Mr Happys online journal

OK I know my title implies all web designers, developers, marketers and owners are guys but you can change girlfriend to boyfriend if you feel you need to regenderfy. Basically I have a gripe (its unusual I know). But can someone please tell me why so many websites seem unloved. The websites I own, market, design or help with are like lovers.

Design for the website as if it were a lover

Designing a website is like a gift to the content. The design should be in place to allow the content, the voice, the attitude of the website to shine. It is not there to provide a barrier to communication. If you lavished the love, attention and all the other things you know you could do how much better would your design be. You can tell websites which are simply churned out as pieces of work – websites treated like a one night stand. Take wordpress themes for example. Many wordpress themes are little more than one night stands. Designed to be almost a commodity. Some are almost drowned in love and a desire to make the site all it can be. Some are simply a way for someone to exploit others it’s simply a way of hacking together as many links as possible.

Almost to their entire detriment all simply downloadable wordpress themes are of the ‘one night stand’ variety. If you look at

Market your website as if your introducing her to your friends for the 1st time

It’s difficult isn’t it. Introducing a new girlfriend to your friends. No doubt down the pub or over a meal with your friends partner(s) in tow. It’s make or break. you’ve probably either said so little that no one believes they actually exist or been so rapt in ardor that you’ve been told to shut up more than three times in the last week. Either way you want things to go well. Marketing a new website is like this for me. You need to have everything ready before the meet (website launch). imagine if you turned up without your partner and they never showed – that’s what your 404 page is like. you need to make sure that your friends can get to the site in the first place before the whole thing clicks and you have a great time together. Your customers are your friends. Make sure that what they’re promised in your email campaigns, natural search results, PPC ads or media campaigns turns up.

Listening is more important than talking

Its the start of any relationship – you try not to say too much and probably say too much. You should be listening. And listening is something that should never stop. You should always be listening to the messages that your site is giving you (and not only what is being said but also what isn’t). Have you ever looked at your analytics to find that you’re not converting traffic into sales. Listen to what your site is telling you through your analytics and find out why. Half your traffic bounces on PPC to your homepage – why is that? You’ve got all the signals – you just need to listen and turn these into a definable set of actions.

Right I’m away to get my wedding planned – hope this ramble made sense. We’ll call this post a concept piece….

I’ve heard tell of this for a while but I’ve never seen it before. If you do a search in Google for “Bar Chocolate” the first result is for http://www.barchoc.co.uk/ and the entire content is hidden inside a flash movie file. The result from Google shows content indexed from within the menu section of the website!

Nice result by Google. Especially as the website itself doesn’t do the bar justice. I ate in the related place Elk in the Woods the other day (having the rabbit for dinner) and it was a pretty damn good dinner (but that could be the bottle of Fleurie used to wash it down talking).

At SES one of the topics that came up over a few pints was negative SEO – using nefarious SEO techniques to get competitors pages/sites removed from the Google index. Anyway the first thing that came into my mind was Spy Vs Spy…

Which side are you on?

Organic search has changed over time, it keeps evolving, and unlike the evolution that happens in the natural world there is no freak traits that remain over time and provide a base for future generations. Instead the organic search section of the results at all the main search engines is constantly being adapter to give you an I an ‘improved search experience’. With improved search experience appearing to actually mean more ways for people to intercept the organic listings.

Before search engines…

Such a time did exist within the world wide web and the three ways to discover a page were:

1. Know it existed and type the URL into your browser
2. Get an email with a link where someone told you about a page of content that they’d found
3. Use directories to navigate through lists of information until you found a listing that looked appropriate

That was pretty much it.

Then along came search engines – I loved AltaVista, Yahoo! and WebCrawler initially (WebCrawler had the best result set for Lemonheads records that I’d seen at the time) so I plodded away with these easily spammable meta crawlers and life went on for a while. All the sites were a mess (think Yahoo! just now with a lack of any editorial control).

Then along came Google…

Yep thats how it used to look over at Google.com

And when you did a search you got ten little blue links.
That was it 10 Links.

Then came PPC – which stole the organic real estate.

The came image search – which stole some more real estate.

Then came YouTube videos and everything started to unravel.

Now when you optimise for the organic part of the page of Google you were optimising pages of content, images, video, shopping feeds, maps and building links to everything.and generally the user experience is worse for it… if you’re a traditional SEO.

Developing content and getting some links just doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead to be an SEO you need to have a holistic view of the opportunities that the organic listings offer you. If you’re doing travel do more Google Local optimisation, if you’re selling products have a look at maximising your rankings on Google Product Search and if you’re selling posters have a look at image search.

I know it sounds simple and you’re all probably thinking it’s an obvious evolution for you and I as SEO ninja. But some of the SEO padawan seem more defeated by the changes than elated at the opportunity. I guess thats what seperates the black belts from the white belts in online marketing

Projections are one of the most important things that an SEO will ever do in a campaign. They tell clients what we think we can give them as a return on their investment. Which is nice. The problem is that if you’re not careful when doing projections you can often portary scenarios that may never arrive – just to make the numbers look even better.

If you think about it the client relies on us to give them an accurate portrayal of what we think is achievable on a specific budget. And it is encumbent upon us to be realistic rather than just give them the numbers they want to get back. Below are a couple of things to make sure you actually do projections and do not prophesize what will be delivered.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do. quick post on some nice bits and pieces I’ve seen today.
Over at Equator the Flash monkeys have been beavering away (can monkeys beaver? – answers on a post card please to the usual address) on some cool little sites for HTC – you’ll have seen their advert on the tv for the HTC Magic I’m sure.

Anyway here’s a list of sites they’ve been doing:

• www.htc-android.de
• www.htc-android.es
• www.htc-android.nl
• www.htc-hero.co.uk
• www.htc-hero.de
• www.htchero.dk
• www.htc-hero.dk
• www.htchero.es
• www.htc-hero.fr
• www.htchero.no
• www.htc-hero.no
• www.htchero.se
• www.htc-hero.se
• www.htc-magic.dk
• www.htc-magic.no
• www.htc-magic.se
• www.styledforperformance.co.uk
• www.touchdiamond.dk
• www.touchdiamond.no
• www.touchdiamond.se
• www.touchdiamond2.cz
• www.touchdiamond2.es
• www.touchdiamond2.fr
• www.touchdiamond2.nl
• www.touchdiamond2.pl
• www.touchhd.dk
• www.touchhd.no
• www.touchhd.se
• www.touchinhd.de

(my hand is now sore with cutting and pasting – Ctrl+c/Ctrl+v – must be getting old)

Alongside this the guys at Flock (my second favourite browser after Chrome) who I follow on Twitter were mentioned over at CNN alongside some other browsers – including the Kid Rocket Web Browsers (designed for weans – which I’m going to try out on my own little bundle of energy later this week).

Also thought I should say I was messing about with a Personality Test – am little bit spooked by my results.

I’m sure my link to content ratio is a touch on the high side but hey I cant please the Google gods every day.

L8rs

It seems like so long ago I got to post as Mr Happy but I’ve managed it – at last.

I thought I’d break my self in nice and easy with a quick link rolling post – where I’ll bung up some links to some cool/not so cool/funny/ interesting things I’ve seen on the old interweb in the last couple of weeks.

1. Terminator Salvation Film Review – one of the most scathing reviews of the new terminator film – ternimator salvation – that I’ve read so far. From what I gather it’s pants and no one should waste their time or effort on going to see it. But hey I’m a sucker for crap movies so will probably go and see it. On a similar note Transformers 2 is a it naff – Megan Fox aside.
2. No Follow Post by Matt Cutts – not as cute as Megan Fox but equally interesting post by Google Guy about WTF Google actually see nofollow as being and WTF they do with links that are nofollowed.
3. Falkirk take on Vaduz of Lichtenstein in the Europa Cup – YAY. But I cant get to the away leg. Minor disaster. but getting to Europe is a great step forward for my – almost relegated – fitba team.
4. Susan Boyle Kicking Hollie Steele – nuff said. snick snick.
5. 
   Song of the week – Beaver Patrol by Pop Will Eat Itself (inspired by Nick)

Right promise to post something serious soon.

I go out the office for one day – don’t check all my RSS feeds and miss the fact that Google has update its algorithm. Anyway thought I’d do a quick overview of the changes here. 

What are the changes?

1. Keyword/Conceptual Relationships: You’re all probably bored when I talk about using keyword relationships to improve content and anchor texts in links but guess what for once I may have been a little bit ahead of Google. Basically they’ve updated the importance of relationships within results – if you do queries with a couple of words you’ll start to see that the related searches have changed to include more related words So we can get more info in the things
2. Longer snippets under Titles: Snippets under the title of a page (the clickable bit) have traditionally been two lines of content – generally the meta description from the page, the Dmoz description or some relevant section of onpage content. Now they’ve extended this in some cases to include longer exceprts.

What does this mean for you?

If you do website content writing, link development or are incharge of a website development project you may want to take it into account when you start making changes to a website:

1. Write good meta descriptions when you write the on page content: title/meta description/meta keywords/navigation./body content are all parts of trhe on page content so when you write them write with related keywords (find these by querying google with a ‘~’ in front of the keywords – bolded words in results are the related words). Take every part of your page content into consideration and mark it up correctly (hx tags, content tags etc)
2. Use these related keywords in your anchor texts where possible : internally and externally. 
3. Create a glossary which includes sensible use of related keywords and link back to other pages within this page : enhancing anchor text and domain relevance.

Three wee tips, nice and simple. If you want more info have a look at the Google Blog and ask any questions that you may have in the comments below.

Welcome to Equator Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Select All

Hit f7

Now the spell checker is running!

Yay