Posts About ‘SEO’

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…)

Can SEO companies be held responsible for counterfeit by their clients? Yes says judge

judge-july

Imagine this: a client comes up to you asking you to build them a new e-commerce website. Let’s say they are selling golf clubs. However, it turns out that the golfclubs were counterfeits, illegal copies of trademarked goods. Is that your problem?

No says an SEO company in the US, but yes, says judge Margaret B. Seymour of the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. She says the company “Bright Builders” was “guilty of contributory trademark infringement and unfair trade practices for allegedly assisting in the construction and hosting of the e-commerce site CopyCatClubs.com.”

And here comes the add on: the original owner of the website was fined $28,250. The company which build and SEO-ed the website however was ordered to pay $770,750 in statutory damages. Wow. (more…)

SEO Forecasting: A Poor Allocation of Resource

forecast

As I’m sure we all know, SEO forecasting is one of the most tedious and frustrating tasks that many of us have to cope with for pitches. In my short time at OMD I am quickly learning how important these forecasts are to larger clients and as a result our team have been forced to  improve the sophistication of our forecasting models.

When I first spoke to Bas about writing this post my intention was to write a bit of a rant about the cost and time consuming nature of forecasting and as many have already illustrated before “a forecast for SEO is not even worth the paper it is printed on.” However, given our involvement in an ongoing pitch and the subsequent improvements we have made to our model I think it is worth sharing my findings and suggestions and would love to hear what sort of things others in the industry have come up with to cope with the myriad of issues thrown up by this reporting.

So, if you are a technical SEO and you already know how horrible the data is, I urge you to skip to the end of the post and to weigh in on the comments below about some of the techniques and modelling you all have done to make life easier (e.g. Excel hacks, estimation tricks, number of terms use when trying to create a sample, how you deal with the long-tail, etc.). Though you may find some of the statistics and arguments useful should you find yourself needing to forecast!

However, if you are a client, if you have to deal with clients or if you have to sell to clients I strongly urge you to read the below issues with the data most SEOs use for forecasting and also read about the amount of time this sort of work can take – time that we could be spending to make your website better! (more…)

Defining the Long Tail for SEO

The Long Tail

Apparently some SEOs believe that optimising a site for long tail traffic is not really SEO. I disagree, and below I will explain why.

First of all, let’s define what we mean by ‘long tail traffic’. It’s one of those often bandied phrases that tends to mean slightly different things for different people. Wikipedia isn’t much help here: “The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases.”

Not sure I agree with that entirely. Another popular definition of long tail traffic is any search engine traffic that arrives on your site using 4 or more keywords. That too doesn’t sit well with me, as many 4+ keyword phrases are actually very popular and can generate substantial volumes of traffic. (more…)

SEO 101: the ranking of “site:website.com” results

site_www.stateofsearch

One thing which many SEO’s tend to do is a search on site:website.com (for example on this site) within Google to see which pages are indexed by Google. It can give you a nice insight in how many pages are indexed and if there are any pages indexed you wouldn’t want to be there. Combined with a keyword you can also see which pages are ranking for that specific keyword. It can also help with determining if your titles and descriptions are right (as you can see I have some work to do).

If you do that search, you will get a list of pages indexed by Google. But how are those pages ranked? Why are they placed in that order? This was the question sent in to Google Webmasterhelp and answered by Matt Cutts. It turns out there are several reasons for why a page is placed in the rankings: (more…)

The Business of SEO

SEO is a bit of an odd duck in the total mix of online (marketing) disciplines. On the one hand it’s a very techy, ‘hard’ discipline that requires a lot of skill and expertise in a wide range of fields. On the other hand, it’s probably one of the more difficult online disciplines to quantify.

Web developers, for example, have a finished product they deliver: a working website built according to the customer’s spec. Email marketers too have very clear deliverables: open-rates, click-through rates, spam reports, delivered emails – all these are very solid metrics that an email marketer can influence and report, and they tend to correlate to a financial ROI somewhere down the line.

Conversion rate optimisers have it even easier: their whole job is to map out the ROI-funnel of a website and to make it work better. And many social media marketers are as of yet still wallowing in the fuzziness of old-school, offline marketing – they get away with meaningless lingo-speak like ‘customer engagement’ and ‘brand building’. In other words, ROI isn’t (yet) a big part of the SMO business.

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SEOkomm, the first SEO conference in Austria

“A cocktail of business conference (like SES or SMX) and hardcore “underground” SEO event (like SEO Campixx)”, that’s how I would describe the first Austrian SEO conference SEOkomm, which took place last Thursday, the 18th of November. 270 attendees from Austria, Germany and even North-Italy visited the sessions, which were divided in two tracks: a SEO practice track and a business strategy & white hat track.

Marcus “Mediadonis” Tandler started the conference with his “big surprise” session, which turned out to be a session about advanced linkbuilding for affiliates.  Marcus’ message: Don’t focus too much on links with keyword anchor texts. Especially on high traffic money keywords (like loans for example) websites, with brand anchor text backlinks dominate the serps! (more…)

SEO Tools 101 – The most under-utilised tool: Your Clients

I’m always jotting down useful ideas, tools, pointers, thoughts etc. etc. for SEO – everything from chats in the pub to conferences – there’s endless amounts of information out there to help make your life easier and your rankings climb.

However I think there’s a really crucial tool that just doesn’t get used enough by SEOs when working on projects, and that’s communication.  Especially with clients or stakeholders.

Get them on board and it’s amazing the difference it can have on both your stress levels and your keyword positions.

I want to give a couple of examples of this point, as the idea for this post actually came to me from a client a couple of weeks ago.

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Simple forecasting for SEO

One of the major talking points that came out of the recent Manchester SEO mini conferences related to the subject of forecasting for SEO purposes. As Head of SEO for a number of high profile search organisations within the UK, forecasting has become part and parcel of my day to day role, both in terms of providing a commercial rationale for undertaking a SEO campaign for the client, but also a way of providing a rational framework to the SEO project, one that has the end goals of the client at its heart and takes into account their fundamental reach and response requirements from SEO.

The main issue with forecasting has and will for the foreseeable future be search data, in particular an accurate number of potential searchers within a particular sector, and even more so on particular keywords. Yes ,there are various tools on the market such as the Google Keyword Tool/SK Tool, Webmaster Tools, Raven or even old school tools such as Elite SEO however the fundamental issue remains in terms of data integrity and robustness particularly when one compares this to a real time environment. Further to this, many of us are lucky to have clients which have 100% coverage on 100% off their keywords, 100% of the time, and without such data, it is very difficult to provide absolutely on the money forecasts. (more…)

A few things you need to know before you can SEO

Search engine optimization is a business that’s still growing. Awareness within companies of the existence of SEO is still growing. More and more companies realize the potential value and want to jump on the bandwagon. But I have to warn you: SEO is not a solution by itself. It is rather a means to reach your online goals. Before you start with SEO there are a few things you should know. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before starting with SEO.

What is the goal of your website?

The goal of SEO is not solely to get more visitors to your website. Your website has a purpose within your organization. Whether it’s to generate more online sales or to create a professional image of your company for potential clients, something has to happen with a visitor to become a valuable visitor of your website. They have to reach a certain goal. The goal of SEO should be to attract more visitors that reach more goals on your website. Therefore you have to know what the goal of your website is before starting with SEO. And most of all you need to be able to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your website. (more…)

Google News in Universal SERPs

Somehow I’ve managed to get the ‘Google News expert’ badge by virtue of my experience with the Belfast Telegraph. In all honesty I don’t feel like a Google News expert by any stretch. I suppose it’s a case of the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. There are some truly great newspaper SEO people around like Brent Payne (Tribune, he was on our radioshow a few weeks back), Chris Moran (Guardian), and Julian Sambles (Telegraph) – compared to them I feel like quite the amateur.

But people seem to appreciate my sharing of what I learn about Google News at the Belfast Telegraph. So much so that I was asked to present about Google News on the Manchester SEO mini-conference last week. (Which was a great wee conference by the way, I had jolly good fun and met a great many wonderful people, including State of Search’s own Pete Young, Nichola Stott, and Kelvin Newman.)

One of the main points of my presentation was how simplistic the Google News ranking algorithm is when it comes to including news results on universal SERPs. I want to highlight that particular aspect of Google News a bit more in this blog post. (more…)

So You Want to Run an SEO Conference? Lessons from ProSEO

Hi Everyone! My name is Sam Crocker, I am a Lead SEO at Distilled in London and I’m extremely excited to be writing my first post for State of Search (hopefully the first of many).  Today I’ve been asked to share some of the lessons we’ve learned from hosting this year’s ProSEO seminar.

It has been an exhausting few weeks for the team but I think there should definitely be some good lessons for anyone who has ever thought “this seems like an easy way to make some money”.

A very special thank you to our organiser Lynsey Little for sharing some of the things she learned and for everyone who filled out the feedback forms that helped me write this post. (more…)

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