Not all of you are joining us on the Insider Programme (although if it’s marketing budget time, please have a think about it for January). On the programme, we hope to identify all the areas for improvement in your existing websbite as well as taking you onwards and upwards. But I’m a nice guy, so from time to time here I’ll still be pointing you towards DIY ways of analysing your websites as they stand. After all, the ideas are in the public domain anyway!

In How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search on Search Engine Journal there are a whole bunch of smart ideas which don’t require any of the clever tools I’ve had to spend money on here at bmon Towers. All you need is access to Google. These commands will give you some good pointers towards weak areas of your website, without any expense. Which is nice. If you want all this sort of thing to be explained properly though, you’ll have to join us on the other side.

You thought Apple’s PR was good, but when Google launches a product - today it was a new browser - it can pick up equally massive coverage (the front page of the BBC website, to name but one example). So why is a new browser (the application you use to look at the web with, like Internet Explorer, or Firefox) of any real importance? Here’s why, and here’s how it affects you.

If you have a decent web stats/analytics program running, you’ll probably be able to see that 80% of your website visitors are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and the bulk of the rest are using Firefox (Windows). However, you’ll also see that there are a number of other browsers which people will be accessing your site with: Firefox (Mac), Safari (Mac and occasionally Windows), Opera, etc. These might only represent a tiny percentage of visitors, but that’s probably several people a month, so you need to ensure your website works fine with those browsers. After all, you wouldn’t turn anyone away from your showroom or exhibition stand without looking, would you?

Therefore your website should have been tested with lots of different browsers - it should be taken as read that your website designer did this. If not, you should never have paid them in the first place (note: one of the things we’ll look at on our Insider Programme is how to test this out without having to set up all the different machines yourself). Testing isn’t hard, but despite this, there are no end of websites which show a complete mess in anything other than Internet Explorer under Windows. Does yours?

Which brings me on to Google’s new browser, called Chrome. For now, I’m not interested in all the features it offers, or the technical implications for the future. I just want to know if the websites I run look OK under it. I shall be downloading it today to see, and you need to make sure that task is on the to-do list for your website designer or manager too, because people will be using this product in increasing numbers over the coming months and years.

Search Engine Journal is one of many blogs which has already given its first impressions of the new Google browser.

The first thing to do when trying to improve your site’s performance in the search engine results is to work out what words and phrases you’re trying to improve it for. These search terms are called the “keywords”. Determining what these should be is not as obvious as you think, and we’ll be covering that right at the start in our Business Marketing Online Insider Programme.

Once you’ve done this, you need to work on making those keywords prominent on your pages. Three Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence on Search Engine Journal gives you a good start here. If the stuff about “source ordered content” seems baffling, it shouldn’t do to your website designer. If it baffles them, get a new web designer.

What happens when you type your company’s name into Google (like many people will, every day) and beneath the first result (which is your website, isn’t it?) is a result with a title like “[Your Company] is rubbish - don’t deal with them”. This is something any company can face, and it’s worth knowing what do do about it.

How to Combat Complaints Sites in Google on Search Engine Journal discusses this issue. I was approached recently by a friend whose TV rentals company had exactly this problem. The first Google result for their name was their company’s site. The second result was something highly uncomplimentary, written by a semi-literate idiot in the comments section on one of those terrible empty local business directories. It rather jumped out of the Google results page though. Our technique for resolving this worked a treat: we simply went to the business directory and wrote our own comment about the company, but written in such a way that Google would choose this page to display as a result instead of the uncomplimentary comment page. It took a week or two before the nice comment replaced the earlier one as the second result in Google.

Here’s a technical item which I hope to be able to talk you through more thoroughly in our Insider Programme if you join it. Your web pages (indeed all web pages) are made up of “source code” which instructs visitors’ web browsers how to display things as the designer intended. You can see the source code of any page (including this one) by clicking “View Source” under “Page” (if you’re using Internet Explorer; if you’re using Firefox, click “Page Source” under “View”).

It’s quite complex stuff, but it’s what the search engines have to deal with - they have to examine this code and pull out the real copy. So you’ll get better results if the words you want them to see are as close to the start of the source code as possible. Badly designed pages will force them to wade through pages of source code before getting to the real words.

For more, read Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?) in Search Engine Journal.

Here’s something you might like to know more about. Sitelinks in Google results are those entries (normally just the first one) which have a series of smaller links underneath them. For example, you’ll probably see them for the first result if you type “Microsoft” into Google. (You might also see a separate “search Microsoft” box, but we won’t discuss that here).

So what are these “sitelinks”? They make your result look much more substantial, so it’d be nice to have them. But how do you qualify to get them? Search Engine Journal tries to answer these questions in 6 Educated Theories Behind Google SiteLinks. It might give you food for thought.

It’s amazing how many companies discontinue products (or entire manufacturers’ lines) and just delete all the relevant pages on their websites. D’oh! No, no, no, no and no.

Imagine you had two adjoining exhibition stands, where you’d planned to separately display your traditional red widgets and your newer blue widgets, and you’d put out a lot of publicity in advance to potential customers of both types. The day before the show, at a strategic meeting, it’s decided that the company will no longer be selling the old red widgets. What do you do?
[1] Leave the red widget display as a big blank wall, with just a notice saying: “Are you a potential customer of our red widgets? They’re not here. Go away”; or do you
[2] Use the space to point customers towards the blue widgets display.

The red widgets have a following which you’ve painstakingly built up over the years. Are you really just going to throw that away? Outdated but Powerful Pages: How to Handle Them on Search Engine Journal discusses the approaches you might take. This is exactly the sort of subject we’ll be covering in our Insider Programme soon: watch this space for details.

There are a few people in the world who love link building, but I suspect that for most of us it’s one of those tasks which seems daunting, as well as potentially boring. So if ever there was a job which is likely to remain at number two on our “to-do” lists, this could be it.

Excuses to avoid getting links are easy: after all, in trade and tech marketing, who’s going to want to link to B2B sites? But I have to keep banging on about how important it is. We have to keep trying if we want those positions high up in the search engines. So every time I come across articles related to the subject, or to keyword research, I’m going to push them in your direction. Because we all need inspiration.

What has keyword research got to do with link building? When you’re clear in your mind what search terms are the priorities for your web site, you can start looking into the sites which are doing well for those terms - and in turn, get some of the best possible pointers to sites which might link to you. So let’s get going with our keyword research, but don’t let that become an excuse for putting off link building!

Today’s coffee-time reading: Keyword Research: Where to Start? from Search Engine Journal

The objective of this blog is to seek out online articles which should be of interest to marketing managers in UK industrial and scientific businesses. Whilst many of the articles chosen will discuss developments in online marketing, and some intriguing techniques, I’ll also be selecting good background articles on various aspects of online marketing. Today’s choice is one of those. Bad SEO Techniques That Will Hurt Your Google Rankings from Search Engine Journal discusses how “search engine optimization”, or as it is commonly called, SEO, can actually hurt your site if done badly. The conclusion we should all draw from this is that if you’re allowing someone to play with your company’s web site, in order to improve its position in the Google results, make sure that person knows what they’re doing. You’re playing with fire here. (more…)

A nice introduction from Search Engine Journal today to Google Site Search. Google Site Search Gives Site Owners More Control explains how outsourcing your own site search to Google’s paid-for, but excellent application could be a smart move. If you don’t have a search facility on your site, or the one you have is a bit clunky or hard to maintain, take a look at this alternative. (more…)