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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
More About: Office

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

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

Writing Articles for Link Building and Improving Rankings and Traffic in th
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Article writing is a fantastic way to create new links to websites from many areas. When writing an article, it should be written about an area that you have a great deal of knowledge about, and that would interest other people who may stumble across it and read it. Once one of our clients has written an article, we will submit it to a number of websites to get this published in numerous locations with links back to the site. Others will publish these articles because it adds more content to their websites, which we all know is one of the key areas of search engine marketing, and continually updated content will increase the number of returning visitors to a site, as they will want to stay up to date with the latest opinions. There are a number of good reasons to write articles for other websites, rather than only writing content for your own site (which obviously needs to be done in conjunction with this article activity). If these articles are constantly providing good consist...
More About: Building , Writing , Articles , Traffic , Link Building

Does your Search Marketing Company Exhibit a "Light Touch"?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
How can anyone refer to SEO services as a "commodity" when there is such huge variation in the way that it is implemented across the planet?  The variations are not just in the detail - but they are also in the approach to campaign management. Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting with many people in and around the search industry and it is clear that there are a couple of different management styles being exhibited by both SEO and Search Marketing (PPC) companies.  I have started to call one of these styles the "Light  Touch ". The "light touch" is the style that is most frequently used by advertising agencies, web design companies, and "low cost" SEO/PPC consultants.  This campaign management style is typically identified by a concentrated level of activity at the beginning of the campaign and then very passive/automated monitoring once the initial work has been completed. ...
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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

Who's afraid of Google?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The Economist has a cover story on Googl e and the challenges it faces because of its incredible power and the speed at which it reached it. The article discusses how despite its "do no evil" mantra, it is creating enemies - mostly from those who feel threatened:  Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns-both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these a...
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Optimising Video for Search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Video optimisation, for searching rather than viewing, is growing in potency. With more users taking advantage of fast broadband connections video is shaping up to be a huge proportion of web content. Delivering video is one thing, optimising it for search engines is entirely another. There is a paucity of focussed articles and research into video search optimisation, with a smattering of sensible comment in fora. To make videos searchable, and get them generating traffic for your site there are some solid ideas that share much with image search optimisation. These ideas are presented here: If your video format allows the embedding of meta data, insert keywords. Upload your video to video sharing sites (YouTube et al) and, if you're permitted, insert the URL of the video at your site in the meta keywords. Don't provide video via a pop-up- it'll be ignored Some video search engines can read keywords from the video, so include them in the first and last video frames. ...
More About: Video , Search

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

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

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

Google Subscribed Links - Yet Another Way to Appear at the Top
1970-01-01 00:59:00
It has been around a while, but hadn't really impinged on anything I was doing. However, I have just taken a slightly deeper look at Google Subs cribed Links and it's a really interesting addition to the Google portfolio. I've played around with Google Coop before, in terms of Custom Search Engines, but not the aspect that is subscribed links. In essence, you create a file of a specific format (XML, TSV or RSS), tell Google about it, get people to subscribe to it and then the results will appear above the normal Google results. Here's an example: Of course, the downside is that unlike a normal OneBox, you have to get people to actually subscribe to your information. However, there's still the possibility here that there are people want to know your information above the Google Search Results. It's less random in some ways because a first answer (if there is one) will come from a site they trust. So if Vertical Leap created one for our blog entries, and I searched fo...
More About: Scribe

URL Rewriting: Part Two: How?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
In "URL Rewriting : Part One: Why?" I talked about dynamic URLs and their limitations. Here I'll describe the ways in which they can be modified for search engine friendliness (and other benefits). Simply put, a dynamic URL is a locator that contains a variable element (that's the bit that makes it "dynamic", usually a call to a database) e.g. http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=154&view=basic ...in this instance it's the query-string beginning "id=XXX". When a search engine interrogates this URL it'll strip the noise out, and by noise I mean everything after the "?". The result is that instead of seeing many distinct URLs such as http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=466&view= http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=467&view= etc. the search engine will just see loads of duplicates: http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l etc. which will be ignored. The...

New Vertical Leap Website Launched
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We've just launched our newly designed website - with our "new look" logo - take a look.  The UK web site has been updated today with the Australian and USA sites to go live over the next couple of weeks. Our primary design goals were: 1. Improved visual impact with new logo, larger fonts, better usability 2. Clearer design with stronger navigation to primary areas of the site. 3. Better interlinking of blog posts (new "related blogs" available for each blog post) 4. Sections of the site aligned to a visitor's needs based on their knowledge and where they are in the buying cycle. We think that we have achieved all of these goals and hope that you do too. Matt HopkinsManaging Director
More About: Website , Launched , Vertical , Vert , Leap

URL Rewriting: Part One: Why?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
So, you have a website, it is indexed and crawled regularly (because you've got the structure right and you update it regularly), people link to it, it has good authority and gets ranked well. What else can you do? One facet that is often overlooked is the way in which URLs are presented to the user, and this can affect how accessible your content is. For instance a dynamic URL such as http://www.example-site.com/cgi-bin/gen.p l?id=554&view=basic might show a particular product in your catalogue, but this URL gives no clue as to what it might be. The point I want to make here is that while verbose URLs follow a syntax and will work no matter how clumsy they are to our eyes, they are not intuitive- we can't readily translate them, and nor can search engines. The product "id" portion of the URL will prevent Google looking any further (its too generic), so even if it read "...?id=hammers..." it wouldn't get looked at- Google won't look at session IDs for...
More About: Part , Rewriting

PageRank Toolbar Update
1970-01-01 00:59:00
After reading the recent SEO chatter about the latest PageRank update in the toolbar I decided to review the websites that I work on's figures. Now, I probably mirror the thoughts of thousands of others when I say that the numbers the toolbar gives you don't mean a great deal. Certainly as linking has become more about relevance than volume, a simple score giving some idea of link strength just doesn't make much sense to me - the way I see it is that link "scores" or "juice strength" is like to vary from search term to search term. However, like everyone else as well, without any other tangible metric to look at we are all likely to take the one we can see and use it as a base guide, even when we know that it isn't accurate. Right well I have access to over 25 sites current PageRank and previous figure, and only two have changed (one went up 1, the other went down 2), so I have not been seeing too much flux here. Nothing to shout about perhaps, but m...
More About: Pagerank , Update , Toolbar , Ager , Gera

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

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

Managed Search Engine Marketing - Its Creation, Its Abuse
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We invented the term "Managed Search Engine Marketing " back when we started in 2001.   We did this to distance ourselves from shoddy approaches and the short-term, quick fix mentality that dominated the early SEO market in the UK.  Personally, I never wanted to "own" this term as it was important for it to become an established concept in the marketplace.  Our goal was always to establish a new category of SEO service and then do what we can to dominate this category.  Naturally, I believe that we achieve this today - especially in terms of our work ethic, approach to managing campaign, proactivity (Action Habit), the completeness of our offering, and of course our technology.  Based on our client retention rates and performance, our clients would also seem to agree. The interesting thing is how this term has been adopted by so many and now misused or perhaps even abused. There are two reasons for this ...
More About: Abuse , Search Engine Marketing , Search Engine

Link Buying - Should You or Shouldn't You?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Link buying for SEO purposes is a dangerous game. First and foremost: Google says no. It’s wrong. It’s forbidden. It pollutes the natural search listings and violates Google’s search engines’ quality guidelines. On the other hand, however, link buying is a secret art of ‘gaming’ Google and achieving highly relevant search rankings. While the risk of getting caught is too much for most SEOers; reaping the benefits can be worth it. It’s a risky business. Link buying is the practice of paying someone to display a text link to your website from theirs. The idea is to buy links on websites that are relevant to your own and are usually regarded as a trusted and stable source of information. The purpose is to allow you to choose a keyword and link back to your own website which—when updated by Google—will receive the benefits of the link from the higher source. As previously mentioned, however, Google doesn’t believe in link buyi...
More About: Buying , Link

Writing Press Releases for Off-Page Optimisation
1970-01-01 00:59:00
One of the things that we always recommend to our clients is that if they write press releases, then it is (a) a good way to get new fresh content and (b) we can distribute them for additional SEO opportunities. Whilst it is important that your press release contains some of your key phrases, given that you are writing about your own company, this is a fairly natural thing that will happen. So whilst writing you can refer to your keyword list, but don't agonise about getting all of them in. Of course, getting started on a press release is one of the things that many people find difficult. It's that "staring at a blank piece of paper" feeling! So here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing on what you could write a press release about: New staff joining Move of office Good sales month New client / renewing client Comment on an industry report that has just been released Charity activity, either for the company or a staff member Starting an eco-fr...
More About: Writing , Press , Press Releases , Page , Misa

NOODP Tagging Makes For 'Truer' Googling
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The "snippet" that Googl e displays below a found page title is taken from DMOZ's Open Directory Project (ODP) or the META DESCRIPTION tag on the page, or from the page contents itself: If your web site is listed in the ODP then Google (and MSN) will regularly use the ODP's description text to describe your web site in their search results. This can be problematic as ODP descriptions are often woefully out of date, not reflecting your current (read: preferred) messaging. It used to be the case that you were forced to suffer this anachronistic data being returned, and take it on the chin... ...that was until May of this year (2007). Google did the decent thing and introduced a Google-specific META robots tag value. The NOODP (No Open Directory Project) robots tag prevents Google from using DMOZ's description. There is a comprehensive practical instruction from Google on how to implement it here, but as a brief overview here are the basics: To prevent all s...
More About: Tagging , Googling