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How To Walk A Mile In A Search Engine’s Shoes

by on Sep 25, 2008 (0) Comments

Small business owners are often curious, and sometimes desperate, to understand why their web sites are doing well — or doing poorly — when it comes to search engine visibility. Online forums and message boards are filled with questions like “Why is my competitor outranking me?”, “Why doesn’t my new product page bring me any search traffic?”, or “How come my site hasn’t been crawled in a month?”

If you live and breathe search marketing, these questions are often pretty easy to answer. But when you’re busy running a small business, these questions may as well be rocket science. One way to get answers is to analyze what the search engines think of your web site, and walk a mile in the search engines’ shoes, as the saying goes. When you learn to do that, it’s easier to solve those questions that you’ve been curious (or desperate) to answer.

Three ways to see what search engines think of your site

1. Use the search engines’ webmaster tools.

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?

How Social Media Can Help Your PR Efforts

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social media and leveraging the different opportunities it offers, they can drive more traffic to their sites, engage in open dialogues and react quicker. So what does this mean for you? More opportunities than ever for you to build relationships and get publicity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to leverage social media for PR purposes — and that’s PR as in public relations, not PageRank!

Start Small

Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:

LiveBar Adds A Little Strip Of Community To Any Site

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that’s been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps.

However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into “out-of-the-box” communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.

A New Way to Search: Use Your Mouse

by on Sep 08, 2008 (0) Comments

KallOut

Here at TechCrunch 50, there are a slew of interesting companies worth writing about on-stage. But I came across one in the Demo Pit that’s just as noteworthy.

Called KallOut, the service allows you to search the Web without minimizing the screen and going to the Web and replaces that with a couple clicks of a mouse. According to the company, its research shows that users can search the Web up to ten times faster by using KallOut. I’m not sure it’ll be that fast, but it’ll definitely improve efficiency.