Gravy834 - Online Marketing, Advertising, & SEO Mumbo-Jumbo

A few weeks ago a friend came to me wondering why his search engine positions had suddenly dropped from 3 to 182 for his main keyword.

Well it turns out he had restructured his site, changing from static pages to a dynamic WordPress site. The title tags, and content remained the same and the new pages had been indexed. This left me scratching my head for a moment.

I looked through his Google Webmaster Central account and found the following:

404 Errors in Webmaster Central

The URLs had changed! 28 pages returned 404 errors to the search engine crawlers, this accounted for over 70% of his site. Now Google is all about giving a great user experience but it encountered this staggering flaw, hence the site was punished with lower positions.

Quick as a flash, I added the appropriate 301 redirects to the .htaccess file, and within a week of the crawlers acknowledging this the site was back where it belonged.

No matter how much linking or keyword rich copy you add, if there’s 404’s being returned to the crawlers you’re not going to reach your full potential. Check your log files and Webmaster Central account and get them redirect immediately.

gravy834 Google SERP's, SEO

Trickster’s recent SEOmoz post outlines how Google are allowing ads to have a title that’s longer than the 25 character limit. Surely this can’t be true!

I thought I’d test it out for myself here in the UK.

I stuck to Trickster’s 28 character example of [oklahoma medical malpractice] (exact match) and used the keyword insert function, {KeyWord: 1} as the title. This is what was displayed;

"Oklahoma Medical Malpractice" - 28 Character Title

Sure enough, there it was in all it’s glory! Despite Google’s own strict AdWords guidelines, it ignored them and my ” 1″ default title and placed in the offending keyword.

Any advances on 28?

gravy834 Google AdWords adwords, seomoz, title, trickster

Well it’s not strictly true, duplicate content will still be an issue for a lot of sites!

Anyway, last week at SMX West, Google, Yahoo and MSN announced that they now accept the rel=”canonical” variable.

What does this mean?

Let’s take a look at Majestic Wine. Their site uses a large database which displays wines based on your choices from the navigation on the left hand side.

Majestic Wines Canonical URLs - Example 1

In the above example I’ve selected Wine > France > Loire > White

This URL was generated:

http://www.majestic.co.uk/find/category-is-Wine/category-is-France/category-is-Loire/Colour-is-White+Wine

However if I then select them in a different order, i.e. Wine > White > France > Loire, I get this URL:

http://www.majestic.co.uk/find/category-is-Wine/Colour-is-White+Wine/category-is-France/category-is-Loire

Despite the 2 different URLs the page content is exactly the same. Until now search engines may have seen this as duplicate content but now that they’ve introduced rel=”canonical”, this will no longer be a problem for ecommerce sites.

So how do Canonical URL Links work?

Read more…

gravy834 Ecommerce, Online Retail, SEO canonical, google, msn, SEO, url, yahoo

Over the coming months I’ll be posting some top tips, do’s and don’ts and best practice guides on various topics for the online community. These will range from E-commerce to Blogging, PPC to Twitter and so on. In fact I’ll even take requests.

All in all there’ll be a total of 834 tips (do you see what I did there), plus a few more from yourselves I hope, in my series, “Top 834 Tips On:”. I ultimately hope it will help you with your quest for web success and dominance. Use it as you please and feel free to feedback your thoughts.

You lucky people!

gravy834 Top 834 Tips 834, tips, top

So here’s a great ad from a great brand;

But are these latest adverts good enough to put Cadbury’s up there with the truly iconic brands, like Nike, Levi’s, Guinness and Sony Playstation?

Each have had amazing TV ads that get talked about and help increase brand awareness, but each ad was somehow related to the actual product. In the case of Cadbury’s, the link is to “a Glass and a Half Full of Joy”, which obviously comes from the production process of the chocolate, but I don’t think it’s enough to really improve the brand status.

There’s a lot of ‘what the f***’ comments out there. Don’t get me wrong, I love the ad, it’s very entertaining and I’ve sent it on to friends and family but it really needs to be more related to the product in order to make Cadbury’s ‘cool’ as there’s no sense of “if I eat Dairy Milk I’ll be able to body-pop my eyebrows”. This is where Levi’s shone with their naked guy in the laundrette ads and set the standard for a new generation of great ads.

Random ads, are they simply too random, so much so that they actually harm the brand? Just take a look at the previous 2 Cadbury’s ads (Gorilla and Airport Trucks), have they swayed your views of the brand?

P.S. The music from the Cadbury’s Eyebrows advert is “Don’t stop the rock” by Freestyle

gravy834 Branding advert, Branding, cadburys, eyebrows, tv

Most people are now aware that here in the UK the VAT rates were reduced in December from 17.5% to 15% in 2008 to help consumers combat the credit crunch. However as a retailer you could be losing out on thousands of pounds in lost revenue this year if you’ve incorrectly set-up the reduction on your e-commerce site. Let me explain:

Some retailers are simply applying the reduced rate to the shopping basket by applying a 2.5% discount to the total value.  It seems right to do this, but many fail to realise that this is actually a reduction on the original VAT rate as well as the product value.

Wrong:
I go to buy an Apple iPod Touch (32GB) which retails at £269.98.  At the basket the 2.5% discount is applied and I only pay £263.23. I save £6.95, wahoo!

This is great for the consumer but bad for the retailer;

Right:
The same iPod Touch is worth £229.78 to the retailer + 15% VAT which means the actual RRP is £264.25.

Now that’s a difference of £1.02 in lost revenue! It may not seem like much but this VAT reduction is in place for the whole of 2009, so that lost revenue will quickly add up.

Times are hard enough as they are, don’t make it even harder than it needs to be!

gravy834 Ecommerce, Online Retail Online Retail, reduction, shopping, vat

In preparation for the company Christmas karaoke party, I was researching which festive songs I should entertain my collegaues with on Google when all of a sudden I spotted a change to the Google listings.

As you can see, the normal vertical line used to seperate the Google sponsored links has been replaced with a line of holly.

Google Holly SERPs

The yule-tide theming also only applies to Christmas related searches i.e. ’santa’ & ‘christmas songs’ and also displays candy canes on occassion.

Is this just another ploy for Google to give retailers the best possible click through rates this Christmas as well as ensure Google have a bumper xmas parties.

- By the way I went for AHA - “Take On Me” (inspired by the recent XBOX 360 Advert) and Lionel Richie’s - “Endless Love”, not very festive I know but I can’t sing so it’s just for their fun and amusement!!!

gravy834 Google SERP's

Yes people you heard me,  Google are literally giving you money for nothing and your clicks for free (do you like what I did there - Dire Straits).

Ever clicked on the ‘More Sponsored Links’ link at the bottom of a SERP’s page underneath the other sponsored ads? Well it turns out that the ads featured here aren’t gonna cost you a penny. Any impression and click data will not reported on in AdWords and this is an area where Google will continue to display your ads even if;

• the daily budget has maxed out
• if you paused/deleted the ad
• if you paused/deleted the AdGroup
• If you paused/deleted the Campaign

This raises the question, could you create an AdWords account, pause it and drive free traffic to your site? Anybody willing to give it a try? No? Ok leave it up to me, I’ll keep you posted.

Sadly I’m not sure of the stats on have many people actually click on ‘More Sponsored Links’ but I’m sure there’ll be a few out there. Any ideas anyone?

Check out Google’s AdWords Help for more info!

gravy834 Google AdWords adwords, clicks, dire straits, free, google

So here it is, that novel opening post where everyone always writes about how this is their first ever post and how excited they are and that they can’t wait to write more etc…

Well this is certainly no exception! This is my first post, I am excited, and I can’t wait to write more for you lucky people!

This is the blog of gravy834 and I’m not really sure what it’s about, but I guess only time will tell!!!

You could be really kind now and subscribe to the RSS feed or bookmark me, or even link to me.

Until next time!

gravy834

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