SEO | Internet Marketing Blog

Supermarkets missing out on an SEO opportunity?

The number of searches for store opening times and related terms spiked over the Easter weekend, as people looked to see if it was worth a trip to the local supermarket, but retailers aren't making the most of these searches.

Robin Goad from Hitwise has been looking at the number of searches for these terms, finding that Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys all featured in the top ten.

by Graham Charlton 14 April 2009 14:01pm 5 comments

Simple SEO strategies for soaring up the SERPs

As a search engine optimisation (SEO) professional, I naturally believe the best way to secure good placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to invest in the services of a good SEO agency. However, that does not mean there are not a number of steps a company can take on its own.

What can a company do by itself to help it rise in the results? Here are some simple SEO strategies you may wish to employ as a starting point for your site...

by Kevin Gibbons 14 April 2009 12:39pm 5 comments

Seriously stupid socialising: how to ruin writing

Engaging with potential customers through social media is one of the key tactics I urge clients to undertake. Blogging, getting involved in forums, creating social spaces and visiting consumers in their own webspace, social media effort enjoys a great deal of success.

Of course, by virtue of being online, the majority of such engagement is made through written copy, with a small amount taking place through online video. While the potential for such marketing is huge, it is frighteningly easy to get wrong, risking reputation and consumer wrath.

Here are my main concerns when it comes to online copy – as always, leave a comment if you think I've missed any.

by Kevin Gibbons 07 April 2009 10:00am 5 comments

25 SEO tips to create trust with the search engines

There's no two ways about this, Google and the other search engines have their favourites. I'm sure you've seen it all before, either working for your client or evaluating your competition. There are a number of sites in every niche, whatever content they publish they rank well whether or not the content is optimised, has any inbound links and without really trying too hard.

You, on the other hand might have worked hard to rank for that content, have got some great natural links, lots of buzz but you've got little to show for it. What you don't know is that these websites have managed to reach a high trust level with the search engines which helps their content rank highly.

by Ran Nir 02 April 2009 18:14pm 31 comments

50 SEO tips for online retailers

SEO for online retailers is the process of improving a website potential in order to gain more organic non-paid traffic from the major search engines. Normally, SEO uplift doesn't happen overnight and it can take a long while to rank well for non brand key terms.

The rule of thumb is this: the more competition a relative term has, the harder you'll find it to rank for the term. With that said, you've got to start somewhere and there at least 50 ways I can think of to improve your SEO.

by Ran Nir 25 March 2009 14:35pm 88 comments

A treatise on the ethics of search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and the online marketing sector as a whole may not present the most ethically challenging jobs in the world but it does offer a few moral predicaments.

We may not need to wrestle with thorny moral debates on the nature of personhood or seek to justify wars, but we are still challenged regularly by everyday small moral queries, which I suppose is true of any role.

Here are a few of the routine debates an SEO executive may encounter. Let me know if you think I have missed any and we can furrow our respective brows and thrash it out in the comments page.

by Kevin Gibbons 25 March 2009 09:40am 2 comments

Q&A: Dr Mike Baxter on applying the 80:20 rule to digital businesses

Econsultancy has a breakfast briefing next week which will advise digital companies how they can optimise their businesses by applying the 80:20 rule.

The speakers at the briefing are Dr Mike Baxter, who has authored a number of reports for Econsultancy, and Robert Colquhoun, who specialises in multichannel customer acquisition and retention strategies.

I've been talking to Dr Baxter about the 80:20 rule, and how online businesses can benefit from its application...

by Graham Charlton 12 March 2009 12:02pm 3 comments

You control your own destiny, Google doesn't

My post yesterday about Google's paid links smack down sparked quite a discussion and a bit of debate.

Good points were made all around on all sides of the debate.

by Patricio Robles 04 March 2009 09:20am 1 comment

When is a paid link not a paid link?

Google has a major problem relating the identification of paid links, but I believe it has an even bigger problem relating to the definition of 'paid links', and the very term itself.

Econsultancy’s Patricio Robles wrote about this earlier today so I don’t want to cover too much old ground, but I do want to comment on the difference – or similarity – between paid and commercial links.

by Chris Lake 03 March 2009 18:15pm 11 comments

Search queries keep getting longer

Search queries keep getting longer. Over the past year, queries of 8 words and over experienced the higher the jump in usage.

A Hitwise study finds searches of 5 or move words in length increased 10 percent from January 2008 to January of this year. Over the same period of time shorter queries of 1 to 4 words in length decreased 2 percent.

The longer the queries, the longer the long tail becomes. As searchers becomes more sophisticated in honing their terms, SEO gets correspondingly more complex, but also more potentially rewarding.

by Rebecca Lieb 03 March 2009 16:46pm 0 comments