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| Unique Visitors: 5 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 20273 |
| Visitors Out: 507 |
| Total Visitors Out: 507 |
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| Sharing SEO knowledge |
| 2008-07-18 09:12:44 |
As an SEO consultant my remit is to get your site ranking for the right keywords, increasing your traffic, increasing the long-tail and generally promoting your website on and off-page so that your business grows. These marketing activities are at the core of my "SEO life".
Now, in my humble opinion, marketing is also about communication- on a person to person level, and if you work in SEO this should be manifest in your client relationships. That doesn't mean that your SEO consultant should be a super-communicator, but they should at the very least understand that you have the capacity to comprehend what it is that they do for you.
If you're currently working with an SEO consultant, or are looking for one, there are some questions that will help you sort the good from the bad- they're not about rankings, or visits, or the long-tail, they are to assess whether that SEO is fundamentally any good at their job.
Do they:
1) ...encourage you to ask questions?
2) ...
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| Greasemonkey Script for Live.com Search |
| 2008-07-18 08:55:26 |
As I was testing some client results, I
noted that my searches on Live.com were not getting numbered. I use a great
little script for the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin
as detailed by Joe's blog on Firefox plugins here.
After a quick search I determined that
there wasn't one available. But then I had a quick look at the one I have to
Number MSN Results and wondered if it would work the same for Live.
And lo and behold, it does. Here are the
instructions:
Right click on your Greasemonkey icon in the bottom right hand
corner.
Select "Manage User Scripts"
Find the "Number MSN Results" script
In "Included Pages" select "Add".
Type http://search.live.*
in the box and click OK
You should now have
something that looks like this
Click close, and now searching live.com has numbered results
too!
There are so many tools in Firefox to make
the life of a professional seo easier, it is just fantastic.
Kerry DyeCampaign Deliv...
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| Growth in Online shopping in the UK highlights the importance of SEO |
| 2008-07-18 05:46:02 |
With the current increases to the cost of living in the UK, the spend in high street shops has been falling. However, recent online results have shown that, in the UK, the amount of money spent online is increasing and not falling as on the high street.
The internet offers shoppers the ability to make some huge savings and also allows them to shop from home or work without the costs of travel. Many online stores offer free delivery as well as their online discounts. Where shoppers are looking to take advantage of these great savings the average UK online spend is now a massive £145 million a day!
Research conducted by IMRG (Interavtive Media in Retail Group) shows that the high end and Lower end products are the areas where online stores are seeing the major benefits of this upturn in Shopping">online shopping.
In addition the research shows that more and more people are using the internet as a research tool before making major purchases and is supported by the increase in UK visit...
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| New Sitemap Protocol Additions |
| 2008-07-11 10:45:11 |
When I was looking in Google's Webmaster Tools to verify a new sitemap for one of my clients this morning, I observed that there are now a number of additional sitemap options available for submission.
Previously there have been options for "general" sitemaps and "mobile" sitemaps, but now there are some newer ones too:
Code Search Sitemaps
Geo Sitemaps
Video Sitemaps
So what are these doing, and why would you use them?
The code search sitemap help users to "find function definitions and sample code by enabling them to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet" - so you tell Google about Public Source code that you are hosting and this can enable it to appear in Code Search.
Geo Sitemaps are to help users to make content searchable in Google Earth and Google Maps. This allows you to tell Google where to find something on a map without them having to find it from another source. These currently support the popular KML and G...
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| Pay Per Click Trademark Storm Has Passed |
| 2008-07-11 08:44:40 |
As of early May 2008 Google implemented major changes to its
trademarks policies and lifted restrictions on branded keywords being used in competitor's
campaigns in the UK and Ireland. Many advertisers/agencies were displaying
apprehension and concern toward the changes and the effects on their campaigns.
As an
Ad Words professional I too had a sceptical outlook to the changes and their
effects. We are now over 2 months into the new format and as ever the decision
from the search Zeus reigned and the storm is slowly blowing over and the calm
setting back in.
Policies Overview
Previously advertisers could
submit keywords with Google that they have trademarks on, i.e. Nike, Audi and
Addidas etc and supplicate that Google prohibited other advertisers bidding on
these keyword terms without form...
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| Tracking "other" Marketing with Google Analytics |
| 2008-07-11 08:03:43 |
While this isn't a brand spanking new technique, it's one that often goes unexplored- and for relatively simple, measurable marketing it's hard to beat.
Say, for instance you have a product to launch, or a requirement to increase market reach, promote an event, promote a brand, or even reinfuse a waning audience, the web provides a platform to do it. However, it might not be appropriate to pursue those activities using a solely web-based approach (integrated marketing communications 101).
There are ways and means of getting people to a site or page for a specific reason, such as to get sign-ups for product samples, or for an offline URL promotion for an address that's easier to remember than your main corporate one- www.bestgadget.com vs. www.uber-corporation.com/great-gadgets/new-gadgets/gadgetX.asp.
So, whatever your reason for getting people to visit that nice neat URL, chances are you'll be wanting them to get to the right page on your site with as little fuss as possible. ...
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| Search Engine Optimisation is not a commodity |
| 2008-07-09 10:29:23 |
When working on the optimisation of your website it is tempting to think that the Engine">Search Engine Optimisation is a commodity that you don't need to worry about or something that only needs a short burst of activity on.
However, implementing Search Engine Optimisation to your site and managing this on an ongoing basis is important for the success of your website and the ability for you to attract business to your company through your online marketing.
Since the birth of the internet the number of websites has grown almost exponentially numbering over 156 million websites available in January 2008. With this level of competition of the people searching the web, SEO becomes so much more important. As we recently reported the number of people searching using Google is increasing all the time, so getting yourself noticed on the Google searches is important to the success of your website.
If your SEO Company recommends that the Optimisation of your site could be done in a short term bu...
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| Grouped Results in Google - The Elastic Band Effect |
| 2008-07-08 10:26:04 |
I have recently been discussing with a client the causes and effects of a double listing in Google. This is where two results are grouped together on a search engine result page, one indented below the other.
What happens when the two pages get on to the same search engine result page (SERP) is that they lock together. If the two listings are not on the same page you can get an interesting week on week effect where one listing goes down and the other goes up by the same amount. This is the “elastic band effect” and can be the result of keyword cannibalization.
Search Engine Land’s 100% Organic column has a good method of deconstructing what the “actual” position of the second result should be, using the &num=X extension to your Google query string. Andy Beard has some information on his site about how interlinking between posts helps to get an indented Google result (beware of video starting playing if you have sound!). His results are ...
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| Google Develops a New Ability to Crawl Flash |
| 2008-07-01 04:54:28 |
Good news for webmaster running a Flash website! Google has announced that, working with Adobe, they have developed a method of crawling textual elements of Flash on your website!
Previously the Google Webmaster Guidelines had warned against the use of Flash on websites as the Google Crawlers were unable to read the content, making Flash sites invisible to Google.
Now that Google have included a version of Adobe's Flash Player in their crawler the headache for webmasters of Flash sites will be reduced. Even better news is that the Google crawler will be able to read a wide range of Flash elements on websites, including menus, buttons as well as self-contained Flash websites.
The information Google will pick up from your Flash website include all of the text a user sees when browsing the site. This will help Google discover the full depth of your website as it is now able to pick up links within the Flash on your site.
There are, however some warnings attached to this new deve...
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| A tip to see if you need to change your SEO Company |
| 2008-06-30 10:06:10 |
If you are already working with an SEO Company you might want to look at the level of service you are being offered by them.
SEO is an important part of promoting your business online and generating more sales for your company. So, it’s really important to know what is going on with your site, and what any third party companies are doing on your behalf.
A good SEO company will be happy to share knowledge and teach you about the SEO process, explaining what they are recommending and why.
When making recommendations about changes to your site make sure that your SEO company is happy to explain the reason behind the changes they are suggesting. An SEO company that is worth working with won’t lead you to believe SEO is a black art only they can understand and will be happy to share the reasons behind changes and recommendations with you.
Making sure you understand what your SEO Company is doing on your behalf is important to your busine...
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| Microsoft to Splash Out $100million on Semantic Search |
| 2008-06-30 06:13:33 |
Semantic search has been “the next big thing in search” for ages, but hasn’t really got any closer to reality. Google hasn’t launched anything significant in this arena, which is unusual given all the PhDs it employs. So for Microsoft to spend $100million on a company developing this technology is a significant move.
For a description of semantic search, have a look at Joe’s blog from October, and to get an idea of how long it has been discussed, here’s another written by our Australian office in March 2007.
Results from the company that Microsoft appears to be purchasing, Powerset, are mixed, with varying levels of accuracy and query detection. At the moment, its main source of data is Wikipedia, but given that Microsoft owns some significant information sources (Expedia anyone?), this could well change. It also remains to be seen what they are going to do with it, but the natural assumption is that it will feed into Live Search, to try an improve...
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| Top 10 methods to provide local content in global search |
| 2008-06-27 11:31:31 |
Say you've got a business and you want to offer your services or products to a global audience. Now, its no good just serving standard content to every visitor, regardless of where they come from. You might (read: should) want to tailor your messaging to each specific region, or country, so how do you achieve this?
One option is to serve different content based on the IP address of your visitor, or the HTTP header status of their user-agent/browser. This IP-based content delivery works by using a server-side script that looks up their IP address or interrogates their user-agent's HTTP header. This then informs the site which content should presented to that user, or rather which page, or if you want to make your life really difficult, which sub-domain.
Problem is that when looking up IPs the results aren't always accurate, and anonymous proxies give nonsense results. More importantly the major search engines spiders come from the US, so they'll show US IPs in the lookup- and they'...
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| Potential Harmful Website Warnings - First Google, Now Yahoo |
| 2008-06-27 10:08:41 |
For some time now, Google have been putting warnings in their search results about potentially dangerous sites - these are perhaps ones that have been reported for phishing or for having potentially harmfull downloads.
It seems now that Yahoo are following this with their own warnings about sites. I was surprised to see this warning when searching for a clients search term "electronic display information":
Fortunately, the warning in question has nothing to do with my client - but the actual listing of the potentially dangerous site included further information about the potential issues with this site:
I think that its good that search engines are alerting searchers to the potential dangers that are associated to a particular domain.
I'm not quite sure that these pages/sites should appear in the search engine listings if there are real dangers associated to them.
However, the counter argument to that is that these pages are ranking in these positions by mer...
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| Google improve related search suggestions |
| 2008-06-24 06:22:09 |
Google have released an improved version of their related search suggestions.
When performing a search on Google you are offered a selection of alternative search terms from the Google database. These search terms appear at the bottom of the first search results page and link through to the search results page for each of the terms suggested.
The new search facility is dynamic meaning that the suggested keywords are fresher and more appropriate for the needs of web searchers.
These suggested search terms aren't available for every search performed on Google but where they are available it tends to be where the search phrase has other popular search terms related to it. These suggestions are designed to make searching the web quicker and helping people refine their search to find exactly what they are looking for more easily.
In terms of managing your website these suggested search terms are a great way of researching other areas where you can promote your services and show...
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| Google Moves in on Alexa and Compete |
| 2008-06-23 06:41:46 |
Google Trends has now added the facility to look at specific websites over time. Launched last week on the Google Webmaster Central Blog it has caused a bit of stir. Not only is this facility producing a directly competing facility to Alexa (owned by Amazon by the way), but it has some odd omissions in the list of sites it returns data for.
Wikipedia traffic – yay, Trip Advisor – sure, Yahoo.com – no problem, YouTube – er no data, Google.com – nada.
Interesting that.
Back to the product itself, as WebProNews points out, this is a Google Labs product, so there’s no indication of the accuracy of the data, which starts about a year ago. Still, we all know that Alexa’s traffic information is miles out, but it didn’t stop us and other SEOs occasionally referring to it as a benchmark, and no doubt Google Trends for Websites will be the same.
Like Alexa, only the busiest sites show any sort of full data. Alexa has recently updated how ...
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| Firefox 3- SEO goodness maintained, security may be flaky |
| 2008-06-20 07:48:08 |
Firefox 3 was finally released on Tuesday 17th to a mixed reception. The security community picked a few holes in it- the unreliability of how it reports phishing sites and drive-by downloads being the main concerns.
My concern was how it would handle the SEO plugins that I rely on, on a day-to-day basis. I'd never thought about how much I take for granted something as simple as Number Google Results for Greasemonkey:
...but as an SEO when you're faced with the possibility of losing this kind of functionality, the upgrade can be a bit fraught.
However, it appears that most useful plugins are fully functional in Firefox 3:
Search Status
CSS Viewer
IE Tab
Web Developer Toolbar
Firebug
Greasemonkey (you need this plugin for Greasemonkey scripts to work)
Nofollow display Greasemonkey script
Numbered MSN Results Greasemonkey script - doesn't seem to work with Live though
...so, many thanks to Mozilla- its pretty much business as usual : )
Joe BursellCam...
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| Top tips to improve traffic to your blog |
| 2008-06-19 05:21:16 |
With so many bloggers on the web, making your blog stand out from the crowd is becoming harder. Here are some tips for improving the performance of your blog.
1 Know your market - once you know who you are targeting with your blog and have done keyword research based on the main topics you are promoting, make sure your blog posts are all relevant to this subject matter and make use of the keywords you have identified.
2 Fresh Content - make sure your blog is regularly updated and fresh - a blog is no good if the content is out of date and keeping the blog updated will encourage both users and search engines to visit the site more often.
3 Original Content - make sure the content you post on your blog is unique - duplicate content will result in you being penalised by the search engines and will effect your blog performance. Getting ideas from other people's website is all well and good but make sure you don't copy them word for word - your blog should be your own work - selling ...
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| Google Increases Search Share in UK to 87% |
| 2008-06-18 05:46:39 |
Nine months ago, I blogged about how Google accounts for 80% of search traffic in the UK. Now, a new analysis (this time by Hitwise rather than Neilson/NetRatings) indicates that Google has grown this share again, accounting for a staggering 87% of United Kingdom search traffic.
From an SEO perspective, this is staggering, as it means that Google is consolidating its hold on the market, and is the most important engine for our UK clients. From a simple time management perspective, it means we should spend 87% of our time trying to improve rankings in Google, and only 13% of the time worrying about any thing else.
Time wise (because I found this train of thought interesting) that means if I work on a UK-focussed client site for an hour, I should spend 52 minutes improving the Google rankings and less than 8 minutes looking at everything else combined.
Whilst I have previously identified that the amount of traffic from MSN/Live Search is not very high it still feels odd as a search m...
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| Google do do hardcopy |
| 2008-06-17 08:44:25 |
I found a flyer in the lobby this morning, from Google. Noteworthy? Yes. My usual contact with Google is via a keyboard and a screen, so finding hardcopy seemed strange. Maybe I think too much, but it occurred to me that the flyer was the only time that I'd noticed Google outside of its usual context. They do run the odd ad in magazines and papers so I'm told, but as I don't tend to read hardcopy I rarely see them.
And that's the point, I'm not the target audience- the target for this flyer is the type of person who would consider spending money on Yell, or Thomson. With this marketing campaign Google are punting AdWords, using in this instance a case study of a wormery firm that has done well thanks to Google.
I think the campaign has been running for a few weeks- don't quote me on that. The Telegraph ran a piece called "The children of Google" back in May 2008, where a handful of entrepreneurs were showcased with their Google-aided growth.
To be brutally honest Yell...
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| Yahoo! get paid for Google Ads |
| 2008-06-13 05:28:01 |
Remember the beginning of this year when Microsoft were offering a fortune but Yahoo! weren't selling? How about when Google stood up for poor little Yahoo! and said that Microsoft weren't really playing nicely?
Well, now Google is going to really help Yahoo! out by paying them to serve up their adverts. Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo! is going to use Google for search and contextual advertising. This is newsworthy because for many it signals the beginning of the end for Yahoo!s search marketing.
For me its newsworthy because of the way people talk about these internet giants. Lets not kid ourselves here, Yahoo! is a MASSIVE company, they employ around 14,000 people and posted a net income of $660 USD million in 2007- they can look after themselves thank-you-very-much.
Similarly, it appears to be OK for Google to buy-in to Yahoo! but not for Microsoft. Google is becoming the internet- that's presumably what they want, and it'll probably happen one day, so it is stra...
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| Google website tools offering content review |
| 2008-06-12 05:42:49 |
Google's free Webmaster tools now include a free content review service. This service identifies if Google came across any issues when crawling your site to list on it's search results.
Once you've registered your site with Google Webmaster tools and verified it you can review the content of your website. Listed under the Diagnostics section of Google Webmaster tools, the Content review tool is quick and easy to use, and provides a downloadable list of information about problems on the site. This means that you have an easy to work from list of things that need changing.
The Content review tool enables you to easily see if the Meta information on your site is duplicated, missing or too short. Meta information is still important as the Meta Description is what is displayed in the Google search results for your page - which can be where people first hear about your site. Therefore, good Meta descriptions are key to driving more traffic to your website.
The content review on Googl...
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| Real Life Happens - Then We Deal With It! |
| 2008-06-10 09:31:51 |
On one of the campaigns that I work on, the client recently decided to redesign and relaunch a website. This involved lots of work to ensure that as quickly as we could, this site was properly optimised for the key terms that have driven traffic to it in the last 12 months, and as a result of these efforts, with only a small amount of flux, the vast majority of the rankings and traffic were retained with minimal disruption.
This is all part of our normal service. I know that lots of SEO companies work on a project based approach, but at Vertical Leap, we don't think work on sites in a project approach really deals with all of the ongoing aspects that are required for success.
It seems to constantly surprise my clients that I am able to do all kinds of things for them as part of the original contract that they sign with Vertical Leap. I can help people to set up a blog, we can create and distribute articles and press releases, and there is no limit to the number of times that I'll ...
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| Google cares about your hacked website- kind of |
| 2008-06-06 08:27:16 |
If you've been keeping up with our security comments and news you'll be aware that not only have we offered advice to the information security community , but we're more than happy to spread the love in all directions.
In the same vein Matt Cutts has explained how Google helps hacked sites. His definition of "help" is a bit flaky, but the intention is good- and "no", the road to hell isn't always paved with good intentions- in Google's case they're doing the right thing, but calling it the wrong name.
They're not helping hacked sites, they're protecting the rest of us from the fallout of hacked sites, which is substantially different. What they do which is pretty cool is that they notify you when they have banned your site, and why. So, if you're oblivious to the attack Google are doing you a favour- they're absolutely not obliged to, so be grateful- seriously.
Google also provide self-help resources so that you can pick yourself up again:
Quick securit...
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| Live search cashback |
| 2008-06-04 07:55:29 |
Back in October 2007 Microsoft bought Jellyfish.com- an affiliate marketing cash-back comparison engine. This brings their current acquisition total to 119 (Farecast Computer reservations were the latest in April '08). We guessed they bought Jellyfish to harness some of that web 2.0 goodness, rather than the revenues that Jellyfish was bringing in- and we guessed right...
...last month (May 22nd '08) MS launched Live Search cashback.
The deal is that they make money from advertising revenues, and then pass some of that revenue on to customers, by means of rebates on purchases. So someone shopping via Live Search cashback gets a kickback on every purchase they make- similar to online-coupon, and cashback sites like FatWallet or Ebates, except that the delivery of the reward/cashback is a little slicker.
In practice a shopper uses MS' cashback search to find products provided from a range of online stores, and those stores pay to be listed. Its up to the shopper to pick the ...
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| Internet Sales: Top Five tips to convert your website visitors |
| 2008-05-23 08:55:42 |
Website Conversions as important as traffic to websites and page rankings
When working on the promotion of your website, one thing you need to consider is that the traffic you receive and your presence on the major search engines is not the whole story! You need to ensure that all that extra traffic is converting to sales for you. There is no benefit to your business if you're not making the sales/generating the business.
Firstly you need to decide what your goal is with the website - what actions do you want your visitors to take?
Use your analytics tool to find out what your visitors are doing - are they interacting with your services like buying products or signing up for your newsletter? Or do your visitors leave the site without interacting with it in any way? Doing this research enables you to find out if your website has enough "hooks" to keep visitors interested.
So, you now know what you want from your site and what your visitors are currently doing. If you...
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| Top Tips for an SEO Friendly CMS |
| 2008-05-21 11:42:46 |
Many CMS' do not allow the level of manipulation and editing necessary for website search engine optimisation. This is not a criticism of CMS developers, it's just that there are so many factors to consider when building a CMS that the SEO-friendly components are sometimes overlooked.
The benefits of building an SEO friendly CMS are three-fold:
1. SEO is a continually growing area- building SEO friendly websites improves your profile
2. Once the key topics are understood you can apply them to other sites in your portfolio
3. The client gets a search-ready site from the off
So, by referring to this wish-list, and implementing its recommendations, you will be able to build an even better CMS.
1. Allow the addition/inclusion of pages
This might seem obvious, but it is something that allows an optimiser to specify non-standard pages, such as:
*Custom 404 error page
*Links pages that are used for linking and presenting links
*Sitemap page
These help increase search visibility and re...
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| New free SEO service for bloggers |
| 2008-05-21 09:28:42 |
We're launching a new service today that will offer bloggers with expert SEO advice... for free.
Blogging is becoming increasingly popular for both individuals and companies and many are using standard blogging platforms such aswordpress or blogger. By default, most blogs are not SEO friendly and there are various tips, tricks and tweaks that could be made to improve theblog's structure for the search engines. Our new service will review your blog and make site specific recommendations to help you overcome these issues.
Furthermore, SEO is more about "on-page" optimisation and you should also look at building authority/credibility online in the way that a site is interlinked with other web pages. Our new service will assess your current linking profile and provide "real world" advice on how you can enhance your online profile which in turn will have a positive impact on you search engine rankings.
In order to take advantage of this...
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| Online Marketing with Yahoo! Buzz |
| 2008-05-14 10:45:59 |
Yahoo! have introduced Yahoo! Buzz (Y!Buzz) into the highly popular social media arena. Similar to Digg and Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz allows web users to rate articles and blogs creating a list of popular content. Recent trend results on the Internet show that Yahoo! Buzz is dramatically increasing the volume of their users and the amount of time these users are spending on the site. Due to the rise in popularity of Y! Buzz there are some real opportunities to get more traffic to your site using their services.
How Yahoo! Buzz works
Taking rankings from popular searches on Yahoo! as a start point, Yahoo! Buzz then factors into their rankings the number of times an article or blog entry has been "Buzzed" or sent to a friend to create a list of the most popular items. Stories that get the most "Buzz" using these factors may be included on the Yahoo! homepage.
Yahoo! Buzz is currently in Beta testing on the main Yahoo! US site so the number of Publishers is currently li...
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| Inbound Link Penalty Issues in Google |
| 2008-05-14 07:19:23 |
I was reading Web Optimist’s blog on being penalised for someone else’s paid links (which isn’t very optimistic!) and I had to read it through a couple of times to get the gist of what he was saying.
This is the paragraph that caused me to pause
“This is where Google’s minus 60 penalty appears to be unjust. It has the potential of penalizing the innocent. Say someone linking to you has bought text links and Google penalizes them. That means you are going to indirectly be penalized as well because that #1 link to you is now at #61. If several sites linking to you get penalized, it could really hurt.”
Whilst that’s true in essence I’m not sure where the unjust bit comes into it. The World Wide Web is a whole network of links, which is the basis of many of Google’s ranking factors. Every link has a value, and the fact that one has been devalued is just another element in the process of SEO. Links get devalued for lots of reasons, a...
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| How to see country specific search results in MSN/Live Search |
| 2008-05-09 10:46:00 |
Back in January, Matt blogged about how to see Google.com results as seen from America and I’ve just discovered that a similar functionality is available on the new Live Search interface, whilst troubleshooting a geolocation issue for one of my clients:
Live results Australia http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=en-AU
Live results USA http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=en-US
Live results United Kingdom http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=en-GB
and what about
Live results USA in Spanish http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=es-US
Live results Spain in Spanish http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=es-ES
or perhaps a different alphabet
Live results Greece in English http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=en-GR
Live results Greece in Greek http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=gr-GR
I didn't test whether every ISO country code/language version worked, but this was a nice cross section!
Have fun...
Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager...
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| MSN/Live Search Engine gets new facelift |
| 2008-05-08 03:53:22 |
There is something strangely familiar about the new live.com interface.. and a clear sign that Microsoft are starting to look at Google and see where they can emulate their success.
For me, this is definitely good news.. not enough to make me switch Engine">search engines yet.. but encouraging.
The problem with MSN / Live.com was never really with the interface. In fact, I'd say that Yahoo has a greater interface problem than any of the others. The Yahoo home page is still stuck in the late 90's search engine "portal" concept. The simplicity of Google's interface was one of its original attractions. It seems that Microsoft are finally starting to understand this.
Further improvements to the SERPs (search engine results pages) were announce Back in October by Microsoft, with better snippets, a larger index and improved spam control. All good things.
It is true the the MSN / Live.com search is getting better and if you look at the sea...
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| Bad Linking and the Worlds Worst SERP Snippet |
| 2008-05-06 07:48:23 |
Last week I blogged about spam factory websites. This week I'm still in the mood for some spam (yum yum etc.), so when my vanity search for "spam factory websites" brought this back I just had to share it:
If I had a site that allowed snippets like this I'd go berserk- it says, very clearly, that the site is spam- big style!
The original blog was about fixing micro-site SEO issues, and used some text in an example (read the SEO blog, it makes sense in context):
"Aircraft abrasives provided by ACorp.com, suppliers to the aircraft industry."
The blog mentions aircraft just twice- in that sentence alone- and clearly has very little else to do with aircraft. Looking at the cached page you see the message:
"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: spam factory websites", so it's not a direct link, but that's not the point.
The point is that link building can have serious consequences, and if it's not managed it can cause nasty sur...
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| Spam Factory Websites |
| 2008-05-02 09:16:40 |
Web developers and search engine optimizers work with the same basic commodities- web applications and the internet. Web developers (usually) create sites that look good, deliver the right information and exceed their clients' expectations. More and more they are also attuned to the requirement that a site should be able to achieve high search visibility. This means making key components search engine friendly.
Building a 100% bespoke site is becoming a rarity- sure, design look and feel, architecture and content are pretty unique factors, but the content management system (CMS) sitting in the background, and/or the database that feeds it are frequently the same. So, your designer/developer may make you a one-off web 2.0 beauty, but chances are its management system is the same as for all their other clients.
I'm not about to beat-up on this approach, it allows scale-economies that (should) get passed on to you. It also means that your tech support (should) be top-notch. If they b...
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| 3 Way Link Exchange Being Abused by Unethical SEOs |
| 2008-05-02 08:22:34 |
A colleague passed me this recent discussion on Webmaster World which discusses how a lot of SEO experts think that 3 Way Exchange">link exchange can now be detected algorithmically.
3 way links were developed by the SEO industry in order to create an alternate linking strategy when two-way (or reciprocal) links were ‘devalued'. The idea was that by creating a triangular structure, the links were undetectable. The Webmaster World discussion would seem to imply that more recent thinking is that they are still found. What it highlights perhaps more is that three way links were specifically created to ‘game' the search engines, and perhaps that has made them a target for detection.
Aside from the fact that the reciprocal link is not as dead as people think, what I have seen more recently is an increase in link exchange requests that are three way, but offer a poor link in exchange for a quality one.
e.g.
Dear Webmaster
I know you are interested in boosting traffic bl...
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| Warning: Two Ways of Killing Your Organic Rankings in Google |
| 2008-04-30 10:14:00 |
There is some debate
about how much Google uses the clickthough rate of the organic listings to
affect where you are listed.
However, with two recent examples for our
clients giving demonstrable results, one dramatic and one less so, I certainly
believe that the clickthrough rate is used for determining your position on a
page.
In our dramatic example, a UK based
holiday company gained a Google Local Map result attached to their listing.
Unfortunately it was not their map listing, but some random hotel in the USA. As a
result, they experienced a dramatic slide off of page 1 for the majority of
their search terms over a period of 1 to 2 weeks. As nothing else had changed,
the only explanation for this is that the US
address put UK
based searchers off clicking on their link. (Thanks Google, that error is a
pain to fix).
The second site is one that has good
organic rankings for a competitive phrase, and is on the first page, but does
not seem to be able to move higher. Despit...
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| How Local Search will change how we use the Internet |
| 2008-04-29 09:29:29 |
Most studies show that a vast majority (something like 60%+) of all searches have what is called "local intent". This means that sometimes the searcher adds a local geographical indicator (e.g. "seo company portsmouth"). But sometimes they search with local intent without being specific about geography - e.g. it is likely that a search for "dentist" has local intent even without being specific about location.
The problem however is that the information that forms the foundation for local content searches is spread across a number of unrelated sources such as yellow pages, newspapers, local review sites, local directories and of course, search engines. Additionally, the information in a lot of these sources is either incomplete or out of date and information relating to smaller towns and villages may not exist at all.
Major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo are aware of these issues and are investing engineering resources to h...
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| Google's Website Optimizer Tool Now Available to All |
| 2008-04-21 09:39:44 |
Do you want to know if a new version of a landing or content page will out-perform the current version? Does your marketing manager think that a red "call to action" button would outperform the current blue one?
Wouldn't it be nice to have some way of testing the potential impact of changes like this before you actually replace a design or page completely?
For the past year or so, Google has had a tool called Website Optimizer that provides this sort of testing (A/B and multi-variant) but it has been available only to Adwords accounts. Last week, Google made it publicly available.
This is a truly excellent tool and I highly recommend that you try it out. You simply sign up with an existing Google account and create one of two types of "experiments":
1. A/B Testing. This is useful when you want to compare the performance of two or more content pages (e.g. landing pages). We recently ran tests on our landing pages...
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| Disturbing Google Universal Image Result |
| 2008-04-15 08:28:02 |
About 6 months ago, Searchengineland.com did a piece about how Google Image Universal Search was no longer family friendly, with an illustration of how a search for "raccoon" brought up an image of a raccoon and a dog being rather..... inappropriate?
Matt Cutts later said that the Google Image team had dealt with the issue.
Well, when searching for some clients keywords earlier this week, I think that I found an example, that is frankly worse - I searched for "office chair" on Google.com and was greeted with:
As Vertical Leap is a family friendly organisation, I have taken the decision to censor the most "offensive" part of the image in question, but you can surely see why I was so surprised by the "illustration".
I checked the other major search engines, and saw no sign of this image, so perhaps this has been optimised specifically to appear in Google.
The painting in question is called "office chair", but perhaps t...
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| Reverse SEO: Kill The Competition And Fill The Void |
| 2008-04-14 04:57:37 |
As competition in search continues to grow and grow, so to do the efforts of crooks and miscreants to hijack, damage or destroy the legitimately gained rankings of their competitors. We've seen many instances of malicious link insertion and now there are increasing examples of other attacks being used to tar the reputation of targeted websites.
If you can create a scenario in which your competitors sites are seen by the search engines as hosting a bunch of spam/malicious links, your site can perform well in the void that is created. The techniques simply insert spam links into the target site. Once Google crawls that site and sees the spam it will see it is untrustworthy- once marked as spam the site may disappear altogether from the rankings.
This type of activity has been labeled "evil SEO", but that's way too simplistic a view. It is an attack, in the same way that a defacement is an attack. What is interesting is that the value of search has reached such a peak that ...
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| Useful SEO FireFox Extensions |
| 2008-04-11 06:11:47 |
I was an IE user for a decade or more but have now been using FireFox exclusively for well over a year.
Personally, I don't like the font rendering in FireFox - when viewing a page in IE, the font smoothing makes a real impact and sites look much better... but there are enough improvements over IE for me that I can live with this issue.
FireFox has a couple of great features that are the driving force for me to have made a permanent switch in browser:
1. Error Console - this has been an invaluable feature to me for debugging issues with JavaScript.
2. Extensions - MS missed the boat with IE by trying to force their plug-in technology around ActiveX. FireFox extensions are simpler. They are small software programs that literally extend the function of FireFox. There are hundreds of them created for all sorts of reasons.. and just about all of them are free.
From an SEO point of view, there are several that are really useful. And so I thought I...
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