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.

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

Best April Fool's Jokes

Happy April Fool's Day, and here are some of my favourite shenanigans found on the web this year:

Pizza Hut's latest home delivery service

Don't use Google, and get paid a million dollars by Microsoft

Google's Gmail prank

Earn some money by advertising Laptops Direct products

BBC's Flying Penguins, thanks to The Telegraph

And a general roundup of April's Fools tomfoolery

You might also like to take a look at last year's April Fools choices

Removing Pages from the Google Index

How can you remove old web pages from the Google index?

I have a client who was advised by some cowboy search engine optimisation company to create lots of web pages stuffed full of spammy repetitive keywords.

He now knows this is a bad thing, and has deleted the pages from his site.

But the old pages still appear in the Google index. He's been told there is nothing he can do about it.

Google will automatically remove dead pages from the search results as part of the indexing process. Pages with 404 messages (not found) or 410 (gone) will eventually be disappear from the index and the search engine results.

But this can take time.

The quick solution is to use Google's Webmaster's Remove URL's tool. It can be used to remove any content that you don't want appearing in the search results. Google says the removal request typically takes 3-5 business days to process.

The Google Webmaster toolkit is full of useful utilities for optimising your site, and learning about your site performance in Google.

Keep in mind that it might be best to simply update the offending page and let the spider re-index the new content.

You might also want to keep the content on your site, and just block Google from indexing it using appropriate meta tags and the robots.txt file.

The URL removal tool does just that: it removes the page entirely.

And remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Humans don't like spam, and neither does Google.

Making (more) money from AdSense

I've invited Keith Cooper of Northlight Images as my guest blogger this week; he's an experienced AdSense advertiser, but his real job is as a successful commercial photographer.

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So, you've got a site or blog which people visit. How about just putting a few adverts on that site and watch the cash just roll in?

A lot of people notice the Google AdSense ads on other peoples' sites and wonder how the scheme could work for them?

Well, Google make it pretty easy to sign up for the AdSense program and get the code to place on your site. They offer help in setting up the code, and as someone who avoids web code wherever possible, I found initial ad placement simple and pretty risk free. Any competent web designer should be able to add web code to your pages very easily.

You can go through some simple wizards and quickly get a small chunk of code that goes in your page. When the page is viewed, Google serves up adverts based on what their AdSense web crawler thinks your page is about. The nice thing is that you don't have to set anything or deal with advertisers, Google just puts the money into your account.

If it's that simple then why don't more people do it?

First of all you have to get Google to accept your web site. They don't like sites with very few pages or ones associated with any less reputable parts of the web. They like to see a site with reasonable traffic levels, so 2-3 visitors a day isn't going to cut it... They also like original content.

None of those hurdles should be too high if you've got a reasonable site, so you place your ads and start checking your AdSense reports to see how well you are doing.

This is the place where a lot of people stop, and feel quite happy to make a few dollars a week, and maybe cover their hosting costs (a reasonable first target)

Even more money

Look carefully at the range of ad sizes that you see from Google. The ads come in a variety of shapes and sizes which fit on your page in different ways (depending on what's already there)

Different ad sizes work better on different pages, and what's more, the same ad blocks work better on different parts of the page.

Google offer quite a lot of resources to help you here. The picture below (from Google) shows the relative effectiveness of ads on different parts of the page (darker colours better)


People are bombarded with adverts and you are looking to counter 'ad blindness' where people just don't even see your ads.

You need to experiment with different ad placements and see how they perform. This is where the comprehensive reports that Google supplies will be of great help.

By making use of 'channels' you can monitor individual ad block performance (or 'ad units' as Google calls them). You are looking for the click through rate (CTR). Don't be disappointed when you see rates less than 1% - most visitors don't click on adverts.

The amount of money you will get depends on the number of clicks you get and what Google happens to be paying at the time. The rate varies considerably by page, since ads are placed through a bidding process, by advertisers using the Adwords scheme.

Remember too that the content on some pages just won't get many people clicking on ads.

My own best results come from my reviews of photographic and colour management equipment. These are pages people will often look at when actively looking to buy a product. CTRs on my own site vary between 0.3% and over 10% for some very specific information pages. Some of the specialist pages also tend to get better paying ads. Google doesn't like you to discuss details of it's payments and stats, but it's well known that some (not that many) advertisers will pay several dollars a click.

Still more money

Let's say you've got a successful site with lots of visitors and are making a modest sum in revenue (maybe enough to buy a modest second hand car each year).

You've experimented with ad placement and your figures have been creeping up.

You've been adding new content to your site to bring in more visitors and their ad clicks.

What's left to do?

Well here's a coding tip that recently increased my daily revenue by over 20%

You'll remember from the picture above that ads in different places on a page get different click through rates? On my site this typically varies on any one page from 0.2% to 3%. It so happens that Google puts it's best performing (and paying) adverts in the place specified by the piece of ad code (javascript) that appear first in the code for your page.

Looking at the code for my page I saw that the best paying ads were going into an ad unit with a 0.3% CTR. A few relatively basic coding changes kept my successful ad layout and put the best paying ads into the 3% CTR ad unit. I've been looking at the stats for about a month and it seems that the overall earnings of the site are some 25% up. As with all statistical analysis it pays to work with larger sets of data so I'll reserve judgement of the actual figures for a few months.

One other area I'm looking at is geo-targeting of adverts. I'm a UK professional photographer and one of the purposes of the Northlight Images web site is to get me new commercial photography work. Since I've put considerable effort into optimising the pages to be found by people looking for a photographer, I get a lot of visitors from overseas. Google targets the adverts, so that what you see visiting my site varies depending on where you are coming from.

Why not put adverts on the commercial pages? Well mainly, I've no intention of advertising other UK photographers. However I've been working on a simple system that enables me to provide Google ads to overseas visitors and content of my choosing to UK visitors (say an image of mine, that occupies the ad space)

It's till experimental but potentially allows me to utilise the success of my SEO activities for advertising revenue, without potentially affecting my main business.

I'm a commercial photographer... not a web developer!





Article ©2008 Keith Cooper, Northlight Images Tel +44 116 291 9092

Tracking outbound clicks to other sites

I provide lots of links to other websites .
How do I measure which of those links you click on?

Google Analytics makes it simple to measure the clicks to links within your own site. But Google Analytics also provides a way for you to track clicks on links that lead to to other websites, away from your website.

It is useful to see where people go when they leave your site; indeed there are websites making a good living by charging companies to send clicks their way. This is a free way to count those outbound clicks.

Take a look at this helpful article describing outbound link tracking using Google Analytics

In brief, all you need to do is add a bit of additional tracking code (highlighted in red) to your links

<a href="http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=74983" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outgoing/tracking_article');">

The word onClick means just that: if somebody clicks on this link, Analytics starts counting.

Use of the /outgoing folder will put all the reporting of outbound links neatly together in a separate folder.

And I have used the phrase tracking_article which will appear in my Analytics reports so I know which exact Google page I was linking to (in case I forget what answer 74983 was!)

I'm going to experiment with Analytics Talks script to automate the creation of the outbound tracking URLs.

And of course for you WordPress readers, you simply need to install the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin to keep track of all those outbound links.

The outbound clicks will appear in my Top Content report.

Google Checkout & BillMeLater

How do you pay for stuff on the Internet?

PayPal is a household name that most of us will have used, but how familiar are you with Google Checkout?




Hitwise report that Google's payment service overtook PayPal in the UK this Christmas as an alternative payment provider.

As you might expect, the majority of PayPal's purchases are coming from the eBay platform. On the other hand, independent retailers and companies like Dabs and Vodafone are offering Google Checkout as a payment option.

Google Checkout have just published a useful newsletter providing an update on the latest service offerings.




Another alternative payment offering that is getting alot of traction in the USA is BillMeLater, a deferred payment provider that doesn't require a credit card.

Amazon are reported as having invested in BillMeLater, along with the likes of Walmart, Reebock, and Toys R Us.

Just enter your date of birth and the last four digits of your Social Security number, and a bill will get posted to you with special payment offered by the retailer such as terms like "no payments for six months."

You can be sure the service will hit our shores soon.

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Google Calculator is a hidden feature in Google Search. You can type in all kinds of mathematical questions, or questions that give a mathematical-ish answer:

Try multiplying Roman Numerals like VII*X

Or doing conversions like 200 pounds in stone

Or calculations like how many seconds in year

There are other questions you can ask, like

What time is it in Philadelphia?

You should also take a look at my blog posting how American Google is still different from UK Google.

But my favourites are the off-the-wall questions, like "how often is once in a blue moon?" Apparently, it is thus:

Most Popular Posts of 2007

The New Year is a great time to review the performance of your website.

In terms of visitors, I must confess my posting about the John and Anne absconding to Panama had an extraordinary response, with more than 2,500 people reading it in the first 24 hour period. It shows the value of writing topical postings!

I'm evaluating the response to my blog articles in order to guide what I write next year. There are a number of different measures that I am considering:

• the number of times the blog posting was read by unique visitors
  
• the number of times the blog posting was a landing page meaning it was the first page people saw, for example from a Google search
• the response to my email newsletters
  

But in terms of my Internet marketing content, my most frequently read postings in 2007 were:

1. Analysis of the differences between American Google and UK Google
2. Google Analytics versus Web Trends for web statistics
3. Google Checkout's free credit card processing service
4. Free Web Tools
5. Writing for the web: readability tests (2006)

It was quite a different story if I look at the click through rate from readers of my email newsletter. Keep in mind these results will be skewed so that my recent articles will have higher click through rates because the number of subscribers grow month on month. The most popular postings for the newsletter subscribers were:

1. How to search engine optimise your PDFs
2. The importance of Meta Tags
3. Spammy Google Adword Advertising
4. My recommendation for the Best Internet Marketing book
5. A great keyword research tool

And finally, there are some older postings that reliably drive traffic to the site:

• Doodle for Google (2006)
• Internet Usage in the UK (2006)
• Networking via the mains (2006)
• The Google F Word (2005)
• Ten Top Blogging Mistakes (2005)

John and Anne Move to Panama

What can your business learn from the "John and Anne Move to Panama" fiasco?

Well, firstly it didn't take a rocket scientist to discover the whereabouts of mystery canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne. Go to Google Images and just type in "john anne panama." You'll find them there Number One. Their photo was featured on the MoveToPanama website, and very helpfully including the date the photo was taken.

The photo has now been removed from the website, but the picture will live on. Forever. In Google cache. And on other people's blogs and websites.

Google Universal Search integrates search results from web pages, photos, video, local information and other resources.

It may have caused John and Anne a bit of bother, but your business should be using this image optimisation to your advantage.

• Create a plan to publish a variety of types of content as part of your search engine optimisation strategy. Photos, videos, podcasts. Be sure to include your keyphrases in the surrounding content, the filenames, descriptions, ALT tags and the like.
• Use keyword research tools to see what your customers are looking for, and generate content the gives them the information they want.
  
• Monitor the media you put online - Google has a long memory, and you will need to be proud of the images for a long time coming.

Google Goofs

Even Saintly Google has a bad day, sometimes.

Google demands high standards for its AdWords advertising: it has it's Editorial Policies, it's strictures against Repetition of words, and promises that all ads "are reviewed by our support staff to make sure they meet Google's guidelines."

Nevertheless even Google can goof up when despicable Pay Per Click Ads like this one appears:


What rock did these advertising idiots crawl out from under?

But it did make me laugh!

Unsung Heros: Meta Tags

Once upon a time Meta Tags were an important part of your search engine optimisation activities. But no longer: very few of the search engine spiders even consider Meta tags when indexing your site.

But you ignore Meta Tags at your peril.

In particular, the Description tag plays an important role in the search engine results page. It is part of the persuasive call to action to searchers, encouraging them to click on your site.

Give your site a fighting chance in the results page, and write a good Description tag.

Note that Google displays the Title Tag in bold blue, and below it are displayed the two black lines containing my Description tag:





You can see your Title and Description tags by using the View | Source option in your web browser.

And finally, remember those two black lines of text in the Google search engine results might come from your DMOZ entry, or from some relevant text extracted from your site.

Google Page Rank Update October 2007

They're calling it the Google Page Rank Massacre: Google has, for the third time this month, been tweaking Page Ranks (PR) which has resulted in a lower Page Rank for many websites, including my own....

First, can I preface this discussion by saying I'm not a Page Rank junkie, and that I acknowledge Page Rank is not an indicator of how well your site is going to rank in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS).

But it is an interesting search marketing metric, and Google's re-calculations are an indicator of what's going on with its search ranking algorithm.

There's alot of speculation, but the consensus appears to be:

1. The reduction in Page Rank is part of Google's campaign against paid links and advertisement links. We may be talking cheap and nasty sites, but we're also talking reputable sites, like the business magazine Forbes and the Washington Post both falling from PR7 to PR5.

2. More interestingly from my point of view, there is speculation that Google is slapping the Internet Marketing industry. I'm keeping good company; my fall from PR5 to PR4 is on par with both Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Guide falling from PR7 to PR4 (ouch).

I'd be very interested to hear of anybody else's change in Page Rank; I've seen two clients have their PR go up. The Page Rank update appears to still be in progress, so keep an eye out...

Google Adwords Qualified Professional

I'm pleased to say that I am now a Google AdWords Qualified Professional.

Having passed the Google AdWords exam with flying colours, and having demonstrated a track record of building and managing AdWords campaigns over a 90 day period, I'm now truly certifiable.

This means Google knows I'm competent to provide Pay Per Click (PPC) AdWords marketing and consultancy services.

I have to say the exam was quite rigorous, and it assessed knowledge of:

• AdWords Policies
• Ad Distribution
• Keyword Matching
• Site Targeting
• Keyword Performance
• ROI and Conversion Tracking
• Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Cross-Channel Conversion Tracking
• Driving Improvements with Analytics Data
• Keywords, Ad Text and Ad Groups Optimisation

If you are interested in some help in setting up a Google AdWords campaign, then get in touch (and I can offer you a free £50 voucher towards your first campaign that I set up for you!)

Free Web Tools

Free web tools are always a popular topic - whether you are planning a new site, or just tweaking your existing site.

Here's a round up of some of my favourite free web tools:

Keyword research tools help you to discover the best phrases for both SEO and PPC campaigns. I have previously reviewed and recommend SEO Book's Keyword Research Tool.

Research your competition using the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar. For those Firefox users amongst us, I strongly recommend SearchStatus toolbar. And don't forget to research your competitors in DMOZ to see what categories they have indexed themselves in.

Promote your branding or logo with a favicon, that little icon that appears when I bookmark your site, or when your address appears in a browser. Try using Dynamic Drive's Favicon Generator.

What colours are safe to use in a web browser? Your Pantone colour might not display safely, so use Lynda's Browser Safe Colour palette when planning your website design.

Do you have a sitemap? You can use the free XML Sitemap Generator to scan through all the pages of your website, and create either an HTML or XML sitemap, no charge.

Is your website bloated and overweight? How long does it take your website to load? Websiteoptimization.com's free speed test will analyse your site, and tell you how specific ways to improve your site.

Have you done a check of the quality of your website code? Or better yet, check the quality of the web designers quoting for your shiny new website? W3C's quality assurance tools will validate your HTML, look for broken web links, as well as check out your cascading style sheets (CSS).

How well do you write? Check out how hard it is to read your web copy using this Readability Testing Tool. And whilst you're at it, check out whether you are using your keyphrases in your copy using a keyword density analyser.

iwebtools has a great collection of tools, including a spider simulator, Page Rank predictor, bank link checker and loads more

And last but no means least, take full advantage of Google's free tools:

• Google Analytics provide high quality, free statistics
• Google's Webmaster Central is a toolbox full of statistics and diagnostics
  
• Google Alerts is a great way to spy on your competition, or manage your own reputation
• Google Checkout is offering free credit card processing til 2008
• Google Mashups lets you plot your own data on a Google map
• Get all those essential Google toys in the Google Pack: toolbars, Google Earth, Picassa....
  

I'm sure you have other free utilities, let me know!

Google Spam Violation Notifications

Google have updated their Webmaster Central service to alert you of spam violations in your website. You will be notified of pages that have been removed from the Google index, the reason why, and how you can get reconsidered for inclusion.

The new Message Centre in your Webmaster Central account will contain correspondence from Google in the event that Google has spotted some hidden text or other violation on your website.

Currently, you need to be a verified owner of the site and logged in to your account in order to receive this information. Google are planning to resume sending out email notifications shortly.

The spam violation service had been around since 2005, with notifications provided via email. But with spoof messages flying around, Google decided to halt the service.

Once you have made any necessary corrections to your site, then you need to go through Google's Reinclusion process. I think it is well worth noting that Google asks what search engine optimisation (SEO) company you are working with that led to the violation:


Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reconsideration requests. If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.

How fast is Google?

How long does it take for your site to make an impact on the Google search results?

3 hours.

Last week's little experiment optimising for the phrase SEO Lincolnshire Rutland gave some rather outstanding results. It has been a very interesting example of the efficiency of Google spidering.

The blog posting was ranking in third position in Google within three hours, and took top position within 24 hours.

As of today, just one week later, seven of the top 10 positions are occupied with various scrapings and permutations of the posting. An interesting technique for crowding out the competition. Although I'm not very happy about the scrapers.

Nevertheless, do NOT lose site of the fact this is not a great phrase to optimise for, nor is it a competitive phrase that requires a lot of hard work.

But I do have had other anecdotal reports from clients who see just how fast the Google results can change, including this lovely testimonial from Caricaturist Richard Ellis:

I would just like to thank you for the advice given at your course.
I have to admit it took me a little while to getting the job done,
but once I had put some of your suggestions into practice,
my site soared from page 6 to page 1 of the Google organic rankings
in the space of three days!
This has to be one of the best investments I have ever made.

And many thanks to Guy Gregory who let me know just how quickly the blog posting was being picked up by Google.

Google stops reporting supplemental results

It has been a busy summer over in GoogleLand, with a number of changes to report.

Google is no longer letting us know which of our web pages are in the Main Index, and which are relegated to the dreaded Supplemental Index.

Using the command "site:www.putyouraddresshere.co.uk" still shows you which pages Google indexes, but the Supplemental Results label has disappeared.

If you need a refresher about supplementals, take a look at my posting on Google Supplemental Results.

The Google blog explains the change as being due to improvements in crawling and indexing, leading to fresher and more comprehensive indexing.

What Google also explains is that there is still a Supplemental Index but the distinction between Main and Supplemental is narrowing. At this stage, the Supplemental Index may be about 3 months out of date, but Google are hoping to reduce that to just one month out of date.

There are calls to restore the Supplemental Results information in Webmaster Central, but we will just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, it is one less bit information for you to digest, or indeed obsess about!

eBay, Google, Dummies, Prams

eBay has pulled all its sponsored advertising off Google in the USA.

What a shame; that means Americans won't be seeing adverts for idiots for sale on eBay (this link shows adverts still operating in the UK)

The alleged cause of this drastic action? Cheeky Google planned a big party promoting Google Checkout on the same day and in the same city as eBay's premier seller event, eBay Live.

And at the root of it all is eBay's refusal to negotiate with Google over the use of Google Checkout as a mechanism for buyers or sellers. Google Checkout, of course, is a direct competitor to eBay's own PayPal. Google Checkout is banned for use on eBay.

eBay's position is that Google Checkout is unproven, and eBay expresses concerns over Google Checkout's fraud and security issues.

Perhaps it really has something to do with keeping competitors off the PayPal turf?

The upshot is that removal of PPC advertising has cost eBay a 7% drop in traffic from Google. Google is the number one source of traffic for ebay.com. I would have expected a more dramatic drop, but the Hitwise analysis of the spat reveals the top search terms in Google are for the eBay domain name or eBay brand.

As for Google, the value of the lost advertising is estimated at $25 million, and eBay is Google's largest AdWords customer.

So, big money is involved. As is usually the case money talks, and no doubt they will kiss and make up soon.

Successful websites... without Google?

Can an online business succeed without the assistance of the search engines?

What about if you deliberately exclude your site from the Google search engine results?

Jennifer Laycock is conducting an experiment whereby she is deliberately excluding her brand new web site from the search engine results. She wants to demonstrate it's possible to grow a business, increase traffic and succeed online, all without the help of the search engines.

You go for it, girl!

Dependence on traffic from Google appears to be a fact of life for small businesses: nearly 80% of all searches in the UK taking place on Google. And at my workshops I'm always hearing small businesses moan that ranking well in Google is a Catch 22: "my business is new and small, so can't rank well in Google, but if it doesn't rank well, then it stays small or goes bust."

So how can you succeed online if you can't rank well in Google, or can't afford (or won't pay) the Pay Per Click Prices?

Jennifer has concocted her robots.txt file to tell the major search engine spiders to go away, and instead will be depending on the lesser search engines, link building, blogging, social networking, and other online marketing techniques.

And her underlying assumption is that by building good links and content, she will have a successful business model, and will rank well in the search engines anyway, eventually.

Follow Jennifer's progress with her new online e-commerce venture Bento Yum on the Search Engine Guide website.

Paid-For-Links Penalties

The debate rages regarding paying for inbound links in order to improve your Page Rank, and Google's efforts to detect (and penalise) sites playing the paid-for-links game.

As a quick reminder, Google is absolutely clear that buying links to improve your Page Rank violates their quality guidelines; however, buying links as part of online advertising is confirmed as a kosher activity.

To this end, Google is actively soliciting us to report those nasty, nasty link selling cheaters in order to help them improve the Google algorithm or method to detect paid-for links.

If you're worried about paid links (and you probably should be) then read Matt Cutt's long but useful overview. In it he clarifies Google's view of paid-for directories (if the quality is good, then they're OK) and confirms that sites selling links are likely to lose the ability to pass their link value onto other pages (which means it just not worth buying the link, after all....)

What's happening to my rankings in the search engines?

At the exact moment you are reading this posting, Google is probably tweaking its algorithm, the rules it uses to determine how your site ranks in its search results. This tweaking means your rankings in the search engine results will go up, and they'll go down.

If Google's mission is to organise the world's information, then these tweaks means Google is attempting to get the most useful set of results for a particular search phrase.

So why does your website go up and down in the rankings? And why, sometimes, does it disappear and then reappear?

Google is looking at a huge range of quality measures, and whilst we don't know the exact recipe, we do know that Google is looking at a number of fairly standard factors. It will weigh different factors in each tweak, and hence your website fluctuations in the search results.

So what can you do to improve your rankings in the search engines even when Google is tweaking?

1. Improve the links to your site

It can be a problem when too many of your links are reciprocal, or the links are of a very poor quality, or the links are not relevant to the content of your site. I would suggest that the effort of getting just one perfect inbound link far outweighs getting dozens of cheap and nasty links.

What's a perfect link? It will come from a site that is considered an expert in your business arena. The page containing the link will have a good Page Rank. The words in the link (the "anchor text") will have your key phrase in it. The page containing the link will have links to other high quality pages, but not too many links. And the page containing the link will be indexed by Google.

I won't pretend it's easy to get perfect links, but their rarity value explains their huge impact on your search engine rankings.

2. Improve the content on your site

Google is a text processing machine; that means you have to have great text on your website. How can you improve your content:

• ensure you have a coherent focus or topic for your website. Google uses something called latent semantic indexing which means it is able to figure out what you're talking about without exactly matching the words you're using. So, if you sell cheap perfume, you'll also want to be writing about discount fragrances, bargain scents, and cut-price cologne.
• don't duplicate your content. It's a problem when a large percentage of your content is duplicated across multiple pages
• don't have empty pages. Minimal content on your pages is a danger signal to Google, and too many minimalist pages will hurt your rankings
• link to other high quality websites in your topical community. I'm not talking about a general purpose links page, you need to link to appropriate sites within the body of your copy.
  

3. Respect your HTML

Web pages have specific characteristics that help the search engines to understand the content, so get your HTML right:

• don't have duplicate Title tags
• don't have duplicate Description meta tags
  
• don't stuff keywords into your Keywords meta tag, or your Alt tags associated with your images
  
• don't use invisible text (white on white background) or nearly invisible text, that is to say text which is too small or text that is nearly white on white
  

Search engine optimisation is a fine balancing act: getting the specific details of your web pages right, but also keeping a high level helicopter view of your content and inbound linking strategy.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Please read this. Trust me, it isn't boring or geeky.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a technique Google uses to discover the meaning of your web pages without depending purely on the exact words on the pages. It all depends on the context of your text.

At it's simplest, if I'm writing about "Windows," Google is trying to discover if I mean double glazing or if I mean operating systems.

Let's see what Google can show you in terms of how it indexes specific key phrases.

First, you need to be aware that Google highlights in bold the keyword you're searching for when it gives the search engine results.

In this example, I've searched for greeting cards and you can Google has put it in bold in the search results:



Now the Cool Part

Google uses the Tilda symbol (~) to search for synonyms, which in terms of latent semantic indexing means finding related terms.

And Google uses the minus symbol (-) to exclude a phrase from a search.

So, if I want to ask Google to show me pages that are related to Greeting cards, but don't have the word Greeting Cards in the page then I can use this search phrase:

~greeting cards -greeting cards

And this time Google highlights phrases like "Birthday" or "Virtual Cards" or "e-cards" which it believes (LSI) are all related to greeting cards:



What does this mean in terms of search engine optimisation?

It will be very beneficial for you to incorporate not only your precise key phrases, but also those closely related terms that will help to improve your overall Latent Semantic Indexing score. Of course, you are very likely to be using these synonyms and phrases naturally in your writing. But it would also be worth investigating these related terms both to have a better understanding of Google's indexing, and to have a better understanding of your competitive marketplace.

Latent Semantic Indexing: not to painful, I hope!

American Google vs UK Google

Why can't folk in Britain see the cool Google stuff the Americans can see? Since when did we become second-class Googlers?

In the USA they see Google in it's full glory, with the additional Google OneBox information. OneBox gives you information you need straight away in the search results, without having to click on any links.

London's weather is better in America:






And they've even improved The Tube:





Why haven't you seen this before, assuming you're a Brit? If Google thinks you're foreign, then it tries to redirect you to your local content. And our local UK content ain't got no OneBox.

Do you want to be an American Googler? Try searching using www.google.com/ncr

'NCR' in the link above probably means 'No country redirect.' Try it, and you will see some quite surprising differences.

Here are some more examples to make you jealous of Google Yanks:




They make it easier to get from London to Rome:







Google will answer your most important questions:






And there's even better business data:



No doubt all this functionality will rollout (someday) to our shores, but until then...

Google Analytics vs WebTrends

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I'm measuring my web traffic using 2 different services - and getting dramatically different reports. Google Analytics vs WebTrends: which should I believe?

The variance in the reporting is substantial, and each gives quite a different slant on reporting how well my web site is performing:

• Google Analytics reported twice the number searchers clicking through for the keyphrase "internet marketing training"
• WebTrends reported 12% more unique visitors
• Google Analytics says my visitors are primarily from UK, Ireland and Sweden
• WebTrends says my visitors are from UK, USA and unspecified European places

I would always advise clients not to naval-gaze on their web statistics, but instead to use them as trend indicators. And as marketing guru Jim Sterne is fond of saying, if your yardstick measures 39 inches instead of 36 inches, it's still great to have a measurement tool. (nb - long live imperial measures)

But why are contradictory trends reported even at a macro level by these two systems?

The answer, of course, is that each system is using different ways of handling cookies (deleting and non-acceptance), different ways of defining the word "daily", and indeed the use of different technologies like JavaScript. It's really for me to get a better handle on both packages and get a deeper understanding of what the statistics are saying to me.

If you want to learn more Stone Temple Consulting's 2007 Web Analytics ShootOut gives a very useful overview.

I also think it is time for a reality check, and a reminder that it still isn't possible to measure the effectiveness of other marketing campaigns like direct mail, radio ads or any of those quaint ways of marketing (!)

I will stick with running both web analytics packages, and together they will serve to validate each other's results and help me to test the quality of the data.

Why am I using both Google Analytics and WebTrends? To help advise clients:

1. Google Analytics is free, whereas Webtrends is a service you rent, costing typically £20 per month plus setup fees
   
2. Your data is confidential with WebTrends, whereas I'm sure Google are peeking at my data

Google 2.0: Evolving Search

Google is rolling out a new way to present its search engine results, integrating data from a range of Google search services: local information, video, books.

"Universal Search" aims to provide even more relevant search results, personalised on our preferences, and promises to provide even more accurate results using Google's various vertical search engines. The new release also incorporates a new navigational interface.

This is going to have significant implications for search engine marketers, and we'll all need a better understanding of Google's various Vertical Search engine capabilities.

Users of Google.com will see the new Google first, and no doubt will be reaching our sunny shores soon.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLane has written a comprehensive overview of Google's new Universal Search.

Understanding Supplemental Results

Should you be worried about Google's Supplemental Results?

Google has a two tier system for indexing pages on the Internet: a Main Index, and a Supplemental Index.

And as the name suggests, the Main Index contains pages that Google feels are important, and the Supplemental Index contains those leftover pages just don't carry the same weight. And of course it follows that pages in the Supplemental Index have little or no chance of ranking well in the search engine results.

How can you tell if your website is relegated to the depths of Supplemental Results?

Go to Google and enter: site:www.yourdomainname.co.uk and go to the last page of the search results.

Take a look to see how many of your pages are tagged as Supplemental Results


It is normal to have a proportion of your pages in Supplemental Results, but if you have a lot of Supplemental pages then it may be a signal that something is wrong with your search engine optimisation strategy.

There are a number of reasons why your pages might be in the Supplemental