Make sure you don’t loose sales from these situations:

Personalised searches

In Dec 09 Google introduced personalised search which examines your search history and ‘adjusts’ your search results accordingly. Read more here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

Are you really ranking that well ?

While the concept of personalised search sounds great, there are a couple of pitfalls you should be aware of.

To explain lets say you’ve been monitoring your website ranking by occasionally searching for it. Google’s personalised search will kick in and display your site  with a higher rank, but just for you. Meanwhile everyone else including your prospective clients will see (or may not see) the site in its real ranking position which may be way down the list and out of sight  :(

In your personalised search induced naivety you’ll believe your site is doing real well, but actually it might be doing really, really bad!

A suggested solution
If you do monitor your site’s ranking, (and I commend you for doing this!) then use your browsers ‘stealth mode’ to check rankings  and see what the rest of the internet sees.

Most browsers have a stealth mode but it can be a bit hard to find so here’s some clues:

• Internet Explorer 8 calls it ‘In private Filtering’ Ctrl Shift F
• FireFox calls it ‘Private Browsing’ Ctrl Shift P
• Chrome calls it ‘Incognito’ Ctrl Shift N
• Safari calls it ‘Private Browsing’

How much does Google know about you?
The other way that your search results might differ from what your clients see, is when you are signed into your Google ID.
Google may  skew results based on info stored  in your Google ID.

The solution here is to log out of your Google ID, or again use your browser’s stealth mode.

Invisible Flash

Apple iPhones and iPads are becoming increasingly popular internet devices. Sites I monitor have up to 6% of visitors arriving on their iPhones and I suspect iPad usage will explode soon to take this total number much higher.

Flash is used to provide visual interest in websites, and is important for emotional based sales i.e. selling products and services that make us feel good. Flash is also good at attracting attention.

As any iDevice devotee will tell you, iPhones & iPads don’t display Adobe Flash.

Any Flash in your website looks like a gapping black hole to these visitors. There’s no emotional sales value, it looks ugly; even defiled and predictably undermines your website’s ability to engage iDevice visitors .

Read what Apple has to say about Flash and why they are unlikely to ever support it.  http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

What does this mean for your business website?
David Radzikiewicz from A7 Designs suggests, split your web presence over two sites; your traditional site and then a mobile visitor site. Visitors are automatically sent to the best site for their internet device by coding in the site.

If your target market is likely to visit using an iDevice then take action soon.

Display Standards

The last and ongoing display anomaly relates to web design standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a set of technical standards for websites to ensure they all display OK, but many  sites don’t comply.

Display compatibility is complex as your website must be displayed faithfully in the plethora of browsers each with multiple software versions. As context; in the last 30 days, 52 different browsers/browser versions visited just one clients’ site.

This is has been further exacerbated by browsers that didn’t comply with the W3C standards (Microsoft being one of the worst offenders), and as a result W3C has lost relevance for some frustrated Web Developers.

Who cares about standards, I just want sales!
Fortunately there are typically few display issues for non-compliant websites, but occasionally the outcomes can be catastrophic sales-wise:

• Menus don’t work properly, so the visitor can’t access product information or sales pages.
• Product information is displayed completely off the screen and unable to be read.
• Search engine spiders are unable to navigate the site, so products don’t feature in search results.
• Text and/or images are displayed over the top of other content making it impossible to read

These are all excellent sales preventers and something I’m sure you dont want in your site.

Is my site W3C compliant ?
Fortunately W3C has an easy to use validation tool that you can check each page in your website for compliance. http://validator.w3.org/

I suggest you discuss any W3C errors your find with your Web Dev as some are trivial and might cost you a lot to achieve very little.

http://www.browsershots.org/ is also an excellent free resource to see how your site looks in a wide range of other browsers.  It also interesting just see see how many there are out there…

Where to from here

• Monitor the traffic in your site
  I strongly recommend Google Analytics. Its free and world class.
• Use Analytics to check your website’s visitor clickstreams to see if they are doing what you want them to do. If not, take action.
• Use Analytics to identify then check correct display for the more popular browsers used to access your site.
• Check the main pages in your site for W3C compliance

Summary

Dont assume that everyone sees the same as you online. Your Clients may have a very difference experience, and its their reality that determines your online sales success.

This blog is based on the Succinct Update newsletter from July 2010.
You can subscribe directly to our newsletter here

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Just in case you might be thinking that the “non-rich Snippets” are somhow economically disadvantaged or low fat versions of a snippet, think again. A Snippet is a portion of  the Search Engine Result  (SERP) This is the bit about your site that Google displays in search results    - read SERP background here

Here’s an example of rich snippets from  the WebMasters Blog article. Rich Snippets contain “value added information” in the SERP such as an image, company name,  location, even survey results etc

Google have declared these  (initial) categories as candidates for Rich Snippets:

• People profiles
• Reviews
• Videos
• Events
• Recipes

Before you starting thinking that adding a recipe picture wont help you sell more from your website think again!
SERPs are an important if not vital part of the organic search sales process, and being able to differentiate your SERP above your online competitors WILL command attention, visitors and most likely sales…

What is interesting is that Rich Snippets don’t just happen spontaneously. They are triggered by the presence of  ’rich  information’ that needs to be coded into your HTML using special HTML coding extensions either: microdata, microformats or RDFa

Adding these is yet another job for overwhelmed web developers who already have too much to deal with and increasing range of detail and sophistication now expected to be in a modern website.

Anyway, watch this space as I can see that Rich Snippets will potentially be applied to a broader range of categories so if/when these become relevant to your business (if not already!)  then jump on it promptly before your competitors do!

It might even be astute to pre-code Rich Snippets into your site…

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Very useful data if you are trying to win some business online.

The new capabilities exposes more data about the terms (ie keywords), the rank and even the pages that did rank. All essential diagnostic data for this type of analysis.

What is even better about this enhancement is the data is presented in Analytics style charts with great drill down capability building into the UI

Nice work Google WebMasters Tools, and all the more reason you should be using this amazing tool to diagnose your business website’s organic search performance

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In supermarkets we see these as ‘specials’; and we get bombarded with them in TV advertising, so consider using a campaigning strategy to promote your business via your website.

Ideally a campaign will add value for your clients, while not costing you much if anything e.g.

• Seasonal products or services
• Launching a new product
• Engaging a new client segment
• Bundling to create a larger sale
• etc

These are all opportunities to engage and entice your clients. Try to be creative, but avoid discounting! Here’s a few tips to get you started with your online campaigning.

Paid search for campaigns
Paid search is ideal for campaigning because it is quick to deploy and can be highly targeted. Google AdWords is the most popular paid search system because of Google’s absolute domination of search in Australia.

If you want to reach Australian women 25-34 years; Small business owners based in Adelaide or South Australians with interests in a particular hobby or indeed almost any other target segment, AdWords will do this for you much cheaper than traditional marketing mediums.

The Google Keywords Tool lets you select keywords and you can add up to 2,000 into AdWords based on your target and budget.
Control your Google AdWords expenditure with a daily click budget.
If you have multiple segments then setup multiple Ad Groups for improved targeting, and get campaigning almost straight away.

Organic search campaigning
Using organic search for campaigning can challenging, but ultimately more rewarding. It is rare these days to find keywords that are not already being targeted and competitive keywords take months of lead time to gain appropriate ranking.

A good PageRank on your home page really helps so continue collecting links to your site.
There is an inherent delay from adding your campaign content to it being digested by Google so you can’t rely on attracting campaign related searches immediately. Because of this I suggest starting with a teaser on your home page linked to the campaign page.

If you have recurring or seasonal campaigns, leave the related pages active in your site rather than removing them. This allows search engines to index the page and you to cultivate links to improve its ranking ready for the critical period.
Prepare your site early for upcoming seasons and then lure search engines to update your new content by submitting your XML Sitemap.

Measuring your campaign success
As always, I recommend tracking your campaign with Analytics.
When there are no related visitors then you need to revisit how you are trying to attract them.

If you do generate campaign traffic, but no sales don’t be disheartened. Analytics can track visitor activity trends (i.e. click streams) through your website, which is effectively their feedback on your offer.

Click stream analysis is the online alternative to focus groups, only your visitors tell you what they think with mouse clicks. Modify your offer and try again.
Mike Moran’s book title says it all: Do it wrong quickly

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In a recent meeting a debate arose after I said that Google doesn’t use the keyword metatag. I was challenged on this point by someone confidently asserting that Google is indeed using the keyword metatag once again. He inferred that any suggestion that they weren’t was simply uninformed.

We agreed to disagree. The customer was confused. My creditability was compromised.

I blogged about the keyword metatag back in 2008. More recently even Google’s Matt Cutts once again debunked this urban myth, but the mighty keyword metatags’ magic powers will continue to persist…

My point is that there is so much SEO mis-information that the sheer mass generates its own pseudo-creditability much along the lines of …Oh yeah that must be true because I heard it the other day….

Metatag Basics
A metatag is a special place inside the web page HTML code that can store variables for example the Description meta tag which is used in SERPs

The keyword meta tag is one of a number of common HTML metatags, traditionally used to store a string of words that represent the content on that page.

Its use has persisted, particularly in Content Management Systems where editors are invited to add ‘search words’ etc that are then published into the keyword metatag by the CMS.

The keyword metatag was identified as being open to abuse around 2002, and no longer used by Google from that time and I suspect by many other search engines for the same reason.

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Newsletters, brochures, annual reports etc. in fact anything you can print or scan you can turn into a PDF document and have in your website.

Visitors to your site can download the free PDF viewer from Adobe (and others) to have your document faithful represented on their browser independent of operating system and browser differences.

Of course you need to link the PDF to your menu or content so visitors and search engines can reach it. Search engines? Yes! They treat a PDF as if it’s another page in your website.

PDFs are a great way to increase the amount of content on a key subject to support search marketing efforts, not to mention the benefit of providing additional sales and product information etc that prospective clients can read to support their decision to purchase from you.

Search engines can’t see inside a PDF
This is an urban myth about PDFs that we really need to bust.
Google has been indexing text content and metatags inside PDFs since 2001

Google cant read images inside PDFs
Another myth busted. In fact in Oct 2008 Google announced that they could OCR (Optical Character Recognition) PDF images. That means they can turn images inside of PDFs into indexable text.

Where are your PDFs ?
Use this Google search to find PDF documents in your website:

inurl:pdf

for example inurl:pdf www.succinctideas.com.au

The INURL search operator tells Google to restrict search results to a particular document type. Read more about Google’s inurl: search operator

Statics show that visitors will more readily open another page in your website rather than open a PDF so keep a balance of content types.

So PDFs really are quite genuine content, engaging sales visitors and search engines!

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This is one of a series of YouTube videos that clarify important information about how Google works, because frankly there is a lot of mis-information out there.

To catch more of Matt Cutts and other Googlers on YourTube go to the GoogleWebmasterHelp channel

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You can try out the web developer preview version of Caffeine here:

Is Google feeling the pressure of Microsoft’s continuing battle to gain a share of the internet ?

Microsoft have invested significantly into their new search incarnation Bing and there certainly is interest amongst my clients based on recent questions

There’s even evidence that Bing is being used more now than MSN ever was; BUT let’s put that into context. This table compares the proportion that search engines are used in a popular Australian website in the last 4 weeks from 19 Aug 09

Google represents 94% of all searches that results in a visitor to the site.

At 2.9% Bing is slightly higher than I would normally expect.

Microsoft Search Network (MSN) and Live (an earlier Microsoft search engine incarnation) continue to spiral into online irrelevance

While I enjoy conspiracy theories, there is just one fact that this one over-looks and that is that Google are continuously building new solutions; enhancements and gizmos. To suggest Google have cranked out Caffeine in response to Bing ignores the amazing stream of new products and enhancements that continues to flow out of the Google online solution factory.

Amazingly most of these are absolutely free.

In fact my personal favourite conspiracy theory is that Google Wave will be the last straw in undermining Microsoft Office by defusing Outlook’s domination of the business desktop.

Feel free to share your favourite Google / Microsoft / World domination conspiracy theory with a comment.

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It caught me by surprise when logging into the Microsoft WebMaster interface today and “boing” (with musical intonations!) there was the ‘Bing’ branding.

Apart from that the Microsoft Webmasters interface is still extremely underpowered functionality-wise compared to Google’s WebMasters Tools

If I cared more I’d research ‘bing’ and tell you more.

Sorry, you’ll have to bing it yourself.

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Google have nonchalantly introduced a new suite of search refinement tools that will help experts through search novices to find that elusive answer buried in the sea of internet information.

Here’s a summary of the search option functionality this new capability provides:

Filters:

• Content type (Videos forums & reviews)
• Time (recent, 24 hours past week or year)

Search result views:

• Images (images & SERP from results )
• Time line (results over time)

Search refinement:

• Related searches (shows related searches to your query)
• Wonder wheel  (a visual relationship interface)

This video provides a brief overview of the search options functionality:

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