A UK SEO

Google Squared has launched this evening in the UK and after a little play there are a few ideas popping inside my head for quick ways to grab data for link baiting ideas.

For example if you have a football website you can write an article looking at football stadiums ordering by capacity, cost, pitch, size.

Having all this data on screen so quickly means you can start to write an article along the lines of “the 10 biggest… “the most expensive… etc. This is nothing new but it can speed up the process of gathering data for such articles.

Google Squared is still in it’s early stages and some of the data given isn’t correct, it would also be good to see the ability to export to csv / excel and also order the data by a certain field.

Head over to Google Squared and have a go.

Slipping into TV and Print advertising in the last 6 months are requests to search online for … Asking the user to search online then means agencies can achieve almost direct conversions from TV ads. The first occurrence of such request was from mobile phone company Orange who asked people to search for “I am” so nothing too difficult for the SEO team to implement!

With no natural listings in sight they had to go with PPC paying for the traffic that followed instructions to search online for I am. The idea was good but the implementation was slated in the SEO community.

Similar to Orange computer animated film Monsters V Aliens asked people to search for MVA, with www.mvaconsultancy.com firmly holding down the number one organic spot PPC was used again to grab the traffic. I made a post with more details about MVA, the PPC campaign wasn’t well implemented and will have costed a small fortune. .

It seemed that most agencies were not getting the grasp of asking people to search online but then along come Tales of the Road from direct.gov, Think! and the Department of Transport.

The advert teaching kids about road safety asked the viewer to search online for “tales of the road”. Not to hard to remember and relatively easy to optimise for. The search result for “tales of the road” is is owned by the website with a PPC ad, number one ranking, site links, number two ranking and a video ranking.

Here a subdomain of direct.gov matches the search term. Using a sub domain then allows for site links (site links can appear for a inner page of a site but easier to gain on a sub domain) and a second listing for a inner page. Placing the video on YouTube a trusted domain then allows for the video to rank easily on the first page page.

One small point is that you can place a nofollowed html link in the description to a video on YouTube.

For any agencies implementing a “search for” campaigns then the Tales of the Road is an excellent blue print to use.

It appears that Wolfman Alpha search results are appearing Google results. This search for “search for i am” returns a number 9 position for a Wolfman Alpha search result.

But the robots.txt is currently blocking search engines form the results page such as http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Where+am+I%3F
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pirates+vs+ninjas
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+meaning+of+life%3F

User-agent: *
Disallow: /input/

So either Google is ignoring the robots rule or Wolfman Alpha have only just blocked their results as their are 71 results for a site command on http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/.

Still not found a really good use for Wolfman Alpha… still better than tonight’s Britain’s Got Talent

I’ve noticed this afternoon that Google is now pulling requirements information in the top of the search engnine results page similar to pulling the next fixtures for football teams or the population of france. For example a search for wordpress requirements shows this.

It says “No Special Requirements” as it pulls the information from http://www.brothersoft.com/wordpress-175754.html. but as people will know Wordpress requires;

* PHP 4.3 or greater
* MySQL 4.0 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module for SEO friendly URL’s

Come on Google get it sorted, the brothersoft website can hardly bee seen as trusted site with loads of adverts it says that WordPress that is shareware costing $19.95.

I’m guessing this is happening on plenty of searches so far i’ve seen it on:

phpbb requirements

Add any other examples in the comments below!

Enhanced WP-ContactForm is a popular Wordpress plugin which adds a neat contact form to your WordPress blog. This can be completed with two small changes to you contact page.

1. Add the tracking code to the form.

On line 185 of wp-contactform.php

change to

All you are doing is adding the track page view which throws a page view into Analytics after the success message is displayed.

2. Move the tracking code

The original Google Analytics tracking code needs to be placed before the line you just added to the contact form. In WordPress I have placed the tracking code on the footer so I just copy & past the footer and header into the page template. The move the code from the footer into the header. If you use a WordPress plug in to manage your tracking you might need to use a plugin that places the tracking code in the head of your template or have a little play around.

All done sent a test contact and in Google Analytics this will appear as a page view.

Now just add that page as a goal and then Google Analytics will start to track conversion rates.

If you want you can add similar tracking when the contact form fails, this will track if the user enters an invalid field. This is useful to track if you think people may be having problems filling out the form. Although the above method applies to Enhanced WP-ContactForm the same concept should be applied to forms that just refresh the page, add the page view just after the confirmation statement and move the tracking to the top of the page.

I search the internet a lot during the day and I do come across dodgy sites but this afternoon this one has rather annoyed me. A search on Google for LPG Conversions and down on page 60 will show you the start of a network of sites targeting the key phrase “LPG Conversions + Area”.

In total they are around 19 of these sites and they are ranking well in Google for a range of searches. Once you dig down into the site they don’t link back to one site which is strange but the phone numbers go to “Rochdale Auto Rescue” who don’t have a site so you wouldn’t really call them up about a LPG Conversion.

It just seems all very pointless that this network of sites takes up places on the SERP’s where legitimate companies could be.

It looks like Google Webmaster Tools is having a few issues at the moment with listing a 404 error on /index.html from external links pointing at that URL, but when you look at the external links they all point to the root of your site e.g. http://www.domain.com. I’ve seen such an instance this morning on a client’s site.

This has been noticed by Fizzarotti who posted on YouMoz.

The fix implemented by Fizzarotti decided to 301 /index.html back to the root. This can be done by rule in the htaccess file if your an an apache server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

This screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools shows the 404 error for /index.php with 100 links pointing to the page. (click to see larger image).

A second screenshot lists the pages where that link to /index.html. Check over them all point to the root of the site and not /index.html (click to see larger image).

In this example the rankings of the site haven’t been poor in recent weeks, Fizzarotti’s case on SEOmoz the site had dropped several rankings. I’m guessing there is another problem with Fizzarotti’s website and this ‘issue’ in Google Webmaster Tools is a reporting problem.

If you’ve seen the same problem add a comment below.

Tracking conversions on a site is essential, most of the time you track on the completion of forms on the “thank you” page. Some sites have mailto links which open up blank e-mails, so how do you track clicks on such links?

Well take your standard link

Then add in the JavaScript tracking and ?subject=E-mail John to set a subject for the message (not essential but see later on).

That page view “mailto/john” will start to appear as a page view on the top content section on Google Analytics

Next add that into a goal.

So at the end of the month you’ll be able to get a total of times the link has been clicked. Then check your inbox / ask the client how many e-mails they have received with the subject specified in the mailto link, in the example “E-mail John”. You then have the data work out of the conversion of clicks to e-mails received. E.g. 100 clicks 60 e-mails = 60% conversion.

If the conversion is low then you might want to change the link to go to a contact form, often people are more likely to fill out forms and some users won’t have their e-mail set up on Outlook which opens on the click of mailto links.

Recently I’ve been advising about best practice in the layout and design of Ecommerce Websites. SEO goes hand in hand with layout and design. A good design should result in easy and good SEO.

Here are four layouts in my opinion that make for a good layout for ecommerce sites. The structure works best for site with not too many products around 50-400 products.

Home Page / Static Pages

Category

Product Lists

Product Page

For a more detailed look see this pdf.

Search Engine Rankings move, they move a lot and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it but keep on the track of building content and links which should reduce the movement.

How much can they move? Well in the matter of 12 hours my Blackpool FC blog move from 3 to 9 on the first page for the key phrase “blackpool fc“.

So happy happy, joy joy with a number three ranking, the official club site takes up number 1 and 2 spot so no room for improvement. That was about 11 last night.

This morning at 11, whammy all the way down to 9 on the bottom of the first page. I’m signed out of my Google account which can skew the results.