Google Local Business listings are a huge source of traffic for businesses lucky enough to have locations in lots of different towns. Unfortunately over the last few months Google has removed a lot of links from these listings and it’s costing people a lot of traffic.

Previously if there was only one business listed on the map then it used to link directly to the businesses website, now it just links to the “place page” which is of course full of AdWords ads…

Some of you may have noticed that your link counts in Google Webmaster Tools have increased somewhat recently, we are seeing amazing numbers up to 1000 times higher than previous figures.

The reason for this is very interesting, following the roll out of the new Caffeine infrastructure Google is able to spider sites far deeper than before and they are now reporting this increased activity in Webmaster Tools…

For anybody interested in news sites the interactive graphic below is an interesting breakdown and shows just how powerful some of the social news sites are. The Drudge Report especially sends a huge amount of traffic as does the BBC at nearly 2m per month.

Interestingly the BBC has committed to increasing the traffic they send to other sites:

BBC Online will be transformed into a window on the web with, by 2012, an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of ‘click-throughs’ to external sites…

In a major cost cutting exercise the government is to close up to 600 websites in a bid to save over £100m per year in running costs. Some of the numbers being quoted are quite amazing, the Business Link apparently cost £35m last year.

A report from the Central Office for Information, published today, found that £94 million was spent on the construction and set up and running costs of just 46 sites…

I’ve been thinking for a while now that, as an industry, SEO agencies are really suffering because of the word “optimisation”. It’s just not the right word.

The Google algorithm is based around 2 things, the easy bit which is on-site optimisation and the hard bit which is link-building. Anybody can optimise a website but in most industries link-building is 90% of the algorithm…

Now that Google Caffeine is 100% live & following up from the recent May Day update I thought it would be good to talk about some of more advanced aspects of long tail SEO.

First of all Caffeine is a new infrastructure rather than an algorithm update so it’s not related to the May Day changes. What Caffeine does is increase the freshness of the Google index by increasing crawl capacity and also decreasing the time it takes to get the crawled pages live and searchable in the index…

Most people have probably heard about the May Day update which has either dramatically increased or decreased traffic depending who you talk to. Initially the talk was all about how sites had lost traffic but there are now a number of people coming out to say that traffic has had a big increase.

We’re seeing either no change or a dramatic increase in long tail visitors since the update…

Ever since the famous AOL data leak of 2006 people have been endlessly quoting the same old figures when asked for amount of clicks a particular ranking gets.

Recently the data has become a lot more accurate thanks to the release of click data in Google Webmaster Tools and a new study by the Chitika ad network.

From the AOL data we can see that first place gets 42% of traffic, compared to just 11…

The original PageRank model used a random surfer model and assumed that people moved randomly throughout the web. Crucially every link on a page had an equal chance of being clicked as all the others.

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page…

First of all sorry about the lack of posts recently, if you want some SEO information take a read of the latest Q&A with Google to see what Matt Cutts thought of the Daily Express selling links.

Now back to the point of this post – to tell you all about a product we have been testing on some of our business to business clients sites. Anybody who has done B2B SEO will know that it’s a different ball game due to many factors:

• Not much traffic to go around
• You compete with consumer facing brands
• A lot of your visitors are sometimes not your target customers
• Products & services are normally more expensive so conversion rates are lower
• Every lead is worth a lot of money

With this in mind we have been trialling a product called Web Forensics which uses 9 databases of IP addresses to identify the businesses that are browsing your website and not filling in your contact form…

Although we use a number of tools here at Branded3 I’ve never been a big fan of most of the SEO software available today. The market seems to be always slightly behind the times and although companies such as SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Enquisite (who are funded to the tune of $17m) and a multitude of keyword research and keyword spy tools have made great strides in the last 2 years it sometimes feels like we should have been here in 2008 rather than 2010…

NMA has recently released their annual Marketing Services Guide detailing the turnover and staff levels of 36 UK search agencies and it makes very interesting reading. The guide doesn’t split natural search revenue from PPC revenue in the main table but if you click on the company name the split is listed in the profile page.

What I find interesting is looking at the number of staff some agencies have in comparison to turnover, useful for figuring out how important search is to their revenue stream…

There has been a lot of talk recently about how TopSEOs.com might not be the “Independent Authority on Search Vendors” they claim to be. I’ve not followed all the blog posts about it but today I decided to see just how much it would cost to get Branded3 listed on TopSEOs for all the services we offer.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the $500 monthly fee for each category adds up to a nice $15,000 per month fee for being listed…

Google is increasingly starting to personalise search results for users and they even have a feature called Starred Results which allows users to make a note of their favourite sites for a particular search result.

We assume that when you “favourite” a site by clicking on the star it gives that site a boost in your personalised results but what isn’t clear is whether it gives the site a boost for every search user…

The single most useful way to find high value keywords has always been to look at the exact search keywords driving sales via AdWords and copy them. Looking at the keywords you are bidding on is useless, looking at the keywords that people are actually searching for is very important.

This month Google is finally going to add a report to Analytics which shows the exact search keywords for AdWords campaigns in your reports, previously this was only available via AdWords (great if you have access, not so great otherwise) and by a filter which was quite hard to implement…

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This week Google released a very exciting new feature in Webmaster Tools – the ability to see impression data and click through data for your most popular keywords. On the face of it this is excellent information however the implications of what Google is actually telling us are pretty unprecedented in terms of how the SEO industry reports on results.

Let’s look at the actual data to start with, the report tells me the top keywords along with data for the number of impressions that my search listings have received and the number of people who actually click through to my page…

In a couple of weeks time I’m doing a half hour seminar on Off-site SEO Strategies for eCommerce Websites at the Internet World event at Earls Court, London.

Internet World always has an excellent seminar programme with case studies and insights from big brands being the highlight of the show. My talk is going to be 100% non-salesy so if you want to learn about the link building strategies we use on a daily basis for ecommerce clients then this is the talk for you…

We’ve suspected for some time now that site speed was a factor in the Google algorithm and today Google has sort of confirmed it. The only strange thing is that they have confirmed it is currently only live on Google.com.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google…

Analysing the link profile of your website and comparing it to your competitors is a fundamental part of any link-building strategy. The normal method is to download all of your competitors links and try to replicate them but sometimes you need to take things further and do some data analysis before you start work.

A link profile is the single biggest SEO asset that a site can have and yet not many people stop to think about what their current profile looks like before trying to improve it…

One of the easy wins in improving search traffic to a large site is to improve indexation. Indexation isn’t about the raw number of pages indexed, it’s about increasing the percentage of real, high value pages, that are indexed.

Forcing Google to index useless pages that won’t get any traffic isn’t going to help things.

Indexation is quite a straightforward issue, every site has an indexation cap based on a number of factors including:

• PageRank
• Trust
• Site / server speed
• Duplicate content

The last one is hard to explain but basically if Google sees loads of pages that are the same then it probably won’t bother to do as deep a crawl of the site as if it found a lot of high value unique pages…

Google AdWords just got a lot more complicated thanks to a new feature called Search Funnels.

Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process…

Doing freelance SEO is tricky for a number of reasons, in this post I want to explain what the problems are and discuss a few ways to become more successful. A few years ago I was a freelancer so I know the challenges pretty well.

Finding work

Finding new clients can be tough, building up a personal brand by blogging, speaking at conferences and participating on forums is the best way but using freelancer sites such as elance, Get a Freelancer and PeoplePerHour…

Good news today for those of you who own shares in Google, the European Court has ruled that Google isn’t infringing trademark law by allowing brand bidding.

The case, which is bad news for brands that are in a continual battle with sites selling counterfeit goods, has been going on for quite some time and I don’t think many people really though Google would lose…

For those of you interested in the rollout of the Caffeine update here is the latest word from MC.

This came in a comment on a post detailing some good link-building tips, Google style.

I covered it on my SMX panel but for some reason Lisa didn’t mention it in the live-blog coverage. You might check this link: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5186826 I think I talked about it some there too…

Facebook is probably the webs most fascinating advertising platform and they are investing heavily in making it easier for advertisers to measure ROI. The latest change is a new conversion tracking system similar to Google AdWords as well as a feature that allows you to track customers who see your ad on Facebook (but don’t click on it) and then buy a product from you later…

I’ve never understood why Google Analytics shows percentages rather than actual numbers in the “Goals” report when you are looking at traffic sources. The information below is good but it’s a lot better to just see the numerical amounts.

Luckily there is an easy way to show the amounts, if you are at home using custom reports. Simply set up the report using the dimensions below and the information will be available straight away…

We work as outsource link building partners for quite a few big companies who have a good level of SEO knowledge in house but don’t have the resources to do high level link building.

Normally we just charge by the day (£750) but recently we’ve launched a new offer for in-house teams whereby we don’t charge anything for our time, we just charge for the links we get…

It’s not often that a premium .co.uk domain with mass market appeal gets auctioned but mobilephones.co.uk is currently being auctioned on Sedo, the current bid is £25k and the reserve has been met with only one bid so far.

Apparently phones.co.uk was sold for £175k a couple of years ago so it will be interesting to see if this reaches the £1m mark. What do you guys think, how much will this domain get sold for? Could you use the exact match domain to rank for “mobile phones” as a keyword or is the brand algorithm too strong in this sector?

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisationMobile Phones …

For those of you into paid links and blog/guestbook spamming this is probably going to be bad news – Google has apparently got a new linkspam algorithm and they are actively seeking reports to test it with.

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e…