Further Search Marketing - Blog

How to get free advertising for your non-profit organisation

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:19:19 GMT

The internet has turned out to be a wonderful thing for non-profits and charities. By setting up a website you can provide the public with unlimited amounts of information about who you are and what you do, wherever in the world they may be.

Sites like JustGiving and BMyCharity allow easy (but unfortunately not free!) online fundraising, which in many cases has transformed the traditional ‘sponsored X’ into something that is far more wide reaching and more beneficial for the charities involved.

Social media is something that (in general) works better for non-profits than for corporations because, for maybe the first time in history, it’s about being remarkable and worthy rather than whoever has the largest advertising budget! Whether it’s a Facebook page or a Twitter account, a LinkedIn profile or a Youtube channel, non-profits are flocking to social media to engage with their audiences.

Here’s something you may not have heard. Did you know that Google give out tens of thousands of pounds worth of free advertising to non-profits every month? And that it’s surprisingly easy to apply for a slice of this free exposure pie?

I’m going to let you in to one of the most unknown opportunities for charities online – Google Grants.

Google Grants are awarded to non-profit organisations in areas that Google are interested in supporting – yes this is a private company and grants are entirely at their discretion. The application process is fairly straight forward however, so there is no harm in applying if there is any chance of being awarded the grant.

Requirements for a Google Grant

• You must have a website that adverts can send people to.
• Your website must not generate revenue via advertising, for example banner adverts or AdSense.
• Your organisation must be a registered charity (by the Charity commission in England and Wales, Scottish Charity Regulator or the Inland Revenue)

There are more detailed requirements which can be reviewed at the relevant Google Grants page.

What do you get?

• Up to $10,000 a month worth of free clicks from the Google AdWords advertising platform.
• Allowed to bid upto $1 per click, on relevant keywords
• Use these free clicks to advertise for donations, fundraising, awareness, volunteering or other charitable causes.
• If you consistently spend the $10,000 a month grant, you can apply for an increase to $40,000 a month!
• Google AdWords campaign is unmanaged by Google, all responsibility for performance is with the organisation.

As you can see, the potential benefit here is huge. What organisation would turn down the opportunity to get a large amount of free advertising, to be used in whatever way best helps you (subject to restrictions, of course!), and to get this every month?

What's the catch?

So, what’s the catch I hear you say? Well... none, really. The application process is fairly painless, although it can take a few months to hear if you’ve been accepted or not.

If accepted, you’re given the keys to a relatively large spend advertising account with no assistance in setting up adverts, or knowing how to gain the most benefit from the opportunity you’ve been given. That can be a bit daunting!

Can I get help?

Thought you'd never ask! Further have now helped several organisations obtain Google Grants and use them effectively to generate awareness, donations and volunteers from around the UK.

If you'd like to talk to us about the process or require assistance, give us a call. We can especially help with the following areas:

• Completing a successful application

• Researching potential areas to target and keywords to bid on

• Setup and intitial optimisation of AdWords campaign, with training so that your organisation can manage the campaign ongoing

• ..or ongoing management by Further to maxmise the benefits of your AdWords advertising.

Further can offer paid search services to registered non-profit organisations at a reduced rate, please contact us for more details.

Click here to visit the Google Grants website, where you can read case studies, application requirements, and ultimately apply for a Google Grant.

Choosing a search agency. 10 simple questions to distinguish the 'dream teams' from the 'donkeys'!

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:51:08 GMT

When selecting a new search agency there are, of course, the basic questions that most clients will ask. You know the sort, those normal questions that agencies are expecting and can prepare for - about things like ‘proven case studies’, ‘client list’, ‘client testimonials’, ‘ethical standards’ ‘in-house or outsourced’......

These questions alone, though, won’t always be enough for you to distinguish the men from the boys, the cream from the cowboys, the dream teams from the donkeys.

What you could really do with, we figured, is a few tricky ones in your armoury that will really get under the skin of the proposition, a few killer questions that just might reveal those beads of perspiration on the brow of even the most confident of pitch presenters.

So here goes, our 10 questions that are designed to do exactly that. We hope you find it useful. And just by way of giving you a benchmark, we have taken the liberty of briefly explaining how we at Further approach each of these areas.

1. “How do you report your results to your clients?”  

Communication between search agencies and clients has never been the best. We hear horror stories from clients who have dealt with other ‘agencies’ in the past all the time.  Some have never met, let alone had a call from, the agency once the work has been signed.  (Yes, sadly it's true.) Others have never had any kind of regular reporting to rely on. Yet it is important that you know exactly how your campaign is performing. Vitally important. Therefore, we’d strongly advise you ask this question and get an agreement on reporting before signing anything contractually.   

At Further we email every client every month with;
i) a full dashboard report detailing traffic numbers and its source by search term and search engine
ii) a rankings report which shows current ranking position for each keyterm you are chasing compared with last month’s position. 
iii) a Summary written by the SEO team explaining the progress during the month and on the revenue gained from our organic search activity.  

As of March 2010, all Further clients will also be able to access ‘live’ reports 24/7 which detail progress across the period of your campaign, right down to the value of each keyword.  

We believe SEO agencies should not simply be judged on rankings, but on the ROI they achieve for their clients. After all, it can be very easy to gain top positions for some terms, but if those terms do not convert for you, then there is little value coming back to you. You are still paying your SEO agency, yet receiving no enquiries or revenue.

 Ideally, when working with ecommerce sites we will have full analytics access, which allows us to report on return on investment so you can instantly assess the value of our expertise.

   2. “Who will be physically carrying out our work?” 

In some agencies you may not meet the person who actually does the work, just the sales person.  That way, you'll never know whether you are receiving senior or junior level attention, or if your work is simply being outsourced.

At Further we have what we believe is a more client-friendly structure. There is the SEO professional who is responsible for your work, and then there is your Account Manager who is there to look after you on a day to day basis. We are happy for you to meet both of the people who are responsible for making your account successful.

All of the Further SEO team are experienced professionals with a proven track record in search, so you know the profitability of your account will not be in the hands of a Junior.

   3. “How many clients do they handle per month?” 

The SEO professional who carries out your work will more often than not have other clients he or she will be responsible for. However, if the agency has 200 clients and only 10 SEO professionals, then chances are you won’t be getting a great deal of attention, no matter what their proposal states.   Do the sums!

At Further each SEO professional will have a small number of accounts they are responsible for as we are conscious of the need for every client to have the necessary time spent on their account in order for us to hit their targets and retain clients longer term.

Another added advantage of working with Further is that each account will also benefit from the input of other members of the team from time to time, in order to bring new innovative solutions to the account to keep you ahead of your competition.

  4. “What is the strategy?”

 Real strategy will be a term that is alien to some search providers.  However, the only way an agency can achieve your goals is to apply some science.  They should know about your business, your objectives, your competition for search positions. By researching and mapping you against your competitors, they should be able to work out what it will take to hit your target. The resulting strategy should outline the activity month by month and indicative expectations from the campaign. That strategy should be bespoke to you, and not an off-the-shelf programme.   

5. “How does the monthly cost relate to your input?” 

Often your proposal will state a monthly SEO retainer cost. Don’t be afraid to ask exactly how this is split down to ensure you are getting full value from your investment. 

At Further, we ensure that if we say your account requires, for example, 6 days a month, then  it will be worked on by the SEO team for at least 6 days a month. The day to day services of the Account Manager are included in this retainer cost and do not eat into your SEO budget. We invest in Client Services because it leads to longer, stronger, closer client relationships, so it is in our interests to do so. 

 6. “Are you working for anyone else in my sector?” 

On one hand it may sound great if an agency is already working within your sector, especially if they have performed well as it will give you the reassurance that they know your industry.  But while knowing and working in your industry is great, you have to be very careful if they are currently working with a direct competitor of yours and chasing the same keyterms. After all, there can only be one No.1!  

Unless you have an agreement for keyword exclusivity, then this is not an ethical situation and one you should think very carefully about.  So, in summary, it can sometimes be a help if the agency knows your industry, and if they have had a good track record with a past client who is a competitor. However, beware if they are currently contracted to a keyword-comparative competitor. You can do without a provider with split loyalties.

  7. “How often would we meet to review strategy and results?” 

Any agency worth its salt will offer its clients face-to-face meetings at set points during the campaign to discuss results, activity, changes in the market place and to agree any new direction in the strategy which may be required. Again, this is an area you should interrogate the agency on and ensure it is part of your agreement, because it is crucial that all stakeholders are understanding of the progress and the strategy being followed.

At Further we always offer client review meetings and the frequency of these meetings will depend on the nature of the campaign and client. Some clients meet with us twice a year, others every three or four months.   

8. “ How many of your clients have been with you longer than a year?” 

Admittedly search, because it is relatively new in the relative scheme of things and has an element of the intangible about it, has a tendency for churn. Love it as we do, it is admittedly not as sexy or real as a clever, beautifully shot double page spread in colour with your logo on it - a masterpiece that you can proudly show around the office.

Having said that, there’s churn and there’s churn - and some SEO agencies are far better at pleasing and retaining their clients than others. Whether it is via results alone, or client service and communication allied to performance, client retention is a pretty fair way to distinguish between agencies. 

At Further 82% of clients who came on board before December 2008 are still with us over a year later.

   9.”If we don’t like you, when can we get out?” 

We come across potential new clients who are ‘locked’ into expensive contracts long after the relationship has broken down irrevocably. Is this really fair on both parties?  

At Further we look at things differently. We believe we perform better when we enjoy healthy, open and honest relationships with our clients. Therefore, as SEO often requires an initial few months before its performance can be measured properly, we offer clients the opportunity to cancel at pre-set points.  

10. “Will you guarantee us rankings positions?

” The trick question, of course.  While we would all love to say 'yes' to this, no agency on this planet can guarantee  organic search rankings. If they say they can, then throw them out straight away, there's no more to say.

Just maybe this should have been the first question! It could save you a lot of wasted time!

Using seasonal search trends to boost your SEO

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:18:40 GMT

We all know that throughout the year keyword search volumes will go up and down. This is all perfectly normal and in most cases perfectly logical. A number of factors influence these trends and they vary from sector to sector. Planning for these seasonal trends is worth bearing in mind with regards to your search strategy.

Retail companies will generally be well ahead of the game with regards to seasonal trends, for instance increasing staff and stock levels to match the increase in demand. Other classic factors influencing search volumes include pay day, the economy, news and the weather.

Stay frosty and alert

In one way or another all of us in the UK were (and still are!) affected by the 'The Big Freeze'. I’m a big fan of Winter which has even gained me the title of ‘Winter Man’ in the office. This love of the snow has precipitated into my Twitter activity. It wasn’t long before snow report tweets were firing off amongst the UK twitterati helped by the popular hashtag - #uksnow. A clever bod known as Ben Marsh developed a Google Maps mashup which incorporates snow reports via Twitter status updates. It’s easy to use and only requires a simple tweet format: Add the #uksnow hashtag, add the first part of your post code and then add a rating out of 10. The results from these tweets were then plotted live on to a map of the UK.

Photo credit: (NEODAAS/University of Dundee) Photo: PA

Snow SEO joke

This simple concept has provided a huge boost to Ben’s link credentials. His new incarnation of the snow mashup found at uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk currently beholds an impressive Google Page Rank of 6. A quick look at this subdomain’s 3k+ inbound links shows a diverse range from high authority blogs and online newspapers such as the Guardian.

Photo credit: andriux-uk

Vision decision

It’s time to think ahead. How can your website take advantage of upcoming seasonal trends? Why not take a look at your keywords in Google Insights for a detailed view of trends. This application provided by the search giant allows you to look at search trends by country and also provides an overlay of news events. The tool also allows you to view related search terms and rising searches too.

Photo credit: ConstructionMovement

Caveat emptor

Creating this buzz isn’t easy though. Link baiting as it’s known the search industry is a fine art which relies on many different factors. These include knowing the right people, impeccable timing and even analysing the psychological reasons why people will want to link to you. Your initiatives don’t have to solely rely on a buzz worthy link bait idea, you could also create and promote content in preparation for the next ramp in searches.

Why not get in touch with Further today to see how we can combine our knowledge of development, link building and Social Media to help give your website a seasoned boost.

Have you seen this man?

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:37:18 GMT

Chances are this man may seem oddly familiar to you. Whether it's the reassuring glow of the perma-tan, the designer stubble, or the winning smile – something might ring a bell.

For those of you not familiar with this man, may I introduce 'stock man', hereafter known as 'Keith'.

Keith is perhaps one of the most commonly used stock photo models. He will be instantly recognisable to any graphic designer who has undertaken picture image research. He can often be found as an 'attractive young businessman' but can also be seen at home as a 'family man' as well as part of an 'attractive couple.' Keith can also be seen scuba diving, partying, having a massage, as well has countless other poses. He is a true polymath and man of our times.

Keith can be found plastered across micro-stock photography sites such as iStock, Fotolia and Comstock. These sites are often used by designers as they much cheaper than traditional libraries. Images will typically cost between one and ten pounds as opposed to perhaps several hundred pounds from Getty Images for a similar shot.

This is not to say that the photographs of Keith are of poor quality. They are actually of a very high commercial standard and stand up against anything from there more expensive libraries. The photographer is a chap called Yuri Arcurs who is otherwise known as the 'world's leading microstock photograper'. He apparently sells over 1 million individual licences a year.

Yuri prides himself on having a 'unique and recognisable style'. So that equates to over a million 'unique' designs that use his photography each year.

Most clients will stipulate that they want a professional looking website. Its a fair request, but should really be a given when employing an agency. A generic 'professional' online presence will only take you so far.

If you have faith in the value of your brand, and what it says about your business, you should think very carefully about who you use to implement this through design. A good agency will work hard to ensure that your brand is not watered down through the lazy use of imagery or through lack of time spent creating a unique presence.

I'm going to stick my neck out here to say that if your website/brochure/leaflet has Keith in it then the people doing your design probably aren't working hard enough for you. It's a bit like looking around a house you think you might buy and seeing where the owner has put a shelf up 'on the wonk'. It's not a deal-breaker in itself, but it makes you wonder what else they have done shoddily.

I would love to know if you have seen Keith in your travels around the internet. I have found a few examples to get us started and would love to know where you have spotted him.

Duplicate Content and the Canonicalisation Tag - Pete's SEO Corner

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:25:52 GMT

Duplicate content on sites is a problem which can be easily avoided yet still occurs on many sites on the web. One of the most commonly affected are database driven e-commerce sites with many products in the store. The problem occurs when a product is sometimes placed into more than one category, creating different webpages with duplicate content.

Google

Google doesn’t like webpages with very similar content. When the search engine spider crawls two webpages with very similar content, the search engine will display only the one webpage it deems the most relevant.

Google: Not happy at the duplicates

Since creating content takes time and a little bit of imagination, some unscrupulous webmasters will try to manipulate their search engine rankings by deliberately duplicating content across multiple webpages or domains. Sites that host 100% duplicate content like this usually get penalised in some way with a hit taken to the site’s ranking in the SERPs. It is important to note however that sites with bits of duplicate content are not put under any kind of penality, the duplicate pages are simply filtered out of search results.

Google seeks to deliver the most relevant and useful information for users and there is little point in them showing 5 pages in the top 10 which contain the same information, if the first page didn't have the information your looking for, why burn more SERP space?

Another possible problem is that if people start deep-linking to your webpages you run the risk of splitting incoming links between the two pages, which.

What you can do

There are a few things you can do to combat this:

Site Structure

The best way is simply to change the site structure so that you remove all the multiple URLs and only place the product under one category. An example is if you had two webpages about selling red felt tip pens:

http://www.example.com/pens/red-felt-tip-pen.html
http://www.example.com/products/colours/red/red-felt-tip-pen.html

In this example, the red felt tip pen page is categorised under “pens” and also under “products>colours>red”. What you could do here is remove the categories in the second URL however this isn’t always feasible and doing so may impact usability.

301 Redirect

Another way is to choose the most relevant page and then 301 redirect all the other duplicate pages to that page. This way, users who visit the other pages will be presented with the 301 destination page. Also, if there are links coming into the other pages then some link equity will be passed over. Although, if there are a lot of links you are still better off getting the site owners to link to the new URL.

Canonicalisation Tag

Last year, Google released a new meta tag called the Canonicalization tag. So coming back to the example of a site selling red felt tip pens but the same page has multiple URLs:

http://www.example.com/pens/red-felt-tip-pen.html
http://www.example.com/products/colours/red/red-felt-tip-pen.html
http://www.example.com/products/pens/red-felt-tip-pen.html
http://www.example.com/products?category=pens&color=red
http://example.com/shop/index.php?product_id=21&highlight=red+pens&cat_id=1&sessionid=99

In this example, the shortest URL and also the easiest to remember and type in is the first one. If we want to tell Google that this page is the one we want displayed in the SERPs we would write the canonicalization tag as:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/pens/red-felt-tip-pen.html">

This little snippet of code goes in the <head> section of the webpages with the duplicate content and basically tells the search engine that the specified page is the page which should be shown in the search engines. This removes the risk of being penalised or having multiple search results showing what is essentially the same page under different URLs.

These are the main things you can do to get around issues with duplicate content. The Google Webmaster tools help section covers them in more detail.

SEO Tip #41: Monitor non-linked mentions

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:10:36 GMT

Today's SEO Tips entry was via SharkSEO.

"Here's an SEO tip - set up a Google alert for "Brand Name" -link:site.com, get emailed when someone mentions you with no link"

Staying on the ball with people that are talking about you can be a great way to gain more links. Get in touch with them and see if they'll be kind enough to give you some link love as well as the mention.

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 #40: Monitor your own site with Google Alerts
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

Spark Something - Or Don't

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:31:00 GMT

I was reminded this week of the Sony Ericsson TV Spot campaign (watch it here) back in October for their Satio model. The TV advert was a colourful and inspirational ad, by Saatchi & Saatchi with the call to action, "Search 'Spark Something'".

At its height, it drew around 20,000 UK searches near the end of October.

"Spark Something" search trend on Google

Here's the problem. Even now, searching for "spark something" shows that Sony Ericsson has almost no search visibility whatsoever.

"Spark Something" in Google - Sony Ericsson ranks #10

"Spark Something" in Bing - Sony Ericsson doesn't rank on the first page

"Spark Something" in Yahoo - A number 1 - hurray!

The situation was even worse during the peak of the campaign, with Sony Ericsson securing no search traction whatsoever.

Interestingly, Google and Yahoo have respectively ranked two different pages from Sony Ericsson. It looks like Google's got the right one and I'm personally quite suspicious about the page Yahoo has ranked.

While it's common knowledge that meta tags don't help you rank in Google, they certainly affect how many users are going to click through to your site and Sony let this appear in their search snippet:

Search snippet from Google

I wouldn't like to guess how much money the TV spot took to create, film, edit, produce and air, but I'm disappointed (probably like many searchers) that the SEO requirement was totally overlooked. The only call to action in the advert is for people to search and Sony Ericsson just aren't there, even now.

What could Sony Ericsson have done? I'm quite confident that anyone with even a basic knowledge of SEO could have got this page to rank well, a start would have been optimising the title tag (or just a vaguely sensible title with a vague nod to the advert would have been a start) and sorting out their meta data to let users know they've found the right place. Any developer worth their salt would have taken care of this as a matter of course; it's more of a usability issue than SEO.

I'm confident Sony Ericsson could have achieved a number 1 ranking without any link building, as well. With their weighty homepage, a link pointing to their "Spark Something" campaign with correct anchor text would have most likely done the trick.

I'm sure it's not the last time we'll see example of search-action advertising going wrong, but it's painful to see a campaign fail when 15 minutes of SEO work could have kept it on course.

New Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:33:17 GMT

Rob recently posted a piece about the importance of page load time, and offered up a range of useful advice and tips as to how you might work to improve your user experience by working to improve your site.

Interestingly, Google has recently delved into its pocket and pulled out one small and charitable penny as a nod to those struggling with this issue. Specifically, they have introduced an alternative version of the Google Analytics tracking code which will at least help those with fact-packed pages to record more accurately the visitors that do patiently wait for the reward that their pages seek to share...

The New Google Analytics Async Code?

Earlier this month Google announced the BETA launch of the new Asynchronous (Async) Analytics code. For the non-developers out there the benefit of this code relates to the page load time. To date, the guidelines for code implementation meant that the existing GA.JS version would sit at the bottom of your html, so that it would not slow the load time of the webpage content. However, if a visitor passed from one page to another prior to the entire page loading it was possible that tracking would not capture their visit.

The Async code, as the name suggests, provides a solution to this issue because it enables the tracking code to be loaded in parallel with the loading of the web page. This means that it is now possible to place the tracking code higher in the html without impeding the user experience, and thus ensure that you capture visits you may have otherwise missed.

Do I have to implement this code immediately?

No. The Async code provides Google Analytics users with an alternative tracking methodology, the existing code will continue to work. The urgency in implementing the Async code lies with the performance of your web pages. Evaluate whether page load time is an issue on your site (do your web pages have lots of content slowing the load time, or do you have exceptionally long pages on your site?).

If page load time is an issue for you, then implementing Async code is a solution that it will be beneficial for you to turn your attention to sooner rather than later. Bear in mind though that if you have E-Commerce tracking on your site this will also need re-working.

Conversely, if your web pages perform well with fast load times you may not need to rush to implement the Async code immediately, remember, the Async code has been developed as an alternative tracking solution to solve a specific issue, it does not necessarily hold inherent, immediate value. Factor the transition to Async code into your overall web development plans, and if you are working on a number of sites, ensure the new code is your default choice hereon in for the purposes of best practice.

Why page speed is important - SEO for 2010

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:38:19 GMT

As users, we all get frustrated when a website seems to take an age to load. With broadband now so common and speeds increasing all the time, we expect websites to load with near instantaneous speed.

When was the last time you checked how quickly your site loads? As a new user I mean, with no images, css or external scripts cached, and on a standard 512k broadband connection.

Why fast loading web pages are important

PPC
'Landing page quality score' has long been a factor in overall quality score for AdWords, which helps determine how much you have to pay per click and where you'll appear in results. As a slow loading website provides a poor user experience, it's reasonable that slow load times will negatively affect this quality score, costing you more money.

SEO
At the recent PubCon, Google's Matt Cutts (head of web spam) stated that page load time may well be a ranking factor in 2010. Whilst this is not likely to be a major factor, it is likely that sites which take unusually long to load will experience reductions in rankings.

Conversion rates
It's common sense to expect that a site which loads slowly may be negatively affecting conversion rates. Users get frustrated, and may not complete their purchase or enquiry.. or just click back to search results if a page is taking ages to appear. Recent research by Forrester suggests that this issue is becoming ever more important for website owners.

• 47% of consumers expect to see a page loaded in 2 seconds or less
• 40% would abandon their visit if page load takes more than 3 seconds
• 52% stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty

and when faced with a poor online shopping experience,

• 79% are less likely to purchase from that site again
• 27% are less likely to buy from that retailer off-line

In summary, the speed in which users can view and navigate your website is becoming ever more important. Websites which have a poor user experience because of slow loading pages are potentially missing out on search traffic and sales.

What causes slow loading times?

Hosting
An important business website hosted on a cheap, shared hosting account is often a false economy. Shared hosting, especially with cheap providers who often overfill their servers, means that you are sharing resources with an unknown amount of other websites. Some of these may be experiencing high traffic or be using scripts that monopolise server resources. If your website generates revenue for your business, it deserves to be hosted on a server which will deliver performance.

Location of hosting is also worth bearing in mind. The nearer a server is located physically in relation to your customers, the less distance and fewer 'hops' the data has to travel to appear on their screens. This may well mean that, for UK businesses, a UK based hosting provider is the best option. Although often cheaper, a server based in the US (especially the west coast) will normally add a second or more to every request a browser in the UK makes.

Page size and included files
Obviously, the larger a page is in terms of kilobytes, the longer it will take to send to visitors. Page size can be reduced by removing unnecessary content, including HTML comments, and by optimising code - for example using CSS based layouts instead of HTML tables.

Included files also add directly to page load times, whether they be images, CSS stylesheets, Flash movies or scripts such as JavaScript. These can all be optimised to reduce filesize, but it's also worth bearing in mind that every request for an external file causes it's own delays to loading time due to a new request being sent to the server. This can be minimised by using techniques such as 'CSS Sprites' for image rollovers, combining multiple CSS files into one and combining and 'minimising' external JavaScript files.

Tools to test and improve loading time

Simple
Web Page Analyzer
Easy to use web tool which tests a page loading time and presents results and recommendations, along with overall load time on different connection speeds. Bear in mind that this website is based in the US, so if your website is hosted in the UK the loading times will be inflated slightly by the distances involved.

Image Optimizer
Manually upload images, and Image Optimizer will return a smaller image with similar quality. Simple, but slower than a solution such as Google Page Speed (below)

Medium
Google Page Speed
This tool from Google is a plugin for FireBug, which means you'll need the FireFox browser and the Firebug plugin installed to use it. It's well worth doing, as you can analyse your page and Page Speed will present a comprehensive list of issues along with suggestions. It even does some optimisation for you, for example providing links to optimised versions of your images where appropriate!

Advanced
CSS Sprites
Combining several images into one and then using CSS to display the part needed on your page can cut down on total image size, as well as effectively reducing the amount of requests each page load requires. Getting the CSS working 100% and the sprite image laid out effeciently can be tricky, but is very worthwhile if your design uses lots of small navigational images. csssprites.com is a website which will automate some of this for you, but it appears to be currently down for maintenance.

More resources
Google have recently launched a collection of resources and information about improving site speed. It can be found at http://code.google.com/speed/

Yahoo also have a good reference and tips for optimising site speed at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/

[Update 2:25pm] Google have just posted about a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools which presents site specific feedback including, interestingly, aggregated data on actual load times of your visitors using the Google toolbar. With the amount of noise Google have been making about site speed over the last week, it seems evident that they are taking the issue of site speed very seriously.

Development Mistakes That Affect SEO

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:30:40 GMT

Here is a small array of developer mistakes which could have big complications to your site’s performance in the search engines. Web design and development companies all work in different ways with some having more or less SEO knowledge than others. And some simply make a lot of mistakes. Below is a guide of some of the ways your site can be affected from these errors.

The noindex, nofollow meta tag
There are a number of ways you can inadvertently fail with this tag especially when getting your brand new website off the ground. One of the ways of falling at the first hurdle is the often overlooked meta robots directive. The meta robots tag in question is one which tells all search engines to not index and not follow the links on your pages. Meta tags provide a range of information to search engine spiders to provide information about the page.

The noindex, nofollow meta tag looks like this: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

The noindex part basically means ‘don’t index this page’. One of the goals of good search marketing strategy is to ensure all your pages are indexed. This is particularly important for large sites as this will help with your long tail traffic (unless you’re tactically removing various pages - see Pete’s search engine spider post for more info).

A number of dynamic websites are built with global includes which allow you to easily control parts of your site from one file. If this line of code is inadvertently added to your header file on every page then it will affect your entire site.

The nofollow part turns all links on the page into nofollowed links. Various (and free) online SEO tools, highlight nofollowed links in the browser by changing the appearance of the link. Not allowing your own site to pass relevance to other pages is also a big hindrance with your search engine rankings.

photo credit: leoboiko

Extra care should be taken when switching from testing to live versions of your site – double checking meta tags in header includes.

Temporary Web Space
Many web development companies will begin building their websites in a test environment. This differs from company to company. Some companies will work on local servers which allow testing of the site. Some web hosting solutions will come with their own temporary web space. If you’re using this temporary (but live) space for site testing be careful. I’ve seen in the past where a client has been allowed to populate their CMS on the temporary web space. Once this goes live it’s been uploaded to it’s correct live location. The problem being if there’s still rogue URLs pointing to the temporary web space URL’s then the web spiders will follow these links and start indexing the temporary site. This can cause huge duplicate content issues.

There are a number of ways to fix this issue. Add your temporary web space to the various Webmaster Tools services from the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and request removal of all URLs. Also add the tag to the header of each page. Another way of checking once your site goes live is to use ye olde Xenu Link Sleuth. This piece of software will crawl your website similar to a search engine robot and will alert you of any issues on the site such as broken links.

photo credit: Kapungo

Live development testing environment
There are other issues where the meta noindex, nofollow tag can cause problems. Some web developers will work on their live testing site with the noindex, nofollow tag applied. This isn’t bad working practise but it does mean you need to take extra caution. However it can be all too easy to forget to remove this when the all important ‘go live’ deadline arrives.

photo credit: Titanas

Once again proceed with caution when putting your site live.

Robots.txt
Never underestimate the power of the robots.txt file. This little fella can cause problems without you even knowing it. It sits in the root of your web folder and it kindly advises the major search engine spiders what content on the site it has it has permission to crawl. It’s not required to have this for your site, but it does come in handy for disallowing bots to areas of your which you don’t want crawled. The extreme of this being:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

photo credit: kevindooley

These 2 small lines of code above tell the search engine robots to not crawl your content. This file can easily and inadvertently be uploaded from the testing environment to your live location of your site. You’ll have some time to rectify this issue if it goes unspotted. After this file goes live search engines, like Google, will slowly start de-indexing your pages depending on the amount of pages you have on your site and the amount that’s currently indexed. The implications of losing not just your deep pages but your home page can be very destructive to your existing and future search traffic.

So how can you avoid all these errors? Firstly make sure you've employed a web agency with a handle on SEO or get someone in to oversee the build. Make sure measures are in place to avoid unauthorised changes to site files. Use a browser plugin which highlights nofollowed links can also help make you aware of problems. Failing that, consider a professional SEO audit to see how you can improve the usability and search effectiveness of your site.

Search Engine Spiders Petes SEO Corner

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:40:52 GMT

In previous articles we looked at ways to optimize your site to make it rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This month, we will look at the force behind what makes your site rank – the search engines themselves and how we can use this knowledge to make your sites rank better.

How do search engines work?

The first thing search engines have to do is to create a database of all the web pages on the web. In order to do that, they use programs called web spiders (or web robots) to follow links on web pages and create an index of them. Search engines will aim to serve up the most relevant pages to users and as we covered in previous articles, there are SEO techniques which will help your site rank better.

Sitemaps

One of the first things you need to do is ensure that the search engines are able to crawl your site effectively. One way to do this is to ensure your site has good site architecture. That is, ensuring that users can access the most important pages through the links near the homepage of your site. For example, if your site is selling trainers it would be bad form to bury the trainers product pages five links away from the home page. If your site is user-friendly, it will naturally also be web crawler friendly as well, since crawlers, like users will follow links to get to pages.

Another good method is to use a sitemap which is basically a list of pages of a website which are accessible to search engines.

Sitemaps come in two forms: HTML and XML.

HTML Sitemap

An HTML sitemap is the older version of sitemap which is a page on your website which is linked to from the homepage. Search engines can then access this sitemap from the homepage which then provides a gateway to all the other pages on the site.

The advantage of HTML sitemaps is that they can be easily read and used by humans to access certain sections of your site. The disadvantage however, is that on larger sites with an extremely large number of links, a web crawler might stop crawling links halfway down the page. Also, even if you create a sitemap with sub-pages, you are creating a further buffer to web crawlers as they are less likely to crawl pages, the deeper a page is from the homepage, especially on new sites.

XML Sitemap

The other type of sitemap comes in XML format. Google introduced this some time ago to help search engines crawl websites easier. XML sitemaps are meant only to be read by search engines and aren’t easily usable by humans but are the most efficient way to get a large site crawled.

All the major search engines support this protocol so having a sitemap will mean that the search engines will have updated information on your site. Even Yahoo uses this as well, their own version was urllist.txt however it now favors an xml sitemap. Bear in mind however, that just because you submit a sitemap, it doesn’t mean that all the links will be crawled and in turn, not all crawled links will be indexed – only the ones Google deems important your site. An XML sitemap can be easily generated by any of the free and paid programs on the Internet.

The disadvantage of XML sitemaps is that they are not as useful to smaller sites as the small number of internal links will mean that the site will be crawled pretty easily. Additionally, having an XML sitemap will remove the possibility of testing your site architecture since an XML sitemap will present the crawler with all the pages on your site without it having to crawl your site for links.

Robots.txt

Naturally, you might think that you would want all the pages of the site to be crawled. However there are some cases where you would actually want to block access to some parts of your site. Since the majority of search engine ranking is automated, sometimes search engines get it wrong and may display web pages such as your site’s privacy policy or terms and conditions which you may not want ranking for key terms. So although you may think you are wasting link juice by robotting out certain pages, some cases such as Google displaying your privacy policy as an indented listing below your homepage is such an example.

Another common thing to prevent crawler access to are dynamic search results in your site since these pages less relevant in the SERPs.

This is where robots.txt comes in. You can use this text file to specify how much access you want to give the search engine robots to your site.

For example, the following code allows search engine robots unrestricted access to all pages on your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The * in the code above means “all” so refers to all crawlers. There is no parameter specified after “Disallow:” so as it is, all crawlers are allowed access.

While the following tells ALL robots to keep out:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The forward slash here refers to the base directory which basically means the whole site.

The following code tells robots to block access to a specified file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

In the code above, file.html is located in a sub-folder called “directory” which can be accessed from the base directory.

Robots.txt isn’t the only way to block crawler access to a file though. In the previous article about meta tags I explained about how you can use meta tags to do the same thing. Robots.txt offers more flexibility, and allows you to have a central area from which to set crawler access to your site. The downside to this is that people can see exactly which pages you don’t want crawlers to see, and will have more information about your SEO strategy.

In general, it is good practice to have a robots.txt file since apart from regulating crawler access you can also do other things such as specify the location of your XML sitemap file. XML sitemaps are useful only if you have a large site, although they are still no substitute for good site architecture.

New police force for websites. Now thatll be interesting!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:19:37 GMT

According to an article in Revolution this week, the good old Advertising Standards Authority could be set to become the new regulatory authority which will, for the first time, scrutinise the content on brand websites.

My reaction?

Well, I’m all for accuracy, good taste and having everyone fight it out on a level playing field.
So in theory, terrific. I'm all for it.

But theory is one thing, reality quite another, as we all well know.

I’m sorry but I speak from experience here, having spent most of my career in the offline advertising world, many years of that as a copywriter and Creative Director. I have witnessed the ASA from afar, and on the rare occasion, the ‘raisin-sharp’ teeth of the regulatory machine close up.

Time and again we would hear the same story. Campaign starts running, consumers start complaining – or more likely, competitive brands under the guise of consumers start complaining. By the time enough complaints have been made to signify a reason for the ASA to even look into it, let alone meet about it, then pass judgement on it, before finally handing out the punishment, the campaign has finished.

‘Hold on a minute’, I hear you say, ‘that’s not a fair comparison, ad campaigns are different from websites in that the content is often permanent, so this would not be a reason to doubt the proposed move.’

Very true, but I am merely trying to give an insight into the speed and efficacy of this less-than-progressive body. To be fair, much of this is probably due to the lack of resourcing and bodies at the ASA – although the industry does pay a levy to fund the organisation. Obviously not enough!

Even on the occasions they did flex their muscles, it was more Mr Muscle than David Hay.

As an avid subscriber to the must-read ‘ASA weekly newsletter’ in those days, I couldn’t believe the number of times the same brands (some big household names) appeared over a 12 month period – yet the punishments never seemed more than a slap on the wrist and a polite request to change the offending sentence or photo. To see the serial offenders getting away with this on a month by month basis hardly gave the arbiters of best practice any encouragement to keep playing by the rules.

And that is precisely my worry with this new proposal for the same ASA to police our online industry.

All sorts of questions spring to mind. Questions such as how many additional ASA people will Google need to fund with millions of websites out there? Will we get to the stage where we all have to follow a little book like the Code of Advertising Practice (CAP) just like ad agencies do? Will every piece of content we are unsure about need to be passed by the ‘we only meet once a week’ CAP committee before we can even put it live?

Just think about the time, the admin, the sheer loss of efficiency, let alone the extra cost we will have to pass on to our clients footing the bill. And all the time, those of us that will suffer will be the very ones that care enough to stay within the rules. Those that don’t will carry on overstepping the mark regardless - unless the ASA’s punishments and powers under Google’s guidance can be radically overhauled. Surely they will need to look at ‘penalising’ or ‘banning’ sites for repeat offences rather than the polite request to make the required content amendments.

I’m sorry but it’s the only way I could ever see it working, but such a transformation just doesn’t sit with what I have come to know about the culture, ethos and power of the ASA.

We all know it is dangerous to pre-judge and maybe, just maybe, the ASA has changed in the four years I’ve been ‘online’ and just maybe all I’ve spouted off here is nothing more than an out of date viewpoint.

I sincerely hope it is, but somehow I can't quite imagine it. Let's wait and see if I'm right.

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.