My God, I have just come across a rip-off even worse than BT’s Web Clicks offering (you might not have thought that possible!) I’ve just seen their website offering to list you on Google Maps for a one-off fee of £99. Yes, £99 to spend ten minutes completing a form about your business for a free service from Google!

I was led to their website after a client forwarded me an email from Lavora, offering to advertise their website on AdWords using “5 specific search terms”, for £199 a month with a £20 set-up fee. Sound familiar?

That’s a very similar deal to BT Web Clicks, another fixed-price AdWords service that is just wrong, wrong, wrong for a number of reasons:

1. Whilst a fixed cost is helpful for budgeting, there is no transparency on what you’re actually paying for, how much it’s costing (because it’s Google who are actually charging for those clicks, not the supplier) and no rollover. So, if you don’t use up your £199 of clicks, you don’t get the remainder carried over to the next month. Hardly good value. You can pretty much guarantee that these suppliers won’t be paying anything like £199 for those clicks either, and I very much doubt that they’ll let the campaign run over budget (well, budget less their profit margin…)
2. Without the transparency, you won’t get the AdWords account linked to your Analytics either, so measuring raw traffic or campaign performance will be virtually impossible. How do you know it’s worth paying that £199 a month?
3. You get to choose “5 specific search terms” – what do you think the chances of choosing “mortgages”, “mobile phone contracts”, “car insurance”, “life insurance” and “diamond jewellery” are? There are bound to be a huge amount of qualifiers on these things, assuming you get to make the choice at all. My guess is they will tell you what the “best” keywords are, based on their profit margin, not the volume or quality of traffic.
4. They claim exclusivity (“we’re only offering this to two businesses like yours in your area”), but of course anyone can use AdWords, so there is absolutely no benefit to that statement.

What really gets my goat about these things is that they are profiteering from people’s ignorance. Morally wrong, but not illegal of course. I really hope nobody reading this has been duped, but having heard a number of stories about BT Web Clicks, I fear the worst…

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I’m pleased to announce a discount on attendance at SMX Advanced London on May 17 & 18 2010. Using the discount code IANLOCK010 when registering will get you a 15% discount on the price. Early bird rates are in operation until 28th Feb, so get in early!

The full programme hasn’t been announced yet, but I’m sure it will be packed with useful search marketing info and they have a strong “no sales pitches” policy.

Let me know if you’re going!

As you might expect, I have a lot of friends who work in the web industry, from programmers to graphic designers, SEO experts to pay per click wizards. In a strange and unconnected coincidence, I have three different friends all with a pretty high degree of experience looking for new opportunities in the web development arena.

So, if you’re looking for a web developer to join your team right now, drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch. Their experience in all cases is in excess of six years, many more for some and by and large they are all front-end developers with some scripting skills, so they can do graphic design, layout, HTML/CSS and implement some JavaScript, ASP, PHP etc. They have a fair bit of management and client liaison experience too, so these aren’t techies with no social skills.

I also heard from a client today looking for a junior web manager, someone who can do a bit of graphics manipulation, HTML, SEO, AdWords etc. Some of that can be provided as training, the key is that you understand the web and have some basic skills to start with. Again, if you know someone, drop me an email.

Long time no blog! I hope you all had a good festive season. I thought I would kick off the new year with a technical post, as Google announced cross-domain support of the Canonical tag last month (worth reading for the explanations of when you might want to use it and how to implement).

You may remember from my earlier post on the canonical tag, that it is a way of telling the search engines the “master” address of a page, when multiple addresses for the same content might exist. Why would you have multiple addresses (URLs) for a page, you might wonder? Well, how about a product list on an e-commerce website with options for ordering the products alphabetically, by price or by manufacturer? It’s likely that the URL will be different in some way for each version of the list, even though its contents are actually the same. That means that a search engine will index all three versions (or possibly six if you have reverse-order options too).

Why the problem? Well, you probably want visitors to see that list in a certain order the first time they visit, let’s say ordered by price, cheapest first. If Google has all six versions of that page in its database, what’s to say it won’t link to your price: descending (i.e. most expensive first) list from its search results? That might make you look expensive and put off potential buyers.

The other issue is link juice – with multiple addresses for the same page, you might have some links to one URL, some to another, all essentially to the same page but for Google, they are different pages. That means the link juice is being split between those different versions of the page. So, using the rel=canonical tag, you can tell Google what the master version of the page is and that therefore, all link juice should be applied to that version and that’s the one that should appear in search results.

This is what it looks like:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.website.com/category/product-page">

It goes in the <head> section of each version of the page, so in the product list example, your page would contain the above code regardless of what version is being displayed at the time. This would probably be done automatically by your content management system, so that when a different category of products is being displayed, the canonical tag references the correct category/product list, because it’s likely the same page template is used for all categories.

In effect, the canonical tag works like a 301 redirect, but without you having to mess around with server settings. What changed in December is that now, you can make cross-domain (i.e. cross-website) canonical tags, when before, you could only use it within one domain. So, even those of you with problematic servers (for example, you’re on shared Windows hosting without access to IIS Admin), you can now create “301″-style redirects, avoiding duplicate content issues.

As noted by Rand, there is no problem having the canonical tag in the “master” page.

Thanks to all of you who attended the Online Marketing Conference 2009 on Thursday, organised by the Business Link eBusiness Programme. We had over 500 delegates attend and it was a pleasure to deliver my “What’s New in Search 2009″ presentation in the morning.

Special thanks to Diane and the team for their organisation and to those of you who took the time to speak to me during the day, your comments and compliments were much appreciated.

Those who want to relive the experience or who couldn’t attend, there is some online coverage, firstly on Twitter using the #ebizconf hashtag and also in these places:

eChampions Podcast (see video on right hand side)

Susi O’Neill’s Highlights (“uber-nerd of tech search”!? Blimey).

Red Creative Moves notes

Remember if you attended, you will be able to download the slides from me and from Susan’s afternoon Social Media Marketing presentation, via the eBusiness Programme website (username and password required).

You may recall that I wrote last year about Google’s First Click Free policy, allowing online publishers to protect their content whilst allowing Googlebot in to index the content, so that all their lovely keyword-rich content wasn’t hidden behind a “pay-wall” (i.e. password protected for paying users).

With a lot of hoo-hah about blocking Google from news sites, led by Rupert Murdoch (draw your own conclusions about that one…), Google have announced a change of their First Click Free policy, so that webmasters can block users from Google after five visits per day.

For those with paid-for content, this is probably good news, but you can’t help feeling that the site owners need Google more than Google needs them…

Do you have a search box on your website that contains a phrase like “Enter Search” or similar? Are you using Google Analytics to track Site Search?

I’ve noticed this on several sites for a while, so thought I would post about it. In most cases where there is text already in the search box, instructing the user what to do, that text tops the list of keywords searched for on the site. Take this example:

As you can see, the search box in the top left of the page has the text “Keyword/Code Search…” inserted by default, and it disappears when you click in the box. Can you guess what the most popular keyword used to search on the site is?

Yep, “Keyword/Code Search…” by a long way! What does that tell us about this use of text in the search box on a website?

My opinion is that it isn’t sufficiently clear to the user what they are supposed to do. So they click the arrow next to the box, expecting it to take them to a full search page, but instead, it gives them the search results from the site for “Keyword/Code Search…” In this site’s case, that gives you a full list of all the products in the catalogue, but not a search page – you get the same box and text again.

My take on this is that designers need to be more instructional about what to do with/how to use the search box on a web page. Just putting “Keyword” in the box is not telling people how to use the function, but “Type what you’re looking for in this box” might just work.

It seems Google has updated its guidelines for businesses listing in Local Business Centre (which gets you on Google Maps/Local Search). You can see the new guidelines here.

The most important of the changes pertains to your Business Name: “The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.” That poses problems for businesses who are “trading as”, with an often unconnected/irrelevant actual registered company name.

Why is Google hot on this? Well, keywords in the business name is a strong element of its ranking algorithm, so it’s been common for “mapspam” to use keyword-stuffed business names to rank highly.

Other changes include not being able to use a PO Box as your address, which may reduce the number of listings for businesses who don’t have a physical location in a particular town and the suggestion (but not requirement) to use the same domain name as your website for your listed email address. Hopefully most people reading this will be doing the last one as a matter of course!

RedBubble is a website where you can browse images and writing created by users, then buy the artwork/writing in a number of formats, say t-shirts, calendars, cards or posters.

Why am I writing about this? Well, my fiancee (Helen Foster Design) has just put some of her cute characters up as t-shirts, which you can see here: Helen Foster Pid T-Shirts.

I really like this model, as it allows creative producers to get their work out to a large audience without a huge cost, hopefully demonstrating demand and leading to greater things. That’s certainly what we hope will be the case for Helen. Meanwhile, consumers get access to unique products away from the mass-market high-street me-too stuff most people have, which really appeals to someone like me.

Please have a browse and leave some feedback and don’t be afraid to buy something if you like it! Helen will be adding greeting cards and other artwork later this week.

I’m pleased to announce the Online Marketing Conference 2009, organised by Business Link and being held on 3rd December at the East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham.

I will be speaking in the morning on all that’s new in the world of search engines, whilst Susan Hallam will be talking social media in the afternoon. This is all-new content that we’re both preparing for the day, so even if you’ve been on our courses before, you should attend! Not least as it’s free to small businesses in the East Midlands…

You can book online by clicking this link.