Ever done a search for Ann Widdecombe? Me neither until today. There's an interesting image shown, as you can see - and from an SEO point of view, it's as interesting as it's funny.

Ann Widdecombe has a new hairdo

The image Google is showing as the number one result is from the www.greatwigs.co.uk website. However, the image in question is no longer on that site, although it is linked to from this Guardian article (where it says "Ann, as ever resembling a peroxide Friar Tuck").

Try to click through to it, and you get a 404 page not found. So why on earth is Google returning a non existent image as the first result? And is that all you need to rank first - one link from the Guardian? Or does its incongruity mean that so many people click on it that Google has been fooled into thinking it must be relevant?

I wrote a guest post about when you should pay professional rates for great copywriting - as opposed to 2p a word via some content mill, or even less for some automated keyword spewer.

If you fancied reading it and retweeting it, I might get invited back to do another one (and you might find it interesting, too).

Anyway, click here to read when it's worth paying top dollar for professional copywriting.

Let me know if I've missed anyone ...

Online marketing summit day (Monday 15 Feb)

10 expert tips on email marketing

Fiona Cullinan: "She promised seven tactics in the presentation but instead, I counted 30."

Social media best practices for marketers inside the brand

Fiona Cullinan: "This is his favourite stat: ‘If you’re under 25 and live in US, 5% of all the time you spend alive is spent on Facebook.’"

Day 1 (Tuesday 16 Feb)

Search Engine Strategies London 2010

Summaries

Fiona Cullinan: "And why don’t we get the love from our execs? Because they just don’t get it. It’s a rare CFO or purse-string holder that gets internet culture and what they should pay and where."

SEOptimise: "The coverage on Twitter has been fantastic so I thought I’d try something different to show the best tweets from day one."

Adido Digital: "We've put together the top tweets from the day for those of you that didn't get to go and for those lucky people who are there but who couldn't see every session".

Return on Digital (video): "The first biggest change we saw this year was that there was a really big focus on analytics".

Other posts about day 1

Andrew R H Girdwood: "Turns out Google Buzz's search option isn't the best way to see what's been said ... The first thing to note is that Google Buzz's search does not do in-word phrase matches. Searching for #ses does not bring back buzzes for #ses1."

Be awesome: ideas for approaching search analytics differently

SEO Chicks: "Avinash is also a fan of tag clouds. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is, so this is rather refreshing."

Fresh Egg: “First click attribution [crediting conversions with original source] is a bit like giving credit to your first girlfriend to your current marriage” - a classic Kaushikism!

Introduction to search engine marketing

No blog posts I know of.

Introduction to analytics

adCenter Blog: "Trends should be identified as they happen and not after the event. If you are the first to notice, you could be the first to take action and advantage of any opportunity that presents itself."

Search Engine Watch: "Keyword trees, yes. Attribution analysis, sure. Monetizing the long tail, got that. Micro conversions, yep."

Duct Tape marketing: "What Web Analytics 2.0 attempts to do is also measure what they did there and why, through the use of tools like surveys that engage individual users."

From real time search to dynamic discovery

Fresh Egg: "I was hoping this session would cover the issue of how Google is incorporating links within tweets and realtime updates into its main index and importance algorithms. It didn’t come close."

SEO Chicks: "Issues exist around relevancy, understanding signal vs noise and developing sophisticated interpretative tools that incorporate behaviour, interaction, semantics and traditional taxonomic databases, to inform product behaviour."

Introduction to conversion optimisation

No blog posts I know of.

Beyond blue links

adCenter Blog: "1 in 3 queries are navigational. Only 1 in 4 queries deliver successful results! Since Search wasn't specifically built to help people accomplish tasks, research from Microsoft indicates that search sessions across all engines are often long and repetitive."

PPC or SEO? THe ultimate search marketing battle

Fresh Egg: "Dave Naylor talks about the way they do it monitoring rankings and traffic vs normalised search data from Google Insights API (I think) and constantly calculating average clickthrough rates for certain positions for non-branded keyphrases ... [He] mentioned the ‘cliff drop’ from #1 which might get 49% clickthrough to #2 (20% if you’re lucky) and lower."

Introduction to SEO

Adcenter blog: "Matt encouraged us to understand the language of customers and of the market and not to automatically use our jargon to describe products and offerings."

Meaningful SEO metrics

SEO Chicks: "There’s a final question about measuring Personalised Search, which in summary, is currently impossible."

Target Stone: "The days when upper management was impressed by subtle changes in Page Rank have been replaced by questions of LTV and ROI."

Managing a global SEO campaign

Multi lingual search: "My advice is quite clearly this; If you can use local domains - do. Only sectors which find it difficult to obtain local links at all (the adult zones) should opt from choice for a dot com."

Fresh Egg: "All in all, my feeling on this session overall is “meh” with a view “ooh” moments."

The basics of link building

Search Engine Watch (close enough to being about this session!): "some of the linkbuilding gems of wisdom that were being tweeted and re-tweeted live from the sessions."

Deep dive into analytics: when bounce rate no longer floats your boat

SEO Chicks: "Just because a deep dive is useful, going deeper may not be more useful. It might just be a total waste of time."

Industry specific search strategies: under the hood

Fresh Egg: "The problem is ... that all the talks are so short that speakers cram a shedload of good stuff into a verbal diahorrea of bullet points."

SEO Gadget: "By considering ways to link across vertical silos that otherwise may not recieve much juice, you may be improving a significant chunk of your overall search engine visibility."

State of the UK industry discussion panel

Fresh Egg: "I think it's short sighted to think that the recession won't touch search - it will, eventually, and just like in any industry the least efficient ones will be picked off first."

DAY TWO (Wednesday 17th February)

21 Secrets of top converting websites

Search Engine Watch: "Now, the average conversion rate for a website is around 3%, but many websites convert at 10% or higher. What do they do that you may not be doing?"

Microsoft Advertising Blog: "Traffic means little if you’re not working to have your visitors take an action – place an order, sign up for a news letter, navigate well and keep digging for more information."

SEO Chicks: "Dell decided to make just one change (two words) from “learn more” to “help me choose”. This change has made $10,000,000 over the years since change."

Andrew R H Girdwood: "There's clearly growing frustration at client-side IT departments. Bryan calls them BPUs - Business Prevention Units. He's not the only speaker to express annoyance with how hard it can be to move from recommending best practise to clients to actually getting that practise implemented."

State of Search: "We’re a bunch of scent following animals, and as soon as we lose the scent we drop off. Keep all design on brand and in line with the campaign. Tie in ppc ads into pages too. Victoria Secret does this very well by maintaining a consistent brand from banner to website to checkout."

Successful information architecture

Endeavour: "User expectance is different from IT view and SEO has to match user expectations, not IT."

Digital asset optimisation

No blog posts I know of.

Social media 101

adCenter Blog: "First things first, when thinking of setting up your campaign, you must, must, must consider your campaign objectives ... And more importantly, will the campaign fulfil each of these objectives?"

SEO Chicks: "200,000,000 blog out there in the interwebosphere, of which 54% post content of some sort DAILY. 34% of whom post product and service OPINION."

SEO where to next

Return on Digital (video interview with Dan Cohen, a member of the panel): "The most important thing you're aiming for when you're trying to develop an SEO program is authority."

SEO Chicks: "Googler in Norway confirmed that H1 tags not as important as 2 – 3 years ago. Stuff like optimum keyword density is bull. Of course title tags, internal linking is massive."

Andrew RH Girdwood: "Once Google finds one paid link they can often use that point to find more and signals that suggest even more. Google can decide to discount a link if it doesn't look right. They can be fairly atomic with their precision and take action against links or pages before targeting a whole site."

State of Search: "Local listings are becoming every popular as they are dominating the search results pages. More and more keywords are triggering local so be aware."

Introduction to paid search

No blog posts I know of.

Real time SEO: No more yesterday's news

Andrew R H Girdwood: "The [Guardian's] CMS makes use of "keyword pages". These aren't pages of automated content. These are automatically built pages from editorial content. How do they fair in Google's crawling; these pages are crawled every 30m by Google and this compares to 3m crawls of the Section pages."

Link building - Methods and risks

State of Search: "Buying links: Odds of getting penalised is very low, all top phrases are buying links yet are still operating. However here are the top 10 ways that will get you banned."

Best practices in offshore outsourcing for digital marketing

SEOFrancois: The powerpoint he gave is available here, plus some links.

Pushing content via XML, RSS and site maps

No blog posts I know of.

Digital media meets party politics

Parliamentary connections: "[Digital campaign staf] all agreed that the biggest impact of the Obama campaign has been to get them a seat at the top table. Whereas before Obama party bosses might have been tempted to treat social media as a sideshow ..."

Developing great content

adCenter blog: "Video is 50 times more likely to get first-page ranking that web text"

New affiliate opportunities and strategies

Magnus Nillson: "I feel that the session failed to deliver anything relevant to more than a handful of affiliate rookies ... in the UK there’s only about 500 affiliates that are actually making any decent money"

Social media and the marketing mix

SEO Chicks: "Mel ... gives an anecdote about a mobile company that urged people in an offline campaign to “search for I AM”, and they have to take out a huge paid campaign, as number 1 algo listing was a rather amusing, yet irreverant site something like iambored.com"

State of Search: "If you only communicate about your own stuff you are less likely to be more interesting to those following you. Be sure to also spread information from others."

Black hat / white hat unconferenced

No blogs I know of.

Day 3 (Thursday 18 Feb)

A UK SEO: A brief overview of the day.

Social media metrics

State of Search: "It is about relationships, we need to listen carefully and we need to use that information to sell more of the marketing goals."

Search advertising tools

adCenter Blog: "During search sessions 42% of the time further keyword refinement was needed."

Introduction to information retrieval on the web

No blogs I know of.

Crossing borders: global site clinic

Webmaster radio FM: Radio interview with Andy Atkins-Kruger, Managing Director for WebCertain.

Advanced paid search techniques

Webmaster radio FM: Radio interview with John Marshall, SES Advisory Board and CTO, Market Motive.

Duplicate content and multiple site issues

No blogs I know of.

Tough live: Get your site tuned up

No blogs I know of.

Paid search, content networks and display

adCenter Blog: "Text on the world's first banner advert stated: "Ever click here? You will do". Did it make people click? No! Since those early days the ads have not really evolved."

Why does search get all the credit

No blogs I know of.

Augmented reality: It's a brave new world

No blogs I know of.

Paid search site clinic

No blogs I know of.

Search becomes the display OS

No blogs I know of.

Automating Twitter

A UK SEO: "t might be the case that in the next few years we are not using twitter. But if you have the process in place to monitor, engage, track that should able to be applied to the next platform."

Conversion site clinic

No blogs I know of.

Overall summaries of the conference

Fiona Cullinan: "Rather than regurgitate whole speeches, here’s what SEOs and marketing types from SES London are saying about Twitter for 2010 – at least in the sessions I attended: 1 Real-time search: be wary of the value of Twitter ..."

Let me know if I've missed any ...

I have a Firefox stylesheet that reveals which links are nofollow. And I'm fairly sure that, last time I looked, @ mentions of people's names weren't nofollowed - but now are, as this screenshot demonstrates.

@ mentions now nofollowed

Is this breaking news, or am I losing my mind?

Update I'm not. I've looked through the google cache of some tweets and this is new. And it seems I was beaten to the news ...

There's a good post about Wordpress's permalink structure on the SEObullshit blog. Which led me to reread the Wordpress codex about Meta tags in Wordpress. I realise it's put together by volunteers. But maybe if you ever read that page, add the word not to every sentence ...

Howler 1: Keywords are important

What Wordpress says:

Keywords meta tags, on the other hand, are still used by Google and other important search engines to categorize and rank your website. Those engines compare the keywords with the content, giving you "points" for having your keywords match your content. Keywords are one of the most important meta tags you can add to your WordPress site.

This kind of conflicts with the official Google line:

"Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking."

Howler 2: Use the same meta description on every page

I won't quote the full advice. But it involves adding the same meta description to every page:

With these generic description meta tags, [your] website would be accurately described and that should please just about any search engine.

Which kind of conflicts with Google's official advice:

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. ... Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

To sum up

• Don't pay attention to Wordpress's advice.
• Don't bother with keywords.
• Do bother with meta descriptions.
• Do follow my advice to easily add unique meta descriptions to every wordpress post / page.

That's it!

I gave a friend of a friend a bit of SEO advice and noticed google's cache of the site's pages - but not the pages themselves - had a link at the bottom that said "website development" with a link to a web development company (we'll call them company X).

The friend's friend didn't really understand what I was on about but it became clear company X had done a small bit of work on the existing design. And it appears they took the opportunity to go into the CMS templates and add this:

<?phpinclude"ipchecker.php";if(isGoogleBot()){echo '<div><a href="company X's website">Website development</a> ...

Yes, a bit of code that shows a link to Google but not to anyone else. A quick check in Yahoo Site Explorer showed up some more examples.

Now I don't know they did all this without their clients' permission, so I'm not outing them. But I figured someone there should know that we're on to them ...

So I'm running searches every time I get to a new computer for the following terms:

• adding secret links clients site company X
• cloaking company X
  
• going to out you company X
• links footer company X

all of which return one of their pages - and then I'm clicking through, hoping their analytics data will soon start to show these terms appearing ...

So, just as Search Engine Land has issued some SEO advice for Bill Gates's blog (which maybe he didn't need), I thought I'd help the Pope out with some SEO and copywriting tips.

He has just come out (today) and told priests to blog, in the message of his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for the 44th World Communications Day:

Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) ....

Here's where he's going wrong (well, he's infallible, but you know what I mean) ...

The Pope needs some SEO

Page title

I think the Pope needs to ask himself how he wants people to find his message. At the moment, the HTML title for this latest message is "Message for the 44th World Communications Day, Benedict XVI", and so this is how the page appears in Google:

How the Pope's latest page looks in Google

Personally, that doesn't look that exciting. What is the message? What's it about? A few words about the content would help.

He could start by looking at what people search for online. I ran a few terms through the Google keywords tool:

• ministry blog
• world communication day
• church blog
• catholic blog

(I didn't include priest blog as that just gets you a load of world of wordcraft pages ...) As you can see from these results, people aren't really searching for world communications day - but a lot of people search for catholic blog and church blog:

Change the title to what people search for

If it were me, I'd change the HTML title to something like:

Catholic Church must blog more says Pope | 44th World Communications Day | Vatican

That should pick up lots more traffic.

Description

There is no meta description set on the page - this is the snippet of text Google usually shows under the result. Because it's not set, Google is picking some text to show, which is why it says:

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI FOR THE 44th WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY. "The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: ...

This is quite SHOUTY. The Vatican should set a meta description that sells and explains the page, and encourages the searcher to click through. Something like:

Hear the Pope's message directly as he uses the 44th World Communications Day to call on priests to blog more. Find out what he said and how you spread the word.

URLs

The URL is ghastly:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20100124_44th-world-communications-day_en.html

The Vatican should read up on search-engine- / human-friendly URLs.

But also, I'd like to see the Vatican use a "living" URL.

The latest message should be on /world-communications-day. Then each time a new message comes out (there's one a year), the old can be moved to /world-communications-day-number-year (EG /world-communications-day-43-2009). The new one can be put on the living URL - that way the latest message always gets the benefits of existing inbound links and so is likely to do best in Google.

Navigation

The only navigation on the page

There is lots more advice I could offer, but navigation is a key one. When you get to the latest message, there are only three links on the page, as the picture shows - a javascript previous-page link (which does nothing if you come from a search engine),  a picture of an arrow that takes you up a page, and that image which takes you home.

The Vatican need to start thinking about lots more links:

• calls to action to convert (in every sense of the word) visitors,
• links to other sections of their site,
• links in the copy to other relevant pages and so on.

This will help both users and search engines understand the structure of the site and what pages are most important. And just as Jesus broke bread, so the website could perhaps mend itself with a breadcrumb trail.

Copywriting

OK, that's SEO taken care of. Now, we know Jesus spoke in parables - and I think the Pope could learn a lot from that. I know he's infallible, but I'm not sure he's got the common touch when it comes to communicating.

For a start, he needs to use shorter paragraphs (one is 240 words long) and more sub headings, to help people understand and scan the structure of the page. I'd maybe lose the coloured background, too, as that doesn't help with readability.

And talking of readability, I'd like to see shorter words, shorter sentences, more active voice - maybe the odd bullet list? Let's give it a go.

Pope says:

God’s loving care for all people in Christ must be expressed in the digital world not simply as an artifact from the past, or a learned theory, but as something concrete, present and engaging. Our pastoral presence in that world must thus serve to show our contemporaries, especially the many people in our day who experience uncertainty and confusion, “that God is near; that in Christ we all belong to one another”

I'd say it like this:

You must express God’s love for everyone in a way that doesn't sound old fashioned or just academic.

Use new media to make it clear his love is:

1. concrete,
2. present,
3. engaging.

We must show everyone, especially those who are uncertain, that "in Christ we all belong to one another”.

Conclusion

Update: Some more SEO tips for the Vatican.

With some simple SEO changes, the Pope's message could be found more.

With some nods to best practice web writing, he could engage more people.

And maybe next year he could get himself a twitter and record his message on audioboo?

Searchers in the UK are starting to prefer the US spelling of some words. Although we can still spell centre, colour and theatre, with the following words the US spelling is now searched for more often than the UK version:

• donut vs doughnut
• yogurt vs yoghurt
• fetus vs foetus

Here are the graphs from Google Insights to show this - the blue line is the UK spelling, the red line the US one.

Donut vs doughnut

Donut has been preferred since 2007 or so

Yogurt vs yoghurt

Yogurt overtook yoghurt in 2009

Fetus vs foetus

These were neck and neck until about 2007.

No wonder Google is having problems with spelling if searchers can't spell ...

More evidence that Google has changed how it handles spelling errors. It is now fixing spelling in autocomplete (the list of suggestions it offers as you start to type in the web-based search form). (I think this is new, anyway ...)

Unlike yesterday's example, where Google was just deciding for itself which version of alternative, correct spellings you meant, I approve of this - partly because it's helpful, and partly because the user retains control (so they can search for wrong spellings if they want to).

Here are some examples - plus some where it ought to be fixing them but isn't. Note in each that the list of suggestions include the correct spellings (apart from millennium), even though I have spelled the word wrong.

Correcting common mis-spellings

Weird vs wierd

You type wierd, Google shows suggestions for weird

Acomodate vs accommodate

You type acomodate, Google shows suggestions for accommodate

Acceptable vs acceptible

You type acceptible, Google shows suggestions for acceptable

Greatful vs grateful

You type greatful, Google shows suggestions for grateful

Bellwether vs bellweather

You type bellweather, Google shows suggestions for bellwether

Please get these right however

Could of vs could have

This is not correct English - it should be could have.

There is no such construction as "could of". Please correct to could have.

Millennium - huh?

And millennium has two ls and two ns, however many results you've found for the wrong spelling ...

Right, I think it just can't spell millennium.

Conclusion

Looking at these, and the various other spelling examples that have emerged lately, it seems that Google must be using user behaviour in some way to deal with spelling errors.

For instance, where it observes people search for X immediately after Y (and X is a spelling variant of Y), it might decide to return X results when people search for Y. This probably explains the stationary / stationery issue from yesterday and the weird / wierd etc examples above.

Alternatively, it might be using its "did you mean" spelling correction data and, where people clicked this a lot, it's now just assuming they meant it all along.

I'm not sure it explains Google returning results for optimization when you search for optimisation, but there you go.

What do you think?

We've all been worrying about Google forcing us to search for search engine optimization when we want to search for search engine optimisation.

I think we can relax, as it turns out hardly anyone searches for either ...

Here's a graph from Google Insights:

It shows that people search for the term SEO about 15 to 20 times more often than they search for either search engine optimisation or optimization. Still, no excuse for Google forcing the -ize spelling on us ...