Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

The definition of search engine optimisation (SEO) has been reviewed, following a call by one digital marketing blog for comments from across the industry.

The shoemoney blog received new definitions from some of the industry’s big names including Danny Sullivan, who it referred to as the ‘godfather of SEO‘.

Mr Sullivan said, as an individual "an SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided".

Other contributors provided varied interpretations. Rand Fishkin said it is "the combination of tactics and strategies" and Neil Patel referred to it as "the art of understanding search engines and using that knowledge to make a website rank high".

Replies were overwhelmingly positive despite one respondent, who preferred to be known as Black Hat, saying it "is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their website shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up".

A recent report by Netcraft has suggested there are approximately 165 million websites, 3.1 million more than in March.

Web designers and marketers should draw on a range of tools to help them decide on keywords for their sites.

The advice came for Search Engine Journal’s, Ann Smarty, who suggested they looked to the web for assistance.

"Recently there appeared a number of useful tools that can help you find more key terms to focus on," Ms Smarty noted and recommended Google Sets, MSN clustering tools, Keyword Map, Search Radar and Urban Dictionary.

Google Sets tells you what the search engine thinks are relevant, while MSN’s helper links search results into semantically related groups.

Search Radar, she noted displays a keyword tag cloud and demonstrates the usage of this keyword and its synonyms in short context, while keyword map shows variations in order, or as a map.

Urban Dictionary takes a different approach in listing slang and urban words. It is "helpful at giving you a full picture of your main term associations as well as jargon, memes, and neologisms", she said.

The UK search market is dominated by Google - it handled 73 per cent of search requests in March, tech advisor, e-consultancy has found.

Video search company, blinkx, has decided to sell parts of the search technology it uses to categorise its collection.

Its advanced media platform (AMP) comprises of four packages, which can be used in tandem or alone.

"We’ve taken a lot of the technology we’ve built for video search, turned it into components and launched it as a platform," said Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive officer and founder.

The company is offering one feature that matches video content with text articles, one to offer community recommendations, a further to automate their categorisation and a search optimisation function.

Mr Chandratillake claimed the platform is a soloution "that finally enables media partners to really, truly organise, distribute and monetise their video assets".

However, analysts have warned the increased popularity of downloading and streaming video files could reduce connection speeds.

The growth in traffic on the Daily Telegraph’s website is partly attributable to search engine optimisation (SEO).

Edward Roussel, online editor with the Telegraph Media Group which owns both the newspaper and its website, testified to the importance of SEO in an interview with the Guardian.

Overall, the site has enjoyed a 38.7 rise in unique users over the last month alone.

"[Unique user figures are] hugely dependent on the quality of your SEO and the extent by which your site is picked up by aggregators and portals," the editor said.

Mr Roussel added that the newspaper has also switched its internal measurement tools for the site - and that major breaking stories such as the Budget had helped to drive up traffic.

From March to April, unique users of the Daily Telegraph website increased from 12 million to 17 million.

The website can be found at telegraph.co.uk.

Advice on web analytics has been offered by John Wyllie, who oversees the division at GE Money.

In conversation with e-consultancy, the executive counselled against the use of Google Analytics.

GE Money is a financial firm currently operating in the UK, which offers mortgages, loans, insurance and credit cards.

It currently operates around 50 businesses in 30 different nations - meaning that its web analytics division is complex and wide-ranging.

Four separate research centres are currently run by the firm in Canada, India, Europe and China.

Mr Wyllie commented: "One or two businesses [within GE] may have [Google Analytics] from a legacy implementation."

He added: "People say [it] is free and it is true - it is free. But for me, that cost is irrelevant because where we really want to spend our money is the people and the talent that will drive value, as well as the technical skills to get analytics implemented."

Businesses considering paid links face a Google-related dilemma, a new blog post on e-consultancy has claimed.

Marketers hoping to improve their search engine optimisation need to weigh the benefits of the links against the fact that the search engine firm "doesn’t like" them, the website said.

Indeed, the website has got tough on paid links in recent months - penalising link brokers, buyers and selling through the dreaded ‘minus 50′ devaluation.

"Google quite simply doesn’t want websites to be able to buy their way to the top of the search engine rankings," the post added.

"It isn’t a question about relevance because nobody buys their way to the top of the search results for a phrase that isn’t related to their site."

However, e-consultancy also counsels that "abuse is so widespread" by firms that Google is "totally powerless".

Nevertheless, the fear of devaluing should be enough to prevent paid link buy-ups in the long term, the post concluded.

"Why pay £1000 for a permanent link when Google can devalue it at the drop of a hat?"

Using tactics designed to frustrate spammers attempting to bombard sites with bot-comments can prove an effective step towards better security, a Google expert has claimed.

Matt Cutts, who leads the search engine firm’s Webspam operation, told a US conference that captcha systems were a good tool for this purpose.

These are programmes which pose questions to users submitting comments onto a website - designed to ensure that the poster is a real person and not a spambot, Bluhalo reports.

Mr Cutts also had some general comments in his speech regarding Google’s position on search engine optimisation.

"SEO is not spam. Google does not hate SEO," he claimed.

"There are plenty of white-hat SEO [companies] who can help you out."

The reference to "white-hat" SEO refers to responsible users of the technique - as opposed to "black-hat", on the other hand, refers to SEO practices such as spamdexing, which are widely regarded as unethical.

Search statistics have revealed insights into the upcoming election for London’s mayor.

Organic search figures from Hitwise show that Conservative mayoral candidate Boris Johnson has attracted more interest from web users.

Labour’s incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone and Liberal Democrat challenger Brian Paddick were found to be trailing in popularity.

Each candidate’s official website was the source of choice for web surfers, Hitwise found.

Wikipedia - the second most popular overall destination for candidate information from organic searches - attracted 31.6 per cent of Mr Johnson’s queries, compared with 18 per cent of those for Mr Livingstone and 19.3 per cent for Mr Paddick.

Elsewhere, Mr Livingstone outpointed his rivals by around 2:1 when it came to news media searches.

Robin Goad at Hitwise counselled against using the search statistics to speculate on the result of May 1stt’s election, however.

"Searches do not equal votes," he commented.

A top marketing executive has warned against potential customer alienation through search engine optimisation practices.

According to Heather Lloyd-Martin, the head of SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, customer retention should be key to online content providers.

This means that shoehorning in keywords can be counterproductive if it makes copy harder to read, the expert suggested.

"Search engines don’t pay your bills, but your prospects and customers do," WebProNews reports Ms Lloyd-Martin as saying.

"General or overarching key phrases are great for home and sub pages," she added.

"Highly specific key phrases work best for inner pages."

In order to keep customers through ensuring readable copy, it is recommended that two or three keywords should be displayed per page, introduced in a "subtle" manner.

Ms Lloyd-Martin made the comments while speaking at the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference - which was held in the US city of Houston this week.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) should be a primary concern for web designers, industry website Search Engine Watch has said.

In a blog post on the site, early implementation of SEO was recommended rather than adapting the new website following its construction.

It also recommends SEO to be of primary concern to site owners looking to have their web presence redesigned.

Developing a small set of keywords to focus on was cited by the blog post as an important first step.

"Having a ranking for a keyword is not happenstance - you need to have content in order to have any ‘meat’ the search engines can chew on."

Home pages should have 400 words of content - along with 250 or so for internal pages, Search Engine Watch adds.

"If you follow these simple steps, you should earn a raise from your boss," the post adds.

"Your website will do much better in the search engines and you’ll never realise the time [and] money you saved in the process."