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New: Use Google Analytics Goals in AdWords
2009-06-18 13:20:00
Google has just announced that you can now use your Analytics Goals in Adwords . Ostensibly, the reasoning as this opens up the Goals that you use in Analytics to analysis in Conversion Optimizer . My guess is that Conversion Optimizer is quite an underused tool and this is another way to plug it for Google. It is a great tool, and a lot of sites could do with the help it could give, but it is rarely used. However, what is more interesting to me (partly because we’ve been talking about conversion tracking in Google Adwords recently in the office), is that this changes the onus from the code insertion type of conversion to a simpler page name based tracking. Page based tracking does have its pitfalls, particularly if your form submits to itself and doesn’t change URL, but it is a far more common form of tracking. It is used in both Google Analytics and our own Apollo Analytics that feeds into our search marketing system. Last year, Google removed the requirement for th...
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Paid Search and the Recession
2009-06-17 12:36:00
Many speculations and mutterings were heard toward the latter part of 2008 about the push into online marketing due to the oncoming recession, for many businesses from large blue chips to smaller SME's. The talk of recession set the jungle drums booming last year but 6 months in what have we seen? Firstly yes! Spends across many platforms have risen in 2009 suggesting that many companies are in fact realising that older much more stayed platforms of reaching the global market are not proving to be cost effective anymore, or even utilising them in much smaller ways to compliment their online advertising efforts. A recent blog post of mine singles out the percentage drops in these previous platforms. With this massive shift to online we ( PPC Agencies) have seen a vast number of newbies to the paid search field, which in some areas has a detrimental effect. Badly managed campaigns and lack of Pay Per Click Marketing know how has led to higher cost of clicks. For 2009 this rise in...
More About: Search , Paid , Recession

Redesigned Google Webmaster Tools available to more users
2009-06-17 12:32:00
In May Google announced a redesign to their Webmaster Tools , but when the first announcement was made the new interface was not available as the default for users visiting the tools, only as a “try the new look Google Webmaster Tools ” link once you had signed in. The new Google Webmaster Tools now appear to be the default when logging in.  This is a useful development for webmaster as it provides a slightly easier interface for users, making it a little clearer what you can get out of using their tools. When you select one of your websites from your list of sites within the tools you now see a “dashboard” type landing page with a summary of some of the information available, including the keywords which lead to impressions on your site and a summary of any crawl errors on the site.  The new design also allows you to see sitemaps which have been submitted by any other people who have access to your site, such as your search engine optimisatio...

The future of SEO has BO
2009-06-17 12:20:00
It seems that many consumers don't understand what a web browser is... or know the difference between a browser and a search engine. Take a look at this video compiled by a Google research intern who asked people on the streets of New York. I believe that this is not atypical of the majority of consumer internet users.  The search engine is the internet to many people and the reason why Google has become so powerful - and the reason why Search Engine Optimisation (or perhaps Browser Optimisation - BO) is an essential part ofeverybody's marketing strategy today.   Search is ubiquitous. This is also the reason upstarts like TweetDeck are trying to become the defacto interface (call it a browser, call it a search engine) for the real-time web including Twitter .  They announced today the release of their version for the iPhone and it is already making a splash.  They want to replicate Google's success in the new frontier - the mobile, re...
More About: Mobile , Future , The Future

US Results showing up in Google UK SERPs
2009-06-11 13:28:00
As has been reported over at SearchCowBoys, there are at the moment some mysterious Google UK results on lots of different phrases at the moment. At the moment there are a large amount of US based websites appearing in listings on Google UK. This is something that I had noticed on various SEO terms, but whilst I have been doing some keyword research for a client I have found lots of other examples. One of the worst of these examples that I found was a search on Google UK was for "family homes kent" - after the local map listings, the top 7 organic listings for this phrase are all US websites: Hopefully this is some form of short term change, as with Bing currently pushing hard for increased market share, the last thing that Google needs to be doing right now to maintain its share is to lose relevance - as the relevance of its search results has been one of the main factors in Google maintaining it's search market share. This could also have quite an impact on search eng...
More About: Results

Social Media, Web 2.0, and Search Engine Optimisation
2009-06-10 13:28:00
We are getting more and more enquiries and questions surrounding social media, but what is more interesting is the way they are asked e.g. "I want more social media activity, how can you do that for us?". The assumption is that it is worth doing. It is clear that social media is important, but what isn't so clear is why it is important to commercial sites and outfits. My point here is that Twitter, Facebook et al are ubiquitous- company pages and accounts are growing like weeds, but to what end? If it is to promote brand and product then is this a useful vehicle?- are people looking for interactions and some level of personal involvement with a "thing", or as the name itself suggests are they looking for that connection with people. My simpleton approach is very black-and-white, people use social media to connnect and interact with people, companies use it in an attempt to get people to connect and interact with a "thing", a commercial proposition. We are happy to a...
More About: Social , Media , Web 2 , Search , Search Engine

UKs most dangerous Search Terms
2009-06-10 12:09:00
McAfee have recently released a study into some of the most "dangerous" search terms used on the web. McAfee looked across 5 different search engines, Google, Live (now Bing), Yahoo, Ask and AOL, looking at the first 5 pages of results on all of these for organic and paid listings and cross referenced these pages with tools that their SiteAdvisor tool flagged as dangerous, and the study reports that it looked at more than 400,000 URLs. Dangerous is defined here as flagged by McAfee's siteadvisor tool, as potentially deliberately malicious or hacked and therefore risky. The study looked at over 2,500 popular keywords, and there were a number of assessments made into the average risk of all results, and the maximum risk of the most dangerous pages. Overall, the risk across the keywords was relatively low (1.7%), but when only considering the phrases that were the greatest risk, discounting some of the lesser risk phrases, the risk percentage increased to 10%. The most p...
More About: Search , Terms

Bing an update on Microsoft?s new search engine
2009-06-10 11:23:00
Bing is now live as the primary search engine from Microsoft .  If you go to MSN or Live both of these sites now. Google Analytics is now showing Bing as a search engine in its stats, so when you look at your traffic sources you will be able to see Bing in the results.  When Bing was first launched the only place to see Bing as a traffic source to your site was under referring sites, so this is a good update for webmasters to monitor traffic on the site.  This will help you monitor your search engine visits more accurately. Interestingly I just did a search for “Bing” in Google and Google’s suggestion tool is recommending that I search for Bingo and not Bing so I’m only getting 3 search results for Bing.  Looking at the choice of name – the development name of the new search engines was Kumo but we think that they’ve gone with Bing to create a verb – like Google – “I Googled them”, “I Binged them&...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Update

Bing an update on Microsoft's new search engine
2009-06-10 11:23:00
Bing is now live as the primary search engine from Microsoft.  If you go to MSN or Live both of these sites now rediredct to Bing. Google Analytics is now showing Bing as a search engine in its stats, so when you look at your traffic sources you will be able to see Bing in the results.  When Bing was first launched the only place to see Bing as a traffic source to your site was under referring sites, so this is a good update for webmasters to monitor traffic on the site.  This will help you monitor your search engine visits more accurately. Interestingly I just did a search for “Bing” in Google and Google’s suggestion tool is recommending that I search for Bingo and not Bing so I’m only getting 3 search results for Bing.  Looking at the choice of name – the development name of the new search engines was Kumo but we think that they’ve gone with Bing to create a verb – like Google – “I Googled them”, &ld...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Update , Engine

SEO Speak: Teleporting
2009-06-09 19:45:00
Beam me up Scotty?  We’ve all done it – you know the name of the company you want to visit but you can’t remember their URL – is it .co.uk or .com?  When this happens we all do the same thing – visit Google and type in the company name and click on the first result in the SERPs, as this will more than likely be the company you are looking for.  Teleporting helps users, who are aware of your brand or company name, search for you directly without having to remember your full URL. If you look at your website stats and view the keywords driving traffic to your site it is more than likely that you will see a high number of people visiting your site from your company name, , URL, core brands, or variations on these. This process of searching for a company name to find their website is called teleporting by Google.  Google launched “search within a site” boxes some time ago, following their research into the behaviour of ...
More About: Keywords , Speak

Search Engine Optimisation and Sandboxing
2009-06-09 18:41:00
I've been looking under some SEO rocks and found the neglected sandbox topic. This search was prompted by a question I was asked, along the lines of "will our new site end up in Google's sandbox?". With Google sandboxing I'm sceptical- at least about the factors that may cause it, at most that it is a useful term. Anytime there is a substantial change to a site Google will necessarily re-evaluate that site. More often than not this does have a negative impact on rankings- as a credibility protection measure for Google, so they don't continue to maintain rankings for a site that does not deserve them. If the new site has a fundamentally different intention, with content for a different audience then of course it doesn't deserve to rank the way it used to. However if the intention of the new site is substantially similar to the old then rankings can recover in a matter of weeks, or sooner- there is no timetable. Some webmasters blame sandboxing for their site dying in th...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Engine , Search Engine Optimisation

Two Great Google Analytics Hacks
2009-06-08 18:39:00
Google Analytics actually has a large number of features that are not enabled by default, that you can use to customise the information you get. A favourite of our PPC team is the one to expand the PPC information in Analytics, so that it gives you the real keyword and not just the matched term. Here are two that are useful for the organic SEO specialists: 1. Create a regional list of search engines All Google Analytics data is lumped together under a single search engine name, so if you are interested in the regional differences between Google.be and Google.co.uk, you are out of luck. However, this set of custom filters splits the traffic out by regional engine. Tracking regional Search Engines in Google Analytics 2. Use the new rankings information from Google search URLs I’m almost surprised that Google haven’t promoted this one themselves! The new URL string change that Google started introducing in April contains ranking data. This hack allows you to set a ...
More About: Google , Hacks , Great , Google Analytics

Google Changes How Links and NOFOLLOW Tags Are Treated on Page
2009-06-05 18:33:00
At the current SMX Advanced conference (it’s in Seattle) Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan held a session called You&A which takes audience questions. I first read a transcript of this in the aimClear blog called Is What’s Good for Google Good for SEO? (Kudos to them for the good coverage of the session). The big bombshell in this is the fact that Cutts replied to a question about the fact that Google no longer appear to support Page Rank sculpting. Here’s a simple explanation of what Matt said from SE Roundtable where they also point out that he didn’t mention this a few days ago in one of his videos. So of course there are a lot of blogs out there today e.g. Page rank Sculpting is Dead and how this changes something that previously worked which is not backwards compatible, something that is a change for Google, who usually make advances that built on the success of earlier ones rather than throw them out of the window. I’ve certainly seen some extrem...
More About: Links , Tags , Nofollow

UTM campaign tagging and SEO
2009-06-05 16:17:00
I was recently asked the difference between how Google handles Urchin Tracking Module (utm) tagged URLs and other, nonsensical URL strings e.g. why are URLs like www.site.com/thingy?thing1&dullID9283 no use for SEO, but it's OK to have a Google tagged URL such as www.site.com/thingy?utm_source=value1&utm _medium=value2&utm_campaign=value3. It's not a new topic but it reminded me that there isn't much explanation out there, so here goes...   Here's how spiders handle things:   Google spiders do recognise strings after the "?", but handle them by not expending any energy on digging deeper. This is because there are so many possible permutations in ecommerce sites that a crawl could take days. So, the spider does recognise them, but doesn't usually follow them.   That is why ecommerce URLs like www.domain.com/product?prod=hiticket&ID=1 234 are poor. Google doesn't care that www.domain.com/product is different to www.domain.com/product?prod=hiticket&...
More About: Campaign , Tagging

Duplicate content SEO puzzle- PR submissions vs articles
2009-06-02 16:39:00
Here's a thing- why is it OK to publish a PR piece on your site as well as submitting it to PR sites, but it's not OK to publish article content that you've submitted to article sites? They appear to be so similar as to be almost the same thing, so why would the search engines potentially penalise you for one and not the other? One key distinction is their intent. Here are the main factors: PR is clearly self promotion- everyone knows this so when you choose to publish on a PR site the engines know that the content is unique to the referenced organisation or brand- they know that you're not being a dirty spammer, they know that PR sites host content that can be found easily elsewhere, and that there is no attempt being made to game them. Online PR pieces usually only use a homepage URL to link back to a site, rather than pointing to a specific page using keyword anchor text- there is no attempt to gain any reall SEO leverage. PR pieces are not int...
More About: Articles , Puzzle , Content

Using the news to help with blog topics
2009-06-02 16:30:00
We’ve discussed previously how important a blog is and how it can help with the search engine optimisation of your site, and how regular posts are important to ensure that the site is seen by search engines as being regularly updated. What happens if you get writers block? It happens to us all from time to time but there are a few tips to help you get around this. The first tip is something we’ve talked about before, which is creating blog topics based on some of the long tail keywords  currently driving traffic to your site. The second is paying attention to the news.  In recent weeks there have been a number of “hot” news topics, which have lasted a few weeks then died off, such as Swine Flu and MP Expense Claims. As these items hit the news the number of searches in Google dramatically increases, so writing a blog as soon as the news item comes up can help you get a slice of this increased search pie. So if you run a blog on your site, co...
More About: News , Blog , The News , Topics

Search engine newness Yahoo and MSN on keeping up with Google
2009-05-28 19:41:00
With Google releasing lots of new things in the last year, such as the new sitelinks.  On top of Google’s new developments Ask have reintroduced Jeeves to help answer people’s questions and Wolfram Alpha is creating a lot of media attention with it’s alternative search methods - So it’s important for the other two main search engines Yahoo and MSN to keep up with the changing times. Yahoo have announced in their official blog that their homepage is currently being tested with a new look which will be more customisable by region to try and make their users  happier and liven up their look. Microsoft have announced that Bing will be the new name of their search engine, replacing MSN and Live search.  The name of the search engine revamp from Microsoft had been tipped to be Kumo but now it seems certain that the new search engine will be called Bing.com and will go live on 3 June.  Mircrsoft are claiming that their new Bing search en...
More About: Search Engines , Search , Search Engine

Google the most relevant search engine? Not all the time
2009-05-27 13:29:00
I've been checking some results pages on some terms that one of my clients targets, and was somewhat dissatisfied with the results that Google returns on these terms. The phrases that I have been looking for here specifically were: Alternative to cosmetic surgery Alternative to plastic surgery Looking at these terms, its quite clear that the searcher is NOT looking for cosmetic/plastic surgery, and the results displayed on Yahoo and MSN respectively seem to reflect that, with a few exceptions: Yahoo: MSN/Live: However when it came to searching on Google, it seemed that a lot of the results being displayed were for cosmetic/plastic surgeons. This baffled me somewhat, as the search term is clearly suggesting that the user isn't looking for someone to perform this type of procedure, and is looking for an "Alternative" - with this being a core word within the phrase. The first 2 results are relevant to the term, but most of the others on page 1 were not: After g...
More About: Time , Search , Search Engine , Engine

Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Rankings
2009-05-26 16:35:00
This is part 4 of my occasional series about how to measure the success of your search engine optimisation campaign. Whether you are working in house or for an agency, there is always going to be someone who is interested in how the project is going. This series pulls together different areas of a campaign that you might be able to use as metrics in order to report on the successes. The previous parts of this series are: Part 1 The long tail Part 2 Website traffic Part 3 Conversions Part 4 deals with rankings. I’ve written before about using rankings as a metric because it is obviously one of the most popular measures of SEO achievement. Reaching a particular position is a good way of marking a victory. And rankings are still important despite the search engines trying to tell us they aren’t. As long as rankings equals traffic, then gaining a better ranking is going to mean more site visitors and that is what any web site wants. Google has made some interestin...
More About: Success , Campaign

Search Engine Punch Up- Optimisers Book Ringside Seats
2009-05-22 13:53:00
We're always looking at "who" is using "what" to search- turns out that Google is still the favourite, but MS really want a sizable piece of the action, so much so that they're on a PR tip using words like "reimagine" to describe what they want to do with their Live search. Apparently the deal is that MS want their engine to show fewer, more relevant results- which is nice. They've had a stab at doing something with Kumo, but there's no hands-on action yet so who knows what the new Live will be like. Much of the commentary is about branding and feel, so I can't help thinking that MS are going to ride the coat-tails of their tried-and-tested-don't-rock-the-boat approach and provide a good looking set of tweaks that MIGHT be better than the current Live. It might even offer the functionality and depth of Google, but then Google aren't taking it easy either. To extend the usage of their products, and their engine they're punting Chrome on TV in the US. Not only a...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Book , Engine , Punch

Yell.com Becomes an Authorized Re-Seller for Google Adwords
2009-05-21 15:22:00
Yell.com, the international directories company, has launched a new service aimed at small and medium businesses. The service will help businesses promote themselves on search engines such as Google and generate additional sales leads. Yell has teamed up with Google to offer this service called “Search Marketing Service” which will make it easier for small and medium enterprises to market their services online via Adwords . With this new alliance with Google, Yell becomes an authorised Google AdWords reseller and will give Yell’s 450,000-strong based of UK SMEs access to Google’s millions of UK users.   James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Seller , Google Adwords , Yell

Tories Start Buying Up Google Adwords Keywords
2009-05-21 15:07:00
The Tory party is buying up Google search terms relevant to the MP expenses row in a bid to gain the upper hand in the scandal that surrounds all parties. The Conservative Party has bought the phrase ‘mps expenses’ with those entering the phrase or similar search terms into Google offered a sponsored link to either David Cameron’s Webcameron YouTube channel or the Conservative home page. Earlier this year, the party bought up search terms around the Budget as Chancellor Alistair Darling revealed its contents in Parliament in order to direct those searching to a Tory response. So with all the ludicrous expense claims that have now been publicised, I wonder if the Tories are now claiming Google Adwords expenses too….. James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager
More About: Buying , Keywords

When is a blog not a blog?
2009-05-21 13:34:00
Several times, I've been asked to quantify why blogs work well for search engine optimisation. This is a multi-faceted answer, but one of the reasons is the liking of the search engines for new content, and that a blog is the ultimate in updated content. Not only is it frequently added to (you do blog often right?) but it even lets the search engines know when it is updated. Yes, using standard blog software, when you press publish, the search engines are automatically "pinged" with the URL of the new update. So when is a blog not a blog? When it doesn't ping. There are a few websites out there that have something in a directory called "blog" that works to all intents and purposes like a blog, but doesn’t have the ping facility. So the effect is not the same. The pinging is done via a Remote Procedure Call or RPC. You send a specially formatted XML message to an RPC server. If you write your own blogging software (as we have got for the Vertical Leap blog, because it i...
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Important SEO Considerations - are you comparing like with like?
2009-05-21 12:13:00
I was reading Pete’s blog on the importance of time when performing SEO on your website, and it reminded me of one of the questions we frequently get asked by some of our clients, relating to other websites. It is tempting to look at one of your friends’ websites or the website of yor competitors and think “well they got a ranking for this keyword really quickly – so I should too”.  However there are so many factors which influence how quickly the search engine optimisation of a website leads to rankings that so often these comparisons aren’t fair. For example a website which has been established since 1999 and have a large number of inbound links will have a greater reputation than a website established in 2008 with a smaller number of inbound links.  So if you were saying “well I know they starting chasing X keyword 3 months ago and are now in the top 10” this won’t necessarily mean you will also get into the top ...
More About: Search Engine Optimisation

Canonical Tag - Really useful for SEO
2009-05-20 17:44:00
It was only a few months ago, that Kerry reported that the major search engines had been working together to create a new tag that allows webmasters to specify which version of a URL they want to be indexed. It was decided that this was necessary, as there are lots of issues of duplicate content on many websites caused by a variety of problems - some of which can be easily fixed, with others that are quite difficult to overcome. Duplicate content is a problem for lots of websites - certainly it's something that we encounter on a daily basis working on a number of campaigns, particularly at the beginning of a campaign, where we have to unravel the mess that we are sometimes given to work with. Sometimes this is caused by shopping carts - lots of shopping carts will have the same products across different categories, each with its own URL. Previously this was very difficult to fix, as short of only having a product in 1 category (which wouldn't be sensible from a user of the ...
More About: Canonical

PPC Search Results - Expand Exact Search Queries
2009-05-20 17:25:00
As a PPC Manager one of the most frequently asked questions to me is." What is the exact search query that triggered my advert in the serps Listings" This has always been a tough one to answer, for some managing their own Pay Per Click Campaigns who do not know how to expand the search in Google Analytics it is an impossibility to do..........Until now let me explain. OK so you have now set up your PPC Account and begun to create your first PPC Campaign for your product or services. Recently I blogged about the choice of Broad Match, "Phrase Match" or [Exact Match] Keywords so by now hopefully you will have chosen the right route for you to take with the keyword matching. You have now set your campaign live and sit back and hopefully count the conversions as they come in. After your first week or so you may begin to realise a pattern in the keywords that are triggering your ads. One of the biggest things you may notice is the number of people clicking on Broad and "Phrase Matc...
More About: Results , Search

The Google Wonder Wheel - Not so Wonderful.
2009-05-18 16:39:00
Google released some new "enhancements" to their search interface last week and included something that they are calling the "Wonder Wheel ". The Wonder Wheel is an interactive keyword suggestion tool that allows you to visually expand and explore groups of related search terms.  When you perform a google search using the wonder wheel, you are able to see a small number of related key phrases (or suggested keywords): If you then click on on of the suggested keyword phrases, a new wheel is added - and so on and so on. I don't know about you, but personally - I just wouldn't search like this.  I might occasionally click on the suggested keywords links within the main search window - but I find using this device laborious and inefficient.  It is "Google fluff". When I first saw the announcements for release, I was hoping it would be more useful.. I really did.  Perhaps a tool that helped visualise the hub-spoke relationships for specific themes ...
More About: Google , Google Search , Wonderful

Wolfram Alpha - What does it mean for Search Engine Optimisation?
2009-05-18 15:46:00
There has been a lot of high profile media buzz about the launch of a new "search engine" Wolfram |Alpha in the build up to its launch today, and this is something that Emily touched upon a few weeks ago when looking at new search engines coming onto the market. Wolfram|Alpha refer to themselves as a computational knowledge machine rather than "search engine" as is being said in a lot of the publicity around it. Although you enter a search query into it Wolfram|Alpha in much the same way as a "normal" search engine, it is there that the similarity ends. Traditional search engines index content, and through the use of an algorithm, determine which pages of content they have indexed are the most relevant results to the search query entered. There are all kinds of factors that determine a pages placement, such as Page Titles, Descriptions and other on page factors, as well as a large proportion of relevancy determined by the number of links and the words used in those links to ...
More About: Search , Search Engine , Engine

Live search cashback
2008-06-04 14:55:00
Back in October 2007 Microsoft bought Jellyfish.com- an affiliate marketing cash-back comparison engine. This brings their current acquisition total to 119 (Farecast Computer reservations were the latest in April '08). We guessed they bought Jellyfish to harness some of that web 2.0 goodness, rather than the revenues that Jellyfish was bringing in- and we guessed right... ...last month (May 22nd '08) MS launched Live Search cashback. The deal is that they make money from advertising revenues, and then pass some of that revenue on to customers, by means of rebates on purchases. So someone shopping via Live Search cashback gets a kickback on every purchase they make- similar to online-coupon, and cashback sites like FatWallet or Ebates, except that the delivery of the reward/cashback is a little slicker. In practice a shopper uses MS' cashback search to find products provided from a range of online stores, and those stores pay to be listed. Its up to the shopper to pic...
More About: Affiliate Marketing , Cashback

Organic SEO - Top tips for Choosing an SEO Company
2008-05-30 15:40:00
Choosing an SEO company can be a confusing with so many companies claiming to be able to optimise your site. Here are our top 5 tips for choosing an SEO Company . Getting Results Don't believe claims that you are guaranteed #1 on Google - no one can guarantee this for you, although some companies might do this for terms that no one is searching on - getting this kind of #1 ranking is worth nothing to you as it won't drive traffic to your website Do listen to companies who tell you they can guarantee improved results on your site - particularly if they are talking about your conversion rate. SEO companies who are looking to drive more targeted traffic to your site and make the site easier to use and navigate are worth talking to. You site should, ideally, get better with an SEO company working on it, and your site certainly shouldn't be worse off following the appointment of an SEO company. Setting clear KPIs for your SEO company and making sure they understand these per...
More About: Tips , Organic