Posts filed under 'SEO'
According to a recent report by E-Consultancy and search marketing firm, Neutralize (*\*), UK companies are seeing the benefits of paid search engine optimisation or SEO.
The report went on to state, that nearly two thirds of those surveyed had seen increases in excess of 300%, with fourty percent of those experiencing increases of over 500%. Unsuprisingly this has had a knock on effect in terms of increased confidence in UK SEO, and UK search engine marketing in general.
Other key findings in the report were
- 87% of search engine marketers said their organisations paid to advertise on Google, compared to 45% for Yahoo, 33% for MSN, 11% for MIVA and 6% for Ask.
- More than half of respondents (56%) said that their companies spend in excess of £10000 on paid search annually. A quarter of respondents (25%) reported spending more than £100000 annually.
- 62% plan to greatly increase investment in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for natural/organic listings.
- On average, respondants spent circa 32% of their marketing budget on online marketing.
April 16th, 2007
Google has recently announced some interesting new features to sitemaps.org. As well as now being available in 18 languages, including Japanese and German, but they have also made it easier to advise search engine robots of sitemap files.
By adding a line as follows:
Sitemap: http://www.e-gain.co.uk/sitemap.xml (including full URL ie http:// etc
to your robots.txt file, any search engine supporting the sitemap protocol will be able to retrieve the sitemap and process accordingly, including Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.
To read further please visit
April 12th, 2007
I recently came across a “whitepaper” from Daryl Wilcox of Daryl Wilcox Publishing (associated with Sourcewire etc), which provided a very interesting overview of the future of traditional PR, which began with an interesting conjecture in 2017
However it soon returns to normality, and highlights what many PR organisations are starting to consider, namely whether to adapt to changing trends and behaviours as to how people read and gather news. To quote the whitepaper:
“The worst case scenario for PR, and this is real world and not fantasy, is that PR loses significant ground to an apparently more dynamic and imaginative profession - search marketing. The danger is this new discipline will take a bigger slice of the marketing budget at the expense of search marketing will start to take on communications roles which were previously part of the PR function”.
As the report goes onto state, there is already significant evidence of this. Many traditional offline publishers are now pouring money into online. Just look at the BBC. The cricket world cup has coverage from every angle including the widespread use of blogging in order to provide a more personalised overview of the world cup.
Search engines are also the weapon of choice when researching products or services, once the sole domain of offline publishers. Companies are getting wise to this, and the associated spend online is reflective of this trend. Added to this, is the ability of search marketing in order to drive traffic to the site.
Search marketing budgets are often similar to PR budgets nowadays - ranging from retainers for small clients of circa £500 per month to budgets of over circa £50000+ per month. However search marketing has one significant advantage over traditional PR in as far as it can demonstrate return on investment more effectively, easily and objectively. This is particularly important in many companies where every penny is accountable. As a result many search engine marketing companies are offering a range of online PR services such as PR syndication. This impacts PR as many organisations that would never have previously considered PR are now introduced to PR by search marketing agencies.
However the PR industry have been fairly slow in response. The report highlighted the CIPR conference in November 2006, where not one of the 14 sessions had any Online PR bias. As the report puts it - “The transformation of the media by the Internet was not a revolution, it was a slow burn. Now it as a raging fire”
However I am in danger of singing the whitepapers praises too highly. Whilst I fully agree with much of the report (particularly with my SEM hat firmly on), the reference to PR professionals being potentially better at SEO than search marketeers seems slightly of the mark. SEO is not all about numbers, numbers is merely a part of the fully equation, and it is this attention to the numbers along with the terminology and phrasology, that allows us search marketeers to leverage this ROI from online.
However Daryl’s document is written with the PR sector particularly in mind, and as such does an excellent job as such in advising PR of the potential of the Internet, whether or not they choose to utilise that information is another question. To be honest, there is no reason why Search Marketing and PR cannot cohabit side by side. I am currently working with a well respected PR agency, who are wholly embracing Online PR and the opportunities it can offer, and I am sure they want be the last.
To PR agencies. If you haven’t embraced the Internet, call us for a quick chat, to find out more on 01282 411170
To download the whitepaper go to http://www.dwpub.com/whitepapers.php?int=Public_Relations_Versus_Search_Marketing
April 11th, 2007
According to a recent report by Technorati, the increase in the popularity in blogging shows no sign of slowing down. The report stated that Technorati are now tracking over 70 million blogs worldwide, approximately 13 million more than the number detected by the last Technorati report in November 2006.
Blogging by its very nature is more informal than other forms of “content websites” and many build up a considerable fan base, which revisit the site on a frequent basis. These sites are often more respected and trusted by the general public and perceived as being a more reliable source of information than many editorial or official websites.
As blogs are become more mainstream and accepted by commerce as a way of interacting with customers, however there is a danger that this perception will change, and there have been some well documented cases as such, with the Walmart blog probably one of the more well known examples.
However, due to the growing popularity, there has also been the associated problems such as spam blogs, or “Splogs”. These are automated blogs that contain little or no unique content and instead use content lifted from an RSS feed, which is then republished with a link. These are of no real value to human readers and exist largely for black hat search engine optimisation, however these can often rank highly in SERPS or search engine results positions.
Blogs can be an effective tool to interact with potential clients, however it should always be considered
- Who is the potential audience - Ensure that a blog is suitable
- How are your potential audience likely to interact with the blog - If you have a very negative public perception, perhaps such an interactive forum may be inadvisable - however saying that it may be a master stroke if implemented strategically
- What is the tone of your blog - personal/corporate - is this right for your target audience
- How often are you likely to update your blog - the best blogs are updated very regularly and often for this reason alone perform well in the search engines, as well as build up large followings.
- Do you wish to “syndicate” your content - this is important when deciding what platform/software to use - this for example uses wordpress.
- Is search engine optimisation important - you may need some technical tweaks in order to make your blog more friendly
There are a number of blogging experts out there, who can help with a long term Online PR or blogging strategy. If you are in any doubt, contact an expert such as E-Gain to find out more.
April 10th, 2007
I was personally going to blog about this myself this evening, having been in the process of evaluating a self catering holiday village in Blackpool, and noticed the distinct lack of meta information of the site. Whilst the effectiveness (or rather non-effectiveness) of meta tags as regards SEO is now well accepted, they are still useful (much like PPC) in enticing the user to enter your site (apart from other things) and as such should still be considered when optimising a site - particularly if like me you like to be judged by the ROI of the website rather than just the ‘number of 1st place terms’.
However Rand Fishkin or Randfish from SEOMoz has written a brilliant post regarding how meta description tags should be correctly used.
In particular he highlights their three main functions, namely
- To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
- To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
- To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searcher
Rand also went on to say
“You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple - when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.”
To read the article in full, please click here to read Rands article on correct Meta Description usage
April 3rd, 2007
I have read a lot recently regarding personalisation in particular from Google, and much has been debated within the SEO community itself on various forums such as SEW, Threadwatch and Cre8asite as to the ongoing effects of introducing personalisation.
In general, whilst the delivery mechanism of such a drastic change in focus will remain the overiding factor in determining whether such a change works to Google’s benefit (and delivers us consumers the results we expect), the effects of such change will provide us Search Engine Marketeers with new challenges.
However in my opinion such a change can only be good for the industry. Gone are going to be the days where results were based on the number of “number 1 terms” and campaigns will be judged by what they physically deliver to a client in terms of ROI, bringing it inline with other forms of advertising both off and online.
This should in turn make us search engine marketeers/engineers start thinking like more traditional marketeers, and rely on a variety of marketing techniques in order to ensure ROI on the websites. In my opinion not a bad thing, and I doubt that other forms of advertising will ignore those that can deliver such results. That and the use of PPC will probably increase in popularity as advertisers endeavour to ensure constant visibility in key areas.
March 6th, 2007
Gord Hotchkiss featured a very good interview with Google spokesman Matt Cutts regarding a multitude of SEO issues including localised search, personalised search and the future of SEO, and in particular Matt’s perspective on how he sees personalisation of Search affecting SEO in general.
One comment in particular stood out
“Matt: I think that it’s natural that some people would be worried about change, but some of the best SEO’s are the SEO’s that are able to adapt, that are able to look down the road 4 or 5 years and say, “What are the big trends going to be?” and adjust for those trends in advance, so that when a search engine does make a change which you think is inevitable or will eventually happen, they’ll be in a good position. Personalization is one of those things where, if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that’s a clear win for users, and so it’s something that SEO’s can probably predict that they’ll need to prepare for. At the same time, any time there’s a change, I understand that people need some time to adjust to that and need some time to think, “How is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect the industry? And what can I do to benefit from it?”
Of course, the big question is how the lack of a monolithic set of search results will impact the reverse engineering that is typical in SEO. How do you reverse engineer something that’s different for everyone who sees it? Which begs the question, “does personalization mark the end of black hat SEO?
I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.”
Source: Gord Hotchkiss - Search Engine Land
Certainly worth a read - the full interview can be found on Gord Hotchkiss’ blog and the SearchEngineLand website
March 5th, 2007
According to recent report by Hitwise, people visiting search engines accounted for 13.3% of the total UK web visits, nearly 2% greater than the number of visits to Adult websites for January 2007. The marke share of the UK’s internet visits to the search engines increased by nearly 21% year on year in January. This compares against a 14% decline for adult sites.
Whilst many organisations in the UK are taking their search engine marketing/advertising strategies very seriously, there is still some reluctance to embrace online. However as convergence technologies become more mainstream, the use as a maintream advertising source can only continue to increase significantly.
March 1st, 2007
In recent research conducted by compete.com, trends of various Google products were highlighted. The trend was interesting for us Google SEO specialists
Amongst the winners were Google Video, Google Blog, Google Scholar, Google Maps and Google Desktop, whilst the big losers in the report were Google Local, Google Alerts, Google Catalogs and Google’s product network Froogle.
To read the full report, go to the compete.com blog
February 21st, 2007
Over the last couple of months you have probably heard of link baiting or social media optimisation. If you haven’t time to get reading. Since then a number have posts have appeared regarding the subject, however none as good as “Andy Hagans Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing“.
In the guide Andy covers all aspects of Linkbaiting including why, how and what to linkbait. Of particular interest was his bit on linkbait hooks as covered below
“News Hook. The news hook is when you are the first to scoop a story; everyone who carries the story will then (theoretically) link to you as the original source. To get a scoop you don`t need to have insider information (though that doesn’t hurt); you can just be the first site to publicly predict something or to reach a controversial conclusion. Bonus points if your scoop is ‘true’ too then many later-proven-to-be-false scoops will make other bloggers and writers hesitant to reference you again.
Resource Hook. The resource hook occurs when you make an extremely helpful piece of content that everyone will naturally want to bookmark (like this one!). This may be my favorite hook, because as opposed to the news hook, it encourages people to link to and bookmark it for a long period of time. Content that sits there and naturally obtains trusted, relevant backlinks passively? Isn’t that the original white hat SEO wet dream?
Contrary Hook. The contrary hook is when you refute a common myth in your niche. Most little areas of the blogosphere hold certain beliefs to be self-evident; all SEOs know that META tags are dead; all Web2.0 designers know that writing validated code is the right thing to do. Calling these people wrong will usually incite them into talking about you, and linking to you.
Humor Hook. People love to laugh, especially at people in their industry or niche. And most niches have so little levity that almost anything will get you a chuckle and a link. You can even directly cite influential people, and if done in a gentle way, they’ll generally be flattered into linking to it.
Tool Hook. A good link bait tool has one of two characteristics: 1) It is actually useful; or 2) It feeds bloggers’ egos. (Very few examples can do both.) Firefox plugins, free design templates and financial calculators are all examples of tools that have received thousands of valuable backlinks. None of them are too hard for a decent programmer to create.
Award Hook. No official awards in your tiny niche? Why not host them yourself? You can either have a more legitimate award with significant organization and actual prize money like the Bloggies, or you can basically nominate everyone in your niche and hope that half link back to you out of enthusiasm for the community, as with the Search Awards. Both tactics work well. The reason is simply that people like positive recognition and they LOVE rankings. Awards get linked to because they help to legitimatize other people it helps the winners when they promote you. Ah, human nature
Giveaway Hook. Anyone who has been to an SEO conference recently (or any other conference for that matter) is stocked for life on pens, highlighters, key rings, and loads of over freebie junk. Companies fight to give trinkets away at certain events because, when directed towards the right audience, giveaways are a great way to drive sales and get a return far better than any ordinary advertising. The Internet is no different. Text Link Ads gets a lot of love around the blogosphere because they offer a free coupon for new clients. Aaron Wall seems to give away an AdWords coupon every other week how else can you get such branding, traffic and links with a $50 piece of paper?
Research/Statistic Hook. Sometimes just compiled numbers, or any kind of scientific survey, will get a lot of link love, especially in an under-studied area. And while a scientifically-conducted study with valid methodology will often get better links, the (sad?) truth is that almost anything can pass as ‘research’ on the Internet.”
Source:Andy Hagans Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing
Well worth a read…
February 20th, 2007
Next Posts
Previous Posts
