Google’s Website optimizer
Google’s website optimizer is designed to help you perform the multi-variate testing I mentioned in an earlier blog.
Political aside
I’m trying to keep off politics in the blog, but today’s (national) headlines regarding Jersey’s endemic failures in child protection deserve some comment. Frank Walker has posted a full statement today, which is really worth reading if you’d like to get a better view of Stuart Syvret’s involvement. Stuart Syvret was reported in today’s Daily Mail (what a bastion of disciplined journalism) as the whistleblower who was sacked for uncovering child abuse in Jersey. As Frank’s statement points out, the Police investigation was well under way before Syvret ‘uncovered’ anything. Syvret’s unprincipled opportunism should do nothing to rescue his ruined career, if there’s any justice.
Landing Page revisited
Time and time again I click on Adwords to find myself on a generalised page with little or no relevance to the keyword I searched for on Google. Not only will these advertisers find themselves spending more on Cost per Click (CPC, because Google rewards relevancy), they’re chances of conversion are greatly reduced. You’ve got less than 10 seconds to ensure the user can complete the desired action (e.g. sign-up, or add to basket) immediately.The key elements you need to consider on your landing page are:
My friend and colleague Mark Evans, gives us a perfect example in his Exercise Equipment site.
To achieve this level of precision, Google recommends multi-variate testing. Adwords gives such granular detail, that you can measure yield on small changes to your landing page layout and copy. At Webreality we’ve seen multi-variate testing yield an increase from 6% to 10% conversion rates for our customers, so it’s definitely worth the effort.
7 handy tips from Google
Saw this on Google blog recently, and it will be useful for those of you under the hood of your sites…Googlebot can’t access my websiteWeb hosters seem to be getting more aggressive about blocking spam bots and aggressive crawlers from their servers, which is generally a good thing; however, sometimes they also block Googlebot without knowing it. If you or your hoster are “allowing” Googlebot through by whitelisting Googlebot IP addresses, you may still be blocking some of our IPs without knowing it (since our full IP list isn’t public, for reasons explained in the post). In order to be sure you’re allowing Googlebot access to your site, use the method in this blog post to verify whether a crawler is Googlebot. URL blocked by robots.txtSometimes the web crawl section of Webmaster Tools reports a URL as “blocked by robots.txt”, but your robots.txt file doesn’t seem to block crawling of that URL. Check out this list of troubleshooting tips, especially the part about redirects. This thread from Google’s Help Group also explains why you may see discrepancies between our web crawl error reports and our robots.txt analysis tool.Why was my URL removal request denied?(Okay, I’m cheating a little: this one is a Help Center article and not a blog post.) In order to remove a URL from Google search results you need to first put something in place that will prevent Googlebot from simply picking that URL up again the next time it crawls your site. This may be a 404 (or 410) status code, a noindex meta tag, or a robots.txt file, depending on what type of removal request you’re submitting. Follow the directions in this article and you should be good to go.Flash best practicesFlash continues to be a hot topic for webmasters interested in making visually complex content accessible to search engines. In this post Bergy, our resident Flash expert, outlines best practices for working with Flash.The supplemental indexThe “supplemental index” was a big topic of conversation in 2007, and it seems some webmasters are still worried about it. Instead of worrying, point your browser to this post on how we now search our entire index for every query.Duplicate contentDuplicate content—another perennial concern of webmasters. This post talks in detail about duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and also references Adam’s previous post on deftly dealing with duplicate content, which gives lots of good suggestions on how to avoid or mitigate problems caused by duplicate content.Sitemaps FAQsThis post answers the most frequent questions Google get about Sitemaps.
Microsoft + Yahoo > Google?
Last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion in cash and stock. This represents a 50% premium for shareholders, and indicates Microsoft’s anxiety to beat Google. In my view, it also represents a tacit admission from Microsoft that Windows Live, MSN, etc., are all failing to win market share. As the Nielsen Online report indicates, Google is still comfortably controlling the market, and that’s in spite of the fact that MSN/Windows Live are default home pages are virgin Vista/Internet Explorer installations.This is a big play, even by Microsoft’s standards, and is a sure indicator that Microsoft recognises that search is the key battlefield for this decade. Search is the big driver for all online marketing and content. Microsoft’s increased muscle in this market, will paradoxically increase customer choice, and hinder Google’s hegemony.From an agency point of view, the biggest problem we face with Yahoo and Windows Live is poor programmatic interfacing. I’m hopefully Microsoft will throw similar resource at a decent API for Windows Live and Yahoo!. If you they couple the API with better incentives for intermediaries, large scale advertisers will have a realistic alternative to Google.