Change in attitude
I’ve recently changed my opinion on perfecting websites before pushing them out live. The problem I’d always have is that I’d constantly try and re-work bits over and over again, not being happy with the look of the site. I’d eventually just hit a dead end when I was sick of changing things over and over again because I was being too picky.
Not the case now, as I’m trying to do small incremental changes to the compareacar.co.uk website. My most recent one which I’ve just published, is a slightly changed UI globally, as well as an updated homepage.
My 2 requirements was to expose more content in the featured item box, and get it to rotate automatically. This I did by changing the way it looked and the wya it presented data. I’m looking to improve the look of it at some point but it functionally does its job and looks neat enough for the time being.
My second requirement was to expose the compare cars section a little more on the homepage, and getting the cars pages indexed a little easier straight from the homepage. This is only a small change, but once the car pages get their second stage of dressing (images, user reviews and better presented data), I’ll push a bit more to the homepage.
Also once I’ve defined some car collections this will hopefully target some keywords that aren’t easy to target with the rigid content we have right now. Terms like saloon cars and green cars for example aren’t easy to target without pieceing together articles/collections to collate this stuff together.
Anyway lots of work going on, check out the top 2 fastest cars articles popular at the moment…fastest cars for under £20k and fastest cars for under £30k.
My Google Mail - new buttons?
Just noticed that I’ve got some new custom buttons in my google mail. It sure looks a bit nicer, and larger hotspots too…
Twitter - Useful or not?
Over the last few days, Twitter in the UK has had some major PR by some big-named fans of the micro-blogging tool. On Friday night with Johnathon Ross, both Stephen Fry and Wossy, discussed the service at length, bringing many people previously unfamiliar with the tool, up to speed.
Phillip Schofield, also talked about twitter on his popular daytime TV show a few days ago, and on this morning’s BBC News, it was again mentioned.
So, will it take off? With this new and undoubtedly continuing exposure, will it take the UK by storm? Will it hit facebook heights? My answer is yes for a number of reasons.
Twitter is connected I believe to the prosperity of the UK mobile market. As more and more smartphones sell and the popularity of the iphone grows, and because twitter itself is an easy to use micro-blogging tool, it’s almost too easy to stay in touch and connect with people that you wouldn’t have been able to before.
This isn’t exactly the world’s best example, but I’m the last person in a team of 25 people at the BBC to get an iphone. Of course, Apple fans and media company… poor example, but it’s an indication of where things are heading. Additionally and more importantly, our recent stats on radiotimes.com, show that we’re now getting a significant portion (vague sorry!) of site visitors from the iphone/ipod combination. Why is this important?
Well twitter is one of those services where you couldn’t (and maybe shouldn’t) sit down on it and use it all day. It’s not like facebook where you have rich media content like photos and videos, and chat with your friends directly. I believe it’s meant to be used quickly when you have a sudden thought or news flash. This means that you have to use your mobile to do it, otherwise it won’t happen. Only a small portion of people will use it on their computer over time, and probably most of those will be reading this post and disagree.
The question over whether it will be a viable business, useful to companies, or even useful to users is hard to address. Useful to users has already been answered to some degree. The platform has allowed people/companies to connect closer to their users/friends/general public, due to its short and personal nature. This means that I know what Stephen Fry is doing or thinking, just as easily as I know what some of my friends are doing, planning and thinking.
So how does twitter make money from other people’s enjoyment? Has it got a facebook-sized revenue conundrum? The volume of traffic must be adding up, and the more people that talk and discuss it, particularly on the TV with huge audience figures, this will only get worse. Twitter will take off but needs to find some money pretty quickly as it’s heading towards mainstream use now, and needs to be prepared.
* Update - celebsontwitter.com and celebsontwitter.co.uk are now mine..! 
*
Yahoo adjusts bidding and says you’re responsible…
I don’t blog that often on here but thought this was worth a post. Marketing Pilgrim are reporting that Yahoo have recently updated their terms and conditions to say that you are fully responsible for any changes that Yahoo make to optimise your account.
A little while ago, Yahoo implemented a system that optimised your bidding and keywords for your campaign automatically, which is slightly worrying. On top of this, they are now saying that it’s not their problem.
Surely this will hardly encourage people to use their system, and surely won’t entice people to move away from Google Adwords.
Compare a car launches…
I’ve just launched compareacar.co.uk, a new site dedicated to car news, articles and hopefully a new place to research and compare cars. We’re currently building a comparison system from a large database of UK car spec data.
It’s throwing up some interesting stuff right now like the fastest cars for under £20,000 and pretty much anything is possible with the data, so watch this space for news on its launch. We’re posting a few articles over there relating to this data up until launch, so expect a few tidbits of trivia like the fastest 4×4s, the slowest cars that cost more than £30k, and a few other bits we can find.
Google reader update…more time spent
I spend a couple of hours every day ploughing through my RSS feeds for marketing/seo/web-design news and inspiration. I sometimes think that I’m wasting my time reading other people’s output every day. However, on reflection, it’s definitely time well spent keeping up and staying up to speed with the fast moving digital industry.
Good news today then, that my experience with my favourite RSS reader has now been upgraded with a cleaner interface, and a few UI extras. Hopefully it’ll speed a few things up and save me a few minutes each day haha! Time is money as they say…
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/12/square-is-new-round.html
Google Customises Search Listings
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html
Google has launched some enhancements to their results pages whereby you can boost, delete and comment on the listings. Take a look over on the Google Blog to check it out.
Despite, Google has said that it won’t affect rankings for other users, I don’t see why this data in the future could be used to give a little extra weighting to pages with more “boosts” than others.
Also I noticed that when I boosted a website, I noticed that there is a total number of “boosts” next to mine, so even if initially these attributes aren’t used to rank sites, it might influence CTRs for certain search terms, particularly if a page in position 1 has no boosts, but a page in position 2 has 56. Unless I’m wrong, (and I probably am!) it seems like it’s a good way to distribute clicks throughout the Search Results Page, and stopping the number 1 position being so dominant in its click-throughs by introducing another factor…
The start of the SEO Project
Over the next few weeks and months we’re going to be starting our own SEO project from scratch to run through some SEO techniques and how to launch a website business from scratch. Hopefully those following will find it useful for future reference, and I’m sure we’ll publish the whole story for easy reading at a later date.
This isn’t a new idea or concept, but ultimately we wanted to demonstrate that with a decent business idea and a niche in the search market, you can be successful.
We’ve already started putting some plans into action, so we’ll be updating the blog shortly with the story so far…
Peanut Butter on Toast Recipe
I’ve posted my favourite breakfast/lunch/dinner/supper….in fact yes, delicious any time of the day! Feel free to comment, although the measurements are slightly erratic.
Check it out:
Measuring SEO success - The more Search Traffic the better?
Whilst measuring the % of search traffic to a site I’m currently working, a thought struck me about measuring the success of SEO. Simply increasing the % of traffic, does not mean that you’re doing better at SEO. There are many other factors that you may not be considering.
- You always need to compare the % of search traffic with your total visit data. This is because your % of search traffic could go up, when in fact, your visit data has gone down. This more than likely means that your search traffic has remained at the same level, whilst the number of direct visitors and referrer traffic has dipped. Ensure you use search traffic visit data rather than the %.
- Be aware that people searching for your brand keywords are people that have heard about your site elsewhere, or are repeat visitors looking for your site. You should really ignore this Search Traffic from your SEO report, as they are merely looking up your URL rather than giving you a lead. Ideally your brand would never leave the #1 spot.
- Are you excluding your own search traffic from repetitive testing?
So what’s the ideal scenario for SEO success?
This may sound obvious but if your search traffic % stays the same AND your visit data goes up, this is great. This will of course mean that your search traffic visit data will be heading the right way. By maintaining a steady search traffic % rather than having it increasing will mean that the growth of your site is healthy, and you’re are ensuring that you are building visitor loyalty. It also means that you won’t be relying on search traffic which could be bad in the long run.
Hopefully, the visitors that found your site through search, will come back again without using search. That, I believe is the ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about leads, and although it may take a couple of visits perhaps from a search engine, you can gain that user as a regular visitor. If you are unable to achieve this, perhaps rather than pursue heavier optimisation techniques to attract volume, work with the traffic you are getting and ensure that you make the best use of that traffic through a great user experience.
You should be able to see this happening with repeat visitor numbers, and keeping the % of search traffic steady, whilst the overall site volume grows. This will definitely vary depending on the type of site, but should stand true with most media/content websites and commerce websites.
