Posts by Barry Adams

Barry is the Digital Services Director at Pierce Communications in Belfast, where he leads an expert team providing web development and digital marketing services for a wide range of clients across Ireland and the UK. Previously Barry worked as corporate webmaster for multinationals, web consultant for SMEs, and in-house SEO specialist for a large regional newspaper. More articles and bio from Barry Adams
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The State of Search for News

Most SEOs are focused primarily on organic search results in Google’s ‘standard’ web search engine. However websites that specialise in providing news have a different Google in mind when it comes to optimisation: Google News.

Biggest Single Source of Traffic

UK newspaper traffic sourcesAccording to data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency the biggest source of traffic for UK newspaper sites is Google, generating over 45% of all visits. This data does not distinguish between the various Google search products, but both Hitwise and my own experiences with the Belfast Telegraph website indicate that the vast bulk of that traffic originates from Google News.

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Battle of the World Cup SERPs

The World Cup, the biggest sports event on the planet, is underway! And because I’ve always wanted to do a sports-themed blog post, I’ve compared the “world cup” SERPs for five different search engines to see what information they present and how.

Google

When you search for ‘world cup’ in Google, the top of the SERP consists of the results of the last few matches played, and an overview of the upcoming matches.

The matches played have links pointing to recap articles on the FIFA site. Below this list there are links to the FIFA.com homepage, the World Cup schedule, current standings and the overview of the England team – Google after all knows where I am, never mind that England is not the UK and the Northern Irish don’t have any particular reason to cheer for the England squad. But we’ve all come to understand that American search companies have great difficulty coming to grips with the intricacies of European nationalities and cultures. (more…)

A Local SEO scam

This is a bit of a rant against a certain type of SEO spam that I’ve recently come across. A big client of mine had a whole subsite full of the sort of spam I’ll be describing below, and I had to fight hard to get it removed. It was sold to my client by a third party company under the pretence of “locally relevant search engine worthy content”.

According to this third party company’s website they are “helping businesses find local customers through targeted online advertising.” Nothing wrong with that, at first glance… (more…)

SEO for Web Developers

I’m due to give a talk at one of those surprisingly fun crowdsourced unconferences – BarCamp Belfast. My talk will be about what web developers can do to ensure the websites they build are search engine friendly. Too often I’ve had to work with websites that seemed built to thwart search engines instead of welcome them, so it’s a topic dear to my heart.

I’ve had some great input from the members at the SEO Training Dojo and have a clear idea of what I want to discuss in this 30-minute talk I’ll be giving, but I figure it never hurts to get some extra input. I’m sure the the State of Search audience has their own horror stories about SEO-unfriendly websites to share.
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The scope and limitations of SEO

Over the past few weeks I’ve had several discussions with fellow SEOs, especially over at the (excellent) SEO Training Dojo, about what exactly the scope and remit of SEO is supposed to be. These debates were often sparked by a preceding discussion on valid SEO KPIs – what metrics we measure as indications of SEO success.

Some SEOs, which I’ll call ‘purists’, stick with a tight definition of SEO, placing the emphasis firmly on the first two words of the acronym: search engines. These purist SEOs see their scope as delivering targeted search engine traffic, and that’s where their remit ends. Turning this traffic in to actual conversions is a different discipline – conversion rate optimisation.

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How SEO is a lot like Poker

Recently, when reading Victoria Coren’s wonderful book on poker For Richer For Poorer, I realised that poker and SEO have a lot in common. Bear with me, this analogy isn’t as artificial as you may imagine.

Poker is a card game that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to win more money in a game than your competitors.

Search engine optimisation is a profession that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to help a site rank higher than its competitors in search engine results.
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The value of keyword rankings

Time to tackle another trend in SEO that may not necessarily be accurate: There’s an increasingly negative attitude towards keyword rankings as viable metrics of SEO success. I’m going to argue that keyword rankings are still valuable and should be an integral part of your SEO reports.

Over the years there have been many changes to the SERPs that, according to some, heralded the end of keyword rankings. From Local Search to Universal Search, every new tweak and addition to the results pages was seen as another apocalyptic event that now, Once And For All, made for keyword rankings truly useless.

The most recent Google features that have once again reopened the assault on keyword rankings are Personalized Search and Social Search. These would really make any monitoring of keyword rankings utterly and totally obsolete, some claimed.

That’s, of course, not quite the case.

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SEO and the Multi-layered Search Experience

There is a pervasive mindset in the internet community that search engines such as Google are an entirely different class of website. Instead of a destination in and of themselves, search engines are seen as gateways to real content. The search experience as many search engine optimisers define it is limited to what users do in Google, Bing, and such.

However, I’d argue that this is a limited perspective that no longer accurately reflects how users find content on the web. Instead I would call Google and its rivals first tier search engines – the first step in a multi-layered search experience.

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Microformats and RDF, is this the right time?

A low-level buzz in SEO that’s steadily becoming louder is the use of microformats. A brief primer: microformats, also known as ‘structured data’, is extra markup that surrounds your content, containing metadata that give search engine crawlers extra information about the content.

There are many different types of microformats, each with their own unique schema and rules, and each useful for a different type of data. A few examples:

  • hCard – the microformat version of vCard, useful for content describing people, places, and organisations.
  • hReview – the microformat for reviews of products, services, events, etc.
  • hCalendar – the microformat version of iCalendar.
  • XFN – a microformat for quantifying human relationships in links. (more…)
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