Google have just issued an email to Google Merchant Centre users (which powers Google Product Search), telling merchants who sell electronics that they need to start including at least two unique product identifiers from a choice of MPN, Brand and EAN.

The email reads as follows:

Starting in the first months of 2011, we are making some changes to how your products in the Electronics category may appear on the UK and German versions of Google Product Search. In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our “product pages” where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. If you are submitting products in the Electronics category, please start including at least two of the following three unique product identifiers: MPN, Brand, and EAN.

These attributes will not be required for your feed to process correctly, however, to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible. You can find unique product identifier information on Product Search product pages, under the “technical specifications” section for Electronics items.

For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=160161

Clearly your product rankings are going to suffer if you don’t follow their suggestion, so if you don’t already put these identifiers into your Merchant Centre feed, now is the time to sort it out!

I spoke to a nice chap called Sam at the Applegate Directory today, who very kindly offered to give all my blog readers, Twitter followers and anyone else who cares to ask a 30% discount off their new Mercury Listing.

The Mercury Listing gets you this little lot:

• List your business in the top section of an UNLIMITED number of product/service headings
• Create as many new categories for your company as you require
• Include a flash animated colour picture of your products or logo on your entry
• Encourage buyers with an UNLIMITED number of words of information about your company
• Include as many deep links and linked images to your website as you require
• Email Link for any enquiries
• Modify at any time during the year

Clearly this is pretty handy for SEO, and you can see how it’s being used by some companies here and here. I have found Applegate to be quite handy for several of my clients, although I’m not guaranteeing it is the right thing for everybody – depends very much if you have the kind of business suited to that directory (primarily business-to-business), although the SEO benefit of lots of keyword-rich deep links to your site from a PageRank 6 domain can’t be denied for any type of website.

The cost? Usually £595 +VAT, but with the 30% discount, £416.50 +VAT. Note that you can’t get this online – you will have to call Sam on 01271 852 000 and quote reference IanLockwoodSR2.

Please feel free to Tweet, email and generally spread this discount code to anyone you think would benefit, it isn’t dependent on knowing me personally!

I’m pleased to announce that along with my good friend Ann Stanley of Anicca Digital Solutions, we are delivering Figaro Digital magazine’s Digital Marketing Academy.

This is a series of training workshops, held at London’s rather swish Hospital Club, based on the Customer Acquisition, Conversion & Retention model. The workshops will provide a holistic view of how to use online marketing techniques to achieve each of the stages in the customer buying cycle, so you can expect to learn about SEO, PPC, Analytics, conversion rate optimisation, social media and email marketing. You can pick and mix from the days on offer at £495 per day, or take all four days at a discounted rate of £1485, giving you one day free!

Click over to the itinerary here to understand more about how the Digital Marketing Academy can help you. Warning: There is a mugshot of me further down that page!

I received some very nasty spam allegedly from HMRC titled “Reminder: Please Resubmit Your Refund Payment” today, as you can see below:

Rather than open the attachment, I saved it to my PC and had a read through the source code, as it’s a web page. The HTML revealed nothing much and references various online.hmrc.gov.uk URLs, until you get further down and spot that if you actually submit the form, it will be sent to this address: http://www.radio-rocket.eu/licznik/ndex.php

The page then goes on to grab various image files (security-related mostly, e.g. credit card logos) from sites including abbyparty.com, rbsworldpay.com and argos.co.uk. I’m sure they’ll all be delighted to know their bandwidth is being used to power phishing spam…

Don’t get caught out by this phishing scam – I’m sure most of you wouldn’t, but just in case you’re tempted by a refund from the taxman, resist!

Just a quick one – you can now get yourself listed on Bing Local Listings (Maps) via this website: www.bingforbusiness.com

In a somewhat odd step, considering they have their own Local Business Centre in the States, Bing has outsourced the provision of local listing data to a company called 118 Information. Clicking the “get started” link on www.bingforbusiness.com takes you to a special page on their site, where you must search for your business by phone number/post code and if it isn’t listed, you can add your details and get a call within the next working day. I strongly suspect this will involve an element of sales, not least as the website professes to provide data for all these:

One other thing I noticed is that for some reason, the submission form is very broken in my browser – no tabbing, use of cursor keys or even delete! Way to go on the accessibility front…

I’m speaking at the Metafocus “Driving Global Trade Through Internet Marketing” forum on 27th May at the Novotel Nottingham, J25 of the M1. To quote the marketing:

This forum has been developed for decision makers in International & Export Companies to help them use the Internet to reach overseas markets, expand their business and drive profit.

The event starts at 8.30am and lasts until midday (slightly earlier actually, to allow time for networking). The cost is £55 inc. VAT and the itinerary is:

9.00 Andrew Schlich, AST Language Services – Successful Communication with your Overseas Customers
9.20 Anja Nelskamp, Metafocus – Why Languange and Culture Matters
9.35 Ian Lockwood, Internet Consultant – The Importance of Ongoing Online Promotion
10.05 Alan Clements, Metafocus – Why You Need a Global Internet Marketing Strategy
10.50 Panel Q&A – Joined by Thomas Schaal (International Trade Advisor for the UKTI)

As you can see, my slot isn’t strictly international-focused, but it is relevant to all online marketing. If you have any interest in marketing outside of the UK, I strongly recommend attending – Metafocus have developed a real reputation for specialist knowledge of international online marketing.

You can book online here.

I received an email from the nice people at Train to Gain/Business Link last Friday, informing me that they have lowered the staff requirement for businesses to be eligible for the Leaders First funding. To quote from the website:

Leaders First gives strategic decision makers within an organisation, the opportunity to develop valuable strategic skills to drive their organisation forward.

So, if you are an owner or manager in a business with at least three full-time employees (or two if you are a limited company), you can apply for funding for training and skills development in any area of your business, including online marketing.

The funding is up to £1000, split so that the first £500 is “free”, in that you don’t have to match the amount. The remaining funding must be matched 50/50, so you could receive as much as £1500 of training at a cost to you of £500. Full details of the programme, including a brochure, are available here on the Business Link website.

If you are interested in receiving one-to-one online marketing training (SEO, pay per click, Analytics, conversion optimisation etc.), please get in touch to discuss your requirements. If appropriate, I have a referral form I can send to Business Link for consideration.

Usually, the eligibility criteria is at least five employees and I have been told that the funding for smaller companies is very limited, so this opportunity may not be around for long.

If you look closely at the header of my website, under my phone number and email address, you’ll see I’ve added one of Facebook’s new Like buttons. There are all sorts of implications for Facebook’s developments in this area, not least that it moves Facebook from a destination to a platform enabling people to find things, communicate across sites without having to visit Facebook itself and thus fundamentally changing online marketing and advertising (at some point…) You can read more about how this will impact us all on the web here (Search Engine Land) and here (Web Pro News).

This post isn’t to get all excited predicting the future though – it’s to help you engage with this shift right now, by simply adding a Like button to your site and enabling your visitors to start sharing their support for you and connecting with each other – driving word of mouth and traffic to your site.

There are two methods and I’ll concentrate on the simple one – using an iFrame to add the button to your site. You could also use the XFBML method, which gives you much more control, but also requires you to be utilising the Facebook JavaScript SDK and my guess is that only the web developers amongst you will fancy that…

All you need is this page: Facebook Like Button Page. Scroll down to the form and enter the relevant details – your page/site’s address, choose a layout style (mine is Standard without Show Faces), set the width to match where you’re going to put the button on your page, choose the font to match your style and either the light or dark colour scheme. The code you will get will look something like this:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fianlockwood.net
&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=200&amp;action=like&amp;
font=verdana&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:100px; height:px">
</iframe>

All you need to do is cut and paste the code into the right place in the HTML of your page/template, and the Like button will magically appear. The astute amongst you will notice that there are some things you can play with to affect the appearance, notably the use of a frameborder and the use of a CSS style to define the size and appearance of the iFrame that encompasses the button.

I made some slight alterations to the code for my site, as the button was sitting too close to the email address:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fianlockwood.net
&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=200&amp;action=like&amp;
font=verdana&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
allowTransparency="true" style="margin-top: 4px; border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:100px; height:25px"></iframe>

Notice that I have added an extra style element: margin-top: 4px; This gives me an extra four pixels space above the Like button, making things neater. In fact, you can add any relevant CSS style element to this, meaning you can position and size the iframe accordingly. I had to play around with the original code a bit, as it was pushing parts of my site’s design around and breaking it.

So, what are you waiting for? Get off and get people liking your site (right after you click my Like button!)

I received a forwarded email from a client this morning, apparently from adwords-noreply@google.com (the usual AdWords notification email address), telling us that “Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.”

Obviously my client was a little worried, but a quick scan of the email made it clear that this was a phishing scam, no doubt designed to extract your credit card/bank details as you “verify” your account. Two things gave it away:

1. Far from great grammar/spelling:

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 12 April 2010).

If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem.

2. Hover over the links to “Click here to get your ads back up” or “verify the status of your account” and you will see it directs you to adwords.google-rs.com/ads/signin.html – very similar to Google’s own AdWords address, bar the “-rs” of course. Indeed, try to visit the site (I don’t recommend that!) and you will see Google blocks it as a suspected phishing site.

Now whilst phishing email scams aren’t rare (how many emails have you had from banks that you’ve never had an account with!?), this is probably only the second or third time I’ve seen it for AdWords. I’ve seen eBay, PayPal and various other ones over the years. Remember to check those links before you click!

Long time no post here! It’s been (and still is) very hectic, but I read this post by Aaron Wall of SEO Book today and I thought it was a very sturdy, significant comment on how “content farms” are affecting search result quality and ultimately how SEO plays out for everyone. You can read Aaron’s view on paid content here.

Without repeating the article, it boils down to sites like eHow (now owned by Demand Media) creating low quality content very quickly, which because it is hosted on an authority domain, easily gets into search results for “long tail” phrases where there is less competition. The money comes from the contextual advertising wrapped around this cheap (often inaccurate) content. Advertising that is not unlikely to be AdSense. Owned by Google. Hmm.

This is now being taken to the next level with “backfill” content on other authority domains, such as USA Today cited in the article, who will get a share of the ad revenue by hosting pages of eHow content on their website. So, you could easily end up in a situation where such cheap content becomes the de-facto monetisation mechanism for authority media sites and hey presto, the quality of search results for many phrases and subjects becomes littered with frankly useless “information”.

This matters, not just because it affects the quality of your search results as a user, but because as a small business owner, you will be increasingly squeezed out of the place you can most easily compete in organic search – the long tail. Aaron makes the point that this paid content on authority domains is just as bad as paid links, as far as messing with Google’s algorithm goes. The issue, of course, is that unlike paid links, Google is likely to be making money itself from the content farms via AdSense, so it has a disincentive to do anything about it.

Ultimately, failure to take action could be the death knell for Google – if its search results become populated with poor quality pages, people will turn to other sources, most likely those which can combine algorithmic search with user rating, where human beings are essentially filtering out the rubbish through their comments and ratings. That’ll be social media then… You can see why Google is trying to leverage social media into its search experience, but at the moment it’s a long way from applying social aspects to search quality (indeed, it has so far only succeeded in annoying a lot of people by including irrelevant Twitter comments into search results).

It will be very interesting to see how Google responds and whether search result quality really starts to drop…