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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!

Are Digg the best linkbaiters of all-time?
2007-05-24 01:53:00
Everyone always talks about how SEO's manipulate social media websites such as Digg in order to potentially gain hundreds of natural inbound links from the huge amount of traffic generated from promoted stories. Seeing that SEO's are getting quite a bit of stick I thought I'd take a look at this from a slightly different angle and by analysing some of the inbound link stats Digg aren't doing too badly themselves! A story which made the Digg homepage last week from TechEBlog titled top 5 Google tricks was arguably a piece of content crafted specifically for the social media audiences. But linkbait or not the story was successful and what I found particually interesting was that while this generated 725 inbound links the actual Digg story also gained a similar total with 688 links.So for every pathetic SEO who profits from Digg (I won't link to the original source of this video as he doesn't like linkbait!) the link juice seems to be shared fairly evenly, also benefiting Digg ve...
More About: Time

My First #1 Google Ranking - Blog Meme
2007-05-15 23:17:00
I first saw this idea at the SEO1 forum and thought it would work well as a blog meme, so here goes:My first #1 Googl e ranking was while at Uni back in 2002 when I did a multimedia project to create a driving school website. I put this up on my personal website and next thing I knew a couple of weeks later I was getting several daily requests to take people on driving lessons around Oxford! When looking into where this sudden interest had come from I found the website was ranking at number 1 in Google for an "Oxford Brookes Driving School" search which is still at #1 today. I'm not really sure why people searched for this but they obviously did, I've changed the contact details since then though so my driving instructor career hasn't been going quite so well recently! :)I think you normally tag 5 blogs in these meme things but seeing that this is just getting started I've picked 10 of the blogs I subscribe to (is that another meme in itself?), would be great to hear how some of ...
More About: Meme , Blog , Ranking

Matt Cutts says paid directory links are fine
2007-05-15 19:34:00
In a recent post I questioned the value passed from paid directory listings following Google's attempts to find paid links.Matt Cutts has now clarified the situation by stating that directory listings are fine providing the purpose of the fee is for a selective review, with only quality sites accepted rather than the directory becoming a "free-for-all link site".I have to admit I've been impressed with Google's transparency over some algorthim questions this week, Matt Cutt's also confirmed yesterday that some sites have been given the -950 penalty as a result of over on-page optimisation.-------------------------Sea rch Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Links , Directory , Paid , Matt Cutts

Beginners Guide to Getting Traffic from Smaller Social Media Voting Sites
2007-05-13 23:09:00
If like me, you've read all the articles about how easily you can get onto the Digg homepage, but have so far struggled to create that killer piece of content, then you'll probably want to hear about alternative methods of achieving social media bookmarking success. A small percentage of people may get it right first-time and receive the necessary 25+ diggs to become a promoted story straight away, but the rest of us will probably have to work a bit harder, learn from our mistakes and build up towards the ton of traffic and nice amount of new inbound links which come as a result of a popular story!I find there seems to be a new "I made it onto Digg once so I'm an expert" post every other day now, so here's my "I haven't made it onto Digg yet, but have managed to get some traffic from a few of the smaller sites" post instead! It's obviously not impossible for beginners to get popular on the main sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Reddit, but it certainly is easier if you have a...
More About: Social , Media , Traffic , Sites , Guide

Google integrating AdSense and AdWords logins in UK
2007-05-11 14:46:00
While logging into my AdSense account today I was greeted with an option to update my AdSense and AdWords login to a single Google Account login. AdSense publisher accounts were upgraded in the US last week, but it now appears that Google have started to roll this out in the UK.Here's the screenshot (click image for full-size):This is something that was previously available for AdWords but until now the AdSense login has remained separate from Google accounts. There have been many requests in the past for transfering money between AdWords and AdSense accounts so it will be interesting to see if this is a step towards making that feature available.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Adsense , Adwords , Ense , Integra

Google Analytics gets facelift
2007-05-09 11:47:00
Logging into my Google Analytics account this morning I noticed the following alert:"Over the next several weeks, we will be migrating all existing Analytics accounts to the new Google Analytics interface. You will be notified by email once your account has been migrated. For an entire month you will be able to access both the original interface and the new interface. During the migration, you should experience no interruption in service and you will be able to see all of your data regardless of which interface you use."The Google Analytics blog announced the new version yesterday, which generally looks like a cleaner, easier to use system. Here's a list of the new improvements:"Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date...
More About: Facelift , Lift

Linkbaiting vs Directories Link Building Debate
2007-05-06 20:53:00
Lyndon Antcliff has started an interesting (and slightly heated) discussion about how social voting beats directories for link building. In my opinion there are still some good arguments for submitting to quality directories, but I totally agree that linkbaiting is the way to go and if successful the benefits are far greater than submitting to directories. It's also far more enjoyable to watch how many people vote or link to your content then it is submitting to directories for hours, so that helps! :) Link baiting may not suit everyone however as it requires a certain degree of creativity and understanding about how the social media systems work and how to manipulate what the audience likes to see, whereas anyone can submit to a directory. I wouldn't completely disregard submitting to directories as a link building technique just yet and probably wouldn't go as far to say directories are dead, but perhaps Google's recent efforts to find paid links could suggest it is dying a slo...
More About: Building , Link Building , Debate , Directories

Internet World conference highlights
2007-05-03 15:54:00
Yesterday I attended the Internet World conference in Earls Court, London. I've never been to the event before but found many of the conferences and exhibitions very useful, below I've listed some of the main notes I took away from the day.Microsoft adCenterThe first talk I attended was from Microsoft adCenter, this was basic but my experience of adCenter isn't great so I found this useful.Some information I found useful was:The Average MSN searcher spends £2,000 online in 6 months (I think this must be based upon adCenter conversion information).Over 11 million people in UK use MSN Messenger8.8 million people in UK have an MSN Hotmail accountOver 5 million people use Live search each month in the UKadCenter audience "is also more likely to convert than any other - 70% more than the average UK searcher and over twice as likely as Google searchers."This also talked about how Windows Live Passport details are used for demographic targeting, this allow you to bid upon keywords targ...
More About: Highlights , Lights , Highlight

Add SEOptimise to Technorati favourites
2007-05-02 00:35:00
I've just noticed my Technorati favourited by figures have jumped quite a bit recently, it's upto 64 members now but the last time I checked it was 2, and one of them was me!100 members would be a good target to get, if you'd like to add SEOpti mise to your Technorati favourites please click the button below. And while your at it why not subscribe to the RSS feed, connect to my LinkedIn profile and join the MyBlogLog community and Blog Catalog neighbourhood too :)Update: The large increase in favourites has come from this evil, lazy or smart plan, cheers Andy!-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Nora , Favourites

5 reasons why Google PageRank is overrated and 5 more about how it can stil
2007-05-01 19:56:00
With the latest Google PageRank update currently underway I thought I'd share a list of 5 reasons why PageRank should be taken with a pinch of salt. Yes it's nice to have an increase in PR, but other than seeing that little green bar move up a bit it doesn't really mean too much else in terms of importance and it definitely shouldn't be relied upon as heavily as a search ranking factor anymore.5 reasons why Google PageRank is overhyped: Authority/Trustrank is the new PageRankIf you want a high quality, respected website you should be looking to become an authority in your field. Building trust with the search engines and becoming a leading site within a certain catergory is what counts in terms of achieving high search rankings, PageRank in this respect is irrelevant. PageRank is updated continuallyJust because your site has gone from a PR4 to PR5 this doesn't mean you'll see an instant jump in search rankings, PageRank is updated continually by Google and is far more complex ...
More About: Pagerank , Google Pagerank , Stil , Reasons

Google PageRank update started
2007-04-30 01:27:00
The latest Google PageRank update looks like it's currently underway. I've noticed a few websites which have seen increases, this blog being one of them going from PR4 to PR5. There were rumours of buggy PageRank data last week but it doesn't seem to be a false alarm this time as many datacenters are now showing updates, not just the Google toolbar. Here is another example to show the increase of www.placesun.co.uk from a PR4 to PR5 on all datacenters.-------------------------Sear ch Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Pagerank , Google Pagerank , Update , Tart

Yahoo! Panana on it's way to UK!
2007-04-24 11:17:00
I receieved the following email from Yahoo ! Search Marketing this morning, look's like we won't have to wait too much longer for the Panama platform in the UK:"Dear Advertiser,The New Sponsored Search Is Coming!We previously announced that an improved marketing platform is on its way, full of advanced, easy-to-use features that will help you better connect with customers looking for your products and services on Yahoo! Search Marketing's distribution network. Please take a moment to read our plans for assisting you during the transition to the new Sponsored Search.We've been thoroughly testing our systems to help ensure a quality experience once advertiser accounts are upgraded, and will shortly begin the process of notifying advertisers about their account upgrade.You will be notified of your upgrade date two weeks in advance of your upgrade. You will also be able to access a preview of what your account will look like after the upgrade, to help you become familiar with the fea...
More About: Nana

5 Reasons Why I Blog
2007-04-23 21:39:00
I've been tagged by Joe Williams so it looks like it's my turn to list 5 reasons why I blog!1) Improve search rankingsIt's no secret that one of the main reasons I write this blog is to help improve the site's search rankings. Providing original content about the latest search news can lead to many natural incoming links, helping to improve search rankings for a range of long tail keywords for individual posts as well as giving a boost to general results for the whole domain. 2) Keeping fresh with the latest newsBecause the search industry is continually changing so rapidly, I think it's very important to have a website which reflects this. Showing readers that you know about the latest Google algorithm or AdWords quality score update and the impact this will have upon results. I've found that writing a blog has also encouraged me to keep up-to-date with what people in the industry are writing about, learning different bits from each which I can incorporate into my own blog.3)...
More About: Blog , Reasons , Sons

Pay Per Click Roundup 23/4/2007
2007-04-23 16:13:00
I meant to post this on Friday but didn't quite get round to it, anyway here's a recap of the pay-per-click advertising news I found of interest during the last week.Google AdWordsOn the Radio: more on Audio Ads - Inside AdWordsIntroducing preferred cost bidding - Inside AdWordsUsing Google Analytics with Website Optimizer - Google Analytics BlogGoogle AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding Not Welcomed - SERoundtableGoogle Pay Per Action First Results For Publishers & Advertisers - SERoundtableDoes "GoogleClic k " Spell The End For Bid Managers? - Search Engine LandNew Google AdWords Dashboard Looks Like Yahoo Panama - Search Engine JournalGoogle Ads Tracking Mouse-Over - Google BlogoscopedHow to lower your AdWords minimum bid - eWhisper.netYahoo! Search MarketingFaster, Simplified Online Customer Checkout - YSM BlogUpgrades and Enhancements - YSM BlogPunctilious Punctuation - YSM BlogDespite Panama, Yahoo Earnings Fall 11 Percent -- Investments Blamed - Search Engine LandMicrosoft adCente...
More About: Pay Per Click , Roundup , Pay-per-click

New Google AdWords SMS Text Phone Alerts
2007-04-22 13:47:00
You can now sign-up for Google AdWords SMS text phone alerts, which can "send your cell phone timely text message alerts for budgeting and billing".For more information please view the Google Help Centre About Phone Alerts page.-------------------------Search Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Google Adwords , Adwords , Text

Google AdWords Account Snapshot out of Beta
2007-04-22 13:31:00
Google have been testing an AdWords Account Snapshot page in beta since November but this has now been made available for all advertisers.My account this morning contained the following alert:"New! Check out the Account Snapshot page. Get an overview of your account on a single page, including actionable alerts and key performance stats. Click 'Account Snapshot' in the Campaign Management tab to try it out." The Account Snapshot is now available under the campaign management tab, as shown in the screenshot of my own account below, please click here for more information.Click image for full-size screenshot:-------------------------Searc h Engine Optimisation - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Google , Beta , Google Adwords , Adwords , Count

Google AdSense displayed without ad notice on LinkedIn
2007-04-20 00:11:00
I spotted today that LinkedIn is currently displaying a plain text advert at the top of it's homepage which is provided by Google AdSense, containing no sponsored links or Ads by Google notice! Here is a screenshot's of an advert which is currently being displayed (highlighted in red box), this is generated by Google AdSense JavaScript and links to a pagead2.googlesyndication.com URL, clicking on the image shows a full-size screenshot where I've hovered over "SEO Compare The Definitive Top Five SEO Websites" so you can see the URL at the bottom of the browser.2 example AdSense ads displayed on LinkedIn homepage: It looks like LinkedIn is a Google search network partner so they will have more ad formats available to them than regular AdSense publishers, but until now AdSense ads have always been marked as sponsored links even if the Ads by Google notice isn't always displayed. An example of another Google partner displaying ads without the Ads by Google notice is MySpace but all ...
More About: Adsense , Google Adsense , Notice , Ense