Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

If you are using QR codes in any type of offline marketing, then it would be a good idea to have some way of tracking these users that come onto your website. One quick way is to achieve this via a HTTP redirect. This redirect would then push people to the right page with some extra tracking code tacked on the end of it. QR readers generally display the destination URL when they decode the QR code, and having something long and complicated may hinder you users from visiting.

One further advantage of bringing users to a QR code with a redirect, is that you can easily change the URL in the future if the campaign changes, or is no longer open. Here you would have the option to show a special notice, or redirect again to a newer campaign.

Code to track QR codes

This code will allow you to track users in Google Analytics by what medium they came from, and you will be able to segment them based on this usage. Below is the code located at http://www.blackdog.ie/q/index.php.

<?php
//////
// Fill out and change
//////
$url = "http://www.blackdog.ie/"; // your website name
$medium = "QRcode"; // type of marketing medium
$campaign = "NewsPaperAd"; // name of your campaign
$content= "ad1"; // use to differentiate different ads
$source= "IrishTimes+QR+code+redirect"; // name of your source publication
$term = ""; // if you are focusing on keywords
//////
// That's enough editing
//////

?>


Test this URL

This should bring you to :

1. http://www.blackdog.ie/q/ which will redirect you to
2. http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/qr-codes-practice/, our post about QR codes, and it will also append the Google Analytics code to track people in the URL.

Create your own QR code for free

There are a few companies out there selling QR codes, probably to business who don’t really understand the technology. There is a free way to generate your QR code, just visit this website and enter the details of the destination URL.

If you have any other tips for business using QR codes, please share them with us in the comments.

P.S. : if you are doing any offline marketing then remember to put a QR code on your flyer, brochure, packaging, etc.

It can happen that your sitemap.xml or your robots.txt file finds it’s way into the index. Just do the following query site:yourdomain.com filetype:xml to see what XML files you have listed from your domain. Here is an example of some files indexed for the domain court.us.

It’s probably not what you really want, as basically it’s just trash in the SERPs. To fix this, and remove it from the SERPs,  you can simply add some extra details to your .htaccess file which will send the the proper X-Robots-Tag.

For your .htaccess file

<FilesMatch "sitemap\.xml">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "robots\.txt">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>
This method can also be used to remove all word documents or similar from the index.

<FilesMatch "\.doc$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "index, noarchive, nosnippet" </Files>

To check your MIME type

http://redbot.org/ is a handy tool to check out the MIME headers, cache control and FileTypes. Their code is opensource so you can run a version on your server.

Thanks

Thanks to some people like Carlo Zottmann , JohnMu, & Paul Cawley for giving me some pointers on this.

As most SEOs will tell you, title tags are up there with what they find important. Sure there are plenty of other things to look at, but titles, well they should be done properly. Titles can be the make or break for you in the SERPs, where better written titles can effect your CTR. So this morning checking on some brands I found that when I used the domain name, which has keywords, it simply showed this up for the title. I was a little shocked, as I know I love my title, which is nicely targeted to the audience it’s focused on. As I can’t share the client project, I had to find another example, and here it is.

Instead of “Aer Lingus- cheap flights, gift vouchers, hotels, car hire, & travel insurance”, it’s now just replaced with “Aer Lingus”. I’m not quite sure what we can take away from this, but I do wonder

• Are title tags loosing importance ?
• Are title tags with none relevant keywords being filtered or peanlised ?
• Are they just filtering title tags that have delimiters like -, : or | tags ?

To me it seems like a strange move by Google, and one that I’m not really sure about.

And it’s not just position 1 rankings, here is a shot for a search of [blacknight] on google.de, logged in.

Here they have chopped off the business name, “Blacknight Solutions“, instead of the full title “European Web hosting based in Ireland, exchange hosting, domain registration, dedicated servers, colocation – Blacknight Solutions“.

So is this bye bye to the advantage of writing good titles ?

This morning I was doing my random look at statistics across some domains, and I came across an interesting set of stats. So being a Friday and in the mood for a ramble, I decided to share.

I am always talking about taking things in context to my clients. 10 / 200 / 40k visitors a day might be good, depending if they are the “right type of visitor” and the search volume. Not many people look for [cars for sale in Ballyhaise, Cavan] compared with [cars for sale in Dublin], and having a little perspective when looking at things will save you potential problems down the line. Here is a look at something similar, but different, a look at taking statistics in context.

Daily Statistics

This example is from an Irish site, and at first glance the weekly view doesn’t look so interesting. We have a dip around Christmas, but over all the numbers seem consistent. There seems to be a weekly peak around Monday & Tuesday, but over all the traffic per day seems to be steady.

Weekly Statistics

Now looking at the weekly view, we see the dip from Christmas week. But we also see that in this 10 week period there is an overall increase in traffic, which looks more pronounced compared with the weekly view.

Monthly Statistics

And now aggregating per month, December 2010 had 7,111 visits, January 2011 had 8,980 and February 2011 is projected to be around 9,300 visits. This in fact shows a 30% increase from December to February. But looking at the daily numbers we probably wouldn’t have seen that it was such an increase, would you ?

Zooming in & Zooming Out

When comparing numbers, it’s important to get an overall view of things, and also to look deeper in certain outliers. In our statistics we see that we had a dip around Christmas week, but looking at the monthly view this is perhaps hidden. Looking at the monthly view shows that indeed traffic is increasing, compared with looking at the daily figures.

When we look at December with the previous months, we see that it was below the projected trend (Christmas really effects this website). And using the monthly figures for December 2010 will give an over inflated view of the website traffic increase in January 2011.

So there you have it, take statistics with a pinch of salt, and try to find out the bigger picture. Knowing this will help you make more accurate assumptions as to the state of your website.

More reading

Yesterday another blog post of mine was published by the web hosting company blacknight.com (no relation, just we like dark colours). Jump to here to see my post on SEO for Dummies

News has come in this evening that Fine Gael’s website has been hacked at around 8pm on Sunday. It appears to be an XSS vulnerability that was exploited in the comment section. These types of hack attempts can occur when user input isn’t sanitised before being displayed on a webpage. The site was only launched last week, and this does come as a surprise.

Preventing Hacking Attempts

Any user generated content you display on your website should be checked for malicious scripts and content, as in the case of the Fine Gael’s website, it has ended up redirecting it to another website [seen below]. In essence it’s a rather straight forward hack :

• A  user entered a comment, which contained the malicious code.
• And it was displayed on their website, without being checked, parsed or sanitised (i.e. potentially malicious tags being removed)
• When the site is loaded the comment is also loaded, but because it had the javascript tags, these were also run, and one of them redirected you to the “hack site”.

Screenshot of the hacked website

No doubt there will be calls for a full explanation as to how this could happen to Fine Gael’s website. For further reading about the hack attempt check threads on boards.ie / politics.ie , news on RTÉ / silconrepublic.com /  thejournal.ie and on blogs like michele’s & nábídána‘s.

Update : As of 21:40 , January 9 2011, it seems that the website has been replaced with a holding template while the website is fixed.

Temporarily taken offline

Google’s Local Business Center (now called Google Places) hasn’t been without it’s problems in the past, but today I did come across an interesting tactic that can probably help you get listed in multiple places in the local business results. Now I don’t condone this tactic, but perhaps by highlighting it Google will get that little bit smarter and they in turn will update things.

This morning I was looking for a T-shirt printer in Munich, and I typed in the following search query [tshirt druck] on google.de , and after position 3, I see the google places map.

Casually checking out C & D, I didn’t notice that they had the same phone number. But both results brought me to the same same website. On closer inspection we see that munich-t-shirt.com 301 redirects to stadtkopierer.de, but none the less google places lists them both.

btw. stadtkopierer I am also surprised you have 20 reviews, when your competitors have 0, but maybe that’s a topic for another day.

Steps to create a multiple listing

Things that will probably need to be unique :

• website URL
• email address
• business title

Things that probably don’t need to be unique :

• phone number
• location

I did notice that the two websites have different WHOIS & DNS settings, but I’m guessing that this also isn’t so necessary.

Adding your business on Google Places

To add your business to google places, simply log in to your google account and visit http://www.google.com/local/add/, here you will be guided through the process. My only tip here would be to include as much information as possible.

I’m not going to go too in-depth as to why being listed on Google places is absolutely important. But if you are selling a product and have a physical presence in a town or city, then having a listing will deliver you a great leads of customers who want your product in a specific area. (examples : wedding planner {city name}, dentist near {postcode} , gardner {town} , etc, etc.) You know that people searching for these types of things are more prepared to buy, than someone looking for general information. Test it yourself, google [tv shop] & [tv shop dublin], and see how Google treats the different visitors.

Now I’m off to do a little further testing