Tom Doyle :: TALK

Adobe released a press release today, stating that they are teaming up with search industry leaders, namely Google & Yahoo! to “improve search results of dynamic web content”.

Adobe have given Google & Yahoo! access to the Adobe Flash technology to allow them to improve their ability to index flash files/websites.

So what does this mean for us, the search engine optimisers and web developers? Well at the moment, very little it seems. We’ve all known for quite sometime that Google has been able to follow links and index some content from within a flash flash file. At the moment, all this does is give Google and Yahoo! insider information on how they can get to information, previously unavailable from within the flash file.

Will it make a difference? Will flash websites now have a better change of being indexed? In my opinion, I don’t think this will ever happen. Flash just doesn’t offer the flexibility that plain text based HTML does. You’ve a lot more scope within plain HTML than Flash to optimise your website.

It’s an interesting development, but not one I see making a huge difference for a long time.

So Google and Yahoo! are now partners on search ads huh? My god what next??

I have to say I think it’s a great deal for both parties. Yahoo! can greatly increase the monetisation of their pages, while Google can continue to grow their penetration of the search advertising market.

Here’s Google’s apparent reasoning for the joint venture : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-agreement-to-provide-ad-technology.html

If you were new to the web, you wouldn’t be forgiven for thinking the homepage of Google is un-inviting, un-interesting and downright boring. Why have such a large company with all their billions never updated their homepage to make it more exciting?

Well to put it simply, it’s been years of testing it’s users. At the Google I/O Conference a couple of weeks ago, Marissa Mayer explained why:

“When Google was a relatively unknown 80-person start-up, the company tested Stanford students on how well they could use Google to find which country won the most gold medals in the 1994 Olympics. The result: students would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…”

When Marissa intervened and asked why they were waiting so long to perform a search, most people said “I’m waiting for the rest of it”. The students were clearly waiting for busier more flashy website and it was never coming.

So what did Google do to counteract this issue? No, they didn’t make it flashier, nor did they add a lot of extra content. No, it was something so simple, most people probably wouldn’t have thought about…

They put a copyright notice at the bottom of the page! Yes, that simple!

It’s not there for legal reasons,” Mayer said. “It’s there as punctuation. That’s it. (It tells the searcher) ‘Nothing else is coming; please start searching now.’”

That’s debatably the most innovative idea to come out of Google to date!

• We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment

I don’t usually do this, but since someone else is blogging about a (so far) successful campaign that we were involved in, I thought “what the heck?”.

So here it is - Blue Sky Mortgages Ireland - Number 2 on Google.ie for “Mortgages”. Now if I’m honest, I’m not 100% convinced the latest Google SERPs are going to last that long - so while it’s there, lets talk about it!

I’ve talked before about the importance of a web designers role in the proper preparation for search engines when designing a website and to be honest our job would not have been easy if it wasn’t for the work of David Behan.

David designed the site perfectly, not only from look and feel, but also from it’s preparation for the search engines. If every site was designed in this way, we wouldn’t have much work!

Of course there was always the consultation and strategising, but the on-site work was mostly already done. So well done David, we need a few more like you in the industry!

I came across a nice free tool for checking your websites ranking for certain keyphrases across search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Live.

Rank Checker is an add on for Firefox that allows you to save multiple websites, with multiple keywords and it even comes with a scheduling tool.

On Tuesday Google launced a new portal for non-profit organisations. The site brings together all the great features of Google to one location and offers “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.”

It includes links to the obvious tools such as Google Docs, Calendar and Gmail. The site also provides links to Google Grants.

Google Grants allows non-profit organisations to “Get free online advertising on Google.com that can help raise awareness and increase traffic to your website”.

For more information visit http://www.google.com/nonprofits/ or http://www.google.com/nonprofits/grantstutorial.html

Recently, the growth in requests from clients to target their websites at specific countries has been huge. I put this down to the recent hype that SEOs have created around Googles geo-targeting in their Google Webmaster Tools service.

For me, this is a lot of hype over nothing. In some cases it’s great to be able to target a specific area. For example, I’m in Ireland, I host my website in the US and I have a .com domain name. I really only want business in Ireland and I really need to appear in the “Sites from Ireland” search in Google. So what do I need to do?

Well the steps for that are quite simple. There are a few options available to you, here they are:

1. Register a .ie domain name
   The easiest way to geo-target without a doubt. If your website has been up and running for a while, you will need to implement a 301 Redirect from your old domain name to your new .ie domain name. It will take time for Google to pass all the trust and popularity that your website has built up over time on to your new website, but it will be worth it in the end.
2. Change hosting or IP Space
   The next thing you should look at is moving hosting to an Irish based hosting company. Now, by that I mean physically located in Ireland, not a hosting company that resell hosting in the US. If this isn’t an option, talk to your current provider about providing you with an Irish IP address.
3. Use Geo-target tool
   Your final option is to use the Google Webmaster Geo-targeting tool. I personally am still not convinced this is a very good option. Although it works, you are at the mercy of Google. If at any stage Google feels that you are not in any way related to that area, you are easily disconnected!

Now let’s think of a different scenario that could in theory be quite common to a lot of Irish businesses. Let’s say we wanted to target Northern Ireland, how would we do this?

There’s a lot of debate over this, but for me there is only one real solution that will always work!

1. Create a new website
   It’s horrible to think of going through that process all over again, but for me it’ the only viable option. All content will have to be different, which will be an absolute pain. But you should also think of contact information. Will someone in the UK expect to ring an Irish Number? Not likely, so you need to think about things like that.
2. Register .co.uk domain name
   As before, I would register a .co.uk domain name.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
   Unfortunately it’s a brand new website. The process of developing links etc will all have to be done seperately to your main website.

Just remember, geo-targeting is all about localised results. It’s in your best interest to spend more time focusing on the keyphrases you need to be found for and making sure you website appears for them no matter where you are in the world.

Let’s face it, if I was to search for a Solicitor in Google using the “sites from UK” option, would I want to see solicitors from Ireland appearing here? Would I even bother doing business with any of them? Unlikely!

So what other ways can you target business from other countries? Well the most obvious is by language!

For example if I’m in Poland, I don’t speak English and I need a solicitor in Dublin. How can you catch this potential client?  

Here’s a good example of how we did it for one of our clients. Instead of geo-targeting Poland, we focused on the Polish language and keyphrases that may be used. From the results below, you will see that it doesn’t matter what country specific search engine you search in, if you have targeted your phrases properly, you will get results!

“prawnik w dublin” - Google.com - Result No. 6
“prawnik w dublin” - Google.ie - Result No. 5
“prawnik w dublin” - Google.pl - Result No. 7

On top of that, it’s more likely for this person to be a qualified lead, that someone that has found you because you tricked the search engines!

According to Eoghan McCabe SEO is Bullshit. He posted a little rant about it here.

But today I think he went a little too far by basically manipulating a response from Dave Davis of RedFly to make it suit his opinion, without delving deeper into fact.

At some levels I agree with him, SEO can be bullshit at times, especially when the search results are filled with spamming websites. However, Google do a pretty good job (although not as good as they used to) of removing a lot of the spamming resuts. Other search engines such as MSN and Yahoo have a long way to go before they can match the techniques used by Google to eliminate these nasty results.

He does have one valid point, that if web designers coded their sites properly from the beginning, there would lesser need for an SEO’er to get your site ranking on the search engines. A great example of this would be the SEO work we are currently doing for a Irish Mortages Broker. The site was created by David Behan and he did a fantastic job. Because of the competitiveness of this market, we have a lot of off-site work to do, but the majority of on-site work was done by the designer. If the market wasn’t so competitive, the site would definitely have appeared in the top results. However, in this case, there is a lot more work to be done. So what did we do for the client? Researched keyphrases, made small changes to the website and managing their off-site optimisation.

The bottom line is simple, there will always be gangsters out there trying to jump on a new hyped business, no industry is different. When crunch comes to crunch, the good people will come out on top. If you want to achieve results with your website, SEO is an avenue that you should seriously consider. 

Lauren Weinstein noticed that Canada’s largest internet service provider Rogers, were hijacking Google, by placing it’s own content on the top of the search giants homepage.

Anyone visiting Google through a Rogers web connection was presented with a screen notifying the user of its current usage and additional usage pricing. To add injury to insult, the page was also branded with a Yahoo! logo. 

To be honest, I’m surprised this has happened a lot before now and I’m actually really happy it hasn’t.

Rogers have announced that they are currently “experimenting” with this technique… more information

I was reading Robert Synott’s blog today and he had an article titled Microsoft’s web strategy becomes increasingly deranged. The article is in relation to Ms. Dewey (www.msdewey.com), the campaign viral marketing campaign set up by Microsoft in 2006 to promote their Windows Live Search.

I personally don’t think it’s deranged at all, in fact I think it’s quite clever.  It means people like Robert (and now me) will blog and talk about it,  hence spreading the word faster than a lot of other marketing mediums. It’s classic example of a viral marketing campaign.

My only complaint about it is that they are not promoting their brand very well. There are no obvious connections to Windows Live Search, apart from a greyed out logo at the bottom of the page. So far for me, the Nokia Great Pockets campaign was a lot better!