Posted by Kelvin in Search Marketing on January 20th, 2012 2 Comments
When I first started out in linkbuilding it was a very different landscape. Generally, it was a bit easier to build links but a whole lot harder to find the data about what type of links you required.
We are now in almost a polar opposite position; we are drowning in data but struggling to turn that into strategies to generate links. The radar graph is the secret sauce in determining your link building strategy. Using Radar Graphs and MajesticSEO data you can understand how you compare to specific competitors and the market as a whole. I think this is really important as SEO is relative – it’s not about absolute values but how you compare to your competitors.
Local search can be very important. We often talk about online marketing as a way of reaching global markets, but for many businesses effective local optimisation can be the best way to find new sources of traffic and income. There have been recent changes to the appearance of Google Places search results, and this post looks at a few of the key parts of local search optimisation.
Getting Included
To be included in Google Places there should be a contact page onsite. This should include full contact names, addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses etc. It is also advisable to add this information to site footers. Read on
Posted by Lyndsey in Search Marketing on November 22nd, 2011 0 Comments
For luxury brands, bridging the gap between traditional and digital marketing is proving particularly challenging, more so than for their high street counterparts.
Shopping online for luxury gifts and goods is an interesting concept as a great deal of the “luxurious experience” one has when shopping in real life is lost. Those who have traditionally bought luxury thrive on the experience of buying – the atmosphere of the store: the ability to see, touch and smell the products are a big part of the process.
As the sensory experience of the store cannot be recreated online many luxury brands have had to choose whether to sacrifice the “experience”. This has resulted in many refraining from actually selling their product online. Instead they create an impressive looking site with videos and flash images that often supply product information, store locators and catalogues. Many sites will often include interactive features to maintain customer’s interest and keep them on the site for longer Read on
In this instalment of the ABC’s of SEO, I wanted to hit on a few subjects around international SEO. Increasingly businesses are looking to tap into foreign markets and search is obviously a very powerful way of doing just that.
Do Google Favour Local Domain Suffixes?
There was a conversation recently in our LinkedIn Discussion Group about domain suffixes and their effect on rankings. Colin asked whether having a foreign domain such as .co (registered in Colombia) makes it more difficult to climb search engine results pages in the UK. Google will prioritise relevant domain suffixes, but there are many other ranking factors. Look around, international sites can still rank really well. Some businesses really benefit from having these bespoke URLs, such as bit.ly or del.icio.us.
Having local domain suffixes is generally thought of as best practise, but there are other things to consider to maximise your performance. Google also score geographical relevance by checking where the server of a website is based, so it could be worth ensuring that this is the country in question. Additionally, a geographic location for a site can be specified on Webmaster Tools.
Three months I had a hair-brained idea it would be interesting to see who in the office who was the best at predicting the future. Obviously we’re a search agency, and you’d expect us to be able to reasonably accurately estimate the success of an SEO campaign, whether that’s due to intuition, analysis or forecasting. I set up a Google doc with ten clients and one of their keywords with its current ranking. The task of the experimenters was simple. They just had to predict the ranking in three months time. The more accurate they were the more they scored.
Generally people didn’t do too bad, but far away the most successful of our predictors was Lyndsey. A Global Hypercolour t-shirt is winging her way to her as a prize. What the experiment did show some interesting patterns. What I found is that we’re better at improving results than we give ourselves credit for, and that Graeme, who gets involved in our forecasting, is the most conservatitive of our team when it comes to these estimates!
Well call it synchronicity or opportunism, but the day I come to write my blog post about grammar in SEO, is the day on which Matt Cutts, Google’s content overlord, published a video about the correlation between good spelling and page rank. But there are a variety of good reason why grammar is important for SEO.
Keywords
I think that an interest in words, punctuation and grammar can really help an SEO when thinking of keyword synonyms, acronyms, misspellings and such. It’s the same eye for detail which can help you to use those keywords and phrases naturally and correctly within copy.
Audiences
Working in search, it’s sometimes too easy to forget that content is for readers. We spend so much time trying to manipulate search results with highly targeted content, sometimes we risk sacrificing quality for exposure. When creating a website, the written word is the most popular way of communicating, and making it clear, concise and sensical should be paramount.
Search Engines
The Matt Cutts video admits that despite the correlation between good spelling and grammar and high page rank, they are not currently being used as “direct signals”. It will probably be quite tricky to give a website score based on its spelling and grammar, but he has indicated that it is something he would support. Google have admitted that they use testers to manually score sites’ quality, asking questions like “Would you trust this site with your credit card?”, so it is possible that a site can be penalised for poor grammar.
For anybody who runs a website, launching a new site can be a nerve-wracking time. A smooth transition between sites requires careful attention to many details, including ensuring that potential customers aren’t greeted with error pages during the transitional period and that SEO rankings and credentials are maintained for the new site. This blog post details some best practices for site migration.
Preparation
The first thing to remember when launching a new site is to not delete the old one! Tweak the new site on development servers (blocking the search engine spiders) and only replace the original site once you are confident about the new version.
If you are not in control of the old site, or want to create a version on your computer for safety, then you can use website copying programmes such as HTTrack. This will create an offline version of the site which should work just like the real thing.
Alternatively you could use programmes like Xenu, which provides a report of all URLs and URIs. This is information worth keeping a copy of, to ensure that these resources are not lost when the new site launches.
Posted by Nick in Search Marketing on August 9th, 2011 0 Comments
It’s the big day. For weeks you’ve worked on your website, ironed out the bugs and now it’s ready to go live. It’s done. Your website is live and you systematically start checking your emails for the orders & enquiries to start raining in. But they don’t. As the days go on realise that your site isn’t the overnight sensation you thought it would be and people aren’t getting as excited as they should be about it.
If this sounds like you then you’re in the right place.
It’s highly likely that just being online is going to be enough for your million dollar idea and you’re going to need to promote your website to get it publicity. But what approach do you take? There’s almost definitely a right and wrong answer to this but I’m not here to preach which one is right, you can make your own decisions, I’m just going to tell you what those answers are:
I won’t rehash that article, but my gut feeling was, G could be fairly confident if something was popular Google+, it would likely to be popular on other social sites. But gut-feeling is rarely enough. So I carried out tiny scale correlation study looking at one site and whether there was any mathematical relationship between the number of shares on Google+ and the other social sites.
Your search agency is now charging you £5k per month so it makes sense to invest in your own in-house SEO Manager and pocket the change. It’s not that simple…..
Taking search marketing in-house seems like a logical step for many businesses as an increasing digital marketing spend begins to dwarf the importance and value of other channels, but the reality is that doing so can be time-consuming, expensive and risky. While clients often appreciate the planning, processes and technological innovation of search agencies, I’ve started a list of other factors to consider when evaluating the business case for taking Search in-house.
Cost
Among the most important issues to consider when taking digital marketing in house is cost. Remember to factor in the cost of recruitment, training, personal development and employment costs. Search specialists have an insatiable desire to learn and that requires an ongoing investment if you want to retain your new recruits. Read on
