If you’ve not heard about Google Instant yet – where have you been?! In the last day or two, the online community has been awash with discussions and debates surrounding this new Google update.
If you’re not aware of Google Instant, here’s a summary:
Google Instant is being rolled out in the US this week and will come to the rest of the world in the coming months. This new way of searching is causing rather a lot of stir at the moment. Many people are saying that this is the closest any search engine has come to reading searcher’s minds! It’s goal it to provide you with the results the moment you begin typing!
“I think it’s a little bit of a new dawn in computing,”Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated during a press conference on Wednesday.
So what does it mean to you and your business website? Well, you will soon start to see evolving search results that can change -potentially even as often as you type each additional character, into the search box.
Google will (try to) guess exactly what you’re searching for by filling out the predicted search term in grey. Underneath that that there will be a dropdown box where Google will supply you with some additional suggested queries.
By speeding up the delivery of search results, Google believes it will keep its users happier and if they are happier, they hope they are more likely to search even more (which is good for Google because they get to serve ads on each query, which means potential for them to increase their revenue)
During the release, they announced that they expect to reduce the time that people collectively spend on its search engine by about 350 million hours annually – all due to Google Instant!
Google outlined what they felt the benefits to Google Instant would be to a searcher:
Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.
Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.”
So a lot of people in the world of search engine optimisation are worried by this new development. Any changes Google makes to its search function can cause issues to those marketing websites, but these are unlikely to ever kill off SEO for good!
No matter what Google does with the way it delivers search results, a good website needs to be optimised in order to be one of the sites it presents. You need to have a search engine friendly site – that’s the bottom line. It’s that simple.
Google associate Matt Cutts has commented on these new changes and the impact this will have for website owners: “The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time, For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”
So Google have clearly stated that rankings will stay the same with Google Instant.
We should also remember that Google Instant is not going to be mandatory; this is going to be something that people will be able to switch off. In doing so, they will leave themselves open to Google’s standard results.
If you want to learn more about Google Instant, you can view this official video:
We’re interested to see how popular Google Instant will be. We often say that online marketing is all about making sure you make it as easy and simple for your website visitors as possible. We often refer to searchers (ourselves included) as ‘lazy’.
People don’t want to have to work hard when they’re surfing – they want to:
Type a search query that takes them straight to a relevant result,
Once they click on that result they want to see instantly that yes, this is what they’re looking for
They then want to have the information presented to them in a clear and obvious way
Finally they then want to be told what action to take next
So people are lazy (or just very spoilt nowadays when it comes to the rich resource of information we have via the Internet). At SMEketing, we feel that Google Instant is just another way to make it a bit easier for us lazy searchers! So things could be getting faster and easier for us Googlers.
However, another bonus of Google Instant is that it’ll open us up to new ideas for search queries relating to our search. What this means for businesses is that you’ll need to have regular, unique content on your site, full of up-to-date information and jam packed full of long and short tail keywords.
If you are considering employing some SEO for your site, now is actually the perfect time. Whenever Google makes a change businesses often scramble to update and optimise their website; this bout of activity could either be an opportunity for you to join in and get some optimisation done or it could be what causes your rankings to potentially drop. Please note Google Instant won’t cause your rankings to drop on its own – it’s the flurry of optimisation by others whenever Google makes a change. Don’t let your competitors out-rank you on Google!
Google Analytics is a fantastic free service that lets you monitor your website performance and the activities visitors take on your site. Tracking your website performance is a vital part of search engine optimisation (SEO), but it can become even more valuable when you start to track your online conversions.
A conversion is an action you want someone to take on your site. There are a range of conversions that you might want to track – such as when a visitor downloads an ebook, registers for an event, signs up to your newsletter or makes a purchase.
When you create a goal in Google Analytics, you are effectively telling it what your desired conversions are. When you get down to the nitty gritty; goal conversion are really the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfils business objectives.
Setting up goals is easy. We’ll take you on a step by step walk through of setting up a goal – this example goal will be tracking when people complete a Contact Us form. All we need to know is the URL of the page people are taken to once they have completed the form. For this example we’ll use www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html. Most goal pages should be pages people only get access to once they have completed an action. So they’re most often thank you pages – thank you for signing up to our newsletter/thank you for contacting us, we’ll be in touch shortly/thank you for buying our product… etc. It’s important that you know the page/URL you want to measure and that visitors can only access this page by completing the desired action.
So…
1. Log into your Analytics account – on the Overview page, select ‘Edit’ on the right hand side:
2. Scroll halfway down and click on ‘+ Add Goal’ (your goals can be split into four sets, each with 5 goals = 25 goals in total overall. The image below is selecting to create the first goal in set 2):
You will then be presented with the following page:
Give your goal a name. For this example we can call it ‘Contact Form Completion’. Then select ‘URL Destination’.
Then enter in your goal URL, select if it is case sensitive or not, and then enter in a value for the goal. This is optional, but if you know that the conversion you’re tracking is worth a certain amount, it can help you get a better idea of the ROI you’re getting from your website.
If you have a specific sales funnel that you have created, you can set this up to be tracked also. For example, you may be directing people to a landing page (via Google AdWords or some other form of online advertising), they then click on a call to action button which takes them to a page with a form, they then complete the form and are taken to the thank you page. So your funnel looks like:
www.SMEketing.com/landing-page.html
www.SMEketing.com/landing-page-contact.html
www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html
The funnel section is optional. Once you’re happy, you can click on ‘Save Goal’ and you’re done!
Tracking Goal Conversions
You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.
You’ll also be able to track the goals on various other pages. For example
If you look at the Referring Sites report, you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed from traffic arriving from various sources.
Did Twitter send 100 people with 68 conversions? Then you know that you’re getting a good ROI from your social media.
Looking at the Browser report you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed by people using various browsers
Did more people using Firefox convert than Internet Explorer users? Maybe there’s an issue with your site in Internet Explorer?
Tracking conversions is an extremely important part of online marketing – if you can track what works and what doesn’t, how can you improve your marketing efforts?
As always with Google Analytics, this is a huge subject. If you have any questions about creating and monitoring goals, please leave a comment or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. Now I was in a rush and my typing went awry and I accidentally typed ‘Meaga bus’. Without even really looking at the list of results, I clicked on the first link:
And this is what I was presented with:
So I had the quite reasonable impression that their site was down for maintenance. As an alternative I logged onto the National Express website to see how much their coaches were.
Once I had my information from the National Express I emailed my friends to tell them that I couldn’t get any information from MegaBus, but that the National Express seemed pretty reasonable and that we should just book with them. It was only then that my friend said she’d also tried the MegaBus site and was able to access it without any problems. So I went back to check and realised the error I’d made.
Even if you type ‘MegaBus’ correctly into Google, the maintenance page is still the third result. It would be interesting to look at their analytics to see how many visits this page gets; I bet it’s shockingly high.
A robots.txt is a file you can create in which you can list all the pages (URLs) of your website that you don’t want the search engines to index. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want certain pages to show in the search results. This MegaBus maintenance page is just one such example. Other examples include:
Random pages such as your thank you or error pages
If you are in the process of building your website or new pages and don’t want your unfinished work to appear in the search results
If your website includes information that you don’t want people to find whilst searching online (such as member only information that isn’t hidden behind a password)
Any duplicate content you may have. For example if you had content in both a web page and in PDF format you would want to add one of those to your robot.txt file to avoid being penalised
The file itself is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It must be saved to the root directory of your site – which is the directory where your home page or index page is.
You can find out more about robots.txt files and how to create them here http://www.robotstxt.org
Have you ever found any pages in the search engine results that you shouldn’t have? Let us know in the comments!
SMEketing are happy to launch our new offer of a Free SEO Report; you can apply for one of these non-automated reports here: Free SEO Report.
The Free SEO Reports will cover:
On-page SEO Factors:
Your homepage
Global Navigation
Category Pages/Subcategory Pages
Content Pages
Off-page SEO Factors:
Number of indexed pages
Number of inbound links
Search Engine Inclusion
Keyword rank position for up to 10 keywords in Google.com, google.co.uk, Yahoo UK and Bing
The report will conclude with some suggestions that you can undertake to improve the optimisation of your website.
To qualify for a Free SEO Report your company must have employ five or more people and be based in Hampshire. We will be giving these reports (usually worth £160) to the first ten qualified companies that apply.
For more information on the report and to apply, click here: Free SEO Report
One of our most popular posts in this blog has been our “Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid“. This was based around the activities and actions you might implement when trying to optimise your own business website. So we thought it was time we created another similar post, however this will be more generic – looking at SEO activities you should be avoiding across the board.
1. Do not respond to any SEO offers you might receive over email: Now I’m talking specifically about the emails you get asking you to swap links or from companies telling you they can get your site 1000 new links for just £100. These are SPAM EMAILS!! They might sound like good ideas, but they’re not. Mass reciprocal link building is a waste of time and any company that will give you 1000 links for £100 is going to be giving you poor quality links that may harm your site. Also any company that promises to get you the number one spot on Google is lying. Don’t trust them!
2. Don’t wait too long to start your SEO campaign: SEO should be something that should be done before your site is even built! You need to think about navigation and site architecture when building your site – so SEO should be something you do from day one.
3. Don’t waste time submitting your site to search engines manually (or worse - pay someone to do it for you): Search engines work by sending out spiders (or bots) that crawl web pages using the hyperlink structure of the web. So as soon as your website gets a link from somewhere else, the spiders will follow that link to your site and as long as your site has been built well, they’ll crawl your pages and add them to their index. Manual search engine submission went out a long time ago!
4. Don’t make your website uncrawlable: Following on from the above point, you need to ensure the search engine spiders can find and crawl all the pages on your website. So avoid having session IDs, huge dynamic URLs, using a complicated, messy navigation menu that spiders can’t (or won’t) follow, or developing an all-Flash, all-graphic, or all-AJAX site. If you are using a robot.txt file, make sure it has been created correctly.
5. Don’t focus on hugely generic search terms: If you’re a bakers in Southampton, don’t focus your efforts on trying to rank well for the term ‘baker’. It’s too generic. Optimise for relevant, targeted keywords and you’ll have more success.
6. Don’t keyword stuff: This is so last decade!! Keyword stuffing used to work back in the mid 1990’s when search engines were naive to the cheating/scamming nature of human beings. People stuffed their sites with keywords and came out tops. But search engines aren’t that stupid anymore! If you keywords stuff, hide text (by making it size 0, making it the same colour as your background etc) you’ll likely get penalised by the major search engines.
7. Don’t have the same title tag on every page: We’ve covered this before in this post: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid but it’s an important issue so it’s worth mentioning again. Each page should have its own keyword rich, relevant title – keep it to within 70 characters. Find out more about title tags in this post: Website Title Tags
8. Don’t think that your visitors don’t want fresh new content: Just because you might not get constant feedback, or because you think you’re in a boring industry, don’t make the mistake of thinking that fresh, new, useful content isn’t important. There are always things you can write about - it helps improve the quality of your site, improves the perception of your company and is a great way of boosting your search engine position.
9. Don’t use the same anchor text in all your inbound links: The anchor text of a link is the (commonly) blue text you click on. When requesting and building links, make sure that you mix this up a bit. Use keywords rather than just your URL or company name and make sure that you vary it a bit.
10. Don’t focus on Google PageRank: This used to be a metric people used to access the quality (in Google’s view) of a web page. However, Google have stated that this is no longer something that they place relevance on. The PageRank you now see in your tool bar is often months out of date and doesn’t affect your rankings like it used to. Google have even taken it out of their Webmaster Tools.
This list could go on and on! Your additions are welcome in the comments – what mistakes have you made/seen in the past?
We all know that every business requires an effective website in order to succeed online (and quite often offline too). If you want to perform well online, you must put effort into ensuring your website performs well in the search engines. However, as well as improved search rankings, there are a host of other business benefits from performing search engine optimisation. This blog post takes a look at a few…
Fixed Costs: The cost of search engine optimisation will stay the same, irrelevant of how many clicks and visits your website gets. Compared to pay per click (PPC) advertising (such as Google AdWords), where the more clicks you get the higher the cost
Cost-effective Customer Acquisition: There are no fees required to have your website included in the natural search engine results. This makes it especially cost effective if you can rank well for quite competitive terms that would have cost a lot to bid on in PPC advertising. If you’re currently paying a lot for certain keywords in your PPC advertising, think how much you could save if you could get these clicks for free in the natural search!
Repeat Business: Studies have shown that customers gained from natural search results tend to be higher quality than those from other paid sources. These visitors stay on your site longer, have a higher chance of converting and are more likely to return to you again for further purchases.
Emphasis on Unique Content: Most search engine strategies will include a content strategy – a plan to create and add unique content to your site on a regular basis. Not only do search engines like this, but visitors do too. Fresh new content will provide a feeling of trust and authority to your visitors and will encourage them to buy. Blogs (like this one!) are a great way of providing new information in a format that helps your SEO efforts.
Credibility: If you’re well known in your industry, yet aren’t showing on the first page of Google for your main keywords, won’t that create an air of suspicion? To keep your brand perception at the required level you need to ensure you come top of the search engine results.
Improved Website Standards: Focusing on SEO will also force you to focus on the architecture and navigation of your site. Your site must comply with best practices in order to gain high rankings. This in turn also improves the usability of your website, giving your vistors a better user experience, making them more likely to turn in to customers.
We recently had a comment via our SMEketing Marketing YouTube channel from a marketer in need of some link building advice:
Hi!
Fantastic video, sooooo helpful!!!
It would be fantastic to see a video on how to create inbound links…..
I went to university in Southampton, and now I am within my first year of a new job and been asked to build 700 links in the next MONTH which is impossible and I dont want to? get my company blacklisted from google how can I do this?
Can you help me with creating quick inbound links to my website?
Thanks
This was our response:
Glad you found the video helpful.
So link building… being asked to produce so many new links in such a short time is not only a bit unrealistic, but it’s not really a good idea. If your site goes from having about 100 links to about 800 in the space of a month, that’s going to look a bit dodgy/spammy to Google.
Link building is all about building up quality links of a sustained period of time. Google wants to see a site that is growing in size and popularity – and getting a steady stream of good quality links is an indicator of a good quality site.
Link building is both about quality and quantity – it’s not an even/or thing (although if you had to pick, going for quality over quantity would be the way to go). You want to have a lot of good quality links.
There are loads of factors that make up a good or bad link. In a nutshell, a good quality link is one that comes from a reputable website, has good anchor text (the blue bit you click on), is on a good quality relevant page (i.e. relevant to your industry) and does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute (which a lot of social media channels/blogs/forums have – basically the ‘nofollow’ attribute stops the linking site from passing any link juice to you through the link).
So the best way to build links is to create really good content that people want to link to. There’s a thing called ‘link bait’ which is basically defined as any kind of content that people want to link to. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.
So you can create content such as:
- Free Tools
- Web 2.0 Applications
- Top 10 Lists
- Industry-Related Humor
- Reviews of Events
- Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
- Surveys or Collections of Data
- Film or Animation
- Charts, Graphs or Spreadsheets
- Contests, Giveaways and Competitions
- Trend-Spotting
- Advice from Multiple Experts
Also things like press releases that you can upload to free newswires and articles that you can upload to sites like Ezine are a great way of generating links.
So I hope this helps! If you need any additional marketing assistance, let me know. We offer a range of outsourced marketing services at SMEketing and can do as little as an hours work, right up to a certain amount of days a month. You can email us at info@SMEketing.com.
Link building is something that should be taken on as part of an on-going marketing strategy; it’s not something that should be done in short, sharp bursts. Think about what content your prospects and customer want to use and read. High quality content will always create high quality links – it just takes time and effort.
In our final post about Google Webmaster Tools, we explain what all the reports mean and how you can use some of them to help improve the performance of your website.
Dashboard
Tells you a summary of your key reports – search queries, crawl rate, keywords, sitemaps and links to your page
Site configuration
Sitemaps– this page will show you what sitemaps you’ve uploaded, how many indexed URLs it contains and if there are any issues with it.
Crawler access– if you’ve added a robots.txt file, this is where it’ll be. If you haven’t, this is where you can generate one. A robots.txt file is a list of URLs that you don’t want Google to index. This would be useful for private, out of data or duplicate content.
Sitelinks– sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. If you have any, you’ll be shown them here.Change of address – this page tells you what to do if your website is going to move to a new domain.
Settings – this is an important page. Here you can tell Google what country you are targeting which is important if you only work with customers in one country. You can also set what your preferred domain is: either http://www.SMEketing.com or http://SMEketing.com.
Your site on the web
Search queries- here you’ll see a similar graph to those within Google Analytics. You’ll see how many impressions your site had and how many clicks. You’ll also be able to see what keywords people used to find your site – how many impressions those keywords created and how many clicks resulted. You can also see your average position for these terms. It’s important to remember that this tells you how people are finding your site at the moment – if you are optimising your site for a particular keyterm, but are not yet ranking well for it, it’s unlikely to show up in this report. This report is useful in telling you where you can direct a little bit of effort to get improved results – if you are ranking 4 or 5 for a keyword you know converts well, with a bit of extra effort you could improve his rank and massively improve click throughs.
Links to your site – Here Google will tell you the number of links pointing to your site. It’ll also tell who what pages those links point to. Like most websites, the homepage will normally have the most links. Not all of these links will be great quality – link building is all about quality over quantity (although having a huge quantity of great quality links is the ideal!). This report will help you see if you have important pages with a low volume of links pointing to it – so you know where to direct your link building activity.
Keywords- If you’ve done your keyword research you should have a good understanding of what your website should be optimised for. This Keyword report tells you the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. The terms at the top are those which are mentioned most often. These should match the terms you’ve optimised your site for. If there’s an important keyterm that’s not reflected in this list, you need to go back and amend your copy (although remember, no keyword stuffing!! Keep keywords to within 3-5%). If you click on one of these keywords, it’ll show you what pages of your website this term appears on.
Internal links – This report tells you the internal links you have to each page. Internal linking is an important part of SEO. Your most important pages should have the highest number of links pointing to them. The volume of links should go down for less important pages.
Subscriber stats – If you have an RSS feed associated with a blog, news page or any other page, this report will show you how many people are subscribed to them.
Diagnostics
Malware - Malware is a piece of software, such as a virus or spyware that can attach itself to your site. You should see the message “Google has not detected any malware on this site.” Call your IT guys if you’re not getting this message!
Crawl errors- This report tells you if Google has found any problems whilst crawling your site. The most common issues would be 404 pages not found and broken links. However, this report can often show pages/links that dont’ exist anymore. It’s not a great report in terms of accuracy. If you want to find broken links on your site, visit Xenu at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Crawl stats- This graph shows you your site’s crawl histroy over the last 90 days. It shows you the pages crawled, kb’s downloaded and the time spent downloading on a daily basis.
HTML suggestions – This is a useful area. It’ll tell you if Google has found any issues with the content of your site or with the title tags or meta descriptions (notice it doesn’t mention meta keywords here… that’ because Google doesn’t pay attention to them anymore!).
Labs
Fetch as Googlebot- You can request to see pages as Google bots sees them – without any snazzy design, pictures of any of that bumf! You can use this to check that Google is seeing your site in the way you want it to.
Site performance - Google is beginning to place more importance on the load speed of your site. People don’t to wait ages for a webpage to load, so Google is starting to place preference on faster loading sites. This report gives you a nice looking graph showing how your page download speeds have averaged over the last few months.
So that’s Google Webmaster Tools explained. It’s best if you spend some time clicking about and exploring the reports. It’s pretty easy to use and can give you some excellent information to help improve your site’s performance. Even though this is Google Webmaster Tools, making changes to improve your site will also help its rankings in the other major search engines.
If you have read our other posts on registering your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you should both understand the importance of this to your website SEO, and also now have an account and your website should be verified. If you still need to undertake these steps, read these last two blog posts:
There is a huge amount of valuable information that you can get from Google Webmaster, but you need to know where it is, and what to do with it.
Firstly, you should submit an xml Sitemap. This is basically a list of all the URLs in your website. It helps to tell Google about all your pages; including pages which for some reason or another they may not be aware of.
There are many reasons Google may not crawl every page on your site naturally, so this is why Sitemaps are helpful. Google states, that Sitemap’s are useful if:
Your site has dynamic content.
Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
To create an xml Sitemap:
Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ add your site URL to the box (ignore the other boxes and options) and click on ‘Start’.
You will then need to save this and upload the file to your website.
Click on ‘Site Configuration’ and then ‘Sitemaps’
Click on ‘Add a Sitemap’
You will be presented with a box with your domain name with a field at the end of it – type in sitemap.xml and then click on submit.
And that’s it. Google will tell you if there is a problem with your Sitemap, but if you have followed these instructions you should have submitted it successfully.
Our next post is the long overdue explanation of what information Google Webmaster Tools can give you and how to interpret the data to improve your website.
If you found this information useful, but feel like you don’t have time to manage your online marketing, please get in touch. We’re online marketing experts and love nothing more than getting stuck into websites, helping our customers get more business from their online endeavours! Email us today on info@SMEketing.com.
Our previous post introduced Google Webmaster – what it was and how it can benefit your website in terms of its performance and how it can aid you with any search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
In order to get the benefits of Google Webmaster, you first need to register and verify your site with Google Webmaster. It’s a very quick and easy process. To find out how to do it, watch the video below:
The next blog post will outline what information you can get from Google Webmaster and how to use it to make your site perform better in Google.
Google Instant is being rolled out in the US this week and will come to the rest of the world in the coming months. This new way of searching is causing rather a lot of stir at the moment. Many people are saying that this is the closest any search engine has come to reading searcher’s minds! It’s goal it to provide you with the results the moment you begin typing!
By speeding up the delivery of search results, Google believes it will keep its users happier and if they are happier, they hope they are more likely to search even more (which is good for Google because they get to serve ads on each query, which means potential for them to increase their revenue)
You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.
Visit 
