In a post on his blog last week, Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality, revealed that the company was ready to start opening up on information that was previously kept highly secret, in an attempt to clarify certain elements of how it works. This came as welcome news to SEO companies everywhere, but perhaps some are expecting too much and in doing so are losing sight of the fundamentals that have been available from the outset.

Google is famous for being extremely guarded on how its algorithms and ranking systems work. As Manber explains in his article, the company has ploughed one thousand “programmer years” into developing the processes, and that’s not something that any corporation is overly willing to open up to competitors and the public. While the protective stance is understandable, it has directly led to frenzied speculation that makes up a good proportion of the SEO market today. The internet is full of companies that spend their time - and their client’s budgets - trying to fathom the inner workings of the Google system in order to manipulate search results in their favour. There’s an entire team of technicians at Google who are solely responsible for identifying and stamping out these activities, but it still goes on to an enormous extent.

While it will undoubtedly be interesting to see exactly what Google reveals in the coming months, it’s worth bearing in mind that the most relevant SEO fact has been freely available from day one - and that is that user experience is the single most important issue. It was at the start, and it still is today. It’s likely to be the case as long as search exists in its current form. If the user experience is lacking in quality then people will drift towards alternative search methods, and that’s something that Google simply can’t allow to happen.

What does this all mean for your website and its own SEO? Well, always put the user first. Create an easily understandable layout and design. Write content for humans, not search engine robots. Clearly define titles and tags in a descriptive and straight-forward way. Link in and out with other relevant websites. In short, always remember that your website is meant for your users, so everything on there should work for them. When your users are happy, the search engines are happy, and Google’s revelations - whatever they turn out to be - aren’t likely to change this.

We’ve seen some extremely quick SEO results here at Greenmedia on our recently launched websites, but one of our latest client sites has exceeded them all - hitting the top spots almost immediately upon going live.

The Thorne & Derrick Cable Joints website was set live late on Friday 16th May, and is already topping searches on Google.co.uk. The site is beating competitors on a whole range of sought-after industry keywords, despite being live for just over four days. Most of the competitor websites have been established online for a number of years, making the results even more impressive.

With such outstanding results from the outset, we’re looking to continue maximising the SEO potential of the Cable Joints website in the coming weeks and months.

As with all Greenmedia-built websites SEO was a priority from the start of the project, an approach that has paid immediate dividends in this case.

Swiss Physio, the Tynemouth-based sports injury specialist physiotherapists, came to Greenmedia in April looking to improve the search engine optimisation of their website. While the site was looking the part and performing a fantastic service for its users, the company was aiming to rank higher on its most relevant service searches.

It’s less than a month since we carried out our initial SEO work on the website and we’re already seeing some great results. From a total of thirty agreed targeted keyterms we’ve achieved significant ranking improvements on twenty-one so far - with seventeen first page placements on Google.co.uk. As the SEO work is only just beginning we’re hopeful that we can improve these rankings even further in the near future.

See the results to date for yourself,

Pilates Tynemouth - 651,000 results

Sports injury Newcastle - 610,000 results

Physiotherapy Tynemouth - 252,000 results

Physiotherapy Newcastle - 435,000 results

Yoga Tynemouth - 508,000 results

With so much focus on the design, copywriting and call to action used in email marketing it’s easy to forget how important the subject line is. The seemingly innocuous subject line is more often than not the last thing to be considered in an email marketing campaign, but it’s essentially the deciding factor behind an email getting opened or deleted. It doesn’t matter how professional and effective the email is - if the subject line isn’t up to the job then the whole campaign is at risk of failing.

Think about your own daily inbox experience and the hordes of emails that you routinely delete without a second glance. If a subject line isn’t immediately attention-grabbing, and it’s an unexpected email, then the chances are that you won’t bother opening it. With so many other legitimate emails requiring so much attention, who can blame you?

So there’s really a lot riding on the subject line, therefore it’s vital to give it the same attention and planning that you give to the other elements of an email marketing campaign.

There are two main issues to consider when writing a subject line - firstly, how to avoid junk mail filters and secondly, enticing recipients enough to actually open your message and read it.

1) Junk mail filters, whether as part of email software packages or wider company security policies, use a number of triggers - one of which is the humble subject line. They’re principally on the lookout for any words that clearly identify an email as spam - you know the usual suspects - but often rope in entirely legitimate messages accidentally. Have a look at your own junk mail folder, amongst the viagra and fake Rolex spam there will be at least one innocent email that has been swept up indiscriminately. Look at the subject line of the unlucky email and you’re likely to find the reason why it’s in amongst the junk.

To avoid this fate befalling your next email marketing campaign, steer clear of using certain characters in your subject lines - £-signs, $-signs, exclamation marks and question marks can all inadvertently flag up an email as junk, despite having good reasons for being used.

As well as individual characters, there’s a whole host of words that you should avoid using in your subject lines - “free”, “buy”, “deal”, “best” and “greatest” being some of the most common. In fact, most superlatives provide nothing more than a fast-track to the spam folder. Modern junk mail filters are intelligent and have been created around years of experience detecting spam, so if your subject line sounds anything like it could be a con, then it’s likely to face the chop and never see your recipient’s main inbox.

2) Enticing your recipients to open an email requires some thought. Of course the subject line needs to refer to whatever you’re mailing about, but you need something special to make it stand out above the masses of other emails in an inbox. This really depends on the purpose of your message, the type of customer you’re targeting and what you’re aiming to achieve overall. The demands here vary wildly, but it is essential to think about what the customer will respond and react to.

If you’re sending a regular message to recipients who are expecting the email, then a standard subject line that they’ll become familiar with is a safe bet. If your client has a respected brand name then use it somewhere in the subject line - the trust-factor alone will ensure a good open rate.

An unexpected message, perhaps to a customer database, needs a tempting subject line that is careful not to cross the line into the sensationalist. Again, have a quick scan of your junk mail folder if you want to see sensationalist subject lines.

So in a nutshell, you know your email marketing is wonderful but your recipient doesn’t (yet), and it’s up to the subject line to win them over. It deserves to be more than an after-thought. It’s just as important as any other element of the campaign, and should be treated as such.