Adsense makes Sense

I read an awful lot on the Internet about why using Adsense is tacky, cheap, money-grubbing and so forth, and while I can see some justification in some of the complaints levelled, I want to put forward here a business case for using Adsense on your websites, which offers justification for harnessing this source of revenue.

The Pros of Adsense

1. You are in business, and therefore your objective is to maximise your profits.


2. While Adsense revenue may not ever form a high percentage of your income, it is working for you 24/7, and it is a revenue stream. Every good business person knows the importance of generating multiple revenue streams.


3. Displaying competitor ads shows that you are not frightened of the competition.


4. However good your products and services are, not all of your visitors will want to shop with you. If your visitors are not persuaded by your argument or products and services, you can at least make some revenue when they click away.


5. Giving visitors to your website the opportunity to shop around, might help to raise your trust factor.


6. When some one clicks on a competitor's ad you are effectively getting paid money by your competitors. This is money in your pocket and out of your competitor's pocket so in effect it is worth double the physical amount of money you get paid.


7. Occassionally, highly contextual ads can even backup the argument you make in the content of your web page. I found this especially useful on a page I wrote about website accessbility where 2 of the adsense ads mention that 80% of websites in the UK are not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act.

Trolling, Web 2 and their equivalents in Early Modern Literature

We have a tendency to view Web 2 and the social conversations that take place on there as something totally new and dislocated from our socially discursive and literary past. Web 2 is in many ways actually a continuation of literary social conversations which were popular in print up until around the start of the 18th century, when the Romantic poets pretty much stuck the nail in the coffin of social discursive literature, turning poetry instead into a dead literary artefact. Something to be admired from a distance rather than engaged with in a socially dialogic exchange of words, where the conversational element was at least as important as the art itself. In many ways, blogging has resurrected this form of public literary exchange whereby writers exchange their views in the written word in a public forum. One noticeable trend that has been resurrected is that of trolling - exchanging written expressions of ill-will, libel, defamation and insult.

Trolling is first used in something close to the context we know it for today in an exchange of verse libels in the 1540s in a printed exchange of insult in verse between one Thomas Smyth and Thomas Grey. The two men issued verse pamphlets attacking each other around London and each sally in the exchange was explicitly called a 'troll', and the activity in which they were engaged, 'trolling', as is evident from the title of the poems themselves. One poem is entitled 'A Newe Ballade Made of Thomas Crumwel, Called “Trolle on Away' and another begins:

Whether ye trolle in or els trolle out

Ye trolle vntruly; loke better about

The term trolling pretty much disappears out of usage between then and the advent of the Internet, and I suspect it was resurrected by some academic or other to describe what is more commonly known as flyting. Flyting has been around probably since the dawn of oral poetry and such formal exchanges of insult have found their way into many cultures in the form of poetry both spoken and written, from the Japanese Tanka and Renku, the early modern French or Troubadour Sirventes, to flytings exchanged at the Scottish court in the 15th and 16th century to the American playground game known as dozens in the 20th century.

In many ways trolling or exchanging insult on the blogosphere is a stultified art form. In the printed and written abusive exchanges of literary antiquity the practice was undertaken upon a more level playing field since none of the participants held more control over the medium of dissemination than another. On the blogosphere, however, trolling is likely to occur between a blog owner and a blog visitor whereby the blog owner has rights of censorship and exclusion over his rival. This has the effect of dampening the vitriol and colourful language that might be expressed. In fact, trolling in its true sense was more something that took place in flames wars on the forums of the late 1990s, where both participants shared equal status and censorship power was held by forum admins who tended to be a bit more lax than blog owners.

One notable shared feature between Internet trolling and earlier forms of written exchanges of abuse and insult is that they are not necessarily confined to two people owing to the socially public forum upon which they are conducted. There is a tendency for trolling to gain momentum as supporters and detractors gather on each side. In some printed instances in the 16th century the participants burgeon up to double figures. The immediacy of the Internet, however, provides the potential for many more participants even than this.

In Early Modern Europe there was much more awareness of trolling or flyting as a literary medium in its own right, and exchanges of insult might even be deliberately orchestrated. There is even an anecdote about James V of Scotland commanding one of his subjects to write a flyting against him, and Sir David Lindsay really rises to the challenge of insulting his king without getting his head chopped off. He tells James 'Ye Fukkand like an furious fornicator', but goes on to say that he really hopes that James doesn't catch any nasty diseases and that he's a really good poet!

I guess that main difference between 16th century flyting and the trolling that takes place on the internet today is that the 16th century writers produced invectives of literary merit. What we get today seems to be mostly sotto voce side swipes and smarmy comments. I think we need some blogs dedicated purely to exchanging colourful insults, and what's more it would make excellent link bait. If anyone knows of such a blog where everyone can get stuck in, I'd love to hear about it

If anyone wants to set something like this up, Squidoo has a feature called duel, which is set up for the purpose of heated debate between participants.

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Note: OED cites numerous definitions of the verb. To troll is to allure or entice, to angle, to perform an antiphonal song, or “to move nimbly” from one place to he next. The word might also denote a knave:

OED, Troll, IV. 15

b. Troll and troll by, Troll hazard, Troll with, as sbs., names for various ‘orders of knaves’: see quot. and cf. sense 1. Obs. Cant.

1561 J. Awdelay Frat. Vacab. (E.E.T.S.) 12 Troll and Trol by, is he that setteth naught by no man nor no man by him. Troll with is he that no man shall know the seruaunt from ye Maister... Troll hazard of trace is he that goeth behynde his Maister as far as he may see hym... Troll hazard of tritrace, is he that goeth gaping after his Master.

Nofollow quick fix for Blogger

I just found a great article on removing nofollow from Blogger. Took me about 30 seconds to implement the hack, and it worked.

Check out the article on removing nofollow from Blogger on the Webstractions blog.

Some nofollow tools you might find useful:

• The SearchStatus plugin for Firefox provides some useful SEO measureables, including identifying links using nofollow: SearchStatus



• CommentHunt provides a Google search filtered for blogs that don't use nofollow: http://www.commenthunt.com/

SEO Terminology: Glossary of Terms

SEO Terminology and SEO Jargon Buster

SEO 101

If you are new to SEO or are shopping for Internet Marketing services for the first time then it if a fair bet that you are having a little trouble wading through the mountain of terminology used by SEO professionals, and that you're wishing we could all just speak and write in plain English for a change. Anyway, to help you cut through the jargon, there follows a list of a few terms commonly used in SEO speak accompanied by a short description.

1. Keyword stuffing - needless repetition of keywords and phrases so as to attain higher search engine rankings


2. Google Dance - The name given to the period when Google updates its search engine rankings. Google's main and secondary server results will differ during this time.


3. Google Sandbox - A filter that Google imposes on new domains in order to prevent the website from ranking highly for the main keywords for a period of time


4. PPC - Initialism for Pay-Per-Click. This refers to paid advertising and paid listings, such as Google's Adwords whereby advertisers bid on advertising space on the search results which appear on the right hand side of Google's Search Engine Results Pages


5. IBL - Initialism for Inbound Link


6. Meta Data - In short this is where the search engines look for brief information about the content on a web page. It is data about data, if you like.


7. Meta Description - the meta data which provides a synopsis of a web page's content and subject matter.
   


8. Meta Keywords - the meta data which provides a list of the most contextually relevant keywords and key phrases on a web page


9. OBL - Not Osama Bin Laden in this instance, but an initialism for outbound links
   
10. Title Tag - this is the text that appears in the blue bar at the very top of the browser. Search engines assume that the text in there will be very relevant to the content and context of your web page.


11. Title attribute - this is the text that you see when you put your mouse over a hyperlink


12. Alt attribute - this is the text that you see when you hover your mouse over an image


13. Hidden Text - the practice of hiding keywords by using a background colour the same as the colour of the text.


14. White Hat - The honest approach to SEO, which involves striving to provide the search engines with exactly the sort of information they want, in the fashion in which they would prefer it to be delivered.


15. Black Hat - An SEO technique which attempts to exploit weaknesses in search engine algorithms, in order to attain higher positions in the search engines.


16. Search Engine - software that searches for information on the Internet and returns results for sites which provide that information.


17. Search Engine spamming - the manipulation of a web page to give it an artificial boost in the SERPS.


18. Semantic markup - HTML that has been written to define the context of the content enclosed in the markup, such as using h1 tags for headings, p tags for paragraphs or li for lists. While this sounds obvious many web designers persist in using CSS for formatting text with the appearance of headings, paragraphs and lists without actually giving them the correct tags which tell search engines what they are.


19. SERPs - an initialism for Search Engine Results Pages


20. Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a user-defined online system for organising bookmarks. Unlike storing bookmarks in a folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and can be accessed from any computer.

rel=nofollow and page rank

I've just been having a read through one of Matt Cutts' posts on the use of no follow and paid links, and I wanted just to take a quick opportunity to point out one glaring issue with the way nofollow can be used in exactly the opposite way to that which Google intends.

At the end of his post Matt States that:

The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.

Not including nofollow on paid links is outside Google's guidelines, although Matt does state that the primary motive behind this implementation of nofollow was not to help the search engines to identify paid links. Rather, they are encouraging webmasters to use nofollow for any links which don't represent a genuine editorial vote for a webpage (such as comments on blog posts). This, however, provides the business directories with a great little tool to drive webmasters towards paid listings. I'm seeing it happen here and there, and I can only imagine that the trend will grow. Automatically submitted free listings are being offered with the nofollow attribute, and the ones without the nofollow attribute are being charged for. This obviously makes it even easier for the business directories to make money out of paid listings, and selling links.

I realise that business directories are not generally selling links as their primary source of revenue, but rather they are selling listings which include a link. Nonetheless, when some of them are manipulating nofollow by including it in their outbound links from free listings, and removing it in their paid listings, it is fairly obvious that they recognise the value of a link without nofollow and are factoring it into the price they charge.

Instead of providing a means to indicate a genuine editorial vote for a site, nofollow is in fact providing a value-added means of selling links. I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice this, but I just thought I'd throw my observations into the arena.

Google is presently working hard to bring unscrupulous business directories down a peg or two, and as any one who has read my post cost effective search engine marketing for small businesses will probably guess, this is something of which I approve. However, I have my doubts about their efficacy in this instance. How do you identify in a machine readable way a directory which inverts the implementation of nofollow to its own financial advantage? My assumption is that the bots will pass through, spot nofollow attributes and assume that these are for the paid listings, and therefore that the directory is abiding by the guidelines. If I'm wrong here, I'd love to hear about it.

Now I realise that Google takes a lot of flak for adopting a monopolistic approach to search, and for trying to manipulate the way webmasters link, but for me right now the real issue is with the way information is served up to us from the business directory listings which monopolise local search in the SERPS. Maybe Google can help us here beyond what it has already done to redress the balance with Google Local Business Center. How about maybe treating business directory results in a similar way to Adwords - give them a separate results space served up outside of the main results, or even offer some choice by way of a radio button option to exclude directory listings from the main results or to move them into their own results area.

There are some guidelines to spotting business directories which don't pass on PR at http://www.loriswebs.com/directories-avoid.html

The SEO Company provides a list of business directories rated by the quality of their inbound link quality here: http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html. Whether all these directories pass on PR is something which I haven't checked.

Coolest Guy on the Planet

coolest guy on the planet: who's who in the SEO wacky races for pole position

There's been a race going on for a couple of years now to decide which SEO owns first place in the SERPS for Coolest Guy on the Planet and its probably not news to most people in the SEO industry that Brad Fallon has been there for quite some time. Anyway, let's have a look at the run down of who's competing to be The Coolest Guy on the Planet. I've been pretty general in my analysis here, just a quick look at Google Web, SEO for Firefox and a quick glance back end, so I haven't looked in any detail at link relevancy, who's linking in, keyword spread, or many of the more nuanced high-hitting techniques I could have done with world enough and time. As a final caveat, links showing on SEO 4 Firefox seem to have been as erratic as hell for the past week or so; apologies in advance if these figures are wildly out.

So who is the alpha SEO on Google Web ?

1. & 2: Brad Fallon holds the first 2 places with around 13000 links going to his homepage which gets the top result. According to Brad's website he fell off the face of the planet for this phrase for a little while and then shot back in at numero uno again. Anyway, seems like Brad has held this position just about forever. 1st coolest guy on the planet
   



2. It's Brad Fallon too. 2nd coolest guy on the planet



3. Jonathon Leger gets in 3rd place behind Brad with only 600 links pointing at the entire site, goes in there using mainly basic white hat techniques that are open to anyone, and claims to do it to the letter of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. There's a lesson in there for all of us. If you tack into the wind rather than against it, the going is always easier. 3rd coolest guy on the planet



4. Using not much more than the title tag, a couple of h1 tags, an h2 tag, meta desc and 6000 odd inbound links Russell Brunson comes in at number 4. Nice job (close the chevron on the meta description tag though). Russ also takes no, 1 spot for coolest guy on the Plant, which is cool in its own way. 4th coolest guy on the planet



5. Mike Filsaime comes in at number 5 for coolest guy on the Planet. This guy is not an SEO, but a mate of Brad Fallon's who wanted to get in on the action. Well done Mike. With only around 90 inbound links obtained through article submission, the perfect domain name (a babe at two years old) and keywords sprinkled through the page nested in good semantic markup this is a really respectable job. 5th coolest guy on the planet



6. While aiming to be 3rd Coolest Guy On The Planet, Garrett Boon inadvertantly comes in at no 6 for the coolest guy on the planet, which is fairly cool. Garrett has about 200 inbound links to that webpage; although I notice a PR0 which just goes to show how much PR matters. Apparently, Skystrider is a character from World of WarCraft and not some sort of SEO software as I first assumed. 6th coolest guy on the planet



7. With a PR5 and 2300 inbound links to this webpage no 7 only needs to tighten up his onsite optimisation in order to become a much fiercer competitor for cool; as he admits himself. With some attention to meta data and some more strategic use of semantic markup we could have a contender here - I'd suggest taking 'July 28, 2007' out of H2 tags and maybe putting, ummmm, the coolest guy on the planet in there once or twice (just a bit of editing blog source code needed here). 7th coolest guy on the planet



8. At No 8 Peter Drew is in here to prove a point. Jonathon went in with White Hat and Peter decided to don a Black Hat for this project to see how he would do by comparison. Peter's BH shinnanigans look to have got him 35,000 inbound links to his blog, but its hard to be sure with BlogSpot. 8th coolest guy on the planet



9. James Schramko treated this one as a project and outlines a cohesive project plan for getting where he got. With around 400 inbounds landing on this page, James too only needs to step on the gas with the onsite relevancy to get some extra edge. More semantic markup, and less content nested in div tags and we may see some movement. 9th coolest guy on the planet



10. Patrick holds 10th place with around 200 links pointing at him and a domain that's been around 2 years. There's a few coding probs in here that need fixing such as h2 tags nested in p tags, unclosed p tags and non-breaking spaces nested in h3 tags. I'd clean these up and see what happens. I'm having trouble myself solving a p tag nesting issue with BlogSpot at the moment - whatever I do a bloody superfluous p tag creeps back in and nests my entire content. 10th coolest guy on the planet

So what do most of these cool guys share in common - well a few of these coolest guy contenders have some pretty dodgy photos. Okay so in my photo I'm hiding behind shades and look like I've just emerged from the bushes after an illicit laison with a squirrel, but really.

So who is really the coolest guy on the planet, is this just SEO testosterone, shameless self-promotion, is this just a case of all us SEO sperm competing to get into Google's golden egg, or is there a serious point? Well of course there is. When SEOs come head to head like this and pitt their strengths against each other it really sets the benchmark for the calibre of companies that will work with them, the fees they are worth and their prestige within the industry. It doesn't really matter whether they are competing over the phrase the coolest guy on the planet or who can fit the most frozen peas down their shorts. Ok so there is some implicit kudos loaded into the term coolest guy on the planet. But its also a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun aswell; there's nothing really cool about being cool these days and SEOs have to be able to laugh at themselves in order to prove to the outside world that we are not an esoteric bunch of juju vendors who belong to some sort of exclusive mystical coven of Inter-nerd warlocks. And even more importantly, to prove that we do not take ourselves too seriously.

I might be tempted to go for silliest sod on the planet' or daftest bugger on the planet. Maybe I should even go for the most flatulent guy on the planet. I wasn't nicknamed the Phantom Farter at school for nothing.

Anyway, enough for today. I've just put out my billionth cigarette of the day, I smell like a skunk-mayonaisse sandwich and I'm going to dive in the bath.

So who is the coolest guy on the planet right now?

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SEO Afterword

10/12/2007: As a result of this post I did inadvertently end up being Google's no. 1 'most flatulent guy on the planet'. Well some people use link bait, whereas I seem to have just introduced stink bait to online marketng.

Free iPod Speakers and no iPod!

Just my luck. 1-2-3 reg were offering a set of free iPod speakers today for the first 5 affiliate marketers who got back to them. Well lucky me I won a pair, but I lost my iPod on the way back from Spain recently. So now I have new iPod speakers and no iPod. Maybe Santa will be nice to me, or maybe I should get off my backside and replace the thing.

Anyway, if anyone wants to get themselves a set of these things 1-2-3 are giving them away with every domain name that is bought with a hosting package at the moment. Shame I missed out on getting a second pair this morning when I picked up a domain name on behalf of a new client - great domain name by the way - www.stellaflights.com. They didn't need a hosting package so I didn't get my second set of speakers.

If anyone wants a pair and happens to need a domain name and hosting package then here you go:

And I promise I will write some more substantive posts soon - only I must have put in 17 hours yesterday, my brain is leaking out of my ears and I'm so tired that I couldn't pull a moist stick out of a dingos arse right now.

Give some link love for Christmas

Its getting up to Christmas again, and since its the silly season I thought I might offer a particularly silly idea for link exchange which just occured to me.

Give some link love for Xmas. What better gift to give to your customers and B2B and webmaster buddies than a link or two. Tell them in your Christmas cards and e-cards that you gave them a link or two and explain what links means in terms of search engine marketing, if they don't already know. If you're lucky they may return the favour and link back to you. Try something that will make them giggle, afterall its only a link and not a gold watch so don't try to make it sound like more than it is - I don't know, how about 'I left a link under your tree' (sounds cheeky in the US but overly twee in the UK, so choose you're audience for this one).

In fact, would it be too sentimental to think that Google might even one day pick up the idea of seasonal links and give them a little extra special relevance? Hang out your Xmas links on December 24th and Santa-bot will come around and sprinkle them with an extra dose of importance during the night. Anyway, back to reality, the serious point here is that sometimes a little personal touch like this can help to build up relationships with the people who matter to your business.

Then of course send the follow up in January if their Xmas link to you has dissapeared - 'a link is for life not just for Xmas', or 'where's the missing link' or some other equally bad pun.

Tssh, I think I need to take the rest of the afternoon off and come back when I have some less outlandish ideas to blog about.

'Cheap Holidays' or 'Book Holiday online': How do 13 major travel agencies perform for organic search?

We took 13 big names in the UK travel industry in order to get a snapshot of how well they perform for organic search for a few of the most competitive keywords for travel and tourism: book holiday online and Cheap Holidays. The results were tested in Google UK only.

The travel agents we picked are as follows:

1. Holiday Hypermarket: 1st for book holiday online


2. First Choice: 2nd for book holiday online


3. Thomas Cook: 3rd for book holiday online


4. Travel First Online: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


5. Direct Holidays: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


6. eBookers: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


7. Flight Centre: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


8. Sky Deals: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


9. uLookuBook: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


10. Going Places: 12th for book holiday online


11. Last Minute: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online


12. Air Tours: 5th for book holiday online


13. Thomson: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

The next key phrase we chose was cheap holidays:

1. Holiday Hypermarket: 3rd for cheap holidays


2. First Choice: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


3. Thomas Cook: 19th for cheap holidays


4. Travel First Online: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


5. Direct Holidays: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


6. eBookers: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


7. Flight Centre: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


8. Sky Deals: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


9. uLookuBook: 28th for cheap holidays


10. Going Places: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays


11. Air Tours: 37th for cheap holidays


12. Thomson: 38th for cheap holidays


13. Last Minute: 24th for cheap holidays

We might have expected more of the traditional market leaders to be doing much better in the Search Engine Results Pages irrespective of whether they continue to rely on traditional newspaper, television and high street advertising. However, this doesn't initially look to be the case. So, now let's have a closer look at the quality of the search engine optimisation employed by a couple of the big name lower performers.

Flight Centre

Flight Centre has historically used a lot of newspaper advertising and I think I even bought a flight to New York from them myself which I found in a newspaper advert back in 1999. These days however, I buy online and if I can't find them then they've missed out on my buck.

The website address (URL) is http://www.flightcentre.co.uk/

Ok, so looking at the home page the first weakness I spot is that the two most important
words in the title tag are 'Flight Centre'; which probably isn't helping. What especially isn't helping is that these are the first two words in the title tag on all the internal pages as well - this will be costing an unimaginable volume of search engine traffic which could be significantly more targetted.

Looking at the source code on the home page, there are more problems. They have not employed any meta data at all - no meta keywords and no meta description. Moreover, there is hardly any semantic markup in there; excepting a few p tags, its all div tags and tables, which is hardly a good strategy to assign importance to your major keywords. Important links are nested in div tags and overall the home page has very little relevance or importance in and of itself. This would lead me to suspect that the website is relying almost soley for its search engine marketing strength on inbound links, so we'll look at that next:

There are around 28,000 inbound links going to the website, 23,000 of which are
pointing at the homepage, and these are lending the website almost all of its importance and relevance in the search engines.

This is a substantial number of links, and may well have been adequate to be
competitive were the onsite optimisation sufficiently improved. However, looking at where most of these links are coming from, I spot another vulnerability. The vast majority of links are either internal links from http://www.flightcentre.co.uk/ or cross links from other Flight Centre websites in Canada and elsewhere. It would only take a slight algorithmic change in the way any search engine indexes web pages and these links could have any relevance that they presently contain squeezed out of them. In short, a more varied link building strategy would build more insulation into the relevance and importance of this site.

I would also point out that the last result for book holiday online on the first page of Google UK gets in there with little over 8,000 links and that the bottom first page result for cheap holidays gets in there with only 11,000. Flight Centre has more than enough links to get in and take some market share for these terms and others, it simply needs to look more closely at the quality of its onsite optimisation.

To be fair a more relevant term for this travel company would be cheap flights or book cheap flights, but flight centre only just makes page 4 for cheap flights and doesn't appear on the first five pages for book cheap flights.

Another small problem with the page is the pound sign. This is just typed straight in there, rather than being hardcoded in as Unicode. Under some browser conditions this can mean that both the pound sign and the first digit of the price dissapear. I spotted a similar problem with the Halifax Property Services website a few years ago, where because of the failure to use unicode some properties for sale lost 100K off their price tags when viewed in Firefox using Chinese Simplified.

Last Minute

http://www.lastminute.com/ has a PR of 8/10 so we would be expecting something pretty impressive here. Initially they appear to make exactly the same mistake in the title tag where the 2 most important words are Last Minute. In this instance though, this is more or less excusable, since Last Minute are well enough known for a substantial amount of traffic to come their way from searchers simply typing this into the search engines, and having the phrase in the title tag adds an extra layer of insulation on top of the domain name against another company attempting to surpass them for this key phrase in the SERPS. I'd still be tempted to experiment here and take it out in order to check that search engine position can be maintained without it, since there are many more useful keywords which are being subordinated to this. Yet again, all of the internal pages make good use of the title tag, so heck title tag doesn't matter too much here on the home page.

Looking at the source code of the homepage, there is some use of semantic markup such as lists and use of the strong tag. There are also some great big long option lists of place names which is going to help a lot, but again links are nested in div tags which doesn't help. Meta data is present but could be improved. There are slightly too many keywords in the meta keywords and the meta description bears no relation whatsoever to the actual content of the page, which doesn't help either.

Where inbound links are concerned, I really don't think these guys should struggle to rank for whatever they want if they put more effort into the onsite optimisation. With half a million links going to the whole website and 280,000 going to the homepage, they are a formidible opponent for most travel related terms that they take the initiative to grab.

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I suppose what this shows overall is that whatever industry you are in, even the biggest players can have some pretty big chinks in their search marketing armour.

Cost effective Search engine marketing for small businesses

Do you ever feel, when you search for anything on the Internet these days that the business directories are taking over? The chances are that, if you are searching for goods and services in your local area, the first page of search engine results will be crammed full of business directory listings.

This is no accident. Many business directories are actually aiming to squeeze local businesses out of the front page of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages), in order to create more dependancy on their services in order to get seen on line. Only recently one directory representative boasted to me that for a wide range of local results, the only pages showing on the first page of Google were his own company's classifieds directories.

I just took the following sample results at random in order to demonstrate just what a stranglehold the business directories presently have over local search. The figure out of 10 is the number of business directory listings that show up on the first page of Google UK:

1. Skip Hire in Durham: 6/10 including the first 2 results



2. Van Hire in Aberdeen: 3/10



3. Glaziers in Southampton: 7/10



4. Locksmiths in Exeter: 6/10



5. Catteries in Preston: 7/10 - including all the first 7 results



6. Damp Proofing in Norwich: 7/10



7. Kitchen Planning in Nottingham: 6/10

This saturation of local search by the business directories does nothing to help Internet users obtain information efficiently online and they actively harm the chances of small businesses, who want to take control over their own marketing.

The upshot of this is that search engine marketing is becoming increasingly important for small businesses who are targetting their local area online. With an effective and affordable search engine marketing campaign you can not only say goodbye to your dependance upon business directories in order to get seen online, you can also get a distinct edge over the competition in your local area.

It stands to reason that if your website is one of only a few quality results showing on the first page of Google, Yahoo, MSN or Live Space, and all the other results are business directory listings, then your results will have the edge over your competitors. Your website will only be a click away, whereas in order to find those of your competitors, your prospect has first to search on Google et al and then to wade through a page or two of results within the directory listing. Getting on the first page of the search engines then is a great way to leave your local competitors standing while driving more visitors to your website.

I've heard search engine marketing is expensive - how can my small local business afford it?

Actually high search engine positions are usually much more easily attained for local search, and you should expect to pay accordingly. What it costs will depend upon the number of web pages you need optimising and upon the strength of the other websites competing over your major search terms. There is also the element of time to take into account since, it is not simply a case of doing the work and closing the SEM project. We need to wait for the search engines to reindex your website and then check your rankings and make further adjustments over time that will strengthen your position. So, don't expect that results will automatically happen overnight (although they ocassionally do, when curcumstances are favorable)) or that it will cost pennies. Do expect, however, that a search engine marketing campaign for local search will be affordable and good value for money in the long run. Every search engine marketing campaign is different so we can not give you precise information regarding exactly where your will end up on the search engine result pages (SERPS) or exactly how long it will take. What we can promise, however, is that with one of our search engine marketing campaigns for Local Search your website can become more visible and competitive.

Search Engine Friendly Business Directories

There is still a lot written on the Internet about using business directories and online classifieds for link building, and there are innumerable online business directories out there which allow you to post a free listing with a link to your website. But which of these directories give links that are actually worth anything towards your search engine visibility?

Page Rank (PR) of business directories

The usual approach when assessing the quality of a prospective link from a business directory is to examine the directory's Page Rank (PR), the assumption being that the higher the PR, the more valuable the link. Sure the PR of the directory counts, but what about the relevance of the link you get? Does the link provide any degree of relevance, or is it just a vanilla link which uses your website address as the link text. If the link text merely contains your website address (URL), then its going to make you more relevant for your own domain name, so even a high PR business directory is probably going to give you a low relevance link for your main key phrases.

You can find a list of business directories which gives their respective Page Ranks at Mr SEO.

So what do I need to do in order to get a relevant link from a business directory?

Choose business directories that let you edit the HTML so that you have full control over the links to your website. You can get relevant keywords in the link text and the title attribute and they will be worth much more towards your website's overall search engine performance. One good example is a directory which is little known in the UK, but which gives its listings a great deal of control over the HTML. Locanto, is straightforward to post on, gives control over the HTML and listings only need renewing every 90 days.

I just created an add in Locanto with the title 'Search Engine Marketing Expert In Leeds' in the Leeds UK Web Services Category. Within the body text of the advert I have added a couple of hyperlinks. One pointing to the FSI website with internet marketing consultancy in Leeds in the link text and the title attribute, and one pointing to the home page of this blog with the link text search engine marketing blog, pointing to the home page of this blog.

You can find my Locanto listing here

Notice that because I am able to edit the HTML I am able to use semantic markup (H1, H2, P and strong) in order to make sure that my key phrases are placed in HTML tags which the search engines regard as important, and because I am in control of this I know that I am not leaving the relevance of either the link text or the listing itself to chance. Obviously one link doesn't make that much difference in the bigger scheme of things, but by concentrating your efforts on business directories which give you control over the HTML at least you know that collectively your DIY link building will be making a difference.

Also notice that my links are within the body of the text in my listing, not stuck in a list, or sat out on their own. Putting the link in the body of your text like this is a linking method that search engines prefer over lists of links such as those often found in business directories or reciprocal link pages. You'll probably want to put more text in your advert than I have in my listing for it to work to optimal effect, but nonetheless, you should now be equipped with the tools you need to use business directories effectively as part of your DIY search engine marketing campaign.