SEO Gemini

One point five million dollars of investment from firms including Google along with an additional three million dollars from other sources; 200 sales before a working product was launched and 5500 total sales in less than six months of trading – this could be good.

In fact it’s just won “Best Business Model” in the US…check out the Press release here.

The Sales Pitch
I appreciate that mobile searches day is coming…and it has been for a number of years now. Success of relative newcomer Appstack to the concept could be the beginning of the coming of age mobile search has been chasing for so long. Originally pitched to Google the idea was

“A mobile website for small to medium sized businesses with the functionality of an app”

Another tagline being:

“Targeted mobile advertising”

Take a look at this:

The History
The company, now 30 strong in the US is growing at a well deserved rapid rate; if you take a look at them onsite you’ll see a fantastic website with a wonderfully fun, light and genuine feel. The staff pictures in particular inspire a chuckle in most, well…they do for us digital geeks anyway

The Product
So, you’re a local business, you have a website – but you don’t have a mobile website. Darn…

Appstack works alongside your website, displaying a mobile website when people searching on mobile devices, conduct their Google searches. The cinch comes in that because of investment from and an affiliation with Google, your mobile site is connected with Google Adwords. Location is set for example for all people within a two or three mile radius (all dependent on industry and search volume), as are your PPC keywords and phrases – all amendable and monitored monthly, then when people search for your target phrase which has been derived for you from Appstack Adwords testers on their mobile, your mobile site shows up in the search results. At present this is the only mobile search tool linked in with Google’s PPC system.

A choice of interfaces is available for your mobile site dependent on your industry for you to choose from and I believe you can also get a bespoke design should you wish. Having been shown the interface by their UK representative I can verify its simplicity and usability, even among non-computer folk. Most of the designs I’ve seen are between five to ten pages and you can design and edit your mobile site whenever you choose. As with other content management systems such as Joomla or WordPress, you receive a log in where you can go and edit your contact information, data, content or special offers at any time, you can also link your mobile site to your main website. Once you’re all set up and agreed, your mobile site goes live within half a day – the reason this is not instant is that time needs to be spent linking the site up to Adwords.

Results & Reporting
The reports are fantastic and delivered monthly. They list items like the number of impressions, number of times your site was displayed, the number of click throughs and the number of conversions i.e. the number that clicked to call or the number that clicked to ask for directions. Data for these figures is derived from Google Analytics. See below:

The Price
Fifty pounds (£50) per month; £30 of this goes on your PPC Adwords spend, £20 goes to Appstack for monitoring of the campaign and any admin…that’s actually it for once!

As a comparison I’m told the cost of a lower end mobile site is around £600 and with regards to statistics – in America 85% go from the free trial in to full service.

There is an opt out option too if you don’t feel the service is working for you and you get the first month for free due to Google’s offer of £50 free advertising for their first month.

The Techy Stuff
Once linked up, each client has their own automatic account which is linked to the Appstack MCC used to run each individual PPC account.

Issues
At the moment your URL on your mobile site shows up as a sub domain of Appstack reading something like www.appstack.com/YOURBUSINESSNAME. Programmers are working on this to make each site a subdomain of your original website.

Give it a Go!
Click here to have a play yourself NB: the two pink buttons on the bottom of the interface bring up more options.

Conclusion
I went into this meeting a skeptic; I came out still looking but not finding a flaw which is rare for me! I think this is a wonderful solution for local, targeted mobile search and I will be recommending Appstack highly as a service.

More Information
The UK representative is Charlie Whitaker who can be contacted at: Charlie@goappstack.com and connected with on LinkedIn as Charlie Whitaker.

You can also like Appstack UK here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Appstack-UK/230985110309243

Dissimilar to printed media, its digital counterpart presents very few limitations nowadays and this is perhaps the best explanation as to why it is quickly consolidating its place in our society today. While on printed media you would need additional physical resources to increase the quantity of text, the digital content permits you to write as much as your heart desires. Or does it?

(Photo credits: Limeryk)

Lately, I can hear numerous questions regarding the optimal word count in blogs, articles or posts due to the Penguin mayhem so I’ve decided to state my personal opinion on the matter. The first thing you need to understand that online content cannot be subjected to any one size fits all rule. Some are perfectly capable of expressing their ideas in 200-300 words (synthesizing the points). Others prefer the more comprehensive approach, so their posts on a similar subject can easily exceed 2000-3000 words. Neither category is absolutely right or wrong and let me explain why.

Aspects to consider
First and foremost, keep in mind that in the online world, all niches have different requirements and rules. I’m not saying that there is a pre-established word count for every niche, well not really. However, there are certain practices concerning the word count average for the type of post you write.

For instance, informational blogs presenting the latest news or hottest trends in a niche will typically have a lower number of words, because their goal is squeezing in as much information as possible within a limited amount of space.

(Photo credits: Poster Boy NYC)

On the other hand, assuming that the website or blog is directed towards client interaction or presenting technical reviews for a certain category of products, then the length of the posts definitely increases in order to present a more detailed picture.

The thing is that these are simply guidelines and in the online world, you will rarely see blog examples that fit exclusively in one category. Therefore, what you really need to consider is the type of post you are writing and its purpose, rather than the overall genre of the blog. Take it on faith, it will definitely simplify decision making. Oh, and I should also mention that in order for your blog to gain consistency, try to stick to an average word count. At least as much as possible, don’t excessively crop your content in the process.

Setting achievable writing goals
In the blogging community, the perceived average word count for newcomers is around 400-500, so my advice is to set this as your target. 500 is neither too long (in fact, a post is considered long when it exceeds 1000 words) nor too short, so you will not bore the audience or leave the impression of spam.

However, once you become accustomed with this word count, you should set incremental targets. 600, 700, 800 and yes, why not, 900 words! Between 500 words and 1000 words, anything goes. Confused about the reason you should gradually increase the length of your posts rather than stick to the iconic 500? Here is why…

Word count and Google
When you write a blog post, you do it because you have valuable information and opinions that you want to share with the online world. But in order to do so, you must first show Google that your blog is worthy of making the top ranks in SERPs. Among the numerous changes to the search algorithm in the wake of the Penguin update, the longer, high-quality text content is prioritized compared to other forms of media. This means that once you get the hang of writing good content, you can take advantage of it by offering the Google bots more of it to crawl and index.

Planning ahead
But hold on, there’s more. In its holy war on terrorists… eh, spam I mean, Google now has a tendency of branding short posts – the ones commonly utilized in link building campaigns – as worthless.

(Photo credits: Decafeined)

While this currently applies to 50-100 words posts, who can predict the minimal length required by this search engine in the future? Better safe than sorry I say! And one more thing, the 500-1000 word count is the best way to introduce natural keywords without exceeding the maximum allowed by Google or making the content sound genuinely weird. Don’t forget to make the information readable by splitting the content into paragraphs or introducing relevant subheadings!

Byline
Hey there, my name is Chad Faith and I enjoy sharing my thoughts on issues like the optimal word count and other hot trending SEO topics!

Many bloggers and webmasters often refrain from utilizing long tailed keywords, especially since the search behavior indicates that the chances of a user searching for a long phrase in the query are very low.

On the other hand, we have to admit the fact that since they are more specific, using long tailed keywords is a surefire way of making your site appear among the first in the search query. Simply put, while they are not very popular, the long tailed keywords are easy to rank for. Not to mention the fact that if you use enough of them, you can bring in a lot of visitors. Let’s elaborate!

(Photo credits: Dave Dugdale)

Long tail keywords and traffic
If you are new in the online environment and you are trying to get users to notice you, then using long keywords is a generally good idea. Let’s imagine for a second that you are trying to raise awareness about your 3-stars hotel located in New York.

In this particular example, newcomers will not stand a chance against the big players if they focus on a short and efficient keyword, such as New York hotels. On the other hand, if they direct their efforts towards adding additional descriptive words for the New York hotel and find around 20 relevant long keywords, then they will not face the same level of competition.

This is the exact principle behind the long tailed keywords: a smaller effort to rank for the keywords and numerous sources to get visitors from. Does it work? Yes it does, since according to Google, 20% (1 out of 5) of the searches performed daily are unique.

Finding the best long keywords to build your campaigns on
In determining the optimal long tailed keywords, you will be confronted with two problems. First off, no search engine is able to provide you with the 20% unique searches information we talked about earlier. Secondly, none of the keyword research tools currently available (AdWords for Google or AdCenter for Bing) will show the keywords that have less than 10 searches.

However, this is the perfect opportunity to call on the help of paid search campaigns, because you can take advantage of the results indicating the broader matches for the popular keywords. After you get the results, you will need to browse through them and find the long tailed keywords (affordable pet friendly hotels in New York, for instance) and start creating content for them.

Other ways to look for long tailed keywords
Following is a list of the top 8 methods you can use to find relevant keywords for your sites:

• Run regular search query reports
• Localize your keywords
• Consider including qualifying terms
• Check out your competition’s keyword report
• Analyze your internal site search
• Investigate your search engine referral traffic
• Cloud your website content
• Use a professional keyword tool application

Site optimization is still necessary!
When we said that long tailed keywords will require less effort and time on your part, we didn’t mean that you can create some content for them and relax right after! After all, if the visitor does not find the information he was looking for on the page, he will move on to the next search result.

Essentially, maximizing the traffic for the long tailed keywords can be attained with the help of subheadings, bullet lists, encouraging comments and sharing on the social network sites or personal blogs, including relevant media files, etc. The bottom line is that you should use the content to offer the visitor exactly what he wants: clear and easy to understand information.

Final thoughts
Don’t hesitate to incorporate long tailed keywords in your next campaign! Even though they have a lower search volume compared to short keywords, in most cases, they have the biggest impact on your SEO campaigns. To summarize, here are the 4 principal reasons why you should not disregard them:

1. They are more relevant for the content and search engines prioritize relevance over search volume.
2. They have the ability to drive more targeted traffic and, because they are likely to be used at the end of the clients’ buying cycle, can easily translate into more sales.
3. Are easier to rank for and can greatly benefit smaller companies that otherwise have no real chance of competing with established corporations.
4. Even though they don’t bring you a lot of visitors, the leads they provide are the best any company can hope for.

(Photo credits: e-strategycom)

Byline
Hi, I’m Chad and I believe that researching keywords is the first solid step you should take to spearhead your marketing campaign. Using a simple keyword tool will start your quest well!

Those of you who know me know I’m always on Twitter – introduced to me by the fabulous @BeckySocial if I have a question I’ll tweet, if I’ll have an opinion I’ll tweet, if I think of something random to say or find a cool quote I’ll tweet – to say I’m an advocate of this wonderful platform would be an understatement.

This week I’ve dedicated a blog to just some of the things I use Twitter for and have gained out of it – perhaps it may go some way to explaining why the Twittersphere is growing so expeditiously. NB: As I predominantly use the space for work my points are going to be business related.

1. Gaining clients
Yes I’ve actually made money from Twitter! A number of clients have found me this way or indirectly heard about me through someone that follows me. Use it properly and you can enjoy financial gains.

Related to this point is networking – something that can definitely get you clients, online networking particularly in the online industry (funny that!) is vital and Twitter is the perfect platform through which this can work. Networking effectively and using all the tools Twitter has to offer for this means can frequently be beneficial for business and I can think of many to whom this applies.

2. Being Personable
I don’t feel this point can translate across all industries, perhaps some such as law or finance may need to skip this one – but feel free to challenge in the comments below! Twitter offers a wonderful opportunity to be personable with others, deviating away from the strict and formal tone of so many brands and interacting more with customers in real time. Response rates can be so much quicker if you set up email alerts for @mentions too, creating a faster response time to those trying to reach you. Reputation management is crucial and can be managed so effectively online! An easy way to communicate with your customers, I believe Twitter is now instrumental to online reputation management.

3. Joining In and Interacting
The community is a wonderful one to interact with. You can give your opinion on certain topics through popular and trending hash tags and communicate with others, networking and building up a genuine following. It’s so easy to meet new people online and forge valuable relationships (a white hat link building tactic in SEO don’t ya know ), connecting with people just as you would offline.

4. Helping Others
Giving back to the community is easy and surprisingly rewarding! People often post questions or SOS’s as supposed to or in addition to posting something to a forum. Being there for others can help in establishing you as an authority and becoming known in your expert subject as well as earning you the reputation of being an all-round helpful dude!

5. Gaining Authority and Managing Reputation
Heard of the platform Klout? Measure your influence throughout the social space and monitor this – look at your peers too, it’s interesting to see how things progress. By being an active member of the community and being consistent your authority will build over time (the odd retweet or at mention from someone respected in your industry might not go amiss either!)

6. Living and LEARNING
Wow what a lot I’ve learnt…and what a steep learning curve I’ll admit. People post a lot of links to their profiles and it’s entirely possible to lose a day migrating from one blog to another learning a huge amount but getting nothing else done in the process .

Ask when you need help too; you can gain a much more rounded opinion by three or four people telling you their thoughts on Twitter as supposed to the level of insight you can gain from one news item.

7. Promoting Yourself and Your Content
If you write something good, promote it, something great…hey you may need to brag a little! Especially if you have news or knowledge about a hot topic you can get some really high readership rates – particularly if you throw a few retweets and @mentions in to the mix too.

It’s also good etiquette to promote other content that you enjoy and think is valuable; people do the same for you and it’s a great way to forge relationships for example: “I really enjoyed your piece on …”. A simple, easy and genuine way to make an introduction.

8. Keeping up to Date – Real Time
Lastly, how many of us turn to Twitter to search for the hashtag when major news breaks versus turns on the news channels? The news of Whitney Houston passing away famously broke in less than thirty minutes with the niece of Houston’s hair stylist being the first to take to the platform. More recently the news of Fabrice Muamba broke; as did the developments about his condition on Twitter. Also, it’s hard to ignore now that TV and radio frequently quote Twitter posts as they come in.

To deny the power of this platform is futile, sure there are those who abuse it for negative means however the benefits of it are astounding to me. Whoever knew “140” would become such an important number .

Post by @SEOGemini.

Question – Why do Panda’s & Penguins like football?

Answer – Penalties.

Unlike the colours of the animals they’re named after, the reported accuracy of these Google algorithm updates in reaching their desired targets has not been black and white. In some cases you can argue justice has been done and in other cases a number of innocent casualties have been created. Heavily related to the two Google updates mentioned above is the topic of duplication which I’m going to attempt to unravel here. We know the basics but there are a number of scenarios that raise questions which I’ve discussed further down, so…

What is duplication?
What it says on the tin; identical or practically identical content. You can test your content for this by using a percentage scale via an online tool. Duplication can either be intentional or unintentional.

Why did duplicated content start getting penalized?
Matt Cutts’ never-ending battle with web spam. Corrupt content duplication pollutes cyber-space and gains websites an unfair advantage via black hat methods that manipulate the search engines to give high rankings to sites that don’t provide optimum benefit to the user. Of course there’s the argument that SEO is in itself a manipulative practice…can of worms trust me! For today though, we’ll just focus on malicious manipulation with a blatant disregard for the rules.

One of Google’s biggest public battles is with combating this intentional manipulative practice in SEO although with such fine lines, complexities and detection difficulties coupled with the occasional moving of the goals posts by the search engines and an evolving black hat industry, this task is monumental at best. You can read some of my thoughts on this subject in relation to link building on a guest post I wrote here.

How did duplication used to benefit SEO?
Imagine you have a web page. You optimize it brilliantly; include some great content, fabulous keywords, on-page links, well optimized images and perfect header tags. This page provides great value to your website and associates wonderfully with your industry, the page gets indexed and recognized as a great page by the search engines, consequently helping you to rank. If one page has this effect…why don’t you double it with two? Or three even? That’s one of the simple (albeit outdated) ideas around duplication…

Panda’s and Penguin’s
We’re equally baffled by the names and in some senses the updates! However these updates have targeted in addition to other aspects of SEO, duplication or “thin content” as it’s also known. The problem came as it always does for those sites that were innocently putting duplicate content on their site.

What innocents got hit?
eCommerce. Imagine an online clothing store, they have this really cool range of t-shirts (insert shameless plug for client here ). You click to view the t-shirts and they sell them in blue, pink, green, orange and yellow – they’re exactly the same t-shirt but in a different colour. To show the website visitor what they look like in each colour you create a different page for these, they’re identical pages, the only difference is the colour – whoops that’s duplicate content. You see the problem! This was predominantly a feature of the Panda update.

The Penguin update hit low quality links, private blog networks, over-optimsation and excessive use of anchor text. There were actually protests in India over this which you can read about here, you can also read more detailed information about Penguin in general here. This more recent update has again has caused ripples throughout digital. Build My Rank famously got hit and there was a de-indexing demon culling its way through spammy links, either de-valuing them or going one step further and penalizing the sites. They got fair warning in the form of an email to their webmaster tools account and you can also fill out a form reporting this practice or if you believe you’ve been unfairly hit – there are links to the form and more in-depth information on this blog by Search Engine Land.

A few scenarios:
Steering away from recent events throughout my work I’ve come across some issues and questions around duplication and arousing suspicion with the search engines in general that I think are interesting, puzzling and do occur in our industry. Please add your thoughts and examples of your own, and correct me if I’m wrong!!

1. eCommerce: you use manufacturers descriptions when you sell their products on your site.
If you sell shoes which you source from the manufacturer, you might not feel the need to change the descriptions when you sell the shoes on your own site. This can cause a duplication issue. However, I believe consensus is that this issue is less of one to worry about than if that content was on the same domain.
2. Google reviews, you’ve collected these genuinely on email and you want to put them on Google Reviews yourself.
A company I know was researching into rich snippets; they had collected genuine reviews over a period of time on email. They wanted to transfer these to Google Reviews to give them a star rating under their organic listing and encourage click throughs. However sitting on Google and adding in all the reviews themselves could arouse suspicion as a manipulative action to the search engines. This is something to be considered and in the end this client used Schema code. This allows people to post reviews on the website which Google draws data from to give the star rating. The existing reviews have been left off for now, but for any ongoing they are put directly on to the site using this method. This could still be easy to fake and I’m sure there will be initiatives put in place if this becomes an issue however presently, this is a good way to go.
3.You’re pulling in data from another site to display on another IP address with an iframe or something similar.
If you rest part of your site on another IP address with the intention of pulling in data form your site to use the infrastructure and technology of another site, effectively you have a blank page that pulls in data. In terms of duplication, when this content shows it’s actually being pulled in from somewhere else, hence I believe it’s not duplicated.
4. You’ve got a white label site.
So, you have part of your website hosted on another IP address; I recently had this conundrum for a site that needed software from one of its partner businesses pronto. A page of their site therefore rested on another site, effectively having the same page appear on two different IP addresses. This can be an issue with duplication and depending on whether you use your own domain name on the secondary site or have a sub-name on the host domain it can also be an issue with SEO.

By directing your SEO efforts to your page which has the hosts domain name but is branded to you, you are actually benefiting their domain. If you have your own domain name on someone else’s site however, your SEO efforts will still benefit your site.

Additionally, if you have a standardised page on someone else’s website – for example if the site owner creates more pages that are copies, if all of these are standardized, unless you make them your own with unique content – you may have duplication issues here too.

Let’s end constructively. What can you do about duplication?
Firstly, don’t panic (all who know me know I am TERRIBLE at taking this advice). It’s a good tip though. Analyse the situation as a whole and do not assume whatever’s in the news is the reason your site may have slipped down the rankings. Get advice, complete a site audit and reach out to the authorities – we’re in the fortunate position of being in an industry full of generosity and people are always willing to help .

If you know you have duplicate content on your site such as the t-shirt example above but each page is still needed on your site, you can use a canonical tag. Decide on which page is the main page and put the tag in the <head> tag of the other pages referencing the main page. Only the main page should then be counted and the search engines get a nice heads up that you’re aware of the duplication and that this isn’t intentional.

If you have two copies of the same page, for example you have transferred to a new website or your site responds to website.name.com AND websitename.com/index.php and you don’t need one of them you can put in a 301 direct which will transfer any of the traffic to the main URL you specify and the vast majority of the link equity.

Finally, from a content perspective Copyscape is a great tool which you can pass your content through to check for any duplication.

And with that, I’d like to finish. Once you open this up duplication is a broad and complex topic, please leave your comments and contribute to the discussion!

The Penguin Update, one of Google’s newest upgraded cannon in their holy war against spammers has recently hit the online world and the aftermath is still claiming new collateral victims. Do you know how to survive after this “tragedy” (as many would call it)?

Well, SEO forums have literally been flooded with complaints in the days following the algorithm update. However, I have also noticed that some bloggers and webmasters state that their page rank actually has increased as a result of the Penguin Update. In fact, they were actually shocked to learn that their rank 0 website earned a rank 3 without any interference on their part! These were, of course, the more fortunate cases because now, there are hundreds and hundreds of legitimate websites still trying to combat the damage caused by the modifications imposed by the search engine and recover their position.

Having learned from the previous Panda updates, Google has installed a form that permits blog and website owners to request a manual verification of their page in case they consider that the penalties imposed by the search engine are not justified. Now, as laudable as this initiative may be, it also tells us that Matt Cutts and the other members of the Google team are aware of the potential flaws and drawbacks of the new algorithm strategy. Let’s find out more about the scope of the Penguin update and what it targets, shall we?

Penguin’s aim:

In essence, the Penguin update is designed to focus on websites and blogs that can be described as over-optimized but ultimately irrelevant to the user. To put it simply, blogs and websites that have very little content that could prove useful, but are created in a manner that takes advantage of all the requirements of the search engine will be severely penalized.

Sounds a bit like the Panda Update at first, doesn’t it? Well, Penguin can be regarded as Panda’s bigger and stronger brother from this point of view. Excessive keyword stuffing, comment spamming and content that was plagiarized from other websites/blogs will no longer increase, but can actually harm your ranking!

Keyword stuffing
In regards to excessive keyword stuffing, Google does not deny the importance of this practice in SEO. Allegedly, websites that utilized varied keywords in their content and respect a pre-established density will not suffer the wrath of Google’s ban hammer. But how much is too much? Because overflows of keywords and keyphrases make the content unreadable for the human viewer, we understand why this habit needed to go. As a recommendation, 1% now is too much. Just sprinkle in your desired keyword once or twice seems to be the best recommendation.

Comment spamming
Placing spamming comments on websites and blogs with high page ranks just to get a valuable backlink to your website used to be a very popular black-hat SEO technique. However, blog and site owners found it very frustrating to have their comment space full of irrelevant links and advertisements so for them, the Penguin Update comes as a relief.

At first glance, you may think that you are actually witnessing the death of the backlink building in SEO, but that is not really the truth. You will simply need to find a reliable and competent page rank backlinks building service that knows how to bend the SE’s rules in your favour.

Using plagiarized content
We’re hanging back on this one, because the Panda Update also promised that duplicate content will not be a viable source of traffic and yet, here is the second stab Google’s taking at the problem. Will the Penguin fix what Panda couldn’t?  Will we no longer be able to duplicate content created by other bloggers in order to increase the traffic? Let’s hope so!

How can professional backlinking services help you mitigate the damage?
Remember when we said that comment spamming is no longer permitted in the Penguin’s jurisdiction? Professional backlink builders do not abuse the blogs and websites that allow them to post by entering irrelevant comments and ad filled bits of text. They can and will create the kind of content that will keep the blog/website owner happy and increase your page rank at the same time.

In addition, comments are done in perfectly written English, conferring them an actual value. Combine that with diversified categories of blogs – both specific and non-specific – and the high page rank of the chosen locations and Google has no reason not to give you a page rank boost. It’s times like this that we are all grateful for the backlink builders who go the “legal” way, because it would take weeks, if not months, to recover with content alone.

This is a guest post by Chad Faith who loves to blog about anything and everything in the SEO niche! His latest fascination is affixed on page rank backlinks.

Ok so first off, I made that title up…to grab your attention! There is no truth to that whatsoever.

I’m just looking into titles. You can spend hours writing fantastic content that really is an awesome read, but with a dull title readership figures of this can remain low and not achieve what they deserve. I was a classic culprit of this, believing that content will prevail and that as long as this is of a high quality people will find and read it – I was wrong! Now I invest far more time in coming up with a solid title.

There’s a great post on the SEOmoz blog which talks of the 80/20 ratio also known as the Pareto Principle. This rule observes that most things have an uneven distribution, as an example your title consisting of only a few words can carry 80% of your blogs success. This principle applies to many events; roughly 80% of the effects can come from 20% of the cause. With regards to how this relates to this blog, your title is a small amount of text with a lot of power and it’s worth investing in.

“For those familiar with 80/20, what this means is, the size of the title compared to the actual content (and time spent crafting it) disproportionately affects the success of that content. It’s one small piece of text with a lot power!” Ref: SEOmoz February 2012.

Titles show up everywhere; as rich snippets in organic search results, by social media platforms, on websites, offline in documents, images and the rest… They are also most often displayed in large and bold text, making them the first thing that visitors to your site or blog read.

So, how do I write titles that pique interest?

1. Write about something relevant and ensure the title denotes this. If there’s industry-relevant news that you know about that other people need to know about make sure they know that they need to know about it….you know? Without being confusing of course…

2. Do you REALLY want to know the secret ingredient to a successful blog title? Yes – questions! Asking a question piques curiosity and implies the content will be supplying the answer, if it’s an answer people want to know about, well hey presto.

3. This gets me every time – when someone posts a picture on Twitter with no explanation at all just saying “Oh my God check this out, amazing!” I have to check it out. Not a title but still, playing on peoples curiosity with an enticing title but not giving them the complete picture is a helpful tip and a great way to draw people in to reading your content.

4. The multiples of five (mostly). “Top five tips”, “Top ten reasons to” or “Top twenty best buys”. These often indicate succinct, to the point blogs that are going to add value to the reader and be worth their time which in itself is another point – bring value to the reader.

5. Dolphins Take Over ITV!
Again – just kidding (excusing Adele’s speech the night of the Brits of course). Grab the reader’s attention with your titles but (unlike me) do try to be truthful.

6. Review it. Review a popular product, book or brand – reviews are massive, write a good one and include the product in as your title. There’s a good chance readership rates will be high (oh and I realise this is point number six which is NOT a multiple of five ).

Cookies – Chocolate, Raisin and Oatmeal

                        Or

Cookies – HTTP, Web and Browser

I KNOW which will be more exciting to read about, alas however in this blog I must focus on the latter (I hope the picture makes up for this somewhat!)

What are they?

On May 26th a new cookie directive law will be baking its way into internet legislation. A cookie is a piece of data, a small text file, placed by a website onto a users computer. Cookies are designed as a form of online memory, remembering actions taken by a browser in the past; sound like gobbledegook? On my web developers third and slightly desperate attempt to educate me on cookies the lightbulb finally clicked on when he informed me that if cookies are enabled, effectively your browser is remembering your actions on the web.

Example: Ever been looking for new clothes on ASOS or Topshop, come online a while later to say, listen to a radio station or check your email and seen ASOS or Topshop adverts on the radio station or email website? That’s cookies as I understand them. They store data to provide you with a better, more relevant user experience.

They’re not out to get you!

The new law

Cookies are rarely used to store identifying information about a user, it’s their browsing habits they are interested in. The EU however on May 26 will be enforcing a new law that means every website in the UK will be required to a) inform users that their actions are being tracked by cookies and b) ask for their consent.

The Guardian explains its use of cookies here.

The deadline for people to take action on the new law is May 26 (we were given a year to implement changes). After that date, websites that don’t comply could be fined up to £500,000. There is no clear cut process about what steps website owners should take and there is still a lot of confusion around the issue. An article from 123-reg (view here) reports that:

“The new rules require websites to get permission from visitors before placing any cookies on their computer. Permission must be informed and overt, which means you have to ask visitors outright if you can put cookies on their computer, and explain clearly what the cookies are used for. You can’t bury the information in your website’s terms and conditions and leave it at that. The only exceptions to this are cookies deemed essential to providing functions visitors have asked for. But you can’t rely on this to cover many of your cookies. The ICO guidance on the law says that “this exemption is a narrow one”. It’s certainly not likely to cover cookies for analytics purposes, which is one of the most common uses of cookies – particularly for smaller websites.”

What to do about it

If you’ve not done anything yet the general consensus is you’re not alone. The ICO added an opt in feature to its website…and saw measured visitors drop, total traffic may not have dropped, just recorded traffic as people had to opt in. View the figures here. Doing nothing may not be best though, 123-reg advocates taking some sort of action.

As a minimum it recommends understanding the cookies that your website uses and putting these in an obvious place on your site, not embedded deep in your terms and conditions. Laying the foundations and figuring out how to create an opt in feature is also advocated. You can find out what cookies your website uses at Bitstorm View Cookies.

Internet privacy

Google made press around the globe recently when its new inclusive privacy law was applied across all its products and services. The age old debate as to how much information should be given about our browsing habits generally forms one of two opinions, 1) it doesn’t matter much as privacy is rare these days anyway or 2) it ignites a personal rights issue as we believe we should have control over the information we share.

Another interesting feature I recently came across was a complete browsing history facility. Only viewable by logging into Gmail, mine only extends back to March 2010 – a friend of mine however has a complete history of every Google search he’s ever typed in from 2007. Five years of searching. The two ways I see of looking at this are 1) Google is keeping your search data to use the information for its own gains, knowledge is power or 2) Google is keeping this information and making it accessible to serve a better user experience.

I personally feel that the transparency with which these results are shown indicates the search engines are not reluctant to share this information with us therefore the saving of these searches is for the genuine purpose of providing us with a positive and relevant user experience.

Conclusion

Something to keep in mind certainly, also something people seem to be waiting and seeing with. Not a webmaster myself from an SEO standpoint this blog provides more useful information:

- http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/03/eu-cookie-directive-what-why-who-when-and-how.html

There is also a piece of code you can implement to comply with the law:

- http://civicuk.com/news/2012/cookie-law-how-to-comply-before-the-deadline

My recommendation would be to find out the cookies your site uses and starting to work out an opt in feature if this becomes necessary in the future. An opt out will now not be enough.

We’ve gone off topic this week! Having been fortunate enough to compete in the Barclays Milano Marathon on April 15 2012 I’ve created a short video blog about the experience (and to gloat a little of course!) Anyone looking to run a marathon – do it!

As supposed to giving my view on Google’s recent de-indexing of a number of links and even entire private blog networks themselves, I’ve decided this week to provide links to four fantastic blogs I’ve come across since the the update was implemented that I feel give a balanced view on the topic in addition to pro-active steps webmasters can take to respond to this recent development.

The first is from a friend of mine, a SEO super-cool, super-on-the-button dude…aptly named helpful guy. If you read down to the March 28th section on this blog you’ll see an article on Search Engine Watch you can access here.

It summarizes the buzz around the web and the reaction by those of us in the industry. The article talks of unnatural use of anchor text and attributes this as a possible contributing factor to the update. It also talks of the webmaster tools notices that have been received by many and concludes by saying (my favourite part) that like the “oh so nearly but not quite” petrol strike the UK nearly had over Easter, a panic-dumping of links might not be totally necessary!

The second article forms part of an eNewsletter to which I am subscribed and can be read here.

It gives constructive, basic advice on how to react to Google’s over-optimisation filter. Words from Matt Cutts are included and the eNewsletter again spreads the message not to panic. A few risky SEO methods such as fully automated link building solutions, automatic forum creation accounts and automated link exchange networks are explained as are safe SEO methods.

The third post gives a practical, proactive 19-step process to respond to the recent clamp down on private blog networks. Quite a techy post and you do need to be adept at Excel for this but great advice! You can read the article on Search Engine Land here.

Another favourite of mine, SEOmoz gives some more practical advice in this great post on how to check which links can harm your sites rankings. Fairly easy to follow these might put a few minds at rest! Read it on the SEOmoz site.

My thoughts on the subject are that link-building using a variety of methods has been recommended for a long time. Putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak does have its dangers which have been proved with this over-optimisation penalty.

The search engines love change and are always working to refine their services and remove spam, if your SEO strategy comprises a number of techniques and link building methods such as outreach, social media, event sponsorship, discussion, participation, article posting, niche directory submissions and guest blogging amongst others, even if some of your links do get devalued, a broad SEO strategy should ensure some level of safety for your clients sites and their reputations.

Some of these networks can provide value and still do, overall my thoughts echo those of the first two articles…don’t panic!