The Adido Digital Blog

Four useful links from the #mozinar on 05/02/10

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:47:00 +0000

We were lucky enough to take part in the latest SEOMozinar yesterday looking more at how analytics data (and in particular Google Analytics) can be used to improve SEO. I was expecting to get some tips and tricks on how to use the data directly to help tweak rankings but rightly the seminar looked at analysing your traffic and breaking it down into segments to help understand what traffic converts best and how to tie up your data to your SEO rankings. All in all it was a great talk we'll be looking forward to more in the future (although we feel Rand needs to look more into the benchmarking tool...)

Numerous things were mentioned in the talk and on the online chat and I've taken the liberty of posting four links which I felt were worth sharing to help improve your analytics analysis.

Exporting over 500 rows from Google Analytics to Excel
When it comes to analysing big amounts of data from popular websites with decent amounts of traffic, you might need to export more than 500 rows of data. Thankfully analytics works from querystring parameters so if you want to get more data then its pretty easy.

Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics past page one
The guys at Distilled came up with a way to track your Google ranking clicks in Google Anlaytics (something which we originally started doing a year or two ago) This is great data to get your hands on to identify opportunities of rankings that are driving traffic but are out of sight to the majority of most searchers. (around 75% of people don't go past page one!). Give it a spin!

Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics (the best way)
This is the holy grail article that you need if you're serious about viewing your rankings and traffic in one place using Google Analytics. By setting up this in GA you can get to see data about the page someone clicked on in Google and the phrase that they clicked on as well. This improves knowledge of conversions, traffic and rankings in one place which makes life a lot easier for anyone doing SEO.

Plugin for Excel to get Google Analytics data
I'd not seen this before but it looks like a pretty useful tool to help analyse analytics data for those who are confident with Excel. Getting to the root of your SEO problem sometimes isn't that obvious from looking at the graphs you get and by having the ability to play around with the raw data in this way, you can find out more about how successful your SEO efforts are. Worth checking out.

There were lots of great ideas shared by the SEOMoz team and we're really excited about applying them to our clients sites in the coming weeks to get better visibility of the work we're doing and how to improve our SEO efforts.

If any other attendees of the mozinar had any links to share, please feel free to add them.

Google introduces Twitter Results

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Haddon) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:06:00 +0000

After the initial announcement from Bing that they would be introducing Twitter results to its search engine results, Google were quick to follow with the same breaking news.

The announcement was coined as to be Twitter’s saviour with the multi-billion dollar deal meaning that Twitter seems to be around for the long haul. Google launched the Twitter search result function on the 8th of December 2009 which was followed by a lot of interest and hype, especially within the online marketing and particularly the SEO industry. Google stated that they;

“believed search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data”

And now six weeks down the line it is interesting to see whether this statement is still relevant and whether the integration has been seen as beneficial.

So how will the Twitter integration be useful to users?

With Google often being the first turning point for most Internet users when they are searching for something. The integration of this relatively new and somewhat niche technology could cause confusion for most average users.

Google has changed continually since its launch and most notably in recent years with the Universal search to integrate images, maps, product listings, videos and news to name just a few, but have always kept a simple clean interface. Will this new focus on real time results prove to be too much for the ‘average Joe’?

Despite these reservations many believed that as the Twitter results will only be displayed when the search term deems them to be applicable (and ‘enhancing’ to the results), this integration will be more of a help than a hindrance. Twitter results are shown in searches where real time information might be more useful than historical results, such as for up to date information on breaking news, sport, weather conditions and possibly traffic updates.

With Bing we have seen the implementation of a tweet only search page whereas Google has chosen to integrate relevant tweets into the first results page within their own self contained box.

The placement of this box often differs with the search query and it is possible that this is attributed to;

1. Relevance of live feeds to search query
2. How recent the tweets are
3. Activity – a subject highly tweeted on in a short amount of time.

Although after searching term’s which I thought would bring up results with Twitter integration such as; today’s weather, road conditions, the word Twitter itself, SEO, ‘Twitter and Google integration’ and around ten more, my Google page was void of any real time Twitter results.

After going to Twitter and searching for one of today’s trending subjects then searching for it on Google, low and behold the mysterious tweet search box appeared. It seems strange that Google would only want to show tweet results that are already trending and prevalent on Twitter itself. Surely it could be said that those that would be interested in the integrated tweet results would be those that had tweeted them or been aware of the Twitter trends in the first place?

And why not show tweet results on other subjects or even on the subject of the Google and Twitter integration itself? Perhaps it is because it has happened in the past. It also seems that Google has scaled back how many search terms use live stream tweets since the launch, where even the search term ‘lights’ was resulting in a tweet box. This would suggest that even Google isn’t sure about the best way to use this data yet and they themselves are experimenting with different ways of implementing this integration to get the best end result for their users.

Google, Twitter and SEO – a happy friendship?

Short of Google creating their own live stream network, without this partnership with Twitter it could be argued that Google would have been left in the dust of Bing in the real time search world (ok possibly somewhat of an exaggeration there!). With advances in the huge adoption of social networks for both networking and socialising and Google’s failed attempts at being a part of this (despite purchasing Jaiku and internally developing Orkut), it seems that this partnership with Twitter is beneficial for both the Internet giants and not just, as suggested, in securing Twitters place in the online world.

So how can we use this for SEO?

Well if your search term has a tweet box you’re in luck. And if your tweet shows, it is a sure fire way to get a quick ranking, but for how long and at what value? It may be argued that as of yet the value of tweets ranking in Google for SEO purposes are minimal and cannot be measured and that with a rolling tweet box in which tweets change constantly the value if any may not be worthwhile. Whether Google ranks tweets like this in the future remains to be seen.

Google ranking factors for twitter

The integration of Twitter and Google has set many tongues wagging in the SEO industry. Here are just some possible factors that could be affecting ranking of tweets:

1) Reputable followers
2) Unique Content – Beware the ‘hashtag’, it’s possible these could be viewed as spam
3) Ratio between followed and following
4) Fresh Content – Regular and prominent tweeters
5) ‘Domain’ age – age of Twitter account
6) Experts – consistency throughout Twitter account and Tweets
7) Re-tweets – amount of re-tweets an account has received

These factors have been adapted from those that many SEO’s will be familiar with and implement to achieve normal Google rankings, but as with these, only time will tell how important ranking tweets will be within SEO and whether the factors suggested above could aid in getting your tweet to show.

If you’ve got any thoughts, please share them with us below.

When is the best time to invest in SEO?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:04:00 +0000

Image credit: paraorkut

To get the best from your SEO investment, timing is crucial. The thrill for most SEOs is seeing month's worth of hard effort paying off and getting to the top of rankings ideally when the search volume peaks. SEO is a bit like surfing in this respect. To get the best results, you have to put a lot of mostly manual effort preparing things and doing the same things over and over before you can enjoy the benefits. Unlike surfing however, if you get your SEO right, the fruits of your labour can last for months and years (and actually improve), rather than finishing in a heap like the gentleman pictured above probably did.

There is still a misconception about SEO with some business owners who still think that you can get to the top of Google overnight. While this is a trend which is starting to change, and despite our best efforts, we still experience a good amount of comments along the lines of 'we are expecting to see results in the next few weeks'.

Indeed, speaking to some business owners recently in some industries there is still a general consensus that just building a website will instantly start to generate leads every day! Unsurprisingly these industries are hardly cutting edge...

However, for those that are looking to get better results in the search engine results pages on the holy left hand side of the results, you can't afford to wait. If you ask any reputable SEO company about how long results will take to achieve most will tell you that it can take anything from week to years, depending on many factors (up to 400 according to Google). These factors will include many things such as;

How competitive your industry is
How much traffic there is on the phrases you are targeting
How good your competitor websites are
How old your website address is (domain name)
How well you've maintained your website over the years (frequency of updates)
How well built your website is (are their technical things harming your rankings?)
How well written the content is (does it use the words you want to rank for in the content?)
How many links point to your website
How many internal links there are between each page
and many, MANY more...

So if it takes months to get good rankings and there are dozens of things to fix to get your website liked by Google, when is the best time to invest and start fixing the problems?

Well, the easy answer is always NOW. If you can fix things with your website to help improve your ranking now then it is only going to work in your favour. However, this isn't always possible due to budgets, resources and skills. If these are in short supply then a more considered approach will be needed. Rather than spending on SEO when budget is available it makes sense to time a good SEO campaign with your searchers. To help find out when the searchers are searching there are a few free tools which can be used.

The first is to use Google Insights. If you've not used it before, it is a really powerful tool to help you see what happens in your industry from a search point of view.

The insights tool allows you to compare multiple variables against each other and to build up a great picture of the micro and macro detail of your market. One of the best things about the tool is that you can see graphically where the peaks in your market are. If you know your market well then perhaps this might not be very surprising but in some cases you might see some unexpected highs of traffic.

In the frivolous example above, we can see Pink Floyd had a spike of interest back in 2005 due to their appearance at Live8. Interest and searches for The Beatles increased at the end of last year when they released The Beatles Rock Band.

In your industry you may find that there is an overall increase in traffic or perhaps even a decrease due to the recession. If you need to get more of an idea about what's happening and how the market is working overall in your industry, this is a great place to start.

The second tool to use is Google Adwords keywords tool. In the same way Google Insights can show you about trends in your industry, Google Adwords keywords tool can help show you which months are busiest for your target phrases. You can use the keywords tool for free and play around with various phrases as you wish.

One of the big things you'll miss if you just use the tool when it loads is Search Volume trend. Use the drop down below as shown above and then click on the relevant option to show it on the table. Using the same phrases as above, you can see that last year, the Beatles had a big amount of searches in September as the insights tool showed us. The key thing about this tool however, is that it gives us numbers instead of graphs. We can use these numbers to try to predict rough traffic estimates for our SEO purposes. We can also sort these columns by clicking on them to get a comparison of various phrases for traffic.

If we can see here that a phrase has had a good amount of traffic in the last few months and has a peak in six months time of X no of searches, then we need to start thinking NOW about how to capitalise on this. Starting work a few weeks before the peak seasons starts is not going to give Google and the other search engines enough time to see your website in a positive light and push you up the rankings.

So if you can't afford to invest in SEO on an ongoing basis, perhaps these tools will be able to help you plan out when to start spending your budget and when to speak to a digital marketing agency to get your house in order.

Quick & dirty brand monitoring using Google Alerts

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:32:00 +0000

I've done several presentations in the last few months on my usual subjects of SEO, PPC and social media which have gone down very well. These talks have ignited many peoples imaginations (not my words I must add!) to think differently about how they view their websites & online activity. Where I've had time, I've also discussed the subject of online brand reputation management, a growing issue for many businesses. Just the mention that it is possible has excited many people and when I've given advice on how to do it, it's sparked many more conversations.

With more and more people using social media in the UK and with web 2.0 sites being used more than ever before (where the user controls the conversation, not the website owner) it makes sense to keep an eye on what is being said about your brand and company online.

Monitoring your brand online is potentially a never ending job. But using some free Google tools, it can make your life a whole lot easier. If you're interested in finding out what is being said about your brand online, and have 10 minutes spare, I've outlined a step by step process below which should allow you to do just this. What have you got to lose? Potentially a lot if people are talking about your brand in the wrong way.

Note: There are many ways to do this, this is just what I believe to be the quickest to set up and most convenient way of keeping an eye on what is going on.

1. Go to Google.co.uk/ig
Like 90% of searchers in the UK, I prefer to use Google. If you didn't already know, Google allows you to personalise your own home page to be whatever you want it to be. To get to it, go to www.google.co.uk/ig

2. Get logged in on Google.co.uk/ig
If you've already got a Google account (you'll probably have one if you have a gmail.com or googlemail.com email address), then log in to your account. Otherwise click on the 'Sign In' link as shown below.

This will take you to a new page where you need to click 'Create an account now'

Fill in the form which creates your account and make sure that you leave 'Stay signed in' checked to on. When you're done, press 'I accept. Create an account'.

When you've done this, you'll get an email from Google as well as being logged into your new Google home page. You'll need to click a link which comes in the email to verify your account to allow your Google home page to work correctly.

3. Set Google.co.uk/ig as your home page
Rather than having to remember to check your Google home page each day to see if anything new has been added, it is alot easier to change your browser home page to be your default home page. Google home page is just the same as normal Google but with a few more bells and whistles added. Doing this will make make it alot easier to see what's going on, trust me. To do this in a newer version of IE, press 'Alt' on your keyboard which will show the menu bar. Then click Tools > Internet Options. If you're using Firefox, go to Tools > Options to get a very similar screen.

In the first box which shows up, enter www.google.co.uk/ig instead of whatever you have there currently and press OK. This means that whenever you click home on your browser from now on (or use the ALT + HOME buttons on your keyboard) you'll see your Google home page.

4. Adding Google alerts to your home page
Now that you've got a personalised page and have it set as your home page, you now need to add some alerts to the page so that you can see any brand mentions easily and quickly.

First thing to do is go to Google.co.uk/ig and click 'See your page' which will show your own page. This is the page which is now yours and that you'll be changing very soon. Google adds a variety of widgets to your page by default which you can delete or remove as necessary.

Now do a Google search for 'alerts'.

The first link (unsurprisingly) is Google Alerts. Click on the link to go to the alerts set up page.

If you are not logged in already, then you'll need to click on the link at the top and click 'Sign In'. When you created your Google account earlier, you would've received an email from them with a link to activate your account, which you need to have clicked to be able to sign in and make this process work.

Once signed in, enter the phrase that you want to monitor in the first box. In our example, we want to know what people are saying about our brand name, Adido, so we enter it into the box. Note, you can only enter and monitor one phrase at a time so if you want to check multiple phrases then you will need to repeat this process several times.

As we want to get this feed showing directly on our home page, we need to change the 'Deliver to' field to Feed.

Once we're happy with the feed settings, we press 'Create Alert' which will then generate the feed that we want to monitor. It will add it to the alert management centre which lists all of the alerts that have been set up in the past.

If you've just set up your first one, this list will look short so it'll be easy to find the one you've set up. What you need to get now is the feed data. Click on the 'Feed' link which will then show a long list of code, some of which might already mention the phrase you want to monitor (as shown here)

You need to tell Google home page about the feed that you've just created. To do this, click in the address bar and right click and press Copy. This will copy the unique address of the feed for you need.

Next, go back to your Google home page by clicking your home button on your browser or going to Google.co.uk/ig. On the right hand side about a third of the way down you'll see an 'Add stuff' link which you need to click.

Welcome to Google gadget world. This page lists thousands of different widgets or gadgets (or whatever you want to call them) that you can add to your home page to make your life easier. You can play around with this later, but for now, you need to go to the bottom left and click on the 'Add feed or gadget' button.

When you click on this, a larger box will appear which is where Google asks you to add your feed. Hopefully you've done nothing since copying the link so it works ok. In this box you can right click and press Paste which will put the feed your created and copied into the box. Press 'Add' and Google will then verify the feed that you've added and after a few seconds will come back with a tick to show that it liked it and that it is now added to your home page! Success!

Now go back to your Google home page and you'll see that a new widget/gadget has been added listing any mentions that Google has picked up about your targeted search term. Superb!

If your feed has been added but has no content listed, then it means that Google hasn't picked up anything recently. Don't worry, it can take some time (up to several days) for your feed to pick up content up so be patient, it will appear! If you want to see more than the three listings shown here, you can click on the small drop down box on the right hand side of the pale blue bar shown above and change the settings to be how you'd like them.

That's it! You've now got Google telling you about things it knows which match the search phrase you want to monior. If you want to know more, go through the same steps and you'll be able to build up a list of phrases to monitor quickly and easily.

What do you do with this data? If people are talking about your brand online then you should try and interact with them. Normally comments on blog and forums allow links to be posted which can come back to your website. The more links pointing to your website, the better and this will, over a longish period of time (most likely months), improve your rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Why not go further and pick up on anything relevant to your industry and comment on it? This will help build your name outside of your immediate network of contacts.

This tool is really, really helpful. We recently discovered a couple of potentially huge issues relating to the Adido brand using Google Alerts which we have taken action on. If we didn't have this set up we wouldn't have found them and we probably would be none the wiser to what people were doing with our brand. More on this in due course...

Any questions or problems, please leave a comment.

More Google Adwords spam emails - BEWARE!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:24:00 +0000

Considering that Google Adwords is the biggest pay per click advertising platform in the world, it is surprising that there aren't more spam emails being sent out trying to get unsuspecting advertisers to click on phishing websites to get login details of advertisers.

We've recently received several of these Google Adwords phishing emails so felt it was our duty to make more people aware of them so that they can be avoided. Here are just a couple the latest one that we've received.

PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINKS IF YOU RECEIVE THEM!

---------------------------------------------
hello dear customer,

You have a new alert from AdWords Alerts
Please use the link below to login:
http://www.adlwevordsx.com/Selects/Login/static/index.html?ref=77493138827

Advertise and Grow your business with Adwords

Yours truly ,
Google AdWords Team ©2009

---------------------------------------------

Here is another email we received asking us to enter our Google Adwords details to another spam/phishing website.

We hope that buy publishing these spam emails that people don't fall into the trap of clicking the link and falling foul of the spammers. We feel that unfortunately some people must click at some point otherwise the spammers wouldn't be so persistent. If you know of anyone who advertises on Google Adwords, why not tell them about these emails as well?

We've read a variety of stats on the open rates of spam emails ranging from 0.0001% through to up to 23%. Given the cost of sending an email is virtually zero, whether open rates are as low as 0.0001% or not it still makes it a worthwhile activity for the spammers to make money, albeit illegally.

Don't fall into the trap!

Please leave any questions that you have below.

Google Analytics with RBS WorldPay - Technical Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:36:00 +0000

On the 25th November, WorldPay changed their system, no doubt for security reasons and not just to irritate the web community but doing so did cause a few problems.

Basically, they disabled javascript from running on their servers. There's a page, the NotificationURL, which you create on the web site's server but that is pulled through by WorldPay, some tags replaced and then rendered from their server. We used to put the GA code here but alas, this is no longer possible.

So... you need a workaround. Now personally, I would work around it by not using WorldPay at all but sometimes these decisions aren't ours to make. Our first step was to do what any self respecting developer would do -> Google it.

I found this article:

http://www.tatvic.com/blog/google-analytics-worldpay-ecommerce-tracking/

Its actually very good and we used it as the principle behind fixing the problem but our implementation was a little different.
Mainly:
1) They use forms to post variables whereas we build up a querystring and redirect
2) They use... ugh.... PHP! :) We use ASP.NET.

My advice would be to read the article above first, admire the pretty pictures, understand the principle, try not to feel queezy at the PHP code or the occasional poor English and then come back here to see how to do it in our world.

.....

.....

Welcome back.

OK so hopefully by now you get the idea. We're wanting to modify the last page before we go off to RBS WorldPay so that we push the GA cookies through the transaction process. Then on completion, we retrieve those cookies and send them back to Google to be tracked.

Step 1: Send the GA Cookies to World Pay

Put javascript like this at the bottom of the page before the user is taken to WorldPay's Payment Page.

Presumably you don't need telling that the UA-XXXXXXX-X needs to be replaced with your own Google Analytics Tracking number and that the domain name needs changing.

The _getLinkerUrl parameter is the URL of the page that the customer comes back to after being to WorldPay. Being that WorldPay doesn't auto-redirect the customer back to your website, you may not have had a page for this before so create paymentComplete.aspx. If you did have one already, just put the URL to that in here instead.

You may also need to change this line
var aPosition = save_url.indexOf("&");

The point of save_url is to have all of the GA cookies in the returned querystring. After you call __getLinkerUrl, it will be set to something like:
...sitedomain.com/paymentComplete.aspx?key=value&__utma=XXXX__utmb=XXX

In our case, we are already passing key=value so we're looking for the first & (highlighted) so that the substring only includes the GA stuff. If you don't have a querystring, you would search for ? instead, if you have multiple of your own querystring parameters, well then I'm afraid you need to write a little more javascript.

The other important thing in that javascript is:

document.getElementById('<%=hfGoogleData.ClientID%>').value = save_url.substring(aPosition + 1);

This is referring to a ASP.NET Hidden Field control that we've added to the page, just put this line somewhere near the javascript.

<asp:HiddenField ID="hfGoogleData" runat="server" />

All we have to do now is on the Submit to WorldPay button, grab the contents of that hidden field and pass it to WorldPay.

Thankfully WorldPay provide a useful feature whereby you can pass any custom variables and they will happily carry them and pass them back. You don't need to define them anywhere in WorldPay's system, the only criteria is that they start with MC_. This is our Submit to WorldPay button code.

Private Sub lnkPlaceOrder_Click(ByVal sender as Object, ByVal e as System.Web.UI.ImageClickEvent Args) Handles lnkPlaceOrder.Click
CreateOrder()
Response.Redirect(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("WorldPayTargetUrl") & "&MC_analytics" & HttpUtility.UrlEncode(hfGoogleData.Value.ToString))
End Sub

The only really important detail here is that you must URL encode the value in the hidden field as it itself is a querystring and we want it to pass as one parameter not several.

Step 2: Get the Customer Back

The NotificationURL is the one that WorldPay pulls off your server and processes, its defined in your Production settings in your RBS WorldPay account. If you had GA code in there before, take it out, all you really need here is a button that reads something like "Click Here to Complete".
Herein lies the weakness of this implementation, if they don't click this button then you'll never get the customer to come back to the site and therefore will not get your tracking data!! So.. make the button look important!!

Key thing to remember here is to UrlDecode the returned (posted) parameter from WorldPay, for example:

<a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/12onku/adido/~http://www.yourdomain.com/paymentComplete.aspx?key=value&<%=HttpUtility.UrlDecode(Request.Form("MC_analytics"))%>">CLICK HERE TO COMPLETE</a>

Step 3: Track It

If you're fixing an old problem, your old code was probably in the NotificationURL page so you just need to move it here instead but here's an example of what should be on this page other than a nice message saying
"Thank you for coming back so we could track your every move, much appreciated!"
You may wish to alter the wording.

Step 4: Test It

Put an order through and then sit back, have a nap and wait to see whether your GA tracking ever comes through.

Hope you found this blog useful.

Happy coding.

Ross Coombes
Technical Director

Why web designers should think like Simon Cowell

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

(Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex Features - Guardian)

If you asked ten people to look at a website and say if they liked it or not, you'd probably get a wide variety of responses from 'Hate it' to 'That looks good!'.

What is one persons Jedward, is another persons Leona (it pains me to use an X factor comparison but hey). There are very few areas of the Internet which provoke such emotion and talking points as web design and how a website should (or perhaps shouldn't) look.

I've been in many meetings with MDs and marketing managers of companies telling us how their websites should look and how it should be one way or another. In a large majority of instances, it is the case that they know their markets better than anyone and therefore have the ideas on how their website should look to get the best results.

But in some cases recently, we have seen that what is perhaps viewed as a bad website or something which looks old, boring or out of date actually outperforms websites which are cared for and have much attention & money spent on them. Some people might look at a website and say the design is rubbish. It's fine to have an opinion but if the person making the comment isn't part of the target market, how much value should you put on their opinion? By the way when we say outperform, we are talking about online sales and/or online enquiries which in 99% of cases is the most important measurable, not visits or even worse 'hits'.

How do we know this? Website statistics. An often overlooked part of the web design and build process (especially in our experience for smaller digital agencies) is the analysis of statistics. They help us to understand what works from a traffic perspective and also from a user point of view. Whilst some packages such as Google Analytics do an amazing job of telling us what is going on at a top level, they still lack detail at the individual (but there are ways to find this out).

What Google Analytics, and in particular, Website Optimiser, allow us to do is test out our theories on the design side of things to see what works best for each client. What we believe to be the 'best' design often isn't the best for the market. What we prefer and assume will work best, often wont. Ideally we should let ~~the public~~ our target market decide for us.

(Image from Political Carnival)

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no 'best' design and you shouldn't be thinking there is. There are now many tools available which allow us to test and tweak versions of web pages to try and find the most profitable or successful version a page. We shouldn't be stuck with our own prejudices and accept them as being the best, we should let website visitors decide for us. Perhaps if more of us thought like Simon Cowell (heaven forbid!) and let our own audience decide for us, in the way the public votes for their favourite X factor contestant, our websites might get better results.

Comments? Leave them below...

8 digital predictions for 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:19:00 +0000

With the end of the year in sight, our attentions start to wonder to what the future will hold in 2010 online. The rate of change in the industry in 2009 was unrelenting with many new platforms coming to prominence and being considered for business use.

So what will be the key issue facing the digital marketing in 2010? Well, we've put our heads together and have come up with eight predictions that we think will be top of the digital agenda next year.

1. Video will become more widely used on websites
You could argue that video arrived in 2009. YouTube is now the second biggest search engine in the UK (even bigger than Yahoo! and Bing) so the demand for video content is most certainly there. However, in the main, most businesses have yet to make video work for them, especially on their own websites or to build their brand. Video is one of the best ways of getting people to find out more about your business and to communicate with them in a much easier and faster way than text. We expect there to be more demand for video services in 2010.

2. Twitter, Twitter everywhere
Yes, we aren't sticking our necks out with this one, but if it's possible we think that Twitter will continue to grow even more in 2010. 2008 saw huge surges in usage in the UK, and 2009 continued this pace at a startling rate of knots.

However, if you asked the average person on the street if they have a Twitter account, the response would probably still be no. The typical profile of a Twitterer (if that's what they are called) is still unknown but from recent research is likely to be Female and aged in her mid 20's. Despite the near mass hysteria at points in the media about the usage of Twitter, it still hasn't 'tipped' and become a true mass market platform.

Our prediction is that 2010 will be the year when Twitter grows up and gets near to the usage levels of Facebook which is the de facto for social networking in the UK. Now that Twitter seems to have finally figured out how it will make money, and it has a partnerships with Google & Bing, it could be a good year for the business. Whether the hype will be justified remains to be seen, because we've seen in the past that what is todays Internet darling, could end up becoming a footnote in history alongside other sites such as Friends Reunited.

3. Real time search is here
According to Moores law, the power of technology doubles in speed every 18 months. In the early days of the Internet, search engine spiders crawled the web and pulled data back into its data centres for analysis in what at the time seemed like a blink of an eye. A real time web wasn't possible due to the technological issues of the time (slow connection speeds, lack of people online, web publishing barriers etc). However, the speed at which the web now moves means we have now come along way since those early days back in the late 1990's.

Users have become more demanding in their needs online and as a result need information faster than ever before. Thanks to the likes of Twitter and other social platforms, information exchange has sped up and is now near real time (where people are now 'lifestreaming'). Users can swap information with their friends whenever convenient at any time of the day and as a result expect the same from their search engines.

Bing and Google have both recently done deals with Twitter to integrate 'Tweets' into their search results to bring real time information to searchers and although the fruits of this integration have yet to be seen, it is expected that real time search will be very prominent in the search results pages (SERPs) in 2010. If ever there was a reason to start up a Twitter account, the need to be part of the real time web could be the most convincing argument yet.

4. Personalisation and behavioural targeting will increase
Thanks in part to social networking sites, more and more information about users is now being captured about you and what you do. Got a Google account or Google home page? Google knows what you search for and the context of your searches. Got a social media account with Facebook? You've probably entered enough information about you and your details to allow advertisers to target you.

Privacy online is still a huge issue but advetisers are already finding ways to use the data available to them to serve up the best adverts they can using behavioural and personalised advertising. By knowing more about users, advertisers can pin point the people they show their adverts to and as a result see better returns on their online investment. Makes sense so why isn't everyone else doing it? At the moment there is still along way to go before these systems and platforms are robust enough to get enough of the advertising dollars and pounds. 2010 should be the year that these form of digital marketing finally realise their potential thanks to better information sharing and more sophisticated systems in place.

5. The end of last click wins?
If you've ever used Google Analytics to anywhere near its potential, then you would have set up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking on your website. If you've not done this for your website, then you NEED to start. By monitoring when conversions, or events that are important to your business happen, you get to find out more about what is working online and what isn't.

While this information can be a true revelation to your digital marketing efforts and help shape campaigns to maximise the returns achieved from budgets, it doesn't tell the whole story.

The industry standard for website analytics packages (such as Google Analytics) is 'last click wins'. This means the conversion you record, is attributed to the last click that generated it. Sort of makes sense, I guess. If someone makes an enquiry then surely it was that visit which was the most important one?

Well, not really. Imagine if you ran a shop an attributed success purchases through your till because people said they saw your banner outside. What if the only reason they were near your shop was because they heard about saw an advert somewhere else first? Wouldn't that be important to know?

Consider this journey of a typical online buyer (from econsultancy.com in 2008!)

The last click model only tells one version of the story when it comes to online conversions. Many more tools are now available which help to attribute online success to all visits to your website and help understand more about the typical customer journey your buyers will take before converting. By understanding this we can make better use of budgets and increase the chances of success in the shorter and longer term. We expect there to be big growth around this subject in the digital marketing industry which will then filter through to end clients throughout the year.

6. Augmented reality - a reality?
When it comes to mobile, 2009 may well be remembered as the year of the App. When iPhone launched its app store in 2008 it was launched as way of making additional revenue for Apple as well as building a community around the product. In the last year or so hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for numerous needs from the ridiculous to the now sublime.

Part of a growing trend of apps has been to build extra layers of information on top of the world that we see. This use of digital data applied to the real world has lead to the development of what is known as augmented reality; applications which look to enhance our day to day lives as much as possible by combining digital data with the real world. An example is shown below;

While many of the apps which have been developed have yet to take off in a big way, we think that 2010 will be the year when the technology will finally reach the mass market. You only have to look at applications like Layar (which allow other developers to build on their platform) to see the potential of what can be achieved.

7. Brand: Me
We've already had several differing views on what we like to call Brand:me ranging from 'I'm not sure I want me to be famous online, I'm happy being normal!' through to those who are determined to make themselves the most famous person of their industry.

The growth of individuals as brands has been accelerated thanks to the low cost and high targeting of Internet communications. The only investment you need to make is your time, rather than your money.

The difference between those that succeed and those that don't isn't that great. If you've got a famous face from TV such as James Caan (image credit LondonSpeakerBureau), then it's obviously a lot easier. James, seems to be putting his face to many companies at the moment to help build them, his brand and longer term his already large bank balance.

If like most of us you're not on TV then getting everyone you know to add you as a contact on LinkedIn or Facebook isn't that hard and it is most defnitely the first place to start if you are going to go social for your personal brand. However, after this initial boost of followers or fans has been exploited the hard work begins and it takes a bit more strategic thinking to work in the long term.

We expect to see many more personal brands being launched and pushed online next year. If you're thinking of starting, there are many places to get help from a speaking to a great digital marketing agency (shameless plug) to viewing some of the great presentations on Slideshare.

8. Website owners will realise that all content is important
We've discussed the omnipresence of Google in most of our online activities many times before, but the one thing which is pivotal in their continued dominance of search is their advancement in all areas of content. The roll out of universal search has been pretty successful thus far. Universal search is where Google brings in other content such as video, maps, product listings, news, blogs, images and anything else which it things is useful to the searcher. An example is shown below;

As yet, most low volume searches don't have anything else showing for their listings apart from map listings. We expect this to change as Google continues its Universal search roll out to all search results pages as its technology gets better and more consistent. Smart website owners will already know about universal search and have started acting already, but for those who are slightly behind the game, this will become a bigger issue.

If you've got any other predictions of how the digital market will go in 2010, please let us know in the comments.

Short and long term tactics to get more sales from Google

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:31:00 +0000

For many website owners wanting to get more sales from Google, many different approaches can be taken. Quite often the assumption is that SEO is the only way to go. After all, everyone clicks on the left hand side of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page)?

While all of the research which has been conducted seems to point to 'Yes', there are still many ways that Google can deliver qualified traffic to your website without having to wait weeks or months. Having given talks to thousands of people over the last year, many of these new features and tools are often underused, if known about at all (as mentioned on SEOptimise recently)

In a recent talk I gave, I outlined some of the ways that Google can be used for short term and long term gain for improving online sales. For everyone who reads this blog, I've outlined them below :)

Using Google for short term results
With the run up to Christmas, many website owners are looking to cash in while the UK starts to spend their pounds online. Last year online sales went up 15% compared to 2007, and this year will only be bigger. Here are some quick wins, that can be used to get sales quickly.

Google Adwords (PPC)

Setting up a Google Adwords campaign can be achieved in under an hour. Creating an account and entering your advert and target phrases you want your website to appear for is pretty straightforward. Google has made it easy for even novices to start their own advertising and now have the biggest advertising platform on the Internet. Create your campaign and within an hour, visitor will be on your website. You can't get more instant than that!

A word of warning though. While it is certainly quick to get started on Adwords, it isn't necessarily easy. Choosing the right key phrases to target can be a bit of a minefield, let alone creating your adverts and selecting your landing pages. We recommend that anyone trying this for the first time should either speak to a Google Adwords Professional or at least watch some of the Adwords learning centre videos before you start spending your pounds.

Google Base
If you are an ecommerce website owner, then this one is for you. Google Base or Google Shopping (or Google Product search) is a very powerful yet underused way to get quick sales.

Google Base is a repositiory of product information which has been loaded onto their databases by website owners / advertisers. To start create an account with Google Base and then upload an XML file of all of your product information such as sizes, features and of course price to your account. Once this information has been uploaded and verfied, your products can be listed in the Google Product search within a day and you will then start to appear in the listings which attract millions of searches each day. It's then up to you to improve your product listings as much as possible to get them noticed in front of your competitors.

Using Google for long term results
Once you've covered off the short term wins and have maximised their results to get more sales or enquiries online, there are several things that you should look to cover off as part of your longer term strategy. Quite often the investment which needs to be made in your long term strategy is time. If you don't have the time yourself, or can't afford to pay for someone elses time, then your chances of success are minimal.

Assuming you do have the time, here are some of the best things to concentrate on.

SEO
When it comes to Google, achieving high rankings on the 'free' (or organic) listings is the holy grail. Most of search engine users click on the left hand side of results (6 out of 7 users click on these listings before clicking on the PPC ads according to Jupiter research) and around 71% of users trust these results more when compared to the paid (Adwords) listings.

To get high rankings on the phrases that you want your website to appear for will always take a significant amount of time. To get high rankings can take anything from a month or two to over a year of experienced SEO effort, depending on the industry you are in, the phrases you want to target and the quality of your current website.

In very basic terms, the websites which rank highest on the free listings have the following things associated with them;

High 'trust' with Google (this can come from the domain name /age as well as many other things)
Good number of regular updates made to the website content
High quality content on website
A high number and quality of links pointing to your website

These things take time to build up and can not be achieved over night (if they are Google will get suspicious!). Google and other search engines monitor a majority of websites online today and are able to see how much effort has been put into a website against this and their own check lists (Google has over 200 factors it considers when ranking a page).

Google Local
As part of Googles mission to ~~take over the Internet and all forms of advertising~~ organise the worlds information, they have invested a good amount of time putting together the Local Business Centre to allow small businesses to advertise their company on their target phrases (e.g. web design bournemouth).

The local business centre can be easily set up once you have completed the registration forms and verified your listing using one their very cool automated facilities (we recommend going for the phone verification option).

Although quick to set up and activate, the time lag getting your company listed in the results is notorious. Due to the (still) mystery over how the maps and local business centre work, there isn't a massive amount that can be done to improve this time lag so it is a matter of sit and wait before your rankings appear and you start to see results. The wait can sometimes be very well worth it though. We have seen businesses drive thousands of pounds of orders using these listings.

Blogger
The Google owned blogging platform (which we use incidentally) Blogger allows anyone to create their own blog for free. Like most Google services, you can create your own account by filling in a few forms and once completed, your blog is born.

Blogs are great for sharing knowledge and expertise (like this one :) and also helping with the SEO effort by allowing content to be published with minimal effort and cost.

Of all Google marketing techniques mentioned here though, this is probably the longest term method you can use to get results. Putting effort into your blog to create new content each week is a manual task which can sometimes take hours. In addition to this you need to tell people about your blog. This is best achieved by getting involved with your industry community online. Guest blogging, posting comments on other blogs, participating in forums and using social media tools like Twitter are all efforts you will need to consider before you start to get users following and linking to your blog. If you're going to be one of seven million blog owners who make it a succes and not one of the 95% who fail, you'll need to put a lot of effort in over a long period of time.

Summary
For most business owners, Google is still a massively under exploited sales tool and if worked in the right way can generate significant results. Whatever the goals for your business, the most important thing to consider before investing in any online marketing is choosing the right tool(s) to fit your strategy. Hopefully we've outlined just some of the ways you can improve your results in the short term and the long term.

Anything we've missed? Please let us know in the comments.

Did e-consultancy outsource its link building?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:28:00 +0000

Having been doing some research into the value of directory links and places to find some good ones recently. On our travels we found various blog & forum posts talking about the value of directory links for SEO, whether we should be doing them at all and the net result of such activity.

While searching around we were a bit shocked to have found a report from a Canadian SEO company which looks like it has worked on behalf of e-consultancy.com (which now redirects to http://econsultancy.com) at some point in the past. I've put the link below for you to take a look at yourself as well as showing an image below.

Take a look for yourself - http://www.seocompany.ca/submission-package-report.html

What we don't know is when this report / web page was first put together. Judging by the fact that it refers to Microsoft bCentral which is now long gone, we would imagine that it is a couple of years old. What I think it is safe to say, is that e-consultancy.com is definitely credited for links and is also being charged 'labor' for time spent getting the links.

What puzzles us is why a website of such power and repute would outsource its link building? With so many paid subscribers, over 13,000 followers on Twitter, other blogs and huge credibility in the SEO world, the gathering of links should be almost an after thought as they have so many. Why they needed to pay for someone to get them seems odd to us.

If anyone could shed some light on this, it would be interesting to know more about what happened.

Is Google controlling what you search for?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:35:00 +0000

In the last year or so, you've probably noticed that Google has made a couple of important changes to its search box. Around a month ago, Google made its search box a lot bigger. They claimed that they did this for a number of reasons including the fact that we now use more words when we search, that users prefer to see bigger characters when they type and that they wanted to focus more on search. How a bigger box does this, we're not quite really sure.

One of the biggest things they have introduced (which has impacted SEO, PPC and search marketing in a big way) is 'Google Suggest'. It went global in Summer 2008 having been in trial for several years and has since been replicated across the major search engines. If you aren't sure what Google Suggest is, it is a drop down list which appears when you are typing something into Google which tries to predict / help you to with your search. An example is shown below

While it does a very good job of this most of the time it seems that Google doesn't realise that Adido means Adido. If we have to see 'audio' one more time, we'll start using Bing...

One of the things that we've noticed is that users have started to use Google Suggest. A lot. Having looked at the analytics for several of our clients, we've noticed some of the top search phrases which generate search traffic have started to look artificial or strange. Why would a seemingly low volume or long tail search phrase start be one of the top search phrases for a particular client?

The answer is Google Suggest. Users are lazy and the idea of clicking a phrase they want to look for rather than type another letter on their keyboard is very appealing to a lot of people.

While the intentions for developing the Google Suggest might seem perfectly legitimate, in that it wants to help make it faster for users to find what they want, it could be viewed that Google is actually trying to engineer or control your searches towards the phrases which is wants you to click on. After all, Google made 97% of its income in 2008 from Google Adwords, its Pay Per Click platform.

It is not clear how the phrases which are listed in the suggest box are put there. Google Suggest help says that it lists the phrases is made up of many things from the amount of searches carried out on a phrase, studying what logged in users have searched for in the past and to how many advertisers there are on the relevant phrases.

Whilst, it might be very cynical for us to say that Google created Google Suggest for its own benefit, one thing that we can say is that it is certainly influencing users in the way that they search. While in the past there may have been dozens of different search phrases for one product, there are now only a handful of phrases which appear in the analytics.

While this might actually make your pay per click campaigns more expensive in the long run (more people searching on less phrases will increase competition) it is essential that you check the Google suggest to get the best from your digital & search marketing campaigns. Miss this, and you might miss out on big amounts of traffic.

Think before you brief a web agency!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:17:00 +0000

We get a lot projects coming to us here at Adido. Having been working with partner agencies and businesses across the South of England for over six years, we get to see all sorts of possible projects before they are built. Some of them see the light of a monitor, some of them don't.

One of the things that we are still struggle with is the lack of understanding shown by companies before they go to tender. We were made aware of a few tenders for website redesigns in the last few weeks which made us scratch our heads. Below shows a small part of the briefs we received;

"website needs to be dynamic and utilize features such as search engines, web directories"
"comprehensive visitor count facility that enables collection of data relating to hits for all pages"
"knowledge of HTML and other design programming languages (such as JavaScript, ColdFusion, Dynamic HTML, ASP, etc.)"
"critical that the website is written in line with our branded image"

We appreciate that those who have no idea about websites, digital marketing or search engine optimisation will find it hard to explain to those in the know what they want from their website. Whenever you try and enter a new industry or explain to people what you need/want without really knowing everything that you should do, things are often very hard.

The issue that businesses that are looking to improve their websites and the results they get from them face when trying to find their potential digital agency is showing up their distinct lack of knowledge. By publishing a brief which is either very hard to understand or makes reference to practices which are years behind the time will only do bad things. From an agency perspective, the following is most likely to occur;

If a brief is really bad, the agency simply will not have the time to get their head around what is needed for the client. This will mean that tenders are rushed or not submitted at all.
If the agency doesn't understand what is needed, then the tender will have to account for all of the unknowns available. This could increase the quoted cost and timescales dramatically.
If all agencies are forced to give high quotes, it could lead to the project not happening at all or a lesser alternative being selected on price. This could then up costing the client twice as much in the long run as not all issues would be looked at or resulting in missed opportunities which stunt the growth of the business.

Our main concern, like any other good web design agency, is being able to quote on what is actually needed rather than what might be perceived to be needed. If a potential client is unsure of what should be asked for when putting a website or digital marketing campaign out to tender, then there are many places to go to get helpful advice.

We've published our own website requirements document and have sent it out to hundreds of users in the last few years to help them with their website planning & build. There are dozens of other websites which can give good introductions on how to brief a web agency, including Business Link, Headscape and Vidoni to name but a few. You can always speaking to any good web design agency (ahem :) who will be more than willing to come and sit with you for an hour to understand more about what you are trying to achieve and help you put a more comprehensive brief together.

Google Adwords Log Out problem with Opportunities tab

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:53:00 +0000

We've been using Google Adwords this morning and have found a problem with the Opportunities tab. No matter who logs in or the browser we use, it does not work. When you try and use the page, it fails to load up all of the tools & options available and shows a message saying 'Your Adwords session has expired. Please refresh this page to try again'.

Have any other PPC companies picked up on this? Does anyone know how this can be solved?

Is the recession over? Maybe Google knows...

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:40:00 +0000

Look at any newspaper or news bulletin on the TV in the last couple of years and it would have probably touched on the 'current economic climate' at some point. Yes, the UK is in recession and has been for a while. Despite some companies posting some very healthy growth figures in 2009 (including ourselves I might add :), there is still much talk about how bad the economy is and how bad 2010 will be for sales.

What happens next year is anyones guess but certainly there seems to be an upwards trend in the economy at the moment and a more positive outlook from a lot of the business people we speak to.

Perhaps one of the best indicators of this is website traffic. Sure, there are lots of things which you can do to improve your online traffic but looking at an overall picture, you're bound to get a good reflection of the general feeling across the country by looking at the amount of website traffic and searches carried out each month.

If anyone is going to know about user behaviour, it's Google. Since Google launched its Google Analytics product a few years ago, its usage has become the near de facto standard for most digital and web agencies. Perhaps one of the little known facts about Analytics however, is the fact that Google owns all of the data is collects. If you stop using the product, you can't take the information with you.

Google by now must have billions of visits and hundreds of billions (I'm sure there must be a term for that) of page views recorded in it's servers. If anyone is going to know about trends, then they're the ones to know.

The reason why we think the recession might be ending is that our own Google Analytics information is showing a huge upward trend at the moment.

As the screenshot above of just some of our accounts shows, there has been growth of around 80% of the websites we monitor in the last month. These range from small brochure sites which receive handfuls of traffic a day through to huge multi national ecommerce websites getting hundreds of visits each hour. Regardless of size, promotion work (to a small extent) and industry, there are pretty much green numbers across the board.

Is the recession over? Only time will tell but for now it seems that users are voting with their fingers in a big way.

12 (+1) tips for ecommerce websites this Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:05:00 +0000

Although Christmas may still seem a while off, the days are now getting shorter and if you are an online retailer, it's time to start getting your online strategy finalised to ensure that you make the most of the busy season.

Here are our top tips for online success this Christmas. Please note, this is not an ordered list! It is a good idea to consult with someone before initiating our recommendations to ensure your budget is maximised!

1. Set up a PPC campaign
Yes, it's an easy place to start but creating a Pay Per Click campaign, using Google Adwords (using one of our free �£50 Adwords vouchers would be a good start), or something similar, can be done quickly and to your budget. Using PPC allows you to get instant & relevant website traffic to your website in hours allowing you to increase your sales when most shoppers are online. Many small businesses over look PPC throughout the year but it can be an easy way to increase orders at this crucial time of the year (don't forget to use seasonal terms for your phrases!). By the way, your PPC campaign doesn't have to be on Google, their are other ways to pay for relevant traffic which can work just as well...

2. Do some planning!
Despite what we said above, it's important to take time out to plan your Christmas online marketing strategy. Don't rush into it or leave it to the last minute. Last year over FOUR BILLION POUNDS was spent online in the UK. Rushing into online marketing activities without consideration could mean potentially lost sales or loss of margin. Use the Google Adwords & Google Trends Tools to help predict peaks of traffic.

3. Review your website TITLE & meta description tags
We assume that most ecommerce website managers or owners will have a content management system of some description to allow changes to be made. While it's the busy season it makes sense to review your title tags not only to ensure they are optimised for search engines as much as possible, but also to make your website stand out in the listings. Include key messages which will make your website stand out against your competitors.

4. Improve calls to action
One of the key reasons 82% of shoppers on ecommerce websites leave empty handed is that key messages or calls to action are not clear enough. We've seen ourselves that improving graphics, buttons or content which urges users to take action improves conversion rates. If you offer 'free shipping' or '24 hour order turnaround' then make sure you make your message clear and easy to see. This should be reviewed regularly all year round to make sure that you've got the best graphic & position for your message but is espicially important at your busiest time of the year.

5. Set up Google Analytics
This is an easy one. If you've got an ecommerce website and don't have Google Analytics, then make sure you set it up as soon as possible before your busy season really kicks off. It's vital to know how your users interact with your website at the busiest time of the year so that you can make any last minute adjustments to maximise your sales, even on the last day of trading. It's never to late to make changes to your website which can increase your online sales.

6. Add a Christmas logo
Ok, this isn't necessarily going to win over your potential buyers to get them to spend more money with you. But it will do two things. One, it shows that your website is current and up-to-date which build trust with your potential buyers. Two, it also adds some fun to your website which might not be evident at other points of the year.

7. Participate on relevant forums / networks
If you have a specific product for a specific market, then this is a must. However, even if you've got a product which might have mass appeal, it still makes sense to participate in social networks, the blogsphere or wherever your potential buyers are. Whatever you're selling, and there are very few niches which do not have conversations online, there will be places to interact with your audience and help guide them to your website.

8. Build your email database
Like other points mentioned here, this is something that should be done all year round. However, with millions being spent each hour over the Christmas period, the opportunity to capture vital emails address shouldn't be missed. If you own an ecommerce website and don't have an email newsletter sign up box on your website, then Christmas is THE time to add one. The email address collected at this time can be used for future marketing post Christmas and for future promotions (such as January sales!)

9. Do an email marketing campaign
If you've been trading online for a while, there is (or should be) a very good chance that you've built an email database of contact or people that have bought from you before. Even if you've an email database of a few dozen or even a few thousand, Christmas is a time where you have start doing some email marketing. Gettting your brand & products in front of your potential and existing at the right time can add many more sales through your online store for minimal investment.

10. Create some viral content
Creating viral content is sometimes very hard. Users want to share with others be it funny content, useful content or content of general interest. However, at the time of year when everyone is hunting for a bargain, vouchers can often be the best way to go. Sending special discount codes via email newsletters or making buyers aware of them on social networks or forums can be a great way to spread the word and get extra sales.

11. Be responsive
This means many things from picking up the phone quickly, putting products in the post promptly and also making changes to your website quickly. As an ecommerce retailer you'll have access to pages and pages of data which can be used to your advantage. As time is of the essence over the xmas period, wherever you can make use of the information that you have you must do so. If a product is selling particularly well, feature it on your home and landing pages. Make your website real estate work hard and you'll be rewarded.

12. Have fun!
It's important to remember that, no matter how stressful your office maybe over xmas, it is a time for cheer and enjoyment. There is much to worry about, not only only online but also in office & warehouses across the country, we hope that everything is done in the Christmas spirit and everyone has a profitable time!

If you have any more tips to make the most of ecommerce this Christmas, please share them with us below!

NOTE: I wrote this post a day ago but woke today to hear of news that their may be a postal strike on the cards across the UK.

12 + 1. Have a contingency plan in place!
You never know what's going to happen in your ecommerce business. If the local postal strikes take place, what will you do? What happens if your web server stops working? How reliable are your hosting providers? Make sure you look at all possible angles of weakness and put a plan in place to try and cover every eventuality.

Lifestreaming - the next development in social media?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Try to keep up to date with the latest social & digital marketing trends can be hard. While platforms come and go (MySpace?) the trend towards real time is increasing. This shift to near real time documentation of events, thoughts and activity is growing. A new term for this phenomenon is 'lifestreaming'. In this article we outline what lifestreaming is and why it is important to know about for your business.

What is lifestreaming?
Lifestreaming is the latest phenomenon that evolves from the field of social media. In a nutshell, it is an online diary that documents someone’s daily life in chronologically order (See the wordspy definition)

Lifestreaming can simply mean to blog in a new style. Lifestreams include thoughts, observations, links and records from everyday life. Contrary to standard blog posts, they are short and random. And, frequently, videos or pictures are inserted to convey meaning. Julia Allison’s blog is exemplary for this kind of lifestreaming. By sharing her opinions and day-to-day events in a very succinctly way, she has reached web celebrity status. Interestingly, her blog does not read vertically like common blogs, but horizontally, which mimics a timeline

Having said that, a lifestream is also the aggregation of content from different social networking sites. Lifestream services gather a person’s online activity and broadcast it from a single entry. All of these services are based on the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult for friends, family and colleagues to keep track of a person’s online presence, since people use more and more social networking platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Flickr, to mention just a few.

Tumblr and FriendsFeed are very similar lifestreaming services. Both are able to merge existing RSS-approved social networking accounts and they also allow its members to post content from the application itself.

Another lifestreaming service is called posterous. Here, members send the desired content, which can be any type of file, as an attachment of an email. A famous member of posterous is the well-known (former) blogger Steve Rubel. He states that “blogging feels old” and that posterous “feels more like flow.”

In one of his posts, he uses this diagram to illustrate how he gets inspired. For example, he uses FriendsFeed as his first filter for all his web actions. He then collects all relevant information in his email account. From there, he sends it to posterous, which in turn, automatically updates some of his other networking sites accounts.

Profilactic, yet another lifestream service, enables members to import information from more than 150 services. However, there is no possibility to post content directly from this website. This means, it is an online media aggregator per se.

Who should use lifestreaming service?
Everybody who is enthusiastic and excited about social networking and who has multiple accounts can use lifestreaming services.

What makes a good lifestream?
In order to create an entertaining lifestream, users should publish information from all facets of their lives. This can include news or reviews of local events, as well as videos, pictures or texts that feature their hobbies and interests. Further, regular updates about the working and personal life is a good idea. Finally, posts about interesting, amusing, funny or bizarre things are very popular.

Why is lifestreaming important?
As we move towards a more 'real time' web where things happen near instantly, lifestreaming will become more important and more common place. Those individuals or companies who are able to relay information to their audience sooner rather than later will end up being remembered in the minds of their target audience than some of their competitors.

Summary
We believe that in the coming years lifestreaming may end up becoming a full time job for online marketers and businesses as the move into online & social networking becomes even more important to businesses of all size. We have already seen individuals and businesses make this fundamental shift towards the real time and expect this trend to continue in 2009 and accelerate in 2010.

Even big companies (still) try and cheat at SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:46:00 +0000

As the SEO industry matures and many companies are feeling the benefit of great search marketing or digital marketing campaigns, companies big and small are willing to take risks to get top positions. As experts in SEO, we've heard all of the questions from our clients about how to get to the top, no matter what the cost.

Our answer is always clear; don't try and cheat the search engines.

If you read the SEO forums regularly, you'll know the so called 'black hat' techniques used by shady SEO companies are hugely frowned on and should never be practised.

The more common black hat techniques which are used include using hidden text on pages which contain dozens/hundreds of links, using dodgy redirects to try to fool search engines and creating copy which is too keyphrase heavy. This is just the tip of the iceberg as many more bad practises are carried out, some which are very obvious, some less so.

Despite search engines like Google publishing their guidelines on SEO, credible websites like SEOMoz publishing their ranking factors and dozens of forums giving advice on best practise, many companies, both BIG and small, still ignore this advice and try and cheat the search engines.

We've found some clear examples while searching around recently of websites who are using unethical practises to try to get better rankings. Perhaps they should have spoken to a credible SEO company first?

Netbanx
Bad use of pale text on a white background containing keyword & keyphrase rich text and links out of context with the rest of the website. This runs the risk of being seen as being sneaky. Note, this is one we found recently, hopefully they fix it.

BMW
Ok, this is old but this screenshot (from Blogscoped) shows how the site did look a few years back. Note the repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive text on the page.

Car insurance website
This website shows you how to not create landing pages. The overuse of poor content on this page would most probably be seen as spammy and wouldn't get any brownie points with Google. Users wouldn't like it either.

88db
We've saved the best to last on this one. This page shows a dizzying amount of keyword repetition as well as trying to baffle the user by splashing numerous colours across the page. One of the worst examples of keyword stuffing we've seen in a long time.

These are just some examples of how not to do SEO. We never recommend practices such as those shown above to anyone because it doesn't do any good and it certainly doesn't doesn't help us.

If you think that your website is running the line between good and/or bad, let us know and we'll be happy to review it.

Free £50 free Google AdWords vouchers!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:29:00 +0000

We've been lucky enough to have been given several Google Adwords Vouchers worth �£50 by the official Adwords team to clients who start new campaigns with us.

We don't have a huge amount of vouchers to give away, so if you'd like to start advertising using Google Adwords in the coming months, please get in contact with us to arrange a meeting. Speak to one of our team on 0845 260 2343 or send us an email via our website.

Please note, our vouchers are set to expire at the end of 2009, so make sure you don't miss out.

Bing- Microsoft’s newest development

noreply@blogger.com (Nicola Maidment) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:07:00 +0000

Microsoft’s new search engine “bing” went online worldwide on the 3rd June 2009.

It is described as a “Decision Engine and consumer brand”, specifically designed to help customers making better and faster decisions with regard to purchasing products, planning journeys and finding local businesses.

To establish itself in the world of search engines, bing introduces new features with which it tries to differentiate itself from its competitors. Bing’s promising ambition is to provide a more organized search experience that enables users to navigate more easily through the confusion of search overload. This eventually should lead to faster, but nevertheless informed, decisions (Microsoft PressPass 2009).

An Explorer Pane on the left hand side, for example, offers a search history, appropriate subgroups and related links. This navigation set helps to arrange the initial search query. Other novel characteristics include: an application that allows to hover over a search result in other to obtain a preview of the site’s content, plane ticket information, which lets you know the cheapest ticket and future prize predictions, current stock information, restaurants reviews and movie listings (Microsoft PressPass 2009).

Unfortunately, these new and exciting properties are only available on the American version of bing, making the UK version an incomplete beta (guardian.co.uk 2009).

At the same time, bing is very similar to google, since it offers a map and shopping feature, as well as instant answers for currency, flight status and definitions (Microsoft PressPass 2009).

Reading through many comments and blogs on the web, there is no consistency of which search engine is considered to be superior, google or bing. Yet, it seems, the majority of people believes that google still delivers more relevant and useful search results (Barron’s online 2009; Computerworld 2009).

However, bing’s video search is impressive, as the user can narrow the results down by selecting videos via the length, resolution, source and screen size (www.bing.com).

In overall, it appears that, at least for the moment, google does not need to worry about losing its number one search engine status. But who knows, Microsoft’s bing is just in the formation phase and maybe, in several years, people rather bing than google the latest news.

Our favourite YouTube videos of July

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:47:00 +0000

The use of video online is still increasing at rapid rate. YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the UK, generating more searches per month than Yahoo! or Bing (MSN). We've mentioned concerns about the long term viability of YouTube in the coming years on Twitter recently but regardless of how Google takes the website in the future, it still never fails to entertain.

Here are our favourite YouTube videos we've seen in the last month.

Stop motion magic (The PEN story)
Created as a viral by Olympus cameras, it shows the beautiful elegance of photography in a touching three minute video.

The ultimate golf shot?
Tom Watson nearly achieved the impossible by winning the Open aged 59 but unfortunately lost out on the last hole. Although Tom didn't make it, this video shows Leif Olson achieving the impossible by hitting a once in a life time shot by getting a hole in one by deflecting off another golf ball. (Ok, nothing to do with the Internet but amazing anyway!)

What is a web browser?
Google have been very keen to promote their new Google Chrome browser in the last few months to try and eat into the market share of Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's starting to work (very gradually) but they still have to make it work for some of the people interviewed in this research video. Good luck Google!

Welcome to MeetDraw
MeetDraw is a networking group for digital agencies and those in the industry who are based in Dorset. See Gary, our Sales Director, meet some of the attendees at the event in this video.

Stay tuned for more of the best videos of the month next month along with some of our own creations in the coming weeks.

Exclusive Google Adwords discount!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:08:00 +0000

As digital marketing experts, we know the power of search marketing. Millions of people in the UK spend billions of pounds online each year and a large majority of searchers spend their money having done a search first. In the UK nearly 90% of all users search using Google so to attract visitors to your website, it makes sense to advertise your website there first.

We are happy to offer one business a massive 10% discount on their Google Adwords advertising if they work with us over a six month period and sign off on their campaign before the 31st of August. We are only able to offer this deal to new advertisers who spend over �£3000 a month with Google Adwords, so if you have already used Google for PPC advertising in the past, this won't be available to you.

To take advantage of this offer, please call 0845 260 2343 and speak to one of our team.

As a Google Adwords Qualified company, we get access to many offers from Google via their agency team and newsletter updates. If you would like to find more about Google PPC advertising why not visit our website. Alternatively to receive information about Adwords offers as we get them, subscribe to our blog by adding our feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/adido to your favourites!

Does Google manually filter its results?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:50:00 +0000

We've spoken before on our blog about the main way Google came to prominence - through it's superior system of ranking websites. It's this algorithm, based around the idea of PageRank, which meant it could deliver the best results to users searching the internet.

In very basic terms, algorithms are just calculations used to come up with an answer to a problem. They are automated and require no human input. This allows them to address massive problems (such as sorting the whole of the Internet) with a relatively low human input. Once the algorithm is written, it just needs to be updated and tweaked over time.

However, on my trips onto Google recently I've noticed somethings which don't look very 'automated' and look like some manual intervention has happened.

Here are just a couple of examples. This week I was looking for the logo of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing. Google doesn't know what Bing - the search engine - looks like (yet). In fact, the results it's returned were less than family safe (I have my image search setting on 'Moderate' and was a bit surprised at the images presented!). I have included a 'strict' version of the results below as the 'Moderate' and 'Off' versions definitely shouldn't be shown here!

Secondly, I was looking to find out information about a link buying service called 'Text-Link-Ads' (TLA). I know that this site is used to buy & sell links to help improve SEO positions; something that is something that is frowned upon by Google. I also know that there is a lot of conversation around this website on many forums as to whether it is a good thing or not.

Therefore there must be links to the site which would mean that Google WOULD know about it. Given I was searching for the name of the company, and the company had its name in the URL, it should've ranked #1 easily. But does it return any results when you do a search for them? See for yourself...

Nowhere to be seen.

I find both of these examples slightly strange. I can sort of understand why there are no images returned for just 'Bing' - it is a new name and there maybe a long history of other images being attached to the word 'Bing' (but no sign of Chandler character from Friends for some reason). Given the amount of blogs/tweets created about the new name Bing recently I would have expected to have seen at least ONE logo show up! But there were none. A more specific search for 'Bing logo' does indeed return the result I was looking for.

It does also make me think that perhaps Microsoft should have thought a little bit harder about the name of their new company. That's another matter...

On the TLA issue, this looks seriously suspicious. Why would a well known and well linked site not appear #1 on Google for it's own brand term? It has a PageRank of 5, which is pretty good (and indication that Google knows about the site and rates it fairly highly) and over 100,000 back links according to Yahoo! Very few sites have this amount of backlinks.

I believe that Google may well be adjusting its results to stop this website getting rankings and hence traffic. It would do this to stop people from buying links and then increasing their rankings artificially, something which they do not endorse at all.

Google has said in the past;

"Our search results are not manipulated by hand. We're not able to make any manual changes to the results."

but I can't see that their algorithm is so smart as to take out sites which it thinks do not adhere to the Google webmaster guidelines (taken from this post - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23155.htm). If it is, then they're even better than we give them credit for!

If they are changing the rankings then this does open up a big trust issue. Why try and get ranking results if it's possible that Google manually filters rankings to suit it's own needs? How can we trust an algorithm to provide the best results when they could be changed to suit Googles own interests?

If anyone else has examples of where Google may have manually filtered, it would be interesting to hear them.

How accurate is the Google Keywords Tool for SEO?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Being SEO & PPC obsessives, we spend A LOT of time using the Google Keyword Tool to predict traffic and therefore sales for our clients. The information presented by the tool help us decide which phrases to target and which ones to avoid. In fact, it's fair to say that the data from the Google Keyword tool actually helps shape our clients future online!

The information from the tool only started to show Google search volume in the last few years. But it seems that the data has not got any more accurate at all. Being in the unique position of overseeing many thousand page one rankings in Google, we thought we'd share our data with our readers to prove just how accurate the tool really is.

Some points to note on how we've presented the information.

We've decided not to use the exact search phrases here to maintain client confidentiality so have instead just made reference to the industry & location that they operate in.
In addition, we have also split the phrases up by what we deem to be general and specific. General refers to phrases which don't contain any geographical search terms or additional words / phrases which would reduce the amount of results returned considerably. Specific phrases are those which target a particular county or place or contain something specific to what the searcher is looking for. Ok, this isn't an exact science but it helps as a guide.
The majority of our rankings use correct META tags and don't contain ...'s in them which might potentially influence whether the listings are clicked or not. Same for TITLE tags and page names as well
We use a piece of software to record our rankings. This information is pulled from Google UK data centres and is accurate for the large majority of the time.
Our traffic data is collected using standard installations of Google Analytics.
All search engine listings are in what we'll call the traditional SERPs. Very few, if any, of the phrases selected have news, local,product or video results as part of the results returned, thus making it a fair test in that respect.

Here are the statistics collected;

(Click image for large version)

Ok, so there are a lot of numbers here. Some of the predictions from the Google Keyword Tool do not seem to correlate when compared to real clicks, while others are fairly good. Here are some of the findings that we can draw from the information that we've collected;

Google Keyword Tool groups related phrases together when showing search volume. It isn't very clear how this information is grouped. For example, several phrases entered all returned the same search volume prediction, yet the specific phrases received very different amounts of clicks. Where the same search predictions were returned we omitted some of the possible results
Overall, the amount of clicks compared to the estimated search volume from the Google Keyword Tool was just about 1%. When making predictions on what sort of traffic you can get from SEO, don't be too optimistic!
There is a big difference between the clicks to prediction on specific phrases when compared to general phrases. In our test, general phrases get less than 1% of searchers clicks compared to something like 12.5% on specific phrases. So just because a phrase doesn't look like it will generate click volume, it may well actually perform better in terms of clicks than some phrases with supposedly higher search volume. This is another good reason to try your phrases out using a paid (PPC) search campaign.
Unsurprisingly, phrases which rank at #1 get more clicks than those that don't. Our data shows that when a phrase gets to #1, it tends to get 2x more traffic than those that don't. This is a general rule of thumb and is obviously different depending on the phrases being searched for, the amount of traffic etc. It does however highlight the fact that your SEO efforts don't stop until you hit the top!
A few of the phrases that we focus on had huge amounts of clicks compared to the amount of estimated searches carried out. These phrases tended to be very time specific and on newer phrases (e.g. containing 2009, 2010). This suggests that on phrases which are new or gaining search traction are not accurately estimated by the Google Keyword Tool.

All in all, it seems that the Google Keyword Tool can be helpful but in alot of cases, isn't very accurate at estimating clicks from search volume. Let me put that another way, using a straight line formula when estimating clicks from estimated searches isn't very accurate. Generally, it is a fairly safe bet to assume a higher click through rate on specific or local phrases compared to general ones. Yeah, so what, you probably knew that anyway. But maybe our research here might make you think twice about your estimates and possibly your ROI calculations.

Further research in conversion rates and PPC clicks to estimates would be good and if we have time we'll look into this further. For now, if you've any comments, we'd be very pleased to here them!

4 ways to tell that a web design company DOESN'T know how to optimise

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Headington, Adido Digital Agency) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:00:00 +0000

It still amazes me how many 'web design' companies there are out there who claim to offer professional SEO services. Having spent the last four years working in, and advising on SEO, I've seen a lot of 'must do' things come and go.

'You should add this to your website' or 'Everyones doing this today' trends come and go but the core principles of SEO haven't really changed since SEO first started (more on that in a later post). Given that SEO has changed very little from its fundamentals, I'm still shocked to see that some companies can't even do the basic right.

Here are four tell tale signs I've picked up which show that these companies don't (really) know what they are doing when it comes to SEO. Be warned!

Keyword stuffed page names
I've always thoughts that having keyphrases and keywords in page names has always been a sensible thing to do. If you've got a page which sells blue widgets, then it makes sense to call your web page blue-widgets.html rather than product13.html. After all, you want your page to be found under blue widgets, the page has good content on it mentioning blue widgets, so why not call the page name blue-widgets?
However, when you see SEO companies calling their pages web-design-seo-ppc-online-marketing-england-uk-services.html, alarm bells start ringing. A page name should be short and concise and not some mess of phrases and words stuck together in the hope that somehow Google will come along and put them #1 of the pile for the random selection of words that no one will ever type in.
TITLE tags stuffed with keywords
As with point #1, too many keywords in the wrong places sends out the wrong message. It has been widely rumoured for along time that less is more with TITLE tags. The W3C recommend 64 characters, and if you look at Google and other search engines, they only show a similar amount of text on the searh engine results pages (SERPs). If your TITLE is too long, then you get the dreaded ... at the end of your nice blue link on the results page. Why ruin your chances of getting that click from the search engine with irrelevant words stuffed desperately into the TITLE tag? I see this quite alot from some of the web companies in the UK and its always very disappointing.
Blocks of text stuffed with keywords
Adding the words that you want to be found by your searchers (your key phrases/words) into your pages is obviously a sensible thing. A search engine is never going to rank your page under the phrases that you want if you don't mention the phrases on your pages. But search engines are clever beasts and know when content is well written and when it is obviously trying way too hard to try and get Google brownie points. Even Matt Cutts (who is THE PR man for Google) say to avoid keyword stuffing. If Google say it's bad, it's bad. Don't know what I'm on about? Look for something like this:

We sell blue widgets to companies who want blue widgets in the UK. Our blue widgets are the best blue widgets available and we sell blue widgets in many places. We sell blue widgets in london, manchester, liverpool, birmingham, nottingham, leeds, exeter, sheffield, glasgow, bristol, cardiff, norwich, wigan, oxford and many other places. When you buy blue widgets, make sure you get your blue widgets from us!
No Internal links
When a website has a reasonable (say, 20) pages then it makes sense to link the pages together so that users can find their way around the website easily. Links also help search engines. Websites which have lots of links pointing to them nearly always do better than those which don't. One of the things that good SEO companies will do is link internal pages together, as this helps the cross linking of pages and strengthens the website. Getting links from other websites is never easy, so why companies don't get links from other pages on their own website seems like missing the fish in the barrel. This should be one of the first things that SEO companies do and yet many don't seem to know or bother.

There are other signs that show that supposed SEO companies really don't know what they are doing but these are the ones which disappoint me (and also make me laugh). When hiring an SEO company make sure you check out the websites which they have worked on to see if they've committed any of the faux paus' highlighted above.

For a more comprehensive list of things which influence ranking in good and bad ways, read the SEOmoz search engine ranking factors list.

If you've got any more you'd want to add, please feel free to add them below.

IE6: Flogging a Dead Horse

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie Morris) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:15:00 +0000