SEO Specialist Matt Lynch - Perth, Australia

Weighing up QR codes

2011-07-31T11:43:00.000+08:00

QR (Quick Response) codes

As a novelty, and stand out difference, with competitive marketing activities, QR codes have been around for a little while now.

I really don't consider that QR codes are substantially any improvement over the use of URLs, and in particular shortened URLs such as bit.ly. Basically a QR code is yet another means of communicating and driving a consumer from their point of interest into the online space where more detail can be provided in relation to a very precise ID associated with a product, an advertisement, or a business.

To be honest, the uptake on QR codes has been limited, and the vast majority of average consumers haven't a clue what they actually are. Maybe this is the fault of a suitable education process to inform the consumers to then drive an uptake.

However, unlike QR codes, a URL doesn't require locating an app, downloading it, installing it, and using it to photograph the code graphic. For consumers who don't have smartphones or have yet to download the appropriate app, a URL (and again I revert back to specifically convenient shortened URLs) will work better.

URLs have wider recognition and I see as preferable to using QR codes in print ads.
After an initial push from Google in an attempt to get businesses to adopt the codes and use them as decals at their places of business, Google dropped QR code support. Therefore if this had been seriously working affectively for local consumers, Google wouldn't have pulled the pin.

Similar options: Microsoft Tag Reader, Google Goggles

Customising the iPad2 for use as a Sales Tool

2011-07-24T08:26:00.000+08:00

Apple's iPad2 is a sensational tool for sales teams for use in presenting to clients.

Right from the start of your presentation, your iPad2 can be customised to match your business brand by selecting a suitable image for the wallpaper display on the iPad:

Set home screen background
Set lock screen background

iPod Wallpaper design specifications:

Image Size: 1024 x 1024px
This will give a full screen look to the iPad even when rotated.
The resolution of the image must be 132dpi
Remember that portions of the image will be cut off both in landscape and portrait mode.
Key to creating the best iPad wallpaper is to choose an image that is focused around the 768×768 portion of the image

Next, to open your company's website from the desktop (if you haven't created a customised app already!) create a favicon icon shortcut browser link on home screen desktop (set icon to iPad quality).

To do this within iPad Safari web browser; save this as an icon on the desktop, which will open the website as required. Current process will save image of front page of website... preferred option would require advanced favicon code within your website HTML (metatags), that point to a specifically optimized Apple icon.

To create favicons specifically for Apple devices such as the Apple iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad:

The recommended size is 57 x 57 pixels, with 90 degree corners. However with the more recent higher definition screens on Apple's products, Apple has their icon at 129 x 129 pixels

metatag to include in <head> code of website with Apple Formatting

metatag to include in <head> code of website without Apple's reflective shine

eMarketing platforms - capabilities and compliance

2011-07-23T19:37:00.000+08:00

There are many different eMarketing platforms available for the online marketer to choose from varying in; capabilities, integration, reporting and social media awareness. Be sure to do your homework to select the most appropriate platform for your business needs today, and as you evolve - so ensure it can grow with your online marketing requirements and the platform itself provides access to new features in a fast changing online landscape.

Many eMarketing platforms provide best practice guides, information and eMarketing tips relevant to what the platform can deliver and to ensure that your email newsletters meet deliverability, usability, functionality and marketability! (See: ExactTarget, MailChimp, CommuniGator)

Ensuring your email marketing meets legal compliance is also an important consideration and in an international context it is important to research the current CAN-SPAM legislation and similar requirements for each country. The provision of a double opt-in is but one part of the process and a must-have. Compliance also includes the provision of Privacy Policy, one-click unsubscribes, contact details of the company along with a few other items.

Associated to this category of consideration is the funcationality of your email template and how it renders for users with disabilities and screen reader applications.

Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)

The legislation in the UK that covers the rights of disabled people – the section of the act on the provision of goods and services includes the requirement that websites should be made accessible.

UK Law

It has been a legal requirement for UK websites to be accessible since 1999. Since then all websites have been expected to make "reasonable adjustments" to ensure their websites accommodate all users regardless of ability, disability.

Is your website legal?
http://www.douceandco.co.uk/website.html

The current information relating to web sites in the UK confirm that many are illegal. They do not include even basic information such as registered company address, VAT details and web site hosting for example.

Making sure your website meets all the current key UK legal requirements is vital to prevent you receiving fines or penalties. Ensure you are up to date with the necessary UK legislation or it could prove very costly to you and your business.

Disability Discrimination Act

UK websites must comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, which states that websites must be accessible to all – including users with visual impairments or disabilities.

Responsible business practice

In today's environment corporate and social responsibility have increasingly become fundamental in building trust and reputation with the people you do business with. However, experience of closed doors on your websites can have a negative influence on the way people perceive even the most reliable companies and the strongest brands.

I would also recommend prior to any go-live activity with a new eMarketing platform that you go through a careful process of deliverability and reputation testing on the email sends to ensure everything is in place. And once your email campaigns are active within your new eMarketing platform keep a good eye out for DNSBL black lists to ensure that the integrity of your IP and sender framework is retained.

Did you know?

About the UK Companies (Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2008
http://www.douceandco.co.uk/website.html

Fines of up to £100 a day could face any registered business whose websites do not comply with these regulations, introduced in October 2008. Further information is available here:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/495/contents/made

Limited companies must include company details on all electronic communications (website AND email) and this should include:

Your full company name
Where the company is registered
The companies registered address
The Companies Registered No e.g. 123456789
Website Hosting company details: address, postcode, hosting company website
Professional Memberships should be displayed on the website or freely provided upon request
VAT Registered number

Cleaning an Email Bounce List

2011-06-12T09:15:00.000+08:00

Implementing an appropriate double opt-in email system that conforms to all the necessary CAN-SPAM rules and similar email marketing legal compliance specifications around the world (if you run a global website), is a must in today's environment. Apart from compliance, and avoiding fines, it is the perfect solution for email subscriber list cleaning process that avoids consumer data entry errors.

But what if you have an old list that you are migrating into a new system, or a list that contains previous email subscribers that were merged across into a double opt-in system with running a reconfirm cleanse?

First steps with old list management requires a look at bounce messages (hard and soft bounce types), and this will determine what email accounts your content is not getting through to. This review process will then help to determine what can be done to recover these email addresses, reduce the level of bounced email, and increase your eNewsletter content visibility to users who had intended to receive your content but had unfortunately been careless during the registration process... and were missed because the site owner hadn't put in a validation check process (double entry), rule check, or double opt-in solution.

One of the easiest things to do is take a .csv dump of the email addresses from your bounce list, run a regular expression clense to filter .*@ and replace with @ to remove all the initial names leaving the TLDs (Top Level Domains), open in Excel and run an alpha sort. Then you can run a visual check over the list and see what errors users have made.

The following list is an example of Hotmail accounts that have been entered incorrectly.

@holmail.com = @hotmail.com

@homail.com = @hotmail.com

@homeail.com.au = @homemail.com.au

@hotail.com = @hotmail.com

@hotmai.com = @hotmail.com

@hotmail.au = @hotmail.com

@hotmail.co = @hotmail.com

@hotmail.co.uk = @hotmail.com

@hotmail.com.au = @hotmail.com

@hotmail.net.au = @hotmail.com

@hotmaill.com = @hotmail.com

@hotmal.com = @hotmail.com

@hotmall.com = @hotmail.com

You can then run a find/replace over the list to resolve these, and then reintroduce back into your operational email subscriber list.

Google Delivers Local Users Local Content

2011-02-05T16:11:00.000+08:00

I've been saying this for a while to my clients, the important of putting local relevancy into their Search Engine Optimisation efforts. From geo locator information using geo-tags behind the page within the metatags, for the location to their physical store location, supported with on-page SEO activities of ensure all location information is included on the contact page; street address, suburb, post code, and even embedding a Google Map on the page.

Google normally assumes that users are looking for and will want to be directed to local business content in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and tends to favour local results, based on IP address and/or search history. The algorithm component behind this is that a local result is likely to be a more relevant result.

Additional areas that website owners can consider to contribute to the overall local search penetration is supporting this with ensuring they select firstly a local TLD (Top Level Domain) such as using a .com.au extension for Australian websites.

Hosting of the website will also impact. If hosted locally there are several benefits, firstly in the lookup performed by search engines determining the hosting locality to support the intended distribution, and speed increases that are gained by reducing the number of hops for end users accessing the website hosted locally compared to in another state or country and so making each component call quicker in response for rendering the page to the end user computer. Another component to consider is even in the details registered for the domain name that can be sourced via a WHOIS lookup. I would suggest providing the local physical office address in the registration details to aid in supporting again this concept of local search reinforcement.

Tie all of this in with Google Places http://www.google.com.au/places/ a free online business listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they'll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. Now when consumers search within Google, and Google detects they are intending to search for location specific things Google will deliver a map with relevant locations within the SERPS where your business can appear.

www.SearchGroup.com.au generates a suitable and extensive Google Places listing for all businesses when they engage Search Group for Search Engine Optimisation services, along with all the many recommendations suggested above... and then a few more!

Google Zeitgeist - Search Trends across the world from Google

2011-02-05T15:50:00.000+08:00

Google's Zeitgeist provides an insight into the search behaviours of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/

Find out what the top global events are, with fastest rising queries; South Africa's world cup, the Olympics in Canada, Haiti earthquake, Mexico's oil spill or Iceland's ash cloud.

Google provides a visualisation of data from their Insights for Search and Google Trends.

Aussies are searching more and more for social sites this year, with sites like Chatroulette, Formspring, Tumblr and Omegle showing our love for connecting with people and sharing information. We’re also getting into entertainment, with lots of searches for Event cinemas, ABC3 and, of course, the 2010 World Cup

So who were the five most popular people for Australian searches... andy irons, justin bieber, julia gillard, lara bingle and katy perry.

Look to Google Trends http://www.google.com.au/trends to give yourself an immediate update on trending popular searches that you can include in your Social Media topics list.

Link your Google Adwords to a highly relevant landing page

2011-02-05T09:30:00.000+08:00

To help you maximise the visibility of your Google Adwords campaign, reduce your CPC (Cost Per Click), and provide a higher conversion rate, deliver the consumer to the page that matters in the website.

Take users to a landing page within the website that meets the expectations set up in your ad copy. This expectation reduces consumer frustration and instead increases engagement due to a correct match of advert to result, creating the preferred user experience.

Highlighting prominently within the copy on the landing webpage your keywords. Show the consumer that they have got what they want quickly, and then deliver the Call To Action (CTA) - the tease for engagement to create the conversion.

Tip: ensure your CTA is above the fold, as many (~80%) of users may not scroll down the page!

Also, to improve the user experience, ensure that your landing page load times are quick. This should be a must for your SEO and your SEM campaigns anyway, just as important as providing a clean coded and validating website, that is functional, effective and where simple things like the browser back and close buttons function properly on your site.

www.SearchGroup.com.au is a leading Perth SEO and SEM company that specialises in Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing as well as engaging clients in Social Media Marketing for their businesses. In my role as Head of Search for Search Group, I like to see businesses succeed in their online marketing campaigns and achieve the return on investment (ROI) from their commitment by using a focused approach, test and measuring, and communicating on milestones through good reporting.

Check your Feedback Forms

2011-02-04T09:22:00.000+08:00

Over the last couple of weeks I have been performing a very simple service for our clients of actually testing their online feedback communication forms that they have set up in their contact us pages. These are a great way to collect structured enquiries, put the data into CRMs in the office, present confirmation/thank you pages and even tie in auto responders so that the end user receives an immediate feedback interaction maybe with specific sales information provided through choice mechanisms... all great - if they work!

I have been surprised at how many clients's website feedback forms don't actually work.

Oops, that really causes consumer frustration and confusion and a lost sale, and with the way social media is so active these days it may also lead to a flame of disappointment about the interaction that the client isn't even aware of.

So check and test now, and make sure your feedback form does actually work and deliver as you expect. And when testing, try it as a user... and try to break it! What if you miss out fields, what if you put irregular characters like ' or " or / or $, what if you put certain words 'sexy' does it get caught in your spam filters?

And set up a regular check process, as things may change. If you change host, if your website designer does an update, if your security/spam/email settings get update, these could all be things that cause a problem along the path.

I would also suggest the inclusion of an email address on your contact us page. This provides a mechanism for people to contact you in the way they 'they' prefer, and also enable them to send attachments as appropriate.

An Advanced look at the use of Sitemaps

2011-01-24T09:02:00.000+08:00

A sitemap is such a simple, and quick win to aid your Search Engine Optimisation efforts, providing a structured overview of your entire website, and all its pages, videos, pdfs and more. This hand-holding exercise with the search engines enables you to tell the search engines directly what is on your site, improve your site saturation, and increase your search visibility for your business. If you would like some direct assistance with a sitemap for your business let me know, and the team of http://www.searchgroup.com.au/ is available to assist in getting the most for your business from your online marketing activities.

Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)
You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes).
If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap files using gzip to stay within 10MB and reduce your bandwidth requirement. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.

Sitemap Generator Tools

SiteMap Generator
http://www.sitemapdoc.com/
Fill in client's website address. It goes through and generates a dynamic list. Allocate priority, frequency. Then click on [XML Sitemap] to provide layout.
Click anywhere below to highlight all 56 entries, then right click, choose copy. Paste into notepad. Then save as sitemap.xml

Google Sitemap Generator: Installation
http://googlesitemapgenerator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/gsg-installation.html
Gsitemap Free Google Sitemap Generator Tool for Windows - VIGOS
VIGOS Gsitemap is a 100% FREE, easy-to-use but versatile Windows sitemap generator tool to help webmasters and website owners to create, edit and submit sitemap files.
http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/

XML Sitemaps
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Create an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Yahoo and other search engines to help them crawl your website better.
Create a Text sitemap to have a plain list of all your pages.
Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.

GSiteCrawler
http://gsitecrawler.com/
The GSiteCrawler is available for free and runs under Windows.
The program also offers tons of options, settings, tweaks, and more - if you want to do more than generate just a simple sitemap file. How about a urllist-file for Yahoo? an RSS feed? a ROR file? a HTML sitemap page? It's all possible with the GSiteCrawler!

If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you should then list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). The XML format of a Sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a Sitemap file.

The Sitemap index file must:
Begin with an opening <sitemapindex> tag and end with a closing </sitemapindex> tag.
Include a <sitemap> entry for each Sitemap as a parent XML tag.
Include a <loc> child entry for each <sitemap> parent tag.
The optional <lastmod> tag is also available for Sitemap index files.

Note: A Sitemap index file can only specify Sitemaps that are found on the same site as the Sitemap index file. For example, http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml can include Sitemaps on http://www.yoursite.com but not on http://www.example.com or http://yourhost.yoursite.com. As with Sitemaps, your Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.

Sample XML Sitemap Index
The following example shows a Sitemap index that lists two Sitemaps:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Example Sitemap.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

<changefreq> options:
    * always
    * hourly
    * daily
    * weekly
    * monthly
    * yearly
    * never

Using Social Media for Link Building

2011-01-22T10:59:00.000+08:00

Link building is one of the important aspects of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) activities.

Promote Your Content in Social Media

If you want people to link to your content, they need to know about you, so start spreading the word. Get involved in Twitter, Digg, Facebook, FourSquare etc. Connect with people in Google Groups or LinkedIn Groups. Ensure you have a profile for yourself in LinkedIN as well as your business. Simply do whatever you need to do to connect with your audience in a way that’s engaging for them. The aim, is to become a valuable resource and they will be more likely to link to your content.

The key concept here then becomes making your content shareable.

Make sure to put links on your site so that people can tweet and share your content via facebook. Instead of spreading the word about yourself, let people take the initiative to spread the word about you!

Remember, as I have recently mentioned, links in social media now count as inbound links for search engines.

Class C Checker - Check if IP from same host

2011-01-09T09:46:00.000+08:00

When developing a network of linked web sites, you should bear in mind that search engines incorporate historical and IP address data. So in order not to be penalized for receiving links from the same Class C IP (the number of bits used to identify the network and the host vary according to the network class of the address) you should check where your linking partners are hosted and test what their IP Address is. This could make a difference for SEO purposes if you are going to get new links from different web sites.

Class C Checker - Webrank Info

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/class-c-checker.php

Class C Checker - Webmaster Toolkit

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml

Class C Checker - SEO Chat

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/class-c-checker/

Creating Confidence for the Consumer, A Secret Ingredient of Internet Success

2011-01-07T22:55:00.000+08:00

Hello and welcome back from the holidays!

This Christmas, has certainly been a period of time where we have seen more and more consumers online comparing products and services, doing their research before making their purchases.

With this level of competition increasing, online retailers must make consumers feel more comfortable on their web sites, instilling confidence in order to support sharing personal and financial information and ultimately completing purchases.

This will be key to reducing abandonment rates at the checkout, or actually any part of your website, and increase your website conversions. Consideration of attention to this area of your website will also support our Search Engine Optimisation activities driving targeted traffic to your website, as well as adding in some recommended features that increase your site saturation (additional content pages), and Local Search potential.

What we are interested in is instilling trust with our website consumer. Giving them the confidence from your website that the interactive experience is going to be successful and hassle free, that they are going to get what they expect from the transaction, and that their data, be it email address or credit card details are going to be looked after securely.

If you have one now, or are considering in the future, adding in a shopping cart to your website for direct online purchases, ensure that you encourage the user to provide their credit card details via a secure encrypted interaction. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates vary in quality and strength of encryption, and provide the means to encrypt important client data during the transaction. For ecommerce sites consider using an EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificate, as this generates a green URL bar in your web browser, providing a very visual indication that this component of the website and transaction phase, is moving into https (not http mode) - the 's' being secure. Note that EV certificates do cost more than standard SSLs, but have been shown to significantly increase confidence in the online buying cycle. Associate this with clear information / logos indicating that you have a secure site will help with the visual recognition right from the beginning (Consider clearly showing what payment methods your website accepts from the beginning eg. Credit Card Types). If you would like more information on this topic please just let me know.

Even without the need of a shopping cart process, there are some simple components that you can include in your website structure to provide confidence and integrity.

Firstly, what information have you supplied on your contacts page? Many web users get quite frustrated when they can't find a simple email address to communicate to your business. Yes, I know you might have a nice looking submission/feedback form, which is great... but, what if the user wants to email you through a scanned document or picture, or similar? Some users will try emailing to default or standard expected email addresses to the business eg. admin@ sales@ info@ so a sensible tip is to have your IT guy create a 'catch-all' that captures emails sent to any address variation and sends this through to a specified account (albeit via a virus and spam check first!) so that you can receive and monitor potential communication from clients.

On the note of email addresses, it looks a lot more professional to have an email address that matches your TLD (Top Level Domain) name rather than using the local ISP address that may have been provided when you set up your ADSL account eg. yourname@bigpond.com. It is normally very easy to have your IT guy set up sales@yourdomain.com.au or info@yourdomain.com.au and have this redirected (as an alias) to your standard email address. Appearance is important!

Consumers have to weigh up many factors when preparing to make their online transaction. What if there is no physical street address provided for the business on your contacts page? The consumer may be considering how do they track you down if there is a problem with the transaction. Some smart web users will use Google Earth/Maps or Google Street View to see if a business premise exists at the address you list. And this also becomes a significant factor in enabling your business to have a Google Local Business listing adding to your website traffic potential. Including the physical address, suburb and postcode on the page can assist with searches performed by street address, suburb, state and postcode associated with industry, service or product keywords, so why not include this? I also recommend the use of geo-tags, your location's latitude and longtitude positioned in the code behind the page of your front page and contacts page, along with using embedded Google Maps on your contact page to help further support local search efforts.

Moving beyond the contact page, other on-page factors I suggest consideration of including in your site are a Frequently Asked Questions, Terms & Conditions and a Privacy Page (If you don't have these already). Administrative pages such as these help to create that consumer confidence that we are looking to embody, and also provide another area where we can show your brand image as being professional and thorough. Consumers are very conscious of their privacy particularly, and how you intend to look after their personal details, which is what a Privacy Policy outlines.

You may like to also consider the creation of a behind-the-page .xml version P3P privacy policy to support your on-page version. According to the W3C the main goal of P3P “is to increase user trust and confidence in the Web through technical empowerment.”... I know, sorry, getting a bit too technical now, but it is useful to be aware of your options when it comes to putting your business's best foot forward and creating that overall confidence to encourage the consumer to enact in some Call To Action on your website and engage with you. If you would like some more information just let me know.

Have a great 2011!

Maximise your efforts in your Social Media bios

2011-01-07T21:33:00.000+08:00

Regardless of the Social Media platform, I strongly recommend that you don't leave your bio blank, or created with little thought, time and effort.

In the exercise of setting up your new online presence in each Social Media channel, take some time to consider firstly your choice of username (does it include any useful keywords for your industry for example?)

When your Twitter account shows up in the SERPs, your description will also show up in the SERPs. This makes is quite helpful when trying to be found for a keyword and/or phrase in your industry vertical.

Many Social Media channels enable you to upload images, backgrounds and customise the design. Use this important screen realestate to reinforce your brand and business logo, keep consistency with your corporate colour scheme, and include useful information such as web address, email address, physical address, and other contact details.

Now take note, if you weren't already aware, Bing and Google confirmed in December that social media positioning, and commentary has a direct impact on rankings. So let's use the value from this to aid your online marketing efforts and get it all tied in together for your business.

The Initial SEO Audit process for clients

2011-01-05T11:06:00.000+08:00

In today's post, I thought I would go through the process that I follow for a new client's initial SEO (Search Engine Optimistation) audit of their website, so that I can understand what has been done so far for the site, what obstacles may exist and create a structured plan of action tailored to the client's website requirements.

In this initial audit process I don't just put the SEO hat on, but look at Social Media engagement and opportunities, Online Marketing activities, Design and Usability issues, as well as hosting, coding and site performance efficiencies.

Business Details
Company:
Contact Person:
Position:
Business Address:
Industry:
Phone:
Fax:
Mobile:
Email:
Website:

Comments on visible front page:
* In this section I'll review elements of the front page and list all issues seen and opportunities of where to add in improvements. This includes functionality and usability.

Google SERPS:
* Here I'll list the primary listing for the front page of the business from Google's results, and pick it apart.

Developed by:
* Determine who created the site, and whether that carries any common and known issues. Surprisingly, working with many web design companies throughout Perth and Australia, I have come to recognise many of their stock standard template deliveries and issues that keep being generated.

Shopping Cart/eCommerce:
- SSL cert type:
* Any information about their online shopping cart and security is noted.

IntraSearch tool:
* Do they provide an internal search tool, how effective is this, do they provide any specialist product/service search tools as part of their site.

Newsletter Subscription Option:
* Is one provided, if yes, subscribe and test it out and make recommendations.

RSS Feed:
* Does the client provide RSS/Atom feeds via the site, how are these implemented.

Number of pages from site indexed in Google:   Yahoo!:   Bing:
* Check on how many pages (site saturation) for the client website in the major search engines. Looking also at canonical (www and non-www issues).

Google PageRank:
* A look at how Google scores the pagerank for the front page and some inside pages.

Domain Age:
* How long as the domain been registered and in use.

URL matches business name:
* Does the domain name reflect the business (not an acronym), is it keyword rich in the industry vertical, have they used an appropriate TLD (Top level Domain) such as .com.au for Australia.

Title Tag: <title></title>   * Review the current home page title tag and comment upon its structure.

Meta Description Tag:
* Review the current home page description tag and comment upon its structure.

Meta Keyword Tag:
* Review the current home page keyword tag is used and comment upon its structure.

Heading Tags on page: x<H1>, x<H2>, x<H3>, x<H4>, x<H5>, x<H6>
* Review how heading tags are being used on the front page, and comment.

Number of images on the webpage:
ALT Tag attributes:   images are missing their ALT tags.
* Review how images are used on the front page, naming conventions and file structure, as well as whether ALT tags have been appropriately implemented.

Site uses Frames:
* Determine if the website use frames/iframes in any shape or form.

Site uses Flash design:
* Determine if the website uses flash, and how, and work out any impact and navigational issues, or display issues for mobile devices (eg iPod/iPhone).

Different titles are used on inside pages:
* Determine if different titles are used through inside pages (no duplication).

Canonicalisation Issue:
* Determine if any form of canonical issues affect the site.

Robots.txt:
* Has a robots.txt file been created, is the structure correct.

Sitemap.xml:
* Has a sitemap been created, and is the structure correct, is it missing pages etc.

Custom 404 error page:
* Does the website have a customised 404 error page, and analysis its design.

Google Analytics code in page:
* Confirm the presence of GA code, or other types of website stats being used on the site.

Number of backlinks to website on Google:   Yahoo!:   Bing:
* Determine how many sites (not including itself) link back to the client's website.

Directory listing on DMOZ:   Yahoo!:
* Any listings exist on either DMOZ or Yahoo directory?

Social Media backlinks:
* Find out who may be talking/linking back to the client's website.

Twitter username: twitter.com/ is available:
Facebook username: is available
YouTube username: is available
MySpace username: is available
FourSquare username: is available
LinkedIn username: is available
* A look at some of the more popular Social Media websites to check if the client already has a presence and if a suitable username is available for their engagement.

Wiki article:
* Is there any wikipedia articles generated about the client.

Does site use Favicon.ico:
* Confirming the status of the use of the favicon.ico for the client matching their business.

Site hosted in:
* Listing a lot of technical mumbo jumbo about the hosting, server, webserver, location, IP, DNS, concerns or issues.

gzip Compression:
* Does the website use compression?

Comments from looking at source code from front page:
* A review of the code behind the page looking at a range of elements.

Any obvious site loading issues/concerns:
* Checking for 404 errors, Site Validation, Speed issues, image compression and much more.

Keyword Density:
* Reviewing the use of text on the page, and the subsequent keyword density from this.

Keyword/phrase group:
* Outlining what keywords I believe best summarise this business.

Related Sites:
* Determine what competiting sites exist in the client's area, and how they are doing.

Keyword Traffic Estimate Volume:
* Generate some stats on keyword traffic volumes and CPC bidding estimates.

Social Media Optimisation with SearchGroup.com.au

2011-01-04T09:00:00.000+08:00

The Web 2.0 phenomenon continues to advance and social networks continue to gain in popularity. Our Social Media Optimisation (SMO) packages are a fantastic way to reach highly targeted individuals, boost traffic and generate sales enquiries.

Search Group can market your business via social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, Squidoo and Twitter.
Social Networking allows businesses and websites to gain exposure on the Internet by using a variety of social media such as blogs and social networking sites. It also allows for more specific targeting, enabling you to select your target audience with a high return on investment, as it is one of the cheapest ways to currently market.

If you’re after increased visibility on your site and want to spread information about your business then one our Social Networking Packages can help.
Request more information about our Social Media Optimisation Packages: http://www.searchgroup.com.au/SEOServices/SocialNetworking.aspx

You have heard of a '404-Error' before?

2010-12-12T10:27:00.000+08:00

If you visit a page of a website that has been moved, deleted or renamed, or if you typed in part of the address wrong yourself or even clicked on a broken link, you’ll see an error telling you that there’s no page at that address. The technical name for this is a ‘404’ error - Page Not Found, and they’re very important to handle correctly.

When your website doesn’t have its own custom 404 error page, website users will see the hosting company's default error screen which isn't all that useful, and starts to create a sense of frustration for website visitors, and in many cases becomes the point of abandonment for the user leaving your website. Once we've driven traffic to a website we certainly don't want to see the user leave without spending time on your site!

It's actually possible to customise your 404 error pages that website visitors will see on your website. This allows you to make the page look exactly like any other page of your website maintaining your branding and professional appearance along with access to your site's navigation menu, but at the same time displaying a clear message to your visitors telling them that the page they were looking for has not been found. A simple example is: “Sorry, it looks like we couldn’t find the page you were looking for”. I also recommend the inclusion of a simple on-page site map or search box, so that the user can quickly locate the area or page of the website that they want to go to and you direct them along their way. Talk to your website designer about any options that they may be able to provide for you in this regards.

Remember that this is the first page a user may see of your website and it’s an error page. They might assume the entire site is down, where actually the only problem is that a page has been renamed.

Some websites even use the 404 page as another place to push their products onto visitors. “We couldn’t find the page you were looking for… so why not have a look at these other items instead…”

I've even seen a few funny customised 404 error messages from companies used to generate 'viral' marketing, and encourage discussion about their company online such as the following:

http://www.dilbert.com/sadsad

http://patterntap.com/gfdgdf

http://www.nextwaveperformance.com/oops.html

http://www.soocial.com/404

http://www.southparkstudios.com/404

Every website hosting operating system, and development application has a different manner in which they can implement customised 404 Error Pages, and some are definitely more complex then others. If you think having one sounds like a good idea than I encourage you to shoot through an email to your website designer to see if they can offer you this feature.

If you want any further details on this process and how to implement, or suggestions please let me know.

Website Validation Check... is there a noise coming from your engine?

2010-12-12T09:47:00.000+08:00

If you are a business website owner and would be interested in receiving a detailed website validation check of the front page of your website drop me an email to matt@searchgroup.com.au

Bit like a car that may gradually, or even suddenly, start to make an unusual noise from underneath the hood you have choices...

- keep driving and hope for the best

- pop the hood and take a look around yourself

- or head over to your trusted mechanic and get it sorted

At SearchGroup.com.au we regularly provide ongoing reports, and expand upon our initial website SEO audit where we outline any concerns that may exist under the hood of your website, particularly when it comes to the performance of your website both for the user experience and the performance and interaction of Search Engines across your website.

I continue to noticed in my role of performing reviews across websites that many clients have invalid websites that do not conform to web standards and meet the necessary quality checks applied.

The following short and simple reference is provided to explain in depth why it is beneficial to validate your website, and answer some of the common misconceptions around this:

http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html

Having a website that has errors or even warnings can be hazardous to its performance.

Just like when you drive behind another car that has a broken brake light, you the web site owner are not always aware of the problem because it seems to just work for you... but this may not be the same experience for everyone else on the internet. Which is why website validation checks exist to help find problems and provide an opportunity to fix them once and for all.

I typically find if a problem exists on the front page of your website then it carries through the rest of the website. This is NOT the time for you to learn html so don't panic! The validation reports that we provide include a summary of concerns. This will provide an outline to what is not 100% correct for your web site. The top section actually shows the code of your website along with comments amongst this code where problems exist.

We can then work with your in-house design and development team, or external web agency on resolving these problems. Our aim is for a perfect health score on the test, but even a reduction in the number of errors and warnings I will consider a win! And you will have a win too. By providing a website without errors will make for a better user experience and a much happier search bot with more opportunity of actually crawling through your entire website to find all your great content and getting this included within the Search Engine Results.

If you don't currently have a website designer available to assist you, or need a helping hand please let us know as our in-house design and development team Star3Media can provide support.

It really is the little things that can make your website stand out...

2010-12-12T09:37:00.000+08:00

Whilst performing a lot of website reviews recently, I have noticed that many website owners are not taking advantage of a simple and important web design feature known as the favicon. The favicon (abbreviation for favourite icon), is a visual representation of your business, and is normally the logo of your business.

So where is the favicon seen?

When users bookmark or save your website to their favourites apart from the title of the website being stored as a link, the favicon image appears next to your link in the users browser. If they also put your website in to their links bar within the browser or drag the favourite to their desktop for easy access, this favicon is used as the icon representing your business website. As well, quite simply, every time a user goes to your website they will see your logo in the url bar of the browser where you type the web address in – AND when they use tabbed browsing, the favicon is next to the website name on each tab…

So as you can see this simple, effective, visual reminder, really helps your website stand out of the crowd, and should encourage users to come back and revisit your site.

Some search engines actually check to see if your website has a favicon, and may use this as part of their ranking algorithm as they determine how professional your website is, which could help to determine whether your website should appear above another. So when they check, and they don’t find one in the default location it may also trigger unnecessary 404 Errors (Page not Found) which we would like to avoid.

Now that you can see how important it is to have this little thing in place, how do you get one?

If you already have a website designer please contact them directly and request them to get this implemented for your website, creating the icon logo, locating this on the server, and ensuring it is in the default location and each page of your site has the necessary meta tag pointing to it indicating that it now exists.

If you need assistance getting this done for you let me know as own internal design/development team Star3Media can assist. This will provide your own customised favicon created and implemented properly across your site.

Competitive Intelligence For Brand Protection

2010-12-11T07:11:00.000+08:00

Protecting your brand online is an ongoing activity. It requires hard work and due diligence. One area of concern is when others bid on your brand, or use your brand name in their ads. The current understanding of Google's policy is that it's OK to bid on a competitive brand name, but it is not OK to use in your ad. Yahoo's policy appears to be a bit stricter, and does allow for the possibility of prohibiting the bidding on a trademarked term.

Finding out who is bidding on your brand may not be hard. You can go to the search engine, type your brand name in, and then see who shows up. This, of course, assumes that they are not geo-targeting their bid to only show up in certain areas (and perhaps not the area you are checking from). This is one of the areas where tools like Hitwise and comScore are useful, as they avoid these types of issues.

http://www.comscore.com/

It's also interesting to see just how important brand name bidding is to a competitor's business:

You can see from this table that Smart Fares receives 4.78% of it's traffic from the Orbitz brand name. A deeper look shows that brand name bidding is a fundamental part of their business model:

Acting on Infringement

Direct bidding on your brand is not really something you can prevent. However, if your competitor takes the next step and starts using your brand in their ad text, that's another matter. The search engines do provide a way to address that. You can use the following links to find the Google Trademark Complaint Policy and the Yahoo Trademark Complaint Policy. Google also provides an Trademark Complaint Form.

http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/legal/trademarks.php

https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint

Most of the information you need to provide in the Google complaint form is pretty basic. However, if your trademark is registered, you will need to have the application or registration number which they can use for verification. You can also apply even if all you are doing is claiming use rights. However, this is a bit more difficult to prove, so be prepared for a longer wait on resolution.

Trademarks can also be on a word, design, or both. These are equally protectable. The Google form accommodates up to 10 trademarks, but Google also provides a way to submit more than 10.

Yahoo does not provide a form, but does provide an email address or a mailing address for sending in your complaint. They request information on the search term for which the complaint is related, the trademark info (much the same as Google), registration information if your trademark is registered, any evidence of consumer confusion (hmm - that Hitwise data looks pretty good for providing that), and any information on communications you have had with the advertiser.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but don't go down this path unless you really have a legitimate trademark to protect. Also, this is not an overnight process. It can take several months for you to get resolution. Just be patient. It is well worth it.

Introducing you and your website to RSS

2010-11-24T06:03:00.000+08:00

RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a great way for your online business to keep in touch with your website visitors once they have been to your website and keep your website 'sticky'... meaning that once you have had the visitor to your site, you can encourage them to receive ongoing information about your company, news, information, new deals or services and keep your clients engaged.

It is actually very easy to implement RSS into your site! By including the following piece of one line HTML code in the head section of your webpages you'll be all set:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="ENTER_RSS_URL">

By doing this visitors to your website will then see within their web browser the RSS icon glow orange and become active - meaning that they can then subscribe directly to your feed, which is like book marking your specials or info page so that they will continue to receive this information from you each time you post out an RSS update.

So RSS is a bit like having an email newsletter subscription service for your website, but only better.

Because RSS was created a few years back as an alternative method to email delivery to get around some of the problems related to email marketing. RSS is automatically opt-in, as the user is choosing to subscribe. There is no spam filters that block your message getting through, nor delays in delivery that can happen with email - RSS is immediate, so a great way for speed to market of your business information or new deals.

A lot of people will actually have RSS available in their email clients like Outlook 2007 and above. So they can subscribe and follow your business information from the comfort of their email application. Once you have RSS set up, you can also provide your clients with a long list of other marketing tools that take advantage of RSS, and which can receive and display RSS. So you could actually create and provide downloadable Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, iPhone & iPad applications, even Screen Savers that receive and show your company information via RSS. These are some great brand building and marketing tools to help disseminate a brand awareness campaign and attract more eyeballs to your products and services. If you would like some further information about any of these just drop me an email.

So why am I harping on about RSS for your website?

Quite simple really as I'm all about driving more traffic to your online business, and retaining client interaction as well as pointing out ways to create better leverage with Search Engines. We're here to work for you and improve your online business.

RSS feeds can be crawled by Search Engines, they can even be submitted to Search Engines, along with a long list of RSS aggregator websites or online directories. This generates more exposure, and a better interaction with Search Engines encouraging them to find all your content, and particularly any new content you create and get this added into their Search Directories so your site is found more.

And here is a simple tip to actually manage and update your website's RSS feed...

Use Twitter! Yup, signup for your free Twitter account for your business at twitter.com and subsequently Twitter provides a RSS feed of your tweets. This RSS address can be put into that one line of code I provided you with at the top of this email and you are away. This means that you are using Twitter and getting your business information and website links out into Twitter and being seen there as well, and having it generated at the same time into your webpage. Bit like two for the price of... nothing!

Did you know that Twitter has a content relationship deal with Google - meaning, that Google trawls through all the data generated on Twitter. So when you tweet a new deal, a special, a new page added to your site or information about your business it will be found by Google and added very quickly into Google's own search index. This is one of the key reasons I recommend the use of Twitter for your business!

Okay, so a bit of information for you to digest this morning. I hope it makes sense. Of course if you have any further questions shoot me through an email.

Careful with your choice of Domain Name

2010-11-20T09:49:00.000+08:00

Such a simple thing, and yet one of the most important and fundamental decisions a business will make initially in their foray into the online space will be the selection of an appropriate domain name.

The Search Engines will look upon this as one of the most important factors in determining what your website is going to be about and hence presenting your site in the Search Engine Result Page relevant to audience queries.

Unfortunately since the internet has now been around for so long, there is relatively limited choice in some aspects for good domain names that still exist. Be careful the choice of Top Level Domain structure and ensure it is appropriate to your location (localised search factor) eg. .com.au for Australia, and not just going for a domain extension because it is available... as this may lead to consumer confusion as they expect the 'norm'.

Keyword rich domain names are the ideal choice that match your business segment. Hyphen separated domains are okay, but do and can add to confusion for typing in the name by the consumer so aren't an ideal first choice, but a good second when nothing else exists.

But beware the acronym, the abbreviated version of your business name purely based on its initials. Particularly if this is not a brand naming convention that users may be aware of. Firstly it is most likely, and certainly not keyword rich, so a back step from the very beginning. However I can understand the use if you have a very long business name. But my concern comes from what sometimes is over looked, in that what does that acronym or abbreviation perhaps mean in another context or even another country? Do your research, search particularly across the Social Media sphere just in case your particular acronym has sinister connections and associations that may already be established and which then may make you reconsider your choice... Research really is an important element of your initial steps into the online space, so step carefully and wisely.

Foursquare as a geo-marketing tool for local businesses

2010-10-31T06:47:00.000+08:00

FourSquare: http://foursquare.com/

Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things. Users check into local places like cafes, restaurants, hotels on FourSquare via their smart phones and provide tips and share their location with friends across FourSquare as well as Twitter and Facebook. Users with the most checkins to a venue become the “Mayor”, and can receive loyalty rewards from the venue.

Foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai met in 2007 while working in the same office space (at different companies) in New York City. FourSquare was launched in Austin, Texas in March 2009. As of August 2010, foursquare had close to 3 million users worldwide.

For local businesses it an opportunity to communicate to your customers, provide coupons as incentives, and promote your business in the social media space.

Wikipedia.org – Online Notability Guidelines

2010-10-23T06:22:00.000+08:00

Wikipedia.org remains one of the most reputed sources of editable content in the world.

Within hours of posting content on Wikipedia, it can be indexed in Google and Yahoo!

However, the editorial guidelines are very strict and it is critical to understand that editors police postings. It is vital to have “reliable secondary sources” as references in any Wikipedia.org posting to ensure it survives the human editorial test.

The Notability Guidelines are detailed below.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

List of Web Server Error Messages

2010-10-17T07:14:00.000+08:00

Errors on the Internet, and those annoying error messages, occur quite frequently, and can be quite frustrating, especially if you do not know the difference between a 404 error and a 502 error. Many times they have more to do with the Web servers you're trying to access rather than something being wrong with your computer. Here is a list of error messages you might encounter while surfing the Web and their respective meanings to help you figure out just what the problem is:

200 If a page is missing, it's replaced with the custom error page.

302 If the page is missing, it's replaced with a temporary redirect to a custom error page.

301 Redirects errors to either a custom error page, or some other page in the site (i.e. sitemap, homepage or best guess).

400 Bad File Request, usually means the syntax used in the URL is incorrect (e.g., uppercase letter should be lowercase letter; wrong punctuation marks).

401 Unauthorized Server, is looking for some encryption key from the client and is not getting it. Also, wrong password may have been entered. Try it again, paying close attention to case sensitivity.

403 Forbidden/Access Denied, Similar to 401; special permission needed to access the site -- a password and/or username if it is a registration issue. Other times you may not have the proper permissions set up on the server or the site's administrator just doesn't want you to be able to access the site.

404 File Not Found, server cannot find the file you requested. File has either been moved or deleted, or you entered the wrong URL or document name. Look at the URL. If a word looks misspelled, then correct it and try it again. If that doesn't work backtrack by deleting information between each backslash, until you come to a page on that site that isn't a 404. From there you may be able to find the page you're looking for.

408 Request Timeout, client stopped the request before the server finished retrieving it. A user will either hit the stop button, close the browser, or click on a link before the page loads. Usually occurs when servers are slow or file sizes are large.

500 Internal Error, couldn't retrieve the HTML document because of server-configuration problems. Contact site administrator.

501 Not Implemented, web server doesn't support a requested feature.

502 Service Temporarily Overloaded, server congestion; too many connections; high traffic. Keep trying until the page loads.

503 Service Unavailable, server busy, site may have moved, or you lost your Internet connection.

Connection Refused by Host, either you do not have permission to access the site or your password is incorrect.

File Contains No Data, page is there but is not showing anything. Error occurs in the document. Attributed to bad table formatting, or stripped header information.

Bad File Request, browser may not support the form or other coding you're trying to access.

Failed DNS Lookup, the Domain Name Server can't translate your domain request into a valid Internet address. Server may be busy or down, or incorrect URL was entered.

Host Unavailable, host server down. Hit reload or go to the site later.

Unable to Locate Host, host server is down, Internet connection is lost, or URL typed incorrectly.

Network Connection Refused by the Server, the Web server is busy.

Sorting out Canonical Issues for SEO

2010-10-16T06:48:00.000+08:00

Information on how to use Canonical link reference, and 301 redirects (permanent redirect) to fix duplicate issues in SEO

I am still surprised at the number of websites I come across daily with this problem. The following information is supplied to look at resolving this issue.

--------------------------------

Set the Canonical source reference, indicating the primary page where ranking is to be delivered if you have duplicate content, by including the following metatag. The following tag tells the SEs to treat the page that they are on as if it is a copy of the listed domain/page, and that all of the link and content metrics that the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

Note: 301s carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page at domain1.com to domain2.com and carry over those search engine metrics. This is NOT THE CASE with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).

The “301 Permanent Redirect” is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for redirecting websites. You can use it in several situations, including:

* to redirect an old website to a new address

* to setup several domains pointing to one website

* to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)

* to harmonize a URL structure change

--------------------------------

ASP Sites – 301 Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>

Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”

Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.example.com/keyword.asp”

--------------------------------

ASP Single Page 301 Redirect (a variation on the above)

This redirect method is used with the Active Server Pages platform.

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'

--------------------------------

ASP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical Redirect with ASP must be located in a script that is executed in every page on the server before the page content starts.

If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."

& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")

& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")

End if

--------------------------------

PHP Single Page 301 Redirect

In order to redirect a static page to a new address simply enter the code below inside the index.php file.

Header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

Header(“Location: http://www.new-url.com/page.html”);

exit();

--------------------------------

PHP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical 301 Redirect will add (or remove) the www. prefixes to all the pages inside your domain. The code below redirects the visitors of the http://domain.com version to http://www.domain.com.

<?php

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');

header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}

--------------------------------

PHP Sites – 301 Redirect: Add to .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]

--------------------------------

Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect for Linux Servers

In order to use this method you will need to create a file named .htaccess (not supported by Windows-based hosting) and place it on the root directory of your website, then just add the code below to the file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm

--------------------------------

Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect for Linux Servers

Follow the same steps as before but insert the code below instead (it will redirect all the visitors accessing http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com)

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

--------------------------------

Search Group - Perth SEO company - www.SearchGroup.com.au

2010-09-29T20:31:00.001+08:00

Hi all,

Just an update to let you all know that I am now working as a Search Engine Optimization specialist with Perth SEO company Search Group.

Search Group is a leading Perth SEO Company specialising in website search engine optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and online marketing activities with a large and growing portfolio of Australian clients.

Address: Suite 90, City West Business Centre, 102 Railway Street, West Perth, WA 6005

T: 08 9278 8899
F: 08 9278 8890
E: matt@searchgroup.com.au
W: http://www.searchgroup.com.au/

So if you would like a free introductory SEO training session, website appraisal and review or just simply to discuss your search optimisation requirements to improve the visibility of your website on Google, Yahoo! and Bing then please drop me an email.

404 Error Pages... have you customised yours?

2010-09-27T09:41:00.000+08:00

I generally recommend for client websites to include a customided 404 Error Page (page not found error alert) for users who mistype or arrive at a broken link. Best practice indicates that a redirect should be provided back to the website home page or site map. I believe that the custom error page has become quite a fashion statement and feature of discussion. Though you can set a meta refresh to redirect the user after a set period of time (20 seconds) to the home page, I prefer to include the site map or site search feature on this page for usability improvement to the users experience, that clearly indicates that they are presented with a page that indicates that they have come to this point as the page that they were trying doesn't exist, and here are some options to assist in getting to where you were going.

It is important to note the most common reasons that visitors to the website land on a 404 page:

• A mistyped website address or URL (or an out of date bookmark or favourite)
• A search engine link that is out of date
• An internal broken link that the webmaster or web developer is not aware of.

Factors to consider for local search SEO - using GEO tags

2010-09-25T08:02:00.000+08:00

This post combines information on what GEO tags are, how they can be implemented, and factors that may contribute in my opinion to improvements in local search for Search Engine Optimisation.

Firstly the Geo Tag Elements

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">
e.g.
<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="-31.9667;115.8167">
or
<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="-31.9667;115.8167">
<META NAME="geo.country" CONTENT="AU">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="AU-WA">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Perth">

Element Description

Longitude:
Longitude is conventionally given in degrees of arc relative to the Greenwich Meridian, a great circle passing through the poles and Greenwich in London, England. Longitude is either qualified as East or West, or given as a signed numeric value of degrees East. The geo.position tag uses a signed numeric value.

On a Mercator map, Longitude is plotted left to right as the X coordinate, while Latitude is plotted bottom to top as the Y coordinate, with (0,0) in the middle. Thus, positive values for Longitude correspond to locations East of Greenwich, e.g. in Asia. Locations West of Greenwich, e.g. in the United States, correspond to negative values of Longitude.
(Latitude;Longitude) in quadrants

Latitude:
Latitude is conventionally given in degrees of arc relative to the Equator. Latitude is either qualified as North or South, or given as a signed numeric value of degrees North. The geo.position tag uses a signed numeric value.

Region:
The geo.region tag is taken from a controlled list, and may be used for resource discovery. It may also be used as a bounding check to validate the geo.position tag.

For the geo.region tag, the ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes are used. These codes are formed from the "domain-name" 2-character codes, for example iso3166-countrycodes.txt, together with a regional code. The codes may be found here, while the GeoTag Generator includes a 2-stage script to pick appropriate codes.

For the USA and Canada, the subdivision code is the familiar 2-character state/province abbreviation. See for instance United States Postal Service, Official Abbreviations - States and Possessions and Canada Postal Guide (Province and Territory Symbols)

Country:
If the regional code is not known, the 2-character country code may be used instead.
ISO 3166 codes are reproduced with permission from ISO

Place Name:
The geo.placename tag is provided primarily for resource recognition; it is anticipated that this field be harvested by automated agents and presented to the user in search engine results in a similar manner to the description META tag. This field is free-text, and typically would be used for city, county and state names. It could, however, be used for resource discovery, particularly if names from some controlled vocabulary such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is used.

Required Accuracy of Position
The accuracy with which positions need to be determined is largely determined by the character of the resource being described.

While a position given in a gazetteer or thesarus such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is convenient, and in many cases adequate, in other cases it is clearly not. For instance, it is probably sufficient to place a branch office of a multinational corporation on a map of the world, or a map of a country. It is, however, clearly insufficient to place a public telephone, filling station or fast-food restaurant. In these cases, position must be measured or researched to greater accuracy.

Accuracy of Elements
Properly expressing the accuracy of geographic positions is too complex for the simple geo.position META tag, yet some clue to the accuracy may be given by the number of digits in each element. One Minute of Arc of Latitude corresponds to one Nautical Mile (1852 metres, or 1.8km). Latitude Accuracy Mile Km

49 1° 60 111
49.1 0° 6' 6 11
49.30 36" 0.6 1
49.320 3" 0.06 0.1

In a commercial GPS set, the standard accuracy is less than 15 metres, now that SA has been turned off. (May 2000). DGPS sets may allow accuracy better than this.

Extent
As currently defined, the geo.position tag describes a point, not a region. It is thus unsuitable for describing an extended area. What constitutes a region may depend on the scale of map or geographic search used; for instance, the country of Andorra (geo.position 42.5;1.5) may reasonably be represented by a point on a map of the world but not on a map of Andorra. It is the responsibility of the user to determine if a point representation is meaningful given the intended audience of the tagged document.

Future versions of geotags may incorporate a region element, as do other metadata standards.

Position Datum
In cases where the resource position is less accurate than a few kilometres, datum issues may be ignored. For accurate positions, however, the WGS-84 datum should be used. In North America, this corresponds to the NAD-83 datum. Many maps and charts still use the older NAD-27 datum, and there is a difference in coordinates of as much as a couple of hundred metres, depending on the exact position. Conversion software is available, and most recently issued topographic maps and charts will give the offsets.

Tag Placement
In accordance with the HTML 4.0 specification, META tags (including geo tags) should be placed in the HTML document header, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> elements, for instance:
<html><head><title>My Document</title>
<meta name="geo.region" content="US-WA">
</head>

TGN etc. Cut/Paste
The Geo Tag Generator allows geographic positions from certain popular sites to be pasted in using the browser clipsheet. Bold text is required. Examples:

TGN: Lat: 49 21 N Long: 123 05 W
Tiger: Scale: 1:218074 (Centered at Lat: 38.89000 Lon: -77.02000)
CPCGN: Latitude - Longitude : 49? 16' 00" N - 122? 57' 00" W

Check Map
The Geo Tag Generator incorporates an optional check map which may be used for a quick sanity check on geographic co-ordinates. Co-ordinates may also be checked against country and region codes, if given.

Icon
Pages which have included geotags may include a geotag icon to indicate that geographic search capability may be available. To use the icon, copy the image to your system (e.g. right-click "Save Image As") and include the following HTML code:

<a href="http://geotags.com/geo/" target="_top">
<img src="geo2t.png" alt="Geo Tagged for Geographic Discovery"></a>
Referenced from: http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html

Notes
The tags describe the position of the resource described on the page, for instance a beach or restaurant, not the company hosting the page, the company managing the resource, or the server hosting the page (cf. RFC 1876)

The tags are described in terms of current HTML practice, which does not preclude them being represented in another manner such as RDF or XML.

The tags are intended for use by a wide base of authors who are probably not well versed in GIS or formal metadata techniques. They are not intended to supplant, and do not address as many issues, as such formal standards as FGDC, GILS, TC211, Dublin Core etc which should be used where applicable.

Hierarchical Position:
     World (facet)
.... Oceania (continent) (P)
........ Australia (nation) (P)
............ Western Australia (state) (P)
................ Perth (inhabited place) (P)

Place Types:
inhabited place (preferred, C) ............ settled 1829
city (C) ............ established 1856
regional capital (C)
commercial center (C)
financial center (C)
transportation center (C)
university center (C)

Unfortunately search engines determine a websites location by the location of its webhost (server).

So, if your focus is a specific locality, then it’s vital that your site is recognised by search engines as being from that territory. Local websites are featured more prominently in local versions of the search engines, there web surfers are given the option to see only pages from their location excluding foreign based sites.

Hosting up until recently tended to be fairly expensive in comparison to overseas in the US. For this reason many Australian based sites found themselves running into problems when they tried to save costs by hosting their sites in the USA.

Also, don’t take it for granted that by hosting with a local Perth based company that their servers will also be based here in Perth! Many Perth hosting companies locate their servers either over East or overseas. When signing up for hosting contracts, if location is an issue for you, always check that the servers are located geographically where you would expect them to be.

There are several factors that are I believe effect the location of a site in terms of search engines:
•             The top level domain extension (.com.au, .fr, .de)
•             The location (IP address) of the website host
•             The geographic location of the domain registrar
•             The language that the site is written in
•             The location of incoming links
•             On page factors (addresses, telephone numbers)
•             Registering with Google Local

Obviously some of these factors hold more importance than others, some I believe are used only marginally, others perhaps not at all, or their effect is too minimal to test.

Using The Correct TLD (Top Level Domain)

This is your best case scenario. You have a site that you’re targeting to local Australian consumers, registering a .com.au site will pretty much guarantee that you’ll be found in the Australian search results, even if you choose to host out of the country. If however you were unable to obtain your business name in the .com.au domain space and went with a .com (maybe because it was cheaper!) or other variations, this may not be the case!
Website Host Location

There are of course many instances of websites that are targeted to a specific country but are using a generic top level domain such as a .com or .net. In these cases simply ensuring that your hosts servers are geographically located in your marketplace should ensure that the site is recognised as being local.

Geographic Location Of The Domain Registrar

I feel this is a factor that is sometimes overlooked by many webmasters, but as Google has access to the geographic location such as the location of the domain registrar it would make sense for them to make use of this as well. This along with other registrar information such as Whois data could well be used as a ‘tie-breaker’ when country-specific TLDs are hosted elsewhere. For example many country specific TLDs such as .fm, .cc, and .tv are now being used because of the brandability of the domain extension. In cases such as these where the TLD extension is indicating one location and the hosting location indicating another then it would be a logical step to make use of the information available from the domain registrar. Tie into this a further step, by ensuring as much of your actual business details (name) and address is accurately reflected in the domain name registration process and thereby reflected in the whois details for your site. This I believe is a factor now being used by Google Local in their lookup for local search.

Site Language

Obviously as well as it making sense to make sure your site is written in the language of the search visitors that you’re looking for, it may well be one of the factors that a search engine may use to help determine the location of a site. It certainly isn’t a defining factor though as it’s relatively easy to find foreign language sites within the AU only search results.

Location Of Incoming Links

As above, the idea is that a search engine can use the location of incoming links to determine the site location. Again, I’m sceptical if this is any more than of marginal importance. I have seen lots of sites with low quality link profiles that consist of largely overseas located links and of course news sites with very few links seem to have little problem get geographically placed before backlinks have had a chance to develop.

Site Addresses/Telephone Numbers

It is simply good practice to have local contact details for local markets. There is also speculation that this may be used to place a sites location. Again this is difficult to test but I’m doubtful if this is would be anything more than of marginal importance. (Consider including local and the international prefix in your phone contacts for example).

Registering With Google Local

Again, hard to test, but it would make sense for Google to make as much use of all the information that was made available to them. Yahoo and MSN also have similar local services.

Robots.txt - informing search engines

2010-09-06T09:41:00.000+08:00

The robots.txt file is stored in the root level directory of the website to inform search engines how to interact with the web page, what to, and what not to go into and list in their directory. The following string is the format that is used and provides an example layout.

The file must reside in the root directory of your web. The URL path (web address) of your robots.txt file should look like this: www.yoursite/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite/sitemap.xml.gz
Disallow: /secure/

To exclude ALL robots from the server:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To exclude a single robot from parts of a server:

User-agent: Named Bot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /images-saved/

The Robot Tag in Source Code

Where a robots.txt file can’t be uploaded onto a website server, the following robot tags can be included on the individual html pages:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">

Robots.txt resources:
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

Robots.txt File Generator
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/generator/

Analyze robots.txt
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/analyzer/

Improving on Robots Exclusion Protocol
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improving-on-robots-exclusion-protocol.html

About /robots.txt
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Tip: the robots.txt file is not the place where you should include comments in the code, as these can sometime be incorrectly misinterpreted and cause problems with the search spider.

Comparing 301 redirects and the canonical url tag

2010-09-02T09:48:00.000+08:00

The Canonical URL tag attribute
<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.yoursite.com/page>
is very similar to the use of a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective.

Effectively you are telling search engines that several pages should be considered as one ,which the 301 does, without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL.

Note however; a 301 redirect redirects all traffic (search bots and human visitors), the Canonical URL tag is just for the search engines to see, meaning you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions. As well, a 301 is a better indicator that multiple pages have a single, canonical source. The power of a 301 redirect is in its ability to carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page from one domain to another and carry over those search engine metrics. This is not something that you can do with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).

The Canonical URL tag

2010-08-30T09:19:00.000+08:00

Yahoo!, Bing & Google all support the "canonical url tag" with the aim to assist webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index.
The tag is part of the HTML header on the web page:
<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.yoursite.com/page>

This would tell Yahoo!, Bing & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.yoursite.com/page and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

Open Directory Project Meta Tags

2010-08-29T09:23:00.000+08:00

Sometimes the search engine will display information about your site taken from the Open Directory Project (ODP) instead of your description meta tag. You can force the search engine to ignore the ODP information by including a robots meta tag like this: <meta name="robots" content="noodp">.

The "noodp" robots meta tag is fully supported by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

If your site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! search results will display information about your site taken from their directory instead of the contents of your description meta tag. As above, you can force Yahoo! to ignore the directory information by including this robots meta tag: <meta name="robots" content="noydir">.

The "noydir" robots meta tag is only supported by Yahoo!

Robots metatag

2010-08-28T09:12:00.000+08:00

Robots: <meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Many web pages have this tag wrong. An example of the wrong usage is content="index, follow, all" - wrong because some spiders can't handle spaces between the words in the tag or the word "all". Most engines by default assume that you want a web page to be indexed and links followed, so using the wrong syntax can actually result in the spider coming to the wrong conclusion and penalizing, or worse, ignoring the page outright.

If by chance you do not want your links followed, or the page not indexed, then you would substitute "noindex" and or "nofollow" into the tag. You can also make an inline link no-follow with the following code:
<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

revisit-after
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">

rating content
<meta name="rating" content="General">

distribution
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">

classification
<meta name="classification" content="PRIMARY KEYWORD PHRASE">

author
<meta name="author" content="Company Name">

copyright
<meta name="copyright" content="Company Name © 2010">

cache-control
<meta name="cache-control" content="Public">

SEO with different languages - a cultural fit

2010-08-27T08:21:00.000+08:00

Who is your audience? If the answer to that is an international audience beyond the borders of the local area of delivery, then don’t forget it, as you need to consider the impact of reaching the masses!

Just by looking at your website tracking stats it should be clear whether you have an international flavour to your site visitors, so by going to ‘their level’ consider localisation factors in the way that international visitors may consider searching on our site.

They don’t watch our TV, they don’t listen to our radio, they don’t read the front page of our newspapers and they say potato when we say potatoe. Use the available language converters to check your main 3-5 keyword/phrases and consider using the results as part of your keyword group.

Language Resources:
http://www.freetranslation.com/
http://www.google.com.au/language_tools?hl=en

Does your domain name (Top Level Domain) say international (.com) or local (.com.au)?

Typographical Errors - Capturing misspelt words in your SEO program

2010-08-26T08:41:00.000+08:00

Fremantle or Freemantle? Typographic errors due to rushing or fat fingers on a keyboard, difficult or hard to spell words, or foreigners of different nationalities attempting words that they may have only heard spoken provides an avenue for picking up stray search attempts.

When preparing your list of keywords consider the variations and attempts that people may make. Particularly review your search stats for the website/page after a few months to determine the attempts that have been made and cater for these if you sense a fair proportion of searchers may continue to err.

This is particularly useful in a tightly competed SEO field – where millions of dollars may be spent on obtaining top position for a particular phrase or keyword, you can skirt the outside of the pack and pick up many stragglers attempting to access that phrase but who just didn’t quite get it right.

Keyword Competition Analysis

2010-08-24T07:55:00.000+08:00

Analysing your competition is an important step in the search engine optimisation process and it takes into consideration: what keywords your competition has chosen and how they use them on their website.

If you want to see who is your competition for the targeted keywords you've chosen then these tools will assist:

Competition Tool - SEO Digger
http://seodigger.com/

Competition Analysis Tool - Seoscorecard
http://www.seoscorecard.com/

Top Competitor Tool - Webuildpages
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/top-competitor-tool.php

Keyword Suggestion Resources

2010-08-23T10:01:00.000+08:00

Keyword Suggestion Resources:

SEObook:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Wordtracker Free Keywords:
http://www.wordtracker.com/

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google Suggest Tool - shows frequently search for phrases starting with the words and letters in your query:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/

Keyword Discovery - free keyword tool from Trellian:
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Microsoft Keyword Forecast - shows predicted Microsoft search impression count and historical trends:
http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/default.aspx

Keyword Mutation Detection - Detect frequent misspellings or alternative spellings of the same keyword in search query logs:
http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection/

Wordze - nice for generating decently large keyword lists quickly and inserting them into paid search campaigns:
http://www.wordze.com/

Metaspy - see what others are searching for currently
http://www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/metaspy/

7search.com keyword suggestion tool
http://conversion.7search.com/scripts/advertisertools/keywordsuggestion.aspx

Use KeywordPad to Clean, Modify & Multiply (Long Tail) Your Keyword Lists
http://www.goodkeywords.com/

Keyword Research Tool - Webmaster toolkit
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

Keyword Suggestions Overture - SEO Chat
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-overture/

Website Keyword Suggestions - Webconfs
http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php

Keyword Suggestion Tool - Self SEO
http://www.selfseo.com/keyword_suggestion_tool.php

Keyword Valuation Tools

Google Traffic Estimator - shows the estimated bids prices and ad clicks for the top ranked AdWords ad. Allows you to check for [exact match], "phrase match", or broad match.

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

SEO & Internet Marketing Google Gadget Tools

http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Search engine keyword position tools

When done correctly, search engine positioning can increase web traffic by a tremendous amount. Use these tools to check your current position of your keywords in major search engines like: Google, Yahoo, MSN:

Search Engine Keyword Position - SEO Chat
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/search-engine-keyword-position/

Keyword Analysis Tool - Mcdar
http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp

SERPS Position Checker - LinkVendor
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/serps-position.html

Website Position Tool - Rnk1
http://www.rnk1.com/

Dictionary Resources:

Using Dictionaries & Thesaurus: Here’s a great starting point for you to consider variations on a theme – use the online Thesaurus to generate associated and similar words to your key focus words.

http://www.lexfn.com/

http://dictionary.reference.com/

Keywords - plurals, singular, misspelt...

2010-08-22T10:43:00.000+08:00

Consider the benefit of adding plurals and/or slight variations e.g. both Australia Australian. The vast majority of search results seem to focus upon returning results for the plural version of the word, instead of the singular version. Providing results that are singular or plural will provide more relevant results for a searcher than if the search engine had just returned results for the version that a searcher entered into a search box.

Also worth noting is where Google’s Algorithm highlights synonyms. Also the degree to which we understand synonyms changes and improves, and this can affect the impact on highlighting the terms. The main point is that the algorithm does change. Google mostly highlights stems, not synonyms, but the distinction is lost on most people. Stemming on Google isn't new. The company has been doing it since back in 2003. It was also highlighting stemmed words back then, too. If you searched for "running," and it found a page with the word "run," the word "run" would be bolded in the search listing description.

Consider using keywords that are misspelled or mistyped. With a business name or product name, consider how people may say it, or sound it out, and thus interpret the spelling of that word.

Do use a combination of very unique and more general words to describe the contents of your page.

Consider using keywords related to something else your prospect would buy or search for.(related phrases)

Once you have completed your brainstorming and have compiled your list of 5-10 core keywords, it’s time to move on and expand that list. A list of 5-10 search phrases will generally not bring the amount of search engine traffic needed to make your website successful. However, that list will be a vital tool when determining which phrases to add to the mix. At this point, you need to turn to the search engines themselves and research which search phrases are actually being typed into Google, Yahoo, Bing et al. While few search engines will openly tell you which search phrases are the most often searched, there are several very useful tools you can use to expand your list of keyword popularity.

Gone but not forgotten - Benefits of the Keyword Metatag

2010-08-21T08:35:00.000+08:00

<keywords> Most search engines compare your meta keywords with what is actually on your page, and if it doesn't match, your web site can get penalized, and suffer in search results. Metatag keywords should have no more than 16 keywords. The limit is usually around 20-30 words. Maximum character length is actually 1000, but aim for less than 300, but really, given the negatives surrounding keywords, less is usually more.

Use plural variations (as the singular is included), comma space separate keywords, focus the design of the keywords around your primary 5 keywords and their variations... but again put the MOST important at the beginning of the list. Keyword PHRASES are important, and more realistic, as most people will search using 2 or 3 word combinations, rather than a single word!. Also determine keywords that searchers may use when looking for products or services that relate to your site. Use keywords that match the content within the page.

The Meta keywords were once the be all and end all of SEO. These days, the importance of the keyword tag has fallen drastically, as the ease with which it can be spammed has made it a less than perfect means for categorising pages. That said, Yahoo still uses the keywords tag, and as such it is still worth having, just not taking as much time over as was previously the case. In most cases, one keyword tag per site, or one per section, is usually more than adequate. The keywords tag should have terms separated by commas.

Keywords represent the key terms that someone might enter into a search engine. Choose only relevant keywords. If the terms are going to appear in your keywords tag, they must appear in the content of your site, or be a synonym to a term on your site. Most search engines compare your meta content with what is actually on your page, and if it doesn't match, your web site can get penalised, and suffer in search results.

The Keyword tag should include the keywords/phrases that you are targeting in order of importance. Start with the most important and then proceed to less important but still relevant keywords. It is extremely important that you do not repeat any word more than 3 times within the Keyword tag. This includes words within target sentences. Also do not place repeated keywords close together.

So even with the relative demise of this tag due to black hat spammy use, the benefits in a structural sense for organising your page and determining your focus should be enough to consider its use.

Describing the Description Meta Tag

2010-08-20T07:36:00.000+08:00

The <description> Description Meta Tag directly represents what will appear as the "summary" of your web page. This will be displayed after the title of your web page in any search result SERP or "listing". The content of the description should clearly communicate what a visitor to your web site can expect to find when linking to your site, and you should include keywords in the description to help boost the ranking of the page even further.

Avoid simply pasting your keywords here as most search engine users will not respond well to a search result that does not contain a short explanation of your page. You should try to 'hide' the keywords within the description so that you achieve more favourable results within an engine listing. This makes the Description Meta Tag the perfect opportunity to repeat keywords and add more key phrases for your web page!

The description tag should be about 250 characters maximum, include the primary five keywords repeated 2x/3x each within this description (but NOT more than three times). Description Tags should contain between 12 and 24 words and written as a call to action to encourage users to click on it. Many search engines will display this summary along with the title of your page in their search results. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point, but make sure that it's an appropriate reflection of your site content.

Here's a HINT; It is beneficial to reflect the content very similarly in the first section of text that appears on your actual page. Try to make your description content very user friendly for humans to read. This tells them what the page is all about. It should reflect the title, but NOT repeat it word for word. Google does not use the description verbatim, preferring instead to return what they consider a relevant snippet from the page’s content. In any case, the description is still a valuable on-page factor, as Yahoo does use the description as intended, and Google will sometimes return relevant parts of the description in snippets.

Every page should, if possible, have a unique description. Descriptions should always reflect what a user can expect from a page, be proper sentences and read well. It should not be a repeat of the title, but instead expand upon the title.

Behind the Scenes - a look at the Title Meta Tag

2010-08-19T08:46:00.000+08:00

The <title> tag in the metatags should aim to include ALL 5 of the page's primary focus keywords in the title text... the title should be about 14-16 words maximum in length, the first two-three words in the title will be the PRIMARY focus keyword for the page. You can used punctuation, but aim to remove wasted information and unnecessary items, such as the following characters: -, :, !!!, all of which waste space in your valuable SEO realestate. Make it readable for humans as well as optimised for Search Engines! Market the title, make it compelling to click on... information rich... relevant to that page. Keep the page title brief. Including too many keywords (keyword stuffing) may dilute your overall relevancy rating. Aim to use a grammatically correct sentence as the title, rather than just a list of keywords. Most SE crop titles at around 70-90 characters, Google shows no more than 65 characters, so the more specific information that can be placed in a title in the first 8-10 words, the better. It is important to remember that titles should provide a ‘call to action’ the more compelling the call to action, the more likely the user will be to click on the SERPs result compared to competitors.

Think of the title as a mini advertisement for a page, try to entice the user to click through. Titles should be constructed from the content on the page to ensure maximum benefit and correlation for relevancy rankings in result pages. All of the keywords that appear in the title should appear within the content of the page. Make Titles as specific as possible, and promote differentiating content, e.g. if a site has several pages about South Africa, including separate pages for “South Africa Tours” and “Adventure Travel South Africa”, differentiate those two pages by using appropriate phrases.

Increasing Keyword Density through bottom/footer links

2010-08-18T09:15:00.000+08:00

Increase the navigational link opportunity throughout all pages across the website by creating a series of bottom footer tags.

Creating these visible hyperlinked text links on each webpage increases the user navigation whilst supplementing the website with high audience keywords that are being used in the pay per click advertising. For sites that may have been designed without an initial SEO focus, and have navigational elements embedded in Flash or scripts that leave a visiting search bot scratching its head as to how to follow and explore deeper into your site, this is an effective solution that provides usability and SEO rich features.

By developing bottom Footer Tags which are standardised across every webpage throughout the website. These hyper-text links are keywords that provide tunnels for search engine spiders, crawlers and robots to access every page on the website whilst adding to the keyword density of each page – without compromising the simple sign up functionality of the website that users are looking for. They can also be hidden behind a link and not exposed on the main pages – to avoid competitors detecting a search engine linking strategy.

With the constant modification of Search Engine algorithms, future algorithm updates may do away with all repetitive and similar looking links to websites. Therefore, it is important to create a range of links and not one standard link text. By doing this, the search engines are not likely to detect a pattern and this may assist in preserving your PageRank if the algorithms change.

Partly off-topic tip: Change the anchor text of a “more” link to the keyword the “more” page deals with!

Some considerations in linking strategy

2010-08-17T09:29:00.000+08:00

The following are some thoughts and cautions around a linking strategy...

Sub Domains

Sub domains are subject to a lot of industry debate as to their importance in the process of natural search engine optimisation. Multiple sub-domains were once used as a way to increase the number of URLs without providing additional content. This practice is largely ignored by search engines. Beware duplicate content issues that may arise through this practice.

Re-Directed Links

A link that is first re-directed to another page within your partner site before pointing to the client website is referred to as a re-directed link. It is important that clients monitor these links, as search engines do not give weight to re-directed links. It is very unlikely that the client would draw any benefit from a re-directed link.

Dynamic Link Pages

The client should also be aware of any link pages that are generated dynamically. These pages are not frequently indexed meaning that a link from such a page would not benefit the client site.

Flash Link Pages

It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Macromedia Flash, as many search engines cannot read and index flash pages or the links embedded within flash.

Directory Depth

It is also important to evaluate the depth of the directory of the linking page. Avoid getting links from pages that are embedded in a very deep directory or pages that are more than two directories deep.

For example, www.yoursite.com/leve1/level2/level3/linkpage.htm is not a good link page. It is important to remember that deep directories seldom earn high PageRank as they are also slow in getting indexed, if at all!

Warning: Avoid Frame Sites

It is important to avoid receiving links from framed sites. A link placed on a website with frames would not provide client website any benefit, as search engines would not be able to recognise such a link.

Google PageRank formula

2010-08-16T07:20:00.000+08:00

What is all this fuss about PageRank?

Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page created their search engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. The formula called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page) evolved where the algorithm would score out of ten the "value" of each website in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two key factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. The value is calculated based on the PageRank of the page linking to your website and the relevancy of the page linking to your site.

In order to do this, you should begin by understanding Google’s PageRank. Although Google PageRank is the heart of the Google algorithm, it is not the absolute consideration in determining the most relevant website and hence the highest listing in the search engine results pages. A definition of PageRank as provided by Google is included below:

Defining Google PageRank

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyses the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Importantly, high quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query.

So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text matching algorithms to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

PageRank of the Linking Page

Firstly, PageRank of the linking page is one of the most important factors as it determines how much value of importance is passed on to your web page. The higher the PageRank of the linking page, the higher the value your website will receive.

Outward Link Benefits

2010-08-15T08:58:00.000+08:00

Search engines not only count the number of external websites that backward link to the client website but their algorithm considers the number of Outward Links from that client website to external websites.

Search Engines consider a website desirable for higher search engine indexing where it contains easy to navigate pathways from each page with a website.

Higher value outward hyper text links should be spread throughout each webpage to the following types of organizations:
- Government departments (.gov)
- Associations and Business networks (.net)
- Related Trade Organizations (.org)
- Information websites and directories (.info)
- Independent Commercial organizations such as news, media and magazines websites (.com)

Include search engine friendly info: Although search engines do not specifically state that there is specific content or file extensions that they rank higher in their search engine results pages, experience in many industry sectors suggest that they have a strong preference for particular formats and content such as PDFs, FAQs, case studies and glossaries.

Internal Links - confirming your intentions

2010-08-14T09:39:00.000+08:00

Google and many other search engines algorithms assume that the page with the most internal links is the most important one in your site. So if you link from all your pages to the contact page it will be the most important page for Google. So you really have to tell Google: Do not mistake this page for the most important one by using the nofollow attribute (not tag!) on the links leading to the contact page, or balance the power and stack the odds, and actually determine your internal link strategy in favour of your intentions.

Design with Accessibility in mind

2010-08-13T08:22:00.000+08:00

I would encourage webmasters to design pages for users, not just search engines. When you're designing your AJAX site, think about the needs of your users, including those who may not be using a JavaScript-capable browser (for example, people who use screen readers or mobile devices). One of the easiest ways to test your site's accessibility is to preview it in your browser with JavaScript turned off, or to view it in a text-only browser such as the Lynx browser. Viewing a site as text-only can also help you identify other content which may be hard for Googlebot to see, such as text embedded in images or Flash.

Whilst in the mode of testing, consider reviewing the browser screen resolution. I feel that it is important to test a web site in as many ways as possible. View it in different screen resolutions, various computer platforms and different browsers. Find out how your web page looks like with the viewer's monitor set to different screen resolutions as you want to be sure your visitor can see everything or at least the important navigation links:

Browser Shots - My Favourite
http://browsershots.org/

Browser Screen Resolution Checker - Markhorrell
http://www.markhorrell.com/tools/browser.html

Screen Size Tester - AnyBrowser
http://www.anybrowser.com/ScreenSizeTest.html

Screen Resolution Checker - AndyLangTon
http://andylangton.co.uk/stuff/screen-resolution-checker

AJAX in your site, should this be a concern for your SEO efforts?

2010-08-12T11:32:00.000+08:00

We can see in many current website architecture design that webmasters have discovered the advantages of using AJAX to improve the user experience on their sites, creating dynamic pages that act as powerful web applications. However, just like Flash was a stumbling block for SEO opportunities, AJAX can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully. There are two main search engine issues around AJAX: Making sure that search engine spiders can see your content, and making sure they can see and follow your navigation.

While Googlebot is great at understanding the structure of HTML links, it can have difficulty finding its way around websites which use JavaScript for navigation. Google continues to work on doing a better job of understanding JavaScript, but your best bet for creating a site that's crawlable by Google and other search engines is to provide HTML links to your content.

If using AJAX to create your links, format them so they'll offer a static link as well as calling a JavaScript function. That way you'll have the AJAX functionality for JavaScript users, while non-JavaScript users can ignore the script and follow the link. For example:

<a href="ajax.htm?foobar=32" onClick="navigate('ajax.html#foobar=32');
return false">foobar 32</a>

Note that the static link's URL has a parameter (?foobar=32) instead of a fragment (#foobar=32), which is used by the AJAX code. This is important, as search engines understand URL parameters but often ignore fragments. Since you now offer static links, users and search engines can link to the exact content they want to share or reference.

While Google is constantly improving their crawling capability, using HTML links remains a strong way to help (as well as other search engines, mobile devices and users) better understand your site's structure. If you need to balance out the benefits of dynamic delivery using AJAX, what does your static sitemap page provide as an alternative to ensure a visibility to all pages in your site?

Use your Rights to better effect - The Right Hand Column SEO technique

2010-08-12T11:22:00.000+08:00

Whether your business is Amazon, eBay or a software development company, it is important to utilise all the available screen real estate of your website for SEO gain, in particular the Right Hand Side column of each webpage to create navigational quick links for customers to find high trafficked sections of the website.

The ‘Right Hand Side Column’ is an often under-utilised search engine optimisation real estate of a website. Consider a ‘RHS Column’ to increase keyword density across your web page layout. The right hand side is a perfect place to add high audience keywords that search engines index whilst providing improved usability for clients.

HTML and CSS Validation

2010-08-12T11:16:00.000+08:00

Although not proved without doubt that W3C validation gives you better search engine rankings, it's sure that errors in your code can cause you big problems. Converting your website pages to XHTML may help you reach more customers, as your site will work better in more browsers and non-traditional devices.

In order to see if you're CSS files or HTML code turns out to be valid use these tools:

HTML

W3C Validator
http://validator.w3.org/

WDG HTML Validator - Web Design Group
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

CSE HTML Validator Lite
http://onlinewebcheck.com/

Validation Services for your HTML / XHTML / WML - Validome
http://www.validome.org/

CSS

CSS Validator - Jigsaw
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

On a side note, the going experiment with the use of the Blogger specific platform continues as I test uptake, design/coding issues using default settings, spamming issues and management of posts as well as organic growth and seeding of content via this medium. Extending past the bare bones approach and adding modules to the template layout, as well as experimenting with advert positioning has been a useful exercise. I have appreciated users feedback along the way as the experiment continues.

The Absolute Positioning Technique - The loading sequence

2010-08-12T08:24:00.000+08:00

Continuing on from my posts on the benefit of absolute positioning getting the content and all those beneficial keywords and phrases in front of the search engines spiders instead of being lost in heavy code and giving up. Today's post will have you consider the ‘order’ in which the certain ‘content blocks’ appear in the source code. It is well understood that cross browser programming remains a challenge to this day which can also restrict the extreme use of positioning.

Our goal is simple - move the main content up to the very top of the source code.

This search engine optimisation technique called ‘absolute positioning’ is to avoid search engine crawlers visiting the website but not indexing the low positioned content.

Absolute positioning will allow clients to write pages in the order required to maximise the likelihood of search engines spiders crawling the source code and to provide control over the order of content elements appearing in the visitor’s browser when accessing the various sections of the client website. The recommended order of delivery:

Loading 1st
- Main Body Content

Loading 2nd
- Keyword Footer

Loading 3rd
- Navigation Menu

Loading 4th
- Image Files

Absolute positioning is done through the use of <DIV> tags and classes inside the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. The blocks are given sizes (through width and height) and are placed at either a set distance from the top left hand corner of the page or a parent <DIV> tag which contains all the visual elements of the page. Absolute positioning can still be done in pages that have their content in the middle of the page rather than resting on the left hand side of the browser.

Load Images Last... a SEO technique using css

2010-08-11T10:26:00.000+08:00

Search engine optimisation often requires techniques to ensure the search engine crawlers can see content higher in the source code, instead of it being hidden deep below source code and images. The ‘Load Images Last’ technique aids in higher natural search engine rankings.

Many websites, load webpages from top to bottom, therefore having images and navigational scripts loading first with the content following.

Moving non indexable content below the main text by the use of absolute positioning can greatly increase search engine keyword density and page rank.

This ensures that the first content block to load and the first content encountered by crawlers is the main body text, which has been optimised with keyword phrases and keyword density methodologies. Ensure that optimised text is placed higher up the page than navigation and graphical images.

Style sheets, need to be maximised for search engine optimisation best practice.

Analyse your code efficiency for better SEO

2010-08-10T08:31:00.000+08:00

The Search Engine Code Efficiency analyses how many lines of code are contained in the source of a website's code prior to the Body tag. The Body tag is where the body copy content is located and what search engines typically look for.

By reducing the number of lines of code before the Body tag this will improve the efficiency by which the search engines will index the website.

Designers are recommended to consider inserting content following the Body tag across the website to increase visibility to search engines. This can be achieved through a technique called ‘absolute positioning’.

So what is the importance of Search Engine Code Efficiency?

As search engines interpret the HTML code of websites from the top of the page to the bottom of the page - reading the content from left to right - the spider or crawler often gives up before discovering content if it is buried within the website.

Search engines will open the <table> tag and look for the first "table row" <tr> and begin to read each "data set" <td>"data"</td> inside the "table row" from left to right until they find the closing </tr> tag.

Often, if there are too many code lines before the <body> tag, the main body content may not be indexed because it is situated too far down the page.

It is also known that search engines usually look at many page identifiers such as the page headings, chapter headings and the main paragraphs of the body copy to determine the consistency of the first 200 words of content after the opening <body> tag. Generally, the first 200 words at the top of the page are considered the most important text. It is common-place that website developers have unknowingly pushed the indexable content below the radar of the search engine crawlers.

As an SEO best practice, you will want to make sure your code is as error-free as possible, from a W3C validation standpoint, and that you follow guidelines for semantically correct markup. Testing shows that good, clean, semantically correct code not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing by the search engines.

Benefit from style sheets to control content positioning

2010-08-09T11:06:00.000+08:00

The use of css (Cascading Style Sheets) in the control of absolute positioning has the following benefits:

Smaller file sizes and faster page loads.
A single style sheet can control 100’s of pages across the your website, enable simple and quick updates/changes.
Improved Keyword density advantages.
Utilise style sheets for different media (mobile).
Finer control over your page layouts.

An advantage of using style sheets to control positioning is that this technique has no effect on the GUI (Graphical User Interface) or how the viewer sees content in their browser.

Code Efficiency for search engine visibility

2010-08-09T08:14:00.000+08:00

To maximise search engine visibility for a website, the ideal location for the main body text is immediately after the <BODY> tag. This location ensures maximum visibility and pick-up for your content by the search engine spiders and website crawlers.

Consider the following to reduce code bloat:
Use of external style sheets for design elements
Use of external Javascript where possible
Use of a CSS based navigation menu

This process also assists in page management, code stability, debugging and a better end-user experience via streamlined HTML code. Consider the following search engine optimisation technique called ‘absolute positioning’ to avoid search engine crawlers visiting the website but not indexing the low positioned content.

Absolute positioning will allow you to write pages in the order required to maximise the likelihood of search engines spiders crawling the source code and to provide control over the order of content elements appearing in the visitor’s browser when accessing the various sections of your website.

Absolute Positioning - giving your content a lift up

2010-08-08T08:48:00.000+08:00

The higher your content is on a given page the more it counts for Google. Google does not see a page like a human being, Googlebot crawls the code. Thus the higher your content is in the code the better. So if you have a complex site with lots of menus, scripts and other gimmicks you should consider absolute positioning, otherwise Google might even stop crawling your page before it reaches the main content. You can place the actual content high up in the code, at the top, while the users will see it in the middle of the page below the menus.

Invisible Text - Search engines can see you, and don't like you for it!

2010-08-07T10:33:00.000+08:00

Simply put, do NOT use invisible text to keyword stuff content in the text on your page! Using 'invisible' text is the practice of making the colour of the text on the page the same as the background colour. This ia an 'old' black-hat SEO technique. As an example... white letters on a white background qualify as hidden text. The reason that many search engines have banned this kind of text is because it is VERY hard to detect it. This is usually a result of the vast number of colour combinations that have to be recognized when an engine 'spiders' the page.

As an example: You have a web page that uses a background colour of #FFFFFF (white). You then place text on the page and slightly alter the colour to make the colour of the text #FFFFF0 (off-white), which would now be ALMOST totally invisible.

Many, but not all, of the major search engines now have a policy against this type of technique, and have set up their indexing programs to hunt it down and blacklist the site because of it. When spotted by a bot, the penalty can range anywhere from ignoring the text, to refusing to index the page at all, or even worse. This type of practice is regarded as a black-hat SEO SPAM technique by most of the search engines and it highly recommended to avoid including it on your page.

Of course you may come across a well ranked page here and there that is still using hidden text. This should be taken more as an indication that the page has not been re-indexed since the tactic was made 'illegal', than an indication that the search engine allows this practice. Basically, most SEO's have come to regard hidden text as too risky, and have moved on from it.

Avoid Duplicate Content

2010-08-06T08:56:00.000+08:00

A big no-no. To avoid delisting, the process is to procure content from other websites and rewrite. Cutting and pasting is not acceptable, original content must be written by you. Search Engines can detect cut/pasting of same word sequencing across websites and punish website rankings that do this. So your aim is to always have fresh and original text for your copy.

Duplicate Content Checker Resource:
http://training.seobook.com/duplicate-content-checker

Keyword Density in SEO on-page copy

2010-08-05T08:30:00.000+08:00

Our goal - achieving 7% or more of Keyword Density per 250 words for each webpage.

Where possible, each web page should have high pay per click and high traffic keywords included into the body copy at a density level of approximately 7% for 250 words – which works out to being about 20 words. It is important that the keywords are contained on the first line of each paragraph. (Just like in school, the starting sentence of the paragraph grasps our attention, then unfolds through the rest of the paragraph as more is unveiled to support the idea being presented in the paragraph).

Use keyword density analysers to analyse the keyword density of keywords on your web site pages or measure the keyword density of your competitor's website to determine the optimum keyword density for your own keywords. The links provided below allow you to enter the URL and search word or phrase which you would like to run the keyword density analyser on (without quotes). The aim - is to have your focus 3/5 keywords-phrases appear predominantly in the results.

Keyword Density Analyser Resources:

Keyword density and word depth calculator
http://www.keyworddensity.com/

Webjectives Keyword Density Analyser Version 2.0
http://www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm

Keyword Density - SEO Chat
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Keyword Density & Prominence - Ranks
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

Analyse Keyword Density - Google rankings
http://googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php

Keyword Density Checker - Webconfs
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

Keyword Density Analyser Tools - SEO Book
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

http://www.keyworddensity.com
http://www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm

Tips for Good Copywriting

2010-08-04T07:02:00.000+08:00

Here is a list of considerations when reviewing or writing the copy for your website:

Mention what you offer exactly on your site/page, use brands and exact product names
Mention where you offer it “Travel Services Australia”.
Mention why you offer it “We offer recycling solutions because we believe that clean business is profitable business”.
Mention to whom you offer it: “Web hosting solutions for small businesses”
Explain one key term on the page eg. your homepage contains: SEO (Definition: search engine optimisation, the process of making websites more search and search user friendly)
Replace your homepage images with smaller ones in byte size (below 50 kb) so that non-broadband users stick with you. (Okay off topic slightly, but just an ongoing reminder on the importance of this one).
Convince! Start the first or second sentence of your page with “We will make you number one in…” instead of solely describing “Product X offers…”
Add your name to the text: Bart, CEO of Simpson Industries... people trust people, not companies.
Understand your audience by researching business related keyword phrases.
Write informative titles and descriptions.
Link the title, description and keyword metatags to the content on the page.
Use language that a user/customer expects and understands.
Good content - emphasise the subject matter within the content.
Did you remember your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? What makes your company or product different and better to what else is out in the marketing? Why should people buy yours?!

Copy Writing - Page Content for SEO

2010-08-03T16:06:00.000+08:00

Optimise Text on the Page - The text on your home page is crucial to maintaining the attention of fresh viewers. In fact, copy is so important that many companies prefer to have a professional copy writer create this content. For many small business website owners however this may not be an option. What you need to do is to keep your text engaging as well as smartly optimised to present an obvious topic to the visiting search engine spiders or visitors. To do this, keep your mind focused on the keyword(s) that you have chosen to target on the search engines while you write the content for the page. (Think of the consumer when choosing these initial level keywords... keywords will refine through the buying process cycle and become more specific as the consumer prepares for purchase.) Implement the keywords within the text without sacrificing the true intent of the information - to engage and retain your viewers.

Now, on the Home Page... specifically;

Often the first 25-30 words of your home page are what the each search engine will use for the description of your web site. Try to utilise your target keyword(s) within this area but be certain the resulting sentence is legible and descriptive. Also repeat your main focus keyword(s) in the last section of wording on your page. The index (or default) page is the first page loaded after the root URL is entered into a browser (e.g. index.htm or default.htm). This is the most important page of any site, as a number of search engines will only start indexing from the home page. (Do you have a textual link navigation that branches out from the home page to touch each and every page on your website?... We'll save this for another article).

The body text on the opening page must contain keywords, and keyword phrases (don't forget the benefit of the long tail search), that relate to the theme of the site as a whole. The copy on the home page should convey to a user, and thus search engines, what the site is about. It is not enough to rely on images and other visual clues, it must be stated in plain text. Search Engines are essentially blind (remember what I was saying about the need for ALT tags on images in your code?), using the text within the source code of the page, to understand what the page is about, and how to navigate around the site.

Many sites make the mistake of using a redirect to move the users to a new page depending on their browser. Mostly, this is done with JavaScript which cannot be followed by a Search Engine. Other sites use the opening page for a Flash introduction or simply a company logo, both of which are barriers to a search engine indexing your site. JavaScript is a language that Search Engines do not understand fully, so many do not bother to read it, or struggle with it.

Content on a page should be around 500 words. Keep in mind that content is for the broader internet community, and remember that the internet is a unique media. Reinforce the keywords you are targeting within the content by repeating them. A keyword or phrase mentioned several times within the content is likely to be given high relevancy when ranking results within search engines, where as a word used once or twice is less likely to deliver traffic. (This should be done appropriately and not just 'keyword stuffed' or other black-hat SEO techniques that may be detrimental to your site's performance).

To achieve high rankings in search engines for specific key phrases, a site needs a page on which that phrase is prominent. Often, for sites with dynamic content, there is no logical page to attract relevant traffic, e.g. a flights site has a lot of flights, but as these change frequently, there is no logical landing point for many, frequently searched terms such as “cheap flights”. By building a few such pages, a site can effectively capture such traffic.

Duplicate Content Checker Resource:
http://training.seobook.com/duplicate-content-checker

By developing pages that Search Engines can index, that are always live and based around commonly searched phrases, particularly specific, longer phrases for which there is currently no logical landing page, the breadth of search terms for which a site can be found can be increased significantly. In terms of volume of traffic, a couple of dozen of pages built in this way will collectively deliver significant volumes of traffic, and traffic that is currently purchased at premium prices.

From a usability perspective, this provides users with a highly bookmarkable page that they can return to time and again, with information tailored to their specific interests or needs. This is particularly true for sites such as property sites, job sites and any other sites with a user base with an action in common, but little else. Giving users exactly what they are looking for and nothing else, is the best way to ensure return visitors.

There is so much information that can be gleaned from users simply by what they search for or which pages they look at. By utilising this information, and offering people a convenient page offering only the information that is relevant to them, not only will Search Engine traffic increase, but so will repeat traffic, which ultimately is the best traffic of all.

Consistency in Page and Paragraph Headings

In search engine copywriting, headlines are as sacred as in most other communication mediums. As search engines weight the text higher in importance if it appears in the page and paragraph headings, it is important the client utilises the targeted phrase for each page. It is important there is consistency in the navigational menu, the Title/Description/Keyword Meta Tags, Page Headings and Chapter headings on every page throughout the website in this manner.

SEO using PDF files

2010-08-03T07:46:00.000+08:00

PDF files greatly assist visibility throughout search engine results pages. High natural search engine results are received by PDF documents.

Search Engine Visibility and Adobe

Adobe Publisher allows descriptions to be added into the document which allows search engine optimization to be related to off page elements such as PDF documents. Each document should have high audience keywords and the descriptive phrase in the Title Tag, Page Heading and Paragraph heading provides keyword density for search engines.

PDF files greatly assist indexation throughout search engine results pages. This is because search engines perceive these documents to be very helpful to users. Although search engines read and store some PDF documents in html files on their servers, if the PDF file name is consistent with the content, they will index it and return these files with higher rankings. To improve your SEO capabilities through .pdfs on your own website, have your design team consider deploying PDF documents into various sections of the website and classify these PDFs with a separate nomenclature as this will improve search engine visibility.

For Acrobat Reader files, Google SERPs now shows information such as the author details form the .pdf in results. This is also an area that can be optimised and searched upon.

What can Google actually index?

2010-08-03T07:44:00.000+08:00

Google can index most types of pages and files. The most common file types include:

Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
Adobe PostScript (.ps)
Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
MacWrite (.mw)
Microsoft Excel (.xls)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
Microsoft Word (.doc)
Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
Microsoft Write (.wri)
Open Document Format (.odt)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Shockwave Flash (.swf)
Text (.ans, .txt)
Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)

SEO using Google Maps

2010-08-02T17:03:00.000+08:00

The use of Google Maps is believed to lead to an increased natural search engine indexation. The rationale is that Google will most likely index pages that contain their Google Maps product compared to other competitor website pages which do not, assuming all other web page elements are equal.

What are Google Maps?

Google has an Application Programming Interface (API) for website developers to integrate Google maps into web pages. This API allows web developers to create an administration where non-technical persons can browse the map using the zoom in and zoom out functions to select a location. This user-friendly navigation automatically generates the geographical coordinates of the location, rendering the map in real time in the users Internet browser.

This same rationale applies of course to the other map providers; Yahoo! and Microsoft. Would site variations that use other map providers rank higher because of this... an interest hypothosis to test I think.

ALT tags for images - usability and SEO

2010-08-02T08:12:00.000+08:00

The hidden text. Remember that Google and search engines are smart, but they don't have eyes looking at the page itself, so use the code to determine what is happening. NEVER ever, forget to put ALT tags for images in pages, and again, be descriptive and keyword focused.

ALT tags are of course a very good design methodology to utilise as they are required for disabled visitors to your site who may be viewing with a speech device that reads the content on the web page out aloud. And of course there are still other web browsers that allow users to “turn off” images when browsing… this is an approach used by users on very poor line connections or bandwidth starved who just want to get to the good stuff!

ALT tags are designed to ensure that the Internet is usable for everyone, irrespective of handicap or impediment. The Australian Government has been vocal about enforcing the use of ALT tags in the past, and it is always a good idea to ensure that they are used throughout a site.

Every image should have an ALT tag, and these should either describe what an image is, or where an image leads to if it is a link. E.g., if an image is a picture of a man standing on a mountain and links to a page about South American tours the image’s alt tag should read as follows: <img src="image_name.gif" width="10" height="10" align="middle" border="0" alt=“Information on Peru & Bolivia tours” />

ALT tags should be kept short, no more than 10 words, and should not repetitively use keywords. This is referred to as “keyword stuffing” and is likely to get a site either flagged for spamming, or outright banned.

Google will only read ALT tags for images that are links, and many other search engines are aware of the past strategy of keyword stuffing in ALT tags. For Organic SEO purposes, ALT tags are often very important due to the extensive use of image-based navigation. For sites that use such a navigation structure, it is important that ALT tags are added to the images in order to maximise the benefit of Link Reputation.

How do you rank... for your images?

2010-08-01T09:18:00.000+08:00

Users online search for many things, and hence use many different types of specialised search tools to filter out and find what they are looking for, whether it is images, music, books, videos... Now getting visitors to your website other than through standard methods, may get you thinking outside of the square. Google has a robot called the Imagebot, which prowls the Internet for images to place in Google's image search, and delivers the user to your website to see that image - all you have to do is capture the users attention and interest from there!

Google ranks and indexes images based upon their filename, surrounding text, alt text and page title.

So this is where your designer needs to consider including the keywords into the naming convention (referred to as the nomenclature) of the images across the website. Get your heads together and think how you can attract interest and clicks to your website with imagery.

Using Google Advanced Search to diagnose your website

2010-07-30T08:42:00.000+08:00

Using Google itself, with knowledge of some of the advanced search features, will enable you to achieve an insight into your own site in regards to SEO.

Firstly, check to ensure that your site is free from any filtering issues by using: search [yourdomain.com] in Google; if your sites comes up #1 for this query, you are doing alright. If you see other sites mentioning your domain ranked first, that could be a bad sign.

Next, check for duplicate content problems. Search for a pretty long extract of text from your site (exact match, i.e. in quotes). Blogs, for example, have a good chance of seeing the category page (summarising the post) instead of the corresponding post page.

Determine how many links or URLs from your site have actually been indexed by Google by using: search [site:yourdomain.com] and then “dig deeper” into the search results by searching [site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory1] and then, [site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory2] and so on, as the “deeper” you dig, the accuracy increases.

It is worthwhile checking to see if your site has canonical problems where a non-www. url reference may be listed, if you had determined to focus on www. displaying primarily. Do this by searching [site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www] and see if any non-www URLs are picked up.

The following are search queries to use in identifying the more powerful pages of your site:
[www site:yourdomain.com]
[tld site:yourdomain.tld]
[inurl:domain site:yourdomain.com]
[domain site:yourdomain.com]

Leading on from this, you can then identify the most powerful pages of your website (keyword-dependent) by using the search query: [site:yourdomain.com inanchor:keyword]

To then determine sites with the most potential for promotional opportunity use:
[site:yourdomain.com inanchor:”key * word”]
[site:yourdomain.com intitle:”key * phrase”]

To assist you to find the most relevant pages of your site, lending them to additional promotion for a specified term use the search query [site:yourdomain.com keyword] or [site:yourdomain.com key * phrase].

Crawl and index frequency by Google can be determined using the search query [site:yourdomain.com] then play around with “date range” advanced search option.

Check who, and also what, your site is associated with in the SERPs by using the search query [related:yourdomain.com]. This will help to identify your site co-citation, or who your promoters also link to as well.

Review your competition's backlinks by using the link domain command. [linkdomain:competitor.com -site:competitor.com]

To narrow this down further and to see who links to all of the competitors you're targeting, you can use a search query such as: [linkdomain:competitor1.com linkdomain:competitor2.com linkdomain:competitor3.com].

Probably worth refining this query to exclude your own site to something like: [linkdomain:competitor1.com linkdomain:competitor2.com linkdomain:competitor3.com -linkdomain:yoursite.com].

RSS Marketing

2010-07-29T08:52:00.000+08:00

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) - How RSS Will Increase Your Business Success

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

RSS will increase your rankings for the most important search engines and at the same time, through RSS specific search directories and engines, generate a new stream of traffic for your web site.

RSS can and will generate completely new traffic for you and help you increase the power of your existing traffic sources.

This medium is also beneficial in that it will get you listed almost immediately, even at directories like Yahoo!, and will get you highly ranked positions for your most important keywords and phrases.

And the best part: it's free and quick to set up.
100% Content Delivery - Avoiding the perils of email marketing

Forget about spam filters that are keeping your content away from your subscribers. RSS gets 100% of your content delivered. This works for direct marketing messages, e-zine publishing, customer support and so on.

With RSS you can even easily deliver daily or hourly news to your subscribers, and everything else as well. RSS will help you expand your content delivery to daily content updates, content updates by interest, content updates for different target audiences and so on. Use one RSS feed to deliver your daily news and the other to deliver in-depth articles, and so on...

So when speed to market is an important consideration for your marketing message, RSS can deliver!

And don't forget about the power of RSS personalization and autoresponder messages, which are already possible.

Discover New Marketing Opportunities

New times bring new marketing opportunities, and RSS is the leader in this area as well.

Use RSS to increase the sales of your affiliates by providing them with RSS feeds to better promote your products.

Launch your own RSS product feeds and digital catalogues (Amazon started publishing those not long ago) that bring your products directly to your recipient's desktops. Amazon is doing, but not many other people yet. Be among the first and get a lion's share of your target market. It is great for content specific subject areas that users wish to focus upon without all the other distractions.
Market through branded RSS aggregators and establish a constant connection with your subscribers. It's just like having a branded e-mail client that your customers and prospects are using every day ... but much cheaper.

Find innovative ways of delivering your ads and direct marketing messages directly to your audiences, making sure they are actually read.

Autoresponders are a great marketing tool, but are becoming ineffective because your prospects just don't want to give you their e-mail addresses. RSS gives you this very same power, but without the fear people have with e-mail.

Use RSS to market to your existing customers, affiliates, business partners and employees/team members.

Publish your own "podcast", a special RSS feed, which carries audio. Perfect for your own audio "radio station" or for getting your voice to your readers, without having to worry about too large e-mail attachments. Podcasting got so big that not only every respected internet marketers is using it, but also huge corporations.

Use RSS to deliver latest posts and topics from your forums directly to your readers, to increase forum popularity and the quantity & quality of conversations.

Get Your Content Published On Other Web Sites

Get your content easily published on other web sites to reach new audiences and use their traffic to increase your own sales, as well as achieve greater recognition as an expert in your field.

Again, it's free and easy, and has the potential of bringing your content to thousands and thousands of new prospects, who are ready to buy now.

Generate New Subscribers More Easily

Internet users are reluctant to subscribe to any more e-mail newsletters, but because RSS is so easy to control they don't have any problems with subscribing to new RSS feeds that match their interests.

That means that by having an RSS feed you can raise your visitor-to-subscriber conversion easily.

Just imagine how converting more visitors in to subscribers will improve your long-term sales ... every additional subscriber you get means a new potential sales and a long-term relationship that could lead to dozens of sales on the long-term, especially if you convert him in to an affiliate.

If however you're not using RSS, these sales could easily be lost!

Don't Worry About Messages From Your Customers Not Reaching You

E-mail messages, yes, even those from your customers and their business enquieries, are often lost due to spam filters.

With RSS, no messages from your customers or prospects will ever get lost again. That means that you'll now capture every business enquiery and respond accordingly, turning it in to a real sale.

Don't forget to measure and optimise your feeds!

Business Research - Brand names in Social Media

2010-07-28T14:42:00.000+08:00

Are you in the early stages of a business start-up that will be considering online activities now or in the future? There are many factors in your business research for consideration, but area that should get some attention is brand management in the online space particular in Social Media.

If your brand name is not available at Twitter or Facebook, and the domain name in the .com and local domain space are not available I would be suggesting some thinking around naming conventions needs some serious consideration.

Two useful resources to assist in your research are:

Knowem? http://knowem.com/
Namechk http://namechk.com/

Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites.

Pre-emptive action for online brand management

2010-07-28T14:35:00.000+08:00

35 percent of the biggest companies own the negative domains COMPANYNAMEsucks.com or IhateCOMPANYNAME.com, .net, .org or similar.
This is a pre-emptive strike action for online brand management damage prevention.
FairWinds analysis on 1,058 domain names for companies on the Global 500 and Fortune 500 lists showed that of the companies surveyed, 35% own the domain name for their brand followed by the word "sucks." They include Wal-Mart Stores, Coca-Cola, Toys"R"Us, Target and Whole Foods Market, according to FairWinds. Some 45% of these domains have yet to be registered by anyone.

Many companies that own these domain names publish no content on them, but simply park and hold them, others take a further procative approach and include support and customer help details or FAQs.

Some companies have been much more aggressive than others. Xerox, for example, has bought or registered about 20 unflattering domain names, including xeroxstinks.com, xeroxcorporationsucks.com and ihatexerox.net.

In an ideal world we would never have to consider these options, but unfortunately comments on the internet last forever, particular with search engines, so many people who know how to use search engines, research a company or individual are bound to find negative sentiments in the SERPs.

NoScript tag for Javascript

2010-07-28T07:57:00.000+08:00

The <noscript> tag can be a great way to provide both users and search engines with some information about your page when they do not have JavaScript available. The contents of the noscript tag could provide a description of what the javascript element does, along with a link to a text-only version of the same content. For sophisticated AJAX applications, I would recommend using progressive enhancement techniques (like Hijax)

SEO Map Listings on Search Engines

2010-07-27T14:16:00.000+08:00

http://maps.live.com/
http://au.maps.search.yahoo.com/search/maps
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&tab=wl

Five Ways to Use Windows Live Search Maps Windows Live Search Maps is a no-cost global mapping and search service that lets you search specific locations for businesses, people, and detailed maps. You can see overhead or 3-D views of many major cities.

Here are five ways Windows Live Search Maps can help your business.

1. Add your business to Live Search Maps results. Say you run an art supply shop. When map users type in " art supplies " and the name of your city, they should be able to find you. So add your business listing to the online directory used by the mapping service. Live Search Maps provides an online form that you can fill out and submit that includes your address, telephone number, and other basic business information.

After your information is added to the Live Search Maps business directory database, users searching it for your type of business in a certain locale will see your business marked on the map. By placing the cursor on the mark, your address and telephone number are displayed.

2. Add a driving directions link on your website. Your website may have general instructions on how to get to your place of business. However, these directions can never take into account where every customer is coming from. The interactive capabilities of Live Search Maps enable the map user to pinpoint your location and their location and then find detailed driving instruction between the two points. This can be a great comfort and convenience for those trying to find your workplace in an efficient manner.

3. Locate potential customers. Use Live Search Maps to locate the types of business in your area that use your services and products. Many companies prefer to do business with suppliers and service providers that are nearby.

4. Discover where your competitors are. Every business needs to keep track of its competition. Use Live Search Maps before you launch or expand your business to search for similar businesses near where you want to set up shop. Even after you have established your location, search your area periodically for new competition that has moved in. Visit their locations to discover how you might differentiate your business from theirs.

5. Discover areas that need your service. If you want to add new business, use Live Search Maps to pinpoint areas where your type of service is in limited supply or not offered at all.

Live Search Maps not only offers a great way to add visibility for your business, but also to gain insight into new business opportunities.

Adjust crawl speed for MSNBot

2010-07-27T08:31:00.000+08:00

If you feel that MSNBot is crawling your site too frequently, you can use the crawl delay directive in robots.txt. Please refer to the MSNBot support page for more information. Here are a few recommended settings:

Slow (wait 5 seconds between each request)

Crawl-delay: 5

Really Slow (wait 10 seconds between each request)

Crawl-delay: 10

Note that setting the crawl delay reduces the load on your servers, but it also increases the amount of time it will take MSNBot to index your website (proportional to the length of the delay), and possibly make it more difficult for your customers to find your site on Live Search.

Another great way to reduce the impact of MSNBot on your website is to enable HTTP Conditional GET and HTTP Compression as outlined in our prior blog post.

Search Engine Optimization and LSI

2010-07-26T07:45:00.000+08:00

Many people are confused by search engine optimization and LSI. What is LSI and what has it to do with SEO? In fact nothing. That’s right – nothing. Zilch. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. So why all the fuss? Through ignorance and possible subterfuge.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, a term that has no meaning whatsoever. There is a term called ‘latent semantic analysis’ that is the analysis of the hidden meaning of text and its explanation by means of an analysis of the way that other words in the passage are used. The code for each letter in a word is analyzed, and the word thereby identified. There are certain known juxtapositions of certain words that provide a meaning to these words, although all may not be what it seems.

For example, is I ‘bought an apple’, did I buy a computer or a piece of fruit? That only becomes apparent when the rest of the semantics of the passage is analyzed. The word semantics means the meaning of words in the way that they are used. For example: “I bought a dog lead for my German shepherd” indicates that the German shepherd is a dog, and not a Teutonic gentleman looking after sheep. It is the rest of the semantics in the text that makes it clear what the term means.

Take another example: “spiders crawl the web looking for ….”. What does this actually mean? Is the passage referring to arachnids seeking flies or search engine spiders looking for specific keywords? Only the remainder of the text will make this clear. What does the term ‘the history of locks’ refer to? If you came across a website with that title, what topic do you think it would cover? The history of canal locks? The history of door locks? Only an analysis of the rest of the text in the page would tell you that, and that is what LSI is. It is not ‘latent semantic indexing’ but ‘latent semantic analysis’.

What the term relates to is the ability of search engine algorithms to determine the relevance of your content to the search term used by the search engine user. Someone searching for the “history of English canal locks” dos not want to be presented with a website entitled “the history of locks” that is an authority on jail locks. The algorithm analyses the text on the page and decides the topic from the word used.

It also ensures that the content of the page is relevant to the keyword, and does not only consist of a continuous repetition of the keyword, as many sites did prior to Google’s algorithm change. In fact, this type of analysis put paid to the software that generated thousands upon thousands of websites and page content from a single template containing no content at all to speak of but a form of words into which any keywords could be entered. Thus, “information on dogs is available all over the internet, and dogs are a popular topic with many websites providing information on dogs”.

Any keyword you can think of could be use in place of ‘dogs’ and the content provides no information whatsoever. That is typical of the reason why Google introduced the LSI algorithm, even though the term is meaningless to the webmaster. Apart from the fact it should really be termed latent semantic analysis, LSA, and not LSI, it is an analytical technique, and analytical techniques cannot be used by anybody to improve their website. You cannot make a website LSI compliant, but you can write a web page with good content that is relevant to your page title. You can include varied information and good English, rather than endless repetitions of the keyword, and so allow the search engine spiders to understand what your web page is about.

Twitter Tools, Clients, Plug-ins and Analytics

2010-07-25T10:24:00.000+08:00

Twitter Clients

TweetDeck
http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.

twhirl
The social software client
http://www.twhirl.org/
One of the more popular Twitter clients.

Spaz: An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
http://funkatron.com/spaz
Cross platform open source Twitter client.

Hahlo
http://hahlo.com/resources/
Web based iPhone (and iPod Touch) optimized Twitter app.

Twinkle - New iPhone Twitter Client Uses Locate Me Features!
Just Another iPhone Blog
http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/2008/04/09/twinkle-new-iphone-twitter-client-uses-locate-me-features/
Twitter client for the iPhone that allows you to socialize with people near you. Great for conferences it seems.

Twobile: A Twitter client for Windows Mobile - Download Squad
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/04/02/twobile-a-twitter-client-for-windows-mobile/
Twitter client for Windows mobile powered mobile phones. Most smartphones other than iPhone, Blackberry and Google Phone use Widows Mobile.

Misc. Twitter Tools

Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory, Twitter Search Engine
http://www.twellow.com/
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.

iTweet 2 : Web
http://itweet.net/web/
This is an alternative web based interface for Twitter and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one, for instance it offers one click retweets and makes bio links clickable etc.

TwitterCounter: How popular are you on Twitter?
http://twittercounter.com/
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.

Magpie: Make Money on Twitter
http://mashable.com/2008/10/31/magpie/
Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter. It boast that users can make something like 50 to 200$ a month just by tweeting.

About crowdstatus :: Crowdstatus.com
http://crowdstatus.com/about.aspx
This tool allows you to create address groups of people at Twitter and notify all of them at once.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

Twitter for WordPress - Rick’s HideOut
http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/
Very basic but unobtrusive way of including your Tweets in your WordPress blog.

Wordpress Twitter Widget
http://xavisys.com/2008/04/wordpress-twitter-widget/
Clean and simple Twitter widget for the WordPress sidebar.

WP to Twitter
Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design
http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
Twitter updater plugin using the Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.

Adnan`s Crazy Blogging World » Blog Archive » My blog gets twitterized
http://kadnan.com/blog/2007/11/12/my-blog-gets-twitterized/
Basic and quite ugly but very popular Twitter plugin many bloggers use, even TechCrunch.

AJAX Twitter plugin for Wordpress
http://kish.in/ajax-wordpress-twitter-plugin/
Advanced AJAX powered widget for your blog not only displaying tweets but letting you send updates from your blog.

Twitter Updater » Fireside Media Development Blog
http://www.firesidemedia.net/dev/software/wordpress/twitter-updater/
This tool lets you tweet your blog posts automatically.

Firefox Extensions for Twitter

TwitterFox – naan studio
http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add on.

TwitBin - twitter your browser - twitbin.com
http://www.twitbin.com/
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.

TwitKit
http://engel.uk.to/twitkit/features/
Another Twitter Firefox client with more features though.

TwitterBar :: Firefox Add-ons
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664/
Let’s you post from the address bar of your browser.

Twitter Social News

Twitturly - Real-time Link Tracking on Twitter
http://twitturly.com/
Digg-like interface for the currently hot tweets.

MicroBlogBuzzes of the last 24 hours
http://www.microblogbuzz.com/
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.

Twitturls - Popular Twitter Links Tweeted err Twittered err Twhatever
http://twitturls.com/
Shows the latest and most popular links on Twitter.

ReadBurner: What’s Shared on the Web
http://readburner.com/
Lets you monitor the buzz around Twitter elsewhere among many other memes.

POPrl.com / Shrinking popular URLs since 1973 / What’s POPular
http://poprl.com/
Short URL service like TinyURL but better. Offers not only stats but also a Digg-like interface for the most popular URLs shared.

Twitter Analytics

TweetStats :: Graphin’ Your Stats
http://tweetstats.com/
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.

Twitstat.com - Twitter Analytics
http://www.twitstat.com/cgi-bin/view.pl?search=interface
Both a Twitter search engine and popularity stats at the same time (e.g: showing most active users).

Twitterverse
http://www.twitterverse.com/
A Twitter keyword tag cloud for quick overview on what’s going on.

Twist - see trends in twitter
http://twist.flaptor.com/?tz=1
Twist allows you to quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s similar to
Google Trends.

FriendOrFollow.com - Who’s not following you back? Who aren’t you following?
http://friendorfollow.com/
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.

Twitter Twerp Scan
http://twerpscan.com/
Gives you a quick overview about your followers so that you don’t have to click each one.

Useful tips for running a Travel PPC Campaign

2010-07-24T08:37:00.000+08:00

Nearly half of all travel searches are brand related; can you afford to miss out on all this traffic? 36% of people who buy holidays use a brand search first and use a brand search immediately before purchasing so bid on branded keywords in your PPC campaigns.

Use day parting for PPC; people are 30% more likely to purchase a holiday on a Monday or Tuesday. Increase your bids then to capture this traffic and lower them at the weekend. Only 7% of purchasers buy a holiday on a Saturday.

Get them early; 15.9% of purchasers buy their holiday from the first site they visit. Only 1.6% will buy immediately, but around 14.3% will return at some point for a conversion (Don't forget to get the user subscribed to your regular newsletter!). Forget what you’ve learnt about the buying cycle; bidding on keywords that customers use in the research phase can get you a 15.9% conversion rate!

Make sure your URL’s are memorable; 35% of transactions occur without a search on the same day. These people must’ve seen something they liked then gone away to think about it. Make sure they can remember where they were.

Destinations aren’t as important as you think. 45% of online travel purchases are made without a destination search. Of course this means that 55% do use a destination related search term but I used to think that just about everybody would search for their destination at some point.

Save some money for January. For the last few years there has been a massive peak in travel searches every January. Look on Google Trends with the travel query of your choice. Or don’t; trust me, there will be a peak in January.

Ad variations are always a bit of a mystery. Test everything. Misspellings can garner some superb traffice - “hotels” as “hotsel” is an ad which turned out to have a (statistically) significantly better CTR. I thought I’d found something great so I rolled similar variations out across other ad groups. A few weeks later I checked to see what was going on, using splittester [http://www.splittester.com/] to judge which results were significant. Some ad groups it was better, some ad groups it was worse. I have no idea why. Test everything all the time.

Most purchasers will visit your site at least twice before purchasing; make repeat visits more likely by including new and interesting content for them.

Be patient. You’ve made all these changes, but on average it takes 29 days between first search and transaction for a holiday buyer. 30% of purchases occur more than 6 weeks after the initial search.

Don’t want to be patient? Want to get the 17% of users who purchase after only one search? Then ideally you’re from easyjet, ryanair or some other well known airline. Branded searches tend to convert quicker (63% of single search transactions are branded) so build your brand if you want the shortest gap between click and conversion.

Website Review Tools

2010-07-24T08:35:00.000+08:00

Website Grader from HubSpot

Website Grader is one of my favorite tools because of how helpful and usable it is. You’ll get a lengthy report broken into various sections with an evaluation of the page and recommended changes. While the grade is helpful to know where you stand, the suggestions are more valuable because they help you to identify areas for improvement, and many of them can be pretty simple.

http://www.websitegrader.com/tabid/6956/Default.aspx

Trifecta from SEOmoz

Quite a unique tool, Trifecta will analyze a page, a blog, or an entire domain based on slightly different criteria. Trifecta will produce numbers based on a variety of factors and it will give you an overall score. Without a pro membership you’re limited to one report per day.

http://www.seomoz.org/trifecta

Spider Simulator from Summit Media

This tool will give you a good idea of how search friendly you site is, and it will also give you a percentage rating. It bases the rating on factors like meta tags, use of headers, images and alt tags, load time, and links.

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

Web Page Analyzer from WebsiteOptimization.com

This free tool will give you plenty of information to work with. It will test how long the page takes to load, how many objects are on the page, the size of the objects and more. The most helpful part of the report that is produced is the “Analysis and Recommendations” section where it will list 11 aspects of the page and give you a rating. Red items are warnings, yellow items are cautions, and green items are good.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Image Naming Conventions

2010-07-23T15:37:00.000+08:00

Ensure images that you save for a page have the keyword name in them.

Keywords for a page should be focused on a cluster of 5 keywords that map around the primary focus or goal of a page. Image search does bring people to our site, though it is realistically only a small figure, but part of branding exercises. So, for image naming conventions keep text lowercase, use underscores/hyphens to separate words, and put location based keywords or product based keywords into the name of the image.

The Design team should use user friendly readable names for content display images, and shortened names for design images.

For instance the name and file structure for an image that is the flag of France should be:

images/flags/flag-france.jpg

Whereas an image that is of the background for a div should be:

images/content/bg-div.gif

Tagging

2010-07-23T15:35:00.000+08:00

There were two significant early adopters in tagging. These are del.icio.us and furl.net. These sites make it possible for users to 'tag' any web page.

Del.icio.us describes itself as "a social bookmarks manager". Del.icio.us describe tags themselves as "one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark." Furl.net doesn't define tags, but says it is "a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages. It's your Personal Web."

Both sites do basically the same thing, allowing users to put a label on a webpage that they have visited, so that they can easily find it again. Users have the option of making their tags public or private (where only the person themselves can see what they have previously tagged) or they can share tagged site information with other individual members. Where the tags are public, other visitors can then see the tags that have been assigned to particular sites by users.

From the perspective of page design this becomes a useful way of summarising the content of a page, and developing the keyword cluster focus for the content of that page. Ideally the page design or CMS should be enabled to allow the administrator to tag pages with relevant keywords. These keywords can then act a primary search parameter for site searches, can be adjusted as the page changes, and act a search mechanism themselves through finding similar tagged pages. These specified tags should appear at the end of the content on the page as such:

“Tags: seo, sem, optimisation, search, organic search”

List of Semantic Code Elements

2010-07-23T08:34:00.000+08:00

ABBR and ACRONYM: For Abbreviations and Acronyms. They have an accompanying title tag which you can use to describe the actual meaning of the abbreviated word or acronym.

CITE: Citation, used to cite a source of information.

CODE: Computer or Programming code.

DEL: Deleted word or phrase.

DFN: Definition.

DL: Definition List. Similar to UL and OL, but uses DT (Definition term) and DD (definition description) to show terms and definitions.

EM: Emphasis, displayed as italicized text.

INS: Insert, used to display text you have inserted due to an edit at a later date.

KBD: Keyboard instructions.

OL: Ordered List.

SAMP: Sample output, used to show sample output from programming code.

STRONG: Strong, or bold, emphasis on a word or phrase.

UL: Unordered List.

VAR: Variable, used to represent a variable in programming code.

Unordered Lists

2010-07-23T08:32:00.000+08:00

Dot points <ul> on the page are great, as these are accentuated words that you are highlighting, so again, try to use these in your page design, include your primary 5 keywords within these.

Make an unordered list which reflects the 3 most relevant topics of the page you’re tweaking and put it on top adding the words “this article deals with…”

Don’t use <br> to separate list items. Instead use the <ol> tag with <li> elements for ordered lists, and <ul> and <li> should be used for unordered lists.

Bold Text and Links

2010-07-22T08:20:00.000+08:00

A keyword that appears in emphasized text is often assumed to be a heading or a sub-title, and is thus often assigned a higher relevancy value.

Consider putting some of your keywords within the body text in-between the <b>...</b> or <strong>...</strong> as text within links and format tags like bold (<b>) and strong (<strong>) are given a minor boost.

As appropriate, bolding certain words, and ensuring keywords are in links, is a useful way of boosting a site’s rankings for certain keywords.

Commonly used links such as ‘click here’ are meaningless to search engines. It says nothing about the content of the following page. It is far better to use specific keyword oriented text links, replacing the ‘click here’ with meaningful text instead. Relevant everyday search phrases should be used in links if possible.

Hyper Link keywords to other relevant pages within the website: Search engines look for keywords that are hyper text linked on each webpage. It is important to have high pay per click keywords hyper-text linking to other web pages with the website that relate to that specific keyword. This is known as internal linking and allows search engine crawlers to easily find other pages within the website during the crawling process.

Please note for bold or emphasized text, it is preferred to use <strong> or <em>, instead of the less descriptive <b> and <i> tags. Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags, and never use <p> or <br> tags just for spacing. Use the margin and/or padding attributes of the <p> tag in your CSS code to add visual spacing.

SEO with Breadcrumb Navigation

2010-07-21T12:57:00.000+08:00

Breadcrumb navigation shows the user's path to their current location, and should be located at the top of the page.

Breadcrumb navigation is wonderful for both usability and for SEO. This text-based navigation shows where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and your location within the site, while providing shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the site hierarchy.

Example from Google's Webmaster section:

Google Help > Help Center Home > My site and Google > Creating a Google-friendly site > Working with AJAX-enhanced sites

If the breadcrumb contains text links with relevant keywords in the anchor text, that is a significant SEO benefit. The anchor text provides the search engines with an important, contextual clue as to the topic of the linked page. That equates to improved rankings.

One throwaway phrase that’s used almost universally within breadcrumbs is “home.” Try revising that link to something more search-optimal version of the anchor text with words like “computing” or “IT” or “technology” along with perhaps “store” or “products” that is site relevant.

You should also consider the amplifying effect of breadcrumb navigation. A link in the breadcrumb will be “voted for” more times if that linked page is higher up in the site hierarchy and if there are more pages underneath that page in the hierarchy. A supercategory page receives more internal links than a subcategory page. A category page covering hundreds of products will receive more internal links than one with only a dozen products in the category.

Breadcrumb Separator (for Horizontal Breadcrumbs)

Here is a summary of what designers tend to use as separators:

67% Right Arrow
10% Pipe
9% Colon
5% Slash
3% Left Arrow
3% Bullet
3% Text Treatment

Orientation of Breadcrumbs

95% Horizontal
5% Vertical

Heading Tags

2010-07-21T12:54:00.000+08:00

In descending priority of importance, H ref tags should be used to group content on the page, and the titles need to include one or more of the primary focus 5 keywords within the title text.

Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>; etc) are given an additional boost in Search Engine rankings by search engines. The reason for this is that headings traditionally carry important information about the structure of a page. For this reason, it is preferable to use headings to mark important elements in a document and to utilise keywords within the heading tags:
<h1>
<h2>
<h3>

SEO for Page Headings

2010-07-21T07:56:00.000+08:00

Page Headings need to contain keywords from the URL.

As search engines calculate the combined total of keywords on the webpage, it is important to ensure there is consistent use of the keywords in the page heading that are used in the URL. This provides a compound effect for search engines to increase the relevancy of the webpage which produces higher search engine rankings.

The following list summarises the important points for consideration:

1. Search engines generally ignore common words like "the", "a", "are", "is", "of", etc - your URLs will therefore do just fine without them.

2. Phrases like "How to do this" or "Which is the best" or "What are the options" or "When did this happen" make titles attractive but you need not put these words in the URL. For instance, the URL is "stop-junk-mail" for the article "How to Stop Junk Mail."

3. If something important doesn’t fit in the page title, put it in the URL. For instance, the URL of a page titled "Get your search fix with two videos" is like "free-search-seo-video" - so you have two new words ("free" and "seo") in the URL that were not in the title but do help in describing the underlying web page.

4. Use hyphens (or dashes) to separate keywords in URLs though Google can also read underscores.

Google probably assigns some fixed weight to your URLs which gets distributed across different words used in that URL. Now the weight per keyword will obviously dilute when you have long URLs.

Therefore, it will help if you can manually create URLs with lesser number of keywords but they should also be relevant to the context of your content. It requires a little extra effort at the time of writing your blog post but they may reap good benefits in the long run.

Local Search using Phone Numbers

2010-07-20T08:48:00.000+08:00

The use of telephone numbers to increase organic rankings in search engines is a technique that is being increasingly implemented.

Place the company phone number on web pages in the following locations:

1. Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tag.
2. Within the Website Address.
3. Within the body copy of the web-page.

An example of using the phone number, including the area code, is detailed below on Yellowbook.com for the Empress Food Products page at: http://www.yellowbook.com/5137711441/empress/ where the phone number is 513-771-1441.

Best practice here is to include the “business name”, “city” and “state” in the URL as well as the phone number so the URL would be as follows:

http://www.YourURL.com/Business-Description/City/Telephone-0812345678

Keywords in URLS - Information Architecture

2010-07-20T08:45:00.000+08:00

I suggest the inclusion of high audience and pay per click keywords into the naming convention (referred to as the nomenclature) within the website. Aim to include real search phrases as part of a page’s URL structure.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo directly match keywords typed in by users and return relevant URLs in the search engine results. URLs which have keywords which match those typed into the search engine typically are returned in priority.

The Keyword Information Architecture approach has proven to increase search engine indexation for an entire website.

Methodology:

Add keywords to the URLs throughout the website according to keywords that are either:

1. High Price and Converting Keywords purchased on search engines such as Google.com
2. Keywords which refer users to the client website that lead to high time spent viewing
3. Keywords competitors are optimizing on
4. Keywords that result in qualified leads and closed orders from lead sources

Implementation:

The rationale for having keywords twice in the URL is to ensure search engines recognize this URL is more heavily weighted to these keywords and ensure higher search engine rankings.

Here is an example of how SearchForecast implemented keywords in TuVox Inc website.

The following list of keyword phrases are sourced from Google.com

Keywords Estimated Avg. CPC
hosted IVR $15.01
IVR $12.43
VoiceXML $7.82
speech recognition software $5.40
Speech recognition $5.38
VXML $3.75
Source: Google.com

These keywords are then threaded into the URLs as below:

Products

On Demand Speech Apps
Former URL: http://www.tuvox.com/prod_ondemand.html
New URL: http://www.tuvox.com/ivr_solutions/ivr_speech_recognition/VoiceXML_VXML.html

Call Routing
Former URL: http://www.tuvox.com/prod_apps_routing.html
New URL: http://www.tuvox.com/ivr_solutions/ivr_speech_recognition/voice_self_service/call_routing.html

Where possible use relevant high yielding keywords when building descriptive URL’s.

It’s also important to not make URL’s too long – keep them to fewer than 1024 characters. Use the home pages, or main category pages to target primary, most competitive keywords. These have the best chance or ranking highly