Search in Klingon, Pirate and more

Klingon might not be recognised as an official language by the UN but that doesn’t stop you using it as a search engine. Other languages on offer are Pirate, Pig Latin and strangest of all, Elmer Fudd!

Google calculator tricks

The Google calculator can be useful to convert units of measurement or doing simple maths equations. Slightly less useful are the tricks it’ll do for you. It can tell you the number of horns on a unicorn and even give a nod to Douglas Adams if you ask it the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Meet the ninja

This is a geeky throwback to the days of Konami games on gthe Nintendo NES. In Google Reader enter the Konami Code up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A to see the ninja pop up in your sidebar.

Recursion, recursion, recursion…

The “Did you mean:” function helps us with misspellings but some word loving Googler wanted to show off his hilarious sense of humour by adding a “Did you mean: Recursion” link when searching for recursion. The fun must never stop at the Googleplex…

Ascii art

I love a bit of ASCII art and someone at Google clearly does too. Searching for Ascii art will give you a lo-tech version of the Google logo.

Go kayaking

Carrying out a search for directions on Google Maps from Tokyo to San Francisco will encourage you to jump in your kayak and paddle for a little over 6,000 km.

Send Google in to a spin

There are quite a few things you can do to make your search results do odd things. Asking Google to do a barrel roll was big news on social networks a couple of months ago but you can also make it tilt, go askew or even enforce gravity.

MentalPlex

Google used MentalPlex as an April Fools joke back in 2000. It explains a new way of searching using mind power alone. The geeks even gave it a FAQ page.

Nag a ram

You’ll see another word joke from Mountain View if you carry out a search for anagram.

The StreetView geeks

The boffins who created StreetView lined up to be photographed by the Google car as it passed. One of them even dressed up as the StreetView Pegman. See it for yourself here.

The many faces of Pegman

The Pegman is the little dragable  guy who shows up in the bottom right hand corner of Google Maps. In certain places he takes on some interesting personas including a lego man in LegoLand and a penguin in a part of the South Pole.

Google Earth oddities

There’s a multitude of strange things to see on Google Earth such as the FireFox logo crop circle but this one of KFC’s Colonel Sanders is just finger lickin’ weird.

Google Doodles

These aren’t really Easter eggs but the Google Doodle has become so popular that they now have their own searchable archive.

Google’s Easter eggs

For Chrome users this is really simple. Just follow these steps and you’ll be up and running in no time.

1. Open up Chrome, click the settings wrench and select Preferences/Settings

2. On the Basics page, click Manage Search Engines under the Search section. This will show a list of all search engines available to Chrome.

3. Scroll to the Other search engines section at the bottom and enter the following in the 3 fields:

• Google UK non personalised (This is the name of your search engine and will show up in your search bar when searching)
• Google UK NP (This is the keyword for your search engine)
• http://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&gl=uk&q=%s (This is the important part which removes personalisation and sets the locality of your search)

The pws=0 part removes personalisation while the rest is to set the locality. This example is for the UK but can easily be changed to fr (France), es (Spain) etc. See Google’s full list of country codes.

4. You can now choose to set your new search engine as default so you see non personalised results each time you search.

Now, whenever you search you’ll see non personalised results, giving you a clearer idea of your site’s ‘true’ ranking.

Get non personalised Google results

This post explains the process I use to identify potential reviewers and the outreach email I send to get a positive response. It’s a time consuming process but I’ve seen a great success rate using these methods.

Finding the right bloggers to target

This is probably the most important part of the entire process. You’re looking to find an authoritative site which is highly relevant to your product and that the blogger would be interested in writing a review. Sticking something like blue widgets inurl:review in to Google will give you a good place to start. Turn on your SEOmoz toolbar SERP overlay to quickly give you an idea of site authority.

Once you’ve identified several potential blogs, the next part is to look carefully at the type of content the blogger has on their site. Do they seem like the kind of person who would be interested in your product? Does their bio or about page give you an idea of the kind of thing they like? You’ll quickly discover that your product isn’t suitable for all the bloggers on your list and you should be left with just a few targets.

Getting the outreach email right

Bear in mind that authoritative bloggers who write good content probably receive product review requests on a daily basis. You need to ensure that your email stands out and that it’s easy for the blogger to accept your request. The trick here is to show the benefit to the blogger of reviewing your product while giving them nothing to do in terms of research. Definitely don’t just give them a link to your product page and expect them to do the work. More than likely they won’t and your email will end up in the trash.

This is the outreach email I use (although I personalise it for every blogger). Keep as short and as friendly as possible.

Hi RECIPIENT’S NAME,

I work at YOURDOMAIN.CO.UK and thought I’d drop you a quick line to ask if you’d be interested in reviewing PRODUCT NAME on sale in our online shop as it may be of interest to your blog readers. ADD SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU HAVE READ THEIR BLOG AND WHY YOU THINK IT WOULD BE BENEFICIAL TO THEIR READERS.

ADD SOME DETAILS ABOUT THE PRODUCT AND WHY IT IS UNIQUE. Obviously, we wouldn’t expect you to the return the PRODUCT NAME.

I have attached a few images of the PRODUCT NAME for your interest.

If you think this is something that your readers would be interested in, please let me know and I will arrange to post out the PRODUCT NAME to you as soon as possible.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Using this technique has given me several high authority links with a very high success rate. I’d be interested in hearing what techniques others use to get product reviews.

Product reviews and outreach for deep links

For me, this problem has become one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. It allows me to be creative and build good, solid relationships which can be a whole lot more rewarding than creating the usual link bait or targeting blogs on which we can write guest posts.

Here are a few methods I use. Feel free to add to them. I’d be interested in hearing your suggestions.

• eBook distribution - Very often eCommerce sites have fantastic original content already on the site. This can be used to create an eBook relatively easily and very cheaply. Make sure the content links back to key landing pages. It’s important that some time is spent presenting the content effectively. Distributing the eBook can be done through your own site as well as eBook directories. Some eBook directories are better than others so discretion needs to be used here.
• Video product reviews – Do you sell products which would benefit from video demonstrations and ‘how to’ guides? You almost certainly do! This is a great way of distributing content and building links. It can be done really cheaply these days too. Submitting the videos to sites like YouTube and Vimeo can boost your product pages’ search rankings. Video sites also help generate relevant and organic traffic to the shop as YouTube and Vimeo videos can rank well (mostly for long tail keywords).
• Submit your product feeds to shopping engines - There are so many shopping engines out there that you can easily submit your feed to. Most industries even have a specific shopping engine which will drive highly relevant traffic to your site. This is great stuff – these visitors are ready to buy!
• Product reviews from industry specific bloggers - Speak to your buying team and send some high profile bloggers products to review. This is a win-win situation – the blogger gets some great content for their site and you get a link back to your product or category page.
• Links from affiliates - Put your affiliates to work! If they sell your products they should be happy to show it. Give them a badge to place on their website which links back to you. You can control the code so you know where the link goes and what the Alt text says.
• Links from associated websites - Most online retailers have business partners or other sites they’ve created. Make the most of these sites and create a link to specific pages. You don’t need site wide links – just create a couple of highly relevant links to the right pages and move on.
• Contact suppliers and manufacturers for links - Work with your buying team. Ask them who would be open to this kind of suggestion. I’ve found that even suppliers and manufacturers who sell the same products through their site are happy to provide links.

All of these link building methods are really cheap (if not free) to put in to action and apply to virtually any eCommerce site.

Happy linking!

Link building for eCommerce

• A Really Great Writing Tip For Your Blog Content Network from MarkRushworth.com
• The best kept Secret in the SEOMoz Toolset from SEOMoz.org.
• Link Building: The Ingredients of Link Juice from SEOhatch.com
• rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WordPress From Yoast.com

If you think I’ve missed anything of note, leave a comment or Tweet me.

This week’s top SEO posts

I’ll be using Google UK for the examples below.

If I search for the term red jeans (hey, I’m a snazzy dresser), Google will return pages with the words ‘red’ and ‘jeans’ on them, in the title text or used in anchor text which links to the page. The words don’t need to be near each other. At the time of writing, Google returned 23,800,000 results. Yowzers! Let’s introduce some basic search techniques and get more advanced as we go on.

• red or jeans - returns pages which have either word on them, in the title text or in anchor text which links to the page. 233,000,000 pages returned.
• red and jeans - returns pages which have both words in them (but not necessarily together or in the same order), in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 233,000,000 pages returned.
• “red jeans” - returns pages which have both words together in the same order in them, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 1,160,000 pages returned.
• red -jeans – returns pages which have the word red but NOT the word jeans in them, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 4,370,000,000 pages returned.
• red ~jeans – returns pages which have the word red and synonyms of the word jeans (for example clothing) in them, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 182,000,000 pages returned.
• jeans (red OR green) - returns pages which have the word jeans and either the words red or green on them, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 284,000,000 pages returned.
• jeans (red AND green) - returns pages which have the word jeans and both the words red and green (but not necessarily together or in the same order) on them, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 17,800,000 pages returned.
• jeans (red AND green -blue) - returns pages which have the word jeans and both the words red and green (but not necessarily together or in the same order), but NOT the word blue on them in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 2,670,000 pages returned.

The following list is especially useful for SEO research. If you want to carry out some competitor research for example, these are a great place to start.

• intitle:red jeans – returns pages which use the word red in the title text and also have the word jeans on the page, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 4,980,000 pages returned.
• allintitle:red jeans - returns pages which use the words red and jeans in the title text. 64,500 pages returned.
• inurl:red jeans - returns pages which have the word red in their URL and also have the word jeans on the page, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 3,990,000 pages returned.
• allinurl:red jeans - returns pages which have the words red and jeans in their URL. 75,100 pages returned.
• inanchor:red jeans - returns pages which use the word red in the anchor text pointing to them and also have the word jeans on the page, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 194,000,000 pages returned.
• allinanchor:red jeans - returns pages which use the words red and jeans in the anchor text pointing to them. 1,150,000 pages returned.
• jeans site:bbc.co.uk - returns pages from only the bbc.co.uk site which have the word jeans on the page, in the title text or in anchor text which points to the page. 29,600 pages returned.
• intitle:jeans site:bbc.co.uk - returns pages from only the bbc.co.uk site which have the word jeans in the title text. 256 pages returned.

Using these searches (or a combination of them) can be a great way to find the information you’re looking for more quickly and accurately. They are also extremely effective for SEO. If I’m looking for guest blogging opportunities on SEO based blogs for example, I can carry out a search for SEO “intitle:blog” “guest post”. This will return a large number of blogs which accept guest blogging so after a bit more research on the blogs and their owners, I can approach them about making a contribution to their site. Nice!

Google search operators and search tricks for SEO

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll see a new ‘Backup’ link in the Tools area of WordPress admin. Give it a click and you’ll be presented with a list of easy to understand options. If you’ve never backed up your website before (tut tut), I’d recommend heading straight to the Backup Options area. Just select what you want to backup and enter an email address where you’d like your files to be sent.

Next you should set up a regular scheduled backup. I backup my site on a weekly basis and have the files emailed to my Yahoo email account. This is to protect me if my hosting company goes pop and I lose my emails as well as my website. Once you’ve entered your details, click the Schedule Backup button and you’re done!

Completely backup your WordPress website

All in One SEO

This SEO plugin is not quite as sophisticated as the WordPress SEO plugin (see below) but still has some pretty handy features. It allows you to write custom title, description and keywords tags for each post or page.

Scribe SEO

This is a paid subscription service that I use every time I write a new post or page. Once your content is written, it analyses elements such as the title tag, description tag and content to tell you how keyword focused your content is and makes suggestions about improving your post from an SEO perspective.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a XML sitemap, helping search engines to better index your site. It notifies the big 4 search engines every time a new post or page is added to your site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

This plugin, written by Joost de Valk, is the best way to integrate Google Analytics in to your site. It features asynchronous tracking, custom variables, Google Analytics API integration, E-Commerce integration and Event tracking.

WP Minify, WordPress Gzip Compression and WP Super Cache

With Google’s announcement that site speed is a ranking factor last year, attention needs to be paid to the performance of WordPress based sites. I used these plugins on my site to reduce page load times from 11.73 seconds to just 3.66 seconds and wrote about it on my post, Speed up WordPress to improve rankings.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

Yep, this is a sitemap generator but not just another XML sitemap generator, this plugin makes an HTML sitemap which is one of the most important things you can do to make your website more crawlable by search engines. You create a new page, insert the code shorthand and the plugin populates the page with your posts and pages. It also updates the sitemap as you add new posts or pages.

WordPress SEO

This is another excellent plugin by Joost de Valk of Google Analytics for WordPress fame. It pretty much does everything that most of the other WordPress plugins on this page do but in one package. Here”s a breakdown of its features:

• Post titles and meta descriptions
• Robots Meta configuration
• Canonical
• Breadcrumbs
• Permalink clean up
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS enhancements
• Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
• Clean up head section

SEO plugins for WordPress

A month or so later I was carrying out some competitor link analysis and noticed that a competitor had commented on a BBC blog using a followed link to their website with the anchor text “Office space”, a very competitive keyword. “How could this have happened?” I wondered as I thought that comments on the BBC blogs could link internally only.

I contacted the BBC using the “complain about this comment” link and gave the reason that it “contains a link to an external website which breaks our Editorial Guidelines” I received a near instant reply informing me:

Further to your complaint about some of the content on on a BBC blog, we have decided that it does not contravene the house rules and are going to leave it on the site”

The blog was a debate on the state of the economy so how could a comment which linked to a commercial website promoting office space in London using keyword anchor text and not a great deal more, be of any real value to the reader? When writing this post, I found the comment (and link) has since been removed.

Then, a few days ago, I read a post on the PushOn blog entitled Paid links on the BBC? It attracted quite a lot of attention, particularly from Lewis Wiltshire (Editor of the BBC Sport website) who commented:

None of the links to external websites from the BBC’s UK-facing website are sold. All of them are editorially selected because we believe they offer useful onward reading for our audience.

I’m in no way insinuating that someone at the BBC is selling links and of course, the BBC is an institution some rival organisations would love to see the back of, but can 3 separate occurrences of this kind really be just a coincidence?

Paid links on the BBC – an SEO controversy

Moving domains throws up a plethora of problems with regard to SEO. The TokyoRepublik.com site had been live for over 5 years and had built up some pretty good in-bound links and domain history. I needed to find a way to keep all (or at least most) of this SEO good stuff. Here is a checklist of the steps I took.

1. Created a sitemap for my old domain (TokyoRepublik.com)
2. Set up the new domain (MancuianRepublik.com) and made it live
3. Created some unique content on the new domain (that’s what you’re reading right here)
4. Registered the new domain with Google Webmaster Tools and Bing
5. 301 redirected my old domain to my new domain
6. Submitted my old sitemap to Google and Bing (This will make the engines crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirects and change their indexes)
7. Filled out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools
8. Submitted my new sitemap to Google and Bing
9. Checked Google Webmaster Tools and fix any errors there may be in the Diagnostics area

And that’s all there is to it. It’s all pretty simple stuff.

Move a WordPress site to a new domain without affecting SEO