Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

Google today announced a new feature designed to give people greater control over the results they see. Do you think a lower ranked result is more useful? It’s easy to promote it to the top, delete a result you’re not interested in, or comment on results.

This is the logical next step in the evolution of Google as far as I’m concerned. Their algorithm has been tweaked until it can’t be tweaked any more without getting dynamic, on the fly, user interaction to help it be even more targeted and to develop further. And here it is…Google SearchWiki.

Now you can customise your search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. You can also see how other other searchers have customised any given result.

You’ll see the changes you make whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. The changes you make only affect your own search results , and your changes will be included on a public comments page where you can also view how the community has edited or commented on a set of results.

Will this go to impacting on the natural search listings long term…in my opinion yes!

Google Analytics have added a slight tweak to their tracking code in the past 2 days to include a try catch block, which hopefully will result in any problems arising with contacting their server will not stop the page from loading. The small tweak adds a try catch block at the end of the code.

New Google Analytics Tracking Code

var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-xxxxxxx-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

Old Google Analytics Tracking Code

var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-xxxxxxx-1″);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

No they don’t have to have the www in there although it depends on how you display the URL to the end user. If you want the user to eventually end up at the www. version of the address then by not having it in there you’re just making Google have to do a redirect when it follows the link. You don’t want to end up with duplicate content, for example
http://www.mysite.co.uk, http://mysite.co.uk, http://mysite.co.uk/index.php and http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.php are the same URL.

This can be addressed with a Canonical redirect in your .htaccess file in the root of your domain. For best results, each page of a website should be reachable at a single persistent url. This address is known as the page’s canonical URL (Canonical refers to being the authoritative address).

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/$1 [r=301,nc]
rewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/$1 [R=301]

What importance should be put on the category that Google defines your website in? If you take the Google Ad Planner it categorises a website in a given category related to your sector. Are you unlikely to rank against what you perceive to be a close competitor but to what Google sees as although industry related, unrelated to the niche you would ideally like to be in?

These categories are not only used in Google’s Ad Planner but surface in Google Analytics under benchmarking and also surface in Google Insight in exactly the same format. I recently interviewed a candidate for an SEO role who had worked for Google in India…she stated that she manually vetted sites before they went into the index…I wish I had asked her if some kind of categorisation was taking place or if this was her primary role in the entry process.

There is inevitably going to be websites which straddle categories and see competitors outranking them on a term they feel strongly on. Does this categorisation have an impact on what you can realistically rank for in the SERPS?

I always find it useful to give visual examples when giving SEO training so I built a tool to display what effect the key fields that editors fill in will represent when they are surfaced in the search engines. This is a very basic version of a tool i created for an in house CMS. Try the SEO Tool here. I hope to add a few more to the list which are currently in development.

Advanced Segmentation Beta is starting to appear in Google Analytics accounts in the UK. Its very sketchy at the moment and even across different machines in the same office are showing different versions of Google Analytics.

Google’s slowly implementing the “Event Tracking” menu into its analytics accounts. I first came across this on one of my older analytics accounts even though we haven’t implemented the function. Even with accounts without the option and with websites that have had the function implemented it does not seem to appear.  I’m keen to see this in operation, there’s nothing wrong with invoking the track_pageview function but I’d rather configure the “conversion” as an event than a pageview.

Google today added  TV and Radio campaign tracking to its UK Analytics accounts meaning a UK switch on of this service pretty imminently IMO. The configuration of the ads seems almost too easy and not what you would expect from TV and Radio campaign setup. I’m looking forward to see how they configure this to take to the UK market.

Google TV Ads Tracking

Google TV Ads is a flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. Using the familiar AdWords interface, you can launch a TV advertising campaign in minutes.

Google Audio Ads Tracking

Nearly a quarter (22%) of Internet users make purchases after searching for something they learned about on the radio, so you can easily increase the overall impact of your online ad campaigns by running Audio Ads at the same time.

Learn more »

With Google AdWords, you can launch radio ad campaigns and track the resulting traffic and conversions — all from within your AdWords account.”

Traditional marketing streams like TV and print is one of the most difficult elements of a business to measure, in the online world this is one of the easiest, we show you how to get the most out of your online marketing spend!

If you have recently acquired a new business whether thats in the online tourism sector or any other there’s always going to be some surprise invoices coming through the door for services and business listings that you may never of heard of let alone know how well they are performing.

So how do you measure these different sources of marketing spend?

If it’s offline it’s notoriously difficult to measure how effective one stream of spend has been over another. Maybe you took out a full page spread with a local magazine or have invested heavily in a TV advertising campaign, both are nearly impossible to measure. Unless you ask each person who walks into your hotel or buys your latest music CD where they heard of you, you’re not going to be able to offset that person against your marketing spend.

In the online world we have the ability to trace that individual user to see where exactly they came from and we can attribute a value to that sources overall cost. Tools such as Google Analytics or Omniture can accomplish this task well. If you’re able to get a trial period with a particular advertiser you’ll be able to see very quickly through your stats how well an advert is performing by looking in the referral sources.

Its all well and good driving traffic to your site but you then need to look deeper and see how those users behave and how well they convert whether thats page views per visit (usually for display advertising) or the value of their transaction (shopping cart).

Being able to effectively measure your online marketing spend will save you money and free tools like Google analytics make sure you only target those businesses that will work hard for you and the ones that don’t…well you’ll be able to see that far sooner rather than later.