Now we’ve managed to get our grubby mitts on to the Beta version of Google Analytics’ new Real TimeData offering.
First impressions? It’s impressive – it made me feel a lot like Big Brother looking at individual clicks, as they happened, with a map of the world below the results pinging red dots at me as visits from across the globe came in.
But – aside from making you feel like the omnipresent dictator of a fictional totalitarian regime – what benefits can using Google Analytics Real Time data bring?
Up until now, the default report view in Google Analytics has been the last month’s data, ending at midnight the previous day – so very much about looking at your performance retrospectively to inform future site design improvements and SEO activity. You can change the Date Range to include the current day, but it is not up to the minute (general opinion among SEOs is that the data is anything between an hour to four hours behind what’s actually happening).
Real Time Data allows you to see what visitors are doing as soon as they do it. On tests we’ve done, a click in our office down the road showed up within a couple of seconds.
The new Real Time dashboard is an impressive beast…
Click image for larger version
Immediately you can see how many people are on your site RIGHT NOW, and what proportion of them are new visitors vs returning.
There are two graphs – one showing pageviews per minute (for the last 30 minutes) and the other showing pageviews per second (for the last 60 seconds) – with little blue bars pinging up each time a user visits a new page. This really is the stuff of a Bond villains lair!
When Google launched Panda in March 2011 many websites began to suffer and many were rewarded. It has shaken up the world of SEO. Since then there have been and will be many more baby panda updates. The last major one, Panda 2.2 update, being rolled out around mid June.
Just when we thought we knew how to get ranked; build unique quality content, put your Keywords in the title, url and content body and gather lots of lovely links to the page, everything changed. I’m not saying that these things are not still relevant, or important (they are) but the bar has been raised and the goal posts have moved. The user experience is now a bigger part of the mix. In fact Google Panda has radically changed they way we need to approach SEO.
Panda is designed to weed out content specifically written for SEO purposes. Panda is looking for content written for people, content that people want to share.
What Google seems to be doing is putting more emphasis on a different set of metrics, the user experience. Now Google appears to be basing the quality of a site more on the grading you get from Google quality raters. They (humans) quantify a sites quality on how much they like the site. These raters are hired as contractors to conduct in-depth Internet based research and evaluate websites based on a set of guidelines set by Google. Although these Google quality raters have been around for years, many SEO experts believe that Panda gives more weight to the information they provide in their algorithm than before and in a more sophisticated way.
Quality raters are asked questions like “Would you trust this site with your credit card? Do you think the design of this site is good?” Questions are based around the site’s trustworthiness, credibility, and quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the differences between the human and machine results.
The Lifestyle Photography Competition is NOW CLOSED!!! Thank you to all that have entered, watch this space for the winner! We have however now launched our NEW Street Photography Competition.
Grandad's Wall by Heather Buckley
Enter our Lifestyle Photography Competition for a chance to win Two beautiful Classic Aluminium Mounted prints of images of your choice, courtesy of Anne Herbert Photo Artistry, The Aluminium mounted prints are finished with a pair of wooden battens giving the effect of floating panels when hung on the wall.
Of course we at Silicon Beach Training being social media heavyweights will make sure you will gain great exposure for your images when the winner is announced.
The theme for our competition this time is ‘Lifestyle‘.
“Lifestyle” is open to wide interpretation. We are looking for images that describe the way that people live. If you want to see the winners of our last competition to judge the standard of entries click here.
To keep up-to-date the competition head over to Flickr, our Facebook page, and also follow our RSS Feed. The winner will also be announced on this blog and also on Twitter so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @SBTtraining.
Competition Prize – Win two classic prints on aluminium mounts that look like floating panels when hung
Many thanks to Anne Herbert www.anneherbert.com for sponsoring the prize. The prize on offer is two Classic Aluminium Mounts, image and size of your choice. The lightweight aluminium panels provide a modern and contemporary display giving the effect of floating panels when hung on the wall..
Images are printed onto high grade inkjet paper as a giclee print, sealed with a ‘metallic’ texture-effect laminate for an authentic look and feel, and then mounted onto a 3mm rigid aluminium panel.
The mount is finished at the back with a pair of 2″x1″ wooden battens giving the illusion of a floating panel when hung.
See more details of the prize here.
‘Lifestyle‘ Photography Competition Judge
Nicole Young is a full-time photographer and author currently living in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah. She specialises in food and lifestyle photography and licenses her images through iStockphoto and Getty Images.
You can email your entry to photocomp@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk with “Lifestyle” as the subject of the email. Attachments should be no larger than 3MB.
For email entries: the file name must state the title of the image and the photographer, e.g. Heather Buckley’s image above could be named as “Grandads Wall by Heather Buckley“, and the email message should also state the photographer’s full name.
A maximum of ONE photograph entry per entrant will be accepted.
If you don’t already have a Flickr account it’s easy and free to set one up, then you need to join the group and add your image (you can only enter 1 image) to the Silicon Beach Training Flickr Page.
We run quarterly photography competitions so keep in touch, let us know if you have any suggestions for the next competition theme or if you want to sponsor future competitions.
The sun’s out, Brighton Festival is on, and as I stroll past the amazing independent shops in the streets surrounding Silicon Beach Training, mulling over which the manyfantastic North Laine cafes to buy my lunch from, it’s hard to imagine a better city to work in.
This is a fact not lost on the good people at Google, who have named Gardner Street on their shortlist for the “Best Shopping Street” in the UK Award. According to the Argus, the shortlist was drawn up by “a panel of experts from the world of travel, lifestyle and popular culture, including TV presenter Dawn Porter and X Factor Stylist Grace Woodward”.
And we can certainly vouch for their good judgement, as all of us in the office spend much of our hard earned cash in these very shops! Delegates attending ourTraining Coursesoften tell us they choose Silicon Beach Training because of the fantastic location and buzz around the area – it’s great to get away somewhere fresh for a few days training away from the office. By the way, new public courses include Google Analytics Courses, Agile Project Management and CSS3 Training – among hundreds of others!
Voting closes on 22nd May, with the winner to be announced in June. We’ve already voted for Gardner Street in the poll, and any self-respecting Brightoner should do the same!
WATCH THIS SPACE for our List of Favourite Shops in the North Laine – which is currently being enthusiastically compiled by the office team!
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll know that we’ve been championing the use of Social Media in business marketing for a LONG time! We were among the first in the UK to offer a Social Media Training course, and we’ve written extensively about how important Social Media is in the modern marketplace right here!
Social Media is important for 2 reasons -well, it’s actually important for LOADS of reasons, but my two for today are:
It provides a platform for businesses to speak directly to your customers
It’s really good for SEO
Most people agree on number 1. Many people are still quite sceptical about number 2, and argue that ‘traditional SEO’ – i.e. link building, on page optimisation etc… still have more effect than Social Media.
However – it’s hard to ignore the fact that the major search engines are investing a lot of time and money in Social, and that their algorithms appear to be placing more emphasis on Social Media in their SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)
However a lot of people won’t believe that Social Media has an effect on SEO without seeing clear proof. It was therefore refreshing to see at the recent BrightonSEO conference, a presentation by Paul Chaloner of Fresh Egg which summarised some tests he had done using Twitter providing exactly that. He showed that using Twitter alone, without any other promotion, can push your pages up the rankings (and even on to the front page). Paul called this TweetSERPing. A video and summary of the presentation are below…
Using Twitter for SEO – #BrightonSEO Video
What is TweetSERPing?
Very simply – TweetSERPing is using Twitter to improve web ranking (and is a term I believe invented for this presentation – lets see if it catches on!) Paul’s presentation described two tests that he ran on separate blog posts, where he used TweetSERPing exclusively to improve ranking. Check out the video… a summary is below.
Paul started by asserting that EVERYTHING is a social network. Whenever we interact with anyone, whether that be online, in the pub, at the office, wherever – we are ‘social networking’. Social Media marketing, whilst using modern technology, is just an extension of things that have been going on for years (people recommending things to each other!).
Our latest Retweet Competition closed on Monday April 18th – thanks to everyone who entered. The competition was kindly sponsored by MyTrainingManager- a fantastic organisation based here in the South East that provides a range of support services for businesses, including people management, development and training advice.
We had LOTS of entries – all of whom are now following MyTrainingManager on Twitter – so watch out for regular tweets from Jen Tarjanyi!
The competition prize was a free place on any of our courses up to 2 days in length, a selection which included our Management Training, Indesign Training andExcel Training courses (among many others!)
Stephen is a Brighton based web editor and designer, and has chosen to attend our Illustrator Training course on 28/29 July
He told us: “I was really surprised but excited to have won – I chose Adobe Illustrator as it’s something I always wanted to do but as the majority of my work is as a web editor/marketer it’s not something that I could readily justify budget for.”
The competition has really helped in raising awareness of the services that MyTrainingManager provides, and Stephen was impressed with the services they offer – he added:
“I think helping business in listening to and developing their most valuable asset (people) can only be a good thing. Often I think employees may have a mistrust of traditional HR which they may feel supports the company first. I also feel that employees may fear repercussions if they are too open. So I can really see the value of a specialised mediator that has the expertise to listen and help in finding the balance of interests.”
Since writing this we have attended Brighton SEO 2011, click the link to see our first blog post of the morning session and stay tuned for more to come.
Writing or blogging about trending topics can be a great way to generate traffic (and links) to your site, provided that your content is high quality and that you pick the right keywords to optimise on.
The second half of that equation can be the difference between loads of traffic and very little, so identifying what people want to read about (and more importantly, exactly what they are typing in to Google right now) is paramount. If you can be among the first to blog on a trending topic you can get your site on the front page of Google quickly, and bag the traffic (what’s more if you’re the first, you’re more likely to stay on the front page longer).
So – “how can I find trending topics?” At Friday’s BrightonSEO conference Malcolm Coles gave a very informative (and highly entertaining) presentation about how he used a variety of tools to discover trending topics when working on the celebrity news site HolyMoly, including some very interesting data on the searching habits of the Great British male!
Here are our video highlights from his presentation, along with a summary of the tools discussed (more information can also be found on Malcolm’s site here)….
News Search Tools: How to Find Trending Topics
We’ve split the video of Malcolm’s presentation in to two parts – the first summarises the News Search Tools used to identify Trending Topics. The second, which I couldn’t resist adding, is an example of how HolyMoly used these tools to exploit the search term ‘Karen Gillan Underwear‘, which reveals some interesting (and very amusing) trends in men’s searching patterns after they’ve watched Doctor Who!
#BrightonSEO Video: News Search Tools Summary
A summary of the News Search Tools mentioned is provided below, but do watch the video as Malcolm puts them nicely in to context with examples…
News Search Tools Summary:
Which of these tools you use will depend largely on the sort of content you publish…
Google Algorithm January 2011 update means big penalties for Duplicate Content
Last week Google’s Matt Cutts announced an algorithm update that has a substantial effect on duplicate content. This much anticipated update is already sending ripples through the SEO community.
“My [previous] post mentioned that ‘we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.’ That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.”
This means that the duplicate content filters have been tightened and Google is using more sophisticated ways of identifying original content. This is great news if your content is fresh and constantly updated, and bad news for the increasing number of sites that ‘scrape’ existing content from the web. Of course there will always be casualties, some site owners are claiming that Google has mistakenly identified their site as having duplicate or low value content.
So What Can I do About Duplicate Content?
If your site has recently lost ranking, the first thing you can do is to identify whether any other sites have copied or scraped your content.
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Last week Google’s Matt Cutts 
