Oh yes.

If you don’t use supermarket loyalty cards, are opposed to the idea of identity cards and balk at the size and scope of the police DNA database, think before you click that “search” button…

Google, which has an approximate 90% share of the UK search market, is working harder than ever to profile its users and their (read “your”) online behaviour in order to… err… well who really knows?

Google is a highly secretive company and is not fond of sharing the secrets which are both a source and a result of their huge competitive advantage.

All of this leads to a lot of speculation as to what is going on in the dark, secret chambers of the Googleplex. Well, technically they are more likely to be bright, glass-walled flexible feng shui approved work spaces with strewn with primary-coloured space hoppers, flowers and bowls of fresh fruit, but I digress; observers and regular internet users have noticed a clear trend towards the collection of more and more data for unqualified purposes.

Before you wrap tinfoil around your head, encode all of your emails and start leaving comments on YouTube videos, remember Google’s fabled motto: ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ A company with a motto like that couldn’t be evil, right?
Let’s consider some of the evidence.

Google Toolbar. Before the advent of personalised browsing there was the Google toolbar. If you are reading an SEO company blog, chances are you have the Google toolbar across the top of your browser. Google Toolbar gives you easy access to your gmail (more of that later), bookmarks (why use your browser’s bookmark function when Google’s is 5cm closer and you can take your bookmarks with you?), spell check, awesome translation tool, PageRank (how we’ll miss you when you go) and a wide variety of search options.

In return, Google gets your data.

What sites do you visit? How do you browse? What services do you use? How long do you spend on a site? Even if you are not logged in to any Google account, the toolbar sends this data to… well… somewhere.

Google Chrome is the next step along from the Google Toolbar. Another good tool for the user and another great source of browsing data for Google. But we still prefer Firefox in the office.

Gmail offers us loads of free storage. So we store loads of private, personal things with Gmail. You receive targeted messages from advertisers alongside your private messages.

This is from Gmail’s privacy page:

When you use Gmail, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).

Google Analytics. Why would Google provide a service that is really worth thousands of Pounds for free? Adding Analytics code to your pages allows Google to learn a huge amount about how people really interact with your content. It’s not hard to see the logic behind this one – all of those interactions that Google could not capture through the toolbar or its own services are trackable from the website end as opposed to the user end. Great stuff!

But how is the data being used? Google ain’t sharing.

So is Google being evil? Depending on your definition of ‘evil’, probably not; but who really knows? What we do know is that they are collecting a huge amount of information about how people use the internet and using that information to offer users better services and shareholders better value.

There is a recurring theme in the way that Google approaches these interactions. Much like supermarkets with their loyalty cards, Google offers something of value for no financial cost, asking only for your data in return. Personally,
I’m happy to make this deal most of the time, but not always.

The recent introduction of personalised results for everyone, whether signed in to a Google account or not, feels like the crossing of some sort of intangible line. Of course, all of Google’s data hoarding has been leading to this: search remains Google’s core product and personalised results are a logical next step to improve experience and create a further separation from competitors (who, it must be said, don’t have the best history of “not being evil”).

You can see Google’s announcement of that service here.

The biggest annoyance with this – and what has concerned some observers – is that the service is an opt-out service as opposed to an opt-in service. So my search results are being “personalised” according to websites that I have visited before? Great. Maybe I don’t want to revisit the sites that I have already seen. This reduces the quality of my “personalised” search results – the opposite of Google’s intention.

Google gives the impression of being a company with a well-tuned moral compass and I am not suggesting that anything else is true. Why would they use all of this harvested data for anything other than providing the best service possible and therefore making money and therefore becoming an even ‘better’ company. And the services that they offer are consistently excellent.

This said, just because a company has no malevolent intentions for all of the data that it holds, does that mean that every single individual within the company is equally as well-intentioned? Who knows.

Do most internet users know how to delete a cookie? Probably not. Would most internet users feel a little bit differently about Google if they knew just how much data the big G was storing? And, due to secure backups, that some of the data is effectively “undeletable”?

Pass the tinfoil…

We’ll be at StudyWorld London 2009 from the 7th to the 9th of September this year, spreading the good word of SEO to language schools across the world. You can find more information on the event here (PDF).

Alex can’t wait to see you there!

Or, more accurately, is PR (as in Public Relations) the new PR (as in PageRank)?

The world of SEO has been all aflutter in the last month as Google’s “Vince” update arrived on these shores and shook up search results in many competitive industries.

The effect on search results has marked a big shift in SEO and online selling. Predictably, this has been at the expense of the little guy and in favour of the bigger fish out there. To cut a long story short, Google now gives more weighting to bigger brands for generic searches like Personal Loans, Hotels, Insurance, etc, etc.

The changes also appear to be filtering down to a wider range of industries.

This printout from Google Analytics shows the effect of the update for one of our own clients, a fashion retailer:

The graph shows volume of traffic generated by high value, generic industry keywords. Notice the expected increase as a result of our SEO work, followed by the explosive spike in early July, soon after the update.

There has been a lot of debate about how Google determines what constitutes a brand and how they calculate this algorithmically. We, as a good SEO company, are running a number of tests at the moment to help smaller brands compete in the new landscape and, of course, to help our larger clients capitalise.

Everyone knows that Google loves links, but they seem to be just one of a number of factors involved in determining what does and what doesn’t pass their brand test. Mentions on social sites are a likely factor, as is brand buzz around the web. This means that more power than ever has been passed to the PR team and means more co-operation than ever between PR and SEO people, which I, for one, welcome.

What do you reckon? Is PR the new PR?

Has the age of link building been and gone?

(If so, will someone please tell the spammers? The flood of SEO company emails in my outlook inbox is reaching epic proportions!)

My article about marketing through the bad times was published is the local paid daily paper on Tuesday July 14th:

“In these uncertain economic times…”

Are you fed up with hearing that yet? There is nothing uncertain about it; we are in a recession.

So, is it time to chop your marketing budget, or to invest more in marketing to strengthen your claim to the business that is out there to be won?

I am a marketing guy and therefore you can probably guess what my opinion will be. But I do have evidence… honest! At Upstream Connections (the SEO and Internet Marketing company where I work), we have not stopped growing in the last 12 months and let me tell you how: marketing. And, of course, being great at what we do.

The big buzzword of the moment is “engagement” (thank goodness; “synergy” was getting tired) and “engagement” is a great place to start thinking about how to market your company in a recession. On a local level, networking groups are a great way to meet real life human beings and boost your profile. We are repeatedly told that the best kind of engagement is “a conversation with your prospects”. Imagine having a real conversation; that’s what networking groups like the BHCC and CADIA offer.

Digitally, the equivalent is business networking sites like LinkedIn and Ecademy, where you can spread your net much further afield. One great benefit of finding people through these sites is that there is no travelling involved and the time commitment is smaller. The downside is that you often don’t meet your prospect face to face.

By networking, you will make yourself visible to a small batch of people at a time. At Upstream Connections, we firmly believe that you should be visible to as many people as possible, all of the time and Search Engine Optimisation is the best way to make that happen. By ranking well in Google for the searches that reflect your business you give your prospects a quick and easy way to find you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you are worried that your website itself isn’t up to scratch, we provide all SEO clients with a free, review of their website in the first month of work. For most businesses, basic is best.

These are hard times for sure, but there is still plenty of new business to be had. The best way to get those enquiries is to push your marketing in the most cost-effective way possible and forge the relationships that will see your business blossom when times are better.

This September, we will be exhibiting at StudyWorld London, the language industry’s premier event for schools and agents.

Come and visit us at stand 20, upstairs the the Hilton London Metropole on September 7th-9th to chat SEO, social media and online strategy. We work with a number of Europe and the world’s leading language training companies and have achieved some striking results over the past six years for brands including Linguaphone, International House, Enforex, ESL, Cactus and many more.

If you would like to book in some face to face time with one of our team, drop us a line in advance and we can schedule a meeting in either at or around the event. If you are a language school with a website that you suspect could be performing better, please send us a link to your site so we can have a look through before the event and offer some expert feedback.

For more about the event, check out the website here.

See you at the fair!

We do. They are the unsung heroes of SEO.

A 301 redirect tells your browser – and search engine spiders – that a web page has changed location permanently. They are often used when an old site is being redesigned and the content is being shifted to a new address.

So far, so good.

But, I hear you say, is this really enough to warrant a blog post of its own?

Yes it is!

As with much of SEO, there are two issues at the heart of this issue: user experience and backlinks (and they are closely related). Here, in a nutshell, is why creating 301 redirects when moving content around on your site is a good thing:

User Experience

Let’s assume your website has been live for a number of years. If you have products or content that people like, it is probable that they have bookmarked a subpage of your site, so that they can come back and purchase/admire at a later date. If you move this content to a new address without a hard redirect, suddenly their bookmark becomes useless and clicking on their bookmark will take them to a 404 error page.

What do you do when you arrive at a 404 error page?

I  go to Google and search for the content elsewhere. This leads to the possibility of finding a rival with a well optimised site. If you had redirected the old page properly, this nightmare is easily avoidable.

Let’s take this a step further…

Backlinks

What happens when a webmaster finds content that they like on your website?

Chances are they will link to it. Yes! Backlink! Woo hoo! That’s a good thing and will help build the reputation of your site with Google and friends. That link passes some of the value (usually classified as PageRank/PageTrust) from the linking website to the linked-to page.

If you move the content of that page to a new address without putting a 301 redirect in place, the PageRank that would have been passed to your site is lost, the link from the host site is considered useless and is liable to be removed when the webmaster realises and thus your site’s value is unnecessarily depleted.

The moral of this post: when you move content permanently, use a permanent redirect!

This just in from Hitwise:

During February 2009, 1 in 35 UK internet visits was to a video website. That’s up 40.7% on last year, when the figure was 1 in 50.

At Upstream Connections, we love video. Quality video content on an ecommerce site helps inspire confidence and greatly improves conversion rates (if applied correctly). Did you know that a well-timed video can also be a route into Google’s top 10 results?

This is a result of Google’s much vaunted (and much maligned) Univeral Search. In a nutshell, Universal Search is an attempt to provide search results from a variety of sources, including blogs, images, authority sites like Wikipedia and video sites like YouTube. If you can create an interesting video with the right title, you have the potential to leapfrog onto Google’s front page. This can be particulary useful if you are selling a product that people search for using its name.

If you are interested in our video production services, drop us a line and let’s talk!

For anyone who’s interested in how the Upstream office building looks, check out this video which we made last year:

Sadly, you won’t see our subterranean office itself, but what a nice building, huh?

Upstream Connections started as a specialist SEO company in 2003. We recently celebrated 5 years in business… which is a long time in this industry.

I started working here as a freelancer way back in 2005, when Upstream operated out of a small office in the Brighton Media Centre. Since then, we moved to a bigger office, then an even bigger office and more recently to an even bigger office in Hove. During these years, we have been very privileged to work with clients in a huge range of industries, from language schools to power tools, via mobile phones, secured loans, tourism and financial software.

A lot has changed in those five years. When we started, most people would be slightly baffled by the mention of “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimisation“. Fast forward five years and the mainstream press is full of Search-related stories, journalists are given SEO training (which sometimes leads to bizarre coat tail grabbing headlines like this) and a little huddle forms at parties when you mention that you know how to get sites performing better in Google. The final point is not necessarily a good thing.

We are, first and foremost, an SEO company. But did you know we offer a whole range of internet services?

As you may well have seen on our homepage, we regularly design websites for clients. One big advantage of an Upstream-designed site is that you needn’t worry about whether it will be search-engine-friendly. You can be sure of it.

You can see some examples of our design work here and here.

We have a dedicated team of designers and programmers. We also work with a selection of highly talented freelancers, who can give a different perspective on a project.

Having great search results is only one part of doing business online. If users are not convinced by the site they arrive at, they will not want to do business with it. People are more trusting of quality websites now that they were even a couple of years ago, but are arguably less trusting of sites that appear dated or in any way suspicious. It is very important to keep on top of your image.

One of the great attractions of doing business online is being able to attract custom from around the world. To really connect with different cultures, you need to be sure that your website expresses exactly what you want it to. Our in house translation agency can ensure that you get a quality translation for a competitive price.

With the Pound set to struggle against the Euro for the forseeable future, now is the time to start appealing to overseas clients. Quality, localised text on your site is a big step forward. The next step is…

Upstream Connections offers SEO in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

Britain has one of the most developed internet economies in the world, but continental Europe is not far behind. If you want to make the most of your potential customer base in the coming years, you may want to look to the other side of the channel.

If you would like to see some examples of our work, get in touch and we would be more than happy to show you what we can do.

Links to your website are still a very important part of search engine optimisation. There are a number of ways that you can acquire these links, but the best way is to create quality content that people want to link to.

We have a specialist team in place to promote quality content in the places that bring the best return in terms of links and visitors. Check out our accent game and evolution of mobile phones video for a couple of examples.

So…

Making money online is a matter of providing the right service at the right price and making sure the right people can find you. Sounds familiar? The methods may be slightly different to traditional business, but the bottom line is just the same. If you want our help in making your website profitable, get in touch.

Santa moonlights in the world of SEO! Who’d have thought it?