First, we set about looking at the target demographic of the client which was females between 25 and 35. We then found a sample of 100, and logged some key stats from their last ten wall posts. We were trying to measure the average of the following:

1. Number of Friends
2. Likes and Comments per Post
3. Interactions per Friend per Post as a Percentage
4. Primary Impressions
5. Secondary Impressions
6. Total Impressions

With this data, we could start to understand the likely impact of any campaign that causes a message to be posted on a users’ wall, and the key to success being that the post looks as ‘normal’ as possible i.e. not promotional but a message from the user.

So here is what happens to a post on the wall of the average UK-based female between 25 and 35 years old on Facebook:

1. Number of Friends = 553
2. Likes and Comments per Post = 3.3
3. Interactions per Friend per Post as a Percentage = 0.59% (view this like the click through rate of a PPC advert)
4. Primary Impressions = 553 (same as number of friends)
5. Secondary Impressions = 1,797 (the 0.59% of people who like/comment on it creates a further post on their walls)
6. Total Impressions = 2,350

Now I obviously don’t want to tell you what are actual strategy for the client is in terms of generating the initial posts, but we are basically looking to give 50 things that cost £100 away which is a total spend of £5000. This should generate approx. 5000 posts on walls of this target demographic, and by the above calculations should create the following buzz:

5000 Primary Wall Posts which at an interaction rate of 0.59% would lead to 16,500 Secondary Wall Posts,

which equates to

2,765,000 Primary Impressions to Friends which would lead to 9,124,500 Secondary Impressions to Friends.

This is a total reach of 11,889,500 impressions at a cost per impression of 0.0004 pence.

Obviously we need to add our management fees on top of the competition give away costs but as you can see, there is plenty of room to play with here. From these figures, I would argue that this kind of activity generates all the brand awareness of a huge blind banner buying campaign, but coupled with the targeting capability and engagement payoff of a platform such as Facebook.

So when it comes to influencing a related group of individuals, I don’t think you can beat this kind of activity. Sure, these are not unique impressions, but the message we want to push will certainly hit our target audience in a powerful manner.

In case you wondered why these topics are trending, thousands of women are currently swooning over Michel Roux Jr making bread, and whose soft tones and French allure are really hitting the mark with the UK ladies. White Hart Lane is currently under siege from some marauding Italians. Dear Maria, an Internet-only released music track has sold 500,000 copies without receiving any radio air play (sounds like a topic for another blog!). Biggie Day is a day dedicated to the memory of the notorious BIG.

So the concept is, that if I am launching a new website or refreshing my SEO or PPC strategy, could I go through the last few months of trending topics and look for related terms to my products and services? If these keywords are new or hadn’t been high profiled before, they would not have registered on traditional keyword research tools. So I may be able to quickly launch new content on this topic, and rank highly within days naturally or get very cheap paid clicks.

I will monitor the ranking and traffic/referring keywords for this post over the next two weeks and report back my findings. Fingers crossed I win the £50 too!

In order to try and find the common threads of viral success I’ve compiled a list of well known businesses / sites and then from my knowledge listed every feature they implemented in order to generate viral growth. I’ve then listed the advantage and benefit of each feature as I see it. From this data there are plenty of conclusions I could draw but I thought it would be great if everyone could add their own knowledge of these sites in the comments field and I will then create a final resource from which I hope to draw some great insights and also hear yours.

Feature > Advantage > Benefit

YouTube –

Embedding of Videos > Quickly Put Video On Any Site > Saved Hosting Costs

Let Any Old Content Upload > Very Open Service > Lots of People Joined

MySpace Users Used It > Embedded Video On Another Site > Enriched Another Service

Twitter -

Followers and Self Promotion > Free Marketing > Grew Users/Content Fast

Leveraged Mobile Boom > Made Service Easy To Access > People Use Anywhere

Facebook -

Created Profiles of People > Forced People to Participate > Accelerated Growth

Invite Mechanism > Encouraged Sign Ups > Viral Catalyst

Bought Mailing Lists > Raised Awareness > Grew User Base

Digg -

Leader Board of Power Users > Stroked Users Ego/Self Worth > Grew Content Fast

Invite Only Key Bloggers > Raised Key Blogger Awareness > Grew Buzz, Sign Ups Doubled

Email Bloggers > Raised Key Blogger Awareness > Grew Buzz

Demo To Influencers > Raised Influencer Awareness > Grew Buzz

Tweet To Complete Sign Up > Raised Awareness To Followers > Drove Sign Ups

Sign Up Pop Up on Visit > Encourages SIgn Ups > Drove Sign Ups

PayPal -

Sign Up Incentive > People Got $10 Free > Generated Lots of Sign Ups

Referral Incentive > People Got $10 Per Referral > Generated Lots of Sign Ups

Leveraged Ebay Platform > Great Service To Community > Leveraged Existing Community

Myspace -

Huge Email Blast > Raised Awareness > Grew User Base

Vertical Focus > Build Loyal User Base > Word Spreads Faster

Banner Ads > Raised Awareness > Grew User Base

Courted High Profile Users > Raised Perceived Value of Service > More People Joined

Created Brand Profiles > Business Could Self-Promote > Recognised Brands Join Site

Quora-

Share Q’s on Social Networks > Raised Awareness > Grew User Base

Auto Following Facebook Contacts > Connected Friends on System > Strengthened Community

AspectUniversal Login/Facebook Connect > Easier Sign Up > Grew USer Base, Linked Accounts

Invite Only at Start > Raised Key Blogger Awareness > Grew Buzz and Perceived Value

Yahoo Answers!-

Leader Board and Points System > Created Competition > Built Loyal Community

I look forward to your comments and getting this all boiled down to a success algorithm! Oooh, that’s going in my next sales pitch

When I was in my teens I always turned to HMV and Waterstones for solid Christmas gift ideas as a book for Mum and CD for Dad were safe and easy bets. I still buy those kinds of gifts around Christmas time and this year was no exception however, Mum got a Kindle with £40 worth of electronic Amazon vouchers and Dad got electronic iTunes vouchers. So where did it all go wrong and what can other high street brands learn from the this.

These two brands were market leaders and occupied a position that meant they were ideally placed to dominate online retail and strengthen their grip on the market, but like so many large brands they failed to change quickly or intelligently enough to embrace shifting consumer behaviour.

Amazon has clearly stolen the hearts and minds of book readers in the UK. It wasn’t that they just started selling things online but they set out with the remit to constantly push the barriers of book selling. Firstly in online sales, then rapid delivery, then community reviews, then on demand book printing, then marketplace and more recently the Kindle. This progression shows the mindset of the Amazon executive team and is something that almost passed Waterstones by entirely.

In the early days they failed to offer online shopping. I remember struggling to find a book I wanted on Amazon and so I went across to the Waterstones site only to find that they had done some sort of partnership deal with Amazon to offer ordering through their site! I almost fell off my chair. But this didn’t mean the game was up, they still had and have a huge customer base and a high street presence and therefore opportunity for engagement, that Amazon simply cannot compete with. So with this huge advantage why could Waterstones still not react to this new e-challenge? I don’t know but in my opinion the strategy and fundamental thinking is wrong even to this day. Let’s look at what a quick appraisal of the Waterstones site reveals:

• Ebooks: they half-heartedly backed the Sony e-reader. In store promotion was minimal and normally behind cabinets, how do I engage with the technology like that? Kindle was not huge when they first launched this and they had a captive audience in store for whom they could have brought the ebook concept to life. Set up a large in store area where people can use secured e-readers to download, browse and read all the books available to purchase. Make it an experience and get promotional staff pushing people into that area. Make it a product I can’t leave store without because it will fundamentally change my life! Do an exclusive deal with Sony and subsidise the cost of the ereader so its a “no-brainer” purchase. Amazon did not have the luxury of putting the Kindle in peoples hands, it is a blind purchase, so how did they lose?
• Gift cards: as far as I can tell and I looked hard, there is no e-gift card functionality on the Waterstones site. Something which is ludicrous considering shifting consumer behaviour and would have given them an edge over Amazon. A gift card that is easy to purchase and can be used online and in store, again, another clear advantage over Amazon but it fails to be implemented. Unforgivable when you consider its sister Company HMV has e-gift cards!
• Community: there is no forum, blog or community of any kind on the Waterstones site. This giant brand that we loved and cherished is not allowing us to tell them what we want, discuss books, share experiences and deepen our loyalty to the brand. A huge mistake.
• Waterstones Marketplace: a great idea. Used, out of print and rare books available online. A great service that again fails to leverage the community side of online and underlines their misplaced strategy. When I first saw it, I thought “this must be like the eBay of used books” but again, this functionality does not exist here. Users cannot upload their own poducts for sale and there is no commenting, forum or community based functionality.

The biggest reason for me that Waterstones is struggling is that the decision makers either do not understand how online behaviour is changing the market or they are not allowed to embrace it. Building an online community where people can recommend, discuss, sell, share and engage with books and the brand could and would fundamentally change the face of Waterstones. Although Amazon has a large lead in this area, Waterstones still has the high street edge in terms of engagement. Amazon will always be restricted by the limitations of online experience in terms of how they build loyalty and bring things to life for their customers. It would not be difficult for Waterstones to match 80% of Amazons online functionality and then build an integrated on and offline community which would bring them back to the forefront of the consumers minds.

I could go into detail about how this thinking is not being implemented within HMV also but I dont want it to look like this is a character assassination because it is meant to be constructive. However, you only have to look at initiatives like pure.hmv.com (a service for music enthusiasts to get concert tickets and digital music) designed to build customer loyalty which fails to implement an online community and has about 5 testimonials on the entire site. HMV should be engaging online communities and from its position in the market should have spawned ideas like MySpace or Spotify or at very least be doing deals to help monetise these kinds of services because again with their high street presence and customer base, they are ideally placed to exploit these technological advances.

To sum up, you only have to think about what drives the offline world of books and music; recommendations, discussion and sharing. In short, community. It is not difficult to see how this can be translated to the online world and then integrated in store to offer a market leading proposition. Woolworths, WH Smiths, HMV and Waterstones alike, must have found it so easy to generate sales in the past. The strategy was simple, in the words of Kevin Costner “build it and they will come”. It was that easy because there was little choice and information could not be exchanged so quickly and easily. These brands show there fundamental misunderstanding of community through their failure to embrace it in store over the years. Virgin became so popular back when they launched because they built places where you could hang out on bean bags and listen to and talk about music, they were more like coffee shops than music stores. That ethos hasn’t changed, people want to hang out with friends and discuss which album/artist is the next big thing or which book they just cant put down. So therefore what should they do? well they need to modify their strategy to match my words “build a community online and they will come”!

About the Author:

Shane Quigley is the CEO of Epiphany Solutions Ltd and is responsible for the strategic direction of the business.

Previously Managing Director of Latitude White and Chief Technology Officer of the Latitude Group, Rob will be responsible for the operational delivery of PPC, SEO and web development for Epiphany. Rob joins the Epiphany board of directors along side Shane Quigley (CEO) and Robin Skidmore (Commercial Director).

Rob has a background of over 20 years in technology and has spent the last 2 years specialising in digital and search marketing. He has managed services for some of the UK’s largest companies including O2, British Gas, Barclaycard, Go Compare, and Tesco. While at Latitude Rob was responsible for the development, implementation and operation of the Latitude White business, the first PPC service targeted specifically at the SME market. He is a regular speaker at small business development events, sharing insight on how search marketing can be embraced by smaller companies to their commercial advantage.

Following his appointment Rob commented, “Epiphany is a hidden gem in the search industry and reminds me so much of the early days at Latitude. The philosophy here is straightforward – Epiphany believes that delivering measurable results that are aligned with clients’ objectives builds great relationships that last. Successful client SEO and PPC campaigns that go back many years are proof that this world class approach works. We have talented staff using intelligent tools; couple this with a motivated and focussed management team and I think we have a great recipe for success.”

Speaking about Rob’s appointment, CEO Shane Quigley commented, “Rob’s obvious pedigree and proven track record of delivering operational excellence in search marketing, combined with his experience in rolling out technical platforms that underpin rapid growth, made him the natural choice for this position. When we heard he was available, we knew his appointment would strengthen the core management team and move us one step closer in achieving our goal of becoming renowned for delivering world-class digital marketing. The decision was simple!”

About Epiphany Solutions Ltd
Epiphany solutions (www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk) has been managing SEO and PPC campaigns for clients including Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Confederation of British Industry (CBI), SilentNight Group and Three Mobile since 2005. Their structured and proven approach to performance led digital marketing has enabled them to consistently deliver world-class results for clients across 12 countries.

The question that begs to be answered is what are the benefits of this white labeled lip service over open relationships, where the search marketing company is brought in as a trusted supplier alongside the media buyer?

In many cases this form of vertical relationship can work, don’t get me wrong. A strong network with tight lines of communication, an agreed working structure and a defined set of goals should form a magical remedy for success. Perhaps. The magma of this lies within the nature of our business, technology is temperamental by nature and can at times rear its ugly head. What happens when a server drops, a site architecture amend causes a cross browser issue or a piece of analytics code spits out security warnings at every turn? Throw in a team of outsourced web developers and you’ve got the ultimate game of Chinese whispers, and don’t get me started with the finger pointing. Still thinking of white labeling?

Do clients prefer open relationships where they know who’s getting what service from who? Or is it better to have these convoluted communication channels that have the potential to fall at the first crisis?

In my experience, clients appreciate openness, up front information and the peace of mind that their money is being spent on the best structures for success within organisations that are dedicated to delivering results in any one media channel. Would you find a search marketing company buying TV adverts? No.

In short, building relationships that can grow together out-weight the ‘remix’ approach of a traditional marketer spinning the search marketing disc to their ‘Digital’ hungry clients. Search engine marketing isn’t easy, it’s a tough technological fight, and we’re professionals in this area that love to practice what we preach!

We’re a friendly bunch who love working with media and marketing teams, can we help you?!

The new ‘conversion optimizer’ tool as they are calling it will ask you for a maximum bid and attempt to optimise your adwords campaign to hit this target. It will only work on campaigns that are seeing at leasts 300 conversions per month but it sounds interesting.

The only downside we can see is that we can all hit low cpa’s by dropping our bids and only bidding on very specific keywords, how it takles volume conversions is another thing!

Let us know your thoughts….

Google announcement here: CPA Targetting

And here it is Adwords Expert Guide

Please pop over and have a look, ask as many questions as you like, we really want to keep him busy!

After its achievements in Pay Per Click, Google is now pushing the boundaries of advertising even further by introducing a pay for performance model called Pay Per Action.

You decide what to pay based on what action you want your site visitors to perform. Whether that be to fill in a sign up form, visit a particular page or even purchase a product.

Its only in beta testing in the US right now but it sounds like it should break some serious barriers to entry for small firms.

Read the full story here:

Google’s Pay Per Action

A short time ago in a city not so far away (from Leeds anyway) i came up with what i felt was the Killer App for AdWords. This was a long time before i’d come across the long tail concept, chris anderson’s blog and my favourite keyword research tool of 2007, Hittail. Basically, the Killer App was a log file analyser that primarily focussed on the search terms that delivered traffic to your website. This tool would look at exactly what query delivered traffic to your website and tell you how unique it was.

Why would i build a tool solely to do that? Simply becuase with the help of other pay-per-click bid management tools you can report on the ROI per keyword. Google, and now Yahoo and MSN, allow you to choose exactly what keywords and search term combinations you are bidding on and the ROI that each one, individually, is delivering.

Looking for answers in the wrong places

What i frequently found, managing some very high spending campaigns, was that it was nigh on impossible to generate more traffic for a keyword without raising the bid price. Yet inevitably when a campaign was delivering a strong ROI, my client would always ask me if I could deliver more converting traffic to them, “Why don’t you just bid a bit higher?” In theory i could by raising the bid price, but in reality that strategy could be potentially disastrous, as not only would i be raising the ad position, to get more clicks, I was paying more for each click, so suddenly I might be in the position of kissing goodbye to that great ROI I’d helped deliver. Clients found my answer, that it was simply impossible to deliver better results simply by messing around with bids (after i’d found the sweet spot), difficult to stomach.

Which left me with something to chew over. How could i squeeze a better ROI, whilst engaged in a bidding war with my competitors, without blowing my spend? I felt like i had to develop the art of zen non-competing.

The Preamble

The idea of non-doing in Zen buddhism centers around a double denial of existence. Essentially it is the logic, “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless”. Basically the logic posits that the statement itself is neither true nor untrue becuase the statement is a component part of reality that only holds a mirror up to what is actually going on. Put another way, the statement itself is only a reflection of what is going on, a description, not actually what is happening.

Pure PPC strategies are just speculative at best

Believe it or not, Pay-per-click bidding is exactly like that. Pure speculation. Most SEMs will push the idea of never before seen levels of campaign control and targeting, yet they are wilfully overlooking that fact that they are overseeing what is essentially a blind auction. When you choose to bid on the term, say ‘jobs in charities’ you can select that to be a broad, a phrase or an exact match, and your bid management engine will deliver an ROI value for each permutation. It’s great becuase it gives the feeling of confidence (especially when you see your exact match is delivering a great ROI), but it’s not necessarily true that the term jobs in charities is the best converter. This is especially clear when you notice your broad match is consistently delivering strong ROI too. A more savvy PPC manager should find cause for concern regarding the long term health of their campaign, simply becuase they cannot say with the same level of certainty what terms are driving conversion. And therein lies the opportunity.

Finding answers in the right places

Typically, although this does vary from market to market, you’ll find that your exact matched term delivers the best ROI but fairly quickly you’ll start to see that drain away as your competitors start competing aggresively and driving your bid prices up. A typical response by most agencies i’ve worked with is to add more keywords and variations to fill out the bottom end of the market with search terms that have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). Frequently this strategy works, but it does not solve the problem of what to do about rapidly diminishing ROI from your super-converting term. Furthermore, in most cases, these ads deploy ineffectively because the click-thru rate on your broad match, out performs your new untested and unserved keywords. So you we’re back to square one, becuase the broad matched ad was served in their place and we have no new data.

So how do you solve this problem?

Firstly, optimise your clickthrough rate (CTR) rather than your bidding strategy by blocking certain terms.
Find all the irrelevant matches that are coming in and delete, delete, delete! Set up negative matches on your campaigns so that your ads don’t serve for any irrelevant phrase or broad matches. This should reduce the number of impressions you get on irrelevant terms, pushing your CTR up and furthermore, becuase you are not getting clicks from terms that are unlikely to convert (hey, you know what useful content is and is not on your site), you are optimising your ROI.

Secondly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by adding new terms.
Discover what relevant variations are still coming in. Log all of the long tail combinations and variations that are coming and see what juicy stuff you can learn about your market and where you are failing to serve them effectively. You will honestly be amazed at the granularity of search terms clicking through to your website in the hope of finding something relevant. For instance, in the broad matched example of ‘jobs in charities’, I was amazed to find how much volume there was to the term ‘jobs working in animal charities’ and variations to that effect. Yet, if you think about it for a second, with a global database and the ability to search it at 0.11 seconds, it stands to reason that the more inquisitive user knows exactly what they want and is going to set about finding it!

Thirdly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by restructuring your campaign.
Re-structure your entire campaign to accomodate new learnings, in such a way that you can learn from the new initiatives you are taking. PPC data should be seen as source of response data about your audience. Aside from having some assurances as to what search terms deliver business, clickthru rate metrics give you some pretty good assurances as to what your audience really reponds to. A lot of AdWords accounts that i’ve taken under my wing to optimise basically fail to deliver more becuase of the way they are structured. High traffic terms are under the same budget control as low traffic terms and in many many cases one generic ad is serving a multitude of different search requests. This is really problematic because you are unable to get a clear overview of what keywords and ads your audience responds to. Restructuring your campaign really allows you to know at a glance how relevant your ads and website your website is in general to the market your targeting. People find themselves in different terms. for instance I principally think of myself as an SEO and PPC expert, rather than an SEM expert. Yeah, i may be quibbling over definitions, but frankly if I am, then your audience probably are too.

Even if you don’t bother with steps 1 and 2, a campaign restructuring will deliver more impressions, have a much less volatile cost-per-click (CPC) and higher CTRs. A solid account structure will give you far more control over your budget on a long term basis to engage in or opt out of particular bidding wars. On a daily basis you can switch on and switch off campaigns and adgroups whilst your competitors bid aggressively, until they burn out and you can slide back in.

Fourthly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by writing more specific ads.
Serve your audience better by serving better ads that meet their specific requirements. Until you re-structure your campaign to accomodate the new keywords, you’re going to be under the impression that your broad matched campaign delivers you a fairly standard number of impressions at a fairly standard 3% CTR at whatever CPC. When you restructure your campaign, and serve a relevant ad (and please don’t forget a relavant destination webpage) to that query, you’ll discover that in fact that particular term, say ‘jobs in animal charities’, drives over 500 impressions a month and delivers a 25% clickthru rate when targeted with relevant ad text and landing page. Sit back and watch your ad sail above your competition without you ever adjusting your bid price.

Fifthly (is that a word?), optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by continuously improving your account.
Repeat the whole process on your new campaigns and adgroups. Each new campaign and adgroup you target will deliver more opportunities to discover how you can compete in the marketplace with your current budget and where to best position your spend.

Search terms ARE NOT markets in their own right, only reflections and sources of insights

So where is this killer APP now? Well the long and the short was i was too young and inexperienced in the SEM business at that time to really win the funding i needed to develop it beyond it’s neo-natal stages. In the end the business died (archived site here) because i still needed to support myself – but hey, it’s totally OK to fail at setting up your first company! (Seriously, the UK needs to realise this and learn from our bigger brothers across the pond). Anyway, the most important thing is, as the dalai lama is alleged to have said, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”. And I can safely say that i didn’t. Instead i put a similar tool, Hittail, into action with some splendid results. So when you think you are losing the bidding wars (and the ROI), remember not to lose the lesson – ask yourselves or your agency how far you are going to improve clickthrough rates.

And btw, Hittail have just upgraded their service. Isn’t that nice!

This leaves us with a big question, “Who should handle online brand reputation management, crisis management and press release distribution – SEO professionals or PR consultants?”

The two worlds are certainly separate but they are treading increasingly common ground. The catalyst for this seems to be link building. In order for any site to rank in a competitive market it needs to have a large amount of external one-way links pointing to it. This is becoming harder and more expensive to do each day as site owners realise the power and value their site holds and start charging to place links to other companies. Search marketing agencies are constantly trying to invent new ways of building links, such as online press release distribution.

This was probably the first area that SEO agencies stumbled into PR territory. An ambitious and well informed PR agency should be managing this kind of event, but from my experience 90% of PR consultants are technology phobic. There is also a kind of arrogance that surrounds most PR agencies: they know what they know, its been working for centuries, why would they change now! Well thats the fast track to ruin in my opinion, as the dinosaurs found out!

Numerous times, I’ve opened dialogue with PR agencies to build a joint service offering that could put us both firmly ahead of our competition – they all paid it lip service but when it came to the crunch they felt safer doing what they do and the talks fizzled out.

Thats where SEO’ers are different; we constantly have to re-invent ourselves, its the nature of the online game, it excites us rather than repelling us and that is why it is so frustrating trying to work with most PR agencies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not attacking PR companies, I want them to listen to this and react. We need to work with a high profile agency and put together a killer service that eats competitors but I need them to listen and listen hard!

The reason press releases are so great for SEO is that, with the right influence from a good SEO agency, they can be incredibly powerful tools that not only influence opinion of a product or brand but also drive traffic to a site and boost search engine rankings.

Since the advent of the online press release, there are many other areas that have mushroomed in popularity like blogging, social networks and online crisis management.

Blogs are here, they’re big and more often than not their content is read as gospel. Its a strange phenomenon, but the average blog reader will value a frank posting or comment much higher than a professional piece of spin. Blog marketing sits alongside SEO quite nicely – they share a lot of the principles for getting blogs to rank highly in search results, but there is also another element to blogging and that is the social side. Blogs are about content, readers and community. If you can write compelling content and understand how to get your blog noticed, you can build a community.

This leads to huge amounts of traffic around your articles and clearly this has benefits in the PR world. In terms of content writing and opinion shifting, I would hold my hands up and say that PR consultants are better placed to handle things but without SEO influence, the content they are pushing will not get read and will therefore be worthless. This is an area where the two industries need to combine resources and offer joint services.

Social networks are another area that PR needs to get heavily involved with. Sure we hear a lot in the press about MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook but what is it that makes them so popular? Its the same thing that makes them so valuable to an SEO firm and that is content and community.

Google loves content, and the hardest thing to do when trying to get high search rankings is to build content quickly without spending a small fortune. Original content created by users free of charge that is constantly building and reflecting the latest trends or news is absolutely invaluable for two reasons. Firstly, search engines love it, people love it, and they both keep coming back to get more. Secondly, the more readily you’re creating content, the more often readers and Google will visit your site, increasing your chances of exposing your views and opinions to a wider audience.

So who is better placed to manage and promote these communities – PR or SEO firms? The PR consultant should be better equipped to understand how the written word can influence opinion and which section of people need to be fed which message, but is that so important when the content is open, honest and user generated? Sure, commenting upon what is published is key and from a corporate point of view, a measure of a company’s values, but if the community is not there in the first place, its all wasted effort.

That’s where the SEO professional is better equipped to manage the process – building the community, readership and search rankings and then engaging with PR consultancies to promote the corporate view.

Crisis management is another interesting area where SEO agencies are being increasingly consulted. In the online world, 80% of all websites are found through search engines and the Internet is the most consumed medium in the work place. So very often, breaking news will be found or researched within the likes of Google. So when crisis breaks, its not enough to publish a statement in an online press area because everybody is forming opinions way before they ever reach a corporate site or press area.

If you search for a company name in Google, you will see (in Google’s eyes) the most important 10 search listings for that company. If 5 out of the 10 are bad press, what can be done? Well a traditional PR answer would probably be, post comment in the press area or make a statement of your site, but that does not solve the problem.

A well informed SEO agency can launch articles, blogs, comments and forum postings in key areas that could push those rankings onto the second or third page of Google, minimising exposure to this bad press. A PR agency alone could not do this; in fact 80% of SEO agencies could not do this. So the key is to find Search Marketers with great rankings i.e. they can get results and then to get them to work with PR functions to ensure the right message is read first.

To sum up, the whole question of SEO vs PR is about maximising online visibilty. With the right message and no visibility, there is no value. The key is getting the right message in front of as much of the online world as possible.

So, you want my opinion on who wins the battle? Well, the advantages SEO companies have over PR companies are results and return on investment. We can easily demonstrate how much we charge and the return we give and we are also well suited to adapt to a rapidly changing market place, but I won’t even presume that I can learn the PR trade overnight. We need to join forces with like-minded PR agencies but I think the SEO company is better equipped to lead the online side of the campaign. SEO is so technically complex that most SEO agencies can’t do it well! So its not even practical to expect PR consultants to add it to their repertoire, you have to live and breathe it.

Interesting Online PR resources:

• PR 2.0
• Future Works
• Social Media Club
• PR Squared
• Richard Bailey

AdWords Optimisation

Following on from their comments I just want to add that optimising AdWords is simply not a case of tweaking adverts and bids to get cheaper traffic. Sure its a major part of the ongoing work but the real magic happens at the business end, your website!

If you have a conversion rate of 0.5%, then regardless of how much your traffic costs, if you can make a few shrewd changes to your site and increase conversions by another 0.5%, then you just doubled your enquiry/sales rate.

Imagine if you could increase it by 3 or 4 percent extra, thats when your campaigns really start to fly. Far too often advertisers forget the importance of a solid landing page with good calls to action and a straightforward enquiry / buying process.

Most of your visitors are lost sales because of 3 things:

1. Your advert took them to a page that does not talk about the product or service you advertised.
2. You forgot to ask for their business! They shouldn’t have to hunt around or scroll down the page to move to the next stage, they should easily be able to see multiple calls to action.
3. Your checkout process or enquiry form is simply confusing.

Spend some time on these 3 areas and see how your campaign is transformed beyond where you thought it could be.

Over the past 12 months its become increasingly difficult to get great results in seriously competitive markets like finance and travel through Google AdWords campaigns. More advertisers means higher costs per click and therefore more expensive enquiries. But are things set to change?

Until recently, the high quality enquiries and sheer volume have been attached to Google searches but there have been some developments that may change this.

Microsoft have launched Live.com, their new search engine along with AdCenter, there new back end advert management system set to rival Google. Previously this was powered by Yahoo based technology which did not reward how well your advert is received and therefore was not as popular as Google.

Yahoo! this week have also launched “Panama”, their new system, designed to work much more like Googles. With competition being so fierce on Googles network, this is sure to spark interest from agencies trying to squeeze more profit out of their clients budgets.

One other HUGE factor in Googles UK dominance will be Windows Vista. This new operating system from Microsoft has started rolling out this month and with it their search engine, live.com, will doubtlessly be embedded in most of the standard applications like Word, Excel etc.

This means that millions of people will have quicker, easier access to Microsoft’s search engine. If you are writing an article in Word and want to get some stats from the Internet, are you going to search from Live.com that is built into Word or go the long way round and leave Word, find Internet Explorer, power up Google and then Search? I think this will result in a large chunk of Googles market share disappearing over night.

The next six months are going to be truly monumental for search dominance and I’m looking forward to it. Competition is a good thing and hopefully we can get a little more bang for our buck!

The scheme is being run as a pilot in the UK, and is set to hit our phones in the first half of 2007. Commenters have noticed with interest the fact that it’s Yahoo who are first to partner, as opposed to the more powerful Google. It has been suggested that this because Google ave historically been slow to enter into partnerships, as well as the fact that the Google brand is likely to dominate in any partnership with a carrier. So, the beginning of mobile advertising is here. The question is, how long will it take to truly take off?

The concept of Social Media Optimisation was coined by Rohit Bhargrava Ogilvy Public Relations recently, who said, “The concept is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”.

This indicates that it’s an area which may soon see greater integration into companies existing Search Engine Marketing strategies. Digital Brand Expressions highlighted a key difference between the two however: “SMO places its emphasis on increasing your brand’s overall visibility in the social media instead focusing on improving your website’s rank in the search engines.”

Social bookmarking is ensuring that this is not only not going away, but increasingly becoming the way that a large proportion of people are consuming their media. Digg and del.ici.ous are both key players in this market. Both allow people to bookmark favourite sites, and then arranges them in their search engine according to the number of times it’s been tagged.

For more information, check out the interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose on ZDNet.

[Via Digital Brand Expressions]

1. A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.

This document details the various methods Google is either employing, planning to employ or has thought of employing to a document or group of related documents in order to attach a point score to that document, for the purposes of ranking.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to an inception date; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining an inception date corresponding to the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the inception date corresponding to the document.

Historical data is to be used to rank pages, at least in part. The inception date of the document is to be taken into account. I assume this “inception date” would be the first date the page was crawled. Either that or Google is looking at meta data contained in each file which lists its creation date and modified date, or both!

Where a content management system is involved, it would be interesting to see what information is being passed to robots. Whether a creation date relates to the first time that page was dynamically created and then each further request for it writes a new modified date. Alternatively, Google might see the creation date and modified date as the same moment that it requested this dynamic page, as they are constructed on the fly.

Either way, this doesn’t reveal which set of values would create the highest point score.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the document includes a plurality of documents; and wherein the scoring the document includes: determining an age of each of the documents based on the inception dates corresponding to the documents, determining an average age of the documents based on the ages of the documents, and scoring the documents based, at least in part, on a difference between the ages of the documents and the average age.

Documents, which are related in some fashion, would be scored according to their age, the average age and the relationship between their ages.

This could be referring to a group of documents with similar content, a group of linked documents on separate sites or quite simply a whole site.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein the generating a score for the document includes scoring the document based, at least in part, on an elapsed time measured from the inception date corresponding to the document.

Does this mean a score would rise or fall over time, against the age of a document?

5. The method of claim 2, wherein the inception date corresponding to the document is based on at least one of a date when a search engine first discovers the document, a date when a search engine first discovers a link to the document, and a date when the document includes at least a predetermined number of pages.

Here they expand upon the “inception date” mentioned in claim 2, which would now be defined as one or a mixture of:

1. The date a document is first discovered by the search engine.
2. The date a link is first discovered to the document.
3. The date the document includes at least a certain amount of pages.

This is all very interesting but now I am unsure exactly what “document’ refers to. In this context I hypothesise that they are referring to the first discovered page of a new site in their index. I come to this conclusion because a web page can’t really contain other pages; if they meant links they would have said links, surely. So, in conclusion, a site in Google’s eyes or a group of content related documents on the same site, will only score points to a preset level until they reach a desired number of pages in total.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to a manner in which a content of the document changes over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining a frequency at which the content of the document changes over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the frequency at which the content of the document changes over time.

This is something most optimisers have believed for a long time, that a page ranks higher the more frequently it changes.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the frequency at which the content of the document changes is based on at least one of an average time between the changes, a number of changes in a time period, and a comparison of a rate of change in a current time period with a rate of change in a previous time period.

More interestingly, the scoring for changes to a page is more sophisticated and based upon either:

1. An average time between changes.
2. The number of changes over a set period.
3. An analysis of the rate of change over time.

Which could mean a page will rank higher if it maintains a rate of change over time or steadily climbs, because if it climbs to soon, it could be a seasonal change perhaps and if it peaks to soon and then falls, a page will be seen as becoming less popular and start to fall in rank.

8. The method of claim 6, wherein the generating a score further includes: determining an amount by which the content of the document changes over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the frequency at which and the amount by which the content of the document changes over time.

Now we are point scoring a document not only based upon changes over time but quantity of change against changes over time.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein the amount by which the content of the document changes is based on at least one of a number of new pages associated with the document within a time period, a ratio of a number of new pages associated with the document versus a total number of pages associated with the document, and a percentage of the content of the document that has changed during a time period.

Included in the evaluation of the change of this content are off page factors, such as:

1. Number of new pages associated with the document.
2. Number of new pages compared with existing pages associated to the document.

All evaluated, once more, over a time frame.

10. The method of claim 8, wherein the determining an amount by which the content of the document changes includes: weighting different portions of the content of the document differently based on a perceived importance of the portions, and determining the amount by which the content of the document changes as a function of the differently weighted portions of the content.

We all know different sections of a page score differently in search engines, but this discusses evaluating quantity changes of different portions of a page and scoring the portions according to their overall relevance of a documents rank against percentage change of that portion.

11. The method of claim 6, wherein the document includes a plurality of documents; and wherein the scoring the document includes: determining a date on which the content of each of the documents last changed, determining an average date of change based on the determined dates on which the contents of the documents last changed, and scoring the documents based, at least in part, on a difference between the dates on which the contents of the documents last changed and the average date of change.

This is an expansion on the comparison of dates of change of a group of documents, looking at the time between changes and the average date of change.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to a manner in which a content of the document changes over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining an amount by which the content of the document changes over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the amount by which the content of the document changes over time.

Fairly straight forward, looking at changes the amount of change to a document over time.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein the amount by which the content of the document changes is based on at least one of a number of new pages associated with the document within a time period, a ratio of a number of new pages associated with the document versus a total number of pages associated with the document, and a percentage of the content of the document that has changed during a time period.

Repetition of point 8 I think?*******

14. The method of claim 12, wherein the determining an amount by which the content of the document changes includes: weighting different portions of the content of the document differently based on a perceived importance of the portions, and determining the amount by which the content of the document changes as a function of the differently weighted portions of the content.

Repetition of point 10 I think?*******

15. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to how often the document is selected when the document is included in a set of search results; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining an extent to which the document is selected over time when the document is included in a set of search results, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the extent to which the document is selected over time when the document is included in the set of search results.

This statement relates to what we know as click through rates, applied in most people’s frame of reference to Google Adwords Campaigns but suspected for a while now to be monitored in “natural” search results.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein the scoring the document includes assigning a higher score to the document when the document is selected more often than other documents in the set of search results over a time period.

Obviously a site chosen often within a set of search results, and therefore have a high click through rate would be awarded a high point score.

17. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to search terms that increasingly appear in search queries over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining whether the document is associated with the search terms, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the document is associated with the search terms.

I think this is saying that as a site / document starts to appear more often in searches performed, for various terms, it will have a higher probability of ranking highly for any term it is considered relevant for.

18. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to queries that remain approximately constant over time but lead to results that change over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining whether the document is associated with queries that lead to results that change over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the document is associated with queries that lead to results that change over time.

This, in my opinion, is outlining a further point scoring for a site or page that, in a highly competitive set of search results, that are changing a lot over time, yet remains within this set of results, i.e. is robust over time, will gain additional points for this.

19. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to staleness of documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining whether the document is stale, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the document is stale.

If a document is not changing over time, then it is deemed to be stale and will therefore fall in the rankings because it will lose points over time.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein the scoring the document includes: determining whether stale documents are considered favorable for a search query when the document is determined to be stale, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether stale documents are considered favorable for the search query when the document is determined to be stale.

This defines a modifier to claim 19 that although a document may be stale it may still be classed as “favourable” and therefore achieve points for this.

21. The method of claim 20, wherein the determining whether stale documents are considered favorable for the search query is based, at least in part, on how often stale documents were selected over recent documents over time for the search query.

“Favourable” means this stale document is still being selected from a set of search results over content that is viewed to be fresher. For instance, although a page / document may not have changed for 6 months, it could still occupy a high position because searchers are still reading that document, e.g. a health and safety notice would remain fairly constant over time but still be highly relevant and therefore warrant a high position within a set of results.

22. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to behavior of links over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining behavior of links associated with the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the behavior of links associated with the document.

The tracking of links to a document over time based on behaviour.

23. The method of claim 22, wherein the behavior of links relate to at least one of appearance and disappearance of one or more links pointing to the document.

This behaviour being the appearance and disappearance of links to a document.

24. The method of claim 23, wherein the appearance of one or more links relates to at least one of a date that a new link to the document appears, a rate at which the one or more links appear over time, and a number of the one or more links that appear during a time period, and the disappearance of one or more links relates to at least one of a date that an existing link to the document disappears, a rate at which the one or more links disappear over time, and a number of the one or more links that disappear during a time period.

Behaviour will be tracked based upon date of appearance and disappearance, rate of and quantity of.

25. The method of claim 22, wherein the determining behavior of links associated with the document includes monitoring at least one of time-varying behavior of links associated with the document, how many links associated with the document appear or disappear during a time period, and whether there is a trend toward appearance of new links associated with the document versus disappearance of existing links associated with the document.

Here we are looking for trends or patterns on the appearance and disappearance of links and comparing the two.

26. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to freshness of links; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining freshness of links associated with the document, assigning weights to the links based on the determined freshness, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the weights assigned to the links associated with the document.

Links are now having scoring weights attached to them by freshness but again, it does not specify whether a good or bad score for fresh links!

27. The method of claim 26, wherein the freshness of a link associated with the document is based on at least one of a date of appearance of the link, a date of a change to the link, a date of appearance of anchor text associated with the link, a date of a change to anchor text associated with the link, a date of appearance of a linking document containing the link, and a date of a change to a linking document containing the link.

Links as well as being monitored based on when they appeared, when they were changed, when anchor text appeared with the link, the date that changed, the date the document containing the link appeared and a date that document changed.

So we are starting to see that data relating to pages between links is influencing the scores attached to both pages.

28. The method of claim 26, wherein the weight assigned to a link is based on at least one of how much a document containing the link is trusted, how authoritative a document containing the link is, and a freshness of a document containing the link.

One of the first paragraphs written in English!!

29. The method of claim 26, wherein the scoring the document includes: determining an age of each link pointing to the document, determining an age distribution associated with the links based on the ages of the links, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the age distribution associated with the links.

Scores are further defined by the age distribution of the various links that are pointing to the document.

30. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to a manner in which anchor text changes over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: identifying a change in anchor text associated with a link to the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the change in anchor text associated with a link to the document.

Scores are given to changing anchor text over time.

31. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to differences in documents and anchor text associated with links to the documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining whether a content of the document changes such that the content differs from anchor text associated with one or more links to the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the content of the document changes such that the content differs from the anchor text associated with one or more links to the document.

This discusses how anchor text of links to a document is related to the content of that document and whether over time as a document changes, does the anchor text change accordingly.

32. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to freshness of anchor text; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining freshness of anchor text associated with one or more links to the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the freshness of anchor text associated with one or more links to the document.

Attaching scores to the freshness of anchor text related to documents. I am struggling to see how this is relevant, who changes their anchor text on a regular basis??

33. The method of claim 32, wherein the freshness of anchor text associated with a link to the document is based on at least one of a date of appearance of the anchor text, a date of a change to the anchor text, a date of appearance of a link associated with the anchor text, a date of a change to a link associated with the anchor text, a date of appearance of the document, and a date of a change to the document.

This is just pulling together all the different freshness levels of the anchor text, the links and the document and scoring in relation to these factors own relationship.

34. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to traffic associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining characteristics of traffic associated with the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the characteristics of traffic associated with the document.

Traffic is being brought into the scoring of a document and the characteristics of this traffic. At this point I assume most of this data is taken from Alexa, a close partner of Google’s owned by Amazon.

35. The method of claim 34, wherein the determining characteristics of traffic associated with the document includes analyzing a traffic pattern associated with the document to identify changes in the traffic pattern over time.

Defining that the characteristics of traffic relating to a document will be analysed over time.

36. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to user behavior associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining user behavior associated with the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the user behavior associated with the document.

Scores allocated to documents relevance are also related to how they behave when they visit a document. An example of this would be if a person chose a site from a page of Google results and then immediately hit the back button, indicating this content was not what they were looking for. Google tracks this over time and a document would fall in the ranking if this repeatedly happened.

37. The method of claim 36, wherein the user behavior relates to at least one of a number of times that the document is selected within a set of search results and an amount of time that one or more users spend accessing the document.

Click through rate is being combined here with total time spent on a page found through Google and a weighting attached.

38. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes domain-related information corresponding to domains associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: analyzing domain-related information corresponding to a domain associated with the document over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on a result of the analyzing.

Domains are now being used to score an associated site or page.

39. The method of claim 38, wherein the scoring the document includes: determining whether the domain associated with the document is legitimate, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the domain associated with the document is legitimate.

Difficult to not what Google sees as legitimate?

40. The method of claim 38, wherein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.

Domains will be scored based on:

1. Expiry Date
2. The DNS record of the domain
3. The Name Server associated with the domain.

Presumably the longer the expiry date the better, indicates a more serious intent to provide reliable content, as will using a respected host and name server.

41. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to a prior ranking history of documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining a prior ranking history of the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the prior ranking history of the document.

Previous ranking of a page / site can influence the rank for future searches. This must mean for other terms otherwise this doesn’t really make sense.

42. The method of claim 41, wherein the scoring the document includes: determining a quantity or rate that the document moves in rankings over a time period, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the quantity or rate that the document moves in the rankings.

How rapidly a document moves up the rankings over time can create a multiplier effect by the sounds of it.

43. The method of claim 41, wherein the prior ranking history is based on at least one of a number of queries for which the document is selected as a search result over time, a rate at which the document is selected as a search result over time, seasonality, burstiness, and changes in scores over time for a URL-query pair.

Combine and appraising sets of results for a documents propensity to be chosen in a set of results and its movement rate and style through the results.

44. The method of claim 41, wherein the determining a prior ranking history of the document includes monitoring a rank of the document over time for spikes in the rank.

Monitoring spikes in a documents rank presumably for seasonal fluctuations, a document may rank higher at certain times of a year or day??? That is purely speculation.

45. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to user maintained or generated data; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining whether user maintained or generated data indicates that the document is of interest to a user, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on whether the user maintained or generated data indicates that the document is of interest to a user.

Monitoring the interest users pay to documents and weighting them accordingly?

46. The method of claim 45, wherein the user maintained or generated data relates to at least one of favorites lists, bookmarks, temp files, and cache files associated with one or a plurality of users.

Google will be monitoring user data in the following formats:

1. Favourites lists
2. Bookmarks
3. Temp files
4. Cached files

The only way to do this is by monitoring people’s locally stored files relating to their Internet browser activity. I would guess this is achieved either through the Google Toolbar or by installing what is commonly described as spyware.

47. The method of claim 45, wherein the scoring the document includes: analyzing the user maintained or generated data over time to identify at least one of trends to add or remove the document, a rate at which the document is added to or removed from the user maintained or generated data, and whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the user maintained or generated data, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on a result of the analyzing.

This covered in my previous notes.

48. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to growth profiles of anchor text; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining a growth profile of anchor text associated with one or more links to the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the growth profile of anchor text associated with one or more links to the document.

Monitoring the growth profiles of anchor text, presumably to see if they are all the same to identify people trying to manipulate their index, this is something I have always disagreed with because there are numerous reasons why the majority of anchor text would be identical.

49. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to linkage of independent peers; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining a growth in a number of independent peers that include the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the number of independent peers.

Simply tracking the growth of independent links pointing to a site or page.

50. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to document topics; and wherein the generating a score includes: performing topic extraction relating to the document, monitoring a topic of the document for changes over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on changes to the topic of the document.

Scoring a document based upon its topic and the growth of that topic over time. So is relevant information growing on the site and how fast is it growing?

51. The method of claim 1, further comprising: obtaining a search query, where the identified document is identified as relevant to the search query; and generating a relevancy score for the document based on how relevant the document is to the search query; and wherein the generating a score for the document is based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data and the relevancy score.

Starting to talk about content being relevant to the search made.

52. A system for scoring a document, comprising: means for identifying a document; means for obtaining a plurality of types of history data associated with the document; and means for generating a score for the document based, at least in part, on the plurality of types of history data.

Documents are assigned a score based on the historical elements we have been discussing.

53. A system for scoring a document, comprising: a history component configured to obtain one or more types of history data associated with a document; and a ranking component configured to: generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.

54. A method for ranking a linked document, comprising: determining an age of linkage data associated with the linked document; and ranking the linked document based on a decaying function of the age of the linkage data.

55. The method of claim 54, wherein the linkage data includes at least one link.

56. The method of claim 54, wherein the linkage data includes anchor text.

57. The method of claim 54, wherein the linkage data includes a rank based, at least in part, on links and anchor text provided by one or more linking documents and related to the linked document.

58. The method of claim 57, further comprising: determining longevity of the linkage data; deriving an indication of content update for a linking document providing the linkage data; and adjusting the ranking of the linked document based on the longevity of the linkage data and the indication of content update for the linking document.

59. The method of claim 58, wherein the adjusting the ranking includes penalizing the ranking if the longevity indicates a short life for the linkage data and boosting the ranking if the longevity indicates a long life for the linkage data.

This is the first mention of good or bad results based on any of the factors discussed. It also confirms what most SEO’s call the Google Sandbox Effect. Where a new site, no matter how well optimised or how many links have been built, experiences poor results for a good few months, sometimes more than six, at the start of its existence.

60. The method of claim 59, wherein the adjusting the ranking further includes penalizing the ranking if at least a portion of content from the linking document is considered stale over a period of time and boosting the ranking if the portion of content from the linking document is considered updated over the period of time.

Rather than just penalising pages for staleness, they are also rewarding pages for freshness. This creates a huge gap between sites and shows even further why it is so hard to make ground on long standing competitors in Google.

61. The method of claim 54, further comprising: determining an indication of link churn for a linking document providing the linkage data; and based on the link churn, adjusting the ranking of the linked document.

62. The method of claim 61, wherein the indication of link churn is computed as a function of an extent to which one or more links provided by the linking document change over time.
Defining link churn as the rate of change of links pointing to a document over time. This must mean the appearance and disappearance of links as opposed to the anchor text, otherwise that would be stated.

63. The method of claim 62, wherein adjusting the ranking includes penalizing the ranking if the link churn is above a threshold.

If links appear and disappear on a frequent basis then you will be penalised.

These are Epiphanys thoughts and are not proven, only born out of our experience in the market place.

Epiphany has seen an increase in the number of B2B businesses looking into making the most of their websites, probably linked with the fact that the Internet is the most consumed medium in the UK within office hours, far outperforming radio, TV and newspapers. Recognising the issue outlined above, Epiphany often recommend implementing a 3 month trial project that closely tracks enquiry rates driven by a B2B campaign, to alleviate any of the concerns from a business unfamiliar with what SEO can do. Within this time, a measure of the number of enquiries that are converting into sales is tracked, after which a more heavy-weight campaign can be designed.

At the conference, David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing, Jon Lisbin, Chief Strategist of Point It! Inc. and Rick Brown, President of NetTrac presented a case study which highlighted several ways in which B2B businesses could target their audience, tactics that are employed in any professional SEO campaign. One point of note was the inclusion of keywords that extended beyond simply the product name. His suggestions included:

• misspelling
• bad grammar
• brand terms
• wholesale terms

There was also a discussion regarding the value of paid inclusion in aggregators specific to a certain industry, such as Industrial Quick Search. Whilst they were highlighted as often bringing in relevant traffic, there was a question over the metrics that they employed, and their effect on the bottom line. This again emphasises the importance of a trial period, since every customer ultimately needs to see a difference in profits.

[Via Search Engine Watch]

Negative keywords are words or phrases that trigger your adverts without you wanting them to. Let me give you an example, if you were a shoe retailer and you had an AdWords campaign advertising under the term shoes, your adverts would get triggered by people searching for shoes, mens shoes, womens shoes, kids shoes, etc. and this is all fine, assuming you sell a wide range of shoes.

The problem occurs when people searching for horse shoes and brake shoes also trigger your advert. This has two dramatic effects upon your account. Firstly, it means your adverts are being shown to people who have no intention of buying a pair of shoes and therefore if they click your advert are wasting your budget. Secondly, if these people never click your advert, you won’t have wasted any money but your adverts click through rates will drop dramatically and you will end up having to bid more and more to keep your adverts on page one.

Our advice is to use keyword suggestion tools mentioned in the previous tip to build a negative keyword list and also check your web stats to see which search phrases visitors are using that are irrelevant to your product or service and then add all of these into your negative keyword list.

For help in doing this or to talk about this topic further, call one of our specialists on 0870 199 6382.

The campaign is predominantly aimed at increasing Yorkshire Building Society’s online applications for their range of consumer finance products, which include credit cards, mortgages, insurance and loans. The Finance industry is beginning to take advantage of the high volume, fast turnaround business that is available through the Web, Yorkshire Building Society are one of the most forward thinking high street lenders and are continual strengthening their online offering.

Epiphany’s main aim is to ensure Yorkshire Building Society is able to make the most of the ten million consumers searching for financial products online each month. Managing Director Shane Quigley states, “Our expertise is ensuring that when relevant financial product phrases are entered into Google or other search engines, Yorkshire Building Society is at the top of the listings. The first few weeks of the campaign has already seen them climb to page 1 of Google for the phrase ‘mortgages’. Using these techniques, we can ensure online product applications increase month on month and give Yorkshire Building Society the ability to offer even more innovative products online.”

Epiphany, located in Leeds prestigious and vibrant area The Calls, are a specialist Search Marketing Agency, dealing in both pay per click advertising and search engine optimisation across 25 countries. With a strong client base in many leading industries, Epiphany prides themselves on their business lead approach in a very technical industry.

Leeds based Search Marketing company Epiphany Solutions have announced their latest account win PKF, one of the UK’s leading firms of accountants and business advisers.

Epiphany have been chosen to ensure PKF maximise their exposure via the major search engines in order for them to fully realise potential new business from the more than 300,000 people searching for their services each month.

Company Directors Shane Quigley and Robin Skidmore started Epiphany in March 2005, after identifying a real need for a specialist Search Marketing company in the North of England. “Most agencies that offer our services simply bolt on sub-standard offerings at cut rate prices because web design is their main service. We stake our reputation on the results we deliver everyday and have built our business around search engine optimisation and pay per click campaign management,” says Skidmore.

Representing a strong client base within the North and London, in less than 14 months Epiphany have acquired accounts that span over 25 different countries and manage one of the largest e-commerce sites in existence.

The importance of web-sites to business is becoming increasingly apparent, with the Internet now the most consumed medium during the working day, there has been a real shift in how companies source new suppliers. Web-sites can no longer be seen as online brochures, they need to be interactive, pro-active business development tools that offer real value to their visitors and help expose businesses to the worlds largest audience. The Internet can be a person’s first port of call and if your web-site does not come top of search results, you could potentially lose the opportunity of a life time.

Technical recommendations for your Web site:

• Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are
  closed, and that all links are functioning properly. If your site
  contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site
  effectively, and users may not be able to reach all of your pages. For
  more information about correct HTML syntax, see the HTML 4.01
  Specification.
• If you move your page, use the appropriate HTTP redirection code to indicate whether the move is permanent or temporary.
• Make sure MSNBot is allowed to crawl your site, and is not on your list of Web crawlers prohibited from indexing your site.
• Use a robots.txt file or Robots Meta tags to control how MSNBot and
  other Web crawlers index your site. Using a robots.txt file will tell
  Web crawlers which files and folders on your site it is not allowed to
  crawl. For more information, see the MSNBot FAQ.
• Whenever possible, use URLs that are simple and easy to read.

Content guidelines for your Web site:

• Limit all pages to a reasonable size. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB.
• MSN Search recommends discussing one topic per page. Use links to take users to related topics.
• To ensure your pages are easy to link to from other sites, keep your URLs simple and static. Complicated URLs, or URLs that change often, are difficult to use as link destinations. A persistent URL is easier for users to find and remember, and makes it a more likely link destination from other sites.

Items and techniques discouraged by MSN Search:
MSNBot recognizes the following items and techniques as spam, an inappropriate use of the index. Use of these items and techniques may affect how your site is ranked within MSN Search, and may result in the removal of your page or site from the MSN Search index.

• Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page’s keyword density. This includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.
• Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and links that are visible to users.
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms.

Pages Yahoo! Wants Included in Its Index:

• Original and unique content of genuine value
• Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
• Hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
• Meta data (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
• Good web design in general

Unfortunately, not all web pages contain information that is valuable to a user. Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called “spam.” Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index.

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted:
Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo! does not want include:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual host names
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

Yahoo!’s Site Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor-quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way. As with Yahoo!’s other guidelines, Yahoo! reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to take any and all action it deems appropriate to insure the quality of its index.

Webmaster Guidelines:

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site, which is the best way to ensure you’ll be included in Google’s results. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites

Design and Content Guidelines:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ‘?’ character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical Guidelines:

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID’s, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID’s or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html for a FAQ answering questions regarding robots and how to control them when they visit your site.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the
  system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl
  your site.

When your site is ready:

• Once your site is online, submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!.
• Periodically review Google’s web master section for more information.

Quality Guidelines – Basic principles:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as Web Position GoldTM that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality Guidelines – Specific recommendations:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here, (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known web sites). Its not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Web masters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The User-agent field is for specifying which robot you are referring to and the Disallow field relates to where that particular robots is
restricted from crawling.

An example :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Here “*” means all robots and “/ ” means all URLs. This is read by the robots as, “No access for any robot to any URL” Since all URLs are preceded by “/ ”, this bans access to all URLs when nothing follows after “/ ”.

If you want to allow access to most area’s but just restrict certain parts of your site then we can specify that as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /products/prices/

In this robots.txt file I have repeated both of the two fields we discussed. Multiple commands can be given for different user agents in different lines. The above commands mean that all user agents are banned access to /products/prices/ , because we might want to hide this from appearing in search engines. It allows access to every section to Googlebot, Googles robot.

Working with the robots.txt file:

1. The robots.txt file is always named in all lowercase e.g. robots.txt.

2. The robots.txt file is an exclusion file meant for search engine robot reference and not obligatory for a website to function. An empty or absent file simply means that all robots are welcome to index any part of the website but it is regarded as best practice to have one, even it it just allows all robots into all area’s.

3. Only one file can be maintained per domain.

4. Website owners who do not have administrative rights cannot sometimes make a robots.txt file. In such situations, the Robots Meta Tag can be configured which will solve the same purpose. Here we must keep in mind that lately, questions have been raised about robot behavior regarding the Robot Meta Tag. Some robots might skip it altogether. Protocol makes it obligatory for all robots to start with the robots.txt thereby making it the default starting point for all robots. There are some handy features to the robot meta tag, for instance, you can specify how often a robot should return to your site in number of days.

5. Separate lines are required for specifying access to different user agents and Disallow field should not carry more than one command in a line in the robots.txt file. There is no limit to the number of lines though i.e. both the User-agent and Disallow fields can be repeated with different commands any number of times.

6. Use lower-case for all robots.txt file content.

Advantages of the robots.txt file:
Protocol demands that all search engine robots start with the robots.txt file. This is the default entry point for robots if the file is present. Specific instructions can be placed on this file to help index your site on the web. Major search engines will never violate the Standard for Robots Exclusion.

1. The robots.txt file can be used to keep out unwanted robots like email retrievers, image strippers etc. who use your email address to spam and send malicious content.

2. The robots.txt file can be used to specify the directories on your server that you don’t want robots to access and/or index e.g. Temporary, cgi, and private/back-end directories. Search engines are that powerful, that a well structured search term could bring back information that could lead to security risks for your site. It is better to deny access to these areas.

3. An absent robots.txt file could generate a 404 error and redirect the robot to your default 404 error page. The robot could then be left with no link to follow and stop crawling.

4. The need for the robots.txt file was also felt to stop robots from deluging servers with rapid-fire requests or re-indexing the same files repeatedly. There are areas of information on most search engine question areas that give specific information about controlling the frequency and speed of their bot crawling your site, if you believe it is eating up bandwidth and over loading your server.

Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Visible Text, Alt Tags, Comment Tags, Domain Name, Image tags, Linked Text, Option Tags and Reference_Tags. Each search engine prefers different density to each other and there is no formula to go by, only some recommendations which will follow.

Most website owners talk about their most important keywords, but very few really do anything about how they use them within their content and expect to feature well in the search engines. These often overlooked search terms that are so important to a website’s placement in the search rankings are a vital component of any search engine optimisation (SEO) effort.

Without keywords for the search engines to index, there is literally nothing to find in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Keywords are the whole purpose of the search engines crawling your site and it is these terms that will potentially lead customers to your site.

Location and Density of Keywords:
There are both “on page” and “off page” factors to be considered when optimising a site for keyword density. As you can see from the list above, keywords are gathered from numerous places and each search engine calculates its keyword relevancy formula in different ways.

Some permit heavier use of keywords on a page than others and some attach more importance to position on a page and page title text. Some engines, like Google, prefer to see much lighter use of keywords to discourage over use, or what is referred to as search engine spamming.

Other on page keyword modifications that carry great weight are bolding, italic, and actual keyword type size used. Other factors include the use of page titles, and their relative importance to the various search engines, as keyword delivery mechanisms. Care must also be taken when creating or requesting links into your site, the anchor text used to link through to the site is actually collated and seen as on page content for your site and must therefore have some relevance to the content it refers.

Once a good balance of both the placement and density of a web page’s keywords is created, you will see a marked difference in performance in the search engines when compared to a site that has not been optimised. Whilst there is no secret formula, common
sense and good search engine practices will harvest great results.

When planning which keywords to target on a page, a plan of attack must first be devised. Never dilute your message by having too many keywords focused on one page, divide your site into sections and theme each section on one keyword. If the keyword is not that competitive, maybe two, but I always recommend optimising for one keyword per page.

Keep the long term goal in mind of ranking high for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. To score highly for that selected search term, a concentrated effort is essential. Think one keyword, with accompanying phrase, maximum for each page. In a competitive search field, the single keyword approach is the only one worth employing, if you want to rank well at all.

The site’s home page and internal pages should have slightly different focus, but they should be created with the overall goal in mind and be highly relevant. This is especially important for highly competitive keyword situations. Since low, medium, and highly competitive keyword conditions require differing strategies, they need individual consideration.

Each targeted keyword should then be provided with separately linked and themed internal supporting pages. By providing additional theme and topic related pages, the keywords are given extra support, and overall on and off page density is increased.

The objective is to create a powerful website theme built around that single keyword. Anything less, and the site will not be able to compete for that term at all. Regardless of the level of competition, it’s a good idea to become dominant in as many search terms within the site’s topic as possible. Once top search rankings are achieved with an important keyword, move to the next one. The more keywords are controlled, the more paths are available to enter the website, resulting in huge increases in visitor traffic, which will in turn help boost your sites rank in achieving better results in other search terms.

Some guidelines to consider:
When deciding how heavily to place keywords on a page, there are different guides for different search engines, I will always recommend optimising for Google because in my opinion they encourage the best practices, they are less biased by paid results and command the lions share of search traffic.

Google has the strictest requirements regarding keyword density. No more than 2% of a web page’s words should be the targeted keywords. Any more will be considered spamming. On the other hand, Yahoo! and MSN Search have much higher keyword density tolerances, perhaps as high as 5% of total words. That difference leaves quite a distance between the optimum limits for Google and the levels permissible in Yahoo! and MSN. A good optimisation company will realise that a trade off will be necessary, while ensuring that the copy reads well for potential customers and clients and conforms to UK accessibility laws.

The page’s most important keyword is included in the page title. Each web page should have a unique title, providing an extra keyword boost to that page. Titles are a very crucial part of the various search engine algorithms, and are an important way to prominently display the most sought after keyword on the page.

While it is debatable whether placing keywords early in the on page copy is helpful in Google, higher placement does appear to have some benefit in Yahoo! and MSN Search. Those search engines give some additional weight to bolding, italics and text enclosed in H1, H2 and H3 tags as well.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated next-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Information taken from: http://www.google.com/technology/

There are arguments to say that PageRank carries a lot of power when it comes to SEO within Google. Google prefers sites with large amounts of content and large amounts of inward bound links. It is important to structure your site well in terms of internal linking because depending on your aim, it is possible to focus your PageRank on a certain page or ensure it balances well throughout the site.

Pages with high PageRank are likely to feature much higher than their competitors for certain keywords even if the rest of their ptimisation is of equal stature.

Not all search engines are created equal when it comes to their ability to perform deep level searches or crawling. Google is probably the most adept but some of the others really struggle to index content three or four levels down, into your sites structure. Therefore, I would recommend keeping your optimisation efforts focused on the first and second level ages within the site. Do not neglect the remaining area’s but be more than sure your main phrases are included on that first and second level.

It is also important to include a link to a site map on every searchable page within the site. This not only means another page pf highly focused content if you title your links intelligently but also mean that at any point, if a robot loses its way or is unable to follow your navigation for some reason, it can fall back to the site map link and reach every level of the site from there.

For instance, www.cheap-flights.com, is a much better domain name than www.expedia.com, unless you have a multi-million pound marketing budget and can afford to promote that name. Most of your custom, if you do not have that kind of marketing power, will come from searching, and search engines place a lot of relevancy on your domain names construction.

Do a search in some of the engines for particular fields and see if this is the case, you will be surprised at what you find.

Keywords and phrases are the most important part of the planning and strategy phase of web site development. It is imperative that a great amount of research and customer profiling goes into deciding which keywords and phrases to use. They are a major deciding factor once your site has been indexed, as to how your campaign will perform. They could be the fine line between success and failure in many cases.

Deciding which keywords and phrases to use is a laborious task. You need to step away from your knowledge of your company and your product and imagine you are a complete stranger to your offering. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who needs the information or service you have, or someone who has a specific problem to solve which you can help with. Then you will be getting close to finding the keywords and phrases you need. Ask friends and family, who do not know much about your subject, to tell you what they would type into a search engine, be sure not to prompt them in anyway, you need quality results.

Once you have decided on your keywords and phrases, enter them into either overture search term tool or wordtracker, to get a better idea of who is searching for what. You can then refine your keywords and phrases, in-line with traffic levels for each word and decide upon 3 to 5 main key phrases, depending upon the size of your site or the competitiveness of those terms.

Once keywords and phrases are decided, you need to start to theme each pages content around one of those phrases. A common mistake is to try and create content that covers all bases but realistically achieves nothing accept dilution of keyword density and therefore lessens your chance of gaining high rankings for those phrases.

Things are by no means as simple as they may appear where search engines are involved. This guide is a framework for designing and optimising websites to perform well in any search engine but predominantly Google, since it accounts for, in my experience, up to 85% of all traffic generated through search engines.

How do they work?
Search engines do not simply search all websites on the Internet and then present you with the most relevant list of sites, it much more complicated. If search engines were to check every site in “real time”, it would take months to return any results. You know how long it takes to search something as simple as your emails for a word or phrase; the Internet is infinitely larger and increasingly more complex. So the search engines had to find a more manageable solution to the problem. This is where software programs called robots and spiders come into the frame.

They move around the Internet, extracting content and other items from the websites it finds and stores these details in its own database, this is called crawling or indexing. Once they have collected this information they then analyze it on a wide number of different factors and attach certain scores to the site for various attributes such as, keyword occurrence, number of links and amount of content.

So essentially, when you use a search engine like Google, you are searching their database, not the Internet directly. That is why it is vitally important to make sure your site has been submitted to the main feeder engines, which means you will at least have a chance of being found.

Understanding the calculations the different search engines use to appraise sites that is so important in achieving high rankings. If we know how to optimise sites for search engines, we can begin to see results and this means more traffic, which could equal more business. 90% of all websites visited on the Internet are found through search engines. They are essentially a mechanism for consumers to find the product, service and information they require, from a staggeringly vast amount of information.

Things are by no means as simple as they may appear where search engines are involved. This guide is a framework for designing and optimising websites to perform well in any search engine but predominantly Google, since it accounts for, in my experience, up to 85% of all traffic generated through search engines.

How do they work?
Search engines do not simply search all websites on the Internet and then present you with the most relevant list of sites, it much more complicated. If search engines were to check every site in “real time”, it would take months to return any results. You know how long it takes to search something as simple as your emails for a word or phrase; the Internet is infinitely larger and increasingly more complex. So the search engines had to find a more manageable solution to the problem. This is where software programs called robots and spiders come into the frame.

They move around the Internet, extracting content and other items from the websites it finds and stores these details in its own database, this is called crawling or indexing. Once they have collected this information they then analyze it on a wide number of different factors and attach certain scores to the site for various attributes such as, keyword occurrence, number of links and amount of content.

So essentially, when you use a search engine like Google, you are searching their database, not the Internet directly. That is why it is vitally important to make sure your site has been submitted to the main feeder engines, which means you will at least have a chance of being found.

Understanding the calculations the different search engines use to appraise sites that is so important in achieving high rankings. If we know how to optimise sites for search engines, we can begin to see results and this means more traffic, which could equal more business.

More about search engine robots:
Search engine robots, as mentioned earlier, are the tools search engines use to gather content and information regarding the different sites available on the Internet. They are sometimes called “spiders”, “bots” or “crawlers”, due to the way they move from link to link, through a site.

The robots seek out web sites, checking for new sites, new pages and any changes to existing content. Once they have gathered this information, they pass it into the database for “indexing”, where it is evaluated.

There are 3 possible reasons a robot will visit your site:

1. You submitted the URL to the search engine through its submission pages.
2. The robot has found your site from another website linking to you, know as an
   external link.
3. The robot knows you exist and is checking to see if your content has changed or been updated.

Robots are the first key to search engine to search engine optimisation, if you do not understand how they move around the site and what kind of navigation system it can follow, then your content is irrelevant because the robot won’t be able to find it.

Robots, at the moment, are relatively simple pieces of programming that have evolved from simple text browsers used in the early days of web browsing, when the Internet was used as a military information resource. They are able to read most text and code but struggle with the following:

‒ Frames and frame sets, this is why they have been largely abandoned by designers.
‒ Flash animations and navigation systems.
‒ Invalid code or coding practices.
‒ Text contained in images.
‒ Dynamically created URLs.
‒ Some Javascript and Javascript navigation systems.

Assuming the robots can find your site, the first thing they will check is your “robots.txt”, Not all sites have one, if you do it will be in what’s called your root directory. The base folder your site is stored in, and it informs the robot if it is allowed to index your site, it is then directed by this file, where it can and cannot go.

Your statistics package for your website should tell you which robots have been visiting you, how often they are coming and how many pages they are indexing per visit. The main three robots are Yahoo’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s, respectively identified as Inktomi Slurp, and Googlebot MSN Bot.

In order to do well in search engines you want them to visit you every day and do comprehensive, deep level indexing. So, what happens once all your information has been gathered? The search engines index the content!

Search engine indexing:
Once your content has been extracted, it is indexed. Each search engine has its own unique system for evaluating this information called an algorithm, essentially a complex mathematical equation that weighs up all the factors discussed in this document, compares them to every other site and allocates a point score to your site.

Because of the unique nature of these algorithms, it does not necessarily follow that a high ranking in Google will give the same result in Yahoo. The search companies are constantly tweaking and changing their algorithm in order that their engine be the one to offer the most relevant results from your keyword search and you will therefore use their service again. They also constantly refine their weighting techniques to make sure they are avoiding dirty tricks used by unethical optimisers to give artificially high rankings to irrelevant pages. It is for this reason that employing the services of a search engine optimisation firm who live and breath these rules, on a daily basis, is imperative. The layman cannot hope to keep up with these changes.

As I write this information now, the search companies are working on their next generation robots with much higher levels of intelligence that will change the face of optimisation, at least for a while anyway. In my opinion, Google is by far the most fair, impartial and intelligent search engine around. It does not allow paid listings to effect its main results and it pushes over 85% of traffic through the sites I monitor.