Category Archives: Seach Engine Optimization - Page 4

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

Are 80pc of SEO consultants are scammers?

Posted by on August 8, 2008 1 comment

College of mine pointed a blog post to me written by Peter Kent, author, SEO for Dummies. The post claims that 80% of search engine marketing consultants are scammers and I must say that I agree. I have seen some poor samples of SEO consultancy to even the biggest companies.

In the post there is also a mention of flash designed webs having poor visability, even though I have seen search optimized flash sites they tend to have lesser chance than other and I must also say that I agree with Peter when he claims not having seen evidence showing that flash sites are indexable, I have but for me it’s rather a question of the ranking.

The rule is that you do not hire anyone that says he/she can get to the top 10, even if he has done it for another client, different clients have different needs.

Another thing is be carefull of what tools you use, many are just there to collect information about you and your activities, understand trends and so on.

Get case studies and references to verify that they are correct.

Bye, bye to my favorite SEO tool

Posted by on July 5, 2008 6 comments

It is official Yahoo is officially and finally discontinuing it’s Overture keyword suggestion tool. Sad but true! So bye, bye, adieu, farwell. My favorite multilingual SEO 1.0 tool gone forever! Now all roads lead to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/

Google announces a “Flash indexing algorithm”

Posted by on July 1, 2008 1 comment

Finally I must say, now that Adobe has made Flash indexable Google launches their Flash indexing algorithm. As most SEO people know the big problem with Flash-based websites has been that they could not be properly indexed by the likes of Google and Yahoo. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences and now they can be indexed by Google, now let’s see what Yahoo and MSN do.

Is Microsoft testing Live Search?

Posted by on June 14, 2008 4 comments

It seems that Microsoft is testing Live Search. I have seen tens of visits to sites directly from “65.55.109.191 (microsoft.com)”, their headquaters in Washington DC – “us , WA, Washington”. This blog has had 8 visits from Microsoft under the search terms “search” and “Google”, here is a sample. These are all new visitors, that means that they are either clearing their cookie or there many testers running these test at the same time. All the testers seam to be using IE7 and 800 x 600 screen resolution.

What also stands out is that most of the time they are not coming to the same landing pages at this blog, I have counted eight so far, what is also something to consider is that when I try to search for the same words I can’t see anything from Optimizer Your Web.

I have gotten calls, over the past days, from clients wondering the same thing, why is Microsoft coming in so often? These search also seem to have it in common that they are nearly all single word searches. This has happened with my clients in the UK, France, Denmark, Iceland and the US.

SMX Advanced was all that I expected and more

Posted by on June 6, 2008 2 comments

I just came from Seattle where I attended SMX Advanced, both as a speaker and a guest. And I must say that Chris Sherman, Danny and their team did a great job at this event. Everything from the set-up, the speakers, sessions and not least the speakers and the session moderators. If I had to find anything to complain about it was the noise interruption from the breakfast hall to the main conference room, but as I said other than that, five stars out of five.

Chris contacted me some months back and asked me to be a part of the International SEO panel with three other speakers, WebCertain’s Andy Atkins Kruger whom I have spoken with on several occasions, also in Iceland. Then there was Ian McAnerin and finally, but not least, the lovely Cindy Krum.
As can be expected we all took this topic from a similar point of view, Ian focused on Asia, Andy looked at the broader picture, Cindy looked at the site architecture and Google Webmaster Tools while I was close to home focusing on the Nordics and Yahoo’s concept of region.

So what is this concept of region? Two years ago I needed to create a business case on why a client needed to change their tactics in order to succeed locally with their search marketing efforts. Their focus was on having all of their material through a .COM domain and they actually closed all of their Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) and routed them to the .COM domain.

Through the many conferences I have spoken at, I have had good contact with various search marketing professionals and all of the agreed that the tactics of my client was not going to help them much, but none of the search engine representatives wanted to go on the record on how they deal with localizing search results, except one from Yahoo. This was John Riccardi, who at that time, was the head of search for Yahoo! Europe, if I remember correctly. Since then he has stopped working at Yahoo and is studying MBA in the US – good luck to him!

So what is it all about? Simply put:

1) The ccTLD (.de and .is are ccTLD while .com is a TLD),
2) The text/copy on the site / pages,
3) Type of inbound links, they need to be regional, and finally,
4) The IP address provided by the ISP/hosting company.

So how can you buy a ccTLD? Do you find a hosting company that has a regional IP address or copywriters in the language that you want to target, and do link building to target that region? I am going to answer that question in my next post here so do come back soon!

Why do consumers choose organic search over paid in the SERP’s?

Posted by on May 26, 2008 No comments

It is no surprise that people want to click on organic (natural) SERP’s. According to an article I saw in Marketing week (UK Magazine) over 58% do not click on organic because “Natural search links are Independent”, 51% because “they think they are more likely to give me the results I’m looking for”. Then there is the trust factor, 31% trust search engines to give relevant results. What I find most striking about this research is that only 51% of people know the difference between paid and organic search.

Google, are you learning Icelandic?

Posted by on March 22, 2008 1 comment

Google is learning IcelandicRecently I found occasion to reprimand Google for poor Icelandic spelling They promptly corrected the situation and what’s more, lately I’ve seen some indications that Google is tackling Icelandic Grammar! If true, my hat is off to Google. I always give kudos to someone that takes the time to learn our (beautiful but a little challenging) language which is spoken by only 300 thousand people!

Relatively free from outside influence for much of the ca. 1.100 years since Iceland’s discovery and settlement, icelandic has retained an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin or, more closely, Old Norse and Old English.

Unless search engines actively learn the language, Icelandic users have to accommodate for the search engine’s illiteracy by entering their searches in various cases, numbers, genders, tenses and then do it all over again with the definite article etc… I’ll spare you the gory details but believe me… I will be following Google’s learning progress with my fingers crossed. Moreover it’ll make my SEO work so much more effective. Welcome to the wonderful world of inflected languages.

What has Dixon the Briton Jones to do with link-building?

Posted by on February 14, 2008 No comments

If everybody is saying it then it must be true, yes? Well we did a little test here at Optimise Your Web and the link that points to my friend Dixon Jones’s blog point to that with the phrase “Dixon the Briton Jones” and when you try searching for it with “” guess what comes up number one… http://dixonjones.com/. In this case there only one saying it, us. What does all of this mean? Anchor tags/text is important and still plays a major role, as this very mild sample shows, in the world of SEO.

What is to be learned? 1) Use you link-building strategy wisely and 2) be careful how you link to others and what you say in those links

P.s. Dixon is actually British and his name is actually Dixon Jones