The launch of Google Chrome Extensions has now meant I have now finally been able to leave the sluggish Mozilla Firefox behind and speed my working life up with Google Chrome, yippee!

Switching to Chrome isn’t without its bad points. There are still certain functions that you may need Firefox for, but I’m now able to do the majority of my day to day SEO work in Chrome, here are the essential extensions and plug-ins required to get the best out of Chrome for SEO.

• SEO Status – Fast and Lightweight Alexa rank and PageRank retrieval.
• Proxy Switchy - Manage and switch between multiple proxy profiles quickly and easily.
• Webpage Screenshot – Great for making those all important on page recommendations.
• SEO Site Tools – Get link data from Google, Yahoo, Bing and SEMoz, highlights nofollow’d links plus loads more useful SEO type website analysis.
• Chrome SEO – In a similar vain to SEO Site Tools it gives some of the same data plus a few extras that make it a worthy addition to your toolbar, all displayed neatly in one click.
• Google Similar pages – One click displays the top few results for a Google [related:] search, always handy for discovering new sites.
• Site search – If you want to search the current domain you are on, this bookmarklet will perform the site:domain.com with a click of the button, just add the following to your bookmarks: javascript:d=document.domain;x=prompt(’Google%20search%20′+d+’%20for:’,”);if(x){location.href=(’http://www.google.com/search?as_q=’+x+’&as_sitesearch=’+d);}void(0);
• Google Chrome Developer Tools – Part of Chrome as standard is the Chrome Developer Tools, it requires no plug-in and is a great way to delve deep into the code of a website.  Easy to get started, simply open a web page, in Google Chrome then:
  1. Select the Page menu at the top-right of your browser window, then select Developer -> Developer Tools or Control-Shift-J keys in Windows and Linux.
  2. You can also right-click on any page element and select Inspect element to get inspect specific parts of a site,
• Import Data from another Browser - If you’re worried about losing all your saved passwords history and bookmarks, fear not, simply click the options button then the “import data from another browser” and your done.

What’s missing?

• Web Developer Tools – Despite the CHrome Developer Tools one of the areas that Chrome falls short of Firefox is the lack of a decent web developer extension. Both Web Developer Tools and Pendule do the basics but lack important features such as the ability to disable JavaScript or cookies, Pendule has a far better UI but less functionality, hopefully in time they will develop a better UI and offer the same experience as the Firefox plug-in. In mean time to disable JavaScript or Cookies in Chrome:
  1. Go into the Chrome “options”
  2. Select the “Under the Bonnet” tab
  3. Click the “Content Settings” button
  4. Then either select the “JavaScript” or “Cookies” tab and then click disable each time.
  5. You can re-enable by clicking the cookie or JavaScript file icons next to the address bar.
• User agent switcher – If you want to view a website as googlebot or a different browser you’ll have to pass the user agent string in the command line at the moment, I’m sure a simply user agent switcher like the Firefox plug-in will be available soon.
• Live Http Header Response – So far I haven’t come across an extension that returns live results, but most can be achieved using the legendary Rex Swain HTTP Viewer.

Are there any other must have Chrome SEO Extensions or ones you’d like to see that I’ve missed out?

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Top 8 SEO Extensions for Google Chrome

London Fashion Weekend follows on straight from London Fashion Week, which is only open to people within the Fashion industry and is not only difficult but near impossible to acquire tickets to the fashion shows, with the likes of Bora Aksu, Erdem and Basso & Brooke showing their collections to name just a few.

This was not as exclusive an event as usual because of the use of digital for fashion designers. This was the first year that LFW designer catwalk shows were streamed live online, London being the first to do such a thing. Not all of the shows but a substantial amount and some of the best, which included Burberry Prorsum in 3D. I happened to catch a few of the shows, which all had a countdown to the start time and a little key on the right hand side of the page where it showed what time each show would start. But fashion being fashion they were mostly late.

The stream was actually very clear as you can see from the below screen shot taken from Burberry Prorsum.

Source: London Fashion Week TV

This was a real breakthrough for the British Fashion Council to be involved in creating the first ever live streaming, of course I am sure it didn’t go down to well with some of fashion’s elite who literally tore off a limb to get an invite for front row! And we get to see it with no limb tearing involved.

LFW over the past couple of seasons has been trying to become more digital by bringing in bloggers to give live updates on their blogs straight from the front row. Commissioning in some cases bloggers to come backstage and watch the whole experience and take photos from start to finish. It’s pretty impressive to be asked to get involved in that way, but it often comes with a price, for example some bloggers are being asked to document the designer’s collections but to only write what they ask them to write to make the designers collection a hit online, this is obviously a very clever way of building an online presence and if you get into the right fashion blogging community it won’t stop with just one blog talking about you either, which means more link’s back to your site and more of an online presence.

Twitter is fast becoming an important channel of communications for fashion, as it is in lots of other industries. People on the front row were complaining about lack of feeling in their thumbs after tweeting at such a fast pace about the next season’s trends to come.

The ever growing micro blogging service is also being used by designers to get ideas from followers, Stefano Gabbana of Dolce & Gabbana as an example tweeted he will “accept suggestions on Women’s collection…(just 2day)”. It seems using digital to find ideas for a fashion collection is a little farfetched but may have worked for some designers. Only if I had an idea for a Women’s wear collection I doubt I’d give it to someone to pass off as their own somehow.

In my opinion it is so important to know your trends if you’re working on a fashion client, not only so you can optimise well in advance, specifically targeting the key trends for each season -but so you can actually be seen as an expert in Fashion SEO.

The new season is showcased at London Fashion Week 6 months in advance, this means you have at least 4 months to crack on with your optimisation around the keywords you expect to start trending. You won’t only be ahead of the game, you will be at the top of it!

All photos are courtesy of Jo-ann Hodgson.

Post from: Connect

The Importance of Utilising Fashion Trends for Search

Google is evolving. Ever since Google has started unleashing new products (involving search) like One Box results, local business listings, universal search across all verticals; image results, real-time results, news results, video and many others, organic results are slipping to a lower position on the first page of search results. However, Maile was keen to mention that Google looks at SEO as a partnership.

Universal Search for a highly commercial keyword 'flowers'

A key part of SEO is to evolve with Google. This could include optimising local results on Google maps, including images and videos on the website or having a social media strategy, amongst others. Infact a very important blog post written way back in 2007 by Kevin Newcomb, Search Engine Watch, highlights this integrated aspect of SEO.

All this might seem like a lot to do, but Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph, is of the opinion that it is easier to wait and see how the audience (users) react to the new landscape on SERPs before implementing new strategies. It is afterall the users who have to evolve and adapt to the huge amount of information being made available to them in such varied and rapidly changing forms.

Each search result is likely to be relevant to the user query, thus improving user experience and it is important for agencies to measure impacts of the new landscape on CTR of PPC ads and organic results. Afterall, paid search has also come a long way from static ads to ‘The Rise of Universal Paid Search’.

My main point is this; It’s important to accept that the search engines we’re all so reliant upon will change and evolve at a rapid rate (look at the amount of major changes in search alone over the last decade). Google in particular has released a whole host of new features recently, in a bid to safeguard its market share from competition.  Some of these developments impact certain digital channels more than others. Ultimately, clients and their agencies need to have an integrated strategy so that the impact of search engine evolution is limited. Don’t place all your eggs (traffic) in one basket!

Post from: Connect

Evolving with Google

Down the left hand side you will see there are now options to filter the search results to have fewer or more shopping sites.

This filter alters what types of sites are listed and also how (and what) Universal results are positioned amongst the Web listing.

For example when you are researching into a product/holiday/etc you may want fewer shopping results and more informational sites and so you can filter to have fewer shopping sites such as:

You will also see that there are image results within the top half of the page - another way to further build your brand awareness until you achieve strong Web listings.

So when you filter to have more shopping sites you get results like:

You will notice that Google has placed its shopping results right at the top - if you don’t have a presence there and you are a transactional site you are missing out on some prime SERP real estate!

Also additional information is being pulled in such as price and product names/details. Google’s search results are now becoming a comparison shopping engine themselves. As you develop your product pages do consider micro formats and their integration into these pages to ensure your Web listing is as attractive as possible.

Other filters are Page Images which pull in even more images into the SERPs:

And Page Previews which pull in screen shots of the landing page and also a longer meta description:

Rich Search Results

This new SERP formatting should further enforce the need to make the most of all your image and video collateral as well as considering using product feeds with Google.

Also integrating micro formatting is now becoming even more key to provide enough information to attract that click-through from the results page.

Personalisation Information

This could have implications for sites listed on the first page of the standard search. As the user refines their searches and navigates through to sites, this user history will then inform their personalisation and so impact on the sites listed in the main results.

If there was ever a reason to build out the content on your site this is it. As a brand you want to present during both phases to be able to ensure maximum coverage and brand recognition.

Also if you are visibile for the research phase, and your content satisfies the users need for information, they may not even need to return back to a search engine to then find somewhere to make their purchase - they just return to your site and convert.

Potential PPC Developments

Interestingly the PPC sites that are displayed do not appear to change depending on the type of view the user has selected. Potentially this could be another development Google could add to this type of filtering, allowing you to change the landing page/creative - or even if your site is visible - depending on what types of sites the user is interested in.

Final Thoughts

In short ‘Content is still King’!

Google is providing their users with an uncluttered view of sites that will provide information to aid in the research and eventually purchase phase. If you are soley focussed on the transactional side of this process then you are missing out on engaging with your target audience at an earlier stage and so build brand awareness.

The importance of good content online is so important. There is some much content out there, but how much actually achieves what it is meant to do - is it content for contents sake or does it meet its specified needs.

As a brand you need to start:

• auditing your existing content - because if you don’t know what you have how can you plan what you need,
• analyse your findings to understand what you have, does it need further development or can it be optimised to gain visibilitiy within Universal results,
• and build a strategy to generate, develope and maintain useful content that satisfies your users needs as well as your business objectives.

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Research Phase vs Purchase Phase

The session was kicked off by looking at the top line statistics comparing PPC and SEO, PPC wins out right!:) PPC had a slightly higher conversion rate, average order value, value per visit and average time on site. Please note though these stats do not take into account if SEO was involved within the users click journey.

Image Credit: CC Flickr User kudumomo

Both methods have the negative points that each team brought up:

Click fraud is an issue in PPC.  Here Dave Naylor quips “that is the great thing about SEO - I don’t mind my friends and family clicking on my organic listings. I don’t even care about people doing click fraud on my organic listings”.  Another concern for PPC is with the market growing more competitive CPC prices are inflating especially around the finance sector. Could it ever reach the state where it is not cost effective?

The main risks pointed out for SEO were getting banned or penalised through black hat methods. Another is uncontrollable drop offs in rankings, which cannot always be explained and tracking revenue generated. It is easy to control paid ads positions and track the results generated. As Mead mentioned from a PPC perspective it is crazy to think of going into a client meeting and just talking about positions rather than the ROI generated!

It is thought that the PPC industry has already matured and is looks likely to stay static in the future whereas, SEO is a rapidly growing industry. It is in Google’s best interest to ensure that advertisers media spend does not decrease in the future. Recently they have brought out new products to help increase the activity on paid ads. These have included site links where it has been said that advertisers have seen up to a 50% increase in CTR%. The plus box is also being trialled pushing the organic search listings further down the page. It was discussed that there may come a time where page 1 is dominated by PPC and Google property listing and that natural search results will not be visible until page 2.  The panel agreed that it does appear to be heading this way and when it happens Google could lose their market share.

It is extremely hard to test PPC ‘vs’ SEO, and in order to get a true comparison it is essential to factor in SEO agency costs, time and manpower put into the results. Many professionals have looked into the effects of paid and natural traffic working together and there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer. Rumours have circulated that when switching off the paid ads the natural search picks up the traffic and as well as the other extreme. In my experience when PPC is turned off the uplift in Natural clicks and conversions does not make up the deficit.

It essential that companies embrace both paid and natural search and use them to their advantages. Look at your rankings together and optimise both. If natural results are strong try moving paid search budget to areas with weak SEO rankings. Utilise Paid ads for terms to assist promoting special offers or quickly getting marketing message out there as well as keywords with high buying intent and high rankings in SEO for the research stage. Crucially the synergy between the 2 must be tested.

The knowledge and intelligence of the 5 speakers at this session shone through and all in all I found it a quick witted and highly inspiring session.

Post from: Connect

Overview of the Ultimate Search Marketing Battle – PPC vs SEO

But I am here to tell you how Open Site Explorer and Microsoft Excel combined can help you when researching links against your competitors.

Let’s use the term “shoes”. First of all, let’s see how the top 10 compare in terms of external links. To do this, I will run all the URLs in Open Site Explorer.

And then filter all links to show only Followed links from external pages to this page.

And then export it to CSV. You will get a nice excel file with all the links (up to 10000, but not many pages will exceed that number) that linkscape think are relevant. Cool. Let’s do that 10 times, with all the URLs in the top 10.

So now that you have done this for the 10 URLs, your computer may look a bit crazy with all those 10 windows open. In one of the spreadsheets add a column named “Destination URL”. In that column you will have to include the URL that those links pertain to. Like this:

Do that for all the sites, and move all the data under one same spreadsheet. Add a filter in the header, order it by Page Authority. You can also add colour for each of the sites, this will make it easier to see things at first sight. At the end you will have something like this:

That looks interesting but let’s filter it so it only shows links with “shoes” in the anchor text.

That looks even more interesting. Here is where you should think how you can use this data. Here are a couple of ideas.

Do the links correlate to rankings?
Pivot tables are great. I don’t know much about them, but I really like them, I wish I knew more. You can create a pivot table to count how many links each site. I only took those links with page authority of 15 of greater, and I made a nice graph out of it:

Look at that! Magic. The first few positions seem to correlate to the links. Office is first, Faith second. It does seem to be not as accurate when the number of links are similar, Clarks is third in links, but sixth in rankings…

What have we learnt? Looking at the number of links can be good if you only want a general overview of the situation. It can give you guidelines, but not certainties. If I was any of the competitors I would imagine that having around 100 links with “shoes” in the anchor text would probably give me a spot on second or third position.

Where can I find new site that may want to link me?
I am glad you ask. Let’s say that you manage office.co.uk. To filter the links so you only see the ones that are linking to competitors do the following. Order by Destination URL (A to Z) and cut/paste all the links pointing to your site into a new sheet (Sheet2). You will have to go back to the sheet with all competitor links and create a column named “linking me”; in that column you will have to paste the following formula: “=COUNTIF(Sheet2!B:B, B2)>0”. That will work as long as the URLs are in column B.

That formula will return whether that URL is linking to you too. If the result is FALSE, then they are not linking to you, and you can approach them.
In this example, if you were managing office.co.uk, there are 554 URLs that are linking to your competitors and could potentially link to you too!

Conclusion
These are just two examples of hundreds where a bit of analysis with Open Site Explorer and a bit of Excel can help your campaign. It will give you a good snapshot of what your competitors are doing, where are they successes and their failures. Do some research before planning your campaign!

How useful did you find this post? What data did you get out of OSE and Excel?

Post from: Connect

Open Site Explorer and Excel, a link made in heaven

The auto suggest feature aids the user by analysing the characters that are being typed into the search box and suggesting possible search terms that the user may be looking for to speed up the search process – and also highlight possible search refinements to return more targeted results.

The recent development brought out by Bing is that these suggested search terms are being informed not only by user search behaviour but also by breaking news and trending search queries:

“In fact, we recently incorporated breaking news and hot trending queries within autosuggest. Updated every 15 minutes, trending queries balance timeliness and relevance to connect you with the most prominent or topical events happening now.”

The following examples from Bing’s announcement post highlights this new feature action:

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the Golden Globe Awards, autosuggest helps you get to the latest news and recent winners:

Whereas through Google you would see the following result:

Curious to know when Tiger Woods will return to golf? Start typing “Tig” and autosuggest surfaces relevant queries that can help connect you with the latest news:

And again in Google you would see the following:

So what does this mean:

This new feature is another development brought out by Bing that challenges Google on being a market leader for innovation within search. Google built its market share through delivering better, more relevant search results than its competitors. If Bing is to really start gaining market share from Google it will be by delivering more relevant results to users, which in this case is by being more topically relevant.

Over the past few years search engines have been developing new offerings in both their Paid and Natural listings, for example the site links that now appear for brand searches, and digital marketers are defining more and more synergy tactics between these disciplines.

With the launch of this new development, the integration of live twitter results into search engine results pages, the popularity of social networks and the ever increasing speed at which search engines are indexing content - we now have to consider real-time marketing and the social implications of the Internet in how we continue to develop our online strategies.

If the first decade of this millenium was about developing Paid and Natural Synergies then the second decade is all about Search and Social Synergy.

Post from: Connect

Bing out suggests Google with new feature

We recently had a session looking at the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) feeds that we run, and an interesting point came out of it. This point was about the amount of coverage a brand could have on a single SERP where there are Natural Search results, Paid Search results, and Product results from Google Product Search.

What are CSE’s?

Comparison Shopping Engines are sites like Shopping.com, Nextag, and Ciao, where retailers can submit a product feed of all their current stock, and these sites can then provide their users with huge lists of products in a selection of categories. Retailers can gain incremental sales from users who may not have used search in their purchase process. The CSEs make their money from charging a CPC on all the referrals to the retailer sites.

Google Product Search is a similar to the other CSEs in the way it takes a product feed, but the results are often embedded in the Natural Search results:

The perfect SERP

After our discussions we started mentally constructing a SERP where a brand could be absolutely everywhere…..
Here it is - the actual SERP used is just for layout, so please ignore sites highlighted: (click to enlarge!)

Key

1.    Your Paid results, because you are bidding on this term. Additionally, you could be displaying an “Adwords Plus” result with site links, or a location – effectively dominating the top Paid results.
2.    Your Natural results, because your site is optimised for this term. If you had an indented result as well, you would be dominating the top Natural results.
3.    The Google Product results, in which you are present because you are submitting your feed to Google. These results have ratings taken from CSEs that your site could have.

Those are the obvious ones, and the ones that are going to drive you direct traffic, but we also have:
4.    A Nextag (for instance) PPC result, where they are bidding on the same term, but you feature on their landing page because they have your feed. We have seen many examples of CSEs bidding on product terms.
5.    A Ciao (for instance) Natural result where they are ranking for this term as well, but you feature on their landing page because they have your feed. A lot of these sites will rank very well for some competitive product terms, and your brand could be on their landing page.

This is a bit of a dream SERP for a brand, and I have not actually seen this anywhere, but this would truly be a great example of the benefits of a multi channel marketing campaign, of Paid and Natural Search synergy, and of TOTAL SERP DOMINATION!

Post from: Connect

SEO + PPC + CSEs = Total Coverage

The Pretender

WolframAlpha is “an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would”. With that in mind this young pretender turns in to a no hoper if you were planning to do conventional queries. But where it comes in to its own specific data related queries or referencing. One of the weird ones is the ISBN barcode

Yes that’s right. It’s pulled up the corresponding barcode for the ISBN number. I’m not sure this will leave any of the search engines quaking in their boots.

A Familiar Friend

Nevertheless moving on to another new but familiar friend we have Bing who also made a splash in 2009. Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft that was formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search.

Just like with their names Microsoft keep trying to improve their search engine. However apart from the name changing Microsoft have made an effort to bring something new to its service. First of all the ever changing homepage image which has always impressed me each time I see it. Another is how Bing now organises search results into categories. For instance typing in Margret Thatcher will allow you to see the normal set of results on the right hand side but on the left there are options to delve in to more relevant and related results such as the ones listed below:

Not to be left out Yahoo! made a deal with Microsoft that would mean Bing would power Yahoo! Search. This all being said Google has pretty much owned this year and not just because of the size of the power house search engine but the developments they have put live.

Here Comes Google

The Vince update that boosted big brand websites within Google SERP’s was the cause of much conversation here as iCrossing UK. Liz Ayers and David Peiris did some fantastic analysis trying to unravel how Google might be using it’s algorithm to display this SERP’s . I’d advise you to take some time out and have a good read of it.

Caffeine was another update that was more focused on upgrading the engine of Google rather than the enhancements of the algorithm. Matt Cutts explains on the Webmaster Central blog that “The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results” and that this update is “the first step in a process that will let Google (us) push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google Social Search is a personal favourite of mine and is an experiment featured in Google Labs.  Basically “Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results.” Right now in Brighton it’s snowing so a quick search shows this for the term ’snow’

The content areas that Google uses can be broken down in to three areas (Web Search Help):

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.

To find this content Google uses your social circle. “The following people make up your social circle:

• People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.

It’s all very logical, simple in it’s idea but very clever and useful. If you want to find out more try watching MattCutts (with his lovely shiny Minority Report looking head, sorry Matt I couldn’t resist.)

Google Social Search was a step in to the Social Web but was then later followed by real time search. Amit Singhal a Google Fellow goes on to explain what this means for the end user.

“..Immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before”

Of course the main difference between Social search and Real time search is that latter is focused on topic, trending and drawing content from sources that will predominately feature outside your social circle. Not stopping there Google’s personalisation that was only available to users who had Google accounts changed its policy and made it available signed-out users worldwide using a 180 day cookie. This means the traditional ranking factors that Google uses to rank still are valid. However in your day to day searching your frequently visited sites will be more prominent in your search results where relevant.  This has caused a real stir in the SEO community but like always this is yet another opportunity for the digital community to come together and provide digital strategy as opposed to single channel marketing.

Well that’s what caught my eye in 2009. It’s been a very challenging year for us all and will be the year that saw social come in to its own. I wish you the very best of luck in 2010 and I leave you with this final link that made me smile.

Post from: Connect

A Decade in Search - 2009

Insofar as a BIG THEME can be detected, (besides the ongoing Yahoo! soap opera), it would be wirelessness. Google began the year by bidding heavily in the US wireless spectrum auction, not to win but to bust the cash threshold that forced open-access rules on to the winner. By freakish coincidence, the Android mobile OS was being demoed by May and launched on the shiny G1 in September.

Google also released this awesome comic strip drawn by the Infinite Canvas guy. It was about a browser or something? I forget.

Meanwhile in the trenches:

As is traditional, around April we all hallucinated an algorithm update, triggering weeks of the usual Beaker-like shrilling in SEO fora around the world. As is also traditional, Matt Cutts denied all knowledge of it, despite inadvertently dubbing it Dewey. The industry also freaked out over a couple of waves of visible PageRank penalisation - apparently aimed in the direction of link sellers. But no, wait - PageRank doesn’t mean anything anymore! Phew.

Also, in no particular order:

Googlebot began crawling through certain HTML forms to discover content not conventionally linked to.

Google brought in 10-box results for local blended search, replacing the previous 3-box - because I know *I* just can’t get enough locksmiths in my morning SERP.

Long-tail freaks celebrated as the average number of keywords per search went from 3 to 4.

Redirects and vanity URLs became invalid as AdWords display URLs from April, causing PPC teams to become grouchy and overly attached to certain coffee mugs.

Cuil demonstrated that a dorky misspelled name is necessary but insufficient for online success.

Post from: Connect

A Decade in Search - 2008