At Search Engine Strategies 2013 I was privileged to be sharing a platform with Google's Maile Ohye.  Maile is Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead and (like most techie Googlers I've met) is both a very smart person and a very friendly person.

The panel was "Next Generation Site Architecture" and Maile and I shared the various components of this topic across our two presentations resulting in what was, I hope, a rounded and complete hour on the topic, ably moderated by Will Critchlow of Distilled.

Maile started off by asking you to ask yourself whether you and your team were committed to your user experience, wherever those users were, whatever language they spoke, whatever device they happened to be using.  Her talk went on to tell you how Google fitted into the picture.

If your site ranks well in one language and country, it won’t automatically rank well in all languages and countries.  There are some coding signals you can use to let Google know the countries and languages you are targeting.

rel=canonical/prev/next

The first two coding signals that Maile covered are the rel=canonical tag for signalling the preferred URL among duplicates, and the rel=prev and rel=next tags for indicating the component pages of a series.  I’ve covered those tags before, in the following posts:

• rel=canonical tag
• rel=prev, rel=next and View-All Pages: New Google Guidance

Maile also offered guidance on how to specify a canonical tag for a non-HTML object (such as a PDF).  This can be done through the HTTP response header for the object, for example like so:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/pdf
Link: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.html>; rel="canonical"
Content-Length: 785710

The technique is specified in more detail on Google’s Webmaster Blog entry “Supporting rel="canonical" HTTP Headers” but the Google blog doesn’t tell you that this technique can also be used to provide canonical alternative URLs for multiple objects of the same type.  For example:

GET /white-paper.pdf?referrer=ABC123 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
(...rest of HTTP request headers...)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/pdf
Link: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.pdf>; rel="canonical"
Content-Length: 785710
(... rest of HTTP response headers...)

rel=alternate hreflang=x

Maile then presented the code for language or regional markup of a page, the “hreflang” attribute.  I’ve not covered that previously on the blog, but have done so at previous SES conferences.  Google covers the mechanics of it quite well in their help document, “rel="alternate" hreflang="x" - Help Google serve the correct language or regional URL” but, despite this, there is much confusion around how to use this tag properly.  The situation has become even more confusing as mobile websites have taken off.  Here’s why: previously, a publisher may have found themselves in a position where they had a duplicate content issue, which rel=canonical was designed to address – now that issue is compounded by multiple languages, multiple regions and multiple platforms (mobile, tablet and desktop).  rel=alternate hreflang=x addresses the multiple languages and regions issue, but it’s quite clumsy code – if you wish to implement it, I would recommend doing so through the sitemaps mechanism described here.  Maile listed a couple of benefits of using rel=alternate hreflang=x:

• Helps discovery of new URLs – URLs that were previously unknown to Google could be added to the crawl schedule once discovered via rel=alternate hreflang=x
• More targeted URLs for searches – it’s more likely that a co.uk domain would be listed for UK searchers, rather than the generic com domain, meaning your visitors get to see appropriate content without you having to implement geo-targeting yourself

Building A Smartphone Site

The remainder of Maile’s presentation went on to explore the multiple platform issues that have become more prevalent since the recent proliferation of mobile sites.  Recent SilverDisc blog posts have touched on this, e.g. “Responsive Website Development Using A Mobile-First Strategy”, but Maile’s approach was subtitled “Building A Smartphone Site” and that’s the angle she took.

Maile began this part of her talk by looking at the difference between feature phones and smartphones, the key differences being:

• Feature phones use cHTML (iMode), WML and WAP, whereas smartphones tend to support HTML5 and can therefore render normal desktop pages
• Feature phones normally have keyboards whereas smartphones normally have a touch UI.

Maile then went on to list the three types of smartphone site – responsive, dynamic, and separate URL – and showed the decision tree for it, which I’ll convert into a table here:

Maile listed the Googlebot user agents that are relevant to mobile:

• Feature phones
  • SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
  • DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
• Smartphones
  • Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

This is helpful to know if you’re coding a dynamic or separate mobile site as it allows you to predict which HTTP response and content that the mobile Googlebot will see.

Maile defined a responsive web design as one which used the same HTML at the same URL, and CSS media queries to vary the layout according to the screen size, e.g.

@media only screen and (max-width: 640px) { … }

Note - in practice we’ve found that some common browsers don’t handle media queries well, e.g. IE8, so you’ll find yourself implementing some hacks if you go for a purely responsive design.

Maile cited the BBC FOUR channel as a good example of responsive web design:

When it comes to dynamic-response mobile sites, typically this is done through detecting the user agent and serving appropriate content.  So that Google knows you’re delivering dynamic content, your HTTP response header should include a Vary field as described in Google’s Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites document, e.g. as follows:

GET /page-1 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
(...rest of HTTP request headers...)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Length: 5710
(...rest of HTTP request headers...)

The third type of mobile web design, the separate URL, needs relationship annotation code to tell Google the connection between the various different pages.  The two pieces of code needed are rel=alternate and rel=canonical.  For example, suppose we have www.example.com and m.example.com. On www.example.com we would place the following code in the HTML <head> section to indicate that alternative, mobile content was available for devices of limited screen width:

<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (maxwidth:640px)" href="http://m.example.com/" >

On m.example.com we would place the following code in the HTML <head> section to show that the www version was the canonical:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" >

If automatic redirects take place between the m. and www. domains, the redirect should be served with a HTTP Vary field in the response header, for example:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Vary: User-Agent
Location: http://m.example.com/
(... rest of HTTP response headers...)

Google’s SkipRedirect for mobile searches

Maile then went on to describe Google’s SkipRedirect for mobile searches.  In a nutshell, how this works is as follows

1. a user searches Google on a smartphone
2. Google may display the desktop version of a particular URL, title and snippet in its search results
3. the user clicks that particular result
4. Google automatically redirects that user to the mobile equivalent URL i.e. without ever sending the user to the desktop URL.

This is something you need to be aware of, especially when implementing your own mobile redirects as you could find it very confusing when searchers aren’t hitting the desktop domain/URL you expect them to.

Best Practices For Next Generation Site Architecture

Maile’s advice, when selecting an architecture for your smartphone site, was to consider your users first.  Think about the context they’re in and what their expectations are.  Use responsive web design if it’s right for your users, as it’s good for Google too.  If you can’t use a responsive design, understand the tradeoffs and pitfalls of the dynamic or separate alternatives and make sure you implement them correctly.

Each URL should deliver the same content regardless of the user’s IP or language preferences.  Maile described this as “shareable URLs”, i.e. if you send a URL to a friend in a different country, they should be able to look at the same content as you.  My rule of thumb for this is “Each piece of unique content, indexed once, at the best URL for it.”  It has stood me in good stead for many years.

Think about page speed – this is especially important for mobile users, of course.  The architecture you use must scale to new users and network distances.

Don’t redirect lots of different desktop URLs to one smartphone URL.  If you don’t have a smartphone version of a URL, then show the desktop version instead.

Summary

Maile summarised her talk as follows:

1. Be as educated as possible when making technical site architecture decisions
2. Use signals such as those described in this post to help Google understand your site
3. Test continually!

Thanks to Maile and Will for a great session.  In a future blog post I’ll provide my own presentation from the show.

You may have heard that in the last few weeks Google have introduced AdWords enhanced campaigns. For those of you who haven’t already separated out your mobile and desktop campaigns according to best practice, you’re in luck!

An AdWords enhanced campaign targets all three devices - mobile, tablet and desktop computer - in one campaign. While you could do that before, you can now select mobile preference when writing ads and sitelinks, as well as adjust your bids for mobile devices. 

This article is part one of a three part series:

Part 1: Is AdSense Right For You?

Part 2: Managing The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (You Are Here!)

Part 3: Panda Problems: Laying Out Your Website To Avoid Panda Attack

Once you're set up with AdSense you'll soon want to get a firm grip on the reins of the beast. You're probably obsessively checking the ads on your site to see if they're working, and just what kind of ads Google think are appropriate to show on your site.

Before we begin we should point out the above approach isn't the most helpful way to work out just what's being shown. While we advocate a proactive stance on managing what ads appear on your site there's so many other factors (such as location and personalisation) which make this approach the least effective way to keep an eye on things. Better ways are to use the ad review centre or ask your community for their thoughts on the adverts.

Managing your ads through AdSense is easy and you're likely to want to do it for a number of reasons:

1. You want ads to fit your audience (The Good)

2. You want to avoid advertising competitors (The Bad)

3. You want to keep out low quality ads (The Ugly)

Why would you want to do any of these things? Well, you want ads which fit your audience because if the ads do fit your audience, they're more likely to click - meaning (some) cash for you!  The flip side of this is you want to keep out low quality ads to avoid reducing your CTR. You also want to keep your site free of crappy "One weird trick" or "One tip for a flat belly" ads which could bring your entire site into disrepute. Finally, and quite simply, you don't want to advertise competitors on your website.

Get Your Ads Audience Fit

To get a rough fit for ads and your audience, head over to the "Allow & Block ads" tab in Google AdSense and click "General Categories"

Here you will see a ton of categories which you can allow and block with the slider on the left hand-side.

If you already know your audience, you can make sure that only certain categories appear to your visitors - hopefully improving certain click through rates for your site. Don't underestimate the ability for a site to advertise across visitors’ interests however, it's not as simple as showing a tech ad because you run a tech site; these people drive, eat, insure and impulse purchase as much as the next person. 

If you're unsure about your audience we suggest you run all AdSense categories to begin with.

From the General Categories view you can see the % of ad impressions and earnings - by looking at these you can see what earns you the most, and what takes up the most impressions in your inventory.

To improve this in the future you could block underperforming categories - categories which serve a large number of ad impressions, but don't provide you with at least an equal percentage of your clicks. It's usually best to investigate any of these categories by looking at the sub categories and working out where the "drop" is. 

Ideally, by blocking (sub)categories which under-perform you will populate your site with more ads from better performing categories. Keep track month-to-month and see what improvements come from you actions. It's also worth noting that there is a limit of 50 blocked categories and sub-categories, so choose what you block wisely.

One Tip For Super Sensitive Categories 

In addition to the general categories you'll want to take a look at the "sensitive" categories. This includes sections which are more likely to produce offensive and, to be honest, crap, ads. The sensitive ads categories include things like Dating, Drugs & Supplements, Get Rich Quick, Sex, Religion, Weight Loss and even Black Magic - i.e. the kind of thing you wouldn't necessarily talk about at the dinner table with your grandmother.

These are all set to "blocked" by default, but it's worth checking if you can unblock any of them if they fit with your target market. Once you've done this, you're set up, right? No more rubbish ads?

Not quite. The content network which AdSense runs from is simply gigantic.

There's no way Google is going to manage this for you, so you (and they) have to trust that advertisers are honest about what their ads are about.

And, while you may block the Dating category on your website, if a wiley advertiser wants to pretend that in fact their advert for "Local Ladies Of Unsure Virtue In Your Area" is indeed about investment, gardening or any of your un-blocked categories there's really nothing stopping them.

That is, there's nothing stopping them except you (and the deterrent of being penalised by Google if they get caught).

Ad Blocking In Google AdSense

The main ways to stop poor advertisers, or a competitor, from advertising on your site are by: 

1. Blocking URLS

2. Blocking AdWords Accounts

3. Blocking Networks

All of these require vigilance and keeping an eye on the AdSense on your site. You can do this by hanging around on your site enough to see AdSense (fairly ineffective, but can catch the big problems) or using the ads review centre (good for catching the smaller issues).

Blocking URLS

Blocking URLs is the best way of dealing with competitors. You know their URLs so you can simply add the URLs to the URL block list to stop any ads showing. Bear in mind however that they may use separate domains for landing pages - so you'll still have to keep an eye out!

If you want to block everything from the domain “example.com” this is all you need to put in the URL field - this will catch:

example.com

www.example.com

example.com/page

www.example.com/page

subdomain.example.com

If you'd like to just on a more specific level, you merely need to be more specific. Full details here can be found here.

If you're running your own advertising on the content network, you may want to block your own website from appearing on the page - after all, you needn't advertise your own site to those already on it.

Blocking Accounts

One of the best ways to keep an eye on the ads which AdSense serves  to your site is to use the Ads Review Centre. This shows you a selection of the advertisers and the ads they are showing. You can scroll through the lists to see ads displaying and, most importantly, block individual ads and individual AdWords accounts.

To block individual ads, just click the red block symbol.

To block whole AdWords accounts, use the cog which appears when you hover over the questionable ad.

If you've made a mistake, or you want to review blocked AdWords accounts you need to view the "settings" page (which allows you to unblock advertisers) and to review individual blocked ads you should look at the "blocked" page.

By default AdSense accounts are set to display all ads without review. You can, if you have time, set ads to "hold" until you've reviewed them. This can be a time consuming and expensive - although you are guaranteed agreeable ads on your site. For the most part we recommend letting AdSense do its thing.

Blocking networks

Networks are the partners which Google has joined up with to provide ads. These are usually large ad buying agencies (many of which you'll recognise). Most of the time you'll find that networks play along nicely, however there are occasions that you'll want to turn ad networks off these could be:

1. Serving Incorrect Region/Language Specific Ads: While many networks are quite clever with their location targeting you will occasionally find a network making a mistake - for example, serving German language ads on your UK site. Many networks are broken into regions (for example: AOL: Advertising.com (JP), AOL: Advertising.com (UK) and AOL: Advertising.com (US)) and turning off ads from certain regions can fix this problem.

2. Consistently Poor Ads: It is fairly rare, but it does happen. We know that even massive companies aren't infallible. If you find a network constantly providing poor quality ads, your best bet is to just switch them off - this tends to be less of a headache than hunting down individual ads they may be serving. 

You can turn any individual network on or off in the "Ad networks" tab under "Allow & block ads" with the slider. Because these advertisers compete for the inventory of your site it's better to have as many networks activated as possible - the more competition there is, the higher the price will be pushed.

What Now?

You're probably pretty set up for the time being - but it's a good idea to keep your eye on the ads and look for small ways in which you can improve the quality and relevance of ads served. Finding a little time each day to have a look at the ad review centre, or responding to community requests to get rid of certain types of ad can improve the overall quality of your ads and in turn the first impression your site gives.

Next: Panda Problems!

When the World Wide Web first started out websites were generally only viewed on huge desktop PCs with heavy CRT monitors. At the time these monitors had comparably low resolutions to what we have today. The most common resolutions were 640x480 and 800x600, and eventually this worked its way up to 1024x768 which became the standard size considered when designing websites.

But it's just not that simple any more:

 “By the end of 2013, it is anticipated there will be 44 million smartphone connections in the UK, up from 36 million in 2012. This means that over 50% of adults in the UK will own a smartphone” (Portio Research, January 2013).

With the evolution of smart phones and tablet devices the way people access the internet has changed. We should no longer cater solely for desktop (i.e. keyboard, mouse and a big screen) web browsing. A website designed for a 1024 x 768 screen means people viewing the site on a mobile have to constantly pinch, zoom and scroll around to get what they need from the site.

An Early Solution – Separate Domains

An early solution to the problem was to build separate websites for mobile devices, usually under the 'm' or 'mobile' sub domains of the main site. This normally means double the development and double the maintenance time needed to keep both sites up to date. With the rapid growth of the tablet market, questions arise whether tablet users should see a ‘full’ website or the mobile version.

A Better Way – Mobile First Responsive Websites

An alternative solution is to create a responsive website using the ‘Mobile First’ approach. With this approach you design and create one website to display all content on a mobile device with limited resolutions and reduced capabilities, like no Flash or JavaScript, then through the use of progressive enhancement techniques, such as using CSS3 media queries, change how the content is displayed to be more appropriate to the device viewing the website. Media queries allow the loading of different CSS files based on device resolutions, giving you the opportunity to change the sizes of different elements on your website. 

Mobile phones are generally subject to slower connection speeds than ADSL or cable and can also be restricted by a data contract limiting monthly bandwidth usage. There are two problems when it comes to designing a website for desktops and mobiles – load times and pictures! Mobile visitors will not appreciate your site if it's slow and uses up a lot of a data allowance on big pictures. But, if you only have small images then people visiting your website on a desktop are going to be disappointed. So what’s a developer to do? A great idea is to use mobile first responsive website images.

Using JavaScript and multiple copies of an image in different sizes means you can display the smallest image to all devices; if a bigger screen is detected the image can be replaced with its larger counterpart. Using JavaScript image tags means images can be changed after the page has loaded and people probably won’t even notice you slotting it in. For example here is our original image. It’s 51KB:

And here are the images resized for all devices:

Image Displayed on Desktop – files/styles/list_desktop/image1.jpg (26KB)

Image Displayed on Tablets – files/styles/list_tablet/image1.jpg (16KB)

Image Displayed on Mobiles - files/styles/list_mobile/image1.jpg (14KB)

Remember, it’s not unusual for a web page to contain 50 or more images. If the original files were used the mobile would have to download around two and a half megabytes of information! Displaying the images created for desktop means the download would be over one megabyte, but with the images optimized for mobile saving it’s only 700KB. Over half a megabyte of someone’s precious data limit is saved and the speed of loading increases by doing this. You can see the benefits of progressively enhancing images on your site - but this is just one of the tools in our toolbox for providing the best possible user experience!

What The Future May Bring

Over the next few years it’s likely that we’ll see devices getting both smaller and bigger. We might see head mounted computers, like Google's "Project Glass", or something like an “iGlass/iPatch” from Apple! Then the other extreme is TV with its sizes, screen resolutions and capabilities ever-expanding - and of course these will be connected to the web. How are we going to optimize for screens of vast resolutions designed to be viewed from a distance? Consideration of how content is presented to the viewer across multiple devices will become an essential requirement - responsive web design is one possible solution for us to overcome these challenges.

AdSense, Google's display advertising platform, has a lot going for it, from the vast pool of advertisers it attracts to its excellent tracking and ease of set-up. 

You may have some concerns though. What about all those blogs with the terrible "one tip for a flat belly" ads running on them? Will your site immediately come to resemble one of those? Or worse, what if you get it right, but you've set up your ad templates in a way which sees you penalised by Google's recent Panda updates? Your hard-fought rankings could be savaged.

Never fear though, we're on hand to offer advice and guidance as to what you need to consider before belly-flopping into the world of AdSense! 

This article is part one of a three part series:

Part 1: Is AdSense Right For You? (You Are Here!)

Part 2: Managing The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Part 3: Panda Problems: Laying Out Your Website To Avoid Panda Attack

How Does AdSense Work?

Google AdSense works by you, the ‘publisher’, placing a small snippet of code on your website to display any ads which AdSense wishes to deliver to your page. A pool of advertisers bid for these ad spaces on your, and others’, website. This collection of websites is known as the Google Display Network. The higher the quality of the publisher's website, and the tougher the competition for placement on that website, the higher the cost is to the advertiser and the more profit to be shared between the publisher and Google. Ads are placed on a publisher’s site based on page content and general site affinity - as well as things like the visitor's search history.

When a visitor to your site clicks on an ad you get paid, Google gets paid and hopefully the advertiser gets a customer. Sounds like winners all round surely? Yes, most of the time but there are some drawbacks  - we'll deal with these in the Limitations of AdSense section below.

Is AdSense Right For You?

Before you begin you need to know whether AdSense is an advertising solution that works for your website. There are two main types of websites out there – ‘ecommerce’ sites which directly sell services and goods, and ‘content’ websites such as blogs, forums and social sites.

If you run a content website you should feel confident that AdSense is for you. Why? Because you don't have another revenue stream to interrupt. AdSense is good for websites which don't have a direct way of making money through a product or service on offer.

In that case your consideration should not be so much whether display advertising is best for your website, but more whether AdSense display advertising is the best option for you: in most cases it will be at the very least a happy medium. Because of the sheer size of the AdSense network there's almost no limit to the kinds of niches which AdSense can find relevant ads for. Even if your direct ad sales pay better and are more directly relevant to your visitors, AdSense is a handy tool to fall back on for remnant or backfill campaigns (i.e. the impressions that remain once your premium advertisers have had their share).

However, if you do have a product to sell, or some other means of converting visitors into cash, then AdSense probably isn't for you.

Why You Shouldn't Use AdSense (Or Any Advertising) On Your Ecommerce Site

With an ecommerce site you're likely to have built your site as a funnel from the first landing page (e.g. via PPC, organic or direct traffic) through to your checkout/conversion page. You have probably spent a great deal of time working out what's the smoothest, quickest way to turn a fresh visitor into a customer. Sticking an ad on the page is like putting a "diversion" sign on the 100m track.

Every AdSense placement is an attempt to distract visitors from your website to their product page and into their funnel - and you certainly don't want that.

There's even a fair chance that your competitors are running AdSense campaigns which, as you're in the same industry, will have a great deal of relevancy to your site and your customers. You wouldn't want to advertise your competitors' products next to your own would you?

If that hasn't dissuaded you from running AdSense on an ecommerce site (or you have a hybrid site containing a mixture of content and ecommerce elements) here are a few quick rules to keep in mind:

1. Keep your competitors off the page: You can do this fairly easily within AdSense using the allow and block ads facility. We'll cover this in a later AdSense blog entry.

2. Don't advertise at key conversion points: This should be a no-brainer, but it's something that can slip through when defining advertising areas of a website template. Advertising on the checkout or shopping basket pages is the same as suggesting that the customer really must shop around first!

3. Don't place ads in better positions than products: Ad placement is a tricky proposition in the post-Google Panda world, but as a general rule of thumb they should be a secondary source of income and be treated as such.

AdSense - What You Need To Know

Once you've decided that AdSense is for you there are a few things you need to keep in mind regarding the rules and applications of AdSense.

Getting Set Up

Getting set up with AdSense is simple. Head over here and sign up with your Google account.  Once set up you can start creating ads on the "My Ads" page. Here you choose your ad type (text, image & rich media, or both), ad size, and if you're using text - the way that appears.

What's Best?

When it comes to AdSense ad units there's a desire to just put "the best" out there - whatever that is. It used to be that image/display advertising would bring better returns than text ads, but this isn't as clear cut any more. 

The position pushed by Google is that a mix of image and text ads is the best option as it makes the advertising pool massive - more advertisers means more bids for positions,  means the better rate you (and Google) get. While this may be the case it really does depend on your site. 

We suggest tracking performance over time and testing to see what combination of text and image advertising works for you. For example, you may want to test whether having text ads in one location improves the CPC of other ad units across the page or if visitors are more likely to be drawn to image ads when they're placed within text blocks.

Regarding ad sizes, this usually depends on the layout of your site, but a variety is encouraged. We've found that large MPUs (366x280) tend to earn a higher CPC than ads of other shapes and sizes - but this again may be due to their prominent positioning on most of the pages they're present on. Generally speaking however you want to tend towards larger, newer ad unit sizes as older sizes (such as 468x60 and 120x600) are no longer as widely supported by advertisers.

If you currently have an old template for your site which contains smaller, less popular ad-types, updating this to allow new ad formats can be a very quick way to improve AdSense revenues.

Limits of AdSense

There are a few limits to AdSense - and falling foul of Google's policies can see you booted out of the AdSense club pretty fast.

There is a maximum of 3 content ad units per page and only one of Google’s new, and frankly giant, 300x600px ad units per page. Google put limits on the number of units per page to avoid publishers putting dense collections of AdSense on a page making it impossible to avoid clicking ads (this is against the rules) or, alternatively, providing millions of unseen impression.

Other limits include not making your ads look like content (and vice versa), aligning images with ads so the images look like they're part of the ad, placing other websites displaying AdSense ads in frames on your site, placing ads on sites with pop-ups, reloading ads on a cycle or encouraging accidental clicks in any way. In short, if there is an obvious way to game Google AdSense, it's been tried already and you're not going to last long if you try it!

What Now?

If you intend to run AdSense on your site you should get started by designing or updating your ad template and have a good read of the Google AdSense Ad Placement Policies document. Once you've got AdSense running you should begin to test different combinations of ad type across your pages and optimize what works best for you.

Next: Managing The Good, The Bad And The Ugly Of Google AdSense

On Monday we extended a warm welcome to Neil Campbell as he joined the SilverDisc team.

Neil is taking on the role of Business Development Director and is based at our head office in Kettering. Primarily tasked with bringing new business to us, Neil brings a wealth of experience to SilverDisc having worked in sales for over 20 years.

Educated at the University of Leicester, Neil has previously worked for Tescocars.com, AutoQuake and JATO Dynamics. In his spare time, Neil enjoys following rugby football.

Why not get in touch with him to find out how SilverDisc’s unique combination of experienced, friendly people and advanced technology can help you achieve amazing results for your company?

Did you know that you can send a video over "Vine" or make a call from "Line"? If that sounds like gibberish, enjoy this week's blog post for a round-up of the latest news from the word of social media.

Twitter Launch Video Sharing App Vine

Currently only available on iOS (i.e. Apple’s iPhone and iPad) Twitter’s new social video app, Vine, lets users share short, 6-second videos with their followers. The clips can contain as many scenes as users desire, just as long as they fit in the 6 second time allowance. Much like popular photo sharing app Instagram, Vine’s lack of desktop presence means that it relies entirely on the popularity of the smartphone to attract registrations.

Users have expressed some annoyance with the standalone app, largely due to the fact that - sometimes very noisy - videos autoplay by default. Interestingly in light of the rivalry between social media giants Twitter and Facebook, Vine initially offered users a way to find friends via their Facebook account; Facebook quickly put a stop to the function by preventing Vine from accessing friend lists.

Facebook Graph Search Revealed

Facebook's search function hasn't exactly been lauded in past - many users note how difficult it is to find friends and pages on the popular social network. This is - possibly - all set to change with the site's introduction of Facebook Graph Search.

Presumably to the relief of Google, the Facebook Graph will be focused on more “social” searches (i.e. “what bands do my friends like?”) rather than more general web searches. For businesses looking to attract more customers via Facebook, Graph Search validates our efforts to attract "likes" to our pages, with a higher number of likes likely to increase the page's prevalence in the Graph Search results.

Free Calls through Facebook

Facebook recently added a new feature that allows free phone calls for US iPhone owners. Using the Facebook Messenger app, users will be able to make free calls to their friends as long as they have a WiFi or data connection to the internet. The calls can only be made if both parties have the Messenger app installed on their phone. Facebook is expecting to roll out the new function to additional countries and operating systems in the future. With Facebook striving to increase advertising revenue, it will be interesting to see whether we’ll eventually be required to sit through an advert before we can connect to our friends.

MSN Messenger Set to Close

As a number of messenger apps open their doors, MSN Messenger (previously known as Live Messenger) has announced that it will shut down on March 15^th. Following this date, users attempting to log in will be prompted to download and install Skype on their computer.

Line Messaging App Attracts 100 Million Users

Social chat app Line, available on iOS and Android devices, now boasts more than 100 million users worldwide - that’s a lot of users for an app that most people in the U.K. haven’t heard of! Used by roughly 1/3 of mobile users in Japan, the popular smartphone app can be used to make free phone calls and texting.

A competitor to messaging app WhatsApp as well as Facebook's Messenger service, January has seen social mobile users becoming spoiled for choice with alternatives to the traditional text message and phone call.

Your website is often your first, and perhaps only, chance to market your company’s products and services to online customers, so make the most of this opportunity by ensuring your website’s content is top notch.

Not only does it give viewers an instant impression of the quality of your company (glaring spelling and grammar errors do not bode well!), but high quality content can also help you rank higher in search engine results.

Content needs to be fresh – it’s important to regularly update the written text on your site. Make sure it engages with your target audience and is interesting enough to encourage people to return.

To help people find your site via search engines, include important keywords in your written content but only in context and where it is appropriate to do so. Definitely do not over-use keywords – this practice is known as keyword stuffing and not only will your content not read well, it can cause a webpage to be penalised as search engines will think it is spam. An example of this would be such a paragraph:

Are you looking for cheap gym equipment? We have cheap gym equipment for sale. Our website is the best for cheap gym equipment. Check out our cheap gym equipment now.

It’s important to create content that fulfils the needs of the people looking for the information. Most people start their online search for a product or service with an information-based query. At this early stage, they don’t want to be bombarded with sales pitches, so subtle sales messages are key here. Ensure that, above anything else, your content is useful.

Homebase’s website is a great example of this. The “help and advice” section on the site provides people with a range of “how to guides” for jobs such as laying laminate flooring, fitting locks and planting trees. Each guide is information-rich and details everything you need to know in easy-to-follow steps. Some of the guides feature videos too. Sales promotion is included in the form of a green button which reads “Choose from a range of flooring”. This button directs users to the retail part of the site, but it is a discrete, inoffensive effort that is not too “salesy”.

If you’d like more information about how SilverDisc can assist you with your website's content, contact us or send us an email at info@silverdisc.co.uk.