Thu, 31 May 2007 20:12:55 by Matt Hopkins
A lot of website design companies claim search engine optimisation as part of their product mix. Now I can understand the desire to build brick walls around your clients to keep them close - but to claim that you can perform a service as demanding as search engine optimisation and then demonstrate how ineffective your skills actually are is just bad business.
Fr...Read More.
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Thu, 31 May 2007 09:59:07 by Joe Ogden
A very dramatic title perhaps but I feel the need to be serious for a moment and to warn of a tactic used by unscrupulous web designers, especially those who offer a limited SEO service. I have had the task to have to work with moving two domain names to different hosting companies, in each case, the customer has enlisted the help of a web designer and the web designer has been most helpful with b...Read More.
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Wed, 30 May 2007 16:47:40 by Hannah Parker
A while ago Matt blogged about the role of SEO in Adwords - specifically the need for a good Quality Score.
If you're asking what's a Quality Score and why can't I see it - then I'll redirect you to an earlier blog on that - "Displaying Your Quality Score".
If you're happy with the concept but a bit fed up that all your keywords have a score of "Poor" - here's a sneaky tip that is po...Read More.
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Tue, 29 May 2007 16:18:42 by Hannah Parker
Sometimes I have to deal with sites where the owner has several domains and they have used server aliasing to point all domains to the same webspace - effectively all domains serve the same content - duplicate content extraordinaire.
Take this scenario. The client has 2 domains:
www.original-domain.co.uk
www.second-domain.co.uk
The original-domain was registered first and the secon...Read More.
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Fri, 25 May 2007 15:38:48 by Pete Handley
I don't know about everyone else in the SEO world, except for those whose blogs I have read on the subject, but I am actually quite excited about some aspects of Universal searching that will change the way we optimise content for our clients.
Instead of the "standard" optimisation, which most good, well trained SEOers can do, we are all going to have to get our hands dirty helping the client ...Read More.
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Fri, 25 May 2007 10:57:28 by Hannah Parker
So what is Click Fraud? Well - since the dawn of PPC, people have been trying to cheat with PPC - web site owners who show Adsense adverts might get their friends to click on their adverts in order to earn revenue. Or your competitor might repeatedly click on your adverts to use up your budget. These "clickers" might be outsourced (as reported in India Times article "India's secret army ...Read More.
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Thu, 24 May 2007 09:40:20 by Pete Handley
On my way to work this morning, I noticed Google had made front page news of a UK national newspaper The Independent, with a headline of "Google Is Watching You". It's not every day a search engine makes national news, and certainly less often that it makes the front page, so I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about.
The root of this article is all the data that is being stored for G...Read More.
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Thu, 24 May 2007 09:32:15 by Matt Hopkins
Here's your Thursday morning thought of the day - in the television show Heroes , a professor is able to track down people who are experiencing genetic mutations giving them "special powers" by searching a database held by the Human Genome Project. Pretty far fetched - right?
Well perhaps this is they type of new search that Google is planning to offer in the not so distant future.&...Read More.
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Wed, 23 May 2007 19:22:00 by Matthew Hopkins
Every few months - whenever some change occurs to one of the major search engines (usually Google), a lot of people start blogging that "the end is nigh" for search engine optimization and SEO companies in general. This has happened over algorithm changes in the past and more recently with personalization, localization and of course Google's new Universal Search.
Here's the reality ...Read More.
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Wed, 23 May 2007 16:04:32 by Hannah Parker
Want to improve your search rankings? This is my "SEO for Beginners" guide with 10 tips for where to start:
1. Make sure you know what keywords you want to rank for. Make a shortlist and maybe research them using online keywords research tools.
2. Look at your site: work out the theme of each page and hence what words each page should be optimised for.
3. For each page, ensure tha...Read More.
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Mon, 21 May 2007 16:56:29 by Hannah Parker
Just a quick observation...
A couple of months ago I tackled a site with 100's of W3C compliance errors. It was a long and boring process.
I've just been reviewing the campaign and the Google rankings are fascinating viewing. They shot up a couple of days after I uploaded the newly validated page and have stayed consistently high ever since. No other changes happened at the same time.
Read More.
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Fri, 18 May 2007 17:22:12 by Matt Hopkins
A few years ago, building and exchanging links was a very effective process for building reputation and enhancing your search engine results.
Its not that it doesn't still work today to some extent, but it is yet another area that has been abused by the masses and in doing so has contributed to its downfall. It has led to the search engines enhancing their ...Read More.
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Fri, 18 May 2007 14:32:07 by Pete Handley
Before I worked as a Search Engine Marketer for Vertical Leap I studied Entertainment Technology at Portsmouth University, specialising in web technologies and dabbling in web design itself.
Once I had finished the first website that I actually set out onto the Internet, the question that I was asked by my friend who I had made this site for was “How do I get anyone to find th...Read More.
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Fri, 18 May 2007 04:58:15 by Michelle Smith
So many Search Engine Optimization companies give the customer a one-time "task based" optimization, working on different areas of your site to improve your rankings, leaving results up to you. There are over 200 different measurements Google uses to rank pages. You can get lucky for a little while with one-time optimization, but the real service we provide to clients is keeping yo...Read More.
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Fri, 18 May 2007 04:42:19 by Rebecca Ratliff
Press releases today online continually gain more value both from the exposure to potential readers/clients as well as satisfying the search engines. It's common knowledge that press releases are currently part of Google's algorithm. The shift of reading the news and press releases online vs traditional methods such as TV and printed publications continues to grow. Press releases...Read More.
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Thu, 17 May 2007 20:06:23 by Hannah Parker
Well we mention things every few blogs about things to look out for in your web hosting so I thought I might put a list together of things that we think are important:
Geolocation - we've banged on about this several times so I wont go on at length - but if you're aiming for a UK market - then host in the UK. Some popular hosting companies in the UK host in Germany and Sweden - so don't t...Read More.
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Wed, 16 May 2007 06:59:45 by Rebecca Ratliff
Deciding whether to tackle Search Engine Optimization yourself or hiring an SEO Company is a major decision. Here are a few things to consider in making that decision. The knowledge required to successfully manage an SEO campaign is extensive and ever changing. Technically making the changes to your website is another area of expertise that is required. Currently the ...Read More.
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Tue, 15 May 2007 17:20:46 by Matt Hopkins
Showing Google Search Results without Ads
One of the reasons that Google has been so successful is their clean and uncluttered design. But do you remember back when Google only returned natural / organic search results - before they implemented adwords? Now that was clean. If you want to turn back the clock and display results from Google without the ads showin...Read More.
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Tue, 15 May 2007 00:19:40 by Danni Mikellides
Traditional Advertising Agencies are beginning to embrace online as a core element to their media strategies. However, optimisation and on line marketing is not an area they specialise in.
Traditional agencies do not have the online marketing smarts, as with many digital agencies. There forte could be their creative abilities, their brilliant copy writing or their clever use of inte...Read More.
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Fri, 11 May 2007 18:20:16 by Matt Hopkins
A lot of companies host their sites on shared servers. This means that multiple web sites share the same IP address. This is not generally a problem unless you get stuck into what is known as a "bad neighbourhood". If you are in a bad neighbourhood - it means you are on an IP address with sites that are either spamming, explicit or perhaps have even been banned. Being ...Read More.
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Fri, 11 May 2007 15:56:58 by Pete Handley
I have just had a useful looking tool pointed out to me by one of my clients.
Its called Poodle Predictor and can be used to alert you to links that search engines may be unable to spider.
All the search engine optimisation in the world can be undone by a search engine spider being unable to follow all the links on a site!
Its important to know whether or not this is a factor in a sit...Read More.
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Thu, 10 May 2007 16:32:13 by Hannah Parker
The metric that Google uses to calculate the Cost Per Click (CPC) that you will pay for your adverts is called the Quality Score.
The Quality Score has 3 ratings: Great, OK and Poor. Keywords with a "poor" rating will pay more for a click than keywords with a "great" rating.
There are lots of factors that affect your quality score - such as bundling huge numbers of keywords into an Ad Gro...Read More.
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Thu, 10 May 2007 16:12:32 by Hannah Parker
Search patterns are fascinating. I've been managing Job related PPC campaigns for over a year and it's interesting to see how people's brains work.
Hits decrease in school holidays and when the weather is good. January on the other hand is crazy season. If there is one time when you want your PPC campaign to be working for a job site, it's January when everyone is trying to change their life. ...Read More.
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Wed, 9 May 2007 20:04:35 by Matthew Hopkins
It's really great to see the level of coverage that "Web 2.0" is now getting. But what's it all about? There are some great references available, but probably one of the best is from Tim O'Reily called "What is Web 2.0"
We've been thinking about software as a service and using the internet as a platform (a couple of the Web 2.0 key principles) for a few years now.
Our campaign ...Read More.
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Tue, 8 May 2007 22:58:17 by Danni Mikellides
Recruitment companies and advertising agencies are changing the mindset of the way they source candidates.
Advertisers are now finding they place a job on a job board and within minutes are already three pages back from the front. They are also finding they loose their audience to competitors and the quality of the applicant has decreased. Advertisers will also tell you that it is too easy to...Read More.
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Tue, 8 May 2007 15:09:33 by Hannah Parker
One of my team recently noticed that one of our campaigns was suffering in the search engine rankings. Whilst investigating, he found out that every page of the site had hundreds of irrelevant and hidden links at the bottom of the source code of every page. The links were hidden by a style sheet setting. The site had been hacked.
I wanted to know if it was an issue with just my client's websit...Read More.
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Fri, 4 May 2007 16:42:52 by Joe Ogden
Hi All,
yes I know, the collective groans of 'what does he want now, I thought we got rid of him for good' can be heard... but well it only a short one and then I leave you to it... apparently Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo and all it's subsidiary companies for a cool $500 billion, *long whistle* now that's a lot of money - general consensus here is that it 'aint gonna happen' as Yahoo cons...Read More.
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Fri, 4 May 2007 14:49:49 by Pete Handley
Another quick tip.
Quite like Hannah's "Shift" click to open in a new window, if you press "Ctrl" when you click on a link it opens it in a new tab, if you are using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox.
Might be one you know already, but always handy to know if you want to keep your desktop a bit easier to manage with fewer windows open. I know how much Hannah likes having 10-15 windo...Read More.
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Thu, 3 May 2007 16:33:35 by Matt Hopkins
There is an established model in marketing known as AIDA:
Attention (aka Awareness) - attract the attention of your target audience
Interest - raise their interest by demonstrating benefits, using testimonials/stories
Desire - persuade them that they need your product / service / advice / information
Action - lead them to a desired action
This model has been arou...Read More.
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Thu, 3 May 2007 13:23:53 by Hannah Parker
Did you know...
If you hold down the shift key when you click on a link, it opens the URL in a new browser.
Sorry - I know most people probably do know that - but I just found out today!
Hannah Parker
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Thu, 3 May 2007 12:47:42 by Hannah Parker
Is that kind of like GoogleOn & GoogleOff for Google Search Appliance then Pete? (response to previous blog).
But back to my own topic Fake PageRank.... This is not a new one - but I was just reading recent forum posts about it this morning before I came to work.. and thought I'd talk about it a bit.
Fake PageRank is when a domain owner fiddles with their site to make it show artifici...Read More.
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Thu, 3 May 2007 11:37:58 by Pete Handley
The most recent news coming from the Yahoo Search Engine is that they have added a new tag that can be used to omit areas of the page that are not relevant for the search engines.
What this is trying to do is mark areas of the site that are meant for visitors only and stop the Yahoo Crawler from indexing those areas of the page. This would mean that the crawler is indexing areas of the site th...Read More.
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Thu, 3 May 2007 01:08:09 by Jayson Munday
More than one in three active internet users are now visiting newspaper sites. And the demographic of the audience is astonishing. The newspaper sites are drawing a younger demographic, and the increase will amaze you. 25-34 year olds saw an increase of 13.7% and 18-24 years old increased by 9.2%.
Not only are the numbers of visitors increasing, the time they are spend...Read More.
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Wed, 2 May 2007 19:50:09 by Matt Hopkins
We've just added a little feature into our campaign management system - Apollo - that is small but powerful.
For each of our client's campaigns, a team of Campaign Delivery Managers, SEOs, developers, link building specialists and Apollo itself record activities and make notes in a screen in Apollo called "Messages". These messages or notes are part of our way to ensure ...Read More.
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Tue, 1 May 2007 20:11:05 by Hannah Parker
Urgh
Just as I've waved good bye to Froogle it looks like Google's personalised homepage "IG" has just become "iGoogle".
And I really hate anything that sounds like Apple.
Hannah Parker
Campaign Delivery Manager |
Tue, 1 May 2007 01:58:29 by Jessica Faltot
Having a solid strategy for SEO in place provides the bedrock foundation for all successful long-term online advertising campaigns.
Search results are becoming distributed in such a wide variety of places it is impossible to estimate the impact of a fully planned, strategic search marketing campaign. The expansive nature of search engine marketing constantly creates larger audiences for ...Read More.
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Tue, 1 May 2007 01:50:28 by Jessica Faltot
When you are optimizing web pages, there have been questions as to whether or not to use hyphens or underscores.
If you are optimizing for Google, some SEO experts believe that Google prefers hyphens. If you are trying to optimize your web site for Yahoo you may want to add a few pages that use underscores to attract Yahoo.
Jessica Faltot...Read More.
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Tue, 1 May 2007 01:46:14 by Jessica Faltot
The "Weather Report" can be found in the Yahoo search blogThe weather report is what Yahoo refers to as any shift in the way they perceive sites for rankings. It could be worth checking out once a month or so to see if any changes have occurred.
You may want to bookmark the site. http://www.ysearchblog.com/
Jessica Faltot...Read More.
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