Remember our post on Nofollow links? That was prompted by a presentation made by Matt Cutts, the Google software engineer who has gained some notereity in the SEO world by keeping a blog. For optimisation professionals, his word is practically law – or at least, it’s as close as they are going to get to understanding the finer points of the famous and ever-changing Google algorithm.

Cutts’ transparency is legendary, and admirable. His blog posts are often followed by hundreds of comments, queries, and even angry quibbles – and what is most remarkable is that he tends to find the time to answer them.

I mention him not because he’s a good read (if you are not completely immersed in the world of SEO, you may actually find his posts rather heavy going), but because he followed up the presentation we referred to with a post that clarified his points even further – and, of course, allowed for extended debate in the comments below. Read the post here if you would like to know all about Google’s attitude to page sculpting, plus a bit more about page rank and how it is distributed. As I say, though, it’s fairly in-depth, and perhaps not one for novices to the industry.

I return to the topic really because Cutts put, even more clearly, the point which struck me in my last post. Here are his words:

<I>The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.</I>

and:

<I>Search engines want to return great content. If you make such a fantastic site that all the web has heard of you, search engines should normally reflect that fact and return your site. A lot of bad SEO happens because people say “I’ll force my way to the top of Google first, and then everyone will find out about my site.” Putting rankings before the creation of a great site is in many ways putting the cart before the horse. Often the search rankings follow from the fact that you’re getting to be well-known on the web completely outside the sphere of search. Think about sites like Twitter and Facebook–they succeed by chasing a vision of what users would want. In chasing after that ideal of user happiness and satisfaction, they became the sort of high-quality sites that search engines want to return, because we also want to return what searches will find useful and love. By chasing a great user experience above search rankings, many sites turn out to be what search engines would want to return anyway.</I>

This is the clearest explanation I have yet seen of one of Notting Hill Internet Services’ most deeply-held beliefs. First and foremost, we will always advise you to look to your content. Yes, we can perform what some may consider minor ‘miracles’ with SEO – but you will make our job a lot easier, and your customers will be a lot happier, if you concentrate on great functionality and superb content before you even look at SEO. Furthermore, you might even find that by addressing your content and architecture in a completely user-centric way, you have already done half the SEO work. Food for thought, isn’t it?

Feel free to debate the issue below. Like Matt Cutts, we will find the time to respond to you .

Google: keeping us afloat?

With many a company closing down, or simply hanging on by the skin of their teeth in the current global recession, Google have bucked the trend, apparently filing an 18% rise in profits for the last quarter.

Adding to the image of the search engine behemoth as unstoppable, this figure, according to Google itself, represents “responsible efforts to manage expenses”. But we’re all tightening our belts, aren’t we? Surely Google hasn’t achieved this feat purely by keeping a tight hold on expense accounts and delaying a few operational moves.

The key would seem to be that people are still spending money on Google’s primary source of income – Adwords. When times are hard, businesses large and small need customers, and Google has provided the most efficient way of finding them. Not just any customers, either: the best-crafted Google Adwords will bring you highly-qualified traffic looking for exactly what it is you are offering.

With its built-in tools allowing you to specify precisely how much you want to spend per day, and ensuring that you don’t exceed it, the Google Adwords model is in fact perfect for those who are being cautious in this difficult financial time. It’s quite possible that businesses are leaving behind traditional methods of print and media marketing and turning towards Adwords, a system which allows you to track, and put a cost on, every single lead or conversion.

We’re not promising an 18% upturn in your profits for the next quarter, but we’d be happy to talk to you about managing a Google Adwords account for your business. It is just about the most cost-effective marketing move you can make in a recession.

Plagiarism is, of course, frowned upon on the web, just as it is in any other circle, but there are times when imitation is your best friend.

When a new client comes to us with a completely blank sheet, requesting a website, I will often ask “what are your favourite websites?”. It’s much easier to see what works well on other websites than it is to envisage, out of a blue sky, what might work for your own, especially if, as so often happens, you are just too close to it.

Often the same websites are mentioned time and time again: Amazon, eBay, the BBC, the Guardian… and often, I’ll be surprised by some website I’ve never heard of because it is one of the client’s competitors, perhaps in a specialised field.

Now, of course I’m not pretending that I am going to build you the next eBay. Looking at these giants of sites can be overwhelming, and my next question – WHY do you like them so much? – can be a daunting one to answer, beyond ‘they work’.

It’s worth taking the time to find two or three elements from your favourite sites that you would like to replicate on your own. Click around the sites for a while, and this time, think not as a customer, but as an interested observer. Just how do Amazon keep you adding more goods to your basket (you’ll find two or three ways on every page)? What is it about eBay that makes it so easy to sift through thousands of goods for sale – and could you utilise a cut-down version of that yourself, if you have multiple items to sell? How do the BBC and the Guardian both retain an air of authority, and provide such readable copy?

Don’t worry if you’re not sure about all the answers. Just providing the questions will give us a very firm basis for our initial plans – and of course, it’s up to us to know most of the answers. You know your business, and we know the web – and together, we can make you the website that you need.

“You ask, they answer” was the header for the Guardian’s series, in which users can post questions in a real-time online forum. Recently lined up to answer the public’s questions was herbal health and beauty store, Neal’s Yard Remedies. So far, so good – until it all went horribly wrong.

No doubt foreseeing some gentle questions along the lines of what homeopathic remedy to use for a mild headache, Neal’s Yard must have been shocked when the forum opened and they were flooded with comments and questions ranging from the mocking to the vitriolic. Who knows where these combined forces had mustered themselves, but it was a good reminder of how, online, like-minded people can gather and act in the blink of an eye. Woe betide anyone who genuinely wanted to know the exact dosages of this or that tincture: their question would be lost in the tide of accusations and ridicule.

Nor indeed, would it have been answered, because as soon became apparent, Neal’s Yard withdrew from the feature and declined to post responses to the comments, which began with questions such as: How do you validate the medical efficacy of your ‘remedies’? and What’s ethical about foam bath costing £39.15?.

24 hours after the forum opened, a Guardian moderator commented: Unfortunately, despite previous assurances that they would be participating in this blog post, I’ve now been told they ‘will not be taking part in the debate’.

Homeopathy, is of course, a contentious subject: not everybody believes in its worth, as Neal’s Yard must be well aware. No-one can be sure quite what they were expecting from this feature, but there are certainly lessons for us all here. Perhaps Neal’s Yard should never have agreed to appear, but since they did, they should have participated. What is left in the Guardian archives, for all to see, are the views of their opposers, with no defence proffered. Perhaps Neal’s Yard feels that through silence they maintained their dignity, but I can’t help feeling that on this occasion, the detractors had the upper hand.

Your business may not be in quite such a contentious arena, but there is a lesson for all of us here. In social media, the clue is in the ’social’ part of the term. Whatever its form: forum, blog, tweets or reviews, wade in, defend yourself if needs be, and don’t be aloof.

Talk to anyone in SEO and after a while you’ll catch them talking about ‘optimising your site for Google…er.. all the major search engines’. The truth is that Google has become so dominant in the UK, that it has pretty much set the rules for optimisation. Indeed, you’d be pretty foolish to optimise for any of the lesser players before you’d made sure your site was performing well in Google. Language tells us a lot in situations like this: while “Google it” is an everyday phrase, I have never heard anyone tell me to “Lycos it” or “Yahoo it”.

Such thoughts were underlined with the recent coverage of the merger between Yahoo and MSN’s Bing this week. Despite being the second and third biggest players in the search market, even combined they lag far below Google’s market share. In the US, Google counts for about 60% of all web searches, while Yahoo and MSN together account for approximately 30%. In the UK, Google is far more dominant: it’s where we perform 90% of all searches.

Will it always be this way? The public commentators seem to think not: we’ve already seen seismic change since the early days of search, before Google was even thought of. Consumer habits have changed, and they can do again. Meanwhile, I’m hearing more and more grudging admittance that ‘Bing is actually pretty good’.

It takes a lot for people to change their habits – I must admit that I, for example, have not ventured back to Bing since it launched and curiosity took me there – but if enough people start talking that way (and if, of course, Bing genuinely starts offering more efficient search results than Google) word will spread, and even those most set in their ways will make a switch. I’m reminded of the increasing popularity of the Firefox web browser: at first it was for cool ‘early adopters’, but when they started enthusing about it to colleagues, friends and family, its market share began to grow exponentially.

If Bing and Yahoo really start to reclaim their share of the search market, then we SEO professionals are going to have to learn to genuinely mean it when we talk about optimising for all the major search engines – which will keep us on our toes. At least life is never boring in SEO.