Archive for September, 2009
With SEO coming up to its 20th birthday, a lot has changed since the use of keywords in tiny white text on white backgrounds!
Now with Google’s latest “Orion” update, it looks like meta-descriptions may be following the same fate as meta keywords. Which begs the question of what would happen if Google decided meta titles were no longer a worthy ranking factor?
Well thankfully, your title tag is still one of the most important factors to optimise for. But if you’ve optimised your page content and you’re still not achieving the SEO results you were hoping for, what next?
Integrating your paid and organic search campaigns with your other marketing channels can dramatically increase website traffic and leads, whilst maximising ROI across the entire marketing mix. Especially when you embed integrated search deep within the marketing strategy.
What has THEME, KOALA & CAPER got to do with integrated search?
Since discovering the famous marketing acronyms AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and SOSTAC (Situational Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, Control), I’ve been a big fan of handy ways to remember strategic marketing techniques.
So, since working at SiteVisibility I’ve been testing a number of models to help our clients increase website traffic and conversions, whilst reducing their PPC spend. I’ve developed these into 3 integrated search models made up 5 letter acronyms…
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Last week Google announced they were testing the use of ‘Jump to’ links in snippets, which direct users to the part of the page which is most relevant for a particular query using named anchors within the page. Richard at Seogadget has a nice write up of how Google is using these links and how you can go about influencing them.
Basically, Google is latching onto id names within the markup of a page. i.e. www.mydomain.com#my-named-anchor.
The problem is a lot of javascript/ ajax scripts also use the # tag in the url and named anchors to trigger actions within the content of the page and Google might not be filtering these properly from the pages which use named anchors in the traditional way to jump to parts of the page.
As an example the FLA’s car finance guide triggers the ‘Jump to’ links on this query:
Read on
If you’re carrying out a varied search marketing campaign and performing well on Google, the chances are you’ll be doing quite well on the other search engines, but that’s not always the case.
And with Bing’s growing market share and impending deal with Yahoo, it’s becoming more important than ever to resolve any issues you may be having with Microsoft’s search engine baby.
So what can you do specifically that will help your search engine rankings on Bing?
Read on
You may have heard a few months ago that Fresh Egg, our friends along the coast made a rather impressive appointment making James Caan from BBC’s hit show Dragons Den their chairman.
James and his ‘Dragon’ collegues are famed for their tough negotiation skills and astute judgement but what does one of the UK’s most high profile investors getting involved in SEO mean for the UK search industry.
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Though the fuss about widget’s really seems to have quietened down in recent months, there really did seem a strong agenda of pushing them as an elixir of ‘doing social media’, and while I can’t argue with the success stories, it’s not hard to search Facebook and the like and find failed widgets of every shape and size.
And while with every marketing campaign there will be successs and failures, I think there’s definate reasons why some web agencies have been keen to push widgets as the magic wand.
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Around a year ago, I started in my new role as Resource and Project Manager. One of the problems we were having was keeping track of all the small tasks we did for our clients. Unlike web projects which usually consist of large tasks ie design phase, build phase, alpha, beta etc, with Search Engine Optimisation, the work is usually split into much smaller tasks and done by a variety of specialists.
The joys of tracking time
We tried various ways of keeping track of all the tasks that were completed for each client but found that we were ending up with a large amount of spreadsheets, no way of tracking exactly who did the tasks (being a small team tasks were often swapped around and there was no record of this) and exactly how many hours were spent on each task.
After looking into a variety of time tracking solutions we came across Intervals (http://www.myintervals.com/). What we liked about Intervals was its ability to be adapted to the way that out individual company worked.
Intervals is actually more suited to larger projects than the ones we work on but it’s fairly easy to adjust it. Read on
I can’t say the word Canonicalization in a client meeting without prefacing it with ‘one of the most over the top words in SEO’ but despite the somewhat clumsy name, the problem where your content can be found across multiple addresses despite only being one file on your server which confuses search engines, is surprisingly common.
As part of any kick off of an SEO project we go through our standard checklist of potential problems, much like any SEO, we have a whole section dedicated to the most common types of Canonicalization and duplication, if a new project gets a clean sweep I’ll make the whole office a cup of tea, and if you work in our office you’ll know how rare an occurrence that is!
So what are the reasons why Canonicalization is such a common problem?
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Mostly I spend my time doing search marketing for companies, and the edges between what we do and social media are a bit blurry. We’re not alone in that like almost any company that’s doing anything that slightly overlaps with social media, we’ve been trying to get a piece of the pie.
Given the current financial climate, it makes even more sense to explore other ways make more money from your agency other than your traditional business. I’d like to think we’re different, but the sad news is for most companies their agency can’t really help them no matter what they set out to achieve. Read on
We were lucky enough to interview one of the worlds most respected analytics experts, Avinash Kaushik, fairly recently for our Internet Marketing Podcast. We were really pleased with how it went, we had some great feedback from our listeners, and Avinash enjoyed it so much he included it in a free CD that’s being bundled with his next book! Yet another reason to order it!
His next book Analytics 2.0 is a follow-up to the analytics bible that is Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. You can read all about the book over on it’s microsite, but as far as I know it’s the first published book on web analytics that really deals with the thorny issues of how to measure social media.
If you can’t wait for the book to be available on amazon you should have a look at Avinash’s blog or have a read of these posts on the difficulty of measuring social media.
Read on
It used to be the case that if you wanted to demonstrate the power of anchor text in Google’s algorithm, you pointed someone at an example of a Google Bomb. Now that Google have altered their algorithm it’s hard to find good examples of link text’s importance. Having said that, RishiL’s recent example of Google Caffeine ranking for Caffeine, almost exclusively on the power of anchor text, illustrates just how important it still is.
But as link building becomes more about content than link requests, how can you get the anchor text you want without even asking for it?
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