After completing the Search and Social Media Marketing course late last year I got involved in the Analysis Exchange – a free initiative to connect non-profit projects with SEO analyst experts and students.

Via the project I work on – Plings (about Places to Go and Things to Do for kids) – I was lucky enough to work with Tom Betts, Head of web analytics at FT.com.

Along with Stewart, our Analysis Exchange student, we really benefited from some great insight and compelling actions to implement. So, with this in mind, I asked Tom a few questions for the Search and Social Media Marketing course blog:

As head of the web analytics team at the Financial Times, what is your main role and task?

“I am responsible for the use of data to make decisions at FT.com. Unlike many businesses, online is our entire business at FT.com, meaning that we provide services to a wide internal client-base. My team and I get stuck in to analytics projects for:

• Editorial (identifying which content is popular with what audience and why)
• Marketing (figuring out how to sell online subscriptions to access our content, attract new audiences, how do we effectively spend marketing budgets etc)
• IT (determining site problems, capacity planning and the like)
• Advertising (to understand who our readers are, what interests them and how we can paint a better picture of our audience back to advertisers)
• Finance (to analyse the profitability of our products and services)

…and the list goes on.

It is an extremely diverse role which spans everything from just telling people what is happening on site, what is performing well / not so well, to developing analytical models to predict future behaviour (what topics of content interest people who go on to subscribe?) and measuring the ROI of search engine marketing spend. Our executive team are heavily reliant on our insights to make product changes.”

Why did you get involved in the Analysis Exchange?

“I already manage an analytics team but wanted to see how I could help a wider selection of students to move their analytics skills up a level. As an industry, web analytics is a little bit chicken-and-egg. There seem to be endless roles for analysts, but only for people with relevant experience. It’s tough to gain that experience and Analysis Exchange is the best way I know of to obtain experience with real data on real-life projects.

Additionally, I spend most of my day thinking of the best way to use analytics for profit and felt I wanted to help some non-profit making organisations.”

What helped you make a success of your first Analytics Exchange project?

“Being on top of student and organiser to ensure that we were sticking to time and scope. I tried to tie the scope down as much as possible from the outset since the single largest reason I see projects delivering late is due to scope creep.”

Crystal ball time – but what is your analytics thing-to-watch for 2011?!

“I have two for this:

1. Predictive web analytics – the area of ‘predictive analytics’ is already mature in many fields, but not yet in web analytics. Using web data to predict what a user might be interested in or what they might buy next is still quite pioneering in our industry. But not for much longer.
2. Multichannel analytics – we’re seeing a huge and rapid shift in consumption from desktop PCs to access content to a wide variety of mobile devices. The development of apps, where the user experience is far more native to the device, poses big challenges but exciting opportunities for web analytics. All of a sudden, you are measuring much more than just the web.”

Finally, what tips would you give those studying on the #SSMM course?

“Find some real data and get stuck in! The Analysis Exchange is a great place to start and some experience there would land you in good stead for any digital marketing, SEO or analytics role.

Read around, and definitely check out the work of Avinash Kaushik. Simply by reading and understanding his ‘An hour a day‘ book, you’ll be well ahead of many practitioners in our field!”

Tom will also be speaking at the forthcoming SAScon 2011 conference in Manchester.

Would you like to know what the delegates of the Search & Social Media Marketing (SSMM) course have been talking and thinking about for their Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media blog posts?

You are invited to attend the free blog post presentations event, which is part of the learning process designed for those who attend the SSMM course. As part of the Search & Social Media Marketing professional course delegates have to write a blog post, which applies their knowledge of SEO and Social Media to the process of writing an optimised web page. These presentations are an integral part of SEO training and Social Media training that we facilitate on the course, since we believe that the best way to learn SEO and Social Media is to practice. The presentation itself is also a mechanism to practice pitching skills, which we can only gain by participating and jointly reflecting on events such as this!

Who is this event for?

This event is aimed at anyone who is interested to meet and speak to those in Search Engine Optimisation/ Search Marketing/ Social Media Marketing and other online marketing related practices and methods. It is ideal for those who are interested to find out about the Search & Social Media Marketing course at the University of Salford Business School, since it will provide you with an opportunity to hear and speak to past delegates and industry speakers who have helped to design and deliver this course.

Who will be there?

All delegates who took part in the professional course for Search & Social Media Marketing and the industry speakers who will provide feedback on the presentations:

• Ben McKay – SEO Director – MEC
• Pete Young – Holistic Search Marketing – SEO & PPC Consultant
• Richard Gregory – Chief Operations Officer – Latitude Group Limited
• Simon Wharton – Managing Director -PushON Ltd
• David Towers – SEO Director – MEC

When & Where?

• Date: 21st April 2011
• Time: from 4pm to 8pm
• Location: Salford Business School, Salford, Greater Manchester, Maxwell Building, Room 516
• Contact: Frances Cuthill – Search & Social Media Marketing Course Administrator Tel:+44 (0)161 295 6692, f.cuthill@salford.ac.uk
• http://foursquare.com/venue/9713015

Do I need to book a place? – YES!

Places are limited to a maximum of 20 guests, so please book in advance by the 14th April 2011to avoid disappointment!

As the co-owner of Smithfield Wine, a local wine merchant based in Manchester, I have had to deal with web developers and so called “SEO experts” to ensure that smithfieldwine.com is returned in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and that the online business grows. As we specialise in niche wine markets such as:

• Vegetarian wine
• Vegan wine
• Fairtade wine
• and Kosher wine

this should be possible.

www.smithfieldwine.com – SEO case study

Our web developer offered us 6 months of free SEO if we would go with them. Sounded like a good idea so we did.

Before we launched the reworked web site smithfieldwine.com had a page rank of 5 and we were on the first page of Google for the majority of our products and all of our niche categories. We now have a page rank of 3 and the restaurants and bars that we supply are ranking higher than us for our products merely by including their wine lists on their websites!

As our 6 months of free SEO was up our developer asked us to consider taking up an annual contract and offered this proposal:

This really got our interest! I started to look at what we had got in terms of SEO over the last 6 months:

• The online wine gift shop category did not have a page title
• None of our 16 categories had any content
• A number of pages had the same page title and description
• There were over 700 Google crawl errors generated by the “bespoke” software

I decide that we needed help. I googled “manchester seo courses” and after sifting through much dross found the Salford University Business School course on Search and Social Media Marketing (SSMM).

After attending the taster evening in January we decided that this course was an essential part of our future development as online marketeers.

Having completed the four day introduction course I know that, after completing the Professional course, if we are not capable of handling our own SEO and SMM we will be more than adequately equipped to find expert SEO companies, which we know are out there and specify what we need and be able to monitor the results of our investment.

My “SEO foundation” results:

Having completed the first four evenings of the SEO Foundation course, which looked at keyword research, basic on site optimisation and off page optimisation, here are some of the observations in relation to the smithfieldwine.com website:

Writing of clearly focused title pages

For example, “Vegan Wines” being the primary keyword on the Vegan Wines page, the title for this page should clearly show the reader and the search engine the content of the page. The reader will be better placed to make a decision when seeing the page title in the SERPS and the search engine will be better able to index the page in its index.

At the moment the Vegan Wines page has the title “Vegan Wine | Smithfield Wine Merchants UK | Buy Vegan Wine Online”. However, the content on the page lists Vegan Wines from around the world etc.

Using the SEOBook toolbar we can see here the Title and the Description tag of the page:

Importance of keyword research

Having done some keyword research we can see what it is that the buyers are searching for; using a tool such as Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, we can see that the term “Vegan Wines” – plural of  “Vegan Wine” seems to be more popular with search engine users. By simply adding an “s” to the “Wine”, the potential number of visitor is increased by nearly 800 per month globally and 120 locally.

The keyword “Buy vegan wines online” – which is prominently featured in the current title and the description tag – has little or no traffic logged according to Google. This is a problem which many businesses can face where SEO professionals suggest that they will optimise a page for certain keywords to make sure that we are on page number one of SERP, but if this term is not used by the customers none of them will find us!

The same applies to the “Smithfield Wine Merchants UK” keyword – which is also prominently featured on the page title. The brand name of the website should really be easy to optimise for and hence there is no reason to include it on every single title page. If anything, this dilutes the focus of the web page to any other visitor who is only interested in vegan wine in the first instance. This is not to say that there should be no pages that have the brand name in the title tag.

A word of warning to any customer of SEO services: – check that the keyword terms selected for optimisation are working for you – if you are number one but nobody is searching for that keyword – it is not going to be of much benefit to the business although some “so-called SEOs” will be happy to point out that they did their job well!

We can also see related keywords to the primary keyword “Vegan Wines”, which are in relation to the web page that lists a number of different wines, these are:

“Vegan wine list”, and “Vegan friendly wine”. Bearing in mind that these are complementary terms, the optimised title which would target the primary keyword – “Vegan wines” – and two secondary terms – “Vegan wine list”, and “Vegan friendly wine” – could be combined into the following title text:

“Vegan wines – vegan wine list for vegan friendly wine lovers”

With this title we are still within the 62 characters that are the recommend length for a title tag.

Now, using the same keyword the META description tag for the page could be optimised from the existing text of:

“META description: Smithfield vegan wine. A stunning selction of great value fine vegan wines from around the world. Buy vegan wine online for home wine delivery.”

To something that provides a better summary of the individual page:

“META description: Choose from a selection of specially selected vegan wines a vegan wine list for vegan friendly wine lovers. From Argentinian to Uruguayan we have tasted and hand picked vegan red, white and sparkling wines for you!”

The new title includes the use of keywords that we researched and summarises the content of the page with more focus on vegan wines and also removes the typing mistake of “selction” in the original description text. Although the keyword tag is no longer used by search engines, there is still some merit if only for the benefit of future SEO page maintenance to remind the editors of what the keywords were that were used to focus this work.

Use of heading on the vegan wines page

The current web page has a heading “Vegan Wines” – which is the new keyword that we found to be more popular with the search results and was selected as the primary keyword for this page. The good news is that it is clearly labelled for the visitor using heading 1 formatting.

The headings hierarchy should show to the search engine and the reader what is important on the page. Therefore, heading 1 should be used for the primary keyword only. But, in our case we can see that the website design template also uses heading 1 for “Search Our Wines” and “Wine Departments” sections of the web page. This sends a conflicting message to Google or any other robot that tries to index this page. It has to understand which text is more important and therefore the two additional heading one selections as highlighted in the following screenshot on the left hand side of the web page do not help in providing focus:

Moreover, heading 2 – which is the second most significant heading of the page is showing the text of “Your Shopping Cart Contains” – this confuses Google indexing bots even further, since this text sends a signal to the bot that the second most important bit of information on the page is something related to a shopping cart! Only at heading 3 level do we see the important keyword for the results of the Vegan Wines – these are the selections of wines classified by their regions. So, to improve this page from an SEO perspective and to focus on Vegan Wines it is important to re-design the website infrastructure which would de-grade the less relevant heading to a lower level and upgrade the headings that provide content to a higher level: For example in this case:

• Vegan Wines – keep at heading 1
• Argentinian vegan wines – could be heading 2
• Australian vegan wines – could be also heading 2 ….
• Search Our Wines – could be heading 3
• Wine Departments  – could be heading 3
• Your Shopping Card Contains – could be heading 4

The incorrect use of headings shows a fundamental flaw in the current bespoke e-commerce web page.

Another lesson learned – if you get a bespoke website it must deliver what is needed for your SEO and not only for the site graphic design!

Thematic breakdown of the website sections

The page file names are also important for SEO and the structure that is developed to help Google and other search engines to show the structure of a site give a meaning of what is important.

For example, now if you click on Argentinian wines the following web page name is used:

www.smithfieldwine.com/Argentinian-Vegan-Wines-C-99

However, a better like naming convention, which helps to show that this one is one of many other “vegan wines”, is:

www.smithfieldwine.com/vegan-wines/Argentinian/

This structure would follow the category of the individual bottle of wine further down the hierarchy of the different wines, for example instead of having this page for Santa Luisa Malbec 2007:

www.smithfieldwine.com/Santa-Luisa-Malbec-2007-PID-1

A better file name convention would be:

www.smithfieldwine.com/vegan-wines/Argentinian/Santa-Luisa-Malbec-2007

This file shows the search engine very clearly that this wine is part of vegan wines from Argentina and is called Santa Luisa Malbec 2007. This naming convention could also be replicated in the page title, page description and page heading 1.

Social media optimisation

Currently at Smithfield wines we use Twitter and Facebook for communication with our customers. However, in order to talk to us on Twitter or Facebook the visitors have to leave smithfieldwines.com. This means that PageRank is being lost to the external websites from every page. To prevent the PageRank leakage the attribute in the link Meta tag rel=”nofollow” should be used.

Moreover, the use of social media is only maximised on the blog and not on the main sales focused website. For example, here we can see that a page can be liked by Facebook users and once they like something it automatically shows their friends that they found something interesting providing an opportunity for “viral” marketing. In the same way, the more people like a particular wine dedicated web page, the more they are passing on a recommendation to others which then helps to increase their trust and so they are more likely to purchase it. The image below shows the Tweet and Like plugin installed on the http://www.smithfieldwine.co.uk blog:

The link to the Facebook page is currently linking to my personal page and the web designers didn’t recommend changing the personal page to the company page – which is very simple to do and creates another opportunity to offer more interaction with customers.

Hmmm, what could be the strategy for the Facebook page?

Please share your recommendations below!

What is the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to the University of Salford and specifically to Salford Business School? The University has approximately 250 websites and the main websites receive hundreds and thousands of visits every year. So why should we worry about SEO and what is the point in Social Media and Social Media Marketing? They can never be monetized. Time is a precious commodity, Social Media Marketing eats time and we need to use our time where it will most benefit the University of Salford and Salford Business School. Right?

Right if you are only interested in website traffic but if you are interested in meeting the needs of your customers, students, stakeholders and research partners, then SEO and Social Media Marketing are fundamental:

• SEO, when used properly, and in the context of meeting the needs of stakeholders and business school students is powerful.
• SEO enables the correct visitor to find the most relevant content quickly.
• The use of appropriate header tags, title tags, alt tags, keyword density and linking strategy not only improve the ranking of the University of Salford’s content but also better meets the needs of the Business Schools student or research partner.
• This is the start of a productive online relationship.

Social Media is the means through which relationships are developed and enhanced. The Business School at the University of Salford has a number of Facebook pages run by the School or by students to enable shared experience, tips, services and commentary. Whilst SEO helps to raise awareness, the Social Media platforms when used as part of a multichannel and integrated engagement solution create the engagement, the conversation, the loyalty and the advocacy.

And what about those 250 websites? We are currently working to reduce the number and increase the quality of websites across the University of Salford. Promoting 250 websites, not only spreads effort but it also results in the cannibalisation of web traffic and dilutes the impact of the SEO and the engagement.

So choose the content most needed and wanted by your audience, map the channels most likely to reach your target audience and focus your SEO and Social Media efforts in those areas. This is a win win for the Business School, the University, the students and other interested parties. Best practice in SEO and Social Media is taught at the Business School in a pragmatic and relevant manner. As Head of Digital at the University, I am keen to ensure my skills are current in this rapidly evolving field and experts in user journey, SEO, Analytics and conversion are hard to find. That is why I am taking the course.

I project manage training for the web and media industries, but I’m not a trainer myself. I’m also being made redundant in a couple of weeks, so the topic of jobhunting, freelancing and career development has been on my mind whilst attending this training. You’d be surprised what you can do with search to get hired:

My plan is a little less audacious but already getting results: my blog visits are more consistent where before they spiked and flatlined too erratically, and I’m monitoring profile views from new individuals on LinkedIn whom I’m then able to contact directly.

Here are some of the items on my current to-do list, with an explanation in SEO and Social Media terms as to why it’s worthwhile, and where I’m up to on it:

1. Get Blogging!

Why? Search engine algorithms are keen on sites that renew their content on a regular basis, including blogs. For a freelancer or jobhunter with few resources other than a web connection and a PC, blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Posterous or Livejournal are a great way to manage an online presence. By adding regular, relevant, well-structured posts, even an individual can build a self-marketing advantage by following good SEO practice.

Progress: 50%. My WordPress blog (mothertown.wordpress.com) has been live since last Autumn, but I’m only managing 1 post per month when I should be updating weekly. One problem has been that I’m blogging on multiple topics in one post, which isn’t great from an SEO point of view. 1 topic per post makes it easier to target keywords, and simpler to create relevant H1 and H2 headers. Another error: all of my old, pre-training posts link out to sites where in some cases I need to go back and add nofollow attributes to certain links to prevent “leakage” of my PageRank. A further omission has been not “claiming” my blog on Technorati and other blog directories. Even though their outbound links carry nofollow attributes, it’s part of a larger strategy to build links with other, more established bloggers in the community.

2. Optimise my blog’s “About” page

Why? The static “About” page is more important than my blog posts in a lot of ways: it’s essentially a landing page and my opportunity to present my skills in a way that will draw relevant search traffic. Running any of the free SEO tools on the front page of the blog – where all the posts sit – demonstrates that it only serves WordPress’ own ends, where I have far more control over the content of the static About page.

Progress: 80%. I need a H2 tag! At the moment there’s a big “About” sitting there – no use to the crawler bots. This page will never be 100% complete, because I’ll always be assessing what keywords and phrases should be included to attract potential employers. Running the url through Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool, some of the suggested keywords aren’t the business or activity areas I actually want to target, so I’ll be delving deeper into this over the coming weeks. I also ran the tool on a potential competitors’ site, which gives me a new set of keywords to target via the About page, plus topics to consider blogging about.

3. Optimise my social profiles, and start thinking strategically

Why? Facebook’s user graph continues to grow, especially in terms of visit length, and in the diversity of use: businesses are not only “checking you out” on Facebook but pro-actively hiring using the platform’s unique features, sometimes stealthily, as German digital marketing agency Jung von Matt/Neckar demonstrated last autumn. Critically, Google have now admitted that they’re measuring social media signals for PageRank, which for individuals means that connections and proactive, positive discussions on any flavour of social platform increases their visibility, just as it would for businesses.

Progress: 75%. My LinkedIn profile page has had a radical rebuild to feature keywords in terms of skills, industries and partner businesses I’ve worked with, and like the blog, this will be an ongoinge process. I’ve staked my claim for online real estate with a LinkedIn vanity url (www.linkedin.com/in/simonpaulknight) – which creates a contextual link to influence search results should someone be searching for me by name.

There’s less jobhunting power with my Facebook profile compared to LinkedIn (but again with a custom, contextual url: www.facebook.com/simonpaulknight), but that may change over time – they may even attempt to acquire or conquer LinkedIn over time. But Facebook (and Twitter) are all about conversations in realtime, and so I’ve made a more committed effort to update frequently and engage in relevant conversations, made a little easier when using a multiple-channel desktop client such as Tweetdeck, which lets me add the same update to Twitter and other social networks in one go.