Then following the Google+ launch, the search engine Bing (which happens to be a partner of Facebook) bought Skype, an internationally popular piece of internet video and telephone software.  Following the announcement from Google about their new Hangouts feature to accompany Google+, it doesn’t take a marketing genius to see that Bing and Facebook were keen to not miss out on any established users defecting to Google+ in the early days.

Facebook and Google have long been rivals, with each criticising the other over many points. Facebook have blocked Google from seeing their users’ public profiles and Google have attacked Facebook for their loose privacy settings.

In response to these criticisms, Facebook has launched a string of new features (including privacy features) that just happen to coincide with Google+ opening up their network to the public. Google+ is incredibly feature-rich even at this early stage, however, at Real Web SEO, we do wonder if Google can really can tempt established Facebookers away from the social network who may have invested a lot of time and energy in to uploading photos, connecting with friends and playing games. Google+ may already have millions of users, but last month, it emerged that 83% of their audience is inactive. Hardly a surprise as the initial audience was web and internet marketing types who wanted to have a look around but found it boring without the majority of their friends signed up to flesh out the service.

So what is Facebook now offering?

If you have a Facebook account, you will see that your homepage has changed. You still have your friend’s recent stories in their normal place, but to the right of the screen, you can see a feed which contains information like comments on their friends’ statuses etc. Privacy settings have also been enhanced meaning you have more control over the posts you are tagged in by your friends.

Coupled with these changes, earlier on this week Twitter announced today that they would be sharing data with Facebook more easily e.g. no apps or programs to link the two so Twitter statuses are automatically posted to Facebook. There is a possibility that this could pave the way so you could give Facebook your twitter login and essentially have a double account. Many people have speculated that this is Facebook and Twitter uniting against Google+. We think this is a small step but if Facebook is determined to use their muscle to consign Google+ into the social network dustbin along with Google Buzz, they may have to work with Twitter more in the future. Would this really be of much use to users though?

Facebook’s biggest announcement was at the F8 conference yesterday which showed an entirely new layout to each user’s feed – see this report for more details.

Do you think the rivalry between Facebook and Google is getting ugly? Do you think that only one will be victorious in the fight for market share within social media, or do you think that they will learn to co-exist? Tell us using the comments box below!

To find out how Real Web SEO can help improve your presence in the search engines, contact David Wiltshire on 0845 544 1764.

This is why Google implemented their Panda update – to encourage people to stop posting copied or similar (spun) content across the web which added no value.

The Panda update affected mostly article websites, but if you post a lot of content on your website, you may want to check that you aren’t harboring duplicate content. One trick to check for duplicate content is to compare the number of pages of your website that Google has indexed to the number of pages you crawl on the site itself.

To do this, you can use the “site:domain.com” function of Google to see how many pages Google has indexed. The program Xenu for Windows (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and Integrity for Mac (http://peacockmedia.co.uk/integrity/) are free programs which crawl an entire site and essentially create a sitemap, telling you how many pages are indexed and the page structure of the website.

If Google has ignored many of your pages then it is likely that there is a duplicate content issue. This might become obvious when looking at the the list of crawled pages that you have generated on Xenu or Integrity or you may have to use a service such as Copyscape to check for duplicate content on a page of your website: http://copyscape.com/

If a lot of your pages are missing, what happens next?

If parameters/session id issues are not to blame for the pages Google hasn’t include in it’s index then the issue may lie with copied or shallow content.

Technical issues that may be holding back the number of indexed pages in Google could be problems such as the robots.txt file, mis-used iframes or canocial tag issues. If this is the case then your SEO company needs to liaise with your web developer to rectify this as soon as possible as the negative impact upon SEO can be catastrophic. Check out our blog post of canonical tags to find out more.

Hopefully, once all pages on your site are unique enough to make it into Google’s index, you can concentrate on other aspect of SEO which will help you on your way to conquering your SEO goals.

To find out how SEO can help your business, contact David Wiltshire on 0845 544 1765.

For over 15 years, Yahoo! has dabbled in video, social networks, email and other services such as live chat. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, all of these services seem to have been superseded by other websites (Gmail, Skype, Facebook). So many ventures by Yahoo! have been quietly killed off such as Geocities, Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! 360.

So where did Yahoo! go wrong?

Usability – The Yahoo! homepage is a famous example of a ‘bad’ homepage. With information overload and a messy design, usability experts have always criticised Yahoo!. In comparison, Google have always kept their homepage fast and simple, leaving users in no doubt about what they need to do when they land on the page.

Spam – Search results have been easy to spam on Yahoo! Back in 2009, we noticed a porn result in the top 10 results for the keyword “make money”. Not only that, but Yahoo! have been widely criticised for adult results appearing when the SafeSearch feature was enabled.

Quality of results - The quality of the results are less popular than Google. Users often find that results seem slower to appear and have less advanced features such as ‘shopping’ or ‘news’.

Management – CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz was fired at the start of September 2011 as no visible improvements had been made in almost 2 years. Bartz slashed budgets, cut staff numbers but reports of demoralised workers and boards of directors taking a long time to make decisions was cited as the reason for her removal by many SEO websites.

Because of the above problems, SEO companies don’t tend to optimise websites for Yahoo! as its ranking algorithms don’t even compete with Google, who have enjoyed a 90% market share in the UK. Can Yahoo! find its way back in to the hearts of UK internet users? What do you think Yahoo! can do to win back market share from Google? Comment below and tell us what you think!

To find out how SEO can help transform your online business, contact David Wiltshire on 0845 544 1765.

Examples of this are:

- www.domain.com/

- www.domain.com/index.html

- www.domain.com/ref=XYZ123

- www.domain.com/visit?n=743835

All of these pages could be exactly the same homepage with the same content, yet but on separate URLS.

Then there are WWW. canonicalisation issues can also occur if you don’t have a 301 redirect in place. e.g.

- domain.com/

- domain.com/index.html

- domain.com/ref=XYZ123

- domain.com/visit?n=743835

The two examples above show that you could theoretically have 8 different versions of your homepage!

When people decide to link towards your website they may simply copy and paste the URL in the address bar.  If this is one of the ‘copies’ of the homepage and not the main version then that link won’t count towards your SEO; remember Google ranks web-pages and NOT web-sites.  Google could index the ‘wrong’ version of your homepage which could harm your sales statistics, but even worse, an affiliate could rank higher for your main brand keywords – taking commission for sales that should have been yours!

To get around this problem, there is a simple tag your web developer can add to your website’s code to instruct Google and other search engines to ignore any duplicate homepages you may have created, accidentally or otherwise.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.realwebseo.com/” />

As you can see, this is an incredibly simple bit of code you can add to your website. This bit of code tells search engines that the original page is located at the web address stated in the canonical tag and to ignore any copy it might find on slightly different URLs.

The canonical tag allows you to improve your email marketing campaigns as it allows you to create lots of different pages that you can use to target different groups of customers with content personalised to the customer’s prior purchasing habits.  Duplicate content isn’t an issue with Canonical tags and a NoIndex/NoFollow tag also on the page.

Creating almost duplicate pages can also be easily done by ordering products on your website by price, name or customer rating.  The same products will get re-ordered in different positions but effectively you will have an identical page than before.  Luckily the major search engines have systems to recognise this and generally do a good job in picking the original category page on an ecommerce site.

Forgetting to add canonical tags to your website can be a very costly mistake for your SEO but can be identified and fixed easily. Speak to your web developer to ensure that canonical tags are all in place and that they are all checked to avoid any SEO goofs.

To find out how a targeted SEO campaign can help improve your online sales, contact David Wiltshire or Jonathan Ellins on 0845 544 1765.

Union Square is the company behind the UK market leading, knowledge management platform, Workspace, which is used by more than 30,000 construction industry professionals from 15 different countries. The company has come a long way since it’s first order for Workspace in 2004, with average annual growth rates ranging between 30-35%. Union Square aim to provide their customers with a high quality service to go a long side the high quality software that they sell.

The company has worked with a variety of businesses and people within the construction industry, including the likes of Volker Fitzpatrick, Osbourne, and the Patton Group.

Union Square are extremely aware that not every construction business is the same, and with this in mind they do their very best to get to know their customers particular interests and their business’s objectives. The pre-sales support team also offer demonstrations of Workspace, which can be viewed online, or they’ll simply visit your work place and show you how it works. There is also the opportunity for potential clients to attend briefings at Union Square, where they will be able to gather a quick overview of how the software works, as well as listen to client case studies and experiences. On many occasions their existing clients take the time to invite people into their businesses to demonstrate just how Workspace has contributed to their success.

Training people sufficiently on how to use the software is one of Union Square’s priorities. They offer a range of different training options such as e-learning, public classroom training, private in-company training and ‘webinars’ which use the internet, screen sharing software and a text chat tool to make the learning process accessible to those who don’t want to travel.

Workspace combines elements including corporate databases, document management, email management, project accounting and project data management into one single project management tool. It offers an alternative to network sharing and public email folders by providing a centrally accessible place for documents and emails to be stored.

Union Square have won numerous awards for their achievements including the title of ‘Nottinghamshire Small Business of the Year‘ back in 2004 and were appointed as a Microsoft Gold Partner in 2008. They are keen supporters of the Care International Construction challenge and host annual charity events.

We are aiming to expand the traffic levels to the Union Square website through related keywords in Google and in turn bring in related clients who are looking for a construction CRM.

When you search for a brand e.g. “Graham and Green”, you will see that the majority of the first page of Google has changed. This is because Google have recently made some changes to how they display search results for large or popular websites by adding sitelinks.

So what exactly are Google sitelinks and how do they work? In the simplest of terms, Google crawls your website and finds shortcuts to the pages that it thinks users will find the most useful and displays these links under your home page when users search for your brand. This helps users find the content they are looking for much quicker.

As the changes seem to currently only appear for company or brand names, this update means it is more important than ever to rank number one for your brand name.

“I haven’t got sitelinks yet, how do I get them?”

At the moment, Google has said that sitelinks are automated and so webmasters will need to build well-structured sites and be patient if their website doesn’t have sitelinks yet – Google has indicated that they may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

There are two bits of good news for websites that are lucky enough to have sitelinks listed under their names in Google already.

1. You can ‘demote’ any sitelink that you are unhappy with. Simply go to your webmaster tools homepage and under ‘Site Configuration’, click ‘Sitelinks’. Enter the URL you don’t want to appear in the search box and go from there. However, changes may take a little time to take effect.

2. It will be harder for competitors to use Google to muscle in on your brand name in search. Competitors can bid on your brand name in Adwords but if your homepage and 12 site links are appearing, it is less likely that competitors will be able to divert visitors away from your website.

In the mean time, you can make sure that your website is easy for Google spiders to crawl with clean code, clean URLs and internal links within your website that are

To discuss your website and how an SEO strategy implemented by Real Web SEO can help improve your online sales, contact us now on 0845 544 1765

Do clothes tend to miss the wardrobe and the drawers? Is it frustrating trying to find things you thought were in the wardrobe but have gone missing?

Maybe you’re a designer or a dressmaker and need something to keep clothing in check and hung correctly.

Then take a look at the Hanger King Pro, a piece of revolutionary wardrobe equipment that will sort out your wardrobe, or your clothing in moments and you’ll never look back.

What is Hanger King Pro? It’s a coat hanger that’s different. Its keeps clothes in place with an anti- static grip, so grabs hold of satin tops and silk or linen shirts. It’s shoulders protect the fabric and don’t get entangled within the loops of knitwear.

The neck of the Hanger King Pro is specially shaped so that clothing sits properly and doesn’t slip down the hanger, therefor stretching and ruining tops.

Trousers sit on the hanger and don’t move, skirts clip onto the Hanger King Pro with the special clips, even ties, belt and scarves have their place.

Not only do clothes sit and stay on the Hanger King Pro, wardrobe room is increased due to the fantastic feature of the Hanger King Pro, which allows you to add another hanger below, so you can have all of your shirts together, all of your trousers and so on. Your wardrobe space is tripled and clothing looks neat and tidy.

If you’re business is clothing you can stock many varieties and style of clothing on just one hanger by adding to the drop loop.

Worried about getting your wedding dress creased or it slipping down onto the floor? Put it on a Hanger King Pro, the dress will sit properly on the hanger and will stay crease free and clean.

The Hanger King Pro is ideal for home and company use, it’s a fantastic investment to keep your clothing neat and tidy.

Surfing online with a smartphone is a completely different experience than a typical desktop PC with these noticeable differences:

- The download speed is a lot slower
- The screen resolution is a lot smaller (typically 320px by 480px)
- Website navigation is done with a touchscreen and not a mouse

So what does this all mean for SmartPhone SEO?

Currently Google are making subtle changes to their results for smartphone devices, these have been recorded with high accuracy at the start of 2011.  Recently Google have added buttons to the smartphone version of the Google homepage, these apply to local businesses such as restaurants, pubs, bars, etc.:

With IP location and Geo-Positioning on most smarthphones, an incredible amount of searches performed on these devices are local searches.  30% of restaurant queries are now done on mobile phones, as you’d imagine people want to find a nearby restaurant that’s recommended whilst they are out and about: see more on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-xh-lNpNhs

If you rely on local search engine traffic then it’s really important to have a listing on Google Maps, these listings add credibility to your business helping with SEO and also act as a free listing in local searches.  Smartphone searches on Google bring up local Google map listings more often than the normal desktop version, optimising your Google Local listing could really pay off for some businesses.

If you have an ecommerce site then Google Shopping results regularly appear in mobile searches and as the screen size is so small they can dominate the screen when scrolling past them.  Most ecommerce platforms such as Magento have an easy way to connect you product lists to Google Base (now called Google Merchant Center).  Give Google as much information as you can on the merchant center, thumbnails that really stand out will help your product click-through-rates also.

PPC ads might be a good option if you run a competitive local business such as a taxi firm or a restaurant which people will need on the move.  You can secure a top position in Google’s mobile results with relevant Google advert, these take up quite a bit of room and are likely to get clicked on.  If you are really on the ball then you can target your ads to only show on mobile devices and only at the times of the day when you really need them, the most savvy restaurant owner could even turn ads on when the restaurant isn’t entirely full!

People searching for services often will look for some type of rating to go along with it so make sure you encourage plenty of positive reviews on your Google listing. Also hunt out all the top directories for your area, for example TripAdvisor ratings are trusted enough by Google to appear in their local listing pages, hunt out which directories work well for your niche.

The Possible Future of Smartphone SEO

As Google announces special Adwords targeting filters towards tablet devices (to go alongside mobile only ads), what features of a website could hold it back in smartphone tweaked Google searches in the near future?

- Mobile friendly dimensions – The most used dimensions of smartphone screens is a resolution of 320 by 480 pixels which is far smaller than most websites built around the 1024px or 1280px resolution of PC monitors.  This means the user has to do some dreaded left and right scrolling to see the whole data which gives an awful user experience.  As Google wants to give it’s users the best experience possible and allow them to find out the right results they could possible demote listings which aren’t mobile friendly in some fashion to smartphone users.

- Mobile friendly navigation – Most smartphones use a touch screen to allow the user to navigate around the programs and browser and they seem to be moving away from the pen-like ‘stylus’ and just relying on finger touch.  This means that tiny little text links on website become frustratingly hard to actually press in practice with a relatively wide finger jab, something which may put Google off a little on smartphone SERPs.  Also dropdown navigation doesn’t always work on smartphones and you can only access limited content, this maybe something to consider checking on your own site.

- Fast Load Times - Browsing on a 3G or 4G network is painfully slow at times; statistics have shown that smartphone users will wait a lot longer to download the page as it’s currently the norm.  Whilst mobile phone networks become faster there is still no excuse not to optimise your site for speed,  this already plays a small role in Google’s normal ranking algorithm and could have a greater effect on smartphone results where it’s impact is felt greater.  A website with say a 2MB homepage with lots of rich content may take over a minute to appear on a smartphone device, by then the user may give up trying to load the page or forget why they visited it in the first place!

Whatever happens with Google’s smartphone search engine results in the future be sure that you make your website as useful as possible on the ever-increasingly popular technology.  Now is the time to act and get up top before you are playing catch-up with the webmasters who designed for the future.

Today Real Web SEO gained access to Google+ and we couldn’t be more excited!

Google+ (also known as Google Plus) is a well thought out mix of the best features from Facebook with instant messaging and video chat similar to Skype.  Here’s our initial reaction to Google Plus asking the question, will it be third time lucky for Google?

Once you have access to Google+ one of the first things you should do is to organise your contacts in to different groups called Circles:

This allows you to quickly separate out groups of people with an easy drag and drop interface.  With Google+ Circles you can keep your work colleges away from your friends for example or keep your close friends apart from people your just friendly with.  There’s not a one to one relationship with your contacts and each circle, you could have the same person in your friends list and your work list for example at the same time.

When posting anything such as messages, images or video you chose which circle of people can see the information and who can interact with you.  This also works in the opposite way with filterable “streams” showing updates from your different circles:

You can quickly switch from your work stream into your sports team stream for example and only see notifications relevant to the subject matter you wish to view.  Streams are updated automatically in the same way as the realtime search function on Google.

One of the most exciting features on Google Plus is the hangout video chat and instant messaging service:

It allows people to jump straight into an open video chat environment, only people from circles you select can join into a chat session which you have started, you can have multiple chat windows open but we didn’t have enough people to test this feature out at more than 2 hangouts.  You have a warning tone when somebody jumps into a hangout; without this it would be quite easy to forget you had your camera on at all!

Cool video chat features include the fact that you see Google’s version of your video feed and not your own so you can see how you come across.  You see a flipped ‘mirror’ version of your image whilst the other user see the un-flipped (i.e. normal) image from your video feed, it’s like looking into a mirror.  The sound echo cancelling function works beautifully on Hangouts no matter how loud you make a noise and what noise is in the background.  When you have 3 or more people chatting the person currently chatting will get the main stage on Hangouts and have a bigger video image.  Two people chatting simultaneously will have them both pop up which is a great little feature.  A Skype/MSN like chat function also appears besides the video feed for quick sharing of links and messages, I can see teenagers and families spending all night on these hangouts!

One issue we had with the hangout was a pausing and dropping of the video feed due to a slow internet connection on one of the computers.  You can pause your video feed if needed to speed up things yet you can still miss out on chunks of conversations if your connection speed drops.

Images on Google+ take center stage with a vast image mosaic displaying whole albums:

Notice that the main album image is four times bigger in the image mosaic and these images take up virtually the entire page.  Each image alone appears as wide as the browser window allowing for top clarity, something which Facebook doesn’t offer.  Flicking quickly through many images just brings up only a lower resolution image stretched to the size of the browser window which quickly turns into a high resolution image when you stop skimming through them all.  This is handy if you want to see people’s holiday images and want to quickly skip over any boring groups of shots without fully downloading them all.

Are these Google+ images a Facebook image beater? You can tag each image with differently sized rectangle tags, these tags can be people from one of your circles or anything else you would like to tag it with.  Comments as usual can be added to each image in a narrow sidebar and each image can be shared with different circles, individual people or even made public for the whole world to see.  Adding new images is a simple case of drag and drop or you can just use traditional methods of finding the image on your computer.

Well that’s our first thoughts on Google+, once it has a lot of people playing with it’s features I think we’ll start to see it’s true potential and whether it’s worth leaving Facebook or Skype for a whole new social platform.

After two failed forays into the world of social media, Google announced it’s latest project this week - Google +: https://plus.google.com/

Billed as a more human way of sharing information online, Google + aims to tighten up the way we socialise online with different groups and make our sharing more selective.

Google+ is a lot like Twitter and Facebook in that users can create lists but the USP is the evolution of social media incorporating search and other fancy features like video chat. Google accepts that other social networks (i.e. Facebook) are already doing this but have slated Facebook by saying it looks like a bolt on and doesn’t work well. Check out JPR’s last blog post about creating lists on Facebook.

How friends are grouped is an important part of Google+. Alongside your ‘circles’ of friends, you can follow people without requiring people to follow you back and view your updates. This means that as you invest more time and energy into building your profile, the greater capacity you have for tracking different people and interests.

Luckily, this time Google has more up its sleeve and is offering a more feature-rich service, tying in the +1 feature that appears to have remained fairly anonymous since its launch. Another feature of this service is that if you enter in a subject of interest then Google+ returns loads of cool results to do with this subject which Google is calling ‘sparks’. But what about those people who are concerned about how Google uses their data? Google have thought about this in advance, Google spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We learned a lot in Buzz, and one of the things we learned is that there’s a real market opportunity for a product that addresses people’s concerns around privacy and how their information is shared“.

But is this acknowledgement really enough? At the moment, Google isn’t offering advertising as part of the service but it would be naive to think that advertising will never form a large part of the Google+ business model, the data it can (and has) gleaned from users is incredibly valuable to advertisers and marketers.

For those who love Gmail, they will be happy to hear that Google has carried its chat function over although it may not please Facebook who run a similar instant message function.

With the obvious rivalries in mind, has Google seriously set up a social network to rival Facebook or has it once again tried to fill a gap that just doesn’t exist?