LBi London

SEO Advent Calendar

Posted by Manley December 24th, 2008

Every day of December is an SEO advent tip day with the LBi Netrank Search Advent Calendar!

Christmas is coming and, more importantly, we are fast approaching the highest ever levels of internet sales. Last year, internet sales peaked on December 11th, or Red Monday, as it became known.

Last year Dug wrote an excellent piece on Christmas search marketing, but this year we’re going to simply throw open the doors of our SEO Advent Calendar:

1. Keyword research
2. Domain name selection
3. URL structure
4. Local TLD
5. Page titles
6. Keyword rich headings
7. Meta data
8. <h1>
9. Content
10. Images
11. Textual images
12. Flash
13. JavaScript fallback
14. HTML
15. Internal links
16. Link order
17. Rewrite URLs
18. Site maps
19. REP
20. LINKS!
21. Unfriendly neighbourhoods
22. Video optimisation
23. Competitor benchmarking
24. Spam
25. Merry Christmas

1. Keyword research

You know what your company does, but that does not mean that your clients do. Look through your logs and get your search agency to look at your analytics and use their tools to do some KPA research for you.

Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are the ones which are being searched for and which will convert for you.

2. Domain name selection

Sadly, it is likely that the largest influence on the selection of a domain name is going to be availability. It may also be that branding issues dictate that you are unable to choose a URL which is not your brand name.

Forget that. Unless your brand is large enough to be one of your most important keywords, then there is always a place for a keyword-rich domain name. For an example of this in action, look no further than B&Q.

3. URL structure

Drop that parameter-based URL structure and move towards a hierarchical model. Your site will naturally structure itself into themed areas and an added bonus is that relevant keywords can be included.

These keywords are not only going to boost your relevancy for the terms, but will also improve CTR, as matches in the URL for the keywords that were searched for will be highlighted. Remember, searchers are twice as likely to click on a shorter URL as they are to click on a long URL.

4. Local TLD

A geographic TLD is an extremely valuable asset. Ideally, all sites targeted at a particular market should use a relevant local TLD (e.g. .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .fr for France, etc).

If your CEO is insisting on using the .com for all territories for branding purposes, try directing him to one of the many successful websites that advertise a .com domain and seamlessly serve a local TLD – for example savebuckets.com or, less obviously, but probably more compellingly, google.com.

5. Page titles

You have done your keyword research, you have built your URL structure and you know what keywords this particular page is targeting. As well as being heavily weighted by search engines, the page title is your only absolutely controlled influence on the SERPs outside of the URL – titles affect CTR as much as they do ranking.

Try to include more keywords in the page title and avoid non-useful terms. For example, the word ‘home’ at the end of the title is unlikely to be noticed by site visitors or to assist with click-through rates.

Try to keep title tags within about 60 characters (including spaces) to ensure that they do not get truncated by search engines and, except on the home page, place your brand at the end of the title, not at the start.

6. Keyword rich headings

It is not all about search either, content without headings can be seriously dull to read – very few things drive users away like impenetrable blocks of raw text. Using well formed headings to break your content into logical areas will help maintain user interest and help both the user and search engines get an idea of what your page content is about.

Including important keywords in headings not only helps with optimisation, giving the search engines valuable clues about the general thrust of your content, they also aid the user in following the content. Remember though, this is not spam, this is sensible, descriptive section headings, do not over do it, or you will lose users.

7. Meta data

Whilst meta descriptions are not involved in the ranking process, and meta keywords are only considered to be of minor significance by Yahoo! and Ask and are utterly ignored by Google, the meta description is the most important marketing collateral available to you in the SERPs.

Careful keyword selection means that, as long as the search term is included, your meta description will probably be the snippet that the user sees. A few calls to action in here can make the difference between a click for you and a click for your competitor.

Always limit meta descriptions to 255 characters and try to keep them to about half of that length.

8. <h1>

Ideally, each of your pages should contain a single, unique <h1> heading which functions very much like the title tag in describing the page.

Multiple <h1>s will dilute their effectiveness, as they may no longer be considered to be page summaries, and excessive use of <h1>s can trip spam filters.

As with meta data and page titles, duplicate h1 tags on multiple pages can contribute to duplicate content issues, so make sure you have SOPs in place for their creation. If
in doubt, the page title with your brand name removed is likely to be an excellent page summary.

And yes, I know that I did not update the calendar image today – I am at home setting up a new laptop and I have not installed Adobe® Photoshop® yet.

9. Content

You have done your keyword research and you know what theme you will be using for the page, so you can now write your content. Make the content enthralling and include all your keywords and appropriate calls to action, but do not spam.

SEO is not about optimising content for search engines. You need to optimise the page for the users, with the search terms that they are looking for. You also need to stay on topic, be relevant and be informative.

Good content = more inbound links.

10. Images

Every image should have appropriate alt text or, where there is nothing appropriate to put in there, an empty alt string, so that it complies with the DDA.

You can put content in the title tag for the image too, if you wish. Alt text and title text are not massively weighted, but the content on the page is positive and, particularly if you name your images sensibly, you can attract extra traffic through image searches.

11. Textual images

Do I really need to say this? If you are using images in order to display textual content, the engines are just not going to be reading that content at all. Every image should have appropriate alt text, as above, but that is still far from ideal.

If possible, actually use text. Designers might get stroppy, but the shop front for your site is not the branding on the page, it is the results in the search engines.

If branding guidelines dictate that you absolutely cannot use anything but the corporate font (and there are good examples of this – for those of us in the UK, the NatWest font is instantly recognisable) then ask your agency about using image replacement to make your titles more accessible to both search engines and users with alternate browsers. There are several methods available and, particularly if your titles are currently images, this is a must.

12. Flash

So, you want things to be a bit pretty too. That is understandable. Just do not think that Google’s ability to crawl Flash is going to meet your needs, because it will not. Flash is nothing like as effective as text.

Anything which you wish to include in the page should be available outside of the Flash file and, ideally, the Flash file itself should be excluded from the index. REP here is trickier than usual, so make sure that your agency understands what they are trying to achieve.

13. JavaScript fallback

JavaScript is a wonderful technology that is able to turn web pages from static brochures to wonderful interactive interfaces. However, without due care and attention your whizzy interface and dynamic drop-down menus will be completely invisible to search engine spiders, who don’t understand the complexities of JavaScript.

The buzzword buzzphrase here is "graceful degradation" – ensure that when you use JavaScript that the same functionality is available with JavaScript disabled. That way both search engine spiders and the small but not insignificant number of users who surf with JavaScript turned off will be able to fully explore your website.

14. HTML

Valid HTML is not a requirement of SEO, indeed, Google itself fails validity checks, but although extensive testing suggests that validation is not part of the Google ranking algorithm, there is still a lot to be said for validation as a means of ensuring that your code is not too badly borked.

If your HTML is valid then you are unlikely to confuse robots, you are going to use correct mark-up which will dictate which sections of the page are important, which are lists and so on and, at the end of the day, Google say that they like well formed HTML, so your agency should be easy to convince.

15. Internal Links

Where there are textual headings for a page section, which provides a short description and a link to that part of the site, ensure that the heading itself is a link. Too many pages out there have links with anchor text like ‘read more . . .’ or ‘click here . . .’.

Whilst the anchor text (text used in the link) value of internal links (links on the site itself) are not considered to be as valuable for search as the anchor text of external links (links from other sites), the keywords used in the site’s internal linking structure can be used by search engines to indicate which pages are considered to be the most relevant for certain keywords.

This helps to ensure that the right pages on the site are returned in search results for particular keywords, and can often lead to better conversions. For example, if a web visitor performs a search for a product, but the page on the site that the search engine returns focuses on another product, the searcher may return to the search engine results and visit another site rather than navigating around the site to find the right page.

16. Link Order

Okay, so this is not really a seperate point, but I did not cover it yesterday and I probably should have. And it saves me a day.

Google generally only takes note of the first example of a link to any given page, from any given page. What this means it that, if you have 4 links on your home page to your blue widget page then only the first is counted.

With this in mind, make sure that the first link in your page (or your press release or blog post) has good anchor text (and is not a nofollow link!). Subsequent links to the same destination URL can be images or just the URL, but that first link should always be the money link.

There are other search engines but, unless you are targeting a very specific vertical, Google is the one which matters most to you and, honestly, the change in order is not going to hurt your rankings elsewhere either.

17. Rewrite URLs

This is a massive topic, but rewriting your URLs can remove huge amounts of duplicate content for a minimal effort.

Be it www subdomains Vs. the core domain, index.html files Vs. root folders or the age old IIS case insensitivity issue, URL rewrites can save you huge amounts of heartache.

I am not about to run through a catalogue of methods or uses, but if your agency are not offering you URL rewrites then you need to ask them why.

18. Site maps

A sitemap is a page (or pages) on a site which links to the most important areas of the site. Although not strictly required, particularly when a site is easily navigable, they are an accepted part of standard site design and can be useful in assisting some users to navigate the site.

They can also be used by search engine spiders to assist in spidering the site, and are recommended in the guidelines published the major search engines.

Create an HTML sitemap, with links to the key sections of the site. This can also include subsections, but should not generally go down to the level of individual products.

Ensure that this sitemap page does not have more than 100 links. Split sitemaps containing more than 100 links into multiple smaller sitemaps.

Not
e that I am referring to HTML sitemaps here, as opposed to XML sitemaps, which are a different technology and which I personally do not recommend.

19. REP

This is not the forum for a full scale lecture on REP, but it is important. Many agencies will tell you about robots.txt, but increasingly this is not enough.

Not having your pages crawled is not the same as not having them indexed – to achieve this you are going to have to use the robots meta element or an X-Robots-Tag header.

REP also includes rel attributes for links (such as nofollow) and subsequently page rank sculpting and all the intricacies therin.

If anyone does want more details of REP, let me know, but more importantly, make sure that your agency knows.

20. LINKS!

Like vegetables links are best when they are natural and organic. Quantity is not always the best thing with links (although it does help a little), quality is.

It is better to have one link from a high quality relevant site than dozens from low quality sites with little or no connection to yours.

You do need to give people something to link to, it is not just a case of create your site and people will flock there to link to it. Quality content, informative product descriptions, any useful information you can add to your site, viral content be it a video or a game, the list is fairly endless, you just need to think in terms of why you yourself link to sites.

21. Unfriendly neighbourhoods

The internet can be an unpleasant place, lots of dark alleys and unfriendly neighbourhoods.

The quality of the pages your site links to and the quality of the sites that link to you are important. Places to avoid are link farms, low quality directories that have only been built to game the search rankings and any site that has more links than content. Link only to relevant quality sites and apply the same criteria to links coming in.

22. Video optimisation

So, you are looking for links and avoiding bad neighbourhoods, what do you do to get those links?

Video is always good, but what is the point in twenty thousand links to a page which has no real content for a search engine to read? You have to optimise your video.

this does not mean a full transcript, but it does not mean a youTube style info snippet either, a detailed description of the video, including any information a user might want to get from it, is needed. Video does not come cheap, do not waste it.

23. Competitor benchmarking

In every other piece of marketing you engage you have checked out your competitors. Why not with organic search?

A surprising number of clients consider their online competition to be the same as their high street competition. I have been in pitches where clients have never heard of the website which is being returned in the top position for their chosen keywords.

This is not just about doing keyword research and measuring your market share, it is not even just stealing ideas (although you do want to be doing that too), this is basic internet marketing strategies. It may seem simple, but today I have been reminded of how often the most important things can be overlooked and so here is an example.

24. SPAM!

Do not do it.

Keyword load a page and get banned from Google and all you need to do is correct the spam and file a reinclusion request. Hire a slightly cheaper SEO agency and get banned for paid linking and you have to identify and remove every artificial link which Google has flagged against you.

Your website cost you a lot of money, you have done off-line marketing of your online presence and you have a respected brand. Why would you risk that by having paid links from porn sites, quite aside from the financial penalty which a ban represents.

Black hat SEO? Just say no.

25. Merry Christmas

When I was a lad, Advent calendars only had 24 days and, as it is Christmas, I am off to play with my children. That’s your lot – come back next year!

Finally, a nod to Aesop for the Advent Calendar imagery which is being used under licence.

Tags: Christmas

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Red Monday.

Posted by Manley December 11th, 2007

With 17% of Britons still paying for last Christmas, yesterday saw the largest on-line spend of all time, with around £370million of the £7billion that will be spent this Christmas changing hands.

Whilst there remains a massive divide across the sexes when it comes to shopping on-line, by far the largest spending sector is professional men, with a little over 60% of sales occurring during working hours. The truth is that the on-line market is growing at an alarming rate.

Is the effect of borrowing likely to lead to a market collapse? No. This is more a shift in habits than anything else. The FT reports that while many British adults expect to spend 40 hours doing Christmas shopping they could do the same chores in just 10 hours online.

There is no marketing or search lesson in this post – Chris has already covered that – but I have recently been hearing rumours that e-retail is a fad, that consumers only buy products that they have already researched in actual stores, that only certain categories of products are bought on-line and that nobody will buy romantic gifts on-line. This isn’t idle back room chatter either, this is coming from boardrooms and conference tables.

I don’t know why there has been such a resurgence of doubt in e-retail, but I feel a little clarification is called for. In the words of the great Mr R Stevens:

Listen and understand.

That Internet is out there.

It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with.

It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop

Ever.

Enjoy your Christmas and the bounty it will bring, but be left under no illusions that we are in the midst of a growth trend which is not about to stop any time soon.

Sources: IMRG [PDF file - 164K], Savebuckets, FT.

Tags: Christmas, marketing, trends

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Christmas is coming, the site logs are getting fat.

Posted by Chris Dugdale November 21st, 2007

Christmas is a time of wanton spending, and spending is increasingly moving on-line. Everyone wants a piece of the action but there are only so many places on the first page of search results.

Christmas spending is immense but the portion of that spend that is consumed online is growing fast. If you sell something on your website, the odds are there are other sites selling the same, or similar things. Competition grows by the year and with the online retail behemoths, like Amazon, seeming to sell nearly everything on the planet, it is getting hard to get your annual slice of the festive pie.

Add to this the apparently unending sea of affiliate sites that simply point you in the direction of people selling what you want, then the outlook for ranking for even the rarest of search phrases starts to look bleak. You have a perfectly optimised and architected site, but you are still nowhere for the competitive terms of your choice. What can you do to make your Christmas bonus a big one? Well, here are a few tips that might help.

1) Loss leaders. Sell your intended seasonal best-seller at cost for a month in the run-up to the seasonal peak and promote the offer like a madman. You need lots of stock and robust site, but people will link to you in droves. As you start to float to the top of the rankings, drop the offer and reap the rewards from riding the seasonal peak. This is very difficult to do and might not pay off, but it is worth considering.

2) Identify the weird long-tail searches that might not be so long at peak season. Granny wants to buy little Jimmy and iPod, but isn’t down wiv da yoof enough to know what they are called. What does she search for? Think outside the box (or rather think like a granny who is slightly hard of hearing). The search phrases "music pod" and "ipop", while dwarfed by the monstrous popularity of a phrase like "ipod", are surprisingly popular and have the same seasonal peaks. As well as being relatively easy to rank for in the organic listings, they have the added advantage of being easy targets for PPC.

3) Do something zany; everyone has heard of viral marketing but few get it spot-on. Blendtec made those fantastic videos that I hope everyone has seen: Will it Blend? The iPhone in a blender is an inspiration to all and should be mandatory viewing for all online marketing managers. Get viral marketing right and you will be bestowed with links in volumes that outstrip your wildest dreams; just make sure you host it on your own site and have a server that can cope with the load.

4) Know your seasonal trends. All the great plans in the world are worthless without timing. The Christmas build-up starts in September and really starts to fly at the start of November; nowhere is this clearer than the seasonal trend for the search phrase "Christmas Gifts".

5) Do research. The press in the run up to Christmas is full of little bits of research about how financially taxing or mentally stressful the season is. These bits of research aren’t overly expensive to undertake and there are a host of agencies willing to take your cash for doing the work. All you need to do then is write some conclusions around the results and push it to the press. Links to your site from online news outlets are very powerful things and the brand awareness that these generate shouldn’t be underestimated either.

Ultimately, implementing all the best architectural practices and the most razor-sharp optimised content in the world will only get you so far, and there are only so many places on the front page of results. The competition isn’t going to go away and while the spammy sites at the top are getting fewer and fewer, there are a host of good-quality sites waiting to replace them. You need to make noise about your brand; links will grow naturally, but people don’t link to you if they don’t know you exist.

Tags: Christmas, long tail, marketing, trends

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