hal9000.ie

Optimising a site for searchers involves doing some keyword research to see what exact terms searchers are using to find what they’re looking for. And the Google Keyword Tool is your friend here. Once you’ve discovered which keywords have the highest traffic, then you optimise the page accordingly.

But what if your searchers can’t spell?

Take a look at this piece of research from Google where they show just how many ways Britney Spears fans spell her name.

Then you might want to start optimising the site for the misspellings. But having poor spelling across your site is not the ideal situation either.

It’ s much easier to target these kinds of spelling variations in a PPC campaign as you can target any spelling but this spelling does not have to be in your ad.

But for SEO it’s a bit more challenging.

Take Dún Laoghaire for example. Even if we ignore the fadas, some research shows us the local monthly search traffic in Ireland on the term and it’s variations.

1. dun laoghaire    135000
2. dunlaoghaire    110000
3. dun laoire             12100
4. dunlaoire                8100
5. Dunleary                   720
6. dun leary                  590
7. dun laoghare            28
8. Dunleery                    12
9. dun leery                     5

Google itself is very good at understanding different spelling variations and will often show you results based on what it thinks that the searcher meant. Which is very handy when your typing is wonky.

But one way of optimising a site for a term is to use the anchor text in a link to the site to associate the site with the different spelling. For example, a fantastic site was built for Dun Laoire and you can find Dunleary news and the Dun Leary gallery on the site.

Want to win €500??

Well it’s the last chance to enter the BlueBrick Video Competition. The idea is to create a video which encourages prospective students to visit BlueBrick and upload it to YouTube – what could be easier.

BlueBrick is an education portal that allows visitors to search for a huge range of higher level courses throughout Ireland and also to compare and then apply online.  The projects aim is to increase the number of part-time and flexible learning students in Ireland.

Video Marketing has become a huge growth area and is a great way of engaging visitors on your website and helps to decrease bounce rate. Also, having well-optimised videos on YouTube or Vimeo and video-sharing sites is a great way of link-building.

For example, if you’re interested in digital media what about taking a look at this digital media course in Dublin?

Having other websites linking to your website has long been established as a ranking factor with search engines. It’s also clear that no two websites offer the same value in the links.

The ideal scenario is to obtain these links naturally, or organically. What Google likes to see are websites with great content that other sites want to link to. For many businesses the process of creating compelling and fresh content in order to obtain a link profile in this way is challenging (to say the least!).

So, one other way to add to your link profile with the aim of improving your search engine optimization (SEO) is to add your site to Local Directories.  This has the two-fold advantage of raising your online profile with users of the directory and driving traffic to your site, while at the same time enhancing your SEO.

Many of these are free directories, but some offer paid inclusion or premium listings. A key SEO factor is the type of link offered. Ideally use directories that offer ‘followed’ links. This is a technical specification in the creation of the link and a ‘followed’ link means that the search engine ‘follows’ the link and transfers link value. One of my favourite Irish business directories is:

Ireland-free-directory.eu

Local Directories

Finding directories that have listings for your area or perhaps county are another source of links and of traffic. These local directories have more relevance for your site geographically from an SEO perspective and for visitors also. The BRAND project is a fabulous initiative which has seen the creation of a Dun Laoghaire Town website. This is to meet the needs of residents, local businesses aswell as visitors and is a great resource. Businesses based in Dun Laoghaire can list on the site also:

http://www.dunlaoghaire.ie/local-businesses/list-your-business/

Niche Directories

It’s also a good idea to list with industry-specific or niche directories that will have greater relevancy for your particular audience or keywords that relate to your product or service. OOYO Sports is a recently launched online sports directory which is currently running a promotion offering 12 months FREE listings in Ireland (see details on their blog). So for those in the sports events, classes or therapies area, this is a great opportunity. For example, if you are running Dublin Yoga classes but don’t have a marketing budget this is the place for you. There is also a blog on the site which the owner is committed to developing and aims to create a go-to place for Irish sports enthusiasts.

Examples of niche directories are:

Ooyosports.com                                – sports classes events & therapies

Iloveshopping. Ie                              –  retail (run by AnPost)

Irishengineeringdirectory.ie        – engineering related

Mediastreet.ie                                     – media & marketing

Local SEO

A Google Places listing is crucial for the local SEO for businesses with a local target audience. Again, this is a free service from Google. It’s becoming even more important with the increase in smartphone usage where the location data is used in mobile delivery of Google Places results.

User-generated reviews on these local ratings directories are important in influencing these results. Google has had to remove review content on its Google Places listings that was taken from external directories such as Yelp, and it now just links to the reviews. But these reviews still have influence. Reviews from other Google Users are now displayed.

Some local review sites include:

Dublin.ratemyarea.com

Yelp.ie

Qype.ie

Whoseview.ie

List also on directories for your specific local area.

Anchor Text

Directories vary in what content they allow, but where you can it’s beneficial to use anchor text on your keywords in the link back to your site. Also add descriptive content with targeted keywords about your business where possible.

SEO Tip

As always in SEO, a great way to find relevant directories to list with is to do some competitor analysis. Do this by selecting 2 or 3 of your competitors that are ranking well online and take a look at their link profile and use Google to see which directories they are listed with.

Want to see some other SEO tips?

Web Analytics is key to having a website perform well. But often you visit your own or your clients sites a great deal and you don’t want this to skew the traffic figures. You can visit the site directly, so you’re not included in search traffic figures, but it’s best to exclude your traffic altogether.

There are a number of web analytics products out there with Google Analytics being one of the most commonly used and the one we’ll focus on here. Many of the others use cookies in a similar way for tracking. IBM now own Coremetrics and Adobe bought Omniture.

There are a few ways you can achieve this:

1. Use a Browser with Cookies disabled

The easiest way is to simply use a separate browser for looking at the sites you don’t want to appear in traffic stats for. Analytics tracking works using cookies and these are set at browser level. If you use a different browser with all cookies disabled then you will not be tracked. Ensure that you are not logged in to Google on this browser also.

For example, I generally use Firefox as my browser, so I use Internet Explorer for browsing my own and client sites. I have ‘Block all Cookies’ set in this browser (it’s in the Privacy tab of Options in Tools tab). This doesn’t affect the use of cookies in my Firefox browser.

2. Filter your IP address in Google Analytics

You can filter out your own traffic for Google Analytics tracking by creating a Filter in Google Analytics and selecting ‘exclude your IP address’ and filling in the numbers.  This option will only work if you have a ‘static‘ IP address ie. one that does not change. Most businesses will have a static one but most home service providers will have ‘dynamic‘ IP addresses. These change on a daily basis.

Find out your IP address at www.whatismyip.com.

This option will completely remove the filtered traffic from your reports, so the data is not held or kept at all for these visits.

3.  Set cookies to disable tracking

The other option is to set a cookie to disable the tracking for a particular website. This will have to be done by computer. For example, if you use a laptop and a desktop you would need to set the cookies on each.

a) You do this by setting up a new page and editing (in html) it as follows:

<body onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('test_value');">

This piece of code will be in addition to the Google tracking code you have already on each page.

b) Set the cookie by visiting the page from whichever computer you want to not track visits from.

c) Set up a Filter in Analytics to exclude the visits from machines with this cookie as follows:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

For more on this take a look at this Google Analytics Support page.

4. Use Advanced Segments to exclude your internal traffic

You could also take a look at this tutorial on using Advanced Segments to exclude your internal traffic from your reports. This option has the advantage of not removing the traffic completely, so that the data is still available to you.

Update 12 Sep 2011

Google also have a browser add-on (Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on) which allows you to not send your details of your visit to analytics. It’s available for most browsers.

See http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en

Here’s a fantastic presentation showing how the focus in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has shifted over the years. It’s from Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz and shows how the various Google algorithm changes have impacted on the approach to SEO.

The slides look at the emphasis in the early days on on-site optimization, and then the focus on linkbuilding. Now, there is increasing attention to social factors with content shared on Twitter providing ranking signals for Google and Bing.

It has some interesting research on rankings post-Panda update.

The law relating to the use of cookies by websites changed on 1st July 2011, but it’s not clear exactly how this affects website owners.

What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a small text file which is placed on your computer when you visit a website at the request of that website’s server. They are used for things like tracking site usage with analytics software, for personal recommendations on shopping sites and storing user names for sites.

Old Law on Cookies:

Previously, the law stated that a visitor should be able to opt out of using cookies. In general, website owners interpreted this in such a way that the Terms and Conditions on the site (or Privacy Policy) said that agreeing to use the site constituted opting in. The statement would also usually say that users can disable cookies in order to opt-out.

New Law on Cookies:

Now however, the EC (Electronic Communications Network and Services) Regulations 2011 is more specific and requires that:

• A user has given consent
• Information about the use of cookies is prominently and comprehensively displayed for the user

The only exception to this is where the storing of a cookie is necessary to carrying out the task that the user has specifically requested eg. items in a shopping cart. And in this case the cookie should be deleted at the end of the session.

Why is it a problem for site owners?

Most sites are running analytics which involves the use of cookies. Google Analytics is the most commonly used. It uses 1^st party cookies – this means that the data they collect is not shared and is not personally identifiable data. In fact it is one of the conditions of using Google Analytics that you have a privacy statement which states their use and explains how they are used.

The problem in complying with the law now is finding a way of getting consent from users that doesn’t get in their way and interrupt their browsing experience. Nobody wants to see pop-up boxes.

And the law is not clear on how to do this.

Possible Solutions

• The use of pop-up windows would ensure compliance with the new law, but would provide a poor user experience.
• Browsers could be implemented so that the default position is NOT to allow cookies or to make the settings more obvious to users. This solution is outside the control of site owners.
• Website terms and conditions with a positive indication eg. where the user has to tick an agreement box.

In the UK, site owners have been given 1 year before having to comply with the new law. In the meantime, the UK government is engaging with browser companies like Microsoft, Mozilla and Google to reach a workable solution.

What do the lawyers say?

Legal teams have been looking at the new law, but are not in a position to guide website owners on technical solutions. See what McCann Fitzgerald have to say.

Conclusion

It seems to be a bit of wait and see. It looks like browsers will be the way forward.

In the meantime, make sure your T&Cs or Privacy Policy makes it clear that you’re using cookies (if indeed you are).

Google launched their latest iteration in search recently with the +1 button.

You’ll start to see this appear across the web in search results, and on websites. It’s the Google equivalent of a Facebook ‘Like’ button and it’s Google’s attempt to get some of the social data that Facebook has in spadefuls.

It’s a social layer that is being built in to search and your results will be influenced by those in your social network and the items that they have ‘plus oned’. Having said that, your social network are contacts you have in Google (in Gmail and Google profiles), which is not the social beast that Facebook is.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online.   TechCrunch

So how does this affect search engine optimisation (SEO)? Well the number of people who have plus-oned a web page may become a ranking signal for Google. If  people are recommending it, then it’s a strong case for the quality of a page.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too crazy about the ‘+1′ naming of the concept, but let’s see how well it takes off.

You can take a look at the top right of this post to see it in action (feel free to ‘plus one’ it).

You can get one to add to your WordPress site by using this plugin. Others are available for different platforms.