Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:40:24 by Kerry Dye
I was reading Matt Cutts' blog from yesterday,
about the Toolbar Page Rank update Google are going to be rolling out
and apart from thinking that is was really soon after the last one, I noticed a
couple of interesting things on the comments:
One of the commenters, Dave (original) said,
"Out of interest, does Google have any numbers of Google toolbar users who
*don't* own a web site that enable PageRank intentionally. My guess is they
represent less than 1%."
To which, Matt Cutts' reply was, "I believe
your intuition is way off on this one. The last time I checked, many many more
users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank
display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out".
This is a very interesting thing to say.
Whilst I appreciate that everyone is always trying to find hidden meaning in
Matt's words, I thought this was inte...Read More.
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Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:05:08 by Pete Handley
Google was yesterday named as the UK's top consumer brand for the first time in a study by Superbrands.
Google has this year beaten Microsoft who have held the title for the previous 2 years and moved up 2 places from 3rd.
The biggest worldwide search engine has beaten some old and established prominent brands and now leads the way as the UK's Superbrand. The list in general illustrates the importance of the technology and media sector to the UK market - as along with Google and Microsoft, the BBC, Sony and Apple rate highly.
Other strong performers here are the some members of the automotive world, the drinks giant Coca-Cola, the sports behemoth Nike and an assortment of household goods suppliers.
Being the most popular brand in the UK just illustrates how important searching on the internet has become as this is now a mainstream media distribution channel that is only going to grow further.
Pete HandleyCampaign Deliver...Read More.
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Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:09:05 by Emily Mace
When working with their websites many companies set up micro sites with sub-domains or entirely new domains such as www.yourcompany.com for the main site and http://campaign.yourcompany.com for the micro site or www.campaigncompany.com as a stand alone website address. This may seem like a good idea for making the content in each of your campaign stand out as a separate offer but in the SEO world this isn't a good idea.
When Search Engines view your site they use the website address to identify the site as a stand alone entity, so they will see www.yourcompany.com and www.yourcompany.com/products as part of the same site. However when they see www.campaigncompany.com or http://campaign.yourcompany.com they view this as a separate website, and won't rank the copy in with the rest of your site.
This means that when you are trying to prove that your site should appear highly in search results for your products, your message is diluted across all the campa...Read More.
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Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:41:50 by David Thomas
So you just spent the last 3 months developing your new site and have your adwords campaign set up tuned and ready to start driving targeted traffic to your site. Keywords stand poised to attract the traffic and your clients land in the right place to sign up and buy your product or service....You can now sit back and watch the sign ups and money roll in right....
Wrong!!
Pay Per Click (Adwords) campaigns once built tested and fine tuned can be the source of some very targeted traffic to your site but converting those clicks is the really tricky part, this is where your landing page steps up to the mark!
So what is the landing page?
After a visitor has clicked on your ad in the sponsored links through the search engine of choice the searcher will come into the site at a designated page. This is the Landing Page. Now this has been established what and how do you promote trust in your searchers and convert their search to a sign up........here are a few tips I have l...Read More.
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Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:07:00 by Joe Bursell
Wikia was launched at the turn of the new year (Jan '08 that is). Pete wrote a great blog about it, but as that was 6 months ago I thought it'd be worth going back and taking another look- with a different perspective.
My idea of what a search engine should be is clearly quite different to Jimmy Wales', but that doesn't mean I think Wikia has no place on the web- far from it. Calling Wikia a search engine is a little ambiguous for my taste. Sure, it provides search results, but they're collated in a markedly different way than the current methods used by Yahoo!, MSN Google etc. That difference is why I'm not sure it really qualifies as a search engine any more.
For a good discussion of Wikia have a look at this cnet article, and for the most recent changes look here.
As I'm a little vain I used Wikia to search myself, and see what those changes are like. The first thing that brought a smile to my face was the amount of editing you can do. To shun...Read More.
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Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:12:44 by Joe Bursell
As an SEO consultant my remit is to get your site ranking for the right keywords, increasing your traffic, increasing the long-tail and generally promoting your website on and off-page so that your business grows. These marketing activities are at the core of my "SEO life".
Now, in my humble opinion, marketing is also about communication- on a person to person level, and if you work in SEO this should be manifest in your client relationships. That doesn't mean that your SEO consultant should be a super-communicator, but they should at the very least understand that you have the capacity to comprehend what it is that they do for you.
If you're currently working with an SEO consultant, or are looking for one, there are some questions that will help you sort the good from the bad- they're not about rankings, or visits, or the long-tail, they are to assess whether that SEO is fundamentally any good at their job.
Do they:
1) .....Read More.
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Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:55:26 by Kerry Dye
As I was testing some client results, I
noted that my searches on Live.com were not getting numbered. I use a great
little script for the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin
as detailed by Joe's blog on Firefox plugins here.
After a quick search I determined that
there wasn't one available. But then I had a quick look at the one I have to
Number MSN Results and wondered if it would work the same for Live.
And lo and behold, it does. Here are the
instructions:
Right click on your Greasemonkey icon in the bottom right hand
corner.
Select "Manage User Scripts"
Find the "Number MSN Results" script
In "Included Pages" select "Add".
Type http://search.live.*
in the box and click OK
You should now have
something that looks like this
Click close, and now searching live.com has numbered results
too!
There...Read More.
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Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:46:02 by Emily Mace
With the current increases to the cost of living in the UK, the spend in high street shops has been falling. However, recent online results have shown that, in the UK, the amount of money spent online is increasing and not falling as on the high street.
The internet offers shoppers the ability to make some huge savings and also allows them to shop from home or work without the costs of travel. Many online stores offer free delivery as well as their online discounts. Where shoppers are looking to take advantage of these great savings the average UK online spend is now a massive £145 million a day!
Research conducted by IMRG (Interavtive Media in Retail Group) shows that the high end and Lower end products are the areas where online stores are seeing the major benefits of this upturn in online shopping.
In addition the research shows that more and more people are using the internet as a research tool before making major purchases and ...Read More.
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Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:45:11 by Pete Handley
When I was looking in Google's Webmaster Tools to verify a new sitemap for one of my clients this morning, I observed that there are now a number of additional sitemap options available for submission.
Previously there have been options for "general" sitemaps and "mobile" sitemaps, but now there are some newer ones too:
Code Search Sitemaps
Geo Sitemaps
Video Sitemaps
So what are these doing, and why would you use them?
The code search sitemap help users to "find function definitions and sample code by enabling them to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet" - so you tell Google about Public Source code that you are hosting and this can enable it to appear in Code Search.
Geo Sitemaps are to help users to make content searchable in Google Earth and Google Maps. This allows you to tell Google where to find something on a map without them having to find it from another s...Read More.
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Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:44:40 by David Thomas
As of early May 2008 Google implemented major changes to its
trademarks policies and lifted restrictions on branded keywords being used in competitor's
campaigns in the UK and Ireland. Many advertisers/agencies were displaying
apprehension and concern toward the changes and the effects on their campaigns.
As an
Ad Words professional I too had a sceptical outlook to the changes and their
effects. We are now over 2 months into the new format and as ever the decision
from the search Zeus reigned and the storm is slowly blowing over and the calm
setting back in.
Policies Overview
Previously advertisers could
submit keywords with Google that they have trademarks on, i.e. Nike, Audi and
Addidas etc and supplic...Read More.
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