Fri, 29 Jun 2007 13:52:01 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 p...Read More.
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Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:12:15 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 h...Read More.
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Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:52:04 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:...Read More.
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Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:28:34 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 fr...Read More.
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Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:02:19 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 (rat...Read More.
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Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:59:57 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 si...Read More.
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Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:26:16 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 ...Read More.
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Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:34:01 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...Read More.
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Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:20:02 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 ...Read More.
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Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:01:38 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 a...Read More.
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Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:49:14 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 ...Read More.
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Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:30:39 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 o...Read More.
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Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:59:18 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
Read More.
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Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:04:30 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 s...Read More.
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Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:27:42 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 o...Read More.
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Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:17:58 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...Read More.
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Fri, 8 Jun 2007 16:47:31 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 ...Read More.
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Thu, 7 Jun 2007 11:49:19 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 qua...Read More.
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Tue, 5 Jun 2007 16:13:55 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 scho...Read More.
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Mon, 4 Jun 2007 16:34:46 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....Read More.
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Mon, 4 Jun 2007 13:17:15 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 differe...Read More.
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Sun, 3 Jun 2007 09:21:01 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 ...Read More.
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