Category Archives: Web Optimization - Page 2

5 simple steps to optimize your website for Bing, the new Microsoft search engine

Posted by on October 9, 2009 8 comments

bing-search-engine-optimizationAfter all the rumours, Microsoft and Yahoo finally agreed to merge their search services to compete with the grand search engine, Google.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing will power the Yahoo search engine, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. Yahoo rankings are going to change once it is replaced by Bing, so if Microsoft’s search offerings have not been of any concern to you before, now is the time to become familiar with it’s rules and ways to optimize your website for Bing.  Read more »

Is it possible to be guaranteed a top 10 ranking on Google or any other search engine?

Posted by on October 8, 2009 1 comment

Unfortunately, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms cannot directly control how search engines rank pages. Therefore, many people will tell you that there is no certainty of achieving a top 10 ranking on Google or any other local search engine.

 However, a guarantee of up to 98 percent can be achieved if the following key stages are met and well performed. Read more »

Do search engines trust your website?

Posted by on September 30, 2009 1 comment

Five years ago, Yahoo engineers wrote about TrustRank, an algorithm used to fight spam in the search results. TrustRank works in such way that it semi-automatically separates trustworthy and good quality pages from spam.

Spam-pages get higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results and today any professional SEO optimizers, Google or any other search engine uses Trust Rank or similar techniques against spam. Read more »

Get your links through Link-Baiting

Posted by on June 22, 2009 No comments

A great way of gaining quality inbound links is through link-baiting, that is get people to link to you through the type of content you have on your site.

Here are couple of ideas:

1. Whitepapers and research
2. Interviews and Reviews
3. Tools or Plugins
4. Tips and Advice

Giving people thins is always good and will gain attention, people that then like what you are giving will link-to your give-aways and recommend them. By getting people to link to you through link-baiting you will grow links naturally and hopefully equally so prominence in organic search results.

When you create a link-building strategyit’s vital that you have this in mind but also that you can compliment these efforts by requesting links directly from site owners or through forms if you are looking for links at directories such as Dmoz, JoeAnt, Randburg and so on. Through the years I have been creating multilingual link-building campaigns mixing together link-baiting, link-requesting, online PR, social media bookmarking and link exchange to mention few of the techniques out there, with good success for well over one hundred clients over the past 10 years or so. Read more »

Using user-friendly URLs for your web site

Posted by on April 4, 2009 2 comments

Often overlooked but important is the role of URLs, so going from yoursite.com/?pageid=123&sub12 to yoursite.com/our_services/ not only helps the user verbally say the URL but also the search engines to connect it to something meaningful.

This is even more important when you have product or service pages so going from a URL that looks like yourhotelsite.com/?hotelID123&city123 to yourhotelsite.com/reykjavik/hotel_plaza/ is not only better to communicate but also helps the search engines to connect the URL to search terms in this case Reykjavik and Hotel Plaza. Read more »

Rand Fishkin Keynotes

Posted by on March 20, 2009 1 comment

reykjavik-internet-marketing-conferenceWelcome to today’s live blogging from the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference here on OptimizeYourWeb.

We are getting under way right away, as is often the way of things. The welcome speech from Ingvar Hjálmarsson was light and entertaining but now the keynote speaker Rand Fiskin is on stage.

He is starting with something of a summary of methods used in internet marketing: blogging, SEO, PPC and the like. Which of these channels is appropriate for me as a company?

Rand’s personal feeling is that Conversion Rate Optimization is the crème de la crème of internet marketing…despite the fact that he works in SEO. Landing Page Optimization is important in bumping up the conversion rate. In fact, a simple experiment SEOmoz conducted increased the CR from 1.8 to 2.2 – meaning several million dollars extra revenue per year.

Read more »

Internet consumer trends in Scandinavia

Posted by on March 4, 2009 No comments

At Nordic eMarketing, one of our big goals right now is help even more companies to increase and strengthen their presence on the Scandinavian markets. We are therefore really excited about the latest report on digital media consumer behavior and trends in the Nordic and Baltic countries, from one of Scandinavia’s largest telecom providers, Telia Sonera.

The report divides digital media consumers up into four different categories, “tech parents”, “iToddlers”, “infomaniacs” and “IT high society”. The latest group is defined as the most important and influential one. The report even appoints the “IT high society” as the new “upper class” of digital media consumers.

Read more »

Use the Internet, It’s 2009

Posted by on February 20, 2009 No comments

Sometimes its good to be taken back a few steps and being reminded of the world that is inhabited by “normal” Internet users. Working professionally everyday with the Internet as a sales and marketing channel, easily makes you loose the perspective of those people. The people that are the end receivers of our clients messages and products.

Luckily though, an article in The Mail on Sunday on the 15th of February reminded me of the Internet reality that actually reigns out there outside of our office walls. Entitled “Millions lost by firms who ignore the net”, the article reveals that six out of ten British companies do not use the Internet to sell their products, even though they are quite happy to use the Internet to buy goods and services for their organizations. A survey on small businesses (up to 50 people) showed that four out of five use their website to showcase their goods rather than sell it. Even more surprising, 67 percent believed that they would not find customers online if they were to try. Considering the fact that 20 billion pounds was spent online during 2008, it feels safe to assume that they are wrong and that they are loosing out on considerable earnings by not incorporating the Internet as a serious marketing and sales channel. Read more »

Most of the top UK PR agencies do not offer online press releases

Posted by on November 27, 2008 No comments

Recent survey carried out by Bigmouthmedia revealed that 79 out of the 100 top UK PR companies don’t offer online PR services.

Sadly, only 14% of the operations that claimed to have new media covered, published their own blogs. All in all, surprisingly as low as 11% of UK PR consultancies communicate with clients, colleagues and the wider marketplace via their blogs.

Companies nowadays still do not seem to see the real semantic difference between online press releases and digital press releases.

The following figures for October 2008 in the UK show the differences in terms of their relative search popularity:

Online PR 2,900
Online public relations 1,600
Web PR 880
Digital PR 590
Internet PR 260
Internet Public Relations 170
Digital public relations 73

Online lookalike swindle, web shoppers getting scammed

Posted by on August 9, 2008 No comments

I was reading a magazine the other day and I found and article in it that I found quite remarkable. So this is the scenario when Virgin MegaStore became Zavvi in the UK, they opened a website as can be expected under their brand name zavvi.co.uk and it was business as usual. But it was not, because around the same time a UK based company opened another website called zavvidirect.co.uk looking strikingly similar to the original site, this did then easily fool unsuspected online shoppers and when they advertised a limited special offer on a gaming computer people when out and ordered, filled in their credit card information, clicked on enter and waited excited for the delivery that never arrived. Just to cut a longer story short, this was corrected and Zavvi has now, through copyright laws, closed this site.

For more information on the WebUser article buy issue 192, 2008 and you should find it there on page eleven to the right above the “Gordon Ramsay Cooks up Game” article and beside the “Internet cafes under attack”.

So how can you try to prevent this?

1. Don’t shop online, just kidding… I have shopped online for over 10 years and never had problems
2. Shop with established online shops such as Amazon
3. If you don’t want to do that, Google the name of the shop you want to buy through
a. If there only or mostly negative activity, don’t shop
b. If there no activity, then that should also ring bells, I would then wait a little to see how things evolve
4. When looking at the forums or blogs and you see one or two negative posts and you really want to shop with them, send the company an email and ask them to explain why these customers are negative
5. Only shop with companies that use PayPal or other recognized payment systems
6. Don’t use debit cards use Credit Cards, they work in a different way and are to my knowledge more secure

Good luck shopping!