81.3% of those surveyed use search engines every day
80.26% said that they use Google, and 11.75% Yahoo!

73.03% use Google.ie, and only 15.35% use Google.com. 11.61% weren’t sure.

61.02% of those using Google.ie are mainly searching using the web function and 38.98% mainly search pages from Ireland.

78.35% of people either clicking on the top 5 results or the results on the first page; which for most people is up to 10.

29.14% of those surveyed said that they click on sponsored links “almost every time” or “quite often”.

25.70% said that they found sponsored listings “somewhat” or “very” trustworthy, while 33.92% said that they don’t trust them at all or not that much.

Sample size was 500. Full stats will be released at Search Marketing World 2009.

I’m moderating the International SEO panel, and sitting on the Duplicate Content Panel. If you’re coming along please say hello! If not why not? There are some tickets still available – see the site for details.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Interesting New Statistics on Irish Search Engine Usage

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He goes by the friendly (wolf in sheep’s clothing type of friendly) nickname grandad. He smokes a pipe, and at times comes across as slightly geriatric. Some might even consider him ‘crusty’. But beneath the kind gentle exterior lies the heart of a calculated senior porn mogul.

But this candid look into the life of a seniors porn kingpin also reminds me that said individual mentioned previously his lusting for some keywords with which to expand his sordid empire. And not being one to disrespect my elders:

[Update: Unfortunately I have to remove this data. Apologies]

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Revealed: Ireland’s Sleazy Senior Porn Kingpin

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Daft.ie Vs MyHome.ie – Page Views on Alexa

And before anyone jumps on me about Alexa data – yes I know. But for trending it can still be useful.

TBH I think I’d be more concerned if I were daft.ie right now. From the looks of things they are getting killed.

The usual disclaimers to the above apply – all just guesswork. Happy new year BTW

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Times to Write Down Value of MyHome.ie?

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European Online Marketing Spend 2008

We all need figures to back up our assumptions and budget proposals. Here’s a handy prediction from IAB Europe which shows that Europe is fast catching up with our North American counterparts when it comes to advertising spend online:

[O]nline advertising spend within the IAB network in Europe during 2007 will reach 11.5 billion euro, up from 8 billion euro in 2006. This is a like for like increase of 38% on last year’s market value. The spend includes values for display advertising, search marketing, classifieds and directories and email marketing.

The release goes on to mention that in emerging markets the increase is likely closer to 70% YoY, and predicts 30-40% increases in the UK, Denmark, France and Germany.

I like the hypothesised drivers of this growth:

The growth is driven by higher levels broadband penetration across the regions and increased advertiser confidence in the medium.

Of course here in Ireland we don’t actually have demand for broadband… Oh, actually, that was the old eircom…

2008 predictions

Every market identified the same trends to watch in 2008: web TV, mobile internet, behavioural targeting and social media.

I would imagine they were most of the trends we were all watching carefully in 2007. Although, in line with my recent post about Multivariate and A/B Testing, I reckon that BT will take off more and more.

I wonder if their are equivalent Irish figures available? If anyone knows if these stats exist I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: European Internet Marketing Statistics

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2008 to be the year of the site optimisation?

When I say ‘site optimisation’ I’m talking about page analysis and optimisation based on statistical analysis of different versions of your page/page elements. In common parlance – A/B testing, Multi-Variate testing and Behavioural Targeting.

I’ve always been fascinated by psychology, and the psychology of Internet users is super cool in my opinion. What makes the Internet such a great place to learn about human psychology? The ability to test and measure like no other medium.

I’ve mucked around with the Google Website Optimizer a bit in the past 6 months, and I’m looking forward to using both Optimost and Offermatica next year (I’m a lucky soul with a large client who wants to get into this area of website optimisation).

Multivariate Testing for Conversion Optimisation

Looking for good tests?

I sat in on the Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking session at Pubcon. By far the best takeaway from that session was a look at how Google uses its own product to analyse and tweak there own landing and subscription pages.

Apparently they run Website Optimizer on many of their main download/sign up pages. They generally leave the tests running for 30 days or more, which I presume means a lot of traffic and high confidence in the results. The example used my Tom Leung, GWO PM, was Picasa:

Google’s Picasa uses GWO for multivariate testing

Oddly enough this page is not the winning page shown by Tom in his presentation. And I cant see the GWO code running on the page (this might be due to my location).

But Tom did mention that the three main elements to test are headline, hero shot and action button. These were the elements that gave best bang for buck from testing conducted by Google. Unfortunately I cant show you the winning version Tom showed at Pubcon, but it didn’t have the product image, and it used a high contrast blue button for the download link.

So as a site owner why should you care?

Given that competition is increasing in almost every vertical and niche, and traffic is becoming more expensive to acquire, it makes sense to maximise your return from the traffic you already have. Google’s Website Optimizer is free (you need an Adwords account), and once you run a few tests it becomes quite easy to use.

Tiny increases in conversion rates can amount to be increases in revenue. Consider this: you currently convert 1.5% of your visitors and generate €200,000 per month. If you can increase that to a 2% conversion rate by testing and tweaking you can increase your revenue to ~€267,000 per month with no extra traffic required.

Of course if you can combine that with traffic acquisition via SEO/SEM you could be onto a real goldmine. Roll on 2008

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Running Conversion Optimisation Tests? Save Time – Copy Google

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I’m all NDA’d up, but as DaveN has already mentioned the demographic info, I think it’s safe for me to say that this data is really cool. I got to see some data, and boy oh boy – it’s really going to be awesome to have such granular information about your visitors/customers.

What I saw was by no means perfect, but that was exactly why MS is running the user testing – to make Gatineau work exactly how webmasters expect and want.

Quite honestly, I think if Microsoft Gatineau lives up to what’s being billed then GA are going to have some serious competition on their hands. It’s going to be a serious, serious package. And I think some of the big analytics vendors are going to have an even harder time justifying their pricing given that far superior products are going to be available for free…

One last interesting tidbit (found via Google) – Live login for Gatineau:

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Microsoft Gatineau

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Thankfully the ‘Facts and Figures’ session at Search Marketing World 2007 included a survey conducted by Amarach Consulting on behalf of the conference organisers.

The survey consisted of:

• a telephone survey of 1,000 adults aged 18 and over in March 2007, nationally representative sample.
• online interviews (in March) with 95 marketers on the Research Now panel, split:
  - 54 advertisers (client side) &
  - 41 agencies (mainly above the line/thru the line).

Gerard O’Neill very kindly forwarded his slides to me, some of which are discussed below.

Navigation

1. Internet Usage in Ireland
2. Average Hours On-line Per Week
3. Frequency of Use of Search Engine Websites
4. Pattern of Usage of Search Results
5. Frequency of Clicking on ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Results’
6. Online Advertising & Marketing: Trend in spending in past 12 Months
7. Share of Search Engine Marketing in total online spend
8. Effectiveness of SEM versus Other Online Advertising
9. Expected Trend in Total Spending on Online Advertising & Marketing
10. Expected Trend in Share of SEM in Total Online Spending

Internet Usage in Ireland

Internet Usage in Ireland – % of each age group using internet from any location
Segment	%
18-24	74
25-34	74
35-44	53
45-54	44
55-64	43
65+	16
TOTAL	53

Average Hours On-line Per Week

Taking Time: Average Hours Online Per Week
Segment	Hours
18-24	8.4
25-34	5.8
35-44	5.5
45-54	4.2
55-64	3.8
65+	3.4
TOTAL	5.8

Frequency of Use of Search Engine Websites

Frequency of Use of Search Engine Websites
Segment	% Use Search Every Day
18-24	67
25-34	51
35-44	37
45-54	39
55-64	30
65+	35

Pattern of Usage of Search Results

Pattern of Usage of Search Results
Use	%
It depends	43
Mainly click on one or more of the top 5 links presented by the search site	32
Mainly click on one or more of the links down all of the first page of links presented by the search site	15
Mainly click on one or more links throughout the first few pages presented by the search site	10

Frequency of Clicking on ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Results’

Frequency of Clicking on ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Results’
Click on sponsored link every time + quite often	%
Very rarely when you do a search	48
Never	34
Quite often when you do a search	15
Almost every time you do a search	3

Online Advertising & Marketing: Trend in spending in past 12 Months

Online Advertising & Marketing: Trend in spending in past 12 Months
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
Increased	59	78
Remained the same	30	12
Decreased	6	7
Remained at zero	6	2

Share of Search Engine Marketing in total online spend

Share of Search Engine Marketing in total online spend
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
A growing share	43	34
A static share	16	20
A declining share	4	7
Don’t use SEM	37	39

Effectiveness of SEM versus Other Online Advertising

Effectiveness of SEM versus Other Online Advertising
Trend	% Advertisers
More effective	59
As effective	34
Less effective	6

Expected Trend in Total Spending on Online Advertising & Marketing

Expected Trend in Total Spending on Online Advertising & Marketing
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
Increase	59	73
Remain the same	31	24
Decrease	6	0
Remain at zero	4	2

Expected Trend in Share of SEM in Total Online Spending

Expected Trend in Share of SEM in Total Online Spending
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
Increase	48	60
Remain the same	42	28
Decrease	2	5
Remain at zero	8	8

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Search Engine Usage in Ireland – The Facts & Figures, Statistical Analysis March 2007

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It was an ad for a new movie starring Hillary Swank called Freedom Writers. The ad itself was unremarkable. What was very remarkable though was the official website URL.

More and more advertisers turning to Social Media Marketing

It’s generally observed wisdom that big box office movies are supported by nice media-rich websites. Most of the major studios have in-house teams of web designers who churn out high quality flash sites to beat the band. Freedom Writers is another such big box office movie (should I be hyphenating?).

But Freedom Writers is different. Rather than host the movie’s official site on a dedicated domain or under the studio’s primary domain, as has often been the case for new movies in the past, the site is hosted on MySpace:

And to top that I noticed a small button about halfway down the page ‘BE HEARD AT YOUTUBE‘. They’ve managed to completely tap into video as well:

From the YouTube profile:

Be Heard
525 Videos | 5339 Members | 170 Discussions
Freedom Writers is now in theaters! Click on one of the links below to see the story that inspired a record-breaking group on YouTube

This is a fantastic case of a product connecting with it’s customers through Social Media Marketing.

Hard, cold statistical evidence of Social Media driven traffic

And if you need some hard Social Media statistics to show to your boss, Heather Hopkins has posted some great data yesterday on her Hitwise blog that shows just how much traffic social media sites have generated for two large UK high street brands:

TopShop.co.uk and ASOS.com last week received more than twice as much traffic from MySpace than from MSN and Yahoo! Search combined.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the charts from Heater’s post (which I hope she/Hitwise wont mind be reproducing here):

In a later comment Heather postscripts some other up-stream data for topshop.co.uk:

Bebo accounts for significantly less traffic than MySpace to both ASOS and TopShop. Here are the figures for last week:

TopShop.co.uk:
#2 MySpace 5.12%
#9 Bebo 2.89%
#14 MSN UK Search 1.29%
#15 Yahoo! UK Search 1.15%

ASOS.com:
#5 MySpace 4.55%
#9 Bebo 2.27%
#13 Yahoo UK Search 1.16%
#15 MSN UK Search 1.11%

Whilst MySpace and Bebo are close to tied (ranking at #8 and #9 respectively among all categories last week) MySpace accounts for a much larger share of traffic across the web. We see this across many categories, in particular music and retail.

It’s safe to assume that Google is the #1 referrer missing from TopShop.co.uk’s figures, but it really is impressive to see just how much traffic is coming from the Social Media sites.

Given the popularity of Bebo here in Ireland, this last nugget from Heather is especially notable:

Our data can’t bear this out, but from what I hear from people in the industry (and what I hear from my younger cousins), Bebo replaces email and the phone. MySpace can be dipped in and out of. But socialising after school happens on Bebo.

Perhaps the mobile operators might be signing deals with Bebo at some point in the not-to-distant future?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: The Rise And Rise Of Social Media As A Marketing Channel

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Today I saw a few added extras at the bottom of the page:

Interesting because I never would have imagined those country stats. I’m not sure on the timeframe used for computing those stats, but it might be interesting to compare them with Google Analytics.

I would also wonder if the level of comment and referral spam I’ve been getting correlates to anything in the report?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Alexa Updates Traffic Stats Console – New Features Added

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With Google rolling out so man updates in recent weeks it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if GA gets a tune-up. And considering Microsoft is rumoured to be entering this space with its own offering…

And is it just me, or is Google Reader grabbing feeds far quicker than before? The latency issues normally associated with Reader seem to be far less noticeable. My blog posts seem to find there way in there after a couple of minutes as opposed to multiple hours previously.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Is Google Analytics Updating Intra-Day?

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Overture, the free keyword tool from Yahoo!, is either dead or dying

Most people will be familiar with Overture’s keyword tool which has been returning free keyword estimates for many years. Now the old adage the you get what you pay for still holds true, and most professionals have long since moved to paid services.

But apparently the Overture tool isn’t too well cared for by its owners, as Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal finds out from John Slade, Global Product Management with Yahoo Search Marketing:

First, I’d like to clarify that Yahoo! Search Marketing’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today… the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear…

The same Yahoo! representative is then quoted as saying:

… the public tool continues to be available but my advice to our advertisers is to use the protected keyword research tool.

which bascially confirms something we all knew a long time ago – the Overture keyword tool pretty much sucks.

One man’s risk is another man’s opportunity

And lo and behold, hot on the tracks of the rumours about the demise of Overture’s tool comes an announcement via Aaron Wall that Wordtracker has introduced a new free version of Wordtracker that returns up yo 100 keywords.

The Wordtracker tool can be found at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

Want a little bit more?

I use a number of keyword tools, both free and paid. To be honest there’s no fail safe method to generate 100% accurate keyword lists, but by using a combination of tools you can come up with pretty decent ones.

As I wrote previously, I’m using NicheBot (that’s an affiliate link) which has some great features for generating and processing keyword lists. Recently I’ve also added another professional tool to the armoury which I’m really liking a lot (I’ll post about that later).

If anyone knows of other tools that fly a little below the radar I’d love to hear about them.

[UPDATE - Now Trillian is offering a free keyword tool - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html]

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Overture Keyword Tool Dead, but Wordtracker Saves The Day (and now Trillain jumps on board)

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Those Awards, a ‘Best Site’, and some META tag fun optimisation

I swore that I wouldn’t mention those awards again (see, I kept my word :mrgreen:), but this post has led to a rather large amount of traffic.

It appears that many people are hitting Red Cardinal off searches for “moviestar”. Here’s a quick screen shot of the Google results for that term:

(You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that my post ranked #2 for that search for a long time. I’m now at #5. Oh, and while I’m at it, I’ve no idea why www.beingthere.com/ is returned at the current #2? And one more thing, does anyone else find that ‘Movistar’ suggested listings in the middle useful?)

Here’s a larger image of my blog post listing on that page:

When I wrote that post I was a little angry at said awards. So I gave the post a META description of “moviestar.ie is NOT the Best Website Launched in 2006″. And boy have I got some traffic from people searching for “moviestar”.

Meta Tag Optimization alive & well

First off, Meta Description tags have little or no ranking benefit. What content you stick in that tag wont make your site rank any higher (well, for Google anyway). But that tag can be hugely powerful for websites that do rank well. That’s because Google generally uses your META Description for the snippet underneath your page URL in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

When you think about your META description tags, you should think of them in terms of getting click throughs, not ranking.

As people searched for “moviestar” many saw my snippet. That snippet aroused curiosity and served as a good call-to-action. And people did act – by clicking and visiting my post.

So next time you’re creating your unique META descriptions for each page (did I mention that unique descriptions on each page reduces the chance of duplicate content filters hitting your site?) you should think about searchers. And you should think about your descriptions as headlines – the more attractive your headline the more likely you will receive that click over a less interesting or off-topic snippet.

People still believe in Meta Tag Optimization

Just as a parting note, I took a quick look in my favourite keyword tool to see what people search for. And they are still searching on phrases related to meta tag optimisation:

[Update] The actual search query is actually “moviestar.ie” (without quotes) – yes, you’d be absolutely surprised at the number of people who search for a domain name.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Who Said META Tag Optimization Was Dead?

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Fascinating report from McAfee SiteAdvisor on the possible dangers of clicking on search results served by the top search engines.

Possibly the oddest finding for me was this:

8% of sponsored results are rated red or yellow – almost three times the percentage of red and yellow sites found in organic results. Notably, scam sites are found at a much greater frequency in sponsored results.

I would have thought that the major Search Engines would be far more vigilant about their sponsored listings?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: How Safe are Search Results?

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Alexa collects statistics on general Internet usage from the browsing habits of millions of Alexa toolbar users. This data is then presented on the Alexa website.

Can you trust Alexa?

There’s are one or two problems though – Alexa is too easy to game, and the toolbar users are very often extremely biased both geographically and technically (heavily US tech users).

But, without prejudice to these issues, Alexa does have some nice features. For instance you can compare traffic data from a number of sites over long periods of time.

Strange what you run into

Recently while searching for some info on a particular Irish Property site I noticed a SERP entry for www.alexaholic.com:

This page had been set up by a visitor to alexaholic.com who entered the following five Irish property websites:

1. www.myhome.ie (blue line)
2. www.daft.ie (red line)
3. www.funda.ie (green line)
4. www.sellityourself.ie (brown line)
5. www.privateseller.ie (cyan line)

So what? I hear you ask

Of course just about anybody could have gone over to alexaholic.com and set up this comparison (the site is public and free). But what really caught my eye was the trends of some of the sites.

Now before I go on let me explain that I studied economics at TCD for 4 years, and had a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) interest in the stock markets. In particular I had an interest in charting and technical analysis.

Trends

Not withstanding the Alexa bias, the following trends are quite interesting:

• November an December are bad months for the property websites;
• Until Q4 2005 both myhome.ie and daft.ie were joint leaders for website reach;
• December 2005 saw myhome.ie visits plunge, while Daft.ie failed to set a new low for the year;
• Since 2005 the paths have diverged significantly for the two large property sites;
• Daft.ie Internet reach appears to have become more volatile but a clear up trend is in place (higher highs, higher lows);
• Myhome.ie conversely has entered a very clearly defined down trend – their reach is falling.

The €50m website

Myhome.ie was bought by the Irish Times last July for a reported €50m. Although no accuracy can be attributed to the Alexa data, over large sample sizes the trends reported may be representative of the actual actual figures.

If so the Irish Times may have quite a job on their hands catching up with Daft.ie.

Funda

Toward the recent area of the chart you might notice a blip in the green line. This is the data for Funda.ie which launched with the Dublin Coastal Development back in September.

The chart shows the uphill struggle Funda will have to compete with the big boys of Irish on-line property.

A pinch of salt

Of course you can’t trust Alexa data. But the charts still give some food for thought and give some indication of the competitive environment facing websites in the Irish property niche.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Property Sites Keeping an Eye on Each Other?

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The following is taken from a press release from Movistar.ie’s Public Relations firm Thinkhouse PR:

“Best Website Launched in 2006! We are absolutely thrilled,” said Gavin McConnon of moviestar.ie. “We spent a lot of time researching and trialling the website ensuring that it was designed in a browser-friendly way.”

The press release goes on to say:

Beating off stiff competition from sites such as callcosts.ie; sellityourself.ie; the Golden Spider was awarded to Moviestar.ie for its performance, as a functioning site in addition to design, innovation, content, navigation, technology, interactivity and ease of use.

An apology

I try very hard to not be subjective. I feel the quality of what I write here is dependent on being as objective as possible. The next line is purely my subjective belief:

If the above is correct, and the judges did indeed award a Golden Spider to Moviestar.ie (the site has been updated since the GS awards) for “its performance, as a functioning site in addition to design, innovation, content, navigation, technology, interactivity and ease of use“, I think they should hang their heads in shame.

As a business I think Moviestar.ie may well be exceptional. As a website it most certainly is (was) not. Had the award been for the ‘Best New Internet Business in 2006′ I would have little or no complaint.

Moviestar.ie currently ‘owns’ the top 10 Google.com positions for the search phrase ‘moviestar.ie’.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Moviestar.ie

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A very interesting poll conducted by ICM on behalf of the BBC indicates that TV is being substituted by Internet and Mobile Video. The poll of 2,070 people showed some very interesting results:

• 43% of respondents watch less TV as a result of watching Internet/Mobile video;
• 22% watch Internet/Mobile video either ‘occasionally’ or ‘Once a week or more’;
• 28% in the 18-24 age bracket watch Internet/Mobile video once a week or more.

I think there is probably some food for thought in those figures, and marketing experts need to pay more attention to video delivery over emerging technologies.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Internet Video Eating Into TV Time

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Bring on the code

It’s all about the code. Writing good code is easy. When you know how, that is. Behind every website you view are a number of coding technologies that make things tick. Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are probably the most important and common of these, and form the backbone of virtually every web page.

So many ways to view

With a variety of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc.) and an increasing number of platforms (pc, tv, hand held devices etc.), the need for a consistent user experience has never been more important.

That’s where standards come into the equation. At their most basic level, web standards exist so that the widest set of users can access and use your data via the broadest number of channels.

What’s the fly in the ointment?

Web standards seem to be very elusive for many websites on the Internet today.

After testing the Golden Spiders nominees, I thought it might be helpful to detail the top coding problems that ‘broke’ so many of the websites considered to be Ireland’s best.

(Some of the following is somewhat technical, so you can skip to my conclusions if you wish.)

1. Document Type Definition

   Every HTML document should contain a Document Type Definition (DTD) before the <html> tag. The DTD tells the User Agent which rendering mode to use when displaying the page.
   The most common DTD DOCTYPEs currently in use are:

   <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

   If your website doesn’t contain something similar to one of the above on every page then it will not validate.

   It is possible to use proprietary attributes and still ensure validation. To do so your site should carry a custom DTD. More details on custom DTD schema can be found here.

2. Character Encoding

   Character encoding tells the browser what characters the page will be displaying to the user. Remember that visitors can originate anywhere on the globe, and not all will use Latin characters.

   Letting the browser know the Character Encoding required (or ‘charset’) can be achieved in two ways:
   1. within the HTTP header sent by the server (e.g. using .htaccess on Apache);
   2. within the HTML document header, e.g.:

   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

   It is extremely important that if set by both the server, through the HTTP headers, and within the HEAD section of a HTML page that the charsets match. A mismatch will invalidate the page.

   If you want to test your site this tool will show you whether the charset is set on your page.

3. Closed or self-closing tags

   If you look at the code behind any web page you will see a bunch of tags like

   <div><a href="www.somesite.com">Click here</a></div>

   Most recent HTML specifications require tags to be closed. So you can see in the example that there was an opening <div> followed by an opening <a> (with a href attribute set), some text, and then the closing </a> followed by a final </div>.

   So each tag was opened and then closed. Notice also that the tags were nested. The closing </a> preceded the closing </div>. Had it been any other way the code would not validate.

   XHTML requires all tags to be closed or self-closing. So it is important to ensure that all your elements are closed, e.g. <head [...] /> or <div> [...] </div>.

4. Lower case tags

   The XHTML 1.0 specification requires that all element and attribute tags be in lower case. So if your document uses a XHTML DTD then you can not use a mix of upper and lower case mark-up throughout your document.

   Whenever I see mixed case mark-up I immediately think of ‘cut ‘n paste’ coding, which in my view is an extremely lazy and dangerous way to author web pages. If you are going to cut and paste, you have 10 times more reasons to validate your page afterwards.

   If you take a look at the source code of your own web pages (in IE6 select Tools->View Source, IE7 select Page->View Source, FF2 View->Page Source) and see something like this:

   <head>
<title>...</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="TITLE" CONTENT="...">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="...">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="...">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index, follow">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="...">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="no-cache">
<link href="..." type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all">
<link href="..." type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all">
</head>

   I would be slightly concerned about the overall quality and standard of coding produced by your development team / design agency.

   (The fact that this style of coding appeared in some of the nominee sites for ‘Best Web Design Agency’ is somewhat disconcerting.)

5. Proprietary tags, attributes and CSS

   Unfortunately in the early days of the Internet the browser vendors were less interested in standards (*glances at IE*). This led to a number of proprietary tags and attributes coming into existence. Recent years have seen considerable improvements to the browsers we use. Unfortunately many designers and developers have not kept pace with the times.

   Generally, the use of proprietary code has one major outcome – the code will only work in one brand of browser. While Internet Explorer enjoyed 95% dominance of the browser market during the 1990′s this was fine. But now that new standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox have a 15-20% market share, you can understand why proprietary code has become such an important issue.

   For example, the use of leftmargin, topmargin, marginwidth or marginheight attributes in the body tag involves proprietary code. Similarly, the embed tag is a proprietary tag.

   If you would like to see an excellent example of what can happen when a web site works only in one browser take a glimpse at what happened Enterprise Ireland.

6. CSS Hacks

   Unfortunately different browser platforms have a nasty habit of rendering content in non-standard ways (*glances again at IE*). It’s a feature of life that hacks are often required to make pages render consistently cross-browser.

   Placing hacks in CSS files has a nasty habit of breaking any validation performed on that file. A far more effective way to introduce hacks is to use conditional includes.

   Conditional includes are special commands that are only read by Microsoft browsers. Such an include might look like:

   <!--[if lt IE 7]>
<link href="path/to/IE/lte6/stylesheet.css" media="all" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

   For a good guide to using conditional includes and their syntax see quirksmode.org.

7. WCAG Accessibility

   They say that the Internet is a great levelling ground. Not just for business, but also for people with disabilities. That’s why Accessible web pages are so important.

   WCAG 1.0 and Section 508 are the most common accessibility standards used on the web today. They dictate certain coding requirements that apply to accessible web pages. For instance:

   All image elements must contain an ALT attribute. Even spacer images must contain at the least an empty ALT attribute – alt="";

   And a very common error is the omission of proper labels for form elements:

   Form input elements should be accompanied by a corresponding label, e.g. <label for="fname">First Name</label><input type="text" name="firstname" id="fname">

   If you would like to learn more about Accessibility please visit WAI. diveintoaccessibility.org/ offers an excellent primer on web site accessible.

8. Legal Color Names

   Many people don’t realise that there are just sixteen legal color names in HTML 4.x and XHTML. If you use color names in your mark-up and they don’t appear in the following list your document will not validate, and you run the risk of inconsistent rendering across browsers/platforms.

   The Legal Color Names (with HEX values):

   Aqua (#00FFFF)
Black (#000000)
Blue (#0000FF)
Fuchsia (#FF00FF)
Gray (#808080)
Green (#008000)
Lime (#00FF00)
Maroon (#800000)
Navy (#000080)
Olive (#808000)
Purple (#800080)
Red (#FF0000)
Silver (#C0C0C0)
Teal (#008080)
White (#FFFFFF)
Yellow (#FFFF00)

9. Unescaped special characters

   Unfortunately certain characters have a special meaning to the computers that run the Internet. In particular the ampersand (&) and the less-than and greater-than characters (<, >) cause problems when they are left unescaped.

   The inclusion of these characters on your HTML page will invalidate the mark-up. In all cases they should be properly escaped to either their equivalent HTML entity or ISO Latin-1 code. In the case of the ampersand &amp; or &#38;, less-than &lt; or &#60;, and greater-than &gt; or &62;.

   For a full list of HTML special characters see here.

So what’s the solution?

My own personal opinion is that those responsible for coding and designing websites need to take web standards more seriously.

The fact that web sites nominated for ‘Best Web Design Agency’ failed to validate (and one or two had truly awful coding) is indicative of the wider issues faced by Ireland’s Internet community.

On the other side of the fence, those commissioning new sites should start to consider, as a decision criterion, the quality of the underlying code and the impact on areas such as Accessibility and compatibility poor code can have.

Design and development briefs should include web standards as a requirement. In fact this is one of the easiest metrics to collect for subsequent evaluation.

Failing the above I think a quote from theMenace is particularly apt:

If we don’t have regulation (which we never really can) then we need 1) peer honesty and 2) client education.

Well said.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: The Quick & Easy Guide to Better HTML

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Total Sample: 128 sites;
Valid CSS: 33 (26%);
Valid HTML: 12 (9%);
Valid Section 508: 28 (22%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 26 (20%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 2: 4 (3%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 3: 3 (2%);
Valid TV Core: 37 (29%);
Valid TV HTML: 15 (12%);
Valid TV WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 43 (34%);
Valid WAVE Overlay: 27 (21%);
Sites with consistent mark-up: 76 (59%);

CSS, HTML, Section 508 & WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 Compliant: 6 (5%)


Special mention should be made of both www.ssiaoptions.ie and www.ulsterbank.ie. Both sites validated to WCAG 1.0 Priority 3 standard and require only limited changes in order to become fully compliant with all tests conducted.

And just one final piece of analysis:

Update as per Ricardo’s suggestion

This analysis was born from the comments left in this thread about W3C standards compliant coding.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Golden Spider Awards – Are These Really Ireland’s Best Websites?

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#1 Framed Site
#2 Unable to test framed site in WAVE
#3 Very minor issue possibly from CMS
#4 Site not accessible without JavaScript enabled
#5 Very minor error in CSS
#6 Very minor omission
#7 In-line CSS could not be validated
#8 In-line CSS could not be validated
#9 Parser failed to access file
#10 Parser could not access file – possibly behind a firewall
#11 No CSS used on page
#12 Flash Website with no HTML alternative
#13 Parser failed to parse file.
#14 No CSS used on page
#15 Could not validate – maybe __VIEWSTATE value?
#16 Validation errors were caused by non-critical image elements. But ALT attribute was missing not empty.
#17 LABEL for attribute != input ID attribute
#18 Empty LABEL tag
#19 WAVE couldn’t parse page overlay
#20 Cynthia – HTTP Transfer Error – 12007: [12007] Internet Name Not Resolved.

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The Golden Spiders Accessibility Results, Categories 13-16

(NB You can click on the image for a larger version.)

The final four categories contained 29 websites of which 1 passed the benchmark for standards compliance – www.primaryscience.ie.

I will post a complete ranking overview of the final results shortly.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Golden Spiders Take #4

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Please note that I have made a very slight change to the legends used. ‘DUAL-CASE’ has been changed to ‘SINGLE-CASE’ to denote the use of consistent type-case throughout the HTML document.

The Golden Spiders Accessibility Results, Categories 9-12

(NB Again you can click on the image for a larger version.)

In these four categories no websites fully passes the benchmark for standards compliance.

Quite notable, however, was the Professional Services category. Four of the eight sites short-listed passed both Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 Priority 1. A number of these sites also displayed high coding standards.

It is possible that the professional service firms may have a better grasp of the accessibility standards. This may be due to the inherently human nature of many of these businesses.

Categories 9, 10 and 12 contain primarily Internet-based businesses. Thus far these categories are tending toward the least standards compliant.

These are the latest running totals (1-12):

Total Sample: 99 sites;
Valid CSS: 26 (26%);
Valid HTML: 10 (10%);
Valid Section 508: 20 (20%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 18 (18%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 2: 4 (4%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 3: 3 (3%);
Valid TV Core: 32 (32%);
Valid TV HTML: 11 (11%);
Valid TV WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 32 (32%);
Valid WAVE Overlay: 23 (23%);
Sites with consistent mark-up: 59 (59%);
CSS, HTML, Section 508 & WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 COMPLIANT: 3 (3%).


Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Golden Spiders Take #3

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After a somewhat disillusioning start to my analysis of the Golden Spiders short-listed websites I’m quite sure that things will be getting better.

The next 4 categories include the Best Web Design Agency group and they, being experts in this field, are more likely to have a higher compliance with coding and accessibility standards.

I wont go into the methodology used, full details of which are included in my first report (Golden Spiders Take #1).

The Golden Spiders Accessibility Results, Categories 5-8

(NB Again you can click on the image for a larger version.)

In categories 5 not one single site passed the coding and accessibility tests performed, while category 6 entertained two sites which had virtually 100% compliance (each had un-encoded ampersands or brackets within text elements).

Category 7 showed some promise. bluecubeinteractive.com/property_news was fully code and accessibility compliant (although the page in question is very, very basic), and I have to tip my hat to Ulster Bank – their site was WCAG 1.0 Priority 3 compliant and the two failed tests were nominal at best (1 hours work and this could be one of the most code-compliant sites in the land).

A note about this methodology

It is worth stating at this time that the tests I perform are in no way meant to be full audits of these websites’ accessibility levels. Such testing requires a more wholesome array of tests which would include subjective evaluation. My methodology is restrained purely to those tests that can be automated and require no subjective input.

Best Web Design Agency category

The Web Design category short-list contains those design agencies who, as experts in their field, should have the highest knowledge of both coding and accessibility disciplines. Well done to Lightbox.ie and Tower.ie who both achieved a very high level of compliance with the coding and accessibility standards. To be fair, a number of the failed tests in this category were marginal and those pages could be easily repaired.

Unfortunately, I was particularly surprised at the results for Magico.ie and Strata3.com. Both pages analysed displayed an extremely high level of coding errors.

One final notable point was the proliferation of dual-case coding. By this I mean the coding of some tags in lower case and others in capital or upper-case. Generally, although not always, this is a sign of ‘cut-and-paste’ re-use of old code.

Overview of categories 5-8

Within the second sample of 34 websites there was an improvement in coding and accessibility standards. ThreeFive sites fully conformed with the accessibility guidelines. A special mention of the Ulster Bank site is also worthy.

This is the latest update to the running totals:

Total Sample: 66 sites;
Valid CSS: 18 (27%);
Valid HTML: 8 (12%);
Valid Section 508: 15 (23%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 13 (20%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 2: 3 (5%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 3: 3 (5%);
Valid TV Core: 22 (33%);
Valid TV HTML: 9 (14%);
Valid TV WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 24 (36%);
Valid WAVE Overlay: 18 (27%);
Sites with consistent mark-up: 33 (49%);
CSS, HTML, Section 508 & WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 COMPLIANT: 5 (8%).

Further updates will appear shortly. Again, any feedback on this is greatly appreciated.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Golden Spiders Take #2

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The eircom Golden Spiders are widely regarded as the oscars of the internet industry and were established exactly this day 10 years ago – to reward excellence in design, functionality, creativity and innovation in Ireland’s internet industry.

After receiving some feedback on this issue, I thought it might be appropriate to conduct a small study into one particular area of web design that is not alluded to directly, but is extremely important – ACCESSIBILITY.

But first a word on my methodology

It is generally accepted that objective measures of accessibility are defined relative to global standards as set out by the World Wide Web Consortium and other bodies.

The W3C has responsibility for the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and also sits on the advisory commission for the revision of U.S. Section 508 standards. The WAI maintained Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and U.S. Section 508 are the accepted international standards for Web accessibility measurement.

Validation of Mark-Up and CSS

Alongside these accessibility standards it is a generally accepted wisdom that valid mark-up (the code that runs all web pages) is a best practice for ensuring standardised delivery across client platforms.

The Study

Using the URLs listed at www.goldenspiders.ie I set about constructing a testing mechanism to appraise the accessibility and coding practices of the short-listed websites.

Each site underwent the following tests:

1. W3C CSS validation service (here);
2. W3C Markup Validation Service v0.7.3 (here);
3. HiSoftware Cynthia Says Section 508 Validation service (here);
4. HiSoftware Cynthia Says WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 Validation service (here);
5. HiSoftware Cynthia Says WCAG 1.0 Priorities 1&2 Validation service (here);
6. HiSoftware Cynthia Says WCAG 1.0 Priorities 1&2&3 Validation service (here);
7. Total Validator Professional desktop HTML & Accessibility validation tool (available here);
8. WAVE WCAG 1.0 and Section 508 visual site overlay tool (here);
9. Manual inspection of the mark-up to identify ‘cut-and-paste’ coding.

3 separate tools were used to assess the accessibility of each page short-listed for the Golden Spider Awards. This methodology conforms to the best practice as set out by the WAI. No other pages within those sites were tested for this study.

The Golden Spiders Accessibility Results, Categories 1-4

(NB Click on the image for a larger version.)

Legend

• CSS = CSS validation;
• HTML = HTML validation;
• Section 508 = Section 508 validation;
• WCAG 1.0 1 = WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 validation;
• WCAG 1.0 1,2 = WCAG 1.0 Priorities 1 and 2 validation;
• WCAG 1.0 1,2,3 = WCAG 1.0 Proriteis 1, 2 and 3 validation;
• TV Core = Total Validation Core Errors;
• TV HTML = Total Validation HTML Errors;
• TV WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 = Total Validation WCAG Priority 1 Errors;
• WAVE wcag 1.0, 508 = WAVE 3.0 site overlay WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 and Section 508 Validation;
• DUAL-CASE = Analysis of page mark-up to identify the use of both upper-case and lower-case element tags. This can identify ‘cut-and-paste’ coding . It can also be the result of Content Management Systems or the use of third party code (e.g. Google Analytics scripts).

Of this initial sample of 32 websites one site comes close to fully conforming to the accessibility guidelines. In fact www.ssiaoptions.ie actually conformed to the highest level of WCAG 1.0 – Priorities 1, 2 and 3. Although the site’s CSS failed to validate it is an extremely accessible website.

Results Categories 1-4 Overview

Total Sample: 32 sites;
Valid CSS: 9 (28%);
Valid HTML: 2 (6%);
Valid Section 508: 4 (13%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 3 (9%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 2: 2 (6%);
Valid WCAG 1.0 Priority 3: 2 (6%);
Valid TV Core: 10 (31%);
Valid TV HTML: 1 (3%);
Valid TV WCAG 1.0 Priority 1: 9 (28%);
Valid WAVE Overlay: 7 (22%);
Sites with consistent mark-up: 16 (50%);
CSS, HTML, Section 508 & WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 COMPLIANT: 0 (0%).

[I updated the above overview at 12:30pm Nov 5 to correct an error in the 'No. of sites with consistent mark-up' and also to include the figure for 'Zero visible WAVE Errors'. Second update at 10:45pm Nov 5 to correct some figures and typos in the overview.]

I would be very interested to hear any views you might have on the above. Further results will be posted later today.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Golden Spiders Take #1

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In ‘13 Deadly Google Sins‘ I looked at a few of the most serious issues that can affect a website’s ability to rank well in Google.

Now it’s time to look at 10 ways to make Google love your site and feed it with all those fantastic visitors:

1. Getting Indexed

   If you want to get into Google’s index in short-time you need to get as many authoritative links pointing at your site as possible. Forget about using the Google submission tool, just find some links from regularly crawled sites (sites that frequently update their content are usually crawled more frequently). With the right links pointing at your site you can get indexed in a week or less, so go beg, borrow or steal to get those links.

2. Give Some Friendly Directions

   When you need to find your way you look at a map. Sitemaps are just as useful to spiders as real maps are to humans. In fact, sitemaps are also incredibly useful for your human visitors so consider creating both a html and an xml sitemap – the former for humans (and spiders!) and the latter for Google Sitemaps.

3. Don’t Stress Out the Googlebot

   Where possible use well formed, semantically correct mark-up. I make sure that my pages validate over on validator.w3.org (well, I let the HTMLtidy plug-in take care of this).

   I also spend a fair bit of time on the page title, the header elements, the text body and the internal link anchors. I try to ensure that keywords are consistent across these four page elements. This helps Google to identify what your page is about.

   BTW the page title is quite an important variable used by Google when applying SERP positioning so make sure to get the correct keywords into each and every unique page title.

4. Avoid overuse of Flash

   Search Engines have always had problems with Flash. For this reason Flash-based websites are notoriously difficult to rank well in Google.

   If you must keep that cool looking Flash site you should consider offering a text-based alternative (not just for the SE’s, but also from a usability perspective). Failing that, you could try utilising the <noembed> or <noframe> elements to incorporate as much text into your pages as possible. If absolutely all else fails your last hope is probably the ‘Google Bomb‘.

   While I’m on the subject, try to avoid using Flash for navigation – bear in mind that some people don’t have Flash installed and others (like me) block Flash from their browser.

5. Create Unique Compelling Content

   Google loves unique content. But more importantly so do humans, and the best advice is to create your content for human visitors first and foremost.

   Great content attracts attention and people show their interest by linking to your content. Every time someone links to you Google counts this as a vote for your content – the more votes the higher your SERP ranking. Oh, and just for the record, the converse of this also holds – Google hates copied content just as much as it loves unique content so don’t expect much love if you scrap other sites.

6. Better Links = Higher SERPs

   The most important trick to getting those all important #1 positions from Google is to get great links pointing at your unique content. (Having a 10 year old domain doesn’t hurt also, but that’s another story.)

   This is probably the trickiest part of getting Google’s love – if people cant find you how can they possibly link to you? Well my advice is to go for the low-hanging fruit first. Human edited web directories offer a great way to get some easy links.

   If you have a bit more time you could also try some writing some quality articles related to your niche and submit these to the top article directories.

   A quick note about link anchors:

   If I can control just one single factor when looking for Google love then it would have to be the anchor text used in the backlinks pointing at my content.

   *Note*: Quite a few people have asked me what are the best anchors to use. I recommend you check out Wordze if you need to find the best keyword anchors.

   IMO Google applies quite a serious bias to the anchor text used in your backlinks when determining the most appropriate SERP position (and if you want to see what the difference is between #1 and #2 or #1 and #10 then take a look at this).

   Some link tools and other info

   Most Search Engines allow the use of the link: operator to display the backlinks a website has. Generally I use Yahoo.com to check backlinks quickly, but be warned that the Google link: command NEVER displays anything other than a sample of your backlinks.

   MSN have just recently released the LinkFromDomain: operator which shows you all the outbound links from a website (handy to check where a site is linking to).

7. Tell Google Where You Are

   Google offers country-specific searches on all its search properties. If you want to appear in any particular ‘pages from [your country here]‘ search you must fulfil one of the following conditions:

   1. your site must be physically hosted in the targeted country (and the server IP must resolve to that country); and/or
   2. your domain must use the ccTLD of the targeted country.

   So if you want to target the ‘pages from Ireland’ search your website must be either hosted on a server located in Ireland (use this to test) or your domain must be a .ie ccTLD.

8. Remember the ‘Long-Tail’

   Google indexes pages not websites so each page can target different keywords that apply to the niche you are targeting. The more possible ways people have of finding your site then the more potential visitors your site will receive from Google.

   You should make use of keyword estimators (again, Wordze is a great tool for this, but bear in mind that no keyword tool is flawless) to ensure that your pages and copy contain the keywords people actually search for. There are many free keyword tools that you can try.

   You should also familiarise yourself with the advanced operators available from most of the major search engines. ‘inanchor:’, ‘allinanchor:’, ‘intitle:’ and ‘allintitle:’ are extremely useful for determining how competitive particular search phrases are, and these operators should form part of any serious keyword analysis.

   It’s worth mentioning that the rapid growth of local search (e.g. appending place names onto queries) means that targeting particular locations is becoming more important. I personally see far more referrals come for localised search queries than from country-only filtered searches. (Note – I work on optimising Irish websites so this observation should be taken in that particular context.)

9. Learn just 1 important Apache module

   If you want to really be best friends with Google then I suggest you learn 1 fairly easy Apache module:

   mod_rewrite allows you to turn those ugly dynamic URLs into their pretty SEO-friendly static-looking counterparts.

   mod_rewrite also allows you to redirect the non-www to your www website URL (or vice-verse). This issue, known as the canonical URL, is one of the most common causes of problems within Google’s index.

   I also suggest getting familiar HTTP header codes, and in particular the 301 redirect which might someday save your relationship with Google.

10. Play by the book

    If you try to game Google chances are you’re going to fail. Unless you are extremely well versed and experienced in
    black-hat techniques any attempt to ‘con’ Google is likely to have very serious consequences for your site.

    I recommend you become familiar with the Google webmaster guidelines, and very carefully research any grey areas before you implement any semi-shady changes to your property. Wrong-doings usual result in either a penalty or an outright ban depending on the severity of the misdeed.

    If in doubt I would check out Google Webmaster Group – you never know it might be me who answers your question :grin:.

If you have any questions or comments on this post why not leave them below. I try to answer any questions people leave, so feel free if you want my opinion on anything.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: 10 Steps to Getting Into Google And Staying There – The Ultimate Quick Guide to Google SEO

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To everybody who commented, I have also removed references within your comments. Sorry – I very much appreciate your comments and would rather never censor this blog, but I’m quite sure the lesson has been learnt and there is little to be gained by ostracising the company in question any further.

<rantWarning>

After a very fruitful week in Holland I arrived back today to this gem of an e-mail from the kind [REMOVED] spammers:

Dear Business,

Hope all is well. We are a Cork based web design company who offer a variety of services. Your company may be interested in our Search Engine Optisation service where we submit your website every four weeks for a year to all the major search engines.

We can also optimise certain keywords you want to come up on searches.

If you would like to find out more about this service please log onto http://www.[REMOVED].net/search_engines.html

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind Regards
[REMOVED]

The above was sent to the public e-mail address of my sister’s catering company. I created the website a few years back and have been adding links ever since (it’s showing it’s age and certainly doesn’t represent my best efforts at on-page optimisation – a new super-duper website is in the pipeline as I write).

But I digress. Back to the original e-mail. While they *may* have manually collected the mail address (I seriously doubt it, and if they did surely they would take a quick look at the rankings?), addressing your sales-related e-mail to “Dear Business” doesn’t tick any of my boxes.

I particularly like the misspelling of the word “Optisation”:

our Search Engine Optisation [sic] service where we submit your website every four weeks for a year to all the major search engines

and to be fair I should add:

We can also optimise certain keywords you want to come up on searches.

Personally I find the above [REMOVED] e-mail just about as annoying as another beauty that’s doing the spamming rounds:

(If you want to see a magic trick entitled “How to Disappear £149 in 2 Easy Steps” these guys can show you.)

But back again to the [REMOVED] SEO spammers

As a professional courtesy I did check out some of the claims on the page the e-mail lands on. Some stand up, some are slightly fickle (e.g. ‘pages from Ireland’ only) while others have very dubious keyword selections [REMOVED].

And what about Amitan?

How about 40-50 search referrals per day. Here’s some ranking & visitor statistic reports generated earlier (click to enlarge):

Lessons to be learnt?

Lesson #1
Don’t spam people with SEO offers – it’s bad for recipients, it’s bad for your reputation, and most of all, it’s bad for the SEO industry.

Lesson #2
If you want to judge the results of any particular SEO company ask them about the traffic levels generated as well as the rankings achieved.

</rantWarning>

PS – did anyone else get this email from [REMOVED]?

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RSS is a really great transport for delivering your content to the widest possible Internet audience. Unfortunately it appears that no one bothered to tell Ireland’s top media and news organisations.

Today I spent a couple of hours in a client’s office checking in and catching up. I had previously worked with them re-engineering and formalising their business processes (yep, aside from the SEO I work as a business consultant).

We were talking about lead generation and market analysis and I suggested using a reader to pull in RSS feeds from the Irish newspapers.

I don’t personally read any feeds from Irish papers, but I knew that the Irish Times had a feed. I was pretty sure that Tom Doyle over at 2bscene had pulled this feed into a site he had created and promoted (a solicitors website which I think makes a great SEO case study – in fact so much so that I have already spoken to Tom about using in a forthcoming post).

Anyhow, I set up a Google account, loaded the excellent new Google Reader and set about finding the required feeds.

The Irish Times was the first site I hit, and I was delighted to see multiple feeds for various channels (news, property etc.). RTE.ie offered four news feeds, but the channels were a bit too broad for our requirements. From here on in things went downhill (fell off a cliff actually):

1. Unison.ie (Irish/Sunday Independent) – NO FEEDS
2. Sunday Business Post – NO FEEDS
3. Sunday Tribune – NO FEEDS
4. Irish Examiner – NO FEEDS

As a last resort I even tried Business World. You guessed it – NO FEEDS.

Disbelief is the only word that I can use at this point. Of all the Irish websites, I really thought that newspapers and media companies would understand the power of syndication?

To be quite honest, I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised – the more time I spend looking at Ireland’s on-line ecosystem the more I see just how far behind many Irish sites have fallen. (And when I get the latest .ie stats from John McCormac over the weekend I plan on writing up an analysis of just how bad the situation really is.)

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Media, News Websites to Readers – ‘Don’t Read Us’

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Initially I found myself logging in and logging out of separate Google accounts. Then I figured out a neat way to overcome this issue by using the built-in sharing functionality of Analytics itself.

1. Log into any secondary Analytics account you want to access from your primary account.
2. From your settings page click on ‘Access Manager’:

   

3. In your Access Manager select ‘+ Add User’:

   

4. Type your primary email address into the ‘Email address:’ field and, THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT, be sure to select ‘Account Administrator’ from the ‘Access type:’ drop-down:

   

   Under ‘Allow access to’ add all the domains you want to administer from your primary account and then click Finish:

   

Now when you log into your primary account you can simply select another account by using the ‘My Analytics Accounts’ drop-down:

There you have it. All your Google Analytics accounts under one roof!

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Searching Google Trends for the term ‘search engine optimisation‘ returns an interesting result:

Interestingly, while news coverage seems to have increased, the search volume for ‘search engine optimisation’ has been steadily decreasing.

Bad press perhaps?

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It’s unusual to think that probably the richest and most powerful indigenous sector of the Irish economy is so poorly represented on-line.

I have been working with a company called The Real Dirtbusters, an industrial cleaning company, developing and optimising their on-line presence.

Their site went live around the third week in July and I have been watching the stats carefully to see how well the campaign is going.

One thing has surprised me quite a bit. Of all the pages on the site, one has seen more traffic and SE referrals than all others. That page was not created with SE’s in mind whatsoever but as part of the overall marketing plan for the website itself.

The page in question is the Clients Page which received over 35% of all hits on the site since July 20.

Checking the logs shows the following top 30 keyword conversions from organic Google search clickthroughs:

By now you should know the answer to the initial question I think.

However, what’s even stranger about this is that when you search for many of the construction companies in question, many of which are large corporations by anyone’s standards, you are often hard pressed to find their websites in the top 50 SERPs (if, of course, they have a website at all).

At least some of the searches made for these companies are likely to be potential home buyers looking for a particular development – very often you drive by hoardings or building sites which are heavily branded with developers logos and the like, so a subsequent search is likely to start with the developer’s name.

I can’t help but think that having better on-line findability may well increase company sales. And when the product is a new home with an average price of perhaps €400,000 the ROI on relatively small amount of Internet marketing could be exceptional.

As for The Real Dirtbusters? Well, although unexpected, these non-targeted key phrase hits are actually an added bonus. The clients page is often acting as a good landing page for the site.

This is evidenced by the average number of page views – the majority of visitors looking for construction companies looked at least one more page on the site – many looked a number of pages before leaving the site. So from a marketing perspective some of these searches are likely to result in the company’s visibility increasing in their key marketplace.

Is there a lesson that could be learnt from this? In a nutshell, publishing your client list on-line can be a great way to generate traffic to your website and increase the overall awareness of your company within your industry.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Ireland’s Richest Companies On-Line Presence

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Previously invite-only, Google Analytics has now opened to the masses for business:

I’m happy to tell you that we’ve just removed the wait to receive a Google Analytics account. Now anyone with a website can instantly create one for free by simply by visiting google.com/analytics or by clicking on the “Analytics” tab within AdWords.

I have been using Google Analytics for quite a while now and have to say I like many of the data-rich features available and the very well deigned (in the most part) UI. The ability to share the accounts with my clients has also come in very handy.

The one warning I would give people new to Google Analytics is that, being a javascript based system, it doesn’t give you any information on server errors. Keeping an eye on the server logs form time to time is a wise move to spot any server-related issues.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Need WebStats? Google Analytics goes free for all!

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The dataset contained 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. While we all knew the importance of the top 3 positions in the Google SERPs, this analysis further reinforces that fact:

SERP Click Through Rate of Top 10 SERP Positions

Interestingly, the #1 SERP position recieves 42.3% of all clickthroughs. The #2 position only accounts for 11.92% of all clickthroughs – almost 72% less clickthroughs than the top position in the SERPs. Attaining the #1 position for your keywords/phrases results in nearly 4 times more traffic than that of your nearest rival – now that’s a serious difference in both traffic and potential revenue.

A #3 placement in the SERPs results in a 8.44% clickthrough rate, almost 30% less than the #2 and over 80% less than the top position on the first results page.

As we move down the page the rate of decline in clickthrough also falls. Notice that a #10 position in the SERPs receives slightly more clickthroughs than #9. This is most probably related to users glancing at the final listing as they scroll to the page navigation:

Image showing the SERP Click Through Rates of #11, #20, #21, #31, #41

Moving off the first SERP the rate of decline in clickthrough picks up considerably. The clickthrough rate for listings with #11 rank dropped to 0.66%. That’s an almost 80% decline in clickthroughs from the #10 SERP position and shows that being on the first SERP page results in far greater SE traffic than lower listings.

Google SERP Click Through Rates – The Raw Numbers

Click Through Rates of Google SERPs based on AOL-data.tgz

Here’s the same table in image format:

SERP Click Through Rates of Google SERPs based on AOL-data.tgz

The volume of clickthroughs for lower SERPs is so trivial that for all but the highest volume search terms these positions will generally yield little or no benefit to site owners (obviously some niches will prove to be exceptional).

The main message from the AOL data is that page 1 SERP is where the real action lies and #1 positions reign supreme.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: SERP Click Through Rate of Google Search Results – AOL-data.tgz – Want to Know How Many Clicks The #1 Google Position Gets?

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AOL Search Database (currently under heavy load)

and (IMO) a more superior site:

DontDelete (new domain so you may have to access via 63.212.167.185)

I am currently indexing the entire dataset myself (2.1GB of search goodness) and hope to bring you some Irish related queries from the data in the next day or two.

[UPDATE]

Michael Duz has created this tool for calculating the increase in traffic from higher SERP positions which you might find handy.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: On-line Tools for Searching the AOL Data

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According to this post AOL released, and very, very promptly removed, the entire search records of 500,000 users collected over a three month period.

Apart from the obvious privacy concerns (most likely the reason for the removal), this data represents a unique opportunity to research the what people search for and the iterative approach they take within their searches. You can see the initial search patterns people use and how they refine those search patterns to find the results they want.

Interesting also because, to the best of my knowledge, AOL search repackages Google’s Search so in essence this is really Google data (Google also recently announced its intention to release 30GB of word/phrase data).

From the ReadMe.txt :

This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months.

The data set includes {AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL}.
AnonID – an anonymous user ID number.
Query – the query issued by the user, case shifted with
most punctuation removed.
QueryTime – the time at which the query was submitted for search.
ItemRank – if the user clicked on a search result, the rank of the
item on which they clicked is listed.
ClickURL – if the user clicked on a search result, the domain portion of
the URL in the clicked result is listed.

Each line in the data represents one of two types of events:
1. A query that was NOT followed by the user clicking on a result item.
2. A click through on an item in the result list returned from a query.

Normalized queries:
36,389,567 lines of data
21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
7,887,022 requests for “next page” of results
19,442,629 user click-through events
16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
657,426 unique user ID’s

And this being the wonderful Internet, the 439MB compressed file is still floating around with the filename AOL-data.tgz. Here are some mirrors I know of:

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?…BB5BE

http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….01.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….02.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….03.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….04.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….05.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….06.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….07.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….08.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….09.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….10.txt.gz

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: AOL Release (and quickly remove) Search Records of 0.5m Users

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And some discussion about algorithms, updates and how Google PageRank is constantly updating (as opposed to Toolbar Pagerank which is updated only every so often): Session 8: Google Terminology

Again one or two interesting tidbits.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: More Matt Cutts Video Blogs

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I use Analytics for all my projects and having more profiles per account means less logging in and logging out

Now all I have to do is figure out a way to consolidate these accounts without losing historic data

Great news all the same!

[EDIT] Google Analytics has responded that currently there is no way to consolidate account

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Analytics Expands

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