Posts by Annabel Hodges

Originally from the UK via France and Malaysia, Annabel Hodges is a digital marketer with long experience in the industry now residing in Sydney. She is currently Head of Content & SEO at Columbus (part of the Aegis Media Group) in Australia. More articles and bio from Annabel Hodges

Visit Annabel Hodges's website

2012: A New Year shouldn’t always mean a New Start

Happy New Year State of Searchers! I hope 2011 was a successful year for you all and sincerely wish greater success for all in 2012. May it be prosperous and filled with fortune.

Now.. onto the body of this post. My initial thought for this blog post did centre on New Year and Resolutions. Pipped at the post by a winning top ten list by Jackie Hole, I had to give my post a little more thought. It occurred to me that my resolutions are always less about change and more about doing things ‘the right way’. Think a ‘classic’ coat rather than an ‘on trend’ coat. There is something to be said for learning what works and sticking to something that will last! Think Audrey Hepburn rather than Paris Hilton. </Fashionspeak>

I’m not saying that change isn’t going to happen, nor should it ever be ignored. The opposite, however, is also true. Principles that work, techniques that make a difference, day-to-day methods should not be dropped after the latest hysteria or in order to keep up with the trends. My thoughts: (more…)

International SEO: A few thoughts on the topic of best practice

As you may have read in Jackie’s excellent summary post on the International Search Summit, I spoke there last week on all things international and SEO. I thought I’d jot down a few of my own personal thoughts for you lucky State of Search readers in the wake of this. This is predominately on one topic. It’s a beauty. Disclaimer: these are my opinions not the truth!

So………………. (more…)

5 simple-but-effective SEO/Social tactics I’ve seen over the last month..

Happy All-Hallow’s Day State of Searchers! Or All Saints Day for those that prefer. Let’s start this post with a little ‘Did You Know’ fact just to ensure it is educational from top to bottom. So, did you know…

“In Western Christian theology, All Saints Day commemorates all those who have attained the beatific vision in Heaven.” (Thank you wikipedia). That sounds pretty special to me, a vision of happiness, perfection and clarity. One can dream eh. But on that note, how about a little happiness and clarity closer to home? SEO heaven?

Yes that is my rather awkward seguing into the main event, some great examples of simple linkbait or visibility tactics that I’ve seen in the past few weeks. Rather than theorise or show amazing examples/ideas that are nearly impossible for the average company to implement, I thought I’d share some examples of marketing tactics that I’ve been impressed with recently simply because they were so very, well, simple. (more…)

Google Signals: What Matters for Affiliates?

Next we have a host of well-known names talking on what really matter for affiliates when it comes to Google signals…

Will Critchlow, Distilled
Razvan Gavrilas, cognitiveSEO
David Naylor, Bronco
Marcus Tandler, Tandler.Doerje.Partner

First up is Dave.. So Panda. What happened? Panda hit sites with weak content pages, that had links from sites that got hit, were over affiliated or generally had poor user experience. So what if Dave were building a site today… In short: (more…)

Internet Sleuthing: Gathering the Intelligence Required to Beat the Competition

Morning sinners, your friendly neighbourhood State of Search panda here… I’ve made it back from the other side of the Atlantic then popped up to the Norf and I’ve now jetted back so I can be here (with you) at A4U, Day 2.

First up for me today is watching three of my fellow State of Searchers up on the block – we have Martijn Beijk, Sam Crocker, Kelvin Newman and David Sottimano up to talk about internet sleuthing and that all important beating the competition. (more…)

Think Visibility 6: Lessons Learned and Top Takeaways (It’s not all about search…)

Six months ago, I was travelling up to Leeds for the Think Visibility conference preparing myself as a speaker to convince an audience that KPIs and reporting can be, will if not sexy, at least pretty fascinating and certainly useful. This weekend I was back up for Think Visibility 6 (and my 5th time at the conference) ready to sit back and enjoy someone else’s hard work and insights.

This is now my 3rd write-up of one of my favourite conferences in the calendar, and I’d say that alone pays testimony to its interest, increasingly amazing organisation and the loyalty of its fanbase. Many others are far more diligent than me and have written full conference write-ups. (See Pete Handley’s, Koozai and our very own Bas’ among others). I’ve decided to take a wider angler, continuing on the Top Takeaway theme I used in my last write-up, and considering some of the specific things I’ve personally learned at ThinkVis. (more…)

Above The Line, PPC and SEO – It’s a “Brand” New Game

First up, an apology. This is less of a informative post and more of an open-ended question to all marketers, and not necessarily for just those that focus on online or search marketing. I’m looking at brand, budget, media and ROI. And testing. Lots of testing.

Being an SEO at OMD, a full service media agency born from a purely offline media buying and planning service, for the past 11 months has been an eye-opening experience. Only half the people in the agency work in “digital”, so getting down on a campaign level as far as ”search” or even more granualar “SEO” can be tricky. I hold my hands up, I understand next to nothing about how offline or “above the line” marketing works. It’s too easy to become siloed and work almost completely separately. You get so used to assuming that my link building has no relation to their outdoor advertising that integration is something that needs hard hard work, daily hard work, in order to make it happen. (more…)

Yet Another Index? Making an Impact in Russa – International Search Summit 2011 #SMXISS

Next up is Preston Carey, Business Development Director at Yandex, giving us an insight into the Russian search engine. Firstly an introduction and some context around the Russian market.

Markets in the developed countries are not really growing very much anymore, the two places that are booming are Russia and Asia. Russia is the seventh largest market in terms on internet users, sitting just behind Germany. Russia only has 43% internet penetration at the moment but it is growing hugely year-on-year so could easily be taking over Germany within the next 18 months. (more…)

Search in Asia – International Search Summit 2011 #SMXISS

Good afternoon SOS’ers, I’ve finally made it down to the International Search Summit and shall attempt to take over from Louis Venter’s sterling live blogging efforts this morning.

Next up I’ll be covering a deep dive into the (ahem) State of Search in Asia and the Far East. This is presented by Barry Lloyd, of WebCertain Asia. (more…)

SMX Advanced London 2011: Link Alchemy – Creative Ways of Conjuring SEO Gold

Next up today is a panel on everyone’s favourite topic – link building. But looking at it from a little more of a creative perspective.

First to speak is Patrick Altoft from Branded3 on his methods to build ‘Golden Links’. First up, he focuses on social links:, things like Twitter and Facebook. A point worth noting:

Standard links to a page benefit the entire domain. (e.g. a link back from the BBC)

Benefits from social links are URL-specific. (e.g. a link back from Twitter)

Key Takeaway: So what to do? Make sure you don’t waste links from social media on competition pages – point them to the product/category page. (more…)

SEO for Google vs Bing: How Different are They?

This post is part of our coverage of SMX Advanced London 2011. It is a panel discussing the differences between Google and Bing and how or if we should be optimizing for these differently.

In this post we will describe the talks from Gill Reich, VP of Product Management, at Answers.com and Daniel Ruby, Research Director at Chitika. They took an in depth look at the differences between the search engines.

Demographics

Firstly some basic demographics:

- The biggest difference between the browsers: 87% of Bing users come from IE vs 47% of Google users from IE

- Users of Bing predominately come from the US - 83% vs just under 50% for Google

- Top cities are all US for Bing vs Google where only NYC is the only American city in its top 10 traffic-generating cities.

Bing’s Growth

Yahoo! and Bing are potentially monetising better than Google and seeing significant growth. This double combination is enough to warrant a second look. Users of Bing are generally less tech savvy therefore generate a greater value per impression, this is worth taking into account.

There are varying views on how well/poorly Bing/Yahoo! will do over thecoming months. Some (Mashable apparently) say that at this rate, Bing could potentially surpass Google within the next year.

Sounds more than a little optimistic to me. Others (Henry Blodget) suggest that the traffic acquisition costs are more than three times their revenue as they try to hit scale.

Bing is buying their traffic at the moment, hoping this will pay off in the long run. Whether it will or not remains to be seen.

Portals and Platforms

Take the MSN homepage as an example– not only is there a search box that points to Bing but it also includes footer links and sidebar links that point to search results on Bing.

Looking at upstream traffic to Bing – 21% comes from MSN whereas Google has a wider variety of sources including 17% Facebook followed by YouTube etc.

Bing SERPs are clearly centred around their own properties – e.g. above the fold predominately centred around links back to MSN pages. Google is much more open, it powers the entire web. E.g. Adsense = a large chunk of pages on web are advertising Google and monetising large amount of the web.

Bing is focusing on being a portal. Google a platform.

How Gill came to Understand Search Engines’ Importance

Search engines were previously always used to help you find websites. Now search engines, particularly Google, is how you find information. Often you barely even know you are on another site. This makes it very difficult for webmasters.

People no longer think of search engines as a way to find a website with an answer, they see it as a direct means to an end.

Summary of the talk by Gill Reich

Users are different (Country, browser)
Searches are different (context, number of words)
Engines are different (technology & business models)

Bing has got significantly better but Google’s technology is still in a league of its own. This sets it apart.

A more in-depth look at Bing

Daniel Ruby, Research Director at Chitika.

Why should I care about Bing?

Volume

Yahoo/Bing has become the first volume related competitor to Google in years. Based on traffic generated by search engines – even though Bing serves much more as a portal, it does still drive traffic. 15-18% for Chitika.

Value per impression

Both Yahoo! and Bing users are more likely to click on an ad, so they’re worth more as monetisation tool.

What affects my Bing Postioning?

By and large, it’s similar to Google – content, links etc.

The differences between Bing and Google?

1. Bing does not like forums, 90% of forum results show up further down Bing results than Google results.

Many forum results that Google positions on the front page don’t appear in Bing’s top 100.

2. Bing does not like content farms

Even post-Panda, Bing tends to rank low quality content sites lower than Google positions.

3. Bing is significantly worse than Google at broad matching keywords such as 401k – Retirement Plan

Verbatim keyword matching is much more important for Bing traffic. Be more verbatim in your keyword strategy for Bing, don’t expect it to understand synonyms and context as well as Google does.

4. URL results are ineffective

If a user searches for a url, Google will assume that the user is looking for information on the url and will also show results with that URL as keyword

5. Bing is more likely to show related searches, sites that are similar to that original searched-on url

6. Phone number searches

Bing provides fewer results, assumes that if you don’t find the number you are looking for within the first couple of pages – there is no point in showing more ‘spammy’ types of results.

7. Ambiguous searches

If a search has multiple possible meanings, Bing will err of the side of local results whereas Google is more likely to err on the side of brand.

General observations

Bing more likely to censor ‘questionable’ content such as watching copyrighted tv shows online, finding free essays, cheats etc. It also seems to struggle with parsing PDF files compared with Google.

Summary of the talk by Daniel Ruby

- The number one long-tail results on Google will appear on Bing’s first page 67% of the time, Bing/Google have a lot of fractured results crossover.
- So do I need to focus on Bing? Yes, according to Daniel. And yes again.
- The traffic is growing and it is valuable.

Yandex

Someone who could be a competitor is Yandex. The session at SMX ended with a few words from Andy Atkins-Kruger on his experience of Yandex having visited Moscow and met its founder Ilya Segalovich recently.

Yandex is focusing increasingly on MLR (Machine-Learned Ranking), which some are suggesting is also the preferred route for Bing. Google uses this to a much lesser degree, favouring it only for the Adwords algorithms. This could lead to increased differences further down the line.

All in all, Bing is growing and isn’t about to go away. It can provide valuable new visitors that may not reach your site if you focus all of your efforts solely on Google. It’s worth taking the time to consider it.

(Thanks to Razorfish for the image!)

More posts about Bing vs Google that might interest you:

- Google or Bing: The Royal Wedding
- Searches on Bing More Successful than on Google
- The Bing and the Beautiful
- Bing keeps denying copying Google and accuses Google of clickfraud
- Osama Bin Laden killed: how did Google and Bing respond?
- Why Bing will be trailing on Google and why it should hook up with Apple and Facebook

Page 2 of 4«123 4 »

State of Search