So we have discussed content and meta data.  Next we need to look at:

IS YOUR URL WORKING FOR YOU!
Quite simply, if it does what is says on the tin – then its going to work for you!  Company name specific URLs are great to be found for a search featuring your company name, but why not also register URLs containing your keywords.  For instance, if you repair televisions – also use www.tv-repair.co.uk.  You can have as many URLs as you like pointing to your website, but I would suggest you keep it real.  Try to keep to the highest regarded URLs – such as .co.uk or .com.  Although I have recently been told that more credence is being given to .net extensions.  Similarly .co extensions are one to watch out for. Nevertheless the search engines still hold the main two extensions in high regard.

In addition to your your main URL, use your keywords in your page URL trailing slashes.  For example, the “about page” for our television repair company could be www.tv-repair.co.uk/about tv repairs/.

For more information, or to receive an optimisation report for your website, simply give me a call!

Last week we discussed the importance of content.  Although that is probably the most important factor, it’s still only a fraction of the battle!  

LET’S LOOK AT META DATA

This helps describe an item and allows it to be found by the search engine spiders.  Your website will have three main meta data fields <title>, <content> and <description>.  If you right click on your website and select “view page source”, this will be clearly visible in the code.   You can also use this technique to see what your competitors are using.  This meta data needs to reflect your chosen keywords, but unlike the content of your website you can simply list your keywords and it won’t have a negative impact.  For instance, if you are a patisserie your <description> could be “homemade patisseries, cakes, desserts, puddings and confectionery”.   Make sure you use this meta data to best effect, because the search engine place a high value on this.

Next week I’ll discuss how to make best use of your tags.  If you would like us to run our report, which compares your website to your top ten competitors and advises on ways to out-perform them, simply give us a call!

I need to drive more traffic to my website, by achieving a higher ranking in the search engines!  Sound familiar?  Well there are two ways of doing this on and off-site optimisation.  It is quite simple really, although many digital marketing agencies like to make it sound complicated.  I intend posting regular blogs each week, to help you make the most of the internet – the first of which is below:

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT
By far the most important way of optimising  your website is to ensure the content is correct.  The search engines want to present the most appropriate results to a user searching for a specific keyword.  Hence you need to think carefully about the most appropriate keywords for each page.  Use the Google Keyword Tool to find out the highest performing keywords with the least competition.   Use these keywords within the content, but don’t overdo it – too many will have a negative impact and you will be seen as a “keyword slut”.  Around 3%  density is right – that is one keyword for every 33 words.  Put one keyword in bold, as that will make a difference.  An average website will only be able to host about three keywords for each page, so it is important you get this right!

If you have any questions about the content on your website, simply post on this blog and I’ll do my best to answer them! Alternatively we can run a report, which will compare your website with your top ten competitors and advise how you should change the content and code to out-perform them.

As some of you may know, Google has been quietly tweaking its search engine in attempts to make it even better. Though Google won’t change on the surface to the everyday user the changed behind the scenes will improve its indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Though we don’t know when the new version will roll out (code name ‘Caffeine’) and how long it will take to make it to the UK, according to the splash page it will begin soon. We’ll keep you posted with any information as we get it.

Twitter’s spree of partnerships isn’t stopping any time soon. Late last month, Microsoft and Twitter struck a search deal to integrate Twitter within Bing. Mere hours later, Google struck back with its own search deal with Twitter.

The latest partnership sees Twitter and LinkedIn join forces, now you can tweet to LinkedIn or make your LinkedIn status updates tweet, either way the two social media sites will cross-post if desired.

To activate simple login to your LinkeIn account and either click the Twitter icon or access your ‘Account & Settings’ and provide your accounts with permission to cross-post!

Once upon a time, one could often attain high search engine rankings simply by filling the meta “keywords” tag of their website with targeted (or untargeted) terms, the later being a black hat method.

We don't use keywords!

Of course, search engines became aware of the fact web developers and spammers were trying to cheat the system and largely started to ignore or at least de-emphasize the importance of the keywords tag in their algorithms.

Now, Google has stated that currently the tag has no influence, at least in their search results, though they haven’t ruled out using it in the future.

According to a post on their webmaster blog today:

When asked how Google uses the keyword meta tag, Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer) answered;
“At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is not at all. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.”

So does this mean we should ditch the meta Keyword? well in a word, No. The reason being,other search engines use the keyword tag and Google hasn’t ruled out the possibility of using it in future, so as one comment on the post wrote “Let’s call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword tag someday, your site is prepared.”

For more SEO related post please click here

wo thirds of businesses are unaware they will be able to use their own name in place of domain extensions such as .com, .org, or .net when Internet domains are liberalized next year, according to a survey.

The change would let the likes of Nike or Microsoft control their own domain and better exploit their brands, and also counter cyber-squatters who use variations of brands on the 280 or so existing domain extensions.

“If you have ‘.nike’, for example, you can create real and specific branded Websites, like ‘running.nike’ or ‘runlondon.nike’,” Joe White, chief operating officer of domain registrar Gandi.net, told Reuters in an interview.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees domain names, is expected to start taking applications for new top-level domains early next year, said Future Laboratory, which conducted the research.

But the move is not on the radar of a majority of companies, the survey for Gandi.net found.

“(Companies) are generally completely unaware of this change coming down the line,” said White. “This change has not yet permeated into the mainstream for businesses or consumers.”

“However, those businesses which are aware actually see the prospect as being quite exciting,” he said.

The price of $185,000 will initially limit applications to the largest corporations and organizations, said Tom Savigar, Strategy and Insight Director at The Future Laboratory.

ICANN is expecting 300-500 applications when it opens its doors in the first quarter of next year, he said.

“You’ll see the big global corporations getting there early to own more of their online space,” he said.

“(Owning their domain) could secure a higher level of credibility and recognition.”

Smaller businesses will be able to use more specific extensions to match their business sector or geography such as “.london” or “.paris,” he said.

So the question is, will you be buying your company name as a domain extension at the earliest chance or will you consider changing your domain to reflect your businesses georgaphical location?

Twitter Icons

Now I’m not going to claim to be ground-breaking following my newly created Twitter account, in fact until last week I was a bit of a sceptic, but as is partly the purpose of this blog I wanted and intend to test all forms of social media and plan on maximising my companies exposure through social media whilst minimising the amount of time invested in achieving this goal.  In a future blog I will explain how I am using Twitter to fully tweet my messages but for this post I would like to focus on Twitter the social media tool.

So I’m confident you have all heard of twitter following the mass media coverage it has received over the past months with many celebrities and even politicians using it (it was part of Barack Obama’s campaign) But in case you haven’t the concept is that you can ‘Tweet’ your message which is made up of 140 characters and contact all your followers with one single message.  The idea was inspired by MSN Messenger where it is possible to add an out of office/ away to lunch message according to co-founder Biz Stone, Biz and the other two co-founders decided to create a prototype and insisted that family and friends use it, at first they were reluctant, but following a minor earthquake many turned to twitter to get a message of their safety out to friends and family instead of using the phone to contact everyone individually – this was a real moment in Twitters history when they realised that there was a use for Twitter. The other was when the plane was landed on the Hudson River and Twitter seemed to be ahead of the media in delivering the news! According to Sue Robinson from the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Campus “It was a kind of mass network journalism, or crowd sourcing is another term for it. A lot of people are writing in, and that mass, that collection of data, creates the news story.”

So Twitter had arrived and had a respectable following for a social media site, but it was when celebrities began to use it that it really took off. It is claimed that when American celebrity Oprah Winfrey ‘Tweeted’ live on her show traffic to the Twitter site increased by 43%. The site has grown in the number of users dramatically, from half a million in February 2008 to seven Million a year later and in the past four months it is thought to have grown beyond 10 million, but there is a downside.  According to a study by Harvard University, 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the content where as on a typical social media website the top 10% of users generate 30% of content. It also claims that more than half of people using Twitter updated their page once every 74 days. This research has led to the longevity of the site being questioned, will Twitter survive the hype?

It is our belief following our brief experience that Twitter is here to stay, it is just the way in which it is marketed and used that needs re-defining.

On the Twitter home page it claims that:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

But it is our belief that users do not want to share the same information with family, friends and colleagues and do not want to use Twitter to communicate personal information. In fact as a personal tool for communicating I am not convinced that Twitter has any future, but as a commercial tool for businesses to promote their services and to maintain continued contact with the clients who are interested it is ideal. In a matter of 140 characters it is possible to remind customers of your company and direct them to your website.

An additional bonus of Twitter is the way in which it now connects to varying applications, we believe it has become a useful SEO tool and an excellent way of generating inbound links. In a future post I will share with you how I am now using Twitter to create at least 3 in bound links to my post whilst writing my post – through blogging I am creating in bound links using Twitter (without even logging into Twitter) which will help to further promote my blog and website.

So now you know what the tweet it’s all about don’t you think you should get tweeting?

Follow IT Pie here (http://twitter.com/itpie)

Well I’ve been thinking about tweeting for some time and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure of its value to our business (though I do recognise that it can be almost invaluable to certain industries) and I will blog on this later, but for now I want to anounce our arrival on Twitter and let you in on a little secret – I have a plugin which should update my Twitter account (This is a test) meaning that as I blog I Twitter, hitting two social media tools in one go and generating links back and forth between blog and Twitter.

I’ll post soon on my experience of setting up Twitter and the plugin used for my blog. But got to do some more testing first.

Oh yeah follow us here http://twitter.com/itpie

Bing Search Engine

So some of you may have heard that Microsoft is/has launched a new search engine, they claim it’s in order to catch Yahoo, the second most popular search engine online, but we all know Microsoft have always had Google in their targets but I think they are telling the truth and this is maybe a two tiered attack.

I’ve inserted an image for a quick look at bing or head over to www.bing.com

Now firstly where did they come up with the name Bing? Google is so well known that ‘to google’ has been included in dictionaries since 2006, so will we all be binging it in2019?  I like to think that this search engine was dreamt up in a suburb in New York full of Italian-Americans and they said, “basically Big BG (Bill Gates) you hit search then bada-boom bada-BING – the results are shown” and this is how Bing was born, but really the name doesn’t matter, its what’s in the box that counts.

So first impressions: Appearance, when you open up bing.com your greeted with a beautiful picture of mountains and a lake, a tranquil image, it’s more interesting than the plain Google page we’re normally greeted with, and a lot less cluttered than the Yahoo home page with all its news. Now I’m not a Yahoo user, but I’m guessing that part of the reason users use Yahoo is for access to the news and for access to their e-mail etc, so has MS missed a trick here?  I’m not sure that they will win Yahoo users over on appearance alone, though it is nicer than the standard Google page – but then I imagine most people now user iGoogle which is full of fun and if your a web developer like me then your iGoogle is very important! So the Bing appearance, I’m going to say it’s pretty and impressive on first impressions, but ummm why. But lets not get caught up on appearance there are more important things to consider like how it works!

Next up: How it work. Now I’ve read a couple of things on Bing, online and in the Times and the one major difference compared to all the other search engines is that the results are presented in three columns, the right is reserved for sponsored links (i.e. where the search engines make all their money) the centre column is reserved for the results, but in the left hand column there is something new, related searches, in an article I read it claimed that when someone searches, the search engine bing recognises what is being searched for an suggests related searches in the left hand column, the example was if someone searches for a Nikon camera, bing recognises that it is a camera and will also return search results in the left column for shops where you can buy the camera, user manuals, reviews and lots of other related results – however when I tried it and I searched for my camera which I bought some four months ago (Sony T77) my ‘related searches’ results returned umm nothing, so excellent concept, but does it really work?  I’m not going to attack bing here, as in the UK we’re still playing with the beta version right now, as it is soon to be or has just been launched in the States with a $100 million advertising campaign. But since IE8 introduced the chrome favourite website thumbnail concepts I have been using bing quite a lot and have noticed that quite often when I search the left hand column is blank, but like I said, lets give them time and a chance. A very nice feature they seem to have introduced is a pop up box, when you hover just right of the results a preview box with the first couple of paragraphs of text appears to help you decide if the website is the right result without visiting it. I also understand that this feature will stream videos without you having to click on the video – a excellent concept, but will it actually work?

The most important part of a search engine: Results. This has been quite hard to assess really, how can I decide if the results returned by bing are better than Yahoo or Google?  If I search for an obvious term, one such as the football team I support then I would expect the Clubs website to be the top result and it was, but it was interesting how they all presented the information. Google as we would expect delivered the ’site links’ – these are sublinks which enable the user to quickly reach a specific part of the website without going through the home page, they usually logically reflect the site navigation and thus the main sections of the website, Google also returned a search box which allowed me to search the club website using Google. Yahoo impressed me with its results (as I mentioned I’m not a Yahoo user) at the very top of the results was a box full of stats as well as a link to the website, these stats showed the league position, last match result top scorer and more. Just below this info box was the first real result which again was the club website and Yahoos take on ’site links’ but these were not as logical as Googles. Finally we reach the new Search Engine, Bing, and sadly it seemed to me that the concept was good but the delivery poor, Bing also presents us with site links but this time they were news story links a great concept, but sadly nearly all the news stories were old news, and I mean 7 months old, which in the world of sport is very old, so for me Bing comes out last in this test. To further supplement this test I wanted to search for something obscure but I couldn’t think of anything so decided to search for my own company to see how we perform, I’m pleased to say that on Google and Yahoo we were Number 1 as I’d expect, but on Bing we didn’t even make the top 100 which worries me for more than one reason. Just to be safe I then searched on Bing for my company using “” and we were 5th, though on this occasion I’m going to let Bing off as the other websites above us were all related to us, but this still worries me a little. Are these search results a simple teething problem? and lets not forget it has only just been launched here in the UK, but still it seems to come third out of three for me.

I guess the obvious questions are, is it better than Yahoo or Google? Will it return better results? and most importantly will it topple either of them? Following my personal test and in my opinion, the answer is NO, though the concept of Bing is great and there seems to be some fantastic ideas, unless they work then there is no point to them and it only frustrates me as a user. I must say though I am disappointed with Bing my first impressions of Bing were impressive, and I must admit, I am a Microsoft fan (well I’m not anti Microsoft) but I don’t see this really toppling Google, and I’m not even sure Yahoo will be concerned but if Bing can take second place in the Search Engine popularity stakes, then we will be paying much closer attention to it than we already are.