SEO | Internet Marketing Blog

How often should you review your SEO strategy?

It doesn’t matter how well your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy is working for you, it’s always worth taking the time to revaluate and see if it could be doing better. Your returns might be impressive, your strategy masterful, but in these times of tightened budgets, you need to be confident that every penny you spend is worth it.

by Kevin Gibbons 24 November 2009 09:57am 11 comments

Search marketing stats round up

Here's a selection of recent search stats, taken from a range of sources, including Econsultancy's Search Marketing Statistics document, which forms part of the Internet Statistics Compendium, and other reports...

by Graham Charlton 20 November 2009 09:37am 2 comments

How SEO complements your PR

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is part of your public relations (PR), not just some geeky addition to your website.

When I’m discussing SEO with a new client, understanding their wider PR campaign is essential to my planning. So why do so many firms see SEO as some website add-on, rather than a developing, often creative enhancement of their PR work?

I think it’s because SEO execs tend to be technology fiends, while PR staff tend to be arts graduates with a passion for creativity – there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Yet it’s essential that PR works closely with an SEO team to make sure both budgets are working as hard as they possibly can and complementing each others’ work.

I've previously talked about how social media marketing should be looked at from both an SEO and PR perspective, but here are a few key ways in which PR and SEO working together can enhance a company’s online presence dramatically.

by Kevin Gibbons 19 November 2009 11:02am 23 comments

3am site goes from swearing off SEO to keyword stuffing in 3 months

The Daily Mirror's 3am.co.uk gossip site has gone from disavowing SEO and promising to concentrate on building a loyal audience - to stuffing its HTML titles with as many keywords as it can think of. And then adding some more. Before finally making sure Britney is in there.

by Malcolm Coles 17 November 2009 13:38pm 26 comments

Five reasons your content is damaging your brand

Although many businesses now recognise the importance of regularly updated content to their search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, not enough of them understand the importance of quality content.

This is apparent from many of the badly-penned blogs, rubbishy ‘news’ stories and plagiarised or simply stolen articles that the web is gradually filling up with.

Many companies fill their sites with scraped posts, barely literate articles and keyword-stuffed nonsense in the hope of attracting Google’s attention, so I wanted to take a look at just what this sort of behaviour is doing to your brand; how it’s affecting the customer experience.

by Kevin Gibbons 17 November 2009 10:30am 4 comments

Whistles: site review

Fashion retailer Whistles relaunched its website last week, and the resulting Flash heavy site is certainly different.

According to Whistles' Jane Sheperdson, 'We spent a lot of time researching best practice online. We then threw out everything we had learned, and just designed something that pleased us visually.'

This is an interesting way to approach the design of an e-commerce site, but what will the result be for the user experience?

by Graham Charlton 10 November 2009 11:20am 81 comments

Business blogging FAQs

faq Last week, Blogware's Chris Baggott and I participated in a webinar about business blogging. As is so often the case with these things, we received more questions from the participants than we were able to respond to. Moreover, many of the questions are ones I've frequently heard over the years when presenting on business blogging at conferences and from readers.

So herewith, the FAQs on business blogging I hear most often...along with answers that will, hopefully, help move things along at organizations that want to blog, but are stymied by confusion, doubt and uncertainty around issues both technical and content-oriented.

by Rebecca Lieb 09 November 2009 16:53pm 2 comments

The Guardian makes its comments search engine friendly

The Guardian has introduced some welcome updates to its comments system, with comments now handled server-side instead of client side.

This means that the newspaper is not using javascript to display comments anymore, which brings with it a number of benefits, as pointed out by Malcolm Coles:

by Graham Charlton 05 November 2009 10:08am 3 comments

The ‘Vince’ update unravelled: does Google recognise brand equity? (pt 3)

Could this be the smoking gun, the SEO equivalent to 'CCTV' evidence of Google's manual intervention? I'll let you decide. My place is only to present the evidence.

Without wanting to sound sensationalist, I found this evidence quite shocking because as we all know, Google would never hand manipulate a SERP... would it?

by Paul Reilly 02 November 2009 10:40am 4 comments

The ‘Vince’ update unravelled – does Google recognise brand equity? (pt 2)

Yesterday we took a retrospective look at the 'Vince' update, exampling the 'Poker' and 'Life Insurance' SERPs, and how Google has cleverly managed to identify and apply corrective adjustments to a small number of rankings for big brands.

Today we're looking at the 'Holidays' and 'Betting' SERPs and the possible methods behind these adjustments, as well as introducing data from the Stickyeyes data set, enabling us to dig deeper into the back-link profiles of these movers and shakers.

by Paul Reilly 29 October 2009 11:53am 3 comments