ShareTweet 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 [...]
Archive for 2011
4 Years of Utter Girly Nonsense
ShareTweet Hi there, it’s me…Julie, the one who used to be prolific here but is no longer due to maddening amounts of chaos in my life that now includes a killer bloodhound, a flock of 6 hens, and a fledgling attic squirrel population. However, considering it’s this site that brought a lot of the aforementioned chaos (ie blogging opportunities and proper business) I should take it a bit more seriously, especially as I’m vacationing with the Viking and her family in August and France is the perfect spot for her to beat my ass, because we’ll all be consuming loads of Camembert and local wine. Oh, and omelettes, because that’s listed as the main vegetarian option in Normandy. Yay. Anyway, [...]
New “Majestic Million” Offers High-Level Insight and Outside-Industry Appeal
ShareTweet 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) [...]
What’s new in Local Search and Mobile – SMX London
ShareTweet 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 [...]
SMX 2011: Social Signals & Search
ShareTweet A particular current obsession of mine and a topic on which I have about three gigs in the next month, so really hoping for some interesting thinking on this subject. Panellists are; Bas van den Beld of State of Search, Cedric Chambaz of Microsoft; Marcus Taylor of SEOptimise and Jim Yu of BrightEdge. Bas van den Beld Google are clearly seeking to define user intent which is of course a difficult thing to do. Quite often user intent and be inferred by UX data, e.g. rich snippets vs ordinary results will give richer data feedback. Don’t think that Google doesn’t “get” social – perhaps not in the network sense but later PageRank iterations incorporate “social” elements (link popularity).