The old bar system used by Google to show search volumes made it very difficult to pick up these gems.  For example, the phrase “business speakers” generates an average of 2,900 searches over 12 months, but also has very high competitor numbers targeting that keyword in adwords campaigns (which we assume they are also doing with their onsite optimisation for organic results).  In contrast, the term “business keynote speaker” generates 880 search on average over the last 12 months and has significantly relative lower volume.  Targeting the latter term will be both cheaper in adwords campaigns and easier in organic optimisation and potentially lead you to more traffic than joining the melee for the larger search term.  In fact, we can even make some meaningful forecasts around this data - such as, if we get 3% of the search volume for our spend we would potentially pick up 27 searches, and not just 27 random searches, but 27 very qualified searches - fill your calendar with these 27 engagements and you will be very busy!   Ascertaining this would have been almost impossible using the previous bar system with Google because in fact the largest search term in this area is actually “motivational speaker” which has on average 60,500 searches.  In this scale the difference between 2,900 searches and 880 searches is insignificant and hence indiscernible under the old Google bar system - we probably would have overlooked a excellent opportunity.

Certainly it is not a perfect tool to use, but it becomes much more useful when you become adept at the art of discernment when considering all the different factors and the new Google reporting of actual search volume has gone a massive way to making this easier.

The Google website gives a few other key considerations for this change - all of which make sense:

• Knowing approximate physical searches allows you to plan your budget more accurately around your selected terms
• Keywords can be selected that are most likely to return quality leads within your budget
• You can better create ad groups around keywords you find relevant and more closely target your ads and landing pages

Finally a few other points to consider when using this tool:

1. The location and language targeting of your adwords account will influence the search volume.  If you are using the keyowrd tool from within your Google adwords campaign be aware that your country campaign and language settings will determine the results.  On the other hand if your are using the external keyword tool you will need to set the appropriate language and country settings - ignore these at your peril, you will end up optimising your site for vacation when you are targeting the UK “holiday” market.
2. The match type of your keyword has a big influence on the search volume that Google calculates.  You need to learn the difference between match, broad and phrase keywords as these influences the variations of your keywords that will display your ads or rank you in organic results.
3. The approximate search volume as reported by this tool shows the search volume statistics for the last calendar month whereas the approximate average search volume column shows the average monthly search volume over a “recent” 12 month period.

The content is one of the most important parts of the website and often its ignored, given to the intern to write, or cobbled together at the last minute.  Or even despite all the strategy, planning and conceptualising there is always a mad rush at the end when a few pages were left out and content is produced ad hoc and jammed into a page that does not fit it.  Unfortunately, this only serves to leave a sour taste for your website visitors and worse risks turning them away.

There are three simple rules that you can follow to make your content more appealing to your visitors:

1.  Use of headings
User don’t read websites, they scan them.  Use good clear headings to help your readers quickly identify with your content and product.  A major word of advice, drop the “Welcome to our website” heading - it is so 1990’s.  Instead state what your company does, or better still use a ‘big fat claim’, such as lose weight in 21 days or top rating hostel in Bundaberg, to draw your customer into the page.

2.  Me, I and We
It’s great to tell your web visitor what your company does, but at the end of the day they really want to know what’s in it for them and how do they get it.  Rather than focussing on your business focus on the benefits to the user.  The idea is achieve “written visualisation” with your content, that is, content which helps your visitors see why they should product to get the maximum benefit - “buy x services and your marriage will last forever” or “use bleach for a whiter brighter smile”.  Have a look at a post we wrote last year about the we-we test when writing content.

3.  Keep it Simple Stupid
It’s cool that you have new 24 seat Mitsi Fusos - but no one really cares.  Joking aside, ignore the technical specs of your products and focus on the benefits.  In fact, I remember from Kiwi Experience days that it always said in the brochure - our buses have big windows to look out and big stereos to cruise to (or words to that effect).  That sort of stuff really works!

Once you determine which keywords you are going target the next step is writing your web content so that it makes the most of these keywords. At Xebidy we have been using a Yahoo API in which we can insert the content to be analysed and it returns the keywords that the Yahoo search algorithm would theoretically pick up.

The guys at SEO Book had actually developed this tool on their site for anyone to use and I thought this a great idea so we have adapted it here using our own Yahoo API key for you guys. Feel free to give it a try - you will find that small changes make a real big difference.

Our own internal tool is very similar to this and along with others we try and work out the best structure for title tags, descriptions, headings, content etc. Unfortunately, no such tool exists for Google that I know of.

One last very important point is to remember about your users. DON’T stuff your content full of keywords to the point where it is completely unreadable by your customers. Search engines don’t buy your product! Check out some of our previous posts on the Art of Writing Web Content.

Many are promoting this as “the biggest change to the way people find each other on the internet since its inception” (Paul Twomey from domain contolling authority ICann). “Apart from the .com, .net or .org, 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city, or proper names,” he said.

In my opinion it will have little effect.  At the end of the day .com will always be the first and foremost important domain.  In the most part if the domain is not available in the standard channels then creating a “similar” domain with a different suffix is not going to help you capture market share.  Let’s say someone decides that they are going to setup .search and register google.search - users are not going to be fooled and likewise I would not think it would take very long for the holder of that URL to get a wee knock on the door from the Google lawyer.  I think it is pretty much in everyones normal method that if they are trying to guess a domain the first place they start is with the .com and then if that is not correct then with the country code of company they are searching - I would expect this to remain the case for a long time.

I certainly don’t think it will be the case that we are going to see a rush of new domains infringing on others business names.  If the domain is gone in the .com or for a New Zealand company the .co.nz then I think people are far to weary these days to try and register the businesses competing name with a  different URL.
The only interesting thing will be if the big boys start registering domains for fun, for example Flickr might become flickr.photos - and because they would own the right to issue the suffix no one else have access to this.  This might create an interesting competitive advantage.  There might be a few new domains that are launched, maybe .xxx for the porno sites or alternatively we might get some real inventive domains such as was the case with the guys that came up with using their sub domains to create del.icio.us and script.alicio.us but overall I don’t think there will be much of the shift that everyone in the general public seems to be talking about.

Normally there is not much to say about someone changing jobs, but in the case of Bruce leaving Oz Experience I thought it only right to say that working with him in a client-supplier relationship has been a great pleasure and a ball of laughs for all of us at Xebidy.  Bruce has moved to Melbourne to be closer to his family and for anyone who cares hunt him down, then employ he - we certainly rate him here at Xebidy.
Bruce, thanks for support, thanks for the fun and laughs and the very best of luck with whatever you do next.  You have left three great website in Oz Experience, Adventure Tours and Wayward Bus.

If you don’t know by now we design and develop great websites (hic).  But great design and lots of cool functionality doesn’t necessarily maketh the website - it’s a cliche, but it’s true - content is king.

The content is one of the most important parts of the website and often its ignored, given to the intern to write, or cobbled together at the last minute.  Or even despite all the strategy, planning and conceptualising there is always a mad rush at the end when a few pages were left out and content is produced ad hoc and jammed into a page that does not fit it.  Unfortunately, this only serves to leave a sour taste for your website visitors and worse risks turning them away.

There are three simple rules that you can follow to make your content more appealing to your visitors:

1.  Use of headings

User don’t read websites, they scan them.  Use good clear headings to help your readers quickly identify with your content and product.  A major word of advice, drop the “Welcome to our website” heading - it is so 1990’s.  Instead state what your company does, or better still use a ‘big fat claim’, such as lose weight in 21 days or top rating hostel in Bundaberg, to draw your customer into the page.

2.  Me, I and We

It’s great to tell your web visitor what your company does, but at the end of the day they really want to know what’s in it for them and how do they get it.  Rather than focussing on your business focus on the benefits to the user.  The idea is achieve “written visualisation” with your content, that is, content which helps your visitors see why they should product to get the maximum benefit - “buy x services and your marriage wil last forever” or “use bleach for a whiter brighter smile”.

3.  Keep it Simple Stupid

It’s cool that you have new 24 seat Mitsi Fusos - but no one really cares.  Joking aside, ignore the technical specs of your products and focus on the benefits.  In fact, I remember from Kiwi Experience days that it always said in the brochure - our buses have big windows to look out and big stereos to cruise to (or words to that effect).  That sort of stuff really works!

I have been on a plane today flying from Queenstown to Auckland on my way to a Backpacking Queensland committee meeting in Bundaberg to take up a newly appointed role. Firstly, New Zealand is a stunning place - lots of fresh snow on the Southern Alps and Mt Cook looking as majestic as ever in the clear blue sky. Nonethless, I am pontification; and that is not the purpose of this post.

In between staring out of the window I was reading an article about SEO and came across this interesting statement:

Don’t put too many links to other sites (on your site). Links out lower your pages’ importance

Somehow this does not quite sit right with me and I thought I would throw it out for some comment (Andrew?).

I have written about the importance of links before and my understanding is that a link to your site from another site (or vice versa) is a vote of confidence for that other site. I believe Google looks at the content of a web page and tries to ascertain the relevancy of that content for your particular subject. Links from similar pages help indicate to search engines that users think this page to be relevant.

Now inbound links are obviously strongest - a link to your page from a page of similar content will increase the value of your site and its position in search results. An important point is that links from pages of dissimilar content will not be regarded with much value - if at all, therefore getting a link on someones link page is pretty much useless.

Second reciprocal links are some value, but nowhere near as high as one-way links. Google and other search engines deprecate the value of reciprocal links as generally they go against the whole idea of links being a vote of relevancy for the content on the web page. When it became obvious of the importance of links in search engines tere was a mad rush to get links - the “you link to me and I will link to you” mentality. It didn’t take long for Google to work out that this wasn’t the idea and to quickly devalue reciprocal links.

So what of outbound links? Well I believe that the backbone of the search engine algorithm is the concept of linking and that if having outgoing links lowered the value of your site the whole search engine rankings system would be undermined as everyone would stop linking.

Instead well used outbound links that provide your users with links to other web pages of complementary content are adding to your website as a resource and increasing your search engine value as your page is recognised as being more relevant for your particular area.

I thought I would take the opportunity to remind everyone of the importance of backups. We had a very bad incident last week with a past client - Backpacking Queensland - where their hosting company has somehow been corrupted and they have lost their entire site - at this stage it would also appear they have lost the backup of the site also (we don’t know why this is; whether the backup was not being done properly or whether the backup has truly been corrupted as their main server has).

Unfortunately for Backpacking Queensland Xebidy had no ongoing relationship with them and so we were not holding any backups either, however, we do have the last beta version before the site went live and we were able to resurrect this on our own hosting solution. We will do our best to assist them in rebuilding their site as fast as possible.

Mat has also been able to build a script which retrieved all the page which Google had indexed and from there we are also hoping that we will be able to rebuild many of the pages this week.

Regardless the important point of this post is to ensure that either your IT staff or you hosting company are doing a backup properly. It is a very wise measure to test these backups regularly also. It is only when something has gone wrong do people actually go to their backup an find that this was not set properly or that something else was wrong with it.

We are Xebidy have certainly taken this opportunity to do a review of our own internal processes for out code and are setting up new measures. Make sure you are not the next to be caught out!

It is not so much probably the power of the blog but the power of fresh content and inter-linked conversation on the Internet.

Last week Google updated the page rank as displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser.  While most of our clients went up a notch or two the interesting result for us was the jump of our own site here from a page rank of 4 to a page rank of 6.  As Andrew rightly commented on one of our earlier posts, despite the fact that we proport to be experts in search engine optimistation and Internet Marketing we are in fact shite at the whole SEO thing on this particular site - evidenced no less by the selection of page title.

The important point I made at the time of this debate is that we don’t really aim this site to do well in search engines, in fact I have no idea which terms lead to our most traffic etc. (far too busy worrying about out clients sites).  The blog is aimed at a pretty specific readership of clients, prospective clients and people who are interested.  It is pretty amazing the number of readers we do have and the number of comments (many of them made via email) that we receive from so many different people.  I find it rewarding when we receive feedback from the so-called CEOs and Managing Directors of some of the big tourism companies in Australia and New Zealand.

However, to achieve a page rank of 6 in just 12 months seems pretty good to me with no effort in actually marketing site.  But in reality all it does is reaffirm the argument we constantly put forward on this blog that by providing good strong fresh content that is valuable to people then your site will generate a high number of links and will be recognised as a valuable resource by search engines (particularly Google in this case).

We try and write something relevant to our audience every few days, and I think the important point here is relevant. I think the Xebidy blog readership is maintained because the content on the site is interesting and relevant to our target market.  Clearly, and this is not new to anyone, if you want to do well in search engines you need to be producing fresh relevant content regularly that is of interest to your target market.  This will lead to people naturally linking to your site without the need to go out and generate false links and put so much effort into actually chasing those links.  And, obviously a blog is one of the easiest ways to do this (but certainly not the only way).

Unfortunately, I don’t know if it is me or am I just not getting it - but I found the new Dragonfly developer tool for Opera quite unusable.

Firstly, Dragonfly is in a separate window and I could not work out how to integrate the window of my site and Dragonfly debugger.  The layout of Dragonfly and the whole feel of it is probably quite cool and it has some nice features like showing the code in a site tree style layout but without the two windows being integrated I couldn’t see the point.

Secondly, I could not seem to edit anything in the HTML or CSS in the debugger.  This for me is one of the greatest joys of Firebug, I can change the colour of a font, or the typeset or the size of a heading and see exactly what it looks like for the whole site.  It’s great for those last few yards when you want to make sure everything lines up nicely or just try a few little tweaks.  The only thing I have ever wanted more of Firebug is if it linked to FTP and SVN so that changes you made in the browser could be committed to the site development for real.

As I said perhaps I am missing something, as Firebug is so intuitive that it is not something that you read the manual for.  In fact, in some cases we have even shown our clients how to use Firebug so that if they have an error while entering content and building up a new site they can go to the console copy the error and send it through to us.  Makes debugging the exact problem 100 times faster.

It is expected that when Internet Explorer 8 comes out sooner than later it also will include a developer tool such as Firebug and Dragonfly.  I hope for their sake it is at least integrated into the browser and has the ability to edit the code on the fly.