« back to blog home

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

To www. Or Not To www.

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Is your web site accessible if you don’t type www-dot at the beginning of the URL? If your web site doesn’t display when you leave the www-dot part out, then perhaps you need to wonder if this is harming your web presence, and your ability to be found – both by direct visitors, and via search engines.

bpodr-address-bar1When the Web first became mainstream, the www part of an address was synonymous with the Internet. As businesses started to increasingly advertise their web sites in mainstream media, billboards, radio ads, TV spots, and magazines were filled with the domain names of their shiny new websites, and almost every single one included the www (World Wide Web). This was probably a neccessity – with large hoards of people being introduced to the concept of web domain names and email addresses, the www was like a sign-post pointing on-line. So has anything changed – is the www-dot still as neccessary as ever?

We’re seeing more and more web sites advertising their services without including the www part – perhaps they feel people no longer need a sign-post, or perhaps dropping the www shows the company as being part of the web 2.0 generation, where www-dot sounds so 1.0. Flickr.com, Digg.com, Google.com – when was the last time you saw a web site being promoted when the www was invited to the party? Perhaps a better gauge is how you communicate domains and interesting sites by mouth – do you tell people your site is www.your-site.com, or just your-site.com?

There a lot of disucssion around the web at the moment about whether you should develop a site with or without the www, with campaigns geared for and against the www.

Whichever way you communicate your business web address, make sure that visitors can reach your site with or without the www. I’ve been working with some clients already this year whose sites were only accessible if you typed the www-dot part. I think this is a mistake. By all means, advertise your site with or without the www, just make sure that you’re not forcing your visitors to get it right – you’ll be the only one to suffer if you do.

Don’t force visitors to have to get it right – think for them (my favourite web development mantra – Don’t make me think!) and make sure that whether they include it or not, they end up at your site. Don’t assume your visitors will type in the www part of your domain, if you do make this assumption, cover your ass (and maximise your traffic) by ensuring that those visitors who forget to type it, still end up where they should be.

What about the www and SEO?

As far as I know, there is no direct consequence to your SEO efforts for not including the www in your domain name. The most important point to note is that Google treats them differently – as if they were two different sites. If you’ve got half your incoming links pointing to www.your-site.com, and half to your-site.com, then your search optimised pages are only working half as hard for you. The page rank (and search engine love), will be split between the two domains.

The easiest way to overcome this, is to set up a redirect. This way, if your visitor types the www: fine, if they don’t type the www: fine. A redirect also tells the Search engines that all your hard-earned incoming links are for the same site.

WARNING: CODE ON ROAD AHEAD!

If your site is running on an Apache server, a redirect is fairly straightforward. You should have a file in the root html directory called .htaccess. Make sure you double-check it definately doesn’t exist before creating one – it could be hidden and could contain a lot of important rules for how your site address behaves.

Your .htaccess file should contain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-site.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(replace the your-site.com with your actual domain name.)
.

What ever you choose to do with your www:

  • Try and be consistent in your naming;
  • Ensure visitors can reach you with or without it;
  • Beware if you don’t you’re confusing users, diluting search rankings for your domain, and probably missing out on some opportunities to drive traffic.

Go check your web address and make sure it is accessible with or without the www.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Blogging & SEO Best For Online Marketing ROI

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

A recent Hubspot report has illustrated some interesting practices among businesses regarding their marketing efforts, and how they translate into sales and leads. From their Best Marketing Practices blog post:

Best Marketing Practices
Word Cloud for Best Marketing Practices

SEO, Blog, and Website representing the best return for marketing spend

Worst Marketing Practices
Word Cloud for Worst Marketing Practices

Direct Mail, Trade Shows and Telemarketing amongst those efforts with the worst ROI

A great use of Tag Clouds to demonstrate the effectiveness of different marketing efforts, but what do they mean?

These images are the result of their State of Inbound Marketing report – surveying a range of business of all sizes about the ROI of their marketing campaigns. Clearly Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), business Blogging, and a company Web Site feature high on the list of reported ‘Best Practices’, so let’s take a look at what the businesses who participated in the survey have reported about these marketing drives:

  • 75% of businesses who regularly blog classify their company blog as ‘Useful’, ‘Important’, or ‘Critical’ to their marketing;
  • 55% of businesses stated that Blogging and Social Media offered the lowest cost per lead;
  • Small Businesses compete with larger organisations by spending a larger portion of their marketing budget on SEO, Blogging, and Social Media activity;
  • Online marketing provides a lower cost-per-sales lead than traditional marketing;
  • SEO represented the most efficient ROI, with an average budget spend of 12% generating 16% of all business leads;
  • Email Marketing accounted for 14% of marketing budget, returning 10% of all leads;
  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing (Sponsored links on Adwords, etc.) saw 15% lead generation from 13% of the marketing budget.

You can grab yourself a copy of Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing report (PDF) over on their blog. Well worth a read if you’re thinking of re-evaluating the spread of your marketing budget during these tough times.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Blogging And Your Business, On-line Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments »

Why Bad SEO Is Bad For Your (Site’s) Health

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Many people now know good Search Engine Optimsation (SEO) when they see it – high rankings in search engines for chosen keywords is one easy way to spot good SEO in action, and usually a pretty fair indication that all is well with a web site, and it’s ranking.

But what about Bad SEO? If your site is filled with good quality relevant content, that you’re sure potential customers would love, but is still languishing deep within the search engine result pages (SERPs), what then? Is this a lack of good SEO – probably, but there’s also a chance your site is implementing bad SEO, and that’s, well, bad.

Bad SEO, also known as ‘Black-hat’ SEO – conjuring images of satanic computer witchcraft – are techniques that are used in an attempt to trick search engines into listing a site higher than its content would otherwise allow. It normally means trying to get a site listed on the first page or so of Google for keywords that are only loosely relevant (if at all relevant), to the topic of the site.

I can understand why some of these dark art conjurers of black hat SEO work their magic to artificially improve the rankings of the site: those who normally try and fool search engines usually have good reason to do so – their content ain’t that hot. Those that employ dark techniques are usually cut from the same cloth as spammers (probably a heavily-stained, rather musky, raggedy edged cloth. Or an often-used handkerchief.) – there sole intention is to drive more traffic to their (usually un-remarkable) sites, in the hope that some people may click on their ads, or buy a product from them. This may sound appealing to you, but I want to show you the (bright white) light.

Why is bad SEO so bad?

Most search engines have refined the way it lists sites over many years (well, a lot of Internet years), and we can safely assume that they know a thing or two about how to return results that are highly relevant to the searcher (after all, those search engines that still exist, still exist). In order to do this, they have developed algorithms to hunt out high-quality, relevant content. It makes sense that their very future depends on maintaining the relevancy of the results they return. Following this logic, it also makes sense that they don’t display content that is trying to pretend it is something it is not.

Search engines know the most common techniques for trying to disguise content, and penalise sites that are blatantly trying to fool them. In some cases, sites can be banned from search results altogether. Ouch. Not so clever now, heh, bad SEO.

As search engines understand these naughty techniques, I wanted to share some of the most common with you, so you can make sure you avoid these pitfalls – and let good prevail.

What to avoid – bad SEO techniques

To avoid a knuckle-rapping from the search engine giants, here are some of the more common forms of SEO trickery:

  • Hidden Text (or cloaking). Text which is available to search engine bots (the small programs that constantly scout the web, hunting out sites and content), but is not displayed to visitors. Bots will make sure that any text it comes across is also displayed to standard visitors – otherwise it is marked as spam. Why else would you want to hide text on your web site?
  • Keyword Spamming. Including an excessive number of keywords in your site copy, writing sentences that make no sense (but are stuffed with keywords), or stock-piling words and phrases at the bottom of your pages – just to promote keywords is considered spamming. Search engines are smart enough to know whether a sentence makes any sense, or exists purely to publish keywords.
  • Duplicate Content. Content should be unique. Any articles which are copied, will usually only be credited to the first site which published the content. Other sites will be penalised for duplicating – as it is usually only done for the purpose of building content. Always write unique, relevant content.
  • Link Farming. Encouraging links from unrelated sites in order to bolster your incoming links is frowned upon. Why would you want tons of links from sites that have nothing to do with your business or your message? Oh, probably to try and get a higher ranking – waste of energy. Search engines won’t credit you with incoming links from unrelated sites. Worse still, don’t go buying links to your site – these sites are probably known to the likes of Google, and will poison your site karma.

For other SEO mistakes, check out Matt Cutts’ blog – Matt is head of webspam at Google, and often posts about bad (and good) SEO.

Check out your site and make sure your not employing any of these crimes against search engines rankings. If you are, there’s a good chance that your ranking is suffering.

Want to repent your wicked ways? Put your black hat back in the drawer and spend your effort trying to shine in your niche through fantastic, original, and relevant content. Besides, good always triumphs.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

I’m New To SEO, How Do I Improve My Site?

Friday, November 14th, 2008

If you feel that your web site just isn’t working as hard as it could be, are envious of how well your competitors are ranked in the search engines, or want to make sure your site is doing all it can to promote your business effectively, you may be happy to learn that Google have just released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF – 550KB).

Primarily aimed at webmasters, if you’re prepared to roll up your sleeves and make some minor and (in most cases) straightforward changes to your web site, you’ll find the guide to be a great help and a useful resource even if you don’t know how to develop a web site. The guide offers this description on the importance of SEO:

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them.

The guide includes the following sections, each containing a concise overview introducing the topic, clear examples showing the techniques in use, and a guide to good practices – including what to avoid:

  • Create unique, accurate page titles
  • Make use of the “description” meta tag
  • Improve the structure of your URLs
  • Make your site easier to navigate
  • Offer quality content and services
  • Write better anchor text
  • Use heading tags appropriately
  • Optimize your use of images
  • Promote your website in the right ways
  • Take advantage of web analytics services

If you don’t feel like getting your hands dirty with what goes on under the bonnet of your web site, being familiar with what goes into making an optimised site is still a great idea. You could always treat the guide as a checklist for how well your site measures up, or refer to it when hiring in a company to develop or modify your site. If your web site is important to your business, being able to perform your own web site health-check, without the need to call in the experts, will pay huge rewards to your web presence and give you an idea of where you need to invest precious time and resource.

If you think your site is failing to measure up, or think you don’t have enough of the guide’s suggestions in place, Google have also put together some helpful tips for hiring an SEO company, so you can make sure your making the right decision when calling in the experts to fix it for you.

You can read Google’s announcement on their webmaster blog, and grab the Google SEO Starter Guide here.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Resources, SEO | 2 Comments »

Are Page Titles At The Top Of Your SEO Strategy?

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Page titles – probably not the most glamorous aspect of a web site, maybe an after-thought for many web design companies, just a bunch of characters at the top of your browser, right? Wrong. Page titles are a vital part of any SEO strategy, and well deserve their position at the top of any page.

What are page titles?

Every web page has a title. It is the phrase that appears at the top of your browser screen, and is used (or should be used) to describe and define the contents of the web page you are viewing. A page title is also used as the primary phrase to list your page in Search Engine Rankings, and should therefore be treated as an important piece of communication – to both potential visitors and to search engines.

Google says about page titles:

“Your title tags… contain important information that Google uses when indexing your site. Descriptive information will give us good information about the content of your site. In addition, text contained in your title tag can appear in search results pages and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.”

Why should I care?

What do page titles mean to you and your web presence? Well, as search engines crawl your site, they look at your page title as an indication of the content that can be found on your page, this creates an opportunity to describe your web page to search engines with relevant keywords. A poorly constructed page title can also be penalised by search engines, and your site might not be listed as high as your content deserves.

As search engines use page titles to display web pages in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP), it is also the first thing a potential visitor to your site will see (when coming via a search engine) – the more relevant and descriptive your page title is when introducing your web page, the more likely it will be clicked. Similarly, if your page titles are poorly written, or do not describe the content of your page, a visitor may decide not to waste any of their precious time clicking on it.

You may be missing opportunities to attract new visitors and to boost your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with badly written page titles.

Page Titles – Doing it right

Primarily, a good page title should accurately, quickly describe what can be found on the page it represents. As the page will generally be viewed by users when skimming search results, a short, descriptive, content relevant phrase should be used to convey the details of your page. Around 65 characters is usually a good length for a title, and is well worth the time and effort to strike a balance between too much and too little description – consider it an exercise in distilling the message you want to convey down to it’s core.

Page titles should naturally contain relevant keywords that explain what content can be found on the page – if you’re describing your page effectively, then keywords will appear in your description. Never try and force keywords into your title, this could be seen as keyword stuffing by search engines, and your site penalised as a result.

Each page should feature a different title – after all, each page contains different, interesting content for your visitors, right?

A good rule would be to design your title for users first and search engines second. Describing your page content effectively is vital when trying to gain favour with both.

Next Steps – Review Your Page Titles

Check your titles: Browse your site and look at the titles – do they describe the content that is found on each page? As a user, do they give you an idea of what they may find on that page, are they descriptive and compelling?

Check your rankings: Type your business name or a key phrase for your business into Google or Yahoo. Take a look at how your site is listed – this is how the world will see your site. Would you click to find out more about your site based on the page title?

Check your competitors titles: Which of your competitors rank highly for the keywords and terms you would like visitors to use to find your business/products/services? Type a phrase into Google or Yahoo and take a look. You will find the top ranked pages all contain very descriptive titles, which will almost always contain at least some of the term you used in your search.

Ask yourself some questions:

  • Do my page titles describe each of my web pages accurately?
  • Do my page titles contain relevant keywords?
  • Would I click on some/all of my pages if I read those titles and was searching for the content that features on my page?

Your site’s page titles sit at the top of the browser – it should feature high on your SEO priorities, too.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

What Your URLs Say About You

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

How well does your web sites URLs communicate the contents of your web pages? Your web site may not be ranking quite as well as it could with search engines if it struggles.

A URL (uniform resource locator), or web address, generally comes in two flavours; static or dynamic. Using the right type could give you an opportunity to describe the contents of the page and promote relevant keywords to both your visitors and the search engines.

Let’s look at an example…

Perhaps there is a site selling bicycles, called example-bikes.co.uk. Let’s suppose we want to promote a mens mountain bike – a TREK 100, let’s also say that it’s the latest, shiny 2008 model.

A typical dynamic address – www.example-bikes.co.uk/products.php?id=146&category=3&filter=price_ASC – does show the web site address, and clicking it would probably take you to the relevant product, but this address contains no descriptive text (or keywords) regarding the contents of the page. The information after the ? shows the parameters for this particular page, but it does nothing to tell the search engines what might be contained on that page, and more importantly, whether it is a relevant result to show users who are searching for ‘TREK 100‘.

A static address, on the other hand – www.example-bikes.co.uk/mountain-bikes/mens/trek-100-mountain-bike-2008 – doesn’t contain endless parameters and ID numbers, instead, it is formulated to provide a decriptive title about the page you will be visiting. Static addresses, when built properly, give a site rich, descriptive, relevant keywords to use as it’s addresses. These will be more appealing to a potential visitor, who can be fairly sure the link they are about to click in Google will be the correct bike they are searching for, but will also give search engines a good taste for whether the page does indeed contain information about a ‘TREK 100‘ bike.

Why should I care?

When search engines crawl your site, there are a number of factors that they look at when deciding where a page should rank in their results pages (SERPs), and your URLs is one of the factors. At the very least, if your URLs aren’t written using descriptive, optimised keywords you may be losing potential visitors who are reading the URLs from search engine results, or worse – your site might be suffering as a result of where it is placed when visitors search Google, Yahoo and MSN for products that you sell (and that’s usually a lot).

Dynamic, parameter filled URLs may be functional, but visitors to your site will probably struggle to repeat a 150 character address of random number and letters if they would like to share the page address with a friend.

So, your traffic may be lower than it could be as a result of unhelpful URLs, Google and Co may be scratching their heads at what content may be found on your pages, and people may be unable to easily share pages that are deep within your site architecture. Tut.

Doing it right…

  • Try to include descriptive keywords which relate to the content/product/services your page promotes.
  • Seperate words in your URL using hyphens (Google treats hyphens as spaces, so would see trek-100-mountain-bike-2008 as trek 100 mountain bike 2008).
  • Your URLs should also be no more than 4 directories deep (e.g. www.yoursite.co.uk/category-1/subcategory-2/descriptive-product-title-3).
  • Try not to make your page title exactly the same as the pages URL.

The benefits of keyword rich, static looking URLs include:

  • Potentially rank higher in search engine result pages.
  • Tells the search engine more about the contents it can expect to find on the page.
  • Makes it easier for visitors to share web addresses with others.
  • Gives a potential visitor more information about your web page before they click it within search engine results.

What next?

Take a look at the URLs within your site, read them and ask yourself:

  • Are these easy to repeat to someone, if I needed to guide them to a particular page?
  • Do they describe they contents/products/services that are displayed on the page?
  • Are any of my keywords feature within the URL?

If you answer no, your traffic may be suffering as a result of your URLs not saying very much about you at all.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

SEO Is Not The Answer. Get Over It.

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Adam and I have both had conversations in the last week with companies keen to talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Companies that still needed persuading a couple of years ago that the web would be a key part of the their business future now see SEO as a panacea for all their traffic ills. If only they could find the right level of SEO skills, the phone would ring off the wall, their turnover of widgets would explode, and the company directors could take early retirement. This belief is reinforced by digital marketing agencies hyping SEO: take a look at the ads at the back of a magazine like NMA and you’ll see pages of SEO services on offer. So it must work.

Well, not quite. Skilfully applied SEO ‘magic’ may increase your search engine rankings in the short term but it’s really a question of diminishing returns. Success will always be temporary because it is subject to the arcane algorithms applied by the ranking engine. SEO is really Search 1.0. Let’s face it, publishing a web site without at least some level of applied SEO nowadays is like publishing your company details in the Yellow Pages using yellow ink: you’re invisible. SEO, therefore, is something you build into your site at birth.

Relying solely on SEO, however, is like putting up a billboard and then expending huge amounts of time, effort, and cash to erect a traffic management system that directs all cars past your advertisement. Described like this, you can see immediately how SEO has its roots in the old rules of marketing: make them look at me! We’ve moved on. (And the traffic will soon find a better and quicker route home.) You may get to the top of the rankings but that’s not much use if all your traffic is clicking through from Poland and Lithuania and you only deliver in a twelve mile radius of Manchester.

It’s the SEO experts who benefit
There is an increasing war of attrition between SEO experts and more wonga is probably spent on fine-tuning what lies behind the site than on the content and usefulness of the site itself. We know: we’ve done SEO in the past. This state of affairs ignores the fundamental truth of a successful web site: the most valuable visitors arrive through recommendation and they return because your site is sticky.

Recommendation leads to valuable visitors because they have already taken some self-qualifying steps before they arrive. They know what your site is about and they are either interested in the subject or even ready to buy. It means, for a start, that your home page or landing page can get down to business quickly. Contrast that with a click through from Google based on a simple link.

Bad love
Talk of recommendations raises the question of back links and link love. Google loves links, of course, but it’s choosy in the same way you would be choosy about recommendations. If I’m looking for a restaurant in a new town, I might look for further confirmation if I discover that the first two people who raved about the food and service at “Hank’s Especially Greasy Spoon” were the manager’s son and Hank’s wife.

Staying with the restaurant theme; if the manager shouts loudly enough then people will come. But what if the food’s dreadful, the service appalling, and my partner’s a vegetarian and the chef only does meat? I won’t be making another booking as I leave and I’m not going to be telling friends, colleagues, and family to hurry on down for a meal.

Acquiring visitors through recommendations and positive conversations means there will be fewer disappointed customers. Save the money you may end up spending on SEO and hire a better chef – or at least some bigger wine glasses.

While writing this I received an email asking if I wanted my web site to be ‘top of the Google rankings’. This sort of SEO promise is becoming increasingly like the other spam I get offering to add inches to my manhood – and I guess they’re not talking about my height. To be fair, the SEO offer, however shady the methods applied, might have a better chance of success – but not for long. The problem with using underhand tactics to manipulate rankings is that sooner or later – and usually sooner – Google notices and your site will be penalised. That means it more or less disappears from view. Yellow ink applied by Google.

Find them before they find you
The answer is to engage with customers before they arrive at your site and then, once they have visited, make sure your product or content is vital enough that they keep returning. (Maintaining core content is a subject for another post altogether.) So, less SEO and more CIE – Customer Interaction Effort.

Tags: , ,
Posted in On-line Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments »