if you want minimal traffic to your site.

But what would be the point in that? If you have a site, of course you want traffic. Surprisingly there are some clients that do not even think about seo. I am always battling to encourage those important stakeholders in a web project to use implement seo before the site has been built, ever before the wireframes are signed off.

Here are a few tips to help those fighting for seo overcome the hurdles:

1. Keyword research
You need to have evidence to back up why you want to use certain keywords for the website. If it is a new product launch and there is no search volume, use Google Insights to show how popular the term is.

2. Google Caffeine
What I like about this is that so many non seo people picked up on caffeine and the fact they thought it would affect their site dramtically. Little did they know that caffeine was working in the background and it was the press release by Google in June that announced they were happy with caffeine. In companies I have worked in, people are more responsive to seo when there are press releases from Google about algorithmns and updates.

3. Title and meta description
If there is not much you can do on the page as that would spoil the “design”, then at least optimise the page title and meta description. The page title is one of the most important elements of seo, you must make sure the keywords you want the page to rank for are the first terms in the title tag. Despite what the brand team may want, I would put the brand name at the end of the title tag.

4. Optimise their press release
If the company has press releases that they regularly post on their website, but has very little optimised copy, make sure you insert links in the body copy. Choose a couple of keyterms where you want to link from on the press release and link internally to that desired page.

5. Monitor all results
Make sure you report back on the results that you see in regards to the changes made. This will then give you more evidence to push forward for more seo changes. Once the client is amazed by the little work done so far and the amazing results, then you can suggest implementing seo as BAU on any new webproject.

Once clients have seen results, they can then begin to understand how important seo is for their website. Don’t give up if they are proving difficult and are reluctant to spend a lot of money on seo.

It is important to have an integrated search strategy to deliver to your clients. There is so much overlap between paid search, seo and social media, that implementing one without the other means that you are failing to capture all potential traffic to your website.

I work closely with social media who produce monitor the amount of online mentions or “buzz” for a particular brand. The seo guys use these buzz reports to see which bloggers and twitters are talking about the brands. The social media team contacts the bloggers but the seo team people give them the optimised content. This means that when the bloggers write about a particular product we have asked them to review they are linking back to our destinated web page on our key terms.

Facebook ties in with social media, but it also has an impact on seo. If your client wants to have a facebook page then they need to make sure it is optimised for seo. They must make sure that their key terms and links are on the facebook page and that they have an optimised URL.

Paid search and seo go hand in hand. By monitoring paid search adverts, we can see the number of impressions and click throughs for certain campaigns. If there is a high number of clicks on key terms and then we see through tracking that there is a high bounce rate, it may be that the landing page does not have enough content or that people cannot find what they are looking for. A new landing page will need to be created and the keywords that generated the highest CTR will be used in the page title, meta description and on page copy.

Another example of working together is when there is a brief for a new landing page to be built. Paid search will carry out keyword research to check the volumes around particular terms. This research can also feed into the seo recommendations.

The next time a client asks you just to do their paid search for them, look at their site and see if they have optimised it for seo. If they have not, show them the great opportunities there are with the integrated search strategy.

Integration is the key to unlocking traffic and high rankings.

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.

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.

I read in the metro on Friday that Apple sold 600,000 pre orders of its new iPhone 4 in one day which crashed their website. And now they say if you have not pre ordered the iPhone 4, you will not get it before July 14th.

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.

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.

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.

There used to be just one smartphone everyone wanted – the iPhone.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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 faster. It is also important if your site has session IDs and duplicate content. A sitemap should automatically be generated through the content management system. If it is not, you will need to manually run a sitemap through tools such as Xenu Sleuth to generate the xml file.

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.

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

Can you believe YouTube has only been around 5 years?

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.

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?