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. Business Link Workshop Delegate
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Google launched a new Labs section of Webmaster Tools today, containing two features. The first is called Fetch as Googlebot, which shows you the page that Google gets when you enter a URL from your website. Quite handy to see what Googlebot sees, particularly HTTP headers. Here’s a screenshot of the tool showing the 301 permanent redirect from the old holding page to my new homepage on the Keyword Examiner site:
The other tool reports any Malware found on your site, but I’m happy to report I can’t give you a screenshot from one of my sites for that!
It’s all pretty simple stuff, but I like the format and particularly the examples of websites that tested and made improvements to their conversion rate. Go have a read!
At long last, I’m pleased to announce the launch of my Keyword Examiner tool, which I’ve been trying to get finished for the best part of a year!
The software itself has been working since January, but I haven’t had the time to put the marketing and support elements together – until now. You can see for yourself at the new website here: www.keywordexaminer.com
In a nutshell, the tool is a huge timesaver when conducting keyword research for organic SEO. It lets you search Google AdWords keyword data, just as you would with their external keyword tool, so that you can identify search phrases that people are actually using. It then runs up to three searches per keyword to see how competitive it’s likely to be if you optimised your page for that keyword, using exact match (“in quotes” searches), intitle (the exact phrase in the title tag) and allinanchor (the exact phrase in link text pointing to a page).
In this way, you can quickly tell whether a phrase is likely to be easy or difficult to optimise for, identifying the “low hanging fruit” as you go. To do this manually takes hours of cutting, pasting and searching, but Keyword Examiner automates the whole process once you’ve selected the keywords you’re interested in. You can even import WordTracker data if you want extra information (requires a WordTracker subscription).
I won’t explain further, you can read about it in detail on the website. If you think you can send some subscribers my way, there’s also a great affiliate programme that pays 40% lifetime commission.
I’d love to hear whether you like the product and from those who subscribe, what you get up to using it.
As I’m sure many of you know, I do a lot of presentations and workshops for the eBusiness Programme here in the East Midlands. Well, in November I’ll be delivering a short presentation on link building advice at a number of venues. The marketing bumpf goes like this:
Top Link Building Advice for Search Engine Optimisation
Breakfast Briefing
Without doubt, the hardest part of search engine optimisation is getting links to your site, but without them, appearing high in the list for competitive keywords is virtually impossible. Obtaining links is a time consuming, ongoing process, but it can’t be ignored if you want your SEO to succeed.
This session provides a wealth of tips on generating powerful links to your website, with the latest thinking on what works and time-saving methods to help you make the most of your link building activity. From Web 2.0 sites to social media and good old fashioned directories, you will learn where on the web the valuable links can be found.
Topics include:
Directories that still provide value
How to use user-generated content sites (Web 2.0) for valuable links
Using social media to generate links
Free tools you can use to find websites to get links from
Agenda
08:30 Registration, breakfast and networking
09:00 Presentation Starts
10:00 Q & A
10:30 Networking and close
Who Should Attend?
This session will be useful to any business looking to improve their search engine optimisation and builds on the information in our Successful and Advanced Search Engine Optimisation workshops.
Event dates:
Lincolnshire 04 November 2009 Boston West Golf Club, Boston
Derbyshire 05 November 2009 Ringwood Hall, Chesterfield
Leicestershire 11 November 2009 National Space Centre, Leicester
Nottinghamshire 17 November 2009 The Village Hotel, Nottingham
Northamptonshire 24 November 2009 Freemasons Hall & Conference Centre, Northampton
Google have been busy adding new features – you’ve probably noticed the larger font in the search box for instance.
One thing you should definitely be aware of if you have a Google Maps listing (Local Business Centre) is the new Place Pages, as detailed here. It’s worth having a read of this to understand how it could affect what people see about your business if they find it through a Google Maps search (as often comes at the top of the search results if you search for a business name and/or place). There isn’t that much different from the old Local Business Centre listing, except for the addition of adverts – so you could see your competitors listed alongside your own information! This is what’s happening with some of the ads in the page below:
If you happen to search for a “hot topic”, Google’s list of which is here, you might find the graph of exactly how hot the topic is appearing in the main search results. Details are here, but sadly it only covers the US and Japan at preset.
Finally, you may notice some additional links appearing in search result pages under some website entries. These are designed to take you directly to the section of the page that’s relevant to your search, using in-page (named) anchor tags that the page’s author has included. Why Google are doing this and what it looks like is explained here, whilst what you can do to utilise this as a webmaster is explained here.
You might also be interested in this explanation of how Google handles duplicate content and why it’s not so much a penalty, as a simple outcome of the per-search algorithm, courtesy of Google’s Greg Grothaus.
Just a quick link: the SEOMoz 2009 Ranking Factors report has been published and it’s no surprise to see that external link anchor text, title tags and link popularity are seen as the most important factors by a reasonable concensus of SEO experts.
A client of mine forwarded an email (let’s be honest, spam) he received from an SEO company in the north-west last week. I thought I’d write about it here, but I’m not going to name names because frankly I can’t be bothered getting hassle from talking to a company who uses these tactics.
The email is quite long, but I shall give you an overview of my main areas of concern (which of course made me quite angry at the time, as it is effectively questioning my services to the client):
“Your website is probably underperforming in the major search engines… I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages of Google…”The email doesn’t state what search terms the sales chap was using. So, um, exactly how does he define “underperforming”? The site is in the top 10 (mostly the top 2) for all the target phrases I agreed with the client, based on solid keyword research and the client’s target market. Very misleading, but to the uninitiated, it sounds very serious.
“I ran a back-link check on your site… Your website has 2 back-links, meaning it’s not very popular.”
Riiiiight, exactly what did the sales idiot use to get this information? I’m guessing Google’s link: command, which has been broken for longer than I can remember. The only way to know what links to your site Google knows about is to use Webmaster Tools, which this guy can’t have had access to. After that, it’s Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which reports 204 links to the site in question. Way to go, salesboy… You’re scaring my client and wasting my time as I explain the real situation to them. Thanks.
“Right now, your site has only 6 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low. This can be down to many reasons which our service can help resolve.”
Um, yeah, the main reason is there are only six pages on the website, genius! Now, I agree that more content will generally help with SEO, but for this particular client it isn’t necessary (see above point about being in the top 10 for all target phrases).
As you can tell, I’m not very impressed with this “research” and these guys are frightening people and causing trouble for other reputable SEOs as a result. The email states that they’re prepared to enter into a 12-month contract at £175 per month to promote five phrases, so basically they want £2100 a year to SEO five phrases for your site. I’ll leave you to decide if that’s good value or not, considering they don’t appear to be able to do even basic SEO research properly.
As a result of the MyDeco experience (see earlier post), we found that the site in question wasn’t recording campaign tracking (although obviously we can see referring websites). In case you’re not aware of Campaign Tracking, there’s a guide here.
MyDeco are keen for retailers to use campaign tracking to ensure more accurate results with a better quality of data. This is usually done by appending “?partner=mydeco” to the end of any link to the retailer, so that it shows up in their logfiles. If you’re using Google Analytics, this won’t do, as Google wants campaign tracking to be done in its own UTM format (see the guide linked above).
So, we tried this with the site in question, which is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server and written in ASP .NET (.aspx). This had the effect of causing an error – the pages really didn’t like having a query string put on the end of the URL, which is what putting a “?” means. So, we needed a way to get Analytics to accept an alternative character to replace the “?” and thereby stop the website from throwing errors.
The solution, after some searching, was to use the anchor signifier “#” instead of “?”, which the website is happy to accept. However, you can’t just make campaign URLs with “#” instead of “?”, because by default Analytics won’t know what it means. You need to add this line of code to your Analytics tracking code (the code inserted into every page of your website when you set up Analytics):
pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
This line of code should be inserted as follows: Find the Google Analytics code in your webpage and add it like this:
var pageTracker._gat._getTracker(’UA-xxxxxx-x’);
pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
I found this tip courtesy of Digital Notions, so hat-tip to them.
Google launched a new Labs section of Webmaster Tools today, containing two features. The first is called Fetch as Googlebot, which shows you the page that Google gets when you enter a URL from your website. Quite handy to see what Googlebot sees, particularly HTTP headers. Here’s a screenshot of the tool showing the 301 permanent redirect from the old holding page to my new homepage on the Keyword Examiner site:
As a result of the MyDeco experience (
