I think sometimes it’s nice to be able to have something technical explained in non-technical terms, so that those people that are not so technically minded can start to understand the technical thing that is being explained… in a less technical way.

It almost always helps and I recently saw a difference in how I approach a situation compared to how somebody else would. Someone that had a completely different mindset and technical background – my Dad. Let me explain.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a new car. Nothing new – in fact it’s just as old as the car that’s about to fail its MOT for the very last time, but it’s well looked after. It’s a retro little thing that I can’t wait to get onto the road at the end of this month and is perfect for the summer… if it actually happens this year, that is!

Anyway, my Dad came with me to see the car and take it for a drive as he knows cars much better than I do and he looks for things that I wouldn’t even think of checking. It was interesting – he checked everything… meticulously.

We put it through tests – speed bumps at 30mph, emergency stops, checking the soft roof didn’t leak, checking the modifications to see if we could work out the kind of driver that owned it previously. We even narrowed it down to ‘young’ and ‘female’. This kind of analysis was new to me when it came to buying a used car and was really interesting – enlightening, even.

It reminded me a lot of how I objectively look at sites that come into our department and the ones we look after every day to make sure they are going to perform as best as they can, which I know is very different to how a designer would look at a website and again very different to how a typical surfer would look at the same site.

It’s not a case of getting a website designed and hoping for the best (which I knew), just as you don’t buy a car and hope for the best (which I now know). It needs going over with a fine-toothed comb.

You check everything to make sure there are no small problems that could become major, expensive issues later down the line when you’ve sold your old car and don’t have anything else as a backup – or when your site goes live and you’re depending on it to bring in regular income so you’re not paying out of your own pocket while the site gains momentum and starts making a return.

You want both to work the best they possibly can so you get the most out of it with as few problems as possible. You want something that just ‘works’.

I consistently run sites through a myriad of different standards, checks and tools to ensure everything is as well-tuned and streamlined as possible to keep Google happy along with the visitors that it sends. Speed tests, diagnostics, effectiveness tests, trying different configurations… the list goes on.

I also always make small tweaks to the site itself to make sure it works as best as it can, whether it’s to aid the optimisation itself, to improve the load speed, to help a site convert better or tailor it to suit the audience they want to attract, just as a mechanic would set tappets and fine-tune the engine to perform work how they want it to perform – it’s best.

There are a lot of similarities… I could go on but I can imagine it getting pretty tedious. I think it’s nice to have a real-world example of something that relates to what we do that a less technical person can start to understand what we do and why we do it and what it compares to.

I know that through running such comprehensive tests and making ongoing tweaks to streamline a site and rule out as many potential problems as possible through meticulous analysis it will work well in the search engines and be great for visitors. As for the car… let’s just see how it goes once I get it on the road in March.

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video tutorial, over the past two weeks we have covered the initial setup of Google places and the optimisation of the listing to improve the impressions for your business.

This week we will explain the analysis of your Google Places listings and the information displayed, we will then show how you can adjust your business’ information to improve the relation of the queries that your business appears for.

To see the analytics, click your business’ name. You are then shown the ‘dashboard’.

The first piece of information shows the date range, you can adjust this accordingly. By default it is set to 30 days or a month.

Next you have the ‘Activity’. This separated into Impressions and actions.

Impressions denote the amount of times your listing has appeared from a user query.

Actions then illustrates the amount of clicks from a user, so you can easily work of the CTR (Click through rate) by dividing impressions / actions.

Actions is also broken down further into ‘clicks for more info’ and ‘clicks to your website’.

(Show image) You can see the two options on an impression. The company name clicks through to the ‘website’ or the ‘more’ button displays the business’ Google places profile page.

Lastly the ‘top search queries’ show what keyword queries your listing is appearing for.

Looking at the ‘top search queries’ will allow you to decide whether what your current listing appears for is related to your business and your main services.

If you want to alter the ‘top search queries’ that your listing appears for, you can edit your business information on the right hand side. You should look to change the description, categories or areas of businesses to suit your business’ main services.

Thanks for watching if you have any additional information that can help optimise Google Places, please leave a comment on the supporting blog post.

Script:

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, The news this week is that Google are threatening to stop censoring its search results in the Chinese Google and possibly stop trading all together. This is partly due to a recent attack on Google mail users, a colleague of mine has recently written an article discussing this further so check that out on the Creare blog.

We thought this week we would take look at the SEO friendly plug-ins currently available for Firefox.

SEO For Firefox - This tool provided by the SEOBook.com is one of the most popular tools available, providing the user with a wide range of information from identifying that a link is follow or no-follow to analysis within search result itself. You can see the in the example, information is shown in the search result. Some popular statistics are Alexa rank, Dmoz listing, Cached date, Twitter, Yahoo Position and various social bookmarks.

Joost de valk - We have mentioned this tool in a previous video blog, the tool essentially details information about backward links and works as an ‘add on’ for Yahoo Site Explorer and Google’s Webmaster Tools. As you can see in the example the anchored text appears along with the Page Rank. The text is colour coded to represent if the link if ‘follow’, ‘nofollow’ or is displayed red if the link isn’t found on the web page shown.

Google Toolbar - This provides you with various tools, the ones that we use on a regular basis are Google page rank and the Highlight feature, the highlight feature highlights the search terms found with in the current web page, from the last Google query. We can see both of these features being used in the example video.

SEopen - An excellent tool that allows an user to quickly find information out about a specific web page. The main features include Yahoo! backlinks, Indexed pages, Google backlinks, cached dates, Pagerank check, Alexa overview and many more.

We have linked to all the Firefox plug-ins on the supporting blog post.

• SEO for Firefox
• SEOpen
• Google Toolbar
• Joost De Valk

Thanks for watching, if you have any questions of comments please leave them on the Youtube channel or blog.

Script:

This week were going to take a look at the free link analysis software called ‘SEO spyglass’. You can download the free tool from http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/.

Once installed and you start a new project you get a choice of 2 options:

1.) Enter a keyword you wish to rank well for.

2.) Enter a competitors URL to analysis.

We will start with the first option, when choosing a keyword, SEO spyglass automatically chooses the website that ranks first in your specified search query.

The second options provides you list of information about your own or your competitors backward links.

Unfortunately on the free version it only uses Google.com and not .co.uk, with backward links from Yahoo!. Once the software has found the first 1000 links of your chosen site it then prompts you to further analyise the links, click yes to this option and we will see the following.

Along the top of the screen you can see all the variables of the backward links:

The main one to look out for are:

• Anchored Text
• Page Rank
• External Links
• Total Links
• Link Value - This is determined by an algorithm built within SEO spyglass.

A few others you might recognise are:

• Dmoz Listings
• Alexa Rank

You can also perform multiple analysis against a few different competitors, have a play and see if you can put any of the tools to good use.

Please leave any comments or questions on the Youtube channel or Blog.