eMarketing Trends|Verbal Acrobatics & Graphic Gymnastics

It has been rumoured by many and mentioned by Google since late last year that the speed of a website is a very important factor. It should come as no surprise then, that Google made the official announcement that they are including a new signal into their search ranking algorithms: site speed.

Simply put, site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to a web request. The speed of a website (time that it takes to load) is very important, to all Internet users and specifically, site owners.

Google says that their users place a lot of value in speed and after doing some internal studies they have found that if they slow users down [on Google.com] thay have seen less engagement. They have come to the conclusion that users love fast sites and that a faster web is a good thing for everyone.

Faster sites create happy users, improves user experience and reduces operating costs. If a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

This is enough motivation for Google and why site speed is taken into account in search rankings.

How does Google measures page speed?
There are two primary ways Google will measure page speed:

1. How a page responds to Googlebot
2. Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar

Tools for you to test your site’s speed
If you are a site owner or webmaster, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.
• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

According to Google, site speed is a new signal and it does not carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. They are saying that currently there are fewer than 1% of search queries affected by the site speed signal and that the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com.

Your site may, or may not, be affected, but it is widely suggested that you start looking at your site’s speed to improve your ranking in search engines and improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Sources:
Using site speed in web search ranking
It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

Images are important elements in any website as they can be used for various purposes such as delivering a visual attraction, relaying a specific message, used for branding or enhancing the feel of a brand. Images, in general, are used to illustrate what we are saying and it is used commonly on millions of websites to help people understand what they see or read. Without images, the Web would be a very bland experience.

That of course is great when people stumble onto your website and have the opportunity to see it, but what can you do to get your images onto the Web?

Most of you have heard of Image SEO, optimizing images by adding an alternative image desciption and by giving images keyword related filenames, etc. That is certainly the way to go, but as of yesterday, Google is making it even easier for us to inform them of the images that we think are important.

Google announced that you can now use a Sitemaps extension to provide Google with exactly this information. By using the Sitemaps extension you can, for each URL you list in your Sitemap, add additional information about important images that exist on that page. Sitemaps are an invaluable resource for search engines as it can be used to highlight important content on a site and allow search crawlers to quickly discover it.

To add your image URL’s, it won’t be required to create a new Sitemap, you just add information about images to the Sitemap you already use. Follow the instructions in the Webmaster Tools Help Center or refer to the following example:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:image=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>

Now you can check in quickly, from anywhere, and monitor what is happening in your Adwords account. Google just rolled out AdWords for Mobile with a new interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices.

AdWords for Mobile provides mobile access to your account, key alerts and statistics as well as a facility to make quick changes to your AdWords settings even while on the move.

You have to customize your experience for your mobile device. To do this you should first log in from your desktop computer and choose the parts of your account that you want to monitor closely. You are able to set up custom alerts for key account events such as when your campaing reaches a certain threshold of your daily budget or to monitor when traffic drops significantly.  You can also set “saved filters” to flag your most important keywords and campaigns.

The interface was designed to access the essentials in your account by viewing and making basic edits to campaigns and keywords. If you need access any other areas of your account then you can switch to the desktop version of AdWords through a link at the bottom of the screen.

AdWords for Mobile is now the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English language advertisers, and Google will be enabling the feature for additional advertisers and languages in the coming weeks.

To try out AdWords for Mobile immediately, simply direct your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre to http://adwords.google.com/dashboard/Dashboard

Today I am deliberately taking a lighter approach to blogging with a collection of my ‘5 Funniest SEO Cartoons’.

I know what you are thinking – and the answer is Yes!! I am lazy to write a blog that some of you may not have time to thoroughly read through. Besides, like Mani Karthik says, “SEO is not always serious stuff you know” (I also took the liberty of adding a short explanation to the terms in each cartoon: For my non-SEO folk). Enjoy

Happy Birthday

Keywords and phrases strategically placed and crafted into your website can significantly boost your ratings in search engine results

Rankings

SEO is no longer about ranking anymore. The significance of ranking has disappeared with the use of personalized search, universal search, real-time search and local search in the SERP’s. Search Optimisers are crazy about this factor, often worrying about drop in their rankings for competitive keywords.

Changed Algorithm

Search engines like Google are frequently changing their ‘algorithms’ that can help your site rank number 1 for targeted keywords. Just imagine there was an algorithm to get to heaven?! – a constantly changing one at that.

No Follow

Basically the No-Follow attribute instructs the search engines how they should value a particular link, in this case not to index the link.

Socialitis

Not only Search Engine Optimisers suffer from “Socialitis” – addicted to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr).

Click here to see more SEO cartoons. Props Mani Karthik for insipiring this blog with his blog post.

Website traffic analysis tools have been around for a long time, used by webmasters, site owners and marketing individuals to try and make sense of what visitors do on any given website. Online trends demanded a change from analytics tools which traditionally only gave you the numbers of visitors that ended up on your site, where they came from, how many views a page received, and so on. The latest analytical technology not only gives you those visitor totals but also goes into further detail enabling you to analyze, and hopefully understand, how visitors engage online and how users interact with your site, offering ways for you to benchmark your site against others.

The challenge however still remains in understanding the data and identifying trends. This is never easy and requires a learning curve for most, therefore, the best strategy is that you plan ahead and think about what it is that you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it, before you slap a bit of analytics code onto your site. Once you have a full grasp of these goals you can easily execute a strategy into both your site and any Analytics tool that will allow you to track and monitor how your site visitors respond.

Your target market

Before you start implementing analytics to your site, it is important to know your target market. These are the people you want to reach; those you either want to talk to or sell your products to. Not only do you need to know who your target market is, where they are and how to reach them, but you also need to define means to engage with them and provide timely information to them.

1. The first step is to attract them to your site, so, plan your marketing efforts to reach these potential customers in every possible way you can. There are many ways of doing online marketing but your money will be well spent if you start with a proper strategy built upon the knowledge you’ve gained from researching your target market.
2. The second step once you’ve attracted visitors to your website is to keep them coming back for more, or at least, make them stay a while. This requires that your site talks to them in the right way. Use content that is fresh and engages the visitor. Offer your visitors ways of sharing and interacting with and through your site.
3. The third (and crucial) step is how you set up and use Analytics to ultimately verify whether your efforts have reached your target market and whether they are enjoying the content that you are showing them on your site.

Where is your site traffic coming from?

Visits to your site will be a direct result of your marketing efforts and how well you “advertise” yourself online. By analyzing your site’s web traffic via analytics, you will know, and learn, exactly how successful your marketing efforts have been. You can track traffic by source (organic search, paid search, referral links or direct visits) and dissect individual pages to see how people discover, engage and enjoy your site, or not. Depending on your analysis, you will know when to cut the fat from your marketing plan and focus on the most strategic and productive campaigns or add to them when you see you are spread too thinly.

What is happening on your site compared to what you expected to happen?

If you are not seeing what you expected in terms of increased traffic to your site through a specific marketing channel, then you need to adjust and make changes where necessary for that channel. If you see a good number of new visitors to the site but fail to retain them then you will need to look at making changes in terms of design, navigation, structure or content.

Only by looking at the analytical data can you see where the potential pitfalls are. You should know how people navigate your site, where they spend their time, what they do and how long they stay around. You should know whether you are talking to the right kind of people and giving them what they are looking for.

One important thing to remember is that you should be making changes on a “trial-and-error” basis. If something you tried does not work, scrap it completely and try something else. Eventually you will find something your visitors will enjoy.

You might also discover that visitors may respond in different ways and that it may not necessarily be the way you thought it would happen, therefore be prepared to revisit your original goals and change your strategy so that you can make the necessary changes to your site and how you track it in Analytics.

What trends do you see?

The Web is constantly changing, what worked last year may not work this year. By tracking your site traffic, you will be able to see trends as they unfold: trends in who is coming to your site, how they are interacting with it, what they want and how they buy for example. You will be able to respond proactively to changing patterns, rather than reactively scrambling to fix a situation after it has become a major problem.

Be sure to always look at historical analytics data over longer periods of time and not just the recent data. In some cases trends are easier to spot when you look at a longer timeline but this may depend on the marketing channel and the timelines associated with it.

Are people interacting with your site?

This ties in closely with the overall strategy and purpose of your site as well as Usability and Accessibility issues. Are visitors visiting because of the great content or is it because they want to find out more about that specific product? Whatever the reason, they should easily be able to find the content or the product they are looking for and do something with it (…complete the site goals).

You should allow your visitors to make informed decisions right there and then by giving them the tools to engage through that content or product. If you provide content, allow the visitors to print it, PDF it, email it, store it, share it or bookmark it. If you sell products, make sure the visitor can see a demo, test the product, buy it, share it or comment on it.

It is essential to provide your visitor with the correct tools and for you to track those tools to see what visitors are doing once arriving on any page. Set up some goals or track events via your analytics tool to see what your site visitors like doing while they are on your site. This way you can see whether the tools that you’ve provided are of interest and whether they are able to easily use it. This also creates a platform for you to communicate with your visitors and learn from them.

All of the above may help you to identify any problems your site visitors may be encountering while spending time on site. And that information can help you significantly improve their user experience and your sales.

In conclusion

If you are serious about using your web site as a tool for business, it is absolutely essential that you define your goals first, implement the correct strategy to both your site and Analytics in order to track your site traffic and make informed decisions. The bottom line is this: you can make wise decisions for your business by tracking the right metrics, but if you start out wrong, you will end in failure. Make absolutely sure that you target the right market, that your goals are clear, that your strategy is sound and that you have executed it into all the right places. This should make it easier for you to then track in analytics, but if you incorrectly implemented or you are tracking the wrong metrics, you will make the wrong decisions.

The growth in the Mobile Industry over the last decade has made it paramount for all businesses to have Mobile Sites in order to reach this growing new target market.

Current local (South Africa) trends show that:

• There are ten million mobile Internet users in SA (Five million PC Internet users in SA)
• One in six Google searches in SA originates off a mobile device.
• In South Africa about 40 percent of mobile phone users have WAP-enabled phones.
• The top Mobile Applications currently in South Africa are: Mxit – with 15 million+ users – and Facebook.
• Mobile search and eCommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.

In short, this indicates an importance for businesses to target mobile searchers and users of mobile applications.

Some of the best Mobile Site examples I can give include BBC, the Goal mobi site, and College Humour (N/B: “these examples obviously look better on your mobile phone – feel free to suggest your favourite mobile sites below“).

However, when creating a Mobile Site it is also imperative to build and optimise the Mobile Sites so it is user-friendly and accessible on the Mobile Web.

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices
When designing a Mobile Site one aspect to consider is that one must understand that mobile searchers/users are different from PC searchers/users. In order to cater for Mobile users designers must:

• Provide an elegant experience by considering whether individuals possess a smart phone (for example an iPhone with fully featured web browsing) or a standard mobile phone (with stripped site features).
• Consider that phones are not used like PC’s – users are usually on the go therefore the site should be more goal oriented – Relevancy and Simplicity is key.
• Mobile designs are to conform to the new W3C standards in order to create mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS).
• Mobile Sites must be small, lightweight and fast-loading site – (< 20kb / page).
• Consider User Agent Detection –  this is another form of transcoding which takes into consideration the type of mobile phone an individual uses to search and provides more uniform browsing experience for various device types.

Once the Mobile Site has been built, Mobile SEO steps can now come into play. These include:

1.    Validating the page with the .Mobi Validator or the W3C Validator
2.    Following ‘traditional’ on-site  SEO Best Practices such as:

• Major keywords in the title tagging
• H1’s and body text
• Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
• Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

3.    Mobile Search results tend to reflect ‘Local Search results’ – your site must be optimized for local type searches. Also submit your business info to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in sites like Google’s Local Business Center.
4.    Get the Mobile Site spidered and indexed – submit to major search engines:

• Google Sitemaps
• Yahoo! Submit Your Mobile Site

In short, the above Mobile Design and SEO factors are to be strongly considered when building a Mobile Site. These aspects help provide a solid Mobile Site foundation for your Mobile Campaign or Strategy. For further Mobile Campaign or Strategy enquiries, visit our Virtuosa website.

Its official there is a new big dog in the social media space. Just a week after Google launched Buzz, the social media service is already rattling the cage of top dogs Facebook and Twitter. It seems as if Google has finally made a successful foray into the social media world. Despite initial privacy flaws Google Buzz has proven to be an absolute success.

Google Buzz has surprised many experts who thought Google would never make it in the social media world. In the past Google suffered embarrassing setbacks with their attempts at creating a rival to Facebook and Twitter. Google Friend Connect and Orkut never really left the ground but Google Buzz shot into outer space.

The growth of the newest challenger to the social media crown has been phenomenal. According to statistics released by Google, just after the launch on the 9th of February 2010, there have been over 9 million posts and comments in about 56 hours, amounting to around 160,000 posts and comments per hour.

Google Buzz also generated big shock waves in mobile phone market. Google revealed that over 200 mobile check-ins per minute, nearly 300,000 mobile check-ins per day. The key to this success is the fact that Google Buzz is embedded into Gmail.

Gmail has millions of users around the world and by putting the Google buzz tab just under the inbox tab; Google applied a very innovative idea. When a user logs into their Gmail account they are greeted by a Google Buzz tab. The system is almost similar to Twitter the greatest difference is its integration to Gmail.

Many Gmail users find the system very convenient, when they open their e-mail account, they can quickly read the newest mail and won’t have to leave the account to create a social media post. Twitter, Flicker, Picasa and Google Reader can also be connected to the system. You can share pictures but this will be saved at Picasa. The most convenient aspect of Google buzz is that you don’t have to set it up if you have a Gmail account.

Key Features

• Simple interface
• No set up required
• Social media integration
• E-mail integration

Initially there were major privacy concerns. The system had an auto follow function where a user automatically followed people he regularly sent e-mails to. According to Ben Parr Co-Editor of Mashable “the auto follow function can let people figure out your email habits.” Google has changed this to an auto suggested model. This allows you to control who you follow. Another concern is that your inbox can be flooded by Buzz spam.

There are clear indications that Google Buzz is already taking some market share from Twitter and Facebook. People are spending more time on their Gmail accounts than before and this is surely taking some time from Twitter and Facebook. The Buzz threatens Twitter and Facebook’s ad revenue. Advertisers are certain to be impressed with the reach that Google Buzz has.

The future of Google Buzz will depend on how it is going to react to upgrades by the two social media giants. Some predict there is going to be a major dog fight between the three networks. If this fight gets very intense Google buzz will be the last network standing. Google has immense resources and will be able to match any upgrade. Google has been salivating for some time now at the prospect of properly sinking its teeth into the social media world. It has shown great determination at penetrating the social media realm overcoming numerous setbacks. Like a hungry dog biting into a bone it won’t let go of its new grip on social media.

Chris Crum from Web Pro News covers the topic of how the search industry is constantly changing and how SEO’s and businesses must adapt to this change.

SEOs know that adaptation and ongoing education are crucial. The problem is that businesses don’t always understand just how much the search landscape actually does change. This can present a whole different set of challenges for both the small business and the professional SEO.

In the following Video, Searching for Profit founder Amanda Watlington recently discussed some arising trends in the search industry and how understanding the changing search landscape is of vital importance.

Chris continues to cover some of the things Amanda mention in the video and ends by saying that if you are the client of an SEO or a business trying to get things done yourself, don’t stay hung up on old tactics that might be outdated. Here are things you should keep in mind:

• Site Speed (it’s going to matter, so don’t ignore it…here are some things to consider)
• Personalized Search (Not everyone is going to see the same Google results)
• Universal Search (Showing up here requires attention to different indexes)
• Real-Tme Search (look for more evolution in this area)
• Changes in Local (there are frequently tweaks made by Google here)
• Some things do stay the same (things like reputable links will always be in style)
• Most importantly, stay informed (just keep up with the latest in industry developments)

I recently wrote an article for our November Newsletter and thought to make a mention of it before most of us go on leave for the Christmas Holidays.

What Influences The SEO Landscape Today? talks about how quickly our online world has changed and the role that SEO still plays. If you are finding it hard to stay ahead and don’t know too much about how Social Media is integrated these days, then I suggest you have a read. Enjoy.

Congratulations to two of our team members, Kerry-Leigh Stevens and Mangosuthu Malinga, who succesfully passed the Google Adwords Professionals (GAP) exam.

As specialists in online strategy and e-marketing, Virtuosa recognises the need to provide credibility and we are proud to say that Virtuosa is now an Accredited Adwords Company – this means that we are officially qualified by Google to advertise online.

What this means for Virtuosa clients:

• Clients are assured of receiving expert PPC services from qualified Google Adwords Professionals;
• With more than one Adwords Professional in the Virtuosa team, clients are guaranteed of even better creative ideas for online business strategy;
• Virtuosa receives insights into future Google developments which allow us to understand and timeously implement trends effectively;
• Virtuosa will have access to Google beta testing of new tools to understand and participate in the development;
• Virtuosa has direct communications with the Google International team as well as exclusive previews of new product launches;
• Virtuosa has access to Google Market Intelligence on best practice within various industries that we operate within

Find out more about Virtuosa’s Paid Search Marketing services.