Search Engine Optimisation

2008-07-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

I get people asking me what the secret to search engine optimisation is. I simply tell them to give the search engines what it wants.

Search engines want to delivery the most relevant search results to users with websites that have good relevant content and where that content's credibility has been verified. That's it. Some people get so caught up in the details that they sometime can't see the forest for the trees.

Search engines mainly determine a websites content relevancy by what keywords are in the title, meta description and body content. And it's credibility is rated in simple terms by how many links are going into it and what keywords are being used in those links.

Yahoo! and MSN now accepts Google Sitemaps

2006-11-15T23:37:00.000-08:00

It has been announced on the Google sitemap blog that Yahoo! and MSN now accept the Google XML sitemap protocol. This is nothing new with MSN which has already accepted XML maps as an undocument feature. Details are still light on the Yahoo! and MSN sites but I except to see documentation on this in the coming weeks if not days.

Adwords and Search Engine Optimisation

2006-07-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Recently Google has announced it's plan to penalise advertisers who send users to low relevant sites. This has been a long time coming since there has been a growing problem of Adword and Adsense spam where Adwords with low cost per click were getting sent to spam pages full of Adsense ads with high cost per click ads.

What does this mean for the ethical advertiser? On page optimisation that is normally reserved for natural rankings will become even more important for landing pages.

Local Time in Google Adwords

2006-06-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

Google Adwords now allows you to set local time and well as time scheduling. This is a welcome change to countries outside of the USA. Hopefully the adwords analytics will also show when during the day that the clicks occur to help marketers make better decisions.

Local Time Zone in Google Analytics

2006-05-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

For those who were lucky enough to get a Google Analytics account you may have noticed the new option available to set the local time zone. The only exception to this is if your Analytics account is linked a Google Adwords account.

Still this is a huge step for anyone living outside the US.

Google to offer Dayparting and Scheduling controls

2006-05-28T17:44:00.000-07:00

The cat is out of the bag. An article on Search Engine Watch has reported that Google will offer Dayparting and Scheduling controls in the coming weeks. So now I am allowed to talk about it.

Basically what this means is that ads can be set to appear at certain times of the day and on chosen days. This gives greater control to the advertiser to tweak their campaigns much like TV ad scheduling.

I suspect more features will be announced closer to the launch.

Google Trends

2006-05-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

There is a new tool in the Analytics space, Google Trends . It lets you slice and dice keyword stats by region and also allows for comparisons between different keywords.

I was playing around with the keyword "belly dancing" and was surprised that Australian cities rank quite highly in the top ten. That makes me wonder if Google is also taking into account where the users ip address is.

Get indexed faster in Google

2006-04-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

At last weekend's PubCon search engine marketing conference in Boston, Google blogger Matt Cutts confirmed that Google does have two types of spiders, Googlebot and Mediabot which is linked to Adsense.

Matt also revealed that even though it is Not true that having Google Adsense ads would improve a websites ranking, it may in fact help getting the website indexed faster.

Click here for more

Conversion Rates are the easy wins

2006-04-24T17:23:00.000-07:00

Working in search engine marketing usually means looking after online ad campaigns as well as the optimsation. This then normally leads to clients expecting the conversion rates to increase with the levels of traffic.

What seperates the SEO people from the Techie is understanding online business. Traffic generation is marketing but once someone lands on the website it should be a well though out sales process. Throwing someone straight to a sales order expecting to close the sale is a trap people can get. Push heaps of traffic to a website isn't necessarily a magic pill to increased sales.

Sometimes just making small changes on a website can increase conversion immediately and is an easy win. Something as simple as more relevant copy or adding a stronger call to action can lead to greater sales from the current traffic that is going to the site already.

Google wins rights to Aussie algorithm

2006-04-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Google is adding to it's already comprehensive search services with a new search algorithm developed at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia.

Search for secret millions + Google - Breaking - Technology - smh.com.au

Tracking results

2006-04-11T23:21:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me that there are commercial websites out there that still don't track what the site is doing. Maybe that is still a hangover from the good old days of brand advertising where if sales increase the ads must be working.

If anything internet marketing is more related to direct response ads, even more so with pay per click advertising. With PPC you want to know which keywords are producing sales, not just click throughs. Google adwords even makes this easy for you by providing code to insert in your success response page to make tracking easy.

MSN AdCenter takes on Google AdWords

2006-04-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

With Microsoft's contract with Overture finishing up on the 6th June 2006, MSN is now going to enter the PPC market with it's own program called AdCentre. This is definately something to keep an eye on in the near future.

Web design and optimisation starts with Keyword Analysis

2006-04-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

As in the offline world, starting a website business should begin to some market research. You need to find out if there is demand for a certain product or service and find out how much supply there is.

Keyword analysis is the science of finding out which keywords are the most popular that gets typed into search engines. This shows you the demand as well as what keywords to optimised, kind of like quantitative market research.

I normally use this keyword popularity list to influence web site navigational design. For example if you did some analysis on financial keywords you will soon discover a huge demand for mortage calculators. If I had a mortage company I would make sure that my website hand some kind of calculator on it because that is what people are looking for.

The main tool for keyword analysis is the Wordtracker service. It's quite an intelligence service where you plug in a keyword phrase and it comes back with some numbers on how popular they are together with other suggested keywords.

What is also unique with Wordtracker is that it will also tell you the competing websites for specific keyword phrases. This is the supply side and Wordtracker will crunch the demand and supply figures to indicate how effective a keyword phrase may be to optimise and buy.

Wordtracker lets people trial this service for free but for any serious analysis the service is cheap at about under $8 for a one day access.

Another useful free software tool that I stumbled across is Good Keywords which can tell you how popular keywords are on other types of search engines like Yahoo, Overture and Ask all in the one place.

Google PageRank Calculation table

2006-04-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

Google pageRank calculation table is a nice little site that estitmates how many inbound links a website needs to achieve a certain PageRank.

This is why it's good to give away free content. If it gets picked up by a syndicated news network then this will boost the chances of a PageRank increase