People are still confused as to which format to use, mainly because Google keeps changing the game plan. Therefore I have written a post about the two different choices explaining both clearly.

Reasons to use subdirectories:

1) The content in the subdirectory benefits from the link authority from your domain.

2) If you have all your content in a subdirectory, the code is in the same file storage space making it easier to edit, find, change and move the code.

3) Simpler

Sometimes it is easier to use a subdirectory – Matt Cutts loves subdirectories – he set up mattcutts.com/blog to keep things simple.

Reasons to use subdomains:

1) Different content.

A subdomain works if your site has different content for its products. For example Google has subdomains for its distinct products such as maps, news – maps.google.com, news.google.com.

2) Localised content

Companies that have content for specific langauges or local areas use subdomains. Gumtree has a subdomain for it’s cities in Australia. For example http://sydney.gumtree.com.au/  while in London, the URL would be gumtree.com/london.

3) Restrictions from hosting company

If you already have a site and want to add blogging software to your site but your hosting company will not allow you to do so.  Therefore you will use a third-party blogging platform such as wordpress, blogger or typepad.  Your blog will therefore look like blog.wordpress.com instead of yoursite.com/blog.

Matt Cutts recommends using subdirectories if you are a new webmaster until you are confident with the architecture of your site. If you have a small site just stick with subdirectories.  If your site sells different key products and you want your site to be known for those, then set up subdomains.

 
1) Integration between ppc, seo and social media
There is definitely and has been more of an integration between seo and social media last year.  From my personal experience with the panda update we did far more blogger outreach as a way of link building.  The social media team in my last agency doubled in size from mid 2010 until the end of 2011. SEO predictions for 2011

2) Local search
With the introduction of Google Places in September 2009 and then the merger of the local business centre in April last year, local search played a very important role in 2011.  A client at my last agency was keen to ensure for every store they had a Google Place.  Therefore we had to get all their stores whitelisted in order to automatically verify all the new shops.

 3) Mobile
Last year I said that people have been jumping on the mobile apps and mobile site bandwagon. I mentioned that mobile would be increasingly important in 2011 and it did.  For our clients, we had to have a mobile ppc strategy as well as a desktop strategy.  We had mobile ppc ads with our own ad groups and campaigns. 

So after reviewing 2011 predictions, we can now move onto 2012

1) Less spam

2011 we saw the Panda updates in an effort to crack down on the content farms on the web.  This will mean there will be less spam out from these content and article syndication sites and therefore they will be less important in terms of link building. Google will  continue to role out alogirthms to make sure users are getting quality search results, making sure that very low quality links to a site have no weight.

 2) SEO and Social will be one package

Link building through social media will be paramount to an seo strategy.  Blogger outreach where clients have content placed on third party authorative sites will have far more weight than using article sites.  An agency that offers seo without a social media strategy incorporated within it will find it harder to compete in the market place. Updates from Google such as Google + means seo needs to use social media if it wants to stay ahead as Google added Google+ brand pages in the search results  in December last year. 

3) Personlised and local seach

Google vs Facebook

Google+ brings all your contacts in one place, and lets you organise them into different groups. You can have a group for your work friends, school friends and so on. Google+ is made of five key areas:

* Circles — your friends hub. Instead of grouping everyone together as your “friend,” you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life like colleagues, relatives, tennis partners. It is very easy to make new groups and add contacts – drag and drop.
* Hangouts — this is where you can send a broadcast to your friends that you are online and want to chat face to face. You have everyone “hanging out” together – only virtually though. It is like a massive three, four way skype chat.
* Sparks — Designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you’re free (like an RSS reader). You can share these items with specific circles of friends instead of all of your friends.
* Instant Upload — With Instant Upload, your mobile photos and videos are automatically uploaded to the web. (So no worrying about backing up your media, you can have it stored online in your own cloud)
* Huddle — A group messaging system, Huddle allows you to chat with a number of friends on the go via your mobile phone.

So do you think Google+ will take off? Only time will tell. Hitwise have come up with the following interesting stats, so it looks like people are using it. I doubt they will give up on Facebook, so the battle between to the two search giants will continue.

- Google+ received more than 1.79M total visits the week ending July 23, 2011. That is a decrease of 3% vs. the previous week (July 16th). The site received 1.86M total visits the previous week
- The average time spent on the site was down as well by 10% from 5minutes and 50seconds to 5minutes and 15seconds
- Among the top 50 Upstream sites, 59% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from other Google properties. Google.com accounted for 37% of Upstream traffic to the site. Gmail accounted 15.59%, a 9% increase from previous week
- 40% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from Search Engines (8% increase). Email provided the 2nd largest amount of Upstream traffic accounting for 19%.
- 59% of visits to Google+ are from Males.
- Among age demos, 33% of visits are from users age 25-34 for the 4 weeks ending July 23rd.

I have yet to really engage with Google+. At the beginning, only those with invitations could use Google+ but now everyone has an invite.

Martin McDonald from seoforums.org
Matt Owen from Econsultancy

Martin McDonald kicked off the event with:

A brief history of search
Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up Backrub.com – yes that was the name before they changed it to Google. They were both students at Stanford University at the time. There were two search boxes. There was the option users to search Stanford University and also the web. In order to be seen within the search engine, you had to have keywords in the code of your site telling the engine what your site was about. This is now referred to as “Keyword Stuffing” and it did help many sites rank for 7 or 8 years.

What is PageRank?
PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. It was designed by Page and Sergey. The more links a site had to it, the higher the PageRank it could achieve. Therefore people started buying and selling links, trying to boost their own PageRank. This is not what Google intended and this is where social signals comes in.

Why are social signals important?
Social networks are more reliable authoritative representation than links. Search engines will ignore unnatural social profiles so there is no way to build up authoritative links by “buying” friends. Google counts retweets as a signal of trust, even more so if it comes from someone who has a lot of followers and who engages regularly with their followers. Not all links are equal, they are weighted. A tweet from seojoblogs who has a few number of links compared to Matt Cutts will not count as much.

So what are the next steps?
Build your own social profile. Set up a Facebook and twitter page, but do not forget to engage with your users – meaning retweet, reply, respond to questions. There is no point having social profiles if you do not use them. By integrating your social media and seo efforts, you will have a higher change of increasing your click through rate and traffic to your website.

Matt Owen from Econsultancy then talked about:

Facebook Optimisation
Google’s biggest rival and quite annoyingly for them, they do not know how the Facebook algorithm exactly works. Matt was able to share with us a few best practices on how to increase your visibility within the Facebook walled garden:

- Fan page name – make sure this is the same as your website/company you are promoting
- Vanity URL – this should be short and contain your keywords
- Keywords loaded in the information and about boxes
- Status updates should contain keywords
- Photo and Videos should be tagged and have a description on each
- Open privacy settings, it may sounds obvious but some people have tight privacy settings meaning users will not be able to see their page.

These are Facebook best practice recommendations, they are still keeping quiet as to how they actually work. Facebook is the closed community of Google and they are set to be its biggest rivals.

Have a look at some of the photos from Search London – Integration is Key

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Google first launched it in 2009 on google.com only. It was supposed to be, as they say “an experimental feature designed to help you find more relevant information from your friends and the people you care about.” We know Google, they keep developing their products and they introduced Google Plus 1 earlier this year. Now, Google are bringing Social Search to more users around the world.

Social search results in other languages and on other domains are mixed throughout the Google results page based on their relevance. If you are looking for a particular product, it will highlight blog posts, twitter feeds that you are connected to .

Click on the link which is a video showing how social search works.

Google Social Search

So what do these updates mean for those in online marketing? It means you need to make sure you are covering all bases. You have to be present on blogs, in forums, on twitter, have an active facebook page (although Google cannot work out Facebook’s algorithm that mean. Social Search will be rolling out globally in 19 languages and should be available in the coming week, with more languages on the way. You cannot ignore social anymore. It is here to stay, Google have also said they will be rolling out the + 1 feature soon.

Google is constantly updating its range of products and even launched its first blog dedicated to search last Wednesday. http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/ I know I will be checking this one out on a regular basis. Google certainly invest heavily in R&D and it has paid off. They are now the number one search engine in the west.

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Why did Google introduce the Panda alogrithm?
They wanted to clean up the search engine results pages from low quality websites. Content farms and sites which that had a lot poor quality information were hit the most. Some of these included well known article syndication sites like Ezine Articles.

Google panda update

(source of photo: http://terry.henfleet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Google-Big-Panda-Update2.jpg)

So how do you know if you have lost out on the update?
Check your rankings and your website traffic from the beginning of April until now. If you have lost traffic and rankings and year on year it is low, then you have been affected.

How can you make sure your website is not negatively affected?
Do not use any black hat techniques which the panda update aimed to stop. Do not overload your page with keywords. check if there are sites out there that are copying your content like article sites, other industry blogs etc. If they are, ensure your duplicated content is removed post haste. Content should be 100% unique on each of your websites and within the website.

Who has lost out?

Poor quality websites and link farms, putting more emphasis on quality link building than ever before. So some low PageRank business directories or article sites could now harm your site rather than help it. When it comes to link building try and focus on the quality of links back rather than the quantity.

Who has won?

Those sites that have high quality content who regularly update their site with good articles and posts. As there were many losers, there are bound to be many winners as well. Some of the sites that have won are quite specialised in its own industry and provide great content:

* Ebay.co.uk
* Econsultancy.com
* Mashable.com
* WordPress.com
* Laterooms.com

So if you lost out, what should you do?

Trust is also a factor in the Google’s update. Websites that used too many adverts like AdSense or Affiliate Marketing banners were deemed to be untrustworthy. The focus now seems to be delivering quality to the end user, so filling the top half of your website (above the fold) with adverts instead of content could now be harmful to your site as well as your end user.

Vary your link building strategy

Build a good variety of links from a wide range of quality sources. Article sites are still a good way of creating backlinks for your website, but the focus should be on writing longer, unique content to prove your knowledge in your niche. It is even better if you can find a niche article site within your industry for improved relevance. I would suggest you optimise any press releases you have and syndicate them to high authority press release sites. Advertorials are a great way to get high authority links back to your site.

On page optimisation

Create good quality unique content for your site. If you create quality content relevant to your sites subject/industry this will help you build relevance to certain keywords and improve your overall authority in that niche.

The update just reinforces that fact the Google is King of the web and we must all be using seo best practice to make sure we are appearing as high in the SERPs as possible.

1) All in one SEO Pack
A great wordpress plugin that allows you to add a title tag and meta description to each of your posts. This is important as each post will have a separate URL and therefore should have an optimised page title and meta description. This means you can optimise different posts for different keywords.

2) Tracking
You definitely need tracking in place. The easiest is google analytics, I wrote a post about how to install ga on your wordpress blog. It is important to see where your visitors are coming from, which sites and on what keywords. If you have done a lot of link building, you want to check that the links are sending traffic to your site and which sites are sending you the most.

3) Images
A picture paints a thousand words. It is recommended to always have at least one image per post. Try and pick an interesting image as well that catches people’s eyes. People will

4) URL structure
Wordpress allows you to create a permalink structure of your blog posts and pages. This means you can have keywords within the URL. When you first set up your wordpress blog, the default URL with have ? and post=231.

Login to wordpress, go to settings and click on permalinks.

Permalinks within wordpress

5) Create categories and tags
Have a certain number of categories that act as sub headings for your blog. Make sure the categories have keywords in them allowing you to help rank higher for certain terms. You should also add tags to each post. This helps users find the content within your internal search.

I mentioned before, you need to love your blog. Keep your blog software upgraded to the latest version to secure your WordPress blog. This is important to do as older versions of WordPress are easier to hack which can not only negatively affect your search engine rankings but also leaves your site open for others to abuse. At the moment the latest version of wordpress is 3.1.2

So how should you optimise your home page?

1. One of the most important elements in seo is the title tag.

The title tag tells users and search engines the topic of that particular page. The title tag should be placed within the tag of the HTML document. There should be a unique title for each page on your site and they appear in the search results as the below illustrates.

Title tag example from seojoblogs

The homepage is probably the only page on your site where the title tag should feature your brand early followed by relevant keyword second. Typically, this is opposite to how your title tags should read for your internal pages.

2. Optimise the metadescription

This tells the search engine what the page is about. It is a summary of the page. It also appears in the search engine result pages and should be compelling enough for users to click through. Like the title tag, the description meta tag is placed within the tag of your HTML document.

If you do not have a metadescription tag, other content from the page will be pulled through.

3. Make sure you have a clear H1 tag

There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with h1, the most important, and ending with h6, the least important.
Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

Other areas to consider
1. Find the Balance Between Design / Usability & SEO – quite often the focus is on only one of these items, as a result the homepage suffers. Avoid having your design team dominate the conversation, be sure to factor in things such as usability and SEO.

2. Branding is Important – little things like company colors and the company logo can go a long way when it comes to designing your homepage.

3. Navigation – be sure that the homepage features clear and intuitive navigation from the homepage. Don’t have too many navigation elements on the page. With some sites, their homepage is their sitemap. Staples is an example of such as site. Ensure that your homepage features some intuitive main navigation (such as a top nav bar) and includes a link to your sitemap (and not to your XML sitemap).

4. Have one Home Page URL – from a user perspective, it can become very frustrating if you have seven different variations of your homepage URL.
Merrill Lynch for example, has 2 http://www.ml.com/ and:

http://www.ml.com/index.asp?id=7695_15125?

5. Content is your Friend – so make sure there is enough content on the page to explain what the site is about and encourage those users to click through. Make sure that the content has keywords the site wants to rank for, without it being spammy.

6. Avoid Having Two Versions of Your Homepage when possible – some will use a Flash version along with a static version of the homepage. Be simple, just have one version and you can make the site look pretty without having flash.

7. Page Load Time / Coding. Avoid having excess coding on your homepage. Have clean coding and optimised page elements so that the page load time of your homepage is not affected in a negative manner. Avoid large Flash files and large images.

8. The website should have a clear call to action, do not try and cram too much on the site, otherwise you will confuse the users and they will leave without clicking through.

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It is the major algorithm update to Google search with the aim to improve the quality of the search engine results. It started in the US at the end of February but has now rolled out across the UK. Many sites have seen their rankings drop which means they will be getting a lot less traffic following on from the update.

The Google Panda update hits the UK

(source of photo: http://terry.henfleet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Google-Big-Panda-Update2.jpg)

The panda update has received a lot of criticism. The product comparison sites, reviews and voucher sites came off badly from the Panda update. Ciao’s UK site lost 94% of its SEO visibility after the update went live in the UK earlier this week. Ciao is the shopping comparison site owned by Microsoft and Ciao along with other Microsoft sites including Foundem and ejustice.fr complained to the EU that Google was abusing its dominant position by lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competitor services in November.

In Google’s defence, they say the Panda update is aimed to reduce the visibility of “low quality websites” that carry duplicate content that can be found elsewhere on the web. Google has also reduced the visibility of sites that carry heavy advertising. Some sites like Mirror.c.uk, ITV.com and Metro.co.uk saw their visibility boosted by 20%.

However, many ligitimate sites which have duplicate content for product descriptions have also been punished. I was surprised when I saw the states about Qype, which lost almost 96% of its SEO visibility. Play.com, ehow.co.uk, about.com and Future Publishing’s Tech Radar also lost out.

I suggest you monitor your clients’ rankings and traffic to see what effect the panda update had on their site. Feel free to comment and share your results.

The table below shows the companies that have lost out and those who have benefited from the update. The data was compiled by SearchMetrics.

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/digital/google-algorithm-update-downgrades-microsoft/3025588.article

What is Google +1?

It was announced on 30th March, posted on the Google blog by product manager, Rob Spiro. Google basically is jumping on the social media bandwagon and many reference the +1 as similar to the Facebook like button. To recommend something, users will click the +1 on a webpage or ad. The +1s will start appearing in Google’s search results.

Google +1

So I bet you are all asking whether this will affect the natural search listings. The answer is yes. If you have two websites all with the same page rank, optimised pages, lots of link building and one site has more +1s than the other, then that site will rank higher. This means you still have to optimise your pages, this update reinforces how important seo is.

Here is a little bit of blurb for the search engine giants Google:

“So how do we know which +1’s to show you? Like social search, we use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including things like the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example). Soon we may also incorporate other signals, such as your connections on sites like Twitter, to ensure your recommendations are as relevant as possible. If you want to know who you’re connected to, and how, visit the “Social Circle and Content” section of the Google Dashboard.

To get started +1’ing the stuff you like, you’ll need to create a Google profile—or if you already have one, upgrade it. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.”

When will it appear?
Google will slowly be rolling out +1’s, starting in English on Google.com. You can also see what it looks like before the launch be going to Google’s experimental search site. Initially, +1’s will appear alongside search results and ads, but in the weeks ahead they’ll appear in many more places (including other Google products and sites across the web). If you’re an advertiser and want to learn more about how the +1 button works on search ads and websites, visit our AdWords blog.

Google did say at the beginning of the year and at Search London – New Year Search Club that 2011 was the year for social, so keep a look out on the updates coming out this year.

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