Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:36:39 by Joe Bursell
Recently Google has released a beta of it's search based keyword tool. It is intended for PPC usage, but there is some SEO value to be gained in terms of keyword research and selection.
It compares your website (and any current PPC campaigns) with historic search queries, and identifies extra keywords that might be useful.
Here's a snapshot of some results:
...Read More.
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Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:57:30 by Joe Bursell
A year ago I blogged about latent semantic indexing, but didn't offer any SEO tools to test if your content could be seen as contextually relevant, or if your keywords are seen by the engines as closely related to other, perhaps equally useful keywords.
After doing some nosing around I found Princeton University's lexical database that offers suggestions for related words. It works, but ...Read More.
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Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:12:25 by Pete Handley
If you are expecting some downtime on your website - perhaps you might be moving web servers or need to perform some server maintenance? If this is going to happen, and you know about it in advance, then there are some steps that you can take to prevent your site being re-indexed by the Search Engines at just the wrong time and protect all those SEO results you have been working to maintain a...Read More.
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Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:16:29 by Matt Hopkins
The IDC have just released the results of a study on social networking services (SNS) such as FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.
Their research shows that SNS sites have great market penetration with more than half of US consumers (with Internet access) using such sites regularly. They also believe that this will grow over the coming years.
So good news for SNS sites, but not gr...Read More.
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Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:53:25 by David Thomas
Welcome back Pay Per Clickers!
Following on from part 3 of my Glossary, This weeks term I have hand picked for all you keen Pay Per Click guys out there is one that has a real sense of importance within a PPC campaign. Many prospective clients and newbies turning to PPC for the first time want to know what the figures are behind this term as it relies heavily on the amount spent on a c...Read More.
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Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:53:45 by Kerry Dye
This is part 3 of my occasional series on “Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign”. The first part was about the long tail and the second was using search engine traffic levels. This third instalment uses one of the many other metrics available to website owners: conversion.
We post about conversion quite often on this blog, because it is an important element of your website...Read More.
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Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:31:07 by Matt Hopkins
We've just released the first in a collection of landing page templates that you can use in your own PPC campaigns. These templates are professionally designed around certain core themes - the first one being released today is designed to support your Christmas "special offers".
Each set of templates will include:
main offer page - simply add your copy ...Read More.
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Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:48:33 by Emily Mace
When I was browsing the web the other day I found a really good article on the importance of internet marketing at the current time. Internet marketing gives you some real flexibility for marketing your business and responding to trends quickly whenever needed. The costs associated with some tweaks to your SEO or website content will be more cost effective to you tha...Read More.
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Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:53:29 by Pete Handley
Google's personalised searching changes have taken a new twist with the release of Search Wiki, as is being widely reported at the moment including on Google's own blog.
Rather than Google deciding how to personalise results for you, when signed in, you can now remove and move around the placements of the search engine results - and then next time you search for the same phrase...Read More.
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Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:47:55 by David Thomas
Recently I posted a blog on the new Google Quality Score feature in Adwords. This new system did away with the old style, where by agencies and users had to pretty much guess what state their adwords campaigns were in and what the quality was by using logic and testing within the campaigns, retrieving data and acting upon it. Google promised a new easy to use Quality Score algorithm........ <...Read More.
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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:05:07 by Joe Bursell
It's the first time I noticed it, although it's probably been there forever- the humble watermark that sits in the search box on the Google Analytics Support page:
It indicates the language that you are likely to be searching with, using the "custom search".
What's odd is that when I've logged out of Analytics the search box contains a Cyrillic alphabet w...Read More.
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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:13:31 by Kerry Dye
As an SEO company, Vertical Leap spends a lot of its time explaining the processes we use and monitoring the effects that our efforts have on the traffic and rankings for our websites.
We also monitor the blogs and websites for information of interest to us. We read a lot of information on a daily basis, some of which we agree with and some of which we don’t. We filter the informati...Read More.
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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:44:47 by Emily Mace
Google have this week released a set of SEO tips for websites and I thought that part of this would make a good follow up to Matt’s blog on Title tags and Meta Descriptions
Google’s advice to webmasters is very similar to that we have covered in some of our previous blogs, such as the importance of unique content for the title tags ...Read More.
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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:58:55 by James Daniels
eBay sellers who want to draw more attention to their listings can advertise on eBay through a new program called eBay AdCommerce. AdCommerce is a new powerful advertising option which will show sellers ads near the bottom of search results pages to targeted buyers that are interested in your product line.
Sellers decide how much they are willing to pay each time a buyer clicks ...Read More.
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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:40:59 by James Daniels
Google is set to trial their own Adwords system on Youtube in an attempt to make money from their very popular video site. The new arrangement will see advertisers bid to have their videos displayed in a new “sponsored videos” section of the site when Youtube visitors search for particular keywords.
As with the current Adwords system where advertisers pay per click,...Read More.
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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:10:28 by Matt Hopkins
There have been many surveys on the topic, but it seems that around 87% of consumers research products online before buying them in person or in a store. This phenomenon has been named "ROBO" - research online, buy offline. People will use a search engine for product reviews, price comparisons, etc and then look for the best local source to actually make the purchase.Read More.
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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:04:36 by Jayne Wiltshire
So many times I hear prospective customers say they are so confused about whom to choose to provide them with SEO - I have to say I genuinely feel sorry for any company taking on board the hunt for a good and trustworthy SEO company who really does what it claims.
Its quite often I come up against competitors adding things to ‘pack out' a proposal. Things...Read More.
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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:46:11 by Emily Mace
The last post we did about Google Base was quite some time ago so I thought it was time we mentioned it again as using this Google Service can increase the level of visibility your site has on Google.
With all the work Google have been doing recently on the SERPs, I’ve noticed more and more of the keywords and industries I’m working in are sh...Read More.
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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:30:35 by Kerry Dye
Today I saw a new feature test on Google, which is something I always like to see happening. On some searches that may have local intent, they are asking you to enter your postcode:
And here it is in context:
A few searches turned up a mention of this appearing in the US, back in May this year, and there was some detail of it in a pres...Read More.
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Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:35:55 by Joe Bursell
Back in June 2005 Google introduced the sitemap protocol to enable webmasters to keep Google informed about new and updated web pages and increase site indexing in Google.
Three and half years later the sitemap.xml has become almost ubiquitous, and justifiably so. Although not an SEO's silver-bullet solution for indexing and crawling it is a powerful tool if implemented properly. There a...Read More.
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Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:52:23 by Gina Bray
Whilst quoting for SEO services to a potential customer I have come up against another SEO Company who claim to offer the ‘same service as Vertical Leap' for as low as £35 per month. (Again)
This is a horrible situation for anyone looking to embark on a long term SEO campaign with a potential 3rd party supplier.
How can the customer...Read More.
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Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:48:17 by Matt Hopkins
Congratulations on your top 5 ranking in Google for your targeted, "high traffic" keyword. All that hard work has paid off.. and you are now getting a torrent of traffic and sales right? Or possibly not.
Its important to remember that for every search result there are at least 10 choices for the searcher to click on (only 7 to 8 organic results "above the fold&q...Read More.
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Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:02:40 by Emily Mace
Following on from my blog yesterday and the maximum number of keywords on a campaign I though I would expand the topic by discussing the keywords that will come out of the SEO work you are doing on your site.
As I mentioned yesterday, limiting the focus of your SEO work on a set of keywords is a good way to ensure you are focussed on getting rankings for your...Read More.
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Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:40:12 by Pete Handley
Well, this is a contentious area.
First of all, I would like to say content is very important. Its the lifeblood of a website - a website without any useful content is very unlikely to be a good website, and is very unlikely to rank well for anything in a search engine.
Most of the time when the SEO community say "Content is King", they are referring to text ...Read More.
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Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:53:59 by Emily Mace
Many of our clients ask us about the number of keywords they need to optimise their site for to achieve good rankings organically.
If you have experience of PPC, your experience will tell you to use more keywords, as using a wide range of keywords can help the paid campaign. However, when optimising your site organically it is good to limit...Read More.
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Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:55:27 by Matt Hopkins
I received a letter from the ISP who hosts our co-located servers today. Despite paying a large fixed fee for our rack space and bandwidth each year, I am now being advised that if our servers consume more power than they think they should, we will be charged additionally. Recently, we were also warned that if our tech team need to access a keyboard or monitor when maintaining our serv...Read More.
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Fri, 7 Nov 2008 09:53:25 by Emily Mace
An important aspect of being able to make sales on a website is your reputation online.
With so much competition out there more and more users are becoming savvy to looking around various different sites to find the product they are looking for.
User Generated Content plays a big part in the decision making process for many...Read More.
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Thu, 6 Nov 2008 11:28:56 by Pete Handley
Yahoo's problems have twice made mainstream news on the BBC website over the last couple of days.
First off, Google have decided that a long legal challenge in regards to their PPC advertising partnership with Yahoo simply isn't worth the hassle they have to go through for the return they would get. This is likely to be quite damaging to Yahoo, as they were expecting to earn clo...Read More.
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Thu, 6 Nov 2008 09:53:55 by Kerry Dye
At Vertical Leap we often evangelise blogging to our clients, both as a tool for search engine optimisation and a customer engagement tool.
Because of this, we’ve written a good number of blogs about blogging, so here is ten of the best:
1. Link to other posts on your blog
2. Blogging tips...Read More.
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Wed, 5 Nov 2008 12:13:02 by Emily Mace
One thing to remember about conversions is that the more people are spending the more content and images you should include in your product page. People need convincing that they need to spend the amount of money involved in larger purchases so having a good level of content for those expensive items helps.
When working with the copy on your site make sure that the ...Read More.
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