The IAB has just released their 2010 search marketing barometer which makes for essential reading if you operate in the digital marketing or search engine marketing arenas.

A total of 144 questionnaires were completed by 91 top brand (chosen as they are were the top advertising spenders for April/May this year).

A summary of the IAB findings are as follows:

1. Integration opportunity – only 28.7% of advertisers said search is fully integrated with the rest of the marketing mix, yet 99% said there is a greater opportunity to integrate and 100% of Search Council agencies felt all of their clients could do more to integrate.
2. Brand building – 78% respondents said search can build brand either directly or as part of the full user journey, reflected by actual use. 70% include brand building as a primary objective of SEO and over 50% for PPC.
3. Budget – 99% of SEO budgets and 90% of PPC budgets will stay the same or increase in 2010 (55% and 43% increase respectively).
4. PPC Activity – Only 14% of respondents DON’T employ a PPC agency; and 72% of respondents are restricted by their PPC budgets.
5. Website effectiveness – only 37% of websites are ‘good’ at achieving objectives, leaving much room for improvement once consumers reach their destination.
6. Advanced testing – 19.4% of respondents carry out A/B testing with 5% carrying out MVT (multi-variate testing); 35% carry out both. 39% of respondents do not carry out testing – so clearly there’s room for improvement.
7. Strong understanding of search? – the majority of respondent claim to understand the main principles of SEO and PPC (only 38.6% feel teams outside of digital also understand the importance of search); but few have enough information about new or advanced tools and data. This would indicate that knowledge is not being filtered to all levels, which is also hindered by an ever changing IT landscape.
8. Efficiency of search – cost, value and resource are clear concerns at the moment, indicating a shift in advertiser attitudes to search where reviewing and optimising activity is currently of greater importance.
9. Finding skills – 37% of respondents said they found it hard to find staff with skills in search marketing; and search qualifications were considered unimportant for 53%.
10. Social Media and mobile – 39% of respondents believe social media will be more important than search in 2015; 49% believe mobile search will overtake desktop search by 2015.

This data is crucial in measuring the effectiveness of your website metadata as well as keyphrase performance according to landing page.

As you can see from the above screen grab, Google reports on the position of keyphrases in SERPS. The reported position fluctuates from 3 – 10, which highlights the reality of personalised search where rankings will vary by individual.

The second columns refers to number of impressions over the reported time period. The third column highlights the click through rate (CTR) for that keyphrase – in this case 11%.

The published fluctuations in rank gives us a useful insight into the effects of personalised search. But even more crucially, the reported click through rate allows us to measure our SERPS effectiveness and adjust our metadata as part of our SEO copywriting campaigns.

Whilst the Webmaster Tools data may not exactly match our web analytics data, it gives us enough insight to make iterative improvements to our SERPS content.

Below is a guide to 18 common SEO mistakes or omissions made by website owners or web designers.

1. Incorrect Keyphrase Deployment

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that deploying commonly-searched-for keyphrases within your on-page content and metadata, will yield better search results. Avoid deploying content with keyphrases that have poor search demand or are less likely to convert humans.

2. Poor Website Architecture

Good website architecture will promote better website crawling, distribute PageRank more effectively throughout a website and will also land humans at the right point in the searching or buying cycle.

Don’t create your website information architecture out of isolation of search engine optimisation.

3. Ineffective Anchor Text

Our SEO audits continually cite poor use of anchor text such as “click here” or “more info” etc. These anchor text links add little SEO value and are not helpful for accessibility. You will improve your overall link equity by using searchable terms in your hyperlink (anchor) text.

Hyperlinks with good anchor text inserted into body copy are effective for SEO, as they are often contextually relevant and often have good keyphrase prominence.

4. Missing or Duplicate Metadata

We commonly find that websites have either poor or missing website metadata. Or the other extreme is when websites duplicate their metadata across all pages.

Follow best practices when writing your website metadata and keep your title tags and meta descriptions unique per page. If your website is huge, consider how you can dynamically generate meaningful metadata.

5. Hosting Location and TLD

UK websites that use a non UK top level domain name (TLD) such as .com or .org – and that are hosted outside the UK – often find themselves excluded from the UK indices of Google, Bing and Yahoo! The same applies to any other localised websites using generic TLD’s.

It’s an easy mistake to make. But it it easy to fix? There are a variety of options available, but the quickest solution is to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to localise your site. However this doesn’t work for Bing and Yahoo! And furthermore, this doesn’t always resolve the problem if the website is targeting an international audience. In an ideal world, site owners should have local country TLD’s with content unique to that country. Easier said than done!

6. No Linkbaiting Strategy

Too many websites still adopt a “brochureware” strategy when it comes to content, where there’s little valuable, up-to-the-minute useful content that would naturally attract links. Brainstorm what kind of linkbait should be available on your website and make sure it’s kept fresh.

7. Zero or Low Content Velocity

Following on from the previous point, ensure that your content is kept up-to-date and fresh. New or recently updated content is likely to be crawled and indexed more readily. Brainstorm your content velocity strategy and ensure that you have the resource to maintain your audience’s expected level of updates.

8. Missing XML Sitemaps

Sitemap submission is often ignored, as the work often falls between the role of your web design agency or your SEO agency. In most cases, submitting XML sitemaps is simple and cost effective. Ensure sitemaps are submitted to the major search engines every time your website content is updated.

9. Poor Keyphrase Relevance

Keyphrase relevance refers to matching popular on-page keyphrases (that have good co-occurrence) with the content found in your metadata, link anchor text, URL structure, header tags and ALT attributes for images. Tackling SEO holistically – either across a single page or across a website – will yield improvements in search rank, so maintain a good level of keyphrase relevance.

10. Complex Data-driven URLs

Nowadays, search engines are much better at crawling websites with query strings and session variables attached to URLs. But, having infinite or very long URLs can slow down crawl rates which in turn can cause index exclusion.

Furthermore, humans will react better to “human-friendly” URLs and are more likely to click on those search results in SERPS. Encourage search-engine friendly URLs that follow your keyphrase research strategy.

11. Duplicate Content

Google is well known for excluding content that looks appreciably similar to other content within your domain or across domains. Avoid duplicate content such as repeated boiler plates, repeated product descriptions, syndicated content or stripped down printer-only or mobile-only content.

Check for duplicate content using Copyscape and if you are syndicating content such as online press, create a backlink to your original content to indicate the original source of the content.

Also, ensure your website architecture is improved, so that duplicate content is avoided i.e. link to one version of a page rather than repeating the same content across multiple pages.

12. Domain Canonicalisation

Domain canonicalisation is harder to pronounce than to understand! In short, ensure that only one version of your page URLs exist. For example, if your home page is http://www.domain.com – avoid publishing alternative versions such as http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com/index.html etc.

Set up appropriate 301 (permanent) redirects to canonical versions of your URLs. If necessary use Google’s link rel=canonical command within your domain or across multiple domains. Lo0k at configuring your server to add www if the URL is referenced without it (or vice versa).

By choosing the right canonical URL, you will avoid possible duplicate content exclusion, and you will also direct link equity more efficiently throughout your website.

13. Accidentally Blocking Bots

If you happen to be deploying a robots.txt file or on-page metadata controlling bot activity, ensure you aren’t accidentally blocking bots. If you’re unsure how to use these techniques, it’s probably better not to use any at all.

14. Excessive Link Velocity

Link building is a huge part of search engine optimisation. But over- zealous link building can be picked up by search engines as black hat SEO, normally seen among link exchange schemes. Encourage link building – yes. But don’t use schemes that build thousands of links in a very short space of time – especially if they all have the same anchor text. Chances are you will suffer for it!

Use Majestic-SEO’s backlink history tool to measure backlink discovery over time.

15. Non-Indexable Dynamic Content

My mantra with search engine optimisation is to keep things simple. Avoid publishing content using scripting languages such as JavaScript or AJAX if you can do it in a simpler way using CSS or HTML. Search engines won’t always be able to execute complex JavaScript which means that some dynamic content e.g. in arrays, won’t be indexed.

Log into Google’s Webmaster Tools or Bing’s Webmaster Tools to gain a better understanding of non-indexable content on your website.

16. No Header Tags

When adding page headlines and sub-headers, follow best practice CSS. Whilst H1, H2, H3 tags etc won’t instantly propel you to position one in SERPS, they are nonetheless considered best practice for both SEO and accessibility.

17. Missing or Ineffective Image ALT attributes

If you are adding images to your website, give each image an alternative description to help with SEO and accessibility. Here’s your chance to squeeze in a couple of useful keyphrases whilst adhering to accessibility guidelines. Best practice says avoid ALT attributes on incidental images that have little or no meaning.

18. Poor Link Building Techniques

I’ve left one of the most common SEO mistakes ‘til last. Don’t bother trying to attract links from websites that have little contextual relevance with your website. Also avoid bad neighbourhoods such as link directories, link farms, banned sites and websites with hundreds of outbound links.

Encourage links from websites that have a good PageRank and search rank for keyphrases in your sector. Try to encourage the backlinks to contain searchable anchor text. Look to see what other links are contained on the donor page; ensure they have good co-citation i.e. the other outbound links backlink to websites within your sector.

Whilst the above is by no means an exhaustive list of common SEO mistakes, these should keep you busy for now!

Social Media may well be the zeitgeist of the moment, but has its popularity eclipsed that of search engine optimisation in Google?

We compared two commonly used short tail search terms: social media and SEO (more popular than search engine optimisation in search).

In the UK, SEO is still more popular in search than social media, with consistent year on year growth since 2004.

Late 2007 sees early adopters searching for social media content, but the news reference popularity doesn’t really kick in until the start of 2009.

This year’s trends show that SEO is still more popular in search, but interestingly social media is the clear winner in news reference searches demonstrating its zeitgeist.

All credit to the guys at SEOMoz for creating the SEO web developer’s cheat sheet; a 2-page PDF document that reminds developers of the all-important detail for search engine optimisation campaigns.

Given that many developers wont even consider SEO as part of their daily development chores, the SEO cheat sheet is a welcome reminder of the important detail to consider.

Broadly it covers the following areas:

• Important HTML tags
• Search engine indexing limits
• 301 redirects for Apache
• Recommended metadata syntax
• Common (basic) canonicalisation issues
• Important search engine robots
• Robots meta tags
• Sitemap syntax summary
• List of common robot traps
• Robots.txt syntax

Download the web developer’s SEO cheat sheet

I often site Google Alerts as a great competitor benchmarking tool particularly if you’re carrying out SEO campaigns, monitoring buzz for online PR or tracking blog activity. Despite its popularity among digital marketers, its power is rarely unleashed, so let’s look at some typical uses, in this case within a search engine optimisation framework:

1, Brand buzz monitoring

The most obvious use of Google Alerts is to monitor your brand activity.  Google will report on any mentions of your brand across the web. Or  should you want to limit alerts to specific indeces, you can choose to only be alerted if your brand is mentioned with blogs or news for example.

Monitoring brand activity not only enables you to assess where you brand has been mentioned, but also let’s you monitor any possible link building activity or opportunities.

2. Backlink monitoring

A more advanced use of Google Alerts is to enter a Google operator such as inanchor:Emarketeers which will send alerts if the brand name Emarketeers is found in any backlinks (within the actual anchor text) rather than just mentioned within page copy.

The same applies to non-branded search terms. So for example, if I want to track mentions of the keyphrase SEO training within links, I’ll add the command allinanchor:seo training into Google Alerts in order to be alerted of any newly indexed links containing the keyphrase SEO training.

3.  Monitoring of different types of content

By using advanced Google operators, Google Alerts allows an SEO expert to gain insight into how different types of content such as PDF files or Flash is indexed. This is particularly useful for monitoring on-page optimisation of Flash content which in the past may have caused problems as non-indexable content.

By adding the alert lighting design filetype:swf or lighting design filetype:pdf, we can to monitor the content of Flash and PDF files respectively for the keyphrase lighting design.

You might want to limit this to your own site to assess how well Google has indexed your content; if this is the case, the Google Alert would be lighting design filetype:swf site:mysite.com.

4. Competitor analysis for SEO keyphrases

Monitoring competitor use of keyphrases is the obvious use of Google Alerts for search campaigns. I can add the following alerts to keep up to speed on my competitor’s use of certain keyphrases:

“digital marketing” site:competitorsite.com – creates alerts for the  keyphrase digital marketing on my competitor’s site

“digital marketing” -site:mysite.com – prevents me being alerted of digital marketing appearing on my own site

allinachor:digital marketing site:competitorsite.com – create alerts when digital marketing is contained within links on my competitor’s website

5. Monitoring of index inclusion

I often use Google Alerts to inform me of recently indexed content on my own website. For example, to be alerted that this blog post has been indexed by Google, I could add the following alert: google alerts site:emarketeers.com

6. Generating leads through search activity

One delegate attending an SEO training course told me how she used Google Alerts for generating a list of prospects to follow-up.  Her company sold catering supplies to caterers in the Manchester area. She set up Google Alerts for phrases such as “manchester caterer”, “north west catering” and other related terms to be kept informed of prospects in her area.

7. Tracking activity of syndicated content

If you syndicate content such as articles (to article submission sites), online PR (to PR syndication services) or blogs (to blog aggregators), Google Alerts will let you monitor exactly where your content has been syndicated.

Create alerts containing the article, press release or blog post names to be informed of how they have been indexed across the web or more specifically within the blogosphere.

8. Check for plagiarism and duplicate content

This is a trickier call as any of your content could in theory be plagiarised. However if you are particularly paranoid about theft of certain content e.g. blog articles you have been slaving over, use Google Alerts to warn you of content theft.

This is particularly relevant to SEO as duplicate content can cause index exclusion.

For a number of years, the issue of duplicate content has been a hot topic for many SEO professionals.
Google has made regular posts offering guidelines to webmasters; these guidelines have varied from content advice, to the use of 301 redirects, domain canonicalisation and more recently the implementation of rel=canonical (now supported by the 3 major search engines) when dealing with specific duplicate pages.

This month Google has added to its WMT the parameter handling tool – a feature which enables webmasters or developers to highlight up to 15 URL parameters for the Googlebot to ignore during its crawl.

For example, your preferred URL for a training course might look something like this: http://www.domain.com/training.php?course=SEO-Training

However, you might also be adding additional parameters such as affiliate tracking codes or session id’s which means your URL could actually look like this:
http://www.domain.com/training.php?course=SEO-Training&affiliate=acme&sessionid=abc123

Using the Google’s parameter handling you can request that the crawler ignores the parameters “affiliate” and “sessionid”. Not only could this increase the crawl efficiency (as it tends to ignore subsequent instances of the stated parameters) but it should hopefully remove duplicate content issues caused by those URLs.

Equally, you can inform Google which parameters not to ignore if those should indeed be included in the crawl.
There’s still a recommendation to use rel=canonical on specific pages, but if the parameters are site-wide, it makes sense to inform Google using the parameter handling tool.

Whilst I can see the benefits of this tool – especially if webmasters don’t have access to URL rewrites – be warned that Google will stop crawling certain URLs which in turn will affect their link equity being passed.

When building a website, it’s pretty much a given that it’ll be deployed using some sort of content management system (CMS) or blogging platform allowing the publisher or site owner to easily amend the website content.
Content management systems come in all flavours from open source to industrial-strength fully licensed software.

And when it comes to CMS support for SEO campaigns, they all vary in terms of quality.

If SEO is a key marketing strategy within your organisation, then your choice of CMS clearly needs to meet your SEO needs by way of an “SEO friendly CMS”.

Let’s look at the key considerations when choosing an SEO friendly CMS:

1. Metadata
Having manual control over your site metadata is a crucial part of any SEO campaign. Whilst your website might be dynamically publishing your page title tags, meta description and meta keywords, your CMS should offer you manual control over that content as well.

2. URLs and Category Management
Ideally you want to choose CMS that publishes search engine friendly URLs where category or file names contain plain English keyphrases separated by hyphens (yes I know this blog post uses underscores – we’re working on it!).
Something like: http://www.emarketeers.com/training-courses/mobile-marketing or preferable to http://www.emarketeers.com/course.php?courseid=123ABC

The latter contains little in the way of searchable keywords or keyphrases.

An SEO friendly CMS will also let you modify the category or directory names that appear in the URL without causing broken links on your site.

3. Link Anchor Text
Link anchor text is the text that appears in hyperlinks and is an important aspect to link building – whether internal or external backlinks.

Whilst it is standard for content management systems or blogging platforms to enable editors to create and control links within body text, not all will give you anchor text control over your navigation as some content management systems will match the anchor text with the target page name which isn’t necessarily the the most popular search term.

4. Link Validation
Before you launch a website, we recommend that you carry out a series of link validation tests. Broken links not only affect the human journey throughout a site, but they also hinder efficient spidering and indexing from search engines.

Link checkers such as the W3C Link Checker are great to use, but it would be good see a similar tool embedded with your content management system.

A good CMS will also allow you to change your folder or page link names and allow those changes to cascade throughout the site without causing broken links. MODx CMS does this by giving each page or folder an ID number within MODx. Any changes to the anchor text or location of that page (if moved), does not affect the ID number and hence maintains the integrity of the link on the website.

5. Sitemap Pages and XML files
Your CMS should be able to dynamically generate an HTML site map page. Ideally you should also have control over the anchor text in your links (see point 4).

Your content management system should also be able to dynamically generate an XML sitemap file in accordance with search engine standards. Some content management systems will ping search engines such as Google every time the sitemap is updated. An example piece of software that performs this function can be found at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.

6. ALT Attributes
If your CMS or blogging platform doesn’t allow you to add ALT (alternative) attributes to your embedded files such as images, I’d reconsider your choice of software.

It’s one of the most basic functions that the simplest WYSWYG editors or blogging platforms will offer, and it not only assists your search engine optimisation, but it also improves your accessibility compliance.

7. 301 Redirects
It would be nice to see a CMS offering content editors the ability to set up 301 redirects (permanent redirects) without having to edit your .htaccess file or have access to the web admin control panel.

Furthermore, it is important to set up 301 redirects from folders with extensions such as index.html or default.html that redirect to the root. This helps overcomes duplicate content issues where more than one URL contains exactly the same content.

8. Custom 404 Pages
Ideally your CMS should allow you to create a custom error 404 page i.e. the server code for “this page has moved or is missing”.

When moving pages or migrating a website you may find that the search engine index contains URLs of old pages that don’t exist any more. Having a customised error 404 page that points users in the right direction can prevent you losing essential traffic to your website.

You might also want to consider a customised error 500 (server error) page, although I’d say that the former is more important.

9. PageRank Sculpting
Google PageRank sculpting is the technique of manually adding “no follow” tags to on-page links in order to gain manual control over Google PageRank within a site.

In order to carry out PageRank sculpting, your CMS should enable you to add “no follow” tags to all links contained within a page, whether these are part of your internal navigation, body copy/image links or external links.

10. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is one factor that can affect your chances of search index inclusion. If substantive amounts of content are duplicated either within your site/domain or outside of it, it can spell trouble with index inclusion.
A nice to have within a CMS would be a duplicate content checker similar to that found at Copyscape.

I appreciate that some of the above are more essential than others; equally this isn’t necessarily an exhaustive list, but hopefully this article should highlight some of the essentials when choosing an SEO friendly CMS.

When teaching seo copywriting, I make the clear distinction between demand analysis and performance analysis.

Demand analysis
Demand analysis is the use of online tools to discover the most popular search terms carried out by searchers by time and geo-location.

Performance analysis
Performance analysis refers to the conversion efficiency of specific keyphrases on our website. In other words, have certain keyphrases engaged visitors and been persuasive enough to convert these visitors into leads, sales or sign-ups etc.

If the words on our website attract users but have a poor conversion effciency, one has to consider modifying them in order to work more efficiently as emotional triggers but without affecting the website’s search rank.

Search words versus “care words”
Performance related words are termed “care words” by Gerry McGovern, CEO of Customer Carewords who says:

“The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website…and give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues.”

So, our every day “language of intent” can differ when searching where we tend to use more mechanical and punctuated terminology.

For example, one might be looking for a last minute holiday to Venice but the search term used might be “flight deals to Venice”.

However upon arriving at a website, is the searcher more likely to purchase the holiday if it was termed “holiday offers to Venice” rather than “flight deals to Venice”?

So, clearly understanding how people search and subsequently convert is extremely significant if we are serious about writing search optimised and persuasive copy for the web.

Measuring keyword performance
My advice is to follow your web analytics reports closely. Assess your keyword performance by bounce rate, average time spent on site, average pages per visit and of course the all important conversion rate.

These metrics will give you a good indication as to whether you have sufficiently engaged your visitors in order to persuade them to convert. Remember, getting the searcher to your website is only half the story!

Whenever I run a writing for the web training course, I am often asked about how misspellings fit into SEO copywriting strategy. Given that misspelled words are so ubiquitous among all of us, should they be considered when writing for the web?

How often do we misspell search terms?
To illustrate how often misspellings occur within search engines, take a look at a Google’s report on search activity for the term “Britney Spears”.

Google reported that over 20% of the search queries were spelt incorrectly; the two most common misspellings – Brittany and Brittney – comprised around 16% of searches.

Similarly, the term “car insurance” is spelt “car insurence” approx 8,100 times on average per month in the UK as is illustrated below.

How do search engines handle misspellings?
You will be pleased to know that Google, Yahoo! and MSN all handle misspellings well by offering alternative suggestions.

Most of us will recognise Google’s “Did you mean…?” functionality whenever we mistype a search term.
MSN operates slightly differently:

…as does Yahoo!:

So given that search engines are supposedly correcting the errors of our ways, do we need to factor in misspellings into our website content? Well let’s take a deeper look at some results in SERPs.

Interpreting search engine results
We did a search for “car insurance” and “car insurence” in Google.co.uk in order to compare results in SERPs (search engine results pages).

A search for “car insurance” yielded the following:

Whereas a search for “car insurence” yielded these results in SERPs:

The top two results for “car insurance” are moneysupermarket.com and confused.com.

Whereas the top three results for “car insurence” were: beatthatquote.com, churchill.com and ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk.

The next obvious test was to see if the misspelling actually appeared in the above three sites. This could be ascertained using the following commands:
insurence site:www.beatthatquote.com
insurence site:www.churchill.com
insurence site:www.ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk
By looking at the results, it is immediately clear that the word “insurence” doesn’t actually appear on beatthatquote.com or churchill.com whereas it is contained within ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk as links.

However, the reason that these sites rank well for the misspelled search term could be due to many reasons such as historical use of the search term or even as a result of backlinks to these sites using that search term in the anchor text.

This can be seen using the command allinanchor:insurence.

Factoring in spelling mistakes
So does this mean that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with tactical deployment of misspelled words on our websites? The short answer is yes.

Let’s not forget user experience. A website with personalized content tailor-made to that individual’s needs, will result in higher conversion rates. Whereas a website too focused on keyword stuffing without factoring in user experience, might well generate greater footfall, but will be less likely to meet the needs of its visitors.

Inserting misspelled words is clearly not a viable strategy for any serious business. Whilst businesses still insert misspelled words into its meta keywords, the chances of those ranking high in Google are basically zero.
There are still many companies that buy misspellings of domain names in order to forward traffic to the correctly spelt version of the domain name.

Google uses this strategy e.g. click on www.gooogle.com or www.gogle.com or www.googel.com as examples.
Whilst this is considered acceptable in my opinion, I wouldn’t start cybersquatting on many hundreds of domains as it could be considered unethical if those domain names could be legitimately purchased by others; equally it might not be cost effective for the amount the potential traffic it could drive.

As an aside, if you want to play around with a fun tool that generates misspellings, have a go on this misspelling tool.

What about UK/US variations in spelling?
The differences between US and UK spellings is an issue that cannot be sidelined. But this requires an entirely new blog article, so watch this space….