Leapfrogg Gets Recognition From Google!!!!

When we opened up our browsers this morning we were over the moon that Google had finally seen fit to recognise Leapfrogg and put an image of our frog leaping on the Google home page.



Ummmmmmmmmmmmm ........OK so perhaps Google might not be referring to Leapfrogg in particular but hey ho we though it was a nice touch :)

Having said that it IS a LEAP year so hurrah for LEAPFROGG we kinda feel its our day today. So have a nice one everyone and to anyone who is thinking of asking THAT question today we reckon you should go for it!!!!

The Two Ring Circus

In recent years, there has been dramatic shifts in Search Engine Optimisation methods to such an extent that what was prevalent three or four years ago no longer holds sway. Off the page factors primarily around how to obtain natural links to a website are becoming ever more important as opposed to on the page factors such as meta tags for instance.

As we all know Google continues to hold sway in natural search and appears to be tightening its grip with innovative tools and concerted efforts to try and monopolise the up and coming natural mobile search market.

What does this mean for search marketing agencies big or small?

It goes without saying that all reputable agencies will follow best practice and go with the flow so to speak in terms of keeping pace with search engine algorithiums to ensure their clients realise return on investment. However, because of the pace of change, it is questionable rightly or wrongly whether the resources at the disposal of each SEM agency are correctly weighted towards doing the right things to benefit a client campaign.

For all agencies the type of work required is dramatically changing and as a result there are immense pressures to adopt a flexible approach to resourcing, developing skills and organisation structures. With this in mind, I personally feel that the search marketing agencies which get the balance right ie (wear the correct ring in the circus) between doing off and on the page activities in the future will succeed and those who don’t will fall by the way side!

Image-courtesy of Google images

Need to add negatives into Yahoo Search Marketing?

Have you ever tried to add negative or excluded terms into Yahoo! Search Marketing and not found the appropriate functionality?? Well, look no further, after about 30 mins of scouring the deepest darkest crevices of one of my client's campaigns I have found the way!

Unfortunately, unlike Google, it seems that you are unable to add negative terms (excluded terms) at account or campaign level. Instead, the option seems only to be present at Ad Group level.

When inserting a negative search term into Yahoo! you first must click on the campaign and then the ad group which you want the excluded term to be present in.

From here you then look to the top right hand side of the page and click on the Ad Group Settings drop down menu. From this, then click on Tactic Settings.

You will then see the following at the right hand side of the screen:

In order to view the excluded or negative search terms in the campaign you must click on the [show] option next to "Excluded Words".

Once this has been clicked on, it will then open a text box where you can enter all of the negative or excluded terms which you want included in that specific ad group.

When you are finished adding in all of the appropriate terms, remember to click Save Changes, or you will have to repeat the process all over again!!

Link building Tips & Mind mapping devices

Well it's this time again, it has been a hectic week and thank you to those of you who both commented on the Meta tag post and inquired as to the welfare of my goldfish "Mr Fatty". He is, to give you an update, still swimming on his head, but for shorter periods of time. Anyway, back to the training, last week saw me dipping my toes into fathomless waters of "social media", in particular "the basics of link building" which i am not afraid to say, is rather like an online form of OCD and the fact that most webmasters will shake a link condom at you rather than look at you, makes it a tough gig.

So here is my, "Basic linking guide" to not loosing your hair to link building. OK, so before you start. Decide what type of link negotiation your client is willing get involved in:

Paid: (what can they actually afford)

Unpaid one way: (this goes without saying)

Unpaid reciprocal: (Is the site a good resource?)

Offering a free service or gift for the right link (have they anything to donate?)

Lets say for arguments sake, our client Mr Bird has a shop selling tiny scarecrows (iscarecrows.co.uk), the product emits a silent but powerful ultra sonic pulse to scare away most large and small birds from gardens and roofs. The flexible little device can be placed in gardens, window boxes, next to carp ponds, on home & office roofs and is powered by a solar charger. He is willing to make one off payments for good links on reputable directories or sites and is offering a free "scarecrow" to anyone who owns a similar site and will give him a link as trade. He has also stipulated that he does not want to be associated with pest control sites that promote the killing of animals and birds, he feels that his products are eco friendly and he is very worried about what his competitors are doing.

Firstly i would make a list of keywords

that we are using to promote the "iscarecrow" site: (here are some examples)

• bird scarers
• garden helper
• scare crows
• pond protection
• humane pest control
• bird deterrent
• bird control product
• natural garden pest control
• eco pest control
• protecting pond fish
• eco friendly bird deterrent

(this would usually be broken down into segments, so for this example - lets say we are promoting the iscarecrow pages:

• Eco friendly pest control - eco pest control, natural garden pest control and eco friendly bird deterrent
• Fish pond protection - pond protection and protecting pond fish
• (Home page) Roof bird control - bird deterrent and bird control products
• Garden bird scarers - garden helper, scare crows and bird scarers

Now we have our landing pages and we have our brief. The client has mentioned some competitors of his:

Competitors:

• www.Pond-Terminator.com
• www.Thescarecrow&mrsking.co.uk
• www.Wizard-Oz-pestcontrol.co.uk

So we can throw these sites in a tool called a backlink checker (i have used all of the top 3 and they all tend to deliver the same information, i would pay more attention to the Yahoo links, mainly because i found these to be the most accurate). Remember that it isn't an exact science, we want to get a feel for the type of sites we should be looking for and those that are willing to share the love.

My recommended Tools:
Backlink watch (these guys have some great tools, good information, PR, URLs and more)
Marketleap (good information and that for the competiton)
iwebtool (As above, with rankings thrown in)

I personally like to use the old fashioned route of links:www.nameofsite.co.uk in the yahoo & Google search bar. See what they come up with, it might take a bit longer, but i think it's all about what you feel comfortable doing.

• You find that Pond Terminator has a high link popularity, but mostly from general directories, some pond landscaping sites and fish breeders but not many and most of the links are simple URLS not keyword rich.

• Thescarecrow&mrsking have a blog and write a lot about fighting garden pests, they have a lot of support from some big garden centres etc and have a major weed killer as a backer. Most of their links are via the blog, not many are on internal pages and a lot of their deeper product pages have no PR.

• Wizard-of-Oz-pestcontrol have over 6,000 links on Yahoo half internal, half external. They have one link from the BBC website and a lot of gardening advice sites and a few review sites.

Once I've got a handle on the kinds of industries that might well benefit from the iscarecrow website i write them down and save them with the keywords to use in the final link choices. I now have a list of URLS and companies attached to the competitors that i may well approach on behalf of the iscarecrow site. I also have a list of words and phrases describing areas and sites that i am looking for. Lastly i consider each of these for my word cloud, i truly believe that the only way to do this well, is to look at it from every angle, every possible avenue until you have saturated paths in to this area. Example: I sell baby clothes, where are the people looking for baby clothes hiding?, what sites are they going to visit, what do they need, who are they talking to, do they need advice?, could a link on a "new mothers advice page" help them? or on a "babies names site" or a "babies health site" perhaps.

To help me i use a word cloud and Mapping Search Tool - Quintura

I admit that i have become pretty addicted to Quintura and it has worked miracles for me so far, but it is still the honey moon period (once it moves out of Beta who knows?). I mainly use this tool when i have completed the other research, but you might find it is easier to go straight here with your keywords, this could really help with an industry you are not familiar with or one which is unique. Quintura builds a word cloud, like a keyword mind map linking one word to another and suggesting a list of sites that match this word or phrase.

Drop the word "pest control" into Quintura and you get this. It needs some fine tuning, but you get the general idea. You can also search for videos and images here.

As you can see, the word cloud gives you a range of terms matching the original search, so we could look at "pest companies", "pest control products", "pest control experts" etc. As with the "babies example" someone who has just had two of their favourite koi nabbed from their pond by a heron might be desperate for a cover for the pond, where do they go, what questions do they ask, are they angry (possibly) do they type in "pond protection?" wanting a net for the pond and then do they see "bird scarer" and decide to buy both "just to be sure that it won't happen again".

When you get your results, try not to be as naively chuffed as me. You might think, fantastic, my job is done. But not yet, get used to reading the descriptions & the URLs so that you don't waste your time. It would be difficult to get a link on wikipedia for instance and their links pass no love (which at my age is about as much help as a chocolate fire guard).

This leads me to a mini checklist that Simon asked me to do, when you hit a site you think would be good for your client and helpful to their visitors. ASK THIS:

1. Is it relevant?, would the users of the site have any need to visit that of your client? if not, forget it. Even if people arent going to follow the link, a spider will.

2. Is it likely that the webmaster will allow you to get a link on a relevant content rich page?In an ideal world it would be better to gain links on content rich pages with the links 'adding value' by enabling the user to 'find out more', as opposed to simple links or resources pages, but these both still hold value.
   

3. Does it have a Resources (links) page? or is their a place to add an appropriate link? if they have a lot of useless links on their, don't be afraid to let them know it in an email. It would be better for your link if some teenwebcam site wasn't sitting below it (unless of course its a bunch of teenagers onto eco gardening in realtime)

4. Does the site have pagerank? Yes. Good around 3 is ideal but if it is a new site it could be low so check out the sites age (a good tool to keep handy to check ranking, age and links etc) is SEO Quake a plug-in for Mozilla, if you have I.E you can also add it or check the http://www.whois.net/ tool. A lot of blogs don't have page rank but we'll talk about that another day. If a site has no page rank and is established, i normally won't include it.

5. Check the HTML for a no follow tag, if its high profile site then it'll still be worth adding a link but normally, no follow means no.

6. Check that the Links are true, if they show the websites URL when you hover over them in the lower left hand corner of your browser this is fine. If they have the websites address or a number of characters after the link (anything different), then it isn't a true link and so won't pass on any juice to your site.

7. Do they offer keyword rich links or plain URLS? (could it have keyword link?)

8. What is the site like? does it have a lot of links, adwords and banners? is the content good. You don't want a link from a spammy website going to that of your clients, it will simply loose it's page rank and stop passing any link popularity to your site.

9. Is there contact details for the webmaster or owner?. You'll need to contact them directly if they do not have an online contact form, so use the whois.net tool i mentioned earlier to get their name and telephone number.

10. Is the link free or paid? and if so how much? is it worth it?

11. If the site is a directory,does it have an appropriate category for your link (if not can you suggest one?) it is better to get on a page with only a few relevant others, but make sure the page has a ranking, if not the spiders probably won't know it exists.

12. Check who is linking to the site? does it have authority sites linking to it? this shows that it's a worthwhile partner.

Once you are sure this is a good site, you should note it down and later check if the client is happy with it. You may have to email the site owner or webmaster to add the link and this can take sometime, it is a nice touch to offer something in return for the link if needed as this is a partnership, not one nightstand. Some webmasters will want a reciprocal link, this dilutes the link popularity, so a one way link is best, but a link from a good site shouldn't be ignored. The site owner needs to understand that their users could benefit from being directed to your site, that by doing this they are adding to their customer experience, not loosing a customer to a competitor. If the site has a submissions page, then save the details and once the client has given the ok, and your ready to submit your link. But we shall go into that in another post.

Of course this is just basic one way linking, I will go into more detail in my link baiting and social media posts. I hope that this makes sense and is helpful in some way. Once again, please add to my knowledge by leaving a comment (its the only way I'll learn) and even disagree with things you agree with (i like it!). See you next Monday with another adventure in S E M.. (you'll have to imagine the re-verb on the deep voice over, this is low tech) Good luck and let me know how you get on.

My Chihuahua is demanding her evening meal as i type and i fear a tantrum of epic proportions as i see the large fluffy pig being dragged across the hall way, so bye...!
Oh and thanks to www.thingamababy.com (how to host a snail race)for the snails image. I had hoped to race my pet snails when i was young, but a big black bird put an end to that one lonely summer evening in 1978 "where were you then iscarecrow? - too late, thats where"

Myspace Changed my Life….

Tomorrow is Valentines Day and as the newest member of the Leapfrogg team I thought it would be appropriate that my first blog should tie in well with the ‘love theme.’

As many of you might already know the rapid growth of social networking sites including Myspace.com or Facebook - which have been around for less than four years – have seen more than 100 million and 19 million members respectively set up profiles.

Such social networks are taking the web by storm, pushing at the average time spent online for numerous demographics by allowing users to easily manage their personal data, back up their photos and videos in addition to providing the means to communicate with those both inside and outside of their network - engaging interests and regular socialising. But is it fair to brand these sites and their users as ‘a waste of time’? - both in terms of personal or a business’s time shown on BBC and The Times Online - and if so, then what of the numerous other sites that ‘demand’ our time on the web?

An online poll, originally posted by Lee Odden, with support from the online marketing community would also have use believe that Facebook is losing its luster, but I would have to question whether we are not forgetting the very essence of Facebook and the purpose for which it was born.

With this firmly in mind I would like to share my story. A story of profile viewing, friending, poking, … and ultimately, how social networking changed my life.

I was introduced to Myspace in June 2006 by my younger brother, and promptly set up a profile, and then, out of the blue, a message popped up in my inbox from a nice looking chap wanting to add me as a friend. After reading his detailed profile and browsing his stunning profile picture I couldn’t wait to hit ‘accept’.
At first we bantered with hello’s and the exchange of messages to get to know one another, but as time went our Myspace “friendship” developed, crossing the waters into msn, where we held regular and in-depth conversations. Our relationship was entirely virtual (call it a pre-friendship) as we both ‘put in the ground work’ that was necessary to assess whether we would go the distance and meet one another offline. (But this bares striking similarities to the underlying framework of social networks in that many friends and networks are made up of individuals who have never actually met?)

Far from suggesting that everyone is as genuine as they say they are I felt we had gained a mutual trust and exchanged phone numbers. We spoke on the phone frequently as if we had known each other forever! After about a year and a half we had discussed meeting in the middle as I lived in Suffolk and he lived in Surrey but never came to an outcome.

I took those first steps and, after setting up a profile on Facebook, we arranged to meet at my 21st Birthday party in London, under the watchful eye of my parents. I am happy to say after that one meeting it was the cliché “love at first sight” and with a lot of hard work and travelling, we managed to maintain an 8 month ‘long distance relationship’. Our relationship was further cemented last week as we moved into our first home together.

Social Networking, in my experience, has been the creator of a series of life changing events. I see it as only fate that we met in such a way and even though it’s not an usual way to meet the man of your dreams it certainly worked for me...

But perhaps, like the evoked memories from networking with long lost friends and acquaintances we can never fully relive the experience of the ‘first time’, the excitement we felt when we first joined Facebook in 2007, the initial gold rush – which slowly followed by the onslaught of irrelevant and untargeted marketing.

But saying this, it certainly presents the concept of having a relationship with your customers, and engaging with them in such a way as to have them evangelising about your brand or your products… but, unlike those untargeted and irrelevant marketing efforts I’ve just mentioned, in addition to my relationship, the necessities for success include time, energy, dedication and honesty.

How to write terrible meta tags

Hi and welcome to the Second Episode of “the oldest SEO trainee diary”

It was an exhilarating week last week, both at work and at home. My pearl scale goldfish has started swimming face down in his tank and I covered a number of very interesting subjects in my training schedule, one of which being the damn scary subject of writing meta tags. So most of the week was spent stressing over both my perpendicular fish and the writing of these little meta devils, I must admit that I messed up most of the tags I was asked to write. I have however written and edited quite a few for various clients now and finally feel I have a grasp on the slippery optimisation slope of life and a foothold shaped like a perfect meta Tag.

First a little introduction to “The meta Tag family”:

Mr title tag (He isn’t really a meta Tag, he’s a header, but since him and Mrs description tag have been dating so long, he is practically her common law husband so we call him a meta).
The title looks like this < title >I tell you what the page is < / title > and should be only 60 characters long, so that it fits in the restricted area shown in the search results.

The title tag is one of the most important factors, used by the search engines in determining a pages relevancy? It is also attributed a weighting in most of the big search engines ranking algorithm. Due to its importance a lot of thought should go into the choice of keywords that go into this tag, the most important keywords (this will be shown at the top of your keyword selection) should always be included in the title and any others you can add are a bonus. Make sure however that the title is readable and descriptive and not merely a list of promoted terms

Mrs Description Tag
Mrs description tag looks like this < meta name = " description " content = "I tell a little story " > and should be only 150 characters long, around 250 characters can be indexed but only 150 of them will appear in the search results, so I would write 150 to maximum 155 characters, think about it as keeping her weight down.
This tag describes the content of your page and is what you will see when you run a keyword search. I always think of this as the textual window to your website, for this reason your description should be concise, use a basic layout, contain optimised key words, act as POS for your site with a good call to action and be readable for potential users.

Miss Keyword Tag
The little miss keyword tag looks like this < meta name="keywords " content="I, like, all, the, chosen, keywords ">
There are lots of differing opinions about little miss Keyword meta tag. Some will argue that;

• Putting your keywords here is giving your competitors the edge
• It is ideal for adding misspellings, plural variations, cultural nuances and industry jargon that would not be added into the page copy or title and description.
• Most search engines put very little, if any weighting on this tag.
• Some smaller engines still pay attention to these keywords for ranking

I am of the opinion, that unless we are officially informed that this tag is redundant, then we will continue to use it in the meta Tags.

Examples:

So let’s say we have a Dog walking company in London Westminster called Barkies. We decide on the key words: “Dog walkers Westminster, Barkies dog walkers, Dog walker in central London, dog walk green park, trained dog handlers”

A good title tag would be:

Barkies dog walkers Westminster - based in Central London’s Green Park

Starting with the main key words i.e. dog walkers Westminster and Barkies dog walkers, we have also managed to get another 2 terms in the title with Central London and Green Park and they are all in order. You do need to be careful not to over optimise the title as this can reduce the keyword density, but if they read well they can be added. The reason I have used a hyphen instead of a comma, as commas are keyword separators and so would reduce the advantage of having keywords like dog walkers at the beginning of the title.

The layout I have decided to adopt (which helps me) is:

• The Question or First Statement
• Second Statement
• Call to Action

Examples of layout:

The Question or First statement

Looking for a dog walker In London? Or View our range of dog walking activities

Second Statement

We offer dog walking in Green Park or our range of dog training techniques are

Call to Action

Buy doggie goodies online now with free UK delivery or order your dog training course online now!

Example of these in a full meta description tag

(Question) Looking for a dog walker in central London? (Statement) Barkies dog walkers Westminster have 10 years experience, trained dog handlers and walks in Green Park. (Call to action) Call us to arrange a walk now!

Examples of some of my awful re-written meta tags (the names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Example Consumer meta tag

Big Fat Rabbit products

Bad title - Big Fat Rabbit dolls Brighton, books, sketches & other Rabbit products

This is too long and doesn’t take advantage of the key words we need to add.

Good title - Big Fat Rabbit dolls Brighton – handmade books & sketches made to order

This is using the hyphen again to take advantage of the terms Big Fat Rabbit books and Big Fat Rabbit sketches.

Bad description - Large Collection of Big Fat Rabbit dolls available online. Also buy limited edition Fat Rabbit sketches and handmade books, available with free delivery

The use of Also is too passive to keep the interest; free UK delivery is more enticing

Good description - View our range of Big Fat Rabbit books, available from The Giant Bunny. Buy limited edition Fat Rabbit sketches & books online with free delivery.

We have managed to get a introductory View, the company name The Giant Bunny as well as UK delivery.

keywords content - Big Fat Rabbit, Fat Rabbit dolls Brighton, Big Fat Rabbit books, Big Fat Rabbit sketches, Limited edition Fat Rabbit sketches

All the terms are used, some in full others with other words but no keyword separators like commas

Example Business to Business meta Tag

London serviced boxes

Bad title - Managed and serviced boxes to rent. In London boxes are the best

This is making a statement we can’t uphold, so this is removed

Good title - Managed and serviced boxes to rent in London

Ideally it is best to get the main keyword in the title

Bad description - Hire your managed boxes in London, in particular, serviced box space London city. Prime locations in London, serviced boxes, available online now

Generally the description stops and starts, using a lot of keyword separators. This stops the description from flowing.

Good description - Looking for serviced boxes in London? We offer flexible managed & serviced box space in London City. Buy our London serviced boxes online now

I like the question at the start, looking for? And it has a good call to action.

keywords content - serviced boxes to rent in London, serviced boxes in London, London serviced boxes, serviced box space London, managed boxes in London

In Summary:

A few other things to remember with meta tags are:

• “don’t over stuff with keywords”
• “try to get all the terms into the title and description, but not at the detriment of the readability”
• “try and write for humans as well as the engines”
• “try to get the company name in the description, if you have a short enough company name you may be able to add it to the beginning of a title”
• “don’t be afraid to re-visit your tags after writing them a day later, you might find it easier to edit them once you have had a breather”
• “Have someone look at your metas and give their opinion, it might help”

I hope that this has been helpful, keep battling away with these and feel free to drop me an email for help or just merely to pick holes in my layout examples.

See you next Monday guys for another thrilling instalment!

Save Money, Increase Sales, Eat Waffles!

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks and I’ve been quietly hoping I might get a waffle iron. Now with any purchase or indeed decision to seed an idea into the minds of my friends and family I usually find myself conducting a lot of research. This research will touch upon product sites, review sites, coupon sites and comparison engines – before coming away with an idea of exactly what I want and exactly what I should expect to pay for it.
This presented a thought, and I am sure I am not alone in thinking this, but almost everything I look at on the web I analyse with a marketer’s hat. I analyse what it’s doing, what it’s not doing and how it can do better – and my search for ‘Buy Waffle Iron’ cemented my thoughts of widespread inexperience within the paid search industry .

The following shots document the first page paid results for the term “buy waffle Iron” from Google and, using only these paid listings, I reviewed each of them from the initial expectation of the PPC ad copy to the respective landing pages. As a customer, I accessed whether these ‘ads’ and landing pages fulfilled my needs in terms of product descriptions, price and availability. The results follow.


Position 1: TheAluminiumShop.co.uk
Ad copy: The addition of ‘top brands’ is somewhat generic and doesn’t really add value to my search.
Landing page: There is nothing above the fold about Waffle Irons, and after scanning the homepage, I wondered exactly what I had clicked. (Visit landing page)
Action: Immediately Dropped out
My rating (0/10)


Position 2: Amazon.co.uk
Ad copy: The addition of ‘top brands’ is somewhat generic and doesn’t really add value to my search. But free delivery is good, especially for my heavy waffle iron.
Landing page: I am immediately drawn to the picture of the Prima Waffle Maker and the inclusion of price and availablility encourage me to click and “find out more”. Aside from this product, the entire page is full of “waffle” related goods. (Visit landing page)
Action: Went to product page and read reviews.
My rating (6/10)


Position 3: HouseMakers.co.uk
Ad copy: Excellent. Providing a brand name so I know what to look for, it’s available today and I can use Google checkout.
Landing page: Displayed exactly what was promised. The landing page was simple but effective, with a good title, breadcrumb trail and a prominent call to action.
(Visit landing page)
Action: Clicked on “more info”, enlarged the image, noted the price and read the excellent features list.
My rating (7/10)


Position 4: UKEquipmentDirect.co.uk
Ad copy: I didn’t want a crepe or pancake machine! But they do promise the lowest prices, so no harm in looking.
Landing page: Generic search page with no clear title or description, just displaying the crepe and pancake machine search results. No mention of a waffle. But the ‘buy now buttons’ and the display of availability if nice. (Visit landing page)
Action: Dropped out.
My rating (3/10)


Position 5: ThomasGolf.com.
Ad copy: Again I didn’t want Iron, and to be honest I am not entirely clear what this ad is about!
Landing page: Ah.. It’s about Golf clubs.. And here is me thinking Thomas Golf was the owner’s name. (Visit landing page)
Action: Immediately dropped out.
My rating (0/10)



Position 6: LQCommodities.com.
Ad copy: Great! At this rate I’m never going to get a waffle iron. Use your Negative keywords!
Landing page: Very content heavy, and nothing to inspire me to read on. (Visit landing page)
Action: Immediately dropped out.
My rating (0/10)


Position 7: Shopzilla.co.uk
Ad copy: “from over 4000 UK consumer rated stores”, seems somewhat generic as I’m sure I’m not going to be present with 4000 stores. Ability to compare prices is good though.
Landing page: I’m made to wait, whilst the prices are compared, but the landing page does display 2 retailers, the price and free delivery. Although this is only a comparison site, and not a retailer themselves, the call to actions are clear, it’s just a shame there aren’t more retailers. (Visit landing page)
Action: Clicked on both retailers, but I’m still not sure which waffle iron is right for my needs.
My rating (4/10)


Position 8: DealTime.co.uk
Ad copy: Like it. They’ve repeated the term which has somewhat reinforced the ad and it looks like they’ve got a dedicated page.
Landing page: The images are almost below the fold as I’m presented with ads, ads and more ads. Not happy about this… but it does display 3 waffle irons of various prices along with prominent “see it” buttons. This, like Shopzilla, is another comparison engine, but I really don’t think it assisted in my search. (Visit landing page)
Action: Had a look at retailers, but then dropped out.
My rating (4/10)

I had to question how these results would influence my future search behaviour. Would I exclude or subconsciously filter out particular retailers as a result of their landing pages? and if I did, what about other users and their perception of the brand?

Presumably, any online business wants to maintain or enhance their brand equity and maximise conversions whilst reducing the cost of these acquisition through their paid search, but why – as the evidence has suggested – are businesses still aimlessly ‘reacting’ to paid search competition without thinking about converting this traffic efficiently?

Within this in mind I would welcome any of the abovementioned retailers including The Aluminium Shop, UK Equipment Direct, ThomasGolf.com and LQCommodities.com to get in touch with either Amelia or I here at Leapfrogg so we can set up your campaigns correctly. In the meantime however, here are my top 5 tips to increase conversions and get your cost per acquisition down!

1. Take users as far along the buying cycle as possible:
Amazon did this particularly well as they directed me to a list of suitable Waffle Irons, which I could sort by price and then purchase. Now ignoring the fact that their landing page for this ad directed me to the Kitchen page, it was a page populated only with ‘Waffle Irons’, and by doing so I didn’t have to sort through lots of other kitchen products to find exactly what I wanted. The No1forFun website really let me done on this, and as a result, I left immediately.
You should use landing pages to your full advantage through the use of ‘headlines’ to grab attention, (Something only HouseMakers.co.uk did well), high resolution images to stimulate and enhance the comprehensive product description and prominent calls to action (which should be clear and located above the fold.

2. Increase the relevance of your ads:
In light of Google’s Quality Score it’s in your favour to ensure your ads are relevant, not only to the keywords in that ad group but also to the landing page for that ad. If I were promoting “Waffle Irons” I would ensure the keywords I were targeting were specific, and it directed the user to the specific Waffle Iron page of the site. By doing so you are presenting the user with the best quality result, and Google, with reward you for this, in terms of lower click costs.

3. Make use of negative keywords:
If you are selling Waffle Irons then include terms like shoes (Nike Waffle Racers), scrap (Scrap Iron) and Golf (golf iron) in your negative keywords to ensure your ads aren’t displayed for irrelevant searches. Further information can be found at Google and by Richard Ball at the Search Engine Guide.

4. Don’t forget that small is beautiful (and profitably):
A larger number of small but incredibly focused ad groups are more likely to bring you a lower cost per acquisition than generic groups that encapsulate multiple terms. Relevance is the key, so don’t bunch all of your keywords together in generic group. Spend time creating specific groups for each product, and direct the user to their respective product pages.

5. Don’t always be the retailer:
Sometimes it’s important to take a step back from being the retailer and actually act as a customer. By taking the time to search for your products within the major engines, review your landing pages, the checkout facility and the general site navigation you can really begin to recognise where you might be falling down and where users might be dropping out.
1,500 daily unique visits is all very well, but a 1% conversion rate suggests massive room for improvement.

In conclusion:
The major search engines want the best quality results for their demanding customers, so the best advice has to be ‘give it to them’. In doing so, you’re fulfilling need and, it’s inevitable that your traffic, and more importantly, your conversions, will increase!

Mobile Advertising; the Future is Here (Almost)

In the Beginning

The growth of technology brings with it the requisite of money. In this sense at least the monetisation of mobile phones is a reality that we must just face; the mystery has shifted from when to how. There are a number of different ideas being banded around from Google’s free phone in which users ‘buy’ into the ads by taking the phone, to interruption based ads similar to TV breaks. Then again the Gphone was denied by Steve Horowitz in favour of the Android platform which goes in semi-direct competition with Yahoo’s Go 3.0. There are many differences between the two, however the main killer is that Go will come preloaded on mobiles, whereas Android is downloadable and therefore you can turn any phone into a Gphone. Closer to home mobile operators 3 and Orange are already introducing banner ads to support browsing or free video in the case of 3.

But what’s going on here? I thought that my mobile was a very personal device and now there’s talk of ads and downloads? This is exactly one of the biggest problems faced by anyone looking to move within this sector. Privacy of one’s space and personal details is crucial for success, particularly when one company can hold so much information on individuals and not be policed in any meaningful way. Take the example of someone with an iphone, My Location and a social networking site including all affiliation or partner sites tied in together. This alone contains enough information to start one thinking.

The Issue at Hand

Therefore what is most important is that users actually buy into anything with full knowledge and consent and as the most important aspect of almost any business model they are treated with the respect they deserve. Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy, notes “there is power in default settings” and this became only too true in the case of Facebook. Their choice to the make the Beacon Project’s default setting opt-out rather than opt-in caused a number of privacy concerns and resulted in one husband buying a present for his wife only for the details to appear on her news feed and spoil the surprise.

Privacy issues and protecting users is fundamental within the Internet's setup and becomes paramount when legal systems take so long to catch up that the privacy debate is almost entirely handled by the companies themselves. This can lead to the debate between customers and profit, sometimes resulting in opt-out systems. In some cases this can be extreme, Verizon decided to sell information on its customer’s calling habits to their agents, affiliates, its parent company and all of their subsidiaries. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to how many companies that is in total and how much money was made from it? To partially answer the question Verizon described the group of companies as “pretty broad” which I think answers itself really.

There are arguments concerning CPNI and how actual customer’s details aren’t released, but looking at trends over the last decade, once you crack the dam expect the flood. There are many companies that are really and truly based on achieving the highest possible level of customer experience, yet with the onus of self-policing left in the hands of companies rather than authorities, it must be a major focus rather than something mentioned in a tiny tab at the bottom. It is about creating a positive user experience and not taking advantage of the user via clandestine methods.

A Eye to the Future

So once the privacy issues have been resolved what is the future for advertising? Well, instead of simply being based around PPC, e.g. what someone is looking for at the particular moment, it could be based around their location, what they have thought about recently (Twitter), what they have searched for and their personal information stored on any number of sites. With My Location and geo-targeting paving the way, and Wifi and Bluetooth offering a tighter form of targeting, it will soon become common to locate yourself, friends or colleagues quickly. Again all of this is not too far way with Admob introducing ‘rich targeting’ which is the start of companies being able to target users via criteria such as device or carrier. With companies accessing this level of information and then buying our calling data there could be another more interesting worry on the horizon.

Sandy Pentland and others at MIT experimented on 100 mobile phone users to find what could be understood about their relationships from their mobile phone usage patterns. For example if you’re married your mobiles will often be very close together during the evening as you watch TV and apart for all of the day as you work separately. However your boss may sit just a matter of meters away from you, and thus have a slightly weaker although static signal, from 9.00am till 5.30pm Monday to Friday. Additionally Pentland notes that “all phones have built-in microphones that can be used to analyze your tone of voice, how long you talk, how often you interrupt people. These patterns can tell you what roles people play in groups: you can figure out who the leader is and who the followers are”.

So most of this sounds miles away and has nothing to do with my current PPC campaign right? Well some of it isn’t too far away and advertisers are already beginning to take advantage of rich targeting. My Location is nearly here and the iphone can even tell if you’re walking or sitting, which in combination with information collected over time a particular time frame could give rise to incredibly targeted, powerful advertising.

Imagine a scenario in which a man leaves his house going down the main road to town on a Saturday at 2pm. Taking into account his previous behaviour there could be a good chance he will pass by shops X, Y and Z. Combined with information from other sites such as Facebook etc. an extremely targeted message could be sent informing him that there is a sale in shop Y of black trousers. An extremely basic version of this type of mobile location advertising already exists in certain places like football stadiums where people come into a Bluetooth area and can access information such as film trailers for free.

The elegance of a system like this is that it is not only targeted against what someone could want, but who and where they really are. Imagine half of your office getting a text at 4pm on a Friday saying that the bar round the corner, which knows you have never visited before, is having an impromptu happy hour and was wondering if you would like to come?

In Conclusion

These are the entirely possible implications of advertising when it actually becomes mobile itself, everything can become bespoke in terms of which ad is delivered, the best time of delivery, the method (pictorial, textual etc.) and any number of other aspects can be added. Therefore, crucially, with the correct privacy limitations and buy-in by users from the start this could be a real step towards always having advertisements which are truly in touch with their target, constantly delivering something of interest and generating higher ROI’s for advertisers funding the whole venture.

Image from www.childlocate.org.uk/

Scintillating Site Maps

Whilst in the process of my training in SEO practices and techniques every website I look at becomes an exciting rabbit warren of pages and information to explore and examine with my increasingly-educated SEO critical eye. In fact, the rabbit warren metaphor can be particularly apt for some websites, especially when they neglect to include a site map. Therefore this blog post is a basic introduction to the benefits of using a site map on your website.A site map is a page containing links to the main areas of a website and will ensure that there is a link to every page on the site within two clicks of the home page - this is key for a page's importance when a search engine comes to spider the site. However, an effective site map is not only important for SEO but also vital for usability.

In the SEO corner site maps are essential for helping search engines index all the URLs on your website. The importance of site maps in this regard increases when the main site navigation is not easily spiderable by search engines. For example, if the main navigation is in Flash a search engine cannot read it and therefore cannot follow the links to pages deeper within the site.

For an optimised site map links should be text based rather than image based. It is also a good recommendation to include keyword rich links which will increase usability on the visitor's behalf and should have a positive effect on search engine rankings. Another method of optimising site maps is to stick to approximately 100 links per page. So if within your site map there is over 100 links this may trigger a search engine spam filter and as a result the spider is unlikely to follow all the links. Therefore these URLs will not be indexed and if not well linked from within the site may not feature in the search engine results. The solution is to split up the site map into smaller, categorised site maps and perhaps use a site map index file to list them all. This method also aids usability when visitors are looking for certain areas within a large site.

Another useful function of a site map is that it alerts search engines as to when and how often pages have been updated as well as a page's relative importance. As site maps should provide links to every page on your site it will improve the number of relevant internal links on the site which aids rankings.

In the usability corner the placement of a site map on a site is very important. The general rule when positioning a site map link on a site is to place it in the footer of every page as this is generally where visitors to a site are expecting to find a site map. Another suggestion would be to actually label the site map as "site map" rather than any alternatives such as "site directory" as its function is then immediately recognisable to visitors. It is also a good idea to have a site map link on every page within a site as this allows easy access.

And one final piece of advice...don't forget to keep your site map updated, check for broken links and make sure that when you click on a link it takes you to the right page. Hopefully if you can follow these few bits of simple advice you will escape the rabbit warren website effect and keep your visitors and the search engines happy.

Image from www.terrierman.com

Search Tip of the Week (12)

This week we have gone down the pictorial route and created a flow chart of the 5 steps to creating a site for maximum online marketing potential.

This is not the be all and end all of what you should be considering when designing a site, but the most important things to consider if you want to end up with a site that can be successully marketed on search engines AND will be in the best position to convert the traffic it receieves.

As we all know it is not a case of "Build it and they will come!!!" A great deal of research and planning into your sites objectives and target audiences needs to be carried out before you should start building your site!

Just click on the image below to view it full size!!

The adventures of a search engine marketing trainee

Welcome to the first 'SEM training adventures' with me, the thirty something SEM trainee.

I am about to start the first week of my search engine marketing (or SEM) training with Leapfrogg and off the back of this, I'll be running a regular training diary. I thought I'd kick off with a bit of reflection, a nostalgic look at the end of my role as an account manager and consider the differences between this, and the behind the scenes clandestine world of SEO. Unlike most agencies, Leapfrogg offers it's trainees a swim in the pond of each area of search; PPC, Social media and SEO.

Over the next few months I will be taking you on a jostling roller coaster ride through the world of SEM, covering the whole search marketing arena, from ranking reports and PPC management to writing in depth consultancy documents and baiting the glittery hook of link building. I will carve my training up into digestible chunks, in the hope that it will be of some practical use to you, our readers. For those of you in the search world, although simplistic, I hope that my posts can offer the odd beneficial fact, and for the newbie's out there, I hope it enlightens encourages and empowers you all.

"The end of an account management era"

Last week was a bit if a tough one as I said a final farewell to my clients, and for the most part I truly believe they were sad to see me go. Not that I have exactly gone far in a physical sense, turned my chair around and have a different view of the sea from our office window to be exact. But it really hit me as I was making those calls, just how different it was going to be in my new role. As an account manager you are on the front line, the main point of contact between the client and your company. It is a very intimate role and in some cases is rather like an odd form of parenting. In some cases you may never actually meet your client; however the bond of trust is easily sustained by merely talking things over and keeping one another in the loop. Some times the connection is strained, but usually due to an implementation delay on the website, and as an account manager it is impossible not to get embroiled in the welfare of your client's site, even if it means being a rather unpopular stalker for a few weeks.

Things I will miss about being an account manager:

• Chatting to clients
• Getting that satisfied feeling when your clients site is doing well
• Heading up consultancy meetings
• Project managing a site launch, from concept to fruition
• Getting Xmas presents from clients (you know who you are)

Things I won't miss about being an account manager:

• My calendar looking like an extra from the Technicolor dream coat
• Having to look at Christos across the desk all day (Joke)
• Not having enough time in the day (this is optimistic)

Things i should have done while still an account manager:

• Attend at least one meeting dressing as a giant frog
• Hold a conference call from the beach (frog costume optional)

So that is it, I am no longer an account manager and will be starting my training in a matter of minutes. My first post will be next Monday and will be on the subject of "How to write meta tags", so I hope you join me in the class room then for a less emotive, more instructive post.

Cheerio until next Monday

Bradgelina clip is from Google images