You will have to excuse me for being a little late in writing this article. It’s not that I have any contempt for this partnership, but the news that Yahoo and Microsoft have finally done the deal is a bit like the news that couple you know who have lived together for 10 years and had three kids are announcing to the world they are getting married. The sentiment is more, ‘good for you’, than ‘congratulations!’

So what does this mean? Well Yahoo is going to be powered by Bing.com, Microsoft’s new search engine and Yahoo plans to control the advertising.

Does this affect anything? From a consumers point of view probably not. Bing.com would like to think it is different from other search engines, but in terms of significant differences, there are very few. Yahoo has become far more focused on advertising in recent times so from a technology perspective there is very little to talk about.

As far as any SEO’s will be concerned the change will be, we won’t be talking about Google then Microsoft and Yahoo anymore. From now on it will just be Google then Microsoft. I truly hope oneday there will be a genuine challenge to Google as competition and change is a good thing. However this deal won’t deliver that change. I just hope in some way it lays the foundations.

So the Google Vince update, which according to Google is definitely not an “Update”, but rather a minor change done by a guy called Vince, has reared it’s head again.  It is a change to the Google Algorithm which has had quite a major impact on SERPs (especially for such a minor change) the main one being that the web pages of large brands and corporations seem to be fairing rather better than before.  Initially the change was implemented in Feb 09 but a second change in July 09 also appears to have had an impact (especially here in the UK).  This seems to have had most impact on general single word or short phrase keywords and that’s the experience our clients have had.

This is an interesting strategy by Google and not one I’m too convinced about.  Promoting well made web sites, with good content and lots of other relevant sites linking to it has been the staple of Google’s success and I’m not sure the public necessarily want to find just the high street stores when they’re searching on Google (especially ones with poor websites, and they do exist!).  Whether this is right or not remains to be seen, I’m sure Google have done a lot of research before making this move but instinct tells that their USP may be devalued a little here.

But the question that’s really on everyone’s lips is how do you become a brand, in the eyes of Google (well it’s on my lips).  The ever helpful Google doesn’t like to think of the word “brand” but rather of “trust” and “authority” (see the Matt Cutts video on youtube), so how do you become one of those in the eyes of Google?  Well on analysing some of the big movers it seems, rather obviously, that it’s a lot to do with popularity and traffic (using the likes of Alexa).  I’m wondering whether the browsing information coming back from the Google Toolbar is of a high enough quality to start basing more weighted SERP decisions on.

Well big brands have clearly moved up the SERPs and whilst it’s certainly not the end of the road for SEO on small business websites this change has made it harder.  We’ll just have to re double our efforts and hope Google slowly reduce the weighting they give to brands.

 Loading ...

To help us with some market research please could you answer the above question. The answers are available for all to view once you have voted.

Everyone with any knowledge of affiliate marketing will know that providing merchant discount codes is key to many affiliates’ business strategy.

So is affiliate marketing all about discount codes? Well simply, no… partner with the right affiliates through the right networks, utilising functionality that suits your relationship with them then the sky is the limit. Affiliates can be capable of delivering huge quantities of traffic that generates valuable revenue all at rates of commission set to suit your marketing strategy and return on investment (ROI) goals. However in my experience many merchants find when their affiliate marketing is scrutinised the majority of it comes from discount codes. Often these merchants don’t understand affiliate marketing and haven’t invested sufficiently to allow this aspect of their online marketing to flourish or have simply left it to go stagnant. Like everything in business affiliate marketing must be invested in and then maintained if it is going to become a serious part of your strategy.

So are discount codes good or bad for online merchants? This really is impossible to give a general answer. Discount codes can be great for some and terrible for others. They can keep customers coming back to your site time after time and they can also kill off the perception of exclusivity that you have spent so long to building up.

So why should I be concerned about affiliates using discount codes? Well if all affiliates do is provide your customer with a discount on a purchase they were going to make anyway (because the affiliate has a well optimised affiliate discount code site and your sites checkout shows you accept discount codes) then you are potentially giving up valuable revenue unnecessarily!

The important thing to remember is your business needs a marketing strategy that considers all the the relevant factors. Is you aren’t familar with any of the concepts then you should seek advise from someone who is.

My Web Developers ‘Do’ Online Marketing! Should I let them deal with mine?

You wouldn’t believe how many times I have heard this! I cannot stress this enough, online marketing is far too important to let just anyone deal with it.

So your web developers build websites, that certainly doesn’t qualify them to do online marketing. My favourite analogy is the racing driver and the race mechanic. They are both fundamental to racing a car but you wouldn’t expect one to undertake the others  role. This goes for your company’s website. Your web developer could possibly undertake the role of online marketing but they aren’t necessarily the most suitable choice.

You might wonder why I am so skeptical? Let me explain… When web developers try and offer online marketing services as an added value service in addition to their core services they try to maximise the revenue they generate from you.  Spending more of your budget might be good for your web developer but it isn’t necessarily the best decision for your business. Obviously, revenue generation is fundamental to all businesses but in this instance the individual aims of both businesses has a chance of being in conflict. It goes without saying you should only ever embark on a business relationship where this isn’t the case.

If you are happy you aren’t in conflict, what about their competences? Are your web developers capable of delivering online marketing to a high enough standard to provide you with the genuine value your business essentially requires? This is where you need to do your home work. The first thing to find out is, are they just starting out with online marketing? If they are new to it they cannot claim to be experts. Similarly, do they have a proven track record and bona fide clients with significant testimonials? Again, if they don’t they cannot back up the claims of their abilities then you must question their expertise and experience. Next, do they have in-house experts or are they simply intending to farm everything out to other companies and take a cut? If they aren’t dealing with it themselves then they are simply brokering. Do you really want to pay anyone a margin to source you another service supplier? You might have good reason to do this such as ease of management and having a contract with only one company, but make sure you understand the relationship fully before you do. It won’t make it easier to get things done by putting more people between you and and the person actually dealing with it.

So when your web developer tells you they do online marketing, think are they actually capable of delivering what my business needs?  If the answer to this is no then be aware that there are other alternatives.

Well a couple of weekends ago it seemed that Google shuffled the pack again and the usual bleating on SEO forums followed – “I’ve dropped from the first page to the 20th page” etc. It seems to me that Google have a real focus on long term link building and have tactics in place to ensure that the quick hit link builders, who see success in the short term, are being hammered eventually as their links are re-evaluated.

So the question occured to me how do you protect yourself from these regular updates? The aim is to have established links from indexed pages with useful & unique content, that matches the link text and the target page. What better way to do this that to control the lot. OK, so it’s a long term strategy but with more and more tools available it’s never been easier. What would you give for a network of 20-30 indexed pages with a google page rank giving exclusive “votes” to your site? This could be a reality within a year, even 6 months and it won’t be you bleating on the forums!

Bing.com - Microsoft's new Search Engine

Microsoft’s new search at Bing.com is apparently going to help people make better decisions when they search online. Because of this Microsoft has deemed Bing to be a ‘Decision Engine’ as it’s being touted as helping customers go beyond search in dealing with information overload.

So what is Bing? Well first and foremost Bing is a search engine. It’s difficult to tell if it’s any different than its predecessor or any of its competitors, as on the surface it behaves very similarly. After performing some testing, to understand the implications on sites I work on and how they would rank, I did notice there was a small variation in the results compared to Google, but nothing I could call significant. I noticed there were far fewer listed sites than Google but then again this isn’t any different to it’s predecessor.

OK, so what is different about Bing? According to Microsoft, Bing is focused on four key areas; making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. These claims are all very well and good but my initial testing couldn’t prove any of them. I can’t say I understand exactly how the focus on these key areas would take effect, but I could not find anything to demonstrate these claims through the search engine results pages (SERPs) being returned.

Obviously Bing is still in it’s infancy and making any sort of judgement about it now could prove premature, although I welcome competition in the search engine market. The lack of genuine competition creates inherent problems which restricts how we are able to use the web. Time will tell if Bing.com becomes just another search engine or whether it can live up to its hype and offer users something genuinely different – which if it could might allow it to take some of Google’s market share.

The world of online merchandising can be expensive and sometimes confusing. Any cutting edge ecommerce software developer will be able to speak for a long time about the sophistication of their merchandising capabilities and may even try to invent new words such as “searchandising” to dazzle you and persuade you that they know what they’re doing.

But don’t be fooled! The rules haven’t changed. In fact the rules never really change, online merchandising is just like offline merchandising – that is to say once you have the customer’s attention how do you get them to buy. Whether you’re the owner of a high street shop or an ecommerce website you will probably have had exactly the same thoughts.

This is not to say that the cutting edge ecommerce software developers are wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. There are some dynamic features available on the market today that really do tailor content for the user and this undoubtedly will have a positive effect on your bottom line. Whilst evaluating this type of software for our clients we have sat in meetings and said “Wow, that’s what we’ve always wanted”, or even better “Wow, I’d never even thought of that”!

I don’t want to talk about the wonders of very expensive ecommerce software right now though, maybe another time. What I want to talk about is how to evaluate your existing site, look for areas that are performing badly and for areas that are performing well.

The first point of call when you want to examine your performance is your analytical software. We use the free software provided by Google, called Google Analytics – mainly because it is free and integrates with Google Adwords software. It’s based on cookies and therefore has its limits in terms of accuracy – especially when tracking transactions but we find it accurate enough to base decisions on.

If you’re not running analytics software this would be a good starting point. All it requires is some code inserted into each page and off you go. And, as always, if you get stuck you can find the answers on Google!

So, back to the analytics software, I find two of the most important statistics for online marketeers such as myself are bounce rate and ecommerce conversion rates. OK so visitor numbers, sales and a whole host of other stats should be used in conjunction, but I find these two can paint a very quick and accurate picture.

Let me give you an example, I analysed data for one of our clients. In particular I was looking at bounce rates for category pages over the past month and whilst most were between 5-25% one page was running at over 40%. The page in question looked OK at first glance but on closer inspection I found that there wasn’t a good cross section of products featured. There were lots of similar products and little variety. So I worked with their product manager to get a good cross section of products on the page whilst also making the page aesthetically more pleasing. Once done I examined the figures and found the bounce rate falling and, more importantly, the ecommerce conversion rate rising! All this is based on science and facts, rather than guesswork.

So there’s some simple advice to improve the way your existing site converts – use the free tools available to maximise the return from the traffic already coming to your site.

Google SERP

People who aren’t in the industry don’t usually pay too much attention to the structure of the Google results page and refer to Google Adwords as “those ones down the right hand side”.  Well if you want to know a bit more about how to get your business listing in “those ones” here is an outline about what Google Adwords is all about.

On a Google results page as well as the natural listings there are also paid for sponsored links. These appear at the top of the results page above the natural listings and down the right hand side in a seperatecolumn. To get these adverts linking to your site you will need to set up an account to use Google Adwords.

The concept is a simple one – you bid on words and phrases in an auction and the highest bids appear at the top of the sponsored links. The highest bid isn’t just about money though. There are two other important factors that Google consider – the Quality Score and the Click Through Rate (CTR).

Every time you bid for a word or phrase Google will compare this with the content on your landing page and work out a Quality Score. The published score is between 1-10 and usually 7 or more is considered good.

The third factor – the CTR – is a percentage of people who click on the advert after it is displayed (clicks/impressions). It is slightly more difficult to say what you should be aiming for here as expected CTRs will vary greatly depending on the phrase and the market. Our ecommerce clients would accept 5%, would be pleased with 10% and would be very pleased with 25% or more. However with some terms much less can be acceptable.

Effectively what this means is if you have a high Quality Score and good CTRs then you will pay less for your clicks than competitors who have poor quality scores and CTRs.

Before you go through the process of getting a new website ensure you think about online marketing first.

If online marketing is important to your business then it is key to its success that you consider the best website infrastructure and functionality to facilitate your online marketing strategy. All too often online marketing is only considered once other less important factors have been decided which can reduce the potential online marketing capability of your new website.

When considering how your website is going to work remember to think about the basics the website should have in order to be optimised. Where possible try to factor in rules, automation and settings which will fill in the basics for you to reduce the manual requirement and negate human error or lack of intervention.

Your pre-build web spec should include details of the infrastructure and functionality which enables your online marketing and you must be sure you understand how this will work.

Remember your website’s infrastructure will effectively define how your online marketing will function. If online marketing is crucial to your business then you need to be sure you know what the infrastructure needs to deliver. If you aren’t absolutely certain of what you need then I advise you seek advice from someone who is!