Cuil - the fallout

As with every young pretender that promises much, obscurity is an ever-present threat. The naysayers and detractors are waiting in the wings.

Part of the reason for the failure of a new search engine is the symbiotic relationship that many companies and search engine optimisers have with Google. Google gets 60% of the searches and so those who want to get the best from their websites will focus on Google and encourage people to use Google.

Another part is the failure of the search engine. Although the verdict is still out on Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') there are whisperings that it's not all it's cracked up to be and that hubris reigns at their Palo Alto HQ. Sarah Carey, a journalist and friend of Cuil CEO, Tom Costello, was somewhat taken aback by the profligacy of the operation being amazed that the company pays for muffins, drinks, a personal trainer and a gym membership for everyone. Dragons will be rotating in their dens at hearing this. With only $33 million to play with, can such expenses be justified in a fight against multi-billion dollar search engines?

Time will tell for Cuil but things don't look good already.

Behind the scenes with search engine optimisation

There are many methods that a search engine optimiser can use in order to help their site to gain more favourable rankings. By far the most important part of this is building links. This effectively channels some of the importance from other sites into your own. This influence (or Page Rank as Google call it) flows through links and, as a general rule, the more links there are to a page, the higher the Page Rank for that page.

In order for the work of link-building to be put to best effect, it is important to channel the influence your pages carry properly. This can be done with the rel="nofollow" attribute. This attribute is used by search engines like Google to prevent link spam and it allows you to tell search enignes not to follow a particular link and thus to assign a greater importance to the other links on the page. If you nofollow the links on your site that lead out to sites that you don't want to give influence to or the links that do not contain your keywords, then the links on your site that link to your content using the right keywords for thaat content in their anchor text will be given a far greater level of importance by Google.

Wikipedia is an exponent of the nofollow attribute. In order to stop people from changing Wikipedia entries in order to gian links to their websites, Wikipedia used the nofollow attribute on all external links. This means that people interested in external resources from Wikipedia can follow the links if they so choose but the search engines will not and will not give any extra importance to the sites behind them.

An example of the practice of using the nofollow attribute in a business context can be seen at Tintisha's website. The site is optimised for the keyword speaker stands and so links that do not relate to speaker stands or to any of the other keywords that the site uses are nofollowed. This means that the site can use navigational elements to help people find what they are looking for but inform the search engines that the deeper content on the site relates to the keywords you deem to be correct rather than those that anyone else thinks is right.

In order to see this in action, you can either use your browser, click on View & then Source Code. This shows the code that goes to making up the web page you see. You can then search for the word "nofollow" and see which hyperlink it pops up agianst.

To save time, however, if you have a Firefox browser you can download the Search Status plugin that puts some useful optimisation tools into the browser. Once installed, you see an extra bar. If you click on the 'q' on the bar and select 'Highlight nofollow links' you will now get a visual representation of nofollow links on a given website. Nofollow links will be ighlighted in pink and you can see how people use this attribute and get a sense of how to harness it.

St James Systems Facebook Group - Are you a Fan?

In an attempt to drag ourselves kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, St James Systems have created a Facebook page as a showcase for the company and its work. the page, which can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-James-Systems/20350889982?ref=ts includes pictures, recent work and this blog.

Facebook is an important social networking medium with over 60 million members at the time of writing and St James Systems would urge any other company interested in gaining business over the Internet to do the same.

If you would like to talk about the benefits of an Internet marketing or search engine optimisation campaign then give us a call on 0116 2836699. For now, however, go along to www.facebook.com/business and sign up for yourself.

Tintisha.com

St James Systems are working with Tintisha.com on a project that has changed the look of the site and increased its profile on the Internet.

A blog has been introduced to keep customers and those in the audio visual industry up-to-speed with what is going on, a forum has been installed which will aim to answer the questions of anyone who uses audio visual electronics. The site has been revamped and St James Systems have begun optimising it for the word speaker stands and for many others.

Yesterday, 10 times as many people visited the site as when St James Systems started working with Tintisha at the beginning of June.

The aim is to make Tintisha.com the online market leader for speaker stands and gadgets. St James Systems aim to increase the level of traffic visiting the site and the conversion rate (turning those that visit into customers).

Maximizing your returns in a difficult economic climate with IT

For many people, computers and technology are the bane of their lives, a necessary evil in the world of work. Not only can computer systems be unreliable but every so often there is another program to learn or the ‘Save’ button of an existing program which seemed to work quite well is hidden in a completely different place. We end up becoming slaves to IT rather than masters of it.

In an economic slowdown, however, businesses can maximize their return on investment by taking control of their IT system. There is still business to be had and companies can get it by maximizing their exposure to clients and potential clients. This article talks about four relatively new facets of IT, their benefits and utility.


Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is unique. There is no better way of putting businesses in touch with targeted customers than by placing your company right in front of people who are looking for the services you provide. SEO opens up a market of people who have no idea about your company but who want your products and services.
In order to do this, your SEO firm should take the time to get to know you, your products and services. They should try to get the most targeted visitors to your site rather than maximize the number of visitors (as 100 people interested in the mechanics of a car will not do the same business as 1 person interested in buying a car).They should give you a strategy of changes both on the website and off and their details of a link building strategy. If we imagine that search engines are a meritocracy with the best information being placed first, the more links to a site from authoritative websites effectively mean that there are more votes for that site as an important destination. A link-building strategy thus helps your site leap up in the rankings as it means that sites with authority in your area of expertise are recognising you.
SEO is often much cheaper than an advertising campaign (such as one using Google Adwords) and it is much more long lasting – your products remain in the search engine even after your budget limit has been reached.


Email marketing

Email marketing provides a way of reaching your clients and prospective clients for a fraction of the costs of a mailshot or advertising campaign. A monthly newsletter or a listing of special offers can pique the attention of prospective customers and get them to find out more about you. The Direct Marketing Association in the United States recently reported a return on investment of 57 times. For each £1 spent on email marketing, £57.25 is received in sales.

The advantages of an email marketing campaign are that an unlimited number of emails can be sent for practically no cost (when compared to the cost of a mailshot, this is quite an eye-opener). More importantly, the sender can find out who has opened their email, who has not, who has clicked through onto their site and who has done this many times, helping businesses to build up a picture of those interested in their products.

The downside of email marketing is spam. Your IT consultancy should give you advice on appropriate use of email marketing and should prevent you from killing the golden goose. However, the reason we have spam is that email marketing works and works very well. Although spam might not have a high return, the return on 0.02% people buying a product that has been emailed to 4 million is still very high.

Spam aside, all companies have lists of clients and customers who like to be kept in touch with developments. Many companies build up a lot of good will with clients who like to know about the latest range or discount and, by using this good will responsibly companies can considerably increase their turnover.


Customer Relations Management

Customer Relations Management (CRM) is relatively easy in the early days of a company when there are not many clients and businesses are struggling to find prospective clients. When the number of potential clients and opportunities gets into the hundreds, or even the thousands, it becomes very difficult to keep on top of everything.

In difficult times, companies have to rely more on service and contact with their clients to sustain and grow their business. As a client, t is extremely frustrating when someone says they will call but does not and, as a business, it is extremely disconcerting when you realise that you have missed out on some business because you forgot to make a ‘phone call.

CRM software can make a big difference, automating the processes behind keeping good relations with your clients from reminding you to make a call to helping you see just how many opportunities you are converting, to seeing the return on your investment to linking with the contact page on your website to ensure that clients who reach you electronically are not lost in the bowels of your email.

If you pride yourself on service and want to increase your business in difficult times through good service then CRM can help to take your business to the next level.


Remote access software

Remote access software can be a massive timesaver for businesses. For small companies whose owners go home at night but wish to look at information and emails on the company’s computers, for businesses whose main fee-earners often travel on business and for companies who cannot afford in-house IT staff but need problems resolving quickly, such software can enable companies to work much more efficiently.

IT can be a frustrating and ephemeral sphere but, with a bit of careful planning and advice, in a slowing economic climate, there are numerous opportunities to gain market share over your competition, maintain good customer relations as your business grows and increase your return on investment. IT can, when used with a bit of strategic thought, get workers away from tasks that take time and help them maximize the time that they spend making money.

Goes Google Count Clicks Against a Search to Weight its Algorithm?

One issue that has come to light recently is: "Does Google count the number of clicks to different sites in a search and use it to weight its rankings?". The theory is that if your page is number 2 in the search but gets more clicks than the number one site, Google might rank your site more favourably.

There are a number of reasons to suspect why this might be the case:

Relevance: Search engines thrive on producing relevant results. The more relevant the result to the search, the easier it is for someone to find what they are looking for using a particular search engine.

Adwords: Googles Adwords will weight adverts that get a higher clickthrough ratio. If you have two adverts for a particular product and one gets twice the clickthrough rate, then Google will show this more often. Again, relevance is involved. If an advert is more relevant (it must be if more people click on it) then search engines need to show this more often to improve the user experience.

The problem with this theory is that there is no way to verify it other than by anecdotal evidence. There will be a host of factors that bring your site a good ranking and anyone of these could make a difference. Furthermore, a link may be clicked on but users could 'bounce' straight away if they realise that the site is not what they'd wanted.

The best thing to remember is that once you're in the top 10 and certainly the top 5 you've made it. Traffic increases massively if you are ranked on the front page. It won't necessarily matter if you are 2nd 3rd or 4th if the description used against your site isn't relevant or enticing. If your description is well written, relevant and useful you will get people coming to your site. It's as simple as that.

Meta Keywords - Myths, Misspellings and Mysteries

In earlier, more innocent times, the meta keywords tag was used by web-designers and website owners to indicate the content of their web pages. Keywords were in use form around 1996 onwards.

By 1998, however, Search Engines had wised up to misuse and more cynical practices. The practice of "stuffing" tags with multiple copies of the same word or even with material unrelated to the contents of the web page was all too common and the keywords tag was rendered next to useless.

Because, historically, there has been a lot of emphasis put on keywords by website designers, the myth about their importance has continued. A look at any search engine forum or a chat about web-design will quickly encompass the keywords topic. Nowadays, however, there is little emphasis placed on them. According to a test performed by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, Google and Microsoft do not use keywords when a search is made.

Inasmuch as it is useful, the keywords tag can be used for misspellings. In the search engines that do use the tag for indexing (Yahoo & Ask), text in the tags is treated as if it was on the page. Misspelling words on your page can have the effect of making you look unprofessional. Hidden away, however, you can encompass common misspellings and not lose face.

As far as getting better rankings is concerned, if the keywords tag was the way, optimizers everywhere would be obsessing on this point. This is not the case and a simple viewing of the source code of any high-ranking site would show you the use of the keywords tag is sparing at best. Keywords will not substitute good copy. Well-written copy will not only get your site ranked but also, the visitors who come to your site will enjoy the content.

Nowadays, search engines worry far more about the links to your site than the keywords text and time spent on keywords is time wasted elsewhere.

Selling Links - Not the way to go.

With a lot of chatter, arguement and debate on the subject of paid links, the debates seemed to have reignited this week wen it came to light that Google have confirmed they are penalising sites that sell links.

Paid links, those that are put on a site in return for a fee, have often been a way of raising a site's credibility, PageRank and exposure extremely quickly. The problem with this is that the democratic nature of search engines is usurped by those with the most money to splash around. If we imagine a Google search as a democratic system where the most popular sites appear at the top of the rankings, links become votes. The more links to a site, the more search engines perceive it as a destination, a place people want to go to. When money exchanges hands, extra votes can be bought and extra influence & greater standing in the search engine ranks can be gained.

There is a case to be made for paid links. For one, Google uses paid links to conduct its Adwords campaign and links are a highly valuable advertising tool. The differene between these adverts and paid links, however, is that adverts are often clearly marked. In a newspaper, adverts are separated from content & media owners disassociate themselves from the advertised content. The media outlet isn't recommending a product in an advert, the advertiser is. Paid links muddy this issue in order to work. In order to influence Google's PageRank system, these links must be like any other on a website. the advertised content and the publised content are indistinguishable.

Danny Sulliavan reported at Search Engine Land that Google have begun to talk about lowering the PageRank of those companies that have been selling links and it would appear that they intend to do this more in the future. It would be hard to identify a lot of the sites that sell links but it is not a valuable long-term strategy as far as search engine optimization is concerned as the penalties are reduced visibility in the Search Engines but, more importantly, lowered trust within your community, something that can tarnish you for a long time. There is no real sens in mixing up paid content & free content & it gives a skweed view of the Internet if you link to sites whose only intrinsic value is the money that the links were bought with.


Adverts but without advertising

The Irrigation Approach

An approach that I have used to help people understand the dynamic linking side of search engine optimization is 'The Irrigation Approach'. In order to raise your site up the rankings, especially the Google rankings, it is helpful to imagine your site like an arid field: Your job is to sluice as much water to it as possible to make it thrive.

We want people to be able to get onto the site easily & so we need to make sure that the sluice gates to our site are open in order to let people and spiders through. In this case, getting as many well-qualified links to your site is good. Not all links will raise you up the rankings but if you take an holistic approach, each link allows people to flow through onto your site and so although a link might not have any worth to some search engines, you should always be open to the possibility that if it's allowing people in, it's broadening the market for and increasing the interest in your website.

If you imagine that each link is a leak in your irrigation system you can then decide whether you want a hole in a particular place or not. Some of the holes are beneficial - they may allow people and search engine spiders to leak into the places you most want them to visit.

Each link that has anchor text on it will deliever an accurate and focused sprinkle of people and spiders to your page. People will respond to the anchor text and you will get targeted visitors to your site and to pages on the site & the spiders will recognise how you have taken time to construct your irrigation system to deliver this timely sprinkle.

Each link that takes people away from the pages on your site that you want browsers to see is an unwanted leak. Each link that carries people out of the site is an unanted leak. Each link that takes search engine spiders away from the areas you want to index and appear high in the rankings is an unwanted leak.

You can use links at any interval on your site to allow people and spiders to leak anywhere. By using rel="nofollow", you can allow people to follow links (say to your terms & conditions) but keep spiders following along the channel. You can allow spiders to flow out in a pressurised torent to a few sites that you want to link to but if you link to many sites, then you will not have enough water in the system to make your land thrive.

There is a point where metaphor becomes confusing, but if you can imagine water springing out of each link to your site, it might help you to visualise the changes you need to make.

Wordtracker for the UK

One tool that many SEOs consider to be essential is Wordtracker, a website that enables you to see how popular certian keywords are by showing you how regularly people search for them and how many sites compete against that keyword.

Wordtracker offers its services to UK as well as US users. The UK data is available within the Keyword Researcher which can be accessed from the members home page.

On the options bar beneath the seed keywords box there is a dropdown box with the option to select the UK or the US database. The results from Wordtracker's UK data sources are held in a different database to that of the US. It is therefore easy to find keywords that are relevant to a UK audience as these may differ greatly (in spelling & taste) to those that a US audience would choose.

The strange thing about the Wordtracker site, however, is that the projects button on the homepage will only take you to US data, something which I have asked the lovely people at Wordtracker to address.

Optilink

One piece of Search Engine Optimization that is not regional is link building. All sites need good quality links on order to get a good showing in Search Engines.

Search Engines look at the web like a large voting system. The more links there are to a site, the more people are voting a site as something of interest, a destination.

There are many free tools that enable us to analyse sites to see who is linking to them - the Google Toolbar has a 'Backward Links' button that will show Google's analysis of a particular page but Optilink provides more detailed analysis from a number of search engines including AOL, AlltheWeb, Altavista, Google, Hotbot, Inktomi, MSN & Yahoo. You can request up to 1000 links at a time & you can see the anchor text that webmasters are linking to the site with.

I've enclosed a link to the video of the software which details the application in 2 minutes: http://www.windrosesoftware.com/optilink/video/ol-qs.html

Increasing Blogging Traffic

Part of the Search Engine Optimizer's job is marketing. One way of doing this is by creating a blog to draw traffic to a website. The problem is that it takes time to get people to know your blog exists, time to then get them to your blog, time to get it seen & time to have it trusted.

A company called Blog Rush have got around this with a novel solution that aims to bring many more people to your site than you would otherwise get. I have included a video below to explain this idea. It might look like a pyramid scheme but it works & it doesn't cost anything so give it a go. Please take a look at the video:



I've put the widget up in the top corner of this website & will report on the difference that it makes to this new blog. However, from reports of friends & colleagues, this can make a massive difference to blogs with high quality & can draw much needed attention to your blog and, by extention, to your site.

Please click the bottom of my widget to sign up & join the fun.

Mantra for all website owners

I read an interesting passage in one of Dan Thies's books the other day which said:

Search engines don’t care about you, they don’t care about your website, but they do care about their customers. If I get what I’m looking for when I use a search engine, I’ll use it again. Search engines are trying to deliver the most relevant resultspossible for every search.

It sounds harsh but it's excellent advice for anyone trying to create a website that needs to be plugged in to search engines. When thinking about your company's website, be sure to build it with your customers and with the search engines in mind. It is all very well wanting a snazzy or 'flashy' site as it makes you look good but if there is no content, users will not stay around ling & the search engines will not look favourably on your hard work.

This is where some of the sites I have been asked to look at recently have come unstuck. If you look at the Ice Cricket website or the party supplies website, you will notice that they are all light on text-based content. As a result, they will fall behind sites that provide up-to-date detailed text-based content in the long-run.

If you're thinking of designing a website for any reason, please let me know & I'll try to help you where I can.