Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:07:05 by Kerry Dye
I read an article this morning from eMarketer entitled What Are Marketers Thinking? and was a bit surprised to learn that one of the current most important marketing trends at the moment is SEO (after "Marketing Basics"!).
Whilst I know that SEO is an important internet marketing strategy, and I realise that search engine optim...Read More.
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Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:58:16 by Pete Handley
I've just been reading the latest technology news on the BBC site and have found that Yahoo will be putting adverts into PDF files.
This is the first time that Adobe have let dynamic adverts appear in this useful universal document format, and it could spell an interesting change for marketers.
I haven't been able to find a great deal of information on how this wor...Read More.
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Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:16:48 by Kerry Dye
There is not a lot of information around about how broken links affect your web site's performance in the search engines. Search engine specialists routinely check their customer sites for broken links as part of a comprehensive service, but there isn't any concrete data on it.
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to say that they do have a negative impact, and it's certainly th...Read More.
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Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:07:46 by Pete Handley
There are lots of people concerned about how freely personal information is available at the moment. Fears in the UK particularly have been heightened by the crazy loss of 25 MILLION! People’s personal information in one of the most farcical losses of personal data ever.
Fortunately I am not a parent (to the best of my knowledge) and have never had to apply for any child ...Read More.
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Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:18:36 by James Daniels
There are many online marketing agencies around who offer the world when it comes to PPC marketing. The main selling point that's floating around is the fact that you can be at the top of Google's listings GUARANTEED. Er no doesn't work like that in the real world unfortunately. The regrettable fact is that many customers/business are drawn in by this statement and it's simply not true. There...Read More.
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Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:53:48 by Kerry Dye
I'm trying to gather some data together at the moment across some of my SEO sites to compare the traffic they are getting for their targeted keywords compared to what is predicted by Keyword Discovery.
So far, the results seem to show that you can exceed the predicted traffic from Keyword Discovery if you have high placings in Google. This isn't unexpected really given the limit...Read More.
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Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:45:33 by Craig Wilson
It was reported this week that Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button costs the company an annual $110 million. This is due to the fact that using the feature causes you to go straight to the first natural result, therefore bypassing the adverts on the results page.
A Google VP, Marissa Mayer, was quoted saying "I would say it's less than 1 percent of our searches are done th...Read More.
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Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:44:08 by Joe Bursell
When we are chosen by a client to manage their SEO there is always a conversation about expected results. Amongst our Key Performance Indicators (measured against percentage increases or target numbers) are:
1. Improving rankings
2. Increasing site traffic
3. Delivering relevant visitors to the site
These 3 KPIs are essential to the success of a campaign, but they don't ...Read More.
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Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:10:29 by Matt Hopkins
One of our Campaign Delivery Manager's was speaking with a client this
week who was concerned about their PageRank. They were worried that
their PageRank is not high enough when compared to a few of their
competitor's sites. The interesting thing about this conversation was
that their site is getting great rankings for their targeted keywords -
beating many of the s...Read More.
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Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:58:45 by Craig Wilson
You may have noticed recently that there’s a handy new service going around the Web at the moment that essentially gives you a smaller, more manageable URL for your longer, more confusing one. For example:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&
ttype=&q=Vertical+Leap,+Portsmouth&ie=UTF8&z=15&iwloc=A&om=1
Cou...Read More.
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Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:40:27 by Kerry Dye
When you are researching keywords for a site, or reviewing them for an active SEO campaign, it is easy to get bogged down in the nitty gritty of the words. Over the years there have been loads of tools for analysing your text, telling you the keyword density (remember when that used to be important?).
Now tag clouds are all the thing, and some of them will even increase the size...Read More.
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Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:33:34 by Joe Bursell
For a little while now I've been using Google's SearchMash, an engine dedicated to universal or blended search- I know it's Google because of the privacy policy. Blended search is creeping into the vocabulary of optimisers as it provides a managed and (hopefully) relevant way to bring back results other than web pages.
It already exists, in part; Google "Guitar Hero&q...Read More.
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Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:59:03 by Pete Handley
Recently, I've been blogging about some of the SEO tools that Vertical Leap offers on our site for others to use. So far I have looked at our broken links checker and geolocation tool.
There has been a fair bit of chatter on assorted SEO blogs about the newly public Microsoft Webmaster Tools - so I though I would go and check it out (as did some other members of the Vertic...Read More.
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Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:48:59 by Kerry Dye
Last week I was wandering around some sites doing some research for a client, and up popped a window for taking part in the Internet User Monitor research. This is a UK research project by Forrester Research that has been running since 1988. As a long time Internet user, I've filled out a good few of these in my time (the when did you start using the Internet question always makes me laugh).<...Read More.
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Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:32:20 by Joe Bursell
There is German folklore that tells of the doppelgänger, a "doublewalker", an evil twin. Apparently if you see your doppelgänger it is an omen of death or serious misfortune.
So, you're carrying on about your business and suddenly something substantially similar to you pops up and trashes your life, making you persona non grata in the world you inhabit. You cease to e...Read More.
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Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:30:47 by Kerry Dye
Following on from my researches into
different conversion results from Google Analytics and Adwords
I also remembered that you can change the tracking parameters for Google Analytics.
This uses a little bit of code, a parameter
called utm_nooverride. It is appended to the end of URLs like this: http://www.yoururlhere.com/landingpage&utm_nooverride=1
Read More.
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Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:55:24 by Pete Handley
As I mentioned in a recent blog, Vertical Leap has a lots of tools that we use to manage our campaigns, and we have made a few of these available for the use of everyone else. The one I spoke about last was Looking at where your website is and today I will look at the Vertical Leap Broken Link Checker. We have mentioned this before, but I thought I would show you how easy it is to use!Read More.
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Fri, 9 Nov 2007 15:45:16 by Pete Handley
This morning I received an email from one of my clients who had been approached by another agency, who offer SEO as part of a larger service. The client in question is in the recruitment industry.
They had obviously been in a dialogue with the client as they knew they were using a service, and approached the pitch to the client as "look at these phrases that you aren't rank...Read More.
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Fri, 9 Nov 2007 14:35:24 by James Daniels
Since Google Adwords was launched its been an ever increasing money spinner. In today's market you are lucky to obtain a top 3 position for under £1.00 in most industries.
Wouldn't you agree that CPC prices are slowly becoming out of control and with PPC spend predicted to hit £10 billion by 2010, where's the space for all the small time players. Google need to...Read More.
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Thu, 8 Nov 2007 11:55:12 by Kerry Dye
I read earlier on today about the new redesign at Perfume.com, and went to have a look, as I know they are considered a leader in eCommerce design, and spend a lot of time refining the experience of people on their site to increase conversions.
But when I went there, I found a spammy looking page full of ads etc http://search.perfume.com/ Have they been hacked? What is going on!...Read More.
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Wed, 7 Nov 2007 15:32:27 by Kerry Dye
Conversion tracking is one of the hottest things in online
marketing right now, as it allows you to track all those lovely visitors and
which sources they came from before they bought a product or filled in your
form.
However, anyone who has spend any time
trying to compare the results of conversion from their Adwords campaign screen
with the conversion repor...Read More.
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Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:21:59 by Kerry Dye
This morning I was looking at the
presentation highlights from the Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing 2008
Benchmark Guide, which was the research on which my earlier blog on search in 2008
was based.
Interestingly, the presentation highlights
some different aspects from those I noted before, which are interesting when
you are looking at the overall search pic...Read More.
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Fri, 2 Nov 2007 15:49:06 by Craig Wilson
Earlier today, my colleague Pete made a blog post regarding your website hosting location and in under half an hour it was indexed and ranking in the Google SERPs. While this on it's own is a great turnaround from the search engine, it also has some other good points that we shouldn't ignore.
Click for large.
First of all, it goes to show that Google's blog se...Read More.
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Fri, 2 Nov 2007 11:28:10 by Pete Handley
Search engine optimisation folks always talk about how important hosting location is. Or at least what country it is. Most of the tools that I use to look at a website location are very good at telling me what country they are in, but rarely much more than that. Here is some examples of how some sites show the location of your server:
However, Vertical Leap have...Read More.
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Fri, 2 Nov 2007 10:57:16 by James Daniels
Google Adwords seem to be missing something here. According to the guidelines, any pharmacy-related content is against their policy unless you have a pharmacy checker ID. The only problem is you have to be based either in the US or Canada. Google don’t accept any pharmacy related content if you’re outside these territories but wait a second, yes you are. Contact your Google repres...Read More.
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Thu, 1 Nov 2007 14:59:03 by Kerry Dye
Just recently, Google announced that they
were increasing the number of Sitelinks to 8, and that in Google Webmaster
Tools, they will give you the chance to "turn them off" temporarily.
Obviously, this has caused a bit of a stir
in the SEO world, as well as renewed curiosity about how they calculate what
they are. As they often appear for brand names it...Read More.
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Thu, 1 Nov 2007 11:59:50 by Matt Hopkins
As I've mentioned before in previous blogs on local SEO, one of the challenges for a locally-oriented website/business is making sure that Google understands where your business (and target audience) is geographically located.
There are many ways to tell the search engines where your business is located - you can ensure that your address is on your site in the appropriate places as Google...Read More.
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