Mary queen of shops comes to Kingston upon Thames

I watched Mary Queen of Shops last week where Mary came to an old vintage and furniture store called “Under the Moon” in Kingston Upon Thames. Being a local resident, I was very interested in the programme and how she was able to turn this shop around. It recently had a closing down sale as they could not afford to keep the shop open.

What Mary does is great, she uses her expertise to allow the business owners to understand their core offering which makes them unique. Mary makes it simple to see the pitfalls, where they went wrong and makes it so easy to see how they can turn their business around.

I like simplicity. I wish websites were given the same publicity as retail stores. Some web owners need to have a “Mary” assess their site and help them to increase traffic and rankings. As part of my job, I audit many websites and analyse what elements they need to change in order to make their websites more profitable.

When a website is built, seo tends to be the last thing people think of, when it should be the first. Seo should be seen as the most important element of a website as it is the first step people take when they are searching for a product or service. Seo is the route to your website. If a retail shop is not in a busy street, if it is down a side alley that is not easily visible for people to see, then they will not come in to browse and purchase. The same is true with a website. It needs to be clearly visible within the search engine results in order for people to click through.

I have raised the profile of seo with my clients through training workshops and have already seen changes. People just have to know about seo and how easy it is to incorporate it with their usual business/marketing tasks. The results will speak for themselves.

What is long-tail search?

I have come across “long tail search” more often at work, especially recently due to the May Update. The long tail concept was first coined by Chris Anderson and are the search words and keyphrases (more than 2 words) which are outside of the top 20 keywords the marketing team normally tracks and focuses on.

In agencies I have worked in, we just reported on just the top 20 terms that the client wanted to rank for. We had to report on the traffic from these keywords as it was assumed it was driving the majority of the traffice. However, despite what people think, most sites get the majority of their traffic from terms that are not tracked. Strange I know, but watch the video from Rand Fishkin about the long tail.

The long tail are the words that have about very few visits per month 0 – 5 queries per month. But it represents 70-75% of the volume of all searches. The queries are more focused and more specific and can lead to higher converting keywords. In the video Rand explains that there was a study that discovered there are 20% unique searches in Google each month.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Ignore the Tail at Your Peril! from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, there is no keyword research tool to show you the tail or the volume behind the long tail search terms which is one of the reasons why people just stick to the top driving traffic terms. But you should not ignore the long tail. It is easier to rank for long tail words than try and move up within Google for the more competitive and shorter terms.

Caffeine Update – What does this mean?

I wrote a post about caffeine and when it was coming back in February. We were supposed to have seen it last December but Google added a new post on their blog this week – that Google caffeine had gone live.

What is Caffeine?

According to Google “it is a new web indexing system. Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches compared to the old index”. Which means, the user can find information much sooner after it has been published than before.

A few more facts about Caffeine as quoted by Google:

What did the old algorithm look like before?

Google doesn’t really give too much away about how their algorithm works, but here is a diagram outlining the index before and after Caffeine.

Google's old index vs Caffeine

Why did Google build Caffeine?
To keep up to date with universal search, real time updates. People want to find the latest information as soon as it is published. The old index had different layers which were refreshed at different speeds.

How will it affect natural search?
Google indexes newer content more frequently which means fresher content will be indexed on Google quicker and appear higher in the search results.
It also means that content on sites will be indexed quicker as there is no index cycle – where website owners had to wait in a queue for Google to index their site.

What changes do website owners need to do?

Make sure you have fresh content on your website and everytime you build a new page, make sure it is optimised for seo.
Caffeine just emphasises how important it is for websites to not rely on just one traffic referral method. For example some sites may just rely on traffic via search engines, others may rely on back links. Instead, they need to use an overall online marketing strategy which includes online pr, social media, seo and ppc. There is a lot of competition in the search market and therefore sites need to make sure there is a lot of buzz about their brand.

Google Caffeine is live, you probably will not have noticed too many changes as the updates have been silently filtering through these past few months and now Google are saying the final version of Caffeine is complete.

I will post any new updates about Caffeine on this blog, so come back for more news.

Malware Hacked into wordpress blog

I have had this wordpress blog for over a year and the other week I found there was a virus on my site. When someone visited my site, the malware image appeared as below:

Malware virus on wordpress

I want to get more visitors to my site, not turn them away. So I started researching how to get rid of this malware virus.

1. Updates
There was a wordpress update, but I did not download the latest version till last week. If you do not download the latest version then you are more prone to hacks into the wordpress blog. So I backed up my blog and downloaded the latest version. I also made sure the plugins were the most up to date.

2. Wordpress plugins
I looked at another
site which recommended I download a plugin for wordpress. It helps find potential viruses, javascript and iframe injections. The plugin is called WordPress Exploit Scanner. I downloaded it but it didn’t highlight any viruses.

4. Google webmaster tools
I logged into Google webmaster tools and checked if there were any errors, but there were not. All appeared well. I was running out of ideas so I decided to call my hosting company, Godaddy.

5. Hosting company
I called GoDaddy and they scanned my site. They found that someone had hacked into their hosting company and sent this virus out to everyone who hosts with them. Great, just what I need, I thought. The problem is that GoDaddy were aware of this problem took a long time to sort it out. I had to call Godaddy to tell them to check out my site, not the other way round. Normally I really like the company, the staff are really helpful

So now I have to look for a new hosting company. I asked Judith Lewis who posted a tweet on twitter and I got a lot of recommendations for hosting companies. My GoDaddy account runs out in a month, so I still have time to research where I want to host seojoblogs.com. If you have any other recommendations, let me know.

Sitemaps, do you need one?

Yes and No.

If you have a small site of less than 10 pages and you already have a link building strategy on your site and your regularly update the site, then you do not need a site map.

If you have a big site, then yes you need a sitemap. A sitemap will help to get the pages indexed and ranked in the search engines. It is also important if your site has session IDs and duplicate content.

I do not have a sitemap on this blog as it is crawled often. The pages are indexed and therefore a sitemap is not needed.

Now if you have a news site, Google suggests you have a news sitemap for the following reasons (as quoted by Google):

* Discover news articles faster: Sitemaps allow Google News to quickly find all of the news articles on a site.

* Crawl and index all news articles: Sitemaps point our crawler directly to each news articles URL, ensuring full coverage of the content on your site.

* Extract and display article information more accurately: Sitemaps identify the article titles, as well as the publication date for each article.

* Characterise article content more accurately: Sitemaps specify the different types of content in your articles by using and tags.

* Annotate articles with metadata: Sitemaps clearly identify each article’s content based on specific description such as related keywords or stock tickers.

Google suggests you use a News Sitemap if has dynamic content (meaning it is updated often), it is a new site or users have to follow many links to get to your articles. Please refer the Google Help section to see how to generate the news sitemap.

But you can only submit a News Sitemap to Google if you’re already included in the Google News program. Basically, you have to be a publisher before you can have your news appear in Google News results.
So how do you become a publisher? Well you need to submit your site to Google and wait for them to come back to you.

Another sitemap that you should start to consider is the video sitemap. This is important if you have a site with lots of videos, film trailers and clips.

Video sitemap example

Check out Google’s help page to see how to set up a video sitemap.

Google celebrates PAC MAN’s 30th Anniversary

The Google doodle was back yesterday and this time was to celebrate PAC MAN’s 30th birthday.

Visit the Google homepage and start playing PAC MAN. What a cool game, I have never before seen a game on a search engine.

Is AJAX seo friendy?

When building a website, there is often conflict between the SEO consultant, developer and the designer.

The designer wants the site to look pretty, which is of course what we all want, but it sometimes affects SEO. For example, a site designed in flash may look good, but it cannot be read by spiders and can therefore not be indexed. This means it is harder for the site to appear high up in the search results.

There is also conflict with web developers. They may build the site in AJAX and Javascript which is great for a usability point of view, it is fast and unlike flash you do not need a third party application to run. However, it does nothing for SEO. A good example of a page using AJAX is gmail, when you click on compose message, the new message appears, but the rest of the site remains the same.

There are a few issues with AJAX.

- the search engine cannot see the content within AJAX and Javascript and therefore cannot index it
- the spider is unable to crawl the site
– cannot use the back/next/reload buttons properly
- all the pages load under the same URL

AJAX can be SEO friendly by following these best practice guidelines:

- Make the majority part of the site based in HTML, including the important navigation links.
- Put all the rich content and keywords in this part of the site – not on a dynamic page.
- Put a URL for each page you want to get crawled and indexed
- Make sure you cache dynamic pages and serve them as static ones
- All links and menu items the important parts of the site should work without AJAX and/or JavaScript – browsers allow you to disable javascript

Google is also proposing a new standard for making AJAX based websites search engine friendly. Google says:

“We’re excited to propose a new standard for making AJAX-based Web sites crawlable. This will benefit Webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based Web sites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the Web”

When this is expected to happen is not yet known, but it does mean that if it is adopted, developers no longer have to choose between site optimization and dynamic pages.

If you have experience in optimising sites for SEO which use AJAX, then let me know.

For more information about AJAX and SEO, please refer to searchenginejournal

Digital Economy Bill

The Digital Economy Bill became law on Thursday. It was one of the bills pushed through parliament before Monday’s dissolution.

Houses of Parliament and Big Ben

It aims to clamp down on illegal file sharing. But it wasn’t completely thought through. It was rushed, discussed in House of Lords, but not House of Commons. It aims to protect big business, the film and music industry without fulling thinking through the affect on the individuals.

The bill is full of controversy as it covers such a broad range of areas, public service televisions, broadband providers, music copyrights and photographers rights all in one bill. It is also being rushed through at the end of a session. It is trying to address digital privacy but it is very heavy handed. The bill is designed to protect the interests of big business.

The privacy of individuals has been affected. The music and film industry has the power to look at the download records of people and can then ask the internet provider to cut off the internet if anyone in the house is accused of file sharing. People’s internet connection can be taken away without any fair warning.

Obviously illegal downloading and piracy is wrong. However, the people who backed this bill are not fully aware that this bill affects innocent people who are using the internet correctly who are sharing the same broadband line (eg public WiFi or Student accomadation) as those downloaders.

For more information about the Digital Economy Bill please visit the Guardian.

Photo is from flickr

facebook is Google’s biggest competitor

In the news last week, I read a very interesting article in the Times about how facebook is the biggest rival to Google.

According to Hitwise, for the week ending March 13th, facebook got more traffic than Google in America. Who would have thought this social neworking site set up by Mark Zuckerberg would have achieved this milestone.

Facebook now has more than 400million active users which makes it the third most populous “country” behind India and China. In the UK, it has more than 23million users, or a third of the population. The speed at which facebook is growing is staggering. Visits to facebook has increased 185% in the last year and Google’s number of visits has increased by 9%

There is a threat to Google, called “discovery” which is the finding of products/services on facebook that has been recommended by friends. More people will go onto facebook and search for products and reviews from their friends and peers instead of searching on Google. However, this information within facebook cannot be seen by Google as customers have to sign in to their account.

Social media is changing the search landscape. More people will be using social networking sites to find out news and information. Even Google wanted to get onto the social media band wagon with “buzz” but it failed to have made any headway in that area. People spend a lot of time on social media sites. According to Nielsen, facebook is the third most visited site with 2.5billion hits in February 2010 which is close to Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3billion. So Google better watch out, it doesn’t want to lose its position as the number 1 search engine.

How to optimise a video on YouTube

I often have clients who produce a video to promote their new product and ask for help to optimise it. This means the video has all the correct tags in place to make sure it is easily picked up in in universal search.

YouTube

Here are a few tips I recommend for those wanting to optimise their videos
1. Title & Description
The title should contain a good keyword phrase , it needs to be short as YouTube limits the length.
The description can be 2-3 sentences and should contain keywords and variations of keywords.
Include a URL link at the start of the description. By default, the description is almost hidden, but the link you create
will still be visible if it is at the beginning.

2. Tags

Include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video eg if you have a cake business and are advertising a new cake for Mother’s Day you may want to consider the following:

Mother’s day cake, bake cake for mother’s day, making cakes, cake for mum

It is important to use tags that will associate your video with other videos that use the same tags.
When people watch a different video, yours will be shown as a related video hence getting more views from people
who were originally watching other videos.

3. Provide transcripts of your videos

Write on page copy next to the video which will be indexed by the search engines and help you to rank higher. This will be in the description part. I would recommend you put this under the text

“http://www.bake-a-cake.co.uk Bake a cake shows you how easy it is to make a cake from scratch. Show your mother you care and bake the best cake for Mother’s Day.

4. Offer the option to embed your video

Links from other websites to your website or video, are very important in SEO

An embedded video is when someone puts the YouTube video into their own website. It works same way as an
inbound link. Promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it.
Use the video as a portal with links to related content on your site

5. Keep the video to under 3 minutes. Make it short and concise and exciting to watch !! Make it relevant and
interesting.

6. Allow users to rate your video

The videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favourite and save.

7. Brand the video with the company logo

This way you are generating brand awareness with your site bake-a-cake.

8. Link to the videos using important keywords in the anchor text – eg bake a cake, mother’s day cake, mum’s cake. You need to make sure the keywords are the same ones you are using on your site.

So there you have it, a few simple ways to optimise your video for Universal Search.