Prefix String with RegEx

Search for [(^)] Replace with [Pre: $1] , this will add Pre: to the start all your stings.
E.g.

• String : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC
• Search : (^)
• Replacement : CNN : $1
• Result : CNN : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC

Postfix a string with RegEx

Search for [($)] Replace with [$1 : Post], this will add : Post to the end of all your strings

• String : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC
• Search : ($)
• Replacement : $1 : CNN
• Result : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC : CNN

I use this for http://pipes.yahoo.com/ which is a handy tool for mashing RSS feeds together. I did want to attribute where the feeds were coming from, and putting the source in the title really improve the feed.

From the first impressions of the website I was a little surprised that there isn’t much of that magic ingredient that search engines love, namely text. In all the homepage has 142 words and only 120 when you remove navigation. This doesn’t give the search engines much to work with. Another aspect to keep in mind is that not every visitor will be be able to read English when they visit. Using tools like Google Translate, visitors would be translate the text on the page into their own language, but sadly most of the information is presented with images.

With regards to the language of the website, I was surprised in was the fact that the website isn’t available in Irish. Seeing as the Irish government is the sole owner of CIE, I would expect that this website would also fall under the Official Languages Act, 2003.

The Official Languages Act 2003 (section 9(3)) requires public bodies to ensure that where they are communicating for the purposes of providing information to the general public or to a class of the general public – in writing or by electronic mail – the communication shall be in the Irish language only or in the Irish and English languages.

But apparently it doesn’t (see end). As this is a website that is also used extensively by toursits having a German / French / Spanish would only help to improve conversions. For example the German train operator Deutsche Bahn offers their site in 10 languages.

HTTP Redirects

Every site should really check that the headers they are sending are the correct ones. This means sending the right HTTP header status, see here for a list of HTTP header statuses. Some potential issues I noticed :

• Main domain : www.irishrail.ie , returns HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved, which is more for when you move something temporarily. If it’s the case that the main page always redirects to /home/ then it should be a 301, a Moved Permanently status.
• Missing pages : www.irishrail.ie/home/help.html returns an error page, saying that the page can’t be found. But the page’s header is saying HTTP/1.1 200 OK, which means that it was indeed found. In this case a 404 Not Found status should be returned. Doing this will help error pages finding this way into the index. It can also have more serious implications like for your robots.txt, where search engines are expecting files in a certain format, and they something radically different while still being told that it’s a valid file.

VIP : Visually Impaired site

I was really pleased to see that they had a section for the visually impaired.

This is a high contrast, low graphic version of their website, as I was expecting.

On further inspection I was a little surprised when not all the links worked. The links to “Your Journey” , “Projects” & “Opportunities” all brought me back to the main website. Also the clicking for the full version of the Breaking News returned me to the home page. While I commend the effort in doing such a website, things like the timetable search works perfectly, I do think that a when doing such a site it should either be done properly or not at all. Doing it properly could involve not having every page available on the VIP version. But if you do include links to resources then they should really be consistent with the ‘expected experience’.

A quick look at the HTML code

Looking closer at the HTML code, there is plenty of room for optimisation. My quick run down would include :

• Moving the 700+ lines of CSS code in the header into it’s own CSS file. This will allow the browser to cache the file, so the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent pages will load faster.
• Moving the 1200+ lines of Javascript code which is placed inline into included javascript files. This will allow the browser to cache these files, so the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent pages will also load faster.
• Moving included files CSS & JS into the header of the file, this will allow these files to be processed before the page is rendered. The one main exception would be the JS include for Google Analytics.
• Remove redundant code, commenting out code sections is great while you are testing, or about to launch. But it also unnecessarily bloats code.
• Use Tables for tabular data, otherwise use DIVs. This websites code uses tables extensively for laying out objects in a grid format, this wasn’t the intended use case for tables in HTML.
• In-line style should be avoided as much as possible, better to use CSS.

The total size of the homepage is 0.45 MB and required in total 50 HTTP requests. This could definitely be reduced to make the page load faster with the suggestions above.

Using AdSense

As the benefit of using AdSense on a sales website can be debated back and forward, I’m not going to go into that here. I really feel that the implementation here is suboptimal. In the screenshot above the top ads do blend in with the site, the right hand side and bottom banners are rich image/rich media ads which don’t blend as easily. One option here would be to turn off the image/rich media ads option. This would result in a uniform look to your page, while also keeping the ads intact. As with most large companies I’m sure they would prefer to have their website inline with their corporate visual identity. It should be considered are 3 ad units really necessary ? Why are they using the maximum number of ads ? Do the all really convert ?

Here we have the AdSense banners highlighted in green with the play button, and the internal banners highlighted in yellow and green marked with an X. While the 3rd party ads are outside the main content, the can be distraction, and potentially annoying for customers. These ads are above the fold, which results in that little bit of extra scrolling to see the pages’ content.

Also I’m not sure as to why you would include AdSense in an IFRAME as this will only skew your AdSense targeting. Also in this case this would be a 4th AdSense Banner, which won’t be displayed (happens automatically), as you are only allowed to use up to 3 AdSense banners on 1 page.

As IrishRail are fans of using AdSense, one tip would be to introduce some Link Units, blended in with some navigational items. These convert quite well, we use them extensively on our Irish Jobs site.

Trying the search function

I tested out the search function, and got a little bit confused. I did a search for the word [contact] and the first result appeared to be the contact page, but it’s located under an obscure URL http://search.irishrail.ie/highlight.aspx?aid=2901210&pckid=147268114&rn=1&sp_id=147267858&lid=113272535&highlight=contact#firsthighlight rather than the expected URL http://www.irishrail.ie/contact_us/ . It searches via a sub-domain search.irishrail.ie , which thankfully blocks indexing via their robots.txt, so this will avoid the duplicate content issue. I did some further looking around to try to see if I could search via http://search.irishrail.ie/ directly, but it comes up with a Danish language search page, and returns results for the domain http://blog.siteimprove.co.uk/ & not IrishRail.ie.

All in all this website gives the appears that it was either half heartily done, or has grown out out control by adding on bits and pieces along the way. Either way this leaves to a diminished user experience and a damaged SEO potential.

A message from IrishRail

I did reach out to Irish Rail before I published this post and they offer the following comments:

• They are planning on relaunching a brand new website in September 2011.
• The website has become over grown and disorganised as they’ve progressed, and the new website will address this.
• They don’t fall under the Official Languages Act, as they are not a governmental institution. Update : Websites don’t fall under the OLA, rather written publications and electronic mail do.
• The new website will have the facility to be multi-lingual, but they are not yet decided as to whether it will be available in multiple languages on launch.
• And yes the AdSense wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t pulling it’s own weight, and it’s quite a helpful source of income.

One further advantage of bringing users to a QR code with a redirect, is that you can easily change the URL in the future if the campaign changes, or is no longer open. Here you would have the option to show a special notice, or redirect again to a newer campaign.

Code to track QR codes

This code will allow you to track users in Google Analytics by what medium they came from, and you will be able to segment them based on this usage. Below is the code located at http://www.blackdog.ie/q/index.php.

<?php
//////
// Fill out and change
//////
$url = "http://www.blackdog.ie/"; // your website name
$medium = "QRcode"; // type of marketing medium
$campaign = "NewsPaperAd"; // name of your campaign
$content= "ad1"; // use to differentiate different ads
$source= "IrishTimes+QR+code+redirect"; // name of your source publication
$term = ""; // if you are focusing on keywords
//////
// That's enough editing
//////

?>


Test this URL

This should bring you to :

1. http://www.blackdog.ie/q/ which will redirect you to
2. http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/qr-codes-practice/, our post about QR codes, and it will also append the Google Analytics code to track people in the URL.

Create your own QR code for free

There are a few companies out there selling QR codes, probably to business who don’t really understand the technology. There is a free way to generate your QR code, just visit this website and enter the details of the destination URL.

If you have any other tips for business using QR codes, please share them with us in the comments.

P.S. : if you are doing any offline marketing then remember to put a QR code on your flyer, brochure, packaging, etc.

Perhaps I’m the wrong type of developer, but I sometimes like to see the minor changes in my code I test as I go along. I’m not able to visualise multiple changes so easily. So if you are like me, give this a whirl ! We found this tool via a post from developer blog post by Paul Tarjan this time last year.

Edit : see below in the comments for a better alternative.

Day 1 @ a4uexpo

• Google On-Page Optimisation : Likes & Dislikes by Sepita Ansari from CatbirdSeat : who brought people through the SEO Periodic Table, focusing on on-page factors. Sepita was good at explaining some of the key SEO fundamentals.
• Persuasion: Surefire Psychological Tactics To Boost Your Conversion Rate by Stephen Pavlovich from Conversion Factory. This was a really interesting talk, about how to eliminate the barriers to entry and exit. Stephen talked about the Chivas effect, where they upped their price and changed the label, and they noticed increased sales. Brand and perception of your brand is quite important.
• SEO Crystal Bowl : Working On A Long Term Strategy Panel with Martijn Beijk, Onetomarket , Sam Crocker, OMD, Roy Huiskes, Chapter42, Kelvin Newman, Site Visibility. This was quite a frank talk between some pretty smart SEOs about where Search & Optimisation is going in the future. More on this session can been seen on State of Search by Sam.
• Common Mistakes: Stagnating Your Affiliate Programme’s Growth by Geno Prussakov, Affilinomics. This talk was a great guide for best practice for merchants, but also served as a good guide for affiliates for picking “good” networks and merchants to work with. Geno highlighted potential leaks to affiliate income (unoptimised landing pages, confusing processes, cannibalisation with other ads, etc) , and how to spot them. I was lucky enough to get a copy of his new book Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day.
• Kick Ass SEO: An Entertaining Discussion on Trends and Insights with Dixon Jones, DixonJones.com & MajesticSEO, Gary Beal, Blueclaw Media Ltd, Alexander Holl, 121Watt, Bob Rains & Marcus Tandler, Tandler.Doerje.Partner. This was a nice panel talking about trends for marketing. Marcus (aka mediadonis) almost speaks as fast in English as he does in German. I really liked some of the things that Gary mentioned, and he was happy to give me some tips after the session.

Day 2 @ a4uexpo

• Facebook, Twitter and Blogging: Secrets for more Followers, more Traffic and more $$$ by Dave Cupples, FatCowBusiness.com. Dave has lots of energy, and probably makes some nice money as an affilate (sharing his affiliate links in your presentations probably helps him). But the overall message wasn’t really
• The strategic use of Search ” the emergence of Search as a true Performance Marketing channel and the rewards from greater, more focused, integration by Pete Newman, Found. This was a good look at up coming changes in advertising for affiliates. One of his examples was the twitter account for a product, namely Westend Musicals, where they buit a social product and website to complement the social interaction. The product was basically another way to get people into purchasing the product.
• KEYNOTE : Applying Behavioural Economics to Affiliate Marketing: “It’s easier to change behaviour than opinions” by Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy Group. A great keynote speaker, I was blown away. He talked about the aspect of heuristics being applied to affiliate marketing. We are all decision engines, but it isn’t really something that can be easily or accurately measured. We don’t really know why & how decisions are made. People aren’t inherently logical. Rory talked about decisions like how to purchase a TV. Where people are almost afraid not go with a brand, even after doing their own research. One of my favorite quotes was “If women like men with expensive vehicles, they would all date lorry drivers“. He believes that the real tech revolution has peaked, like how the car industry has failed to be really innovated since the 1930′s. Some of the cool ideas he covered was an app from, Westpac Bank, called “Impulse Saver”, which at a press of a button moves money from your current a/c into a savings account, using the idea of impulse saving instead of impulse shopping. See below for a cool video that Heathrow Airport & IBM produced during Wimbledon last year. For more from Rory, check his talk at TED in 2009, titled Life lessons from an ad man.
• How to Build Links Which Look Natural: with Kevin Gibbons, SEOptimise, Kelvin Newman, Site Visibility. Not only are they great lads to have a few beers with, they had some interesting ideas about gaining links websites. One tip I particularly liked, was to get Universities to syndicate your open job positions, or using sites like toluna.com to get quick survey information gathered. Kevin’s slides can be seen here, and Kelvin’s are here.

So that’s a quick post about my thoughts on a4uExpo Europe, sit back and enjoy the video below. Video from shared in Rory Sutherland’s Keynote : IBM’s Wimbledon Lotus T5 campaign.

Update : Added Dixon in there, sorry mate !

It’s probably not what you really want, as basically it’s just trash in the SERPs. To fix this, and remove it from the SERPs,  you can simply add some extra details to your .htaccess file which will send the the proper X-Robots-Tag.

For your .htaccess file

<FilesMatch "sitemap\.xml">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "robots\.txt">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>
This method can also be used to remove all word documents or similar from the index.

<FilesMatch "\.doc$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "index, noarchive, nosnippet" </Files>

To check your MIME type

http://redbot.org/ is a handy tool to check out the MIME headers, cache control and FileTypes. Their code is opensource so you can run a version on your server.

Thanks

Thanks to some people like Carlo Zottmann , JohnMu, & Paul Cawley for giving me some pointers on this.

Instead of “Aer Lingus- cheap flights, gift vouchers, hotels, car hire, & travel insurance”, it’s now just replaced with “Aer Lingus”. I’m not quite sure what we can take away from this, but I do wonder

• Are title tags loosing importance ?
• Are title tags with none relevant keywords being filtered or peanlised ?
• Are they just filtering title tags that have delimiters like -, : or | tags ?

To me it seems like a strange move by Google, and one that I’m not really sure about.

And it’s not just position 1 rankings, here is a shot for a search of [blacknight] on google.de, logged in.

Here they have chopped off the business name, “Blacknight Solutions“, instead of the full title “European Web hosting based in Ireland, exchange hosting, domain registration, dedicated servers, colocation – Blacknight Solutions“.

So is this bye bye to the advantage of writing good titles ?

This morning I was doing my random look at statistics across some domains, and I came across an interesting set of stats. So being a Friday and in the mood for a ramble, I decided to share.

I am always talking about taking things in context to my clients. 10 / 200 / 40k visitors a day might be good, depending if they are the “right type of visitor” and the search volume. Not many people look for [cars for sale in Ballyhaise, Cavan] compared with [cars for sale in Dublin], and having a little perspective when looking at things will save you potential problems down the line. Here is a look at something similar, but different, a look at taking statistics in context.

Daily Statistics

This example is from an Irish site, and at first glance the weekly view doesn’t look so interesting. We have a dip around Christmas, but over all the numbers seem consistent. There seems to be a weekly peak around Monday & Tuesday, but over all the traffic per day seems to be steady.

Weekly Statistics

Now looking at the weekly view, we see the dip from Christmas week. But we also see that in this 10 week period there is an overall increase in traffic, which looks more pronounced compared with the weekly view.

Monthly Statistics

And now aggregating per month, December 2010 had 7,111 visits, January 2011 had 8,980 and February 2011 is projected to be around 9,300 visits. This in fact shows a 30% increase from December to February. But looking at the daily numbers we probably wouldn’t have seen that it was such an increase, would you ?

Zooming in & Zooming Out

When comparing numbers, it’s important to get an overall view of things, and also to look deeper in certain outliers. In our statistics we see that we had a dip around Christmas week, but looking at the monthly view this is perhaps hidden. Looking at the monthly view shows that indeed traffic is increasing, compared with looking at the daily figures.

When we look at December with the previous months, we see that it was below the projected trend (Christmas really effects this website). And using the monthly figures for December 2010 will give an over inflated view of the website traffic increase in January 2011.

So there you have it, take statistics with a pinch of salt, and try to find out the bigger picture. Knowing this will help you make more accurate assumptions as to the state of your website.

More reading

Yesterday another blog post of mine was published by the web hosting company blacknight.com (no relation, just we like dark colours). Jump to here to see my post on SEO for Dummies

Preventing Hacking Attempts

Any user generated content you display on your website should be checked for malicious scripts and content, as in the case of the Fine Gael’s website, it has ended up redirecting it to another website [seen below]. In essence it’s a rather straight forward hack :

• A  user entered a comment, which contained the malicious code.
• And it was displayed on their website, without being checked, parsed or sanitised (i.e. potentially malicious tags being removed)
• When the site is loaded the comment is also loaded, but because it had the javascript tags, these were also run, and one of them redirected you to the “hack site”.

Screenshot of the hacked website

No doubt there will be calls for a full explanation as to how this could happen to Fine Gael’s website. For further reading about the hack attempt check threads on boards.ie / politics.ie , news on RTÉ / silconrepublic.com /  thejournal.ie and on blogs like michele’s & nábídána‘s.

Update : As of 21:40 , January 9 2011, it seems that the website has been replaced with a holding template while the website is fixed.

Temporarily taken offline

Street View Privacy

Besides the issue with the WIFI networks, people have been requesting that their should have a way to “opt-out” of this service. Currently Google blurs out faces & number plates of cars, but in Germany people have the right to request that the image of their house can be removed. Right now this is a storm in a tea cup for the German regional Information Commissioner, Dr Johannes Caspar. Some{DE} newspapers {DE} are reporting that there are over 10,000 requests already to remove information, and it’s expected that this number will continue to grow.

I must admit, I think that these people are forgetting how the internet works. This type of information is not just available from Google. Here are a series of videos from a Düsseldorf letting agency, which show houses and other details of locations through the city. People fail to realise there isn’t much you can do from stopping someone taking a picture of your house, and putting it on a service like Panoramio, here is an example of a house close to my office. And the bigger question, is this something you should be able to request ? Is this an invasion of privacy (either morally or legally) to have a picture of your house on the internet without your permission ? All that Google is doing is making this information easy to use, and filling in the many holes in what other services offer. While I realise that Germany’s privacy laws on photography of people are stringent, I really don’t understand why this could extend to an image of your house.

There are other issues that I wonder about, like if you live in an apartment building, and one person requests your building removed, but the other 11 tenants are perfectly happy with the image being included. In the end, my fear is that it will just render this service unusable in Germany.

Google Video on Street View Privacy

Here is a video from Google’s Street View page in German that talks about data privacy {DE}, from their microsite about this topic.

Street View German Cities

The cities list of cities that google plans to roll out streetview in, via google blog {DE} :
Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hannover, Köln, Leipzig, Mannheim, München, Nürnberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.

Business Card Backgrounds

Using Business Cards

As the backgrounds are all different, you do get a few interesting looks handing out business cards. Some people think you are giving their colleague a different / special / secret card, compared with the one they are getting. To be honest I am not a big fan of handing out business cards (and these ones will probably last a year), but in certain circles it looks bad if someone gives you their card and you can’t offer one in return. At the very least the business cards are good for entering competitions in trade shows and at hotels For anyone settings themselves up in business and starting out, a few euros and an hour invested in some cards should help.

Right now they have an offer, which only runs until tonight, where you can get 200 cards for about €50, see here. Or to test is about €15 for 50. They have an email list too which regularly sends out offers.

One final moo tip : unless your company is a really focused on the environment, avoid the eco paper cards. The finish isn’t as polished on they as it is for the matt (no recycled card) business cards.

btw. I will be the first to admit that my cards aren’t as cool as these cards, being an ex-electronic engineer I find them really intriguing.

Delivery !

And five days after I’ve ordered they’ve popped up on my door.

Presentation

The packaging

The Moo Cards

This morning I was looking for a T-shirt printer in Munich, and I typed in the following search query [tshirt druck] on google.de , and after position 3, I see the google places map.

Casually checking out C & D, I didn’t notice that they had the same phone number. But both results brought me to the same same website. On closer inspection we see that munich-t-shirt.com 301 redirects to stadtkopierer.de, but none the less google places lists them both.

btw. stadtkopierer I am also surprised you have 20 reviews, when your competitors have 0, but maybe that’s a topic for another day.

Steps to create a multiple listing

Things that will probably need to be unique :

• website URL
• email address
• business title

Things that probably don’t need to be unique :

• phone number
• location

I did notice that the two websites have different WHOIS & DNS settings, but I’m guessing that this also isn’t so necessary.

Adding your business on Google Places

To add your business to google places, simply log in to your google account and visit http://www.google.com/local/add/, here you will be guided through the process. My only tip here would be to include as much information as possible.

I’m not going to go too in-depth as to why being listed on Google places is absolutely important. But if you are selling a product and have a physical presence in a town or city, then having a listing will deliver you a great leads of customers who want your product in a specific area. (examples : wedding planner {city name}, dentist near {postcode} , gardner {town} , etc, etc.) You know that people searching for these types of things are more prepared to buy, than someone looking for general information. Test it yourself, google [tv shop] & [tv shop dublin], and see how Google treats the different visitors.

Now I’m off to do a little further testing

The FrontEndUser Module is a great addition, where it allows you to have a login for your site, and display certain parts of templates whether a user is logged in or not. Sadly their email validation is slightly flawed, as it didn’t like email addresses with dashes in the username part.

I came across a great post titled “Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions” , which show various examples of what regular expressions will match and check for valid email addresses.

FrontEndUser Fix

To fix the FrontEndUser module to allow dashes (some of you call them hyphens) you can take the following steps

• go to /modules/FrontEndUsers/FrontEndUsers.api.php
• find the function IsValidEmailAddress around line 965
• comment out :

if( !eregi("^[_a-z0-9-\.-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-\.-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$", $email ) )

• and replace it with

$reg ='/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i';
if( preg_match($reg, $email ) )

The next thing from Google

I’m thinking out loud here, while looking at my credit card bill earlier today I am really quite surprised that Google hasn’t launched their own version of a credit card. They already have a payment gateway, google checkout, which can provide data on consumer spending processes. But it is limited to online transactions. I’m sure that offline transactions, and the data set of

• what people buy with the cards
• where they are when they purchase
• what time of the day they purchase
• what their average purchase amount is
• frequency of purchasing at a location
• etc.

could nicely be tied in with the data on into

• how they search (google search)
• use a phone (google voice)
• use broadband
• use email (Gmail)
• use health care (health.google.com)
• etc.

to allow them to create a comprehensive profile of a person, and ultimately target ads to people with products that  now that they like to buy.

Again this would align with their strategy to organise the worlds data. hen I see Google touching into these markets with their recent  credit card comparison tool for the UK, I really start to think that it could be a possibility.

We’ve seen how they will soon destroy the GPS industry with their Google Maps Navigation (which I wish would be launched in Europe, so please hurry up) to provide free turn by turn directions to users instead of having to buy rather expensive GPS devices. Google entered the market under the radar so to say, by licencing the content until they were in a position to use their own. Maybe with the comparison tool google will be able to see what offers interest consumers most, is it a low APR , balance transfer or rewards ?

Ways to make the Google Credit Card attractive

I’m sure they will want to avoid another backlash like they got from the launch of Buzz earlier this year, so it will have to be something people are willing to trade their data for. Most cards in the United States don’t have an annual fee, unlike European cards, so I don’t think that a no-fee card would be a such an attractive proposition. And offers of points, air miles and cash back are also quite standard. To catch the attention of the public it would probably need to be something significantl that people wouldn’t mind their purchasing data being analysed. My thoughts that it would be something with an extended credit limit, lower balance, and then tied in with another google product like say a free phone for example. Again these are just some random thoughts on what they could do.

One other possible entry into the market would be to purchase one of the smaller credit card companies, like say Discover.

After Google Credit Card

And what will Google do after that. Could Google start to be an cheap energy provider or even a  bank ? Sure why not ! At the end of the day it’s all data.

• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimization
• SEO consultant
• etc.

Note: I’m not slamming anyone company in these examples, well maybe one, but this is not the point of the post. I want to give some tips on picking a SEO company so that you know the right questions to ask and know when someone is pulling the wool (a little) over your eyes.

Reality Time

A sad fact in this matter is that people searching for [SEO] are more likely to be other SEO companies, rather than potential clients looking for some SEO help. So the fact that they rank for SEO probably doesn’t even help their bottom line. Here is a little comparison between the number of searches for [SEO] and the number of searches for [cake recipe] using a popular enough keyword [house prices] as a scale. This graph relates to the worldwide view rather than just Ireland.

It just can’t be that there are similar enough numbers of people looking to bake cakes, as there are people looking for information on SEO. My tip would be if a company says they rank for a keyword, give it a check on google trends or on google keyword tool for adwords to find out exactly how popular it is.

Looking at the amount of enquiries I got last year, and the % of them which came from the keyword [SEO] I would have to say it was close to zero. I would hazard a guess that the a lot of my manual comment SPAM for SEO tools and link building etc, is from dubious firms putting these keywords into their browser and going through the first few pages of Google results to find some links. So the fact that a company ranks for [SEO] doesn’t really help them, rather it probably wastes a bit of their resources, unless they are using it for bragging rights.

Final Thoughtson hiring a SEO company

If you are going to hire a SEO company, ask more about what they do and how they do things. What is their approach to site structure ? And how to they go about procuring back links ? Don’t be fooled when a company says that they are are #1 or #2 for a particular {keyword}, and therefore they must be good and they will be able to get you to rank at a high position too. Rather, ask for real life cases they have worked on, and what the resulting traffic increase has been because of their SEO efforts. Request Google Analytics data (or some other statistical report) of before and after the SEO campaign, and if necessary verify with their client that the SEO company has actually done this.

An aside : And oh, here are our SERPs for SEO so we do rank somewhere, but just not that high, but then again we are not looking for new clients, so that’s okay.

The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash  amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :

1. open up notepad
2. enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
3. for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
4. save as ASCII .TXT file.
5. login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
6. click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
7. fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
8. click review, do a review and see the fees.
9. Click send and save some fees !

Paypal Fee Savings

For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com  1000 EUR

So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge,  rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.

It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !

Merry Christmas !

And once you focus your mouse on the input box to put in your search query, the other links are then shown. For this test it wasn’t every visit to google.de resulted in such a behaviour, it was more randomised.

Google UI Testing Video

Use full screen to see more details.

Google can generate valuable information from these testing sessions in the areas of usability / accessibility / user experience / conversion optimisation. What do you think of all these Google UI tests ?

1. The 3rd Bar Camp Cork is on next weekend, November 14th 2009. If you can make it I would really advise popping along and listening in on some of the talks (or even giving a talk yourself). Last year it was the first event of it’s kind I went to, and it was worth travelling back from Munich to attend.  I met some great people and actually learned alot from it. If you want to meet some  motivated online entrepreneurs and IT geniuses then this is the place to be. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but hopefully I will be there again next year.
   
2. The SEO world tends to get a bad reputation for dubious offerings, being over priced or just plain out lying. Often these companies contact clients of mine offering the sun, moon and stars. They tend to talk about  special affiliations to google, and promise that they can achieve organic SEO #1 positions for competitive keywords.  A while ago, fancy dress mogul Ronan O’Brien called foul over a SEO company Storm Media , and managed to grab their attention via his blog. Check out the blog post about Storm Media. This company has also been covered by other Irish bloggers like Sian Phillips

Hopefully the next update won’t be as long coming.:D

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

And last year they also had a special edition :

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains