Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Google’s Penguin 2.0 Has Launched! So What Is It?
"Don't panic, don't panic"- Ian Lavender (a.k.a. Private Frank Pike), Dads Army. So, after 10 days of anticipation and preparation, Google’s Penguin 2.0 has arrived today, 23rd May. Whilst some people working in digital marketing may be on the brink of a nervous breakdown, the fact is that it really isn’t something t...
Takeaways from #BrightonSEO: The Do's and the Don'ts!
On Friday (12th April) I was lucky enough to venture down to Brighton SEO 2013 - one of the biggest search marketing conferences in the UK. This was the first SEO conference I had ever attended and it certainly won't be the last. I really didn't know what to expect and was pleasantly surprised by just how many search marketers had attended...
Is online shopping responsible for the demise of the High Street?
As a somewhat, ahem, mature member of the team, I remember what Christmas Shopping used to be like before I discovered the internet! Cold, nay freezing, conditions, packed shops full of coughing and sniffling people, the arm-deadening carrying of dozens of bags and finally the exorbitant car-parking charges (some things never change). Since 1998 I...
How to write a Reconsideration Request for Google
It's been nearly 6 months now since Google dropped Penguin on the SERPs, penalising sites with (what they deem to be) unnatural backlink profiles and most likely putting hundreds of Webmasters out of business. It didn't matter if you had spammed the hell out of your website with tonnes of automated links, if you had been duped by a lo...
Ideas for creating a keyword list
The very first step in any SEO campaign is to compile a list of relevant keywords. The second step is to then take this list and use a keyword analysis tool, such as Wordtracker or the Google Adwords tool, in order to determine the competitiveness and search volumes. Of course, these tools can also help in suggesting further keyword ideas for your...
The Great Big Elephant in the SEO Room
When Google release an algorithm update there will undoubtedly be waves of bloggers milking Google's FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) creation by publishing articles along the lines of 'SEO is Dead'. There has probably been at least one of these articles released every year since 2003 when Google released the Florida update. T...
Post-Panda Content Marketing Strategies
In my previous blog I spoke about my theory that Google's recent algorithm updates (Panda & Penguin) have triggered a reaction in the online marketing community whereby article marketing is in a state of decline and content marketing is on the rise. I also briefly outlined the difference between content marketing and article marketing...
A Proposal to Google Webmaster Tools
GWMT is undoubtedly a great tool to have in your SEO arsenal, it offers insightful information into how your sites are crawled, indexed and viewed but what have Google missed? Do certain features frustrate you or do you feel some features are missing? I work in GWMT daily and having a large client base makes the homepage scrollbar pretty small, my...
The human side of Google
For this blog I want to step away from SEO, web development, analytics, PPC etc. and reach out to the human side of Google. Within the last 12 months there have been various Google chrome adverts which aimed towards the way people can use it. The adverts explained the features and how it can benefit the users; but most importantly they have persona...
Is Google Really Facing Competition from DuckDuckGo?
An interesting article over at Search Engine Land a few days ago made a couple of interesting points about the possibility that Google's most realistic long term rival in the search engine biz could be DuckDuckGo (DDG). The article seemed to be based on the fact that DDG have seen their traffic grow by 227% in the last three months, and interesting...
Are Users Falling Out Of Love With Google?
Whilst no one is claiming that Google isn’t still the most used search engine by an incredible margin, recent usage graphs released by ‘minor’ search engines Blekko and DuckDuckGo indicate that the number of visitors and search queries being run through them have rocketed since the start of 2012. Google certainly haven’t released any graph...
How you can avoid over-optimisation on your website
Last week, Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google, was speaking at SXSW and he made the following statement: "We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don't do SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many lin...
SEO Tips straight from Google
Google recently published a new post on their Official Webmaster Central blog that contained some really valuable tips about search engine optimisation. SEO is often central to the success of any internet marketing campaign, so I thought it might be good to cover this Google blog in a bit more detail. The blog was split into two sections: Avoid t...
Search Quality Highlights Update
In January Google announced 17 new quality improvements detailing changes to the algorithm and feature enhancements. Google is still focusing on the freshness of results, this month improving how they determine the date of pages giving us results that are most relevant, more timely and fresher, particularly for pages that are discussing recurring...
SEMRush – Make it Part of your Keyword Research!
Keyword Research nowadays is not just simple guesswork but it is an exact science of carefully choosing the most money making keywords. SEMRush.com is a keyword tool that goes beyond providing a list of keywords to target for an online marketing campaign; it helps to identify the terms with the most profit yielding potential by offering an extensiv...
Why Having a High Bounce Rate isn't Always Bad
For webmasters and search marketing experts, the bounce rate on a page can generally be a very helpful metric to help gage the quality of a particular webpage. However, some people new to SEO or internet marketing might naively assume that a high bounce rate is always a bad thing – but this is not always the case. A high bounce rate i...