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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

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

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

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

SEO Tools - Ever Wondered Where Your Website Hosting Location Is?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Search engine optimisation folks always talk about how important hosting location is. Or at least what country it is. Most of the tools that I use to look at a website location are very good at telling me what country they are in, but rarely much more than that. Here is some examples of how some sites show the location of your server: However, Vertical Leap have a fun tool that can actually find for you the location of the server where your site is located and show you on a map! Here is where the Vertical Leap website lives: Here are the locations of some other sites servers: Google.co.uk uk.msn.com uk.yahoo.com Amazon.co.uk Ebay.co.uk dell.co.uk download.com tripadvisor.co.uk Why not look where your website lives using the Vertical Leap Geolocation Tool! Pete HandleyCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Tools , Hosting , Website , Location , Loca

How Quickly Does Google Respond to Your Website?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Earlier today, my colleague Pete made a blog post regarding your website hosting location and in under half an hour it was indexed and ranking in the Google SERPs. While this on it's own is a great turnaround from the search engine, it also has some other good points that we shouldn't ignore. Click for large. First of all, it goes to show that Google's blog search is an excellent resource for getting pages indexed quickly and that updating your website every day is something that Google encourage and thrive on. Secondly, in the past Google has favoured ranking the home page in cases like this, but it's good to see that the user is now being given more accurate SERPs for their long-tail searches. Craig WilsonCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Website

Telling Google Where Your Customers Are Located
1970-01-01 00:59:00
As I've mentioned before in previous blogs on local SEO, one of the challenges for a locally-oriented website/business is making sure that Google understands where your business (and target audience) is geographically located. There are many ways to tell the search engines where your business is located - you can ensure that your address is on your site in the appropriate places as Google's spiders are able to recognise address blocks.  You can also make sure that your site is listed in the business directories that ultimately provide data to search engines such as Google.   The challenge, however, is to tell Google where your customers are located. Google has recently added a new facility in their webmaster tools that will allow you to assign a target geographical region for your site or business.  This is a much simpler approach in the context of Google and I can only assume will be used as a ranking factor for web searches with "local intent" and...
More About: Customers , Loca

Are You Getting The Sitelinks Treatment from Google?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Just recently, Google announced that they were increasing the number of Sitelinks to 8, and that in Google Webmaster Tools, they will give you the chance to "turn them off" temporarily. Obviously, this has caused a bit of a stir in the SEO world, as well as renewed curiosity about how they calculate what they are. As they often appear for brand names it is often taken to be a sign of authority, and will certainly be seen that way be search engine users. I like Aaron Wall's take about how much they are worth to generic domain holders, which also proves it isn't just about big brands. SEO Roundtable has more information and pictures about editing the links in the Webmaster Tools interface. And I'll be watching Gabriel at Montreal SEO closely as he tries to reverse engineer what might make a good candidate for a Sitelink in his Google Sitelinks Research Project.  Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Treatment , Elinks

The Future of SEO and PPC in 2008?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This morning I was reading Is Search Still Worth It? on eMarketer, which refers to the new Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008 by MarketingSherpa. It quotes some interesting statistics, which are all taken from a survey of actual marketers. For instance it says the marketers they surveyed said they planned to increase their pay-per-click budgets by at least 11% in 2008. Respondents also rated both PPC and search engine optimisation as effective search marketing tactics. SEO came is as the second most effective marketing tactic after house email marketing, with PPC coming a fairly close third. This is good news for all of us, as it validates the fact that these online marketing methods are actually working for the companies on the ground, and highlights once again that SEO and PPC are on the agenda to increase website traffic for a lot more companies than they are at present. Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Future , The Future

Local SEO Directories You Should Consider
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We're very excited about Loca l Search both in terms of its immediate benefits to small and local businesses but also how it will become the foundation for the "next big thing"..  Mobile Search. In order for search engines to effectively deliver "local" results to a searcher, they need to know two key elements - 1) the location of the searcher/user and 2) the physical location of the business behind the website.  That way when some submits a search with "local intent" and does not use a geographical indicator, they can still provide relevant results.  For example, if I search for "dentist" it is unlikely that I am looking for a dentist in another part of the country and so the search engines will view this type of query as one that has local intent despite the lack of any sort of locationqualifier. There are a number of methods to ensure that search engines understand where your business is located.  These can be both &q...
More About: Directories , Consider , Dire

Fasthosts penalising clients with duplicate content
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I was looking at a backlink checker this morning whilst trying to track something down, and I noticed some Fasthosts entries. These turned out to be complete copies of Fasthost's client sites, displayed under a Fasthosts URL. See here for the Google results page. So if you are looking for a search engine friendly webhost, this is just a quick post to say that Fasthosts is not one!   Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Content , Clients , Tent , Hosts , Client

Here's a Quick Way to Boost Your Rankings in Google
1970-01-01 00:59:00
How long do you spend looking at the structure of your website? Really really looking? And comparing that with what Google has got indexed? I'm betting it isn't all that long, but the fact that Vertical Leap do spend the time is paying dividends for some of our clients. If you aren't looking at an SEO project every day, it's sometimes easy to assume that the reason a site isn't performing well is down to having very competitive keywords. But the application of some time doing crawl checks and cross-referencing your site with search engine results can yield surprising results. Google is quite sensitive to duplicate content in the form of very similar pages with only a small part of the page that changes. It is a key factor for dumping you in the Supplemental Index. Although Google is bringing the two indexes closer together, you still want to have a website that Google rates as important. As I said in my recent post about keeping a page out of the search engines there are go...
More About: Quick , Boost

Pharmacy-related content within Google Adwords
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Google Adwords seem to be missing something here. According to the guidelines, any pharmacy-related content is against their policy unless you have a pharmacy checker ID. The only problem is you have to be based either in the US or Canada. Google don’t accept any pharmacy related content if you’re outside these territories but wait a second, yes you are. Contact your Google representative and they will accept the content straight away. I'm based in the UK so why can’t the Google interface and Google Adwords editor accept this? Google, I think you have a flaw….. James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Google , Google Adwords , Content , Related

Perfume.com hacked? Er, no but...
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I read earlier on today about the new redesign at Perfume .com, and went to have a look, as I know they are considered a leader in eCommerce design, and spend a lot of time refining the experience of people on their site to increase conversions. But when I went there, I found a spammy looking page full of ads etc http://search.perfume.com/ Have they been hacked? What is going on! But a quick search of the web and the blogosphere turned up nothing obvious. Strange - if there has been a high profile hacking you can usually find something about it somewhere. So I dug a little more and turned up this gem on an affiliate marketing forum. From David at Perfume.com in April 2007: "We only sell perfume in the US. Visitors from foreign countries (except Canada, which is where I am located) receive a landing page with links to merchants who may sell in those countries. This is done by IP identification technology, which is not always perfect. In addition, we identify users f...
More About: Hacked

Duplicate Content: Doppelgänger Websites
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

What Do You Do Online?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Last week I was wandering around some sites doing some research for a client, and up popped a window for taking part in the Internet User Monitor research. This is a UK research project by Forrester Research that has been running since 1988. As a long time Internet user, I've filled out a good few of these in my time (the when did you start using the Internet question always makes me laugh). However, this year's version was fascinating as they are trying to define many many more things that people do on the internet than they used to. Here are some examples of the questions:   And a few more:     Seems to me there are a lot more things that you could possibly do online than you could in 1998. I don't know exactly when it was asked, but one of the questions I remember was "Have you changed your home page in your browser?". Somehow "maintaining a profile on a social networking site" seems a lot more sophisticated in terms of usag...
More About: Online

SEO Tools - Broken Link Checker
1970-01-01 00:59:00
As I mentioned in a recent blog, Vertical Leap has a lots of tools that we use to manage our campaigns, and we have made a few of these available for the use of everyone else. The one I spoke about last was Looking at where your website is and today I will look at the Vertical Leap Broken Link Checker . We have mentioned this before, but I thought I would show you how easy it is to use! I know from my former existence of learning web design techniques, that these broken links can pop up anywhere, it only takes 1 extra character here, or a renamed file without suitably updating everywhere, and before you know it the site will be littered with broken links. These aren't good for your users, and they certainly aren't good for search engines either. So if you go to the Broken Links Checker you will be greeted with the following screen: Fill in your details to request your report. If it has been successful you will be greeted with a thank you screen, telling you that the r...
More About: Tools

Choosing Not To Track The Conversion From Branded Terms In Your PPC
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Following on from my researches into different conversion results from Google Analytics and Adwords  I also remembered that you can change the tracking parameters for Google Analytics. This uses a little bit of code, a parameter called utm_nooverride. It is appended to the end of URLs like this: http://www.yoururlhere.com/landingpage&am p;utm_nooverride=1 This basically stops the more recent click overwriting the "Source" information for the visitor. This stops the "last referrer" getting the sale/conversion, which normally happens in Google Analytics. There are basically two situations in which you might want to use this parameter. The first is in emails to your house list. This means if someone converts as a result of an email, you actually track them back to how they originally found you. You can see how useful this could be if you are trying to track the ROI from the original source and not the ROI of your email programme. Secondly, as explained i...
More About: Terms , Track , Conversion , The Con

PPC Spend Predicted To Hit £10 Billion By 2010
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Since Google Adwords was launched its been an ever increasing money spinner. In today's market you are lucky to obtain a top 3 position for under £1.00 in most industries. Wouldn't you agree that CPC prices are slowly becoming out of control and with PPC spend predicted to hit £10 billion by 2010, where's the space for all the small time players. Google need to implement low budget solutions before all the high rolling spenders saturate the market. Its starting to become a game of (I’m bigger and better than you because I’ve got more money) I suppose you could always move to Yahoo Panama or MSN Adcenter.... James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Predict , Billion

The Pitch at one of my clients from another Agency
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This morning I received an email from one of my clients who had been approached by another agency, who offer SEO as part of a larger service. The client in question is in the recruitment industry. They had obviously been in a dialogue with the client as they knew they were using a service, and approached the pitch to the client as "look at these phrases that you aren't ranking for!", and proceeded to list 50 phrases that they weren't ranking in the 1st page for. Suprisingly enough, they even said that if they went with them, they "promised" to get a first page ranking for these terms. Now this really frustrates me! As an SEO, there are many things that you can promise, certain levels of activity, hitting particular targets with gaining links for a website, but you cannot "promise" to gain particular rankings, and if you do, I'll bet that those terms aren't going to be ones that drive traffic to your website. I decided to analyse the phrases t...
More About: Agency , Clients , Pitch , Client

Search Research Delivers Some Surprising Results
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This morning I was looking at the presentation highlights from the Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing 2008 Benchmark Guide, which was the research on which my earlier blog on search in 2008 was based. Interestingly, the presentation highlights some different aspects from those I noted before, which are interesting when you are looking at the overall search picture. Given  Craig's blog just over a month ago asking if Google really is the best search engine it is an interesting contrast from the Compete.com results about search fulfilment that in this survey 80% of the marketers measuring ROI said that Google deserves its number one position and prominence as it delivers the best return. A very curious finding from the survey is the eyetracking results, that short URLs are better than longer ones. Stefan Tornquist, Marketing Sherpa's Research Director says of this result "What we found that was very interesting to me, anyway, is that a long URL seems to have a ne...
More About: Results , Some

Are you getting different results for conversion from Google Analytics and
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Conversion tracking is one of the hottest things in online marketing right now, as it allows you to track all those lovely visitors and which sources they came from before they bought a product or filled in your form. However, anyone who has spend any time trying to compare the results of conversion from their Adwords campaign screen with the conversion reported by Google Analytics will end up scratching their head in puzzlement. This is because the results from the two sources are different. I knew I had read about this in detail when the subject came up in conversation yesterday, and sure enough it was on the blog by those people at ROI Revolution. They explain in complete detail how this happens, and why neither measurement is actually wrong!  In summary however, Google Adwords conversions tracks using the original visit to your site for up to 30 days, even if the visitor buys on a subsequent visit via organic search. Google Analytics on the other hand, always tracks...
More About: Results , Conversion

How to share Google Analytics data
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I've been fortunate enough to have some new campaigns to work on over the last few weeks, and there is always a bit of work to get everything sorted to ensure everyone at various organisations has the correct access to the information and statistics that our campaign management tool Apollo collects about websites. However our tool doesn't replace the need to use other Website Analytics tools - it collects different information that is used by us CDM's to manage a campaign. So we will always be asking a client for access to the area that collects data about total traffic numbers, often this will be LiveStats, StatCounter or increasingly often Google Analytics. I really like Google Analytics (although I am still not sure that I prefer the new interface compared with the old one - but maybe that will come with time) and in the past people have given me their Google Username and Password. Some flaws exist when doing it this way - I have to be honest - I forgot to sign out one da...
More About: Data , Share

Three Ways to keep a Web Page out of the Search Engines
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Recently in the Vertical Leap office, controlling "link juice" (using a more generic term than Google's Page Rank) has been a hot topic recently. Therefore, it seems to be a good time to write a blog about the different ways this can be done, when you might want to use them and why. Method 1: robots.txt This is a file that you place in the root of your site. When a spider/robot comes to visit your site, this is the first file that they access. Using the information here, they look at your site, excluding any pages that you don't want them to visit. For the purposes of this blog, I am limiting my mention of robots.txt to SEO uses, but it can also be used for directing other robots, such as content scrapers. For search engine optimisation, we use robots.txt quite specifically. It is the best way to prevent pages from appearing in the index. Putting them in robots.txt with the Disallow command will stop a search engine from looking at a page and putting in the resul...
More About: Search Engines , Search , Engines

SEO, Keyword Research and The Curse of Knowledge
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Choosing the right keywords for your optimisation campaign is an important part of the process - after all, it is what will shape the structure and content for most of your site.  There are plenty of tools available to help you research and locate appropriate keywords (although they are all flawed in some way), but the real question is who is more qualified to select keywords for SEO? Some firms actually abdicate responsibility completely and hand this process over to their client.  In some ways this makes a lot of sense; after all, its the client's business and they should be best qualified to understand what keywords should be targeted to reach those searching for their products or services. This may also be one of the reasons that some companies want to keep their search engine optimisation in house - because no one knows more about their business than they do. The problem with this line of thought is that everyone with an in-depth knowledge of an industry, service, ...
More About: Research , Curse , Keyword , Knowledge , Keyword Research

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

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

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...