So, after a lot of rumours and behind the scenes testing, Google has come out and made it official – the speed of your website is now one of the (over 200) factors taken into account when ranking your site in the search results.

Cue widespread panic and a lot of shark-like activity on the part of shadier SEO companies – but reading the details, both on google’s official webmaster blog and a reflection by Matt Cutts should put your average site owner’s nerves at ease. Speed is a factor, but it’s a very,very small factor (less than 1% of search results are affected). In fact, this new development has already been rolled out, without any widespread outcry across the net about sites falling down dramatically in the serps (search engine results pages).

So don’t panic, but do take note. Now is as good a time as any to check up how your site is actually doing speed-wise, and to consider making changes to improve the performance. It will certainly be a plus for your visitors, and may have the added bonus now of helping you gain an advantage on your competitors online – because all things being equal (which, given the amount of factors involved in ranking, is never the case – but you get the point), if the only difference between your sites is speed, the faster one will now be ranked higher.

How to go about checking the speed of your site:

There are plenty of free tools out there to benchmark the speed of your site. A good starting point is  Google webmaster tools itself, which now includes a section (under google labs / site performance), which will give you a rough idea of how fast your site is, and make recommendations on how to increase the speed.

If you’re using firefox you can download a page  speed checking add-on tool.

You can get some tips on speeding up performance here (at the yahoo developers network), or here (at Nettuts+)

But above all else, remember, it’s the content on your site that is the #1 factor. Making sure that it’s delivered in a quick and attractive manner makes sense, but if you’re content is crap it doesn’t matter how fast it loads.

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 interesting, though flawed, marketing campaign going on for Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus, The Scoundrel Christ. It takes full advantage of social networking and technology to promote the book, and is worth looking at a little more in detail for other novelists promoting their books online – with or without the help of an established publishing house.

How I stumbled upon the book was, like many others, through two great videos up on youtube, where Pullman talks about the book. The first video sees Pullman give an intelligent and strong response to a question posed during a public reading.  In turn this was tweeted and re-tweeted (look at the sharing stats at bit.ly alone http://bit.ly/info/c8wUyZ) .

This is a great lesson for authors – who often, reasonably enough are somewhat reticent about ‘promoting’ their work. In this case Pullman is saying something interesting, and his marketing team have taken full advantage of technology to let people know about it. It’s a far-cry from a simple ‘buy this book’ plea. It’s also something that you don’t need a publisher or marketing team to do, though you do need to put in effort and research.

The second video is a straight-forward promotional one, where Pullman talks about the enhanced version of the book (the book is being sold as an app for the i-phone, where you get an ebook, audiobook and video content all wrapped up together – a format that Canongate have already experimented with, ahead of the pack,  when publishing Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Monroe). This video is a straight promotional tool, but because it takes an interesting angle it’s more likely to be shared (and sharing is the name of the game if you’re going to put material up on youtube).

Now the technique of doing a simple but engaging video, putting it up on youtube, and getting people to share it is not beyond the means of a small self-publishing author either. The essential thing is to have something interesting to say, and to have already built up a reasonable following on the various social networks. Then you’re going to need to be inventive when tweeting, but hey – if you’re a writer that shouldn’t be so hard. So there’s a lot to learn from the Pullman campaign.

Where the campaign falls down though, is on the seo front. The video does have a screen at the end linking to the book’s dedicated site (http://www.thegoodmanjesusandthescoundrelchrist.co.uk), but do a search for ‘the good man jesus and the scoundrel christ’ and you’ll get press coverage and links to a wide variety of sites but not the official site (i’ve gone four pages in without finding it), which is a shame because the site is a very nice one indeed. One problem it has is that its front page is a fancy flash screen which does no favours whatsoever for search engine indexing on what should be the most important page on the site. Add to this the fact that if you go to Pullman’s official site you have to delve deep before you get a mention of the new book – go to the links page and there’s no link to the dedicated site etc.

Another questionable choice is the youtube route in this case. If you’re going to set up a dedicated site for a book, and you know you already have a following, why wouldn’t you set up a dedicated video player (with the option for people to embed on their own sites) with seo’d video, so that when your must-be-talked-about content starts ranking you pull people not into a youtube page (where you can’t buy the book directly), but directly to your own site where you can offer your visitors various calls to action (and monitor more accurately the traffic and stats).

None of which is to take away from the marketing of Pullman’s book – the people at Canongate are doing a great job, and the audience that Pullman already has means that these seo issues will probably have little impact on their overall sales. If you’re a self-publishing or unknown author though they could have a huge impact.

So, to sum up – take the lead from this campaign, in terms of creating interesting and shareable content to promote your work.  Use as many avenues as possible to distribute that content, but never lose site of the end-goal which, for you, will be to grab people’s attention and pull them into your site, where you have control and can benefit directly from your hard work.

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

We’ve already pointed out one horrendous experience had by a self-publishing author (who paid his publisher over ten-times the going rate to register his preferred domain name, and then found that they had actually registered it to themselves). Browsing about we’ve come across another mistake that authors/novelists using self-publishing companies can make.

They presume that, because their book is published to a high standard, their self-publishing company is the best place to go to when setting up a website for their book.

Any decent self-publishing company has various extra services available for their authors, ranging from business cards through to marketing, and inevitably web design. But are they taking advantage of their client’s inexperience to offer them an over-priced deal?

Let’s take a look at one of the bigger self-publishing site’s web design offer for their authors. They offer 3pages, graphic design, 2 rounds of revision, and html javascript for a whopping $600 . If you want .php or .asp you need to pay an extra $100.

That’s $600 or $700 dollars for a small static website, and one in which the design will probably feature your novel’s dust-jacket heavily, which is something you’ve already paid for elsewhere.

If you want to market your book using a website, you’re going to need a number of things that aren’t included above:

The ability to add content. Sites that regularly add/update material are – for obvious reasons – more attractive to both search engines and visitors. Having three pages online might work o.k if you’re already world famous, but if you’re a struggling author you’ll need to use your website as a tool to gain an audience, and three static pages is not going to do you any favours. You’ll get as much attention that way as you would leaving a single copy of your novel on the upper deck of the bus home – i.e not much.

The ability to integrate with social networks: The above package doesn’t stop you from setting up social networking accounts, but it doesn’t include them or integrate them with your eventual site. Trying to market your book online without using facebook, twitter, myspace etc is like entering the ring with your hands-tied.

Search Engine Optimisation: The description of the services on offer focusses heavily on the visual, but there’s no mention of working with you to ensure that your site is optimised for search engines. The deal offers you a pretty web-site, that will most likely end up hidden under a bushel as no-one will find it. Search Engine Optimisation should be an equally important part of any web design

And that’s all just for starters.

The Bodu Writers standard package offers the following:

• Customised installation of wordpress
  We’ll set up the super-easy-to-use free software WordPress, but customise it to your needs to make it more of a content management system rather than the simple blogging tool it’s usually used for. You’ll be able to add pages and blog posts whenever you like, and as your website grows so will the possibility of reaching out to a new audience for your book.
• Graphic Design
  As a self-published author you’ve already got the main design element paid for – the book cover. We’ll design a site template that shows off your cover to its full advantage. We do a number of sample site designs, getting feedback from the client on each one in order to work out what their tastes are. Based on that feedback we do the final design.
• Search Engine Optimisation
  We know that a happy client is one who can see his/her website performing well in the search engines, and one which is getting visited. With that in mind, we’ll ensure that the design follows the best practice guidelines issued by the major search engines. We’ll also explain to you what you need to do to improve your site’s visibility – remember, the code and structure of any site is important in s.e.o but a huge part of it is also the content created by the website owner (you).
• Social Networking Sites
  We’ll set you up on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, with profiles customised to compliment your main site. We’ll also give you our own tips and guidelines on how to use these social networks to good effect. [We can also set you up on other social networks of your choosing, though this is subject to additional cost to be negotiated.]
• Tech Support for a year
  We design your site for you to be able to manage it on your own, but we won’t leave you stranded. We realise it can take a bit of time, particularly if you’re not technically minded, to get up and running and feel comfortable with your site. We offer free tech support for one year as part of the package.

And the cost? Our websites for authors costs just €200

That’s a whole lot more for a whole lot less!

What about hosting/domain name etc?
These aren’t included in the price, for the simple reason that they are annual recurring costs. We can advise you on where to go, how to register a domain, or set up a hosting account – but the annual cost remains for you to pay. It’s worth pointing out that the self-publishing example provided above has the same conditions regarding hosting and domain registration – so the difference in price between our package and theirs remains the same.

How long does it take to get set up?
Typically we can get you up and running within a week – that includes time to do different draft designs, to consult with you to choose the design which suits you best, and to ensure the site is set up correctly. We’ll then help you over a week or two to get used to the site structure and ensure that you’re comfortable updating it.

Interested? Get in touch with us for a no-obligation discussion about how we can meet your website needs as an author

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.

I was a little dissapointed listening today to the otherwise excellent SEO Rockstars podcast site-review program, with guest s.e.o. expert Chris Boggs, when Boggs pointed out amongst the failings of one site the fact that they had ’spelt optimization wrong’  [Chris has been in touch to point out he was actually being 'tongue in cheek' - see his comments below].

Wrong because they had used the standard British spelling for optimisation that is.

Now you could argue that the largest online public in English is in the US and so it makes sense to use standard American spelling when copywriting. You could also argue that the target market involved was undoubtedly American, and for that reason the spelling should not have opted for standard British spelling.

What you can’t do is say flat out that ‘optimisation’ is a misspelling of ‘optimization’. It’s not, and there are plenty of cases where it’s the most appropriate spelling. For example, if you’re dealing with an Academic market in Europe where cultural sensitivities might suggest that things are, in fact, the other way around – that ‘optimization’ is an incorrect American-ism.

Don’t get me wrong. Boggs is an expert with lots of sound advice, but that slip of the tongue seems to me to be indicative of a widespread problem where the world wide web is considered to operate in just one cultural setting – a North American one. It doesn’t.

Interestingly if you type ’search engine optimisation’ into google you don’t get their suggested spelling link. It could be because Google is a world wide company that does have to deal in cultural sensitivites. More likely though is the fact that the search pulls up about 41,400,000 results (a search for ’search engine optimization’ pulls up 49,100,000 results).