screen, ie. The kerning of the fonts has been set to work in small point sizes on high resolution monitors. Opening up an unlimited amount of fonts (most of which will have been designed predominantly for print, and interestingly, to actually bleed into the paper) will do nothing to improve the web experience. I for one very much agree with this viewpoint (and secretly share his dislike for sIFR too!)

The next presentation more than worthy of a mention was given by Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services of AbilityNet, who despite being totally blind is a daily IT/web user. His talk was exceptionally enlightening and really outlined how vital good practice is when it comes to front end development of websites. He was able to point out the good and the bad of everyday websites very acutely by demonstrating how he browses the internet with screen reading software. It has to be seen to be fully appreciated, but it did really hit home just how important getting the basics right can be (such as alt tags, anchor text, heading hierarchy, content structure, access keys etc.) He also expressed how he was increasingly favouring mobile versions of websites; chiefly for their conciseness, making it faster and easier to get to the latest/most popular content.

By far and away the most inspiring talk of the day for me came from Mike Kus of Carsonified. He gave a brief lecture on the importance of good design in modern websites, underlining how the usability experience of a website can ultimately stem from making the correct initial design decisions. The strength of his lecture however came not from what he said, but from what he showed us. Each of his slides had been meticulously designed and were all beautiful individual works of art in their own right. But to top it off he concluded his talk by running a screencast of his entire slide design process, condensed to around 3 minutes and to the sounds of Sigur Ros. It was fascinating to witness the various incarnations of design he went through before arriving at his final slides, and also reassuring to know that even great designers don’t achieve the look they’re after at the first attempt!

Personally I found the day to be an overwhelming success and found a lot to take home from it, besides the complimentary eco-bag, journal, poster and Goodbarry t-shirt which were nothing short of awesome! The speakers were largely all very good; and you may be glad to hear that audio files, slides and videos taken from the presentations are already starting to appear online and are well worth checking out.

I look forward to my next web development field trip, the Future Of Web Apps tour, which will be hitting Cambridge on June 2nd. See you there?

Google Confirms Ranking Data Tracking

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Having posted yesterday on the new Google referral strings, I was interested today to see via Google Blogoscoped that Matt Cutts confirmed the fact Google will be tracking ranking data via referral strings.

An excellent piece of detective work, Patrick!

New Google Referral Strings

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

If you're not analysing your own traffic logs and using Google Analytics / Urchin, then you are excused; this update won't impact you. For those of you who are crunching your own log data, you'll need to be aware that Google will soon be changing their referral strings from organic search.

Today, over at the Official Analytics Blog, Brett Crosby announced that during this week, we'll slowly be seeing new Google referral strings being introduced.

Currently, if you perform a search on Google for "flowers" you would see a string like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

After the update, a search for "flowers" would give you a search string more like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2F
www.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa1N5O8M_qW8dQN&
rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Nice, huh? The main thing you're going to have to worry about here is the change from "search?" to "url?", so make sure any analysis you are doing does not rely on picking out "search" - or it will break.

Why the change?

Google isn't normally one to make things more complicated than it needs to be. It's interesting that they're obviously going to track even more data from the SERPs.

There has been speculation that variables such as "cd" may be "click data", tracking the current organic ranking of the site when it was clicked. The "source" can show which vertical the result was discovered through (e.g News, Blogs, Video, Images) and there's obviously some encoded information on the end too.

Google obviously feels that this data is important enough to their search quality to make such large change.

What does it mean for SEO?

Aside from the implications if you're crunching your own numbers, this change should also sit in the back of the mind of the SEO community. Google has historically, weighed the vast majority of it's algorithm to off-page factors such as incoming link authority, relevance and velocity. These signals were held above on-page factors, because of their relative "independence" from the webmaster, making them harder to skew. If Google is going to enhance it's search quality by looking at user behaviour, it will need more data, potentially similar to the referral data we're seeing here.

Hopefully, it's always been at the forefront of your mind, but looking at your own (or client's) websites in terms of usability, quality content and added value is likely to have more relevance to good organic positioning than ever.

New to Search Marketing? Let our Client Services team guide you

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Search marketing as a discipline is still relatively new and considered somewhat of a minefield to those trying to get to grips with it for the first time. So it is little wonder businesses are hesitant when it comes to looking at choosing a provider. It can be a daunting prospect. You’re bound to be asking yourself questions like:

• Who can I trust to deliver the results I need?
• Who will tell me the truth and not blind me with science?
• Will they make me feel silly every time I ask a question?
• I haven’t got a massive budget. Will they be interested in working with me?

Trust is key
Here at Further we don’t just work with large brands who have search marketing experts in-house. Far from it. Every month we are working with brand new clients who are search marketing debutants.

Further was formed on the basis that it would be a company clients could trust – in all senses of the word.

Trust, in our view, starts with good communication – and while search marketers are exceptionally skilled at providing results, communicating what they are doing and why to a search-fresh client can be a very different matter. (No offence to search marketers intended. I wouldn’t know where to start if you asked me to build valuable links!)

Consequently, we leave the results delivery to the search specialists and client communication to a member of the Client Services team who will act as your guide, your teacher, your translator. Someone who can manage your account and your expectations.

Obviously communication alone won’t provide that trust. Like I said before, it’s simply the first step. We then have to demonstrate that what we do for you is providing you with value for money.

Our comprehensive monthly client reporting, provided to all Further clients at no extra charge, outlines exactly what has been achieved each month and summarises the progress made.

Face-to-Face client review meetings, (often on a quarterly or six monthly basis, depending on the contract ) are also held to discuss progress, your return on investment and to agree the strategic direction for the next period.

Another important aspect to tell you about is our more flexible attitude to contracts. At Further we understand there may be unforeseen reasons why you cannot continue with a contract, and unlike many other agencies, we don’t hold you to 12 months.

Our contracts are for 6 months, as most strategies are created around six month periods, so we ask you to commit to this duration.

All Further clients benefit from:

• Client Services Manager/Director for day-to-day management
• Award-winning search and social marketing expertise
• Comprehensive Monthly Reporting sent by email
• Client Review Meetings at pre-agreed intervals

If you are looking at search marketing companies to approach to carry out your work, we recommend you consider all these points. In a sector which is becoming crammed with suppliers, (some good, some bad as with any industry) it is vital you feel comfortable about the decision you make.

Don’t be afraid to ask them for reassurance. Ask for testimonials or, better still, ask if you can contact their clients direct to find out if they do indeed deliver ‘ exactly what it says on the tin’.

If you are considering SEO, PPC or social media marketing, then Further would love to hear from you. Please get in touch. Meanwhile, good luck in your search! And should you wish to, feel free to ask me any questions.

Is Google buying Twitter?

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It wouldn't be the first time that Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone make a sale to Google, who sold Blogger to Google just over 5 years ago. Some sources indicate Google are in the final stages of the deal, while others state they are just beginning - but it is confirmed, a deal is being negociated.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook back in November for $500 million, based mainly on the face Facebook stock was overvalued. This isn't a problem Google would face, making the purchase in either cash or public stock even with Twitter's recent valuation coming in at a respectable $250 milion.

Why would Google want Twitter?

It's been quite a hot topic, especially around Further - the possibilty of Google using Twitter data to improve search results. Twitter is sitting on a vast chest of data - real time data. It doesn't need to crawl, collate and compare, almost everything you need to determine the popularity, relevance and quality of pages is there and it's up to the minute.

With the launch oh http://search.twitter.com - the Twitter search engine, many people have begun to see Twitter as a player in the search field. Combining this data, with Google's huge index the possibility of an incredibly accurate real-time search engine is a distinct possibility. Such an acquisition would go a long way to cementing Google's prime position as top search engine for at least a few more years.

Is this a good thing?

For Google, it's going to be a smart acquisition with Twitter's value still on the upward curve and more brands diving in of the tweetfest everyday. From a user point of view - possibly with the chance of higher quality search results, but possibly not with Google owning another cornerstone of the web.

Why SMEs are Twittering away!

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Love it? Hate it? Don’t understand what all the fuss is about?

No matter what you think about the new social media phenomenon,Twitter, it is a fact that smaller businesses are quickly adopting this online medium according to new research carried out by mobile operator O2.

The study showed that of the 500 SMEs interviewed, 17% are actively using Twitter – no less than a quarter of them joining in the past few weeks.

Why? Good question indeed. Well it would appear that the recent economic situation has pushed smaller businesses towards looking for more cost-effective marketing, customer service and recruitment channels – and Twitter seems to be starting to work for them.

Digging into the detail, some surprising stats emerge. 28% of those surveyed said that staying touch with similar smaller businesses also helped boost their confidence and the research also highlighted that nearly a third of the responding companies estimated they have saved around £1,000, with one in ten claiming to have saved up to £5,000 in marketing and/or recruitment costs.  What the results are from that activity we do not know, but they seem confident enough that the medium can work for them to be continuing with it.  Interestingly, around 40% of respondents say that they are using it more than LinkedIn or Facebook, which is testament to both the simplicity and power of Twitter.

A further data breakdown shows that nearly three quarters of the companies surveyed recognised Twitter’s cost-saving and marketing advantages, 42% saw the medium to be useful as a means of staying in contact with customers and suppliers, and 34% felt they could use it monitor their competitors.

Amazingly, even the Federation of Small Businesses itself has started to tweet.   Simon Devonshire, Head of Small Business Marketing at O2 officially commented: The way small businesses are using Twitter is a great example of how the community is embracing new technologies in order to adapt and survive in the current economic climate. The increase in small businesses using converged devices such as the iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones combined with the simplicity of Twitter represents a fantastic opportunity for businesses to further raise their profiles and increase efficiency.

Further’s view of this news and of Twitter in general? We asked Rob Welsby, Senior Search Consultant at Further for his view.

“Twitter is a great communication tool for both personal and business use. It allows companies to present an approachable and human point of contact, which can be invaluable for generating new business and networking within your niche.”

“Twitter (and other online social platforms), he continues “ can be used by businesses in a huge variety of beneficial ways. From spreading latest product news to answering customer queries, increasing brand awareness by appearing as an authority in your area, monitoring your brand online or even interacting with like minded business to achieve common goals. No matter what your company does, there will be a beneficial use of Twitter if approached in the right way. Although the exact implementation will be different in each case, the common foundation is that Twitter can be a valuable and exceptionally low cost addition to your marketing activity.”

Reputation Management: Dealing with impersonators online

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It was like a scene out of an Agatha Christie whodunit in the office yesterday. Plenty of earnest looks, a host of convoluted theories and the occasional 'who'd have done such a thing?'. Let me explain.

Some time back we'd been alerted to a Twitter comment which claimed our site looked a little similar to another site: KyanMedia. And on review yes, it did a little. Genuine coincidence, no big deal. If you look at it mathematically, it kind of happens sometimes given the number of web pages out there. We thought nothing of it and so moved on.

It therefore came as a bit of a surprise when our monitoring systems alerted us to the fact that one of our directors had been posting potentially incendiary comments regarding this presumed dead issue. OK, Steve likes to talk, but none of us could quite understand why he'd be challenging the authenticity of the Kyan site and accusing them of copying us, especially given they'd been around a good while longer than us. A frantic call to a taxi cab somewhere in London demanding to know what the hell was going on soon made it clear that this was not of Steve's doing. Clearly, someone was impersonating him online, presumably in an effort to undermine Further. Stranger still, the imposter had cited one of our website URLs which was only accessible via an Adwords advert, which in turn was only viewable within our local area. Meaning the offender was likely very close to home.

This is the moment when the reputation management wheel started turning. Within an hour we'd turned a potentially bad situation into a positive and identified the culprit.

Steve called Kyan to explain who he was, that he'd never posted the rogue comment, and that if deemed necessary to the interests of preserving good relations we'd change the Further site where applicable. The owner (Piers) was very decent about the whole matter, didn't feel there was any need to change our site, and even offered to help track the criminal mastermind behind these scandalous events. Within 10 minutes his IT team had identified the IP address of the person who was impersonating Steve. A quick look-up identified it as being none other than...

Look, no Scooby-Do moments here. We're bigger than that and you can’t throw mud without getting some on your hands. However, it is interesting to note that the action our competitors have taken is actually illegal under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) which came into effect on May 26, 2008. The UCPD specifically prohibits business from "misleading actions and omissions" online, legislation that is specifically targeted at businesses leaving fake comments (whether it is posing as consumers or other businesses). Naughty stuff.

Anyway, you might be thinking this is all a storm in a tea cup, which of course it is. However, the point which I think is worth making is that unless you're aware as a business of what is being said about you online, then you are never going to be able to react to it. In this instance we managed to stop a situation from getting out of hand, reached an agreement on design differences, gathered hard evidence that identified the culprit and hopefully nurtured a new relationship. Piers, we'll do that beer next time we're in London and thanks again for the help yesterday!

So, it goes to show that reputation management for business is worth considering and that it can pay dividends.

Is This The End For Voucher Site Affiliates?

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There's no doubt that voucher and coupon affiliate sites are pretty heavy players within the affiliate marketing industry. It's quite ingenious; shopping online, getting to the checkout and seeing that all too familiar "Voucher Code:" box.

Personally, those voucher code boxes slow down my transaction. Somebody is getting a better deal than me and I could save some money here. So, like millions of others, I head to Google and do a search for [website] voucher codes, in search of active voucher codes to save myself a few quid.

Well, I used to do that. I rarely bother nowadays because the amount of time it takes to find a "legit" voucher site normally outweighs whatever saving I would have made with the voucher.

The problem lies with affiliates creating (sometimes generating) sites with just about every possible web shop going, optimising them to pull in voucher-hungry punters. So the usual routine now is, you do your voucher code search, land on a page which says "click here to reveal voucher code" or "jump through this flaming hoop to receive voucher code" and before you know it, you've actually been punted off to the merchant website left only with a "sorry, no active vouchers" message.

Not particularly helpful for you, but great for the affiliate. You're still probably going to buy whatever it is you were after and most importantly; you have their tracking cookie on your computer so they get their "hard-earned" commission.

As a pet annoyance, I was quite intrigued when I received this e-mail from WebGains today:

"IAB'S AFFILIATE MARKETING COUNCIL REVISES CODE OF BEST PRACTICE

The best practice guidelines that were introduced by the AMC in December 2008 have ensured that the voucher sector is now effectively regulated. In response to some issues and concerns raised by the industry, the IAB has revised the code of practice, in order to provide further instructions and clearer guidelines:

The aim of the IAB's affiliate marketing council code of best practice for voucher code sites is to ensure that traffic from affiliate sites sent to merchants is not done in a misleading or confusing way and that consumers receive a good user experience. To this end all of the major UK networks are committed to enforcing the following guidelines:

1. Affiliates must not use a mechanism whereby users are encouraged to click to interact with content where it is unclear or confusing what the outcome will be. For example:

* Using "click to reveal code” and opening the site when no valid code is present or an offer/deal/sale is presented instead, without this being made clear before the click.

* Using "click to copy code” and opening the site when no valid code is available

* Opening the merchant's site without making it clear that this will occur

2. Voucher code affiliates must clearly detail the nature of the voucher or offer/deal/sale before a user clicks to interact with it (by revealing, copying, visiting the merchant site etc)

3. A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for your use online. This code will have an activation date and, where provided, a deactivation date. When a code has expired it must either be removed or the fact that it has expired must be clearly stated in writing, not simply by listing the expiry date.

4. Sites displaying voucher codes must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and voucher codes.

5. Any affiliate judged by one of the participating networks to be contravening the code will be referred to the IAB's Affiliate Marketing Council and all members will agree on a course of action. The discretion of the council will be used when determining what is judged as misleading or confusing and is not confined to the examples above.

Webgains is a signatory to the code of conduct and will monitor our affiliate sites to ensure they comply with the above guidelines.

Please ensure your websites comply with these guidelines. "

It's obviously come to crunch point. Sometimes (not all of them but sorry, it's true) affiliate networks turn a blind eye to dodgy merchants, as affiliates earning commissions means affiliate networks earning commission. However, when merchants are getting upset when dodgy cookie practise starts impacting on the bottom line, affiliate networks have to start slapping wrists or lose the merchant.

I'm not sure how much enforcement power the IAB will actually have to throw around, but if they get some of the major affiliate networks onboard and get them to actively enforce these guidelines, the next 6-12 months will be very interesting indeed.

Capitalisation Affects Google Results

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It would appear that Google is showing different search results in some cases, depending on whether to searcher uses capitalisation in their search query or not.

Ryan kindly supplied me with this example today:

A search for Woolacombe Holiday Cottages (with caps) produced this:

(Note: I've cut out the local results and paid search results for ease)

So we have:

Position #1 = woolacombe-cottages.co.uk
Position #2 = woolacombe-cottages.co.uk (sub-page)
Position #3 = woolacombeholidaycottages.co.uk
Position #4 = northdevonholidays.co.uk
Position #5 = marsdens.co.uk

However, a search for woolacombe holiday cottages (without caps) produced this:

(Note: I've cut out the local results and paid search results for ease)

So we have:

Position #1 = woolacombe-cottages.co.uk
Position #2 = woolacombeholidaycottages.co.uk
Position #3 = northdevonholidays.co.uk
Position #4 = marsdens.co.uk
Position #5 = resort-guide.co.uk

So we actually have two fairly distinct set of search results here, which at first is surprising. How many people use capitalisation when they search? Not many that I know (I even did a small office test, it was 14-0).

When we tried to replicate this result, we found we could in several different SERPs, however it could only be replicated when Google was handling navigational queries - trying to distinguish between a generic search term and a company / website name.

Our first thoughts were, perhaps the use of capitalisation would indicate the user is searching for a brand / company name / website name, as oppose to a generic search so Google responds by giving intents to what it thinks may be that site. Unfortunately, further researched showed that not to be the case with non-caps searches sometimes returning intents and other times vice-versa.

I'd be interested in outside opinion - is this a bug, or something else? Why would Google pay attention to capitalisation? (Maybe something to do with acronyms?). As far as a I can tell, Google Analytics forces keyword data into lowercase, so it is not possible using their own tool to see how many caps/non-caps searchers you have.

Adwords putting the squeeze on Adsense

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Having experience as an Adsense publisher as well as managing multiple PPC accounts, you get a view from both sites of the fence. There's no doubt that the Adwords game has got a lot harder over the last few years, with many new competitors flooding into the market as the search marketing channel matures. Unfortunately, the same can be said for Adsense publishers.

This year, I found myself in the 70% of Adsense publishers reporting lower earnings in January 09. Despite, my overall traffic being up a healthy amount, more coming from Google (higher quality you'd assume?) and more clicks, I'm getting a lower cost per click.

While I would be cautious as this survey only covers 119 respondents, it certainly seems to be in-line with other webmasters I've been talking to.

Interestingly enough, this month's issue of NMA had an interesting graph (can't find it on your site guys?), demonstrating the increase in average cost per click on the Adwords platform over the last few years, while delivered traffic decreased. In a nutshell, less traffic for more money.

Many marketers have found that after separating the Search and Content distribution channels on Adwords, they get a much better ROI with just Search. If you combine a this trend with Adsense still being one of the top choices for monetizing spam sites (MFA = Made For Adsense site, for the uninitiated), you can understand why Google may be paying out less per click to publishers while demand is lower and perceived (and perhaps actual) quality is lower than search.

What does this mean for my business?

While increasing Adwords costs and lower publisher costs may be the trend at the moment, it certainly doesn't mean you're going to run campaigns at a loss. Sure, it's not easy to set up a flat affiliate arbitrage campaign anymore (I see lots of these on Facebook now), it's still possible to return good profits.

If you've got somebody (hopefully qualified!) doing your Adwords management, they should at very least be doing the very basics of:

1) Making sure your landing page quality is high and meets Google standards
2) Doing detailed keyphrase research (misspellings and looking at intent - not just volume!)
3) Splitting your key phrases into specific AdGroups
4) Writing specific adverts, targeted at the adverts within that AdGroup (the more specific the better!)
5) Creating multiple variations of these adverts to A-B test them
6) Proper usage of broad, phrase and exact match targeting on key phrases
7) sing negative keywords when needed to avoid bidding on unwanted terms
8) Monitoring and controlling the position your ad is shown in

All of these factors will impact your quality score, which a campaign will love or die by. The higher your quality score, the lower cost you're going to pay per click and the higher your advert will show.

This would mean that two people with identical budgets and websites could have a polar experience of Adwords, with one losing money hand over fist and the other making a healthy profit.

If you're struggling with an Adwords campaign, then why not drop us a question in tour knowledge centre?

It's free, there's no strings attached and of course, no obligation. We'd just like to give you a push in the right direction with your search marketing. Or if you're pulling your hair out, why not see what we can do with our paid search management?

Hiring Business Development Managers

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In response to Will Critchlow's Tweet, asking for tips and tricks on hiring business development managers within the Search Industry, I'd like to take the time to put together some points.

I think it's an excellent topic to blog about, as recruitment within the SEO industry has been one of our biggest challenges as a company. Quality SEO people are few and far between, with some of our latest search team relocating from Wales and Scotland to join us.

Having just recruited our second business development manager, I feel we're in a good position to dish out, what I hope is some good advice on finding, vetting and hiring a BDM.

The number 1 difficulty

When business development comes into mind, there is always one recurring issue that pops up; the difference in skill set between an SEO and a salesman. A business development manager's role is complex and intrinsic to your business and I certainly would not simplify it to these two titles, but they are two skills, which I consider at opposite ends of the learning spectrum.

Rather than learning individual skills, it is very likely that you actually learn skill sets. That is, as you aim to learn one skill, you inherently pick up other skills on the way that help you towards this goal. The problem that arises is that there is no natural overlap between SEO and sales. You could be an incredible SEO and never had to deal with a client or sales situation in your life, just as an accomplished salesman could become so without ever encountering SEO.

This becomes a problem in that, do you hire an SEO that you teach to sell, or a salesman that you teach SEO?

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that.

Define what you're looking for

Before you can start looking, or even think about posting that vacancy on your website, you need to define what you're looking for. By this, I don't mean Googling "Business Development Manager Job Specification", you need to examine how this role is going to fit into your current structure.

The detail of the type of person you are looking for is going to be defined by your business strategy and your current strengths and weaknesses in terms of internal resources.

Business strategy and business development

Anyone agency side in the search world will know there is a massive disparity between clients' levels of understanding. You can encounter businesses that have in-house SEO resources that are looking just for consultation, SMEs that are looking for specific parts of campaigns to be carried out, or clients that need hand-holding throughout the whole process.

While it never pays to make assumptions on a client's level of understanding, there are definite trends between the size and current online presence of a brand vs. whether they will have someone in-house that will have a handle on Search Marketing.

A great first step is to look back over your meeting notes and contact reports and pull together a list of common points that needed explaining to your client base. If you cross-reference this with the level of client you have chosen to target within your business plan, you should start to come to an idea of what kind of level of education was needed during initial meetings.

Take this list as a first draft of "possible things you would like an ideal BDM to know".

Internal resources and business development

From our recently acquired list of "possible things you would like an ideal BDM to know", we can start to look at internal resources. Your BDM is going to be the link between the services you sell and a client who may/may not have any knowledge or understanding of how these services work.

Take stock of your current company intelligence, what's on your website, brochures, leaflets and documentation you have. From our wish-list of "to know", how many of these can be met by:

1) Internal one to one training - do you have the time resource to do this?

2) Information on the website - are there common questions you can answer and arm a BDM with?

3) Brochures / leaflets - does this information already exist in some form?

4) How does this fit in with your current workflow procedures?

5) Who will be responsible for liaising with BDMs providing them with the information they need?

I think the last point is particularly important. As discussions with potential clients progress, you will need direct information on this client's website, competitors, current standing, rankings, on-site SEO and a host of other information.

Your search team will have work procedures in place with a way they tackle all of these situations. The problem with having smart people doing a smart job is, sometimes internal communication goes AWOL because everybody knows exactly what they're doing and gets on with it.

It is therefore vital that a channel is opened between the search team and business development. A healthy flow of information will ensure that your BDM is going into situations they are prepared for, clients are getting the correct information and you're much more likely to be able to deliver those pitch winning ideas.

This integration will likely involve tweaking your workflow procedures, which can be a painful process as nobody likes change when they're in a groove, but it will definitely pay dividends. You may, like many reputable companies, be getting a lot of business via referrals, as well as networking and advertising. There will need to be a shift of how these incoming leads are handled, having one person responsible for the networking and management of these contacts, leads and clients and the front-end can dramatically improve the working efficiency and profit of your agency.

Interviewing potential business development managers

While I certainly wouldn't consider myself a recruitment specialist, (should I have mentioned that earlier??) drawing from experience from all the interviews I've conducted and sat in on, I can certainly say one thing: People from a sales background generally perform very well under interview conditions.

You'd kind of expect it, anyone in a direct client-facing environment has to be able to be articulate, amicable and think on their feet while delivering their ideas in a concise and easy to understand way. These job skills are very closely aligned to interview skills, which unfortunately, makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Personally, once you've got some interviews (as a potential employee) under your belt, you pretty much know what to expect in terms of questions; which means prepared answers. This raises the game for the potential employer as you'll need to come up with new ways to scratch the surface on the candidate's true experience, personality and potential benefit to the company.

Both of the business development managers at Further were seen at least five times in an informal setting. This means going for a coffee, chatting about experience, career aspirations and digging around their knowledge and thoughts of the industry.

While I would that getting someone in for 5 interviews would be excessive, staying in contact with potential candidates, letting them know when job opportunities may be available and having out of work meetings can be very productive.

A business development manager is going to be your company's first impression on a potential client a lot of the time. They are going to be the ambassadors for your brand and a client will make a decision whether they trust your company or not, based on the strength of this initial meeting. So, it's pretty important to get right :)

Conducting formal interviews with business development managers

Hopefully, by this stage, you know exactly where a BDM will fit into your business and how you can provide support for them, you've got to know your candidates and are confident in their personality and networking ability and you have a "wish list" for things they're going to bring to the table.

From whatever angle you look at it, search marketing is a fast moving game. Rules change, goal posts move, new web developments, advertising opportunities and business opportunities pop up and disappear constantly. While the core of your team may be responsible for identifying which of these is useful to your business, a business development manager will greatly benefit by being able to talk around all of these areas.

For me, there is a definite line in the sand for potential candidates. It is absolutely possible to teach anybody who wants to learn about various aspects of the web, however you can't teach interest. Interest is core to learning, self-learning and questioning.

It makes me wince when we receive CVs that are flooded with how enthused the applicant is by search engines / the internet / (insert latest 2.0 fad), but when you actually sit them down and ask them, it's blanks all the way.

Curiosity is absolutely vital. If you ask somebody if they're interested in "the web", they'll give you a positive answer, unless they've walked into the wrong job interview. A better question may be:

"Can you name a successful website and give reasons to why you think it was successful?"

It sounds like a basic question, but tests a whole range of skills.

1) Has the applicant named an actually successful website?Can they identify the business opportunity of that website?

2) Can they identify how different elements of site design aided this success?

3) Do they know how the website got popular?

4) Do they know what marketing techniques this website has used?

5) Do they know how this website started?

This question links up understanding of clients' requirements, online marketing techniques, site designs, web usage, customer triggers - all of the things you would hope a BDM would meet a client with.

Delivery of targets and hard sell

There's nothing that gets my back up more than a hard sell. Especially in the UK, culturally, hard sell tactics don't go down too well with top-end decision makers. The last thing you want is to send a "used car" search marketing salesman out there.

As a search marketing agency, you will have to work with your client, which means long-term relationships and clarity, not keeping the client at arms length and giving short-term promises.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't expect your business development manager to bring home the bread, after all, you are in business to make money.

It's likely your business development manager will have some sales history and track record. This track record will be need to be taken on face value, evaluate what it is they were selling, what type of people they were networking with and how closely this ties in with your objectives.

Any business development manager should agree to have targets set. These targets can be derived from your business plan and projections for the year, these should be discussed and perhaps reworked until both you and the business development manager agree they are fair and achievable.

There will of course be a "bedding in" time, as with any role. This is especially typical of business development managers, who will need to start gathering contacts, making first meetings and getting in front of clients.

It's not what you know, it's who you know

It is not uncommon for a potential candidate to offer up "existing relationships" with clients they've previously had contact with and bringing these established relationships. It is absolutely true, knowing the right people and having those right people say the right things about you can do endless good for your business, this is something again you will have to take on face value.

It's a very difficult thing to quantify, if the candidate is confident they can bring extra value with existing relationships, then a percentage of this should be added on top of any previously agreed targets.

Hypothetically, if you're pulling between two applicants, one which you believe is the personification of your brand and another which doesn't quite check all the boxes, but comes with an impressive "existing relationships" portfolio, I would always lean towards the former, no matter how tempting the latter may seem.

As we discussed earlier, a business development manager is (hopefully) going to be a long-term and incredibly influential part of your business and needs to be fully aligned with your brand and goals. Short term sales aside, they need to be someone that you can rely on.

Baptism of fire

If you're at a stage where you'd like to proceed with a decision, a great final gauge is to put yourself in the client's shoes. Have your BDM candidate give you a pitch.

You're the client, they're representing your brand, provide an outline of business objectives (this can be for an existing site, a test site, your own site, an actual client) and get them to pitch for it.

I was corralled into a similar situation when I first started Further, having to pitch for online marketing business to my interviewers. Role playing makes me feel uncomfortable, but it really does bring out a different side to everyone and gives you the added pressure of "it all feels a little weird".

Turn up the heat, throw in awkward and curveball questions and see how they handle it.

Two heads are better than one

Lastly, what if they were given absolute free reign? How would they manage new and existing business? Would they be using a specific CRM system? Cold calling? Direct Email? Seminars? Networking breakfasts?

The style of client and business management will likely vary radically from person to person. The method and strategies used to manage business and clients will likely reflect on that person's view on how a business should be run.

Keeping your own cards close to your chest at the beginning can show you how aligned your feelings are.

Checklist for hiring business development managers

1) Specify the job role and how it fits into your business

2) Build a wish list from information from past client experience and business plan

3) Work out how your internal processes will change with a business development manager

4) Make sure you're getting someone who is interested enough to embrace the depth of service you offer

5) Try related ways to find candidates - LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter; if your candidates are here, you're off to a good start

6) Gauge whether this person can "bridge the gap" between client needs and the services you offer - can they complete the jigsaw with the right information?

7) Meet good BDM candidates a few times informally before either party commits

8) Get their input on how they would run things given free reign

9) Let them pitch to you as a client

10) Have a solid communications structure in place between BDMs and other teams

Further proof that Facebook can deliver an audience.

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Facebook. Love it or hate it personally, there is no doubting its success in community building.

The website currently has more than 222 million active users worldwide. To put this into perspective, 1 in 5 people who access the internet is a Facebook user. It is nothing short of a social media phenomenon.

A little history.
Started by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, while a student at Harvard University, Facebook (or The Facebook as it was originally known) was initially built as an online community for the use of Harvard students.

As word spread, it was soon expanded to other colleges and universities, then to all high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over based anywhere in the world.

By June 2008, just over four years since inception, it had attracted 132.1 million unique visitors worldwide displacing the iconic Myspace as the most popular social networking site in the world.

In the UK alone Facebook now has over 17m users (Feb 2009) and numbers are still rising fast!

A new route to targeted marketing.
Aside from its obvious and daily fascination for millions of users, Facebook Ads is a new media channel which allows you to reach relevant audiences in much the same way as direct mail has done for decades.

With direct mail you don’t blanket the whole population with your advertising message, but target a demographic or postcode areas to cut down on wastage, usually renting an opt-in list of profiled names and addresses.

Facebook takes that profiling a stage further and allows you to show your advertising message only to those you believe would be interested in your product or service. In addition to age, sex and geography, the beauty of Facebook is you are able to target via user’s hobbies, pastimes, special interests, even travel preferences.

It can be used in one of two ways.

You can opt for a cost-per-impression campaign whereby you will pay a set amount for every thousand times your ad is exposed. Alternatively, there is a pay-per-click model, (similar to that of Google Adwords), a model by which you only pay if the user clicks through from your ad to your goal. This allows you to essentially gain brand exposure to the entire profiled audience for free.

Another notable and very handy difference from the Google Paid Model is that you can use a visual in your ads to catch the eye.

Having said this, Facebook in general delivers a lower CTR (Clickthrough ratio) than Google Adwords, basically because of the difference in user intent. With Google Adwords, the user is actively searching for a relevant product or service at that very point in time, whereas on Facebook the exposure is on a far more passive basis.

New channel, new challenges.
It all sounds a fantastic opportunity for advertisers, but as with all new channels, agencies are only just starting to understand how they can harness the power of Facebook Ads and the many other social media platforms to provide a cost-effective ROI for the client.

As with any advertising medium, it will not be right for all brands, but what we are discovering here at Further is just how much value it can add to a campaign – and not necessarily on massive budgets.

The recent France Show 2009, which took place 7-9th January at Earl’s Court is a perfect case in instance.

Further’s France Show 2009 campaign.
It was the second year that Further had carried out the online marketing to gain visitor bookings for the consumer show – and one notable addition to this year’s strategy was a small campaign on Facebook to reach a new base of potential visitors to the Earls Court extravaganza.

For this campaign we were interested in users based in the UK who were interested in gourmet food, wine, champagne, holidaying in France, cookery and the Uk’s favourite French chef Jean-Christophe Novelli.

In addition to the demographically targeted ads, an official event page was created for the show and seeded with influential users and past visitors. This group was then advertised on the official website and grew hugely, creating a pre and post show buzz.

So how did it deliver?
Working with a tiny test campaign budget, Facebook was used for 8 weeks and proved its worth in a number of ways.

The France Show ads (which were rotated, honed and tested throughout the campaign);

- were shown over 4 million times to hundreds of thousands of Facebook users.

- received over 3000 clicks, resulting in 241 ticket registrations for multiple tickets and converted at a far lower cost per click than Google Adwords for this event coming in at an average of just £0.36 a click.

- were also responsible for the late stand bookings of two new exhibitors at the event - an unexpected, yet very welcome bonus for the client.

The France Show 2009 itself turned out to be another resounding success, despite the economic climate – with over 25,000 visitors flocking to Earls Court to join in the UK’s biggest celebration of France.

This first Facebook campaign for the event not only delivered over 500 visitors at very low cost, but these were a new audience which other offline and online activity had not reached – therefore as part of an overall strategy, has to be deemed to have been hugely successful and will be key in next year’s strategy, building on the existing user base as a startpoint.

And all for a total Facebook media spend of £1,045!

Tips learnt.

1. Don’t think it can replace all other channels.
Use it to supplement your strategy. It’s still early days and the CTR is lower than Google Adwords.
2. Don’t dismiss Facebook as just for young audiences.
Take a look for yourself. You’ll be very surprised.
3.Test, test and test your ads again.
Don’t just sit there and wait for it to happen.

SEO Keyword Selection and Calculating Value

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen when companies (or agencies) kick off an organic search marketing campaign is the keyword (or key phrase) research. Making comparisons to offline marketing, key phrase research is your market research, even though you’re “one step ahead” in the process.

Traditionally speaking, a marketers’ first job would be to ascertain the audience, get demographic information and try and work out the best placement for their advertisements. Search marketing makes at least part of this job a lot easier. With most search campaigns being based around the big three, Google, Yahoo! And Live, you know where your audience is. The situation for finding the consumer is also flipped on its head, for instance if you’re selling spare parts for Raleigh bikes and you’re targeting the search term “Raleigh Bike Spare Parts” it would be a fair guess that the user is interested in spare parts for Raleigh Bikes, their demographic information is secondary.

This train of thought can lead you down the slippery slope of grabbing your notepad, writing down your “list of keywords” and ten minutes later giving yourself a pat on the back. As you can probably guess, this would be a mistake. Let’s have a look at some of the considerations when building a key phrase list.

Why are you even writing a keyword list?

It’s an interesting question, have you thought about it? Just because you build a keyword list, it does not magically change the range of products or services that you offer. If your website does not offer that service, product or have the relevant information: don’t add it! It is not uncommon for a business to provide a keyword list and when questioned about why they wish to rank for “service x” when they don’t offer it , the reply is “Well, it’s something we’d still like to rank for”. If you don’t have the content, don’t try and rank – you’re wasting your time, the visitors’ time and you’ll achieve very little when you could be focussing your efforts on more fruitful terms.

Focus is one of the main things a keyword list can give you. Even at the early stages of site design and development, producing a “mind map” of key phrases will give you a good idea how to structure your site in a logical hierarchy. Having your website and pages laid out in such a fashion makes it much easier for end users to navigate and increases your chances of ranking your website well within the search engines.

For instance, you may have your core services as top level pages, then specifics within these sectors as sub-pages as you navigate deeper into the site. While this makes perfect sense to the user, you are also presenting the more competitive “core” search phrases, higher up your site, which should give them more link equity and increase their chances of ranking. The deeper sub-pages will naturally be focussed around “long tail” search terms, which will have less competition and may rank particularly well without much concerted effort.

The reason you’re creating a keyword list and looking where you currently rank is simply to provide yourself with a benchmark. There are many different ways to judge the success of a site, with keyword ranking being one of them. It is not unusual for us to look at some analytics for a website and see it has had traffic for over 30,000 search terms within a month, however we would not benefit from tracking every single one of these, so we should already have a core group of valuable terms which we are tracking. These terms may change over time, however looking at a specific part of your site gives you focus for your link building campaign and gives you a good toe in the water as to how your site is performing in the search engines.

The longtail of keywords

If you’ve spoken to an SEO about your website, chances are you’ve heard the word “longtail” thrown into conversation more than once. Longtail refers to the kind of search queries that are very specific, maybe four or five words. Generally longtail terms have relatively low monthly searches and are not particularly competitive (depending on the field) to rank for.

“The Longtail” is something that is discussed at great length in SEO circles but it is actually quite a simple concept. As long as you have good on-page SEO (and by this I’m referring to good use of page titles, header tags and internal linking) you don’t really need to make endless lists of possible longtail variations.

Gone are the days when a content writer is scratching his head working out how to stuff his keyword just once more into the last paragraph, Google (and its smaller cousins) have got really good at rating page relevancy (partially by looking mainly at off-page factors as well), so writing should be done naturally, without trying to stuff keywords in.

If the on-page elements of your site are optimised correctly, it is simply a matter of using a little guidance from a tool such as the Adwords Keyword Tool [link]. Using this tool, add several variations of what you think would be a good (and descriptive) title for your page, set the filtering to exact, no synonyms and suggestions and you’ll see the title that will likely provide you with the most traffic.

On choosing core key phrases

Choosing your “core” set of keywords is another matter completely. While they will drive infinitely more traffic keyword vs keyword, they will likely be far more competitive, tougher to rank for and broader in terms of user intent. It may take you several months of work to achieve a good and solid ranking for a core key phrase, so you need to make sure you’re backing the right horse.

How to identify potential core key phrases

When choosing your core key phrases you will need to consider:

• Monthly searches for these terms

• The competition for these terms (i.e. how much investment it will take to rank)

• The value of each of these terms (how well they convert and how much money they make)

Calculating Monthly Searches

Now that Google has provided a keyword tool that provides real numbers, it is easier than ever to predict potential traffic from specific search terms.

Logging into the Google Keyword Tool will give you this interface:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool Interface

You can enter your primary list of keywords in the box and you may wish to leave the “Use Synonyms” box checked. This along with the “Show new keyword ideas” (in filter options) will allow Google to use its data to give you potential search terms you may not have thought of.

When displaying the results you have a “broad” or “exact” option – there is an important distinction.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool Broad/Exact Match

Broad Match: Will give you results for any key phrases that include the keywords entered. For instance, if you entered “Raleigh bikes” as a key phrase, it would also count searches for any terms that include this term such as “What is the history of Raleigh bikes?”, which may well not be what you’re looking for if you’re selling bike spares!

Exact Match: Tends to be more useful. This will only return results that exactly match the keyword you have entered. This will give you a much truer outlook of the potential searches that are out there.
This should be enough data to make a base list of possible key phrases and perhaps scrub some off your list. Keep in mind that while numbers are good, they do not reflect the value of a particular keyword. Always keep in mind the question “what exactly is the user looking for?” when examining search terms.

Calculating Competition
Calculating the competition and how hard it is to rank for a particular term is a bit more difficult and certainly not an exact science. This is really where you can test the salt of your SEO agency. There are various tools around which can try and estimate “page strength”, which will look at a number of comparative factors and try and estimate how difficult it would be to rank for a particular key phrase. While this can be useful, you will need somebody with SEO experience to use their judgement with any such type of number.

A great tool for looking at the competition is the SEOquake plugin for Firefox. This will allow you to see the vital stats of competitor websites directly from the search results page. The kind of things you want to be looking at are:

• How old is the domain? Older domains tend to be harder to outrank

• Is it a single page ranking or a homepage? Homepages tend to be harder to outrank as they naturally attract more links and indicate websites dedicated around this search term

• How many links are there to the domain? Domains with high link popularity carry authority and can pass this within their website.

• How many links are there to the individual page? Links to the individual page are an indicator of good content.

• How quickly does this competitor gain links? Look at the age of the domain against how many links they have gained in this time

• How many pages do they have indexed? This will give you an idea of their keyword coverage and their longtail strategy

• How does their content compare to yours? Do they offer more content than you? Better prices? More information? To compete you need to be at least as good, preferably better!

All of these factors can be tabled and compared to your current website. This will give you a very basic outline of your strengths and weaknesses in the market. There are some things you can’t do much about (i.e. domain age) and there are other things that can really make a difference (i.e. content).

Once you have established what you need to achieve, you can put this information into your strategy formulation to give you a better idea of timescales.

Calculating The Value of Search Terms

To calculate the value of a search term, you first need to know how much traffic it will deliver. Unfortunately, the numbers gleaned from the Adwords Keyword Tool won’t accurately reflect that. Organic search has click-through rates, which will have a massive impact on how much traffic you will receive. While there are no exact numbers (as things like titles and meta descriptions play a part) this table has proved reasonably accurate when gauging potential search traffic via position in the results:

Average Google Click-Through on Organic Search results

Using your earlier competitor information, your current standing and a dash of SEO knowledge, you should be able to plot a rough roadmap against your target keyterms and how long it will roughly take you to achieve the desired rankings.

The next step is looking at the value of each individual user. This requires some historical data, but can be achieved by measuring the value of an average purchase or an enquiry. Let’s work through an example.

Calculating the Value of Search Terms For An E-Commerce Site

If you don’t have any e-commerce data yet (maybe because you’re not getting any traffic), this would be a great time to look at doing some research with paid search, such as Google’s Adwords platform.

Adwords will allow you to track clicks, conversion rates and basket values, which is exactly the information you need. For this example we will say we have set up a fictional campaign for “buy raleigh bikes”

After buying 1,000 clicks you obtain this data:

1 in 7 visitors purchase a Raleigh bike after coming from this keyword (14.29% conversion)

The average basket value is £150 for each of these conversions

The average profit margin on these sales is 50%

This can tell us that:

Each visitor from this search term is worth approximately £21.43 in revenue

Each visitor from this search term is worth approximately £10.71 in profit

From our keyword research we know that:

“buy Raleigh bikes” has 500 searches per month (made up for ease of this example!)

Using our chart above we can say that:

Ranking #1 for “buy Raleigh bikes” would get us approximately 282 visitors per month

Using our above data we can say that:

Ranking #1 for “buy Raleigh bikes” would be worth approximately £6,043.26 in revenue and £3,021.63 in profit.

Now these are made up numbers for this particular example, but this kind of data will give you an idea on what you can afford to outlay over 12 months to rank for these terms. You could build your top 10 keywords into a timeline, tracking predicted revenue and profit as search positions change over 12 months and apply this to your search campaign.

Once you’ve ascertained your internal cost, you should have a good idea of what you could spend on an SEO campaign and if an agency could achieve these rankings for you at this cost (or lower, hopefully).

This model does not just apply to e-commerce websites. All that is required is the “value of action”, so if you’re a website that generates enquires, work out how many visitors on average you have before you get an enquiry, how many enquiries do you convert, what is the average value of an enquiry and its end profit?

Overview of Calculating Keyword Value:

Step 1: Establish the end average value of the target action (enquiry/purchase etc)

Step 2: Establish how many users it takes on average to achieve this action

Step 3: Calculate the value of a visitor (Action Value / Number of users per action)

Step 4: Establish potential search volume (Adwords Tool Value / Click Through %)

Step 5: Calculate monthly value of search term (Value of visitor * Potential Search Volume)

Step 6: Establish how long it will take to achieve rankings

Working with the above information and an experienced SEO agency, it will be possible to draw up a costed timeline which can give you predicted revenues against SEO spend, which can give you estimates that can greatly help manage expectation and put the campaign in focus.

Top Tips For Keyword Selection

In summary, as takeaway points for keyword selection:

• Only focus on keywords relevant to your site’s content

• Do not guess at keywords: Use tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool, Trends, WordTracker

• Don’t get bogged down in Longtail strategy, make sure your site is SEO friendly and use Keyword data on the fly to guide article titles and headers

• Research your current search position strength and weaknesses compared to your competitors

• Gather data before investing with pay per click platforms

• Build your data into a roadmap to predict costs and revenue

SEO for Misspellings

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

One of the hallmarks of a good SEO agency is when the user has no idea the page they are looking at has been intentionally optimised for search. One of the hallmarks of a great SEO agency is when they actually get a better user experience after an SEO agency has done some work on the site.

It has always been my belief, if your optimisation includes writing keyword stuffed paragraphs, big chunks of tiny text in a footer or in anyway making your site less efficient and user-friendly, then you're doing something wrong.

This did pose an interesting question in regard to misspellings, however. When chasing high volume and competitive key phrases, a lot of the time it can be more beneficial to rank #1 for a misspelling than #4 for the actual term, due to the drop in clicks outside the top three.

Search Position (SERPs) vs. Click Through Ratio

There has been a lot of research into SERP click-through data, with the AOL User Data leak proving an exceptionally popular source of data.

It's impossible to tie down exact percentages of click-throughs, as factors such as meta descriptions, titles, screen resolution and user intent all play a part in eventual clicks.

Adrian Land has merged four pieces of click-through data to come out with this:

Which is one of the more comprehensive pieces of combined research on click-through data. One conclusion, we can draw though is that from any statistics you look through, the top 3 positions gain around 70-75% of all clicks.

With this kind of data, it is easy to see why it may well be better to rank #1 for a popular misspelling, rather than having a lower rank for the actual key phrase.

Should I create pages with misspellings?

This does leave you in a bit of a dilemma. Do you really want to create pages with misspellings on? While it will drastically improve your chances of ranking for these terms, it will make you look.. Well, a bit stupid.

The answer is a definitive, no! While Google used to use the "Did You Mean?" correction in their search results, the search result page for a misspelling now has the standard "Did You Mean?" link, but the top 2 results shown are now for the (correct) "Did You Mean?" spelling.

For instance, there are thousands of people searching for "Karoeke", rather than "Karaoke". The top 2 positions (which is going to be the vast majority of clicks), are now the same for both search. This means creating a page optimised for the misspelling will land you maximum position of 3 in the SERPs.

A "karoeke" search result

While I may not be a fan of all of the guidelines Google imposes, this is a particular masterstroke. By taking away the benefit of creating pages filled with misspellings, Google have set the web up to be rid of potentially millions of pages of sub-par content.

Looks like it's time to run a website spell check!

The Google Sitelinks Guide

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Sitelinks, those little extra links Google sometimes pops under website results have been around for a while now, but there’s a few things you should know about them, such as how you get them, what prevents Sitelinks appearing, the impact they have on your website and their place in search as a whole.

Google’s Vertical Mission
Google’s core mission for their search engine is improving relevancy and increasing how useful search results are. Generally speaking, Google does an excellent job of returning a fairly decent set of web pages on a user query, you can usually find what you’re looking for without a lot of hassle.

However, what about when you’re looking for something really specific? Job listings, plumbers, book reviews, would you use Google? Or would you go straight to Monster.co.uk for jobs, Yell.co.uk for plumbers and Amazon.co.uk for books? Google has to compete with specialist search verticals, which have a much easier time returning more relevant results. Specialist search vertical sites don’t have to second-guess user intent, a user has come to their site for a specific reason and they know what it is. Google, has the much harder job of trying to establish what exactly that user is looking for and what information they want. To get over this, Google has to include a variety of different type of results in the SERPs.

Let’s try this result (simply because it gives a good example, honest) for “posh spice”

Lets look at these results in a bit more detail:

a. Search Suggestions
User behaviour over the last 5 years or so has changed when it comes to search. Whereas the average number of words used in a query used to be 2, this has gone up to 3-4 as searchers have realised that the more specific they are, the better results they get. Google now uses common search data to suggest searches so users can refine their search and Google can use comparative data to return the most relevant search results. So in this case, lots of people that search for “Posh Spice” are also looking for information on how she does her hair and what styles she has, as well as users commonly searching for pictures of her.

b. Image Results
Google has been providing search verticals such as images, maps, businesses, products, video, blogs and documents (to name a few) for a long time. Unfortunately, the majority of searchers either don’t know these verticals exist, or simply can’t be bothered to use them and rely on Google “universal” search to return them the results they are looking for. So, if there’s a good chance people are looking for images of Victoria – why not give them immediately and allow people to jump straight into image search with some previews?

c. Wikipedia
Everyone knows that Google absolutely loves Wikipedia, it has some kind of ranking for just about every search term. Without entering into a dissection of why Wikipedia ranks so well, it is a good example of a non-profit, purely factual information page which contains just about any bit of information you’d want to know about Victoria Beckham in this instance.

d. Video Rankings
After launching Google Video, the powers that be decided to take the leap and Google purchased YouTube, whereas Google Video has become a portal to search a host of different video sites. Similar to images, it is not uncommon for rich media to appear right in search results with a preview as well.

e. Web Pages / News Results
Normally, there is another search vertical – Google News listed for Victoria Beckham (she obviously hasn’t done anything worthwhile of late). Google News listing look like this:

News results, again, are ranked differently to regular SERP results. News results, like Blog results tend to be strongly ranked in chronological order; as Google is well aware freshness is one of the most important factors in news results.

So this one results page gives you:

• Search refinements to make sure you weren’t looking for something specific

• Easy access to pictures of Posh Spice

• Rich media (videos) on Posh Spice

• A page with (as near to) factual information on Posh Spice, all the facts and figures you could want

• Chronological news results, which tell you what she’s been up to recently

• A host of general fan pages, screensavers and websites about Posh Spice

It’s quite obvious that Google’s integration of their search verticals are drastically improving the relevance of their universal search.

How do Sitelinks fit into this?
Going along this line of thinking, it is obvious that Google is trying to reduce the amount of clicks from their search page for the user trying to find what they are looking for. Yet another example of this, is the widely popular Internet Movie Database (IMDB), where people can go and get the latest information about films playing and more importantly, hundreds of user reviews and rating for just about every film that’s ever made the big screen.

A search for “IMDB” gives you this result:

Fairly recently, Google added an “in site” search feature to their results pages. It is highly likely that when a user goes to IMDB, one of their first actions will be to search for the film they want to find out about. Google is aware of this, and aware that on many sites (there’s loads of examples of “in site” search if you have a look about) the first action of a user will be to perform another search.

Above the search box, you have the Google Sitelinks listed. These are pages that Google believes are important on your website and are algorithmically selected to be displayed below your search result. For IMDB, you have Search, Now Playing, Top Movies, New Releases, News, as well as the latest hot topics like The Dark Knight film.

What Sitelinks do for your website
It is common knowledge that the lion’s share of searchers click go to the top 3 results, so you’d think that dominating another few inches of premium search real estate would have a good increase in traffic.
There are really two types of Sitelinks you can get hold of, the first is a “navigational query” block and the other is a “keyword query” block, both are slightly different.

“Keyword Query” Sitelink blocks vs “Navigational Query” Sitelink blocks
Keyword query Sitelink blocks are much harder to achieve than their navigational query block brothers. A keyword query block is when your site is given Sitelinks under their search result for a main keyword search. So for instance, searching for “trainers” gives you this result:

Aside from some sneaky Google shopping results, JD Sports have Sitelinks for this high volume search term, which gives users direct access to the sale items, new trainers, men’s and women’s trainers and the store finder.

The key here is user intent, if a user is searching for “trainers”, it is no way safe to assume that they were specifically looking for JD Sports, however Google has given them direct access to various parts of their site and over double the normal space a 1st place search result would get.

So what extra traffic can you expect from this? Earlier this year, Further scooped a set of keyword block Sitelinks for a website we were performing SEO for. The results were quite astounding:

Achieving Google Sitelinks in mid-February, I have compared the traffic from the month of January (where we had #1 position, with no Sitelinks) to the month of March (where we had #1 position, with 8 Sitelinks), we saw a massive 30% increase in organic visitors from Google, for this one key phrase.

I’ve blanked out the key phrase to protect the client, but it is a non-seasonal search term which we see steady traffic for, regardless of the time of year.

This is in stark contrast to “navigational block” Sitelinks. Achieving Sitelinks for a search term that matches your domain name or company name is relatively easy, but the results are nowhere near as amazing. On average we would notice a 2-5% increase in traffic after achieving a navigational Sitelink block.

This demonstrates the importance of user intent. If a searcher is specifically looking for your website, they’ll likely visit you whether you have Sitelinks or not. Still, an extra 2-5% increase in traffic is nothing to be scoffed at.

How do you get Sitelinks?
While there is no “secret” to getting Google Sitelinks, there are definitely some guidelines you need to follow to make sure you are eligible for the honour.

Make sure your site has clean, crawlable navigation in a logical hierarchical structure
As this is a pretty basic requirement of any half good website, I’d hope it would be something everyone has before going to deep into SEO territory. Basic site design and coding rules apply; having clean HTML links to clearly marked pages (good use of titles & header tags), working down from your homepage, to general sections, down to the specific pages.

You must have a healthy and diverse backlink profile
When dishing out Sitelinks for a key phrase, Google is going to be looking carefully at your internal pages. A healthy link profile will include lots of links to these “deep” pages, not just your homepage. If 99% of your links are pointing at your homepage, it might well suggest to Google that your internal content isn’t that great. Remember; Google focuses on ranking pages, not just sites. If your internal pages have a pathetic amount of links to them, they’re not going to be deemed important enough to warrant Sitelinks.

Incoming anchor text
As you would expect, like with any link building campaign, the anchor text used in links to your website which other webmasters or web users are essentially “tagging” your page with, are important. Anchor text plays a main part in having your site achieve a Sitelinks search query block.

Domain authority & ranking
Needless to say, before you get close to achieving Sitelinks, you are going to have to rank #1 for the term you are targeting. It is not impossible to outrank a site which currently has Sitelinks. I have personally seen e-commerce sites ranking for a specific product, being outranked by the official product website (which had Sitelinks for their product name) and eventually take the number 1 spot in Google, moving the official site down and removing their Sitelinks.

Google must be sure
I recently saw an interesting SERP whereby two different companies shares the same domain name, but with different TLDs (one .com and one .co.uk). Doing a search for the domain name brought back two standard SERP results. One of the companies removed their site from Google’s index and as soon as it was gone, the other company was promoted to Sitelink status. When the other company was reindexed and included again, the company with Sitelinks, lost them. This would bring you to the conclusion that Google must be absolutely sure you are the authority on the search term, whether it’s a keyword search or a company search. For keywords, this means improving your backlinks with targeted anchor text and for domains, it means making sure you own the different variations (it’s less confusing for visitors too!).

In summary, any user-friendly and SEO friendly practise is going to help you attain special listings in Google, whether they are Sitelinks, search boxes or whatever Google will bring into their search results next. Following basic SEO and usability standards for your websites will aid your users and Google will recognise and reward this behaviour. Sitelinks can provide you with a large traffic boost and as with many things SEO, link profiles and link quality play a large part in achieving these listings.

With this under your belt, Further wishes you the best of luck on your road to Sitelinks.

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