Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:59:45 by Craig Wilson
This week’s most interesting subject—in my opinion—goes to the idea that Google actually comes 2nd on a list for something search-related. “Behave!” - I hear you cry; let me explain:
Compete.com recently published their research of ‘web search fulfilment’, which seperates all web searches between answered and unanswered. An answered web search is ...Read More.
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Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:24:11 by Pete Handley
I've been a bit busy recently, so have not been blogging as much as my co-workers, but I have been extolling the virtues of blogging to a number of my clients recently, so thought it was time for me to partake once more.
You may or may not have read one of my previous blog posts about how important it is to link to other pages on your blog or website when you post a blog - do y...Read More.
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Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:41:44 by Matt Hopkins
Choosing the right keywords for your optimisation campaign is an important part
of the process - after all, it is what will shape the structure and content for
most of your site. There are plenty of tools available to help you
research and locate appropriate keywords (although they are all flawed in some
way), but the real question is who is more qualifie...Read More.
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Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:38:23 by Kerry Dye
Those of us in the internet industry are very aware of social media. We use Facebook, StumbleUpon and Delicious. We know what Digg is and how it affects traffic. But how about the rest of the country? Outside of the technical professions and the universities, how is social media actually seen or used?
If you are a member of the so-called "Millennial Generation" you pro...Read More.
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Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:46:44 by Kerry Dye
Search engine optimisation is not an exact
science, but it is a form of marketing and thus needs to be measured in its
performance to monitor whether it is working. We have mentioned before
that the ongoing process is one of our key differences from other SEO
companies. However, I want to explore here one of the particular metrics that
we use to evaluate a campaign.
Read More.
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Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:42:54 by Joe Bursell
The Apollo system is our management platform that allows us to proactively control all aspects of client SEO campaigns.
It enables us to manage SEO at a granular level, as we can see the smallest variations in everything that affects the optimisation of a site, and make constant improvements.
Whenever we work on a client's campaign we post messages to Apollo. To view our c...Read More.
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Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:48:06 by Kerry Dye
LinkedIn is becoming a more common tool than ever, with an explosion of invites in the UK.
Whilst it doesn't have the popularity of some of the other more "fashionable"
social media tools such as Myspace and Facebook, it is a useful business tool,
filling a niche for business networking rather than your friends.
Whilst the most obvious way to use LinkedInRead More.
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Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:19:44 by Kerry Dye
I've noticed more and more recently that there are more Universal Search Results appearing when you do a search at Google. As this is something of great interest to all of us here at Vertical Leap, as well as our clients, I have documented some of them that I have come across, and I thought that the readers of this SEO blog would also find them interesting.
Speaking at Citigroup...Read More.
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Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:48:09 by Kerry Dye
According a recent report by Nielson//NetRatings, Google now accounts for 80% of all search click throughs in the United Kingdom. They report that in July 2007 Britons clicked on over 1.3 billion search results – which is over 29,000 every single minute!
Yahoo comes in at second place, with AOL gaining the third place in the UK.
Interest...Read More.
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Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:20:24 by Pete Handley
Well, obviously I would like to think that many many people out there in the WWW like to read my blogs, and I have had some reaction from people before, but my recent blog about Yahoo Sponsored Local Search seems to have caught the attention of some people.
I just had a thoroughly interesting and pleasant conversation with the CEO of Infoserve Steve Barnes, who had a couple...Read More.
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Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:49:13 by Pete Handley
Yesterday I was playing around in Google's Webmaster Tools, making a removal request for a number of URLs (254!!!) for one of my clients who had just fixed a badly formed URL rewrite but was unable to get redirections in place. As such there were hundreds of pages of duplicated content indexed, which we have now blocked with the robots.txt and removals request.
I went back to ch...Read More.
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Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:34:40 by Pete Handley
I had a phone call from a Yahoo saleswoman this morning, who had been referred to me by one of my clients to discuss the possibility of us using their Sponsored Local Search offering. The client in question has over 40 hotels, which Yahoo was attempting to convince me of the benefits of signing up each hotel at approximately £300 per listing (for 6 months), and for a limited number of t...Read More.
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Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:11:07 by Craig Wilson
View the HTML source of the home page on your website - are you satisfied with out it looks? Most websites I look at (that don't specialise in website design or SEO) always look terrible. The top of the page is filled with JavaScript image rollover code and let's not get started on the unnecessary Meta tags. Recent activity suggests that search engines may favour those tidy websites over your...Read More.
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Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:27:01 by Craig Wilson
It seems that there may be a significant change to Google's algorithm over the next few weeks. We already know that trust and the age of a domain are major factors in search engine rankings - but just how important are they? What about trust and age of a single web page?
It seems there has been some buzz around the Internet asking these very questions. Our SEO Management system ...Read More.
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Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:58:26 by Joe Bursell
In this second instalment I'll explore how and why JavaScript can presents problems for your site's search visibility.
As we have seen, AJAX is reliant on client-side JavaScript, and there needs to be quite a lot of scripting present to enable AJAX.
A common notion regarding JavaScript and search engine optimisation is that it should be avoided, or at least curta...Read More.
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Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:32:45 by Kerry Dye
Matt Cutts recently announced that underscores were soon to be treated as word separators in Google. At the
moment, they are not treated as spaces, so "seo_consultancy" is not the same as
"seo consultancy".
Whilst Ask, MSN/Live and Yahoo have always
treated underscores as word separators ,
Google has not done so, and is in the process of makin...Read More.
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Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:27:59 by Joe Bursell
In the first part of this blog I'll introduce web 2.0 concepts and explain the enabling technologies, in part two we'll get to the nitty-gritty of how web 2.0 can affect a site's search visibility.
Currently web 2.0 is not defined well enough for me to discuss it here, but we can cover AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) as it is, in simple terms: A bundle of existing technologie...Read More.
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Fri, 7 Sep 2007 15:10:21 by Craig Wilson
Link buying for SEO purposes is a dangerous game. First and foremost: Google says no. It’s wrong. It’s forbidden. It pollutes the natural search listings and violates Google’s search engines’ quality guidelines. On the other hand, however, link buying is a secret art of ‘gaming’ Google and achieving highly relevant search rankings. While the risk of getting caug...Read More.
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Fri, 7 Sep 2007 15:08:12 by Pete Handley
This morning I reviewed a campaign that I had been working on recently, and was astounded by how quickly Google had taken account of a number of recent changes.
Last Saturday (September 1st), a brand new site was launched on the same domain as an older site used to exist. It was a full redesign, page construction changed dramatically, and file names were changed. The conte...Read More.
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Fri, 7 Sep 2007 09:35:53 by Matt Hopkins
How can anyone refer to SEO services as a "commodity" when there is such huge variation in the way that it is implemented across the planet? The variations are not just in the detail - but they are also in the approach to campaign management.
Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting with many people in and around the search industry and it is clear tha...Read More.
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Thu, 6 Sep 2007 09:49:36 by Kerry Dye
One of the things that we always recommend to our clients is that if they write press releases, then it is (a) a good way to get new fresh content and (b) we can distribute them for additional SEO opportunities.
Whilst it is important that your press release contains some of your key phrases, given that you are writing about your own company, this is a fairly natural thing that ...Read More.
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Tue, 4 Sep 2007 13:45:40 by Kerry Dye
HTML entities I hear you say - what are
those? Well, you will almost certainly have used them if you have written any
HTML code. They are the little codes that you use to make sure that characters
appear correctly when seen in an HTML rendering engine. The most common one you
will have come across is probably & - used because the ampersand
character does not render...Read More.
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Tue, 4 Sep 2007 12:43:38 by Joe Bursell
The "snippet" that Google displays below a found page title is taken from DMOZ's Open Directory Project (ODP) or the META DESCRIPTION tag on the page, or from the page contents itself:
If your web site is listed in the ODP then Google (and MSN) will regularly use the ODP's description text to describe your web site in their search results. This can be ...Read More.
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Mon, 3 Sep 2007 11:49:44 by Kerry Dye
When I look down the client list for Vertical Leap, there are a large number of travel related sites. Not all the same sort of company, it must be said, but sites offering hotel breaks, flights, holidays, information on cities, travel insurance, even airport portering services. So what is it that makes this such a dense arena for search engine optimisation?
First of all of course, there's...Read More.
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Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:16:30 by Matt Hopkins
"Without investment in SEO, online businesses will struggle to generate the traffic it needs to survive" according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK.
According to David Thorp, CIM director of research and information, "Although there will always be those who accidentally stumble across your web site, if you are looking to attract new customer...Read More.
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Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:13:35 by Joe Bursell
Branding is an often misunderstood topic, frequently discussed without an understanding of its fundamental tenet- that it is the set of values by which your stakeholders define you. No amount of leverage or intentionally skewed measurement can ever see "brand" being controlled or dictated to by the marketer.
Your logo is not your brand; it is a badge, a symbol used to identify ...Read More.
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