Posts About ‘SEO’

What Is Pinterest And Why Should Marketers Care?

pinterest-logo

Pinterest. If you have been on the internet for more than 10 minutes in the past 6 months you can’t have failed to notice the hype surrounding it. I’ve been a member since July 2011 and, following an agonizing 4 hour wait for my request to join to be approved, I’ve been using it consistently since that date. I’m a very visual person so I find it very satisfying to use – not only from an aesthetic point of view but also as a search engine for images and, increasingly, for products themselves.

What is Pinterest exactly? It’s essentially an invite-only social network for sharing images that are found online (including uploaded images from the users themselves). The images are known as ‘pins’ and users can organise them in themed boards i.e. silver jewellery, green hats, cats with Hitler mustaches etc.  So far, so dull – so why should we care? Well, according to the latest figures, Pinterest has become so popular that it is now driving more traffic to retailers’ sites than Google + and is attracting traffic at an incredible rate. There are two ways that marketers can take advantage of Pinterest – they can sign up and start curating contact, and they can also start optimising their client’s visual content to encourage others to re-pin and distribute.  Images can be linked directly back to a site, or even better, a particular landing page so everyone who sees the pin will have the opportunity to visit the original site – that’s where ‘Pinterest as Search Engine’ comes into it’s own. You can also add the price of a product to something you pin and it will appear with the content – a nice touch. (more…)

What Website Owners can Learn From Gordon Ramsay

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Who doesn’t know British chef Gordon Ramsay. He is well-known around the world, mostly because of his swearing in the kitchen, but also because he has set up many successful restaurants., His fame is mainly based on his television shows like “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” and the swear words he uses in these shows.

One show in particular is now running for years with huge success: “Kitchen Nightmares”. In this show he comes into a restaurant, which is usually almost bankrupt and barely attracting any customers, and helps save it.

Watching this show can help you a lot when optimizing your website. Think whatever you want about Ramsay and his swearing, but he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to optimizing a business. And optimizing a business, or restaurant in this matter, is not that different from running a restaurant. Let’s take a look at some lessons we can learn from Gordon Ramsay. (more…)

What’s the Price of a Link?

ATM

With a title like ‘What’s the price of a link?’ this is probably the article you’re burning to read, but don’t want to get caught reading!

In reality, unless you’re doing your own SEO with no budget for anything vaguely marketing related, there’s a cost to any link created, whether paid for or not. The cost of time and resources for starters.

But there are three hidden costs that are often overlooked: the costs of buying links (beyond the cash transaction); the costs of free press release distribution services; and the costs of untrained staff. (more…)

Building Your Brand: Test Your Content, Not Just Your Keywords

Make Writing Fun Guest Post

I was doing my usual shuffle through a few analytics accounts the other day, for interest rather than with a clear goal in my mind when this blog post occurred to me. Firstly apologies for again writing something that is not ‘in the news’ as such. I promise my next post will be about current events – from Google plus-ing to site mobile-ing and everything in between.

For now, back to the thought I had about content, brand and analytics.

Here’s my train of thought:

1. We all know that our analytics accounts tell us what content is working, what search terms people come in on and  even what search terms send the ‘right’ kind of people to our site.

2. We all know that we need to hone our keyword targeting in order to get those ‘right’ kind of people – even if we are limited to using endlessly frustrating tools like the dreaded Adwords Keyword Tool.

3. We all know we need to write content, using those target keywords, in order to get conversions.

4. How often do we think about brand visibility and its value alongside conversions?

Let me give you an example. (more…)

What Would Google Bot Do?

What-would-Googlebot-do-intro

When building or optimizing a website you have to keep in mind you need to do things so the website can be found in search engines pretty well. Therefore you have to ‘obey’ to the rules of Google. And since Google sends its bots around to find what site is relevant it might be a good idea to consider ‘what would the Google Bot do?’ when optimizing a site. (more…)

More Traffic is Not Always The Answer

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This is a guest post by Dan Taylor, founder of SEOwned and currently working for Moneysupermarket. Like this post? Let us know!

As an SEO one of the most common statements from clients has always been “we need more traffic to our web site’. I am not saying that this is the wrong tactic to take; in fact the stats below show that delivering more traffic to a website will produce the same overall results as the methods I am going to recommend. However, the effort required to increase traffic to an under-performing site is akin to shovelling snow whilst it is still snowing. If we work on getting our site in better shape, and better performing in future the best thing for the business will inevitably be to increase traffic. (more…)

Why an editorial calendar is essential for kickass content creation

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As an SEO and content creator, I know how vital it is to keep on top of each of my client’s needs when it comes to blog and web content. There’s nothing quite like missing an opportunity because you were too late to tie in content to a holiday season, a product launch or a pre-planned event to focus the mind on how to work that much smarter…..

It was this post from Lisa Barone back in 2009 that first alerted me to the wonders of the Editorial Calendar, and I’ve been using one ever since. Well, several in fact, for myself, my blogs and all of my client sites.  You might argue that an editorial calendar (EC) takes all of the spontaneity out of blogging, but it actually provides a solid basis for producing and distributing content, still leaving plenty of wiggle room to write those posts that leverage current news stories.  You still get to put your message out there, but in a way that provides your readers (and the search engines) with content that meets their needs on a consistent basis – with the added bonus of ad hoc content as and when required.

(more…)

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

audrey hepburn

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…)

Top 10 New Year SEO Resolutions

Resolutions! We all make them, 20% of us break them by the end of January and 50% fail within 6 months. If you haven’t made yours yet for 2012 – here are the top 10 most commonly broken New Year Resolutions (with an SEO slant)

#1 – Lose Weight & Get Fit

By now we all know what Panda is and which sites are the most likely to be affected. 2012 looks to bring more of the same algorithmic fun which means it’s time go on an SEO weight loss and fitness programme, and what better time than a New Year to put your site pages on the virtual treadmill, trim those low quality pages and firm up the existing content? (more…)

The Division Within SEO: Google is our friend/enemy

SEO - criminal or hero?

Over the weekend there was an interesting post up on SEOmoz which chronicled Rand Fishkin’s discussion with SEO Book’s Aaron Wall about outing web spammers. It’s definitely worth a read and will provide some background information for this blog post.

Basically Rand is in favour of pointing out what he believes are bad SEO practices, specifically web spam, and Aaron is against it. Some other SEOs contributed to the debate, as well as a follow-up discussion I had with Rand and others on Saturday. (more…)

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