SEO expert marketer

0871 Numbers - SEO and keyword research

2010-10-27T02:28:00.000-07:00

For anyone that has looked into online marketing for 0871 numbers, gold numbers or premium rate numbers, they will already know that this can be a pretty tough nut to crack. If it were only that there are 100s of sites chasing the most popular search phrases then this would be no different to your average campaign. However, with premium rate numbers from the 0871, 0844, 0845 and 0800 number ranges there are a couple of curved balls to consider.

One of the main ones here is targetting your search traffic in order to get the buying terms. Search terms such as rates, prices, costs etc are swamped by private individuals looking for information on what it costs them to make a call with only a tiny fraction of these looking to make a purchase. So the first pitfall is that of ending up with mountains of traffic and no customers.

This is further complicated by the fact that if you then drill down to more intuitive buying terms which appear to be a fair bet, such as buy 0871 numbers, 0844 numbers, 0800 numbers you find that barely anyone is searching for these.

Most successful 08 number sites take one of two strategies in order to get around this. One is to go with higly focussed sites which just go for the top terms, and getting a domain name to prop this up on, such as for example 0800numbers.co.uk, 0871numbersuk.net etc etc. The other, which over 90% go for is to focus on volume, with content rich webpages and over 100 web pages on the site, as well as their link building of course.

Both methods can be very effective; however, they can be further boosted by highly detailed competitor and keyword research, aimed at targeting and prioritising chosen keywords as precisely as possible and using this to redirect the focus of existing web pages in order to maximise their potential.

If we take the following information from Google's SKTOOL as an example just for 0871 numbers and related terms:

Keyword	Monthly searches	Suggested bid	Currency
0871 numbers	1200	2.38	USD
say no to 0871	660	0.51	USD
0871 cost	230	1.34	USD
0871 charges	190	0.87	USD
0871 call charges	125	0.54	USD
0871 phone numbers	125	2.29	USD
no to 0871	100	0.71	USD
0871 numbers cost	100	1.03	USD
0871 telephone numbers	100	1.94	USD
say no to 0871 numbers	82	0.8	USD
0871 phone sex	82	0.54	USD
0871 scam	66	0.36	USD
0871 call cost	66	1.38	USD
0871 rate	52	1.1	USD
phone 0871	42	1.09	USD
0871 national rate	33	0.2	USD
telephone 0871	33	1.15	USD
not 0871	33	0.22	USD
0871 calls	33	1.37	USD
昆明传真 0871	33	0.1	USD
0871 number charges	33	0.81	USD
tel 0871	33	1.47	USD
0871 call rates	33	1.42	USD
0871 sex	25	0.39	USD
0871 tariff	25	1.9	USD
uk 0871	25	1.06	USD
0871 price	25	1.56	USD
0871 area code	25	0.47	USD
0871 mobile	25	2.15	USD
0871 alternative	20	0.47	USD
0871 alternative numbers	20	1.13	USD

We can see here that there are no buying terms, such as buy, get, and so forth and we can also see that our prime target needs to be 0871 numbers. But when we start to look further down the list and compare this with what the competition are doing a number of other smaller opportunities arise. See 0871 mobile hiding innocuously down the bottom of the list with only 25 searches a month. Looking at this it seems surprising that so many companies are actively optimising pages for '0871 to mobile' related phrases. What we also see is that none of them have the exact key phrase '0871 mobile' which makes this an easy opportunity with just a string of two words to pull in a small amount of potential business.

And we also know from the information we have gathered that terms like tarrif, UK, alternative etc might be useful to work into the mix. But much more importantly we know where not to waste our time, and that these don't deserve entire webpages devoting to them, whereas 0871 numbers, 0871 phone numbers and 0871 telephone numbers are what we should focus upon and where the money is most likely hiding. The upshot is that when it comes to choosing keywords for your SEO campaign intuition is not always right and you need to research both your competitors and your keywords in order to get a sense of the directions you should be taking and the intuitive pitfalls you should avoid

How to cripple your SEO campaign and become invisible on Google

2009-10-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

SEO Suicide and SEO Disaster Recovery

If you have ever wondered what the most common reasons are for invisibility on the major search engines, here are a few of them. These particular problems are ones that are usually inherited by Internet marketers rather than failings in an SEO campaign themselves.

Many amateur SEOS, or small business owners dipping their toes into Internet marketing for the first time find themselves scurrying around the web for what to do to promote their website and pay little thought to what they should not be doing. In actual fact what they need to do first is to risk manage their work and investigate what not to do. This, I believe, is the core reason why many web masters and small business owners get their websites into trouble and seize failure from the jaws of victory.

1) Duplicate content

These days most people who fall into the duplicate content trap do so by accident and didn't actually set out to steal anybody else's material. Two of the most common scenarios we see are:

a) Company is part of a franchise and the same marketing material is distributed to all franchise holders.

b) Company has two or more websites which are essentially clones of each other.

A third, less common, one occurs during a website migration when a web master unwittingly puts up an extra website to compensate for any down-time.

Each of these scenarios can and do lead to websites falling out of the sky for their major key phrases and it can take an awful lot of time and work to get them back on track. In one instance, a new client's website had dropped 21 pages when he came to us after falling for the third scenario listed. In another instance a client's website had disappeared almost completely when he got caught out after having added content provided as part of his franchise without re-writing or editing it. With a thorough re-write and a re-inclusion request, this client was back in business within a couple of weeks.

2) Irrelevant DMOZ listing

Getting listed on DMOZ (The Open Directory Project) is very useful; however a listing on DMOZ can really set you back if you don't know what you are doing. Google and some other search engines have a habit of using information from DMOZ to display in their results pages. If what they find there is less relevant to your key phrases than what is on your home page, then you can soon find yourself disappearing down the listings.

In one instance we saw this problem drop a client 8 pages for his major key phrase after one of their techies got them listed on DMOZ (The Open Directory Project).

To avoid this you need to use NOODP in your robots.txt file:

Our client climbed back to page one within a week or so after this was implemented.

3) Fixed height web pages.

Have you ever tried editing, adding to, or freshening up fixed height web pages? If you have you will know what a nightmare it is and that you can sometimes be fighting a losing battle. There are few better ways to lose control of your content and for your web pages to become stale than fixed height web pages - add a couple of words and the formatting falls to peices, try to tighten up your onpage optimisation and you find you are in a straightjacket - marvellous!

As a kludge for this content can be added below the main graphical area of the web page, and this does work. However, it can look shoehorned in, and won't reach its full potential because search engine spiders have to crawl through a whole lot of other content and code before they get to it - i.e. your best optimisaed content is never going to look as relevant or important as it should be.

This scenario often leads to another incidental breach of Google's guidelines. Many website owners feel, with some justification, that content added here damages the overall aesthetic of their website and thus want it hidden half a foot down the page away from the main graphical area. Of course hidden content is another problem that can get you penalised.

4) Overly Intrusive Content Management Systems

Content management systems have become significantly more popular over the past five years, and while once it was quite unusual to find a small brochure website that was content managed, these days it is not uncommon.

CMSs often take too much control over the content of your web pages, and in the worst cases auto-generate the most important elements of a page such as filling h1 tags and h2 tags with nonsense such as 'our products' or even auto-generating title tags that are duplicated on every pages with nonsense such as 'our company PLC'. Auto generated meta data is almost as bad.

Even in less extreme cases they can be a nuisance, such as when they insert a company name as the first words in the title tag, thereby ensuring that

a) the keywords in the title tag are diluted

b) you can't give your most important keywords pole position at the front of the title tag.

The solution here is to get an SEO consultant involved briefly at the design stage of your content managed website in order to set out some ground rules for your web designers and to ask some pertinent questions. You may have to pay for this, but that is much better than taking an unviable SEO project to an Internet marketing specialist further down the line, only to be told that your CMS needs re-architecturing from scratch or that your SEO campaign will never reach its full potential because the CMS is badly flawed from a search engine optimisation perspective.

5) Obsessive compulsive keyword spamming and keyword dilution

Even in 2009, the first thing that many web masters do when they get hold of the concept of keyword relevancy is to over-burden a web page with 'relevant words', with little thought to how concentrated keywords should be, where to place them and also with little or no attention to what keywords and phrases real people are actually using when searching for the particular goods or services offered. Roughly speaking each word in a 50 word long title tag or meta keywords list is diluted by five times that of a 10 word list, and thus the relevancy of each word is heavily diluted. Less is more, if you want to get seen, and if you have more keywords, then add more web pages.

6) Relying on intuition rather than keyword research.

Many web masters remain completely unaware that they need to know whether people are actually searching for the keywords that they believe to be the right ones before they start chasing them.

If there are no people searching for your chosen keywords every month, then there is absolutely no point chasing them. Unless that is you are aware of a trend in the market place that is about to break and are getting in early. Keyword research is one of the most effective strategies to help you to grab market share, extend it and reach out to a wider target audience. Ignoring keyword research is like putting your website into a raffle that has already been fixed in someone else's favour and then hoping for the best.

In short, today's lesson is: risk manage your online presence and learn what not to do before diving in and trying to promote yourself online.

What the Dofollow Crowd Don't Want You to Know

2009-09-18T05:07:00.000-07:00

DoFollow Fraud

Have you ever been searching around Comment Hunt or Dofollow blog lists for good links for your website and noticed just how many of the entries are really Nofollow blogs posing as Dofollow?

Dofollow fraud is perhaps these days one of the commoner techniques that blog owners use to try and drive traffic to their website, and its simple. Just submit yourself to a bunch of Dofollow resources and then switch to Nofollow while no one is looking, so that you can hang on to your link juice. And, sure enough, loads of people will start visiting your blog searching for those elusive Dofollow link opportunities.

It's so easy to fall for as well. Many people are still unaware that they will need a plugin such as SEO for FireFox or SearchStatus in order to identify NoFollow links. Others, more like myself, sometimes forget that they don't have 'highlight NoFollow' switched on and end up wasting our time.

Now here's what the DoFollow crowd don't want you to know: If you search around social news services such as Digg, Propeller or Yahoo Buzz for links to blogs with opportunities to leave a comment link, a higher percentage of them tend to be dofollow than the ones found on those sites or search engines that list blogs with supposed DoFollow credentials. What's more, if you aim for the ones with large numbers of Diggs, Buzz Ups e.t.c. you stand a really good chance of getting some high quality dofollow links, and even the nofollow ones have intrinsic value if you get one from a popular, relevant site with lots of traffic then some of that relevant traffic is going to seep through to you.

No hat SEO

2009-03-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

I'm peeved today, downright annoyed, upset and perturbed. One of our oldest and dearest customers, is being ripped off. We've been providing them with technical support almost since our company formed, but we are not their SEO provider. They've been using another SEO company in Leeds for about 10 months now, and upon checking today their £150.00 per month has bought them about 70 crappy low value links to date. What's worse is that they are really being hit by the credit crunch and there is market share out there for them to grab with a half decent SEO campaign.

I'm just so maddened by this. Anyway, I've decided I'm just going to get their link building properly kicked of for free regardless. Whatever they decide to do about these snake oil vendors I really don't care. They are sat at the bottom of page 2 on Google.co.uk for a term that really isn't that competitive and I'll get them pushed up. They've spent nearly two grand on about 50 quids worth of work, and the on-page work that's been done isn't great either - the title tag is way too spammy, there are loads of outbound links from the homepage, none of which have been nofollow-ed and there's just not enough written content on there, let alone any attention to semantics.

There's not even any point in taking this useless SEO company down a peg or two, since they aren't particularly white hat, grey hat or black hat, more like their hat has blown away in the wind. Of the three major SEO terms they have optimised their own website for, one we're on page one for in fourth place and they aren't even on the first 13 pages, the other two we're on the first page for and I can't find them either (I got bored after page five on those).

okay, anger vented - time to get on with doing some good now!

SEO Reputation Management

2009-02-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

When your business has an online presence, reputation management is very important, since on the Internet people pretty much have the freedom to say just about whatever they want about your business, and irrespective of whether what is said is actually libellous or whether you have recource to legal action, it is imperative that you take moves to reduce the visibility of bad reviews and other negative comments about your business.

Do I need SEO Reputation Management?

If you type your company name into a major search engine and negative reviews about your company or website show up anywhere on the first couple of pages of results then the answer is yes. Its a no-brainer that you need to take action to reduce the visibility of these web pages. if you are a relatively small business, you might want to look at the simple SEO reputation management strategy given below, but you might also want to consider enlisting the help of a professional SEO reputation management company.

What is SEO Reputation Management

SEO reputation management is a form of search engine optimisation, the objective of which is to fill up the first couple of pages of the search engines with results for which you are in control of the content when someone types your company name into a search engine. This can be used to push bad reviews and negative comments further down the search engine results, or to provide you with a layer on insulation in the event that such reviews might arise in the future.

The good news is that using SEO to manage your online reputation is relatively straightforward most of the time. The techniques you will need to use though, go against the grain of those usually recommended for effective search engine optimisation.

Using Web Directories for SEO Reputation Management

First off, you will need to use web directories, a source of links for your website which is usually discouraged by competent SEO consultants, or at least discouraged as a source of links which should make up any significant proportion of an SEO campaign.

You need to use web directories that get indexed rather quickly in order to move the reviews down in good time.

www.joeant.com

and

www.mygreencorner.com

are two web directories that get indexed rather quickly, but there are 1000s more to go at. See for instance, our list of web directories here.

When you are filling in the web directory submission form, you also need to do something counter-intuitive for SEO - you need to put your company name and only your company name in the title tag, in the keywords, and also include it in your description of your business. So, you are optimising, not for your keywords, but for your company name. Now repeat this process for as many other web directories as you need to use. and hopefully this should push your bad reviews down in the search engine rankings.

Don'ts for SEO Reputation Management

Don't use paid for directories, because there are many out there for free. If you need to use more powerful websites to push down bad reviews though, you may then need to consider paid-for expedited directories such as Yell and the Yahoo web directory. Usually though these should be used for marketing rather than reputation management.

Don't use social media sites such as Digg, Yahoo Buzz or Propeller. Such social news services are on a timeline and they will rank well when they are fresh but will drop down in the rankings after only a short time.

Google Toolbar 5 beta review in brief

2009-02-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

Google Toolbar 5 Beta - ummm, I'm not too keen to be honest. It has the same privacy issues as Google Chrome, which I've blogged about before. When you open a new tab, you get screenshots of your most recently visited pages with links to them. I'm not really sure I like the idea of this since its pretty much advertising who you bank with, what affiliate accounts you have e.t.c. e.t.c. to anyone who happens to be looking over yhour shoulder. I also have a bit of an issue with the new Page Rank-ometer which is now squashed up to a third of its normal size making it difficult to tell a website's Page Rank by eye. I'd say either keep it or dump it, as a demoted feature its just an annoyance.

save time on your SEO campaigns

2009-01-31T23:04:00.000-08:00

When embarking on any SEO campaign it is really important that you only chase results on keywords that are going to bring in a return, and that have a decent number of people searching for them. This sounds astoundingly obvious, but it is actually remarkable that there are so many campaigns out there chasing keywords that, even if you drive a webpage up to the top of the search engines for them, will bring in no return at all. In fact, it is not infrequent to find dozens of companies agressively chasing a term which, were they to succeed for it, might be expected to bring in 2-3 visitors a day. Now unless each visitor is potentially worth an awful lot of money indeed, this is a real waste of time.

Google has been kind enough to provide a number of SEO tools you can use to estimate the traffic any given keyword or key phrase might generate, and to get a picture of how popular it might be. Its pays to use these, and do some keyword research using the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator, Google Insights for Search, and Google Trends before embarking on any campaign. This way you can avoid wasting your time chasing something that isn't going to pay off even if you succeed in your objective.

Where the competition for your keywords is particularly fierce, you should also consider using these tools to identify related, mid-range terms which will still generate a decent volume of traffic, but where the competition is less fierce, since this will help you to identify realistic and worthwhile SEO objectives as well.

Social media stalking tool

2009-01-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

Whostalking is an excellent social media research tool which allows you to search by keyword across many of the major social media websites. This makes it an amazingly effective link building tool - find relevant posts on Digg, Blogger, Technorati, Friendfeed, Blogtype, Backdigger, Twitter and many more. If you are engaged in link building and website promotion, then you can't afford to be without this resource which we have embedded here for your convenience. Give it a whirl.

Lucky SEO

2009-01-18T23:57:00.001-08:00

Put your website in the way of luck

It might seem strange to use the word luck in relation to SEO and Internet marketing, but I'm not talking about leaving things to chance here. What I mean rather by the idea of luck, is that there is really no such thing as luck unless you put yourself in the way of luck. Each webpage that you add to your website is another instance of you putting yourself in the way of luck since it is another potential landing page which might get found and from there convert a visitor into a new customer. Up to here its a bit like buying a lottery ticket and each webpage that you have is an additional lottery ticket which might bring you in a return on your investment.

Unlike buying a lottery ticket though, you can swing the odds in your favour, and you can do this by optimising each webpage you add onpage, by link building for that webpage and by adding more content to it. The more agressively you do this, and the shorter the odds will become that you're putting yourself in the way of luck will pay off. So, in short, to put yourself in the way of luck and internet marketing success, you need to be prolific, thorough and agressive. Write as much content as you can for as many web pages as you can. Get these pages optimised onsite and keep coming back to them and examine what can be improved. Lastly, link build for each of your webpages individually, so that each web page you have gets it share of relevant inbound links.

If you simply deploy your business website as a 10 page brochure site, and don't do anything with it, then you are not putting it in the way of luck and your website will not be lucky.

RIP Woolworths

2008-12-26T23:21:00.000-08:00

Woolworths finally closes today

Woolworths, that British high street retail institution we all loved has closed down 200 of its stores today, and the rest will probably follow soon unless they find a buyer - 27,000 jobs are potentially to go and they are apparently £300 million in the red. We never knew just what your purpose was, and never expected a coherent shopping experience, but you were ours nonetheless.

My aunty started a high flying career in our local Woolworths in Brighouse going from punky Saturday girl to supervisor, to promotion to promotion to being headhunted repeatedly and on to some of the most prestigious jobs with British Aerospace and others so this is for her:

Xray Spex - Warrior in Woolworths

WOW Gold Competition

2008-12-24T01:34:00.000-08:00

WOW Gold Competition

This is it, the opportunity for WOW Gold afficionados everywhere to get a legitimate comment posted. The funniest, or most original comments only will get through approval. Please no comments about how you've made millions out of selling WOW Gold even if you have, and any claims that you are commenting from your Gold mansion on a tropical island surrounded by sun-kissed semi-naked women, men or sheep could be greeted by an IP Lookup which places you in Scunthorpe, Detroit, Bosnia, Adelaide or where ever. Will there be tumbleweed blowing through this WOW Gold competition post, or will I get a deluge of witty one-liners from sharp WOW Gold afficionados? Closing date 31/01/2009.

Or if you've nothing interesting to say about WOW gold, just watch this clip from the South Park WOW episode - It may be the end of the World of Warcraft as we know it.

Two weeks in and the only conclusion is that you WOW Gold marketers just don't listen:

Happy SEO

2008-12-17T09:40:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy, nay even smug, right now. I just updated FireFox and for the first time ever, it didn't delete all my SEO plugins, SEO for Firedox, SearchStatus, Google Toolbar, StumbleUpon toolbar etc etc. To top it all I think I just penetrated a multi-million quid industry extensively on Google.co.uk in less than 24hrs with nothing more than onpage optimisation - fingers crossed, touch wood e.t.c. and bring on the commission. A happy end to the day methinks

social media sites that don't exist but should

2008-12-11T23:53:00.000-08:00

New social bookmarking and networking sites are popping up every day and, as if there aren't enough of them around already, here are some not quite so serious suggestions for some new ones. This is the dark side of social bookmarking, social networking and news submission websites and gives me the opportunity for some really bad puns. Well it is nearly Christmas.

So here is the definitive 26 social bookmarking sites that don't exist but should:

Splutter - viral social bookmarking - pass on germs of wisdom every time you post a Sneeze

Sh*tter - whereas Twitter is social networking on your mobile phone this is social networking while sat on the toilet

FumbleUpon - post stories from web sites you found while trying to type in the dark

GrumbleUpon - post stories from and vote down web sites that you find irksome

MumbleUpon - a social bookmarking site for people who are really understated and sotto voce about how good their story content is

Flatter - social bookmarking site that let's you say gratuitously nice things about web sites that no one is interested in

Wimpy This - vote for web sites you like by giving them a burger

Pimpy This - vote for web sites by blinging them up large

WindianPad - submit web sites that provide cures for flatulence (sort of like a panty pad but for your bottom)

EverSmote - share and bookmark web sites that God doesn't like

SkidMarks - vote for web sites you like by giving them a pair of dirty undies

Humptags - vote for web sites you like by shagging their leg

Rumptags - vote for web sites you like by shaking your bottom at them

Redeye - share your holiday photos with people who've been avoiding you for the past 15 years

Stalker - a cross between Facebook and Twitter but more honest

Fixx - social bookmarking site that lets you vote for yourself ad infinitum

Rigg - see above

Smug - a social networking site where you can boast about your pointless online
achievements

FoeFeed - regularly update all the people you don't like on how much better your life is than theirs

ObamaBin - whether you are a jubilant democrat or a disapointed republican, this is where your deluge of tedius posts should go, all of them!

RecycleBin - let yourself believe that your post is being read, voted up and commented upon by thousands of interested readers, but really we deleted it five seconds after you submitted it. You should have read our submission guidelines now shouldn't you?

PlugIMP - bookmark your favorite rubber fetish web sites

Batter - social networking for chip shop owners

Hixx - bookmark your favorite redneck, hillbilly, chav or bogan web sites

Flutter - social networking for bookmakers

Bleat - get them to follow you just like sheep - baaaa!

Or just think of a word and put some dots in the middle of it:

in.fect.io.us

poi.ntl.es

Or, a few literary social bookmarking sites for bookish sorts:

BookmarkOrange - give their web site a smack over the Gulliver

BigendianPad - for afficionados of Jonathan Swift

Ideas for more social bookmarking sites? Let me know.

10 ways to grow your business and beat the credit crunch

2008-12-10T05:16:00.000-08:00

How to expand your business in a harsh economic climate

To undertake any one of these ways to make your business recession proof could really be as simple as adding a new page to your website and marketing it. With so little to lose and so much to gain, this has to be the perfect strategy for growing your business during harsh economic times. Do this agressively and you can beat the credit crunch and stick two fingers up at recession.

Use geo-targetted webpages to capture business in new geographical areas. You can either expand around the margins of your current coverage, adding more local towns and cities that you provision. Or, you could even market further afield - the way to do this is to find people in those areas that offer the same services as yourself and ask for cut every time you pass work on to them. Before long you could grow from a local to a national company by adopting this strategy.

add new products and services to your portfolio.

target new demographics, expanding your appeal to different age groups, genders, income groups, cultures or ethnicities or industries, or even bigger or smaller businesses than your usual target market.

product cross placement. Highlight relationships between your products and services and the ways in which they might complement on another and let your website upsell for you.

re-package existing advertising for your products and services. Extend your appeal by displaying what you offer in different ways in different places.

harness the skills available to you to offer new services

Identify synergies with your competitors and strike deals to pass business between you.

find new sales channels. There are ever increasing numbers of free places online to showcase your products or services and with a little research you can identify some of these social shopping websites and multiply the visibility of your goods online to well targetted potential customers.

sell advertising from your website. You can do this either on a business to business basis or look at advertising schemes such as Google Adsense or an affiliate marketing package. In hard times you will welcome the additional revenue stream.

jump on the eco bandwagon. Tell people what your business is doing to help the environment and let them know about any eco-friendly aspects of your products and services. You can also introduce eco-friendly cost saving working practices to help lower your overheads into the bargain.

Monetising your web content

2008-12-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

Today's free installment from our forthcoming Internet Marketing ebook is from the section 'Monetising your web content'. When released, this Internet Marketing handbook will be given away free for the first 30 days. If you would like to pre-order a free copy of the e-book now, email us as seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

Monetising your web content

In this section we cut straight to the chase, and cover some means of making money online. You will find this particularly useful, if you are not selling your own products or services on the Internet but are looking for some opportunities to make some extra cash from home or from a home business. You will find that these sources of online cash can be exploited more effectively if you read beyond this section and get to grips with the task of promoting your website.

You should be aware that get rich quick Internet schemes generally don’t work, and that time and effort is involved in making money on the Internet. Any online article or advert promising you a 6 figure income, or untold riches from the Internet is most probably a scam. However, if you are willing to put the work in, and the research in, your income will increase as you go along and you can make good money and a worthwhile residual income when offset against the amount of time that you need to put in. Think in terms of revenue streams – something you put work into now could still be making you money 6 months, a year or even five years down the line.

Making Money with Adsense

Probably the most common way to turn a website into cash is to serve up Google Adsense adverts on your website or blog. Adsense provides smart ads which will usually match fairly closely the theme of your website.

Adsense these days is getting rather sophisticated, and as well as the conventional Adsense ads for content, you can also use Adsense advertising with RSS feeds, mobile content and YouTube, as well as making money out of putting a Google search box on your website (Adsense for search).

https://www.google.com/adsense/

In order to make a decent amount of money with Adsense you really need to find out what the top paying key phrases might be, i.e. those that Google Adwords users are bidding most highly upon.

You can research potential Adsense payouts using a tool such as SEO for FireFox which has a traffic estimator feature which will also give you an estimated Adwords Cost Per Click on any given Adwords keyword. You can download SEO for Firefox here: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

There is also a very useful list of top paying Adsense keywords here: http://makemoneyseotips.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-high-adsense-keywords-listget-lots.html

Making money with Affiliate Marketing

With Affiliate marketing you place banner link ads and text link ads on your website and every time a sale is made as a result of somebody clicking on your link you will receive commission.

Find advertisers related to the subject matter of your website and display their banner ads and text ads on your website.

Some affiliate marketing programs that you might try include some of the more popular ones such as

http://www.clickbank.com/index.html

http://uk.cj.com/

here is also a categorised affiliate program directory here: http://www.top-affiliate.com/

Pay per post

If you have your own blog, many companies will pay you to blog on content of their choice. There are plenty of brokers out there who will give you a choice of subjects to write upon, and you can get paid for it.

Blogvertise will pay you £12.00 for every 100 words you put into a positive review of one of its customers.

PerPerPost will hook you up with many advertisers who will pay you to blog about them: http://payperpost.com/bloggers/get-paid-to-blog.html

Warning: There are risks involved in pay per post, and some bloggers have reported being penalised by Google. However, if you are being paid to promote something, then cover yourself and nofollow any links that you give to your clients. See this 2007 article for instance: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/12/payperpost

Drop ship

Drop Shipping allows you to sell other people’s products from your website as a retailer, while letting your Drop Ship company worry about the order taking, administration and the shipping. Each time a sale is made through your website you will receive a commission payment, based on the difference between the wholesale price of the product and the retail price which you sold it for.

Some drop shippers will provide you with a ready-to-go sales platform or ecommerce system. In order to achieve your potential, you will need to customise this and tailor the content extensively, so that you can find your niche and stand out from others using the same system. This will also help you to avoid search engines duplicate content penalties and help to get you found on the search engines.

One of the major advantages of drop shipping is that you usually need no upfront cash to get started selling products online.

You can learn a lot about the pros and cons of drop shipping on the Drop Ship forum: http://dropshipforum.co.uk/

Other ways to make money on the Internet

Third party sites where you can create pages and make money:

Squidoo gives Adsense revenue share on your squid pages: http://www.squidoo.com/

http://www.syncone.net/ - this is a social bookmarking site that allows you to add affiliate marketing and Adsense on your page.

eHow will pay you for writing articles telling people how to do something (US residents only). Payouts are based on the amount of traffic your article generates and upon the quality of the content: http://www.ehow.com/

You could also add a price comparison service to your website or blog. PriceRunner will also give you a small payout for every click through they get to their price comparison website. You can set this up through Commission Junction (see the Affliate Marketing section): http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/

Sell your digital photographs to stock photography websites. Stock photography websites that will buy your images include http://www.stockphotography.co.uk/ and http://www.photographersdirect.com but there are plenty more. Check their terms and conditions, since some require a minimum number of photos, and others have stringent quality guidelines while others are more lenient.

Write an ebook and sell it, just like this one – you can do this through paypal or even through download.com: http://www.download.com/

For a more comprehensive guide to making money online have a look at this article: http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1042-top-ways-of-making-money-online/

Tip: One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to start making money online is to start up your own blog through WordPress or Google Blogger, both of which are free and require almost no technical knowledge to set up. Then you can integrate Adsense, affiliate marketing and even some paid for posts on there and start making some money almost instantly.

One of the best strategies here is to write about what you know, and monetise things that you do in your every day life. So if you eat out a lot, maybe start a restaurant review blog, or if you enjoy skiing or golfing write a blog based around that. You could start a blog about places you have visited or even concentrating on your own town, city or suburb – the possibilities are endless. The trick is though to make it easy for yourself and write about something you know, and or participate in, since this will save you a lot of time and energy researching.

Tip: Build up as many revenue streams as you can. The more sources of revenue you have giving you a payout every month, the better insulated you will be from any downturn in day-to-day business i.e. those times when numbers of new on-off customers are less than usual, or when you lose customers. Moreover, with multiple channels of revenue you avoid the risk that many less versatile businesses face of struggling when their major revenue source underperforms or dies off. Take Ford as an example, they were playing a zero-sum game whereby their survival depended on people buying cars. This was a fifty/fifty bet which they would always lose eventually over a long enough timeframe, because people either buy enough cars to keep you in business or they don’t, and once they don’t your business is over, unless you have multiple streams of revenue.

You should also always be on the look out for more revenue streams so that your business grows reliably and steadily.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Internet marketing but were afraid to Google

2008-12-04T23:55:00.000-08:00

Everything you ever wanted to know about Internet marketing but were afraid to Google

We have a working title for our forthcoming Internet marketing guide now, and the release date draws ever nearer. We are giving this away free for the first 30 days and if you would like to pre-order a copy, please email me at seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

You can read the introduction to our internet marketing handbook below. and you may also find of interest our recent ehow article on making money online without becoming a couch potato:

FSI Internet Marketing Information Handbook Introduction

This Internet Marketing booklet is your SEO (search engine optimisation) bible and essential online marketing guide which will provide you with the information you need in order to help you get started with your first Internet marketing campaign. Here you will find SEO information for beginners and also learn a few juicy SEO secrets that you might not find anywhere else on the Internet. Most importantly, you should find the subject matter in this SEO e-book an indispensable 101 reference guide for strategies that will help you to get found on the major search engines, make the search engines like you and drive relevant traffic to your website. You will also learn how to harness Web 2 and social networking services to create additional interest in your website.

The role of search engines is to gather, organise and serve up information and the search engines that do this best are the most successful and receive the lion’s share of search traffic. There is a really important lesson here – the quantity of information, the quality of information, the care with which it is organised and the efficiency with which it is served up and delivered are all key factors to online success. This applies to any website or blog just as much as it does to search engines and it is something that you should try to keep in mind whenever you are marketing a website online on the Internet.

The skills required for Internet marketing successfully fall into three main categories:

technical – the technical skills needed to market a web site online are often overrated by those not involved in Internet marketing. You will need them and you can’t do without them, but Internet marketers are not nerds, techies or geeks, and usually not IT gurus or web design geniuses, they just know enough to harness these skills in order to facilitate the promotion of their online writing and their web marketing in the most effective way possible.

arts/humanities – the ability to write interesting, compelling and useful information, and to a lesser extent to provide attention-grabbing images, is an absolute must for online marketing success.

marketing – the ability to gauge what will grab people’s attention and turn them into customers and to provide them with it. The dedication to identify and exploit aggressively the best opportunities for getting online content found and seen. Again essential.

These are all skills that you will develop and cultivate as you gain experience marketing your website online, but be warned, there is no shortcut to learning how to do this, no silver bullet for search engine optimisation, and no such thing as Internet marketing for dummies, guide to SEO in a nutshell or overnight online success. You need to build up a good combination of technical skills, develop your aptitude for writing and your flair for marketing and utilise them all to drive your online publicity machine. This search engine marketing booklet will furnish you with much of the Online know how and many of the Internet resources that you need to drive traffic to your website, but without a flair for marketing and writing your web site visibility will not reach its full potential. Most of all though, you can get a very long way with hard work and perseverance, and if you explore all of the Internet marketing opportunities given below thoroughly then you should go a long way. Good luck!

Carpet Cleaning Los Angeles

2008-11-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

Carpet cleaning in Los Angeles

I was just having a scope around for some of the highest paying key phrases for Adsense and was really surprised to discover that carpet cleaning los angeles is fetching 15.17 USD per click, at least according to this list of keywords which gives out the best Adsense revenue: http://makemoneyseotips.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-high-adsense-keywords-listget-lots.html

We have had over a dozen UK carpet cleaning companies on our books for SEO, so I have a fair idea of the industry in the UK. I can only imagine that either the LA market is very competitive indeed or that there has been a serious spate of over-bidding on Adwords by some of the carpet cleaning companies in the City of Angels.

Free Internet marketing guide

2008-11-25T21:14:00.000-08:00

Free SEO tutorial handbook

We've been a little quiet on the blog lately, owing to a trip to China and work on our forthcoming ebook reference guide to SEO and Internet marketing. This will be complete shortly and we will be showcasing sections of it on the SEO blog as well giving the whole thing away free as a downloadable PDF for the first 30 days.

To pre-order your free copy of our reference guide to SEO ebook, please email us and we will send you out a copy: seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

This ebook will provide a handy reference source for finding resources to help you market your website online, as well as providing some great pointers for both those new to SEO, and more experienced Internet marketers wanting to have SEO techniques, strategies and opportunities listed out for them in one handy ebook.

After 30 days from its release date, this online marketing reference guide will be charged at £1.99 per download, and remain free to our SEO training customers.

the worst long con

2008-11-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

This is the worst preamble to a long email con that I ever read. It's so flawed, it's almost poetic:

Dear,

It is with trust and confidence that I make this proposal to you because I have been very careful due to the sensitive nature of this transaction.
I am Ango Karen David, 17years old and daughter of Sir Ekpojuo David Ango, a reputable businessman who passed away in a hospital on 12th, February 2007. His sudden death was masterminded by an uncle of his who travelled with him during his business trip.

I was 4 years old when I lost my mother.

Before my father’s death on February 12th, 2007 he handed over to me all documents of his business and also told me that he never believed that his brother will poison him. He handed over to me the documents of his money which he left in the bank. The total fund is nine Million United State Dollars.(USD$9, 000 000.00). The money is still in the bank and l am with the documents. Please I need your assistance in the following ways:

1. To help me get this money out of the bank and invest it in your country.

2. To help me to come over to your country to continue with my education.

3. To stand as my guardian and business partner until I am out of school to handle any investment which you will set up for me with the money.

4. If you can help me with these three things, I am promising you 15% of the total money as soon as you receive the money in any account of your choice.
Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded.

I am waiting to hear from you as soon as possible.

My sincere regards,

Karen David

SEO gives up smoking! stop the press

2008-10-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

Not sure that I've really given up smoking. I just couldn't be bothered to go out and buy some cigarettes this morning so I put a nicotine patch on.

The only problem is that I now have about a billion kilowatt hours of nervous energy coursing around my system. Someone plug me into the national grid!

real time search engine position tracker

2008-10-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

Live SEO stats from Exact Factor

ExactFactor have launched a free website ranking tracker with several useful features such as a search engine ranking change Alert and a competitor site alert which allows you to monitor the performance of your Internet marketing campaign in realtime.

With the new search engine position checker you can:

Track your website's search engine positions in various major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch (and receive weekly SEO reports).

Receive alerts when your website position moves up or down.

Receive alerts when competitors move past you on Google.

You can check it out here: http://www.exactfactor.com/

How to check up on your SEO company

2008-10-07T04:39:00.000-07:00

If you have been asking yourself any of the following questions about your SEO company then this article is for you:

Is my SEO company giving me value for money?

Is my SEO company doing any work?

Is my SEO company ripping me off?

Is my SEO company giving me value for money?

Have I fallen for an SEO scam?

One of the problems with hiring an Internet marketing company is that many customers have almost no idea what they are buying or how to evaluate the services they get, or whether their SEO company is living up to its promises. While it is true that there are no absolute guarantees in this profession as to the ultimate results of your Internet marketing campaign, it is possible to get a fair idea of how hard your internet marketing services provider has been working for you and to get a pretty good idea of whether they are living up to their promises.

There are many great SEO companies and internet marketing agencies out there, but there are also a lot of cowboy SEO companies, lazy SEO operators and ones who use dirty and risky techniques to give you what you want, but potentially at a huge cost to you if they get found out. While there is a lot of information available on line about chosing the right SEO company and also what to do if your SEO company rips you off, there seems to be comparatively little about how to evaluate your SEO company while they are working for you - sure there is advice out there, such as to make sure they provide you with reports, communicate well, etc etc, but what about the actual work they are undertaking? If you have mistakenly hired a bad SEO company, then you need to be able to tell so that you do not go on paying them needlessly and indefinitely, for work they are not doing or are doing badly.

Here are some of the things you can check up on your SEO company has done for you.

Content and code changes

If your SEO company was supposed to make changes to your website in order to help it to perform better in the search engines then the place to check this is the WayBackMachine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php). Have a look at your website as it appeared shortly before they commenced work, and then over intervals of time when they have been working. Changes might not be immediately obvious so also look at the source code and look for changes to the title tag. meta keywords, meta description and heading tags h1,h2 etc as well.

Unfortunately you can only do this for up until about 6 months ago - but its better than nothing, and at least gives you the opportunity to compare before and after month by month.

You can also check how strong your website is onsite using a tool such as this: http://whois.domaintools.com/. If you can do this before your SEO company starts work and afterwards then you should be able to see if there is noticeable improvement.

Link building

Your SEO company probably promised, or was contracted, to do some link building for you. They may have promised to find you a certain number of inbound links every month, or they may be working on a more ad hoc basis. The place to check on the links they have obtained for you is LinkPopularity.com. Choose the Yahoo option since the results are more accurate.

You need to check how many links you have, but also look at the web pages that are linking to you. If anything looks suspicious about these web pages then dig deeper. Do all the websites linking to you look the same, for instance? If so you may have been the victim of an SEO company that uses link farms.

If the websites linking to you are part of a link farm then they have very little value indeed and, entail the added risk of associating your website with bad linking partners. What's worse you are paying for nothing.

You also need to check that the websites linking to you are cached in Google's index. Link farms have a tendency to get identified and penalised by Google, and if this happens you may find that all the webpages with links to your website have been removed from Google's index. You can use a tool such as SEO for FireFox to check that these websites are cached. if the number of cached web pages show up as zero then you know you have a problem.

If the websites linking to you are not in Google's index then the links have no value and you are paying for nothing.

Bear in mind that each link your SEO company acquires for you will not necessarily show up immediately or even the next day. Some will take several weeks, others maybe even months.

Unique visitors

The ultimate test of how well your SEO company has done for you is how many more unique visitors they are bringing to your website each month. If your SEO company is not providing you with stats for this then you need to check your Google Analytics account, if you have one, or the web stats provided by your webhost. Have a look at how many unique visitors you were getting before your SEO company started work and then have a look at how many you have been getting in the months since then. Bear in mind that it can sometimes take a couple of months to start seeing improvements here.

Search engine placement

If your SEO company is not providing you with information about where you appear in the search engines for your major key phrases then you need to find this out. You can do this manually, or Google Webmaster Tools will be able to give you some idea of the main terms that you are ranking for. Ideally you need to check this before a campaign starts, and at regular intervals (say every two weeks) while a campaign is underway. This way you can tell whether your search engine positions have actually improved since you took onboard your SEO company.

How to react.

Now this is the important bit - if you have found anything during your investigation that makes you uncomfortable then do not immediately jump to conclusions. If you are reading this you are probably a lay person and are going to need some professional independant advice before you can say anything for certain. The best place to look for this is on large SEO forums such as the Search Engine Journal or WebProNews which you will need to join. The helpful people on there will soon tell you whether or not your suspicions are justified, and give you a good idea of whether you ought to leave your SEO company.

If you are still in any doubt then now is the time to challenge your SEO company about the work they have been doing and see what response you get.

SEO for 404 not found pages

2008-10-01T02:57:00.000-07:00

Make every sq inch of your online footprint count

SEO or Internet marketing is mostly about getting high positions in the search engines for your most valued key words and key phrases, however, it is not just about this. SEO and Internet marketing is also about making every square inch of online real estate that you possess count.

One way to do this is by editing your 404 page not found pages in order to direct users back to the major pages on your website or your sitemap, search your website, let them know a little about your business, and even to monetise the page if possible. This way, even if there are a few broken links that you haven't uncovered yet you are keeping your website visitors in the loop through your strategic deployment of 404 page not found pages.

Have a look at this example: 404 Not Found

SEO Misinformation | Misleading SEO article

2008-09-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

SEO unhelpful and misleading advice

With all the fuss around about bad SEO suppliers and what to look for in a good SEO supplier, about what matters in Internet Marketing and what doesn't, I was really disheartened to read today's Entireweb.com newsletter entitled 'What Corporates should know about Online Marketing'. This sort of misinformation really doesn't help anyone looking to choose a reputable SEO, web marketing, online marketing or SEM supplier. Just read this:

Tips when hiring SEO experts: - Whenever using a company in order to improve your SEO, always check out the Google Rank of their website. Since SEO is not that well known in management circles, there is a lot of companies that will try to sell SEO skills while there own SEO are terrible.

Really, check their Page Rank! Eh hem, how about finding out what their search engine rankings are like, how many unique visitors they get, how successful their portfolio of past campaigns is etc etc. Page Rank is just no guide at all and this tit bit of information is really going to get the heckles up of a lot of SEO consultants, Internet marketing specialists and professionals, as well as mislead a lot of people looking to improve their positions in the major search engines.

Oh, and what if its a talented SEO consultant who has decided to go it alone and only just started his/her own SEO website - not going to have much of a PageRank, but could be run by an SEO guru. In short, PageRank is the least useful measurables to use in order to check out the credentials of an SEO company or Internet marketing consultant.

They also claim that:

if you could increase your Google rank, your number of new visitors to your website will most certainly increase.

Not the case - Getting in bound links from websites with high page ranks might not do any good at all of A) the website/ webpage isn't relevant and doesn't have relevant content or link text is irrelevant B) the customer/ client web site has bugger all content C) The client website has problems such as not being indexable or is using duplicate content and so forth. Website visitors might not increase, the increased volume of traffic might not be properly targetted, or high ranking inbound links have been used as a silver bullet without properly identifying issues with the client website that need to be changed or improved in order to get results.

They continue:

Also try to get some form of guarantee. It is very rare that marketing companies ever give guarantees about the effects of their efforts, but if they actually do, you know they are serious about their skills.

Wrong - the SEO companies who do give guarantees are often charlatons who over-promise and under-deliver on their Internet Marketing campaigns - promises such as 'Guaranteed first place results', 'Guaranteed first page results' or 'see your online income skyrocket or your money back' are just absolute rubbish. There are no guarantees in this game and it is irresponsible to offer them without very carefully thought out caveats and clauses - SEOs need to be honest about the uncertainties of their profession both to protect themselves and to ensure that their customers make informed decisions. In truth, search engine marketing professionals have no control over the vagaries of search engine algorithms, nor can they have any control over what the competition are doing or how they are performing (unless perhaps if they are engaged in some dodgy black hat practices to knock them down). Ultimately web marketing professionals don't even have any control over what customers can do themselves to ruin their own chances - they can only give good advice, set guidelines and hope that the customer abides by them. The very best Internet Marketers I know are very careful about the promises they make, while some of the less reputable ones are happy to throw out guarantees left, right and centre - '200,000 links in two months', 'immediate search engine placement', 'you can buy a top search engine position', 'get to the first page or your money back' etc etc I've heard them all.

Finally, one small point of contention (I'm nit picking now):

Search engines have the most advanced mathematical algorithms available today

Not true. SE algorithms are indeed complex, but A) we have no real way of knowing how complex B) it is highly doubtful that they are THE most complex or advanced algorithms in the realm of mathematics. For instance, the true LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) algorithm is almost certainly not the exact one used by Google or anyone else online - sure they will be using a watered-down version, but to apply it in its original form, well, many people have their doubts.

I want to weep, after reading this article.

The proof in the pudding is the very next email that landed in my inbox after the newsletter: Read it and weep:

Does your site bring you profit?

Well ,it must!

Mass stream of clients is what is you want your site to bring you!
Your site should not only be repaid but keep on bringing prosperity
to your company. Your site is your very own representative in the
World Wide Web and it's what works 24/7 and independently.

We'll make it work for you, bring you clients and bring you profit,we
shall advance your site in above board ways.

So these guys just farmed one of our business emails and sent out a mailshot claiming with certainty that they will make us money, and make our website successful - All automated - a bot collects our email address, then a mailer sends out a mail shot - no one has even checked that our website has potential, that our keywords are profitable, or even noticed that we are an SEO company or checked what our industry is etc etc - its an obvious and extreme example of shoddy guarantees, and there are plenty out there who sound more credible, but still they're bound to be convincing someone. There are plenty of gullable people out there, and give them some misleading SEO advice about guarantees and they will be just a little bit more suceptible to false promises and the reputation of our industry will sink just a little bit further into the shit.

Make money with affiliate marketing

2008-09-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

It isn't often that I take a look at forms of marketing other than organic search on this blog, but today I thought I'd do a little to remedy that by taking a quick look at affiliate marketing. If you are new to affiliate marketing then the information below will give you an overview of what affiliate marketing is and how it works

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective means to increase your online income. If you already have a website that is selling goods and services, it makes perfect sense to add an affiliate marketing account to your portfolio and to start making additional money by selling related and complementary products and services on your website.

The benefits of affiliate marketing

free - affiliate marketing costs you nothing

simple - all you need to do is add the affiliate link to your website

no shipping or admin - once the visitors purchases through your affiliate link, your affiliate partner handles everything, so there is no shipping, no product storage, no customer service, no aftercare. All you do is collect the cheque.

no billing or invoicing - all billing or invoicing is handled through the affiliated company and all invoicing from you to the affiliate broker is handled by self-billing invoices.

bonus income - affiliate marketing can help you to increase the revenue that you generate through your website.

Moreover, if you are starting an online business from scratch, then affiliate marketing is excellent for starting up, because it answers the first two questions for you that any new business must ask itself, 'where are my customers?' and 'where is by income?'. Each affiliate partner that you take on effectively becomes your customer. You are providing them with a service when you host their affiliate advert on your website and you get paid by them every time a sale is made through one of your affiliate links. Therefore, you can harness this potential further by advertising them as your customers on your website, as well as putting up their links in contextually relevant places. The effect of this is that you can make yourselves look like an established business with existing customers much more quickly, while gaining more sales through having more affiliate links on your website, and more web pages, which means more landing pages for people to find you by. Moreover, this gives you an additional source of revenue during your startup period, and can ease the financial struggle of starting up a new business.

Sell products with affiliate marketing

The benefits of selling through affiliate marketing are pretty obvious. The beauty of it is that you don't pay a penny for other websites to host your ads unless you make a sale. This gives you tight control over your marketing budget and enables to you manage your margins scrupulously. Plus it gives you the oportunity to grow your online visibility expodentially - the more affiliates who take up your adverts, the more you will be seen and the more your online brand will be visible on the web. You can vet affiliate advertisers before you accept them and give them performance incentives to make them work harder for you - and if they don't work for you they don't get paid, so you are taking very little risk.

If you want to discover more about affiliate marketing then there are many books you can read that will show you how to maximise your sales and make a good profit through affiliate marketing including the following:

Affiliate Millions

Affiliate MillionsFor more than a decade, the Internet has allowed people to make substantial amounts of money on both a full-time and part-time basis. Today, with even more online opportunities available than ever before, you can achieve a level of financial success that most people only dream about-and in Affiliate Millions, author Anthony Borelli will show you how.With the help of coauthor Greg Holden, Borelli will show you how to make thousands, and eventually tens of thousands, of dollars each month through the process of paid search marketing and affiliate advertising. Along the way, they'll also share the secrets to mastering this often-overlooked strategy and provide you with the tools and techniques needed to maximize your potential returns.Since making one million dollars through paid search marketing and affiliate advertising in his first full year of operations, Anthony Borelli has never looked back. Now, he wants to help you do the same. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, Affiliate Millions will introduce you to this profitable endeavor and show you how to make it work for you.

Internet Marketing - the devil is in the detail

2008-09-19T04:55:00.000-07:00

With Internet marketing attention to detail is everything

When you are marketing your website online, you really have to pay attention to the impact of everything that you change or update on your website and not only check whether the changes deliver more/ better search engine results. You must also ensure that changes aren't going to have any impact upon your conversions as well. The lesson is that even seemingly innocuous changes can have an affect which can be both positive or negative.

One example is a recent addition of snapshot testimonials to our website scattered across some of the major pages. These testimonials provide a great snap shot of some of our major services such as search engine optimisation and software training, and some of them started to appear in the SERPs as well.

Thus far, the exercise was an ostensible success. Especially when in some of our SEO search engine results the string: "SEO testimonial: You're a bloody genius" was appearing. However, for some software training searches this testimonial was also finding its way into the results; not something we want, since this phrasing might be suitable for our SEO customers, but it is less likely to attract software training customers. In order to rectifiy the situation we needed to change the order of our testimonials so that a different and more appropriate SEO testimonial was adjacent to this particular software training testimoinial. Doing this, all a prospect should now see in the SERPS is the software training testimonial and the tail end of something which reads much more on message for our software training customer base.

This all sounds very dry and finnicky, but sometimes you really need to be sensitive to what people are searching for and how they will respond to the text that appears in the search engine results in order to preserve your conversion rates and so improve your performance simultaneously.

SEO and the credit crunch

2008-09-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

Is the credit crunch affecting your business?

If your experience is similar to that of any business which I've spoken to, from small one man bands right through to SMEs and blue chips, the answer is probably no. In fact, the vox emptor (voice of the customer) seems particularly chirpy on the business front at the moment, unless of course they are involved in property or financial services. Northern Rock went to the dogs and not a whimper of a downturn in business, HBOS almost goes belly up and still nothing.

The truth is though that hard times may be in the post and the effect of what is going on in the top echelons may filter down to smaller and smaller businesses. This makes it all the more important to insulate yourself with some aggressive marketing which enables you to reach out to ever wider and wider spectrums of prospects. Bring in more visitors to your websites, tighten up your strategies for increasing conversion rates and either fasten your seat belts for a bumpy ride or lay back and relax as the customers start to flood in. Either way, there has rarely been a more important time to think about search engine marketing as a means of getting yourself out to channel and selling more goods and services.

I would also say, protect yourself through diversification. If you only have one revenue stream, then you are taking a big risk. Look for related, ancillary and complementary revenue streams for what you do. Simple options online are of course affiliate marketing and Adsense, but don't stop there. Are you turning away business from people who are asking you for related services that you don't provide? If the answer to this question is yes, then contact companies who do offer those goods and services and try to arrange a commission or referral scheme. Most importantly, try to dip your toes into more than one industry and/or more than one customer demographic - the more elastic and diverse your business model, the less the credit crunch can hurt you.

Be imaginative about your business and what it can achieve, and if you can't afford to pay for professional search engine optimisation services, then here's what you do - add more content to your website and add more web pages - be bold, don't be frightened - add lots and lots and lots, and you will see more visitors and more inbound business.

Google Chrome test drive

2008-09-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

Is Google Chrome any good?

With all the hype over the past few days about the arrival of Google Chrome beta, I thought I best take the new web browser on the block for a quick spin. It can be downloaded from here: www.google.com/chrome, if any one would care to give it a try.

My initial impressions before trying Google Chrome are that I will probably keep using FF as my main browser, although I also have IE7, Safari and Opera kicking about they all barely ever get used for anything other than browser compatibility testing.

Okay, firstly, I'm not sure that a lot of people will want their most visited websites appearing on the home page - in a work environment this is going to be a big no no for anyone who likes a bit of extra-curricula browsing, and well elsewhere, we just don't always want people to see exactly what we've been looking at which could quickly give away which bank we use, who our customers are, our shopping preferences or even a penchant for porn websites to anyone who happens to walk in the room or look over your shoulder. From a privacy perspective, this browser shoots itself in the foot straight off. Ok so you can turn off the internet history as with most browsers, but I doubt more than 10% of users will be savvy enough to do this for themselves.

There is one cool privacy feature that certainly deserves a mention and this is the incognito window, which pretty much says what it does on the tin - Google's Chrome Browser promises that

Pages that you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files that you download or bookmarks that you create will be preserved, however.

This feature goes a long way to overcoming my above reservations - but don't forget that Google Chrome will store your browsing history and cookies etc, by default, so if you don't activate it then your privacy is at risk not just on the Internet but from those who share your home and workspace as well.

In terms of appearance Google Chrome is very clean and crisp and appears to render CSS in a pretty standard way without any gotchas or workarounds needed - but time will tell here through more vigorous usage.

I'm also noticing that from a search perspective Google Chrome seems to be serving up newer results than google.co.uk results displaying on FF. Either this, or the results are being ordered slightly differently. Anyway, a search for one of my new customers' keywords came up page 2 second on FF and page 1 10th on Google Chrome and the results were the same after several repeat searches on both over a few minutes. This keyword had been showing up as page 2 2nd for a couple of days already, so I can only assume that Google Chrome gets new results faster, which should make it popular with SEOs. This might offer a useful way of finding out more quickly whether you are due to head upwards or downwards in the SERPS, but again don't take me at my word here.

I don't like the fact that there is no reload or refresh option on right-mouse-click. I also don't think I'm really too keen on the fact that the zoom option only has three settings - smaller, normal and larger. This is surely not so good from an accessibility perspective. On the plus side there are some slick features such as being able to add application shortcuts to the browser and use it pretty much as a desk top, the incognito browsing and the tab features, but overall, I don't think this is any threat to IE or Mozilla - 6/10 for Google Chrome.

Google Insights for Search rocks

2008-08-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Google Insights for Search

If you haven't yet tried Google Insights for Search, its well worth checking out as an SEO tool which gives you very good information about keyword popularity - It works in a slightly similar way to the Google PPC traffic estimator, except you are able to pull out some much more useful geographical and chronologically based measurables for searches done on the keywords you are targetting. Its even possible to anticipate searches in a particular holiday season, get a geographical spread or to search by category. You can figure out very quickly which search terms are worth something and which aren't, and find what related terms you ought to be targetting as well.

Google Insights for Search is still in the beta version, and if you haven't checked it out then do; http://www.google.com/insights/search/# - happy hunting

Getting ranked on Baidu

2008-07-29T01:57:00.000-07:00

How to get on the Baidu search engine

There is a lot of interest these days surrounding China's number 1 search engine, Baidu; especially with the number of potential visitors this powerful search engine could bring to your website. So here are a few tips for getting listed and ranking well on Baidu.

Getting listed on Baidu

1) All I did was to buy a .cn domain name and forward it to my main domain name - Baidu found me. You could also bind a .cn domain name to your main domain and set them up as domain aliases if you like, but simple domain forwarding did the trick for me.

2) Submit your website to Baidu:

You can submit your website to the Baidu search engine here: Baidu

SEO for Baidu

Baidu responds well top very similar factors to the Yahoo search engine. So, use semantic markup, get your keywords in the title tag, and use lots of internal text linking - basically things you should be doing anyway. Oh and Baidu also likes meta data - meta desc, meta keywords etc. And. like Yahoo, link building counts, but not half so much as it does for Google.

If you really want to go for the Chinese market then get your website translated into Chinese, since this is the only real way to make it big time on the search engines over there.

Oh, and if you're worrying about the Great Chinese firewall, then don't - we have just as many government censored websites in the West. Unless you are selling something very unsavory you shouldn't have too many problems.

Google's latest PageRank update

2008-07-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

Google's summer PageRank update

OK so Google updated PageRank again yesterday, and although we all harp on about how PageRank doesn't matter all the time, we still all get a little excited by all the changes and by whose gone up or down both in terms of their PageRank scores and in the SERPS.

The fact is that although PageRank doesn't mean much technically and has a really negligible impact upon how a web site performs live in the SERPS, a move up the rankings does mean something. It carries a certain amount of status, clout, trust and gravitas which influences anyone who visits your website and happens to have the Google Toolbar or any other pluggin that comes with a PageRank. This no doubt influences shopping decisions, repeat visits and much else, so while PageRank might not impact upon your performance in the SERPS it certainly makes a difference to some of your visitors some of the time.

Which social bookmarking sites does Google index fastest

2008-07-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

Some social bookmarking sites are indexed by the search engines faster than others!

In our experience, if you need to rank quickly three of the best to go for are Propeller, Digg and Mixx - they can all show up in the SERPs in under an hour, which really can't be bad.

So get out there and have a quick rank!

All three of these sites are excellent places to submit your online content. They do all have their quirks though - Mixx can be a pig to log back into sometimes, Digg blows up a little too much for my liking and I'm not enamoured of Propeller's recent facelift. However, they all generally do what they say on the tin, and all provide a really fast hair trigger rank.

Ahh, I missed ClipMarks off the list. There is some dispute going on about whether ClipMarks poses a duplicate content risk, but looking at the source code it does make use of the blockquote and cite tags, so I'd say its a safe bet. Clipmarks is indexed really fast and it can produce a strong presence in the Search Engine Results Pages, so its got to get my vote.

Latent Semantic Indexing

2008-07-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

Blatent LSI BS Merchants

If I get one more email from offshore 'SEOs' telling me they work using the latest LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) techniques, the big bulging blue vein on my forehead is going to pop.

Firstly, it's very doubtful indeed that any search engine, including Google has managed to integrate the verbatim LSI equation into their algorithms, or whether they would if they could, and secondly, if you try to replicate the LSI equation as part of your SEO strategy and balance all your semantically related keywords (synonyms, metonyms etc etc) on your web pages according to this, then its about as pointless as stuffing 500 spammy words into your meta keywords tag and much more time consuming.

Go ahead if you want to, but please don't email me telling me how clever you are! ARRRGGGHHHHH!!

Never ending SEO

2008-07-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

SEO TIPS - Be industrious

As well as all the technical skills, marketing strategies, innovative techniques you need to employ as part of your search engine marketing campaign, there is one cardinal rule - be industrious!

It's very often wrong to think of search engine optimisation as a project. Instead think of it as continual improvement management, because there is always something that needs doing, and as soon as you stop you are well on your way down that slippery slope again back into search engine obscurity. It's a sure bet that if you sit on your laurels then your competitors will be striving to overtake you in the SERPs while you sleep, your inbound links/backlinks will start to deteriorate over time and your cherished search engine positions will be in jeopardy.

PhD PhD PhD

2008-07-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Finally my PhD is online

After years of procrastinating and generally dicking around I finally did it - I put my PhD up online: The culture and rhetoric of the answer-poem, 1485-1625. Its actually taken more time get it out there than it did to write the thing, so I'm pretty pleased that finally people have a chance to read it. The online version isn't quite finished yet, but most of the rough edges have been smoothed out.

The website itself is relatively search engine friendly; however there are quite a few drawbacks caused by having to produce 364 webpages quickly. The website was created using the following methodology.

I took the original Word document and converted to PDF

Then using Adobe Acrobat Professional I converted the content to HTML

I cobbled together a pure CSS template very quickly indeed and added in the HTML content produced by Acrobat

I put in all the internal page navigation and pulled out mountains of extraneous HTML generated by Acrobat either using regexs or worse, by hand.

Lastly I ran through each page very quickly to optimise onsite for the most important features

This is admittedly a far from ideal way to get a website out into the market place; however it does seem to be paying dividends and the few pages that Google has indexed so far are already ranking very well indeed against Google Books results and .ac results. Once all 364 pages have been indexed then I'll see where we land and get on with some link building for my big fat baby.

Addendum 19/09/08

As an additional note, the online version of my thesis has now picked up 40 inbound .edu links and is performing very well indeed. A couple of hours worth of link building and it already ranking really high for some of the bigger search terms. As for monetising itself, its not really doing much, but this was never a profit making venture. So long as its getting plenty of readers and it makes enoughj to pay for its own domain name every year, then its a success.

SEO Monopoly

2008-07-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

Why marketing your website is like playing Monopoly

Monopoly might seem like a strange thing to be comparing with SEO. However, one of the fundamentals when marketing your business online is to grow your online real estate in order to extend your online footprint. Every content rich webpage you add is like buying up another peice of property on the Monopoly board, and if you provide unqiue, well-written material that has value to your readers/customers/prospects then it will all work in your favour. Just like in Monopoly you are playing a numbers game and the more property you have, the more the chance that someone will land on it.

Of course if your web pages are not well optimised and you have little or no link building then don't expect too much traffic from each page. Every webpage will be doing at least a little work for you though and if you can't afford to buy Mayfair just yet, then you can at least get yourself a couple of hundred Old Kent Roads, just by getting that content out there and building up your online real estate.

Preventing Image Theft

2008-07-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

Preventing Image Theft

To my mind people are often a little overly concerned about preventing image theft from their websites. People are always going to do it, and it certainly isn't ideal, but the real question to ask is, 'are you losing any money by it?' If you are not going to lose any money and a few predatory image theives aren't going to cost you any money, then you probably have more important things to worry about.

Traditional Javasript solutions for preventing website visitors taking images using right-mouse click are generally awful, and create a really unprofessional feel when you click your right mouse button and get a popup telling you this is not allowed. I really don't like these things. Moreover, preventing right mouse click does not always prevent image theft because the visitor can still acquire the image using FILE > SAVE AS.

Instead I would suggest a really simple alternative that will help a little with getting link juice flowing around your site, and deter at least some image theft. Link your images to other relevant web pages on your website. Wrapping your image in a hyperlink will mean that in Mozilla Firefox at least, right clicking on the image will offer the option to save the link, but not the image. This will not work in Safari, Opera or IE, but at least it affords a little protection, is better than preventing right-mouse-click with Javascript and has a little bit of SEO benefit. Its a compromise, but to my mind a worthwhile one.

SEO peeing standing up

2008-07-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Be considerate of your website visitors

When planning a web site, one fundamental mistake that companies and individuals make is to fail to distinguish between their own preferences and features which actually provide a comfortable and accessible visitor experience.

The best analogy I can think of here, would be the numerous complaints I've had from female visitors to my house, who insist that I should leave the toilet seat down. My answer of course is that since I live there and I pee standing up I leave the toilet seat up and that is how it stays.

When thinking about the visitor experience on your website though, your guests take precedence since they are the ones who must find it convenient to use if they are going to become your customers. In short, what they find helpful is much more important than what the website owner happens to like or prefer.

In order to get conversions, you need to think about the needs of your guests at every stage, and ask yourselves as many of the following questions as possible:

Contact details: Are contact details highly visible on every web page?

Navigation: Is it easy to reach every page, and every product or service you offer from every web page?

Payment: If it is an ecommerce site, then is the payment process simple? are payment options, delivery information and shipping charges easy to find and understand

Content: Is the font-size used readable?

Spelling: Are there any spelling mistakes that need fixing?

Context: Does each web page have a clear and transparant message and purpose?

Mess: Is there any clutter that can be got rid of?

Calls to action: Are calls to action, clear, concise and simple?

Bells and whistles: Is the website visitor presented with any unexpected and or un-needed surprises such as popups, pop unders.

Lastly, if there is any function or feature of the website that was included purely on the merit that you like it, then can you justify it? Ask yourself whether it is essential and whether it is likely to make a positive or negative impact on the visitor experience. Such features might include excessive use of Flash, audio, Javascript functions and more.

Do follow blogs and resources - the bumper list

2008-06-19T01:36:00.000-07:00

Do Follow blog list of lists

This is a bumper list of lists of do follow blogs and resources, including do follow blog lists, lists of forums and social bookmarking sites which all have nofollow removed. Its a sort of meta list if you like, cataloguing the no follow resources that others have been good enough to compile for us. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Don't think outside the box, just make the box bigger

Do Follow Blogs list

List of Blogs that follow from Court's Internet Marketing School

Bloggers Directory: List of Dofollow Blogs

Do Follow Blogs Directory A human edited directory for blogs allowing search engines to follow links in their comments. Over 300 blogs already listed.. more added daily!

DoFollow: Increase Your Backlinks with DoFollow Sites The DoFollow revolution embraces the sharing of link juice going out to other sites. Learn more about DoFollow, where you can get listed on DoFollow sites, and what it means to you as a webmaster and link builder!

Do Follow Blog List | Do-Follow Blogs Join the Do Follow Blog Movement and submit your do-follow blog to our do-follow list. It's FREE and no link back is required.

DOFOLLOW Blogs With Good Google Page Rank | Work at Home Blog All the blogs listed here are 'DOFOLLOW'. You are encouraged to visit these blogs, read their posts and make sure to leave your comments with a link

More dofollow blogs.. : “Do Follow” Blog

List of DoFollow Blogs This is the list of blogs who does not have rel=nofollow tags in their comments.

DoFollow Diver - The Premier DoFollow Blogs Search Engine Easily find blogs with DoFollow enabled on comments, along with CommentLuv and Top Commenter.

Do Follow List | Nickoo Shore The Do Follow List contains now more than 300 links to blogs which have the no follow link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual link back to your site.

The Aroengbinang Project: DoFollow Blog List

140+ DoFollow Blogs (SEO Tips) from IndiaSEO

List Of Over 250+ DoFollow Blogs by Minterest | Money, Internet, Investing List of Over 250+ DoFollow Blogs which uses a DoFollow Plugin.

Cherry Red Huge Dofollow Blog List

Do Follow Search engines

Digerati Marketing » Blog Comment Niche Search

Comment Hunt- Search pagerank blogs with out Nofollow tags

DoFollow Diver - The Premier DoFollow Blogs Search Engine

Do follow forums lists

List of “Dofollow” Forums with “Dofollow” Signatures.

List of Forums that allow “dofollow” signature links from Swollen Pickles For webmasters interested in building back links to their sites, this just might be my most useful post ever. Well, besides this one of course.

Do Follow Social Bookmarking lists

22 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites That Actually Work (and how to bookmark QUICKLY) from Caroline Middlebrook

Free Web Directories

2008-06-18T01:42:00.000-07:00

Free web directories.

If you use free web directories as part of your link building then we have done most of the leg work for you with this monster list of free web directories. Half the effort with getting listed in business directories is finding suitable ones to use, and it can be time-consuming, laborious and un-rewarding. So, we've done the leg work - now all you have to do is to go and get yourself some web directory listings with the help of our list below. Good luck!

The list features free deep link web directories, one way link web directories, SEO friendly web directories and even more directory lists. A few of these do require reciprocal links but most are one way for a standard listing.

List of free web directories

Gbet web directory

Adzooks web directory

Web Central Directory

VivaStreet Free Classifieds

list of free directories

Another list of free directories

Luton Engineering Directory

Scrabblestop Directory

Deep Link Directory

One Way Links

Deep Link Index

Free Deep Links

Deep Linked

Stellar Articles Directory

Snofs Directory

DeepLink Directories

Seo Court Directory

Cafrid

Grand Directory

Xtreme Directory

MWHS Directory

Seo Facility Directory

Web Info India

Connected Internet
Directory/

link777

Do Follow Directory

Very Potent

wwwi Directory

Joomla Directory

The Local Web

Add URLs Free

Add New Link

Suggest Link

All The Shops Online

At Web Pages

Big Free Directory

BL Bid Directory

Vile Silencer Directory

Business Sites on the
Net

Squid Link

iServ Directory

Dynamutt Directory

Business Directory
North East

Portafolio Directory

Domaining Directory

EZ Web Tools Directory

Big Wig Biz

SEO 2 SEO Directory

UU Directory

Brilliant Directory

Directory Submission

Ethical Directory

A Free Directory

Directory Link

Xland Directory

777 Media

Skype Media

Red Cog

Pegasus Directory

Suppliers Nearby

Go Green Cellande

Sector Prime

Free Web Directory

ir8 Directory

My Green Corner Directory

Nice Directory

Seo Directory

Busy Bits

Gigantory

Golden Links

Links Heaven

Forever Links

Free Back Link

Power Directory

Directory Master

Directory Monster

More Visits

Vip Directory

Linkorama

000 Directory

New Concept Directory

Seo Executive Directory

Free Directory List

Join Society

Ayay Directory

Ensurelinks

dirscape

Deep Link Directory

Deep Link List

Tag Tag Tag

Free Url Link

My Country Directory

So Many Links

New Free Directory

Directory Classifieds 1000

Itza List

Free Web Directory

Free Animations
Directory

Dir Hut

Vlaemsch

Directory For You

Business Magnet

SEO Friendly
Directories List

Gratis

Pro Link Directory

Link Dir

Free High PR Directory List

Skoobe

Submit Helper

A List Sites

Can Links

World Wide Directory

Do Follow US

Hit Boss

Afforested

Afflictions Directory

Montezuma Well

My Web

My Site Online

My Site Dir

Country Boy Trailors
Directory

UK Hotel Accommodation
Directory

Search Monster

SEO Links

Oodle

Xland

Harrogate Directory

Skipton Web Directory

UK Clicks Connect

York Directory

The Free Directory

Caven

Link 777

The Health Zone

Misi

Brilliant Directory

NR Directory

go 4 Websites

Directory PK design

Britain 4 u

Verimity

Easy Travel Group

Arableland

Top UK Websites

LS Links

Free Magic Directory

Cat Web Directory

Tiger Web Directory

Do Web

Classic SEO

British Information

Tree Bat

Free Web Directory

Free Magic Directory

Web Links Home

Web Magic List

Links Magic.com

Tiny Web Directory

Web SEO Rankings

Web Power Directory

Web Pro News Directory

Manta SEO Solutions

Dynn.net

Dynn.org

high street shopping and SEO

2008-06-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

high street shopping and SEO

When I'm exploring new search engine marketing strategies I often look for parallels found in conventional marketing or even in a normal high street shopping experience. Generally search engine marketing is very product specific. For instance a Leeds mobile phone shop might want to target mobile phones Leeds, or Vodafone shop Leeds, Orange shop Leeds and so forth. Of course this will bring in search engine traffic from searches which are looking specifically for these things, and the first job is always to target your core market and core following.

However, what about searches that are looking for related products and services or unrelated products and services but in the same location. During the high street shopping experience in Leeds, the shopper might well be on his or her way to have a coffee at Costas, to pick up some ear rings from Accessorise etc etc, but on their way there they might pass the Vodafone shop, O2 shop or Orange shop. This high street visibility obviously helps to raise brand awareness. And once you have your core key phrases covered, it pays to think about ways of replicating this high street experience by adding content rich and well optimised pages targetting your local area or related products and services. By doing this you widen your net, and by introducing yourself as being local to the prospect and/or offering related products and services to those which they were searching for you create a type of brand awareness all too rarely harnessed in the world of search engine marketing.

So, for instance, on our main website we have a Leeds community area offering information about events in Leeds, transport in Leeds, accommodation in Leeds and places to visit in Leeds, and they all bring in their fare share of traffic which helps to promote us as a local business without the need for a high street shop front. Similarly, we bring in oodles of global and national traffic from technical article related to our core IT services which raises our profile across a much broader spectrum.

The point here is that if you look for parallels in more traditional forms of marketing, or in the conventional shopping experience, you can often tease out a search engine marketing strategy from your musings which will lend some extra weight to a campaign and help it to grow and develop. Based upon quite loose principles like this, moreover, the potential for growth and development is almost endless.

Under the bonnet search engine marketing

2008-05-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

Under the bonnet search engine marketing

Have you ever had a look under the bonnet of your website to see what's wrong? Just like when something goes wrong with your car, the first place to look is under the hood. The symptoms however, are not leaking oil or hot gas, but search engine results. if you are coming absolutely nowhere in the search engine results pages, then look at your source code, because the chances are that there are things in there that need fixing before you even think about stepping on the gas with your link building.

To give you an example, we were recently presented with a website (a whitelabel project, so I can't give too much away), where the initial code looked like this pretty much all the way through:

Bad HTML

Click on the image for a better view

Now if you can't read a single word in here, then neither can a search engine spider. This is an extreme example of html code and content that has absolutely no raw potential for search engine optimisation and which must rely soley on link building.

Now lets have a look at the code when our web guys got their hands on it to re-create what is essentially the same website with a few aesthetic improvements:

Good HTML

Click on the image for a better view

What we see here is a web page with no onsite optimisation work done on it yet, but with oodles of raw potential, simply because the search engines can work their way through whole paragraphs and lists of text without being interupted or wrong-footed by mountains of extraneous HTML code.

As a general rule of thumb, the easier the source code is for you as a non-technical person to read, the easier it is for a search engine to understand. Words are the biggest asset of any search engine marketing campaign from whatever perspective you look at it, so you can't afford to hide them.

Cleaning up with local search

2008-05-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

Cleaning up with local search

We really have been cleaning up on local search recently with all of our mature campaigns for local search taking first and second places on Google.co.uk for most of their key phrase wishlists. Its always nice to put a spotlight on some of the smaller campaigns and these guys certainly deserve a bit of attention.

Especially pleasing is the perfomance for the websites in the carpet cleaning industry where two of our customers Gunn's Cleaning and Revita Clean in Newcastle usually take up first, second and third place for 'carpet cleaning Newcastle'. Word really got around the guys in this industry how good we are and were now taking business from professional carpet cleaning businesses across the country, including new customers, Dirtbusters who provide carpet cleaning in Liverpool and Aaron Cleaners who offer carept cleaning in Basildon, Billericay and Hornchurch.

Also pleasing, are the performance of those websites where we were able to offer a little bit of SEO combined with some good advise and consultancy - Of note especially are SLIQ Tools who are performing extremely well for 'invoicing software' and the Garfield Guest House, now doing outstandingly well for 'Bed and Breakfast Edinburgh' - well done guys and its always nice to see the results when someone takes advice on board.

The Marketing Paradox

2008-05-23T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Marketing Paradox

One of my favorite things about many of the marketing companies that I encounter in my day-to-day life is the blind spot they tend to have for the inconsistencies, paradoxes and deep irony inherent in their own marketing strategies.

Okay so, it pays to go for a range of marketing opportunities and strategies in order to see the best Return on Investment (ROI). However, when you see an email marketing company using cold calling to bring in new business, or an organic SEO company using Pay Per Click advertising, email marketing or cold calling, then it really begs a big question. If you are really so good at the form of marketing you sell, then why do you have to use a different type of marketing in order to get my attention?

Such inconsistency really does send out mixed messages to prospects. So, you're an SEO company that brings in its own business through cold calling, or a telephone marketing company that brings in its new business through email marketing - already I'm suspcious and my irony radar is beeping away like mad.

As a marketing company, if a marketing strategy works for you then include it in your portfolio of services so that you can give out a consistent message to prospects - stand by what you sell, and make sure the message is that this marketing strategy works for us and it works for our customers. Don't give out the message we sell one marketing strategy and use another.

Literal Link Building

2008-05-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Literal Link Building

When building up the links for your website (both internal links and inbound links from other websites), it is always worth remembering that it pays to be literal.

Think of your link text as a sign post which tells both website visitors and search engine spiders what they will find if they click on the link. The more signposts you put up and the more explicit, obvious and prominent the links are, then the clearer it will be both to your visitors and to the search engine spiders and bots as to what they will find.

As such, it should be apparent now that link text both within your own website and linking in from other sites should really never say things such as “read more”, “click here” and so forth, since as signposts, such link text is virtually useless.

Being literal, however, does not mean that you cannot vary your link text now and again. For inbound links, this will actually give off a more natural and organic feel to your inbound links from a search engine's perspective - a good sign that you aren't attempting to artificially doctor your website's relevance and importance beyond what it actually is. Search engines are smart enough to associate many synonyms and related words these days and they will ammalgamate related words together when evaluating what your website is relevant for, so while concentrating on the focus and context of your inbound links you should also pay some attention to variety. So for instance, if I had a web site about iPods I might go for internal links and inbound links concentrating mainly on using the keyword 'iPod', but also perhaps make sure there were some for 'music player', 'mp3 player' and so forth, as well as 'iPod music player' and 'iPod mp3 player', 'Apple iPod player'. If you think logically and literally, while keeping in mind word associations and the principle of signposting, then you can ensure that you have an effcient and relevant link building strategy, and help to ensure that as few words as possible are wasted.

SEO reporting

2008-05-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

SEO reporting

While reporting and statistics should play their part in any mid-to-large scale SEO campaign, I often feel that SEO companies often get the emphasis wrong here, between getting stuck in and doing the work and providing SEO progress reports and measuarables.

The pressure for this comes from both sides. SEO customers feel that they are getting value for money when they recieve reports almost as much as they do when they get results. On the other hand SEO companies know that they can charge big for reports and compared to the actual work involved in an SEO campaign itself, these often provide a really good Return on Investment (ROI).

Somewhere in the midst of all this it sometimes gets forgotten that the objective of the campaign is to achieve good search engine results and not the reporting itself. In fact, good SEO results really stand out - you don't need statistics and reporting to tell you how successful your campaign is.

The lesson of the day is then, “You don't fatten a pig by weighing it” or rather, you don't create a successful SEO campaign by measuring it. Results are achieved by getting stuck in and doing the work.

It is also the case that some disreputable SEO companies have even been known to dress up their SEO reporting to try and show success where none actually exists. Its easy to guess who some of these might be without even having dealt with them - you know the ones that offer to get you in the top ten places for utterly worthless terms such as “three-legged saddleback pig farmers in Swindon on a Tuesday”.

Its is also worth mentioning finally, that if a customer wants to know the progress, then there are many free tools out there which can help to give them a really good impression of how things are going: tools such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, AWStats and SEO for Firefox, are all free, and can be used to get an overall feel for how a campaign is progressing. If the customer is comfortable with using these then, the SEO consultant or SEO professional is left free to get on with the job at hand, and will probably be able to bring in the bacon faster and better as a consequence.

Conflicting title tags

2008-05-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

Conflicting title tags

Now that Google has speeded up the way it re-evaluates and re-indexes websites, and that the search engine results pages (serps) are more fluid than ever, the focus and emphasis needed from the title tag has changed a little bit.

It has alway been good advice to make title tags unique for each page so that you get as much mileage out of each webpage as possible. Now, however, Google can change its mind over night as to which web pages of your web site to rank for particular phrases. You can really shoot yourself in the foot if you give out mixed messages here, since Google can pick pages you haven't optimised as being relevant for the keywords you are targetting largely on the basis on the title tag content alone, and completely ignore the ones you have optimised for these key phrases.

For instance, imagine I have a web site with two web pages optimised for the term 'great website'. The title tags contain 'my great website' and 'great website - my website is great'. But I've also been lazy and just left two un-optimised pages with the title tags 'what makes a web site great?' and 'is your website great too'. In the present climate, Google can easily change its mind and decide to index the latter two for this term and not the former two. The result? Your rankings drop considerably.

The lesson is to focus upon and optimise each web page or pair of web pages for different key phrases. This way you can increase your online foot print and avoid falling victim to this scenario. For instance, in the above example I might take the second two pages and optimise them for the term 'best web site' and then change the title tags to 'do you have the best website?' and 'what makes the best website?'. Thus, when Google re-indexes my web site it knows which two pages to rank for 'great website' and which to rank for 'best website'. No conflict, and no mind changing when the site is re-indexed. I have increased my online foot print and done some useful risk management.

A Novel Approach to Hidden Text

2008-05-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

A Novel Approach to Hidden Text

I just came across quite a novel black hat approach to hidden text which has been put together by these guys: http://www.knowledge.co.uk. Its a hidden text, link farm combo which actually seems to work but it's very high risk and once the house of cards comes tumbling down I really wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

Here's how it works: Firstly, every web site they design for their customers comes with a links page, which has links, not to their customers' customers or other relevant websites, but to Knowledge's own other web site design customers. I.e. they interlink all their customers' websites and accrue relevance and Page Rank that way, while simultanously advertising their own services by flaunting their customer list. Secondly, these links pages come complete with hidden text in decent semantic markup which pushes up their onsite relevance. You can find an example if you look at the source code of this page: http://www.aquakleen.org/customers.php

So, if it works why not? Well here's why; if Knowledge get reported or caught then every single one of their customers' inbound links potentially goes down the tube in one fell swoop. Now Google might just take a sympathetic view, if they do a manual check since none of these companies probably has much understanding of what is going on and its not their fault. However, they might at the very least be punished by some sort of demotion or by the removal of these links pages from Google's index, which would in itself bring the whole thing crashing down since many of the web sites in question seem to be relying wholy on these links pages for their inbounds and some of the links pages even seem to be the best performing pages.

To be fair, I'm not even sure that Knowledge know what they are doing since some of the hidden words I found weren't even keywords; although the vast majority of them were.

Google honestly isn't doing such a good job of picking this up in this instance, since a hidden text string on the Aquakleen links page is even displaying in Google's results description. So not only are they allowing hidden text, they are displaying it in the SERPs.

Anyway, enough for today - co-opting your customers into a link farm and then inflicting hidden text on them is just shoddy. Knowledge, did you explain the risks to your customers before you did this?

An Addition to the Microsoft Office Suite

2008-05-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

An Addition to the Microsoft Office Suite

My rant about Digg the other week, just gave me a genius idea for the perfect addition to the Microsoft Office suite, but after checking on it they got there before me. It was going to be a blog post authoring tool for Microsoft Word (Office 2007). Damn and blast they already thought of it and it seems to be in the beta version.

I guess that leaves me with just one question - do we get a paperclip popping up and saying: “It looks like you're writing a new post”?

Chinese domain name scam

2008-05-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

Chinese domain name scam

I'm seeing quite a few of these spammy little gems arriving in both mine and my customers inboxes from our friends in China lately:

This is Beijing Erimat Network Information Technology Co., Ltd, domain name registrant in China. A formal application dated on May 6th from one company called Guangyuan Investment (China) Co., Ltd requested "YOUR DOMAIN NAME" as their Chinese top-level domain name(.cn/.hk.tw) and internet keyword. Due to the possibility of involving your company name or trade mark, we bring this into your attention immediately in view of your priority and IPR according to the registration procedure. Please contact us for protective prior registration of those domains or learning more about it.

If its not patently obvious to anybody this is a scam designed to frighten you into buying domain names and/or trademarks that you don't necessarily need, and probably at vastly inflated prices.

If you get one of these, then just ignore it. Altough, I have to admit that when I got my first one of these it did prompt me to buy our .cn, but not from these spam mongers. It cost a whole 20 pence, yes that's twenty English pence, 0.2 Great British Pounds or 2.73 RMB for the first year. Try getting that sort of price from 1-2-3Reg or any other domain seller. I love finding cheap domain names.

Frames - please don't make me beg!

2008-05-07T05:35:00.000-07:00

Frames - please don't make me beg!

ARRRRGH! It seems like however much information goes up online about why frames are a bad idea, however loud people shout and for how long, there will always be some web designers out there who insist that frames are a good idea.

Web designers, please don't make me beg! Frames are bad, bad, bad. Unless of course you want to provide your customers with a web site that is invisible, not index-able, will not sell anything and not make one brass razoo for the customer you obviously care so much about, because after all their website looks great and you are happy they are happy, aren't you. Until, of course, you get that irate phone call; the one where the customer is screaming down the phone at you “what the fu*k have you done to my website?”.

My heart honestly sinks every time I see one of these frames disasters, because I then have to tell the prospective client how it is and that they will either have to spend a helluva lot more on link building than otherwise, get the site completely re-designed before we do any work, or that they will have to look at relying solely on PPC. I hate being the bearer of bad news, so please please please, any frame mongers out there listening, give me a break.

Google.co.uk almost manages UK spelling

2008-05-04T14:03:00.000-07:00

Google.co.uk almost manages UK spelling

Awww, bless you Google finally after all these years you can almost spell. All those searches using UK English spellings now don't try to correct me. I can type in 'search engine optimisation' and 'capitalise' without being asked 'did you mean search engine optimization?' or 'did you mean capitalize?', oh and specialise and realise!

Well, we're most of the way there - fraternise and few others still get all Yankeefied on me.

Wer're getting there though

Update: 15/05/08: Okay I just typed “optimisation– into google.co.uk and got asked “Did you mean optimization?”, hmmmf. Most other things look alright though - maximise is fine, as is realise. Ironically, “localise” also brings up the question. If anyone from Google has their radar switched on - you may find this WikiPedia article useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_localization

Is your website seasick?

2008-05-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

Is your website seasick?

Do you ever feel that your website is getting seasick as it floats up and down on the flotsam and jetsom of Everflux.?

Everflux is the term coined to describe the phenomena whereby Google changes its mind as to the positions of its results in a constant and almost schizophrenic blurr of undecidedness.

Or is it? Everflux seems to be with us now more than it has ever before and previously secure rankings are moving around at a pace which can be quite daunting if you don't know quite what is going on.

So what can I do to combat everflux?

Most advice on the SEO blogs over the years has focussed upon ensuring that you have a tight, content rich, search engine friendly website and just to ride it out. However, there is also one other important aspect that you should take into account - fresh content. Google has always favoured new, pristine, hot-off-the-press and up-to-the-minute content. However, enthusiasm for this and the ability to test for it rapidly and effectively appear to have stepped up a notch recently. So the lesson is that it is now almost mission critical to your success to regularly update, edit, freshen up or amend your content. Treat it as continual improvement management and get stuck in there as often as possible. As usual, this will be of great benefit to your readers, and what is of benefit to your readers will help form an integral part of your search engine marketing strategy.

Of course no one knows exactly how Google might test for or evaluate the freshness of content, but if I were Google I'd be taking the following measurables into account:

How long since the web page was last updated

The percentage of updated content on the web page

The age of the web page

How often on average the webpage gets updated

Number of other pages recently updated

Overall average frequency that any of the website gets updated

Just a stab in the dark, but you can see from this hypothesis, that regularly updating some webpages may even help others overall.

Play the SEO game

2008-05-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Play the SEO game

I played the SEO Anti-Spam Webmaster Game and the Keyword Stuffer Girl kicked my ass.

The trick with this game, just like SEO, is to get in the combinations of punches and not being a one trick monkey. Oh and the space bar blocks punches - I didn't see that first time round, no wonder I got spannered.

Anyway, there are tonnes of flash games out there just like this one, but if you fancy a bit of a punch up with some basic information for SEO newbies thrown in between rounds, then off you go: http://www.gsinc.co.uk/tips/seo-game.html enjoy!

SEO and Apple iWeb

2008-04-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

SEO and Apple iWeb

Twice this week I've been given SEO projects for websites designed using Apple's iWeb and both times I've had to recommend a complete HTML code re-write before any SEO work was viable. The main symptoms have been: Fragments of text rather than whole sentences nested in reams of style, mountains of extraneous code and javascript link menus. Its possible to create a web page that is not search engine friendly using just about any tool on the market, but this is off the scale. It looked in both instances like the web pages had been generated by Microsoft Word '98, or worse. Come on Apple, you're slicker than that. If you're going to offer something that allows non-technical folk to design webpages with wysiwyg tools and drag and drop widgets, then at least try and ensure that what happens backend isn't html spaghetti. There's no point in Joe Public being able to create web pages like this if they are never going to be found on the search engines.

Google rollback

2008-04-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

Google rollback

Google has been doing a fine impersonation of the wayback machine today. All the SERPs we are picking up are two weeks old, as the big G seems to have reverted to an index that hasn't been updated in a while. We've seen title tags that have been changed and re-indexed twice fall back to what they were and old search engine results positions from 2 weeks ago popping up like a bad case of deja vu, for almost every site we've checked on. Is this revenge for my April Fool's post?

pop a cap in the ass SEO

2008-04-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

pop a cap in the ass SEO

Pop a cap in the ass of the competition with search engine optimisation advice from the SEO rapper

Radical Changes to SERPS?

2008-04-08T02:34:00.000-07:00

Radical Changes to SERPS?

Something really radical has just happened to the way Google displays search engine results - this must be one helluva algorithm change. I have no idea yet whether this is temporary or accidental even, but it is certainly a first. I picked this up for one of my customers just a few seconds ago and my jaw is still hanging somewhere down by my knees. Could it really be that now it is possible to get three results in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) for each web page or is this just an aberration? - only time will tell.

The third result disappeared on a second search and hasn't come back up again yet. If anyone sees something similar, please capture an image of the SERPS and please let me know.

Click on the image to get a better view

Digg Digg Digg, there be treasure buried here - having a dig at Digg

2008-04-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

Digg Digg Digg there be treasure buried here - having a dig at Digg

Is it just me, or is Digg's attempt at being friendly patronising, condescending and corny? Maybe I'm just Victor SEO Meldrew, but if I read the words 'patience my friend is a virtue' one more time, I'm going to shove that spade right up that little flatheaded man's arse.

Dearest Digg, you serve a very valuable function in the WWW2 world but you have caught a serious dose of the Microsoft Office Paperclip syndrome and need medical attention

Whoa! Something blew up!

Link building in time and space

2008-04-01T02:34:00.000-07:00

Link building in time and space

Ever wish you could travel back in time to when link building was much more straightforward? - no nofollow to worry about, less stringent spam rules e.t.c. Well now you can with the WayBack Machine. Pick up blog posts from yesteryear and submit your comments back in the swirlly spirally history of the Internet. oooooooh.

If you've ever wanted to comment on a blog before comment moderation was enabled, or before comments were closed or nofollow was implemented then the WayBack Machine is your passport to the Internet of yesteryear. Happy time travelling.

Okay, its April Fool's Day!

Yorkshire SEO | Flat Cap SEO

2008-03-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

Yorkshire SEO | Flat Cap SEO

Yorkshire SEO for Yorkshire web sites. 'Cause if your web site's outside Yorkshire its not worth bloody visiting!

Mine's a Tetley's

Wikipedia has the following to say about Yorkshire:

Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in Great Britain. Because of its great size, over time functions have increasingly been undertaken by its subdivisions, which have been subject to periodic reform. Throughout these changes Yorkshire has continued to function as a recognised territory and cultural region.[2][3] The name is familiar and well-understood across the United Kingdom and is in common use, featuring in the title of current areas of civil administration such as Yorkshire and the Humber.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorkshire

Does this paragraph about Yorkshire actually mean anything. What on earth is a 'historic county', ehem? How does this make Yorkshire different from any other county? What the hell does functions undertaken by subdivisions mean? Okay I know what they're trying to get at, but what horribly torturous prose. I could have eaten alphabetti spaghetti and pooed a better paragraph about Yorkshire.

Of all the areas of Yorkshire it has been proven scientifically on an EtchaSketch that West Yorkshire is by far the best. Some days out in West Yorkshire:

York, North Yorkshire

Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds West Yorkshire

Leeds, West Yorkshire, sightseeing

Roundhay Park, Leeds West Yorkshire

Cow and Calf, Ilkley Moor West Yorkshire

Green Hat SEO

2008-03-28T04:15:00.000-07:00

Green Hat SEO

Conventional marketing and sales techniques are all energy intensive activities; whether running an outbound call centre, employing field sales teams, or using paper-based advertising such as mail shots.

By comparison search engine optimisation (SEO) is almost carbon neutral. So, if you consider yourselves to be a green company and carbon conscious now is the right time to think about opting for search engine optimisation as part of your business strategy to reduce your carbon footprint.

To do this properly, you want to choose an SEO consultant or company that spends their time focussing on your SEO campaigns and not jetting off all over the world every couple of weeks to conferences since this sort of defeats the whole object. Choose a hands-on SEO company and not a 'life-style SEO' company and make your SEO campaign Green Hat SEO.

Twisted Vista

2008-03-28T01:57:00.000-07:00

Twisted Vista

I'm starting to feel like an outcast. Am I the only person on the planet who hasn't had any real issues with Microsoft Vista since migrating across to it?

Okay for I have a few issues, but they are not very serious, and its running fine on the whole and has been since I installed.

The few quirks that I haven't yet sorted out are as follows.

I use a split screen with a KVM switch and when the machine goes into hibernation the keyboard and mouswe freeze up.

I used to use ActiveSync to sync my mobile device. Now I have to use Vista's Sync Center which doesn't seem capable of importing my contacts and insists on syncing media files which don't need syncing

That, however, is about it.

Variety is the Spice of SEO

2008-03-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

Variety is the Spice of SEO

Almost whenever I speak to some one new to SEO or a webmaster or business owner who wants to get their web site seen online, they are fixated with just one 'important thing' which they think will be the silver bullet to get them seen online and bring in the search engine positions they want. This might be a domain name, a DMOZ listing, or title tag and even more dubious things such as automated reciprocal linking services. However, it is very often just one marketing technique, recourse or strategy with which they are preoccupied.

As every SEO knows though there is in fact no silver bullet, and when it comes to successful online marketing variety, resourcefulness, innovation and strategy building are essential. Confine yourself to just one strategy and you may be very lucky and it may work for a while, but if it goes wrong then you have lost everything and will need to start again from scratch.

If you are new to SEO you should look for lists of Internet marketing techniques and SEO tips that are tried and tested and apply as many of them as you can. You should also look for lists of don'ts. Find out what is safe and legitimate and what is not, and extend your strategies while you consolidate those you have already employed. Most of all, just keep going. learn, test, apply, try and reapply. Your perservation will pay off once you stop looking for that silver bullet and commit yourself to the job.

The Great DoFollow Swindle

2008-03-25T00:54:00.000-07:00

The Great DoFollow Swindle

Since the emergence of DoFollow in the Blogosphere a whole DoFollow industry has arisen, and whilst previously I have blogged about some of the positive side effects of this, it has also given rise to some rather devious link building and link bait strategies.

Now that everyone is out there searching for a DoFollow blog to comment on, a whole load of DoFollow blog lists and directories have sprung up to cater for these commentors which usually assure them that all blogs have been checked and verified as legitimiately DoFollow. There are now even dofollow search engines such as CommentHunt. The blogs that get on these lists often get almost instant popularity, or at least a significant boost to their number of visitors.

The grim truth, however, is that a large number of these supposedly DoFollow blogs are actually nothing of the sort and have submitted themselves under false pretences, in order to get DoFollow traffic without taking the trouble to remove nofollow.

This is rather a clever move in some ways since they attract commentors expecting a dofollow link in return for their comment while simultaneously sticking within Google's nofollow ethos for a link that is not an editorial vote. In reality, what these bloggers are doing is manipulating the relevance of their blogs through false advertising, while protecting themselves under Google's nofollow wing.

Admittedly, some bloggers simply haven't managed to implement dofollow properly and haven't realised, but many others are lapping up the traffic they gain from this and are well aware of what they are doing.

The solution for this as I see it is a little blogger self-regulation. When you find one of these blogs, post a polite comment asking whether the blogmaster is aware that they are advertising a nofollow site as dofollow. They'll probably be quick to resolve the issue if they are genuine and quick to delete your comment if not. For anyone who is blatantly misleading their visitors - name and shame em.

Most importantly, get a Firefox plugin such as SearchStatus so that you can avoid being duped by the dofollow swindle.

SEO 101: expand your shopfront

2008-03-19T01:47:00.000-07:00

SEO 101: expand your shopfront

It is often the case that webmasters and website owners who are looking for SEO (search engine optimisation) or SEM (search engine marketing) services haved missed some of the fundamental things that they ought to be doing in order to help themselves, and to grow their online business organically. The foremost among these is ensuring the organic growth and expansion of their web site. A successful web site is most usually not a static and complete entity. A successful web site is dynamic and evolves and grows over time.

The search engines prefer web sites with fresh content and fresh webpages and will come around more frequently if a web site exhibits a trend for being updated on a regular basis. Moreover, the more web pages you have then the more landing pages you have, and the more content you have, the more long and short tail keywords you have available to be found by. In short, spend some time adding new web pages and new content to existing web pages every week and your traffic will almost certainly increase, as will your conversions.

In short, get the fundamentals right before reaching for your wallet to pay for SEO professional services.

Keep an SEO Ace up your Sleeve

2008-03-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

Keep an SEO Ace up your Sleeve

One strategy which I don't often see practiced in SEO and search engine marketing is that of saving some SEO muscle and marketing arsenal to one side. If you can do just enough to make the first place result or first page result you want with a safety margin, then it makes no sense to throw everything you have into attaining your search engine results.

Instead hold back a little and keep something in reserve for when the competition on the search engine results pages (SERPS) gets stiffer. By keeping this ace up your sleeve you'll always be ready for action when your competition improves or you get stung by an algorithm change e.t.c. So the moral here is, don't blow all your SEO budget in one go, or exhaust your best sources of links and let yourself run out of new marketing strategies. You can even leave a few holes in your onsite optimisation which can be patched up later when circumstances change. Have something heavy hitting left in reserve for a little bit of SEO risk management, and you can sleep much more soundly in your bed.

Genius Viral Marketing | An inspired Link Pimp

2008-02-29T09:14:00.000-08:00

Genius Viral marketing | An Inspired Link Pimp

The SEO pussy goes link fishing

Its not often I get sucked in by viral marketing, but this is a truly inspired bit of link bait. The SEO Pussy gives you a run down and overview of onsite optimisation, offsite optimisation and link building. He's a husky SEO alley cat link pimp, attired with bling fish bone collar.

Credit where credit is due. I've seen some pretty awful, tired and cardboard SEO video pitches in my time, but this one breaks the mould. Everyone likes a cartoon, and its far better than having some monotone marketing bloke, blonde publicity model, cheesy techie or other stiff moaning on to you in a fuzzy mpg about what SEO means to your business. Meoww, the SEO pussy rocks, I got sucked in and I embedded the video.

See the SEO pussy in action

SEO Expert 'The SEO Pussy' Introduces Himself - The best video clips are right here

Why I dislike duplicate content

2008-02-28T05:04:00.000-08:00

Why I dislike duplicate content

I've said a fair bit on this little old blog so far about why putting duplicate content on your website is a bad idea, but not very much about my dislike of duplicate content and where it comes from.

Top quality original content is something which contains unique thoughts, ideas, concepts or perspectives, and the bottom line is that this is the intellectual property of the person who wrote it and they deserve attribution.

I spent the best part of four years inculcating undergraduate English and Computing students with the ethos of intellectual honesty when it came to their written work and I would be a hypocrite if I participated in or advocated the dissemination of duplicated, plagarised or ripped off content online. Even in an academic environment its usually pretty easy to spot plagarism, even when you can't just run a paragraph of text through Google. And to be fair, I took a certain degree of pride in catching people out whether they be web design students who tried to copy other web sites wholesale or literature students who thought I might not have read a particular article on Milton's Paradise Lost, and presented the ideas therein as their own.

So, how do you avoid plagarism?

This is not an official definition, but it is based upon what I used to provide as a general guideline.

For unquoted or unattributed content, no more than one word in five should be the same as your source.

Where you paraphrase someone else's ideas use a citation. For HTML use the CITE tag

Where you use someone else's words use quotations. For HTML use the blockquote tag. And also a citation

Provide a bibliography and footnotes if you really want to go for it, but at least link back to the source

Promote your sources rather than hiding them, and your article will look better researched and more authoritative; both to your readers and to the search engines.

Add your own perspective and interpretation of the information you have gathered from elsewhere. This is what makes the intellectual content of what you are writing unique as well, as making the content original

Doing this will give you a fair chance of getting started in your search engine marketing. The search engines are looking for the most authoritative content on any given subject and will prioritise it when they think they've found it. Links, CITE and BLOCKQUOTE all help to indicate to spiders and bots that the subject matter in front of them has been thoroughly researched and carries some weight. In short, one factor that will contribute towards your online marketing success, is to make your content as unique and authoritative as possible and to put out the right signals to show that this is what you have done.

Do follow trust communities

2008-02-22T23:55:00.000-08:00

Dofollow trust communities

With all the complaints and railing at the moment which are going on against Google's implementation of DoFollow, I thought it might be an idea to offer up one positive and rather ironic side effect of this. There is a new blogging culture emerging online as a direct result of the link juice being sapped out of links by nofollow.

A quick look around the Comment Hunt blog search engine or around popular dofollow blog's reveals the emergence of quite a number of dofollow blogger trust communities, whereby bloggers using dofollow all seem to know each other quite well, read each other's blogs and comment on them. Many of them also seem quite savvy at fighting blog spam themselves.

The upshot of this, is that these resistance movements to Google's little link juice vampire nofollow are actually unwittingly creating trusted link networks and communities where linking more often than not is from a trusted source. There is moreover an incentive to become accepted into these communities since it has obvious rewards - e.g. being known online, having people visit your own blog and getting link juice into the bargain.

I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about nofollow, but there you go! Nofollow does seem to be have at least some positive effects!

Link building with PDFs

2008-02-21T07:54:00.000-08:00

Link building with PDFs

PDFs are an excellent, but under-utilised, option for marketing your web site. One great thing about PDFs is that you have more places than just the WWW to market them. They can be added to your own web site, article sites and even placed on file sharing software. Finally, PDFs don't use the rel=nofollow attribute so you know that links from them count for something.

First of all get your links on them, get them on your web sites and submit to articles sites. If other people nick them for their own web sites then you have free inbound links.

Second, get them out on file sharing software (of course you can also put html files on file sharing software, but who will want to open them?). Some people will find these and visit your website, and you got this traffic without needing to worry about SEO at all. Again there is also a fair chance that someone will 'steal' your content and put the pdfs up on their own website, which will mean more free links. This is a really useful little backdoor, since it gives you traffic without going through any of the usual channels.

Before you do any of this though, your PDFs do need optimising just like html pages. In order to add your links and optimise your PDF you will need some PDF editing software like Adobe Professional.

Adding links in Adobe Professional is straightforward - Go to TOOLS - ADVANCED EDITING - LINK TOOL and select the text you want to link in. Then type your URL in the dialog box.

To optimise your page, you need to go to FILE - DOCUMENT PROPERTIES and give the PDF a title, subject and keywords - this last step will really help, and all too many people neglect to do this, part of the job.

Finally, you need to add some document security so that your links can't be removed or the content tampered with. Go to DOCUMENT - SECURITY - RESTRICT OPENING AND EDITING and choose the security settings you want to use to protect your PDF document.

You can watch a video showing you how to create PDF links and protect your PDF document using Adobe Acrobat 6 Pro here

Running Multiple Adwords Accounts

2008-02-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

Running Multiple Adwords Accounts

Running multiple Adwords accounts can be tricky if you are running a few seaprate accounts for just a few customers, or just want to log into a few of the accounts you run and check on progress without the benefit of PPC management software. Google has this habit of remembering the last account you logged in to and not letting you near the login screen, so that you can get into other accounts. A quick tip to get around this is to use different web browsers for different customer Adwords accounts. Google appears not only to remember your IP address but also the browser used even when you clear the cache, so if you log into one using Mozilla Firefox, use a different browser such as Opera or Safari for other Adwords accounts. The same is true also of Adsense accounts, and if you are running both an Adwords and Adsense campaign.

However, if you manage 100s of pay per click (PPC) campaigns then you are going to need some pretty beefy PPC management software and the hardware and database to back it up. Such bespoke software is going to need to handle bids for each keyword and communicate with each PPC vendor such as Google, Yahoo and MSN through an API and this can mean having 1000s of simultaenous connections going. This involvess sending/ recieving, analysing and reporting on a hefty quantity of information, and means that you will require both rugged and powerful bespoke pay-per-click software in order to run your campaigns in an efficient and timely manner. For this you can expect to pay anywhere from £30,000 upwards depending upon your requirements as well as investing in enterprise level DB software such as Oracle and a decent server to put it on. If you are managing 100s of PPC campaigns for your clients though, the investment is well worth it, and not such a big overhead when set against your management fees per month.

Our specialist software developers can provide reliable bespoke pay-per-click management systems that can effectively help you to streamline your PPC campaign management processes across your campaigns and PPC vendors, with excellent turn around times and for very competitive prices. If you need a PPC software solution and have your intial requirements ready, let me know and our developers can start to work on a project outline for you.

Is your web stats software working properly?

2008-02-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Is your web stats software working properly?

If you've ever been puzzled by a down turn in visitors, when all your search engine positions remained the same, then here's what might have happened: Very simply, the webstats provided by your web host might not be working properly. A sudden drop in visitors can be very worrying when you depend on your website for your income, but before you despair, you should set up Google Analytics and compare the results. If there is a significant difference between the two then, there is a very good chance that there is a problem with your web host's implementation of the stats software.

We recently had this scenario, whereby we were asked to look at a down turn in stats for a company when none of the important search engine positions had changed. The company used AWSTATS which is usually very reliable. The issue was only uncovered when we began hosting another web site on the same webhost and noticed that the web stats were distinctly and definitely wrong. Comparing with Google Analytics we were able to demonstrate that the other web site's traffic had not actually dropped but that the stats software was at fault.

The lesson here is that web traffic statistical software is not infalliable, and if you are concerned about a sudden downturn in the number of unique visitors showing, then it is well worth having an additional set of measurables against which to compare them so that you can quickly identify the source of the problem.

How to get a .com onto the Google UK data centre immediately

2008-02-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

How to get a .com onto the Google UK data centre immediately.

One of my customers recently unwittingly showed me how to get a .com website onto the Google UK data centre immediately.

This looks to work faster than all the usual techniques such as using Whois information, declaring the language in the meta data, specifying your UK location in your address on every page, submitting to the Google UK data centre and so forth.

What my customer did was this: She copied her content directly out of Microsoft Word into the content management system. Ok this is not something to be recommended. The content management picks up Microsoft Word’s back end formatting and replicates it on the page, and the result is a mountain of superfluous HTML code. But guess what else it inserts in every paragraph, the language of the Word document, and this comes out something like the following for every paragraph:

Forget everything else in there, just nest <span style="" lang="EN-GB"< in your paragraphs and you will get indexed and included on the UK data centre with lightening speed.

SEO: a warning for techies, web masters, web designers and SEO customers

2008-02-15T07:38:00.000-08:00

SEO: a warning for techies, web masters, web designers and SEO customers.

A good search engine marketer, needs to be able to synthesise large amounts of information very quickly and to make judgements and decisions based on that information in as prompt a manner as possible. Moreover, your SEO will probably make a multitude of such decisions just about the content of your website alone. Where this often becomes a problem is when the reasoning behind these decisions isn’t immediately apparent to other people who have a hand in the web site. Ideally, your SEO will lock down the changes that can be made to the web site, and play the role of a project manager taking authority over what changes can be made and when.

This however isn’t always possible, and some obstructive web masters, techies and customers can actively resist such control being taken by the SEO guy, and consequently hurt their own chances temporarily in the search engine results, or just make their SEO’s life more difficult. Every search engine marketer has experienced this at some point, whether through a campaign where back end website access is denied totally and the campaign needs to depend wholly upon link building or when customers or web masters unwittingly go into the site and undo changes or make new changes which are detrimental to the overall success of an SEO campaign. Since the success of your online business depends heavily upon how well you rank in the search engines customers can not afford not to listen to their SEO guy when it comes to the management of their website.

Relinquishing control is hard for some people, but sometimes it just has to be done in order to give you a better chance of getting value for money.

Ideally, while your SEO campaign is underway, you should consult your SEO specialist about what changes can and can’t be made to the website – these might include, changes to html file names, moving html files to different directories, changing content, meta data, or the html code, even adding new content to the web site. That sounds like almost everything because it is, your SEO specialist will have taken an overview of all the web pages they are working on and made alterations accordingly, and many components of the page will be working together to ensure better success – change one of them and you disrupt the over all balance.

Moreover, a good SEO specialist is going to need full access to your website and to make changes in both the HTML and CSS, and possibly in asp or php sites as well. If not you will need a very co-operative and responsive web designer or webmaster who will make changes exactly as they are instructed without fuss, or challenge. Sometimes web masters are simply rigid with fear about letting an SEO loose on one of their websites since this might expose to their customer or employer all the things that they have done wrong or don’t know. In truth, however, they are not specialists and can’t be expected to know what should be done for the best search engine results, even if they have researched it in books and on the Internet. They might, moreover, really benefit from the education, if they allow themselves to cultivate a good relationship with the SEO guy, and take on board what they are told to do.

Phew, rant over.

Valentines day links

2008-02-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

Valentine's day links

We missed Valentine's Day yesterday, but we're back on form today for some link love.

Love us, Link to us, because we are soft cuddly and cute and just a little bit hirsute.!

Reasons to avoid Duplicate content

2008-02-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

Reasons to avoid Duplicate content

When you are populating your web pages with content it is a straightforward fact that unique content is better than duplicated content. The search engines, and Google especially, are looking for the more authoritative source on any given topic or subject and if you want to succeed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) then the uniqueness of your web pages (each individual one of them) counts.

I have heard it said, even among supposed SEO experts that there are ways around the duplicate content issue, which will enable a web page to perform better than the web pages from which content was copied. The other old chest nut is that the oldest domain wins out or that the page cached first wins out. However, you are not competing against just one or two other websites unless you are exceptionally lucky indeed. While you might do better than the other web pages which have the same content, this is not the same as doing well over all. Just because your web page is coming before another one which has the same content for your search terms does not mean that your web page is not under-performing. There will be a lot of other web pages out there which have unique content and which are doing better than yourself, across a range of subject related key phrases.

So, what might happen if you use duplicated, copied or plagarised content for your web page. In truth, the search engines are fairly lenient usually, but you will nonetheless be doing yourself no favours by thinking that this means it is acceptable to paste duplicated content onto your web site. Search engines are sophisticated beasts and they can usually tell if you have only made a piecemeal attempt to make your content unique by moving a few words around. Google will even ignore whole paragraphs of text or sentences which it deems to be duplicated, and these can be difficult to spot, because the whole web page still appears in the search engine results pages for a few terms. Moreover, the trend is that search engine algorithms are getting more sophisticated rather than less, so even if you have not been caught out thus far, the risk increases as time goes on.

Anyway, here are a few things that can happen to your website if you do decide to include duplicate content:

Search engines ignore paragraphs and sentences of text

Web page doesn’t perform as well as it should in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)

Web page appears only in the search engine supplementary results pages.

Web page/ web site is banned or blacklisted.

One easy trap to fall into with duplicate content is when you are a reseller. Resellers often get their product information and other web site content provided along with the product they are re-selling and it is very tempting just to copy this wholesale as a ready-to-go package. This is a mistake however, but it is also one that you can turn to your advantage. As a reseller it is a safe bet that a lot of other re-sellers are using duplicated content and suffering as a consequence of this. Here, you stand a very good chance of surpassing all of your competitors just by taking the time and effort to re-work the content you got and to make it individual and unique. You need to be thorough here though and a half-hearted attempt, most usually will just not cut any ice. Ideally you should re-write everything from scratch. At very least you should do the following:

Change word order

Change word choice using synonyms

Change paragraph order

Add new paragraphs

Thoroughly re-work all headings

Thoroughly re-work and re-order all lists

Localise the spelling

Remove superfluous words and phrases

Concentrate on tightening up and focussing on your keywords

Add your own comments and points interpolated between existing text.

Pay more attention to detail than your competitors using links within the text and other granular changes

Make use of the cite and blockquote tags when you can’t get around making a quote verbatim.

As a final thought; this post contains 736 words of unique content and it took less than 30 minutes to write, so it can't be that difficult to play by the rules

Customise your Google Homepage

2008-01-31T05:21:00.000-08:00

Customise your Google Homepage

This won't get you better results in the Google Search Engines, but it will allow you to personalise your Google homepage with images and so forth. http://www.groovle.com/ - check it out, its either cool or twee depending upon how you want to look at it.

More coverage on Google Local Business Center

2008-01-25T04:26:00.001-08:00

More coverage on Google Local Business Center

Over the past week Google has started displaying many more results in the local businesses section of its search engine results pages, making it much easier to get listed on the front page. Previously it was unusual to see more than 2-4 businesses listed in the Local Business results, but now it seems to be the case that 10 is the norm, which allows more businesses to get more coverage, but which pushes the organic results further into obscurity as they compete with both sponsored listings and local business results.

Since getting a presence within the Google Local Business results is free, this makes it all the more important for companies competing within their local area to get listed. Listings often appear at the top of the front page and are sometimes even more visible than both PPC (Pay-per-Click) results or organic search results. If your business is not listed then you should do it today, in order to avoid being left behind.

As with all free marketing opportunities there is always a slight catch. The drawback here being for companies geographically situated on the periphery of the city or town they provision. Those businesses closest to the centre get listed first, so while city centre businesses win out, those outside will struggle a little for visibility and will be in more need of professional help with either Adwords or PPC campaigns or with getting better results in the organic listings.

When posting your listing on Google Local Business Center consider carefully the information you need to provide in order to get the most mileage out of this marketing opportunity. Describe your business as succinctly as you can, making sure you use as many keywords which describe what you do as possible, fill in the list of places you cover as comprehensively as you can, and if there is more than one sub category which matches the core services you provide then make sure you make use of it. Lastly if your business provides enough discrete products and services to warrant having more than one listing then, use multiple listings. In short be as thorough as possible. This is a gift horse so don't look it in the mouth.

Google Maps UK Map

2008-01-24T07:40:00.001-08:00

Google Maps UK Map

Looking around the default home page for Google Maps in the UK I just noticed that there are some big omissions in the default scale UK map. Glasgow is there, but not Edinburgh, Hartlepool but not Newcastle, Preston but not Liverpool. How bizarre that Google Maps, the most prominent cartographical authority online omits these places in favour of much smaller towns.

View Larger Map

With just one click of magnification all these big cities appear, but Hartlepool dissapears and it takes 2 clicks of magnification before Bradford appears? Did Hartlepool sink into the sea?

Even more strangely, when you reduce the map scale two clicks from the default Edinburgh reappears.

I always thought the art of cartography was one of accuracy of scale and proportion. Maybe I was wrong.

choosing domain names and naming web pages - seo 101

2008-01-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

choosing domain names and naming web pages - seo 101

Choosing the right domain name and the right names for your webpages is a great way of enhancing the link juice that your site gets. If you get the keywords you are targeting in both your domain name and your web page file names, then you will reap several benefits. One being that the search engines will give some consideration to the words in your domain name and file names when evaluating your site. More importantly, getting these key words in here will encourage people to use these keywords when linking to you without any prompting. The upshot of this is that you will get more relevant inbound links to your web site, and you will benefit from it without any extra effort.

Back in the day when we chose our domain name for the FourSquare Innovations site, we made exactly the mistake of not taking our keywords into consideration for the domain name, and to be honest its far from a disaster if you do this. However, marketing on the web these days is tough and it makes sense to make things as easy for yourself as possible when it comes to Internet marketing and to grab any legitimate advantage you can when the opportunity is presented.

You can explore more considerations for choosing a domain name in our article Find domain names & how to register or buy domain names.

Coolest Guy on the Planet Update

2008-01-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

Coolest Guy on the Planet Update

Following my post on December 6th about the SEO competition to become the coolest guy on the planet in Googles Results Pages, there have been some indecedental consquences of putting up this review of the competitors. The first one being that I'm now almost in the running for coolest guy on the planet myself, have just hit page 2 - maybe I'll even climb. The second consequence is that as a result of this post I am still Google's no. 1 most flatulent guy on the planet - well maybe I should just get used to this. The result did disappear for a while, but now it looks like I'm stuck with it. I might as well just sit back and enjoy the sweet smell of success, unless someone wants to be kind enough to knock me off there - it should only take you about 3 inbound links and I'll help. Please, anyone?

So who''s the coolest guy on the planet now?

I hate emoticons

2008-01-17T06:07:00.000-08:00

I hate emoticons

Ok so this is a bit of a digression away from our core subject, but to be honest I don't care. I never realised just how much I hate emoticons until I just accidentally clicked on a banner ad and got a whole page of the gurning little mongrel beasts. They should be banned, hunted down and squashed like blueberries in a juicer. Why did they ever become so popular? How come they have such a take-up, and how come I continually encounter them online, in emails and sms text messages from people who assume that I will appreciate the humour of some little yellow blob winking or sticking its bloody tongue out at me or dribbling insanely at me like some animated gif throwback?

We all hated the Microsoft Office paperclip - we couldn't wait to see the back of it - it must have cost businesses thousands in computer users calling out engineers to ask how to get rid of it. The Microsoft paperclip was evil and rightly recognised as such. Why is it then that emoticons are so prolific? It's like they are parasites breeding and multiplying in Cyberspace. In fact, maybe I should get in on the game - for every emoticon out there I want its avatar taken and redesigned into an animation of it being squished with a sledge hammer, so I can send this in response to the emoticons I get plagued with. Please can we clean up the Internet and get rid of the Emoticons. Maybe Yahoo et al need to develop an emoticon filter, and bounce any email back with one included in an email with a message in the header that says 'This mail is undeliverable because you are infantile and need to grow up before you ever send another email'. or some such.

God I hate emoticons

If you want to take out your frustration on these nasty little critters - play the kill the emoticons game

Internet Marketing Vanity - SEO 101: the title tag

2008-01-17T01:37:00.000-08:00

Internet Marketing Vanity - SEO 101: the title tag

A small rant for the day...

Have you ever noticed how it is very often vanity which stands between web sites and even the most modest search engine visibility or search engine marketing success? Personally, I've lost count of the number of times that the first words in a website's title tag were the company name and the same goes for first level headings. Businesses, webmasters and web site designers all need to be aware that the most important thing about a company is not its name but the products and services that the company offers. It is these that the consumer is searching for, and if the important keywords are not given in the most contextually important places on a web page then that web page will not bring in the traffic it ought to be.

So rant now over, I'll say a few words about the title tag.

The title tag should contain the most relevant keywords which contextually describe the content on a web page

Each web page should have its title tag specifically tailored for its content

If you do need to put the company name in the title tag, then put it at the end

Ideally the title tag should use no more than ten words, you can get away with a few more at a push but avoid being spammy at all costs

If your web page is place/location specific then get the place name in there

PPC vs Organic Search

2008-01-15T23:07:00.000-08:00

PPC vs Organic Search

I must confess that I have an instinctive bias against using PPC services such as Adwords. Its simply a matter of not being prepared to pay for something that I can do myself and a dislike of the artificiality of PPC search engine results. This is my feeling; however, and in this instance I must confess that my feeling is not logical.

The truth is that a good PPC campaign can pay off - otherwise why would anyone continue to use this method of getting search engine placements. Moreover, PPC can usefully complement an organic search campaign. The organic search aspect of the campaign might generate more traffic and a better return, but the PPC campaign will usually more than pay for itself and is also of benefit to your market saturation. If you have high results in both the organic and PPC SERPs then this increases your prominence greatly, squeezes out more of the competition and enhances your credibility since if you show up in both you will appear to be all the more relevant to those searching your chosen key phrases.

Just like any other industry - its not always best to go with your gut feeling for search engine marketing. You actually need to look beyond your personal preferences and work out what will actually make you more money and bring a better return on investment.

SEO Resistance

2008-01-15T05:17:00.000-08:00

SEO Resistance

If you've ever dealt with a company which has approached you for search engine marketing, but which simultaneously exhibits extreme resistance to the advice that you give them, then you'll know how frustrating this can be.

This sort of reluctance to follow advice can be for a number of reasons. Often, clients resist making changes to their existing web pages such as adding content or changing other factors which will make them more search engine friendly. Other times, SEO has previously been in the hands of an in-house techie, who is either not-forthcoming with information and help because he is scared it will uncover flaws in his work or because he has researched SEO on the Web and what you are telling him just plain does not match up with the drivel that many search marketers give out as free advice, simply because they understandably do not want to give out proprietry information or what they regard as industry secrets.

Another source of reluctance arises from the atfermath of SEO snake oil vendors. A new client is always much less eager to trust you if he has previously encountered an Internet Marketing Company which either over-promised or under-delivered or both. It can be very difficult to overcome objections, and to steer a company down the right path, when you can't offer absolute guarentees and all the usual 'No 1 spot guaranteed' BS. It's much easier to sell the service if you sell the dream that hot search terms can be delivered up without a significant outlay in link building. Doing this however is dishonest, because as any search engine marketer knows, obtaining good results is not all slight-of-hand and legerdomain. Good search engine positions are produced through 90% link building and onsite work and 10% or less of innovation and unconventional techniques. Trickery is by its nature high risk and therefore should be avoided at all costs if you value your clients and your reputation.

In order to overcome such obstacles and objections about your search engine marketing services the best advice is probably to keep a list onhand of working examples of what you have done for clients in the past, with information about the problems they encountered, what needed to be done and what the results were. In our experience this has been found to be by far the best method of overcoming objections and doubts. And if you have any flops or projects which had shortcomings, where you were unable to take the necessary actions to achieve success because of client resistance, then show these too. Knowing why things went wrong as well as why other SEO projects achieved their objectives, can only help you to illustrate quickly to your clients that you are worth doing business with and that they should take your advice seriously.

Adsense makes Sense

2007-12-27T22:40:00.000-08:00

Adsense makes Sense

I read an awful lot on the Internet about why using Adsense is tacky, cheap, money-grubbing and so forth, and while I can see some justification in some of the complaints levelled, I want to put forward here a business case for using Adsense on your websites, which offers justification for harnessing this source of revenue.

The Pros of Adsense

You are in business, and therefore your objective is to maximise your profits.

While Adsense revenue may not ever form a high percentage of your income, it is working for you 24/7, and it is a revenue stream. Every good business person knows the importance of generating multiple revenue streams.

Displaying competitor ads shows that you are not frightened of the competition.

However good your products and services are, not all of your visitors will want to shop with you. If your visitors are not persuaded by your argument or products and services, you can at least make some revenue when they click away.

Giving visitors to your website the opportunity to shop around, might help to raise your trust factor.

When some one clicks on a competitor's ad you are effectively getting paid money by your competitors. This is money in your pocket and out of your competitor's pocket so in effect it is worth double the physical amount of money you get paid.

Occassionally, highly contextual ads can even backup the argument you make in the content of your web page. I found this especially useful on a page I wrote about website accessbility where 2 of the adsense ads mention that 80% of websites in the UK are not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act.

Trolling, Web 2 and their equivalents in Early Modern Literature

2007-12-17T23:56:00.000-08:00

Trolling, Web 2 and their equivalents in Early Modern Literature

We have a tendency to view Web 2 and the social conversations that take place on there as something totally new and dislocated from our socially discursive and literary past. Web 2 is in many ways actually a continuation of literary social conversations which were popular in print up until around the start of the 18th century, when the Romantic poets pretty much stuck the nail in the coffin of social discursive literature, turning poetry instead into a dead literary artefact. Something to be admired from a distance rather than engaged with in a socially dialogic exchange of words, where the conversational element was at least as important as the art itself. In many ways, blogging has resurrected this form of public literary exchange whereby writers exchange their views in the written word in a public forum. One noticeable trend that has been resurrected is that of trolling - exchanging written expressions of ill-will, libel, defamation and insult.

Trolling is first used in something close to the context we know it for today in an exchange of verse libels in the 1540s in a printed exchange of insult in verse between one Thomas Smyth and Thomas Grey. The two men issued verse pamphlets attacking each other around London and each sally in the exchange was explicitly called a 'troll', and the activity in which they were engaged, 'trolling', as is evident from the title of the poems themselves. One poem is entitled 'A Newe Ballade Made of Thomas Crumwel, Called “Trolle on Away' and another begins:

Whether ye trolle in or els trolle out

Ye trolle vntruly; loke better about

The term trolling pretty much disappears out of usage between then and the advent of the Internet, and I suspect it was resurrected by some academic or other to describe what is more commonly known as flyting. Flyting has been around probably since the dawn of oral poetry and such formal exchanges of insult have found their way into many cultures in the form of poetry both spoken and written, from the Japanese Tanka and Renku, the early modern French or Troubadour Sirventes, to flytings exchanged at the Scottish court in the 15th and 16th century to the American playground game known as dozens in the 20th century.

In many ways trolling or exchanging insult on the blogosphere is a stultified art form. In the printed and written abusive exchanges of literary antiquity the practice was undertaken upon a more level playing field since none of the participants held more control over the medium of dissemination than another. On the blogosphere, however, trolling is likely to occur between a blog owner and a blog visitor whereby the blog owner has rights of censorship and exclusion over his rival. This has the effect of dampening the vitriol and colourful language that might be expressed. In fact, trolling in its true sense was more something that took place in flames wars on the forums of the late 1990s, where both participants shared equal status and censorship power was held by forum admins who tended to be a bit more lax than blog owners.

One notable shared feature between Internet trolling and earlier forms of written exchanges of abuse and insult is that they are not necessarily confined to two people owing to the socially public forum upon which they are conducted. There is a tendency for trolling to gain momentum as supporters and detractors gather on each side. In some printed instances in the 16th century the participants burgeon up to double figures. The immediacy of the Internet, however, provides the potential for many more participants even than this.

In Early Modern Europe there was much more awareness of trolling or flyting as a literary medium in its own right, and exchanges of insult might even be deliberately orchestrated. There is even an anecdote about James V of Scotland commanding one of his subjects to write a flyting against him, and Sir David Lindsay really rises to the challenge of insulting his king without getting his head chopped off. He tells James 'Ye Fukkand like an furious fornicator', but goes on to say that he really hopes that James doesn't catch any nasty diseases and that he's a really good poet!

I guess that main difference between 16th century flyting and the trolling that takes place on the internet today is that the 16th century writers produced invectives of literary merit. What we get today seems to be mostly sotto voce side swipes and smarmy comments. I think we need some blogs dedicated purely to exchanging colourful insults, and what's more it would make excellent link bait. If anyone knows of such a blog where everyone can get stuck in, I'd love to hear about it

If anyone wants to set something like this up, Squidoo has a feature called duel, which is set up for the purpose of heated debate between participants.

Note: OED cites numerous definitions of the verb. To troll is to allure or entice, to angle, to perform an antiphonal song, or “to move nimbly” from one place to he next. The word might also denote a knave:

OED, Troll, IV. 15

b. Troll and troll by, Troll hazard, Troll with, as sbs., names for various ‘orders of knaves’: see quot. and cf. sense 1. Obs. Cant.

1561 J. Awdelay Frat. Vacab. (E.E.T.S.) 12 Troll and Trol by, is he that setteth naught by no man nor no man by him. Troll with is he that no man shall know the seruaunt from ye Maister... Troll hazard of trace is he that goeth behynde his Maister as far as he may see hym... Troll hazard of tritrace, is he that goeth gaping after his Master.

Nofollow quick fix for Blogger

2007-12-14T14:56:00.000-08:00

Nofollow quick fix for Blogger

I just found a great article on removing nofollow from Blogger. Took me about 30 seconds to implement the hack, and it worked.

Check out the article on removing nofollow from Blogger on the Webstractions blog.

Some nofollow tools you might find useful:

The SearchStatus plugin for Firefox provides some useful SEO measureables, including identifying links using nofollow: SearchStatus

CommentHunt provides a Google search filtered for blogs that don't use nofollow: http://www.commenthunt.com/

SEO Terminology: Glossary of Terms

2007-12-10T23:17:00.000-08:00

SEO Terminology and SEO Jargon Buster

SEO 101

If you are new to SEO or are shopping for Internet Marketing services for the first time then it if a fair bet that you are having a little trouble wading through the mountain of terminology used by SEO professionals, and that you're wishing we could all just speak and write in plain English for a change. Anyway, to help you cut through the jargon, there follows a list of a few terms commonly used in SEO speak accompanied by a short description.

Keyword stuffing - needless repetition of keywords and phrases so as to attain higher search engine rankings

Google Dance - The name given to the period when Google updates its search engine rankings. Google's main and secondary server results will differ during this time.

Google Sandbox - A filter that Google imposes on new domains in order to prevent the website from ranking highly for the main keywords for a period of time

PPC - Initialism for Pay-Per-Click. This refers to paid advertising and paid listings, such as Google's Adwords whereby advertisers bid on advertising space on the search results which appear on the right hand side of Google's Search Engine Results Pages

IBL - Initialism for Inbound Link

Meta Data - In short this is where the search engines look for brief information about the content on a web page. It is data about data, if you like.

Meta Description - the meta data which provides a synopsis of a web page's content and subject matter.

Meta Keywords - the meta data which provides a list of the most contextually relevant keywords and key phrases on a web page

OBL - Not Osama Bin Laden in this instance, but an initialism for outbound links
Title Tag - this is the text that appears in the blue bar at the very top of the browser. Search engines assume that the text in there will be very relevant to the content and context of your web page.

Title attribute - this is the text that you see when you put your mouse over a hyperlink

Alt attribute - this is the text that you see when you hover your mouse over an image

Hidden Text - the practice of hiding keywords by using a background colour the same as the colour of the text.

White Hat - The honest approach to SEO, which involves striving to provide the search engines with exactly the sort of information they want, in the fashion in which they would prefer it to be delivered.

Black Hat - An SEO technique which attempts to exploit weaknesses in search engine algorithms, in order to attain higher positions in the search engines.

Search Engine - software that searches for information on the Internet and returns results for sites which provide that information.

Search Engine spamming - the manipulation of a web page to give it an artificial boost in the SERPS.

Semantic markup - HTML that has been written to define the context of the content enclosed in the markup, such as using h1 tags for headings, p tags for paragraphs or li for lists. While this sounds obvious many web designers persist in using CSS for formatting text with the appearance of headings, paragraphs and lists without actually giving them the correct tags which tell search engines what they are.

SERPs - an initialism for Search Engine Results Pages

Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a user-defined online system for organising bookmarks. Unlike storing bookmarks in a folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and can be accessed from any computer.

rel=nofollow and pagerank

2007-12-07T22:46:00.000-08:00

rel=nofollow and page rank

I've just been having a read through one of Matt Cutts' posts on the use of no follow and paid links, and I wanted just to take a quick opportunity to point out one glaring issue with the way nofollow can be used in exactly the opposite way to that which Google intends.

At the end of his post Matt States that:

The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.

Not including nofollow on paid links is outside Google's guidelines, although Matt does state that the primary motive behind this implementation of nofollow was not to help the search engines to identify paid links. Rather, they are encouraging webmasters to use nofollow for any links which don't represent a genuine editorial vote for a webpage (such as comments on blog posts). This, however, provides the business directories with a great little tool to drive webmasters towards paid listings. I'm seeing it happen here and there, and I can only imagine that the trend will grow. Automatically submitted free listings are being offered with the nofollow attribute, and the ones without the nofollow attribute are being charged for. This obviously makes it even easier for the business directories to make money out of paid listings, and selling links.

I realise that business directories are not generally selling links as their primary source of revenue, but rather they are selling listings which include a link. Nonetheless, when some of them are manipulating nofollow by including it in their outbound links from free listings, and removing it in their paid listings, it is fairly obvious that they recognise the value of a link without nofollow and are factoring it into the price they charge.

Instead of providing a means to indicate a genuine editorial vote for a site, nofollow is in fact providing a value-added means of selling links. I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice this, but I just thought I'd throw my observations into the arena.

Google is presently working hard to bring unscrupulous business directories down a peg or two, and as any one who has read my post cost effective search engine marketing for small businesses will probably guess, this is something of which I approve. However, I have my doubts about their efficacy in this instance. How do you identify in a machine readable way a directory which inverts the implementation of nofollow to its own financial advantage? My assumption is that the bots will pass through, spot nofollow attributes and assume that these are for the paid listings, and therefore that the directory is abiding by the guidelines. If I'm wrong here, I'd love to hear about it.

Now I realise that Google takes a lot of flak for adopting a monopolistic approach to search, and for trying to manipulate the way webmasters link, but for me right now the real issue is with the way information is served up to us from the business directory listings which monopolise local search in the SERPS. Maybe Google can help us here beyond what it has already done to redress the balance with Google Local Business Center. How about maybe treating business directory results in a similar way to Adwords - give them a separate results space served up outside of the main results, or even offer some choice by way of a radio button option to exclude directory listings from the main results or to move them into their own results area.

There are some guidelines to spotting business directories which don't pass on PR at http://www.loriswebs.com/directories-avoid.html

The SEO Company provides a list of business directories rated by the quality of their inbound link quality here: http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html. Whether all these directories pass on PR is something which I haven't checked.

Coolest Guy on the Planet

2007-12-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

coolest guy on the planet: who's who in the SEO wacky races for pole position

There's been a race going on for a couple of years now to decide which SEO owns first place in the SERPS for Coolest Guy on the Planet and its probably not news to most people in the SEO industry that Brad Fallon has been there for quite some time. Anyway, let's have a look at the run down of who's competing to be The Coolest Guy on the Planet. I've been pretty general in my analysis here, just a quick look at Google Web, SEO for Firefox and a quick glance back end, so I haven't looked in any detail at link relevancy, who's linking in, keyword spread, or many of the more nuanced high-hitting techniques I could have done with world enough and time. As a final caveat, links showing on SEO 4 Firefox seem to have been as erratic as hell for the past week or so; apologies in advance if these figures are wildly out.

So who is the alpha SEO on Google Web ?

& 2: Brad Fallon holds the first 2 places with around 13000 links going to his homepage which gets the top result. According to Brad's website he fell off the face of the planet for this phrase for a little while and then shot back in at numero uno again. Anyway, seems like Brad has held this position just about forever. 1st coolest guy on the planet

It's Brad Fallon too. 2nd coolest guy on the planet

Jonathon Leger gets in 3rd place behind Brad with only 600 links pointing at the entire site, goes in there using mainly basic white hat techniques that are open to anyone, and claims to do it to the letter of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. There's a lesson in there for all of us. If you tack into the wind rather than against it, the going is always easier. 3rd coolest guy on the planet

Using not much more than the title tag, a couple of h1 tags, an h2 tag, meta desc and 6000 odd inbound links Russell Brunson comes in at number 4. Nice job (close the chevron on the meta description tag though). Russ also takes no, 1 spot for coolest guy on the Plant, which is cool in its own way. 4th coolest guy on the planet

Mike Filsaime comes in at number 5 for coolest guy on the Planet. This guy is not an SEO, but a mate of Brad Fallon's who wanted to get in on the action. Well done Mike. With only around 90 inbound links obtained through article submission, the perfect domain name (a babe at two years old) and keywords sprinkled through the page nested in good semantic markup this is a really respectable job. 5th coolest guy on the planet

While aiming to be 3rd Coolest Guy On The Planet, Garrett Boon inadvertantly comes in at no 6 for the coolest guy on the planet, which is fairly cool. Garrett has about 200 inbound links to that webpage; although I notice a PR0 which just goes to show how much PR matters. Apparently, Skystrider is a character from World of WarCraft and not some sort of SEO software as I first assumed. 6th coolest guy on the planet

With a PR5 and 2300 inbound links to this webpage no 7 only needs to tighten up his onsite optimisation in order to become a much fiercer competitor for cool; as he admits himself. With some attention to meta data and some more strategic use of semantic markup we could have a contender here - I'd suggest taking 'July 28, 2007' out of H2 tags and maybe putting, ummmm, the coolest guy on the planet in there once or twice (just a bit of editing blog source code needed here). 7th coolest guy on the planet

At No 8 Peter Drew is in here to prove a point. Jonathon went in with White Hat and Peter decided to don a Black Hat for this project to see how he would do by comparison. Peter's BH shinnanigans look to have got him 35,000 inbound links to his blog, but its hard to be sure with BlogSpot. 8th coolest guy on the planet

James Schramko treated this one as a project and outlines a cohesive project plan for getting where he got. With around 400 inbounds landing on this page, James too only needs to step on the gas with the onsite relevancy to get some extra edge. More semantic markup, and less content nested in div tags and we may see some movement. 9th coolest guy on the planet

Patrick holds 10th place with around 200 links pointing at him and a domain that's been around 2 years. There's a few coding probs in here that need fixing such as h2 tags nested in p tags, unclosed p tags and non-breaking spaces nested in h3 tags. I'd clean these up and see what happens. I'm having trouble myself solving a p tag nesting issue with BlogSpot at the moment - whatever I do a bloody superfluous p tag creeps back in and nests my entire content. 10th coolest guy on the planet

So what do most of these cool guys share in common - well a few of these coolest guy contenders have some pretty dodgy photos. Okay so in my photo I'm hiding behind shades and look like I've just emerged from the bushes after an illicit laison with a squirrel, but really.

So who is really the coolest guy on the planet, is this just SEO testosterone, shameless self-promotion, is this just a case of all us SEO sperm competing to get into Google's golden egg, or is there a serious point? Well of course there is. When SEOs come head to head like this and pitt their strengths against each other it really sets the benchmark for the calibre of companies that will work with them, the fees they are worth and their prestige within the industry. It doesn't really matter whether they are competing over the phrase the coolest guy on the planet or who can fit the most frozen peas down their shorts. Ok so there is some implicit kudos loaded into the term coolest guy on the planet. But its also a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun aswell; there's nothing really cool about being cool these days and SEOs have to be able to laugh at themselves in order to prove to the outside world that we are not an esoteric bunch of juju vendors who belong to some sort of exclusive mystical coven of Inter-nerd warlocks. And even more importantly, to prove that we do not take ourselves too seriously.

I might be tempted to go for silliest sod on the planet' or daftest bugger on the planet. Maybe I should even go for the most flatulent guy on the planet. I wasn't nicknamed the Phantom Farter at school for nothing.

Anyway, enough for today. I've just put out my billionth cigarette of the day, I smell like a skunk-mayonaisse sandwich and I'm going to dive in the bath.

So who is the coolest guy on the planet right now?

SEO Afterword

10/12/2007: As a result of this post I did inadvertently end up being Google's no. 1 'most flatulent guy on the planet'. Well some people use link bait, whereas I seem to have just introduced stink bait to online marketng.

Free iPod Speakers and no iPod!

2007-12-06T08:58:00.000-08:00

Just my luck. 1-2-3 reg were offering a set of free iPod speakers today for the first 5 affiliate marketers who got back to them. Well lucky me I won a pair, but I lost my iPod on the way back from Spain recently. So now I have new iPod speakers and no iPod. Maybe Santa will be nice to me, or maybe I should get off my backside and replace the thing.

Anyway, if anyone wants to get themselves a set of these things 1-2-3 are giving them away with every domain name that is bought with a hosting package at the moment. Shame I missed out on getting a second pair this morning when I picked up a domain name on behalf of a new client - great domain name by the way - www.stellaflights.com. They didn't need a hosting package so I didn't get my second set of speakers.

If anyone wants a pair and happens to need a domain name and hosting package then here you go:

And I promise I will write some more substantive posts soon - only I must have put in 17 hours yesterday, my brain is leaking out of my ears and I'm so tired that I couldn't pull a moist stick out of a dingos arse right now.

Give some link love for Christmas

2007-12-04T04:50:00.000-08:00

Its getting up to Christmas again, and since its the silly season I thought I might offer a particularly silly idea for link exchange which just occured to me.

Give some link love for Xmas. What better gift to give to your customers and B2B and webmaster buddies than a link or two. Tell them in your Christmas cards and e-cards that you gave them a link or two and explain what links means in terms of search engine marketing, if they don't already know. If you're lucky they may return the favour and link back to you. Try something that will make them giggle, afterall its only a link and not a gold watch so don't try to make it sound like more than it is - I don't know, how about 'I left a link under your tree' (sounds cheeky in the US but overly twee in the UK, so choose you're audience for this one).

In fact, would it be too sentimental to think that Google might even one day pick up the idea of seasonal links and give them a little extra special relevance? Hang out your Xmas links on December 24th and Santa-bot will come around and sprinkle them with an extra dose of importance during the night. Anyway, back to reality, the serious point here is that sometimes a little personal touch like this can help to build up relationships with the people who matter to your business.

Then of course send the follow up in January if their Xmas link to you has dissapeared - 'a link is for life not just for Xmas', or 'where's the missing link' or some other equally bad pun.

Tssh, I think I need to take the rest of the afternoon off and come back when I have some less outlandish ideas to blog about.

'Cheap Holidays' or 'Book Holiday online': How do 13 major travel agencies perform for organic search?

2007-12-04T01:06:00.000-08:00

We took 13 big names in the UK travel industry in order to get a snapshot of how well they perform for organic search for a few of the most competitive keywords for travel and tourism: book holiday online and Cheap Holidays. The results were tested in Google UK only.

The travel agents we picked are as follows:

Holiday Hypermarket: 1st for book holiday online

First Choice: 2nd for book holiday online

Thomas Cook: 3rd for book holiday online

Travel First Online: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

Direct Holidays: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

eBookers: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

Flight Centre: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

Sky Deals: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

uLookuBook: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

Going Places: 12th for book holiday online

Last Minute: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

Air Tours: 5th for book holiday online

Thomson: not on first 5 pages for book holiday online

The next key phrase we chose was cheap holidays:

Holiday Hypermarket: 3rd for cheap holidays

First Choice: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

Thomas Cook: 19th for cheap holidays

Travel First Online: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

Direct Holidays: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

eBookers: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

Flight Centre: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

Sky Deals: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

uLookuBook: 28th for cheap holidays

Going Places: not on first 5 pages for cheap holidays

Air Tours: 37th for cheap holidays

Thomson: 38th for cheap holidays

Last Minute: 24th for cheap holidays

We might have expected more of the traditional market leaders to be doing much better in the Search Engine Results Pages irrespective of whether they continue to rely on traditional newspaper, television and high street advertising. However, this doesn't initially look to be the case. So, now let's have a closer look at the quality of the search engine optimisation employed by a couple of the big name lower performers.

Flight Centre

Flight Centre has historically used a lot of newspaper advertising and I think I even bought a flight to New York from them myself which I found in a newspaper advert back in 1999. These days however, I buy online and if I can't find them then they've missed out on my buck.

The website address (URL) is http://www.flightcentre.co.uk/

Ok, so looking at the home page the first weakness I spot is that the two most important
words in the title tag are 'Flight Centre'; which probably isn't helping. What especially isn't helping is that these are the first two words in the title tag on all the internal pages as well - this will be costing an unimaginable volume of search engine traffic which could be significantly more targetted.

Looking at the source code on the home page, there are more problems. They have not employed any meta data at all - no meta keywords and no meta description. Moreover, there is hardly any semantic markup in there; excepting a few p tags, its all div tags and tables, which is hardly a good strategy to assign importance to your major keywords. Important links are nested in div tags and overall the home page has very little relevance or importance in and of itself. This would lead me to suspect that the website is relying almost soley for its search engine marketing strength on inbound links, so we'll look at that next:

There are around 28,000 inbound links going to the website, 23,000 of which are
pointing at the homepage, and these are lending the website almost all of its importance and relevance in the search engines.

This is a substantial number of links, and may well have been adequate to be
competitive were the onsite optimisation sufficiently improved. However, looking at where most of these links are coming from, I spot another vulnerability. The vast majority of links are either internal links from http://www.flightcentre.co.uk/ or cross links from other Flight Centre websites in Canada and elsewhere. It would only take a slight algorithmic change in the way any search engine indexes web pages and these links could have any relevance that they presently contain squeezed out of them. In short, a more varied link building strategy would build more insulation into the relevance and importance of this site.

I would also point out that the last result for book holiday online on the first page of Google UK gets in there with little over 8,000 links and that the bottom first page result for cheap holidays gets in there with only 11,000. Flight Centre has more than enough links to get in and take some market share for these terms and others, it simply needs to look more closely at the quality of its onsite optimisation.

To be fair a more relevant term for this travel company would be cheap flights or book cheap flights, but flight centre only just makes page 4 for cheap flights and doesn't appear on the first five pages for book cheap flights.

Another small problem with the page is the pound sign. This is just typed straight in there, rather than being hardcoded in as Unicode. Under some browser conditions this can mean that both the pound sign and the first digit of the price dissapear. I spotted a similar problem with the Halifax Property Services website a few years ago, where because of the failure to use unicode some properties for sale lost 100K off their price tags when viewed in Firefox using Chinese Simplified.

Last Minute

http://www.lastminute.com/ has a PR of 8/10 so we would be expecting something pretty impressive here. Initially they appear to make exactly the same mistake in the title tag where the 2 most important words are Last Minute. In this instance though, this is more or less excusable, since Last Minute are well enough known for a substantial amount of traffic to come their way from searchers simply typing this into the search engines, and having the phrase in the title tag adds an extra layer of insulation on top of the domain name against another company attempting to surpass them for this key phrase in the SERPS. I'd still be tempted to experiment here and take it out in order to check that search engine position can be maintained without it, since there are many more useful keywords which are being subordinated to this. Yet again, all of the internal pages make good use of the title tag, so heck title tag doesn't matter too much here on the home page.

Looking at the source code of the homepage, there is some use of semantic markup such as lists and use of the strong tag. There are also some great big long option lists of place names which is going to help a lot, but again links are nested in div tags which doesn't help. Meta data is present but could be improved. There are slightly too many keywords in the meta keywords and the meta description bears no relation whatsoever to the actual content of the page, which doesn't help either.

Where inbound links are concerned, I really don't think these guys should struggle to rank for whatever they want if they put more effort into the onsite optimisation. With half a million links going to the whole website and 280,000 going to the homepage, they are a formidible opponent for most travel related terms that they take the initiative to grab.

I suppose what this shows overall is that whatever industry you are in, even the biggest players can have some pretty big chinks in their search marketing armour.

Cost effective Search engine marketing for small businesses

2007-12-03T23:10:00.000-08:00

Do you ever feel, when you search for anything on the Internet these days that the business directories are taking over? The chances are that, if you are searching for goods and services in your local area, the first page of search engine results will be crammed full of business directory listings.

This is no accident. Many business directories are actually aiming to squeeze local businesses out of the front page of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages), in order to create more dependancy on their services in order to get seen on line. Only recently one directory representative boasted to me that for a wide range of local results, the only pages showing on the first page of Google were his own company's classifieds directories.

I just took the following sample results at random in order to demonstrate just what a stranglehold the business directories presently have over local search. The figure out of 10 is the number of business directory listings that show up on the first page of Google UK:

Skip Hire in Durham: 6/10 including the first 2 results

Van Hire in Aberdeen: 3/10

Glaziers in Southampton: 7/10

Locksmiths in Exeter: 6/10

Catteries in Preston: 7/10 - including all the first 7 results

Damp Proofing in Norwich: 7/10

Kitchen Planning in Nottingham: 6/10

This saturation of local search by the business directories does nothing to help Internet users obtain information efficiently online and they actively harm the chances of small businesses, who want to take control over their own marketing.

The upshot of this is that search engine marketing is becoming increasingly important for small businesses who are targetting their local area online. With an effective and affordable search engine marketing campaign you can not only say goodbye to your dependance upon business directories in order to get seen online, you can also get a distinct edge over the competition in your local area.

It stands to reason that if your website is one of only a few quality results showing on the first page of Google, Yahoo, MSN or Live Space, and all the other results are business directory listings, then your results will have the edge over your competitors. Your website will only be a click away, whereas in order to find those of your competitors, your prospect has first to search on Google et al and then to wade through a page or two of results within the directory listing. Getting on the first page of the search engines then is a great way to leave your local competitors standing while driving more visitors to your website.

I've heard search engine marketing is expensive - how can my small local business afford it?

Actually high search engine positions are usually much more easily attained for local search, and you should expect to pay accordingly. What it costs will depend upon the number of web pages you need optimising and upon the strength of the other websites competing over your major search terms. There is also the element of time to take into account since, it is not simply a case of doing the work and closing the SEM project. We need to wait for the search engines to reindex your website and then check your rankings and make further adjustments over time that will strengthen your position. So, don't expect that results will automatically happen overnight (although they ocassionally do, when curcumstances are favorable)) or that it will cost pennies. Do expect, however, that a search engine marketing campaign for local search will be affordable and good value for money in the long run. Every search engine marketing campaign is different so we can not give you precise information regarding exactly where your will end up on the search engine result pages (SERPS) or exactly how long it will take. What we can promise, however, is that with one of our search engine marketing campaigns for Local Search your website can become more visible and competitive.