I appeared to have fallen off the (b)log. Apologies. I’m now back on top and posting regularly again. Honestly!

So I’d like to announce the first in an irregular series on using Google Labs & Beta products as tools for online marketing. There’s no priority in the order, I’m just going to tackle the details of an issue as I come across it in a professional capacity. If there’s anything you’d like my take on drop a suggestion in the comments.

First up: Google’s Custom Search Engine ‘On The Fly’

OK, so the Custom Search Engine (CSE) has been kicking around for a good few years now, but recently got upgraded by Google to be the core tool to leverage AdSense custom search revenue for Adwords Publishers. Ah! Instant marketshare!

Then, suddenly, a new flavour came out promising ‘On The Fly’ results delivery!

And no-one got excited. At all.

Except, I did. What Google’s tool actually does is allow you to perform a search leveraging Google’s algo on all sites links to from one page. So if I performed a search for SEO on LifeDesignSEO, then I get this.

…so lots of Drupal, Matt Cutts, and WordPress pages related to SEO.

Of course, we can also see lots of sponsored links along the right. Well we need to keep those clouds running somehow!

Flying with the CSE: what’s the use?

Is this a toy? Well, I can use URL encoding and a script to trigger scrapes of this output for any input domain and term. There’s a huge delay in the results delivery, so I’m not going to be able to do any industry or vertical snapshots, but that’s OK. I can then parse the data to match up to a scrape of a Google SERP for any territory for the same term. As part of that data processing, I might try isolating position ranked for both sources and the number of domain occurances in CSE On The Fly.

So this might be useful to highlight if the domain I queried ‘On The Fly’ was linking to highly related pages/domains. I can then drive a few actions by digging through the total domains listed for the term and doing a quick gap analysis. Should any linked domains be dropped? Should I try to link to high scoring domains?

Of course, this is just scratching the surface, but like any good tool it opens the door to further analysis and impactful implementation.

Oh and also: I may have opened a can of worms on one of my favourite ‘overlooked SEO factors’: improving rankings by linking to strongly relevant and authoritative domains. Flies in the face of many PageRank sculptors out there, but then, healthy debate’s the best way to improve your search skills IMO.

Next up in the series? Well we’ve had something new, I’d quite like to revisit something old: Google Sets.

OK two of my favourite companies have failed me recently: Google & Apple. Or more specifically: Google’s robots.txt protocol support and Apple’s iPhone via O2’s service.

The iPhone’s over there, mocking me with a ‘No Service’ signal. But it’s not no service. Or it is no service. The forums are confused.

My bet is the forums are all a little right. I’m going to let it spend the night checking away. I’ll do a couple of resets in the morning (I’ve firmware reset twice this evening) and we’ll see how we go.

One thing I’m definitely leaving to last is calling the O2 support line: that’s one thing everyone agrees is shocking. My tolerance for holding on a phone is low. Especially when you have no indication where you are in the queue. I mean: not even a number?

I guess that’s Apple/O2. Google?

Everyone knows the robots protocol. It’s a fundamental web protocol that everyone supports. Google points people their way, and have always complied with their standards. Of course they do. Everybody does (everybody ethical, that is).

Even when you try to be a bit flash and use the REGEX functions to trim back the length of the robots - which is not part of the protocol, Google supports it. Hell, they even give you a few tips to get your REGEX right.

Except they don’t support their own guidelines. The oldschool SEOs reading this (hello) will be going through the same emotions I went through: a wry sense of deja-vu and a geeky intensity of nailing down the flaw.

In this case it’s simple. A quick phone call from Matt would likely fix it.

Essentially: Google’s robots’s wildcard matching is broke.

Wildcards disallows to exclude filenames plus a query parameter aren’t functioning as disallows, and are even being flagged in Google’s Webmaster Console as not functioning.

For example:
User Agent: *
Disallow: *brokeniphone.php?

or even Google’s own example:

User Agent: *
Disallow: /*?

Return the below:

It’s a pain for all the sites I’ve set up wildcard rules for as I’ve got a long debugging session looming as a result. I’m no Google hater - far from it! - but this used to be A-OK, it’s documented in Google’s Webmaster Pages, and it’s not functioning.

Please, Matt: give us webmasters an early Easter Egg.

<disclaimer>Google used to support this wildcard matching - at least up until a few weeks ago. They seem to have turned a dial somewhere since then.</disclaimer>

Apologies for the hiatus: at least my first post of the new year is pre-February!

Why so busy? Site rebuilds. I’m working on a range of site rebuilds at the moment. January is a classic time for this: just like we do in our private life, businesses tend to look at the their new year’s budget and make a few resolutions.

I’m working with a range of business types, sizes, and budgets. With this mix comes a cloud of CMS systems. Sadly, one of those is Websphere, but on the plus side one is Drupal :-). I also have a feeling that there will be a first of a kind blend of Websphere and Wordpress on one project!

It’s incredible when you think about it that a business would spend thousands of pounds on IBM’s famously inflexible CMS tool, then host a free, open source blogging CMS alongside so that content can be easily and quickly hosted.

But then, web design’s always throwing up these paradoxes.

Building a great website: foundations

What do you do first on a site rebuild?

This is my favourite stage of a web build project. I love getting to the core of a web accessible, seo focused, user friendly site. For me, this starts when you’ve got a whiteboard in front of you, a clutch of marker pens, and the key site stakeholders all in the same room to make decisions. The speed with which you can make decisions and plough forwards through the key broad strokes steps is always astonishing.

Getting a feel for the finished product while in these stages is important, and to make the best decisions you need experienced people in the room. It’s a huge win for a site’s SEO to have an understanding of how the code will need to be laid out to achieve a certain structure - and what impact that will have. A savvy designer will know their code and be able to ensure you degrade gracefully for your mobile audience (you haven’t thought of your mobile audience? Start thinking).

There’s challenges, of course, but getting the right decision in place the first time pays off throughout the course of a build. Some of my current projects won’t complete until cSeptember - and I’d add on the obligatory 15% overrun time to that deadline too ;-), but they are all looking in good shape and I plan to give some more detailed updates relating to build tips and tricks, common problems, quick wins, and insider know-how.

Assuming I can get everything off the whiteboards and into the mock-ups that is…

This isn’t news, it’s inevitable. We all know that Google’s infamously never first to market, but it’s products tend to dominate either via superior technology (see text, image, blog…well: any search function) or by driving traffic and cash into the product from related products/services which dominate their own niche. Google Checkout is a classic ‘Forced entry’ to a market which was otherwise dominated by PayPal.

3 Reasons Checkout is Unstoppable

1. You get preferential treatment in Google SERP listings, with a larger clickable area and visual cues to encourage user clickthrough. Interestingly, Google changed the clickable areas in text ads recently, adding further weight to this benefit.

2. Google Base and Google Products both promote filtering out of non-Google Checkout products.

3. Google Checkout Gadgets. These are fantastically useful and Gadgets are another area of strong growth and promotion by Google.

I’m stopping at three simply because there’s an almost endless list of more trivial reasons why Google will succeed with Checkout where others have faltered at the feet of PayPal.

If you could add one more critical win for Google Checkout, what would it be? Also, if you think PayPal has a Checkout-killer, tell us more…

I’ve been waiting for the tide of comment following Google’s launch of the gOS - the Google Operating System - early last month (again). But it just seems to not have happened. Tie that in with the almost entirely unheralded launch of a syncing tool for OpenOffice and Google Docs and I can only assume that thanksgiving’s caused a lot of the high volume bloggers state side to rest on their laurels for the festive season.

Personally, I love OpenOffice - it strips out the unnecessary elements of Microsoft Office. In fact it forces me to think about the content I’m producing, and not how it’s formatted. However, I’m a multiple machine kind of guy. I need to get documents synched. Google Docs then, right? Well yes and no. I like the look of Google Docs, but the feel is way too laggy for me. If I’m entering data into a spreadsheet, I want that data going in and updating other cells instantly. When I save a doc, I want that to be done straight away.

Also: I bet I’m not the only one here who finds Google Spreadsheets to be frustratingly simplistic. I’m not talking about pivot tables, but at least a little flexibility in basic editing functions and some support for decent formulas is desperately needed.

So I just don’t get the speed I need from Google Docs and sometimes the product is a little limited. syncing up OpenOffice is a great step forwards. In fact it’s surely the greatest app for the gOS?

Google Operating System Vs Plain Vanilla Ubuntu

I was a big fan of Fiesty, and Gibbon is another great leap forwards, but still the pickup for Linux via it’s friendliest flavour is low. Google’s talent for making the mainstream love the geeky could be just the injection of glamour open source desktop environments need.

I blame it on being ill.

I spend most of my time online. I’m lucky enough to work in a company where I’m more or less obligated to spend all day everyday keeping in touch with the latest trends online. I’d do it anyway of course. In fact I’ve spent a substantially larger part of today fiddling with one such development that I couldn’t even strictly justify to myself. Why? It’s all about Flock & social media.

So sure, Flock’s nothing new. It’s not even unique, or first.

It’s damn pretty though.

GTD for Social Media?

OK, so it’s not in the spirit of GTD* to rely on a fancy tool, but if you are trying to Inbox Zero your social sphere and you’re more than a little active online, then anything you can use to make the complex simple should be welcomed.

Flock’s ‘People’ function allows me to share broadly in my multiple social spheres without having to wade through logins or get tangled up in MMFFT (Massively Multiplied FireFox Tabs). When I’m testing web code I run things through multiple user agent versions and types - and I piggybacked my social presence into these different browsers: Opera for a formal profile; IE for work; FF for play; and so on.

I’m still fiddling (and will be for hours), so I’m not going to bang on too much about some of the other cool features. I do recommend you take it for a whirl though, especially if you happen to be bed-bound by winter flu.

Yeah, yeah - very interesting. But did you…you know?

Did I blog with it? Well you’re reading this aren’t you?

*For those of you unfortunate enough not to have come across this mind-bendingly simple life hack: GTD = Getting Things Done.

It’s always amazing to me how little attention is paid to niche areas in the halo of competitive search terms. Dig around on any of the big four search engines and you’ll see dramatic competition drop off on quirky keyword combinations.

Take finance. I’ve been researching news, comment, and blogging habits around a key finance term and differing lifestyles and there are a number of opportunities for the savvy search marketeer. A great example: “eco friendly” is a zeitgeist term right now and it’s set to grow significantly. Lifestyle financial packages are emerging, and banks are getting ethical as public opinion strengthens.

Demographics are your friend

Free, friendly, and quick demographic info suggests that the ethical consumer has a higher pay bracket. Paid solutions reinforce this.

Anyone out there running finance clients should be digging through their analytics and onsite search stats to see if the interest has crept onto their brand. If it has, you need to act.

If it hasn’t? You need to act.

Niche & lifestyle keyphrase terms

Niche has a habit of becoming saturated. Spotting a new growth sector is gold dust.

Interestingly, one of the best ways to target such a niche is to build a community presence. Try getting content up that’s fresh, unique and relevant. With an eco lifestyle finance term try to address your user’s concerns in an offbeat way. Be approachable.

Go back to your analytics. Put yourself in their shoes.

Most of all…keep it to yourself.

Ah.

I’m watching old episodes of Cranky Geeks (Dvorak is pretending to be Nick Nolte for Halloween) while I work on Thunderbird filters and I think the above.

This is my disclosure moment which will be referenced in future posts (Hello people from the future! Are you sitting comfortably?). I’m a technically minded chap from well known SEO company bigmouthmedia. However everything published on this blog is of course entirely my own opinion and shouldn’t even be taken seriously, let alone considered professional advice.

But is that the real you?

This is what I look like as an SEO professional and as a scruffy geek with little spare time. That’s all there is. Apart from some blog of course.

Hopefully now you’ll be feeling even more relaxed about my stance on anything controversial, potentially libelous, genuinely thought provoking, or simply au courant.

* Of course you are!

Often underrated in the push for best practice is password admin and general housekeeping in the back-end.I’ll worry all day long about Id v’s Class usage for site design style sheets, but having just spent 3-4 hours clearing up my admin, role permissions, passwords and user profile options I’ve come to realise that CSS standards are simply so much fluff in the face of core site maintenance.

Can you bulk change all your ftp passwords? I hope so, I’m going to start digging and I’ll share what I find.

CMS systems vary wildly in their friendliness, but hardly anyone seems to talk about mass tweaking. They should. It’s crucial. If you head up a development team then multiply that last statement’s sonorous tone by 100.

Password Protocols

I hope you have some. But I hope they aren’t logical. Think like a machine and you’ll likely get hacked. Remember: SSH is your friend: never go online without it (I’d feel naked, I think).

Yep. And in that order too. Basically.

It’s a lame theory I had back in the day that has kicked around my head for just too long. It’s about priorities and all about online. Online life. Web design. Search optimisation. It’s the new economy, and a new way of life - wait, no: it’s almost completely *not* about ways of life. Although of course it is.

It’s about building a new blog in two minutes to pass the time because you were looking at Google’s homepage and suddenly went blank with your cursor in the search field.

Fact: it won’t all be like this. And, yes, there are a few changes I’ll be making.

And so?

First up: wordpress transformation sliced and diced into my life, my design, and some good old fashioned SEO nuggets.