In Europe there has been a lot of debate about cookies. Because of privacy regulations it could be that some countries decide cookies are a “no go”. What that would mean for websites, search and social is almost indescribable. Even though we should all be aware of privacy matters, taking away the cookies probably is not the best way to go. But how to make those who don’t understand how things work understand the importance of cookies? Maybe this video from IAB UK can help.
State of Search
Posts on State of Search about ‘Technical SEO’
How to Track Google Products Traffic in less than 5 minutes
Ok, Ready? Start your stop watch. Go.
SEO without analytics is pointless.
I am sure we all agree on that point which is good because I have a time limit.
The beauty of Search Marketing is that it can be tracked, measured and defined. It is very important to realise that data which can be measured can be improved, and in our industry, measurement is crucial to success. This is even more apt if you work with an ecommerce client.
There are 2 ways to track traffic gained from Google Products; tagging URLs and inserting a filter within Analytics. One takes a while and can be quite complicated if you are exporting products to Google Base from a CMS, the alternative takes less than 5 minutes and is relatively simple. (more…)
SEO: Back to Basics
So now that we’ve thoroughly established that SEO is not dead and we all still have jobs, livelihoods, and incomes, let’s get back to actually getting some SEO done, shall we?
I caught a tweet last week of a fellow in Northern Ireland who, in all seriousness, described himself as a ‘seasoned SEO guy’. In this tweet he advocated the use of PageRank Sculpting. Naturally I felt inclined to put the matter straight and educate the poor chap on his dependence on outdated info. Unfortunately this is wasn’t the only case of ill-informed SEOs using outdated practices that I’ve come across recently.
So let’s discuss a few contested SEO issues and try to sift through the disinformation to distil some proper best practices. (more…)
The Need for Speed in Site Performance and CRO: Time is Money!
A few weeks ago I blogged on the need for speed and enabling http compression within IIS and Apache. There have been recent posts on how http compression and crawl rate are related and how speed is now a ranking factor, albeit a small one. While crawl speed is important the effect of site speed on conversion rate can be far more devastating.
Recently we had a client that ran a live chat application that caused a load delay of around 8 seconds. We obviously got in touch quickly to let them know about the delay but they were unsure of the effect that would have. A load delay of this kind won’t affect the load speed for the crawler, (although WMT did pick it up which we will look at a little later) so really we didn’t have a leg to stand on, until we tested conversion rates. (more…)
New changes could mean massive changes for SEO
Its been quite a month for search, including significant changes to the search engines pages, as well as a number of noticable acquisitions for the mighty search behemoth that is Google. In particular Google’s recent acquisition trail would tend to suggest very much a focus on search and social – something we haven’t seen recently with a number of Google’s acquisitions.
This would sugget that Google very much appreciate the threat of a united Bing/Yahoo alliance – a move I can’t help feeling still has a lot of mileage in it despite many recent studies suggesting that Bing wins have mainly been the expense of Yahoo (Neilsen and Holistic Search) – and that social contnues to be a medium to long term target – particularly if you look at three of the acquisitions made durint the last month alone – those of Like.com and Angstro in particular (and even more so if you look how some of Google’s past acquisitions are now coming to fruition – such as Android (acquired August 2005) and Doubleclick (April 2007 – and now being expanded to include natural search tracking)
However whilst those acquisitions suggest social may be an integral part of Google’s future, search remains a fundamental part of their present – and it is here where we have seen a number of significant changes and tests within the Google search pages. One of the most notable was that of the Google local testing results – where many of the Google organic results pages were limited and local/paid search results played a more integral part of these pages. (more…)
The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation
Last week Jeroen van Eck and Bill Slawski lamented the lack of a solid guide to image search optimisation. Bill threw down the gauntlet, and I picked it up. Here’s my Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation.
First, what do we mean with image search? Simply put it’s the vertical search option that allows you to search for images on the web. Google has an image search, and so does Bing, and there are several other specialised image search engines around.
For the purpose of this blog post we’ll focus on Google’s image search, though I reckon most of what follows can also be applied to other image search engines.
(more…)
5 Common Problems (and solutions) with Google Base
“Why do we fall sir? So we might learn to pick ourselves up”
After my usual reminder from Bas about my blogging deadline fast approaching, instead of wiping the sleep from my eyes and staring into the distance trying to think of a topic, I unusually sprung to life and typed two words onto the open word document:
Google Base
Nurses and Doctors in SEO
This article was published first in last months State of Search newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter to receive unique content every month.
I have come to understand that all professionals active in the field of SEO can be divided in to two categories: doctors and nurses. On the outside they both seem to be doing much of the same things, but underneath the surface there lies a big distinction.
Most SEOs are like nurses: they treat the symptoms of a disease by handing out medication and making patients feel better. These SEO nurses provide their patients – website owners – with the common SEO medication: keyword research, optimised title tags, structured content, linkbuilding, and so on. These nurses are effective at SEO, as they’ll make the patients feel better (rank higher) in nearly all cases.
The other type of professionals, the SEO doctors, seem to be doing the same things. The difference lies in the diagnosis: the SEO nurse treats the symptoms, the SEO doctor understands the disease. (more…)
Information Architecture: Common pitfalls (2/2)
This is part two of the post Information Architecture: Common pitfalls. The first part was published yesterday, find it here.
And if you’re done with that it’s now time to move on to re-organizing the contents. Things you might consider:
Flattened site architecture
Considering the facts that there is a limited amount of links each page can carry (in the webmaster help center Google states that it should be not more than 100 links – however this very much depends on the authority the domain has) and that it is important how many steps down a page resides within the domain (aka how many clicks from the homepage does it take me to get to that specific page?) there really is one problem to tackle: Keep the “depth” to a reasonable number. There is a great visualization on this over at webmasterworld.com: (more…)
Information Architecture: Common pitfalls (1/2)
Editorial comment: We welcome Bastian Grimm to our blogging team! His first post will be published in two, today part 1, tomorrow part 2.
“A properly optimized and therefore search engine friendly information architecture is probably one of the most underestimated on-page optimization concepts in search.” – That being said, welcome to my very first post at State of Search!
I think one of the reasons – maybe even the number one reason – for websites not having real success online is poor information architecture. You see that happen all the time: Basic rules, for example “one piece of content, one static URL” are not considered and guess what: Most of these websites do badly in search! And since I will be attending Search Engine Strategies 2010 in San Francisco and do a coverage for State of Search and the agenda looks like they’re having a dedicated session on this very specific topic (really looking forward to that one!), I thought it might be nice to revisit some parts of good IA and do an overview on what is important to consider. There are a lot of great resources out there – if you know some more please feel free to mention them in the comments.
But before we really dive into that, let’s have a quick look on a possible IA definition. While doing some research on the phrase itself I came across an organization called the Information Architecture Institute (honestly, I hadn’t really heard of them before. They have a pretty solid definition of what IA means: “The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.” – So let’s see how this correlates with the topics we’re visiting during this post. And a quick side note: Yes, I’m mainly covering the search point of view and for sure will be simplifying things a lot – in a real-world process you’d pretty sure work together with a user-experience designer, etc. (more…)
HTML 5 and SEO – when, what and how?
Almost everyone is touting HTML5 as the flash killer and a new horizon for web development. I wanted to take a slightly closer look at the HTML structure and possible implementations to see the effect on SEO.
When is it coming out?
Initial predictions were late 2010 however the first public working draft deadline was missed by 8 months and it is currently still in the working draft stage at the present time. Ian Hickson now expects the specification to reach candidate recommendation by 2012. It is expected that many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products well before then though so best be ready for the inevitable questions. (more…)
5 types of links that shouldn’t be nofollowed
I don’t like the nofollow attribute. In fact I think I’m starting to hate it. Why? Because of the extensive use for purposes it wasn’t meant for. Linking is the basis of the web. And therefore it plays a major role in search. Offering the possibility for nofollowing links distorts this structure. In this article I will highlight some types of links which shouldn’t be nofollowed.
But first of all, let’s take a look at the original purpose of the nofollow attribute as stated in the article “Preventing comment spam” on the official Google blog:
“We encourage you to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute anywhere that users can add links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay.”
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