Owner: Search Engine Marketing Blog URL:Search Engine Optimisation Blog Join Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:20:21 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Vertical Leap blog is intended to develop search engine related and relevant resources, techniques, skills, aggressive tactics, concerns, strategies, unique ways, viewpoints, global perspectives, updates, recent trends, insights, ideas, emerging technolog Site statistics:Click here
How many number one search engine rankings? 2008-03-27 04:20:09 I was looking at a competitor's site for SEO services
the other day and they made a few boasts in their landing page about
their track record. One of the bullet points said that they had 200
clients which was not too bad. As a comparison, we currently have over
100 campaigns under active management.
But another claim stated that they had achieved "500 number one
rankings" for these clients (an average of 2.5 per client). Well this
didn't seem to many to me - and so I thought I'd review our current
portfolio of campaigns to see what our numbers are.
If we look at all the major and regional search engines that we track
for our current campaigns only, we currently have achieved 3,214 number one rankings (an average of 32+ per client). If we looked at Googl
Meta Robots Tag Syntax for SEO 2008-03-20 08:07:33
I just wanted to post a quick blog about the Meta Robots tag. Quite often, we in the SEO
world try to make sure that the code element of a page is small in comparison to the amount of visible text on the page.
So we move CSS formatting and JavaScript off the page into external files, and we encourage the use of "table-less design". However, we can be less than frugal with the meta robots tag, especially as each tag can be added in a separate line.
Therefore, amalgamating them all on one line gives you:
<meta name="robots" content ="index, follow, noodp,
noydir">
But there is an even shorter syntax, using the "all" reference instead of index and follow.
<meta name="robots" content ="all, noodp,
noydir Read more:Syntax
Local results in Google maps added by users 2008-03-17 09:51:37 It is being reported in a number of blogs that Google
are adding the ability for any user to add a place into Google maps.
Currently, in order to add or edit a place/business in Google maps you need to register with Google Local
Business Centre. The registration involves a process that verifies that the business details (address, phone number, etc) are correct and can take anywhere from a few days (register by phone) to a few weeks (by post).
The recent reports say that Google is implementing functionality to allow anyone to add a place into Google Maps and that these will be available to all search users
(globally) within a few hours.
Although only available at the moment in the USA, apparently a new option is available on the left hand side when performing a search that s Read more:results
SEO specialists - we're recruiting 2008-03-12 04:52:49
As one of the UK's largest and most successful search engine marketing companies, demand for our services based on our unique approach called TotalPropulsion is growing at a record pace.
We are therefore recruiting
for one of our key positions - the Campaign Delivery Manager. This particular role is primarily based around Organic SEO
and involves managing a portfolio of new and existing Search Engine Marketing campaigns that are based on long term contracts and ensuring that they are delivered to a very high standard. This is a varied, absorbing and rewarding position. Essentially, you will ensure that your clients' campaigns are operating efficiently and effectively, overseeing a team of SEO technicians, web developers and link builders through the process, troubleshooting where
Nice tool to help understand site performance and loading time 2008-03-10 10:48:31 Last week I wrote a blog on Google's introduction of load time as a factor in determining quality score in Adwords. As this may effect all our clients, we needed to look for something easy to use to better assess the impact of this change.
I discovered a nice little tool from a site monitoring company called pingdom. The tool is called "Full Page Test" and it very visually demonstrates the size and loading time of all elements on your website (css, images, javascript). This is a much better approach to many alternatives out there as it more accurately simulates the loading time that would exist in a browser/client.
Here's how a typical result will look:
In our own tests, loading time for our clients' landing pages ranged from 1.1 seconds to 21.2 seconds.&nb
Search Within a Site on Google Results 2008-03-06 04:23:59 Google
has recently launched a new "onebox" feature, where a site gets not only their sitelinks and a stock quote if they have one, but also a search box that searches the site.
Here's an example:
Whilst the technology to do this search isn't ground breaking (it does a site: search with your search term appended), it is interesting that they have chosen to do it.
According to Google, it is an extension of the Sitelinks and deals with secondary searching of a site. So those sites that people search for and then search again using that term. Apparently, it came out of their study of "teleporting" - a name they use for the user behaviour of searching for a company name.
Again, like Sitelinks, the need for them is generated algorithmically, based o Read more:Search
Load-time can now influence your Adwords quality score 2008-03-05 01:31:37 Someone over at a webmaster world forum noticed that since 8 February, Adwords
is now using load time as a factor in determining the quality score for your Adwords account.
This change appears to be so recent that Google has not updated their help system. I tried to find more information about this topic before writing this blog post and could not.. and then clicked on the link to get the full FAQ in one page -
What I found was this:
How does website load time affect my landing page quality?
Beginning in February 2008, you'll be able to see a grade for your website's load time in your AdWords account. 'Load time' refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.
Several weeks after your load time grad Read more:influence
Top 5 SEO Plugins for WordPress 2008-02-28 09:40:14
If you're looking to start up a new blog — or switch from an existing blog software — then I can't recommend WordPress enough. In my opinion it's the best open source blogging platform out there, it's easy to use and highly flexible.
There are so many great aspects to WordPress that I could write about it all day, but maybe another time. Today I will be focusing on it's Plugins
feature and how you can customise your blog with third party tools. There are thousands of plugins for WordPress, so I couldn't comment on them all, I'll just be looking at the top 5 SEO
plugins and how these can benefit your blog.
1. All-in-One SEO Pack
To kick things off, I give you the All-in-One SEO Pack. This is a great place to start because it covers all the basics with a whole range of new
SEO for Travel Sites Brings Extra Dividends in January 2008-02-28 06:21:35
I worked in a company previously that had a travel arm, and throughout the period I was there we noticed a trend towards people booking holidays later instead of the traditional rush in January
.
So what is surprising to me moving in to the SEO
arena, where we monitor and drive traffic for quite a few travel industry clients, is how important January still is for travel.
For retail clients, November and December are the big months, where they rake in a considerable amount of their takings. For business to business clients and for travel, they wait eagerly for Christmas to pass, because come the New Year, that is when they start getting the extra visitors to their site and the extra sales. And even despite the “credit crunch” and spending fears, many of our clients still recor Read more:Travel
, Sites
, Extra
Yahoo Opens Search Results 2008-02-27 10:23:45
Embracing a more open source philosophy, after their Hadoop roll out, Yahoo
has also announced that they will be opening their search results.
Whilst as several people have pointed out, this is similar to Google's
Subscribed Links it won't necessarily require people to explicitly sign
up - some of them will show to normal searchers.
After the continuing furore over the Microsoft Bid for Yahoo
it is an interesting slant that this openness of content would make the search more interesting, using the power of user-generated content, which is very un Microsoft! Wikia Search
is one response to this trend and follows on from previous user-generated content successes like Wikipedia
and Open Directory - albeit that both have their problems with the open nature.
We will be watching how Read more:Search Results
Google Mobile: Portable Local Search 2008-02-26 08:09:33
As Matt reported on 31 Jan 2008, Google
released enhanced mobile search in the UK. Since the official release of the application on February 21 I've been playing with the Symbian S60 incarnation on a Nokia n95 8gb. Here's what I found:
The claim by Robert Hamilton (Google Mobile
's Product Manager) that using the ‘phone app, rather than opening a web browser, reduces the initial search time by 40% is bang on- comparably it is incredibly fast.
Installing it is a doddle. From your ‘phone go to Google Mobile and download it.
Once installed there's a default option to use a screen shortcut:
...but I preferred to disable it and place a shortcut in the active standby apps toolbar (I found that the screen shortcut can get in the way if you've a long list of reminders):
Read more:Local
, Search
, Portable
Yahoo! Uses Distributed Computing to Speed up Search Index Processing 2008-02-26 04:18:56
After wading through the official blogs
on this subject, which mainly deal with the fact it is the world's largest
Hadoop installations, I've got a few interesting facts from the SEO point of
view.
The Webmap (which is the database that feeds their algorithm)
now generates in a third less time
than it did before
It keeps track of roughly
1 trillion links
It uses 10,000 Linux cores (which doesn't mean 10,000 computers
or even 10,000 processors, as processors are multi-core, but I guess it
makes a nice round number)
So hopefully that's some information that
might actually be of use when talking to someone non-technical or if you have a
need to discuss it with a client.
Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager Read more:Search
, Yahoo
, Distributed
, Computing
, Speed
, Index
, Processing
Google Testing Adsense (PPC Ads) in Videos 2008-02-22 01:32:20 Google
has recently launched its public beta of Adsense
for videos in the US.
This will not be video ads - but a new system to embed adwords/adsense text ads into videos on blogging sites and yes, sites similar to YouTube.com (which currently has its own format). As a viewer, I may find these ads intrusive - despite how relatively low-key they are. As an advertiser, I would be salivating.
The new system is currently only available in the US and only in English. It will also only be made available to sites streaming more than a million videos per month. That's the restriction for the publishers, I don't believe that there will be restrictions for advertisers.
When someone is watching a video - you have their attention. They are not scanning a p Read more:Testing
How is Google SEO Different to Regular SEO? 2008-02-21 06:54:07
This blog is actually a result of me misremembering a possible blog title that was on our list of suggestions. I’ve actually concatenated two titles, but it should do the trick in covering what I wanted to talk about.
So, in thinking about the title that I remembered wrong, my answer to the question was at first "It isn’t!" and then I considered my answer a bit more carefully, and realised that whilst when we do a site optimisation we don’t specifically do anything to target Google
above other engines (more on this from Rand at SEO
Moz), at least initially.
But there are things that we do that we know impacts mostly on the Google rankings, or perhaps with a more marked result on the Google rankings. And after all, with Google having such a large slice of the s
5 Insights into Live Search SEO 2008-02-20 10:22:28
I've written several times now over the last few months about MSN/Live Search
, and they have been pretty popular blogs on our website, with traffic from search engines, Sphinn and StumbleUpon among others.
This is just a quick post to tie them all
together all in one place.
What Everybody Ought to Know About MSN/Live Search
and 301 Redirects
If
You Don't Rank in MSN/ Live Search How Much Traffic Are You Missing Out On?
5
Ways to Get More SEO
Help on Live/MSN Search Results
Live
Search Results Update January 2008
Recent
Changes in Live Search Engine October 2007
Have fun, and I hope these SEO tips for Live Search are useful to you.
Kerry DyeCampaign Delivery Manager Read more:Insights
SEO Benefits of Website Forms 2008-02-20 03:56:09
When you contact someone/make a request/post a comment etc etc through a website form you are likely to be seeking a response- otherwise why bother? It could be that (e.g.):
-someone will get back to you
-your words will appear on the site
-you'll get to download that plugin you've been jonesing for
...whatever the response, it is utterly reliant on the form mechanism.
Forms
can be great- if they're well constructed, meet the expectations of your visitor and actually work that is. For example they can increase your conversion rates, get you talking with more people, give you a managed distribution platform, gather information etc.
However (you knew that was coming, right?), a bad form is worse than none. Typically a bad form is one that allows you to submit it with null data, or is Read more:SEO
, Benefits
What Everybody Ought to Know About MSN/Live Search and 301 Redirects 2008-02-19 06:49:32
It has been reported for quite some time
that MSN/Live does not handle 301 redirects gracefully.
Whilst putting in a 301 redirect is picked up in Google within days and Yahoo
within a few weeks, on MSN it might never be interpreted correctly.
As search engine optimizers something we
often do is recommend 301 redirects - perhaps because a page has moved, or
search engine friendly URLs have been implemented using rewrites. It is a key
tool in the SEO armoury.
There is some additional discussion at
Sphinn from various SEOs, but if you are moving a site, or considering moving one,
here is a great guide from SEO Book How to Move a Website... Should You Fear 301 Redirects Hurting Your Rankings? This
post goes through the process in detail.
Clearly there was a traffic loss from MSN,
but th Read more:Search
, Live Search
, Everybody
New SEO Keyword Game Launched 2008-02-15 09:12:47
If you show a simple image to a group of people and ask them to write down what keywords they would use in a search engine like Google to find the object, you'd be amazed at how varied the responses will be.
We typically use this technique to help people understand that not everyone thinks like they do. I know - it shocks me too sometimes.
Take the following image:
This has been shown to dozens of people today and here's the verdict (from our "straw poll"):
perfume (33.33%)
chanel perfume (18.52%)
chanel (14.81%)
chanel eau de parfum (3.70%)
150ml channel no 19 (3.70%)
bottle of perfume (3.70%)
chanel number 19 perfume (3.70%)
chanel no 19 (3.70%)
ch Read more:SEO
, Keyword
, Launched
Google's New Conversion Optimizer - The Worst Tool Ever.... 2008-02-14 11:00:23
In recent times Google
have released many new tools to help assist people like me manage PPC campaigns productively. A new tool called the conversion optimizer caught my interest as I manage quite a few CPA target driven campaigns. To actually use this tool, the campaign that you wish to test needs to accumulate 200 conversions within 30 days. I managed to achieve this and was ready to use the Google conversion optimizer. The way it works is that instead of entering in a CPC bid price you enter a CPA target price. My target was £6.00 as the campaign was currently operating at £11.00.
Everyone wants a better return on investment (ROI) right. Well if so don’t use Google conversion optimizer. As good as it may sound, after just two days of using this tool my overall CPA Read more:Conversion
, Optimizer
The No 1 UK Local Search Query is? 2008-02-14 07:03:07
I was reading
Matt McGee's excellent post on local search queries when I was
researching for my local search in the UK post.
Whilst
it isn't relevant for the UK
(Craigslist exists in some UK
localities but hasn't taken off), I was spurred to do some research to find the
answers to similar questions in the UK, because it is of interest for our local SEO clients.
Using
Keyword Discovery, but restricted to the UK Database, I checked on 7 places in
the UK
of varying sizes to see what the top queries were using the city/town name.
These are the results that I discovered correlated between the cities using the
top 20 results.
Football
Club (I should have seen that one coming given the conversations in this
office on a Monday morning)
Airport
University
Hotels
Jobs
Other
correlat Read more:Local
, Search
, Query
, Local Search
SEO hackers - the three ways to tell if your site has been link hacked 2008-04-04 06:43:26 If you've followed our blog over the past few months, you will have noticed a lot of posts relating to sites being hacked for the purposes of search engine optimisation. This is a relatively new phenomenon and gaining in frequency.
One of our SEO
CDM's (Kerry Dye) has just had an article published in the March issue of Network Security Newsletter - called "Website abuse for search engine optimisation". You can register to get a free issue on their website or you can view the specific article on ScienceDirect.com.
In case you may be concerned about your own site, here are three ways that will help you tell if you have been "link hacked":
1. Visual check - obvious perhaps, but regularly check your site's homepage and make sure that nothing is out of p
PPC Management Team Expansion 2008-04-04 05:55:02 A big welcome to Jayne Wiltshire who joined our sales team this week.
Jayne joins Vertical Leap from our Portsmouth neighbours at IBM HQ where she was part of the media sales team (sometimes seems like half of the company worked at IBM at some point in their careers).
Jayne's primary focus will be with our PPC Management
team offering both sales and account management. Our PPC service is growing at an amazing pace on the back of a solid track record of client success; in fact, we have an 85% renewal rate for PPC contracts with our clients.
I'm very excited to have Jayne join our team.
Matt HopkinsManaging Director Read more:Expansion
Useful SEO FireFox Extensions 2008-04-11 06:11:47
I was an IE user for a decade or more but have now been using FireFox exclusively for well over a year.
Personally, I don't like the font rendering in FireFox - when viewing a page in IE, the font smoothing makes a real impact and sites look much better... but there are enough improvements over IE for me that I can live with this issue.
FireFox has a couple of great features that are the driving force for me to have made a permanent switch in browser:
1. Error Console - this has been an invaluable feature to me for debugging issues with JavaScript.
2. Extensions - MS missed the boat with IE by trying to force their plug-in technology around ActiveX. FireFox extensions are simpler. They are small software programs that literally extend the function of FireFox. Read more:Useful
, SEO
Reverse SEO: Kill The Competition And Fill The Void 2008-04-14 04:57:37 As competition in search continues to grow and grow, so to do the efforts of crooks and miscreants to hijack, damage or destroy the legitimately gained rankings of their competitors. We've seen many instances of malicious link insertion and now there are increasing examples of other attacks being used to tar the reputation of targeted websites.
If you can create a scenario in which your competitors sites are seen by the search engines as hosting a bunch of spam/malicious links, your site can perform well in the void that is created. The techniques simply insert spam links into the target site. Once Google crawls that site and sees the spam it will see it is untrustworthy- once marked as spam the site may disappear altogether from the rankings.
This type of activity has been labeled &q Read more:Reverse
, SEO
Disturbing Google Universal Image Result 2008-04-15 08:28:02
About 6 months ago, Searchengineland.com did a piece about how GoogleImageUniversal
Search was no longer family friendly, with an illustration of how a search for "raccoon" brought up an image of a raccoon and a dog being rather..... inappropriate?
Matt Cutts later said that the Google Image team had dealt with the issue.
Well, when searching for some clients keywords earlier this week, I think that I found an example, that is frankly worse - I searched for "office chair" on Google.com and was greeted with:
As Vertical Leap is a family friendly organisation, I have taken the decision to censor the most "offensive" part of the image in question, but you can surely see why I was so surprised by the "illustration".
I checked the other Read more:Result
Google's Website Optimizer Tool Now Available to All 2008-04-21 09:39:44 Do you want to know if a new version of a landing or content page will out-perform the current version? Does your marketing manager think that a red "call to action" button would outperform the current blue one?
Wouldn't it be nice to have some way of testing the potential impact of changes like this before you actually replace a design or page completely?
For the past year or so, Google
has had a tool called Website Optimizer
that provides this sort of testing (A/B and multi-variant) but it has been available only to Adwords accounts. Last week, Google made it publicly available.
This is a truly excellent tool and I highly recommend that you try it out. You simply sign up with an existing Google account and create one of two types of &quo
How Local Search will change how we use the Internet 2008-04-29 09:29:29 Most studies show that a vast majority (something like 60%+) of all searches have what is called "local intent". This means that sometimes the searcher adds a local geographical indicator (e.g. "seo company portsmouth"). But sometimes they search with local intent without being specific about geography - e.g. it is likely that a search for "dentist" has local intent even without being specific about location.
The problem however is that the information that forms the foundation for local content searches is spread across a number of unrelated sources such as yellow pages, newspapers, local review sites, local directories and of course, search engines. Additionally, the information in a lot of these sources is either incomplete or out of date Read more:Local
, Search
, Internet
Warning: Two Ways of Killing Your Organic Rankings in Google 2008-04-30 10:14:00
There is some debate
about how much Google
uses the clickthough rate of the organic listings to
affect where you are listed.
However, with two recent examples for our
clients giving demonstrable results, one dramatic and one less so, I certainly
believe that the clickthrough rate is used for determining your position on a
page.
In our dramatic example, a UK based
holiday company gained a Google Local Map result attached to their listing.
Unfortunately it was not their map listing, but some random hotel in the USA. As a
result, they experienced a dramatic slide off of page 1 for the majority of
their search terms over a period of 1 to 2 weeks. As nothing else had changed,
the only explanation for this is that the US
address put UK
based searchers off clicking on their link. (Than Read more:Killing
, Organic
, Rankings
Spam Factory Websites 2008-05-02 09:16:40 Web developers and search engine optimizers work with the same basic commodities- web applications and the internet. Web developers (usually) create sites that look good, deliver the right information and exceed their clients' expectations. More and more they are also attuned to the requirement that a site should be able to achieve high search visibility. This means making key components search engine friendly.
Building a 100% bespoke site is becoming a rarity- sure, design look and feel, architecture and content are pretty unique factors, but the content management system (CMS) sitting in the background, and/or the database that feeds it are frequently the same. So, your designer/developer may make you a one-off web 2.0 beauty, but chances are its management system is the same as for al Read more:Factory
, Websites
3 Way Link Exchange Being Abused by Unethical SEOs 2008-05-02 08:22:34 A colleague passed me this recent discussion on Webmaster World which discusses how a lot of SEO experts think that 3 Way link exchange can now be detected algorithmically.
3 way links were developed by the SEO industry in order to create an alternate linking strategy when two-way (or reciprocal) links were ‘devalued'. The idea was that by creating a triangular structure, the links were undetectable. The Webmaster World discussion would seem to imply that more recent thinking is that they are still found. What it highlights perhaps more is that three way links were specifically created to ‘game' the search engines, and perhaps that has made them a target for detection.
Aside from the fact that the reciprocal link is not as dead as people think, what I have seen more recently Read more:Exchange
, Abused
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