I was contacted by one of my clients yesterday regarding an email they had received saying that their site didn’t have any search engine optimisation on and that my client should employ this SEO company to resolve the issues. What was quite scary was that the email appeared to have been automatically generated and didn’t [...]
I have previously written about how 3 way link exchanges are being abused. I’ve recently come across another instance of a similarly unethical technique – sending out link request emails promising that you will link back, and then never doing it. Whilst reciprocal linking isn’t a large part of any link strategy these days, sending [...]
Services that shorten URL’s so that they take less space or are perhaps easier to remember (you can create custom “shorties” with many services) have been around for some time. With the explosive growth of Twitter and similar micro-blogging services and the limitation on space, they are more useful than ever. The problem is that [...]
Choosing a PPC Management Company With so many new players swamping the PPC management market in recent times, how do you choose the right company to manage your Adwords account to best effect. Pay Per Click has evolved in the online market place so rapidly since the early days of Overture and Goto. So much [...]
We’ve been asked a lot recently by our SEO customers about the Link: command in Google and the fact that Google only shows a few links. Previously there have been a few comments on the internet about how Google has disabled this functionality but there was nothing official and Google did actually mention the Link: command [...]
Twitter has become mainstream. It was discussed on the Sky news this very morning in connection with Jennifer Aniston ending her relationship with John Mayer over his obsession with Twitter. Everyone is talking about Twitter and what it is and what it isn’t; but can it help your SEO campaign? Don’t forget that SEO is [...]
Yesterday, Google announced two new amendments to the way that search results are presented to the user – extra search refinements and longer snippets for 3+ word searches. We’d seen those search refinements in action already – look at the number there are for [search engine optimisation]. My guess is this shows a likely second [...]
The BBC is currently running a report about Scareware websites using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to trick searchers into downloading malicious spyware and programs onto their computers. These rogue organisations are optimising sites that they have access to for popular and misspelt search terms and conning the people that visit their websites into thinking that [...]
We’ve been noticing recently that the number of searches is down for some of our customers’ key terms. This obviously affects how much subsequent traffic they get to their sites. Some of these trends are seasonal and depend on the client’s business, but some appear to be an overall shrinkage in demand. Now it is [...]
…a quick follow up from my last SEO post where I noted that the BBC weather pages were having ranking issues. It also appears that no matter where in the world you search for “weather” from, the news.bbc.co.uk/weather/ SERP title is always “BBC Weather | United States of America”, and when you click through to the page the [...]
For this SEO speak blog I thought I’d focus on a term we’ve used a lot in our blog: the Long Tail. So what is a long tail keyword? When you are working on the search engine optimisation of your website they keywords you tend to go for are those that have the potential to [...]
At the beginning of the month I posted a blog about why managing site updates with SEO techniques is the shrewd thing to do. The reference point was the BBC’s weather pages. My point was that if you do not have a strong domain any unmanaged page or site changes can kill your rankings. Now, the BBC’s weather [...]
Businesses evolve over time and as a result, the products on offer or the services that are delivered change too. It’s important to let the people that help you market your business know when these changes in emphasis occur, as without telling you telling them, how are they meant to know to change their marketing [...]
We often hear the phrase “two countries separated by a common language”, usually referring to the UK and the USA. This language barrier is just as obvious in search as it is when talking in person. For a case in point, yesterday, a Googler posted a blog on the main Google Blog that I had [...]
Google Inc are heading to the courts with luxury designer Louis Vuitton.. The luxury goods maker has filed a complaint against Google Inc for helping fake branded manufacturers to promote their products under the Vuitton brand. According lawyers representing Louis Vuitton, Google’s AdWords service allows advertisers to bid on terms such as “Louis Vuitton fakes”, [...]
Here at Vertical Leap we’re not shy talking about the good, the bad and the ugly, but we tend to avoid the bad and the ugly as we are decent sorts. In the past we’ve provided comment and advice for mobile search/sites/SEO but have never really explored any downsides to the explosion in mobile device usage. Sure, we [...]
This is something that we get asked a lot and is something that we often discuss with our clients. Is there any search engine optimisation benefit to having keywords in your website URLs? Well according to Matt Cutts, there is a small benefit in Google to showing keywords in your URL. There is also some [...]
Backlinks or In Links are important to your website’s performance in search engines but what are they and why do they work? Backlinks are links to your site from other sites on the internet. Your website’s backlink profile shows the number of links and their potential value to your website. It is important when creating [...]
Google webmaster tools, and to a lesser extent, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Search Webmaster Center all have a great array of tools at their disposal to help you ensure that your website doesn’t have any issues with being crawled, review the links that your site has built up over time and identify any potential [...]
A recent survey by the Advertising Association shows that advertising spend in all offline channels dropped sharply in 2008, but online advertising is still growing. According to the report, the total amount of advertising spend (online and offline) was down by only 3.9% in 2008 – but with a steep drop off in the final [...]
It occurred to me that when a site has it’s on-page search engine optimisation carried out there is often very little obvious evidence that anything has changed. When a site is refreshed, or content updated it is clear to everyone that something is different. And that is where the search engines share our point of view- to [...]
What is Keyword Matching and what is best to use? There are many different arguments out there in the PPC Management world of how to use the keyword matching facility supplied by adwords. Firstly
I’ve just been working with one of my clients on their blog and on trying to resolve an issue with their blog stream on the homepage of their website, discovered that the RSS feeds within Blogger are broken and being published as completely empty files. If you run a blog on Blogger and publish a [...]
Matt Cutts recently posted a video on YouTube in response to a question from Mark Lykle: “When will Google create a software similar to Web Position so that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmasters can check rankings etc. without violating the guidelines? Why not make a better product instead of going to war against these [...]
Facebook gets over a third of the number of unique visitors that Google does and it continues to grow. The graph below shows the lines between Google and Facebook getting closer together: If Facebook’s growth continues the way it has been, perhaps they should be considered Google’s greatest threat maybe not in general search, [...]