uTargeting

5 Things To Avoid When Optimising Your Site

uTargeting — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:30:20 +0000

Google recently uploaded a nice 8 minute video with 5 mistakes people often make when optimising their site. Consequently, Google being so friendly, links these mistakes to 6 useful tips in order to avoid the mistakes in the first place…Thanks G!

Even those of you which are more “hands-on” with their site’s SEO, we would strongly recommend you watching it as it may refresh your memory and remind you of a few key concepts you might have forgotten.

Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW) – Thoughts

uTargeting — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:25:59 +0000

Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW) has been live since the begining of the year and feelings have been mixed – to say the least! We first introduced this new feature last month, in a blog post about what Google Search Plus Your World means for SMEs.

The “problem” with this update seems to be that a lot of people simply don’t care if their neighbour, work colleague or even their mum has just bought a new ironing board, or if they have just +1′d a their favourite TV show.

Below is a link to a fantastic TED talk on what personlisation across the web is doing to our society. The video is around 10 minutes long, but well worth a watch…

Many would ask if Google has gone too far this time, or whether or not this change has come too early… Is the world not ready for such extreme levels of personalisation on the web? From an online marketing and AdWords perspective, Google’s Search Plus Your World is a theoretical gold mine – using your search terms, with friend recommendations combined with clever ads to shape your buying decision!

What are your thoughts on this?

Search, plus What?

uTargeting — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:26:44 +0000

You’ve probably noticed the phrase “Search, plus Your World” popping up all over the place and wondered what all the fuss is about. Well, let us help you try and understand what it’s all about. At the beginning of January Google unveiled its Search, plus Your World as a way of completely personalising search results by using data from its social network, Google+.

Below is video about this new feature, from Google, with their typical feel good spin on it.

Search, plus Your World essentially consists of just 3 major components:

Personal Results – This basically fills your search results with Google+ posts and images from those inside your circles as well as yourself. For example, if you are preparing a holiday somewhere, and did a search on Google, you may discover photographs of the friends and family on holiday at the same time as posts associated with that subject. Experiencing the magical splendor of seeing pictures of you as well as your friends right within your search results may convince you to take that holiday in that same spot…or maybe not.

Profiles in Search – This puts profiles from Google+ directly into the auto complete as well as integrated into your search results. For example, lets say you want to find a good friend online and you decide to search for them (let’s just pretend you wouldn’t just use Facebook instead). You can start typing their name into Google search, and if that person is in your circles, or is prominent person in general, Google will show them in its search results in the auto complete dropdown.

People and Pages – This allows you to easily find and connect to prominent people who commonly discuss the topic that you are searching for, and then displays them on the right side of your results. For example, lets say you are looking for music you would see a list of celebrity musicians that have a major link to a community of music enthusiasts.

And, that’s it really! Simple, huh? But what does this mean for my business I hear you asking…Well, it essentially means that if you haven’t got your business onto Google+ you should do it NOW, or if you are already on there you need to make sure you are actively be trying to increase your connections. This will increase the likelihood of your website appearing to as a personal recommendation to friends of those your business is connected to, which straight away creates a level of trust in them towards your business.

Being an Kent SEO company, if you have any questions about Google+ or anything else relating to search engine optimisation (SEO), please feel free to get in contact with a member of our tea who will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

3 Tips To Combat The Panda in 2012

uTargeting — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:07:49 +0000

It’s the first 5 day week of 2012, so we thought we should start it by giving you three simple tips to help combat the beast – Google’s Panda updates. Google announced last month via Twitter that Panda updates will continue in 2012. There have currently been six updates to Panda since Google first introduced it in February 2011. With the next update anticipated sometime this month you should paying attention to the following three areas when performing maintenance on your website to help ensure that its rankings aren’t adversely affected.

Keyword Density
Panda has been coming down heavy on duplicate content (content that is not unique), poorly constructed language, and which have a high keyword density level in an to penalise sites that use too many keywords to try to increase their site rankings. Although there is no globally accepted keyword density percentage, we advise keeping it at between 5% and 8% in order to avoid being considered spam by Google or your visitors. The most important thing to remember however, is that nothing beats creating original, unique and quality content as often as possible.

Relevancy of Keywords
Using keywords which are often used by spamy sites may have a detrimental to your site. Before targeting a new keyword try Googling it and look at the quality of websites that are ranking on the first page. Are these reputable companies in your niche? Do they carry stupendous amount of content that looks spamy (are they a content farm)? These are just some of the questions you should be asking when evaluating these results.

Fix Broken Links
Finally, we recommend checking all links and making sure that the URLs they are pointing to still exist. If you find links that are no longer working, update them with the correct URL or remove them if the page cannot be found anywhere. Carrying broken links on your site can give Google the impression that you are just a link farm or that your content is outdated – both of which will negatively affect your rank.
Extra Tip: If you are using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, then have a look for plugins that automatically scan your site for broken links and alert you when any are found. For WordPress, we recommend using Broken Link Checker.

KLM Goes Social!

uTargeting — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:00:20 +0000

Dutch Airline KLM is introducing a new concept when it comes to seating on aeroplanes – social seating. Planned to launch in the early part of this year, social seating is an attempt to jazz our travel experiences by using social media data.

By using social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook, KLM is giving passengers to choice to hand pick their seating buddy based on their age, likes and interests in an attempt to make the flight more enjoyable.

For those worried about safety and security, KLM is making this new service optional to passengers and will require prior consent from all passengers wanting to participate in social seating

Microsoft Now In Second Place

uTargeting — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:27:41 +0000

ComScore recently announced that Microsoft is now officially the second highest traffic collection of sites online, finally beating Yahoo. First place is still obviously held by the giant that is Google.

Based on November 2011 traffic data, it was reported that Microsoft’s sites received 175,499,000 visitors, over 1,000,000 more than Yahoo during the same period. Watching Microsoft playing catchup with Google will certainly be interesting, however, for the time being Google has got the first place secured. In regards to search engine marketing, the numbers above don’t reflect the amount of traffic Bing, Google or Yahoo can send your way. The number above purely show the total user traffic on all of each company’s sites. In regards to search engine traffic, Google still has a huge lead over Bing or Yahoo for referrer traffic. Over 65% of search engine traffic – organic or PPC – originates from Google!

We’ve certainly seen Bing nibble away at Yahoo’s market share month after month, and perhaps even draining a bit away from Google too. However, given that Google has reportedly paid nearly One BILLION dollars for a three year spot as the default search engine for Firefox, Bing will find it harder to keep nibbling at Google’s market share. On the other hand however, Bing will probably get a nice boost in the near future from the addition of Bing Search for Xbox which should start to show up in Decembers stats.

Google’s Freshness Update – What does it mean to me?

uTargeting — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:01:09 +0000

In November this year, Google announced the introduction of yet another new update to their Caffeine web indexing system that was originally rolled out in June 2010. This most recent update, known as the “Freshness Update” affects roughly 35% of all searches, and has the intention of delivering fresher, more recent search results to searchers. What this means is that Google prefers, and wants to rank higher, newer/fresher content when possible. A number of queuries now generate results which are timestamped to show their freshness; this may be the date, the hour or even the minute the page was published or updated.

To put it another way, fresh and up-to-date content is more important than ever before, and you need to take action!

So, to help you we have written a list of 7 strategies we recommend you implement straight away (if you are not already) in order to ensure that your site isn’t left behind.

1. Get a Blog: Google has made it clearer than ever, that it likes sites that publish fresh content. Publishing regular content on a variety of topics, as often as you can, is the best way to accomplish this. Installing something like WordPress doesn’t take long (and is even something we can do for you) and is the perfect software to use for your blog.

2. Use Link Bait: Publishing well researched, informative, and entertaining content can and does bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media signals, and dozens of links, everyday. Content that ticks these boxes will result in higher rankings and is exactly what Google’s new freshness update was created to identify and promote!

3. Understand & Leverage Time-Stamps: As we already mentioned, Google is increasingly adding time stamps as part of its results. This timestamp is pulled directly from the article’s content. But how is this done, we hear you ask… Time stamping content is a must and is relatively easy to do in most blogging software suites (such as WordPress). The thing to keep in mind, is that Google recommends you display the date as: YYYY-MM-DD.

4. Embrace Social Media: There is nothing fresher than a Tweet, Stumble, Facebook status update, or a Google +1. Make sure you are using social media to push your content out, but are also using it to pull traffic and social signals to that same content. It’s also great to encourange your readers to generate content for you, as this improves your site’s freshness! The way they can do this for you, is by promoting your content (for example by retweeting it) or even by commenting on your blog posts (again very easy to do via WordPress).

5. Dynamically Update XML Sitemaps: XML sitemaps by default contain time stamps for each URL included within it. Making sure that your XML sitemap is updated as and when any content is updated on yoru website is hugely important. If you have a WordPress blog, this can be achieved automatically by using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. But for regular sites (as in those not running on WordPress or some other CMS), we suggest that you install a standalone XML sitemap generator that will generate and update your XML sitemap and when you update your pages. We recommend Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator created by XML-Sitemaps.xom

6. Publish more Press Releases: Nothing puts a bigger tick in the freshness and time-stamped boxes like a press release. More so now than ever, press releases may be the best and fastest way to give the search engines what they are looking for… fresh, juicy content. However, you must remember that a press release is probably only going to be considered fresh for a couple of days, a week tops. A good strategy to combat against this is to publish new press releases as updates/follow-ons to the previous ones. This helps ensure that there is always fresh content available for Google to serve on your behalf and which can also be used for link bait.

7. Get into Google News: We have put this at the bottom of our list, purely for the fact that it’s usually very difficult for single author/blogger to get into Google News. However, if you are able to get yourself into Google News you will be massively increasing the likelihood of your content will find its way to the top of the fresh search results.

Finally, an important thing to remember, is that freshness doesn’t always mean relevancy when it comes to search results. We believe that this factor will cause Google problems in the upcoming future, however, time will tell how they overcome these. Either way, watch this space!

Duplicate Content Warnings by Google

uTargeting — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:39:27 +0000

Google has recently announced they will begin notifying webmasters if and when they make a cross-domain URL decision involving your site. What this actually means is that when Google comes across similar or duplicate content on a domain, it chooses which of the domains to index that carries this duplicate. When such a decision is made, it may your version of the content that does not get indexed, in favour of another domain’s page.

While there can be multiple reasons for having duplicate content on your site – some of which are ok, but some of which are not – it’s never good to have Google deciding to not index a page on your domain. For this reason, Google has decided to notify webmasters every time this happens to one of your domains.

Currently Google only sends the notification to you via their Webmaster Tools, so make sure that you have claimed your website in Webmaster Tools and have set it up to send you an email with any notification that is raised.

For more information on the benefits of Google’s Webmaster Tools (which is FREE!) and how to start using it, visit the Webmaster Tools Quickstart Guide.

How to Dodge Past the Panda

uTargeting — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:24:02 +0000

Dealing with the recent Google algorithmic changes are not as straight forward as some may think. Just adding new (or more) content to your website will not reverse your Google Panda problems. You should looking to be adding the right type of content and in some cases you may even need to reconsider your entire website strategy.

Panda Updates to Date

As we’ve covered previously mentioned, Google Panda is actually a long-term algorithmic shift that has involved a number of updates. The very first update, Panda 1.0, rolled out in February and has been followed by several more, all of which have affected a growing number of websites.

These updates, as of this writing, are as follows:

Panda 2.4 on August 12th.
Panda 2.3 on July 27th or so.
Panda 2.2 on June 18th or so.
Panda 2.1 on May possibly 9th or so.
Panda 2.0 on April 11th or so.
Panda 1.0 on February 24th.

When asked, we always recommend that those which believe that their website has been affected by recent algorithm changes to first review their website logs against the above listed updates in order to identify when and which update affected their site. If drops in traffic are identified which closely correlate to the dates above, then Panda was likely the reason behind this.

To refresh your memory, Panda specidically went after sites which triggered off all/some of the following: duplicated content, excessive use of manufacturer or non-unique content material, RSS feed problems, incorrect canonical tag implementation, excessive on-site advertisements, poor on-page optimization, as well as other problems.

At the time, Google supplied very little concrete and actionable assistance for Webmasters to use to directly reverse the drops in traffic and rankings they had been experiencing as a result of Panda. The lack of information and clarity continued until Google’s Amit Singhal posted a detailed post on the Google Webmaster Central Weblog.

Inside the post Amit poses the question – “What constitutes a top quality web site?” and then lists twenty-two content-related questions Webmasters should ask themselves when reviewing their website content material going forward.

We will not list all those questions here but the full list above ought to be reviewed by ALL site owners (and not just those affected by Panda) as a method to get into the “Google’s mindset” about what they ought to be looking at specifically when reviewing a page in a post-Panda world.

The above post is the only real guidance Google has posted for webmasters as to how to cope with the recent changes.

Luckily for you, we are here to help! If you wish to get your site “Panda friendly” and make Google fall in love with your content then this is what content you should be looking to publish… User Generated Content (UGC).

What type of content do I need?

What is UGC? User generated content is content that your audience adds to your website or which you add as a result of discussions with your audience. UGC entails any of the following:

Customer testimonials
Product or service ratings
Product and service customer reviews
Discussion boards
Customer or site-driven WIKIs
Product tutorials (video or text-driven)
How-to guides or FAQ’s
Company or customer interviews
Social media content (blog comments, likes, tweets, etc.)

UGC in a nutshell is all about connecting with a niche community, utilizing that community to add content to your website, and promoting and sharing that content to others in and outside that niche.

This idea of community content material creation is nothing new. We’ve pushed the importance of a blogs and of link bait content material for a while now, both of which are essential to produce those social media signals that Google and Bing have been making use of as ranking signals for a while. But now, in a post-Panda globe, this content is crucial to getting your website ranking competitively.

Nevertheless, good content material Isn’t Adequate These days! Everybody is attempting to put up excellent high quality content material. It is also not enough to write up exclusive content that you’ve optimized for Google. You’ll want to write-up content which is going to lead to an emotional connection with your audience, and supply content that your site audience is going to take and run with!

How do others achieve this?

It is possible to do this in a number of techniques. Write up link bait form content material that results in 1000′s of social media signals and 100′s of incoming links like this piece on bizarre advertising and marketing campaigns or this one on the most secure places on the planet.

Or it’s even possible to tap into your fan base, like Zappos.com does on a regular basis. Look at their Video Expertise channel which collects videos from their members praising Zappos.

These are just several examples but you get the picture. Most of you reading this have probably not carried out something comparable to the above. And performing this is Important. It is content like the above that is going to generate the elevated page visits, lower bounce rates, and higher-converting usage metrics that Google will THEN use to recalculate your website’s authority.

In summary, if you are not developing a community around your website and brand, and you have been affected by Google Panda, it has never been a better time to start. Best of luck!

Google Panda 2.5 Update

uTargeting — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:08:41 +0000

Google has recently rolled out more updates to the algorithm, and the most significant of them has been labelled by many as the Panda 2.5 update. According to Google these updates have been considered to be insignificant, however that’s what they said about the Panda Update to begin with. It’s no surprise that many webmasters are up in arms and the general opinion around the water cooler is that this isn’t a minor update at all.

Several SEO sites have been putting up polls to ask users their opinions of the Panda update as a whole. Many, up to 80% in some cases, voted that they think the update is significant or very significant. One poll even had people stating they had lost their job or had to fire staff because of the recent Panda updates, while many more are afraid that things can still go in that direction. Some people who have worked hard and were at the top of the results have reported loss of traffic, sometimes up to 60% because of the update.

While the idea of “significance” is very subjective, job loss is an actual potential problem, but it’s hard to know the validity of these polls since people who are burned, are probably more likely to vote because they want their voice heard over the people who are doing just fine.

If you’ve seen your site take a dive recently, then there are a number of ways in which we can work with you and help. We are currently in the process of writing a guide on how to fight the Panda and ensure that your site does not take a nose dive down the search engines results pages (SERPs).