website optimisation brighton

The Datacentre Disco Dance

With all these rumblings from Matt Cutts about localisation and increased personalization of results, we thought it’s about time to look at some tools for checking Google results on various UK datacentres.

Google is incredibly secretive about its datacentres, as it believes they give it a competitive advantage. Fair enough, no one’s going to expect them to show all their cards, but if you and your clients want the edge over your industry competitors, every juicy nugget of deep-fried information that you can pull out of Fatty’s greasy bargain bucket is going to help.

For a start, when conducting a UK-wide internet marketing campaign for travel products related to distinct UK cities and counties, you’re really going to want to know exactly how those northern pikeys and southern bufties’ results are lining up, and rework individual campaigns as needed. As the glut of sites battling it out for top 5 positioning turns into an amorphous blob of heavily optimised pages desperately trying to out-linkbuild each other, going for the local angle is looking more and more appealing.

Anyway, that’s the why, so what’s the how?

Search Engine Genie, despite their laughable 1990-world-cup-style logo, have assembled a fairly useful suite of tools including this one which purports to pull in data from a range of IP addresses.

Used in conjunction with these Visual IP tools,  you can murder a morning faster than reading the top 100 stories on reddit. Similar tools can be found at Webrankinfo, and more comedy-logo-meets-handy-utility action is here at SEO Chat.

Right, time to run, I hear a meaty fist banging on the door.

Changes to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google is implementing another strand of its local-search-focused paradigm, and now that this particular tune has stopped, it’s time to obediently scramble for a seat and work out what it all means.

A new ‘Global Monthly Search Volume’ option has replaced the ‘Average Monthly Search Volume’ in the latest update to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Similarly, ‘Search Volume for Previous Month’ has become ‘Local Search Volume (for previous month)’.

Average search figures (taken over an unknown time period) have been replaced by an estimate of the previous month’s average search volumes, which has pros and cons for anyone researching a seasonal keyword’s search volumes, for example, ‘christmas parties’. Users can still hazard a guess at average search volumes by bringing up the Search Volume Trends column, but this change represents a step backward for some users.

Definitions taken from the Keyword Tool itself:

Local Search Volume: [Last Available Month]

This column shows the approximate number of search queries matching each keyword result. This statistic applies to searches on Google and the search network in the most recent month for which we have data. It’s specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. If we don’t have sufficient data for a particular keyword, you’ll see not enough data.

Global Monthly Search Volume

This column shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching each keyword result. This statistic applies to searches performed on Google and the search network over a recent 12-month period. It includes traffic in all countries and languages and is specific to your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. If we don’t have sufficient data for a particular keyword, you’ll see not enough data.

In an interesting quirk, local search volumes can sometimes exceed global average volumes. But then again Brighton does have a habit of imagining it’s at the centre of the universe. And Google does have a habit of telling us what to believe.

Sadly, even using the API there is no way to access data in the same way as before. Additional information for the keywordTool API massive is available from the Google Adwords API Blog.

Phone numbers in AdWords

This old debate has been doing the rounds again on the Webmaster World forums. It centers on whether or not it’s a good idea to include a telephone number in the ad copy of your Adwords campaign. The ‘Ayes’ say you’ll save on CPC costs and have more chance of converting a lead with a human operator to answer questions about your product or service, and hopefully upsell/cross sell to boost the bottom line. The ‘Nays’ say your CTR could drop, necessitating an increase in your CPC bid to stay visible. They also claim that including a number wastes valuable space for the ‘call to action’ in your ad, since people browsing the SERPs are in a clicking frame of mind rather than a calling one.

Google’s position on the matter is that it’s not against the AdWords TOS to include phone numbers. They acknowlege that every business is likely to experience different results. I know I prefer to book my flights online to save money (which works out well for the Airline’s cost per acquisition figure too), but I also know that my mum likes to ring up the florist to order a bouquet and chat about what they have in stock or what’s looking good at this time of year.

As ever, research wins out and an A/B comparison with an additional text ad will require little outlay and could reveal some interesting trends in your market sector.

Seo Tips for Designers

Search Engine Optimisation Tips for Designers

Overview

Good design and good optimisation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Laying out a site from an SEO perspective can often lead to a site structure that is intuitive, easy to navigate and rich in useful information. A site needn’t obey every SEO principle to succeed and rank well, but the more of these ideas you can accommodate, the easier it will be to rank well in the search engines once the site is complete.

The main thing to keep in mind is that Google’s spiders read html and can’t see images or most of the page layout information. When you view the source of a webpage, (in Internet Explorer click View, then Page Source) this is what the spiders see. If your site is made up completely of images, for example, Google will have no text to read and therefore have little idea of what your site is about.

Content and structure

A site that contains plenty of information about a given topic has a head-start over the competition. Include plenty of text about the subject at hand, if necessary putting it in a box with a scrollbar if you don’t want the page layout to be dominated by blocks of text.

Avoid positioning text far down in the page after a lot of images. Keep it up near the top of the page so that it’s the first thing spiders see when they arrive.

Using headings and subheadings is important. You should have at least two heading sizes for main headlines / page names and subsection headings. Google pays more attention to the text in headings than the text in paragraphs when it’s determining what your site is about.

When a long article needs to be put on a page, avoid splitting it into too many pages. Spiders may not traverse all of those pages and some of the content may not be indexed. If you do need to split an article into many pages, include links to all pages, for example <Prev Page, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Next Page> rather than just a link to <Prev Page and Next Page>.

Flash

What to avoid

• Don’t have a splash screen. If it can’t be avoided, put the ‘enter site’ or ‘skip’ button in html (above or below the flash) rather than in the flash, otherwise very little of the site will be spidered.
• Menus and navigation with images. Google’s spiders can’t read images so make sure the navigation is split up into a button background image and some text overlayed, or simply a text-only navigation system.

Fonts

When the time comes to convert your design into html, if you have used non-standard fonts, the web developer is likely to turn your text into images to preserve the typography. The side-effect of this is that Google will have no idea what the site is about, as it can’t read images. Wherever possible, use html-safe fonts for text, titles, headings, and subheadings at the design stage to avoid this happening.

List of html safe fonts:

http://www.fonttester.com/help/list_of_web_safe_fonts.html

Page titles

It’s very useful to talk to the client about SEO and keyword choices before beginning the design work. The names of headings, pages, sub-sections etc will all have a huge impact on the success of the site in the search engine rankings.

If in doubt, ask your local friendly search optimist!

Quirk of Gmail

I uncovered this interesting nugget of information while gunning around the Digital Point forums, a hive of web development and SEO activity.

If you append a + followed by up to  two digits to the end of your gmail address, the mail will redirect to your normal address. For example, john+03@gmail.com redirects to john@gmail.com

The more unscrupulous amongst you may well see this as a good way of registering multiple accounts on sites for any number of purposes… I’ll leave the rest to your overactive imaginations.

How to conduct a website optimistation audit

1. Onsite analysis.

• Thorough structural analysis of site tree structure
• Analysis of all key html sections for semantic (html) improvements
• Recommends for any improvements to the above

2. Competitor Research

•  Scope out top competitors
•  Investigate site structures and link structure of competitor sites
•  Summarise key similarities / improvements which can be harnessed if appropriate
•  Investigate backlinks for easy wins and to see the kind of backlinks being built / given by competitors
•  Investigate overt revenue models for these competitors

3. Keyword Research

•  Based on analytics data, competitor research and pool of available data establish a variety of general and long tail keywords to target on an ongoing basis

4. Offsite analysis

• Analysis of analytics data to identify top sources of visitors, as well as relevant trends in terms of keywords or user behaviour
• Analysis of analytics to ascertain top current content. This will help to establish areas for improvement, and also potential quick wins. Look for trends
• Assess the current standing on Google for key terms, identified in keyword research
• Identify key topic areas, which have potentially large volumes of traffic that are not being exploited, or could be honed
• Look at search volumes for short listed keywords and use this data to highlight gaps in the market and prioritize choice of topic areas to link build

5. Form an action Plan

• Specify best keywords to target initially, this will likely be some general keywords, and some long tail
• Identify best link building methodologies for gaining credible backlinks, i.e. direct contact, blog seeding etc
• Recommend onsite changes which will help to sculpt pagerank to subsections, and improve current profile of the site
• Recommend likely timescale for improvements
• Recommend best deployment of adsense and other potential revenue streams for consideration

On Site Optimisation tips for beginners

SEO Tips for Graphic Designers

Title Tags should:

• Be unique for each page
• Include a reference to your brand name if appropriate
• Include a keyword or keywords that are present in the body text of the same page
• Be written in Title Case (Proper Case)
• Communicate briefly the contents of the page to the reader
• <64 characters to avoid cropping in Google results

Meta Tags

The Meta Description tag should

• Be unique for each page
• Be relevant to the content of the page
• Be 170 characters at most
• Provide a concise summary of the page’s content

The Meta Keywords tag should

• Consist of 10-15 keywords deemed the most important in the body section of the page
• Have keywords separated by commas
• Have the most important words or phrases at the beginning of the list

Header tags should

• Define the most important sections of the page’s content
• Be nested logically, ie h1 for main headings, then h2 for sub headings/bylines, h3 for sub-section headings etc.

Text Styles

Use <strong></strong> and <em></em> occasionally to emphasize keywords in the body copy. Overuse is not recommended.

Copywriting

• Conduct keyword research before writing copy.
• Avoid having an abnormally high keyword density on page.
• Consider using synonyms to keep the content from reading strangely.
• Target long tail keywords if you are in a competitive sector.

Link optimisation

• Use keywords in your link anchor text.
• Add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to off-site links to conserve your PageRank.

Image optimisation

• Include alternate text in the image tag E.g. <img alt=”Description of Image” src=”image.jpg”>
• Use meaningful file and directory names. For example images/flowers/daisy.jpg is better than /db/DSC41129.jpg
• Use image title tags
• Use image keywords in your link text when you’re linking to an image. E.g. use “view an Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view” as the anchor text.

Mind reading for beginners

Mind-reading for beginners

It’s never been so easy to reach into the murky soul of an internet user, grope around a bit in the dirty dishwater of their deepest desires, and pull out a fistful of pretty good impressions about how they see the world.

For example, the Google Keyword Tool

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

was recently modified to give approximate search volumes in numbers rather than the vague green bar charts of old. I’ve spent whole days working out what words people use when they’re looking for cheap flights, sound systems, concert tickets, and online music. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle – at least if Google’s numbers are the honest truth. Other online companies have been offering similar data recently, which may have prompted Google to start publishing its own numbers to take the wind out of the competition’s sails.

Interested in home cinema? I didn’t think so. But 450,000 suckers with cash on the hip and a televisual inferiority complex typed in ‘home cinema’ in June 2008. 90,500 were clued up enough to prefix this with ‘5.1’, while another 9,900 wanted a ‘7.1’ system, which presumably involves some wipe-clean paddles and the Dolby Digital whirling butt-beads.

Marketing departments the world over should be salivating over these intimate revelations of our consumer whims. “How far has our new addition to the lexicon penetrated, Sally?” “Well Brad, 25,000 people typed ‘something to give meaning to my sad life’ last month, but two million searched for ‘something cheap to give meaning to my sad life’ so I guess we gotta reoptimise, dammit”.

Another tool for the budding teleworking clairvoyant is Microsoft adCenter Labs’ Keyword forecast tool

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/default.aspx

where pretty graphs and ‘audience’ demographic data (age, sex) lie sweetly alongside search volume figures which are a full order of magnitude lower than those of Google for the terms I tested it with. Audience? The term conjures a roomful of popcorn munching sloths, slouched in obeisant awe, with mouse in hand to move the volume slider and little else. I suppose that attitude’s to be expected from a company built on a premise of telling people exactly how they’re going to have it, but which now has to pay people http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070316-microsoft-paying-businesses-to-use-live-search.html to use their search engine.

If you feel like tossing $59 per month into the chocolate biscuit fund of the folks at Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html

then you’ll be rewarded with some excel spreadsheets, 1997-era clipart graphics, the option to save your searches into projects, region-specific keyword usage reporting, some insight into what keywords your audience associate with blue widgets, and the nagging feeling that you could have got all this information for free elsewhere.

If your problem isn’t telepathy, but rather convincing your boss to change your company website’s keywords from ‘preowned items’ to ‘secondhand toss’ (the latter being what your customers actually type into Google), then Trellian’s latest offering, Keyword Discovery, might be just your cup of tea. For a subscription fee of $49.95 per month you can stuff the inboxes of your senior management with hard-hitting reports brimming with convincing phrases like ‘core generic offering’, ‘low-frequency population’ and ‘give me a pay rise I know stuff’.

Other offerings from Wordze http://www.wordze.com and Nichewatch http://www.nichewatch.com will help you keep tabs on the competition and see what their SEO consultants have been prodding them with this month. Nichewatch is free (registration required) and kicks up a very useful list of how you and your competitors are doing on the allintitle, allintext and allinanchor stakes on Google. I like it, it’s quick, dirty, and lets you come to your own conclusions.

Like Keyword Discovery however, Wordze.com might as well have been optimised for the phrase ‘give us about six hundred quid a year and you’ll look like you know what you’re talking about in the meeting tomorrow’.