Blogger Tips: Future Dated Posting

This blog is powered by Blogger, the freely available software provided by our friends at Google.

A new feature of Blogger is the ability to future date your posts; write your article now and then schedule it to get published automatically on the date of your choosing.

This is a very useful trick for time-strapped small business owners: just sit down one Sunday evening and write a few blog postings. Your new articles will appear magically at the appointed time, updating your website and feeding content into the search engine network.



Almost exactly a year ago I wrote an article on How I Would Improve Blogger, and this feature was one of the three things on my wish list.

My blog is now well over 3 years old now, and Blogger continues to add features to keep it on a par with the other major players like WordPress and TextPattern.

Blogger: if you are listening, here is what is on my wish list this year:

1. Insert images where I expect them to go. At the moment, every image I insert is placed by default at the top of the posting, instead of where my cursor is. I have to manually drag the image into the right position. Annoying, or what?

2. Provide some stats in my Blogger account that tells me my most popular postings, most commented, most linked to, and the like. I know integration of Analytics and Blogger is in beta, but just hurry up, OK?

3. Give me more choices of which posts to display, not just my most recent posts. At the moment I have to manually insert links to my most popular posts.

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Looking to read more about blogging? Try these articles & resources:

Blogging gets your content into Google... Fast!

Reusing your blog as a email newsletter

Your blog comment policy

Desire lines and blogging: what do you readers want you to write about?

Google Page Rank Update

It is that time of year again, folks. Google is updating our websites Page Rank.

And once again, small businesses go barmy over the magic number that displays in the Google Toolbar. I have to admit I am pleased to see my Page Rank returned to 5, following being downgraded to PR 4 in October.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: your Google PageRank score is not an indicator of how well your pages are going to rank in the Google search engine results.

Consider it an overall health check score from Google. If you get high quality, topical, trusted sites linking to your website, then up goes your Page Rank.

Buy links, sell links, get spammy links, or generally try to artificially manipulate your linking, and then down goes your Page Rank.

I am aware of several clients having an improved Page Rank, and I welcome feedback from other site experiencing a Page Rank change.

Customer Reviews, UGC & SEO

Customer reviews of your products and services can help to build credibility and engender trust with potential clients. Reviews can also increase the number of visitors converting to buyers on your site, and positive reviews can increase the price that clients are willing to pay.

Customers reviews form just one part of the huge wave of User Generated Content (UGC) comprising opinions, advice and commentary on the web. Reviews are found in blogs, discussion groups and forums, and social networking sites.

Small businesses are not paying enough attention to the value customer reviews can bring to their company websites and search engine rankings.

In my experience one of the biggest barriers to businesses implementing customer reviews is the fear of negative comment. Take a look at this article discussing how even negative reviews can benefit your business.

According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of the study’s respondents.

Customer reviews and user generated content also plays an important role in your search engine optimisation strategy: 26% of search results link to user-generated content. (Nielsen BuzzMetrics)

And the Google search results includes local results Google Maps data displaying the number of customers reviews in the search result for any type of business:

Google Maps allows customers to write reviews about your business directly and then publishes the reviews immediately. Remember you must be logged into a Google account to write reviews.

Take a look at this comprehensive overview of how Google Review works.

Google trawls hundreds of different websites for reviews hotels, restaurants and the like, but for non-tourism and non-leisure businesses I found TouchLocal.com to be the primary source of UK business reviews that Google displays, aside from the reviews entered directly into Google Maps.

Other services like FreeIndex are also encouraging review activity:

Google Stereotypes: what we all suspect about Google

83.41% of statistics are pulled out of thin air.

And sometimes I do not trust those lie, damn lies and statistics. I prefer to go on my gut instinct.

Even so, sometimes it is reassuring to see that gut instincts are backed up by evidence from trustworthy research organisations.

Google evokes some strong gut reactions in most of us, and some recent research might serve to confirm what we all suspect to be true. Here are some of my assumptions:

Assumption 1: Rich People use Google, Poor People use Yahoo

I thought that assumption might get your attention. The Great Google Class Divide.

Hitwise have published a review of "audience strengths" comparing the Google-Using population to the General-Online population. Using the benchmark of the propensity of searchers to spend $500 online, Hitwise, found the richer you are, the more likely you are to use Google.

The top left corner shows the high users of Yahoo, and bottom right are the Google users:



Assumption 2: We only look at the first few results in Google, and if we don't find what we want, we change our search

JupiterResearch have conducted an interesting study into our searching behaviour.

The vast majority of us (68%) only look at one page of Google results, with a ruthless 27% only looking at the first few results. Nearly a fifth of us browsed through more than 3 pages of results in 2002, but that has fallen now to just 8%.




Assumption 3: None of us use those little Menus at the top of Google

Images, Maps, Shopping: those little menu choices at the top of Google are used for "Vertical Searching." Research commissioned by iProspect shows most of us don't use them, we just type straight into the Google search box, with only about a quarter of us dipping our toe into the Google Images search.


It is all Google food for thought!

Find Your Top Ranking Keywords

Where does your website rank for your key phrases in Google?

What phrases are you ranking well for, whether you know it or not?

And what phrases are your competitors ranking well for?

SEODigger is a free utility that shows you those keywords that trigger your site in the top 20 results for a Google search. SEO Digger maintains a database of keywords and search results that can help to assess and plan your search engine optimisation activities.

The free, unregistered version analyses a single page of your website and provides you with a list of high performing key phrase, the key phrase position in Google, and some rough and ready WordTracker and Overture data showing you the search popularity of the phrase.

It is worth taking the extra step of signing up for the free registered version because it will give you rankings of all the pages on your domain, rather than just a single page.

Taking my own business as example, I can see the key phrases in Google SERPs (search engine results page) order, in other words the phrases I'm ranking position 1, position 2, and so forth:

However, if I click on the WT column to sort the data on the popularity of phrases as measured by the WordTracker data, I can see where I'm ranking for those valuable phrases that people are actually searching for:


And what is very interesting to note (and is confirmed by my Google Analytics data) is that it's the blog postings that is helping with the rankings, in this case the article I wrote about The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

As always, these services do come with a bit of a health warning

• the data will not be current - it is a snap shot of the search results when the database was last compiled. My searches today was delivering data last retrieved in February. Nevertheless, it provides a useful benchmark.
  
• the database does not include all search phrases. You can add your search phrases to SEODigger for inclusion in the index.
• the WordTracker and Overture data is, at best, unreliable.

This article is one of a series of postings about SEO tools that you might find useful.

I have a list of new services I'll be reviewing for you over the next few weeks, and suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, why not take a look at some of my previous reviews:

iWebTool Collection of free SEO tools
Quirk SearchStatus toolbar
Free Web Tools
SEOBook Keyword Research Tool
Website Grader Review
Backlinks Checkers
Good Keywords Tools, especially KeyWordPad

Google's Related Searches

Google continues to experiment with improving its user search experience. You may be noticing more frequent appearance of related searches recommendations appearing at either the top or bottom of your Google search results.

I was hoping to dress my dog up like Darth Vader (as you do...), and Google gave me a handy list of related search suggestions to consider, including Darth Vader sounds, and Darth Vader quotes:









Later, I tried a search for "garden design", and at the bottom of the page Google made the following 8 recommendations, and interestingly it came up with concept of "decking."






Hint: think how these related search terms might guide and shape your search engine optimisation efforts; if Google thinks this is what users are looking for, who are we to argue?


These related searches have appeared at the bottom of the search engine results pages intermittently for quite a while now.

Try searching for a solicitor, and the related results suggestions are quite earnest:







But search instead for a lawyer, and Google knows you're looking for jokes:

Get a Good Name on the Web

Getting a great web address is important to small businesses - and I was very pleased to be interviewed in a recent domain names article in the Sunday Times.

It is not that hard to choose a great domain name. Choose a name that is :

• memorable
• consistent with your brand
• easy to type, which usually also means short
  
• and if possible, consistent with your search engine optimisation efforts.

We know that British buyers prefer .co.uk domain name because it suggests the company is local, or more relevant to their needs.

And I don't like dashes (or hyphens) in domain names. I think they are awkward to pronounce, and look like spam when typed. And usually looks like you use dashes because somebody else has the name you wanted.

An entire second hand domain name industry exists offering to sell you an existing domain, as well as waiting to steal yours out from under you nose if you forget to renew your name.