Finding good quality small & intimate SEO training sessions isn’t always easy these days as most of the big popular conferences are packed with hundreds of people.
For those of you in the London area we have a good discount for you on an upcoming Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) conference coming up near Heathrow. This isn’t affiliated with Branded3 or Blogstorm but a reader pointed it out and it looks like a pretty good deal…
Just been reading an interesting article about Demand Media following the IPO earlier this month.
For those of you that haven’t heard of the company they are a content farm using outsourced writers to produce 5000 articles per day on sites such as eHow and various other informational resources.
On January 25th Demand Media sold 8.9 million shares at $17 each in an initial public offering…
One of the most important reports an SEO agency gives for a large site is the one that breaks down the traffic to the different sections of that site. This allows you to analyse whether traffic rises came from product pages, product types, category pages, sub-category pages, blog posts etc.
For most sites you can produce this report by looking at the top Google Organic landing pages and filtering by an appropriate folder or file name from the URL…
2011 has been a busy year so far at Branded3 HQ, we had 5 new people join the SEO team at the start of the year and after a very strong 2010 we’re looking forward to an even better 2011.
One of the reasons we’ve been winning business recently is the fact we focus 90% of all our efforts on link-building, in line with the fact that 90% of the Google algorithm is based on link data…
We’ve been working on a few projects recently where it transpired that a significant amount of AdWords traffic was being miscounted as Google Organic which meant skewed figures and incorrect conclusions.
The way Google Analytics tracks AdWords clicks is via the gclid parameter which is added to your landing page URL when you enable auto-tagging in AdWords.
If you don’t enable auto-tagging (and haven’t set up manual tagging) then your visitors will be miscounted as organic rather than paid and the number of AdWords “visits” being reported by Analytics will be a lot less than the number of “clicks”…
Google has added a new method of refining certain search results – “Top References”.
This seems to be a very limited bucket test at the moment as we were not able to replicate it on any further searches. We will update the posts if/when we can get some better screenshots!
The functionality seems to be that the filter allows you to search through all the existing search results for “roses” to show “Pages mentioning” the reference used to refine the search…
Google Local works based on citations and the more citations you have the higher your listing will rank. A citation is basically a mention of your business address of phone number on a website that Google trusts as a data provider.
The standard advice is to list your website in as many of the major citation providers as possible which is a good strategy until all your competitors do the same thing…
Google Places is the single biggest change to the natural search results this year and considering the resources Google are investing in making the system work its something that every single website needs to start using.
At present Google Places results are shown for geographical queries such as “plumber in Leeds” as well as the more general “plumbers” query…
In the last few months our Twitition.com site is continuing to grow and it’s getting quite a bit of recognition in the industry – yesterday we won the innovation category at the Some Comms awards in Manchester and a couple of weeks ago we scooped the top award at the GoldenTwits in London.
Below are some stats showing just how big twitition has become:
Google has made a couple of interesting announcements today about how social media signals and “customer experience” affect rankings in the main organic search results.
The social media signals information was revealed in an interview with Danny Sullivan.
To paraphrase, Google looks at the number of people tweeting a link as well as the authority of the people doing the tweeting…
When I broke the news that Google was showing full page previews in the search results most people thought it was an interesting test. I doubt many of the 25,000 people who read that post actually thought it would become a real feature.
Today Google has announced that previews will be rolling out across 40 countries in the next few days.
Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine…
Google Places is big news this week but it is exposing a massive flaw in the methods Google uses to find out where searchers are physically located.
The main problem Google has is that they use IP geolocation which is woefully inaccurate in the UK. The second issue they have is that they use two separate systems – one for Adwords and one for the normal Google Places results…
Google has announced a major change to the way that the search results are displayed for local based search queries. Rather than having a map at the top of the results Google is just going to integrate the local results into the main organic results.
The impact of this change is that in the long term any site that doesn’t have a physical address in the location that people are searching for will probably no longer be able to rank for local based queries…
Google seems to be rolling out seller ratings to the UK AdWords results today, just in time to take advantage of increased Christmas marketing budgets.
This feature has been in existence for a few months on Google.com but today is the first time I’ve seen it on Google.co.uk. Last week Google was still telling people on forums that this was only for US campaigns.
The new change means that if you advertise on AdWords you simply have to put some effort into making sure you have 4 or 5 stars in the reviews on Google Product Search – the links point directly to a review page like this one for John Lewis which no doubt customers will be reading and taking note of…
Due to continued expansion Branded3 is currently recruiting for a number of SEO positions based in our Aberford office, just near the M1 on the outskirts of Leeds.
We’re always looking for Link Analysts but we are also looking for a Senior Search Strategist to help develop the natural search campaigns of some very large brands and some small brands with very large ambitions…
I wasn’t intending to publish this presentation online because some of the content is the sort of thing best kept private. However it seems that the slides are already live on slideshare and various other places so I guess the secret stuff won’t be secret for much longer.
The presentation is below. Any questions please ask in the comments.
tl;dr – brand links are big…
Do you have a link in the Yahoo UK & Ireland Directory? If so then Yahoo will be sending you some bad news – it’s going to shut the site down and your listing will be deleted.
The Yahoo Directory has always been a well trusted link source and there are no doubt a lot of sites benefiting from having a link there. The email is unclear because at the start it says the links will be eliminated and then says that you can still maintain the listing…
October is a busy month for the SEO industry and I’m going to be speaking about link building at both the A4U Expo and the SEOmoz Pro Seminar.
A4U Expo – Day 2 at 4pm – Advanced Link building Strategies for Affiliate Sites
Wednesday October 13th
Achieving strong natural search engine rankings for an affiliate site is a hard task, especially when you consider the advantage that brands have in the current Google algorithm…
Google is today testing a major new layout to their search results – full page previews of the target site and blue backgrounds behind the search results when you hover over them. Click the image below for a full size version.
One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information…
Google released a new keyword research tool some time ago now and although it wasn’t very good people ignored it because you could still access the old tool which worked perfectly.
Now the old tool has been turned off and we are stuck with the new tool permanently.
Below are the things I hate most about this tool:
There are only two things SEO people want to be able to do with a keyword tool:
What does your link profile say about you? Over the last 9 months this question has become hugely important and still most people are building links while blissfully unaware of what’s really going on.
We spend a lot of time doing link profile analysis across entire industries and while I’m not going to let too many secrets out of the bag I suggest you take a read of Tims post about over optimised anchor text and also anchor text losing influence published a couple of weeks ago…
Google has just updated their SEO starter guide and it’s a “must read” for anybody new to the subject.
The guide makes very little mention of linkbuilding but it covers 90% of what people need to understand when building a website. It’s also full of pictures of Googlebot to brighten things up.
On another note, apparently in 1999 Excite had the chance to buy Google for $750,000 and turned it down…
Our twitition.com site has been very busy for some time now and always gets more than 10,000 visitors per day. Lots of people are big fans of the site and use it every day.
Last week the site got a pretty big spike and ended up getting 89,847 visits in a 48 hour period after both Lady Gaga (6.5 million followers) and Justin Bieber (5.4 million followers) tweeted out links to the site…
Google Instant is a very clever move by Google but I don’t see it having a visible effect on most websites.
The reason Google has done it is the same reason they implemented the automated search suggestions that appear when you are typing – so that they can direct you to more commercial & profitable search queries.
By teaching people to use the right search queries they are able to show better search results with more targeted ads which attract higher cost per clicks…
Buried in the middle of an otherwise fairly uninteresting New York Times article about Digg is the following piece of information, emphasis added by me:
According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore…
Some of you may have noticed that Blogstorm was subject to a malware hacking a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to everybody to contacted me to point the issue out – Google sent an automated email to alert me to the problem which is very proactive of them.
I’m just back from 2 weeks holiday so my involvement in fixing this was pretty much zero however it was a tough hack to track down and it took a few days to get the issue resolved…
Due to continued expansion Branded3 is on the lookout for somebody passionate about SEO to join our growing team based in Aberford, near Leeds. Working with some of the UK’s largest brands on cutting edge natural search campaigns this is a great opportunity.
I’m not going to put a full job description here but if you are interested please email patrick @ branded3…
We’re very lucky here at Branded3 because a good percentage of our retained SEO clients are household brands. The fact we work with non-brands as well gives us a pretty good insight into the impact of “brand” on an SEO campaign and this post will hopefully convince a few people to start investing in brand campaigns again.
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:
Across our client base it’s very clear that brands have a much larger conversion rate than non-brands…
Over the years we’ve tried dozens of ways to monitor rankings on the major search engines and none of them have ever been able to deliver accurate results, apart from Advanced Web Ranking.
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…
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…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
