Over a decade ago, in an effort to break into marketing (whilst studying a part-time HNC in business and marketing) I applied for the role of Marketing Assistant at Spearhead Training Group. I had a little relevant experience under my belt; a year’s HNC, two years in life and pensions admin, two years in retail merchandising and some freelance promotional efforts in a nightclub. However, on 6th May 1998 Jim Tappenden offered me the position of Marketing Assistant at Spearhead Training Group. It was just the break I needed!

Some months later I asked Jim about my appointment and he confessed that on paper I didn’t have the CIM diplomas or work experience that other candidates had done, but that I had common sense: “Common sense is a commodity in short supply” Jim told me. The older I become and the more candidates I interview myself the more I agree with him! I am grateful that Jim considered me to have it, and was willing to gamble on an ambitious 21 year old.

Some time later Jim agreed to fund the final year of my marketing qualification at a time when I was going through some financial hardships, this was very much appreciated. Furthermore, after a year of working with Jim’s wife Val on the company’s marketing, I was myself promoted to Marketing Manager and given the wonderful opportunity to manage (with Jim’s approval and guidance) an annual marketing budget approaching £1 million. It was a fantastic way to learn about managing Direct Marketing campaigns, Display Advertising and the evolving Internet – which I became fascinated with at that time. I built my first website at Jim’s request, something that I found thoroughly enjoyable, especially the analytical side of understanding audience behaviour.

I left Spearhead in March 2000 to move into an online marketing role at a publishing company.  After my departure Jim arranged for me to maintain the Spearhead website on a contractual basis in my spare time. This gave me the funding to get started with my own company and expand a little into other areas – leading to the founding of Firetop Ltd in 2003. Today, although I no longer maintain the UK website of Spearhead Training I am proud to maintain the Spearhead Gulf website and have even had the pleasure of a trip to the Middle East as a result.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have worked with Jim and to have had the opportunities that he and his wife gave me, the knowledge of how to run a business, the in-house courses that he let me attend in sales, marketing and management and the financial assistance with Firetop have all been invaluable. Without Jim I would not be where I am today and outside of work I certainly wouldn’t have my wonderful family (having met my wife via Yahoo chat ten years ago this weekend)!

I would like to end on a final piece of wisdom that I have always remembered from Jim (in addition to the scarceness of common sense) – “With a business idea you can spend too long planning for perfection and never get started“. I’m not sure I necessarily understood how true that was at the time Jim told me but now as I approach my 15th year in the working world I know exactly what he means.

Goodbye Jim you will be sadly missed yet remaining frequently in my thoughts.

The site sits on a PHP/MYSQL based Content Management System (CMS) powered by Hungarian web development company Pressflex. The folks at Pressflex have been super efficient and managed to tweak our HTML to fit their needs for all browsers (including the dreaded IE6). We like their CMS, it works very nicely indeed for publishers and enables traditional print-based publishers to upload XML files for each printed issue whilst also editing and tagging the content themselves.

Now it won’t have passed you by that my company is called Firetop Ltd, a name which enabled me to take a childhood addiction to choosing your own destiny, and apply that tenuously to search engine optimisation (’Fire’ ‘top’). Indeed in the office here there is an autographed copy of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain signed by authors Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (as well as many other original books). I’m pleased that with the help of Canadian developers Big Blue Bubble, Ian and Steve have decided to take their brand into the Nintendo DS era for a new generation. I’m also pleased to report that the original books still cut it with the modern generation anyway (having recently converted a 10 year old relative to the books as a gift).

From what I’ve read online the DS game doesn’t have a UK release date yet but does come out in the US and Canada around the 26th / 27th October and some time later as an iPhone game. Here’s the game trailer (embedded from YouTube); quite different to the books that inspired me but given my Firetop obsession I couldn’t resist a posting of this modern version.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Nintendo DS Game

1. Popular YouTube videos appear at the top of Google search results pages (SERPS) alongside standard website listings so it’s quite easy to understand that if you have a popular video in YouTube, titled with your relevant keywords, then it could get you an extra spot in Google search results alongside your main website. The downside is that this traffic will go straight to YouTube so you have the job of ensuring that the video viewer knows your website address and decides to go and visit it for more information. In a way this isn’t an SEO benefit to your site, more a way of grabbing an extra position and keeping a competitor off of the search results.

2. If you create several videos and your own keyword branded YouTube channel to house them all, then you can benefit from the placement of a back-link to your main website on your channel page (a little like the Twitter profile back-link benefit discussed in Part 1). However, creating YouTube videos just for the benefit of an extra back link to help your search engine optimisation probably isn’t a good use of your time and money unless you know you can create a fantastically popular video channel that everybody will link to – and boost the channel’s Google PageRank score.

3. Google likes YouTube embedded videos in content – don’t ask me why this is, but Google seems to give web pages that hold embedded video content a higher position in the results. Bizarrely this means that you don’t need to create the video but simply embed useful videos that you find relevant to your audience into your website. Of the three reasons for using YouTube with SEO in mind, this is probably the most effective and requires the least amount of effort. Of course the ideal is to combine all three ideas and embed your own YouTube videos into your web pages.

Optimising your videos within YouTube itself is something quite different but does impact on ‘1’ above – since only a popular video makes its way into the Google results. Therefore you need to consider the following factors when uploading a new video:

1. Make your video informative, interesting and snappy ( 5 minutes or less).
2. Give it an optimised title (using your target search terms and website name) e.g. How to save money on car rentals – car-rentals.co.uk.
3. Optimise your video description. Include keyword based informative content in the description (more info) of your video and link to your website from it – ideally do this in the first line – to appear in the main YouTube descriptor.
4. Ensure that your keyword tags are relevant and contain most of the search terms you used in your title and description. As with SEO try and avoid keyword stuffing.
5. On your main website aim to create hyperlinks to your YouTube video URL containing keyword-rich anchor text.
6. Watermark the video with your URL and use an interesting freeze frame shot.
7. Create and customize your own YouTube channel using search terms to create a keyword friendly URL. Consider the creation of multiple channels for multiple niches.
8. YouTube’s internal site search factors in other rules including the video’s rating, total views, how many times the video has been favourite. The age of the video is also a factor because new videos tend to appear more highly to keep YouTube looking fresh.
9. Ask all your friends to vote and view your video, share it on your Facebook profile page to help with video ranking.
10. Post your videos towards the end of the week, weekends are YouTube’s busiest days (for a B2C audience anyway).

That about covers search engine optimisation and YouTube, both the indirect benefits to your main SEO strategy and also the methods of optimising your videos within YouTube’s own search results. I’d really like to be selling the virtues of this hyped up video technology but personally I’ve only really found it useful for showing clips of the Oompa Loompas and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to my 2 year old daughter…

A professional developer has to test multiple browser platforms with each new Website build and create CSS work-arounds to fit the whole gamut of versions, this ensures that a consistent screen display occurs for the majority of people. For the website funder / customer this means more time spent and consequently a more costly development. One could argue that the BBC headline may as well be ‘Microsoft to make Web development more expensive until 2014’.

Given the recent Twitter hashtag popularity on ‘IE6 Must Die’ we would have hoped that Microsoft might have paid attention to the Web developer community! However, as they appear to have done quite the opposite we shall continue to test multiple browser versions via a single PC on an IE6 simulator. This isn’t particularly straight-forward until you look into it and discover Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2004 download and associated ‘VPC images’:

1. Download Virtual PC 2004

2. Download a suitable Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
Here there are many VPC images for IE6, 7 and 8 on XP SP3 and they provide the only really stable and well supported browser testing environment that we can find. The VPC images currently expire on 31st August 2009 so here’s hoping that with the new IE6 support announcement new VPC Images will be loaded in the next few weeks! September update: new VPC images expire January 1, 2010 – PHEW!

There’s rather a lot of Twitter rhetoric being bandied about in the Web marketing industry these days so naturally a common question that’s been coming from Firetop clients is “Would being on Twitter help our search engine positioning?” and my short answer on this is “Indirectly yes, but nothing momentous“.playboy tm slot machine Online Poker Software casino poker black jack,
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In my opinion the biggest SEO benefit of Twitter is in providing a publishing vehicle that you can syndicate onto a website’s home page to provide an element of freshly updated daily content. We’ve known for years that Google weights pages that have daily content on them more favourably than those that stay static for long periods of time, so in this way one might argue that Twitter post syndication helps SEO. However, by the same token you could just as easily change your home page content daily through some other means like a Content Management System.

If you’ve already decided to seriously embrace Twitter for the benefit of marketing to that social medium then of course you may decide to use Tweets on your home page for SEO as it’s really not much extra work to implement (typically). Micro-blogging with 140 characters via Twitter takes almost no time at all versus full article blogging and if fresh content for SEO is your primary goal then it does the job. It’s important to remember though that saying something useful, on topic and of consequence is important on Twitter in order to drive followers who will be seeing your regular Tweets.

Your Twitter followers do provide a potential link building source if they like what you are saying and decide to investigate your main site as a consequence of your mini biog link (which incidentally is one extra back-link). If you are writing blogs you can promote each newly published blog entry via Twitter to your followers, which again means that you might more quickly generate back-links assuming followers are in a similar field and that what you have produced is useful content that they want to promote on their own blogs or ‘Retweet’.

Finally, in addition to the extra biog back-link already mentioned above, your personalised Twitter profile page does provide an opportunity to have an additional Google search result listing – separate to your main website’s. Remember that your Twitter profile name appears at the start of the page’s <title> tag (still the most important tag for SEO in my eyes) so it’s important to make use of the 20 or so <title> characters you use there… within reason! The more useful your Tweets, the more followers you will gain and the more links your profile page might gain – making the back-link you have there more valuable too.

To summarise, all of these small search engine optimisation gains from Twitter are indirect and in my opinion it’s really not worth considering Twitter for commercial gain unless you  intend to fully maximise Your Twitter experience…

Great Hitwise article on Twitter about the key uses of Twitter.

The main difference is that server logfiles track all server activity from browser based surfing through to Googlebot visits and non HTML file downloads (such as images viewed via Google images),  analysis of those gives a picture of both real AND automated visits. Client-side scripts only count data for browsers used by real people viewing HTML pages and therefore give the most accurate picture.

Generally, most people want to know which is the best tool to quote for online advertising purposes or for analysis of real visitor browsing behaviour. To do that correctly you really have to turn to a client-side tracking application like Google Analytics, this ensures that the spiders and robots are discounted, cutting page view data reported by log files by around 30% (in my experience) and affecting session time (although I’ve not figured out whether it inflates or deflates it yet as who knows how long a crawler stays on a site each day – possibly just seconds, or once a month for 20 minutes).

Digital ad servers like Doubleclick, which themselves use client-side code to serve adverts, will produce ad impression data which excludes automated crawlers – this is why Google Analytics data will usually be quite accurate for selling advertising. There’s not really much point in giving the outside world a false view of how busy a website is from logfile analysis if their expectations on ad delivery will be dashed when a campaign is initiated.

With that in mind it is sensible to take around 30% off of logfile sourced page impression and visitor data. 30% is my average, I’ve seen some sites with a 15% discrepancy and some with 45%, hence I play it safe at around half way.

However, we eventually discovered the problem – although the site was returning a 404 status for all .php or extension-less URLs (folders) the .html extension was still returning a status 200 (the site doesn’t use .html but the Google Webmaster Tools validation file does). As the Webmaster Tools validation feature checks for both the presence of the Webmaster Tools HTML file (e.g. hghgjg576gjg.html) on the wesite root AND checks a random .html error to see the 404 response code this was why there was a temporary problem (it was seeing a 200 code).

Once corrected the site revalidated but I thought it was worth the post in case anybody else went around in the same circles as we did

Matt

‘Web 2.0’ is defined in Wikipedia as ‘the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users’. It is by that definition that I say it should be entered into wisely by a B2B publisher – dipping a toe in the water of user commenting to see what might happen is probably the best idea before embarking on an expensive website development project.

In my opinion there are some core factors which when evaluated can tell us whether Web 2.0 functions will be successful on a website… or just sit there redundant making the website look even more devoid of life than if did prior to the supplementary ‘comment here’ calls to action. I call my theory the ‘Peskett’s Posting Predictor’ and it is based on my experiences with different publishing clients, what I see on web platforms and what I have discussed with my peers at numerous conferences during the past year.

There are six factors which when entered into ‘Peskett’s Posting Predictor’ will tell you whether there is a poor or good chance of Web 2.0 functionality take up on a site, these are:

a) Traditional Community Spirit (Score 1-5)
b) Passion for Day Job (Score 1-5)
c) Daily Reader Isolation (Score 1-5)
d) Reader Ego / Vanity (Score 1-5)
e) Hours of Daily Internet Access Per Reader? (Score 1-5)
f) Competitive / Secretive Vertical (Score 1-10)

These scores are entered into the following success equation: e((a+b+c+d)-f)

‘Traditional Community Spirit’ (a) usually a historic ‘community’ vibe and can be influenced by external factors such as government legislation, economic and environmental factors which increase bonding where a body of people can use social tools to unite against a perceived attack on their businesses or trade.

‘Passion for Day Job’ (b) is there from the outset, white collar workers are more like to be passionate about their jobs than blue collar (but both equally passionate about ’social’ topics – hobbies & sport etc.).

Daily Reader Isolation (c) varies – often a mix within an industry sector where independents (home workers and SMEs) seek a common group, whereas corporate environments offer ideas sharing internally.

Reader Ego / Vanity (d) is probably an offshoot of (b) – more passionate areas see more individuals seeking to raise their own profiles

Hours of Daily Internet Access Per Reader? (e) – the longer somebody is sat in front of the Internet the greater the chance they may spare a moment for a comment on an article given other factors (a,b,c,d,f)

Competitive / Secretive Vertical (f) - a strong influencer of Web 2.0 participation because it can override all other factors. Money is the vital ingredient in business and nobody wants to give away a secret or get fired for sharing company information. Equally nobody really wants to help a competitor to reach a decision which might make them a more difficult rival. In this sense it is in B2B that Web 2.0 is the most unlikely to flourish unless among salespeople, SMEs and job seekers using networking tools to their advantage.

After scoring the various factors of ‘Peskett’s Posting Predictor’ for a business sector and calculating using the formula e((a+b+c+d)-f) the resulting score will tell you whether it is worth considering a web project. Anything over 25 is probably worth trialing, over 50 and you’re most likely onto a winner.

Here are three example calculations:

Road Sweepers
a) Traditional Community Spirit? 1
b) Passion for Subject? 1
c) Daily Isolation? 5
d) Ego / Vanity? 1
e) Hours of Daily Internet Access? 1
f) Competitive & Secretive? 1

1((1+1+5+1)-1) = 7: Web 2.0 FAILURE

Farmers
a) Traditional Community Spirit? 5
b) Passion for Subject? 5
c) Daily Isolation? 5
d) Ego / Vanity? 1
e) Hours of Daily Internet Access? 2
f) Competitive & Secretive? 1

2((5+5+5+1)-1) = 30: Web 2.0 SUCCESS

Students & Academics
a) Traditional Community Spirit? 5
b) Passion for Subject? 5
c) Daily Isolation? 2
d) Ego / Vanity? 5
e) Hours of Daily Internet Access? 5
f) Competitive & Secretive? 3

5((5+5+2+5)-3) = 70: Web 2.0 BIG SUCCESS

Daily newspapers have a mix of all people and will publish a variety of topics from business to social, some will generate interest and some will not. According to a speaker from The Guardian I saw last week (Tom Turcan) they get 100,000 comments a month posted online. At face value this sounds like a lot but I’d guess that probably half came from unique visitors – taking us down to 50,000 commenting individuals, from a pool of 18 million unique visitors (0.27%). This is about the same as average click through rates on a single banner advert, and given that most sites have multiple banners per page this makes Web 2.0 commenting far less of a runaway success at present than all the hype suggests.

PESKETT’S POSTING PREDICTOR

“Anything over 25 is probably worth trialing, over 50 and you’re most likely onto a winner.”

These two statements: A Harvard study “found that than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.” and “Research by Nielsen also suggests that many people give the service a try, but rarely or never return.” seem to me to suggest that the very same experience of blogging is true of Twitter. For the masses it’s a trial of curiosity which even at just 140 characters a go is a micro-blog of effort too far in our busy lives…