Wed, 28 Feb 2007 by Pete Handley
Seeing as Hannah started the habit, if we are looking further afield than Google, Yahoo have now started highlighting the key terms you are looking for on a page when you look at the cached version they have stored on their database!
... Read More.
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Tue, 27 Feb 2007 by Jessica Faltot
With all the latest news pouring out of the Google and online touting the future of social media in the search market - only to have next week's flavor being how everyone must jump on the blog bandwagon or last month's news that talked about nothing but the importance of inbound links and Page Rank - it's a wonder anyone can keep up.
Last night I was trying to catch up on one SEO newsgroup I've enjoyed readin... Read More.
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by Jessica Faltot
Search is the consumers most widely used online tool. Activity in search is second only to e-mail. That means people are looking, learning, seeking solutions for business, the home and personally. Anything from finding the best recipes from Southern Living Magazine to researching the best search engine optimization companies.
Clearly if you have a product or service and are looking for a powerful, sustainable means of growing revenue - you must consider organic search as a part... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
Afternoon all.
I'm being too Google centric. I've looked at all my posts and they're all about Google. The other search engines deserve a turn.
MSN has its adlabs - which is (currently) a beta feature that it has provided to support its Pay Per Click (PPC) model adCenter.
The Search Funnel in adlabs is my favourite. By default, it shows the top 5 outgoing funnels - i.e. the top 5 searches that a user makes after an initial search. Go try it - I took an example search of - "chicken"&nb... Read More.
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by Jayson Munday
The question has bee raging since the dawn of SEO, should companies outsource their SEO needs or handle the project in-house? The debate rages on both sides, yet still there is no clear definitive answer. The question I put forward to you is, “Why do you outsource your marketing and advertising?” Why is it that day after day companies outsource this necessity? Is it because the advertising and marketing firms are the experts in their field? Is it the time that a company can save... Read More.
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by Cameron Winslow
Here is a link to an upcoming Australian SEO conference that looks very good: http://www.searchsummit.com.au/.
... Read More.
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Mon, 26 Feb 2007 by Pete Handley
Google have started distributing stickers to some clients as part of a marketing strategy in the UK. Thought this looked quite good!
... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
Another short one from me. If you've got 5 mintues spare - go and play with Google Image Labeller..
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
It's addictive so beware. You get automatically paired with another player. You both get shown the same picture which you both try to label. If you both come up with the same term then you score a point and move on to the next picture. You have 90 seconds in which to score as many points as possible. Google shows you terms which are "off limits".
My record is... Read More.
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Sat, 24 Feb 2007 by Matt Hopkins
Here's something that you wouldn't necessarily expect to hear - but according to Hitwise, search engines have now overtaken porn sites in UK market share.
It seems that search is a growth industry and the seemingly ubiquitous adult-content web sites are now in decline. In January, search engines had a 21% year-on-year growth in terms of market share compared with a 14% decline by adult websites. Google and Yahoo are still the primary players in the UK market with MSN/Live Search and Ask.com a ... Read More.
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Fri, 23 Feb 2007 by Pete Handley
One of my clients recently asked me about utilising social bookmarking to help articles and press releases on their site to get more coverage on the web and ultimately gain more traffic.
Sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and many others are springing up which is what is causing this phenomenon.
Social bookmarking, is where users click a button (often in the top part of the browser) and log a web page as something they have enjoyed. These bookmark... Read More.
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by Mary-Ann Dick
The latest edition of BRW featured a section called “Australia Online”. Generally it showcased the Top 10 Digital Media Companies in Australia, Corporate Blogging and Travel just to name a few.
It’s interesting to know that Google Australia launched in December 2002 and now has more than 100 Australian employees. Managing Director for Google AU Richard Kimber, says that this past year has brought a wave of conventional media marketers trying search marketing (organic and ppc) for th... Read More.
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Thu, 22 Feb 2007 by Pete Handley
Many people in the Search Engine Optimisation world still talk about the phenomenon that may or not be the Google Sandbox.
This is where Google treat new sites differently from other sites that have been established, penalising the rankings and not allowing them visibility in the search engine rankings until such time as a series of factors is met that allow them to begin rankings for the content that a site contains.
I am not certain that this "sandbox" actually exists. However, it is like... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
As Matt has talked about Google Maps - I thought maybe I’d do Google Base.
If you’re ecommerce enabled then you’re missing a big opportunity if you’re not in Google Base.
Google Base might not do anything for your organic rankings but it can really help your traffic - often listing your products right at the top of the organic search. Furthermore it feeds its products into Froogle (http://froogle.google.co.uk/)
Here’s an example of what I mean - a search for “ch... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
There's been a lot of discussion lately on various forums about Google Sitemaps and whether or not they should actually be submitted.
If you don't know - Google provides a service called "Google Webmaster Tools" (http://www.google.com/webmasters/) to help website owners with indexing and SERPs. Various graphs and diagnostic tools are provided to allow you to see what Google see's on your site.
A Google Sitemap is a list of all of the URL's (pages) on your web site along with some additional in... Read More.
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by Mary-Ann Dick
On the internet everything is fast paced and with so much information and very little available time, it’s too easy to lose your website visitor in a matter of seconds. You only have several seconds to capture the reader’s attention. So if you want your website to stand out from the crowd then you have to give the reader something of value to them, and to do so you need to ensure you write original, good quality content in such a way that your readers actually want to read it.
The by-... Read More.
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Wed, 21 Feb 2007 by Joe Ogden
Hi Guys,
I have just read an SEO article about Google and the DMOZ directory (handy for search engine optimisation!). According to the article, Google have removed all links to the Open Directory Project from its results pages, which has some implication in relation to SEO and search engine marketing as a whole.
Obviously there is still great value to be had in being included in the DMOZ directory as, fortunately, the search engine world still has other major players!
I will continue my researc... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
CSS is used by web designers to style various elements of websites, from fonts to page layouts.
It is good for reducing the code to content ratio on a site, which is always good for optimisation purposes.
However, there are some unethical designers and optimisers who will use CSS for the purpose of hiding content on their site from viewers, stuffing the pages of a site full of keywords, and cloaking areas of the page.
Search engines do not want to be tricked by web designers into putting unwor... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
Sometimes we evaluate sites which are not indexed in some search engines or are ranking very poorly.
This MIGHT be because they’ve been banned for dastardly spamming techniques like heavy interlinking between domains or it might be because the site is brand new - alternatively it might be due to technical issues which we can advise on.
A big problem is sites that are geographically targeted but hosted in the wrong country or with the wrong domain suffix. For example if a si... Read More.
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Tue, 20 Feb 2007 by Pete Handley
As many people who work in or around SEO, or who own website may know, the correct method for transfering the PageRank of one page to another is through the use of the 301 redirect.
We all know that using a 302 redirect can cause no end of problems for transfering this, but this often seems the standard method with hosting companies as well as many web designers who are ignorant of SEO.
However, once the redirect was put in place, the next thing we all wonder about, is when will the transfe... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
Over the past year, I have had a couple of problems with hosting providers for a few of our sites. It happens – and to be fair, sometimes it is out of the hands of the hosting provider when hard drives fail or servers crash (in fact recently Google has released a report on the hard drive failures in their data centres with an average failure rate of 8-10% from hard drives at least 2 years old). But it is the speed in resolving these issues that will prevent a negative impact ... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
My next favourite thing is showing lots of results per page in Google - up to 100 in fact.
To do this without delving into Google Advanced Search is simply a matter of changing the URL slightly after you search.
Say, for example, you are searching for "chocolate chicken" on Google...
Your URL would look like this:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=71&hl=en&q=chocolate+chicken&btnG=Search&meta=
If you then edit the URL slightly by adding &num=42 (to show 42 results per page)... Read More.
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Mon, 19 Feb 2007 by Matt Hopkins
You may have noticed that Google sometimes displays "local" businesses in its results pages for some search terms along with a map reference. Have you ever wished that your company could appear in these results (right at the top of the page)?
Unlike most things with Google... the good news is that getting yourself displayed in this area is actually free!
Yep - no kidding.
Check out the Google blog on the subject at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/find-and-compare-local-busines... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
I came across a slightly changed version of Google that was designed for accessibilty (web search for the visually impaired) at http://labs.google.com/accessible/
Having used this version, although there was some variance in results from the standard international version of Google, I found it really refreshing to use a search engine that did not have any paid for ads visible on the results pages.
I also thought this was a great idea, as it could be a shining beacon for following the ... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
Morning all - quick one.
http://searchengineland.com/070202-224617.php (Danny Sullivan 2 Feb 07)
The upshot of this is that if your search history is enabled and you are logged into your Google account then Google notes the type of sites you select from search results and gives them a boost in the rankings.
Just something to be aware of if search results don't seem to be displaying what you think they should.... Read More.
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Fri, 16 Feb 2007 by Hannah Parker
Did you know...
You know when you're looking for how many pages of a site are indexed so do a search for:
site:www.vertical-leap.co.uk
Well did you know you can restrict it to the supplementals? Yes? Of course you did. But in case you forgot - here's the syntax:
site:www.google.com *** -view... Read More.
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by Cameron Winslow
What is SEO? What is Search Engine Marketing? What is website marketing and promotion? How can I make the search engines work for my business?
These are questions we all hear everyday from companies to corporations that are trying to untangle the internet marketing jargon that is being thrown around authoritatively. Let's try to keep the language simple and message clear.
If you are looking to promote your companies website and transistion from a brochure to an... Read More.
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