Anyone interested in the special and unique sound of Ibiza, the real sound of the island, not the commercial, poppy trash played in the vast majority of bars and clubs here ought to acquaint themselves with THE ORIGINAL & BEST radio station on Ibiza:

Ibiza Global Radio – don’t bother with the rest, this is the best!

24 hour amazing electronic dance music!

It only seems like a few months ago we were last  announcing their (last) new site, however it was actually approaching two years ago. We got all excited about the possibility of really making it buzz in the (Google) charts, only to be frustrated by a poor technical design (frames) and incredibly complicated module design that didn’t even allow tweaking on basic pagetitles, and non-existent support from their developers.

So obviously we’re super happy they have yet another new site, built in php, by a web and seo savvy and  super co-operative designer, so now we’re really going to have some fun trouncing all the other pretenders to the Ibiza Music throne.

So following on from the onsite optimization example a couple of posts back, we thought we’d share some PPC happenings that we’ve got going on too.  As this campaign was already profitable, the brief was simply:

“more sales – I’m happy to spend more, I just want to sell as much as possible.”

We took control of it at end April and started implementing changes on 01 May 2010.

The first two months were spent optimizing the performance, culling back the non-performing ads, groups and keywords, and honing the performing ones sharper still.  We were primarily looking to reduce average Cost per conversion, and sell more for the same spend. – We did manage the main objectives, ie reduce CPC and  sell more, but the spend also rose a little too, although not as much as the sales – but you can’t always have everything you want.

Then it was time for phase 2,  increase spend on the new sharper campaign..

Obviously we cant pull identical time-period comparisons until the end of August, but if it keeps on this track we think we’ll be looking at approximately 40+% more sales, for approximately 15 ish % more spend (than at 01 May) at this point. Bargain.

Remember this second image is now comparing against our own improvements in May too.   & We’re not doing anything complicated here either, just the basics, A/B testing new ads, honing bids, a couple of new campaigns and cutting back wastage.

- We  don’t really even consider ourselves “PPC experts” in the same way that we would in Organic SEO, and hence don’t really chase this business, but we quite often end up getting involved in it one way and another, and to be fair, considering we’re usually taking over campaigns that have been set up and operated by “PPC experts” just maybe we’re underestimating our capabilities a little

A Tweet from @phil_nash made us chuckle a couple of days ago

Welcome to the new decade: Java is a restricted platform, Google is evil, Apple is a monopoly and Microsoft are the underdogs..

But his timing was pretty good, just in time for the underdogs to bite back. The much vaunted Microsoft / Yahoo merger has finally got a plan and a timescale, and a new website to announce both – www.searchalliance.com

.

Lots of people in the business (internet business) and quite a few of the public seem a bit fed up with Google in one way and another lately, whether its search results, privacy issues, or the new perception that Google might just be a bit evil after all, the timing of this announcement will be welcomed by some, for sure.

And “Bingahoo” say they have potentially 31% of the search market, which is significant volume, certainly too big to be ignored by businesses and SEOs alike. The project between the two companies gives them access to 5.2 billion monthly searches.  The deal is reported to leave Bing as the provider of the underlying results of Yahoo searches, with Yahoo retaining control of how those results are displayed.

From their website:

More volume, less effort.

Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of 561 million searchers worldwide.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve monetization for partners.

When the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences. However, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.

Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

Timing
Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.

We would actually like to see this go well and the Google stranglehold monopoly on search & PPC face a serious challenge, never thought we’d see the day we were wishing MS well against Google, but here we are.

Whatever next..?

This is a question we get asked a surprising amount.  – The image below should answer that, this is the one month period since the changes were cached.

This was one of those slightly more nerve wracking jobs, a small business seo project where the site already ranks pretty well, already at #4 for the main (converting) 2-word key-phrase, and #5 for the big one word key-phrase, (less conversion) and the client heavily relies on these keyword rankings for their current levels of business.

Normally with sites like this you would immediately be thinking about more and better links inbound, and minimal onsite changes to start, because the closer you are to the top, the more you have to lose, rather than than to gain on the big rankings.

But every site is different, and this one already had bundles of IBLs because the owner has been on a successful link-building drive for some time. But although the big kws were already in the zone, there were also a myriad of combinations, and variations on the theme that weren’t covered so well, so potentially a lot of traffic to be picked up by going sideways as well as up.

So we agreed with the client to cease his linkbuilding for a while, so we could accurately assess the impact of our onsite seo work and got down to it. – As you can see it’s going pretty well.

Lots of SEOs think that it’s just links, links, links, but often when a site has a decent amount of links already there is much more to be gained by leveraging the “latent ranking potential” already there, and spreading sideways to go after longer-tail keyword combinations more effectively.

And almost as a bonus, as of today the 2 word phrase is at #2 and the 1 word phrase is at #3.

Bargain.

So Google Caffeine has been *officially* live for a little while now, and for most people there doesn’t seem to have been too much effect, either positive or adverse.  However some sites have been hit quite badly by what we were watching  rollout which was the Mayday update that was just *prior* to Caffeine. 

Here’s a great interview with Maile Ohye from Google that sheds as much light as Google are likely ever going to give us on the subject,  quoted below.

We tweak little things in our algorithm all the time. Mayday was a significant update that really impacted long tail terms.

A lot of people were leveraging long tail phrases for lots of traffic but it was frequently done via automated methods. We’ve looked to eliminate spam, and that’s been a big priority for us. At the same time, there were people developing not quality content (not a violation of guidelines, but also not providing value).

What it does is for long tail queries, is we now just consider them queries like anything else. We are going to put as much value in those search results as all search results.

Someone else on another forum said:

“Google toned down the importance of exact match titles, perhaps all the way to zero. They were being gamed.. ..Searching for the example above “Cheap Red widgets in New York City” used to return a lot of exact match pages but now you may see none of them in the top 10 (20-30?).

It just means you can’t go out of your way to target just longtail (at least not with titles). When every longtail query is met with 1000′s of pages with those exact titles the titles became useless anyway”

We haven’t had any issues with any established client sites however we’ve been watching the long-tail devaluation effect on a new-build “bricks & mortar” small business website.

Anybody who’s built and/or ranked websites will understand that the longer a phrase,  in general, the easier it is to rank for? – well now it seems that’s not necessarily the case any more with these new algo changes.

For instance in the past, if you were concerned with ranking for the long-tail phrase “Janitorial service in Forth Worth” obviously you wouldn’t build the whole site around that phrase because hardly anyone is ever going to use that exact string, but you could be reasonably confident that if it ranked for “Janitorial Fort Worth” (or in reverse – FW Janitorial etc)  which “should” be harder and in effect the next level up, then the longer phrase would be at the same position, if not higher.

…Not any more.

There also seems to be something strange with the new treatment of the “in”, because again, in the past you would always assume that if it was say around position #60-ish for “Janitorial service Fort Worth” that it would be there if not higher for the same phrase with “in”  – ie  “Janitorial service in Fort Worth” ? – again, no, that’s changed.

It’s actually more like page 19.

Maile mentions two types of sites this was specifically aimed at in her interview:

Sites with content created by automated methods.

Sites with low-quality content that doesn’t provide value.

By this they mean these automated scrapers and such (Mahalo etc) that copy other site’s titles exactly and can then outrank them for their own Titles by virtue of their domain authority. Removing just those sites probably would improve the general search results quality, but it also seems to be having a very adverse effect on genuine small businesses who whilst actually providing a real live janitorial service IN Fort Worth,  now find themselves more likely to be ranking in the top 100 for “Janitor service”  nationwide before they even show up for their local search terms.

Thank the Lord (Google) at least for local business listings eh? ..And if anybody is seeking a  janitorial service in Fort Worth <– there’s one on the end of this link.

The other side of the coin for this is that more powerful sites have started showing up regularly in things they weren’t optimized for, or really even focused on, we’ve seen a considerable amount more hits (via Woopra) for reasonable strength 3 word phrases, where NONE of the words is in the ranking page’s page title, and the words are spread around the page, and not even used in the order of the query, on the page.

In fact, we wouldn’t be at all surprised at all to see this post turn up for the query we’ve been discussing while the actual site who have the service in the area is languishing on page 19.  – Still, must be good for Adwords revenues too, eh?

Well apart from putting a couple of articles up on hubs for them we’re not doing any ongoing SEO for this site as small business budgets don’t allow, but as we’re curious (about a lot of things, but mainly) whether this can be  overcome with quality links, or whether this is something more fundamental at work, so lets see..

So this is a project we’ve been toying with the idea of for a good while now, but have  thus far stayed away from because it might upset some of the long-time local’s gravy trains quite badly.

As the majority of our work is now non-Ibiza based there didn’t seem to be any point putting locals noses out of joint just because we can supply better cheaper services to Ibiza businesses,  however the decision was finally made easy yesterday based on the actions of certain local “web designers” and their “service levels” not to mention costs to their clients.

But even apart from all that, we think that what with the ever worsening state of the global, and soon to be local economies, it’s going to be a winner anyway.

So we would like to announce that we are now in the process of building a local business directory where businesses can advertise on a page with a guaranteed top 5 placing in Google for their business keywords (or they don’t pay) and for the insignificant cost of only 150 Euros per year.

Certain other websites here charge up to 800 Euros for the same thing and don’t have anything like the search engine presence or depth we will be offering.

The local business advertising directory will be primarily aimed at businesses without websites, but businesses with websites will also be able to advertise, and will receive a free bonus SEO overview report of their site as part of their advertising fee.

We feel one hundred and fifty Euros per annum is about fair price for your Ibiza-based local business name and phone number top 5 in Google for your business keywords, if you can’t make a profit on that in a year, well you probably need a new business model.

Edit: live now! – Ibiza internet business advertising directory

There will be a grace period of a few weeks where you can list free, but once it’s ranking for your terms it will be paid listings only, so be quick..

And check out our new small business  Ibiza web design package, for less than 800 Euros (one off payment) you could have your own website at the top of your Google searches.

"seo demo" - click to view

So this has been making us chuckle of late, way back in late 2007 when we launched this site we decided it was going to be an ongoing “SEO demo” and at that point in time the only serious SERP competition (for a new site) for the term was “Master SEO” and his Taekwondo Demo on youtube.

In fact at one point some numpty on a forum said:

“SEO Demo? – what do you want to rank for that for?” (think Birmingham accent)

Well in “proper” SEO terms of course he was right, no search traffic so waste of time, but we had some time to waste at that point along with (we like to think) a little vision, and we just wanted it anyway, so why not?

In fact we gathered up quite a few SEO + terms just because we liked the sound of them and nobody else was doing anything interesting with them – Demo / Demonstration,  Power, Domination, Experiments, Theories etc etc..  - you might also call it “foresight”

Fast forward on nearly 3 years and Woopra has been showing  a small but steady stream of traffic for “SEO demo” for a few months now and on looking we now seem to be in some fairly distinguished company, vying for the phrase (not that we’ve actually done any vying for it for about 2 & 1/2 years)

The (current) running order is

#1 – Microsoft of all people, in the guise of an employee’s Silverlight “SEO Demo”
#2 – SEO Ibiza’s “SEO Demo website”
#3 – Network Solutions very own Flash “SEO Demo” site –  networksolutionsseo.com

Then we have the universal video box with a “Brute Force” SEO demo going down

#4 – The awesome Hittail software company

Then the page quality deteriorates a bit, Youtube, that sort of thing…

Now it occurs to us that the mighty Network Solutions (PR8 domain) wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making a new website in Flash, called “SEO Demo” on it’s own domain (PR5 from one link) Putting only “SEO Demo” in the page titles and then linking to it from their main site with the correct anchor text unless they wanted to rank for it?

Whoops, sorry to ruin the party

And the even mightier Microsoft would presumably also want their Silverlight SEO demo at the top too? Well MS is an old chart adversary, spec ops were dissing their free websites right under them in Google (with a blogspot blog lol!) back in 07 -08.

So as we now find ourselves here representing WordPress (the upstart underdog) against Corporatist technology personified (Microsoft, Network Solutions) and their latest technology, well it’s probably best we make it absolutely clear which is still the utterly dominant superior SEO technology eh?

Since then of course there’s been interest in several of the others as well, “SEO domination” is picking up, lots of people are using it as a tagline, but nobody has managed to “dominate” our page yet, and “SEO experiments” hasn’t even flinched from the #1 position for more than 2 years despite some other distinguished company in that search, so we’re pretty confident that WordPress SEO power will see Microsoft off fairly shortly too and leave the one truly dominant SEO platform well in charge of any demos going on..  :)

So here’s how the SEO Scotland tests are shaping up at one week in..

We want to repeat that we are just testing here, anyone who is actually looking for SEO help with their website, our recommendations of local companies are on the SEO Scotland page linked to just above here.

Scottish SEO tests at one week in..

The red squares are the initial serp “probe” blog posts, one of which has since been merged and redirected at the main “static” page (as opposed to blog posts) We’re still waiting for Google to recache the whole site to fully power up the main Scotland page, and follow the redirects, at which time it’ll be at full strength and we would normally  be able to assess if we needed to get any more links to it.

As it’s just a test and we don’t want Scottish SEO work (major corporations can maybe apply, but we’re pretty busy and can’t promise anything) we won’t be further linking at it externally, we think we probably have sufficient domain authority to cope with allintitle: readings of 2k ish over a little time.

Ok, so anybody who’s familiar with our WordPress SEO tips, and content creation in particular this is a “working post”.

The green boxes on the screenshot are the homepage, which as it ranks reasonably (#1 -  top 20′s dep on term) without “Scotland” – then of course just addition of the word on the page, especially when the word is a link to inner content, means more or less instant presence. In another week or two the blog posts will switch positions with the main page, maybe indent for a little while, and then fade away over the next few months, exactly like this.

It’s important to note that although WordPress is a potentially superior seo system, it doesn’t just do this on it’s own, it still needs to be structured,  set up and operated correctly to achieve these kinds of results.

Other SEO testing news..

New test site to launch this week:  www.ibizascooterhire.com – scooter hire in Ibiza.  – it’s a domain a local contact has agreed to buy once we’ve “incubated”  it for a little while, so may as well use it for some testing in the meantime? 

Lordy our blogging is like buses (in the UK & Scotland anyway) none come along for ages then several turn up at once.

Well this weekend instead of blasting through the backlog and making a dent in the waiting list we’ve been mostly messing about over on HubPages.com

We’ve never bothered with it much before because the links from Hubs / Squidoo etc are generally pretty weak-arsed unless you either work on the hubs with external links or have time to write lots and lots of inter-connected and related hubs, and even then they still need  links built to them too to rank anywhere mildly competitive.

However a well written hub can be useful for driving targeted traffic to a new site as well as getting a decent link if you do it right, so we thought we’d knock up a hub explaining how to:

1. use hubpages to promote a new site

and also courtesy of some suppliers we just built a Link Wheel site for..

2. how to make a link wheel that works

And whilst there, got involved in a conversation that ended up with us having to attempt a pop at ranking for “SEO Scotland” of all things.  But you know us, we like a test shot every now and again anyway to keep us sharp.

So without further ado, let the Scottish SEO test commence..

Anybody who knows us knows that we love WordPress..  Flash,  not so much..

The Flash SEO help-page on the main site is actually one of our most Google-trafficked pages, there’s a surprising amount of people out there wanting to know how to SEO their Flash websites and with good reason as it’s still pretty hopeless without a lot of help.

WordPress however, we love for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of it’s awesome SEO capabilities when used correctly. But SEO for WordPress is the same as SEO for anything else, it requires at least some knowledge of SEO.

Because the general public now seem to be aware of WordPress’s SEO power on well built sites, there is also a general mis-conception that all you have to do is use WordPress to build your site and it will do it all automatically for you. This is incorrect, and it won’t.

We’ve said it before and will no doubt say it again, good SEO starts long before you think about what you are going to build the site in, because every action you take in building and structuring the site will affect it’s SEO performance, so throwing it up randomly with no seo planning or strategy in advance will not work, whatever platform you build it on.

WordPress does however at least give you the opportunity to plan and build a search engine (super) friendly site, Flash in general does not.

So when we started hearing about “FlashWordpress” from customers..

“it looks like Flash, but because its WordPress it’s SEO friendly”

..was the impression they have been given, alarm bells obviously rang loud, and there were unpleasant visions of leagues of prissy Flash Evangelists  all planning to contaminate WP with their Flashy SEO kiss-of-death.

Happily, after digging about a bit,  in general we were fairly pleasantly surprised by the shotgun marriage of WP & Flash  (in most cases, not you numpty) and would go as far as to say some of the WP themes & free XML scripts are pretty good.

There’s lot of pre-made themes featuring Flash banners and displays, most of them of course are just embedding Flash into WordPress and in this way it’s not possible to do too much harm to your site’s potential rankings, and there are also several plugins that allow you to do this nicely.

But the couple of  brainwaves out there thinking that showing the whole WordPress site through a Flash front end is the way forwards, well..  we definitely would not advise use of those for a business website that has to rank in search engines to sell for you.

If anybody is currently tempted by any kind of  FlashWordpress  creation we highly advise you to:

1. get a URL of a  running demo site from the developer
2. go here http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php and plug in the URL of the sample site.

If you can see the same written text on the Lynx viewer results as you can see on the demo site, then you’re OK.

Note** – You definitely also need to be able to see the full site navigation linking including widgets, tags, categories, comments, trackbacks etc on there too, just the on-page content is not good enough, it’s WordPress’ automatic internal ball linking system that when both configured and operated correctly gives it such phenomenal SEO power.

If however you just have a blank page, or some nonsense about the FlashWP interface they’re using or about needing to install Flash and none of the relevant site content, then these are definitely SEO lemons at their finest and if you need it to rank in Google, you need to decline this kind offer immediately.

Because although these Citric Flash creations obviously do give the user more control over their content than a standard Flash site does via an easy-to-use WP interface, it’s a pretty bad shot in your own foot to take a formidable WordPress SEO framework and spend a lot of time and effort designing a system to make it totally invisible to Google by showing it through Flash.

DOH!!

If you’re looking at one of these sites and are not sure of what you’re seeing please do feel free to hit us up on the contact form and ask us and we’ll advise, otherwise don’t come crying to us when your “WordPress” site is an epic SEO Fail.

SEO Ibiza is proudly powered by FlashWordpress without the Flash

the website might not be flashy, but the rankings certainly are..