W3C validation

It is interesting to hear about W3C from Matt Cutts, a chap working at Google and answering questions about search engines optimisation.

Most of the websites, including Google, don't respect W3C standards. And there is no "direct" relation between W3C compliance and search optimisation or browsers compatibility.

I am sure that Google can aford the best front-end designers in the world... and I always find it amusing to see in front-end designers or in quotes**: produce 100% W3C compliant XHTML code.

This is a great objective to strive for 100% W3C compliant code, but can hardly be a requirement for complex dynamic sites.

** I must admit that I put this in proposals myself, when I know that:
1) it is achievable (semi-static sites)
2) it will re-assure the client who has been told that validation is mandatory for quality websites..

I just hope that the distribution of this video will help destroying this myth.

Google adwords :: new tips and techniques

It has been a long time since I last wrote about CPC, specially Google adwords.

Here are a few tips/tools I have recently started using a lot, with very positive impact.

1) Quality score

Quality Score is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It combines a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query.

This is a very important parameter, which can be used to troubleshoot the performance of each keywords, specially related to the content of the ads and of the landing pages.

I am usually targetting at 7.

• run a report showing quality score for each keyword
• identify each keyword which can potentially bring traffic to the site (significant volume of impressions) and highlight all keywords with a Quality Score <>
• Verify that the ad copy contains these keywords. If not, create a new ad group for this type of keywords, and create a relevant ad containing the keywords in the copy
• Verify that your landing page is optimised for this keywords (meta tags, h1 title, image alt tag, copy contain these keywords). If not, create a new landing page targetting these specific keywords

Note: this process can be very time consuming if you try to apply this to ALL keywords (specially if you have got 1000s listed...). This is why it is important to focus only on keywords bringing potentially significant traffic to the site.

Benefits: A poor quality score usually means that the ad will not be clicked as much as it could be (poor CTR), that conversion rate will not be as good as it could be. By improving your quality score, you ensure that the ad copy and the landing pages are optimised to some extents. Also, a good Quality Score will ensure that you pay less than competitors for a same position.

2) Watch out position 1-2-3 format for your ads.
If your ad is in position 1-2-3, it may be formatted differently by Google (see picture below)

You need to ensure that your ad still makes sense (right punctuation) in both formats.

3) Use the editor
The adwords editor is nice piece of software allowing you to manage your ads more effectively that for the google.com/adwords interface

4) Use the media planner
This is a tool I have very recently started using, and turn your CPC content campaigns into a real media buying tool. Use this tool to build a map of all the sites you want to advertise on.

5) Use Google Insight Search
It is a combination of Google Trend, and Google keywords suggestion tool, providing you with a good way to create your different adgroups. This tool would deserve a post itself, which I will probably add to this blog later on this month.

Google: Vertical search - secret weapon?

Targeting profiles
I think one of the reason Google is providing a better search experience than other rivals is its ability to deliver very relevant results to specific profiles of searchers.
E.g. 1: businesses or individuals looking for local suppliers



If you search for "printers london" for instance, Google will combine results with google map, and display directly a list of local printers in the results page.

E.g. 2: definitions

If you are looking for a definition of a word or expression, Google will return a series of definitions in search results.

Always adding new "vertical" results.
And Google keeps adding new "vertical add-ons":

E.g. 1: people looking for information on a specific site (large portals)




If you are looking for a book on amazon, you can use their search box directly for Google search results.

E.g.2: Programmers looking for code snippets
This one was added only very recently. Just type in some random code, and you'll find files containing this code



Some articles pointed out that Google was upsetting large websites such as amazon with their embedded search bar:
"[Google] has absolutely crossed the line because it's so blatantly about commercialisation and not user experience."
Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude

I personally don't think that these features are driven from the marketing department. By improving its vertical results, Google improves the user's experience, and keep them on its results page.

This is of course a matter of concern to all publishers (Amazon complained about the search box, and got it removed for instance), who get their number of page views reduced, and consequently their advertising revenue. But Google's mission statement is to offer the best results to its users, allowing them to find the right product/service/content directly from the search results, and the addition of these "vertical features" are going in the right direction, keeping Google ahead of the game, and definitely improving the overall user experience.

overcoming the minus 6 penalty

A lot of things have been written about the minus 6 penalty/filter added by Google recently.

It is quite easy to demonstrate:
e.g.: we have very recently released a site (http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk), and I was checking the ranking of this site for some specific/unique titles.

"Segmenting Your Customers - Uncovering Hidden Value": This is a very unique title, which should get http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/articles/segmenting-customers.html into position #1 straight away.

Instead, the page is ranked at position 6. It is clear that this position is assigned on purpose by Google (you can check yourself with other very unique titles for recently released sites), which is probably because this is the position the less likely to be randomly clicked on.

Google probably tracks the number of clicks on results it returns, and take this into account in the ranking algorythm. But provided that some people just click on first links without thinking about it, positioning the "on probation" link in position #6 gives Google more chance to test effectively if the link is actually relevant.

I think that it is just a temporary position. Google hasn't computed all data yet, and hold the site in the position until more processing has been done. Nothing really to worry about, it is in my opinion just a sign that google has crawled the page, but not asssigned a proper ranking yet.