At the BRAND New 2010 Conference and Awards, Belfast Telegraph owner Independent News and Media picked up an award for marketing excellence in the services sector. Additionally INM received a highly commended in the best online marketing programme. Visual Script congratulates Independent News and Media on their success!

We at Visual Script have contributed modestly to Independent News and media’s online success at these awards, as we provide ongoing technical, SEO, social media marketing, Google Adwords, and email marketing consulting and execution to the Belfast Telegraph and its network of sites.

Our SEO guy Barry was invited to join the SEO Dojo fellas for their weekly radio podcast, to talk about linkbuilding and SEO for Google News. It was a great show with a good discussion on linkbuilding and the various aspects of SEO for Google News. You can stream or download the podcast here (Barry’s contribution starts 40 minutes in):

» SEO Dojo Radio Episode 4
“In the second part of the show today we’re having Barry Adams from Visual Script in Belfast. He deals with some major newspapers and as such we’ll be asking him about his (extensive) knowledge of Google News.”

Sitemaps are a crucial aspect of a successful website. First, let’s make it clear what we mean with a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps: one meant for visitors of your website, and one for search engine spiders.

Sitemaps for Visitors
The first type of sitemap is probably very familiar to you. It’s a webpage that shows an overview of all the content on a website. You can see an example here of our own Visual Script sitemap.

This type of sitemap is very useful as it allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for without having to go through your website’s navigation. Especially for large websites it’s recommended to have a well-structured sitemap that is linked from every page on your site, for example in your website’s footer.

Sitemaps for Search Engines
The second type of sitemap is a so-called XML sitemap. This type of sitemap is specifically intended for search engines, and it does roughly the same: allowing search engines to find all the content on your website quickly and easily.

Why bother with an XML sitemap then, if it’s the same as a normal sitemap? Because an XML sitemap allows you to include extra information about the content on your site, such as:

• when a webpage was last updated
• how often a webpage is usually updated
• what the priority of a webpage is relative to other pages on your site
• what type of content a webage contains (text, video, etc)

An XML sitemap allows a search engine to quickly and efficiently index all the content on your website, making sure your site is fully spidered and all your content is part of a search engine’s index.

Google recommends every site includes an XML sitemap. You can create an XML sitemap yourself manually, or you could have one generated automatically – ask your site’s web developer about it, or look at Google’s sitemap help pages here.

For larger websites it’s recommended to have a sitemap created automatically, so that whenever you create a new page or update an existing page your sitemap is automatically updated as well.

You can tell Google you have a sitemap by submitting it manually in Google’s Webmaster Tools, or you can include a sitemap reference in your robots.txt file. The second option is always recommended as this way other search engines such as Bing can also find your sitemap.

Need help with sitemaps or other aspects of your website? Get in touch with us at Visual Script, an experienced Belfast Web Design and Development company that can help you with all aspects of your online adventure.

Our search engine guy Barry gave a talk last month at the Barcamp Belfast conference. The talk was about some technical SEO mistakes web developers occasionally make when building websites, that result in the site being significantly less search engine friendly than it should be.

If you missed the talk or want to absorb its content some more, here are the slides:

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph.)

Google seems to have a global stranglehold on the internet search market. With market shares ranging from 60% to 95%, depending on what country you’re in, Google is the preferred search engine for users from Warsaw to Hawaii.

But there are some big gaps in Google’s global dominance. Take Russia for example. A Russian company called Yandex has monopolised the Russian internet landscape for years with its own Russian-language only web portal, yandex.ru.

On May 19th Yandex launched an international version of its search engine on yandex.com. Search engine professionals around the world fell on it like sharks, trying to find faults with it. We search engine optimisers love to complain, and we were fully expecting Yandex’s foray in to Google’s territory to be buggy and flawed.

We were wrong. As it turns out the yandex.com search engine is good. Really good. The results Yandex provides are amazingly relevant, accurate, and spam-free. It easily beats Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to undermine Google’s dominance, and might even be better than Google.

Google initially came to dominance because its results were more accurate and cleaner than those of its rivals at the time. Serious internet users quickly adopted Google as their preferred search engine, and it spread virally from there.

But over the years Google has kept adding features and functionality to its engine, which have ended up cluttering and distorting their search results. Add to that the pervasive presence of ads on Google – 99% of Google’s revenue is from its advertising platforms – and you end up with a search engine that perhaps has lost a lot of its appeal.

Yandex seems primed to fill Google’s shoes as the new favourite search engine for serious internet surfers. Its results are clean and accurate and lack the clutter that has come to characterise Google.

It will take much more than just a strong search engine to overthrow Google. But I for one welcome the added choice and hope that Yandex, as well as Bing, can nibble at Google’s market share. Competition is good for everyone.

Barry Adams is search engine specialist at Visual Script, a Belfast web design & development firm. He’s thinking of taking a Russian language course.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph.)

Last week I received a surprising email from Facebook entitled ‘Your Weekly Facebook Page Update’. It contained an overview of all the Facebook pages I am an admin of, with statistics on the number of new fans, wall posts and visits to the page.

Those of us who use Facebook and other social media sites in a professional capacity have been aching for reliable metrics to judge the success of our social media marketing campaigns.

Facebook launched its Insights tool in late 2007 as a means for page admins to gather data on what happened on their pages and get some basic demographical data on the composition of their fan base. However, since then there’s been remarkably little movement by Facebook on the analytics front.

This latest move is an indication that Facebook is starting to take the professional use of their social media platform more seriously, and can be seen as an outreach to social media marketers.

The fact that several professional web analytics vendors such as Omniture and WebTrends have recently announced new Facebook tracking features, makes this latest move from Facebook just that little bit juicier.

Perhaps Facebook is trying to pave the way for its own (paid) analytics package, that will hopefully allow admins to gain deeper insights in to how visitors reach their pages and how they interact with it.

This will hopefully help take a lot of the guesswork out of social media marketing, and allow clients of social media marketers to demand clearer ROI on their investment.

Barry Adams is a search engine specialist at Visual Script, a Belfast web design & development firm. He spends way too much time on Facebook and somehow manages to pass it off as ‘work’.