Do optimised Footer links work for SEO?

Most SEO 'experts' are divided on this question. Rand Fishkin argues that they have little or no value and in some respects I have to agree with him.

Just.

Rand points out 5 pretty good reasons not to get too caught up spending hours and hours optimising your footer purely for SEO reasons.

Rather than re-write everything Rand says, I'll list them directly:

1. Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically
   Check out the evidence - Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links, Bill Slawski uncovers patents suggesting the same and anecdotal evidence suggests Google might do this (or go further) as well. Needless to say, if you want to make sure your links are passing maximum value, it's wise to avoid the footer (particularly the footer class itself).
   
   
2. Footer links are often not the first link on the page to a URL
   Since we know that the first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts and footer links, while anchor text optimized, are often a second link to an already-linked-to target, they are likely not to have the desired impact.
   
   
3. Footer links get very low CTR
   Naturally, since they're some of the least visible links on a webpage, they receive very little traffic. Thus, if algorithms like BrowseRank or other traffic metrics start to play a role in search rankings, footers are unlikely to have a positive impact.
   
   
4. Footer links often take a page beyond a healthy link total
   Many pages that already have 80-100 links on the page are going to lose out when they add a footer with another 30-50 links embedded. The link juice passed per link will go down and the value of each individual link is lowered.
   
   
5. Footer links can be a time suck
   The time you spend crafting the perfect link structure in the footers could be put towards more optimal link structures throughout the site's navigation and cross-linking from content, serving both users and engines better.
   

They're all good, solid reasons not to deploy an optimised footer but personally I think optimised Footer links transcend SEO simply because they can help people better navigate your site. Not everything should always be focused towards search engines, people matter too.

If the content on a web page is good enough, I often find myself reading (or these days scanning) right to the end. Without wanting to state the bleeding obvious, that's usually at the bottom of a page, and I often click the footer links to find additional and related content (if there's a footer there).

But from an SEO perspective, do they really hurt as much as Rand says?

Personally, I think not.

Let's look at Google.com for a minute; the gushing well-spring of search itself.

Google has (for all intents and purposes) an optimised footer promoting some of its own services.

And guess where they both rank at Google.com for their declared search terms, "Business Services" and "Advertising Programs"?

Yep, you guessed right. First and First.

The point here is that anchor text rich footer links can and do work.

And if you have a large website, it means you have a large number of internal links all pointing to each target page, which I don't think can be a bad thing.

A little off-topic, but one thing I immediately noticed about Google's own result for itself is the search result snippet. This ties back into last week's blog post about DMOZ editor descriptions showing up in your Google results.

See the similarity?

If Google can't get this right, then what hope have the rest of us got?

Till next week.

Domain names, misspellings and SEO

Author: Chris Thomas on 12 March 2010
Latest posts

* AdMob Reviewed?
* What kind of offers should I make on my site?
* How to make online videos that sell
* How to make money from your conversion page
* Does page load speed affect my search engine ranking?

Buying a keyword rich domain can give you an incredible boost in the rankings without having to do very much at all.

By way of a quite recent example, I built a website on Wordpress one Sunday afternoon in mid-February for a friend so she could talk about her favourite topics, food and mood. It's www.completenutrition.com.au and almost as soon as it was indexed by Google, it ranked number one for the (ever-so-reasonably competitive and no prizes for guessing) search term "complete nutrition".

No links were built to it, no real SEO was performed, but in spite of lots of other websites being quite well optimised for that search term and being very well established, her new blog took them all out.

Instant search engine traffic right there.

There are literally thousands of examples like this; from http://www.birthdaycakes.com.au to http://www.laptopbags.com.au all enjoying number one positions at Google for those search terms (and presumably a truck load of targeted traffic).

There are many other benefits to buying keyword rich domain names. They can protect your own ranking positions, so for example if you already rank highly for popular search terms, it might pay to buy the keyword rich domain names to stop someone else buying them and suddenly out ranking you.

They can also be valuable. There are lots of examples where popular, keyword rich domains have sold for many thousands of dollars. Not a bad investment really.

The other thing that often gets overlooked (and this is a bit leftfield) is the concept of buying keyword rich domains with misspellings to get rankings and traffic.

Here's a screenshot of estimated monthly traffic from February for a common misspell of the word "jewellery".



Obviously if you put up a website you need to be a bit careful not to look like a silly, typo-challenged loser! But you could have some fun with it, get some traffic and try and point some of it to your main site.

If you run a blog, you can be a little cheeky and optimise it further (for misspellings) by adding comments using the misspellings you're targeting, because then it's not 'you' it's your 'visitors'!

Obviously a lot of domains have already been taken, but if there's a long tail key phrase that's driving traffic and strong revenue to your site either organically or through AdWords, you should think about buying it.

Put up a cheap as chips website to get people through to your 'real' store through some content and links.

Does Page Load speed affect search engine ranking?

Is your site slow to load? Have you checked it lately? How would you even know?

In 2009 Google flagged to website owners that the speed at which pages on your website load (or “site speed”) is an important metric you should be assessing from a usability perspective.

And it’s not just a matter of upgrading your website hosting to a faster, dedicated hosting plan, it’s also about creating elegant code, which loads quickly and is nimble for browsers.

Developers take note.

Research shows that website conversion rates are improved when a website is lightening fast, as people spend less time waiting and more time browsing in their task -based mindset.

Google does seem to spending a lot of money educating us about ways we can improve the speed of our websites with this dedicated “let’s make the web faster” section.

And recently Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Web Spam team) weighed in on the act, saying in a late 2009 interview that although Google doesn’t currently factor in page speed to its ranking algorithm, it’s something “...that could change in 2010”.

I think we can read that as, “...it probably will change in 2010”; so here comes yet another change to watch out for in amongst the 400 or so algorithm changes every year.

I think you might be able to get the ‘seo jump’ on competitors in 2010 if you spend a little time optimising page load time on your site. That’s got to help your online sales.

To check the speed of your site, get the FireFox Plug-in, FireBug then add YSlow, or “PageSpeed” to find out!

Without going into too much detail, these tools will help you or your developer understand which aspects of your pages and associated code cause page-loading times to slow down.

You can upload the results from the Page Speed (and YSlow) to http://www.showslow.com to see how your site ranks amongst some of the biggest and the best.



Speaking of concern, looking at the screenshot above, there’s quite a discrepancy between the two tools! YSlow says the MSN website (second from the bottom) gets a page load score of 68% where as the PageSpeed Tool returns 81% for the same site.

So which score will Google use?

Given YSlow is a Yahoo product, my money’s on PageSpeed.

Google’s not saying anything, but I’m guessing any ‘score’ slower than 80% could be cause for concern. You should at least forward this answer to your developer if you’re worried.

Another aspect to consider is the physical location of your webhosting. Ideally you should host in the primary country where your audience lives as this will “generally speaking” make your website load quicker for them.

Obviously it’s tempting to take your web hosting offshore as it can be a lot cheaper, but it is getting much competitive here in Australia and you can pick up some pretty good hosting deals these days.

Speed thrills.

Affiliate Marketing, link building & SEO

Let’s face it, for most of us, link building is a time consuming and (sometimes) soul destroying past-time! (I have to say though, I actually really enjoy it! – But I’m a bit weird like that).

But that’s enough about me.

I think that if you’re an online retailer, you might want consider investing some of your link building budget in an affiliate campaign. The reason is that if you set this up properly, you’ll receive lots of inbound links from affiliates, who often deep link into your product and category pages.

Getting links to pages other than your home page (known in the trade as “deep links”) isn’t easy, so this is a neat way to get other people to do a lot of the hard work for you.

Basically there are three ways you can go about setting up your affiliate campaign:

1. Create your own affiliate campaign
2. Use what I call an “affiliate portal” website
3. Use a combination of both

Creating your own ‘propriety’ affiliate campaign involves a bit of mucking around; you’ll need to install the software on your own server. I haven’t personally used this software, but I’ve heard good reports about http://www.idevdirect.com/. You’ll need to promote you own affiliate program yourself and wait for people who actually visit your site to sign up for your program themselves.

Affiliate portals such as www.clixgalore.com.au, www.commissionmonster.com.au and http://www.dgmmarketing.com.au allow you to create your campaign as a merchant, and they promote your campaign to a bunch of potential affiliates who are members of their networks.

This is probably the easiest method if you’re just starting out. They manage all the tracking and payments on your behalf (for a fee of course!)

Basically you’ll need to setup your promotions with banners and recommended text links etc so that affiliates who join your program can cut and paste your links and banners into their own websites. Instant links!

Clixgalore does allow for search engine friendly text links and linkable banners, as does commission monster, but at this stage DGM does not.

If you’re using a proprietary affiliate program, ideally you’ll also set your banners up so they have image alt text, which becomes anchor text for search engines when they view the link, so you can get the most ‘bang’ for your SEO buck.

Unfortunately, the affiliate portals that I’m aware of don’t provide image alt text settings for affiliate banners.

Anyway, the upshot to all of this is you’ll enjoy increased traffic from your affiliate links, deep links from their websites to your home page, category and product pages and hopefully, more online sales as a result of improved search engine ranking positions as well as your affiliate traffic.

With this strategy, everyone wins!

My budget is tight, what’s the best bang for my buck getting more traffic to my website?

Author: Chris Thomas on 9th November 2009

Traffic. It's the blood that courses through your website's veins.

But there's good traffic and there's bad traffic, and anyone can get a bucket load of crappy traffic. All you have to do is wander over to Google and type in "buy traffic" then pick a site and spend a few hundred dollars buying tens of thousands of visitors a month!

I can tell you now; you might as well pass the time at home setting fire to $100 bills (unless you need to get banner ad impressions up!). While the stats in your analytics package will look impressive, the needle on your website goals (sales, conversions, newsletter sign ups) won't have moved an inch. That's because the traffic you buy (through expired domain redirection - and a host of other ‘shady' pop under tricks) isn't targeted.

You'll probably melt your server too, so be warned.

But be my guest, knock yourself out. Try it for yourself!

So what's good traffic?

Good traffic is targeted traffic (it's a mantra, so keep saying it over and over again). It makes up the second pillar of online marketing, no matter how big or small you are.

You need:
1. A good product or service.
2. Targeted traffic.
3. A website that converts.

Targeted traffic comes from a search engine, a Google Ad, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, other referring sites and bookmarks.

So frankly speaking, I'm not interested in pure numbers, I like to see the best quality traffic hit your site because it has the highest chance of converting.

Works every time.

Top tips for cheap traffic building:

1. SEO - can take time, but if you get it right and are patient enough, high rankings in search engines will provide lots of traffic for many years to come.

2. Affiliate Marketing - not for everyone, but affiliate marketing can deliver free and targeted traffic into your site and you only need to pay someone for it once a conversion has occurred. It can also be a useful link building tool for SEO as (if you've set it up properly) each link on affiliate site can create link popularity.

3. Google AdWords - yes you need to pay, but if you're keeping an eye on your ROI (conversions versus AdWords spend) then it's worth every penny.

4. Social Media - Facebook fan pages can drive a lot of traffic to your site, and the more fans you get, the more traffic you'll probably receive too. It takes a lot of work, but can be well worth it in the long run. Really great info on how to build a Facebook community here.

5. Twitter - some of our clients are receiving a lot of traffic from Twitter. Build your list of followers, make awesome, compelling tweets and link those tweets to your website. Slow going in the beginning, but can be worth it in the long run. You could also explore advertising on Twitter - try www.ad.ly - and have your ‘tweet' message forwarded (and to some extent, endorsed) to 675,000 of Nicole Richie's Twitter followers! One guy recently made $15,000 in a month using Ad.ly. Scary.

6. Secondary Networks - Getprice, myshopping, get your product list up on these sites and get quite cheap, targeted traffic.

7. Don't forget offline - Display your web address on your car, business card, letter head, email sig and press releases you might send out.

8. Web 2.0 (remember that?) - Any content you create from a blog post to a new article - Digg it, Stumble it, Delicious it, Reddit, etc.

Obviously outsourcing much of the above to an agency will make things more expensive, and if you have the time then that's sometimes the only cost involved. What's the price of time spent with the kids?

I'll leave that for you to decide.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

Using Paid Search (PPC) for Intelligent SEO

Annemarie Hunter - Search Marketing Specialist

We frequently recommend our clients run a paid search (PPC) campaign prior to optimising their website for SEO. The information and insights gained from PPC, specifically Google Adwords, are invaluable for the long-term success and effectiveness of a search engine optimisation strategy.

Keyword Research & Refinement

Using Keyword Research tools such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Google’s Keyword Tool can often display skewed and conflicting results. You never really know the true traffic volumes you can expect, or what variations of a keyword or phrase will deliver the best results.

With paid search however, you get the raw data. You’re able to test an infinite number of keyword variations and track each of them extensively. In addition to the number of “clicks” generated, “impression” data (the number of times an ad is shown) provides a fairly reliable metric for a keyword’s search volume. You may discover the singular version of a keyword outperforms the plural, or that a multi-word phrase is most optimal.

Paid search uncovers the exact keywords and phrases to target organically. This is especially powerful given SEO campaigns can take months to produce solid results. You need to be certain which keywords are worth your time, effort and investment from the outset.

Keywords that Convert

Having thousands of visitors to a website each day means little if they don’t convert. The most valuable insight a paid search campaign can provide, is uncovering the keywords that actually produced a conversion. With Conversion Tracking, it is possible to identify the exact keywords and phrases that resulted in a desired outcome - whether that’s a lead, a sale, a sign-up, an enquiry or a download. Identifying and then using these phrases on the website is hugely valuable for maximising its overall SEO strategy.

Long-Tail Content Opportunities

Searchers are increasingly using “long-tailed” search queries (3 or more words) to find exactly what they need. These refined, highly-targeted, specific searches indicate intent and generally lead to higher conversions. Paid search campaigns allow you to identify and mine these valuable phrases to then create additional, highly-optimised web pages.

Testing Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

One of the most important elements in organic search is the Title Tag. They’re vital in influencing a page’s ranking, as well as a user’s “click decision”. They’re not only very difficult to test, they’re risky in that they may jeopardise the page's current rankings. With paid search however, you’re able to trial multiple ads using various title options. You can then determine which performs better in terms of clicks, CTR or conversions.

Similarly, Meta Descriptions are essential in influencing a user’s “click decision”, due largely in part to the keywords that are bolded. Testing calls-to action, unique selling points and product descriptions with paid search is a useful way to uncover the most effective sales message.

Landing Page Optimisation

A/B split and multi-variant testing through paid search is an effective way to craft the ultimate landing page. With Google Adwords and Google Website Optimiser, you’re able to reveal the better performing page layout elements (content, headings, images, design), as well as the best placement for them. You can test different sales copy, deals, specials and calls-to-action to see which combinations drive the most conversions, to then use in your final version.

Paid search and SEO should work in unison to deliver optimal results and maximise the overall ROI. This relationship needs be on-going and shouldn’t stop once the organic search strategy is producing strong results. No matter how effective an SEO campaign is, there are numerous advantages in using paid search when you’re already ranking organically.

Reliability and SEO

Last year a couple of my friends (and even me personally) made some basic SEO blunders which dramatically affected site rankings. It’s much easier to learn from other people’s mistakes, so benefit from ours!

Mistake number 1. Unreliable Hosting

This problem came when my friends saw their sites almost completely removed from Google’s index. In one case the hosting went down for 2 - 3 days and that’s all it took for nearly all rankings to disappear.

In the other case, the server was configured incorrectly by a developer, which meant Google couldn’t find the site at all for a couple of weeks.

We’ve now set up website monitoring so we’re alerted the moment a site goes down. We’re using www.freewebmonitoring.com – you should too.

It’s taken months for those sites to improve in the rankings, and one in particular is still many positions away from its top 5 position before the trouble started.

Lesson. You get what you pay for. Don’t skimp on your web hosting if search engine rankings are important to your business. If you’re a larger organisation with budget, consider a dedicated hosting server, rather than a shared box. They’re far more reliable.

Remember, Google wants users to have a great experience at its search engine, so if someone clicks on a search result and a “Page not found” error occurs, that’s a poor experience.

Worse still, if the Googlebot gets a “page not found” error on your site, you’ll probably see the search result removed from the index pretty quickly (as my friends did).

Mistake number 2. Forgetting to renew your domain name.

This is one that happened to me! It’s my partner’s website, which when it disappeared from the face of Google, got me in a bit of trouble at home!

Of course I forgot to renew the domain, so when it expired, so did the website.
Once I re-registered, the site was back up and running within hours, but all rankings at Google were lost.

Interestingly, Google seemed to be a little kinder in this instance and quickly returned the site back to its former ranking positions.

The site itself is www.potted.com.au – and it’s kind of an interesting case where the business really only exists in name (and website) only these days, Lib closed the shop a couple of years ago when we started a family.

Way back when Lib first built it, I optimised the site for “indoor plant hire melbourne”, “office plant hire melbourne” and “plant hire melbourne”.

Within a couple of months it ranked first for those three at Google and we used to get a lot of business from that (highly targeted) traffic.

When Lib closed the business, it seemed like such a shame to pull the site down, so, thinking about it for a while, gave a competitor a call. We set up a deal where we would send the enquiry leads through to them in exchange for a commission. I like to think of it as “offline affiliate marketing”.

It’s been a great arrangement for a few years now and continues to provide Lib with modest but helpful income. Provided I remember to renew the domain name every couple of years!

Articles and SEO

Last week I spoke at the Search Engine Bootcamp about Link Building techniques; why link building is important and where to get them.

So, yes, it was a little on the dry side.

I’ve blogged quite extensively about link building before, but I never discussed the benefits of creating articles (or using someone else’s).

Probably the biggest ‘article’ website is http://www.ezinearticles.com. They have thousands of articles on the site published by an army of content producers (or article writers). There are articles on everything from Promotional Mouse Mats For Employees to Wiggles cooking tips!

There are two ways you can leverage the world of free articles.

1. Become a contributor
   
   
2. Publish articles on your site for free.

Become a contributor

If you have a flair for writing, you can sign up to ezineartciles (or the countless other sites which offer this service) and post your articles on the site for other people to use on their websites, email newsletters or blogs.

Ok, so won’t get paid for offering your work directly, however the indirect benefits of unique article creation are numerous.

Perhaps the most important benefit (which ties back to link building) is the ability for you to create powerful, relevant links back to your site from the copy of your article. If your article is picked up by other websites and re-published, your inbound link count can be replicated and increased very quickly.

Rather than me list them all out, other (rather self promotional) benefits can be found on ezinearticles site here.

Become an article publisher

Publishing other people’s articles on your site can also be beneficial. This can especially useful if your site is quite new and you’re looking to flesh it out a little.

More content on your site can help reduce bounce rates (the number of visitors who visit just one page and leave straight away), as interesting content usually has people reading and engaging more with your site.

The downside is that the articles you publish won’t create any search engine ranking benefit due to duplicate content filters being applied. In other words, those pages probably won’t rank at search engines (like Google), as the original article will have priority over your copy.

One thing we have noticed though is that ezinearticle content doesn’t show up when the ‘results from Australia’ button is ticked at Google (because they’re a US based website). This indicates to me that if you did post articles on your Australian site, you might have a chance of ranking for Australian users.

Another useful tip might be to publish a few articles on your site and look at your page view stats from analytics. If one particular article is receiving many more page views than the others, you may consider writing your own unique content version of the article.

That way you can research areas of content that is of most interest to your visitors and provide a highly useful experience (as well as achieve some search engine ranking benefit as you avoid the duplicate content filtering issues discussed earlier).

To sum up, ‘content is (still) king’ and the more content you create on your site, the more targeted traffic you will receive.

Why Use Paid Search (PPC) When You’re Already Ranking Organically?

A common question often asked in online marketing is whether or not to continue using paid search if you’re already achieving top organic search rankings. Why would you pay for traffic when you’re already in position 1 or 2? There are in fact a number of key benefits and sound arguments for keeping your paid search campaigns active despite these great results.

High organic rankings do not always warrant high click throughs

Just because you’re ranking #1 in the natural search results does not guarantee visitor click-throughs. Quite often, a PPC ad itself can be more successful than the organic listing. Why? The calls to action within paid search listings are generally much stronger and more compelling than the title and description found in the natural results. You may well find that turning off your PPC campaign in favour of your highly ranked organic listing results in a vast drop in overall traffic and conversions.

Have a look through your analytics, are your highly ranked pages returning good conversions? Or is the bulk of your traffic coming via your paid search component? Do your organic results contain a clear marketing message? Even if they do, you most probably have more than one offer or more than one target audience to communicate to.

You can’t possibly be ranking #1 for all your keyword phrases

Achieving top rankings for all your keyword variations is extremely difficult in a competitive market. Paid search can give you visibility for those harder to rank key terms. Depending on your business, there are potentially an infinite number of possible ‘long-tail’ keywords and phrases that can only be tapped in to via a fully optimised paid search campaign.

Paid Search enhances your online visibility

Appearing in both organic and paid search listings can help in achieving a stronger brand awareness and visibility online. It can also help to build the overall credibility and trust of your business according to some studies. Dominating the search results has also proven to be an effective online strategy in highly competitive markets.

Paid Search sends additional traffic

Increased search visibility generally leads to more traffic. Studies have shown that multiple exposures within the search results can increase your overall click-through rate (CTR) as customers are more likely to buy when exposed to a company's brand in multiple places.

Further studies have shown that you can double your traffic by being at the top of both paid and organic results.

What’s more, on average, 20% of searchers click on paid search results on any given search. So, if you can obtain additional targeted traffic through a PPC campaign, why wouldn’t you?

You can’t rely on organic rankings

Organic search results are forever fluctuating and are served differently from one searcher to the next. Whether through algorithmic updates, competition, data centres, personalised or universal search, PPC can act as a sort of back-up to the ever changing search landscape.

Paid Search supports SEO

Lastly, but of considerable importance, paid search campaigns are an ideal testing ground for search engine optimisation. The information generated through paid search campaigns is invaluable for an effective SEO strategy. Paid Search campaigns are able to target an endless number of keyword variations and can be tracked extensively to identify which keywords and ad copy send the most traffic and which ones convert.

In the end, having a well optimised and successfully integrated SEO and PPC campaign is a powerful combination. SEO and PPC work hand in hand in delivering superior results and maximising your overall brand exposure and ROI.

Annemarie Hunter - Search Marketing Specialist

Domains, Mirroring and SEO

Complicated topic this week! Thinking caps on please.

If your business has a global presence, one of the biggest headaches is making sure your website shows up at the search engines in all the countries you operate in. To add to the complexity, it’s often helpful to be shown in the ‘local results’ too!

So what factors do search engines like Google take into account when deciding whether to show a website or not?

Domain Name extension

The biggest ‘give away’ is the extension of your domain name. So, if you own www.results-from-the-uk.co.uk – your website will show up in the United Kingdom for both “the web” and “pages from the UK”, no matter where your website is hosted.



However, your website won’t appear in Australia’s Google with the ‘pages from Australia’ button ticked.

Server Location

Google also looks at where your website is physically hosted. If your domain www.hosted-in-australia.com is hosted in Australia, it will appear in both ‘the web’ and “pages from Australia’ results even though it doesn’t have an .au extension.

That’s why you’ll often see .com’s, .org’s and .net’s showing up in a localized search. However, you’ll NEVER see www.results-from-the-uk.co.uk showing up with the ‘pages from Australia’ button ticked.



What’s the best plan?

If you have lots of domains; i.e

• yourbusiness.com,
• yourbusiness.com.au
• yourbusiness.co.uk

…and you want them to appear locally in each country, then the best plan is to create different websites and host them in each country. You’ll need to ensure your content is not duplicated across all the domains, making sure that everything’s unique, otherwise Google might use its duplicate content filter to remove duplicated pages.

Obviously it’s quite onerous to create dozens of websites all filled with unique content – it’d be better if there was just one website which displayed in all your target countries wouldn’t it! So is there a way to do this?

The answer of course is ‘yes’.

Mirroring a website is perhaps the easiest, where you have a single .com domain – with a single associated website but it’s replicated and hosted locally in all your target nations.

The idea is to sync up the main site to your ‘satellite sites’, so that any updates you make to the main site are automatically mirrored to your local sites. Given that the cost of web hosting has become so cheap, it’s now become an option for small to medium-sized businesses to entertain the idea.

All you need is a credit card for the hosting and an experienced developer for the set-up!

6 Steps to optimising your e-commerce products pages

The most daunting prospect for any shopping cart owner is SEO’ing every single product in their shopping cart. If you’ve got thousands of products in your site, you can be forgiven for not even attempting to optimise your product pages. Sometimes when a job seems too big and too daunting it can paralyze all initiative!

So this week’s tips to improve your online sales will be short, easily digestible, and (hopefully) actionable.

1. Break the job down into small, easy bits. Start by targeting and optimising the top 10 best selling products in your cart. Then do the next best 20 and so on.
   
   
2. Make sure you include the name of the product or service in your Page Title Tag. You need to format it so you keep the name of the product or service first, the name of your company second.
   
   
3. The next important page element for SEO is your Heading Tag. Include your product or service name in your H1 tag.
   
   
4. Obviously every product or service needs a description. I’m often shocked by how little effort online retailers take to describe their products. Given that Google needs at least 250-300 words per page to create a complete “relevance” picture, it’s in your interests to make sure your description is fully optimised and that the benefits of the product or service are blindingly obvious. My ten cents; hire a copywriter.
   
   
5. Product images should also be optimised, so name your image with the product’s actual name ie: blue-widget.jpg. Make sure that when you include the picture on the page that you use an image “alt” tag which also uses the product’s name.
   
   
6. If you’re reselling products that are not your own, don’t copy the exact same content from the original manufacturer. Substantially rewrite your copy to avoid having your page penalized by Google’s duplicate content filter. If you have substantially similar content as the original content creator, Google will stop your result from appearing the in the search results.
   

Honestly, if you get into the habit of ensuring your detailed product descriptions are fully optimised with engaging copy which encourages conversions (purchases), you’ll be a long way ahead of most your competitors!

A GlimPSe into the future? GPS and Google

I’ve had a bit more time to digest many of the presentations from the Sydney Search Marketing Expo back in April.

Apart from the usual SEO topics, the major forward looking themes were to do with local search (i.e. Maps), mobile search, social media optimisation and the optimisation of all types of content, not just text.

The folks from Google seemed to offer the biggest clues as to where they’re heading.

Obviously, Google’s Universal Search where images, news stories, video and maps etc can be blended into the Google results pages featured highly.

But I felt there was one important topic which barely got a mention.

It made me suspicious, and when I get suspicious, I start thinking.

Where was GPS in all of this? One of the hottest consumer goods of 2007, GPS sales have exploded with personal hand held and in-car devices almost everywhere.

Every Taxi I’ve sat in recently (thankfully) has a GPS unit stuck to the windscreen. As I sat in the taxi on my way to the Search Marketing Expo I watched the GPS map constantly updating the maps on screen as we travelled along. It was quite mesmerizing.

The next day Marissa Mayer from Google spoke at length about how Google was rolling out streetview in Australia.

Here’s an example from downtown Chicago:

If you haven’t tried Google streetview yet, give it a whirl because it’s quite a fun way to whizz around the streets of a city you’ve never been to before.

So when you combine streetview and local search, what do you get?

At this stage, you get this…

Pretty cool huh!

You get to see local businesses, what they look like and where they are.

But how does all this tie into GPS?

If you examine Google’s previous business strategies (such as investing in Youtube), you’ll notice that there is nearly always a financial return at the end. With Youtube, Google were WAY ahead of the game. They bought it in 2005, but it took 2 years for Google to actually use the videos as part of it Universal results.

Streetview was launched in May last year, and I imagine it’s a big financial investment having cars with 360 degree cameras driving up and down nearly every street of each city.

Look, this is a bit of a long shot but I think Google will probably try and license Streetview to GPS manufacturers. It will allow people to switch between a map view and streetview. If streetview is selected, it will allow Google to highlight local businesses as you’re driving along (in your taxi for example).

You might hear an ad in your cab which say’s something like, “Coming up on your right is Miller’s Pub and Restaurant. Mention this Ad for 20% off your next meal”. The taxi company takes a cut and Google takes a cut from the ad revenue. The local business has an opportunity to stand out in a crowded market place and it can measure (with reasonable accuracy) its conversion rate based on people who mention the Ad.

It’s all there, Google just need to put the whole thing together… If they haven’t already.

My advice?

Move your business to the busiest road to and from the Airport and come up with a compelling offer!

Maximising conversion rates.

When larger companies develop their new websites, they often call on the services of a usability testing company prior to launch. Probably the best known example in Australia is www.usabliltyone.com.au.

I was lucky enough to sit in on a presentation they did at a conference I attended back in February. The case studies showcased were fascinating and demonstrated how designers and developers can sometimes get too close to a project; forgetting how a typical user might interact with their designs.

Unfortunately not all of us can afford the luxury of a new website coupled with usability testing.

Luckily there other (and in some cases free) methods you can use to increase the conversion rate of your existing website. Don’t be scared of the big words(!) but the answers lie in ‘AB split testing’ and/or ‘multivariate testing’.

Certainly this week’s interview Amanda Gome conducted with Jason West from Websalad confirms this.

Having enjoyed many conversations with Jason, I wholeheartedly agree with his mantra that there are two ways you can double the amount of conversions; you can double the amount of traffic to your site, or you can optimise your website to achieve the same result. If you do both, you can retire rich.

AB split testing is a method where you create two (or more) versions of a web page and analyse the conversion results to see which one entices your visitors to convert in greater numbers. You then ditch the lower performing page and keep the good one!

If you’re really serious about it, you keep testing. Forever.

Multivariate Testing is similar in concept to AB split testing, but instead of serving up two pages, you serve up just the one page and change and test various page elements to hit upon the best combination.

Page elements you’re likely to test usually include:

• Your page heading

• Your images

• Your body text copy; and

• Your call to action method.

Google explains it all quite well in this video:
http://services.google.com/training/websiteoptimizeroverview/2995095/index.html

Research shows that two elements affect conversion rates the most: your heading and your call to action method.

In one case study, a red “buy now” button was compared to a green “buy now” button. Multivariate testing quickly revealed that the green button received more conversions. Red means ‘Stop!’ and green means ‘Go’.

Surprisingly, images and body text tended to have lower impact on conversions.

Google has a reasonably new (and free) tool called the ‘website optimizer’. You’ll find it inside your Google AdWords account. You get what you pay for though! You’ll probably need a developer to help you set it up as the coding requirements are quite involved. Plus you’ll need a lot of time and traffic for the tool to accurately report back the results.

Of course there are paid tools available which are typically more sophisticated than Google’s free website optimizer tool. I guess if you were to weigh it all up, using a paid testing system set up by an experienced operator might prove cheaper than trying to learn it all yourself.

They typically also use sophisticated mathematical modeling to allow you to test much higher numbers of variations in a much shorter period of time.

Certainly if your conversion rates are static, at say 2%, then doubling that to 4% (or more) might make the $4K or $5K average spend worth the investment over time.

SEO and website design

As they say, a great looking website is no guarantee of success. If potential customers can’t find your website because you’ve compromised its chances of a good search engine rank, you’ll need to resort to expensive Pay Per Click, Banner advertising and/or affiliate marketing campaigns for the life of the design.

When you commission a designer to build you a new website, it’s really up to you to make sure they design your new website with SEO in mind. Obviously design and usability is the designer’s job; they want to make your new site look as beautiful as possible for humans.

But sometimes designers (and I should also mention developers) overlook how a search engine might respond.

You can have your cake and eat it too, so let’s look at the elements involved in website design that really matter to search engines.

1. Textual content
   
   I often see designers create quite ‘image heavy’ designs, particularly on home pages. Remember, search engines can’t ‘see’ or ‘read’ images, so we need to give a search engine some text to hang their hat on.
   
   While you can use image ‘alt tags’ to populate text onto an image heavy site, search engines place less weight on them, so it’s not a genuine workaround. Search Engines typically need a minimum of 350 words per page to get a clear ‘relevance picture’ of the theme for each and every page in your website.
   
   Search engines like key phrases in headings, body text and links (in the form of anchor text).
   
2. Technology - flash
   
   Just as search engines struggle with images, they also struggle with flash. At the moment, search engine robots can’t access and index content from flash files. I would be very wary of a home page (or indeed an entire website) presented solely by a flash file, if you want to rank well.
   
3. Technology - javascript
   
   If you don’t have a sitemap, search engine robots need to follow links within your site (and from other websites) in order to index all your website pages. Search engine robots are unable to follow javascript links (which are often a feature of drop down animated menu systems for example).
   
   If your designer recommends using javascript based navigation, ask if it’s possible to use a CSS driven navigation system instead.
4. Site Structure
   
   I have mentioned this before in a previous blog, but when you’re developing your sitemap, dedicate some thought keyword research for each directory name and file name.
   
   Designers often build your sitemap with quite uninspiring directory names like http://www.autobarn.com.au/products/17/159/.
   
   I often use the example of Seek Learning as one of Australia’s best overall websites in terms of design, usability and search engine optimisation.
   
   Seek Learning’s site structure is something to behold, it’s obvious they had significant input from a SEO specialist during the sitemap creation phase of the project. Given that Google does place importance on keywords is directory and file names, it’s vital you do too!
   
   
   

Next Thursday and Friday I’m attending the Search Marketing Expo in Sydney, so I’ll report back to you on some of the latest trends and idea’s coming from Google and other industry leaders!

Website relaunch & SEO. Your website re launch checklist

So you’ve built, or about to build a brand new website. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking all at the same time isn’t it!

So let’s make sure it goes as smoothly as possible so that you reduce the chance of a drop in traffic from search engines.

1. 404 Error – Page Not Found

‘Page not found’ errors are really annoying! A good, user-friendly website should handle it by helping your visitors rather than allowing a browser to show the error.

I guess the key thing to remember here is that your existing website has pages indexed by search engines and those pages are bringing traffic to your site. Usually with a new web design you’ll have signed off on a new site map. This means the new site will have a completely different structure.

From a search engine’s perspective, the minute you kill the old site and launch the new one, for a few days at least it’s going to have the old pages still showing in the results. When users click on those results, they’ll be taken to a page that no longer exists. That’s a classic ‘404 page not found error’. Trust me. That’s bad.

I’ll talk about how you can avoid this problem in a minute, but for now you should have your developer set up a custom 404 error page anyway.

I’ve seen two really good custom 404 pages recently. The first is Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre www.MCEC.com.au – they have rebranded (and have a new URL!) from Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre – or www.MECC.com.au. Quite a bit to get your head around, I know.

Let’s have a look at some screen shots to illustrate how a good 404 page should work (especially after a website launch). The first is the old MECC site still indexed over at www.ninemsn.com.au (note this test may not work for you as ninemsn may have re-indexed the site by the time you read this):










The second is a screen-grab of the custom 404 page www.mcec.com.au has created which was shown to me after I clicked on the link on nineMSN. Basically, it’s grabbing the referrer information and cleverly inserting it to connect to the user, helping them navigate as quickly as possible through the new site to the information they’re after.



The other example I like is the custom 404 page at the new www.MembersEquityBank.com.au site. Nice and friendly, and I like the “report the broken link to us“ feature.



2. Permanent Redirects

OK, this could be a bit dry, but bear with me.

Getting this right is critical and virtually guarantees no loss of traffic from search engines, affiliates, online advertisements (i.e. Google Ad’s) and other link partners if your site is restructured. It also means that custom 404 page you’ve just built will hardly get used at all!

The idea here is to compare your existing site map with the new one. Where you have two pages with the same topic, you need to get your developer to permanently redirect the old page address to the new page address (also known as a “301 permanent redirect”). It can be a big job which is best setup in a table, but well worthwhile.

A good developer can write a script to perform this task automatically.

3. Notify your link Partners!

Any decent site has other sites linking to it. Again this can be a big job, but if you setup a Google Webmaster tools account you can see exactly who’s linking to your site and which page they’re linking to. If you can’t setup permanent redirects then it’s a process of contacting them, crossing your fingers, and hoping they’ll modify their links to your site.

If you have an affiliate program, it’s even more important to notify them! Affiliates will be mightily, um, upset if the links and banners they have on their site deliver affiliate traffic to pages which ‘404’.

And don’t forget to update your Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing Ad’s. You’ll be throwing good money away if you don’t sort that out as soon as you launch.

4. Update your Google, Yahoo and MSN Sitemaps!

As soon as you launch the new site, generate and upload new sitemaps for the search engines to re-index. It’ll speed up deletion of the old pages and re-indexing of the new ones. You can use www.gsitecrawler.com to build a sitemap quickly (if your new site doesn’t generate one automatically).

5. Test

Finally, run a broken links tool once the new site is fully uploaded and goes live. A couple of sites to visit include:

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

http://www.dead-links.com/check_links.php

All the best with your re-launch!

Google Local Universal Search gets serious! Really serious.

Ok, today Google's rolled out a big change to its local results. If your a local business & you're not registered for local search - you better get a move on!

Here's what's happened...

Yesterday, Google local map results looked a lot like this:



Today they're looking like this:



Not only that, in the 'old days' the top three results next to the map made up the top 10. Now Google's crammed 20 results onto the search results page!

Now we are seeing all sorts of strange results showing up too...



Then, as we started to wonder just how weird it could get, someone in our office yelled out "try 'brothels!'" as a joke. Sadly, I did and here's the result (I don't think the baptist church will be very happy about their result)....



Honestly Google, you've rolled out this new local box 'algo' update too quickly, and are now potentially damaging the reputation of all sorts of upstanding organisations.

I've also read on another blog how this update has nearly sent an online florist to the wall.

Test test test.

Please. Dedicate some thought to SEO before you build

The tips I’m going to give you today will enable you to perform search engine optimisation before your new web site is even built!

I touched on the importance of getting SEO right when I blogged about the Commonwealth Bank’s new website launch a few weeks back.

Just as an aside, Liesl and I met with Adam Farraway from the CBA last week in Sydney. Adam kindly took some time out of his day to chat about the article and the Bank’s position. It was a very interesting insight into the world of big bank websites!

Back to the topic!

In my experience, SEO is nearly always called in after a website has been built. Soon after launch a website owner gives me a call saying they need their site Search Engine Optimised. This usually presents several problems:

1. The site has been built using SEO unfriendly technology like flash, javascript navigation or an ‘el-cheapo’ Content Management System (CMS) that won’t allow you to change meta data or title tags etc.
2. Their directory structure is all over the place (thematically speaking). This is a time consuming problem to fix.
3. Usually little or no initial thought has gone into keyword research while the site’s copy is being written.

So let’s start with item 2. – your directory structure/sitemap, because fixing the issues in item 1. usually means an expensive re-build!

Every website has some kind of directory structure (unless it’s built using flash or just a one page website!). Draw up your site map with all the likely pages and their content. Do this as logically as possible, so you cater for humans and search engines.

Then for each page you’ve created, perform keyword research to find the most popular keywords and phrases. Download this keyword tool.

Here’s a fantastic example from one of the best optimised websites in the country: www.seeklearning.com.au. Look at the way the web builder created the directory structure so that’s optimised for “short course”:

http://www.seeklearning.com.au/short-course/computer-short-courses.asp



As you can see the site ranks really well!

Seriously, this stuff sends a geeky shiver down my spine!

There’s no doubt they were thinking about SEO before (and during) the build. It’s much easier to get this correct at the beginning than to go in and change the structure of your website later.

The benefits are obvious. You get a logical, thematically structured website for humans and search engines which ranks like mad and brings lots of targeted traffic!

http://www.seeklearning.com.au/short-course/accounting-and-finance.asp
http://www.seeklearning.com.au/short-course/leadership-and-communication.asp http://www.seeklearning.com.au/short-course/teaching-English-overseas.asp

When it comes to really competitive key phrases (and all things being equal), Google will rank your site higher than your rivals if you have keywords and phrases in your website’s directory structure.

It’s just one of the 120 or so factors Google takes into account when working out who’s going to rank where when someone makes a search.

Get the foundations right from the beginning and you will be rewarded!

BIG google rank shake-up for the world's most highly prized keyphrase!

Goodness knows what Google's upto this time! Yesterday I blogged about why Australia's top ranking website http://www.webprofits.com.au/ ranked 1st for the key phrase "Search Engine Optimisation".

Today they're gone!

Outta here!

Yep, Google's done a serious little dance and pretty much changed the entire top 10 - BUT FOR AUSTRALIAN RESULTS ONLY.

I haven't had time to analyse the top sites in much detail, suffice to say I can't for the life of me understand why the websites which now make up the top 10 are there. Most of them are barely on topic and seriously thematically diluted.


Here's a screen shot of Monday's results:

Here's today's!

Seriously weird stuff going on!

There are two answers.

1. Webprofits and the majority of top sites were either buying links or simply 'over optimised' and got busted (copped a ranking penalty).

2. It's a ranking anomoly (which can happen on occasion) and everything will go back to normal in the next 48 hours.

Let's wait and see.

Buy me a scotch for helping you with SEO? Sure. Why Not!

Katie May, founder of http://www.seek.com.au/ and now growing http://www.kidspot.com.au/ (at a rate that would put a Japanese bullet train to shame) was interviewed by Online Magazine http://www.smartcompany.com.au/ (coincidentally where I contribute weekly!)

Here's an excerpt of what she said to SmartCo. I love her comments, she's saying all the things I've been pushing for years...

Katie May - permanent marketing priorities.

It’s all about getting the traffic then building the brand. “I don’t want to be a slave to Google for the rest of my life,” she says.

1. Make really, really, really good friends in the area of search engine optimisation (SEO). “Buy them a bottle of scotch,” says May. “If you get that (SEO) wrong, you will have to spend a bomb to get it right.
   
   Build your web pages in ways that are easy to index, have good page titles, key words for each page, all the links you need to boost your Google rankings. Get the basics right and you’ll do fine. We invest in it every month.”
   
2. Try and cut a deal to reduce search engine marketing costs. To avoid those 15% commission fees on search engine marketing, try and negotiate a deal to grow the fee as you get the results. Kidspot buys 100,000 keywords (some keywords cost 1c, others a lot more), often buying expensive keywords for a day or so, then concentrating on cheaper, related search terms.
   
3. Build links. Use contra to build links, affiliates and online partnerships.
   
4. Get outdoors to build the brand. Billboards are the best way to build a brand, May says. “Experience and research tells me this works to build a brand,” she says.
   
5. Cultivate word of mouth. “Everything we do, we ask ourselves ‘Can we get word of mouth?’. Anyway to get people to send information about us on to friends and colleagues, we do it — and it’s free.”

SEO and Australia's Biggest Bank - Which Bank?

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia launched it's new website recently. Full marks on the design. It looks good! But if we take a peek under the bonnet, there are some search engine optimisation basics which have been completely over-looked.

First of all, the home page title tag reads "homepage". Bit of an oversight there.



Secondly, they have no meta content description tag, or meta content keywords tag. Unforgivable.



Thirdly, none of the images on the home page have been alt tagged for usability (and ethical seo).

Coming up next is the old DMOZ issue! Read this carefully because it could be affecting you too!

Look closely at the following images and compare:

This is the DMOZ listing for the Bank...


Next: Google's result...



What's happening here is Google is using the DMOZ editor description (if your site is listed in DMOZ), replacing the Meta content description tag from your own website! Google doesn't always do it, but if you don't have a Meta description tag, the DMOZ description is better than nothing!

What the Bank needs to do here is place a command in its header tag which tells Google NOT to use the boring old, unoptimised, DMOZ editor description.

meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP"

(Note: please encase the tag in <>'s - Blogger software won't let me put the tag around!)

DMOZ is the world's largest human edited (volunteer) directory. You've got to be good to get included! Google likes websites listed in DMOZ because they've been evaluated for quality by a human (something Google doesn't do with its spidering technology). Once you're in, your rankings will improve. But don't hold your breath, it can take years to be included once you've made your submission.

Finally, a quick look around the site, and none of their pages have had much thought to the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation. Title tags and Meta tags.

To their credit, there's pretty good content on most pages, with search engine friendly navigation, the site works fine with javascript and stylesheets turned off.

I'd be optimising their anchor text if given the chance. Often I see juicy links like this:

Home Seeker Approval - that's a link on their home loans page. I don't think there are many people searching for "home seeker approval". It should be changed to "Home loan pre approval".

Of course I couldn't help myself, I sent a note to the Bank with a few suggestions. Here's a excerpt of the form submission...

.... Your home page title tag reads "homepage". Change it to something like, "Commonwealth Bank. Home loans, Business loans, Bank accounts, Credit cards, Insurance, Personal loans" etc, etc.

Add meta content/description and keywords tags to the home page.
Add image alt tags - describe your images for usability and Search Engine friendliness.

Do a site wide review for keyword popularity - i.e. on your home page you use the word "super". In fact "Superannuation" is more popular and is typed in more than 15,000 times a month at Google.

All pages need keyword analysis followed by on page-optimisation, with clever but subtle anchor text optimisation for cross linking.

Hope this helps,

Cheers

Chris

Today is Tuesday 23rd of October. I wonder how soon it will take to get fixed? Click here to see if they've made the changes I've suggested have been implemented.

It never ceases to amaze me how much effort businesses put into their website design, usability and content. SEO is often 'called in' as an after-thought! Big business often spends huge amounts of cash on a new website, getting them up and hosted, along with hefty monthly maintenance fees too.

It's amazing how they balk at allocating a small part of their initial (and ongoing) budget to SEO and SEM advice and optimisation. A good seo provider will always bring ongoing value, long after the web design company has disappeared.

Reputation Management

It's interesting how the Commonwealth Bank has also tied up most of the top 10 at Google with their own results and business divisions if you search for "commonwealth bank". I've got hand it to them, that's very good reputation management!

Online Reputation Management is a whole other topic for another day, but basically, businesses like http://www.websalad.com.au/ help large brands with their online reputation; amongst other things monitoring blog posts (like this one - who says I'm paranoid?) and helping them to tie up the top 10 spots at Google. By doing this, whenever bad news hits, often people will turn to Google for information, but only get the company message, so to speak because no one else is in the top 10. It's a form of reputation damage control.

However, now that Google Universal results are hitting home - showing up-to-the-minute news stories in the Google results - online reputation management will become increasingly difficult.

So to finish, the lesson is this. Before you launch your site, step back make sure you've checked everything off the list and get the whole package right before launch! (or indeed, lunch).