Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:07:51 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 physi...Read More.
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Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:21:53 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% i...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:20:14 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...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:15:24 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.exam...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:07:55 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 ...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:07:44 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 h...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:58:51 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 l...Read More.
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Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:07:22 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...Read More.
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Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:29:32 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 ...Read More.
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Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:45:03 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 Fasth...Read More.
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Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:04:23 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 An...Read More.
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Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:34:24 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 pla...Read More.
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Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:41:24 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...Read More.
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Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:30:19 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 b...Read More.
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Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:46:59 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 fr...Read More.
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Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:54:00 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...Read More.
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Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:29:45 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 journal...Read More.
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Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:30:38 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 th...Read More.
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Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:21:08 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...Read More.
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Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:33:10 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 com...Read More.
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Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:00:25 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 ...Read More.
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Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:40:15 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 ...Read More.
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Mon, 8 Oct 2007 12:01:09 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 t...Read More.
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Thu, 4 Oct 2007 13:22:33 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 u...Read More.
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Thu, 4 Oct 2007 13:07:03 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 loca...Read More.
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Tue, 2 Oct 2007 10:46:12 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 eng...Read More.
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