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On the 8th May, Google announced that they are now using landing page load time as a factor in assessing the quality score for Google Adwords ads.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/05/landing-page-load-time-now-available-on.html

This means that it you advertise on Google Adwords, it may cost you more to maintain the same ranking on Google if your pages take a long time to load.

It also suggests that the same may well be true for Google's organic listing. So even if you don't advertise, now would be a good time to check your page load times and try to make improvements.

Firstly, you can use a tool like the 1&1 Site Checker, http://sitechecker.1and1.co.uk/analyze/?ladezeit, to find out how long your pages take to load and compare them with your competitors.

If your performance is poor, you will need to find out why. There are several factors that may be involved.

1) Latency
If your web site is on a server in a different country, the pages will take longer to load because of the distance and, more importantly, the number of different steps in the connection between your customers and your web site. Consider relocating your site to a server that is in the same country as most of your customers - even if it costs a little more.

2) Server performance
Cut-price web hosting that crams a large number of sites onto a single server is a false economy. Performance will inevitably be affected, especially at peak times. Upgrading to a proper ecommerce web hosting package will greatly improve the browsing experience, and almost certainly increase sales.

3) Images
Large images greatly increase the amount of data that has to be delivered before a page is fully loaded. Use smaller images that open larger versions when you click on them. Make sure that jpegs are compressed as much as possible, consistent with the image quality you need to achieve. In general, 5% compression will not produce noticeable loss of quality, and will significantly reduce the file size. Anything over 20% is likely to be highly noticeable, and won't deliver much saving in size.

Wherever possible, use CSS styles instead of images for the site design. A lot can be done with CSS to add background colours, borders and other effects, without the need to use images.

4) Code
If all else fails, go through the code and eliminate unnecessary content such as Comment tags. For Actinic-based ecommerce pages, make sure Actinic is set to Compact the code before uploading.

In general, a tableless CSS-based design will be noticeably more compact and faster to load than an equivalent design using more traditional methods. Some effects that in the past required Javascript, such as pop-up menus, can now be achieved far more efficiently using style sheets.

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Whenever I ask delegates on our Search Engines and Online Marketing course which is the most important search engine, they invariably name Google. But they are always surprised when I show them exactly how important Google is to their business.

For example, web-tracking company Hitwise announced recently that in March 2008, over a third of all traffic to UK web sites came from a Google-owned site. 36.55% to be exact. That's an increase of over 6% compared with the previous March - and it's an awful lot of traffic. (www.hitwise.co.uk/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/uk-google-websites-one-third-uk-traffic-28042008.php)

When it comes to search, Google's dominance is even more impressive. Hitwise state that in the same period, about 88% of all searches in the UK were carried out on Google. That's even higher than figures published last year by Forrester Research. (www.hitwise.co.uk/datacenter/searchengineanalysis.php).

Given that search engines in general are the number one source of new visitors to web sites (and therefore, of new online customers), getting prominent listings on Google should still be the online marketers first target.

For some hints as to how to start doing this, check out Actinic's Search Engines White Paper; or buy or download our free Top Tips book and read tips 37-47.

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Google recently announced that it is changing its policy towards trademark holders. In the past, if an Adwords advert for a competitor appeared in searches for a trademarked term that you own - such as your brand name - you could submit a complaint to Google, and they would remove the ad. From 5th May, that will no longer be the case. See www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html for Google's official statement.

The change follows a High Court case brought against Yahoo! for exactly this type of advertising, in which the case went against the trademark holder. For a summary of the legal ruling, see www.out-law.com/page-8916.

Although companies in the UK and Ireland will no longer be able to stop competitors from advertising against their trademarks, Google does still offer some protection in the form of its Quality Score. Competitors' landing pages will, by definition, have low relevance to searches for someone else's brand, and Google takes this into account in ranking the ads. To outrank the trademark owner, the competitor would have to compensate for this by significantly increasing their bid - probably to an uneconomic level.

Shutting competitors out

In the case of Actinic, we have already seen a couple of competitors trying to take advantage of this change. But in our case, we not only bid on our own name, we allow any of our recognised partners to bid on it too. Because their sites are also relevant to the search, they have a better quality score than the competitors - and the competitors appear at the bottom of the list.

The mathematics of this means that if you and nine partners such as resellers or affiliates all bid on your brand name, you can push your competitors completely off the first page of search results.

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A broken link is a link on a web page that points to something that doesn't exist. This can be caused by an error in the link; or by the removal of (or failure to upload) the object it points to.

How much do broken links matter? One broken link on a large site may not seem to matter all that much; but it matters to the person who clicks on it! Left unmanaged, though, broken links will multiply over time and can significantly degrade the quality of the site.

Broken links = lost business

In the long run, broken links result in lost business, because they have several negative effects on the site.

• Lost Page Rank. A link is the means by which one page donates page rank to another. If a link points to the wrong place, the intended destination page won't inherit any page rank from the page the link is on.


• Search engine penalty. A page containing a broken link may have its page rank reduced. A site with a lot of broken links may be downgraded by the search engines as being of poor quality.


• Lost listings. If a link is faulty, search engines will be unable to follow it to the next page. This may result in the search engine not updating its index for that page, or worse, not listing the page at all.


• Lost visitors. Search engines are the number one source of new visitors to web sites. Anything that damages your profile on the search engines will reduce the number of new visitors you attract.


• Lost customers. Visitors to your site who click on a broken link will be redirected to your error page, if you have one. If not, they will just get a 404 'Page not found' error. Most of them won't waste time hunting around your site for the thing they wanted. They will go and look elsewhere.

Dealing with broken links is quite easy. You can either download and run a software link checker like Xenu's Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html), which is free and widely used; or you can use an online service that does the same job – such as the one provided by Webmaster Toolkit (www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-checker.shtml),, which can also check for missing images.

If you've never done it, you may be surprised at how many broken links your site has, and it may take a while to work through and fix them all. Done regularly, though, it is not an onerous task; and will improve both the quality of your site for visitors, and its search engine performance.

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Your online brand is under threat from people who want to use your hard-earned brand equity for their own profit - or just want to cause trouble. But with some simple precautions, you can eliminate 95% of the risk. The other 5% probably isn't worth worrying about.

1. Trademark your brand
Trademarking your brand protects your legal ownership. The biggest name on the internet, In the UK, trademarked terms are protected online under law, and the law has teeth. The biggest company on the internet, Google, was unable to use its 'Gmail' brand in the UK because someone else already owned the name here. So if you haven't already done so, do trademark your brand.

2. Brand your domain
Your www. address should ideally be the same as your brand name. If that domain is taken, choose another that contains your brand name. Purchase relevant 'top level’'domains, such as .com, .co.uk, and .eu, to prevent 'cybersquatting' - their use or abuse by someone else.

When PricewaterhouseCoopers rebranded themselves Monday a few years ago, they only bought the domain introducingmonday.com. For years, introducingmonday.co.uk displayed a photocopy of a hand performing a rude gesture, and proclaimed 'We’ve got your name!' Don't fall into the same trap. On the other hand, don't be conned into purchasing loads of obscure domains that you don't really need.

3. Lock your domain
'Locking' your domain with your domain registrar prevents unauthorised transfer requests. Otherwise, someone else may gain temporary control of your domain by persuading your registrar that you have left the company and they have taken over.

4. Block the hackers
Being hacked can harm your business and damage your reputation. If hackers gain access they may deface or replace your home page, or delete files on your site - which could include your latest batch of orders.

Make sure your web server is always up to date with the latest security patches. Use secure passwords that are not in any dictionary; make them hard to guess, and don't write them down. If any staff leave who know your passwords, change them. And use a secure ecommerce package for ordering, so that credit card details are encrypted. Then if your site is hacked, your customers will still be secure.

5. Stake your slaim
Claim your brand, and demonstrate your intention to protect it. Include your brand name and logo on every web page and in every downloadable document, and use the TM or ® logo where appropriate.

6. Protect your copyright
Put a copyright notice on every site page, and every downloadable document. Search Google for unique phrases used on your site, to see if anyone has copied them. Unless they are partners or resellers, contact them with instructions to remove the content. If they refuse, get a solicitor to write a legal 'cease and desist' instruction.

One online vendor copied images wholesale from The Gentleman's Shop (www.gentlemans-shop.com). When challenged, he insisted they were his own. Site owner Robert Johnston pointed out that the image sizes and names were the same as his own originals. "The show stopper," Robert explains, "was that some images had our garden as a backdrop!" Faced with the evidence, the offender removed the images.

7. Monitor search advertising
Your competitors may pay search engines to display their own advertisement to everyone who searches for you by name. This can be confusing for customers, as John Sollars of Stinkyink (www.stinkyink.com) discovered. "At one time, if you typed 'Stinkyink' into Google, an advert for one of our competitors appeared at the top", he recalls. "We had customers phoning up asking where their order was, when they had ordered from the competitor."

In the UK you can prevent advertising against your registered trademark, and Google, Yahoo! and MSN have procedures for dealing with infringements.

8. Top the rankings for your brand
Unless there are bigger organisations using the same name in different markets, you should be able to come our top in search engines listings for your own brand. Optimise your home page for your brand name. Use it at least 3-4 times in the text of the page. Include it in the page title, meta description and meta keywords tags, and in text links pointing from other pages to the home page. And make sure

Protecting your brand is important to building your reputation and maintaining trust. So don't let the pressure to win more customers and make more sales push it right off the agenda. Give it the priority it deserves.

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The first Christmas trading results are beginning to come in, and it looks like another bumper Christmas for online businesses, and more misery for the high street.

An email poll among our own users – mostly small and medium businesses in the retail sector – found a 27% rise in the number of people buying online, and a 46% increase in revenue (www.actinic.co.uk/news/080102.htm). So not only are more people shopping on the web, but they are spending more as well.

Other results suggest that small and medium businesses did at least as well as their larger counterparts. DSG, representing Dixons and FotoVista, reported a 31% rise in online sales – somewhat less than the smaller businesses represented in the Actinic poll. And Next, who at the time of writing have yet to report their online results, recorded an overall increase of a miserly 0.3% (www.internetretailing.net).

The biggest rise of all was reported on Christmas Day itself. Research by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) found 4.4 million people spending £84 million ordering goods online on the 25^th December – up a massive 269% on the previous year. (www.imrg.org).

In comparison, the high street may have done appallingly badly. Both DSG and Next recorded an actual fall in like for like sales in their stores in the pre-Christmas period – of 0.3% and 1% respectively.

So however you cut the statistics, the message is the same. The future for retail business is bright – so long as you’re online.

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One of the great things about the Firefox browser is the huge range of add-ons available, including several that are very useful for Marketing purposes. In this respect at least, Internet Explorer doesn’t come close. These are the ones I use regularly – feel free to comment, and add any others that you find particularly helpful.

1. SeoQuake

Invaluable for competitive research, it displays useful information about each site underneath its entry in Google’s listing -- like this:



Information provided includes the age and size of the site, links, traffic, and the number of people who have bookmarked it. You can select which items you want displayed, and you can also have the results on the page sorted according to different parameters. Great for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your site in comparison with your main search competitors.

www.seoquake.com



2. Google Global Firefox Extension

Allows you to compare your search performance on different Google regional search engines. Right-clicking on a Google results page allows you to display the results of the same search, as seen in a range of different countries. By default it offers the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; but you can add any Google regional domain to the options.

www.redflymarketing.com/blog/google-global-firefox-extension



3. Social Media for Firefox

In the browser status bar, shows how many times the current page has been bookmarked in the main social bookmarking sites, and allows you to post to each of them. Currently supports Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Very useful for social networking and link building.

www.97thfloor.com/social-media-for-firefox



4. Google Blogger Web Comments

Allows you to see quickly whether any comments have been posted on Blogger about the current page, how many, and what they are. A right-click on the Web Comments icon brings up the first few words from each blog; allows you to click through and read what is written; and allows you to post your own comment to Blogger. Can also pop up a box automatically with the list of comments.

www.google.com/tools/firefox



5. IETab

A Firefox add-on that allows you to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine from within Firefox . This enables you to ccompare how your web pages will display in both Internet Explorer and Firefox by simply toggling between the two in the same Window.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419


6. SearchStatus

Displays the Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic Rank and the Compete Rank for the current site in the status bar. A pop-up menu offers an array of information about the current page and its site, including Whois information, robots.txt and meta tag listing, nofollow links and keyword density.

www.quirk.biz/searchstatus

Labels: add-ons, blog, blogging, blogs, bookmarking, browser, competitive, engine, extensions, linking, links, marketing, media, networking, optimisation, plugins, research, search, seo, social

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Alexa ranking has its own significance in the ranking position of website in the search engines. The ranking in Alexa.com serves as a criteria for the Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If one depends on link or site selling as a form of monetization one will definitely want to increase their Alexa rank because it’ll increase bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing. Here we are taking into account the ranking of Social media. Social media is an Internet media that allow people to interact in some way. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet Forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. The basic services provided by these sites are interactive connections. The 10 social media sites stated below are ranked high in Alexa.com. These are:-

1. Yahoo
2. Microsoft Network
3. Google
4. You tube
5. MySpace
6. Orkut
7. Facebook
8. Hi5
9. Blogger.com
10.Friendster

Like Orkut.com is the online social networking services operated by Google. Here people come into contact with each other and build up relations whether personal or business.

# posted by  Anonymous : February 14, 2008 10:46 PM

 

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One of the questions I often get asked during our Search Engines and Online Marketing Course is how best to submit a web site to Google. There are basically four ways to do this, and some are preferable to others.

1. Automated submission

Many of our competitors offer automated search engine submission with their ecommerce packages, but we have never offered or recommended such a service. For one thing, it's a breach of Google's terms and conditions. If you don't believe me check it out here! It's point four under 'Quality guidelines - basic principles'.

2. Manual submission

You can submit your home page manually to Google, and to the other main search engines. But it doesn't guarantee that you will be listed, nor will it help them find all the pages on your site. It's better than doing nothing, and at least you won't be breaking any rules. But it's by no means the best way to get listed.

3. Linking

If your site is linked from other sites, the search engines will find it and index it. If you don't have any links, you might get a basic listing, but you will never rank well. All the search engines take account of the quality and number of inbound links when ranking a site, and on Google, they are the most important factor. It's far better to spend your time recruiting links from good quality, relevant sites than to go round submitting to every search engine you can think of.

4. XML site map

The best way to ensure that Google can find and index all the pages of your site is to submit a site map in a format called XML. If your site is built in Actinic, you can generate this using the free Google Site Map Mash from Mole End. Alternatively, search for something like 'google site map generator' to find one of the free generic tools that will do the job for you. In this case you will need to upload the XML file manually to your web site.

To submit your site map to Google, sign in to your Google Account (it's free to set up if you don't have one) and use the Webmaster Tools. You can also submit your site map to Yahoo! Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and enter the URL of your XML file into the 'Submit Site Feed' field. (MSN has promised to support the same site map format at some time in the future).

That's it! You now have an official back door to submit all your web pages to Google, and to Yahoo! as well.

Labels: ecommerce, google, linking, links, msn, search engine, site, site map, site maps, submission, submit, web, yahoo

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Used properly, email can be an effective, low-cost way of communicating with customers. It also gives you the ability to direct the recipient to a relevant page of your web site with just a single click.

On the other hand, junk email is a huge turn-off. The trouble is, one person's junk is another's treasure. It's all about relevance. Email that is targeted towards the recipients' interests or needs is more effective for the sender, and avoids irritating the receiver. Here are a few suggestions for using email in conjunction with data about your customers' purchasing behaviour, to identify likely interest and maximise possible sales opportunities over the Christmas period.

1) Target last year's shoppers

Customers who bought Christmas gifts from you last year, assuming they were not dissatisfied, may have a higher propensity to purchase gifts from you this year. Send an email specifically to that group of people, with information on this year's Christmas range and links to your site for more details. Obviously, you must exclude any who have opted out from receiving your emails already.

2) Reward your biggest spenders

Higher spending customers are your best friends - their Christmas orders are likely to be worth more than the average. An email offering a free gift with their order may encourage them to come back to you rather than looking elsewhere.

3) Target by product interest

People tend to give presents that they themselves would like to receive. They also tend to acquire friends who have similar interests. So it's a good strategy to target people who have already bought specific types of product - like DVDs or perfume, for example – with related Christmas promotions.

The Mailing List feature in Actinic Business enables selective export of customer data according to all these types of criteria and more, for use with your email client (in the BCC field), GroupMail, or another mass email package. To see the options available, select 'Mailing Lists' from the 'Marketing' menu.

4) Use hyperlinks to trigger offers

Many sites manage offers and discounts by giving some customers a 'promotional code' which they type into a box at the checkout. Unfortunately, this tells other visitors that some people are getting a better deal than they are - which can increase cart abandonment and leads to lost sales. Use email links to trigger offers, and you can reward whom you choose, while keeping the others blissfully unaware.

5) Set time limits

Customer procrastination costs you orders. Putting an expiry date on every offer will encourage customers to make a decision now, rather than putting it off in favour of something that seems more urgent.

6) Encourage the price-sensitive

Price-sensitive shoppers are looking for low prices and high value. You, on the other hand, are looking for the most possible revenue and the best possible margin. You can serve the interests of both parties by offering a little more to those who spend a little more, with offers like '3 for the price of 2' and '10% off orders over £xx'. This gives more value to the purchaser, while increasing your overall revenue. You can offset the reduced margin by selling more and getting a better deal from your suppliers.

Special offers are managed in Actinic Business through the 'Discounts and Surcharges Settings' option in the 'Marketing' menu (you must first select 'Product Groups' and set up a group of products that each offer will apply to).

In 'Discounts and Surcharges', select 'Cart Contents' and set up your offer. Tick 'Requires Coupon Code' and enter a code, then 'Copy URL to Clipboard'. This generates a hyperlink that you can paste into your email, which will trigger the offer when it is clicked. To set time limits for the offer, go to the 'Restrictions' tab.

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Whenever people ask me how they can get higher rankings on Google for their web site, the first question I ask is, "Higher rankings for what?" Anyone could get a high ranking in Google for 'Purple venusian cucumbers' - but what's the point? They don't exist, and nobody is looking for them.

Rather than wasting time on guesswork, the first step in achieving better results on Google is to find out what 'key phrases' people actually use when they search for the type of things you sell. Incorporating these phrases in strategic places within your web pages will greatly improve your chances of attracting visitors who are searching for them.

1) Build A Seed List

There are a number of tools that can help you, but first stage you need a seed list - a very broad list of all the words and phrases you can think of that relate to your business and products. This should be as comprehesive as possible, and you will need to think a bit outside the box to be sure of covering all the bases. For more ideas, check out Aaron Wall's article on the SEO Book site.

2) Find The Most Promising Niches

Next, take a look at Wordtracker, http://www.wordtracker.com/. You can use the free version at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. But £14 will give you access to the full version for a week. This will give you more comprehensive results, and also automate parts of the process and save you hours of time.

Wordtracker searches its own Thesaurus and also interrogates the search engines of your choice to find literally hundreds of search phrases that are relevant to your business. It finds out which are the most popular key phrases, and also counts the number of web pages that each search term returns. In this way it identifies niches where there are plenty of potential customers, but not too much competition.

SEO Book (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/) is another tool that can provide relevant UK-based search data, but for Google and MSN it only delivers estimated results.

3) Where Is The Money?

Having identified which key phrases are most popular, and which ones attrach the least competition, you need to decide which ones will deliver visitors who are most likely to make a purchase. You can probably make a first pass through your list and eliminate some that are clearly irrelevant, or seem unlikely to represent a potential customer - searches that are plainly of an academic nature, for example.

4) Check Out The Competition

Next, you can do a bit of competitive research. What terms do your competitors think are important? Go to Keyword Count (http://www.keywordcount.com/) and type in the web address of your main competitor, and it will tell you which words and phrases are the ones most used on his home page. Take the top ten or so phrases, then repeat for a few other competitors and make a master list. Compare this list with the one you got from WordTracker. Look for popular phrases that seem relevant to what you sell, that are not widely used by your competitors. These will hopefully point to a quiet but profitable niche where you can start establishing yourself. (You might choose to take on your competitors head to head for the most popular terms, or you might want to wait until you are in a stronger position).

5) Get To Work On Your Pages

Choose some relevant pages and optimise each one for 3-4 key phrases, optimising your home page for the most important ones. A good place to start is to search Google in the format 'site:www.yoururl.com key phrase'. This will list all the relevant pages of your own site, ranked for that phrase. Other things being equal, the easiest page to optimise for a given phrase will be the one that ranks highest already.

Provided you also have a reasonable number and quality of links pointing from other relevant sites to your own, this process should significantly improve the traffic you get from the main search engines.

Comments:

http://www.keywordcount.com seems to have stopped working. Well it isn't as of now! Shame.

# posted by  Jenny : October 3, 2007 9:27 AM

 

Hi

As with WordTracker you can also try the KeywordDiscovery - Keyword Research Tool which has a much larger keyword database. Great for tail end and niche keyword research.

Cheers
Nicole

# posted by  nicole : October 11, 2007 7:10 PM

 

For your keyword research try using KeywordSpy.com - a keyword research technology that will help you know what keywords your competitors are using and how it generates money for them, you can use those keywords to drive traffic to your site and give your business the exposure it needs. It offers Free trials.- http://www.keywordspy.com/

# posted by  michelle : March 5, 2008 7:54 PM

 

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