by Michael Cropper | Dec 14, 2011 | SEO |
As a search engine optimiser you will come across programming every day in one way or another and while it isn’t a must have skill for a lot of roles, I believe it is essential to be able to program and have a good understanding of programming in general.
Some SEO roles require you to get hands on with the code and make the changes straight away, where as within other roles the actual hands on work is completed by the technical team/department.
Either way here are a few reasons why I believe programming is an essential skill to have.
Improve Working Relationship with Developers
If you can speak the language of the developers then it goes a long way to building trust with them. It is important for developers to feel that the work they are doing is contributing to the wider business objectives, so by being able to speak in technical terms means you can bridge that gap between business requirements and technical implementations. I am not saying everyone needs to be an expert programmer or website developer but it is important to understand how things work.
If you don’t understand how things work then how can you go about making things better?
Working on several large scale multi-national travel websites has taught me that changes to the site are much easier to make once you understand how the site has been built. If you want to change the H1 or Meta Title on a selection of pages, then if you understand that the pages are built based on templates then this can help you devise a solution with the development team which allows you to make the required changes. Possibly some kind of mini content management system would be useful?
Understanding how to program also means that you don’t go asking for changes that are either impossible to achieve, that take a long time to implement and provide little or no return on investment.
For technical people, getting things right first time and developing code properly is what drives them. For non-technical people, they are at the opposite end of the spectrum and are only interested in the end product. To achieve a successful product it is important for all parties to work together and ensure that code is developed in a robust way and in a way that meets the original specification.
Whether you lean a bit of Java, PHP, C# or ASP.Net, it doesn’t matter since it gives you an understanding of how things work. It will help you have a real conversation about a technical problem and enable you to understand why seemingly simple changes can actually take a few days work. On the plus side, learning to program is fun too! 
Ability to use Macros in Excel
If you can program, then you will soon be able to pick up the programming language in Excel, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). With this you can quickly develop tools which will make your job and your life much easier by automating the regular tasks or pulling in the required information quickly.
There are alternatives to using Macros in Excel, such as using Microsoft Access, but my preferred method is still traditional programming as it offers much more flexibility since you can integrate this information within a database.
Website Scraping
As a search engine optimiser I have no doubt that at some point in your career you have needed to scrape a lot of information from a certain website. Weather that be for price comparison, scraping data from the HTML or just playing around for fun. Website scraping can be done at a basic level using tools such as SEO Tools for Excel, but if you want the more juicy data then you really want to be able to put this into a database and either use on your own website or use it for further research.
To Spot The Rodney McKay
If you don’t anything about programming then when you get told by the technical team that something can’t be done because “the CSS file is located on an external server” you will have no knowledge to be able to question what has been said. You will find a Rodney McKay in every organisation who will say everything is impossible to fix, so they seem like a savior when they solve the problem that didn’t really exist in the first place!
Knowing your onions and being able to question things is extremely important.
Using APIs For Extra Data
There is a lot of data analysis within the SEO industry and some of this can include pulling in data from external sources such as Open Site Explorer via their API, Application Programming Interface. Some other APIs that you will no doubt use at some point will be the free Google APIs.
Whether that is using the KML API which is used for creating cool Google Maps visualisations or using the YouTube API to automatically post new content to YouTube when you add it to your website.
APIs can be an extremely powerful tool to use when joining bits of information together and connecting online applications and will certainly help your normal SEO efforts by taking the manual work out of things.
Summary
Take what you will from this long winded rant about programming, but I can strongly suggest learning to program and learning more about how ecommerce websites work in general. All of this knowledge is never lost and it will help you bridge the gap between marketing, external demand (ie search volumes on Google) and the technical team.
by Michael Cropper | Oct 14, 2011 | SEO |
There has been a lot of developments over the past few years with Google in the travel industry and their actions are ones I have been closely watching. With Google Hotel Finder launching earlier this year it is interesting to see how Google is changing.
When searching for hotels online there are two main categories of searches
- Destination searches such as London Hotels
- Hotel name searches such as The Lowry Hotel
So if we have a look at each of these to see how Google is handling these now we may get an idea of what lies in store in the next year or so.
Destination Searches
Looking at the search term Manchester Hotels we can see that there are several important parts to this.
Here we can see several parts to this section which are
- The link for “Places for hotels near Manchester” and “More results near Manchester”.
- The travel dates are listed
- A selection of individual hotel websites are listed
- Different recommended search terms related to “Manchester Hotels”
- Nearby locations
Lets take a look at each one of these and see how Google are handling this.
Places for hotels near Manchester
This is where the
link goes to.
As we can see above, there are what you would expect to see on any hotel aggregator website such as
- Hotel name
- Brief snippet of information (albeit a very poor snippet)
- Link to show where the hotel is located on a map
- Average rating of the hotel
- Number of reviews of this hotel
- Price of the hotel for today
When comparing this to some of the hotel aggregators, it seems Google has got a lot of the areas covered already. Hotel aggregators really need to step up in terms of innovation to ensure they are staying ahead of Google which is going to be quite a challenge.
Travel Dates Listed in SERPs
This is a great option for customers since this will automatically update the prices from various different hotel aggregators when the date is chosen.
Individual Hotels Listed
Again great for the user since this allows them to go direct to the hotel who may be able to deal with their queries better.
Related Search Terms and Nearby Locations
These ultimately send the user through the same process as above but with a more refined search.
Hotel Name Searches
Now if we have a look through the same process for hotel name searches to see how Google is handling these.
These listings within the SERPs are a first step towards integrating all of the universal search items into one nice area, which nicely takes up a large part of the results and is positioned prominently above everything else. Now for a user, this again does make sense to have the hotels listing first with other good content pulled together from various sources. My main issue with this though is that Google is notoriously bad at grouping things together like this and there is often a lot of errors with either images or reviews that are listed.
This listing has got all of the items that have been discussed but is just formatted in a nicer way. The interesting point will come when this switch is made from a listing like above to a similar listing like found on Google Hotel Finder as seen below
I have no doubt that this is on the cards for Google, it is just a matter of when they will do this or begin directing users towards their own Hotel Finder product.
How Much Can Google Reviews Be Trusted?
One item that Google has yet to work on though is the quality of the reviews left for hotels. Since there is no way of Google knowing if the person has actually stayed in the hotel and this is there hotel aggregators can stand out as they have the full booking details of the customer and know if they have stayed there. In addition hotel aggregators also have manual checking process in place to keep hotel reviews high quality.
As for how Google may overcome this issue, I am not sure yet. Although I imagine there will be some kind of information linked in with Google Plus in a very similar way of how Page Rank works. I.e. If the person leaving a review has an active Google Plus profile, lots of friends & followers and is also active on other Google products. This would be one way to class a reviewer as trustworthy or not. The same is on Twitter when it is obvious someone who has just began following you is a bot due to their statistics.
Is Google Going To Become a Competitor?
In a recent article from Marketing Week, apparently not.
“We have no intention of entering the booking space” – Google
Although I am not convinced. There are a lot of options open to Google in this industry and it is an extremely lucrative area for them, so only time will tell exactly what they will do. One thing for certain is that the travel industry needs to step up their game to compete against Google.
by Michael Cropper | Oct 14, 2011 | Social Media |
Local businesses in Manchester are taking full advantage of social media to help promote their selves and services. There can be a lot of businesses who try this and fail tragically, but for certain business this makes full sense. I always get a lot of random people following me on twitter purely to get me to follow them back, albeit mainly people promoting their SEO services / blogs etc, but more recently I have noticed a lot of bars begin to follow me on Twitter (@MickCropper).
I think this is a great idea for bars and events to follow local people on twitter, purely to promote their event since good places and events can be difficult to find when not always mingling in those circles.
A couple of bars who have started following me are @FabCafeManc and@TheTigerLounge, both of which I haven’t been to before. They are always places on my “to drink at” list but I have just never got around to it, so I may just be going to these places a little sooner than I planned now they are back in the forefront of my mind.
If you are looking to promote your local business via social media then Twitter can be a good place to start by using Twitter’s Advanced Searchand finding tweets for people in your local area.
In addition to this, another option for finding new customers for your local business is seeing who your competitors are following and who are following them. One thing I certainly noticed with the bars who began following me is that once one started following, others soon followed on so this is already happening. If you aren’t stalking your competitors then you are missing a trick, since they will be doing it with you.
by Michael Cropper | Sep 14, 2011 | Data and Analytics, SEO, Social Media, Technical, Tracking |
With the recent announcement from Bit.ly stating that their Pro version is now the normal version, this means that it is now possible to get your own custom short URL. But how though?
Step 1 – Register a nice short domain name
A good place to do this is 101Domain.com as you can get a nice view of all top level domains available, with the added bonus that they are very reasonably priced too. For mine I chose “mic.cx”. When looking on 101Domain.com you will notice they offer some great advice on the restrictions certain domains have, such as where the hosting or name servers have to be based so keep an eye on this when purchasing an odd top level domain.
Step 2 – Set up the DNS A record
When you log in to your registrar (the person you bought the domain from) there will be some settings somewhere that allow you to change the DNS records (not to be confused with the Name Servers). Here is an example of what this will look like
When you see this, change the IP address which is currently in there (may be worth making a note of this in case you mess up the first time like I did!) to the IP address “168.143.174.97” which is for Bit.ly. Other URL shortening services that offer this will have a different IP to enter, so check on their FAQ’s.
The “@” above, strangely, has no relation to email. It is referring to your domain in its purest form with no sub-domain. So for example that would mean mine is “http://mic.cx”
The “www” is referring to the URL “http://www.mic.cx” – but since Bit.ly doesn’t use this, then there is no real need to put this in – although I have done anyway for good luck.
Be aware that once you have updated the DNS settings this can take around 24-48 hrs to propagate the internet so be patient!
Step 3 – Add Custom Short Domain to Bit.ly
The next step is to go to Bit.ly (i’m assuming you already have an account at this point – if not sign up!) and click on the “settings” link from the drop down where your username is. Then add in your new URL into the box provided and go to the next step.
Step 4 – Verify Your New Domain
Step 5 – Success!
by Michael Cropper | Sep 14, 2011 | Data and Analytics, SEO, Tracking |
Different custom URL shorteners behave differently and can either help or hinder SEO so I have put this guide together for reference. I will be looking at both HootSuite and Bit.ly in this article to show how the different options behave.
HootSuite & Ow.ly
HootSuite has 4 different options when shortening URLs with their service. Each of the shorteners behave slightly differently, all have a use, but the only one that passes any SEO benefit is the one that 301 redirects the user to the page on your site.
Ow.ly
This URL shortener will automatically 301 redirect visitors to your website and passes all of the SEO benefit to your site which is what we all want.
Example: http://ow.ly/5Fjta
Owl.li
This URL shortener will 302 redirect visitors to your site although with it being a 302 redirect then there is no SEO benefit passed through this link. This may be a good option when linking out to websites other than your own if you don’t want to be seen as endorsing them in the eyes of Google.
Example: http://owl.li/5Fjwl
Hl.ly & Ht.li
Both of the URL shorteners above actually display the content of the page on your site, but on their URL which is no good for SEO. This has been implemented via an iFrame, which Google find difficult to index correctly. This page does have it’s benefits though, mainly being that these pages include lots of social sharing buttons at the top of the page. So even though the pages do not pass any direct SEO benefit, they could still be beneficial if they result in more people sharing the pages with their friends. Although personally, it is not my choice.
Example: http://ht.ly/5Fjxk and http://htl.li/5FjyV
Bit.ly
Now looking at how Bit.ly shortens URLs, they also have several options which all 301 redirect and do not have the variety that HootSuite have.
I am a little confused as to why there are 3 different URLs that all behave in the same way, maybe it is due to the limitations of custom URL shoreners – The fact that you can only have a maximum number of possible short URLs using 6 alpha-numeric characters (which is into the millions mind!).
There are also lots of other URL shortening services out there which likely behave in similar ways and offer different methods of redirection, so it is just something to be aware of when pasting these short URLs around the internet. Make sure they are passing the benefit you require.
Goo.gl
tinyurl.com
is.gd
ow.ly
bit.ly
Like the post and examples; I think it’s a fair point and I agree in the main. Essential is a strong word; there are a lot of areas of SEO where this isn’t really the case, but at the same time I think a lot of SEO’s who shy away from the technical aspects could really improve what they can offer their company or clients by learning to code.
One of my pet hates at the moment is the whole mobile same url versus subdomain versus sub folder argument. I see so many SEO’s who think for a large e-commerce website, it’s as simple as changing a CSS style sheet to make it mobile friendly (hey, if it’s this easy for WordPress, it must be this easy for everything else!). This leads to mindless comments like “if you don’t serve your mobile site on the same URL as your main site, you should sack your devs”.
As I guy with technical knowledge, I understand this is of course bollocks; I see e-commerce sites with masses of extra conditional statements, huge code bloat, div hiding and so on just so the mobile site can be run from the same URL. A lot of the time it’s better on so many development and technical levels to run the mobile site from a subdomain/folder (just ask eBay, Next, Argos etc) but a non-tech savvy SEO just wouldn’t see this – it’s so different from the simple task of setting up a mobile version of a blog or content site.
That’s just one example that’s current for me at the moment, but there are a lot of other cases too where tech knowledge is useful.
Just to finish, I thought you might like to know that you do have quite a well known ally in this line of thinking! I was at SES London 2012, and one of my favourite quotes was Dave Naylor saying in a session “If you want to be an SEO, learn to code”. So you’re not alone
I disagree. I can’t code worth a damn, but I do think I’m rather competent at this SEO malarkey.
I think what you really mean is that a certain level of technical understanding is essential. I would agree with that. I can’t code, but I have a solid understanding of how the internet works, how websites work, and how HTML works. Those are required aspects of being an effective SEO.
The ability to code is a ‘nice-to-have’ extra in my book. It helps, but it’s not necessary. Then again, as a non-coder, I would say that.
As a coder, I would say it is essential :-p
But as you say, actually being able to do the code yourself is more of a nice-to-have – as long as there is the deeper understanding of how websites work, how the internet works, understanding HTML. These types of skills are not always as common as one would hope.
What I have found is that having this deeper understanding of ‘how stuff works’ actually helps things get done easier, as it helps to understand technical difficulties with implementing SEO recommendations then work through the solutions together with people to come to an amicable solution.
People may not be able to do it their self (hey, I can read PHP & ASP and understand what is going on if forced but I wouldn’t have a clue where to begin writing it – my background is Java – and I also have no desire to learn those either!) but at least being able to understand things at a deeper level helps an awful lot.
Also having the ability to ‘muck in’ can help get some of the smaller SEO tasks through which people often don’t value. E.g. messed up meta titles, missing H1s, fixing broken canonicals and removing the line from robots.txt which is telling Google to go away. In larger organisations often the technically smaller items are often pushed back even with huge amounts of evidence to back up how important they actually are, as there is always something more important. I have yet to come across a company (which isn’t an SEO company!) where SEO is prioritised above everything else.