A printer-friendly option is a boon to most sites as it allows users to print off content to read later or store on file without the accompanying images and info that can cause a one-page article to eat up toner and whizz through printer paper unnecessarily. By offering a more concise version of the page without ads and blinking images, you make it easier for your reader to enjoy the material in a way that suits them. Many still feel more comfortable with a hard copy document rather than reading lengthy text passages on a monitor that can cause eye-strain, or that can only be read when a PC is available.

However, while this simpler version of the page is a plus point for the user, it can be a Trojan horse for the website owner by leading to duplicate content issues in the eyes of the search engines. A printer-friendly page will be almost identical to the original screen version but may have an extra /print/ folder in the URL or otherwise reference print in the file name. So www.mywebsite.com/news1.html would be the full version of the page with navigation systems and images and www.mywebsite.com/print/news1.html would be the same page minus images and navigation. To a search engine spider, these two pages are identical which poses a problem when it is attempting to sort and filter web information to provide a useful cross-section of information to the user.

If a search engine finds two pages that are strikingly similar, it may be forced to choose which one to include in its index and which one to ignore. This becomes a problem when printer-friendly pages are thrown into the equation because you may end up with your simple, pared down printer page being indexed and your main page not. All search engine traffic would then be directed to the non-branded page without navigation or adverts, leaving them stuck in a single corner of the site with no means of venturing out to your other more lucrative pages.

If your site is design heavy but you also publish a lot of news and otherwise useful information, it is advisable to include a printer-friendly button on each page, simply to ensure your site is tailored to the needs of all your visitors. However, certain steps must be taken to prevent the search engines seeing these simplistic pages as a duplicate version of your main page. To do this;

1.  Include a standard robot barring instruction. Simply copy and paste the following snippet of code into the source of the page.

2.  Amend your robots.txt file to disallow access to any page within a /print directory. All printer-friendly pages would then need to be created in a /print directory for the instruction to be effective.

3.  When you place your ‘printer friendly version’ button on the main page, make the link a no follow link. You can do this by including “no follow after the start of the link code. For example < a rel=”nofollow” href=www.mywebsite.com/print/news1.html”>

Follow these simple steps and you will be able to please all sides — the search engines whose indexing you crave and the visitors whose attention you need!

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A Duplicate Content Problem You May Not Know You Have

In simple terms, a session ID is simply an identifier that is assigned to you. Much like your own name, a session ID is given to you on first sight – in this case when you log on to a website – and is used to track your journey from page to page for the duration of your visit. A session ID will be generated as a list of numbers and is assigned to you the visitor by the website’s servers. The factors used to determine a session ID depend on the site itself and the preferences or needs of the administrator. They could be generated to include the date and precise time of visit for example, should such data be important to a particular website.

If your site is an ecommerce one, you’re likely most familiar with seeing session IDs when a shopping cart is used. As visitors to your site add products to your cart, they can also continue to browse the site and add new products from time to time until their shopping is complete. A session ID would be used here to keep track of the correct contents of the cart.

Typically, a session ID will only last for the length of the visit. So, if you open a page on a site and are assigned a session ID, then accidentally close your browser window, when you navigate back to that same page you’ll see a different session ID tacked on to the end of the URL. While this won’t have any impact on your user experience, it can be a quagmire of problems for search engine spiders, those wishing to link back to a particular page on the site and therefore, ultimately cause problems for the site owner.

Imagine you visit the products page of your local supermarket, which uses session IDs as part of its online shopping cart. When you log in on Monday evening to do your weekly shop, a session ID is assigned to keep track of you, creating the following unique URL: www.yourlocalsupermarket.com/products/milk_sessionid=11111112. You then shut down your browser by accidentally clicking on the cross, and need to re-launch your browser then navigate back to the site to start your shopping all over again. Now you’re back on the site, a session ID is assigned to once again keep track of you and the following unique URL is created: www.yourlocalsupermarket.com/products/milk_sessionid=898989789. Although you are looking at exactly the same page as before, a totally new URL has been created for you. Herein lies the first SEO issue with session IDs; duplicate content. Although the two pages are the same, the two different URLs mean the search engine spiders can interpret them as two unique pages which it then finds are the same. This causes a problem for the search engines because each time their spiders visit, a new session ID will also be created, causing it to mistakenly add the same pages to its index on each visit. When these pages are investigated more thoroughly, the search engine discovers that what it thought was 40 different pages are actually 10 unique pages indexed three times too many.

The same problem arises when users start to link back to the pages on your site. When they first tap in your web address, they are assigned a session ID. Now, most website users won’t know to remove this identifier when they post a link back to your site on a blog or bookmarking site or similar. The next user comes along then arrives at the site via a link that contains a session ID – this can make the link appear to be broken, when in reality the session ID token has simply expired. Additionally, that same user may be assigned their own session ID to replace the outdated one, creating more pages of duplicate content.

Large sites suffer particularly badly in the search engine rankings when using session IDs to track visitor progress through a site because of the sheer volume of duplication that is generated through regular activity. Often, the search engines will simply stop spidering new pages or, will start to remove pages from their index. So, what to do?

Google does offer a parameter control tool through their suite of webmaster workarounds which will allow you to tell the search engine to ignore anything after the session ID field. This simply advises the search engine to ignore anything in the URL after that parameter which helps with the duplicate content issue but not with inbound linking. There are also some CMS systems that offer a similar capability and will simply withhold the session ID portion of the address from the search engines. Again though, this doesn’t totally solve the inbound link problem.

A far better longer term solution is to stop the use of session IDs on your website. While it may be too late to invest in coding to resolve the issue on this incarnation of your website, it is something to keep at the forefront of your development wish list next time around.

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Get Comfortable With Session IDs

The tool is found under the opportunities tab and provides insights on the metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. To make it relevant, the benchmarks are specifically comparing with other advertisers within your category (as determined by Google) and within this sub-segment, advertisers with similar performance to your own campaigns

When comparing the data it will show the performance for one out of about 50 top level categories (e.g.,  “computing”), which can then be drilled down to more specific sub-segments (e.g. “drafting and design software”). It’s advisable to drill down to the most specific segment possible to assure the comparison is highly relevant. By default it will also show performance across all markets using the keyword sets (e.g., blend data from US and UK), which can skew the data, so again it’s recommended to pick only the relevant market for comparison.

Worth noting is that although Google refers to the tool as a “analyze competition” feature, the data provided is anonymous and cannot be used for direct comparison with specific advertisers. Here’s a screenshot:

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Benchmark Your PPC Activity In Google

With the growth of citizen journalism and popularity of YouTube, video news development has been a very real possibility for Google for some time. With the new look Google News all about making it easier to share and personalize your own individual news experience, video news stories are a quick route into the consciousness of a target audience for website publishers.

Producing video releases in the same way as you’d traditionally put out a news release to announce a product launch or important event is an excellent opportunity to reach a new and more diverse audience immediately. To make the most of this chance, try these best practice guidelines, tips and techniques…

1.  Timing is everything: News becomes old news very quickly, particularly online where every second there are millions of other publishers submitting their news and views, all eager to have their minute in the spotlight. Where news can be consumed and replaced in the time it takes to click a mouse button, speedy uploads of news videos is the difference between publication and viewing by a large audience and languishing in the outer echelons of online current affairs.

Try and upload a video the same day as the story breaks, within an hour or two if possible. Any longer than 24 hours and unless it’s a major story that is likely to run on for days and days, it simply isn’t worth investing the time in filming, editing and uploading.

Professional news outfits turn stories around in a matter of minutes sometimes but non-professionals can also become quicker with practice – taking half an hour a day to familiarize yourself with the various aspects of your digital video camera or committing to attending a video editing course after work will really cut down on delays. As you become more familiar and more comfortable with shooting and editing functions and the equipment to hand, you should be able to create a short news video and upload it within hours.

2.  Be specific: The traditional rules of search engine optimization apply to videos to some extent; the title should relate to the content and the story should be specific and focused, making it easier for search engines to understand the video and how it should be grouped. It’s better to limit yourself to one story per video when it comes to multimedia News as that ensures ease of classification for the search engine spiders. You’ll also be less conflicted when writing an accurate title and description, as you won’t be trying to shoehorn four or five different keywords in to a space designed for one.

3.  It should be classified: When uploading your news videos to YouTube for Google News consideration, you’re far more likely to be featured in the higher realms of the News page if you accurately categorize your video. General news videos can be filed under the News and Politics category but anything else will have its own dedicated area. Think of YouTube as a library and yourself as the librarian to work out where best to locate your video to get as much traffic as possible. This is one of the reasons point two (above) is so important as its effects will filter down and either aid or hamper the rest of the process.

4.  Descriptions: The five W rule in journalism should be applied to the description filed. Forget long-winded and teasing intros, when describing a news video stick to Who, What, Where, When and Why. This information will play to the Google News gathering process, helping the spiders to understand which News category and which group of stories the video should be added too.

Tags will also help here so list the names of key figures in the video, as well as any locations that are significant to the story.

5.  Embed: Videos must be embeddable if they are to be found on Google News.  This technical requirement is actually a great reason to take the time to upload your own news videos to your own website. Embedding them within your own pages will have other benefits, particularly from an SEO perspective.

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Are Your Videos News? A 5-Point Checklist

• 27% of respondents reported having a formal marketing budget line associated with social marketing, ranging from 19% in businesses in the Banking & Financial Services sector to 38% in Media & Marketing and the Retail industry. More than half (52%) the companies surveyed in China have such funding built into their formal budgets.
• When asked about the main reason for involvement in social networks, more than half (58%) cited keeping in touch with business contacts. 54% said they use business social networking to join special interest groups and/or gather useful business info.
• 51% reported using social networks to organize or connect with consumer groups, with businesses located in India, South Africa, and China more likely than average to do so (71%, 66%, and 65% respectively).

I have to agree with the study’s authors that it remains difficult to adhere to the long-held belief that social networks have little-to-no influence on ROI when faced with the results showing customer acquisition being tied directly to social networking in combination with the increasing evidence of budget being allocated to the development of social networking. One strength of this study over others is its concentration on worldwide trends and social hot spots, which show that there are parts of the world outside of the US where businesses have more invested in social networking and are seeing more concrete results from it.

Again, if your want to take a look at more of the results, you can download a PDF copy of the summary of results from Regus.

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Selling The Social Side – Part 2

The study, undertaken by Regus (an office services firm located in 450 cities in 80 countries), surveyed a number of businesses worldwide (about 15,000), and found that just under half of smaller companies who responded to their survey reported having acquired a customer through a social network. Interestingly, fewer medium-sized companies (36%) reported doing so, and even fewer (28%) large companies.

Here’s the data broken down by country:

As eMarketer comments, this is “despite large companies being more likely to devote budgets to social marketing.”

The Regus study covers a lot more ground. Tomorrow I’ll get into some of the other trends and findings.

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Selling The Social Side – Part 1

Anyway, since Fridays are a slow day, here’s a link to the interview. Mostly I want to call attention to the link not because it’s an interview with me (AWESOME!!!!) but because Tad, who has been in the industry for quite some time, talks about a lot of interesting stuff on his blog. It’s well worth a visit and browse of his post archives to see if you would like to sign up for his feed. Tad did contribute to an issue of Search Marketing Standard a couple of years ago where we focused an issue on International SEM, where he provided information on the state of the industry in Germany.

It’s probably time we did an update of that issue on International SEM — what do you think? Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see that, and have a great weekend.

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Blowing My Own Horn, er, Vuvuzela

Garrett and Ben timed the release of the ebook with the debut of Ontolo’s new link building toolset. Designed for complex campaigns, the new toolset is accompanied by a collection of free tools that will help those involved in link building campaigns power through some of the mind-numbing tasks involved. The Ontolo Link Building Book takes you from the planning stages of a link building campaign all the way through execution. Along the way, the authors provide a vast array of advice, examples, templates, tips, tools, and resources from which both the novice and the expert will be sure to find something of value. If you’ve been looking for the definitive resource on what link building is, how it can help your site rank better and attract more attention, and some real-world advice from people who know what they are talking about, this is the ebook for you.

Some of the tasks that the book details and provides advice on are:

1.   Identifying the main benefits of link building so you can judge how best to fit it into your general search engine goals and plans

2.   Identifying types of linkable assets you have on your site – or that you could develop on your site – that are likely to make links to your site something that will have perceived value

3.   Analyzing common link opportunity types and design queries for each opportunity type

4.   Developing link prospecting methods and using tools and strategies for automation

5.   Developing methods for qualifying the link prospects you collect, based either on metrics or “by hand” qualifications

6.   Deciding when the market is ripe for your linking prospecting and relationship building advice

7.   Providing some actual implementation tactics and suggestions for ways to deal with responses you receive.

The authors’ approach is to “take the high road” with link building efforts to ensure that the links collected are relevant, of good quality, and procured in a legitimate fashion. If you are looking for ways to get links as quickly as possible with no concern for relevancy, this book is not for you. But if you are looking for a clear, straightforward approach to link building that focuses on ethical and legitimate link collection, this book provides concrete advice that is beyond reproach. The authors are also proponents of “what goes around comes around” in the link building world – called “preciprocration”by them – advocating that you freely and willingly look for places to cite work done by others, link to useful sites, etc., when appropriate and relevant. Taking the first step, before someone contacts you asking for a link, can be a great way to start building a relationship that will lead to much more valuable connections and exchanges further down the road.

Once you have digested the theory behind link building and the suggested ways of assessing what type of link assets you have and need, the next step is to make use of the tools and templates provided with the book to help get you started with your campaigns. Then follow the tips sprinkled throughout the text for help in implementing the theory in making the most out of the linkable assets you already have and in seeking out ways to create more linkable content.

The book could benefit from additional real-world examples illustrating the procedures being described, (perhaps using the same dog grooming brush business referred to a couple of times) to help the reader to understand how to judge the value of particular assets and approaches and to see the tactics in use.

There’s a ton of great information in this ebook, whether you are looking for a little inspiration about the process itself or if you are in search of concrete tactics and techniques to help you rescue a flagging linking strategy. The authors brings many years of experience working with a variety of different types and sizes of client businesses, and certainly know what works and what doesn’t in this field. Take advantage of their decision to share their knowledge with other website builders and consider downloading a copy of their ebook, available in PDF on the Ontolo company website.

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Confused About Link Building? New eBook Sorts It Out And You Save $$

Why should you start preparing for the Christmas Blitz now? Here are a few items to consider before the big day approaches.

SEO:

• Have you created holiday themed pages for the search engines? You may want to do some keyword research that shows what terms were popular last year.
• Spidering and indexing can take several weeks, even with Google Caffeine. If you sell holiday products (like chocolates, cards, and fruitcakes) it often pays to keep the pages active year-round.
• Are you adding external links to new pages? These links need to get “age” for proper consideration, so they should be placed in advance. You should consider that links from other sites take time to be found, cached, and applied to search engine rankings.
• Links from interior pages need to be added in order to show that the holiday pages are relevant to the site as a whole. On page link popularity is often overlooked for seasonal products.
• Have you added fresh content, titles, and tags? An SEO audit should be done to ensure that any of your older pages aren’t utilizing yesterday’s optimization tactics.

Pay Per Click:

• Have you built out holiday-themed landing pages? Do you need any graphics or design work done in order to get them ready? Does the rest of your site (like the logo) use a different theme for the holidays?
• Do you have ad creatives at the ready? Google and Bing PPC have quality score requirements that factor in the “age” of the ad and whether a landing page is relevant enough to the keyword. Your cost per click and ad position are going to depend on quality score, so you may want to have your ads paused and ready for a quick activation.
• Have you budgeted for the season? Many ecommerce stores will triple their PPC budget for the month of December, and some sites have an open-ended budget as long as the daily sales justify it. If you start hitting credit limits on PPC, then you may watch your sales grind to a halt when the ads shut off!
• Are competitors listing lower prices for the same products? You may want to adjust your pricing to match or beat theirs.

Email and Customer Service:

• Have you emailed coupon codes to current and past customers? A 10% off coupon usually costs less than what you’d spend on PPC to make the same sale.
• Do you have enough people to handle phone calls and emails? Do you need to hire temporary employees and train them? Do you have enough phones and workstations ready?
• Have you made the site easy enough that the average person can make a purchase within a few clicks?
• Can most customer service questions be answered on the site? This frees up the phones for sales calls. You should also make sure that a toll-free number is prominent on every page.
• Can you automatically email tracking numbers to customers and save the cost of a follow-up call?

Logistics:

• Can the site and shopping cart handle the extra traffic? Online shoppers may start buying as early as September, but the pace picks up a bit more dramatically toward the start of November and ramps up from there. You want to make sure any site functionality issues are addressed ahead of time. If your site is slow right now, how will it react to a crush of customers?
• Are the programmers lined up? Almost every online initiative faces delays in implementation. If you are outsourcing your coding, you may end up with slow response times from programmers who are working feverishly for their “other” clients. It is better to experience issues before a busy season than after it.
• Do you have a reputable shipping company lined up? Have you negotiated any volume discounts? You want to make sure that you aren’t overpaying for shipping, but you definitely don’t want to experience a bunch of chargebacks because the shipping company failed to deliver Christmas gifts before December 25. (This last tip comes from personal experience with a major shipping provider who didn’t get some “next day air” gifts to their destinations until January.)

With many online retailers, the hectic pace doesn’t die down until the last day a product can be shipped. For the brief remainder of the year, most calls and emails usually involve tracking verification and sales from people who still want to make sure someone gets a gift, even if it is a few days late. As shipping confirmations are sent out (either from drop shippers or a warehouse) then credit card charges are batched for processing. This is the point where all of the preparation pays off, and your efforts can be quantified in real dollars. A good preemptive initiative for Christmas season (or any seasonal sales uptick) can fatten up your bottom line while it leaves your competition believing that the recession has turned into a depression. Even though you’re probably still weary from the last chaotic holiday rush, you may find that this season runs more smoothly and profitably thanks to the work you’re doing right now.

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Christmas in July: Build Your Online Marketing Strategy Now

The MobiLens study covers the share of the market by mobile OEM and the market share of the different makers of smartphones. The one significant change in these figures is a 4% increase in Google Android. The next three month period will include the impact of the iPhone’s new version, which came too late to be included in this set of figures. Overall, smartphone ownership increased 8.1% over the previous period.

Of the types of activities that can be done via mobile devices, the largest increase was in accessing social networking sites or blogs, at 20.8%, up 2.6% from the period ending in February. Using a browser was close behind, with a 2.3% increase, and using downloaded apps at 2.1%. More ordinary types of activities, such as sending text messages to another phone (1.4%), listening to music (1.2%), and playing games (0.7%) follow, with smaller rates of increase of use.

In all, not much earth-shattering is revealed by this set of figures, but they do show the continued steady increase in the use of smartphone features and capabilities. When one looks a little further back in time, it’s possible to see which capabilities are the ones whose use has grown fastest. Looking at results from the same study covering the three month period ended September 2009, here are the changes for each of the type of activity tracked (May 2010 figure vs. September 2009):

Sent text message to another phone – increase of 4.2%
Used browser – increase of 5.9%
Used downloaded apps – increase of 13.3%
Played games – increase of 1.1%
Accessed social networking site or blog – increase of 7.0%
Listened to music on mobile phone – increase of 2.6%

It’s clear that the activity that is growing in most popularity with the smartphone is the use of downloaded applications. Not too surprising, considering that apps combine utility and ease of use, are inexpensive, and have a viral aspect to them. Accessing social networking sites/blogs is also quickly increasing in use, up more even than using a browser itself.

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Devouring Mobile Content: The Feast Continues