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.

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

One of the most popular free content magazines for the web design community, the German run Smashing Magazine, appeared to go slightly crazy yesterday, redirecting all of its pages to an urgent plea asking readers to buy a special ebook ” for 9.90 to help keep the magazine afloat. The move to redirect all of the magazine’s content to this donation page, albeit temporarily (the magazine is back online normally at the time of writing) caused a lot of justifiably negative comments, as did the choice to sell an ebook of material the majority of which is already available online.

The redirect was certainly not good for pr, but it remains to be seen if it was good for donations – probably, as for a limited amount of time it became the focal point for all visitors to the site. To those who argue that a simple donation banner should have been used, the response is simple – how often do you read website banners (particularly when they include a price tag). There’s even a term coined for our ability to screen them out - banner blindness

As for the book vs donation argument, it’s obviously much easier to put a $9.90 price tag on a book graphic, even if in effect the majority of the material is already available online free. The mistake here, in my opinion, is the way the whole move was done including the urgency, and the knock-on effect it may have for genuine books produced by the magazine remains to be seen (they currently have a number of great books including Smashing Wordpress: Beyond the blog and Smashing Javascript). It would be better to raise less money through a transparent donation system rather than having a purchase where people part with their cash and may – despite it being clearly described as already existing content – be dissapointed with the results. What-s the likelihood of them buying other books from Smashing Magazine then?

The wider issue though is the question it raises about free content. If these guys, who have been so innovative in many ways, can’t manage to keep afloat, what hope is their for the less web-savvy media to turn a profit while giving away their content for free?

In reality, though, as I’m sure the magazine editors would admit themselves, this is a story of a rapid expansion that has run into problems, not least of which were the spiralling costs of their first book publishing venture – an effect surely of dipping their toes into an unknown territory. You live and learn (and in fact their latest books are being published by John Wiley and Sons).

So rather than signalling a complete failure of the free content model, this is a work in progress to harness the fremium model as described by Chris Anderson in his book Free: The future of a radical price . How Smashing Magazine weathers the financial storm remains to be seen, but the fact that it’s free already brings two important things to the table during this pr fiasco. 1) The brand is unlikely to suffer significantly from its poor decision regarding the redirect and ebook sale, because it consistently offers great free content. Despite the uproar from some readers, it’s hard to imagine them shunning the magazine because of it – something which would be very different in a non-free context, and the brand is what will make money through associated ventures, and 2) Because the magazine is free, it has built up a huge and largely loyal following. Many people commented that they have bought the ebook even knowing that it’s not original content. If you can provide quality paid-for content – in ebook format, for example -harnessing that loyalty to make the magazine profitable should be easy to do.

Here’s hoping that the magazine gets through these growing pains, and learns some lessons from the reactions of their readers. It-s a great resource.

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.

The huge range of useful plug-ins for Wordpress are a contributing factor to its huge popularity both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. The great thing about the plugin system is that – in theory at least – it’s dead simple to setup. You upload the plugin to your plugins directory, then go into the wordpress admin area and activate it. Any special instructions will then appear from the plugin itself.

Of course life isn’t always that simple. A client called early this morning saying that he was having problems installing a new plugin (the mailchimp wordpress plugin- that he was getting a ‘Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.’ message. Working through his problem is hopefully instructive for others, so here’s what we did.

Check the Wordpress error message

Error messages appear for a very good reason. They’ll give you the clue as to what the problem is. So try to activate the plugin, and at the top of your plugins page, when a problem occurs, you’ll get an error message.

In many cases the problem exists because of a limit placed by the server setup on memory allocated to php. In this case you’ll get a ‘Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted while upgrading Wordpress‘. There’s a good discussion on how to fix this very common problem here

That, though wasn’t the problem for this client. Instead he was getting the following error:

‘Warning: main(/public_html/testsite/wp-content/plugins/mailchimp/MCAPI.class.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in/public_html/testsite/wp-content/plugins/mailchimp/mailchimp.php on line 28

This straight away gives us something concrete to work on. In the activation of the plugin the file MCAPI.class.php is called, and if not present will produce the above error.

“But it is there”, an increasingly frustrated client remarked – “after all, I uploaded the latest version of the plugin directly, and even went into the file-manager to check if the file was there!”.

A quick check on the server confirmed my  hunch. The file was there, but was in lowercase – rather than the specified MCAPI.class.php.  In grammatical terms I’m as guilty as the next for my often random capitalisation of terms. This often produces mild irritation from people reading things I’ve written, but rarely causes downright confusion – Web Servers, though, are a different case.

A file in lowercase is not necessarily the same as a file in uppercase – for example, on a unix system you can have both existing in the same folder.  So, the simple solution? A quick rename of the offending file to its correct uppercase format – and bob’s your uncle the mailchimp plugin was fine

The offender? Take a look at your ftp client

This solved the immediate problem, but how had it occured in the first place? After all, Client A. had done everything according to the book – he’d downloaded the latest version of the plugin. He’d checked that it was compatible with the version of wordpress he was running (this is another useful check to do whenever having problems with a plugin), and uploaded it.

A quick look at his ftp program settings revealed the problem. Using the wonderful Total Commander program, he’d missed one tell-tale setting which was causing all the problems:

That little box checked, ‘convert file names to lowercase’ was the problem. So, from now on, it’s unchecked, and all systems are go.

Have you had any other problems installing plugins, for which there was a simple solution? Let us know and we’ll link to them.

Things have been very busy here for the last couple of months, so sorry for the lack of posts. We hope to resume normal posting shortly.

In the meantime, here’s a quick and simple wordpress tip that’s come in handy for us so we thought it would be good to share.

One common problem you can run into, when customising wordpress themes, is the default length of  text returned by the handy template tag the_excerpt . The default, which is set at 55 words (not characters!) is often to big a chunk to fit its required purpose – that of providing a teaser for posts.

What to do? Well, you can add code into the functions.php file to change the default size of the_excerpt site-wide – as detailed here

What, though, if you just want to reduce the excerpt on a specific page – for example on your home page (by default index.php)?

Using the simple php command  substr you can reduce the_excerpt directly in the loop.  You’re going to have to use the get_the_excerpt hook first though, as you can’t run substr directly on the_excerpt template tag.

Let’s take the example of the front page:

The loop starts here: <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> returning template tags like the_title(), the_author(), and the_excerpt() for use within the template.

We’re going to create a variable called $excerpt and assign the contents of get_the_excerpt() to it. So <?php while (have_posts()):the_post();$excerpt=get_the_excerpt();?>

Then, wherever in your template you want to reduce the size of the_excerpt simply replace it with <?php echo substr($excerpt,0,x);?> where x is the number of characters (not words!) that you want to display.  So, to display an excerpt of 50 characters you would have <?php echo substr($excerpt,0,50);?>

Adding a ‘Read More’ link

You should, of course, provide a link to the full post when using the_excerpt or any variation on it. To do that, simply add <a href=”<?php echo the_permalink();?>”>[ read more...]</a> immediately after your excerpt code.