Gerrys opinions...

SEO = SnakeOil Salesmen ...

2009-10-19T13:37:00.004+01:00

Firstly I had no idea what snake oil actually is (quick glance on Wikipedia changed that), anyhow it seems that people in the SEO industry are frequently accused of being snakeoil sales people.
Secondly the SEO industry IS filled dodgy salesmen over promising over charging and under delivering.

Whilst the majority of SEO is actually relatively simple - a good seo'er has to understand the psychology of the search team at Google, the users of Google and how to target the market you need. So what does an SEO guy do that makes him actually worth money? He makes sure your market can find your site, this is done by making sure that what ever they are likely to type into a search engine you are likely appear , not definitely, but likely...

Typically an expert in SEO won't be talking about rankings but will understand that good positions in search engines will drive traffic, and he will understand the long tail, it may be better to rank for "compare insurance" than "insurance", maybe not in terms of traffic but in terms of converting traffic.

It maybe common sense (SEO) but brands including Samsonite, McDonalds and NSPCC have failed in some of the basics and someone like me could help them drive a fantastic amount more traffic easily by following some of the basic SEO... I believe that nearly 85% of sites have substantial room for improvement, so I guess this means they need to employ a snake oil salesman?

Personal post ... my daughter laughing -

2009-10-08T22:22:00.002+01:00

Its been pretty cool being a dad at times, though completely exhausting - tonight we gave her a bath, and she wanted to pretty much swim underwater perpetually...

Anyhow some moments make it worth it ...

XML Sitemaps - good idea - badly implemented...

2009-10-04T21:24:00.004+01:00

Firstly - I think that sitemaps are a good idea, badly executed. It seems that most sitemaps are developed with little thought for the actual usage of them.

Why I think they are a bad idea from Google?
Well, they need to be in an XML format which means that a huge number of less experienced website owners can't easily produce them except by using one of the many tools that scans the website and produces a snapshot of the pages. If this snapshot is perfect, its pretty much the same as Google sees your site, if its not then it could potentially be worse - typically people upload these without reviewing them at all ... duplicated warts and all ... Basically there is little point...

For it to work right the page needs to be linked into your CRM and created with time and energy put into getting it right, particularly the 3 optional variables, priority, changefreq and lastmod... these aren't static numbers and should change as the page changes, some pages will be changed regularly, some won't, but this in itself can change (imagine a page on the labour conference, won't change for 10 months, then almost daily for two). The date will need to be changed everytime the page contents changes (NOT the file, the contents, most sites are fed from a database now), and sitemaps shouldn't contain CSS, JS and all the other files except for those you want indexed (including PDF's).

An XML file almost seems like the best option, it fits the description - the problem is the that most of the people who create or manage or websites don't have a clue and so produce websites without any real consideration, a "fire and forget" solution, oddly this seems to include people who are normally quite savvy.

Seriously - the option of just putting up a simple text file of all your pages ... something that is easy for anyone to create and manage - more advanced XML files available to those who can.

Still - I do like the canonical tag, but I have already seen a sites implement it wrong enough that it will cause problems for them (such as including any parameters you put into it - doh!)

Gerry

Suspicious minded ? - ticket drop ? SEO events in Leeds...

2009-07-23T15:45:00.005+01:00

we got 'budget approval' for two tickets to an SEO event in Leeds - ThinkVisibility, unfortunately we have a team of 4 people - and to be honest I am feeling that despite the success of previous ones, the list of speakers isn't quite as good as, well previous ones ... A couple of golden speakers but I want all 4 of us to go along - mainly because these things have a habit of being more fun in groups and more educational if we can discuss them afterwards.

The last one I went to however was only a few days after my daughter was born, so I slept through a couple and probably looked a bit, disshevelled (I should check the spelling on that one), anyhow - it was invaluable to talk it through with colleagues afterwards!

Anyhow, one of the things I mentioned in my email was that the tickets hadn't sold as quickly as the previous event, and with the recession etc.. I was trying to blag a discount, not forthcoming I think that we probably won't be going this year, but anyhow - since spotting the speed of ticket sales, it seems the number has magically dropped by about 30% ... now either they have suddenly sold a lot, OR they are trying to stop cheeky b'gers like me trying to blag a discount based on sales ... Me, suspicious?

I did also ask about SEO North and didn't get too much of a response on that one... Having recently moved up to the lovely city of Leeds I haven't got my usual circle of contacts so I think I am going to need to start socialising in these circles again... If your an SEO bloke in the lovely city of Leeds who likes a beer once a month, give us a shout!

Google O/S ? and my personal wish list ...

2009-07-08T12:11:00.002+01:00

Firstly, what do they have against MS - it seems that everything they do seems to be aimed at the former monopoly of Microsoft, Google themselves have such a stranglehold on 'online' whilst they claim to "do no evil", or what ever the slogan is (Matt Cutts promises a post on the truth behind it, but as yet hasn't done it) ...

So Google are producing an operating system that will be designed around cloud computing - Great! But there are things that I want to do locally... even with a ligher o/s. I am hoping that apps will still work well enough - this includes:

1. Watch videos either locally, across a network with UPNP support (Media server) or over the internet, but I really do want the option of locally so when I go on the train, I can ...

2. As mentioned above, UPNP type support, for music, photos and video - for what I have in mind for this, it is required.

3. Offline editing - I spend two thirds of my time in front of Excel and Word - this I want at least to have a usable substitute...

I also want "coms" options including video, audio ...

Connectivity with Bluetooth (wifi is a given)

And this if Google brings out the O/S should be an awesome "home" always ready system, that can stay plugged into the TV ready to be switched over to a media centre, communications system that frankly an always on, power hungry system I am just not comfortable with ...

Who knows, android maybe the better system already for this...

Getting the UK out of debt.

2009-05-12T09:54:00.002+01:00

Dear Mr Gordon Brown ...

This is how we could be out of debt ...

1. Politicians who seem to show outrage at greedy bankers should NOT claim for anything but the essentials, the UK is not a massive in profit corporation - where claiming a bit more to top up the salary is acceptable... Please ask all politicians to pay it back before they get 'fired' I would like to vote for the honest politician, but I don't think there are too many left!
Well, unsure how much this will save...

2. Google - stop leaching off the UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6122329.ece pay back the 100m tax you deliberately seem to avoid, it wouldn't be much more than a drop in the ocean...
100 million saved...

3. Reduce the number of nuclear weapons (particularly from abroad)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/25/nuclear.weaponstechnology
3bn saved.

4. Stop the ID card schema.
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1114013_id_cards_to_cost_5bn
5 billion saved

so thats 8.1 Billion saved!

On a quick calculation, is that over 10% of the national deficit ?

My guide to business and MoreCars in Luton

2009-01-19T13:00:00.004Z

I recently bought a car (well about 3 months ago now) paid a bit extra for a warranty, turned out that the MoreCars Luton don't really understand that its not just a bit of paper, in fact they decided that it wasn't worth the paper, I discovered they had sold it to me with a faulty injector - it would stall regularly on the motorway. With a heavily pregnant wife I didn't want to take the risk and with the threat of legal action they decided to buy it back off me - I paid about 2,300 they gave me 1500 (plus an extra hundred if I returned some more paper work) ...

Oddly enough the guy was complaining because business wasn't good - not sure how to explain that if you treat customers like rubbish, they won't exactly promote you to their friends, and any business I have been in which has had customers has been built on "reccomendations", negative reccomendations will loose you more business than positive ones will build!

Well, I learnt three things -
1. never deal with More Cars Luton and to make sure everyone I know doesn't.
2. if you buy a warranty make sure its on paper and ideally third party from a company you are comfortable with.
3. bad customer experience = bad customer reccomendations / retention.

Guess what - the same goes for Three Mobile and TalkTalk both of who have probably lost a large number of customers because of the way they have dealt with me or people I know ...

(quick apoligy to all those people I said that Three and TalkTalk were a good deal - Threes customer service used to be excellent!!!)

BBC iPlayer - Air Version (beta labs)

2008-12-30T23:29:00.003Z

So this is a followup from a previous post where I mentioned that I hated the Kontiki installation, where it had a serious negative impact on your computer and couldn't easily be removed ... since then I haven't downloaded iplayer programs, just watching them online - (on a side note, my laptop battery became seriously poor, so most of the time what was the point!)

However I recently noticed that they had produced an "Air" version, which was Mac and Linux compatible, being a PC user, this didn't really impact me. However it is now installed and I am downloading the programs I want to watch.

Notes:
Good -
- Not peer to peer (all downloaded straight from the Beeb)
- Light weight "Air"
- Controllable and needs to obey Airs rules
- Can minimize down to the system tray

Bad -
- Not HD!
- Just BBC - not 4od etc..
The single biggest annoyance for me at the moment is that I can't as yet play offline content from the Beeb on my iphone (legally)!

Off topic, I have heard that Sky are doing a Silverlight version of their player, that could be interesting ...

Web analytics Wednesday - on a monday, free beer WOOHOO

2008-03-31T20:57:00.002+01:00

Just got back from a Web Analytics Wednesday - Mr Eric T Peterson presented a quick look into the future - more of an industry overview than a technological insight. Not sure if it was the American accent combined with the enthusiasm but it was a very entertaining presentation.

So conclusions
- Web analytics is hard (LOL see previous posts)
- The industry is still consolidating (keep an eye open Mr P hinted that their was still some movements happening
- Google Benchmarking isn't really worth it yet

I have to be honest I can't say too much more that isn't better expressed in his own blog so other stuff ...

Bumped into an old colleague from Directgov - we discussed analytics talked about career options analytics, Omniture, Speed-trap and Google Analytics - the one thing I think we agreed on was that an efficient interface is important as well as good reliable data.

Not a lot of info in this post, but I will hopefully fix that in the next one ...

Software running in the background ? BBC Iplayer, Kontiki and 4od Sky on demand etc...

2008-03-28T08:14:00.003Z

OK - I loved 4od, sky on demand and BBC iplayer, they are all great services in principal and I have nothing against a P2P distribution system.

But this software is just wrong - I have just switched on my laptop and despite explicitly saying 'no I don't want it running when I start the computer' it's there in the background according to the software explorer.

I often use a mobile internet connection so my download / upload limits are pretty low at times and I want to be pretty in control of what services are running. I strongly object to any peice of software that insists that it should be run in the background every time you switch on your PC.

This includes Adobe Reader (I have switched to Foxit, much cleaner) and millions of other bits of invasive software - thanks to Microsoft for allowing us to see these clearly with their Software Explorer application (great for seeing whats running in the background). I am often surprised by how much quicker my laptop will switch on when I disable or remove these applications! Although Ashes to Ashes is a serie I was enjoying, it is more important to me, productivity.

So this is my message to BBC Iplayer, 4od and Sky - great service but allow people to have control over their computers if you want people to leave them installed.

Google - teleporting and evil ...

2008-03-16T12:30:00.000Z

Google have a moto - do no evil, in fact they seem to believe they are the gatekeepers of morality on the web, frankly my feeling is that they are just a little bit 'too much'.

They seem to barge into every area by rapidly buying and being able to mass promote their own services its just not a level, open playing field - oh and I know that this is a Google owned blog, my main email address is a Gmail, that I am reccomend Google Analytics all the time, but I still hate doing that ...

Google may be bringing tools and services to the mass market at a lower price, funded by advertising but they do this by smashing companies and services who can't compete out of the market. Microsoft are sort of similar (confession I am sort of a MS employee, in that they own a company who own a compant who own .... who I work for, its a long chain), but at least Google have never declared themselves as the 'do no evil' company (motto of Google) and what they offer they sell which can compete with free alternatives.

Teleporting
A recent innovation is something called 'teleporting' which is a really daft name for an auto insight search. Very annoying for site owners, especially where sites are based on a search or the search has been painstakenly developed to deliver the most relevant results.

I tried three sites, Autotrader, Directgov and Argos - all three I got better results by using the onsite search... and of coure if you do a search for a specific item you get further google ads.

Frankly I consider heavy promotion of 'teleporting' to be evil.

So what about the buy out of DoubleClick?
Its funny how they claimed to be so opposed to Yahoo being bought by Microsoft, so far as calling it 'evil' in a blog post, when they have such a dominance in all aspects of online advertising, and with the purchase of Double Click (including Dart and even an SEO company) they don't seem to see their own sheer weight of ownership as being wrong ?

Micrsoft aren't so bad - a lot of their products are free and a lot of them are very expensive... but you get a PC, you get a choice of pretty much everything. there are hundred of free alternatives to everything from Operating System through to word processors....

From my point of view, if a company comes in and makes everything we offer at a competitive rate free, whats the point in coming to us? I know that we offer more (a whole heap more) but can we show that? Budget analytics companies are dropping out the market (or being bought by the bigger boys) at a rate faster than you would believe. so what happens next? Google are coming into the mobile O/S market so their adverts are there, they control the web in a way that is quite unprecedented... Oddly they said that that MS would break the web if they bought Yahoo, my feeling is that Google are way ont the way to breaking the web unless they slow down a bit ...

Do your bit - change your default search to someone else ....no? why not ? Googles good at that ? oh - ok ... mmm use a different video sharing website ? no ? oh Stage6 has just closed down... nothing else that isn' coated in prn? mmm....

Privacy & Targeted ads

2008-03-09T21:38:00.000Z

Targeted adverts are great, I don't want to see adverts for stuff I am not interested in - I am interested in techy geeky stuff - so showing my adverts for hair straightners or perfume isn't going to interest me, or going to get me to click on the adverts. I want to se adverts of cool stuff, brand new gadgets and other stuff I am interested in!

Targeted advertising is this regard is advertising that is displayed based on online user habits, what you do on chosen websites and possibly profiles that you give to social websites.

So because I have told Facebook I am interested in crime thriller books, I might see a fairly heavy proportion of adverts for the latest novel from one of my more favourite authors, because I click on it, in the future that proportion might go up. This to me is good!

OK - so why do you mind people using anonymised data to give you better adverts?

web 2.0 - embedded into my life ...

2008-02-25T12:58:00.000Z

I was never really an early adoptor of web 2.0, in fact for a long time, I never got what it was all about, user generated content was something we had been doing for a long time, forums have been around for years, and on-site reviews are a definent must for a good shop, but after a conversation with the missus it was a shock to find out just how much I was interacting with my web 2.0 services...

Blogs, well I have just started this one
Facebook, I am on it once a day, catching up - often on my mobile...
Last.FM, checkout what I listen to, I would share my login, but to be honest its not exactly taste to be proud of..
MySpace, actually did have a profile, but I never got it..

Well, thats about it, but its true that web 2.0 has started impacting my life - but mainly Facebook I am ashamed to say.

SEO - its just basic common sense ?

2008-02-13T21:07:00.000Z

I have never really gone for SEO jobs, because its all pretty much just common sense isn't it? Oddly enough though, developers are never told about this stuff and an increasing number seem to have been brought up with Web 2.0 and dynamic tools almost without the experience in bog standard HTML. So with people utilising Flash, AJAX and other tools, no one ever seems to take that step back and say "hows this going to look to a search engine"

I am often shocked at how often people pay thousands for "site optimisation" before they have done the basics - and this is my list!

Make sure your URL is what you want to be found for (company name, or subject matter)

Titles - ensure they are descriptive and are "keyword rich"

Links - all links within the site are viewable without javascript and don't use 'click here'

Content is still king - make sure the terms people will search on will feature sufficiently in the page ...

Thats it in the onsite stuff, Flash, Ajax and JavaScript are all largely ignored by search engines.

Off site, links are how you will be discovered, and will heavily influence your rank - however its hard to try and get links, most of the time they will come organically over time if you have some real quality.

Finally, PPC - its great to get people to your site, it is relatively cheap and it is an effective way

Metrics is hard ....

2008-02-07T14:43:00.000Z

For those of you that care about the background, two views exist on web metrics - 1. its hard, 2. its not hard but it is complicated.

Its an entertaining war of words between Avanish Kaushak and Eric T. Peterson, and is helping to sell books for the latter!

I personally don't worry too much about this, but in my experience reporting on the basics is pretty easy, especially with an application like Google Analytics - of course where it gets complicated is when things don't quite match, or numbers lie ... or of course someone asks you:
"if I add up all the daily visitors its different to visitors for the same period" - whilst it may seem pretty obvious to you, its not that easy to explain.

Why is it that 90% of the recorded clicks aren't landing onto the site (they were, but they weren't being recorded as PPC - why not ? cause they were hitting a redirect...)

There are hundreds of questions that can be hard to diagnose - especially as the online worlds evolving, Ajax, Flash and more ... Browsers are hitting the market that aren't even recording ... so yes, web analytics is increasingly complex.

"...find me some actionable analytics...."

"....is this number good or bad..."

Some questions are easier to answer than others...

My two pence (english, they are worth more than cents)