SEO Musings from the Hive
…General thoughts from the world of SEO
Adwords Campaign Experiments (ACE) – Googles new tool for PPC Advertisers
Jun 11th
Google have this week announced the BETA release of their new tool, ACE. The ‘Adwords Campaign Experiments’ tool allows advertisers to compare the effectiveness of campaign changes in real-time.
This is great news for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers. Currently the drill is to make a change, test it for a set period of time and then look at the post test analysis. This has inherent problems, firstly a PPC auction is dynamic, do on any given day at and given time the auction looks different. Advertisers run out of budget, use automated bidding tools and optimise to position amongst other things. So, the auction landscape is never static making any test less than ideal – if nothing ever changed in the search landscape then there wouldn’t be such a problem.
Internet World 2010
May 20th
In April this year I attended Internet World 2010. This was thoroughly worthwhile with some excellent seminars given by some of the leading experts in their fields. Yes, there was a lot of teaching to suck eggs but then there were many presenters who gave an insight into their own methodologies whether thats in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media or Affiliate Marketing.
YouTube Facts and Figures
May 18th
Another great infographic based on YouTube facts and figures since birth. Thanks to Vojtech (@Bobby_D_) for tweeting this and thanks to website monitoring for compiling this graphic.
This YouTube infographic show stats such as Video Stats, top channels, history and milestones…
Google extends universal search?
May 13th
So, either im miles behind the times or this is a relatively recent development from Google. Gig listings in the search results when you search for a specific band. I’ve just been out and bought a couple of CD’s on my lunch break, one of which being the Foals. Having sat at my laptop and started listening to the album I thought I’d have a quick look to see if there were any gigs coming up in London, to my surprise I saw that Google has been inserting deep links into dates and venues for gigs, have a look at the screenshot I took:
How do you learn SEO?
May 12th
I often end up having an awkward and lengthy conversation with friends about what I do, sometimes although it sounds simple to me it’s usually hard to convey to the less technically minded. Yesterday I had this exact question from an old uni friend who I hadn’t seen for years. Following my simple explanation of ‘you know Google (and others), well….’ he asked how I got into it and how I learnt what I know today.
For me the learning process started with building sites when I was at school doing my GCSE’s/A-levels. I was always fascinated with the internet and spent most of my evenings after school jamming my parents phone line with our delightfully slow 56k modem, very much to their frustration. More >
Top 10 Link Building Strategies
May 11th
I often get asked about the easiest ways to start building links to your website. This is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimisation and one that should never be underestimated, it’s key for you to start ranking highly on your targeted keywords.
Often I see people build websites, get excited, and then find out that when they install Google analytics they’re getting no traffic. This is pretty obvious really, without people knowing about your site then they’re not going to link to it nor is Google likely to index/rank much of the content.
Link building is important to build your rankings in the search engines but it’s also important that you don’t get carried away too quickly. We should always build links naturally, that’s to say that 22k new backlinks in a month is clearly not natural. A small trickle of backlinks is what you want, slowly but surely. It is easy to get carried away when you find potential linking partners and sign 50 up in the first day, just go steady and spread them out – it’s worth the wait in the long run.
So what are the Top 10 link building strategies? More >
Designing a website with SEO in mind
May 6th
You need to put a lot of work into designing a website and it needs to be designed and programmed correctly for it to benefit your business. To design and create a good website you need to have knowledge of SEO and what is/isn’t going to work in a website design build. It can be difficult to design a site that is not only going to be appealing to your users visually but also readable to a search engine spider. The design needs to make it easy for the user to find what they’re looking, this is a fundamental in SEO, a flatter navigation structure is much more useful to the user and search engine spiders than one that just gets deeper and deeper.
Useful SEO Infographics
May 4th
Infographics are an excellent way of visually describing a concept which otherwise can be quite difficult to grasp. These can be especially useful when describing SEO concepts.
These SEO infographics are very useful for trying to describe some of the fundamentals of search engine optimisation. More >
Targeting the Longtail Keywords
Apr 29th
I went to Internet World 2010 yesterday and spent the day listening to various SEO practitioners. There were some pretty obvious speeches about what SEO was and how to make the most out of your optimisation strategies but then there were some about more detailed strategies.
One speech I liked in particular was by Rahmon Coupe, CEO of YourAmigo (they could do with a site revamp, urgh). The talk was about their strategies in the SEO marketplace and how they differ from other SEO services. Now, im not entirely sure that they differ that greatly from other agencies apart from some of the AI tools they said they were using. One thing that Rahmon was talking about that should be at the top of everyones agenda should be optimising for the longtail keyword. A lot of people can get caught up in the optimisation of the pure generic such as ‘insurance’ and ‘credit card’ for example. This is all very well if that’s your target market but it only makes up a relatively small proportion of your overall site traffic when looking at all keywords. More >
Million Dollar Landing Page
Apr 24th
Sometimes its hard understanding what makes a good landing page and often it can take many iterations of an optimisation to really reap the rewards that you’re looking for. Not every optimisation will get the desired effect and that’s why you should always try many different versions until you’ve really found the optimal solution. Where do you start, well the Conversion Rate Experts released an excellent live website guide based on real optimisations made to the SEOmoz website to help sell their services. This is great stuff – read and learn.