• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.icrossing.co.uk/file1.html
• http://www.icrossing.co.uk/file2.html
• http://example.com/another_file.html
• http://www.acompletelydifferentdomain.com/

You might find yourself in a position where want to take this list and reduce it to just the domain portions like this:

• example.com
• icrossing.co.uk
• icrossing.co.uk
• example.com
• acompletelydifferentdomain.com

It’s possible to use an Excel formula to do this. Here’s one I found by searching:

=IF(LEFT(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1),4)=”www.”,MID(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1),5,256),LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1))

This is fine, but as you can see the formula is rather long and combining this with any further functions would be a real headache. To try to solve this, I wrote an add-In for Excel that adds a handy function to perform this step (along with a few others).

Download the URL Tools Excel Add-in Here

To use the Add-in, you’ll need to save it somewhere on your computer (we use ‘C:\Program Files\URL Tools\’ by convention, which helps when sharing workbooks) and install the add-in via the Excel Options menu as follows:

1. Click on the Office Button in Excel

2. Select ‘Excel Options’ from the bottom of the menu

3. Select ‘Add-Ins’ from the left hand menu in the resulting dialog box

4. Click ‘Go’ where it says ‘Manage Excel Add-ins’

5. Click ‘Browse’ and browse to wherever you saved the Add-in file

6 Click ‘OK‘ in the appropriate places to return to Excel

Hopefully, you will now have the Add-in installed. To test this, do the following: Put a URL in cell A1. Any URL, but try something long like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_edmonds. Then, in cell A2 type ‘=wwwsubdomain(A1)’. All being well, this formula should return ‘en.wikipedia.org’. If so, celebrate, otherwise go back and check the installation steps again.

There are a number of other functions included in the Add-in that I will summarise below. There are a couple of options for handling the domain extraction outlined above, but they are subtly different. If in doubt, you probably just want to use ‘=wwwsubdomain’.

• subdomain() – returns the domain part of a URL including any subdomains e.g ‘http://www.example.com/index.htm’ becomes ‘www.example.com’
• nowww() – removes ‘www.’ from the start of a URL (note that www must be at the very beginning of the URL)
• wwwsubdomain() – basically, a combination of the above, equivalent to ‘nowww(subdomain(A1))’. This is what you want to use most of the time!
• urlencode() – Encodes a URL string (try it on a string like ‘Hello World!’)
• urldecode() – Un-encodes a URL string (try it on a string like ‘Hello%20World%21’)
• tld() – Returns the TLD of a URL (not 100% perfect but pretty good)
• geturl() – Extracts the URL from a Hyperlink

I hope you find this useful. It’s very much a work in progress so please let me have your feedback or questions in the comments section below.

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URL Tools Add-In for Excel

I always thought location was the only factor deciding the ranking of the map listing; the better optimised the map is to the location keyword, the higher are its chances to rank on top. However, according to the latest edition of David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors, there are more points to take into consideration. The most positive ones are summarised below:-

1. Claiming places page/local listing
2. Associating Google Place page with proper categories
3. Use of product or service keyword in title and description of local listing
4. Use of product or service keyword in description of local listing
5. Using local area codes or numbers
6. KML File and Geo-Sitemap (the Geo-Sitemap/KML protocol is a standard enabling to identify the physical location of the business in a standard file format.)
7. hCard Microformat (standardized protocol for displaying contact information. Google and Yahoo have both announced their support for this format.)
8. Customer Reviews (although they were once considered an important aspect, this factor is now largely supposed to be diluted, as per the recent ranking research)

More local submissions:

Apart from the above mentioned, submitting to as many local search engines or directories as you can will add more value to the listing as it builds trust for Google. It is also recommended that you submit the website to local search engines such as Yahoo!Local, CitySearch, Yell or SuperPages. Google has a Local Business Center, as well as data providers such as InfoUSA, which are just as helpful in pulling up the site rankings locally.

Spying competitors:

It is good practice to keep an eye on who is appearing on top in the listings and look into which directories they have submitted and what tactics they are using to inform future programmes of work.

Things to avoid:

Among the factors that can have negative impact are using 800# or multiple phone numbers across listings, using non-local area code, listing PO Box on a website without a physical address, multiple listings with same phone number and/or address, over-loading geo-targeted keywords into non-related categories or fields and a high percentage of bad reviews.

The Future:

Inclusion of local search in universal listings must have massively uplifted the number of local searches conducted recently.

Also, with Twitter joining the race and introducing Twitter Places (which lets you tag tweets with specific places as well as creating new Twitter Places), the local search is undergoing a major shift. People might rely more on a Twitter Place page for the most updated snapshot of a local business (complete with the latest tweets), rather than a Google Place Page — many of which often show reviews that are months or years old.

Google has been trying to integrate its business and maps data with real-time context via Google Buzz on Maps, but after its poorly executed launch, Buzz has fundamentally failed to capture people’s interest. Google must now try even harder to innovate if it is to prevent the inception of a Twitter-dominated local search landscape.

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Ranking higher in Local Search Results

Caffeine is “a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online”. What does this mean at this stage? Well exactly what it says on the tin: Caffeine is in it’s infancy but has been built with the future of ever increasing content creation in mind.

Google also announced the ‘may day update’ (around May time surprisingly) which is an algorithmic change to place more focus on long tail searches. Long tail focus is a win for online content because Google will now put relevance on deeper content with less focus on domain authority and greater focus on tail terms and deep links. Going on the Pareto principle 80-20 theory of the long tail then we are looking at an algorithmic shift in the worlds biggest search engine that actually favours the non-hits (or at least is trying harder to find them).

A quote from Matt Cutts in this video:

“…we’re trying to assess the quality of sites that match up to long-tailed queries…”

Assessing the quality – of course Google will continue to tweak this algorithm change to perform as smoothly as possible. Combine this with Caffeine (“an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online” – remember) and you have Google indexing pages, faster and in higher quantity with additional focus on the 80% of that 80-20 split getting users to deeper product pages and quality content faster.

If you’re into rotoscoping and close ups of Matt Cutts (or if you just want to learn the nuts and bolts of how Google finds what you’re looking for) then this is a neat little video.

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The importance of great content

It feels like we are getting closer and closer to the point where we will be able to use the same metrics across search as a whole, and the points here are where I think that Paid Search methods can now be applied to Natural Search campaigns.

…..and I want to go beyond simply reporting the ROI or CPA of Natural Search campaign because, although it generally makes you look very good compared to Paid Search, I don’t need to explain how to do that (hopefully).

What you should already be doing

Focusing on Revenue

Any PPC campaign is always going to boil down to how much it is costing to drive a sale, or how much money is being made for every pound that is being spent. Taking this mindset into how you target terms (for instance) in your SEO work is going to drive you the right kind of results.

Splitting Brand vs Non-brand

Brand traffic is arguably navigational in the most part, and non-brand traffic is arguably the valuable new customers that you are trying to acquire. This applies to all of search.

Just like you would in PPC, you should be looking at these SEO visitors very differently. Jumps in brand traffic could be an indicator of offline marketing successes, whereas jumps in non-brand traffic are going to be all about your performance for your core terms.

It’s tempting to say “you can’t really take any credit for brand traffic in SEO, because you will always be #1”, but that isn’t always true. If you are a new company or brand, brand visibility and traffic might be valuable KPIs when you begin SEO activity. In addition to this, if your brand has a generic name like “eggs.co.uk”, you need to be addressing the benefits or disadvantages this may be bringing you.

CTR Testing

The Google Webmaster Tools now gives you CTR data. There is no excuse for not testing the titles and meta descriptions for your key landing pages now. It’s not as quick or easy as it is in PPC, but you can get a good idea of the sort of things you should be including. If you have invested time and money into achieving a good ranking for a competitive term, it seems logical to optimise the result you are showing – a no-brainer in my opinion.

Forecasting

Not the easiest of tasks for a Natural Search campaign, but if you are hoping for significant investment from any part of any business, the chances are that they are going to request some sort of forecast. Paid Search teams have been providing forecasts split by product areas, including seasonality, for a long time, and there is enough data at your fingertips to be able to do this for an SEO campaign.

What you might need to start doing soon

It is not uncommon for metrics such as “contributing clicks” to be measured in Paid Search campaigns, where non-brand clicks earlier in the conversion path that end on a branded click are given some value. Nor is it uncommon to measure the uplift in branded searches during a period of good visibility for high search volume non-branded terms. These are the kind of metrics SEO people should prepare to have to report on.

More and more money is going into search marketing, and there is more and more scrutiny over how that money is being used, as the people who control those budgets become more and more savvy. The people running SEO campaigns now need to provide better forecasts, thoroughly explain their activities, and show the true value of the work that is being carried out. There are a number of lessons we, as SEOs, can learn from our friends in PPC.

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Applying PPC Methods to SEO

What it is: The option of establishing a secure https connection when searching google.com

How to use it: Visit https://www.google.com (Attention to the extra “s”) and search as usual.

What it is SSL: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that provides secure communications on the Internet for things liike web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging & other data transfers.

Advantage: Added security for your users. It helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.

Effect: Potentially a slightly slower service due to the additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server.

Other: Not all products are available with a SSL so there will not be the usual links to other products like Maps & Images.

When to use it: When not on a non-secure Internet connection, such as a public wireless or non-encrypted network.

Post from: Connect

Securely Search

The last eighteen months saw some of the most significant changes to the way Google produces its natural search listings. While Google updates its ranking algorithm almost on a daily basis, inclusion of entirely new signals are rare.

Since the launch of Google in 1998, back link analysis determined the credibility and relevance of a webpage. This worked well in 96 but by 2007, the very thing that helped Google dominate was also becoming its Achilles heel. As the SEO industry battled for the first page, links were getting far too noisy to provide the signal of quality they once represented.

The introduction of user data

In 2009 we saw the introduction of user data in the form of the Vince Update. It was characterised by  the dominance of brands across highly competitive search real-estate, even when they were not specifically optimised in the traditional sense.

While the SEO community complained Google was favouring brands – our research into Vince showed a strong correlation between  user data and better semantics. The sites doing well had a lot in common – they were all highly searched-for in their category and they were also synonymous with their core category keywords on the web.  For example, many people search for ‘British Airways’ following a query for ‘flights’, and the words ‘British Airways’ and ‘flights’ also appeared on the same pages a lot. As a result of this, Google has judged that ranking BA high for a search on ‘flights’ will provide a better user experience, regardless of whether the word appears on its site.

Personalised search

In December 2009, Personalised search was made default for every browser with cookies enabled, bringing an end to the universally-shared search experience. For queries with several meanings, Google attempts to return results based on ‘your’ historical context. When you search for BMI, do you mean the airline or the body mass index? If Google knows you like Amazon, then it will boost Amazon in future results.

For brands, building a search and web history with your customers and potential new customers becomes more important than just being visible to everyone. Failing to provide an engaging experience could also mean being less visible to a user in future results. If you have a loyal user-base it’s now harder for competitors to enter your search space. Of course, it’s also harder for you to enter theirs.

Social search

In January this year, Google’s social search moved from labs to beta on Google.com. For certain queries, content from your social circle –  those publically declared by you through Gmail and many of the popular social networks – are included in your results. So, if I search for ‘broadband’, and someone in my social graph is complaining about their provider, I’ll see that in my result. While Social search will  expose customer dissatisfaction, being talked about positively by a user’s peer group is about as good as advocacy getsis .

Real-time search

As it attempted to make the most of social signals in its search results, Google had an additional concern – the increasing popularity of real-time status data provided by Facebook and Twitter. For topical events, people were opting for real-time engines for discussion and discovery. In the short term, Google’s only option was to follow Bing and, for highly trending topics, simply include Twitter data directly into results. To me the integration looks poor and rarely useful in its current format. I suspect that this is a moving target, and things will continue to evolve as Google collects more data. For brand that are being talked about, having a presence on and the ability to respond through real-time engines will become an integral part of digital communications.

So, in a very short timeframe SEO moved from a purely technical discipline that could almost operate independently to other marketing and communication to one where success is intrinsically linked to what a brand is achieving elsewhere online. The key to this is taking a holistic, user-centric view of the marketing mix – considering user journeys across different marketing budgets, and taking a more integrated planning approach to your search, social and creative initiatives. This doesn’t mean that traditional SEO is now unimportant. Your site still needs to be accessible and relevant. But now, if you are to do well in search your brand also needs to be searched for, talked about and liked by users.

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The Evolution of Search

Most recently is the launch of Google Places to replace Google Local Business Listing on Tuesday of this week.

So what’s new in Google Places:

• Service areas: Businesses that travel to their customers can now specify which geographic areas they serve and be eligible to show in search results for queries in those areas. Also, if a business doesn’t have a physical street address, its address can remain private.
• Tags: For a flat fee of $25/month, businesses can enhance their listings with a yellow Maps icon that displays a customizable line of text describing any aspect of the business.
• Business photo shoots: Businesses can already upload photos of their locations to their Google Place page. Now Google is offering to do a free interior photo shoot of the business as well.
• QR codes: From its Place page dashboard, a U.S. business can now download a QR code, that if scanned by a user’s capable smartphone, will direct that user to the mobile version of that business’s Place page.
• Favorite Places: Google plans to mail window decals with QR codes to 50,000 businesses around the U.S. to use in advertising at their locations.

Below is some handy advice from Eric Sidone (@esidone) our Natural Search Strategist in the Phoneix Office of iCrossing.

Reason’s to Hang Your Google Marker

1. Engage Your Audience Offline: Internet users are accustomed to using search engines to find information. This need for information is localized with mobile searches on the fly, and now QR codes offer another touch point for brands and consumers.
2. Be a Market Leader (beat your competitor into the QR Code game): Silver Surfers are on Facebook, and new technology is becoming less foreign to broader segments at a faster rate of time. If a map marker fits within your brand standards, then embracing QR Codes can resonate with your audience which will position you to be top-of-mind as local search evolves.
3. Promote a Sale with Coupons: Coupons can be tied to your GLBC account. Putting an offer in the hands of the consumer at the point when they are looking at your physical location is a huge opportunity to drive sales.
4. Capture Valuable Feedback: We see twitter and other networking sites become a channel for complaints and accolades for consumers. Now, feedback from consumers is one “click of the camera” away, and can provide almost up to the minute consumer data in a nearly face-to-face environment.
5. Enhance each Google Channel to Improve Overall Conversions: Industry data shows the benefits of running paid and natural campaigns together. Combining local and mobile into that data set only reinforces the value of optimizing your business in Google Local.

You can read the full post Five Reasons to Display a Google Places QR Code here.

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5 Reasons to use Google Places

Google aims to give a great user experience by delivering users information more quickly and webmasters now play a role with responsibility to contribute towards this by developing sites with good performance. By prioritising sites which can deliver their content quickly whilst also being relevant, Google steps again in the direction in achieving their goal.

This new ranking factor is still one in hundreds, effecting a nominal amount of search queries and is still marginal in comparison to ‘relevancy’, so don’t down tools and change strategies. It is recommended to continue focusing on relevancy and providing valuable accessible content, but do not neglect looking at site performance speed to fine tune your rankings.

There are a number of free tools to use to diagnose your site performance issues and amongst those is ‘Site Performance’, an experimental Google labs feature which can be accessed through Google’s Webmaster Tools. From here you can find out latency information about your site and find some recommendations on how to make improvements.

If not for your rankings alone, it is worth considering page load performance for onsite usability to increase your conversion rate!

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Speed up to keep up with Google’s new ranking factor

I’ve now updated it so it works on all Google regional engines, as well as Yahoo and Bing including all their regional engines.

It also now has another feature which I thought would be quite helpful; one-click switching of the number of displayed results.

Links are placed at the top of Google and Yahoo, which link through to SERPS of different result sizes for the same search term. This utilises parameters in the search engines URL, and will not change your default setting.

You can install the extension by clicking here in Chrome, and extensions homepage can be found here.

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Our Google Chrome extension v2 – Numbered search results

When creating a video or TV ad, reference your web site – and not just with the URL but also with “Search for …”. Not only with this aid in the viewer of the video remembering more easily how to navigate to your site, or even a specific web page, but also it can help influence viewers personalised searches within Google.

Through understanding Social Media platforms and understanding the networks your target audience live in you can seed these videos effectively for maximum exposure.

With personalised search now by default within Google, brands need to think how they can maximise on their audiences search history. Instead of suggesting at the end of the video or TV ad to search for just the brand name, consider incorporating non-brand terms into the call to action as well, i.e. “Search for brand product/service“. This can then build you brands relation to these non-brand terms and influence your rankings for these terms as well.

Of course this has huge potential if the videos created are useful, engaging, easy to share and of course have that ‘je ne sais quoi’ element that makes videos go viral.

Photo credit: CC Flickr user dan_taylor

But be aware, if executed poorly like the Orange ‘I am’ campaign you open yourself up to a lot of criticism. Orange promoted “I am” through their commercials & billboards, initially it  was a fail (it still is.. they rank #3 currently) as their site wasn’t ranking for the keyword in Google natural search and industry experts criticised them for their poor implementation.

2) Network Analysis & Link Equity

Through performing a Network Analysis Audit of the Web it is possible to identify where your target audience have their own sites, or where there are communities that are having conversations around your brand, products or topics related to your brand. This analysis allows you to narrow down the vastness of the Internet and ensure your strategy and efforts are as focused as possible.

Not only will this audit and analysis identify ways to engage with your target audience through the means of Social Media but it will also identify opportunities to develop relationships with topically relevant sites. These relationships can lead to your brand creating useful content that can be hosted on these sites, which can have relevant links incorporated where necessary resulting in targeted, optimised links from topically relevant sites.

3) Brand Advocates & Social Search

By understanding your target audience and being active within the communities that they live in you can extend your reach beyond your brands immediate “friends/fans”. This is through looking for opportunities to be visibility to the friends of your brands friends.

As Google’s Social Search becomes more ingrained into everyday SERPs your brand can start to become visible for core, competitive terms through Social Circle listings – even if you haven’t gained a Web listing yet.

Through building your online reputation and influence your brand’s own community will grow and from this it’s extended community will increase massively.

4) Conversation & Link Worthy Content

Link Worthy Content is any content that is created where one of its main purposes is the gaining of natural links. Blogs, forums, news sites and many other sites will frequently link to content that is useful or interesting to their users. Creating content that site owners will willingly link to is difficult, but highly rewarding. This can be content such as infographics, unique vouchers, guides, reviews, exclusive content, etc.

There are various Social Media platforms that are great for developing awareness of new, useful content. These are platforms such as twitter, facebook, Digg and Reddit as well as blogs and forums of brand advocates that have been identified through your Network Analysis Audit. As this awareness increases and traffic is driven to your site people will start to link to your content if it is useful or interesting.

5) Social Profile & Localisation

Localised listing hasn’t really been developed into Social Media platforms but is incorporated in search results for destination related searches. However it is only a matter of time before this cross-over happens.

For example if someone tweets that they are going away for a weekend to London then they can then be shown a list of bars, restaurants and shops with exclusive offers that are on during that approximate time period. All of this pulling in maps and local business listings – whether this is on their laptop or desktop or even via their mobile phone.

As a brand you need to ensure, where applicable, that you own your local listings – even if at the moment this is only through getting all your branches listed in Google Local Business for both Paid and Natural Search.

6) The Platform & The Tail of Search

Now creating a blog or forum may not be appropriate for all brands. Some brands may find the best way to engage with their audience is through other people’s forums or platforms such as twitter and facebook. But if it is right for your brand then it is imperative that SEO is built into this platform and that it is accessible to search engine spiders to ensure the possibility of visibility within search engines.

If your platform is accessible it allows you to mine the tail of search for your products and services. Allowing you brand to gain visibility for niche terms and related terms that may not have a place on your main site. This platform will allow you to build on your customer service as the community you build asks and answers questions about your products and service or related topics. But don’t forget if you do decide to build a platform with the aim of building a community, you do need to give your audience a reason to visit, engage and come back – otherwise you may end up with a ghost town!

7) Topic of conversation & search behaviour

Through monitoring trending topics with tools such as Google Insights and understanding your target audience’s search behaviour you can develop an understanding of their needs. This can help inform the types of conversations you have or engage in around your brand, products and services or related topics.

Now these are some ideas that could be used for your brand, and this is by no means everything, for example I haven’t mentioned the recent incorporation of live twitter results into SERPs and the Google’s convergence of Search and Social. However it is not about rushing in and trying everything, or even any of these ideas. That could even have a negative impact on your brand and its growth online. It’s about the research and the execution of the strategy that will allow your brand to flourish through the means of Search and Social Media.

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7 Search & Social Synergies