Tue, 30 Oct 2007 by Matt Hopkins
We're very excited about Local Search both in terms of its immediate benefits to small and local businesses but also how it will become the foundation for the "next big thing".. Mobile Search.
In order for search engines to effectively deliver "local" results to a searcher, they need to know two key elements -
1) the location of the searcher/user and
2) the physical location of the business behind the website.
That way when some submits a search with "loc... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
This morning I was reading Is Search Still
Worth It?
on eMarketer, which refers to the new Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008 by
MarketingSherpa.
It quotes some interesting statistics, which are all taken from a survey of
actual marketers. For instance it says the marketers they
surveyed said they planned to increase their pay-per-click budgets by at least
11% in 2008.
Respondents also
rated both PPC and search engine optimisation as effective search marketing
tactics. SEO
came is as the ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
It has been around a while, but hadn't really impinged on anything I was
doing. However, I have just taken a slightly deeper look at Google Subscribed
Links and it's a really interesting addition to the Google portfolio.
I've played around with Google Coop before, in terms of Custom Search
Engines, but not the aspect that is subscribed links. In essence, you create a
file of a specific format (XML, TSV or RSS), tell Google about it, get people
to subscribe to it and then the results will appe... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Joe Bursell
In "URL Rewriting: Part One: Why?" I talked about dynamic URLs and their limitations. Here I'll describe the ways in which they can be modified for search engine friendliness (and other benefits).
Simply put, a dynamic URL is a locator that contains a variable element (that's the bit that makes it "dynamic", usually a call to a database) e.g. http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=154&view=basic ...in this instance it's the query-string beginning "id=XXX&q... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Matt Hopkins
We've just launched our newly designed website - with our "new look" logo - take a look. The UK web site has been updated today with the Australian and USA sites to go live over the next couple of weeks.
Our primary design goals were:
1. Improved visual impact with new logo, larger fonts, better usability
2. Clearer design with stronger navigation to primary areas of the site.
3. Better interlinking of blog posts (new "related blogs" available for each blog post)
4. ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Joe Bursell
So, you have a website, it is indexed and crawled regularly (because you've got the structure right and you update it regularly), people link to it, it has good authority and gets ranked well. What else can you do? One facet that is often overlooked is the way in which URLs are presented to the user, and this can affect how accessible your content is.
For instance a dynamic URL such as http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=554&view=basic might show a particular product in your cata... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Pete Handley
After reading the recent SEO chatter about the latest PageRank update in the toolbar I decided to review the websites that I work on's figures.
Now, I probably mirror the thoughts of thousands of others when I say that the numbers the toolbar gives you don't mean a great deal. Certainly as linking has become more about relevance than volume, a simple score giving some idea of link strength just doesn't make much sense to me - the way I see it is that link "scores" or "juice st... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by James Daniels
More and more companies are trade marking their personal and product names these days. For people like me who build campaigns for clients, it’s becoming a real pain. If the client is a distributor of a certain trademarked product, there should be an easier way of being accepted when using certain keywords. At present it takes around 4-6 months to receive a trademark acceptance note from Google and that’s before you spoken with the client/company. By this time the client has decided ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
When I am talking to my clients about considering search engine optimisation (SEO) in their marketing strategies they will immediately want to know statistics. I generally share with them research on keyword analysis and demonstrate to them how many people are going to search engines to look for their products or services. I will then break it down even further and go into specifics. For example if I am talking to someone who is selling perfume online, I will provide reports on exactly how many... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Cameron Winslow
There is still an amazing number of "Marketing Executives" in charge of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollar advertising budgets, that remain absolutely clueless to what Mobile Search entails, potential to create new revenue streams, or even its existence. I was speaking with the Head of Marketing for a Resort and Spa in Australia that had never heard of Mobile Search or the existence of URL availability for .mobi for their organization.
With travel being a hig... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 by Cameron Winslow
Their is an upcoming Search Engine Marketing Seminar in Sydney on November 29th that may provide some value for Companies that want some initial knowledge of what is happening in the industry. See below:
A lot has changed in the last year with Bootcamp, we have taken on a lot of feedback from our delegates over the last few shows and we now have an agenda the really reflects the audience that it now targets.
That's people like yourself, that already have good skill sets when it comes to sear... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 by Danni Mikellides
The big promise of advertising on social networks has always been the ability to target members by their own self-proclaimed interests and demographics. Facebook has taken a small step in that direction, they now have what’s called Facebook Flyer ads. These are advertising widgets down the side bar. Facebook controls these, unlike the majority of the inventory on the site. Currently Microsoft deals with the existing inventory. In term of what revenue this generates to Facebook, I wouldn’t im... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
How long do you spend looking at the structure of your website? Really really looking? And comparing that with what Google has got indexed?
I'm betting it isn't all that long, but the fact that Vertical Leap do spend the time is paying dividends for some of our clients. If you aren't looking at an SEO project every day, it's sometimes easy to assume that the reason a site isn't performing well is down to having very competitive keywords. But the application of some time doing crawl checks and... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
I was looking at a backlink checker this morning whilst trying to track something down, and I noticed some Fasthosts entries. These turned out to be complete copies of Fasthost's client sites, displayed under a Fasthosts URL.
See here for the Google results page.
So if you are looking for a search engine friendly webhost, this is just a quick post to say that Fasthosts is not one!
... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
Is search engine optimisation (SEO) better than adwords? Adword Fraud... It is topic that comes up in all our presentations, some clients are very well aware that click fraud does occur with their adword campaigns and some just interested to know what they can do about it. What I wonder is, when Google are charging such high amounts for these ad words to be purchased, do they take into account the 10% fraud amount that they admit to? A man once said to me, “It’s kind of lik... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Fri, 19 Oct 2007 by Danni Mikellides
Social Media is pretty hot on the radar everywhere at the moment. Every meeting I am attending across all sectors, they are talking about the buzz word ‘social media’. I was at a real estate office yesterday and they had an internal meeting the day prior on the topic.
It’s really refreshing to see that this is something we as search engine optimisation (SEO) experts have been talking about for some time. And before the trend hit we were already including this as pa... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Thu, 18 Oct 2007 by Pete Handley
I've been fortunate enough to have some new campaigns to work on over the last few weeks, and there is always a bit of work to get everything sorted to ensure everyone at various organisations has the correct access to the information and statistics that our campaign management tool Apollo collects about websites.
However our tool doesn't replace the need to use other Website Analytics tools - it collects different information that is used by us CDM's to manage a campaign. So we will always b... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
Recently in the Vertical Leap office, controlling "link juice" (using a more generic term than Google's Page Rank) has been a hot topic recently. Therefore, it seems to be a good time to write a blog about the different ways this can be done, when you might want to use them and why.
Method 1: robots.txt
This is a file that you place in the root of your site. When a spider/robot comes to visit your site, this is the first file that they access. Using the information here, they l... Read More.
Tags: robots, SEO
Posted in Blog | No Comments
|
|
Tue, 16 Oct 2007 by Matt Hopkins
Momentum for local search services is growing and one of the major players in the US market has recently opened a UK office and sub-site which can be found at http://uk.local.com/.
From an initial review, it looks like they have purchased some data to get them started here as there is actually no way to add a UK based business to their site via the "free basic listing" mechanism that they promote.
If you perform a search and then notice that you (or your client) is not listed ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Pete Handley
I'll be honest. I thought paid inclusion for listings in search engines had gone away, and then one of my customers asked me for some advice about it.
It seems that they have been paying for Yahoo's paid inclusion program for a substantial amount of time and were asking me about its uses and benefits.
My instant response as I would imagine most good SEO's would be that paid inclusion really isn't worth it. After all, paying for inclusion carries no guarantee of a particular placement in t... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by James Daniels
The thought of using content network at the beginning of the “adwords” saga seemed to be a great idea. You build a new campaign and expect it to drive masses of quality traffic to your site. WRONG. All it really provides us nowadays is useless “impressions” and no clicks. You look at your latest AVG “CTR” and it displays 0.01% which is becoming ever more frequent across the board with individuals and agencies. This figure is obviously poor and more so damagin... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Cameron Winslow
After a succesful conference in Melbourne and excellent attendee feedback, Search School (www.searchschool.com.au) has extended a promotional invitation to members of Vertical Leap's member network offering $100 off the normal registration. See below or click this link:
https://subscribe.reedbusiness.com.au/default.asp?offergroup=SS07WB13&pubid=181
SPECIAL offer for SearchSchool
2007 - SAVE... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
Do you the words "universal search" have little meaning to you? Well it most likely does to the average person on the street. But these two words represent the next evolution of search engines - a development that will potentially change both the way users and advertisers use search engines.
By Universal search Google mean, essentially, multi-media search results. It is new search technique that means users will see images, video, sound, podcasts, RSS feeds, blogs,... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Mon, 15 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
Have you ever wanted to keep a track on
where your website is being mentioned as a result of your marketing activities such as SEO?
Well, believe it or not, the tools are already out there for you to do this.
Like a press cuttings service for
newspapers, there are a many services that you can use online to keep a track
of where you are being mentioned. There is a very comprehensive list of
reputation monitoring tools here.
However, even for the busy executive who
doesn't have time for all ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
We have very pretty strict laws about clubs and bars serving people that are intoxicated. There is a certain limit of alcohol consumption that can be served to patrons, and yeah it varies between premises. This is generally up to the discretion of the bar staff. But have you ever seen someone that has been at a pub all afternoon or a club all night drinking red bull? Well I sure have and it’s a funny site, they practically bounce off the walls. And seriously I mean how bad for your health... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 by Craig Wilson
Social networking sites are great. From everyones perspective, they're fantastic. Take Digg for example, one of the most original of its kind and certainly the most popular. Basically, it's a user-driven news website where users submit news articles from all over the Web and other users vote on which is good and which isn't. It's a great system that gives credit to some quality writing and journalism in the form of website traffic and inbound links (from an SEO point-of-view, at least). Submitti... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Joe Bursell
The activity of getting sites to link to you can be explicit and formal:
E.g. the request: "your site is awesome, will you link to ours?"
Or it can be a natural extension of providing good content. If a blogger or webmaster deems your content useful enough they'll reference it to reinforce a point:
E.g. "For a legal discussion on linking read this.
The first option requires repeated effort on your part, and has a disproportionate return for that effort. The second... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Kerry Dye
In my Inbox this morning popped a report
about how Associated Press is suing Moreover (owned by Verisign) for using content from their site.
Straight away on reading it I was reminded
of something that happened way back when here in the UK, when I first started working
full time on web projects in 1996. The Shetland Times sued the Shetland News
for linking to its news stories without permission. The nascent Internet held
its collective breath as the concept of linking to other sites threatene... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
Take a look at the latest figures released for searches in Google across Asia Pac, it really gives a good indication of just how vastly this medium is being used in our region.
Gone are the days where companies can flog the idea off of using Search Engine Optimisation as more relevant for the US or UK market.
More than half of the 61 billion internet searches carried out around the world in August were made using Google, easily beating its nearest rival Yahoo! which claimed 14% of ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Thu, 11 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
We all like being told that we are doing a good job.
Although for a company making money is great and new sales or sign ups or
renewals is a good way to measure your progress, it's always nice to have
someone tell you that you are having a positive effect on them.
Where
do you find this information on the net?
Well,
if a company has a page on their website with testimonials, or quotes from
satisfied clients, then these are a useful input to a buying process. You may be
quite cynica... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Cameron Winslow
In our continued efforts to support providing valuable and timely information on website marketing strategies, Vertical Leap presented the Search Engine Optimisation module at this week's Search School held at BMW Federation Square in Melbourne on Tuesday.
There is an upcoming Seminar in Sydney on November first that would be of great benefit to any business that is either considering a website to promote their business online or take full advantage of the capabilities of a... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Matt Hopkins
We have finally completed our move to our new, larger offices in Portsmouth.
Our search for larger premises began six months ago and we had been frustrated by the lack of available office space in Portsmouth which is mainly due to so many of the commercial properties being converted into flats to cash in on the recent property boom in this area. But just as we were about to consider expanding our search to areas further afield, the offices next door became available which are per... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
Word on the street is if you haven’t received an invitation to join Facebook over the past few months you’d have to question where are my friends.... and seriously ask yourself how unpopular you really are... Well that might be going to extremes but you would have to agree this Facebook has emerged seemingly out of nowhere and become huge in the social networking space.
A recent analysis demonstrates the growth in Facebook's profile. Between mid-April and the en... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Wed, 10 Oct 2007 by Kerry Dye
At the end of last month, Microsoft held an event at its Mountain View offices called "Searchification". This was the official launch of the new Live Search (Live 2.0) which is a new, updated an shinier version of the search engine that drives queries across Microsoft properties including MSN.
Microsoft announced some significant improvements, including increasing the size of the index and search relevance. On the index side, they claim they have increased the number of pages ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Mon, 08 Oct 2007 by Joe Bursell
The first issue I'll deal with here is the popular assumptions made about Google penalties. This is so that you can separate myth from fact (well, as near to fact as we can make out, based on collated observations within the industry).
Here are some of the more well-discussed "supposed" penalties:
OOP- the Over Optimisation Penalty
This is reported by webmasters when they over-indulge in the use of keywords, in anchor text, meta, body content and links. The fact is that if you over-... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Thu, 04 Oct 2007 by Joe Bursell
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a method for extracting related and pertinent data from a vast resource. Literally it means:
Latent: a characteristic that is present in an undeveloped or hidden form
Semantic: relating to the meaning of words
Indexing: a way to highlight a particular trend or condition
Therefore LSI is the discovery of trends in the way words are used, and putting those trends to good use in a search context.
Historically LSI has been applied with varying success to stru... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Pete Handley
Article writing is a fantastic way to create new links to websites from many areas. When writing an article, it should be written about an area that you have a great deal of knowledge about, and that would interest other people who may stumble across it and read it. Once one of our clients has written an article, we will submit it to a number of websites to get this published in numerous locations with links back to the site.
Others will publish these articles because it adds more content to ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
Tue, 02 Oct 2007 by Joe Bursell
Its amazing how much controversy a simple tag can stir up. Take the nofollow link tag:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com/page.html" >Visit My Page</a>
...an indexing command first implemented 2 years ago in 2005. Its purpose is to flag that a link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner, and as a result the search engines treat the link as having low/no trust or value in relation to the site it is posted on. It was a response to sites ... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
by Danni Mikellides
Not much has changed in the recruitment industry in regards to how competitive it is. If anything, there are even more players in the market, with a smaller pool of applicants. It continues to be an increasingly competitive market and each company needs to be ahead of the rest.
It is really refreshing to see recruitment agencies are starting to find new and innovative ways of dominating the market, through search engine optimisation SEO. With the traditional forms of newspaper advertisin... Read More.
Posted in Blog | Comments Off
|
|
