Search Engine Workshops UK

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It seems Google has been experimenting with a different style of listing.  Instead of displaying a listing as

www.atracks.co.uk/training/wa-training.html

there have been results appearings as

www.atracks.co.uk > training > wa-training.html

but only of course if your website uses breadcrumbs.

This is great news because it means that instead of just a single link to the page that has achieved the ranking, the listing includes links to all the breadcrumbed pages as well.

Google is certainly talking about page speed and download times.  There is even a little video that Google has recorded, http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/index.html

I still like the page page download time tool I referred to in an earlier post, but Google’s interest over the past summer in download times is perhaps best not ignored!

There are lots of rumours circulating at the moment that Google is increasingly using page load time as an important parameter in its ranking algorithm.  That is bad news for those over-engineered sites full of flash, bells and whistles.  But good news for the more simple sites that aim to deliver a simple message, clearly and concisely.

But how quickly do pages load?  Website Optimization offer a free web page analyser tool that will measure download times.  It also provides a record of different object types,

• HTML
• HTML images
• CSS images
• Total Images
• javaScript
• CSS
• Multimedia
• Other

For example, the Atracks homepage scores pretty well on most things except for javaScript.

but for another site, page load times probably are pulling down its rankings!

The download times may only be a guide, but not everyone is using fast broadband.  A quick look at your stats will show the number who are using some kind of mobile device, which will inevitably have a much slower connection.

Website Optimizer goes on to highlight which areas of the page being analysed are likely to be causing problems.  For examples, for my javaScript excesses, it suggests I

Consider optimizing your JavaScript for size, combining them, and using HTTP compression where appropriate for any scripts placed in the HEAD of your documents. You can substitute CSS menus for JavaScript-based menus to minimize or even eliminate the use of JavaScript.

This is certainly a useful tool.  Not only does it indicate areas that search engines may be struggling with there are big usability issues around download times.  Search engine spiders may not be patient enough to wait for a wiz bang page to download, but human visitors are expecting ever faster page loads.  Even if they can find you, your visitor may well be gone and off to your competitor’s site if he has to hang about waiting.

It isn’t an accident that Google has the cleanest, fastest page home page around!

Just came across what looks like a really useful tool called Excellent Analytics – it imports Google Analytics data into Excel.  I am forever downloading individual reports into Excel so this certainly looks worth checking out.   If anyone gets a chance to check this out before I do, please post a comment and let me know how you get on.

There is a review of Excellent Analytics on SEOmoz.

Google is testing out a big new idea – Google Social Search – and it could have big implications for how it ranks pages in its search listings. Google Social search was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco at the end of October, it’s still under development, but even just its existence gives a clear indication of how Google’s mind is working.

In essence, Google is planning to offer content from the searcher’s social network in addition to its normal listings. So if I have published content on Twitter or a blog on, say, a basketball match that I have watched and someone in my social circle searches for something on basketball, then my content will appear at the bottom of the page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle.” Of course, you will need to be signed into your Google account to see this feature.

Apart from the privacy implications (!!) it does show how important Google thinks social networking is. That might not be exactly news but Social Search does take it to a new level.

Google first has to determine who is in your social circle. It is planning to do this by looking at places like

• FriendFeed
• Feeds you are following in Google Reader
• Gmail contacts
• Youtube
• Picassa
• Sites you have listed in your Google Profile
• Twitter

and any other social networking sites that you are subscribed to and on which you are connected to friends.

Google will go one degree of connection further, so will include content posted by friends of your friends.

Whether or not Social Search proves popular is not really what is important. What is perhaps more interesting is that it shows Google is increasingly tracking your social profile – and knowing Google, it would be very surprising if this information does not end up being used in its rankings algorithm.

So it strongly suggests that you – or more importantly from an SEO point of view – your website needs, more than ever, to work on developing a good social profile. Put another way. Google looks like it is developing a system whereby connections could become as important as links. For company websites, that translates into how many people read your blog or have your RSS feed in their Google Reader or follow your Tweets.

Of course Google is keen to assure us all that only content that we have proactively put in the public domain will be used, but even so the whole idea is pretty scary.

Matt Cutts, the human face of Google search has put out a video explaining exactly how Google will be trawling our social networks to work out our social circles. He also reassures us all that, as always, Google is doing this to “improve your search experience”. And yes that really is a direct quote from the video.

Technical issues have a great effect on SEO rankings. It might be difficult to reverse engineer which technical issues have what effects but it must make sense to get things right – the site will work better for its human visitors and keeping bots happy is always a good idea.

Visitors (and links) often try to access pages that do not exist. They may mistype the URL, the page may have been removed or the site may have been rebuilt. Whatever page is returned when this happens, it should return a 404 code. Frequently, webmasters configure their sites to return a 200 or a 3xx, and show the visitor content designed to help them on their way. This is not a good idea – if everytime a ‘wrong’ URL is accessed and brings up a real page showing a 200 code, then this is telling Google that there are lots of valid pages all with the same content. In other words that are lots, possibly thousands, of valid pages all with identical content. Not a good idea!

The best way to address this issue is by building a custom 404 that shows the sitemap. In this way, any missing pages return a 404 (telling Google they do not exist) and presenting real visitors with a way of easily navigating to where they were trying to get to.

There was an interesting discussion on WebMasterWorld on this topic.

then a custom 404 is the best paFrequently, typing an incorrect page name brings back a page that shows a 200 code when put through a header checker.

Whenever I start working for a new client, the first thing I always do is prepare an assessment report that benchmarks where the client’s site is now. In fact I often do this before I even have a contract with the client and prepare it almost as paid quote. It provides both a roadmap for the client which, if they chose, they could take away and implement themselves or ask someone else to do so for them, hence the charge.

I have just come across an excellent blog post which explains perfectly why this is the way to start – so rather than repeat it, the post is on G-squared Interactive’s site. It makes good reading.

If you have two (or more) links from one page to another page, then SEO value will only be attributed to the anchor text on the first link.

So if I say, click here to go the Atracks blog, then rattle on with lots of interesting material on anchor text and finished up by saying, go to the Atracks blog for more interesting stuff of anchor text, then Google would ignore the anchor text ‘anchor text’ and only give my blog page – the one I am linking to – SEO credit for the term ‘click here’.

Video can be a very useful tool in promoting both your website and your products and services.  But like everything, they don’t ‘just get found’, they have to be optimised so that anyone looking for what you are offering finds your video and not your competitors.

In general the same rules apply to promoting videos as to promoting any other sort of file format but there are a few differences, after all, there is no readable content within the video so Google and YouTube have less to work with and tags are therefore even more important.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Adwords has been around a while and is almost synonymous with PPC advertising – but certainly not quite.  Yahoo! search marketing and Microsoft’s offerings have not proved much of a challenge but Facebook might just be.

I have just run my first campaign on Facebook.  The client is the insurance/mortgage/finance sector where Adwords clicks are expensive, well over £10 a click which is prohibitive for all except the really big players with huge marketing budgets to play with.

So we thought we would try out Facebook and the results were interesting.  They can be summarised quite easily.  The quality of the visitors that we generated was low, clicks were cheap and it has great potential for branding campaigns.

Visitor Quality

Quality of visitor was measured by the conversion rate (zero for Facebook) and the bounce rate once on the site.  Again Adwords came out on top with a 50% bounce rate compared with over 90% for the Facebook traffic.

Cost

Cost was interesting.   On Facebook, clicks came in at around 40p.  Adwords clicks cost about £4 but this was for content match (where ads appear on other sites as Adsense) and very low positions to keep the cost down.  For a first page listing the bid price was well over £10.

Branding

There is one other benefit to any PPC campaign and that is their ability to get your name seen, in other words branding campaigns.  Credibility can be a big issue and it certainly is in the insurance/mortgage/finance markets.  The cost of 1000 impressions on Facebook was 5p compared with £2.80 on Adwords.  The campaign was running for only six days but received over 1,000,000 impressions.  That’s a lot of exposure especially as the ad included the company’s logo so even if the ad was read very often – which it probably wasn’t, subliminally the logo was being seen an awful lot of times.

Facebook matches its ads to its visitors in a completely different way to Adwords.  In setting up a Facebook ad, you select the visitor profile you are targeting.  Male, 18-35, in a relationship etc.  There is then the option to further focus based on keywords that Facebook members have included in their profiles, eg accountant, golf.  With Adwords on the other hand, ads are displayed based on the keywords visitors have typed into the search query box.

By the way, the CTR (click through rate) on Facebook is generally much lower than on Adwords, 0.05% is generally considered about average.

Recommendation

As a result of the comparison of these two campaigns, which were admittedly very short, my recommendation to my client has been to continue the low cost Facebook campaign to get the name seen and the logo familiar for branding and credibility.  Adwords can then be used sparingly to pull in the high quality traffic which may well have already be familiar with the company name and logo from Facebook.  That way the two media should complement each other and we get the best of each.

More generally, I do think Facebook has huge potential as an advertising medium.  Its ability to target specific segments of the population is a real advantage.  Econsultancy recently wrote an interesting piece about advertising on Facebook and Google Adwords which looks at the where the future may lie for both players.