The Web Consultant's Blog

Google AdWords Trademark Policy Revision

2008-05-16T13:42:00.002+01:00

Interesting news arrived recently from the Google AdWords Policy bods.

The policy used to be that you could not use the trademarks in the text or sponsored keywords of your adverts, unless you owned them. While the policy remains that you cannot use someone else's trademark in your ad text, the revised policy now allows you to bid for trademarked terms in your sponsored keywords.

So my client who sells second hand Portakabins can now use the word Portakabins in his sponsored search listing and furthermore my customers who run a beauty clinic in Ringwood can sponsor words like Botox for their adverts.

Now, there's lots of people all getting worked up over this and saying it's essentially the end of days and we'll all perish in a burning trademark shaped law suit, but really the question is; How can this benefit your business.

For Google AdWords help from the professionals call the web consultancy today.

TTFN!

SEO - Snake Oil for 2008?

2008-05-09T18:39:00.003+01:00

I got this email from a concerned client today asking if the chap who sent it could actually help my client to optimise her site (advertising her excellent Bristol hypnotherapy clinic). Quite reasonably my client hoped it would be a better investment in search engine marketing than the work she and I have recently started to do together, following these search engine optimisation principals, which are essentially quite a bit of hard graft and this email seems to offer a short cut to effective search engine optimisation!

As with many of my clients Mindscape Therapies is a small concern, so I was particularly upset that it appeared that some shyster (or babbling brook, if you prefer) was trying to pull a fast one.... So in an effort to help others to be forewarned and forearmed, here's the email the business owner received:

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: I visited your website and had a question
From: "Luke Ilech" luke@onelukey.plus.com
Date: Thu, May 8, 2008 12:58 pm
To: REMOVED FOR PRIVACY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi,

I was looking at websites under the keyword "hypnotherapy bristol" and
came across your site http://www.mindscapetherapies.co.uk/. I see that
you're ranked 42 - on page 5.

I'm not sure if you're aware of why you're ranked this low but more
importantly how easily correctable this is.

There's no reason you can't have a top three ranking for this keyword
based on your site structure and content. You have a very nice site.

You need significantly more one way anchor text backlinks. If you're
interested I can help you with this...

I'm talking about getting you ranked for ALL your keywords. Adding new
backlinks on a steady and consistent basis from high PR quality websites
is what produces the rankings you are looking for.

The right kind of links are very critical in getting top ranking....and I
can hand deliver these quality links to you.

My partners and I own 1000's websites and offer discrete, private linking
to hundreds of website owners like yourself.

I didn't send this email out to thousands of people but I am currently
contacting a list of your "keyword competitors".

Important: I will only work with one person for this keyword group.

I have your contact info as: phone 07810 510170. Is it ok if I give you a
call?

I have a very simple way to prove that what I do works and it's risk free
for you to try. Nothing beats seeing the results with your own eyes.

Is it ok if I give you a call? I would love to pursue this further over
the phone with you or should I go somewhere else?

all the best,

sincerely,

Luke Ilech
0845 003 0582

Now - I should point out that we've only just started working on the site in question and it's likely to take a while to creep up the rankings, but it is No 1 on Google (at the time of writing) for hypnotherapy Montpelier and emdr bristol from tiny acorns, mighty oaks, etc etc.

Anyway - here's my opinion on what this unpleasant little man said in his vile little epistle:

What “Luke” is saying is based in truth, but primarily that email is selling Snake Oil 2008.

While back-links are important for search engine optimisation, I don’t think “Luke” is going to do you as good a deal as he proposes to.

Let’s assume that Luke can deliver you a top three ranking for all the keywords you’d ask for (NB. He doesn’t stipulate which search engines, he just lets you assume it’s Google), if his service is sooooo amazing why isn’t there a website at the address “Luke” used to send his email from..... luke@onelukey.plus.com should resolve to onelukey.plus.com as a website right? WRONG.
The domain plus.com is actually registered to plus.net, a broadband supplier who do not offer the services Luke offers. So..... The person who has sent this email has actually appears to be “spoofing” this email address. Essentially, “spoofing” is using a forged “sent from address” in an email as appears to be the case here. Why this email was sent using a spoofed header I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because the sender isn’t particularly legit and would prefer not to have the many complaints about his unsolicited emails arriving in his email box. While I’m not clear on Email Spoofing’s status as a criminal offence it is certainly morally wrong in my opinion.

One final check. I called Luke’s number. The conversation went like this:

“Luke” – Hello?
Me – Hi. Is um, Bill there?
“Luke” - No, you must have the wrong number.
Me - Oh. Sorry.
“Luke” – What was it about? Maybe there is a Bill here.
Me – Nothing important, bye!
Surely if this wasn’t a scam of some sort Luke would have said “Hello XXXX website promotions, how can I help?” or something similar.

If you have heard from Luke or someone like him promising search engine joy, email the web consultancy and we'll tell you if you're being conned or not.

Pip pip!

Flash Website Search Optimisation

2008-05-01T15:32:00.004+01:00

The David Payne Drama website is a nice looking site for a theatre company including animations and video clips.

My job was to optimise it for search engines.... "How do you optimise a Flash web site for search engines?" I hear you cry.

Well amongst some other special magic I performed on the site, I also added a link that says "Can't See Anything?" in the site's footer. That little link leads to the slightly boring but terribly accessible David Payne Drama HTML site, which is good for Search Engines and good for business.

Happy days!

The Web Consultant

Hardcore WiFi

2008-04-28T08:13:00.003+01:00

Does your Wifi have auto config? I hope it's not like this:

http://xkcd.com/416/

Effective Google AdWords Campaign

2008-04-20T11:47:00.005+01:00

This painted kitchen designer and manufacturer uses the web consultancy's search marketing services as the only form of advertising for his business. He receieves approximately an enquiry per day for his high end kitchens. The site was optimised for search engines in terms of build and we also wrote the search engine friendly copy too.

Optimising For Google and AdWords

2008-04-20T11:37:00.007+01:00

This Bristol based solicitor Personal Injury Solutions wanted to appear highly in the natural and paid search results on Google.

By employing best practice search marketing techniques, adjusting his site slightly and completely reviewing his Google AdWords, We've managed to increase the amount of traffic to his site by 100's of percent for no additional cost with Google Adwords. Plus he's featuring really highly for the search terms CRPS Compensation.

I feel pretty darned good about that and so does the client.

Geeky but good

2008-02-13T18:00:00.004Z

OK - so I think we've established I'm a bit of a geek. I like sitting in front of my PC, testing websites on different operating systems, browsers and with different add-ons enabled.

I enjoy figuring out how to make my clients' websites appear above their competitors in search engines.

If my girlfriend stays away for a night or two, I leap at the chance of eating food that is high in MSG and low in nutrients. It also gives me the opportunity to avoid washing.

So, I am a geek.

But, I am not as geeky as the chap who writes this webcomic: http://xkcd.com/198/ and I kind of wish I was.

What are meta tags?

2008-02-10T09:39:00.000Z

This is a follow on from the post Does a blog make a good business website? I guess the other question we need to ask in addition to what are meta tags? is... how can they benefit my business?

Meta tags are the bits of a web page that you don't ordinarily see, but they are there hiding at the top of all web pages. Here's what a meta tag looks like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">

This one would tell your browser to render the page as text. But that is soooooo tedious and nobody cares. So lets get to the useful stuff.... what you can do with your meta tags to make them improve your site's visibility in the search engines results pages.

The main meta tags you should concentrate on when you are considering launching your new website are:

Title (not a meta tag, but now is a good time to take a look at it)
Description
Robots
Keywords

The title appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser:

And along with the description, the title also appears in the search engine results:

So it's a good idea to have the search terms you'd like your page to be found for in both the title and the description.... There are no hard and fast rules governing what you can put in the title, but it's best to keep it simple and under 20 words. For the description, I try to keep to under 35 words. Different search engines will show different amounts of the title and description in their results pages so, make sure all your important information is in the first few words.

If your site is listed in the Open Directory Project or ODP (a human edited search engine, and your isn't listed yet, submit it NOW!) then Google, MSN & Yahoo! will not show your description in the search results but the description that ODP has written for you. You can override this with the robots tag. "Robots" is a catch all term for the automated browsers (or "search engine spiders", "crawlers") which follow all the links on the web to build up the index of web pages for their parent search engine.

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">

tells the search engines to show your descriptions, not those which ODP has written on your behalf. You can also give the commands "NOFOLLOW" (tell robots not to follow links on this page) and "NOARCHIVE" (tells robots not to include this page in the index), but really this should be done in a separate file called robots.txt, which all robots look for to get instructions when they arrive at a website.

Finally we come to the meta tag "keywords" - way back in the 1990's when the web was young, and search engines weren't as rich, rather than waste expensive resources on sending out their robots to read an entire page, the robots would read just the meta tags (including the keywords) for a kind of synopsis. The page would then be ranked according to the title and description and because there wasn't much info in here you could tell the robots what else existed on the page by giving it a list of "keywords". For this page the keywords might read something like:

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="search marketing tips business uk">

Sadly, some people would stuff their keywords with hundreds of words hoping it would improve their ranking and even worse, some other naughty people used misleading keywords so that unsuspecting surfers might search for "spice girls" and arrive at a page showing pictures of ladies with no tops on. This wouldn't do, so search engines pretty much ignore keywords now and look at the title, description and actual 'on page' content to see what the page is about. I still use the keywords attribute myself, but keep it to 4 or 5 words per page. I'm not sure it has any real value, but if the keywords are accurate and brief, I'm confident it doesn't do any harm.

There are a few of final comments:

Keep your titles and descriptions meaningful and accurate, search engines like providing their users with accurate results. You will not achieve high rankings in the search engines if you over egg the pudding.

I know it's difficult but try to make sure you have a unique title and description for every page, to reflect the content on the page. This way all your pages are more likely to rank highly in the search results and you are more likely to be found by people who are looking for your products and/or services and who have never heard of you.

Need more help? Confused about this? Post a comment or contact the web consultant

Friday night is research night

2008-02-08T19:44:00.000Z

Wow, my life is so rich and full. All of my meetings overran this week and consequently I'm only just getting the work that I should have finished on Wednesday done now. And it's Friday night.

Never mind, in a little while I'll settle down with a nice Rioja and read this really useful article.

Sometimes, I agree with people when they call me a geek. Other times I just weep into my keyboard. No wonder my girlfriend has started to work increasingly late increasingly often....

Does a blog make a good business website?

2008-02-03T14:22:00.000Z

Here's an extract from an email I received last week....

> I need some advice about how to create a website succesfully! at the moment
> I can't afford to get one up and running by a proffessional - and I don't
> think it's something you should skrimp on - as a website can be very
> profitable to a business if done correctly.
>
> currently i've created a wordepress blog - which is a mixture of industry
> info and my informatiom about the
> company i.e 'about us' 'services' 'fees' etc etc - I'm not sure if its ok to
> use a blog site like this - but I've tried to use it to the best of my
> ability.
>
> I'd really appreiate it if you could explain to me terms like 'meta tag',
> CSS, RSS feeds etc etc - as its completely over my head!

Some good questions here, but I'll start by answering a question that wasn't really posed... Does a blog make a good business website?

Like many questions about doing business online, there's not really a definitive answer. What is right is what works for you. But, here's some considerations:

Using a blog in this way does make it difficult to optimise the site and it's pages for search engines, as the pages are built using templates provided by the blog provider (blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc).

Blog templates are designed for use by people of all levels of technical ability, and as such have a lot of bulky code built in to keep your web pages looking nice, and to allow you to apply your own house style. Now I mentioned "bulky code".

Simply put, "code" is the technical bit that holds the site together. The more efficient your use of code, the easier it is for search engines (and people with disabilities) to navigate your website and enjoy your content. Blogs can't use code as efficiently as a custom built site, as they have to cater for a colossal variety of styles, layouts, etc. This bulky code is just the sort of thing that makes it difficult for search engines to read and appreciate the value of your content.

It stands to reason that if your site is difficult for a search engine to read, and your competitor has a site with similar content that is easier for a search engine to read, your competitor's site will appear higher in the page rankings.

In addition to all the competitors in business you have to outperform, consider how many indirect competitors there are for your potential customer's attention.... news sites reporting on your industry, forums discussing products and services you sell, hobbyists who just love giving away your trade secrets.... It's easy for your site to be lost underneath this heap of 'competitive' sites.

There are however a number of blogs that perform fantastically in the search results of many search engines. How do they do this? Well, it will have a lot to do with their link popularity (see my explanations of link popularity) and, crucially, the amount of relevant content on their pages. So as getting hundreds of links to a brand new webiste is difficult, what you need if you're using a blog as the main website for your business is lots of content. Content is king!

When you see how much content is on the top performing blogs you'll see just how much content you need to compete with these chaps. It is likely to be at least 10 times as much as you're comfortable with, so to keep it easy to read, start with a compelling headline, and then a 5-15 word introduction to the information and give more and more detail as you get into your subject. Just like a newspaper article.

If you are using Worrdpress (I'm not, but I know many people do), make sure you click the button that shows the Advanced Toolbar (it's the button on the far right hand side of the menu that appears above the box where you type your content). Now you must use the format drop down menu to make the headline of your page 'Heading 1', the 5-15 word intro 'heading 2' and any subsequent headings 'heading 3', 'heading 4' and so on. This will show the Search Engines what the most important bits of your content are.

So it's worth having a section on your site that is a real blog, with compelling content to which people will want to place links on their sites, blogs and forum posts. Which will help your link popularity too!

Now, I know haven't answered the questions about Meta Tags, CSS & RSS yet, but I will this week, so watch this space kids!

Oh, and if I've been too confusing (people are increasingly referring to me as 'geeky') or you would like more info you can get in touch with me at The Web Consultancy or simply add a comment to this post using the link below.

How to choose a domain name

2008-01-14T09:34:00.000Z

Each domain name consists of two parts - the ‘Mid Level Domain’ (MLD), and the ‘Top Level Domain’ (TLD). The Mid Level Domain is the ‘thewebconsultancy’ in thewebconsultancy.org, the ‘amazon’ in amazon.co.uk. This part of the domain name can consist of up to 63 characters in .com, .net, or .org domains. Only letters, numbers, or hyphens are permitted; no underscores, exclamation marks or full stops. The Top Level Domain refers to the .com, .net, or .org part of the web address. There are also country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD's) such as .uk for United Kingdom, .fr for France, or .us for the United States. In most cases, you will need to reside in that particular country if you wish to purchase a ccTLD.

Choosing The Right Domain Name For Your Business

Choosing the right domain name can be critical to the success of a website. Most Internet users remember websites by their domain names; your domain name can also affect the anchor text of inbound links; and your ranking in search engines.

Keyword or Branding?

Branding

Many of the most successful sites do not use keyword domains. These online businesses have chosen to go with a completely original domain, and brand it. A few examples are Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Monster, and eBay. It's not that these large corporations don't know about search engine optimization; it's just that they are putting more emphasis on creating a brand name around their business.

Keyword

A keyword domain is a domain chosen to take advantage of search engine traffic. By choosing a domain that matches a keyword search, we are able to rank higher for targeted keywords and thereby benefit from added traffic and more potential for sales. For example, if you were a Bristol estate agent, you might want to target the search phrase Bristol Estate Agency by choosing the domain Bristol-Estate-Agency.co.uk. Looking through the Bristol yellow pages, many estate agents have websites, but most do not target any specific keywords. It appears most realtors are simply naming websites after themselves; e.g., www.cjhole.co.uk and www.taylorsestateagents.co.uk who won’t be benefiting from a lot of free search engine traffic.

Whether you choose a brandable domain or a keyword domain is a choice you must make, and a choice you should make in accordance with your business plan. If you have a large offline advertising budget and the budget necessary to brand your organization, I'd recommend a brandable domain. If, on the other hand, you're working on a shoe-string budget, choose a keyword domain and let the search engines bring the customers to you.

Don’t forget to ask friends, family and customers what they think of your proposed domain name choices.... they’ll really help you get a different perspective.

If you want to search domains this site has a really good tool: www.freeparking.co.uk

If you want more advice – call 0845 643 0977 or contact the web consultancy.

Considerations when building a new site

2007-12-19T14:06:00.000Z

I have just completed a simple sheet of information for a couple of clients who are looking to build a new website. They needed a little guidance as how to identify keywords and how to use them effectively... If you are a very small, or start up business who can't justify buying in someone like me, then the advice I gave to them will probably stand you in good stead for your website.

Targeting the right market – Keyword Selection

What Key Words or Search Terms are people using to find products and services similar to those available via your website?
Which of these keywords already drive acceptable levels of traffic to the site?
Which of these keywords aren’t working for you, but you feel (or evidence suggests) that they work well for your competitors?

A simple measurement of website success is the ratio of visitors to enquires or sales. The process of a web visitor turning into a web enquirer or a web buyer is we call a ‘conversion’.

Which keywords currently provide most conversions?

Now create matrix or chart that analyses the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target.
The keywords selected must be used appropriately throughout the website in the main navigation, copy and text links.
This is not a one off approach, analysing your website’s traffic logs will provide data which can be used to refine and improve on keywords selection and targeting.

Optimal Keyword Usage
Directory Structure
Wherever possible the most appropriate keywords must be used in the folder name and file name of each page. With a little additional planning this is quite simple to implement in the directory structure of the site. Content Management systems that place question marks (?) and ampersands (&) in URLs of the web pages should be avoided, while search engines are becoming more adept at getting around these symbols, it is best practice to stick with forward slashes (/), underscores (_) and dashes (-) if possible.

Examples

"http://www.car-dealer-website.co.uk/php/a3_offer.php" might perform better as "http://www.car-dealer-website.co.uk/new/audi/a3_offer.php"

"http://www.car-dealer-website.co.uk/php/special_offers.php#swindon" might perform better as

"http://www.car-dealer-website.co.uk/used/audi/swindon.php"

Navigation
A menu across the top of the page or down the left of the page is optimal for both usability and search engines. A text based menu is preferred for the menu items, as this is more accessible and also improves the weighting for the landing pages. However, if an image based menu is used a duplicate of this as a text menu must be placed in the footer of the page.

Page Titles
This is what will show as the ‘headline’ on Google so it’s is important to make this attention grabbing copy while using the most appropriate keywords. At the time of writing using a maximum of 100 characters and a maximum of 3 keywords is optimal.

Example

<title>Car Dealer Website > New Cars > A3</title> might perform better as

<title>New Audi A3 UK Special Offer – Discount Audi A3 – Order Online</title>

Page Meta Tags

Description – compose as a sub heading to the Page Title, use up to 100 characters and 3 keywords
Keywords – use 3 keywords without repetition or punctuation
Robots – a must to include to show spiders and robots the pages you want indexed

Example

Page Content

Copy – using keyword rich copy will improve the weighting search engines will apply to the page.
Links – using keyword rich links will improve the weighting search engines will apply to the landing page. Utilising the ‘Title’ attribute will also improve this.
Images – acceptable ‘Alt Text’ is essential for accessibility.

Site Map
An html sitemap will encourage spiders and robots to index pages that might be quite within the site. Sitemaps (XML & TXT) should also be created and uploaded to Google & Yahoo! upon launch of the new site, with regular updates at least monthly.

Old Pages – Redirect
Prior to launch, all pages listed in the major search engines should be listed and then mapped to relevant pages on the new site. The old pages should then be redirected using search engine friendly 301 redirects and the new pages will likely inherit the PageRank attributes of the old ones.

Every site is different, so there is no real one size fits all approach, but hopefully this will help you if you aren't up for getting in an expert like me to help... if you do need some help, then talk to me about my search engine optimisation service.

Interesting interview with Google chap

2007-12-18T14:49:00.000Z

When optimising your site to achieve higher rankings in Google, you'll often have an amazing idea about how to fool Google into thinking your site is bigger, better and more important than it actually is.

If you're one of my clients I'll often (tactfully) tell you that you cannot use your "revolutionary" technique as it has been used by people who have tried to (or are trying to) fool Google for more nefarious purposes and therefore it will be considered 'spamming'.

While the article below is probably too detailed for many end users, it is a great interview with Matt Cutts, of Google's antispam team and is pretty interesting... which these interviews have a tendency not to be, normally.

Stephan Spencer interviews Matt Cutts

Enjoy!

What keywords should I use in my website?

2007-12-17T09:56:00.000Z

A client and I are working on her new website... and we're trying to make sure that she features highly in the search results for her chosen market. It's great to be in as part of the build process, because website optimisation is so much more effective when it is part of the framework of the site.

So, her question is "What search terms are people using to find products like mine?" In short, what keywords should we target?

Whatever stage you are at, keyword research is an essential component of search engine optimisation. Without it, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be misdirected to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see.

I find the most effective method to research keywords include:

Brainstorming - Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).

Talking To Customers - Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what's likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.

Use information provided by Keyword Research Tools - Several tools online (including Wordtracker, which is one of the ones I use) offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using tools like this can offer concrete data about search trends. However, while it can help you see broad information about search trends, if you're looking
to estimate traffic numbers, use programs like Google's Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to test the number of impressions a particular term/phrase gets.

Search Term Analysis - The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyses the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target.

Performance Testing and Analytics - After keyword selection and implementation of targeting, analytics programs (like Google Analytics) that measure web traffic, activity and conversions can be used to further refine keyword selection.

Keyword targeting is then an ongoing process, you should continually refine the words you target and add new ones, based on your changing products and services and the conversion rates of particular phrases.

If you're stuck on getting any of this sorted out yourself, perhaps you are too busy, or simply not as sad as me, then talk to me about my search marketing services

UK Shoppers spend over £750,000 online, in one minute

2007-12-11T20:50:00.000Z

It's true.... see the original story here

Perhaps you should make your site a bit better for next year, if you have e-commerce!

Improve your site's PageRank with contextual back-links

2007-12-10T10:55:00.000Z

I've briefly touched on this in my previous article on Link Popularity. To reiterate, link popularity is used by many search engines to calculate the importance of a particular web page, and therefore that page’s rankings in the search results. And when I talk about back-links I mean those links from other websites that link back to your web site.

Since it’s by far and away the market leader, we’ll concentrate on Google’s PageRank system (see my article “What's my site's Google PageRank?” to find out your site’s PageRank if you don’t already know it), to get a handle on your website’s link popularity.
This diagram hopefully gives an idea of how PageRank calculates the popularity of your web pages.

In the diagram above, Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it: the link it has is much higher valued. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links. (Thanks Wikipedia)

So, it’s important to remember that PageRank is Page to Page, not site to site.

Getting your PageRank improved then, is a matter of getting more back-links to your web pages from more sources each with a high PageRank.

There is an additional (and possibly more important) way to boost your PageRank. Include your most important keywords in the anchor text of the back-link. The anchor text is the text which the visitor would click to follow the link... For example in this link: www.bbc.co.uk the anchor text is www.bbc.co.uk , but in this one: News and information the anchor text is news and information. Both links point to the same page, but the second example will boost the landing page’s relevance for the keywords news and information.

So utilise this knowledge about anchor text to boost to place well for your chosen keywords. The best way to take advantage of this is to request that your keywords are placed in your back-link anchor instead of your domain name.

Here’s the code you need, just fill in the relevant bits about your web page:
<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/" title="keyword">Keyword</a>

There’s a lot to take in, so if you need more help call the web consultancy

For Web Traffic Statistics, Use Google Analytics

2007-12-06T14:47:00.000Z

As the owner / director of a small business which has a website, you should be monitoring the visitor data to your site. Key Performance Indicators are:

Number of visitors
Referring website (the site on which the visitor clicked a link to land on your page)
Search term used to find you (if the referring website was a search engine)
Entry Page
Exit Page

Now, most web hosting companies these days will give you 'free web traffic statistics'. More often than not, these free packages have much of the information you want, but presented in a way only techies can be bothered to understand. For example, if your web stats look like this:
Then your web hosting company is insulting you by even providing them. You need something more useable. You also need to ask what what the hell they do all day for the money you pay them... nothing but drink energy drinks, coke and coffee while they do unspeakable things to servers or build online games... is my guess. And, I know. I've been there. I've watched them do it and it sickens me.

If you don't have stats provided, your web design company or web host may have suggested you use one of these:

flash logo design

Which is so ugly and is so unfit for that purpose that I actually contemplated poking my own eyes out so I didn't have to gaze upon it any longer. Plus it's also an advert for someone who makes Flash Logos. But just to make crystal clear how poor this is as a way of measuring visitors, refresh this page and look at the counter again. It went up, right? Oh, how useful. If someone is browsing your site and you use one of these, it's like having a shop and having just one customer come in and go back out again, come in, go out, come in, go out, ad infinitum. And then you as the shopkeeper say at the end of the day "Well, I don't know why we didn't sell anything.... there were 100 people through the door today". !

Anyway, back to the task at hand and that's getting you some useable, business related stats.

All you need to do is sign up for a Google Analytics account and put a little bit of JavaScript (simply, a little bit of programming code that is invisible to most users) on every page you want to monitor. You may need your web designer to do this for you, but it is a very small job.

If you already have a Google AdWords account you should apply for Google Analytics by clicking the little green tab at the top of the page between 'Reports' and 'My Account'. If not, you don't need to be using AdWords to use the Analytics, and you can sign up here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/en-GB/

It's all pretty self explanatory, but if you get stuck and fancy a half day training on how to get the best out of it get in touch. I'll see if I can help.

Once you've got this all installed you can analyse which marketing works for your website and which doesn't. It will probably give you a better handle on your marketing ROI than any other tool you've used.

What is cross browser compatibility?

2007-12-05T10:48:00.000Z

Just this morning, I was asked "My site looks fine to me.... doesn't everyone use Internet Explorer?"

Um, no. They don't. Lots of people have Macs and they will probably use a browser called Safari, which is also available for the PC now. Other people (like me) use a browser called Firefox, because it has lots of add ons and is a bit more flexible.

It's true to say that the majority of people use Internet Explorer (IE) but, recent figures have the market share for IE at somewhere between 57% [W3Schools] and 77% [Net Applications]. That means that in any given thousand visits to your site, between 330 and 430 people may not see your site at it's best. Eeek!

To check out how your site looks to people who aren't using IE, download the browsers below:
Firefox
Safari
Opera
And if you haven't already upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, you probably should....
Internet Explorer

So, make sure your website works across these browsers. If it does, it will have the pleasing side effect of being more accessible to the two million people in the UK who have a sight problem [RNIB] and the one in twelve people (or 9% of the UK population) who have some form of colour blindness [IEE].

If you're concerned about your site, and don't have the time to chase your web designers to fix it, my website accessibility review will give you an analysis of how your site performs against industry best practice. I'll provide you with a written report of where improvements need to be made, with the technical documentation to give to your web designers so they can make it happen.

Which video format is best for your website?

2007-12-05T08:39:00.000Z

This question came in via email from one of the delegates at my 'How To Market Your Website' course...

Question
"I have to get a video clip from one of my DVDs made up to go on a website for a publisher that I am writing an article for.

Could be good free publicity and I have realised that I should post it on to my new website.

My DVD editor tells me that he could either provide it as a Windows Media file or as a Quicktime file.

Which would be the best format?"

Answer

Bear in mind that this is an opinion based on 10 years in web development and emarketing, but that it is just my opinion, here's what I'd generally say to a UK based small to medium sized business;

The best format would be a Windows Media (.wma, .wmv) file as this can most easily be converted into a ‘Flash’ movie which can then be embedded in your website. This method has the most ‘cross-platform’ (multiple browsers, operating systems, etc) compatibility and is what I’d recommend. The drawback is that you need to find someone who’ll convert the file into a Flash movie for you. I can do it, and it’s only an hour or so’s work, if you get stuck.

Flash embedded movies are what YouTube use and they look like this:

The second best is QuickTime (.mov, .movie, .qt), but that has drawbacks in that seemingly less people have it correctly installed on their browsers than those who have Flash, so it will reach less of your market. This is strange I think, because QuickTime is a very mature and trusted bit of kit and many people install it as a matter of course when they install itunes... however the anecdotal evidence I've seen would make me put it as second to Flash for this purpose. If you were showing animation created by CAD software or some sort of virtual reality sofrtware, then it would be a different story.

Finally there’s the option of uploading a simple movie file such as .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, wmv and allowing your web visitor's browser to choose which ever video player it has set as default to play the movie. This is quite widely used, but not much liked by me, as it requires Windows Media Player, QuickTime or similar to work without popping up any errors, and you as a publisher have less control over your movie's performance and projector size.

Also, you should consider your hosting package. Most hosts don’t really care about the size of the files you store on your web hosting server, but they care very much about how much data people download (called ‘data transfer’), so you will definitely need to check that a) you are allowed to host streaming video and b) you have a sizeable transfer limit per month.

If you are planning to add streaming video to your site and want to know how to go about it, get in touch.

What's my site's Google PageRank?

2007-12-04T21:13:00.000Z

Your website's visibility is heavily influenced by it's link popularity and a good judge of this is Google's PageRank. It's easy to find out your site's PageRank, you just need Google Toolbar.

Get it here: http://toolbar.google.com

Once you've agreed all the terms and conditions and downloaded the software, it should appear in the menu bar of your browser.

At the extreme right hand side of the bar click 'settings' then select 'Options' from the drop down menu. In the dialogue box select the tab 'more' and tick the box 'PageRank'. Click 'OK' to accept and then 'OK' to close the dialogue box.

Now browse to your website and check out it's PageRank.

Don't worry if it's only 2/10 or 3/10, that's not the end of the world you can make some improvements, but bear in mind that the BBC is only a 9/10.

If your site's PageRank is less than 2/10 then you should probably do something about it to improve your website's visibility. If you don't know what to do, check out my article on Link Popularity, to see what you can do yourself or talk to me about my search marketing services for your business.

Find out who links to your site

2007-12-04T20:50:00.000Z

When I'm talking to people about search marketing and improving a website's rankings on Google, I often cover the importance of link popularity. As you can imagine, in my working life my words are often met with blank looks. Sometimes the looks stay just that, blank. Occasionally, when I'm doing my job properly the looks turn to ones of understanding, and often I'll elicit looks of pity. I sense right now that you have a blank look. Let's see if I can fix that. Link Popularity is quite a simple concept to grasp. Think about your website. You want people to visit it and a good way for people who've never heard of you to find it is using links from other sites, such as trade associations, local news sites, The Yellow Pages, etc.

This is also how search engine spiders find your site. It's reasonable to assume that the more popular your site is link-wise, the more times a search engine spider will arrive at it from a unique source. The more times a search engine spider finds your site via a unique source, the more useful a search engine perceives your website to be for it's users and therefore it gives your site a higher ranking in it's search results.

To see how many sites in the Google index link your type this in Google's search box:

link:www.yourdomain.com

For example to see how many pages that link to my site you would type this into Google's search box:

link:www.thewebconsultancy.org

Link popularity is only a part of your overall search marketing mix, but it is vital. It's also important to get links from useful sites, not just your web design company! See this article for more details on Google's PageRank system: http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

And if you want some help with your site, get in touch