There’s a good article posted by Nine by Blue’s Vanessa Fox (who, when working for google was responsible for google’s webmaster central), about why restaurants should care about local search.

Amongst the key points that it makes is that your business needs to take on a holistic approach to its online presence, not concentrating solely on search engine optimisation or social networking, but rather taking them together. It’s not an either or situation.  Fox takes a good example, which rings true:

A woman is reading Twitter and sees that a new restaurant has opened up nearby. Later, when she and her husband are trying to decide (yet again!) what to have for dinner, she remembers the new restaurant. Finally, a new idea! She suggests it. Her husband says great, but what’s on the menu? Will I like it? The woman does a quick search on Google for the name of the restaurant to see if the web site has the menu. Huh. The restaurant doesn’t come up. She goes back to Twitter and starts scrolling back through the tweets, trying to find the right one. In the background, her husband is getting hungry. And after waiting a few minutes, he picks up the phone and orders a pizza.

The moral of the story is as old as the hills, and as relevant as ever. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The amount of restaurants I see locally that have a presence on facebook, but nowhere else, is interesting. They’ve taken a good strategy, to use social networking to increase the visibility of their business, and completely missed the point – partly because it’s free, and partly because it’s this year’s fad. Many of the restaurants don’t even get the facebook equation right,  choosing the wrong options between personal, public and group profiles and having limiting privacy settings to boot (there’s a good article here for facebook seo).

And what they’re missing is the fact that an overall web presence can be cheap/free compared to more traditional marketing methods – so, for example, including yourself in the local business centre at google is a great way to get listed towards the top of the search results in a local search context. It’s free, and will pinpoint you on the map and give searchers useful information that traditionally you might have gone to the Yellow Pages for.

You can choose to add a location in twitter now as well, going into your account settings and clicking on ‘tweet location’. This makes perfect sense for businesses with a local presence – though perhaps less sense for individuals (privacy concerns have been raised by many, meaning it’s an opt-in feature).

If the restaurant has taken the step of setting up its own website (which is a must, in my opinion), then they should consider a number of things carefully to ensure being listed correctly for local searches.

• First, if you don’t have a specific top level domain (like .ie or .co.uk) relevant to your location, and your site is not hosted on a server in the territory you’re located in (both common problems for sites with a .com address), then the very least you need to do is to set up a google webmaster account and select a territory in your profile settings. This will give a very clear indication to google as to what local search index results you should be included for
• Obviously tied to this first point, you’ll need to make sure that your site has content that marks it out for local searches – put your address and telephone number in the page footer (which you should do for your customers in any case), and maybe include maps. Put in some local information on your home page etc.

These are tips obviously for businesses, like restaurants, that rely on people physically finding them – but the lesson is equally important to completely online sites where often the emphasis is equally misguided but in the other direction, ignoring the possibilities of social networking to bring traffic to your site. The presumption being that if your site is indexed by the search engines and ranks well for your keywords, then your online-marketing job has been done.

This of course ignores the fact that, while neither are the google-killers they’re periodically made out to be, both twitter and facebook have powerful search functionality that people use increasingly. Ignore them at your peril. As you rest on your laurels your competition will be out there exploiting them fully.

Food for thought:

Get Found Now! Local Search Secrets Exposed: Learn How to Achieve High Rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing

Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business

Buy any of the above books from the book depository and you’ll get free delivery worldwide!

There’s a good article in Mashable magazine entitled ‘Why Your Brand Needs to be on Facebook Now’, which goes back over the fact that Facebook hit a milestone recently when it became a more visited site than google in the US – that’s their main reasoning behind why your brand needs to be up there: facebook is hugely popular, and with its advertising possibilities it makes sense for you to be on it.

Do you need to be on Facebook? Only if you're going to do it right!

Well, yes and no. Certainly if you’re willing to take time out and design an effective profile that integrates cleverly with your existing online presence; if you’re willing to assign someone the task of maintaining the profile; if you’re going to take social networking in general seriously and devote time to it, then they’re right – your brand should be on facebook.

If, though, you’re going to set up a two-bit page with precious little information or interaction that can’t be found at your main web site, then expect to have a dead duck on your hands – and worse than that, a dead duck with a very prominent fan count that shows it to be a dead duck.

The recent case of Nestle on facebook, where Greenpeace activists managed to combine the open commenting settings of the facebook profile, with the word-of-mouth effect of twitter to effectively turn Nestle’s social network presence into a firm denunciation of the company’s policies, show the danger of taking a half-assed approach to social networking.

If you’re going to do it, then, to paraphrase George Michael (and its not often that I find myself doing that…) ‘do it right, right!’.

Food for thought:

Facebook Marketing

33 Million People in the Room

The Social Network Business Plan

Buy any of the above books from the book depository and you’ll get free delivery worldwide!

Following on from the earlier post about Smashing Magazine’s cash crisis, and the extraordinary measures they’re taking to raise funds, and in response to a comment made there, it struck me that while there’s plenty of talk about how free content is an outdated and unworkable model, hardly anyone talks about the real elephant in the corner – free advertising.

Trying to break the free content model, some publishers risk looking like Canute

The common conversation, when critics of the free content model get started, uses the example of a real physical newspaper. ‘You’d never dream of getting it for free, would you?!?’ they say scandalised. Well, there are plenty of free papers out there – in most cities you’ll find free local papers that survive based on circulation, low distribution costs, and highly targeted advertising. Obviously it’s not fair to compare your local event guide to the New York Times, The Guardian, or any serious national/international newspaper – their costs are much higher. But when you pay for your newspaper, you’re paying for only a small part of the costs – the bulk of any serious newspaper is paid for by its advertising revenue. Take away the advertising revenue and you have a flawed business model for most newspapers – they woulnd’t be able to survive on your subscription.

And when a newspaper/magazine goes online it can reduce its costs to the essentials – the labour required to produce it, and maintain the technological infrastructure of delivery. If the magazine is wildly succesful in terms of readership then advertising should follow, and here’s where the problem occurs.

Online advertising is essentially free, thanks to the major models available ranging from google’s dominant adsense network through to the various affiliate networks available. What publishers are expected to do online is to display a brand prominently to their readers for free. They – in the majority of cases (obviously the bigger a publisher gets, the more leeway they have to negotiate) – only get paid when the reader clicks through the advert.

Imagine a similar situation in the traditional media. A newspaper only gets advertising fees if the customer produces the newspaper when buying a product;  a tv program gets advertising revenue only it can prove that customers of product x have bought it because they saw the ad during their program break.

It wouldn’t fly – not just because of the technical implausability of it, but because it ignores a fundamental that advertisers know only too well. The purpose of advertising is to build up brand recognition – and its a repetitive constant task – the end goal of the advert in a newspaper is not simply to make you jump up like Archimedes, and run to your nearest shop shouting ‘Eureka, give me product x before I explode!’.  The ad men would be delighted if that was your reaction, but they more realistically hope that when confronted with a multitude of choice in the supermarket aisle, you’ll recognise their brand and so favour it. That brand process is being fulfilled by online ads, regardless of the click through.

How to change the model? It’s almost as difficult as changing the free-content model, given that it’s the predominant way people place adverts online. The change certainly won’t come from the advertisers, who are in a win-win-win-win situation. Maybe, instead of the Canute like measure of trying to erect a payment wall around all their content, Murdoch’s minions would be better off using their circulation clout to negotiate realistic advertising fees for placement on their sites – now that would be something useful.

Food for thought:

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

You can buy the above books directly from the book depository, for free shipping worldwide

I recently participated on a discussion (on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/cgHG8R) about the advantages/disadvantages of having a video on your home page.

The discussion was an interesting one, bringing up various aspects including accessibility, brain-mapping, and general layout pros and cons, but one thing struck me forcefully – the ‘received wisdom’ that video has no seo benefits for your page at all. One commenter went so far as to say

[video]” is a bad idea. Distracting, absolutely a loser for SEO (The guy ** [referring to an early contributor to the discussion] has no clue).”

Now, aside from the arrogance of that answer, it’s also completely wrong. Adding video to your site can dramatically improve your ranking for some results, if done correctly.

The confusion around video seo comes from a simple and recognised fact – the search engines cannot automatically and independently determine a video’s content. Great strides are being made in voice recognition and image recognition (see this interesting interview Charlie Rose did with Marissa Mayer of Google), but for the moment the search engines when faced directly with a video draw a blank as to what it’s about.

So there are plenty of people out there that have translated that fact into a presumption, that adding video on your site is the same as adding nothing for the search engines.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and yet again wrong. You just need to go to the search engine results themselves to see how misguided this is. Do a search for almost anything these days, and check the front page results and you’ll get mixed media results that include image thumbnails and video thumbnails. Videos are appearing on the front page results (and not just in google video search, nor just from youtube and other big video hosting sites like vimeo etc). Not only that, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence out there (including testing we’ve done ourselves with clients including iguidez) to suggest that it may be easier at the moment to rank highly for some keywords using video rather than a straight seo’d page.

And as with so many seo issues, the best place to start here is with the search engines themselves. Take a trip over to google’s webmaster centre and there’s plenty of information about how to set your videos up so that the search engines can make sense of them, and so add them to their index.

Key to this are general seo best practices –
1) Give your videos relevant filenames
2) Where possible caption your videos – this may/may not help with the seo side of things, but will improve your accessibility and benefits the end user, and we all know that benefitting the end user in many cases carries an seo advantage.
3) Submit a correctly formatted video sitemap – this allows you to give a better picture of the video to the search engines, including keyword tags, description etc.

These are just some of the ways to ensure that your video content is playing its part in your overall seo strategy.

There has always been plenty of debate about the importance of choosing an appropriate tld (top level domain, like .com, .ie, .co.uk etc), and choosing a hosting service based in your main target market.

Until recently the common wisdom was that, if you wanted to rank well in a specific local search engine index, like for example google.co.uk, your best bet would be to have a server based in the u.k, and a .co.uk tld.

It runs against the logic of the web though, as many companies wish to have a .com tld as it is still the most popular and open of tld’s (many tld’s cost a lot, and require a large amount of bureaucracy to prove your entitlement to use them), and many companies operate in a number of different markets. Also choosing a host in your market country might not be economically advisable (for example, a number of years ago many web-site owners in places like Australia chose to host their sites in the States because of the considerable savings available due to competition).

Google has a great track record for focussing on useful results for visitors, so it’s no surprise that they’ve been making efforts to clean up the geo-targetting issue. Matt Cutts discussed it at some length on his site, explaining why increasingly .com results are being returned in local indexes like google.co.uk.

So, one of the big questions of the moment is ‘how do i get my site included in the local index?’ – or to put it another way, using google.co.uk as the example index, ‘how do I get my site included in the results from a search where the user has clicked ‘pages from the uk?’

I helped out a site owner last week on this very issue, so can happily report that it isn’t as difficult as you might think. In a forum this particular site owner described his situation – he has a .com site that is performing well in the main search from google.co.uk, but when searching in ‘pages from the uk’ index he was nowhere to be found (and we did a check, searching for some unique text on his site, so it wasn’t – as often is the case – that his site was indexed but not performing well, which is a separate issue).  The solutions posed in the forum included
1) Change to a google.co.uk domain – something which is best to avoid, particularly if your site is already doing well under a .com tld. If you change you’re looking at correctly implementing 301 redirects to avoid losing links and page rank.
2) Change to a host in the UK – switching hosts is one of the most traumatic things a webmaster can go through, and should be avoided if you’ve already found a good value/service host.
3) Change the site from flash, because it’s not seo friendly – this was a bit of a red herring, given that only a small part of the site was built in flash. In any case, while the search engines have always advised using flash only where necessary due to indexing issues, this would be a big change, when the real solution was much simpler.

So? What did we do?
We did what all webmasters should try first, and that’s follow google’s advice. We set the site up in google webmaster tools and, in the site configuration / settings section, we set the geographic target to the uk. A couple of days later the site was appearing in local searches.

Some caveats:
1) Your site should realistically be appropriate to that geographic market – if you’re a Russian spam site and you set your target market as google.co.uk in webmaster tools don’t expect it to work
2) Consider whether you actually want your site to focus specifically on one market. Depending upon what your business is, it may maker more sense to leave things open. The site in this case was a hairdressing salon, so obviously they want to do well in local searches – but if you sell goods online, and your physical location is largely irrelevant, then why bother focussing on local search.

It seems that Googlehas suddenly  subscribed to that famous old adage of Bill Shankly’s – football is not a matter of life or death, it’s more important than that – given that they’ve started pushing Premiership, and Serie-A fixtures to the top of their serps (search engine results pages) for searches using city names that coincide with clubs.

Search for Bologna, and google seems to assume that you're a footie fan

Example, do a search in google.com for Bologna, and you’ll get at the top of the page – with a football icon – the next two fixtures for Serie-A club Bologna FC, provided by UEFA.

Try the same for Blackburn and you’ll get the next two Premiership fixtures for Blackburn Rovers, provided by premierleague.co.uk.

This is an interesting development, and one that may cause a bit of a flurry for those developing and running travel-related sites, where ranking for a particular city name is important, and made just that little bit more difficult by these seemingly parachuted-in results.

Maybe it’s because searches for these two cities statistically tend towards football, but I doubt it – particularly in the case of Bologna which is struggling to remain in Serie A, and can hardly half-fill its stadium for most matches.

It’s hard to argue, I would suggest, that  the #2 and #3 results for ‘Bologna’, wikipedia pages on the city and the sausage respectively,  are less important than upcoming fixtures for Bologna fc – indeed Bologna fc’s actual site ranks a lowly #15 on the serps for the same term.

Interestingly if you do a search for Milan, where the wikipedia page for Berlusconi’s club A.C. Milan is #2 in the overall results, you get no fixtures. Is this because football is less important in Milan? Or because there are two clubs in the city? Or simply because there’s something else triggering the fixtures at the top of the page?

Probably because there’s something else triggering the results, given that a search for Liverpool – a city which has two clubs – gives upcoming fixtures at Liverpool fc only. Will this lead Everton fc fans move over en-masse to Bing as a protest?

And why is it that these results are only coming through – as far as my brief research shows – for Serie A and the Premiership. What about Spoain’s La Liga, and the German  Bundesliga?

All of which is to say that, though we’re  football fans at Boduweb (and support Bologna FC as it happens), maybe it’s best to tweak this new system so that fixtures get returned for searches for the club not the city.

Google has just published an interesting research paper which suggests that they have made big advances in the image-recognition software field. At a computer vision and pattern recognition conference in Miami recently, Jay Yagnik, google’s head of vision research claimed that their new system has had an 80% accuracy in identifying untagged images of up to 50,000 famous landmarks.

This is exciting news that will, if and when the system is integrated into google’s search engine (to be clear, the research remains, at the moment, just that – research).

Exciting and challenging, because at the same time that google is increasingly adding both image and video results to their main search pages, the current s.e.o practices for images are almost exclusively text and code based. At the moment if you want your images to appear in the google index you need to focus on giving them appropriate file-names, filling in the alt tags with appropriate keywords, and generally optimising the context and page on which the image appears.

Sophisticated image recognition could potentially change all of that. Imagine a site that has lot’s of images on its pages but none that are actually labelled or set up in terms of the above s.e.o. The images are all simply called image1.jpg, image2.jpg etc and the alt tags are left blank. These images are not completely useless to google and other search engines currently – they can analyse the page context and hazard a guess that the images are of something in particular. The chances, though, of the images ranking well are poor though, and are almost completely in the hands of one’s competitors – if they’ve optimised well, they’ll outrank these images easily. It’s also highly unlikely that google will give prominence to these images on the main results page – as the possibility of them being spam is just too high.

If some computer vision system were able, however, to correctly identify these unlabelled images, then coupled with more general s.e.o. on the page you could start to see them crop up on that all important first page of results – spelling a lot of traffic for some, and perhaps a corresponding drop in traffic for others.

For the moment, though, this is all in the future – and related specifically to landmarks and readily definable visual content. The tip for the top is to make sure you have all your images presented on the page in a search engine friendly way (and in keeping with accessibility). So:

1. Give image files descriptive filenames
2. Make sure that images on your page have their alt tags properly filled in
3. Put images in context – to perform well, make sure they’re not left hanging on their own on your site, but are placed in a proper textual context

So the big news in recent weeks has been the presentation of Google Wave, due to be fully launched later in the year. You can check out the presentation here.

As with virtually any new search/social media release, there’s immediate talk of it being a *killer – with twitter being the * in this particular case. It’s also been suggested that this is Google’s shot at robbing some of facebook’s thunder.

Time will tell, but what’s particularly interesting to me is the fact that it’s going to be open source, and the possibilities for integrtation with your website or blog, allowing you to directly apply some principles of social networking to your own website.

Boduweb are already working on an idea for one of our clients – we’ll keep you posted here on the blog about developments. Exciting times ahead!

There’s a great article by Vanessa Fox over at SearchEngineLand.com which, taking its lead from triumphant announcements at the Google I/O conference, discusses the still very real problems some sites have in being effectively indexed and ranked in google and other search engines because of their use of AJAX and Flash – two very useful and established technologies.

Vanessa’s article lays out the key obstacles that these technologies pose for search engine bots, and it’s important reading for anyone who’s entrusting their web-site design to a developer who focusses primarily on those technologies.

We, at Bodu Web, use both Flash and AJAX in plenty of our projects – and we’d go so far as to say that they’re an indispensable part of any designer’s toolkit. The use of either can bring big value both to the look and functionality of any site. But, you need to be sure that their use isn’t going to hamper your site’s ability to be seen by the search engines.

Back in April Google guru Matt Cutts decided to move his blog from his www.mattcutts.com domain to another that he owns, www.dullest.com, changing host and ip address at the same time. All things that can have an impact on how your website performs both for visitors and for search engines.

Now he’s moved it back, and plans to blog a little bit about the experience. It will, no doubt, be recommended reading, because it’s a very common experience – particularly for people starting out with a website.

Commonly it happens like this. You do up a website, or get it done for you by a friend. It’s no great shakes, but it works and you start getting visitors. You develop a following over a period – say a year – and decide it’s time to expand. You do some research and realise that your url structure is an s.e.o. setback, possible security risk, and a pain in the ass for your visitors. So you pay a professional web-design company to update your site, adding design features and switching to search engine friendly links. Maybe at the same time you decide that you want to change the domain name of the site as well.

It takes time and patience, but eventually your brand spanking new site is launched, and you’re delighted. After a while, though, you notice that you’ve lost some page rank, and that your visitor numbers are down.

What may well have happened is that your design company haven’t followed the best practice of redirecting all your old url’s to the new with an .htaccess 301 permanent redirect command. An easy way to check this is to go browse to one of your old url’s – if the redirect has been done correctly your new url should appear in the browser address window.

If you’re not redirecting your old urls to the new, search engines will probably see two near identical versions of the page at two different urls – at which point they’ll judge one of the pages to be duplicate content.

Just as important, if someone browses through an old link to your site, instead of being taken to your snazzy new site, they’ll end up back at the old site (if they’re lucky. We’ve heard more than one story of old files being deleted from the server once a new structure has been launched – meaning visitors get a .404 error).

It’ll be interesting to read Cutts’ experience, also of moving hosts and ip addresses. There’s still a lot of debate about how much your hosting location and ip address affect search results. Having a specific tld (top level domain – .com, .co.uk, .it, .ie etc) or hosting location does seem to affect the performance of a site in a particular country specific searches – something that has caused a lot of controversy for example in Australia, where hosting costs have in the past been prohibitively expensive. Many webmasters have complained that availing of cheaper hosting in the states seems to adversely affect their rankings in the google australia index.

The bottom line if you’re a non-technical person with a website, paying someone to update its design, move host, or change anything fundamental regarding the site’s architecture, is to be aware that serious problems can easily occur just at the moment you’re trying to make the site so much better. In a perfect world the web designer will already be on top of things, but in the real world the onus is on you to ask questions and make sure that best practices are being followed.