Why do you think these Digital Certificates are needed? 

First of all, we received a lot of requests from our members, so we knew there was a demand out there. 

As this space matures, there's a need to support ever more junior levels, and provide training to those looking to hone their craft after they've worked in the industry for a number of years, as well as those just starting out. 

While there is no substitute for experience, having a frame of reference against which to establish professional standards is extremely powerful, both for the individual and recruiters. 

How has the industry responded to the Digital Certificates?

There's still a certain amount of circumspection around formal digital marketing qualifications in industry, and for specific skillsets, I think anything that claims to teach in the classroom is seen as fair game.

We did suffer a bit of a backlash on Twitter about the idea of making someone an expert in SEO within six months, but that's not our claim.

Our Digital Certificates aim to make candidates confident practitioners with real world experience within six months. The certificates are there to create a 'learning space' within which people can practice, share experiences, seek guidance and gain confidence with access to an expert and away from commercial pressures.

We actively encourage real world application either through business or personal projects, so we are very keen not to divorce the learning from the real world.

Despite this, however, we have received a lot of interest. Analytics starts in May with ten delegates from organisations such as AXA, Sportingbet, RS Components, Department of Work and Pensions and the Cooperative Group.

The Digital Certificate in SEO is due to start in June, with five places already taken and well over 60 people currently considering application. The certificates are the first UK accredited qualifications to address such specific digital skillsets, and there's always work to do to gain momentum, but the response has been very positive and interest is growing steadily.

The reputation for delivering robust and relevant qualifications gained by our MSc courses also provides a great foundation for confidence in the certificates. 

What was the importance of the accreditation with MMU? 

Accrediting a qualification requires the creation of a robust framework of knowledge and skills against which recognised levels of competence can be assessed.

As the digital industry matures and core best practice is established, organisations are increasingly looking for ways to make confident hiring decisions.

Individuals with an accredited qualification stand out from the crowd and come with concrete evidence of their skills and knowledge, but organisations can also use the qualification framework as their own reference for unqualified applicants, so they can ask questions or test knowledge based on the content of a recognised award. 

Accredited qualifications are a required element of professionalisation, and we've certainly seen the MSc courses gain significant recognition as valuable awards.

Graduate certificates provide an ideal stepping stone for those who have perhaps studied an unrelated subject at undergraduate level and are now looking to prove their credentials for a career in digital, or those wishing to switch industry after some experience.

The new award level also helps to create a cohesive learning journey for those wishing to be seen as professionals in the digital marketing field. 

Who has signed up to the courses to date?

Although the certificates are well designed for those coming from unrelated disciplines, as expected, we have initially attracted an industry audience.

Job titles including e-commerce marketing manager, internal comms manager, digital campaign manager, events marketing assistant and community manager.

In general we find applicants have around two years' digital experience.  Applicants for SEO come from LV=, Holidays 4 Travel, Wilson Cooke and a freelancer so far. Most are coming from general junior roles and people looking to specialise.

How do these fit in to digital career development?

Digital careers tend to follow this idea of 'T'-shaped people, with new entrants to industry displaying a broad and shallow knowledge or all areas of digital, before specialising in order to take on specific management responsibilities and then broadening out again as they start to develop strategic responsibility for businesses as directors or CEOs.

The certificates support the specialisation phase perfectly, providing a structure within which people can confidently gain thorough specialist skills, and make the move into a managerial position.

They are also an ideal way for non-digital people to demonstrate their passion and interest in a particular specialism in order to gain entry to the industry. Successful completion of a certificate also guarantees automatic entry to our MSc courses, so they really do set individuals up for a specific career development path. 

With entry to university becoming increasingly challenging, Econsultancy is keen to ensure we're supporting individuals in terms of skills development throughout their careers, and the certificates are another step in this journey.

Ideally, we would look to help school leavers find their first digital marketing positions at age 18, supporting them through their first two or three years through various training initiatives with a view to having them complete a graduate certificate by the time they are 22.

They would then have a qualification accredited at the same level as an undergraduate degree at roughly the same time as a university graduate, but with three years of solid experience.

By the time they decided to move on to the MSc stage, they would be on an even playing field in terms of qualifications, but with significantly more work experience and probably a deeper understanding of digital.

To find out more about Econsultancy's Digital Certificates, you can find details of the courses on offer here. 

To read more about careers in digital, see Econsultancy's Digital Marketing and E-commerce Careers Guide: For Senior Digital Professionals and For Students and Graduates 

So what is the motivation behind its latest move? Does Google seriously want to reposition itself as a price comparison site?

To get a better idea of Google’s plans we asked three SEO experts for their views on the credit card comparison service.

Is Google abusing its market position by promoting its own service at the top of search listings?

Kevin Gibbons, director of strategy at SEOptimise:

As with every change Google makes to its SERPs I always ask two questions; 1) how does this improve relevancy for users, and 2) how does this make Google more money. 

In my opinion there's a very thin line between providing what users want and Google getting what it really wants (more searches and more money). 

But as much as it may look like they're pushing things too far from an advertiser standpoint (for example, Google have somewhat changed their stance on paid inclusion placement) I honestly believe they are trying to make it more useful for users to compare credit card options. 

It just so happens that it also removes the need for users to go straight to the likes of moneysupermarket.com and it will make them a lot of money in the process!

Jon Beeston, director of new product innovation at Adobe

That depends who’s asking. 

A credit card provider might not think so, but a comparison website certainly would. It’s certainly promoting its own product in a way that competing sites can’t with their products.

Peter Handley, SEO director at The Media Flow

It certainly seems it to me. You can’t even see the full snippet for the first organic result on my monitor!

Also, the terms say:

Based on your search query, we think you are trying to find a credit card. Clicking in this box will show you credit card providers who can fulfil your request. We may be compensated when the user clicks to contact, fills out an application with, and/or receives a product from a product provider.”

Has Google just made a play to be the biggest affiliate in the world?

This has been on the cards since the acquisition of BeatThatQuote, and Rishi totally got his prediction right on this one a couple of years ago.

Does that mean it’s right? I don’t really think so personally.

Is there anything advertisers or regulators could do to prevent Google from promoting its own products?

Kevin Gibbons

I think it's unlikely. If this was a promotion for a Google branded credit card they might have a case, but it's just providing an alternative method of comparing third-party products.

I'm not sure if the fact that they are monetising this comes into it, at least not legally.

Jon Beeston

Regulators have the power, but it is a slow, considered process, as it should be, when government decides to get involved in business practices. 

As for advertisers, it depends – clearly some brands, like Barclaycard and Nationwide, want to be involved in this, otherwise Google wouldn’t have tried this new unit.

Peter Handley

To a degree, Google is entitled to do what it wants with its search results, including promotion of its own products. 

But do Bing do this? Is it good for the user? 

Are consumers going to think because it's a Google service that all credit cards are being compared here? Is this fair to the competition?

And what sanctions could be imposed? Fines? 

They will probably just pay any fines, whilst laughing all the way to the bank with the revenues this has brought in while they were able to get away with it.

There could perhaps be some mileage in some sort of anti-competitive lawsuit, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes over the next few days.

The use of images makes the ads appear more imposing than the normal paid search results. Why would Google risk annoying advertisers and users in this way?

Kevin Gibbons

Firstly, does it annoy Google's customers? 

I think Google see their customers as searchers, not advertisers. 

There will always be advertisers on Google for as long as the market is there and they're getting a return on investment. 

So if Google can provide searchers with something that they think is useful, I'm not sure if they're too concerned about the advertiser reaction. 

Google are in such a strong position in terms of market share, so if anything, it gives advertisers extra incentive to appear as one of the sponsored images and increase their clickthrough rates and, as a result, their profits. 

Jon Beeston

Google sees the flow of ad money from credit card brands to comparison sites, some of which comes to Google via Adwords. 

Clearly if it can disintermediate in that process, there’s more money to be made.

The bigger question is whether it’s annoying its users.  

Essentially a search on ‘compare credit cards’ delivers a page full of ads on most screen resolutions.

Peter Handley

I suspect that users are unlikely to be annoyed by this actually. 

With the rise of universal search results and products appearing in sponsored listings, from a user perspective, this is likely to be seen as an evolution of what is already in place rather than anything overly concerning.

If it were to annoy a small percentage of users, but make Google a lot of money from the majority, would they really care? I suspect not. 

Google offers comparison services for travel and financial products. Can you see it extending this to include other sectors?

Kevin Gibbons

Yes, absolutely. 

I think they've been developing this for a while and are currently working through the most profitable comparison markets one at a time. 

I'd be very surprised if there's not more to come later in the year.

Jon Beeston

Quite possibly. Under the Larry Page era, Google has shown itself to be much bolder in trying and pushing new things, and killing stuff that isn’t working.  

But travel and finance are the titans when it comes to comparison, and I think Google has a long way to go before it can say they’ve mastered them.  

My hunch is they will continue to focus on them before going after other verticals.

Peter Handley

I think that this is the beginning rather than the end of this process. 

At the moment, this is being applied to searches using “compare”, “best” or “cheap” as a trigger for credit cards and bank accounts. 

How long will it be before these start to appear on more generic head terms like “credit cards” and “bank accounts” without the trigger words?

Will it be applied to other verticals? If it makes Google money, and you can only imagine that it will, I can see them expanding this sort of approach to any areas that they have the services for already.

Don’t try to be a jack of all trades

There are so many different areas and disciplines in digital marketing, that it can be overwhelming if you feel you have to be knowledgeable about everything. 

Instead, it's best to focus on a few areas that you are interested in and can be knowledgeable in.

In my case, thanks to reading our reports written by people like Dr Mike Baxter, I focused on e-commerce and user experience, as well as being fascinated by SEO, email, mobile, social media and more. 

This doesn't mean you should ignore all other topics (as Editor, I do have to know a little about affiliate marketing, online ad networks, etc) but it's better to specialise where possible, and it's more enjoyable to write about topics you care about. 

Learn from the experts

Fortunately this industry is full of talented people who know their stuff and are prepared to share what they have learned. 

As well as my colleagues at Econsultancy, industry experts such as Craig Sullivan, Andrew Girdwood, Matty Curry and many more have been willing to lend their opinions and the odd quote when I've needed it. 

In addition, I've learned loads from some of the excellent speakers at Econsultancy events such as the Future of Digital Marketing and JUMP. There are some other great conferences out there too, including - most recently - BrightonSEO. 

Don’t rely on spellcheck

I'm as guilty as anyone for making mistakes on blog posts, and in the early days I placed rather too much faith in spellcheckers. They're great for catching obvious mistakes, but there's no substitute for checking things yourself. 

Even better, a second pair of eyes can find the mistakes you may have missed even after reading a few times. Check and doublecheck, then check some more.

Keep it simple

There are some complex concepts in digital marketing, and it would be easy to baffle readers with terminology like RTB, demand-side platforms, and so on. 

Of course, some terminology is useful, and industry jargon is unavoidable to a certain degree, but I've always tried to avoid too much this and explain ideas to readers as clearly and simply as possible. 

Avoid jargon 

Although I'm guilty of using some at times, I really hate jargon, especially since it's normally possible to convey meaning in plain English. 

We do have a list of banned words in our blog style guide, including such crimes against language as: 

• Leverage
• Synergies
• Learnings
• Holistic
• Actionable

Kill them with fire. 

The importance of headlines 

Headlines are key when writing for the web. A good headllne can make the difference between hundreds and many thousands of page views, and can give you a real advantage in the search rankings. 

A few key points for headline writing: 

• Use adjectives. This turns a dull headline into something that will catch the eye and get people clicking. For example, '25 brilliant examples of Facebook brand pages' is about the most popular post of the last year or so on this blog, and this is thanks to the combination of a popular topic, useful examples, and that adjective. Oh, and it's a list. 
   
• Lists work. Chris Lake explains this in more detail here, but list posts work because of a number of factors. They're easy to scan and read, people want to know what did and didn't make the list, and it forms the basis for debate in the comments. 
   
• Consider search. We try to make sure headlines will rank well and try to secure a spot in the rankings for phrases which relate to our reports and content, like 'checkout optimisation', 'SEO best practice' and so on. It makes sense to check Google first to see what people are searching for and, within reason, adapt your headlines accordingly. 
   
• Make headlines descriptive. You often have just one chance to convince people to click a headline as they see it in their Twitter feed, in the SERPs, or in a newsletter. The headline should describe what the article is about:

• Keep the length of headlines down. Headlines need to be short enough to work as email subject lines, allow for easy retweeting, so they appear in full in search results, and so on. We have a 65 character rule for headlines, which is the perfect length. 

Internal linking

Internal linking is very important, especially if, as on Econsultancy, you have an archive of useful content. 

• It's useful for readers. If someone has come to your site attracted by an article on a particular topic, then it makes sense that they may want to read related content, so give them some ideas for further reading. It may be that you have written a news article on a topic which you have covered in more detail previously.
• Internal links reduce bounce rates. If people arrive at an article and you give them some related content and somewhere else to go once they have read it, then it gives them a reason to stay on the site a little longer. For us, we not only want to show visitors our other posts, but also for them to see our reports, details of events, training and so on. 
   
• It helps Google to crawl your site, as links are a great way to help Googlebot through your site. Here's Matt Cutts on the subject. 
   
• They can help you to make a point. For example, if I'm writing about checkout optimisation, and I want to refer to the reasons customers bail out of purchases, then I can link to a post like this one. Normally I'd use better anchor text but that's another story...
   
• They send traffic to older posts. A decent chunk of our blog traffic is generated by archive posts, and now and again older articles do the rounds on Twitter, as someone discovers them via search or a link from a newer article and decides to share them. 
   
• It helps you to rank for certain keywords. You can use anchor text contain a key phrase you'd like to rank for when linking to older posts. For example, I can link to an interview with the ICO using the keyphrase EU cookie law in the hope that this will help bump it up from position 18 in Google. 

Create readable content 

Even if they have been enticed to your post by the title and subject matter, readers can still be deterred if the article is badly formatted. 

Huge swathes of text with huge paragraphs, little formatting, and no images would be enough to make most readers bail. 

Instead, you need to break up blocks of text with headings and sub-headings, use short paragraphs, highlight key points and stats, and use images and charts, both to illustrate the points you are making, but also to make the article easier to read. 

For example, this post on how marketers can target tablet users is almost 3,000 words, a bit on the long side for a blog post. To counter this, I've used headers, sub-headers, lists, charts and highlighting to make it seem less of an effort to read it: 

Original content works best

There are thousands of marketing blogs out there, and lots of them are just writing the same articles, which are often straight write ups of the same press releases which reached my inbox. 

This is not to say there's no value in press releases, or that we never just write about a survey or a piece of news we've seen, as these posts can be useful sometimes. 

However, the best content, and that which is most popular on the blog, and keeps traffic coming in long after being published, is that which is original. 

If you look at the 25 most popular posts from this blog last year, you'll see a mixture of curated lists (top ten e-commerce infographics etc), great stats, and original posts full of useful tips, such as Kelvin Newman's Ultimate guide to the Facebook algorithm.

Link to other bloggers 

Of course, you want to promote your own content, but it's also important to link to other bloggers, to give credit where it's due, and to share some of that link juice. In return, you are far more likely to get links back from other sites. It also allows you to debate issues and bounce ideas off each other.

For example, while looking for more reasons to link internally for this article (I could only think of four) I found this great post full of blogging tips on SEOMoz.

Do lots of reading

I have to write a certain number of posts and reports, but it's vital that you keep some time aside just to read and digest as much information as you can. 

When I started, I worked my way through Econsultancy's best practice guides, but you also learn a lot by reading other bloggers. 

For example, as someone who likes to write about e-commerce and user experience, sites like Smashing Magazine, UX Booth and Get Elastic's blog are fantastic resources for inspiration and insight. 

Dealing with the trolls

Fortunately, though we do get plenty of comment spam, we don't get too many trolls on this blog. This is how to deal with them:

Listen to feedback

I love to hear feedback, good and bad, on blog posts. Well, if I'm honest, good is much better, but you should learn from both. 

This helps you to avoid making the same mistakes again and again, and helps you improve as a writer.  

Don’t blog for the sake of it

This is a tricky one. Some days you just have fewer ideas for blog posts than others and you're tempted to write anything just to get something up on the site. 

Far better to wait until you have something better to write about, and to make a note of the ideas you have when you're in the mood, so you have a reserve to fall back on. 

It’s about quality not quantity

It's very important to keep the articles coming to give people a reason to keep checking your blog, and to give Google's spiders some fresh content to crawl, but this shouldn't be at the expense of quality. 

I'd rather see one or two detailed and insightful posts than a bunch of quick articles published just to keep the numbers up.  

The value of social media 

Social media is massively important for bloggers in three ways: 

• Getting ideas for new posts. 
• Encouraging debate around your blog posts. 
• Promoting your content. 

To take Twitter as an example, I get plenty of ideas for posts from the people I follow sharing news, stats, and ideas, while I can always ask a question or two and get some useful background for posts. 

We also promote posts on social media, and a good deal of our blog traffic comes from social sites. 

The importance of analytics for blogging

It's not always about numbers for us, if we have just a few hundred people view a post, but a decent proportion then go on and download a report, then this can be more valuable than getting 1,000 retweets and buckets of page views.

However, we do like to know what works and what doesn't, and looking at the figures from analytics and learning the lessons is important. 

For example, the stats below show a variety of bounce rates and time spent on site.

The post on Zeebox and Dancing on Ice brought the traffic in thanks to people searching for news about the ITV show, but the bounce rate was 97.5%, meaning that these people probably weren't looking to visit an internet marketing blog. 

Timing is everything

The time and day you publlsh a post can make a big difference, and this is something we try to learn from. Generally speaking, posts will do better for us when published late in the morning and midweek, which is partly why this post has been published at 12pm on a Tuesday. 

Different posts will work well at different times though, so we'll publish something we think is of value to UK and US users a little later for maximum exposure. 

It's also why we'll publish lighter posts, such as this one showing 10 easter eggs hidden on websites, on a Friday when people are thinking of the weekend.  

Comment on your own posts

I like to see comments on our posts. If nothing else, it reassures you that something is actually reading them. 

If you can get a good debate going, as on this post on the 'cookie law', then it means people are coming back to check replies to their own comments, they're more likely to be tweeting about it, and you can learn something from the comments people leave. 

You can help to encourage this by joining in, answering questions and asking some of your own. 

The value of timesaving tools and apps

This is worthy of a post in its own right, so I'll just mention a few, but there are plenty of tools out there that make my job much easier.  

• Screenshot tools such as imgur are great, especially for reviewing websites.
• Twitter Search, for all its faults, can be very handy for real-time research. 
• Flickr Creative Commons is great for sourcing images. 
• Q&A sites like Quora or LinkedIn answers are great for finding elusive stats and case studies. 

If you're interested, here are the other 1,999 articles if you have a spare month or two...

Wikipedia dominated the search terms, but as we have previously reported this is due to a number of reasons including its domain authority and unique content.

I Spy also estimated the amount of traffic each site would get as a result of its natural search rankings for 60 generic clothing keywords.

Again, ASOS led the retail sites with 8.2m clickthroughs, while Coast, Debenhams and House of Fraser continued to hold a top ten ranking with 3m, 1.8m and 1.8m respectively.

I Spy notes that while young fashion brands and luxury retailers fail to make an impact on the results, informational sites and niche accessory retailers perform well for SEO.

The report also examines which brands feature most in paid search results.

It found that e-tailers featured more prominently in paid search terms for womenswear compared to multichannel retailers.

“The stronger performance from e-tailers suggests that as they don’t have a physical store they need to work even harder than their bricks-and-mortar rivals through online marketing, such as paid search, to grab consumers’ attention.”

It is also notable that there are no luxury brands in the top 30.

Looking at menswear, the results showed a mixture of department stores, pure plays and high street stores investing in paid search.

In contrast to the paid results for womenswear, luxury e-tailer Mr Porter and Amazon achieved high rankings.

For more information on search tactics check out Econsultancy’s SEO Best Practice Guide.

Similarly, our SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide 2012 contains profiles of 36 leading UK agencies, as well as advice about how to find the right agency.

Authorship markup on Google UK

Currently, journalists and bloggers who write about technology, medical and food topics are among those that are most visible in the the SERPs, thanks to their author markup. 

The most visible is Elaine Lemm, who writes for the New York Times, and About.com, while the remainder of the top 10 are authors on either About.com or the WebMDNetwork, which suggests these two sites a) rank well for a number of keywords and b) have encouraged their authors to sort out their markup. 

Edward Chester of TrustedReviews.com and the Guardian's Tech Editor Charles Arthur are among the most visible UK-based authors on the list. 

Authorship markup in US

A similar study for the US found that 17% of results tested are showing author integrations. As in the UK, authors writing about food and medical matters were the most visible. 

How to get authorship markup

If you have a Google+ profile, you can head over to this page for instructions on enhancing search results for your articles. 

This is something we have implemented for Econsultancy's authors, with varying degrees of success. 

While several guest authors and staff (such as Andrew Warren Payne shown below) have their mugshots next to their results, annoyingly it hasn't worked for me as yet... 

Why is authorship markup important? 

The theory is that, anything which makes you search results stand out should increase CTR, so it's worth trying for that reason alone. 

Also, since it's relatively simple to set up, or at least it shopuld be, then it's worth experimenting to see if it does improve search visibility. 

It is possible that this will become nore significant as a ranking factor in future, as Google looks to integrate social signals into its algorithm. This is the view of SEO experts I asked to contribute to a recent article on this. 

According to Econsultancy giuest blogger Kevin Gibbons: 

In my opinion, this will become very important. Google is aware that the importance of a website shouldn't just be based around links. Social is a huge indicator of influence and many people will now share great content instead of linking to it.

That makes things harder for Google as it means that by ignoring social it's missing out on a huge part of the big picture when reviewing how authoritative a website is.

This means that brands now struggle to rank so highly if they just hire copywriters to publish content for them. If Google is going to measure a the influence of a writers social profile when ranking content, you should do the same when looking to hire them too!