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Avoid the sandbox by being first to market
2007-10-23 10:49:00
Having a brand new site is not much fun these days and many companies and even individual webmasters are trying to buy up old, established sites just to avoid the dreaded Google sandbox.However, with a bit of careful planning and good timing you can take advantage of changing markets and neatly avoid the sandbox by getting your site out early.As soon as the iPhone was announced this year millions of people started writing about it. Every single trusted domain wrote something about it and yet I was able to get a brand new 1 page site into the top 5 for the term "iPhone" in a couple of weeks. The reason is that the sandbox doesn't apply to terms that are brand new and don't have a huge list of Adwords advertisers.Next time you spot a new product hitting your market start up a mini site about it and promote it on a massive scale for a couple of weeks using blogs and social media and it will rank straight away. Even if you can't monetize the site very well you can always sell it to ...
More About: Market , Avoid , Sandbox

The great meta description debate
2007-10-19 10:14:00
Google Groups user Cass Hacks has started an interesting thread about why you should remove the meta description from your pages.The thread raises the point that Google chooses their own snippet a lot of the time and will normally choose a good one whether you have a meta description or not.Some users are chiming in discussing supplemental results and how meta descriptions can help you in this area. To me all this is irrelevant - meta descriptions are one thing you can't afford to ignore.In my mind the meta description is one of the most important things on a page. If you were starting an Adwords campaign would you let Google write the ad content for you? Your meta descriptions form the search result snippet most of the time and if you are ranking for a really competitive term it can make a huge impact on your click through rates.Sure there is little point in handcrafting the meta description for every page on your site, let a database do this for you. But for your highest traffic ...
More About: Great , Debate , Meta , Description , The G

Small sites don't need many links
2007-10-17 11:34:00
Most people will tell you that to get better rankings you need more links. However, in the majority of markets this simply isn't the case.A lot of websites for offline companies such as small shops, garages, sports clubs can rank perfectly well for their main keywords with only 10 or 20 good quality links.Before you start spending time building hundreds or thousands of links it's often best to look at the sites you want to beat and see how many links they have. If your market is ultra competitive the number of links will be 50,000+. In some markets you might only need 50.Once you figure out how many links you need you can start to build a strategy to help you get them.------------------------------------ -------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Links , Sites , Small

User Generated Content can ruin your SEO
2007-10-15 15:38:00
Web 2.0 is all about user generated content and while its great to finally be able to let your customers interact with your site it's also important not to let things go too far.One day people can be happily uploading valuable blog content to your travel site and the next you have been banned from Google for hosting millions of parasite pages advertising pharmaceutical products.So many huge sites these days are full of spam that it can sometimes seem like a losing battle, even archive.org has been taken over by spammers uploading dubious text content just to get a link from the homepage.Three years ago the Guardian got overrun with spam and they still haven't got round to deleting it. Pretty much every other mainstream publication has the same problem.You would be forgiven for thinking that if these mainstream sites can still rank highly while full of spam Google is clever enough to figure it out. Unfortunately this isn't the case. If your 10 page site gets spammed then be prepar...
More About: Content , User , Ruin

When SEO makes you cringe
2007-10-12 10:57:00
The news this week that T Mobile spends £160,000 per week on PPC campaigns made me cringe. To think of a company blindly spending all this money without devoting any of their budget to organic search engine optimisation is totally amazing.Of course I'm just guessing that they don't spend anything on organic SEO since they could get on page one for the "money" phrases such as "mobile phones" without spending more than a couple of thousand pounds. Perhaps they spend a fortune on SEO but just hired the wrong company.The large mobile phone networks have access to links most people can only dream of. Sites such as the BBC and all the major newspapers are happy to link to these giant companies and yet most of them waste their link equity by not even trying to rank.O2 has a PPC ad for the term "iphone" and yet their main iPhone page doesn't rank because they don't have the word "iPhone" in the title tag.------------------------------------- ------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discou...

What would make you switch from Google?
2007-10-11 16:16:00
Google is a great example of a company that became popular just at the right time.Since 1998 millions of people have been taught how to use Google as a gateway to the web, for 5 years I've had Google as my start page and use it as a spell checker, email application, calculator, route planner before you even consider the applications I use every day at work.Yahoo, MSN and Ask have a tough act to follow, search is just one of the things I use Google for and it would take a massive drop in the quality of the results for me to even consider switching away. As a web savvy user I've trained myself to only click on the results that look useful so even if Google was returning a few poor results its likely I would click on a good one.Now that millions of people have grown up with Google how can their competitors ever hope catch them simply by making a better product?Even a company like Facebook would struggle to create a successful search engine as anything that didn't look like Google wo...
More About: Google , Switch , Make , Witch

What do your pages say about you?
2007-10-09 18:25:00
Some sites are hand crafted and have beautiful urls, perfect page titles and meta descriptions that any copywriter would be proud of.Others look like this:Most sites that use ASP based content management systems have the most awful urls, perhaps ASP developers don't realise that real people click on friendly urls?Having lots of strange characters in your urls and search snippets is the quickest way to halve your click through rate and yet it seems to be only us SEO types that care about this stuff.Would you let somebody build your shop so badly nobody wanted to come in? Of course not, so why should we let programmers build websites that are unfriendly to our customers?------------------------------- ------------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Pages , Ages

How much is a link worth?
2007-10-08 17:56:00
Google seems to be reducing the PR of sites that sell links and possibly reducing their rankings this week. We have seen some high profile cases where this was suspected but until this weekend it wasn't confirmed.Why Google chose to confirm it to a blog rather than on their official webmaster help page isn't clear but I assume they will make some kind of announcement soon.The main issues for people who sell links is a clear case of how much income you make compared to the income you might make once Google catches up with you.The really interesting debate comes when you consider how link buyers will be affected by all this. We have seen several sites stop ranking for their own name which is a pretty easy penalty to spot. All link buyers should check that the page they are getting a link from ranks very well for the terms in its title tag - if it doesn't then don't buy the link unless you have very good reason.Google isn't giving the same penalties to every site however, some peo...
More About: Link , Worth , Wort

Google AdWords Help Centre adds keyword insertion info
2007-10-07 21:11:00
Until now if you've heard about the Google AdWords dynamic keyword insertion it's likely that it's through a blog or forum, but last week the Google Help Centre added information to answer seven common questions about keyword insertion.Personally I've found keyword insertion can be a great method of improving an adverts clickthrough rate by dynamically inserting the exact query string into the ads title, description or URL. The keywords searched for are also highlighted in bold which helps to draw further attention to your ad, potentially boosting it's CTR. The new information from Google is great as this clears up any misconceptions which people may of previously had about keyword insertion, making sure that advertisers have all the details they need to use this method effectively. One concern I had was how keyword insertion affects your ads quality score, for example if an ads quality score is calculated using the default text rather than the dynamically created version, but ...
More About: Info , Keyword , Google Adwords , Adwords

Do you know what your SEO is doing?
2007-10-06 20:05:00
With all the talk about buying and selling links in recent months I'd assumed that most SEO's had realised Google is pretty serious about cleaning up spam. Given the fact Google is willing to hit sites just for selling links I was amazed this week to find a new client with doorway pages added by his SEO company.The pages were pretty easy to spot and will be removed ASAP but if Google had spotted them the site would have been banned or hit with a penalty at least. Funnily enough the doorway pages actually ranked lower than the real pages as they didn't have any links pointing at them.Incidents like this really bring home how far behind the times some SEO consultants are. Doorway pages are a 5 year old method and yet a company in the UK is still adding them to sites this year.For webmasters with small sites its worth using the site:www.yoursite.com query in Google and looking at all the pages you have indexed, just to check whats there. If you see pages that are either not supposed...

Amusing Google AdWords keyword suggestions
2007-10-04 18:37:00
I found this quite funny; doing some keyword research for cleaner searches on Google AdWords one of the suggestions was "crap cleaner", at least it's honest I suppose:Maybe I should setup a test as the competition is unsurprisingly very low. The broad match suggestion for scrubber (sorted by relevance?) might also throw up a few unwanted clicks too!------------------------------------- ------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Keyword , Google Adwords , Adwords , Amusing

How Matt Cutts made us #1 for paid directory links!
2007-10-04 15:27:00
OK he didn't really, but I found it quite surprising to find searches for paid directory links coming through in our web stats today. This is because the #1 Google ranking for this search is our post titled Matt Cutts says paid directory links are fine. Perhaps after the great Google directory ban there's no other unbanned sites left relevant to this search anymore!It's quite interesting to see the actual directories which are listed for this query, other than the Yahoo! Directory I wouldn't say that the rest of these are the top paid directories on the web. To be honest I think Google still has a long way to go before getting this right in what seems to be the unenviable task of sorting which directories are just selling links as opposed to the ones charging for review fees and only listing quality sites. I have to agree with Rands post which suggests that all directories, large or small, should be treated in the same manner and any penalised sites should be stripped of their P...
More About: Links , Paid , Made

Aviva Directory Promo Code for July
2007-07-12 08:48:00
The Aviva Directory have released a promo code which offers $20 off per submission between July 15th and July 31st. To claim the discount you need to enter "Umdum" as the coupon code when submiting a website.Aviva Directory is another excellent directory which I would highly recommend, SEOptimise are listed, unfortunately the BOTW promo code has now expired but they are still offering listings in the blog directory at the promotional fee $39.95 which is great value.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promo te your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Code , Tory

Yahoo Search Marketing Quality Score Ranking Model in UK from July 23rd
2007-07-11 11:11:00
UK Yahoo Search Marketing accounts will use the new ranking model from July 23rd. The ranking model, which was launched in the US back in February, uses the bid amount and quality score to determine an ad's rank in search results.Here's the email sent out by Yahoo! this morning:"Dear Advertiser,With new features like ad testing, geo-targeting and fast ad activation, the new Sponsored Search gives you more ways to connect with customers searching for what you sell.During the week commencing July 23rd, 2007, we are introducing a new ranking model in the UK that considers an ad's quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help you spend less time in bidding wars with other advertisers and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for your business. Here's a quick summary of this important change: Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in search results the week commencing July 23rd, 2007. This wi...
More About: Model , Score

Will Google Integrate Analytics & FeedBurner Stats?
2007-07-03 19:54:00
Google began making changes to FeedBurner today by making TotalStat s and MyBrand free, this is great news and I've requested the MyBrand RSS domain control change.What I'm interested on seeing is if the next step is to integrate Google Analytics with FeedBurner Stats. I posted back in February about how FeedBurner will add RSS conversion tracking in the future so hopefully this will be released shortly as it would be an excellent feature for marketers. Tracking RSS subscriptions as conversions using pay-per-click is currently very difficult to estimate but this could become much simpler if Google Analytics is combined with FeedBurner Stats, especially seeing that the Google AdWords/Analytics integration has improved greatly since the recent update. This feature would also be a nice addition for Google too seeing that it's something Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter couldn't offer so easily.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business onl...
More About: Google , Feedburner

Has Google Images indexing speed increased?
2007-06-27 23:04:00
Seeing that the UK don't seem to be getting any sunlight this summer I did a few searches for some places which do. While searching for Barcelona on Google Images I noticed a picture of Theirry Henry listed, nothing too strange there expect that the photo was from Monday when he signed for FC Barcelona!I couldn't find any further information about an increase in Google Images indexing and as far as I'm aware the last update back was in March. It's possible there has been a full update within the last 24 hours but if that's the case I still wouldn't expect this image to be included, what seems likely is that a limited number of highly regarded news sources are getting images indexed far more frequently. The Shanghai Daily isn't the only website where this is happening, images from uefa.com and tsn.ca covering the same story are also indexed.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Speed , Index , Ease

Logo Design Concepts Vote Part II
2007-06-22 12:40:00
Thanks for everyone's help with the logo design concepts vote, we decided to go for #5 as voted by you. We now have 3 versions of this logo to choose from and quite like all of them in different ways so any help again would be great.#1:#2:#3:Once again you can vote for more than one logo if your just as indecisive as we are:-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Design , Concepts , Vote , Part , Logo

Google AdWords Pay Per Action Beta Now Worldwide
2007-06-22 09:06:00
Google AdWords have now rolled out the beta test of pay per action to all worldwide accounts. I've noticed some of my UK based client managed accounts now have this activated where they meet the following upgrade requirements:"advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis."For more information about this please read yesterday's Inside AdWords and Search Engine Roundtable posts.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Google , Action , Beta , Google Adwords , Adwords

Live.com Link Command Now Treated As Regular Search
2007-06-15 21:45:00
If you now perform a link: command search on Windows Live /MSN/Live.com, or whatever it's called, you now get a list of regular search results instead.I've just noticed a search for link:http://www.live.com appearing in the website stats as my original post about the Live.com link command being broken is currently ranking at number one for this, maybe it's worth optimising for link searches too now to get some extra traffic!-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Link , Regular , Comm

Business.com & BOTW Directory 20% Promo Codes
2007-06-15 12:22:00
Aaron Wall posted yesterday about a new 20% Business .com discount, using the promo code "AVIVA". Best of the Web is also currently running a 20% discount with the promotional code "BEACHBUM". These are two great directories which are well worth being listed in, SEOptimise are in both, so this could be a good time to submit.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promo te your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Directory , Tory , Director

Temporary Fix to Blogger Publishing Error
2007-06-15 11:43:00
I posted (manually) yesterday about how many Blogger users, including myself, were experiencing problems when publishing posts or comments. I'm not sure why this was happening but as a workaround it seems that if you set the date of your latest post to tomorrow's date this fixes the problem. Thanks to Abandon Skip who posted about the fix on Google Groups.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Publishing , Error , Tempo , Logger

Help choose the next SEOptimise logo
2007-06-15 11:00:00
We are currently in the process of upgrading the SEOpti mise website, the first step is to get a more professional logo. Instead of making it easy and just giving us a new logo design, Logo works have given us 7 to choose from instead! :)Here they are:1)2)3)4)5)6)7)I've only run a poll once before on here and I'm not expecting a major response but any help with this would be great, at the moment my favourites are 5 and probably 2 as well.You can choose more than one logo if you can't decide!-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Choose

Blogger.com not publishing any posts or comments!
2007-06-14 17:16:00
Over the last few days I've noticed that any blog comments which I've approved have not been published succesfully. I posted a topic about this on the Blogger Google Groups yesterday and when checking the publishing trouble group today I've noticed a lot of people have the same problem but even worse they can't publish posts! Here's one example:"For the past two days, whenever I write a post, only the post titlepublishes. Everything else disappears. This is true in both my blogs.When I go back to "Edit Posts ," the text has vanished intonothingness. It will also not save. Anyone got some insight into thisproblem?"There doesn't seem to be any feedback from Google about this so far and I'm not sure if it's affecting everyone, I assume it's not, but it would be great if anyone has some more information about this. Especially as I don't expect this post to publish so I'll have to edit and upload the files manually!-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote y...
More About: Comments , Publishing , Comm

Google UK Site Command Search Broken
2007-06-06 18:34:00
I've just done a site search for seoptimise.com on Google .co.uk, with "Pages from the UK" applied, and this has not listed any indexed pages. I've checked and all other websites are doing exactly the same thing, as shown by this screenshot of a site command search for google.com:Google had a problem last year with .com homepage's disappearing on Google UK but this time it's every site: command search for all domain suffixes, seems very weird. If you add a keyword to the site: search it does work though:-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Site , Comm , Command

Shoemoney vs SEOmoz Link Disclosure Debate
2007-06-06 00:10:00
This week everyone seems to be talking about the debate between Shoemoney and SEOmoz following Rand Fishkin's post last week about disclosing paid blog recommendations. This continued when Shoemoney and Rand Fiskin discussed their opinions today on Net Income.Here's a bit of background into both of their views, Shoemoney say's you should assume every recommendation on his blog has some sort of method of making cash behind it:"So yea you should not trust me… or Rand… or Andy Beal… or John Chow… Or Darren Rowse… OR ANYONE like we are Jesus Christ who you should do whatever they say and not use your own head. you should try EVERYTHING and let the money show you what works the best."While Rand believes that he provides users with a more honest review by not taking payment for posting a link about a product or service:"Even Indextools, which I love, and am very fond of talking about, doesn't give us anything beyond the usual free account for re-sellers and discounts for hav...
More About: Debate , Link , Sure , Disclosure , Disc

Search Marketing Standard Magazine
2007-06-06 00:01:00
A couple of weeks ago I was kindly asked by Search Marketing Stand ard magazine if I'd like a free trial copy of their magazine, having liked some of their blog posts I thought this sounded great. The magazine came through last week and I was very impressed, the UK is still a long way behind the US for getting printed material like this so it was nice to read some articles about recent SEO news and modern techniques such as linkbait, local search advertising, PPC quality scores and blog marketing. I found the magazine to be useful throughout, the articles were of a good length, well written and relevant. Overall I found the magazine to be very interesting and will be signing up for the next one!-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Magazine

Large Jumps in Yahoo Site Explorer Figures
2007-06-01 20:22:00
It looks like there's been an update to Yahoo Site Explorer links today, I've noticed a large increase in inbound links for a number of different sites.I first found that seoptimise.com had increased to 12,779 from around 10,000 which is great! :) But I'm not the only one, last week I noted down the total number of links for Digg, SEOmoz, Pronet Advertising and Tropical SEO and they have all received substantal increases too, maybe this is because they're counting all the extra email links! :)Digg: 80,581,285 -> 96,274,838SEOmoz: 512,025 -> 700,970Pronet Advertising: 198,313 -> 225,616Tropical SEO: 13,803 -> 17,600I just noticed that for all link searches you can only view the first 1,000 inbound links, I don't think I've ever checked that far down before though so not sure if there's always been a limit to this.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Figures , Figure

Local SEO - Comparision of Abingdon Hotel Websites
2007-05-31 14:42:00
I've been doing a few local searches recently to find some examples of well-optimised Abingdon websites, I found a Google search for "Abingdon hotels" brought up an excellent example of both good and bad SEO for various local accommodation websites. Just to make it clear I have nothing to do with any of these websites and I'm unsure if they have received any SEO advice, I just find local search engine optimisation quite interesting so chose these sites to take a deeper look into how they're ranking.Here's a quick look at how some of the basic SEO factors compare for the top four hotels in Abingdon:Upper ReachesPage Title: "The Upper Reaches Hotel - one of the finest hotels on the Thames"This certainly needs the keyword Abingdon in there somewhere.On-Page SEO: Not sure about the breakline within the H2 tag, needs a bit of a tidy up to target the Abingdon hotels searches better.Internal Linking: Most links are within the navigation, some cross-links to further hotel information wo...
More About: Websites , Local , Compa , Bing

Charity SEO Blog Meme
2007-05-29 00:58:00
I got tagged last week by Marty Weintraub in the latest blog meme to share some link juice to charity websites! Great idea, here's a quick list of some UK based charities:Cancer Research UKMissing MadeleineOxfamChildren in NeedComic ReliefI almost clicked on some of the AdWords ads when searching for some of these, not sure that would have been too charitable! :)I don't think these guys have been tagged yet; CK Chung, Brandon Hopkins, Jaan Kanellis, Joe Williams and Chris Sandberg.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Meme , Charity , Blog , Char , Hari

Yahoo! Favicon Appearing on Facebook
2007-05-28 20:59:00
Maybe Yahoo ! have agreed a deal with Facebook after all. Or more likely, my Internet Explorer browser is trying to trick me into blogging about a rumour which ended a while ago :)It's quite interesting that of all the .ico images that could have been mixed up the Yahoo one was used, even a new window and a CTRL+F5 page refresh doesn't fix it, but everything's fine in FireFox. Also if anyone knows how I can set MSN Messenger to open my Hotmail account using my default browser instead of a new IE window please let me know, I don't think Microsoft have made that too easy though! ;)-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Favicon , Yahoo!