I’m not going to put a full job description here but if you are interested please email patrick @ branded3…

There are loads of reasons somebody might start a branding campaign and as long as you correctly track and monitor everything then each one is perfectly valid – as an SEO I’m mainly interested in two things:

• Increased traffic
• Increased conversion rate

Across our client base it’s very clear that brands have a much larger conversion rate than non-brands…

I have very little patience with rank checkers that don’t show accurate search engine rankings because there is no point in reporting on incorrect information. We used to have an in-house tool for monitoring rankings but Google managed to spot all the IP addresses and started to return strange results…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…