The below screenshot shows a current local results in Google UK for the search term ‘dentists in Manchester’

Here you can see the following changes

• 1. Only two Organic listings at the top
• 2. The map on the right hand side where the PPC ads are
• 3. Local citations are sometimes shown in the main SERPs
• 4. Links to the reviews page

It appears that Google are aiming to raise the importance of having a Google Places listings. One quick check I performed was checking keyphrases without GEO modifiers, such as the keyword ‘limo hire’. Here I can see that Google realizes that the user is looking for a local listing and Google automatically insert the new Local listings into the SERPs based on their IP address.

These changes will certainly have a big impact for the following type of web sites:

• Directory sites – Traditional directory sites used to perform well for a wide selection of local searches, they may not appear anymore unless they have lots of authority
• National sites – You may have a site which covers the whole of the UK, this change means that if you don’t have a bricks and mortar building you may not list as well
• Sites which don’t have a physical address – Sites without an actual physical address will now struggle to rank for local queries.

But what should you do to try and combat this change? local SEO is no longer about trying to get yourself into the top 7 local listings as before, meaning having an optimised Google Places listing will be even more important. One obvious tip is to get your sites physical location into as many top directory sites as possible such as yelp.com, yell.com, thomsonlocal, city search, yahoo local and many more…

Google are even listing some important directory sites underneath the local listings in the SERPs. If Google are showing which sites are important, GET YOURSELF LISTED IN THEM!

Final thoughts
Google and other search engines realise that they need to be more local, this will be especially important to the massive mobile search market. Google know by pushing their local service they will become a resource for people looking for local information, which may well see their overall traffic levels increasing!

This new change is also opening up the market place to smaller retailers who cover their local area, making it easier for them to take some business off the larger retailers. I think this is a smart move from Google and will result in users finding what they want easier, which at the end of the day is the biggest goal for any search engine.

The first thing to note, is that there are many types of links including:

• Blog Comments
• Directory Submissions
• Article Submissions – Writing unique articles for links using services such as ezinearticles, articlebase.com etc
• High PR links – Links with high Page Rank
• Authority links – Links from magazines etc
• Themed links – Links on theme

Each of these links has their own benefits in SEO with different market places requiring different types of links. More difficult markets will require a higher quality link profile, whereas easier markets may only require a lower quality link profile.

Analysing competitors
The first job is to analyse your competitors links. I advise that you write down 4 competitors for your main search term. Once you have your list you need to run all your competitors through the popular www.opensiteexplorer.org tool from SEOMOZ and export all the data into Excel. The idea here is to create a one massive Excel file with the links to all your competitors and your site.

Analysing the data from www.opensiteexplorer.org
Obviously it is difficult to analyse all this link data, what we need is a way to group the data to determine what links are required for our site. Looking at all the links to these sites they come in the following formats:

• Home Page links – These are generally the high PR links
• Inner page – These are generally link pages or directory submissions
• 2nd level links – The links at these levels are generally article submissions
• Level 3 downwards – A lower quality of link

So we need a way of breaking down what level each of the links pointing towards the sites are coming from, the more links at the higher level the more competitive the market place. The below table shows an example of the different level of links pointing towards www.mysite.com, obviously you would have much more links at each level

The next job is to seperate the links at each level, this can be achieved by using the ‘text to columns’ function in Excel, and separating each ‘/’. Please see image below, this basically seperates all levels of the links.

Once you have achieved this you should have a list of all the different levels for each link. You can then use the COUNTA function to count all values in each column. This should give you a total of each level. Once you have this information you can then work out how many links a competitor has from each level, this can be achieved by summing the total from one level and removing the value from the next.

For example if you wanted to know how many level 1 links you had you would remove the total from level 2 away from the total from level 1. The below images shows how this may look in Excel

Now that we know how to evaluate each competitors links we can now run this analysis through all competitors. This data can now be added into one big table, from this table we are able to analyse the links we require. The below images shows a populated data table with 4 example competitors and our site

Once you have this data you can then create a bar chart, this will clearly identify where you are missing links. You need to make an assumption as to where you require links, basically the area with the smallest bar!. The below graphs shows the above data in the bar chart format.

From this data we can see that the main area our client is missing is the higher quality links. They have a very small percentage of root domains linking to them. This means that we should focus on higher quality links and less on directory submissions and article writing

If you have any comments on the above data, or any other ideas to analyse this set of data please contact me via the contact form on this site.

The whole new update is all about giving users results quickly. It seems speed is something that Google has been working on heavily in recent times, first they introduce the site performance tool in Google Webmaster Tools, then they release Google Local which is a massive change to the search results.

The below video shows one of the first demos of Google instant:

Since the launch of Google instant may SEO’s and website owners have been worrying about how this may change their online marketing campaigns. Some questions that have been going through peoples heads are:

• Will my listings drop?
• Will I still receive as much long tail traffic?
• Will the impressions of my ads massively increase?

The main thing to do is not panic, look at your analytical data and don’t make any quick decisions as to your marketing plan, if you do you might regret it!

I thought I would voice a couple of opinions on how I think Google Instant may affect SEO, they are:

International SEO
The new Google instant system predicts searches from search databases. Search database however will be different from country to country. This could mean that optimising for a search term which appears as an instant result in the UK may not work in the US. This could make it more difficult to optimise one domain for many different countries.

Make those top positions even more important
I don’t know if you noticed but the search bar for Google instant is slightly larger, this means users will need to scroll more through the results. But as users generally don’t like scrolling down the page this will mean the top positions will receive even more clicks.

Enforce short tail terms
As the results change as a user types words into the search box the short tail terms will receive far more impressions. This will mean that large brands will potentially receive more clicks than previously.

Long tail search terms
The affect on long-tail search is a massive subject that has aroused intense debate. My thoughts are that this could go either way. Firstly you may notice a shift towards more mid-tail search terms as these results will instantly rank for the term before Google suggest a longer term, meaning short terms become very important. For businesses that heavily rely on long-tail searches to compete with the larger brands they may well receive less traffic than before as a user wont bother finishing their search term. It could however go the other way with certain long tail phrase that appear as an instant search getting more traffic, Google is in fact narrowing down their search for them. This could lead to certain long tail search terms which appear as a suggest to be very competitive. I guess on this one we will all have to wait and see.

Adult Search Terms
Adult search terms are actually some of the most popular on the internet! Using the new Google instant it does not show instant results for a selection of adult terms, the user has to hit enter to get the results. Does this mean less clicks for these terms, who knows?!

So there is some food for thought with this update, I guess as with anything Google does we will just have to wait and see. For now review your Analytics data regularly and see how this could be affecting your business. If you have any thoughts or comments on this interesting subject please get in touch

Directory Submissions – Submission to relevant directories
• Press Releases – Press releases of your products and services
• Article Submissions – Writing relevant articles and submitting them to high quality article sites
• Guest Posts – Completing guest posts on related sites
• Contacts – Utilize your contacts to get some quality links
• Authority links – Links from magazines or high PR sites
• Blog comments – Commenting on relevant niche sites in your industry
• Competitions – Running a competition
• Link Bait – Create tools, write something controversial, this is great as link bait
• Social Media- Using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build up your links

There are of course many other methods of obtaining quality back links to your site. One of the most important factors when link building is to use your main services as the anchor text to your site. This can however lead to an unnatural link profile, resulting in loss of rankings and all your hard work lost.

To make your links appear more natural you should look at building links that appear more natural such as image links, brand links, using people names in links, and links simply to the domain name. This is especially important if you are link building to a new domain as it is likely the new domain would have very few natural links on the internet.

To test this theory I completed some tests on a domain name evaluating all the links, and deciding if they were one of the following:

• Brand links
• Service Links
• Image Links
• No anchor text
• Brand and service links

The test involved exporting all the links, and then breaking the links down into the different anchor text that was used. I then manually decided if the links equated to one of the above list. This showed the following:

Here we can see that the site in question was heavily service related, with very few links towards the other types. To me this link portfolio is a little unnatural. Google would expect to see more non service related links in the sites link profile.

Evaluation
After reviewing the above link profile of the above site I would evaluate that this site needs more non-service related links. This can come in the form of blog commenting or perhaps some brand linking using social media. I would also concentrate on creating some links that contained a brand and service, as this would relate the brand and their services more closely together in the search engines.

• Banner Advertisting
• Email Campaigns
• PPC campaign

One problem many webmasters find is tracking the success of these campaigns. Recording any marketing campaigns success is a critical part of the optimisation process, you need to know which of your marketing campaigns is working well for you.

Luckily Google Analytics provides the ability to tag your URLs so that the traffic data is sent to your Google Analytics account. You should remember that if your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts are linked, your adwords data will automatically be tagged, meaning cost, campaign and click through data is automatically sent through to Google Analytics.

You will however still need to tag your other non search engine campaign, such as banner ads and promotional email. It is important to remember that you don’t need to tag any natural search clicks as Google Analytics automatically records these visits under natural search.

Within a tagged URL you can use the following variables:

• Campaign Source – The referrer such as Google, citysearch etc
• Campaign Medium – CPC, Banner etc
• Campaign Term – Keyword
• Campaign Content – Used to differentiate between different adverts
• Campaign Name – Used to indicate the campaign, for example xmas campaign

To help your tag your URLs Google has created a URL builder, this easy to use tool creates the tagged URL for you, you simply have to copy and paste the URL into your campaign links. The below link shows a tagged URL for a Google banner campaign, for a christmas campaign using the keyword xmas trees.

http://www.website.co.uk/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=xmas%2Btrees&utm_campaign=christmas%2Bcampaign

Once you have completed your tagging you will be able to review the success of your campaign through Google Analytics, it is important however to remember that data can take hours to reach your Google Analytics account.

In Google Analytics go to Traffic Sources –> All Traffic Sources

You will then be able to look for medium and source of your campaign, such as Google banner advertising campaigns. It is important that you analyze and review the traffic from your tagged URLs to discover what form of advertising is working for you, and achieve the highest return on investment possible.

• Video
• Images
• News
• Blogs
• Forums
• And more…

Videos will always attract users as they are more appealing to view than traditional adverts. The search engines have quickly caught onto this allowing users to search a huge selections of videos on sites such as YouTube.

One of the main things to think about when deciding to use video as a form of marketing is where to host the video itself. Traditional it is more efficient to host content on your own site as this builds up your site, and provides more search terms for users to reach the site. Video however is generally hosted on third party websites such as Youtube, mainly due to the technical reasons of hosting video. Users also host videos on Youtube due to its popularity and reach, Youtube is now in fact the 2nd biggest search engine.

In more recent times however websites have become more powerful, making it easier to host the video on your site itself. Most people however will still host their video on Youtube as they will make more money per view than they would on their own site.

A good idea is to promote the video on your site and third party video websites, that way you get both of the benefits including links to your video on both Youtube and your site. One great way to get your video on as many third party sites as possible is to use a video syndication services such as Tubemogul which will sent your video to a selection of third party websites.

But what ranking factors are used for videos
Like natural search Youtube uses a selection of ranking factors including title, description, tags, views, ratings, how many times it has been embedded, comments, age, subscribers and inbound links

One way to get Google to index the video on your site is to use a Video Sitemap, video sites are like traditional XML sitemaps, it is a sitemap of the locations of your videos. The video sitemap protocol also allows you to specify a thumbnail image which can appear in the search results. Once you have completed the video sitemap you should upload it to Google Webmaster Tools as usual, you should also reference the sitemap in the robots.txt file

To help your video rank better in the search results it is still best practice to include some text description of the video next to it. Google’s algorithm still heavily relies on text, so including some relevant text can only help your chances of listing.

One great tool to discover new SEO keywords from your PPC account is the search based keyword tool. Firstly you should login to your Google Adwords account then open the search based keyword tool. You should then be able to pick your site from a drop down list and click on find keywords.

This tool will then provide you with a long list of keywords from your Adwords campaign. Each keyword comes with the following metrics of data:

• Monthly searches
• Competition
• Suggestion bid
• Ad/Search Share

The most important parts of data from this list are monthly searches and Ad/Search share, you can actually use this data to discover niche keywords for your SEO campaign, that you were not aware of before.

To discover these niche keywords you should export this keyword list to Excel and then filter the list by ‘monthly searches’ and ‘Search Share’. You should look to filter the search share by anything between 50-75, and search volumes over 200 a month.

This will provide you with a list of keywords that appear on the first page 50-75% of the time, and have high monthly searches in Google. This gives you a great starting point to push more long tail SEO keywords which are one the first page of Google, but can be pushed higher through SEO to improve your sites visibility in the search engines.

Doing this means you are actually using all the keyword research your PPC account manager has undertaken to help your SEO campaign. Not only this the data you are analysing is real data from your account and hence is more trusted than other methods of analysing websites.

This way of analysing keywords for SEO only works for clients who have both an SEO and PPC account. I will be reviewing other ways of analysing this data soon, so watch this space.

Our stand was in a great position and was busy for most of the day which was great. On day three of the event I presented a seminar on ‘SEO for ecommerce websites’ in the ecommerce theatre. The seminar was full, with many people having to watch from the outside of the theatre.

The presentation talked about SEO tips for ecommerce sites including structure, content, internal linking and technical recommendations for ecommerce sites amongst other things . For those of you that missed the presentation please see the slides below

• Adding dynamic meta data
• Removing duplicate content
• Addition of content, possibly a blog system
• Implementing canonical URLs
• Changing the navigation
• Plus much more…

SEO of course does not finish there, your site will be ever evolving especially if you have an ecommerce site selling products online. In order to ensure that your site’s SEO is still optimised as well as possible you should be also undertaking regular site checks they include:

Checking Pages can be Indexed
Search engines can often have trouble indexing the lower levels of your site, this can be due to navigation problems, your server is slow, or a possible penalisation reducing the amount of pages indexed by Google on your site. This can be monitored by adding many sites maps across your site and submitting them to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. For example you should create a different set of sitemaps for categories and sub categories of your ecommerce site. Google will then provide you with the following information:

• URLs in sitemap – How many URLs are in the sitemap
• Indexed URLs – How many URLs have been indexed

This will give you a good idea as to where any problems arrise, you can then work on the best ways of fixing the issues and getting all your pages indexed.

Canonicalisation
One method of increasing internal link strength and reduce duplicate content is to specify the canonical tag on your URLs. As your website is changing often you may find that your redirect rules have been removed, or the canonical tags have been removed. It is always worth checking canonical URLs in the site, perhaps the most common are URLs indexed with and without the trailing slash, upper and lower case duplication issues, and old unfriendly URLs which have not been properly 301 redirected to their new page.

Duplicate Meta Data
Perhaps one of the most easiest things to diagnose is duplicate meta data in the site. Simply go to your Google Webmaster Tools account then click on HTML suggestions. Google will supply you with a break down of any duplicate meta data (see image below)

Duplicate meta data general means that your dynamic page templates are missing a meta data section. Most of the time this can be resolved by adding meta data into the database and calling this within the of the pages. This exercise although quite simple to undertake can help increase your long tail traffic, especially for large ecommerce sites.

Site Speed
There have been many blogs and post recently talking about Google introducing site loading speed into its algorithm, to me these stories make sense, Google want to show the best possible result to a user, and a slow site is not the best result. To enforce how much Google would like you to speed up the web they added the ’site performance’ tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Going to labs > site performance will show you how well your site is performing. (see image below)

If you notice that your site is particular slow speak to your webmaster who should be able to optimise things to make them a little faster

Sites that link to you
An extremely important factor in SEO is the sites that link to you. A link to your site is like a vote of confidence in your service, so the more links from respected sources you can receive the better. You should regularly check your links using the ‘links to your site’ section under ‘your site on the web’.
You should check a selection of your links to ensure they are of a high quality, you may also find some hidden gems here, like a strong link from a site with high PR. You can then contact that webmaster to change the link to one of your keywords to improve your rankings on that term.

The fact is that page speed is very important to users, studies have proven over and over again that web users like fast websites. If a web page takes a long time to lead then their is a high chance that you might lose a potential sale, a user will simply click on the next relevant result that has a faster website.

There has also been a lot of talk recently about Google introducing page speed into their algorithm. Why wouldn’t they? Google’s mission is to create the best result for a user, and is the best result a slow site that users don’t like? Search engines also prefer a high content to code ratio, meaning that reducing the code in the page makes the search spiders life a little easier. For most sites this should not be a huge concern, only a really slow site will not get indexed properly and could get punished by Google.

But how do you know if your site is fast enough? There are now many tools which you can use to test page speed they include

Google Page Speed Tool
Google released the Google page speed tool back in June 2009. This page speed tool is an open source Firefox extension that provides information as to what is slowing your page down. This tool is for technical people, and details anything which is reducing performance including combining CSS files, browser caching, combine external JavaScript plus much more. Well worth looking into to improve performance.

Google Site Performance
To enforce Google’s stance on page speed they introduced the site performance tool into their Google Webmaster tools service, this tool again provides suggestions from Google as to how to make your site faster. You can find the site performance tool under the labs section in Google Webmaster Tools.

The tool will even show site performance over time, to show you if your changes have improved performance, which is great. Below is a screen-shot showing this.

YSlow
Finally yahoo have released a page speed plug-in for Firefox called Yslow. This tool was actually released prior to Google’s page speed tool. Yslow is also a great tool and provides easy to understand information in chunks back to the user. Although not as good as the Google page speed tool, this is still worth looking at.