Removing Personalisation From Your Google Results - Any Good?

OK, this might be a bit of a techie post - i.e. not just for the everyday user of the internet, and in fact might be a little silly, given recent finds from Dr Pete over at SEOMoz. Still it's an important metric to be aware of within search.

Google has been using personalised search for more than a couple of years now, and recently decided that they will deliver you personalised results in the serps even when you're not signed in. This means that your search history will influence future results, as will other sites tyou visit on a regular basis. In a similar way that GMail scans your mail to provide you with "appropriate" adwords ads within your email, Google likes to control what they present to you in the serps.



So for people like us seos who need to check "reliable" serps for reporting on clients, etc. this can be a bit of a pain. Sure, Webmaster Tools recently intorduced a time-saving "your-site-is-ranking-position-X-for-these-keywords" kind of tool, which is veerrryyy handy, but not always reliable.

So, there is simple way to ensure your results are NOT personalised. You make a search and then add "&pws=0" to the end of the search string in the direction bar at the top of your browser. So for example, if you make a search like this for Barcelona SEO Training you can add on a &pws=0 to the end to DE-Personalise the results. Depending on your IP and your previous search history, you may or many not see a difference here. And as the post from SEOMoz describes above (although hardly exhaustive), it can appear to have little effect anyway - it's just good to know the possibility exists and for this to be exaplianed to clients, too.

Are you looking to improve your website's performance? I can help. Contact me at Barcelona SEO for an informal chat about your site and its possibilities.

Great Free Eye-Tracking Tool

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of improving conversions. There are various methods for testing content and appearances of websites, such as A/B testing, heatmaps, videos of your site viewers as well as looking at your analytics and logs. So what about at the design stage? Sometimes if your company has SEO in mind from the beginning, you can start to save valuable time with testing. Sure, A/B testing is a fantastic way of letting your users decide which page they prefer to help in the conversion tunnel, but it can take time for an experiment to run. Real eye-tracking equipment and testing is very expensive, and again, is better with a website already designed. This is where attentionwizard steps in.



Attention wizard allows you to quickly upload any .jpeg file and then creates a pdf eyemap on the image. So this is a great way to see, even at the design phase, if you're getting it right with the calls to actions, etc. The process claims to have a 75% accuracy rate, and having seen other tools at a preview or at an introductory price, I'd have to say that it's good enough as an indicator, and a fantastic addition for any design stage for free.

Check out the first image above, which is my home page for Barcelona SEO. Then check out the below image (click for greater detail).



You can see clearly the position that the eye would naturally follow, and the numbers over the lines tell you (the estimated) trajectory of the eye scanning your page. Good news is that people are drawn to the subscribe box, and after quickly looking at the translation flag, move back to reading the text. This reinforces the need for a good site structure, with the majority of users expecting navigation to the left.

Are you looking to improve conversions on your website? Contact me for ideas and a review of your site, or ask about my Barcelona SEO Training sessions.

A Couple of New Twitter Tools.

Keeping up with all things social is difficult. Many small businesses are torn between allocating budget and time between traditional marketing methods, SEO and Social Media. Social Media is a much larger and longer strategy than traditional SEO mentods, or conversion optimisation and needs specific goals to warrant the time and effort spent. This is again difficult to measure - how can you set goals for twitter, for example? Number of followers? brand mentions? it all depends, and I still maintain that time can be better spent for the majority of small businesses on other seo strategies to drive more traffic or increase conversions on the traffic you already have. By all means, claim all your brand names as soon as you can, and maintain a small presence so accounts don't get deleted, but if you're struggling on man power for a B2C (business to customer) venture, don't go overboard.



There are a couple of great tools to make things that little bit easier for you to try and keep up with things if social media is new to you. Twitter itself has an internal search, but there are a couple of other supplemental tools which can help.

Firstly, in terms of reputation managment, and finding out when you, your name, or your product and website are mentioned, you can use TweetBeep. This is a handy way of tracking your online presence and will become a more important tool as your social strategy continues along the way. Sign up as you start, and then wait until things get moving before you'll see important data. Kind of like google alerts, but for twitter.



For trending topics, try Twitturly. If you want to stay on top of what's being re-tweeted the most, or fing out particular notions in your niche, then try this service as well as twitter search. The main difference is that twitter search will give you a real-time vertical list of the things you seacrh for, and twitturly gives you trending topics with amount of retweets, etc. It's very handy for stripping down bit.ly urls, for example (so you can see the destination url) and also if you type your own username in there, it will give you a drilldown of your tweets, who has retweeted, who clicked through to the link, etc. handy.

Are you struggling to cope with the idea of a social strategy? for affordable SEO in Barcelona contact me for more details. Also, if you're interested in SEO Training in Barcelona, I can offer in house sessions and workshops.

AdWords Invitation Again

While it seems many are still feeling the effects of a the financial downturn, the monster that is Google reported 6.6 billion dollars revenue recently. No-one is denying the firm's amazing grasp on today's current market share, and if anyone can topple Apple's current iphone monopoly, it could just be Google (but maybe not with the nexus one). Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt will be touching down in Barcelona next month for the 3GSM Mobile Phone conference.


However, maybe the above article has more to tell, as investors were less than pleased with the revenue created in the last release. Cue my typical letter through the post for an invitation to Google's AdWords programme. I'm not quite sure why Google assume I'm not already using AdWords, or have not in the past, but still the letters come.

This time, the offer was for 75 Euros to spend on AdWords, with the usual annoyance of this only applying to new accounts of less than 14 days validity. So that's really 75 Euros minus the $5 Google makes you pay to set up the account then? The amount goes down if I don't "claim" my credit before 28th February - a clever trick to get users in the door asap.

As I've explained before, this "hook" is an easy way for Google to make more money, given that the majority of small businesses would leap at the chance to have a free 75 Euros spend on AdWords, perhaps not knowing the cost per click of their chosen keywords. AdWords interface is sufficiently complicated for you to plug away until you have a campaign and a couple of adgroups set up for a free 75 Euros, but the enticement is there once that 75 Euros is spent - they already have your credit card, and you have your campaign set up, so all you need to do is leave it live - temptation is great.

Depsite there being some great online resources from Google themselves to learn more about AdWords, it's not all that well publicised, and I suspect that many people will be sucked into throwing away lots of cash on campaigns which are not optimised, or which they have no idea of how to manage. It's also fairly well known that ads can appear on poor choices of the content network, and that default settings such as broad match are always left on, meaning an initial 2 or 3 day campaign can throw away money before refinement is carried out.

Do you have an AdWords account which needs attention? I offer AdWords set up and management in Barcelona as well as other Pay Per click campaigns. Contact me at Barcelona SEO for more details.

Query Deserves Freshness

I've talked before about the importance of real time search and the engines have been trying their hardest to keep up with the speed of the internet, especially with breaking news stories - things like Michael Jackson's death and even going far back as the elections in Iran. While Google likes to think they're keeping up with real time search, and Matt Cutts comes out gloating as soon as something worthwhile occurs, the fact of the matter is that google is still having to rely on Twitter updates in their new "onebox".

The whole idea stems from something within Google's algorithm which is known as QDF or "Query Deserves Freshness". So basically if a load of people start to search for something similar, then this can trigger something within the algorithm to search for more current documents. Let me give you a concrete example.

Imagine we're in mid-July, and you perform a search on google for "Golden Globes". The likelihood is that you'll get a pretty standard SERP with 10 results (likely no local results here), possibly a video? OK, but we're not in July, we're in January, and the Golden Globes have just finished last Sunday. So this is the kind of query that searchers want to return "fresh" results, get it? Check out the image below.


You can see that the SERP is returning the scrollable "onebox" with tweets from 2 minutes ago. This one box appeared around half way down the page. First was news results, then 4 organic results, then the onebox. I assume that google is still taking high preference with the news results as obviously they are much more credible and trustworthy than people's tweets. In fact, I'd bet my bottom dollar that it's why they're doing that - check out this worrying post on real time spam from sugarrea and a couple of others.

So what's the takeaway from this? Well, if your niche within your sector is currently not being exploited and you run a very "current" business, think about staying REALLY up to date with news and breaking stories - obviously without spamming. If no-one else within your industry is doing it (or no-one in your area) then the chances are you'll establish yourself as an authority on that niche, and if google decides to experiment more with the onebox away from the QDF algorithm , then you'll be right placed to scoop up all the traffic.

Need help planning a campaign to stay on top of the current real-time search? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about your business and website. I offer affordable organic website optimisation for your website as well as SEO Training, PPC campaings and link building campaigns.

Increase Subscriptions with Email Sign up

Despite the varied attempts at making RSS an open and easy thing for everyone to use, it's still pretty complicated to the everyday internet user. Most people recognise the difference between a typical website and a blog, and often people can stumble upon blogs when searching for something on the web. Now maybe the blog doesn't fulfill the original query's desire, but is still of interest and is something a user might want to look back on at a later date, with more time. This is what bookmarking is all about. But what about if you love the content on a site and want to subscribe?

Well, up to now there's been RSS, which is the norm for any site publishing new content on a regular basis. News, reviews, blogs all use RSS, and the unfortunate thing is that not everyone knows what it is or how it works. However, help is at hand. We're talking about e-mail subscription.



Not only did hubspot recently find that if you're looking to add subscribers to your blog or your news feed, then 12 times more people will subscribe if compared to RSS, but it's a hell of a lot easier to simply type your email address into a box and subscribe than work out how to read your RSS feeds if you've never used a reader before, or have an intention to. What could be easier than opening an email in your inbox from your favourite blog?

For some strange reason, blog hosts like Blogger and WordPress don't use the email subscription widget as a default (although RSS is there). There is more than one free tool to enable email subscription, and despite Feedburner getting a little bit of a hard time over this sometimes, it's dead easy to set up.

First you need to set up a feedburner account, or if you have RSS through blogger, it's likely you already have one. Next you need to go into the feed itself from the default page, and then click the publicize tab, top middle. From here you'll see the third option down should be Email subscriptions. Click here, and then you have a couple of choices. If you're using typepad or blogger, you can simply convert the code into a widget and blogger will add that to your html template you already have in place (you may want to move the widget around - usually up to near the top). And that's it! from then on, you can manage your feed subscriptions and look into the stats any time you like. Given hubspot's anaylsis and the general idea of it being easier than RSS, I'd be surprised if you didn't see an increase in subscribers.

Are you looking to optimise your website or blog? Barcelona SEO has many techniques which can raise your web's profile and move your pages up in the organic listings. Or would you prefer to lear yourself? Barcelona SEO Training is another option for in-house sessions tailor made for your website and needs.