Here is the existing site:

Where let’s be honest, it’s not exactly hard to find News, Sport or Weather – even less so if you’ve gone all bespoke on it. Following the link to the new Beta site takes you here:

Other than the absence of the clock, the only real difference (as they’ve pointed out) is the navigation. I’m always one for keyword rich links making up your main navigation so opting for this new top menu would suggest to me they’re starting to implement good SEO practice across their sites. They actually do rank no.1 for the terms “news”, “sport” and “weather” but the original changes to title tags would suggest they’re keen to get good practice SEO going on. Perhaps with Rupert Murdoch wanting news to kept from the reaches of Google, they’ve spotted an opportunity to ensure maximum exposure for the free to read content on their website.

Whilst on the subject of the BBC, a competitor to iPlayer has been launched in the form of MSN Video Player. The reason I mention this, I like the message you see when viewed in Google Chrome that tells you to get a better browser:

Bit cheeky? Maybe, but I like it.

Pest Control
1 – kill some flies
2 – allow them to dry for an hour in the sun
3 – take a pencil and paper and let you imagination go

A list of the “best entries” was covered by SEOptimise’s 12 SEO Blockbusters blog entry, then, to raise the bar somewhat, Search Engine Watch has introduced an SEO movie poster competition.

Not wanting this opportunity to combine my love of HTML, film and Photoshop to pass me by, I came up with the following:

That should disspel any rumours of geeks in our industry if nothing else.

Now however, a lot of sites have bolt-on ‘labs’ full of great features that well surpass the efforts of old. Most ‘labs’ projects are genuinely innovative and having a ‘lab’ area to test them in makes perfect sense.   As with most things on the web today, the Google lab is one of, if not the best.

Their latest lab project involves their other new toy, Google Maps. Maps are starting to take over the search results pages so it is probably only natural that they are looking to add new functionality to this area.   The new ‘lab’ features for Google maps are being rolled out selectively, you’ll know if you can access them if you see an icon like the one shown below when you are in Google Maps:

If you see this, then you are in business!  If you don’t, you’re not going to be getting a Christmas card from Google this year!

If you click this link, all of the new features are shown, including, Drag ‘n’ Zoom (my personal favourite), Aerial Imagery – giving a new perspective for those cool aerial shots and a latitude / longitude tooltip – great for those who use sat nav a lot and need to know how to get somewhere off the beaten track.  There’s a screen shot of this in action below:

There is also the option to add a ‘Beta’ badge to the Google logo – I guess we’re not completely away from the old days just yet…

Try the features out (if you can) and let us know what you think?  If nothing else this is another indicator of Google’s shift towards local search and its growing importance in the search results pages.

The section I couldn’t remember for my sum up was simply making sure you website told the search spiders not to re index a page if it had no new content added, to make sure they spend time looking for the new stuff, not re looking at the old stuff! Clever Eh!

He started off by informing the average conversion rate was 3% but then showed a list of the top converting websites with the no.1 (don’t remember what it actually was) with a rate of around 45%. How? By following these 21 “secrets”. I won’t be expanding on them, I can’t write as quick as Bryan can speak, plus, there has to be some advantage to attending SES London:

1) Communicate UVPs and UCPs
2) Make persuasive and relevants offers
3) Reinforce offers site wide
4) Maintain scent
5) Make a strong first impression
6) Appeal to multiple personas/segments
7) Don’t do slice and dice optimisation
8 ) Leverage social commerce – use the voice of the customer
9) Use it for navigation
10) Use it for promotion
11) Use it for credibility
12) Use it for feedback and research
13) Use persuasion principles like scarcity
14) Make forms engaging
15) Provide Point Of Action assurances
16) Keep you in the process
17) Consider email preview
18) Budget for user experience
19) Utilise a system for prioritisation
20) Make data driven decisions
21) Know how to execute rapidly – Amazon had Micheal Jackson promos and links to his albums etc on their site within 2 hours of his death – they also account for 25% of all ecommerce sales in the USA.

As with any good presentation, he stuck in a quote from some knowledgeable bod or other:

“Execution is not an event – a one time push toward acheiving goals. It is a way of life”

Following on from this – 5 steps to getting great conversion rates next week:

1) ID the problems, review analytics, check for high bounce rates on key landing pages.
2) Create a do to list on what you’d like to improve
3) Document hypothesis
4) Prioritise
5) Test

And that’s your lot, there’ll be a video update at the end of they day, for a round up of yesterday, follow this link.

Valid HTML

First off, it does annoy me (it really does) that the embed code that YouTube provide for each video is invalid HTML, so, here is W3C valid HTML you should use:

Note, you must use the embed URL provided by YouTube here and not the standard link.

Turn Off Related Videos

When the video has finished playing, by default it will then show you related videos.  This can be an issue if, for example, the video on your website then shows related videos that link to a competitor’s videos.  To get around this, you simply append &rel=0 to the end of the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/v/cpRPin0yPHU&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0

Autoplay

If you want the video to start automatically playing when the page is accessed, simply append &autoplay=1 to the URL.

http://www.youtube.com/v/cpRPin0yPHU&hl=en_GB&fs=1&autoplay=1

Deep Linking

As an aside, if you ever want to link to a YouTube video, but want to access a video at a certain point, you can add minute and seconds parameters to do just  that, so, whereas normally you’d send a link such as:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKgCXWGM3wY

and say “watch this for the greatest free kick you’re ever likely to see, but if you don’t want to watch highlights of a great game then spin on to about 4m40″, you can now just send the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKgCXWGM3wY#t=4m47s

You just need to amend the minutes and seconds accordingly, it’s that easy.

What this then allowed was for data like this to be displayed without having to go back to Excel.

Nice – and a big time saver! Have you seen it and used it?