My Blogroll

Seth Godin's Blog

Marketing insights by one of Internet Marketing's top guru.

Small Biz Trends

Just started following this blog - the name says it all.

SEOMoz Blog

Information on the latest in the world of SEO.

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

"If you can't measure it - you can't manage it." (Drucker). Avinash tells you how to measure everything on your website.

aimClear Blog

Aimed at people doing their SEO and online PR 'in house' - there is a wealth of information on all aspects of promoting your site.

Mashable

THE blog to read for current information and trends in Social Medai.

Copy Blogger

READ THIS if you ever get stuck writing copy

TIMR Web Services
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SEO & Online Marketing

Marketing your small business online is not just Marketing 101. You also need an understanding of how search engines find sites (SEO) and how your customers use websites.

JW Player Tracking Code

At the CV Posse last Thursday the subject of using JW Player with HTML5 came up. I have asked about adding tracking code for analytics to to the script.

Turns out it is fairly easy. This is pretty much copy and paste from the API:

<div id="container">Loading the player ...</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jwplayer/jwplayer.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
jwplayer('container').setup({
flashplayer: '/jwplayer/player.swf',
file: 'http://youtu.be/3NmA04QgzaM',
height: 270,
width: 480,
events: {
onPlay: function(event) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'My Video Title']);
} }

});
// ]]></script>

The only part I added was the call to the events. In this case the ‘onPlay’ event calls the ‘_trackEvent’ in Google Analytics.

events: {
onPlay: function(event) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'My Video Title']);
} }

Note: You need to add the comma after the ‘width’ when adding items to the list.

There are a number of events to choose from. I will be adding the onReady and onComplete for tracking. The difference between onPlay and onComplete should give me the number of abandoned views.

Creating A Microsite

It has been a long time since I posted, but this is important, so I thought a quick post was in order.

I created my first micro site today.

Micro sites are small sites that point back to your main site. I know some supposed SEO experts that say they are a good idea. The theory being the more links to your site the better. That is pure BUNK.

The search engines are getting very good at detecting when they are being manipulated. But even if search engines didn’t detect that these sites were all owned by the same person, their value is still questionable. They are either low value sites with little content that pass no ‘link juice’ or high value sites with great content that only pass some of their ‘link juice’. Why not put all those great content on the main site and get all the ‘link juice’.

So when do you use a Micro Site?

Here is my situation.

I just signed a client, Section 8 Snowsport. They are busily getting ready for a major ski and snowboarding trade show in London. ( Who knew the UK was home to skiing trade shows? ) With very little time to generate any buzz, I am trying an ‘end run.

I registered the name www.section8atmetrosnow.com and made a ‘quick and dirty’ page from content found on the main website. There is very little competition for the shows name ‘Metro Snow’, so hopefully I can get some traction in the search engines before the show is over.

These are my rules for using a micro site.

  • Short duration – just until the show closes
  • Keyword rich URL
  • Low production costs

Client or Customer?

I have just started reading Jay Abraham’s book “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got”. Near the beginning of the book he makes the distinction between ‘client’ and ‘customer’. In the first chapter he quotes Webster’s Dictionary:

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Marketing Tip – Be Easy to Find

I have been working on a directory and interactive map for local tourism related businesses. The directory is just a simple ‘no frills’ directory, the map has the name and location of the business.

For a variety of reasons I am creating the map manually. Which means I need to get the address for each business being listed. To my amazement, many businesses, particularly restaurants and pubs, don’t have there address on the Home page. Or, if they do it is below the fold, so I have to search for it.

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Tracking Page Speed in Google Analytics

Google has confirmed that page load speed is one of the 200+ variables that contribute to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). While there are a number of sites that will tell you how fast your site loads to your location, it would be nice to see how long it takes your site to reach your customers. In addition, once your site gets past a few pages, tracking the load speed of each page become a REAL PAIN.

Google Analytics Site Speed metric has changed that.

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Facebook – Now You See It – Now You Don’t

Facebook just released a migration tool that lets you migrate your profile to a ‘business page’. And, as with most things Facebook does – it has its own set of twists and turns. Which was fine – I managed to get everything changed on my account.

I planned on doing a few client accounts on Monday, once I had finished testing everything with my own account – but the tool has been removed.
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Where In the World Are You

I was adding some information to a client’s. The client runs a bed and breakfast in a rural setting and I was adding the locations of restaurants and pubs near their location to their Google map. An easy job, if somewhat boring.

Adding this information requires getting the latitude and longitude of each location. An application at itouchmap.com makes this a simple operation. One option is to put in the address and it will spit out the latitude and longitude.

Problem #1 – the two most popular local pubs didn’t have their address prominently displayed on their websites. In one case the address was there, but way down on the page. In the second case the address was not on the Home page – but on a inner page.

Problem #2 – In both cases the addresses was not found in Google maps. They were using a local variant of the street address ‘Island Hyway S.’. Google shows the same road as ‘Island Hyway W.’ (Which is strange since it is to the East of the ‘Inland Island Hyway’. )

To be fair to Google Maps – it will actually find the right address if you enter the closest town. However, it displays the address as ‘Island Hyway W.’.

Should you be a slave to Google Maps? (MapQuest couldn’t find the address at all.) I guess it depends on whether you want you want only local people to find you?

Getting The Top SERP Just Got Harder

On Oct 27th Google announced a major change in local search results. The changes give more prominence to the Google Places results.

Like the old map search results, the Places results are placed near the top of the page. The map overlay has been enlarged and placed in the right column, previously reserved for Adwords (PPC). Surprisingly, the map overlays the PPC, so as you scroll down the page – the top PPC listings are hidden ‘behind’ the map.
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Kubuntu – Lucid Lynx (10.04.1)

It was time to buy a new computer. My old no-name white box wasn’t able to keep up with all the demands of web development. I like to keep a number of programs open three browsers, a virtual box loaded with XP, email, ftp, and eclipse are the minimum. Also, there are Apache, ssh and mySQL servers running in the background. Not a particularly heavy load but it was starting to bog down my old system.

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Website Review

I have been visiting the UK for the last few weeks. It was a bit of a “whirl wind” tour “5 cities in 14 days”. There was so much to see that 14 days per city wouldn’t have been enough.

Among the items waiting for me when I got back was a request to do a SEO audit on a website that had recently been updated. One of the problems was so common that I thought I would pass it on.

I first checked the robots.txt file. This is the file that tells the robots (search engines) which pages pages you want them to exclude from their index. Google, and the other major search engines, take the robots.txt as gospel and obeys all the entries. Getting the robots.txt wrong is the quickest way to get your site ignored by the search engines.

Unfortunately, it is a sad fact that many, dare I say most, people claiming to be web designers either don’t know about or forget to check the robots.txt. In this case the txt was blocking the search engines from a directory that no longer existed – not a problem. And, pointing to the sitemap.xml file.

The sitemap.xml, or sitemap, is a complete listing of all the pages that you want the search engines to index. And, while the search engines have a method of submitting sitemaps, they can also ‘discover’ the sitemap if it is listed in the robots.txt.

IMHO, all websites should have a sitemap, with ONE BIG PRIVISO – IT MUST BE KEPT UPTO DATE!.

One of the key pieces of information provided by the sitemap is the last time a page was modified. The search engines use this as a short cut. If the page hasn’t been modified since the last time they indexed the site – there is no reason to check that page for new content. It saves the search engines time, and reduces your bandwidth usage. But, this works only – ONLY if the sitemap is upto date.

Sadly, it hadn’t been updated since 2009.

Fortunately, the major search engines were ignoring the “last modified” tag and viewing the new pages. They new content apperared to be indexed as the new description meta tags were appearing in the SERP. However, this is sub-optimal.

A current sitemap is the best way to ensure all your pages are at least being indexed. Don’t forget to update it when you do your next site update or add new content.

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