Is the Google Keyword Tool any use for SEO?

The title of this post is a question I was asked by a colleague recently. I realise that for most people working on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) I’m teaching you to suck eggs, in which case stop reading, or read it and tell me what I’ve missed! But for any beginners (which is what this is aimed at), read on for my answer:

Yes the “Google Keyword Tool” is very useful to anyone doing SEO.

What it does is analyse actual search traffic for certain keywords in Google as well as suggest other keywords. The current keyword tool is a combination of two previous keyword tools and despite initial problems with accuracy of the search figures it seems to be fairly trustworthy now. That said I wouldn't base your company strategy on the figures they quote, just use them as a handy tool, backed up by your own site analytics.

For example type the word ‘property’ in there it will tell you how many times people searched for that keyword on Google worldwide and in the UK. You can search for many words at the same time and it will also give you related keywords, again with search quantity.

Now there are loads of uses for this but some examples include:

• When you’re looking to optimise a page about a specific subject, for example “Architect jobs”. I can type this in to the keyword tool and find out how many times it’s been searched for. However I can also type in “architects” and find out related topics people are searching for which may help me extend my website reach, such as “the role of an architect” and “architect salary”. In this particular example I added these two subjects to my job website and so increased the traffic to the site.

• Another example is when someone comes along and says “I’ve a great idea, why don’t we change all our title tags to ‘Real estate’ from ‘property’ to grab the American market”. I can go to Keyword tool and prove that it’s not a good idea because the word isn't used much in the UK or that maybe we should create an entirely new section targeted at the American market that discusses real estate.

You probably already know the top keywords people use to reach your site, but by using this you can gain a better understanding of the search universe for different keywords. It can confirm what you’re doing is right, maybe clarify keywords you should use or suggest other areas of development.

Oh and you can also now put in a website address and it will use all the keywords on that site to feed its keyword ideas.

The original purpose of this is for people to find keywords to put against their AdWords but it works for what I’ve suggested too.

PS: There are two versions of the tool one 'external' and one built in to Adwords. There are numerous posts about the accuracy of the external tool so suggest you use the one in AdWords. You just need a FREE AdWords account to access it - you don't even need to use AdWords itself.

Related posts
Finding keywords for Google Adwords (Jul 2007)
Growing strange cacti (Feb 2009)

Introduction to WolframAlpha search engine

Launching soon is WolframAlpha, a search engine which is doing what Ask Jeeves tried to do in the late 90s - answer questions, sort of.

Get a good understanding of how it works with this introduction screencast.

Unlike last year's launches of Cuil and Wikia Search i'm far more excited about WolframAlpha as they are focusing on a part of search that isn't currently serviced sufficiently. The more factual infosheet side rather than a method of redirection to other websites (which is what Google does).

For me, it could take over from Wikipedia for provision of immediate-response factual based information (i'm not suggesting it will usurp Wikipedia, just for those times i need straight facts).

Queries such as, "What's the GDP of Germany?" or "Where is the ISS at?". Neither questions i ask as often as i type in "BBC football" into Google mind.

Relevant web links
Web tool 'as important as Google' - BBC News

Monitor the online buzz around your brand

How to ensure you know what people are saying about your brand in social media, and what you can do to influence the conversation.

This was the title of a panel debate about buzz monitoring at Internet World 2009. Chaired by Tom Nixon of NixonMcInnes, with his colleague and two other speakers whose names I can't remember, one from Huddle, one from Attentio.

ENGAGEMENT

Get EVERYONE in your company engaged. Get everyone monitoring your brands, or the brands relevant to them. The more eyes you have out there the more you will pick up and the less you will miss.

Some tools to help you monitor your brands

• Google Alerts - Type in a search term, such as your brand, and set up an email alert or RSS feed.
• Twitter Search - Search for terms and brands to find real time discussions on Twitter.
• Google Trends - Monitor regional interest in topics and their appearance in Google News.
• Technorati - Search the blogosphere for your terms and brands. Google Blog Search also does this, although not quite as well.
• Trendpedia - Free tool from Attentio who was one of the speakers. Not sure of effectiveness but worth a play.
• Company Buzz - Application on LinkedIn. Essentially it's just Twitter Search.
  

Tools to aggregate some of this content to you

There are lots of tools to monitor buzz but having to go from one to the other every day would be very time consuming so there are a variety of methods to get this information to come to you.

• Email alerts - this is part of Google Alerts and obviously lets you get the information to your inbox. Any RSS feed can also be set up as an email alert with a variety of tools, Feedburner is a good one.
• RSS readers - most if not all of the tools above output RSS feeds of your results. You can plug these into a reader such as Netvibes and iGoogle.
• Addictomatic – This is an RSS reader with a difference. It's automatically set up to look at a number of sources and tools. Just type in your brand or terms, here's one I made earlier for number 1 breakfast spread, Bovril.
  
• RSS manipulation - you can combine, change, filter and do pretty much anything with RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes. It's not that simple for non-techies though, here's my short demo.
  

Things to bear in mind

A pack of fags

A mammal

• Setting up an alert for a brand which can also mean something else may bring irrelevant results: For example "Camel" can mean the cigarettes and the mammal with a hump.
• You could therefore nail it down by searching for "Camel cigarettes"
• Or look for buzz where both the words "Camel" + "smoking" are used
• And don't forget there may be other non brand names you can monitor, such as your CEO's name, any campaigns you are running, competitions you are doing, anything else about your brand that might be being talked about.

RESPOND

1. If someone is interested in your product, the sales team can act on this and chase.
2. If there are problems or issues with your brand then the relevant people can address these. Such as customer services or your technical support employees.
3. People like to know they are being taken care of.
4. Respond with AUTHENTICITY and have a clear consistent VOICE
5. Be INTERESTING, USEFUL and HELPFUL
6. This is a representative of your brand talking, don't reflect badly on the brand by being petulant or of no use.
7. Also remember that it's just people you are talking do, ditch the sales and marketing speak, be yourself.

Related posts
YouTube, Facebook, BBC, Reuters discuss social media (Feb 09)
Stop pop-ups popping up, online advertising needs to evolve (Nov 07)
Aren't Google Alerts clever? (Nov 07)

Should Google News pay publishers for their content?

Working for a publisher the discussion has come up on a number of occasions that surely Google should be paying us for the content we provide it via Google News.

Rupert Murdoch had a whinge about it last month:

"Should we be allowing Google to steal our copyrights? If you have a brand like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, you don't have to."

While, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson came out with the slightly ridiculous:

"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet."

Both quotes from the BBC article about this subject.

Should Google pay publishers for content? - No

It's right to expect to be paid in some way for content that you have spent time and money to produce.

Maybe when advertising revenues were strong it was something you could afford to ignore but now this source is receding digital needs to step up and produce another channel of profit. However, stating that Google should be the one to provide this revenue is a rather naive argument.

Google has found a way with Google News of taking what is available for FREE on the internet and making money off the back of it - through referrals to the rest of their offerings.

Off the back of this the main newspapers received a boost in traffic from Google News. When ad budgets were high, all was good. Increased traffic meant increased revenue from cost per impression, cost per click & cost per acquisition advertising business models.

But with no advertising money available thoughts turn back to the evil G. Surely it makes sense that if Google are making money from this content when no one else is then they should share this pot around.

Well no it doesn't, it's a crap argument. The publishers are offering their content for free online, to everyone. You can access the same content via traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live Search) but nobody is asking for cash from referral here.

Until the content is not available for free on the internet, Google are never going to volunteer cash. They'll wait until somebody calls their bluff. If all the main newspapers pulled their feeds from Google News then they might enter into a discussion. This hasn't happened, yet.

Despite this Google still felt it was necessary to bitch back at the publishers claiming,

"[Google] has shared £3.3bn with publishers through ads program AdSense in the last year".

Well good point, but firstly Adsense is opt-in so doesn't apply to all publishers on Google News and secondly by making this statement Google is admitting that they do indeed owe the publishers something, schoolboy error.

How else can publishers make money online? - Subscriptions

Up until very recently most of the big players online were reluctant to broach the other obvious money from content method - paid for content / subscriptions.

The big UK exception to this is the FT, who in 2007 introduced a hybrid system where you could have 30 views per month before having to pay.

Subscription models become more viable with less money from advertising as site traffic and unique users become less important to the bottom line. Quality, uniqueness and diversity of content take over and differentiation from the competition becomes a sales tool for attracting the lucrative subscription market.

With the addition of subscription revenues, less revenue is needed from advertising to meet commercial targets. The lower traffic figures as a result of content gating and its knock on effect on advertising is therefore diluted.

And not to forget, Google News will still index your site (albeit with the 'subscription' tag).

The future? - Unique online offerings

Gated content is the online equivalent of buying a newspaper. Getting Google to pay you is the online equivalent of getting the newsagent to pay for your newspaper before selling it on.

"Online equivalents" are lazy ways of trying to transform business models to the digital age. In true 1990s buzzword speak it's not thinking outside of the box.

The brands that will prosper online are the ones that start to use the internet for its strengths:

• Huge audience
• Extremely fragmented demographics
• Extremely niche markets available
• Extremely flexible routes to market
• Personalisation and tailored news opportunities
• Portability
• This list is in no way complete; tell me more in the comments!

Instead of indiscriminately slapping a subscription wall around content, publishers should take a leaf out of Google News' book.

Use your generic consumer focused general news content as a free traffic driver - that's your website's bait. Let anyone view it, pimp it to every news aggregator going and if advertising returns you still have pages with high traffic. It will also keep your website brand out there.

Use this driver to push your paid-for content. Charge for all truly unique content, ie.

• Areas of news that only you produce and people need - ie. industry focused business news, such as the FT provides
• Premium reports - a tech magazine could publish SEO guides, link building guides, technical help
• Customised reports - Repurpose your unique content into bespoke industry reports for companies and charge for it. Ie. Look at where a company has been in your news and help them to create a report of their brand values in their industry.
  
• Sponsored content - Do you have a specialist news channel? Offer a sponsorship package where a company could provide content, sponsor competitions and get involved with your readership in a way not possible with banner ads.
• Apps - With the rise of iPhones & Blackberrys, apps are big business. Create something so unique you can charge.
• Sell bespoke content creation - Companies like their customers to think they know their markets. As a publisher you are in a unique position to provide your content in formats that companies can align themselves with - i.e. targeted minisites for brand building.

If people really need something and can't go elsewhere they will pay.

Be creative with pricing strategies. Online items can be sold on an ad hoc basis (download this PDF report for £10) or via a number of tiered subscriptions providing varying levels of access to your content (£900 a year for full unlimited access).

Want to know how to make lots more money online (not a spam link!)? Then read this fantastic presentation by faberNovel about Google's business model.

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The future of mobile: widgets

Vodafone Widget Manager

This article about mobile widgets touches on what will (a long time from now) be a very interesting method of content distribution.

[NB: This guest post is taken from an email one of my colleagues sent me a couple of days ago.]

Mobile widgets, in my mind, will be like the current iPhone apps mixed with databases, HTML, Javascript and XML with cross device/platform support.

The fundamental idea of the mobile widget, is to “write once, run anywhere”, where you download all the necessary files (javascript libraries, xml files, HTML code) in the first instance, then not need to load those files after that point. Increasing load times/accessibility and decreasing net traffic.

The author of the article works on mobile browser compatibility for the W3C and is slowly developing the mobile widget platform.

Something for the future.

Check when GMail goes down with Google's status dash

I stumbled across Google's Apps Status Dashboard last week. It just lets you know which of Google's apps is having service issues and often a time frame of the fix.

It won't do anything to prevent a Twitter storm next time GMail fails but it's handy if you use any Google Apps for important business.

YouTube, Facebook, BBC, Reuters discuss social media

The top bods from these four media brands talked social media at yesterday's TFM&A conference in London's Earls Court. I've paraphrased some sound bites from each of them.

Keynote title: Getting Social Media Marketing to Deliver Real Business Results
Watch entire thing online: Seminar Streams (needs free login), Digital Training (nothing there yet).

The individuals were, from left to right:

• The host, Danny Meadows-Klue (standing)
  
• Bruce Daisley, Google’s Head of Agencies, YouTube
• Stephen Haynes, UK Sales Director, Facebook
• Tim Faircliff, General Manager, Reuters.
• Pete Clifton, Head of Editorial Development, BBC

How does social media marketing deliver real business results?

BBC
If it’s not helpful & interesting to the user, a blog or whatever is pointless. You need to ensure frequency and content.

Reuters
You must maintain focus with UGC [user generated content]. Innovation will happen so we can’t avoid the use of UGC and all its associated technologies. We must therefore control the risk while riding with it.

Facebook
"I report to a 24 year old!"
We rely on simplicity. Our marketing / product page that people can become fans of are just simple templates given away for free.

YouTube
The best social media has a purpose i.e. Flickr (images), YouTube (videos). It’s not about control – you can’t have that – it’s about engaging in dialogue.

The brand and social media

Reuters
Your customers own the brand not you. You must understand this to engage in UGC. Once you accept this you can enter into meaningful dialogue

Future plans and Twitter

BBC
We have to reach as many people in the UK as possible as we are funded by licence payer’s money. We realise that to reach them we must let more content go. This includes allowing embedding and downloading of videos so they can be used elsewhere.

Reuters
Twitter opens up the conversation – I don’t just mean ‘Twitter’ but this form of interaction. It’s about engaging with customers first and foremost, not just being cool and trendy.

BBC
Twitter is a really good feedback tool for us. It’s often used by bloggers writing a post to ask their followers, for example, ‘what do you think about this new software’.

What's the next big thing in 2009 for social media?

Facebook
In 2009 there will be more ideas and companies using the social space in different ways. There will be a huge increase in Facebook users.
Ad formats are changing and they will start to recognise what users are doing.
[I mentioned that ad's need to change over a year ago]

Reuters
I agree, ad formats will change. The AOP [which he is a part of] is also looking at this. There will become more business models in social media – for example Spotify – check it out if you haven’t already.

BBC
"I’ll be dead."
And I agree with ad formats. The BBC will embrace more facebook style functionality. We’ll try and join up users and preserve the time they spend on the site. Get users to suggest other areas of the site, improve areas, etc.
[This explains the recent increase in "most popular stories now" from 5 to 10]

YouTube
There will be an on location explosion. Mobile use is already showing the importance of location based stuff such as Google Latitude knowing where you are by using GPS. You will be able to track your friend’s whereabouts. iPhoto is already making use of the inbuilt GPS that some phone cameras have and embed in photos.

Related posts
Stop poking me, I'm bored of Facebook (Aug 07)
Can social networking sites afford to bank on future success? (Dec 07)
Everyone's bored of social networking (Jan 08)
16 weird but amusing Twitterer accounts (Feb 09)
Monitor the online buzz around your brand (May 09)

Search images by the colours within them

My colleague showed me a really fascinating image search by colour that indexes 10 million Flickr images and allows search based on colour.

For example here are the results for the colour blue:


And I can break down these results even more by adding the colour red:


The people who made this Flickr image search are "developers of advanced image recognition and visual search software" and i've also discovered another search engine they have called TinEye which searches for copies of an image you give it. Handy for copyright checking.

Image search is a fascinating subject and one that hasn't really grown up as much as text search. Things like Google Image Search are very much based on titles of images, related text, alt tags and link anchor text because of course search engine spiders traditionally only read text and can't 'view' images like a human can. STOP PRESS - Update: Google have just launched search by colour on Google Image Search.

Google Image Labeler is one method of getting round this problem - using humans to tell the computer what things are through the use of a simple game. Using humans to categorise images is a simple way to better search - Wikimedia Commons has a nice tidy pile of multimedia all categorised and named up as appropriate.

However I do like the idea of trying to search images in different ways - by using colours like the above example is one way - perhaps by the angles contained within the picture? Perhaps a search could be created that 'recognises' commonly seen shapes - such as buildings, cars, people, animals, hair, pornography!

Related posts
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BBC increase most read stories to top 10

Shock horror! The BBC has changed it's top 5 most read to a top 10. OK, really it's not that exciting despite the fact that many SEOers and usability people tend to hang on the BBC website's every move.

I can understand why, they have the space, it encourages click-through, increases average page depth per visit. An easy decision really, wonder why they took this long?

Not quite sure why they haven't changed the most emailed to a top 10 yet though, maybe they're worried about people manipulating it, like me!

The "most popular stories now" as of 3.20pm 17th February 2009*
The top 5 most emailed	The top 10 most read

*And in the time it's taken me to write this post it's gone back to a top 5 again, how very strange, maybe it was a glitch? They really should make it a top 10 though, take this fumble as fate.

*And it's back to top 10 again as i write the following morning (18th Feb). Email still top 5.

Update: A few days after writing this post I heard the BBC's head of editorial development, Pete Clifton, speak at a conference and he stated the BBC's current aim of trying to increase time on site through user involvement and related stories - which explains this.

Related posts
Online popularity culture is killing good journalism - writing content for the benefit of most read and most emailed widgets
Feedjit widget provides your site's most popular pages

Only print specific sections of a web page and save the world

P*ss off advertisers the world over by only printing out the bits of a web page you want.

The oxymoron that is environmentally friendly printing

To be fair I’ve been doing this for years and single handedly saving the rainforests and defending pandas by copying any text from a site I want to read in a non digital format into Notepad and printing from there.

However you often want more than just the text (like pictures) and you've only a big red LED light where your laser printer should have a green LED light for presence of magenta ink and you know that printing all the adverts on a web page will push it over the edge.

So for you I present "PrintWhatYouLike.com, save the money, save the environment, print what you like". Really if I felt they were truly serious about saving the money and saving the environment they wouldn't be encouraging printing at all but I guess they're half way there and "save a bit of money, and a part of the environment" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Thanks to my colleague for forwarding me the link, it's really straightforward; the site lets you input the URL you wish to print then remove page elements before printing, such as MPUs, side bars, removing background. It also works the other way round - you can just select the bit of the page you want and isolate it. Internet Explorer did crash when I tried big manoeuvres when printing my own blog such as removing the background or isolating one blog post. Firefox on the other hand coped perfectly and quickly.

I rarely print stuff and when I do I just do my copy and paste to Notepad trick - plus a lot of sites have print style sheets these days which cut out clutter anyway but nevertheless it's a clever gadget with a good heart. Just remember to only use it in Firefox.

Can Cuil take search volume from Google?

Cuil launched today. Set up by former Google workers it's another search engine.

Will Google get beaten up? (Original image from Wikimedia Commons, additional editing by Ed)

Will it be better than Google? Difficult to tell. Will it matter? Probably not.

The problem now for rival search engines to Google is not just creating an awesome search engine to compete with Google but getting people to leave the 'Google method' of searching.

We're so used to how Google works, what it looks like, the results it gives, that even if Google is sub standard to another search engine, it still gives the results you want 99% of the time, it's simple to use and we trust it. Going to Google, typing in your search, pressing enter, flicking down the results, picking the right one is as second nature as answering your phone when it starts to ring.

Any new search engines hoping to bite into Google's share will have to be so good that people will happily put up with having to learn a new way to search (however slight the changes may be).

For example, when you search in Cuil you get results in 3 columns (or 2) with pictures. Already I'm slightly annoyed at how I'm having to look horizontally and vertically for the results / it doesn't give as long a URL string as Google (just as much as fits and ...) / there's a category search i don't understand / the text is a little smaller / it takes a few fractions of a second longer (probably due to search volume on it's first day).

Now if the search results are significantly better - ie. you find exactly what you are looking for - then Cuil could start to get a fan base from the millions of people who depend upon search engines to do their jobs but will this ever migrate to the majority of all web searchers? Plus for the first few searches I've done there isn't a lot of different between it and the Google, so why move?

Another search engine that's still plodding along is Search Wikia. I'm a big fan and regular contributor to Wikipedia so i have a lot of hope for their user led search engine. I'd like to think that Open Source will always win due to the sheer quantity of contributors. However it's only the recent upgrade last month that's made me even consider that this could start taking search volume from Google.

I'll keep testing all three for like search terms over the next few months and keep a tally of which helps me most. Which will win, well I'll keep an open mind.

Google can't last for ever. The world will run out of electricity at some point.

Visit the sites: Google | Cuil | Wikia Search

Related posts
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Online popularity culture is killing good journalism

Sites with 'most popular' box BBC Times Online CNN Reuters New York Times The Sun

Sites without 'most popular' box Guardian CNET Telegraph Don't quote me on the above information but it was correct when i looked

Pretty much every news site has a 'most read articles' and a 'most emailed articles' box somewhere on every page - indeed i wrote a post about a plugin that did just that a few months ago.

Journalists writing online are increasingly paid or incentivised based on how many hits they get. I was at a conference held by one of the UK's top online publishers just two weeks ago where i was told that all the journalists are incentivised on clicks to their articles as well as general site traffic.

Now this isn't surprising. Most online publishers make money from advertising. The more hits you get the more of an attractive proposition you are for advertisers. And if you are charging on a cost per impression basis then hits are your mainstay - or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in buzzword business-speak.

The problem with this, as stated in a Lee Siegel interview i was reading in New Scientist this morning (subscription only), is that:

"Popular culture is becoming popularity culture, where quality no longer matters. News, for example, is becoming a popularity contest as never before."

By trying to ensure all your contributors are aiming for popularity through high hits and high email referral there is a real danger that news may start concentrating on quick wins. The subjects that get the most people's attention, that can be read quickly, and that provoke an instant reaction start to take over from often longer articles, that are well researched and present a deeper opinion but may take longer to digest.

The problem with this from a purely SEO point of view is that it is no coincidence that these high hit 'popular' articles are known as quick wins. Yes they get the traffic on the day of publication and may result in higher unique users as more non-regular visitors come to your site attracted by the bait, but that doesn't necessarily mean they attract many links that last - and this is how you get long term sustainable traffic.

Good articles that last are often just as relevant two years after publication as they were when they were written. These can continue picking up links from external sites long after the popular story about a high profile celebrity is forgotten about.

I DO think that journalists need to be incentivised on different metrics as writing for the web is a different matter to writing for offline publications BUT part of this strategy needs to take into account your long term link building strategy and the importance of building up a number of resource articles in your web archive.

One way out of this fall into popularity contests is the 'top rated article' box that some sites (such as the register) have started to employ but i still don't think this is the perfect solution as some of the best articles and those that get the most links are the ones that polarise opinion. It's clear that publishing still hasn't quite grasped the potential of the internet.

Related posts
BBC increase most read stories to top 10
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Digital editions should be killed

Digital editions don't provide the functionality of a website and you are wasting your content by using them.

What are they?
Digital editions are online magazines that physically look like a print magazine.



These have been on the scene for many years but I've so far managed to ignore them and tried to convince others to do so too. I've never had a specific reason for this dislike beyond the feeling that doing something that looks like it's offline online seems wrong. To be honest I'd thought they'd go away but they haven't, in fact they seem just as popular as ever.

So I've recently been looking at them in more depth, well if advertisers are willing to spend money on them and people are willing to read them or even pay for them then i can't ignore them.

Examples include the lad's mag Monkey (NSFW) and a whole host of print titles which you can get in digital magazine format (men's health, business week, hello...). They come in two main types - reader-based and browser-based - the former requiring a download and the other online (with the use of flash).

No search engine indexation
My first problem with digital magazines is their inability to function with search engines. They are flash, Google doesn't like flash. However I'd heard that some suppliers of browser-based digital magazines are also providing a HTML page for each flash page so allowing the magazine to be indexed by Google. I wanted to find out more.

So i rang up a digital magazine supplier (CEROS) and battled through the sales spiel until i was passed to a technical member of their team to properly explain what they did to produce this page and what it looked like. I learnt that they are just outputting the PDF (which is what a digital magazine is made from to begin with, and flash graphics and animation is added in later) to HTML. Simple!

Well yes and no. Simple is what it does - it just takes the text in the PDF and puts it into a HTML page that looks like a simple text file. Not pretty but does the job - some of it will be indexed. All the flash content put in after this process (such as animations) won't have any HTML equivalent unless you type it in yourself.

Normal digital edition page	HTML digital edition page (click to enlarge) Yes, it is black text on a grey background but then i guess it is for search engines only...

This is essentially hacking apart a PDF file to turn it into a website. The time and energy doing this would seem better spent copying and pasting every page into notepad and saving every image and then creating a website with the functionality of, well a website.

Update: Google now indexes flash, this doesn't change my opinions though.

Recreating offline experiences
Why shouldn't you recreate offline experiences online? Well the following are my reasons why and I'm not alone:

• Zooming: If you want to read you have to zoom in to the page and move the page around - This seems ridiculous when you can fit an article with images on a well designed webpage and see it without any zooming, just a scrolling down of the page to read more.
• It's not interactive: The beauty of the internet is its interactivity. You can't comment on digital magazines (mostly), it's difficult to link to it, you can't print it without using up all your ink.
• It's a dead end: The internet is a city and you surf from website to website like you would walk from house to house. Digital magazines don't share this world, they're a web cul-de-sac.
• Where do you go from here? Your digital magazine is a static screenshot. They'll be no dynamic links on the side of your digital magazine articles linking to newer articles. Once it's done it's done.
• Usage: Why would i want to flick through a virtual magazine with turning pages? I know I'm online, I realise this is a computer and I'm looking at a screen.
• Browser function: Digital magazines are flash - you can't press the back button on explorer when you turn a page and want to go back.
• Accessibility: I'm not sure how accessible these are but looking at the HTML page i'm not hopeful

Longevity
Content is king online. Good content will gain links over time, the more good content in your website the better you will perform in searches. More good content = more good links = higher Google ranking. But if you are putting your fantastic content into a format that is not as compatible with Google as a normal HTML web page and it doesn't lend itself to being linked to you are wasting that content.

So if you're thinking about using digital editions only use it if you want something short term - it may well provide instant hits when emailed out, and immediate revenue from advertisers excited by its interactivity. But long term, putting good content in a search engine friendly format will gain exponentially more hits over time and building relationships with advertisers on your website may well provide more revenue over time.

SEO Suite 8 review: What does it do?

According to the Apex website, SEO Suite 8 is a ‘comprehensive’ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) programme doing a variety of SEO functions.

Some of the functionality of SEO suite 8 is new to me and quite useful (such as the external link checker) however much of it can be found in numerous free tools on the web.

The cost of SEO Suite 8 ranges from £75 to £300 pounds for a number of different versions. I tested the trial version (which is free) for about 20 minutes and there is also more functionality over and above the core functionality I will look at below.

On the sites I carry out SEO on there are already initiatives in place that cover a lot of the functions of this software – such as directory submitting from an online list monitored via an excel spreadsheet, a linking policy done in much the same way, a manual check of internal website structure, tags and links plus reporting done through a separate analytics programme.

As a result I won’t be buying SEO suite 8 but it’s not as bad as my cynical mind expected it to be.

Following is a break down of all the functions and overview of what they do.

SEO suite 8 is split into 4 tools:

1. Site Optimizer
2. Site Submission
3. Links Building
4. Reporting

Site optimizer consists of:

• Keyword builder
• Input in a keyword and it will give you more related keywords. Same thing as Google Keyword Tool or Quintura does.
• Plus a ‘keyword library’ – which is where the list is stored, much like copy/pasting into Excel.
• Site optimizer
• Based on the keywords you input on the previous page this will scan your webpage(s) and tell you the keyword density
• Page creator
• I didn't use this but apparently it creates a page containing all the keywords. You could just do this yourself.
• Meta Tag Editor
• Hook SEO suite up to your website, enter in the meta tags you want and it will change them all. Again you could just do this without SEO suite.
• Competitor Analysis
• Do the same for you competitors and compare where you lie, what keywords they use etc.

Site submission revolves around submitting to search engines

• This has a list of search engines. Essentially it’s a browser that will take you to each of these search engines where you go through the normal submission process.
• Of course if you get people linking to your sites you may well get indexed without resorting to this. (click image below to enlarge)

Links building does what it says on the tin.

• Backward Link checker
• Find sites that link to yours. Do this in Google by entering "link:www.yoursitename.com" into the search box. Update: This is actually inaccurate, read how to get backlinks here.
• Competitor Link checker
• Find sites that link to your competitors. Do this in Google by entering "link:www.yourcompetitorssitename.com" into the search box. Update: This is actually inaccurate, read how to get backlinks here.
  
• Internal link analysis
• In their words "this will analyse your internal linking structure to make sure that it complies with search engine standards. This will help to increase your link reputation." - I couldn't figure out exactly what this did, think it shows amount / proportion of links.
• This seems a bizarre and slightly pointless way of checking site structure - card sorting and user testing (video on user testing) are probably more useful – however i could be wrong.
• External link analysis
• Checks your external links – this will check all the links to your site and look at the keywords contained within those links. One of the few functions of SEO suite I really liked. (click image below to enlarge)

• Link directory creator
• Submit to directories – as useful or not as directory submitter.
• Reciprocal link creator
• "It will send "personalized" reciprocal link invitations to all potential link partners" – much like sending a "personalized" email to a list of websites.
• Article submitter
• I wasn't actually aware of this technology – it will submit articles to popular ezine websites. I've never seen an ezine website but imagine this submitter tool to be along the same lines as the link directory creator.
• Link partner checker
• Become an SEO Clouseau with your link partners. Once you've entered in your link ‘partners’ (the sites you've asked to link to you) this will check their site to see the link actually exists.
• Link validator
• I couldn't get this to work but if it checks internal links then it may well be useful. This would mean alerting you to links on your site (both internal and external) that return dead pages, 404s etc.
• This is something that Google Webmaster tools also does, just not very well.

Reporting

• Web Ranking
• Set up regular reports to monitor your 'ranking' on search engines.
• I've always been a bit dubious of the word 'ranking'. Surely what’s more important are whether people are clicking through, not leaving your site, visiting other pages within it, buying products, reading articles etc. See my post on measuring SEO effectiveness.
• Page Rank
• Gives you Google page rank for all your URLs.
• Link popularity
• I got bored by this point but the promo is just as informative as this post on the matter telling me that "[checking your link popularity] can be done easily with the SEO Suite" no less than twice in a three sentence paragraph.
• Index checker
• What pages are indexed on which search engines, not just Google.
• Ranking on each engine, not just Google.
• Submission report
• Remember that submission you did earlier? Well here's where you find out if it worked.
• Site statistics
• Didn't get into this but quite a stats package with everything from hits to unique visitors. Much like Google Analytics, webtrends etc.

Who should pay the costs of increased bandwidth requirements?

This is in relation to a row that's broken out between the BBC and some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Tiscali (more on this here with some good comments).

The increase in mass downloading caused by things such as the BBC's on demand TV iPlayer (why does everything have to begin with an 'i' these days?) is putting strain on the networks apparently.

I don't even understand why the ISPs are arguing. The network is core to their business, if the network can't take it then they have to upgrade it at their cost. The problem is their own fault, they sell 'unlimited' broadband, people use it, full stop. If 'unlimited' wasn't meant to include TV on demand then they clearly need to get better at predicting the future or at least be more careful about what they offer.

More multimedia, TV, films, legal downloading isn't something that's snuck up on the world. It's been inevitable since broadband was first introduced.

Maybe in the future they'll have to change their offerings and remove the 'unlimited' broadband option. That's fair enough. If you want to store ten boxes with a storage company it will cost you more than storing two. If you want to regularly fill up your swimming pool from the tap the water company will charge you accordingly. For the time being though they're going to have to live with it.

In the US this change from the 'unlimited' broadband offering has led to worries about ISPs prioritising content (i.e. such as blocking people from file sharing regardless of the files) and threatening 'net neutrality' (a phrase I've never heard before so see definition below).

Net neutrality = 'A broadband network free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, that does not restrict content, sites, or platforms and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams would be considered neutral by most observers.' (source: wikipedia)

The difference here though is that the US broadband market consists of 2 major providers. If anyone tried to do this in the UK users would just move to another of the 60 different ISP providers (I'd hope).

I say let the ISPs try and charge the customer, or try and sell packages based on internet usage. As long as there is a free (ish!) market and the ISPs don't all band together in a cartel, the competitive nature of the UK broadband provider market will mean that consumers will choose what they want...

Don't let Google boss your website around

Google have always been good at creating a business model where previously it didn't exist, or if it did, doing it better.

Online advertising was always a bit of a dog until Google came along with AdWords in 2000, now AdWords is it's major revenue source.

With Google's unique ability for making money where no one else is looking, web professionals need to be wary about what Google is up to. If Google do introduce any new Beta offerings or alter the specifications of current offerings they'll do so on the quiet.

Google site search
Recently a quiet change to Google site search has been making waves in the web community (more examples of this). Many will know Google site search as something you can do in the main Google search, eg. input "site:http://themeaningofweb.blogspot.com/ seo" into Google and you will search this blog for all instances of the word 'seo'. The change Google has made is by automatically including the site search in it's results listings (see image below). The worry amongst website owners is that users will now search your site for what they want on Google before even getting to your site. This may reduce your visitors, discourage user visits to your home page and worst of all place Google AdWords on the search results page.

Savvy website owners need to be well aware of Google activity and i encourage them to fight Google if you feel you've been hard done by. Amazon.com have recently done just that to prevent site search appearing next to their search listing.

All this innovation by Google works both ways. Clever individuals and companies can make money out of Google.

ACAP
One major new business model being developed that amongst other things attempts to give publishers payments for the use of their news stories is ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol). ACAP in its simplest form will provide rights information (DRM) for all articles, news items, images, videos etc on a publishers website that can be read by a machine, such as the Google News spider - I'm not exactly sure of the mechanics of it but it will be an extension of the robots.txt file.

Google are reluctant to embrace ACAP as they believe current robots files are sufficient. Considering ACAP seeks to provide some limits to how information is used on the web I'm sure that this is not the only factor causing Google's reticence.

If ACAP, or something similar and maybe less restrictive, does take off and Google comes round to the idea (or is forced to by legislation) then publishers could find themselves making a lot of money.

The web is changing as businesses become more aware of the capabilities of the internet - there are more publishers and website owners out there than search engines and without us what would the search engines search?

Related pages
Should Google News pay publishers for their content?

Remember all those passwords and user names

So many websites, so many passwords, how do you remember them? Regularly clicking the 'forgot your password' link is my favourite.

I have to have a log in name and passwords for well over 20 sites such as email, social networking, ebanking, travelcard, supermarket loyalty cards, eshopping, YouTube, Wikipedia, the list goes on.

I regularly forget on logging in what password I've used or what user name i was forced to call myself as a result of all the obvious ones being used up when i registered.

The extent of this problem is highlighted by the fact that i can point you to an article on this subject from no less than 8 years ago. This article ends with the conclusion that we're stuck with remembering multiple user names and passwords until finger scanners are routine on computers.

Finger scanners! I admit i have seen laptops with these gadgets but it's still going to be 2050, flying cars and robots before every computer has finger scanners.

Add to this that web professionals 'recommend' using different passwords for different accounts as well as non-word passwords including symbols and numbers to avoid hacking.

So what to do? Well I've had a little look and come up with some options, listed in order of best to worst.

1. Remember them! - This is what i do. Admittedly i forget my passwords as often as I drink tea but then every site has a 'forgot your password' link.
   Disadvantages: You might have the memory of a goldfish
2. Write relevant passwords - For each site you use create a password formula. For example, the site name backwards followed by your dog's date of birth and all o's and i's replaced with 0's and 1's. ie. Facebook - k00becaf0308 There are far cleverer formulas out there.
   Disadvantages: Break the formula and someone has access to all your sites. Your formula is so clever you confuse yourself.
3. Use cookies - Both Firefox and IE will store your passwords as cookies so that when you revisit a site you're automatically logged in.
   Disadvantages: Because you end up having to go through the log in process less, when the time comes when you have to log in (such as when on a different computer) you've completely forgotten your user name and password.
4. Password managers - I don't like the idea of storing passwords as you just need someone to hack the password manager and 'bang' you've lost everything but according to this Simple Website Guide article there are some safe options.
   Disadvantages: Lose all your passwords at once.
5. Use your browser's in-built password manager - A bit more advanced than cookies, Firefox will keep your passwords in its own password manager. IE probably does this too.
   Disadvantages: Same as cookies and password manager.
6. Write them down - The most foolish of options but according to 'Orlick', apparently they'll be fine if you lock the paper away in a safe.
   Disadvantages: Anyone finding the piece of paper has access. For example someone breaks into your house steals the safe and can assume your online identity immediately.
7. Create a new identity - Change your name, home address, date of birth and all personal details to create a new online persona. Use 'password' for all your passwords and when someone steals your identity, who cares? It's not yours anyway.
   Disadvantages: None, it's foolproof.

From this point on i will be known only as Miss Penelope Smallbone.

Update, 8th Feb 2008: Tech giants Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo have joined the board of the Open ID Foundation which aims to streamline login systems across the web.

How we use and peruse the web

I've just read an article about web usage that a friend kindly sent me.

Putting links 'below the fold' (ie. off the page so you have to scroll down to see it) has always worried me, based on this report it doesn't seem to have too much of an adverse effect.

"User rarely scroll horizontally (total of 0.4%), but over 23% of all links followed were "below the fold." This is surprising considering the short mean stay time on pages."

The article also mentions the 'Golden Triangle' - users tend to look at the top left of a search results page - I must have been living under a rock because I've never heard of it until now.

Yet more ammunition to support the argument that high Google listing is important. I still believe in SEO through content rather than spamdexing though.