Google has been using site speed as a ranking factor in its AdWords model for some time, but speed is now one of the 200 or so factors taken into account when ranking a page in organic listings, marking a fairly fundamental change and making it ever more challenging for web developers, web masters and search engine optimisers to achieve strong, high ranking positions. The knock-on effects will also be felt at hosting companies (particularly those who rely on the high-volume, low-service model) as more pressure is put on them to deliver web pages quickly, which itself can be largely dependent on the quality of code produced by programmers but also on the hardware provided, internal infrastructure, bandwidth available and connections. Suffice to say, those who invest in high-quality infrastructure and fast connections will feel the benefit as clients migrate towards them, as will developers who take the time to produce efficient, clean code that doesn’t get in the way of the user experience.

The team at Google are keen to stress that the impact is likely to be minimal, saying:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Speed has long been of interest to Google as they have carried out extensive testing on the impact of speed on how users interact with their search tools. In short, a speedier site means better click-through rates, higher levels of engagement and a generally higher degree of satisfaction.

The course is designed for attendees who are new to SEO and will give them a grounding in a variety of principles and techniques that can be used to improve and optimise a web site. Some of the topics being covered are:

• Semantic HTML
• Web Development Techniques for SEO
• Researching & Planning SEO
• Writing effective, optimised content
• Building Links
• Techniques to Avoid

The course takes place on Thursday the 3rd of December, runs from 10am to 4pm, includes lunch and costs £300 + VAT per person. Note that the course is ILA approved.

For more details on the day and to book a place, head over to the Netresources site or call them on 0131 477 7127.

There are just 8 places available so if you’re interested you’d best book your place as soon as you can.

Hope to see you there!

- Nick

The announcement was made in a post on the Google Webmaster blog the other day and has triggered the usual speculation and discussion that surrounds Google’s regular dissemination of information, most of which involves the usual picking apart of the statement looking for hidden meaning. Perhaps Dan Brown’s latest book is stirring up the SEO industry in its week of release?

Our View on Meta-Keywords

Our view on keywords has always been simple and straightforward: don’t bother. We have seen no difference in ranking ability of two pages that possess and lack keywords respectively, none whatsoever. Likewise, we have never seen any impact on ranking come about as a result of meta-keyword tweaking.

Meta-Descriptions Make Sense

The post also mentions that Google has not used the Meta-Description field for ranking purposes for a number of years, however, our experience is that the description field can actually aid matters as it plays a crucial role in determining the click-through rate of a listing on a search engine ranking page (SERP). Our view is that the higher the CTR on a link, the likelier the associated page is to rank more highly. Furthermore, the higher the click-through rate of a page, the more traffic you’re likely to attract, so a well optimised and written description can really make a difference.

If you don’t include a meta-description then Google will select a snippet of text from your site, which might not work as well as a bespoke one. We use the meta-description field to display the Mackerel Media phone number on the SERPs page, as you’ll be able to see here. Neat eh?

Looking to the future, we can only hope that now Google has cleared keywords up, they’ll move swiftly on to link spam blogs, dubious paid link vendors and all the other fun issues that keep us busy. Hmm…perhaps we’re a little too optimistic.

The search giant is showing a handy summary of today’s tennis at Wimbledon, but as the screengrab below shows, they haven’t quite spelt “Quarterfinals” correctly, rather it says “Quaterfinals.”

Oops.

In one case we suspected sabotage, and in another it was probably something that was forgotten about when the site went live (the developer using robots.txt to restrict search access instead of having a separate development environment most likely, still no excuse), but whatever the case the impact is severe and perhaps even catastrophic for a site or business.

The robots file can be used to some effect to aid search engine optimisation efforts, or to aid the transfer from an old site with its outdated architecture and navigation to a new site with its new structure, for example:

URL Removal via Webmaster

You can request the removal of old URLs or directories from Google’s index by adding them to the robots file, then submitting a request via the webmaster console. This is particularly useful when whole directories become redundant and need to be removed from search engine indexes.

Sculpting Link Juice

This is one of those SEO techniques that seems to attract an equal mixture of praise and criticism, but it is one way of controlling how internal links flow around your web site, and from there how much ‘equity’ or ‘link juice’ you pass from one page to another. The theory says that you can focus link juice from – say – your home page on to a select few sub-pages and in doing so raise their ranking.

The recent announcement from Google on the canonical tag does (to a certain degree) render this redundant, but until we see conclusive proof it works, we’ll remain on the slightly sceptical side of the fence.

The company caters for a wide range of the market, from the occasional hill-walker looking for something to ward off the dastardly Highland Midge, to the rescue team making their way carefully through a remote rain forest whilst being pestered by mosquitoes.

Our work will take in Search Engine Optimisation, PPC Advertising and Link Building, all aimed at attracting hordes of visitors to the site.

You can see the site at www.healthy-travel.co.uk

We’ve been working on a couple of campaigns for different clients, playing the game, patiently waiting for new links to be established. Out of the blue, we found we had two fantastic links on our hands – from two of the most visible sites on the web, let alone in the UK. Both The Guardian Newspaper and The Sun are sending traffic to sites we manage. Needless to say we were very pleased, as it was somewhat unexpected.

What was the secret to this? Content, pure and simple. It just goes to show that for all the talk of enticing links through quality content, it’s quite true. And whilst these not might be the Holy Grail of links, (we’re still holding out for that elusive front-page-of -Google link – we might be waiting a while!) it shows that with a little effort, directed cleverly, you can achieve great results.

Charles and Dee McGowan at Southlands Farm have three beautiful self catering Northumberland Cottages available for rental the year round. They began converting the cottages in 2006, welcomed their first guests in 2007 and hopefully will take things from strength to strength in 2009 with the help of the new site.

The challenge they faced was common – accurately portraying the very high standard of their accommodation, without sacrificing the personality that makes them unique and the values that make them admirable. So, our job was to build a site that does showcase the cottages in the right light, captures their unique brand of hospitality and encourages people to come and stay.

In our approach to the project we placed one foot in the aesthetic camp and the other in the business camp – after all, without guests there would be no business.

To that end we’ve developed a site that first and foremost captures the unique green, ‘country life’ that the cottages offer and, secondly, is designed and built to attract a serious volume of enquiries by being both highly attractive to search engines and (as one would expect from an seo company) highly capable of converting visitors into enquiries.

Now that the site is live, we’ll be carrying out a comprehensive search engine optimisation exercise to ensure the site is as visible as can be.

The excellent design work comes courtesy of Andrew Pendrick, with whom this project is a first-time collaboration. I would say only that I hope this is the first of many collaborations between Andrew and Mackerel Media.

The development was carried out by Alan White, of Alan White Web Development. Alan coded the templates, integrated the modX CMS framework and deployed the site to the hosting environment.

You can see the site at www.southlandsfarmcottages.co.uk

Google Local Business
Google Local Business results typically appear at or near the top of SERPs when a user performs a search for a phrase that contains a local (or geographic) element. For example, if you carry out a search for ‘distillery glasgow‘, you’ll see a couple of businesses, plotted on a map, at the top of the page (one of these is our client Glengoyne). These are the local business results and naturally, if you want to attract customers, being in that list is going to be of benefit to you.

How Do I Get My Business Listed?
It’s actually very easy, if a little fiddly. All you need to do is visit the Google Local Business Centre and add set up a profile for your company. If you don’t already have one, you’ll need to set up a Google Account. You can add the following information to your listing:

• the name of your business
• your phone number
• an email address
• a web site address
• opening hours
• payment types accepted
• other facilities on offer
• photos
• videos (you can link YouTube videos from other users)

Once you’ve added this information, you need to verify your listing, which you can do in one of three ways:

• by postcard – this takes a few weeks so we don’t advise you go down this route
• by Phone. Google gives you a call and when you answer, they’ll ask you to key in a 4-digit PIN number. Once you’ve done that your listing is verified and will appear shortly thereafter
• by Mobile Phone – most of our clients don’t specify a mobile number so we don’t tend to use this

What Are the Benefits?
As we’ve mentioned, the biggest benefit of doing this is that your web site will hopefully appear within the Local Results listing when people perform a search related to your business. This ought to lead to more traffic.

The other benefit of doing this is that your listing will look more attractive to users and will hopefully attract more clicks than businesses that haven’t tailored their listing. It simply makes you look more professional.

Another benefit is that the data you provide can be shown in other places – in Google Maps, Google Earth potentially, and when other web site owners insert Google Maps into their web pages.

How are the Local Listings Ranked/Ordered?
This is one of those million-dollar questions and is the subject of intense debate amongst the internet marketing community. We’re always honest and would say that we don’t know for sure, but we do believe that the following factors do influence where you appear:

• the services and keywords you add to your listing
• your proximity to the ‘centre’ of a city – this might be defined by postcodes. EH1 is just to the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh, for example, so businesses located in or close to that area ought to rank more highly
• the presence of the search phrase in your company’s name
• the content of your web site
• the number of reviews that exist for your business
• the rating of your business through those reviews (this is one that’s unclear at the moment)
• close to a telephone exchange – this is a theory we have (strictly unproven as yet) which states that the results may be influenced by how close to a telephone exchange a business address is. This is based on there being a large telephone exchange in Edinburgh near Waverley Station, around which local businesses in SERPs are often clustered. This may be due to Waverley being next to the EH1 postcode, so that may be the influencing factor in this, rather than the exchange.

Other Local Web Sites
There are a number of popular local web sites around and we’ll be writing a longer and more detailed post on how you can increase the exposure of your business through them.

In the meantime, some simple advice: ask your customers to write reviews for your business on Qype.co.uk – do it now!

Tables

Many e-commerce systems rely heavily on tables for layout, and unfortunately Viart is no exception. Tables are used extensively for layout, and for decoration.

Much as we’d prefer this not to be the case, it’s likely that until Viart updates the templates provided with the package, we’ll be stuck using tables.

Use of H1, H2, H3 tags

Using CSS to create a heading structure for a web page is considered to be a well established way* to encourage achieve search engine rankings, amongst other benefits. However, all the Default Style uses CSS extensively, it doesn’t use Heading Tags to structure the content on the page. This, combined with the templates’ use of tables, doesn’t help matters particularly much.

However, if you’re willing to get under the hood a little it’s perfectly possible to introduce these tags. You can do this directly in the code (perhaps using h1 tags for the product names) or by creating a styles in the CSS, then using them in Custom Content Blocks or on Custom Pages.

Either way, the system isn’t great out the box, but can be improved with some work.

Discrete & Search Engine Friendly URLs

Viart offers the ability to use ‘search engine friendly’ URLs rather than the standard cryptic ones. These two alternatives look a little like this:

www.mackerelmegastore.com/fresh_line_caught_turbot
www.mackerelmegastore.com/product_details.php?item_id=123

From a pure SEO perspective the first of the two (the search engine friendly one) is vastly more preferable, primarily as it allows keywords to be placed into the URL – a sure-fire way of improving rankings.

Interestingly, we’ve found that search engines don’t necessarily have a problem indexing a site that uses the cryptic URLs, which can sometimes be a problem.

User Friendliness
We always think that a meaningful URL can help increase the attractiveness of a site to a user. For example, someone using Google may well look at the URL under the search result for extra verification on the link they’re considering clicking on. Of course it’s far easier to assess whether this is the case if the URL contains the phrases you’ve actually searched for.

Analytics
A minor point but Search Engine Friendly URLs can also be useful when it comes to analytics, making the identification of pages within the site easy. It’s far simpler to say “Yay! 100% increase in traffic to the About Us page” rather than “100% increase to..wait a minute…what’s ‘product_category.php?id=252′ again?”

Sales Funnel Tracking
As Viart helpfully creates distinct URLs for every stage of the Shopping Cart/Checkout process, tracking the progress of users through the Sales Funnel is a doddle.

Conclusion

Our conclusion, which seems to be shared with a number of people over at the Viart Forum, is that the SEO of the Viart system out-the-box is poor and needs to be addressed as a matter of priority. This is a shame as the product has a lot going for it. However, online retailers who are really serious about optimising their sites and gaining high volumes of traffic will have problems.

That said, the templates can be modified if you have the know-how so you may be able to get at least part of the way.

Finally, we should say that none of this takes into account the value of high-quality links. None of the SEO things we’ve mentioned above would be any use without high-quality in-bound links. Our work has shown us that we can vastly improve the ranking of a Viart site purely through link-building and a little optimisation of content and meta-data.

* Yes, I know that there’s always going to be healthy debate about how much of an influence heading tags are, but for the purposes of this example let’s assume that they do. In any case, it’s good practice to do so.