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Category Archive for ‘SEO’ rss

The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers

by on Sep 23, 2008 (0) Comments

Posted by Tom_C

I recently read a couple of posts on e-consultancy about the state of play with major UK retail brands and how they perform online. First was 10 things Asda could do better online, which while I enjoyed didn’t touch on any of the SEO failings of these companies. Kevin’s Supermarkets ignoring SEO for major keywords post touched more on SEO which was nice but I wanted to go into a few more meaty things so here’s my review of the state of play with SEO for major UK highstreet retailers.

While the point of this post is to highlight common mistakes and not to call out individual brands, inevitably I’ve mentioned specific names as examples. This isn’t an attempt to cause offence and I appreciate that even if you know what the right answer is it can be difficult to implement using legacy systems.

Keyphrase Targeting

Who said keyphrases were important? Sometimes you’re just too cool for school. Don’t listen to all those other guys telling you how important keyphrases are – surely it can’t be that important can it?

10 SEO and Marketing-Friendly Title Tag Formulas

by on Sep 23, 2008 (0) Comments

You want keywords in the title tag. Your marketing VP wants the brand. You know he’s wrong, because search engines are structured thinkers. He knows you’re wrong, because the title tag shows up in the search snippet and branding matters:

title-tag-snippet.png

Now what?

Blog Marketing & Pay Per Post: They’re Not The Same

by on Sep 23, 2008 (0) Comments

The vitamin supplement company Berocca has been engaged in a vaguely interesting piece of blog marketing over here in the UK recently. Taking their cue from the recent NY Times article suggesting that blogging can be highly stressful, they have put together a blogger relief pack which consists of a number of ‘stress-busting’ desk toys and, of course, a pack of Berocca. In a nice nod to the community-lead nature of blogging, the mini-site always has a link to one of the blogs that is taking part in the campaign.

This campaign, which is hardly revolutionary in its nature, probably wouldn’t deserve a mention on these hallowed pages were it not for a post written by Michael Gray recently. In this post, Michael asked whether Guy Kawasaki, who frequently reviews products he is sent and links to the manufacturers’ sites, should be the subject of a penalty in the same way that sites which operated ‘pay per post’ systems were*.

SEO, Is It All About Links? Not Anymore

by on Sep 23, 2008 (0) Comments

With so many new algorithms being adjusted, modified or replaced altogether, between the cached version of the SERPs (search engine result pages) and the actual index there are obvious discrepancies
leaving their mark on the web.

The New Search Engine Moderator – Indexing and De-indexing
Before you can rank competitively, achieving the proper balance between your on page [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “SEO, Is It All About Links? Not Anymore”, url: “http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo/seo-is-it-all-about-links-not-anymore/” });

How Persuasive is Your Marketing?

by on Sep 22, 2008 (0) Comments

We know that SEO can deliver traffic, but we know from experience that traffic alone is not enough.

Skeptical consumers require more from your websites’ proposition to relinquish their reservations. This requires persuasion and persuasion marketing.

SEO, relevant and persuasive copy as well as usability all need to work harmoniously in order to shatter prior expectations about what users need from a website in order to take action. One aspect presented without the proper balance of the other can leave the visitor on the fence when it comes to making a decision to purchase.

Transforming a prospect into a customer involves multiple emotional and intellectual layers to facilitate trust. Often, the resolve of the prospect is weathered by a natural layer of mental and emotional buffers to offset the sales process. Just consider it natural reaction to being bombarded from disruptions from advertisements attempting to breach their awareness from every angle.

If you realize it or not, your pages are waging an argument of relevance, persuasion and validity. If you win, conversion occurs, if you lose, then your just another stepping stone for your competition who has structured a better offer, argument or call to action.

SEO Ethics Are In The Eye Of The Beholder

by on Sep 18, 2008 (1) Comments

True story. I was sitting at one of my computers, a bit flustered because I was trying to solve yet another CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) browser incompatibility, and I received the following email:

I would be pleased to buy some text links on your website. Let me know if you are interested so we can proceed for further negotiations. I can really offer you a smart and competitive package.

Smart and competitive package? This guy had to be kidding me, right? Anyone who knows me can reasonably assume that I will respond to most search engine optimization (SEO) and/or link buying pitches with one of the following responses: (a) Hit the delete button, or (b) Report search engine spam. Of course, the delete-button decision would have been more efficient. But I was in one of my moods. I really hate CSS browser incompatibilities.

Search Engine Mannerisms

by on Sep 18, 2008 (0) Comments

When you constantly crawl thousands of search engine result pages daily (just to understand the behavior of cause / effect and the search engine algorithm) you start to notice the mood swings of search engine mannerisms which are the residual fragments, routines and traces the algorithm leaves behind.

In light of all seriousness, following are some of the “in-house” SEO nicknames we have dubbed these occurrences around the water cooler to identify these phenomenon.

Just like wine, pages get stronger with age, so the more pages you have about a topic (aging) in your site, the better chance your sites pages have when real page rank, trust rank and website authority is achieved.