There is no denying it, apps are big business and you can be sure there is an app for almost anything. They are great for offering quick access to vital information, which in meetings and presentations can prove invaluable. So what apps can make on-the-move SEO easier? Here is a rundown of the top 5 apps our marketers always keep in their pocket.

Website SEO Analyser [IPHONE]

Simple to use and free, this app is a great starting point for those beginning in the industry. Enter the domain name and the app will display the meta data from the page, the domain information and the link profile. This app will also offer simple tips and advice to improve the SEO ranking of the page in a very user friendly typeface.

Cost: Free

Download: iTunes

Developer: Impact Media Ltd

Iseo [IPHONE]

This app is a clean and simple one stop shop for essential SEO tools. It includes all the basic functions you would expect, such as a SERP analyser, Inlinks analyser and an updated Web Directory. Its clean interface means information can be accessed swiftly, perfect for any unexpected questions that can come up during meetings or presentations.

Cost: £0.59

Download: iTunes

Developer: Marco Siino

SEO Search Ranking [IPHONE]

This excellent app allows you to quickly check the ranking for numerous keywords and numerous sites, perfect for giving a quick answer when a client wants to know what their current status is. Some reports have said that sites can take a while to load if you are using an abundance of keywords, but this app is still a vital tool for anyone in the industry.

Cost: £1.79

Download: iTunes

Developer: Leon Huang

Analytix for Google Analytics [ANDROID]

This app is the only Android one featured, and although there are similar ones available on the iPhone, none quite match up. It gives the user a through and real time depiction of Google analytics and let you decipher vital information such as the top landing page and the top problematic pages quickly. The app also includes a host of other information.

Cost: £0.87

Download: Android

Developer: Folkert

SEO Manager [IPHONE]

The most expensive app we have featured but in our eyes it’s almost worth it. This app allows you to manage keywords and pages, reduce IP blocking and individually set the engine and h1 for each project. It also allows for the opportunity to identify and analyse competitors quickly, a big selling point for many. However the more technical the app, the less use our marketers seem to have for it as they argue that sort of analysis would be done in the office and not while they are out and about.

Cost: £5.99

Download: iTunes

Developer: at2

Will your site speed its way up the Google rankings or will its position in the results be held back by slow performance? See how slow site performance can be a double whammy on both your search engine ranking and conversion rates.

Back in April, Google announced that it had included site speed as a factor in its ranking algorithm and that some sites were already being penalised in search results because of slow site speed. Whilst it was just English searches on the .com site that were affected at that time, if we follow the usual Google trend, this is likely to be released across the rest of their sites including the Google.co.uk site shortly.

Getting visitors to your site via search engines is only part of the picture though, what happens once they arrive on your site? Back in 2001 research showed that users were willing to wait 8 seconds for a page to load before they started to move away to other sites. This dropped to just 4 seconds in 2006. With broadband widely available and plenty of sites offering the same products, this figure has halved again and current research shows that it now stands at around 2 seconds before you start to lose your visitors.

There are many ways to help improve the speed of your site which range from changes to the server platform through to simple updates to your website or design. Obviously the impact of any particular change will vary depending on how your specific website performs and where the bottlenecks currently lie.

Follow the 5 I’s action plan to improve your site’s performance:

Identify

You need to identify what is causing any performance bottlenecks on your website. These results are likely to be different for each site, however there are some very good free tools available to help you. Here are two of them that we use, both will also require the firebug add-on to display their results:

• Page Speed – A Firefox add-on which covers many common issues
• Yslow – Yahoo’s Firefox add-on which also covers many potential issues

If you use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) there is a labs feature called “Site performance” which shows you information about how fast or slow your site has been over recent months in the form of a nice graph and also includes some suggestions to speed up your site.

Investigate

You need to do a cost / benefit analysis of the identified issues. This will ensure you are making the biggest impact for your budget and prioritising the biggest improvements over the smaller ones. For instance, it may take next to no time to save a second in one area whilst taking days to save 1/4 of a second in others.

Implement

Implement the changes you have identified as offering the best cost / benefit ratio then, after rigorous testing and QA processes, put these changes onto your live website.

Inquire

Allow a week or two to build up a picture of the effect that the changes have made on your site and then make use of whatever analytics or analysis methods you use to see what differences there have been in visitor behaviour. Then you can evaluate what action you can take to further enhance the user experience.

Invigorate

Enjoy the benefits of invigorated site performance. Firefox found that by reducing the page load time by 2.2 seconds they increased their conversion rate by an amazing 15.4%.

Here are a few things to bear in mind during your investigation stage:

Enable gzip compression on the web server. This will shrink the page before it is sent and the visitor’s browser then re-expands the code without the visitor ever knowing it was compressed. It is quite normal to reduce the size of downloaded code by 70% or more by using this change. whatismyip.org offers a really useful tool to see the difference this can make to your site. Remember to check compression rates on css files as well as html pages.

Consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for static content e.g. images. This can have a dramatic impact on visitor page load times as they load images directly from high performance servers which are usually located much closer to the visitor than your own server. As Google uses the full page load times including images to calculate site speed, the delay introduced by slower image serving does impact your performance.

Make use of Google code to host any of the popular open source javascript libraries you may be using. You will immediately benefit from faster code loading and compression as Google hosts these for free on its own CDN.

Whilst image size is not the major bottleneck that it was before the widespread adoption of broadband, loading a full size image and then resizing it to a thumbnail in html is still common on many sites even though it has a definite impact on bandwidth and page load speeds.

Shrink or minify your Javascript and CSS files to remove large amounts of unnecessary characters in your code which has to be downloaded by visitors.

Use asynchronous scripts wherever possible. There is nothing worse than visiting a site and waiting 10 seconds for anything to be displayed due to a slow loading Javascript or advert still loading and the browser having to wait for that to complete before it will show any content to the user. This can be especially annoying to the end user if the delay is caused by analytics or advertisement content that has very little value to the end user.

These are just a few of our top tips, we would love to hear what things you have done to help with your sites.

My communication with some clients has shown that, understanding search is also hard for them (and of course it should be as it is not their industry, try asking me what I know about engineering!…).

To try and overcome this problem I have put together a guide to search jargon that I hope will help those who don’t know much about search marketing to understand what we do. Most of the terms described are in the simplest form and are of course far more technical in reality.

Search Engines – are machines that index other websites, allowing you to search using a specified choice of word. Search engines exist to the user as a web page. However, behind the scenes the engine is running a complex set of algorithms, which are configured by developers to bring up the most relevant results depending on the search term

Algorithm (algo) – is a program used by search engines to determine what pages to bring up in search results for a given search query – its the technicality that goes on behind the scenes when we enter a search term

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – is the term used to describe actions associated with researching, optimising and positioning a website within search engines to achieve maximum exposure for that website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a website by achieving  a high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. Research indicates that users tend not to click past the first page of search results, therefore high rank in search engine results pages is desirable for obtaining traffic to a site. SEO, and the processes associated with it, help to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favourably ranked by the search engine.

Target Search Engines – this is the choice of search engines targeted in a particular campaign, the most popular targets are Google, Yahoo and Bing. You might also target the same search engines in different countries.

SERPs – this is shorthand for Search Engine Results Pages, and refers to the pages of search results that are generated when a user types in a key word or phrase into the search box.

Organic Search Engine Results – are sometimes called natural results; these are what are displayed right down the centre of the Results Page when you search at a search engine. Although they are supposed to occur naturally they can be manipulated by using SEO techniques and in most cases are not paid for directly to any search engine.

Organic Search (campaign) – refers to the strategies and tactics implemented by SEO professionals to improve the organic search results for a brand or set of key words/phrases.

Paid Search (campaign) – this is also known as PPC (pay per click). It is when a relevant text advert with a link to a company page is displayed in search engine results when the user of a search engine types in a particular phrase. Companies bid for rankings and the bid amouint is  charged every time someone clicks on the ad. The most common PPC provider is Google AdWords, and you can recognise AdWords as the results which appear as ’sponsored listings’ at the top of the page and on the right hand side.

Keyword / Key Phrase – is the word or phrase that a  search engine user enters into a search engine when searching for something – for example if I am searching for Tesco, the keyword I might type in is ’supermarket’.

Keyword Research – is the hard work carried out by SEO professionals of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting in an SEO Campaign.

Target Key Phrases – are a highly researched list of keywords or phrases that have been selected as appropriate to target after extensive keyword research. In order to create target key phrases Zeta undertakes a complex key phrase analysis and research process.

Primary Key Phrases (PKP’s) – this is a term used to group the most important key phrases in a campaign. The primary key phrases are deemed the most competitive, have the highest search volumes and are the most relevant.

Brand Key Phrases – are key phrases that feature a brand name or the brand names of products stocked or sold by a supplier– e.g. if our client was Pepsico -  Pepsi drink, Pepsi can, Walkers Crisps, Pepsi would be brand key phrases.

Non-Brand Key Phrases – are keywords or phrases related to a brand, products or services but not mentioning the brand name itself – e.g. (with relation toPepsico again) drinks manufacturer, drink cans, cola, fizzy cola.

Analytics – the most common analytics program is Google Analytics. In simple terms Analytics is used to gain, analyse an report statistics and data relating to website usage, traffic and conversions.

If I have missed any out which you would like us to define please let me know.

Personalised search works by ranking results higher if a user has shown a tendency to click on them more often. So if I search for [news] every morning while I am drinking my coffee, and I choose the number-eight result www.thesun.co.uk each time then Google will assume that I probably want to see that site higher up the rankings and put it at the top for me in future.

Apart from during our daily checking-of-rankings routine, this might not be such a bad thing for SEOs: we just need to encourage users to click our results instead of our competitors and the next time we might be rewarded with a higher ranking. Frankly, that’s something we should be thinking about anyway, so how can we do it?

Optimise title tags for clicks

As SEOs we are judged on rankings not on clicks, so we tend to optimise title tags for keyword prominence to grab that extra place where we can. But if we write title tags for clicks we might get more traffic from a lower ranking and be rewarded with high rankings in subsequent searches. So in the new world of personalised search would the title tag:

Zeta Widgets > Click now to see the best deals on the web

Be more effective than its keyword-stuffed alternative? And unlike AdWords no-one can stop us from using unsubstantiated superlatives

Meta Description

The long-neglected meta description tag could play a vital role in the world of personalised search. We can use it to display a custom snippet that is designed to drive clicks and boost our personalised rankings. Because the meta description is only ever displayed as a search snippet you can use language that you wouldn’t normally use on your site.

Google has been telling us for years that we should write better meta descriptions, but now they have given us an even better reason to do it.

Conclusion
When a website has strong rankings altering the Title tag is a scary proposition, but I know that the Zeta team is going to be busy looking at ways to maximise click through rates where possible over the next few weeks.

If personalised search only has the effect of making us think more about getting users to actually click on our results in the SERPs then I think it has done a good job. And even though, as an SEO, I will have to disable it in all my browsers I think the average user will find this change an improvement.

I wrote about Google’s search options after the launch back in May. Since then Google has included the “Images from the page” option. Image search has become one of the fastest growing verticals in search so my guess is that this will become extremely popular over the next 12 months.

This does not work like searching through Google images, the results are different; thumbnails are included alongside the normal text results and this causes the listings to change in priority. The results are still based on relevance but the image option appears to add another filter over the top, adjusting the results to combine page relevance and image optimisation.

John Lewis gets relegated to page two

I have experimented with a few different search terms to see if the option influences the rankings. One term was [flat screen tv] which had 74,000 exact searches in October. A very well known brand (John Lewis) ranks position two for a standard search, but when I select “Images from the page” the listing is relegated to page two. This is a seriously big drop especially for such a powerful brand and on a term that is ideal for the “Images from the page” option.

Maximum exposure through search

This is a good example of why image optimisation has become so important for generating the maximum exposure through search. Without a well planned strategy your website could end up like John Lewis, deep in the relegation zone of page two.

How to create a PKP traffic advanced segment

Open your Google Analytics account and select Advanced Segments.

Select  +Create new customised segment.

To create your segment, drag and drop your chosen dimensions into the statement boxes. The two you need to select are both under Traffic Sources: Keyword and Medium.

Drag Keyword into the first statement box and choose Matches regular expression from the Condition drop-down menu. Value is where you insert the key phrases, but we’ll add these in a moment.

Choose Add “and” statement, and drag Medium into the second statement box. Choose Matches exactly from the Condition drop-down menu, and choose Organic from the Value drop-down. This is what it should look like:

Now we need to add the primary key phrases in the Value box of the Keyword statement. The easiest way to do this is with a text editor capable of regular expressions such as Ultra Edit, as you need to add carat, pipe and dollar symbols to separate the key phrases.

Open the text editor and paste in your primary key phrases.

Now you need to place a ^ symbol before each key phrase and a $ symbol afterwards. In between each key phrase there needs to be a |. So it will look like this:

^keyword one$|^keyword two$|^keyword three$

To do this, go to the Search menu and select Replace. You need to replace ^p with $| and tick Regular Expressions. Then select Replace All. This is what it should look like in the replace wizard:

Now you need to replace $| with $|^ and untick Regular Expressions. Then choose Replace All again.

Make sure there is  a ^ before the first key phrase, and a $ after the last key phrase so that it looks like this:

^keyword one$|^keyword two$|^keyword three$

Now that you’ve added the symbols, select all and copy and paste into the Value box in the Keyword statement box in Analytics.

The last thing to do is name your segment e.g. Client PKPs and select Create Segment. And that’s it. Now you have a quick, easy way to measure a really important KPI.

To help out all the people who find this behaviour unacceptable, Zeta has created a simple Firefox search extension to allow us to search Google UK with the default “The Web” option selected. The add-on has already had thousands of downloads and a five-star rating.

Download and rate the Google UK Search extension

If you’re part of a global company that is using a .com domain and hosting all its websites from its US head office you are going to incur some costs to appear in the UK results, but is it worth it?

A quick survey round the Zeta studio revealed that around half of us are still selecting “pages from the UK” as a matter of course. I stopped doing this when Google started giving higher rankings to UK sites on google.co.uk even when “the web” is selected, but it looks like many people still haven’t broken this habit. I’m going to call them PfUKers (Pages from the UK [er]).

To allow us to do a cost–benefit analysis of moving a site to the UK or changing to a .co.uk domain name we need to know what proportion of the general population are PfUKers. I can’t find any useful data for this online, but we can analyse the referring URLs in our web server’s log files to find out.

I have taken the logs from a wide selection of sites and run them through my trusty old log analyser. This is a very small sample of data; if anyone has access to a large pool of log files please let me know.

• Sample Size: 527,942 google.co.uk referrals
• Number of “Page from UK” searches: 151,775
• Percentage of “Pages from the UK” searches: 28.75%

From this we can estimate that around one in three UK searchers are still choosing “pages from the UK”. If you’re not a PfUKer the odds are the person sitting to the left or right of you is… go on, ask them.

How to contribute your stats

If you have log files with at least 100,000 Google.co.uk searches then it would be useful to add your stats to the mix. You need a good quality log analyser or Excel 2007 (I don’t think an older version will handle this much data).

You just need to find out two things:

• The total number of referrals from “google.co.uk/search” (this excludes product search, image search etc)
• The total number of referrals from “google.co.uk/search” that also contain the string “countryUK|countryGB”

Please post your results in a comment or email me and I will collate the data.

Timing could not have been more appropriate as Twitter is surrounded with speculation of challenging Google’s search share with its own search functionality.

So the announcements cover three main features:
1.    Search Options
2.    Rich Snippets
3.    Sky Map for Android

There are 100s of possibilities now available with Search Options, deciding what is relevant for each client and how to make the most of the technology to gain market share is the fun part.

Search Options

Many of the search options were already available through the top level links and advanced search. What this feature adds is an easy-to-use filter system giving users greater control over their search results. Great for shopping and the latest news (Maybe a step towards Google’s Twitter-style search). This addition has strengthened the importance of fresh content and multi-channel optimisation.

Two great new tools are the Timeline and Wonder Wheel. Anyone familiar with Google Analytics will recognise the timeline functionality as it is similar to the date navigation, and I love Wonder Wheel because it provides a key phrase related visual tool.  There are already many questions we are asking ourselves and will be asking our clients.

Google’s official post about Search Options

Rich Snippets

Microformats and RDFa standards have a serious calling with the introduction of Rich Snippets. This feature is really cool and adds a lot of customer value to search results. So developers and publishers need to get on board. Find out more on the Rich Snippets help page.

SkyMap for Android

This application looks so much fun it nearly made me put my iPhone down and go pick up an Android based mobile. Nearly! Check out the video below, this application proves Google’s potential to challenge the iPhone stronghold on the mobile market. The king of cool, easy-to-use applications delivers again.

When performing keyword research for any market one is never short of surprises. I always find a popular key phrase that makes me stop and wonder what on earth people were thinking when they typed it, but there is one very popular search that takes the biscuit.

Every month 68 million people worldwide search Google for “google”. (And for those of you familiar with the keyword tool: yes that is on exact match.) That means around 600 people have searched Google for Google while you were reading this post.

So if you think you know what people will type when they are looking for your products and services: think again. In-depth keyword analysis will always surprise you.