Ian Lockwood is an independent consultant specialising in online marketing, with a decade of experience in the web industry. He works with everyone from start-ups and SMEs to international corporates.
Ian is an SEO God, no kidding he is worth his weight in gold. I have never been so excited & received such practical useful & invaluable info.
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Some chatter in the ranks about Google changing the way it treats NoFollow links, in order to combat PageRank manipulation through PageRank sculpting (i.e. applying NoFollows to links on your pages to prevent them “leaking” PageRank and hence retaining more “power”).
Full explanation in this article from WebProNews.
I had an interesting email today from Parcel2Go.com, who I use occasionally to send bits of cars around the country. It seems that they’re getting into buying links in an interesting way! I wonder what Google makes of this? 
Apologies for the paucity of posts recently, I’ve been very busy delivering training and consultancy for the eBusiness Programme. Presenting my new Google Analytics & Conversion workshop (four times in a week!), Analytics is very much on my mind and I spotted this on Erik Vold’s blog, relating to the previous post here about the Canonical tag and preventing Analytics from double-counting pages:
http://erikvold.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/23/relcanonical-and-google-analytics
Erik has created some Javascript and amended ga.js to stop Analytics counting canonical pages in your stats. Very handy! 
Google has announced its new “interest-based” advertising, allowing AdWords adverts to be targeted at users who have visited particular websites. The service is in beta now and allows advertisers to target specific groups, whilst providing a way for AdSense publishers to target ads better and hence generate more revenue.
There’s a good overview of the system here.
The major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN of course! ) have announced that they will all support the use of the “canonical” tag as a way to understand duplicate content pages in a site. In essence, this means they are providing a way for webmasters to tell them which version of a page is the “master” and which are “alternative versions”. So, wherever you have the same content appearing in multiple pages on your site (say, a product on an e-commerce site that appears in several categories and hence has multiple addresses), you can tell the search engines that you know these are “duplicates” and which one it should treat as the “master”.
This is done with a simple line in the section <head> of your pages:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.website.com/category/product-page">
The canonical tag only works within a domain (including subdomains and folders) and should use absolute URLs rather than relative URLs (that means http://... addresses, not just ../path URLs).
Remember this will only work for pages that are very similar, so don’t think you can go applying the canonical tag to any page just to point some extra link juice somewhere else on your site!
There’s a slightly longer article about using these tags here at Search Engine Land.
Well, I’ve now finished my short run of breakfast seminars on converting website visitors into customers, but I’m pleased to say that from April, there will be a full day workshop available. I promised in a previous post that I would write more about conversion and I thought I’d start with something really simple.
I’m running a test for a client that is simply testing the best wording and placement of a call to action, essentially “click here to make an enquiry”. Previously, the call to action was quite small and not very commanding (a link that started “Request more information…”), so I’ve created a few combinations of text and an email graphic to see what works best. That’s all - no fancy images, no major changes to page layout, just different text and an extra email icon.
These are the results:
As you can see, although the test is still running, we’re looking at an increase of over 41% with the best combo, from the original’s 3.58% conversion rate up to 5.07%, pretty much an extra 1.5%. That’s just from re-wording the link to the enquiry form!
Goes to show how even the simplest things can significantly affect conversion rates.
Happy new year to everyone! For many of us in business, this coming year could be the toughest for a long time - the recession has barely begun and incomes are likely to fall. That’s why I’m concentrating on maximising return on investment from online marketing at the moment, primarily by increasing the conversion rate of the websites I work on.
Being number one in Google and getting all the traffic in the world to your site won’t mean a thing if those people don’t turn into paying customers. Conversely, improving your conversion rate from 1% to 2% without getting a single additional visitor would mean doubling your site’s income. That’s why testing what works in turning visitors into customers is probably the single most important thing you can do to your website.
With that in mind, I’ve written a short(ish!) presentation for the Business Link eBusiness Programme called “Converting Website Visitors into Customers”, which I’ll be delivering around the East Midlands in January. You can find the date and venue nearest you here - it’s free to attend for small/medium sized businesses.
I will be writing about my experiences of what works and what doesn’t, as well as how best to test, in the coming months, as well as continuing to keep an eye on search engine optimisation, pay per click and all the other forms of online marketing. For now, I recommend you start by checking out Google’s Website Optimizer tool - free testing software to help improve your conversion rate. Happy testing!
I received an amusing email via one of my site’s yesterday whilst feeling slightly feverish on the sofa (it’s December, it must be time for a cold!) The (poorly formatted) email was from a chap offering to “hand deliver… quality links and rankings” to me.
How would one do such a thing, I pondered? He went on to offer a 30 day free trial and guaranteed first page rankings for a particular relevant phrase within 90 days. The free trial bit was what got me twitching - a free trial suggests that the service being provided can be turned off/undone. If we’re talking about links from “high PR [PageRank] quality sites” (as he was), how could these be simply switched off?
The answer is obvious, of course. You own all the sites providing the links. Yep, we’re talking about a link farm - a network of websites created purely and simply to link to others, not to provide useful content to humans. So I went investigating, as this chap handily linked to some of his clients on his website.
What I found was a long list of WordPress-based blogs linking to this client’s site. I have to say, it was well done - every (keyword-rich) link was part of a decent-length blog post about a relevant topic and from my brief surfing, each post on a different blog was unique content. Quite time-consuming to create. What was a big giveaway was the incredibly broad and random spectrum of blog posts on each site, from NLP to office chairs to funeral homes. Not the sort of breadth that an individual’s own blog/site usually covers!
Whether this chap is directly responsible or simply reselling another service, I’m not sure, but as his own site has zero PageRank and a lot of the link farm’s content is about foreign businesses, it’s probably the latter. It wasn’t clear how much this “service” costs.
So why am I irritated by it? Well, firstly, it is a (usually) short-term solution with dire consquences when it falls apart. Either it becomes enormously expensive, because you pay by the month and the moment you do, all those links disappear, or worse, your site gets banned by Google because they are very much against link farms.
It is far better to build genuine links from independent websites, as they will last for a long time and don’t present any danger in terms of Google penalties. One way to find these links is to analyse those of your competitors, a service that I provide. If I found a list of spammy link farm sites in the list of a competitor’s links, I’d be straight to the spam report form on Google. You might call that fighting dirty, but if your competitors are breaking the rules while you strive to meet Google’s ever more stringent criteria, why shouldn’t you level the playing field?
If you have a Google account and are logged in whilst searching, you’re now likely to see these buttons (in the UK at least):
These let you promote (the up arrow) or remove (the cross) an individual search result from the listing. You can also add your own comments using the speech bubble icon at the bottom of each result. The first time you use these you’ll see this message:
So, as you can see, Google has effectively taken a Digg-style approach to its search results, allowing users to vote (and negatively vote) for pages, as well as providing comments on them. Should you remove a search result from the page, it will disappear in a puff of smoke and re-appear at the bottom of the listing, along with some other options:
So, this functionality is useful to users to help them organise their search results, telling Google the type of sites they don’t want and to make notes they can refer to later when searching again for similar information. But will it affect SEO?
I think the answer has to be… possibly. At the moment, I find it unlikely - it’s too early and Google will want to see how users respond and what data is created. If the results are positive, maybe they will incorporate this user feedback into rankings, although it is a very simple system - “yes or no”, in effect, not “how good”. I think the notes are useful, as people can identify spam sites etc. before others click through to them, but whether keywords in these comments will affect rankings is a slightly more difficult proposition.
If Google did let SearchWiki affect rankings, how long before people in, um, less well paid countries than ours started offering “1000 positive reviews from 1000 unique Google accounts” type services? Then Google would have to start checking Google accounts against IP addresses to identify mass activity from a particular location, but even that is quite easy to get around. Ultimately such action might affect the whole user-friendliness of a Google account, which would cause far more harm than good.
No, I think the likely outcome is that SearchWiki will be included as an option for users to get input from others as to whether sites are any good. You may be able to search notes made on SearchWiki directly at some point, essentially mirroring a search on Digg (or other social bookmarking sites). I wouldn’t be surprised if additional social bookmarking features like keyword tagging appear as well; but I don’t think we’ll see this stuff directly affecting rankings for others, as the implications for spamming are too difficult to control.
As a final comment, don’t forget that Google already personalises your search results if you’re logged in - for instance, your own website may well appear higher in searches than other people see it, because you often go there! SearchWiki just takes that to the next level, so rather than Google guessing what you do/don’t like, you can tell it directly.
I’ve been busy training a lot lately and also developing a new keyword analysis tool, which I’m very excited about. It’s nearly ready, I just need to get a few bugs ironed out and come up with a name!
The keyword tool will use both Google and Wordtracker data and perform competitive analysis on a number of factors, making life much easier for those of us trying to find the right target phrases without spending hours in front of the computer.
