I’ve seen blended results, where google local listings are blended with organic results.  See below.

This will I am sure primarily affect organisations that are targeted to a specific area, but don’t have a physical address.  Local listings will appear ahead, pushing results down to the second page if you happen to be the low half of the first page.

It’s also yet another driver for paid search, however with increased costs of paid marketing the affordability for small businesses becomes a significant problem.

I’ll be watching visitor levels carefully to measure the impact of this.  Fortunately SEO embraces a more holistic view of a businesses presence on a search engine.  You need to be sure that you’ve optimised your Google Local entries to appear as high up the list as possible though, as well as locally built links for multi-location businesses.

I’m not clear how this algorithm works, as there are some varied results.  Also, from the various accounts we use here at Cenetrix, one doesn’t show the new results pages, whereas others do so I’m sure this will be phased in and evolved.  Time will tell, but hope we find out more from Google soon.

In a working example of this, consider how you might approach the tracking of content or campaigns you send out via Twitter. For this your site URL might be www.mysite.com/page1.htm?cpid=SOCIAL:1233456, which includes some campaign tracking (so that example is SiteCatalyst). I would certainly advocate you using a URL shortening service account, a good one is bit.ly, and would recommend that you setup an account be used to shorten any long URL as it will give you some extra data.

The approach of tagging your URLs with campaign tracking will be beneficial in helping you identify visitors to your site from Twitter. This isn’t fool proof as your tweeted link could end up in an email, bookmarked etc. however it does however give you an indication of the reach.

There are pitfalls to be aware of though.

Google is now much better at dealing with parameters within url’s (correct as of writing this), and since twitter is used by Google to feed and accelarate (my assertion) indexing of new content then it is possible that the link sent over Twitter is picked up by google. Certain url shorteners publish a permanent 301 redirect from their websites, which means there is a permenant reference to the shortened URL.

So why is this an issue?

Imagine you have a popular site that feeds articles out immediately by Twitter, RSS and the website simultaneously. The internal linking of the site might have a link that is nice and clean, such as www.my site.com/news/12345/this-is-my-proper-page.htm and RSS is auto tagged adding &cpid=RSS:123456 and that you also use feed burner, the Twitter url adds &cpid=SOCIAL:123456 on the end of the standard URL and is shortened by bit.ly.

There are now 3 possible links to pages that could end up in Googles index, but only one physical page. If Google indexed all 3, this in it’s simplest form would mean that duplicate content was created, as Google will treat them as separate pages. A challenge which needs to be overcome.

There are several ways of overcoming this, and for that matter cleaning up duplicate content on Google.  These are detailed below but with different results and challenges.

1. Use google’s webmaster tools to remove parameters.

Since the world doesn’t just revolve around Google this is quite an issue as this solution would only work for Google it is not a complete solution. Given Google’s market share you coulp hypothesize that most visitors would come that route and naturally led to think – quick win! Unfortunately it’s not a quick win. I’ve experienced that post application of url parameter filtering is not guaranteed. Launching a new site with this enabled may help, however this technique is not universally accepted.

2. Write a canonical reference on to each page, so that parameters are ignored and the one true page is always acknowledged by a search engine.

There are inherent risks in retrospectively applying this to a huge site, but it should clean up a lot of duplicate content. Beware of canonicalisation of your entire site to one page – seriously bad news for your business!  This approach is possibly the simplest to deploy (bar testing), as it requires little technical knowledge and a content management system could be changed to facilitate this. Canonicals will also help where you have the same content categorised differently, for example a pair of shoes categories in red and pink, as well as say an article that is categorised in different groupings say, a new product launch appearing in a car section and new product launches.

The following is an example of a canonical tag that would appear in the of the document.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/pagename.htm” />

3. Use a 301 redirect to remove URL parameters.

This is possibly the more challenging to implement and does have down sides as well as upsides. Google now acknowledges that some credit is lost with every 301 redirect, also there is question of retention of the anchor text. The real upside is that the page will always results in a clean URL being used.  If this is later shared it would not be shared with all the parameters added. This solution requires server access to achieve the 301 redirect, and also the capability to write data either into the page as say meta data or into a cookie for later access. Be careful as if you also depend on the GCLID for your adwords and google analytics the 301 redirection to clean up the URL could be problematic as you’ll lose this parameter, which will have knock-ons if you use Google Analytics with Adwords.

The use of a 301 redirect would require that the web server process the page request, and then update a cookie on your browser (if cookies were used) or pass the parameters to the renderer to be added to the resulting page as meta data when the 301 redirect is issued. Also be aware that some analytics vendors lose referring sources through redirection, for example SiteCatalyst.  When the analytics JavaScript is executed, it should be written in a way to either access the DOM to pick up the meta data, or access the cookie data.

If you use the cookie method, it would require that you write any parameters to a first party cookie to reduce the impact of cookie filtering. Since your website writes the cookie, this should be a mute point. We must not forget though that this technique may not be appropriate for mobile devices where cookie support is not enabled. Thankfully though the advent of Android and iphone there is greater support of JavaScript and also cookies on mobile devices.

Conclusion

My take on this is that pages need a canonical reference to it’s clean URL, however it is also appropriate that you consider the 301 redirection solution as this would ensure that any bookmarked, shared or linked content to your site uses a clean URL rather than depending on the canonical. With Canonicals, you are at the mercy of the search engines continued support of the approach. I cant see that being an issue though.  The same applies to 301 redirects, and whether credit for links are diminished in some way.

One caveat though – With any post launch change to a site, comes risk. The way to reduce this is with lots of testing, to ensure you haven’t done anything to damage your site.

I’ve focused down on campaign management in this post, however this applies for anything that might add parameters to your URL and risk the creation of duplicate content in the eyes of a search engine.

We believe that every website designer and website developer should understand the bare bones principles of search engine optimisation and how it relates to good user experience, information architecture and technical architecture. Both disciplines carry the need to understand this, as a failure at these early stages in the lifecycle of a website can be very costly to unravel along with running the risk of compromising the relationship with the client. An agency that doesn’t have any SEO capability, should consider partnering with an organisation (such as Cenetrix) to ensure that the solution proposed is search engine friendly.

A typical web design implementation should include information architecture, technical architecture, user experience. These should minimise the risk of fundamental flaws to the technical implementation.

With the advent of web 2.0 and laterally more dynamic websites, developers have occasionally taken it upon themselves to increase complexity without any business gain. This is not a new phenomenon as it has not changed in the software engineering profession for the 20 years I’ve worked with technology. It does however need to be challenged by customers and they need to be empowered to ask the smart questions.

Customers engaging a website design agency should ask some smart questions to protect their investment, such as:

• After the site goes live, will all my pages appear on google?
• Do you implement a solution that search engines can crawl?
• Where will my site be hosted, in which country?
• Does a visitor see the same web page if they enter the site from a search engine results page and also navigating to it from within the site?
• Have you ever migrated a website or relaunched one before and how did you deal with continuity of search engine placement?
• Can we engage with an SEO company during the design and development phases?

These short questions could save you a lot of re-investment and makes an SEO strategy more about content for your customers, keywords and building the relevancy and authority of your site rather than changing the technology used in the implementation.

The challenge in this industry is that there are lots of people that develop websites, the barriers to entry are low and some times the quality suffers as a result. As a business looking for a website development partner you must ask yourself whether the outfit you choose understands user experience, information architecture, technical architecture and SEO along with it’s implication on a website.

Cenetrix are a full service digital agency. We also partner with other businesses to provide a range of services for clients of all sizes.

In all our engagements we include a brief introduction to SEO, we find it works well as most businesses either don’t know, or did know but were afraid to ask. It is our belief that basic best practice should be built into all websites.

It is often the case that the web analysts spend more time reporting than they do with analysis, which doesn’t really add a huge amount of value.  Blind reporting helps no-one, you just end up with a sea of meaningless data and in the wrong hands it can give a misguided sense of security.

Analysis should provide and business meaningful and actionable insight that the business can use to influence change.  Providing a report on the number of visitors, page views, bounce rate etc. is interesting however these are not necessarily KPI’s.   Without changing the organisations perception of a reporting only analytics function, the analysts are never freed from what is perceived as their core responsibility, this really starts with working with the organisation to understand their key performance indicators and influence change through reporting and valuable actionable insight.

Actual analysis is a fundamental part of any web analytics function, it should never be a compromise of reporting over analysis.  There are always reports to run, but these should be automated, put on dashboards and minimised so that they are a small percentage of your overall time.

Analytics is also less about the tools, although you need a best of breed analytics tool such as Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics and Google Analytics, but about people and educating the business about the value you can add through analysis.  As a business or an analyst, this really needs to be a day one exercise – evaluate the health of your analytics function and influence change with the stakeholders.  In real terms, a small change in conversion rate will make a lot of difference to the bottom line.  Analysis will help you achieve this.

It is my view that the best performing analytics functions sit within marketing organisation, have full access to the full business key stakeholders with a close relationship with them.  As a successful analyst you need to understand the marketing programs, business drivers and initiatives.

The only challenge there is that simplicity comes in 12 month blocks, so 18 months doesn’t really exist save that you buy a new phone at full price after 18 months and renew simplicty after 12 months.  This is as a personal contract/tariff rather than a business tariff.

One of the issues now is that all carriers are capping data, which seems like a very backward step to me.

As of 18th June these are my findings.  All prices in £’s

What I haven’t done is compare buying a full price phone from apple and shopping around for the cheapest data tariff. t-mobile do have a 30 day contract for £10/month, but no mention of micro SIMS.

Google, for example uses a combination of your server location and the domain suffix (e.g. .co.uk, .com) to work out the country of origin of the website.  Domains that have a  .com suffix  are not country specific, so combine that with offshore hosting in say the US and you are going to find it quite difficult to appear on google.co.uk as a UK based search.  In this particular example the location of your servers is extremely important.

If you are a UK based business it is worth checking where your website is hosted, especially if your domain suffix is .com.  You may be wasting your SEO budget on optimising your site when the actual location of the server is causing you problems.

In today’s economy, the price of hosting is often cited as being important in the decision making process. This relatively small difference in actual price between offshore and UK based hosting could cost you considerably in terms of your marketing budget and sales.

Offshore hosting also has another challenge, and that is speed.  Servers based in the US for example will risk displaying more slowly in countries such as the UK, due to the huge distances involved.  Site speed is important for SEO and also paid search.  For PPC a slow site affects your quality score and ultimately how much you get charged for paid search marketing.

When buying hosting, you should consider your server location.  If you have hosting already, check where it is based.  Moving hosting can be time consuming and expensive, so it’s better to consider it right at the start of your website development.

Google does offer a facility in their Webmaster Console to be able to adjust the Geographic targeting, we prefer to use a combination of all of UK based hosting and setting the correct targeting for the business with Google.

How mistaken I was, my very pleasant support represeantative at Apple kindly informed me that the contract of sale is to an end user not a business and therefore they did not have to give me a VAT receipt.  They gave me the following link and just stood behind that.

http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/uk/terms.html#SALE

I was at first told:

“… since iTunes is based in the US, we are not required to provide customers with VAT receipts. This is included in the Terms of Sale, which you agreed to when you setup iTunes.”

This is factually incorrect, iTunes actually operates from:

iTunes SARL, 8 rue Heinrich Heine, L-1720 Luxembourg, Company Reg No: B 101 120, VAT No: LU 20165772

The dialog then took a different tone once I pointed out their mistake.  They re-enforced that sales are only to consumers.  They were however prepared to provide VAT receipts for apps purchased.  A breakthrough!

“Although I cannot provide the VAT receipts for all of your purchases, I will gladly do so for Apps. Here is the UK Terms of sale for you to look over”

So, being clear of the facts from today’s approach of Apple.  You seem only able to get VAT receipts for apps.  I am yet to get an explanation for other products sold over iTunes, however it does at least allow me to reclaim VAT for the recent iPad apps that I use on my business owned iPad.  I can’t help but think that this is just the first of many such complaints of Apple as the iPad will be used by businesses.

It seems the irrefutable piece of evidence was that iTunes is actually VAT registered.  Also, that Apple are legally obliged to produce VAT receipts on request.  Why they don’t just issue VAT receipts as a matter of course I don’t know.  I’d love someone from Apple to explain that to me.

- silence -

The keynote presentations were very informative, but primarily designed to give some perspective on the recent takeover of Omniture by Adobe.

The CS5 integration between flash and Omniture was demonstrated in it’s simplicity and offers really tight integration on the surface between both SiteCatalyst and Test & Target.  The latter was demo’d later in the day and really demonstrated the power that marketing users are now given to control behavioural targeting and multivariate testing.

One opinion put forward by Josh James, General Manager of Omniture was that we should be less focussed on cannibalisation of the different channels but to look more at the bigger picture of how the channels complement each other.

Josh also positioned the history behind the CMO being able to turn the tables on other departments in the business, for example keeping sales on task.  Marketing can now deliver quality leads to sales and information is now available on conversion rates slipping.  Cool!

There was also emphasis on looking at business metrics rather than marketing metrics, really look at an integrated approach to understand pipeline, engagement, sentiment, distributed presence, revenue, influence and brand equity.

Adobe’s take-over was discussed by their VP of Corporate Development, Paul Weiskopf.  He positioned the following benefits:

• Blurred lines between what is content and what is content and applications
• Multi-device use of the Internet, which places Adobe at the front
• Optimised creativity, through simple application tagging.

There were some announcements, for example Search Centre Plus now includes facebook marketing.  There is also now a genesis integration between Facebook Open Graph implementation and SiteCatalyst.  This integration is in development, but is essentially sentiment analysis, or as they put it “buzz”.

Some key takeaways from the keynotes were:

• Really understand your visitor paths to contact pages, to try and understand why people called rather than converted This includes looking at on-site search as there may be key questions that aren’t being answered online.  Analyse and Optimise.
• Improve internal search, understand why people use it and how.  Cover common misspellings.

Social Media Strategy

This was a bit of a slow session, however some key take aways were that Omniture are very much focussed on the quick wins in social media, namely Facebook.  They can apparently integrate with other mediums through the SiteCatalyst API, if the other party has an API. No specifics were given with other integrations.

Facebook applications are a great way to understand more about your customers, and used in conjunction with the Facebook genesis integration it allows you to get really granular data into Discover – detailed segmentation capability.

Attribution Modelling

Attribution modelling is such a dry subject area but so important to understand.  The presentation was very good in explaining the various attribution models and then that the cookie expiration is a key factor, along with the unique behavioural characteristics of your customers in visiting the site.  Each business is different so there is not set best practice on expiration, it will however have a huge impact on attribution.  The attribution schemes are:

• Last click
• First click
• Linear, even distribution
• Decaying, where the last click is attributed most decreasing down to
• the first click
• Reverse decaying, as above except most value attributed to first click
• U shaped

Recency and latency are significant factors on the attribution model used.  Omniture’s default is 30 days for a cookie.  the audience had people down to 7 days.

The main takeaway was to really understand the path to conversion, and to use attribution to help in that understanding.

RIA Measurement

This session was really showcasing the integration between CS5 and Omniture.  of note has to be the control that marketing is now given to be able to test almost in real-time without a developer having to be involved.

CS5 is also going to support the open screen project, which will be used to send events back out into Omniture.  An example was given of a player sending meta data via the OSMF.

The key takeaway on RIA is to differentiate between what is a page view and what is an event.  Both are server calls however it keeps your page view metrics intact as just that.  With the rise in RIA’s you need to be careful with this.

Looking forward to Friday’s sessions now.

When adding the open graph implementation for the “like” feature, it is possible to create multiple pages and effectively fans against each page. If you already have a fan page, adding a “like” button will create a new pages within Facebook and therefore multiple places for interacting with your customers.  For small to medium sized companies with potentially limited resources and budget this can pose a challenge as consolidating fans into one way to communicate needs some knowledge of API’s.

If a brand decides to interact with their fans using the new “web page” page, then it does mean for particularly active people on Facebook that updates would disappear off their wall quickly.

I can see a case for both external and fan pages in Facebook, but they really need to integrate the two.  This would allow a particular brand to have multiple web pages associated to a particular fan page or brand.  From a review of the developer documentation it appears the only way is to create an application, but then you are stuck using API call using Graph API to send updates.  As the application can be tied to a particular page, it does get round the multiple page issue. This is an area Facebook need to work on.

This poses some questions.

Is open graph set to replace fan pages of old? Do you continue to invest in your fan pages?

What does open graph mean for SEO? We are already moving away from a pure play on keywords and to leverage authority as a quality signal, now we potentially have another signal.  This is certainly an area to watch as an SEO.

Are Facebook looking to compete with google? A reasonable question, as they now have data about real web pages and can take a more authoritative view on a clean set of search results.  Facebook also have something google don’t, personal information anchored to we pages.

Will Google be interested in taking a feed from Facebook, and add it to their quality signals? Is Facebook looking to expand it’s search position?

Will Facebook look to augment bing’s search results if not with Google?

Regardless of the underlying agenda, some fundamentals are good.  Open Graph implements semantic principles, further supporting the semantic web.  Facebook open graph are very easy to configure which will massively improve take-up.

It’s early days with open graph, but time will tell with the impact it will have with fan pages for B2C brands. From my own experience I can already see potential conflicts.

Web analytics vendors need also pay attention as many have recently announced Facebook measurement solutions.  These may already need to change as there is another variable to consider.  Arguably it does directly attach sentiment to a brand and page, so perhaps Facebook have just made lives a little easier. I’m off to Omniture’s Summit in May where they are launching their Facebook measurement solution, so it will be interesting to hear their position.

One thing is for sure, this is the start of an interesting chapter with Facebook.  Here at Cenetrix we are already integrating open graph and semantic web details into our websites.  Anything that makes a customers life easy to share information and supports a richer experience embracing quality of experience with brands is a good thing.  From a personal perspective I like to see that people have positively rated a brand, so Facebooks “like” features is another signal to the customer to trust a brand.  In my view this is complimentary to reviews and testimonials.

What I don’t like however is that the screen gets really grubby quickly so if like me you might watch a movie, write an email, go to a few websites etc. then you tend to notice the finger marks build quickly.  Given the size of the screen you notice this more so than on an iphone.

In order to kurb the imports, apple have very kindly locked down the app store on the ipad, so anyone thinking of buying one from the US – you’ll have limited app availability and you won’t be able to update apps directly from the ipad.  Fear not though as you can just open itunes on your PC or Mac, and look around for ipad apps.  There are a number of them.

Even more frustrating though is that I can’t get the iBooks or iWork apps, so am going to wait until the official release in May, depsite my best efforts to get a US apple account.   Kindle have their reader working, so at least you have the kindle book option in the interim.  I’m not sure whether I’d use it for productivity apps such as spreadsheets and document editing.  Time will tell as to how this new device settles into its use.

Another gripe for me is the lack of flash support.  With a larger screen size you would expect an almost full browser experience, however thankfully you aren’t taken off to a mobile version.  Apple do need to get their flash position sorted out as this will be one of the big let downs and frustrations, compounded by the recent CS5 debacle with Adobe withdrawing support for their flash conversion tools.

Overall though – I can’t wait for more app support, oh and the UK release so I can finally get into updating things without going via iTunes.