hal9000.ie

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is now running a TV advertising campaign on Channel 4 in the UK. The ad appears targeted at the younger demographic and features a character suffering the poorly, robotic, effects of ‘irrelevant’ information overload.

Advertising on the telly is a new approach for search engines and shows that Microsoft values traditional media to bring it new customers. To this end, Bing is also sponsoring The Simpsons, coinciding with the show’s 20th anniversary.

Here’s what the Search Engine market share looks like globally, as at Feb 2010, according to marketshare.hitslink.com:

In the UK, according to Mediaweek, Microsoft has a 4% share, the same as Yahoo!, while both are dwarfed by Google’s 86%, (Nielsen Online statistics for January).

The picture in Ireland is similar, with Google streets ahead of the other search engines (indeed, it is literally streets ahead when it comes to Google streetview, but that’s another story…).

So, is it about to change?

And the answer is yes – that’s the only definite on the internet, that it will change. But will traffic move to the Facebook ‘walled garden’ or will search engines eek out their own markets, only time will tell.

You can submit site to Bing at:   www.bing.com/webmaster/submitsitepage.aspx

We are offering a FREE Website Evaluation to the first 10 people to subscribe by email to our Blog!

For the first 10, Irish-based, customers to subscribe by email to our Digital Marketing Blog, we are offering a FREE Website Evaluation.

The evaluation will deliver a written report detailing how effective your web site is from a Digital Marketing perspective. The report will contain recommendations on how to increase traffic to your site, and on how to improve on your Google page rankings, thereby resulting in higher entries on the search engine results page (SERP).

After subscribing to the Blog, simply Comment here with your Email address and the URL of your site and broad description of your business area.

Of course, if your site is perfectly optimised already, then our report may have alot of white space!

The offer is for one week only and will close on March 26th.

You can unsubscribe at any time, and your details will not be used for any other purpose.

This is a possible new logo for us here at hal9000. What do you think? Does it say who we are? Or is it back to the drawing board?

This wee word can be short for bottom, but in the context of the internet we’re talking crawlers (huh?).

In general terms, a bot (derived from robot) is a piece of software which carries out a task, usually with a great deal of repetition. But a ‘search bot’  browses, or ‘crawls‘, the web in an automated way, in pursuit of content to index.

So, in marketing terms, our aim is to have them crawl all over us! And we don’t want the little mites to get lost either (hence the importance of a sitemap and sound navigational structure on your site).

The most famous search bot to crawl these virtual shores is ‘Googlebot‘ – yes, that’s Google’s bot.

How can something so techy sound so much like parasites…they come to feed and we need to leave them out some fresh content..

It’s not enough to be online these days, you need to be online and mobile! Increasing amounts of web traffic are now coming from new generation mobile phones, or smartphones, Apple’s iPhone being one of the most popular.

Mobile Web

The best solution for your online business is to have a site designed for the desktop/laptop and a separate one designed for the mobile. The appropriate one should be picked up by the browser being used. In this way, a WAP enabled site can be used for the older mobile phones and a site optimised for the small screen can be picked up by the newer Smartphones. See the difference between www.rte.ie and m.rte.ie   Or the difference between www.gmail.com and m.gmail.com.

The .mobi top level domain names can now be used for mobile sites. While there is no specific technology required, the aim is to have .mobi sites optimised for mobile browsing and user experiences should be consistent with guidelines. Critics of the .mobi approach point to the overhead involved in maintaining 2 different sites, and to the more fundamental issue of breaking from the device-independent nature of the web up to now.

Alternatively, there are other technical solutions which can render the screen to a small size eg. Opera Mobile. However, these may still be loading/accessing the full web page and so may not be so well optimised in terms of load time.

You can get a scoring for how your site will perform on a smartphone by going to ready.mobi.

Some tips for design for mobile include:

• Avoid specific image sizing and use percentage and relative measures such as em, ex, bolder, larger and thick.
• Keep pages short.
• Keep images small (for quick load time).

Apps

Then, when it comes to Apps, the question is how an app could be developed which could fulfil some ‘need’ or ‘desire’ in your customers. App development is not cheap, but will become more competitive as people enter the market. So, is there a business case for you for developing an app?

There was for payment gateway, Worldnet TPS, who have answered the ‘call to innovate’  and have just launched the first app which turns an iPhone into a virtual credit card terminal. The app allows businesses to accept secure card payment transactions through their iPhone and it is now available on iTunes.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0312/1224266101298.html

Site Load times now a significant factor in Google Indexing

At WordCamp last weekend in Kilkenny, I asked the Google search representatives why a Posterous blog I maintain might be slow to be indexed by Google. Elena responded that she couldn’t comment on any individual site, but that the site load time is a significant factor in Google’s new algorithm.

In the case of the Posterous blog, it is being indexed, but is not being returned in search results for Ireland as it is hosted in the US. The load time is not an issue.

The SEO advice is always to optimise the site load time where Google ranking is critical to the site. The site load time is increased by running Flash (Adobe) visuals, and the number of Javascripts – the number of calls to the server in order to build the page. Obviously, there is a trade-off between design and making your site attractive to customer and ensuring that it loads quickly.  

For sites that run on WordPress, the WP-SuperCache Plugin (or WP-Cache Plugin), which is freely available, can be installed to allow the ‘caching’ of pages, so that the page is built and stored as a static file and served to visitors. In this way, the page is served more quickly as it does not require to build the page from the database again.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

You can check to see how long your site takes to load by running it through Pingdom Tools. This will show you how long each part of your web page is taking to load.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

Here’s the data from this site’s Home page:

Website information

Total loading time:    3.7 seconds

Total objects:  22 (165 KB)

External objects: 0

(X)HTML: 1 (13.9KB)

RSS/XML: 0

CSS: 2 (22KB)

Scripts: 4 (70.7KB)

Images: 15 (58.3KB)

Plugins: 0

Other: 0

Redirected: 0

Google speaks

I’m just back from WordCampIreland held in Kilkenny over the weekend and have a notebook full of juicy tips. This was the first WordCamp to be held in Ireland and proved to be a rich resource for the SEO-minded and online marketer. For those not familiar, WordCamps are a professional meet-up of individuals using, or interested in, WordPress as a site platform. So while it was primarily about WordPress use, the online visibility (SEO and Digital Marketing) of those users was a theme running throughout the sessions.

Google search home page

There were two representatives from Google’s organic search team there (Luisella Mazza and Elena) and the good news is that they listed a number of SEO tips for increasing your Google ranking and enabling easier site crawling for the Google bots. The bad news is that they stated that there are now over 200 factors used by Google in determining page rank!

And they didn’t list them all.

So SEO isn’t getting any simpler. But here are some of the points they made:

Keywords

Use words that people search for.

Categorise your content (blog posts) with keywords.

Use keywords in your URL path.

Have keywords in your Title (Meta Title tag).

Have keywords and ‘English’ description of your site in your Meta Description tag.

Avoid Duplicate Content and Indexing

Use canonicalisation: avoid duplicates by having only 1 version of URL ie. either www.name.com or name.com, not both so as not to have a situation where back-links are pointing to different versions of the same URL. This is to avoid the dilution of link popularity.

If using WordPress, select your preferred domain on the WP Admin panel.

Images

Google’s crawlers cannot ‘see’ images, so they suggest the following to allow them to index what’s on the page:

Give images relevant file names.

Add ALT attributes to your images.

Include a textual description of images.

Spammers, Nasties and Security Best Practice

Check using Google search to see if spammers have made it onto your site. Google gives a ‘malware’ warning if it detects dubious content. This is a sure-fire way to lose ranking.

Spammers hack sites for two reasons: 1) to add links 2) to distribute malware.

Security suggestions include:

• keep an eye on site
• add .htaccess file to increase security
• keep WordPress (or software) up to date

Site Maps and Navigation

Create an XML site map for Google and submit to them.

Create a sitemap for your visitors.

Ensure all pages are linked back to rest of site.