Web Data Source » Kelvin

SEO-sans Greetings – Taking advantage of Xmas through Search Engine Marketing

Kelvin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:28:29 +0000

While I’ve been involved in SEO for a while it still surprises me quite how unfamiliar many people are with the concept of Search Engine Marketing.

My Mum, for example, while she might not have been familiar with SEM she certainly is affected by its outcome. She, like many others will be doing a large proportion of her Christmas shopping online, the BBC reported last year how as much as £7bn will be spent online in the run up to the festive period, while the credit crunch is sure to have an effect the trend definitely is away from the uber busy town centres to shopping from the comfort of your sofa.

But how can search marketers take advantage of this?

Like most people, a lot of where those billions are spent will be decided by what appears on the search engines results pages and the search for the gift for the difficult friend or relative, provides a unique opportunity for websites small or large:

The run up to Christmas and New Year provides the perfect opportunity to create rich content that’s relevant and topical. From the simplest of ideas, like providing a helpful gift guide, to more complex campaigns with a wide variety of valuable editorial, it’s the ideal chance to use the holidays as a springboard for new ideas on your site.

The internet is a linked together place and you should work with those around you. The links between sites help people navigate around the web. These links are double-y useful; firstly someone can click on that link and go straight to your site. Secondly search engines like Google look at the links from other websites you have, so they can determine how popular your site is and how high on results your site should appear.

This works both ways, if there’s a relevant website or company your readers might be interested in you should point them in that direction. You might be a butcher and it might be worth having a link to your local Wine Merchant after a customer has ordered a turkey, these links are useful to you and your customers.

Keep an eye on what everyone else is up to. It’s always good to monitor your competitors online, they might be doing a special seasonal offer that you might be able to match, or they might be stocking some new items that you were not aware of.

If you are not selling gifts it does not have to stop you taking advantage of the festive season. If you’re a travel agent you can focus on special Christmas getaways or hot trips abroad away from a chilly December. It’s worth bearing in mind the affect the time of year can have on your marketing campaign all year round; many websites will see seasonal changes in their visitors. If you’re a recruiter January might be the ideal time to ramp up your online presence in the New Year for those wanting a fresh start in a new job.

When thinking about your sites search engine strategy remember to think like a searcher. It’s unlikely you’ll find a gift for your loved ones by typing only gift into the search box. Gift for sporty teenage girl, is far more likely to yield a suitable present. If you are using pay per click adverts be sure think about these longer more accurate search phrases.

The Christmas period offers plenty of chances to try new things online, its worth having a try if just to get away from the cold and the busy shops!

Also if you enjoyed this post you might also like these posts from last year about SEM during the holiday period…

Tailoring your Link Velocity to coincide with seasonal peaks in demand.
The Ultimate Guide to Adapting your PPC campaign for the Christmas Season

Has Google Cache killed Page Rank?

Kelvin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:46:38 +0000

This is an old post that I found in the depth of my documents, while the test is old I certainly think the point of the article remains

Ages ago Aaron Wall made a short post promoting a friends online web tool. In the post Aaron suggested, given Page Rank’s infrequent updates and old data that the date Google last cached your site was a better indication of how much Google “trusted” your site than the green strip in the Google Toolbar.

It got me thinking, quarterly updates of Page Rank with data from who knows when, while quite useful isn’t the most reliable indication of how respected you are in the halls of the Googleplex. With the rise of blogs, RSS, social media & user generated content how long ago the search engine spiders visited your site probably is pretty good indication of how important your site is.

So time dust of Excel and see if there is any evidence to prove Aaron’s hunch. The test was simple, three simple generic key phrases, take the first page of the Google.com search engine results page and see if the more recently cached pages appeared higher up the results.

Test One – “Movie Trailers”
First up “Movie Trailers” Apple’s trailer site was in top position and the cache theory seemed to hold water through the first 6 results. However after this it all got a bit messier. In seventh place joeblo.com was the most recently indexed site. To complicate matters further it was followed by movie-trailers.com which was indexed ages ago and seems to be an expired domain. Bellow these sites, at the bottom of the first page; movies.monstersandcritics.com/trailers/ was indexed more recently than the 5th and 6th place results. Hardly conclusive but the results seemed to follow the general trend.

Test Two – “Global Warming”
The key phrase “Movie Trailers” features regularly updated pages from some of the biggest online players, so for my second phrase I felt something a phrase likely to turn up more static authority pages with lower search volumes would be good test. Partially inspired by the SEO World Championship from back in the day. I opted for “global warming”. Surprise, Surprise, Wikipedia in top place. Here we have the opposite of “Movie Trailers” the lower order is arranged nicely in order of cache date but the top results aren’t following the pattern I was hoping for.

Test Three – “Brighton Function Rooms”
For the third query I thought I’d go nice and niche with “Brighton Function Rooms” A lot less traffic than the previous queries and fewer indexed pages. The results were a bit spammy with plenty of Adsense reliant directories. Unfortunately the results deviated from the “Most Recent Cache Date = Most Trusted” formula more than any of my three queries. The dates were all over the place some really recently indexed others up to six weeks old.

Has Cache Killed Page Rank?
Aaron’s prediction wasn’t quite as simple to prove as I’d hoped. The sites most recently cached weren’t the highest in the rankings. However I don’t think this entirely discounts the theory. My test only checked how recently the pages had been cached, not how frequently. Some of the sites in my test might have been spidered recently but been waiting weeks for their visit from the bots. I haven’t given up on the idea, I’m going to try and test the cache frequency see if Page Rank really is dead.

Is Your Keyword Research Methodology Up To Scratch?

Kelvin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:01:21 +0000

There’s no avoiding how fundamental keyword research is to the natural search marketing process. Without it how will you know if your site is sending the right relevance signals to search engines? Without them how will you measure your performance? (Admittedly ranking reports are rapidly becoming less and less relevant though they still have a place in most clients KPIs) How will you know you’re looking at the right competitors when carrying out back link analysis?

However despite this inescapable performance I think many SEOs don’t give keyword research the attention it deserves. There’s lots of different ways to skin a cat but here’s a few ways to try and make your keyword research work a little better.

What’s already on the site – unless you’re working on a brand new site you’d be naive to ignore what’s already there. I like to take a print out of the site and go old school with a highlighter pen. The chances are this isn’t going to capture every variation but it’ll give you a strong starting point.

Which keywords are narking the client – it’s a fact most clients when they begin looking for a search agency or leave an existing supplier it’s a desire by the marketing manager or their bosses to gain visibility on certain terms. You can explain that it’s about traffic and conversions, and they’ll understand that, but if you can gain movement on those particular phrases you’re going to please the client. So they have to make an appearence your list.

Where’s the traffic – all keyword research needs to take into account where the traffic is, there’s a chance you might find all the keyword you’ve found already have no volume, if that’s the case you need to expand your list. Also use suggestion tools, there’s plenty out there but my first stop is always Google’s freebie tool.

Mind the gaps – another step where I like to go analogue, print your keyword list in alphabetical order, where are you missing terms. Do you have every plural variation? What about the sequence of words, are there shorter terms which could be combined into longer but more precise searches?

Understand the trend – if you look at the volume of terms be aware it’s only a snap shot. Take into account almost every sector there will be seasonal variations. A great bookmarklet to have on hand is this Google trends tool, type into Google your keyword hit the bookmarklet and it’ll show you the trend of search volume over the last couple of years. Tip picked up on GoogleTutor via Social Desire

Start big then narrow your list – when compiling keyword research I like to create a huge shortlist then narrow it down to a select few based on traffic, competition and relevance to the business. If you’re not prepared to create a huge list initially there’s a chance you’ll miss the golden goose…

Why I Hate Social Bookmarklets & Proof They Don’t Work

Kelvin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:21:30 +0000

The social media bookmarklet has become a de-facto element in most new website designs. And while I love social media and think it can have some huge benefits for websites; I think including social bookmarklets like AddThis to a new web build default is at best lazy-ness and at worse symptomatic of a complete miss-understanding of how social media works.

So after I went off on a bit of rant about them in the office I thought I needed an experiment to prove my point.

I chose the bookmarklet tool from AddThis and using Yahoo Site Explorer I found some websites using the tool.

To get a random selection of websites I chose the website ranked 1, 101, 201 etc on SiteExplorer all the way to 1001. The idea was for the websites to be of mixed quality, as it would have been too easy to choose rubbish websites and try and make my case with those sites.

For each of these sites using the book mark tool I tested there presence on Digg & Delicious to see if to some extent the bookmarklets were working, then finally on stumbleupon (which isn’t included on addthis bookmarklet by default) to ascertain whether the sites in question would have gained their votes without the bookmarklet.

Improving Your Chance of Link Bait Inspiration

Kelvin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:42:48 +0000

There’s been hundreds if not thousands of articles written about link bait. I’d hazard a guess that there’s probably even more articles about how to write the bait than there is paid up pieces of link bait for clients.

But with this post I’m going two try and write about something slightly different. With
link bait the content is hugely important. There are some great articles out there about how to write titles, about making your content scan-able even which images to use.

But before you get on flickr looking for creative commons images you need to come up with an idea. That’s the difficult bit, and that’s where I hope to help with some advice on how you can increase your chances of inspiration and when it does come along how you can make more of it.

Have a pad at all times – when you’re on the phone discussing the minutiae of an analytics report on the phone explaining why two almost identical landing pages have completely different bounce rates an idea will come to you that’s foolproof.

Write it down that second on a nearby pad because by the time you’ve hung up the phone the idea will have returned to the ether.

Note ideas even if you don’t have a client – most of us won’t be lucky enough to be a full time bloggers. The chances are we will be writing link worthy content for specific clients these can cause a few problems. When you are coming up for ideas of bait for a financial services a brilliant concept for a piece for a pet store will come to mind.

Keep those ideas somewhere because in six months time you’ll be trying to come up with an idea for a piece for a pet store and a great financial services piece will come to mind.

Read the Small Stories in the Tabloids – a while ago I used to work on Zoo magazine, the journalists there were great and putting together a great title and a couple of supporting paragraphs. They’d storm digg and stumbleupon if they ever set their mind to it.

Every Cloud… Search Industry Opportunities Caused By Credit Crunch

Kelvin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:16:46 +0000

At the moment doom and gloom seems to surround the economy, whether or not search marketing budgets are going to fall remains to be seen though.

We’ve had a few clients get more pragmatic with their spend; but generally it doesn’t seem as bad as everyone feared. Though that could easily change.

But with every negative situation there comes opportunities. And in the search sphere there are few you’d be mad not to take advantage of.

Buy up failed businesses Domains

When there’s a downturn it’s inevitable a few businesses will hit the wall. In the past if your competitor went bust you might by up their stock at discount, nowadays top of an insolvency sale shopping list should be the company’s domain.

At the very least you could 301 redirect the domain to your client’s website. Eventually the link equity should transfer over and you should see a corresponding uplift in the rankings.

Alternatively you could keep the site as a going concern and differentiate the sites with slightly different marketing messages. Or maybe you could remove all commercial content and develop a semi-independent community; it would teach a lot about your clients customers and build a strong relationship.

PPC Costs Should Fall

One of the biggest problems facing the PPC management sector in the last few years has been bid inflation. If people are blindly throwing money at PPC it’s harder to create a campaign that creates great ROI while still doing good volume.

If belts tighten; then those spending more than they makes sense will either have to switch their campaigns off or become more realistic. Those who were bidding based on their margins should make more as their volume increases.

Performance Billing Will Become Even More Popular

As an agency, taking a client purely on performance billing is always a risky business, do they have a secret cachet of bought links from MFA in the casino sector which has set of a filter? Or has the marketing department promised complete freedom over the site only for the web developers to have completely different ideas?

However when you get performance billing right and you are confident in your abilities it can create great revenue for your agency. Some of our most rewarding relationships aren’t with our best known clients, it’s with businesses who know the value of a lead and are willing to reward us based on those leads.

The clear KPIs motivate our team and when the performance billing is uncapped it pleases the accounts people too!

4 Easy Do-Follow Link Building Opportunities

Kelvin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:59:24 +0000

Long term you need to do just two things (neither of which are particularly simple) in terms of link building. Continuously add link worthy content to your site, ensure the linkerati are aware of it (whether via social media or good old fashioned email.)

photo credit: Fujoshi

But sometimes when you are starting the link building process you’ll want to quickly and easily get a few good quality links pointing at a site to kick start the process, that’s where these easy do follow link building tips come in handy.

They’ll never supersede a concerted link building effort and aren’t as simple as a drive by link drop but they do get a pretty good bang for your buck in the first couple of hours of link building.

LinkedIn Answers – unlike the more popular Yahoo Answers site, LinkedIn’s Q&A section at the moment seems to be following their links when supplied in the answers. Here you’ve got to spend some time writing a response and finding relvant questions but you can set up a Yahoo Pipe to help you with that.

Don’t be sleazy and set up a false user name, use your own account and write useful responses and where relevant include a link to more information on your or your clients site.

Twitter – My good friend Nick Wilsdon pointed out a great way of getting some do follow links from your twitter profile over at his blog Again if you set up a profile just to drop the links they’ll have no value but if you’re an active user they could send a few targeted clicks and some small search engine benefit.

Book Marking Sites - there are quite a few social book marking sites where the links are followed if you manage to scrape your way onto the home page. If I had a quid for every time I’d read write some good content and submit it to digg. It’s never that simple but starting on a few smaller sites where less votes are required can make the success of front page a bit more achievable.

It won’t send you the deluge of traffic of a FP you would get from one of the big sites, but it might give you a quick link equity boost.

Academic Blogs – I’m not going to reveal my favourite culprits in this category but let it be said there are quite a few blogs out there set up on trusted academic domains where it’s possible to leave a relevant if a little self serving comment. Also worth looking out for are forums on government domains, most will be no-followed but not all.