Posts by Sam Murray

Sam Murray is in his 4th year of search marketing. He graduated from University with a BA (Hons) in Marketing in 2007 and wrote his 10,000 word dissertation on Search Marketing. Sam is a search manager for Verve Search and deals in every detail of running a day to day search marketing campaign for multiple clients. When not on his laptop Sam likes to spend more money than he has on festivals, trips and will use any excuse for Vegas. He loves Tottenham Hotspur FC and is optimistic about the new season, well more than fellow bloggers Sam Crocker and Annabel Hodges should be about Fulham. More articles and bio from Sam Murray

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How Sentiment Analysis via Twitter can help you Beat the Market

How much power can be gained from 140 characters you wonder? Well in the case of the Derwent Capital Hedge Fund market an awful lot. In May this year Derwent Capital Hedge Fund started trading using algorithms and a trading model that follow comments posted on Twitter.

Paul Hawtin who is the hedge fund manager of Derwent stated that “For years investors have widely accepted that financial markets are driven by fear and greed but we’ve never before had the technology or data to be able to quantify human emotions.” Now we do. This newly developed algorithm allows is based on a research paper from the University of Manchester and Indian University which concluded that there was a strong correlation between the mood on Twitter and the rise/fall of stock and commodity prices in the FTSE 100 and the Dow Jones. There are now 175 million users on Twitter producing around 95 million posts per day, a pot of gold for data analysts and mathematicians who have already started to find new ways to analyse rapidly growing source of real time data. (more…)

3 Key Areas Where it is Essential you Think like a Marketer

The size of your agency or your client might dictate just how far you have to go to really help a site improve. Over the years I have worked with large clients both in terms of the size of the site, turnover and staff to clients whose marketing department consisted of 1-3 people. It is on these occasions that you really get involved in every area of a client’s marketing strategy and gain a much deeper understanding of the client. I have regularly found that larger organisations often have internal politics which affects the role you can play as certain information such as PR, social accounts and site updates is loathed to be given over.

I personally feel you should essentially be an extension of a client’s marketing arm, and have found that by immersing yourself within the business you discover aspects that the client never shared at the beginning of the campaign but can help you improve your content strategy, conversion optimisation or off page campaign. My fellow blogger Claire Carlile’s post on starting a campaign with client questions is a good start if you have recently taken on a new client. Thinking like a marketer means that you have a solid understanding on USPs, audience, marketplace, competitors and think more about the end user than a search engine. It also means that some issues which traditionally you might not have gotten involved in are exactly where you should. The price of a product is one example and the CRM systems is another. (more…)

Time Management for an SEO: The Pomodoro Technique

“For every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned”

As an SEO, or in any industry where time is spent earning value for your clients, the ability to manage time effectively is a skill that needs to be learnt. I think this is particularly true for anyone, at any level, within search marketing and that mainly holds true because there are normally several activities that needed to be done yesterday.

A well thought out and constructed timeline can help with project management but if you are the account manager of numerous clients a certain amount of overlapping is bound to inevitable. Clients are not the only thing that requires your time and attention during a normal day at the office, reading and keeping up to date with news, strategies, studies and methods is essential. Add to this the constant stream of information pouring through Twitter and now Google + and you are faced with a persistent fight against your urges to check whether you have missed anything in the last minute. (more…)

How to Use Xenu for the basis of a SEO Campaign

Depending on who you ask Xenu is either the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft or a tool that finds broken links. The second option doesn’t sound as interesting but to you and me it is far more valuable.

Earlier this week I was speaking to a few SEOs I know who work in house and I was surprised to hear that neither of them had heard about Xenu. I was even more surprised since they both work for large brands whose sites have over 50k pages indexed and if anyone can benefit fromXenu it is large sites. Xenu was originally built as a broken link checker but as I will illustrate you can use it as a basis for technical and on poge analysis but to also as a basis for client questions and discovery. A lot of our regular readers will most probably be familiar with Xenu although there are hopefully some takeaways for everybody. (more…)

Technical SEO in Magento

More and more ecommerce websites are being built on the Magento platform but the number of technical SEO resources remains few and far between. There are a lot of good extensions out there, particularly from Yoast, who also has the best starter guide too so make sure you check that out.

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms around but even for simple setups there are always the inevitable head scratching moments for people who are new to the platform. This is hopefully where I come in, as I have compiled a small list (that I will update as time goes on either from experience or from the comments column) which covers some of the first stages of the techical SEO side of a campaign. This includes how to sync your Google Base account with Magento to perform product uploads, the magic of path hints for changing on page elements to implementing the EPDQ payment platform. (more…)

Digital Asset Optimisation in the evolving and merging world of search

The world of search and marketing is constantly evolving and merging which is why SEOs have got to constantly be aware of how to utilise off page assets online. Universal search has meant that organisations can now index, rank and obtain traffic from a wider channel of sources so it is vital that you are involved in that space.

Paddy Moogan steps up first to talk and makes the point known that he is called Paddy not “Patty” as it says in the SES conference guide. I am sure people won’t forget as his presentation was packed with actionable points and valuable pieces of information.
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Mobile Marketing Strategies: how to drive traffic with mobile applications

Mobile strategies are an ever increasing consideration when organisations consider marketing budgets. This session focused on mobile SEO but also touched on how to drive traffic with mobile applications.

Both presenters discussed the common mistakes that are made within the mobile environment and how you can act to resolve them and have a more effective mobile strategy

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Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

More and more site owners are concerned that they might be getting penalised accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content.

Do they have cause for worrying? Certainly, many in house or external SEOs have experienced duplicate content issues and 90% of them through natural means such as syndicating content or catalogue driven product pages that vary only in colour of product.

This session looks at various issues and explorers potential solutions.

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