So Google Street View now covers 95% of UK road.

Like any self respecting vanity searcher, I downed my Search Engine Optimisation tools and spent 5 minutes (ish..) looking up my house, then my old house…. then the one before that… and then the one my parent live in. I can report one of my old houses has now got double glazing and a velux window in the roof and another one has an overgrown front garden.

My current house has got a tree with lots of fresh green leaves on it in the front garden (Spring-ish then)

Then of course I started wondering if I could find myself anywhere… I scrolled up and down the nearby high street. The shops were open but there were very few people about. It looks like it was a lovely day. Thought I’d better have a scroll along the sea front to see if I was out having a jog. Nope – though there were a few other runners about it seems but very few other people.

I’ve since been wracking my brains to work out where in Portsmouth there is a public digital display with the date and time on. We’ve got a display near our current workplace that shows the temperature so I had a look there and apparently it was 16 degrees. Late spring I reckon then is when it hit Portsmouth and by the number of people around, I’d say about 9.30am (after rush hour and the school run has dissipated).

Damn – it would be so much easier to find yourself if they displayed the date and time that the pictures were taken!

Can anyone from Portsmouth think where there is a date display near a road?

An important tool in the testing of any website is the development site which allows you to test new tools or pages on your website before sending them live to ensure that things are working right before presenting them to your visitors or the search engines.

If you have a development site it’s important to know that it could be found by Google and consequently indexed. This could mean bad news for your website, as this will tell Google that there are two versions of your website and could lead to duplicate content issues, which is not what you want damaging the search engine optimisation of your website.

The quickest way to ensure that your development website is not indexed by Google is to either IP lock it, so that only specific IP addresses can view the site or block access to the site using a username and password that blocks anyone without the access permissions from seeing the stei – and this means Google as well.

However, this might not be possible so the below steps will help you to ensure that your development website is not crawled by Google.

Firstly ensure that your development site can have a standalone and unique robots.txt file and then create and upload the below robots.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Once you have done this add a Meta Robots tag

These two steps should help the site not be indexed by Google. However, run a site: check on the development site address in Google (e.g. site:dev.yoursite.co.uk) to ensure that no content from the development site has been indexed. If this has already happened then you can remove the site from Google’s listings using Google Webmaster Tools. To do this add the development website address to your Webmaster Tools account and verify it. Once you have done this go into the “Site Configuration” section and select “Crawler Access” from the menu. Clicking on the “Remove URL” tab will give you the option to create a new removal request. This option allows you to ask Google to remove your entire site. Once you have selected this option Google will check to ensure you have blocked the whole site from being crawled using the Robots file and/or meta tag mentioned above, and once it’s confirmed that the Development site is supposed to be uncrawlable it will remove the listings for the site from Google. Obviously it’s important to make sure that you ONLY do this on the development site and NOT your live website!

If you follow the above guidelines you can enjoy the benefits of having a development website to test your changes without worrying that it will appear in Google’s listings.

Blogs, news, products, customer reviews, buying guides, articles – regularly adding fresh content like this to your website can give your SEO campaign a big boost.

Here are 3 ways content marketing can help your website:

1. Freshness

If search engines spiders see that new content has been added regularly since they last indexed your site, they are more likely to come back and index your site more more often. This can also help build authority – search engines will see your site as fresh and up-to-date.

2. More keywords

The more content you have on your site, the more variations of keywords and phrases the search engines can index. This means more chances for your site to be found by many more search terms (sometimes called the ‘long-tail’).

For example, the keyword posterous seo drove 27 visits to this site in the past week. And the landing page for this keyword in Google is a blog post I wrote in October last year. This is just one of 1000s of keywords that drove traffic to the site in over the last 7 days.

3. Relevancy

Basically, the more relevant content you have on your site, the more likely your site will appear for relevant search terms.

For example, Google doesn’t just look at the content of a page when it ranks sites in its results pages. And one factor it will look at is the amount of relevant content across the site and domain.

So if you’re an estate agency, regularly adding content about buying and selling property will help your site rank for search terms related to your business.

With the impending demise of FTP publishing for Blogger, we have been looking around for any other Blogging services or software that allows FTP publishing.

Why FTP publishing? Well it’s particularly good for websites with no server side scripting facilities. Ideally we would get a nice Wordpress blog going on a website – but this isn’t always possible.

Blogger was useful in that it was web based – you could create and upload your blogs from anywhere. The alternatives I’ve been looking at seem to all be desktop software. The big disadvantage of this being that I would have to download and install the software anywhere I want to use it. (Haven’t even checked to see if it is actually compatible with having 2 installations of the software – or if uploading from one version of the installation would overwrite). I’ve just download and tested one called Thingamablog for example… it’s all right. It’s not perfect

What do I want from my FTP publishing blog software (that I haven’t found in anything other than Blogger yet…)

1. Well – ideally web based rather than desktop software
2. SEO friendly URLs and Titles. I’m guessing people who write blogging software aren’t really “down with” the whole SEO malarky as so many of them create endless duplicate title tags and URLs of the format blog/entry_1.html (keywords, keywords, keywords – where are my keywords??)
3. SEO friendly usage of H1 tags – same thoughts as above really. The one I’ve just tested does allow you to go into the html and add your own H1 tags – but it immediately degenerates into the homepage having some sort of h1 festival when more than one post is published.
4. Some Comment mechanism – this one must be quite tricky to integrate into blogging software that relies on FTP publishing. Blogger relies on saving the comment at Blogger until you’ve reviewed and accepted it and published to your site. I suppose it could be via email. There are some Commenting system add-ons such as HaloScan though

And then of course there are all the usual requirements…

• Permalinks
• Post Date
• Categories
• Trackback and or pingback
• RSS feed
• Multiple authors

Of course, having said this… you might have noticed that I haven’t downed my SEO tools to write my own bit of blogging software. I’m contenting myself with moaning about others!

To be somewhat encompassing, content marketing covers the creation of content to engage both current and potential customers. Essentially, content marketing is custom-made media, appealing to an intended audience by distributing relevant and informative content, without the hard-sell .  Instead of flooding your potential client with sales patter that they can easily ignore, content seeks to encourage or persuade an them to make an informed decision with little pressure.

The backbone of content is trust – by informing your current and potential customer base with consistent and valuable information, the belief is that they will return and reward your business with their support. In turn, they will willingly share this content by following, retweeting, commenting, reviewing or downloading your carefully presented content.

To be specific what does content marketing cover? Well, content covers the more traditional mediums such as magazines, newsletters, printed publications or white papers. However, for the more en vogue and innovative amongst us, content can cover podcasts, online news, email marketing campaigns, videos and mobile content. The BBC’s iplayer mobile app is a great example of content marketing wrapped in a funky and fresh technology.

To contextualise, during our recent content marketing survey at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising Show (TFM), it was interesting to discover that 49% of marketing professionals hadn’t heard of the term, despite it being hotly tipped as the marketing phrase of 2010.

So are we too early in promoting ‘content marketing’? Not at all, as 100% of marketing manager respondents, both in small and corporate businesses, used at least one form of content marketing, particularly the uber ‘now’ social media. Strike while the iron’s still warming up comes to mind, as more companies will be seeking the services of content marketing specialists in the move away from traditional promotions.

So we may all raise our glasses to ‘content marketing’ – the new non-interruption marketing tool that may sound the death knoll for in-your-face, yet easily ignored traditional TV and magazine advertising.

I noticed recently that Google has at least 3 very similar pages listed in their index.

They pages I saw are:

• http://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB
• http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=mac&hl=en-GB
• http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux&hl=en-GB

If you have a quick look at the pages, you’ll see that they are very similar. All have the same page title tag:

Google Chrome – Get a fast new browser. For PC, Mac and Linux

And the same meta-description:

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer and easier.

The content on each page is also very similar, with only the H2 heading and footer links different on each page.

SEO advice

OK, so I doubt Google actually need any SEO advice. And it’s not a total disaster to have pages like this, especially for a site with so much authority.

But having pages like this with duplicate content on your website could potentially damage your rankings. Here’s Google’s own solutions on they could deal with these pages:

Minimise similar content

Google could merge these pages into one page only. Then set up 301 redirections from the old pages to point to the new page to tell themselves that the content has moved.

Use the canonical tag

Google could tell themselves which page they want to be indexed by using the canonical tag across the duplicate pages.

An issue with this approach is that users might not land on the most appropriate page for their search query from the search engines – potentially, each click to find the page they want is a barrier to a conversion (in this case, a person downloading Chrome).

Parameter handling

Google could tell themselves to ignore certain parameters (such as platform= or hl=). They could do this in Google Webmaster Tools by going to Site configuration and Settings in the left-hand menu.

However, again this will mean that some users may not land on the most appropriate page for their search query

Unique title tags and meta-descriptions

However, the the best solution here would be for Google to take notice of the HTML suggestions tool in the Diagnostics section of Google Webmaster Tools.

This will probably tell them that they have duplicate title tags and meta-descriptions and that dealing with these issues “won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site’s user experience and performance.”

Then they could update each title tag and meta-description to make them all unique.

If you are going to perform SEO on your website there are a number things that will make the process of doing this a lot easier

Regardless of whether or not your website has a CMS the following things will help you ensure that all aspects of your website are as SEO friendly as possible.

1. Every page of your website should have unique title tags and meta descriptions – and the tool you use to create and manage your website should enable this to be the case

2. You should also be able to specify other Meta tags such as the canonical tag or robots tag in the Head section of the site.

3. Creating a custom 404 page is important for handling any broken links on the site and you should be able to specify the contents of this page and ensure it serves a 404 header status when it is displayed – this will ensure broken links aren’t indexed in Google and will also help you run broken link checks on the site.

4. Make sure you have the ability to create a unique H1 tag for each page of the site and that any CMS you are using does not link the H1 tag and <title> tag together.

5. If you are using a shopping cart or CMS to create content you may find that you have long URLs being generated such as www.example.com/Parent/Child/Item/Default.aspx?Taxonomy,6711,List,12,CatID/333Levelj/SortField=ProductName,ProductName so make sure you are able to rewrite these URLs to be more search engine friendly.

6. If you need to rewrite URLs or have old pages from a previous version of your website you need to be able to create 301 redirects

7. Make sure you have access to the FTP of the site so that you can create and upload a robots.txt and sitemap.xml file.

8. Finally remember that Content is very important on your website, make sure that you can create new pages on your website and look into adding a blog or news service to create new pages regularly.

Although this isn’t a complete list of everything needed from an SEO point of view making sure that your website has the above functionality will make the process of increasing your website’s visibility in Google easier than if these things aren’t in place.

Following my recent blogs about Google Chrome extensions for SEO I‘ve been asked to do a review of a new extension for Chrome called SEO Site Tools.  Keen to get the most from Chrome following my issues with Firefox last week I’ve installed this plugin and used it whilst working yesterday to see how it worked for me.

The SEO Site Tools extension allows you to see an overview of the SEO on a website from one box.  Information from this tool is displayed in a pop up window with a series of tabs covering much of the information you would be looking at when reviewing the SEO of a website, including the following:

External Page Data tab

This tab gives an overview of the site including the PageRank, last cache date, number of indexed pages in Google, Bing and Yahoo.  There is also information from SeoMoz’s Linkscape tool and a check on the DMOZ Directory listing for the site.  This tab also includes Alexa data which I don’t use.  This tab contains a lot of data and has a scroll bar on the side which is a bit annoying, it would be better if all information was displayed without having to scroll but that could just be me being lazy!

Page Elements Tab

This tab shows the title tag of the page, meta description and keyword tabs and confirms if the page passes CSS and HTML verification.  I love the verification element of this as with The Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox this was always a clickable option you had to select to see if the code was valid whereas this tool just tells you, so it’s quicker.  If you scroll down this tab you can also view the header status of the page and information about link anchors used on the page.

Social media Tab

This tab tells you if the page has been mentioned on a number of social sites including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Digg.

Page Terms/Tools tab

This tab allows you to pull up a list of the most commonly used keywords on a page and also allows you to go directly to Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool to perform keyword research.  There is also a link through to the Google Labs Browser Size tool allowing you to see how much of your website will be visible depending on what monitor size someone is using.

Server/Domain Tab

This tab shows you the domain registration date, IP address of the site and the physical location of a website, all of which are useful tools and it saves having to go to domain tools to retrieve the information.

Suggestions Tab

This tab uses a traffic light system of red, amber and green to highlight areas where attention might be needed.  Items shown in green are all OK, amber highlights indicate something you might want to look at and red highlights show things that should be looked at.  The items covered n this tab are some of the basics of SEO such as title tag length and Image Alt tags.

The traffic light system works really well as it’s really clear where work is needed on the site and I like this functionality. However, I’d like to see a few other elements added to the Suggestions tab, including a confirmation that there is an H1 tag on a page.

Some of the tools this extension includes are really useful, particularly the Title tag and meta information box, particularly as Chrome’s tabs don’t allow you to read much of the Title tag on a page – which is an annoying downside of using Google Chrome all the time.

Overall I really like this extension; it does most of the functions I’ve used in Firefox and things that I’ve been looking for in Chrome.  The Site SEO Tools extension is really easy to use and gives a lot of information in a clear way, which I found when I was working yesterday encouraged me to use the extension rather than making it off putting.  There are a couple of things I’d like to see in future releases of Site SEO Tools, such as expanding the tabs so there is no scroll bar on any of them, and it would also be nice to have the option to pin the pop up window down so it doesn’t disappear when you move to another window, which would help you pull out the information displayed without having to keep clicking on the tool to make it appear.  I will be continuing to use this extension following my test and I am sure it will enable me to use Chrome to do more of my work, which is all to the good.

We talk about measuring and tracking conversions a lot on this SEO blog it seems, but I want to have a waffle too.

I’ve been looking at various Google Analytics account recently, and the goals often seem to be ignored or not configured to show anything very useful. Here are the absolute basics of tracking conversions in Google.

1.) First of all you have to be an administrator on the Google Analytics account before you can do anything.

2.) You then need to click in to ‘edit’ the Analytics Settings – you should be on a screen that reads “Analytics Settings > Profile Settings” in the breadcrumb trails.

3.) Click on “Add Goal”. You should now be on a screen that reads Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Goal Settings.

4.) You should now be in a position to set up your goal. People are usually interested in getting the user of the site to buy something or leave contact details, so your goal URL will usually be something like a /thankyou.asp (or .php or .whatever) sort of page. It’s the page that the user is shown AFTER they have entered their contact details and clicked submit, not the page that they enter their details in.

5.) You could also enter some URLs in the the Goal Funnel if it is relevant – for example it might well be the contact form that you’re tracking, in which case you could add the page where the user enters their details as step 1 of the Goal Funnel (e.g. /contactus.*)

6.) Click “Save Goal”. Happy days. Conversion is setup.

It’s easy to find visits by day, month or year to your website in Google Analytics.

But sometimes it can be useful to find out at what time of day people are visiting and using your site. Especially if you need to take the site offline for any reason.

Here’s how to find out visits by hour using Google Analytics’ Custom Reporting.

1. Login to your dashboard and choose Custom Reporting in the left-hand menu.

2. Then choose Create a new custom report.

3. Under Metrics, open the Site Usage drop down menu and drag the Visits panel into the first metric tab.

4. Then under Dimensions, open the Visitors drop-down and drag the Hour of the day panel into the dimension box.

Then just give your report a title if you want to, and then Create.

Now, you can go into your report under Custom Reporting in the left-hand menu, choose a date range and view visits by time of day.

Just remember…

If you need to take your site offline, remember that this custom report will usually only cover human visitors to your website, not search engine robots.

If you do need to take your site offline, remember that search robots won’t be able to access your pages while it’s offline. If your site is offline a  lot, it can seriously affect your SEO efforts.

Following a bit of a nightmare time with Firefox last week I’ve been using Google Chrome  to do my SEO work for a week now and I thought I’d write an update about how it’s going.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that Chrome doesn’t seem to slow down once you’ve installed extensions to it, which was one of my major complaints with Firefox.  This is great news as one of the benefits of Chrome has always been that it’s super quick, so being able to have funky tools installed whilst maintaining this speed is music to my ears!

I’ve also found a couple of new Google Chrome Extensions which are helping me complete my everyday SEO tasks which I thought I’d share with you.

Firebug Lite. Firebug is a really useful tool I’ve been using in Firefox for sometime as it allows you to view the source of a page in a split screen view with the webpage at the top and source code at the bottom, which is great when debugging the code on your website.  This is now available in Chrome which is great news.

Speed Tracer from Google – allows you to analyse the speed of a website and any potential  issues with a website’s load time – useful as Google have been making noises about site speed becoming a ranking factor.

There are a couple of tools I do use in Firefox I’ve yet to find in Chrome, but hope will come soon.  The SEO Book Rank Checker tool is one of these and something I use from time to time when looking at keyword research or monitoring.   The other tool which I use every day and keeps me coming back to Firefox is the Greasemonkey script to show numbered results in Google – so useful when checking to see where a site is for a given keyword without having to count the results manually!

I’ll be keeping an eye on Google Chrome’s extension site to see if these or any other useful tools become available so I can continue my defection to Google Chrome.

I attended and presented at the BrightonSEO mini conference organised for SEOs last Friday, which was a great day of exchanging knowledge amongst local SEOs from the nearby communities and was a great afternoon full of fun and learning.

There were 8 presentations from web designers and SEOs which were all entertaining, but a 9th session, that I don’t think was widely expected at the end of the day, caused a lot of debate amongst those present in the room.

A gentleman called Paul (I didn’t catch his surname) stood up in front of the assembled throng and launched into an impassioned sales pitch. By all accounts, there has been an NDA floating around in the SEO community with regards to this pitch, so some folks were aware of what was being proposed, though for a large percentage of the audience (myself included) it was the first we had heard of it.

Paul introduced himself as a “blackhat” SEO, someone that had in the past control of millions of links that he used to rank sites in the top 3 positions for highly monetised phrases, in sectors like finance, and had a view that a website was disposable, and if you gain a top ranking and earn money for a few days that you hold that position that it is better than being perpetually “stuck” at number 8.

By all accounts if you take everything that he said at face value, it proved to be an effective tactic, although he was not concerned if a website “crashed and burned” as he had another site ready to replace it, which again could be manipulated into top positions through his link network.

All quite interesting stuff, although the clients I work with are ones that want to establish a long term brand success strategy, and his explanation of how he approached things just re-affirmed my thoughts that the tactics employed in a long term strategy are much more suitable for the type of business I work with as standard.

Paul then moved on to talking about the “struggling” Newspaper industry, about journalists losing jobs all over the place because of the boom of free low quality content being seeded around the web (and a lot of it coming from SEOs) and losing revenue with advertising to Google. By all accounts, they felt that is was about time for the Newspapers to fight back and start reclaiming their previous position.

Paul discussed an overview of the link building – by all accounts its a $3 billion dollar industry, and the newspapers felt that they could get a good cut of this finance.

So – onto the plan. Apparently a very large network of hundreds, if not thousands of local and national newspaper websites across the US and UK have apparently signed up to begin selling of links. The plan is for them to identify pages that have little to no traffic, and sell links in context on these pages in large quantities to manipulate Google’s search engine rankings in the favour of those sites that are linked to as a result.

Basically, it struck me, that this organisation was talking about creating a new generation of link farm – a tactic that a few years ago proved to be successful for many websites, but has dwindled in it’s authority passing in recent years. Newspaper links are well thought of by Google and other search engines – journalists have standards that have to be adhered to for journalistic integrity (which I would suggest are not always “exactly” met) and the content is generally considered as “high quality”. These sites also have lots of links pointing to them, which in return means that they have a lot of authority to pass to sites that they link to, meaning that very good, authoritative links can be gained as a result.

However, once this type of practice is out in the open, surely it’s over? If such a widespread abuse of Google’s system by such “authorities” in the web landscape in terms of the link juice they pass on is not stopped by them, then it would become something that everyone in a competitive area would have to do to ensure balance. However, the easiest way out for Google with this if it does come to pass is to just stop those sites being able to pass “link juice” on to the sites that they link to. The only losers in this instance are the early adopters of those links, who will have paid money to not gain any benefit, although that is the risk that you take when purchasing links.

Whilst the practice of abusing Google’s algorithm is not “illegal” – you don’t break any laws after all, it is however against Google’s quality guidelines to purchase links for the purpose of manipulating rankings. My perception of “purchasing” a link has always been to do with intent. If a link is being bought for the traffic that it is likely to deliver, then Google probably wont penalise you (after all, is that any different really to AdSense or AdWords?).

If you are buying links to boost your Google rankings, then you are running a risk – because Google can at any time decide to not pass the authority that those links have. If you pay a monthly retainer on that link, then you are effectively throwing that money away from that point (and you don’t always know when it is).

I’ve helped clients purchase links for traffic purposes – for example, the Yahoo Directory, which is decent for SEO, as well as having the potential, still, to be driving traffic to a website, although I have seen this decrease over the last year for some of my sites that traditionally got a fair amount of traffic from it. But my general advice for purchasing links, has been to not do so, mainly because the vast majority of paid links are incredibly easy to spot.

Not so long ago, we had a group of Newspapers approaching us offering to sell us some links on their site, and providing examples of sites that already were using this service. I think that they should have been cleverer about marketing this link selling, as none of the sites they provided as examples ranked for any of the terms that links had been purchased for, which led me to believe that these quite expensive links weren’t providing sufficient benefit to engage with.

The biggest frustration about the link buying system is that it does prove effective in the short to medium term – and much more than Google would like webmasters to believe, for obvious reasons. Google need to become better at detecting this manipulation of their algorithm to prevent people from wanting to continue to use it and I am sure that this is something that they are constantly wanting to improve at!

UPDATE: It’s clear from feedback that I have had on this blog that some of the details of what I recalled were not quite correct, or were perhaps misinterpreted – this was written from memory, as I had stopped writing notes from that point. Paul’s speech was much more heavily  targeted to saving the jobs and content production of journalists by enabling them to produce content for the “new world” so to speak, and I think it’s only fair to the presenter that I clarify that – as that was the largest thrust of this speech.

Reading a blog on SEOmoz surrounding the idea that great content is not always necessary to boost search rankings got me thinking… I always strive to write good, audience-specific content with punchy titles and a bit of personality mixed in there for good measure, but is this really needed?

After reading the blog a number of times I only re-enforced my own belief that writing good quality content is key to a successful marketing strategy…

Yes, it is important to add internal links to content but you also have to inspire your audience to link back to your work. Creating a piece of content just to promote a specific keyword, without offering anything new or informative will not engage your audience. If this content fails to allure and interest them, they will not bother to finish digesting it, let alone create external links, comment, share and contemplate on it. Making such content easy to share and create connections is perhaps one of the most important goals of any content marketing strategy.

Yes, mediocre, poorly written content can be successful if marketed by popular, in fashion organisations, but that doesn’t mean that we should all follow suit. The web is full to the brim with average, run-of-the-mill content, so isn’t it best to create content that will captivate your audience, generating increased external links, raising your authority in your industry feed and tying in nicely with your en vogue social media strategies?

Great content doesn’t necessarily have to mean traditional articles or web copy, it can be in the form of vibrant and attention grabbing podcasts, opinion fuelled blogs, video, mobile content or even digital magazines. Good quality content has to use a multitude of communication channels to succeed and be relevant to today’s ever innovating world, standing out in amongst a plethora of images and sounds.

Randfish summarises in his blog that ”Like many parts of life – it’s not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully.”

I disagree and make my own summary that writing good content is in itself marketing. Ok so it’s not enough just to create good content and leave it floating, but by adding elements to your content such as a retweet or share button, or a comments and reviews feature, you can measure just how successful your content really is at convincing your audience to take a particular action. Quickly running up average content may engage a reader in the short term, but creating great content will forge links for the future and allow the content to be re-used in a variety of different communication mediums.

Following on from Tom’s blog the other day, a few more things spring to mind that a good SEO Agency needs to consider when doing keyword research. Perhaps not such neatly defined concepts but certainly things that are well worth considering.

1. How is the website currently ranking for these keywords.

It’s all very well coming up with a list that includes fantastic keywords with little competition and high traffic – but have a check first to make sure the website isn’t already ranking for these terms. Claiming great success for achieving rankings if a site already does well for given terms is unlikely to make anyone happy.

2. What is the website already ranking for and does it provide traffic

Similarly, if you’ve established that the website doesn’t already rank for your chosen keywords, have a check to see what the website DOES actually rank for and whether these terms are either important to the client and/or provide good traffic. You are also unlikely to make any great friends if you achieve rankings for your keywords at the cost of rankings of other favourites.

and finally…

3. What does website actually do.

This sounds a little bit bizarre, but really – if it’s a niche website, do you really understand what service the website offers. When you are running your keyword list passed your customer, make sure they really, actually read it and approve the keyword suggestions.

TFM & A (Technology For Marketing & Advertising) is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and all indications point to yet another successful year.  Recently voted “Best Trade Event” for 2009 the show sees over 200 exhibitors showcasing their wares to over 8 thousand visitors.

The show includes  latest industry and market insights, trends and developments as well as returning exibitors from the CRM and data world. This will give you and your business a wealth of much needed knowledge af the future of marketing and advertising and the directions that the industry is heading.

Vertical-Leap are proud to be showcasing at TFM & A for another year and we consider this to be the most important trade event in our calendar.

Why not come and visit us on stand C36 where you will be able to discuss your Search Engine Marketing needs with one of our specialists. One the stand will be representatives from our SEO, PPC and News & Article writing teams so you will be able to chat face to face with them ( and not a pushy sales team) about your startegies and see if we can offer experience and guidence.

You can register for the event Absolutely Free of Charge here

Dont forget to come and say hi to Vertical-Leap and get your free surprise!

A lot has been written about the importance of having a dedicated IP address to achieve search engine rankings and Matt Cutts has confirmed the following statement by Googles Craig Silverstein still to be true;

“Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!”

In our experience best practice dictates that you should always opt for a dedicated hosting solution with a dedicated IP address. This has the effect of retaining complete control over your website. A few years ago dedicated hosting solutions were expensive, not any more! With shared hosting solutions and shared IP addresses, there is always the risk that third party websites beyond your control could damage your SEO by participating in link farms or spamming Google which could end up with an IP address that is forever tainted.

If you are moving hosts or setting up a dedicated hosting solution for the first time, enquire with the host as to whether the dedicated IP address has been used before. If so, find it who previously occupied the space. As a precaution, think twice about using an old IP address used by the Gambling, Viagra or Adult fraternity. If in doubt, demand a new IP address from your host.

Before entering into an SEO services campaign agreement with an agency, factor in the cost of dedicated hosting as part of the overall campaign costs and eliminate the risk of external influences impacting your campaign.

What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

Dynamic keyword insertion is a pretty funky bit of script that will call upon keywords within your ad campaigns and add this as the Title of your advert on the sponsored links part of the search engine. It is a must have tool for all of us PPC Managers out there…

Let me explain in a bit more detail:

When you are creating a campaign within one of the search engines paid advertising platforms there is an ability to call upon any of the keywords within a specific ad group and add this as the title of that advert providing that term complies with character length rules. See Google’s example below

In the ad group ‘Puppies,’ you create the following ad using two instances of the keyword insertion code:

 Your ad group ‘Puppies’ contains the following three keywords: poodles, yorkies, west highland terriers

Depending on which keyword a user searches on, your ad will show in one of the following ways:

Notice that the default text is used in the ad’s title when a user searches on ‘west highland terriers,’ since the keyword is too long to fit.  

The use of dynamic keyword insertion code also has other variables that can be utilised to improve you ads. For example, the keyword that triggers your ad is “cheap blue widget”. Use different formats of dynamic keyword insertion code to show your ad text in different capitalisation:

{keyword:default text} = cheap blue widget  no capitalisation
{Keyword:default text} = Cheap blue widget  1st Word Capitalisation
{KeyWord:default text} = Cheap Blue Widget  1st Letter Capitalisation
{KEYWORD:default text} = CHEAP BLUE WIDGET  All Word Capitalisation
{KEYWord:default text} = CHEAP Blue Widget  1st Word 1st Letter Caps
{KeyWORD:default text} = Cheap Blue WIDGET  1st Letter Last word Caps

Once you have chosen the most effective code for your insertion you need to take into consideration that you are limited as to a normal text title to 25 characters. So if you want all of the keywords in the account to be able to be called upon than make sure they come under this limit. If the keywords exceed this amount then the title will simply default to the default text in the code string.

Why do advertisers use this functionality…?

This gives us the ability to add a targeted approach to a somewhat generic campaign. After all one of the key elements in Google’s quality score algorithm is relevancy. So if we wanted to have a specific title for individual (Colours of widget in this case) we would have to create an ad groups for each individual one. With the dynamic insertion code our list of keywords now looks like this

Cheap blue widget

Cheap red widget

Cheap yellow widget

This gives us the ability to Test Test Test new campaigns and keywords. So from here if we suddenly notice a trend in blue widgets being most popular we can then create individual campaigns around the specific terms.

Google have just rolled out an analysis toolbar across the AdWords user interface to allow advertisers to easier analyse and segment AdWords data when optimising AdWords accounts.

The new toolbar incorporates the following functionality which was previously available in different parts of the AdWords UI;

View – View All, All enabled, All but deleted campaigns or ad groups.

Segment – Segment data by;

Network
Day
Week
Month
Quarter
Year
Day Of The week
Click Type
Device

Filter – Filter data by account performance e.g CTR > 5%

Columns – Customise AdWords interface columns with desired metrics for campaign goals.

The new toolbar can be found directly below the main ‘Campaigns, Ad Groups, Settings, Ads, Keywords and networks’ tabs.

Great to see Google still continuing to enhance the AdWords UI giving advertisers greater transparency of their account(s) performance, allowing much more time to be spent on optimisation as opposed to data mining.

Last year I blogged quite a bit about the Google Chrome browser which was newly launched and although I found it to be a quick browser which did speed up the browsing experience Chrome was limited for the SEO work I do on a daily basis as there were no plugins or extensions to help with this.

Last September there were some bookmarks available which allowed you to do some basic SEO tasks such as view the last cache date on the site and the pages listed in Google.

There are now some plugins available which perform similar functions to some of the Firefox plugins that I use on a regular basis.

Some of these include:

IETab – displays pages in the Chrome Browser as Internet Explorer.

Chrome Flags – the Chrome version of FlagFox which shows you the country flag for the location of the website thatyou are viewing.

Chrome SEO – allows you to view the indexed pages in Google, Bing and Yahoo, server location, domain information, backlinks and access the Google cached page

SEOQuake – the SEOQuake toolbar for Chrome

Domain Details – allows you to view the domain information such as server headers and IP addresses for any website.

Chrome Web Developer Tools – aims to be a clone of the Firefox web developer toolbar and enables you to check the validation of the CSS and HTML of a website, show link details and image alt texts.

Although I will continue to use Firefox as my primary browser I do see Chrome as a faster browser than both Internet Explorer and Firefox and will use Chrome when I want to view websites quickly without the load times of launching either of these browsers. These new extensions for Chrome will help me to do more SEO work from within this browser and could lead to me using Chrome more.

A few weeks ago, the blogging platform Blogger announced that it was ending support for the FTP publishing method via its control panel. This is because only 0.5% of their users used this service, but servicing these used a lot more resources than 0.5%. It also coincides with a change in Google’s infrastructure that would render the current method that FTP is used by inoperable. As Google own Blogger, the removal/change of this technology means that it was unworkable for them to continue supporting Blog publishing via FTP.

This was quite frustrating for some of those that work in SEO, many of who had used Blogger as a simple platform to help clients setup a blog on their website, with very little in the way of configuration and installation.

I’ve helped a number of clients setup blogs for their websites using Blogger – and this proved to be a useful tool, as it allowed via FTP, the publishing of a blog to the same website as the main site, but in a sub-folder, such as /blog/. This capability was due to be removed on the 26th March, but it has now been announced that the migration deadline for FTP users of Blogger has now been extended until May 1st.

This gives Bloggers that use the FTP service a bit more time to work out how to either migrate to a sub-domain (as opposed to a sub-folder which FTP allows you to do) – although this has to be configured as a custom domain and remain hosted by Google’s servers. It also gives FTP users a chance to identify a new platform that retains Blogger’s simplicity, although having looked for some alternatives myself in the last month, there are not many similar solutions available.

In the light of Blogger’s recent removal of some music related Blogspot hosted domains,  there are fears that there could be more sinister reasons for the enforcement of hosting with Google, either on Blogspot or on a custom domain, in that Google & Blogger then have control over the content being published to these blogs – and should they have reason to, are able to remove this content from a website. This capability was not there for sites that were publishing via FTP, and ultimately this change means that Google will have full control over whether or not content published through Blogger remains visible on the Internet for all sites that continue using the platform.

Using benchmark keywords to track your rankings and build authority and relevancy for your website is essential for any SEO campaign. Here are 3 things to consider when choosing your ‘benchmark’ keywords.

1. Traffic

Do some investigation to make sure your keywords are actually likely to drive traffic. There are quite a few keyword tools out there that can give an estimate of search volumes, and data from your traffic log or analytics software can tell you what keywords currently drive traffic to your site.

Then once you get rankings for a keyword, go back to your analytics to check that it’s actually driving traffic. If not, consider targeting other keywords.

2. Competition

Choose keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for. If your chosen keyword gets 10,000 searches a day, there’s no use being on page 500 of Google.

For example, if you have a brand new site selling toys, you won’t have the authority or relevancy to rank well for keywords such as ‘toys’, ‘baby toys’ or ‘toy shop’.

So do your keyword research and start building authority and relevancy for ‘long tail’ niche keywords. For example, something like ‘wooden toys for babies under 1 year old’ might be a good one to go for.

There are many ways to evaluate the competition. And doing it probably can take a while. But this is something that your SEO agency will do during the keyword research phase.

3. Relevancy and conversions

Keyword research will probably reveal some great keywords that have high searches and low competition. But there’s no use targeting a keyword unless it’s relevant to your site. Otherwise, you’ll drive traffic but no conversions (sales and enquiries).

But, keyword research can sometimes unveil trends and ‘untapped’ keywords that might affect your business and buying decisions. For example, you might sell women’s jewellery and notice that good search volumes for keywords related to men’s jewellery. With some extra research into the market, you might decide to also sell men’s jewellery products.

With a change in buyer attitudes moving toward the credibility of content to help them make informed purchasing decisions and away from standard advertising methods, it is important for companies of all sizes to embrace good content strategies. ‘Good’ being the operative word as customers are more in control of what they read and know the difference between mediocre and great content.

Despite the recession easing, cutbacks in the media mean that there are voids in the media sector – industry specific content generators can fill this gap in the market. Selling to customers has also become more challenging, so a good approach to marketing is to establish your company as an authority in its field, becoming a trusted source of information, in turn helping to develop a loyal customer base.

Technology is cheap and easy to use, so both small and large companies can deliver good content to a specific customer base. Publishing content on websites, digital magazines and e-newsletters is inexpensive and can allow a small company to better target their client base than multi-million dollar large corporations.

With all these benefits, how does a company come up with a great content marketing strategy?  Junta42 has devised a helpful content marketing roadmap – the B.E.S.T Formula – comprised of the following elements:

Behavioural: all communications should have a purpose and seek to make the customer feel an emotion and take a specific action such as buying a product.

Essential: include only what the customer needs to know by presenting the content in the most positive light as well as including the most important elements of the campaign.

Strategic: make sure the content fits in with your company’s strategic aims and integrates with other communication strategies.

Targeted: to target content, you need to understand your customer base and what motivates them. For example, how do they view the product or service you offer and what are their professional roles?

Now you know who you are targeting, lets move onto the most important bit – executing the plan. According to research by B2B Magazine and Junta42, the most effective way of putting the plan into motion is to outsource your content projects. Marketers can be so busy promoting their products that they can’t distance themselves enough to think about customers informational needs in the same way that journalists can. Writing is not a simple task and requires skills, patience and talent. As such, employing an online news provider or content marketing specialist is the way forward for most companies.

Such companies can provide an editorial plan, a high degree of research and vitally a project manager to oversee the whole process. Content providers can also help to identify sources of content and advise on where to place good content, from audio/video podcasts to news provisions. Other deciding factors in employing the services of an external content specialist include that they can provide valuable advice on content design, budgeting and assume responsibility for accomplishing the goals of the project.

PPC Glossary Part 8:       What are Negative Keywords?

Welcome back to my glossary of PPC terms to assist you in your quest for the ultimate campaign for your business. It has been a while since I last blogged on any glossary terms but with Christmas campaigns and valentines campaigns it’s been a mad few months for the search marketing world. With the increase of spends on digital marketing whilst we are in difficult times (supposedly) agencies like ours are increasingly busy.

If you have not yet trawled through my Glossary blogs just let me explain…I am creating a small catalogue of blogs on terms we PPC Managers use on a day to day basis and try and explain the to you and what they are used in the industry for, in an attempt to help you build a successful campaign for yourself. Ultimately for larger businesses the issue is lack of time and knowhow to optimise a campaign to reach its full potential that leads to using a PPC agency to manage their campaigns. With these glossary blogs hopefully you can toe dip in the sponsored link world and gain a better understanding of abbreviations and factors that all contribute to the day to day running of any PPC Campaign before you take the next step and have it fully managed so you can refocus on your business.

Negative keywords:

If you are starting out with a new campaign the biggest piece of advice I can give is to TEST. Create campaigns with any keywords you wish. There are tools that can help you with this too. Let data stream through and clicks arrive before beginning optimisation on them.

Negative keywords are simple to add to any campaign and will ultimately save you money when testing new keywords within your account. The process of creating a Negative Keyword list will ultimately stop unwanted searches coming through to the site costing you much needed budget.

Let’s say for example you sell roof tiles and you are using tiles as a broad or phrase match keyword within your account you should be adding negative keywords like

Carpet, Floor, Slate

This will stop your ads from showing when people search for

“Carpet tiles”, “Floor tiles”, “Slate tiles”

In many businesses this is the ultimate way to refine your campaign and get real time search data entering your site for you to analyse and refine your account. This way you will discover trends for searches such as brands or colours of tiles for instance that you may not have implemented as keywords within the account from the beginning. Then the optimisation fun starts and you can create campaigns around theses terms without wasting precious budget on unwanted searches coming through an generic terms that you do NOT stock.

Traditional marketing methods such as mail shots, relationship building campaigns advertising and market research still have a valuable place in modern marketing strategies but there has been a shift in marketing to the digital side.

With the rise of the entrepreneur, combined with an ever innovating society, consumers are no longer swayed solely by traditional marketing approaches. Instead, they have grown to expect more from companies and are fickle in their affections. Companies that implement more current, technological and en vogue marketing strategies will thus stand out amongst a sea of images, sound bites and strap lines. Inevitably, these companies will succeed over those that don’t move with the times.

So what are these new attention grabbing methods? The most discussed marketing term of 2010 surely has to be that of content generation… Such content isn’t as demanding or disruptive as advertising, but allows a brand to be promoted in an authoritative yet discrete manner. Well written, informative content can be used in a variety of mediums such as blogs, white papers or company newsletters. Unlike advertising, content can be re-utilised and inform customers of important developments in a particular field. Most importantly, content engages with a reader, especially when integrated with social media marketing tools like Twitter and LinkedIn.

White papers by organisations such as Click Predictions and Junta42 rave about the use of content marketing this year, with marketers spending more of their budget on good quality content generation, promoted in relevant arenas. What is perhaps so relevant about content is that it can be harnessed by the private & B2B sector, the public sector and by small or large organisations. The reason why content generation is so encompassing is that whilst a good level of quantity is helpful, quality is the king – personality and a catchy, innovative article are the reason why people read and act on content. In particular, personality is emerging as a strong market advantage, identifying with readers. After all who wants to read anonymous company copy?

So content marketing must be expensive right? Far from it, content marketing is one of the most financially viable of all marketing strategies, yet it is one of the most effective. Whether content is generated internally or a digital marketing agency is enlisted, content can be considerably cheaper than taking out full page newspaper adverts or organising intricate promotional events.

Savvy companies relish the opportunity to establish their business as a trusted, valuable and fresh provider of the latest information – posting this information direct to where their clients are. As such, utilising content pushes a company to the top, waving goodbye to competitors who are stuck using old marketing favourites.

A robots.txt file is recommended for all websites to help direct search engines around your site.  A robots file should always contain a  link to your sitemap.xml file as below

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Once you have created your robots.txt file it’s important to be sure that it will work correctly before uploading it.  A simple robots.txt file probably won’t need testing but if you are using wildcard rules to disallow groups of pages from the search engines it’s probably best to test it’s working correctly before committing it to the site.

The best way to check your robots.txt file is to use Google Webmaster Tools.  To do this login to Google Webmaster Tools and select Site Configuration from the left hand menu and click on the Crawler Access option on the sub menu that appears.  This will bring up a window which shows you the robots file for your site.  About half way down this page there is a text box which shows the current text of your robots.txt file.

Using this text box you can add in the new lines you have added to your robots.txt file so that the box reflects the text that you want to test.  Scroll down below the box and you will see another text box called “URLs specify the URLs and user agents to test against” in this box type in the URL of the pages you want to check to see if Google can see or not.

For example if you have added the following rules to your robots file which reads:

Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /*?cm=*

Then add to the URLs box the following URLs below your domain name:

www.yoursite.co.uk/admin/
www.yoursite.co.uk/index.html?cm=1234

Click the text button and you will receive results for the pages you have added to the URLs button.

The homepage of your site should be Allowed but the other two URLs should show that they are Disallowed.

If all is OK with the results you can upload your Robots.txt file but if not you can tweak the contents of the file and test again.

Doing this ensures that your robots file will be working when Google reads it and that you aren’t damaging your rankings by banning Google from the wrong pages.