On Internet Business

Optimising a business website for SEO keywords

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

Assuming you’ve worked out your keywords, what should you do with them?

Once you’ve identified your keywords – structure them

This means taking the most important two or three, and using them appropriately in your website. The essential places to utilise them are: titles especially the website title, headers, image alt links and in descriptions and article titles. Finally you use all your keywords, not just the high priority ones, in the content pages of your site to reinforce the search engine’s explorations so that your sight looks rich in information relevant to the enquirer.

Keyword Popularity

Use a keyword popularity tool to explore the options for the keywords you’ve identified. This does two things – it offers alternatives to your identified keywords, so that your text doesn’t look keyword heavy and clunky, and it reveals new and linked words that might draw the right kind of business to your site.

Be careful though – just because a word is reckoned to be popular, it also needs to be relevant to your business and your target audience. In the USA, for example, one of the top three words in terms of popularity related to ‘writing’ as a keyword is ‘resume’. So ‘resume writing’ would seem like a good keyword … but if your target audience is predominantly British, it won’t be using that word at all because in Britain people say ‘CV writing’ not ‘resume writing’.

Apply common sense to your choices because there’s no point generating interest that you can’t fulfil, nor in failing to reach a target audience because you’ve chosen the most popular key words rather than the ones that will attract the right people to visit your site so that you can convert them to customers.

Content and Optimisation

Another important point is not to destroy your site’s appearance in favour of keyword optimisation. If you’ve ever visited one of those ‘make a million dollars guaranteed’ type websites and entered a completely circular world where every time you click a link it leads you to another, even more key-word dense page but never to the information you were promised, you know that visitors can lose the will to live, let alone to click, if optimisation is given priority over content.

It’s not enough to have good content alone, and it’s never enough to produce a superbly optimised site without solid content that pleases visitors and allows for a high level of conversions: combining the two is essential to getting the blend right.

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation is a series of strategies that allow your website to maximise its chances with the various search engines. The most important tool is linking – you can do this by launching a link campaign, asking complementary businesses to provide links to you as you provide one to them. Other tools are:- directory listings where you have to apply to be included: the most important are DMOZ and Yahoo!; issuing online press releases; article distribution systems; using social networking; blogging and forum posting. All of these give your site a higher profile by making it look more relevant and more substantial, and that moves you up the search engine rankings.

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Getting Started with SEO

Posted by Michael under Search

SEO looks like black magic or arcane science to many people who either don’t understand it, or who’ve been ‘sold’ the idea that SEO is something you have to pay somebody to do for you. This isn’t true; although SEO can be time consuming at first, understanding the basics of SEO can help your business thrive, whether you choose to undertake the work yourself or whether you hire in expertise.

The first thing to note is that many of the tools you need to master SEO are actually available to you for free via the internet. This means that you can play around with the concepts and strategies of SEO for yourself without it costing anything except time.

Get cosy with Google

Begin by getting familiar with Google. Love or hate the search engine empire, it’s the biggest driver of online business and you need to work with it to get the kind of visitor rates that can be converted to customers. And because Google provides a service, it helps you get your site high in the Google rankings. To begin, you go to their Webmaster Central pages and register an account so you can begin to benefit from their services. They have an advice section, they show you how to submit a site map that helps Google rank your pages, and even how to write a robots.txt file. The good thing about putting in the effort with Google is that it pays off for all other search engines too.

Work out your keywords

There are three routes to doing this:

1) Ask your customers – find out what they put into a search box to get to the services or products they want to find
2) Ask your staff – what words to they use to describe the business or their jobs, or to communicate with each other. Don’t forget this stage because often there are words that are used within the business that you’ll forget to include in your keywords because you think they are industry specific. As an example, ‘technical’ is not a word that many people would think of as featuring on a running shoes website, but ‘technical clothing’ is a term often used to describe fabrics that wick sweat away from the body, or shoes that contain shock absorbers, so serious runners will often use this terminology in searching for top-of-the-range shoes.
3) Check out the competition – see what words your rivals are using, they often know the best words to drive business to their sites.

You can use a keyword tool to help you find other keywords that are related to the list you produce. Google have Adwords, which can be found via their Webmaster page, or you can use a tool like Spacky which gives you a monthly feed of search volumes on related keywords for Google, Overture/Yahoo and MSN.

Next time, how to optimise your site for those keywords you’ve found.

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How a website can please a search engine

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, Search

Understanding what a search engine needs to put your business at the top of the search table is vital if you want to have any kind of online business. We’ve talked about the way Google Caffeine might change the way businesses look at their SEO tactics, but the basics remain the same.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the major search engines do, bearing in mind that the developers don’t just hand out details of the algorithms that decide the search rankings.  If they did, SEO experts would be able to use them to design websites that matched the algorithm perfectly!

Google

Leaving aside the alterations that Google Caffeine will bring to the SEO business, the standard Google-courting system will still apply.

Google is the Emperor of SEO and there are a lot of SEO practitioners who base their service package entirely on getting a site higher up the Google rankings. And it is simple to state the basic Google need – content, content and more content. Pages that appeal to the Google algorithm have three main attributes in terms of content: they are easy to find, they are coherent (clearly written and logical) and they have high information content.

Google also responds positively incoming links from other relevant websites. It treats each link as a ‘vote in favour’ of the relevance of your site, and that pushes your page up the results ranking.

Technically, it’s vital that your site is easy to navigate – Google is the search engine that is most like a person, it responds to clear linking. This means that you need to have at least one static link that points to every page of your site to satisfy the Google algorithm as well as the actual visitor.

Bing

Is not new, despite the vast amount of advertising that seems to suggest it is. It’s a revamp and rename of Microsoft’s old Live Search – it’s been much more heavily promoted in the USA than in the UK, especially through hotmail and the MSN pages. A couple of interesting features are that Bing ‘makes sense’ of its search results by organising them into helpful categories, rather like the Clusty search engine so beloved of journalists (but perhaps not loved by many others as it’s not become a credible rival to the big three) because it allows them to exclude searches that don’t meet their needs when tracking down leads in a hurry. Bing also broadens a user search by offering related search terms that – it says – will increase the likelihood of a searcher finding what they are looking for.

To please Bing, you can use the same algorithm tactics as for Google i.e. relevant and popular content provision, but it does seem that Bing is predisposed to give a higher rank to websites that have the search word in the URL – so, as an example, websites that have ‘cruise’ in their URL rank about some others that are more content rich but are simply cruise company name URLs

Yahoo!

SEO used to take account of Yahoo! But now that its search engine is going to be powered by Bing, there’s no differentiation in tactics for these two engines.

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Google Caffeine: is this the end of SEO?

Posted by Michael under Search

Currently codenamed Caffeine (although complaints are being heard – and apparently serious ones – from the Mormon community, about the name) it’s a substantial upgrade to the Google search engine which, the developers say, will improve improves the speed of response to queries, the index size and the value of search engine rankings. If true this would make it a faster, more accurate, larger and more comprehensive search engine.

What is SEO ?

SEO is the art, craft, trickery or business (depending on your viewpoint) of optimising a web site by altering both internal and external aspects to increase the traffic arriving from search engines. Because most web traffic is driven by the big three or four commercial search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc, SEO is a vital part of online business strategy.

If your site isn’t fully and properly visible to search engines or your content doesn’t fit into their databases, you fail to get visitors who use search engines to find matches to their desires. In other words, a customer who may want what you have goes straight past you. It’s as if your High Street shop is blacked out, so nobody walks through the door.

Search queries are the words typed into the search box. Finding the best terms and phrases to register your site with search engines can bring massive results – search engine traffic can create or destroy a business

So how has Caffeine changed Google search results ?

Let’s start with what a search engine actually does. According to the google webmaster central blog a great search engine needs to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible

So, on those terms, Caffeine has changed the landscape phenomenally, and not always in ways that businesses want to hear about. The search is faster, search response times used to be a key decider in which search engine people use, but now response times are measured in milliseconds, it’s not likely to be a key determinant in Google Caffeine’s success.

More importantly, for business, the short term impact from the google webmaster central blogseems to suggest:

•        an increased weighting on domain authority and some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages and Feedfriend, as well as Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority.
•        perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names
•        either a bit better understanding of related words/synonyms or an algorithm that’s better at picking up related words and ‘curving’ the related word results back into the search results in proximity to the key word.
•        turning down some of the value given to video and some universal search results
 (source http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine)

 What is the likely long term impact of Google Caffeine?

Well, on one level Google is going to doing everything in its power to diminish the ability of the SEO industry to manipulate search engine results. This means that  the job of the SEO professional is much more demanding. The new s algorithm seems to rely more on keyword strings to produce better results which means that the keyword manipulation tools used by many businesses to fine-tune their search engine rankings are not just out of date, the actual model they are based on could be obsolete.

Is this the start of the end? Who knows? One thing is certain, it’s going to become harder and harder for new websites to come top of Google.

If you want to find out for yourself – try Google Caffeine here.

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Google Chrome OS – Is this the beginning of the end for Microsoft?

Posted by Michael under Search

Google have come along way from their humble beginnings as just one of many search engines in use on the net, to the household synonym for Search Engines. Their next big step on the ladder to internet domination has taken the form of their own browser, Google Chrome. As if the rave reviews for this alternative to the hugely popular Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers isn’t enough, Google are pushing the boat out in an even more spectacular fashion.

Next on the agenda is Google Chrome OS – a revolutionary operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows packages. Focusing on speed and user-friendliness, the system seeks to change the way our computers work via ‘cloud computing’. Put simply, this means that all the information we usually store on our hard drives – photos, music and documents – is kept in a virtual cloud online. Allowing your entire computer’s contents to then be accessible all over the world, Google Chrome OS means that users will never again be tied to one piece of hardware. If your hard drive and the whole operating system you know as your Desktop is stored online, Google Chrome OS offers you the chance to ‘log in’ to your entire operating system from any computer, anywhere and at any time. You never need to bring a bulky laptop on the commute again.

Other benefits of Chrome are centred around price. While Microsoft has monopolised the home computer market for decades, the growing size of their Windows packages, especially recently standardised edition Vista, has seen the size of home computer hardware and laptop memory having to grow in capacity, and of course price, to house this bulky software. That’s not to mention the fact that with hard-drive based software systems, faults and bugs are something we’re all too familiar with. However, with Chrome’s proposed internet-based memory storage operating system, cheaper computers and a freeware operating system mean that Google could hold the home market firmly in their hands.

As we increasingly make moves towards an entirely online existance, with photostorage sites, online email accounts and online music players already mainstays, Google may just have latched onto the new zeitgeist of the computing and internet savvy world in which we operate.

It almost sounds too good to be true, so what are the inevitable drawbacks? We’ve all seen the targetted advertisements appearing on plenty of pages across the web, eerily accurate at times and all generated by GoogleAds. If Google are so willing and so talented at getting information from us in order to generate ads now, what’s to stop them accessing your own private hard drive if you’re a Google Chrome OS user? Of course, they only ever do it to make money, so is it no harm no foul in this case?

I started off by talking about Google’s rise and rise, and while it’s exciting to watch, it could be a downside. With Google holding a monopoly around 70% of the Search market, and gmail growing every day, soon it seems that the once-independent bastion of the internet could find itself under the ownership of one overarching, all-powerful company.

That might seem reactionary, but is there any reason to celebrate robbing Microsoft of their crown only for Google to become the new super-power?

Related: The Times

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Internet Business and the Cloud

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

A must read for all internet entrepreneurs is Nick Carr’s, The Big Switch.

The Big Switch  can be fairly divided into two sections. The first section draws a parallel relationship between the 19th century electricity utilities of America and today’s computing industry. In the second section, Carr discusses the impact of the internet on business, society and culture.

Carr asserts that the business model, that persuaded companies to generate and use electricity as a ‘Utility’ service, would drive us towards a ‘Computing Utility’. Computing Utility i.e., Software virtualisation. Data Centre consolidation, IP connectivity, ITIL processes, hardware standardisation, and Shared IT Services model is gaining popularity among entrepreneurs and the Computing Utility model is looking more and more likely to become the dominant model of the future..

 In the Second section he deals with how computers are used and how they are facilitating the transformation of our society. In his own words:

 ”In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centres located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed with the rise of electric utilities in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society – for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think – promise to be equally profound. If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth century society – that made us who we are – the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century”.

 As in his previous book, Does IT Matter, Information Technology is represented as an essential commodity that is not sufficient for a competitive advantage. In The Big Switch, he insists that the cloud computing or computing utility has great potential to change the way IT products are used and ultimately our society and business.

 A central idea presented in the book is an unexpected polarization and inequality in the society that is arisen as a result of the internet.

 In The Big Switch, Carr has presented his ideas very thoughtfully and carefully in a way that provokes readers to think about the consequences of using the internet.

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The website I hate most – Ticketmaster.

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Search

Ticketmaster are a market leader when it comes to event tickets which unfortunately means that I end up having to use their web site. I can’t understand why they have designed a site that is so unfriendly, time consuming and frustrating to use. The sequence for trying to buy tickets goes like this. 

1. Choose an event.
2. Select date.
3. Submit the number and type of tickets required.
4. Type in a difficult to read code (designed to foil bots).
5. Wait. In the case of some concert tickets this required 20 minutes, with the site repeatedly crashing.
6. Be told there are no tickets available for the performance. Return to step 2.

Any company that wanted to provide a decent user experience would show users ticket availability before they try and order them. I can’t believe how many times I have hit the submit button and how much time I have wasted to be told that there are no tickets available. 

 I wish I could find an alternative…….

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Price Comparison Websites Get Regulation

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Search

The web is the place to find the best deals. For financial products like loans, credit cards, mortgages and insurance price comparison websites are extremely popular. According to Scott Wingo, Price comparison engines 15% of online sales. These websites allow consumers to compare the prices, features and benefits or various products from different suppliers in one place before making a decision.

Now the question arises, how do these websites earn money?

Price comparison websites earn a commission, when a customer buys or clicks on a product through the website. Price comparison websites also charge product providers for featuring their products prominently. If these websites are promoting products on the basis of their commission it can be misleading to consumers as the real best buy may be hard to find .One of the big insurers – Direct Line, is not featured on price comparison websites.

Eric Galbraith, chief executive British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA), says: ‘So many of these sites are offering services that are misleading and ultimately it is the consumer who will suffer. However, there are some price aggregation sites that want to get rid of any malpractices and prove that they are accurate and fair.’

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) published a report that urges price comparison websites to provide consumers ‘clear and fair information.’ The FSA is also considering bringing in some stringent rules for price comparison websites.

Major players have are prepared for the challenge and are launching a code of practice. Richard Mason, former executive from Moneysupermarket.com, founded the Comparison Consortium in February, 2009 and is now all set to publish a code for online insurance aggregators and professional guidance for the insurers who use them.

Major price comparison websites in UK like Confused, uSwitch, Moneyextra, Tesco Compare, Direct Line, Beat That Quote  and Moneyexpert are already part of the consortium.

“The Comparison Consortium’s committee…collectively has over 45 years experience in the price comparison industry, acquired from the UK’s biggest aggregators such as , Moneysupermarket, Confused, uSwitch, Moneyextra, Tesco Compare, Beat That Quote and Moneyexpert,” said Jennifer Rose, a spokeswoman for the consortium.

However, some major players like Moneysupermarket.com and GoCompare.com are not represented in the consortium.

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Sales by Online Channel

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Search

Source: FBR Research 

Some of the most interesting numbers I saw presented by Scot Wingo at the Channel Advisor Catalyst event earlier this year where the split by online marketing channel.

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Google takes on Skype

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

Google Voice is a service that will provide “one phone number for all your phones.”

After the acquisition of GrandCentral two years ago, Google has relaunched the service as Google Voice. Google has incorporated several useful features which include: 

• Easy voicemails
• Text messaging
• Call blocking
• Call screening
• Call conferencing
• Voicemail transcripts
• Low-priced international calls
• New user interface

There are established companies, such as Skype, SpinVox and Bueno, who compete in the Voiceover Internet Protocol (VoIP) market. However, providing a central interface to manage all phone calls and automated transcripts is an attractive feature that will encourage users to switch to Google.

Anyone can register with Google Voice by signing up at: www.google.com/voiceinvite .

Invitations will be sent as soon as Google Voice is available for widespread use.

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