When choosing an online marketing service there are a number of user behaviours you need to consider. Traffic and user volume are clearly the key two considerations, but one sorely overlooked aspect of advertising is the amount of time a user spends on a particular platform.

It is natural to gravitate towards advertising on the most popular mediums, Google remaining the most obvious choice. But surely the best places to advertise are the places in which users spend the most time. Think about it like this, the longer or more regularly a user visits a platform the more time they will have to view an advertisement and consider following the link. Read more

seo outsourceSearch engine optimisation and SEO in general is a multi faceted beast, there are so many ways to drive traffic and improve rankings, yet we often over complicate things by searching for some technical hidden bit of genius that no one else has discovered yet. So, how about this instead; if your website is suffering a lull and the buzz seems to have died down, consider looking a little closer to home and make a change that creates an emotional response.

Humans react strongly to change, even subtle change. Whether a web site undergoes a complete redesign or removes a previous function, your regular visitors will have a reaction – possibly positive or negative – but a Read more

google instantA few of my clients have been a little concerned about the recent launch of Google Instant and how it might affect their SEO progress and search rankings. In fact I have been reading a lot of conflicting information on Google Instant and SEO over the last few weeks so I did some investigating to set the record straight for you.

For those who don’t know, Google Instant is a new feature that predicts what a user is searching for and shows results as they type. It uses Google’s auto-complete technology to show predicted search terms in a drop-down box and begins to display search results below the box.

In my opinion, there is no chance of SEO being affected here. Humans are still Read more

google buzz$8.5m sounds like a big payday for someone, but don’t get too exited for the plaintiffs, the seven involved in bringing this action will receive no more than $2,500 each. 30% of the cash will go to lawyers and the rest will be put in a fund for organisations involved with internet education and privacy issues.

Google made a huge booboo when they launched Google Buzz back in February by automatically including users’ frequent Gmail contacts on public Buzz profiles. As the world’s biggest search provider you really have to get ‘privacy’ right, but then aren’t lawsuits tax deductable? This could be a small blessing for the Google accountant.

Who gets to keep the interest on the fund is my question, perhaps they can slice it up between the rest of the Gmail account users who may have divorced, lost business or been caught lying in the debacle of the Google Buzz launch. Or better still, allocate the money to search engine marketing company initiatives to help us protect against Google privacy slips….wishful thinking. Read more

I have been following the Yahoo-Bing transition since its inception giving those who own an SEO services company and individual marketers the heads up on developments as they happen. Last week saw the completion of Yahoo’s organic transition becoming fully powered by Microsoft Bing. This week Yahoo has given search marketing advertisers the green light to start the transition process from Yahoo Search ads to Microsoft Bing search ads. This announcement marks the first step of the paid search transition.

yahoo bingIt is anticipated that Yahoo paid search in the US and Canada will be fully powered by Microsoft adCenter come the end of October. In the interim Yahoo are advising advertisers to prepare. We encourage you to transition your account before the ad serving transition begins, so that you are ready to reach more than 159 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million searchers in Canada* on Yahoo! Search, Bing and our partners”.

For those concerned about making the account transition more information is available at both the Yahoo Advertising Blog and the Microsoft Blog. Basically you need to prepare your account, transfer your account and then continue managing your account as usual. For an SEO services company like mine this will create some extra work on behalf of my clients, but let’s hope it isn’t too painful.

gmailThe idea of an email marketing campaign is to grab the reader’s attention through a compelling headline and keep pounding them with relevant information and tantalizing offers until they cave in and buy into your product or service. In a nutshell you need to make your emails unavoidable and irresistible.

Emails always drop in order of delivery, so if you send enough marketing emails to a person you can guarantee a top spot or two in your target’s inbox at one stage or another during the campaign, yet what if there was a force working against you that not only made sure you never made the top spot, but made sure all your targeted emails were way down on the list?

gmail emailEnter Google Priority Inbox. This intelligent little monster uses algorithmic techniques to automatically capture and organize “important” emails and de-emphasize other email. It is not a spam filter, but an automated organization tool that could very well upset your web site promotion internet marketing strategy. Google had this to say about its new baby:

Gmail’s servers look at several types of information to identify the email that’s important to you, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email with these people, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.

If Priority Inbox makes a mistake, you can use the clip_image002 clip_image004 buttons to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important, and Priority Inbox will quickly learn what you care about most.

So, you can see just how targeted web site promotion internet marketing emails will get pushed to the bottom of the pile as the priority system relegates promotional emails. Rather than simply reading emails in order as most people tend to do, the unimportant stuff will get pushed into the “everything else” category and may never get read.

See for yourself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nt3gE9dGHQ&feature=player_embedded#!

barebones cmsAs a search engine optimisation company we are always looking at CMS developments to see what potential they have for enhancing the SEO potential of our clients’ websites. If you have already had a look at Joomla, Drupal and WordPress and are still thinking none of these platforms really suit your business model, then you may want to consider Barebones CMS. Recently released by Cubiclesoft, Barebones CMS does exactly what it says on the tin, it gives you the bare bones of what you need to get a website up and running, but also the barebones of a website enabling you to build exactly to the specification you need.

From a search engine optimisation company point of view this is an exciting prospect as the program allows for maximum SEO manipulation from the outset rather than having to feed in and add SEO through default features.

Barebones was conceptualised out of the need for a simple software solution to create static websites. This open source system offers developers a blank slate from which to start. Developers don’t have to leave the browser to develop a website, neither do programmers when writing PHP code, nor designers when building or editing HTML and CSS layouts. Content editors also benefit from the live editing feature.

barebones login screen

Barebones CMS is a cool solution for those who find other CMS too heavy and simply don’t need all the gimmicks, also for any search engine optimisation company looking to try a new platform still highly unutilised by the masses. Whilst Barebones can be simple for the novice, one can configure Barebones to a very complex standard in order to suit the requirements of your business model. Barebones will come as a breath of fresh air for those who hate fiddling around with the blogging style template of WordPress for example.

Other features on the Barebones platform include:

  1. Built-in SEO
  2. Multilingual support system
  3. Plugin support
  4. Three login privilege groups: developer, designer and content editor

For programmers and who want to develop administrative interfaces there is an admin pack available. There are also additional shortcode components in the form of Flash Object and Code/Syntax Highlighter.

Barebones is free to download, but be nice and make a financial contribution to cover development costs and professional support for the product.

You couldn’t make this up, and why would you want to; MC Hammer taking on Google, whatever next! The “Cant Touch This” rapper announced WireDoo at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He explained that the “Deep Search Engine” would go beyond Google’s ability to deliver “deep” results based on the relationship between keywords and searches.

Hammer explained that a search for a car is about more than just a car, but also about the model, the mileage, the specifications and the location of the dealer. Similarly, a search for a home is related to the surrounding community, shops, schools, crime, etc. “It’s about relationships beyond just the keywords,” Hammer said on stage.

With the tagline, “Search once and see what’s related, “ Hammer didn’t elaborate too much further on WireDoo, only saying that it could search vertically on multiple levels. WireDoo is still in Beta but you can sign up here WireDoo. Read more

No doubt by now you will have heard about the nerd fight going on between Google and Bing. Popcorn has been thrown back and forward all week as each side responds in a war of words that represents something like, “My dad can beat up your dad”.

Google accused Bing of copying search results after suspecting unethical practice and setting up fake search results to see if they were copied. It seems they were and the sting operation was successful.

Google Bing Results

Matt Cutts and crew went around pointing algorithms at the Microsoft engineers laughing like schoolboys who’d just
seen a friend kissing a girl, only to be shocked when Bing claimed that the results showed little more than a lesson in how to commit “click fraud”. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior VP of Online Services, determined to have the last word, spat back at Google like a viper:

“We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting. Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.”

As the school kids fight it out, one thing is clear, Bing have come off well out of this. Why? Because many people who know nothing much of search outside of Google now know Google has a major competitor. Mark my words, Bing searches will escalate in the wake of this argument. The other side of the coin is that Google have made it obvious that they fear Bing. I mean if they didn’t then why would they invest time in trying to smear Bing’s reputation, or are they simply exposing unethical practice?

In truth this proves nothing, because Bing readily admit their users’ activity in Google affects their search results, but then so do a thousand other factors. Bing claim that if you do a search for a term that makes no real sense in English, and Google has created a fake search result for that term, Bing is likely to give you those fake results, too.

I fear that Google have made a huge unfounded accusation based on a manipulated test that is speculative at best, and anyway who cares if Bing copied a few search results, we all know Google is the definitive search platform so why wouldn’t a competitor replicate their practice.

wordpressWith 28,000 downloads everyday and over 11.4 million active installations, WordPress is a force to be reckoned with. The release of WordPress 3.0 in June this year had Joomla and Drupal shaking in their boots again. But what difference will this new version make to the CMS world and website promotion and optimisation.

Multi User Integration

The biggest change with 3.0 is its ability to integrate with the previously separate WordPress MU (Multi-User) variation. Multiple blogs can now be managed under a common domain name within one installation of WordPress.

Themes

There is some change in the standard theme mode. The new custom Theme “Twenty Ten” is more customisable than its predecessor making it easier for newbies to jump straight on board. Take care though if you are upgrading to 3.0 from a lesser version, complete success depends on how customised your content is and the amount of static content your site.

Plugins

There is a bulk plug-ins upgrade feature which allows plugins to be updated en masse from both the plug-ins page and the renamed “WordPress Updates” page, which doubles up to list available theme upgrades as well.

Custom Post Types and Tags

3.0 also allows for the creation of custom menus as opposed to having to code HTML on previous versions. Where blogging is concerned the dashboard is sleeker but essentially no major changes have taken place. For advanced users there is the ability to create custom post types and tags. It’s now possible to create a database entry that represents for example, a film, with metadata that specifies the actors, director and release date etc.

Website Promotion and Optimisation

Where SEO is concerned there are no major changes, and to be honest its hard to see where there could be. And, to be honest, with the amount of independent developers developing SEO tools for WordPress they needn’t bother about building any website promotion and optimisation tools into the interface anyway.

In Conclusion

To the untrained eye WordPress 3.0 hasn’t evolved much, and that might be the case for the average blogger. But what WordPress have done is created a deeper side to the software in a solid attempt to attract those who prefer the complexities of say Drupal for example. Custom post types and multisite blog networks are versatile assets that can give experienced administrators the tools they need to realize their visions.

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