Don’t get me wrong – everyone loves to look at those growing analytics graphs showing many more visits to your website – BUT why do you have a website in the first place; is it to have people visit it or is it to make you money?

Let’s imagine your website is a shop – lots of people are coming in to the shop but if they never buy anything then you are not a very successful shop – maybe your products are displayed terribly or they do not reflect what was in the shop window, but it is not selling any items.

This shows how HITS = how idiots track success. What matters ultimately is profits. Profits are what gives us search marketers jobs, what’s makes businesses hire our agencies and what keeps our clients happy.

How every marketer should work…

Our goal is to make profits for our selves or our marketing company. We do this by making profits for our clients. In website terms the first thing to understand is what does the client want, the overall goal usually being to increase profits.

As a self-titled web strategist when starting any project I first look at what will increase the current profits. I find the keywords that will drive not the most search traffic but the most likelihood of quality conversions.

These usually come from liaising with the clients on profitable products/services, looking at their Analytics goals and (if setup) PPC stats. Once I have a confirmed priority order list of profitable (and hopefully well searched keywords) I then look to see if the website is effectively targeting these profitable keywords through clear landing pages.

Now we get into On-Site User Experience, which entails conversion optimisation, SEO and content strategy – make the website simple and clear to navigate, have great quality content, have clear paths to conversions al0ng with being optimised to rank well in search.

All done and now we can make sure our analytics is setup to track website conversions (forget hits/visits) – even if your main conversion is a phone number use a (relatively cheap) phone tracking company that changes the number based on how the vistor got to your website.

So from a web strategy point of view you should now have a website that is geared around conversions and profits.

Anyway am back and ready to impart my new SEO knowledge to the masses.

Recently I attended the CS Forum 2011 conference so that I could learn more about the latest buzz word that has been associated with SEO – “Content Strategy”.

For the agency that does not yet employ a content strategist, content strategy has previously been touched upon by many disciplines: Sales, Account Management, Project Management, Development, Search, Creative, Information Architecture/Wireframing, Design (if no IA), the client……

As a search strategist bringing these different disciplines together is a crucial step to creating an overall web strategy solution for clients. Content strategy is no different and in many cases the content can define the SEO strategy (and the overall website structure).

A decent seo’er will know that content needs to be created to target a certain theme/keyword set. Search strategy relies heavily on content since the content on a website will help define the landing pages and then hopefully conversions (therefore giving justification for SEO).

A great quote I heard at the CS Forum was that “If “Content is King” to the search strategist, “Context is the kingdom” is key to the content strategist. The context of the website defines the content and the content defines the site structure – simple really.

Search strategy begins with finding the conversion on a website. Working backwards we then look at the keyword sets that will define landing pages for users and this will lead to creating a site tree. The content on these pages are crucial for bringing and converting the visitor.

A well executed content strategy will have input from the client and search team to work out the pages required and then plan the content creation in a way that the User eXperience, Information Architecture (wireframing) and creative teams can work with.

Content Strategy / Search Strategy (short) Case Study

I recently worked with a pension company who had not executed a search or content strategy. Due to this their website did not have targeted landing pages for search, had random content all over the place and no page had a clear purpose for the user.

A couple months later and the new structure of the website had been worked out by myself and a great content strategist to give:

• A clearly defined navigation on the site
• The landing pages to drive search traffic that the site desperately needed
• A great user experience since the content was clear, concise and told the user the information they really wanted.

What this story tells us is that websites can always be rescued from the depths of the terrible website abyss by actually stopping and thinking – is this site right for my users and does it have the landing pages they really need?

Also it raises the point that if the company had done this in the first place they would have not only saved their marketing budget but also got far more revenue had they done it 5 years ago.

By incorporating a search/content strategy from the beginning:

• Content is seen (great content without great SEO is often unseen).
• Budgets are not consumed by costly rewrites and edits.
• Content is created that targets users, not search engines.
• Content that targets users will always have a much higher chance of conversion than content for search engines (this doesn’t mean that content for users cannot be optimised).
• Websites with content and SEO at its core become much more relevant to the user and therefore search query.

The user journey is the main consideration for a web strategist. Ideally a user should search for what they want, find and click on your website, see what they want on the page they have landed on and then use the call-to-action to become a conversion. Also if the experience was that good they will become a “convert”, or someone who will remember your business and return in the future.

Get the search and content strategy right and the user journey should flow like a gentle stream in a Japanese garden (couldn’t think of a better analogy)…..

Better User Journey = Higher Chance of Conversion = Greater Return on Investment

Joy of Tech cartoonists Nitrozac & Snaggy are pure genius.  I have posted some of my favourites that I have come across recently for your viewing pleasure.

If you like it please follow the link at the bottom to their website and show some support.

Joy of Tech

Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn have dominated the social marketplace and the search engine giant haven’t managed to penetrate – and everyone’s knows the mishaps in falling behind on the evolving online world (think back to the old dominance of Yahoo and MySpace).

So introducing social market penetration attempt number 3 (ish) – Google+ (Google “Plus”).  An integrated social/search project for users logged into Google and the button you will see seems a direct copy of the Facebook Like button (and Twitters “Tweet”) – but it is important to note this is not simply a competitive strike against Facebook’s like button, but against Facebook itself!

Already a big hype on the internet – Google are pulling out all the stops with this one. The Google+ project is starting to appear all over the place. Notice the +1 buttons next to all your search results when logged in to Google?

It has already been added to Search Results, Websites, Analytics & Webmaster Tools…

If you are a webmaster you may have noticed the integration with Webmaster Tools and Analytics! All Google’s blog posts and media are steered towards it. Basically they are doing a an Apple and hyping it up with maximum effort.

Lets look at the new landscape shall we….

What is Google+?

Google + is a way to get users of the search engine Google to have an online “social circle” (or “friends” as Facebook like to call them) and share websites they like with this social circle by either clicking on the +1 on search results or alternatively on the website itself (if it has been installed by the website owner). So it is just the Facebook “like” button, but sharing the content on Google instead of Facebook.

Google+ Bar

In a nutshell – New dark coloured bar at the top of Google – when you are logged in gives notifications of social things like “social circle” requests.

Photos / Videos

In a nutshell – same as Facebook photos with the whole album, comments and tagging standards – only probably has greater privacy.

Circles

In a nutshell – Facebook “friends” but organised into groups. You name the groups but some can be ones like “Mad Ones”, “Family”, “Distant friends”, etc.

Sparks

In a nutshell – Scans the net for articles and videos that it thinks you will like.

Hangouts

In a nutshell – A new form of chatroom for people with similar interests.

Huddle

In a nutshell – conference call but online format. Multiple chatting in one big email. Think MSN Messenger with multiple people on 1 conversation.

Will it affect search ranking positions?

In typical Google fashion, different spokesmen say yes and no.

From the Google +1 Page -

From spokesman Prosser:

“no it will not!” but adds that “it’s something Google is “very interested” in incorporating in some form at some point.”

Basically it will affect your search results if you or someone you have “socially connected” with have used the +1 button on any of the resulting websites. It “may” affect the position of search results on mass, i.e. if thousands press a +1 button on a website Google “may” take this as a signal that it is more popular and show it higher…..

How does it differ from the Facebook Like button?

Google’s animosity towards Facebook is at an all time high, seeing it as a direct threat to its online empire. Google made $29 Billion in revenue in 2010 and it doesn’t want to see that slip.

The Facebook “like” button shows on your or your businesses Facebook profile that you have recommended something. If you have say 1,000,000 followers. e.g. Lady Gaga, then every “like” you do is shown as a news wall update to 1,000,000 followers – so quite an audience.

The Google+1 button will store a list of websites in your Google profile (which you can set to private or public) and acts similar to Google bookmarks. Also if you have  connected to other Google Account holders you have a social circle. These +1′s can be shared with your social circle, e.g. “Kim – you’d like this”.

On average how many searches on Google do you do in an average day? All these results could start to be affected by Google+. This suddenly provides far more power than the Facebook “like” button ever could.

What else is new?

Webmaster Tools

As you can see from the Google Webmaster Central Blog – Webmaster Tools now shows stats on the +1 usages…..

Analytics

Again it has tracking for what people are getting up to socially on your website. To be fair this is much more than what Facebook gives….

Want it on your website?

Get the code here

What I have learnt over the years is that getting it right at the start is crucial to the long term strategy of a website. A good SEO structure that is user friendly, easy to navigate and designed with passing link juice in mind will all aid in increasing rankings and driving conversions later down the line.

I have seen terrible examples of how site architecture either got missed or just was not thought of as important. Usually a few years after the website launch the business will approach a design agency and say “My bounce rate seems very high and my conversion rate is very low – why is this”???

Well it is because you were numpties when you commissioned the creation of the website and never researched the steps that should be taken in order to have an effective marketing tool actually work for business.

So lets start with -

What is website architecture?

Site architecture, as defined by wikipedia:

…”is an approach to the design and planning of websites which, like architecture itself, involves technical, aesthetic and functional criteria.”

Basically planning what pages there are going to be and how they all link together. You could also argue that site architecture includes the information architecture stages, but we prefer to separate the 2 as information architecture is a way of showing where elements go on a webpage structurally (Visio type of thing) shows a webpages concept, rather than a websites structure.

Bad website architecture

Lets start with the negative. A bad structure for a website usually means that either it was not really thought about to begin with or that it has been hacked and cross-linked so much that it may as well have not been.

So as you can see the website has added lots of pages that keep linking to further pages. This means that the top page authority on the homepage loses practically of benefit by the time it gets 5 levels down. This is not good – in fact it is just kinda pathetic, especially if you have wrote loads of great content on that far right page.

You may have noticed the “search results query” line – this is very common and describes a website that uses a search feature to let users find the bottom level pages – but does not actually put a link to the product on any page. Come on people – search engines cannot submit every variation into search fields to find every query string results page! Get the bottom level pages onto category or sub-category pages and get them indexed!

I cannot stress enough the importance of good internal linking and how it forms the basis of website architecture. Get it sorted if you want the website to be successful….

Good website architecture

In good website architecture there are several things to consider.

1. Minimal click-depth (very important for indexing, passing link/page juice, conversion likelihood).
2. How will each page be linked internally (navigation bars, cross content linking, naming conventions, usability, fastest routes to conversions).
3. How will each page be linked externally (broad keywords at top levels, more specific linking to popular subcategories, specific product keyword at product level).
4. Avoiding the big issues from the start (avoid duplicate urls, get link rel canonical tag used, get search friendly URL’s, minimal code for fast pages).

This image from SEO Gadget shows that none of the pages are more than 3 levels deep. Each page has more links to it and a user who lands on the homepage will never have to click more than 3 times to reach the bottom level content. This is sometimes called “website flattening”, although I dislike the term because it indicates a negative context, whilst it is in fact a very positive one.

A good example -

http://www.example.com/cosmetics/fragrances/la-roche-fragrance.html

This URL shows exact the internal linking and navigation structure, as shown in the website tree below:

As mentioned on point 2 – cross linking is very important in deep linked pages (yes level 2 or 3 is classed as deep linked).

An example of cross-linking

For example you have an “iPod Nano 4gb” product page, which is under the subcategory of “MP3 Players” and then category of “Technology“.  Lets pretent that it is thought of really well by the search engines, has loads of quality external links and social shares and it has a Pagerank of 4. Now imagine that you have an “iPod Touch 20gb” product page that is new and has no external links or equity with the search engines and does not link to any other product in the same category. What to do?

Well the first problem you have is that the iPod Nano is in what is called a “silo“, kinda boxed in. It links to the homepage, categories and possibly subcategories (depending on your linking and navigation structure) but not other products.

Ok so you could put a link in the page content to the other product, but remember that this will most likely be manual so time consuming and subject to being broken in the future. Another option is using automatic links, i.e. “similar products in this category”. These kind of links are two-fold in purpose,

1. They create a link to the other product, therefore passing link/page juice and getting it indexed faster.
2. They are creating further options and chances of conversions for viewers of the page.

Some examples of how to create cross-linking for both page/link juice and for conversions are as follows:

eCommerce

• similar products in this category (same category only)
• customers who viewed this also viewed
• usually bought with
• similar tagged products (this makes it cross category)
• other nearby shops

Blogs

• similar posts
• posts in the same category
• similar tagged posts

You get the idea……

Website navigation

Navigation is a key part of website structure planning. This is something also needs to be monitored after the website has gone live and further tested to reflect users behaviour and improve the route to conversions.

As you can see on the good example diagram, there is the menu navigation and also a search feature. Now there can be multiple search features on a website. The most powerful one you can find on Amazon’s website – I honestly cannot remember the last time I used the navigation menu on Amazon, I just always type in the search box what I want!

That being said when I use eBay I tend to use the category refinements to get to the category I am interested in before actually searching. Offering these different methods of navigation is certainly a major benefit to any website with 20+ pages.  Keep in mind that although in most cases the search pages do not have to be thought of as landing pages (although I have seen this and it can work very well for SEO), the internal links that the search results page brings up absolutely need to be the correct URL for the category/product/page, not a search query string URL for it!

Maybe also think about how many links are loading at the top of a page. If you have 200 links on a webpage that are all loading with long keywords above the pages content then this obviously is not great for SEO.  Maybe think about have the big navigation element on the left with a float left and the page content div with a float right – then load the content before all the links.

Down the line…

Once you have had lots of visits and some Analytics stats you can then look to see what the site search feature on Google Analytics can show you (remember you need to set this up as early as possible to track as much data as possible).

The brilliance of site search is it actually shows you what users are searching for – it’s like your recording what they are thinking! Use this information to tailor your navigation to the users needs!

Website architecture summary…

Lets me finish off by saying that getting this right at the start makes your (and my) life sooooo much easier down the line. Sometimes websites that havn’t had this kind of pre-planning are just to far gone to rescue and it is better to build the website afresh on a new and better template, but this time with the correct architecture & navigation.

Correct URL’s and navigation that reflect the users search along with planning the tree levels of pages will all aid in creating a website that is user friendly, conversion likely and will stand the test of time……

Please note these are taken from the video blogs of Matt Cutts over the past year. Google could change their algorithms and any point on here may then become redundant.

In case there are newbies out there Matt Cutts works for the “Google Search Quality Group” and has become famous (or notorious?) for his video blogs on Google .

Also note that there is always the chance that everything he is telling us is in fact a load of tosh – always best to try and get some hard research to prove the theories like SEO Moz do….

On-site SEO factors-

• Use hyphens or commas as “Page Title” or header separators - not underscores. Matt Cutts on Seperators
• If possible use a file extension (.html) or at least have mime type to help Google and also users. Matt Cutts on File Extensions
• You can “unleash” hundreds of pages (obviously all with great content) at once with no penalty -thousands of new pages, however, “may” flag up for review. Matt Cutts on Unleashing Pages
• A HTML Sitemap is still recommended by Google for googlebots & for users. Matt on Sitemaps and Apples
• Google does not “penalise” duplicate content - it will just show one page over another.  If there are 3 pages of duplicate content on your website it generally will only show 1 result on a Google results page, (unless the search is incredibly longtail and specific – but of course we now get the “omitted results” link displayed). Google just shows the content that it feels is most relevant to the users search. New algorithms take into account things like content age (so original content is more likely to rank higher). (Greg gives the best explanation, not Matt) Greg Grothaus on Duplicate Content
• A webpage being 4 levels down in the URL (example.com/some-news/2011/march/a-great-news-article.htm) is just as valuable as a webpage 1 level down (example.com/a-great-news-article.htm) IF linked to from a top level page. Matt Cutts on URL Levels
• In SEO terms,“example.com/tools/hammers/a-great-hammer” is no different than having  ”example.com/tools-hammer-a-great-hammer”. In user terms, however, it can start to look spammy to have multiple keywords separated by a hyphen. Matt Cutts on URL’s
• “Read More” dropdowns CAN be seen as hidden text (blackhat) if large areas of text are hidden with only a small area of visible text. If there are reams and reams of text hidden below a javascript/accordion type button with only a few words always visible then it will show as being hidden text to Google. Instead use tabs to show as much content as possible that switches with tabbed buttons. Matt Cutts on Hidden Read More’s
• Using the visitors IP address to change the title & heading to the local language/dialect is perfectly acceptable. Geo-location content is not classed as content cloaking. Matt Cutts on Geo-location
• It is better to have keywords in the URL as it is taken as a factor in the ranking results, albeit only one of over 200. Matt Cutts on Keywords in URL’s

Links and off-site factors

• Google will not penalise a website that uses the “no follow” attribute on all of its outbound links – Matt Cutts on No Follow
• On-site links are no longer restricted to 100 links per page (as Google guidelines used to state). It is perfectly reasonable to have more if the page and site is rich in content. Common sense is needed, however, as 1000′s of links on a page could indicate a link farm. Also keep in mind that pagerank on a page is divided out to the links on the page (a PR4 page with 40 links will mean each link gets a 1/40th chunk of the PR) so it may be beneficial to have only important pages linked to from a high PR site. Matt Cutts on link numbers
• Links at the bottom of the page are treated differently than ones at the top or within the content body. Matt Cutts on link locations
• The amount of 301 redirects to a domain will not penalise you. 301 redirects carry link text (anchor text) but if there are too many new links being generated to a 301 redirected URL it could look shady. Matt Cutts on 301′s (old)

Other interesting facts -

• Currently the Google bots only crawl from ip addresses in the USA – not from any other country. Matt Cutts on Googlebots
• A good best practice for mobile sites is to have it on a subdomain, e.g. mobile.example.com and to show the mobile site to mobile viewers and googlebot mobile, whilst showing the regular version to regular viewers and standard googlebot (not classed as cloaking). Matt Cutts on Mobile Sites
• Blocking the search engines from seeing some pages on a website (e.g. robots.txt) means it will not be seen if users are using safe search on Google, so at one point many pages on the whitehouse.gov website were not shown by Google to safe search users as they potentially could give adult material. Matt Cutts on Safesearch
• Twitter IS now indexed by Google different to a standard webpage. However historic tweets may not be continually indexed.Matt Cutts on Twitter Indexing ….. and here again
• If you are penalised by Google spiderbots for what it detects as duplicate content or blackhat issues then the next time it comes round to indexing the webpage/site it will take a fresh view of the page, i.e. the changes you have made to fix the problems will be then taken note of. If, however, you have been a very naughty boy and Google have taken manual action to penalise your website then they typically set a time-out on the penalty that varies due to the severity of the cyber-crime. Matt Cutts on being Penalised

What does it mean?

Content is king – every SEO specialist has heard this at some point – the web is littered with it.

Back in the 90′s, you could make a website, put a couple lines of text on a page and then feasibly rank  at number 1 on search engines.

Then Google came along and set the standard for showing relevant , fresh and interesting websites to users searching. Yahoo and Microsoft took too long to catch up and Google (along with some fantastic branding/marketing) became number 1.

This changed things and whilst Yahoo used to sail along happily without really having to change anything they finally realised that the content, i.e. text on a website, is key to a user’s search.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all now gear their search algorithms around those big chunks of text on pages of your website. Long gone are days of just ploughing keywords in your meta keywords tag and ranking above eBay.

Fresh, interesting content!

This is why is is more crucial than ever to create “fresh” or new content (copy, text, lots of words, etc) on your website. You need to show the search engines that your website means business and has the most relevant and newest content about a certain subject (your keywords).

A similar post on the SEOForums even stated: “This bodes well for good sites and ethical SEO consultants looking to promote true, quality content.”

This is great for the future of the internet as it means when people create website they will actually have to make it good and relevant, which is exactly what the internet should be about!

How to do it right!

Obviously domain age and other websites that link to your webpage are key factors as well, but the first thing you need to address is getting your site-wide copy created in an interesting manner (written for users, not search engines) and then if you have wrote the page well it should naturally be talking about your keywords in the paragraph text and headers.

Lots of text is boring so spice it up with images (getting your keywords in the alt text, again in a describing the image method) and points of interest. A good copywriter will apply short – punchy headlines (headers) and break up text often (short paragraphs) so that users can read it easily (a webpage in general should not read like a book but more like a newspaper).

Update content for link building

Another reason to update your content is for link building.  Imagine Google scans your webpage and is also scanning incoming links, and then it sees the links have gone up 500% to that webpage, yet nothing on it has changed…..

This seems suspicious to Google and you may not get as much benefit. Now image you have changed the content and then lots of lovely new links are made. Now Google associates the changed content with the new links and you get more benefit! This is an important lesson for any would be link builder!

What Google say…

Matt Cutts (all hail) recently posted this interesting message:

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.

The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010.

And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

All the major Google changes we have seen recently (Google Instant, Maps display, page title rewrites, etc) and of course the “Mayday” algorithm update, which changed the way long-tail keywords were indexed have seen some real differences in user searches.

Google will continue to implement algorithmic changes that focus on reducing the rankings for low-quality sites (sites that are not what a user really wants to see when they search) and increasing the rankings for high-quality sites (like sites with fresh, unique and interesting content – YEAY).

Well let me tell you any SEO guide worth its salt says absolutely does matter. Why you ask?

1. Google and other search engines now take the speed of your website into account in their algorithms to determine ranking positions.
2. Website surfers have no patience these days – why should they have to wait on the limitations of your website!

Google wants to speed up the internet. By making page speed a part of the ranking results this is forcing webmaster to start optimising their websites for quicker loading times.  Not a bad thing really as this makes the internet much less frustrating to use (remember the days of 28k modems with large images taking a couple minutes to appear).

Imagine a website takes less than a second to load. The user is happy as he/she does not have to wait (no-one has patience with websites) and the information is given to the user fast and efficiently. If a user has to wait 10 seconds for a page to load chances are they will say “stuff this”, press the back button and go to the next search result where that site won’t have the cheek to make her/him wait so long.

What Google Say:

“We believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user’s experience and helps them become more productive. “We’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users, and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But, faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs”
- Google Webmaster Blog

“Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should have a fast load time as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly”
- Google Adwords Support

Ok – i’m sold. But what now?

So it is all round good to speed your website up. But how fast is my website?

You can use this page speed checker to find the speed of your website (always fun – even if you can go HA my website is lighting), but the best check is to log into your Google Webmaster Tools, select your website profile and go to “labs” and “site performance”. A pretty little graph will show you your page speed over time:

So what do I do to speed up my website?

Well there are plenty of methods for increasing website speed. Some of these are listed below:

• Reduce image sizes – Make sure your images on your website are as small as they can be (in kb, not actual dimensions) without losing quality. See if the image is smaller as a jpeg, gif or flattened png rather than just putting the max resolution one in.
• Have a decent server - Paying that little bit extra to have a faster server helps no end. Spotted Panda recently moved from JustHost to VPS.net and just from doing this we have reduced page loading times by 6 seconds!
• Gzip compression (technical skills required) – Consider Gzip for all you pages, JS and CSS. Now this can be a tricky thing to implement due to the server your website is on, e.g. if Apache then either mod_deflate or mod_gzip needed (ask your hosting company) and then activated in htacess or page headers. Also you need to compress the js and css files and upload them to the relative folder. If this sounds too technical then you may need to pay to get someone to do this for you. Also in some scenarios gzip can work against you, if the server is very dismal and can’t cope with the extra pressure.
• Page cache – Sorting your cache out is also very beneficial. For CMS websites like WordPress there are fantastic plugins like WP Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
• Combine External CSS and JS – Less external requests, faster loading.

A brilliant tool to speed to tell you how to speed up your webpages is the firefox add-on “firebug” – get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843, and then get Google’s add on of “Page Speed” at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/. In the bottom right of your browser is the icon to bring up firebug and you will see the page speed link.

It can be a lot of effort to speed your website up, but if you are serious about ranking well then these days it is a practical win.

Spotted any pandas recently?  Our bloggers have and they are posted here…

Our bloggers have been busy this year educating the masses on real SEO – but whilst living their busy lives they have come across variations of our dear mascot – The Spotted Panda!

Musical panda spotted – 27/03/2011

Panda spotted in girlfriends room – 19/02/2011

Panda spotted in toystore – 19/12/2010

Panda spotted in office in threatening stance with wizard- 17/12/2010

This free guide is to help you implement the basics of SEO on your website…

SEO Guide: SEO (search engine optimisation) is, believe it or not,  all about common sense, content and links.

1. BASIC ON-SITE SEO TECHNIQUES

Below are basic On-Site SEO techniques that should be applied to every website at its creation, or when you take it on to optimise it for search engines and for users.

Keep in mind that these points are aimed at search engines and users, with white-hat being the key.

This guide is aimed at helping SEO and also users on your website. This is a great starting point for any website, and after these points are achieved then display marketing (call-to-actions, etc) and social media marketing can be addressed….

Choose the Right Domain Name

• Having your keywords in the domain name certainly influences the ranking decision by the search engines. However it is not absolutely necessary to have this, just nice if you can. It is one of the many factors search engines look at, but it can work against you if your domain name starts getting too long and full or hyphens (-), as no one will remember the  URL. Plus you may find the url you want is already taken so you have to start thinking up clever alternatives. Keywords are a plus, but don’t compromise on the user friendliness of the name.

Internal Linking Menu’s

• Make sure all your websites pages have a clear menu structure that link together. This helps the search engines index your site and also makes the site more user friendly. A good internal linking structure can really make the difference for the spiders crawling your website.

Breadcrumb Menu

• Maybe not necessarily a search engine must, but this really does help users navigate your site (remember making the site user friendly can be the difference between a conversion or someone going back to the Google search and clicking the next result). An example of a breadcrumb menu is above.

Sitemap Page

• Have a sitemap page for your website, even if other people have told you that it is not as necessary any more.  This is basically a page with every internal page shown and linked to. Descriptions are not necessary as long as the link text says what the page is. This may be an older method for sites and if you have a good internal linking structure then this certainly may not be necessary, but it doesn’t take to much to do on small sites or sites on a CMS like wordpress or joomla, so what’s the harm.

Sitemap XML File

• Use a free sitemap generator site, Google / Yahoo / Bing generator or write it yourself. The sitemap is an xml file that sits in your home directory and tells the search engine your sites pages, the change frequency (when to recheck the page), the priority of a page (“Home Page” is 1.0 whilst “About Us” may be 0.80). Open source CMS’s like WordPress and Joomla have some fantastic auto xml-sitemap generator plugins that are free. Again if you have a good internal linking structure then this is not always necessary but all the webmaster tools ask for the location of it and also you can enter more detailed information like the priority of certain pages (can be auto set on CMS plugins) and images, etc.

Robots file

• A robots file tells the search engine if they should send their “robots” to auto find a page or directory in your site. The easiest way to manage this is by having a “robots.txt” file sat in your home directory which tells the search engine what to do. Use a free robots file generator of write it yourself (Google webmaster tools can write it for you).
• Most sites will auto allow all pages. Also put a link to your sitemap.xml location in the robots file to help other search engines. Most websites need a robots.txt file in order to block the search engines from scanning unnecessary content, like the wordpress wp-admin folder.

Search Engine Friendly URL’s

• A must these days. Do not have any ? or = in your URL’s. Basically aim to get a url as easily rememberable as possible and put the webpage’s keyword in the url, e.g. instead of “www.spottedpanda.com/section2/?=queryfishjuPART4=results27263″ you should have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”. Obviously a domain name with your primary keyword is the best (e.g. www.cheap-iphones.com) but usually the best keywords are taken, so we can put them in the rest of the URL, i.e. www.exampleurl.com/cheap-iphones.
• There has to be a point where you say that the domain name is just too long and user unfriendly (www.really-cheap-iphones-galveston-texas.com = not the best domain name). This is why using SEF URL’s you can put the keywords into the url, as well as on the page and META.

XHTML W3C Validated & CSS Validated

REVISED:


• Firstly; Amazon, Google, eBay and all the other big boys are NOT validated. It is very hard to get to 100% validation if you have a website with any special features at all. Validating your website only helps to make sure it will work in future browsers and also be accessible to special software’s.  Google themselves have said that they do not take into account the validation of your website. However if your website is very bad on the validation side then maybe the Google spiders can’t make it through all the content…..so try and validate the majority of the code, especially where the text you want to get indexed is.
• To check your site to see if it is XHTML validated use the world wide web consortium at http://validator.w3.org/. Keep in mind validating your website is not essential and won’t help SEO massively, but helps make sure your website will be viewed correctly on all browsers and monitors for the future (user optimization).
• CSS = Cascading Style Sheets. Basically this is the external style sheets that define the way your site looks (most sites these days have external style sheets as apose to internal code). Similar to above, it is good practise and also if the css is valid then different screen resolutions tend to display better.
• Check you code at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. Again this is not essential for SEO but it helps from an accessibility point of view and for future proofing.

Page Loading Times

• Google now takes page loading times into account for determining page rankings. Basically Google have the nice idea of speeding up the web – which most people would agree with.
• Imagine a website takes less than a second to load. The user is happy as he/she does not have to wait (no-one has patience with websites) and the information is given to the user fast and efficiently. If a user has to wait 10 seconds for a page to load chances are they will say “stuff this”, press the back button and go to the next search result where that site won’t have the cheek to make her/him wait so long.
• Consider Gzip for all you pages, JS and CSS. Also reducing all image sizes by changing them to gif or flattened png. Sorting your cache out is also a must. A brilliant tool to speed to tell you how to speed up your webpages is the firefox add-on “firebug” – get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843, and then get Google’s add on of “Page Speed” at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.
• Obviously the server you are on can have an affect on the sites speed. If you find that the server is just too slow then try and ask your web host to move it to a faster one (then may only charge a small amount extra per year).



Page Sizes – try to be under 100kb

• If a page is too big then not only will it take a while to load but also it may not load correctly in a users browser. Reduce all image file aizes by changing the format, e.g. change from bitmap to gif.
• Page sizes are obviously linked with Page Speed – something that Google takes into account these days in their effort to speed up the internet.

Limit Outbound URL’s (max 70)

• Your site may be penalised if you have too many outbound links. A search engine may see you as a spam site – this is very bad! Keep out bound links beneath 50. 50 to 100 is pushing it a little.

Webmaster Tools Submission

• Get your site setup and verified on Google, Yahoo and Bing. This helps to get your site indexed and gives you an abundance of information. They will give you either a verification code to put in your sites code or a verification file to upload to you home directory. Google will give you alot of information on its findings on the site and how you can improve it. Google Webmaster Tools - Yahoo Site Explorer - Bing Webmaster Center

301 Redirect or Link Rel Canonical Tag

• There are currently 2 acceptable ways of redirecting a website page to another page. The older (but still very useful) method is the 301 redirect. Apparently you lose around 20% of your “link juice” with this method, but at least that means you can redirect users and search engines to the correct URL without completely losing your link juice from the other websites linking to that page.
• In terms of duplicate content (happens alot on websites, especially with SEF URL rewriting methods), the best way is the link rel canonical tag that goes in your “head” section. Imagine you have 3 URL’s to the same address, but due to one reason or another you cannot use a 301 redirect to send users to the correct one. The Link Rel Canonical tag would tell the search engine which page is the correct one, and most search engines use this tag now very effectively.
• 301 redirects are still the best to use on non-www to www rewrites and in other places where you want to “force” the user or search engine to the redirected page, but always keep the link rel canonical tag in mind!

Analytic’s Installed

• Get it done! If not Google Analytic’s then any other preferred platform. Analytic’s show you the number of visitors to your site, where they have come from (search engine, direct link or referring site), what general location they are in and if the page they went onto was what they wanted or did they “bounce” back to whence they came.
• Google Analytic’s is brilliant and free to use – simply create an account and then copy the code they give you to the end of your websites homepage code (just before the end of the code – right before the tag). For anyone not yet using Analytic’s I cannot stress enough how important it is to know your target audience and website statistics! In order to really move forward with most websites you need to know the metrics.

Links

• Links links links. Without question a very important part of getting your website to the top of that search engine. If you can’t create links naturally from interesting content and social media and networking sharing (which in our experience, almost everyone can) then consider hiring a professional company to build some high quality links from relevant content websites that are thought of well by Google (i.e. at least a pagerank of 2). Also stay away from link farming – they do the world no good! See our Link Building Explained for more info.

Apparently not! The latest change on the (once clean) search engine is a thumbnail preview of the website listing, by hovering your mouse over a magnifying glass icon by the result.

This gives the latest snapshot (cached) of that particular website, so instead of clicking on the link to view the website you can “preview it” before dedicating yourself to actually visiting it….

What You Now See…

Pointless Gimmick, or Actually Useful???

Well Google have been trialing many changes recently in order to “enhance” user’s searching, and in some cases saving valuable seconds.

If those valuable seconds really are important to you, then give Google a pat on the back. The instant search apparently does this, although like most people I am still pressing the “return” key and not bothering looking at the results until I have typed in my full query.

This change, however, may have more promising results. If I am looking for a particular site then the preview function may come in handy and actually save me 10′s of seconds.

Affect on SEO –

Non as far as we can see. However this should definitely affect click-through rates and it may help to get qualified traffic through to your website.

Verdict

Have Google given us a change that is worthwhile? We say yes – and the more we are using it the more this becomes apparent.

…accurate stats to work off, or disastrously inaccurate jibberish????

The Google Adwords tool in theory should be incredibly useful….

A tool that you can type in a search term and a geographic target (i.e. UK), and then it not only tells you the monthly local searches (and global) but also it gives a multitude of keyword variations based on actual user search stats.

Great right! Well not if it is not working properly and you base an entire Adwords or SEO campaigns on false statistics…

Is it Giving Accurate Stats?

In August (2010) – absolutely not….stats were wildly out for long and shorttail keywords, figures were differnet depending on if you were logged into Adwords or not, all in all it was about as useful as a chicken with it’s head cut off.

As of October (2010) – maybe….figures seem to be more back to reasonable levels and they are matching up now if you are logged into Adwords compared with if you are not logged into Adwords (or Google at all).

Some Examples…

Malcolm Coles gave the following examples -

Adwords Keyword Tool Logged Out

Adwords Keyword Tool Logged In

You can see that the results for global monthly searches are different for “karen gillan pictures” (she is the more attractive and easier on the ears Billie Piper type replacement in the new Dr Who), depending on if you are logged in or not.

This does not give us much confidence in the the tool at all – which result is the accurate one?

If you try this now (October 2010), however, you will find that they are the same if you are logged in or not.

In short either they have fixed it or now it is just harder to tell if they are accurate or not.

Summary…

Can you rely on Adwords Keyword Tool?

Ish! Use it to get a general idea of keywords and search levels but back it up with some more research from other resources.

Keywords are the words or search terms that people type into search engines that can relate to your services or products. For example, if you have a drainage website for the York region then your keywords may be “York Drain Unblocking”, “Drain Services York” and “Blocked Drains York” – as this is what a person trying to find a site relating to this might type into Google. Keyword research is fundamental to any SEO campaign.

A large part of search engine optimisation is making your website optimised for the search engine algorithms to scan your content, titles, META tags, image alts and links to see if the keyword the user has typed into its search query is related to your webpage.

When undertaking an SEO campaign, or even just trying to have some focused SEO on your site, you need to make a list of keywords and then implement them onto your webpage. This is a vital step in SEO, as the 2 most weighted factors by search engines are keyword rich (unique) content and incoming links to a webpage (again keyword targeted in the anchor text).

You see, the keywords relate directly to what the (potential) customer is typing into a search engine, i.e. Google. This makes this step vital for anyone wanting to understand their customers and their competition. The “competition” are sites that are high on a search engine results page for your websites particular keywords.

A great way to begin SEO is to analyse your competition and find what keywords they are utilising. Simply use a freeMETA Tag analyser on the top websites you are competing against. If you are unsure of the competition then enter a keyword you are wanting to optimise for and the first page results are the ones you want to analyse.

STEP 1 – RESEARCH

Research is paramount to keyword optimisation. You need to research 2 things:

1. What would a user type into a search engine to find my site, product or service.
2. How competitive are those keywords and do I stand a chance against the competition?

1. Think about whet you are selling or offering on your website’s particular page (remember keywords are specific to each page). What would you type into Google, Yahoo or Bing to find the thing you are offering. Try and think how a potential customer would search for these and also if they would specify it per location, e.g. “Web Design Leeds” or “Washington Web Design”. Come up with a good list of at least 3 keywords per webpage on your website.

• PAGE SNOOP – This is not illegal (freedom of the internet) and is a well known way of checking out your competition. If you know your competition is doing well or if you just want to see what keywords they are optimising for then use a free keyword density checker and a free META tag analyser on a webpage on your competitors site. The results should show you the page content keyword density and also the meta and title tags keywords.
• Now you should be getting a feel of what people are typing in Google to find your kind of product or service, you should have a feel of you competition and also an idea of the keywords you shall be using on each page.

STEP 2 – IMPLEMENTING THE KEYWORDS

On-Site Keyword Implementation

• First have your URL to include the keyword if possible. This helps with search engine indexing. E.g. if my keyword was “SEO Explained” then I might have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”
• Use the keywords in the header tags on the page. Header 1 should have a keyword in it that represents the content on the webpage as a whole. Header 2 is more of a section header and should still be based around at least one keyword. This way you form a good structural hierarchy on your website.
• Write your pages content naturally, without forcing keywords in all over the place. Make your pages content unique, personalised and interesting to the viewer. Since the content you are writing is to do with the keyword for the page then the keywords should naturally appear whilst writing it. Use a META checker and keyword density checker to check what the search engines will see as the focus of the page!

Title & META tags to be edited (in the “head” section of the code of the webpage).

• Put the keywords in your “META Keyword” tag for each page- this sets the page for these keywords. Search engines don’t use this tag much any more, but it helps when using the free checkers on the page to see how well you have optimised the content.
• Write your “Title” tag (unique for each page) in the to include the keyword with a one line header title of the page. This will appear in the search engine results pages, at the top of your browser (or browser tab) and is used a lot for keyword identification by the search engines.
• Write the “META Description” for each page based on the keywords and the page content. This will be shown in the search engine results pages and will only show 150 characters so don’t go overboard on the text.

Images and internal links

• Your images on your webpages have a tag that can be used with them calles the “alt” tag (alternative). This was designed to be used as a description of what the image is, just in case your web browser throws a wobbly and cannot show images. This tag can be used to put your keywords on the page, but remember this is not an acceptable keyword stuffing technique (there are non) – the tag should still be descriptive and meant for the user. NOTE. Although the “Alt” tag is important, the image “title” tag is not really used by search engines but is still a user bonus (when you hover your mouse over an image the descriptive text that pops up is the image title tag).
• Internal links tell the search engines what the page the link is going to is about. Really the keyword should be what the page is about so the link should have the keyword in it (e.g. “Car Insurance FAQ”, “Car Insurance Quotes”, “Car Insurance Enquiries”.

Social media has opened up many new channels for the forces of good in the world, as well as the bad. But at least the picture below shows that it is achieving some very good things for charity.

Online Charitable Donations in the past 12 years have risen from $300,000 to $15,400,000,000 – quite a leap and a major plus for the social media crowd.

Basically what Mashable and the Social Good are saying is that social media is not only here to stay, but it proving to be a good force in the world for charities.

Clicking on the image below will open it larger on the same screen.

This post was originally brought to you by the Social Good Summit.

Google

The way we find information on the internet underwent a “fundamental change” last night, as Google claim to give “Instant” search results. In essence, it means the web giant will now “autocomplete” our every word.

“search at the speed of thought”…

The service predicts a user’s query and modifies the displayed results as more letters are typed into the search box.

Google described it as “search at the speed of thought”, and although we at Spotted Panda are sceptical to this claim, we have tested the feature and found both pros and cons to its use.

Why have Google done this?

Google have failed and failed and failed again in the social media market. They clearly see social media as a threat to their empire and have realised they cannot easily “jump on the bandwagon” successfully, at least with the platforms they have tried thus far (anyone actually use Google Buzz or Google Wave).

So they have returned to their search roots in a bid to combat the rise in social media and the “next level” of the internet, or Web 3.0 as some have come to call it.

Google fears that one day users will have a social media giant, such as Facebook, as their homepage on their browser and on Facebook will be a search feature that acts identical to a search engine search, but has the added benefit of all the social media groups, pages and profiles to scan as well, thus leaving Google defunct.

In order to combat the rise in social media searching Google are trying to think 1 step ahead and improve its (already great) search feature, trying to stay ahead of the game, as it were.

How Google Instant looks on Google.com and .co.uk

What does Google Instant mean for user searching?

Currently you have to be logged into Google for it to work, so it won’t affect 85% (ish) of Google users. This will most likely change soon though, and it also will be rolled out to mobile users later this year.

Users will definately get faster search results, although we are yet unsure on the percentage of relevant results users will receive as they type. Another question is will people really be bothered about 1-5 seconds faster searching (consider how much time per day you spend eating or on the toilet and this 1-5 seconds doesn’t add up to much).

Perhaps this will have the same effets as the move from dial-up to broadband (or ISDN, depending on if you went in for that or not).

One reason for users to be logged in to use the Instant search is that it may confuse not web-savvy users who won’t yet understand why their screen is changing, but as with our evolution of understanding of the web this will undoubtedly change over time.

With users now able to refine their search before they finish it,  they should become even more intelligent with their searching.

What does Google Instant mean for SEO?

Well there’s a question! In reality only time will tell, but most likely Google Instant will not affect SEO very much, as far as we can see.

Black Hat SEO enthusiasts may be able to use this to try and cheat the system more, but as for Spotted Panda we prefert to optimise the content for the user (and we tend to find the keywords fit in naturally and search engines respond better to the content).

Cheesy “Google Instant” Promotion Video -