Fri, 29 Jun 2007 by Pete Handley
I was just undertaking a submission for Google's Local Business Centre, looking at getting this business listed here.
In the past the only way to complete this entry was to ask Google to send a postcard to the business address that you entered into this listing.
Now though this has been updated to allow a number of different verification methods:
It is now possible to request a phone call, to receive a text message or still use the postcard method to verify this listing with Google.
I'm yet to... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
Have you experienced the "Pitch and Switch"? I have.
A number of years ago, I had engaged a PR agency to run a campaign for a software product that I was launching in the US. I met with a few agencies and one was very impressed with one in particular. In my meetings with them, they brought in the "dream team" that I would be working with... the account exec that had done exactly what I was planning to do many times before, the agency Director who had written books o... Read More.
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Wed, 27 Jun 2007 by Hannah Parker
We've mentioned before that if you want to rank well in Google.co.uk (with the UK Filter on) - then it's best to have either a .co.uk extension or be hosted in the UK. Ideally both.
I've recently checked a campaign, which is hosted in the US but has a .co.uk extension. I searched for it in Google.co.uk with the "UK Filter" checked, using the following search to exclude supplementals:
site:www.domain.co.uk -allinurl:www.domain.co.uk
And I noticed that it is not indexed at all in Google.co.uk main... Read More.
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Tue, 26 Jun 2007 by Matt Hopkins
We're looking to expand our team and are recruiting SEO Specialists for a position we call Campaign Delivery Manager. This is a key role at Vertical Leap that covers hands-on SEO, campaign management and the overall responsibility for a dedicated portfolio of campaigns and clients.
This position includes the following core responsibilities:
* Manage organic optimisation projects from strategy through implementation. * Follow, manage and adapt our unique approach to search engine optimisa... Read More.
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Mon, 25 Jun 2007 by Hannah Parker
Back in March, I mentioned the launch of Google Adword's Pay Per Action (PPA) program.
I've been catching up on my reading and just noticed that this had now been launched WorldWide in beta.
I was interested to work out who they offer it to - for example - if you Pay Per Action on an Adwords Campaign and all the conversions come via people clicking on your ad, then phoning you up (rather than filling in online forms) - then you'd end up paying Google very little. Bargain!
Unfortunately this... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
The process of SEO is rarely straightforward. Ideally, when we start a new campaign we'd love FTP details to the site. We'd love to be able to FTP in and see lots of lovely pages all hosted on the domain that we are working on. We'd like nothing more than to be able to upload some files such as a robots.txt, a sitemap.xml or a .htaccess file....
BUT
The real life scenario is rarely that simple. There are often issues to work around such as a Content Management System (CMS), or dynamic pages with... Read More.
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Fri, 22 Jun 2007 by Jayson Munday
We all know the movie, the whole world’s population living in a virtual world, but is it all just sci fi? We have already seen the birth of virtual worlds in a lot of successful video games, and with online social media platforms such as Second Life, but now IBM stands to take it in a new direction.
The production of Innov8 is at full throttle, and apparently it will be here soon. Innov8 is designed to be the ultimate corporate training tool. It has been said that it will... Read More.
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Thu, 21 Jun 2007 by Cameron Winslow
Here is an interesting article by Barry Swartz-he organized the Search Summit we attended in Sydney earlier this year:
http://searchengineland.com/070621-144447.php
This article is one of his sources:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/21/EU-questions-other-search-engines_1.html... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
I have recently been researching the potential traffic for a seasonal Adwords campaign. When researching keywords using Google's Keyword Tool, the default option is "Keyword Search Volume" as you can see in this screen shot:
If its a seasonal campaign though - like "christmas cake" might be - the May search volume isn't much of a reflection on the number of searches that might take place in December. So what do you do?
Well - its very simple actually. The drop down box has an option to... Read More.
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Wed, 20 Jun 2007 by Cameron Winslow
Here is an article from Information week on Google's personalization:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199904793... Read More.
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Tue, 19 Jun 2007 by Cameron Winslow
Here is another good article from Matt Cutts for review:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-improves-search-for-fresh-documents/
Matt refers to an article from May 30th, 2007 by Tara Calashain:
http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/05/30/google-makes-change-to-daterange-syntax/... Read More.
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by Danni Mikellides
Franchise companies have spent the last few years relying on print publications and on-line directories to list their business for sale opportunities. Their latest marketing dollars are being spent with the new SEEK commercial site, where you can look at profile pages for various companies with franchise opportunities.
Are these mediums working for them or is it similar to looking at a job board where one company may spend the money to obtain the traffic while another benefits from receiv... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
We're growing and in search of new office space. In my quest for new premises, I registered with a property portal for commercial property and actually requested to see one or two of the properties. I completed the online enquiry form and waited for my phone to ring. It never did. When I called the property agent directly a few days later, they said that they never received the emails. As he was using Outlook for his email, I suggested that he look in his Junk Email... Read More.
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Mon, 18 Jun 2007 by Pete Handley
Now, while I am sure that most of you have read the other parts of this series, for those that haven't, go check out part 1 DOCTYPE and <head>, part 2 DIV's and CSS and the most recent blog part 3 Navigation.
Right, now that you are up to date with this series, I will begin looking at some of the most important factors for a well optimised website and what you can change to rank well for particular keywords, which are the document Title tag and on-page headings.
... Read More.
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Fri, 15 Jun 2007 by Hannah Parker
And another thing...
Matt mentioned Google Checkout the other day and it reminded me that I missed something when talking about sneaking in a 5th line in Adwords Ads.
In the first blog I mentioned that creating a "local business centre" ad then getting it displayed in the main search, gives you a 5th line which lists your location.
Another way of shoehorning a 5th line in and drawing attention to your ad with flashy graphics - is to accept payment via Google Checkout...
Look at this ... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
Sorry for the delay in the latest installment of my website construction guide for SEO. There are always lots of other things to do and people to meet that slow you down from these kinds of activity.
If you missed part one about Doctype and the Head or part 2 about DIV's and CSS you may want to go back and catch up on those before continuing with this one.
Navigation is a key area of the site, for users and for the optimisation of the site.
... Read More.
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Thu, 14 Jun 2007 by Matt Hopkins
I was reading an article today on the San Francisco Chronicle web site about a spat between EBay and Google.
Apparently. Google had planned to hi-jack eBay's user conference by luring its delegates to a party that promoted Google Checkout. For those of you that don't know, Google Checkout is the online payment system that Google launched last year to compete with PayPal which is owned by EBay. Needless to say, EBay were not happy and actually pulled all of their advertising on... Read More.
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by Joe Ogden
Hi y'all,
I am currently looking into the best, and of course ethical, ways to optimise videos to be included in Google 'universal' search. I will be adding a blog as I continue my journey into the unknown but in the meantime here is a list of video sharing sites that will prove to be useful when marketing your newly optimised video:
YouTube
Google Video
Google Video UK
MySpace Videos
MetaCafe
Yahoo Video
Daily Motion ... Read More.
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Wed, 13 Jun 2007 by Hannah Parker
If you search geographically for some terms in Google's main search index you might see some adverts that have 5 lines of text. This stands out slightly as most ads usually have 4 lines of text:
Title (25 chars)
Description 1 (35 chars)
Description 2 (35 chars)
Display URL
Do you want to know how the 5th line appears?? Well if you've created a "local business advert" and enabled it - it can show either in Google Maps with a map marker and image that you've uploaded OR it can display in ... Read More.
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Tue, 12 Jun 2007 by Matt Hopkins
I just read about an interesting report sponsored by one of the major meta-search engines Dogpile.
They analysed 780,000 first page results across the four major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) and found that less than 1% (0.6% to be exact) overlapped across all four.
Here's some more facts from the report:
88.3 percent of the results were unique to one search engine.
8.9 percent of total results were shared by any two search engines.
2.2 percent percent of total... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
This isn't a new subject but I realised as I was explaining it to someone that it's not something we've covered in our Vertical Leap blog.
We've talked about searching Google without the supplemental index. But we haven't talked about what it is, what the problems are, what puts pages in it and how to get out of it.
So let me rectify that.
What is the Supplemental Index?
Google has 2 indexes - its main index and the secondary index. When it searches for results it looks in its main index first a... Read More.
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Sun, 10 Jun 2007 by Jessica Faltot
When you hire a search marketing company to help your web site rank on major search engines, one of the first things companies should try to review is the content on their site. There are certain fundamentals that once in place can greatly assist the efforts of your search marketing companies efforts. Here is a basic checklist to follow:
- Is your content (message) clear and concise on your home page?
- Have you separated each important area of your business and given them their own ... Read More.
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Fri, 08 Jun 2007 by Rebecca Ratliff
Through the efforts of companies like Vertical Leap providing fully managed search engine marketing, your website is achieving great rankings and traffic increases from month to month. Taking advantage of this qualified traffic means providing your visitors with a website that gives users content they searched for and leads them to hopefully utilize your products and services. In other words how best to use this traffic to convert them into new customers and how t... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
In my last instalment, I reviewed a website for a marketing company that I crossed paths with recently. This site (it shall remain relatively anonymous) had some major structural issues with it and I covered a few of those in my last post. In this post I want to cover some other problems with the site that would prevent it from getting indexed and ranked by any significant search engine. Navigation. How your users interact with your site and navigate from one page to th... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
One of the big mistakes that many Pay Per Click advertisers make is to direct the adverts destination URL to their home page.
If you're paying for the click you want to make it as likely as possible that the customer performs the action that you're aiming for - whether that be to leave contact details or to buy a product.
The easiest way to increase your conversions is to create a bespoke landing page for each group of adverts. Jayson spoke a bit about landing pages in general - but here are&nbs... Read More.
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Thu, 07 Jun 2007 by Hannah Parker
Todays tip for Adwords.
When you create a campaign in Adwords it is set up, by default, to run on both the search and content networks.
When I manage Adwords accounts I like to separate the campaigns into Search campaigns and Content Campaigns.
The reasons for this are:
Ads running on the content network usually have low Click Through Rate (CTR). This doesn't affect your quality score if a campaign runs on both the Search and Content network - but it is hard to work out what the Search CTR is... Read More.
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Tue, 05 Jun 2007 by Pete Handley
Hello Blogosphere....
As promised yesterday, here is the next installment of my SEO Guide to website construction. Go read part 1 first if you missed it!
Todays topic on website construction is DIVs + CSS.
Now, I have actually seen a fair few Web Designer's company websites (who offer SEO as a service) that say that having constructed a website from tables (the old school method) means that your website will not rank in a search engine.
This is rubbish. I wouldn't be surprised th... Read More.
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Mon, 04 Jun 2007 by Pete Handley
This is the first blog in a series that I am going to be doing, discussing various methods that can be used when designing a website to help it from a search engine optimisation perspective.
Step 1 is going to begin right at the top of the HTML behind the scenes on a web page, with specifying a DOCTYPE for your page and the correct information in the <head> of a document.
A DOCTYPE declaration at the top of a webpage is telling the browser what type of HTML is being used on ... Read More.
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by Joe Ogden
Hi All,
I have just been looking through Matt Cutts' blog this morning, his most recent entry talks about how nervous he was about Google letting a journalist sit in on a quality meeting within the walls of the Google Empire. The article is worth a read but I thought I would highlight a couple of points that Matt had in his blog:
‘Google makes a go / no-go decision on several different quality changes each week.’‘If you want to build search loyalty, you have to get a lot of dif... Read More.
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Sun, 03 Jun 2007 by Hannah Parker
Back in March, Pete mentioned Wikia Search. Wikia Search is led by Wikipedia's coufounder Jimmy Wales. It's aim is to be an Open Source search algorithm.
My husband passed me his New Scientist today which is running a story about it.
The interesting thing in this that I didn't know is the solutions they are considering to tackle the expensive requirement of thousands of servers to contain the indexes. They're thinking about farming it out to the volunteers home PCs in the style of SETI.
OK I'm h... Read More.
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