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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Case study – the sports bar – part two – website optimisation

Limited by the brief (and time and budget) to reworking the existing design, rather than replace with a Wordpress driven site (my personal preference), below is a list of the basic SEO and general site changes I made.

1. More meaningful title tags, meta descriptions and keywords
2. Logo/header graphic turned back into a single image and named more explicitly (no longer img01.gif, img02.gif).
3. Replaced Flash navigation with text links
4. Homepage now contains the text that had previously been on the About page and a smaller image rather than just an image and no text.
5. Renamed a couple of menu items to make more sense to users (Live Sports > What’s On, Events > Specials [the word for special offers in Czech is the same as the word for events, essentially this was a mistranslation])
6. Changed from static html to php so we can use includes for header and footer information, making further edits easier
7. Navigation inconsistencies (opening a new window for the food and drinks menu pages) have been corrected.
8. Removed Flash audio player
9. Switched Flash schedule player for a simple text file include, schedule now displays on the page, as text, and is searchable.
10. Added a Google Map to the contact page – there was no map there previously.
11. Google Analytics tracking code added for ease of statistics monitoring.

Based on the first few days of stats from Analytics we will be able to judge the efficacy of these changes. The initial keywords that are bringing in traffic are purely the name of the bar – serving to highlight that the site’s SEO was pretty poor. The Pagerank as of today is 2/10 and the site is not coming up in the first few pages of organic search results (SERPS). I will cover how this situation has changed in a month or so.

Case study – the sports bar – part one

Over the next few weeks I will be documenting the progress with this project.

The pre-match
A local sports bar, well appointed, with friendly attentive staff, serving good beer and food, with a website badly in need of a rework and an all-round ‘experience’ uplift as well.

The site is an SEO disaster area: the homepage contains no visible text. All navigation on the site is in Flash – just to get rollover and a sound effect. There’s a music player that loads up by default and makes the site a liability for someone to visit at work. The title tag says simply ‘The Pack’, the meta description is in Czech (the site was put together by a Czech web designer), the meta keywords don’t contain any references to the most popular events (English Premiership Football). The one link on the homepage that’s not done in Flash is to another company’s site. There’s no differentiation between the www. and without versions of the web address. All this combines to create a situation where the site doesn’t come up in the first 10 pages for a Google search for ‘Sports Bar Prague’ (though Google suggests ‘the pack sports bar prague’ as a related search). The content pages are a little better – there’s human and machine readable on most of them.

The ‘experience’ part of the study is all about lifting the quality of service at the same time as making sure that opportunities are not missed to improve ’share of customer’.

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5 Marketing & Social Media Podcasts worth subscribing to right now

Podcasts are a great way to learn and keep your brain engaged when you’re doing something boring – exercising, housework, commuting, your day job (kidding!).

But your time doing any of these things is finite and there’s an awful lot out there to listen to. Here’s a rundown of the marketing podcasts I listen to regularly, the kind of content they cover, the average frequency and duration and why I like each of them.

Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel

Primarily covers social media/new media marketing, Mitch also writes for a couple of newspapers and is president of Twist Image, a marketing consultancy. Often alternates between a standard Six Pixels podcast and Media Hacks – though that may change, so subscribe to both, just in case. Read the rest of this entry »