I promised myself yesterday that the next post I wrote would be about SEO so here it is. I’m going to share some really basic, but hopefully useful, SEO tips to use on your site.

SEO Tip One – Build Your Site Using Tables

I know what you’re thinking – tables are SO 2005! With the advent of Web 2.0 and “design standards”, no-one uses tables any more. They use fancy semantic markup so their code is all clean and shiny. Think about the signal this is sending to Google – websites using DIVs, CSS etc are new, but as we all know, new websites are less trusted than old ones.

If you build your website using tables, Google will think that your website is really old, and therefore trusted and authoritative. Old, trusted websites rank really well, so if you build your site using tables you’re more likely to get rankings!

SEO Tip Two – Use Frames Wherever Possible

Google have been hinting that page load speed is important, and increasingly this seems like another big ranking factor. Think about all the stuff that your webpage has to load – all that content! Your server can only handle so many requests at a time, so your site is at risk of being really slow.

Speed up your website by loading the textual content in an iFrame, hosted on a subdomain (e.g. content.yourwebsite.com). This increases threading so Google sees your site load super-fast and boosts your rankings!

SEO Tip Three – Use Lots Of Parameters In Your URLs

Google loves big websites – if you want an example take a look at Wikipedia. The more pages a site has, the more authoritative it is, and if pages are added regularly Google sees the site as fresh and relevant.

You can generate loads of relevant pages on your site by using parameters in your URLs. That way, you only have to write a little bit of content, but you get potentially hundreds of pages out of it!

For example, say you have ten pages about “ponies”. If someone searches your site for articles on “ponies” they get all those results on the URL yourwebsite.com/search.php?po=123. If someone else searches for “tiny ponies” they get the exact same results, but on the URL yourwebsite.com/search.php?po=123+ti=456. Google sees these as two separate pages = you have a really big site = you get rankings!

Okay, so I’ve only written three tips, but this is my first SEO post for ages so I hope you’ll forgive me. These are the three most important anyway, but if you’ve got any to add just leave a comment!

Anyhoo, thanks to my talk at Think Visibility, Piggynap.com has collected a few links with my name in as people link back to my site as part of their write-up. Yesterday I ranked third for Zoe Piper – today:

Who knew – all I had to do to get the top spot was speak at a conference!

According to the Google blog, they’re changing the way snippets operate to allow more information into the search results. From my highly scientific and rigorous testing it appears to be more informational (i.e. long) searches at the moment that result in these enormous snippets, but this surely has implications for the humble meta description.

It’ll be interesting to see how many meta descriptions get borked by this update – will Google just pick some random text from the site in order to fill the extra space? Is it worth writing longer descriptions just in case?

As e-consultancy puts it, No:

• A lot of the articles are spammy
• A lot of the content is copied
• A lot of the formatting is crap
• If you still want to browse, you can’t

I’d like to expand on this and add my own observations. They are not scientific or in any way fair, but that’s why I have Piggynap, right?

Bizarre

Firstly, how on earth do Google decide which Knols to put on the front page? Wikipedia choose based on such factors as; what’s interesting today. Featured Knols on the other hand appear to be the arbitrary ravings of madmen. For example, ‘How To Farm Lightning™’ appears alongside ‘Dreams Are Fun Because They Are Emotional Not Logical’ whilst the browse button is about the size of a pinhead. ‘Bag o’Knols’ is a poor translation of “we couldn’t be bothered to build a menu”.

Shoddy

They didn’t even register www.knol.com

Google claim that Knols are used by people in 197 countries. If their traffic is really that great why do some featured Knols have less than 5 page views? I think Google mean that people from 197 countries write Knols, which would explain the 100,000 bizarre articles in various grades of English. My last post on the subject said that Knols seemed to rank pretty highly but that no longer seems to be the case (cue some unscientific observations). Perhaps it’s related to this apparent lack of editorial standards?

Half-Assed

Writers can put adverts on their Knols, which sounds okay only a) most people will never get any traffic and b) you have to sign up for an Adsense account meaning Google have sold you another product and can potentially make money out of your efforts (assuming you buck the trend in a). Anyone familiar with the make-your-own-page service Squidoo will notice a strange resemblance, only Squidoo doesn’t pretend to offer authoritative content. It focuses on community and personal taste – “Dreams Are Fun” wouldn’t look so crackpot over there.

As with any free-page service, Google had to decide whether links from Knols would be nofollow. They are – except for those from “trusted users” (whatever that means). Nofollowed links, although annoying, do have the rather useful effect of discouraging spammers from posting. If there’s an easy way around the nofollow (i.e. become ‘trusted’) it will be gamed and therefore useless.

Finally, and this could just be me, you have to click the back button twice to get off a page. Argh!

When the girl was kidnapped American police, instead of scouting the area themselves, used Google Street View to find places she might be hidden. After identifying a likely motel, they then sat in their offices and used Google to find out its name. After making sure through Google that the motel was indeed in the right location, they finally send someone round to make a bust.

Is this is end of police as we know them? Wait a minute, when was the last time the police set foot in the street anyway?

Aside from the half hour I wasted today playing with it, what else is Insights good for?

The comparison feature obviously has its uses – X-Factor producers will be glad to know they get far more searches than Strictly for example. It’s the search trends over time that really fascinate me however…not just to learn what’s becoming popular, but to compare what was popular in the past and why.

Let’s take a look at London 2012. Back in 2005 Lord Coe and his friends were organising their bid and winning the contract and we can see a huge peak on the trends graph. In 2006 no-one cared, but the Olympics were a point of interest again in 2007, apparently when the horrendous logo was unveiled.

Insights really demonstrates how search behaviour follows offline events and I think search marketers should take note. Rising trends, the next big thing, the hot news story…it’s all reflected in the graph. If you keep an eye on current events you can probably guess what’s going to hit Google next – what you do with that information is up to you. Building a site all about the impending Olympics or deciding to fire Paul Chuckle…we’ve got all the justification we need.

The last I heard, Google were linking subdomains with their – what would you call them? Canonical domains? So that if www.piggynap.com ranked for monkey toes, monkeytoes.piggynap.com wouldn’t rank separately. It would be indented and counted as one result and not two. This means that relevant subdomains still have a chance of ranking for a key term, (the main domain might even play the role of the indented result) but several subdomains couldn’t dominate the page.

I also thought that subdomains would find it a little harder to rank – given the choice Google would rather place a proper domain first. Obviously this isn’t the case with domains like wordpress.com where separate blogs are owned by different people – presumably Google make an exception for hosting solutions like these. They still have to be careful however and avoid showing many results from the same site so I thought that in general they held subdomains at arms length.

So where am I going with all this? Well, I first noticed that Google were ranking their own subdomain in the form of books.google.com. It seemed that Google had made an exception for themselves. Then I noticed that a lot of the results were subdomains, whether or not the parent site was an authority.

I know this is all a bit subjective, but I just wonder if Google have started to allow subdomains more power. If I had my tinfoil hat on I’d say that they’ve changed their tune since deciding to put books.google.com into the results. But I’ve got no evidence, just some observations and a wild imagination. In the Webmaster Guidelines they say “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content” so who knows. Maybe that line will disappear just like the advice they used to have about buying a listing in the Yahoo! Directory.

If you’ve noticed anything weird going on with subdomains, leave a comment. Let’s be confused together.

Now this is meant to be an Adwords update, so why would I want to know about the Google news archive, Google Reader and Blogger Following (not to mention the US Elections!). Call me sceptical, but I imagine that a lot of Adwords users haven’t even heard of these other Google properties, which means this newsletter is acting as free advertising to a captive audience. Adwords users might think Google Reader is relevant to them – after all, Google are telling them about it in a special update!

With the launch of Chrome on their homepage it’s pretty clear Google aren’t afraid of pushing their products. Adwords updates are just the latest victim and I’m sure they won’t be the last.

The Logo

This is probably a matter of personal taste but I’ve always liked the Firefox logo. It’s striking and fun and does exactly what it says on the tin.

The Chrome logo on the other hand looks uncannily like a Pokeball. Sorry Google, but I keep expecting Pikachu to jump out.

Winner of Best Logo: Firefox

The Address Bar

Firefox 3 gives you URL suggestions when you start to type in a web address. These include your favourites and pages you’ve visited recently. Unfortunately the top suggestions are never what I’m looking for so I’m not impressed with this feature. What is neat is if you type enough letters it gives you the exact page you want – great if you’ve forgotten the address but know what it was about (it records the page title for reference).

Chrome’s address bar on the other hand is also its search box. It has access to Google’s web results so offers you search suggestions as well as relevant web pages out of those you’ve already visited. Unlike Firefox it doesn’t just search the page title, it searches the whole page to find your phrase. This makes for fantastic results.

Winner of Best Address Bar: Chrome

Web History

Firefox’s history is functional. It shows web addresses or page titles in a neat little sidebar, so it doesn’t intrude on your browsing. It’s functional and practical – no complaints here.

Chrome’s history on the other hand is far more informative. You get the time of your visit, a cute little logo for each webpage and the links look exactly like links. There’s more space and you can see the full page title – Firefox offers a simple record but Chrome offers browsing options. The one letdown is the history appears as a separate page, not a sidebar – not good for multi-tasking.

Winner of Best Web History: Tricky one this, but from a usability standpoint I think Firefox wins. Chrome’s history offers maybe TOO much information

RSS Reader

I really wanted to cheat here because I use the Sage plugin and it’s fantastic, but I’ve stuck to Firefox’s inbuilt RSS reader. You access your feeds through the bookmarks folder and get a simple list of headlines. It does exactly what an RSS reader should do – gives you the info you want without interrupting your browsing.

Chrome also has an inbuilt RSS reader and just like Firefox you can access feeds through the bookmarks folder. Forget about sidebars or lists though – clicking on a feed opens the whole thing in
your browser, presented as a complete (stripped down) webpage. It’s pretty but intrusive and defeats the object of RSS. If it doesn’t save me time I’m not going to use it.

Winner of Best RSS Reader: Firefox

The Scores!

Firefox

Chrome

Even with Chrome’s stripped-back simplicity it just doesn’t deliver on convenience of use. Firefox wins by a hair!