google SEO
Like JR the Meta Keyword Tag is back!
Posted By Sam,
September 20th, 2012
About 6 years ago I came across a local Estate Agent site that was painfully slow. It was awful. Finally it loaded but had very little content on view. I looked at the source code and saw that it had over 10,000 keywords forced into the Meta-keyword tag.
Now if there is one thing that even the most amateur SEO knows, that is the Meta Keyword tag is useless. Many have suspected so for ages, then Google admitted it itself a few years ago.
Due to over-use and spammy behaviour, such as that Estate Agent, Google stopped even looking at it. It’s pointless, a waste of time and a waste of space.
But now, like JR, Bobby Ewing and Cliff Barnes, it’s back – but with a bit of a facelift and on a different channel. (more…)
Focussed Data and Insight – The Foundations of a Competitive Advantage
Posted By Garry,
September 6th, 2012
The key to unlocking a powerful strategy is to ask a simple question: what is our competitive advantage?
As Jack Wech once notably stated, “if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” If you know your competitive advantage then you are aware of how the company can compete and make money. Today, companies have the opportunity to generate a vast amount of data but much of it is stored away for later retrieval (that somehow doesn’t happen). When it does, there is a shocking lack of desire to work at revealing insights that will provide them with a strong competitive advantage.
In a recent survey by McKinsey, only 35% of 2,135 global executives believed that their strategies rested on unique and powerful insights. In addition, only 14% of executives surveyed placed novel insights among the top three strategic influencers of financial performance. McKinsey offered that one likely reason was that widespread availability of information and the adoption of similar sophisticated strategy frameworks create the impression that “everyone knows what we know and is probably analyzing the data in the same way that we are.” (more…)
Google puts itself in position 1 of SERPS for “credit cards” and “bank accounts”
Posted By Sam,
August 29th, 2012
Search for ‘bank accounts’ or indeed ‘credit cards’ or even ‘best bank’, some of the most lucrative and therefore competitive search terms around, and you will see that Google has displaced the normal natural search results for an Ad-box of its own, paid-for results. Click on this ad-box and it take you to a Google comparison site where the content is streamed by getthatquote.com
Previously if you searched for ‘credit cards’ or ‘bank accounts’ in Google you would get two ads above the organic content and 8 or so ads to the right of your page. As seen in the example below for “Insurance”. (more…)
Natural Search accounts for 94% of Search Engine clicks, PPC 6%
Posted By Sam,
August 28th, 2012
With further proof that successful natural search is the overwhelming method of attracting users to your website, a recent unprecedented study has claimed that Paid search or PPC only accounts for 6% of total successful clicks from search engines, against natural search which accounts for the remaining 94% of clicks.
The research, compiled by GroupM UK and carried out with Nielsen’s statistics, stated that of the 1.4bn successful search queries in UK search engines in June 2012, the vast majority clicked on natural search results as opposed to PPC. (more…)
Weather Patterns = Search Patterns = Spending Patterns
Posted By Sam,
July 11th, 2012
Due to the weather, the Brighton deckchair salesman has said it has been his worst year in 20 years.
We are told that the UK is one of the trickiest countries in the world to predict the weather. But if you think it’s hard being a weatherman predicting the next three days’ outcome, imagine what it’s like for a British retailer to predict spending patterns months in advance on an island that can have heat-waves in March, floods in August and droughts in December.
The weather is fickle and therefore so are our spending patterns. But how much does the weather impact on our online search patterns and therefore our spending? (more…)
Google Penguin Winners and Losers
Posted By Daniel,
May 17th, 2012
It has been spoken about for a long time: searchers and web optimisers alike have been longing for an algorithm update to clear out the spammy, single themed websites built on bulk links with little authority.
Google’s print advertising – should we believe it?
Posted By Sam,
December 13th, 2011
Google has spent a lot of money in the past few weeks on full page spreads and banner ads in many online and offline newspapers extolling the virtues or the search engine, localised search and security. Google’s latest print and banner ads reminded us of some of the flaws in the Google localisation search results. (more…)
How often does Google change its SERPS – search results?
Posted By Sam,
May 18th, 2009
Someone wrote in a business blog I read earlier “Has Google changed its SERP results, I’m no longer number one, has anyone else noticed a change?” Which made me laugh. Then it made me think, how often does Google change its SERPS? (more…)
Google gets better. Search Engine reads Flash
Posted By Sam,
May 6th, 2009
12 months ago the Search Engine Google was indexing flash pages as individual swf files allowing users to click through to parts of websites often delivering an out-of-context experience – basically it wasn’t good for flash developers and definitely not the user. (more…)
SEO Copywriting – The Facts
Posted By Sam,
March 23rd, 2009
SEO Copywriting and content development is the key to producing a high quality website and one that is searched for by Google and enjoyed by humans. (more…)