The Telegraph’s Business Diary has a great piece about businesses that unintentionally come up with URLs that have the word “sex” (or related) in them.
The Economist noticed in the nick of time that the name of its new blog economicsexechange might be misleading.
Powergen was supposedly considering opening its Italian web presense with powergenitalia.com.it
But there are some URLs that have made it onto the web.
Search for agents representing stars like Paris Hilton at whorepresents.com
Buy a pen at penisland.com (It’s actualy gay dating).
Consult a shrink at therapistfinder.com
Get changed at dollarsexchange.com
Google looks at words contained in the URL pretty closely, so these these sites presumably do well for non-relevant traffic.
I’m glad that Mallika is doing well with her Quick Indian Cooking blog. She wrote her first post on September 21st, and you can see from the active comments that she’s building a following with her fiery style. We helped her set it up, and give her a little advice about the technicalities of blogging, but Mallika came up with a great idea. It’s a niche (Indian cuisine) but it’s a subset of an active blog community (cooking and food). This means she’s part of a network and that’s the life blood of a blog. Top food blog Noodle Pie gave her a rather cheeky but welcome link recently.
The following table from Google Webmasters tools shows that she’s already showing up well for relevant search phrases. This shows the importance of having a well focused subject to blog about, as well as a good url, title, and description, all of which Google loves.
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I’m in the mood for SEO tips. Most site owners realise that in-coming links are all important to Google. You can’t get enough of them. It’s less obvious that out-going links can help too - well at least I’m fairly certain that they do.
When Google looks through your webpage, it pays particular attention to links. It rates these higher than ordinary content. You can tell that this is so, because search results tend to show up links in the brief summary of content.
So to use an example (as usual) from our own work - on Storynory we are publishing an audio book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s our biggest project and we want people to find it. There are loads of other audio books about Alice, so the competition is strong for a search phrase like “Alice in Wonderland Free audio”. In the post, I’ve included three outgoing links to the best Alice background sites I could find on the net. This is a good service to our users - it also helps us with Google.
Incidentally, I’ve also made sure that the key words appear in the URL. I hope these SEO tips help people. I knew nothing about this subject a year ago, and Search Optimisation Companies charge a lot for their wisdom. It’s largely true that common sense and good content win through in the end.
Another short word about Quick Indian Cooking. Its author, Mallika, came up with the title and URL - even though we said she would never find a free address as good as that. But beforehand, we advised her to look for a URL with key words for search in it. It’s really important to get Search Engine Optimisation right from the start. Google looks at the URL and then the title at the top of the browser before most other other things. It takes a few months to kick in, but when it does, it’s hard to beat a site that has those vital key words in its url. Look at the success of cheapflights.co.uk for example. When people start to link to the site, they are likely to use those words, and reinforce the effect.
So this is our top SEO tip. Get the web address and title optimal for search.
Google Sitemaps keep on adding tools that help anyone who runs a website gain a better understanding of how people arrive on your pages. The top search queries table provides fascinating info. I’m hoping that the latest addition will solve an SEO problem for our Storynory site.
Google lists our pages as http://storynory.com without the www. The trouble is that our Google ranking seems to be split between the www address and the non www address. http://storynory.com has a ranking of 5, while http://www.storynory.com has 6, meaning it should come higher up in search results. Unfortunately, its the lower ranking address that’s listed. Now Sitemaps allows you to choose how your site will be listed in its index. Naturally I’ve plumped for www. It might take a while to update.
I reckon the best option, if your ISP will allow it, is to only give out one address with or without the www. This should avoid the problem all together. If you are using WordPress, make sure you have the Sitemaps plugin.
Now that Google is being kinder to our Storynory site, I feel freer to pontificate about some SEO tips which I hope will give some insight.
The information lower down this post comes from Google’s very useful Sitemaps service which I use in conjunction with the Wordpress Sitemaps plugin. It shows the average top position for our site in certain search queries.
The results aren’t bad for a young site that gives away “free audio stories for kids.” You will notice that our top search queries tend to include those words, or synonyms such as “children” for “kids”. This is because the words are included in the title of the weblog which appears at the top of the browser. As the site is run on Wordpress, I simply typed the key title words in under options / weblog title.
We do better on “story” than we do on “stories” because “story” is part of our URL (Storynory).
In order of importance, I think Google looks at URL, Title, Description, Content. In other words, it’s pretty important to think of SEO when you set up a URL (take cheapflights.com for instance), which has done enormously well out of having a URL that says exactly what it provides, and happens to be a frequent search query on google.
Incidentally, there’s another UK company that is using blogrelations in its URL, clearly in an attempt to usurp our rightful position with that search.
Of course, in real life, you can’t usually choose the URL you would like. But there’s nothing to stop you changing the title tag what whatever you wish.
Top Search Queries Average Top Position
children story 10
audio stories 10
free stories 51
history of soccer 18
free audio books 34
story for kids 9
adam and eve 55
free audio stories 3
storynory 1
bear in a kids tale 5
free children stories 8
story for children 7
children storys 7
s stories 6
one tin solider 7
childrens storys 9
free children’s stories 9
kissa 19
children’s stories 26
free children 9
This isn’t just another moan about Google, it might serve as a useful SEO tip. Unless you are ultra-trusted by Google - i.e. a .gov .edu or a BBC or listed in the hand-picked Google Directory or of similar stature - be very wary of making big changes to your site.
After many months of being consigned to the Google dustbin, our Storynory podcast started to turn up well on searches about a month ago. For instance, we were often number one search for “audio free kids” and so forth. New visitors to our site started to grow steadily. This only seemed fair, as lots of people were linking to us, including some quite big sites.
I noticed from the web hosting log that some people coming in on relevant searches were sticking around for “0″ seconds. I concluded that the pages weren’t loading fast enough for them to actually hit the page after clicking. I also felt that not many people scroll down our Storynory pages, but hunt for audio stories instead in the archive. So I dropped the number of entries per page from 8 to 4. The pages across the site were much shorter and loaded up much more quickly. But a few days later Google put us back in the dustbin.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to see the sites that link to us come up in searches, but own site all but invisible. Even blogs that don’t normally have much to do with kids audio came up but not us. So I gave in. I restored the number of entries per page back to 8, and now we seem to be allowed back into Google’s land of the living again.
Why did this happen? My only guess is that if you make a change that radically alters the number of times a key word appears on your pages, then Google gets suspicious. It thinks you were pretending to be clean, only to reinvent yourself as a spam site. Most of the entries on Storynory mention words like “audio” “story” “Kids” “children” - though free does not come up much. By halving the number of entries per page, I also halved the number of times those words appear.
It pisses me off that we can’t make useful changes to our own site without being kicked in the Googlies, but is my SEO tip for moody, temperamental Google: Don’t go making changes.
Try putting “search engine” into Google, and you are hard-pressed to come up with a decent one, like Ask.com. Even Google itself is down the page.
Is it just us, or do other people agree with Matthew and me that Google is getting more and more useless? A friend pointed out the other day that if he put the name of a hotel into Google, he got back anything but the hotel’s own webpage, even though that would be the most useful for checking out the rooms and getting a feel for what it was like. It’s harder and harder to find what you are really after.
Google still relies a fair bit on the hand-vetted sites in Open Directory Project, upon which it bases its own directory. After all the technological progress since 1999 or thereabouts, it still takes human eyes to sort out the spam sites and convince Google that you are completely legit. You can submit a site to the directory and NEVER hear back from them. You will never know if they have even looked at your submission. It’s worse that sending a book to publisher. Your whole livelihood depends on the whim of one person, and whether they can be bothered to look at your site. If they don’t like it, that’s it. Getting to the top of Google will be that much harder, no matter how good or relevant your site is.
Google, I think, has got some problems. They won’t come home to roost for some time yet, but they need to work harder at being the best search engine, and perhaps put some other projects on hold.
This interview from the Online Marketing Show is with Julian Walker of Steak Media. Julian and much of the team from Steak worked at Espotting Media which introduced pay per click advertising to Europe in 2000, before Google Adwords. So Julian is in an ideal position to see an Online Marketing Campaign from both sides of the fence.
[audio:http://www.blog-relations.com/audio/Julian_Steak_Media.mp3]
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The Second SEO tip a the Online Marketing Show comes from Colin Gillespie, Joint CEO of Search Marketing Agency, which is a specialist in Pay Per Click - which sometimes sounds a little like Paperclip, but which is at the cutting edge of advertising in these days when the money is moving online.
To hear Colin’s Tip, use the play button, or dowload, or subscribe to our podcast (top left) in iTunes or any podcatcher.
[audio:http://www.blog-relations.com/audio/onlinemarketing/colin_seo.mp3]
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I’m official podcaster at the Online Marketing Show.
There are plenty of companies offering their Search Engine Optimisation services. I wanted to find out what are their Tip Tips for getting to the top of Google. First up, Mike Taylor of onlinemarketingjobs.
To hear Mike’s SEO Tip, use the play button or download. (If you have iTunes you can subscribe to our podcast top left).
[audio:http://www.blog-relations.com/audio/onlinemarketing/mike_taylor_jobs_seo_tips.mp3]
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