Get Visible SEO Blog

The New Cookie Law – What you need to know

Lee — Mon, 28 May 2012 09:56:11 +0000

Today is officially the first day for UK businesses to embrace the new legislation governing the use of cookies.

As of today, businesses that run websites will need to be able to show their compliance with the new law.

For non compliance, the governing body responsible for the new law (Information Commissioner’s Office) will have the ability to impose fines of up to £500,000 although the likelihood of receiving a fine at this stage is unlikely.

What is the new law?

The new law (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2011) states that websites must provide “clear and comprehensive” information about the use of cookies – small files which allow a site to recognise a visitor’s device.

The law requires that website operators must:

Tell people that cookies are used;
Explain what the cookies do;
Obtain the visitors consent to store a cookie on their device.

Are there any exceptions?

If the cookies used on your website are regarded as ‘strictly necessary’ then you won’t need to obtain the visitors consent. For example, exceptions are likely to be made if the cookie is only being used to ensure a page loads quickly or is used to track a user’s shopping basket contents.

For cookies that are used to track the user’s activity for marketing purposes and to improve conversion rates, consent will need to be obtained first before the cookie is used.

Why has it changed?

The idea behind introducing this new law centres around the problem we have with how easy personal information can be accessed and exploited. Cookies on websites can monitor a visitor’s online activity without them necessarily knowing and some cookies can remain on a visitor’s computer for over a year. Although they are used primarily for improving the user’s experience on a website and capturing the user’s tastes and trends for new products and promotions, the new law is designed to put a limit on how easy it is to monitor the activities of each visitor to a website.

What are the problems?

The main problem is the burden it places on small businesses to comply with the new law, especially when third-party cookies are used for embedded technology that web operators have no control over i.e. Google Analytics.

By obtaining mandatory consent to cookies used for analysing useful information for marketing purposes, businesses will no longer have an accurate picture of how effective their website is at attracting new visitors and what those visitors are looking for.

The ICO’s own research suggests this could be an issue as only 10% of its visitors agreed to accept cookies from its site.

The UK and the rest of the EU will also be at a competitive disadvantage compared to our international rivals who do not currently require full consent to cookies.

In hindsight, there could have been closer collaboration with the browser providers in order to ensure information on cookie use and storage is more readily available to the user through their browser rather than forcing the individual website to bear the cost of compliance.

What is the solution?

The ICO will be looking for websites that can show that they have taken reasonable steps towards complying with the law. This can be covered by having a Privacy & Cookie Policy available to view on your website.

A good Privacy & Cookie Policy will cover the following points:

Who is responsible for collecting the data;
Who is responsible for ensuring the security of the data;
What data is collected;
Why the data is collected;
Where the data is stored;
What cookies are used, including the name;
How long the cookies are used for;
The reason why cookies are used;
How to opt in and out of the use of cookies;
Information on third party cookies.

The BT homepage provides an excellent example of how to obtain your visitors consent to cookies, but there are plenty of useful free tools out there that your web developer can use to get the same effect for your website. www.civicuk.co.uk is one example.

Written by : Watertight Legal who can provide a bespoke Privacy & Cookie Policy for your business which covers all of the essentials in order to show compliance with the new law – and who are currently writing my bespoke privacy policies as you read this (probably).

Static Traffic, Falling Commissions. Look To Mobile?

Lee — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:10:10 +0000

One of my major sites was proving to be a conundrum. Over the first four months of the year traffic was largely the same as it has been for the past three years although day traffic peaks may have increased significantly over that time. But total commissions have fallen by 41.41% from 2010 to 2012. Just like any affiliate I had to find out “why?”

At first I was thinking that it could be EPC but that has risen from 4.88p in 2010 to 5.39p in 2012. On that basis I’d say that I’ve been doing better at attracting relevant visitors to my site – although in that sector there has been a noticeable increase in general prices. I’ve also become better at getting my commission rates increased above standard. I also ruled out the level of non-affiliate product reviews as the heat maps were so in favour of affiliate clicks.

However, after seeing the Affiliate Window blog post: “Why mobile Marketing is hitting affiliates in the pocket” and the stand-out comment that affiliates “lose out on £1.2m in commission for every 1% of sales through mobile handsets” I started to come out in a cold sweat. I had a flash back of dropping Buyagift an email about their mobile site being indexed in Google and wondered what my merchants were doing. Thankfully I got confirmation that Thornton’s were tracking mobile sites, whilst Cadbury Gifts Direct had a mobile site, but it looked like they weren’t and Hotel Chocolat didn’t have a mobile site.

Although I saw that Thornton’s conversion rate had increase from 4.53% to 7.42% from 2011 to 2012 and I just put that down to more prominent advertising. My Earnings Per Click was up, and AOV not really fluctuating, so what could it be?

My jaw hit the floor when I popped into Analytics and saw that now 24.77% of my traffic was from mobile devices. Furiously checking for last year’s data I saw it was 9.22% and the year before it was just 2.24%. Obviously Google Analytics traffic of particular devices has only recently kicked-in, I did notice that 11.26% of my traffic was via iPhones – and I knew how crap my site looked on an that far from being mobile friendly. Most of the revenue hotspots were being pushed to the side as people as people tapped in for the content.

I then thought I should found out how many clicks I was sending to merchants and realised they had nearly halved since 2010 even though this year I didn’t run AdSense and had slightly more landscape taken up by ads (no Panda affect this year as traffic was up significantly during the late March Panda update). But seeing the figure of CTR falling from 73% the year before to 36.7% this year was a huge kick in the teeth and proof that I really should have kept an eye on mobile stuff.

What were people doing? Well, when people first visit the site the text is far too small to read…

… so people were tapping in so they could read the reviews, which meant all the adverts were lost. From heat map analysis I knew that those adverts at the top where getting tonnes of clicks, but not mobile traffic, it looks like they were being ignored.

All the mobile plugins I’ve looked at just did the same, the content was there, but the monetization was lost. With a strange case of serendipity I hooked up with the guys at MyMCart in a consultancy basis and started to bash their referrer product around to see how we can make it even more relevant and useful for affiliates (I hope they appreciate the long emails and constant suggestions?). We’re at a stage where we’ve made heaps of progress in the last couple of weeks and we can start to allow a few affiliates to have a play.

Essentially the product is a suite where you can upload product CSV files from your favourite networks and that data will be organised and pumped out into a mobile version of a product listing site. I’m currently trying it on d.eals.mobi and doing a joint venture with cluck.mobi to ensure that Google gets on ok with it from an SEO point of view. But I see heaps of opportunity for affiliates because you can alter your own CSV files, tweak the product data and add content and use it purely as an SEO tool, or show banners within your site only when people are viewing with mobile devices and send them to merchants that have mobile sites and ensure you increase CTR and EPC. I’ll be providing the code this week to so you can drop links into category specific or search specific pages of your mobile site.

The idea is that’ll be a piece of cake to monetise your mobile traffic regardless of what platform you use or how you generate affiliate sites.

My big affiliate push this year will be mobile, as I want that damn commission chart to have a huge uplift next year. But maybe have a look at your own data and see how much mobile traffic you’re getting and if that’s deflating your clicks to merchants and commissions.

Google’s New (?) Personal Information Snippets

Lee — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:15:53 +0000

Have you tried searching for a name in Google recently? You’ve obviously done your own, but you done someone elses?

Taking Gordon Ballantyne – a former director of T-Mobile as an example. Google adds relevant information below the title but above the page/meta snippet:

The most interesting bit for me is that people’s Facebook listings where they mention a sample of the person’s friends.

Is this new? Has anyone else seen it? Also, what about an option to opt out, or amend? Do we have the right to opt-out? Should we care?

Cover image © the other Martin Taylor

A Stumble Down Memory Lane … The View Is Still The Same

Lee — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:21:45 +0000

So for most of you this won’t be the most relevant of posts I’ve ever made. But for some of you that occasionally look back at where you’ve come then it may be interesting.

Whilst on my way to check the location of a meeting I’ve got in the morning I realised that I’d beaten that path before. I used to walk that way to the Old Street Station when on my way home for providing Workthing.com with SEO consultancy.

It must have been about eight or nine years ago that I was last year – before the company went bump.

I started thinking about the strategies I was recommending. Then I realised they’re pretty much no different than I recommend today.

Here’s what I was suggesting to them:

1) Clear out the crap.
I suggested that they streamline the route from homepage to relevant content.

2) De-dupe
They used some microsites to target different recruitment niches, but they were too similar to each other. I tried to get them to create relevant content and use it on those sites (they already had great content on the main site)

3) Obtain more relevant links from industry authority sites to those microsites whilst trying to get more recruitment links to the main.

4) Focus more widely on relevant keywords and devise a format across sectors that will attract visitors that are more likely to convert.

5) Greater accountability of the data set and track goals more accurately.

6) Increase the likelihood that visitors would enthuse about the site and recommend it to others.

It’s remarkable that these six objectives are still 100% relevant today. So has SEO changed in the last eight or nine years? My view is that it hasn’t as much as people think.

To me SEO has always been about writing good content, content that focuses on your head terms, but extends into the tail. It’s always been about getting good quality links. Even when I first started link building in late 1997 I always tried to get links from relevant sites. I never tried to get them from totally unrelated, but highly-valued (in general) sites. I’ve always tried to account for my SEO actions and gauge the success of everything I’ve done. So to me, the core principles of SEO have not changed during the past decade.

All that’s changed is that you’ve got to work a hundred times harder because the competitive landscape is much tougher.

Here’s to the next decade.

Cover image © twodolla

Playing Around With Easy Content Units & WordPress To Mitigate Duplication

Lee — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:23:54 +0000

So I’m going to do a bigger post on the process of moving from Blogger to WordPress and all the bits and bobs, stresses and headaches that go with it. But here’s just a quick one for those people that block out category, tag and search pages due to the fear of duplication.

Well there’s no need to!

What you can do is add content to these pages on a page by page basis. I want to show a unique head paragraph for specific category pages so that’s what I’ve done on my Ganache and guest reviews category pages with the code within the archive.php template:

The reviews below are from Guest Reviewers. Having just one reviewer may give a slanted perception of chocolate, so offering the site up to others to add their thoughts should give a more balanced scope of reviews.
Reviewers are chosen for their lack of bias or favouritism for a particular brand, but they may prefer certain types of chocolate so feel free to give them your feedback

Ganache is a smooth mixture of chocolate, cream, and butter. Generally, it is dipped in tempered chocolate and rolled in powdered cocoa, sweetener, or other coatings to create a truffle, though it is also frequently used as the centre of a bonbon. » Read more in the Glossary. «

Below you can see a list of reviews about – we hope you enjoy!

It’s not rocket science really. I’m crap at php but am learning the odd bit here and there. I’ve even started to put conditional EasyContentUnits in dependent in the category at the bottom – although I need to sort the formatting out. The code I used was similar:

[Your ECU php unit code]

That’s all for: – we hope you enjoy!

I also use the excerpt option when posting to add a little snippet to appear in the search results (I block this) and meta description:

” rel=”bookmark” title=””>

Now I’m working on changing the sidebar navigation dependent on what category the individual posts are in. Everything is possible if you put your mind to it.

Cover image © Lady Alec

Lee, Please …

Lee — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:24:33 +0000

Just had this from someone who works for a client. I might just do a summary blog post on it. But the beauty with most things social, is that we all share ideas – and so they’re not all mine. But after the first quarter of the year is over (my busiest) I’ll be hitting the blog with more useful posts. I’m currently testing a few tactics so I’ll loads of feedback to give.

Lee,

When will you be bringing out your book on internet marketing and the social media? The one all about ‘how to….’ that takes a complete novice through the hows and whys in a step by step format, such as:

How to set up a blog

How to write SEO relvant blog articles

Where to publish your blog

How to chose blog articles to write about

How to make Facebook work for you

How to make Twitter work for you

How to set up your first twitter account

How to choose the twitter topics to write about

How to choose the facebook topics to write about

All about google adwords

How to choose relevant adwords

How to organise your google adwords account to make it efficient and effective

Where to link your adwords to your website and why

What about other social media sites – what are they, are they useful

Then the advanced course – how to take all this info and turn it into a strategy for doing it for paid clients – how to find clients, what to charge, what to offer on a regular basis etc, how to write a proposal for the clients etc

If you could do it on a step by step basis, taking someone through from scratch how to sort it all out, with screen shots for each step, I think you’d be onto a winner.

You’ve probably got a lot of it written already, so you could get a £19.99 (or whatever) ebook going – back it up with a £199 course, and a £9.99 a month newsletter with the latest info and what you should be thinking of doing on a monthly basis.

Can I buy the first copy/newsletter subscription please?

PLEASE launch it asap, help me out and make yourself another great stream of income.

[Anon]

Kids Today Don’t Know They’re Born

Lee — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:30:03 +0000

I must be getting old as I’m moaning out about how lucky kids are today compared to when I was in short trousers! They get everything on a plate and even their exams are bloody easy, they can’t go to school with a bit of snow or a grazed knee, they get school psychologists and all sorts of pampering.

All this takes me back to that fantastic Monty Python sketch:

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort. “Farewell to Thee” being played in the background on Hawaiian guitar.

Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?

Terry Gilliam: You’re right there Obediah.

Eric Idle: Who’d a thought thirty years ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

MP: Aye. In them days, we’d a’ been glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.

GC: A cup ‘ COLD tea.

EI: Without milk or sugar.

TG: OR tea!

MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.

EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

EI: ‘E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN’. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.

GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin’ in a corridor! Woulda’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say “house” it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpaulin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o’clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing “Hallelujah.”

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that… and they won’t believe ya’.

ALL: Nope, nope …

Answering Elaine’s SEO Questions

Lee — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:26:09 +0000

Elaine asked some questions earlier in the week. I’m not sure how many were rhetorical, but I thought I’d add my thoughts (anything to keep me away from the VAT).

Should I search the ethernet for PR4+ blog posts, which don’t implement the ‘no follow’ and then try and figure out how to, sneakily, get my link in, so it looks oh so natural?

– Sneakily? I’ve had some great success using the Majestic SEO tool and SEOMoz’s Competitive Link Finder in finding other blogs to get links from – I don’t’ take too much interest in page rank.

– My biggest source of links is from retailers who place my reviews (testimonials) on their site and then link it.

– I’m also working on another strategy which crosses the biz dev / link building objective by using Twitter to engage and then acquire commentary / links. I’ll expand on this later.

– A few years ago I saw that it’d be more difficult to acquire links without offering something better than the average site. So I started going further down the content route with more emphasis.

Should I be making fan pages on Facebook, My Space, Bebo, Squidoo and Wikipedia?

– I get some traffic from Facebook and Wikipedia. It doesn’t help with SEO a great deal (well conventional wisdom says that – who wants to be conventional though?)

– Don’t forget Flickr though – more on that some other day.
Should I be creating numerous twitter accounts to cater for the wide range of products I could twit to unsuspecting followers?

– Nope – one per site is good. Twitter is a massive element of my biz dev strategy. It’s paramount that I engage and illicit the support of my followers to grow my sites.
Should I be writing numerous blog posts to my various alter-ego blogs and inter connecting them all?

– there’s nothing wrong with inter-linking in a relevant fashion. I do it to some degree, but only when the link is valuable because the content I link to is of use to the user. I won’t do those stupid links in footers on their own.
Should I be creating more niche websites on the WP platform?
– I use Blogger, everyone knows that. But after some recent client work with WP I’m going to move a couple of new ones over to it and see how they get on. There’s some awesome plugins that would save me a massive amount of work, so they’re worth testing.

– I often think its worthwhile extending your 2 or 3 main sites. You could use HitTail to extend your keyword range?
Should I be searching out different hosts so that I don’t host my sites on the same IP address?

– this strategy is only useful if you’re over-reliant on using your own link juice and you find it difficult to attract links naturally.
– make your sites good enough and it won’t be a problem.
Should I be signing up for the latest SEO/Affiliate conference, although they cost a fortune?

– I was just thinking this. There’s so many good resources (like SEO Scientist) etc that I feel that often its not worth it for the education alone. But there is the value of networking.
If I sign up for the latest SEO/Affiliate conference will I make myself ill worrying about networking?

– Elaine worry about anything? Nah. You’re an expert!

Should I be writing dozens of articles for article sites

– only do what you’re interested in. For sites that I have less passion for I use TextBroker – they’re awesome!
Should I be writing concise articles, inserting just the one link to my site, for other complimentary sites?

– have a look at Glen’s views on the most tweeted blog posts. Long posts work. Only link when its relevant. Do some content because people will find it useful.
Should I be spending most of my time finding those ‘impossible’ PR8 one way links which will lift my site up to Nirvana Link Heaven?
– Have a read of the World Wide Rave or Crush It! – there’s some great ideas there to attract great links as a by-product of self marketing.
Should I just concentrate on good content and bugger the SEO side of stuff?
– Nope – they’re two sides of the same coin. Make SEO a “given”, always have it in your mind, but put the content first.

Should I forget about good content and concentrate on the on-page stuff?

– as above.
Should I use ‘no follow’ to sculpt my site into the silo effect? (no I haven’t got a clue, either!)
– lol! Read this post from SEOMoz.

Should I start using pivot tables to analyse my data from Google Analytics?

– I gave up on this post too. For some it’d be useful, but for me it was over-kill.
Should I start actually analysing my data from Google Analytics?
– hell yeh. As well as Hittail there’s some great keywords in there for content expansion as well as source URLs that you can go back to and try and expand your exposure on.
Should I be concentrating on the long tail keywords and not the short tail ones?
– With different sites I’ll do different things. But generally I concentrate on mid-range keywords and when the site has got some traction, I move further into the head.
Should I be using Linkscape or Majestic – or both?
– Both.
Should I start buying links? (that’s a rhetorical question Matt, I’m a Yorkshire lass!)
– It depends what you mean “buy”. But in the traditional sense, now. But some directories are worth it.

Should I start selling links? (another one of those rhetorical jobbies!)

– One of my competitors does. Now do I report them? cough

Should I start interlinking my pages with the relevant anchor text (don’t forget to alter it, though) from within the content on similar pages?

– Yes, where relevant.

Should I ‘no follow’ all my affiliate links?

– you should be robots.txt’ing them. I’ve not really bothered with nofollow. Perhaps I should.

Should I ‘no follow’ all my outbound links?

– I don’t do it. If I link to people its because they deserve it. Ok, so I’ve done it once or twice when I’ve thought they’ve not.
Should I bother with reciprocal links?

– Value is obviously less than one-way links with relevant anchor text in relevant content. But also think about the traffic they give. I get some useful traffic from reciprocal blog roll links.
Should I bother with backlinks from sites with PR1 or less?
– Today’s ugly duckling is tomorrow’s “bit of alright”. If the site is relevant its worth asking. A site might also have a penalty and if it is removed then the link-juice could be of use.

Should I submit to directory sites?

– There some useful ones, but they’re mainly topic related.

Should my main content be moved to the top of the page with the help of CSS?

– Er no. Concentrate on what’s within the content – that’s infinitely more important.

Should I start following all the Twitterartis mentioned on the latest top 500 worldwide SEOists?

– I’ve really reined in who I follow. There’s some good information streaming through. But be selective.

Should I stop salivating each morning at the thought of the little pearls of wisdom which might have appeared in my Twitter timeline overnight from SEOists with strange names?

– I’m going to be controversial. SEO doesn’t change as fast as people think. Only people’s perceptions of it.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below

Img © walkn

How To Get More ReTweets

Lee — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:27:56 +0000

An awesome presentation, you may have to join the dots, but take a look at this analysis of retweets:

The Science Of ReTweets

View more presentations from Dan Zarrella.

Tracking Link Profiles Over Time

Lee — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:32:15 +0000

Bigger Image

Well it looks like Myspace is not only loosing the traffic stakes against sites such as as Facebook and Twitter, but also in terms of inbound links too – as can be seen by the chart above from Majestic SEO.

It’s a bloody nifty tool and one I’ve been looking for for a while. It lets you compare a the number of inbound links (and their domains) found for given sites over time. This will allow you to gauge your efforts against your competitors.

One of my major tasks in the coming months is to improve the link profile of my and my clients’ sites, and this will be a great tool to provide KPI data.

Hopefully you guys will have a good play with it.