One of the many inspired marketing strategies of Google is the idea of PageRank. Not just in the brilliance of the concept itself, but in the way the idea has experts and self-proclaimed-experts alike obsessing over one relatively minor aspect of SEO.

People still lose sleep over their PageRank to this day, and many still don’t understand how it actually works. Brilliant.

Google +1 (not to be confused with Google +) is simply a means of people endorsing a web page, and signifies a refocus for Google, where they acknowledge the importance of the user: the start of social SEO.

From Google:

“The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out”.

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.”

From an SEO perspective, four words jump out:

“…others on the web…”

I personally don’t believe that +1 will make much of a difference in the short term. The feature is still experimental, and it’s still not possible for Google Apps users to even use it.

It’s also worth noting that Google have had a poor track record of jumping on the social wagon, notably with Buzz and Orkut.  But if the feature catches on, it could prove to be an important aspect of your SEO strategy.

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When I give instructions to the person who cleans our house, I sound quite different from when I’m talking to a potential client.

Aside from not grovelling as much, I use different language and a different tone.

Most people speak differently depending on the context of who they’re talking to. In fact I recently noticed that when I pay our window cleaner, I subconsciously adopt a more working-class accent. How embarrassing.

When you meet someone for the first time, you more or less scan their appearance and make note of the clothes they’re working, their cleanliness, haircut, displays of wealth/status and so on. I still remember the first time I met one of the investment specialists from our business bank. I noticed his expensive suit and shoes, his expensive car-keys left ‘carelessly’ on the desk, but what struck me most were his slightly dirty fingernails.

It could be that he’d been gardening before work, that he’d had to change a flat tyre or that he’d been rescuing old people from a burning building. But his inattention to his fingernails jumped out as loudly as all the positive signals he sent.

When someone arrives at your website they won’t be meeting you face to face. They won’t be able to judge your clothes, dandruff or how you hold yourself.

But they will notice the appearance of your site. And they’ll certainly notice the tone of your copy.

Your website tone plays a vital part in creating that first impression. Get it wrong and everything else may be overlooked.

Two additional thoughts.

The first is that you probably have a different idea of the right tone than your visitors.

Take a look at some of the text on our main page:

I personally don’t like the tone. But we test all of our content, and we know that this text produces better results than what I would have chosen.

The second thought is that you don’t have to be boring. Too many companies believe that their websites have to be dry to the point of monotone.

They don’t. Amateur and boring aren’t opposite ends of the same scale.

Test your content, increase your sales.

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Too many businesses believe that the people who come to their website are unpredictable. That they’re out of control, entirely irrational and impossible to control.

This is nonsense.

The people who come to your website can only read the content that you present to them.

They can only click the links and buttons that you put in front of them.

If you don’t want so many of your visitors to go from the main page to the contact page, then remove it from the top navigation.

If you want more people to click on your main products page, then get rid of some of the other links and distractions. And make the link text more compelling. You can do better than Products can’t you?

You’re in control of what your visitors do when they arrive. Control your traffic.

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When I was a student I didn’t have much money. But once in a blue moon, some friends and I would go for a night out at a Casino.

We didn’t expect to walk out with more money in our pockets than when we went in, but it was a good night, and we enjoyed ourselves.

Broadly speaking, you get two types of people in a Casino:

The people who go to have a good time, who also enjoy the buzz of knowing there’s a small chance they might actually make some money.

And the people who hope or believe that tonight is the night they’re going to strike it big.

We all know that the casino always wins. Right?

The AdWords model, on the other hand, is more subtle than the Casino.

The average AdWords account is wasting a sizeable part of their budget, but they don’t even know it. The account holder is walking out of the Casino smiling happily, not even realising that the money they’re making is leaking out of their pocket with every step they take.

How do I know this?

Because we see a lot of Google AdWords accounts. And I’d estimate that about 1% of them aren’t wasting far more of their budgets than they realise.

Most AdWords accounts we see waste money. Chances are that yours is one of the 99%.

Have your Google AdWords account checked – for free.

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Yes, this was the subject of an email I received last week. Yes, the person who wrote it gave me permission to quote him. No, I’m not going to name him.

Before going further, let’s remember the difference between a bounce rate and an exit rate.

An exit rate is the percentage of visits to a page that go no further in your website. For example you’d expect the exit rate of your form’s confirmation page to be high.

A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits. For example the number of visits arriving at your home page who go no further in interacting with your website.

Let’s be realistic here. Your main pages are probably going to have a reasonably high bounce rate. People come to your website for all sorts of reasons, and one of the quirks of the search engines is that a number of them will probably looking for something that you don’t provide.

In the case of the person who sent me the panic-struck email, there was nothing wrong with his website.

A quick play with his Google Analytics filters reassured him that a significant percentage of the visits to his main page were looking for something that had no connection with what he was selling.

When we excluded the junk-traffic, we saw that his bounce-rates were actually in the region of 35% – considerably lower than many other websites that we’ve seen.

Of course it didn’t take long for him to realise that there was room for improvement even here. He’s just engaged our conversion optimisation service to see how we can reduce his bounce rates further, and I’m confident that he’ll be happy with the results.

The bottom line is that balance is a good idea. There’s no need to panic when you see your bounce rates, but there’s no need to accept them either.

Conversion rate optimisation really works.

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I often come across businesses who want to improve their performance in Google – often through organic search.

Most of them use Google Analytics, and all want more traffic from Google.

When we begin optimising a client’s website for the search engine/s, the process begins by getting a feel for how they’re doing so far.

Apologies for the screenshots using the ‘old’ interface of Analytics, but there are bugs in the new version that haven’t yet been resolved.

The first step is to isolate Google organic traffic using a simple segment:

Remember that from this point onwards you’re only looking at the organic traffic from Google.

It’s easy to confirm this by going to Traffic Sources, Search Engines.

From here you want to know which pages are working at bringing in traffic from Google. So go to Content, Top Landing Pages.

Note that you’re more interested in landing pages than top content, as these are the pages that are ranking in the search results and generating visitors.

It’s at this point that quality starts to come into play. Take a look at the Bounce Rate column. If some of the figures surprise you, then you might want to drill down into the page to see what keywords are sending you traffic.

Click on the page name link, then choose Keyword from the third drop-down along.

From there you’ll be able to see which keywords are responsible for the high bounce rates. You’ll either understand these, or identify opportunities for improvement.

If you want to see the bigger picture, go to Traffic Sources, Keywords to see how the website as a whole is doing.

You want to focus on two main areas:

1 – keywords that you should be getting traffic for but you’re not (or not enough of it)

2 – keywords that generate large proportions of visitors with high bounce rates

You can ignore any keywords that have nothing to do with what you sell. Unless there are high volumes, you can’t use these to your advantage, and it’s not worth trying to fix an essentially benign problem.

The key is quality through relevancy.

Getting high volumes of visitors who aren’t interested in what you sell is meaningless.

Ranking highly for phrases that no-one searches for is pointless.

Effective SEO begins with identifying relevant keywords, and selecting which to target based on the number of searches and levels of competition.

Only then does the task of optimising the website begin.

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A disclaimer: I love Google; it has become an integral part of my life.

But I don’t trust Google. Especially when it comes to AdWords.

The reason?

A bittersweet yet subtle mix of cunning and disinformation, fuelled by ignorance and trust.

The myth: Google and their advertisers have a perfectly symbiotic relationship.

Reality: Advertisers and Google have an overlap of shared goals. But the overlap is small.

At a push I could probably give 50+ examples of this, but you won’t thank me for it. So I’ll stick with one.

Let’s consider two companies, WOW and NOT, each of whom are bidding on the same keywords for a given phrase, and paying the same per click – $1.

The difference lies in what happens after the click.

When someone clicks on one of WOW’s ads, they tend to realise they’ve found what they’re looking for, and so their search is over.

When someone clicks on one of NOT’s ads, they tend to not find what they’re looking for, so go back to Google for more.

If Google place WOW’s ad in first place and NOT’s ad in second place, Google will usually get one click – a total revenue of $1.

If, however, Google place NOT’s ad in first place and WOW’s second, most people will click both ads – a total revenue of $2.

Good for WOW, not for NOT.

The beauty of this approach is that not only are Google making more money by putting NOT in the top slot, but NOT is probably quite happy to see their ad consistantly in first place.

Do you still think that you and Google have the same priorities?

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