December 2011 saw the busiest month for UK search traffic with a staggering 2.3 billion visits. Over a 1/3 of the clicks on search results were sending traffic to some kind of e-commerce (transactional) site. A third of 2 something billion ain’t too shabby is it? These figures are for December though, so they’re more than likely skewed because of the little event by the name of Christmas. But never the less it’s a pretty sure sign that search is a powerful traffic driver, provided your site can be seen.

YouTube is one such channel that can be wonderful in exposing your content. The videos feature directly in Google search results, which is nice. The site also has a huge number of users browsing and using the service. Recently we talked about the importance of interesting content as a corner stone of a good SEO campaign.  Showing your products or service in video form can give a real feel for what you do and really enhance the textual content. The hugely reduced publishing costs that the web allows you to provide some amazing video content, highlighting your business and have it open to a potentially huge audience. No matter how niche the content is though, you don’t need to justify its publication to some publishing gatekeeper and if you do have a hit on your hands the costs aren’t prohibitive.

More and more I find myself looking for video demos or comparisons of products I would like to buy. Although a video isn’t as good as actually getting the thing in your hands it can be a wonderful enrichment to a bit of text and a blurry photograph.  Fuji, via “The Fuji Guys” are really making a lot of use of YouTube to show off their products. Of course Fuji are also producing slick adverts, but the Fuij Guys videos offer more of a demonstation feel and also give direct feedback to customers comments.

So focusing on YouTube specifically, what should you bear in mind when you’re publishing video content? Firstly, I’m not pretending that producing a good looking video is easy. It’s not. It’s a skill and needs work. You have to make a decision if you are capable of the production standard you want or if you need to find someone to help you. These videos are going to represent your business and you want to make the best impression.

Let’s assume you have some content you’re happy with. How should you present it?

1. Start by creating a YouTube channel. YouTube allows you to discover some pretty diverse stuff; you start off watching a speech about nuclear power, but minutes later you’re watching a cat playing the piano. A channel will allow you to group your content together an give users a hub to more easily find your content. Creating playlists will also give viewers a path to follow once they hit one of your videos.
2. Fill out all the descriptions with information about your company, products etc. Make sure at least one link is going to your site. You want to make it easy for people to make a purchase or find out more if they want to. Make the descriptions helpful, avoid just writing spam.
3. Give your videos meaningful titles. The title is going to indicate what’s in the video, it’s going to help it show in search results. Never ever ever just leave it as movie001.mov. The title might include  a mix of model number, keywords that people are likely to search for, link bait.
4. Fill out the video description. Give some details about what’s in the video, link to a page on your site where you can find out more.
5. Add tags. Tags group together similar videos. Add some very specific to your products models etc. as well as more generic terms that are going to be shared with a larger number of videos.
6. Make sure your video has an opening an closing slide with your site URL company name etc. Remember YouTube videos can be embedded into any site. If your video ends up somewhere else you want people to know where to go to find out more.
7. Reply to comments. It must be said that YouTube dones’t always attract the most intelectual comments. But do check the comments on your videos. You can provide direct response to potential customers as well as use them as feedback for your future videos and products. Make sure you remove spam or offensive comments. No comments is better than something off putting.

The primary reason for pulling the Facebook stores appears to be lower than expected sales figures. The current way of offering products for sale through Facebook is via the company Facebook page on a custom tab. This is the first clue to the low sales figures. How many times do you just browse a companies Facebook page? It’s hard enough to find the link to it. Even if you’ve previously “liked” the page it’s unlikely you’ll have much more interaction with it after.  Figures on the interaction Facebook pages get, even pages with millions of fans indicate that they don’t get much “clickfall/footfall” after the initial action. If you haven’t twigged by now, massive numbers on the Web often don’t mean that much. Facebook have also announced that “pages” are to have the timeline interface applied to them in the coming months. Initially, it looks like the new layout will make custom tabs less prominent.

It’s been said before but the Facebook experience is akin to the bar, how many times have you bought a pair of shoes off a bloke in the pub? That’s not to say that the bar experience can’t boost sales. I’m sure most people have talked about a holiday, new service  new widget with their friends which has resulted in their friends at least considering making the same choice. Although not a shop, the Guardian app does tie together the social aspects of Facebook while selling their media services. By deeply integrating into users’ everyday Facebook experience and offering something of value they can make sure they are front and center of a lot of eyes while avoiding the spammy label.  You’re probably familiar with the Facebook games that bombard the wall with useless updates about how many leaves have been swept up etc. If e-commerce is going to work on Facebook it’s going to need to be a much richer and more integrated experience than just replicating your existing store on a (hard to find) page.

But perhaps Facebook isn’t the place to sell one off products. The Guardian produces new articles every day and people want to read new articles every day. News articles have a much better fit into the “what’s going on?” experience that Facebook offers. It’s unlikely you’re going to want to shop and share your thoughts about a new pair of jeans every day of the week. With the lower volume content production and consumption cases, the Facebook feed isn’t likely to produce many results. Pinterest on the other-hand could have hit upon something with its endless scrolling of aspirational, pretty things.

One of the first things to do before you even consider setting up a social media presence is to work out what you want to gain from it: market research, promotion and marketing, supporting customers, gaining other business partners, offering meta information about your business. I’m not going to get into the process of setting and measuring goals here. So if you don’t have them down on paper go and do that now.

Assuming you know what you want to gain from a social media presence the next step is to start identifying what sites/services/tools are going to help you the most. No two social media platforms are the same. Even if they look like copies they probably have a different user make up (ages, interests, expectations of the site). These all affect what kind of communication works well on them. Take time to learn what individual platforms have to offer and if they fit with your goals.

I’m pretty sure top of most people’s list of social networks are Facebook and Twitter but there are a whole host of others that may fit your needs. Don’t forget the more traditional forums  and older sites as well. Niche forum sites can be a very good route to get to know your customers and gain some insightful feedback (as long as you are reading with your Internet filter goggles firmly attached). Investing in a few targeted social services that you understand and are actually going to use is going to be better for you in the long run, rather than trying to hit every new fad and leaving a string of abandoned pages. A neglected presence can be very damaging to your image: If someone leaves negative feedback and you don’t respond, if links become broken, if your customers try to contact you and you leave them hanging, these are all going to be more damaging than not having presence at all.

By investing in social media we’re not just talking about hiring someone to get you a snazzy design, although a strong visual design is important. What we mean is taking the time to understand what the platform has to offer. Lot’s of the social media sites have analytics built in. Facebook, for example allows you to see how popular your links are and get some strong data out, even though the site is generally quite closed. Twitter, allows you to search through a huge amount of data and find messages mentioning your company. You can also use hash tags to generate topics and monitor their flow. You can even integrate your existing analytics systems to see which links you share generate traffic and track conversions. Often these data gathering techniques require changes to your site or coming up with a methodical way to construct your source data. There are numerous tools to help ease this technical stage. The important factor is that you know what the platform can offer and what you want to get out of it.

As well as the techie wizardry you also have to invest time into monitoring the interaction your customers are having with your company. If you just want to put up an advert you’re far better off buying adspace and moving on. To actually have a social media presence you need to invest effort into the social part. This is the part that most often differentiates businesses that “get” social media and those that don’t.  A business presence on social media sites should be thought less of an advert and more of a dialogue. You have an opportunity to actually get close to your customers and talk with them, this is the real benefit of social media sites for businesses.

We’re not trying to dissuade you from jumping on the Facebok, Twitter et al. train. But before you jump make sure it’s the right train and it’s going in the right direction. If we didn’t think the Internet had huge amounts to offer business we wouldn’t have set up a company to do just that.

Good content needn’t be Shakespeare or next summer’s best seller, it just needs to be interesting to your audience. Even very niche topics can be of interest to a surprisingly large audience on the Internet. The first place you are going to need good content is on your main website. If you sell electronics for example, do you provide rich unique descriptions or do you just copy and paste some specs from the manufacture that are on a million different sites? Do you explain technical terms to your users? Do you use words that users are searching for or just industry terms? Of course good base content isn’t restricted to e-commerce product pages. Have a look through your website’s pages and ask yourself honestly if the words on the page are interesting and helpful. Do you know what the page is about just by skimming it? Is it enticing? Would you forward that link to a friend?

A very common way to add extra information to a site is via a blog. It allows content to be added that would look out of place within the main site but still allows you to communicate your brand and engage your visitors. Thinking of blog posts can be difficult but once you know where to look, finding content isn’t actually that hard. Once you get a readership you’ll be surprised at what topics people find interesting. A technique that it’s starting to be popular on newspaper and magazine  blogs is to focus a post on one particular aspect of an article from the main site. For example there might be a large report covering many areas and the blog post will pick out just  a subset to focus on. This gives the original article a new spin and also chunks it up into more manageable pieces (web visitors have a notoriously short attention span). This technique also allows you to come up with content that perhaps appeals to a wider audience and incorporates catchy, link-bait titles (slightly sensational and likely to be shared forwarded or “liked”, think tabloid headlines) while also retaining the authority and reputation of your source material.

This is all well and good but you’re probably not a national media organisation. You can use the same technique though. Do you produce annual reports? Is there an area of your business in there that would make for an interesting focus? Has your company been mentioned in someone else’s article? Is your business area in the news at the moment? Could you give your perspective on the issue? You are far more likely to get links for interesting, relevant timely content – keep your eyes open for it.

It doesn’t just have to be written content though. Increasingly sites like Pinterst are allowing good visual content to be surfaced by users, and search engines are getting better and better at discovering non-text information. Keep your eyes open for interesting stories you can share with your customers and ways your can present them and you’ll soon have a solid content base.

If you have ever looked at setting up and online shop you’ve probably seen the requirement at some point for you to acquire an SSL certificate. The SSL certificate is part of the puzzle that will allow your visitors to view your site via a secure “https://” connection rather than the usual “http://” connection.  But how does this file, or collection of files make your site secure?

SSL certificates serve two functions. Firstly they hold your public and private keys. The keys are long strings of characters that are plugged into a mathematical formula that encrypts and decrypts the data moving between your server and the end user. This is a good start. Without this mathematical magic all your data is about as secure as a postcard in the hands of a nosey postman.

SSL certificates offer some other protection though. It is possible (a necessity ) to get them “signed” by a trusted party. The idea behind it is this:  The visitor to your site (really the user’s browser) assumes they don’t know you from Adam and doesn’t trust you. Which is a pretty good thing to do in the Internet. But they do have a list of people they do trust, these are certificate authorities that have been audited and manually added to your web browser. These trusted authorities can lend you some of their trust by signing your untrustworthy certificate. In effect they are saying that because they trust you it’s ok for others to. This signing process is the part that will cost you money. It’s possible to generate and even sign a certificate yourself but because no one trusts you, your visitors will get warnings when you try to make them use your certificate. Without this signing process it would make compromising the secure connection significantly easier because the client would have no way of verifying that the person they are talking to was who they are saying they are.

So in short the SSL certificate gives you the ability to make sure a connection remains hidden from prying eyes and provides a means of verifying that you are communicating with the person they say they are.

When looking at purchasing SSL certificates you may see quite a range of prices. The pricing differences are based on:

• The amount of verification that goes on, i.e how much you are trusted. The cheapest certificates are usually just verified by you answering an email. Certificates with higher levels of verification are often indicated in browsers by a green bar being shown or something similar these are usually refereed to as “Extended 
  Validation (EV)” certificates.
• Certificates usually just secure one hostname. Wildcard certificates can secure a number of hosts on a domain. Even though these are more expensive. They may work out better value if you have a lot of hosts to secure.
• Another factor affecting the cost is how many entities actually trust the person signing your certificate. There’s no point getting someone to sign your certificate if no browser will trust them. The certificate authority you are considering will usually have a list who trusts them out of the box.
• Certificates are usually valid for a year, after which you will need to renew them, similar to renewing a domain name. Purchasing multi year certificates will be more expensive but perhaps better value.

This has been a fairly high level explanation of how the SSL certificate fits into securing the communicate on your site. As you can probably see there’s quite a bit to it and getting it wrong can  expose your site to attack, scaring your customers away and ultimately losing business. If you’re unsure about how to go about getting an SSL certificate ask your web developer or ISP or us. Have you made your facebook page https capable? We’ll try and get a guide up ASAP of how to go about getting your certificate up and running.

One comment from that discussion particularly caught my eye:

Many great startups shut down because they couldn’t find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this).

Having a wonderful product isn’t going to magically attract customers, you have to market it in someway. In a nutshell SEO uses search engines as a marketing platform to get customers to your site.

So what what does an SEO company offer your site?

First of all we don’t sell magic or silver bullets. SEO is often sold as a mystic power that will transform your site. It can make a big difference to your business but it’s not magic; it’s experience, attention to detail, analysis and a deep understanding of the search market.

First we look at your site and how you currently looks to search engines, we’ll discuss your aims and what you want as a result of our SEO work. This is our first consultation stage. Many customers don’t really know what they want from their search positions, apart from “better”. We help you choose a path that’s actually going to make a positive difference to your business rather than throwing money at keywords that mean nothing to your customers.

Next we do a lot of in depth research and analysis about your competitors and how people are searching for your products, we’ll also start tracking your site’s performance to give you concrete facts about our impact.

Lastly in the planning stage we’ll devise a strategy for your Search Marketing campaign and present it to you. For example it might be beneficial for you to split your budget up among a large number of less competitive terms or concentrate on one or two very competitive ones. The type of business you are in and your future plans will play a big part in which direction we sugest. But at the heart of our recommendation will be what we think will benefit you the most and what’s achievable with your resources.

The actual hands on work will vary from project to project, there will be some on site changes. After all it’s no point trying to polish a turd. But a large chuck of resources will be devoted to building links with other sites and making sure that the search engines view your site in the best possible light. This is often the hardest part for website owners to do themselves. Anyone can alter the text on their site to include content that people are looking for but few have spent time building up relationships with sites that will be beneficial to their long term SEO aims. Randomly buying links isn’t going to cut it and is going to put your site in serious danger down the line.

The idea of more personal searched results is also a trend we’re seeing more of. You can see evidence of this in some search results where the listings will be appended with any of your contacts that have a relationship with the result, for example if they have re-tweeted something on Twitter. You can use this to your advantage by building relationships with your customers through your social network channels. When their contacts search for similar terms you get the equivalent of an “as used by” stamp of someone they trust.

So moving away from the direct effect on your search positions social networks can also have a positive effect on how many visitors you get to your site and as a marketing channel even when your website isn’t ranking so well. Imagine you make a new widget to help new mothers. If no one knows that these new widgets exist it’s going to be pretty hard to get people to search for it and find them in search results. However if you can get your happy customers to share the link through Facebook, Twitter etc. There’s a pretty good possibility that they will have friends who are also mothers and also interested in your product and attracted to your site. Obviously press releases and traditional marketing are still going to play a part in your marketing strategy but having your customers spread your message is a very powerful tool I’m sure you’ll agree.

At this point I want to point out that although there a big gains to be made from social networks it’s not enough to just spam out links and expect a flurry of new customers. The rules haven’t really changed much from the traditional offline world. You still need to create interesting content that people want to engage in, you have to respect your customers and not bombard them. Just getting a load of auto responders isn’t going to get you very far in the long run. One important difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing is that social media marketing often carries with it the message of those that share and pass your on your message.  For instance if you were to take out an add in a magazine you could have a pretty good idea of how many people would see it no matter how good your product was. However in a social media situation if your product isn’t any good or the way it’s presented isn’t interesting it’s unlikely to get shared nor attract strong recommendations.

So assuming you’ve got a good product how do you start building your social profile. Well the two big social networks in the UK are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is generally considered more of a personal network with connections usually staying between people who have a stronger “real” connection with each other. But they do allow profile pages for products and businesses and this is also where you can host Facebook Apps. Twitter is more like a pub conversation; there’s often people you know but also random strangers and often someone trying to sell you something from the back of their van (don’t be one of those people). If you or your company don’t already have a presence  on Facebook or Twitter my advice is to sign up for an account and just have a look around and observe what other people are doing see if any of your competition or businesses you respect are there and how they use it. This will give you pretty good idea of the unwritten rules of engagement. If you decide not to use social media after your in initial toe dipping it might still be an idea to claim a good account name for your company. The last thing you want is for someone to open an account in your name and start spoiling your reputation. Fill in the profile information and perhaps enough up to date information so people know how to contact you and your account doesn’t look completely abandoned.

For help and advice on how you can integrate social networks into your site, including marketing strategies and Facebook application drop us a line.

Before I begin let me say that this isn’t intended to be an anti flash post nor am I insinuating that flash is the root of all evil on the web as seems to be the case in some circles. Especially the Apple flavoured ones. What I want to do is show that you don’t need to really heavy on flash if you want to have an interesting website and by opting for a site built on HTML, CSS and Javascript you are going do be doing yourself a big SEO favour.

Flash does undoubtedly have its problems and hasn’t always been used with that much care, especially evident when you think of those irritating flashing ad banners. But it’s also bought widespread video and audio to the web as well as an easily programmable platform for things more demanding than rollover effects.

But now it’s 2011 and the web has evolved a bit. Unless you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, in which case go and sit in the corner and think about what you’re doing. People have toiled away with HTML, CSS and Javascript to give designers and developers a bewildering array of tools to bring really rich content to websites without the need for flash and deliver it across a wide rage of devices in a reliable and consistent fashion. But why not use flash if it’s there?

The big problem with Flash especially from an SEO perspective is that search engines find it difficult to crawl and gather the information they need from it. If your entire site is built in flash getting control of really important SEO factors like URLs, pages tiles and easily readable text is going to be an uphill battle. The engines are getting better all the time, but why make it hard for yourself when there are really good alternatives available? This is especially true if you’re using a flash animation for your menu. There really is no need for it. If you are using flash for your menu the first thing you should do is swap it for an HTML/CSS version. If a search engine can’t make sense of your website it’s going to severely hamper your chance of doing well in the results. There are also usability issues with a site entirely built in Flash. Handling the right click, opening new tabs or windows is tricky and not there by default, the back button and history wont work in the same way as a standard HTML site. All these little things can really add up to irritate your visitors and affect the success of your site. Both in terms of your conversion rates and indirectly your search rankings as your users are less likely to share and promote your content. Last and not least iOS based devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches) don’t support flash at all so your flash site is going to be a big square of nothingness on those pretty screens.

I’m feeling all negative now lets move on. What can you do in practice to steer away from flash. You generally see flash sites used when the site requires a layout or navigation system that’s a bit out of the ordinary but as you can see from www.theadventurists.com/the-adventures/mongol-rally and imagemechanics.com.au/ , vegas.jaysalvat.com/demo/ , you can deliver a really polished and interesting site with just the built in tools of any modern browser. Okay it requires javascript to be enabled, but the vast majority of browsers have it on and you can design in a way that it falls back to more primitive methods if the need arises. The beauty of designing without flash in this instance is all the site content can easily be picked over by the search and engines and they can send visitors directly to the page they are looking for and it’s far easier for you to target specific pages at key terms you are interested in. All this isn’t to say that you should never use flash. If your site is entirely built in flash I’d seriously recommend looking at rebuilding it. If you are just using it in certain areas consider if they are providing unique content and if that content can’t be found anywhere else you may want to look at some alternatives. Games are still an area where Flash dominates and for the immediate future that’s not going to change. HTML5 certainly has the potential to disrupt that but until more people move up to the new browsers replying on HTML5 isn’t going to get you a guaranteed audience.

Contact us if you want to discuss changes to your website or if you don’t know if your site is harming your positions in search engine