While there is some truth in this advice, it is mostly a myth as there are so many different factors when it comes down to how well your site ranks.

I’m going to show you the Google Analytics from two of my sites that would normally be considered to not be optimized SEO wise.

They share the following characteristics:

Static content

The content on both sites has been virtually unchanged since they were created.

High bounce rate

The bounce rate (ie: the percentage of visitors that leave the site after viewing one page within a certain period) is over 80%.

Short Visit Duration

Related to bounce rate is the amount of time a visitor spends on your site.  Both of the sites have a average visitor duration less than 2 minutes.

Low Number of Visited Pages

Generally, the higher the number of pages visited, the better, as it indicates your website has content that is of interest to visitors.  Both my sample sites have an average page views of less than 2 pages.

Google Analytics

So given the sites have the characteristics listed above, let’s look at the following analytics for Site 1.

Click to view full size

The analytics period is from October 2011 to the end of November 2013.

As you can see, the number of visits over that period has been steadily rising and there certainly haven’t been any drops in the number of visitors due to major Google updates like Panda and Hummingbird.

The other interesting stats are:

Average Pages per Visit: 1.25

Average Visit Duration: 1:36

Bounce Rate: 83.67%

To show how consistent these figures are, here are the stats from the previous month:

Click to view full size

The corresponding stats for this period are:

Average Pages per Visit: 1.21

Average Visit Duration: 1:40

Bounce Rate: 86.61%

Similarily, here are the analytics for Site 2 (which is a much smaller niche)

Click to view full size

Where the corresponding stats for this site are:

Average Pages per Visit: 1.28

Average Visit Duration: 1:39

Bounce Rate: 83.65%

Why are these sites ranking well?

So the obvious question is why do both of these sites rank well and have very consistent traffic if the don’t fit the general SEO advice on how to rank a site?

The short answer is returning visitors.

In each of the three graphs above, the percentage of returning visitors is around 40%.

The percentage of returning visitors is a very good indication to Google (and other search engines) that your site is useful to visitors as they have a reason to keep coming back.

There is also another related factor, and that’s the referral source.

Click to full size

In the analytics screenshot above, it gives a breakdown as to where/how visitors are reaching the site.

You can see the number one source of traffic is direct traffic.  This means visitors are either typing the URL of the site into their browser or accessing it via a bookmark.

Number two on the list is Organic Search, ie: visitors coming to the site via search engine.

Referrals are the third highest source of traffic.  In most cases, is visitors coming to your site via a link on another website.

Fourth on the list is Social.  This includes visitors coming via Facebook, Twitter and other social media sources.

Given that  less than 40% of visitors are coming via a search engine, this is also a good indication to Google that the site has something of value for visitors as most of them are arriving via other sources.

The Defining Characteristics

So now, you might be wondering what characteristics the two sites that I’ve given a breakdown of the analytics for have in common.

Simple answer is that they are both lookup services.

By that, I mean a visitor comes to the site, enters in some type of query, clicks on a button and sees the result.

There are many examples of lookup services, eg:

• Calculator sites – home loan calculators, temperature conversions, currency exchange rates etc.
• Query sites – search engines (general and specific), domain lookups etc.
• Generators – baby name suggestions, domain name generators etc.
• Voting sites – voting on popular social memes, current affairs etc.

The point is, these sites can provide a useful service to visitor that encourages them to return to the site.

Cheers

The post The Fresh Content and Bounce Rate Myths appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

These days, anyone can start up a site offering SEO services, so what warning signs should you look for to ensure you don’t end up wasting your money, and more importantly harming the ranking of your site?

[dropcap style=”dropcap2″ color=”magenta”]1[/dropcap]Guaranteed Rankings

No reputable SEO company can offer an unqualified guarantee that will get number 1 rankings for your chosen keywords.

The old adage “if it seems to good to be true…..”, definitely applies here.

Below is what Google has to say about guaranteed rankings.

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Now, I’m not saying that all SEO guarantees are worthless.

If a SEO company offers a guarantee of rankings, make sure you read all the fine print.  You’ll most likely find that they have a qualified guarantee with items such as:

• Improved rankings, but no guarantee it will be on page one.
• Exclusion of certain keywords like “car insurance” that are extremely competitive.
• No guarantee that the improved rankings will last due to the changeable nature of SEO.

[dropcap style=”dropcap2″ color=”magenta”]2[/dropcap]Undisclosed SEO Methods

While it is unreasonable to expect a SEO company to fully disclose their methods, if they won’t give you any information as to what processes they will employ, then that is a warning sign that they probably use unreliable SEO techniques.

In a lot of cases, SEO companies will simply outsource their SEO jobs to dubious SEO companies that are very cheap, and the results will certainly reflect that.

I’ve seen instances of SEO companies that charge a premium and then simply use a whole bunch of Fiverr SEO gigs that will create a blast of very low quality backlinks.

A reputable SEO Company should be able to provide you with an outline of their SEO campaign.  For example:

• Analysis of on-page SEO of the target website (content, internal linking structure, keyword structure, navigation etc)
• Keyword research to avoid common mistakes from the onset.
• Creation of web 2.0 accounts, eg:  YouTube, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook etc.
• Publishing schedule for each of the web 2.0 accounts.
• Social bookmarking
• Tier 2 content

Beware of any description that mentions automatic submission, as that’s generally a sign that they plan on using software to blast out lots of low quality backlinks.

[dropcap style=”dropcap2″ color=”magenta”]3[/dropcap]Lack of Reporting

If you are spending a lot of money on a SEO campaign, you want to ensure you are getting value for your money.

It is essential that the SEO company you use has regular progress reports as part of their SEO package.

The two essential elements that should be included are:

1. Report stating what SEO work has been done and what SEO work will be done in the next period (fortnightly or monthly).
2. A ranking report for each of the keywords that you are targeting.

It is a good idea to independently check your rankings as a safety measure so that you have a second opinion as to how well your rankings for your chosen keywords are performing.

[dropcap style=”dropcap2″ color=”magenta”]4[/dropcap]No History or Ranking Examples

Just like any other service you may use in your everyday life, it helps if you have some knowledge and assurance that the company has a good track record.

If a SEO company can’t offer any examples of websites/companies they have helped improved their rankings, then be very cautious about entrusting them with your business.

If possible, contact the business they have cited to check if the claims of the SEO company are valid or not.

Also keep in mind that some keywords are very easy to rank for, so if a SEO company is claiming they have ranked company “X” number 1 for keywords “A”, “B” and “C”, where the keywords are long tail keywords and/or keywords with little competition, then ask if they have ranked any sites with highly competitive keywords.

The Bottom Line

Remember that if you employ specific services for your business, then you are ultimately responsible for the outcome of your decision.

Engaging SEO services should not be taken lightly as it can severely harm your rankings if you choose unwisely.

If your website relies exclusively on organic traffic, this can have a huge impact on the income your site generates.

If you’ve come across any other warning signs or experiences with bad SEO services, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

The post Warning Signs That You Are Being Sold SEO Snakeoil appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

The video was made by Sam Applegate who obviously has a lot of spare time on his hands to produce a video like this.

However, it is a very good example of a viral video (although not in the same category as the truly viral videos that appeal to a mass audience).

I know a lot of people love to hate Matt Cutts, but I’m sure even his detractors would have to admit that Matt would most probably get a good laugh from the video.

How To Rank #1 On Google

Hope you found the video as funny as I did.

Cheers

The post Matt Cutts Mashup Video appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

While there are plenty of paid plugins, there are so many really good free plugins to choose from.

Everyone has their personal favourites, so here is my list of the top 10 WordPress Plugins for 2012.

1.  Yoast WordPress SEO

Plugin Name:  WordPress SEO

Author: Yoost De Valk

Summary: Aids with on-page SEO, eg:  titles, meta description etc.  Also has control over link structure, RSS and XML sitemaps.

Price: Free

Source: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

There are a number of WordPress SEO plugins available.   Probably the most well known is All In One SEO Pack (AIOSEO), as it has been around for a while.

I used to use AIOSEO on all my sites, but switched over to Yoast WordPress SEO, as there were a number of benefits including:

1. Better performance.  I tested the speed of both plugins  and found that Yoast SEO had slightly better performance and less overheads compared to AIOSEO.
2. Flexibility.   In most cases, you only need to fill out the title and description, but it is useful to have the advanced features such as complete control over meta robots options, 301 redirects, and keyword page analysis.

Yoast WordPress SEO has options to control the following functions:

• XML Sitemaps.   No need to install a separate Sitemap plugin.
• Breadcrumbs.   If your theme doesn’t have inbuilt breadcrumb support, this is a handy feature to enable.
• Permalinks.  Additional options to fine tune permalinks.
• RSS.  Ability to insert content into your RSS feeds.
• Social.  Ability to add Facebook Open Graph meta data and Twitter Meta Card data to your site.

2.  Pretty Link Lite

Plugin Name:  Pretty Link Lite

Author: Blair Williams

Summary: Shorten, beautify and track links

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link/

Pretty Link Lite has been a favourite with marketers since the plugin was released.

It comes in Lite (free) and Pro (paid) versions.  The main difference between the Lite and Pro version is that the Pro version has the ability to cloak your links.   Cloaking links (via an iframe) is NOT recommended as it is against the TOS for many affiliate networks.

The Lite version has everything most people need.

It is particularly handy for making your affiliate links look more friendly.

So instead of having a link like:

you can turn that into:

The Pretty links are set up using URL redirects.  You have the option to use 301 permanent or 307 temporary redirects.   You can also set them to be “nofollow”.

Another important aspect of using Pretty Link Lite is that it has great tracking so that you can see exactly what links are being clicked on and work out how effective they are.

3.  TinyMCE Advanced

Plugin Name:  TinyMCE Advanced

Author: Andrew Ozz

Summary:  Adds additional formatting options to the standard WordPress Editor.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

While the default WordPress editor is sufficient for most purposes, there comes a time when you want to have greater control over the style of your article without having to switch over to HTML mode and hand code the raw HTML.

TinyMCE  Advanced adds a load of useful options to the editor, including:

• Advanced image control
• Advanced link control
• Emoticons
• Full font and style control
• Search and replace
• Tables

Even if you rarely use those options, one reason a lot of people install TinyMCE Advanced is to prevent WordPress eating up your blank lines.

I’m sure you’ve tried to create a post where you hit the enter key a few times to insert blank lines, only to have WordPress effectively turn it into a single blank line.   TinyMCE has an option that will prevent WordPress from doing that so that you preserve all your blank lines.

4.  Duplicator

Plugin Name:  Duplicator

Author: Cory Lamie

Summary:  Plugin to backup, copy or clone your WordPress sites.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicator/

In the past, I tested a lot of different WordPress Backup Solutions.  While some of those plugins/products are still very effective, I find that I use Duplicator on most of my WordPress sites as it is very flexible, easy to use and more importantly works well.

I’ve cloned, copied and restored various WordPress sites many times.   On one occasion where I came across an issue with Duplicator not working correctly after doing a WordPress update, the developer was very responsive and came out with a fix within a day.

While Duplicator works very well as a backup solution, I wouldn’t recommend it if your WordPress site constantly changes as the backup process is manual.   However, if you are updating your site once a week or month, then it is a great option as you can also use the backup to copy your site to a new domain for testing or if you need to move to a new web hosting provider.

5.  WP Super Cache

Plugin Name:  WP Super Cache

Author: Donncha & Automattic

Summary:  Speeds up your WordPress site by caching your content and reducing processing load.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

If you aren’t using caching on your site, you should do so.  It is the single quickest and easiest way to improve the performance of your site and reduce the processing load (this is particularly important if you have a shared hosting account).

There is much debate as to which is the best WordPress caching plugin.   I’m not going to get into that debate.  What I will say is that some caching is way better than no caching.

I’ve used the three main caching plugins that are currently the most popular, ie:

1. WP Super Cache
2. Quick Cache
3. W3 Total Cache

They all have their advantages and disadvantages.

W3 Total Cache is the most comprehensive caching plugin, but it can take quite a bit of effort to set up efficiently and I’ve had compatibility issues in the past with some WordPress setups/plugins.

Quick Cache is definitely the easiest of the three to set up and use and I would recommend it as a good alternative to WP Super Cache.

WP Super Cache does have good support and is actively developed.  Both Quick Cache and w3 Total Cache were last updated in 2011, whereas WP Super Cache was last updated (at the time of writing) in October 2012.

6.  Socialize

Plugin Name:  Socialize

Author: Jon Bishop

Summary:  Adds social media buttons and call to action boxes to your site.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/socialize/

If you do a search on WordPress.org for social media plugins, you will come back with a huge list of plugins.

I started using Socialize a while back and it is still one of my favourite social media plugins.

One of the main reasons I like Socialize is its flexibility.

Some of the options include:

• The ability to choose which social media sites you want to use, eg:  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Digg, Pintrest etc.
• Changing the button sizes and styles.
• Three locations for buttons:
  1. Inline
  2. Alert Boxes
  3. Floating
• Include a call to action box at the bottom of each post.
• Override settings on a global or per post/page basis.

7.  WP-Table Reloaded

Plugin Name:  WP-Table Reloaded

Author: Tobias Bäthge

Summary: Allows you to easily create and manage tables for your WordPress posts/pages.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-table-reloaded/

Creating tables in WordPress has always been a bit of a pain as you usually need to write the raw HTML.

WP-Table Reloaded remove the need to know any HTML to create tables.  Instead you use simple forms to input and manage your table data.   You then include the table on your post/page via a simple shortcut or by using the insert table icon added to the WordPress editor.

You can see an example of WP-Table Reloaded in action on my IM Discounts Page.

Each of the columns can be sorted and you have control over the widths, colours etc.

8. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Plugin Name:  P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

Author: GoDaddy

Summary: Tests the performance of your WordPress Plugins

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/p3-profiler/

While plugins are one of the greatest assets of WordPress, using too many or using badly written plugin can have a significant performance impact on your site.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) is a plugin (which you could probably say is a little ironic) that will test the performance impact of all your plugins so you can see which ones are potentially slowing down your site.

You can read my detailed post about how I used P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to detect a plugin hog that was slowing down my site.

9. Paid Downloads

Plugin Name:  Paid Downloads

Author: Ivan Churakov

Summary: Protect you paid downloads with a temporary encrypted download link

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/paid-downloads/

While there are many solutions that protect your downloads from unauthorized access, Paid Downloads is a great free option if you are on a budget and want to protect your downloads.

It works by issuing a temporary, encrypted download link whenever someone buys your product (eg:  PDF guide), which expires after a set number of days.

Paid Downloads supports:

• PayPal
• Payza/AlertPay
• InterKassa

The “Pro” version includes support for:

• Authorize.Net
• 2Checkout
• Skrill/Moneybookers
• EgoPay
• Liberty Reserve

10. Hybrid Connect

Plugin Name:  Hybrid Connect

Author: Paul McCarthy/Shane Melaugh

Summary: Creates Opt-in Forms, Squeeze pages and more

Price: $39

Source: http://umstrategies.com/hybrid-connect/

Hybrid Connect is the only paid plugin that I’ve included in my top 10 plugins list.   I do purchase various WordPress Plugins when I think they have something very useful to enhance my sites.

In my opinion Hybrid Connect is the best optin plugin that’s currently available on the market.   It is very easy to use and is incredibly flexible.

Some of the features that I think makes Hybrid Connect special are:

• Optin forms can be placed anywhere, eg: sidebar, footer, inside a page/post etc.
• Apart from the traditional forms, you can also use Hybrid Connect to display lightboxes, slide ins and squeeze pages.
• The ability to automatically do sign ups via regular name/email or by Facebook Connect button.
• Large range of form templates that are very easy to customize via the Hybrid Connect form builder.
• Integrated split testing function that will automatically select your highest converting form.

I wrote a review of Hybrid Connect a short while ago not long after I had purchased the plugin and had it running on a few of my sites.   Note that since I wrote the review, Hybrid Connect has had the slide ins, squeeze pages, split testing and a whole bunch of other stuff added.

Support and development of this plugin is top notch and is just one of the reasons I recommend it.

Summary

Remember that this plugin list is based on my personal opinion based on all the WordPress sites I own and maintain.

If you have any really good plugins that you’ve come across in 2012, please leave a comment below and let the world know.

Cheers

The post Top 10 WordPress Plugins For 2012 appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

Simply put, URL redirection is when a request to a particular URL results in the request being redirected to another URL.

In some cases, a redirected URL will in turn be redirected to another URL and you end up with a chain of redirects.

Common uses for redirects are:

• Directing users and search engines to a new page after a website redesign or a move to a new domain to avoid 404 page not found errors.
• Masking affiliate links by presenting a “friendly” looking link that redirects to an affiliate link.
• Temporarily presenting a specific page when a website is down for maintenance.
• Redirecting from the www to the non-www version of your domain, or vice versa, to ensure both versions are seen as the one website.
• Shorten long URLs to an easier to remember and easier to type URL.

It’s not always easy to see exactly where a redirected URL ends up without actually clicking on the link.   Additionally, if there are a number of intermediate redirections, these generally happen too fast to see in the browser status bar.

I wanted a tool that would visually display URL redirects.  After checking out existing tools, I didn’t find any that worked correctly and I wanted something that would display the different redirection types in a specific way.

After investigation, I decided to develop my own free tool called Redirect Detective.

Redirect Detective recognizes, the following types of redirects:

• 301 Permanent Redirect
• 302 Temporary Redirect
• 307 Temporary Redirect
• Meta Refresh
• HTTP Refresh

Additionally, it will also detect:

• 403 Permission Denied
• 404 Page Not Found
• 500 Internal Server Error

The following screenshot shows an example of an affiliate link that uses a variety of redirects to reach the final destination:

The different server responses and redirects are colour coded to make it easier to see what type of redirect is being used.

Additionally, if cookies are being set at any particular point, the cookie item will be displayed and if you hover your mouse over it, the number of cookies being set will be displayed.

Video Overview of Redirect Detective

The video below gives short overview of the types of things you can use Redirect Detective for.

I hope you find the tool useful and I welcome any feedback you may have regarding use of Redirect Detective or any enhancements you would like.

Cheers

The post Where Do Those Redirects Really End Up? appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

As usual, there’s the typical fear and loathing from many people who don’t properly understand what the change was all about.

It pays to go straight to the source (Matt Cutts), to see what he actually said.

The initial tweet from Matt said:

[success]”Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.”[/success]

I’ve bolded the words “low-quality”.

Now you could argue what “low-quality” actually means, but one thing that is certain, is that it’s not a blanket change affecting all EMDs.

All my EMD micro sites have stayed pretty much static in their rankings.

Certainly plenty of people have reported big rises and falls in their rankings, but I don’t think that can be attributed directly to the Google EMD update.

Gregory Smith on Twitter was highly critical of the change, until they got the following clarification:

[success]Matt “Multiple algos are rolling out all the time. Likely those sites weren’t affected by EMD update but by another algo.”[/success]

[info]Gregory “Thank you matt but all this happened during the past 3 days. Has another update happened during this time?”[/info]

[success]Matt “yes. 500+ algo launches/year mean 1-2 a day. I know of at least one other algo rolling out over same timeframe for example.”[/success]

Read that last response again.

Google makes over 500 changes to their algorithm each year!

The bottom line is if your rankings change drastically, don’t look at the cause in isolation.   In almost all cases, it’s going to be a combination of factors.

Cheers

The post The Storm Over Google’s Changes To Exact Match Domains (EMDs) appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

Over the last few years I’ve used a number of popular plugins to handle email opt-in forms, popups, popunders etc, but I’ve settled on using Hybrid Connect for all my sites.

You’ve probably already noticed that I use Hybrid Connect forms in various locations and designs on this website.

To find out how I came to the decision to use  Hybrid Connect exclusively on all my sites (and for clients), read on…….

Hybrid Connect Summary

Official Website:   http://umstrategies.com/hybrid-connect

Publisher:  IM Impact – Shane Melaugh & Paul McCarthy

Price: $39 for Single Site, $57 for Multi Site and $127 for Professional License

Guarantee: 30 day money back guarantee

Video Review

For those of you that prefer the visual medium, the video below gives a good summary of using Hybrid Connect.

Hybrid Connect Features

I’m not going to bore you with all the features of Hybrid Connect, as it does a lot of the stuff most other similar plugins do.   Instead, I’m going to cover the features that I considered to be major factors in my decision to purchase Hybrid Connect.

Facebook Sign Up

Firstly, the main selling point of Hybrid Connect is its ability to show an opt-in form with either the traditional email address sign up, or Facebook connect, depending on whether the visitor is logged into Facebook or not.

Note that this hybrid feature is entirely optional.   On one of my client websites, I turned off the Facebook option as their target audience weren’t big Facebook users.

You have complete control over how you want Hybrid Connect to operate.

Form Designer and Customization

While my web design skills are OK, anything that makes the task easier is most welcome.

Hybrid Connect comes with a range of pre-designed templates that you can use as your starting point for building your forms.

The screenshot below shows a small selection of the various templates.

Once you have chosen your template, you can edit the text and images.

To get the form looking exactly how you want, there is an extensive list of customization options that you can tweak.   If I was being nitpicking, I’d say that the customization options might be a little overwhelming for some people and it would be nice to see a basic/advanced settings for customizing.

The screenshot below gives you an idea of the types of elements you can change.

It is important to note that while there are a large number of options to tweak, as you get a preview of the form that instantly updates whenever you change the settings, you can easily see what affect each option has.

Flexibility of Form Placement

I really like that you can display Hybrid Connect forms pretty much anywhere you like on your site, either via the built in settings, shortcodes, widgets  or the raw code you can insert anywhere on your theme.

Hybrid Connect allows you to create:

• Forms on any post/page
• Forms at the bottom of any post/page
• Widget to add forms to the sidebar
• Lightbox form
• Squeeze page
• Slider Forms

Hybrid Connect Support

Quite often, one major factor that is commonly overlooked when purchasing software is the level of support and upgrades you get.

Too many times I’ve purchased software from seemingly reliable sources, only to find that when it comes time to get a response to a support ticket, the reply is either not helpful or in a lot of instances, it is non-existent.

I’ve been using Hybrid Connect since it was initially released as a beta product.   As it was an early release, I did find some bugs and limitations with it, but I was highly impressed with the level of support I received and a number of suggestions I made to improve Hybrid Connect were incorporated into later releases.

Additionally, because  this product was created by Shane Melaugh, I have a very high level of confidence that the support and development of Hybrid Connect is solid.   I can base that opinion on Shane’s previous excellent track record with looking after his clients.

Summary

Given my very favourable impressions of Hybrid Connect so far, I have great confidence that you’ll find it one of the best list building plugins out there.

I encourage you to try it out for yourself.

[button size=”large”  link=”http://umstrategies.com/hybrid-connect” linkTarget=”_blank” color=”blue”]  Click here to visit the Hybrid Connect website [/button]

Cheers

The post Hybrid Connect Review appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

In this article, I’ll explain the concepts of mobile aware sites and the best options available to ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Firstly, let’s look at the chart below which shows smartphone penetration in 2012 as a percentage of population.

Source:  Our Mobile Planet

With a few exceptions, most major countries have a smartphone penetration rate of around 30%-50%.

Increasingly, people are getting rid of their traditional laptop or desktop computer and solely utilising their smartphone or tablet device.

Main Approaches To Serving Mobile Content

Broadly speaking, there three main approaches to serving up content for mobile devices.

1. Separate Mobile Site

This was the most common approach used when mobile devices first came on to the market and is still used by a lot of major websites.   The website is effectively duplicated, onto a separate website which is optimized for mobile devices.

There is no particular standard for the domain name for a mobile version of the website.   Say example.com was the main website, then some of the naming formats typically used for the mobile version re:

m.example.com

wap.example.com

example.mobi

Advantages

• The user gets to choose which version of the website they want to view.
• The mobile version of the website can be heavily optimized to ensure good response times for viewers using mobile devices via a mobile network.

Disadvantages

• Effectively two versions of the site need to be maintained.
• Some sites rely on the user manually selecting the mobile version of the website.

2.  Adaptive Design

This is where the website automatically detects what type of device you are using and serves up an optimized version for it.    As this is done automatically, it means the URLs are the same whether you are browsing via a traditional laptop or a smartphone.

Advantages

• The process is transparent to the end user.
• You can do different types of optimization depending on the type of mobile device being used to view the site.
• Bandwidth savings for mobile users.

Disadvantages

• Additional maintenance is required to produce an optimized version of the site for all supported mobile devices.

3.  Responsive Design

With responsive design, you have a single version of your website that serves up the same HTML regardless of the device, and the CSS is what dictates how the site will look.

Effectively a site that uses a responsive design will resize correctly to be viewable on any screen size.

Advantages

• You have a single version of your website.
• Your layout will respond to any screen/device size.

Disadvantages

• It does offer a truly optimized mobile version of your website in terms of bandwidth or navigation.
• Relies on mobile devices that support CSS3 and Javascript

Video Demonstration

The short video below shows the differences between responsive and adaptive website designs.

Google’s Recommendation

Google has two types of crawlers:

• One for regular websites
• One of mobile content

Google recently issues their set of recommendations for building smartphone optimized websites.

The three different types of configurations they support are:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.

2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.

3. Sites that have a separate mobile and desktop sites.

Note the sentence in bold that Google recommend responsive web design.  Of course, this is only their recommendation and there isn’t any evidence to suggest if you use the other methods that Google will look on your site unfavourably.

Testing How Your Site Looks On A Mobile Device

The most obvious way is to simply use your smartphone or tablet and view your site.   However, not everyone has a smartphone and it is difficult to cater for large variety of devices out there.

That’s where an emulator comes in handy, as it let’s you easily test the look of a site using various devices.

Note that there are some limitations (mainly they don’t have a zoom option) with emulators as they won’t always give you exactly the same result as using the actual device itself, but in most cases, emulators provide a quick and easy way to check your site.

In the video below, I cover the best smartphone emulators and testing tools that I’ve found.

Screenfly

Screenfly by QuirkTools is the best online emulator I’ve found.  It emulates:

1. Desktop devices from a 10″ notebook up to a 24″ desktop
2. Tablets including Samsung Galaxy, Apple iPad and Morotola Xoom
3. Mobile devices including Blackberry 8300, iPhone, Google Nexus and ASUS Galaxy 7
4. Television including 480p, 720p and 1080p

The screenshot below shows the Microsoft homepage being displayed on an iPhone 4.

Mobilizer

If you prefer to run an emulator on your own computer, then Mobilizer is about the best one I found.  It runs on Adobe AIR, which means you can run it on PC or a Mac.

At the time of writing, it only emulates four different types of smartphones, but it has some additional features that make it worth while using, including:

1. The ability to open multiple devices at once and simultaneously see the differences one each device as you navigate the site.
2. Export a screenshot of the device and web page it is displaying.

The screenshot below shows the Microsoft home page again in the Mobilizer iPhone 4 emulator:

Mobile Support For WordPress

As WordPress is so popular, I wanted to cover the main options for improving your site so that it is compatible with smartphones and other mobile devices.

The options for WordPress come down to two main approaches:

1. A Responsive theme
2. A mobile specific theme that is either displayed automatically (Adaptive approach) or manually selected by the user.

Responsive WordPress Themes

More and more WordPress themes are being designed to be responsive.   This means you don’t need to install any additional themes or plugins to make your website compatible with mobile devices.

There are a range of free responsive themes in the WordPress Theme Repository, but if you are after a premium responsive theme, then I personally think the two best sources are:

1. StudioPress
2. Themeforest

WordPress Mobile Themes

While there are a large number of WordPress mobile themes available, the best option I’ve found is to use the WPtouch plugin, which automatically detects mobile devices and displays a mobile. optimized version of your site.   WPtouch can be classified as an Adaptive design.

You can use WPtouch with any WordPress theme, even responsive themes.   It is particularly useful if you are using a WordPress theme that has no mobile support at all as WPtouch will turn your site into a mobile compatible site without changing your existing theme or any other settings.

WPtouch comes in two versions:

1. Free version available in the WordPress plugin repository.
2. Pro version available from the BraveNewCode website.

The main differences between WPtouch Pro and the free version of WPtouch is the Pro version has full support, better admin features and additional customized options.  There is a full table listing the differences on the WPtouch Pro website.

Cheers

The post Optimizing Your Site For The Growing Mobile Market appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

However, there is a downside of having access thousands of freely available plugins and that is some of plugins can be real resource hogs and slow down your site.   Not only is that undesirable from a user perspective, it also has an impact (albeit small) on your SEO, as site load times are one of the factors that Google uses in its ranking algorithm.

So how do you determine if there are any plugins slowing down your WordPress site?

Funnily enough, there is a plugin that can do the job called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) that was developed by GoDaddy (don’t let that put you off), that tests all of the plugins you have enabled on your site and gives you some handy charts and tables that allows you to easily see if you have any plugin hogs.

Video Overview

In the video below, I go through the elements of the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler and show how I found that one particular plugin on my old site was using a huge amount of resources compared to all the other plugins, the WordPress Theme and WordPress core combined.

Using The Plugin

You install the plugin the usual way by going to Plugins->Add New, specifying p3 plugin profiler and clicking on the search plugins button.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can access it under Tools->P3 Plugin Profiler.   Then you simply need to click on the blue Start Scan button and then click on the Auto Scan button.

The scan will take a few minutes depending on the content on your site and the number of plugins you have enabled.

Analyzing The Results

When the scan is complete, you will see a summary page like the screenshot below:

Looking at the pie chart above, it is immediately obvious that one of the plugins (Simple Lightbox in this instance) is using a lot more resources than all the other plugins put together.

The other useful figure to look at is the Plugin Impact percentage.  In the above example, this figure is 70.2%, which is quite excessive.   There isn’t any magical figure this should be, but in general lower the better (I aim for 20% or lower).

The other useful information to look at is under the Simple Timeline tab.  This shows you a a graph with the amount of time used up by:

1. WordPress Plugins
2. WordPress Theme
3. WordPress Core

In general, you want them to be more or less even.

In the screenshot below, it makes it clear the impact the WordPress plugin load times are having on the site.

What To Do Once You’ve Identified Problem Plugins

If you discover one of more plugins on your site taking up a lot of resources, there are a few courses of action you can take.

1. Determine if you really need that plugin.  In some instances, you’ll find a particular plugin doesn’t really give you any benefit, in which case, just delete it.
2. Check to see if there are any updates to the plugin that fix performance problems.
3. Check if there is an similar plugin that does the same job, but has better performance.
4. Check if your WordPress theme offers similar functionality to the problem plugin.    If you have a plugin that performs the same function as your theme, you are wasting resources by having duplicate functionality.

Remember that if you are adding, upgrading or changing your plugins, it is always a good idea to check what impact they are going to have on your site.

Cheers

The post How To Find Out What WordPress Plugins Are Slowing Down Your Site appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

While there will most likely be a few improvements and changes to the initial release, I’ve made a video that gives you a good overview as to how the tool works and what data it returns.

The whole premise behind the keyword checker tool is to allow you to check the competition strength of the keywords which you specify.

For free accounts, you can specify a maximum of 50 keywords and silver level users can specify up to 150 keywords.

In essence, the tool returns the number of domains and URLs for where the keyword appears in the title, anchor text and in the URL. The data comes from the Majestic SEO database and claims to be more accurate than other search engines (primarily Google) which report estimated figures.

Do I think the keyword checker tool is useful? Watch the video below to find out.

Video Overview

Do you think this new keyword checker tool will be useful to you or not? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

Cheers

The post Overview of the New Majestic SEO Keyword Checker Tool appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

Just because you don’t want Google tracking your searches, doesn’t mean you are up to something bad like looking for illegal software or spamming purposes.

This article covers why it is a good idea to not let Google have access to your search history and how best to perform private Google searches.

Unbiased Google Searches

I’m sure most of you will have had an experience where you have searched for a particular keyword you are trying to rank for and thought you were ranking very well.   That is, until you got someone else to search for the same keyword and discovered that it was actually ranked way lower than you initially thought.

The reason this happens, is that Google will bias your search results based on previous searches.   That means if you are searching for a particular keyword multiple times and clicking onto your site, Google assumes that the site you are clicking on is more relevant to your query and will place it higher up in the search results next time you do the same search.

This is particularly this case if you perform your Google searches while you are logged into your Google account.   However, even if you aren’t logged in, Google still tracks some of your searches via cookies and IP address.

There are various approaches you can use with varying degrees of success, such as:

• Clearing your browser cache and cookie history
• Using “private mode” setting in your browser
• Using a different browser from the main one you use for most of your searches
• Using Chrome incognito browsing mode (do you really trust Google to make a browser that hides 100% of the data from itself?)

While the above methods are OK, they can be a bit of a hassle to do every time you want to do a search.

In the past, I used a site called Scroogle.  This site allowed you to do anonymous and unbiased Google searches with no privacy concerns.

Unfortunately, Scroogle was closed down in early 2012, which left a lot of people looking for an alternative service.

Startpage

I only recently came across a site that is quite similar to Scroogle, but has been around for quite a while.

Startpage has a very similar look to Google and allows you to perform Google searches with no cookies or IP address being tracked by Google.   You can read the full Startpage privacy policy here.

I should point out in case there’s any confusion, that startpage.com and ixquick.com are the same sites except with a different logo.

The following extract is from the Startpage company background:

Startpage was released in 2009 in the United States as a new name for the Ixquick search engine. Because the name Ixquick can be somewhat difficult to remember and spell, people asked us for an easier name, and we were happy to oblige. Startpage uses Ixquick’s search methodologies and privacy features, and is governed by the same privacy policies. Startpage is only available in the English language at present, but we expect to launch Startpage in additional major languages later in 2010.

Startpage uses SSL by default (ie: https://), so that means that all your searches are encrypted, which gives you another level of privacy.As

The results page is quite similar to Google results page, with some minor differences:

• Startpage returns just websites, whereas Google results can include videos, Google Places etc in the results.
• Startpage doesn’t display Google Ads, but display their own version of Ads (which is how they fund the service).
• Startpage has a minimal number of options in the left sidebar (which is a good thing), compared to the ever growing list that Google displays.

The following two screenshots show the results page for “dog training” from Startpage and Google.

Please note that as I’m based in New Zealand, both results are querying google.co.nz (more on geo-location in the next section).

Also note that I use an Adblocker, so the screenshots don’t show any Ads.

Startpage Search Results

Google Search Results

Startpage Video Overview

If you prefer the visual medium, the video below I made gives you an overview on using Startpage.

Anonymous Web Browsing

When you look at the Startpage search results, you will see a link titled: View by Ixquick Proxy

This allows you to view the particular web page via the Ixquick Proxy.   This allows you to view web pages completely anonymously as the website can’t set any cookies or use any other tracking methods to identify you.

There are some limitations with using the proxy, such as:

• Slower performance
• Javascript is disabled (which can be a good thing if there is malicious Javascript on the web page you are viewing)

The following short video gives a good overview of the Ixquick Proxy and how it helps your privacy.

Geo-Location Searches

As I previously mentioned, I’m based in New Zealand, but a lot of my marketing sites are targeting the US audience.   One aspect of Scroogle I liked, was to be able to see US results for my searches.

If I want to do a Google US search, I can simply go to google.com and type in my search query.   Note that in the past, if you typed in google.com, Google would automatically redirect you to your local Google site, but this is no longer the behavour.

As you’ve probably seen from the Startpage screenshot, the results are coming from my local Google location, ie: New Zealand.

On the Startpage Privacy Q&A page, it states:

Q: Where are Startpage’s servers located? Startpage has server clusters in the Netherlands and the United States. Startpage typically routes European searches to the European servers, American searches to the U.S. servers, and searches from other countries to the closest location. On the rare occasion that there is a problem in one facility, searches are briefly handled by the other facilty.

If you want to perform a search based on a different region, you can use the Startpage Advanced search options and set the region, eg:

However, I found two issues doing this:

1. You can’t do a default broad match search.  You need to redo the search query once you are on the search results page.
2. More importantly, I couldn’t get similar results between Startpage and Google when doing US based searches.   I don’t expect the results to be completely the same due to a whole range of variants, but the results I was seeing were quite different and I couldn’t account for the differences.

In Summary

Startpage is great resource to use if you value your privacy when you perform Google searches and need to do anonymous web browsing.

It is also a good resource if you want to check unbiased local searches, but don’t rely on it for search result positions outside your region.

Cheers

The post Private Google Searches appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

The question asked is:

How do I increase my PageRank?

At first glance, this might seem like a reasonable question, until you start to delve a little deeper into the reasons why the question is asked so many times.

In this article, I’ll be looking at those reasons and some of the misconceptions and myths surrounding PageRank.

What is PageRank?

Firstly, let’s briefly go over what PageRank is.

Put simply, PageRank is a number from 0-10 that indicates the importance or popularity of a particular page.   PageRank is increased based on number of links to a page, but more importantly, high quality backlinks, ie:  backlinks from authority sites with pages that already have PageRank.

The PageRank score is publicly updated a few times a year (typically four).

If you want to bore yourself with all the gory details as to how PageRank is calculated, then the Wikipedia description of PageRank is a good place to start.

Wikipedia PageRank Example

Why Would You Want To Increase Your PageRank?

The first thing I ask when someone post on a forum that they want to know how to increase their PageRank, is why?

Quite often, the answer is along the lines of:

• I need to increase my PageRank to get my site higher in the SERPs.
• I don’t really know, but I’ve been told that PageRank is very important.
• I want to increase traffic to my site.

These are all invalid reasons, because increasing PageRank has little to do with how well your site ranks or how much traffic it receives.

This a major misconception regarding PageRank.   PageRank is really only a factor for the pages that link to your site.

For example, if you have one backlink from a page with no PageRank and one backlink from a page with a PageRank of 5, then the backlink from the page with PageRank is going to be more useful for helping your rankings.

I should point out that the above example is very simplistic as there are a whole range of factors that come into play, such as:

• Site authority
• No-follow links
• Number of outbound links
• Contextual backlinks
• Backlink relevance
• Anchor text

In general, it is better to receive backlinks from pages with PageRank.

So what would be some valid reasons to want to increase your PageRank?

The two main reasons for wanting a higher PageRank are:

1. Flipping (selling) your site.   Sites that have pages with some PageRank generally sell better than sites without PageRank.
2. Building a private blog network.   The idea is that by increasing PageRank, you can pass the link juice onto the various sites you are wanting to improve the ranking on.

Faked PageRank

You need to be aware that due to the obsession that a lot of people have with PageRank, many pages have faked PageRank.  The reasons for faking PageRank is people who want to flip their site (typically on flippa.com)  for an inflated figure or are selling backlink services where you pay a fee to have a link to your site on a page with PageRank.

PageRank is very easy to fake.   There are two main methods:

1. Set up a 301 redirect to an existing page with PageRank and after the PageRank score is updated, the redirect is removed.
2. Install a script detects if the request has come from a Googlebot then do a 301 redirect to a page with PageRank, otherwise display the webpage of the site to human visitors.

Both these methods are quite easy to detect using any number of the fake PR checkers that are available, or by doing a simple Google query:

info:domainname

If the result shows a different domain, then the PageRank has been faked.    There is a fuller explanation of this method  in my Google Tips & Tricks article.

Recently, there has been new method of faking PR that passes all the fake PR checks.   I’m not entirely sure how this new method works, but applying common sense, it is very easy to detect the obvious ones.

For example, recently someone posted a link to a WordPress blog where the homepage had a PR10.

As you probably know, PR10 is the highest score and google.com only has a PR9.  In fact, there are only a very small number of pages with a valid PR10.

Search Engine Genie has a list of PR10 pages, which currently totals only 10 sites.

This particular WordPress blog was only 2 months old and had a very small handful of backlinks.   A brief look at the site, without even checking the backlink details should have instantly set off warning bells that it had faked PR.

Now it’s quite possible if the owner of the site hadn’t been so “greedy” and had faked a more realistic score like PR4-PR6, then most people wouldn’t have given it much scrutiny.

PageRank Misconceptions

By far the biggest misconception with PageRank is many people think a site/domain has PageRank.

You see it all the time when people talk about how their site has PR or selling a domain with PR.

PageRank is referring to a specific page.   Pages have PageRank, not sites.

Now, it’s no coincidence that the page with the highest PageRank on most sites is the homepage.   So when most people talk about their site having PR, they are actually referring to the PR of their homepage.

The other major misconception as previously mentioned is that PR on your site will increase your rankings.    It is true that if you have a page with PR, then it has gained that PR from backlinks, which is an important factor for improving your rankings, but it doesn’t automatically give your site a boost.

You can see plenty of search queries where a low PR page will outrank a high PR page.   That’s because there are many factors involved in rankings, such as on-page SEO (which PR has nothing to do with).

Should I Worry About PageRank?

Bottom line is that way too much time is spent on worry about PageRank and on methods to increase it.

You are much better off spending your time writing articles and promoting your sites.

If your pages gain PR, you can briefly bask in the warm inner glow of satisfaction and then move onto more important matters.

Cheers

The post An Obsession With PageRank appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

While we all use Google everyday in some capacity, whether it be simple searches or doing keyword research with Google Adwords Keyword Tool, there are quite a few hidden corners to Google (that’s definitely an under-statement) that a lot of people don’t know about or don’t know how to use efficiently.

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer the visual medium, the video below covers most of the Google tips listed in this article.

Advanced Search Queries

The following collection of advanced search queries have a range of uses from keyword research to analysis of your website.

The first search query we’ll examine is the site: operator.  This is very useful for determining:

• Whether your site has been indexed (particularly useful to know if you have a new site)
• Conversely, whether your site has been deindexed, aka Google slap, Google Sandbox etc.
• How many pages are indexed.   This is useful to check if a new page has been indexed or not.
• Whether a the PageRank (PR) for page is faked or not.   Faking PR is quite common when selling a domain/site.

Checking If Your Site Is Indexed

An example of checking whether your site is indexed or not, is to just type in your domain with the site operator, eg:

site:example.com

If your site is indexed, Google will report the number of pages it has in it’s index.   If the site is not indexed, it will say something like:

Your search – site:example.com – did not match any documents

A word of caution!

If your domain has subdomains, eg:

• blog.example.com

• store.example.com

then the site: operator will also include those subdomains in the query.

There doesn’t appear to be any easy way of excluding subdomains, unless you manually exclude them, eg:

site:example.com -site:blog.example -site:store.example.com

 [/note]

You can also check if a specific page has been indexed, eg:

site:example.com/page1.html

or

site:example.com/category/postname

Another point to keep in mind is whether you use www in front of your domain name or not.   When you are checking your site, make sure you use the format that you normally use.   As most sites have a 301 redirect set up from the non-www to www version of the URL (or vice-versa), you should use the form the redirect points to.

 Checking For Fake PageRank

Related to the site: operator is the  info: operator.  This can be used for a number of function, but one very quick and easy method is to check if the PR for a particular page is faked or not.  The most common way of faking PR is by doing a 301 redirect from another page with PR to the target page.

This technique is sometimes used when people are selling a website or a domain and they artificially inflate the PR during the selling process and when the site/domain has been sold, the redirect is removed and when Google releases the next PR update, the new owner suddenly finds their PR has vanished.

There are a number of ways of checking for fake PR, but the quickest is to simply query the page (in most cases, it will be the homepage), eg:

info:example.com

 [/note]

If Google then shows you a result that has a different domain, you can very confident the site has a faked PR.

Checking The Actual Number Of Results Returned

Whenever you do a Google search, Google will give you a number (generally quite large) with the number of results.   It’s important to understand that this is just an estimate by Google in order to speed up how quickly they can display the results for your search query.

The following quote is from the Google Webmaster Tools Help.

When you perform a search, the results are often displayed with the information: About XXXX results (X seconds).

Google’s calculation of the total number of search results is an estimate. We understand that a ballpark figure is valuable, and by providing an estimate rather than an exact account, we can return quality search results faster.

In addition, when you click on the next page of search results, the total number of search results can change. Google’s search index is constantly changing, and your second search results page may come from a slightly different version of the index than the first page.

As you probably know, Google will return a maximum of 1000 results.   However, in most cases it is much fewer than 1000, because Google will filter out most of the duplicate content and pages that have low relevance.  That means, if there are more pages of relevance for your search term, the higher the number of actual results.

This metric can be used as a factor for gauging competition for ranking for a particular keyword, although I would caution that you shouldn’t use it as your sole metric.   You are much better off doing a full analysis (on-page and off-page SEO) of the top 10 results to get a much better idea of the real competition, but looking at the number of actual results returned can still be useful.

OK, let’s take an example.

If I search for:

front loading washing machines

Google tells me:

About 2,8700,000 results (0.16 seconds)

Note that you’ll most likely get slightly different figures depend on when and where you do the same search from, but it should be roughly around the 2-3 million results.

Now, if we were to click on the Next button at the bottom of the results until we got to the very last page (that’s a lot of clicks), you will see a message like:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 592 already displayed.

If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

What that means is that of the 2.8 million results that Google estimated were related to your search term, only 592 were worth displaying.

Obviously you are quickly going to get very sick of clicking, Next, Next, Next…….

The quick way to get to the last page of the results is to modify the search URL.

When you do your initial query, the URL in your browser will look something like:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=front+loading+washing+machines&oq=front+loading+washing+machines&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=hp.12…0l0l6l23123l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0.frgbld.&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=fb944df5651897fd&biw=1920&bih=1066

To get to the last page of the search results add:

start=990&

anywhere in the URL after the first &, eg:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&start=990&sclient=psy-ab&q=front+loading+washing+machines&oq=front+loading+washing+machines&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=hp.12…0l0l6l23123l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0.frgbld.&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=fb944df5651897fd&biw=1920&bih=1066

then press Enter and hey presto, you’ll be taken to the last page.

Querying US Search Results Outside the US

I live in New Zealand, but most of my sites target US audiences.   If I type in google.com into my browser, Google detects that I’m from New Zealand and will automatically redirect to google.co.nz

Doing a search on google.co.nz is biased towards New Zealand sites, which is generally not what I want.   To query the Google US results, simple add /ncr (which stands for “no country redirect”) at the end of the URL, eg:

http://google.com/ncr

Performing a Non-Personalized Search

As you probably know,  Google  personalizes your search results based on your search history.   This mostly applies if you are logged into your Google account.

If you don’t want to log out of your Google account when you do a search, just add

&pws=0

to the search URL in your browser bar.  For example:

https://www.google.com/?q=onpage+seo+plugins&pws=0

You can also use Chrome in “Incognito” mode, which is supposed to remove traces of your search history and cookies.

Note, that none of these techniques will give you 100% guaranteed non-personalized results, but for most cases, they should be sufficient.

Scroogle.org used to be a great resource for getting unbiased Google searches, but unfortunately the site closed down in Jan 2012.

Using Google Cached Results

It can be very useful to know when Google last indexed a specific page.   Google keeps a cached copy of your pages in order to speed up processing search results.

To view the Google cache details for a particular page, use the query:

cache:example.com/page.html

Google will display the cached version of the page along with an information area at the top of the screen that will say something like:

This is Google’s cache of http://example.com/page.html.  It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 31 Mar 2012 13:38 GMT.  The current page could have changed in the meantime.

Another very useful tip that not many people use is the link to the “Text-only version” of the cache.

If your site uses a lot of graphics and/or has a complex design, viewing the text only version of the cache gives you an inside view as to how the Googlebots see your page.   This can often be very revealing and may give you some big clues as to how to rearrange your site in order for it to be better optimized for Google when it next crawls your site.

Handy Google Links

Google has so many products these days, but as an online marketer, there are generally a small handful of links that you will use most of the time.

The following is a list of what I consider to be the most useful Google functions:

https://adwords.google.com

Without a doubt, this is the number one tool used by online marketers for keyword research and Adwords campaigns.

You actually have access to a number of related tools from this URL.  The two most useful are:

1.  Keyword Tool – Invaluable for keyword research

2. Contextual Targeting Tool – If you are monetizing via Adsense, then using the contextual targeting tool will give you a much more accurate idea of the CPC.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google Insights For Search is essentially a more advanced version of Google Trends.  It’s a great tool to use with your keyword research as it can tell you things like whether the keywords you are interested in are suitable for your targeted region or whether the keywords are seasonal or on a downward or upward search trend.

I wrote a post about Google Insights and the importance of trends in keyword research that has more details on the uses for Google Insights.

https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

The load time of your site is one of the factors that Google takes into consideration, therefore it is important to ensure your site loads as fast as possible.

The Google Page Speed Test will not only test your page load times, it will give you a list of suggestions on how to improve the performance of your site.

If you know of any other handy Google tips, tricks or techniques, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

The post Google Tips and Tricks appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

The changes that were mostly rolled out at the start of February are also known as Google Panda 3.3 update.

There are 40 changes listed on the Inside Search Blog post.   Not all of them are very important from an SEO point of view, but there are some changes that are quite significant.

In this article, I’ll be giving you my opinions on the impact of the key points of the Panda 3.3 update.

Panda 3.3 Key Points

Note that Google will never reveal the exact details of their changes, so there is a certain amount of guess work and reading between the lines with the information they have provided.

More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

This description is a little vague as it depends on what Google’s definition of “official” is, but presumably it means that sites that target brand names or trademarks will no longer be given a boost in the rankings from a misidentified “official” status.

 

Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

It’s well known since the first Panda update that freshness is an important factor for a lot of sites to rank well.   It’s impossible to say what the old classifiers are, but my guess is they are related to auto-content.

Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.

It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that the new Flight Search feature (first introduced in Dec 2011) appears to favour the major airlines, rather than the smaller carriers or travel agents.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

What this means is that Google will show more local results for various queries, eg: doctors, restaurants, movies etc as they are able to better detect what location the searcher is in.

 

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

This is probably one of the biggest and most important updates.  Again, it’s very hard to know exactly what methods of link analysis that they’ve turned off.

Reading between the lines, it is possible that Google is going to place less importance on the anchor text and more importance on where the link comes from.  Presumably this will benefit sites with contextual links from sites that have related topics to the site where the backlink is pointing.

So What Does It All Mean?

The most important thing to remember is that every Google update is not “The End Of The World For SEO” or “Google Hates Us”.

Google are always going to be tweaking the way they calculate the search results.

The bottom line is if you have a diverse set of non-spammy backlinking sources and a good mix of social media (eg: Google Plus, FaceBook, Twitter etc), then it’s more than likely you won’t notice much different in your website rankings.

Cheers

The post Key Points Of The Google Panda 3.3 Update appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.

However, after checking the search trends (in particular the regional differences), I quickly realized that the keyword was nowhere as good as I initially thought it was.

Given that keyword research is the foundation for any site, I think trend and regional data are often overlooked in the whole keyword research process.

In this article, I’ll go through why analysing trend and regional data is a very important part of keyword research and why you shouldn’t ignore it.

Video Summary

For those of you that prefer a visual medium, the video below covers most of what is written in this article.

Keyword Research Case Studies

I’ve had good success with Amazon stores and I was looking to get into the baby product market as that can a potentially very lucrative market to be in.

As a father, I recall just how much stuff you end up buying when you have a baby, so it seemed like a great market to tap into.

I use SECockpit for my keyword research as I can process huge amounts of keywords in a very short space of time.   Generally, I always leave the location set to “All countries and territories”.

After using a few general seed keywords such as baby and baby products, I saw what looked like a very promising keyword as you can see in the screenshot below:

The keyword baby bunting really stood out with 49500 exact monthly searches and lowish competition and with appropriate products available on Amazon.

When I looked at the keyword in more detail, I decided to check it out in Google Insights.  One quick glance at the data, told me instantly that this wasn’t a suitable keyword to target after all.

If you look at the Google Insights screenshot below:

you’ll see that while the trend data is very steady, under the Regional interest section, it shows that baby bunting is by far and away mostly used in Australia.

Amazon doesn’t have an Australian presence and all my Amazon stores are targeting the US market, so targeting  baby bunting really wasn’t going to be worth my while.

Now, what I really should have done from the beginning was to set my search location to be United States and I wouldn’t have wasted a few minutes checking out a keyword that wasn’t very worthwhile.    That’s certainly something I don’t forget to do now when doing keyword research for Amazon products.

Obviously, not everyone uses SECockpit, so let’s have a look at the data if we were using Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

In the following screen shot, you can see I’ve set my location to be United States and Match types to exact.

You can see that search figures are:

Global Monthly Searches (GMS): 49,500

Local Monthly Searches (LMS): 1,900

That’s a huge difference between the global and the local monthly figures as was clearly indicated in the Google Insights regional data.

Now the main reason for the difference is that baby bunting just isn’t a very common term in the US, whereas in Australia it’s a term commonly used.

As I don’t live in the US, I try to keep in mind the differences between terms in the US and other English speaking countries, but I don’t know them all.

I’ll give you another classic example of a huge difference in search volume between the global and US local monthly figures.

In the screenshot below, you can see that the keyword car hifi gets:

Global Monthly Searches (GMS): 18,100

Local Monthly Searches (LMS): 91

Now let’s look at the Google Insights data for car hifi

Here you can see that the United States doesn’t even make it into the list of countries under regional interest.   Clearly car hifi is a term most common in Europe, UK and Australia.

Trend Data

While it might be obvious to some people that you should choose a keyword where the search volume isn’t on a downward trend, it’s still a step missed by a lot of people.

In general, you always want to ensure that your keyword has a steady or rising search trend.

The following graph from Google Insights shows the search trend for baby bunting from 2004 onwards.

 As you can see from mid 2010 onwards, there is a very nice upward trend.   However, you recall previously, this keyword would currently only be suitable to target an Australia audience.

The same principle applies to seasonal trends, eg: Christmas, Valentines Day, Halloween etc.

The following graph shows the trend data for the term christmas gifts:

As you can see, there is an obvious peak over the Christmas period, but apart from 2004 and 2005, the peaks from 2006 onwards are all pretty much consistent, so you could classify this as a steady trend.

Taking a look at the other side, there are two main reasons for a declining search trend.

1.  A term that slowly declines due to waning interest or being superseded by something else.

2.  A short term fad where there is a big spike in popularity followed by a sharp decline.

An example of a search trend that are slowly declining are technology products that are becoming redundant, eg: VCR player, pager and fax machine

An example of a fad is myspace.   The following search trend graph illustrates very clearly the impact that Facebook had on myspace.

The Exceptions

There are a few exceptions to the cases I’ve already written about.

Sometimes, you don’t need to be so concerned with regional differences if the product or service you are promoting has a wide appeal across many countries.  Examples of this are: informational products, software, books and music.

With trend data, it obviously applies to search terms that have been around for a little while, but sometimes you may want to jump onto the bandwagon of some new technology that’s just about to be released but has no historic data to go on.  This is a bit of a gamble, but you can be rewarded for getting in early if it proves to be a very popular piece of technology.

Summing It Up

No matter what type of keyword research you are doing, it always pays to spend a short moment checking the trend and regional data.   It takes you very little time and could potentially save you a lot of wasted effort targeting a keyword in the wrong market.

Cheers

The post The Importance of Trends In Keyword Research appeared first on Ultimate Marketing Strategies.