Welcome back Rankers. Want to get right into this week. Question is coming in from myko54 who says ‘Does Google have plans to transcribe audio component of video to make it searchable?’ God, I hope not. The reason I say that is because obviously that would make a lot of sense, right? It’s sort of the next logical step for Google to go but they’re already doing closed captions on video and they’re trying to transcribe these things on the fly. If you just have a look at mine they’re absolutely terrible, they turn out as gobbledeegook, I don’t know whether that’s because I’m not articulating properly or it’s the Australian accent or it’s a bit of both. Makes sense for them to do it but they are going to have to become Apple like in their ability to understand different dialects and accents and all those sorts of things.

I want to talk a little bit to you today about Adwords. Many of you know that we do Adwords campaigns for clients but we only do them when they’re doing SEO so the idea is that we use the Adwords and the SEO together to have a more rounded campaign for a client. There’s a few things that you need to understand with Adwords, I’m not going to get into the mechanics of it today but just how it works in conjunction with an SEO campaign. It’s great because you can use Adwords to target specific phrases right now and switch it on and see what happens or just this weekend or a specific timeframe or a specific geographical region. So it allows you to target a lot better. One of the things that you are going to find when you get into keyword analysis is that Google tools will all tell you something different about what’s popular and what’s not.

I want to take you back a couple of weeks to our Gasp Clothing Gasp Melbourne experiment or blog posts and the shows we did back then and the sort of traffic we were getting from those phrases. Some of you may remember it was a major social media faux pas by an Australian fashion retailer. Everyone said, ‘Oh it’s terrible that’s the end of that company, they’ve committed social media suicide’. Anyway, it hasn’t hurt them and the hoohah from that social media episode has gone away but they got lots of great publicity out of the whole experience. We have a couple of posts on our site so we rank for some of those gasp keywords. We were looking at the stats a couple of weeks ago and looked at Google Insights which was telling us at the time that Gasp Clothing was more popular that Gasp fail or Gasp Melbourne. Now, you can see here that there is a spike around that time that I’m talking about specifically for Gasp Clothing. Gasp Fail in relationship to Gasp Clothing doesn’t even rate on the board anywhere, it’s insignificant in comparison. Gasp Melbourne shows as 38% of what the Gasp Clothing searches are. This is a world wide search for the last 90 days, if we go the last 30 it’s pretty similar except we don’t have any Gasp Melbourne data. Then if we have a look at Webmaster Tools and this is the search queries, your site on the web search queries that I’m looking at and because we were ranking for these phrases I can get data on them within Google Webmaster Tools and that will tell me the search impressions. What we’re seeing here is Gasp Clothing is 1000 impressions and Gasp Melbourne is 700 and this is only the last 30 days so it’s saying something completely different from Google Insights for Search. That’s why I would recommend that if you are going to do Adwords make sure you’re using Webmaster Tools and make sure you’ve got it set up properly. If you are already ranking for some phrases, you don’t have be ranking high, you don’t have to be ranking on the front page to get this sort of data. You can be ranking say 53 it says here for Gasp and it’s telling us there’s been 500 impressions. What you can do with Adwords is quickly test those numbers to see whether they’re accurate or not. Interestingly, we’re seeing here Gasp Melbourne 700 and Gasp Clothing 1000 in the last 30 days. If we go to the Google Keywords Adwords Tool and we put those same three phrases in there we see we get very very different numbers.
We’re getting told nearly 10,000 people a month search for Gasp Clothing, you gotta get into that, which of course is not true. Remember that the Adwords team, the Webmaster Tools team, they’re different teams within Google. Of course, they talk to one another but they’re totally different departments so they’re going to have different data. These numbers here are made up of an average of what Google Adwords thinks the total global 12 months search would be. So, it’s a monthly average. So, it’s obviously wrong. What I would do is use this Tool in conjunction with Google webmaster Tools if you’re already ranking for some phrases and you can start to see some impressions. The one thing here that is really outrageously inconsistent is the relationship between Gasp Clothing and Gasp Melbourne according to Google Webmaster Tools. Not necessarily so when you look at Google Insight for search but one thing that is consistent is that Gasp Clothing is definitely the most popular phrase out of those three so we’re seeing that across the board. So that’s what you take with you and you can then go and test.

The mistake that a lot of businesses make that we see when we take over their Adwords campaign is essentially they’re paying too much for a phrase. Here’s an easy example. On the weekend my wife was googling for a Dremel which is basically a small hand held drill that’s got lots of different attachments, no, it wasn’t for me, it was for her. We googled Dremel and we can see that Bunnings is finally doing Adwords which is great to see, Bunnings are probably Australia’s largest hardware retailer and if we click on their ad, hopefully it’s not costing them terribly much, we don’t actually have the word Dremel in that ad. The same sorts of things that Google applies to Organic they want to see similar things in Adwords and it’s about relevance. They will reward relevance in your Adwords. If your ad is really relevant to the search it is going to give you a higher quality score and possibly cost you less and also increase your click through rate. When someone does a search they want to see what they’ve searched for. I happened to click on that ad because it was Bunnings and maybe the brand, it’s got a good click through rate because of the brand. But I would say they are probably paying more that necessary because there’s a couple of things that’s happening here. When you click on that ad the word Dremel didn’t appear in the ad itself. When we look at the source of the landing page that we were taken to and it’s great that we’ve got a landing page, you see so many ads where they just drop you at the front page of the site or the home page. That’s really really bad because it’s totally irrelevant, some one’s going to click on that ad, they’re going to hit your page which is your home page which probably won’t have a lot to do with their search and then they are just going to hit the back button. Basically it’s a waste of money for you and Google’s going to charge you more if you do that sort of thing. So, you’ve got to set up pages that are very specific to the search. You can see here the page title is not specific to the search ity doesn’t have dremel actually in the page title. But when we do a search for that word actually in the copy on the page it’s right down here in “Narrow by Brand” so this page really isn’t relevant for my search. It might be relevant for that Ad but that Ad is not relevant for my search. When I search for dremel on the Bunnings Warehouse site there’s a whole range of dremel tools that are just not seen. Not that you can buy off this site anyway, it’s basically a catalogue site but I would assume that in some point in the future they are going to turn it into an ecommerce site. So that’s an example of an ad campaign which could be getting much better results than it probably currently is.

One of the other problems that Bunnings has with this particular ad campaign and of course the other morning while we were sitting in bed googling for a dremel I didn’t have my desktop with me because that would indicate I’d be at the desk not in bed, so of course I was using an Ipad, an IOS device, portable device, mobile device whatever you want to call it. I did the search for dremel got the same page that we see in Google desktop, then unfortunately for Bunnings if we click on their ad we’re taken to a page which is obviously set up when you look at the URL, it’s re-directing me to a mobile friendly page so I can search my store. But it’s got no relevance to what I was looking for so of course, I didn’t look at Bunnings the other morning, I just looked at that page and went “wow what a waste” and looked somewhere else. I actually looked whilst I was mobile at the Google shopping results, which of course Bunnings are not in because they are not transacting. It’s those sorts of things that can really hurt your quality score in an Adwords campaign and there could just be 5 or 6 of them and your going to be spending too much money and your not going to be getting the best bang for your buck that you possibly could. When we take over an Adwords campaign they’re typically the things that we have to fix and make things more targeted and those sorts of things.

How you use that in conjunction with SEO is that you make sure that if a phrase is costing you a bundle, you better make sure you’re ranking organically for that phrase as well. Whilst a lot more people are clicking on ads now than what they used to people still trust the organic results more than they do the ads. Just ask some of your customers Do you click on ads? Or do you click on organic results? See what they come back with.

They’re some of the basics of how you should be using Adwords and Organic search together. Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. Last week, last Thursday in fact, was a big day here in the office. We had our highest traffic day for the website in a single day, ever. It was because of IOS5, what’s IOS5? It’s the new operating system for things like your Iphone, your Ipod touch, your Apple TV, your Ipad. The new operating was released last week, lots of excitement, I was excited, I came in here early got my Itunes, tried to download it and it said it’ll be finished in about 7 years and it was saying the same thing to everybody around the planet basically. It wasn’t able to be downloaded, it was just getting hammered. The Apple server was getting hammered because everybody wanted this piece of software. One of our writers in here, said there’s a better way to get it, you just go and do this and you pull this switch over here and you put that URL in there and I said Yeah OK. I wasn’t that interested because it sounded like too much hard work to me. Then later on in the day one of the other guys was trying it and it worked for him as well, I think it was Byron and he said “You know what, this would make a great blog post”. And all of a sudden we all just went “Oh yeah of course it would why didn’t we think of that earlier?” So Michael, the writer whose idea this was wrote the blog post. This is the page that got us about 650 views in about 36 hours, something like that. You can see that it’s only had 32 tweets, it’s only had 21 likes and it’s only had 2 +1’s if you know what I mean. I know what you’re thinking, e3 right but that’s it that’s all the backlinks it’s had that we initiated with. We didn’t put our backlinks on networks, we didn’t jump into forums and put backlinks in forums. Within 12 hours it was ranking #1 for download iOS5 or iOS5 download timeout which was the main problem. People were having problems with timeouts trying to get it. So the traffic actually came from, we got 155 hits just from Google itself being real time. We were ranking on the Saturday, so about 30 hours after the post went live we got about up as high as 5 for download iOS5 with no other backlinks except a little bit of social media here. We’re nowhere to be found for that phrase, we got to #1 for the timeout phrase but the download iOS5 phrase only got as high as 5 and then it disappeared. The only linking that we did was here. This is what you would typically expect with social media signals for Google. They’re time sensitive, they have a short life span unless people keep talking about it. If people keep talking about it and keep sharing it then Google will keep taking notice but it won’t if it’s transient in nature like this event was. People could download iOS5 after the initial rush and they didn’t have a problem with it. Incidentally, Google Webmaster Tools was showing that we had in this period 110 different queries and that’s not searches, that’s queries. It’s saying here 2,500 different searches for that particular phrase that we would have been ranking for. Admittedly some of them would have been on page 2 so we wouldn’t be getting traffic from them because no one goes to page 2. This is the spike of the traffic and what happened. This referral source here is Twitter being #1, Google being #2 which really surprised me because it was such a short timeframe and we didn’t have any backlinks so why would we rank for those things or those phrases. They were hard phrases to rank for but because we got the amount of referrals from Twitter I believe that sent a social signal to Google to say this is popular right now so you need to show it. There were only 32 tweets so all this traffic would have come from the followers of those people that tweeted and probably about 10 of those were from us. Just interesting to see what effect social signals have and that you actually can rank for something just through social signals. But if we wanted to keep that page on the front page of Google for download iOS5 we’d probably have to do more work with more pages inside the index inside our site linking back to that particular page referencing it.

The other interesting thing that happened this week which kind of made me think about that experience and what you’re up against with Google. This is an excellent interview by a guy called Eric Enge (I don’t know if that’s how you spell his name) if you go to stonetemple.com you’ll find this interview. He’s interviewing Google’s chief scientist, essentially, and basically what he’s saying is reiterating 2 things for me anyway, there’s a lot more in the article than just the 2 things. It’s a really good read, it talks about Google translate and everything. He emphasizes that Google is making up to 2 changes per day to the algorithm. This isn’t just tinkering with the edges of the website this is like to the algorithm itself and also he reiterated that speed is so important now. You’ve got to have fast pages, you’ve got to have fast delivery. In this article he brings out Google’s even going to the extend of trying to guess what it is that you are searching for and the most relevant page for that search and is trying to cache in the background for you. If you’ve got a slow website they’re going to ignore you, you’re not going to be included in that because it’s going to hold up the user experience too much. We’ve seen it time and time again, slow sites equals bad rankings.

The other interesting thing that came out this week. If you use Google Webmaster Tools regularly you may be a bit flummoxed. It’s always concerned, well not concerned me but thinking “Why are you telling me that Google? That doesn’t make a lot of sense”. It’s under this diagnostics area, under crawl errors. It says here quite clearly these are Crawl Errors and then it says here Restricted by robots.txt, it’s like well “Why are you telling me that’s an error?” I’ve gone through and restricted all these parameters – replytocom – if you’ve got a Wordpress site you’ll know why I’ve done that. But why are you telling me this is presumably an error. There was an excellent discussion that Matt Cutts was involved with last week and it was about how sites can get pushed out of the search results if they have a lot of auto generated pages from search and those sorts of things which Google doesn’t deem to be that useful to the user. One of the things that came out of the discussion is that this guy here says “I build webmaster tools so this confusion is entirely my fault”. The fault that he’s talking about is that what’s restricted by robots.txt is coming up in crawl errors. The reason that’s in there is it’s a report to show what’s being blocked and to correct it in case some of those things in robot.txt you didn’t expect to be blocked. For all of those who have asked me over the years “Why is Google saying this is restricted by robots.txt is an error?” It’s just purely putting the information in here that it’s found in robots.txt and it won’t crawl just so you know, in case there’s anything in there that shouldn’t be and you can change it.

Had a heap more to talk about this week but we’re just not going to have time. Thanks very much. See you next week. Bye.

Oh!! One more thing, Michael would kill me if I didn’t talk about this. In the site we now have a new category called Ask Jim. This is because we get a lot of queries via Twitter, obviously Facebook all of those things. If you have a question about SEO just ask on Twitter on jimboot or at stewartmedia or on the facebook page which is facebook.com/melbourneseo we’ll put answer up here or you can come and comment on any of these.

That really is it. See you next week. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. What an eventful and sad week with the loss of Steve Jobs. That guy, like most of us in this industry, had a huge impact on my business over the last 3 years. We switched the whole business across to Mac in 2008, I now have an Ipad, an Iphone, an Apple TV and I don’t know what I’d do without the devices. I bought an Ipod touch when they first came out just to get an idea of what the design was all about and I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe we could go from something like the Nokia or this device here, it’s the world’s first MP3 player, holds a massive 8 songs to what we have today. What a guy! As weird as it is to me, I was actually working with John Scully, the guy who sacked Steve Jobs from Apple when OS10 was coming out. So Steve Jobs would have been back at Apple and John Scully would have been out and when I say OS10 based on a Unix operating environment, intel chips, an operating system for the masses that just works beautifully and it still does. So, sadly missed.

This week I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about online reputation management. Well, not so much online reputation management but the sorts of things people will end up searching for based on what they’ve heard from their friends. Also I’m incorporating into this the merging, if you like, of part of webmaster tools into Google Analytics which happened last week. Basically what Google has done is moved the part of Google Webmaster Tools which is under Search Queries. You will now find this and you’ve got to hook it up, connect it and plug it in, I’ll show where you do that. If you go into Traffic Sources in Google Analytics then Search Engine Optimization then Queries and then you’ll get that information within your analytics environment. It really isn’t that much different it’s just that it’s just one interface to access this information because your impression information is really important. A lot of people will be used to impression information if you’ve been running Adwords campaigns. Impressions, basically is the amount of times someone types a phrase in. So for instance, this is the phrase “gasp fail” we were trying to rank for and we can see here it got 250 impressions. That means 250 people have typed it in since the 26th of Sept to the 10th of Oct. in Australia and of those 250 50 people have clicked on our link which on average ranked about 3.7. So it went to #1 than dropped back to #2, it started at #4 over this period of time, that’s where the average comes from. So that gives us a click through rate of 18%. If you’re used to Adwords you’d be used to these sorts of calculations. But what’s important in this situation is – look at this one here – gasp Melbourne, we weren’t trying to rank for that. Incidentally there’s 76 phrases here that we’ve ended up ranking for with one article. So when people tell you they’ll have a primary phrase, a secondary phrase and a tertiary phrase it’s like well sure it’s good to know which phrases are the most popular or less popular as you go down the track but seriously if you write a good piece of content using the keywords that your customers use you will rank for hundreds of phrases. This is one article, one page and we’ve got 76 different versions of the word gasp. You’ll see here gasp Melbourne, this is what’s interesting, this is why you need this data, 500 impressions but only 30 clicks. So only a click through rate of 5.4% but look at the average position, 7.6. So it’s right down towards the bottom of the page, it’s still getting a 5% click through rate but there’s 500 impressions. Imagine what would happen if we got that to #1, I’m not going to try because seriously what am I going to do with that traffic right. This is how you would use your impressions information in Google Webmaster Tools. Bring it into analytics, you’ll love it. It’s great. Just remember, the things your missing out on if you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools setup are to me the most important tools for SEO. This is where I start, there’s a lot of other tools out there but Google Webmaster Tools is it. I was going to say something else but it wouldn’t have been family friendly. The most important ones for me are always under Diagnostics, that’s where I would start when I go to analyze a site, so get that.

The other story this week in online reputation management is that Google was sued by a bloke called Jamie McIntyre who was trying to get the details of a site called jamiemcintyreexposed.com. Now you might think why would you sue Google to get the details of a third party site. Well, the reason is a convoluted one. If you do a Who Is look up on jamiemcintyreexposed.com you will see that it’s all domains by proxy, which basically means it’s a private registration and they’re hiding their details. They don’t want anyone to find out who they are or they just want some privacy. Turns out that this site has been calling Jamie McIntyre a “thieving scumbag” amongst other things as reported in Newslimited.com. So what they’ve done is they’ve seen at some point, this site has had Google AdSense on it. Now, you would question the intelligence of someone who sets up a site purely to attack a third person and then put AdSense on it. Anyway, Jamie McIntyre’s lawyers have gone to the courts saying “Google, give us the details of this guy who you have an advertising relationship with”. The court said “Yeah you got to do it”. So they have got 28 days to do it. Presumably they are looking for information like this which is our own account information for Google AdSense which is when you have Adwords on your own site. It give you the payee name, you know, who the cheque gets made out to, Address all that sort of stuff. They’ve got 28 days to hand over that information. There’s no AdSense on that site now but when did they get rid of the AdSense, did they close that account, how much data has Google got on hand now anyway. You’ll see here there’s already been some legal responses to some of the search results. If you were to type in “Jamie mcintyre exposed” now, you will see that the pages that were ranking, well you won’t see them because they’ve been removed but there were pages ranking apparently that were the most damaging. It looks like they have now been removed in response to a legal request. It’s not clear at the moment whether that’s Jamie McIntyre’s lawyers but you would think that’s the logical people who would’ve made that legal request. The story in News Ltd doesn’t tell us much more about it. I don’t understand what the court case would have been to remove those pages from Google because if you do a search on the site jamiemacintyreexposed.com there’s still about 30 pages in the index and they’re all pretty nasty pages. I mean none of them are really that nice but I’d say what they’ve done here is the pages that were ranking up high for his name, they have actually taken legal action to get removed. I’ve never seen that successful, that’s the first time I’ve seen that so they must have had pretty good grounds for Google to comply with that and then the court case following that trying to find out who actually owns the site by Google handing over the AdSense data.

That is it for todays show. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. Trying to get a new piece of software today, well, it’s an old piece of software but it’s now available for Mac so it’s new. I used to use it back in the days pre twitter but since I’ve been tweeting a lot and people have been accessing the Youtube channel a lot they always ask me “what is the software that you use to record the show?”
Since about 2008 it’s been a thing called Screen Flow before that though, I was using a technology called Camtasia when I was on Windows. So from about 2005 to about 2007 I was using Camtasia. Well, there is now a version of Camtasia for the Mac and thank you to Daniel and Jessica from Techsmith for giving me a version that we can have a play with today. The other thing with the software that I’ve been using on a Mac to record the show, I would usually edit in Screen Flow and record with Screen Flow but then I would also have to take it into Imovie to do Titles. So I’m going to try to do the Title today all within the one piece of software which is Camtasia, like I used to in the olden days.

So moving right along. What’s happened this week? Lots and lots of things have happened. Hey! Iphone 4S launch today hey, zzzzzzzzzzzz. Didn’t we all expect something bigger than that? The other big thing that’s happened this week is of course Google Analytics Real Time. If you want to see real time stats look at this, we’ve got 0 people on our site right now. Unless I had this real time data I would not know that so there is no-one on our site right now. I’m going to sit here and watch it and see when they jump on. I was having this conversation with someone in the office last week actually the day before Google announced this and I said the thing about Analytics which I don’t like (well, there’s a few things, but one of the things) is that it doesn’t give me real time data. We live in a time of real time information and real time data and we know that when something happens you need to be on it in the social media space and in the search space now too. Look at Google since we’ve had Google Caffeine nearly 2 years ago, things are happening now in real time, things are getting indexed in real time. But Analytics hasn’t had that information. Now you can see when people jump on your site exactly when they jump on and exactly when they jump off and you know where they’re coming from and all those sorts of things. Possibly how they found you all in that real time environment. There’s been plenty of other real time analytics packages out there, in fact when I used to use Joomla Content Management system it was all pretty much built in. It gave you the closest to real time that I’ve had and then we had a thing called Wooprah come out in about 2009 which was a great real time stats tool. But the problem with these things is they all slowed the site down a bit. There was even one for Wordpress (whose name escapes me at the moment) but it basically slowed the site to a crawl. The problem with that of course is that it will affect your rankings. So I ditched all of those things and haven’t had a real time package because Google is going to punish you if your site is slow. So now that we’ve got Google Analytics and it’s real time, I’m a happy man.

The other thing that happened last week, in case you’re from overseas and didn’t hear about this particular story, there’s a company called Gasp here in Australia and they had a major major customer service social media moment which did not go well. If you just google Gasp Fail and you can just see our story is there on it and what happened. It was in the same week that I was doing the story on Online Reputation Management and it sort of tied in quite well. It made headline news here, it was across all the television stations, it’s still going on in Twitter, there’s still a Twitter stream happening on that as we speak. You can still see it there as of 2 hours ago but it has slowed down, we’re probably getting 1 tweet every few hours now but it was faster than my SEO stream. The shelf life of a social media disaster is nowhere near as long as things that are in Google. Yes, you should be responsive to social media disasters, you should be on the ball to social media disasters, you should be engaging in the same environments where those social media disasters are happening just like David Meerman-Scott says. If I just go back to the Gasp Fail, Gasp has had problems in the online space long before this particular incident and these other things are just going to stay there for a lot longer. Now the only thing, in my opinion, Gasp may have lost a few customers out of this whole social media faux pas but there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth, beating of chest, people getting upset. Yeah, the emails that went back and forth were pretty ordinary but they were also a bit funny and gave us all a bit of entertainment for a few days. I think in the long run it’s just opened up more people to their brand. There’s people today saying “Ah, Gasp is having a closing down sale, they must be closing down because of this social medial faux pas.” That doesn’t seem to be the case to me and if someone could confirm that, that would be great. I haven’t been down to Chapel St. to have a look but my understanding is the closing down sale is they’re moving from one shop to another shop on the same road. I don’t think it has affected the business in a really bad way. The reason I say that is these guys have been getting bad reviews for a long time and this is something you should be checking yourself, go and google your brand, have a look at your places entry. They don’t seem to have updated all their places entries, but look here, three google reviews, and this is what I’m talking about. In social media, it’s dying right down, it’s backing off, it’s not an issue anymore, it’s not news, it’s not making the headlines and the viralness has been stopped. We’ve got someone jumping on the band wagon here on the 3rd of October leaving a review and that’s when all of this was going on. 20th of June 2011 and I found another really bad review in a fashion forum for 2005 saying basically the same thing. Everyone hates their staff, they try to pressure sell and their product is rubbish. They’re not my words by the way, that’s what I’ve read online. That stuff’s been there forever, it just so happens that their brand was exposed to a lot more people who wouldn’t even have cared about their brand. This company’s not Pizza Hut, it’s not a mass market brand. I think Gasp could have played it a lot better, I think they should have been true to their word because they were quite arrogant in the way they were talking about who their products suit, their products basically only suit people who are celebrities, that was kinda the gist of it you know a bit snobby, all that sort of thing. I think they should have played that up even more and got people more outraged and talking about them even more. But they didn’t do that and they tried to sort of defend their position and it all looked a bit sad in the end really. I really don’t think that this social media disaster has affected or will affect their business. I could be wrong but I think what you need to be caring about is these sorts of things, because search doesn’t forget, social media does. That’s the difference. When people are googling your brand chances are they’re considering doing business with you, obviously not in a social media disaster time. But at any other time when there isn’t a social media disaster and you’re not in the news and they are googling your brand, they want to find out about you, they’re probably going to be making a purchase. That’s why great customer service is important because of search. Social media is great but remember there’s a bell curve to it and that’s what David Meerman Scott talks about, go and get his book, it’s a great book.

So, we’re using this Camtasia software, I hope it’s working, I think the shows going well, what do you think?

I want you to check out this site Noise 11, we launched it last week, it’s a great music site. Some of you may have known the crew that used to be Undercover, they are now Noise 11 so we’ve got this site live. Lots of video, I’m heading across to their offices this afternoon. Great interviews, a lot of great music that you just aren’t going to hear anywhere else. These are exclusive sessions at Undercover. Check that out it’s a great site.

Finally today, I just want to talk one more time about brand and be careful who you get to work on your site. The reason for this is simple. Got this Skype spam overnight, we’ve all had them, “please like my page capitalwestadvisors”. So we go to capital west advisors on facebook and we can see that their Likes here are the Paladin Cleaning Service, supplements for gastric bypass patients and Farmville and they are a “quality business plan writing and capital introduction services start-up and growth…..” really! your spamming me via Skype. I’ve tweeted them today but they haven’t responded. These sorts of things… you’ve got to think about your brand people. When you go into their site they’ve done a bit of work here on SEO, but you go and find out who are these people and they’ve got all their advisors names. So, then you look up say Seth and we can just google him and all of a sudden probably his Linkedin information is going to come up, hopefully. No. He’s certainly not on Twitter, but you wouldn’t expect him to be because he doesn’t understand that outsourcing your online marketing to the cheapest bidder is the best option. Look here, this guy’s an SEO rockstar, it says it right here and I don’t actually know what that means. But we can see he’s in India, can’t even spell his city name right so how do you expect him to look after your brand online.

That’s it for todays show. Go and have a look for Seth Schwartz o Google. I’m going to hook up with hi on Linkedin and say hello and ask why is he spamming my Skype because let’s face it we all hate Skype spam, we all hate spam full stop. Don’t do it. See you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. Had a couple of interesting telemarketing calls last week. We had someone ring in from India who then transferred us to the USA and it was the same company on Thursday and Friday. We recorded both calls and I’m going to play the second call that happened on the Friday in a second. If it gets too boring for you just fast forward 8 minutes. I know a lot of you aren’t that fond of telemarketers. Personally, I love them, think they’re great.

This is their site and we’re going to review their site and a little bit about online reputation management in a second but here’s the call first: “view the video”.

OK so that was Mario and this is the Blue Ridge Telecom site. You can see we’ve got a couple of formatting issues here. I don’t think the site has been cross browser checked, make sure you cross browser check and there’s a lot of browsers to cross check in these days. You’ve got Chrome, you’ve got Firefox, you’ve got Safari, you’ve got IE, you’ve got Safari Mobile, there’s a whole bunch of other mobile or IOS and Android browsers now as well but you’ve got to do the cross checking because this is the sort of thing that happens. This site might look reasonable in Internet Explorer but I do not know because I do not have a copy. If we have a look at Google and we just type in the Company name and this is where I was having trouble “blue ridge telecom”. Blue Ridge Telecom complaint systems in Australia. The keyword suggestions here are really about what the most popular phrase is in my geographical area relating to this base phrase here and you’ll see it changes as I type. Right up we can see there that the office that Mario was working in or that site doesn’t rank #1 for that phrase. He’s got the page title right but seriously there’s nothing else really, there’s no H1’s on the page. If we have a look at the site, we’ve got Blue Ridge Telecom here but no back links. One of the things I was interested in was the other results have started to come up in Google when you typed in their name.

We’ve done a lot of what we call “Online reputation management” jobs before. If we have a look at the Google results again I’ll show you what I mean by online reputation management. We’ve got forums here from Whirlpool (if you’re in the USA you might not be seeing this) but as you saw from the call, when I was talking to Mario they do have an Australian office as well. But there’ some things in here in the old Whirlpool forums, now a lot of people when they get a bad review or something in Whirlpool forums they are quite worried about it. A lot of people think that when they get a bad review in a forum like Whirlpool, that’s it can’t do anything about it. There’s a couple of things you can do. Either you can choose to engage in the forum itself, some people say that’s just going to inflame the situation whereas you should just let it fade away. Well… that might be a good idea in a lot of cases but you can see here this was posted in 2004 so jumping into the conversation now is probably a bit too late. If you need to make that go away the way to do it is, because it is so old, basically you’ve got to get out there and let Google know there’s more pages on the web other than just your home page. So that can be your Twitter presence, if you have one. In the case of Blue Ridge, I did a long search, no Twitter presence, no Facebook presence. I did actually find the President at Blue Ridge Telecom on Facebook and I’ve befriended him but he hasn’t added me back. There are pages like Linkedin, your Google profile, your twitter presence, your Facebook page, all these things can serve to be pages about your business and get those ranked above, because let’s face it, an old forum post from 2004 if there’s something more relevant about that phrase blue ridge telecom that’s what Google’s going to want to rank. That’s what you’re trying to do here, you’re trying to get more positive pages on the system, on the Google search engine results page above ones that might be negative. Like this one from the Telecommunications Ombudsman, this is not so bad, this is just a member of the TIO so that’s good, here we’ve got all their customer service numbers and fax numbers and the address where Mario was, which is nice. That page is fairly OK to have there, it’s not doing anything bad, it’s not doing any good. Then you’ve got the Australian page, no it’s not an Australian page, it just talks about Australia. You may also have a duplicate content issue here, you might want to check that Mario or get your boss to check it. Then we’ve got another negative one down here unfortunately but you will see that even though I’m doing this search in .com.au these are .com results coming up. Which means if you’re an Australian company and you see a lot of .com negative stuff about your brand and your audience is primarily in Australia you can create a lot of .com.au presence which will automatically rank above the .com if it’s more relevant with keyword density and those sorts of things than these other ones and half the time it will be. This one is Blue Ridge scandal, probably not a good title that jumps out when you’re Googling your name there Mario. You may want to check all these things but just remember that when you’re doing online reputation management quite often it’s far better for you to jump in, engage, nip the bad press in the bud. Other times, if people are just being bullies then it’s probably a good idea to stand aside. In fact, I’m always surprised a lot of the times when Sensis or the Yellow Pages engage on my blog. I think they’d be much better off just letting it go. If they want to engage that’s fine with me, I’m happy to talk
To talk to them.

That is it for todays show. Hopefully that’s helpful, hopefully if you’re spending money on employing telemarketers you may be thinking twice about it now, maybe thinking of putting the money into say search or social which of course have much better returns. That is it for this week. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. Going to talk about Google+ today, it’s been frustrating me just a little bit. First of all, up until now, apparently there’s another one on it’s way, the app on IOS for Google+ is pretty sucky. Google+ has announced today though, it is open for anyone to use so anyone can join up to Google+. They’ve also opened up their API for Google hangouts, that’s the live video experience so it will be interesting to see what developers can come up with there. They’ve also announced that if you have an android phone that you will now have mobile hangouts, which is very interesting. So that’s mobile video group conferencing and they’ve also announced a couple of other things to do with document sharing and those sorts of things on hangouts. Which is great.

The thing that is frustrating me this morning is the new search feature in Google+. Now this is something I have wanted for a while. The reason I want search for Google+, well, just have a look at my Tweet Deck. You can see there I’ve got way too many search columns, right. It slows the whole desktop right down and after a while I have to shut down tweet deck because there’s so much going on. So, I was hoping Google+ was going to get to the point with search so that I could start using that more than Tweet deck. The reason I haven’t been using Google+ as much as I would have liked to use it is because of the lack of a good experience on an IOS device (Iphone, Ipad). That’s when I do most of my tweeting or social mediaing, does that make sense? It’s when I’m on a laid back device and I really don’t have that with Google+. Google+ is great at the desktop but it sucks on a mobile device. Well, and Apple mobile device, maybe it’s great on android.

The thing that’s frustrating me with search this morning, first of all thank you to Josh Rowe for sharing this on Google+ and bringing it to my attention, if you now go into Google+ and search for anything you will get these results here which you can do Save this Search. This particular search I’m doing here is a name of a website that was involved in the GoDaddy hosting compromise last week and one of our clients and good mate, David Meerman-Scott’s site got infected with this malware which we fixed. I wrote a blog post on how we fixed it and how we restored the Google rankings and all those sorts of things. I’ve done a search for that and you can here that we’ve got Best of and Most Recent. If we click Most Recent you are going to find my other persona talking about it but if you click Best of that’s what you will see. Interestingly, I also put in the title of that blog post “godaddy malware” and the reason this is interesting for me is that it’s been driving me nuts this morning and the staff are probably wondering when is Jim going to get the show out? The reason why I’m late today is because it’s just driving me crazy. OK so there’s me but if I go and do the search by the way you can now save these searches and they come up in your Google sparks which is similar to what you can do with Twitter, you can save a search and see who’s talking about that thing and dip into it whenever you want. You can search either Google+ posts, people, everything or just sparks. Sparks is for the most part the web, but it has a slightly different algorithm to it than the actual web algorithm. If you look I’ve got godaddy malware and we’ve got here stewartmedia.biz is #1 for that search and domains directory is #2 whereas if I do that same search on a browser where I’m not logged into Google in any way shape or form you can see that that domains directory is #1 and godaddy.com is #2 and we are down here at about #6. You can see that there is a good difference. Now the only sites that a relevant to that search that I just did, for me, is the #1 result which is great, is this register.co.uk result which is great. This one’s not which is back in May, this one is relevant and of course the one I wrote is relevant. Out of the top 7 results only 4 are relevant but remember where I’ve done this sparks search I’m actually logged into Google+. If you want to have a look at Google+ posts then it’s just people talking about it and People that would be something that would appear in their bio or their About section or maybe their name or whatever and then we have Everything. So, if then we go back to our Comino browser which I’m not logged into Google+ and I do a search for godaddy malware you can see here the post that I made actually on Google+ which is this one here where I just announced the link to the blog post. I didn’t actually put any other content around it, all I did was put the link and let Google bring in the rest from the actual blog post. Now when I do the actual search here not logged into Google+ which you can now do if you want to do a Google+ search so you can find out what people are talking about within Google+ but you don’t have a profile or you want to do it not logged in just go to plus.google.com/s/ If you do that we get the Hacker News here which was the 17th of September but my actual post on Google+ doesn’t appear at all. See here we’ve got Best Of and Most Recent, if we do Most Recent we can see the line up changes. This guy, this Kevin Burns, he still stays there and he’s the man that’s been driving me nuts this morning because he’s #2 in Best Of, he posted it yesterday so it makes sense that he’s there in Most Recent. One of the things that is different here and my post doesn’t appear at all and as far as I know it’s probably about the first or second post on Google+ about it but guess what I didn’t actually write anything, I just placed a link to the blog post. So therefore it’s probably less important because all I did was place a link, it wasn’t actually me saying anything about the link. So the lesson here is if you’re using Google+ it’s probably a good idea to say something about the link. But this guy Kevin Burns, why he’s driving me crazy is because his post has got no shares, the word malware doesn’t appear anywhere in his post but godaddy does and godaddy’s in the title and the link and all the rest of it. So there’s a couple of signals there. This #1 post has had 4 shares, 2 +1’s and one of the comments has a +1 and it’s got Godaddy in this information up here, he’s actually written that, so he’s got godaddy and malware in the actual post. So the lesson here is if you’re linking to something, write about it, use your keywords in the Google+ post that you’re writing about if you want to come up in Google+ search. So it’s operating very differently from say Google normal search in that you’re not going to get things in here that are really old, mainly because Google+ isn’t that old anyway. Even the sparks results where we’ve got everything, if we have a look at sparks again for godaddy malware (this is me not logged in) you can see here stewartmedia.biz is #1 for that phrase on sparks, domains directory is again #2 so sparks is operating slightly differently to the results that we’re seeing in actual Google. I think this is an actual signal as to where Google is heading for certain types of searches. It won’t apply to all searches because there are a whole host of searches that people will do that have nothing to do with how recently they were posted. You could be doing something on JFK or whatever, you’re not interested in recent results. It’s all very interesting, Kevin Burns has been frustrating the hell out of me but I think I’ve worked it out. I thought maybe it’s all the shares but I had a look at his profile, he says he’s a blogger but then I couldn’t find any blog posts that he’d written. I was searching everywhere then I thought well, maybe there’s a lot that he’s doing on twitter or maybe something else, it wasn’t. Basically it’s because he mentioned those words actually in his post. I did this whole search too in Google+ for the title of the article on the register.uk for this particular phrase and the #1 result wasn’t Kevin, it was Joltrast. It doesn’t make any sense there because of the words that she’s used there except she’s probably more recent 12.53 yesterday and Kevin was earlier, so there goes that theory. But it’s interesting and I hope you have enjoyed that. If you do get onto Google+ please hook up with me and we may even have a hangout. Won’t that be something to do.

We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. It is Kiwi day today, you didn’t know that did you? But my New Zealand friends were the only one’s to respond to me this morning when I said “Who wants a site review?” That’s probably because all the Aussies were still on the road or not looking at Twitter or whatever else, you know, it’s already midday in New Zealand.

Today’s reviews are for Siobhan and Jayson. Let’s have a look at unscrewed first. I’m going to do this site review process one on top of each other so that you get an idea of the things you need to check first of all when you’re looking at the health of your site from an organic search perspective. First thing that we do is have a look at the index. Jayson’s site is a Wine site unscrewed.co.nz and what I’m doing at the moment is having a look at what is already in the index. Google’s telling me that there’s 673 pages. I’ve drilled down a bit and you can see here I’m at the 55th page of results for this. What I’m starting to see here, Jayson is, I’m guessing, duplicate content and I’m guessing we haven’t got Tags set up properly in your Wordpress install. The other interesting thing about your site is (I’m in google.co.nz here and one of the other interesting things is that they don’t seem to have the Google+1 button yet which is a bit rude, but anyway Google must still be rolling it out) when I simply type your brand name or the main part of your domain name into Google I’m not getting all the extended site links, like we are with the other site we’re going to review this morning. I’ve typed in plunket and we get all these great site links. To me that says there’s something that Google’s having trouble understanding about your site. When we have a closer look at the site, you would hope that some of these menu items here would be picked up in site links but you’re not so I would have a look at Google Webmaster tools. Make sure that you get that set up so that you can go and see if there’s any problems with site links from Google’s perspective and the reason it isn’t picking up. We’ve had a bit of a look at the index and the main thing to look for there is anomalies, so if 673 pages, Jayson, is way to many which I suspect is the case, then you need to look at that. For any one else if it’s not enough then you need to look at that.

Once you’ve done that, then go and have a look at your site with your keyphrases in mind. What are the keyphrases? With Jayson I’m assuming that New Zealand Wine Reviews is the #1 phrase we need to rank for. What I would do is take that phrase and just look for instances of it on the front page of the site. We’re not getting it there so straight up we’ve got that phrase in the page title which is great but it’s not anywhere on the front page. We’ve got variations of that like Wine Reviews or Restaurant Reviews or Video Wine Reviews but we don’t actually have the phrase New Zealand Wine Reviews. It’s all about consistency in these things, get it in the page title, get it somewhere on the page and then get a link to it. I would suggest with Wordpress, maybe getting a footer menu so that all the different New Zealand Wine Reviews are categorized under one section of the site.

The next thing I would look at is what sort of headings you’ve got on the page. If you have a look here what we’re looking for is either H1’s or H2’s, Jayson in this case we’ve got a bunch of H3’s. Whilst Video Wine Reviews and Wine News are probably good phrases for you to have they’re in a H3. I would look at the theme and css attached to that and see if you can reformat some of these as a H1. Remember if you are going to use H1s and H2s and H3s which Google recommends you do then make sure you have them in order, don’t have a H3 above a H1. It’s basically signposting the content for the bots, this is the main heading, this is the subheading and this is the sub subheading if you get my meaning. So they’re the main things that stand out for me. Also Jayson, it’s great that you’ve got video here but I haven’t checked to see if Wammo who is the radio channel who’s doing this has got related videos switched on at the end of the video (that’s a biggy). What I am looking for at the end of that video is if you are embedding video into your site, we’ve got next in the channel but we don’t have related videos, you may not have any control over this Jayson because you may not have that relationship with Radio Wammo, but I would always just have related videos switched on. In my experience we find that it gets the bot out to the site more. So that’s one thing you can look at.

The other thing to look at too here is when you do that site:unscrewed.co.nz just have a look at some of the cache dates, The other thing you can look at with the cache is get a picture of how Google sees your pages. We’ll go to your front page and what I’m looking for is 2 things. One is when did Google last come out to see the site and you find that by clicking on cached and we can see it came out on 13th of September so yesterday. You don’t have a problem with Google coming out to the site and visiting the site. The other thing I want to look at is how does Google see this site, what is it looking at. For that we click on the text link, text-only version under the cached area and we can see here these are the things that it sees first. It’s picking up this bit of information here from the information attached to this graphic so it’s good that you’ve got new Zealand wine reviews there too. But you really need to get it on the page. Hopefully that’s helpful to you Jayson.

Now we’re going to switch over to the site that Siobhan has asked me to look at. Another New Zealand site plunket.org.nz Once again let’s go to the index site:plunket.org.nz, up here we see 14,300 results, that’s a lot of pages. When you dig deeper into these results, once again go to page 40 or 50 you can see that we’re starting to see a similarity in the URL’s and right down there I start to go “OK what’s going on here?” There’s something consistent with all these extra pages and you look at the description tags and it seems to be following a lot of geographic directory type of entries on the site. So if we go in here, have a look at that page and we can see that it’s probably got a lot of these sorts of pages. Problems with these sorts of pages that you’re going to have with Google is it’s going to dilute the rest of your content. Overall Google’s looking at your site authority for content and if you have a lot of pages that don’t really have a lot of content on them that can dilute basically the rest of the content on the site. Typically these sorts of directory type pages don’t have a lot of content on them. I wouldn’t worry about that too much just yet because when we have a look at (we’ll just go to the home page here) the site itself we can see here that Parenting Advice is something that this site presumably wants to rank for. When we go do a Google search in google.co.nz pages from New Zealand we see that they are already on the front page. Which is great so that 14,300 pages whilst it may be having some effect, maybe in the .co.nz space it’s not as competitive as you might think and therefore it’s not having a big detrimental effect because the competition above you maybe isn’t as hard. What I would look at first and once again, do what we did with Jayson’s site, have a look at the front page. Once again we’ve got the brand at the start of the page title, I would put that last. PlunketLine, I don’t know if there’s really any good reason to have that in the page title because it’s not really appearing in the search results. You can see here it’s cut off so it’s not really giving any benefit to people being able to find the phone number quickly. Once again we’ll have a look for those phrases on the front page of the site and I’m looking for parenting advice. I’ll do a search for it and we don’t have that on the front page so once again if you’re going to put these phrases in the page title get them somewhere and anchor them on the front page of the site. Also, Jayson going back to your site for a second, the nature of this site is that it’s a new site and your content is going to change regularly. Try to get some content on the front page of that site that is anchored there even if it’s down below the fold here it says something about this site and get some keywords and links to different sections of the site in there. That way there’s some consistency at least and some anchors to the front page of the site that Google will always know what the site is about. The other thing that I forgot to mention with your site Jayson, is that I had a look at the robots.txt This is the file, for those of you who don’t know, that tells all the robots that come out to your site how to behave, basically and what the can and can’t look at. You can see here you’ve got User-agent:, Disallow: and then nothing. That’s not really doing anything. If you had a / in here it would have blocked robots from everything so speak to your Web. Dev. But when we redevelop sites and build sites for that matter, sometimes we will disallow the robots to go into certain sections of the site because it just creates confusion for the robot. You might just want to have this that says Allow/ Disallow and then block out the directory that may be you don’t want it to go into. In the case of Plunket, you guys don’t have a robots.txt at all so Google doesn’t know what it should or shouldn’t be looking at, so it just looks at everything which is why you might have 14,300 pages.

But the main thing with Plunket really, is you just need to get some of those keyphrases you’ve got in the page title actually on that front page. Even car seat rental, or car seat rentals I should say, remember singular and plurals are always different. We’ve got rent a car seat here, why not make that …oh, and that’s a graphic anyway so Google can’t read that information anyway. Why not have an equivalent text version of that menu down here somewhere for people who use screen readers, the vision impaired. Why not get some alternate menu’s down there and make it more universal access if you like. And get the keywords in those links.

The other thing, once again, let’s have a look at the H1’s and H2’s and we can see here that you’re suffering from the same sort of issues that Jayson’s site was. That is, we’ve got this graphic as a H1 which I can understand why it’s done from a design perspective but it’s not really doing anything for the authority of the site or telling Google what the site’s about. Same here, H3’s all H3’s through here and of course all these things here, they’re all graphics. Oh, the other thing Jayson, those site links this is because Google knows that these are the constant anchor points to the site. For some reason it’s having an issue with your site. If we go and have a look at the case results of Plunket we can see here once again, 9th of September, so not to bad. It’s coming out on a regular basis at least. If we have a look at the text version you can see here that all those graphics are gone so a lot of those phrases that you would have in those graphics are lost, they’re not appearing anywhere to Google. There’s no problem using graphics for look, appeal and design reasons but make sure that you get some good alt information that tells Google about those graphics and tells Google what they are. Name the graphics, put the keywords in the graphics and this goes for everybody. It’s quite often overlooked, quite often a Web Designer is using an editing package they might batch a lot of their images and they’ll all come out with numbers as part of their file name. Make the file names descriptive, it gives Google some indication of what that image is about. If images are important to what you do, you might be selling products, fashion whatever, make sure you set up image search as well because that then is another channel to your site.

That is it for today’s show. Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you all next week. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. We’re rebuilding David Meerman-Scott’s site, davidmeermanscott.com, that’s a site that we work on for SEO, David is a client of ours. It ranks really well for things like “real time marketing” and we’re working with his design team to re-build it and bring it up to date all those sorts of things you do after several years of having a site that you haven’t updated, from a design perspective anyway. What, of course we want to make sure that we do is maintain all it’s fantastic rankings and it’s fantastic keywords. When you go through a site revamp like this or a site refresh inevitably there’s going to be content that you think “Ah, it’s not longer relevant, maybe we should get rid of that piece and put something else up that’s more relevant, that’s more now”. What you need to do before you make any of those sorts of decisions which is the process we’re going through with David now, is have a look at the authority of that content from Google’s perspective. The way that you do that #1 is look at the backlinks. This is a tool that we use, one of the tools that we use, majesticseo and it shows a number of backlinks. You can see here that for David’s site there’s about four and a half thousand different domains linking to his site and of that there’s one hundred and thirty nine thousand in actual backlinks. When you look at the sites that are linking to him, fantastic sites, mashable.com, problogger, chrisbrogan, really high authority sites that are going to give him a lot of link love. What we’re interested in is what are the actual pages that have the most backlinks. Typically your root domain is going to have the most backlinks but what we’re interested in is what pages within the site are going to have the most backlinks. In David’s case because he’s a prolific writer he’s got a lot of ebooks up there, a lot of pdf’s. You can see here that a lot of the pdf’s are getting a lot of backlinks. If you move those pdf’s you can just 301 the old link to where they are, where you’ve moved them. That’s great but our rule of thumb is if you don’t have to move something, don’t. What we’re recommending is taking it out of the navigation if you don’t want the user to get to it, if it’s not relevant. You’ve got all those sites out there (look at me I’ve got a White Board) this might be your ebook, pdf, incidentally Google did a blog post on pdf’s this week which we’ll touch on in a second, but let’s just say you’ve got an ebook, this could be a webpage or anything, and you’ve got all these other sites out on the web or all these other web pages and they’re all linking into this page. For all you know that might be your most authoritative page on the site but you think the content may no longer be relevant, our recommendation would be to, OK if the content’s no longer relevant and you need to bring it up to date, do that write something different but do not change the URL. Keep the URL the same. If you want to take it out of the site navigation do that but make sure that if you have pages like this that you then use these pages to put anchor text in back to the rest of the site, certainly back to the root page and other pages off the root domain. The reason that you do that is because you’ve got an authoritative page so Google’s going to come and see that page a lot because it’s got all these links out here. As the Google bot goes in and discovers these things it will re-crawl that page. You might think “the content’s five years old what does it matter the Google bot’s already found it?” What matters is it may not have found all the backlinks as the Google bot gets more and more powerful at crawling the web. We see this all the time. We’ve got a client this week whose web developer (web developers – don’t you love em?) had put a whole duplicate site of our client up on the web as a staging thing. This is a typically thing that web developers will do, they’ll stage a site. You would hope that most web developers will block the bot from finding those sites and this didn’t happen. We didn’t know and the client didn’t know that this site was in a live environment and it had been there probably for a couple of years but Google only picked it up in the last 2 weeks and then bang the rankings went down. That tells us that the Google bot is discovering things all the time. We’re seeing 404’s now from old pieces of content, 2006, 2005 I’m talking, where Google has picked up these links. It could be from an old forum in my case it was from an old video blogging site from 2005 that Google had somehow found these old pages. It’s because the bot is crawling more and more. You might say ‘well, how relevant is that if those are old links, how relevant is that content?” Who knows! But Google is crawling it, Google is finding those links, so more than ever you need to keep hold of URLs or at the very least make sure you 301 them, but for goodness sake don’t just dump them.

On the subject of PDF’s one of the things that’s interesting on the Google blog post is that it says that sometimes if it can’t determine the title of a PDF it will make it up based on what these other sites or how these other sites are linking to it. It makes good sense for you to take control of that yourself and make sure you’re using a Tool like Adobe, Acrobat or any of these other PDF creation tools to put the Meta data in your PDF’s. We used to say years ago, “why would you do a PDF if you could just do a web page?”. The reason you would do a PDF is because you want people to be able to download it, email it those sorts of things, move it about the web. It can carry authority especially if it’s a technical document. A lot of businesses out there who may be selling specific products of a technical nature might have a tech spec sheet or something like that. Take those spec sheets and put your own backlinks in them and also change the title of them if you’re allowed to of course, if you get permission of the owner of the tech sheet or if it is indeed your tech sheet. This is a PDF that I created years ago and you can see down the bottom that we’ve got a bunch of links in here. That’s not only because it sits on our site but this particular PDF was sitting on a City of Melbourne website and I want those backlinks. So if you’re a member of a local council group and you’re allowed to put a spec sheet up about yourself or a PDF up about yourself in your local area, make sure you have backlinks to your site in it. For what Google’s talking about this week with your Meta data, with your sheets here is that make sure you put a title in here, make sure you put the author in here, probably put some keywords in there. How valuable that is is debatable because Google sees right through people doing keyword stuffing on these sorts of things. Just make sure you use every piece of Meta Data along the way that you can. Put backlinks in and that’s especially true if someone’s downloading your ebook and putting it up in a forum or uploading it somewhere else you’re always going to have those backlinks.

Hopefully that’s helpful, that’s my White Board and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. Look what’s out, it’s the new edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman-Scott. I just got my copy today and David sent me one because I’m actually in the book this time which is lovely. If you haven’t read this book you really need to if your in business basically because it’s not just about online marketing and those sorts of things, it is what the title says. So if you’re in business you need to read this book. Available from all good online book stores. I’m not too sure if this one is available as an audio book but certainly as an e-book.

What I want to talk to you about today is just the 7 basic steps that are required to make it easy for customers to find you. Remember when we’re talking about search engine optimization we’re talking about customers looking for your products or services. It’s not like display advertising where you’re trying to be interruptive and get your message in front of potential customers because you know where they hang out like Facebook or where ever else. SEO is about customers searching for products or services that your business may have.

First thing that you’ve got to look at is Keyword Analysis. You’ve got to drill down, you’ve got to consider things like regionality and for todays exercise we’re taking this site here, Roof Seal Australia, they’ve been in business in Australia for I think, about a million years, I’m not sure, but they’ve certainly been advertising on television for a long time. So, we’re going to use their site today and do some keyword analysis straight up. Here are some phrases that I’ve already searched for on Google Insight for Search, there are a number of other tools available out there, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Market Samurai piece of software, great bit of software made locally in fact in Melbourne. So the phrases I’ve done are tile roof restoration, roof tile paint, and roof repair. I’ve come up with these phrases by searching for a base phrase, by the way Roof Seal, amongst other things their main product advertised on television is basically repairing concrete & terracotta tile roofs and resealing them so that’s the nature of my keyword discovery process. So I just put the word roof in and get all sorts of results so then I drill down and look in Australia. I’m not going to try and rank for the word roof because even if I was able to rank for that single word it’s going to deliver a lot of unqualified traffic. OK here in Australia we now start to see a break down, we’re seeing roof racks, we’re seeing roof tiles. OK so we can drill further into roof tiles and we’re seeing more related phrases there, some are brand phrases but we’re starting to get away from what the actual product is now. We’re probably getting into people looking to buy roof tiles or looking to select roof tiles. So we’ll go back, start to look to phrases that relate to your product or services, roof repairs OK. This probably the place to go, you can click on that one and get further results. We’ve got roof repairs Sydney, Melbourne roof repairs as opposed to roof repairs Melbourne. So a variety of phrases there. That’s how I’ve come up with these phrases and I’ll just put Melbourne roof repairs in, just seeing how that compares and when I’m talking about regionality, that’s what I’m talking about, actually having a town name. Melbourne roof repairs is actually pretty good and you would say probably high converting because it’s so specific and it is a local phrase. However we’ve still got roof repair far and above all the others. So, if we go roof repairs, I always like to check the plural against it when I get a high volume phrase like that to see if there’s any discrepancies there and we can see that there is. The plural is giving us more traffic. People will often ask in this situation, if I just try to rank for roof repairs won’t I therefore rank for roof repair – not necessarily. If your competition is trying to rank for the singular and they’ve got pages geared more towards the singular than you have then they’re going to rank for the singular. I would say you really need to be going for both of those phrases but this is a very rudimentary keyword analysis of course.

So let’s go and see roof repair, so let’s go and have a look at Roof Seal. This is the page title, we can see here that we don’t have that phrase in the page title but before you go and look at those sorts of things have a look at the competition. What is it that you actually have to beat. I’m going to go for the higher volume phrase, roof repairs, and we can see here we’ve got Jim’s roofing, we’ve got Melbourne Roof Repairs. These guys I’d say have done a little bit of keyword research, I don’t know who they are but the fact that we saw this phrase Melbourne roof repairs come up in the keyword analysis and we see someone’s gone out an registered the domain name and they’ve got roof repairs as the first phrase in their page title says that they’ve done a little bit of homework. This mob here have not done some homework or if they have they’ve implemented it badly. Mainly because, you see this phrase here Roof Roofing repair Sydney, Google’s going to see that as a single phrase because the comma doesn’t come until after the word Sydney. So, if you’re trying to rank for the phrase roof roofing repair Sydney, that’s great, that’s excellent but seriously no-one’s going to be typing that in. This is interesting, even though I haven’t put a town name in, Google has decided to deliver some Maps or Places entries. We can see here that these guys here are getting Google reviews, this guy here sealatex this is the guy at the top of the Places, they’re here on the front page as well. But I would say for that phrase you’d need to pick a spot where you can jump in and I would say, certainly first round of changes you would hope to get somewhere around the bottom of page 1. Even this guy here, he’s done some basic SEO where he divided up the phrases on his page title and broken them into distinct phrases. I don’t think Victorian Slate Roofing is a good one, people tend not to type in a state name unless they’re tourism accepted. For products and services ranking for the state really is not what you want to do because people don’t type that in. Exceptions to that rule would be around say conference centres or venues where you would seek to attract either interstate or international but certainly for most products and services people will type in a town name rather than a state. So, that’s some pretty basic competitive analysis done.

I would also just quickly have a look to see whose doing what with backlinks. Try to assess if these are real, look Jim’s Roofing’s only got 34 backlinks but they’re #1 for that phrase. These guys here, I suspect, will have more because they’ve gone out and registered that domain name and they have they’ve got 83. So you can see already the number of backlinks really isn’t a measure of where you should rank. Then we’ve got the #3 result with 18 backlinks. Let’s have a look at this other person we thought was having a red hot go at ranking and we can see 86, not much there. Remember it’s not about the volume it’s about the quality of the backlinks. Not a lot of backlinks but I would also have a look at those backlinks just to get a feel of what they’re doing or whose working with them or if they’ve employed someone. When I see these backlinks here I would say they’re all fairly legit because we’re getting backlinks from other Jim’s sites, we’re getting backlinks from a franchise site. What I’m not seeing there is a whole bunch of junk links that you will sometimes see. We’re getting your typical directories like HotFrog, those sorts of things, but mainly they look like they’re legitimate backlinks. That’s probably why they’re #1 for that phrase because they are real backlinks. They haven’t done much for that phrase in their page title so it’s always a trade off. Jim’s roofing services has got there I would say for that phrase roof repair mainly because of legitimate backlinks. I would also have a look at the page and what I’m looking for here is to see if the word roof repairs and it’s not, the word roof repairs does not appear on the front page. That in itself tells me it’s there only because of backlinks and maybe some content deeper within the site but it is something you can beat.

So we’ve done our competitor analysis, we’ve looked at backlink strength, whether it’s real or artificial. It doesn’t look as though they’re doing a lot of content production on that Jim’s site and they’re certainly not using authorship or anything like that we’ve discussed in the past.

So then you have a look at your own site. Let’s first of all, look at the index. Type in the word site:roofseal.com.au. We can see that Roof Seal has 115 pages in the index. If the site is not that big, once again you’ve got a problem. If the site is a lot bigger than that, you have a problem. If that seems about right, then OK. To me that seems a lot of pages for a site and I’m already starting to see some things here that look a bit questionable. Where you start to see things repeated in a description like this, you know that something’s not quite right. I would say (and I haven’t done a good check of this) that it’s some of the plug-ins or the content management system that’s been used here. We’re seeing here flash files, the one thing I always do is go to the end of the search I’ve just done and always click this “repeat the search with omitted results included”. Right there we’re seeing a lot of links actually in the index but Google hasn’t actually followed these links but is actually listing them. That’s part of the 115 pages and I think it’s because we’re using this plug-in. I think that’s a plug-in for Joomla, Zoom I think it’s like a gallery plug-in, from memory. It’s been awhile since I’ve used that. Really you’d need to block Google out of that and keep Google away from that. See there’s a lot of them in fact that’s probably the bulk of the results in the index. This is good, we’ve got videos in here as well, that’s always good. Obviously get rid of a lot of those backlinks.

The next thing to do is check your own code. Check to see what your code is like for the keyphrase and I’m talking about roof repairs here the plural. Yes it is a Joomla site. I would, and you can do this with Joomla, loose this meta tag up here ‘index follow’ I think it’s just not needed. Robots do that by default anyway. The one thing that pops out here which can be fixed for a Joomla site is the page title appearing down here after the Meta Tags, big no no. The page title should be at the start, the reason for that is it is the first thing Google sees. Also, just looking at these keyphrases in that page title, obviously we haven’t got roof repairs in there so we need that. I would question some of these phrases themselves. Home Seal (I don’t know if these are brand names, maybe they are) isn’t really something that someone is going to type in. Reroofing that’s not bad but cement sitting out there all on its own (when I say all on its own I mean there’s a comma on the end of it and it’s a word sitting there all by itself) isn’t going to help you. Drive Seal maybe that’s meant to be Driveway Seal, I don’t know, but you would always do your keyword analysis around these keyphrases and double check. Also with Joomla you can make certain that you get a lot of this script and these sorts of things that the bot doesn’t need to see, out of the actual page.

Then I would have a look at the site to see what is the keyword authority on the page. What is this page telling me about? The first thing I’m looking for here is Heading tags. I’ve caught a lot of flack over the years but just for the record Google has said time and time and time again that it does consider H1’s, H2’s, H3’s those sorts of things. That’s formatting basically, what I’m talking about here as to what has authority on the page or what the page is about. Right here it looks like we’ve got a graphic as a H3 and we’ve got Contact us Online Now as a H3. There’s no H1’s no H2’s so Google says there’s not authority. I don’t even think we’re getting that phrase on the front page, let’s just check that – No. So roof repairs does not appear on the front page. I mean there’s a good amount of text here, good balance.

Then the next thing to look at is your link structure, so make sure Google can actually follow these links here. These are text links and the one good thing here is that these links actually match your page title it’s just that we’re not seeing consistency through the headings and back into the menus. Google looks for all these things, it looks for that consistency of the page title, the headings, the link structure itself and the keywords in those links. The main issues there would be around certainly cleaning up the index and certainly making the page titles and those sorts of things far more targeted to the relevant keyphrases.

They’re the main things you would look at. Of course, step no. 7 is set up Webmaster Tools and check it religiously. Always check things like site performance, crawl errors, also make sure you check things like crawl rate because that will tell you how often Google’s coming out to your site and if it’s taking a long time to download a page and those sorts of things.

That is it for today’s show. Sorry it was a bit of a long one but these are the questions I get asked all the time and this is the process I go through to rank a page. Hopefully that is helpful to a bunch of you out there. We’ll see you next week. Bye.

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Welcome back Rankers. I’m doing a Webinar next Tuesday August 23rd at 12.30pm Aust Eastern Standard Time if you’re in the US I thinks that’s Pacific Time 7.30 at night on August the 22nd. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m sure someone will. It’s going to be about SEO and Social Media and how they inter-relate. Today I wanted to touch on one particular aspect of that and that is Google Authorship and some of the network sharing that we’re seeing coming up in the search engine result pages now. A lot of you will be familiar with these sorts of results when you do a search for anything in Google. Here’s a search I’ve done for the word search and the #1 result is Bing and Matt Cutts of Google has shared that on Google Buzz. Now, I don’t use Google Buzz but as Google tells me here I’m connected to Matt Cutts on Google+, that’s one thing. Then you may have also seen things like, I’ll do an undercover search (Undercover is a famous Australian Music site) and I can see here the only bit of network information I’m getting is that Robert Scoble shared this on Twitter. How does Google know that I’m using Twitter? Or how does Google know that I’m connected to Robert Scoble via Twitter, it’s not that he follows me, I follow him. If we have a look at Google Profile, I’ve got my Twitter account set up for my Google Profile and that’s how Google knows that Robert Scoble shared that via Twitter. However with the recent breakdown in Google actually with real time search using Twitter and all these sorts of things and actually taking a feed from Twitter it looks like they’re starting to fade that out or actually give preference to Google+ shares or what we call +1. So, in the social shares, what we’re talking about is Twitter which I think is going to get fazed out, it looks like it is already and you’re not going to see that anymore in the search results. The +1 and remember you don’t have to have a Google+ account to use +1 it’s available as long as you’re logged in to Google in your gmail account, you can +1 something, a search result. The +1 button is available on site, it’s a little bit like the Facebook Like. I still believe that Facebook shares and likes are actually counting to your ranking in the search results but remember that with various types of access and publishing whether something’s public or private, that’s less accurate to who has actually shared something and liked something on Facebook. Yes, Google has actually indexed about 2 billion pages on Facebook but it’s only the public stuff not the private stuff. So the +1 allows people to say I like the search result even an ad. Now, over the weekend, we’re seeing that Google is actually saying people on Google+ are sharing that result. If I go to Googe+-mashable I can see these 3 people here have shared this via Google+. There’s Mr Mashable – Pete Cashmore and Ben Parr – journalist on Mashable.

So, what is this Google Authorship all about? There was a video released last week by Matt Cutts and Uther Hanson of Google talking about Google Authorship. Basically they’re saying it’s about attribution. I think it might be about a little bit more than that, I think it might be eventually, something that will take over page rank, replace page rank, be more important than page rank. Essentially a signal that will be used as a tie breaker like page rank used to be used as a tie breaker and I’ll explain that in a second. First of all attribution is about if an author posts an article somewhere regardless of the site it sits on, what Google is saying that you should link back to a bio page on that site with this code rel=”author” and then that bio page should actually point to your Google profile. Then that Google profile page should point back to the bio page with the code rel=”me” and that gives double confirmation that yes you’re the owner of that profile and you confirm that that bio page is about you and that the bio page is saying it’s about this guy. That way someone with a Google profile just can’t claim someone else’s work and someone on a particular site can’t say “Hey this was written by this really popular author”. That in turn will show up like this Robert Scoble’s one when you do a search. If I type Robert Scoble into Google you will see that this article here, this site here or this page here is by Robert Scoble. This is what they’re calling Authorship Markup so when an author who has authorship markup implemented on the articles that they write they will show up in the Google search results with their little photo and a link to their Google profile. Both of these things are important like this share thing here that we’re seeing and authorship here. The shares will appear when anyone’s logged into Google. This is something as a business that you don’t have a lot of control over, who shares your content. All you can do is create great content and hope that people are going to share it. Authorship you do have control of and this will appear to everyone regardless of whether you are logged into a Google account or not. So it’s independent of someone’s network, it’s purely about an individual who wrote that article.
Whilst the primary reason for Authorship, Google is saying, is attribution, both of these things are about click through rates. Google’s always trying to improve it’s product and they’re trying to increase the click through rates. In fact in Google webmaster tools these days we actually have a whole section now of +1 metrics to show you how it’s increasing click through rates and the effect on the search results. And yes, these shares and +1 and things will probably at some level be a signal to get a page up in the rankings. But why I think authorship long term is going to be more important is that if someone’s out there sharing content, if people are out there sharing content of a particular page, the author of that content is also going to get some kudos as well as the page itself, the URL itself. So, if a particular author’s content is always getting placed with +1 and it’s always getting shared on Google, that’s got to say something about that authors content. So the next time that author publishes it’s already going to carry a fair bit of weight regardless of where they publish. Of course if they publish in a more reputable publication, even better. In fact, I think a lot of publications, although they seek out bloggers, popular bloggers and authors already for their following, another part in the future is going to be about if you’re using this code down here and you’re using a reputable author. It’s going to give that page much more authority rather than just the followers who might backlink to it. So, it’s really important for a business these days if you’re creating content, and you should be, to have this authorship set-up for the long term and start getting used to that idea. It hasn’t been rolled out fully yet, I haven’t seen any in the .com.au space but certainly some of the major digiteratie like scobleizer and Pete Cashmore and the others you will already see a lot of their content start to appear with their photograph next to it to say this article is by this particular person. But just remember everyone sees the authorship results and who did it to increase click through rate and only people that are logged in will see this content from their network. It looks like certainly in my own streams, that Google+ and the +1’s are far more dominant than the twitter shares. I’ve got about 8,000 followers on twitter and I follow about 7,500 and on Google+ I’ve only got a couple of hundred but I’m seeing the results for Google+ come up a lot more than twitter. I think it’s also the transient nature of twitter that the Google bot maybe isn’t going back longer term and indexing things older than 30 days.

That’s it for todays show. Don’t forget webinar with Smartcompany.com.au next week, just head across to smartcompany and you will find that just google SEO Social Media and smartcompany and you will find that. We’ll see you next week if not Tuesday, we’ll catch up next Wednesday. Thank’s very much/ Bye.

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