Debate surrounding this one has been raging over at the Top Click Media offices for quite some time now. Some of us think it’s one of the most exciting developments to the ranking algorithm for quite some time, whilst others of us question the relevance of seeing things posted to the internet in order of how recently they were posted rather than relevance. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been following this blog over the last few weeks you’ll know that Google have been looking into including a twitter style real time element in their search engine results for quite some time now. I personally thought it would be included as part of the caffeine update and said so on the blog a couple of weeks ago. Just shows what I know, this week the search engine giant began to release the real time element across the world. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s de facto mouthpiece to the SEO community, Google’s latest search update, caffeine, will launch early next year. What do I mean when I say launch? Don’t worry, the rankings aren’t going to turn upside down overnight. As is Google’s recent form, the roll out will be gradual and in stages over approximately the first quarter of next year. Read the rest of this entry »

A very interesting adwords development that’s been trialled across the US recently has finally made it to these shores. Essentially what’s happening is that Google are allowing some accounts, initially just ones with particularly high quality scores, to show more than just text in their ads, this can take some surprisingly diverse forms with everything from links and maps, to pictures of products and even videos. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all,

We wanted to say a big thanks to all those of you who’ve been reading the Top Click Media blogs over the last couple of years, and what better way than with a free Google Wave account.

Wave is currently in Beta and only available via invitation. Luckily, we just happen to have fifteen invites to give out. If you want one, simply post a comment on this blog with your email address and name – the first fifteen will get invites sent to their inboxes within a couple of days.

Just our way of saying thanks,

Keep on reading.

For those of you who still are living in the dark and do not know about Wave, have a look at this video:

As anyone who sells goods online should know, we’re fast closing in on the most important day of the year for the ecommerce industry, Cyber Monday. For the uninitiated, Cyber Monday is statistically the busiest day of the year for the vast majority of ecommerce sites. It typically happens on the first Monday of December, right after people have been paid for the last time in the year and when the highest numbers of shoppers are making online purchases agead of christmas. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a small change to the adwords interface over the last few days that seems to have caught a couple of people on the hop. What’s happened is Google has decided to stop allowing exceptions to its 35 character display URL rule. It used to be that you would be allowed to file an exception request if your URL was longer than this but now that function has been removed. Read the rest of this entry »

Today on the blog, I want to talk about a new beta function of analytics that’s currently in the process of beta testing, ‘Intelligence’. I’m going to resist all the obviou jokes, finally some intelligence on this blog, etc., and just tell you that it’s… Amazing. Read the rest of this entry »

The workplace is becoming less defined by desks and terminals every day, people are recieveing emails and surfing the internet anywhere and everywhere, increasingly through phones as well as laptops. It’s no different in social life either, a huge number of people now have an incredibly high standard of internet connectivity and computer processing sitting in their coat pockets, ready to use at a moment’s notice, almost no matter where they are. This is why any PPC professional worth their salt knows how to plan a good mobile campaign, and why you should too.

To that end, we’ve decided to let you in on a few of Top Click Media’s main mobile advertising tips, so sit back and prepare for liftoff. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

SEOs spend most of their working lives – and, let’s be honest, some of their private lives – trying to think like the Google Bot, in order to make their clients sites as welcoming and comfortable for it to visit and return to as possible. For the most part this is a pretty difficult thing to do, the Google Bot is, after all, a computer programme – not a living thing and, as such, is pretty hard to empathise with.

Until now, that is… Read the rest of this entry »

Google Labs has struck again with yet another useful tool entering beta testing on Webmaster Tools. It’s called Malware Details and it’s basically a godsend for anyone worried about hacking/illicitly installed Malware on their site. It works by crawling the site and flagging anything that it feels is malicious. Read the rest of this entry »

Know your aim and don’t get sidetracked

Keyword choice is the cornerstone of a good SEO campaign. As I’ve said before, SEO campaigns resemble super tankers, in that they are incredibly difficult to turn around if you make the mistake of setting off in the wrong direction. But how do you choose good keywords? Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »