Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

Instant Preview is not to be confused with Google Instant: Instant is the smart search engine dialog box which uses predictive texting to complete your search input.  Google Instant Preview is another step in the direction of speeding up getting to relevant search results; in a nutshell, Google Instant Preview provides visual shots of the web sites returned in the search results. Continue reading →

As we move firmly into the fall season and welcome a cool crispness to the air, whilst waving goodbye to summer sun, retailers are looking forward to the Christmas season and the most important part of the year in respect of sales. We have not yet gotten the specter of Halloween out of the way, with Thanksgiving only a blurry turkey gravy vision and no sign of snow for Christmas, so why should you be stepping up to the SEO plate today? Continue reading →

Top Ranking Delivers a Competitive Advantage but Now you Need to Maintain Your Lead

We touched on developing a Competitive Advantage using SEO last month, however for many Rankpay clients, top ranking has already been achieved so what happens next? Do they stop using SEO services? Rest on their laurels? What happens if they do quit using good SEO strategies? Continue reading →

Link building is one of the most vital SEO tasks which exist – you’ll hear and read about this all over the net and SEO practitioner’s will tell you the same thing again and again. Without a successful link building program in place, you are not going to gain high search engine rankings, or the profitable traffic which will come pouring through the virtual doors to your website. Continue reading →

The major factor in gaining high search engine rankings is your content, but Google and Bing cannot “read” images or photographs which are a major content component. Search engine bots are so “stupid” they cannot even read text placed in an image, so the problem is your photographs and images are not contributing to your search engine rank.

Still, your website images can improve search engine rankings if you know how to enable the search engines to “read” them. This is because of the web coding which is associated with them (we dealt with optimizing your website with the web coding in a previous post). Continue reading →

The fanfare has barely died down from the launch of Google Instant Search and many people in the crowd are busy scratching their heads over what the Google Doodle still means. Google has a history of changing its opening screen doodle, usually to celebrate a holiday or anniversary, but yesterday a set of psychotic balls with a mouse phobia jumped around the screen until they settled back into the familiar Google logo.

The “Big News” is Instant Search, and when the head scratching subsides on the juggling balls, the real questions will need to be asked. Continue reading →

Google reports that in 2009, 50% of new internet connections originated from cell phones –  the mobile internet has finally arrived!  Mobile and local search has become big business and cannot be ignored by web site owners; Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are all pouring huge sums of money into local search because this is a natural adjunct to mobile internet access.  Google’s research also shows that as mobile internet speeds get faster, web browsing using a cell phone becomes more common and the trend is clear – mobile internet connections and use are increasing at an exponential rate.
Continue reading →

Automating SEO tasks can have a seriously damaging impact on your SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Position), but at the same time, there is also a great deal about SEO work which is already automated.  The real question is not whether automated SEO damages your SERPs, but what aspects can be automated and what cannot.

Where Can Automation be Used?

There are a number of areas where SEO automation has its place, and indeed, without it we’d all be floundering.  Keyword research relies heavily on automated tools to research and find appropriate keywords; Google and many other search engines provide automated resources to perform just this task.

Site analysis also relies heavily on automated SEO tools as does many of the testing resources which are commonly used.  Multivariate or split A/B testing would be next to impossible without automated resources.  Combing through PPC (Pay-Per-Click) reports and masses of data, produced from traffic and marketing data capture tools, would not be capable of rendering any useful information without software tools to help interpret it all.

SEO experts will say that content is king, but how do you get that content out into the web world?  Article submission to article and directory sites is one way of dispersing your message, and while you need a human being to manage the process, a great deal of the work is automated.
Continue reading →

Google has been collecting and storing users personal search histories going back for the previous 180 days; until December 2009 only signed in Google users had this feature enabled, but now we all do (unless we disable it).
Google says: this delivers search results tailored to your own tastes which are determined from what you have been searching for, and sites you have been visiting, in the last 6 months.  If you are into dinosaurs, then when you search for “raptor” you are less likely to get search results based on the USAF fighter plane and more on the Jurassic Park theme.  If you search for wines a lot, then typing in Bordeaux will get you more results aimed at the drink and not the French town.
Is this really a good step forward for Google? Continue reading →

SEO techniques are broadly divided into on-site and off-site categories: off-site SEO deals with the techniques and strategies used away from your site, such as building links from other websites to yours. On-site SEO covers anything which has to do with optimizing your website itself to promote the site in search engines, and as such, it is firmly within your control.  After all, you own the site and have full access and discretion over what is on the site and how the back-end is set up. Continue reading →