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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...
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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

Mashups: Universal & Blended Vertical Search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
For a little while now I've been using Google's Search Mash, an engine dedicated to universal or blended search- I know it's Google because of the privacy policy. Blended search is creeping into the vocabulary of optimisers as it provides a managed and (hopefully) relevant way to bring back results other than web pages. It already exists, in part; Google "Guitar Hero" for instance and it should bring back a couple of video thumbnails in the first page. Those thumbnails sit quite happily within the regular web page results, and they're an example of blended search in action. Now, go to www.searchmash.com to repeat the search. See the difference? No thumbnails. That's because it has dug out all the non-web page results and supplied them via the drop-downs on the right-hand-side of the page. There you can (currently) find sections containing Images, Blogs, Videos and Wikipedia entries. If SearchMash were the brainchild of some trust-fund kids in Sa...
More About: Universal , Mashups , Vertical , Vert

Is PageRank really that important?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
One of our Campaign Delivery Manager's was speaking with a client this week who was concerned about their Page Rank .  They were worried that their PageRank is not high enough when compared to a few of their competitor's sites.  The interesting thing about this conversation was that their site is getting great rankings for their targeted keywords - beating many of the same competitors that they mentioned.  And so the question is - how important is PageRank? We would never argue that PageRank is irrelevant - not by any means.  It is an important attribute that Google uses in its ranking algorithm based on the strength and importance of a site's links.  But the important thing to realise is that it is not the only attribute used when Google ranks its search results.  The relevance of the content to a keyword, its page titles, the URL, and many, many more are all factored into this equation. Let's take a look at some real examples to illustrate this p...
More About: Pagerank , Ager , Gera

Do Tiny URLs Affect SEO?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
You may have noticed recently that there’s a handy new service going around the Web at the moment that essentially gives you a smaller, more manageable URL for your longer, more confusing one. For example: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl= en&geocode=&time=&date=& ttype=&q=Vertical+Leap,+Portsmouth&am p;ie=UTF8&z=15&iwloc=A&om=1 Could be swapped for: http://tinyurl.com/39duvf This is a great idea as it makes it easier for all to swap links, but how does it affect SEO? Tiny url.com is one of many of these websites; I’m using it as the example because it’s the most popular provider. Tinyurl.com claims to have shortened over 54 million URLs and receives over 1.6 billion hits per month. Right now the service runs great, but what happens if their server goes down and suddenly 54 million links are dead? The service also discourages people to replace the links with relevant anchor text (why bother generating a short URL if you&rsq...

We're Number One in a Top 10 SEO Company List
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Props to the guys over at NorthSouthMedia who have ranked Vertical Leap as the top SEO company for the National/UK rankings in their November 07 "league table".  Take a look at their latest results or see the extract below: UK National results as follows:   Company Nov 07 Oct 07 Alexa 1 Vertical Leap 70 pts 78 pts 265,731 2 Dolphin Promotions 70 pts 69 pts 249,087 3 Submit Express 62 pts 42 pts 361,365 4 Blue Claw 58 pts 55 pts 274,004 5 Mister Web 54 pts 52 pts 632,391 6 Kruse 53 pts 56 pts 446,539 7 SEO Company UK 47 pts 47 pts 1,179,574 8 BW Services 37 pts 45 pts 1,636,306 9 Daedal 33 pts 37 pts 2,563,386 10 ...
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How do broken links affect SEO?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
There is not a lot of information around about how broken links affect your web site's performance in the search engines. Search engine specialists routinely check their customer sites for broken links as part of a comprehensive service, but there isn't any concrete data on it. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to say that they do have a negative impact, and it's certainly the case that getting listed in reviewed directories such as Open Directory is harder (or impossible) if you have broken links on your site. PageRank-wise a broken internal link is always going to have a negative impact - you are wasting the "vote" that you have to pass link juice on to another of your pages. After all, a mis-typed link is a connection that you were wanting to make. Additionally it is worse for the user trying to follow it than it is for the search engines. Personally, I don't think the odd one is going to make any difference to your site rankings, but in the interests of y...
More About: Links , Broken

Adverts in PDF Documents - New Yahoo and Adobe Tie Up
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I've just been reading the latest technology news on the BBC site and have found that Yahoo will be putting adverts into PDF files. This is the first time that Adobe have let dynamic adverts appear in this useful universal document format, and it could spell an interesting change for marketers. I haven't been able to find a great deal of information on how this work yet, but from the brief report on the BBC site is seems that it will be the people that publish the PDF that choose whether or not an advert appears in it. I suppose that this opens up a new market for people that are regularly publishing PDFs, perhaps giving them away for free and are now looking for a new revenue stream. I know that most PPC marketers that I speak to are wary about putting too much budget into any form of content network, so it may be interesting to see who targets their ads for these locations. We'll keep our eyes peeled to see how this pan's up and I'll maybe do an update in the future w...
More About: Adverts , Yahoo! , Documents

SEO - The Next Big Thing In Marketing...
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I read an article this morning from eMarketer entitled What Are Marketers Thinking? and was a bit surprised to learn that one of the current most important marketing trends at the moment is SEO (after "Marketing Basics"!).   Whilst I know that SEO is an important internet marketing strategy, and I realise that search engine optimisation is gaining in popularity with many companies due to rising costs of PPC (although it is still very profitable), it is interesting that this is high on the agenda for marketing professionals. The days are long over when the company website was the domain of the IT department, and Marketing has long been responsible for this method of company promotion, so it is good to know that we are on the agenda for 2008. This is an exciting and dynamic industry and everyone at Vertical Leap will be looking forward to helping a lot more customers reach the top of the pile in the search engines next year! Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager
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The true value of SEO KPIs
1970-01-01 00:59:00
When we are chosen by a client to manage their SEO there is always a conversation about expected results. Amongst our Key Performance Indicators (measured against percentage increases or target numbers) are: 1. Improving rankings 2. Increasing site traffic 3. Delivering relevant visitors to the site These 3 KPIs are essential to the success of a campaign, but they don't always address the über specific 'success' factors for a campaign. For example, your site may have the option to: * subscribe to a feed or newsletter * download a trial * request a quote * make a purchase * a mixture of all the above Which of these 5 options would hold the most value for your business? Which is going to provide the biggest benefit or serve a longer-term goal? Of course, your answer will depend on your business needs and associated requirements at one particular moment in time. Obviously visitors need to do something to make investing in getting them to your site worthwhile. But w...
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Google Loses $110 Million, but Still Feels Lucky
1970-01-01 00:59:00
It was reported this week that Google 's "I'm Feeling Lucky " button costs the company an annual $110 million. This is due to the fact that using the feature causes you to go straight to the first natural result, therefore bypassing the adverts on the results page. A Google VP, Marissa Mayer, was quoted saying "I would say it's less than 1 percent of our searches are done through the "I'm Feeling Lucky" route." Despite being low in usage volume, it's certainly high in popularity. A lot of users see the button as being part of Google's brand and history. Removing it, they say, would make the company "too corporate." So they don't want to remove something that loses them $110 million every year, what can they do about it? One idea is that the button could go to the top PPC advert instead of the first natural result. Which is great in theory as it saves Google that lost revenue and is also an extra incentive to be the top bidder on a PPC ...
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Comparing Real Traffic to Keyword Research - Company Name Searches
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I'm trying to gather some data together at the moment across some of my SEO sites to compare the traffic they are getting for their targeted keywords compared to what is predicted by Keyword Discovery. So far, the results seem to show that you can exceed the predicted traffic from Keyword Discovery if you have high placings in Google. This isn't unexpected really given the limitations of the data that KD has to work with and the predominance of Google searches. However, I have come across an interesting anomaly, which shows you the importance of brand, even online. It's well known to us as an SEO company that manay of our sites get a lot of traffic for their own company name. That makes perfect sense - unless you have a really memorable domain name (and even then sometimes not) people will search for you. But what is really surprising is that for company name searches, where the company has a no1 ranking, the resultant traffic can be 3-5000% higher than the predicted traffi...
More About: Research , Traffic , Company , Real

Avoid PPC agencies who offer placement/position guarantees
1970-01-01 00:59:00
There are many online marketing agencies around who offer the world when it comes to PPC marketing. The main selling point that's floating around is the fact that you can be at the top of Google's listings GUARANTEED. Er no doesn't work like that in the real world unfortunately. The regrettable fact is that many customers/business are drawn in by this statement and it's simply not true. There are many aspects to getting your name in flashing lights at the top of Google and there’s certainly no guarantee. Avoid agencies who offer this or in fact any guarantee as they are the ones who will take your money and run REMEMBER - PPC/SEO marketing holds no placement/position guarantees...... James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Agencies , Offer , Position

Information on the Internet - Have you left an online fingerprint?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
There are lots of people concerned about how freely personal information is available at the moment. Fears in the UK particularly have been heightened by the crazy loss of 25 MILLION! People’s personal information in one of the most farcical losses of personal data ever. Fortunately I am not a parent (to the best of my knowledge) and have never had to apply for any child benefits. However, it does highlight the need for securing your personal information as much as possible. Even though the government can lose it without a trace, it is still important that we all take steps to ensure that we do what we can to keep this information secure. I was reading a report on the BBC today about how young people are placing too much personal information on their Social Media pages, be it MySpace, Bebo, Facebook or whichever other one of the multitudes of sites that are available. I must admit, I have a public MySpace page (which I wont link to now, you don’t want to read abou...
More About: Internet , Information , Online , Left , The Internet

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

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...
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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

Link Baiting: the whys and wherefores
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...
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The Increasing Importance of Social Networking and Blog Spam
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Social networking sites are great. From everyones perspective, they're fantastic. Take Digg for example, one of the most original of its kind and certainly the most popular. Basically, it's a user-driven news website where users submit news articles from all over the Web and other users vote on which is good and which isn't. It's a great system that gives credit to some quality writing and journalism in the form of website traffic and inbound links (from an SEO point-of-view, at least). Submitting an article and it being made 'popular' isn't as easy as it sounds - bearing in mind there are thousands of users submitting thousands of articles every day; the most likely outcome is that your submission will get lost in the crowd. Compare it to shouting "Bon Jovi are great!" at a Bon Jovi concert and you'll see what I mean. So what happens to the submissions that make it? For every user that submits a front-page article, there are 20,000 other users reading it. That's...
More About: Social , Social Networking , Spam , Networking , Blog

Recent Changes in Live Search Engine
1970-01-01 00:59:00
At the end of last month, Microsoft held an event at it's Mountain View offices called "Search ification". This was the official launch of the new Live Search (Live 2.0) which is a new, updated an shinier version of the search engine that drives queries across Microsoft properties including MSN. Microsoft announced some significant improvements, including increasing the size of the index and search relevance. On  the index side, they claim they have increased the number of pages four-fold to more than twenty billion. However, repeating all the information that you can find elsewhere on the web like here, here and here is not really the purpose of this blog. What prompted me to write this blog was the fact that their claims are actually related to the results we are seeing here at Vertical Leap. In the past, sometimes, MSN results have been a bit of mystery. It wasn't always possible to see why some pages had gone up and some down. Results tended to be quite mixed...
More About: Search Engine , Engine , Recent

Moved into New Office At Last!
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We have finally completed our move to our new, larger offices in Portsmouth .  Our search for larger premises began six months ago and we had been frustrated by the lack of available office space in Portsmouth which is mainly due to so many of the commercial properties being converted into flats to cash in on the recent property boom in this area.  But just as we were about to consider expanding our search to areas further afield, the offices next door became available which are perfect for us... and the best news was that we didn't have to move too far or change our Post Code! We're now settled into our new home and ready for the next phase of our growth.  This includes the arrival of James Daniels, our newest Campaign Delivery Manager, who is an experienced and certified PPC specialist and will be looking after our growing portfolio of pay per click management clients. Matt HopkinsManaging Director
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Who wants lots of people to tell them how great they are?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
  We all like being told that we are doing a good job. Although for a company making money is great and new sales or sign ups or renewals is a good way to measure your progress, it's always nice to have someone tell you that you are having a positive effect on them. Where do you find this information on the net? Well, if a company has a page on their website with testimonials, or quotes from satisfied clients, then these are a useful input to a buying process. You may be quite cynical, and think that anyone could make up a page of glowing testimonials that are complete fiction. However, it's just a part of the buying process and as long as you get other indications that the company is reputable, then a read of the testimonial page might help you make the final buying decision. If you haven't got a testimonial page on your website then get adding! For products, there are innumerable sites on the web that you can look at and see what other people think of the product, ...
More About: People , Great

The Google 950 Penalty?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The first issue I'll deal with here is the popular assumptions made about Google penalties. This is so that you can separate myth from fact (well, as near to fact as we can make out, based on collated observations within the industry). Here are some of the more well-discussed "supposed" penalties: OOP- the Over Optimisation Pena lty This is reported by webmasters when they over-indulge in the use of keywords, in anchor text, meta, body content and links. The fact is that if you over-do optimisation it suddenly stops being "optimisation" and becomes spam. Optimisation simply means "modifying a system so as to achieve the greatest possible efficiency"- if whatever you are doing prevents this it cannot be "optimisation"- ergo this is not an optimisation penalty, it's a penalty for using poorly executed techniques. MSSA- the My Site Sucks A** Penalty If your site drops off the radar because you have made changes that Google finds unaccepta...
More About: The Go , The G

Using the nofollow tag for internal links
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Its amazing how much controversy a simple tag can stir up. Take the nofollow link tag: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com/page.ht ml" >Visit My Page </a> ...an indexing command first implemented 2 years ago in 2005. Its purpose is to flag that a link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner, and as a result the search engines treat the link as having low/no trust or value in relation to the site it is posted on. It was a response to sites being spammed with irrelevant links e.g: You have a site with a forum Comments posted to the forum are full of links to utter rubbish (the usual suspects- casinos, porn, drugs, etc. This comment spam leads the search engines to devalue your site in light in of the dross it is associated with All in all a good thing- you'd think so wouldn't you? But what happens when you get creative with your nofollow and try to use it as way of bumping up the value of your internal links? The id...
More About: Links , Internal , Nofollow

Is social media getting more mainstream?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Those of us in the internet industry are very aware of social media. We use Facebook, StumbleUpon and Delicious. We know what Digg is and how it affects traffic. But how about the rest of the country? Outside of the technical professions and the universities, how is social media actually seen or used? If you are a member of the so-called "Millennial Generation" you probably can't live without your messenger, social networking and internet connection. But if you are not, if you are Generation X or a Baby Boomer, then all of this is quite likely to be a foreign language. The adoption in these demographics is much slower, and the penetration of even the names of these high traffic, high volume sites is actually very low (try asking your Mum or Gran to join you on Facebook!). Therefore it is interesting that the BBC news website has added social media icons to the bottom of its news stories. As one of the most widely read websites in the UK, this could make a real differe...
More About: Social , Media , Mains

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