Digital Marketing Blog - Noisy Little Monkey musings on SEO, AdWords, Social Media

8 SEO websites and blogs for beginners

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Matthew Weeks

Thinking about, which websites I find most useful?? I was recently asked the question ‘ Which websites do you go to for all the latest news in your industry, or about new SEO techniques?’

It’s a really good question… When I first discovered the world of SEO I would spend hours scouring the web looking for useful blogs and websites so I could digest as much SEO and marketing information as possible. So based on trial, error and my opinion, these are the most valuable SEO blogs/websites out there currently. Some of the blogs you may have heard of, but hopefully you’ll discover one or two you’ve not seen before.

Ok…first up is SEOmoz. The guys over at SEOmoz do a great job of helping individuals answer some of the most common questions in SEO as well as answering very, very technical ones too. If you are just starting out in the world of SEO or maybe you have a site but need to implement some level of SEO they have a great beginners guide to SEO, (which is also available in PDF form), packed full of information and explained very clearly. You can find other beginners guides, but not to this level of detail.

SEOmoz also provide up-to-date techniques and theories via a brilliant video series called ‘White Board Friday’, as well as exceptionally helpful blog posts (often by their user community), which must take hours if not days to complete as they are packed with detail. What is so useful about SEOmoz is they try out new techniques and inform everyone about the results, whether they have worked or not! SEOmoz also provide a whole host of tools, which to fully access you have to pay for, but they give away so much valuable content for free, they have to make a living somehow.

SEObook was where I spent most of my time learning the fundamentals of SEO and Aaron Wall’s training modules are simply brilliant. A great resource for anyone looking to learn SEO at their own pace!
Similar to SEOMoz you have to pay to use some of the features, but having used SEOBook for a long time, I would highly recommend this site not only for its resources, but also for the level expertise at hand if you need them.

Wiep.net has been around for a long time and is one of those blogs that gets better with age, like a fine cheese. Wiep covers one of the trickiest subjects in the world of SEO, link building. If you think rushing out and buying 10,000 links for £10 is a good idea you might need to read this blog first.

Loads of useful content, and links to other useful resources and with posts going back as far as 2007, it will keep you busy for a while. I recently saw Wiep speak at SearchLove 2011 and his knowledge of link building is far superior to anyone else I have seen talking about link building, and he is a nice guy to boot.

There are hundreds of SEO blogs and websites available on the net, but it’s just a case of sorting the wheat from the chaff and finding blogs that are the most informative, for a vast selection of subjects within the industry. With Wiep.net this rule applies, as there are tons of blogs going into great detail how to generate links, best practices and the like – but Weip’s blog is the best.

Google gives people who are new to SEO a helping hand by having a handy SEO Starter Guide. Guides don’t really come much simpler than this really…Google wants to help optimise your website to rank well in the search engines. The guide includes how to optimise your website for mobile devices, content guides and much more.
Along with the downloadable PDF guide from SEOmoz, this one is another great guide to print out and look through.

The Google Webmaster Central main blog is the place to go to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth for any Google search engine news/ updates. Another great blog to visit for all things Google is Matt Cutts blog. Matt is the head of Google’s Webspam team and his blog is packed with videos of Matt answering some of the most common questions he is asked on a monthly basis. His explanations are always simple and to the point, perfect for both beginners and experts alike.

Blind Five Year Old is one of my all-time favourite blogs. They are actually a very reputable SEO company, (I thought it was just a blog for ages!) They don’t just cover subjects on SEO, but also general stuff from PPC, general rants and analytics.

Sometimes the topics talked about regarding SEO are a little technical for beginners but it’s worth having this blog in your arsenal, so when you have some understanding of the more technical stuff you can come back to Blind Five Year Old. If you would like to know why this blog is called Blind Five Year Old you can find out here, as it was one of the first question I asked myself, ‘Why Blind Five Year Old?’ .

There are a handful of blogs that I have to check on a daily basis for fear of missing something out and this next blog just happens to be one of them. Blogstorm is regularly updated by Patrick Altoft who is the Director of Search at a very respectable company called, Branded3.

Like some of the others posted above, Blogstorm covers a range of topics from blogging, SEO and Affiliate Marketing. The main reason why I enjoy blogstorm and find it so valuable is that they cover such a variety of subjects and in such detail too.

If you are thinking of attending a conference whether it is SearchLove, LinkLove, whatever and you see that Patrick Altoft is one of the speakers on the list, go. Patrick is a great conference speaker, and after reading his blog for such a long time, it was nice to finally see him speak last year.

Search Engine Round Table has been about as far back as I can remember, and is still one of the first places I still go to today to keep up-to-date on the latest goings on with search engines. The thing I love about Search Engine Round Table is that as soon as anything changes or there has been an update, someone from Search Engine Round Table has digested what has happened, written a post about it and published it for the world to see.

Sites that do this kind of quick fire reporting are worth their weight in gold, purely because they don’t keep their findings to themselves and are willing to share (for free I might add) with everyone. Again Search Engine Round Table may be a good place to come back to when you have understood some of the fundamental tactics of SEO.

Well there you have it. I hope you find some of the sites I’ve listed as useful as I have over the years.

Posted in seo, SEO Trade Secrets | Tagged blogs, google, Matthew, research, Tips, Tools | Leave a comment

Training Seminars & Events List

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Sophie Wells

Upcoming Events

Jon will be speaking enthusiastically about SEO and Social Media at the following events this month. There are a few remaining places so get in touch asap if you would like to go along!

17 January 2012
SEO & Social Media
10am, North Somerset Enterprise Agency
Oops! Sorry, you’ve missed this one!

25 January 2012
SEO – Getting to the Top of Google
10am, BRAVE Bristol
Book Tickets – only 3 places available

25 January 2012
Introduction to Social Networking
1pm, BRAVE
Book tickets – sorry, this one is now full

26 January 2012
SEO – Getting to the Top of Google
10am, Bristol City Council
Tell me more

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Twitter Tips

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Sophie Wells

Ever thought of using Twitter but don’t know how or why? Here is a simple guide to help you along your way.

On Twitter, anyone can read, write and share messages of up to 140 characters. These messages are public and available to anyone interested in them.

Twitter users subscribe to your messages by following your account. Followers receive every one of your messages in their timeline, a feed of all the accounts they have subscribed to.

When you Tweet for business

You have 140 characters (and ideally less) to get your message across.
Twitter is public so only write what you would be happy to see published in a newspaper that your mum was reading. Be polite, helpful and informative. Be friendly but perhaps not too friendly . . .
Having said that, Twitter is a conversation so being spontaneous and genuine is what it’s all about . . . just not as spontaneous and genuine as you might be at home!
Respond to negative Tweets if the complaint is actionable but don’t feel the need to respond to every moan and complaint. It’s about being responsive, not necessarily apologetic.
However, use opinions and complaints to demonstrate excellent customer service where possible, especially to correct mis-information or mis-understandings
Remember if you have synced your twitter account to other social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook all the points above apply and must be followed strictly. If you don’t realise that you have linked the two together, you can spam your twitter account with irrelevant information.
If you don’t feel comfortable publishing your message on twitter via other platforms, un-syncing the associated twitter account is the safest option.

When you Re-Tweet

Again, pass on information that is genuinely useful.
Be a human being. If someone tweets something that makes you laugh, or they are really happy about something, this is exactly the sort of thing to Re-Tweet.

When you follow

Remember the list of who you follow is also public, so follow organisations and people that are relevant and appropriate to your business.
The timeline of news should be genuinely interesting and useful for you. Every so often find more people to follow and cull the ones that aren’t useful or interesting (or fill your feed with nonsense).

Suggested Format

Cold weather coming? http://url/ Check our life saving tips for the elderly

This tweet is 75 characters long, so has 65 characters left to allow people to edit and retweet. Also the link is in the middle which is easier on the eye and more likely to be clicked.

Twitter Glossary

Twitter users have developed short-form syntax to make the most of 140 characters. Tweets should be under 100 characters ideally as this means they are easy to retweet with added comments. These are the Twitter fundamentals:

Mention:	Once you’ve signed up and chosen a Twitter username, you and others can mention an account in your Tweets by preceding it with the @ symbol, eg: “Glad your shipment arrived @janesmith!” “text @twittername” – will be visible in your followers’ timeline, whereas “@twittername text” is visible when people visit your twitter page or @twittername’s page. It will also show up in the timeline of people who follow both of you
Retweet:	When you see a Tweet by another user that you want to share, click Retweet below it to forward it to your followers instantly.
Message:	If you want to privately Tweet to a particular user who’s already following you, start your Tweet with DM or D to direct-message them, eg: “DM @joesmith234what is your order number?”This will only be visible to you and the twitter account you have direct messaged.
Hashtag:	Users often add # to words in their Tweets to categorize them for others – think of hashtags as the theme of your Tweet. Users can then click on a hashtag to see other similarly-themed tweets and find yours in search.

For more information on when and how often to tweet etc, please see these other blogs:

Posted in Social Media | Tagged social media, Tips, twitter | Comments Off

The 10 best Infographics of 2011

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Matthew Weeks

I am a MASSIVE fan of infographics and this year we have seen quite a surge of great infographics. Every other week there seems to be a new one doing the rounds on the social networks. So…now we are nearly at the end of 2011, I thought I would do a quick round up of some of the best I’ve seen this year. In no particular order, here they are .

First up “The 20-Minute (Or Less) SEO Audit” from Search Engine Journal. A great infographic showing you the step by step process of carrying out an SEO Site Audit.

This next one appeared in July of this year after the topic of ‘Internet Censorship’ hit the headlines after recent events in the Middle East and other countries around the world.

This year Twitter celebrated its 5th birthday and to celebrate, this timeline infographic was created by the guys over at Visual.ly. These guys really know how to create a great infographic and have been pumping them out all year, but this is definitely one of their best.

Some times you see an infogrpahic and you just have to spread the word about it as quickly as possible…this next one had that effect on me.

It appeared over on the Search Engine Watch and shows that sometimes you don’t need lots of data to create an infographic, just an awesome bit of imagination. Once you had worked out which colour your lightsaber was you could then add a badge to your website or blog. Brilliant!

As SEO’s, we love using software to enhance our ability to give ourselves and clients the best possible information available. At Noisy Little Monkey we have a huge set of tools that we use of a daily basis. This infographic appeared on James Agate’s blog Sky Rocket SEO showing in great detail the pieces of software used, who uses’s it and where. A great amount of time went into this infographic , and deserving belong in this list.

With website and page speed playing such a valuable role in SEO and all round performance, this infographic from the guys at Kiss Metrics went down a treat! Packed full of lots of facts and stats, that I was constantly tweeting over the following days.

Thinking about links and how to create awesome link bait can be very time consuming. Coming up with great content to entice people to share it is even harder. So… when Voltier Digital created an infographic covering the basis of link bait, it worked brilliantly!

Next up we have an infographic that illustrates the top 25 most influential people in performance marketing. I am a bit of a petrol head so an infograpahic that was going to be designed in the form of a race track was going to tick all the boxes in my book.

It was published on Impact Radius blog and is defiantly one of my favourites this year.

The next one is more of an ‘active’ infographic. This one was again created by the guys at Visual.ly and appeared over on the Thomson website. It shows how different types of music has travelled around the world since the 18th Centurty, right up to today. I watched quite a few times as I kept missing things. A truly fascinating infographic.

The final infogrpahic which stood out for me was “where’s Google making its money?” Even if you don’t work in the industry this is a great infographic is fascinating, and the numbers involved are staggering. This one was developed by Now Sourcing and appeared on the WordStream blog.

Thats it…my top 10 infographics of 2011! I apologise if I have missed any great ones out, please link to them in the comments as I may have not seen them.

Posted in seo, Social Media | Tagged Link bait | Comments Off

How to use HootSuite for business

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Jon Payne

HootSuite is an application that we think is particularly good for managing your Twitter accounts (like this one) and Facebook business pages (like this one). It can manage quite a few other social networks for you too (such as LinkedIn and FourSquare, and soon you’ll get to use it for your Google+ pages too) but we’ll keep this little starter guide simple and focus on HootSuite for Twitter.

Why not TweetDeck?

We used to prefer TweetDeck, but as our team (and our customers) have grown HootSuite is a better fit for our requirements. Also – since it’s purchase by Twitter, TweetDeck seems to have got a bit flaky. In short – we like HootSuite best.

Get signed up for Twitter / HootSuite first.

If you don’t already have a Twitter account, you should go and set one up before you start using HootSuite.

Try to choose a Twitter name that fits you or your brand. Not something like 5w3llz which while it was available, didn’t really build the personal brand of our Sophie. It needs to be 20 characters or less… so, think short.

Once you’ve got your Twitter Account. Go to www.HootSuite.com and sign up for an account there too.

Step 2 - Connect with HootSuite Twitter

Step 3 - Authorise with your Twitter login

Done that? Good. Let’s get started.

OK – here’s how to get going and (because the team at Noisy Little Monkey use HootSuite for Twitter every day), a few trade secrets too.

To tweet or not to tweet? That is the question.

And since you’re reading this, the answer is that it’s time to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune and start tweeting.

Top right of the HootSuite dashboard is an empty box containing the words “compose message…” – click in that box and you’ll see this (without the arrows!):

Click for a larger image

This is a nice little screen to help you tweet. Starting with the arrow top right and working round in a clockwise direction.

- The contents of your tweet. Type in here

- The number of characters you have left, 140 is the limit and although Hootsuite will shorten your tweet if you go over this, don’t go over 140 characters. Nick Griffin the leader of the BNP nearly always uses too many characters and he’s a tosser. Don’t be like Nick.

- If you want to link to something paste the link (including the http:// bit) into the link shortener.. otherwise your link will make your tweet too long

- Click the paperclip to attach a photo or a video, but remember, these will be shown as links, so leave plenty of character space for the link.

- You can schedule your tweets for later. If you’re going to be out of the office tomorrow, the day of that big product launch, you can schedule tweets throughout the day, in line with the launch time table. Sweet!

- If you hit ‘Send Now’ the tweet will get sent, you guessed it, now.

- You can add your location, if you think that makes it more interesting. Tip: Your office / home is not interesting. Neither is Tesco.

- If you have connected multiple Twitter accounts, you can select which to tweet from, here.

The perfect tweet?

Don’t worry about perfection. I’ve spent hours composing tweets that are not even a the tiniest hint of the merest of blips on the screen of eternity. These aren’t haikus you’re composing, they’re tweets. Think immediate, think now, in fact, sometimes – don’t think, type.

Trade secrets:

If you’re going to add a link. Add it in the middle of the tweet. You’ll get more clicks.
Leave at least 20-50 characters to spare if you want retweets. The more characters you leave available, the easier it is for people to retweet with comments of their own.

Reply, ReTweet & DM

Reply, retweet, direct message

These buttons make communicating with other Twitter users simple, but if you want to do it the old fashioned way, this is how:

@MrJonPayne then the tweet – will send me a direct message that will be seen by anyone who looks at my profile or follows both you and me.

RT @MrJonPayne Just reading @mattyweeks latest link development report. O, as the young people say, MG! – will retweet the message above and give me credit.

D @MrJonPayne then the tweet – will send me a private message (a bit like an email) which nobody esle can see.

Finding out more about your Twitter followers

If you want to know more about the people who are following you (or who you follow) so you can write about subjects useful to them, then HootSuite makes that really easy.

First off – click on their photo / logo which shows next to their tweets and you’ll get a window pop up that looks like this:

Obviously not all profiles have my somewhat camp photo. Those tabs above the photo will lead you to more information about the account and my particular favourite is ‘Insight’:

In here you can find all the other online profiles HootSuite has been able to discover for this user. Good stuff if you’re planning to sell to them / approach them to write some content for your blog / whatever.

Following Subjects / Brand Monitoring

One of my favourite uses for HootSuite is following topics I know lots about and sharing advice, helpful articles / videos when people have problems. It’s nice because it makes me people happy AND it gets me lots of retweets and good sentiment which shows Google I’m a nice, honest guy. Really.

Here’s how to follow mentions of your brand so you can see what people are saying and then engage with them if they feel they need better customer service (when they compain) or just to say thanks to them for being so nice (when they are a brand advocate).

Just under the bit of the dashboard where you compose your tweets, click the ‘Add Stream’ button.

Keyword search in Hootsuite

In this example I’ve set up a search for any mentions of my brand. You’ll notice I haven’t set up a search for the words noisy little monkey because that would return any tweet containing the words noisy and little and monkey – which is 100′s per day. Putting it in “quotation marks” means that it will only return tweets when those words are used in that exact order.

HootSuite recommends these query types and we love em!

twitter search = containing both “twitter” and “search”.
“owls rock” = containing the exact phrase “owls rock”.
ninjas OR pirates = containing either “ninjas” or “pirates” (or both).
super -man = containing “super” but not “man”.
#followfriday = containing the hashtag “followfriday”.
from:HootSuite = sent from person “hootsuite”.
to:invoke = sent to person “invoke”.
@memelabs = referencing person “memelabs”.
colbert since:2008-07-27 = containing “colbert” sent since “2008-07-27″
w00t until:2008-07-27 = containing “w00t” sent up to “2008-07-27″.
unicorns = containing “unicorns” with a positive attitude.
fail = containing “fail” and with a negative attitude.
bacon ? = containing “bacon” and asking a question.
rainbows filter:links = containing “rainbows” and linking to URLs.

Have more than 1 member working on an account?

Cool – you can both sign up for a HootSuite account which allows you to add a free team member for one Twitter account. More than two people? That’s fine too, we have lots of people working on lots of accounts. It just means you have to pay for Pro Membership (which starts at $5.99 and goes up to around $1,500 per month).

Google Plus For Business – A Quick Intro

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Jon Payne

What is Google+?

It’s Google’s new social network that looks like it’s going to rival Facebook.

Is Google+ just Google’s version of Facebook?

The simple answer is yes but Google+ has several advantages, in my opinion, for normal users. Here’s a couple of my personal favourites:

Circles

When you are friends with someone, Google+ is set up in such a way that makes it easy to add that person to one, or many circles. My circles include; Friends, Family, Following, Customers, Co-Workers and most of these are set up automatically. It’s therefore far easier to choose to share updates with the right circle of people.

Hangouts

These are a bit like Video Skype crossed with Facebook. A Hangout is a group video chat with up to 9 of your mates. You can all speak at the same time BUT if you have a point to make, waving your arms about and shouting will make you the most prominent in the chat. If you do this too much, other members of the group can hit mute so you can’t railroad the conversation.

Will people use it?

In short, probably yes.

75% of the Facebook users Noisy Little Monkey asked in the summer said they’d try Google+.

Most of us probably already use Google to search, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa and / or many of the other ‘free’ services the company already offers and since these will almost certainly become part of Google+, then it’s difficult to see how it can fail as a platform.

I have a business page on Facebook. Should I bother with Google+?

It depends. If your customers are all geeks then get onto Google+. If your customers are not early adopters of new technology then stick with Facebook, at least for the foreseeable future. You’ve got to fish where they’re swimming, right?

Should I bother with Facebook?

If you don’t already have a Facebook page for your business and are determined to jump into social media, then go ahead and use Facebook. That’s where your customers are at the tail end of 2011. UNLESS your customers are geeks and propeller heads…. In this case ignore Facebook and get on over to Google+ today.

What pages could I use for inspiration / stealing ideas?

At this early stage, all I can tell you are my particular favourites – if you have any to add to this list, please let me know in the comments.

Red Bull – Uses some nice animation, shares interesting stuff
Burberry – Great animation, looks sleek and sells very gently.
Mercedes – Utilises their scrapbook nicely (those photos across the top of the page)*
The Muppets – I love their photos across the top!
Noisy Little Monkey – A personal favourite. Add it to your circles today!

*You just need to save your photos at 125 x 125 px to do the same

How should I get started?

Assuming you have a copy of your logo on a white background then it’s easy to set up a page that looks quite nice. If you deal only with customers locally, then you can set up a local business page otherwise just set up a business page. To set up your page, go to Google+ here.

Once you have a page you need to regularly share tools / blog posts / images / videos / office banter that will be interesting or useful for your customer. Ideally every day, but at a minimum twice per week. This doesn’t have to be stuff you’ve created – it could be useful resources your team have discovered online… Sharing useful / entertaining stuff is what it’s all about.

I’d also consider sharing photos of your people, prizes, and activities. Show the human face of this business.

Hangouts are great for distance training too! Even more so when the ‘Share your screen’ option we’ve been testing goes on general release.

Updating your page with something interesting / unique every day can be time consuming, but it’s really important if you want your organisation to be perceived as useful.

It’s relatively easy for your web designer to add the Google+ badge to your homepage too (check out ours here). If they can’t or won’t do it for you, let us know. We can make it happen. While you’re thinking about visibility of your new page, why not share it (gently and elegantly) with those people who like your brand on Facebook and follow you / your team on Twitter?

What should I be careful of?

You know you get emails that tell you could do better on Google if you bought a load of links back to your website (which is bullshit, by the way). Well we’ve already had spam emails selling ‘+1s’ for our Google+ page. There is an outside chance that buying ‘likes’ on Facebook, Followers or ReTweets on Twitter and +1s on Google+ will give your website a short term boost. However, this kind of spammy activity is easily picked up by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Bing (there’s a really blog post about it by a Bing engineer which I’ll post when I can find it again!) and you will almost certainly be penalised. Avoid anything that feels like you’re doing it for the sole benefit of your organisation and it’s visibility online (that’s visibility on Search Engine Results Pages or Social Media)… Create and share content that is useful to your customers – then real people will share it and you’ll probably rank better on search engines, but you’ll also be getting lots of personal recommendations via social media.

Anything else I should know?

Increasingly Google & Bing are personalising their results pages even more… stuff that is shared (+1’d, tweeted or liked) by influential people in your industry will probably show more prominently in the results. Likewise stuff my friends have shared will be more likely to show up in my results.

The more social shares your content has, the more likely it is to rank in front of your customers when they search. There’s some examples in my post here and in this more technical post here. So get your social on, NOW!

Postscript

We’ve just seen more evidence of Google+ integrating directly with the other results you see on Google. Check out Google+ comes to Google Places on SEO Roundtable

Useful resources

Google’s intro to Google+ pages for business:

Social Media Examiner’s guide is useful if you want to check what you need to know before you get started:How to set up a Google+ page

Posted in better search engine rankings, Social Media | Tagged facebook, google, social media | Comments Off

Search Love 2011

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Matthew Weeks

Recently Jon and I attended SearchLove in London hosted by the guys over at Distilled and a host of other people, including some big names in the search world such as Rand Fishkin, Patrick Altoft and Martin Macdonald just to name a few.

It was a great two days and I came away from it buzzing – full of new ideas and tools I wanted to try out. So for readers of the Noisy Little Monkey blog I wanted to share with you 10 things I learnt that you may find useful.

My two favourite speakers over the two days where Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) from Branded3 and Stephen Pavlovich (@conversionfac) from Conversion Factory.

Some of processes Stephen talked about for coming up with ideas and documenting them for CRO on websites blew my mind, and I have put them into practice already (CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation – optimising a website / process to get more sales, enquiries, e.t.c.).

My top 10 tips from SearchLove are:

Using third party data to profile your customer, helps cut your costs and only target the right people.
TV advertising is not going to die, it’s just going to progress online.
Regarding the EU cookie law- Do an audit of all the third party cookies you have on your website, so you know how to ask user permission when the cookie law starts in May. It’s worth reading Nicola’s post EU Cookie Law too.
If your website (or certain pages on it) have been affected by Panda updates, the industry slang for that content is Bamboo (panda food).
If your website is not performing well don’t start building links to it before you improve it.
If you run an Ecommerce store, allow the customer to create an account after they have placed an order, this will make the order process far easier.
If you are looking for a certain individual to write a guest blog post for your website then it helps to be nice to them before you get in touch. Interact with them on Twitter, retweet their stuff, tweet at them and leave useful comments on their blog. Only then email them asking them for a guest blog post or to review your product.
If a competitor of yours lets their domain name expire and it has links pointing to it, register it and redirect it to your website.
If you are a member of lots of forums or websites which have a profile page, make profiles a point of pride so users link to them. Also make sure you use these as places to link to your websites.
Finally use Similar Sites. It’s a great way of finding online competitors in your market or niche.

Posted in news, SEO Trade Secrets | Tagged SEO, social media | Comments Off

WordPress Vs DNN – Which is faster?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Matthew Weeks

We are in the process of building a brand new website for ourselves and we need decide to Content Management System to use. We’re don’t have the in house resource to build our own and we have decided against Joomla, Drupal and various other popular (but flawed in our opinion) systems. So it’s either WordPress or DNN. A critical factor in the decision process for us is the speed at which each system performs.

After much discussion, one thing led to another and even money was involved to try and settle the score on which content management system would be faster. We went around the whole office and only I said that WordPress would out preform DNN.

Why is the speed of my website important?

As Google says…

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Source: Google Webmasters

If Google says it wants to make the web a faster place, then I need to make my site fit in with Google’s goal, so…

Let the experiment commence!

The first thing we did was to get our favourite cloud hosting providers, Bison Grid to set up two identical sites on the same server (WordPress version 3.2.1 and DNN version 6.00.01), with the same amount of content and number of pages. So, at this stage there are no plugins installed on either site and both themes are also as close to one another as we could get them:

Keeping it fair

To keep it fair, I used 4 tools to try and see if there was much difference in the results, where appropriate I ran the tests from 4 different web browsers as some are faster than others. The web browsers I used were;

• Chrome
• FireFox
• Safari
• Internet Explorer

Bison Grid then sent us results from Link Vendor, and as you can see from the image below on the left hand side DNN was faster than WordPress, with the estimated load time results.

Next thing we did was to see what happened when we tested both URL’s with Google’s very own Page Speed Labs.

The Google page speed labs Page Speed analyses the performance of a website which then gives us some specific suggestions to make our websites faster. Now, even though DNN was slower than WordPress both sites can be modified slightly and Bison Grid tell me they can further speed up the DNN version by increasing browser cache times. Although if this is an option available to most business users, I don’t know. I doubt it.

On to the next step. The graphics below compare the process and load times for both sites and for this comparison I used a site called webpagetest.

I’ve broken down the results to make it easier to read:

The graphs above show a lot of information about the two websites and immediately you can see that WordPress killed it. DNN looks a really sluggish by comparison. The data shows that the WordPress site is quicker to render than the DNN site. The graphs also show that the WordPress site also had a 404 error whilst being tested, which may have improved the speed of it by a fraction as it had one less thing to load.

The final website I used to run a test on both sites was called Load Impact. This website is again similar to webpagetest.org, but I wanted to see if it would highlight any more points that may have been missed by any of the others.

Colour Key for the graphs above

These results above clearly show that this WordPress website runs a lot faster than a copy running in DNN.

Summary

In a straight sprint, out of the box with no plugins installed, or any cache tweaks, WordPress is the clear winner.

Secretly, I was a little bit worried about the results, as DNN is new to me and I’ve been using WordPress for such a long time, I thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew with this outside bet.

In spite of these speed tests, we may still look to use DNN as it has some great features that make it so easy to edit and change the pages quickly and easily. Unlike WordPress where you have to preview the changes, you can simply work on a live page, move images where you want them and move widgets to new places easily. So DNN maybe wins here in terms of ease of use for the average business user. Having said that, in terms of today’s SEO world where page speed is a critical factor, it is important to choose how you build your website carefully.

We’re doing some more tests now and will share the results once we’ve tweaked each content management system for speed. We’ll probably also take a look at how they perform on mobile devices since DNN 6.1 has got us all excited about that.

Please follow @bisongrid & @NoisyMonkey for news in the meantime.

The Tools I Used

If you would like to check the speed of your own website there are a few ways of doing so. You can use the same websites as we did to carry out this experiment;

If you are using Firefox and you have access to a Google Webmaster Account you can also download and install a page speed browser add on for your browser, or you can simply view it under the ‘Labs’ tab in your Google webmasters account.

Posted in better search engine rankings, better website usability | Tagged SEO, Tools, user experience, wordpress | Comments Off

Facebook – Managing what you share

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Sophie Wells

Facebook has just made some huge changes to its News Feed and added new features such as Ticker and Lists (see my last blog on Facebook updates). So what does it mean for your privacy? With all these new features and so called improvements, there comes uncertainty as to what it can do and what you are exposing yourself to.

Subscribe - Firstly you must understand that anything you post or comment on a Friend’s wall is public and may show up in other people’s Tickers or Timelines. You may have seen this on your friends’ wall:

Please do me a favour and move your mouse over my name here, wait for the box to load and then move your mouse over the “Subscribe” link. Then uncheck the “Comments and Likes”. I would really rather that my comments on friends and families posts not be made public, thank You! Then re-post this if you don’t want your every single move posted on the right side in the “Ticker Box” for everyone to see. I’ll be glad to do the same for you if you post this!

People are clearly worried about what is being shared where.

If you want to hear what certain Friends are saying more than others, you can edit your subscription to them by hovering over the Subscribe button on the top right hand corner and choosing what to hear. You also have the option to unsubscribe to their news (don’t worry, they won’t be told!)

Remember you can also Subscribe to important people like artists and politicians and be able to follow them just like on Twitter.

Sharing – Make sure you check the sharing settings before you post an update or photo / video to select your audience. Do this by clicking on the sharing icon on the bottom of the status box. If you do not see a sharing icon (because you are on a public page, for example) always assume what you are posting is public.

Lists – You can now organise your Friends into Lists and then share your news to a particular list. If you add a Friend to a Smart List, be aware that they will be notified (except if adding them to Close Friends) so make sure you don’t mind them knowing which list you to add them to.

Tags – Check your privacy settings and make sure you are happy with how Tags are set up. If you are tagged in a photo you should a) now be asked to agree to the tagging and b) be able to see who can see the photo and remove the tag by clicking on the blue cog symbol on the top right of the post. You can always block a person who persistently tags you without your permission.

Facebook Pages are public and are used by companies to share information about their products. If you “like” a Page you link to it, it is added to your profile and may be shown in your Friends News Feed. You can check how your Page looks to the outside world by clicking on View As… Remember any updates you post which are marked as Public can be seen by anyone, not just your Friends.

The updates to Facebook, which are intended to make your choices easier and clearer, seem to pose an important question (and a bit of a tongue twister!) – Should social media be so social by default? What do you think?

Posted in Social Media | Tagged facebook | Comments Off

Ecommerce – Christmas Starts Here

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Nicola Payne

Its official – the supermarkets are full of tinsel, the nights are getting longer and soon we’ll be rocking around the Christmas tree. And what does Christmas mean in the world of the internet? Ecommerce of course! Each year the amount of Christmas shopping we do online has grown; last Christmas we spent over £2.8bn on the web in the run up to Christmas.

So Santa Baby, how are you going to improve your Christmas sales?

October: people are starting to research what’s going into their Christmas wrapping. If you don’t rank well naturally, then consider Google placement ads or a Facebook ad campaign to generate brand awareness. Don’t expect an immediate return on investment on this; it’s about getting your name out there. Remember to evaluate using Google Analytics and add goals to test the campaign’s success.

November: do they know its Christmas? Shoppers do by now and will have started their Christmas shopping frenzy. To capitalise on this:

Make sure your ‘all I want for Christmas’ best sellers are highlighted on your home page and are easy to buy
Step into Christmas with a festive theme on your website. You might want to change the home page text or write some festive blog posts
Advertise your last delivery date – put it on every page if you can
Be a Little Saint Nick to your past customers and send them a voucher code/discount. Promotional codes not only mean customers walking in the air, they will also get shared – meaning more new visitors and traffic to your site.

December: the cost of Google AdWords has rocketed by now, but people are more likely to click on sponsored Ads because they are ready to buy, so if you are feeling lonely this Christmas and want more sales, then Adwords is a good bet but make sure you are very precise on targeted keyword phrases.

Or why not try a pre-Christmas sale – spread the word using your social media channels and pull together some pre-Christmas offers that will entice customers to come to your site. Remember though stagger your offers to keep people coming back or to stay another day.

January: new year and time to start planning for next year. Evaluate the data from the last sales quarter to see what you can learn. If you have set up goals in Google Analytics you should know which search terms have driven the most sales and where people leave the website. This information is invaluable for optimising your website further and improving the conversion rate.

March: if you are considering re-designing your website for next Christmas, now is the time to start so that you have launched the site and debugged any problems by September, ahead of when you would expect orders to start rolling in. Alternatively, if you are happy with your website, then get an SEO company to take a look over what you’ve got to see if there are tweaks and improvements they would recommend.

May: social media mentions are increasingly important for ranking well on Google as are reviews and interaction with visitors to your website. Build on your followers from last christmas now so that when you come to launch your Christmas range next year you have lots of people who will spread the message for you.

September: summer is over and baby it’s cold outside! If you started early then your website and social media should be poised to launch its Christmas campaign. Time to . . . jingle bells and get excited about new products on Twitter; offer your Facebook followers early bird deals or plan a series of e-shots to remind existing customers to step into Christmas with you.

Come on, don’t you wish it could be Christmas every day?

Posted in Funnies, seo, Social Media, Uncategorized | Tagged advertising, analytics, conversion, sales, social media | Comments Off