I’m very glad to say that after speaking & moderating at the inaugural a4uexpo event last year that I’ve been invited back to do the same again this year. Last year’s show was amazing, with a huge turn-out and some very high calibre attendees and I’m sure that this year’s will only be better.

As someone who doesn’t work directly in affiliate marketing it was also a real eye-opener. Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion pound industry, with a huge percentage of online sales driven by affiliates. And, as someone who works on SEO & social media projects, there is often a surprising amount of overlap. I’ll actually be speaking at a4uexpo on how affiliates can make use of social media & similar channels, as well as moderating an all-star SEO panel including Dave Naylor & Rob Kerry (both infamous within the industry).

If any of you fancy coming along to the show, and if you have any interest in affiliate marketing I would highly recommend it, we can offer you a 10% discount on entry: simple enter the code SPK10 when you register for a4uexpo. And if you’d like to find out how you can start using affiliate marketing to help your business, why not drop us a line - with our own affiliate network, we really ought to know.

London Excel image by Liline sur Flickr | No Comments

In the world of SEO the Holy Grail for many years has been a link from the BBC. Due to the way that search engines view the web and assign values to links from one site to another (a process which SEOmoz recently explained) sites such as the BBC, which are what might be described as trusted, or authority domains, can provide a huge boost to an SEO campaign with just one link.

Up until now links from news articles on BBC.co.uk have been relegated to side bars and have tended to be to the homepages of companies or organisations mentioned in the articles. However, as Graham at e-consultancy reports, that has now changed.

The BBC is experimenting with the idea of linking out to external sources from within the body text of its news articles, in a trial which will last for four weeks.

Graham also points out though that the way the Beeb has done this is, to put it politely, a bit of a dog’s dinner.

Take the example below. Here, clicking on the link doesn’t take you to another website - as most link-aware users expect - but instead triggers a pop-up, used to preview the Wikipedia page related to the article.

Clicking on the links within the pop-up then creates more pop-ups until, if you follow this horrible mess to its inevitable conclusion, you can’t see the original article because the whole page is covered with little Wikipedia summary boxes.

Further down in the article, which is about the British Museum’s new Hadrian exhibition, there is a link to the British Museum which, thankfully, doesn’t trigger a pop-up but actually goes direct to the British Museum’s site. But even here Auntie hasn’t been able to get it right. Rather than linking to a page giving information on the Hadrian exhibition the link takes you to the British Museum’s homepage which means that the user then has to click through the site to find the page with the information they would probably be looking for. Taking this as an example, if they wrote a piece about American Express’ profits, would they link to its homepage, which offers people the chance to take out a credit card?

This trial has undoubtedly been implemented due to a recent report by the BBC Trust which, as well as finding that BBC.co.uk had overspent by £36 million in 2007/8, also pointed out that the BBC did not do enough to link out to external sources.  It was exactly this failure to link to 3rd parties and, in particular to British sites, that was highlighted by web entrepreneur Ashley Norris (no relation I hasten to add) as one of the reasons that British blogs struggle to match the success of their counterparts in the US.

Looking at how this trial has been implemented so far, I would suggest that the BBC still has a long way to go before it counteracts the reports findings. As Graham again points out:

Most of the links I have seen so far are to well known sites like Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. It’s early days I guess but it is essential that the BBC links to a broader range of sources, and not just the bigger sites.

If the BBC really hope to make a success of this trial in linking to 3rd parties, they might want to try reading (and even linking to) these posts on why links bring benefit to all those involved &  why links shouldn’t open in a new window.

After all, if the BBC can promote its own content all the time, why can’t we?

Chain link image: dcJohn on flickr | 1 Comment

Hitwise have released some data which quantifies something that I’ve thought for quite a while: for many people Google has now replaced the address bar as the primary way of navigating the web, even when they know the address they wish to get to.

Hitwise’s stats suggest that in May of this year:

88% of searches for the top 2,000 search terms in the UK were branded in nature, up from 81% in 2007 and 66% in 2005.

and whilst it’s a very high percentage, the more I think about the less surprised I am. On a daily basis I see very literate web users typing the name of a brand or website into Google when they want to reach the site in question, even when the web address is utterly obvious, or one that they surely know.Howver there may be another factor in play and one which I’m guilty of: if you use Firefox (which more & more of us do) then the address bar actually performs Google searches for you: try typing face into the Firefox address bar if you don’t believe me. This has now become my default method of browsing and I wonder how many others share my habits.

Hitwise also go on to list the most searched for brands and whilst they may be struggling to work out how to make enough money to justify their valuations, as far as British internet users are concerned it seems that the social networks are still the place to be, with Facebook, bebo, YouTube & MySpace all featuring in the top 10.

So what does any of this mean for brands that don’t feature in this list? Well, for a start it suggest that, if you can prove an ROI, bidding on your competitors’ brand names may be something that you should really be considering (even if it’s a method we don’t necessarily agree with - at the end of the day business is business.)

Admittedly Google’s quality score often makes it difficult to keep the CPC at a level where it’s worth doing but if I were competing with Amazon, eBay or Argos (all listed in the top 10) I’d be investing in research to prove why my service was better than theirs and then creating content detailing this and using these as landing pages for ads on searches against these brand names.

It also shows how vitally important it is to make sure that you are optimised for your brand name. This may sound utterly facile, but I’m regularly astounded by brands that don’t rank for their own name. This often happens when companies decide to re-brand and come up with a new name that is also used by companies in a million other sectors or which has a plethora of different meanings. And this is an especially dangerous move to make as re-branding often also involves changing domains, which brings with it all the pain of Google’s Sandbox, which I’ve seen in action far too many times, no matter how much some people deny its existence.

The one thing that really disappoints me about this data is that it doesn’t back-up the old story that suggested that the most popular search term on Google was Yahoo, and vice versa. | No Comments

 Yesterday the blogosphere & Twitter were buzzing with the news that Gmail (or Google Mail as its known here & in Germany due to copyright issues). Search Engine Land carried the official announcement from Google on the problem which, unsurprisingly, played the problem down:

The Gmail team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are looking into the issue and we will provide updates here as they become available.

In fact it seemed last night like everyone on with access to a keyboard and a means of expressing their feelings was unable to access Gmail. To be fair the problem was fixed pretty quickly but it did raise some interesting issues, especially regarding the rise of what is often known as cloud computing.

The Times describes the concept of cloud computing as the idea that:

vast computing resources will reside somewhere out there in the ether (rather than in your computer room) and we’ll connect to them and use them as needed.

In other words, if you want to set-up a new website you won’t need to buy a server, you’ll just need to rent server space off of a company like Google or Amazon (both of whom are busy creating new business models by providing such services) and if you want to run a business you won’t need Microsoft Office, instead you’ll just use Google Apps.

This is all wonderful of course and in fact it is these developments that have allowed the proliferation of new businesses that have exploded on the web over the last couple of years, due to the reduced costs they bring - whether or not that’s a good thing is another matter entirely. However the, admittedly brief, Gmail crash yesterday exposed some of the dangers that come with cloud computing and should perhaps act as a warning to those businesses planning to ditch all their traditional hardware & software.

A lot of the posts I was seeing on Twitter last night highlighted exactly what these dangers are:

Ok… can’t access the design specs I need, because they’re all in a folder in Gmail. Guess I start that project tomorrow.

Gmail down multiple places. Our institution runs on Google Apps for Education.

not just gmail down, google apps email is down too, unbelievable… Let’s hope this is just a glitch it would ruin the web20 transformation

Now, this last post may be slightly over the top, but it certainly captures the dangers of placing all of your eggs in a basket you essentially have no control over, and which you can do nothing to fix if it breaks. Whilst many people who work in offices would argue that having an IT department and Microsoft products doesn’t exactly put you in control of your systems, at least it’s unlikely that your IT department will suddenly stop you accessing your email or stored documents without telling you why.

But yet that is exactly what happened to someone called Nick Saber recently, when he discovered that he couldn’t use any Google services except for search. Whilst the problem only lasted a, relatively, short amount of time (just over a day) that’s still a long time not to have access to information that may be critical to the success of your business. And, as Victor Keegan of The Guardian pointed out last year, the T&Cs of almost all of these services (and especially the free ones) state that they reserve the right to do exactly this sort of thing, without any warning.

So whilst the rise of the cloud is almost certainly a positive thing, if you’re planning to run your whole business off of it you should probably remember that plenty of clouds don’t have a silver lining.

Cloud image by saipal on flickr
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Several months ago, I posted about the beta sign up for a little something called the People’s Music Store. I went ahead and tacked my name to the list, and was duly invited to join the beta launch.

The concept is simple and enticing: you sign up to create your own online music shop at The People’s Music Store. Then you personalise your shopfront and search the MP3 database for the products that you would like to sell. The developers have thought of everything; you can arrange and rearrange various playlists and compilations, keep a back catalogue, write commentary on individual tracks and albums, and there’s even a shoutbox!

Once your shopfront is up and running and the sidewalk outside is swept, the punters come in and purchase music from you. The more music you sell, the more points are added to your account and the more DRM free music you can buy from other shops on the site. Every time you buy from someone else, they earn points with which to buy music and you leave a little flyer in their shop window, letting their patrons know about you.

Perhaps the cleverest bit of functionality is the . You can nab a snippet of code that “shrinks your store down to a miniature size so that you can embed it on your blogs, websites and social pages. Using the microstore, people will be able to listen to the music in your store and also link through to the site to buy it.”

So, now that the site has launched, pay my store a visit or, indeed, start your own! | 1 Comment

Working in digital marketing, and particularly search marketing, I’m always very interested in tracking exactly how well a campaign is working. It’s why the first thing that we always do when we start work with a client is to get access to their analytics, or install some of our own if there aren’t any. However businesses often seem more concerned with how they’re doing relative to their competition than they are with their own performance.

This struck me after I was reading a blog today which claimed to be one of the most popular in the world according to Technorati. Whilst I knew that it was a popular blog in its sector I was surprised that it could really be one of the most popular in the world. However, on going to Technorati and checking their Top 100, there it was. I decided to see how this particular blog was doing according to other free stats/analytics services, and checked it on Compete against the site ranking directly below it on Technorati’s list.

I’ve blurred out the names of the blogs involved as this post isn’t meant to be about their popularity, rather the reliability of free, external facing analytical tools: suffice to say, the blog that Technorati believe was more popular is the one represented by the blue line. I then thought that I’d check on another free service, Alexa.

Again, the site that Technorati had as more popular is the one represented by the lower line (in this case, one that can barely be seen). So what’s going on here?

Well, it’s quite simple. Essentially all these tools have different methods of measuring popularity, and they are all limited by the fact that they don’t have access to the true traffic figures. So Technorati essentially looks at how many links are directed at a blog, Alexa basically tracks visits from users who have downloaded its toolbar whilst Compete tracks the web-history of a large user panel. None of them actually have access to the back-end data which is the only real way of measuring success.

Now it may seem strange to use results from two less than perfect services to disprove the results ofanother less than perfect service. But the fact that the blog that started this bit of investigation off is related to search marketing and social media (and therefore is quite likely to be more linked to than a more consumer focussed one, due to the type of readers it attracts) means that I think in this case the Compete data is probably slightly more reliable.

But at the end of the day, unless you’re running a business which operates on an advertising based model where you have to prove thatyour site attracts more traffic than the competition (in which case you should probably be signed up to ABCe or some other organisation that audits all sites equally) then you should really be concentrating more on how succesful your site is rather than how you (appear to) measure up against the competition.

Header image: wadeferd on flickr | No Comments

We arrived at work this morning to find a rather large rat sitting outside. Road workers had left a pile of sand in preparation for laying paving slabs. A cunning sculptor under the pseudonym “Ace of Spades” came along and turned it into a rat. Our security told us it took her about one hour to sculpt.

For more information visit SANDALISM.

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Adobe, the company behind products such as Acrobat (which is used for PDF files) and the players that allow users to view Flash files, has anounced a partnership with two of the major search engines to make it easier for Flash files (SWF) to be crawled and indexed. According to Adobe:

Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.

As you may or may not know, up until now content contained within such Flash files has been more or less invisible to search engines and, therefore, to the millions of people who use them as their primary method of finding information on the web. As an agency which offers both web design (including some amazing Flash work) as well as search engine optimisation, we were very excited by this news. However it’s not necessarily quite as ground-breaking as it may at first sound.

As Vanessa Fox points out over at Search Engine Land this news only relates to text & links contained in Flash files:

[A lot of content in Flash files is] made up of images, video, and animation, and none of that will be surfaced in search results with this advancement…Everything else is still a black box.

Vanessa also points out that this new development also won’t help when:

Flash implementations dynamically load text as the user interacts with the application, but the URL remains the same.

In these instances, whilst the engine may now be able to follow the interactions to a certain point, when the user clicks on the search result they will be directed to the start of the file and will then have to navigate to the point they’re looking for. So, even with this development, our advice would still be that you should ensure that any & all content on your site can be found at a distinct URL.

We’re already spending quite a lot of time working on how we can achieve the impact & engagement that Flash often brings, at the same time as optimising content for search engines (and users with accessibility difficulties of course) and have had quite a lot of success; often by using tools such as Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) which we use for the headlines on the posts on this site, or ensuring that all the content can be found on unique URLs. That said, anything that makes this a little bit easier is certainly to be welcomed.

Header image: michelphoto53 on Flickr | No Comments

We’re very pleased that the dothetest ad for Transport for London, created by our friends at WCRS, and for which we handled the digital marketing (resulting in over 5 million views online in the space of one month) won a Gold Lion at last week’s Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. It really is a great ad, and one that we’re very proud to have been involved with.

For any of you who haven’t seen it (where have you been) you can watch it below. I may have given the game away in the headline but to be fair, even though I’ve watched the ad countless times I still often miss ‘it.

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