Sound Advice from Google’s Matt Cutts

A great article recently on USATODAY gives and insight into improving natural search rankings in Google. Matt Cutts provides the insight and invaluable tips on ethical, white hat techniques to improve your site’s ranking.

ARTICLE
You have a website and can’t figure out why it’s not showing up at the top of Google’s search rankings. You go to Google.com for some guidance but get lost trying to find answers.

Certainly, achieving visibility in Google’s search rankings can be a mystery. To help solve the riddle, USA TODAY sat down with Google’s Matt Cutts, an engineer and active blogger, who has five easy tips on how to “optimize” your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.

More and more businesses are turning to the Web to find customers: $5.8 billion was spent on advertising in the first quarter alone, up 18.2% from the prior year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Google’s share of Internet searches continues to rise as well — to a record 61.8% in May, according to measurement service ComScore Media Metrix.

If you haven’t “optimized” your site, here’s how:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.
“Think about what people are going to type in to try and find you,” Cutts says. He tells of meeting a chiropractor from San Diego who complained that his site couldn’t be found easily using Google search. The words “San Diego chiropractor” were listed nowhere on his site. “You have to make sure the keywords are on the page,” Cutts says. If you’re a San Diego doctor, Des Moines architect or Portland ad agency, best to let people know so immediately, at the top of your page.

2. Fill in your “tags.”
When creating websites, Internet coding language includes two key tags: title and description. Even if you don’t know code, which is used to create pages, software programs such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver have tools that let you fill them in in plain English (rather than “<title>San Diego Chiropractor</title”). Tags are crucial, Cutts says, because what’s shown in search results most often are the title and description tags.

If Cutts’ chiropractor had properly tagged his Web page, a search would have returned something like this: “San Diego chiropractor. Local doctor serves San Diego community. There’s also a third tag, to add keywords, or search terms, but Cutts says Google doesn’t put much weight in its rankings on that one.

3. Get other sites to “link” back to you.
Google says it looks at more than 100 pieces of data to determine a site’s ranking. But links are where it’s at, once your search terms are clearly visible on your site and the title and description tags correctly marked.

In a nutshell: Google ranks sites based on popularity. If authoritative sites link to you, you must be good, and therefore you get to the top of the list. If you can’t get top sites such as USATODAY.com or The New York Times to link to you, try your friends. And what if they don’t have a site? They probably do. Read on.

4. Create a blog and post often.
Cutts says blogging is a great way to add links and start a conversation with customers and friends. It will cost you only time: Google’s Blogger, WordPress and others offer free blogging tools. With a blog, you can link back to your site and offer links to others. It’s also a great way to start building content, Cutts says.

5. Register for free tools.
Google’s google.com/webmaster offers freebies to help get your site found. You can upload a text-based site map, which shows Google the pages of your site (create it at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com). Once that’s done, you’ll be registered with Google, where you can learn vital statistics — including who is linking to your site and how often Google “crawls” your site for updates.

Google’s Local Business center (google.com/local/add) is the place for business owners to submit a site so it shows up in local searches, with a map attached. Savvy consumers who use Google for searches know that the first 10 non-advertising results often are from Google Maps, so if you have a business and haven’t submitted it, you’re losing out on potential customers.

Don’t overdo it
When weaving keywords into a main page, Cutts says, some zealous Web publishers will use the term over and over again. That’s called “keyword stuffing.” It’s a big Google no-no that can have your site removed from the index.

“After you’ve said it two or three times, Google has a pretty good idea — ‘OK, this page has something to do with this keyword,’ ” he says. “Just think about the two or three phrases you want to be known for and weave that in naturally.

For blogger newbies, Cutts knows that writing (for example, posting new material) doesn’t always come easy. He suggests finding ideas by visiting social news sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon, to see what people are saying about your particular topic.

Aside from that, Cutts says, new material falls into the common-sense category: It’s all about your business. “If I’m a plumber in Iowa, I may want to write about some of the strange things that happen to me on the job, or the five most common ways to fix a toilet,” he says. “That kind of content can get really popular, and it’s a great way to get links.” Folks will post your piece on one of the social media sites. And with links comes higher Google rankings.

Finally, Cutts says, there is one big misconception about getting Google visibility that he wants to clear up: In order to be found at the top of Google’s rankings, you do not also have to advertise.

“One thing doesn’t have to do with the other,” he says.

ENDS

Driving Conversions Through Good Website Design

Whether you obtain traffic to your website through Natural Search or Pay Per Click, it is imperative that the ratio of unique visitors to conversions (sales) is high on your list of key stats. A recent article we have been reading on Entrepreneur.com highlights the big difference between a well-designed website and a great-looking one!

A well-designed site is one that sells! It leads visitors through the sales process without getting in their way. If it’s pretty on top of that, fine.

What you want your design to do is entice people to stay on your site when they get there, draw them into your message and make it easy for them to keep reading so they can make a buying decision. However, many sites do just the opposite. Below are the Seven Deadly Sins which could be killing your conversion rates:

Website design sin #1: Slow-loading pages and graphics
Count out three seconds. In web time, it feels like forever! If your home page takes that long to load, you’ve got trouble on your hands. Web users are extremely impatient people. If they can’t begin reading or viewing your page right away, they’re going to leave and go to another, more user-friendly site.

If you absolutely must use large graphics on your homepage, provide a small icon that links to the larger graphic and warn people they may have to wait as it loads. Here are a few things you can do to speed up your loading time:

Reduce the file size of the graphics on your page. Specify the dimensions of your graphics files in your HTML code. Substitute coloured text for a graphics file whenever possible.

Website design sin #2: No eye-catching headline to grab your visitors’ attention
Now you have to capture your visitors’ attention right away and convince them your site has exactly what they’re looking for. The best way to do that is with a well-formatted, attention-grabbing headline that’s packed with intriguing benefits and compels them to read further.

Website design sin #3: Distracting banners and links
On your site, don’t put up banners or links that send people to someone else’s site (and that includes Google AdWords ads). Everything on your site should directly relate to its ultimate purpose – whether it’s to get more opt-ins for your e-mail list or to sell your product. Anything on your site that doesn’t serve this main purpose should be immediately deleted.

Of course, if the purpose of your site is purely to promote affiliate products or sell advertising space, then obviously you’ll want to include banners or links. But if you try to promote affiliate products on a page that’s also meant to sell a specific product, you’ll end up doing a lousy job of both.

Website design sin #4: Too many dizzying colours or fonts
Nothing screams “amateur!” louder than a dizzying mishmash of different fonts and colours. To make your site look professional, use a basic colour scheme with two or three colours and a couple of fonts. Look at any well-designed site and you’ll see that it’s pretty conservative with the colours and fonts it uses.

Website design sin #5: Patterned backgrounds
Make sure your background stays in the background! If you add textures or use dark backgrounds on your site, people won’t be able to read your copy easily. And if you aren’t making it easy for them to read your copy, you aren’t making it easy for them to buy your product.

Tests have shown over and over again that the sites with black text on a plain white background – with colours limited to the margins – get the highest conversion rates. It might seem boring from a design perspective, but better sales are pretty exciting from an income perspective.

Website design sin #6: Too many distracting graphics, animations, or video clips
Here’s another amateur mistake: thinking that lots of images, fancy graphics, animated gifs or video clips will make your site more interesting. Unless those visual elements help persuade people to buy your product by showing visitors what your product looks like, or demonstrating how it works, they’re useless decorations that will distract your visitors and prevent them from following through on what you want them to do.

Website design sin #7: Huge blocks of text that are nearly impossible to read
What happens when you run into a giant block of text on a website? Do you read it, scan it or skip over it to something shorter?

If you want your visitors to read all the way to your “order” button, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Limit your paragraphs to six lines. And make sure you vary your paragraph lengths so they don’t all look the same. A choppy paragraph structure makes online text much easier to read.

SEO Consulting on the Rise

An interesting article from The Times Online highlights the rise in the number of firms using reputable search engine optimisation companies to drive ‘Natural Search’ traffic to websites. We have published the juciest bits of the article below for Betwixt readers to digest:

Searching to get to the top of Google
THE hotels website Superbreak had a problem three years ago. The volume of traffic arriving at its web pages was worryingly low. Surfers were confused by cybersquatters trying to pass themselves off as the business and, to make matters worse, it shared the same name as a popular brand of American rucksacks.

Search-engine optimisation (SEO) proved to be the answer.

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines. And it is perhaps the fastest-growing sector in the marketing industry. Cracking the code of how search engines like Google work is forecast to be a £400m industry in Britain alone this year and it is growing at 60% a year.

Superbreak called in the experts to ensure its name rose to the top of search lists when users tapped in queries for “short break” and “hotel break” into Google or other search engines. The plan involved redrawing every web page to focus on the word “break”, simplifying its design, and making information more sharply relevant to weekend trippers.

“It was like replumbing an entire city,” said David Ranby, Superbreak’s internet-marketing manager. The benefits of coming top of search lists are clear. Although click-through rates vary from query to query, results that make the second page or lower of a Google search stand only a 1% chance of being clicked on. Not surprisingly, the top result on the first page gets perhaps half of all clicks.

Revenues at Superbreak’s hotels division have risen to £154m a year and Ranby says the SEO programme is responsible for 35% of the increase in online revenues over the past three years. It is no easy task to work out how to get a website to the top of the results thrown up by a search engine. Google — which with 85% of the search-engine market in Britain is by far the dominant player — keeps tweaking how its algorithms read web pages and indexes them.

“There are 200 signals that determine a page’s relevance,” said Matthew Trewhella, Google’s developer advocate. “Imagine it as a big wall of dials with a bunch of people turning them slightly every day.” While Google offers plenty of guidance and advice, it won’t tell companies exactly how its system works.

Such results mean that spending on SEO grew faster than pay-per-click online advertising — also known as paid search — for the first time in Britain last year. SEO addresses “natural” search results that appear in the left column of the Google page, while pay-per-click relates to keywords it auctions to create the sponsored links ranked on the right-hand side and often shaded at the top. For a decade, these have been the moneymaking meat of the search industry.

The specialist online site E-consultancy said spending on SEO rose by 68% to £250m in the UK last year, compared with a 56% rise in pay-per-click spending to £1.97 billion. Microsoft, which last week souped up its own search site with an easier-to-use system, thinks that pay per click in Europe, Middle East and Africa could grow by only 20% next year. There are two reasons for this.

First, pay per click is extremely buoyant compared with traditional media and its cost is rising quickly. Search marketers argue there is little point in, say, banks paying £15 to Google every time they want to be connected to a customer that has entered “credit card” into a search form. With a conversion rate of one in 100, it takes a long time to earn a return. Even more targeted searches, say for “student credit card”, have shot up in price.

Firms have also worked out that more than half of all web searches do not involve a transaction. To appeal to window shoppers, they are better off polishing their reputation and profile with future trade in mind. And then there are increasingly shrewd customers to contend with. They often take against being spoon-fed overtly commercial messages by never clicking on a result from the right side of the page.

“Big firms are looking more at SEO than pay per click because they realise that consumers are becoming aware the listings on the side and top of the page are paid for and that natural listings are in some cases more credible and more relevant,” said Rebecca Jennings, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Her firm forecasts that spending on pay per click in America will increase between 2007 and 2012 by 125% to $10.1 billion (£5.1 billion), compared with SEO soaring 365% to $8.9 billion.

As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.

Historically, boosting a site’s volume of web links has been easy. But Google has been clamping down on “link farms” — machine-generated websites created purely to connect with the central site to make it look more popular than it really is.

Offenders have had their rankings reduced on the back of such exploitative behaviour in the past. Google went so far as to suspend the carmaker BMW from its search index for two days in early 2006, although the carmaker denied any wrongdoing.

“The vast majority of SEO firms are good,” said Trewhella at Google. “But it is a constant battle. They will do one thing; we will discover it; they will do something else.”

While Google welcomes SEO for making searches easier and findings better quality, it doesn’t make any money from the left column of listings. Instead, it hopes better searching means more use, yielding it its fair share of clicks on paid-for links. Fredrick Marckini, the chief global-search officer at Isobar, part of the media buyer Aegis, said SEO was no threat to the search engine’s business model.

“There are no $10m SEO engagements but there are many $10m, $20m and even $100m pay-per-click search-advertising engagements. SEO is a necessary and critical component.” Marckini argues that the shift in spending patterns is beginning to better mirror consumer behaviour. He cites research that shows 72% of web users click on natural listings and not on the paid ads.

“The European market seems to spend money on search marketing in a way that is inconsistent with the way the audience is using search engines,” he said. “European marketers must place a higher priority on natural SEO to more successfully target their audience.”

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo. Its renewed importance is only set to grow.

“This presents a great evolution opportunity for the advertising agencies,” said Chris Dobson, acting boss of Microsoft’s online UK business. “It shows you need a human touch to add value to technology platforms on behalf of clients.”

Google Webmaster Guidance on Paid Links

Following on from a couple of previous posts we have made on the subject of acquiring paid links, Betwixt reminds its blog readers of Google’s guidelines on buying links:

Google’s policy on paid links has long been the same: it does not approve of buying or selling links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. Links that use the “nofollow” attribute or some sort of redirect to prevent the passing of PageRank are fine with them. Google employee Matt Cutts comments: 

“Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.”

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines.”

Reporting a Paid Link
Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.

Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Managing Your Online Reputation

Just how important is your online reputation?

Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop.

However, managing to keep up to speed with what is being said about your company and brand on the web is a tough job. The internet is a 24/7/365, always on medium which means that opinions, views and comment is being broadcast without respite.

A high ‘social status’ means having your website or company consistently talked about and discussed online. One of the major benefits of this can be an increased number of relevant links pointing to your website – leading to higher rankings in search engine natural listings (SERPS).

When it comes to your online reputation, preventing damage is easier than curing it. However, in the unfortunate event of a crisis situation arising, you will need sound advice and a suggested course of action for your company to follow. This will minimise the long-term damage done, and provide you with opportunities to recover from it.

Paid Links – Too Much, Too Soon

The article below illustrates the perils of trying to buy your way onto the first page of Google in a short space of time.

However, a quick note:
Whilst we don’t doubt the integrity of the Google index, there have been previous instances of big car insurance brands being turfed out of  first page Google results, only to be allowed back in, in a relatively short period of time.

Two cases of this are MoneySupermarket.com and Endsleigh – both companies were found out trying to (allegedly) cheat their way to the top of the Google rankings for the search term ‘Car Insurance’, using dubious or black hat SEO techniques. However, both websites are now back ranking very high (page 1) in the Google natural search results, for the ultra competitive search term car insurance.

Let’s all keep an eye on both GoCompare.com and Kwik Fit to see how quickly they rise back up to the top of the Google rankings for the search term ‘Car Insurance’?!

ARTICLE:
A couple of major UK brands in the insurance sector have recently been penalised by Google for boosting their rankings by buying paid reviews and paid links.

Last week, car insurance aggregator Gocompare.com was dropped from the number one slot for the term ‘car insurance’, and sent to the relative obscurity of page six of Google.

Its big mistake was to attempt to boost its search engine rankings by buying paid links and reviews, increasing the number of links into the site. This enabled the relatively new car insurance aggregator to reach the top of the natural search rankings.

The company achieved this in just over a year, which may well have raised alarm bells at Google, as such a rapid rise in the rankings is unusual, especially for such a competitive search term.

A similar penalty was imposed on Moneysupermarket.com last year, while the most recent victim of Google’s penalty has been Kwik Fit.

Kwik Fit is better known for tyres and brake pads than car insurance, but it has recently moved into the market, and was hovering between pages one and two of Google for the term ‘car insurance’ before being punished by Google for buying paid links.

Now Kwik Fit has moved down to page 5 on Google for the term, so it seems this strategy has not paid off for the company.

Google’s penalties can have a serious effect on web traffic – a recent Hitwise article showed that traffic to Gocompare.com from this search term had fallen by 87% in the weeks after the penalty.

It is likely that there are more brands using these SEO tactics, something which Google is keen to weed out, so we can expect more such penalties in the coming months.

Mobile Search

The mobile search industry has been primed to take-off every year for the past couple of years – without doing so. Many commentators have written articles about how 2008 is going to be the year that mobile search technology finally reaches out to the masses.

Big players in the search and telecoms industries are forming strategic alliances to try and attain first mover advantage and gather market share in consumer mobile search. The quest for delivering search results for people on the move is gathering pace with every passing week.

At the forefront of mobile search is Google Mobile which utilises the unrivalled knowledge and experience of Google in the Search field. Both Microsoft and Yahoo! are also proactively developing and marketing their own mobile search technologies in a bid to attract early adopters.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Alexa

Alexa – The web information company

Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users.  The business is now owned by Amazon.com.

Alexa has developed an installed base of millions of toolbars, one of the largest Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data. For users of Alexa’s Toolbar and web site this has resulted in products that have revolutionised Web navigation and intelligence.

Wikipedia Launch Search Engine

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a new Wikia Search Engine based on trusted feedback from a community of users.

An alpha version of Wikia Search aims to provide a viable alternative to the likes of Google by allowing signed-up users to submit ratings on search results.

“Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the internet, and should be done in an open, objective and accountable way,” said Wales. “Wikia Search, which we have been working on for a long time, represents the first draft of the future of search.”

Wales admitted that the very nature of the site means that it will take time for the effect to be noticeable, as its community-driven remit will take a while to build up entries. “Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in the coming weeks,” he said.

Wales believes that the new search engine adheres to the Four Organising Principles on which the future of internet search must be based. These are:

1. Transparency
   Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate in the form of open source licences and open content APIs.
2. Community
   Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organisations) to a strong social and community focus.
3. Quality
   Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy
   Privacy must be protected. Do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Definitions…

Affiliate marketing is the use by a Web site that sells products of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon.com, the book seller, created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

Alternatively…

A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a percentage of any sales generated for site B.

Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimisation, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising.