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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 Articles
Search metrics such as CTR and conversion rate are meaningless unless they
2008-02-12 15:16:00 We spend a lot of time analysing and tuning the performance of search marketing campaigns. With SEO, we look at the number of rankings, the traffic, the keyword growth, weighted strength, and of course - conversion rate. On the PPC site we are constantly reviewing the CTR of ads, the conversion rate of both keywords and ads, and the overall CPA (cost per action / acquisition) amongst others. I'm sure that many of you have your eye on similar sorts of metrics that help you understand and improve your search marketing campaigns. Its easy to get caught up in analysis and measurement and miss the point of the marketing campaign in the first place - to generate more business. And so what is the point of spending money on marketing if the leads are coming in and you are doing nothing with them? We're currently looking for a new PR agency. Naturally I used the search engines to locate a few local companies that I thought would meet our needs. ... More About: Search , Metrics , Conversion , Rate
Content is King - Especially on the Home page
2008-02-11 17:10:00 “Content is King ” is a common term used by search engine optimisation companies and internet marketers and is especially true of a websites home page. I had been encouraging one of my clients to add some content to the home page for over a year, and there are some clear statistics on how this has improved things. For a long time, I was battling with “extra text doesn’t work with the home page design”, or “there is no room to put the text” – but deeper in the site there were always some good content pages built from the same template that could handle this amount of text content. Eventually I convinced them to add an extra 450 words (there had only been about 50 on the page prior to this – everything else was in a graphic) “below the fold”, so in an area where the users of a “standard” resolution browser would have to scroll down the page to read it. 6 months on I have been reviewing the effect on ... More About: Home , Page , Home Page
Search marketers beware - new EU law to ban fake reviews
2008-02-07 10:18:00 Businesses, business owners, hoteliers, restaurateurs, search marketers, social media marketers, authors, bloggers and so on who create any online review where they pretend to be a consumer of the product or service could face criminal prosecution when a new EU law starts to be enforced later this year. Increasingly, search engines and other aggregators of "user-generated content" are starting to rely on reviews as an indicator of quality and relevance. Amazon have been using this concept for years and most travelers will check sites such asTripAdvisor.com before making any hotel reservation. Recent research by The Sunday Times found that a large percentage of positive reviews on travel sites were submitted by the actual hotel or restaurant owner - posing as guests or patrons. The EU believes that this type of behaviour is essentially misleading consumers and in recognition of the increasing role that user reviews play in marketing a business, it needed to p... More About: Reviews , Search , Fake , Beware , Marketers
Here is a Quick Guide to Local Search Engine Optimisation in the UK
2008-01-31 15:51:00 As our Managing Director, Matt Hopkins said the other day "Local search is the Next Big Thing". The curious thing is that whilst everyone agrees it seems to be a slow burn and not a quick one. Back in July it was reported that the majority of searches have local intent and then in August that local search is growing faster than traditional search. The strange thing is that despite Google's foray into mobile search offerings and Yahoo's Sponsored Local Search listing availability, small business owners in the UK are still not quite catching on that they can use the internet to promote a business locally. Still, as I recently pointed out optimising now will get you ahead of the competition. Local searches are not competitive in the same way as the big terms, and the visitors will be highly targeted. Search engines are getting better all the time at targeting locally, whether you call it personalised search or whatever. Apart from the odd hiccup, such as the Google ... More About: Search Engine , Guide , Quick
Google releases enhanced mobile search in the UK
2008-01-31 09:28:00 Mobile search is the "next big thing" and all search engines are investing heavily in their technology to deliver search services in better ways to a mobile/local user. Yesterday, Google announced the release of an improved mobile search interface for the UK market. One of its main features is the ability to remember your location for certain types of searches. This means that you don't need to add the location in the search term (e.g. bike shopPortsmouth ). In other words, once you have entered your post code or city as your location, any searches that Google considers to have "local intent" will be restricted to businesses closest to you. This is great news as we have been anticipating this type of behaviour when working with our Local SEO clients for some time. But it's interesting to see what Google currently considers as a "local" type of search. First of all, you can't set your "local" location in the &quo... More About: Mobile , Search , Mobile Search
Top 5 Tips to Make a Content Management System SEO Friendlier
2008-01-30 15:38:00 I am constantly working with various different content management systems (CMS). I totted up this morning and over 75% of the websites that I work on use some form of system to manage content on their website, either for adding content to specific pages/areas of the site, or for managing the content of the entire site. These also include shopping carts in my mind - although not a content management system in the strictest sense, they are used to add pages and words to websites so I in this regard I am ignoring their other facilities. Of these 75% of my sites, only 2 use the same system - and even then they are using different releases and have different capabilities and methods for implementing site changes. Each system has different strengths and weaknesses, but only one or two of these systems were developed with any consideration of search engine optimisation in mind, and even those that have been designed to consider this also have their own problems. I think that there ar... More About: System , Management , Tips , Content , Make
If You Don't Optimise for Local Now, You'll Hate Yourself Later
2008-01-29 10:09:00 Local searchers might not be the same volume of website traffic as ranking for big terms, but the users searching locally are using more specific search terms and tend to convert better as a result. As Matt mentioned the other day, there is a lot of experimentation going on in the search engines for increasing relevance for local searchers. And local online advertising is predicted to grow at 13% per year which means that increasingly, users are turning to local options. With the increasing use of mobile search (which uses GPS or antenna location) being visible is becoming ever more important, and it is essential that the search engines know where you are and where your customers are. Here are some ways that you can attract this local traffic for an organic SEO campaign: Make sure your physical address is on your website. If you have a local premises that you receive customers/clients at, you should use it prominently, perhaps in the footer of pages. Note that it i... More About: Hate , Local
Who do you link to - time to check your outbound links
2008-01-23 16:05:00 Who you link to can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings. You can't control who links to you, but you should be in control of the sites that you are linking out to. If your web site links to sites that are known to spam the search engines or those in "bad neighbourhoods", then this can have an adverse effect on your rankings. We've just added an external links report to our seo tools section of our web site which can help you better understand your outbound linking profile. We added this tool primarily as a result of the recent hacking incidents that have been reported by our SEO team. These links were not visible without looking at the page source code and as they effected the pages on a shared web host, they were not in local copies of the site that would normally be used to report this information. If you have a relatively static site, then you should be able to use your web development tools such as Dreamweaver to ... More About: Time , Links , Link , Check
Local.com opens in UK but is still US-centric and not very Local
2007-10-16 19:41:00 Momentum for local search services is growing and one of the major players in the US market has recently opened a UK office and sub-site which can be found at http://uk.local.com/. From an initial review, it looks like they have purchased some data to get them started here as there is actually no way to add a UK based business to their site via the "free basic listing" mechanism that they promote. If you perform a search and then notice that you (or your client) is not listed and proceed to click on the "Advertise your business on UK.Loca l .com!" link, you are ultimately taken to a form that demands the US state in which your business is located.. uh, isn't this suppose to be a "local" search engine? Local search is hot and many believe that combined with mobile search, a new "killer app" will emerge.... but despite the numbers and the potential, its always disappointing to see companies trying to expand their reach oversea...
Yahoo's Paid Inclusion - Is it worth it? Are there Risks in dropping it?
2007-10-16 18:30:00 I'll be honest. I thought paid inclusion for listings in search engines had gone away, and then one of my customers asked me for some advice about it. It seems that they have been paying for Yahoo's paid inclusion program for a substantial amount of time and were asking me about its uses and benefits. My instant response as I would imagine most good SEO's would be that paid inclusion really isn't worth it. After all, paying for inclusion carries no guarantee of a particular placement in that index - so what are you paying for? After all, it's not that difficult to get listed in any search engine - which is what you are paying for here - the tricky part is achieving a ranking. To get listed all you need are some credible links and a half decent website structure and you are away. In the past search engines were harder to get listed in, in part because the crawl rate was slow. Also because of a slower crawl rate, it took longer for search engines to take account of the c... More About: Paid , Worth , Inclusion , Drop , Wort
Google Adwords Content Network - Pointless
2007-10-16 12:46:00 The thought of using content network at the beginning of the “adwords” saga seemed to be a great idea. You build a new campaign and expect it to drive masses of quality traffic to your site. WRONG. All it really provides us nowadays is useless “impressions” and no clicks. You look at your latest AVG “CTR” and it displays 0.01% which is becoming ever more frequent across the board with individuals and agencies. This figure is obviously poor and more so damaging your campaigns “quality score”. “Quality score” is like a credit score. The better it is, the more there is available to you. Over time the quality score reflects how much you pay when positioning your ads. Poor “Quality Score” = Higher “CPC” prices - higher ad positioning Great “Quality Score” = Lower “CPC” prices - higher ad positioning The conclusion here is why use “Content Network ”. It doesn&rsquo... More About: Google , Google Adwords , Adwords
Déjà vu on internet linking can of worms
2007-10-12 12:21:00 In my Inbox this morning popped a report about how Associated Press is suing Moreover (owned by Verisign) for using content from their site. Straight away on reading it I was reminded of something that happened way back when here in the UK, when I first started working full time on web projects in 1996. The Shetland Times sued the Shetland News for linking to its news stories without permission. The nascent Internet held its collective breath as the concept of linking to other sites threatened the whole concept of websites, and especially search engines and news aggregator sites. Settled out of court, this was followed by another threat the following year (1997), where news aggregator site News Index received a legal notice from The Times about using its content without consent. This too, endangered the whole concept of linking on the Internet. Obviously, ten years later, we know that everything turned out OK, and the "old media" way of looking at things didn't prev... More About: Worms , Linking , Linkin
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!
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... More About: Code , Clean
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
Corporate Blogs and SEO
1970-01-01 00:59:00 I've been a bit busy recently, so have not been blogging as much as my co-workers, but I have been extolling the virtues of blogging to a number of my clients recently, so thought it was time for me to partake once more. You may or may not have read one of my previous blog posts about how important it is to link to other pages on your blog or website when you post a blog - do you see what I did there? ;-) Well today I am going to discuss some of the benefits of corporate blogging, and some SEO tips for using it to bring traffic to your site. I really enjoy my contributions to the Vertical Leap UK corporate blog. It's usually an interesting diversion from some of the more mundane tasks that a day brings (not that there are many in my job, but you know what I mean), and is a forum where you can put your ideas out there. I regularly look for blogs on all kinds of websites, as I find it a good way to understand more about a company, its approach, ideals and they are usuall... More About: Corporate , Blogs
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 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
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
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
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...
The Secret of Checking on Your Web Marketing Activity
1970-01-01 00:59:00 Have you ever wanted to keep a track on where your website is being mentioned as a result of your marketing activities such as SEO? Well, believe it or not, the tools are already out there for you to do this. Like a press cuttings service for newspapers, there are a many services that you can use online to keep a track of where you are being mentioned. There is a very comprehensive list of reputation monitoring tools here. However, even for the busy executive who doesn't have time for all those hundreds of services, there is one key one that you shouldn't live without, and that is Google Alerts. Google will send you an alert for blog content, website pages and Google News related hits, so the coverage is pretty comprehensive. Here at Vertical Leap we use it for monitoring our blog posts and who is talking about us on the internet. I also have one set up for the company name of each SEO campaign that I manage, so that I keep abreast of what is happening online with them. ... More About: Marketing , The Secret , Secret
Déjà vu on internet linking can of worms
1970-01-01 00:59:00 In my Inbox this morning popped a report about how Associated Press is suing Moreover (owned by Verisign) for using content from their site. Straight away on reading it I was reminded of something that happened way back when here in the UK, when I first started working full time on web projects in 1996. The Shetland Times sued the Shetland News for linking to its news stories without permission. The nascent Internet held its collective breath as the concept of linking to other sites threatened the whole concept of websites, and especially search engines and news aggregator sites. Settled out of court, this was followed by another threat the following year (1997), where news aggregator site News Index received a legal notice from The Times about using its content without consent. This too, endangered the whole concept of linking on the Internet. Obviously, ten years later, we know that everything turned out OK, and the "old media" way of looking at things didn't prev... More About: Worms , Linking , Linkin
Link Baiting: the whys and wherefores
More articles from this author:1970-01-01 00:59:00 The activity of getting sites to link to you can be explicit and formal: E.g. the request: "your site is awesome, will you link to ours?" Or it can be a natural extension of providing good content. If a blogger or webmaster deems your content useful enough they'll reference it to reinforce a point: E.g. "For a legal discussion on linking read this. The first option requires repeated effort on your part, and has a disproportionate return for that effort. The second option requires you to create interesting and useful content that others will naturally refer to. Getting people to talk about your content in this context means encouraging them to post links to it on their site, or through del.icio.us, Digg et-al. Q: How do you encourage people to link your content? A: By any ethical means possible! Making linking to you worthwhile is called link baiting, and if you have no idea how to go about that you shouldn't be writing at all- in fact you shoul... More About: Link , Baiting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
