Posts Tagged ‘Search engine optimization’

• Delicious looks safe

  Friday, August 7th, 2009

  Concerns that Delicious might be lost in the Microsoft- Yahoo! deal seem to have been waylaid with a slew of new features added to the oldest and arguably the best of the social bookmarking sites.

  New features on Delicious included related tweets to new bookmarks, a fresh content tab (in addition to the existing ‘Popular’), and a ‘Send’ option to share your bookmarks.

  For SEOs, delicious is once again a great place to combine your social media efforts in an easy to use process. By adding social bookmarks for your own and client’s content into your delicious account, and also tweeting the link to your followers, you can help push a link onto the Fresh content page. Careful tagging is always a good idea, eg by looking not just for trending topics, but those in the “Popular” section, as is consideration of headlines and descriptions.

  There has always been a preponderance of website design bookmarks; hopefully this will now change as more fresh content is posted that comes from the new algorithm that includes popular Twitter topics.

  

  Tags: Delicious, Search engine optimization, social bookmarking, twitter, yahoo
  Posted in SEM Industry, SEO, Social Media

• Why behavioural data may be the new Google black

  Friday, August 7th, 2009

  Many of us who have been in the business for some time have watched, and worked, with interest as prominence has been added, and taken away from, key SEO factors.

  First, it was the importance of on-page optimisation, which became subject to major abuse with issues such as spamdexing, keyword stuffing, doorway pages and so on. Google changed its tactics and we saw far more relevance given to links.  That too has become subject of abuse and is now less relevant in some ways, although the importance of back links etc is never going to cease entirely to be a constituent of the algorithms.

  Now, it seems that behavioural analysis may be the new black amongst the search engines. Great article here describing how Google collect personal data from users, which should encourage SEOs to think about how they can use such information. And perhaps endeavour to learn from the past and use, rather than abuse, the system.

  Meanwhile, your average surfer should, maybe, contemplate the implications of Google holding so much personal data.

  

  Tags: algorithm, behavioural, Google, Keyword stuffing, Search engine optimization, search engines, SEO, Spamdexing
  Posted in Google, SEM Industry, SEO

• Wordtwit vs Twitterfeed

  Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

  As some may have noticed, we have been experimenting with some of the Twitter tools available for clients and SEO agencies alikes.

  For those with a blog, there are multiple options for ensuring that the information posted to your blog is automatically added to your twitter account, thereby saving a job. However, some tools only work with specific blogging software eg WordPress, whilst others offer a variety of useful functionality across multiple platforms.

  This post is to check out what happens with Wordtwit (a WP add on) as against Twitterfeed, which works somewhat like Feedburner (now in the Google stable) and potentially is of more use to a wider audience.

  Let’s hit send….!

  Just before we do though, a salutory lesson to others. If you try to post in different places, eg blog, facebook, Twitter etc, and automate distribution of the content between those places, be very careful not to create an infinite loop!

  For instance, if you set up Twitter to feed into your corporate Facebook page, and for your FB page to feed new content into Twitter each time a member of staff posts there, you will end up with a constant re-posting of the same content between the two places. Test and think out such processes before applying them live….

  Update: you can use the Feedburner Awareness API to see your stats from Twitterfeed to Twitter and compare stats for clickthroughs between your traditional RSS feed distribution and your social media distribution.

  

  Tags: Blog, FeedBurner, plugins, rss feed, Search engine optimization, social marketing, twitter, Weblogs, WordPress
  Posted in Blog, Link Marketing, SEO, Small Business Resources, Social Media

• Using automated article writing software – DON'T!

  Sunday, July 26th, 2009

  As a native English speaker, I shudder when I read internet marketing articles about SEO that contain the most appalling English. Prime examples of this crop up all over blogs where it is blatantly obvious that automated article writing software has been used to generate content.

  Here is one such example:

  SEO is a process of improving the traffic to your website from the search engines by using high quality content. It is a rich internet marketing strategy which considers how search engines work and what people search for. Try to place your web page as top as possible so that the indexed search will list your site first which has higher page rank and drive you more traffic.

  Hmmm!

  Yes, content is important, but not so important that you damage your own reputation by using software which cannot ever replace a good copywriter. If you plan to use such tools, at least read ALOUD any article produced and check that it reads well and doesn’t contain basic grammatical errors.

  However, there are better versions of article autowrite tools that search the Net for sentences to use in your chosen article, and therefore you are just plagiarising other people’s work, ergo it is not unique content. It is quite possible with the huge amount of content now available online that your imagination will come up with a sentence that has been used elsewhere already, particularly on popular topics, but it is highly unlikely that an article you write from your own creative juices will contain multiple repeated sentences that have been pre-published elsewhere.

  However, there may be potential uses for article writing software for SEO research. For instance, you can use these type of tools (which are generally cheap) to find top level sites and related keywords and put this research easily into a report for your clients when they need to do a keyword brainstorm with contextual content.There are plenty of other tools to do such a job though – a search engine, Notepad, and Ctrl C Ctrl V springs to mind!

  Whenever you create any content, however you choose to do it, ensure that it reads well, is high quality, grammatically correct English, and that it passes copyscape.

  

  Tags: article writing, automated article writing tools, content creation, copyscape, Search engine optimization
  Posted in Content, SEO, Tips & Tricks

• Google SEO Agency toolkit

  Friday, July 24th, 2009

  Ever wished that all the different Google tools you use, such as Analytics, Adwords, Keyword search tool, etc etc were all in one place? Well, they are, in the  Google SEO Agency toolkit

  The different applications and tools are categorised:  Plan, Create, Place and Measure.

  So, for instance, when you are planning and researching a marketing campaign, whether for a client or your own business, you can use Insight for search trends, estimate traffic for keywords and sectors, search blogs for trending topics or niche areas to fill, and so on.

  Very useful having it all in one place, and it may help you to define your campaign more effectively if you think along the Plan, Create, Place, Measure lines.

  

  Tags: adwords, Google, marketing, Search engine optimization, toolkit
  Posted in Google, SEO, Small Business Resources, Web Analytics

• Creative website revenue idea for SEO

  Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

  If you are using Twitter, then you should also be using Tweetlater, which allows you to automate many of the processes which you need to do to make the most of Twitter eg send a welcome message, auto-tweet, auto-follow, auto-unfollow and so on.

  

  Even if you are not using Twitter and tweetlater, a quick look around the tweetlater site reveals an interesting idea for banner ads and raising revenue from your website.

  At the top of every page, above the fold, is a featured user banner. This reaches a large audience, both through the website and inclusion in 30k emails that are sent out. In order to feature here for 24 hours, all you need do is bid in the auction.

  This is an interesting idea to deal with unsold inventory, raise money, and also promote your website as anyone who wins an auction will also mention your site in blogs, tweets etc. Particularly if they see an increase in followers from being featured.

  Setting up persistent auctions such as this is not difficult, and could prove to be a valuable revenue generator for any site with a reasonable number of page views.

  From an SEO / Web PR angle, purchasing a banner in such a way and on such a site will gain you a useful backlink, even if only temporary, whilst also getting your name and details out through email marketing to a large number of potential followers, customers etc. And very affordable, looking at the prices of previous successful auctions.

  

  Tags: Auction, email marketing, online promotion, Search engine optimization, TweetLater, twitter, Web banner, website
  Posted in Link Marketing, Online PR, SEO, Social Media, Tips & Tricks

• Is Google a broken model?

  Monday, July 20th, 2009

  More than likely not, but there is no time like the present to look at the possible issues around this question.

  There have been numerous discussions recently about the UK serps (search engine results pages) showing too many non-UK sites above established UK content. Is it a bug in the algorithm, some sort of global testing to open commercial doors for non-UK companies or is it just SNAFU?! We’ll discuss this issue next post.

  On top of that, comes a re-opening of the discussions which started in 2006-7 when many in the internet marketing world were amongst the early adopters who started to use social media for personal engagement first, and then for marketing. With that use came the realisation that here was huge potential for less searches to be made on search engines because answers could be found more quickly from your peers and community.

  The threat to Google et al search revenues was quite clear, as well as to SEO companies who needed to develop social media marketing strategies quickly, and the effects have become more apparent as Twitter, Facebook, community media tools and social networking have taken off.

  However, the last few weeks have seen an escalation of the Google backlash, negative PR, and questionning which has been ongoing for some time because of the ubergoogle factor, but it is wider than that – it is beginning to affect the perception of the whole industry.  This article seems to be the most telling of many recommending that the time has come to regulate the search landscape.

  Bearing in mind the phenomenal growth of tools such as Twitter, and the fact that for many it is now far faster to find an answer to a simple problem, to conduct research, to run a survey, to go viral and so on through tools such as Twitter than through standard internet marketing and seo, it was inevitable that the search engines would start to lose favour for certain ‘real-time’ needs.

  As the threats of social media have become apparent to the Googles of this world, it would seem that efforts have been made to either eliminate the threat from the likes of social bookmarking tools and blogs (as in the great October 2007 Pagerank loss for major blogs), incorporate social media tools within Google’s own apps (eg the new features in Google Reader) or to remove certain results from the algorithm entirely, whether that is manually or automatically.

  The blogosphere and Twitter are both full of many, many theories, commentaries and opinions on just what is going on and what should be done about it.

  If Google finds its revenues under threat – we know Google has been slow to adapt to the fast-paced development of social media – then those in the internet marketing industry need to be aware of the potential changes that Google may make to resist that ‘attack’. And hence how others will see the impact those changes have when such a massive proportion of the search engine acreage is owned by a single company, and the efforts that are then proposed to regulate that control of search habits and results.

  There may be difficult times ahead for those who have put all their eggs in the Google basket.

  Now really is the time to look out of the box. If the dominance that Google (once everyone’s darling and the word on everyone’s lips meaning “to search the web”) has coveted for so long is seen as a threat to world trade (particularly in times of global recession), or to the independence and freedom web surfers should enjoy, and hence efforts are made to reduce that dominance, the impact to all in the SEO, SEM and IM trade could be awesome. And not in a  good way for those who have been slow to see this cloud on the horizon.

  Whether you are reliant on gmail for your email, google apps and docs for all your in-house documents (a problem Twitter has recently faced when hacked) or your core business relies on serps, you should start researching and considering the potential for you.

  Discuss!

  

  Tags: facebook, Google, Google Reader, internet marketing, Search engine optimization, Search engine results page, SEM, SEO, Social network service, twitter, Web search engine
  Posted in Google, SEM Industry, SEO, Social Media, Stats & Trends

• 9 Easy Ways to Locate your Link Targets

  Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

  We all know how important it is to find sites that are willing to link back to us, but sometimes it can prove difficult to track down sites of high value with a loyal audience in our niche.

  Here are 9 quick and easy ways to find sites that you can establish a link with.

  Firstly, though, make your life much easier by downloading the SEO for Firefox tool. This will enable you to see at a glance how many site visitors the website you intend to link to receives, its Page Rank, the number of links to the site, its Alexa ranking, and much more.

  The following are all very simple search terms that you can use to find sites to link to. Simply type your keywords or phrase and then add the term of your choice in quotation marks in the search box after your keyword.

  eg internet marketing + “add URL”

  1) add URL

  2) add link

  3) add site

  4) suggest url

  5) suggest link

  6) suggest site

  7) submit url
  submit link

  9) submit site

  Keep a spreadsheet showing the details, such as PR, and whether you have submitted your site and when, and this will make it easy to keep an eye open for linkrot, or for sites whose PR has decreased or increased dramatically and so on.

  

  Tags: Google, Link Marketing, linking, pagerank, Search engine optimization, search terms
  Posted in Google, Link Marketing, SEO, Tips & Tricks

• Matt Cutts says content not page rank

  Friday, June 19th, 2009

  In a recent blog post, Matt Cutts clarifies the Page Rank debate which has raged, with particular relation to sculpting sites for PR. He recommends allowing Page rank to flow freely through your site rather than trying to sculpt pages and links to force PR to flow.

  It seems that some of us SEO folk had failed to notice, or hear, what Google has been trying to intimate about use of resources and time with Page Rank. So, just to make it clear, Matt has spoken out about the issues.

  Basically, content that is important should be high level not deeplinked within a site. Your site should be easily accessible to both search engine bots and human beans alike (Many people forget the human element, yet they are the ones who will buy your products!) Your site should host great content that attracts links naturally, rather than trying to force links through PR sculpting. And he is quite clear about the value of nofollow (or not) and trying to ‘hoard’ PR ie don’t.

  So, we are slowly heading back to the logical, sensible path where sites respect their visitors, make navigation intuitive, and focus less on what the search engines are doing and more on what the people want to know and leading them easily and quickly to the answers.

  

  Tags: Google, Matt Cutts, nofollow, page rank, pagerank, Search engine optimization
  Posted in Google, SEM Industry, SEO, Stats & Trends, Website Usability

• Search Engine Marketing Scholarship

  Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

  Marketing Pilgrim have just announced the launch of the 4th Search Engine Marketing Scholarship and with a deadline of 22nd June, it is time to start writing!

  The competition is open to residents of all countries and the prize is a package worth $10,000. All you need do is write an original and engaging How to article about any aspect of internet marketing and search engine optimisation with a minimum word count of 400 words.

  Once the best articles are chosen by a panel of esteemed SEO experts, including Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Jill Whalen, there will be a period of 4 weeks during which each author can promote their article, with the winner being the one that proves most popular. So, not just a challenge in writing, but also in effective internet promotion!

  Last year’s winner, Linda Bustos, wrote on “8 stupid things webmasters do to mess up their analytics” and this article gives you a great example of what the judges and the voting audience are looking for.

  So, pick up your quill and start writing your entry today!

  

  Tags: competition, Danny Sullivan, internet marketing, Jill Whalen, rand fishkin, Search Engine Marketing, search engine marketing scholarship, Search engine optimization
  Posted in SEM Industry, SEO

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