I wrote a host of short blog posts for State of Search over the past few weeks to cover for the site’s owner Bas van den Beld while he was on vacation.

The most substantial of these blog posts is a case study on why geotargeting users based on IP address is a silly affair, especially when trying to determine what region of a country a user is from. In the UK especially, IP targeting is utterly broken.

State of Search: Geotargeting Based on IP Address is Broken

It’s when you get to regional IP targeting that all semblance of accuracy goes straight out the window, and it becomes nothing less than a total crapshoot. In fact, firing buckshot at a big national map will probably yield more accurate results than the geographical data you’ll get from any web analytics package.

Some other blog posts I wrote for State of Search recently are primarily news stories about new developments in search and web:

• The Explosive Growth of Google+
• Google simplifies Adwords for small businesses with AW Express
• Branded AdWords advertising boosts total site traffic
• Growing pressure on Microsoft over Bing
• Adobe Edge: SEO-friendly web animations?
• Universal Search: how often are they shown on Google’s SERPs?

IP Address Geotargeting / State of Search is a blog post from Barry Adams.

For State of Search I wrote a blog post comparing two URL shortening services: Bit.ly Pro and Yourls. Each has its pros and cons, and which you should use depends on your situation and resources:

State of Search: URL Shortening Services Compared: Bit.ly Pro and Yourls

URL Shortening services are the lifeblood of Twitter. With short URLs you can share links on Twitter in abundance without having to worry too much about breaking the 140 character limit. And, just like links are branding opportunities, so are short URLs. Yes, you only have a few characters to work with in a short domain, but why not make optimal use of it and make it a branded short URL?

My latest for Search News Central is purely for SEO geeks. I describe several solutions for dealing with duplicate content issues arising fro faceted / layered navigation and conclude with my own recommended approach:

Search News Central: Solving Duplicate Content Issues Arising From Faceted Navigation

I’m a big fan of faceted navigation on ecommerce websites, also known as layered navigation. With faceted nav users can find exactly what they’re looking for with just a few clicks, even on websites that contain tens of thousands of products. A good implementation of faceted nav is a user experience dream come true.

In my new column for the Belfast Telegraph I take another shot at predicting the future, this time for the mobile web. HTML5 might in due time supersede mobile apps, and in my column I explain why this could happen:

Belfast Telegraph: The Future of the Mobile Web

The problem with apps is that they are platform-specific. An iPhone app will not work on an Android phone. Blackberry users need to download different apps that are specifically developed for that platform. Nokia faces the same issue. While some mobile companies such as Apple are quite happy with this business model, others aren’t.

URL Shortening / Duplicate Content / Mobile Web is a blog post from Barry Adams.

For Search News Central I’ve written a blog post about the trustworthiness of the data Google shares with us. In many of Google’s free tools, such as Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and even Adwords, the data we’re presented with isn’t always reliable.

Search News Central: Can We Trust Google’s Data?

As part of my work for the Belfast Telegraph I do a weekly report on which articles performed the best, and there was one article that stood out in more ways than one. It was the most viewed article of the week – it was an article featuring a video of the Chile miners’ rescue – but Google Analytics gave me two entirely different pageview numbers, depending on how I approached the metric.

Inspired by a recent blog post by Bill Slawski I decided to build my own Custom Search Engine aimed at enabling easy searching through the web’s leading and most trustworthy SEO blogs and news sites.

Custom Search Engine: SEO Search

Let me know if you feel I’ve left out a major SEO/Search site that should be included in this CSE.

Google Data / SEO Search is a blog post from Barry Adams.

If you’re doing any search engine advertising you should be tracking what your ROI is. In other words, you should be monitoring your PPC spend and your income from this spend – i.e. your conversions from PPC.

If you’re using Google Adwords, you’re in luck: Google has an array of tools that allow you to track exactly what your ROI is. You can track your ROI straight from Google Adwords, or you can tie Adwords in to your Google Analytics account and track your goal conversions there and attribute them to your PPC spend.

On top of that, Google has tools to help you increase that ROI by improving your conversion rate: the Google Adwords Conversion Optimiser and it’s big brother, Google Website Optimiser.

All these tools, each with their own approach and implementation, are a bit daunting to wrap your head around. Which should you be using and why?

Google seems to realise this and have published a free online e-book to help you figure things out: Improving Online Conversions for Dummies.

It’s a handy little e-book that goes through every one of Google’s optimisation tools and tells you what you can do with each, and in which scenario they can (and should) be applied.

Not only an excellent guide for beginners, it’s also very useful for seasoned professionals like myself that sometimes get lost amidst the forest of new tools and features Google continually releases.

You can read the book online for free or download a printable PDF version.

Improving Online Conversions free e-book is a blog post from Barry Adams.

A while back I wrote about the state of search for news. In this blog post I tried to summarise where online journalism stands with regards to SEO, and outlined some tricks SEOs could utilise to enhance their presence in Google News.

State of Search: The State of Search for News

According to data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency the biggest source of traffic for UK newspaper sites is Google, generating over 45% of all visits. This data does not distinguish between the various Google search products, but both Hitwise and my own experiences with the Belfast Telegraph website indicate that the vast bulk of that traffic originates from Google News.

Recently I wrote a blog post outlining what a solid, all-round search engine optimiser should know about search engines. Many SEOs treat the symptoms of badly optimised sites, but they don’t really understand why – because they don’t understand how search engines work. By studying IR, patents, and research papers, a good SEO can gain a greater understanding of the craft.

State of Search: Understanding Search Engines

Every search engine is in essence an information retrieval system. Information retrieval can be described as “the science of finding information contained within documents and/or within metadata about documents”. IR was around long before the world wide web was born. From the moment computer scientists started storing information in early computers, IR was needed to retrieve that information.

At the invitation of its creators I reviewed the SEO Effect software suite and published my findings on State of Search. I concluded that it was a useful and powerful tool that has a lot of promise as it continues to be developed and new features are added.

State of Search: SEO Effect Review

It’s hard to judge a suite of tools based on only two of its five modules, but I have to say I’m fairly impressed. If the three remaining modules under development will adhere to the standards of quality and robustness as set by the keyword research and trend monitoring modules, SEO Effect might well become one of the industry’s most powerful tool suites.

The Search for News / Understanding Search Engines / SEO Effect is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Learning how to be a search engine optimiser is not a particularly straightforward process. There’s no college education you can follow to become a SEO. There are precious few courses you can follow, and most of these aren’t worth the money.

So what is the best way to learn SEO and become a specialist in the field? Well, you could buy some books and dig in to them. A recently published tome called The Art of SEO is pretty solid, as is the SEO an Hour a Day book.

But these books will only give you the basics. Since many SEO problems and challenges are specific to certain (types of) websites, these books will give you a starting point but no more than that.

Reading blogs, articles, and white papers about SEO is also encouraged, though with one caveat: don’t get carried away by reports on the latest hypes and “must-do’s” in SEO. These are nearly always blown out of proportion and when chasing the latest hypes its easy to lose track of the core essence of SEO.

SEO can of course be learned by simply doing it. Learn what works for other websites, then unleash it on your own sites. The problem with this is that sometimes this can backfire and you end up harming your sites more than helping them. Still, learning through experience is absolutely essential.

So, what else is there to help you learn SEO and become a true specialist? Well, in my opinion there is no substitute for a good community. A community where you can ask questions about your specific SEO challenges and get helpful, straightforward answers. A community that shares its specialised knowledge freely and widely and isn’t afraid to spill the occasional ‘secret’ that can really prove to be the difference between a good site and a great site.

Such a community exists, and I happen to be a member of it: the SEO Training Dojo.

The Dojo boasts an impressive range of tools and resources that are useful for everyone, from newbie SEOs coming to grips with the complexities of the craft to experienced SEO gurus that have seen and done it all.

Some examples of what the SEO Dojo contains:
- Knowledge Exchange forums
- Free SEO tools
- Discounts for paid SEO tools
- Weekly chat sessions
- SEO Beginners guide
- Ranking Factors guide
- Link Builders handbook
- and much much more…

I’m very pleased to be able to offer a discount for my readers who want to join the SEO Training Dojo – use the “barryrocks” discount code when you sign up and you get 25% off any subscription plan!

This discount code is only valid for the first 25 who make use of it, so it pays to act quick! I promise you it will be worth it – the very first chat session I attended earned my whole annual subscription fee back with the incredible amount of insight and tips that I gained from it.

So if you’re serious about becoming a true search engine optimisation specialist, the SEO Training Dojo is the place to hang out.

Learning SEO is a blog post from Barry Adams.

A term often busied by web developers and also SEO agencies is W3C compliance. I’ve written about the benefits of W3C compliant code before, but my perspective has changed a bit over time and I feel it’s important to point out that full W3C compliance is not a definitive requirement for an effective website.

W3C compliance basically means that the HTML and CSS code that a website is built with is fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short).

The W3C is an international standards organization, founded by the inventor of the web. They develop the standards on which the world wide web is run.

You’d think that making sure your website’s code complies fully with these standards is pretty important. And it is, up to a certain point.

You can easily find out if your website’s code is W3C compliant – simply submit your website URL to the W3C Validator tool and you’ll get an overview of all the ‘errors’ in your code. And you’ll almost certainly get a lot of ‘errors’. It’s very unlikely your website’s code complies to all of the W3C’s standards.

I say ‘errors’ because often they’re not really errors. The W3C standards are extremely strict, with no room for interpretation. So every little niggle in your code, every small deviation from the W3C’s strict standards, will generate an error in this validation tool.

W3C compliance for browsers

But most web browsers are flexible pieces of software that are built to deal with a wide range of different sorts of HTML and CSS code, and will probably render your website perfectly regardless of how many errors the validation tool shows.

Often web developers have to use shortcuts and non-compliant code to make something work in a particular way on a website, and while this results in validation errors it doesn’t hinder a website’s functionality at all. Quite the contrary, sometimes you have to break the rules of the W3C to get something to work exactly how you want it in every web browser.

W3C compliance for SEO

There is also the misconception that search engine crawlers require a website’s code to be 100% W3C compliant, or else they will rank your site lower in the SERPs. A lot of SEO agencies recommend you make every webpage on your site fully W3C compliant.

This is often a costly endeavour, and quite unnecessary. Search engine crawlers, like browsers, are sturdy and flexible pieces of software that can index almost any type of code, regardless of the errors it contains.

For proper crawling and indexation a search engine will need to be able to distinguish the different elements of a webpage – style, navigation, and content – and will need to be able to interpret the meaning of the content, which it does through analysing the content itself and the mark-up code that is used to style the content.

Clean, compliant HTML and CSS code help in this process. Compliant code makes it easier for search engine crawlers to identify what the content on a webpage is, and what that content means.

But 100% compliance, meaning zero errors in the W3C validation tool, is not only often hard to achieve (especially if your website has advanced functionality) but is unnecessary as well. The code just needs to be sufficiently well-structured and tidy enough for search engines to be able to distinguish style, navigation, and content.

So bad code is OK?

No, bad code is not OK. It’s still a good idea to strive towards compliant code. A website with hundreds of W3C validation errors is not a good thing. It’s likely that these errors cause the site to display differently in some web browsers (or worse, not work at all) and can cause all sorts of trouble for both users and search engines.

But if your website’s code only shows a couple of handfuls of non-critical errors, especially if they’re only small warnings, there really is little need to fix them.

For on-site optimisation your time and resources are better spent on making sure your website’s title tags, content, and other factors are fully optimised.

W3C compliance – is it a requirement? is a blog post from Barry Adams.

About nine months ago I was facing a sizeable site migration project at my employer at the time, and I was tasked with mapping out the best way of handling this migration to minimise the impact on our search engine rankings.

I wrote a post summarising my research into the SEO aspects of a site migration, and I feel the time has come to look back at the migration and the lessons we learned from it.

The site migration was a two-step process – we updated the design and we added new sections with fresh content. We decided to follow the recommendations outlined in my site migration blog post pretty much to the letter:

Content: We phased in the new content one batch of pages at a time. We put a couple of new pages live, linked to them from the homepage, and waited for them to be indexed & cached. Then we put the next batch of new pages online.

Design: The design changes were implemented gradually as well. The old and new designs weren’t radically different, it was more a tweaked & modernised version of the old design, so we felt it would be fine to have the old and new designs co-exist on the site for a while.

We first did a Google Website Optimiser A/B test to make sure the new design yielded at the very least a similar conversion rate. When this was confirmed, we migrated pages to the new design one at a time. The URLs all remained the same so we didn’t have to do any 301-redirects.

We used the Duplicate Content tool to ensure the HTML code and content of our key pages with high SERP rankings matched at least 90% in the old and new designs, so we wouldn’t get hit with a ranking penalty when we put the new version up.

When a page was updated with the new design, we waited for it to be indexed & cached in Google and checked how its SERP rankings were affected.

The end result was a site with a fresh design and new sections added, with minimal impact on SERP rankings. We did see some fluctuations in rankings but these fell well within the normal daily and weekly ranking variations.

We also noted that the new content started ranking fairly soon for relevant keywords, despite no direct links coming in to those pages. This is most likely due to the incoming link value generated across the rest of the site, spilling over to the new content.

It was a long and labour-intensive process, and in hindsight I’m not sure it would have impacted the rankings massively if we just switched the site over in one go. But as organic search generates a significant portion of the sites traffic and revenue, it was definitely better to be safe.

Site Migration SEO Concerns – The Results is a blog post from Barry Adams.

The steady rise of spam (which is now said to make up over 90% of all emails) has resulted in less emphasis on email as an instrument of online marketing. But well-managed email marketing campaigns are still, and will continue to be, an important instrument in your online marketing toolbox with a great ROI.

Email allows you to engage with your website visitors in two-way conversations, enabling you to connect with your customers. Email marketing is a great way to enhance customer retention as well as cross-sell and up-sell your products and services.

But you can’t just start harvesting email addresses and spam them at your whim. You need to develop a solid email marketing strategy based on your customers’ needs and requirements.

In this article I will outline the basics of email marketing to help you get started.

1. BUILD YOUR LIST

The most important aspect of your email marketing is the list of email addresses your messages are sent to. A good way to build your list is to have a sign-up form on your website that allows visitors to subscribe to your emails. You can also harvest emails from your online order process and contact forms, as long as you give users a clear way to opt-out – or better still, opt them out by default and make opt-in optional.

There are varying levels of legislation for each country regarding opting your users in on your email lists, so be sure to do some research and find out what the requirements are where you’re based. It’s usually best to err on the safe side, as not only will this ensure your emails won’t be marked as spam, your users will appreciate it and you’ll have a greater level of engagement with your subscribers.

2. WRITE YOUR MESSAGE

A good email starts with a great subject line. Users are bombarded with dozens, if not hundreds, of emails a day, and the first thing they see when your emails arrive is the subject line. This is the most important aspect of your email that determines whether or not a user will open the email and read it.

Tips for good subject lines:

• Clarify the benefit: users have crowded inboxes so your email’s subject line needs to communicate a clear benefit. What will a subscriber get out of it if he opens and reads your email?
• Personalise: use the recipient’s name in the subject line, as this helps your email stand out and helps make a connection with the recipient.
• Ask a provocative question: Questions make recipients wonder and often encourage them to open your email. An example would be “Are you at risk of overpaying on your insurance?”.
• Avoid spam words: words like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, ‘instant’, and dozens more are often interpreted as signs of spam.
• Be mindful of character limitations: many email clients cut the subject line off at some point, either due to the user’s screen resolution or the program’s layout. Understand what part of the subject is seen by most of your recipients.
• Test, test, test: try out different subject lines with different formats and benefits, and never stop experimenting.

Next is the actual content of the email. Needless to say this needs to match the subject line. If you make a promise in the subject that you don’t keep in the content, chances are most readers will either delete your message straight away, unsubscribe from your list, or report your email as spam. Too many spam reports and your email will never reach another inbox ever again, instead being redirected to your recipients’ junk mail folders and thus oblivion.

It’s generally a good idea to write email content following the same guidelines as for website content: strong headlines, structured content, and clear calls-to-action.

This means starting with a strong headline that describes the content accurately and challenges users to read it. Then you need to divide your content into short paragraphs that are easy to read – large blocks of text are unattractive and discourage readers. It’s also a good idea to emphasize key phrases in your text with bold and italics so that readers that quickly scan through it still catch the general idea.

And finally you need to finish with a clear call-to-action. What do you want readers to do with what you’ve just told them? If you want them to visit your website and buy a product, tell them! If you want them to forward your email to their contacts, encourage them! Use buttons in combination with text links and get users to interact with your email.

3. FORMAT YOUR EMAIL

A good subject line and strong content aren’t enough to get the most out of your emails. Your message needs to look good too. A plain text email will look boring no matter how good the content is. Nearly all email programs support HTML emails, which means you can write email messages the same way as you build web pages.

However, there is one big difference: there are huge limitations on the HTML code you can use in emails. Every email program, from Outlook to Hotmail, from Gmail to Thunderbird, handles HTML differently. On top of that many advanced features used in webpages, such as CSS and JavaScript, won’t work at all in most email programs.

This means you need to keep the HTML code as simple and straightforward as you can. A good rule of thumb is to avoid using any CSS and scripting languages, and stick to plain simple HTML code using tables to build your email’s layout.

If you don’t have sufficient knowledge of HTML, there are literally thousands of email templates available for download online which you can use and adapt for your own emails. Of course you can also avoid the whole HTML hassle and just use plain text emails, as long as you understand that your emails will look unexciting and may not be as effective.

4. USE EMAIL MARKETING SOFTWARE

So you’ve built a list of subscribers, written a good email and formatted it in an attractive layout, and you’re ready to send it out. You can use your own email address for this and manually send it – this is adequate for small lists. (Just make sure to use BCC so your readers don’t see the whole mailing list!)

But if you want to get serious with email marketing, the best approach is to use professional email marketing software. Good email marketing software does most of the hard work for you: managing your subscriber lists, building good HTML emails, and reporting on the success of your email campaigns.

There are hundreds of options available, usually in the form of online services, and for all different business sizes. So you don’t need to have a big budget to make use of good email marketing software.

A good place to start is AWeber, a very popular online email marketing service provider that offers cheap rates for lists under 500 subscribers and has over a hundred ready-made HTML templates to choose from. (Disclosure: I am an AWeber affiliate and get paid a small commission for every sign-up through this website.)

5. MEASURE AND IMPROVE

Once you’ve sent out your first email campaign it’s important to analyse how it performed. Did you achieve what you hoped for? If not, why? Was the open rate low? You may need to work on better subject lines. Were there few clicks from the email to your website? Maybe you need better content or stronger calls-to-action, or maybe the HTML layout wasn’t right.

With email marketing, as with your website, you’re never done testing and improving. There’s always a way to get more out of your marketing campaigns and increase user engagement. Never get complacent, but strive to continually improve your email marketing.

6. ENGAGE IN CONVERSATIONS

Email started out as a two-way communication medium. Despite the rise of unsolicited bulk email, that core essence of email hasn’t changed. Don’t just send out your campaigns and turn a deaf ear to what your subscribers say, but engage with them.

A good way to do this is to make sure that the reply-to address of your email campaigns is a valid email address. Yes, you may get a lot of mail delivery errors and out of office replies, but you will find that many users will reply to your email marketing campaign in various ways. This is not a bad thing – quite the contrary, it means that they took the time and effort to respond to your message.

Engage with your readers in conversations, whether they’re complaining about your email or complimenting you. Not only can you get valuable feedback on your email marketing, you will also build customer loyalty this way as well as enhance your online reputation.

Another method is to put polls, surveys, and contests in your emails. This increases user interaction with your emails and will allow you to gather valuable information from your customers.

TO SUMMARIZE

Email marketing is a powerful instrument that can bring strong value to your online marketing efforts. A well-run email campaign will ensure your customers keep coming back to your website. A badly run campaign however can have a detrimental effect on your reputation and might hurt your long-term prospects. So put the effort in and you’ll find the rewards will exceed your expectations.

Connect With Your Website Visitors Through Email Marketing is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Google has announced that their Search Engine Optimization Starter’s Guide has been translated into 40 languages. You can now read Google’s own SEO recommendations in your native language.

Go to the official Google Webmaster Blog to download the SEO Starter’s Guide in your own language.

SEO Starter’s Guide Now Available in 40 Languages is a blog post from Barry Adams.