Why Should You Know About Canonical Tags?

August 27th, 2010

This post was written by Steve Grzywacz

The top 3, soon to be 2, search engines announced back in 2009 that they were all going to support “canonical URL tags” in an effort to help webmasters eliminate the common problem of duplicate content in their site. You know the kind of sites, typically ecommmerce sites that by their very nature can often have many pages filled with the same types of products. Searchers may for example be able to reach the same product by searching under numerous different categorisations such as brand, category or ‘most popular’. The result in this instance is different URLs for the exact same products. Search engines see all these slightly differing URLs and have to suddenly decide which ones to use as the original.

The last thing you want is for search engines to start being unclear about what they are doing, not knowing what to index, which pages to rank or how to divide up the link metrics between all the various pages. When this is the case rankings and traffic volumes for your site suffer, and that is exactly when you should consider the canonical tag.

How do canonical tags function?

This type of tag should be placed in a web page’s HTML header section, the same place where you’ll find the title tag and meta description tag. As with the nofollow tag, a rel parameter is used, i.e.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http:www.yoursite.com/snowboards” />

When placed in the header area Yahoo/ Bing and Google bots would then see the canonical tag whilst crawling the page for information and know to treat it as a copy of the page mentioned, in this case http:www.yoursite.com/snowboards. All of the metrics for the page contents alongside all the link metrics would flow back to that stated URL.

This type of tag acts much like a 301 redirect with regards to SEO, informing the search engines that multiple pages should be treated as one. Yet, unlike a 301, human visitors are not redirected.

Session IDs, print only URLs and category systems, are just a few of the factors that have the ability to make pages look very similar to search engines. Often particular websites will have their own very unique problems that need solving. Talking to your SEO consultant is necessary to explore and then iron out all the potential weaknesses in your general online strategy.

As of this last December Google and Yahoo/ Bing expanded the use of this great new tag by adding cross-domain functionality. Now you are able to transfer search engine bots, and therefore the link benefits (authority and trust, anchor text, ‘link juice’ etc), from a single page on one website through to another page on a separate website.

Affiliate Marketing: Discount Codes and Cash Backs, Friend or Foe?

August 13th, 2010

This post was written by Wajid Ali

Affiliate Marketing:  Discount Codes and Cash Backs, Friend or Foe?

Let’s be honest, the majority of online success stories have come about from the basic concept of affiliate marketing. Amazon is by far and away the largest online retailer and most famous for mastering the art of affiliate marketing with their Amazon market place and several direct merchant partnerships. This role of affiliate marketing has contributed to the success of hundreds of online retailers from the now major players such as play.com, to the smaller independent retailers. But is affiliate marketing still working?

Many of the established online retailers find it to be more successful now than it has ever been, but does this mean the same thing for the offline late comers to the affiliate marketing party?

Traditionally the system relies on partner sites promoting a merchant’s products, either in the form of a product sale onsite, or a redirection to the merchant’s site, where if a sale occurred, the partner would get rewarded for the sale.

Online marketplaces such as the ones seen on Amazon, play.com (playtrade), ebay etc have provided an avenue in which merchants can directly sell products to consumers helping merchants widen their true reach. This obviously benefitting both parties, the merchant gets an extra sale, and the affiliate gets a cut for their help in making the sale.

There’s always been a degree of cannibalisation when it’s come to affiliate marketing though, with shady affiliates using not so honest methods and abusing the ‘system’ so to speak, ranging from brand bidding to click fraud. As a result, there have always been some fears for merchants to jump on the affiliate marketing bandwagon less they become victims of this abuse. Credit where credit’s due, the majority of the major networks and affiliate programs have successfully been clamping down on such affiliates and providing merchants the tools to help minimise the risks of them falling victim to the abuse over the past 3-4 years; this is not to say that it doesn’t happen, but less so now than before.

What has come about over the past 3-4 years is the sharp increase in online shoppers becoming more accustomed to finding online bargains. This has led to a surge in popularity for discount code and cash back sites (think myvouchercodes.co.uk and Quidco). Both offer discounts for consumers, either in the form of money off their order or cash back after the purchase, of course these sites make money through the classic online means of affiliate marketing, but is it really the same thing for the merchant?

Now, when looking at the level of performance of an affiliate program, the usual stats that are looked at revolve around 1) Revenue and 2) ROI. This is generally a fair assessment on most online marketing activity, but due to the nature of these new popular affiliate sites, it’s worth taking a step back before getting excited about all those sales. If I’m being honest, in recent times the purchase process online, for me anyway, involves a need for a product, research on how to fulfil that need, compare the findings of products, choosing where to buy it and before hitting the ‘checkout’ button, a Google search for discount codes or a scan on cash back sites for that merchant or product.

At that stage I had been ready to purchase the product regardless of whether or not I found a voucher code that would give me 10% off or free delivery, so is it really fair for an affiliate to get rewarded for that sale? This is increasingly becoming the trend among consumers who are becoming more aware of discount codes available and cash back available from online retailers. Again, this isn’t to say all cash back or voucher code purchases online are from customers ready to buy or not, but what this shows is that it’s not all about revenue and sales generated,  it’s worth looking at things like how many sales through affiliate marketing are actually bringing in new customers?

Other sites such as HotUKDeals.co.uk (a forum whereby member post ‘hot deals’) does more to instigate sales through discount codes being posted as well as cash back being available for products, as appose to just collecting and storing voucher codes for people to use. An application of discount codes in this manner works, and works well. Having said this, voucher code sites do have ways in which to spark interest in their customers, through newsletter mailing, facebook/twitter pages etc. but you have to begin to wonder, how many are really helping you create demand? Not to say there isn’t any value in using voucher code or cash back sites in an affiliate program, the volume in which these sales are coming through usually counter the reduced margins that a merchant may see. Just be aware that sales may simply be being attributed a different source and not generating any real additional income.

Looking at aspects such as new customer acquisition, and AOV’s can give you better insight into how well your program is performing and not necessary top line figures such as revenue and ROI. It could mean that customers online are so used to finding discount codes, that if they cannot find one, they may turn elsewhere.

Just remember, online buyer behaviour constantly changes, make sure you know who your real friends are.

Eye Tracking Reveals Some Interesting Results for Future SERPs

August 11th, 2010

This post was written by Steve Grzywacz

Search engines are now blending what they consider important results with the established listings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Placing relevant information, often in the form of video, social media or shopping results, between the listings is just the start of what will be a radical change in the way the SERP looks in the future.

Eye-tracking initially uncovered the now famous ‘heat map’ of where searchers eyes tended to rest during their entry of search queries into Google, Bing etc.  Eye movements were extremely definite, with groupings being strongest at the top left of the page, on position 1 of the organic search. ‘Heat’ was spread down the page by around 3-4 organic listings, diminishing heavily in the process. People also scanned up a little onto the top 2-3 paid advertising slots, with another pronounced scan horizontally to the right from the organic position 1. The result was a faint ‘F’ shaped heat distribution.

In the post-blended world, orientation largely did not start from the top organic position. People initially focussed in on the graphic thumbnail embedded into the results by the search engines. Searcher’s eyes then proceeded to scan from that location.

Further research found that images in the SERPs caused searchers to mentally divide up the page. It seemed as if people were extending mental boundaries aligned with the edges of the blended images, from which further scanning would be performed. Our eyes, used to swinging up to the top left became interested in the image to see if it was relevant, divisions of the page then occurring. As our brains become more used to the search engines introducing us to new indented results we may begin to increasingly ignore them, but for now the effect is strong. The resulting heat map represented an ‘E’ shape, the centre of the E being the image. What was a powerful top left bias pre-blended results, was now dramatically lessened due simply to the presence of an image.

When more tests were done on the exact placement of an image on the SERP people’s eyes tended to become fenced in to some degree. Images placed in the centre had the strongest corralling effect, with the least movement of eyes below the mental line drawn horizontally across the SERP from the top edge of the image/ graphic insert. As image placements moved up the top half of the page so did the corralling of sight spots above.

Interestingly, at the same time eye movement became more likely to skip down over the mental line drawn in our heads, to move down the left had side of the page.

Studies on which parts of the brain have electrical nerve activity have led us to believe images appeal to us much more than text owing to an emotional, rather than abstract or logical attachment.

Tests done on the introduction of both universal search and personalised search tended to draw eyes to the largest mass of these results.

As internet marketers what has become clear is that we can’t assume , as in the past, that gaining listings on the very top of the page’s results leads to the largest searcher interest. Introductions of extra graphical, relevant search results to the SERP can radically change the traditional top to bottom, left to right scanning motions. If you are able to get an image into the results mores the better. If you see a competitor’s image on the first page of the search engine results, you should carefully consider where you want to rank.

Similarly, don’t expect search engine interfaces to reach a standard any time soon, if anything more testing will be done by said search engines, expect interfaces to increase in differentiation over the next few years.
Saying that, top page relevancy is something the search engines are aiming for. The balance between organic and paid results in the search engines will always be such that neither should draw too much attention from the other. Successful monetization and success with the user experience mean although the ‘area of greatest promise’ may change, it will never move too far out of line.

Reference previous posts for more information on blended or personalised search engine results.

Apple VS Google in the mobile advertising market

August 9th, 2010

This post was written by Sam Baker

British mobile users will soon have to align themselves to a tech giant, as both Google and Apple are setting their sights on the lucrative mobile advertising market.

Google boss Eric Schmidt recently announced the company will be following a “mobile-first approach” and prioritising investment in a rapidly growing sector that is becoming “fundamental to everything we do”.

In Apples corner, is the iAds platform, which was launched onto the mobile advertising market by Steve Jobs earlier this year. Jobs claims the iAds platform will allow developers to produce “free and low-cost apps to delight users” by allowing revenue to be generate from interactive video ads hosted within applications.

The battle isn’t expected to reach fruition until September, the time The Guardian reports as when the iAd platform will hit the UK, while Google – owner of the world’s other largest mobile ad network – is working on making its own splash across the mobile web.

Ian Carrington, Google Europe, Middle East and Africa’s director of mobile ad sales explained Google is focussing its efforts on a results-based approach for mobile devices. Carrington gave an example in which a mobile user is reading a book review in a cafe; “The accompanying ad will understand its context.

“It will know what book is being discussed in that review. You’ve also got GPS in most smartphones now, so your handset can tell you that the book is £5.99 in a shop 100 yards away, £4.99 in a shop a mile away.”

Whilst Apple and Google are divided by their differing approaches to mobile advertising, they are united in their desire to hold onto a large share of revenue generated through their respective platforms. Apple’s plans involve the app developers receiving 60 per cent of the revenue generated through ads on their applications, as Google made similar promises of “at least 50 per cent” of revenue will be passed onto publishers.

YouTube’s New Enhanced Channel

August 6th, 2010

This post was written by Wajid Ali

I once heard someone refer to social media as the ‘blob’; it is everything and everything is it. The meaning of this is obvious and vague at the same time. Everything online that can refer to your company and brand (in the way of user generated content) can be classified as part of social media, and today nearly everything online has evolved to incorporate this interactivity. There are the ‘big 3’ social networking sites (YouTube, Twitter and Facebook) that the most people have direct interaction with, something both Google and Bing have increasingly paid more attention to (see Sam’s post on Google & Social Media), and as a result have got the attention of companies looking to enhance their online profiles.

Facebook and twitter require more off the cuff interaction and can take some time to master how your brand’s personality translates to day to day interaction with fans and followers’; making sure your company has personal, and more importantly natural feel to conversation. YouTube on the other hand, provides an arena for users to consume and generate content in a completely different manner altogether. Users regularly post videos in response to others as well as rate and comment on videos they find to be of interest, building one of the largest community’s online (24hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute!). As a video publishing platform, it has been an area many companies have been interested utilising for some time, and so they should be, Internet users spend more time on YouTube than on any other website.

Many companies have looked to promote product videos, publish their TV adverts (surprisingly 59% of users have looked for aTV ad online), or help push their viral marketing videos out; however it has been quite difficult to set up a well branded YouTube channel with many companies settling for standard user channels instead. For a small/medium sized company, to spend £25k on a branded YouTube channel can be hard to justify, especially for a marketing channel that isn’t directly tied in with your sales.

Google (YouTube) has recognised this barrier to entry for a lot of companies to fully embrace YouTube and have now begun to offer a new type of channel, Enhanced YouTube Channels. This new type of channel offers many enhancements over the standard user channel, coming very close to the features offered in a fully fledged ‘brand channel’. Some of these features include a channel page header banner (including external linking), a side column branding box, background image along with integrated analytics tracking and Tracking URL’s. This new Enhanced YouTube Channel format essentially gives companies the opportunity to gain the bulk of functionality that was tied in with a significant amount of spend using a brand channel is now free. Yes you heard right, free.

With Google’s new strategy to get as many companies on board by lowering the barriers to entry, it will inevitably encourage businesses to utilise its’ platforms advertising functionality from the many different ad options available, helping Google, and the many tech minded companies who are prepared to spend, monetise a phenomenally popular user platform, and why not? After all, YouTube is technically the 2nd largest search engine in the world.

SEO with China – Think ‘Baidu’

August 6th, 2010

This post was written by Steve Grzywacz

How many of you have ever contemplated what the largest search engines are? In the world I’m sure many of you would say Google, Bing or Yahoo, perhaps even YouTube. More of you still would state that Facebook has become monstrous over the years, its social search function qualifying it for amongst the largest of search engines.

What percentage of you would’ve remembered to mention Baidu, China’s largest search engine operator? This company has by far the largest market share with regards its own population. With more internet users than  both the US and Canada combined, this is one very large country-specific search engine. China has always been extremely cautious when it comes to the internet, and interestingly Google has not sat comfortably whilst providing it’s search service to China.

Recently, with a sophisticated cyber attack and China’s repeated orders to abide by their heavy level of cencorship, Google finally decided to stop their Chinese service under the domain Google.cn.
Baidu has been able to capitalise on a fairly rare situation where no real competition now exists, and is now the second largest search engine by value, actually having surpassed Yahoo.

A lot of investors have seen Baidu’s rise and jumped on the chance to take a piece of the action. Many people now think Baidu is set to move over into western markets.

There are two main reasons for Baidu having been in the Chinese government’s good books:

•    Baidu uses Chinese-based technology
•    Baidu fully abides all the Chinese government’s censorship laws

As China’s industrial might continues to grow, so too does the number of people gaining access to computers and the internet. With just over 1.3 billion people, China’s online market is substantial.

So, if you are interested in taking your online business to China here are a few handy tips that could make your online marketing efforts more effective:

•    Ensure your hosting is actually in China
•    Use a hosting company that is respected – e.g.‘China Host’
•    Create unique content for the whole of your website
•    Only use ‘simplified Chinese’, not ‘traditional Chinese’
•    Minimise/ negate the use of flash, javascript, iframes and frames
•    Ensure your main keywords are prominent on the right sections of your webpages, e.g. titles, headings, in the main body of content, and inbound external link anchor text
•    Use highly relevant and authoritative external-linking partners
•    When linking out of your website, only link to authoritative and relevant websites

With Russia’s dominant search engine ‘Yandex’ also having risen in popularity in recent years, never mind the growth of other search engines like South Korea’s up-and-coming ‘Naver’, 2010 on into 2011 is set to be increasingly multi-lingual. Take a good look at the international search opportunities that are currently presenting themselves, for they are only going to grow in size over the next few years.

For more information regarding creating international websites be sure to read further Digivate blog posts.

Feeding content into Social Networks

August 5th, 2010

This post was written by Sam Baker

Feeding content into Social Networks

Following on from Harry’s post on social networking and principles SEOs adhere to, a common feature on a large portion of regularly updated or authoritative websites, are plug-ins and widgits; friends if you like, of creative and share-worthy link bait.

In many ways, these widgets are a reflection of the SEO industry’s maturity over the last few years; an emphasis on building meaningful SEO content which addresses the needs of customers.

An interesting method of building this type of content is by suitably leveraging the SEO benefits social networking sites can offer a site.

The view is social networks are similar in a sense to search engines, whereby the goal is to ensure the most relevant and interesting content is displayed on top of the pile.

You may have seen numerous ‘buttons’ pop up across news, entertainment, games, e-commerce and pretty much every other type of site on the web. These buttons represent social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as social news sites including Del.ic.ous and Digg. They simple, 1-click buttons to ‘vote’ for that piece of content and transport it across these networks. If you obtain enough votes from the social network communities and you’ll find yourself famous in those circles and almost certainly beyond.

So, you have content on your site which is ‘liked’ or ‘tweeted’ and it has gone viral, popping up across the social network. Although you have achieved success in viral terms, you still haven’t necessarily succeeded in drawing people to your site.

You do not want the piece of content, which has achieved so much going viral around a social network, to remain in the confounds of that network. The trick is to ensure the content has enough draw to lead the user back to your site.

How do I Create International Versions of My Website?

July 28th, 2010

This post was written by Steve Grzywacz

Suppose you see great chasms of unused marketing space abroad in other countries and just know you want that success, and fast. Even if good competition exists you still think success can be made. You’re going to need to create international websites, honed to their location, many of them in other languages. When you start looking into it things can get rather complicated very quickly. Don’t panic, follow these tips and you’ll be heading in the right direction.

Your first task, if deadly serious about international website creation, is to pick the one of the 3 URL options detailed below that best fits your circumstances:

  • Using a subdomain e.g. uk.example.com/

Advantages of this URL structure include the retention of various ranking metrics such as domain popularity, domain trust that exist with the root domain. Visitors to your website are easily able to identify that they are in a country-specific version of the original website they know and trust. Lastly, subdomains are actually able to be hosted servers with the designated country IP address.

Disadvantages are that, although some of the beneficial ranking metrics are kept, a significant quantity are lost. Another problem is that for anyone referencing your website URL may inadvertently use the “www” instead of the country specific subdomain.

This option can be useful for websites that really are looking to expand their international reach from within the company. Due to the lack of transfer of ranking ranking metrics (commonly known as ‘link juice’) from the original domain to the subdomain (search engines see two distinctly separate websites), in addition to setting up a subdomain being rather more complex to achieve, we as an agency would generally recommend against this form of domain modification. The following two URL examples have, in our opinion, a greater chance of providing ranking increases/ search engine visibility for your website.

  • Using country-specific top level domains (TLD) e.g. www.example.co.uk/

Advantages are that website users are easily aware of and understand the country reference of this type of TLD, similarly they are less likely to get the links incorrectly spelt in blog posts or social commenting and so forth. Country specific IP addresses are a possible for the correct country domain name, a powerful move when hoping to rank in search engines more specific to that country.

Disadvantages include the fact that totally different domains means there is no internal link juice to benefit from, all your sister sites are separated!

Generally this option can be superb for websites that benefit hugely from their own country of origin. Country-specific TLDs are also useful if the many country-specific sister sites you have are extremely different from each other, internal linking between wildly differing sites can be a tricky business.

  • Using subfolders e.g. www.example.com/en-gb/

Advantages here are that any internal linking between different country versions of the site can have very positive ranking effects. Additionally, linking mistakes from people referencing your site are less common when adopting this URL strategy.

Disadvantages include time tested evidence that this particular URL option is the least useful when trying to rank in country-specific search engines. Also, people hunting around for country-specific TLDs can sometimes be confused, as not all URL subfolders in use are easy to understand, let alone remember. Lastly, with this use of your URL structure you are not able to host your country-specific on the exact country’s servers and relating IP addresses.

This option is best used with websites that have had a large customer base for some time, and which are now looking to expand their reach abroad.

Aside from working out what URLs are best for your company’s situation, Google has made the process of internationalisation a little easier. If you verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools your website can be aligned closer to the country you are targeting by using the option of geotargeting. Simply place the necessary code on your pages, verify, then look for the ‘Geographic target’ heading, tick the box which sais ‘Target users in:’, select your country and save. Not all country-specific TLDs are possible with this option, all this is is a move in the right direction, a kind of hint to the search engines.

Language is an important hint to the search engines regarding where and how your content should be ranked. Many webmasters have not tried hard enough, for example many US English webpage’s having ranked over UK English pages in the UK. Duplicate content is also something you want to avoid.

IP addresses mean a lot when using a country-specific website. For medium to large sized sites try to ensure that your server is in the same country as the most of your visitors.

External linking to your website from other websites in the same country is a small help, really more of a tactic designed for local search ranking to be honest.

Lastly, where you have the time, use meta content to tell search engines which language you are hoping to target e.g.

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-gb”>

If there are any problems with creating or moving your website to gain a better hold in a particular country why not consider the many good reasons for using expert SEO agencies!

Social network SEO practices

July 27th, 2010

This post was written by Harry Follet

As an agency it is our responsibility to stay on the edge of what is happening in internet marketing, and with regard to SEO and social media (my current specialities) this means understanding the whole online landscape, how it is developing, and what this means for how our current strategies have to be modified in order to keep delivering impact and achieving continuous growth for our clients.

New tools are released frequently, there is constant online dialogue speculating as to exactly what the latest Google algorithm means for search, and on top of this Google’s own product offering keeps changing, so naturally we must keep adapting our offering to stay up to speed.

All these things are part and parcel of what defines SEO as a practice. Keep up to date, keep on top of your theory and rework your offering to navigate the changing online landscape.

At the moment it is quite obvious to anyone this side of the moon that social networks have provided the largest and most powerfully developing online trend. But what does this mean from a search perspective and where does it leave us as an agency?

From a classical SEO perspective this shouldn’t change the way we service client accounts because link authority is not passed through Twitter, Facebook, Bebo and Myspace links. So why should we bother pursuing them if they do not provide the authority transferral necessary to charge our landing pages?

On a basic level it is important to understand that although social network links don’t currently pass authority, they do in fact provide spiders with another route to access your site. This means your site will be crawled more regularly and your content development strategy will have more impact delivering better visibility and more timely results.

At a less obvious (but still pretty obvious level) it is all about content syndication, and how as an agency we ensure our clients content carries momentum online, be it video, images or written content. Ensuring we use the best online PR resources, communicate with the most influential bloggers and continue to grow our overall network are essential factors, but as social networks are now the predominant way to share content online it has become a massive search advantage to have effective means by which to feed link worthy content into social networks. If this content is bounced around within Facebook and Twitter you have the potential to build momentum and attract links back to the contents natural home on your site. It is important to understand that content must be resolved in some way on your site, if it is not your site will not be linked to and the benefits of the content will stay within the network. If you get it right then these links will not only come from Facebook and Twitter but also the websites and blogs of the thousands of people that have interacted with your content.

Google Image Search Ads

July 23rd, 2010

This post was written by Wajid Ali

As you may have heard Google this week announced the release of their new image search ads to the AdWords platform. These are billed just the same as normal ads and built with the help of the display ad builder inside AdWords. This effectively shows a thumbnail image inside the traditional text ad seen across the search engine’s sponsored links. This is a good thing. Google is showing intent towards developing the AdWords platform constantly, and with this latest global roll out allows advertisers to showcase a product in an image search (albeit in a small thumbnail) but is it all rainbows and butterflies?

Some online retailers and businesses will find it a great addition and take advantage of having the customer engage with the sponsored link more so than a plain ol’ text ads. As every advertiser would agree, images are indeed that much more interesting for a consumer to acknowledge and engage. However, some may find it quite an ineffective tool. As it is only appearing in the ‘images’ section  of Google, people are just as likely to be browsing around for images for whatever reason; not everyone looking for ‘stockings’ is looking to buy a pair, if you get my drift, advertisers should really keep a close eye on the ROI these new ad formats are produce as it may not work that well for everyone.

New Image Search Ads

In time this new image search ad format may be used across all its search products, unlikely, but who really knows what the folks at Google are thinking? But having the ability to display an image with text ads on the normal search side of things would do wonders for advertisers, though it would probably impact the user experience if not executed correctly, one thing that Google really does emphasise. In the meantime, Google’s Beta for the awesome Product Plus Box will have to do (for those online retailers that are lucky enough to be on it), it will be interesting to see how Google goes forward with that Beta that has been closed since last year and how it comes together with the new image search ads, it will be interesting indeed.

I for one am excited at having some visual appeal in ads even if its only for image searches, as they say; a picture speaks a thousand words.