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Are we an SEO Agency or an SEO Company?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
One of the important attributes of good keyword analysis is to ensure that you are selecting keywords that are used by your target audience and not "industry jargon".  One of the typical examples of this dilemma is the "cheap flights" versus "discount airfare" comparison.  A few years back, the travel industry spent a lot of time optimising web sites for keywords and phrases like "discount airfare" as they felt that this phrase most accurately reflected what they offered.  The problem was that most consumers searching for "discount airfare" were not using this phrase at all - and were using phrases like "cheap flights".  So - be aware of the language of your target audience. I was thinking about this in our industry today and was considering the terms "SEO agency" and "SEO company".  Search Marketing and in particular search engine optimisation is an interesting...
More About: Agency , Company

Innovation at Google Video with Google CIO Douglas Merrill
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I just watched this video presentation on YouTube by Googl e 's CIO and VP of Engineering, Douglas Merrill.  It has some really interesting content and gives a great insight into Google and how it is trying to nurture a culture of innovation.  I read an interesting comment for this video on YouTube that likened Google to a "for-Profit University" rather than a regular corporate behemoth - which I thought was an interesting view. Anyway, if you have the 50+ minutes to invest and don't mind Google Adwords being compared to the evolutionary impact of an opposable thumb, then this is well worth it. Matt HopkinsManaging Director
More About: Video , Google Video , Innovation

Local Search Growing Faster than Traditional Search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
A recent report from leading internet analysts, comScore, shows that Local Search grew faster than traditional search by 40% this year.  In a single month, more than 850 million local searches were performed in the United States resulting in an average per year of 1 billion local searches.  According to many industry analysts, this total is expected to grow to 30 billion per year by 2009 (less than two years away). Another interesting statistic in this study was that almost 50% of local searchers visited a local business as a result of performing search online.  This clearly demonstrates the importance of online marketing to offline conversion.  This issue of "offline conversion" has been considered by many as being the "last mile" for internet marketing and is notoriously difficult to track but should not dissuade businesses from engaging in online marketing initiatives. Currently, the majority of local searchers st...
More About: Growing , Grow , Traditional

What is Natural Search Engine Optimisation?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Like many industries, search engine marketing is rife with jargon.  One of the terms that you'll hear frequently is "Natural Search Engine Optimisation" and it can have a couple of different meanings depending on who you speak with. I've heard this term used as another version of "organic seo" or the optimisation of web sites for the natural listings in search engines such as Google.  These are the "free" search results that are provided by search engines and usually appear on the left hand side of the search engine results page (SERP) - paid listings typically appear on the right side of the major engines. The order of these results are determined by a complex computer program (also known as an Algorithm) that determines the relevance of web site pages to a particular search query.  No one is paying for these results, but problems with a company's web site can prevent it from ranking&nb...
More About: Search Engine , Search Engine Optimisation

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

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 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

Yahoo Sponsored Local Search - Follow Up
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Well, obviously I would like to think that many many people out there in the WWW like to read my blogs, and I have had some reaction from people before, but my recent blog about Yahoo Sponsored Local Search seems to have caught the attention of some people. I just had a thoroughly interesting and pleasant conversation with the CEO of Infoserve Steve Barnes, who had a couple of issues with what I wrote on the subject yesterday. He had come across my blog, and had obviously spent some time looking at our site to discover more about what Vertical Leap do, and the work that we do to get our clients more business to their websites. Among the information that I was supplied by Steve, I have been told that there were 341,224 visitors using the word "Hotels" in this engine last month, an illustration of how important a prominent "sponsored" listing can drive traffic and enquiries to the site, as these listings appear not only in local areas, but in the Yahoo equ...
More About: Yahoo!

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

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 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

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

Site Relevance
1970-01-01 00:59:00
In order to gain rankings in any search engine, your site needs to be relevant to the topic that you are targeting.  Call me Captain Obvious.  However, you'd be surprised at the number of sites that we come across where the keywords (exact or related) are not present on the site in question.  Or perhaps they are relying on a very graphically-oriented or flash-based site but with no textual content that can be effectively indexed by the search engines.  These guys are in the right ballpark, but they are no where near the field of play.  Naturally, one of the main activities we work on for these sites is to add real and relevant content that can help the search engines place their site into a topical context.  Most of the time this content has already been written but has not yet been placed online.  Perhaps its in press releases, brochures, testimonials from clients etc.   This is part of the optimisation process called "o...
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Portsmouth SEO Firm Bursting at the Seams
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We've outgrown our offices.  This is a great signal that we are doing things right and achieving fabulous SEO results for our clients.  We have further growth plans too - with a marketing assistant and another PPC specialist joining next month.  The problem is, that we barely fit in our current office and there's no suitable office space left in Ports mouth .   It seems that every spare office in Portsmouth over the past five years has been converted into residential properties (flats or houses).  I was reading somewhere that there has been a 25% drop in office space in Portsmouth and Southsea over the past 2-3 years. Some company's in the online marketing space run their businesses virtually.  I can certainly see the benefits in this - having 4 offices on 4 continents means that we are pretty adept at working virtually when we need to.  But in the UK, we like to see each other.  We like to be in the same office and unders...

Search Optimisation and Brand
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Branding is an often misunderstood topic, frequently discussed without an understanding of its fundamental tenet- that it is the set of values by which your stakeholders define you. No amount of leverage or intentionally skewed measurement can ever see "brand" being controlled or dictated to by the marketer. Your logo is not your brand; it is a badge, a symbol used to identify you. Its intrinsic meaning is whatever perception your customers have of your operation. That perception is the brand. So, by understanding that your brand is owned by your customers you can seek to nurture and develop your customers, and by consequence, rather than direction, manage your brand. It is this pragmatic thought process that frees the marketer from meaningless metrics and self-serving activities. When a customer decides to pick you they make a decision that your offering (and by extension, you) are worth bothering with. When a customer picks you it is likely that they have searche...
More About: Branding , Search Engine Marketing , Search , Brand , Misa

Chartered Institute of Marketing Says Search Engine Optimisation is Essenti
1970-01-01 00:59:00
"Without investment in SEO, online businesses will struggle to generate the traffic it needs to survive" according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK. According to David Thorp, CIM director of research and information, "Although there will always be those who accidentally stumble across your web site, if you are looking to attract new customers you need to invest in search engine optimisation to drive customers to your web site" Naturally this is something that most of us have realised for some time - but its great to get some of the industry pundits to start to discuss SEO and Search Marketing in general to help raise the profile with small to medium sized businesses in the UK.   Although Pay Per Click has seen its popularity sky rocket here in the UK over the past few years, SEO is now seeing a surge of interest due to the rising cost of clicks and the higher conversion rates that the organic lis...
More About: Search Engine , Engine , Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation for Travel Sites
1970-01-01 00:59:00
When I look down the client list for Vertical Leap, there are a large number of travel related sites. Not all the same sort of company, it must be said, but sites offering hotel breaks, flights, holidays, information on cities, travel insurance, even airport portering services. So what is it that makes this such a dense arena for search engine optimisation? First of all of course, there's the internet; it has truly revolutionised the way that people look for holidays and travel. Along with the growth of the internet there has been a diversion from package holidays to independent travel, with people often booking flights, hotels, insurance and excursions all from different sources. Whilst this is partly a way to save money, it is also a mindset change, as people turn away from what they see as more staid holiday options to richer experiences and adventure travel. This explosion in the niche sectors has allowed smaller operators to operate effectively, and the internet allowed new ...
More About: Travel , Search , Search Engine , Sites , Engine

Google Subscribed Links - Yet Another Way to Appear at the Top
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 Subs cribed 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 file of a specific format (XML, TSV or RSS), tell Google about it, get people to subscribe to it and then the results will appear above the normal Google results. Here's an example: Of course, the downside is that unlike a normal OneBox, you have to get people to actually subscribe to your information. However, there's still the possibility here that there are people want to know your information above the Google Search Results. It's less random in some ways because a first answer (if there is one) will come from a site they trust. So if Vertical Leap created one for our blog entries, and I searched fo...
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URL Rewriting: Part Two: How?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=154&view=basic ...in this instance it's the query-string beginning "id=XXX". When a search engine interrogates this URL it'll strip the noise out, and by noise I mean everything after the "?". The result is that instead of seeing many distinct URLs such as http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=466&view= http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=467&view= etc. the search engine will just see loads of duplicates: http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l etc. which will be ignored. The...

New Vertical Leap Website Launched
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 areas of the site. 3. Better interlinking of blog posts (new "related blogs" available for each blog post) 4. Sections of the site aligned to a visitor's needs based on their knowledge and where they are in the buying cycle. We think that we have achieved all of these goals and hope that you do too. Matt HopkinsManaging Director
More About: Website , Launched , Vertical , Vert , Leap

URL Rewriting: Part One: Why?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=554&view=basic might show a particular product in your catalogue, but this URL gives no clue as to what it might be. The point I want to make here is that while verbose URLs follow a syntax and will work no matter how clumsy they are to our eyes, they are not intuitive- we can't readily translate them, and nor can search engines. The product "id" portion of the URL will prevent Google looking any further (its too generic), so even if it read "...?id=hammers..." it wouldn't get looked at- Google won't look at session IDs for...
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PageRank Toolbar Update
1970-01-01 00:59:00
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 link strength just doesn't make much sense to me - the way I see it is that link "scores" or "juice strength" is like to vary from search term to search term. However, like everyone else as well, without any other tangible metric to look at we are all likely to take the one we can see and use it as a base guide, even when we know that it isn't accurate. Right well I have access to over 25 sites current PageRank and previous figure, and only two have changed (one went up 1, the other went down 2), so I have not been seeing too much flux here. Nothing to shout about perhaps, but m...
More About: Pagerank , Update , Toolbar , Ager , Gera

Optimising Video for Search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Video optimisation, for searching rather than viewing, is growing in potency. With more users taking advantage of fast broadband connections video is shaping up to be a huge proportion of web content. Delivering video is one thing, optimising it for search engines is entirely another. There is a paucity of focussed articles and research into video search optimisation, with a smattering of sensible comment in fora. To make videos searchable, and get them generating traffic for your site there are some solid ideas that share much with image search optimisation. These ideas are presented here: If your video format allows the embedding of meta data, insert keywords. Upload your video to video sharing sites (YouTube et al) and, if you're permitted, insert the URL of the video at your site in the meta keywords. Don't provide video via a pop-up- it'll be ignored Some video search engines can read keywords from the video, so include them in the first and last video frames. ...
More About: Video , Search

Who's afraid of Google?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The Economist has a cover story on Googl e and the challenges it faces because of its incredible power and the speed at which it reached it. The article discusses how despite its "do no evil" mantra, it is creating enemies - mostly from those who feel threatened:  Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns-both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these a...
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Search Marketing Improves Offline Conversions
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The majority of our clients have online goals in mind when they initially speak with us about the their search marketing campaign.  But our experience with clients that have physical locations has shown that offline conversions also increase as a result of an effective online marketing campaign.  This experience is now being supported by a number of recent studies on the subject. Recently, Yahoo commissioned a study that looked at the behaviour of 175,000 shoppers over a nine month period in 2006.  It split these people into two groups and compared the purchasing behaviour of one group who was exposed to online advertising with the other group that was not.  Its specific focus was on in-store purchases at five major retailers. The study found that consumers exposed to the online advertising "pre-shopped" for products and then went to the physical store to purchase.  This group of "pre-shoppers" spent 41% ...
More About: Marketing , Offline , Search , Version , Improv

Does your SEO Firm have the Action Habit?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The best people in all industries share a common trait - they get things done.  This attribute is more important than any other when it comes to performance.  But despite this simple fact, there are very few SEO companies that share what has been called the "Action Habit " - the habit of putting ideas into action now.  I'm proud to say that this principle is at the very foundation of everything we do at Vertical Leap and an essential ingredient in our unique approach called TotalPropulsionTM. Here's a few hints that will help you know if your current SEO company has it or not: 1. Waiting, waiting, waiting.  SEO has a long-term game plan but does your SEO always wait for the conditions to be perfect before making any change?  I'm not saying that they should constantly be tinkering with your site so that the optimisation is not allowed to run its course - but there's a lot of things that can be done in parallel...
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Managed Search Engine Marketing - Its Creation, Its Abuse
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We invented the term "Managed Search Engine Marketing " back when we started in 2001.   We did this to distance ourselves from shoddy approaches and the short-term, quick fix mentality that dominated the early SEO market in the UK.  Personally, I never wanted to "own" this term as it was important for it to become an established concept in the marketplace.  Our goal was always to establish a new category of SEO service and then do what we can to dominate this category.  Naturally, I believe that we achieve this today - especially in terms of our work ethic, approach to managing campaign, proactivity (Action Habit), the completeness of our offering, and of course our technology.  Based on our client retention rates and performance, our clients would also seem to agree. The interesting thing is how this term has been adopted by so many and now misused or perhaps even abused. There are two reasons for this ...
More About: Abuse , Search Engine Marketing , Search Engine

Do you need Local SEO?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
So you are a small or medium size company who has a website, but your audience is profoundly local. You might be an estate agent, a solicitor, a health club or a dentist for instance. Are search engine optimisation techniques any use to you? Of course, we would say that they certainly are; but you as the local company have to make the judgement call. In marketing the company, you have to take a lot of factors into account, of which SEO strategies are only one. Measurement of traffic to your website is likely to be one of the marketing metrics that you take into account however, and ultimately, you are responsible for the conversion of any traffic that reaches that website. If you have an effective conversion route then increasing your website visitors is the next logical step. However, when you are local, the problem becomes more complicated. You probably meet face to face with a lot of your customers, and the visitors to your site won't be interested in what you sell if they h...
More About: Local , Loca