Latest Articles by xseopr

It May Be Summer, But It’ll Be Christmas Before You Know It

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

There’s a strange inversion in the seasons that can’t be attributed to global warming. Christmas is when all the holiday advertising starts, and any time now we’ll be seeing Christmas presents appearing in the shops. Which means that savvy Internet marketers are spending the summer getting their sites ready for Christmas.

The wisdom of this is obvious for retail sites, after all it’s the busiest time of the year. But what about business-to-business? As retail prepares for an income boost, B2B gets ready for an inevitable slump.

The Internet doesn’t close for Christmas, so it’s worth considering what can be done on-line, either to maximise the seasonal peak or ride out the festive trough. Now’s a very good time to overhaul the Website to make sure it does the best job possible over those crucial months.

Your position in the search engines springs to mind as an obvious issue here. Anything you do is unlikely to make an overnight improvement in your listings; building your ranking is a slow process that typically takes months. Which is why you need to be thinking about this right now. To achieve the best results possible you need to put a tick in all the important boxes; miss out an element and you’re groping in the dark.

But let’s be clear: you need to get started straight away. If Christmas is your main selling period – or if it’s when your cash-flow takes a dive - then you need to be climbing the rankings in the next two months to be in position to build your business. So start your search engine optimisation now.

The Peril of Duplicate Content

Perversely, your best efforts to improve your listings could be to no avail because Google isn’t even looking at your site. This isn’t to do with submitting to the search engines, it’s a quirk of Google’s algorithm that can leave people baffled why their site isn’t being found.

If Google finds two sites with near-identical content, then it’s likely to ignore one of them as a copy. It may even ignore both. It’s worth copying a string of unique text from your Website and pasting it into Google. This could reveal an unauthorised copy somewhere that’s not only infringing your copyright, it could be damaging your search engine ranking!

But it’s possible for your own site to appear to Google as a duplicate of itself. This phenomenon, known as a canonical domain, occurs when typing the domain with or without www at the start points directly to the same location. Google sees the two addresses as discrete but identical Websites. It’s quite easy to correct this problem by creating a permanent redirect from one version of the domain to the other.

Keyword Clean-up

Think about how you use search. Most people now have wised-up to the fact that the best results come back if they search for a short phrase, or even a fairly detailed description of what they’re looking for. Yet those same people try to grab search engine real estate with single keywords, putting themselves hopelessly into competition with millions of other sites – many of which aren’t even their competitors.

So take the time to put some real thought into the phrases that appear on your site. Don’t try to make a single page into a candidate for half a dozen phrase; the key to having Google understand what your pages are about is to specialise.

Build Links Slowly

It’s fairly widely known that Google bases much of its judgement of a site’s authority on the number, type and quality of links pointing to it. As a result, many companies have opted for the route of acquiring vast numbers of incoming links. And a few of them have paid the price of trying to fool the search engines.

In recent months we’ve seen a number of major on-line organisations – including two front-line insurance companies – blacklisted by Google. In their battle for position for high competition terms like "car insurance" they’d been a little too overt in acquiring links.

This highlights an axiom for anyone who wants to build long-lasting rankings in Google: Give the search engines what they really want.

Google isn’t operated by idiots. They know exactly what tricks site operators pull to try to fool their algorithms, and they’re getting better every day at spotting the perpetrators. A link to your site should be granted because the linking Website operator believes you have something of interest to its visitors, not because you paid someone $20 for a listing.

So don’t launch into a programme to build a thousand new links a month. Think about creating news stories that could be syndicated, look for related sites that carry material that’s relevant to your area. Link-building is still an important element of search engine ranking development, but quality is now far outranking quantity.

Examine The Statistics

Finally, take a long, hard look at exactly what your visitors are doing. If you don’t have a statistics package on your site, get one. Google Analytics is free and does a fine job. And if you do have stats available – use them! Don’t hide behind "I’ve had a look, but I didn’t really understand them". Spend half an hour or so and you’ll soon start to get what they’re telling you. And when you do get it, make changes. Tweak your site until every visitor is giving you maximum value.

If you start all this now, while the sun’s still shining (UK readers can ignore that last phrase), you’ll be in better shape this Christmas than you were last year.

...and may we be the first to say it: Merry Christmas.

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XSEO’s MD, Matt Paines, has been involved in the internet since 1995 and has been actively involved in search engine optimisation (SEO) since 1997. He was the only UK SEO invited to participate in the Microsoft Search Engine Champs project, which was first run in 2004. Matt speaks at various local and national seminars on the subject of internet marketing. He also provides services and research an an expert witness in Internet Marketing and Copyright related legal cases.

Soon To Be Christmas

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Google Succeeds Where Governments Fail

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

With Google now recognised as the UK’s number one brand we’re seeing the developing maturity of an Internet-controlling corporation. Google has been remarkably subtle and intelligent in taking control of the Internet. They won the search engine wars some time ago, effectively defining the way Websites are developed and presented. Governments and the EU have tried to do this and failed.

The Rise and Rise of Google Checkout

It seems certain that we’re about to see strong growth in take-up of Google’s checkout system for buy-online Websites. Google Checkout is a good example of the company’s subtlety. EBay’s PayPal has a long-established lead here, but it’s regarded as e-commerce for amateurs; it’s a great way of selling Billy’s outgrown bicycle, but there’s no real solution here for serious Internet marketers. By contrast, Google has introduced a feature-rich, scalable payment solution that’s easy for developers to implement.

David Ogilvy always maintained that having a product that delivers what your customers want is an essential for sustained market success. Google’s satisfied that criterion, but it’s then raised the stakes by a clever offer proposition: free order processing to a value of ten times your pay-per-click marketing spend. I have a client spending around £6,000 a month on Google Adwords. Effectively that gives him free order processing, which makes alternatives like ProtX or the infamous HSBC payment gateway look ludicrously expensive.

But Google’s cleverer still, using their Checkout puts a highlighted flash on your paid Google advertisement, which is already shown to be increasing click-through rate. This is going to make all of us more aware that Google Checkout exists and, sooner or later, every one of us will have set up a purchase account. Now the snowball rolls. Once you’ve signed up, it’s easier to buy through a Google Checkout than anyone else’s, and the alternatives start to die.

I foresee Google Checkout becoming the de facto standard for buying online in under twelve months. EBay is actually banning it from its auctions. This looks very much like a finger in a dyke: it may stop the leak for now, but the water pressure’s going to keep on building on the other side of the wall. PayPal may have something under development, but they’re going to need to be very clever not to be forced into a "me-too" style of marketing.

The Responsibilities of Market Leadership

It’s clear that, with the success of Checkout, Google has raised the bar and further strengthened its grip on the market. The survey carried out by Superbrands of the UK’s top 500 brands showed Google a clear leader, despite being only ten years old – the average age of companies in the top 50 is 90 years.

We have to watch carefully how Google handles this power. Microsoft has demonstrated that it’s possible for a market leader to be a benign dictator, and has largely proved laudably ethical during its reign as the world’s biggest brand. Signs so far suggest that Google may be similarly responsible, and that bodes well for the Internet as a whole.

Implications for Search Engine Optimisation

Google’s ascendancy has significant implications for search engine optimisers. XSEO, the company I co-founded with Matt Paines in 2001, has seen big players like AltaVista disappear, and even MSN, with all of Microsoft’s massive muscle behind it has been unable to break Google’s stranglehold.

Put simply, Google is frighteningly good at what it does. Before Page and Brin, people were optimising their sites by repeating word a hundred times over, and Internet searching was pretty much a lottery. It was Google who made it possible for us to find what we want by detecting these tricks.

XSEO has always tried to give Google what it wants, though admittedly finding out what Google wants can be something of a battle. Overall I see Google’s position as a good thing for the good guys. The strength of their recognition algorithms is now such that they can detect more and more of the tricks pulled by the "black-hat" optimisers. We’ve recently seen major UK Insurance players black-listed by Google. As the Google search engine handles more than 80% of UK search traffic, no one can ignore being removed from its listings.

What we’re seeing is an emerging set of standards – something the search engine optimisation industry has been seeking for some years. The EU legislation has failed to force site owners to comply with accessibility guidelines, while Google has enforced accessibility as a by-product of its search engine spider requirements. A site that’s accessible, has good relevant content, and that’s regarded as genuinely authoritative by its peers is likely to be a site worth visiting. It’s no coincidence that Google has aligned its ranking criteria with these three parameters.

So how do I view Google’s increasing power over our online lives? Provided they keep their heads and don’t allow absolute power to corrupt absolutely, I’m more than happy for them to rule. When standards are imposed legislatively they’re often ill-considered and rarely well-implemented. Here we’re seeing standards emerging commercially; if they’re the right standard – and so far I believe they are – then we all benefit.

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Jem Shaw is Marketing Director and co-founder of XSEO, the UK-based search engine optimisation specialist. Drawing on 30 years’ marketing experience, 15 of which have been primarily in digital media, he’s a regular speaker at marketing seminars and conferences.

Google Succeeds

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

A Pit Opens for Incautious Online Marketers

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The news that major corporations are putting search engines such as Google and Yahoo! at the forefront of their marketing strategies could herald huge problems for incautious optimisers.

We've already seen several significant players in the Car Insurance market fall victim to the dangers of over optimisation. Having reviewed the penalties, the companies involved are believed to have been black-listed by Google for search engine optimisation activities that don't comply with the webmaster guidelines. The important consideration here is that the companies were not necessarily doing anything wrong, they are playing Google's game, although a little too aggressively. In the past companies would disappeared from Google's listings because of attempts to deliberately fool the search engine to get traffic the site didn't deserve, but now it's possible for brands to lose their position in the results simply by doing their optimisation too enthusiastically.”

Google has, for some years, judged a site's authority by assessing the links pointing to it from other Websites.This has given rise to an industry wherein companies sell link-building programmes to artificially raise a site's perceived authority.

Google doesn't like to be manipulated. Internet search is a three-way deal: if I'm looking to buy car insurance, and you sell car insurance, I want to find your site. Google wants to give me what I'm looking for. But, given that there are a lot of competing sites, Google has to decide who to show first. If other sites point at yours, this suggests that your site is worth looking at- if they're related in some way to car insurance. A link from a site about artists' supplies isn't logical, and suggests that this is just part of a numbers-building campaign.

By looking carefully at the relevancy and context of links, as well as their rate of growth, Google has significantly raised the stakes for companies looking to optimise their search engine position: do it carelessly and you could disappear from the radar faster than a reclusive stealth bomber. The future is clear- as Google gets ever better at detecting the tricks that optimisers pull, the only option left will be to do the job properly.

Doing it properly consists of giving Google what it wants. Incoming links should be built by attracting interest, propagating news and information coherently and systematically throughout the Internet community. If your site's worth visiting, it should be possible to attract links from related and interested organisations by providing content that enhances their own proposition. That could be industry news, market observations, research, even humour.

There's no doubt that we're seeing a significant shift in Google's attitude to inbound links. A site might be number one for a given search term with, say, 50 or 60 links, while the entry at number two has 500- 600. Why? Because 50 or 60 relevant, logical links outweigh all those arbitrary entries that were placed to build up the numbers.

The underlying message appears to be that any company that relies strongly on Internet traffic needs to be looking carefully at its optimisation strategies to avoid the pit that has already begun to swallow some major players.

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Online Marketers

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Why Search Engine Ranking is Like the NHS Waiting List

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500

OK, so the optimisation process was a raging success. You’re number one worldwide for Lem-Sip flavoured dinnerware. Return to your office and prepare for profit.

Don’t rush, it could be a long time coming.

Search engine ranking is a key performance indicator; it isn’t an outcome. It’s all too easy to forget what we’re actually aiming for and treat symptoms, not causes.

The NHS analysts put huge importance on reducing the number of people on their waiting lists. We hear news items placed by various governments (I’m being party-agnostic here!) that waiting list numbers have reduced by X% and nod sagely at a job well done. Until we hear that the figures are being massaged by admitting fewer people to the lists. Bizarrely, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of us that the number of people on the list doesn’t matter. It’s how long you’re waiting to be fixed that counts.

Our obsession with search engine position is distressingly similar. The key outcome is conversions, not where you appear in Google. Imagine searching for treasure on a Pirate Island. The more holes you dig, the more chance you have of finding the doubloons. But if you don’t know where to dig, or if you’re even on the right island, that’s an awful lot of sweating for not much of a result.

OK, So You Already Knew This

By now you’ve probably worked out that I’m talking about the relevancy of the key phrases for which you’re high in the search engines. You’re half right; that’s certainly an element, but it’s only a small part of the story.

We’ll come to the really important stuff in a moment. But before we do that let’s talk for a moment about this bit that you already know. You worked out ages ago that there’s no point being top for a search term that no one ever keys in.

Didn’t you?

I’m glad you did, because that means you’re not one of the thousands who are sucked in every day by scammers who "guarantee" you a top ten listing. Key phrase relevancy is hardly breaking news, but it’s still forgotten by a depressing number of people, who then become easy prey for the fast buck brigade.

Conversion is the Only Criterion

Let’s get back to basics. When you built that Website you had an aim in mind. In most cases filthy lucre figures strongly in the equation, but some Websites are aimed at imparting particular information or gathering responses. Whatever you want from the site, it’s fundamental to its success that you define the goal. Try writing that goal down. You should be able to express it in one sentence. If you find there are "ands" in there, you might need to define two or more separate goals.

· We want to sell items through the on-line shop

· We want to receive qualified enquiries from potential customers

· We want visitors to tell us their opinions

· We want visitors to request a brochure

· We want people to sign up for something

There are countless more possibilities, but the common factor here is that we’re looking for a definable, countable result. When a visitor takes one of these options we’ve converted them into something different; they’re no longer a stranger. Until they take that step they’re no help to us.

Now the good news. Conversion is far, far cheaper than traffic. Driving people to your site always costs, either in straight money or in time and effort, which ultimately are the same thing. But conversion can be boosted by relatively trivial tweaks to your Website. I came across a client recently who’s shopping cart completions increased by 40% when we moved his checkout button an inch higher on the screen.

Pay-Per-Click is a Great Optimisation Tool

It follows then that analysis of visitor behaviour is the key to improving conversion rates. We need to understand exactly what visitors are doing on the site. At this stage absolute numbers are of secondary importance. As long as we have enough click-throughs for a meaningful analysis we can make good decisions.

And here we come to the litmus test for key phrase relevancy. OK, we don’t want a phrase that no one searches for, but equally we don’t want phrases that don’t lead to conversion. Just as importantly don’t be persuaded to bid for terms that you cannot provide content for. Checking your bounce rates is essential to ensure you are not paying for traffic you don’t want and cannot hope to convert.

Finding out this information before starting a natural search engine optimisation program is critical, as it can prevent the campaign being built with the wrong focus. With pay per click it’s possible to try combinations of different phrases, landing pages, site content and navigation until you find the best result.

Once the site is working at full chat, responding to search terms that relate to your target audience, you have a sales conversion tool that will provide increased return from increased traffic. Now’s the time to go looking for those search engine positions!

Simple Isn’t the Same as Easy

This is all easy to say, but not necessarily that easy to put into action. Improving a site’s conversion rate comes from a blend of common sense, experience and good intuition. There are plenty of excellent analytical tools around – and Google’s own Analytics will tell you a great deal about your site without soaking up your server resources. But you need to invest time into relating all the separate pieces of data and working out what they’re telling you.

And sometimes you’ll be surprised at the hidden message. Many buy-on-line sites love to offer you additional purchase options as you progress through the shopping process: "People who bought the Anteater exercise wheel also bought the Diary of a Vegetarian Arc Welder". Why? Because filling stations sell chewing gum by placing it next to where you pay for your petrol.

But the Web doesn’t work the same way. Most buy-on-line sites work better when you reduce people’s options as they progress through the buying process.

To return to my opening statement, this is where the focus on search engine position fails you. Driving thousands of people to your Website will do nothing but cost you money until you’ve tuned the site for optimum conversion. Measure and optimise the results from the visitors you have first, and then you can turn your attention to increasing their numbers.

And, let’s face it; everybody needs Lem-Sip flavoured dinnerware.

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Search Engine Ranking Like NHS Waiting List

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Payroll: Salary Sacrifice

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Employers are increasingly using salary sacrifice to manage employee remuneration. This raises the employee’s perceived value of their reward package, and forms a large part of Human Capital Management. But times have changed from the original aim of flexible benefit schemes: which was to adapt salary packages to be of more advantage to the employee, without additional cost to the employer. Now more employee package elements are based on employer cost savings, primarily at the government's expense.

The Lighter Side

Since February 2005, HMRC has allowed employers to operate benefits schemes in whatever way they wish: original salary, reduced salary, notional pay, pre-tax and pre-NI deductions and all combinations in-between are now permitted to be applied. What the HMRC inspector will be interested in when finding such arrangements, are copies of the revised contractual arrangements between the employer and employee. If revised arrangements exist then the salary sacrifice is in good standing and any qualifying advantages with regard to the correct operation of tax and NICs apply.

What's the catch?

If evidence of the employer's revised contractual arrangements with their employees cannot be provided, then the employer will find themselves presented with the bill for the underpayment of tax and NICs along with associated fines and penalties.

Employers also need to ensure that they do not fall foul of the new Tax Avoidance Disclosure (TAD) regime. The government is determined to ensure that all employers and employees pay the correct amount of tax and National Insurance Contributions (NICs). Since 1 May 2007 the TAD legislation additionally incorporates NICs with regard to avoidance schemes, obliging employers to disclose.

Nothing specifically excludes salary sacrifice arrangements … from disclosure. HMRC

However, HMRC expects very few such schemes to be notifiable because they fall out at some stage of the tests.

HMRC does not expect childcare voucher schemes to need disclosing. Ultimately it is for promoters and payroll managers to decide whether they have to disclose a particular scheme.

Some important points

Opting for salary sacrifice means a contractual change in employment terms and conditions has occurred. During periods of ordinary maternity, paternity and adoption leave, employers are legally obliged to continue to provide all contractual benefits. Salary Sacrifice cannot occur against the statutory payments received by the employees during these periods (the payments rates are already calculated on the lower earnings amounts after salary sacrifice), so the benefits must continue to be provided with any associated costs being met by the employer.

With the increasing and popular use of Smart Pensions or similar schemes, employers need to recognise that during any paid period of parental leave (such as maternity and adoption), any contractually based employer contributions for money purchase schemes - or even personal pensions - must continue to be paid by the employer. This is the case, even if the payment period extends beyond the ordinary parental leave periods, as is now the case for both maternity and adoption. These employer contributions have to continue to be based on the employee’s normal in-work earnings and, unlike any employee contributions, not on the reduced parental leave payments. So employers need to be smart about salary sacrifice pensions: understand your true continuing liabilities.

Did you know?

The employee can potentially save 22% tax and 11% in NICs on the costs of some of these benefits, and increasingly more important, the employer can save 12.8% of the costs of such benefits from their employer NICs contributions. These amounts can potentially be substantial. And higher-rate tax payers can achieve savings of 40% (although the NICs savings is potentially limited to 1%). This, of course, all changes from April 2008 when the basic rate reduces to 20% and NIC upper earnings limit is aligned with the higher tax rate band.

So where is flex expanding into?

Most benefits being offered attract commission payments as an income to the provider, but employers may consider taking advantage of other elements.

Save with reduced NICs

The following flexible benefits attract no tax or NICs liabilities and potentially offer great savings to the employee over the costs they would bear if paid direct out of their net pay:

Employee medical screening

Provision of a single mobile phone (limitations were placed on the provision of multiple phones in April 2006).

Share incentive plans held in trust for a period of years.

Through the provision of salary sacrifice, the arrangement can be engineered to take advantage of the employer-provided free shares at no cost to the employer. In effect the employee sacrifices pay to receive free matching and free employer given shares.

Employees who occasionally work from home may agree to offset some of their pay to receive as an alternate the £2 per week tax- and NICs free. Although the advantage is limited, it does boost the net pay of the employee potentially by between £34.32 and £42.64 per annum and saves the employer £13.31 per year for every employee in the scheme – it all potentially adds up.

So the scope for the expansion of Salary Sacrifice arrangements is wide and varied, thereby paving the way for a number of specialist flexible benefits providers, like Ceridian.

Found these tips handy? Why not use our expertise to take full advantage of the legal loopholes that apply to benefit provision?

Contact us for more information on flexible benefits.

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Ceridian provides HR, payroll, EAP and HR consultancy services to over 50% of the Financial Times Global 500 and more than 75% of the Fortune 500. In the UK, Ceridian serves 9,600 customers with a headcount of over 1.7m and processes 24m payslips a year. It is the largest payroll provider overall, and the second largest outsourced payroll processor in terms of revenue, with over 70 years' experience in payroll in the USA and 40 years in the UK. http://www.ceridian.co.uk/

Flexible Benefits

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Successful websites built on‘good foundations’

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Eighty six per cent of UK businesses do not realise building a website should always start with "good foundations".

One of the UK’s leading search engine optimisation experts is concerned that only 14% of companies reported that they had thought about how their website would be found on the Internet before they built it.

Head of XSEO, Matt Paines, believes that companies are wasting their money if they do not build websites so they can be found by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

"Good foundations underpin the potential success of any website," said Matt. "And it is vital that every website is built so it can be as search engine friendly as possible.

"In the same way a building will fall down if it no has foundations, a website is rendered invisible on the Internet if it is not built in a way that allows it to be easily signposted online.

"Companies still seem to see the appearance, content and functionality of their website as a priority, when in fact arguably the single-most important consideration is having a search engine friendly design."

"If it came down to a simple choice, I’m sure every business would rather have a mediocre looking website which attracts lots of visitors, than one that is stunning but nobody can find it on the Internet."

XSEO conducted the research at February’s Technology For Marketing Show (TFM) Search Clinic at Olympia London and Paines, who is one of only two Microsoft Search Engine champs in the UK, was astounded that in this day and age so few companies put SEO on the agenda at the planning stage of a website’s construction.

"For many years we, along with other SEO's, and search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) have been trying to re-educate web designers to consider search engines and how they navigate websites."

"Building search engine friendly or accessible websites is not complicated, in fact it’s relatively easy," he said. "Search engines use simple programs – which are commonly known as robots or spiders - that crawl the Internet looking for websites and their content. If they can access a website they can begin assessing the relevance to any given search.

The search engines use computer programs (often called robots or spiders) that crawl the internet looking for websites and their content. Once this data is collected it is processed and it forms the basis for the search engines to derive the sites relevance to any given search. Being search engine friendly allows them to enter the site and read the content. So conversely having a site that does not give the crawlers access to the readable text will prohibit them from understanding the sites content thereby, destroying any ability of being ranked highly in a search for a product or service.

"It’s a shame," he added. "That so many companies waste huge amounts of money on websites, many have bought into the idea that the Internet offers untold riches, but fail to understand that a website is not the end of the story."

He went on to remark that basic marketing principles are often not adhered to. "The results from the TFM Clinic demonstrated that simple planning and consideration regarding target audience and means of attraction are still being disregarded. Given that for media time, the Internet is catching up with that of television, ignoring how they will be found on the Internet and the real measure of its success online will be the nail in the coffin of many companies"

For more information visit www.xseo.com/pitfalls.htm

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Good Foundations

Source: http://www.articletrader.com