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.

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.

iPhone 4

I wonder did Apple do this on purpose? They knew there was going to be a huge number of people signing up for the iPhone 4, they could have made more ready. Lets see how the other mobile phone operators are reacting to the news.

O2 are ranking number 4 for the term “iphone 4″ and it immediately takes you to the page which clearly describes O2’s response to a shortage of handsets. They are saying that only those O2 customers can get the iPhone 4 and then after July 4th, it will be available for non customers. I registered my interest for the new handset and I have been receiving emails with a count down of when I can go and buy the iPhone. This was a nice touch as it lets customers stay excited about the launch.

There was no place to register my interest on the Vodafone site. They also do not mention anything regarding an iPhone shortage, does this mean they will have enough when they become available in their stores? Their site has no new content about the iPhone 4, simply an overlay which appears to be from Apple and sits on the old Vodafone iphone URL.

I registered my interest on the Orange site who sent me an email a week ago letting me know when the iPhone 4 would be available. On their website, like Vodafone, there was no mention of an iPhone shortage, simply a detailed breakdown of their price plan. Orange are the only UK network to reveal their prices for the handset and the tariffs. Prices range from £169 for the 16GB handset on the cheapest £30 per month two year contract, to free for the 16GB model on a £75 per month two year deal.

I am sure demand will only increase once Vodafone and O2 announce their deals. Lets just hope not too many customers switch from O2 since their capped data usage was announced.

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.

Now that Google launched the Android in 2008 which is gaining popularity, customers coming to the end of their contracts are torn between the iPhone and Android. Here are some facts about each handset:

Apple vs Android

iPhone

Android

When I go into the mobile shops and ask which handset is better the sales assistants always seem perplexed. You are either an Apple fan or an Android fan. For me, I love both, but I have to say I have been disappointed with Apple recently. My sister had a problem with her iPhone and it has taken forever to sort out. Someone basically hacked into her itunes account (in China) and purchased music which they didn’t pay for. My sister now cannot buy anything from iTunes until this is resolved.

The market share for Android is growing. It offers just as much as the iPhone does to its customers but as it is open source it allows for further developments to be made without customers having to wait for the big releases as we have seen with the iPhone.

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.

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.

It was registered on February 14th, 2005 and has grown so fast in the past 5 years. It serves more than 2 billion videos per day. That is the equivalent of every person in the world watching 10 videos per month, or according to YouTube is nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.

YouTube turns 5

There were other competitors to YouTube, there were services such as Veoh, Vimeo and Viddler and many more. But it was YouTube that came through and 19 months after setting up the company, it was bought by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. Not bad for a couple of Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

Check out YouTube’s blog for the “My YouTube Story” which has tales by people around the world describing how YouTube has changed their lives.

Anyone can broadcast yourself on YouTube, politicians, students, even brides and grooms from their wedding videos. My favourite has to be the Wedding First Dance – Baby Got Back . That has been viewed over 12 million times. They are stars in their own right. and many unknown joblogs have used YouTube to show off their talent (Justin Bieber) or show their odd family videos. YouTube was started to give bloggers an easy way to put their videos in their blogs and has expanded ever since. Apparently 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. YouTube also has content deals with more than 10,000 partners including entertainment titan Disney, and has a fledgling online movie rental service.

It will be interesting to see how much YouTube develops in the next five years especially now that is is part of Google’s “media cloud” for people to access films, books, magazines, tv shows old and new. YouTube will go from strength to strength and who knows how much the video search landscape will have changed when we celebrate its tenth 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.

E consultancy reported last week that Marks and Spencer launched a mobile site.

Unlike the other high street retailers who have launched apps, Marks and Spencer have put all their efforts into the mobile site. I have tried it on the iPhone and it is pretty good. I also tried it on the Samsung Tocco (not a smart phone) and it was easy to navigate and the pictures were very clear. A full review can be found at E consultancy

This news just shows you that more and more companies have mobile as part of their marketing/business strategy. Then yesterday, I read another article about mobile phones . Android phones outsold iPhones in the USA, last month for the first time. The iPhone better watch out, it is not the only smartphone out there. And for those companies that want to have a mobile strategy, do not just tailor it to the iPhone. Make sure the Android, Symbian and the Samsung handsets are involved as well. According to The Times, BlackBerry controls 63% of the market for business phones, so do not exclude these handsets either.

The trend in smartphones is expected to increase. According to Garner, sales increased by 49% to 54.3 million during Q1 2010. Overall, 314.7 million handsets were sold worldwide, with Nokia the number one supplier in both categories. Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS globally, selling 24.1 million units, with a market share of 44.3%.

RIM came second with 10.6 million sales and a 19.4% share, followed by Apple’s iPhone OS with 8.4 million sales and 15.4% share. Sales of Microsoft Windows handsets were flat at 3.7 million units, seeing its market share falling by 3.4 percentage points to 6.8%.

There is no denying it, these smartphones are here to stay, so it is vital to integrate these into your marketing strategy. Next time you are thinking of redesigning your website or adding new pages, think of making it viewable on a mobile phone.