I dig the fact that Google have updated their SEO page. The update includes two key areas: what an SEO might offer & useful questions to ask an SEO.
It's interesting to note that a few of these bullet points seem to edge towards suggesting that an SEO should offer a little bit more than just SEO analysis; content creation or other complementary marketing services are two suggested extras.
In particular, the question "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?" caught my eye.
Have you been to an SEO pitch? How much do you like that question?
I'm always keen to stress that ethical SEO is not usually quick. A common analogy is to pair SEO to a marathon and PPC to a sprint. Of course, SEO can produce results quickly if an otherwise authoritative site has some easy to fix and howling issues (like a disallow: / in the robots.txt).
What about results? Do you talk keyword positions any more? Really? Even with geographic results being increasingly common and personalised results frequent. Perhaps you talk about traffic... but then can you predict search frequencies?
A big company once asked me to predict some search frequencies for their brand term. I asked them whether they were planning another year of TV ads and whether they planned to repeat last year's aggressive London Underground poster campaign. They had no idea. It was pretty easy to point out that those offline advertising campaigns have dramatic effects on their search frequencies and I was in no position to even estimate their brand traffic until they knew more about their marketing plans for the year.
Face it; "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?" is a tough question to answer.
I'm glad Google's pushed it to the fore, though. SEOs who guarantee high positions, quickly, for new sites in competitive marketplaces should get caught out. They'll probably repeat their unlikely predictions whereas better educated and more ethical SEO agencies in the pitch will likely explain some of the issues around the question.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Google's trick question?
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
SMX Madrid - Target Global
Ah; managed to find a power supply here in the huge Spanish conference centre and get some juice back in my laptop batteries - enough for a spot more live blogging.
Next up is the Target Global session. We've Matias Perel and Rand Fishkin speaking. Rand has sunglasses on his head and a beard - must be Spanish.
Do you know what... Matias looks a lot like Massimo Burgio. I wonder if there's been a last minute speaker change. Yep. No Matias.
Targeting US/English Language Regions
Rand promises less corny American jokes. Awww.
We kick off with Hitwise's market share graph they did for Search Engine Land. The one that shows Google with a huge 67.9% blue pie slice of the US market. Poor old Yahoo and Microsoft with just slivers. If I squint... oh, I think I can see... it's Ask.com.
Now the Hitwise chart for the UK. It's worse here; they have 73% with Google UK and 14% with Google.com. Yeah. Do the maths.
If you look at Western Europe - it's Google, ebay and Yandex. Hmm. Yandex? I wonder if someone in Moscow is currently sulking that they've just been lumped in with Western Europe.
In Canada Google has a 90% market share. Ouch.
In Oz and New Zealand - 90% Google too. That leaves Yahoo and nineMSN with about 5% each. Rand points out that Yahoo and MSN have their TV partnerships (7 for Yahoo and 9 for MSN).
Israel... go on, guess the number... yeah. It's 90%.
So! Is there anywhere Google doesn't rule?
China - Baidu 55%, Google 21.7% and Yahoo 7.2% Rand notes that when he was in China you could search at Google but get your results back in Baidu. The government was forcing the ISPs to do this... easy to see why Google might struggle.
Russia - Yandex 47.5%, Ramber... rumours that Yandex's share is much higher.
Japan - Yahoo, Google and MSN in that order. Searching is very vertical so lots of traffic goes straight to, for example, shopping pages.
Korea - Naver 72%, Duam 11% and Yahoo with 6%. Rand reckons the future of social search might be echoed here. When you type a query into Naver, before you see the SERPs, you get UGC answers.
Czech - Seznam 62%, Google 24%, Centrum 5%, Atlas 3% and Jyxo 0.5%
Also something about Estonia - but I blinked.
Rand says search engines look at the geographic location of your IP address. They look at the geographic association of your domain extension. He notes that .com, .org, .net have become English language centric.
The registrar information is also used. He says Danny's a hippy. On-page address information is also used.
Language can be used too but can be frustrating. Take Spanish, for example, there are a lot of people in the US and Latin America who write in Spanish and then Google assumes they're targeting Spanish users.
Rand toys with the idea of targeting SEOMoz to just Spanish traffic. :)
Ah... on to the challenge of targeting two or more countries via Google's WMC. It's true that you can't do it on one domain but you can register two folders (or more) and geo-target them.
Why doesn't Google use the Dublin Core meta tags for language/country targeting? Not enough sites use them.
What's important for Google?
- trusted domains
- trusted links; Rand reckons 1 or 2 trusted links can be more useful than 500 other links
- the dreaded sandbox; Rand reckons we'll see more of this in languages Google's not so confident in
What's important for Baidu?
- phone up Baidu and buy the organic traffic
- lots of traffic is multimedia centric
What's important for Yandex?
- similar to Google but less influence on domain trust
- rumours that you can ring up and buy changes...
What's important for Naver
- be social; get the community to write about you
What's important for Yahoo Japan
- it uses Yahoo search technology
- some focus on domain authority
- some focus on keyword use
- slightly easier to game
What's important in local engines (Seznam, etc)
- talk to a locals
Targeting the US
- competition levels very high; with the exception of some UK results
- best spam detection
- best spammers
- lots of link evaluation; lots of links discounted
The US population expects a high level of user experience. You need to do well here in order to get those editorial citation links. This is why blogging is popular.
Rand says he's not a monkey.
Here's a big question; Why am I ranking well in one enigne but not others?
Here are Rand's answers;
- different weighting of links
- different crawling/indexing index - Google is more robust; Yahoo & MSN are more flaky
- different keyword usage limits - easy to go overboard on Google
- different ways to measure 'valuable vs thin content'
- sometimes historical issues with the domain or IP address can cause problems
Getting Local Results from Anywhere in the World
- Rand shares the &GL=<country> trick with the audience
- ie; &GL=US or &GL=DE (for Google)
- for Yahoo; simply go to the country specific domain
And that's a wrap! Now onto the questions.
... oh. Wait. Massimo's talking about SEMPO again.
SMX Madrid - Target Europa
Oohkay; let's see if I need the translation headsets for this one. Next up I believe we are talking about targeting Italy and the Netherlands. Speaking we have Lennert de Rijk (Netherlands) and Massimo Burgio (Italy). The panel is going to try and take questions on the German market too.
The Netherlands
Ah yes; Lennert is speaking in English. Good man. +5 points already. He's Dutch and works in Spain. He's the Managing Director and cofounder of Onetomarket Spain. I wonder how many languages he speaks?
Let's see if his presentation on the Netherlands is as good as Joost's was for SES New York! Ha. :)
The Netherlands are 2nd in the world for broadband penetration. The Dutch spend about 6.4 hours online a week.
He doesn't understand the costing structure of telephone/internet usage in the Spain. The Spannish pay x4 more and have worse quality. He suggests that this is one of the reasons why internet shopping is larger in the Netherlands than in Spain (If you're not European; Spain is a large country and the Netherlands is not).
Ah! A picture of a cow. This is to remind us that agencies should have a global mindset but must act locally. All of the major players in the Netherlands are local - although iProspect just bought one of the market leaders.
Don't use Kelkoo. He says. He recommends using "ormaspdsfsdfsdffdf" or "asmdsfhdsfsdsdf" instead. Okay; I can't quite pronounce or spell the sites he recommends.
Also TradeDoubler, he says, aren't really getting into the Netherlands. Lennert says that TradeDoubler simply doesn't have the knowledge or marketshare to work as an affiliate network in the Netherlands (If you're not European; TradeDoubler is a large pan-Europen affiliate network).
Lennert describes the Dutch market as immature. It's growing quickly and expected to keep on growing.
Here's a fact for you; elderly people use the net more often than young people in the Netherlands. This is due to the demographic situation where there are simply loads of 65+ people and that they have the time and money to spend online.
Last year, on average, Dutch users would spent at least 500 euros online.
This is interesting; the leading vertical of spend in the Netherlands is travel and Lennert's included 'insurance' in that group. There doesn't seem to be a finance vertical of note.
This is a similar picture to the UK. In recent years we've seen the pure plays shops get their act together for online and start to take marketshare back from aggregators and affiliates.
Top sites in the Netherlands; Google.nl, Startpagina.nl, Marktplaats.nl, Live.com, Msn.com, Postbank.nl, nl.wikipedia and then hyves. Hyves is a popular social network in northern europe/the nordics.
Startpagina et al are the always popular 'starting pages' who simply refuse to go away in the Netherlands. Lennert urges us to be careful with the Startpagina clones as they're nothing more than link farm clones which mess up your link profiles and which have started to suffer drops in Google.
Some Dutch basics;
- use .nl domains
- host locally
- get local links
- be as aggressive as you need to be (Andrew's note; there's a Faith No More song about that)
The Dutch home shopping organisation (thuiswinkel.org) is important. It has 750 members and 100 business partners. It represents 80% of the Dutch home-shopping market. Oh... wait, I think Lennert has a connection to these guys.
Lennert would like us to remember that the Netherlands are neither Belgium or Germany. Yes; the Netherlands and Belgium have a language in common but the culture is very different.
Are there any other search engines after Google? Nah. Not really.
How do you get a Dutch person (or user?) to love you? Be unique, Lennert says. (Slide shows Dutch beauty blowing a kiss (lucky kiss)).
Hyves has 4 million users. 2 million of these people are Dutch. That's 2 billion page views.
NuJij has 1 million users. That's about 4 million page views.
74% of the Dutch are on at least one social network.
Right. That's Lennert finished. Now for Massimo!
Italy
Before he starts - I bet Massimo plugs SEMPO Italy.
Win. Massimo's plugging SEMPO Italy.
... still plugging SEMPO.
Right. Now on to Italy.
Italy take 2
Google is big there. They're the market leader with Yahoo and MSN coming second. After that we've got Virgilio (an Italian directory) and Alice.
There are big publisher portals - kataweb group, RCS and RAI.
However, despite these big publishers and alternative portals there is only really AdSense and AdWords.
Panama is slowly gaining a little more traction but have very far to go.
MIVA disappeared from Italy. Facebook offers some PPC alternatives. Massimo doesn't recommend trying Facebook just for PPC campaigns... got to use it for social media strategies instead.
Massimo says that the interactive agencies in Italy have rushed to embrace Web 2.0 stuff but have forgotten their SEO basics on the way. There are some in-house SEO teams in Italy but they have neither the training nor the resources.
The Italian search agencies are working very well. Massimo thinks the agency fee is a problem, though, as the Italian clients don't really want to pay that. He says he adores Google Italy but hates the way they simply act as sales people. There are only six people in Google Italy, they're only sales people and can't solve your problems (reading between the lines; Google Italy are promising to run SEM campaigns for clients directly and Massimo doesn't rate their ability).
Turns out there are Googlers in the room. Massimo changes slide. :) (Actually Massimo ; there's an Italian Googler in the room and within throwing distance - if I shout duck then duck!)
The evolution of search in Italy;
- from SEO all the way through to SMO
- SERP rankings - blogs + social media (says Massimo)
- universal search = social search
- PPC = lead acquisition
Social media is of increasing importance in Italy. We're also seen an increase in Web TV and mobile ready users (thanks to the iPhone once again).
Germany
Thomas Bindl can't make it so we're going to adhoc...
Germany's internet market is more advanced than Spain. The Travel and Retail verticals in particular are much larger.
Some popular German social networks
- JUX.de
- StayFriends
- SevenLoad
- MyVideo
- Mister Wong
- StudiVZ
Tomy says Mister Wong is good for links as the site doesn't use nofollow. Er... I think they added nofollow some months ago. Tomy did warn the audience that he hadn't been active in Germany for a few months though and so that makes sense.
Alex (surname?) works for a search agency active in both Germany and Spain. He's here to walk us through some search campaign differences.
- Germany is more saturated than Spain; this effects the bid costs
- You can't transplant a campaign from one European country to another; you must localise
- Germany is more sober than Spain. German creatives need to be more technical.
- In Spain, Alex's agency uses 'flashy' landing pages designed to capture the users' attention
- In Germany, Alex's agency uses more conservative landing pages
- When data harvesting; in Spain you can ask for it, get it and know everything about the user - in Germany no one knows their national ID number
- It takes more effort to persuade a German to part with their money
- Spanish customers are easier to keep happy. If you can show a Spanish client you're doing well - then they'll keep the PPC campaign going.
Thanks guys! I'll not live blog any of the questions and answers and keep them exclusive to the conference instead.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
YahooPeople.co.uk - Too Much Effort For Me
Here in the UK, Yahoo have been promoting Yahoo People through some display advertising (I first saw the ads over at Brand Republic last year) and trying to push it towards viral status.
I think it's a nice idea but it's too much effort to get started and that's why it's not viral.
With Yahoo People you create an avatar of yourself. This avatar lives in the virtual Yahoo People world and as you interact with different Yahoo services your Yahoo People avatar learns new abilities. For example, to teach your Yahoo Avatar to break dance then you muck around on Yahoo Music.
So, why is this too much effort for me? I have no art talent and you need to draw your avatar. You upload a headshot of yourself, resize it to fit on a body and then you're supposed to trace around the image to convert your photohead to a sketchhead. That's beyond me. I've tried, tried and tried - just can't do it. I don't have the mouse dexterity!
The products that Yahoo are pushing via Yahoo People are Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Music. The search engine optimisation crowd will grin because although Yahoo People is a Flash site Yahoo have remembered to include text links to these pages below the Flash. It's also worth noting (with a grin) that the Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Music links point to the US address - ie, news.yahoo.com rather than uk.news.yahoo.com. Yahoo Sports points to the European URL of uk.eurosport.yahoo.com.
The banner adverts I've seen for Yahoo People feature different avatars from various participants. What I don't know is whether these Flash banners are static and just chosen at random/with bias for the campaign or whether they're a dynamic element of the Yahoo People viral site itself.
I think it would be much cooler if the system picked the best avatars automatically to appear in the banners. That would then give you a real incentive for your avatars to do well. Just imagine, you could have a dancing Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media capering in the corner of Brand Republic! - that would certainly persuade me to try and draw my own avatar one more time.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Think of the human. Write for humans!
One of our golden rules about SEO is that copy should always read well. When we were a smaller company we would get people from the finance department to proof read copy for us. We wanted to avoid the suggestion that the author had been too eager to stuff in keywords. These days each country as a department of Search Copywriters who are capable of writing great copy and also getting an appropriate percentage of keywords in.
Google and the other search engines do need to see keywords on a page. They're not psychic. However, one of the biggest crimes that SEO has inflicted on the web are pages which simply churn out a mantra of keywords. They look and read awful. They're written for robots and not people. They drive me mad.
David Cushman and Sean Warwick - both from the publishing industry - are calling SEO spam. Sean thinks writing with a 15% keyword density produces awful copy - and he's not wrong. David hates the way SEO 'tricks' you into clicking into off-topic content.
Of course, Sean's been given harsh advice. You don't need to write at 15% keyword density! Please. Please don't try and write at 15%.
David might be being a little harsh himself. Proper SEO (okay; let's use the word 'ethical') is about ensuring the search engine can see what your site is about. In fact, proper SEO includes basic tips like ensure web page content has an unique URL so communities and forums can link to it (as opposed to an Ajax style or single Flash URL which is used to display all the content). It tends to be the horrid combination of search spam and poor websites which result in Google searchers clicking themselves into a worthless experience.
Google's increasingly good at analysing copy. Do you want to bet that a website that's full of grammatical errors is a website giving off negative quality signals? Do you want to bet that a webpage with an unusually high density of a particular word is a webpage that's giving off negative quality signals? Pretty safe bets, huh?
Let's have a look at what Google's Adam Lasnik has offered for advice on this topic:
Our algorithms want to see something that's a happy medium cleanly between:
Extreme A: Not listing relevant terms at all on the page.
Extreme B: Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. Hard. Repeatedly.
And I'll let you in on a little algo secret: There is no single magic number. People who say "The guaranteed optimal keyword density is [x]%" would ideally meet the same fate from an angry English teacher. Or Googler or Webmaster.
And lastly, let me respectfully (and pleadingly) reiterate one key point: The fact that you *can* find sites that rank well for a particular keyword engaging in "keyword stuffing" is NOT evidence that such keyword stuffing is an effective SEO tool. I can also show you many sites that use the letter "Q" exactly three times that also rank well. And no, this is not an indication of a secret "jump the 'q'
rule."
Sunday, October 28, 2007
McAnerin to Patent an SEO Technique? - IPGeoTarget
Ian McAnerin is a smart guy. On Thursday he announced a competition to help come up with the best name for his patent pending technique.
The trademark-safe name for the product is going be IPGeoTarget. It was a lucky Jill Whalen who won the prize (a hundred bucks).
We don't actually know the solution that Ian's trying to patent but we know the problem and his answer to it. The problem is fairly common in corporate SEO. If you're a dot-com and hosted in America but want to rank on engines like Google.co.uk then you'll be in trouble. Why? The initial geographic signals from your site will suggest that you're an American one rather than a British one. Sure, there are other signals that Google looks at (domain name records for example) but if your sever is in the wrong place then you have a mountain to climb.
Ian suggests three common solutions.
- register a ccTLD (not popular due to branding issues)
- host in the target country (not popular with head office, usually for political reasons)
- park a ccTLD on the .com (complicated, slow, and easy to mess up)
There are other solutions to the three Ian listed - for example, putting a proxy server in the UK and pointing that to your main server. When the search engines try and check the geography associated with the IP address they'll (likely) to get the UK. Even this solution can be complicated and messy for big corporate clients. Some of us have software solutions in place to try and make this as easy as possible.
I think I should point out that I have every expectation that Google is going to make it much easier for webmasters to signal who the appropriate geographic audience for the site (in natural search) is.
Hopefully we'll end up with a really useful service from McAnerin in the form of IPGeoTarget. Hopefully we won't find tried and tested techniques stuck behind a patent.
Update: Ian's helpfully shed some light on the patent following this post.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Selling Links Can Harm Your Site
Danny Sullivan has put together a well written post on Search Engine Land titled Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google.
The title says it all.
Back in March I suggested that Link Sellers are taking a risk with their site. I don't think we'll ever see the black mark I suggested - as Danny points out, this makes it easier to try and successfully buy links - but Google's gone further by actually starting to penalise sites.
What strikes me about Danny's post is how it came about it. We had seen some evidence that Google was acting out against link sellers but nothing that would earn the "Official" tag. Danny writes;
Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That's a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.
That relationship with key people in Google is just one of the many reasons why its worth keeping tabs on Danny and Search Engine Land. I'm hugely busy. I fly around the world - but I always try and keep up with Search Engine Land.
So, now you have two actions you can take when your competitor (or client competitors) start to buy links.
- Report them to Google
- Contact the link seller and point them to http://searchengineland.com/071007-173841.php
I know a lot of SEO folk still think Google is wrong to punish paid links. I know a lot of them still recommend paid links to their clients. Whether you agree Google is right to do this or not, Google is doing this. If you are taking money from people in order to promote their website please have a sit down and a think about your paid link stance.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
SEO in Scotland
Yep. That's right. I'm from Scotland and live in Scotland. In fact, I've just bought my first wee flat down near Edinburgh's Shore district.
It takes me about an hour to fly down to London. I do this once or twice a week. That's not bad for a commute at all. I was talking to a Google Manager today who takes an hour every morning to reach her desk in Google's Manchester office.
In today's marketing world distance really isn't an issue. We have email. We have phone and internet conferences. Oh, we certainly have voip and Skype too. I find communicating and meeting with clients based in London and even New York is easy.
One thing to note about Scotland is how strong it is for SEO. There are quite a few agencies, blogs and names worth noting. If we had an SEO World Cup - then Scotland would do very well.
I particularly enjoy keeping an eye on Scottish SEO blogs. It's pleasing to see that we ride the curve. Two in particular, Paul Steven and his North South Media blog and Shaun Anderson's Hobo SEO blog keep my attention. In fact, the battle for 'Scottish SEO' terms is so fierce among the locals that Paul keeps tally of how well people are doing.
The other thing to note about Scotland is that we have our own notes. We use Pound Sterling like the English, Northern Irish and Welsh but print our own folding money. It's perfectly legal to spend it in England... just be prepared to battle with London taxi drivers!
While I'm on the subject of SEO hubs in the UK I'd have to mention Brighton of course. There's an unusual collection of good (some not so good!) SEO firms and bloggers down there too.
Friday, June 22, 2007
LinkedSEO at LinkedIn
I was just updating my linkedin account (which I rarely find time to do - but should do more often) and was distracted by the "LinkedSEO" group. It's an invite only group for, you guessed it, SEO.
One of the features I like best about the web site is the ability to drill down to a geographic location (American city or country) and see who's the most linked in. Here's the top 15 connected SEOs in the United Kingdom. I know some of them!
| Rank | Name | Connections | Recommendations | Title | Location |
| 1 | David Deutsch | 500+ | 11 | Online Marketing Professional (DD@2bc.us) | United Kingdom |
| 2 | Giotto De Filippi [giotto5@sardan.com] | 500+ | 10 | Search Engine Optimization | United Kingdom |
| 3 | David Rosam | 500+ | 4 | Search Engine Optimized Copywriting, Online Strategy and Pay Per Click specialist | United Kingdom |
| 4 | Mike Nott | 500+ | 4 | Head of Search Marketing at PartyGaming Plc | United Kingdom |
| 5 | Francesco Maugeri | 500+ | 1 | Sem, seo and digital marketing specialist | United Kingdom |
| 6 | Rob Kerry | 324 | 3 | evilgreenmonkey - SEO Consultant & Search Marketing Expert | United Kingdom |
| 7 | Gilles Bourdin | 203 | 1 | COO and partner at NetBooster Search Marketing | United Kingdom |
| 8 | James Sandoval | 188 | 3 | Technology & Analytics Director, Neo@Ogilvy (London) | United Kingdom |
| 9 | Jason Hall | 162 | 0 | Director, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com | United Kingdom |
| 10 | Aurelia Noel | 156 | 8 | Senior Manager, Strategic Marketing | United Kingdom |
| 11 | Alex Horstmann | 125 | 7 | Senior User Interface Engineer at Tideway Systems Ltd | United Kingdom |
| 12 | Rob Collyer | 120 | 5 | Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Specialist, Web Developer & Programmer | United Kingdom |
| 13 | Matt Peskett | 119 | 5 | Managing Director - Firetop Limited | United Kingdom |
| 14 | Andrew Girdwood | 117 | 0 | Head of Search at bigmouthmedia | United Kingdom |
| 15 | Jeremy Sulzmann | 109 | 2 | Content & SEO Lead - Social Media at AOL Europe | United Kingdom |
Well done to David. If you're called David you've a 2/5 chance of being in the top 5 :)
On a more serious note it's good to see Rob Kerry/ evilgreenmoney from SEW's forums listed so high - shows that the voice of the forums is planted firmly in the middle of the SEO community.
The full list is here on LinkedSEO and if you know me at all then my profile is public too.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Cheapflights CEO warns against Google trap
When I read the title of the Mad.co.uk article I knew I was going to blog about it. "Cheapflights CEO warns against Google trap" (log in needed).
The trap, according to David Soskin, is threefold. You have to combine your PPC and your organic search. You need to learn through trial and error. You need to diversify rather than just count on Google.
I agree with all three points.
If you're running a large PPC campaign then it can be easily to rely on Google and, sometimes, Yahoo and MSN simply do not have the volume to keep up. That really is an area to watch.
There are no quick wins, certainly not in SEO and even with PPC - although you can make quick and decisive steps - you do need data and time on your side to begin to really optimise the account.
You certainly need to combine your PPC and SEO strategies. There are very few agencies known for good SEO and good PPC and so it can be a challenge for some big brands to find help here.
Ahem. Now for the other reason why I knew I would be blogging about these comments from Mad.co.uk's SEO conference. I was pleased to see that Soskin cited British Airways as a company that deployed a good search engine marketing strategy. Clearly I can't discuss that much at all but I think BA has done very well with Google Earth and the marketing campaign around it.
Digital Cream
I was lucky enough to go speak at Digital Cream yesterday.
It was a really good event. Speaking in the Natural Search track I was able to pick my own agenda and discuss SEO issues which face decision makers responsible for marketing big brands.
What did I cover? This was an audience who didn't need to be told what a meta tag was but I thought it would be a nice idea to pause and examine whether meta tags actually work these days. Of course they do, well, if you know how to use them right. Some meta tags are easy - like "y_key" or "noydir" - but others are a little tricky. One important phrase to use here is "quality signal" and that's a phrase Matt Cutts popped into his keynote speech at SES London this year.
One of my favourite "blue sky" discussions at sessions like this the future. What's coming next. There are some easy ones like Video Search and Radio advertising. I'm bias, of course, but also keen that the right people are there to help brands step into the world of Google/dmarc radio.
The old media way would have large, slow and traditional agencies plod forward with scripts and haggling for air time. In the future I hope that new media agencies are there to push the boundaries of technology and marketing.
New media agencies - like full search agencies - are right at home with Google's way of doing things (unlike dmarc's founders who quit - rumours say because they didn't like Google's 'new media' way of doing things) and are positioned to answer questions like "What was the ROI of that radio ad?". The challenge new media agencies face is that of resources. I can't think of many search agencies equipped to compose radio adverts! We're lucky in that we've a room decked out with recording gear in the Edinburgh headquarters for our experiments with podcasting.
Digital Cream disallows agencies from sitting in each others' presentations (though I think I recognised a few faces!) so I didn't get to see what other people wanted to talk about.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Filters, Facts and Fiction
One of my pet hates are SEO who present theories as facts. At SES this week one SEO announced to a room full of paying people that Google's new anti-Googlebomb filter tweak was nothing more than a cynical hoax. That is his opinion. My opinion is that he is wrong.
Let's try this list.
- The Sandbox
- Strong theory - Google alluded to this
- The -30 Filter
- Theory
- Googlebombing Filter
- Fact - Unless Google are liars
- Google Bowling
- Theory
- Duplicate Content Filter
- Fact
- Supplemental Results Filter
- Fact
- Domain Name Age Filter
- Theory
- Omitted Results Filter
- Fact
- TrustRank Filter
- Theory
- Links Page Filter
- Theory
- Reciprocal Links Filter
- Theory
- Co-citation Linking Filter
- Strong theory - alluded to by Google
- Too Many Links Filter
- Theory
- Too Many Pages At Once Filter
- Theory
- Broken Link Filter
- Theory
- Page Load Time Filter
- Theory
- Over Optimisation Filter
- Theory
- Keyword Stuffing Filter
- Theory
- Meta Stuffing Filter
- Theory
- Automated Google Query Filter
- Theory
- IP Class Filter
- Theory
- Google Toolbar Filter
- Theory
- Click Through in SERPS Filter
- Theory
- Traffic Filter
- Theory
- Google -950 Filter
- Theory
Hat tip to Joe Whyte's list of filters. Frankly, it's hard to keep up with what the SEO forums are raving about on any given day.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Dead Birds - When Life Scuppers Your Marketing Campaign
It was about two weeks ago that I first saw a dead chicken on the way to work. I was pretty sure it was a dead chicken... but, come on, a dead bird? Yuck. The advert had been on the side of a bus which had whooshed past at speed and I was left with some doubt in my mind. Who would be advertising dead chickens on the side of a bus?
A few days later I saw another. A different poster - a brown chicken rather than a yellow one - but clearly a dead chicken. Swiftcovered, heh? At the back of my mind I could vaguely recall a TV advert when a guy trying to arrange his insurance gets very frustrated at a bunch of chickens clucking at him in a call centre spoof. It is the same people.
Current affairs have not been kind to Swiftcover. The deadly Asian strain of bird flu - H5N1 - has broken out at a turkey farm in England this weekend. The news is full of images of dead birds being dumped into large trucks.
The public is worried. The BBC has interviews with Joe Public who all say they'll be steering clear of poultry. Of course, these people are over reacting, but Joe Public has a propensity to do that.
It's just bad timing. Very bad timing. Under no circumstances do you want your brand associated with bird flu. Unless, well, you sell flu vaccinations or health insurance. Unfortunately for Swiftcover they only sell car, travel, dog or cat insurance. I suspect only farmers get chicken insurance.
I should remind you that this is a personal blog and opinions here (I have lots of them) do not reflect the opinions of the company I work for.
My first reaction to the dead chicken advert was a bad one. Sure - it got my attention - but I didn't think "Ah-ah! Swiftcover!" My first thoughts were "Yuck. Was that a dead bird? What on earth?" A negative response. I don't mind being challenged when it comes to important issues like domestic violence, famines abroad, climate change or drugs but my hackles rise when someone tries shock tactics to sell me car insurance.
Given the bird flu outbreak the dead birds seem even less pleasant.
As it turns out this isn't the first time Swiftcover's chickens have been used. The Register has an article dating back to 2005 which explains that despite 800 complaints Swiftcover was allowed to depict call centre workers as chickens (call centre workers in the UK complained). Now Swiftcover are killing those call centre workers off. Another negative association.
I remember the dead birds not the insurance deals. Now the 24 hour news channels are full of H5N1 stories I strongly suspect most of the UK will be noticing the dead birds before they notice the insurance offers too.
I do remember the phrase "clucking call centre" though. Simple word games always stick in my head. If I didn't camera-phone a picture of the Swiftcover advert I would have gone to Google to check for that.
Swiftcover's SEO hasn't done too badly here. They've got the site in at #3 for the search. Swiftcover are doing the right thing by having a page up with their quriky advertising. In fact, I took the chance to review the TV advert I remembered. They should have the videos up at YouTube though. I would have had a web page for every advert.
It's the PPC players who are doing badly here. Swiftcover aren't represented at all and this would have been a chance to build that brand message. Look at all those pro-call centre adverts who really shouldn't be there. "Clucking" should be a negative keyword for everyone of them.
The other "key phrase" is swiftcovered. The name "Swiftcover" doesn't actually appear on the poster (and I'd always encourage people to put the domain in there). What happens if I search for [swiftcovered]?
Ouch. On this search the organic results are not kind to Swiftcover. They're not on page one. I suspect my suggestion of having one page per ad on their site would have helped them out here.
It's the PPC player (or a big affiliate using Atlas Tracking) who get the position right here. If it wasn't for the AdWord then Swiftcover wouldn't be represented at all.
I'm afraid there's not much you can do to future proof your marketing campaign from the random stuff that RealLife(™) throws at you. I suspect some people would encourage brands to stay away from negative images though. All big brands, especially those which live entirely online, need to coordinate their online and offline advertising. When you're creating a buzz phrase or a memorable quote via posters, radio or TV you should be sure you can be found online for the same quote or buzz. It's a must.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Is SEO Rocket Science? Kevin Lee brings the diatribe to LinkedIn
Over at LinkedIn Kevin Lee has re-stated his Is SEO Rocket Science? What do you think? [log in needed] debate. That was 11 hours ago - at the time of this posting.
He already has six bullish replies. I'm an idiot for adding fuel to the flames. I'm more interested in his use of the SEMPO brand though-out all of this. I'm not interested in the flamebait. Don't people remember the Usenet days?
He'd made sure SEMPO are mentioned in his LinkedIn badge ID.
Is the debate harming the industry's reputation?
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Reddit gets a fashionable baby sister
One of my favourite social news sites Reddit is due to get another fashion conscious sister. Stylefinder.com will be born on the 8th of March. That's the same day as Glamour relaunches. Glamour is the elder sister at the mighty age of 5.
Wondering about those family relations? We have this genealogy because Condé Nast bought Reddit back in October last year. I suspect many techie SEOers will never have heard of Condé Nast. They own a truck load of magazines. They own Wired. I suspect all techie SEOers will have heard of Wired.
I think Reddit have done well. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian told Michael Arrington that as far back as 2005 they had raised $100k. Condé Nast clearly keeps the web firmly in mind when planning expansions and marketing activity. Nikki Preston from Mad.co.uk noted;
The campaign includes placing advertisements on bus panels servicing Manchester and London, ensuring that the brand is well covered by Google’s and Yahoo!’s search engines, putting advertisements in Glamour, and emailing its existing database of 500,0000 readers.
So Stylefinder.com and Condé Nast are thinking PPC at least and are hopefully in the position to launch an organic search friendly site. Judging by the name (and this is a complete guess) Stylefinder does have that "social search" vibe to it. Find something interesting on the online magazine - and show your friends.
Even if Stylefinder are social search/social media naive Reddit are still safely part of a web savvy family. Digg is still fishing around for concrete support, probably a buyer, while the speculation that their bubble will burst seems to ebb and flow through the world of blogger speculation.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Safari for Windows
If Mac released Safari for Windows and it became popular then how many web sites would suddenly need a re-design? How many would need to tweak their CSS and XHTML? More than a few, I would say. Mass re-designs would shake up SERPs.
ZDNet are running a poll on the issue and although it is early days yet (early days favour the Windows masses due to mathematical distribution curves) the idea of Safari for Windows clearly has a lot of support. Mind you, Mac have just announced the iPhone and everyone loves Mac just now. It's the fashion. Mock Mac? No. Not me. You must have been thinking of someone else.
If we do have a three-way field in the browser race; Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (or a four-way if I'm kind enough to remember Opera (and at least one Organic Search Manager at work is a fan)) then we're likely to see more web sites employ user-agent detection scripts.
User-agent detection is always risky. Google (Yahoo and Live Search) need to be sure that the web site they are seeing is the same web site that everyone else is seeing. If user-agent detection is place than there is doubt. Sometimes some features simply do not work on other browsers and an alternative presentation is necessary. At that point you are showing a different version of the web site to different user-agents.
In fact, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has dug up some obscure suggestion that Mozilla is expecting Mac to bring Safari to Windows. Could they? Yes. Would they? That's harder to answer.
This is not a problem which the search engines would struggle to serve. Googlebot already visits sites pretending to be Internet Explorer in order to try and catch cloakers out. That's one of the reasons why user-agent cloaking is scoffed at.
If the web was viewed by a competitive range of browsers and user-agent detection became commonplace then the search engines would have to respond by spoofing their own user-agent more often.
All this comes at a time when the SEO community are discussing whether Google is/whether Google could parse CSS. Google is. Google can. It strikes me as madness to suggest that Google could not cope with CSS. Of course Google can cope with mere CSS! Of course! It's just text. It's simply the case that (and we're back to the distribution curves) that CSS checking has not been worth Google's effort. For all the benefits that CSS spidering would bring the cost would be too great. It's a numbers game.
CSS continues to grow in popularity, so hidden or conditionally visible text becomes more and more common, and it is therefore not a surprise to find that Google is taking stock of things. It could well be the case that Google concludes this look at CSS and decides it is still not worth the effort. This would not be unheard of. In 2004 a test Googlebot was seen scooping up .js files. We didn't see this bot back in a hurry.
Google can cope with JavaScript too. For heavens sake, spammers can defeat captchas, of course Google can cope with JavaScript and CSS. Finding a way through captchas is worth the spammer's while. Picking through JavaScript may not be worth Google's while.
... unless, that is, alternative browsers like Safari become more popular and JavaScript based user-agent detection becomes the norm.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Intent is Keywords 2.0
I'm surprised at how long it is taking the SEO community to twig to this - search engineers have been talking about it for years. The key is to work out what the searcher wants. If someone types in 'Hoover' are they after the branded vacuum, the dam or the FBI guru? Hoover is the keyword but it is the searcher's intent which is most important.
Let's say you've a client who sells MP3 players from their website. That's all they do. Are you going to go away, do some research and then conclude that keywords include "ipod", "zen", "mp3", etc. Ah! Perhaps you'll talk about the long tail and claim that the keywords are keyphrases that include "black 80gig ipod with free shipping". That's better but that's not good enough.
The intent phrase there is 'free shipping'. What does that tell you? The searcher is rich enough to go for the 80gig but poor enough to care about the shipping. A student, then? We can also be fairly sure that this searcher is ready to buy. If they're thinking about shipping then they're not researching. It would be best to target a "buy" page to this intent phrase. A buy page is unlikely to have an essay of text on it. Many SEOers who try and persuade their client to shoehorn as much keyword laden text on to their 80gig ipod page as possible.
But what about the 80gig ipod? The MP3 client should have some strong and authoritative ipod pages. In this example an authoritative page is one which offers useful information about ipods and actually gives people a reason to link to it. That's a tough call. Could you write a page about ipods that actually stood out well enough to persuade people to link to it? This is where social media (social search) can factor in as we could button this page to encourage users to tag it in search engine friendly social bookmarking sites.
The authoritative pages are the first stage in the search cycle. They target the researchers. They're there for people talking about ipods online and should begin to enjoy natural forum and blog links. The authoritative pages link to the buy pages. Yeah, it would be worth having a different page for "free shipping" than the normal "shelf page" if you can avoid duplicate content issues. Users intend to avoid body content that they've read already.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Bad Google SERPs
Here's the worst Google organic search result I've seen in a while. One of the search analysts in the office pointed it out to me. When I pointed it out to Google their response was: Good catch. Thanks. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.
The search term is [credit card] and it is not a Personalised Search result. 
Using Yahoo's SiteExplorer you can see that they have back links from some pretty bad sites. They've links back from good sites too, often due to the page's good organic results.
The worst looking of the sites redirect to a links directory (via a half obscured JavaScript script). Other than the JavaScript there's no content on the site. Clearly there's been content there in the past for Yahoo to have noticed the link though.
One easy hunch is that we're looking at a scraper network that's evolved into the sneaky redirects.
Now, there are sites like this one which are just scraped spam (with the noarchive tag too) and which do link to the mysteryly ranked Afreserve page. However, these scrapers could well have Afreserve content because Afreserve ranks highly for the competitive credit card term.
Matt Brittin joins Google from Trinity Mirror
As the Guardian says:
His role will be UK-specific, working alongside Mark Howe, who is the UK director of sales focusing on agencies.
Google UK counts "agencies" as a vertical. When you visit you'll find Account Managers who specialise in the likes of Travel or Finance or... Agencies. Mr Brittin is coming in to oversee relationships with advertisers. I suspect this will be larger firms who come to Google directly.
Matt Brittin has come from Trinity Mirror where he was the the Directory of Strategy and Digital. The funny thing about Trinity Mirror is that I always associate them with the icNetwork because of a fairly aggressive sales call I was once ambushed with. Despite explaining again and again that we didn't buy links because we felt it was neither ethical nor in the best long term interest of clients it was one of those calls that would not finish. I need to have two phone manners; one for clients and one for everyone else.
The links there come from the bottom of icWales's homepage. Some links go to partner sites (also within Trinity Mirror) like AdZooks and other links point to competitor sites for Trinity Mirror properties.
Friday, January 05, 2007
How Google Reader could influence organic search results
Certainly it seems safe to suggest that Google reader could - and perhaps should - influence personalised search.
I think I was one of the first to break the news that Google Reader had been updated. I'll note that because it'll rarely happen. This isn't a "news first" blog. This is my rants and raves blog. I saw the chance to be quick with news and so I took it.
Some time later the brain begins to work. I do this often. Sometimes the penny can be slow to drop. I knew all this already. 
What we see on the trends report on Google Reader is that Google isn't just recording which RSS feeds I subscribe to (which is an indication that a human just voted for the quality of the site) but it is recording what percentage of the articles I read.
If I ignore an RSS feed then Google could notice.
If I ignore AdWords what happens? The quality score goes down and the advert begins to slip in position. It wouldn't be impossible for Google to note which RSS feeds got read (implying good content) and which did not.
Anyway... here's an idea. Do you know what would be cool? Being able to integrate your subscribed RSS feeds in reader.google.com to Google News. When I'm searching Google News and I use keywords which have also recently been mentioned in my Google Reader then it could let me know.
