You’re spending time and money promoting your web site with online press releases, blogs, and email marketing. Avoid common press online release gaffes; read my guide to the Top 10 Online PR mistakes (PDF).

Online press releases are a great way to drive visitors to your website, to get visibility in the search engines, and to get inbound links to your website. It can mean a lot of benefit for relatively little effort.

What are the top ten mistakes you should be avoiding?

1. Lack of success criteria measures
2. Not doing your keyword research
3. Not playing the keyword game
4. Not linking back to your website
5. Using the wrong press release service
6. Too many messages
7. Not reusing your press release content
8. Not measuring your results
9. Sending you press release as an email attachment
10. It’s just not newsworthy

And for good measure, I’ve thrown in an extra pitfall:

11. Abusing Social Media sites.

Read my complete article on the top 10 online PR mistakes

There are a range of specialist Online PR services, such as ProTalk with specialist channels such as Engineeringtalk: news for product design and automation engineers or Manufacturingtalk: news for manufacturing engineers

Why can’t folk in Britain see the cool Google stuff the Americans can see? Since when did we become second-class Googlers?

In the USA they see Google in it’s full glory, with the additional Google OneBox information. OneBox gives you information you need straight away in the search results, without having to click on any links.

London’s weather is better in America:

And they’ve even improved The Tube:

Why haven’t you seen this before, assuming you’re a Brit? If Google thinks you’re foreign, then it tries to redirect you to your local content. And our local UK content ain’t got no OneBox.

Do you want to be an American Googler? Try searching using www.google.com/ncr

‘NCR’ in the link above probably means ‘No country redirect.’ Try it, and you will see some quite surprising differences.

Here are some more examples to make you jealous of Google Yanks:

They make it easier to get from London to Rome:

Google will answer your most important questions:

And there’s even better business data:

No doubt all this functionality will rollout (someday) to our shores, but until then…

Web 2.0 can be difficult to describe – I reckon it is easiest to understand when you see it in action. I’m learning lots by looking through award winning Web 2.0 websites as chosen by SEOMoz.

There are lots of examples to look through: mashups and marketing tools, social networking and search tools.

But my favourite category is Widgets and I’ve had a go using youminis free widget creation tools

It truly is a case of Blue Peter’s “here’s one I created earlier”:

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I’m measuring my web traffic using 2 different services – and getting dramatically different reports. Google Analytics vs WebTrends: which should I believe?

The variance in the reporting is substantial, and each gives quite a different slant on reporting how well my web site is performing:

• Google Analytics reported twice the number searchers clicking through for the keyphrase “internet marketing training”
• WebTrends reported 12% more unique visitors
• Google Analytics says my visitors are primarily from UK, Ireland and Sweden
• WebTrends says my visitors are from UK, USA and unspecified European places

I would always advise clients not to naval-gaze on their web statistics, but instead to use them as trend indicators. And as marketing guru Jim Sterne is fond of saying, if your yardstick measures 39 inches instead of 36 inches, it’s still great to have a measurement tool. (nb – long live imperial measures)

But why are contradictory trends reported even at a macro level by these two systems?

The answer, of course, is that each system is using different ways of handling cookies (deleting and non-acceptance), different ways of defining the word “daily”, and indeed the use of different technologies like JavaScript. It’s really for me to get a better handle on both packages and get a deeper understanding of what the statistics are saying to me.

If you want to learn more Stone Temple Consulting’s 2007 Web Analytics ShootOut gives a very useful overview.

I also think it is time for a reality check, and a reminder that it still isn’t possible to measure the effectiveness of other marketing campaigns like direct mail, radio ads or any of those quaint ways of marketing (!)

I will stick with running both web analytics packages, and together they will serve to validate each other’s results and help me to test the quality of the data.

Why am I using both Google Analytics and WebTrends? To help advise clients:

1. Google Analytics is free, whereas Webtrends is a service you rent, costing typically £20 per month plus setup fees
2. Your data is confidential with WebTrends, whereas I’m sure Google are peeking at my data

Google is rolling out a new way to present its search engine results, integrating data from a range of Google search services: local information, video, books.

“Universal Search” aims to provide even more relevant search results, personalised on our preferences, and promises to provide even more accurate results using Google’s various vertical search engines. The new release also incorporates a new navigational interface.

This is going to have significant implications for search engine marketers, and we’ll all need a better understanding of Google’s various Vertical Search engine capabilities.

Users of Google.com will see the new Google first, and no doubt will be reaching our sunny shores soon.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLane has written a comprehensive overview of Google’s new Universal Search.

Our first Advanced SEO training course was sold out, so we have scheduled to run it again on 3 July 2007. Get in touch if you would like to book your place.

I hope you don’t mind me sharing these rave reviews:

I recently attended Susan’s Advanced Web Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) course. Thanks to the superb delivery and comprehensive content of this course I now have more clarity, energy and enthusiasm for all things SEO AND what’s more I couldn’t wait to recommend this course to my peers. With absolute honesty this has been, by far, the best course I have EVER attended. In my opinion, what Susan doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing!

Aftervote is a customisable Social Search Engine that is also a great little SEO research tool. Aftervote takes results from Google, MSN and Yahoo, and combines the data into one big search mashup.

And it incorporates the all important Web 2.0 element: vote for the sites you do like, or blacklist whole sites if you don’t want them appearing in your own personal search engine results.

Add onto that dynamic widgets that display PageRank, Alexa Rank, links from del.icio.us, technorati, and digg, and you’ve got an excellent SEO analysis tool.

Be sure to customise your Aftervote experience using the My Settings tab

For the geeks amongst us, it make nice use of Ajax

It’s worth spending some time exploring all the functionality AfterVote has to offer, particularly in terms of customising your searching experience.

Should you be worried about Google’s Supplemental Results?

Google has a two tier system for indexing pages on the Internet: a Main Index, and a Supplemental Index.

And as the name suggests, the Main Index contains pages that Google feels are important, and the Supplemental Index contains those leftover pages just don’t carry the same weight. And of course it follows that pages in the Supplemental Index have little or no chance of ranking well in the search engine results.

How can you tell if your website is relegated to the depths of Supplemental Results?

Go to Google and enter: site:www.yourdomainname.co.uk and go to the last page of the search results.

Take a look to see how many of your pages are tagged as Supplemental Results

It is normal to have a proportion of your pages in Supplemental Results, but if you have a lot of Supplemental pages then it may be a signal that something is wrong with your search engine optimisation strategy.

There are a number of reasons why your pages might be in the Supplemental Index. Some common culprits:

• duplicate content
• duplicated Title Tags across pages, or identical meta tags
• a lack of content on each page (very typical of ecommerce product pages)
• a lack of links to the page
• the page used to have inbound links, but those links have now disappeared.

I noticed a number of my own pages have slipped into the Supplemental Results, and we’ve taken the following actions:

1. My Blog was creating postings that contained nearly identical Title Tags. It was prefacing every blog posting Title Tag with “Internet Marketing.” So we’ve turned that off, and will keep an eye on the Supplemental results.
2. Getting more inbound links to internal pages of this website, rather than just to the home page.

I’m finding a number of companies having trouble with Supplemental Results, and they seem to have in common the use of Content Management Systems (CMS) or Ecommerce Systems that are introducing some of these negative factors. They also seem to have few inbound links except to their home page.

So, it’s best to avoid falling into the Supplemental trap by getting a range of inbound links across your whole. site. In particular get high quality links to the valuable pages that you want to pull out of Supplemental Results which in turn will help Google to reindex those pages.

Google’s search engine market share continues it’s upward rise in the UK, topping out at 79% according to Hitwise’s data for the 4 weeks up to 14 April 2007:

Google’s market share in the UK has risen 4% compared to this time last year, with MSN’s collection of search products appearing to be losing ground.

Date: 3rd May 2007

Time: 1st – 3rd May

The educational content of Internet World offers the most comprehensive wealth of digital business subject matter of any Internet event.

Keynote speakers include representative from  Google, Channel 4, BBC, Bebo, IKEA, Sainsbury’s, Yahoo! Europe, Aol, Vodafone, John Lewis, Cheapflights.com, Six Apart and many more

Susan Hallam will be presenting Can you Spot these 10 Online PR Mistakes? on Wed, 2 May at 13:00 in the Revolution Zone Theatre.