NORAD tracks Santa and his Reindeer across the Globe!

I am just sitting here on a chilly Xmas eve in the office and came across this post about NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) who track Santa's progress around the globe as he delivers his presents. The Commission manages this purely on sponsorship and has been doing this since 1955. The technology behind this wonderful idea, would put most military manoeuvre's to shame. A multitude to satellites, radar and even a jet fighter are used, just to be absolutely sure Donner and Rudolph don't give NORAD's Santa Tracking command tower the slip.

Thousands of volunteers at NORAD work over Xmas eve and answer calls and emails from children who wish to to help them track Santa, just in case Rudolph's nose disappears off the radar screens.


You can follow Santa's progress here with Santa Tracking or watch Santa's Progress in 3D on Google Earth. He is in Russia at the moment delivering presents there, so it all looks to be on track for him to get to the UK for 12.00pm tonight.

Merry Xmas from Leapfrogg

Merry Christmas from the Froggers!

We would like to wish our readers a very Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year!

The Froggblog is going to take a short break over the festive period but we'll be back, bigger and better in 2008!

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for being a part of the Froggblog in its first year.

Best Wishes,

The Leapfrogg Team

Usability Article

Just wanted to share a great article covering 30 Usability issues that you should be aware of.

It provides a great introduction to usability as well as providing some interesting psychological reasoning and priniciples to explain these issues. A good read.

Search Marketing Word of the Week (14)

With some great content being posted by the wonderful staff here at Leapfrogg over the last couple of Friday's, this regular post has had a break. The Frogg has been chomping at the bit to get back though so here goes with this weeks 'word of the week'...

'Natural'

No, not a description of the skin condition of our immaculate faces (!!) but how we describe the listings on a search engine results page (SERP, OK that's two words this week!) that are not paid for. Imagine a Google results page; the listings you see on the right hand side and the one or two often featured at the top of the page (in the section labelled 'Sponsored Links') are part of the Adwords program whereby advertisers pay for placement.

On the other hand, the 'natural' or 'organic' results are those on the left of the page, whereby websites are ranked according to a number of factors associated with the website itself ('on the page') and external factors ('off the page').

Have a great weekend!

And if you haven't had a chance, check out our '12 days of SEO Christmas' video

New Google Analytics Code

There are more changes a foot with Google Analytics. We have just noticed that there is a new code to be used for tracking websites. It looks more complex than the previous code and should be able to offer better tracking in the future.

So why have Google done this and what does it mean for us?

The new code is far more complex than the legacy code and this is in preparation for new features that will be introduced by Google over the next year. If you stay with the old code these new features will not work.

They key change we are aware of so far if that the new code will automatically detect if a page is on a secure server.

In the past it was possible if non secure code was present on a secure page that an error message would appear informing the user that the page contains non secure items. If this was your shopping cart it is likely that many users would have been scared off at that point. With the new code this mix up can not occur which is great news.

However the bad news is that it is likely that the old code will be phased out in the next 18 months and as such there is likely to be a lot of time and effort spent by many SEM's to get this replaced on their client sites. It will also mean for many clients extra costs involved in getting their developers to implement the new code.

As such make sure that from now on you use the new code for any new analytics set ups and possibly to prevent mass panic in the future start to slowly migrate websites from the old to the new code.

An SEO song for Christmas

Well it's that time of year again folks, and over at Leapfrogg we have been getting in the festive spirit. So we have spent a little time putting together our own 12 days of SEO Christmas for your enjoyment!!!

It's from the eyes of our respected clients and details the 12 things our clients asked of us over the festive period.

Enjoy!!! We certainly did making it!



And just in case you wanted to join in (or can't understand what the hell we are singing about!!!) here are the lyrics.

On the 1st day of Christmas my client asked of me ....better online visibility (1st time)
For his online visibility (2nd + time)

On the 2nd day of Christmas my client asked of me - 2 new domains

On the 3rd day of Christmas my client asked of me 3 301s

On the 4th day of Christmas my client asked of me 4 textual menus

On the 5th day of Christmas my client asked of me 5 one way links

On the 6th day of Christmas my client asked of me 6 static pages

On the 7th day of Christmas my client asked of me 7 spidered news feeds

On the 8th day of Christmas my client asked of me 8 engaging titles

On the 9th day of Christmas my client asked of me 9 new blog posts

On the 10th day of Christmas my client asked of me 10 tags on Digg

On the 11th day of Christmas my client asked of me 11 well written Meta Tags

On the 12th day of Christmas my client asked of me 12 top 10 rankings

Diary of a Link Builder (4) - Reflecting on Widgety Goodness and predicting the future...

It’s difficult not to get consumed and indeed enthralled in all things widgety with an event like the inaugural Widgety Goodness that was hosted yesterday.
Brighton’s Corn Exchange welcomed a range of digital agencies (both large and small), new media consultants, widget developers and intermediaries to present, listen and participate in discussions of Google’s Open Social, widget development and syndication and I would be surprised if anyone left uninspired.

Steve Bowbrick described an evolution of widgets, their uses and the internet as whole – and it’s one he termed the “Darwinian Disco” – but does this evolution ultimately mean something will die?

From my experience both within Leapfrogg and in the affiliate marketing industry prior to joining the company I experienced this evolution as a publisher and the continual challenge of driving conversions. It was never enough just to include vertical banners within a webpage, and it is not enough for a company director to say, “We need a viral” or “We need a widget”.

Simon Andrews provided the above image in his presentation, which I think, really speaks volumes.

Perhaps websites, as the existing destinations we know and love will be replaced by personal – widgetized - start pages including iGoogle, Netvibes and PageFlakes, adorned by all manner of widgets from news, product and video feeds.
But of course the future in unforeseen – however isn’t it better to try something out, to experiment, to take a gamble (which, when considering the cost of developing widgets can be a low cost gamble) to make a mistake and learn from it?

Conversely, and of course this is open to discussion, I believe widgets aren’t for everyone – both in terms of budget, business model and business objectives – but they still can represent an excellent tool, for some businesses, in increasing or complimenting their brand awareness if executed and syndicated effectively.

STA Travel Tools, from STA travel (the largest supplier of student and youth travel) are just one example of an inspirational deployment of widgets (call them gadgets or applications if you so wish) which include ‘travel to do lists’, ‘Weather comparison’ tools and ‘travel offer’ widgets that users can integrated into their personal pages, blogs, Facebook/ Myspace profiles or download onto their PC or Mac desktop.
With each widget branded with the STA colour scheme and logo, the company have added value to their business by offering something useful for the user, who in turn, by embedding these widgets, are advocating the brand through their social spaces. In the era of social media and the power of social recommendations would you not agree that a recommendation from a friend carried far more weighting than a recommendation from a marketer?

But again, lets not rush into this…. Creating a widget isn’t just about throwing something up and should be proactive and not reactive.

One factor that was continually impressed yesterday was that of ‘user centricity’, the recognition and full understanding of your target user or customer and it is a point which I firmly believe is key to any strategic decision, not least when thinking about integrating widgets into your online marketing campaign(s).

If you, as a developer or marketing strategist do not recognise and fully understand your users but simply create an application with the ‘hope’ it will go viral, then you are fundamental failing. Don’t forget the importance of content and context – of which STA travel tools provide excellent and relevant examples. The Widget Success Factors - raised in Steve Touhill’s presentation are also work consideration in adding the most value and maximising the return from a widget.

But again, as with previous ‘diary of a link builder posts’, I feel a good point of conclusion would be to quote the late Malcolm Muggeridge and it is a quote I feel the Widgety Goodness delegates, sponsors and speakers would be fully behind and that is to:

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream”….

To find out more about Widget and all things Widgety be sure to check out the following sources:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget
- http://widgetavenue.com/
- http://www.widgetbox.com/
- http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/

And of course: http://widgetygoodness.com/

On another note, I’ve posted a few photographs of the conference on the Leapfrogg Flickr account and I’d welcome any annotations or comments if I have missed out anybody’s name or website.

Google Sitelinks: Facts and Theories

Google sitelinks have been a hotly debated topic over the last year and there are many theories as to how they are generated. However as a result of numerous queries from clients I have delved into this deeper and posted my findings below broken down into two distinct categories facts and theories.

THE FACTS
1. The facts are fairly simple. Sitelinks are a list of links shown below a search result. There can be up to 8 links below any one result. I have pasted an example here:

2. Google produces sitelinks by an automated algorithm. Their intention is to provide users with a shortcut that can possibly save them time when searching.

3. Google analyses the link structure of a site to find good sitelinks. Some sites that do not have a clear structure may actually prevent Google from producing sitelinks. This process is completely automated.

4. You can block sitelinks from within your webmaster account. This means if Google's algorithm has got it wrong you can remove the short cut.


THE THEORIES
So that now leads me to the theories. Most of these surround the mysterious algorithm. However it is fairly easy to test some of these so I have had a go and would really like to hear from anyone that can prove or disprove any of these:

1. You must rank first in the natural listings for a term. This may actually be a fact as I can not find any examples to disprove this.

2. Traffic has to be of a certain level. I have checked all my clients that have sitelinks and found the lowest monthly traffic volume to be around 13,500. Interestingly all the clients that have sitelinks with traffic volumes less than 20,000 have very high traffic volumes for their branded names (Usually above 2000 per month). However clients with over 20,000 visitors per month can get away with having less than 500 searches for their branded name. This may just be a coincidence but could be indicative of a dual threshold for overall traffic and traffic for a particular term. It could be that traffic above 20,000 per month triggers sitelinks as does a unique term with over 2000 searches per month. I am very keen to hear about examples that would confirm or disprove this.

3. The click through rate will have to be very high. I have assumed that this would have to be above 90% but have no data to support this. My reasoning behind this is that I have only actually seen the sitelinks for terms that relate to a website URL or a brand name. I am very keen for anyone to post examples of any sitelinks that are generated for terms that do not relate to brand names.

4. The age of a domain seems to be an issue. I read in one blog post that the domain had to be several years old. However we had a client recently achieve sitelinks whilst the domain was less than 2 years old. I also have another client with traffic over 15,000 and brand name searches over 2000, however the site is less than 1 year old and as such does not have any sitelinks. As such we can deduce that the domain has to be at least 1 year old but can be less than 2 years old.

5. Link popularity of the site and deeper pages must also be a factor. This would help Google decide which pages were most important.

6. The structure of the site itself is very important and if not quite right will actually prevent sitelinks from being generated (This much we know is a fact). However from my research the sites that gain sitelinks seem to have a clear structure, a templated design (with the template present on the home page) and more often than not a breadcrumb trail.

So whats all the fuss about?
For a site owner sitelinks may be seen as an accolade that has been earned. It is almost a compliment or a statement that Google has taken note of your website.

At the moment the only examples I can find for sitelinks are for branded terms. And I think this is a crucial point to note. Could sitelinks serve another purpose other than helping users find the information they want more easily?

The algorithm seems to be very good at recognising unique brand names and attribute them to your site. Would this algorithm with a bit of tweaking be able to specifically identify unique brand terms and use this as a factor for page rank? The mention of a unique brand term in a page could be measured in a similar way to backlinks? This would add an extra dimension to search marketing and mean that branding would become much more central to all search marketing campaigns.

Finally make sure you check your site links
If a your site does receive sitelinks it is well worth checking exactly what Google is predicting your clients are after. Have a look at this search result for cineworld.

There are definitely some that that need to be removed here and in fact these links could actually be adversely effecting user experience. However there still is no way of telling Google what your preferred sitelinks are, this may be something that is just around the corner.

Diary of a Link Builder (3) - Learning from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares

The latest offering from Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares aired on Channel 4 last night, followed the somewhat disastrous adventures of ex-boxer Mike and his wife Caron Ciminera as they struggled to run the Fish & Anchor, a restaurant in Lampeter, West Wales. Whilst the couple’s arguing appeared to better the food they were originally sending out (a mix of jarred sauces and home cook book trophy dishes) they did let slip on a fantastically poor bit of black hat optimisation, which I hope made all white hat SEOs laugh out loud.

If there was one lesson to take away from the show, it would be – Don’t fake reviews!

In order to gauged the feeling of the local community for the failing restaurant come sports bar, Ramsay conducted a search on Google for the Fish & Anchor, to which he was presented with a range of reviews, two of which were rather suspiciously from a character calling himself Michael or Mike Burns.

On the Wales portal of the BBC website Burns had posted “Well i don't get excited about food too often, and having dined in Rick Stein's, and Gordon Ramsay's,I think i have found a better restaurant in West Wales”. On the SugarVine website he also posted “what a fantastic restaurant for couples, and families. it seems to have everything, the food has to be the best i have eaten (home or abroad) this place will go far”. Other online reviews echoed what has already been said, but with the dire state of the restaurant, its food, its reputation and its perception from both the local community and Ramsay itself, would it not be right to question who was telling the truth?

The restaurateur confessed to posting the reviews, his rational pointing to stimulating custom, however with any reactive strategy it requires a degree of foresight – and I am not sure he really thought through the wider ramification of posting these “inaccurate” reviews.

Firstly, a warning must be expressed. For example, if someone finds your restaurant or hotel via a positive (fake) review and they have a bad experience, there is a chance that they will post a true review to assist fellow users and generally have a rant. The initial seeding of this true review has the potential to lead to an onslaught of further reviews from other visitors who might not have otherwise posted. Don’t forget the saying “people don't lead… they follow”.

But how can you manage your reviews and ultimately what your customers are saying about you? Well first and foremost, address the problem(s)!
You wouldn’t put a sticking plaster on a gun shot wound, so why think that a positive review about the quality of your food or the softest of your sheets is going to counteract the adversities of your customer service?

The customer is king, a point stressed by Ramsay, and one that should ring true for any business, after all, without them, where would we be?

By rectifying or at least making plans to manage any failings within your business, regardless of its size, will be the first step in managing your online reputation, but this is an area I will not going into comprehensive detail for this post. Instead, I will offer some simply pointers as to how to harness online reviews for good.

Sites like Trip Advisor, which boasts over 10,000,000 user generated reviews of various hotels, holidays and restaurants is gaining increasing weighting as an resource for honest and unbiased review and via its system of community recommendation it really has the power to drive custom, and in many instances, divert customer – the key factor being positive, and consistent reviews.

But if you do run a successful hotel or restaurant and wish to harness these social spaces, but wish to do so in a more ethical way than that demonstrated in Kitchen Nightmares than why not encourage your diners of hotel guests to post a review after their stay.

When the customer is paying their bill or even booking their hotel room why not take their email address, or even ask them to submit their business card in return for entry into a monthly prize draw for a free meal in the restaurant?

In addition to building up a client database by collecting this data - for use in promotional mailings including notifying customers of events, promotional and the launch of a new menu – you can also harness it to stimulate online reviews by dropping your customers a short email after their stay / meal, which might look something like the following example…

“Good afternoon Simon, and thank you very much for your booking at the Leapfrogg Restaurant, we hope you had an enjoyable meal.

We pride ourselves on the quality of our food and our attentive staff however we’re always striving to enhance and improve what we do, and as such we would appreciate you taking two minutes of your time to write a review for us at Trip Advisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com), a free travel guide and research website that allows users to post review and ratings.

Your comments are important to us, and will be used to improve the Leapfrogg restaurant.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to welcoming you again to the Leapfrogg restaurant in the near future.

Sincerely,

A Restaurateur
Leapfrogg restaurant
Brighton
Tel: 01273 669 450”

Of course, many of your requests will be ignored, but providing you are personal in your emails (a point we at Leapfrogg have mentioned previously in this blog) then you are more likely to get a response, and even if you only have a 5% success rate, this is still 5% of valuable customer feedback.

A point to which I will conclude this post is one which has stuck with me from London’s SMX, and one that I will most certainly be repeating from here on out is that “Yesterday's news no longer wraps today’s fish and chips”. Online news and online content, including user generated reviews do not simply get binned like a newspaper at the end of the day, but they remain live, and can even appear within the search results for a brand keyword search… so isn’t it worth paying attention to what your customers are saying?

Ramsay image courtesy of Buddy TV

How to build an RSS Feed

Firstly let’s talk about RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is a way of automatically putting your content in front of people in places other than your own website.

Here is what RAW RSS looks like: Pretty eh?

How can people read this RSS feed, it looks like Gobbledegook?

Good, question, they read it via a piece of software called a feed reader, and this application takes all the RSS content and organises it neatly into one single location for easy viewing. There are a number of these readers out there to use, Google Reader being possibly one of the best known, but other such as Bloglines, Feed demon and Newsgator are also widely used.

The end result is much more readable and looks like this in text or video:

Ok, but if I wanted to make an RSS feed, how would I do it as I’m not a techie?

Easy, I found a nice easy tool called the RSS Headliner from the lovely guys at weddevtips. http://www.webdevtips.co.uk/webdevtips/codegen/rss.shtml

Firstly select how many headlines you want to be included in your feed. I have selected 1 for the example. Then think of a snappy and descriptive title for your feed, Since mine is about RSS feeds made easy, i have called it "Easy RSS feeds”. Then I've added the URL of where these articles will appear and then a breif description about what the feed will contain. Language should be set to English but if it is not, click on check here for your language code, then choose the Document Type which is RSS. I have then added a headline, in this case it is about "My first RSS feed" and again I've included a URL specific to this particular article and a quick description about it saying "This is an example of my first new feed" and that is it, Simple eh?

This handy tool then converts these selections into code, as shown below. As you can see the tool fills in all the elements needed to create an RSS feed?

The Site Title
Site URL
Site Description
Language
DOCTYPE
Headline 1 Title
Headline 1 URL
Headline 1 Description

Ok so I have got this Feed thing but how do I get it onto my website?

Create a file and call it something like Myfeed.xml or Myfeed.rss and make sure it has the .xml or .rss extension. Then Upload the Myfeed.xml file to your web directory on your web server.

What is Feed Validation the Magazine’s talk about?

Once you have saved your file you need to Validate your RSS feed by running it through the RSS Validator to make sure it's set up correctly. It is also a really good idea to validate this code by going here to the W3validator website
and you will need to cut and paste your code into this window. I was lucky to get 1st marks, thanks to webdevtips.

How do people know the Feed is on my page if they can’t see it?

To let people know that the feed is there and to prompt them to subscribe to it, add a logo like either of these two , you just have to copy the button to your web directory in the same way as you added the .xml file. Then add the logos on the page and display your RSS to the web (e.g on your homepage). You must also add a link to the RSS or XML button that links to the saved .xml file.

Example:(a href=http://www.mysitename.co.uk/rss/myfirstrss.xml)( img src=www.mysitename.co.uk/rss/rss.gif width="36" height="14")

This then provides a visible link to your saved feed as shown above. You can obviously change the title to what ever you want it to say.

OK, so now it’s on my web page, but it is meant to go beyond my website?

Now you have got your feed URL and feed on your website, you can submit it to applications known as content aggregators. Some sources are provided below. (I will talk about aggregators in more details and about analysing feed data in my next post) – RSS Network, RSS Locator, Syndic8, Daypop, Feedster, Technorati, Userland and Rocket news. Do remember that you must use the Feed URL to submit to these directories and not your homepage URL.

Do I have to do anything else in the future or do I leave it alone now?

You will need to keep your feed fresh and make additions to your .xml or .rss file as regular as possible and making sure that each of these additions has a link of its own on the website, also always make sure that your feed is available.

You need to try to keep your channel items to a maximum of five, deleting older items from your feed as you update it. The dates next to your news items will adjust depending on when content aggregators pick them up.

Sources I used for this post were: http://www.w3schools.com/rss/rss_publishing.asp / http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175271 and http://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html . Thanks guys, it’s all a bit clearer now!

Ad Scheduling on Yahoo - SORRY YOU CAN'T!

Why - oh - why does Yahoo not have the functionality to ad-schedule/day part?

I was setting up a campaign this week and was astounded by the fact that they did not provide this feature.

Google Adwords allows you to schedule your ads to run at any time of day, and on any day of the week.

MSN Adcenter allows you schedule your ads to run on any day of the week and will let you set the times of day but within the specific times:

3 AM - 7 AM (early morning)
7 AM - 11 AM (morning)
11 AM - 2 PM (midday)
2 PM - 6 PM (afternoon)
6 PM - 11 PM (evening)
11PM - 3 AM (late night)

This obviously does not give you as much control as Google, but still provides you with an option.

Panama's launch this year (in the UK) was supposed to try to get some way in closing the significant gap between itself and Google. With basic features like this missing, I think they still have a long way to go!