Entries from January 2010 ↓

It’s really great when people you don’t know can see the value in what you’re doing and today was such a day. I received a nice little email about my Glastonbury post where I mentioned buying walking boots in place of wellies. It said something along the lines of…

“shame you’ve already bought some walking boots as I’d have given you a pair in exchange for a link”

As a died in the wool Yorkshire man, I couldn’t resist a freebie so I quickly emailed Adam from Fitness Footwear and opened expressed my interest.

It seems that Adam is using product bribes as a way of increasing his serps for the term ‘walking boots’ (amongst others), approaching blog owners like me and offering a sly bribe of some free equipment in exchange for some juicy links.

Needless to say, this post is the result (let’s throw in another reference for walking boots just for good measure lol) however it begs the question…

“Why don’t other product suppliers offer goods in exchange for marketing assistance?”

In my previous life, as owner of a small web studio, I’m no stranger to blagging some freebies from the occasional customer. yet in the realm of online marketing with millions of casual bloggers creating masses of content on a daily basis, such an approach could yield massive results. Sure, you have to cherry pick the brightest and best of blog owners, the articles need to be well written and come from authoritive sources, and you’re offer has to be tempting enough for a bite, but this is no different from ‘obtaining links’ for cash.

Where it does have the advantage is that its a more personal relationship and instead of a couple of pounds spent buying some dodgy links from an Indian blog network, you could get bigger and better product placement reviews from a more Google friendly sources.

Adam also mentions that It’s also worth mentioning that bloggers have been so impressed with Fitness Footwear that they’ve bought products from us, essentially making our money back on the freebies that were sent out in the first place.

So if you’re a marketer working for a product based company consider throwing some freebies at worthwhile bloggers… you never know, it could be the trust/authority/juice you need to top the rankings.

I’ll post a picture of my new walking boots when they turn up next week shoe money stylee

…and thanks for the bribe Adam.

So its coming close to the time when I’ve to pay the balance on my Glastonbury ticket so I’ve decided to go shopping and correct some of the mistakes I made last year.

1. Wellies

Last year I borrowed a pair of wellies (thanks john). this resulted in much time wasted trying to get them on and off (especially when a little drunk), and rub marks appearing on my legs due to prolonged use over the 5 days we were there.

This year I have opted to buy some waterproof walking boots and several pairs of long walking socks. I picked up my Hi-Tec walking boots for £35 from an outlet and got some free socks into the bargain. Although they wont be suitable for deep puddles, they will prove to be more versatile, comfortable and easy to get on and off and I can always lace them 1/2 way up should it be a sunny day (fingers crossed).

2. Sleeping Bag

If anyone wants a 1 man sleeping bag… used only once for last years Glastonbury then get in touch… you can have it!

This year I’ve been bought (thanks Jo) a double sleeping bag with a cotton inside. This will help me get to sleep better, providing more room to move around, additional warmth (its freezing at nights) and comfort as the polyester inside of my old sleeping bag became clingy and often took to wrapping its self around me making me uncomfortable.

3. Food

This year I wont be taking any food accept for some cereal bars for breakfast. The food there is pretty cheap at around £3 for a plate full of food.

4. Water

I will only be taking 1 refillable bottle of water with me this year. Just top up when your in the line to wash in a morning.

5. Booze

I’m taking a bottle of jack and a few bottles of premium cola this year. Last year we too too much booze which almost killed me transporting it from the car to the tent. I also made the mistake of choosing a cheap bourbon which after a day or so became the nastiest drink ever lol.

6. Clothes

I’m taking an extra set of clothes this year to go home in. It is evident that after sleeping in a tent for 5 nights without any proper showers and only a stand pipe to wash from that you’re going to pong. save the embarasment of the journey home and the numerous service station stop-offs by changing and if possible having a shower in the service stations.

7. Going Home

We plan to leave on the night of the last event. Last year we stayed over until the morning after and was stuck in the car parks for over 4 hours which was a nightmare. So on the last day you will see me carrying my stuff back to the car in the morning before the gigs start.

I’m sat here today with 3 browsers open, one using the latest build of Google Chrome, Opera and one using the new Firefox release. Both browsers have the search term Chesterfields inputted into Google.co.uk and im seeing startlingly different results.

As you can see, even seaWhere have the rogue firefox and Opera entries come from? Is it from personalisation as I’m certainly not interested in the riverfront, cylinders or whatever chesterfield.gr is selling etc? Maybe this is a continuation of the internationalisation issues reported in the UK serps of last year?

…or could it be that Google is polluting the SERPS on non Chrome browsers to drive people to use their platform… in which case I’m just adding to the propaganda :/

This also means that when pulling in metrics for SEO clients that you cant rely on the results from one browser and that if personalisation is the cause, that any listings you get on any Google awaye platform will, over time, begin to show non ‘cold hit’ results.

If it is personalisation and you know a way of getting me back to basics then please drop me a line.

When my iPhone contract ended in April (last year) I was hesitent to jump on the band wagon with one of the smart phones of the time, mainly due to the massive whispers about Android and the leaked shots of some of the new android devices (Samsung Galaxy, Hero, Leo and the now X10) so I moved my contract to o2′s rolling contract (saving myself a fortune) which left me free to change/cancel my contract with a months notice when one of these new blisteringly cool phones came out.

I decided to leave the Hero and Galaxy as the screen size was too small as I really wanted an android based iPhone like experience. The HTC HD2 was a disapointment not due to the hardware or features, but because it was stuck on Windows Mobile 6.5 so I kept my fingers crossed for the X10 or Driod/Milestone to be in the UK for a pre christmas release.

Fed up of the constant delays in releasing a next-gen android phone in the UK I went phone shopping and over the course of a few months built up a big list of the phones I didnt want.

Last weekend I found the T-Mobile Pulse and was instantly smitten. The screen size was perfect it had Android (1.5 not 2.0), a cool form factor and was pretty snappy. So I signed up on a bargain contract and took the phone home happy as larry.

T-Mobile Pulse

Over the course of the next few days I began playing with the phone, optimising the settings ala iPhone to max out the battery life, adding the usual apps like Facebook, TweeDroid and the likes with a view to having a really sweet setup.

I ran into a problems with the phone including battery life, keypad usability and it wigging out every so often so I dialled 150 and decided to give T-Mobile support a call… only the phone doesnt work with ‘press 1 for this, press 2 for that’ call systems it seems… so back to my iPhone I called through and got through (no problems there) and asked them about battery life. Even with some mamoth full charges lasting overnight, my Pulse was only giving me about 1/2 days charge with super light use, no calls or text (im waiting for the number to move across). I checked online and im not the only one experiencing this. I plan on using my phone at Glastonbury so need it to run for at least 5 days with limited use, which the iPhone managed no problem.

It seems t-mobile wont let me swap the phone over the telephone and that any change is at the discretion of the store manager where I purchased it as ‘I have time to look over the phone in the store’ which I hardly think is a long enough period to text a new piece of technology, so I’m going to have to go back to manchester to pick a new phone this weekend.

I might go for the HTC HD2/Leo after all, as theres some great noises about porting android to it using blends of Nexus One etc firmware. Its a shame really becaue the Pulse had a lot going for it. It just needs the buggs working out.

I suppose the moral of this story is that when buying phones, protect yourself by buying online. That way your’re subject to the 30 day cooling off period.

Update: After lots of faffing, the Manager at the branch agreed to swap my Pulse for the HD2 (I relented as it is a good phone but I still want android on it so I hope the developers of haret get it working soon on xda-developers forum. I’ll post my review of the HTC HD2 later.

At last! A feature ive been waiting for for an eternity (and had originally built into a previous in-house analytics package) has arived for Google Analytics – Annotation.

This is a great little feature that takes the hassle out of monitoring events on the timeline.

With Annotations you can add notes to the timeline which makes it great for:

• Tracking PR activities
• Promotional Sales
• The effect of any high value link (purchases?)
• SERPS changes i.e. Caffeine

The only issue I can forsee is that the notes wont go far enough. I’d like the ability to have different, user defined note types as I can see my Annotations becoming the dominent factor of the visual display.

This feature was originally mentioned in the Google Analytics blog post of December 7th, but has taken until now to be implimented on the UK analytics.

Check the OP here.

Heres a brilliant image of britain in show as snown from a NASA satellite.

Beautiful.

I’m no PHP guru, in fact I’d say im starting out and at the very bottom of a ladder. Never the less, I thought it wise to document any simple web development tips I’ve picked up. Most of these will be VERY simple, however theyre all things I’ve learned or needed to know in a real world scenario where im trying to SEO a website without development support.

The first of these is joining strings.

To extend a <title> tag that was stuck displaying the product name I needed to know hot to extend this by joining two text strings together. Luckily the guys at QBN.com were on hand to help and if you’re in a similar situation and need to join text strings here how.

$_title = $title . “what ever text you want to add” ;
or
$_title = “starting text” . ” ending text” ;

Basically you add a period ‘.’ between the two elements you want to join. Remember that in the text string above you would need to add a space after the first quote mark to split the strings if needed and dont forget the training semi colon!

Just been reading a blog post about 13 things you can do to optimise an ecommerce site and am astounded by how paper thin the advice is so I took it upon myself to flesh out the issues with some real meat.

Check the original post and then view my comments below (sorry you’re going to need 2 monitors for this lol)

1. Meta descriptions have naff all to do with your rankings, best to make sure they support your point of sale message as they’re not much use for anything else

2. In the real world ecommerce sites have a hard time generating any useful content, most cant even be bothered to create a unique product description. What you can do here is perform some simple keyword research around your subject matter and add them to a blog (hosted on yoursite.com/blog) making sure that the terms targetted dont detract from your product categories i.e. don’t have a blue widget category and then blog about blue widgets!

3. There’s more to optimising images than having alt text and a file name. when ever possible have your image surrounded by descriptive text i.e. have something written before and after the file, this will help you with google image search.

4. Don’t you mean domain canonical issues? the simplest solution for this is telling google how you want to be indexed www. or non www. Secondly don’t link to index.php or whetever, just use the raw domain http://www.domain.com the same goes for folders.

5. Folder structure wont hurt your sites serps, in fact, it could add context i.e. widgets/flexible/red.html when it comes to navigation thing about common groups of products, this may be different to how you catalogue products. In addition if a product needs to be linked under multiple categories dont duplicate them, instead have both category listings link to a centralised product page.

6. Great advice but don’t forget to link singluar and plural terms and remember that it’s the first links anchor text on a page thats going to carry the ‘weight’ so optimise for this, the rest can be anything.

7. Loading times is far too big a topic to add under a simple bullet, things like caching, compression, use of sprites, whitespace and carriage return removal can all help.

8. If people need to use a sitemap page then your site is too hard to navigate so look there first, it is a great idea to get all of your products listed in some form of directory, just dont go mad as google doesnt like a single page with 1000′s of links on it, its just going to ignore most of them and stop after its got bored, if your navigation is 3 or 4 levels deep then consider categorising your site map and flattening the cats into a 2 tier system

9. Recent tests (check SEOMoz) show that H1 etc tags dont effect SEO, theyre great for semantics and do help if it contains a link, so use them for this and not for any seo reason as they don’t give extra weight.

10. Google Webmaster Tools is better at finding 404 links as it also shows internal and external links that are faulty. Also consider that your product inventory isn’t going to remain static, so make sure your ecommerce solution 301′s removed products to the parent category.

11. Yes encourage review, but for SEO purposes try and get them on 3rd party websites, if you use froogle you can quickly see which sites google rates for product reviews so this would probably work best if incentivised through after sales email marketing or a competition or something. You can always post the results on your product pages with a healthy ‘independent’ review validated by the 3rd party website.

12. Great tip and one I use all of the time… think about your order complete page and add some widgets, banners and cut and paste code for use in facebook, blogs and twitter and don’t forget to PROMPT them to use it!

13. Sounds like good advice but you just have to jump in sometimes as it can take a week or so for a change to be picked up by google and even longer for you to be able to get any metrics from it. My advice is to progressively work forwards with an eye on what youve been doing which can quickly be reversed via SVN and worked forwards methodically should something bad happen.

Well it’s officially the start of 2010 and despite not being able to work in the office due to frozen pipes I’m working from my home office and loving the snow (but not this aweful flu I contracted over the new year). So what better time to do some general housekeeping for your websites to make sure theyre on top of the game for 2010!

Heres just a few of the things I intent to do over the next few weeks to get things back on track.

Blogs

As our blogs are managed by the team, theres the opportunity for them to go off the rails, so I intend to revisit the last years posts (January 2009 was the last time I did this) and correct any typos, make sure the links are anchor rich, add images where appropriate and swap out any dead links. This will make the blogs perform a little better and I will be able to draw up some further guidelines for the bloggers to ignore lol (not really guys you’re doing a great job). A top tip is to remember that citation (mentioning your brand) in posts on 3rd party websites is going to be big in 2010 so get a few of those in there.

Copyright

I will quickly revisit the footer files of each site and make sure that the copyright statement is up to date.

Past Comments

I will use Yahoo Site Explorer to look back through any 3rd party blog entries that mentyion the brand and if I commented with a link, ask the owners to remove my nofollowed comment link, leaving the in-content do follow link to do the job it was originally supposed to do without my sabbotaging myself. This is based on new info published late 2009.

Image Search

I will use Google Images to look for people using our phopography without permission and ask them to drop in a link as thanks.

Check IBL’s for 404

Using Google Webmaster Tools I will look through our back link profile and check that all inbound links resolve to a target page and contact the owners of linking sites where the link is now off target.