First Google Update of 2013

Posted in News on January 31st, 2013 by Helene Hall

Google rolled out a further Panda Update on January 22nd 2013, making it the 24th Panda update. This time the update is set to make a noticeable impact on 1.2% of English queries.

The SEO industry, forum and leaders are all seeing “quite dramatic” fluctuations in the search rankings leading up to and around the announcement.

Google have reiterated the need to build “high-quality” sites which benefit the searcher. Expanding on some of the signals Google takes into account when analysing the sites are:

• Would you trust the information presented on the site?

• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

• Is there social activity surrounding the brand/site?

• Are there strong engagement signals such as time on page, page depth and bounce rate?

• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Google is continually tweaking their algorithms resulting in regular fluctuations in the search engine results pages, ultimately trying to increase the positive User Experience of the sites they display.

Gravytrain are dedicated to building great content with a strong focus on gaining high levels of engagement and social signals as naturally as possible to ensure success within organic search.

Embrace HTML5

Posted in Web Content on October 24th, 2012 by Stephanie

Craig, our Front End Developer explains that the web industry is moving along at a rapid pace and trying to keep up can be quite tricky. Here’s what he has to say about embracing HTML5:

New web technologies are being released on a more regular occurrence. Yes, we will never have full cross-browser support for these new technologies, but as long as you know the audience you want to address and you provide suitable fallback options for legacy browsers… then why should you be held back?

The biggest leap over the past decade has been the invention of HTML5. HTML5 is more an evolution and combination of three technologies (HTML, CSS and Javascript) into one specification. It’s come at the right time too. Since Apple does not support Adobe’s Flash technology on its mobile devices, animated Flash based websites have steadily declined. Lets be honest though, we all want to see things moving around with loads of interactivity on websites. Adobe, not to be outdone by this have created an application called Adobe Edge Animate (http://html.adobe.com/edge/animate/showcase.html) which converts your completed animation into HTML and CSS code ready to be viewed in modern browsers.

HTML5 and Search Engines

Currently Google does not promote or penalize a site being written in HTML5. However, as we all know Google search engines are getting smarter all the time, so writing your website code in HTML5’s cleaner and semantic fashion could theoretically provide more weight to the content on your site and help to boost your all important search rankings in the future. Each version of HTML introduces new markup but there has never been so many new additions that relate directly to describing content. So as a basic example you would normally structure your page using tags and the heading section might look something like this:

<div id="header">
         <h1>Header Text</h1> 
         <div id="nav"> 
                <ul> 
                     <li><a href="#">Link</a></li>
                     <li><a href="#">Link</a></li>
              </ul>
         </div>
</div>

This code is fine as it is but we can clean it up even more using the new HTML5 tags to replace the division tags:

<header>
   <h1>Header Text</h1>
   <nav>
      <ul>
         <li><a href="#">Link</a></li>
         <li><a href="#">Link</a></li>
     </ul>
   </nav>
</header>

Browser Support for HTML5

All major modern browsers support HTML5 these include Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 9 and Opera, however earlier versions of Internet Explorer do not recognize the new HTML tags. There is a work around to this by using a bit of Javascript to force the browser to parse the new elements. So for example in your script file you would have : document.createElement(“header”). This lets the CSS engine know that the element exists and would then allow you to structure and style that element in the legacy browser.

Great Reasons for Developers to use HTML5

There are loads of new features, not all are down to HTML directly but as a whole including CSS and Javascript combined you can create some amazing stuff.
• New Doctype
No longer need to remember or rely on your IDE to create the XHTML Doctype :

Replace this with
• New native form features
Form validation
Autofocus on form fields
Placeholder text

• Video and Audio
No longer require additional 3rd party plugins to run.

• Canvas
Allows you to draw, create games and animations using code (no need for a drawing or animation software)
Some great examples : impressive-html5-canvas-experiments/

• GeoLocation

http://html5demos.com/geo

• Web storage
Web pages can store data locally within the user’s browser. This is normally done with cookies but web storage is more secure and faster.

And loads more. (See additional resources below)

Sum Up

From more descriptive tags to animations and improved multimedia support, developers using HTML5 have a lot of new tools to build better user experiences. Browser support will continue to improve and evolve at a rapid pace. WordPress now ships out with its default theme written with HTML5 markup and seeing that developers have been using it in their projects for well over 2 years now is testament that we should all be using it now. It is the future and you certainly do not want to get left behind.

Additional Resources

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/

http://html5doctor.com/

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_intro.asp

http://www.script-tutorials.com/

Figaro Digital Marketing Conference 2012

Posted in Conferences, News, Speaking Engagements on July 16th, 2012 by Steve

Last Thursday the Gravytrain team were in full force at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference. With hundreds of digital marketers all converging on one place, this was one of the biggest conferences of the year and one not to be missed. We certainly enjoyed the day, whilst the after party drinks were an added bonus!

The conference was packed full with talks from a wide range of the industry’s professionals, both agency side and client side, while the conference also included the fabled Figaro21’s – this is where a series of speakers rattle through 21 slides, each of which last just 21 seconds. It’s an intense struggle against time and it makes for very entertaining, yet informative viewing! Billed as the session to make grown adults weep, we nominated our own Head of Search, Matthew Oxley, to kick off the 21’s.

Matthew’s talk detailed the rise of mobile and tablet and how device segmentation is now key for all paid search campaigns. Matthew outlined that by the end of 2013, it is predicted that mobile web usage will actually overtake desktop web usage. Mobile is seemingly dominating our lives more and more as we have a constant need for information and data.

The mobile phone has become such an integral part of our lives and with the addition of the tablet, searching while on the go has become even easier than ever before. So, it is little surprise that mobile web usage will soon surpass desktop web usage.

Furthermore, there were other notable presentations, such as Jack Lundie, from Save the Children, who acted out a conversation with himself. The slick nature of his delivery and creativity of his presentation made for compelling viewing!

Then there was Peter Wood from Steak who deserves a mention simply for his incredible jacket! It sparked quite a response on Twitter…He did give a fantastic presentation too about the merger of SEO and Social Media, what he called “SEOcial”.

With the digital marketing landscape constantly evolving and more digital marketers becoming savvy to the rise of mobile web usage, the overriding theme of this year’s Figaro Conference truly was device segmentation and the importance of it. “Ignore mobile at your peril” was one particular quote that stood out for me!

Who’s Dominating the Google Search Results in Insurance?

Posted in SEO on June 13th, 2012 by Matthew Read

Back in March we brought you details of who was wining the Google search battle for insurance rankings, with Moneysupermarket.com dominating, holding 1st place in Google for all 3 of major insurance terms; Home Insurance, Car Insurance and Travel Insurance.

3 months on we have looked at how things have changed in the insurance rankings game and you can see the results below:

Moneysupermarket.com continues to dominate all 3 insurance products, but although they have stayed steady there has been a lot of change! Comparethemarket.com has seen a big loss on these 3 terms over the last 3 months whilst Churchill.com has seen a big improvement in Car Insurance and Aviva.com have gone from the second page up to second place for Home Insurance.

Are you surprised by these rankings? Do you think anyone can topple the domination of Moneysupermarket.com?

Day Two of Internet World 2012

Posted in Conferences on April 27th, 2012 by Stephanie

This year is the 20th anniversary of Internet World and as Steve said in the last blog post, Gravytrain are attending for all of the 3 days. Day 2 was mine and Alex’s turn to visit Internet World (on the wettest day of the year, but still worth it!).

Alex and I got the venue and while we drip dried we listened to Markus Fehr from e-Spirit. He talked about integrating CMS and online shopping to an already substantial business that is offline. It was interesting to hear how many businesses are still wary about having an online presence as they feel it may discourage shoppers from their local stores. However, as the world is now largely on the internet, the amounts of visits to local shops are declining and those businesses that don’t have an online presence are realising this.

The next was a talk on email testing. Sean Duffy from Email Center showed us that by using a multivariate testing technique we could see a 45% increase from email marketing. Here we learned that an email testing plan was something to avoid as you need to be dynamic and that each test is a trial and therefore not to worry if the results are negative.

The last talk Alex and I attended, I thought, was the best out of the three. It was hosted by Luca Benini from Europe, Buddy Media. Here he spoke about “The elusive ROI of social media: Tracking connections through sales.” Luca spoke about how actually, the ROI is not elusive. He said that by interacting with consumers, many are drawn away from the customer service phone line and are more inclined to tweet or post, which is a lot cheaper to reply to and therefore, is an instant return on investment from social media. This was one of the points Luca said was a way to measure ROI from social media. The others included: Brand equity, shareholder value, “talkability” for a TV show, Web traffic referrals and sales. He gave an interesting statistic about web traffic referrals that showed more traffic was generated from Facebook to YouTube than from Google to YouTube.

This shows the complete shift in the way people access information and highlights the importance of having a presence on social media sites.

HTML5 and Search Engines

Browser Support for HTML5

Great Reasons for Developers to use HTML5

Sum Up

Additional Resources

Cookie Use