theMediaFlow » Search

An International SEO Implementation Tale – Sitemaps: rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

Peter Handley — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:30:32 +0000

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that over the 6 or so weeks, I’ve been digging around for information and details on results from the implementation of rel=”alternate” and hreflang on sites.

Basically, this is a relatively new option from Google to appropriately mark-up your webpages to tell them that you know there are multiple versions of what is quite possibly mostly the same page that are targeting visibility in different countries/languages, and that here are details on which country each of these pages are targeting.

What it won’t do, is “improve the rankings” that a site has. The idea is, that wherever a site (or group of websites) appear in search, if marked up with rel=”alternate” then it will swap out the ranking page based on region – so UK searchers would get a UK page, the US the US page, rather than always being the page that would rank. So, if you have a global over-arching website that ranks all over the world, on a regional basis, it will then show users their localised page.

Mark-up in the – rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

Initially when first launched in December, there was one method for putting this in place on your website. This involved adding the appropriate mark-up to each page of your website, telling them page “x” was for one particular language and/or region/country, and that page “y”, “z” etc, were for other respective locations.

Google gave us guidelines on how to plan what to do here, and essentially you would add something like the following code to the of all pages of all of the websites:

Example taken from Google’s rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” guidelines.

The examples show a sub-domain being deployed, but the beauty of this, is that it works across different domains, sub domains and could even be used on a sub-folder international SEO setup.

Whilst this is a good way to tell Google about what content is for which location, it is not without issues.

You have to produce a map in advance so that you can plan which pages are linked together in this way, you have to determine what region and/or language you are going to going to be targeting for each version of each page, and you have to plan the mark-up that is going to be deployed.

On a medium to large scale ecommerce site, this mapping could involve a hell of a lot of work, let alone working out the deployment of the code. If you are doing this for several languages, for several thousand pages, it just seems overwhelming.

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” Sitemaps

Around May of this year, Google announcing another way of doing this, through the use of XML sitemaps, and not too long after, we started working with a customer that this was perfect fit for.

The XML sitemap approach allows you to take the largest element of the work out of the equation, as you essentially just have to map the variations, work out the country code for each region, and then use that map to create the appropriate XML sitemap.

I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of SEO’s, and it seemed that everyone wanted to implement this, but had no idea if it would actually work as intended, as well as encountering from potential nervousness from clients about implementing this, presumably because there was some visibility in all regions and there was no desire to go rocking the cart unnecessarily.

For our client, it made perfect sense – they operate in 3 regions, the UK, US and Australia, with top level domains for each market. However, the .com website was ranking in all regions, causing all sorts of billing headaches and the like.

A few methods had been tried before our involvement such as IP delivery and currency selections, but none of these worked perfectly to get to the bottom of the issue – users were reaching a website that wasn’t appropriately priced for them.

We agreed that we would proceed with implementing this sitemap approach after tidying up a number of other necessary changes across the group of websites.

The approach we implemented for this, led us to create an XML sitemap along the lines of the following:

http://www.clientsite.com/

It was of course, quite a bit bigger than this – this mini sitemap gives the relative variations of the home pages that we used for each region. For each additional “”, you would set the main “”, and then give details on the alternative used in each sub region.

There are also further details from Google about the implementation of XML sitemaps.

For starters, as it was the URL that was ranking in all regions, we decided to only implement this for the .com website (something I’d probably think differently about and produce extra sitemaps for if there were lots of sites ranking in the various regions).

If you did want to implement this on each site, as I understand it, you’d need to create a variation of this for each specific website, as the main “” would vary from site to site – but this assumes top level domains and is something I’d want to examine on a case by case basis.

The Results

After a week of impatiently waiting, and checking on a near hourly basis, something began to change. Rankings for the site where the .com had always ranked, despite this being the US centric website, started to show the .co.uk domain instead.

I quickly checked visibility for a number of keywords we’d seen to drive traffic to the website and searching from the UK, everything had switched domains. I rushed off to check US and Australian visibility, and in every instance, the correct website was showing to the correct region.

So, in short, it worked perfectly! I’ve come back to it today, and can see marked increases in traffic from search for both regional domains since this has started to kick in, and the visibility in each region is still leading users to their correct version of the website.

I should note, that as I had expected, rankings didn’t change at all as a result of this. It really wasn’t the goal – it was all about making sure that the content being served to users was correctly localised to them.

I think that this something to think about and plan very closely – get the implementation of this technique wrong, and it could cause all sorts of havoc to visibility (if you say that the UK site is Australian, and Google pay attention to this, it’s clear to see what could go wrong).

That said, in the right circumstances, this is clearly a very powerful tactic to serve up the correct localised results in each region that you are targeting. When coupled with other international SEO work to increase visibility of those websites in each region, you can really give international targeting a good kick in the right direction, particularly when starting out in a new region for the first time. It seems that this has effectively allowed us to piggy back off visibility one of the existing web properties already had.

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The Future of Geospatial Technology – Paper Maps ARE Dead

Peter Handley — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 12:55:22 +0000

I’m not all that fond of saying things are dead, but after my first visit to Digital Surrey yesterday, I will agree with Google’s Ed Parsons, that Paper Maps ARE in fact dead. Well, mostly, I have seen a few friends tweet of late of the need for actual maps when in the countryside, and not connected to the internet etc, but for most of us, we have moved well beyond what a paper map can offer us.

Digital Surrey Setting

Well, I’ve never been to a digital conference set in a castle before – Farnham Castle was our host for the evening:

Whilst this is a castle that has never really seen battle, it was an impressive setting for the evening, and the gardens were a lovely place for a pre event beer.

The Annotated World. The Future of Geospatial Technology

The presentation for the evening was from Ed Parsons, the Geospatial Technologist of Google, and formerly of Ordnance Survey.

He started with a picture of the world, which apparently only about 20 people have ever actually seen with their own eyes.

We use tools like google earth to explore the planet, but the annotated world goes beyond the image and starts to pull out more information

Imagine if you could make a map that was to scale to reality. This isn’ something that is possible physically, but digital technology allows this, and much more. Tech Allows you to go deeper than that 1:1 view - Google’s street view for example allows you to start to annotate things and augment these images with things that can’t be seen by the naked eye i.e. directions, but also much more than that.

You can incorporate business information and overlay onto the image which allows actionable nights with that data, using harvested information from the web

Ed showed us examples of how street view images can be overlaid with information about waste bins and road signs. Basically, information from the Internet can be taken from a variety of sources and can be used to augment the reality of the map image – becomes more than just a 1:1 scale map, and becomes something more than what you can see in real life when you look at it.

Increasingly these tools are now allowing people to use tools to annotate the world themselves. Users can capture information and publish it to the web to share with others.

There is also a new tool coming to the UK where users can fill in the gaps not captured by street view. Users are annotating the World and expanding the knowledge database. They can capture images, go through verification process and submit details and images of that location to further extend the data Googles holds about these things.

What’s coming next?

Well it sounds like there is a 3D mapping cold war occurring, with Amazon starting to jump on the bandwago to compete with Apple & Google.

These “3D” maps are created using grid based photographing technology, to create 3dD models to be incorporated into Google Earth. But… really, it’s not 3d. It’s textured surface models. 2 1/2D is how Ed described it, as real 3D would include 3 dimensions “properly. Inside buildings. Inside structures. I found this quite scary!!!!

Geospatial technology is now moving indoors. Up to this point, its largely been cars have driven the desire for mapping to this stage – but apparently people want help navigating in more situations.

Now, with John Lewis, they are mapping the inside of their stores. Also surveying wifi signals from all stores to help with this (they all have WIFIapparently to allow price comparisons) as the WIFIsystem can now be used to map where you are in store in relation to those WIFIpoints, pretty accurately (to 2-3m)

This is also happening in most railway stations in London.

The growth of this isn’t scaling particularly well though – it’s hard to get partners to agree and is a complicated process even once that has happened. Ed was very honest when he said that they have history of messing this up, so they know they need to be careful.

The Map of the Future is not a Map

Paper as a medium is dead when it comes to maps.

Google Maps when you signed in are now personalised. My map will have subtle differences from your map.It knows where we live even when its not been explicitly told – it works this out from your previous activities.

Markers get placed where you or friends have left reviews for businesses.

These personalised maps get generated on the fly for millions of people using HTML 5. It’s now dynamic.

Ed went on to show us how the geometry changes looking at the map of St Paul’s Cathedral images depending on where on the map that church is.

Geospatial technology is far beyond maps now. It’s intrinsic to phone tech, calendars etc, but has moved on now and can give you weather based on location or destination. This technology can help you find people you are due to meet, adapt to traffic or public transport problems, link pictures to locations. This all leads on to Project Glass:

Augmented reality has been talked up for some time, and these glasses may be coming in the next year. Ed suggests that it’s possible that these might replace phones?

Geospatial technology is powering these sorts of new technologies.

Big Data

Typically, when thinking about “Big Data” we are thinking in in terms of ‘volume’. Ed said that there are about 6 petabytes of data powering Google Earth for example – that is a huge amount of data.

But, by all accounts, rather than ‘big’ large volumes of data it’s actually about velocity of that data. Google earth is mostly static data, but the problems arise with big data when data is moving really quickly.

Twitter firehose examples were given, but basically, you can’t query a database of this volume when the data calls are too slow to pull it, compared to the speed that the data is being added.

With approximately 35bn devices connected to net worldwide and on average 6 devices per person, there are a lot of “sensors” connected together. As I thought about how many devices I myself own, I stopped counting at about 14.

Ed also showed example of phone data being used (anonymously) to track traffic data – working out where there were jams, where traffic was moving slowly. This data is really useful, but I wonder if the owners of those phones know that they are being used in that way?

Schema is also going to play an important part in this in the future, with structured markup giving more context than just text allows.

Summary & Implications

Paper maps ARE dead in most situations – the growth of the web is all about personalisation – of which location plays a huge part, and maps have evolved to fit this need.

We need to share more data for this to get more personalised to better suit our needs. To do this, we need to trust the data suppliers more, Google and more.

They need to earn that trust!

At the moment, this sort of technology scares me a little, amazing and useful as it is. I don’t know that I trust Google with this data – you only need to look at Barry Adams’ list of issues with Google from 2012 alone.

Claire Thompson, who I met for the first time for example, would find the mapping of the river ways would be genuinely useful.

I see a need or at least a use for the growth in this sort of technology. It could have some important implications for SEO too, where location is increasingly affecting rankings, and the integration of maps and Google Plus is also having an impact.

But I am scared at the implications of this technology. Should peoples phones be used, almost certainly without explicit consent to track traffic speeds on main roads?

Should Google or any other mapping company be able to map the inside of my home, or place of work, and create a 3D map of that?

Where will the lines be drawn? Ed said that this was close to creepy, but I’ll be honest, I did find it quite creepy as it was. Usefulness and Privacy need to be balanced here, but I suspect that usefulness may well win out in the minds of the people developing these tools.

It seems to me that Nichola was right on her talk at BrightonSEO where she talked about Serendipitous Search…

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Just WOW… Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference #RIMC12

Peter Handley — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:11:18 +0000

Those of you who know me may well be surprised, but I was left nearly speechless by just how good the last few days Nichola and I spent in Iceland were.

Quite frankly, it was without a doubt the best few days I’ve spent in my professional career, and we are already discussing our plans for attending next year. The Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference was simply superb.

There was so much content, that I’m not going to be able to cover everyone in sufficient depth in this post – by my count there were just about 20 sessions or panels crammed in to the day. I’ve whizzed through as much as possible on this post, but you might still want to grab a coffee before settling down to read the rest it!

The Golden Circle

We arrived early, and spent our first day out on a tour exploring The Golden Circle. As this is an SEO blog, I won’t linger too long on these details here, but Nichola and I have got a load more photos up on theMediaFlow Facebook page.

So much snow! More than this soft English southerner has ever encountered in his life!

Intro with The President of Iceland

I kid you not. The conference was opened by the actual President of Iceland:

Can you imagine David Cameron doing that at any Internet Marketing events in the UK? I doubt it is very likely!

He had some really interesting things to say, tying in to the conference theme of “You Are Not In Control”.

The President talked about established Western political structures being revolutionised by Information Technology and Social Media, with an example given with regards to the banking crisis issues, which ended up with 25% of the Icelandic population signing a petition to force a referendum.

One of his final points was absolutely spot on as well – what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning – no one knows what the landscape will be like 10 years from now.

The Filter Bubble

Is the Internet as democratic as we’d hoped?

Is it the great connective force that we think it is?

These are the questions being asked by Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble.

Eli told us a tale of how he broadened his Facebook friends deliberately to look at political views from both sides. However, Facebook only displayed the liberal stories which tied in to the activity of posts that Eli interacted with. Why? Because:

In the quest for relevance – things get perfectly targeted to you. But personalise information can lead to personalised facts too. As time goes on, its going to become harder and harder to watch or learn things that haven’t been specifically tailored to them.

Is this a good thing? Should these algorithms tailoring this information to us have this sort of control? What information do we NOT see as a result of our filter bubbles?

We need these information gatekeepers to challenge us. To show us other points of view, things that we need to see. Can we rely on them to do this?

I found this a really interesting opening to the day, and I am certainly interested in checking out the book further. It certainly asks some pertinent questions about matters that should concern all of us, as this information helps us to determine what we perceive as fact. Those facts being presented to all of us vary based on our own previous personal views, or those in our networks, is somewhat unsettling, as it distorts the perception of our own personal realities.

Social Media Marketing Sessions

At a lightning pace, straight after Eli had finished we were flung headlong into the Social Media track. Here we head presentations from Bill Hunt from Back Azimuth Consulting, Ben Chapman, Head of Popular Music at the BBC, Paul Madden from Automatica and Hubert Sepidnam (AKA Mr Taster) from Kaspid.

I really enjoyed all 4 of these sessions.

Bill looked at what search data reveals about customer needs and desires. We need to understand searchers – search suggest and related searches need to be leveraged as this is what people want to know around those root topics. We need to understand query intent better, as this can be great opportunities for new products and services to drive a business forward. Language has to be used in the way people looking for them use, its no good using internal jargon – forcing users down that path doesn’t work!

Ben from the BBC looks after all the popular radio channels. Ben overcame some technical challenges to deliver a really interesting presentation about the challenges of getting content out onto the website whilst the audience interest was high (i.e. it has to get out immediately, or interest wanes!).

Liveness and Friendship are the 2 core drivers of all BBC radio now – listen, watch and share!

Paul is a speaker that I’ve seen a few times before, and have always really enjoyed and RIMC was no different. Paul whizzed through a presentation about building a Twitter Bot Army (I really want to get to see those slides again, as I just couldn’t write fast enough). This presentation took us through why you’d want a Twitter Bot Army, what you need to do to build it, and what you might want to do with it. The golden rules here seemed to be mixing up real outsourced people with some automation and most importantly, don’t be anti-social.

Hubert, AKA Mr Taster led us through a really fun presentation looking at how to operate on social media in countries like Iran where he came from, where Twitter, Facebook, YouTube; even Google AdWords are banned.

Seeing as they couldn’t get any traction from the main company account (Facebook is for fun right, no one wanted to read SEO articles on there), they created a persona called Mr Taster, full of adventures and cartoons from tasting lots of food. Despite Facebook being banned in Iran, this got fantastic local pick up and by all accounts Mr Taster is quite the celebrity these days!

Internet Marketing Sessions

In this final session before lunch we had 3 more presentations squeezed in. First up we had Matt Neal from BrightSparx, followed by Massimo Burgio from Global Search Interactive and finally Ludvik Høegh-Krohn from OMG.

Matt was looking at how Social and Search are not the new TV, but instead are the new telephone. This presentation looked at why businesses shouldn’t start using social because its popular, without having a driving reason to actually be using it. Why use it? How does it fit in? What will you get out of it? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before getting involved.

Ludvik looked at the new GTLD applications being made (which could cost some businesses and groups a couple of million Euros!). These were mostly being broken down in to 4 groups; Brands, City/Areas, Generics and Communities.

There is only a short window left on applications here though, so if you are thinking of applying you’d better do it soon. Ludvik suggested that there could be PR benefits for the first few big brands to start using a .brand domain. I’m not convinced that these will be that huge, as .com’s are so deeply engrained in the user psyche at the moment, but it will certainly be interesting when some of these applications get approved and sites start to use them.

Massimo looked at Social Media Policies. What are they? Why do you need one? This was a really energetic performance, and my favourite example policy was simply “Don’t be stupid”. Massimo closed with a really good video by the Department of Justice in Victoria, Australia and this was so well produced I’ve embedded it below:

Making the Most of Facebook

The first session after wolfing down lunch was with Charles Dowd from Facebook, who offered us an insight behind the scenes there.

I though Charles was brave to acknowledge Eli’s concerns about the Filter Bubbles, and said that Facebook were constantly aware of this and looking at ways to ensure that the users don’t just get tied in to these bubbles.

Some of Charles more interesting points were:

EVERY page you look at on Facebook is personalised specifically to you.

A lot of their ideas come from their hackathons and hack culture, including the phone app and the timeline features.

One of their favourite motto’s is “Move Fast and Break Things” – focus on getting things done. Also, that if you never fail, you probably aren’t trying hard enough.

PPC & More Sessions

As I don’t use PPC particularly often specifically myself, I often find it interesting to learn more about this side of Search Marketing. Here we had Phil Greenwood from Microsoft, Ólafur Kr. Ólafsson from Nordic eMarketing and Bardur Orn Gunnarsson from Hvitahusid.

Phil’s presentation was titled “The Mafia, Bachelor Parties, Black Hat and Me” and started with a marketing effectiveness quiz where the audience scored themselves on how much they had influence over marketing with their roles.

The message here was that Marketing and Innovation are what produces results. Everything else comes at a cost. We need to get ahead of analytics and develop much deeper customer insights.

Be the voice of your customer in your organisation, and pre-launch market like hell to generate early awareness of products and services. Most of all though, “Be Lucky”!

Ólafur looked at the bigger picture beyond Google Adwords. You have to use marketing tactics hand by hand, and say it like you mean it. Offline and online marketing should never be a head to head duel, and should focus on supporting one another.

We were shown a case study looking at the lack of visibility between a Home Improvement show sponsor and the tiles they had (and what they didn’t do to join up those segments).

Bardur’s session looked at paid search being the beginning, not the end, allowing for real time market research.

This centred on another case study, using Facebook ads to A/B test to identify what the audience wanted (in this case, it was looking at the local Airline and what route they should be looking to add to their flight plans).

The lesson mostly learned from this was that you had to be careful about the results found on only one medium. When this market research was carried out on different platforms it produced varying results, and the aggregated scores across all the areas that they used for this had very different results to the initial Facebook only tests.

Organic with a Twist Sessions

The final sessions that I’ll be properly writing up were the organic with a twist presentations.

There were 4 presentations in this section, with Brent Payne from BaldSEO, Motoko Hunt from Adobe, Barbara Coll from WebMama and Sepita Ansari from Catbird Seat.

Brent started these sessions with Social Media to Improve SEO. Brent urged us to get involved and start talking, explaining about his rule of thirds – 1/3rd activities on social platforms should be Personal, Self/Company Promotion and Interesting/Useful Info.

Brent looked at the ways you can bypass SEO results for particular terms by helping “enhance” (ok, the word was “manipulate”) Google Suggest results to display messages that will push users directly to your site, without going to the main SERP they might have been thinking to search for originally.

There was some controversy on this talk – I’m not going to get in to those, but the over-arching message was “We, as SEOs, have one task…get results for clients. We should not care about anything beyond that.”

The methods used for the Google Search Suggest manipulation were quite interesting – particularly the final ones of these that we were asked not to repeat. I can certainly see it would be fun (and potentially make some clients lots of money) to play around with these techniques!

Next up was Barbara Coll with SEO, Keywords and the Sales Funnel. This centred on making sure you identify the right sort of phrases across the spectrum of buying cycles, producing content for education, content for product spaces and much more.

A lot of this resonated strongly with me, as in the past some of the most successful campaigns I’ve worked on have been built on the foundation of producing truly worthy resource content to cover users at the research stages of the cycle, the purchase and the post purchase. Dominating all these areas in a particular niche is certainly an effective content based SEO Strategy. Most of all though, keep building this content up – there is always more to write about!

Motoko took us through an the process that Adobe went through to bring search activities at Adobe in house, and breaking out from the multi-agency model that they’d used previously. This was all about reducing the number of cooks in the kitchen, streamlining processes and being responsible for achieving the required growth targets.

This allowed the development of an over-arching strategy for search that was integrated at all levels. It meant that best practice guidelines could be adopted by all the stakeholders at every stage and that KPIs could be unified as much as possible, as everyone knew what was being measured and why.

Sepita looked at Large Scale Linkbuilding. This presentation took us through what you need with link campaigns at larger scales, looking at why it was necessary for competitive terms, quality vs quantity, trust & social signals, whilst of course being “invisible” to Google – needing to be as natural as possible.

We were presented with further information on anchor text variations (brand, non brand and beyond), link location, sitewide vs content links, deeplink vs homepage ratios, follow/no follow and velocity. Plenty of food for thought was given here, as well as some ideas of what you could (and shouldn’t) do to get what you need.

The Dark Session

I don’t really want to write up too much from this session. It was great fun and definitely thought provoking, but some of the topics were not all that suitable for sharing, and there was definitely some “adult” themes running through it.

This panel was made up of Fantomaster, Mikkel DeMib from DeMib and Peter Van Der Graaf from SearchSpecialist.

I think the chord was struck with the following statements though:

“It’s not about ‘hats’, its about achieving goals” and

“Blackhat shouldn’t necessarily ‘harm’ innocent bystanders”

Closing thoughts

I’ll return to my title… just WOW. We’ve had such an awesome, unforgettable time in Iceland and we absolutely cannot wait to return.

A huge thanks to Kristjan Mar Hauksson, founder of Nordic eMarketing, his family and all of the team that organised the event. Everyone truly made us feel welcome. All you UK (and beyond) search marketers reading this should start planning for coming along with Nichola and I next year!

Now I just have to hope that videos of my singing at the after party don’t surface anywhere – I’ll save that particular public embarrassment for BrightonSEO in a months time!

I’ve done my best to link everyone up when I could find the right places – let me know if I’ve missed any though!

Also, thanks to Jackie Hole for letting me borrow all the pictures!

The post Just WOW… Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference #RIMC12 appeared first on theMediaFlow.

Thinkvisibility 7 Highlights from @ismepete

Peter Handley — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:57:11 +0000

It was time once again for one of my favourite conferences with ThinkVisibility 7, and Nichola and I took the mammoth trek on a road trip to represent for southern England. Before I get started with my round up, I do want to thank Dom and his ace team for putting on yet another cracking event. The highlights from the sessions I attended are below:

SEO for Ecommmerce, Barry Adams from Pierce Communications

The day kicked off for me watching Barry’s tips for ecommerce SEO. This is something I’ve done quite a lot of over the years, and there were some really good ideas on enhancing what I’m already doing here.

Below are a few of the main highlights:

Focus on where the money is. The keywords bringing the greatest revenue aren’t always the ones that bring you the most traffic, so focus on the money first

Use site search tracking in GA for ideas on potential keyword targets

Make sure you structure your site properly with appropriate internal linking anchors. Don’t forget the breadcrumbs!

Where possible get multiple high res product images. Don’t just use JavaScript to display these, as this might prevent them showing up in image searches (alt tag them too)

Use easy and intuitive faceted navigation, using appropriate SEO focused facets. Use URL parameters to block facets that have less SEO value. Be careful of duplicate content though!

Get delivery information on all product pages – don’t make users click through to a specific page, taking them away from product and reducing chances of sale.

don’t 404 your out of stock items. 301 them if they go permanently to retain that value.

Product reviews – use schema (I love rich snippets!)

Link building efforts should be focused to category pages where possible

Great way to kick off the day, and I was really glad to have met Barry finally after a long time talking online. You can find his SEO for Ecommerce slides in full over on slideshare.

Link building with Swiss Toni, Jon Quinton from SEOgadget

Our next session was off to see our good friend Jon’s ThinkVisibility debut. Jon showed us lots of funky tricks to help identify good link opportunities as quickly as possible, using all sorts of data sources and pulling them all in to excel.

My main highlights here were:

‘Link building can be like making love to a beautiful woman’

Use google docs to scrape link prospects, and pull in metrics to assess potential targets authority.

Use SEO tools for excel (I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while) to pull in page rank and social metrics

Make link prospects offers they can’t refuse.

Only use really good content – its not an area to scrimp on costs for poorly written articles.

Cheap content is a false economy (so true!)

Well done Jon – great presentation, and I’ll look forward to seeing some more from you in the future! You can see Jon’s post and slides over on Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni at SEOgadget.

Website analytics – 60% of the time it works every time, Anna Lewis from Koozai

Anna is another good friend who I was really looking forward to seeing speak. Anna clearly has some good ways to use analytics – helping to find the right kind of numbers from it, as well as finding them faster.

She rightly talked about making sure that data you use, and present to clients needs to have both context & authority.

Determine the right metrics for customers and create custom reports to look at the factors as simply as possible

Use APIs to speed up these processes and to ensure you don’t rely on sampled data. Either learn to code, copy and paste or outsource this work.

Not provided traffic – look at landing pages of this traffic to gain better intelligence as to what might have brought visitors there.

With multi touch attribution set up custom channels to review data more accurately. You can see Anna’s presentation and slides over on the Koozai blog.

25 Useful Tips on WordPress, Dan Harrison from WP Doctors

Another session I’d been looking forward too, I was really torn here as to whether to watch this or go see Carla Marshall from Sorbet Digital presenting in video SEO. Nichola went off to watch that one, so I’m hoping she’ll share her insights once we’ve recovered from the weekends exertions.

Back to WordPress, Dan whizzed through his tips for WordPress (I reckon he could have done 50, but needed Q&A time too). I really liked the shirt he had made for the event:

Fortunately ahead of the event, I talked him out of a ninja themed shirt!

Anyway, on to the content. Dan highlighted the ways on speeding up WordPress using caching and assorted other techniques, shared tips for encouraging social sharing and ways to set it up properly in the first place. I thought the CTA buttons looked interesting and Dan showed us lots of ideas for using gravity forms.

Dan also turned this into an ebook, so you can see all his tips!

Saying Stuff Is Dead… Is Dead, James Carson from Bauer Media

This was possibly my favourite session of the day, but was also the one I took the least notes on. It was fun and engaging (I loved the ‘Steve Jobs IS dead’ joke ).

This presentation looked at how most things that are written about as being dead, actually aren’t. SEO, Email, Facebook; none of these things are dead!

Great stuff from James! James has his slides up on his blog already too.

From URL to Result, Pierre Far from Google

This was a really interesting session, and the first one I’d ever seen from an actual Googler.

It looked at indexing of the Internet, and looked at the process of how this happened (this wasn’t to do with the described ‘magic’ of how rankings were determined however).

I was intrigued that there had been a new smartphone Googlebot thrown out into the wild recently, and Pierre encouraged us all to setup email forwarding on Webmaster Tools messages, as they are sending more than ever now (I didn’t really know this existed, so will go and hunt for this).

I was also particularly fascinated to learn that crawl budgets are not set for ‘sites’, but are instead budgeted by servers. Google call this host load, and do it this way to minimise the chance of breaking a server, but still looking at as many URLs as possible.

I’ve not found any links to this presentation, so let me know if you find a copy available somewhere.

Final Summary

There is a real family, community oriented feel to this conference that many others could learn from – there is a really sociable feel to this event, and it’s always great to meet up with a set of like minded peers again, as well as meeting a bunch of other old friends for the first time.

This time around there was once again a great selection of speakers, although with an emphasis on letting some fairly new speakers get up and show us their stuff. It was a great opportunity to see some folks delivering different angles on things than I’d seen in the past, and I’m hoping to take some inspiration from them and try and dip my toe into having another go at doing some speaking if I can get an opportunity at some stage this year.

It was another fantastic event all round, as they have been every time I’ve trekked up to Leeds for ThinkVisibility. Where else would you see a bouncy castle in a casino?

There are lots of interesting pictures from the event over on Flickr.

Thanks again to Dom and the team for having us, and I hope to see you all again in September, if not before!

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My Most Used Search Marketing Tools

Peter Handley — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:11:47 +0000

As a result of moving jobs recently to come and join theMediaFlow, I’ve had to re-audit the tools that I use on a regular basis, as well as moving all my bookmarks across. I was incredibly grateful for the Google Chrome Syncing functionality.

In my last role, we had a number of internal tools that I’ve had to find replacements for or just stop using the equivalent of. As a result, it’s made me think closely about the tools that I needed to be bringing across, look for some more modern variants in some cases, as well as making sure I find some new ones to help with the day to day role.

Some of these are SEO specific, and others are more general useful tools to aid productivity, but I thought that this would be a decent topic to write my first blog for theMediaFlow on. I hope you find some of them useful, and be prepared for a fairly long list!

SEO/Search Marketing Tools:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider -

This tool has changed my working life immeasurably for the better. I first started talking to the Screaming Frog tool about this whilst it was in development well over a year ago now, as I was looking for a tool that could help me check with the implementation of the canonical tag across a website.

From an on-site audit perspective, nothing beats this for me. You can evaluate titles, descriptions, keywords, headings, canonical tags, internal link patterns. You can review specific inlinks and anchor texts to specific pages, review broken links and links passing through internal redirects. I’m sure that there are plenty of elements that I am still not getting the full benefits from still, but this is a tool I love and recommend incredibly strongly that you try it if you haven’t already.

Google Keyword Tool - I’ve used lots of keyword analysis tools over the years, and found most of them fatally flawed by the data sets supplying the information. Who knows, they may have got better over the years, but I have my doubts (let me know in the comments if there are any worth having a look at).

I don’t exactly trust the data that this tool gives as the potential traffic levels available on terms are rarely anything like what the exact match data suggests is possible. However, I do find that in terms of comparative volumes between phrases that this is a useful indicator of how a keyword might perform in terms of traffic potential.

Excel - I definitely need to get better with spreadsheets, as I’ve been known to tear my hair out at times, but where would I be without Excel? 2012 is the year where I am really going to get my head around better spreadsheet usage.

I know a large number of the SEOs are talking about learning to code this year, but for me, maximizing and improving my Excel usage is a considerably higher priority.

Already though, I wouldn’t be without it, and its an essential part of the Search Marketers tool kit.

Raven Tools - in particular this is replacing the internal tools that I have previously used.

I have a long way to go before I get to grips with everything that its possible to do with Raven – I’ve mostly thus far been using it for the rank checking & competitive intelligence elements for campaigns that I am working on a the moment, and am planning on spending a lot more time getting to grips with all the extra features over the coming weeks and months.

Header Status Checkers – I now mostly use check your server result codes.

GSiteCrawler - this has been mostly superseded for me now with the additional features being added to the Screaming Frog tool, but this is one that I’ve historically had a lot of use from. I used to use it to create XML sitemaps (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider), spotting duplicate content issues (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider) and… ok, maybe I don’t really need to be using this one anymore – if you don’t have a paid subscription for the SF SEO Spider, then it could be useful for creating fairly big XML sitemaps.

Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools - goes without saying really!

Google URL Builder - A handy tool for tagging links up for campaigns.

Google Analytics Configuration Tool - This is a newly released tool from the Raven Tools team to help configure Google Analytics in the way that you need for your website. It has options for helping you to setup Google Analytics accounts for websites with multiple subdomains, track multiple domains in one account as well as configuring site search and 404 tracking. It also helps you to setup Goals for the website, using event tracking methods, helps you to track Facebook page traffic and has a URL Builder.

I’ve actually not used this yet beyond a couple of tests, but can see plenty of uses for this in the future and can definitely see how simple this could make configuring some of these options.

Piwik - This is a new one to me, but I’ve been starting to have a look at this open source analytics package since starting at theMediaFlow. It seems to broadly collect the same sort of information as I am used to seeing in Google Analytics, without Google having access to that data specifically.

MajesticSEO - The link analysis tool that I am most familiar with, I regularly use this one. Useful for identifying potential problems in your backlink profiles, performing competitor intelligence and comparisons. So much data available to be looking at it can be a little daunting at first, but once you get your head around what’s on offer its a valuable resource.

OpenSiteExplorer - Since the demise of the Yahoo Site Explorer, this has been my go-to for quick link spot checks. It also does some good comparisons and visualisations of the data.

Link Research Tools - I’ve historically only really used free tools and MajesticSEO for backlink analysis and have enjoyed having access to these Link Research Tools to review that data from a slightly different source

Cognitive SEO Tools - this is a fairly new tool, and one that is certainly new to me. However, I’ve started to play around with the data that this is collecting for a few clients of late and have really liked the data visualisation that you can produce from it. I suspect that as I start to use this a bit more in the future that I will be finding plenty of additional uses for it, as it seems to have a lot of additional features beyond the link analysis elements that I’ve been using it for mostly so far.

Schema Creator - I actually only found this tool today, but I can see this being really useful for using Microdata as set out by schema.org to mark up People, Products, Events, Reviews and more. It gives you a preview and then the HTML to copy and paste where you want to use it.

Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool - Well, once you’ve implemented schema for your reviews (and recipes which I’ve used a fair bit too), you want to make sure that its possible for it to display with those 5 star reviews in the SERPs. Drop a URL into here and see how Google *might* display your rich snippets. It’s also useful to find any problems that you might have with your code to help you get these working properly. Rich snippets are everywhere in search results at the moment and seem to have fewer barriers for entry at the moment, so now is the time to get them on your site!

Google SERP Snippet Optimiser - I’ve loved the SEOmofo SERP snippet optimization tool since i first stumbled across it. It lets you put your title, description and URL in and generate a preview of how that snippet might look when its live on a Google search.

WHOIS Domain Tools - Always useful to do a bit of snooping. Find out details on the Whois record, registration details and some hosting information on websites you want to know more about.

First Link Checker - I’ve used this tool for a number of years now; it lets you look at the links outgoing on a page and flags to you when you link multiple times to the same URL. It can be useful to identify when you might be over-linking internally to a page on your site – I particularly use this a lot on website home pages or specific pages that I want to investigate further.

SEO Browser - Another old one, but I still find it useful to have a quick look at text only views of a page from time to time.

Hitwise Intelligence Dashboard - Whilst this isn’t a tool as such I tend to find myself checking this data a couple of times a month. I find its search engine share statistics particularly valuable to check in on (it always amuses me as well that Google has the top 2 slots here, with .co.uk and .com engines).

Assorted Productivity & “Other” Tools:

Percentage Calculator - I used to get a lot of stick for this one being in my bookmarks, and yes, I can calculate percentages in excel. But this has been in my bookmarks forever, and for a quick and easy percentage calculation that I don’t want to attempt in my head, I always visit here.

Skype - to keep in touch with those around that I need to be able to communicate with at all times (it’s mostly a smaller extension of my Twitter network).

ToodleDo - I resisted using this in my last place of work, but particularly now, where I am working in multiple locations, the importance of a to-do list that syncs everywhere I go has grown to be invaluable. Throw in the iphone and ipad app and I can access my to do list wherever I am in the world. Much better than the post it notes and scraps of paper that used to litter my desk space.

Evernote - Another app that I’ve started to use as a result of working more frequently in multiple locations (and the primary location that I have written this blog from), Evernote allows you to write notes and attach data to it, and have a central storage and access to that wherever you go, on all the devices that I own. In tandem with Dropbox and Toodledo, these are keeping me organised at the moment.

Dropbox - I’ve used dropbox every now and again over the years, but not really with any seriousness. However, since starting here, having an online storage space where I can access what I am working on everywhere that I am working has become more important. Again, using iphone and ipad apps has proved invaluable whilst out and about

Google Chrome Extensions:

I made the switch to Google Chrome about 18 months ago for the most part, although of course keep other browsers to test differences in SERPs and the like. I regularly make use of the following Chrome Extensions to help make SEO’ing that little bit easier!

SEO Site Tools - A fantastic extension for Chrome, my main browser based tool. Contains a ton of offsite and onsite data about a wealth of factors, it lets you have a quick snapshot of a pages primarily important on page items. A must have for Google Chrome using SEOs.

Pinterest Right Click - Not a search marketing tool at all I guess, but I have really enjoyed adding things to my Pinterest boards – particularly since I found this extension that allows you to right click on an image and pin it without any faff.

PageRank - Pretty simple extension – displays the PageRank of a page. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it with any credibility, but hey, I still like to know.

XML Tree - I didn’t like how Google Chrome displayed XML sitemaps when I looked at them, and this makes them more usable and readable

Number Search Engine Results - Does what it says on the tin, and numbers search results for you – simple!

Google Global - an extension to let you see Google results in different regions. I often forget that I have this extension, but it is handy for some quick research on how your results might appear in other locations when I do remember to use it!

Evernote Web Clipper - in conjunction with using Evernote I’ve been using this to clip articles to Evernote for later reading.

Honourable Mention:

Spotify… ok, this isn’t a search marketing tool at all. But everyone needs some background noise to help the day on its path. I’ve also been enjoying starting to build some playlists for sharing, and will be tweeting about some more of these over the coming months. I am someone that isn’t a complete iTunes hater, and have previously run my music collection mostly through that, but similarly to some of the other things I’m using at the moment, the accessibility between multiple locations is growing in its importance for me these days.

Finishing Up:
For things like Twitter & Facebook, unlike many search marketers, I actually just use the web interfaces. I find that I can dip in and out of the activities on these platforms much more simply as a result of closing down the browser windows, rather than receiving a barrage of notifications when there have been new updates and getting distracted all the time. For the same reason, I have notifications switched off for most things, particularly email.

Hopefully not all of these were completely the usual suspects for this sort of post, although I appreciate that a lot of these are popular tools and bookmarks. I’m always on the look out to develop this toolset further though, so I’d love to hear if there are some obvious tools and bookmarks that I should be adding – please let me know in the comments.

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Bing Ranking Algorithm Includes CTR

Nichola Stott — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:41:54 +0000

I just read Bing have finally confirmed what some of us have suspected for some time. Bing definitely do use CTR as a ranking factor.

Although Bing is currently very much the also-ran, in terms of search engine market share; their partnership with Yahoo! (which will be in effect in the UK before year end) plus their increasing innovations in search technology, plus rather enormous marketing budget means that they will be a serious contender in 2011.

I firmly believe that Bing will start to erode some of Google market share and by the start of 2011 will have at least 10% share if not more. Now is the time to start planning and acting on improving rank on Bing.

What’s the News?

Bing have confirmed that CTR is a factor in their ranking algorithm. This information comes from Barry Schwartz, news editor of Search Engine Land and Schwartz has carefully detailed and personally checked the information with his source, Steve Tullis – Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing. You can read the full story here.

What is CTR?

CTR is the abbreviation for “click-thru rate”. It is a derivative metric determined by dividing the number of times your listing is clicked (clicks), by the total number of times your listing is shown (search impressions), to determine your listing CTR, which is expressed as a percentage.

Example: My site is in position 10 for the term “car insurance”, on Bing, which is searched for 10,000 times a day. I receive 300 clicks a day from Bing, on that listing.

300 /10,000 = 0.03 (expressed as percentage) 3% CTR

What Factors Determine CTR?

Setting aside comparative CTR to competing listings, and the variation afforded by position on-page; in my first-hand experience of working at a search engine, CTR increases or decreases according to assumed relevancy to query term. I.e. the more relevant the page (may be assumed to be by the user,) to the query term, as signified by the title, description and URL of the listing; then the more likely the user will click that listing. Bing generally display the page’ meta title and meta description, as the search result snippet.

What Does this Mean for Rank?

In the Search Engine Land piece, Steve Tullis of Bing is asked if they use CTR as a ranking factor, “yes, we do – but it is one of many factors.” So assuming all other factors determining the ranking order for the sites on a search results page are fairly equal, we might imagine that a listing with compelling, relevant title, description and URL gets a slightly better than average CTR (than might be considered network average,) for the position then this may contribute to that listing moving up the ranking somewhat.

Do I Need to Do Anything?

I’m not a great believer in deliberately optimising for any single known componant of a single search engine’ ranking- algorithm, however in this case we’re talking about click-thru rate; which ranking factors aside, should always be on the agenda for your search engine optimisation team.

I’ve written a rather more detailed piece on four ways to increase organic search CTR for Econsultancy in the past, which is a good place to start. Ultimately, you do need to consider the user journey – in that the query-term, search snippet (normally meta data) and subsequent landing page, all need to provide a relevant and consistent experience. After all; you can optimise the shizzle out of your search result snippet, but if your web page content doesn’t match, you’ve missed an opportunity to convert a potential customer.

I intend to follow up this post with a look at the type of behavioural data CTR as ranking factor provides, plus examine the merits and demerits of CTR as ranking factor.

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London Affiliate Conference – Keynote: Bing, The New Search Experience

Nichola Stott — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:03:41 +0000

Speakers: Cedric Chambaz and Adam Goodman – Microsoft Advertising.

Confession. I bleed purple. I have an emotional as well as professional motive for attending this session. I’m also becomming a big Bing fan of late and I’m pretty excited to see what they come up with this year.

2009 – Bing has established itself as the “best converting” search engine.

Cedric, 34MM UU in the UK across MSN Windows Live Messenger etc. IT’s not all about reach for you – it’s about performance. Today we’re looking at product capabilities focusing on Bing.

Launched June 2009 and is apparently the “best converting” search engine.

One question we always get. Why bother in search? A – because we are committed to succeed. 5 yrs ago Steve Ballmer said “we want to be number 2”, now they are so how to take it further.

Context – in ten years we have seen 100,000% growth in content. Everything has changed including consumer behaviour. It’s way more difficult to get around the web – hence the rise of search. More and more people are searching more and more.

Queries are becoming more complex in string length and composition. Many more variables to consider and consumers are voicing their frustrations with the search experience. Consumers have evolved faster than search.

Bing Promise: – A brand new search experience. Rich and engaging search content to help British consumers reach more content more quickly.

Intent – we switch on the internet because we want to switch on the internet. Just like TV. Don’t really have an objective in mind.

Bing – capturing attention using the UI – the attractive imagery. Intended to be a source of information too, with some rollover features. Images are chosen locally by UK journo.

To the search engine nitty gritty.

Many, many queries are purely navigational – therefore why clutter the SERP with anything other than the desired object. E.g. “William Hill” , you would expect the brand result for William Hill.

Informational searches – delivering the answer in the SERP with the feature “instant answer”. E.g. if you type the ref for your flight “BA74″ in the search box then details of the flight will appear in the SERP, giving an instant answer; such as “BA74 departed LAX at 17:45, on time and is due to land at…”.

In the next few weeks expect to see live sports results in the SERP (done in partnership with in-market content providers). Partners include Sky Sports and Toptable.

UX is at the core. Understanding or catering for intent is key. Hence the left navigation. Categorised search for related query term.

Twitter – Bing were 1^st to market with this integration.

Innovation is a core philosophy. Example – using visual stimulus to search, such as searching premiership players by image. Refine by rollover information on the image or refine criteria in the left-hand links. E.g. “Top Scorers” (This looks awesome).

He quotes John Batelle. “Search engine: the database of intent” (I’ll leave it there.)

Over to Adam, who manages the entertainment and gaming channel. We’re gonna get some stats (whohoo).

Reach – 90% of UK internet base.

Unique functionality and tools. MSN targeting capabilities. Adcentre platform has some sophistocated targetting – including days of the week, age and gender.

3^rd year running NNR reports Bing as best converting search engine in the UK.

Bing searchers 47.4% more engaged than Google searchers.

The remainder is an interesting sales pitch for their various AdCenter tools, with UI screenshots. I’ll leave it there. The tool is called “Mate” and has a lot of deep-dive data, demographics, trends, KW data etc. so look it up.

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Google – Well we can’t all be perfect!

Nichola Stott — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:32:25 +0000

SEO is in some ways a science and at the same time a craft. Given that the search engine algorithms are kept possibly more secret than ‘The Colonels Secret Recipe’, none of us know for certain the definite answer to any SEO question. Our theories of what works and what does not work, must be informed by experimenation; however working with multiple variables in an uncontrolled environment means that we can never be 100% sure that our action is the sole driver of the reaction.

If Immanuel Kant was alive today, I think he’d be an SEO on the side. I think the combination of knowledge fuelled by common results of repeated experimentation, combined with the all- too- common Cartesian doubt (did we really drop a place – or did they gain a place) would seriously appeal to him.

So, it is with some sense of compassion that I wanted to reference this hilarious Google result for the search term “Google Ireland”. Have a look at the top ranking results…

Notes on a small Ireland

How good is that?

Maybe someone did a misspell in the meta keywords, cos – like New Zealand is an Ireland, right? Of course the search engines don’t use meta-keywords to inform the ranking algorithm though.

Regardless. My point is that SEO is an inexact science, though we can use learned inferences and experimentation to support our hypotheses, but when all is said and done – even Google can fall foul of their own algorithm.

Diddums.

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Top 5 SEO Ranking Factors Explained

Nichola Stott — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:13:11 +0000

SEO can be a confusing discipline for many, including those within the online industry. A lot of conflicting advice, secrecy, misdirection and outdated practise still exist. A good way to get a feel for how to cut the bullshit, (if you’re a small business or brand owner, seeking to hire an SEO) is to refer to expert blogs and independent research. A blog search engine such as Technorati can help you refine blogs by subject matter and will also rank blogs by authority. Additionally the consultancy SEOmoz publishes an extensive report every two years Search Engine Ranking Factors, which uses a polling methodology which survey top SEO professionals by invitation only. Such methodology is useful as this means you get the aggregate opinion of a large number of industry leading professionals (72 respondents in 2009 edition.)

We can hopefully help you a little further as here we’ve taken the Top 5 Ranking Factors from the SEOmoz report, and explained what they refer to in layman terms.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

Anchor text refers to the clickable text part of a hyperlink. Anchor text is thought to be weighted quite highly in search engine algorithms as the linked text is normally highly relevant to the landing page. Thus, the anchor text of a link is an indicator of what the linked page is about and can help search engine spiders understand the subject of the target webpage better.

It is best to try and use anchor text which is similar or identical to the keyword targets for your website. Whether the link is from from an internal or external source, even if you can’t use one of your keyword targets, never, ever use a generic phrase such as ‘click here’.

2. External Link Popularity

External link popularity is a measure of the quality and quantity of external links that point to your website. External link popularity is an off-page factor that is supposedly impartial. The theory is that the more links that point to your website, the more popular it is therefore the more useful the pages should be. Content-rich sites should attract lots of links easily; content-poor websites should find it difficult to attract websites.

However it isn’t just about the quantity of links – it’s also about the quality. Not all incoming links are equal; a link from a well-repsected site from a well-respected page (such as the BBC’s homepage) will be worth far, far more than 10 links from an obscure link directory. Naturally, the more respected the website is, the harder it is to get a backlink therefore the more weight the link will carry.

One-way links are thought to be the best kind of link to have (where Site A => Site B only). Reciprocal linking (where Site A => Site B, and Site B => Site A) is useful, particularly if both websites are well respected, however the link is not thought to carry as much weight as a one-way link. Three way links (Site A => Site B => Site C => Site A) are at attempt by some webmasters to create more ‘natural’ looking links. Three way linking can sometimes be better than normal reciprocal links as each link looks like a one-way link.

3. Diversity of Link Sources

Link diversity refers to the number of different root domains that link to your website. Although link quality and link quantity are important, the variety of links is also a critical factor in the search engine algorithms. Example www.themediaflow.com/about and www.themediaflow.com/contact are two different links but are not diverse as the root domain is the same ‘themediaflow’.

The more domains that link to you, the more trust and authority your site is likely to have. Links from a variety of sites are also likely to create new traffic opportunities as well as giving your site exposure to a larger audience. Linking repeatedly from the same domains also looks slightly artificial – a wider sphere of influence means your site will tend to look more authentic.

Having a wide source of links is also a good insurance policy – if you have links from just one or two websites, what if one of the sites loses all of it’s content? You’ve suddenly lost a whole bunch of links. Or what if the search engines adjust their search engine algorithm? You could be out in the cold.

As a final word on link building, when you are building links for your site, don’t just look for the followed links (when links are created, you can apply an HTML attribute called ‘nofollow’ to the link which tells the search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the SERP. Many blogs, directories and bookmarking sites have ‘nofollow’ applied as standard to any link). OK, ‘nofollow’ links won’t pass your website pages any link juice however it is slightly suspicious to only have full-fat links pointing at your website – it will probably look more natural if you have diversity in your links. Also, link building is not just about the SERP – it’s about traffic. Some of the ‘nofollow’ links may actually drive good (free) traffic at your site – and having a diverse source of traffic is great insurance against search engine algorithm changes.

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

There are two titles that are worthy of mention: the first is within the metadata and the second is within a link.

Metadata title tags should appear in every page on your website and every page on your site should have unique title tags created for it. Titles should always include the keyword targets for that particular page and it is also a useful place to put in alternate spellings in the hope of ranking well (e.g. customisation vs customization). Always front-load your titles with your keywords, but don’t put too many in as this will ‘water down’ the relevance.

Link titles serve two purposes: to help users predict what will happen if they follow a link and to give more relevance pointers to the search engine spiders. Link titles are usually seen by the user when their mouse pointer hovers over a link. The link title should be descriptive, however they should ideally be less than 60 characters and certainly no more than 80 characters long. The link title should be used for supplementary information and to backup the anchor text of a link.

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

The link distance refers to how many hops you are away from a ‘Trusted Domain’. The closer you are to a ‘Trusted Domain’ the more trust/authority you inherit from that link.

So what exactly is a ‘Trusted Domain’? Trusted Domains are domains which search engines believe they can trust. Unfortunately, there is no known public list of trusted domains although places such as brands are likely to be on the list. Once a site is classed as a trusted domain, it is believed that any link published within the site will get a little bit of extra link juice. Even if you can’t get a link directly from a trusted domain, by having a link from another domain which does have a link from the trusted domain, you will probably still see a little extra link juice.

I’d say we’re pretty much in agreement with the SEOmoz Top 5 Ranking factors, though there are a number of other factors that can have both a positive and negative effect on your ranking in the SERPs that are also not to be ignored. Finally; one thing that is worth stressing time and again, is that you need to have a fair amount of good- quality, original content that grows and updates frequently. When it comes to SEO you really can not polish a turd.

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Why Metadata Matters

Nichola Stott — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:47:17 +0000

We’re often asked by our clients ‘What is metadata?’ and ‘Why is metadata important?’ Metadata quite literally means ‘data about data’. In terms of web pages, metadata allows you to describe your website, mostly for the sake of search engines but it can also benefit your users too.

The HTML format allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, most commonly keywords and description however it can be expanded to highly-granular information such as the Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.

Metadata is typically hidden from a user when they visit a webpage, however a search engine spider will be able to pick up the metadata. Metadata helps a search engine spider understand what a webpage is about, helps to categorise the webpage, and therefore helps to facilitate search and retrieval (NISO, 2001).

Four Key Reasons Why Metadata Matters

1. Meta data works on image-lead pages
It’s a bit of a cliché but there is some truth in the statement oft-used by search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, that “content is King”. Certainly having a lot of content, that changes and updates regularly is a key criteria in optimising for search engines; however there are many valid situations, web pages and entire websites that are very image-lead. As an example many web designer and artist’ websites would naturally contain a gallery of graphical and image lead work. Ensuring you have detailed meta-data describing the site and page content and the nature of your business ensures that search engines have something to get hold of other than just the image content.

2. Meta data expands on existing content
There is often more than one way to describe something – perhaps there is an incorrect way of describing something or there is a commonly used slang expression. If you want to keep your pages corporate and don’t want to include this alternate content however you’d like to rank in the search engine results page (SERP) for the slang, adding them to your metadata may help you rank well for text which doesn’t actually appear on your on-page content.

3. There’s more than one way to spell
There is sometimes more than one way to spell a particular word, for example English spellings tend to prefer the ‘s’ whereas American spellings prefer ‘z’ (e.g. specialisation vs specialization).

If you want to keep your website consistent, you will want to ensure that you keep your descriptions and spelling conventions consistent throughout all your webpages. However what if you run an international website and you want to rank for the alternative spelling?

Metadata can help by allowing you to add these alternate spellings into your metadata. Effectively this data is hidden from your user when they visit the webpage so there are no consistency issues; however it allows search engine spiders to potentially rank your webpage for a variety of other terms.

4. Good metadata increases click-through rates
Search engines will often use the title and meta descriptions of each webpage when they list the result in the SERP. Pages with good metadata are much more likely to be clicked on than ones with poor metadata for example:

Poor metadata – the title of the page is unhelpful, the description doesn’t say anything about the company.

Better metadata – the title of the page explains what the company does and includes keyword targets, the meta description gives more detail about the company’s services and what’s on the page.

If any of the contents of your metadata match up with the phrase the user has searched for, the keyword terms will be bolded up in the SERP. Research has shown that users are more likely to click on a result the more bolded keywords there are in the listing, thus it is important to plan your metadata carefully and ensure that every page on your website has unique, hand-crafted metadata.

However if you leave your metadata out, it’s not the end of the world – search engines will often try and use some of the on-page content in the SERP if you don’t have a meta description and there are “over 200” factors which influence a web page’s position in the SERP for a given keyphrase (that’s the Google secret sauce) therefore you may still rank well even if you leave this key information out. It does tend to be harder and take a lot longer!

References

Google (nd); Google Basics – Serving results
Available from: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&ctx=sibling
[cited: 25 August 2009]

NISO (2001); Understanding Metadata
Available from: http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf
[cited: 25 August 2009]

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