Ignore the shitty meta description. My site cached weirdly.

Here is how my site appears when you find it in the search results.  Google my name to check it out.  It shows I’ve got a 4.5 / 5 rating, based on 152 reviews.

Want to know a (probably bloody obvious) secret?

I’ve had zero reviews.  Hell, I don’t even offer a product or service to review.

It’s pretty dubious, I’ll admit.  Although I wouldn’t quite agree with what Matt Gammie said:

Playing around with some of the schemas you can find at Schema.org it’s possible to make Google tell people you’re a highly reviewed member of society… with very little evidence.

Obviously I’ve got no reason to do this for any reason other than testing, it was merely an experiment… but this definitely leaves the door open for people to manipulate how they appear online.

(The best part of this is that the exact star-rating is set by you, in the code, and won’t fluctuate… regardless of the ratings you actually receive online.)

Anyway, without further ado…

How to get your own fixed star-rating in the Google search results

Just add the AggregateRating schema to each page you want the rating to appear on.

I added this to every page of this blog, just to see the full affects.  You’ll see it in the sidebar.  If it’s not there now then here’s a screenshot of how it appears when you add it:

And the code you need to add is:

<div itemprop=”aggregateRating” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/AggregateRating”><span itemprop=”ratingValue”>4.5</span> stars – based on <span itemprop=”reviewCount”>152</span> reviews </div>

I’ve highlighted in bold the two areas that you can edit to your heart’s content.

Final note

You can test whether or not this has been implemented properly by visiting: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets and entering the URL to check.

Oh, and in WordPress this doesn’t seem to work if you place it into the footer section of the page so you’ll have to place your reviews somewhere like the sidebar.

Sweet.

This post is a further look into the SEOMoz post Eye-tracking the Google SERPs.  It’s a great post, so I recommend you go check it out.

(image credit: all images in this post have been taken from that SEOMoz blog post)

Google Places listings are a huge draw – not just for brand terms

The image below glows brightest where users spent the most time looking after making a Google search for pizza.

Where are people looking most after searching for pizza?  At the Google Places listings.

You could look at that as a “no shit”, but I think there’s something interesting to think about.

The main aim for SEOs has, traditionally, been to rank for high volume, generic keywords like pizza.  But… based on these eye-tracking overlays it seems that even if you’re in position 1 organically for these generic keywords then most people will still be more interested in the Google places listings.

We should be optimising locally rather than wasting effort trying to rank for these kinds of big generic keywords.

So how do you know what kinds of phrases to optimise for locally?

I’d say if you’re selling certain FMCGs or fast-food then optimising your listings in Google Places is better than trying to be number 1 outright.  A person searching for chinese food is unlikely to be interested in learning about its history, and more likely to want somewhere nearby to eat it.

Problem-solving searches and “how-to”s

With problem-solving searches like  ”how to make a pizza”, video content is king.  Users have an itch that needs scratching and video is usually the easiest way to do it, at least on desktop searches.

I doubt the same thing is true for users searching from mobile devices though.

The main takeaway from this is to always remember searcher-intent

Keyword research and mapping should include suggested types of content based on probable user-intent.

e.g.

If someone searches for “how to make a pizza” then give them a page that best teaches them.

If someone searches for “pizza” then tell them where their nearest pizza restaurant is.

Don’t look at just trying to rank for keywords, but instead aim to offer users the best information.

Mobile users love auto suggest

100% of users offered keyword suggestions chose at least one of them.

The Google autosuggest

The message: use autosuggest to come up with ideas for search terms to target on mobiles.  This can either be done manually or with a free tool like Ubersuggest.

In particular, look for the terms that look like they would be used by people on-the-go.  This means things like location-based searches (“sofa store directions” or “double glazing london”) and review based searches (“best restaurant in holborn”).

If it’s a query that implies someone wants a quick, straightforward answer then it’s something to target on your mobile site.

If your site doesn’t display properly on a particular device then you’re in the shit

Google has a different search ranking algorithm for mobile that takes device data into account.  If your site doesn’t display properly for a particular device (errors, incompatible markup, etc.) then there’s a chance you’ll be removed from the search results for all users of that device.

If your site looks like crap on a certain Blackberry model then Google will remove you from the search results for that device.

The message: make your site compliant for as many devices as possible.  Your best bet is start with something stripped down and generic and then expand to take advantage of different handset capabilities.

(an example of this would be the brilliant, free Skeleton mobile framework)

Use the w3c mobileOK validator to check your site offers a basic user experience for wide range of mobile devices (this won’t tell you if your site gives people a good experience, just that it works).

How Google search results work differently for mobile searches

Your site has two separate Quality Scores:

• One dictates how well your site will rank in desktop searches,
• One dictates how well your site will rank for mobile searches.

There are a number of ways Google can tell if your site is serving mobile content, i.e.:

• Increasing mobile quality score if the ranking page links to downloadable content for mobile devices.
• Reducing mobile quality score if your page language does not equal the language set on the mobile device.
• If a page appears unchanged for both desktop and mobile searches then it’ll be removed from mobile results (see the next header for more on this).

Google will remove generic pages that are not optimised for mobile searches (and replace them with ones that are)

Google compares searches made on desktops with searches made on mobile devices and removes any duplicate pages if there’s a mobile version available.

Sound confusing?  It’s dead simple, but will be easier to explain with an example:

The DFS homepage (http://www.dfs.co.uk) ranks #2 for “sofas” in Google searches from a desktop PC.

The mobile site (http://m.dfs.co.uk/) doesn’t appear in the top 100 results, but it’s in the main index.

When a mobile user makes a search for “sofas”, Google swaps out the DFS homepage at #2 for the mobile version that it has in the index.

The message: What this seems to says is that you should create your mobile pages and optimise them for the same search terms that the desktop versions are targeting.  Google will automatically switch the mobile optimised one into the place of the desktop page.

The other insinuation here is that the main focus of link-building should be your desktop pages – the mobile versions will slip into their place when people find them through searches on mobiles.

Note: this does seem to be a little like cloaking…

If there aren’t enough mobile-optimised pages returned for a search query then Google won’t serve any of them

If there is only a small number of mobile-optimised pages available for a given search query then Google would rather just display all desktop results for mobiles.

This makes sense: Google can use the number of mobile sites optimised for any given query as an indicator of the “mobile” nature of that term.

The message: if you’re only just starting to look into mobile then, initially, go through the keywords you’re ranking for in the generic search.  Run the main search terms through a mobile device and make a note of which return mobile-optimised pages in the top results.  These are the keywords you should create mobile pages for first.

Closing thoughts

There are over 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide, with over 85% of them having access to at least 3G.

I’ll post more on mobile SEO in the coming months.  As far as a closing statement, I can’t do much better than the paragraph that @eldadyogev used in this slideshare:

If you want maximum visibility for your mobile content, and to be truly optimised for mobile search, the best practice is to make it clear to the engines that you have a mobile site, optimise it for mobile queries and make it essential to mobile users, and then trust the engines to return it when they think it’s relevant.

Peace out, mofos

When most people think of Page Rank, what they are actually pondering is toolbar Page Rank, which can be substantially different to the actual rank that Google gives a site.  This “toolbar” Page Rank doesn’t get data from Google directly, but from a dataset that Google updates sporadically, sometimes taking up to 11 months in between refreshes, according to Rand Fishkin.

The little green bar you see in your Page Rank toolbar is old, out of date data.

For their own uses, Google updates their actual page scores somewhere in the region of once every five minutes, but they don’t share this figure with the general public. It’s also not really the single integer that the toolbar displays (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.) it’s a long decimal figure.  The reflected rank in the toolbars will only ever be a random shot of where you were at the exact moment of the data update.  If you temporarily dropped a few points onto a lower PR during the update then you would have no way of knowing (and may incorrectly assume your site hasn’t improved at all).

If Google viewed your Page Rank as 3.93556 at the time of updating the public dataset, it would only show as 3 in your toolbar.

Most importantly, there is a very low correlation between toolbar Page Rank and how well things rank in the search engines.  The correlation is around 0.11, which is almost negligible.

High Page Rank (in itself) does not equal a better ranking

Finally, a very important thing to know is that there is no such thing as a “domain Page Rank”.  If the homepage has a rank of 5, all that means is that the specific page http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html has a Page Rank of 5, and says absolutely nothing about the rest of the pages on the domain.  There are lots of examples where a homepage can have a lower Page Rank than the articles on site.

Page Rank tells you nothing about your domain as a whole, just single pages.

It’s best to ignore the Page Rank you see in the toolbars, except as a novelty.  It is certainly not reliable enough to be used as something even approaching a KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

Well, can I at least use the Page Rank of my competitors as a judge of how well they’re doing?

Well, firstly remember that the rank you see on their homepage is just the rank of their homepage, not their overall domain.  There is no such thing as “a Page Rank 5 domain” or any other variation of that.  Page Rank increases come from getting more quality links to pages, and apply only to those pages.

So, the answer to this question is:

No, they’re not getting more traffic and links because they have a higher Page Rank.  They have a higher Page Rank because they are getting more traffic and links.

It’s super important that you understand the difference between correlation and causality.  Their market position is correlated to the Page Rank of their pages, but is 100%, definitely not caused by it.  The reason they have good organic traffic is because they have built and tested their sites with SEO in mind, have produced clean, logical site structures and above all made it easy to share and link to their content.

If your competitor has a higher rank for nearly all of their pages then that tells you their content is good and that people are sharing it.  Take a good look at what they’re saying.  Work out why people are sharing it.  Do it better.

Regardless of all this shit I definitely squealed like a little girl when I saw that the PlyMarketing homepage had gained a toolbar Page Rank of 3 recently and that I work for the best looking media agency in the world:

(It may not be obvious but my trial version of Photoshop has expired. Farewell nice graphics... hello shoddy MS-Paint images. Woooo!)

Hypocritical?  Naaa, I know this doesn’t mean anything but it’s still bad ass!

This post was originally posted by me on the MediaCom Beyond Advertising blog.

This is Bob, a used car salesman that desperately wants to sell more cars than his neighbour, Greg.

Bob decided that the best way to increase sales was to drive more potential customers through his gates.

More customers = more sales… right?

He started a huge ad campaign in the hopes that he’d get more visitors, which he certainly did: within a month, twice as many people were visiting him compared to his neighbour, Greg.

But Greg was still selling more cars than him and wasn’t spending a single penny on advertising… Bob couldn’t understand it.

Not to be outdone, Bob threw more and more money into his advertising campaigns, shrinking his profit margins smaller and smaller until last year he went out of business.

And Greg? He’s just started his own advertising campaign with a leading digital media agency and he’s making a killing.

But how?

Bob wrongly focused on increasing visitors

Bob tried to make more money by getting more people to see what he was selling. He drove more and more people to his offering but didn’t ever change how he was selling and how he presented the benefits of his offer.

It didn’t matter how effective his upstream advertising was at pulling in visitors because he, the final stage in the conversion funnel, was inefficient and unproven.

Greg focused on his conversion rate…

While Bob was busy getting more traffic through his gates, Greg was testing and refining everything about his car lot. He watched people as they came into his lot, listened to how they interacted with him and tested different sales pitches.

He wanted to be able to point at everything in his car lot, at every one of his processes, and be certain that it was there for a reason and that it improved the chances of him making a sale.

When he first started his testing he discovered that only 2% of his visitors turned into customers. After a year of testing and refinements he’d improved this figure to 20%.

Then, and only then, did Greg decide it was time for more traffic.

Website owners are making the same mistake as Bob

Advertising a website that isn’t being constantly tested to increase the conversion rate is just throwing good money after bad.

More traffic sent to an inefficient website will magnify the inefficiency and cost you money.

More traffic sent to an efficient website will magnify the efficiency and ROI.

Forget about website traffic until you know your visitors will convert

Don’t be precious about your website. Just because a whole lot of blood, sweat and red tape went into designing it, doesn’t mean it does a good job.

If you can’t point at every element on a page and say exactly what it does, why it’s there and why it’s better than any alternative (with proof) then your site isn’t good.

At best it’s better than nothing.

Testing and altering your site doesn’t mean changing your core brand message or USP either. Far from it.

It means that you discover, through testing, the best way of presenting your offer so that it resonates with your audience to give you a maximum ROI.

It”s no longer enough to expect people to navigate through your poorly designed site. We’ve got short attention spans, little brand loyalty and we’re looking for every opportunity to minimise your website and go back to playing Farmville.

Further reading

• Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com - If you think finding the best converting website design is easy / obvious then look at these examples. Even the tiniest of changes can result in a higher ROI.