It’s now been over 2 years since Google announced they use the image alt attribute contents to ascertain what an image is and related to. This, in addition to Google’s recently granted reasonable surfer patent suggesting that more power and value is passed via links that are more likely to be clicked upon i.e. banners and images, shows it is incredibly important to make sure we are correctly optimising the images we have on our own sites.

There is a distinct difference between the supposed contents of the image alt and the image title tags:

Image Alt Tags

Alt text is meant to be an “alternative information source” for those people who have chosen to disable images in their browsers and those user agents that are simply unable to “visualise” the images.

It should be used to describe what the image is about and get those visitors interested to see it.

Image Title Tags

The image title should provide additional information and follow the rules of the regular title: being relevant, short, catchy and concise (a best practice title ‘offers advisory information about the element for which it is set’).

How do we optimise our images?

Using the description of both tags means it is quite easy for us to discuss how we can optimised them correctly:

• Both tags are meant for the end user even though alt text seems more important for crawlers.
• For the ‘Alt tag’ contents we must provide explicit information on an image to encourage users to view them and to pass on as much information to search as possible.
• You should include your keywords within both tags but keep them different.
• Whilst adding your keywords to the content avoid keyword stuffing. Even though it’s Alt and Title text, it is still keyword stuffing.
• Keep both relevant.

Many people have argued that super brands do not care about search because they do not need to- happy instead to rely on the high amount of higher converting traffic generated from brand related searches.

I, however, am inclined to disagree. I believe that a lack of awareness of the potential or even existence of search marketing is a major factor as to why super brands are not engaging in search, likely due to senior management and decision makers being relatively new to the online world.

Marks and Spencer’s have been used as an example of why super brands do not need to implement search marketing but instead can rely on the huge amounts of traffic generated from brand related searches to be successful online. And I’m sure they can. But this supposed attitude of “we don’t need to do that search marketing because we are doing well enough with our brand traffic” doesn’t ring true to one of the UK’s most successful retailers. If this had always been the attitude at Marks and Spencer then they would likely still be running a stall in Leeds market.

How do you know M&S Aren’t Implementing Search Marketing?

Currently the M&S website, from an SEO’s point of view, is pretty poor. It would pretty much miss every tick-box on an SEO architecture review: awful title tags, hardly any textual content, un-readable URL’s, massive duplicate content issue…….. the list could go on. And the back-link profile- although amassing over 30k links, has an anchor text distribution consisting of…. well take a look below.

It would definitely be fair to say they are relying on their brand name.

But, all these issues could be relatively easily fixed using fundamental SEO methods and with relatively little investment, especially when compared to the TV and other traditional market budgets being thrown about by M&S.

The combination of the M&S sites organic power and authority, due to the M&S brand name, combined with a strategically targeted search marketing strategy, both on and off page, would give the M&S site the ability to rank highly for a huge range of high traffic driving, non-brand terms and therefore greatly increase its current traffic levels.

And I believe, if the decision makers and senior marketers within M&S understood this then they would invest in search marketing in a heartbeat, as would their peers at other Super Brand companies.

Super Brands that Do Use Search

One super brand, currently sitting at the top of our brand search ratings, who have identified  and successfully implemented search marketing despite their strong brand name, are Thornton’s, the UK based chocolate confectioners.

Unsurprisingly, Thornton’s rank 1^st in Google for “Thorntons” and a whole host of other Thornton’s related keywords, and dominate the first page of Google with a range of universal search results- already a hint that Thornton’s are implementing search marketing.

Thornton’s dominance of the search engine results pages for brand related terms is likely to bring them a fairly large amount of high converting traffic. Despite this, Thornton’s have not sat back, as has been suggested of super brands, and relied on this brand generated traffic. Instead they have targeted a broad range of generic key terms related to the online chocolate confectionary niche by implementing a search marketing strategy, encompassing both paid and organic search, in order to further increase the amount of traffic visiting their site and thus growing there business as a whole.

The Online Chocolate Confectionary Market

Similarly to the online clothing market of M&S, the online chocolate confectionary space is one comprised of a mixture of global MegaBrands (Cadbury, Nestle etc), comparatively small online specialists and those like Thornton’s who fall somewhere in-between. This makes this online niche an excellent case study to show how successful a targeted search marketing strategy can be, as well as demonstrating how SuperBrands are potentially missing out by not implementing search.

The Thornton’s Strategy -

To view our full analysis of the Thornton’s search marketing strategy head over to our Market Insights section.

During a painful 1.9k swim, 90k bike ride and 21k run you get a lot of time to think about a decent blog post and I started to draw the analogy of my favourite sport (Triathlon) with my business passion of Search Marketing.

So how do you draw a comparison?  Well, ask anyone who trains for Triathlon and they will tell you that one of the biggest benefits of the sport is the mix.  Unlike other endurance sports (say marathon running for example) the mix of swimming, biking and running is physically beneficial as it works many complementary muscle groups without causing particular strain to any specific part of the body. This means much better general health.

Okay so triathlon lesson over, back to search.

Ask any good integrated search marketer about how to manage a great on-line campaign and they should tell you that it too is all about the mix.  In this case let’s says it’s the right blend of SEO, PPC and conversion rate optimisation.

To continue the analogy let’s say that the bike leg is SEO, it takes the longest to complete and you need to focus for extended periods of time to ensure you meet your eventual goal (great natural rankings or completion of the bike route without any technical failures). The analogy continues as the bike leg is often technical, taking skill on the bike and technique to get the most out of your gears etc.  We know from experience this is certainly true in SEO where many people talk a good game but few deliver, it takes genuine skill and experience to succeed here and that experience takes time to develop.

If SEO is the bike then PPC is the run.  It’s often the discipline that takes the glory. In the race it’s the run past the finish line that gets all the attention not the other disciplines.  As often it is with PPC. Those who don’t fully understand click path analysis or the full user journey to an ultimate conversion (a purchase from your website, a brochure download, whatever means a conversion to you) will often attribute a disproportionate amount of value to the last click and forget what it took to get the customer there.

So that just leaves the swim. Again speak to most triathletes and they will tell you they don’t like the swim, it’s a necessary evil of the sport and it’s the thing they train least for. In this case I’ll compare the swim to conversion rate optimisation. For those who don’t know this is the process and technique of testing and refining your website to ensure those customers you worked hard to get there ultimately do what you want them to once they arrive. We see time and time again in search campaigns that this is the discipline that people leave to the end or ignore totally. It’s amazing that so much time can be invested in PPC and SEO only to overlook that critical point at which the customer arrives on your website and you simply hope and pray that they then stay there.

So the key to great search marketing results is the mix, make sure you are considering all disciplines together, get the balance right and healthy results will follow.

The Basic Syntax

Your instructions within your robots.txt come in blocks. Each block starts with a declaration of the particular robot or robots it will apply to via their user agent (all nice robots should declare themselves via a user agent so you can handle them appropriately). So the start of a block would look like;

User-agent: Googlebot the Google robot
User-agent: msnbot the Live and Bing robot
User-agent: * all robots (or at least all of them that obey)

After your user agent line come your actions to be followed. These need to come directly below with no blank lines. There can be as many as you like as long as each is on a new line. So with instructions your block might look like;

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /supersecretfolder/
Disallow: /worlddominationplans/
Disallow: /poemsaboutunicorns/

Comments can be added into your robots.txt file by starting them with a hash (#) e.g.

# This is a comment.

Folder, filenames etc. are case sensitive as it should be… sorry rant over.

Instructions are handled in order which can lead to unexpected behaviour. For instance;

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /supersecretfolder/

Would not prevent msnbot from looking in the folder as you have already given it the key to the city in your first block.

More Advanced Usage

Noindex

Disallowing a folder or file doesn’t necessarily keep it out of the index. It simply prevents the search engine robots from grabbing the content and adding it to their index. If somebody links to your content its location will still appear in the search engine index and relevance will be gleamed from the anchor text etc. The snippet will simply be the URL only with no other information.

To prevent your folder or file from being indexed completely you need to use the Noindex directive although this is only obeyed by Google.

User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /supersecretfolder/

Allow

If you have a large amount of content you don’t want crawled but somewhere in there, there is a piece you do want crawled, you can use the Allow directive. This directive supported by Google and Yahoo means you can override part of a previous disallow statement e.g.

Disallow: /poemsaboutunicorns/ blocks everything in that folder
Allow: /poemsaboutunicorns/notwrittenbyme/ opens up the child folder

This is a whole lot easier than writing individual lines for each of the child folders.

Pattern Matching

One of the most useful things you can do within your robots.txt file is pattern match. Let’s say you have a large number of pages indexed with random variables attached, all of which are creating duplicates of your homepage and you lack the ability to apply 301s etc.

You can apply a disallow statement that uses pattern matching to say “if it’s got a variable tagged on the end, don’t crawl it”. So let’s say we find a load of duplicates with the variable affid= tagged on.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?affid=*

Would handle them all. You can also go further and block a particular file extension or even any URL which uses a variable.

Disallow: /*.cfm$ blocks all cfm extension pages
Disallow: /*?* blocks all pages that use a variable

This can be very powerful but remember that by disallowing, you are in effect causing the pages to be ignored so no links inside will be followed and any link juice flowing to the pages will meet a dead-end.

Handling HTTPs

If you have the issue of all your pages being indexed under both HTTPs and HTTP protocols you can tackle the issue using robots.txt with a little help from URL rewriting.

First you need to set up 2 robots.txt files, one that handles your HTTP pages, named robots.txt and another that handles your HTTPs pages names robots2.txt. Maybe;

User-agent: *
Disallow:

—–

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Noindex: /

You then set up a rule in your URL rewriting to say if the request is form robots.txt using the HTTPs protocol, serve the robots2.txt file. Something like;

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^/robots\.txt$ /robots2.txt [NC]

Sitemaps

Although I would always recommend linking to your XML sitemap from your HTML sitemap, you should also specify your XML sitemap location within your robots.txt file. The format is simply a clean line containing Sitemap: the location e.g.

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

So, that’s robots.txt. You can find out a lot more at http://www.robotstxt.org and if you know any tricks I have missed, please don’t hesitate to let me know via a comment.

Well, it all depends on when exactly the search volumes hit the critical point whereby it will become profitable to have an optimised site to attract this increased traffic. For this data, we’ll turn to Google Insights.

Let’s take a look at the term ‘World Cup 2010’:

The trend shows that pick-up began tentatively in March then really took off throughout April. However this is a term that you would be very unlikely to be competing for directly, so let’s imagine your website delivered breaking news on the World Cup and you were optimising for the keyword ‘World Cup News’:

The trend here is slightly different with pick-up growing steadily throughout April followed by 2 spikes; presumably when the World Cup teams were announced in May and as the World Cup kicked off in June.

Alternatively, you may run a betting website that is looking at cashing in on the millions of people on the hunt for the best odds on how many times Emile Heskey will miss an open net or when Robert Green will next let a ball trickle past him. In this case you may be looking at implementing SEO for ‘World Cup Odds’:

I think you can probably see a pattern forming here.

So with this in mind, and the fact that these terms are extremely competitive, you should have been looking at starting your Would Cup SEO sometime way back in November 2009 to allow for it to mature in time to capitalise on the period when the growth in search traffic began. By the time your target market is thinking about searching on these keywords, the moment has long passed for optimisation. You need to be one step ahead of the game and (if you excuse the pun) always keep your eye on the ball!

With this said, I’d pencil in December 2011 for some serious SEO work for the London Olympics, or in the shorter term, how’s about getting on with some cricket related SEO for the next Ashes series in November 2010!

Sometimes a large part of the SEO strategy will revolve around generating traffic through an extensive list of very specific keywords, and sometimes the strategy will be focused around a few critical, large volume keywords.

The same can be true for PPC. Large volume keywords can cost a fortune to advertise on, putting them out of reach for many smaller advertisers, but for some advertisers, they are critical to the success or failure of the campaign.

‘The Hammer And Scalpel’ is one approach to ensuring that you get the most from your advertising budget – The Hammer is SEO, and the Scalpel is PPC.

The principal is simple – you use SEO to target a number of very large keywords (that are out of reach for your PPC budget), whilst you pick up the long tail keywords with the PPC.

Clearly, this won’t work if high rankings are impossible to achieve on the biggest keywords, perhaps if you have a new website, or the incumbent top adverts are immovable advertising colossuses (colossi?!).

But if your website has some history, then page one rankings for these keywords may certainly be achievable. Whilst you focus your SEO efforts on these keywords, PPC can be used to pick up any potential traffic on lower volume keywords.

There are a number of advantages to this approach:

• You will be represented on all of the relevant keywords, unlike an SEO-only strategy.
• You won’t have to worry about your adverts cannibalising traffic from each other.
• Your advertising spend is likely to be far less than a PPC-only strategy, targeting the same keywords.
• You’ll start getting a return on your investment far more quickly than from an SEO-only strategy.
• Your advertising spend may start to fall in the long term, as you achieve top results in SEO.
• Once you have top results in SEO, you can target new keywords, and remove these from the PPC campaign if you want to.
• You will still get a ‘halo effect’ on other keywords in SEO, as a result of improving your website’s visibility in Google on critical terms. These can, again, be removed from the PPC if you want.

Advertisers with deep pockets, or in less competitive or smaller markets, may still be better targeting everything in PPC – this solution certainly isn’t for everyone.

But if you’ve found in the past that PPC is too expensive, then a combined PPC and SEO strategy may be the perfect solution for your needs.

However, at the recent SMX London conference, Rob Kerry from Ayima, during his talk on ranking factors, , stated that from research he has carried out he could conclude that 301 redirects no longer pass any link juice in the eyes of Google, a theory that was neither confirmed nor objected to by fellow panellist, SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin.

So how are you supposed to tell search engines you’ve moved your page and pass on some of that precious link juice going into the old page?

Well it may just be a coincidence but the demise of the 301 redirects ability to pass on power seems to have coincided with Google’s roll out of the cross domain rel=”canonical” tag, a possible hint by Google that this is their preferred method for you to tell them that you have moved your page. Whether the rel=canonical will pass on any link juice…… well currently your guess is as good as mine but this is something we will be monitoring very closely.

Is rel=”canonical” the replacement for 301 redirect?

To put it simply- No. Even if the rel=”canonical” tag does solve Google’s problem of deciding whether to index your old URL or your new one, it still leaves you with a huge usability issue in that it does not actually take your users to the correct new page .

There are lots of great obvious – and not so obvious – things you can do with the data, but that’s for a later post. Today I’m going to highlight a few fundamental problems I’ve spotted with the data.

For the above keyword, the website in question consistently has a double listing – position 1 and 2 (it’s a brand term so unlikely to be subject to personalised search). So, whenever someone searches for this keyword both the 1^st and 2^nd listings get an impression. Obviously most people click the first listing, hence the 67% CTR for position 1 and the low 3% CTR for position 2.

So, while it is correct to say that both position 1 and 2 get 301,000 impressions – it’s important to note that they are the same 301,000 impressions.

When displaying top level keyword data (as highlighted in the diagram above) Google’s calculations are simply wrong. For this keyword, the total impressions should read 301,000. Instead the impressions for all positions have been summed (it doesn’t exactly add up but that’s another story!). And why total clicks are reported as 201,000 rather than 201,000 + 9,900 + 390 etc is beyond me. With impressions and clicks used to calculate CTR these errors render that metric completely useless. Similarly with average position – surely if you always appear in #1, you want Google to report your average position as 1, rather than calculating it based on all of the other positions that you also appear in?!

It’s a real shame because the integration of this data into GWT was potentially a great step forward. With these sorts of issues though, along with inaccuracies reported by others, it has unfortunately fallen short.

I highly recommend you read Bill’s full post for a more detailed list of the kind of factors considered in the patent – some are obvious, some not so obvious. The stand-outs for me – those that every link builder in the land should be taking note of – are:

• Prominence of a link – We already know Google are able to assign different weight to links based on page segmentation / block level analysis (i.e. contextual ‘body’ links being more valuable than footer / sidebar type links) but I think few will have considered factors such as font size and colour versus the rest of the page’s content and the aspect ratio of images used as links. The important takeaway here, which is in line with the fundamentals of PageRank, is that links which are more likely to be clicked will pass more PageRank.

• The website associated with the linked-to page – This is very subtle but very important and is likely to factor in multiple elements. I envisage these being at least:
  • Is the target page in line with the overall theme of the website
  • How obvious is that theme – i.e. is the website as a whole optimised well
  • How well integrated into the website is the target page
  • The authority of a website could impact the weight passed by links to it

The last point may be a bit dubious and would potentially lead to the ‘rich getting richer’ but I can certainly see it being applicable where websites have some sort of Google ‘black mark’ against them. It’s also fairly common to see large, authoritative websites needing minimal external links to a deep page for that page to rank – because the overall site authority amplifies link power.

• User interaction with a link – While this is related to the prominence of a link it’s interesting to see the frequency that a link is clicked (relative to other links on the page) and factors such as ‘interests of the users’ are stated. The latter for me implies that personalised search comes into play – i.e. how relevant is a link to recent searches that have been performed. For me this says links need to be very tightly targeted (i.e. topically relevant) and must also entice a click – ‘sell themselves’ – to ensure as high a quantity of clicks as possible.

Smart link builders will inherently be doing much of this anyway – high quality links should be topically relevant and should be placed with direct traffic as well as rankings in mind – and so should be prominent. What we don’t know is how many of these factors are already in play. With the original patent filed in 2004 it’s safe to say Google has had the technology to do this for a while and have probably been factoring in at least some of the listed features for years. It’s also safe to say that there are probably many more factors being taken into consideration, or at least tested, since this patent was filed. Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see how (if at all) link building strategies alter now this information has been brought to the attention of the community!

What is Pagination?

Pagination is the act of splitting content via a series of numbered pages. This can be implemented for a variety of reasons however, is usually found on ecommerce websites (when displaying products), blogs (when displaying post snippets) and on pages where the sheer amount of content poses an accessibility issue, forcing the user to scroll for an extended length of time.

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Unfortunately, splitting content through pagination causes many issues to arise that hold potentially negative SEO impacts if not addressed.

• Crawl Depth

If a website has a vast amount of content that is being paginated, the number of clicks required in order to view a deep page can be huge. As well as the obvious impact this has on usability, these deeper pages could never be indexed as a spider may determine them unreachable. If the spider gives up after a few ‘clicks’, these pages will remain undiscovered and not be returned in SERPs.

• Duplicate Content

If pagination is being used on an ecommerce site then the chances are that each page will contain very similar products i.e. Canon Digital Cameras or Hotels in Paris. This makes it difficult for the search engines to decide which to assign authority to and thus display in the search engine. If all the pages contain content that is almost identical, more serious issues may arise regarding duplicate content.

• Duplicate Page Titles and Metadata

As with the duplicate content issue, pagination will also cause identical page titles and metadata to be generated across each of the paginated pages, leading to potential indexing issues.

• Keyword Diluting

If the website is using pagination to simply break up a content heavy blog post or product review, then duplicate content will not be so much of an issue. However any keyword weighting may be lost with the content being delivered across many individual pages. This will also present a search engine with the dilemma of which page to offer up in a SERP.

What can be done?

Unfortunately there is no hard and fast resolution for the issue of pagination; however measures can be implemented to help show search engines how we would like the pages to be dealt with. Also, depending on how and why pagination is being used on any given website, not all of these steps may be possible or feasible.

• Categorised Pages

Categories can be developed to limit the number of ‘clicks’ a search engine has to make in order to reach any given piece of content. Within each category, a list of individual pages can be presented. On a car retailers ecommerce site for example, rather than having all Vauxhall cars presented on one large page with pagination, offer pages showing Vauxhall cars categorised by make i.e. Astra, Corsa, etc. In addition to limiting the number of ‘clicks’ required by flattening the page hierarchy, this will also offer pages that have further longer-tail keyword potential.

• NoIndex, Follow

Implementing a NoIndex, Follow robots meta tag on all of the paginated pages, aside from the first one, will allow search engines to only index the first page meaning that no duplicate content is given to a spider. Unfortunately though, doing this doesn’t stop users linking back to one of the paginated pages. This will be wasted link juice as the linked page will not be indexed. Whilst this tactic is available for paginated article content, it should be avoided on ecommerce sites as none of the products on the paginated pages will be indexed.

• Dynamic Page Titles and Metadata

To prevent all paginated pages inheriting identical page titles and metadata, they can be dynamically rendered depending on the paginated page category i.e. page number. For example, paginated page titles for a jewellery ecommerce store could read:

“Ladies Silver Wedding Rings | Jewellery Store”

and

“Ladies Silver Wedding Rings – Page 2 | Jewellery Store”

While this is not fool proof, it does offer a search engine some distinction between the paginated pages.

• CSS/JQuery Pagination

This type of pagination is not true pagination. To the human user it appears as if they have clicked a page number or tab and are delivered new content on a new page; in reality they stay on the same page URL, and the content comes to them.

Employing a CSS and JQuery based solution enables the content to always be present on the page when it loads; selecting a pagination link simply delivers the user the relevant content chunk without generating any new pages. As a spider will see all of the content on the one page, no issues arise. There are of course, issues relating to the volume of content shown to the spiders and the number of links out they will follow. If this is a problem i.e. you have 500 different cars to show, then you should really be looking into category filtering as it’s unlikely users will trawl through 25 pages of cars.

• Unique Page Content

For all of the paginated pages to be indexed, the search engine may have a hard time deciding which to deliver in a SERP. To aid this process, a section of keyword rich copy can be implemented onto the first paginated page only. While this method is by no means infallible, it can help offer some degree of control over which page within the pagination is displayed in a search engine as the copy offers added keyword relevance.

As you can see there are several options for handling pagination and the best approach is generally a combination. Fixing pagination can lead to a massive increase in long-tail penetration and associated traffic so the reward is definitely worth the effort!

Again, we have taken some time out to test various aspects with the following results.

The Google Caffeine IP Tested

Firstly, if you are unsure as to what Google Caffeine is, I would advise looking at one of our early Caffeine related post;

Get ready for some caffeine – November 2009
Google Introduce Caffeine: The Google GTi – August 2009

Pretty much as soon as the Google Caffeine sandbox was closed, people started speculating about various data centres being the first to show Caffeine results. After reviewing many such claims, we found that eventually one data centre did seem to be showing Google Caffeine results, some of the time. This was then later confirmed by Matt Cutts of Google.

The IP address was 209.85.225.103 and it could be accessed via http://209.85.225.103/search?hl=en&gl=uk&q=seo+leeds where the query variable (q) could be set to your search query (with +s to replace spaces of course).

The Tests

We carried out three tests around Caffeine. Firstly, as Caffeine has always been documented as likely to affect the speed in which results are returned and the size of the returned data set for a result, we looked at those two variables. As Caffeine is likely to affect index sizes, it may also have some impact on rankings due to more pages of your site being found or more pages containing a link to your site being found on other sites etc. So we looked at ranking variance for the third test.

The tests were kept simple and carried out using IE8 on a base unit that connected to the internet via a UK IP address that had never been used to search for any of these terms before. In fact, prior to being set up for this test, the box had never even connected to the internet before.

Test 1 – Size of Returned Results Sets

We generated a list of 100 search terms, ranging from head terms such as ‘mortgages’ to long tail terms such as ‘government grants for energy research’. Each search was carried out using http://www.google.co.uk and the Google Caffeine IP above. The size of the returned dataset as shown by the ‘of about’ line (Results 1-10 of about 10,200…) was recorded for both and the percentage difference between Caffeine and Google.co.uk was calculated for each.

As I said, nothing too complicated.

When the Google Caffeine sandbox first went live, initial tests carried out by others showed that the data sets returned by Google Caffeine were much larger than those returned by normal Google.

When we carried out our own testing nearer to the end of the sandbox’s existence, this difference was almost unnoticeable, with the average difference being that Google Caffeine returned 4% more results (a 4% bigger data set).

The latest set of tests using the live Google Caffeine IP were even more unexpected, with most searches bringing back considerably smaller data sets through Google Caffeine (as can be seen from the above graph). On average, Google Caffeine returned 13% fewer results. In some instances, the data set returned was nearly 70% smaller.

Test 2 – Speed of Returned Results

At the same time as testing the size of the returned results sets, we also recorded the time taken to receive those results and display the first page, as shown by the time quoted after the data set size.

It’s important to remember for this test that several things could have an impact, not least the fact that we had to refresh the result until it showed Caffeine results. Google is also already pretty fast at returning results, so rather than worry about how much faster Caffeine was or the average speed difference etc., we kept this test really simple and based it on wins.

This is the first time that we can make any real conclusions about speed, as the sandbox environment wasn’t a true representation of Google to compare like-for-like. Even now, the result has to be taken with a pinch of salt and certainly wasn’t conclusive, but on average (52% of the time), Google Caffeine was faster.

But then, if it is passing back smaller results sets, it should be quicker, shouldn’t it?! However, it could also be said that if Caffeine is indexing more and therefore has a large index to work with to construct the data set to be returned from, it should actually be slower.

Test 3 – Ranking Changes

For our final test, we looked at how rankings differ for 145 terms that relate to our clients. We took the clients ranking position now for the particular term and compared it with where Google Caffeine ranks them for the same term.

Just to clarify, a positive number equates to Google Caffeine ranking the client lower than normal Google, while a negative number means the ranking was better on Caffeine.

As can be seen from the graph above, the range of ranking changes was limited, with the majority showing improvement. Some did slip, but none suffered any major impact from Caffeine.

Of course, we are not aiming to draw any conclusions from this particular experiment. We are, however, sleeping better.

Conclusions

Google Caffeine does seem to be returning smaller sets of results most of the time, which could be due to an improvement in relevance. If Google Caffeine is drawing from a larger index, then it is definitely faster at working out the data set to return. All along, we have expected ranking changes to be minimal, and the latest tests seem to confirm this.

In general, Google Caffeine looks to be a success so far.

We are expecting the full roll-out of Google Caffeine around February, and will probably carry out another round of testing a few weeks after, when things have settled.

Until then, get your fill of decaff. Caffeine is coming.

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So exactly what is likely to be a big area of growth this year on the web? What are our forecasts for the ‘next big thing(s)’ in online marketing? See below for our predictions on what to look out for in 2010…

Social Gaming

FarmVille, a Facebook game in which you grow and tend to your own Farm, currently has 70 million active monthly users. By comparison, Twitter currently has approximately 12 million users. Clearly Social Gaming is already popular, and will continue to grow strongly during 2010. I’d also wager that FarmVille has much more of a ‘middle America’ demographic than Twitter…

Brands looking for new & innovative online opportunities for exposure need look no further; create a killer Social Game on Facebook. These types of games could even be tied into product promotions; with codes to unlock various aspects of the game available on the back of packaging for example, as well as forming part of a link generation campaign.

Social Games are going to become the Flash Games of 2010 for big brands.

Payment Platforms

Those that just make the games will look to ‘internal game economies’ and user purchases for monetisation. Micropayments can already be made on Facebook for charitable donations and gifts, so this functionality lends itself well to this purpose.

With the seemingly never ending proliferation of Facebook Connect (allowing you to log into other websites using your Facebook ID), will 2010 be the year we see Facebook emerge as a general e-commerce payment platform? Probably not (just yet), but for micropayments (to access premium content for example), Facebook is in prime position. Expect to be using Facebook, or similar, to make micropayments to access individual articles on pay newspaper sites (owned by Rupert Murdoch).

The Amazon Flexible Payments Service is likely to be the early leader as a full blown payment platform, allowing consumers to purchase goods from third party websites through simply using a passphrase and a pin number. Clearly this adds convenience to a consumer’s journey through a website as they don’t have to enter details more than once. It also addresses any issues of trust a consumer could have with a small e-commerce website, no payment details are passed to the third party as Amazon processes the payment: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/. Online retailers unable, or unwilling, to obtain a merchant account of their own may also see this as a viable option.

Expect this to be a big area of growth in 2010 which the web’s big boys will fight over to control.

IPTV & Internet TV

I’ve been banging on about internet TV for years now and have been waiting with baited breath for the platform to come to full fruition. Will 2010 be the year more people watch TV via the Internet than traditional methods (digital or analogue)? Probably not, but 2010 will be a huge year for true Internet TV and could open up new online marketing channels.

IPTV

Whilst interesting in itself, IPTV doesn’t open up any new (& immediately accessible) marketing channels, as IPTV offerings are largely walled gardens such Virgin TV, for that you need the real raw internet. It will however, get consumers en-masse more used to the idea of Internet based Television.

You can already get YouTube and iPlayer on your telly via a wide variety of methods, we’ll see this and similar functionality make its way from the geeks living room into your grandmas living room during 2010 via the inclusion of Freeview boxes and standalone TVs with Ethernet or Wi-Fi connections.

YouTube

No wonder so many UK TV channels have signed on the dotted line with Google’s YouTube.

This makes it even more important to rank highly for brand related terms (for exposure and protection purposes), or your viral TV ad, as more and more people use YouTube via their normal TV.

Internet TV & Set Top Boxes

We will also see an excess of new set top boxes and software solutions offering to bring together the many current web TV services and other websites all in one place. As a long time fan of XBMC (Xbox Media Center), I await the launch of Boxee’s (XBMC predecessor) set top box with baited breath. For more information on Boxee check out my blog post from November of last year (link to blog).

Online Marketing

These new TV distribution channels will give online marketers an additional channel to work with; you’re probably already creating a large amount of video for your website or YouTube (or are about to), why not wrap it in a new little branded package and create a mini TV Channel based solely on your brand and push it onto Boxee or similar?

Widgets & Apps

Yahoo TV Widgets have been around on Samsung TVs for a little while now, though no one paid them any attention. The concept of TV widgets was re-launched at the recent CES show in the US, with Samsung announcing a new set of widgets supporting TVs and, importantly, a new iPlayer widget.

Whilst your digital marketing agency may discuss Facebook applications with you today, expect them to begin talking about making a TV widget or something similar by the end of the year.

Augmented Reality

The web will begin to bleed into the real world during 2010. Augmented Reality ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’, it takes reality (the physical real-world environment) and adds something additional in the form of computer generated imagery, in real time. This has a myriad of applications in the world of e-commerce, mobile marketing and paid search and will break through into more mainstream use during 2010. Find out more here.

Mobile Web

So iPhones and Smart Phones are generally pretty popular, right? Of course they are, but 2010 will be the year this area truly takes off with an abundance of new, more advance and most importantly, more affordable Smart Phones hitting the market. 2010 will be the year this platform becomes completely mainstream and we begin to see much higher percentage of users accessing the web via their mobile.

How people are viewing and using the web is changing. Websites that are serious about maximising their online exposure will need to pay closer attention to how their website operates in a mobile environment during 2010 and what additional services and applications they can offer to maximise the potential of this literally mobile audience.

Mobile Payments

Mobile Payments, the ability to pay for goods via the direct use of your mobile phone, rather than cash or credit cards is already popular in many parts of the world, will take off in 2010 in the UK.

Wave and Pay within Debit Cards may triumph in the UK in terms of purchasing goods in the physical world, but mobile payments are so convenient to make purchases with when you’re browsing a shop via your mobile phone that their increasing popularity seems certain.

The Web as a Platform

Always a long term goal of ‘web 2.0’, cloud computing will truly kick into gear in 2010 as businesses and individuals alike begin to see the Web as a platform itself, in the same way Windows currently is, as both Google and Microsoft strongly push their offerings.

As web users get more accustomed to the functionality in their every day websites, or applications, e-commerce sites will begin to feel the need to offer more advanced functionality in their own offerings.

Oh, and if you haven’t rolled out Facebook connect, OpenID or other such services into your website login procedure already, you almost certainly will during 2010.  The use of Social Media APIs will also become increasingly popular and important.

The long term battle of the web lies not between the search engines, but the platforms…

Google in 2010

Google Wave (Real Time Collaboration)

Whilst Google Wave on the surface appears to be an over elaborate replacement for GTalk, when you think about the encroaching cloud computing and regularly using Google’s Chrome OS, this software takes on a more useful and substantial roll as a real time collaboration tool and its use will grow relatively strong during 2010. Welcome to NetMeeting, 2010 style.

When we think about ‘Crowd Sourcing’, and using it as a marketing tool, there is a strong chance that Google Wave will emerge as a platform on which we see companies and consumers collaborate. I have no doubt that someone, at some point, will attempt this in 2010.

Google Search as an Application?

If we begin to think and use Google as an operating system, this could potentially result in Google Search just becoming another application. Will this change how people use Google, and more importantly what search results they click on? Google Search being viewed ‘just’ as application, a widget, or an applet may be quiet a way off yet. The way people view and use Google, and thus what results people are drawn to however, will change during 2010.

The New Google User Interface

Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout, this change means it will become increasingly important to rank highly in image, video et al search results, as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface. Try it out yourself.

Real Time Search for the masses

Originally this article was to include a section on how Real Time search will break out of Twitter (and off Bing) and into the mainstream. The speed at which Google is releasing new features at the moment has made this prediction for 2010 out of date already. Announced at the end of 2009, Real Time search results from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and other news sources will be integrated directly within the natural search results.

This change has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank highly in the search engines. Check out my and others Expert opinion on this topic over at Econsultancy.

Personalised Results

Google also announced earlier this month that search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not.  Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?!

Find Out More here.

Google Caffeine

Google Caffine, Google’s latest update to its core search offering, is set for release early on in 2010.

“At this stage, Caffeine is not a full-blown algorithm update although there has been a lot of speculation regarding things that may have changed. Caffeine is in fact, documented as a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that sits under the hood of Google’s search engine.”

Find out more from our Head of Search, Malcolm Slade.

Google’s Pace of Change

2 years ago, would we have seen Personalised Results and Real Time Search released in Google Labs first, before hitting the ‘big-time’? Most likely so, at least in the case of Personalised Results, so what has changed? Why has the pace at which Google is releasing new features increased so dramatically over the past year?

In a word – Bing. Increased competition from Microsoft’s search engine has resulted in Google upping its game, and we should expect the two engines to continue this pattern in 2010 as one looks to increase its market share and the other protect it.

Of course the web, and thus search itself has changed. Nowadays Google welds enough power to try and manipulate the environment in which it operates but for me, Google at its core is a mirror of the (web) environment in which it finds itself. As the web and how people use it changes, so will Google…

To stay ahead of the curve, and the competition, websites in 2010 will need to pay close attention to search engine innovation in order to maintain their current levels of traffic and capitalise on the new opportunities that will present themselves. Companies simply must connect with their users in order to keep them engaged and ensure they maintain the highest possible positions in the search engine results.

By creating a widget for the community, you are able to control the content that appears on their website. The only area of control you do not have is where the user wishes to position the widget on their website.

A widget should cost your company relatively little and have a low resource time. Without being too technical, you can make it extremely easy for users to add your widget to their website too by providing the preferred code or setting the widget up as a plug-in so users can download it to their blog.

Why Does Your Company Need A Widget?

As social media has become much more popular over the course of 2008 and 2009, users have changed the way they use the internet. They no longer begin their web experience at Google or Yahoo but instead start on Facebook, Twitter or their favourite social website. Users also have the option of viewing these websites on a mobile phone meaning that there is even more reason to package up your brand and expose it through as many channels as possible.

By creating an educational or entertaining application, a widget allows you to reach potential customers with similar interests, on websites where they spend most of their time. This will not only expose your brand to them, it will also give them a company to associate a certain product or service with, increasing the likelihood of them returning to you.

How Can Widgets Help With SEO?

By providing a link to your website within your widget, it can provide a form of link building and the more popular a widget, the better an effect it will have on your SEO. Take advantage of the widget’s link by adding a keyword term you are targeting as anchor text (the text used to link to your website).

It is very likely that your widget will be used by users that have a similar interest meaning your widget and link will be surrounded by relevant content, a factor that search engines look for.

Examples of Widgets

As an avid fantasy football fan, a widget that I find extremely useful is PhysioRoom’s Premier League Injury List. The widget can be imported to a website or blog and shows all the current player injuries and expected return dates for each team and can be changed for fan websites to show just one team.

From an SEO perspective, PhysioRoom add their own link at the bottom of the widget with specific keywords linking to their products. This tool has become so powerful that it now ranks above the homepage for the search ‘PhysioRoom’ proving the effects of a popular widget.

The PhysioRoom as found on Tottenham Hotspur Web Guide

iGoogle is an example of a page taking advantage of widgets. The page can incorporate the latest news through RSS feeds providing quick links to the articles and short description snippet. Other widgets can be added too such as a YouTube player, games and ‘To Do’ lists all on top of your everyday search functionality. There is no reason why your widget can’t appear on iGoogle either to increase your brand exposure.

Photo Credit: mil8

Well, the public testing is now officially over and Caffeine has been placed behind closed doors prior to launch, meaning it’s time to review what we learnt and what we can expect from Caffeine in 2010.

Visiting the Caffeine URL (www2.sandbox.google.com) now get you forwarded to http://www.google.com/errors/caffeine/unavailable.html which displays the above message.

Soon?

The statement that caused some panic was of course “Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center”. As anyone who has been in online marketing for a while will tell you, historically major Google updates can cause significant fluctuations in traffic while they settle into place. Not something you want to be experiencing over the holiday period where online purchases go through the roof (fingers crossed).

Luckily Google’s Matt Cutts pre-empted this concern and stated;

“Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

Full post by Matt. We all breathe a sigh of relief.

So we can expect Caffeine to be rolled out onto a single data center shortly and hopefully the location of that data center will be made public. Google’s uses many data centers so impacts from any negative side effects or positives are likely to be minimal until late January 2010 where we expect to see further expansion.

I will add the location of the data center (IP address) to the post once it is known.

What to Expect

The current architecture that underpins Google is around 10 years old and is updated in sporadic chunks to improve the performance of various elements and add new functionality. As with most complex systems, there comes a time when it is necessary to completely rework what you have to create an even stronger platform for further growth and development. This is Google Caffeine.

At this stage, Caffeine is not a full-blown algorithm update although there has been a lot of speculation regarding things that may have changed. Caffeine is in fact documented as a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that sits under the hood of Google’s search engine. Google’s Official Blog Post.

With regard to Search, this new infrastructure is designed to speed up the rate in which Google can index the billions upon billions of web pages, files, movies and pictures available to it while also increasing the amount of items indexed and the rate at which results are returned. A larger index allows returned results to be more comprehensive and accurate while quicker indexing allows results to be kept fresh and up to date.

Of course a larger index is going to have an impact on a large number of sites. If Google suddenly crawls your site and finds 10,000 extra pages that it had previously ignored, things will change. Likewise if Google suddenly finds a number of ignored pages on other sites that link through to you, things will change. What if Google suddenly finds 3 resources that are better than yours? Things will change.

Test Results

We carried out testing at various stages of the 3 month period where the sandbox was available to gain an insight into things to come. Two things worth mentioning are that we had to use various methods to get comparable results (US proxying, modifying URLs etc.) and the Caffeine sandbox results are slimmed down (no PPC etc.) so currently conclusions have to be taken with a pinch of salt until we can get our hands on the real deal.

Index Size
At the start of testing, the Caffeine index was noticeably bigger than the current Google index. Although we never saw results close to the 7 fold increase seen by the guys at Mashable we did see a noticeable size difference in the amount if results returned. Over the 3 months, the Caffeine index grew slightly but the distance between Caffeine and the current Google index actually shrunk. The number of results returned by Google.com today for Dog is 345,000,000. A lot closer to the 359,000,000 seen by Mashable on Caffeine.

Result Speed
Like others, we saw an increase in speed. This could be explained by the fact that the results set didn’t feature PPC, sitelinks etc. But like the index size, the gap seemed to close which can again be seen from the above example.

Result Accuracy
We didn’t notice any drop in poor quality results worthy of note, not for want of trying and in general, results were very similar across the board. There was a time where social media sites seemed to be getting a boost for certain queries but this again seems to now be reflected in the main index as well.

Conclusion

We are not expecting the initial launch of Caffeine to have a major impact, as at the close of the public sandbox, results were very similar to current results. That being said we have learnt to never take anything for granted. What will be more interesting are the subsequent updates that take place on the back of the Caffeine rollout. Real time, trust, links and content are all still very much at the top of Google’s mind and Caffeine looks set to give them the foundation to delve further into these issues.

Exciting times ahead but for now keep adding worthwhile content, keep engaging and growing your community and keep the links coming.

We would be very interested to hear from anyone else who looked at the Caffeine sandbox closer to the end of its availability and look forward to the day when an IP address is confirmed.

One of which is custom alerts, which is in the new intelligence section of analytics. This section itself is a great little tool that shows expected results for almost all aspects of the site, and should the data not fall between these expected margins, it creates an alert.  I look forward to see where they take this feature – some form of correlation between the alerts would be very useful, so instead of “x happened” (which is what we currently have) we should be looking at “x happened because of y and z” – but that discussion is for another day.

Moving on to my useful tip:

Knowing when there’s a problem

How often have you had a client or novice web developer *angry face* down their analytics? If you’ve had it, you know how annoying *second angry face* it is to see that lovely blue graph just flat line:

If you haven’t had this yet….it WILL happen, but you’ll be pleased to know when it does you can react quickly.

In the intelligence section you can now create your own custom alerts – yey!
These alerts will email you when someone downs their analytics so you can immediately pick up the phone and in the following order:

1. Fix it
2. Fire the person responsible

So how do I create these wonderful alerts I hear you ask, well it’s simple.
In the intelligence section click the “Create a Custom Alert” link:

Create your alert name, I’ve gone for the aptly named “CODE RED”; ensure the period is set to “Day” and that you have checked the “Email Me” box.

Ensure the alert conditions apply to “All Traffic” and you can then customise the “Alert me when” to: “Visits” : “% decreases by more than” : “10%” : Compared to “Same day in the previous week” – we use same day in the previous week as, for example, comparing a Monday to a Sunday usually created false emails.

This is not a hard and fast rule for every site, you can use day to day and also the percentage will need tweaking depending on the level of traffic consistency each site has. I always ensure this is set-up to be on the more ‘paranoid’ side of things. I’d much rather the system emails me than something goes unnoticed.

You should now have something that looks like this:

Click the button and you’re done!

You will now know (relatively quickly) when there is a problem with tracking in Google Analytics.

There is another useful custom alert coming soon, but let me know what you’ve got set up.

Here’s what Google have to say about it:

“Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds.”

[Source: Webmaster Central Blog, 29/10/09]

To see if your RSS feed is available to be crawled, you can test your feed URLs using the Robots.txt tester within your Webmaster Tools account.

Up until this point, TLDs (top level domains) have had to be written in the western Latin alphabet, resulting in the .com .org .net and .co.uk web addresses we are all familiar with. Whilst Korean websites, for example, have been able to use their own alphabet within the start of a domain, the end of the address has had to end in the .kr suffice (i.e. Latin script) for the addresses to resolve to websites IP address (the destinations true ‘internet address’).

This change could potentially mean new TLDs could appear in as diverse characters as Hindi, Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Mandarin and Russian Cyrillic.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet. The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online – people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives.”

[Source: Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO, 30/10/09]

Applications are being taken from November 16th this year and the first IDNs are expected to be in operation around mid-2010, with the mostly likely up takers being Chinese, Arabic and Russian users.

The release of IDNs follows the recent moves from ICANN to regress from its strong ties to the US government and become a true international organisation and regulator.

Geocities had been around since around 1995 and offered its users a free place to host their website. At its height, Geocities was the MySpace/Blogger.com/Wordpress.com of its day, leading to Yahoo purchasing the site for $3.57 billion in stock (yes that’s $3.75 billion!) back in January 1999.

Due to the age of the hosted websites themselves, and the large amount of (aged) links pointing at those sites, Geocities contained some of the most powerful webpage’s on the web in terms of SEO.

• Before the big switch off Google UK returned 30 million results for the Geocities domain.
• Many of these hosted sites ranked for many high traffic and competitive terms in Google.

Can you imagine how many links were pointed at those 30 million pages?  Can you imagine the amount of traffic Geocities attracted on a daily basis? Personally, I don’t like to think about it…

I’m not saying that Yahoo didn’t need to do something with Geocities, they did, it hadn’t turned a profit for a while (if ever), and it had lost its meaning in a Web 2.0 world. But if there was ever a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, then this was it.

If you were to visit a Geocities hosted webpage today you would be greeted with a bland 404 page, as the original content has been removed. This is pretty bad from a user perspective but what really upsets me is all the link equity that that page held (and 30 million+ just like it) has been lost. Gone, destroyed, wasted. Forever.

As every good SEO professional knows if you have a page that ranks for a particular keyword, or even if you remove (or even delete) a webpage you should 301 redirect the old URL (address) into a new location to carry across the age and incoming link equity that page holds.

Now, I’ve never 301 redirected 30 million pages and transferred the link equity those 30 million pages held into one new location, but boy I would like to try!

Yahoo could have also been more intelligent about this and redirected various URLs into appropriate places in their own portfolio. I can also think of various ways in which Yahoo could have used the power of the Geocities domain to embarrass Google significantly in terms of manipulating rankings. Can you imagine the uproar Yahoo could have caused if they’d starting selling links on Geocities? 

If you’re thinking of closing down a section of your website, or even removing a few old pages, please don’t do what Yahoo did and waste the power of those old URLs, consult an SEO professional and make sure you keep your rankings and your link equity!

So it’s time to take a critic look and gauge whether this new campaign is going to hit the mark.

What are the specifics of the current campaign?

The campaign has been developed by WPP owned Ogilvy and is the first global campaign carried out by Yahoo. Funded for the next 15 months the campaign will cost $100m (roughly £60m) and will span traditional media and online channels expected to run until late 2010.

The aim of the campaign is to remind people about Yahoo and hopefully get those of us who have fallen away to take another look at what they have to offer. Ultimately it’s all about getting more people using Yahoo as a hub for online activity so that Yahoo can increase their stake in online display advertising – something that is central to the company since the recent search deal with Microsoft.

Is the campaign likely to achieve its goals?

Exposure-wise there is no avoiding the new campaign. I personally see 5 billboards on my way home from work (4.8 miles) and must have seen the TV advertisement at least 20 times during the hours of the day that I am allowed to choose the channel.

Generally, the campaign has received a cold response with press understandably comparing it against the recent Microsoft campaign to promote Bing, and consumers in the main not understanding the message due to the lack of content and failure to explain the available functionality. The Microsoft campaign of course, was all about promoting the launch of its new Bing search technology, while the Yahoo campaign isn’t really trying to promote anything new in favour of trying to remind people that ‘we are here and we have this great functionality’.

As a whole the campaign is certainly creating a buzz although it doesn’t seem to be very positive. As to whether it will inspire people to give Yahoo another try, the general consensus is no. The chances of such a vague campaign inspiring first time Yahoo users to switch from Microsoft or Google offerings is very slim due to the lack of a definitive message other than ‘the Internet has a new owner and it’s Y!ou’.

Digital research centre OMD recently commented that across its tracked client base (including Royal Mail, easyJet and Peugeot) there has been a consistent increase in ad impressions on the Yahoo network since the launch of the new campaign which implies a rise in traffic to Yahoo but goes on to say that click-through-rates have decreased by roughly 8.4%. Of course the new campaign is still in its infancy and the latest ads are very likely the tip of the iceberg. Only time will tell if this $100m campaign was of value to the Yahoo brand once the initial buzz dies down but initial indicators don’t look good.

We look forward to seeing how the next phase of the campaign will play out and ultimately, the impact it has on Yahoo.

The Leeds-based business has been certified a Google Conversion Professional (GCP) and is now in an elite band of companies in the UK – including global management consulting company, Accenture – endorsed by Google as being an expert in website optimisation.

In order to receive GCP status, companies must first apply for and achieve two separate Google accreditations – Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant.

The final stage involves months of detailed analysis and interviews to ensure rigorous qualification standards are met.

Rob Shaw, managing Director of Epiphany, said: “This is a fantastic endorsement of the expertise which resides within the agency and cements our position as one of the UK’s leading digital agencies.

“Google doesn’t give this accreditation lightly, they have created a robust qualification process and we appreciate that. To be part of an exclusive club including the likes of Accenture is a tremendous achievement for us.“It demonstrates the maturing of our business into a commercially aware agency with a results-orientated approach. We have always said that we wanted to build a world class digital marketing agency and this latest accolade is a further step to achieving that objective.”

Next week, Epiphany will be attending a four-day conference at Google’s headquarters at Mountain View, California.

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.

If you have logged into your Google Webmaster Tools account recently, you may have noticed a new item under Site configuration -> Settings. Welcome to Parameter Handling.

The new Parameter Handling feature of Google Webmaster Tools lets you potentially take control of how Google handles the indexing of pages within your site that contain parameters. Google’s own ‘Learn more’ text gives more info.

So what can you do with the new Parameter Handling functionality?

As Google state, you can create up to 15 rules (that they don’t guarantee to use) on how parameters found within your URLs should be handled. You simply add the parameter name and select Don’t Ignore or Ignore.

So if we used a variable to reorder the elements on a page which means that /page.html and page.html?order=1 are basically the same page with the content reordered, we might want to say ‘Hey Google, save yourself some hassle and us some bandwidth. Ignore pages with the order variable attached.’

And to do this you would simply add order select Ignore and click Save.

What benefit will using Parameter Handling have?

Well it may have none (see the Google ‘Learn more’ text) but what Google are trying to achieve is more efficient crawling. More efficient crawling means that the robots will have more resource to crawl more of your site rather than wasting time on duplicated pages.

How does using this feature compare to the canonical meta tag or 301 redirects?

Well one important thing to remember is that this only applies to Google. Yahoo have supplied similar functionality for a while (which of course may disappear) while Bing haven’t. The canonical meta tag on the other hand should work across all 3 (but seems to be a bit flaky at the moment on Yahoo and Bing). Another benefit of the canonical tag is that it handles all cases in 1 go. No matter what variables get added to the end, the same rule is triggered.

The canonical tag however, doesn’t aid crawling as the page still needs to be crawled and analysed to find the tag in the first place.

Compared to 301 redirects, using this functionality can in some cases be a better choice. Consider a random unavoidable tracking variable. This variable creates the URL /page.html?source=aff123. Now traditionally we might have set up a 301redirect to handle this. 301 redirects have the advantage of passing some link power but they can be hard or sometimes impossible to implement. They can also sometimes play havoc with tracking.

Other things worth a mention

Well the first interesting thing that I noticed was that Google list all of the individual parameters that they have found on any of the URLs for your site they have crawled. In the case of the site I was looking at they found the variables i, referrer, loc, ftype and a few others.

Now you should really know what parameters are being used within your site but there are always going to be times when you don’t and this is a good piece of insight.

One important item to mention (and this applies to 301 redirect, the canonical tag and a whole lot more) is the need to use the functionality correctly. Although this functionality gives a lifeline to people who are non-technical or don’t want to get the techies involved, it can very likely bite you if you set it up incorrectly – so be careful.

And to close, the real solution to all this is to apply various techniques to handle every eventuality. Handle requests for pages with variables at the server via a 301 to the human readable URL. Avoid using old style URLs in your internal navigation. Use the canonical tag and this new functionality in the knowledge that it may be ignored. But don’t just leave it to fate.

Good luck.

SEOMalc.

Why on Earth would I want to keep my pages out of Search Engines?

Yes I know we spend most of our time looking to get more pages into the Search Engines but there are times when we absolutely don’t want a page to be indexed. Sensitive information may be present on a page, the page may be some kind of super secret test, it may be a dev version of an existing page, it may be an unavoidable duplicate of another page or the page may simply be unworthy of indexing such as a page that has the same content as the previous page but in a different order or a login page.

So for whatever reason you decide you don’t want a particular page to feature in a Search Engine, here are a few techniques to aid you in achieving your goal.

Don’t link to it

Yep, not very technical this one. Search engines traditionally discover pages from links on pages they already know about or from other methods of being told about the existence of a page such as an XML sitemap.

So if you don’t link to the page, nobody else links to the page and you make no reference to the page in your XML sitemap Search Engines should never find it.

The problem here is can you guarantee that nobody else will link to it?

Link to it via complex Javascript

Back in the day you could happily link to a page using a simple Javascript link such as;

<a onclick="window.location=‘http://www.site.com/secretpage.html" href="#" ></a> safe in the knowledge that it would be ignored. Now though, Search Engines are able to read Javascript to an extent and pull out URLs so http://www.site.com/secretpage.html would make an appearance in the Search Engines indexes.

Now you need to be a bit more techie with your Javascript so the URL is less obvious such as having a function that assembles a link from an array of characters then sends the user on.

The problem here of course is the reliance on Javascript. How important are the users that don’t have access to Javascript to you? Also, will your technique stand the test of time as Search Engines become even more invasive in their quest for knowledge?

The no-follow tag

No follow doesn’t mean no index. Even if you add rel=nofollow to every link pointing to a page chances are it will still get indexed. No follow is more of a “don’t send any value via this link” message.

Robots.txt

Adding a robots.txt file to the root of your site will allow you to have some level of control over which pages you don’t want Search Engines to index.

By grouping all of you pages into a folder you are able to advise robots that you don’t want them to index anything in that folder.

/secrets/page1
/secrets/page2
/secrets/page3

Could all be handled via adding the lines;
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secrets

The good thing about robots.txt is that it is normally easy to implement via FTP access and Notepad. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t always work. It should work but on some rare occasions Search Engines just seem to ignore it.

For more information on robots.txt visit http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Robots meta tag

As discussed above the robots.txt is limited to folders. To apply the same effect to a page you will need to apply a meta tag into the head of the page as below;

or

This tag basically tells robots (Google / Bing / Yahoo) to not index this page but still follow the links for discovery or don’t depending on which version you use.

For more information on the robots meta tag visit http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

Canonicalisation tag

In instances where duplication is the issue, the canonical tag can be used in the head of the page to specify the preferred version. An example might be;

http://www.page.html

http://www.page.html?order=2

http://www.page.html?order=3

All 3 pages have the same information just in a different order. Here you only really want one of these pages to be indexed (or I would anyway) so I can use the canonical tag to say “hey, this page is really just that page so don’t bother with it and look at that page instead” a bit like a 301 redirect but not.

The syntax for this is;

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.page.html “ />

For more info on the canonical tag visit http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/” target=”_blank”>http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ He even has a video.

Log-ins, forms and other techie solutions

One technical way of keeping a page out of Search Engines is to hide it behind a form element or set your web server to request a login. Search Engines do probe forms in an attempt to get to the information beyond but they don’t go as far as to hack logins etc.

Another techie solution would be to identify Search Engine Robots and disallow them via a header response. This does however rely on your ability to identify the robots and may not stand the test of time.

Possibly the best solutions…

Solutions fit situations with some being overkill for certain situations and with others providing not enough of a guarantee.

For keeping normal web pages out of the index the easiest solution is the use of robots.txt and the robots meta tag. You can also add Javascript linking into the mix if you wish.

For handling unavoidable duplication you can use the canonical tag and you can dynamically add the robots meta tag as required. Using the previous example you could have a piece of code in the head that says;

if (isset($_GET[‘order’]))
{
echo “<meta name=\”robots\” content=\”noindex\”, \”nofollow\” />”;
}


For handling secure information, dev pages and secrets you should really be putting this content behind a log-in either within the site or via the web server as this will stop Search Engines from knowing about it rather relying on them taking the appropriate action.

As always, if you have any other techniques worth a mention or would like to comment on anything I have written then please do.

Malcolm Slade / SEOMalc

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.

Since the launch of Bing, the rivalry between Google and Microsoft heated up in recent months, add that to the browser wars of Google Chrome and Internet Explorer and you can only see the competition intensifying further. Well, it just has.

Google announced on their blog that they plan to launch an operating system by the name of Google Chrome OS. It is said to be a natural extension of Google Chrome, an operating system designed to incorporate the modern day usage of the internet and set a new standard of operating systems.

Google already have an operating system

Google have already released a mobile operating system known as Android, and was designed for various mobile devices and even netbooks. Google Chrome OS has been created for those who spend most of their time on the web (I suppose I’m in there!), with speed, simplicity and security being the key aspects. Google said the following on their blog:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”

As mentioned above, Google expect to have Google Chrome OS available through netbooks later next year. How it will run is another question though. Google mention in their post that they will use open source software and everything will be available from the internet. So does this mean no hard installs from CDs/DVDs? Just simple downloads from the internet? All your files and back-ups will be filed on the internet too?

Obstacles for Google Chrome OS

As most of the user experience occurs on the web, I question the security aspect and I’m sure this is something Google will respond too in the upcoming months to put our minds at ease. Microsoft has never really been great on the security factors, just recently Internet Explorer has been found to have a major security flaw. With this in mind, Google will need to be on their toes with the security issues to ensure they get the full backing from the public.

Finally, I question the uptime. Speed and simplicity are great, yet in regards to storage Google quote:

“They (the users) want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files”

After recent downtime issues with Gmail and other applications Google provide, this will be another hurdle they must get over and make sure there are no downtime problems leading up to the release of the Google Chrome OS.

The prospect of Google Chrome OS is exciting, I’m sure there will be scepticisms but the potential of this new operating system is massive and Microsoft (don’t forget Apple too)  may be fighting to keep their market share in the near future.

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.

What is ‘Goo on the Loose’

Operation ‘Goo on the Loose’, setup by the CIA (Cadbury Intelligence Agency), holds its base at the ‘Goo on the Loose’ microsite. This website provides the latest scheming clues from the devious Creme Egg Twisted whilst also providing access to the public competition.

The Super Agent competition began on Friday 12 June 2009 with Cadbury drafting 10 winners of the Phase One competition as their new Super Agents. The aim, from what I have read and seen of the Super Agents so far, is to receive the most exposure across all platforms of Social Media in an attempt to win £20,000.

Agent Prince Cleton seems to describe this best on his blog:

“I am Prince Cleton one of ten super agents taking part in the Cadbury Creme Egg ‘Goo is on the Loose’ competition to win £20,000. By solving clues leading to famous landmarks the agents have to make witty videos, photos, blogs and recruit followers to earn points to take them to the No 1 spot.”

How Does Operation Goo on the Loose Work?

Now the Super Agents have worked for the CIA for a few weeks, their humorous reports have been flooding out across YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and their own personal blog, all linked together with Twitter.

Each agent was briefed by the CIA and provided with their tools for the venture including a Flip camera and a set of novelty disguises. The Flip camera plays a large role in the Super Agents intelligence reports and although Cadbury are seen as a mainstream quality brand, this campaign allows Cadbury to have fun through the agents and amateurish style of entertainment being brought to our screen.

It is also interesting to see the different techniques of each Super Agent as their quest unfolds and how successful each agent has become.

Examples of Operation Goo on the Loose

Super Agent Dean Stokes gives us amusing updates of his progress through (mainly) YouTube, a free Wordpress blog and via Twitter. Other agents have been throwing their message out over local radio and even through Celebs too. Agent Stokes has been clever with the way he has set up his videos, his Agent name and personal URLs appear on his videos at the right moments. Speaking with a colleague of mine, we both remembered his name after watching his first YouTube video which is priceless in value. Along with Toby Tully, he could be a favourite to win the £20,000.

On the other hand, Super Agent Spud Hartrey has gone for a spammy technique which has gained her (strangely enough) a fair amount of followers on Twitter. However this technique will no doubt aggravate a lot of users and lead them to un-follow her at the same time.

It’s an interesting and relatively amusing campaign to keep an eye on and I’ll write another post specifically on the Super Agents once the competition comes to an end.

Goo on the Loose Gone Public

Let’s not forget about the public competition! Although not as mainstream or entertaining as the Super Agents, you sign-up, create your own agent name based on two random questions. Through signing up, my new alias became ‘Agent Crunchie Whitesmith’(?!). Follow CremeEggTwisted on Twitter and look for the ‘ATTENTION – YOUR NEXT TARGET IS:…’ for the latest clue. The aim is to find ‘Twisted’ on the interactive Google Map based on the clue provided. Two clues are given each week, cracking eight clues or more will enter you into a prize draw to win a trip to Morocco. Good times!

Personal Thoughts

Through both campaigns Cadbury have attempted a viral campaign and I stress ‘attempted’ as it hasn’t really taken off…. yet. Viral campaigns generally require two things to launch. A genius idea which catches the attention of a few, turning the few into more until the number becomes great enough for the conformative momentum to pick up and result in the word spreading with minimum effort. Cadbury’s idea is a good one and still has five or so weeks remaining but I think it will be a struggle for this to become large-scale.

The campaign is not perfect, it’s a little too spread out and hard to follow. The microsite isn’t very user-friendly and information is hard to find (but maybe that’s part of being an Agent, right?). From what I’ve seen and read, however, it has been enjoyable to follow through posts, videos, tweets and pictures and lay a superb foundation point for Cadbury in the future. By engaging the public too, they will promote the Super Agents antics for nothing.

Overall, it’s win-win for Cadbury. They promote one of their latest products through others via a social media experiment and then use and analyse the successful techniques used by the Super Agents to gain the most attention on each YouTube, Twitter, blogs etc. I would bet after some fine tuning and maybe a little more testing, you’ll be seeing more campaigns from Cadbury to promote themselves, if not their new products, and endorse themselves as a social media marketing force in the future.

So if these large companies don’t provide their customers with an e-commerce solution then why should you? There are some very clear and convincing reasons why you should be considering an e-commerce website for your retail business, if only to capitalise on the fact these big players aren’t participating…

Cut down on customer queries and related costs

Sick of answering the phone all day (or paying someone else to do it), only to field the same questions again and again?

A well constructed and thought out customer service section of your website can save you a fortune in dealing with these types of FAQs. An intelligent strategy in this area can also have both a positive effect for your sites SEO and provide insight to your customers thinking and needs.

Become a 24/7 business, without the associated costs

Don’t you wish you could be taking orders and making money whilst you slept?

Of course you do but the thought of taking the chance of opening up such a store in your local area probably seems unrealistic, or if not, prohibitively expensive. An e-commerce solution solves both these issues and opens the doors to your business around the clock.

By selling online you are also exposing your business to markets who could never have reached before, such as consumers who are at work from nine until five and those who choose to shop at home after work.

Increase your brand exposure and improve offline sales

The introduction of an e-commerce website can also have a positive effect on offline sales.

Savvy (and increasingly not-so-savvy) consumers are using Google as a research tool to find the goods and retailer for the product or service that they desire, regardless of where they end up making their purchase. Without an e-commerce website you’re not even in the running to seen by those people and gain the extra brand exposure.

Escape the high street

Clearly the number of retail outlets you have puts a cap on the number of consumers you can reach and sell to. Moving online opens your business to a much wider potential audience allowing you to sell your products nationwide, or even internationally, without the associated cost of opening a new retail outlet.

Your exocentric niche product could sell millions online

Exploit the long tail! Whilst there may not be many individuals interested in ornamental china chopsticks in your local area, worldwide there’s probably a sizeable audience out there desperate to purchase just that.

E-commerce is still growing

The amount of people turning online to shop continues to grow and this trend is only being re-enforced by the recession, as consumers increasingly turn online to find the best prices. It’s not too late to get involved with selling online as the market continues to expand.

An affordable option for all

E-commerce websites are affordable for all. No matter the size or scale of your business you can find an e-commerce solution that will suit both your needs and your budget. Be it an SEO ready e-commerce platform design to achieve maximum market penetration and best conversion rates, or a simple e-bay store, there is something out there for everyone.

The bottom line: increase your sales

As many retailers experience a downturn in sales on the high street turning to the web can be a great way to offset these losses and even increase the number of overall sales as you expose your products to a wider audience, and all at a relatively low cost and risk to the business.

Perhaps the real question we need to ask here is why wouldn’t you launch an e-commerce website?

And that’s one of the reasons Google introduced Universal Search relatively recently, to provide visitors with all the ‘types’ of information they want in one place. The idea was simple; lets mix in other media (such as images, news items and videos) in the main Google results, hence providing better & more useful mixed media search results to their visitors. Let’s give visitors a choice. Remember with Google it’s all about the quality of the results that makes them so great, right?

Well I’m here to tell you that Google has failed; it’s still failing, and will continue to fail its UK visitors, at least for music related searches, until it fixes Universal Search here in the UK and removes the irrelevant YouTube results. Most sad of all is its probably failed Michael Jackson too.

Earlier this year YouTube lost the rights to broadcast a whole host of music and music videos here in the UK. They were (in my opinion) deliberately priced out of the market by the record companies, as they look to established their own new online music business models.

When you try to access any of the restricted songs in the UK you are met with the YouTube ‘red bar of death’; ‘This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions.’ is duely displayed. There’s something about that red bar that makes me feel like I’ve done something very very wrong even when I haven’t…

When this happened many in our office predicted the ‘death’ of YouTube. Beyond the odd funny personal video and network TV copyright violation YouTube had really turned into an on demand MTV for many.

The loss of these music rights was actually almost scary; where am I going to get my on demand music fixes now (Okay there was last.fm back then it was pretty limited IMHO)? To be honest the impact of the loss of music on demand from YouTube has been offset by the launch of Spotify in the UK (smart move there guys…), so all was well for music lovers.

So whilst consumers at large have found a (better?) alternative for their musical needs what have Google been doing? Well not very much it seems. Many months on and Goolge UK results are still littered with irrelevant, out of date, and dead YouTube links. On this evidence alone universal search has failed, it’s not delivering a better user experience, its delivering a highly annoying frustrating experience. Seriously though, if you can’t view those videos from your location then why the hell are Google including them in their search results?

The UK Top 10, a test case

I like music, you probably do too, and my usual course of action is to Google an artist when I first hear about them to try and learn more; well at least that’s what I used to do. You probably do the same (?), so as an example let’s go the UKs top 10 single artists this week and see what videos are available through universal search.

In choosing to take a straw poll of the artists currently appearing in the top 10 UK singles I decided to be nice to Google. These artists are currently promoting their work so, in my experience and opinion, are more likely to be openly sharing their music videos in order to promote their single. I wonder what percentage of failure you would get, if say you Google’d a set of more established all time great artists? I don’t know, say someone like Michael Jackson for example…

Helping heal those Michael Jackson wounds

Now unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours you will have heard that Michael Jackson passed away yesterday. Many (if not millions) in the UK would have awoke to this news and eagerly ran to their computers and Google’d the singers name in the hope of reliving their favourite Jackson music videos of the past.

Clicking on both these videos results in the YouTube ‘red bar of death’. Okay, there is the link for Video Results which gives you more options from Google Video but how many people click on that in comparison to the shiny videos links? Not many, and if they do there going to be mightily annoyed by that point after clicking through two irrelevant results.

Does Google have a conflict of interest?

So why are Google doing this? I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice this today but this has been bugging me for a while. Surely Google with all their algorithmic might would be able to easily weed out the copyright restricted results and replace them with something more relevant? Well you’d think so, though you never know with the Big G (perhaps they’re not that interested in the UK market after all), but let’s assume the answer the yes.

That gets me thinking about how and why I first started using YouTube. Never a big fan of homemade videos, besides the odd copyright infringing Family Guy clip and Star Trek fan montage, I only ever really used YouTube for music videos. And I was drawn in by the embedded Universal search results. The reason Google bought YouTube was due to the sites tremendous success and the amount of eye balls it had. Google mantra is to do no evil and deliver the best quality most relevant search results it can. Conflict of interest anyone?

Are Google afraid that UK users will just ‘forget’ about YouTube if it doesn’t appear in their search results, especially for the thing YouTube became synonymous with, music videos. It’s either that or, and possibly more likely, Google Universal search delivers poor quality irrelevant music related results to its users in the UK.