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

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.

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel.

There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so far as to reprint Silman’s email address and phone number, for her readers to join in.

There are plenty who are labelling this as a great example of ‘how not to use twitter’, while Hoffman herself seems delighted to have this direct channel to discuss ’snarky reviewers’ with her readers.

Our view here at boduweb? It’s a great illustration of the power of twitter, and the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’s also an important lesson on how writers can get involved – for better or worse – in their own promotion.

Ony time and sales figures will tell whether Hoffman has the last laugh in this.

One thing that is essential, though, for any writer promoting themselves on twitter, is to understand the ramifications of using the system. If you post up there – even if you only have a handful of followers – your words may well be taken at face value on thousands of sites.  Remember, the system is disproportionately used by journalists and bloggers ever hungry for new stories to publish. It’s a double-edged sword.

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

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter.

The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ’should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as part of their research staunchly defend questionnaire neutrality.

An email and tweet campaign got under way encouraging people to vote yes on the poll, and so it was that right-wing rag saw 96% of the polled answering yes (with traffic that apparently almost crashed the newspaper’s server).

An interesting story in itself, but one with lessons for bands/writers/ businesses trying to promote themselves online. Hold on now! We’re not suggesting you start posting xenophobic poll questions in a tacky bid to increase your hits! No, but this combination of normal polling with email and twitter can be a great and powerful way to boost traffic.

An example: you’re a writer, so you put a poll on your site asking ‘who is the most important novelist of the last 5 years?’. You send out details of the poll to your email list – if you have one. You send it out to your facebook friends, and you post a link on twitter (making sure that the title of the tweet is short and snappy enough to encourage plenty of re-tweets).

Google are rolling out various search options that, in theory, will change the way you search for things. It’s unclear how widely available they are at the moment, but plenty of people are seeing a small ’show options’ link at the top of their search results, which opens up  a new page of tools to refine and redirect your search. Think of them as an indication of where Google imagines search going.

One of the flashiest ones (in more ways than one – as it’s powered by flash) is the wonderwheel. Click on it and you’ll get something like the following – where the search term is google wonder wheel

Click on the tangential circle ‘document cookie’ and you get this, with a different set of results

This is a handy function broadly fitting into that noble category of ’second guessing’ your search request. In many cases when you search for something, you’re not 100% sure that you’ve used the correct search term to produce what you’re looking for. This function gives you some visual clues to hopefully get you arriving on target.

What does it mean for search engine optimisation? Well, it’s a very clear indication that Google , when faced with competition whether it be from social networks like twitter, or from computational answer machines like the much-touted (bologna failing) Wolfram Alpha, is refusing to stand still. It means that the search engine giant is actively working to change how people search – and if it changes how people search, then there are various sites that will no-doubt find themselves in difficulty (just as other sites will see themselves getting an unexpected boost).

How to prepare yourself for these changes? Well it’s back to basics, and the most common sense approach. Make sure your site is designed following the clear guidelines that google and others have published. Make sure your site offers original and useful content – and make sure that that content is visible to all your visitors (search engine bots included). Get online and converse – let people know your site is there (and they in turn, if it’s of value, will let others know – including search engines).

In short, make your website the best it can be for your potential visitors, rather than solely focussing on google pagerank and s.e.r.p’s etc.

With specific regard to Google’s Wonder Wheel
Try using it on your own list of keywords for your site. See what related searches come out, and consider whether your site fits into those categories – and if so, are you presenting your content effectively enough to attract visitors for new keyword phrases.