Mon, 6 Oct 2008 15:03:19 by Matt Hopkins
MarketingSherpa have just released the transcripts from their teleseminar entitled "What's working in Search". The information presented comes from several months of research and surveys including around 2,000 SEM companies, consumers/search users, research from their labs, and other sources.
The document covers trends in the search marketing industry itself, but also highlights a few trends with the nature of search. Here's a couple of "take aways" that I found useful:
1. 54% of search phrases 3+ words
Over the past several years, there has been clear evidence that search user behaviour has changed. A few years back, searchers would enter akey term (possibly broad) and then navigate a few pages of Google to locate a relevant result. Today, if a user doesn't see what they want on the first page of Google or another search engine, they rarely (21% at most) navigate to the second page. Instead, ...Read More.
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Mon, 6 Oct 2008 11:04:45 by Joe Bursell
At the end of the last week we came across an issue with Admins adding authors to existing Blogger accounts.
The problem is that when an invitation is sent to a recognised Google account, for that user to become a Blogger author, it is met with this bX-b0uqh3 error:
The problem seems to be caused by Blogger not recognising a fresh (to Blogger) Google account, or more specifically they don’t provide a clear path to resolve it.
The invitation process stumbles and spews the error. The problem isn’t isolated either; there are a few posts in the Blogger Help Group that reference the same issue.
After a bit of experimenting we found a workaround.
1) Log in to Blogger with the Google account details of the person you want to invite, or get your desired author to log in to Blogger with their Google account.
2) Once logged in set that account up as a Blogger user, or get them to...Read More.
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Mon, 6 Oct 2008 09:41:04 by Emily Mace
Now your Search Engine Optimisation campaign is delivering more traffic to your site, it's time to take a look at your conversion rate - are you getting as many sales or sign ups as you'd like from all the extra traffic you are getting?
Take a look at the forms on your site, both for sign up and sales - are these forms easy to use? Are you asking for too much information from your visitor?
Make sure you are only asking for what's important to make a sale, visitors will naturally be hesitant about giving you too much information - "why do you want to know that?" will be their question!
When getting people to sign up for your e-newsletter, do you need their home phone number or address? Users on the web are getting more savvy and they know that an e-newsletter is by email and not by mail, and they will be concerned about being inundated with junk mail at home, so unless you need their home address don't ask for it. If you do need a...Read More.
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Fri, 3 Oct 2008 09:11:59 by Emily Mace
Calling all Muppet Show Fans! Following our recent post about Talk Like A Pirate Day I thought I'd brighten up your Friday by showing you how to make Google talk like the Swedish Chef! I thought I'd have a go and my Google Homepage now looks like this:
To enable this is simple
1. Select Preferences from the side of the current Google search bar
2. From the Interface Language option select "bork, bork, bork!" and select the "Save Preferences" button from the bottom of the screen.
Now you can search with the Swedish Chef and relive those Muppet moments!
Bork Bork Bork!
Emily MaceCampaign Delivery Manager...Read More.
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Thu, 2 Oct 2008 16:14:57 by David Thomas
I would really like to help all of you keen Pay Per Click people out there get to grips with the massive glossary of terms used on a day to day basis by us campaign management types. More often than not I find myself using these terms and abbreviations to new clients that have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. Hopefully by explaining these Pay Per Click Keywords it will give you a better idea of where we are coming from. Think of this as the Bablefish of Pay Per Click.
I will periodically post my keyword term here followed by a brief description to steer you into the right direction to insert this into a conversation over dinner. This will only add credit to your claims of being a PPC expert and really get your friends Hooked!!! ( or at least semi interested)
My Term for today is
Pay-per-click (PPC)
Obviously a great place to start
"This is the Marketing medium that is used ...Read More.
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Thu, 2 Oct 2008 14:59:31 by Matt Hopkins
Industry site topseos.com has once again ranked Vertical Leap as one of the top 10 SEO Companies in the UK. The monthly rankings list published by topseos is a guide to the cream of the crop internet marketing vendors in the industry.
topseos compiles the monthly list of leading internet marketing firms after a rigorous evaluation criteria that includes:
Competitive advantage
Superior services and pricing
Customer and technical support
Response to client problems
Innovations that set it apart from the competition
Overall efficiency
Overall performance
As part of the evaluation process, our clients are asked to give feedback on general and project specific questions such as:
Rate your overall experience.
What type of needs analysis was conducted before work initiated?
What are the most competitive keywords you have been able to rank on the major search engine...Read More.
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Thu, 2 Oct 2008 09:11:23 by Emily Mace
With so many people claiming to do SEO and offering advice on your site and how best to get your site to the top of the pile here are a few tips of things to avoid, and to watch out for your SEO company recommending.
Doorway Pages
A Doorway page is a method of spamming the search engines. Each Doorway is a single page that serves no other purpose that to redirect a search engine to the main site. Doorway pages and websites are highly optimised for a given keywords, high rankings can be achieved for this page, which will drive more traffic to the main site without having to over optimise the main site. Doorway pages are listed in Google's Webmaster Guidelines as something that they will penalise websites for.
Cloaking
Cloaking is another thing Google lists in the webmaster guidelines, and is where your website provides different content to visitors than to Search Engine Crawlers. For example if you provide information with...Read More.
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Wed, 1 Oct 2008 17:37:04 by Matt Hopkins
Did you know that more than 95% of actual purchases still occur offline (i.e. in the real world) - yet a large amount of these purchases started online.
This phenomenon is known as "Research Online / Buy Offline" or "ROBO". Consumers use the internet (i.e. search engines) to learn more about a product and then locate a retailer that sells what they need. But many purchases are unlikely to actually be made online - especially if the product needs to be seen, touched or perhaps it is too large (e.g. flat-screen televisions, gardening equipment, etc).
The opportunity for companies and PPC agencies is to ensure that your products are visible to these consumers. Pay Per Click advertising is a great channel for achieving this - it is quick to establish, can be adjusted in real time, and it is in the right place at the right time. The challenge, however, is in tracking the conversions (sales) that occur offline as a res...Read More.
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Wed, 1 Oct 2008 16:05:56 by Kerry Dye
As Pete pointed out in his blog earlier, the Google interface has remained ostensibly similar since 2001. In fact, there have been quite a number of changes in the pages, most of them pretty subtle.
I remember a major redesign where they eliminated a lot of images and reduced the code size considerably. Clean, tiny code is a bit of a Holy Grail in the Googleplex, and they are infamous for writing JavaScript with the smallest possible character count, including one letter variable names.
And there have been changes to the content of the search results pages, such as Universal Search, which we have now pretty much all got used to.
For many changes, Google runs tests, which sometimes people report on when they see them running. In May 2007, Google actually launched Google Experimental where you can opt in to a particular experiment.
However, there are other tests that are not as well publicised, the latest of which seems to be a trial of the amount of ...Read More.
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Wed, 1 Oct 2008 14:11:07 by Pete Handley
As part of their 10th anniversary, Google have brought back an their oldest available index, meaning that we can search results as if we were back in January 2001.
I love the old school interface that you can search from, but its amazing how little this differs from the one they are employing today.
My first search was of course a vanity one, I Googled my own name first. I was nowhere to be seen, but considering that I was still in college at the time I suspect that my web footprint was virtually nil at that time.
My next search was for "search engine optimisation", just to see what sites used to rank here:
I've been in the SEO business for well over 2 years now, but I have to confess, none of the sites listed here are names that I am aware of nowadays - certainly none of these are top 10 when I search now, but then again, in 2001 there were 12,300 pages competing for the top 10, ...Read More.
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