Let's talk for a moment about gratitude. About how people sometimes do things for no reason beyond wanting to say, 'Thank you for a job well done'. As small business owners, gratitude is often the last thing on our minds. Overwhelmed as we are by our quotidian railing against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Taxes and wages and equipment costs and rent and insurance and accountants and bookkeepers and ever diminishing profit margins and, oh, did we mention taxes already? The enormity of the 'all hands to the pumps!' approach small business owners go through on a day to day basis makes thinking beyond the next task on our  'To Do List', nigh on impossible. This isn't a slight upon us as small business owners, or as human beings. It isn't that we don't care about other people. It's just that running a small business demands so much of our focus, so much of our time, that it's often hard to look beyond our own borders. Beyond what we need or what we want.

Consequently in business (and indeed in life), someone saying thank you for a job well done, is an all too rare occurrence. Just think about how many satisfied customers you've had down through the years with your small business. And then try to reconcile that with the tiny handful of positive reviews you've got on Google maps, or the minuscule amount of testimonials you've got from customers or clients on your website. Because I guarantee you the math will never come close to adding up.

In small business a customer says thank you by re-signing with you when the contract is up for renewal, or by returning to buy more products from you, etc. And maybe by recommending you to a friend, colleague or business associate. Beyond that, all bets are off.

But sometimes - just sometimes - the innate kindness of the human condition shines through when you least expect it. Today was such a day for me. It started when one of our clients, AutoActive Car Solutions, (a leading North Shore Mechanic) emailed me this wonderful testimonial out of the blue:

"Appointing Brian and Tony from SEO North Sydney to build our new website and do our SEO was one of the best business decisions we’ve ever made. Brian is creative, knowledgeable, focused and is fantastic to work with. His experience and expertise are unparalleled. We had no idea how SEO worked but Brian explained everything and made understanding the process particularly easy for us, and it has been a wonderful experience. Solid results were seen within a few short months, and now we have twice the Google first pages promised in the contract (with many at number 1). Thank you again Brian – we simply cannot thank you enough!" 

                                                                                             - Leeman and Bruce – AutoActive Car Solutions

As if receiving that wonderful and unexpected testimonial wasn't enough, we then received delivery of this amazing gift basket!

When Autoactive signed with SEO North Sydney several months ago, they needed a new website designed and built, they needed SEO for the new website, and they needed brilliantly written content to populate the new website. But more importantly they needed someone on the other end of the phone who not only understood what they go through each day as small business owners. But who actually gives a damn about whether their business grows or not. And that's where I like to think SEO North Sydney offers a real point of difference. We're a small business just like you. Our clients are small businesses and SMEs just like you. And so we understand - I mean really understand - what steps need to be taken in the digital domain to ensure your small business can compete on an equal footing with the big boys - WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK. Because when it comes to Google, the size of your business doesn't matter a hill of beans. What matters is the concerted ongoing execution of a comprehensive, tailored WHITE HAT SEO strategy, via Google Best Practice guidelines. Do that correctly (and ethically) and any company, no matter how modest it may be, can rank on the first page of Google.

So to Leeman and Bruce at Autoactive Car Solutions, let me go on record and say that it's our turn to say Thank YOU. Because your thoughtfulness and kindness totally made our day!

With the run-in to the July 2nd federal election underway, Australians are already tiring of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s mansplaining rhetoric, with tens of thousands of disgruntled voters demonstrating their growing dissatisfaction with the Liberal leadership by visiting PunchMalcolmTurnbull.com.au to, ‘Open up a can of  (digital) whoop-a** on the PM!'.

#punchmalcolmturnbull | #punchbillshorten

When questioned about the election, renowned left-wing union leader, Dave ‘Make sure you call me Davo’ Davis was quoted as saying: 

Opposition leader Bill Shorten has also been on the receiving end of the Australian public’s pre-election rancour, with thousands of middle-class Australians rolling up the sleeves of their Tom Ford suits and putting down their Triple Venti Soy No Foam Skinny Lattes just long enough to visit PunchBillShorten.com.au in order to, ‘Give that Shorten chap a good what for!’.
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Political blogger and three times Eastern Suburbs bridge champion, (Captain) Bruce Tabernacle Watkins-Drummond, from the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse, was quick to respond when questioned about the up-coming ‘Australian Federal Punch-Up’:

​While some political pundits will view the greater number of votes counted on July 2nd as revealing the winner of the Australian Federal Election, everyday Aussies will know the truth: that the real winner of the election will be the candidate who receives the least number of (digital) punches, and thus demonstrates once and for all, his superior popularity!

SEO North Sydney Pty Ltd, being the web design company responsible for these displays of digital shenanigans, wish to point out in the strongest possible terms that they are in no way taking sides in this election. Indeed, if this current Australian political debate were made up of countries, SEO North Sydney would be Switzerland. (Just without all the silly accents, hidden slush funds and corrupt FIFA officials…)

Further, while these websites may at first glance seem to be 'putting words into the mouths of Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten’, SEO North Sydney Pty Ltd wish to point out that the words 'spoken' by the cartoon versions of both Malcolm and Bill on these websites, in no way represent either the views of the Liberal or Labour parties, or Malcolm Turnbull’s or Bill Shorten's personal views, or indeed anything either candidate may or may not have said in real life. Rather, the words 'spoken' are purely there for the purposes of parody, satire, et al. Naturally we could have had cartoon Malcolm saying, "All Australians understand that high-quality, reliable and affordable broadband is a critical part of the infrastructure our nation needs to prosper in coming years".  And cartoon Bill saying, "Labour is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action - ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.”  But honestly…where’s the humour in that?

Also, while we’re on the subject of pointing out the patently obvious, SEO North Sydney Pty Ltd wish to go on record and say that these sites are in NO WAY promoting violence. Be it against politicians or anyone else. And as much as you may wish to give these (or any other) politicians a good old fashioned shellacking for broken campaign promises or ludicrous shifts in policy. Don’t. Just don’t. Rather, might we suggest that you take out your pent-up frustrations on them here in the digital domain. Where, with a bit of imagination, you can give them a good what-for 'till the cows come home!

Media Contact:

Thanks for popping by and visiting punchbillshorten.com.au. A fun little website we built to help Australians get through the monotony of yet another Australian federal election. Naturally when it comes to which leader will make the best PM, Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten, we here at SEO North Sydney are completely neutral. So please don't take the Punch Bill Shorten site to heart, or else treat the subject matter too seriously. It's just a bit of satirical fun when all's said and done. And we hope it put a smile on your face and lightened up your day :)​   

In the spirit of friendly political rivalry, we invite you to vote on what you would like Bill to say when he's being pummeled by Australia. And also to invite you to suggest some words yourself (in the comments below). We'll add any funny ones to the poll. And once the voting has been tallied up, we'll get Bill to speak the winning words when the biffo is happening!

Please remember that if you're suggesting something for Bill to say, do your best to keep it clean (this is a family site after all), in the spirit of fun, and to keep it to 5 words or less..

Thanks for popping by and visiting punchmalcolmturnbull.com.au. A fun little website we built to help Australians get through the monotony of yet another Australian federal election. Naturally when it comes to which leader will make the best PM, Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten, we here at SEO North Sydney are completely neutral. So please don't take the Punch Malcolm Turnbull site to heart, or treat the subject matter too seriously. It's just a bit of satirical fun when all's said and done. And we hope it put a smile on your face and lightened up your day :)​   ​

Website design has evolved a lot since internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee, published the World's 1st Website in August 1991. Back then, the internet didn't exist in the way you and I think about it today. So it's a pretty safe bet to assume that the words 'Design' and 'User Experience' were not exactly at the forefront of Tim's thinking when he was looking to publish this gorgeous piece of HTML wonderment:

As any competent webmaster, system admin or SEO guru will bear witness, making a website load faster can yield huge dividends, in multiple ways, on multiple levels for small business owners. When implemented correctly, it can significantly impact where your small business website appears in the Google search index.

Benefits include:

• Faster loading when viewed on Desktop.
• Faster loading when viewed on laptops and tablets.
• Faster loading on mobile devices (super important in 2016).
• Much better UX (User Experience).
• Significant reduction in bounce rates.
• Increase in page views.
• Increase in time on page.
• Increase in time on site.
• Significant boost in search engine rankings.
• Increase in conversion rates.

Unfortunately for most small business owners, website loading speed is pretty much the last thing their web designers take into consideration when building a website for them. Consequently, though your small business website may look (to the untrained eye) like a Lamborghini on the net when its published. You'll be shocked to know that you're actually cruising around town with a 2 litre Ford Focus engine under the hood...

Right about now you're probably pulling your hair out and gnashing your teeth when you think about how slow your website is running. Because chances are you've finally realised that this issue may not only be the root cause of your horrible rankings in Google search, but also largely responsible for the fact that you can't convert the measly amount of organic search traffic you actually do get, into sales. However I'm sorry to break this to you, but the fact that your website is unable to get out of second gear is more than likely YOUR fault, not your web design company.

Now wait up, wait up, before you accuse me of defending other people's sub-par web-building practices, let me explain what I mean!

There are three reasons why web designers build sites the wrong way:

1. Because they don't know any better.
2. Because they don't care.
3. Because you screwed them on the budget.

To point 1: it's true that there are a large amount of website designers out there who learned to build websites in what might be termed, 'the old school of web design', and who are simply not cognisant of Google's many, many, many updates on the subject of how to build a website so it loads faster (or how important page load speed and mobile compatibility actually are).

To point 2: it's also true that there are a percentage of web designers out there who know how websites SHOULD be built so far as Google is concerned. But who really just don't care. Because - not to put too fine a point on in - you haven't paid them enough to give a damn. Which segues very nicely...

To point 3: remember when you were haggling with your web designer over price? And how you screwed him down a few thousand and felt good about it; safe in the knowledge that you were getting the exact same product, just for a much cheaper price? Well unfortunately for you, even though it may LOOK (from the front end) like you got the same product, I can assure you that is NOT the same product so far as Google is concerned.  And therein lies the problem.

I don't want to turn this blog into a sales pitch, but I can't help feeling that it would be remiss of me not to point out that the very reason SEO North Sydney rock the Casbah when it comes to website design (and building kick-a*se websites generally), is that we are a SPECIALIST SEO COMPANY WHO ALSO BUILD WEBSITES; and not a web-design company who also do a bit of SEO on the side, but who in actuality have little or no knowledge of the 10,000 sub-ranking factors that go into getting a website onto the first page of a Google search.

Even if we think about this from a common web user's perspective, it would not be difficult to envisage why a faster loading website would be more beneficial. As a web user yourself, what would you normally do when a site is taking a long time to load? Would you hang around waiting for it to come up or would you just click-away?

In case you're not familiar with the term bounce rate – which happens to be a very important parameter related to the performance of a web site – it is commonly defined as the percentage of visitors who reach a website and then just leave (or 'bounce out'), without interacting with the site in any way.

The findings of a Kissmetrix study (citing gomez.com and akamai.com as sources) reveals that:
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• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

And a Strangeloop study brings the point home even more strongly:

As if losing visitors and revenue via their website is not harmful enough to small business owners, slow loading sites also get fewer visitors to begin with. This is because Google utilise loading speed and mobile compatibility as major search engine ranking factors. Thus, the slower a website is to load, the lower its SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position), and the smaller amount of organic search traffic it receives.

As any web marketer or SEO professional worth his salt would tell you, web traffic derived from organic search results is the best converting traffic a website can get. But with over 200 major ranking factors, and 10,000 sub-ranking factors deciding who goes where in Google's search engine results, it's become increasingly difficult for small business owners to get their websites on the first page of Google (where all the action is). Website loading speed however, is what we might call 'low hanging fruit' so far as SEO is concerned. And once the website's code is re-written to better mirror Google Best Practice specifications, a significant (and almost instantaneous) bump in your website's rankings in Google search, is common.

Which brings us to the question of:

Click the link below to check out the Pingdom Website Speed Test:
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http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

The second one is none other than Google itself, by way of a service called 'Google PageSpeed Insights:

Check out the Google PageSpeed Insights at the link below:
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https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ 

The third and final one is a company called, GTmetrix:

Here is the link to the GTmertix website: 

https://gtmetrix.com/ 

​As you'll notice, all three sites show how quickly (or slowly!) your website loads, while also provide various guidelines in terms of what actually needs fixing. Implementing these fixes are obviously extremely technical in nature, and very easy to get wrong, so it is always recommended to leave the changes to the experts:

As the owner or marketer of a small business website you are no doubt all too aware that slow websites lose and fast site win in the race to be #1 in Google. And with Google putting more and more relevance on how fast your website loads, and how well it works in the mobile environment, now is definitely the time to turbo-charge your website to win the race. 

Click here for a whole heap of brilliant Web Design examples. And here for Search Engine Optimisation information to guarantee your website gets on the 1st page of Google.

Of course, while RankBrain is primarily used by Google on the 15% of new-to-Google search queries, don't be fooled into thinking that is all it does. Because it is (to quote Google), "Not limited to any particular set of queries". In other words, the technology driving RankBrain also comes into play when trying to make sense of other long-tail searches. And post Hummingbird, long-tail Google searches make up over 40% (and growing) of all search queries. And as keyword driven search is dying (and it is) and question based and vocal search becomes more and more the norm, long-tail question driven search queries are more and more where the SEO gold is buried.

Google's Gary Illyes was asked on Twitter to clarify whether the RankBrain algorithm continually re-programs itself and learns as it goes along (as was originally believed by the SEO community). But it turns out it doesn't. Rather, RankBrain is periodically 'Re-trained" by  the boffins at Google, to do its job better, as and when new up-dates are released. In Illyes own words: "Its effects are expectable, not assumable".

IIlyes went on to say: “We’ll keep experimenting with and testing new models, and we’ll make updates as we come up with models that do a better job than the existing one. That could be about refreshing the data or developing new neural net architectures.”

Another ingredient in RankBrain is believed to be Google’s Word2Vec Project, which is based on the twin architectural models of CBOW (Continuous Bag of Words) and Skip-Gram. Both of which are, in nerd-speak, considered “shallow neural models”. In essence, CBOW tries its level best to predict the current word, based on the words around it (because words make more send when viewed in context with the words nearby). Whereas Skip-Gram cleverly predicts meaning from the sense of the words it finds.

Or to simplify it even further:
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• CBOW predicts the word given its context.
• Skip-Gram predicts the context given a word.

Whether RankBrain is actually using Word2vec (or a variation of the methodology) or not, is ultimately by-the-by. All we really need to know is that RankBrain is converting words and phrases into vectors, which it then uses to allow for a deeper understanding of the data it's reviewing. The implications of all this being that if Google is able to convert a typed question into vectors to better understand the inherent meaning behind the question, then Google will be able to significantly improve the search results it shows. 

Another potential element under-pinning RankBrain (and until Google opens their Kimono to reveal all, this is just more guess work on our part, remember) is thought to be ‘Distributional Hypothesis’.

In linguistics, Distributional Hypothesis states that words used together in a sentence tend to infer similar meanings. This is a theory born from Statistical Semantics. The distributional hypothesis for this infers that the more semantically similar two words are, the more distributionally alike they’ll be, and the higher probability that they occupy similar linguistic contexts.

Or to simplify it even further:
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• Distributional Hypothesis states that a word is more often than not characterised by the company it keeps.

Ultimately RankBrain will expand its remit from learning patterns within short strings of data, to learning patterns within entire documents. Because just as there is learning to be had in the former, there is surely deep learning to be had with the latter. And it's not too far of a stretch to think that the RankBrain algorithm of a few years down the track will be able to read an entire book and distill its meaning into a few short paragraphs.

Cliff Notes look out!

Okay, so let's back track for a minute. RankBrain “Converts words and phrases into vectors," right? But what exactly does that mean? To better understand that, we need to look to Professor Geoff Hinton of the University of Toronto's work in 'Word2vec Connections'. Mr. Hinton is a gentleman and scholar (as the old saying goes) with much wisdom in the field of artificial neural networks. And who happened to have owned a company called DNNresearch Inc, which was acquired by Google in June 2013.

(Ah...the plot thickens...)

Neural Net reporter, Jack Clark of Bloomberg (who wrote the original Bloomberg Business article) attempted to get clarification on the whole Word2ve Connection issue:

"They wouldn’t explicitly confirm that it (RankBrain) is Word2vec, but everything we discussed indicated it’s likely doing something roughly equivalent to Word2vec, and is also doing similar conversions for sequences which is likely connected to Sequence to Sequence learning (PDF: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learni…).

It also links to Geoff Hinton’s stuff on Thought Vectors which implicitly involves word2vec."

When pushed on the subject, a Google spokesperson said “It’s related to Word2vec in that it uses ’embeddings’ — looking at phrases in high-dimensional space to learn how they’re related to one another.” Which is about as much clarification on the subject as we could rightfully expect to get.
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​For those with a mind to dig deeper into Rankbrain, there's a Patent Application by Googe pending, which includes this:

Which segues us rather nicely back to the question of, 'Okay, so if RankBrain is the third most important factor in Google search, what are the first two?'.

This we didn't need last week's announcement to answer; because I, and many other SEO types, have known the answer to this question for years. The first most important thing (in the post Panda world) is QUALITY ORIGINAL CONTENT.  The second most important thing (in the post Penguin world) is QUALITY LINKS.

You'll note I added the word 'Quality' to both those Google ranking factors? Good. Because if you think all you have to do to rank in Google is flood your website with cheap content (no doubt sourced out of Eastern Europe), and point thousands of low value links at it (no doubt sourced via an el-cheapo company in India), then you're probably the proud owner of a time machine*, and are kickin' it back in 2010 listening to Ke$ha's mega-hit, 'TiK ToK', or else queuing up with the kids to see Toy Story 3 at the cinema for the umpteenth time. I say this as nobody with half a brain in their head would run that strategy today. Because if they did, their website would have the living crap kicked out of it by both Panda and Penguin, and find itself buried on page 35 of their particular Google search. And given that 92% of people don't go past the first page of Google...good luck with getting the phone to ring from there.

The most advanced research vessel in British history is on the brink of being Christened RSS Boaty McBoatface. Yes, you read that correctly. Boaty McBoatface! The boffins over at the National Environment Research Council thought they'd be a bunch of clever clogs and run an on-line poll to name their new multi-million dollar research vessel. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, you know...being the internet, everything that could go wrong probably will. To paraphrase Voltaire: "The trouble with common sense is, not many people have it'. Which is another way of saying, never trust anything you read on the internet!*

*unless you read it here of course...then naturally the information must be gospel! ;)

And if Boaty McBoatface wasn't enough of an incentive to stop people running on-line polls to name things, now the US Air Force have joined in...

So expect 'Planey McPlaney' to put the fear of God into those terrorists over in the middle east sometime soon!

Big thank you to Belinda and all the amazing staff at Fancy That Costumes in Crows Nest. Super helpful staff! Couldn't have got the costume for our new corporate branding, 'Logan Thor - The Superhero of Search' done without them!

If you've typed Website Design Ipswich into Google, it's a fairly safe bet that you run a business in beautiful Ipswich, Queensland, and you're sorely in need of getting a new business website designed. Fortunately, you've come to the right place!

Everyone who drives a car thinks they could successfully race a car around a track if required. Everyone with a blackbelt thinks they can win a fight if push came to shove. And everyone who knows how to string a few words together, thinks they know how to write. But just being able to drive without crashing into things, throw a few kicks if cornered, or write an email while at work, does not mean you are an expert at it. It just means you have a functional level of ability. Which is great to have, don't get me wrong. One might even say, essential. But if you want to really drive fast, you hire a formula 1 driver. If you want to protect yourself from a bully, you stand behind a UFC fighter. And if you want content for your business website that Google not only loves, but that human beings respond to...you hire an experienced SEO Copywriter. 

Because time was pretty words were all it took to rank in Google. But with Google's Panda algorithm ruling the roost since 2012, an understanding of tone, voice, syntax, grammar et al, is now just the beginning. Write badly and you'll get penalised by Google. Write well and you'll get prioritised by Google. 

'A picture is worth a thousand words' is an idiom we all know. But when it comes to ranking your website in Google search, give me a thousand words every time.