Search Engine Optimisation
DIY SEO: Listing in Google Local
Mar 8th
If you own a local business and are doing web marketing, but haven’t yet looked at your own listing in Google Local … go do it. Right now, before you read any further. Drill Sergeant Pepper says go go go!
Now that you know your starting point, we’re going to show you how to make that listing prettier, help make sure that those reviews that show up are mostly positive (without cheating), and generally draw more customers through your sliding door. Here’s how to edit your Google Local listing, and what it could do for your business.
1. Go to www.google.com.au/lbc and add a new business
Most of this information is fairly straightforward, however close to the bottom of the listing page (as it stands currently) you’ll have to enter a description and category for your business. These will be critical in driving traffic to your site through Google Local. Make sure your description contains a variety of your keywords (don’t use word order variations, or singular AND plural versions). Choose your category carefully as well – use this list, and search the page with Ctrl+F to find your keywords and their associated category.
The other field you should take note of is the business name – it is likely that Google uses this to help rank you and display your results as well. If your official business name is ‘Making the Cut’, and you are a hairdresser, we advise you to list your business name as ‘Making the Cut Hairdressing’ in Google Local to have the best chance of being found.
2. Enter information
Throughout the rest of the process, enter as much information as possible about your business. Tell people how they can pay, tell them when you are open, tell them everything. Add photos, add videos, add all the additional details you can think of. The internet is there for information, and while some businesses have a competitive aversion to telling others what they do, customers expect it … and appreciate it.
3. Reviews
Check out where your competitors are getting reviews from in Google Local, and put up a physical sign in your shop asking people that had a good experience to post a review of your shop on that site. You will inevitably get some bad reviews as well – don’t worry too much about them. If you have a good business, you will get mostly good reviews.
Eight On-Page SEO Magic Bullets
Mar 5th
In SEO, if your competition is savvy, top search rankings comes down to time, creativity, dedication and persistence. However, if your competition is not savvy, or you are just starting out in the field, there are a few things you can do to make a big difference in how search engines view your pages. Today we are looking at the simple little on-page tasks that everybody (or their SEO firm) can do in less than a week, to instantly gain kudos with the search engines.
Magic SEO bullet breaks the Google front page barrier
1. Ensure internal links contain anchor text
Your own website is the place you have the most control … use it! Ensure that when you link to another page on your site, it is with relevant, keyworded anchor text.
2. Use your H1 tag
This is a must on all pages! The H1 tag is one of the major ways that Google decides what a page is about – one of the strongest ways to ensure that it matches a page up with a user search.
3. Use your H2 and H3 tags
Same as above. Not using these tags is a massive wasted opportunity.
4. Move the keywords to the front of the title tag
In some sites you will really have to prioritise the pages that you do this activity on … because it is a bit transparent when every one of your page headings starts with ‘Bangkok hotel’, or ‘hotel in Bangkok’ or ‘Luxury Bangkok hotel’ or ‘Discounts on Bangkok hotels’ that you care more about the search engines than you do about accurately describing content for your readers. A good page structure, created with SEO in mind, is obviously of help here.
5. Bold your keywords
Use the <strong> code to bold at least one instance of the keyword that you are targeting. No point overdoing this one … so it takes very little time.
6. Use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs
Google indexes punctuation, including underscores. It will recognise the words “Bangkok_hotel” within a URL as a single word. However, if you write “Bangkok-hotel” the page will rank for Bangkok, for hotel, and especially for Bangkok hotel.
7. Put alt tags on your photos and images
It doesn’t make a huge difference, but if you don’t add your alt tags, it is just another wasted opportunity. SEO has become such a big game that every one of these little things is absolutely necessary … if you wan to be competitive.
8. Don’t put anything more than three clicks away from the home page
Three degrees of separation is the golden rule for both users and search engines.
Is Google News for Yews?
Mar 4th
Google news sends almost a billion visitors to publishers worldwide … in a month! If you are doing internet marketing for a site with ‘newsworthy’ content, it is well worth investigating how you can start having Google news index your content. You can start your investigations on the very next line!
Artist's conceptulaization of the Google bot discovering news
Why publish in Google News?
Apart from the whole ‘be part of the billion clicks’ thing, there are very important SEO reasons for getting published in Google News. If your news article is highly relevant to a search, it automatically gets excellent real estate on the Google front page, via the ‘news results for xxyyz’ box. Additionally, if you have a highly trafficked article, you may get to the iGoogle news widget box, and get clicks from everyone that uses this widget on their iGoogle home page.
Getting content indexed
You can just leave your content there to be discovered … but considering the whole point of news is to be fresh, and Google might take up to 30 days to get round to your site again, submitting a Google News sitemap is a much better strategy. There is a Wordpress plugin for this purpose, or you can follow the guidelines from Google itself.
Using categories and subfolders
Google uses your own categories and subfolders, as well as the URLs they create and the keywords that naturally occur on your site, to decide what your content is about. You don’t want to keyword stuff (although do use keywords instead of referential phrases like ‘it’ or ‘them’).
If your news content is more of local interest, put it into a ‘State/Region/City’ subfolder on your site to help the dear Google bot.
Use static URLs
Otherwise you’ll destroy your Google ranking everytime it is refreshed. Create a permanent and unique URL for every story, and include ‘articleID=’ in the string to help Google identify it as news.
Put the date into the text
Placing it between the title and the body text helps Google News know the proper date of publication, as well as identifying it as news rather than ordinary HTML.
Don’t break up the text
If you ordinarily have advertisements in the middle of an article, or links to related posts at the bottom of the fold, take them out on your news pages.
And of course, don’t forget Yahoo News – still a significant source of traffic.
The Life and Times of Google, continued
Feb 25th
A day on which a person living in Australia, America, the UK or Europe doesn’t interact with Google is a rare day. Most of us depend heavily on our computers, our internet connections, and Google. Google is the giant of the SEO world, driving the overwhelming majority of search traffic, and therefore creates a livelihood for businesses worldwide. In that spirit, today we’re continuing our Google gossip-fest from yesterday, checking out the ins and outs of Google’s relationships for our own voyeuristic gain 
Google buys Remail
Remail created an email search application for the iPhone … and as soon as Google saw the word ’search’ in a product that it didn’t own, that credit card in it’s ginormous wallet really started to itch! It has now bought Remail, and seems close to closing a deal with on2.
Real time search now to include MySpace
Previously only Bing included MySpace status updates, and there was some balance to the world. Now Google’s real time search includes MySpace status updates, Facebook updates, tweets and news results.
Google and Yahoo raise doubts over Conroy’s filter
Stephen Conroy’s controversial internet filter, which would attempt to remove content that has been ‘Refused classification’ by the Classification Board, has taken a hit from Google and Yahoo. Both search engines have said that the filters ‘would not effectively protect children’, and noted that it is the chat rooms and message boards that usually feature material relating to child porn … and these are not usually indexed by search engines anyway.
Google looks to bring 1G per second broadband speeds
It’s the way of the future – Google is now working on bringing internet connection speeds of up to 1G per second to thousands of households. Unfortunately, they are currently located only in America.
eBay Exec is new Google VP of Commerce
The hiring of Stephanie Tilenius of eBay as Google’s VP of commerce has raised talk that Google might be upgrading their checkout process or other ecommerce initiatives.
Facebook more important than Google?
People are more often getting product recommendations and referrals from Facebook than Google, according to the San Francisco Chronic. Of course, this will not outstrip demand for general search information on Google, Bing or Yahoo anytime soon.
MS Uses Google’s own platform to take a swipe
Microsoft has recently uploaded a series of videos to Youtube – hosted by Google – attacking Google Docs and Google Apps. The videos suggest that the applications don’t have the security or on-premises flexibility that most businesses need.
The Life and Times of Google
Feb 24th
If you depend on internet marketing for the success of your business (and there are all sorts of businesses, from eBay to Ricardo’s Hairdresser around the corner, that do), then you will also be very interested in what Google is doing. Every little movement has an immense impact on the search environment … at least, when you are as big and as fat as Google is! So today we turn all gossip rag-ish, and in a testament to the quality of publications like ‘New Idea’ and ‘Famous’, take an intimate look at Google’s life details over the past month or so 
Google Buzz - Saving the World?
Google Buzz gets launched to mixed reception
Most gossip journalists concur that Google Buz has been getting buzz in the press for the wrong reasons … the main one being the default privacy settings. In some cases, people feel that their physical safety has been horribly compromised by Google’s Buzz introduction. However, there are some real advantages to Buzz, not the least of which is the opportunity to set up a Google profile and get followed links to websites from a PR10 site.
Electronic Privacy Info Centre complains to FTC
This US based group, concerned over the privacy breaches engendered by Google Buzz, wants the FTC to investigate and consider forcing Google to make Buzz an opt-in feature, rather than opt-out.
Google Books saga comes to an end
In 2005, Google was sued over copyright infringement by a group of authors and publishers, because of the preview feature on Google Books. It seems likely that the lawsuit will be settled in the next week or so, and if it is, Google will be able to create a subscription library for its collection of over 12 million books, sell books direct from its site (bye bye, Amazon!), and display portions of books for free.
Google works on creating real-life Babel fish
Before the Altavista Babelfish search engine (and its AMAZING accuracy … not), it seemed incredible simply that computers could translate between different languages. Now Google is working on creating a more realistic ‘Babel fish’, with Google Goggles. They would use OCR, Optical Character Recognition, to pick up what a text is saying, and then run it through Google Translate, and spit it out in comprehensible form.
How NOT to Get a PR10
Feb 23rd
Ironically, the site pr10(dot)com ranks extremely highly for search terms like “how to get a pr10″. This would be unsurprising … if it weren’t for the fact that every piece of ‘web marketing’ advice on the site is very, very thickly veiled sarcasm. I would almost think the authors deliberately wanted to drop the Pagerank of every site other than their own by using these tactics! So, in retaliation (and courtesy of pr10(dot)com), here is how NOT to get a pr10. Optional subtitle – How to get dropped off the Google index.
Google - not as antiquated as they once were
1. Use hidden text on your site
The suggestion is to colour code your text so that the text is either the same as the background colour, or visually very close. The example given is to use 00FF33 and 00FF66, so that Google will index your keywords on the page but humans can’t see them.
2. Use full stops as links
Put full stops down the bottom of every web page, each one linking to Google, to Yahoo, and to your own site.
3. The ever-increasing non-magical Pagerank
Sorry, this tip is so ridiculous that I have to quote directly from pr10(dot)com:
“This tip is probably the most powerful one on here. Make at least three pages on your site and link them as follows:
Page 1 >>>>>> Page 2
Page 2 >>>>>> Page 3
And this is the kicker
Page 3 >>>>>> Page 1
Google will give points to page 2 from page 1, then to page 3 from page 2, and then – if you link it back to page 1 – it starts all over again. I can’t even count how many points this will end up giving you. Just don’t abuse it too much – or the big sites will complain you are taking too much PR from them.”
4. Use lots of meta keyword tags
Having your meta keyword section stuffed with your keywords may have helped several years ago (and to be fair, the pr10 site is copyright 2002), but nowadays the technique does little to nothing. You won’t get de-listed, but you will have wasted your time.
5. Link to a Google page that contains all the inbound links to your site
This supposed magic trick just doesn’t work! The in vitro data is not supported by in vivo testing. You are supposed to link to pages that link to your sites using “link:www.whatever.net”, thus listing all of the inbound links for that page and pushing up their Pagerank, and therefore your own.
If these tips didn’t seem so much in earnest, I would laugh at them … as they are published on the net, I certainly worry that they’ve irrevocably hurt many people’s SEO rankings.
5 Acceptable SEO Techniques to Learn From the Black-Hatters
Feb 22nd
One thing that few self-service style SEO guides make clear is the distinction between white-hat and black-hat tactics. SEO is a tool that can be used in a variety of different ways … so while a fork can be used to pick up food, it can also be used to stab somebody. Google is trying to avoid being stabbed with the forks they hand out, in the form of the reward that their algorithm provides to different sites! However, every current black-hat technique started out as a legitimate way for Google to differentiate between sites for relevance. So how can you get back to basics, and safely use those ‘black-hat’ style techniques?
Black and White Hat SEO are opposite sides of the same thing...
1. Hide your text
Black hatters use hidden text for nonsensical keyword stuffing. Legitimate sites can still get the benefit of any keywords that may be located in hidden text, but without cluttering the page itself, using JQuery effects like mouseovers to make text appear, etc. Here is a legitimate example (text in the question marks).
2. Mis-spelled terms
It is a popular black hat technique to try and rank for misspelt versions of popular terms, for example, ‘credtit report’. If you have a common misspelling in your industry, define it somewhere on your page, and let visitors know the correct version.
3. Grow your own farmed links
Create a network of related blogs in house, each focusing on a niche within your company or industry. A single person should be able to manage four or five, still very professionally.
4. Pay for your links
But not in the standard black hat way – donate to charitable organizations or community organizations that have a ‘Sponsors’ page with followed links.
5. Do some brand jacking
Do you have a legitimate tale of disappointment from a corporation? People love to complain, and they love bad news, and they love to hear about how terrible a place is before they do business with them. It is a legitimate purpose – just don’t overdo it, your site will develop a negative ‘aura’!
5 Internet Marketing Strategies You Can Do in Ten Minutes
Feb 11th
Unlike hospitality or retail, internet marketing is not an industry for those who need instant gratification. Everybody is vying for top Google results, and that means that it is going to take a lot of time to get those valuable top 10 positions. However, as turtle-like as internet marketing can sometimes seem, there are plenty of things you can do in ten minutes or less, that will help your search engine rankings. Today we go through 7 of them.
Now that's fast SEO!
- Answering Twitter questions
Set up an alert through any one of the Twitter companion programs for questions with keywords related to your industry. When you see someone ask a question about either your industry, or your brand specifically, answer them! This really makes your customers feel cared for, encourages them to visit, pushes up your Google ranking… - Write a case study
Information from experts is in short supply on the web. Knock out a case study for recent clients of yours, and note how you solved problems for them. Provide real, useful information and people will not only visit and link to you, they might even hire you. - Create a narrow ‘How-to’ article
The big, long and in-depth ‘how-to’ articles are more than a ten minute job. However, people want the answers to all sorts of small questions – they don’t always want to have to read through ‘The Ultimate Guide’ to solve a problem. - Use Google Hot Trends to decide what to tweet and blog about
Of course, it will still have to be related to your industry – but Google Hot Trends shows what the buzz is about, right at this very second. If you can link a news item or issue to your content, the traffic possibilities are enormous. - Check your page speed with Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools lets you see how fast or slow your site is. And Google has hinted that page speed will become an ever-more important factor in ranking … so make sure you know where you stand.
3 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Web Marketing Success
Feb 10th
Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.
How healthy is your website's shopping cart?
So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.
1. Look at what happens after the click
There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site. What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.
Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.
2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them
The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.
Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.
You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.
3. Add a Live Help function
Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:
- There isn’t enough product information on a description page
- An error occurs during checkouot
- Return policy is not clearlt stated
- People need to enquire about shipping
- The product is expensive
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #3
Feb 9th
We all have a brain … well, most of us do . One of the interesting things about your brain, is that it follows quite a few rules that can be used to predict your behaviour in many situations. Just ask Hunch! Your brain and its rules can also be used in an SEO context, to get visitors to your site, boost its value in their minds, and climb up the Google ladder. Today we explore another tip for using neuroscience in a web marketing context.
The grossest, but certainly the best, web marketing tool
Use scarcity as a selling point
The neuroscience: Humans are a social creature, and we tend to look for both acceptance and status among our peers. If we believe that a lot of other people have (or want) a particular product or service, we will also want it. Having the same thing as everyone else helps build our acceptance; having something everyone else wants confers status.
The web marketing tactic: So, if you truly only have a limited number of items, or can honestly only provide a service for a limited time, let people know that. You might do this by:
- Modifying your ecommerce software to show the number of items left in stock of a particular product
- Modifying your ecommerce software to show how many of a particular item have been sold in the recent past
- Puttingup a widget on your site that shows people the most popular items, and how many there are left
- Creating a special promotion or sale, but only holding it for a limited time. DON’T extend it past the indicated date. This is like telling your two-year old that they will get a time-out for touching the television … and when they touch the television a minute later, simply telling them that they’ll get a time-out again. You are teaching people not to believe what you say.
- Holding a special limited time event, such as an exclusive customer party, a product celebration, a promotion to hold inconjunction with a trade show, etc.
Of note: This usually only works when there really is a limited amount of something! For example, we’ve all seen those email marketing letters and landing pages that urge us to ‘Sign Up Now – This Offer Expires in Thirty Days’ … without mentioning what thirty day time period the offer covers. We know that people say this just to get our attention, and when this occurs, it breeds distrust.
The trick is to let your customers know when there REALLY is a limited time offer … not to invent time limits to try and increase signups.