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.

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.