Is Yahoo Directory still worth it?

Now Bing is powering Yahoo’s search results, anyone tracking their search engine positions across both engines will have see their Yahoo rankings move into line with their Bing ranking

In a particular case of a client with a paid Yahoo Directory listing, the Yahoo rankings have dropped from a probably unrealistic first place all the way down to 21. Theoretically the directory listing didn’t affect the organic placement but that’s pretty hard to believe on the basis of this evidence.

This leads me to question the value of a Yahoo directory listing. The listing in the directory itself has brought just 3 visits so far this year, indicating that no humans are using the directory. As for that top ranking, there wasn’t much organic traffic coming from Yahoo anyway (less than 10% of the traffic that came from Google).

A Yahoo Directory listing costs $299 a year, so now it’s just down to gut feeling on whether a known paid link from it still carries any value in the other search engines’ algorithms. Google no longer suggest getting listed there on their webmaster advice pages. Is this an indication that it’s time to cut that expense and spend the money on something more trackable and productive?

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What’s on your radar?

You’re busily going about your work, doing what’s necessary to keep things moving, reacting as things come in.

What can you do to be more take a wider view and be more proactive?

A good start is to get an idea of what’s going to be taking place in your city over the next three to six months – we’re talking conferences, festivals, exhibitions, even concerts.

You will be amazed at the variety and number of events taking place right under your nose.

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Use WordPress? Feel a Need for Speed?

Since Google have now been very public that site speed is a ranking factor, albeit a minor one, now is a good time to get testing your site’s speed.

I’ve been using Google’s Page Speed Firefox extension, you can also use YSlow from Yahoo. For either you’ll need to install Firebug first.

There are plenty of tutorials online for how to use these Firefox extensions, and each of them has built in suggestions and information on what it all means. Some of the suggestions can be a bit cryptic, also there’s a limit to how many of the suggestions you can implement (seriously, how do I ‘parallelize downloads’ by loading static files from different hosts and at the same time keep DNS requests to a minimum?).

Most of the suggestions (Enable compression, Leverage browser caching) can be handled using .htaccess rules, but some are a bit more involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, Park 458

Many years ago that’s how people used to answer the phone, confirming the number the caller had dialled. The reason for this? Phones were less personal and misdials were more common. Some people still do it, at home. Mostly it’s a waste of time, the percentage of misdialed calls is dropping as more people call from a phone that confirms the number dialled. In any case people answering company phone lines don’t quote the number back, they state the name of their company.

You may wonder why I’m mentioning this. It’s because I’ve noticed a fair number of websites recently using content management systems set up with no thought whatsoever to the SEO value AND usability benefit of having a well crafted title tag. Repeating the domain name is a waste of time – it’s already in the location bar of the browser anyway. Imagine calling Hertz and the phone being answered by someone parroting the number you’d just dialled: “Hertz, 08455 19 15 36″, completely pointless.

Take a few moments to check through your site. Your title tags should be:

1. Keyword rich
2. Non-repetitive
3. Written for humans, not used as a replacement for the meta keywords tag
4. Devoid of your domain name. Please.

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Domain name housekeeping

An often forgotten aspect of search engine optimisation is centred around various aspects of your domain name. For example Google’s search algorithm takes into account over 200 different factors, categorised as on-page and off-page. On-page is the content of your pages themselves – the visible text and the code. Off-page factors include things like external links and a whole host of things you mostly have no control over.

There are however a number of simple ‘off-page’ domain-related factors that you can control and that search engines consider when ranking sites:

1. Age of domain
   You can’t fake this, but you can buy up older names, sometimes it’s worth making an offer, if the domain you want is up for sale. If it has been registered for a few years, that may help you rank higher, even if it’s not currently in search indexes. Just do your due diligence first – check it doesn’t have a chequered past.
2. Domain ownership details
   Many domain name registrars offer a premium service of domain name anonymity. Google and other search engines aren’t so keen on this. They figure you have something to hide. If you’re worried about privacy and don’t want to put your home address, you don’t have to – nobody’s going to be posting anything to that address (or at least nobody you want to hear from).
3. Domain expiry
   Most people don’t pay for things until they have to. So you wait till your domain name is up for renewal and renew then right? WRONG! A domain with less than a year remaining till expiry is considered as a potential drop-out. Most domain registrars offer multi-year discounts and you don’t have to wait till your name is due for renewal to secure it for 3, 4 or more years more. At around $10 a year for a .com it’s a false economy to hold off on renewing your name till you start getting email reminders.

Now go get your domain in order!

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Link Exchanges – Dead as Disco

Back when I was running our e-commerce store and getting the webmaster and other generic address emails, we were inundated with spammy link exchange requests.

You know the type:

I found your website in Google and I’d like to swap links

Reciprocal link exchanges are dead as disco (see this 2005 post from Matt Cutts, Google’s webspam team leader). It’s that simple. Google, Bing and others see them for what they are and if anything they do more harm than good.

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I’m no SEO but…

I’d never describe myself as a Search Engine Optimisation consultant. Whilst I understand the basics, and keep up with search industry news via Search Engine Land, SEOMoz and SEOBook, getting heavily into SEO is a full-time commitment and doesn’t play to my strengths.

My preference is to employ a rounded Inbound Marketing strategy, with SEO as a component of that. One key element to both SEO and inbound marketing is the requirement to monitor and measure your efforts.

That measurement can be done manually and is immensely time consuming. Nobody’s going to pay me to Google their keywords by hand over and over and nor would I want to.

That’s where tools like Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager by Caphyon come in. I’ve been working with the Enterprise version of these for about a month (there’s a free thirty day demo available for both of them and you choose which license level you want to test). Here’s a review of the two packages. Read the rest of this entry »

Is paid search the height of responsibility?

In response to The Irresponsible Marketer

Having just read Mitch Joel’s latest post, I was going to post this as a comment, then when I got to writing it and it grew to longer than would be polite, or even that readable, as a comment.

To paraphrase, Mitch is saying that marketers should put as much as they can into search marketing, spending “whatever is left over for your more general branding campaigns”. Now I’m sure that Mitch is trying to seed a discussion rather than truly believing that we should give up on all other kinds of marketing efforts to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit and maximising our Adwords spend and hiring SEO experts..

What about cumulative effects?

I think this is a perfect case for ‘with, not instead of’, to quote Mitch again. Paid search, and to almost the same extent, well done SEO/content marketing efforts are eminently trackable. But what drove that search? Reading this post I immediately thought of David Ogilvy’s belief that a consumer needs to see a message multiple times before they act on it (though as he was head of an ad agency, one might question the number of exposures required). Read the rest of this entry »

Is there such a thing as too much SEO?

Or is Google’s algorithm a little off?

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Whilst checking into some background info for yesterday’s blog post about the Jury’s Inns hotel chain I did the obligatory Google search for Jury’s Inns. Not sure what you’re seeing, based on Google’s penchant for showing different search results based on your location or whether you’re logged in or not.

Click the image to see the results I got. Almost the entire first page on Google for that term is either the main site or a search-engine friendly subdomain for Jury’s Inn hotel(s) in a particular city.

If I’d have searched for jurysinns.com seeing this wouldn’t have surprised me at all (and this is exactly what does come up, similar to ibm.com or allcapitals.com). If I’d have searched for Jurys’s Inn Hotels London I wouldn’t be surprised to see the custom subdomain come up first or second either.

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Case study – the sports bar – part three – summer update

Just a quick update on the website situation

Web traffic is holding steady (even though it’s off-season for their main sports).

Now number 2 result on Google.com (above the local 10-pack) for a search for “Sports Bar Prague”. Beating out sportsbar.cz

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Not performing as well on Google.cz (which Firefox defaults to when you’re in the Czech Republic) because there is no Czech version of the site. Though the Czech language version of the Facebook Fan Page that we set up does make a showing lower down the first page, compensating somewhat.

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