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.

In keeping with my habit of keeping you all updated regarding Google’s algorithm changes, I wanted to mention a few updates that took place as recently as over the weekend.

The main gist of the updates seemed to be that freshness remains important, and the aim of achieving more recency and relevance in the search results.

Of the freshness tweak, Google said:

We made several adjustments to the freshness algorithm that we released in November. These are minor updates to make sure we continue to give you the freshest, most relevant results.

So not saying much then. Still, this does show that Google seems to have noticed that their freshness update back in November didn’t quite work as planned.

Users complained that the SERPs were displaying less relevant listings simply because they were more recent than the more relevant content, which might have been a little older. The problem was that the original content for any given issue is inherently going to be the oldest content for that issue, meaning that it isn’t likely to fare very well under Google’s freshness update.

Google did mention that they’ve improved the way in which they ascertain the age of a page, and they point to pages discussing recurring events as beneficiaries of this particular element of the update.

So hopefully this latest tweak will work to counter the problems associated with freshness, although evidently we’ll have to wait and see. Keep an eye on your campaigns as this tweak could lead to the resurgence of content you thought far too old to rank well again.

So what else do we have in this latest box of goodies?

Spellings

Well, Google seem to be particularly concerned about spelling right now, with several changes to the way Google’s autocomplete feature makes corrections for common and rarer misspelled terms.

Panda

They’ve also apparently integrated Panda and everything it stands for more firmly into the Google machine, meaning that, in theory, higher quality sites will be ranking more highly in the SERPs. I haven’t noticed any impacts either positively or negatively on my campaigns yet. I think it’s safe to say that if your sites were hit after the main Panda update and you haven’t rectified the problems yet it might be worth sorting, as it doesn’t look like Google are going to drop Panda any time soon.

Picture Perfect

This change relates to how images are ranked in image search. Apparently, if the landing page on which an image is displayed if off a high standard then the image is more likely to rank well. This means that it’s no longer practical to slap that soon to be viral image on a basic page – you’ll need good quality content accompanying it to rank better.

Realtime & News

The final noteworthy SEO related change is a supposed improvement to news article integration in the SERPs. Google have refined the way their algorithm decides which queries should return news results with a view to getting it right more often. This update is specifically significant as it comes at a time when relations between Google and Twitter is at an all time low – suggesting that re-integration of Twitter’s real time results into Google search isn’t likely for a while yet. It’s probably that Google is doing everything it can to improve the real time aspects of its SERPs in order to make up for this loss.

February 14th is just around the corner, and with this momentous day millions, in fact billions of us will be heading out to the shops to buy gifts for the special ones in our lives.

Although its origins are fairly unknown it’s a tradition that has grown across the world and with 1 billion cards sent annually it has become the 2nd most popular card selling holiday after Christmas.

As we all get loved up and think of ways in which we can show our true love you should consider ways to love your SEO campaign to keep it fresh and exciting.

Find Me

An age old tradition at Valentine’s Day is to leave your chosen card anonymous instead choosing to sign it with the simple words “From your Valentine”; this is perfect as a romantic gesture and will leave the object of your affection in wonder trying to work out who their secret admirer is.

Anonymity isn’t something you want in an SEO campaign; the main purpose of any campaign is to ensure that when your customers boost up a search engine your business is the first one to be delivered in the results.

If you want to be number 1, let’s be honest who wouldn’t, you need to be careful in your keyword selection. Think about what your customers will be trying to find and use places like Google Adwords or analytics to find out the highest search terms in your area.

Trust Me

Over the Valentine’s Day period there will be hordes of men heading into shops rushing to find that perfect present; do you trust that your partner won’t bring back a bunch of flowers from the local petrol station? There’s a shocking statistic that says 53% of women will dump their partners on Valentine’s Day if they don’t buy them a present! And who says love is dead??

Trust is an important aspect in any relationship whether it’s with your loved one or with the customers of your business. With this in mind why not consider ways you can reach out and increase your brand image with some handy SEO techniques. Social signals such as Twitter and Facebook have become valuable tools for a campaign; not only will you benefit by getting your name out there it will also make your business more personal to your customers, therefore increasing the trust they have in your business.

Fax Me/Email Me/Page Me

The sugary treats Love Hearts made famous by the Swizzel company are a Valentine’s favourite for many because of the individual messages applied to each one, apparently you won’t find more than 3 repeats in each packet of 20, pretty impressive stuff. They strive to constantly add new messages to keep their sweets relevant to the world we are living in and with a few simple words they can create a long lasting personal message.

This is something you should take on board with your SEO campaign, keep an eye on the changing times and trends. Google often update their algorithms and so will rank websites differently according to various factors. You SEO consultant will have the knowledge to understand these changes so it’s worthwhile taking on board any advice or guidance they offer.

As Valentine’s Day approaches put some love back into your SEO campaign, with the help of a professional SEO company the success of your business is in your hands.

So I leave you with this poignant poem:

Roses are red, violets are blue, your SEO campaign begins and ends with you.

Ok, so your trusty SEO company has got you onto page 1 for your search phrase. Competitive or not, it’s an achievement that places you right in front of the eyes of people looking for your products and/or services and allows you to grab potential sales or leads from being visible in the right areas. But is Page 1 really considered a success?

For some campaigns, it definitely is a major achievement to get a competitive keyword onto page 1 – I have a few! But the campaign really doesn’t stop there.

Research from a study by Optify recently shows that almost 60% of people click on positions 1-3. Position 4 only sees 7.9% of clicks while position 10 gets a measly 2.2%. Positions 1 really is the place to be with 36.4% of all clicks.

With this information we know that to get the most of being on page one you really have push hard to be to be in position 1-3, although there are other attributes that may skew this information. Things such as video and image listings, or non-blended and blended places results.

It’s also worth noting that positions 1 on page 2 actually gets more clicks that the bottom of page 2.

The information was taken in December 2010 and based on the US version of Google‘s search results pages, analysing 250 randomly selected sites for keyword visits to sites within the B2C and B2B.

Optify noted that ranking beyond the top 20 results (2 pages) has almost no business value and concluded that that you won’t see “huge benefits until you get to the top few positions”.

From our perspective it shows that there are two distinct goals, particularly for bigger campaigns; one to get the site onto page 1 and another to work our way up page 1 to get to position 1-3. Do they have different strategies? Potentially.

It’s something that needs more thought and analysis but clearly there are two different – and easily measurable – goals and, although the overall goal is very similar, allows us to set smaller goals within this that can be tackled individually.

After all, if you’re consistently taking small baby steps one day you’ll look back and see that you’ve not just pottered forwards but you’ve actually taken a giant leap towards achieving a much larger goal!

If you’ve been involved in the SEO industry for very long at all, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of the importance of robots.txt files in certain circumstances.
Robots.txt files can be very useful in determining how your site is viewed by Google and the other search engines out there. Not only can you forbid the search engines from seeing (and therefore indexing) your site at all; you can also hide specific pages from their view.

For bigger sites, such as ecommerce platforms with hundreds and hundreds of pages, this can mean configuring quite a sizeable robots.txt file. And this is exactly where the problem can occur. Via his Google + page, Googler John Mueller recently reminded SEOs that, ideally, robot.txt files should be no larger than 500kb in size.

According to JM, Google’s web spider, or Googlebot for short will only read the first 500kb of any robots file. This means that if you have important information in your file, but it’s larger than 500kb then you could be leading Google to disregard said information. This could lead to serious problems and could even mean that your robots.txt file doesn’t succeed in performing the task that you originally configured it for – potentially causing big problems with your SEO campaign.

More than this, an unnecessarily large robots file could be exactly that; unnecessary and could suggest that the entire build and coding of your site might need a rethink. With Google and SEO in mind, remember to check your robots file after any work is done on the site, and remember that the simpler your site is to navigate, the better chance Googlebot has of doing so successfully.