Archive for the 'Search Engine Optimisation' Category

The medium of search engine marketing, both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) remains a strong and successful source of traffic and sales for online retailers. That is according to an Internet Retailer survey conducted in April 2010. The survey included 102 consumer brand manufacturers, web-only retailers, catalogers and chain retailers.

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Mou Labs, creators of SEO software Moovin On Up, is only in its second month and support for this new SEO tool seems to be growing as the momentum continues to build from new clients signing up at an increasingly rapid rate.

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The subject we’re tackling today is one of the hot topics in the world of SEO currently – the importance (or otherwise) of ‘.edu’ links and whether or not they’re necessary or desirable part of the optimisation process. If you’re an SEO or webmaster, you may have already been approached by someone attempting to sell you ‘.edu’ backlinks for a not insubstantial monthly fee, claiming that they’re a shortcut to better rankings and pass substantially more authority than normal co.uk or .com URLs.

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The fight for local search rankings has just gotten a lot nastier, thanks to a decision from Google to cut the number of results displayed on the first page of Local Search from ten down to seven. The decision from Google is likely to turn up the heat on a battle that is already pretty vicious. Google does obviously display more than seven local search results if you click through to the second page or further, though it doesn’t take a marketing genius to realise that, the number of clicks for position eight is going to be vastly different top the number position seven gets.

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In this industry SEO professionals tend to live or die by their rankings. There’s nothing quite like being able to say that you took a nothing site to number one on Google for a really competitive keyword. It’s how we market ourselves and how others judge us. But is that right? Are rankings really the best metric, or are they just the easiest one to measure?

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#5. Local Business Listings

If you’re not on Google Base, Google’s local business listing service, then for goodness sake sort that out immediately. Go on, do it now. It doesn’t even take that long to do. Local business listings generally come up in first position when relevant keywords are searched, so if you’re not on there then you’re effectively giving up position one on Google, a position that could cost thousands of hours and pounds to achieve naturally.

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#4. Prepare for Real-Time Search

Most SEOs agree that real time search is likely to be the future of web searching. Over the next few years freshly updated content is likely to become more and more important to determining ranking.

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#3. Check your site for evidence of hacking

Okay, now I know you may think your site is the most pristine secure thing on the internet but are you absolutely sure you’ve never been hacked? I know I know, but just please take five minutes to do a ‘site:yourdomain.com’ search and see what URLs come up. If everything’s as you thought then fine, but you might be surprised.

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#2. Optimise Images

If you take the time to describe the images on your site using the tags associated with them then you open up another family of values for Google to crawl and index, giving the Google bot more information on which to make a decision and so, probably, better ranking. Whenever you post an image it’s important to remember to specify a few things about it…

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The other day in a brief moment of downtime, myself and the rest of the SEO department got to talking about just how many useful SEO techniques are overlooked, even by professional SEOs. Whether it’s because they’ve fallen out of fashion or they’re just not widely known about, it seemed strange to us that so much useful stuff is not widely known.

That’s why, this week, we in the Top Click Media SEO department have decided to devote our considerable talents to letting you in on some of the lesser known secrets of SEO. So without further ado…

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Google has launched a new web application called Merchant Centre that will list products uploaded by online sellers in the search results. If this is all sounding very familiar that’s probably because this is exactly what Google Base is doing currently. So, Merchant Centre is replacing Base? Well no, it’s not quite that simple I’m afraid – Base will remain as a platform for listing business addresses etc., allowing Merchant Centre to list products for sale.

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Use PPC as your SEO Roadmap

Yesterday I wrote about why someone should use a combined SEO and PPC strategy. Today I’d like to talk a little about how exactly to go about exactly you should go about making PPC complement SEO and vice versa. The first thing I’d like to discuss is using PPC to plan your SEO.

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Okay, first things first, SEO and PPC are incredibly different tools, the people you are targeting are different and the approach has to be completely different. The most successful SEM campaigns incorporate the best elements of both in order to make sure that there are no blind spots in terms of potential clicks.

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Firstly let me state that I am not a legal professional, I have no training in law whatsoever. What I am about to give you is a response to the above, based on my understanding, which in no way constitutes legal advice…

Right, now that I’ve covered my back, let me begin. As far as libel (that’s written defamation as opposed to verbal) goes, the rules for blog posts (and subsequent comments from that original poster) are the same as if it were a newspaper article. Basically, with blogs, online libel is still libel.

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