Dangerous Thinking

There’s plenty of evidence that many marketplaces are moving from conventional channels and media on to the Net – I’m not even going to start pointing out the plethora of comment and reports, because you can Google just as well as I can.

Typically, many retailers are finding their high-overhead high street outlets are not looking as viable as they did a few years back, as consumers like to shop online from home, when it suits them. Other businesses are finding that traditional print-based advertising no longer works or is cost-effective.

Perhaps that’s the kind of challenge your business is facing, and you’re feeling unsure about what the future holds or what’s involved in getting business from the Web.

I’d argue that the change can be positive. While effective SEO isn’t the 50 quid a month many dodgy dealers may lead you to believe, try comparing a realistic proposal from a good consultant or agency with the cost of a quarter page ad in a print publication that gives you access to the same kind of audience.

An Organic SEO campaign will also have real longevity, not the day, week or month you’ll get from the print ad. While moving to more economical non-retail premises may save your business a packet.

It’s a sobering thought. One that will probably have your business wholeheartedly embracing the possibilities online.

Web Positioning Centre’s Paul Silver – our linking guru – has always been against buying links. Indeed, I can’t think of an occasion when we’ve done that for a client.

Recently, Google’s Matt Cutts has commented at length on paid-for links, and there has been much debate in the blogosphere.

If you want a more concise statement on Google’s view, there’s a great paragraph from Vanessa Fox on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren’t useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines. (my italics)

I think that’s clear enough – if you’re interested in natural search engine results, don’t buy links.

There is a misapprehension amongst some people – even, disappointingly, in the Web business itself – that carefully commissioned, researched, written, revised and approved optimized copy is just a widget for surreptitiously tweaking the interest of search engines. They want to bury it in small type or in some graphical device, because… well, why would people possibly want to read any copy based on key words?

If the optimized copy is based on proper research, it has actually been developed to appeal to the majority of the visitors to your site. How do we know that? Simply because the key phrases that have been chosen have high volumes of searches.

So when the search engine ranks you highly for those key phrases, naturally you’ll get high volumes of visitors. And it’s not much of a jump to see how the key phrase framework the copy has been built on helps the page be more relevant to those visitors. The copy is automatically more relevant because you’ve included the very words your visitors are searching for – or something very similar.

Now comes the important bit. If your SEO copywriter is any good, no-one will know it’s been written to appeal to search engines as well, and you’ll see both traffic and conversions increase.

The Google Webmaster Blog summarises them:

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I think they can be summarised by saying ‘don’t be dishonest, and don’t load your site with junk’. I’d say they were excellent principles to get your site to perform well on just about any major search engine.

From time to time we see sites that have bespoke blogs. Indeed, for many reasons that I shan’t go into here (profit?), suppliers of Web sites often offer their client a bespoke blogging application.

While in some cases, such a solution may integrate better with the rest of the site, the leading blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Movable Type are mature and powerful, offering just about everything you’d need. For what it’s worth, I’ve used both over a period of many years but I choose Wordpress these days. Indeed my two most used blogs (Dangerous Thinking and Meals on Blogs) are both Wordpress-based.

If you’re planning on using on a blog for SEO reasons, there’s one absolute killer in favour of using one of the mainstream blogging platforms – they have reliable protection against comment spam, when some of the bespoke platforms we’ve seen do not. (I’m assuming the bespoke platform will generate clean HTML, offer RSS feeds and give you comparable publishing flexibility.)

Why am I stressing comment spam protection? If you’ve not run a blog before and haven’t suffered under the onslaught of porn and dodgy pharmaceutical vendors, you may not appreciate the true implications of not having spam protection.

Earlier this year, Bad Behavior (one of the anti-spam measures I’ve experimented with) reported over 3000 attempted comment spams in just 7 days on this very blog. Think about the overhead of deleting each of those manually. I just let the software do the business.

So before you allow yourself to be lured into having a bespoke blogging package installed for you, at least be very clear you will have adequate comment spam protection. Whether I use Akismet alone, or a combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior, the result is the same – no comment spam finding its way on to this blog. And hardly any intervention required from me.

With comment spam out of the frame, it allows me to get on with blogging. I’m sure that’s what you’ll want to do with your blog, too.

In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web – more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites – it even largely ignores new sites by ’sandboxing’ them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They’re the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Read the full article Only pick a fight you can win – the first rule of successful Web marketing at Web Positioning Centre.

Last week, Google announced it is to unify its search results into a single search, called Web. The news made the mainstream media.

On its blog, Google said:

Here’s the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we’ve only been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the top of the page, like this example for [trends in education]. But it’s a tall order to earn placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on the page when they don’t quite deserve the top, we could share the benefits of these great Google features with people much more often.

and concluded:

This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making improvements so you get the most relevant information from our varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we’re especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place where we can get big things done!

At Web Positioning Centre, we’ve seen some shuffling and inconsistency in Google results for some of our clients recently. Internally, we predicted some upcoming changes in the Google algorithm. I guess we were right.

It’s difficult to know exactly what implications Google’s unified search will have. One immediate response is that with more results competing for each search, you may have to invest more in SEO to get on that first page. Google takes a positive spin on its Webmaster Blog and makes some suggestions on how to take advantage of universal search.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the effect of the changes following the launch on Wednesday. It’ll almost certainly take a few weeks for things to settle down and it should start becoming clear what kind of sites and content Google is giving highest weightings to.

The other day I wrote about ‘What’s in it for me?’ and hot prospects. It led to an interesting conversation, which in turn, led me to realising I should have spun the benefits out a little further.

The point I found myself making was as follows. You must let go of your prejudices about what your prospective customers are expecting. Your key phrase discoveries are acting as very valuable market research. They’re telling you what people are looking for in your market segment.

So if the findings are not wholly in line with your expectations, you should listen closely to what people are telling you about their needs through the searches they’re actually making.

Follow what your potential customers are telling you and you’ll get a better, more effective Web site.

On Tuesday, Google announced a New Version of Google Analytics (henceforth Analytics).

We will be activating this new version on all current Analytics accounts over the next few weeks, so please be on the lookout for an email from us and keep an eye on your settings page.

Well, our main account has been upgraded, and my look around the new version this afternoon put a huge smile on my face. Google must have been listening to my grumblings and finally put its house in order!

Google summarises the upgrades as follows:

Here are some of the improvements:

* Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
* Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
* Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
* Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

At first glance, the most exciting thing is the ability to e-mail and export personalized reports. So Analytics is not now dragging its feet behind Adwords – always very frustrating when trying to sell the benefits of Analytics to a client, and having to point out that, by the way, they can’t have those reports e-mailed.

I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the new Analytics. It looks as if I won’t be saying ‘Google Analytics is good for the price’ any more.

I had a conversation earlier in the week with someone who insisted that what his chosen SEO company was doing was correct and he was spending his company’s money correctly. I told him it wasn’t what Web Positioning Centre either did or recommended. To cut a long story short, we agreed to differ and went our separate ways.

I was reminded of the conversation while I was catching up with Matt Cutts’ blog at lunchtime. He responds to The Forbes article, Condemned to Google Hell that has been been referenced all over the place. Basically, some poor site owner complains how they’ve been so hard done-by Google, and how much business they’ve lost consequentially.

There’s something familiar about the story Matt pitches in Google Hell? For some reason, it seems the company featured in the article has employed an SEO company that in turn employs, er, questionable practices.

The guy I talked to earlier in the week could be headed into very similar waters.