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Internet Marketing Generalists lack synthesis
1970-01-01 00:59:00
That old adage - jack of all trades, master of none - is true with many things and none more so than with search engine marketing.  Its not an issue of capability.  Many web designers have fantastic skills that would also make them great search marketers or optimisers.  The same is true of many copywriters, web developers, etc. The issue is with consistency of approach, experience and the time required to learn and keep up with best practice in one of the fastest changing industries on the planet.  If your staff (or your agency's staff) are required to be web developers, web designers, analytics specialists and optimisers - there is not enough time in the day to become good let alone great at any of them. This is an industry where specialists really do make a difference and in order to get anyone to become a true expert requires the implementation of a system and hands-on experience. Reading books, blogs and other material on search engine optimisation prov...
More About: Marketing , Internet , Internet Marketing , Lack

Which industries are getting the most traffic from search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Recently, Advertising Age released their Search Marketing Fact Pack for 2007.  This is a great document to download and keep by your computer for casual reference as it is jam-packed with little factoids. One of the sections provides the top industry categories that are getting the most traffic from search.  At first, I was pretty surprised by the results and so conducted a straw poll around theVL office to find that we were all were guessing similar industries - travel, news, sports, etc.  But we were all wrong. Here's the top 10 industry categories who are getting the highest percentage of their traffic (visits) from search engines: Rank Industry Percent of Traffic from Search Engines 1 Education 44.64% 2 Health and medical 44.43% 3 Food and beverage 39.74% 4 Music 39.16% 5 Community 34.73% 6 Travel 32.51% 7 Government 31.78% 8 Sho...
More About: Industries

Submission Service From Hell
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I quite like "retro"; I've got a boxfresh pair of black Air Jordan V's, Tetris is still my favourite game and Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture remains brilliant 60plus years on. What these things have in common is that they are still functional and enjoyable, they were created in the past yet people like me still enjoy them today. Clearly this doesn't apply across the board. As the world and it's contents evolve there is a natural order, whereby the dysfunctional is often swept aside and occasionally "new" really does mean "better". In web terms "retro" may have its place in design look-and-feel, but its not really a good idea to use it as a credo for anything else. Where is this going? Its going down a big, dark, lonely hole that's where- or rather it is if you use crappy submission services to promote your site. In the year dot it might have been a vaguely good idea to perform multiple manual submissions to search engines and direct...
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Website Identity Theft
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I recently came across a case of a website design being stolen, where the duplicate site was being used to host affiliate links. I am presuming, because the site was a top 10 result in Google for a high traffic keyphrase, that the expectation of the copier was that the site would rank for the same phrase and thus gain traffic intended for the original site.  The problem with that sort of masquerade is that (as anyone with any SEO knowledge knows) the backlinks for a site make up a pretty fair amount of the Google ranking algorithm. It is highly unlikely that just copying the site and hosting it on a brand new domain is going to get you anywhere at all. There are scraper sites out there that steal copy in an attempt to rank high for searches, and partly because of this, there is a duplicate content penalty. Sometimes this creates false positives, and hits the original site as well as the scraper (presumably what has happened to SEO expert Sugarrae). But usually, the engines ...
More About: Website , Identity Theft , Theft , Identity

Linking Out to Spam Sites Hurts Your Rankings
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I came across the SEO Checklist blog when looking for an SEO checker to examine the outbound links from a site. I was very interested in the article Does Linking to Spam Sites Hurt Your Rankings? Due to the recent parasitic spam-attacks that we discovered last year on our clients' sites, (see the press releases) the answer to this question is not no, as Mariella Moon concludes, but a definite YES. We have comprehensive proof that our clients' search engine positions suffered as a result - one in particular lost all placements in Yahoo, which recovered immediately after removing the inserted links (well the next time there was an update after a crawler visit). Google positions also improved, as did the Toolbar Page Rank of the site. Additionally, another one of our clients had a temporary problem with spam comments after installing a blog, and that too hit rankings in Google - whilst Google was obviously clever enough to realise what was going on, the site ranked several plac...

Google Checkout - The Pay Per Click Advantage!
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Google Checkout has been around for a good year now but I'm still rarely seeing online retailers use it. It's highly recommended that all online retailers using Google Adwords should sign up to Google Checkout. The main reason is that the Google Checkout graphic is the only colourful graphic on any Google SERP and reports suggest that CTR can increase by as much as 20%-30% by having this logo displayed next to your ad. What are you waiting for?   James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Google , Pay Per Click , Click , Pay-per-click , Advanta

How to see Google.com USA results from a different country
1970-01-01 00:59:00
If you or your clients have a global or international market, then it can be difficult to understand how your SEO is performing in those countries due to the localisation of search results in Google . Over the past few years, Google has worked to "regionalise" most of its search results.  This means that with each search request, it takes into account which Google domain you are using (e.g. google.co.uk), where you are physically located (usually based on your IP address), any geographical indicators in your search (e.g. Portsmouth), etc. We have a few clients who are marketing their services globally.  This used to be simpler.  Google.com was always the "international" or "global" search engine.  If you wanted UK companies, you searched Google.co.uk.  If you wanted to see how you were doing internationally, then you searched Google.com  - because all the results in Google.com used to be the same - no matter where you were...
More About: Country , Results , Diff

UK Online Ad Spend to Eclipse TV in 2009
1970-01-01 00:59:00
A recent report by Group M demonstrates that they have read their crystal ball and determined that given current growth patterns in spending on TV advertising and internet, there will be more spent online by 2009. There is a good breakdown of the data by eMarketer and a really nice analysis of why this should happen in the UK particularly. The TV market in the UK certainly seems to be anomalous, which is what is giving rise to the potential overtaking in spend, compared to the rest of the world.  Karin von Abrams, the analyst, also points out that in the UK we have had good, concrete examples of online spending that has worked, and this breeds further investment.  I know that in terms of website marketing, the UK is a mature market; it has always been amongst the top countries for internet penetration, use and spending. The National Statistics site has some great up to date information from 2007 about how many UK households have internet access, which is now up to 61%....
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Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Friendly – What’s
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This blog topic is really about a pet peeve of mine (well it's a pet peeve of most Organic Search CDM's at Vertical Leap too and probably every other reputable Search Engine Optimisation company) and that is Web Designers that offer SEO. Well, maybe not all of them, but a large number of web designers that I am aware of claim to offer SEO as a package bundled in with web design (and sometimes charged on top off the web design fee) but don't actually know what is required for SEO. In the most part, I consider that most web designers that offer SEO probably are actually constructing a search engine friendly website but NOT optimising it. I have been told of some people billing it as its expected and then not actually doing anything for that additional money. I'm not really a web designer, despite the fact that there are many elements of web design that I am aware of and am capable of implementing. I can and have built websites, but I am primarily a search engine optimiser. I...
More About: Friendly , Search Engine Optimisation

Is Google Really the Best Search Engine?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This week’s most interesting subject—in my opinion—goes to the idea that Googl e 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 when someone clicks on a search result and an unanswered search is where a query is made but the results are ignored and a new search is carried out. Surprisingly, Yahoo! has the best answered/unanswered ratio with around 75% of searches being fulfilled, which leaves Google chasing behind in 2nd place with only around 60% of successful searches. I guess while less searches are being made on Yahoo!, their users are actually finding their results quicker. Great news for Yahoo!, but what would Google make of this? Matt Cutts’ response was that more searches go unanswered because users often fi...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Engine

Domain Age and Trust - How Important Are They?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 shows that some older pages are starting to rank higher than usual over the past few weeks - could this be a sign of things to come? Look out for the follow up to this post, where I'll be reviewing the activity of some of our SEO clients to come up with a conclusion. Craig WilsonCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Domain , Trust , Import

Latent Semantic Indexing: LSI
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 used, and putting those trends to good use in a search context. Historically LSI has been applied with varying success to structured databases, and currently it forms part of the search process for engines such as Google. ‘Back in the day' human powered searches were the norm, people collecting and organizing websites that were submitted to them, or that they found. They would add their finds to a directory would be the resource you used to find information. Yahoo! began as a solely human powered search facility- the Open Directory Project still operate in this fashion, with many search engines using their ...
More About: Xing , Tent , Latent Semantic Indexing

Writing Articles for Link Building and Improving Rankings and Traffic in th
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 locations with links back to the site. Others will publish these articles because it adds more content to their websites, which we all know is one of the key areas of search engine marketing, and continually updated content will increase the number of returning visitors to a site, as they will want to stay up to date with the latest opinions. There are a number of good reasons to write articles for other websites, rather than only writing content for your own site (which obviously needs to be done in conjunction with this article activity). If these articles are constantly providing good consist...
More About: Building , Writing , Articles , Traffic , Link Building

Does your Search Marketing Company Exhibit a "Light Touch"?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 that there are a couple of different management styles being exhibited by both SEO and Search Marketing (PPC) companies.  I have started to call one of these styles the "Light  Touch ". The "light touch" is the style that is most frequently used by advertising agencies, web design companies, and "low cost" SEO/PPC consultants.  This campaign management style is typically identified by a concentrated level of activity at the beginning of the campaign and then very passive/automated monitoring once the initial work has been completed. ...
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Google - New Site, New Hosting Country, 301 Redirects - Instant Changes
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 content on the pages remained the same or similar, but many new pages were added to the site at the same time. When I was looking on Monday morning, I could see already that a good number of the new pages had already been crawled and indexed by Google. I didn't really expect them to be turning up this quickly, but it seems we were fortunate that Google crawled these pages on the day that the new site was being rolled out. Also the site changed from being hosted in the USA, to being hosted in the UK. Matt has already discussed the importance of location and websites I thought that we would probably...
More About: Hosting , Country , Site , New Site

Link Buying - Should You or Shouldn't You?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 caught is too much for most SEOers; reaping the benefits can be worth it. It’s a risky business. Link buying is the practice of paying someone to display a text link to your website from theirs. The idea is to buy links on websites that are relevant to your own and are usually regarded as a trusted and stable source of information. The purpose is to allow you to choose a keyword and link back to your own website which—when updated by Google—will receive the benefits of the link from the higher source. As previously mentioned, however, Google doesn’t believe in link buyi...
More About: Buying , Link

Writing Press Releases for Off-Page Optimisation
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 will happen. So whilst writing you can refer to your keyword list, but don't agonise about getting all of them in. Of course, getting started on a press release is one of the things that many people find difficult. It's that "staring at a blank piece of paper" feeling! So here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing on what you could write a press release about: New staff joining Move of office Good sales month New client / renewing client Comment on an industry report that has just been released Charity activity, either for the company or a staff member Starting an eco-fr...
More About: Writing , Press , Press Releases , Page , Misa

NOODP Tagging Makes For 'Truer' Googling
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The "snippet" that Googl e 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 problematic as ODP descriptions are often woefully out of date, not reflecting your current (read: preferred) messaging. It used to be the case that you were forced to suffer this anachronistic data being returned, and take it on the chin... ...that was until May of this year (2007). Google did the decent thing and introduced a Google-specific META robots tag value. The NOODP (No Open Directory Project) robots tag prevents Google from using DMOZ's description. There is a comprehensive practical instruction from Google on how to implement it here, but as a brief overview here are the basics: To prevent all s...
More About: Tagging , Googling

HTML Entities and SEO
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 in HTML. Other common ones include " for a quotation mark   for a non-breaking space, and in the UK, the useful £ to make sure that your pound signs appear correctly. They are also really useful when you are writing web pages in other languages - you need them for the French character c cedilla (ç) for instance. So what use are these to a search engine optimiser then? Well, the particular one that made me pick up my virtual pen about was ™ - this renders a trademark sign into HTML thus™. Cool eh? Well yes, but this particular symbol is underused on the w...
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Web 2.0, AJAX, and Search Engine Friendliness: Part Two
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 curtail its use to small functions within a site- definitely don't use it for navigation. Why? As with CSS, search engines have difficulty understanding it well enough to use it for rummaging around your site to find pages and keywords. Spiders look for content directly in HTML, not the dynamic content loaded by AJAX. So, AJAX interferes with the indexing of your site. As AJAX provides data without refreshing or reloading a page it presents non-unique URLs to a search engine. If a page doesn't have a unique URL (i.e. no other page within the site has the same URL) the options to manipulate headers and title tags are ...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Engine , Ajax , Part

Search Engines and Underscores
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 making a change to its algorithm so that words with underscores are treated as separate words. This change goes back to Google's programming roots, but has been one of the things that we as an SEO company, and everyone else in the optimisation industry, has always urged people to change in order to rank better in Google. So in the future this will be one tip that we won't need to recommend to our clients. But looking a little wider, this introduction could have very wide implications, as thousands of websites that currently use underscores receive a boost to their current rankings. TypePad and Movable Type blog engines a...
More About: Search Engines , Search , Engines , Scores

Web 2.0, AJAX, and Search Engine Friendliness: Part One
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 technologies, used to achieve a new structure for web applications. As far as web 2.0 is concerned AJAX is a key enabling technology. The traditional web model works like this: The browser (user) requests a webpage > the user clicks a link and an HTTP Get request is sent to the server > the web server deals with the request and sends the webpage to the browser (user). If the user wants to send information to the server (clicking on something) another request is made with the same process. This communication method is called "synchronous" as information can only be exchanged by request...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Engine , Ajax , Part

Using RSS feeds in Apollo
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 commentary we have supplied an rss (Really Simple Syndication) feed. Here's how to access that feed if you're a client of course! Visit www.vertical-leap.co.uk and go to the customer login. Step 1. Log in using your Vertical Leap User ID and Password: Step 2. Locate the "Campaigns" icon, and click to open your campaign page: Step 3. Click on your company name to access your campaign folders. Step 4. Click "Messages" in the "Status and Processes" section: Step 5. In "Messages" there is an orange icon for your rss feed. Click this and a new page will open. T...

Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: The Long Tail
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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. If you have ever spoken to us, you will know that we use a relatively small list of terms to optimise a website, and these are the key terms that you and we have jointly highlighted are the ones that are most relevant to your site. Unlike a PPC campaign, it is not necessary to specifically target every possible minor phrase, "the long tail", in order to appear for that search. Increased trust and authority What an organic search campaign does for you, besides targeting your benchmark keywords, is improve the authority of your website and its general reputation with the search engines. It increases the tru...
More About: Success , Campaign , Long , Long tail , The Long Tail

Google Universal Search - Some Examples
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I've noticed more and more recently that there are more Universal Search Results appearing when you do a search at Googl e . 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's Annual Global Technology Conference recently, Sundar Pichai, director of product management at Google, said users will see an increase in the frequency of search results that include various types of links, like Web pages, video clips, images, news articles, and maps. "We're still at the nascent stages. Going forward, we'll be more aggressive in terms of when we trigger this," Pichai said during a question-and-answer session. So here are a few examples that are already live and "in the wild": Search Result showing a Book Result: Search Result showing a News Result: ...
More About: Examples

Search Engine Optimization Tip for LinkedIn
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 LinkedIn is for its networking abilities (never lose touch with a contact when you change companies again!), it is also a great tool for research. If you have to meet someone at a company, for a sales pitch perhaps, or even an interview, then a quick search on LinkedIn will usually bring up some great background information. Get an idea of company structure or what areas someone's job covers or even how many people there are in the company. However, this is an SEO blog, so I also need to give you a tip on how to use LinkedIn to promote your website. I found this great pointer at GetFound and it leverages the strength and tru...
More About: Search Engine Optimization , Search , Search Engine , Optimization , Engine

Google accounts for 80% of all search click throughs in the UK
1970-01-01 00:59:00
According a recent report by Nielson//NetRatings, Googl e 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. Interestingly when related to my recent blog on SEO for Travel Sites, NetRatings are reporting that the Multi-category Travel sector (containing brands such as Lastminute.com, Expedia and Thomson) received the most of these click-throughs, 41.6 million, or 4.7% of all click-throughs. Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings says, “Britons online are most likely to be searching for travel deals, social networks or reference information through sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. "To see how deeply ingrained search is in the Internet today, one needs to look no further than the fact the fourth mos...
More About: Click , Search

How Clean is Your Code?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 error-ridden mess that you call your own. There are many benefits which would suggest that it does, these include: Faster load times. Less bandwidth. Easier to update. Smaller HTML files. Less stress on the server. Less chance of a programming error. Less chance of a broken link / 404 page. Semantic web is more accessible to all users. These examples not only help search engine spiders to crawl your site, but also make it more enjoyable for the user (faster load times) and easier for you to update at a later time. In my own experience, this seems to help with MSN Live and Yahoo! r...
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Yahoo Sponsored Local Search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 targeted phrases. So lets have a look at the Yahoo Local interface: In all honesty, it looks much the same as most of the other local interfaces that I am familiar with. There is a map, there are a number of listings, and unsurprisingly there are sponsored links at the top of these. Comparing this with the Google local interface, there is similar information being displayed, the main difference is that there are more listings on the Yahoo SERP and more Map on the Google Local search. Personally, I like the look and feel of the Google interface, but it is perhaps because I am more fam...
More About: Yahoo!

Google Webmaster Tools gets a Makeover
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 check the status of these removals (sadly not yet approved - so there is still massive duplication on my clients site, but hopefully this will be resolved shortly) and realised that Google's Webmaster Tools had a makeover and has been reshuffled. The dashboard of Webmaster Tools now looks like this: No great changes that I notice here, but when you move through to the overview of a website, there is an entirely new layout (I've highlighted the area that has changed below:) Now to be fair, the information displayed hasn't really changed a great deal, but the layout of where you access this, i...
More About: Google Webmaster Tools