Share As a child, it used to piss me off no end when my parents would answer my frequent requests for quantification, with the above question. “How long till we get there?” “When does it stop?” “What time does it get dark?” “How deep is water?” “How much do apples cost?” “How long do Goldfish live?” All such questions would be met with the question “How long is a piece of string?” It’s a colloquial saying which I think is fairly common in the UK, though for sake of clarity means, “It depends.” Whilst of course it wouldn’t take much for a parent to guess the sort of parameters the childish mind is working within; fill in the necessary missing [...]
Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
- July 18th 2011
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How To Create a Search Strategy
Share For too many people for too long, SEO has seemed like occult sciences. Part research, part technical, part magic, search, and specifically SEO, has seemed something you had to trust someone else to do. Understanding more about how search works means not only being able to ensure it is executed in-house properly, it also means a better working relationship between you and your agency if you utilise one. Setting up a search strategy may seem impossible if you come from a point of not understanding even the fundamentals of search, but information about the core of SEO – those elements which are most important to ranking – are published and freely available. What regrettably isn’t free is the expertise [...]
- July 4th 2011
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SEO Resolutions
Share As a search and social media “expert” (boy did I fool them!), I speak at a number of conferences through the year. I talk about the techniques behind ranking well but I rarely speak about the fundamentals and with the changes in Google’s algorithm this is more important than ever. Starting from a solid foundation will mean the difference between ranking well and failing. Starting with a solid foundation and following all the rules means you are also less likely to get hit by negative algorithm updates. Businesses are experiencing increases in online transactions and more than ever, consumers are using search to drive both online and offline purchasing. Here are some tips about what you could do to [...]
- May 20th 2011
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New “Majestic Million” Offers High-Level Insight and Outside-Industry Appeal
Share Majestic SEO have today launched a new product (in stealth beta), which I got a little demo of on Tuesday at SMX. Majestic Million shows data points for the worlds top 1 million websites as determined by link popularity, such data points being number of backlinks, number of linking domains (and gains/losses on the numbers since last crawl). You can request a single site, groups of sites (by name entry – not yet any classification by industry or type) and sites by TLD. A request for a comparative group of sites generates a URL that you can use to access the same data sources over time. Potential Data Observations From a high level viewpoint this data has the (theoretical) [...]
- May 17th 2011
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What’s new in Local Search and Mobile – SMX London
Share As many as 30% of all search queries have local intent, and the Google Places platform now operates in over 100 countries. According to IDC, more smartphones will be sold this year than computers which is astonishing and makes you realise just how entwined local and mobile search will become. The session mainly dealt with devlopments in local search, some “must do’s” when optimsing a places acocunt, alternative ways to track Google Places and mobile apps. Just a heads up, webmaster radio tonight have a show, airing from 7pm, which features Local David Mihm, Martijn Beijk and Lisa Myers Don’t worry if you missed the the show, it will be up on State of Search tomorrow You can also [...]
- May 17th 2011
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Keyword Research Ninjas Tactics – SMX London 2011
Share Keyword research tools are powerful and plentiful and your competitors are using them for the same reasons as you are. This session explores keyword research “outside of the box”, mining unique or unusual sources of data for insights and opportunities that others overlook. Richard Baxter The problem with keyword research data is it’s a bit of a jumble, anyone can make a list, but how do you make it actionable for SEO? How do you get from a dataset to IA? If you can find a way to group and segment, and take away noise you can learn about priorities. By breaking down the following search query you can identify segments and groups within the phrase. Buy used audi [...]