Speed Up Your Page 2 - Gzip compression

OK, so almost everyone is familiar with the concept of a "zip file", right? The idea is that if you have to download a packet of information, be it a programme, big pdf, or simply some large image files, then you can compress the data into a smaller file, known as a zip file. This file is much easier and quicker to download, and then you can extract the file or files, using another programme.

A similar concept is available for your website. This is very handy when it comes to the speed of your page, because the majority of people are still using windows internet explorer as their default browser. Chrome is faster, Firefox, Opera and Safari are all much better, with good old IE being the slowest.

So, how can the compression work here? Well, it's known as gzip and is a universally known piece of code which you can add to your websites's htaccess file. Basically, when a browser goes to your site, they will look for this indication of whether the site is enabled as a zip, and if it is then fetch it. Your site will work perfectly fine without the gzip compression, but adding the simple piece of code can help a great deal with page loading times, not to mention bandwidth for your server - potentially saving you a load of money.

I have come across a few different snippets of code whilst researching this post (you will know I'm no programmer), but have decided to re-post a snippet of code from a google employee on a help thread. This is the code you need to add to your htaccess file:

# compress the files
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript
# removes some bugs
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent


This includes any bugs which have been known to crop up in Firefox, for example. Try it out, and de-bug in Firebug's pagespeed plugin. Let me know any comments/suggestions in the comments below guys!

Are you trying to make your website better for the search engines? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about your site. I also offer SEO Training in Barcelona if you'd prefer a more hands on approach.

Speed up your page with htaccess file

I mentioned the other week that Google may be beginning to put more importance on page loading times and speeds. There are some handy tools out there to suggest some of the ways you can improve page load times, and therefore the overall speed. I will try and tackle some of these issues, but in a few seperate posts. The reason for this is that personally, I'm not a designer or a programmer, so many of the suggestions I have come across for my own sites and sites that I manage have left me a little stumped, and I have had to research a little. For those of you already competent in HTML, CSS, and other programming elements of websites, this may be all too easy for you!



So, first one is your .htaccess file. This is a file stored on your server, and is very often empty. It is a simple text file, so if you need to open the file, you always need to do so in a simple program such as notepad, or something similar - never dreamweaver or Microsoft Word - those programmes have unseen code which can interfere with the file. Some sites I've found talking about the htaccess file mention that if you don't find it on your server, you should ask your hosting company if they will accept such a file. I have to say that I haven't found this to be a problem so far. BUT it's probably better to ask, as it can affect download times for servers, and can therefore affect other sites if you're on a shared server, for example.

So, what's the big deal with the .htaccess file?! Well, before we start, it's always wise (as with anything on your website) to make a back up of anything on your server before you start to modify it. The htaccess file is a file which can isntruct the bots on the search engines with regards 301 redirects, custom error pages, etc. and other such operations as cache of elements, images, etc. This is a big deal for page speed.

So if you have no experience with adding instructions to a htaccess file, then it's fairly simple. Each command needs to be on one line only (so potentially the file can be as long as you need it to be). And like html, each command needs to have a start and end. So, say you want to cache all of your image files, as reccommended by pagespeed on Firefox, which I mentioned in the last post. You need to add this to the htaccess file:

< Files img >
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
< / Files >

To break it down. The tag of < files > can be followed by a space and then any file extension you have and want to cache.

The following line needs to copied exactly, and basically tells the bot how long to chache the files for. The numbers are in seconds, and those figures represent a year.

If you prefer to cache individual images, then this can also be done, if you need to chage images on your site on a regular basis. Say, for example, your logo never changes (likely), then you can add a line just for the location of your logo.

Obviously don't forget to end the command with < / Files > to close the tag, and remember that each command needs a new line.

If you have any queries, please leave them in the comments. I'll be returning to htaccess again shortly, so come back for more spage speed tips.

Not satisfied with your website? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about the things we can do. I specialise in Website Optimisation in Barcelona, but can be contacted for any particular site - regardless of the location.

*Please note, due to the built-in html editor in blogger, I have used extra spacing in the tags for clarity.

Advanced Search Queries in Google

Google is making things easier for you to search. Apparently they continuously test the home page (some 41 shades of blue have been tested according to Marissa Mayer) and also this year the search box has been widened, and larger font is used when you type. More recently they've introduced a "fade-in" background (which I'll be honest is a bit odd, but there you go) so as to not distract from the already minimilistic page.



The majority of people simply type their query in the search box or toolbar, and then google even cleverly suggests the end of the query for you - all to make things easier. However, it can still take a bit of refining before you satify your needs. This is where the advanced paramenters can come in handy. There are a few extra things you can type into the search box to refine your search. Anyone familiar with Google's Adwords will probably know.

For example, using [] to bracket your search gives a broad match to the keywords. It's kind of like the same words you type with no extra symbols before or after, but can often change if you compare both.

Using "" around your search means you want an exact match of the keywords in that order. You can also use the - sign to denote negative keywords you want google to remove from the search results. The minus sign always needs to have a space before and be joined to the word, like this: "Turkey Recipies -Christmas" if you want some great recipies for cooking turkey but not a christmas turkey!! This is good if you know exactly what you're looking for, but can sometimes omit results. Think if you type "George Bush" into google, it won't display any pages where "George W Bush" appears. Get it?

If you want to search a particular website for information, then you can add site: to the query. For example if you want to see news about how Bing is doing in the UK, you can type Bing site:bbc.co.uk into the search box, and you'll be only given results from the BBC website. Simiarly, if you only want websites from the UK, then you can type site:.co.uk or government pages type site:.gov and so on.

The * key is a great little tool to use. This is what google calls a "wild card" and will basically fill in the blank for you if you don't know the word you're looking for. Sounds daft? Well, think of something like a football score. If you know the teams playing or who played, then you could type in FC Barcelona * Bayern Munich * which will remind you that the score was 4-0 to Barcelona.

There are more additions to your search query terms you may need to know for SEO, so I might touch on a few more of those in another post, but I think these are a good introduction for the moment. If you're not happy with your website's rankings in the Search Engines, then contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat. Or if you'd like some one-to-one SEO Training in Barcelona, then I can also help.

Google's Page Speed Unrealistic?

OK guys, I've been away a while in terms of posting, but had two fairly big projects on, and didn't have much free time!

There has been a fair bit of buzz around the SEO community since Pub Con in Las Vegas last November, when Google's Matt Cutts talked about Page Speed. There have been suggestions that speed of pages, loading times and the like may become a factor in Google's main search algorithm in 2010. This may or may not be true, but whether or not it's 100% true, there's no harm in making your page quicker for your users, right?

I've mentioned previously ways to monitor the performance of your web server, for example in terms of downtime. This is surely a ranking factor - if on a number of occasions googlebot cannot access your page due to server down time, it's unlikely they'll display your results to the users in the serps.

So all of this has prompted some great tools such as Firefox extension Firebug (a must, by the way) and even Google's official blog announcing a new feature within Webmaster Tools to show your site's performance. The tools show a graph, over time, which looks a little like this:



So according to Webmaster Tools, one of my sites is 83% lower than the majority of sites on the web! Wow! That's huge - and it takes 6.7 seconds to load - not too bad, right? But 83% of the sites on the web are quicker than this one, which sounds terrible. However, I think this is perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration on Google's part. For example, UK SEO Team Blogstorm reported that their site was also 86% slower than all other sites. I think I can see a trend developing - even in the comments, you can see the highest seems to be a 66%.

If you check my graph above, you'll see a huge spike mid way through September. This was due to a conflict with the javascript used in the sharethis buttons. This was not letting the page completely load, until you actually hovered over the icons. I also have to say that this was fixed extremely quickly and professionally by the support team. There's still a long way to go before I get into the 20% bracket for example, but it's a head start if things like this will influence any way in the rankings for the coming year.

Are you looking to improve your site's performance in Google and the other search engines? Barcelona SEO can help. I specialise in website optimisation in Barcelona and internationally, and will be happy to chat about your site. Contact me here for more details.

Spy On Your Web Users

As I've mentioned on many occasions, I'm all for experimenting and changing things on your landing pages to improve conversions. There are more and more tools becoming available for this kind of marketing - not really classed as SEO I suppose as it has nothing to do with your position in the SERPs, rather what happens when your visitors arrive on your website.



It's a great idea to have a few landing pages, long-tail keywords make up most of the web (it's true) and optimising just your main page is fools play as you may be missing out on some real opportunities and customers.

I've blogged before about ways to keep visitors on your website, and I'm a great fan of Google's free website optimiser tool, which allows you to perform split A/B testing and also Multi variate testing and will choose a winning combination. This is all good, but you never really know WHY the winning combination worked, right?

Step in ClickTale. This is by no means an affiliate post, rather something very cool which I wanted to share with you all. ClickTale is a simple javascript added to your website pages, similar to a Google analytics code or other tracking code which then "records" the actions that your website visitors perform. The results are quite fantastic, with scrolling heatmaps, hover maps, form analysis and actual videos of your website viewers for you to see just what people do when they land on your site. I've been using the tool for a couple of months, as there is a free version you can sign up for, and I'm very impressed.



Some things you can imagine that people would prefer - move the image, make that bold type bigger or smaller, etc. but click tale shows you exactly the amount of clicks and hovers and basically everything that your visitor does.

Are you looking to improve conversions? Barcelona SEO can help. Contact me for more details. I also offer AdWords Managment and training in Barcelona, too.

Solving Duplicate Content Issues

Many site owners worry about duplicate content issues. Often site owners might see a search engine results page (SERP) with words to the effect of

"we have omitted some results from the search results here. Click here to repeat the search with these results included"

If you click the repeated search and your site appears, it probably means you have duplicate content issues. Google has a hard time dealing with duplicate content issues, and scraper sites which copy articles, blog posts and wikipedia articles, for example and reproduces them on a grand scale.



Of course the biggest way to avoid duplicate content issues is to produce 100% original, quality content. This is not always possible, though, and if you have an online store, it's often difficult to describe a series of, say, LCD TVs that different to what the brochure says and what (more importantly) hundreds of other sites say. Adding user reviews to a page can help with this, for example.

Google's rel=canonical tag can also help with this issue. This is more for sites which have different navigation to reach an end product and can be accessed therefore via different urls. The use of the canonical can be used here to tell Google which you want the "right" page to be, and the other pages can be effectively ignored by the search engines. This is a fairly complicated topic for a newbie, so I may expend on this in another post.

If you have old pages of content which you have edited slightly, or changed to a new, user-friendly url, and don't want to lose any link juice, then use a 301 redirect (permanent redirect to the new/correct url).

Do you think your site may be prone to duplicate content issues ? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about the site and the ideas. Or if you prefer SEO Training in Barcelona, we can arrange a series of sessions for me to explain these things one on one.

Compare Google...with Google

As has been widely publicised - even by Google themselves - there will be a new change in Google's algorithm coming shortly, and instead of having a surprising drop/rise in the SERPs, Google has given you the change to try out the new search engine and see the results for yourself here. The new change has been dubbed caffeine by Google.



All good, but what about if you want to compare the current position of your site in the SERPs with the new results side by side? Well, help is at hand, in the form of a couple of websites, but my favourite is Get Caffeinatedfor the funny design.

I suggest you check it our for yourselves - it's great to compare both and see if you're in for good news, or a bit more work!

Looking for website optimisation in Barcelona? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about your site, and how to improve your rankings.

SiteMap Help From Bing.

Anyone wanting to index their entire site quickly in any search engine should submit a sitemap to the search engines. This is no guarantee that your entire site will be indexed, but it will be crawled much much easier. If you add new content to your site, you can modify your sitemap, and "ping" the engines, letting them know you have new content, too.



The standard for a search engine site map is an xml file, nothing to do with a html sitemap you may have on your website (or asp, or whichever code your site uses), as this is not for the end user to help find their way, rather the seach bots.

Bing has today released a very comprehensive guide to submitting a SiteMap to their search engine, although the principle can be applied to the other bots. Well worth a read, especially for those not too tech-minded.

Looking to improve your visibility on the search engines? I offer Search Engine Optimisation in Barcelona and also Link Building Services for your website to improve rankings. Contact me for more details.

Improving Conversions

Any web page has a purpose. Perhaps it's a click through to a second page, a sign-up, a form to be completed, or any other clear Call To Action (CTA). Optimising a page only for keywords is a great way to start your SEO, but it's only half the battle. If you're a good Search Engine Marketer, you'll know that once the visitor arrives on your page, they need to act on what you've planned. This is what's known as a conversion.



Conversions can easily be set up as "goals" in your analytics software, for example, it's a really quick exercise in Google's Webmaster Tools. You will be able to see the amounts of visits to the page in question and the goals completed, or the conversions you have managed to get. You might be pleased with the current results, but there's always room for improvement. What use is the analytics data you have if you don't aim to improve, right?

One of the best ways to improve on conversions, which I've touched on before is to start doing testing. It's amazing how stagnant a page can become with nothing changing it over a period of years. You have to ask yourself this question: If it's free (minus your time) then why not do it? There are a ton of free tools out there, and it makes sense to test everything. EVERYTHING. Start with split tests A/B and check the bounce rate, and the conversion rate. Then make follow up tests to see if your choice is right. Google's website optimiser is a great tool for this - I really, really like it.

Ask your friends who have no idea what you do to take a really quick look at your website, and get them to tell you what sticks out. Tone down colours, leave out images, see what happens. Don't make your page too "noisy" with too many choices. Funnel your visitors to the right page, and the rest should follow naturally.

Not getting the conversions you want? Barcelona SEO can help. Contact me for a chat and we can brainstorm some ideas. I also offer comprehensive SEO Training in Barcelona - both in-house or one-on-one.

Bing Offers SEO Guidelines

After Google's introduction to SEO earlier this year, Bing has now released it's SEO guidelines, in an attempt to encourage users to keep best practices and adhere to their guidelines with regards clear and white hat SEO.



There's nothing new here, and it's clear that Microsoft want to instill in webmasters the need for clear page content, optimised Title and meta tags, in order to be in line with those doing the same - they state that they can't produce via their algorithm clear captions (or snippets as Google likes to call them) in the SERPs - a funky little feature in Bing.

there's a handy url to be able to ping Bing's bot and update your site map immediately, although if your site structure is correct, there should be no need.

Bing even goes as far as touting their competition, stating that

"Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well."

Either way, if you've read Google's introduction to SEO, Bing's is worthwhile reading, too. Comments welcome as always guys, and I'd love to know what you think.

Not happy with your website's performance, contact me at Barcelona SEO for analysis and reporting on your website and how I can improve it. I also offer SEO Training in Barcelona, either in house, or in the upcoming workshops planned for early 2010.

AdWords Hook - Part 2

After my recent post on Google's intent on gaining new customers by offering thousands of euros in online advertising through their adwords programme, I was surprised to receive this week, yet another letter through the post offering me another incredible 50 Euros coupon (it came as an AdSense user, so maybe that's why it was 50% less than last time?!)



Considering Google has a 95% market share in Spain according to comscore, it just makes you wonder how much google are making in online ads, and clicks from people who don't know how to set up an AdWords account properly. I have encountered a high proportion of customers who have dabbled in AdWords or other PPC platforms, and have cringed when I've seen their accounts - exactly the same as what I was doing when I started.

I can offer AdWords and Pay Per Click management in Barcelona as well as thorough training to help with any campaigns you might have running or want to start - and if it's soon, I have 150 euros worth of credit to offer you for free ;o) I also offer excellent website optimisation in Barcelona to improve your positioning in google and other search engine's rankings. Please feel free to contact me for more details.

The Influence of Branding

I've mentioned before the importance of branding and creating an important idea of trust for your website users. Every company needs and depends on this - even the search engines. Google's huge market share as a preferred search engine in the US is around 70% and only slightly less in the UK - so it's important to keep the branding up, to keep the users coming back.


There is a premise that you will always return to a search engine - like a store - to find what you're looking for, even if the products (in this case the results) start to worsen. With the arrival of Bing and Microsoft's intention of winning back some of that huge market share, Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi has developed a Blind Search Page which I think is a great idea.

The page has a search bar at the top, for you to search for anything you like - kind of like any normal search engine. However, the results page will show you three columns of results, from Yahoo! Google and Bing, but without the branding. You need to review the results, compare and then vote for the column you think has fulfilled your enquiry. Once you click, the results are revealed.



I think it's a very fun tool to play with - to have all 3 results on the same page right next to each other, and have enjoyed playing around with it. I suggest you give it a go and see what you think. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Want to appear high on these 3 search engines, too? I offer website optimisation in Barcelona to enable higher rankings for your chosen keywords. Or if your traffic needs an immediate injection then let me manage your Barcelona Adwords account.

The Google AdWords Hook - By Post

Like many of you, I'm sure, this morning I received through the post an invitation to Free 100 € credit for an AdWords account. The promotion is only valid until the 26th July, and comes with a personal code for you to reclaim your credit.

The leaflet is very clear, and states such benefits of "Earning clients with Google" with such ease of Three Easy steps. Create an Ad, Choose the keywords for your daily budget, and your clients will click and reach your company.

So, where's the catch? Well, the leaflet is clearly based at people who have little or absolutely no idea what Google AdWords is (it's only mentioned once on the whole 4-page leaflet), and they even have a 902 number where you can call and a "Google specialist" will help you create and set up your first AdWords account. And therein lies the catch. The coupon code if for accounts of less that 14 days old. The majority of first time users of an AdWords account will have useless keywords, far too broad, and even probably take heed of the keyword suggestion tool (basically encouraging you to spend more money). Depending on your sector/niche, the 100 Euros gift could be used up very quickly in clicks. However, you will be so tied up with the adwords campaign (which you have probably put a lot of effort into or spent money on the 902 number) that you'll want to continue, and will probably keep spending badly for hopeless clicks for another couple of months before either deciding that "it doesn't work/it's too expensive" - either that, or pay for a professional to have a tweak and set out a quality campaign. So it's a win-win situation for Google who'll probably easily make back the 100 € gift.

Have you received one of these through the post? What do you think? Please contact me for AdWords Management in Barcelona and for any other elements of Search Engine Optimisation in Barcelona I'll be happy to help.

Real Time Search

As I've mentioned before, the Engines are struggling to cope with the impact of real time search as seen on social sites such as Twitter. I think if you haven't claimed your social media name already, you're wasting time. At least your brand name or company name - even if you're unsure of what to do with it just yet.

We've seen steps recently that Google seems to be adding Twitter information (profiles, not Tweets) of fairly high profile users in the SERPs - where a normal search for your own name might throw up a Linkedin page, Ashton K's Twitter profile is showing.

Bing has also attempted to add real time search into their results, but it's a bit sketchy at best. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

Looking for better results from your website? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a no obligation chat/review of your site. I also offer Link Building Services in Barcelona to boost your rankings in the SERPs.

Facebook Click Fraud

I commented on this blog last year about Facebook Ads and them being a cheaper alternative to Google's AdWords and other Pay Per Click ventures.


However, a recent thread over at techcrunch has highlighted the fact that many people feel they're being over charged for their accounts, with conflicting reports of clicks from Facebook compared the third party web analytics software. This is worrying as in some cases the ratio was said to be as bad a 1:10.

Facebook is a huge company who many believe have not been able to monetise their vast growth - the same kind of rumours flying around about Twitter at the moment. They are expected to raise $550 Million this year - over twice the amount raised in 2008, so that might be a big ask, especially as they're not the bigger player in the Facebook vs Twitter game in terms of growth.

I have 2 clients with Facebook ads, but we have had them on pause since December last year, so I can't comment directly on any known discrepancies with our Weblogs vs Facebook's spending/Billing cycles. What I will say, is that I won't be resuming either campaign just yet, until I can see a transparent solution (which if you read the techcrunch artile, Facebook cliam they're on top of it).

Looking for Website Optimisation in Barcelona ? We also provide SEO Training in Barcelona in a workshop or One-on-One basis. Please contact me for more details.

Search with a Bing

Microsoft recently released Bing, it's new Beta search engine, with a fairly powerful advertising campaign, and email campaign.



I have to say that compared to MSN search and Live! search, it's much much better. They've managed to clean out a lot of the spam from the listings, and there's a handy pop-up box to the right of the search results which displays what is on the page and other links on the page, too. It also looks more like a search engine home page, with no distractions apart from the search box (no news, no tabs, no other images) which is where Google has always steered clear from.

I can also say from the web analytics from my sites and some of the sites I manage that people are using Bing, or at least experimenting with it. It's not all just Google, which is good news I think. If people find the right information within Bing's results, they'll come back.

If you want to know how to optimise your site for the search engines like Bing, drop me a line at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about your site. Or if you're looking for instant traffic to your site, I can help set up and maintain your AdWords Barcelona Account, too.

How to Keep Visitors on Your Website - Part 6

Server Down time is an important factor in any website or online business. Google themselves have stated that if your server is down on more than one occasion that Googlebot tries to crawl your website, then you risk exclusion from the SERPs - obviously not something you want.

This is equally important for your regular customers or those which will visit your site either directly, or from another means that is not a search engine - other publicity or advertising you may do. Imagine if they visit your site ready to buy/sign up, and the server is down, so they get an error page. Not good. So how can you tackle this?



Some people would say pay for a dedicated server, so that you have a unique IP address for the site and thus avoid the possible pitfalls of shared servers, etc. However, there are easier ways of deciding whether or not to switch servers or hosts. For example setting up a website monitor service. This is not an affiliate post at all, but I'd like to share a free website monitoring service with you. The site is very easy to use and sign up for an account, and you will be emailed reports when your site is down, and when it comes back up again - handy to know and this kind of thing might influence a change of server, or dedicated server instead.

Not getting the results you want? Contact me for SEO in Barcelona Or fancy learning more about website marketing? I also offer SEO Training in Barcelona for groups or one on one.

Twitter Scam - TwitterCut

It seems a few people have been duped today by TwitterCut - a scam claiming to raise your followers by thousands in a short space of time. The page looks fairly convincing, but none of the footer links work, making me immediately suspicious.



Just a short while ago, tweets began warning about the scam, and I expect that to continue into tomorrow and there after.



While some web spammers will do anything to get spam on the go, it also seems that 12th June 2009 might be a day for all Tweeple to be concerned. Twitpocalypse is upon us!

Looking for better results in your web positioning? Barcelona SEO can help you achieve first page results in Google and improve your web traffic through sites such as Twitter. We also offer SEO Training workshops in Barcelona for one-to-one or group sessions. Contact me for more details.

Track Your Company & Brand Online

The rise and rise of social media and user generated content (UGC) has been taking a big place in the world of search for most of 2009 now. I've recently blogged about the ease of finding real time answers to problems and Google this week has also introduced it's own way of trying to apply a time filter to your results, in keeping with sites like twitter.


However, another big move (that will obviously be gradually introduced) is the inclusion of Rich Snippets. We've already had longer snippets introduced, and this is now based on user reviews, possibly including prices, star ratings, etc. There is a html code you need to mark up pages like this so that google knows to include these rich snippets, and you can also opt in for this "experiment" which will be introduced slowly.

This also raises another issue, which is how to control what people are saying about you or your company. Or maybe not to control, but how to track it.

Social media is a big mover in reviews and comments (often unintentionally), but Twitter for example, recently removed @ replies, making it a little more difficult. I suggest you do a Twitter Search for the name of your company and subscribe to the results via RSS. Another great tool for Twitter is backtweet which can help you control the mentioning of any urls of your website - even if they've been bit.ly or tinyurl'd.

Another quality and usually relaiable source of tracking your company or personal name is to set up e-mail alerts. Google Alerts can send you details of News, Blogs, Videos, etc. on a daily, weekly, or even "as it happens" basis helping you keep right on top of things. I've been using this for over a year for my sites and some clients, and sometimes things slip though the net, but it's a great tool to combine with other things, too.

Other things such as BackType Alerts which works in the same way as Google Alerts, but seems to pick up much more on sites like digg, reddit, etc. Yahoo! alerts is another you may want to consider. All in all, it pays to keep abreast of what people are saying or tweeting about you or your company, and it's free, too.

Like what you're reading? Feel free to leave a comment and broaden the discussion.

Looking for link-building campaigns ? Barcelona SEO can help with optimising your website and delivering results.

Google's Wonder Wheel

I can't help but make the bad joke "No, it's not a poor take on the well known Oasis song" - sorry.

Google announced the Wonder wheel this week, which is an easy way to view similar search strings to that which you're already looking for. This is clearly a benefit for the end user, who might not realise different ways of searching for topics, news and other queries on the search engines. SEOs are wise to the fact and can employ keyword tool analysis and advanced features in the SERPs, but for the everyday user, this might be something that catches on.



I've mentioned before about real-time search coming from social media and this is Google's way of telling everyone that they're on the ball, too. The left hand column lets you choose different date ranges from "recent" (just how recent that is remains to be seen), to past 24 hours, to past week and finally to past year.

I wonder how long it'll take for the spammers to try and game the system?!

Looking for Search Engine Optimisation in Barcelona? We can help you achieve the rankings you want. Instant traffic is also an option with AdWords Barcelona Strategies we can set up, run and manage for you. Please contact me for more details.

Google Tries Yahoo! Answers

Google has recently introduced Google Friends Connect gadgets, one of which is designed by Barry Welch and is called a Get Answers Gadget which seems remarkably like Yahoo answers, but on a smaller scale.



Apparently, you can

* View questions/answers from the community
* Ask questions
* Answer questions
* Vote up answers
* Highest vote-getting answers are labeled "Best Answer"
* Sort answers by popularity/date
* View questions you've asked
* Comment moderation

Ground breaking stuff, eh?

The huge difference of course is that this is a gadget/widget that you install on your website, rather than an external page to visit (like Yahoo! answers). This is all fantastic information for Google to have access to through your own site, and I'm not exactly sure how well it would work - I haven't come across a site with it yet. What about you guys? Any input?

At Barcelona SEO we offer link building strategies as well as AdWords Management and set up for clients of every level.

How to Keep Visitors on Your Website - Part 5

As I've mentioned before, it's becoming increasingly important for you to make sure that any visitors to your website stay on your page for long enough to get to your call to actions, and see your website's message. Previous posts have details on certain techniques such as custom 404 pages, freephone telephone numbers, and your website or company "voice", but there are also a certain number of things on websites that can be an instant turn off.

Things like "empty cart" or "clear form" are things that always puzzle me. Why on earth would you have a "clear form" button on any kind of contact form? People know who they are and why they're completing a form, and even if they did make a small mistake with something it's easier to edit one particular field, rather than clear the whole form and start again.

Again, if you've been on a shopping site, and been collecting things in a basket, then why would you suddenly want to empty that? Surely the basket has things you have intentionally clicked on, perhaps through visiting various pages on a site, and might not necessarily be that easy to find again. I'm also puzzled when people add these buttons so close to the Call to Action buttons - like "Proceed to Checkout" "Buy Now" or "Send". Are you using any of these signals on your website? You may well be sending your clients away without knowing.

For more information about website optimisation in Barcelona and other e-marketing strategies, please contact me. We also offer Adwords managment Barcelona and other services.

You Tube Insights - Video Analysis

An often overlooked medium in today's search world is video. The rise of Vertical Search means the it's ever more likely for your SERPs to throw up a youtube video along with the local results, paid results and normal organic listings. That Google is the owner of youtube means that youtube is probably the main one to focus on from an SEO point of view, although such sites as vimeo, aol video, metacafe, etc. are all good exposure for your business and increase branding.

This is all great, but what about analysing the videos? How can you see if the videos are working? or if you need to target a particular region/sex/age group, etc. ? Well, youtube has Youtube Insights which helps along the way with your analysis.

This is great for tracking exactly where your visitors are coming from, and who is viewing your videos. The analysis can give excellent information as to sex and age groups, geographical location and of course how the viewer found your video (search, embedded video, etc. Whilst the information could be a lot better (maybe hotspots within videos, how much of the video has been viewed, click out or pause/stop, etc.) it's still a great tool to have for free from YouTube.



Are you taking advantage of all the mediums for your website? Barcelona SEO can help create your online presence and make it more visible. Contact me for more details, or if you'd like to find out more about Search, we also offer SEO Training in Barcelona on a one-to-one basis or in groups.

Internet Market Training in Barcelona

After recent demand, Barcelona SEO has teamed up with UK based Internet Strategy company ProMarketingOnline and will be hosting a number of SEO workshops in the beginning of 2010 in both Barcelona and the UK. The workshops will be covering three main areas of SEO:

·Internet Marketing Training in Barcelona
·Online Marketing Strategies in Barcelona
·AdWords and other PPC training and Management

The workshops will be pro-active and cover both beginners and advanced SEO techniques and e-marketing.

If you or your company may be interested in workshops or one-to-one SEO training in Barcelona pleae contact me at Barcelona SEO

Claiming Your Social Media Presence

Social Media is becoming more and more important as a current e-marketing strategy. More and more people are turning to social media for reviews, comments, and up to the second information regarding products and options for purchases. So it's important for your company to start creating that social media presence in those websites that might work. Have you created a Facebook page? Already Twittering? Got your photos on flickr?



There are literally hundreds of social media sites to choose from and depending on your website's audience, some may work better than others. So what happens when you go to one of these websites and your domain name has already been taken? This can happen, and is definitely something that can throw a spanner in the works with regards your branding. Sites such as Twitter are fairly good at helping reclaim a name if they think you deserve it, but it's a good idea to claim your name amongst as many sites as you can, even just to cover all possible options.

Knowem is a site which takes care of a lot of the legwork for you. The site checks your desired user name on 120 social media sites, and also offers a paid service to register those names for you (if you don't have the time). It's a fairly quick process for them to check all the sites (considering the time you would take on your own) and is also a great place to check out some new sites that maybe you didn't know before.

Interested in creating your social media presence online? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for more details. Or if you prefer to find out more about other link building techniques, I also offer SEO Training on a one to one basis or in groups.

Longer Snippets in SERPs - Possible Problems

In late March Google released information regarding 2 new improvements with regards to Search Engine Page Results. It's the second that I'm going to focus on here.

When a SERP presents the organic results, the small description below the title is called a snippet, and Google have decided to lengthen the snippet for longer-tiled keywords - i.e. giving you a little more to read before you click through to the pages.

This, for me, has 2 main implications. It's clear that this move has been taken by Google to improve the end user experience, to help the users find the right page faster. Google does not want a high bounce rate, or back click rate. If a Google user clicks on a result through the SERP, quickly sees that it's not what they're looking for and then clicks back to the Google SERP, this reflects bad not only on your site for the bounce rate, but also for Google as it's not providing the user with the correct result quickly enough.

So, this can work in a couple of ways. One is that it can improve your bounce rate - if people are clicking through from an extended snippet, it probably means that the page's content is sufficiently relevant for them to find what they're looking for.

Implication 2 is that you won't get clicked through at all. Obviously there will have bee steps taken so as to not be able to abuse the new extended snippet via keyword stuffing, etc. and Google will have taken care of that, but I think it just proves once again how much the content of your pages is so important as a global SEO/Internet Marketing strategy.

For more information about Website Optimisation in Barcelona or if you'd like some In-House SEO Training in Barcelonaplease contact me for more details.

Social Media for Search

Traditional search has changed dramatically over the last few years, and it looks to be on the brink of (or it's already happening) another shift, a quite important one.

After the introduction of Google's Universal Search SEOs needed to prepare for visibility in what was essentially going to become a Vertical Search for a product. However, it's well known that search results can be manipulated, and despite Google doing it's utmost to deliver the best results, it can still fall short - and that's because it's SERPs are dependent on Mathematical algorithms, not people (obviously that would be impossible!).


So here's where the shift is going. The rise of Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter mean that as long as you have a certain community established within those websites, you can get your answers a lot quicker. Let me give you an example. Let's say your printer breaks down on you. So you send a quick tweet on Twitter - which updates your facebook page - about how your printer just broke and you're on the lookout for a new one. No more than 90 Euros.



Within a couple of hours, you might have some replies from friends or colleagues, or hell, even PC City if they're SEOs are savvy enough to use things like backtweet. These can range from "wow, don't get an Epson" to "I'm sure XX store has got a special on this week" to "I'm selling mine, only 2 weeks old, cos I got it free with my new laptop" etc. etc.

Now if you compare that with a normal SERP, you would likely get a couple of review sites, some branded pages like HP, Epson, etc. but nothing "REAL TIME". It is this freshness of having real people to talk to which can make us think twice about rushing straight to Google, Yahoo! or MSN for something we need. User Generated Content (or UGC) is going to become huge and Content is always King.

Like what you're reading? Please feel free to leave a comment or if you have anything specific to share about your social search, I'd love to hear from you.

For more information about social search, contact me at Barcelona SEO or if you'd like some SEO Training in Barcelona I can come into your office or workplace and teach you.

The End of iTunes?

Everyone knows the popularity of video sites such as youtube, aol video and Metacafe, and many people use these websites to watch music videos of their favourite stars. The UK has recently announced that it will be restricting music videos on youtube and this week China completely blocked youtube from the whole country.



However, there's a new website which has the potential to blow youtube and even itunes out of the water. This is Spotify and is best described as an online jukebox. Users can listen to music, but not download, for free. There are the occasional ads to hear, but if that's too distracting, there's also an option to pay a small subscription for unlimited use. According to the press releases, there are over 10,000 songs being uploaded each day, and with the massive amount of internet-enabled phones on the market, who needs an iphone?

Google Image Search as a Dictionary

OK, so maybe this is a little off-topic, and hardly an SEO technique, but it is a blog by an Englishman who lives in Barcelona, and I found it quite funny so thought I'd share it (few light hearted posts now and again won't hurt, right?).

Pete Lidwell at Google Zurich posted an amusing post about his limited German getting in the way of conversations, and that he found google images like an online image dictionary (even quicker than a real dictionary, cos you don't even have to read the text!). Ovbiously this has it's limitations, and can probably only be used for physical nouns, but imagine the situation - you're in a restaurant on holiday in Barcelona, and have your handy pocket translator - be it electronic or pages of a book - and come accross the chef's reccomendation in Catalan like calçots, and have no idea what it is. Well, just get on your internet phone and log onto google images and there you go! Problem solved!

For website optimisation in Barcelona please contact me for analysis and a quote.

Great New Tool for Twitter

There's no denying that Twitter is huge. Despite the huge amount of spam and rubbish around on twitter, it's still an invaluable tool to be subscribed to, as long as you don't spend too much time on there. I've already explained before (which provoked some great comments)that for small businesses I think your time can be much better spent investing in link-building, or creating a couple more pages of quality content, instead of wasting 4 or 5 hours trawling through possible people to follow and their tweets of tinyurl links.


I also commented that the links are nofollow, and although this is not a huge problem - you still get the click through to your site, which can be a visitor/conversion, just no link juice - there's a cool new tool I found last night from those clever people at back Type. Back Type already have some great tools out there, and I suggest you visit their site and check out their products. They have an alert service a little like google alerts, which is very good and can often pick up a few alerts that google might miss depending on what time of day the alert is created.

The new tool is basically a url search on twitter. This is a great tool to use, as it will search for any url you type in - even if it's been used via a url shortening device such as tinyurl. I think this is a really cool new tool, and is a great way to sift through the mass of people on twitter who are just on there for fun, and to try and target more customers for your business. One of the quickest ways to use backtweets is to search for your competition's urls and find out who's talking about them, what they're saying, and who's following them. Check it out, and let me know what you think, I'd be pleased to hear any comments.

If you're looking to optimise your website, please contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about the possibilities and options for your website.

The Importance of url Structure

With regards to on-site SEO, there are some small changes you can make to your site structure which can make a huge difference. One of the great things you can ensure you do - which might not sound all that important - is to have a good, clean url for each page. Ideally, you'd like to try and include the keywords for that particular page in the url, too, but without being too spammy. Search englines will rank you higher if you do this correctly.



Google recently made a move to adjust the amount of duplicate content within the SERPs, so they clearly think it's important, too. If you look at the url for this blog post (google owns blogger) then you'll see it's also important.

I speak from experience. I have had a client who was finding it difficult to break into the top 5 results for a certain set of keywords. They had very dynamic urls which we changed to html keyword-based urls and they shot straight up to number 1. I realise that sometimes it can be a huge job, especially if there are databases involved, as the parameters and list of urls could possibly be endless, but if it's something you can consider for a small to medium sized site, then I highly reccomend it.

Want to find out more about improving your website's performance? Please contact me at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about it.

Link Building - the Importance of Anchor Text

This may seem like a really simple posting and some of you more advanced readers may want to skip this, but I think it's important to get the basic things right. I've already talked about a few strategies to link building for your website, BUT what's also equally important is how you get these links.

Anchor text basically just means the text you use for the link - the actual words that the url will direct you to. These typically would be your keywords that you have optimised for that particular page on your website. This is very often overlooked by many website owners - and there needs to be no more proof that this. That's an example of anchor text right there. I've used the word "this" but sent a completely different url in there. The link shows that the words "click here" give an organic number 1 listing in the SERPS to Adobe reader!



So anchor text linking is very important for gaining your links, but it's as equally important ON SITE. Avoid using links such as the words "next" or "following page" or "continue" - and try and really use the keywords on your website. If you have a natural web design and layout, you will be able to direct your users exactly where you want them to go, so it's just as easy to optimise your on-site links which will help slightly improve your position on the SERPs as well as letting the crawling robots know more about your site and it's structure.

Would you like to optimise your website? I offer affordable website optimisation in Barcelona and also Barcelona SEO Training in your company so you can take control of your website's destiny and start seeing improvements.

Link Building - Article Marketing

As I've mentioned on a few occasions, building links is one of the most important parts to a good SEO campaign.

One-way links to your site are also a great start to building your link arsenal, but can often be hard to attain. Link baiting is one clear way of going down this route, but if your site/blog is new then you can post something as controversial or challenging as you like but if next to no-one sees the post then it will never become viral. So there's a great way of obtaining one way links AND the possibility of generating even more from this source, too. Article marketing.



Article marketing is unique in that an article itself can become reprinted freely on any other website/blog, etc. BUT that you have two links to your site at the bottom of the article which always need to be re-printed along with the main body. So, if you write a good article about your niche, it might be re-printed on tens of other websites. If you write a great article, the viral aspect can earn you a lot of links - for free!

Now, some SEOs are announcing the early death of article marketing, with many sites allegedly using the nofollow attribute on your links. And there are now hundreds of article re-print sites offering this service. So my advice is to choose a handful of sites, and then track the links via your stats package (or Google Webmaster tools/Google analytics). Don't waste time writing an article and then trying to find all the possible sites you can - remember, google doesn't like duplicate content, so the vast amajority would be ignored anyway. The best idea is to write another article in that time, and build up your status as an expert in your field, which is great for branding and getting your name out there.

For more link building techniques and tips, contact me at Barcelona SEO - I'll be happy to discuss your website and help to plan a strategy together.

Google Website Optimiser

I've been fiddling around on a couple of sites with Google's Website Optimiser (or you might get "did you mean Google's website Optimizer") and thought I'd share a few findings.

First of all, I think it's a very, very valuable tool which can save you hundreds of Euros in testing and public opinion polls, etc. The idea is that you can create very similar pages to your website and then test them. You need to add a bit of javascript code to the test pages you want to run the tests on, and the website optimiser starts to compile a report.

There are 2 types of test you can do. A Simple A/B split test and Multi-variate testing which basically just means you test various different things on the page at the same time. The great thing about website optimiser is that you can test absolutely anything.

I'll give you an example of how an A/B split test can work. If you choose the goal page as your conversion page and make some drastic changes to your landing page from a Pay Per click campaign for example, you can track not only which ads are working for you, but which version of your home page is creating more conversions, too. It doesn't always have to be your home page either - you can literally fiddle around with any page on your website - even test run a completely new design.

Multi-variate tests are much more specific, and generally take a lot longer to give a good result. As with most experiments, it's important to be able to interpret the results. Google makes this very easy with a percentage of the possibility of beating the original test page. With the multi-variate testing, the interpretation of results is slightly more difficult but still great to see.

A small criticism which I've found. There must be something in the javascript that blocks the referrer stats in some of the website statistic programmes. I have a query open in Google groups and will post a fix if I get one!

For more details about SEO in Barcelona, or in-house SEO training in Barcelona please contact me.

Google's New Idea for Duplicate Content

Quite a lot of SEO's were getting excited about the news of Google's new canonical attribute. As far as I can work out, it's basically a way to tell the search engines about the origin of content which could be reproduced on your website, so as not to be penalised by duplicating content.

A strip of code is placed in the head of the html document to "re-direct" any messy urls (those with session id's, tracking info, or other figures and numbers) to a clean url. I think the idea around it, is to try and tidy up the web a little and stop producing duplicate content in SERPs.

I'm not exactly sure of the implications and long term benefits or disadvantages this might have, as it's obviously something very new, and can only be used within the same domain - you can't re-direct a page to another website. I'd be happy to hear any comments or ideas, too, regarding this move, so feel free to post.

For Website Optimisation in Barcelona and other online marketing, please contact me at Barcelona SEO

Follow Me or Not?

As I've previously mentioned, gaining links to your website is probably the most important off-site SEO strategy you can impliment to improve your rankings on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). However, simply adding a load of links to your site isn't the way to go.

SEO used to be simply the number of links or "votes" to your site would improve rankings, but with increased intricacies in the algorithms used by the search engines, this is now not only a possible waste of time, but also could be actually detrimental to your position.

The rise of vertical search means that links need to be chosen carefully, and if at all possible be relevant to your site or niche - what's the point of adding that link to the Thailand guest house if your website is all about London fashion? You get the point. This is all about "link juice" and every link from your site dilutes your authority and quality within the world wide web. Basically the more links you have leaving your site, the less quality the search engines assume it has - you're passing your "link juice" to another site. And if your site doesn't have many inbound links, then it's even worse, and your site is viewed as even less of an authority and could be labelled a "link farm" and even be excluded from search results. This would have to be on a huge scale and is not meant to scare any readers, it's just a big example to explain a little thing.

Google needed a way to fight these spam attacks on their algorithm, and so their Spam team decided in 2005 to introduce the nofollow attribute. This was originally introduced as a measure against blog spam, but was embraced by the whole web within a very short time and is now common. The basic idea is that you can add the no follow attribute to a link on your website, and the search engine will ignore any possible benefit to that site from yours. It doesn't ignore the link, but just does not pass on the "link juice" from your site.

So when do need to use nofollow? Well, maybe you have important information on your site to external pages, such as a list of books on amazon, for example. Well, you can nofollow the amazon links (they don't need your publicity) and you're still providing a service for your clients visiting your web.

I can offer you Barcelona SEO services for your company and website. Also, if you prefer, I can offer in-house SEO training in Barcelona. Contact me for more details.

How Many Googlebots Does it Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

After the recent Barcelona Search Congress in January, anyone would think that Barcelona is becoming the hub of all things Search!

Yesterday saw the start of WSDM 2009 - apparently we're supposed to read it "wisdom" guys - which is only the second, but hugely important ACM (Association for Computer Machinery) International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. OK, sorry for all those acronyms, there

Although very small scale as opposed tothe search congress, and held in the Auditorium of the Imagina Building, there were some fascinating things discussed on just day one.

Google's Jeff Dean kicked off the show (ok, well after the typical Spanish coffees, etc.) and literally wow-ed the audience with details of Google's infrastructure with regards search compared to 1999 and 2009.

Google now has 1000 times more search queries now than in 1999, so they also now have 1000 more computers, processors, etc. to tackle the problem. This has resulted in speedier repsonses (down to 200 miliseconds from 1000) and it's amazing to think that up to 1000 machines are consulted for a single search string!Perhaps the most important and impressive thing to note was that the new machines also crawl content much much faster (like 10,000 times faster) meaning that often SERPs change order within minutes of being shown - your position is never absolute until another full day or update, which is amazing.

For more information on website optimisation in Barcelona, please contact me at Barcelona SEO and I'll be happy to chat with you about your website.