All Things Search

Thought we would give you some good SEO tips for August 2010….. well here goes:

 1. Keyword Research - Before undertaking any SEO on your website you must always do keyword research. How else will you know what your target market are actually typing into search engines to find you.  To undertake keyword research (with limited time), make a list of possible keywords by thinking what potential customers would type into a search engine while looking for your website (also ask staff & friends for their keyword ideas). Then use the free Google Keyword Tool to find out search volume.  What you are trying to locate are keywords with high search volume, high relevancy to your website and ideally low competition (the holy grail!).

2. Content - Search engines love content. Try and update a website often with new content. If you already create a physical newsletter, why not re-use this collateral and put it in a blog or something. Remember… potential customers can land on any page on your website.

3. Backlink Anchor Text - When obtaining back links to your website (a back link is a link from someone else’s website pointing to yours - this is viewed as a ‘vote’ for your website) make sure that the anchor text of that link is keyword rich. If the link is just your domain name you are missing a trick - the likelihood is you will already rank for your domain (unless it is something generic).

4. Think of SEO From The Start - Don’t design your website without first considering SEO. Things like Flash and Java Script can be detrimental to your website unless dealt with in the proper manner. Getting things right from the start will benefit you in the long term.

5. No Short Cuts - There are no short cuts to good SEO. Tactics such as buying links and link exchanges may give you short term gains but will often cause problems in the long run. Things like this are known as ‘black hat SEO’ and should be avoided.  There was a time when link exchanges worked, then Google got wise to it so people started 3 way linking… Google soon got wise to that… see a trend happening :-). It’s not worth trying to trick the super brains that develop the search algorithms.

Hope you liked our top 5 SEO tips for August.

The search engine landscape could be changing…. enter Swingly www.swingly.com. Swingley is a new kind of search engine designed to provide searchers with the information they are seeking as quickly as possible - its not about sending searchers straight to another website.

Swingly may send searches to a web page… however it is just as likely to send a searcher to a cinema’s showtimes, a football/rugby score or any other relevant information.

You can register for an invite to try Swingly’s BETA version here: beta.swingly.com

From Swingly:

“Isn’t it time you got some answers?

Swingly is a Web-scale answer engine designed to find exact answers to factual questions. Want to know where Don Rickles grew up? How about the number of electrons in Argon? What about where Steve Ballmer went to school? Or who invented the chocolate-covered pretzel?

You’ve come to the right place. Just ask a question in plain English — and Swingly will find you the answer (or answers) you’re looking for.”

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the Internet has helped level the playing field for small businesses around the globe. Unfortunately many small businesses do not have a general marketing budget and therefore cannot afford to spend a lot of money working on their search engine rankings.  Here is a few top tips that can be implemented by small businesses to assist their rankings:

1. CONTENT IS KING

Search engines love content, the more content that you can add to your website the better, an analogy that I like to use is: “fish and a fishing pole - when explaining how text heavy sites often outrank thin ecommerce sites, I like to call searchers fish and each word on the page an additional fishing pole in the water. The more text you have on a website the more searchers you are likely to ‘catch’”.

It is important that the content added to your site is unique, a good idea to increase content is to add a frequently asked questions page which you can update regularly or even better add a blog which you post to on a weekly basis.

2. THE PERSONAL TOUCH

Customers often like the personal touch and opinion. Make your personal knowlege on your subject known, this will help you become an authority in the eyes of a searcher/potential customer. (again using a blog will help here).

3. LOCAL SEARCH IS IMPORTANT

Optimising for local search is crucial. There are many ways to do this, one such way is to incorporate geographical terms in your on-page optimisation (ie. Your city name in the META title and H1 tags). The other thing that is quick and easy to do is register with Google Places, Yahoo Local & Bing Local - this allows people to find your business through the map searches etc.

4. WEBSITE SPEED

As stated in a previous post, Google now incorporates a website’s loading speed in it’s algorithm. Use the tools highlighted in the previous post to check and improve your website’s loading speed.

5. PRESS RELEASE

Write a press release for local online media outlets (and offline). make sure that you have links (with anchor text) back to your website. This can be a crucial help - one of my recent press releases has led to a pitch for one of the countries largest organisations - It can work very well.

 Hope you like these tips…. feel free to add more if you like.

Google has now introduced Google TV, the concept is simple, you attach a ‘freeview’ style box to your TV (via HDMI) and can watch/surf the Internet through your television. Google state that currently TV is too complicated and that watching the Internet through a TV is not good enough. With  Google TV you will be able to search for the latest programs on the Internet or TV and have immediate access. There is a good video to explan this on Google’s website: http://www.google.com/tv/

In terms of SEO the ramifications are pretty huge, we already have to consider the implications of SEO on mobile media such as IPhones and the Android phone, we will now have to also incorporate SEO into thinking about the new TV by looking at SEO for streaming media.

 Here is a bit of information on the new Logitech Google TV box: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/logitech-google-tv-box/?news=123

The Logitech Google TV box will let you add Google TV to an existing TV, as long as you have HDMI ports and an internet connection.

Logitech takes aim squarely at Apple TV with their new Google TV external box which will be powered by the popular Android-based OS and Chrome web browser. This will allow users to add Google TV to an existing television without the need of purchasing a new one.

The futuristic-styled glossy black box will feature a 1.2-GHz Intel Atom Processor, 4 GB of internal memory, 802.11n Wi-Fi, two HDMI out ports, a pair of USB ports and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. The Logitech box will work in tandem with your existing set-top box provided by your cable or satellite company and pull content in that way, allowing you to search both the internet and your DVR under a single Android -based infrastructure.

Included with the system is a remote control, but users will also be able to use their Apple iPhone or Android based smartphone to control content. The application for your phone will include an on-screen keyboard, D-pad and other necessities. From what has been demonstrated, it looks like the phone will need to have a touchscreen in order for the application to work.

Google TV promises to give users easy access to the videos they love including photos and other internet content, all accessible through a compatible Google TV or peripheral box.

The Logitech Google TV box will be available in the U.S. this fall and pricing has not yet been announced. Logitech has a small teaser micro-site which you can check out.

This month Matt Cutts has proclaimed on his blog that Google have decided to incorporate site speed (loading times) in their search algorithm. What this means from a practical sense is that if your website takes a long time to load, it may be penalised by Google’s new ranking system.

On the Google Webmaster’s blog it states:

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

If you are worried about your website’s speed you can use the following tools to check out how your site performs: 

For more information: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

I don’t think this change is a major problem for most websites, as many sites do not take very long to load. It may however be a problem with websites that have loads of pictures/ Flash (which I dislike with a passion!) or video content.

As an SEO expert I dislike Flash with a passion - I have never seen a website written solely in Flash rank for any generic term.  Steve Jobs, the Apple boss today replied to Adobe’s frustrations with an open letter. None of the iphone, ipad or ipod support Flash, which Job describes as being from an era of “PC’s and mice”. 

 The letter shortly followed the news that Adobe (Flash’s creator) would cease to make tools that allow developers to translate flash code to run on Apple products.

Have we seen the end of Flash?  I surely hope so….

New research from Statcounter reports that with 48% of all social media hits Facebook is still the king of the social media domain, however, somewhat surprisingly StumbleUpon now has 25% of the traffic and is therefore clearly ahead of Twitter with just under 10%.

The March data is collated by lookin at the 13 billion pageviews from throughout the StatCounter network of websites. ”From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

The next largest social media websites were YouTube with 6%, reddit 4%, Digg 2% and MySpace 2%.

According to  Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter “Social Media market share fluctuates a lot more than browser or search statistics,”

“For example, Facebook peaked over Christmas and the New Year with almost three quarters of the total, perhaps reflecting its important role in communications between families and friends.”

In the past 12 months over 1.4 million New Zealanders have made a purchase online according to Nielson in their 2010 Online Retail Report.

What Kiwis are purchasing:
Airline tickets: 51.1%
Books/magazines: 30.6%
Entertainment (concerts/tickets: 28.2%
Clothes/accessories: 26.8%
Travel services (hotels, car hire): 23.8%
Computer hardware: 13.4%
Music CDs/DVDs/Videos: 13%
Health & beauty products: 12.4%
Movie DVDs (not downloaded): 11.8%
Computer software (not downloaded): 10.3% 

These figures are up on last year and substantially up on the 39% in 2007.  As a nation that has siezed the Internet with both hands I can only see this increasing.

There are literally hundreds of ways (black hat, muddy hat and white hat) of getting great backlinks. Here I have highlighted a few that anyone can do that can achieve good quality, long lasting links:

1. Asking business partners/associates or suppliers for a link from their website (with correct anchor text)

2. Looking at where competitors have got their links from and trying to get links from the same places.

3. Writing superb and interesting articles (publsh on places like Ezine) that people will want to use on their blogs etc. (obviously there should be self serving links in the articl / authors biography)

4. Creating a blog (again with compelling content and links). Make sure the blog is part of your domain rather than on a 3rd party domain.

5. Online press release with links - again the quality of the content is crucial to haw many people wil pick it up and run with it.

Hope you liked them… feel free to add some of your own.

Last month Google pulled out of China due to the Censorship row. They have now revealed that there have been requests for handing over information or asking to censor information. Brazil has put in the most requests with 3,663 requests, followed by the US with 3,580 and UK with 1,166.

I’m glad that Google is making this information public as transparancy has to be a good thing.  I imagine that the censorship requests often deal with things like child pornography and the data relate to crimes or potential crimes… however, it is quite scary to see that western governments are requesing this information…. remember big brother is always watching you (although that’s not such a bad thing if it means that there are less terrorist attacks and child pornography rings are broken up).