Black hat SEO techniques around again

March 10th, 2010

It would appear that once again the top search engines are being targeted by the black hats. SonicWall announced yesterday that top SEO terms are bringing up increasingly malicious sites.
Always a good idea to a) check the link you are clicking on and b) keep a close eye on your listings and report any malicious [...]

Social Media Icon Sets – yum!

March 8th, 2010

Image by webtreats via Flickr

There are some very striking social media icons out there, and they can only add to a website, as well as showing you are aware of social media and its importance in everyone’s online life.
Smashing Apps have put together a full range of social media icons for you to plagiarise, enjoy, [...]

Adios SearchWiki, Hello Google Stars

March 6th, 2010

Image by malglam via Flickr

Google has announced that it will be dropping the searchwiki feature from the search engine, and introducing Google stars instead.
These work in the same way as you may have become used to with Google Mail, News and Reader. The Google blog states:
“With stars, you can simply click the star marker on [...]

Are the big boys playing catch up?

March 6th, 2010

The latest report from the University of Masschusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing research may initially seem to imply that the largest Fortune 500 companies are adopting social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) more quickly than their smaller counterparts in the Fortune 500.
However, the reality is that whilst 35% of the Fortune 500 companies tweet and [...]

Bing and Yahoo adopt the canonical tag

March 6th, 2010

Image by Noah Sussman via Flickr

After the announcement last year that the 3 major search engines would adopt the canonical tag, it seems that Bing and Yahoo may be about to support it too, though not to the cross-domain level that Google plan to.
This tag helps solve the duplicate content issue, particularly prevalent when multiple [...]

Think glocal – has Google lost it?

February 17th, 2010

Think global, act local (AKA glocal) was a well known campaign slogan for a multitude of ’sins’ – eco warriors etc. As the internet has permitted many of us to search further afield for what we seek, the hope had to be that this could be turned on its head and we could think local [...]

Belgian ad agencies go on strike

February 15th, 2010

27 Belgian advertising agencies have so far joined the virtual strike that is ongoing over the state of play of pitches in Belgium.
Start here
http://www.bubka.be/
Pitch lists cause immense pain and expense to agencies and the points are well made.

Google advertises….finally!

February 8th, 2010

Whilst Google may not really need to advertise as the brand name is inextricably linked to ’search’ in most of the world’s minds, it is interesting to see their contribution to the SuperBowl ads this weekend.
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Google have been hitting the news with negative headlines recently, so perhaps the motivation to advertise at such a major [...]

Increase in Internet Marketing Budgets

February 4th, 2010

The majority of companies are aware of the importance of internet or digital marketing, although for many it is a struggle to understand how exactly to capitalise on the budget spend and achieve hard results.
Even so, a recent report from Econsultancy and ExactTarget shows that a large proportion of businesses expect to increase and maintain [...]

Warning – your traffic may drop from Google

January 23rd, 2010

Are you offering facts and figures which people regularly search on? Does it drive traffic to your site?
Let’s give an example: what is the height of St Paul’s cathedral?

As you can see, the information the searcher requires is (partially) in the search engine listing. However, the likelihood is that this is enough to pique the [...]