Posts About ‘SEO’

Structuring an SEO Project: Moving Away from the Retainer Model

brick-wall

There is no question that I have voiced my concern a fair few times about SEO needing to grow up, for us to become marketers, allow more transparency with our clients and so forth, though it has dawned on me that I’ve not really done too much to discuss how specifically we could go about accomplishing this. I do not hope (nor do I think it feasible) to address all of the issues we face in this one post, but I would like to point out one specific way in which I believe we can earn more respect from the people we work with directly and hopefully seek to avoid ever losing an existing client again (unless of course we choose to do so :) ).

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Panda – The Quality Bear of Search eats Affiliates

Ralf Schwoebel at A4uexpo

It has already been two weeks since the A4Uexpo in Munich, but I still want to cover the “Panda-session”, because it was one of the best sessions at this conference. Ralf Schwoebel of the downloadportal Tradebit, one of the victims of Panda, started the session explaining what changes he did to get back on track. After that Dixon Jones, Marketing Manager of Majestic SEO, showed the results of some research Majestic SEO did.

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SEO within the SOSTAC® strategy framework

SOSTAC IM strategy framework

I tend to blog about things I’m actively engaged with, and this week I’ve been digging in to a structured approach to our company’s internet marketing (IM) activities. Basically we’re developing a strategy for all our IM projects, and we’ve chosen the SOSTAC® approach as the framework, as recommended by Econsultancy .

To summarize it very briefly, SOSTAC® stands for Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and Control. Developed by PR Smith, SOSTAC® is a powerful yet simple strategy framework that captures all aspects of creating and executing an IM strategy, yet it has enough flexibility to fit around the varying requirements of our wide range of clients. (more…)

Brand SEO, Information Retrieval and Ecommerce

Digram of the purchase funnel showing stages from awareness, opinion, refinement, decision to purchase.

I am constantly surprised by how often different term sets and query types are either ignored, or their role in a user-journey, misunderstood. All too often, run-of-the-mill keyword-research advice leads with an emphasis on relevance, volume and competition; ignoring the vital supporting role of e.g. “brand” terms – or the interplay between product/transactional terms and brand/navigational terms.

Brand SEO is often overlooked, as let’s face it – it’s pretty easy to dominate a good few pages of any search engine with your company results (whether on your owned and operated properties, or whether {your content} on social network and sharing sites), which means it’s not so sexy. However when it comes to Ecommerce, it is brand visitors that drive the revenue, often at a far greater contribution to overall revenue than what we may understand to be “transactional” terms. In order to get at the “why” we need to get out of our “doing” mindset and think about brand SEO from a user perspective and to do that, we need to revisit Information Retrieval and query-type classification. (more…)

The Future of SEO

future-of-seo-panel-a4u

Today I want to walk you through and talk you through some of the interesting conversations that emerged from a panel comprised almost entirely of State of Search bloggers on Monday at a4uexpo in Munich! I joined up with Martijn, Roy, and Kelvin to discuss what the future of SEO may look like and what’s in store over the next few years.

This is not an exhaustive look nor is it necessarily reflective of what the future will look like for SEO because hey, as I’m sure Harold Camping can attest, we can’t predict the future. However, I’m going to do my best to summarise here the different viewpoints from the panel as well as the audience so please feel free to disagree, even I disagree with some of the predictions but we’ve all used our experience to try and figure out what is in the future of our quickly maturing industry. (more…)

A4uexpo: Google Onsite Optimization – Likes and dislikes

Google onsite optimization at A4uexpo

So here we are: the first session of the A4uexpo 2011 in Munich. Sepita Ansari of Catbird Seat. Moderator Alexander Holl introduces Sepita as “a very famous German SEO”. His topic “Google onsite optimization” could be very boring, but as I know Sepita as a good entertainer it will be fun!

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SMX London Keynote Address – The State of Search Marketing

Good Morning folks! I’ll be starting us out with our first post of our live coverage from SMX Advanced London.

Up first is Chris Sherman talking to us about “The State of Search Marketing” and the big picture as well as changes to the market in general.

Recent Google Updates

-Google instant has come into play since the last conference and he also mentioned that the image search catalogue has increased widely and made reference to some of the opportunities this may create.

-Of course, the notorious Panda/Farmer update (a big shock that has caused a lot of fallout for a lot of people).

-Chris also made mention of the forthcoming Plus 1 buttons and made a joke about the fact that they are basically an identical copy of Facebook Likes. For what it’s worth, I do think these will be on every blog with a Twitter or Facebook share button though I am still somewhat sceptical of the impact they will have on search results as there is so much opportunity for abuse.

- Google makes 300-500 changes per year on an ongoing basis – be more careful than other and not inadvertantly do something that gets caught up here. Radical “Panda” like events are very uncommon, but we see loads of new changes. (more…)

SEO in 2011 What’s Working, What’s Not? – SMX London 2011

Google Instant

Hi again folks, in an effort to get posts out as quickly as possible I’m going to stick with a “Top Tips” format for this next session. Today we’ve got Max Thomas of Thunder SEO, Mikel deMib Svendsen of deMib and Christine Churchill of Key Relevance.

As an aside may I just interject the fact that Mikel deMib Svendsen is wearing an excellent patterned suit and the cover slide of his presentation deck looks a bit like it was inspired by a GeoCities website, very excited about this one! We’ll definitely link to it once the decks go live.

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A dangerous game?

dangerous-game

There was an interesting debate taking place recently between a number of high profile people within the organic search space regarding the recent spate of outings taking place over on influential online publications such as the New York Times. During recent months, the New York Times has been responsible for the reporting of a couple of major organisations for activity which goes against the guidelines outlined by Google regarding how people should be optimising their websites. (more…)

The 5 Best SEO Books That Aren’t About SEO

Thinking Online books

I get asked quite often what beginning SEOs need to do to become advanced practitioners of our craft. Specifically they want to know which books to read.

There are a handful of good books about SEO out there – I recently reviewed Danny Dover’s new SEO Secrets book – but no matter how good they are, none of these books will make you an advanced SEO.

When I pondered this question in detail, I realised that the books that have shaped me the most as an SEO, and have helped bring my skills to higher levels, aren’t actually SEO books. Yet these books have been vital study material in my continued development as a SEO professional.

Here I will share the five best books for SEOs that aren’t actually about SEO. (more…)

The Rules by Which We Play

zero-sum-game-seo-1

It’s a zero-sum game, this industry of ours. There are winners and there are losers. There can only be one site that ranks highest, and many sites that rank below it.

Though strictly speaking that’s not true any more – due to personalised results and the continued integration of social signals – I think we can all agree that there’s limited space at the top of any given SERP.

Fortunately we have a big playground to work in. Search engines process billions of queries a day, many of which they’ve never seen before. Every query, potentially, serves as an opportunity to reach an audience. (more…)

Linkdex review: a tool as your new SEO assistant

Linkdex-dashboard

At SES London I talked to the team of Linkdex. They wanted to show me their new tool. To be really honest: many people want to show me what they’ve built so they hope I will blog about it. In some cases I get pleasantly surprised in other cases it is hard for me to hide from those who want free promotion for a sucky tool. In this case that was different. It became clear very quickly that Linkdex had built something which could be very useful for many search marketers out there.

Linkdex offered me the opportunity to play with the tool for a while. I found that the tool is very useful and has a lot of potential. Below you can read my findings and review of the tool. At the end of the review you can sign up to be one of 50 to try out the tool. (more…)

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