Ideally a site should only render under a single domain to avoid any problems with duplicate content. Although Google claims this is no longer an issue, evidence shows otherwise with pages from many domains being indexed with the www and without. For some this causes no real problems, for others it can cause a complete nightmare with duplicate content causing major pages to disappear and rankings vanishing over night.

In either case with the fix being relatively simple (especially if you own the server / have admin access / use a competant web host) there is no excuse.

So to cover this topic I will define two hypothetical problems and document how to solve them.

Situation 1

I have a site running on IIS 6 that suffers from canonicalisation.

Problem 1

My site renders as http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com. I want it to only render with the www extension and handle anyone using the non-www properly rather than showing them a 404 page.

Solution 1

Open IIS Manager and create a new site profile for the non-www version of the site. The IP address and port should be the same, as should the home directory. Set the host header (which should be www.mypoorlysite.com for the main site) to mypoorlysite.com avoiding the www. Now complete the process and select finish.

Open the properties of the newly created non-www site profile. Select the “Home Directory” tab. Select “A redirection to a URL”. In the “Redirect to:” field enter the full URL of the final domain i.e. http://www.mypoorlysite.com.

Finally tick the box labelled “A permanent redirection for this resource”, which switches it from a 302 to a 301 redirect.

Click apply and that it. If all is correct, http://mypoorlysite.com should now 301 redirect to http://www.mypoorlysite.com.

Situation 2

I have a site that has several domains pointing to it all of which suffer from canonicalisation. I’m running on IIS 6 and have set up a separate Website through this for each all pointing to the same folder.

Problem 2

My site renders for each of the domains and also for the non-www version of each of the domains. Here the problem goes beyond the www / non-www issue mentioned above as several domains are also in use i.e. www.mysite1.com, www.mysite2.com, www.mysite3.com etc.

I want everything to redirect correctly to www.mysite1.com including the non-www versions.

Solution 2

Firstly implement the solution 1 for www.mysite1.com. With this in place visit the properties of each of the other domains. Select the “Home Directory” tab. Select “A redirection to a URL”. In the “Redirect to:” field enter http://www.mysite1.com.

Finally tick the box labelled “A permanent redirection for this resource”, which switches it from a 302 to a 301 redirect.

Click apply and that it. If all is correct, the www and non-www versions of the domain you are redirecting should now 301 redirect to http://www.mysite1.com.

Useful Tools

Google Webmaster Tools – Here you can set your preferred choice as to whether Google should use the www or non-www version of your site. Sounds OK put personally I would rather sort that myself.

Redirect Checker – A handy tool for checking your redirect is a 301.

It can be a great way to stretch your marketing budget whether you are a small or large business. Particularly for small and new businesses, social media has provided a new channel to market their products and/or services through.

The first example I had of this power was when Lilly Allen found fame after promoting herself and her music on MySpace. Now there are a number of similar social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo all of which provide a business owner with a new audience to promote their business too and another activity to add to their marketing mix.

The outlay for a social media campaign is very little compared to other forms of media, for example TV advertising. Some large businesses can spend millions on TV advertising with the aim of creating a conversation for their customers, however it is so much cheaper to listen to a conversation and engage in one through things like blogging and social networking sites. The only real cost is your time as opposed to your money. So calling all new businesses and SME’s, get SMOing and stretch that budget a little bit further.

The deal is pretty simple, each student team will get $200 to spend on a Adwords campaign for a local business of their choosing. The students will then have to outline a strategy, run the campaign, assess the results, and then provide the business with recommendations for further development. Teams will then submit a report to Google of their Adwords escapades and they will be judged by a panel of independent academics from all over the globe. The winners will get flown out to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, and get to meet the team that created AdWords.

Check out the press release or visit the main site for more information.

Google analytics is something that I, and I’m sure most online marketers, use on regular basis. It is a great way to identify patterns and trends in your traffic and conversions. The only drawback was that you couldn’t compare different time periods to monitor year on year patterns and trends and see obvious areas of growth and/or decline.

The comparison tool is easy to find and easy to use and, as always it produces excellent reports in seconds.

I have to say that for me Google Analytics is fast becoming the most useful metrics program available. It’s free, it’s comprehensive and it’s easy to use. I’m sure it will soon become the industry standard for all search marketing agencies. It’s fab!

It is no longer enough to get hundreds or thousands of visitors a month to your website it’s the action your visitors take when they get to your website that’s important.

As an account manager working for a search marketing agency, my recent discovery of the new Website Optimiser tool has provided me with a great way of adding value to the service we offer our clients. Any business that relies on their website for sales and lead generation will find this tool remarkable and I am sure it will become an essential part of the marketing function. It is another one of Google’s innovative tools designed to help any business large or small and it’s absolutely free.

Google Website Optimiser has allowed me to take the SEO and PPC service we offer our clients to the next level. We already track conversion rates to measure the volume of traffic we drive to a site and how much of it converts into a lead or sale. Website Optimiser now means we can drive the conversion rate even more by constantly testing different pages to maximise on the number of conversions made.

I am not technical at all, but using web optimiser is really easy and can have a massive impact on your conversions. Quite simply you select which page you would like to test and then create the variations. You can decide on how often each variation is served so in case you are worried one of the changes will reduce your conversions you can opt for a 70%-30% split for instance, which can put your mind at ease. By continually monitoring and changing the pages you will eventually find the perfect page where you will hit your maximum conversion rate where everything on the page is motivating your visitors to take the action you want them to take.

It doesn’t get any better than this – what will Google think of next?

Although any SEO bod worth their salt already knows that titles and meta description need to bespoke, to the point and related to the page content, it is often difficult to relate this to clients and even more so to web developers set on making everything as easy as possible via a single dynamic page.

Set your client up with their own login to Webmaster Tools for their site and they will soon be on your side.

For me, Google has spurred the recent revival of the computer whizz, look back 10 years and the time when we mercilessly sent a cute black Labrador to scowl the web, when computer swats had become the Hugh Hefners of the super highways, everyone wanted to know them, after all they held the keys to the .com goldmine.

.bomb, crash, oops, many got it grossly wrong and their status plummeted like there stock…back to the bottom, the pimples once again reared their ugly heads and the wedgies returned.

Fast forward to now, the Internet is regaining its social status of being cool. Let’s have a look at some of the evidence…you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home to do your Christmas shopping…cool. You usually get things a lot cheaper off the net…cool. You’ve got 200,000 people in your social network despite only knowing 10?…cool. You can go to the bank without standing in a que for three hours…cool. You can ramble on about your thoughts on a ‘blog’ and people read it…cool. Advertising supposedly isn’t worth doing unless it’s got ‘online’ in it…cool. You can get your website top ahead of 2 million others in Google…cool.

Think of the internet and you think Google. A recent poll cemented Google at the top of the best loved brands for the second year running…cool! But it’s only a page with a search box and a multi coloured logo, however this changes on special occasions - cue snow topped Google…cool.

This page represents so much more, it’s iconic, familiar and for many people it’s their door way to the world and the internet. It has become a life management portal, booking a theatre ticket, looking for a flight, a hotel, a car, a cd, a job, then use Google.

People who work at Google are called Googlers, they work at the Googleplex (has anyone else got the image of Robin Williams prancing around a factory in the film Toys?!!) Let’s face it, no matter how cynical you maybe you’ve got to admit that you want to be a Google employee for just a day, do you think that they have red, blue and yellow uniforms?

So it’s plain to see that Google is cool, we love it, and we can’t get enough of it. May I motion that all involved in the Internet are ‘Coogle’ (my girlfriend will kill me when she reads this, yes people who work with the Internet do have girlfriends) long live being Coogle, long live Google!
(Although they may wish to stop taking over the world Murdoch style, it kills diversity…not cool!)

Coogle - Coo·gle v(cōō’gəl) - Person who works with and for the internet.

Ryan

N.B. Google never paid me to write this blog!

The top 10 best-loved brands are as follows, with their 2006 position in brackets:

1. Google (1)
2. Nokia (3)
3. Amazon (17)
4. Tesco (2)
5. eBay (4)
6. British Airways (9)
7. Coca Cola (7)
8. Persil (5)
9. Heinz (37)
10. O2 (15)

Asking this question is usually a result of a lack of knowledge. They assume that because SEO involves the website, the web development team must be able to do it. This is certainly not the case; many areas of the website may require the input of an external company. There are 2 areas that I strongly feel should be performed by an external company:

• Conversion Optimisation
• SEO

I would love to hear if you have any other areas that you feel should be outsourced, however, there is a one word reason why I have picked these two… experience!

In these two areas I feel there is no substitute for experience. Respectable companies specialising in either of these two areas will have extensive knowledge on what does and doesn’t work. They will most likely have worked in the same or similar industry and can plan the new campaign based on the knowledge from previous ones. In-house teams will be unable to do this.

With SEO, relevant link building resources will be readily available having already built links in your industry. You will also be working with someone who should be fully up-to date with the world of organic search. It’s true that your web development team could go and learn how to make a site search engine friendly, and could have a go at SEO. But do you really want someone ‘having a go’ at something that could make or break your business?
I’m sure there are some success stories out there and that the occasional web development team gets it right (I doubt these will be in competitive industries). But a growing proportion of the leads we receive are from marketing managers whose in-house team or web-development company have ‘had a go’ at SEO and it have not got the results they expected.

As far as I’m concerned there are certain areas where you will need a helping hand. Do you agree? Let me know your thoughts.

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?!

It’s important to remember that the web is still relatively young as an industry. Whilst I think we’re beyond the automobiles industry benchmark of the the Ford Model T, we’re nowhere near the deterioration of Detroit! The longevity of Search Engine Optimisation is less clear, but you can be guaranteed that as the web moves out of pubescence / young adulthood its evolution will have an effect on the way Search Marketing operates. Social Media Optimisation could be only the first of many examples.

So what is Social Media Optimisation?

The term Social Media Optimisation has been credited to Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations, he defines SMO as the following.

The concept behind SMO 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.

When looking at SMO for his own clients Rohit breaks SMO down into 5 rules to help his thinking,

• Increase your linkability
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• Reward inbound links
• Help your content travel
• Encourage the mashup

To get a strategic overview of these points check out Rohits original post 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Rohits post is most definitely worth a look, but based upon my own experience and others I intend to delve into these points a little deeper and hopefully explain how they translate into real world (well, web world) actions.

1. Increase your linkability

For the uninitiated linkability is the measure by which your website is worth linking to. For most business sites out there this is usually pretty low; they offer generic shop fronts or dry corporate sites that are not regularly updated, both remain ’static’.

You need to give people a reason to link to your content, a standard pretty brochure based site simply isn’t enough. You need to offer something unique, interesting, original, useful, innovative, comprehensive, controversial, argumentative, informative, witty, -insert your own adjective here -. What’s your differentiator?

The most common and easiest way to achieve this for most organisations large and small is to introduce a corporate blog. This gives them a platform via which they can offer regularly updated insightful information about their organisation in an informal way, and it might just turn out to be something worth linking to or voting for.

The options here though are almost endless, from academic white papers, through to a themed Flash Game, back to a Firefox extension. An extremely old school example of this would be an office web cam, nowadays on its own this won’t be enough, but point it at your custom built office water cooler piranha aquarium and you’ve got a guaranteed hit.

The best example I can give is a site I recently created, Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide, by PPC agency expert Steve Baker. This site is a comprehensive guide to using Google Adwords and contains a level of depth and insight not previously available on the web; its a unique and comprehensive guide on a topic that plenty of people blog about, and importantly a topic we as a business can easily generate content (or a resource or a tool) around. Making something that has linkability isn’t as hard as it may sound, just think about what you already know and how you can put that across in a unique and interesting fashion to others.

2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy

In the early days of Digg those ever so enthusiastic early adopters would happily manually submit your amazing content for you, just for the kudos of being first to do so; plenty of users would then follow on and Digg you up. Sure that still happens, but in order to maximise your potential number of votes and ‘make the front page’ of social media sites you need make it easy for users of these social sites to vote for your content.

Think about it, how many sites do Digg users visit in one session? Unless your content is the best of the best they’re not going to go out of their way to submit your site when there’s a funny video of Britney Spears exposing herself in the next tab waiting for their attention. Users of these sites want to reward content they enjoy (on whatever level), its part of the experience for them, you’ve just got to make it easy for them to do so.

Social Share Buttons

I like to call the answer to this, Social Share Buttons (SSBs), those little icons and text links you increasingly see on the bottom of every web page. Please feel free to propagate usage of this phrase via your own weblog :).

Technically SSBs are easy enough to implement, it’s just a matter a adding a few images, correctly linking them through to the social site and perhaps throwing in a few database controlled elements in, such as titles, descriptions and relevant tags. Most of the Social Media sites offer guidance on how to properly link to their service for user submissions and there are plenty of Wordpress plug-ins available to automate the installation of SSBs to help along the unsure.

SSBs (Social Share Buttons) from The BBC

Social Share Buttons enter the Mainstream

Over the past 6-12 months the practice of including SSBs has become practically mainstream. It all started in the Blogosphere, but SSBs can now be found on almost all national UK newspaper websites, weblogs, and local rag sites alike. Even the lamest of websites now include them, in fact the point of saturation is so that SSBs have become almost uncool, practically passe for the ultra web hip. It is perhaps the ultimate endorsement of your content or creditability when you are successful on social media sites like Digg without using them, I’m so big I don’t need to advertise kinda thing.

Participation is compulsory to protect your interests

The most recent high profile example of adoption of SSBs is the BBC. Whilst the Beeb was quick to pick up on and promote RSS feeds it has been slow to jump on the SMO and SSB bandwagon having only introduced its icons in the past few months. I would suggest that in part, the decision by the BBC to adopt SSBs was based upon the fact that many bloggers were recycling BBC news stories into their own blog posts and garnering the social media attention for themselves. Since the BBC has introduced the buttons the original stories (i.e. the BBC) are now receiving the social media attention rather than the copycat bloggers. This doesn’t just apply to large well known sites like the BBC. Imagine you were an obesity surgery business that introduced an innovative new type of surgery that was newsworthy. Introducing SSBs to the official press release would mean you would stand a chance of being noticed amongst the numerous blogs that will attempt to make grass on the back of your story. A more targeted SMO campaign could ensure that it is your copy and message that gains the most social media attention rather than some amateur blogger looking for cheap gains at your expense. Protect your brand and gain potential new customers all in one go.

The Facebook Phenomeom

You’ll notice that the Beebs SSBs also include Facebook. Facebook truly hit the big time in the UK over the summer, regularly making the headlines in print and on TV alike. We are regular informed that time spent on Facebook during work hours is costing the UK economy millions (if not billions) in wasted man hours. The speed at which Facebook SSBs appeared was remarkable, it has taken years for the phenomenon that is Stumbleupon to appear on mainstream websites, the adoption of Facebook SSBs was practically overnight. This is perhaps even more remarkable when you consider the fact that Facebook is largely a closed garden. Web developers and web marketers alike, whether they realise it or not, are embracing SMO tactics wholeheartedly.

3. Reward inbound links

If you’ve got this far into the article your probably already aware that links to your site play a crucial role in your success in Google rankings. Quite simply, the more inbound links you have the better.

A lot of ‘amateur’ bloggers will link to your content just to have something to blog about (assuming you have the right type of link bait of course) but to maximise your incoming linking potential you need to offer linkers a reward. The only truly valued reward you can give here is a link back.

Most blogging software offers track backs, allowing people to ping your blog when they link to it and receive an excerpt and link back to their original post in your comments area. It’s a simple, effective and established method of encouraging people to link and discuss your weblog posts.

More recently a number of webpage widgets have emerged that show related weblog posts to the page you are reading, this relationship is usually established via incoming links. Personally I’m not a fan of these as I feel they add more of a hindrance to a users site experience than adding to it, but I can appreciate how perhaps they are more appropriate than ‘techie’ trackbacks on some sites.

The ultimate aim of any search marketer is to generate one-way incoming links, and this is still possible using the above methods as, at least in the eyes of Google, these links are discounted if they have rel=”nofollow” insert on the link back. Most modern blogging software does this automatically nowadays. Also, most of the widgets that are available render their links in Javascript, meaning they are invisible to Google and other engines.

You should also make it as easy as possible for people to link to your site, simply by having human friendly URLs, eg http://www.example.com/news rather than www.example.com/index.aspx?5847. For the less technically minded (Bebo, Myspace et al users) it might also be an idea to introduce code which they can copy and paste to embed a link and a banner to your website.

4. Help your content travel

Making your content travel is about creating content that can be portable, content that can submitted and appear on other sites or elsewhere in the ‘real world’. We’re talking MP3s, videos and PDFs here. Ultimately, Rohit argues, this will result in more backlinks to your site, I assume as simply your URL and content is in-front of more eyeballs. Whether creating portable media like this generates a significant amount of backlinks is too hard to assertain but submitting your creative video to YouTube will certainly increase your exposure.

5. Encourage the Mashup

A mashup is the idea of taking data sources from several different websites and mashing them together to form a new web application. Most mashups are altruistic affairs due to the nature of content licensing; common examples include such things as taking traffic reports from the BBC website and placing them onto top of Google Maps interface in real time.

As Rohit points out the best example of commercial success in offering content for syndication is You Tube via their video embedding, the promotion of their brand and service on every site that featured their videos weighed heavily in quickly raising their profile early on.

The easiest way for most websites to fulfil this point of SMO is to offer an RSS feed of their latest news stories. Doing this allows your content to be syndicated out to the rest of the web; your headlines and news excerpts can appear on other peoples websites, creating one-way back links and driving traffic. There are hundreds of RSS aggregators and search engines (and geeky developers) waiting to devour your content and promote it to a new audience.

Many worry about issues of copyright and duplicate content in making there content available in such an accessible manner, but they shouldn’t. RSS feeds can be set to only include a snippet from the news story meaning duplicate content penalties from Google should be avoided and anyone wishing to read the entire story will have to visit your site.

The truth is though, the chances are unless your what your feed offers is particularly unique or press worthy you are unlikely to feature in anything more prestigious than an RSS aggregator or directory. Whilst not reliant on RSS perhaps the ultimate ‘mash up’ (more accurately aggregator) most sites can hope to feature in is Google News. This endeavour though is still worthwhile, just for the backlinks it can generate alone (and we haven’t even touched upon the user experience enhancements it makes possible).

My own personal favourite mash up related tip is geourl.org. Add some ibcm geographical co-ordinates into the head of your document, submit and your listed. This instantly generates over 100 potential backlinks from geourl. What really interests me here though is where this data may eventually end up being used…..

On a very low level many blogs already feature GeoURL links in their sidebar. As there are few automatic services for embedding this data available these blogs tend to be of fairly high value as they have been created by web professionals, a free geographical on-topic backlink from a decent blog.

Its Still About the Links, Baby

As Google seemingly continues to shout clamp down on paid links the importance of being able to attractive and generate real natural links will become increasingly important. They’re not quite there yet, but eventually Google will manage to get its act together and weed out many paid for links (though probably not all). This could be years away, but as part of a long, long term strategy every site should be looking to build as many natural and real links as possible.

For me, working day to day as an SEO analyst this is the real attraction of SMO, the potential incoming one-way links it can generate, be it from the social media sties themselves or the proceeding blog posts. Sure, huge traffic surges can be nice but the traffic is often of a low quality or off-topic and offers me little or no real value as a search marketer of commercial sites looking to sell specific products.

If an article or ’social media bait’ of yours makes the front page of Digg you can be guaranteed that you’ll pick up a whole host of links from others sites, as others look for interesting content to blog about, recommend or link to.

Beyond the Social Media Optimisation 5 step plan

SMO though doesn’t just stop there, though I’m going to. A number of marketing professionals have picked up on Rohits post and run with it, creating several more SMO check points of there own.

6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
From Jeremiah Owyang

8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
From Cameron Olthuis

12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
From Loren Baker

14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
From Lee Odden

Social Media Optimisation is an emerging art and changing daily as new social media players emerge and the established sites update themselves. Your thoughts on this article, or on how this emerging industry will evolve are welcome.