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The State of the SEO Information Industry
2007-11-21 10:34:00
Finding out about a new topic is quite straightforward nowadays, you simply visit Google and carry out a few searches, read a Wikipedia page and usually get the information you require in less than 10 minutes.When the subject you want to find out about is search engine optimisation the task becomes quite a lot harder. All the sites at the top of the search engines for terms such as SEO and search engine optimisation have been there for quite a long time and, while some deserve to be ranked highly, a lot are simply ranking because they are old sites. A newcomer to the industry will no doubt end up using reciprocal links and submitting to search engines because that's exactly what the highest ranking sites are saying to do. The newcomer has no idea the site hasn't been updated in 5 years.Forums such as Digital Point used to be quite valuable sources of information but valuable contributors no longer see any point in posting good advice when it just gets drowned out by a lot of other...
More About: Information , Industry , State , The State

Studying the Topix site move & wondering why they still sell links
2007-11-19 17:44:00
A few months ago Topix, a site with 50% of its traffic coming from Google, announced they were moving from Topix.net to Topix.com.The Wall Street Journal picked up the story and quite a lot of SEO people no doubt read it so lets see how the move is going so far.A search for "topix" brings up the new site no problems and the .com domain has over a million results indexed so is everything going well? The .net version still has 70,000 results indexed and the .net domain doesn't seem to redirect to the .com, even when I set my user agent to be Google.I'm confused as to why the site would buy a new domain to improve branding and not redirect traffic to the new site. Having 2 different sites is confusing for users and for search engines.Also, why are they selling links using Text Link Ads if they value Google traffic so highly? Do the advertisers on this page know they are paying money for a link with nofollow? Would you buy a tiny footer link with nofollow?-----------------------------...
More About: Links , Site , Studying , Move , Sell

Why you should delete your date based archives
2007-11-15 15:27:00
Building a solid blog that Google wants to rank highly is not easy task to start with but it's made much harder by blog content management systems being designed using every SEO faux pas you can think of apart from Flash.Most people have now figured out the obvious tips such as improving your url structure to include keywords, adding a unique title and meta description to each page and preventing indexing of noise pages such as comment feeds.However lots of bloggers are still falling into a major SEO and usability trap - date based archives. When was the last time you visited a blog and browsed their date based archives? I've certainly never done it. The thing to remember about blogging is that maybe 90% of the content is time sensitive. If you want to read about internet marketing or some new product launch that's great but the information is likely to be out of date in a couple of months. I certainly would never want to look back at something you wrote back in 2006 unless I kne...
More About: Archives , Delete , Hive

Plan for life without Google
2007-11-13 01:19:00
Worrying about Google rankings isn't good for your health and it certainly isn't good for your business. This year Google has probably dished out more penalties towards sneaky webmasters than at any other time in it's short history and yet we still rely on them for traffic every day.Letting a third party company which is totally unaccountable to any government body is like putting your savings into a bank run by somebody you met in a bar. It just doesn't make good business sense.Sure Google says that it has users best interests at heart but what would happen if they banned your perfectly legitimate, never broken any rules website tomorrow. Aside from sending Google an email what could you really do to fix things? Nothing. You can't call them, you can't sue them and they don't have to even justify your complaint with an answer.Imagine if Google starts to lose users and they all switch to MSN or just browse sites recommended by their Facebook friends, where would your site be i...
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10 Ways to Make your Website More Popular
2007-11-09 15:07:00
Everybody who owns a website wants it to be more popular. From the web design team at the New York Times right down to the small retailer trying to expand into ecommerce, popularity is the key to success. Reading and working with popular websites every day can sometimes feel like living in a bubble where everybody has good search engine rankings and sites are all beautiful so it's nice sometimes to look at how “normal” websites can improve their popularity.Invest in a good design – while people like Ling might think design isn't everything it is one of the key aspects a site can use to build their visitors trust so you need to get it right.Learn about usabilty – having the best designed website in the world is useless if normal people can't use it. Sit behind some of your non internet savvy relatives and friends and watch them navigate your site and make purchases from your store. If they struggle with things you need to improve your usabilty.Create a useful website – I...
More About: Website , Popular , Make , Pula

5 Web Design Elements to Earn Your Visitors Trust
2007-11-07 18:09:00
Giving your visitors a feeling of trust when they first load up your website is a hugely important and often overlooked aspect of web design. Some sites look trustworthy and some don't but it's not until we examine the designs a bit more deeply that the key elements that help to build a visitors trust become clear.Starting at the top of the page it is important to have a unique logo. Right from large multinational companies down to humble bloggers, if you don't have a trustworthy and striking logo you probably won't get my business or my subscription. The examples below show two high profile bloggers that spent time and money to get the right logo early on and it has paid dividends in terms of trust and subscribers.Next on the list and an element often overlooked by bloggers and large corporations alike is the about page, demonstrated very well by Digg in the screenshot below. An about page needs to have photos, good formatting and most importantly some easy to understand text e...
More About: Web Design , Design , Elements , Earn , Trust

Links that send traffic
2007-11-05 13:03:00
Most websites that rank highly in Google are old and well established sites that haven't gained any new links for months or even years. These websites receive a huge amount of search traffic from Google without producing anything remarkable thanks to the trust Google places on old sites.Compare this to the thousands of new websites with generous budgets for viral marketing & content creation that don't rank anywhere. It's clear that the gap between old and new is too large for Google to ignore for much longer. The search results are stale and out of date with social media becoming the best way to find new content.New sites are being linked from social news sites and blogs every day with thousands of visitors arriving from the most popular links. Older sites only get their traffic from Google and never do anything newsworthy or interesting. Why should they continue to get traffic?Why is an old site automatically better than a new site? How long will this situation keep going?-...
More About: Traffic , Links , Send

Make your top pages work for you
2007-11-01 13:15:00
One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to look at it through the eyes of a searcher.Take a look at the top 10 pages on your site in terms of search traffic from Google and see what keywords people are using to find those pages. Do a search for those keywords yourself, what do you see?Is your site number one? Does your title look right? How about the snippet? There is always room to make your title or snippet more "click able" and attractive to searchers, getting a 20% higher click through rate on your top 10 pages can have a huge effect on traffic.Taking this a step further you can use a keyword tool to see what other phrases related to your top pages people search for and alter your title tags to include those phrases. Targeting two terms is always better than one.Sometimes these small tips can have a huge effect.---------------------------------- ---------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Work , Make , Pages , Ages

New Google AdWords Feature: Number/Date Formatting
2007-10-31 11:38:00
Google AdWords seems to be rolling out some useful features recently, last week it was the snapshot date range comparison and today's is the option to change number, date and time formatting.This is a great addition for UK users to avoid any confusion between US and UK date formats.Here's the Google AdWords account alert (click for full-size/readable image):---------------------------------- ---------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Google , Feature , Google Adwords , Adwords , Number

Google Universal Search Confuses SEO Inc with SEOmoz!
2007-10-31 11:08:00
Or at least it confused me anyway, while searching for SEO on Google today I noticed the following Google News universal search result listed:Having a quick glance at the image and headline I assumed the story was about SEO Inc, but clicking on the headline shows that the story CEO Puts fresh face on SEO article, from the Seattle Times, which is infact about SEOmoz instead!What is happening is that there are actually two news stories, the image links to this article about SEO Inc on Earthtimes.org, with the headline pointing to the Seattle Times story. I'm sure a lot of people have just assumed there is only one story displayed rather than two. Has anyone else found this confusing?------------------------------- ------------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Search , Universal , Univers

Why Web Hosting Affects SEO
2007-10-30 11:44:00
Chris Winfield writes an interesting post about why you need good hosting over at Search Engine Land about how robust hosting helps you in the event of a social media traffic surge. This is of course very valuable but the importance of good hosting extends much further than simply keeping your site running under a traffic surge.When a website suffers hosting issues during a Google crawl it can have drastic effects on traffic for weeks afterwards. The problem is particularly striking for very large sites that attract a lot of long tail traffic as site owners often find it hard to figure out why their traffic has dropped.Imagine Google spiders your 100,000 page site and one day finds 10,000 pages are not working. Those pages will drop from the index until Google crawls them successfully again. If the dropped pages had good rankings each might send 1 visitor per day - suddenly you have lose 10,000 unique visitors per day from your site even though your main keywords are still ranking h...
More About: Hosting , Web Hosting

What would you like to read next week on SEOptimise
2007-10-26 18:33:00
The SEOptimise blog has increased in readership quite a lot recently and we want to make sure it keeps churning out interesting content.Next week we want to post about the subjects that matter most to you so if you have a SEO question that you just can't find the answer to or if you want to know how to knock your competitors off the top spot for a particular query post a comment below and we will do our best to cover it.-------------------------------------- -----Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Read , Week

Don't rely on one type of link for PageRank
2007-10-25 12:14:00
The furore surrounding yesterdays PR downgrades doesn't seem to be dying down yet. I've managed to steer well clear of Digital Point so have happily missed most of the discussion so far.The sites that lost PR include a lot of big names that have not lost rankings in Google so most people won't really care. However a loss of PR does make you a bit worried in case a ranking penalty is around the corner.Most sites that lost PR are probably just the victim of Google bringing their scores back down to where they should be. Having adjusted for paid links and devalued links across site networks there must be a huge impact on PR calculations.This update really brings home to me that websites should have as many links as possible from as many different sources as possible. Relying on one type of link is never a very good idea.------------------------------------ -------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Pagerank , Link , Type , Ager , Gera

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!
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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