Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Google. And delicious little pain au chocolat pastries they had too! They also provided some interesting insights into search behaviour.

The breakfast briefing was the first in a series of digital marketing briefings being organised for members by the Digital Marketing Institute. The turnout was so huge that the queue for coffee snaked rather a long way. Alot of interested people.

One of the hot off the press insights that the Googlers in Barrow St. shared with us, from their massive amounts of data was:

mobile search had out-performed desktop search for the first time

It was just on one day, but it just shows the massive shift in online behaviour.

The briefing focused on two key areas:

• tips on little-used functionality for your adwords campaigns
• the latest on mobile advertising campaigns

AdWords Tips

Two aspects of an adwords  campaign were looked at: Ad Extensions and Dimensions.

You may be familiar with Site Links. This is where a search result has links to different parts of the site directly beneath the listing. This makes for a better search experience as the searcher can often go directly to the landing page that interests them. This functionality is available in the AdWords interface also. The cost per click is the same with this enabled. You can find it on a dropdown list on the Ad Extensions tab.

Another feature of Ad Extensions is the location extension. If you’re a local business this is important for you. If the searcher is not looking for your location then you’ve saved yourself a click. You can add this in with Google Places. According to the Googlers, this market is mature in the UK and in the US,  but it isn’t in Ireland and thus offers competitive advantage.

If this tab isn’t viewable for you in your account you can simply add it in by selecting it in the tab on the right.

The other often overlooked facility in adwords is Dimensions. You can use this to see the time of day, for example, that offers the best conversion rates. You could then focus your budget on this time. Or, you could see trends on better performing ads geographically. One very important one to look at is the actual terms the searcher typed in that triggered the ad. If there’s something that’s not relevant for you, you may want to add it as a negative keyword. And save yourself the cost of that click.

Here’s where to find it:

Event take-away

A key take-away from the event was that marketers should never assume they can predict online behaviour, always look at the data. It can surprise you. One client I worked with recently was in the field of clinical research. Now my guess would have been that organic search would not have been a major lead generation channel for them. Wrong.

And the data from analytics, both organic and paid, will show you.

Check out the next blog post for mobile marketing insights from the session.

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.

Your website will probably be the foundation for your online presence, so be sure to put the right bricks in place before you start.

Read on to see some factors involved in the decision and get some inspiration from seeing how others have done it.

Cool Domain Names

Ma.tt – This is the blog of Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, the open-source blogging and CMS platform. The.tt is the country code for Trinidad and Tobago. As you’d expect his blog also has a great theme. The Digital Marketing Institute’s site is built on WordPress.

Jenn.ie - Actually, I haven’t got this one yet, but I’d rather like to..

Appvise.me -another way of creating a cool domain name is to get a.me. This young Icelandic company is building a recommendation engine for apps.

.Me domains were formerly the domain names for Montenegro until they became so popular with the ‘call to action’ and virtual ‘me’ brigade. It’s quite difficult now to find available .me domain names that have active verbs.

Ow.ly – this is a URL shortener used with Hootsuite. So, of course it’s short. It’s also the ccTLD for Libya.

Sift.ie – sift.ie is an Irish start-up and the name has a nice ring to it. They offer a service to ‘sift’ through the deals from voucher sites like CityDeal and email only the relevant deals based on the user’s preferences.

Optim.al – this company aims for ‘optimal’ Facebook ads. It’s easy to remember and optimal.com was taken many years ago. The domain is Albanian.

Sociable.co – the domain hails from Colombia and the similarity to a company suggested these might become popular. But there aren’t too many.

Brand Building

It’s generally advisable to try and register the different TLDs for your name to protect your brand. Also, re-direct them to your main domain. Visitors often forget whether it’s a.ie or a.com when typing in a name, so it’s good to have both. Even if your business starts off small, allow yourself the online real estate for future expansion.

Next.com – you might think this was the UK clothes retailer, but you’d be wrong. This one is owned by Apple and re-directs to the new ‘white’ iPhone 4. A neat idea. But to find clothes, you’ll have to go to www.nextdirect.com.

DropBox.com – one of the most useful services I use is DropBox. This is a great name that is easy to remember. You ‘drop’ documents into the ‘box’ on the cloud and then you can access them from any device online.

hal9000.ie – when you go to develop your brand you need to do some research on domains and see what’s available. You may choose a name that you feel reflects your business. For us, the name hal9000 was chosen as it refers back to the supercomputer called Hal, Series 9000, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was a time before the internet, or digital marketing, existed. Hal reflected futuristic computer technology at the time, but now technology has moved on radically, so it serves as a play on the original name.

It wasn’t possible to get the hal9000.com domain and this is a weakness. Having said that, our target market is primarily Irish and the .ie is the most relevant.

Read more about brand building.

Irish Businesses

.ie domains are the best for those sites which target Ireland only. However, you generally need to be a registered business or trademark to get the name. See Irish Domain Registry at IEDR.ie for more details.

Irish domain name registrations are very popular and are currently running at an increase of 37% each year. Because they are more difficult to register, they tend to be higher quality sites and less spam-like. In fact,.ie domains are amongst the top five safest domains in the world [IEDR.ie]

Why.ie – this one belongs to the IE Domain Registry and the name says it all. It aims to promote.ie domains. This is a useful site giving you the advantages of a .ie domain.

123.ie – there’s a sing-song vibe to this and the radio jingle has been very effective for the company. It’s an example of a domain name that has no keywords but has established a brand name to set them apart. It’s distinctive. Avoid names that are hard to say, for example those with hyphens

Ireland.com – the Irish Times scooped up this one a long time ago (14 years ago – older than Amazon.com). Domestic and international traffic is guaranteed with a name like this.

International Markets

In targeting international markets, it’s generally best to have a country-specific top level domain name (TLD) of the country you’re targeting. For example,  .co.uk in the UK or .fr in France, .de in Germany etc. However, sometimes this is not possible. In France, for instance, you need to have a physical presence in the country in order to register the domain. China has experienced a huge growth in .cn domains.

www.Pants.com -   this might have you think undies (or maybe nonsense!), but in the US where this .com is presumably targeted, they’re selling trousers. This illustrates the importance of having the right keywords for your target market. Even if you start small, you may be exporting globally eventually.

WWW or non-WWW

The www at the beginning of your domain name is optional and leaving it out will make your name shorter. Also Google (in Webmaster Tools) allows you set a preference for the www or non-www version of your domain name. For search engine optimization (SEO) reasons, re-direct the www to the non-www (or vice versa), so that all links are being counted by Google to the one domain.

Quick Top Level Domain Overview

A top level domain (TLD) is the last part of the domain name. Here are the main ones:

.com – most popular and used for sites with an international audience

.org - for non-profits and informational sites

.net – used for business

.info – relatively cheap and so often used by spam sites

.eu – with a European audience and theme

.edu – used for educational (mainly US-based)

.tv – useful for multimedia sites

.mobi – mobile sites – often a subdomain of a main site can be used to hold the mobile specific site which can be picked up by a mobile browser. However, building an app may be a more appropriate solution.

WordPress has gazillions of plugins to perform a variety of functions. Here are a few that are my favourites, either because they save time or look good – or both.

While you may have come across some of these before, hopefully there’s something new.

1. Social

One of my favourites is the TweetMeme Retweet button. It easily allows your posts to be retweeted and shows a count of how many times. You can see it above this post.

And it’s used by TechCrunch, so you’ll be in good company.

2. Mobile

If you check your analytics, you may  be surprised how much of your traffic is coming from mobile platforms. WP-Touch is one of the most popular plugins to render your site for the smartphone screen size. There is now an updated version available, WP Touch Pro with more colour customization.

Here’s what a website looks like rendered on a smartphone without any plugin or mobile-enabled functionality – very difficult to use:

And here’s what a blog site with WP Touch looks like:

3. Sitemap

This site map is for your visitors. If your site is more than a few pages then it’s always a good idea to give your visitors a sitemap in the footer to supplement the navigation and help them find what they want. The one I use is Dagon and was recommended to me by Inspiration, a Dublin Web Design company that specialises in WordPress implementations.

4. SEO

With WordPress, you need an search engine optimization (SEO) plugin in order to customize your meta title and description tags. All In One SEO by Michael Tarbert is probably the most common SEO plugin, but Yoast’s WordPress SEO has more functionality.

5. Broken Links

Broken Link Checker is a handy one to tell you your broken links. Links can become broken either because of typos or because the site your linking to has changed. This one is a time-saver. It’s better for you to find your broken links than Google’s spiders.

6. Related Posts

If one of your readers gets to the bottom of your post, then they’re probably interested in what you have to say. So, offer them some other related posts. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is great for this. It allows some customization so that categories or tags can be excluded and it can also display them in your RSS feed.

7. Widget Placement

This is one of my favourites. You can choose to display a specific widget on the pages/ posts of your choice. In this way, you can customize your sidebars to be more relevant to the page. It’s called Widget Context.

8. Back-ups

In anything to do with computers, back-ups have to be the most boring task. Let this plugin take care of it for you behind the scenes. BackUpWordPress can back-up your entire site, including database, each day. You can even choose to have it emailed to you. Email it to a gmail account and have Google store it for you for free.

You’ll find all of them at WordPress.Org.

What’s your favourite plugin?