Jennifer Slegg has 52 different, excellent ways to make your blog more user- and search engine-friendly. One of those classic pages that could save the weary digital marketer several hours work.

Being number one in natural search is important, we kind of knew that.

But just how important we probably couldn’t have said. The answer is hidden away in a Wikipedia entry about click through rates. Wikipedia links to Red Cardinal’s definitive analysis of click-through rates based on Search Engine ranking. They base as their work on data inadvertently leaked by AOL. It turns out that the number one position is hugely important. It brings almost four times more click-throughs (42.3%) than number two (11.9%).

And if you are not on page one, forget it. Result #11 has 80% fewer click-throughs than number 10.

A mile and a half up the road from our office in London is an area - Borough - which has undergone huge investment over the last few years. There are plans for even greater development, including constructing the tallest building in Europe, the Shard of Glass, designed by the man who co-designed the Pompidou Centre, Renzo Piano.

A search on Google for Shard of Glass reveals some interesting things about how brands function online. There is an official site for the Shard of Glass, but it has the unintuitive name www.shardlondonbridge.com and is not to be found on the first page of results. The number one result is a website called www.shardofglass.co.uk. This is the unofficial website for the Shard of Glass, built by James Hatts, the man behind the local community site www.london-se1.co.uk, home of a thriving message board about local issues.

What else is on the Google front page? A spoof website about ice lollies that contain “shards o’ glass”, news coverage of the project’s announcement, a book called Shard of glass, a software company called Shard of Glass studios … you get the picture.

Why is the community site result number one?

• It has an intuitive url
  
• It benefits from a large number of contextual links including links from influential sites like dmoz
  

The community site is number one despite consisting of a news story and little other information. Why is that?

Well, let’s look at the official site. This contains beautiful panoramas of the site, location maps, statistics - a smorgasboard of relevant information.

BUT search engine crawlers see less than fifty words of this. Here are those words:

“Home A Vertical City Timeline Renzo Piano Image Gallery Development Team Contacts Information You need flash to view this. State-of-the-art office space Efficient, flexible floor plates from 14,456 sq ft (1343 m²) to 31,473 sq ft (2,921m²) to let. More info Truly mixed use A truly mixed use vertical city in one building. More info T&Cs Sitemap”

Notice the absence of the phrase “Shard of glass”. Notice the presence of the phrase “you need flash to view this”.

There is no interactivity in the official website, no fresh content, no reason for the crawlers to visit it. (The news page is as invisible as all the rest, and without syndication, noone else will be carrying its headlines). Its links are partly from professional partners and partly internal.

I do not write about this because this corporate site is particularly worse than any other websites. A search engine optimisation expert last week (the largest in the UK) informed us that only 3% of websites are accessible to the search engines. But the two Shard of glass websites neatly symbolise the problems with brand websites. They are too often invisible online because of poor design, and this weakens the underlying brand. The Shard clearly has a community of stakeholders which lives around it, is interested in it, part of which lives at http://www.london-se1.co.uk. If, during the lifetime of the project, there is a controversy about its development, or any issue on which it needs the support of its stakeholders, it has no links with them. It is marooned, isolated. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Shard and other brands, can reach out into their communities of stakeholders. To do so is not just good politics, it is good business.

Search engine optimisers BigMouth Media are back in the Google organic index. I mailed Steve Leach to find out what went wrong, but can’t find a public statement online. The threads here are the only clues and are full of (for me, baffling) speculation about redirects and scrolling text in divs.

The phenomenon of consumer blogs having such a disproportionate influence on major brands, which we highlighted in our “Search is Brand” study, derives in part from the failure of brands to create functional, easily indexed sites for themselves, and to produce lively, relevant and topical content.

But some companies get over this by cheating. They do deals with unethical agencies who use spam and dummy websites to create phoney relevance and push a brand up to the top of a search term willy-nilly. We have been anxious for a while about this, as large brands have been using this technique not realising the risks (pace the BMW ban) or suffering from the fact that their competitors are doing so.

Ashley Friedlein, writing on e-Consultancy’s forums, points out that some black hat tactics appear to be working for some SEO-related consultancies. A company called Oyster-web seems to have got itself up to number 2 in the “Search engine optimisation” search, but its business seems to be selling leads to SEO companies.

At the same time Google appears to have woken up to this to the extent of going after first BMW and now some SEO companies to punish. It’s very surprising that they have picked a highly reputable agency like Scotland’s Bigmouthmedia to zero-rank. Bigmouth have some very respectable clients and it would be surprising if they have knowingly done anything unethical, but it is a chilling development.

BMW are back. German web search guru Alan Webb writes about it on Public Relations Online. Apparently the speed of their reinclusion in the Google index has caused some raised eyebrows. Scandic Hotels are still in the outer darkness of zero page rank many months after being booted by Google for similar offences.

How often do search engines crawl the web? A report by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor of the Department of Information Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany looked at websites with daily updates and concluded that many were not crawled more than once every 20 days. There are specific issues identified at Yahoo, and to a lesser degree MSN which often seem to have out of date caches.

The study was undertaken using the expression “Helicopter crash in Iraq”, and looking at updates from Reuters.

The implication of this for communications business professional is that even with daily updated content you cannot be sure that your content will be found by any search engine.

Unless you are using RSS and blogging techniques to ensure that your content is published to as many intermediary sites as possible your story may not even be indexed by major search engines within the news cycle. The implication of this study is that even if a PR professional puts up a press release on their own site and on e.g. PR Web, it might not be being indexed by the major search engines, and is therefore unlikely to be found the 75% of users who use search engines to find information about companies.

Mark Rogers is interviewed by Guillaume du Gardier of Blogging Planet in a podcast about online visibility, brand auditing and benchmarking, and brand response.

Steve Broback in an excellent piece at the Blog Business Summit site observes that a company may waste money spent on search engine optimisation (SEO) on an existing, poorly designed site. Better he argues, to invest in “a brand new Lexus” - a site built as a blog, where the money goes on well-tagged, freshly published content.

Market Sentinel gave a presentation on September 15th at the Internet Advertising Bureau, looking at how company’s reputations are effected by search. It is interesting to note that a huge consumer-facing company like Hutchison 3G, despite vast off-line investments in branding, have somehow ended up with a web site which contains fewer than 50 words indexable by search engines, with zero information about their products, services, customer issues, investor issues etc.

Hutchison Whampoa hopes to float the company next year and one wonders how long it will take them to sort this out.

Chris Edwards has published a long and thoughtful piece about our Search is brand white paper.

He makes one point that calls for a clarification - yes the stats were UK only. We are planning a wider survey in due course.

He also makes two points which call for a response:

1) the report counted everything that was might be seen as damaging to the brand as “negative”. He mentions the fact that a search on Dairylea brought up a reference to an historic product recall. This is true. We assumed that anything that would diminish the public perception of the brand was negative.

2) Chris questions whether search engine optimisation and blogging are enough when a brand is deep in the mire, as in the case of the Kryptonite lock. We would answer that the Kryptonite case and the recent issues with Land Rover instead demonstrate a couple of important things:

a brand under attack in the blogosphere has to respond early. If a blogger has raised a valid problem, then it is important not to ignore the problem and hope the blogger will get bored and desist. Blog attacks are public and remain on search engines forever. If the problem is a real one, others will find the attack and link to it.

the brand has to address the problem. There is no point in planning a sophisticated Google-bombing, SEO-ed up to the gills, widely syndicated response that doesn’t take away the original pain. Only if action has been taken on the problem, and the company has publicised that action, will the links go to the new source of authority. For example the “how to get a cash refund for my Kryptonite lock” page.

We would argue that SEO and blogging are both useful tools in making a corporate response public. If there is a problem that effects a small number of consumers, then the brand has nothing to lose by creating a well-indexed page which comes up on Google when a description of that problem is entered as a search term, and making sure that all stakeholders in the company know about that page. Ideally it would be part of an FAQ.

Blogging is an informal way of dealing with issues major and minor and getting the word out. “We screwed up. We have decided to give you all your money back or offer you a free upgrade. Here is what you do. Email us here if you are stuck. By the way, we are building a better version of the product applying the lessons of this experience.” This is an approach that is much more likely to win back lost trust and loyalty than putting out a press release written in legalese, or Google-bombing your detractors.

Market Sentinel is currently pitching to a large company with a prominent detractor. Two thirds of the traffic his campaigning site is getting, he says, comes from people putting the words “[product] problems” or “[product] complaints” into Google.

The company’s customer service FAQ is absent from the top ten results of this search.

This effectively means that the detractor is doing the job of customer service for the company. He is qualifying the customer service experience, and providing the answers to the consumers. This is not a healthy situation for the company concerned.

This is anecdotal evidence for something we all experience. A couple of days back I hired a Smart car. The highly-sophisticated, semi-automatic gearbox stalled and left me marooned in teeming rain in heavy traffic. The rental company couldn’t explain the problem and struggled to find me with a replacement vehicle. When I came home I put “Smart Car” gearbox problem into Google and found

http://www.atomised.org/smartcar/faq.php

Yes, it’s the unofficial FAQ - not authorised by Mercedes but highly useful and entertaining. It turns out that either I wasn’t pressing the brake, or the brake microswitch was faulty. Good for me to know, good for the rental guy to know.

Brand owners have two options to make good use of of customers (and maybe resellers) putting their problems into Google:

1) provide a highly-functional, highly indexed FAQ

2) find a way of harnessing their community of users to provide this kind of customer service (think http://share.skype.com)

Online PR gurus Shel Holtz and Steve Rubel have linked to our white paper Search is Brand dealing with the influence of online detractors and methodologies for coping.

Rubel suggests that one way forward is pointed by CommonCraft who deliberately targeted a #1 Google slot for “weblogs and business” and achieved it. Commentators on Micropersuasion suggest that this approach becomes more difficult the larger your brand is.

This is true, but Search is Brand shows that you can target smaller search phrases successfully, even if you are a big brand - like Madonna! The report shows how she could optimise her website if there were rumours of marital problems with Guy Ritchie, for example.

To take a theoretical example, Madonna might want to optimise her web site for the phrase ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, and point people to positive content on the site that emphasises how happy she and Guy are, having recently renewed their wedding vows. Then, should the marriage hit the rocks, and more people start making the search ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, the site content can be updated to give her side of the story ahead of the celebrity gossip sites which might not be so positive and promoted via the paid-for listings.