I attribute it to not only the after party that happened on the last day of the expo but the constant churning of ideas circulating in your head about how the information you learnt in the sessions can benefit your clients, your company and also what a squirrel has got to do with the people at Conversion Rate Experts.  I should ring the R.S.P.C.A.

I must admit the expo was the best I have attended. I went to the expo as a blogger for Search Cowboys, so without them I wouldnt not have attended, so a massive thank you should rightly go to them and mainly Bas van den Beld. The organisation in particular was spot on; there was plenty of time in between sessions which allowed you to walk to the next room with plenty of time to spare. Not to mention great food and drinks all day.

Before I attended the expo I had reviewed the agenda and pencilled out the sessions I wanted to attend and thankfully managed to attend them all.  Not just search related either, as I chucked a couple of curves balls in by attending a few affiliate presentations and sessions on how to improve your conversion rates, an important aspect no matter what sector to operate in.  I came away from the conference feeling inspired and wanted to get stuck in to some work as soon as possible, after the obligatory drinks of course :0)

So what did I learn I hear you cry? I thought it would be best to summarise everything that I would be interested in hearing if someone else was blogging this, so read on, oh and get comfortable.

SEO Strategies

•    The top 3 ranking websites in Bing are ripped and have Encarta entries. I have checked and this is true. Aggressive optimisation of pages also seems to work quite well in Bing too so test and see what you can achieve.
•    Dave Naylor discussed Google focusing on returning results at a faster rate, that they are looking at speed metrics of a site when analysing ranking position.  Now, we have felt this for a while but it is nice to be supported by the man himself. So, through webmaster tools start analysing any broken links etc… Start treating the crawler like a user.
•    Subfolder Vs Sub Domain debate goes on… A lot of the panellists felt that it completely depends on your situation but all were in agreement that sub domains passed external backlink equity whilst subfolders passed internal link equity. One advantage of a sub domain is that it can be put on a different IP address.

SEO & Search Engines

•    Allow http compression, reduce the download time for users and bots
•    Organise your content, understand that value is placed on the hierarchal structure of a site.
•    MSN Videos will start appearing in Google results pages soon as they have overgone a complete overhaul of their site, reducing the amount of Flash and Ajax.
•    New feature from Google webmaster tools that allows you to adjust the return rate of crawlers.
•    25% of queries at present were not seen in the last 3 months. (This was the most astounding quote when you realise the significance)
•     Remember to submit video sitemaps
•    When content is in the same language but across two sites, for example on the TLDs .co.uk and .ie then alter the copy to reflect the country. Do not leave exactly the same. Use geographical references and symbols (currency) if appropriate.

Affiliate

•    When setting up a site is it better to have a keyword rich domain name or a brand name?  All panellists agreed that it depends on the competitive nature of your sector.  If you happen to be in a niche you can afford to build a brand name whereas if your sector is very competitive a keyword rich domain would help to get you ranked within the search engines.
•    Significant factor of success in terms of affiliate sites is obtaining a constant stream of returning visitors.
•    A lot of affiliate sites have thousands of pages of content. The key to obtaining traffic from search engines is to ensure this content is unique. Do not reproduce the content on similar affiliate sites as this will be deemed duplicate content and affect your ability to rank effectively.
•   Do not write about a subject, write for an audience. Ensure your content is topical and relevant to what the customer wants and this will in turn improve your returning customers.

Conversion Rate Experts – SEOmoz Case Study

•    Most important lesson is not to keep chasing new traffic but to improve your conversion rate of existing traffic. This will have a massive impact on revenue.
•    How do you treat New vs Returning customers? Build relationships based around their site activity and reap the benefits.
•    Analyse every action and the effects this has on the conversion funnel. Plan future steps based on results.
•    Multi variant testing is vital to improving your conversion rate.
•    Most websites don’t contain enough copy to effectively sell a product or service. If you imagine how long a sales pitch would take and compare it to the copy on your site you will get an idea of the difference. Improve and add copy but ensure you have call to actions throughout for customers that have been converted sooner than others.

Beyond Link Bait

•    Backlink analysis should never be overlooked as it can play an important part in link development.
•    Two tools that can help with researching backlinks of competitors and  process are Linkscape and Majestic
•    Panellists stress the importance of not wasting time in approaching websites where the chance of obtaining a link is low. Dedicate your time to prioritising the value of links and the likelihood of achieving a backlink.
•    Think about ringing potential link targets as it is more credible. It also increases the actual conversion rate of link requests. Most importantly, it allows you not only to build links but relationships.
•    The tone of voice is very important when approaching link targets; review the language used on the site and base your email around it.
•    Spend time finding the most appropriate contact rather than just sending an email to info@
•    Websites build links over time and the power of the older pages are lost due to broken links and poor site architecture. Link reclamation is a process of reclaiming these links and regaining the power.

Resources to bookmark

•    http://www.dwpub.com – Daryl Willcox Publishing. Their tagline is “If you have the story we have the contacts” Using a list of journalist they syndicate newsworthy content.
•    usertesting.com, 4Q and SurveyMonkey.com – low cost customer feedback tools
•   Google Alerts, serph, Twing, Omgili – free tools to monitor your brand mentions online
•    Clicktale.com – watching movies of visitors’ browser behaviour
•    www.conversion-rate-experts.com/101ways – how you could improve your conversion rates.

A4U Expo Round up is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Google Local is a relatively new channel for marketers to obtain traffic and however much we theorise and assume how valuable it is, nothing will give clearer data than tracking and monitoring. We track and monitor every other aspect of our organic and paid search so why wouldn’t we want to track other channels that generate site traffic?

From an analytical point of view Google Local could previously only be measured if a browser came through the Google Maps section to our site.  We were not naturally able to measure visits from a Local Business Listing (LBL) unless we implemented tracking codes.  Now there are a few posts around the web detailing how we should track Google Local, in particular from Martijn Beijk who specialises in Google Local. What I found interesting after reading these posts was that no one ever replied back, detailing whether implementing the analytic codes created any problems and if so, how they dealt with these issues.

We recently implemented tracking code to one of our clients’ local business listings. We experienced some issues along the way which inspired me to write this post about how to track Google Local.

Track URLs in Local Business Centre

One method that was recommended by a few people was implementing a tagged URL within your local business listing through the local business centre. This included giving each local business listing a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, theoretically it should then appear in GA under traffic sources – campaigns

In order to tag a URL you should use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in specific information in the tool. The campaign source (in this case; Google local), the campaign medium (local business listing) and also give it a campaign name to differentiate various listings, for example Search_Consultancy_London.

Just to clarify, if tracked correctly the statistics should appear within Traffic Sources – Medium – Local Business Listing

One aspect that you need to be aware of before you update the new tagged URL is to remove any “%2B” or “%20” symbols.  The symbol %2B is part of the URL encoding process and it merely means ‘+’, similarly to %20 which means space. In my experience and after discussing this with others these characters should be replaced with underscores. Hyphens are better from a search perspective but you are not trying to rank this page as it is merely a tagged URL.

Once you have inserted this tagged URL, the local business centre it states that it can take up to 48 hours for the change to be updated. We waited, and waited some more but the change never took place. Some people say you have to wait up to 2 weeks for Google to update their listings to include your utm source code within the URL. After 7 days the update still did not occur and we were not willing to wait any longer as a week without data was long enough. I still remain sceptical that this method works and would love to hear from anyone who implemented this -  was it successful and how long you had to wait? Are you still waiting?

Use Vanity URLs to track page views

Another option is to create separate landing page URLs for each listing that is within the Local Business Centre. The separate landing pages are essentially duplicate pages of the original URL but given a vanity URL name.

For Example:

Original URL:

http://www.example.com/location-service

Vanity URL:

http://www.example.com/localad-location-service

To avoid the duplicate content issue and to specify to Google the canonical URL we would simply input the canonical tag within the source code of the Vanity URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/location-service”/>

Once you have created this page, insert the vanity URL into the Google Local Business centre. The beauty of this method is that it appears in less than 48 hours and you can see instant results. Statistics would appear in content – top content – then type in “local” within the filter box.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method; the main factor is you are restricted to the amount of quantitative data you can analyse.

Since the URL of the local ad page has not been tagged it does not appear within the traffic sources as a ‘medium’. This prevents you from easily evaluating how much traffic this medium generated in comparison to other sources. Furthermore, site visits to the local ad page can only be determined through accessing the top landing pages within the content section of analytics which is not ideal.

Another negative aspect to tracking your local search this way is if you are running an ecommerce booking engine through your Google analytics you will not be able to analyse how much revenue was generated through Local search.

This can only be determined if you tag the URL, which brings me on to my last method.

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

This method may take a little bit more time in liaising with client programmers and web developers but it is the preferred and recommended method.

First you need to set up a vanity URL, but this time do not create a page, just a URL that will be 301 redirected to the original tagged URL which we spoke about in the beginning.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location

needs to be 301 redirected to the following URL

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location.htm/#utm_source=GoogleLocalutm_medium=local_business_listing&utm_campaign=london

This would then track all visitors and able us to see the TOTAL number of visits from Google Local Listings within the Traffic Source (separate to organic and everything else) under the medium local_business_listing (or whatever you decided to title your medium within the URL builder)

This will ensure reporting on monthly statistical data is far easier as you can compare the effectiveness of your campaign and evaluate individual segments.

The amount of data you can now analyse through this method is much greater than the previous method. Additionally to appearing under traffic sources – medium it will also appear as a tagged campaign under traffic sources – campaigns which will let you view each individual listings analytics.

It also provides you with further dimensions in which to breakdown the data, including:

•    keywords visitors typed into Google to trigger your listing
•    Visitor type (new vs. returning)
•    Visitor Country/territory/region

Most significantly, if you have e-commerce set up through analytics it allows you to view how successful your local ad is in terms of generating revenue.  Within traffic sources you can breakdown the following:

•    Overall Revenue
•    Transactions
•    Average Value
•    Conversion rate
•    Per visit value

We also found that by creating the Vanity URL and implementing this in the Local Business Centre it actually improved our local ranking.  We believe this is due to the added keywords within the Vanity URL so ensure you use appropriate and relevant keywords (without spamming) related to what you wish to appear in the local listings for.

How to Track your Google Local Listing is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The value in regards to SEO is not the only factor that we will be analysing, the effect bold and italic tags has on usability and their ability to convert customers will also be considered.

Halt…. Attention:

Beliefs are split into two camps; some people believe that the bold tag is now ineffective whereas others still believe it holds value.  Within the SEOmoz ranking factors, the contributors (various respected industry figures) draw the conclusion the bold tag has a moderate importance.   Opinions and attitudes here range from “Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much”, “I’m still doing it sometimes, but I’m really starting to wonder why” to “We focus on communication to the user; we never bold terms in an effort to rank for them”

These opinions contrast particularly to the views from 3-4 years ago, where contributors to the SEOmoz ranking factors (2005) commented: “I think that this is still very important” and “H1 and BOLD are still vital indicators of important factors.” The belief was the algorithm used to determine that any keyword placed within a bold tag would be given value as to determining what the page is about. The question is, has Google now realised this was being manipulated for the search engines and not for the user as was its original intention? Additionally, is the bold tag now obsolete?

Why and How to utilise the bold tag

Personally I believe that the bold tag still holds slight value and should be incorporated within on-page content.  Search engines spiders can read and understand html code so it seems logical that the assigned keyword within a bold tag would carry a degree of importance to the page.  This question still remains to be decided whether it carries any ranking weight but undeniably it does carry visual weight.

The usability of a website is a big feature of converting visitors into customers. Bold tags are vital for catching readers that scan, reinforcing the belief that they have found the right page. Various eye tracking data indicates users are drawn to breaks in the text, including bold and italic fonts.

Furthermore, when online users read or scan text, they apparently will only re-evaluate their scan strategy when they detect particular formats. One of the main factors, that subconsciously make users eyes stop and evaluate; is bold tags.  So even if they hold no weight within search engines, I feel it is vital to ensure you give your website the best possible chance to connect with visitors.

Research always shows that user behaviour when consuming information on the internet follows a very basic pattern. In Jakob Nielsen’s words; site visitors don’t read; they scan. His study found that only 16% of people will read a post word by word. The implication is that readers need to be able to extract the key messages of a post at a glance, and not have to work for it. This means that content must be made scannable. Roll out the red carpet; cue the brass band and the victory march parade!  Welcome home Bold…

So to end, I was recently watching the film American History X and related to the part in the script when he said “it’s always good to end a paper with a quote, if someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong”.

So here is my victim, Seth Godin.  He undertook an experiment regarding eye tracking and said he learnt the following:

“The biggest lesson wasn’t news to me, but it might be to your boss: your visitors are not rational and organized and linear. You can’t count on them sitting still and hearing your story from beginning to end. They won’t. The answer is not to try to change human nature. It’s to embrace the hunting skills that people are bringing online (and to their daily offline media consumption) and to make your media match their needs.”

Resources:

The following resources can help you monitor how well your online content is doing in terms of time spent on page and users clicks.

Heat Mapping

Crazy Egg, ClickDensity, Google Analytics (Site Overlay)

How to be Bold and Influence People is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Through the creation and posting of videos illustrating your products or service a sharp boost of brand awareness can be gained via user generated content sites like YouTube.  Currently 48% of internet users have been to a video sharing website like YouTube (fact finding = tick) So by simply positioning your brand online it can help to generate an extra channel of traffic to your website.

The expectant long term increase of site visitors is not the primary focus of hosting online videos as it can first and foremost be a successful and valuable asset to generate brand awareness for your client. Companies such as Nokia have successfully utilised YouTube to show off their products and latest phone features.  So far, the video has 1,222,525 views, 536 ratings and 799 comments.  By establishing a link to the blog from the YouTube page Nokia could leverage the viewers by turning them into website visitors. Since this is a FREE feature I will twist anyones arm for them to place a link! How can you turn down anything that is free, unless it happens to be swine flu of course.

Creating and distributing online videos can enable you to leverage compelling video content and enable you to obtain a consistent stream of traffic from sources outside of the search engines (thought spilling = tick)

No matter what market your client is in posted videos can help illustrate a wide range of products and services. This is a great way of interacting with the consumer and allowing them to not only read your brand message but to visualise it too.

A major turning point in Google displayed search results was the introduction of Universal search. There is an increased frequency of YouTube and other videos showing up in the Google search results. A long term goal is to eventually have your clients videos displayed in the Google search results for selected key terms.  Having a video in the search results can actually generate more traffic than a listing in a higher place due to the interactive nature of a video.  Video optimisation and the allowance of Google to host these in its search results creates a new channel for marketers to exploit and interact with consumers.  The comment feature in particular can be used to monitor the attitude and commonly held beliefs of consumers about the brand. This knowledge can be harnessed and be very valuable for changing negative brand opinions.

It is an ever growing common occurrence for a browser who searches for products and services via a search engine to perform a secondary search on YouTube to see if there are any videos or related content about the original search query. Having video content hosted there can increase the likelihood that the browser will decide to convert into a customer. Popular and successful videos can help become a positive and permanent addition to brand equity.

If there are any questions about this post or if you just want to say hello or even if you want to offer me free products to plug your service feel free to email me on samatvervesearch.com or follow me on Twitter @sammurray

V SEO – why businesses should optimise videos for YouTube is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency