Seo Blog

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

HTML Entities and SEO
1970-01-01 00:59:00
HTML entities I hear you say - what are those? Well, you will almost certainly have used them if you have written any HTML code. They are the little codes that you use to make sure that characters appear correctly when seen in an HTML rendering engine. The most common one you will have come across is probably & - used because the ampersand character does not render in HTML. Other common ones include " for a quotation mark   for a non-breaking space, and in the UK, the useful £ to make sure that your pound signs appear correctly. They are also really useful when you are writing web pages in other languages - you need them for the French character c cedilla (ç) for instance. So what use are these to a search engine optimiser then? Well, the particular one that made me pick up my virtual pen about was ™ - this renders a trademark sign into HTML thus™. Cool eh? Well yes, but this particular symbol is underused on the w...
More About: Html

Are we an SEO Agency or an SEO Company?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
One of the important attributes of good keyword analysis is to ensure that you are selecting keywords that are used by your target audience and not "industry jargon".  One of the typical examples of this dilemma is the "cheap flights" versus "discount airfare" comparison.  A few years back, the travel industry spent a lot of time optimising web sites for keywords and phrases like "discount airfare" as they felt that this phrase most accurately reflected what they offered.  The problem was that most consumers searching for "discount airfare" were not using this phrase at all - and were using phrases like "cheap flights".  So - be aware of the language of your target audience. I was thinking about this in our industry today and was considering the terms "SEO agency" and "SEO company".  Search Marketing and in particular search engine optimisation is an interesting...
More About: Agency , Company

Innovation at Google Video with Google CIO Douglas Merrill
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I just watched this video presentation on YouTube by Googl e 's CIO and VP of Engineering, Douglas Merrill.  It has some really interesting content and gives a great insight into Google and how it is trying to nurture a culture of innovation.  I read an interesting comment for this video on YouTube that likened Google to a "for-Profit University" rather than a regular corporate behemoth - which I thought was an interesting view. Anyway, if you have the 50+ minutes to invest and don't mind Google Adwords being compared to the evolutionary impact of an opposable thumb, then this is well worth it. Matt HopkinsManaging Director
More About: Video , Google Video , Innovation

Local Search Growing Faster than Traditional Search
1970-01-01 00:59:00
A recent report from leading internet analysts, comScore, shows that Local Search grew faster than traditional search by 40% this year.  In a single month, more than 850 million local searches were performed in the United States resulting in an average per year of 1 billion local searches.  According to many industry analysts, this total is expected to grow to 30 billion per year by 2009 (less than two years away). Another interesting statistic in this study was that almost 50% of local searchers visited a local business as a result of performing search online.  This clearly demonstrates the importance of online marketing to offline conversion.  This issue of "offline conversion" has been considered by many as being the "last mile" for internet marketing and is notoriously difficult to track but should not dissuade businesses from engaging in online marketing initiatives. Currently, the majority of local searchers st...
More About: Growing , Grow , Traditional

What is Natural Search Engine Optimisation?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Like many industries, search engine marketing is rife with jargon.  One of the terms that you'll hear frequently is "Natural Search Engine Optimisation" and it can have a couple of different meanings depending on who you speak with. I've heard this term used as another version of "organic seo" or the optimisation of web sites for the natural listings in search engines such as Google.  These are the "free" search results that are provided by search engines and usually appear on the left hand side of the search engine results page (SERP) - paid listings typically appear on the right side of the major engines. The order of these results are determined by a complex computer program (also known as an Algorithm) that determines the relevance of web site pages to a particular search query.  No one is paying for these results, but problems with a company's web site can prevent it from ranking&nb...
More About: Search Engine , Search Engine Optimisation

Site Relevance
1970-01-01 00:59:00
In order to gain rankings in any search engine, your site needs to be relevant to the topic that you are targeting.  Call me Captain Obvious.  However, you'd be surprised at the number of sites that we come across where the keywords (exact or related) are not present on the site in question.  Or perhaps they are relying on a very graphically-oriented or flash-based site but with no textual content that can be effectively indexed by the search engines.  These guys are in the right ballpark, but they are no where near the field of play.  Naturally, one of the main activities we work on for these sites is to add real and relevant content that can help the search engines place their site into a topical context.  Most of the time this content has already been written but has not yet been placed online.  Perhaps its in press releases, brochures, testimonials from clients etc.   This is part of the optimisation process called "o...
More About: Site , Vance

SEO Tip for making Blogger pages more Search Engine Friendly
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Of all the different blogging environments, I've found Blogger  to be one of the best for most of my clients when adding company blogs to their web site. Some of the things that I like about it - its easy to set up, its free, and you can have it generate pages and upload them directly to your website.  This is an important feature as you need your blog to help promote and build your existing web site (www.yourcompany.com/blog/) and not be presented on a separate domain name (yourcompany.blogspot.com).  One of the other benefits is that you can modify the templates for the blogs and change the look and feel so that they blend into your existing web site seamlessly.   In addition to adjusting the style of the blog pages in these templates, you can also implement a few tweaks that will make your blogs more search engine friendly. By default, the blogger template does not create unique page titles for each blog page.  As you probably...
More About: Blogging , Search , Search Engine , Engine

Portsmouth SEO Firm Bursting at the Seams
1970-01-01 00:59:00
We've outgrown our offices.  This is a great signal that we are doing things right and achieving fabulous SEO results for our clients.  We have further growth plans too - with a marketing assistant and another PPC specialist joining next month.  The problem is, that we barely fit in our current office and there's no suitable office space left in Ports mouth .   It seems that every spare office in Portsmouth over the past five years has been converted into residential properties (flats or houses).  I was reading somewhere that there has been a 25% drop in office space in Portsmouth and Southsea over the past 2-3 years. Some company's in the online marketing space run their businesses virtually.  I can certainly see the benefits in this - having 4 offices on 4 continents means that we are pretty adept at working virtually when we need to.  But in the UK, we like to see each other.  We like to be in the same office and unders...

Search Marketing Improves Offline Conversions
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The majority of our clients have online goals in mind when they initially speak with us about the their search marketing campaign.  But our experience with clients that have physical locations has shown that offline conversions also increase as a result of an effective online marketing campaign.  This experience is now being supported by a number of recent studies on the subject. Recently, Yahoo commissioned a study that looked at the behaviour of 175,000 shoppers over a nine month period in 2006.  It split these people into two groups and compared the purchasing behaviour of one group who was exposed to online advertising with the other group that was not.  Its specific focus was on in-store purchases at five major retailers. The study found that consumers exposed to the online advertising "pre-shopped" for products and then went to the physical store to purchase.  This group of "pre-shoppers" spent 41% ...
More About: Marketing , Offline , Search , Version , Improv

Does your SEO Firm have the Action Habit?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The best people in all industries share a common trait - they get things done.  This attribute is more important than any other when it comes to performance.  But despite this simple fact, there are very few SEO companies that share what has been called the "Action Habit " - the habit of putting ideas into action now.  I'm proud to say that this principle is at the very foundation of everything we do at Vertical Leap and an essential ingredient in our unique approach called TotalPropulsionTM. Here's a few hints that will help you know if your current SEO company has it or not: 1. Waiting, waiting, waiting.  SEO has a long-term game plan but does your SEO always wait for the conditions to be perfect before making any change?  I'm not saying that they should constantly be tinkering with your site so that the optimisation is not allowed to run its course - but there's a lot of things that can be done in parallel...
More About: Abit

Google - New Site, New Hosting Country, 301 Redirects - Instant Changes
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This morning I reviewed a campaign that I had been working on recently, and was astounded by how quickly Google had taken account of a number of recent changes. Last Saturday (September 1st), a brand new site was launched on the same domain as an older site used to exist. It was a full redesign, page construction changed dramatically, and file names were changed. The content on the pages remained the same or similar, but many new pages were added to the site at the same time. When I was looking on Monday morning, I could see already that a good number of the new pages had already been crawled and indexed by Google. I didn't really expect them to be turning up this quickly, but it seems we were fortunate that Google crawled these pages on the day that the new site was being rolled out. Also the site changed from being hosted in the USA, to being hosted in the UK. Matt has already discussed the importance of location and websites I thought that we would probably...
More About: Hosting , Country , Site , New Site

Google Adwords Trademark Issues
1970-01-01 00:59:00
More and more companies are trade marking their personal and product names these days. For people like me who build campaigns for clients, it’s becoming a real pain. If the client is a distributor of a certain trademarked product, there should be an easier way of being accepted when using certain keywords. At present it takes around 4-6 months to receive a trademark acceptance note from Google and that’s before you spoken with the client/company. By this time the client has decided to go elsewhere.   Google needs to be more user friendly with behind the scene actions James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Issues , Google Adwords , Adwords , Trademark

Kaizen and SEO
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Kaizen is a Japanese term that effectively means continuous, incremental improvement.  This is a large part of our company ethos and features heavily in how we manage both SEO and PPC campaigns. The Kaizen philosophy was brought to light during the 1980's when the success of Japanese manufacturing was leading the world in terms of quality.  It is part of a larger qualityimprovement process, but the basic notion is that small, incremental improvements are always more successful than large, "big bang" initiatives.   There are many reasons for this, some to do with human behaviour and the difficulty in changing people's working practices.  Another reason is that it is empowering.  Sometimes, it is the smallest change suggested on the "shop floor" that can have the greatest impact and these sorts of changes are often overlooked with large process optimisations. There was a time when you could get away with a "big bang", "do...
More About: Process

Link farm SEO Hacking Reaches Australia
1970-01-01 00:59:00
An Australia n company MD Webhosting has admitted being a victim to a similar hacking incident that resulted in hidden links being inserted into clients' sites to the one we reported earlier this month. The ISP has admitted that their security was not up to scratch and that not all their customers were affected. If it is like the hacking we have been tracking, then only those customers with a high Google PageRank will have been targeted. Although the compromise doesn't have the same visibility as stealing credit card data, the effect on a company's business that relies on organic search engine traffic can be dramatic, as they become innocent victims to bad-neighbourhood algorithm checks.  Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager
More About: Link , Farm

Facebook - Pay Per Click Advertising Now Available..
1970-01-01 00:59:00
The famous social network has recently released its own pay-per-click program with cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing structures. The great thing about advertising with Facebook is that you can accurately work out what type of audience you want to target you ads towards and Facebook will also assist you on this Facebook’s Pay Per Click reporting interface includes many different features like demographic data, clicks, ad performance and trends. Conversion tracking is not available but this can be obtained by using Google Analytics. If Facebook can do it, how long do you think it will take for other networks to catch on? James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Advertising , Pay-per-click

Christmas Number Ones
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Forget Band Aid, or Slade, the Christmas number ones that I'm interested in are the search engine chart toppers. By searching for "Christmas" in the big 3 engines (Google , MSN and Yahoo ) you would think it would bring back heart warming, chestnut roasting results. ...and you'd be right. Top of Google's results is www.northpole.com , a "family-oriented Christmas site for children and families to share together"- an oasis of festive frivolity. Yahoo counters that with the modern classic that is Wikipedia. Luckily Wikipedia doesn't over promise and under-deliver with its hard facts- "Christmas is an annual holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus". MSN however seems to have missed out on the Christmassy vibe, delivering NewsShopper at the top slot- it does have a picture of Santa- which is nice. MSN (unsurprisingly) serves up Encarta Encyclopedia as a prefix to its rankings- with a big snippet that totally trumps Wikipedia's feeble result- "...
More About: Number

Video Google Sitemaps, is this the start of Google indexing video content f
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Google recently announced in its webmaster tools blog, that they are extending the sitemaps protocol to include Video . Now I say extending, what I actually mean is that you can upload a second sitemap containing information about the locations of Video on your website. At the moment, the only ways to get your videos appearing directly in search results pages is to have them listed on one of a number of sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video, MySpace etc, and this sitemap protocol is likely to be the first stage of indexing videos directly from sites rather than social media sites or other aggregators. I suspect that it will still be some time before video from a site begins to appear in video search results, and probably even longer (if at all) until it starts to appear in the main index in the Universal Search way (see below): (p.s. that Zero 7 Video is really good, but anyway, I digress...)  The blog making this announcement also says that you can ...
More About: Google , Content , Start , Google Sitemaps

Are you leaving your search engine rankings to chance?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
No matter how you look at it, there are only two ways to achieve decent rankings in the search engines - by chance or by optimisation. It is totally possible that your site accidentally meets the needs of the search engine's algorithm for your targeted keywords and phrases.  If you have decent content, your site isorganised and well-structured, and you have people linking to you because they like you, your site, and your content then you may be doing pretty well on your own.  So when people say that SEO is irrelevant, this is what they are referring to - the fact that some people out there are getting rankings without optimisation.  But they are the lucky ones.  The fact is, that very few websites are without a number of impediments to their search engine rankings..  these may be minor or they may require a complete overhaul - but like with the national lottery, although it is true that "anyone can win" - the reality is that only a handful get ...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Chance , Engine , Leaving

Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Friendly, What is the Differen
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This blog topic is really about a pet peeve of mine (well it's a pet peeve of most Organic Search CDM's at Vertical Leap too and probably every other reputable Search Engine Optimisation company) and that is Web Designers that offer SEO. Well, maybe not all of them, but a large number of web designers that I am aware of claim to offer SEO as a package bundled in with web design (and sometimes charged on top off the web design fee) but don't actually know what is required for SEO. In the most part, I consider that most web designers that offer SEO probably are actually constructing a search engine friendly website but NOT optimising it. I have been told of some people billing it as its expected and then not actually doing anything for that additional money. I'm not really a web designer, despite the fact that there are many elements of web design that I am aware of and am capable of implementing. I can and have built websites, but I am primarily a search engine optimiser. ...
More About: Friendly , Search Engine Optimisation

Travel Websites Losing Consumer Interest?
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I've blogged before about how travel sites are turning to SEO because they are in such a competitive industry. Therefore I was interested to read that they have recently been slated for not giving the consumer what they want. I firmly believe that the Internet was a revelation for booking travel and it seems unlikely now that someone would turn to a telephone booking service rather than a website for booking a flight. However, Forrester Research's data seems to indicate that they are somehow missing the point in meeting consumer needs. Some of the problems (11 per cent of US online leisure hotel guests say it's more difficult to shop for travel online now than when they started) are almost certainly down to the proliferation of choices on the Internet, making the array of options more confusing. What is more surprising is that 15 per cent feel the Internet doesn't help them save money. Now originally, that was usually the driver for booking online; but have those savings be...
More About: Travel , Consumer , Websites , Interest , Eres

Google's New Service: Google "Knol"
1970-01-01 00:59:00
If Google has its way the likes of Wikipedia and Squidoo are set to face some stiff competition. Yesterday they announced that they have begun building the groundwork for a serious contender. Google Knol (apparently it means a unit of knowledge- who am I to judge?) is intended to provide a resource that will be the first thing that someone who searches for a particular topic- for the first time- will want to read. The concept is that because the web allows information to be disseminated so freely there is no way to maintain the association between an author and their original work. For authors Google Knol would be a step in the right direction, but I'm concerned with how Google would go about actually ‘hiring' or selecting authors for a topic (maybe I've missed something- if I have please comment). It is possible that in picking the author for a Knol Google will by default be able to decide the tone and balance of a Knol. The claim that they will not edit any content is l...
More About: Service

Adding Pages to robots.txt Takes Time to Work
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I wrote a while ago about ways to exclude parts of your site from the search engines. In the section about robots.txt removal I noted that the response was not instant, but I didn't elaborate any more than that, so I thought I would revisit that subject having observed the response to some of my robots.txt changes over the last few months. In Google, the bottom line on removals is that the page won't get removed until the spider revisits the page. On a small site that is visited often, this happens really quickly. However on a larger site with many pages, it may be months before the spider revisits the page. You might have thought that it would work in a different way - that if you added a directory to the robots.txt file, then the first time that robots.txt file was downloaded, Google would go "Aha!" and remove from its index anything that matched that rule. But that isn't what happens; it is done on a page by page basis as the spider finds the page, which is then ...
More About: Robots , Time , Work , Pages , Ages

Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Friendly – What’s
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This blog topic is really about a pet peeve of mine (well it's a pet peeve of most Organic Search CDM's at Vertical Leap too and probably every other reputable Search Engine Optimisation company) and that is Web Designers that offer SEO. Well, maybe not all of them, but a large number of web designers that I am aware of claim to offer SEO as a package bundled in with web design (and sometimes charged on top off the web design fee) but don't actually know what is required for SEO. In the most part, I consider that most web designers that offer SEO probably are actually constructing a search engine friendly website but NOT optimising it. I have been told of some people billing it as its expected and then not actually doing anything for that additional money. I'm not really a web designer, despite the fact that there are many elements of web design that I am aware of and am capable of implementing. I can and have built websites, but I am primarily a search engine optimiser. I...
More About: Friendly , Search Engine Optimisation

Google can help when looking for Keyword Synonyms
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Naturally, there's a strong focus on keywords with search engine marketing but did you know that the synonyms of your keywords can also help you?   The Google algorithm understands many related words and phrases and when these synonyms are used in the anchor text of your links, they will assist in creating a theme around your primary set of keywords. The great part is, that Google will help you identify these phrases.  All you need to do is search Google and use the tilde (~) operator in front of your keyword or phrase like this: ~films When you look at the search results, the related terms are all in BOLD.  So from this query, we can quickly see that the following words are also considered related to the keyword "films": Video Movie Movies Cinema Optimising your site with these keywords in mind (in content, in anchor text of both internal and external links) will all help build a stronger thematic association to your primary keyword of "fil...
More About: Keyword

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 ...
More About: List , Number

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

Search Engine Demographics - Google, Yahoo and MSN
1970-01-01 00:59:00
It’s amazing to think that search engines can calculate the gender % of users and their age.  But it’s true and recent studies have shown interesting statistics. A recent study carried out by Hitwise showed that 55% of Google users are male, whereas 58% of MSN users were female. Did you know that paid search listings are most likely to be clicked on my females and organic ads are most likely by males.         ;      &nbs p;      &nb sp;       Click on Organic Ads      Cl icked on Paid Ads Women               ;  56.9%               ;      &nbs p;      &nb sp;    43.1% Men     &nbs...
More About: Yahoo , Search , Search Engine , Engine

Google Announces the Death of the Supplemental Index
1970-01-01 00:59:00
In a what is probably an incredible feat of engineering, Google has announced that the Supplemental index is no more. Whilst we had an inkling of this earlier in the year when they removed the "Supplemental Result" label, it is still a significant milestone. On the other hand, the issues that used to cause a page to "go supplemental" or into "Google Hell" as it has been coined for the process, have not entirely gone away. For an SEO the identification of these issues is one of the processes we go though, and that isn't going to change. Your site still has a better chance of attracting search engine traffic if those elements that used to make a page appear in the Supplemental Index are dealt with. Supplemental acted as a flag for Googlebot to visit a page less often - one of the reasons getting out was relatively time consuming. There still have to be some flags for Googlebot to use to determine a revisit frequency - it would be a monumental task to...
More About: Death , Anno

Google experimenting with Local Search Ads
1970-01-01 00:59:00
It seems that Google is really experimenting with their local business ads to better understand the Loca l Search user and how they utilise search. In the past few weeks, I've seen full addresses appear for businesses in the sponsored listings (PPC) section of the SERPs (as you can see in this example): I've also seen Google playing with the placement of their Local Business OneBox by moving it within the search results and not just at the top as this screen shot clearly shows: It is very clear that the local search market is starting to heat up.  I predict that local search will be the fastest growing segment of online marketing this year and all the major search engines are investing large sums instrengthening their services, improving search relevance and with mobile/GPS products.  If your target market is limited to a geographical area of 25 miles or less, then you should also be considering your Local Search options. Matt HopkinsManaging Director

Live Search Results Update
1970-01-01 00:59:00
This blog is a bit of an update on what has occurred with our Live Search results since I wrote a blog back last Autumn on the Live Search Recent Changes: Pete also wrote this one on Live Search Webmaster Center - it is working now for me, although the information is light on detail. (Find some reviews of Live Search Webmaster Center here). Regarding the results we have seen lately from Live Search here are some bits and pieces.  Sites are still not listed in Live Search that were not before, so there is no improvement there. In the webmaster center they just show "Last crawled date 00/00/0000" which isn't very useful. Our sites either showed a general rise or general fall initially, but since then it has been mixed the same as it was before, until the last couple of weeks when there has been a big update. UK sites first showed differences by making gains in MSN UK, followed by gains in the .com version and the regional versions (e.g France, Spain, Germany). ...
More About: Results , Update