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Déjà vu on internet linking can of worms
1970-01-01 00:59:00
In my Inbox this morning popped a report about how Associated Press is suing Moreover (owned by Verisign) for using content from their site. Straight away on reading it I was reminded of something that happened way back when here in the UK, when I first started working full time on web projects in 1996. The Shetland Times sued the Shetland News for linking to its news stories without permission. The nascent Internet held its collective breath as the concept of linking to other sites threatened the whole concept of websites, and especially search engines and news aggregator sites. Settled out of court, this was followed by another threat the following year (1997), where news aggregator site News Index received a legal notice from The Times about using its content without consent. This too, endangered the whole concept of linking on the Internet. Obviously, ten years later, we know that everything turned out OK, and the "old media" way of looking at things didn't prev...
More About: Worms , Linking , Linkin

The Secret of Checking on Your Web Marketing Activity
1970-01-01 00:59:00
Have you ever wanted to keep a track on where your website is being mentioned as a result of your marketing activities such as SEO? Well, believe it or not, the tools are already out there for you to do this. Like a press cuttings service for newspapers, there are a many services that you can use online to keep a track of where you are being mentioned. There is a very comprehensive list of reputation monitoring tools here. However, even for the busy executive who doesn't have time for all those hundreds of services, there is one key one that you shouldn't live without, and that is Google Alerts. Google will send you an alert for blog content, website pages and Google News related hits, so the coverage is pretty comprehensive. Here at Vertical Leap we use it for monitoring our blog posts and who is talking about us on the internet. I also have one set up for the company name of each SEO campaign that I manage, so that I keep abreast of what is happening online with them. ...
More About: Marketing , The Secret , Secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate Blogs and SEO
1970-01-01 00:59:00
I've been a bit busy recently, so have not been blogging as much as my co-workers, but I have been extolling the virtues of blogging to a number of my clients recently, so thought it was time for me to partake once more. You may or may not have read one of my previous blog posts about how important it is to link to other pages on your blog or website when you post a blog - do you see what I did there? ;-) Well today I am going to discuss some of the benefits of corporate blogging, and some SEO tips for using it to bring traffic to your site. I really enjoy my contributions to the Vertical Leap UK corporate blog. It's usually an interesting diversion from some of the more mundane tasks that a day brings (not that there are many in my job, but you know what I mean), and is a forum where you can put your ideas out there. I regularly look for blogs on all kinds of websites, as I find it a good way to understand more about a company, its approach, ideals and they are usuall...
More About: Corporate , Blogs