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).

I look at so many web projects where there has been lots of different but similar websites created by the company for different angles of their business, yet they are all marketing pretty much the same message.  What tends to happen is these sites all kind of have the same look and feel but are selling the virtues independently of a particular product or division of the business.  I guess the idea behind this sort of strategy is to spread yourself out over the Internet - try and make a bigger sales web.  Unfortunately, I believe that this sort of strategy is missing one essential point in search engine and internet marketing.  That being the value of a site is in it’s perceived authority and at the end of the day it’s number of links.

For example, those that follow this blog will know that one of our team, Mat, owns and operates Experience Queenstown.  Mat regularly acquires strong Queenstown based domain names that are no longer used by their owners (that is, they have been left to expire).  For example, he owns a lot of good taxi URLs.  Mat does not try and develop a whole new site for each domain (or set of domains) he purchases rather he redirects all the URLs to their relevant pages within his Experience Queenstown website - thereby building up the overall number of links to his site and therefore the sites authority.  The perceived authority value of Queenstown taxis does not just go up, but also the overall value of his site in all things Queenstown related (somewhat illustrated by the infamous Google page rank algorithm).

This is however an SEO strategy and in most cases the stuff I come across involves businesses that are running 5 or 6 domains each with only a handful of pages for each of their products and companies all linking together, just for the mere purpose of feeling like they have more stuff out there on the web.  For example, I saw one such site that has it’s sort of corporate home page, then it’s got it’s coaching products which sits on a completely separate URL called something like Bobscoaching.com, then it has it’s corporate solutions which sit on a URL something like Bobscorporate.com and so on.  Each URL home page has page ranks of about 20 or 3.

I don’t agree with this sort of strategy.  I believe that in this case all sites would be better off being combined into one corporate site and the other URLs permanently redirected (see post on 301 redirects) to this one domain.  I believe that this could raise the Google page rank to 3 or 4 and would give the site much more overall authority in all areas.  The overall site would now have more incoming links, it would be easier to maintain, introducing fresh content to one area will have a positive impact on all areas of the business and so on.

It is common practice in the travel industry to start a new website to try and sell the same thing differently - but at the end of the day, you are doing no one any favors.  The money you invest in building the new site would be better suited to developing the message and the marketing programme of the existing site and increasing its’ overall position in the search engines.  It is interesting to see the likes of HostelWorld have recently let some of their regional domain names expire in the interest of pursuing their primary domain only.

Finally, I think it is important to think about this when buying domains.  I see a lot of people buying domains because of the name of the domain thinking this will be the most important thing - sure it helps in part in the mystical search engine algorithm, but at the end of the day the real value is in the perceived authority of the website content itself and therefore it’s inbound links.

Most website administrators create a site map, but do they actually know why they do this?  There are two main reason for creating a site map and both of them entail completely different forms.

Firstly, there is the site map for the customer, that helps them navigate around your website.  This usually takes the form of hyperlinks and sometimes even a short excerpt about each page.  The link to this site map usually appear somewhere around the website footer.

The second type is the one that we generate to tell search engines about our site.  These contain elements that can significantly assist search engines in cataloging your website and therefore your sites performance in search engines rankings.

Site maps should firstly be generated in XML.  These can at a later date be changed to an RSS or Atom feed which will tell search engines when URLs are added without having to go back and resubmit your site map all the time, but initially you want Google to know of all your pages and a feed will only give the recent URLs.  The alternative options is a straight text file (.txt) but I am not a huge fan of this as it allows only one URL per line and misses all the frequency and priority information.

An example XML site map would look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-9″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www,sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://xebidy.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The two most interesting tags are the frequency and priority tags.  The frequency tells a search engine how often the content of the pages is likely (not necessarily exactly) to change.  The different options are:

• Always
• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Never

An important point is that although you are only indicating the likely frequency of your page updates you should be as accurate as possible.  If you state that your content is updated weekly and search engines consider this information when setting their index stats for your site and it is not the case then the search engines may not return to those pages even monthly, meaning you could go for some time without getting your fresh content indexed.

The priority tag allows you to set a relative value of between 0.0 and 1.0 for each page.  Unfortunately it is unlikely that the priority you assign to a page will effect the order in which your pages appear in the search engines (as we know there are many other factors that influence that) however it does tell search engines the order of importance of your pages as you deem them.  It will help search engines to determine which pages in your site to index first and it will increase the likelihood of your most important pages appearing in the search databases.  Finally an important point is that you will not gain anything by setting all your pages priorities high as the priority is relative to the other pages on your site so your important pages wont be considered over the others.

Once you have created your site map the next step is to advise search engines of its existence.  In Google this is easy, you simply submit the site map through the webmasters interface - this is certainly the best way.  Alternatively, you can specify the location of the site map into the robots.txt file - this is a good method for when using an RSS for your site map.  Ideally you should do both.

For more information on site maps check out sitemaps.org

Isn’t Google great? There is a whole industry of hacks like me built up around trying to “beat” Google and get better search engine rankings. It’s clever how if you want to do anything to improve the way Google considers the mountain of data it holds, or the way it receives that data then there are APIs for everything from maps to search algorithms to visualization techniques and so on. But if you want to find a way to cheat the system, take a short-cut to higher rankings, then Google significantly vague. Better still through you will find a mountain of debate, myth and general confession across the so called experts about whatever the subject may be.

In this regard I am talking today about the Google link: operator. I am regularly asked why if you type link:www.domain.com into Google you get a different list and numbers of links than if you look at the same domain in Google Webmaster; and moreover is there any value in the list of links provided by the link :operator, after all it seems to list a bunch of crap pages with ranks even of zero.

In my opinion the facts are:

• In the old days (pre 2002) the link: operator displayed all the links to a site – but this was changed for two reasons: firstly, it provided an opportunity to cheat the system, you could in effect identify a competing site’s links and set out to poach them; secondly, the shear weight of the data Google is holding and the ongoing processing power required to continually answer such queries became a burden for Google.

• The second point above is case in point by the fact that Google does not publicly update it’s page rank tool nor the numbers of links shown in the Webmaster section regularly. Some say it is as infrequently as three monthly - but I see my link numbers growing month on month in Webmaster tools – so it seems just fair to say frequently but not in real time.

• Which means that the number of links and in fact the physical links themselves in your Webmaster tools are unlikely to ever be exactly accurate.

• If you want to “spy” on a competitors links then it appears Yahoo is the best most transparent source. You can be rest assured if Yahoo, MSN or anyone else knows about that links, so does Google. The important point in fact is how much weight Google gives to those links. Recall, Google looks at the content of the page generating the links, the text that makes up the link (the anchor text), the considered importance of the link generating page (it’s Page Rank) and the content of the page receiving the link. Quite simply if your page is about Queensland and the linking page is about Queensland and anchor text says something like “more information about travel in Queensland” then that link is going to be of more value than same reciprocal link buried in a links page linking to your generic home page. Matt Cutts on his blog even makes it more clear than this - he says “do not assume just because you see a back link that it’s carrying any weight”.
  

So is there any value in the list of links generated by the link: operator. After all Google includes it as a tool from Webmasters. Firstly, the list is not as random as some would suggest – evidenced by the fact you get the same result over and over, and because of the point that Google doesn’t want to be bombarded by erroneous queries when its primary purpose is better quality search results matched to pertinent advertising. Unfortunately, I can’t see the value of the link: operator. The list is clearly a subset of all the links to a site but there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to the list; they don’t seem to be the most recent links, not the highest value links or any other obvious reason, and they certainly are not going to be of any use in a competitor analysis.

So in summary the answer to the continual question is why does the results on the link: operator vary so radically from the links shown in Google Webmasters is to avoid link poaching and to reduce the effort on the Google database.  Secondly, the links shown in Webmasters more accurately reflects the number of links to your site - but in no way indicates the value of those links.  Finally, use Yahoo! or MSN to get an indication of your competitors links.

Unfortunately this is not a unique post, in fact it is something I have harped on about a lot before - but it seems extremely relevant to me at the moment as I have had two incidents recently where I have seen that people don’t understand the concept of keywords with regard to visitor numbers to a website and more importantly the business purpose of the website.

Let me explain; your website exists for a specific purpose, whether it is to sell bed nights for your hotel, or tours, or houses on a real estate site, or rental properties as in the case of the property development guys I had lunch with yesterday, or in the case of many sites, just as source of information. The biggest mistake is to get trapped in the game of focussing purely on visitor numbers, that is, all search engine and marketing effort you put in focusses just on increasing visitor numbers, without a commensurate focus on real website purpose - say for example selling bed nights. Let me put it another way, if Xebidy reduced the overall number of visitors to your site but doubled the number of people booking a nights stay in your hotel would you say that the search engine and Internet Marketing strategy was a success or a failure?

Hopefully, a success - the return on investment is better. So, one of the most important steps in this regard is the selection of keywords that you will focus on in your marketing efforts to attract customers to your site. This is not rocket science, identify your target market, if you sell tours in Northern Territory to 35+ age group then targeting keywords such as “backpacker bus” and “backpacker tours” is a waste of time and effort, the result is that you will have a high bounce rate on your website. That means, visitors are coming to your site from search results expecting to see some information based on their search query and instead seeing something different so therefore immediately leaving your site. Step 2, identify the search queries that your target market is using, assuming then that you appear high up in the search results page for your selected terms, the higher the search volume the better. If you can find that getting high rank results in search engines for a particularly competitive terms (say Sydney hostel) is difficult, then target more specific terms that might be easier to rank with but nonetheless are more likely to lead to conversion (purchase etc) of visitors on your site. Studies have shown that the more words a user puts into their search query the more likely they are to be a purchaser.

Finally, the keywords you select should be proprietary information, they should be your competitive advantage. If you approach your keyword phrases with a great deal research and then refining them ongoing based on your analytics, which terms lead to more sales, which terms don’t - this is not something you should be telling everyone. We can use lots of tools such as Spyfu to try and work out what competitor keyword terms are, but at the end of the day only you know your sales figures. More importantly, you should be setting up goal conversions and funnels in your analytics packages so that you can see what customers are doing on your site when they come to your site from particular search terms and identifying which ones make you money.

Let’s sum up with a hypothetical example, Bob has a tour company running backpackers around New Zealand. 40% of Bob’s market is Americans, 40% English, 10% Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities thereafter. Bob’s competitors all rate very highly for the terms Backpacker Bus and Backpacker tours - Bob doesn’t. But Bob does do well for some nice generic terms such as New Zealand and Queenstown, and even adventure travel, he has spent a great deal of money targeting these terms. But, he hardly makes any sales online - why not? Because, when someone comes to his site from the search term New Zealand they leave it again. They were not looking for a backpacker tour they were looking for information on New Zealand. Xebidy do the analyse of the search terms with Bob and discover that before his market travel to New Zealand 90% of them do not use the term Backpackers. In the US Backpackers are people that go hiking in the bush and camping. In fact, Bob discovers through his analyse of his market that most of his American market are students and that the main search terms they use are in fact budget travel, student travel and student vacation. Wow and behold, this is a long way off from “backpacker”. Bob reworks his strategy, suddenly his web sales to his America market sky rockets. He does the same for his UK and Canadian market, identifying the keywords that they use in search engines and targeting his site to match. An interesting thing occurs, Bob receives the same amount of traffic as before but from different sources. He receives less customers reaching his site for non-specific terms like Queenstown and more traffic for specific terms like “cheap bus travel New Zealand” and his sales go through the roof. The last thing he is going to do is announce to his competitors, hey I found where all the business is!

Sounds too simple? It is! But it is staggering the number of people I talk to who don’t get it. They want to target broad keywords terms that don’t generate sales, that try to be everything to everyone, and interestingly enough they don’t identify their market. The use of “bus” for companies selling tours, “hotel” for companies selling hostels and Queenstown Restaurants for a company that leases commercial space properties in Queenstown. Go figure!

I think that people completely underestimate the importance of the title tag in their website development and subsequently in search engine optimisation. In some ways the title tag can make or break the success of a site.

Firstly, the title tag is given very high weighting in search engine algorithms (Google included).

Secondly, like the title of a book the title tag tells the user what the page is about - it draws the user in. Looking at two options: “Fletcher Living at Jacks Point, Queenstown” versus “Your next home at Jacks Point, Queenstown”. Which one would you be more likely to pick up and read? Clearly, the second one not only appeals to an emotion (or in other cases has a call to action, e.g. book your hostel online here) it also explains quite clearly what the page is about - finding your next home in Jacks Point.

Getting your book picked up or in the case of the web and search engine results, your web page selected for visiting, is an important point that I think most website publishers/owners overlook. Focus tends to be so driven toward the search results without then taking that extra step and focussing on actually turning those search engine rankings into real customers. The title tag plays an essential role here. In the search results it is the title tag that appears at the top of the result. It is here that a user say staring at a page of results for a search, say, Auckland hostel, has to make a decision on which they are going to click on to get the information they want. If your title reads “cheap Auckland hostel”, “book your Auckland hostel here”, “the best rates on Auckland hostels” “Auckland hostels rated and booked” and so it is going to do one heck of a better job at attracting the user to your site than the page that says “Bobs Backpackers, Auckland, New Zealand”. Notice, I switched in that latter title example to “backpackers” - I did this on purpose; it is essential that you know what search terms users are using to get to your site, or not as the case may be, and match your title tag accordingly. (For more information on selecting keywords read this article).

As a rule of thumb, in most cases stay away from using your company name in your title tag. The example above for Fletcher Living being casein point. Instead try and use your main keywords; and whatever you do don’t stuff your title tag with keywords - what a waste of time and space.

Thirdly, analyse and fine tune your title tags. If the goal of search engine optimisation, internet marketing or even simply having a website is to attract more customers then you should be continually trying to etch a few more visitors from your search results. Rather than becoming obsessed with search results and how can I get a site from position 4 to position 3 in Google for a search term I prefer to focus on how can I increase the number of visitors clicking through to a site relative to the number of searches being made. I believe that this results driven strategy leads to faster results and better overall long term sustainable search engine rankings. Who knows, perhaps Google even puts a weighting on click through rates from search results - they have the quality score on keywords for cost per click campaigns!

One of the most important tools I use in measuring the effectiveness of title tags is Google webmaster tools and the top search queries, under the statistics menu. On this page you see a table of all the top search queries that you site featured in on the left hand side and the top search queries that generated clicks through to your site. I firstly look to see what terms the site is generating alot of search volume for and if there any terms that appear high in that list, but are not generating matching actual visitor numbers. Ongoing, I will rework title tags ever so slightly monitoring both the search volume and the click through rate continually trying to etch out a higher number of visitors to the site. This process should be never ending.

A final note here, and probably the subject of a second related post. Along with the title tag, the meta description is the text that appears beneath your title tag in search results. Once again select this content carefully to attract your customers to your site against the 6 or 7 other sites that appear above the fold around your site in the search results page.

Launching a new version of your website can be a stressful exercise, particularly when so much of your business comes from direct Internet enquiries. The biggest risk is that you lose those hard earned search rankings and virtually have to start again. I am writing this post as one site I know very well has just recently launched a new version and experienced just that a large fall in their search engine rankings.

The reason I am sure is that they have overlooked one of the most important steps in launching a new site - the art of 301 redirects. 301 redirects are page redirects that tell search engines that URL’s have permanently changed their name and therefore to take the previous information held about this page, including all it’s incoming link value and most important search engine position and permanently transfer this information to the new page names.

301 redirects are a server side redirection, meaning that once a search engine (or user for that matter) comes into the page looking for a previous URL they are redirected to the new URL and simultaneously told to remember that redirect because the change is permanent.

Most websites are hosted on apache web servers and therefore the easiest way to handle a redirect is with regular expressions in the .htaccess file. The

To Move a single page add: Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.domain.com/newurl.html

To Change domain names:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*oldwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.net/$1 [R=301,L]

For some reason on our sites we don’t actually use the first command instead preferring to add: RewriteRule ^oldurl\.htm$ /newurl [R=301,L] for individual page redirects as well.

The $ sign means that this is the end of the URL, note the forward slash before the dot in the redirected URL also. In the brackets at the end of the rule the 301 states that this is a permanent redirect, while the L says this is the end of the rule. Note also for a single page redirect that capitals are important. If the URL is in capitals on your previous site then it must be in capitals as well and also note that you clearly need to state whether the old URL is htm or html suffix.

If you are dealing with a huge number of URLs that are to be redirected and they have similar names it is possible to not include the $ sign and simply produce a regular expression that is encompassing of a group of URLs, such as RewriteRule ^/folder/ /newurl [R=301,L]

I hope this helps, as I say, a popular campervan company I know of recently launched their new site only to experience significant falls in their search engine rankings, which can only be attributed to the 301 redirects not being done properly.

Whenever generating an SEO report for any client or a site appraisal I always look at the sites Alexa ranking, both at the time and over time. Over time I use it as a measure of performance.

But, really is there any value in this ranking? After all Alexa rankings are determined by traffic measures for Internet users that have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browser (either Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Firefox), so isn’t the data completely skewed.

Mat Weir, Xebidy lead developer, believes the data to be completely useless; his argument being that installing the toolbar is more likely in some users than others. For example, he says that You Tube users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, whereas Digg.com users are not, giving Digg a much lower traffic volume than it really has.

I had a brief look at some of our mates sites. Comparing Wayward Bus (ranking of 2,322,699), Adventure Tours (834,129) and Oz Experience (974,589) they all have rankings comparative to each other of about where I thought they would be based on our web analytics. Perhaps there is a value in comparing apples with apples. When I compared Base Backpackers (14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand) with The Park (a hostel in National Park, New Zealand - where you say, exactly!) I find that their rankings are 3,292,826 and 2,522,225 respectively - this is very contrary to my web analytics.

Is there any value in the Alexa ranking as a site comparison indicator. I think there is if comparing two sites in exactly the same market with similar Internet users. I think Mat is right though that comparing sites across markets is pointless.

Is there any value in the Alexa rankings as a site performance indicator? For the time being I am going to say yes, but I am going to investigate further. As a trend indicator it provides another measurement, but, at the end of the day, theoretically the ranking is derived as a measure against all Internet traffic (well, a sample of it anyway) and if, say, The Parks ranking goes worse, but our web stats show our traffic has increased and revenue has increased then surely we are happy; or are we, perhaps it is a fair argument to say that we are under performing relative to the Internet.

Heres’ an issue that everyone faces as more resellers of products appear on the Internet - the issue of duplicate content.

Say you write great content for your website, but then you share that content with all your main affiliates or suppliers, for example, a hostel might give the same content they use on their home page to Hostel World or a tour company might do this for STA Travel, what will Google and other search engines think when they see the same content?

We know that duplicate content is frowned on and we know that those sites that have plagarised content are devalued by Google in the search results rankings even to the point of being banned for sometime. The risk is that by supplying the same copy to your partners you are in fact risking having your content considered as duplicate content and having your own site devalued.

For example, Hostel World, STA, eBookers and so on are always going to be considered more authoritative websites than your own - they have thousands of pages, thousands of links and are good quality sites. They probably have higher page rank than you too. So, when Google reads your content on their site it is highly likely that Google may interpret that content as theirs and penalise you for copying them. Now thats’ not on!

What about if some of these sites even pay for cost-per-click ads on your name. Well it is surely not a bad thing if you are say Base Backpackers and STA Travel are promoting your brand in the search results so as they sell more of your products is it? Perhaps it is. After all the sale always has a cost of commission. If you are coming up in the search engines number one for your brand you are hoping that you will secure the sale yourself - thereby paying back the investment you have made in web marketing and getting that amazing site. You don’t want to be giving away revenue for someone else trading on your name without actually doing anything for themselves.

These are interesting conundrums for the travel (and other industries). Perhaps it is time to turn against the hands that have fed us for so long, the STA Travels, the Hostel Worlds and so on. When it comes to the web you are all on an even footing and perhaps you are right to say no to large commissions and demand that these companies produce their own content about your product or even not trade on your name in the search engines.

This is such an interesting area and at the same time very confusing for all involved. In fact, it is a regular source of hours of debate amongst us guys at Xebidy, no less so the other night at 11 pm after a BBQ and far too many beers at my house.

Mat Weir our lead developer is our guru on expired domains. He buys them with some regularity to use to promote a number of sites he personally develops and promotes. He recently acquired www.queenstowntaxis.co.nz, a fantastic domain with lots of links, to promote his www.experiencequeenstown.com website, after the domain had expired of course - the problem is that Queenstown Taxis is still heavily in use by the previous owner - on their business cards, or their vehicles, everywhere. And they want it back.

Now, my understanding is Mat has done nothing wrong, he has not purchased the domain name to resell back to them nor has he purchased the domain name to trade on their business name or confuse the market, in fact, he has purchased the domain name to promote his business legitimately.

This is quite different to the well-quoted Qantas situation in Australia in which when domains were first really becoming important a couple of guys purchased the www.qanatas.com and tried to sell it back to Qantas at an extortionate rate. In this case a court ruled that they had to give it to Qantas for the same $50 they had paid for it. The ruling was that they had purchased the domain name with knowledge that the name belonged to someone else and that they were therefore attempting to profit on someone elses fortune illegitimately.

I have also seen another recent case in Australia where a large Australian touring company let one of their domains expire and a small operator in the same area purchased the domain and built a site on it. The court in this case also ruled that the domain had to be returned because both companies were operating in the same area and therefore the second company that now was using the domain was confusing the market.

I don’t know what is fair and what is not. Firstly, when a domain expires it sits in a type of state of limbo for about 3 months to give the original owner a chance to renew. So it is not a case of it expiring and then the next day someone else owning it. Secondly, when a domain expires it is available to everyone, surely it is open market. I agree with the Qantas situation where these guys had no other intention but to profit off Qantas. But what about the tour company story? They clearly did not have an intention to profit off the other tour company (I don’t know how public this whole scenario was so I don’t want to be going around saying company names at this time) simply they intended to promote their own business with a domain that was good and because of its’ history and links had good Google rankings. Is there anything wrong with this? And what about Mat, he has purchased a domain to promote his own information website in a completely different market. He has pointed the domain to his page about Queenstown taxis - this is fair is it not.

The one thing I do know is make sure you have got your domain management in order. If your domains are looked after by your web master or similar make sure they know what their doing and that they have in place the processes to know what is happening with your domains at any point in time. If it is managed in house make sure that person is onto it. And, finally until it is clear keep your eyes peeled for good domains that you might be able to acquire to promote your business.