Fri, 30 Oct 2009 by Tom Hallett
How many times have you read a chunk of copy on a web page and seen the same phrase repeated again and again? And again. And again...
When a phrase has been stuffed into copy, it just looks stupid. And if we are put off by content that doesn't read correctly, you can be sure that the search engine robots will be too. They may not be human, but their job is to find the best information for humans for specific searches.
So, as search engines evolve, they are acting more and more like a h... Read More.
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Thu, 29 Oct 2009 by Kerry Dye
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is (pending approval) going to be allowing other characters into domain names including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek Hindi, Japanese and Chinese scripts.
This will be good news for companies in those countries, who will finally be able to register a domain name in the script they prefer rather than having to translate into a western character set.
Concerns are being raised about how exactly this will be implemented the potential for co... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
I really wanted the title to be "Alexa is not an entirely pointless waste of space used solely by SEO peeps" but thought that might be a bit long.
Snappy title yes? Or no. There are reasons why I got into computing rather than say journalism. But back to the point...
I happened to have a bit of spare time whilst waiting for a report to generate this afternoon and thought I'd have a read of the Geocities stuff that's been going on this week. I went to the Geocities page and found that once ... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
Ranting time.
Gosh. Sometimes even now I find that the degree of rubbishness of some commercial sites is astonishing. At the weekend we were desperately trying to find some reference to a construction toy kit which a kind friend has donated to us. I was hoping to find a website about it so that I could show my daughter. We had a slight issue, in that we couldn't remember the name of the product - however we could think of lots of good descriptive phrases to search under - absolutely no luck. ... Read More.
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Wed, 28 Oct 2009 by Paul Broomfield
After translating several European campaigns last week I was rather frustrated to find out that yesterday Google launched the ‘Adwords Translator Toolkit’.
The toolkit will automatically translate your keywords and adtext to your chosen target language.
You can upload your campaigns into the translator using adwords editor to be automatically translated then re-import them into adwords editor to post to your live account.
I have yet to have the pleasure of using this new toolkit as ... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
Whilst it's important to have great content on a website, without SEO, or other forms of marketing, it can be difficult for people to find said content.
Assuming good content is already in place, then the title tag is the most important on-page factor that an SEO is able to manipulate in terms of the weight it has in a web pages ability to rank.
Here are my top 3 tips for maximising title tags across your website.
1) Use keywords in your title tag - it's important to identify phrases th... Read More.
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Tue, 27 Oct 2009 by Emily Mace
Alexa, which is an arm of Amazon.com provide website information detailing an overview of your website, traffic details and related links. However, many people ask us if this information is a useful measure of how well a website is doing.
The Alexa information is based on results collated from the Alexa Toolbar, which is similar to the Google Toolbar but much less widely used.
The Alexa Toolbar, like Google’s Toolbar, phones home when people using it in their browser interact with a we... Read More.
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Mon, 26 Oct 2009 by Joe Bursell
Last Thursday I posted a piece on SMO and SEO , and made a schoolboy error, saying that the live beta version of Bing/Twitter didn’t work.
Turns out that it can work, but only if you force Bing to think you are in a specific geo-location. By adding a short suffix string to bing.com/twitter you can kid Bing into thinking you are actually somewhere, and it will dish some results for you.
So, go to www.bing.com/twitter, and slap on a set market suffix with a country code in it e.g.
www.b... Read More.
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Fri, 23 Oct 2009 by Tom Hallett
Posterous is a 'mini-blog' site that lets you post blogs, photos, videos and lots more to the web by email.
As well as the ability to post to your Posterous from anywhere where you've access to your email, you can also automatically 'autopost' to your other pages like Twitter and Facebook, and your blogs on Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.
Autoposts to Facebook and Twitter
Autoposting to places like Twitter and Facebook isn't an issue for SEO. Posts to Twitter from Posterous will just in... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
SEO can be confusing for people and signing up with an SEO Company can sometimes seem a leap of faith. After all, no reputable search engine optimisation firm are trully able to offer guarantees about the results that a prospective client will gain from working with them.
With so many factors outside of our control, what we can do is offer potential clients is a good level of service - with certain levels of activity that we know should result in improvements to a websites visibility - improv... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
Never one to rest on their laurels, the Google Analytics team have launched a huge range of new features recently.Here is a very quick summary of what these are:
More goals - you are no longer limited to just four
Engagement goals - use time on site or pages per visit as a goal metric instead of a single page visit
Mobile OS reporting (for non JS supporting mobiles) does need dynamic web pages your end
Advanced filtering in table views - cross checking one type of data with another bec... Read More.
Tags: google analytics, statistics, traffic
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by Paul Broomfield
Here is the start of the PPC teams quick tip PPC related blog posts starting with identifying long tail keywords.
Keyword research can be extensive and the Google keyword tool isn’t always 100% accurate with search volume of CPC estimates and it is hard to identify the long tail keywords quickly.
Therefore I would recommend creating an adgroup with the broad keyword variation of your desired keyword then adding that keyword to the adgroup as an exact match negative keyword.
For exampl... Read More.
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Thu, 22 Oct 2009 by Emily Mace
We’ve been asked recently if the keywords that should be used in an SEO campaign should be Long Tail keywords or shorter terms.
A lot of websites experience a large number of visits from long tail keywords, but if you look into this in more detail it tends to be the case that longer terms are only driving 1 or 2 visits each, it’s the number of these terms that drives the level of traffic to the site, not the keyword itself.
Building the reputation of your website using some of these lo... Read More.
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by Joe Bursell
There, 2 TLAs in one post title, a first for me. Another first is the possibility that a web2 app could actually be capable of delivering an ROI for SEO (strike 3 and 4, more TLAs). SMO (social media optimisation) has been commented on before, so I won’t get sidetracked here, but there’s a snappy post at googleblog saying that Google are excited that they are working with Twitter to find a way to include updates in the SERPs.
Now, they don’t use the word “tweet” anywhere, so I’m r... Read More.
Tags: ROI, SEO, SMO, Twitter
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Wed, 21 Oct 2009 by Joe Bursell
Q: When is a website not a website?
A: When it’s a salesperson.
Alright, I know that’s hardly a killer punch line, but it should get you thinking about what your site does for you. To my mind every website should be a salesperson- or at least do some of the things that you’d want a salesperson to do.
Most websites are selling something; even if those things can’t be commoditised (I’m thinking “ideas” here). A blog that is alive and kicking is selling the author, or their i... Read More.
Tags: Post-Click Marketing
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Tue, 20 Oct 2009 by Kerry Dye
For some time if you entered the Google.co.uk site by the home page, you have had the search suggestions appear as you started to type. They have now added this functionality to the internal results page.
As someone who always used the search box in the browser and then subsequently the internal pages I was usually blissfully unaware of the search suggestions, so this is a major change for my interaction with Google.
This has been a Google Labs feature for a very long time, so it is intere... Read More.
Tags: Google, interface
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Mon, 19 Oct 2009 by Paul Broomfield
After a recent meeting with our Google account manager she has been advising us to focus more and more of our efforts into utilising the content network. Google state the content network is able to gain CPA's within 2% of the search network CPA's, however I have only experienced this level of success a handful of times after spending years of my life optimising for the content network.
Google have now launched the ‘view through conversion’ functionality to allow advertisers to more accu... Read More.
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Thu, 15 Oct 2009 by Emily Mace
As mentioned in my blog earlier this week there is now a Labs section in Google Webmaster Tools which allows you to see your website as the Googlebot sees it.
This is a great new function, however when we were looking at this earlier in the week we noticed that there seems to be a 100k file size limit on the HTML files that Google is reading.
From an SEO point of view this is interesting information as it implies that Google will only read the first 100k of the code on any page on your w... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
Communication is a vital part of everyday life, in business and in pleasure.
I've written in the past about how the secret to success for any SEO Company is in talking to your customers, and this is really important to ensure that you understand a clients goals - how can you deliver what a client wants from an SEO campaign without listening to them. Whilst for many this is obvious - i.e. more rankings, visibility, traffic and conversions for a website, some people do have other goals, or a pa... Read More.
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Wed, 14 Oct 2009 by Paul Broomfield
Yahoo have released updates to Yahoo sponsored search network allowing advertisers to display ads across iphone and android mobile phones. This update has been rolled out automatically across all Yahoo sponsored search accounts.
Yahoo state that the update will provide ‘greater experiences for mobile users and advertisers, giving your ads wider appeal and more relevancy’.
Google launched their ability to view adwords ads on the iphone late last year. ‘How come this has taken Yahoo so... Read More.
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by Hannah Parker
Rather suprisingly, after 11 years of marriage, it must be admitted that my husband sometimes doubts my knowledge. I started back at work on Monday after a period of maternity leave and rather typically everything insisted on going wrong before I left the house. The most irritating of problems was the boiler choosing this moment to give up working. Under normal circumstances this wouldn't be too disastrous, but it was my poor nanny's first day on the job too and she has my 2 young twins and my s... Read More.
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Tue, 13 Oct 2009 by Emily Mace
Google Webmaster Tools have been developing more tools for webmasters in the last few weeks.
When you log into Google webmaster Tools now there is a new menu option on the left hand side – call Labs, this new tool contains a couple of new features and there are more in the pipeline.
Once of the new options in the Labs section of Google Webmaster Tools is “Fetch as Googlebot” which enables you to view the code on any page on your site as the Googlebot sees them. You can request a Go... Read More.
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Mon, 12 Oct 2009 by Joe Bursell
…just found an update that follows an AJAX post I made 2 whole years ago. It ended on a bit of a woolly note though, along the lines of “AJAX isn’t terribly SEO friendly, but hey, what can you do?”.
A recent visit to googlewebmastercentral turned up a little gem, so that “hey, what can you do?” now nearly has an answer. Turns out you might be able to do quite a lot.
The post isn’t really a light read, but for those with a dev background it should make plenty of sense. For ins... Read More.
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by David Thomas
NO NO NO don't do it......
I have been looking into this in depth recently after a new client said to me that until moving over to Vertical-Leap his PPC Campaigns were being managed by a firm in India. After asking the question why? to him I thought I would do some research of my own into to what entices people to get managed abroad and why some move away from the UK market to get this done.
The answer is Money! The biggest saving I managed to find was of 500% now why would you not go for ... Read More.
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by Tom Hallett
We are often asked how Google can spot paid links.
How would they know the difference between a 'natural' link and a link that's been bought or sold?
What's wrong with paid links?
First, some background:
Buying and selling links is not 'illegal'. Anyone can do it. And it might make perfect sense to some websites, either as a revenue stream (selling) or to drive more visits to a site (buying).
But, Google doesn't like paid links that can pass on PageRank and therefore manipulate ... Read More.
Tags: Google
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Fri, 09 Oct 2009 by Paul Broomfield
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about the launch of the new Google Beta Keyword Tool.
WordStream have now launched their FREE new keyword tool, which can be found here.
The tool is very straight forward to use (similar to Google) by allowing you to search for a keyword and return related keywords that are highly relevant to your desired search query.
You are then able to export your selected keywords to your clipboard or have them emailed to your email address compressed in a zip file.
... Read More.
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by Tom Hallett
So, you're doing SEO and getting good rankings in Google.co.uk. Great.
But your target audience is also based in Australia - how can you start ranking well in the Australian version of Google as well?
For these examples, let's say the website you have that ranks well in Google UK is mysite.com and is hosted in the UK.
Option 1: Set up a .com.au website (most effective)
For maximum impact, set up a mysite.com.au website. And then host it in Australia.
The IP address and top-leve... Read More.
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Thu, 08 Oct 2009 by Kerry Dye
Today, Majestic SEO has announced that they have a web map index of more than one trillion unique URLs.
Apart from Google, who announced reaching this milestone last year this makes Majestic the biggest database of unique URLs on the web. Interestingly, as they point out, this validates Google’s claim that there are more than a trillion web pages on the internet.
I’m sure that Tim Berners Lee never foresaw the day when his invention of hyperlinked pages to form the World Wide Web would... Read More.
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Wed, 07 Oct 2009 by Emily Mace
Last week Google introduced a new method of verifying websites for Google Webmaster Tools.
As before, you can verify using a Meta Tag on the homepage of your website, which allows you to view all of the tools and information from Google.
Google have now made changes to the file upload verification method. Previously the file upload involved placed a named file (such as Google12345678a.html) in the root directory of your website. This file was simply a blank HTML file with a reference num... Read More.
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by David Thomas
Oh yes its that time again!
I'm sure I wrote a blog like this last year but a bit later!
Supermarkets have already shunned the Point of Sale Halloween and Bonfire goodies for the big one! Christmas. It frightens me that each year we seem to be getting a little earlier with our advertising and if seasons were to catch up we would be having Boxing Day lunch on the 26th October!
There is method to the madness in the early advertising campaign being released. Its so people can prepare, peop... Read More.
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Tue, 06 Oct 2009 by Kerry Dye
In contrast to the video they released last month Google have announced at SMX that they will start to support the canonical tag on a cross domain basis by the end of the year.
As Yahoo and Bing (despite the announcement that they would be supporting it in February 2009) have not yet implemented support for it in their indexes, this puts Google well ahead of the game on this tag.
The main concern about this that is voiced is how Google will stop domain hijacking using this tag, but I am su... Read More.
Tags: canonical tag, duplicate content
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Mon, 05 Oct 2009 by David Thomas
I have now been running PPC Campaigns through Google, Yahoo and other sponsored search networks for some years and still it stuns me whenever I see a prospect come to me that is not utilizing any sort of conversion tracking on their account.
So what makes conversion tracking so important?
How can you optimize any type of sponsored link account without any conversion tracking inserted? Which parts of your account is returning the sales or leads? Which parts are not? What keywords work and h... Read More.
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Fri, 02 Oct 2009 by Tom Hallett
Today I saw this link on the BBC News website: Pompey fan 'hung' in Southampton.
Even with the playful inverted commas around 'hung', this suggested to me that a Portsmouth football fan was murdered in Southampton. (If you're not aware - Portsmouth and Southampton football fans have a very bitter rivalry.)
So I clicked through to see the motive. Did they walk through the city wearing their Portsmouth football shirt? Did they get a flat tyre on the M27 with their 'play up Pompey' car sticke... Read More.
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Thu, 01 Oct 2009 by Emily Mace
Now you have begun working with an SEO professional and have your site fully optimised what should happen next? Here are some tips to help you get more from your website.
Tip 1 Blogging
Setting up a company blog and adding one new post a week to the site can help with your site’s reputation as well as allowing you to communicate with your potential and existing customers.
Tip 2 Link Building
SEO is about more than on page optimisation and building links to your site is an importa... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
The Google Base blog announced the launch of the new Google Merchant Center. This is another name change for this part of Google, having been Froogle and Google Product Search and Google Shopping in the past.
Specifically for product items rather than anything else in Google Base, this presumably points to the fact that extra features will be added to the site. Interestingly, the Merchant Center name is a bit of a throwback to the Froogle days, when it was caled Froogle Merchant Center. There... Read More.
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