Search results matching tag 'SEO'

Best resources in Social Media? A personal plotted history...

2679359 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:06:00 GMT

Television and newspaper reports make ‘Social Media‘ and ‘Social Networking‘ buzz words sound like something that’s arrived on the scene in the past couple of years – but at least the basics pre-date the existence of the internet itself. Early BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) existed before anyone had even heard the term ‘internet’, and in concept will probably exist when its moved on from its current form.

My first experiences of the Internet involved struggling to make an Acorn RISC PC (post-Archimedes era RISCOS system) connect to Demon Internet – something I very shortly lost interest with and then attempted again a year or two later using Compuserve as an ISP. At the time this involved a sign-up fee, monthly subscription costs and national rate BT call charges. Compuserve had a built in message board structure as well as IRC (Internet Relay Chat), then later First Class (combining the two, plus rich media) which was adopted by the Open University quite early on – something I got involved in quite heavily as a means of exploring the diverse social aspect of the net. But all of this was heavily limited by both the inherent costs of being online for any significant period of time and the critically slow connection speed of a 56.6kbps modem.

If you’ve been using the internet since as early as 1996 (or even earlier) then your experiences of connecting to other users for social reasons may be very similar, and like me, you’re probably keen to embrace new forms of social networking, especially if they can offer something new.

Instant messenger clients like MSN, AIM and ICQ proceeded Internet Relay Chat use and existed way before any of the current social networking sites came into play. They’re still very popular, although the media still seem to be stuck in the mindset that IM’s are still ‘chat rooms‘ and lead to children being duped into strangers’ cars.

MySpace seemed to be the first Social Networking site to get mainstream news coverage and therefore mass popularisation, but its novelty seemed to be centred around having the highest friend count out there. It suffered from grotesquely heavy amounts of spam, and now seems to be almost entirely left for dead by its user base. Has anyone asked you “are you on MySpace?” in the last year and a half? Despite its flaws however, MySpace does seem to still be the default option for Bands on a self-promotion tip. To an extent it’s probably still one of the best options as the site is still very well trusted, and it’s big advantage is how heavily it can be customised – ideal for bands and labels who want their artwork to be fully integrated online. Somehow it does seem ironic though that the default MySpace music player re-encodes mp3’s to a noticeably poor bitrate. I’d say MySpace’s days are probably numbered and without re-inventing themselves or taking better advantage of their music profiling niche, then at some point in the next 5 years it may well find itself at the online graveyard with Geocities....

[Full article available at 1985... Click to read]

Things that will make your relationship with your SEO agency a success

2605857 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:22:17 GMT

Hi there,

I wanted to bring to your attention a really good post from Jeremy Spiller about the 10 things that will make your relationship with your SEO agency a success. This covers things like budgets, expectations, results measurement... 10 really good tips to know about whichever side you are (client's or agency's).

Read the post:

http://www.whitehatmedia.com/blog/2009/10/27/10-top-tips-when-working-with-a-search-engine-optimisation-seo-agency/

is the keywords meta tag now completely redundant?

2606359 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:20:00 GMT

We had a note round our department today saying that the keyword meta tag is now officially useless.
Desptie having thought this for ages, i still populate it. I don't know why. am i wasting my time?

SEO - what' s changed?

2606400 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:36:24 GMT

I've recenly been reviewing search agencies. iv'e been struck by how little has changed. can that really be the case?

what is new in seo land? is it still just content, in bounds links and keyword density? if so, are the agenices thriving off providing the same stuff over and over?

Re: Links: and link:

2304494 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:27:14 GMT

I hadn't. I'm fairly sure Google have made minor alterations to the UI for this and it is now much clearer why the results sets are different.

We All Need A Technical Understanding

980070 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:23:00 GMT

Just back from my Hawaiian honeymoon, mai-tai-addled and catching up on the mail blocking my entry to my flat, I tripped over 4 copies of Media Week to spot Rob Taylor’s Best of the Blogs post – Do you have a feeds director? It was hula music to my ears!

Talking about Bing and Farecast in the US, he gives a mini-master class on what it means to provide easily accessible information to search engines and suggests, “We could see this becoming increasingly important in site development briefs and maybe as its own stand alone ‘feeds' channel within a marketing department.”

Well crack open a pineapple, fill it with Malibu and stick a garish mini-umbrella in it by way of celebration because I’ve been saying this for years!

Marketing departments should be using smart technology to provide search engines with tidy and timely information will help them make the right decision about what products and services they should display to a particular user.

In other words, marketers need to get smart about the technology available to optimize their content and distribute it where it’ll have the most benefit for the end user.

I’ve never understood the reticence of some folk in our industry to even try and get the concept of SEO, XML or APIs.

“But I’m not technical!” is usually the cry but it’s really not difficult to get your head around and it’s vital as we progress and innovate towards a totally digital media world.

Building a website from the ground up, making sure the navigation and data accessibility is sweet for both the user and 3rd party digital channels is crucial to success.

I remember once helping a client understand the basics of the purchase funnel, persuading him that a 7 page application process might be a feat of engineering for his internal reporting needs but that he was losing customers and revenue hand-over-fist, and the search engines were losing the will to live trying to interpret what each page was about.

We live in an age where easy access to data and a streamlined flow of inventory equals success in a fast-moving online market. Making sure the marketing departments and technical teams understand each other’s remits and work together towards the common good can only help us build a better and more relevant web!

Adding value to the PPC equation

2517221 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:17:00 GMT

Regardless of the techniques used to entice customers, a standard acquisition strategy generally has the potential to deliver prospects of both high and low value. On the positive side, prospects who are converted into active customers may prove themselves to be worthwhile targets because of the revenue they generate in the short and long term. On the flipside, other new customers may not allow such a fruitful relationship; they may take advantage of an introductory offer or only make a single purchase, costing more to acquire than the brand can ever hope to secure a return from. And of course, yet more customers will fall somewhere between these two extremes.

New customers delivered through investment in search marketing – both SEO and PPC – can deliver both types of customers. However, PPC, in its prime role at the entrance to the sales funnel, can be used in a much more tactical way, in order to encourage the acquisition of consistently higher-value customers.

Firstly let’s consider how PPC works. A good PPC agency will be constantly improving and enhancing the search terms associated with a brand campaign, to capitalise on those terms which are delivering the greatest responses. By adding another layer of insight to this process – namely identifying which search terms deliver higher-value customers - the campaign can then begin to evolve to appeal to a larger majority of these prospects.

It sounds simple, but there is the obvious requirement of developing a more detailed understanding of customer value, in order to clearly recognise and group new customers, and utilise this information within PPC activity. Value isn’t an exact science, and can be more about examining the potential a new customer can deliver to the brand, as well as considering other factors like risk and attrition. The brand may need to develop a communications strategy to successfully unlock value over the long term, based on customer insight and its own product and service portfolio. But if an accurate enough gauge can be created at the point of acquisition, the PPC campaign can develop to reflect the need to attract certain customer groups over others.

The brand will obviously benefit from the improvement in quality of new customers it acquires, and the PPC agency can use this in combination with other methods of campaign enhancement to improve its own performance; especially important if it’s working on a cost per acquisition model. If the average value of new customers increases, it can even lobby to increase the acquisition fee to reflect this.

Brands should investigate the opportunity to use PPC in a strategic and considered way. In doing so they can improve the quality of customers entering the sales cycle while simultaneously maximising their search marketing investment.

3am and everyones asleep

1713999 — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:24:00 GMT

On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls- Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers. http://www.3am.co.uk/ What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky. Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like? Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6. Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth. Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear. To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about. But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

This SEO Business Doesn’t Travel Small!

980070 — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:18:00 GMT

This afternoon I’m going to judge some digital travel awards within the travel sector which centre around SEO or search engine optimization.

While big travel sites are investing heavily in agencies and in-house teams to revamp their pages, build links and create engaging and compelling content, many small businesses still aren’t and it’s a shame.

I’m getting married in 17 days time and it was my “stag weekend” on Saturday/Sunday just gone. My best men booked a cottage in near Monmouth for all of us to stay in and use as a base for a plethora of activities on and around the Welsh border.

They told me on the trip home that it had taken hours to find the right kind of place to take us on: near a pub, near some cool activities, not too far from a motorway from London with a supermarket nearby.

One of the reasons why they found it so tough was that the websites showcasing these kind of places - cottages, B&Bs, small hotels etc - just don’t have enough information on them to make an informed decision, an informed decision from a search engine or a potential punter point of view.

Earlier in the year I went on a trip to Dublin and thought I’d combine the trip with a weekend down in County Wicklow. It took me 4 hours of searching on all 3 search engines, travel review sites, mapping sites and more before I found the kind of place I was after – walkable to a pub, within an hour of Dublin, nice hikes nearby and a traditional Irish breakfast for my American fiancée to savour after a night on the black stuff.

Why did it take so long?

Because boutique web designers who throw up these kind of small, niche sites obviously haven’t got a clue about SEO. They aren't doing their clients justice by not titling pages properly and providing information on the local area or facilities that might be useful for users or search engines to rank them properly.

So let’s all do some evangelism the next time we’re by the sea, up in the lakes or walking the valleys of this great country of ours.

If the establishment’s website is a pile of dirty laundry then tell them and point them to Google, Bing and Yahoo!’s webmaster guidelines so we can help these small businesses flourish and get deserved visibility in search rankings, better site usability and more relevant and higher converting traffic.

Google Wave – set to revolutionise online communication?

2618871 — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:55:00 GMT

When Google Wave was released at Google's I/O Developer’s Conference at the end of May it sparked considerable excitement. Now the novelty factor has worn off it's time to start considering the potential of this revolutionary communication tool.

The application itself is impressive, but the use of its API in allowing the possibility to create bots/extensions is what could really pave the way for a new ’wave‘ of web applications, and even the advent of Web 3.0.

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration tool, where you can experience changes to a conversation, character by character, by multiple users and with added functionality through extensions. It falls into the ‘collaboration tool’ category due to the many uses it offers - from straight communications such as email and instant messaging - to installing the wave on sites like wiki's, forums and blogs, creating content and encouraging interaction. So rather than having a set of emails, threads or instant messages; there will be just one ‘wave’.

A good way of describing how you would interact with these waves would be to imagine you’re sharing a word document with some of your friends simultaneously, where you can edit an itinerary, decision or line-by-line conversation with them - in real time. Doesn't sound too revolutionary does it? Google has put their own spin on it though, by introducing intelligent formatting, real-time translation, and integrating external tools like Google Maps, images, and soon, developer’s own creations. It wasn't so much of a product launch, but rather an API launch so they could educate the developers that will be producing these extensions for when Google Wave is officially released later this year.

With these extensions, users will be able to simultaneously run a 'wave' on a blog/forum/site and see changes made both in the application and the external locations simultaneously. If the take up of Google Wave is as substantial as expected, the way that content is delivered to web pages will be completely changed and with potentially dramatic repercussions elsewhere.

For search marketing, with Google Wave providing updates within a conversation on external sites in real-time, the content will no longer be reflective of the last time it was indexed, thus rendering search results and even text ads irrelevant. If a destination page's content changes, the ad will be less relevant and subsequently affect detrimentally the quality score and CPC price. Advertisers that would be susceptible to this would need to commit to increased levels of budget to ensure they maintain their positions if their quality score does fluctuate.

This would obviously affect certain websites more than others though and for search engines to produce relevant results, they will need to continually update and index sites. To take search to the next level, you would need the results to be switching positions in real time, as sites become more relevant than others.

For website owners, Google Wave could cause a change in the way users view their content - for example, being able to view articles, comment, take part in polls and interact, all through a Google Wave bot without even visiting the site. Google wants Wave to not only be the hub of all their products and communication, but also the hub for experiencing and contributing to content from the rest of the Internet. This could have a grave effect on display advertising, a crucial source of income to the running of many websites - and would prompt a sweeping shift of business models towards subscription models where users pay for content.

Google Wave will prompt a notable change in the way search engines index sites and produce results, simply because they will have no choice. Obviously, currently channels such as forums and wiki’s are changed often, but as Google Wave becomes widespread, search engines will have to think about how to adapt to these constant changes.

With Bing taking a couple of bites out of Google's market share and Twitter indexing updates, search technology over the next year could produce something of a cold war. Google has already started making changes to its search functionality including "search options" and Google Squared, and this will escalate between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as the full launch of Google Wave approaches later this year. Bing's "decision engine" has woken Google up from a distinctly average innovative few years on its search front.

All of this has ramifications for companies using natural search, since to optimize their “crawlability” on Wave, sites will need updating once a day or even more.

Of course the scale of these changes is dependant upon take up, though anyone who has watched the Google I/O developer’s conference video would be surprised if Google Wave doesn’t become the next focus of online communication and collaboration and have a huge impact upon digital marketing.

Author – James Glick, Media Account Manager, CheezeDMG

Follow Cheeze on Twitter.com/cheezedmg