SEO Blog

As with any new system where the results are ordered by popularity, it doesn’t take long before people start to find a way to manipulate the rankings. With Digg people will offer to ‘digg’ your content and with StumbleUpon people can ‘stumble’ your content, and in both occasions there are services that let you pay people to promote your content on these platforms in this way. Now it seems Google+ is next.

In the case of Digg and StumbleUpon, the more people who promote your content the more chance it has of being seen by other users, or appearing at the top of various lists of information. The higher you appear, the more people will read your content and this helps to spread awareness of a brand online. So it’s easy to see how people could be tempted to pay strangers to manipulate these platforms.

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SEO needs to be taken as a medium to long term strategy. Just like marketing and just like PR. You won’t receive overnight success, and if anyone’s offering you this, you should take their claims with a pinch of salt, because the reality is that SEO needs to be built up over a long period to be effective.

Naturally, the results will vary depending on the client, the industry, your consultant or agency as well as the campaign itself. For example, different agencies and consultants will use different tactics, and it’s usually those who are offering quick results who are dabbling in the murky world of black hat tactics.
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There was an interesting piece in the New York Times over the weekend that looked at fledgling search engine, Blekko [see: An Engine’s Tall Order: Streamline the Search]. Whilst the comments made about the algorithm and their unique approach to was more than readable, it was the criticism of SEO as a practice that caught my attention particularly.

Now I throw my hands up when it comes to this kind of thing. I’m an SEO, therefore I have a vested interest in all things related to the industry and the practice. As such, I don’t think I would ever be described as impartial when dealing with such issues.

However, with the disclaimer now done and dusted, there are a number of issues within the article that really surprised me. For instance, as with many conventional media reports, there appears to be a great deal of misunderstanding about what SEO actually is. For instance, this article includes the following:
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Domain age is an important factor in SEO, you don’t need to be reminded of that. However, from time to time, you might get an impulsive desire to try something different. Perhaps your business is considering rebranding or maybe the name you chose 10 years ago simply isn’t relevant or workable any more. It happens.

But what you need to remember is that a domain name isn’t a life sentence. Whilst in an ideal world you’d pick one and stick with it forever and always, there’s no reason that you should feel unduly pressured to do so.
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Display advertising has become an integral part of online marketing. Whilst website owners use it to monetise their sites and services, advertisers can get their messages seen by a wider, yet targeted audience.

Over in the U.S. the latest comScore figures show that Facebook is beginning to monopolise a thriving market, with a 31.2% share of the 1.1 trillion impressions seen in the first quarter of 2011. That’s a full 346 billion impressions on adverts in just three months.

Trailing in their wake are Yahoo! (10.1%), Microsoft (4.8%), AOL (3.0%) and Google (2.5%). Impressions increased by around 100 billion (or 10%) year on year; however the vast majority of these were snaffled up by the titan of social networking.
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In Google’s last update they have reinforced their web master guidelines by blocking some of the main DIY software applications such as Web Ceo and Web Position Gold.

Google doesn’t like automated software accessing its search engine as it uses resources and slows things up so you can understand why they are keen to stomp it out but people also want to know where they are ranking so we have an issue.

This is causing seo’s in general big problems as many applications seem to have been hit but I am sure when these big companies put their heads together they will find a fix.

There are still applications that can get through but it means that people will now more than ever need to ensure they follow Google’s guidelines to avoid getting their IP’s blocked.

Google has now introduced and new feature that will enable you to add video sitemaps. This will enable you to give Google more information on the videos you have including META data which will help to make them more searchable via the Google video search.

To submit video sitemaps to Google you just need to use your add sitemaps function within your Google Webmaster Tools.

The time is here and the book is now finally being shipped out to shops and will be available any day now (although it is available on pre-order at Amazon on the following link)

Getting Noticed on Google in easy steps

If you are new to search engine optimisation and are looking to optimise your website then this is the book for you!