SEO Blog Posts

National Look Alike Day – Top 10 SEO Look Alikes

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Industry News, SEO

To celebrate the much loved National Look Alike Day today (I know, I’d never heard of it either), I have put together a collection of some of the best SEO look alikes in our industry!

Whilst attending the SEOmoz Pro SEO seminar back in 2010, myself and Andy Heaps spotted some great look alikes of both speakers and attendees that we had never noticed before, most notably Will Critchlow and Stephen Pavlovich. After the conference I had every intention of writing up a funny little blog post about their uncanny likeness to two other well-known figures, yet other things (arguably more important things) came up and I forgot.

However, the look alike post was rekindled last month, when a bunch of the team from Epiphany went to the Think Visibility conference in Leeds. During one of the morning sessions, Malcolm tweeted an amazing shout of Jason Duke as he was on stage attempting to help fix the ailing WiFi, and so I set about putting together a whole host of other look alikes from in and around the SEO industry. (more…)

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Panda Watch Update – Google Panda Deployed To The UK

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Google, Industry News, SEO

Panda Watch! The mood is tense; I have been on some serious, serious reports but nothing quite like this…

For a few days now we have been seeing ranking fluctuations beyond the everyday EveryFlux effect across certain sectors and data centres.

This has now been officially validated as Google Panda hitting the UK. In a post yesterday, Google’s Webmaster Central channel posted – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html letting us know that the English language roll out of Panda is now complete along with some “new user feedback signals.” (more…)

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World Stores – Highlighting Google’s Flawed Ranking Algorithm

Friday, April 1st, 2011

E-Commerce, Google, Link Building, Microsoft, SEO, Yahoo

I read an interesting article on the BBC website yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/03/world_stores.html

It appears that an innovative entrepreneur in Twickenham has spotted that all you need to do in order to achieve a high ranking in Google is to buy a domain with the target keyword in it.

OK, it’s a little more complicated than that. For those not in the know, here’s how it works…

Google wants to display relevant websites, and two of the key things that they look at are the number of links to a website (which shows how ‘important’ the site is), and what the anchor text says (the text on the link to the website, which tells Google what the page is talking about).

But clearly this system can be gamed – if you want to rank for a keyword, all you have to do is to buy huge numbers of links, and use the same anchor text. Google has all kinds of checks in place to make sure that this doesn’t work – if all of your links have the same anchor text, Google will ignore them and possibly penalise you. (more…)

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Michel Roux, White Hart Lane, Dear Maria and Biggie Day!

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Featured, Keyword Research, Twitter

So, what does this random collection of words have to do with search marketing you ask? The answer is simple: they are all trending topics on Twitter in the UK. I wrote this blog because I wanted to see how important trending topics were when it comes to influencing search over a period of time, and whether or not they should be included within a comprehensive keyword research strategy. Also, we win £50 Amazon vouchers for the most read blog and I want the money, even if it is already mine!?! (I own the agency).

In case you wondered why these topics are trending, thousands of women are currently swooning over Michel Roux Jr making bread, and whose soft tones and French allure are really hitting the mark with the UK ladies. White Hart Lane is currently under siege from some marauding Italians. Dear Maria, an Internet-only released music track has sold 500,000 copies without receiving any radio air play (sounds like a topic for another blog!). Biggie Day is a day dedicated to the memory of the notorious BIG.

So the concept is, that if I am launching a new website or refreshing my SEO or PPC strategy, could I go through the last few months of trending topics and look for related terms to my products and services? If these keywords are new or hadn’t been high profiled before, they would not have registered on traditional keyword research tools. So I may be able to quickly launch new content on this topic, and rank highly within days naturally or get very cheap paid clicks.

I will monitor the ranking and traffic/referring keywords for this post over the next two weeks and report back my findings. Fingers crossed I win the £50 too!

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Google Hacked by Russian Mobsters?

Friday, March 4th, 2011

Google, SEO

On my travels across the web Wednesday, I somehow came across the first SERP for the term ‘Adidas Originals,’ and I swear Rob, I wasn’t just looking for a new pair of pumps…really!

Now as expected the Adidas site ranked first for the term as you would expect, but the search snippet from the first organic listing looked quite peculiar indeed.

Search Snippet

Now for those who don’t know, the search snippet was a feature Google introduced in early 2006, in order to enhance its user experience. The snippet is the two-line summary that appears along with the link to the website. (more…)

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