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30 October 2009

Google Social Search

Photo by manfrys via Creative Commons

Google's Social Search was announced this week by the Official Google Blog. It sounds like a great tool for making search results more relevant. Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google's search results. It achieves this by aggregating your social circle ( Google creates your social circle by scraping your Gmail friends, your blogs on Google reader, your Twitter followers, your Friendfeed contacts and a variety of other sources ) information and relating any input your social circle has to your search results.

One thing to bear in mind is that it's not twitter search and it's not real-time search. I would have liked to tell you I have tested it this service and it's great. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be bringing up any results for anyone in the Bruce Clay Australia Office. I have tried it logged into my Google, Facebook, Twitter and with my Google reader open and links to my social media account within my Google profile implemented but unfortunately no results come up in the social search option. So either I don't have a social circle ( according to Google ) or my social circle has no input on a wide variety of searches ( from cars to seo ) or the most likely option, that Google Social search is still a little buggy, especially with sites outside the Google.com domain. Attached is a screenshot of my social search.

However this is a Google labs 'experiment' and I'm sure they will iron the bugs out soon. From what I have heard and read from people whose social search is active, it's really nifty and if (make that when) this social search is added to the blended results, it will definitely add value for the searcher.

There are privacy concerns with regard to Google social search, but that fear has been allayed by Matt Cutts who says any of the information returned with social search information will already be public and indexed by Google, they are just helping to assign this information to relevant search results. The results are also tailored specifically to you so nobody else will see your social circle.

What does this mean for search engine optimisation? Well it means that people in the SEO industry are going to have to monitor social media much more carefully for input that could affect the search engine rankings and conversions. We might see more SEO's getting into the social media field to get positive comments for certain results ( gaming social media accounts perhaps ).

There are some immediate benefits for the average searcher. Imagine you are searching for ' Italian restaurant Sydney', your results are not only ranked by relevance but also by positive or negative input your social circle has on the Italian restaurant scene in Sydney. This combined with the news that Google will be indexing and using twitter for relevancy of recent events all points to more accurate and relevant search results, which will make more searches happy and in turn make Google more revenue.

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/30/09 at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Fun Friday SEO

27 October 2009

Website conversion tactics | SEO Drives Activity - Activity Drives Sales

Photo by alan(ator) via Creative Commons

I use this in our SEO training and have many clients meetings on the topic. Many website developers profess to be experts, but few will agree to be measured on it.

Nobody likes being manipulated, mislead or coerced. Being persuaded to perform an action is however OK. It's called buy-in. The user's choice is at stake, and the user remains empowered. Users who have "bought in" also usually return and become repeat customers. This is conversion.

So can we persuade website users to perform the required choice of action and get more visitors to do this? Consider your last sales experience.

Think about your last purchase:

On average the sales person probably presented some or all the following attributes to close the sale:

• They presented well, were likable, helpful and credible and appeared sincere, knowing their own field of expertise well and could answer the questions you asked

• They provided proof of the product by either having used 1 themselves or having a close friend who did

• The big sell didn't happen upfront, it was through a process you found hard to back out of, a series of small yes's. Do you have this issue? Have you experienced that? Would you like to try this? And so on.

• Answered the small lingering doubts subtly, such as warranty, returns, hidden features, there was no way back, no excuses not to buy

• They made it personal, how this product would meet your needs

• They had a close. "We only have x in stock", or "We have a special on this week" etc. Would you like me to get one from the back for you?

Who is your customer?

Ok, so a website works differently, but just to add complexity. We are different and behave differently in a purchasing process, sometimes exhibiting different behaviours for different products? Recognize some of these traits below?

• Direct approach: They want to know outcomes, results and answers. Just the facts please. This group will also put off a purchase if there is more to gain from waiting. They are smart and want options that make sense on all fronts not just financially and to be able to control the option they choose.

• Methodical buyer: They work through a process, understanding the product attributes, features and price. They work toward a deal and need information to decide on what that deal should be. It Can be very tiring for the salesman who can easily lose the deal due to a lack of patience.

• The Feeler: They focus on the human side, wanting to understand the product impact on others and the environment. They may put themselves second. They also are easily influenced and want to see testimonials or endorsements from perceived people in the know. Low levels of product knowledge but lots of external positive influencing factors.

• Spontaneous: They are impulsive and excitable, they go to buy groceries and come home with a flat screen TV. They need the answers quick, stock must be available and the ability for them to walk out the store with product in hand is important, or you may lose the deal. These people may drive around for a day seeking a specific product, and not give it a second thought the next day.

Do you know your customer? Do you accommodate each of these groups?

Onto website conversion. How to minimise that bounce rate and get more than your fair share of conversions. I mean really get on top of this from the ground up, not just at a superficial level with some feel good A/ B testing.

Simplified Conversion factors to consider

1. Create a good first impression:

You have around 3-5 seconds:
• What does the user see first to keep them there?

• How fast does the page load?

• Does the page load without errors?

• Do you have a credible and professional logo, slogan and overall website look and feel?

• Are you unique or do you look like all other websites? That's the problem sometimes with best practice.

• Do you have a contact us page, about us, terms and privacy policy that is easily accessible?

Does your website come across as a trusted, credible and quality website, ready to meet their needs? People will only convert if they feel comfortable. Discomfort in many cases = risk.

2. Where to next with navigation?

Now you have them on your page. What do you want them to do? Push the big red button with "BUY HERE" or "FREE TRIAL" on it? Alternatively, let them hunt around hoping they find the grey'd out link in the footer? Website navigation takes many twists and turns, make sure you understand your customers needs and take them through a process and make it easy to convert. Keep in mind small purchases with low risk require no process, while larger high value purchases may require several visits, research and even discussions prior to making the decision.

Do you take them through a process of small yes's, logical next steps, which attempt to obligate them to buy? A process of persuasion subtly answering questions and concerns along the way to the end goal. Big yes's upfront can = big no's.

3. Provide relevant content to support different user requirements

Include detailed and engaging information, images, tools and videos on product features for those researching, provide testimonials for those needing to be persuaded, provide a streamlined process with an overview of features for those impulsive buyers.

What information does your average user need to convert? How have you positioned this information on the website? Are your differentiators, product features and needs clearly defined? Is the real problem or issue your product or service addresses clearly articulated?

Do you answer the little alarm bells ringing for the customer such as return policies, money back guarantees and privacy? These may not differentiate you but need to be there to put you on par with competitor sites.

Identify the tickets to play items with respect to conversion and the real differentiators or unique propositions you offer. Map these out and consider how best and when they are communicated to the user to support the conversion process.

Can you answer all their questions, supporting their decision to purchase no matter what the buyer type is? Is this is a series of little yes'es, taking them down the road of conversion?

4. Continually develop conversion processes to close

Link points 2 and 4 above together. Think about where users enter your site. Search engines will deliver them to different pages throughout the site based on search terms. Think about how you want people to navigate, given how they might interact to convert and ensure these conversion paths are easy and simple. Monitor Analytics to establish common user paths through the website and improve both primary and secondary conversion paths and actions, continually.

Does the website close well. When the user has enough information to buy, can they? Or do they need to hunt around looking for the place to do it?

5. Test everything

Test and monitor everything from headlines to action buttons. Be patient, analyse the data and make informed improvements. Document your process.

In summary then:

1. Tell them what you want them to do
2. Make it easy for them to do
3. Tell them when they've done it

Planning your site's conversion processes is more than just deciding on where to put a button on a wireframe. It is an integration of customer understanding, site content and process design. Get it right and the value of your website will increase substantially. Get it wrong or don't bother, and you may be missing opportunities. The traffic is there, the investment is done. You may as well convert more of them.

Posted by Jeremy Bolt on 10/27/09 at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks

23 October 2009

Twitter | Bing and Google Seal the Deal

The biggest news this week was the fact that Bing is starting to index and list in its search results, Twitter and Facebook information that has been made public by the profile owners. Oh and Google is doing the same thing re Twitter, but it's a planned rollout over the next few months, WOW that is big news. That's 54 million monthly Twitter uses whose tweets will now be in the SERPS. This has a really good outlook the big search giants in regards of value they can add as with a lot search segments (news, online shopping, recent events etc) the most recent news are often the most relevant.

Photo by respres via Creative Commons

This doesn't however mean that your once pristine search engine results will be polluted by largely inconsequential tweets and Facebook status updates. More than likely the big search engines will use all this additional data to leverage existing results and refine them using the additional Facebook and Twitter data to get the most relevant sites to the top of the rankings. I think a big factor will be how the search engines rank tweets as relevant or not. Will they use number of followers? Re-tweets? Specific mentions across other social media outlets? I think this will be one of the most difficult parts of the deal for the search engines to work out. An interesting aside is that Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg mentioned that no money changed hands with Microsoft with regards to their deal.

Some reviews of the Bing Twitter search has revealed that some already established Twitter search engines have better effectiveness and features. Such engines like Tweetme is said to be far more advanced in terms of interacting with Twitter than Bing, unfortunately without changing my Bing locale setting, I can't confirm this. It seems the Bing Twitter search is not available in Australia, see below.

I attempted to find some information about how much data the Twitter servers actually hold but was ultimately unsuccessful but the point I wanted to get across was that's it's got to be loads. All that data is now going to be duplicated within not only Bing but also Google, now when you add in the additional Facebook data that Bing is going to sift through, thats alot of storage requirements. If I was an investor I would look at who provides storage and servers to these behemoths and get involved right away.

What does this mean for search engine optimisation? Well, you should tweet all new content created, this might get it indexed more quickly. What will be very interesting is the value that search engines will assign to the value of links and would the value of links change if the search engines 'see' the tweet as an authority ? There are also spam considerations here, Twitter is inherently easy to spam and the search engines will have to implement some pretty stringent spam measures, will these measures filter out any SEO specific measures to take advantage of Twitter? Here is a list of some good seo tips for Twitter that might be more applicable in the next few months.

Personally I think this is a good thing, if it is done correctly that is. More real-time results, more relevancy will be added to the SERPS. This will only be the case if this extra data stream is integrated in a way where useless ancillary tweets are eliminated, spam is filtered and ranking algorithm is perfected in a way that it allocated high relevance to trusted tweets while discarding the one-offs and tweets about how you like your toast.

Enjoy your Weekend all.

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/23/09 at 1:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Fun Friday SEO

21 October 2009

Spam | Where the Wild things are

Photo by freezelight via Creative Commons

So I have a pretty standard ritual most mornings when I come in the Bruce Clay Australia Offices. Generally, I will come in, boot up the PC and open my Outlook. While my plethora of emails download I will mosey down to my local cafe and get a caffeine fix in the form of a great cappuccino and the culinary highlight of my morning, banana bread, toasted with some butter ( yes I know unhealthy, but I am a hedonist at heart).

I'll then return to my PC and on any normal day and see between 5-10 mails arrive in my blog comments folder. Before I open it, my colleagues often hear me hoping and mumbling under my breath "No spam, No Spam" or " be a proper productive comment, plleeeezzzz", they think I'm a little odd ( that's probably a nice way of putting it ) I just think I'm indulging in the power of positive thinking.

Unfortunately, it is normally an effort in futility as 95 % of the blog comments I get are spam. Now I know we could implement more anti-spam measures but that would also filter out some genuine blog comments, something I am not prepared to do. I have been monitoring blog comments (in various capacities) for a good few years now and have noticed a pretty sizeable shift in terms of where these blog comments are coming from. So where are these wild things (spammers) that continually pollute my blog coming from and why has their location changed?

I will give you a clue. It is the biggest country in the world, they value vodka over wine and this particular country is home to the Czar's and that scoundrel Rasputin. To those who correctly guessed Russia, congrats, for those who guessed Finland or Paraguay, I think it's time to brush up on your General Knowledge. Over 70% of my spammy comments come from Russia (calculated from Russian email addresses and some very basic I.P analysis).

The other spam pretty much comes from various other sources but a significant proportion comes from Bill Bartman (Bill, I know you think "Your site was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday" but please vary your message every 20 comments or so). Some other comments, especially from my Russian comrades are particularly funny or strange, here is a selection of my best (I have no idea what kind of value these comments would add, if you have any ideas let me know, my thoughts on the comments in brackets):

• If the plural of tooth is "teeth," why isn't the plural of booth "beeth"?

• Hello from Russia ( Well hello from Sydney Russia)

• This is a test message, please ignore it ( No Problemo)

• Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so, Excellent post! ( thanks again Bill)

• How much money do book editors make on average?

• Why do we say "heads up" when we actually duck?

• Obviously. Apple manufactures the Mac. ( wow a revelation)

• Where are you from? Is it a secret? :) ( Big Big secret)

• Excellent site, keep up the good work ( Once again thanks to Mr Bartman)

• charming post. upright one decimal where I bicker with it. I am emailing you in detail.(how bizarre)

• hi, how are you? http://google.com - Google (Hi Google)

Photo by D'Arcy Norman via Creative Commons

That is but a selection of the most amusing. When I started monitoring blog comments, the majority actually came from the US, but why and how does most of it come from Russia these days? Has Russia started offering attractive tax breaks for all those spammers out there? Hmm I don't think so. According to Project Honeypot , Russia is the 4th leading comment spammer in the world, although I don't have any historical evidence of this, I can anecdotally say this was not always the case. So why has Russia become this spam superpower?

One of the reasons may be that the ISP's and the internet controlling bodies in Russia lack DNS blacklisting and network spam filters that other countries may have. There are also some very very smart Russians out there that are constantly developing new tools and techniques to circumvent existing anti-spam protocols. Russian Internet usage is also growing at quite a staggering amount, with growth rates reaching 40% annually during the mid 2000's. Pursuant to this, Russia's spam share rocketed from 3 percent during the beginning of 2007, finally reaching 8.3 percent towards the end of the year. As of today, there are almost 58 000 identified spam accounts within Russia. Russian Botnets are also on the rise. One particular Botnet was discovered to have over 70,000 compromised computers at its disposal. There have also been accusations from several security organisations that it is Russian Spammers who cracked the CAPTCHA code, In February 2008 it was reported that spammers had achieved a success rate of 30% to 35% in circumventing spam, using a bot.

But how is this related to SEO? Well every few months or so there is a spiteful post done where SEO's are held responsible for all the spam in the world? This happened pretty recently many people came to both the defence and attack of people in the search engine optimisation industry. I dont like being lumped in with spammers, it's bad for my fragile psyche. Anyway Danny Sullivan has articulated his opinion in a series of articles through the years, his most recent post Thoughts On Web Developers, SEO & Reputation Problems has some great insight and he has a personal interest in the matter after his post How Link Spammers Killed My Wife's Web Site.

My final point is that people associate SEO with spam, this is generally incorrect, however the more spam that gets through peoples defences, the more the SEO=spammers view will be perpetuated. If a rallying call from Danny to stop spam isn't going to stop it, then mine definitely won't. However, if more and more people come out against it, we have a chance to stop the deluge of spam. I can personalise this message though, for all you Russian Spammers out there оставьте мой blog в покое!

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/21/09 at 3:07 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimisation

20 October 2009

Search Engines: Do as we say not as we do

Photo by Eliel via Creative Commons

Well, I had the unfortunate case of waking up on this particular Tuesday morning with an affliction that affects all of us bloggers once in a while, the dreaded 'writers block'. While perusing all my online marketing related news and posts in my inbox this morning looking for some inspiration, I found an oldish article that certainly piqued my interest. It was a Search Engine Land blog post where they stated that Yahoo is indexing the keyword's tag after announcing that they don't ( in a follow up post Yahoo re-articulated what they meant, essentially they sent SEL a message stating "What changed with Yahoo's ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system", so they have corrected the mistake). However, it got me thinking should we as people in the SEO industry (or any other realm of online business) be acting on what the search engines say, or what they ACTUALLY do?

There is a whole lot of examples like this one though. One example that I find particularly amusing is that Google states "You should never have to link to an SEO" and you should avoid SEO companies that "puts links to their other clients on doorway pages". However, I have seen many SEO agencies rank for the highly competitive term 'SEO' based on just links (from what I can tell, although I can't say this for sure) from unrelated client sites (pages about dog food for example using 'SEO' as the anchor text and linking back to their SEO agency) along with 'SEO' in their URL and a strong age of domain as they have very little content on their sites and are still ranking very highly. This occurs across many different county TLD's. You would think Google would address that, especially as they maintain that links should be from pages focused on the same theme or basic content to have high value.

Another example of Google saying one thing and doing another was this example that was spotted by TechCrunch. Essentially Google changed the appearance of their buttons, and they did this by using CSS that "is not currently part of any standard and are only supported by Webkit based browsers (i.e. Chrome and Safari"). In addition the Google.com throws up 39 errors and 2 warnings if you try to validate its homepage for W3C compliance, especially strange as Google is a W3C member. Google accusing Microsoft/Yahoo of becoming a web monopoly also smacks of hypocrisy.

This may be a little bit of hearsay but digging up dirt on search engines is a little more difficult than I previously thought. According to this post Yahoo is offering a substantial financial grant to the University of Stanford for a programme of support for the journalists "working in countries not respecting the freedom of expression" all while working with the Chinese government to purge its china web index of 'undesirable information'. According to Reporters Without Borders, Yahoo.cn blocked a higher percentage of politically sensitive results than Google.cn or msn.cn (this was an old test so things might have changed), talk about saying one thing and doing another.

Now this is not meant to be a rant (although it might sound like it, it's not meant to be an attack on any entity) but I needed some examples that support my main point. The axiom I am trying to get across here is that you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, even if its source is one of the big search engines (who for some reason the majority of us trust implicitly) or a slightly nerdish guy whose surname rhymes with mutts and loves cats.

You need to read between the lines, listen so carefully so what the Google, Yahoo and Bing's of the world DON'T say as sometimes you can glean more information out of this, than what they actually do say. Rely on successful tests that you (and contemporaries that you trust) have run to evolve methodologies instead of Sergey Brin intimating that links don't have value anymore. Run experiments, collect data and make intelligent decisions on that data as opposed to hearsay. The SEO industry is one of the most dynamic in the business world and will only continue to grow, evolve and improve if we persist with challenging the conventional wisdom out there, finding new and better ways to get our clients websites in front of the right target market, so get out there and challenge & question everything!!

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/20/09 at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Industry News

16 October 2009

Rich Snippets, Semantic web, Linked Data and SEO

You probably all have noticed that Google is displaying more and more rich snippets in its SERPs. These snippets include various information such as number of reviews, rating, price range, author, format, etc.

These rich snippets are made possible thanks to two major open standards called Microformats and RDFa that are now supported by the major search engines. In that matter, Yahoo has been leading the way since 2006, and we had to wait until May 2009 for Google to start supporting them. As far as I know, Bing hasn't made any official annoucement about supporting microformats yet, but seems to be supporting them somehow (see below).

Bing result for my favourite cafe in NY:

Same result in Google:

The microformats and RDFa are two elements of a broader project of semantic web called Linked Data initiated by Tim Berners-Lee. The basic principles is to mark-up the html using specific tags to make the information richer on the page.

The rich snippets are a direct consequence of this initiative, making these SERPs results more interesting for the users as well as for the webmasters who are encouraged to use them to gain more real-estate on the SERPs.

Three major types of information can be marked-up with Microformats: Reviews (hReview), Product information (hProduct )or Contact details (hCard). The same can be done using RDFa.

If you go and have a look at the citysearch page above, or at any Linkedin profile page, you will notice that the microformats or RDFa are being used in different orders, often mixed together. This is just to say this standards are flexible, and Google is getting very good at picking them up.

So what are the uses for SEO? Well for instance, you might want to mark-up the "Contact-Us" page to help the search engines pick up the contact details and improve local business rankings. When optimising websites selling or promoting products and/or services, you can use microformats to markup the product title, description, brand, price, review etc, or use them to markup reviews like most shopping websites already do.

Besides, some other standard are emerging such as the video microformats, and its RDFa equivalent based on the Dublin Core Meta Data Initiative. You won't be surprised if such initiatives start spreading for images, and think about the potential of marking up social media profiles.

Anyways, before publishing your page, you can use the rich snippet testing tool from Google. For instance, the test of the result above gives a similar result below, but when I tested my Linkedin public profile, the test displayed my location and position, but these are not appearing in Google.

One thing to bear in mind when it comes to rich snippets, there are no clear guidelines from the search engines, and they always mention that they "may" use them for their SERPs.

This evolution of the web to the semantic web will enable users to search through more and richer data, potentially being marked up by dozens of different tags referencing each others, inter-linking the web and therefore providing a new dimension called Linked Data.
The search engines are well aware of this, and the more they use these new dimensions, the more relevant their results will be.

Posted by Martin Orliac on 10/16/09 at 2:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Industry News

14 October 2009

Google Webmaster Tools | New Features | Malware details & Fetch as Googlebot

As announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, two new features have been rolled out in a special 'labs' section of Google Webmaster Tools. The two new features are Malware details and Fetch as Googlebot.

Malware details

Finding out whether your site had been maliciously injected or modified with Malware has been fairly difficult to determine in the past. Now it's a whole lot easier. Google has announced the an option within its webmaster tools that will show you segments of code(injected HTML tags, JavaScript, or embedded Flash files) within your site that it considers Malware. This will help you get rid of any nasty Malware issues affecting your site and prevent any possible ranking penalties. This tool is based on automatic Malware scanners that Google developed to clean up their index. If possible Google will also provide details about the particular Malware that is afflicting your site. Below is a screenshot of the new feature (The Bruce Clay Australia site doesn't have any Malware, awesome).

Fetch as Googlebot

The fetch as Googlebot feature allows you to see a specific page on your site pretty much exactly as Googlebot sees it. On first viewing it looks remarkably similar to the source code of any given page however it also includes other information such as the HTTP headers information. This tool is useful for a couple of reasons; first of all it may give you an insight as to how Googlebot views complicated and advanced JavaScript functions on your site. It's also handy as it will quickly highlight any issues you may be having with your robots.txt or .HTACCESS file. On the Google Webmaster Central Blog some users seem to be limited to receiving only 585 lines of code or a file that it's limited to 100kb, however these maybe isolated incidences.

These two new features may not be revolutionary or have massive SEO benefit but are a nice incremental improvement to Google Webmaster Tools.

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/14/09 at 11:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Industry News

12 October 2009

The value of StumbleUpon

Essentially the Bruce Clay Australia blog was started on the 1st of April (I do love the irony of starting a blog on April fool's day). Since then I have not only been the main contributor of the blog but have also been tasked with content syndication goals for the blog to increase the profile and publicity of the blog. I have experimented with RSS content syndication engines as well as the usual social bookmarking sites ( Digg, Sphinn, reddit etc) but by far the best referral in terms of sheer numbers, low bounce rate and average time on site is StumbleUpon.

Photo by topgold via Creative Commons

StumbleUpon is a social website which allows its users a new way to experience the Internet. Users list their preferences and likes and are randomly directed to a site/ blog post that is tagged with and matches those interests, think of it like the Pandora music player but for content. It was originally sold to eBay for $75,000,000 (that's 75 million if I got my zeroes right) and recently it was sold back to the original developers. StumbleUpon has more than 8,453,000 members as of October 11, 2009. It even has a nifty StumbleUpon Toolbar which makes it easy to rate selected articles and submit new articles for review by the StumbleUpon readers. One of the great things about StumbleUpon is that their algorithm is pretty good at choosing fun and interesting articles that match your tastes and deliver them seamlessly to you.

To put this in perspective during the month of September, StumbleUpon sent 5 times as much traffic to the Bruce Clay Australia blog as the next best referral site. Granted the time on site was slightly less that the site average but it is a great result regardless. A great piece of advice on a guest post from Problogger states that "write posts for your target market, not for the many" and I think this is really sage guidance. StumbleUpon has also driven traffic from places in the world where I'm pretty sure nobody had ever heard of Bruce Clay Australia (Isle of Man for example)

Now it's all good and well that you know StumbleUpon can generate lots of traffic from a wide variety of sources for your site/blog, but how can you write articles that effectively garner new traffic? Well, I now present Marc's Super StumbleUpon Submissions Secrets (try saying that a few times over):

• Make an eye catching headline- this will entice readers to read the article (this is true for all social media bookmark sites but seems to be particularly so for StumbleUpon.

• Dont let you blog/site look like a barcode-Spice it up a little, most of us are visual beings, throw in a cool image or two, research has proven that our eyes are attracted to images immediately and words secondary.

• Vote and Stumble often-the more you vote and Stumble other posts or article the higher value your Stumbles will become.

• Use Relevant tags-Don't forget to tag your article with the correct and relevant tag, or it will never find the target market you are after.

• Suggest new sites- dont just Stumble the same site all the time, if you have found a new site that knocks your socks off, Stumble that too. StumbleUpon seems to give more weight to users who consistently Stumble new sites.

I would recommend submitting a series of articles to a number of social bookmarking to find out what works best for your genre or niche. When I did this, I found for the Bruce Clay Australia Blog that StumbleUpon was the best resource and shall now leave the Digging and Sphinning to my peers.

Happy Stumbling everyone.

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/12/09 at 2:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Linking Strategy

9 October 2009

How to be a better SEO

We all know people in the search engine optimisation field can be a competitive bunch, all trying to get to that number 1 ranking for their chosen key terms, phrases etc. This competitive nature drives a desire to be better and do better in most of the SEO's that I know. This really is a good thing as it drives people to innovation, and I think even more importantly to better themselves and improve their skills as SEO's. But how can you become a better SEO?

Photo by World Economic Forum via Creative Commons

Expand your Skill set

A lot of people in the SEO industry either have marketing-esque or IT-based origins and historically these are two disciplines haven't overlapped much with the few exceptions (looking at you Steve Jobs). People with marketing qualifications have been hesitant to branch into the IT field and vice versa, however if you want to become a successful SEO you need to have a fair bit of knowledge of both. Personally, I came from a predominantly marketing background, and I felt it was imperative that I learnt some IT and in particular HTML and CSS skills. Yep that was me, the guy reading HTML for dummies on the bus and let me tell you something it has been a massive help in my SEO analysis work.

No longer am I the one going to the technical guru asking the difference between a span and a div, now I can figure it out for myself and see how certain HTML impacts of the SEO effectiveness of the page I'm analysing, awesome. Similarly, if you are a complete coding freak who views a website and automatically sees the code behind it (Neo style from the matrix) but has never explored the wonderful world of Google Analytics it is time to get involved, study up on some Google analytics tutorials, visit Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik (in my opinion one of the best analytics blogs on the web) and get a heads up on what great things you can do with Google analytics. If you are unsure about where to start do a website audit (not a real website audit but you know what I mean) on your own SEO skills, find out where you think you are great and where you are not so great and concentrate on improving your weaker areas. Many SEO companies also deliver training programs, which specifically address certain SEO areas such as SEO copy writing or link building; these may seem fairly pricey but are usually worth the outlay as they can provide valuable SEO information that is presented in a structured way. In fact Bruce Clay Australia is running a 1 day SEO training course in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during October.

Read, Read, Read

An imperative part of being an SEO is keeping up to date with new developments, emerging technology and current trends. For example, when the no=follow/Pagerank sculpting debacle (Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that Pagerank sculpting no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages) erupted, I needed to know what was going on ASAP to soothe anxious clients, but how did I know what to tell them? Well, I have about 20 different online marketing/search engine optimisation/general marketing/Search engine webmaster central emails or information updates sent to me daily. If I have the time I also peruse my RSS reader, which has some less vital but always informative posts on topics ranging from Google's less than stellar handling of old Usenet archives to Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing short stories. There are a couple places to start off here, The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog is always a good resource and well as Search Engine Land's Search Cap, which is a collection of the week's best articles and resources from around the web. The more resources you read the more resources you will find and it's all about prioritising and finding the blogs/updates that you feel give you the best value.

Start your own site and Experiment

This was something that was suggested to me as soon as I got into the industry, and I regret the fact that I only acted on this advice about a year later. You can learn a fortune of theoretical information about SEO on the web, but if you never put that intelligence into practice you won't improve yourself as an SEO as quickly and effectively as you could. Believe me its alot easier to tinker with your own site and stuff it up completely than explaining to your boss why you mistakenly disallowed all the search engine spiders in the robots.txt file and your clients' site is not longer ranking for anything (this happened to a friend of a friend, promise :) ). If you are looking to get to grips with the Google Website Optimiser where you can use different types of testing to see if a red button or green button will get you more conversions, it is also easier to implement this on your own site. Another advantage of setting up your own site is that is gives you a unique insight into how your clients might think and what metrics and KPI's to present to clients to show that your SEO efforts are actually working.

There are heaps of other things you can do like : improving your people and public speaking skills, getting to grips and exploring new social media trends and networks, getting to grips with the mainstream advertising industry and what methods and techniques they employ that you could borrow to improve your SEO, the ability to hypnotise Matt Cutts and steal his Google knowledge and...... well I could go on forever but they key here, is knowing yourself and being able to prioritise what new skills or projects would most benefit you as a practitioner of SEO and endeavour to improve yourself in these areas.

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/ 9/09 at 1:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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7 October 2009

SEO for mobile - back to 1999

Do you remember websites in the 1999? List of links and information, not very content rich, lots of 404 error pages, algorithms based on on-page factors (such as keyword density) and links were not a major ranking factor in most of the popular engines. It was just the beginning of a new economy with new business models and a new exciting channel for companies. Businesses were unfamiliar with this new channel and were adopting their old marketing knowledge to the web. Search engines were still trying to understand the complexity of the web. Does this sound like websites for mobiles in 2009? I think so. However, I believe this time round, companies will start considering the importance of website design and seo for this new channel much earlier than before.

Mobile internet growth

The mobile internet has been taking off only recently and things are beginning to evolve in 2009.

SEMPO has just released a white paper released on the growing of the mobile market which included some phenomenal stats:

- US: mobile searches will expand to 56.2 million by 2013. In May 2009 there have been 64 Million US surfers in the mobile internet (twice that of 2008)

- Japan : 55% of Japanese mobile users accessed the interned at least once a week

- China: Almost 20% of mobile users (118million people) accessed the internet at least one hour a week

- EU-7 (FR, GE, IT, Neth, SP, SW, UK) end of 2008 - 24% of mobile users accessed the internet at least once a month.

Interesting statistics have been released from AIMA on usage behavior and preferences of Australian mobile phone users (based on a survey of 3,710 respondents). According to the research:

- 56% of respondents used their mobile phone to get information at least once a month
- 21% of respondents said they visit websites on their mobile phone at least once a day
- 25% of respondents conducted mobile searches at least once a week.
- 34% of respondents accessed websites on their phone by typing in a URL
- 18% were likely to access the web using the mobile phone's company portal
- 52% used their mobile phone to visit websites
- 49% used their mobile phone to browse the internet
- 43% used their mobile phone for mobile search
- 50% uses their mobile phone for account balance
- 14% used their mobile to buy things not for their mobile phone

Interestingly 34% of respondents type in URLs as opposed to using search engines. This is mainly believed to be because of the poor usability of handsets, but I also believe due to the lack of accessibility through search engines or mobile portals. 53% of the respondents stated that they used coupon or barcode to a free discount or a free ticket (that's very interesting). According to AIMIA the next area of growth are payments through mobiles. This will reinforce the importance of the mobile channel for e-commerce opportunities.

The industry has overcome some barriers however still some more need to be overcome. A big barrier to entry is cost as consumers still believe that mobile internet is too expensive. Speed is improved however it is not fast as we would like.

SEO for mobiles face new challenges.

The biggest challenges are the multiplicity of platforms and browsers, different hardware and software, different apps and rival search engines. Most of the websites do not have mobile friendly version of their sites. Currently search engines use transcoded software to re-format websites to their mobile standards for mobile search users' devices (e.g. flash technologies frames and Ajax that are not supported by mobile phones). The downside is that transcoded websites are usually poorly re-formatted, causing a poor users experience - this is very bad for SEO as URLs and links are transcoded too. Technologies however are evolving and adapting to mobile users needs, in fact Adobe recently announced that the Flash Player for mobiles will be available in 2010.

At this stage, the mobile results reflects desktop results due to the lack of mobile content available. So if a site ranks well in Google for desktop, it should rank well also on mobiles. Still this does not guarantee that your visitors are going to convert if your site is not user friendly. However new mobile metrics are emerging, such as location, device type and content format and I am curious to know how search engines will control this. According to Google, the average queries on mobile search are 15 characters and Google is now using what is called "predictive search" to assist users in completing their search.

Interesting guidelines have been released by mobithinking.com for mobile seo best
practises. In summary key points are:

1. Improve user experience on mobile to attract more audience

2. Focus on targeting mobile users not desk users

3. Recognise the difference between mobile search engines and traditional search engines - where location, devices type and formats play an important role

4. Understand mobile search phrase queries and optimise around them - most of mobile search queries are location/task specific

5. Realise the challenge of different browsers, devices and content standardisation

6. Submit your mobile site to directories, business listings services and relevant portals

7. Make your mobile site crawlable - use correct headers, don't block IP ranges unless necessary, submit a mobile sitemap, use clean code, link to other mobile pages

8. Confirm to the new W3C MobileOk .

Posted by Raffaella Bronzi on 10/ 7/09 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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2 October 2009

Google Webmaster Tools

Some people in the office have called me a bit of a Google fan boy and you know what, I am a bit. If you look at how much help and assistance Google offers website owners and anyone involved in the web, it's hard not to be a little bit of a fan. One of the Google products I use every day is their webmaster tools.

Photo by SEO Toronto via Creative Commons

Google webmaster tools are super easy to set up. It is as easy as signing up for a Google account and uploading a html file to the root directory of your site to validate that the site is in fact yours. Then the fun begins. Google webmaster tools provides a wealth of information for your site on the web and a lot of the intelligence can be used to further tweak and optimise your site to improve the ROI gained from your website.

You may be able to extract a lot of the information that is contained in Google webmaster tools from other sources, but it can be time consuming and the intel might not always be that accurate. Here are some of my favourite parts of Google webmaster tools.

• Top search queries -This section returns information about your best pages on your site in terms of driving traffic and converting people who view your site in the SERPS into people who actually visit your site. One page converting better than others? Have a look at its title tag; see how you can modify title tags on other pages throughout your site to be more like the better converting pages. You can also find out what keywords your site ranks for, cool!

• Links to your site -Links are the life blood of SEO, generally speaking the more links to your site, the better it is going to rank. In Google webmaster tools you can download every link pointing to your site, and you can even find out what pages have more links than others. You can find out which pages garner more links and create similar content for other pages in order to get natural back links.

• HTML suggestions- Google webmaster tools even helps you find out potential HTML problems with your site. When the GoogleBot spiders your site it makes note of duplicate meta descriptions, short meta descriptions and meta descriptions that are too long. You can do the same thing with title tags. This allows you to fix any HTML errors that might have a negative effect on your rankings within Google.

• Crawler Access- We recently had a client who couldn't understand why their traffic had suddenly dropped about 90% in the space of about a week. A quick visit to Google webmaster tools illuminated the fact that they had disallowed access for the GoogleBot to their entire site, probably not the smartest move but by using Google webmaster it was quickly rectified.

• Settings- You can even use Google webmaster tools to target a specific county for your site. You also have the ability to make your site appear with the www preceding it or not.

But don't take my word for it, setup Google webmaster tools on your site today and find out what a useful and productivity enhancement tool Google webmaster tools can be.

Have a Good long weekend everyone.

P.S Happy birthday for a certain Mr Clay who celebrated his special day during the week.

Posted by Marc Elison on 10/ 2/09 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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