Mon, 8 Sep 2008 13:16:36 by Emily Mace
How do you get your travel site to the top when the competition is so strong?
If you run a Travel website, you're not alone! Travel is one of the fastest growing online sectors and new sites are coming online all the time - taking advantage of some of the travel trends taking place worldwide, such as the Olympics.
So how do you use SEO to get your site noticed amongst all the others?
One way to help your site optimise well for search engines, try writing a blog. Writing a regular blog on travel news, trends and ideas for travel visitors will help the relevancy of your site against your targeted keywords. Blogging once a week will also encourage your existing visitors to return to the site. Keyword rich blogs with links to relevant pages on your site will definitely help your SEO.
Keep your blog posts informative and relevant to travellers. Give travel tips, recommendations, suggestions and news about the latest travel tre...Read More.
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Mon, 8 Sep 2008 12:23:45 by James Daniels
It was announced it June that Google and Yahoo had agreed upon a deal where Google would have the rights to sell search and other text ads on Yahoo sites, sharing the revenue generated with Yahoo. Today the deal has been challenged by some of the world’s biggest marketers.
Google currently have a 76.6% share of the search market whilst Yahoo has 17.9% and MSN have just 5.5%. The deal could generate an extra $800 million for Yahoo who were planning to sell their search marketing division to Microsoft but pulled out.
So who would benefit from this deal and is this just another of Google's bullish tactics to take over the world? They've already acquired DoubleClick last year.
James Daniels
PPC Campaign Delivery Manager |
Mon, 8 Sep 2008 10:23:52 by David Thomas
A study collated a few years back showed that in the
electronic and gaming markets over 90% of searchers trawled the net and found
specific product information online, but then bought offline. The trend was to
visit a local store or pick up the phone and purchase.
As a Pay Per Click Campaign delivery Manager this is
one of the biggest hurdles that I come across on a day to day basis. Many
clients have raised concerns regarding a low conversion rate but have been too
busy on the phone with new customers to take a return call and put this down to
nothing more than a busy period. When in reality this surge comes from their
paid search campaign.
Conversions tracked through a pay par click campaign
are usually counted when searchers fill out a form or request a call back etc.
More often than not this is not taken into consideration when creating landing
pages and these calls to action are hidden at the bottom of t...Read More.
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Mon, 8 Sep 2008 08:58:01 by James Daniels
Microsoft is giving away a free month of search ads to both new and current customers. The free ads can be placed on any of Microsoft's Live services including Messenger, Hotmail and the MSN search engine. The reason for this action is to make brands/businesses/agencies realise that MSN can deliver better results than competitors like Google.
MSN may deliver quality results but the quantity is definitely still with Google. Is this a strategic way forward for MSN or just a desperate attempt to gain more custom? Either way the FREE ad incentive is definitely a positive move and will attract the smaller/new businesses with little to no marketing budgets. Maybe Google and Yahoo should do the same. (Wishful thinking)
James DanielsPPC Campaign Delivery Manager...Read More.
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Thu, 4 Sep 2008 12:20:35 by Emily Mace
Now Google Chrome is available I thought I'd follow up on my blog earlier this week about the performance of Google's new browser.
Google's big claim on the launch of their Chrome browser is that it's fast when browsing the web, and it certainly is that. It's a very light browser with none of the normal tool bar options you get in Internet Explorer and Firefox which makes it easier to run however, there's currently no Java plug-in built into the browser and when trying to load a Java plug-in I was told there was no add-on available, so there are limits in the websites you can view with Chrome.
In addition, all of the SEO tools that we use in Firefox, that give great SEO functionality to Firefox aren't available yet. However as Chrome is a Open Source browser I imagine that it won't be long until at least some of these SEO tools are available.
I find the clean interface of Chrome easy to use and the start page that shows recently browsed we...Read More.
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Tue, 2 Sep 2008 12:29:30 by Kerry Dye
Recently, Google made a change to the HTML that displays the search engine results. A side effect was that a lot of the automated ranking checkers broke (as did the autonumbering of search results much to our temporary dismay).
However, an interesting offshoot was the amount of buzz in the blogosphere about whether ranking reports were important or not. Now I’d seen this before - SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin famously commented some time ago that “rank checking is so 1999”.
But it is something that is easy for clients of an SEO company to understand, and generally, something they request. However, ranking reports don’t tell the whole story, and that seems to be the main problem. Here’s a great defence of ranking reports and another, talking about how they are an essential part of the analysis because without them you don’t have the whole story either.
Interestingly, the author of that last link also wrote a couple of great po...Read More.
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Tue, 2 Sep 2008 08:58:55 by Emily Mace
On Monday Google announced that they are launching a new browser called Chrome.
The browser will be available in 100 countries from Tuesday and is billed by Google as being a competitor to both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser will be cross platform working with Windows, Mac and Linux and is the first software release for Linux that Google has released. The developers at Google who have been working on this new browser started with a blank page - looking at what the guys at Google would ideally like a browser to do, having spent so many hours on the internet.
The Chrome browser is aimed at both making the internet easier for user and also to drive innovation on the internet. Designed to be clean and easy to use it's focussed more on the experience of browsing the web. Their tabbed browsing will run each tab as an isolated instance meaning that if a website crashes the browser won't shut down as with IE and Firefox, just that one tab....Read More.
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Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:18:31 by Emily Mace
Many e-commerce website tools now come with SEO add-ons to enable you to make them more SEO friendly but one thing there still seems to be problems with is duplicate content issues.
A number of the e-commerce packages available provide the option to produce HTML versions of the product catalogue on the site, which sound great to many companies as an extra way to promote their products, however this is a great way of duplicating content for every product on the site, so where possible avoid this or if it is pushed then the containing folder could be disallowed in the Robots file to stop Search Engines from crawling these pages and penalising the site.
In addition many e-commerce websites have a http and https site for secure payments. If the https site is crawled and indexed by Search Engines you will also suffer from Duplicate content issues as the https site may not just contain the check out and payment pages but also the rest of the site.
Read More.
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Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:23:10 by Pete Handley
I've worked on lots of sites where I've taken over the SEO from a previous encumbent. The actual SEO techniques that are employed vary from company to company – some do the on-page changes in a similar fashion to how we would do these, others have a very different style.
One frequent (legacy) complaint from clients who have fired their previous optimiser is the poor the communication the relationship suffered from. It often doesn’t matter how good results are achieved in an SEO campaign like this, primarily because the clients don’t appreciate what levels of improvements have been achieved.
This is something that we try really hard to not let happen with our clients. The solution to this is really quite simple – Talk to your customers!
The first conversation that I would normally have with a client isn’t just about looking at the types of keyword that they want to be ranking for. Instead, its about trying to understand the goals...Read More.
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Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:24:18 by Matt Hopkins
We've been asked by a few clients recently for a formula for calculating ROI for their pay per click marketing campaigns.
I've always found that ROI is one of those terms that has been over-used and abused by so many people and as such, there is confusion on how best to calculate it. Personally, I like to use the following formula when we are discussing the ROI for any PPC campaign:
ROI = [Contribution] / [Cost]
So to calculate Contribution for a PPC campaign:
([Your average profit per sale] x [Estimated number of Conversions]) - [PPC Spend]
To demonstrate more fully, let's take the following example:
Monthly PPC Spend: £1,500
Average Profit per Sale: £50
Number of Conversions (Sales) pe...Read More.
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