Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:18:31 by Emily Mace
Many e-commerce website tools now come with SEO add-ons to enable you to make them more SEO friendly but one thing there still seems to be problems with is duplicate content issues.
A number of the e-commerce packages available provide the option to produce HTML versions of the product catalogue on the site, which sound great to many companies as an extra way to promote their products, however this is a great way of duplicating content for every product on the site, so where possible avoid this or if it is pushed then the containing folder could be disallowed in the Robots file to stop Search Engines from crawling these pages and penalising the site.
In addition many e-commerce websites have a http and https site for secure payments. If the https site is crawled and indexed by Search Engines you will also suffer from Duplicate content issues as the https site may not just contain the check out and payment pages but also the rest of the site.
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Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:23:10 by Pete Handley
I've worked on lots of sites where I've taken over the SEO from a previous encumbent. The actual SEO techniques that are employed vary from company to company – some do the on-page changes in a similar fashion to how we would do these, others have a very different style.
One frequent (legacy) complaint from clients who have fired their previous optimiser is the poor the communication the relationship suffered from. It often doesn’t matter how good results are achieved in an SEO campaign like this, primarily because the clients don’t appreciate what levels of improvements have been achieved.
This is something that we try really hard to not let happen with our clients. The solution to this is really quite simple – Talk to your customers!
The first conversation that I would normally have with a client isn’t just about looking at the types of keyword that they want to be ranking for. Instead, its about trying to understand the goals...Read More.
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Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:24:18 by Matt Hopkins
We've been asked by a few clients recently for a formula for calculating ROI for their pay per click marketing campaigns.
I've always found that ROI is one of those terms that has been over-used and abused by so many people and as such, there is confusion on how best to calculate it. Personally, I like to use the following formula when we are discussing the ROI for any PPC campaign:
ROI = [Contribution] / [Cost]
So to calculate Contribution for a PPC campaign:
([Your average profit per sale] x [Estimated number of Conversions]) - [PPC Spend]
To demonstrate more fully, let's take the following example:
Monthly PPC Spend: £1,500
Average Profit per Sale: £50
Number of Conversions (Sales) pe...Read More.
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:30:38 by Kerry Dye
Many years ago, a man called David Siegel (the man who invented the “transparent one pixel gif trick” in web design) wrote a book called 'Creating Killer Websites' and in it, he advocated a site design that looked a bit like this:
The reasoning behind it at the time (if I recall correctly) was that it gave the user the satisfaction of seeing they had got into the site without the big overhead of loading all the graphical and other elements associated with a home page. This was in the days of modems, so it made sense at the time.
Then, as time went on and modems got faster, and then we switched to broadband, and the splash page became either a long flashy intro, or got eliminated in favour of getting people straight to where they wanted to be, as the page with the main navigation made a much better landing page.
But now event the search engines have got in on the act and Google gives you a link direct from the se...Read More.
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Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:25:13 by Matt Hopkins
Over the past six months, we've been implementing more PPC capabilities into our SEM campaign management software called Apollo.
Apollo helps us run campaigns better - by providing campaign intelligence, process management, and a totally unique rules-based engine that ensures that all campaigns are meeting our client's goals and that every client is getting the most comprehensive search marketing service available.
For the past few months, we have been enhancing the capabilities that Apollo provides to both our internal PPC team and our clients. Recently, we implemented a full integration with Google Adwords, PPC campaign/client goal management, and additional business rules to ensure that all PPC campaigns are performing at the highest levels possible.
We are now pleased to announce the same capabilities for our PPC campaigns based on the Yahoo advertising network (formerly Overture). This now means that clients will be able to see summary...Read More.
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Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:12:48 by Matt Hopkins
We received this wonderful client testimonial by email the other day:
Knowing the importance of good search engine rankings to generate business nowadays, and knowing the difficulty of achieving this without outside assistance, I started making enquiries in 2006 into finding a reliable company to help my company, Trent Pottery Ltd, with this venture. I invited several companies to quote for this service, and explain their methods to me. After much consideration I chose Vertical Leap because their approach to us seemed the most honest without big promises of instant results, rather saying that they would work hard to advance consistently.
As my colleagues and I are busy running the company I was pleased how quickly we made progress without the need for too much input from our side. Over two years the impact of Vertical Leap's SEO has been more than significant. Our campaign is control...Read More.
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Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:07:51 by Kerry Dye
We've talked about this before, and it recently came up again, after reading Hubspot's blog about asking other people for inspiration. what to blog about.
The long tail is a valuable resource for blogging, you can find unusual keyword phrases, perhaps a local variation that you haven't optimised for (like our SEO Portsmouth example).
Measuring the size (length?) of the long tail is also a good metric for working out the success of your SEO campaigns, it is one of the KPIs that we use in-house to monitor the progress of a campaign over time.
So if you look at your long tail results, you should find something that you can blog about. It doesn't matter if you use long tail keywords from a PPC report or an SEO one, either can be used as a source.
So here are a few interesting ones I have picked out of our long tail - I especially like the question ones as they create something that is answerable in the blog format.
What...Read More.
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Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:49:04 by Emily Mace
There are quite a few companies offering a full SEO service for less than £100 per month, which might sound like a great deal but there are lots of reasons why spending less on your SEO won't help you in the long run.
Your SEO campaign is a key element in your marketing and ensuring you get a good quality SEO company will ensure you don't loose out in the race for conversions.
1. Full SEO service - optimisation of your website is not a one off job and is not something that can be done just on the landing-page of your website but the whole site. A full SEO service, which will cost you more than £100 a month, will include the ongoing optimisation of all pages on your site, including new pages.
2. Monitoring - a good quality SEO company will regularly monitor your website and it's performance, the keywords that you have selected and make recommendations for any changes that need to be made. Again this optimisation and monitoring is for the ...Read More.
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Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:24:01 by Matt Hopkins
Google's search engine results pages (SERPS) are increasingly becoming more localised. If you wanted to see the results that people in Australia get on google.com.au when searching for terms like "SEO" then you simply accessed the regional site. But now, the results you get from any regional site are adjusted slightly to reflect your current location.
There is a way to tell Google that you want the same results that others see in a given location. I blogged about this approach a bit back in January (see How to see Google.com USA results from a different country), but I wanted to follow up and highlight some additional parameters that you can use to be even more specific.
Perform a search in Google and then look at the URL of the Google results. You will notice that there are some parameters in the URL that tell Google what you are searching for. For example, a search for "pizza" will have a URL like this:
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Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:17:04 by Matt Hopkins
When you perform searches in sophisticated search engines such as Google, you would think that similar queries would yield similar results... but this is not the case at all. Plural forms are wildly different from their singular forms and simply changing the order of two terms can have a dramatic effect. For example, our own site ranks well for "Portsmouth SEO" but does not for "SEO Portsmouth".
The strange thing about this is that you would think that two nouns used together could be swapped around without too much impact to the searchers intent... its almost more of a preference than any sort of prioritisation. To me, there is no difference between these two phases - "Portsmouth Boats" and "Boats Portsmouth"... but the results are clearly different.
This is an important point to keep in mind when you are implementing Local SEO. You need to ensure that your content matches variations of your local...Read More.
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