Apparently I had been lied to…… all these cutting edge marketing models and theories, which had been so enthusiastically taught to us, proved to be a little redundant and dated when it came to digital marketing, and when I say a little, I mean totally. (In hindsight I should probably have thought it was a little suspicious that our most recent text book was published in 1986 and definitely raised my concerns when we watched a BBC video entitled “The Future of Online Marketing”, filmed in 2000!)

Not once in my role as an SEO Analyst, have I been asked to carry out a SWOT analysis for a new client’s site or a PESTLE analysis of the external environment of a client’s marketplace. Surely my intimate knowledge of Porters 5 force model would come in handy?! Apparently not. All that time memorizing the 7P’s of the Marketing Mix – wasted – I could have been down the pub or watching Come Dine With Me…. or could I?

Because the thing is, although these traditional marketing models are rarely mentioned by name in the world of SEO and search marketing, we inherently carry them out, or at least aspects of them, almost constantly, without even realizing it. And they are in fact, as relevant today as they were when they were first thought up, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago.

Don’t believe me? Well take a look at the following couple of examples. Just because you don’t call it a SWOT analysis, doesn’t mean it isn’t one!

SWOT Analysis or New Client Site Review

So, as an SEO Analyst one of the first tasks with a new client, or perhaps even earlier during the sales phase, is to carry out an initial review of the site with the aim of highlighting potential strengths and weakness, reviewing the competiveness of the niche and ultimately finding potential opportunities for improvement – be it quick wins or a long term strategy. This, believe it or not, is a classic SWOT analysis and would look something like this:

S: Strengths
W: Weaknesses
O: Opportunities
T: Threats

Still have your doubts? Well how about this………………

7 P’s of the Marketing Mix for Link Building

Love it or hate it, link building is an integral component of search marketing. Backlinks remain the most influential factor used by the major search engines when ranking your webpages and as such, developing a powerful backlink profile is of the upmost importance. However, doing this is not an easy task. Link building is time consuming, resource heavy and often monotonous. To be a truly good link builder takes time and experience and to achieve that powerful backlink profile, you need to ensure you have the perfect backlink mix.

And that brings me on to my next old school marketing model: The 7 P’s of the Marketing Mix. A term first coined in 1953 to describe the fundamental elements necessary for a successful marketing campaign. The then Four P’s has grown over the years to become seven; Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence.

So can this 57 year old methodology really still be relevant in today’s digital marketing world, and even more so in the often difficult and murky world of link building? Well let’s see.

The 7 P’s of Successful Link Building

Product: Understand your product. So for link building, your product is going to be the site you are link building for. Ask yourself ‘why would somebody want to link to this site? What features, services, information or benefits does my product offer? What value would linking to my product add to somebody’s website or customers?’ If you can’t answer these questions, then neither will the people you are approaching to build links so why would they link to you? When you can answer these, questions use this information in your sales pitch.

Price: Buying Links. So everybody knows that search engines don’t like people to buy links, (unless you’re buying them off Google of course!) and recently Google seems to be clamping down extra hard on webmasters who do. However, everybody also knows that buying links can still work, as was highlighted in a recent experiment over at SEOMOZ. So the question is do you or don’t you? If you decide to be whiter than white then you’re going to have to work extra hard on your organic and creative link building strategies, and if you do, then you’re going to have to be extremely careful about the paid link footprint you create.

Place: Where are you going to place your link? The placement of your link on a page is an extremely important factor used by search engines to determine the importance and thus power of the link. This is becoming increasingly important with Google’s recent development from Random to Reasonable Surfer (if you have no idea what I’m talking about this post by our Director of Search, Andy Heaps, should explain it). Also, don’t just think about the on-page position but the website as a whole. Ask yourself ‘is this website really relevant to my site and my visitors?’ If not, the link is probably of little value. With search engines becoming more and more capable at semantic search, relevancy and placement are ever important factors.

Promotion: Link Bait. What incentives are you offering people to link back to you? Is it funny? Is it newsworthy? Is it groundbreaking? Is it an exclusive? Is it controversial? Are you offering free products for a competition or gift vouchers? Are you going to pay them? These are all things you need to consider when you are promoting your site for links. If your site is none of the above, maybe you need to think about creating some new content?

Also when promoting your site you need to consider how you are contacting people. Are you sending bland, generic, non-personal emails? Well maybe you shouldn’t. Promotion is all about adding value – work out what value you can add to someone else’s site and tell them about it!

People: We are currently in the midst of the Social Media revolution, so get out there and be sociable! Join forums and communities, comment on blogs, use Twitter and Facebook. These are all ways of reaching out and forming real relationships with people which you can use not only to gain direct links, but to spread the word about your link worthy product.

Process: Managing Your Link Building. Managing and monitoring a link building campaign can be a fairly complex process, especially for agencies that have many campaigns running in parallel. However, it remains an essential element of achieving a successful link building campaign. Although I could write a whole other post on this topic here are a few things to consider.

• Monitoring links: Are they still live?
• Tools and Methods: Sourcing Links
• Backlink Analysis: Tools and Records
• Finance
• Metrics: Valuing Links
• Making Contact
• Contacts/ Link Database
• Testing and Feedback

So whether you use a bespoke in-house tool like we do at Epiphany or an off –the-shelf tool such as Buzz Stream, successfully managing the link building process is vital!

Physical Evidence: Okay…. so 6 out of 7 wasn’t bad!

So there you have it; two old school, traditional marketing techniques that work perfectly for two common search marketing processes. And it doesn’t stop there. Next time you are carrying out an analysis of the competitor landscape, perhaps you should take a moment to consider Porters 5 Force Model or a PESTLE Analysis?

I know as search marketers we like to think we are at the cutting edge of innovation and technology, but perhaps we should take a step back and show a little respect to our marketing forefathers. After all, there is little point in reinventing the wheel.

The past few weeks prove that, as it has been rather eventful for the four main players in the world of search: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu. Let’s look at some of the main headlines the last two weeks:

1) The YaBing merger:

It all started back in mid-2009 when Yahoo announced that it was joining forces with Microsoft’s Bing to take on Google. As explained in the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, in short, Microsoft is powering Yahoo’s search with the Bing engine. This affects only the Yahoo organic listings for now, although some algorithmic testing for paid and unpaid listings have started in the beginning of July (please refer to Yahoo! begins testing with Microsoft for more details). For all SEO-ers, the main question is what does that change from an optimisation point of view? Well, Nothing really. Who optimises for Bing or Yahoo nowadays? But it’s still a good idea to do it anyway. Good tips can be found on this Search Engine Land article.

2) Yahoo! Japan says ‘Arigato’ to Google

Yahoo strikes again, this time from Japan. Indeed, a new deal sees Yahoo! Japan employ Google technology to power its search engine and online advertising systems.

This can be regarded as one of the best deals in the Search Engine Market share war as they are now both covering almost all of the search market in second largest economy.

Although Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo back in February 2008, the announcement was made on the 27^th July 2010 leaving Microsoft feeling a bit lonely.

3) Baidu, the international Search player!

This week saw a rather interesting statement from Robin Li, CEO of the Chinese player Baidu, released on the 9^th August. Li commented on Baidu’s international expansion plans as follows:

“Going forward I think we should make this kind of move as early as possible,” Li said. “During the next five to 15 years we should see some meaningful revenue outside of China.” Bloomberg published the interview with Li portraying him as ‘increasingly keen’ on acquisitions.

With 70% of the Chinese search market, one thing is for sure, Baidu is definitely hunting for more market share on the Google territory.

4) Final announcement and no later than a few days ago, Google is dropping its old keyword tool and this by the end of August 2010. The New keyword tool has been available on beta for quite a while. The new tool apparently offers more features (such as removing duplicate keywords, adding negatives to the list). The old version can still be found here.

The latest bi-annual report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows that UK online ad spend has risen 4.9% in the first half of 2009 up to £1.75 billon and equates to 23.5% of total UK ad spend. Television advertising now consumes 21.9% of UK ad spend, press display consumes 18.5% and direct mail 11.5%.

This was of course, an inevitable event although few would have predicted that it would occur during a time of recession. The return on investment and measurability of online channels has driven budgets from traditional mediums to their online counterparts with budgets moving from conventional classified ads to online classifieds and a rise on budgets allocated to PPC advertising channels (£1.06 billion) such as Google AdWords.

This report puts the UK as a world leader in terms of market share for online advertising with growth expected to continue through 2010 and 11. Television on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline in spend but with the new product placement rules and a possible end to the recession it is difficult to predict what 2010 has in store.

SEO and Social Media have now become intrinsically linked. If you want to achieve maximum success in one, you can’t do it without the other, as the lines between Social Media and SEO are becoming increasingly blurred. Let me explain…

SEO Relevance and Authority

At its core, SEO is primarily concerned with relevance and authority. If you want success in the most competitive SEO niches, your website needs both authority and relevance in the eyes of the search engines to achieve the rankings your company wants. In today’s often confusing digital marketing mix Social Media has become integral to generating both of these aspects for your website.

Link Generation through Social Media

When we refer to having authority in search engines, in essence we are talking about links.

• How many incoming links does your website have?
• What types of links are pointing at it?
• What links does the webpage linking to you have pointing at it?

Social media has become a crucial aspect of generating ‘natural’ links for your SEO campaign. Let’s take a quick look at some practical examples of how social media can generate one of the crucial aspects of success for today’s search engines, links.

Social Media Directory Link Building

At its simplest level, submitting your website to all the available social media websites will generate a relatively small amount of incoming links to your site, in the same way that submitting to a range of low quality free directories would. A worthwhile base link building technique, good for your link profile mix, but there’s nothing earth shattering here, this practice in many ways is similar to free directory submissions (DMOZ, Best of the Web et al).

Link Bait, the Old Fashioned Way

Link bait – the creation of content to appeal to a specific audience to order to generate incoming links, was all the rage when Digg, Reddit, Newsvine etc all burst onto the scene as new social networks. Achieving a front page position on Digg, as well as driving large amounts of (possibly irrelevant) traffic, would also generate a large amount of incoming links to your website. If your content is great, and targeted at the right audience, they will link to it.

Networking and Public Relations to generate links

Through the use of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn it’s now possible to use information sharing and networking techniques to build high quality incoming links to your website. If done correctly, these emerging Public Relations processes can yield huge returns in terms of incoming links from high quality and/or relevant websites.

Generating ‘free’ content and gaining customer insights through Social Media

Relevancy comes from text, be it on page or off page. If you want your website to be relevant to your niche then you’re going to need content (text) on your website!

Quite simply the more content your website has, the bigger chance you have for your website to appear in search engine results for a wide variety of long tail terms. Spread that content out across many SEO friendly pages and you’re onto a winner in the Google search results (and your bottom line).

Of course generating content takes time and resource, and this is where Social Media can come into play. Putting the effort into initially building a following or community around your site can wield massive long term gains in terms of generating free content, increased SEO traffic and more conversions.

Blog comment forms, ‘Ask The Expert’ platforms, forum discussion boards, story submissions, and social platforms are all great ways for your visitors to generate this keyword rich content for you, and for you to get a unique insight into what customers think about your brand and products.

Fail to participate and offer your visitors the ability to interact with your website and your brand means you’re failing to maximise the potential of your websites traffic, your brands exposure and your bottom line.

Social Media signals as a ranking factor

For a long time links have been the most important ranking factor for search engines, and they still are today. However there is a widely held belief in the SEO community that social media signals will become an important part of how Google ranks websites.

This train of thought is logical, search marketers understand how the current link algorithm works, and they know how to game it. One way the search engines can combat this threat is by introducing social media as a ranking factor, to maintain the quality of their search engine results.

Why not use the indicators of a good website left by the web as a whole participating on social networks rather than just those (relative) few who own and run websites?

If you want to future proof your website against these likely future changes, then the time to engage in Social Media is today. Be proactive rather than reactive, otherwise in a few years you may find the top rankings you hold today have disappeared and you’ll be left playing catch-up with your competitors.

Personally, I view Google as a mirror of the environment in which it operates. It uses the variables available in that environment to produce the best search results for its customers. This environment, the landscape of the web, has changed dramatically since the inception of the search engine. At its core, the Google algorithm is still very much a Web 1.0 search engine, operating in a Web 2.0 environment.

I would also argue that in many ways Google always was a social search engine. What are links if not a machine readable indication of the relationship between two human parties? For me this ‘social measure’ playing a part in ranking websites will only continue to grow.

Raising brand awareness through Social Media

Achieving a front a page Digg story, having a popular Facebook app, spreading your widget across the web, driving traffic via Stumble upon, appearing in many Google search results across many terms are all going to push your brand out, increase the amount of people searching for your company online (and hopefully your products offline too) and visiting your site from a link on a Social Media site. Ultimately this increase in traffic and exposure will affect your bottom line.

Social Media can’t work without SEO

How do people find your blog? How do people find the comments left on your blog? How will people discover all that fantastic content created in your forum? Through the search engines of course! Without a search engine friendly website you’re not maximising the potential of the content being created on your domain through your Social Media platform.

If you’re spreading your brands name fair and wide via Social Media it is crucial that you have a SEO campaign to back it up when people remember aspects of that campaign and subsequently search for them in Google.

Having multiple Social Media accounts is also a fantastic way to help with brand protection, fill up that first page of Google SEO search results with profiles you’ve created and control; and push that negative publicity out of the spot light.

SEO and Social Media – bed fellows for life

SEO needs Social Media, and Social Media needs SEO. In today’s digital marketing environment one cannot operate successfully, to its full extent, without the other.

So if you haven’t begun to think about it before, now is the time to integrate both your SEO and Social Media strategies to ensure you’re maximising the potential of your website and your sales, future proofing yourself today.

About Think Visibility

Think Visibility September 2009 (the second Think Visibility conference) hosted and organised by Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson, brought together 200+ attendees and 13 speakers (not including the panel) to discuss and learn about a broad range of subjects from Universal Search to Corporate Blogging.

The Speakers and Talks

The first speaker of the day was Joost de Valk discussing Wordpress SEO. Now a few of us had heard Joost speak before on the subject of Wordpress SEO and we were all familiar with his blog over at Yoast.com, so we were slightly worried that he might cover old ground. The amazing thing was that Joost had anticipated this himself and addressed this issue at the start of his presentation. He then went on to cover some pretty exciting stuff including optimising images, distributing page elements to get the most out of progressive rendering, caching and a whole lot more.

The next speaker was Julian Sambles from the Telegraph talking about the challenges he faced in bringing online to the forefront of the Telegraph. This subject could have been very dry and corporate but Julian did a fantastic job of bringing the subject to life and gave a great commentary on what, when you think about it, must have been a really difficult job. One thing he highlighted was the need to consider how much time people actually have to do what you need of them with regard to SEO and give them options based on this or a priority list so they can do as much as they can in the time they have.

The final speaker before lunch was Judith Lewis talking about Universal Search. Judith did a fantastic job of stressing the importance of universal search and gave some great ideas for getting the most out of video content, news, images, Google Base and Google Local listings. Oh and Judith gave out chocolate which always goes down well at conferences!

The lunch break saw the unveiling of a mystery and very entertaining panel consisting of Chris Garrett, Al Carlton, Kieran Donoghue and Pa.. Dom with Tim Nash as the host. After witnessing someone nearly being decapitated by a flying t-shirt, the main room was split into 3 separate rooms and we dispersed.

The first of the 3 split sessions saw;

Elaine Forth and her husband give a very honest and informative talk on how they had gone from being the owners of a simple parenting website (http://www.allkids.co.uk) with a whole load of good content, through the affiliate channel and ended up running a business that is looking to turn over £1 million this year.

Fiona Thomson talk about how the F-Pattern is pretty out of date and backed this up with several examples of data from eye tracking studies from major brand sites such as House of Fraser.

And Paul Robinson discussed advanced user analysis techniques and how available data could be used to drive recommendations, cross selling opportunities and user adaptive websites.

The second of the split sessions saw;

Tim Nash talk about Links. Not link building, not analytics but methods of evaluating links and his experiences while researching this subject. Tim’s was one of the more technical talks with discussion around page segmentation techniques and how someone might create various tools. Tim showed and discussed an image from a segmentation tool he had created (the only slide of his with any colour on it) and explained how page segmentation could be used to create a link footprint for a site and could potentially be used by search engines to further granulate the value of links based on their position on a page.

Chris Clarkson’s talk on his trials and tribulations during his affiliate journey; this was a great session telling not only the highs of being an affiliate but also how bad things can get.

And Tom Smith gave an interesting and entertaining presentation (with amusing doodle slides) on where social media websites may be going wrong and how to overcome the mistakes to turn a website into a success.

Tom’s theory on succeeding in social media was to promote ‘selfish media’ first. Promote the benefits and rewards of the user and the social aspects of the website will naturally promote themselves, providing a thriving website. The core of his presentation revolved around explaining several methods of identifying where website interactions were “making you do things you didn’t know you wanted to do” and included methods of improving these interactions by mapping “process beads”(a flow chart of knock on effects of an initial action).

The last of the split sessions, prior to the 3 rooms becoming 1 again saw;

Karyn Fleeting talk about Corporate Blogging. Karyn gave some good advice on what corporate blogs are often missing, the need to breathe life into corporate blogs via a face and humour and the need to assemble processes for handling the issues that sometimes arise such as negative comments, legal issues etc.

Zoe Piper talking about how to win on the content network, in which she provided tips on how to get the most out of the content network aided by cats.
And Rob Manuel provided an insight into his experiences from running what he calls his personal hell, Sickopedia.

With the rooms opened back up the final talk of the day (if you don’t count drunken rants during Drink Visibility) was from Yahoo’s Artur Ortega on the impact of accessibility on the modern office. It was interesting to see how research into disability had lead to so many of the tools and systems we now take for granted and also just how much Bell Laboratories played a part in it all.

Think Visibility as a whole

Think Visibility September 2009 was a success. Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson and his team pulled off a blinding conference, managing to keep it intimate and fun. The only real issue I heard about all day was the printer breaking which slowed down the lanyard production at the start of the day.

The food at the lunch interval was very nice although I would have liked to have known what was in the sandwiches mainly because some of them were amazing and I have it in my head I was eating tuna, mayo and sweet chilli. I would also like to know what was in the Firebox boxes that the lunchtime panel walked out with (looking very shifty). Oh and there is a rumour (probably started by one of my guys) that the cookie area had a sign saying 1 each. If this is true, I’m truly sorry for depriving 4 people of their cookies which incidentally, were cracking.

The next Think Visibility conference will be in March 2010. Hopefully we will see you there.

Deirdre, whose time is much in demand as a corporate motivational speaker and business mentor, is using the website as a gateway for new projects and Leeds-based agency Epiphany Solutions has been contracted to enhance the site’s online visibility.

It was in the 1990s that the self-proclaimed ‘drop-out’ set up ethical travel company i-to-i from her Leeds bedsit it was bought ten years later by a FTSE-100 company for an eight-figure sum.

Now she is carving successful new careers on the speaker circuit, as a mentor to businesses and most recently as a successful author, Epiphany is creating an online pay per click campaign to ensure the website appears in more relevant and appropriate searches, which will ultimately drive more business enquiries.

She said:

• I launched my website 18 months ago to help with my new projects, but it has become even more critical for my business now I no longer have a link to i-to-i as I’m more difficult to track down.

• As well as making it easier for businesses to find me, I’m broadening my speaker role beyond the travel sector which I was predominantly known for. So it’s important that my website appears in search results around other sectors and subjects.

• I’m also using my site to promote and sell my new book, Fulfilled, so all-in-all it’s critical my website is visible in all the right places.

• Epiphany is an experienced digital agency and their critique of my site in relation to where it should be appearing will not just increase traffic volume, but crucially improve the quality of that traffic, too.

Rob Shaw, Managing Director of Epiphany, said:

• Regardless of whether you’re a small business, a global organisation, a start-up, or an entrepreneur like Deirdre, your company website is a gateway to sales.

• Deirdre’s shop window is the internet so it’s critical that potential customers can quickly and easily find her website. Therefore, weâ’ve devised a paid search campaign that will enhance the site’s visibility and drive the right sort of customers to it.

*Deirdre’s first book, Fulfilled: A Personal Revolution in Seven Steps, is currently top of the Amazon UK bestseller list of self-help books visit http://www.deirdrebounds.com for more details.

Over the last 3 weeks I have been using the site since its re-launch, but the more I visit the more disappointed I am by how our beloved former high street brand has been launched online.

SEO

As an SEO analyst I have tried to keep my eyes closed about the complete lack of content throughout the important pages within the site, I mean the only text on the homepage that isn’t a link is the statement about who owns the website and their offline address. The URLs make my eyes bleed, I mean what is the below URL really telling users and search engines about the page it is linking to?? I don’t see it saying much, if anything, about paddling pools.

http://www.woolworths.co.uk/rf/wlo/s.do/toys-games/outdoor-toys/pools-waterplay?N=159+4294484527+85+4294483400&Np=1&Nu=this_product&seo=t&pageSize=12&Ns=prod_in_stock%7C1%7C%7Cprod_min_base_price%7C0%7C%7Cscu_id%7C1&Nao=0&cmEvent=product_order&cm_re=Homepage-_-Text+Links-_-Pools

I’ve not followed that link as I find it quite offensive.

I could go on for hours and days about the lack of input from someone with SEO knowledge into the project, mentioning the very poor page titles, the Meta descriptions, the page code and how this site doesn’t really stand a chance in Organic search. But then i remembered it was one of the most loved high street stores and, since it does manage to rank for its own brand, it is most likely going to receive a fair amount of traffic. With that in mind I am going to try and consider the site from another point of view.

Design

I must admit, the jquery added to the site is quite funky and the different carousels kept me entertained for about 5 minutes, clicking through the various products, and the pick and mix section is simply outstanding. It should be nominated for a set of web application awards – it would get my vote. Once you overcome the jquery and pick and mix section you start to reflect on the look and feel of the site and to be honest I am not a fan. It looks similar to my very first website but with a lot of rounded corners.

This image shows how the navigation on the Woolworths party site looks in Firefox, or the latest version at least, not a pretty site for up to 20% of the sites visitors. (This appears to have been fixed since I wrote this post)

Large chunks of whitespace appears down the left hand sub navigation on the entertainment site as can be seen in the image below. Nobody can tell me that this was a pre-meditated design decision, that it had some purpose or that it would affect conversion rates in any positive way.

Usability

I have always been sceptical about sites built across multiple domains, not necessarily from an SEO point of view because the benefits are obvious (especially when built by a large brand), but from a usability point of view it can become a large issue that puts users off or, at the very least, reduces the amount of sales.

Woolworths has been split over 3 websites, one being party/pick and mix, the other being entertainment items such as computer games and DVDs, the third comprising of everything else Woolworths traditionally sold.

Visitors have to individually log into each of the sites and go through a separate checkout process for each site; which could get extremely tedious should a visitor wish to purchase an item from each section.

Overall

Considering the resurrection plans were put in place early February 2009 and the site launched in June 2009, I believe the site has been both rushed and not thought through properly. Although I have seen improvements occurring across the sites over the last 3 weeks both in terms of SEO and design, I feel that Woolworths Online is nowhere near 100% polished compared to competition such as Amazon, EBay, Play, ASDA and ASOS. This could potentially lose them a lot of the visitors that would have flocked to the sites brand on launch.

After reading over the study I decided to pick out a few nuggets of information that web designers can often overlook.

1. Visitors read in the shape of an F. Visitors were found to generally scan WebPages in the shape of an F. Make sure important elements of your content are in these key areas to keep readers engaged. Place headers, sub headers, bullet points, and highlighted text along these lines so readers will be enticed to read more
2. Headings draw the eye. In the majority of cases the first things readers have been found to look at on a webpage are the headlines. Make sure your headlines are not obstructed by other items on the page and that they are engaging enough to draw the reader into looking further through your site.
3. Text before Graphic. Contrary to popular belief, the first thing visitors look at on a webpage isn’t the images. Most casual visitors will be arriving on your site looking for information, not images, so make sure your website is designed so that your text is most prominent.
4. White space isn’t a bad thing. Whilst it may be tempting to put something in every corner of your webpage, it’s often better to leave some of your site free of any text as sites with too much going on tend to overwhelm users. Try to keep things simple and allow some open space for readers to rest their eyes.
5. One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats. Overwhelming visitors with too much information is easy. Simplicity is better in some cases.
6. Readers ignore banners Ads. Ads may be the bread and butter of your site, but studies have shown that readers largely ignore banner ads, often focusing for only a fraction of a second. If you’re trying to make money from ads, you need to be creative in your ad placement or in the types of ads you have on your site.
7. Visitors only look at a sub heading if it is of interests them. Don’t put in sub headings just to stick to a particular format make sure that they are relevant and interesting.
8. Visitors generally scan lower portions of a webpage. Use this to your advantage by giving readers something to latch onto when they’re scanning your page. Highlight certain sections or create bulleted lists so information is easy to find and read on your page.
9. Short paragraphs perform better than longer ones. Information on your webpage should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context influences otherwise, such as descriptions of products on a e-commerce sites.
10. Navigation works better when placed at the top of the webpage. You don’t want readers to look just at the initial page they arrive at on your site, you want them to stick around and explore their way around it. You can help send them in the right direction by making sure your navigation is easy to find and use by placing it at the top of the page.
11. Visitors spend a lot of time looking at menus and buttons. Because of this, you’ll want to put in some extra time making sure that yours are well-designed. After all, they not only draw a lot of eye fixation, they are one of the most important elements of your site.
12. Lists hold reader attention. One way to break up the paragraphs in your content and keep visitors looking through your site is to make frequent use of a list format in your articles. Use numbers or bullet points to highlight important information within your content.

In addition to enhancing the CBI’s communication with its existing members through dedicated sites which have improved member interaction, Epiphany will also improve the visibility of the CBI as a whole which will aide in the recruitment of new members.

Epiphany has built four sites – around climate change, higher education, public services and tax reform – which aside from video, audio and written content, include tools to allow RSS feeds and blogs, providing the CBI with enhanced, two-way communication with its members.

Each fully content-managed website has been built from the ground up with search in mind and this, together with a link-building programme around news content, will improve rankings and help to attract new visitors and build CBI membership.

Epiphany is also holding a series of seminars for key stakeholders within the CBI on making the best use of online and search marketing to reach their audiences.

Robin Skidmore, commercial director at Epiphany, said: “The CBI has a huge volume of content providing a wealth of information for its members – what we’re doing is segmenting that knowledge into specialist microsites which brings a number of benefits internally and externally.

“From an internal point of view, the content management system will make the site far easier to manage, update and expand.  For CBI members this will mean quicker access to information and speedier navigation through the site.
“Externally, the CBI will be far more visible – it will rank higher and more frequently in search engines.  The knock-on effect is that the CBI will attract more visitors, boosting membership, and will be seen more frequently which will enhance credibility.”

Graham Smith, head of marketing at the CBI, said: “Our members consider us to be the voice of business.  As such we need to be the leading source of information on all relevant policy areas.

“In appointing Epiphany, our core objective was to make our content more readily available – and more visible – to our key audiences: government and policymakers, business and the media.

“The solution that we’ve been provided with ticks all those boxes.  Epiphany will help us achieve our objectives and already the first of the sites to go live, http://climatechange.cbi.org.uk, has reached page one of Google for key search terms.”

An independent league table published last month of the country’s biggest digital marketing agencies has shown that Epiphany is the UK’s fastest-growing search marketing agency, with its total staff increasing year-on-year by 178%; it is the 13th largest search marketing agency in the UK.

The four sites produced by Epiphany for the CBI are:
http://climatechange.cbi.org.uk
http://taxreform.cbi.org.uk
http://highereducation.cbi.org.uk
http://publicservices.cbi.org.uk

About the CBI
The CBI (www.cbi.org.uk) is the UK’s leading business organisation, speaking for some 240,000 businesses that together employ around a third of the private sector workforce. With offices across the UK as well as in Brussels, Washington and Beijing, the CBI coordinates British business representation around the world.

Further Information
For further information, images or interviews, contact Amy Noel in the Epiphany Press Office on 0800 019 9727 or email amy.noel@epiphanysolutions.co.uk

So beyond the standard Visa and other credit and debit cards, what other payment options can e-commerce stores offer to maximise their sales?

PayPal and Google Checkout

The most obvious choice here is PayPal and Google Checkout. Whilst many smaller retailers offer PayPal (and it’s something consumers have grown to expect), practically none of the larger retailers offer this to their customers. Those utilising Google Checkout have an extra button on their Adword ads asserting this, which, according to Google, increases the amount of clicks these ads receive by 10%. This is a great option to address those dubious about submitting their credit card details to an unknown entity.

In a sporadic move Kiddicare have made it possible for their customers to pay for goods with cash by buying a voucher and entering the voucher code during the check out process. The vouchers are available from over 21,000 pay points throughout the UK, including many petrol stations and local newsagents. The reason for this new mode of payment is customer demand, as explained by Scott Weavers-Wright, partner at Kiddicare, via silicon.com.

• We get about 400 or 500 calls a day and 300 or 400 emails a day, (and) we do get questions on ‘is there an alternative payment?’ and it’s definitely increasing.

Taking cash over the web

Clearly the recession plays a role here, with more individuals being unable to access credit cards that they can use online. That said the ability to pay by cash addresses the fact that a sizeable group of people are still fearful of ordering online due to crime and fraud.

“It’s very apt that we should be able to offer the ability for customers to pay with cash in the current climate. If (customers) don’t want a credit card they shouldn’t be penalised and they should have the option for another payment…

Telephone Orders

According to a Get Safe Online survey 14% of people in the UK are still deterred from using the internet due to fear of online crime. The provision of a telephone number on the site through which orders and customer service issues can be resolved could be used to address this, offering those alarmed a traditional payment choice.

Businesses, and rightly so, may be reluctant to offer such a number on their site because the attraction of operating an online store is the low running costs and overheads, such as operating a call centre.

PetFoodDirect.com have taken an intelligent approach to this problem allowing consumers to fill in their order details online, minus card details, and request a call back to make payment. This significantly reduces the amount of time each consumer spends on the phone and ergo the associated cost to the business.

Signs of Trust

Often the reason consumers are looking for alternative payment methods to the standard Visa card is the lack of trust they sense towards a website. Consumers should be reassured whilst visiting a site in regards to security and privacy, particularly through the checkout process and product pages; so the inclusion of a genuine VeriSign logo confirming this is essential. Displaying company contact details (ideally physical address, email address and telephone number) also significantly helps, assuring people there’s somewhere to turn if anything should go wrong.

Whilst the fear of online crime and fraud maybe more prevalent than the actual realities, online retailers need to offer customers the ability to pay for their purchase through their preferred payment method, if they want to maximise their sales and profit.

To explain why social media is so important I feel that I should explain my very mundane morning. It is currently 10.23am on Monday 1st June 2009 and already today I have:

• visited Twitter through Twitroid and Tweet Deck;
• caught up on blogs released overnight through an RSS aggregator whilst on the train, I am also kept up to date on new blog posts throughout the day via Outlook on my laptop;
• browsed forums to catch up on the latest Liverpool FC news;
• visited Youtube for coverage on Britain’s Got Talent;
• logged on to Facebook to see if any friends have any up-coming birthdays;
• monitored Yammer for internal communication;
• used MSN Messenger and Google talk to keep in touch with friends and colleagues;
• started thinking about  this blog post;
• searched Wikipedia to see what it has to say on social media.

My day is only 3 hours and 53 minutes old but the combination of sociology and modern technology that is social media has dictated the majority of my morning already.

What are Social Media Sites?
Social media sites at the core are platforms and tools that facilitate the discovery, participation and sharing of information between select groups and the masses.

They have revolutionised the way in which individuals, such as myself, can reach large groups of people and have led to the democratisation of information by allowing people to give opinions and express what they deem important.

Examples
Sites like Digg and Delicious are employed as a source of news by many, whereas networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are more commonly used for interacting. Social gaming communities that surround Eve online are becoming increasingly popular on the web, in the same way as World of War Craft or the one that Microsoft has created with the Xbox 360.

Social media exists in many different forms such as forums, blogs, microblogs, podcasts, video logs, wikis, email, networking, instant messengers, gaming, photos and video sharing.

If social media sites continue to grow at the current rate they will become an integral part of our lives as we move further into the 21st century.

Social Media Marketing
The mass appeal of these social media sites has resulted in businesses following consumers into the Web 2.0 era. Social Media allows companies to reach more customers, meaning that businesses can answer questions and receive feedback on their products and service.

It is another channel through which businesses can communicate with the consumer, adding another dimension to the traditional marketing mix.

So how important are Social Media sites?
Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Youtube, Sphinn, Digg, Amazon and Wiki have revolutionised the way in which we build relationships, meet new people, share content and find information.

Social media sites are infinitely important to me and my work, and this is increasingly becoming the case for corporations and the individual. Watch this space.

As the web’s entire link profile has been changed (and manipulated) by search marketers certain ‘natural links’ have gained more importance in the eyes of Google; links embedded deep within the belly of a blog post, for example, carry more weight that those placed in a blog roll.

Whether you’re looking to grow your website ‘organically’ or simply improve your current linking profile, you need to understand how you can attract more natural links. As time goes by, attracting natural links will become increasingly important as Google continues to weed out as many ‘un-natural’ links as it can.

When we say ‘we wish to attract natural links’ what we are really attempting to attract are the people who create these links. The hardcore geeky nucleus of the web who create the vast majority of worthy content, actively use social media and, most importantly, create outbound links – the ‘Linkerati’.

So the concept is simple – create content that these ‘web influencers’ want to link to. Actually tying down what it is you can do to manipulate these influencers and get them to link to your webpage is a little more difficult to explain.

Looking Non-commercial
The ‘Linkerati’ love content that appears to be non-commercial in nature. These people love the web and don’t view it as a commercial platform upon which companies make contacts with consumers. To them the web is, in many ways, still the altruistic project based on the sharing of information for ‘the good of all’. It was their baby and they want to keep it as ‘clean’ as possible. Google themselves were originally very much members of this group.

This is one of the reasons why Wikipedia has become the defacto reference site to link to; why would you choose to refer someone to a blog post, complete with ads, if this was your outlook?!

Once you’ve made this realisation you can take steps to attempt to appear as ‘non-commercial’ as possible to this crowd. Domain name choice (.org is always respectable), graphic design and advertisement placement can all be manipulated to best serve this group of people in terms of the key signals they want to see (or don’t want to see) before they’ll link to your webpage.

Showing your ‘good’ intentions
As awareness of SEO grows amongst web users and web developers alike so does the amount of attention people pay to micro sites, viral campaigns and link bait. The scrutiny these types of creations have to pass before web users will ratify them as ‘legit’ increases by the day. The Linkerati have, in the past, been wholesale manipulated to best serve the needs of Search Marketers and generate links – and they’ve had enough of it!

If you have an image you want to communicate, don’t post on it on a key word stuffed, over optimised HTML page complete with garish ‘link to this’ buttons, and copy and paste keyword stuffed HTML link code – it’s just not going to pass muster with the elite of the Linkerati. Use credible and ‘cool’ sites like Flickr to share your image and watch the link-love and social media traffic flow.

Using design to your SEO advantage
A huge part of expressing your non-commercial credentials and good intentions is down to your design; this is where the psychology of so called ‘bad’ or ‘dated’ web design comes into play and can be used to your advantage to portray your desired impression.

On the other side of the coin stunning, modern, clean web design will also always help attract links simply through looking more professional and credible.

Make yourself easily linkable
So, if you’ve put the effort in to make your content as link worthy as you can, then it makes sense to make it easy for people to link and reference that content. Let’s face it, people are lazy and we all lead busy lives. Include short URLs for your articles, provide HTML non-technical users can copy and paste, include social media buttons (and target them to your niche). Make it as easy as possible for people to share and spread the word about your content.

The BBC website is a prime example of this. Before the BBC introduced its social media buttons to BBC news articles it’s stories were quickly being re-spun and spat out on various other websites and getting voted up to the top of Digg and other social media websites. Why? Because those sites made themselves easily linked and shared whilst the BBC did not.

Using emotion to trigger a response
Why do people choose to link to a news story on one website over another? They both, in essence, carry the same information and facts, but something from the first story means that people choose to link and discuss it and not the second. That something is an emotional response.

In many ways this touches on traditional journalist tactics, evoking a response in the reader through the manner in which the content is constructed; anger, excitement, envy, confusion, disappointment, shame, pride are all emotions that can be used to entice someone to link to and discuss your content.

Many could argue that whilst attempting to evoke emotions, one must be careful not to leave potential customers alienated. However, in a world made up of sterile web servers and pixels on a screen emotion, passion and personality can be a huge driving force.

Finding a non-competitive market within your niche
Imagine you’re an estate agent and you write fantastic content about properties available in your city. Surely every other estate agent in the area would want to share that content with their visitors? Of course not, they’re not about to link to a direct competitor and help your rankings. Once you’ve made this realisation you can start targeting your content towards individuals and groups that won’t feel threatened to link to your work – identify your own local ‘linkerati’.

Is your estate agent based in a student city? Great, create a guide to student living in the various areas and tell all the student websites about it!

Are there local charity and government organisations concerned with housing issues? There is, great! Create a genuinely useful and helpful resource based around local housing issues and tell them about it!

Creating Credibility
Data, resources, white papers and even pure opinions that originate from a trustworthy, reliable source which are well researched are much more likely to be linked to than other content.

Most UK users for example generally feel perfectly safe to link to or cite a webpage from the BBC, knowing that, in all likeliness, the information will be correct; these academic Linkerati types are a stickler for accurateness.

Whilst it may be virtually impossible to gain the same amount of credibility the BBC possess, the same kind of trust can be established relatively easily within your own niche… with a little work.

On the surface many of these ideas may seem obvious or even simplistic, but when implemented and promoted correctly can have a huge positive effect on incoming links and ergo rankings, especially over the long term.

Quite simply, if your competitors are undergoing an active SEO campaign with a good agency (like you are) how are you going to differentiate yourself:

•    What’s your competitive advantage?
•    Is your incoming link profile diverse enough to be deemed risk adverse?
•    Have you got a strategy in place to attract more natural links over time than they do to ensure long term success (even after you’ve finished working with an agency)?

If you’re struggling to answer any of these questions with confidence, then perhaps it’s time you too paid attention to the Linkerati and how you can leverage them for your own commercial benefit.

Last year Queensland tourist board proposed an audacious publicity stunt involving one person inhabiting Hamilton Island for 6 months, implementing social media to record their experience by blogging, taking photos and producing videos of their experience, whilst being paid $150,000!

A micro site of tourism Queensland was launched in July 2008 sending the social media world into frenzy, creating such a buzz that by the 22nd of February 2009 – the application closing date – over 35,000 applications had been submitted.

Twitter went crazy with tags such as #islandreefjob and #bestjob, whilst Facebook saw people setting up groups thousands strong creating mass publicity around the campaign. Websites, blogs and social media profiles were created specifically for the competition, all providing links back to the micro site and the tourism Queensland site, which we all know is great for SEO!

Applicants had to submit a 60 second video clip, from which judges would short list 50 candidates. The final 11 were decided by public vote, and these applicants were then flown out to Queensland for the final set of interviews.

Many events raised the competition’s publicity; one that springs to mind is the application of Christopher Grima, a 25 year old student who jumped off the south causeway bridge in Florida to make his video stand out from the rest. The only thing he gained was a fine and ear ache.

The campaign received immense press coverage to the extent that the BBC has run over 40 stories covering it, as has CNN, Reuters, The Guardian, USA Today and many more global news agencies.

It is estimated to have cost Queensland tourism board no more than $1 million but, with the excellent leverage of social media, experts estimate that the board has received more than $80 million worth of publicity from the competition.

With experts predicting the amount of success that this media campaign has seen, who really is the winner?? Is it Ben Southall, the 34 year old charity fund raiser from Hampshire who won the competition; or is it Queensland tourism board – the organisation responsible for one of the most successful social media marketing campaigns ever??…….

As of yesterday morning, they seem to be popping up all over the place based on IP address, as can be seen in this example for the search “casino”.

So what does this mean?

Well, even more of the natural listing space is now taken up by non traditional listing making places near the bottom of the first page even less attractive. Local businesses featured within Google Local Business should get a nice boost in traffic while businesses outside of the area are likely to see a drop off especially if they rank below the local search box.

Do I like it?

Well to be honest no. I’m a bit of a purest and would prefer to see some form of opt-in for local results where a location isn’t specified as Google is kind of taking for granted the fact I am not willing to travel etc.

What should we do?

Well getting you self into Google Local is a good start. Beyond this I wouldn’t worry too much at the moment as this may simply be a brief experiment that will never see mainstream daylight.

My location is wrong!

Well luckily Google have provided a helpful link to modify your location as let’s face it, the science of matching users to locations via their IP addresses is flawed.

What searches does this affect?

Well without spending too much time researching (sorry, I’m a busy guy), it seems that only service style searches are affected e.g. “Pubs”, “Cinemas”, “Web Design” etc. Product style searches seem to have remained the same e.g. “Mortgages”, “Blue Widgets”*

Let’s see how this one turns out!

Malcolm Slade / SEOMalc

*Wouldn’t it be funny if “Blue Widgets” had some local results. Well I thought so.

In an ideal world, you would create a website, furnish it with some well-written thought-provoking content and whizz your way to the top of the rankings due to the influx of people finding your content and linking to it. Your site is a success, your company makes loads of money and your boss gives you a promotion. Your life rocks!

In the real world, you spend absolutely ages trying to write something thought-provoking about mortgages and end up with a typical mortgage guide, you put your new site live, your work colleagues, scrapers and spammers are the only people to visit and you try desperately to pitch the exercise as a success to your boss who then makes you redundant as part of a new cost-cutting exercise brought on by the fact no mortgages are being taken out through the website. Your life fails to rock!

The fact is we don’t live in an ideal world. Search engines only use content as part of their ranking algorithm. Other sites are already at the top of search results and are gaining momentum because of this. Some subjects are already written to death.

If we were able to remove all links from the web, press the reset button on all search indices and get all the seed sites to review every site on the web and link to the best (as a starting point for spidering etc.), then there is a chance that the crème de la crème would rise to the top naturally.

Or if we switched our focus away from the currently popular search engines to a new (currently fictitious) search engine that solely used text as its ranking factor and was ungameable. Then the best written, most appropriate content would rise to the top naturally.

Oh what a world…

Are you saying “Content is pointless”?

God, no! Please don’t be that guy. As an SEO consultant, I spend far too much of my time trying to convince site owners to actually add content to their new site design alongside the rounded corners, nice logo and picture of a woman with a headset on. Tell visitors what you do, tell them about your services, tell them about your products, maybe even let them tell you and each other. Oh and tell them where they land, not on some page five clicks away.

Content is a very important ranking factor. If written correctly, it tells the search engines what your site is about, and adds to stickiness and visitor confidence. Alongside good architecture, structure, external links and promotion, it will put you in good stead to rank within search. I have no doubt that all other things being the same, a well written piece of structured copy featuring the correct keywords will rank higher than a wishy-washy sentence or two. But when are all other things the same? Even if they are, they never say the same for long.

What I am trying to say is “Content is King!” is not enough. I have however found a way of explaining content which actually allows “Content is King!” to still be used as long as it backed up with the rest of the explanation.

Here comes the science bit!

So content is king if you think in terms of chess. I will endeavour to explain.

• In chess, you need a king to play and if you lose your king you lose the game. You need some form of content to rank in search. If you lose your content (you have no site), you can’t rank.
• If you only have a king, you can only get a non-loss outcome from a game of chess by forcing a draw. This is very hard to do. In search you can only get rankings with content alone in very niche subjects and long-tail terms.
• You can only win a game of chess with a king and some other pieces.** Content, and the use of other ranking factors will get you rankings. Good links are definitely a queen, the title tag is maybe a rook and so on. Notice I haven’t used pawns in my analogy as pawns are pretty darn powerful and can be upgraded. Try marrying that back to a ranking factor.

My memories of various Jakob Nielsen articles are screaming at me, saying I am about to lose you now as you have read enough, so I will conclude. Content is only part of the solution and the term “Content is King!”, stands in the context of chess but not in the context of a monarchy. In terms of a monarchy, links are king as from experience you can make any old crap rank if you point the correct links at it.

I hope this blog post helps at least one person understand the role of content better and I bid you adieu.

Malcolm Slade / SEOMalc

* I didn’t really create a baseball field, and the cats that do frequent my herb garden certainly don’t play baseball.
** Easier with a queen, even easier with a full side, pretty darn hard with just one pawn.

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.

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!

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.

This morning however, it seems that the tool has become completely defunct as no terms return any search results. Does this mean the tool is officially dead ? Either way this throws a serious issue for the little guys who relied on the fact the Overture tool was free.

So what now ?

With Wordtracker now using UK data there is now a solid alternative at a cost. £15 per week / £29 per month / £149 per year. Having now used this tool with the UK data (I wouldn’t have recommended it to the UK market prior) I can say it is a sound investment and the billing structure makes it accessible to both big and small whether you want to cram all your keyword research into a single week or have the tool on hand all the time.

That being said, I for one would like to see the Overture tool reborn as it provided another angle to compare with Wordtracker and the more thorough you can be with your research, the better the results.

Let me explain. Roughly 80% of all UK search traffic originates from Google. In the majority of cases, your long term website traffic (& conversions) will originate from a search engine (insert your own social media caveat here). Before this online behemoth and others can begin sending you those potential customers it has to visit, ‘read’ and ‘understand’ your website, not just once, but hopefully time and time again. How else can Google decide on which pages to recommend to its users? ‘The machine’ (or rather several thousand servers) that does this is know as the Google Bot.

Meet Mr Google

Here’s a rather loose analogy. Imagine that in your town, the only way the vast majority of people learnt about a new shop was through recommendations. Not recommendations from friends or family, but recommendations from one man, and one man alone. Mr Google. If this was the case in the real world, you can bet your mortgage that you’d make sure Mr Google can find your shop, can get inside, enjoys his time there and can most easily understand what you sell. You’re relying on this one man to drive the vast majority of your customers to you. Think of Mr Google as kinda like a restaurant critic on steroids.

The simply conclusion? The most important visitor that your website will ever receive is the Google Bot, and the chances are that your competitor is, to some extent, ignoring it.

If you owned a high street shop, you may be tempted to get the banners (rollover effects) and bunting (flash animations) out right about now to tempt in this ever so influential Mr Google. Just slow down there, cowboy.

The Blind (Google) Bot

You see though, the thing is, when the Google Bot visits your website, it doesn’t notice your new shiny navigation, it can’t read the ‘text’ embedded deep within your graphic rollovers, your amazing(ly) (expensive) photography leaves it cold and that sexy Flash animation is most definitely not a turn on.

The Google Bot is a lean, mean, text eating (image hating) machine. It’s interested in what you have to say and how you say it, not what you look like. He’d probably date the cute intelligent girl who studied maths at university (and liked dogs).

Mr L. Google is as ‘blind as a bat’. Never mind the barn door, the Google Bot would miss the adjacent field. After all, it is only a machine.

And here in lies the problem: web developers/ designers are only (mostly) human (well, at least 90% are). Traditionally, they have designed & created web pages for visual effect. They often don’t consider how messy their code may be, if the page is usable in any browser, on any platform within any device, or if it can be ‘best read’ by a blind user, aka Mr Google.

Boat number 97 please come in your time is up

There are very good and completely understandable historic reasons why this ‘incorrect’ method of creating web pages has been so prevalent in the industry. But, without boring us all with the history of web development and browser development (or lack of Mr Gates!), there is simply no longer any excuse for this.

Since November 2001 (the release date of Internet Explorer 6), we have had a set of browsers that understand modern web technologies, enabling all web developers to develop accessible standardised sites that can be viewed and understood by all, including Mr Google.

Though things have improved immeasurably since the dark days of 1997, primarily driven by the advent of blogs and many ‘Web 2.0’ sites, many (and I mean many) corporate/commercial sites still bask in the table tags, messy code, and inaccessible methods of the late nineties.

I have yet to see a single client’s site that comes anywhere close to fully implementing and understanding the standardised and accessible method of creating websites.

The sites that do attempt this (most probably unwittingly so) more often than not also get it horribly wrong. It seems that many web developers have simply switched from nested tables to div soup. They place Header 4’s before Header 1’s within a page. They leave unclosed tags. Quite bluntly, they don’t understand (X)HTML, the basic building blocks of any website.

But I like my pretty website! Or, my pretty website cost me a lot of money!

As a business owner, at this point you may be beginning to worry, you’re interested in sales, not some altruistic method of website development that gives access to all. Sure, you’ll want to meet your legal requirements but let’s face it, you want to know about the bottom line.

Don’t worry, when we SEO your on-page content were not going to build virtual wheelchair ramps or install text-phones. Your website can remain just as beautiful to the human eye as it is right now, and after our on-page optimisation it will also be beautiful in the text hungry eyes of Google as well.

Accessibility alone is never the answer.

In essence, what we’re talking about here is page mark-up; how the page is constructed, the order of your content, the semantics of your document. A standarised and professional approach to creating web documents.

If you’ve read this far you probably already know that on-page factors alone will never result in a success SEO campaign. Simply creating a website that addresses to WAI guidelines is not going to result in high rankings for Britney Spears. There are many more factors at play here.

What is important here is understanding. If you can understand how your webpage is read, viewed and interpreted by every user from your granny on Windows 98 through to your nephew on his new PSP, you can then truly say you fully understand how Google (a machine) can read and understand your webpage, and can maximised this potential to its fullest.

So there you have it – Web Accessibility, the basis of any solid SEO campaign.

Hey! Hold on a minute, who’s Larry?

Larry Page is the co-founder of Google along with Sergey Brin. Neither is know to suffer from any visual impairment.

Well I guess I should look at exactly what I actually need to do my job effectively and whether I will still be able to use it at home. I’m the head of the natural search department by the way.

So, probably the most important thing and one of the hardest things to teach my team to use is my brain (teach them to use their brains obviously). I might struggle if I leave that in the office. “Why do I feel my brain is the most important tool I use?” you may ask, well it’s very easy to shrug and assume that everyone involved in SEO uses their brain but really from my experience most simply play follow the leader in a kind of robot fashion. As the head of the department I am involved in some pretty major projects and therefore need to be creative, innovative and go beyond the norm with my ideas. I do a lot of reading (I honestly expect my newborn son / daughter to understand “Trust Rank”, “Social Media” etc. from day 1) but then go beyond what I have read so I can disseminate the useful information to my team and file the crap under B.I.N. That’s another thing I will need, a bin. I see no reason while I can’t continue to read while on maternity as my voice should calm the baby (I have a tendency to read out loud by the way) and most of my reading material is plucked from the SEM community which is all online. Printing might be an issue as my home printer hasn’t been used for a long time. I will just have to print anything major in the office pre-baby.

A computer would be nice as it allows me to access the Worldwide Web, my useful tools, client data and shields the world from my hideous handwriting. I’m very lucky here as my amazing bosses (Mr Quigley and Mr Skidmore) have provided me with a laptop (a Rock Pegasus 665 to be exact) which has truly made me mobile and made me more efficient. I can’t recommend a laptop enough as it removes the need for constantly updating multiple machines, ensures all my files are the latest versions, allows me to work even when the power is out, allows me to work on the couch and allows me to involve my wife in some of the things I do outside of work (World of Warcraft has never looked so pretty). Did I mention how amazing my bosses are?

Communications-wise I will miss my office phone. I do however have a mobile which I will get important calls patched through to. I have a great relationship with most of my clients as I am a very sociable person so I am not expecting to have to pass my mobile number out to anyone and we also have some very good alternative communication tools in place including a client management system, IM and of course good old e-mail.

Tools-wise, most of our tools are web based meaning as long as Virgin Media and the dodgy kids on our street don’t decide to ruin my broadband connection I should be fine. All of the other tools I need are on my laptop. I like to write stuff down which could be an issue. I’m not saying I don’t have any paper etc. but as any of you who have children will know, babies seem to take up a lot of room or their stuff does anyway. My office has already become the guest bedroom so I will have to curb my spreading habit and start using bound paper rather than loose. Other things I might miss are my filed notes and printed client records although my team will be able to help me there, oh and of course the witty and intellectual conversations that happen within our office.

So in a nutshell I should be fine. I have my laptop, my broadband and my notebook (the old style paper version) so I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to oversee my team and clients from afar. I’m sure I read somewhere that babies are quite, polite little bundles of joy……

If you feel I have missed anything or you know of any tools, advice etc. that might help me I will be glad to hear from you. Oh and the estimated ESA (estimated Spud arrival, we chose not to learn the gender.) is 8 weeks.

Disclaimer

I am aware that legally I am entitled to 2 weeks maternity leave which should be a complete break from work. To be honest I love my job and the whole buzz around search engine marketing and will find it hard to not stay in the loop. I’m not expecting to carry out all my duties while on leave and neither are my bosses expecting me to (amazing). I will be briefing my team and letting them take the load off as well as briefing my clients.

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!

This map can be expanded to show an overview of the area:

At first this seems to have been a rare and random appearance but now it seems to be almost a common feature in most generic searches. So far it only seems to list American businesses and the selection of who gets a map seems to be completely random, however it seems you need to be listed in Google’s local directory to be eligible for a map.

Google is constantly testing new ways to improve its user’s experience, these maps look to have become a useful and permanent feature of search results and hopefully will soon be rolled out across UK businesses.

You can read the official google announcement here

A common way is to have the affiliate id contained within the URL as a dynamic parameter. This example (http://www.merchantsite.com/?affid=1234) is a straight through link with no redirection. This means that Google & other search engines will place this page in their index, this would cause several copies of the homepage to be indexed by search engines and result in major duplicate content issues. In some extreme cases these affiliate pages have replaced the home page of the merchant site, meaning that the merchants were paying for visitors coming through naturally on their brand name.

A second and most common way is to have an affiliate page that records the visit and then redirects the visitor to the homepage. (http://www.merchantsite.com/redirect.php?affid=1234) This will have no effect on search engine results but means that there is a lot of link juice going to waste. The redirect being used in this case is most commonly a 302 (temporary) redirect, these will mean that the effect of the link will not be passed on. Changing the redirect to a 301 (permanent) redirect will pass on the link value in some search engines, but the more intelligent ones will be able to figure out the parameter at the end of the URL (?affid=1234) is related to some form of affiliate scheme and discount the weight of the links.

The way to make your affiliate scheme have a positive impact on your search results evolves using a URL that does not have a dynamic parameter and combining this with a 301 redirect. So instead of using http://www.merchantsite.com/redirect.php?affid=1234 as the page to refer visitors to, each affiliate has their own folder to point to i.e. (http://www.merchantsite.com/welcome/1234). This folder then contains a page that will record the hit and 301 redirect onto the homepage. To search engines this looks like a normal link and the 301 redirect ensures that all the links pointing to this page are credited to the homepage.

With the web becoming busier and busier sites are needing to find new ways to set themselves apart from the crowd. Many will go with the user experience with involves using so called web 2.0 technologies to enhance user experience. AJAX is one technology that uses XML and JavaScript to create a flash like effect to pages. Others provide customer review sections to provide additional information to users surfing the web. This is resulting in the sites becoming more complex in nature and offering more and more in one place.

SEO Implications

Search engine optimisation is part of Web 2.0. One of the advances in the web is making sites search engine friendly. But the direct effects of web 2.0 on SEO should be positive. With more interactivity it is easer to keep fresh new content on pages but the basics of SEO should stay the same. With advancing technologies, such as AJAX, optimising site structure and solving search robots problems will become more complicated. For the future more and more sites will require SEO but this will increase the amount of competition on phrases.

A phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004 refers to a
supposed second-generation of Internet-based services — such as social
networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies — that let
people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.
O’Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase
as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular
(though ill-defined and often criticised) buzzword amongst certain technical
and marketing communities.

The main points of Web 2.0 are participation and integration,
with sites prompting user input with product reviews, chatting and blogging.
Below is a table showing the evolution of well-performing Web 1.0 sites to the
currently well performing Web 2.0 site:

Current Web Relation

The idea of Web 2.0 is to enhance user experience by making
the web a place to be and trying to move everything you would normally do
offline, online. This can be seen in the surge of social sites now available,
with the idea of moving something that almost all people do offline into the
online market. This has meant that for almost everything you do offline, there
is a version or online equivalent. This is where making your site stand out
from the crowd becomes essential, some sites go for the user experience other
sites go for a marketing approach.