Every morning, I take the tube to go to work, and I usually always keep a look on the advertising inside the trains. This is purely OFFline marketing and I realized that finally, more & more people are using vanity Urls to track the impact of their offline campaign. I found 2 different ads which I think are interesting to review (sorry for the quality - it’s taken with a 1.5 megapixel mobile phone camera).

SpareRoom (www.spareroom.co.uk)

and Paypal (www.paypal.co.uk)

Let’s look in details now

Spareroom

Creative: I’m not a very visual person, and I have to be honnest with you and admit that I actually saw the message “What would you do with a year’s free rent” only when I was uploading the pic on my computer. (it’s a cut a little on the right - sorry for that). I’m not a big fan of the creative but I have bad taste for this. I doubt that everyone saw the message (I did not at all).

Incentive: In pink, it “explains” the marvellous incentive with a year’s free rent to win (wow cool). I have not seen the big hidden message but the message is pretty clear in that very tiny pink square. Don’t you guys realize that we are on the Tube, usually sat probably 2 meters away from the ad????? The pink square is the Key of the Ad and this is the information which should be used to attract the eyes. Have you heard about “Call to Action”?

Vanity Url: This one is interesting: Have you not realized that a lot of advertising on the tube are using vanity urls just adding “/tube” after their domain name? If there is no incentive to visit that specific url, why would a visitor would add those 5 characters when they reach their browser? A lot of advertisers are using it, but do not create a real incentive to use the url advertised. Spareroom have a real incentive here: there is value added for the prospect to remember that SPECIFIC url. Maybe, the url could have been elaborated a bit more with a simple “/FreeRent”, allthough TUBE is a very easy word to remember.

I typed the url http://www.spareroom.co.uk/tube. The landing page seems to be good. However, I’m very surprised that it actually does not redirect to another page. The big advantage of the vanity url is that you can advertise one url which will 301 redirect to a new url with all the tracking parameters you ideally need.

They did not do aything like that.

To conclude about spareroom, I would have done things completely different and instead of “creating” something trendy, I would have gone straight to the point. The incentive is the key of the Ad. A simple  “Win a year’s free of Rent - Visit SpareRoom.co.uk/FreeRent”. BLAM, big message, straight to the point, no “chichi” or creative blah blah. You got the outcome in 1 second and as someone interesting to not pay rent for a year, I’ll probaly have a look next time I reach a computer.

Let’s have a look at Paypal now:

Creative: One more time, I’m not a creative person so I won’t tell you if it looks good or not. However, I can tell if I get the message quickly, and this is very clear what Paypal is about on this ad. Very informative and persuasive ad in my opinion.

Incentive: “£10,000 a week!” highlighted in yellow. Great incentive (wow I can earn a lot of money). We can actually see the incentive. The quality of the pic is not good but we can still read the message, which means we can read it from our seat in the train. This is the point.

Vanity Url: I like it a lot too. www.paypal.co.uk/win10k is a good url to advertise. It pushes the prospects to specifically remember that Url. It is very good.

Regarding Paypal, I don’t have much to say, I just think it’s good work.

Conclusion

Here are 5 rules for good practice for promoting your service and track impact of your advertising in the tube:

1. Large characters - We are minimum 2 meters away from the ad.
2. CALL TO ACTION!!!!!
3. Highlight the important information.
4. Vanity Url easy to remember.
5. Must have an incentive so the user type the full vanity url.

If you think of other rules to apply, and have different opinions regarding the above advertisement, please share on the comments.

Web Analytics, advertising advertising on tube, tracking tube advertising, tube advertising, vanity url, Web Analytics

Apparently there was some big changes in the Google Algorithme recently. I wrote a post months ago about how to use the nofollow attribute for internal linking (PR sculpting): be aware that this is apparently changing and the use of NoFollow internally does not seem to be advised or accepted by Google.

See below a pic from SEOmoz which explains in details what is now changing:

This is a very good explanation from Seomoz. They also explained that 3% of the links on the web are NoFollow, and this could have a drastic change on the web. I’m not entirely sure for this one, as most of the NoFollow links are used for external linking in my opinion.

I also recommend this excellent post from Searchengineland.com which also explained this case.

SEO, news internal linking, matt cutts, nofollow, pr sculpting, SEO, seomoz

This was the online marketing buzz of the week. Gocompare has been blacklisted from the search engine result pages…. again? Yes, again! It has happened last year already in January 2008. They were at the top for “car insurance”, which is a crazy competitive keyword, but Google finally found out the huuuge paid links campaigns they were operating. That’s why they were blacklisted from search engine result page.

It has happened again this week, apparently the 22nd April. They are not blacklisted though as they are still showing on SERPs. However, they are so low in rankings that the impact is as close as if they were blacklisted. It seems that the penalty is a “minus 60 positions” as they are hitting the position 57 at the moment for their own brand name. I would not like to be the SEO agency OR the one dealing the SEO in house.

So why are they so heavily penalised again? That’s what the buzz is about as NOBODY really knows what is going on. Have they been paying for links still? Have they tried sneaky, black hat stuffs? I’m not entirely sure.

James at Coast Digital had an original opinion about that buzz : isn’t it a lINKBAITING OPERATION? I think this is a really interesting idea, as the whole online marketing community has been talking/tweeting/blogging about that since yesterday. This has actually produced great inbound links from authoritative blogs to gocompare.com. If this is the case, the person who came up with the is an incredible genius creative master of the world, and should be given an award just for this operation.

I’m personnaly suspicious and I’m convinced this is a penalty from Google, and not a calculated operation. Indeed, Gocompare.com is having a massive TV campaigns at the moment, and they are not showing for their brand term on organic results (they are still on Adwords though). If someone  see the commercial today, go to Google and type in “gocompare”, look what they find today!

GoCompare is associated with the word PENALTY or even CONSPIRACY. I really doubt this will have an amazing impact on the brand. I actually think this is a disaster, considering the money they spend on TV. The share of people who would google the brand name instead of typing the Url in the browser will really have to click fast on the Adword at the top for not seeing the world Penalty attributed to GoCompare.com.

Anyway, this has been an interesting buzz, and I’m hoping that Matt Cutts will communicate soon on this.

SEO, news blacklisted, gocompare, google penalty, matt cutts, paid links, SEO

I went accross a french blog post some weeks ago on SEO analytics with Google Analytics, which is in my opinion one the biggest bomb I read regarding a Google Analytcs technique in the last 6 months. I decided to translate that post on my blog to tell you about it, and share this secret with the english speaking community.

As most of us know, this is impossible to track search engine bots with GA as the tool get data through Javascript tags and the only way to track bots is with Log files. Those 2 french guys found a solution, which will give you the opportunity to see on Google Analytics, which Spiders visited your site, and which pages they crawled!

You first need to create a new profile within your Google Analytics account. The profile has to be for a new domain (see below). You can give to the profile the name you want although ROBOTS.yoursite.com is in my opinion a good way to keep things clear within your GA account.

You then need to download this folder, which contains 3 PHP file, and change 3 small things within the config.php file which are:

• Adding the Google Analytics ID of the profile you have just created.
• Adding you domain name
• Adding the Hash of your domain, which you can find looking at the value of your _utma cookie on your website (see pic below).

The next step is to include the analytics file (downloaded earlier, and with the changes made) in the source code of your website (the header is the most appropriate location in my opinion).

<?php include_once( dirname(__FILE__).’/analytics.php’); ?>

That’s it! That is the only thing to do. I manage to implement this in 30 minutes, without having strong technical experience. The Outcome is very interesting, as you can then see which bots visited your website.

When you click on the bot name, you will be able to see which pages have been crawled by this specific spider.

And finally, if you click in one of the page, you will be able to see which machine visited it (IP).

I’m not the real author of this post, so please visit the real guys who made it, and give them some nice deserved comments. Web analytics blog AND SEO blog.

Google Analytics, SEO GA, GA implementation, Google Analytics, SEO

We have been seeing in the last 2 years something called latent semantic index (LSI), used by search engines. So, what is it exactly? Here is a quick definition:LSI gives the possibility to search engines (especially Google), to associate keywords between them, like a human brain would do. For example we might associate milk with the color white, a ferrari with the color red. That’s exactly what search egines are now doing and learning: the keyword Ferrari will be associated with sports car, speed, red, and expensive keywords, and this is key to take this in consideration when you create content, and also when you build your website.

Let’s make a step backward, and remember how search engines used to give credit to a page some years ago.

Your page had to target one expression, and there was an old trick called Keyword stuffing, which relied on BOMBARDING your page with your targeted keyword or expression. If I want my page to rank well for the expression “tennis shoes”, this keyword would have taken most of the content and therefore this would have make spiders believe that the page was HIGHLY RELEVANT for this specific expression. This practice has worked some time however pages looked rubish as it was repeating the same keywords.

Focusing on quality, Google came up with the Keyword density filter to fight against this. If the density of your main KW was above a certain rate, it was considered as spammy for Google, and therefore your page was not showing on Google anymore. This was a big step in filtering fake content, but this was not enough as you could just put any text in your page and put your targeted keywords randomly in the page… Google needed something else to be sure they are showing only qualified content for their users. And that’s how LSI came up. The whole idea is based on making association between keywords, and index them using those associations.

So now, how can you take advantage of it? Let’s take again the Ferrari example. If you want to create an article about the last Ferrari model, you should use every related keywords in your page: Here is a small list: Speed, F440, F480, red, Porsche, Lamborghini, and the list is long… Now, if you think of this, a genuine article about the last Ferrari model SHOULD CONTAIN THOSE KEYWORDS and this clearly helps Google to decide the quality of an article.

Article writing is not the only area in SEO where LSI is applicable. Indeed, you can define the whole structure of your website using that mindset. The different categories and sub categories should be created with LSI in mind, and how those categories are associate with each other. It’s the same with Internal/External linking. LSI changed the SEO rules making the industry more mature (that’s my opinion).

One of the rule which changed recently is actually the way to optimize the HTML Title and H1 tag on a page. 2 years ago, it was adviced that both should match exactly the keywords you’re targeting (being almost the same). It is different today, and the SEO industry recommand to have use synonyms and variations between those 2 tags, rather than using the same keyword or expression.

I embedded below a slideshow explaining a bit more on details what LSI is, and how we can use it for a website optimization.

SEO Latent Semantic Optimization, LSI, LSI Copywriting, SEO

Quick reminder: NoFollow is an HTML attribute used for hyperlinks on a page. The link remains a text link but Google Spider won’t follow them, or won’t give credit to that link for rankings (the link juice is not passed). Google has set up this originally to fight against spam. Indeed, links from comments on blogs or any other websites are now NoFollow, as people were abusing of it for having quick and cheap backlinks for their website. Wordpress automatically have Nofollow links now.

However, if you don’t like the idea of Nofollow, you can still install a DoFollow plugin for Wordpress.

I like Nofollow for another reason: it gives you the possibility to sculpt the Pagerank on your website. There are some pages on our websites, we don’t especially want spiders to visit. Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, Recruitment, and all other corporate pages (most of the time on the footer), should all be NoFollow. Indeed, there is no real use to pass link juice of those pages. We better keep/save the pagerank for the important pages.

Another way to optimize your website with NoFollow, is with the “Home” link which should be on every page of your website. “Home” is a very bad anchor text, and therefore you should change it OR, you could add another link on every page with a rich anchor text this time (a breadscrumb is ideal for that situation). If you do so, you MUST NoFollow the “Home” link. That way, Google would only take in consideration the new link with the bad ass anchor text.

Another way to use NoFollow: Spiders don’t like pagination. If you have pagination with hundreds of pages, chances are that Spiders won’t visit all of them AND there is no real value to have all those pages receiving link juice anyway. One more time, we want to save that link juice.  So I recommend keeping the first 2 pages (if not only the first) as normal, and adding the NoFollow attribute to every other pages.

I’m not a big fan of NoFollow for external linking. Links on blog comments should be accountable for SEO rankings, as they are most of the time (when not spam) a really authoritative source.  Some webmasters unable NoFollow so their comments with plugins.

However, there are ways to manage NoFollow in our advantage for internal linking.

SEO link juice nofollow, nofollow, nofollow links, pagerank nofollow, SEO, seo on site

I have seen many websites built by friends of mine who were starting their businesses. I have also worked on several internet companies, and I always differ myself from the way people make decisions for those websites at the start.

Here is my point: I believe that design and appearance of one website should NOT be decided by us. Indeed, whose is that design for? It’s for the visitors, and our consumers! Don’t you think they should be the one to decide the way the website look then?

Most of the time, when people start an internet business, they allocate a big part of the budget in “design”, neglecting a budget for advertising the website itself (PR, SEO,…) . I think this is a huge mistake here, and 90% of people still does that .

Why is that a mistake? Well, Design does not generate traffic. So why would you spend so much money in this when you need traffic more than anything else.

Here are my points:

• A good design is important for a website, I know, but it does not generate traffic and then sales, and therefore should not be a priority at start. The first priority when you start a website is to generate traffic, and prepare your site to be search engine friendly as having your website friendly from the beginning is key factor for success, in the long term. Your design should be only enough for not pushing visitors away.
• After a few months running your website, you should start having a decent traffic coming from different marketing channels. This is at that time only, that design will become important because your traffic will give you the opportunity to test different design, and then keep the most converting one. Test different design? Google website optimizer is great tool for A/B testing and multivariate testing of landing pages. Keeping the most converting design or appearance of your pages will increase the number of sales of your website without spending an extra penny in advertising. That is how things should work.
• So now, have you noticed that we are not deciding the design in that process, but the visitors do? That is why we should not decide the design. I actually think that because we are running the business, we should be the last people to decide for our customers. Being user centric is simply taking our customers opinion in consideration, and therefore taking our thoughts out of the game.

When you start a website, those are the 3 steps to follow:

1. Generate Traffic
2. Test different designs
3. Keep the most converting design.

That’s All! And don’t give priority to design when you start your website!

Web Analytics design, SEO, Web Analytics

Title Tags

This is just a post on how to manage the <title>title tag</title> on each page. As most of you probably know, this is the first, and maybe the most important criteria on your page. It clearly tells Google which keywords you are targeting on each page. Although there are no standards in SEO, I will tell you some rules to follow for your Title Tag.

• You keyword must show the keywords you are targeting per page (very obvious though, but sometimes important to remind). Indeed, I have worked for a client recently who had the same title within 80% of the pages on his website. They are a big company, and a lot of business, but their SEO was just a nightmare. Each title on your website must be unique!

• The first keyword is the most important.So the first keyword or expression has to be THE ONE specific to that page.

• You title tag must be AT LEAST 65 characters. Why? Because your title tag are the keywords showing in the search result page. Google takes the first 65 characters of your title and use it as the headlines for you rankings, so we need to use ALL that space.

• Ideally, a title should be between 10 and 14 keywords and repeat your most important keyword or expression twice (not more or you could be considered as spammy. 14 keywords is a lot so use it for also targeting different variations of your keywords.

• Because the title tag appeared on Search Results, we can use it for a branding operation. Indeed, you can decide to put the name of your company in the beginning of your title, so anytime a page of your website is shown on SERP, you will be also showing the name of your company. You can do this when you start a website, however I advised to change that once there is brand awareness, and put the name of the company at the end of your title.

• On your website, your homepage should have the most generic keywords in the title tag, and deeper you are on the website, more specific the keywords should be.

Those are the 6 points for the Title Tag. If you follow those rules, that means you started your SEO criterias on page very well

Meta Tags Optimization

So now, as the title tag optimization tips is told, I decided to dedicate a few lines on meta description and meta keywords. Some people might think this is useless, because search engines do not “consider” those anymore: well I disagree with that, there are still search engines considering it (Google, Yahoo and MSN are not the only ones!), and there are other reasons I will mention later.

The Meta Keywords: In the past those were massively abused by webmasters, that’s why Google are not really considering it. However, I use the meta keywords for misspells. This is the only place where you can actually optimized your website for misspells. Indeed, this not appropriate tu use those words in a Title Tag or on your page (this would look unprofessional), that’s why meta keywords are a great place to put any misspells or variations of your keywords, as simple as visitors can’t see it.

The Meta Description: Like the meta keywords, spamming meta description with keywords was the first Black Hat SEO practice. That’s why major search engines have taken off those from the criterias of their algorythm. There might be no impact on search engine anymore, but it still have an impact in your traffic from search engine. Indeed, the meta descrition are the 2 lines showing below the Title Tag on SERP. Like the 2nd and 3rd line in your PPC ad text, the meta description (if written properly) will have a direct impact in the Click Through Rate of your page.

The standards for meta description optimization are as follow:

• The meta descrition has to contain at least 140 caracters. This is the number of caracters showing on SERP, so USE IT to sell your page. If you have less than 90 caracters, you’ll only have one line as descrition of your page in SERP.
• Use targeted keywords and expressions, as much as you can WITHOUT being spammy. Google highlights keywords in the meta description, when they match with the search query from the searcher. The more you’re ad is highlighted, better will be your click through rate.
• Use variations! Your targeted keywords must have synonyms, and meta descriptions is a great place to use them. Don’t use misspells here, as it will be showing on Google (that would look really unprofessionnal!).
• It has to be catchy! You MUST consider the meta description as an AD TEXT for your page.

That’s all for the Meta Tags. Don’t neglect them! They can make the difference sometimes, especially the meta description. You could be number 4 on SERP for a specific keyword, and get more clicks than the number 3, just because your meta description is more appealing!

SEO meta descrition, meta keywords, meta tags, SEO, seo on page, serp, title tag

I wrote the following post for an assignment in my Web Analytics certification. We had to answer 2 questions whire are as follow.

Am I willing to give up my “privacy” in order to have easier-to-use websites?

I believe that first party cookies are a brilliant way, to improve our user experience on the web. I’m a big fan of Amazon when I reach the homepage, MY HOMEPAGE, referring me to other books related to those I bought in the past. To answer the question, I’m willing to give up my privacy for a better user experience on websites, which imply only first party cookies. I think everybody here agree with that.

I’m fine with first party cookie, but I do not want a company whom I’m a client, to sell my data to a third-party (even non-personal data). Companies are obliged to let us know and give us the choice of the use they could do of our data because of the Data Law Protection. On Internet, companies actually let us know with the privacy policy page. I read that Swatch.com sells non-personal data to aCerno (company like DoubleClick). Here is a sentence from Swatch Privacy Policy Page:

“We may share non-personal, non-individual statistics or demographic information in aggregate form with our marketing partners, advertisers or other third-parties for research purposes.”

They respect the law because they tell us through that page. Now, I’m asking you… Do you regularly check the privacy policy of websites you’re visiting? I bet less than 1% of Swatch.com visitors are aware that their data are sold to an advertising platform.This topic actually leads to the second question:

Am I willing to give up my “privacy” so that the ads I see on websites are likely to be more relevant to me?

The issue of online privacy goes a lot further than cookies. To illustrate this, I would like to talk about Doubleclick which merger with Google. That is really controversial. Let’s recapitulate to understand:

What does Google do? It tracks all our searches, and stores them per IP address (almost nominative/name/identification information). They also track websites we are visiting through Google Analytics now, as they own the data (check their terms and conditions for Google Analytics, article 8.3 ). FYI, Google has ranked “worst company” for user privacy in 2007(also here). What does Doubleclick do? It serves ads on thousands of websites using their DART system (Dynamic Advertising Reporting & Targeting) through one cookie on almost each computer, with a number assigned to each user/profile. DoubleClick had planned in the past to link user data with data names and identification!! Can you imagine the information on consumers Doubleclick and Google could have after combination of their data? This combination would (will?) make them even more controversial. Three privacy groups had filed a complaint last year regarding those issues.

I believe behavioral marketing have proved to be very effective and companies just want to know AS MUCH AS they can about us now to serve us the most appropriate advertising. Those companies know who we are, more than our own mother. They know what we search for, our interests, our fears, and serve ads related to this in order to target effectively. And those information could almost be with identification. That’s what Google/Doubleclick polemic is about. A poll in January 2006 actually tells that most users are unaware that search engine collect their personally identifiable data. So now, am I willing to give up my privacy for a better advertising on pages I visit? I think I would actually, that’s my CHOICE. The Data Protection Law relies on giving people the choice, the problem is that people just don’t know. I believe that the key here, again, is to visibly empower visitors with the option to opt-out. I’m giving you the option: here is a page where you can opt-out from every third-party cookies from doubleclick-like companies. It also shows you which ad network actually have a cookie on your computer already (I had 11 out of 22). I’m curious to know how many you had

Web Analytics cookie, DART, doubleclick, google, internet privacy, online privacy

Just a quick reminder for the neophytes, there are 3 big families of criterias to work on in SEO:

• Criterias On Page (Keywords on your page)
• Criterias on Site (The structure of your website - internal linking)
• Criterias Off Site (External linking)

This post will talk about criterias on site. I had observed many websites, and the criterias on Site are always the most neglected ones. That’s a shame because it’s key factor for success to have a search engine friendly structure (almost as important as external linking). With a good structure, Google spiders will crawl your website EASILY, and that is the aim of a good structure.

So how do we make spiders crawling EASILY our website? We feed them with links! Spiders follow links and this is how they find our pages. The faster they find all our pages, the better it is for our rankings.

I have invented a small rule to test your website yourself :  “The 3-clicks Rule”.

Definition: “Whatever the page you are on, you must be able to reach any other page on your website in 3 clicks or less.” It’s an easy rule to understand but is a real challenge to follow for big websites, considering that having too many links on 1 page is not advised and not optimal for SEO.

After trying to apply this rule, you’ll understand how important the organization of your website is. Segmenting your products catalog by categories and sub-categories is therefore primordial for a decent structure. For example, breadscrumb are more than welcome on your website, as they give a very good navigation for spiders.

The 3-clicks rule is very good to follow for Google Spiders, but ALSO for users! If you succeed in following this rule, your criterias on site are well respected.

SEO 3 clicks rule, google spiders, internal linking, SEO, seo on site, web crawling, website structure