For many businesses, advertising is about sales. You pay money to be noticed by people who then come and pay you some money. The problem with that model is that social media thrives on a different mindset.

A Marketing Sherpa study showed that 78% of marketers want to generate high quality leads, compared with 44% who want high volume leads. Advertising on Facebook allows you to target a specific type of person, but if your aim is to advertise on Facebook the same way you advertise on Google Adwords, you are perhaps missing the point.

A high value purchase like a car relies on many factors – what have leading automotive journalists said about the car? What are the running costs? What do friends and family think about a specific model? What’s the warranty like and the after-sales service?

If someone clicks on a Facebook ad for a GM car and then goes to buy the car, the chances are that the customer has already made their decision based on a wide range of other research. The brand awareness is strong and they are already in buyer mode when they click on the ad. For most other people clicking on the advert, perhaps it was the first time they had seen the car and the click was their first step to a whole range of research.

In the same Marketing Sherpa study (in PDF form here), only 10% of business to business companies said their sales cycle is one month or less. That’s the time it takes from initial enquiry to a sale. A third (30%) said the cycle is 1-3 months but 50% said it’s between four and twelve months.

What does this tell us about the news of GM saying Facebook advertising doesn’t work? It tells us that Facebook and other social networks can work if they are used in the right way. Social networking is about engagement and conversation – about brand awareness and interaction. It’s about standing in the stream rather than trying to divert the waters. Be seen, engage, ensure potential customers find what they need so that, when they are ready to buy, they know where to come and they are willing to come to you.

While some companies can advertise products that sell on Facebook, for many, advertising is about buying visibility more than buying sales. Get your sales team and your marketing team working together and find ways to measure brand perception on social media rather than looking for the same ROI models that work for offline adertising.

Again this is another sign that you will soon not be able to access the old version of Google Analytics.

Scheduled reports can be incredibly useful.  They allow you to send a snap shot of information in a PDF to either yourself or someone else. This can include a person who does not normally have access to your analytics.

Reports can be sent from any screen from within Analytics and the information can include data which has been filtered, had advanced segments attached to it or is a custom report.

To set up an email report in Google Analytics first go to the report you would like to send.  Make sure that this report is set up with the view, data set and dimensions which you want it to show.

Once you have your data set up as you want it to be you will see an Email button (with the word BETA next to it) in the sub menu as shown below)

Click this button and the email scheduling tool will appear as shown below.

This form gives you a number of options

From will show the email address you have logged into Analytics with. To allows you to select who to send the report to. Multiple email addresses can be placed in this report and to do this the address separator is a comma.  If you want a copy of this report to be sent to you then you will need to include you own email address in this box as you are not automatically copied in on these reports.

Subject can be set to whatever you want it to be, but it’s best to call this something useful for the people who are to receive the reports -including the data included and perhaps the frequency of the report.

Attachments allows you to select the format of the data to be sent. This can be a PDF, CSV, TSV,  and TSV for Excel. I generally send these schedule reports as a PDF, but if you are sending something like ecommerce transaction data to your accounts person then they might want this data to be sent to them in one of the other formats to allow them to edit the file in Excel.

Frequency allows you to set how often a report is generated and the next section (currently showing day of the week) will update accordingly. The options available here are:

Once – for one off reports

Daily – can be sent once a day  – no time options available for this report

Weekly – sent once a week and you can select the day of the week the report is sent

Monthly – sent once a month on either a specific numbered day (e.g. the 14th) or on the last day of the month. Currently it is not possible to send these reports on the third Monday or the 1st Friday of the month.

Quarterly – sent once every 3 months – no customisation available on this report.

Advanced Options just allows you to choose how long the report is active for, so if you have a short term campaign which you need to set up a daily monitoring report on but this campaign will only last for 2 months you can set the report to expire.  By default this is set to 6 months.

The white text box below is for the content of the email and must be completed with at least some text.

Once you have completed this press send and your reports will be set up.

Only you can see and edit the reports you have created, so if a change is needed you will need to do this yourself.

Happy reporting.

Here’s a quick list of some of our old favourites:

All in One SEO Pack or Yoast’s WordPress SEO – for on page optimisation

Tweetly Updater - Update your latest blogs to your Twitter feed automatically

Redirection – quick and easy 301 redirects without needing an htaccess file

W3 Total Cache – improve server performance to help your users experience.

Askimet – stop spam comments on your blog

XML Sitemaps – create XML sitemaps for your website

Shockingly Simple Favicon – easily add your company logo as a favicon for your website.

Since the last of these WordPress Plugin blogs there have been changes to both the search engines and the plugins available from WordPress developers.  So here’s a little update of some of our new favourites.

Contact form 7 is a great simple way of creating contact forms for your website.  This allows you to have some forms which look fantastic and not just a boring old form.  Many themes have Contact Form 7 in them already. But using this will help you to create forms which are more likely to be completed by people on your website.

Next Gen Gallery – Create image galleries. Manage photography and create user friendly light box style galleries really simply.

Easy Columns is great for creating more complete layouts within posts and pages, with little or no coding experience. You can also used this to create some nice layouts and content boxes. Great way to make your content stand out.

Social media is more important than ever for your SEO, and making sure that you are promoting your content, engaging with your market and allowing people to share your content with their connections on the main social networks.

Previously we’ve suggested using the separate plugins for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn but as we now have Pinterest into the mix as well it’s worth reviewing this as all of the different social buttons end up looking and feeling different and to manage them you end up with lots of different plugins and styles to manage to make them look consistent.  AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget can be used to create these buttons in a consistent format and to help with the layout of these.

Once you’ve installed these buttons there are some tweaks to the code for the buttons which can be done to help with the monitoring of how your site is being shared socially by adding some code to the template for your pages around the Add This buttons – information about this can be found here.

My other new favourite plugin is WP Paginate helps you to display your “previous” and “next” buttons with the correct pagination code as this code helps the search engines understand that the blog it is looking at is part of a series.

A plugin we’ve talked a lot about in the past in YARPP (Yet Another Related Post Plugin) which we used to help provide you with related post content on the blog and news of our site.  However in the last few months we’ve migrated away from this plugin to nrelate Related Content.  This does the same thing but seems to work much better as the most recent version of YARPP was only providing relevancy scores on other content based on the title of the content and not the content so we were getting things showing up which were not at all relevant or suitable.  Since upgrading to nrelate we’ve had none of these issues.

One I’ve also been using recently is WP Bots Analytics.  This plugin allows you to easily see what robots are crawling your website. This can help you to exclude crawlers from your website without having to trawl through your server logs. Following the launch of Google’s Penguin it’s more important than ever to make sure that your content is not being scraped so this plugin we’ve found to be really important.

I’m sure there will be some more to add to this list the more new plugins are launched and as the Google Algorithm changes.

I assume you are one of the following three groups regarding social media and its effect on SEO.

You/your company:

• Use social media and understand its importance.
• Use social media and have no understanding how it affects SEO.
• Do no social media and have no understanding how it affects SEO.

If you somehow fall into “Do no social media and understand how it affects SEO” then I hazard a guess you are just about to launch your social media marketing campaign. I hope so.

Google Analytics Goes Social

Humans by nature are social creatures, Google and all the search engines know this. This month saw the end of Google’s PostRank, that they acquired last June, and now you can access social data for your website through Google Analytics.

So now, not only do Google have access to your backlink profile, but if you use their analytics they also have an in-depth view of how socially active your site is across social networks.

Now I don’t want to scare you all making wild accusations that backlinks are dead, but think about this for a moment – if your site has thousands of backlinks, but no social interaction, Google will work out something is amiss.

Backlinks are social recognition that your site is worthy of linking to (in the eyes of Google). So why would you have backlinks but no social signals? It simply does not make sense!

Make social media work for your SEO efforts

This is basic social media 101. I feel like screaming when I see a website that does not implement the basics when it comes to helping their social media presence and then complain that social media does not work for them. But yet you see their personal Facebook account is full of their musings of life, the universe and everything in between.

So please tick the following off and make them a daily task where necessary:

1. Install social sharing buttons on pages/posts of your website.
2. Share your content on social networks.
3. Build a following by sharing more than just your own content.
4. Interact with your followers.
5. Do not forget social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon.
6. Do not automate all your social media activity.

Does any of the above sound difficult? No, I thought not.

A recent study has shown that Twitter affects Google rankings and it is well know that Google+ is certainly having an effect on how your website can be displayed in their search results.

Vertical Leap has stated “Social media is integral to search marketing” way before I joined the team, and 2012 is the year that it finally comes to a head with content leading the way in helping your social media activities bring in those search results you want.

To simplify the last 500+ words starting with your content in the blue circle…

Once again, there is no secret to SEO, it is just a fact that times are changing and you need to move with them.

Running around panicking won’t mean you will see improvements! Also reacting in a knee jerk way could make a non problem into a problem.

So,what do you really need to do in the light of these changes?

Identify a Problem

Have you actually been hit by Penguin?

• Check your rankings and traffic.  If you have a penalty then around the 24th April you should have seen a drop in your visitors and your rankings will have fallen in the SERPs.
• Check your site in Google Webmaster Tools too to make sure there’s no messages in there about penalties

If these things have happened then it is possible that you have been hit by Penguin.  So how to recover those lost rankings and traffic?

Keywords

• Read through your web content. If it sounds as if too much focus is on the keywords and not enough into talking to your customers then you’re probably using a technique called “Keyword Stuffing”.
• Chris wrote a blog which explains this well with an analogy about shouting “BREAD” at the search engines.

ACTION: Rewrite content if you are over using your keywords so it’s more natural

Links

• Using your keywords to link through to your core pages can also be an issue. Links within your content are great but only if they offer value to the customer. For example a link to another blog related to the content in the blog you are writing.  A good example of this can be seen at the top of this page where I’ve referenced and linked to Ellie’s blog about Penguin, so that people could read it if they’d missed it. It’s unlikely your visitors would click a keyword link in some content unless it was clear it was something which would offer them value, like my link above.

ACTION: Remove these “forced” links and to link more naturally.

• Do you have a MASSIVE footer with your entire sitemap on it? Having a list of keywords in your footer, or a full sitemap list is not great for SEO now Penguin is live and chances are your customers won’t use these links anyway.
• Better to make your menu structure easy to use.  This is also true even if your list of keywords in your footer is only 5 or 6 links. Keep it simple.

ACTION: Keep your footer for links to your privacy policy, terms and conditions and remove all those extra links to pages on the site. Make your Menu structure clear

• Review your inbound link strategy too. Paying for a service which gets you into a link scheme or buys you links could mean that you get hit by Penguin.
• Another thing to watch out for is having a really unnatural looking link profile.  This includes having all of the links pointing to your website coming through to just one keyword or loads of site wide links from the same site or IP address.
• When people naturally link to a website they tend to use a range of terms including your brand name and URL or even “click here”.

ACTION: Make sure when you are link building that you don’t participate in these schemes and that your back link profile contains a mix of natural looking anchor texts and not just your core keyword.

Social Media

• Social Signals are now important to Google and we’ve spoke a lot recently about how social media and author tags are the new “big thing” in the SERPS. So, now is the time to make sure that you have a good social media strategy in place and that you are promoting your content to your customers on these networks.

ACTION: Become active on social media outlets.

Non of this is revolutionary. But it will all help. And, just to reinforce this, Don’t Panic!

How can something this cute possibly be bad?

Last week Google rolled out a new algorithm update called Penguin.

This caused a huge amount of uproar amongst the SEO and the blogs and forums are full of people bemoaning the changes. This is not the case for me. I liked the Penguin update because I believe that this latest update forces the SEO industry to behave more like supermarkets and I love supermarkets. Seriously.

I should probably explain that.

Supermarkets are a marvel of the marketing world. You may or may not know this, but the layout and functionality of a supermarket is a carefully planned, measured and executed thing. It is also one of the most successful marketing models ever created and it remains the same today as it did when first designed. In fact, it is so successful that every supermarket in the world adopts the same approach. This approach is one of intuitive, non-interruptive, simplicity.

It works first by separating products into categories and grouping them together. Mayonnaise is next to the BBQ sauce which is next to the mustard. Brown bread is next to the white bread, just up from the croissants.

After creating these groups of products, the supermarkets provide shoppers with massive signs that say ‘Bread – this way →’. The beauty of this system is that it doesn’t matter which supermarket you visit, you always know where to find the croissants. Not because there is a sign that says croissants, but because there is a sign that says bread.

The second thing supermarkets do is assume that I am intelligent enough to work out where everything is and leave me to get on with it. If ever I do need help there is always a convenient member of staff nearby who I can ask for help. Not only that, they group the staff with the product groups and so I know who to ask about bread because they wear that funny little paper hat that implies, ‘I am the bread man, ask me questions about bread, I am an authority on bread.’ Clever, eh?

Lastly, I like supermarkets because they don’t hassle me. I can browse as long as I wish without interruption. The occasional special offer or interesting item may be placed in my eye line, but importantly, supermarkets don’t have someone who upon my arrival to the bread aisle keeps shouting ‘BREAD!’ whilst pointing at the bread.

Now then, back to Google.

The Penguin update was launched to reduce the ‘over optimisation’ of websites. Loosely speaking, ‘over optimisation’ is deemed to be the practice of unnaturally filling your pages with as many instances of your keywords as possible.

As an example, perhaps you are in the bread industry. You might target a key word like ‘bread’ and it would be natural to have that word on your website here and there. Over optimisation would be when every article and page on your site has the keyword in the title, in the content, in the footer and also as the managing director’s middle name. Probably.

Over the years Google updates have forced webmasters and the SEO industry to build websites the same way that supermarkets layout their stores. You need to make things clear and simple for your visitors, by providing clear navigation and content that lets them know where to find what they are looking for. You need to make sure there is someone around who can help them when they ask for it, by featuring fresh, quality content that answers their questions.

And now, with this Penguin update, you need to stop shouting at your visitors. Google has done a lot of work on synonyms, so you no longer need to optimise your site for “bread”, “croissants”, “bagels” etc with repetitive content for each. If you have provided clear quality content, your visitors and Google know what you sell. That is why they are here. You no longer need to keep shouting ‘Bread!’ at them.

Beware the rampaging Google Penguin!

No, please don’t – the sky is not falling.

In fact, Google themselves have said that Penguin affects just 3.1% of searches!

We’ve seen a lot of scare-tactic marketing lately over Google Penguin…

Yes, some websites have taken a hit in rankings.

And yes, you do need to understand how this latest algorithm update will affect your SEO strategy.

Many SEO agencies are busy terrorising businesses with the threat of penalties, complete loss of rankings and online obliteration…we think this is totally unnecessary and actually, a bit of a cheap trick.

KEEP CALM and CARRY ON

Really, everyone just needs to relax a bit. If you have a strong, Content-driven SEO strategy you shouldn’t get clobbered by Penguin.

By all means, get in touch if you are worried, but please read our guide first…

A guide to Google Penguin

We’ve published a number of blogs on the Penguin update to help inform and make sure your website remains in great shape:

In Pandas and Penguins – the Google updates we look at what each of these algorithm updates mean in the real world.

Google puts the ‘author’ into ‘authority’ as Penguin eats links – an insight into how online authors are now gaining more recognition as a ranking factor.

Finally, in Penguin impact and reviewing your website we offer some tips on how to check some key areas of your site.

In Do you serve Penguins? Chris talks about why he welcomes the Penguin update, makes a nice comparison with supermarkets, and offers a cute picture too : )

If you would like some calm, competent and honest advice, call us on 0845 123 2753 or email info@vertical-leap.co.uk

Theoretically, the meta title and the meta description tags in your header should appear as the text within the search result, but Google often ignores these elements to present its own choice of content – and what it displays can vary every time the page is shown in search results because each result is tailored to the assumed intent of the searcher.

Some search marketing professionals and webmasters get frustrated by this because, well, it’s your website and you should be able to show it the way you want, right? I think that’s the wrong attitude and I actually like the way Google thinks. Sometimes you see a page appearing with an odd choice of text but that’s not Google’s fault, it’s the fault of the content on the page.

Google is a recommendation service as much as it is a search engine. You search the index and Google then recommends web pages to you based on what you are looking for. If I recommend a car to a friend who is looking for a red sports car, I might recommend a “Ferrari” rather than a “Luxury sports cars | XYZ Company | Ferraris London”. Just as we use the most apt way of describing something when talking to people, depending on the context, Google tries to use the most apt term for describing what page it is recommending to you, based on what you just searched for.

This can be a problem if your page content is not well structured for the search term. Here are two examples.

Example 1: A search for a company by name

Here’s a real example I found just through a random search. If you search Google for “official Pavers shoes website” the result in position one is the official website, with the URL shoe-shop.com. The title of the result is cut off because it’s a long meta tag – you can see it in the image below.

Now, if you search for “shoe shop” you get a different result. The same page comes up, but the title has changed.

From a business point of view, we would want the search result to say more than Shoe-Shop.com – especially if the business is known as Pavers – at least it should include a description of what they do. Because the search term was not in the meta title, Google decided the meta title was irrelevant to what the searcher was looking for, so it used the domain name as the meta title instead.

Solution: The simple solution in this situation is to ensure the meta title contains the term people might commonly search for, so Google has an incentive to show a more meaningful title, such as “Shoe Shop – official Pavers shoes website”.

Example 2: The ALT text that no one thought about.

I had a strange example where one page of a site was showing in Google with a title phrase that was not even visibly present in the page. In a search for the company by name, the contact page in Google’s results was showing a phrase that did not make sense. When I examined the page, there was a contact form there and very little text, however, there was a Contact Us button and some ALT text behind the button that was not relevant to the button at all. Google was finding the button called contactus.jpg and then assuming the ALT text for that button must be the best thing to show as the title for the Contact Us page when I searched for the company by name.

Solution: Ensure the text structure of your page is relevant to the page and to what people might look for. Make sure you use meaningful and relevant names for images and for ALT text behind images.

We persist with our ‘Content-driven Search Marketing’ mantra because, quite simply, it works, and is now the only effective way to get the best results online. Lee Odden has just published a book on the very same subject.

We’d like to take a moment and celebrate the achievements of one of our customers, Love Camping, an online business offering a huge wealth of information to the camping community – from campsite info and reviews to suggested destinations, activities, packing lists, user reviews, if it’s camping-related; they’ve got it covered!

We began working with the business in November 2011, creating news content for the website to support the wider online marketing plan. The news articles had to be of the highest quality to support the Love Camping brand and stand up to scrutiny by experienced campers and caravan/motorhome owners.

In just a few months, the news articles have made a real impact on the levels of visitors and engagement with both the company website and Facebook page.

You can read the full story in our case study.

So, to recap, to create a strong, effective and profitable online presence, you need search, you need content and you need to not be shy about using it (social media).

Having a look at your core keywords have you noticed any changes to your rankings? Are these changes large or small? Following the go live of both Panda 3.5 and Penguin there seem to be a large number of sites which have seen a couple of place changes for their keywords, both increases of a couple of places and drops of the same. However, some sites, although only a small amount, have seen some large drops in their rankings with many of their core keywords.

So what are the sorts of things which we are noticing that the Penguin update is frowning upon and what things are we finding are working?  As we know Panda is about quality but Penguin is more about stamping out of manipulative over optimisation of sites.

As mentioned previously there are some things which are clearly against the Google Website Guidelines and these seem to be some of the things which Penguin is cracking down on. This is great as it means Google themselves are using the guidelines as a meassure (and so these mean something for webmasters), but I do wonder why they’ve not done this before as these guidelines have been around for ages!

Here is a sample of the things which we’ve noticed that might be causing issues for your site if you’ve been hit by Penguin.

Hidden text

An example of hidden text is having white text on a white background. This sounds really old school but we’ve seen sites with this on recently. This is frowned upon because it means you are showing things to Google to get them to rank you which your visitors can’t see. Remember;  your website is for your visitors and not for Google as your visitors are the one’s who spend money.

Cloaking or Sneaky Redirects

This happens when you have content in your code which is not presented to a browser.  This can be done by IP serving content specifically to Google.

Keyword Stuffing

This is where you’ve used your keywords too many times on a page. Content should read naturally and not have the feeling that keywords have been shoe-horned into the page to artificially manufacturer relevancy or even links. They way to review this is to make sure that content reads well out loud and doesn’t sound artificial.

The other thing to do is to consider if a link in your content is actually a link that someone would follow. If you just link your keyword and main service pages changes are people won’t follow it. However, linking to a related blog which you mention in your content or to your contact form (“if you want more information about this Contact us now”) is a good idea as these links are things people are likely to use. Keyword stuffing can also be seen as having a large footer at the bottom of pages as these can also be seen as false methods of promoting your content.

Now is also a good time to review your on page optimisation. Keyword Spam is also something which can be seen in over manipulated Title Tags (with the same keyword in multiple times). Your meta descriptions can also have this over use of keywords so review these too. Remember your meta descriptions are seen by potential customers in the SERPs and so making sure that these are well written and compelling is important.  Some time ago Google also announced that they are no longer using the Keywords Meta tag to define what pages are about and now that Penguin is live this could also be seen as something which stuffs keywords onto a page to influence the rankings. Look at your keywords tag and consider what message this is sending, this could be perceived as a list of keywords and what’s more a list of very similar keywords… Personally I’d be removing these from your site now.

Spun content is also an issue as it is something which can be seen as low quality and is somerthing which Panda picked up on. However, with Penguin now live, this is also something which could be considered spam.  Make sure that all of your content is useful for visitors and delivers something unique to their experience, rather than having multiple pages which are very similar and are designed to make a keyword rank and create links to another page or series of pages.

Back links

This becomes an issues if your back link profile contains links from link schemes, blog networks or site wide links from other sites. Paying more attention to your back links is important as Google have also been emailing people about “unnatural” links as Stu mentioned in his blog last week.

Keep an eye on your back link profile and check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that you have not received a message from them about these links.

Now, there has been a lot of talk about sites which should have been hit by Penguin and weren’t, including one site which Matt Cutts used as an example of web spam which doesn’t appear to have been penalised. There are also sites out there who aren’t doing things wrong but have been hit and found their rankings have gone.

So, if you feel that your site has been penalised unfairly or if you have corrected the issues you think were a problem then Google has a form to provide feedback with which can be found here.  One note on this though is that the Penguin update is an algorithm change so it’s an automated process rather than something which has been manually reviewed so be aware that you might not see the results from this that you would like.

My key tip post the launch of Google’s Penguin update is to make sure that you are reviewing how you are presenting information on your website including the optimisation and to make sure you aren’t link building using any techniques which Google frowns upon.

I’m quite sure that like Panda, the Penguin update is going to be a regularly applied set of rules that Google will refine and update on regular intervals so watch this space for the next Penguin update.