A UK SEO

Think Visibility is a mini seo conference taking place next March in Leeds. It’s only ¬£30 to attend and there is a limit to only 100 tickets which makes it sound like a great day.

The topics covered are SEO, PPC, Blogging, Accessibility and Usability. There are some well know speakers too Dave Naylor, Tim Nash, Tom Critchlow and Kieron Donoghue to name a few.

Around 45 tickets have been bought already so if you want to go grab a ticket from http://www.thinkvisibility.com/

The BBC have announced that the iPlayer will now be able to handle downloads on Mac and Linux OS. The iPlayer is one of my favorite sites since it’s launch in July 2007. The only negative is a lack of ability to download content to watch offline if your on a Mac but this all seems to be sorted now.

The next Christmas wish must be for Channel 4 to make their 4OD service work on Mac’s. There has been chatter that BBC would allow other channels to use the technology behind the iPlayer which must be a good thing!

So Woolworths have gone bust and there are many reason for it. A lack of direction, a lack of online marketing maybe? The number of search for Woolworths has gone through the roof as it always does at this time of year.

So search volumes are going through the roof, you have a 50% sale on to get rid of the remaining stock and what happens. Your site goes down.

A few tv and radio adverts are now asking listeners to search for a phrase or product name. The latest is the Nokia mobile phone that comes with free music downloads, your asked to search for ‘comes with music’.

If you are going to take this approach you have to be pretty confident that you can rank for the key phrase, if you don’t your going to be losing out on a heck of load of traffic. Nokia have managed to rank at number 1 for the phrase but at the moment the URL is an IP address http://62.61.85.218 with a flash site, with a chunky no script which looks legitimate. Must be a error from Nokia?

I’m a big fan of Google Webmaters help, it’s great for learning new SEO techniques, keeping on top of algorithm changes and also have a laugh at the odd person who wants help but doesn’t help themselves.

The forums have moved last week getting a new url http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en for the UK users. Theres a slight change to how things work with now the use of the answered button, so if you think that the questioned as been answered you can hit the button. Stats will show up for how many answers and questions made by each member.

Look out for posts from seo101, Phil Payne, John and Google employees. I’m posting under the name aukseo.

The X Factor is huge in the UK, on average it pulls in around 10 million viewers every Saturday night for its 18 week run on ITV. Some of the 10 million viewers each week go on to make the odd related search on Google. Using Google insight you can gain a rough idea of the popularity of each contestant.

At this late stage into the competition (semi-finals next saturday) there are four contestants left in the competition. Diana Vickers, Alexandra Burke, Eoghan Quigg and the band JLS. If you stick those four into Insight, select UK and the past 90 days you get a little graph with four lines for each term search for.

Blue = Diana Vickers
Red = Alexandra Burke
Yellow = Eoghan Quigg
Green = JLS

A few point to take into consideration, numbers are bound to increase as the competition comes to a close as the hype builds. Numbers will also increase as the number of contestants decreases, less people in the competition less people to search for.

From that graph it’s clear to see that Diana Vickers has been well in the lead since the searches picked up in September, JLS are on the rise in the last month, Eoghan Quigg has been pretty steady and there’s only been a slight increase in searches for Alexandra Burke in the last week or so.

What is interesting if you add “xfactor” to the start of each contestants name you get JLS in front of Diane Vickers.

Playing around with key phrases also showed that you can get traffic trends on an almost daily basis. By adding a 5th key phrase “xfactor Diana Vickers” the traffic levels show each Saturday when traffic peaks, lulls during the week and then increases again when the show airs on the Saturday.

So from those stats it looks like the Diana Vickers is the front runner to win. But what do I know, I’m just an SEO my other half thinks it will be Alexandra Burke.

The lesson behind the story, use Google Insight for checking out key phrases, play about to find traffic levels, compare to other key phrases but sometime you need to need use off line key phrase research to pick the best key phrases for your site.

In my last post I pointed out a problem with the Cineworld site, I’ve had a response today

Thank you for contacting Cineworld.

We have recently changed our website and as with all things new, we are
still tweaking it to make it perfect for our users. We truly appreciate
your comments and these will be forwarded to our Web Team for their
consideration.

Many thanks again.

Kind regards,

Natika Morrison
Customer Services

So a good reply and lets hope that the web developers get to work on the fixes!

Cineworld have 74 cinemas around the UK. They are doing pretty well considering the company was only formed in 1996. Their site recently had a bit of a re-vamp but the developers didn’t bother with any re-directs from the old URL’s to the new URL’s. It means my bookmark to my local cinema doesn’t work and they must be losing a big chunk of traffic.

So I thought I’d should sent them an e-mail.

Dear Sir / Madam

I go to the Cineworld Didsbury cinema about three to four times a month. Before the visit I check times by going to the Didsbury cinema page on your site.

Last week I checked cinema times to see a film but when clicking my bookmark the page returned a 404 error. (A 404 error means the page isn’t there). It was at this point I noticed the site has been redesigned and after a quick check released that the inner page URL’s had also changed. For example

The old Didsbury cinema page URL was :

http://www.cineworld.co.uk/reservation/ChoixResa.jgi?REGION=4&CINEMA=84

The new Didsbury cinema page URL is now:

http://www.cineworld.co.uk/cinemas/18

I know a little about websites and Internet marketing, so I’ll give a little bit of free advice. Add 301 re-directs from the old URL’s to the new ones. This way when clicking on my bookmark I’ll get automatically re-directed to the new URL. Best of all the search engines will also get re-directed. Your site must be loosing a lot of traffic indeed which can have the knock on in less people visiting the cinema.

The re-directs can be done by adding rules to your htaccess file. It’s pretty simple, any problems do e-mail back.

Kind Regards

Lets see if we get a reply.

A few days without a post as I spent the weekend in the lovely Birmingham, it rained. Since the last post Google has released Search Wiki, it’s being doing the round on labs and it’s now been rolled out onto Google accounts.

The simple explanation is you can now move rankings up and down, add comments to rankings and this data can be used to present ‘better’ results to you and other Googlers logged into Google accounts.

Now ‘better’ is placed in bold there due to the face that most people have started to spam the hell out of it. The best exampled form Dave N. It looks like SEO’s will big up their own clients and dismiss competition. This has already confused one client who removed all the competition from the top serp’s in his industry and then wonder why there was no increase in traffic as he was now number 1.

In terms of does this change anything in your standard SEO, not much it just places more preference on having a user friendly site and having a good service. As the saying goes if you offer a good service not many people will recommend you, have a bad service or product then 10 people will let friends, colleagues know etc. Doesn’t have to be be 10 but that sounds like a good number…

So really Search Wiki seems to be more to do with reputation management that SEO, that is providing Google doesn’t unleash the product onto the main search??

I noticed today a slight change in Google handling 302 re-directs. I’ve seen in the past site still rank even if there was a re-direct from the domain to an inner page or folder. For example.

www.domain.com -> 302 -> www.domain.com/inner

What would happen is Google would still rank the www.domain.com in the listings, not the inner page www.domain.com/inner. But today the home page dropped out of the rankings, even out of the index. As no page rank is passed to the inner page www.domain.com/inner and internal links pointed to the root of the site the inner page wasn’t stronger enought to rank.

The lesson here, you should never have a 302 re-directs, always re-direct with 301. To check if you re-directs are done correctly use a http server header checker.