Despite the moustache making a fashion comeback in recent years, we here in the Think Tank tend to view that particular item of facial hair with the same disgust, suspicion and disdain as any other respectable citizen, but that didn’t stop many of us participating in Movember last year. It’s a month of sponsored tache-cultivating in aid of prostate cancer prevention, research and awareness. As Kelvin remarked on the internet marketing podcast, it’s a great cause with superb marketing, and we’re proud to be part of it yet again.
From the 1st of November we will be letting their hair down. The hair on our upper lip that is. Last year we raised over a thousand pounds for the cause and we’re hoping to improve on that this year. You can track our progress on the SiteVisibility Movember Team page, both in terms of growth and sponsorship. Perhaps you might consider sponsoring us or getting involved yourself, if you’re the type of individual who can cultivate the appropriate fuzz. Read on
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!
Maybe I’m stuck in the past but I don’t think link builders give enough attention to back link analysis. The process of understanding who links to who is, in my eyes, an unavoidable step in the process of building the type of links that lead to more search traffic.
I think a big part of this oversight is based upon the fact that many people oversimplify the back link analysis process. In my talk at A4U London today on the Competitive Sleuthing Panel, I explained where I think the real value is in back link analysis. Read on
This week, Kelvin and Andy are discussing the latest News and Tools. They’re discussing the new Facebook updates including the addition of the ticker, what the introduction of the Kindle Fire will mean for Amazon and digital marketers, and a few books that Kelvin has on the top of his reading list.
We’re also looking for any of you, our fantastic listeners, who have found that listening to the podcast has had a great impact on your business or career. If this sounds like you, please get in touch with us!
With any technical onsite optimisation, there are always a number of common issues that sites run into and in this screencast, Kelvin takes you through the process of dealing with these problems.
There’s a really interesting trend I’ve seen in some excellent posts like PR has a big role in joined up marketing, but can it step up? by Danny Whatmough, talking about Earned and Owned Media in relation to PR and Social media. Earned and Owned Media are part of a trinity with Paid Media.
Lots of people have been talking about this in the world of PR and Social media, but not in search, which is a shame as I would have thought the industry should be thinking about these ideas.
I’m a big believer that there’s a fine line between Link Building and SEO and I’d go as far as saying as ‘online earned media’ is probably a better description of what most link builders get up to rather than building links. Read on
This post outlines the most important HTML elements for SEO. So even if you don’t know any html at all, hopefully by the end of reading this you will be able to check whether you are optimising all the main tags that Google will be looking at.
The Title tags
are the first tags that a spider looks for when arriving on your page. This is the most important html element to place your keywords. Here you need to put your most important keywords for the page eg:
<title>SEO Services Company | SEO Search | Digital Marketing & PPC Agency </title>
You don’t need to include your company name here because you are likely to be optimising this throughout your site without even trying. So rather than wasting characters it is more important to get the most competitive and the most relevant keywords here.
This week’s episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast has been borrowed from a BrightonSEO presentation. We know that most of you weren’t able to make it, and we wanted to share with you some of the talks. James Carson is Head of Search Marketing at Bauer Media. His presentation, “Dr Social Love: Or how I learned to Stop worrying about Google Algorithms and Love the People” was an overview of significant developments in social media marketing, how social activity relates to search strategies and how to “socially charge” marketing content to ensure that it is shared and linked to.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes the ideal search marketer. We’ve been doing quite a lot of recruiting, which is never easy, and I’ve been discussing whether we ought to re-jig our company mission statement. Both these processes have converged and led me to believe that the most important quality in any search marketer is being inquisitive. Let me explain why.
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.
