Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

When Web Developers Should Get Back To Basics

I have two objectives in writing this article: the first is to have a small rant about web developers and the second is to prove that by writing relevant content this article will leapfrog ahead of at least one of the sites that these web developers created.

Earlier this week I was trying to find information about two events: the first I will be attending in Swansea and the second was an event where one of my client's had one a prize. Let's take a look at both events.

Lead On 2007 - Liberty Stadium, Swansea
This is an event that is being held in Swansea's Liberty Stadium. It is being organised by the Institute of Directors, Chartered Management Institute, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, Wales Management Council and the Chartered Institute of Marketing company called Cazbah. According to the website (more later) the event is geared towards leaders and managers. Speakers include Richard Scase, David Magliano, Dina Matta and Ian Williams, amongst others. It is billed to be one of Wales' top business events of 2007.

Showcase Wales and National Tourism Awards 2007
This Visit Wales (Wales Tourist Board) event was held at Bodelwyddan Castle, North Wales between the 2nd-4th October and according to their website:

The National Tourism Awards for Wales are all about showcasing the very best that Wales has to offer. Turning the spotlight on the stars of Welsh tourism and showing what can be achieved through, hard work, ingenuity and commitment.

At the 3-day event the Showcase Wales and National Tourism Awards 2007 website said that around 250 international travel agents and buyers would be there to do business with Wales' tourism companies.The Awards Ceremony was hosted by the BBC's Huw Edwards and Rob Brydon supplied the comedy.

What are the problems with these site?

Lead On 2007 - the website for this event is almost entirely made up of Jpeg images. We are not talking about standard images here but graphic images of text. The only part of the Lead On 2007 site which is not made up of images is the navigation. Further SEO faux pas include not using keywords like "Swansea" or "Liberty Stadium" in the page titles and no meta descriptions.

I am sure that there will be many people like myself will use Google to get information about the Lead On event in the coming weeks and will be unable to find the site. If you're reading this the web address is: www.leadon2007.com. Good SEO practice would  dictate that  I include a link to their site but this would probably give them a small boost on Google - forget that!

Showcase Wales and National Tourism Awards 2007 - I must admit that over the past week the SEO ranking for this event has climbed up and the site does feature number 1 on Google for the search terms "Showcase Wales" and "tourism awards wales". However, I would say that this has more to do with links from those sites who won awards, press releases and news sites than good SEO on their part.

The big problem I had with this site had to do with its design and content. I felt that for a major Wales Tourism event the Showcase Wales website was, and is, a major disappointment. It had no WOW! factor, lack of good images and information was generally very old. Let's take an example - I was interested to find out who the finalists for awards were and instead of the names was offered an application form (entires closed in June!).  I won't discuss some of the issues that potential buyers may have had.

As for trying to find press releases on the site I have given up and now am relying on my client's own.

One of the problems with sites such as this is that PR and Marketing companies try to create web sites either in-house or get graphic designers to design sites for them. And invariably, these people are usually ill-equipped to do projects like this - they don't have the necessary web design, usability or SEO skills to do projects much justice.

The Solution

If you're looking for ways to create good event sites, take a peek at the Future of Web Apps site. The Le Web 3 website and the Search Marketing Expo site offer straightforward, easy-to-use examples of how to build event sites. The French site was actually built using the same technology as this site and aside from design the cost of the site (except booking) was probably under £79 per year!

Update
For the terms "Lead on 2007 Swansea" this site is number 1.

Mind Your Language

If I wasn’t involved in Internet Marketing, and hadn’t spent some time teaching English as a Foreign Language, I probably wouldn’t think twice about the way we use the English language. But I do! I often find myself asking why someone uses a certain phrase or why used specific words. I often get frustrated when the BBC’s Radio 4 presenters, when interviewing foreign nationals, pepper their questions with words like “pass out”, “speak up” and “make up” – these “phrasal verbs” mean something to a ‘native’ English speaker but to someone who uses English as a second or third language, it is quite difficult to ‘work out’ what their meaning is.

This morning, as I travelled by train from West Wales, the intercom informed me that I should take all luggage that had been stowed on the train with me and that when alighting from the train I should mind the gap. I tell you what – thank God I'm a native speaker!

As an Internet Marketer – whose clients use Google AdWords, SEO, Blogging, PR, email Marketing and Web 2.0 tools – I always try and question the logic of using certain keywords. I often play devil’s advocate with clients to try and identify the most appropriate language for their target audience. As I always say, it is not just about the words and phrases your colleagues, employees and directors use but more importantly about the keywords that your customers use. Identify them and they can be filtered through to your SEO work, your blog articles, email marketing communications and Google AdWords campaigns.

There is a famous quote from Dale Carnegie which says:

"Talk in terms of the other man's interest"

Very true!

Of Web Developers and Men

Over the past month I have been working on a couple of interesting client projects with a subtle mix of Site Design Architecture, SEO and PPC built into most. These projects have meant that I have had to deal with web developers and clearly state to them what elements of SEO should be included in the overall development. Here are some of the elements which should be givens:

• Individual Page Titles for each page
• Customisable Meta Tags
• H1 Tags
• SEO-friendly URLs
• Sitemap

Up until last week I was asking for URLs to be created in not just a search friendly way but also asking for them to be created with hyphens. Well, recently Google changed this policy and was now treating underscores as  word separators - the same applies to MSN and Yahoo! Another given should be Google Analytics - this is a free tool and integrates easily with static and dynamic web pages and offers great reporting results.

The latest web developer I have dealt with, in all fairness to them, has been very much aware of the need to include the key elements of SEO. In fact the web development proposal actually highlights the work they will do with regards SEO - and I don't mean registration with all the major search engines, as some muppets who I come regularly across often talk about!

I must admit that it is quite amazing that a high number of web developers are selling solutions to clients, with no consideration of how people will find the site (e.g. search engines) and what they will do when they are there. It would appear that their business model is built on making a quick buck from a client with no consideration of future relationships. And the staggering thing is that they keep churning clients out using the same business model. On a slightly different tack, and as a good rule of thumb, I would recommend that companies try and identify what type of web developer they are dealing with:

1. Graphic designer turned web developer
2. Web developer come web designer
3. Web designer come web developer
4. Muppets

I would always try to make sure that you deal with a web design firm that has a good blend of web design and development skills and which has a dedicated SEO specialist. Always be wary of graphic designers turned developers, invariably they come up with 'pretty' designs which are almost always search and visitor unfriendly.

I would also recommend that you do not believe web design firms when they tell you that client sites have been successful - always telephone the client yourself, explain you're thinking of going with this web design firm and ask how much money they have generated or enquiries received.

Dectek - Best Ecommerce Site in Wales

I heard some great news yesterday - one of my clients has just won an eCommerce Award at Wales' most important Business Awards. Dectek is based just outside Cardiff, capital of Wales, and makes resin badges for businesses across the UK.

The work that I have done with them has focused on tuning their Site Structure, Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click campaigns. As recognised by their Marketing Director, Dave Beese, the company now generates more than 90% of new business through their website. Over the past year Dectek Spain has opened, they will shortly be adding new premises and taken on more staff to cope with demand. I am currently working with the business to look at ways that SEO and Pay-per-click can be used try to tap into the North European market.

SEO Is Not Just About Optimising Your Website For The Search Engines

Most people think that Search Engine Optimization is purely focused on getting YOUR website ranked highly on the search engines. Well, that may have been the case in the past but things have changed and these days you can actually SEO pages on other people's sites to help drive traffic to your site.

Chris Smith over at Natural Search Blog recently did a presentation at Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York on Image Search and he has made these available on his site. They certainly offer some great tips on how you can use sites like Flickr, and even Yahoo! Travel, to drive traffic to your site. In a previous article Chris discusses Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization and shows how he managed to drive traffic, and create buzz, from Flickr to his own site by optimising images using H1 tags, descriptions, tags and keyword links.

In a few of the eMarketing Workshops that I have delivered, those clients involved in tourism, sports and activity businesses have quickly recognised the potential power of using Flickr and similar sites to drive traffic to their sites.

Does Page Rank Matter?

You may well have heard about Google's Page Rank and may be wondering how important it is in getting your site ranked on the great engine itself. Does Page Rank mean you'll get better rankings? Is it important to get links from someone with a PR of 6/10 or 7/10? Well, here are the top searches for the term "Does your page rank matter?" on Google - go figure it out:

Does PageRank Matter?

Why does pagerank matter?

Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.

Does Pagerank Really Matter?

GeniusShack » Blog Archive » Does Google Page Rank Matter?

In Your Web: Why Does Page Rank Matter in Mutual Linking?

PageRank: Google's Original Sin

Pagerank Explained Correctly with Examples

Does PageRank Affect Your Ranking in Google?

New York Times Gets A Little SEO

Last year at SES London I heard an interesting account of how the New York Times was using SEO to drive more, and better, traffic to its website. It was interesting to hear how Marshall Simmonds, the guy responsible for SEO at the NYT, was educating journalists in how to use anchor text, headlines, page titles and content in a more search engine friendly (and user friendly) way. If you'd like to find out more about how he has achieved SEO success with the NYT, have a look at Chris Sherman's interesting article, Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly.

Looking Under the Bonnet of Your Website

I realise that I haven't written many articles on Search Engine Optimisation tips for a while now. So, just thought I'd point people in the direction of an article that PJ Fusco has written on what search engines are looking for behind your web page. She looks at Alt tags, Meta Description, etc - all pretty basic stuff but still useful to revisit.

Factors Influencing Search Engine Rankings

SEOmoz has a comprehensive list of factors that influence your search engine rankings on the major search engines - Yahoo!, MSN, Google and AskJeeves. They invited some of the big names - Danny Sullivan, Ammon Johns and Scottie Claiborne - in the search engine world to vote on the major factors and an average rank was given to each. Here are the top ten:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

For the complete report, head off to the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors page.

Interview with Matt Cutts of Google

Aaron Weil, of SEO Book fame, posts an interview that he conducted with Mark Cutts, software engineer at Google, on his Search Marketing website. Here are some excerpts from it:

Is all SEO spam?
Absolutely not--I need to do a post about this on my blog sometime. Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all. Things like making a site more crawlable, tweaking the words on a site based on what users type in or what you see in your server logs, and gathering links by coming up with creative ideas or services that make people link to you naturally. To me (and Google), spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality guidelines--things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

And on unsolicited email from "SEO Experts"

Some SEO firms cold call saying they can rank people in first place. Can they guarantee this?
Not on Google. No one can guarantee this, not even Google, since our ranking algorithms are often updated. I've seen scams where the "#1 placement" is really buying ads. I've seen scams where the "keywords" that they sell are really for people who have scumware hidden in their browser. I've seen stuff where the guaranteed keywords are 5-6 word phrases that only have nine results, and no one would ever really type that really long, specific phrase.

Here's an interesting insight for bloggers:

I originally started a service-selling site and then later sort of stopped selling services and started blogging. An interview with you will likely go on that static site and is likely to be a well linked page, but my blog is by far the more popular of the two sites. Am I effectively hurting my end rankings by splitting up the content? I don't think that's ultimately hurting your end rankings much.
There's always going to be people who do some attribution by linking to your main seobook.com page, and some people that link directly to a post or to your blog--and some people that do both, because they're different urls. So having a primary service that's off the main page can sometimes even help a little bit. I think you'll get the same total number of links (or even a little more if they link to the root and the blog or specific post). After that, it's up to you how to handle that with internal linkage.

And this:

What would be the best ways to integrate the link popularity?
I think having a main site with a large feature like a blog somewhere near the main page is actually a pretty good structure. If you run a blog, it's good to spend some effort to have one main url for each post so that there's a single well-known permalink. I haven't been as nitpicky about that on my own site, but if you do SEO for a living I'd pay a little more attention to that.

On what to do if your site is out of favour (banned) with Google:

If I got a site banned what is the procedure to get it re indexed?
This is boilerplate that we're sending out to some site owners as a pilot program if we detect spam, but it's the most current info: "If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py
You can select "I'm a webmaster inquiring about my website" and then "Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking," click Continue, and then make sure to type "Reinclusion Request" in the Subject: line of the resulting form." If that procedure changes, I'll blog it.

Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

Jakob Nielsen has just published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. It is based on the results of a survey he conducted with readers of his Alertbox newsletter. As you will see most of the issues are perennial favourites (baddies!).
1. Legibility Problems – Number one spot reflects the issues that people have with fonts.
2. Non-Standard Links – Jakob includes 5 guidelines for getting hypertext links correct. He says:

Links are the Web's number one interaction element. Violating common expectations for how links work is a sure way to confuse and delay users, and might prevent them from being able to use your site.

3. Flash – Surprisingly, he says that web developers still don’t get how to use Flash correctly on a web page.

Flash is a programming environment and should be used to offer users additional power and features that are unavailable from a static page. Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don't make your pages move. It doesn't increase users' attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.

4. Content That's Not Written for the Web – He advises that writing for the web means making content:

·    short,
·    scannable, and
·    to the point (rather than full of fluffy marketese).

From both a visitor and search engine perspective, he says that Web content should:

·    answer users' questions and
·    use common language rather than made-up terms (this also improves search engine visibility, since users search using their own words, not yours).

5. Bad Search – this is one area that Jakob concedes will take investment (on software) and time to get right
6. Browser Incompatibility - with the rise of Firefox, Opera and Safari it is worth paying attention to get this right.
7. Cumbersome Forms – often too long and asking too many unnecessary questions. Jakob offers  five basic guidelines to this end.
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info – The number of times I have to advise clients to address this basic principle is unbelievable. As Jakob says,

Even though phone numbers and email addresses are the most requested forms of contact info, having a physical mailing address on the site might be more important because it's one of the key credibility markers. A company with no address is not one you want to give money to.

9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths – 2 complaints here: relating to monitor resizing and printing.
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

One of the long-standing guidelines for e-commerce usability is to offer users the ability to enlarge product photos for a close-up view. Seeing a tiny detail or assessing a texture can give shoppers the confidence they need to place an order online.

Giving Search Engine Optimization a Bad Name

How often do you get spam email which claims to get you number 1 in the search engines? Well, I got one today and thought that I would share it with readers:

"Nobody knows where your website is, unless you do the right things. We stay current with search engine criteria to make sure your website gets listed in the top 3 spots for Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Alta Vista, etc.. If you want a no obligation quote for our services, with examples, reply to this email or visit us on the web at: www.finishline-solutions.com If we don't perform....you don't pay."

For a firm that purported to get people "top spots" on the search engines, I thought I would check to see how they ranked. Here are the results:
Google: No Rankings
Yahoo: 1 Page listed
MSN: No Rankings
Ask: No Rankings

This is not surprising as they only had one web page and this was poorly optimized.

I often tell clients that the first step in selecting a web developer or web optimization firm is to check where they are actually ranked on the search engines. Poor rankings will invariably equate to poor service. However, you may need to look a little further afield as many companies come up with the excuse that they are too busy to update their own sites. My suggestion would be to either ask them for examples of client sites they have worked on, or to check out the portfolio on their website. Once you have identified these companies, telephone them and ask how happy they are with the service they received from the web developers/internet marketers (happy should equate to how their work mad a difference to the "bottom line").

And yes, I did add this company to the spam filter!

How to Use Wordtracker To Conduct Keyword Research

I just picked up an interesting article at Future Now's A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect, which talks about a report done at Wordtracker. The report - Keyword Research Guide - offers an insight into how experts use Wordtracker to carry out their online keyword research. With a foreword by Andy and Mike Mindel, creators of Wordtracker, and with 'analysis' carried out by some of the key names in search engine marketing it makes for very good reading. Here's how it goes - Word Tracker decided to create a fictitional company:

We created a story around Virginia Veg, a fictional vegetable processing company that wants to sell vegetarian dog food online, and asked experts to tell us how they would use Wordtracker to offer advice to Susan Webster, the CEO of our fictional company.

and they then asked the search engine marketing experts to come up with some solutions for this fictitious CEO. Here were their tasks:

• Bryan Eisenberg - Convert more traffic using Wordtracker
• B. L. Ochman - Understand your customer's real motivations
• Kevin Lee - Combine thousands of phrases for an effective PPC campaign
• Stephen Mahaney - Use Wordtracker to find the size of the market
• Ken McGaffin - Discover the most important sites in your marketplace
• John Alexander - Find inspiration in Wordtracker's top 1000 words report
• Neil Davidson - Learn how an Ad Agency uses keyword research to position a client
• Robin Good - Use Wordtracker to identify niche opportunities
• Nick Usborne - Incorporate keywords into your content and copy

This FREE, 75-page pdf document offers some great advice for the selection of keywords for an online campaign. Here are some words of wisdom from Bryan Eisenberg:

Behind every search is a person. The terms typed into search engines reveal a surprising amount about visitor intent. Know as much as you can about your potential customers, and use keywords that reveal intent to purchase your dog food products.

Related Site
Keyword Discovery - which according to their site: "KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool".

Related Article
Keyword Research (Suggestion) Tools

Technorati Tags: wordtracker | keyword research

Search Engine Strategies in San José

If you couldn't get to the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San José, or if you would just like to look at a resumen of the events (to prove to your boss that you actually did attend some seminars!), Search Engine Rountable has done an excellent job of making notes of practically every event that went on. You may be interested in the following:

Search Engine Q&A On Links - Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google and Kaushal Kurapti from Ask Jeeves
Usability Clinic - Shari Thurow and Matthew Bailey
Why Using A Static IP Address is Benefical... Google Engineer Explains
Indexing Summit 2: Redirects, Titles & Descriptions
Landing Page Testing & Tuning

Some of the Web's Silliest (Unwritten) Rules

Bryan Eisenberg demonstrates in an article on Clickz - Unwritten Internet Rules - how silly (unwritten) laws are starting to find their ways into the online world. Bryan says that:

Solid rules and best practices are great for managing well-established systems and keep social order. Online, following unwritten rules can be a recipe for rotten conversion.

Here are some of his favourite unwritten Internet rules:

Unwritten Rule 1: When in doubt, create a link that reads "click here."
Unwritten Rule 2: Use lots of "more info" links.
Unwritten Rule 3: Use as many vague hyperlinks as possible, such as "read more," "continue reading," and "next."
Unwritten Rule 4: Write for search engines.
Unwritten Rule 5: Short copy is better online. Or: Long copy is better online.

Why are they such silly rules? Check out Bryan's article to find out.

 

Technorati Tags: permission marketing |web content

Tailored Destination Page

On carrying out a search for "Movable Type Tutorial" I got taken to this weblog by Rick Klau, which welcomed me with the following message:

Talk of tailoring web pages to mirror search engine search words!!

Japanese Search Engine Relationship Chart

Having seen the number of visitors from Japan to this blog, I thought my Japanese visitors may be interested to hear about the Japanese Search Engine Relationship Chart and find out how inter-related some of the engines are. If you're getting similar results from different engines, here's why.

Will a Paid Inclusion Program Boost my Ranking in the Organic Search Listings?

This is Jupiter Research's take on it:

Will a paid inclusion program boost my ranking in the organic search listings?

Bridging the Gap Between PR and Search Marketing

When speaking to clients about Web content, I always try to make a distinction between what comes out of a company brochure and the content that appears on a company's website. Very often the way that companies present information about themselves and their products in an offline context, is different to an online one. In most cases the target audience is already receptive, and have made a decision to listen to you, be it through a brochure, an advert, TV or through PR. This allows you to put as much spin and shine on the message as you want. Search Engines are different. They don't understand spin, they work on keywords.

That is why an article, entitled PR & Search Marketing: 5 Steps to Get More Press Attention by Using No-Cost Search Optimization, in Marketing Sherpa caught my attention. It starts off with this:

"The PR person's highest goal has always been to get a mention on the cover, above the fold, of the Wall Street Journal. But the most powerful place you can be on the planet is on the front page of any search engine. That's the new cover page."

The quote comes from an Internet Marketing and PR firm which believes that keywords should be at the heart of all PR campaigns. The article has some good tips for getting PR firms to use keywords at every level of their campaigns. Here's an extract from Step 1 - Create a list of Keywords:

"A keyword can be a single word you'd like to be most optimized for, or several words. It should be a term a potential customer or member of the media would typically use when searching for products or services like yours. So, it's not your tagline (how many people search for companies like General Electric using the term "imagination at work"?) It's also not a buzzword that no one outside of your management team and maybe a few analysts use."

The article is FREE to download for around 10 days but will then be available for purchase (I think the cost is about $5).

Inland Revenue (UK Tax Office) Manages a PR of 6/10

I've just been on the Inland Revenue's site and noticed that its Self Assessment page for tax returns had a Google PR (Page Rank) of 6/10, on  whilst its 2003-04 Tax Returns, Notes and Help Sheets managed a PR of 5/10. And no, I don't make a habit of frequenting such sites!

Using Keywords to Speak your Audience's Language

It's amazing how many marketers fixate on their site's HTML, believing that's where solutions to their search engine marketing (SEM) challenges are found. But they're looking inward when they need to be looking outward.

So begins an interesting article by Fredrick Marckini, titled Keywords: Speak Your Audience's Language, in Clickz. In it Fredrick gets to the heart of good search engine marketing, namely that the answers to good Search Engine Marketing don't really lie within the code but with your target market. This is a theme that I have banged on about on Marketing Tom - that in order to succeed with Search Engine Marketing, or for that matter any marketing, you need to step out of your company/industry box and start speaking the language of your target audience.

This reminds me of an article by Bryan Eisenberg called the Empathy Sell which drives home the importance of putting the customer at the heart of your SEM activity. These are some great quotes that he uses to emphasise the  role of customers, all of which appear in my E-marketing presentations:

The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. --Claude Hopkins, "Scientific Advertising"

Talk in terms of the other man's interests. --Dale Carnegie, " How to Win Friends and Influence People"

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person -- a real person you know, or an imagined person -- and write to that one. --John Steinbeck

So, it's not rocket science, but good old-fashioned common sense.

Fighting Comment Spam

Over the past few months I have received on this site, and on another blog of mine Mad About Madrid, a huge amount of comment and trackback spam. Comment spam is a technique used by certain webmasters and owners of websites to develop links from blogs (often with a high PR) to their own site. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Adding links that point to the spammer's web site increases the page rankings for the site in the search engine Google. An increased page rank means the spammer's commercial site would be listed ahead of other sites for certain Google searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Comment spam falls into diffferent categories with the most basic being a blatant link left on an article to the spammer's  website. Some of the more subtle ones leave a comment on the blog which you think is innocuous enough but on closer inspection is still spam.

My own opinion is to stamp it out wherever possible and I always delete comment spam wherever I see it. Why should others benefit from the hard work and time that I put into building my site? However, I´m always happy to accept comments from people who I believe add value to an article or who raise reasonable objections to what I write.

If you're using TypePad, make sure that you receive email notification of new comments and trackbacks. Delete spam comments and trackbacks before Google or other search engines spider your site. You should also make a note of the IP address of the spammer and add it to your IP banning list.

It wouldn't do any harm to look at what they're doing at  Chongqed. You can leave details of the spammer on the site, find out which sites spam and help to stam out spam. Adam Kalsey has a good article about the subject with 184 comments (hopefully not all spam!).

Related Articles
Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam (Six Apart)
Comment Spam Manifesto (Adam Kalsey)
Comment Spam Compiled and Interpreted (sitepoint)
How spammers are targeting blogs (BBC)
Combating Comment Spam (WordPress)
Solving Comment Spam (Simon Willison's Weblog)

Search Engine Marketing Resolutions

A New Year! and why don´t we start with some New Year resolutions? These are some of the tips I saw on Shari Thurow´s interesting article SEM New Year´s Resolutions on the Clickz site.

Resolution 1: I will stop focusing on positioning as an SEO benchmark.
Resolution 2: I will use the most appropriate search terminology to describe my services and processes.
Resolution 3: I will integrate search into the Web design, development, and usability processes.
Resolution 4: I will stop making erroneous cause-and-effect conclusions without testing and verifying.
Resolution 5: I will stop using Web standards as an excuse for limited design skills.
Resolution 6: I will follow all the search engines' guidelines, terms, and conditions.

Do you think you can keep them?

Real-time Keyword Suggestions from Google Select

According to 4WebResults Google is testing a new tool called "Google Suggest". The tool sounds really  cool as it will throw up keyword suggestions as you type in the words. As Tom says in New Internet Tool Offers Suggestions in Real Time - "Google Suggest": "this is the perfect tool to do exploratory keyword research, especially if you're not sure what people are really typing in to find your business. Or if you're writing an online article (like a blog article) and you want to use keywords that are popular to increase your traffic, then use Google Suggest."

Blogs that feature "Google Suggest"
Google Suggest (Anil Dash)
Top 5 Web Applications of 2004 (Andy Budd, Blogography)

Search Engine Secrets (and keeping them so)

Do Search Engine Marketers keep the best secrets of Search Engine Marketing to themsleves and away from forums?

The Search Engine Watch blog has picked up on this interesting theme in an article entitled Keeping SEO Secrets. The article is influenced by another written on Threadwatch (The Dirty Little Secrets of SEO & How Information Travels), where the author claims he asked someone who had posted to a forum asking about whether a certain technique worked to 'remove his post in exchange for finding out how that technique actually worked'. Danny Sullivan gives his opinion on the subject and comes up with his own advice for search engine marketers. Two very interesting and thought provoking articles.

Flash and Search Engine Optimization

Flash and Search Engine Optimization don't make good bedfellows but if you REALLY MUST, you will get some tips from this Clickz article by Shari Thurow:

Get Flash Sites Ranked in Search Engines

The Art of Persuasion Architecture

I always enjoy reading articles by Bryan Eisenberg, of Future Now, and one of his latest articles on the Clickz site is no exception. Points of Resolution discusses how you should try and anticipate your visitor's questions, through the use of persuasion architecture. I'm sure that many of his observations will resonate with readers:

"When you read or navigate a site, you're led down a dim path toward understanding. Sometimes you bump into something. There's a concern or question about what you just read, or you'd like more illumination, deeper explanation or additional information. This is a Point of Resolution, where you smack into a question, curiosity or concern that requires an answer."

He says that: "On your Web site, a visitor may have a question about what she just read or saw. While it may not be serious, it halts progress and must be addressed. Don't allow anything to slow a visitor down or compel her to rethink in order to continue."

A theme which I have seen crop up before in Bryan's articles is the idea of getting closer to the customer and trying to get in to their mindset. In this article he talks about answering questions asked by theoretical personae (probably your top ten customers). One observation, though funny, happens time and again in a high percentage of websites: "A common folly among site owners is to answer the questions they themselves would ask, not what visitors want to know. Despite good intentions, they're shooting in the dark."

Search Engine Relationship Chart (updated)

This page is well worth looking at to give you an idea of where search engine results come from. I wrote an article last year which mentioned this chart (Which are the main search engines?) but the page seems to have been updated using Flash in the interim - it is much more effective. The map indicates whether the results a search engine sends/receives are primary, secondary, directory or paid results. A pdf version can also be found on this site.

Search Engine Relationship Chart

Domain Registry Services - another Domain Name renewal scam

Yesterday, I received a "domain expiration notice" from a company called Domain Registry Services, based in Cambridge, UK. This company is not the registrar of my domain name yet they were asking me to send them £60 to renew the domain name. Here is the tone of the letter:

"The domain name shown above is due to expire. Please renew this domain immediately to ensure service continues uninterrupted. If payment is not made to the registry before the expiry date the domain is subject to immediate suspension and deletion without further notice from us."

Wow! Isn't this illegal?

I wrote a similar article about a company called Domain Name Registry of America: Beware! - Scam from 'Domain Name Registry of America' in April of this year. Keep an eye out for these organisations make sure to let your friends and colleagues know about them.

See also
Domain "registration" firms keep trying it on

Has Google listed all, or any, of your web pages?

How many of your pages are listed on Google? Not sure? Then try this:

domain_name+site:www.domain_name.com [.co.uk, whatever]

It can make sobering reading finding out how many, or few, of your web pages have been indexed by the biggest search engine. Recently, whilst checking the site of a new client, I found that only 1 of the many pages had been listed on Google. The web developer had decided to turn the main navigation bar into an image map and Google had been unable to navigate (and index) any further pages. If you're unsure of whether Google has indexed a particular page, simply go to Google and type in the URL for the page you wish to know about. If it is indexed, Google will display its page title and a link to the site.

For any pages that are not listed, you have to help Google find its way to them. In the case of the client above the recommendation was to come up with a plain text navigation bar; have hyperlinks at the bottom of the page and ensure that internal keyword links can be found throughout the site.

Remember, sometimes Google may have cached (indexed) and old page of your website and, again, you will need to help Google re-spider this page. You can view the page Google has cached for your site by typing in its URL into Google and clicking the cached button. Here, you can see that Google spidered the page on the 7th September.

Develop your own Keyword Calendar

In an interesting article on developing keywords (How Effective Is Your Keyword Research?), Shari Thurow explores a number of techniques for identifying suitable keywords to include within your website. She focuses on techniques to identify keywords like Overture's suggestion tool and web analytics and looking at the results from your own site's search engine. What caught my attention was the idea of creating a keyword calendar, which could flag up important dates for your website/business. The idea is to write articles for your website which are published at times of he year when certain products sell, when exhibitions are held or when products are launched. The key is to anticipate when and what your target audience is likely to want at certain times of the year.

I have done this with quite a lot of success on my other website Mad About Madrid. Knowing that the football season was about to start I wrote an article which linked to a site with the Spanish League Fixtures for 2003-2004. This brought in many new visitors, as did an article I wrote about Michael Owen signing for Real Madrid. Other examples include advising people in advance about a new airline route (Fly from Bristol to Madrid with easyJet) and letting people know that the ski resort near Madrid was still open.

If I know about things in advance, I can add them into my Outlook calendar and prepare the articles with time enough for the search engines to spider the site. I often do this with art exhibitions in Madrid, fiestas, art events and musicals. The key to using a keyword calendar successfully lies with anticipating what your audience is likely to type in and making sure you note the day to post.

How to Optimise Website Content for Search Engines

In an article entitled 5 Content Ideas for Optimizing Your Site to Get More Organic Search Engine Traffic, Anne Holland offers some good, practical advice on driving traffic to your site by simply tuning its content. They include:

1. Topical glossary
2. Topical Q&A
3. Press releases
4. Email newsletter articles
5. Blogs

A British company, its .com website hosted in Germany and Google

I spoke to a company this week which was having problems getting its site listed on Google for the search 'pages from the UK', even though the site was listed on Google.com. Frustrated at this the owner decided to contact Google and was told by them that only sites hosted in the UK could display the search results 'pages from UK'. He then decided to contact his hosting company, a large well-known, and he thought British, company who informed him that, yes, his site was hosted in Germany. It turns out that though he paid in pounds, the company is actually German.

And Google's advice to him on how to get listed on the UK country-restricted search - get your site hosted in the UK. You may be interested to look at some similar experiences of users on this search engine forum:

Get listed under google uk

Search Engine Optimization - Update

A week ago I put up an article entitled Search Engine Optimization in Action. In it I mentioned that I had had problems getting some pages of Marketing Tom listed on Google with their correct page titles. To give you an example, this page: Search Engine Optimisation - Don't Forget Design! had following page title - htttp://www.marketingtom.com/2004/04/search_engine_o.html, that is the URL was listed as the page title. As page titles are such key elements in search engine indexing, this page stood little, if no, chance of being found.

In order to remedy this I did three things:

1. I wrote an article about the subject.
2. I created keyword links to the article, the page title of the destination page also used the same keywords.
3. I added a new section to this site called 'Recently Posts' which obviously included the article I published. This was important in that Google added the article/page to its index much quicker.

The result was that the article, Search Engine Optimization in Action, was created on the 27th July and it was added to the Google index on August 3rd. The problem articles were all re-spidered at the same time. It is worth noting that Google did spider the home page and article within 2 days of publishing but the individual URL for the article took a couple more days to index. It now means that I have 6 more optimized pages through which people can enter my site.

Search Engine Optimization in Action

The other day I noticed that the pages that Google had spidered on Marketing Tom fell into 2 categories:

1. Those which where the page title was displayed:
Marketing Tom: Search Engine Basics and
2. those which only displayed the URL:
www.marketingtom.com/2003/10/tom_peters_on_t.html

Needless to say that your ranking on Google is much better when the page title is displayed. When I found out that an important page on my other blog, Mad About Madrid, was not listed I took one simple step - I put a keyword link on the left-hand navigation bar to that page. The result: within a couple of days Google had re-spidered the page and it was appearing in position number 2 for my keywords (if you want to try it out, type in "Plaza de Cibeles" on Google).

Search Engine Optimization Experiment
I would like to use this article to demonstrate how the above can be achieved. I will simply put links to all the articles below and wait for Google to re-spider the pages and add in the page titles. You will obviously notice that the keyword link is the same as the page title on the destination page. In order to further help this process, I have also included a new section on the left-hand side of this page called 'Recent Posts' which links to the permalink of this article. Please check this article periodically to see how I get off and why not even read the articles. I hope to God it works now!

Search words – identifying them
Yahoo! launches a new paid inclusion programme
Search Engine Optimisation - Don't Forget Design!
Measuring Web site Success
Page Titles - How to use them effectively
Overture's Suggestion Tool for search keywords

Search Engine Optimization - how to plan

Shari Thurow offers some interesting tips on how to use various techniques to optimize your website, in an article entitled Using Paid Search Engine Advertising for Better SEO Campaigns. It discusses how identifying the right keywords beforehand can help with a site's information architecture, how to refine page titles and how to use paid search advertising to identify the ideal position for your 'call to action' elements.

Search Engine Optimization Problems

Wednesday, 7th July – I read an article on Seth Godin’s blog, entitled The problem with search engine optimization, which paints a pretty dim view of search engine optimization. Seth says that: ‘Lucking into (and it is luck) the top slot of a great word on Google is not a business plan. It's superstition. It's blind faith.’ He goes on to say, ‘If you want to grow your business, you need a reliable and scalable and dependable way to spend time and money… Online, it's about adwords and site design.’

His final paragraph says: ‘SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won't win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.’

Good search engine optimization is all about figuring out the ‘mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.’ It starts with getting into the mindset of your target audience. What are they looking to achieve? What words describe how they see your product? What are their expectations? What problems does their business encounter? In short, your business must look at its products, services or company from the ‘user perspective’. Once you have got into the mentality of the user, you can apply this information to optimizing your Web site for search engines and, in parallel, creating a visitor experience that appeals to your target audience.

Seth believes that the 2 key elements for growing your business on-line are: 1 adwords and 2. site design. I couldn’t agree more with the latter. However, how can Seth say that adwords are the key when at worst the clickthrough rate is under 0.5% and at most around 10-15% - that means a staggering 80-90% of those who don’t know a company’s URL address will click on the search results from Google, Yahoo!, et al.

Thursday, 8th July – The weather in Wales is pretty miserable today: high winds, rain and grey skies. I must get away to the sun! - Tuscanny will be perfect this time of year. So, I go to Google and type in ‘Tuscan Holidays’. First result comes from a company called Tuscan Holidays, with a home page which has been tuned to the search engines, delivers the content I want and just makes me want to get my credit card out and book two weeks at a rural farmhouse right now. This company operates on an even playing field to other larger and richer companies and generates far, far more clicks than Google Adwords can deliver – and it’s all down to a well-optimised home page and good site design.

To conclude, a well optimized site should deliver visitors through search engines, using THEIR language and give them a visitor experience to match.

Incidentally, if you carry out a search on Google for 'search engine optimization problems', Seth's site appears at number 3 - proof that it even works for him!

Beware! - Scam from 'Domain Name Registry of America'

I returned home from work yesterday to find a letter from the 'Domain Name Registry of America' advising me that my domain name, Marketingtom.com, was about to expire and that I should renew it for the price of £18 with the Domain them. With a name like the Domain Name Registry of America I thought that they must be some official body for the registration of domain names but no, they are some scam merchant looking for people to TRANSFER domain names away from their existing supplier to them for an inflated price. I pay GoDaddy something like $7 per year (£4) and my domain doesn't even expire until September of 2005. I did a quick search on the Internet last night and found the following articles relating to this company:

Register.com Wins Stay Against Domain Registry of America
Court bars Canadian domain slammer
Boycot Domain Registry of America
Domain Registry of America, again.
Domain Registry of America (at it again??)

Please inform your business colleagues and friends of this scam and feel free to link back in to this article.

Page Titles and Blogs (Typepad)

As many people who visit this website will know, and even some visiting for the first time, that this site is actually a web log. For more details on what a web log is, take a look at the blogging category of this site:

TheTypepad blog has many great features, including the ability to upload information instantaneously and the ease with which you can redesign its format. However, for me one of the great attractions is its search engine friendly code. Every article that I write is composed of a headline and content which may, or may not, include images. Each article is, in turn assigned its own individual 'permalink', or individual html page and these pages derive their page titles from the headline of the article. This means that you do not have to create individual page titles but you do, or should, think carefully before creating a headline. You have to tread a fine line between creating something that will capture people's interest and coming up with a headline that the search engines can easily index.

Someone searching for 'Retiro Park' (the main park in Madrid) on Google.com would find this listing at number 3:

As you can see the article headline features in the page title of the browser window:

I have read a few articles from people criticise bloggers for clogging up the net with their banal observations on life. It is true that there are a number of poor blogs out there but if people are actually visiting a site and leaving comments, then surely someone is deriving value and if that value is legal, ethical and moral, then that can't be a bad thing.

Page Titles Revisited

A few times on this web log I have mentioned the importance of using page titles to help drive traffic to a website. An article on MarketingProfs.com entitled 'Page Titles That Attract Readers' gives useful tips on how to use page titles effectively.

Keyword Articles

Here are a couple of articles that I came across in Clickz, which contain some useful tools and advice on for identifying keywords:

Keyword Research Revisited, Part 1: Log Files
Keywords Revisited, Part 2: Free Research Tools

They are very useful and though most have been mentioned in this blog, Kevin Lee does come up with a lot of interesting comments:

You need third-party keyword research tools and resources to build and expand keyword lists for search engine marketing (SEM). Each popular external keyword research tool has a place in keyword expansion.

I must say that I especially like his advice to use a thesaurus to identify new keywords!! - modern it may not be, logical it certainly is.

Keyword Links - Try not to 'Click here'!

When writing an article, or adding content to to your website, there is always the temptation to use the words 'click here' to take you to another page. However, it is much better, from both a search engine and visitor perspective, to create keyword (or text) links which tell visitors where they will be going. And we mustn't forget that keyword links are used by search engines to rank sites, albeit to a lesser extent.
Let's look at an example: an online New York food guide will be given greater credibility if another site uses a good keyword link, like New York Food Guide, to link into it. The link New York Food Guide gives the destination page much more relevancy in the eyes of the search engine, hence helping in its ranking. The same can also be said of links from A to B within your own website.

In their 'Quality Tips for Webmasters' the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers some good advice on using text links.

How to Score Higher in Google Search Engine

Thanks to Charles of Bizpitch who left a comment on my article How blogs can make money. Bizpitch has an interesting link to a thought-provoking article by Eric Wolfram, Score Higher in Google Search Engine. There are quite a few interesting points he raises, especially the use of hypertext links for navigation buttons and the use of keywords in your hypertext links, instead of words like "click here" (oops! - blatant self-promotion).

Using Macromedia Contribute to modify meta tags and site content

Many of the articles in this blog deal with optimizing websites for the search engines. One difficulty for those who don't have the html skills is that they have to rely on a third party - web developer, colleague, the kid next door - to carry out these changes. Macromedia's Contribute is an ideal tool to help you make these changes. It allows people to download their websites, with a user name and password, modify site content and update in an instant. The result is that you can change page titles, meta tags and body content as and when you require and you don't have to pay anyone for it. For more information, visit the Macromedia site.

Page Titles - How to use them effectively

Clients often ask me about the best way to use page titles effectively. I always say that you should use the page title on your Home Page to give a 'global' view of what the site is about and the Sub-pages to give a 'localised' view of the information that is held on these pages. The sub-pages of the website offer you with an excellent opportunity to focus on particular areas of your business, services, products, or whatever and really shouldn't be used to pedal the same information as the home page. This article, by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs, offers excellent advice on how to use your page titles to great effect:

Titles and Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization Ethics

Like most people, I'm sure you have come across emails that purport to "give you a top 5 ranking", "number 1 on Google" or "beat the search engines". However, many of the companies who send these emails, which you probably never asked for, will use unethical ways to get you ranked on the main search engines. This article offers advice on what is the correct way to optimize your site.

Ethical and Accepted SEO Practices</