Google PageRank

There's a lot of discussion in online marketing circles as to whether the Google PageRank score is actually worth taking any notice of. If you're not sure what pagerank is, it's a score out of 10 that Google designates to websites and you can see this score if you have Google toolbar installed, shown below.

The image shows the Google toolbar which has a Google search box and further along the PageRank score (a green line). The score for my Forty First website is 5/10. I suppose in general terms it means that a website has a fair amount of link popularity, which affects rankings on Google.

To be honest I don't take a great deal of notice of PageRank as it can be unreliable (although I'm quite happy with my 5/10 score!), but plenty of people get obsessed with it and almost base their entire link building strategy on PageRank by only asking for links from sites with a page rank of 3 or 4/10 or higher and checking it each day. My advice is to not take too much notice of it. Google uses so many factors in its algorithm to rank websites and my guess is that PageRank makes up a small proportion of it.

Basing a linking strategy on requesting links from websites with a PageRank of x/10 is not really going to work as many sites will only put up links to sites that they're actually happy to have on their website and most link request emails get ignored anyway.

The most effective method is to create decent content on your website that will engage your visitors and other sites will want to link to, optimise your content and promote your business in as many ways as possible. My PageRank hasn't been worked on by any means, but I have made sure that my website is kept up to date with useful information for visitors!

Blogging for Higher Rankings from SEOmoz

I was watching a video earlier today on SEOmoz's blog, called Whiteboard Friday (they produce a short video each week on a different topic about web marketing) and this week's theme is blogging for higher rankings. It's well worth watching so thought I'd post it here and try embedding a video into my blog at the same time!
(PS forgot to mention it's only 5 minutes or so)


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Two blog posts in a day, that must be a record for me!

Making the Most of Web Analytics

The latest edition of Marketing Karma is now out and this month we've looked at web analytics and some of the features of Google Analytics to help you measure the performance of your site, which campaigns are working well and how the information can help you. There's lots of web analytics software out there some free, others paid, many of which vary on the quality of stats that they give. Google Analytics is free and the stats are pretty good so many companies are using them. However there are alternatives if you don't want to give away everything to Google and we've listed some in our article.

If you want more understanding on what all those stats mean, then there are a few books available, I've just bought 'Web Analytics an hour a day' by Avinash Kaushik, but have yet to read it!

Do You Check Your Website for Broken Links?

This is something you need to check from time to time, and the bigger the website, the more likely you are to find broken links. They occur for all sorts of reasons, plain misspellings of hyperlinks, pages that have been taken down or moved and the main cause of broken links is website re-designs.

So how do you check your site for broken links and how do you minimise their impact?

Firstly, there's a free link checker available called Xenu's Link Sleuth. You can download it to your PC and run your website url through it and it'll find any broken links and produce a report. Now you know where those pesky broken links are and you can go about making sure either that the links work or are taken off the appropriate web pages.

Secondly, how can you minimise the impact of broken links?
You need to make sure your website has a 404 error page. Each time I work with a new client I check for a 404 page on their website and if there isn't one, I ask them to get one sorted out. For those of you who aren't sure what a 404 page is, basically it's a page generated by your website that appears if someone finds your site via a broken link (e.g a page removed from your website that can still be found in the search engines database), or clicks on a broken link within your website. The page should be polite, pointing out that you're sorry they've landed on a broken link and encourage the visitor to continue browsing your website.

If your site doesn't have a 404 page, visitors will be taken to one of those horrible browser error pages saying something like 'this page cannot be found'. All the visitor can do is click on the back button and if they came from a list of search results, what will they do - they'll click on another listing, a competitor of yours! Boots doesn't have a 404 page and neither does WH Smith or Starbucks. These big brands make no attempt to retain visitors on their website who may arrive via a broken link.

I've written about 404 pages in a past edition of Marketing Karma, so you can read up more about it. Some of the bad examples cited in the article have been sorted out, Marks and Spencer's 404 page is actually quite good. Of course Forty First has a 404 page, and so does Marketing Karma!

Promoting International Websites

I've written about optimising foreign language and international websites on a couple of occasions, not only in Marketing Karma, but also in this blog. Search Engine Land have published this week, a great 'Search Illustrated' of international SEO which explains what you need do to promote an international site very succinctly using images. Well worth checking out if you're going to be promoting a foreign language website.

The Right Way to Write for the Web

The latest edition of Marketing Karma is now out, and this month's issue focusses on writing for the web. It's really important that website owners get this right as you only have a few seconds to engage visitors to your website. Writing for the web can be quite difficult when you don't know how and for those who aren't confident in writing engaging content, it's well worth considering hiring a professional copywriter to do the job for you.

Since it's also the 40th edition of our newsletter, make sure you enter our draw to win a £20 Amazon voucher, for one lucky reader! If you'd like to enter, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't already, and just send your details to me by email.

Making the Most of Title Tags

I've written several times before on how important the title tag is in SEO and I'm always surprised by how many websites make no use of it. The title tag is the tag that sits right at the top of your browser in the blue band, and is also the clickable link to a website in the search results pages.

Since the title tag is one of the most important tags in optimisation, it needs to include important keywords for a particular web page - and yes, the title tag should vary across your website to reflect the unique content of your pages. Not the same title tag across the whole site.

I mostly come across company names within the title tag with no keywords, or 'Welcome to Joe Bloggs' etc. Even worse, the designer hasn't bothered to include the title tag at all, and all it says is 'untitled document'. A Google search returns over 32 million untitled web pages and that's quite a lot (just UK too!).

Just adding descriptive, keyword rich title tags to your web pages can make a huge amount of difference (and could even result in more clicks from the search results pages to your website) so make it your priority to check through your website and make sure all of your website's pages are properly labelled!

Blogging with Wordpress

Those of you who read my Marketing Karma newsletter may remember that back in January I mentioned that one of my resolutions was to try blogging with Wordpress, but on a self-hosted site rather than the free hosted version. Well, I've set up my Wordpress site and thought that this blog would be a good place to document my progress.

This is what I've done so far and I'll be expanding on some of the points in other posts:
1. Bought the domain name I wanted for the blog - www.toutefrance.co.uk
2. Bought 'Wordpress for Dummies' by Lisa Sabin Wilson, which I've added to the books page on Marketing Karma. This book has been a great help as it's meant I can sit down away from the computer and read up about Wordpress and what I need to do. Everything is laid out in a step by step way, but although it says you don't need to have technical knowledge, it certainly helps to have some for the self-hosted Wordpress sites.
3. Choose a hosting company - this was more difficult as there are so many web hosting companies and in the end I went with the existing web hosting company I use for Forty First and Marketing Karma. I emailed them asking all sorts of questions that Wordpress suggested but on retrospect, things may have been easier if I'd chosen a web hosting company who specialise in Wordpress sites.
4. Choose a Wordpress template. I thought this would be easy, but it was really hard! I've decided to go with a free template for now and when things get going properly I'll get a professionally designed template. Wordpress.org has loads of free templates but not all of them worked or had the features I wanted, and not knowing exactly what I wanted in the beginning made the task of finding a decent template much more difficult.
5. Download the Wordpress files. As I went with a web hosting company that didn't have a 'one click' Wordpress set up, it meant downloading all the Wordpress files from Wordpress and uploading them to my web hosting account. I also had to set up a MySQL database which I've never done before and if I'd chosen a different host, this could have all been done for me!

I'll continue with my experiences with Wordpress in another post along with the techie bits, but it's been quite a learning curve so far. The above doesn't even include starting to write posts, so you can see how long it can take to set up and manage!