Current & Historical Search Engine Positions - Ongoing reporting, with graphs, of the search engine rankings on both Google and Yahoo for each keyword or keyword phrase you specify.

Main, Current & Historical Referrers - Current & Historical Referrers shows the number of inbound links to your website for Both Google and Yahoo with historical reporting of your inlinks over a user-defined period of time. Main Referrers shows the links to your site ordered by PageRank. This report details the URL of the linking page, the PageRank, the link text, the target URL and whether the link is nofollow or not.

Current & Historical Social Reports - Shows your status on Digg and Delicious both currently and over a user-defined time period.

Single, Double and Triple Keyword Density - Reports the number of occurences for keywords and keyword phrases of every page on your website.

Current & Historical Indexed Pages - A useful SEO tool that displays the number of pages currently indexed on Google and Yahoo with historical graphing.

Current & Historical Supplemental Index Ratios - Shows the percentage of pages on your site that are found in Google’s main and supplemental indexes.

Backlinks Watchdog - A superb SEO tool that monitors, on a daily basis, inbound links to your site and reports to you of any change in a links status.

All these search engine optimisation tools (and probably more to come) can be found at SheerSEO.com - online SEO software that specialises in tracking SERPs, PageRank and more. Give it a test drive by signing up for a free 90 day trial account. I definately suggest that you add Sheer SEO to your search engine optimisation arsenal today.

As far as PPC tools go, you may want to check out our very own UK localised PPC tool which allows you to generate multiple keyword phrases targetted by geographical area (ie: North West), by county (ie: Lancashire), or by town/towns, with exact match, broad match and phrase match targetting of your keyword phrases.

“Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.” - [ http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=basics&hl=en ]

It seems that this no longer holds true and that Google searches are indeed case sensitive, for the time being at least, but why? Is it simply a glitch in the algorithms? or a brave move by Google to allow more websites to benefit from better SERPs visibility based on capitalization variation?

Maybe the latter sounds a little too far-fetched, but why should Google not offer different results based on capitalization. It’s already happening with localized and personalized results? After all, who really wants to go back to the days where, for any query, a different handful of websites dominated the SERPs.

It would be really nice if Matt Cutts or someone of a similar standing in the SEO community could present Google’s take on this matter.

SEOBook are one of the first to report that they have recently updated their online rank checking tools SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker and according to Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com “Both should work as of now, and if any more SERP changes happen we will try to update the extensions as soon as possible.”

The changes however do beg the question. Are the SEO community, and their tools, responsible for so many requests on Google’s servers that they need to take action or are we looking at a simple backend HTML layout update?

The very act of querying Google with automated software is wrong, and according to Google’s webmaster guidelines…

“The sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software (such as WebPosition Gold) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.”

So, was it a simple backend update that caused a blip or a deliberate attempt to slow down the SEO community. Lets hear your thoughts?

Just like Google Trends, this new Google search marketing tool offers seasonal and historical trends with search volume shown distributed across regions and cities. Google Insights for Search however goes even further by allowing you to narrow search data to specific categories, location subregions and even user specified date ranges.

Once your search parameters are defined Google Insights for Search not only presents you with historical trend data and regional interest statistics but, in a similar manner to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, also offers you the top search terms related to your query and a list of the hottest related rising searches.

As wonderful as this search marketing tool is, I do however have to question the validity of the representation of the data. For example: A search for the term ‘Gifts’ with the filters of United Kingdom / All Subregions / Last 12 Months / All Categories produces the following demographics.

Compare this to the same search on Google Trends and the data starts to get a little confusing.

As you can see from the Google Insights for Search results it appears that the Isle of Man may be a market worth exploring for our particular term. For those who are not familiar with the Isle of Man - it is an island nestled between England and Ireland with a population of around 75,000 people. Approx 1/100th of the population of London.

But wait a minute? Google Trends is highlighting Scotland as a popular search market for our term! Both tools, by default use the broad matched version of a keyword so where does the difference in statistics lie?

All-in-all a wonderful search marketing tool, which is still in Beta, so possibly the results may be distorted at this time.

Could not connect to database

This was the description on the returned results for our client’s website.

It would seem that when the site was last crawled the database was down and the client’s developer had returned the afore mentioned error message with a 200 OK header. So instead of our nicely optimised pages the search engines found zero relevant content and a server response header that said ‘Yeah sure! This is fine, this is what we want you to see’.

So what should we really be doing if a database connection fails?

We should be looking to our SEO friendly 503 (Service Temporarily Unavalable) header to let the search engines�know that there is a problem and to come back later. For details of implementing the 503 header there’s an excellent tutorial at http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/503-service-temporarily-unavailable.html

Dont get caught out. Check your SEO procedure for handling failed database connections and make sure you use the 503 header.

More often than not, the web agency or web designer is at fault by trying to create something which is impressive to look at and, in an effort to embrace the web 2.0 ethos, has features that probably only 1% of site visitors will use. This can often result in having a badly designed website that is difficult to navigate and probably results in your customers moving on to the next website.

Lots of websites which use customisable features fall into this category where over 90% of the users will never use these ‘great’ features available to them. The development time for the extra features are often relected in higher costs for the client - resulting in very little ROI, if any. 

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen held a presentation on this, highlighting some of the facts about our headlong rush towards Web 2.0. He warned that the desire to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.

E-Gain like many other web agencies use good practices include making a site easy to use, integrate good search tools where necessary, use jargon free text, usability testing and consideration to the design even before the first line of code is written.

Always ask yourself if you really need those extra features built into your website, and will the majority of your website visitors use or benefit from it?

Online retail is currently worth around £20bn, an estimated 7% of overall retail spend and by 2012 Verdict forecast that this figure will rise to 14% or around £45bn.

With shoppers increasingly turning to the internet as an effective means of seeking out bargains and low-priced products, will an online retail presence become the difference between commercial success or failure? And will online apathy lead to a retail sales disaster?

A wide range of comments have been received and it is interesting to read other peoples perspectives on domain usage from an SEO perspective, particularly with the American (primarily .com etc) vs other parts of the world (.com & localised domain usage).

Domain usage is an often under-used part of SEO, particularly the usage of localised vs global domains, and I would recommmend that any up and coming SEO spends some time understanding the nuances of domain usage from an SEO perspective.

To read Anns full post, click here

Total usage for profiled countries:

Google: 73%
Yahoo: 4%
MSN: 5%
Yandex: 5%

These figures were obtained as below from the following data, for the following countries, UK, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria and Russia:

So feel free to give us some feedback. Whether you think its the usual suspects ie Danny Sullivan, Ralph Wilson or even Matt Cutts, or perhaps some of the new kids on the block (so to speak) such as Rand Fishkin, Jon Myers, Vanessa Fox or Andrew Girdwood. Or perhaps one from left field, maybe Lisa Dietliefsen or Kevin Lee. The floor is yours…

However taking a step back now that the dust has settled - what is the current scenario. Sure new facets of optimisation are starting to take shape (such as blended/universal search), and many search engine optimisation specialists are starting to have to think like marketeers rather than SEO’s, something which has been good for the industry, and as the industry continues to evolve will hopefully continue to produce more and more broad thinking online marketeers.

However following on from the paid links (which people like Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia in particular activately campaigned on behalf), a new trend which in my opinion rivals that of paid linkage (well in my opinion is more devious and off less value than targetted paid links), has started to become much more widespread in its use. It has been noticeable the amount of Search Engine Optimisation companies now starting to employ ‘doorway sites’ or ’satellite sites’ more aggressively as part of their online marketing strategies. In particular I can name two organisations based around Burnley, Lancashire alone (and that isn’t a huge geographic location) that actively engage in such tactics. I would suggest on a UK basis there could possibly be hundreds if not thousands more employing this technique. Many of these sites have only one major plus on the side - relevancy (and I use that term loosely) but are however of very little use, and often merely filter people through to the primary site.

Used well and strategically as part of a campaign, there is no issue with the use of microsites, however a thought pattern develops in my brain, that if you (ie Google) are going to penalise sites for artificially affecting the algorithm via the purchase of linkage, then surely trying to artificially affect the algorithm by developing hundreds of throwaway sites is against T&C’s as well, in fact quoting from Googles own Q&A page, surely the above practise would fall under shadow domains or at the very least doorway pages.

“There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

• owns shadow domains
• puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar
• doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
• gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
• has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google”

Therefore I have to ask, why do you continue to reward such activity Google?

Surely it is not that hard to track - a simple DNS or Whois lookup would sort some of the wheat from the chaff, and more sophisticated algorithmic calculations would probably take care of the rest?

It would be interesting to gauge other peoples thoughts in the industry on this one. Pretty sure there is going to be a broad difference in opinion…

However nothing should be taken away from some major advances though that I believe have been made over the last year. It is very noticeable now how many more organisations understand SEO and its commercial benefits. It has to said, that there are a a number of people that have played a key part in laying the foundations but I do believe that SEO has to a certain extent started to move away from the ‘Dark Art’ perception and one can only hope this continues across the digital marketing landscape.

As Michael mentions in his post, most websites are built around a core function, whether that be completing a purchase, downloading a thought leadership piece or merely signing up for further information. It is therefore unfortunate that many website conversion funnels therefore suffer, in order to appease egos, wild theories or a desperate quest for user information with little regard of target audience or the product in question.

I recently watched a presentation by Omniture regarding conversion funneling and multivariate testing, two key areas when it comes to maximising any online advertising whether search or display. This can take many forms, however the main ones tend to be

• Landing Page Optimisation
• Creative Optimisation
• Flow and Form Optimisation - one of the more important here I think)
• Segment Optimisation
• Optimise with the general public in mind

However moving on from this, when optimising your conversion funnel, you really need to do your homework.

• Make your conversion mechanism fit for purpose- I was involved recently in a campaign, where we had little control over the landing area for the campaign. The product centered round a very niche offering, and something whilst fairly close to a mainstream service, did not directly relate to it, and indeed, the type of people who would buy this product/service differed significantly. Added to this the product was not one you would directly type into Google. It is therefore essential that any conversion mechanism whether primary site or microsite is fit for purpose, and provides your customers with the details they need in order to make a decision and complete the sale. As you may have guessed, this initial was not the case, something that came back to bite them quite significantly (we did raise this with them), however it did highlight the requirement to provide potential customers with information, such as coverage, usage, and cost, as well as comparisons with similar products
• Don’t ask for too much information - THe amount of sites you go to where you have to sign up, and are subsequently asked for everything bar your National Insurance/Social Security number (and sometimes even that) - just to get something like a whitepaper is astounding, and fortunately one of the easiest to fix. At one of my first jobs at Tiny.com (sorry), this was something we addressed quite well, turning what was originally a lengthy sales process, to something that was much more streamlined and had the customers requirements at heart, rather than the marketing department. As a result, sales increased by over 300%.

  My rule of thumb for this however is, the more valuable/desirable the product/service/information - the more likely you are to be able to ask for more information. Using the information above, the desire is to complete that computer sale as quickly as possible, however something like a Key bit of research may carry considerably more business value, and as a result you may get away with a greater volume of customer information requirements. Ask for too much - and you will scare people away, ask for too little, and you may not be able to close the deal. Getting the balance right takes time and effort.

• Profile and Monitor - Like everything else - getting your site optimised from a conversion perspective takes time, effort and sometimes money. However I would suggest in many cases, this is money well spent, and will provide you with a streamlined, effective solution, that will return that cost over and over and over again.

  Get the tools in place, whether they be

  • Analytics - Such as Google Analytics, Clicktracks, WebTrends etc
  • Behavioural Analysis - such as BunnyFoot or other eye tracking software
  • User/Focus Groups - Speak to people  - at the end of the day surely its better getting it straight from the horses mouth.

I would suggest you take some time to read Michael’s article, and spend sometime researching the area round conversion. Myself and John Hill here at E-Gain have spent a lot of time over the last couple of years (and yes our website is not testament to this - Cobblers shoes and all that) and much of this changes, as behaviour and technologies improve. However at the end of the day, you are aiming at the majority of the time at people, and its worth remembering that.

So what changes have been introduced? In the main, these are primarily changes to the main interface, allowing quicker access to the most used pieces of information (at a campaign level), such as delivery statistics (Clicks, Impressions, CPC, Costs etc), and performance statistics (like Conversions, Cost per Conversion etc)

Taken from the Google update page itself:

“On the Performance page, you’ll find stats on clicks, conversions and conversion rates, as well as separate columns for Search and Content CTR, allowing for easier comparison of performance based on network placement.On the Budget page, you’ll find information about start dates and end dates, percentage of budget spent and total spend for each account.”

Personal first impressions are favourable. Only time will tell

To read a full overview, the MCC Dashboard post is here

Keep it fit for purpose

The amount of times clients have approached us saying “this company has offered me super-injury-lawyers-in-england.com - and says it is very good for SEO and wants £x for it”.  Whilst there is no doubting that domain names do have an effect on SEO, however at the end of the day, the effectiveness of such urls are two fold

• How much direct traffic do you have - having such a long winded domain can often be difficult to type in, and provide (by word of mouth) to your clients (particularly if you use hyphens - believe me - we know - and possibly should have listened to our own advice). You are therefore likely to either lose traffic to your site by mistyped domains, or worse still lose traffic to direct competitors by them exploiting loopholes in your online marketing strategy.
• Its only as good as the way it is implemented. Correct setup of domains, minimising duplicate content and ensuring a well structured SEO campaign are still required in order to make your website work as hard as it can from an Search perspective.

To me so many people get this wrong - focussing too much on the domain aspect of SEO, and forget ultimately who uses the sites. At the end of the day, SEO is part of your marketing strategy. The likelihood is a high proportion of users will rely on a multitude of channels to find your site, whether that be direct, search or email before buying your service or product, so you really need to be thinking from a cohesive marketing perspective rather than just a one-dimensional focus

KISS - Keep it simple stupid.

An obvious URL is a good URL. Having an easy URL to remember can be worth its weight in gold. Just look at all the big online brands - Yahoo, Dell, Google, Facebook. All have one thing in common, all have a simple, easy to remember domain. Whilst wat.com may sounds funky, chances are people aren’t going to type your ’special spelling’ in as their first attempt, and thus you face the same potential dilemmas as you would mentioned above. At the end of the day, URL’s get shared, pasted and passed on by word of mouth, so keep it relevant and it simple

Static vs Dynamic

There is no doubting that search engines DO treat static URL’s better than dynamic ones, and it is worth bearing this in mind when it comes to the structure and architecture of your website. Further to this - no one likes typing in ‘&’, ‘?’ or ‘=’ into their page names. With the development and awareness these days, there really is no reason as to why you can’t use some form of URL rewriting to make your pages more URL friendly.

Words or numbers - which is better

There is no doubting again, that page naming plays a part in the algorithm - however small, and for this reason it is worth considering your page naming convention right from the development and planning stage of your website. This is something I find many people miss out during their web build and then have to retro fit it on deployment when they decide their traffic volumes aren’t what they expected.

Many dynamic sites us keys in order to identify particular records (our glossary for example - http://www.e-gain.co.uk/online_marketing/news_articles/Press%20Releases/4), however given a well structured database and site hierarchy there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to use text based matches or alternatively a mixture of both (ie www.product.com/123/blue-widget.html)

Thorough keyword and keyword mapping also play an important part here. By ensuring your page naming convention is tied into a well structure keyword/page mapping plan, can pay handsome dividends when it comes to your SEO results 

Familiarity does not breed contempt 

If your site uses a single format throughout the site, don’t break with tradition on one section and differ it from the rest. I would suggest this comparison is carried through your whole online planning and development, as I personally would advise any clients to ensure familiarity with browsers, in order to ensure consistency and ease of navigation. I would suggest the same rings true for your domain and URL structure.

Re-inventing the wheel in situations where reliance on convention makes everyone’s tasks easier doesn’t really make sense.

Hyphens, dashes, pluses - whats best? 

It is often debated as to what is best from an SEO perspective, but to all intents and purposes, and maybe Google may be interested to provide their thoughts on this, they are probably going to be used to provide a benchmark as to where words stop - so whether it is a hyphen or underscore I would suggest is irrelevant. This may go against most peoples thoughts however from a simple PHP programming perspective the following could be used to replace a “-” or “_” with a ” ” thus making it a seperate phrase, and as you will see - none has priority.

preg_replace(”![_\-\+]!”,” “,$pagename);

However what I would add, make sure you use what Google suggest. Underscores and hyphens are known to work - for goodness sake do not seperate phrases by use of anything else (* for example)

Streamline your folders

I would suggest any excess backage is reduced from your domain hierarchy (and add to this words or characters for that matter of fact).  Less is more from an SEO perspective, and I would suggest the more streamlined your architecture here, the better for your SEO.

As Rand Fiskin stated on the SEOMoz article covering a similar topic - “The extra fabric is useless and will reduce his likelihood of impressing potential mates.”

There can only be one

I have come across a number of sites recently where the same page is presented however from a domain perspective presented as completely seperate pages (a well known cinema site for example). THis not only presents potential duplicate content issues, however from a SEO perspective, it dilutes the linkage potential of a particular page. The cinema above for example references movie pages individually as well as via local references. ie movie/movie1 and location/x/movie/movie1. Centralising movie pages not only benefits internal linkage, but also gives external linkage a centralised place to link to.

To conclude

It is potentially one of the easiest parts to your SEO strategy particularly during the early parts of a web build, however it is suprising just how many people don’t give the domain structure as much though as the design and content of the website.

It is worth adding, doing this at the beginning is time well spent, and you will save yourselves a packet having to talk to experts like me down the line.

More and more recently, I have been involved in campaigns where a primary aspect has been to protect brand perception not only from competitors but more and more often from negative pr, user generated content and other consumer reviews. Sometimes it is possible to respond in person to such issues however sometimes the problem is greater and search marketing can play a major part in reducing the effect of such activity. It should be noted the likelihood of making such ‘noise’ go completely away is nigh on impossible however you can do some things to reduce the effects, using existing online marketing tools at your disposal such as SEO, Online PR and Social Media:

1) Monitor what is being said.

There is a saying ‘knowledge is power’, and this couldn’t be more true within the corporate marketplace. There are a number of tools available online to monitor noise, both paid (Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Meltwater and Market Sentinel) and free (Icerocket, Blogpulse, Technorati and Google Alerts), however the most important aspect is ensuring that wherever you are being talked about, you are able to monitor whats being said and if necessary respond where appropriate to this activity.

Social networks should not be ignored. I have been working on a number of projects recently where political opposition has taken place on social networks such as Facebook, and these social networks should not be ignored during monitoring

2) Identify brand advocates.

This is a conversation I have had a number of times with a Managing Director of Connectpoint PR, Sandra McDowell, and something she passionately believes in. Brand Advocacy online is no different from brand advocacy offline. Identifying and working with brand ambassadors online can be a powerful tool in tackling potentially negative pr and translating this into positive brand perception.

This is something we used to do in the far and distant past whilst i was at Supanet. We used to identify potential ‘hotspots’ and react to them in order to try and ensure that any potential issues were dealt with quickly and early. However as Sandra has said many times to me previously, we need to be tackling issues proactively as well as reactively.

3) Get a website

Probably the most simple way of protecting your brand perception onin, particularly in the likelihood (albeit unlikely), that you don’t already have one. However saying that it is still suprising how many organisations have their brand domains and no website, and with advice regarding SEO friendly domains there are some organisations that do not have a brand-led domain. Introducing such a simple tactic is low hanging fruit and can be scaled further (ie develop more brand related websites in order to populate more real estate on brand searches.

4) Don’t forget about blended search

Blended search (or Universal Search) basically describes the use of images, news, feeds and maps as part of the the main search results. Many of these are integrated into a number of searches these days whether it be localised (generally Google Local results), product specific (use of Google Base Feeds), Cinema or use of video or imagery.

Search results these days provide more than one way of getting into the search engines, and effective use of PR can be one such way of dominating more real estate on the search engines. A well structured SEO-PR / Online PR campaign can pay dividends not just in terms of increased exposure, and increased exposure but also from increased brand exposure and coverage particularly on brand searches, not only from the articles and associated coverage itself, but also potentially in short term gains where Google deems an article newsworthy enough for the index.

5) Network

With the increase in popularity there is no reason you can’t use Social Networks to your benefit. In particular there exist a number of targeted social networks such as LinkedIn where business people can network effectively. Not only is this good for raising your profile but it also has the knock on effect of Google friendly content (only if you dont use limited profile), and a customisable URL all of which can be used to blend in with your brand reputation strategy.

There are also a number of other social networks such as Ecademy & Naymz where like minded business people can network, and facilitate introductions and business deals.

View Peter Young’s LinkedIn profile

Social Networks such as LinkedIn can also be a great way of finding the most relevant people within an organisation. Many of these social networks contain a very advanced search facility which allows you to more accurately define the person or people you are looking for.

From a search perpective it is not a great suprise, however given the lack of credible accreditation out there it does seem somewhat of a pity to see this fall by the wayside. This like the Google Advertising Professional/Company accreditation is a distinguishing feature and something that certainly can help in distinguishing you from smaller ’smoke and mirrors’ organisations.

Other coverage on this

Search Engine Land - Yahoo Search Ambassador Program closing

Search Engine Watch

Reporting accessible via the quality score analysis tab allows you to analyse whether there are any issues relating to your landing pages and landing page load times, with a brief comparison to other ’servers’ in the region . This is reported on by keyword level.

To access this data:

1) Choose the applicable campaign, and ad-group.
2) Choose the keywords tab if not chosen automatically
3) From the keyword page, click on the magnifying glass icon, and click on the ‘details and recommendations’ option for quality score.

This will present the following page:

For further help on improving your load times, refer to this help document from Google themselves

The tool will allow users to:

• Securely send personal data such as friends lists, presence status and the like
• Maintain single friends list

So why you may ask are organisations fighting for what seems such a small prize. The answer is the price is actually a very large one, one worth potentially millions of pounds to the winner. At present it would seem Google’s product does seem limited in some rather major areas such as user profiles (well to the same extent as Facebook and Microsoft (via Hotmail etc), however it would seem if this can be sorted via partnerships with other high profile partners this problem should be somewhat alleviated.

There is already a reasonably amount of noise on the net about this, and it is worth keeping an eye on places such as

Search Engine Roundtable - Google goes social with Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect - Webmasterworld

Google Friend Connect - Search Engine Watch 

However, whilst this tag has been input into the source code with the best of intents, it is indeed absolutely worthless in terms of SEO, offering no benefit for any of the main search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. It was indeed developed for and supported by Vancouver Webpages and their search engine SearchBC (a local search engine aimed at British Columbia)

In fact Google go as far as stating figures, quote:

” To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used - at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless than use the em element! ” - Google Webstats

Truly thats a worrying stat, given the amount of ‘SEO experts’ out there, but probably symbolic of the lack of SEO standardisation out there (however thats probably another conversation and one that has been tackled before on the E-Gain blog in a post called ‘SEO certified - will it ever become a reality‘. However I would suggest if your SEO consultant does suggest the implementation of the afore mentioned tag - point him here, and perhaps to one of these established resources as well

SEOconsultants.com
WebmasterWorld