SEO

Car Rental and SEO

In a resent look at the car hire market, in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), some very interesting points were brought to light. Anything in the motor business, whether it’s dealing with the new sales, second hand sales or rental is hugely competitive. The foreign car rental business is massively competitive and it’s on this we are going to concentrate. Just as a small aside, and one that as a country we have to be able to capitalise on: Hitwise recently released their Travel Quarterly Review – an overview from a search perspective of the travel and related markets. This quarter they analysed the UK searches for ‘flight destinations’. By Flight destinations searches it means search phrases that have a fight slant to them and a specific city destination. So, this could be expressions like “cheap flights Dublin” or “Dublin Flights” etc. “Flights/Dublin” ranked 4th (up for 11th in the same period last year) of all the city destinations searches from the UK. It’s not a bad showing for the Capital being forth on that list of potential destinations. Anyway, once all the bookings have been made there is always the issue of Car Hire. Sticking, for the moment, with the Hitwise research their fastest moving expression in the first quarter of 2011 was “car hire Spain”. “Hire” being the appropriate term here in this neck of the woods. If you are optimising for the visitors from the USA then that has...

Search Engine Simulators

In order to see exactly how your pages are seen by search engines you can use an online ‘search engine simulator’. There are plenty of them about but there may be some variations in the results. Using this facility will show you what words and phrases are going to be indexed in that page. It’s an excellent way to look at your pages. Its takes away the distraction of graphics or flash and strips the site down to its most basic. And that’s the way the site will be seen by and indexed by search spiders. A word of caution, some sites look absolutely fantastic to the human eye, readable and navigable. Take for example the retail site of Brown Thomas. A lot of care and attention has been taken with this site and it’s very easy to negotiate. However the home page is all flash and therefore cannot be read easily by a search engine. You can see the results of what a spider sees in that page below – very little. More importantly the rest of the site is a blend of Flash and HTML and would be of some use to a spider. But the home page has no spider navigable links to the rest of the site and therefore it’s like a bullet in the head of a spider entering that page. Its not exactly a big meal for a spider!   

Panda Problems?

Here's a interesting take on the recent Google Panda update – specifically on Google.com. Below is the before and after of an Irish website whichwas competing for a fairly competitive key phrase. Before the update we had tracked it in and around 10th# and it had been relatively stable over that months up to that give or take a position or two. The landing page for that keyphrase on that particular site was, well, a bit light and really didn't live up to the promise. After the "update" they currently reside in 75th#. That has to hurt.

Mobile Retail and m-commerce.

Some interesting stats and facts have come to light this month – in this instance concerning the rise and rise of m-commerce. In a report conducted by Tamar (UK Based Research) suggest that 19% of consumers will do their festive shopping via a mobile handset in 2010. I’d hazard a guess that there are also a huge number of individuals that will conduct their primary research on a mobile but might leave the “last mile” to be concluded elsewhere for a variety of reasons (some set out below). Tesco in the UK expect 10% of their sales will come through a mobile. Understandable as Tesco customers would already have their details registered and it’s simply a matter of signing in and doing the weekly shopping when you’re getting the evening tube to Tooting Broadway. And that seems to be key – the convenience and safety of having your details already gathered and stored on a retailers site. The survey suggested that many more would go the m-commerce route if their fears over security were allayed. There is also the logistical issue, and again, the security aspect of using a credit card in a public place. Then there’s the physical and mental anguish of attempting to key in a 12 digit credit card number (and all the other relevant paraphernalia that goes with it) on, say, public transport. If you don’t have the digits and dexterity of a seamstress, then the last mile is best conducted elsewhere. In the UK 54% of the top 20 retail sites had either a mobile app or a dedicated mobile web portal. But it still leaves nearly half that have neither. In...

Adwords and Trademark infringement

An interesting digging match is ongoing in London over the use of trademarks and Google adwords. The case was taken by Interflora against M&S over their used of the trademark name “Interflora” as a keyword in their adwords campaign (CPC of the keyword is €0.63 here). The case even dragged Google in with Interflora looking to hit them in the suit as well. However the ruling stated that Google simply facilitated third parties and did not mean that Google itself was using the mark. The court ruled that a third party could be liable 'in the case where the ad does not enable the average internet user, or enables that user only with difficulty, to ascertain whether the goods and services referred to therein originate from the proprietor of the trademark or an undertaking economically connected with it or, on the contrary, originate from a third party'...

"Yer Havin a Laugh"!!!

I came across a company who were selling the virtues of their expertise in Web Design and SEO. I couldn't complain about the Design side (although design is subjective in the first case) but I would have to take issue with their efforts in the sphere of SEO. I think where the problem arises is that the end client was blindsided as some point, given a spin like a whirling dervish. The “SEO Company” told them what it was – and the hadn't or didn't research the topic even slightly. The client was left with a decent enough website – its a brochure site (a concept much maligned at a recent conference!) but works well for that business. But: No page descriptions Page titles that are rotated though pages thus having repetitive page titles Very little in the follow-up. For instance no evidence of submitting the business to Google maps or anything to do with local search There is a real opportunity to have people sit between a potential client and a potential design company – just to have a bit of realism brought to book on both sides.

Regional Papers Websites

I was looking at offerings of some of the regional web sites and, in general, how they try and market themselves through the web (for both print and online). It's was an interesting exercise and some of my observations are posted here. The print edition of any of the regional newspapers is bounded by its franchise area. Some manage to get a little further than that, maybe even as far as the news stand in Easons on a weekly basis. But it their information franchise, their local information franchise, extends much much further. Look at the Irish/County Diaspora - they are scattered to the four corners, not only globally, but nationally as well. There would be a natural curiosity in any migrant (see previous post on Polish Websites) to seek out information from 'home' and not only national but local as well. As part of my look at the web offerings of the local papers (I'll return to that expression again!) I looked at two simple expressions - "[county] news" and "[county] newspaper" to see who scores well under these terms in their franchise and why. The terms are particularly broad and wont suit every local paper. Here is not the platform to go through each local nuance, so I have to be broad. Also, I edited it down to the top two websites in each county, otherwise the list would be simply too long. Should anyone want a more comprehensive list (and why!) - just contact me and I will get you what I have. In the main most of the regional papers scored well when the county terms were used. There were a few anomalies county by county but rather than go...

Mobile Sites for Newspapers

In the last ground of electronic ABC figures there were some extra interesting stats furnished by the Guardian. They launched a mobile site earlier this year and they gave a first look at some of the data.  Overall they had 27,324,309 unique users to its site in April - making it the most visited site out of all the UK morning papers. But the mobile site attracted 101,000 and 2.1m page impressions during the month. More interestingly, two thirds of that traffic came from either an iPhone or iPod Touch. "The Web" seems to feature very high on the agenda of Apple disciples. Figures released by AdMob showed that, from their tracking, that although Symbian have a 52% market share of handsets worldwide the operating system only accounts for 7% of HTML mobile usage.   The iPhone users as a...