Over the last ten years, the main criteria for success in natural search has shifted many times. We started with “Spam.” Spam that ALT text, stuff those keywords in, hide that content using white text. Next came “Links.” Get them! Get as many as you can as fast as you can. Get the anchor text set to your main keyword. Then it was “Content Is King.” Spend five minutes writing some throw away text. Submit to 1,000 article directories. Add text wherever you can. Well now there is a new King in town – “BRAND.” (more…)
SEO Blog Posts
To Brand or Not To Brand: Understanding Brand Benefits for Natural Search
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011Brand Monitoring, Online Marketing, SEO
HTML Parsing with Ruby and Nokogiri
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011Link Building, SEO, Tools, Web Development
I’ve been working on a few health check/utility scripts and since I’ve been swaying towards Ruby as my language of choice recently (I’ve put Python on the shelf briefly), I decided to check out Nokogiri. Stupid name I know, but Nokogiri is a pretty powerful XML/HTML parsing library for Ruby. It was written in the C programming language (which means its quick) and supports XPath and jQuery CSS style selectors meaning no more complicated regular expressions! As with all the high level interpreted languages out there nowadays, Ruby/Nokogiri doesn’t fail to deliver excellent results within a few short lines of code. (more…)
The Future of Google+
Monday, August 8th, 2011At the end of June, Google launched Google+, which appears to be the search engines answer to Facebook. Even after a few months, social media enthusiasts can’t seem to get enough of it.
When Facebook launched in 2004, it gained 20 million users in 3.5 years; Google+ reached it in just three weeks! The main reason for this astonishing growth was the large user base Google already had. While the amount of users Google+ has generated up till now is amazing, given the short space of time, it still doesn’t compare to Facebook’s astounding 750 million users or Twitter’s 200 million users. (more…)
Attacking the Long Tail – Why FAQ’s Should Come From Your Customer Service Team and Your Copywriter
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
On more than one occasion recently, we have met with clients who have started to add FAQ content to their website. Not only is this content extremely useful from a usability point of view, but it can also help attract the long tail of search.
FAQ sections are useful areas of content on a website as they help to dispel any fears from a potential customer about delivery, warranties and the like. However, FAQ sections are rarely structured to what the potential customer might ask, and are generally tucked away in a content plan that lands on a copywriter’s desk. (more…)
Global Google Algorithm Investigation – Data Request
Saturday, July 23rd, 2011
If you are reading this then you have probably been selected to help take part in a study after you responded to a request for help, by either myself or Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, on the collection of data from Google in your respective countries.
The data collection is to be used to look into the maturity of the Google algorithm across the world in different Google search engines. It is thought that the UK and US have the most up-to-date algorithms in Google.co.uk and Google.com respectively and are the first to experience any tests or changes Google make.
However, how different are the Google search engines in other countries and how should SEO strategies be altered to suit the different algorithms in different locations? (more…)
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