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Blog Details for "Seo Blog"
Seo BlogSeo BlogVertical Leap's very own blog for lots of information and opinion from the UKmarket leader for Managed Search Engine Marketing 
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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!
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
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
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
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... More About: Scribe
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... More About: Part , Rewriting
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
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... More About: Raid
Google Gravity and its effects on New Content such as Blogs
1970-01-01 00:59:00 Have you ever played "feather blow"? Take a small, downy feather and whoever can keep the feather in the air the longest (using only his/her breath) is the winner? Well, new content on Google is a bit like this. New content from an existing and established web site has a tremendous opportunity to get search rankings relatively quickly - especially for long tail keywords - but these pages suffer from "Google Gravity" just as the feather suffers from ... uh, "real" gravity. When you first release some new content such as a post on your blog, Google takes it and puts it on the "fresh" list. You will gain some decent rankings - especially with less competitive / long-tail keywords. But it won't take more than a few weeks before this content starts to slide down the rankings ("Google Gravity"), just as the feather will soon float to the ground. Once you have your content created, the key to keeping ... More About: Link Building , Blogs , Content , Effects
What makes a web host "search engine friendly"?
1970-01-01 00:59:00 In the world of the Internet there are literally thousands of web hosts. Some are vast server farms hosting millions of sites, some are specialist load-balancers for sites with huge traffic, others are hosting companies for specialist projects, and still more are web design companies offering tailored hosting to the needs of your own website. There are lots of factors to consider when choosing a web hosting company, and search engine friendliness is one of them. If you have a vested interest in getting to the top of the natural listings, then the abilities of the web host come into play as well as the other options that the host offers. If you are looking for a new host, then Hannah's excellent post How To Choose a Web Host may help you out! Whilst your hosting isn’t the number one factor for search engine sucess, if you are a marketing manager with control of the website then organic search is definitely on your radar for something you want to improve and target, and th... More About: Search , Search Engine , Engine , Friendly
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... More About: Site , Vance
SEO Tip for making Blogger pages more Search Engine Friendly
1970-01-01 00:59:00 Of all the different blogging environments, I've found Blogger to be one of the best for most of my clients when adding company blogs to their web site. Some of the things that I like about it - its easy to set up, its free, and you can have it generate pages and upload them directly to your website. This is an important feature as you need your blog to help promote and build your existing web site (www.yourcompany.com/blog/) and not be presented on a separate domain name (yourcompany.blogspot.com). One of the other benefits is that you can modify the templates for the blogs and change the look and feel so that they blend into your existing web site seamlessly. In addition to adjusting the style of the blog pages in these templates, you can also implement a few tweaks that will make your blogs more search engine friendly. By default, the blogger template does not create unique page titles for each blog page. As you probably... More About: Blogging , Search , Search Engine , Engine
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 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... More About: Abit
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
SEO Tips for More Efficient Meta Tags
1970-01-01 00:59:00 Meta tags are way to give your page properties that don't affect the website from a user's point-of-view but can change the way your page is handled by a search engine spider. There are many different Meta tags, although many are now obsolete and the rest are generally used for the wrong purpose. Understanding your Meta tags is important for any SEO firm. There are a few out there that can benefit any marketing campaign which I will be covering in this post. I'll be splitting them in to categories: essential, useful, dangerous and useless. Essential Meta Tags Title <title>Page Description Goes Here</title> Your title tag is the single most important tag on any page. It should briefly describe the content on the page and follow with your brand name if desired. Page titles should be different on every page; this can be the difference between falling into Google's supplemental pages or a high long-tail ranking. Description <meta name="description" con... More About: Tips , Meta , Efficient
SEO Blogging Tips - Link to other posts on your Blog
1970-01-01 00:59:00 As I am sure you know if you write a blog, or read lots of blogs, that it is not unusual for the content of this to get scraped and regurgitated all over the rest of the internet. This is usually not done with much thought about how this content is displayed. Its not uncommon to find identical content in these places, they don't even try to change it to pass it off as their own. So to get some benefit in terms of SEO for your blog, why don't you link to another blog entry (like Craig's excellent first blog about "SEO Tips for More Efficient Meta Tags" or even another page of the site (like the SEO Tools that Vertical Leap offer on our site). Then, when your content has been scraped by another site, at least we get the benefit of these links pointing back to the site, and you have full control of the anchor text used in these links. I wont go into the pro's and con's of the practise of essentially stealing this content to display on pages full of adsense adver... More About: Blogging , Blog , Link , Posts
Google Adwords Trademark Issues
1970-01-01 00:59:00 More and more companies are trade marking their personal and product names these days. For people like me who build campaigns for clients, it’s becoming a real pain. If the client is a distributor of a certain trademarked product, there should be an easier way of being accepted when using certain keywords. At present it takes around 4-6 months to receive a trademark acceptance note from Google and that’s before you spoken with the client/company. By this time the client has decided to go elsewhere. Google needs to be more user friendly with behind the scene actions James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager More About: Issues , Google Adwords , Adwords , Trademark
Google can help when looking for Keyword Synonyms
1970-01-01 00:59:00 Naturally, there's a strong focus on keywords with search engine marketing but did you know that the synonyms of your keywords can also help you? The Google algorithm understands many related words and phrases and when these synonyms are used in the anchor text of your links, they will assist in creating a theme around your primary set of keywords. The great part is, that Google will help you identify these phrases. All you need to do is search Google and use the tilde (~) operator in front of your keyword or phrase like this: ~films When you look at the search results, the related terms are all in BOLD. So from this query, we can quickly see that the following words are also considered related to the keyword "films": Video Movie Movies Cinema Optimising your site with these keywords in mind (in content, in anchor text of both internal and external links) will all help build a stronger thematic association to your primary keyword of "fil... More About: Keyword
Word Clouds and Keyword Research
1970-01-01 00:59:00 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 of the words depending on the importance (I particularly like the way it's the main navigation on 43things.com). There are even some SEO tools to display your content as a tag cloud. It does provide another way of looking at your site and determining what a search engine might consider the most important words on the page. It can be a way of taking an overview and approaching your keyword research in a slightly different way. The best tool out there is not a tool at all - at SnapShirts.com you can put in your website URL and it will give you a picture of a tag cloud like this: ... More About: Research , Word , Keyword , Clouds , Keyword Research
Microsoft Webmaster Tools - not working for us yet :-(
1970-01-01 00:59:00 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 Vertical Leap CDM team). We signed in - put in some information for the website we wanted to track, entered our email addresses to receive the newsletter and are greeted with the following screen: So, despite being enthusiastic about another major search engine offering this type of facility, it doesn't look like its without its teething problems at the moment. Hopefully it will be resolved soon, I'll certainly keep trying, and hopefully I will shortly be writing a blog talking about its features rather than its issues. Watch this space! Pete HandleyCampaign Delivery Manager More About: Webmaster Tools , Working
Duplicate Content: Doppelgänger Websites
More articles from this author:1970-01-01 00:59:00 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 exist; your presence is wiped out. This is the perfect analogy for duplicate websites. Take the example of wanting to increase your reach and leverage by creating duplicates of your site and hosting them on different domains. Your original site's domain is www.seodoppelganger.com, and you host a copy of that site on www.eviltwinseo.com. The hope is that by multiplying the instances of your site you will saturate the web space that its aimed at, pushing it higher up the rankings, getting more traffic and increasing conversions. A very, very long time ago this may have been effective, but in t... More About: Websites , Content 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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