Wasted Text Links

Take a look at this PR 5 page. You reckon Google crawl this page often? Hmm. I reckon so:

http://www.blogger.com/changes10.g

I know blogging's about 'having a voice' and not necessarily SEO, but you gotta think that a key word specific post title is going to separate the wheat from the chaff in this case.

Check it out - over 11000 blogs updated in the last 10 minutes - lol - what was that about competition?

PS - Check out the major faux par on my part - Post title - 'Wasted Text Links' good job I'm not hoping to rank well for 'SEO' lol.

Tune of the Day: Foo Fighters - Everlong

Sorry . . . on one tonight, must be 'First night back at the laptop syndrome'. Here's a serious rock-n-roll track to get the SEO community moving:

Foo Fighters: Everlong

I've Just Been on Coronation Street

I am now actually famous!

Bad PR Good for Serps?

We all know the saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity" - well I guess that goes for the search engines too.

With so much emphasis seemingly placed on back links these days, no wonder 'bad' publicity is paying dividends in the serps.

Take Northern Rock for example, I've noticed a particular page steadily climbing the rankings in a ridiculously competitive market. In fact, just in the last couple of weeks they've moved into the more stable top 4 position (in Google).

For those of you not familiar with Northern Rock, they're the UK's primary example of the 'credit crunch crisis' losing millions (if not billions) in market value over a few days.

It seems all those inevitable back links are paying off in some weird way and driving pages up the rankings!

Maybe someone should issue a warning to those journo's - take care with link love - it can resurrect a business!!! No worries though, if Mr Branson (of Virgin fame) finally gets his way, at least he'll inherit a well linked website :)

Good luck to all those at Northern Rock, we know it was a tough 2007, but we English love an underdog and can't wait to see you come back from the near dead!

Can't Beat That Cheeky No.1 Feeling!

I know it's not the most competitive phrase in the universe, but this one's been a labour of love. Floating around the top 5 for the last few months we finally clinched the No.1 spot! Guess we'll be spending a few less $ on PPC! A lovely Christmas treat ;)

Happy Christmas

I always try to take a little time off at Christmas and just popped on the laptop to check emails and stats.

Thinking back, strangely I've not done any shopping online this Christmas . . . that's quite bizarre really. Last year I bought ALL my Christmas shopping online. Hmmm.

Anyway, back soon, off to catch some egg nog. Tally ho! Merry Christmas to one and all!

Moving On, Moving Up, Climbing the SEO Career Ladder

Today's my last day with my present employer. I've really enjoyed my time here as the in house New Media Exec, and I feel we've achieved so much in the last year or so. It's time for me to move on however. . . and I've been lucky enough to get the opportunity to move into a more senior role where I'm able to use my SEO skills to generate massive revenues in the b2c market.

More or my new role later . . . but for now I just wanted to put down in words exactly what we've done here and how it's helped in achieving the companies goals:

New Media Exec - What have I been doing?
Essentially I've been handling everything digital that we do in house. Here's the story to date:

• First thing we did was implement a total re haul of the company website including full SEO
• Then we took the site live and saw an immediate return in the SERPs. Long tail top 10s came first, swiftly followed by our main key terms
• We doubled traffic almost overnight as Google kindly indexed the new pages withing just a few days
• The site started generating leads immediately via white paper downloads, contact forms & incoming enquiries
• We started strategically building links to compliment those that came from PR activity
• Next up, we got the PPC campaigns running across Adwords, Yahoo, MSN & Miva - we set up, measured, tweaked, measured, tweaked . . . we generated more leads :)
• After that we concentrated on email marketing and took a good look at what was happening there. We found a decent email package and got cracking!
• We got into web analytics and started to see how well the long-tail was working for us - so we added some more long tail content - it did the business and started generating more pre-qualified leads
• Then we re-evaluated the PPC, re-jigged our accounts and doubled the clicks we were originally getting for our money
• Then we got acquired, we had to hire another NME and we had a team :)
• So we started work on our acquirers site - we generated tons of leads for them, and their new site is going live in Jan 08

Quite a time really! I've learned a lot about SEO and online marketing in general, but I've learned one thing more than anything else:

Business is about making money, and well executed internet marketing can make lots of it!

In the 12 months since the site went live we generated:

• Over 1800 online leads and enquiries
• Over 600 product demonstrations and seminar registrations
• Put over £750K of sales in the pipeline (bare in mind the company turnover is only £4mil)

All that with a PPC spend of £24k and my salary. . . I'm not stupid enough to think that it was all my own doing, I've had a lot of help from a lot of very helpful and patient people. This really has been a team effort with everyone in the marketing team pulling in to support the online effort.

Anyway, I've learned a lot, made a lot of good friends and I'm looking forward to moving on and making a difference somewhere else :)

Importance of the Long Tail in B2B SEO

Here's a real business example of how important the long tail search can be to your company. I've changed the keywords that actually delivered the success, but the principle could be the same across a number of b2b markets.

Top Level Phrase "HR Software" delivers 100's visitors a week but the quality of traffic varies enormously and it doesn't deliver that many qualifiable leads.

Long Tail Phrase "Integrate HR software with SAP" delivered 1 visitor. This visitor called the office to arrange an immediate meeting with his project team and there is a £100K opportunity in the pipeline as we speak.

This isn't a one-off. The site in question receives numerous direct enquiries as a result of 100's of long tail search phrases we built into the site.

So there you go . . . if you wanted to know if the long tail is worth anything . . . it was in this case . . . to the possible tune of £100k.

Rock n Roll SEO Tune of the Day - Embrace - Good Will Out

Embrace - Good Will Out (1998)
A perfect tune for writing title, description and keyword tags to.

Make Money through your Social Nework with eenoeBUZZ

Make Money through your Social Nework with eenoeBUZZ

I'm trying to get a database of Social Nework users together so I can start creating 'BUZZ' campaigns for some local clients because I think that Social Media promotion can be a fantastic addition to the traditional sales promotion techniques.

Just the other day I met a guy (well an 18 year old) who was using his own social network contacts to promote his local bars and clubs . . . and it seems it was a nice little earner for him . . . at least in the way of free beer! He said the clubs he helped experienced additional sales of up to 5k a night through the distribution of an online flyer.

So I've set this up alongside my existing personal shopping brand and am trying to entice people to sign up to make money through their facebook network through eenoeBUZZ.

It's a pretty simple concept - build a database of social networkers who are prepared to promote the odd product or brand, then charge brands a campaign fee for utilising the my network. The social networkers then get a nice reward (cash, voucher, product, other) for their hard work :)

I'd love it if you'd sign up, and better still contact me if there's an opportunity to work together:

Find out more:
http://www.eenoe.co.uk/BUZZ
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21185896920

Thank you Links - 18.12.07

I'm a firm believer in good link karma, meaning what goes around comes around. And wherever possible I like to give people (or companies) who deserve it a bit of link love in a special post. Don't get me wrong - I always try to thank in other ways too, but a little weblink is my own little extra :)

Today there are 3 people I'd like to thank:

1st Up - MacMillan Cancer Care
My mum officially finished her cancer treatment today and I'd like to say a massive thank you to all those at MacMillan who take time out of their own precious lives to make the world a happier for cancer patients like my mum. Without cancer care like this, the world would be a sorry place.

2nd Up - Fujifilm Digital Cameras
Big thanks to Fujifilm who unexpectedly delivered my Wife a brand spanking new digital camera this morning after she won a fab competition with them - cheers guys :)

3rd UP - RW Electricians of Preston
There's no site there yet, but they'll be developing it soon and I just wanted to say thanks to Rob for the jump start he gave our car the other morning. Cheers Rob!

Link Building Ideas

Link Building Ideas

I love it when fellow SEOs put detailed lists together. They always spark the imagination or remind me of ideas I've had before . . . they also give me a kick up the bum and get me moving with totally new techniques and strategies. This is a link building resource list that I'm going to keep adding to so keep posted to it.

1st up is Tyler Dewitt's - The Best known ways to build links, and traffic 2007 - added 18.12.07
Go get stuk in to these fab link-building techniques and ideas!!!

Search Stability - A Competitive Measure?

Search Stability - A Competitive Measure?

Like most SEO's I'm always trying to further understand the SERPS more thoroughly, and as a result of this I'm trying to develop new tools to help me understand what's going on in a particular search niche.

Search Stability is one notion I'm currently working with - essentially i'm trying to see if there is an overlying trend in particular search results, and whether that differs from niche to niche - the theory being that:

1 - A 'stable' niche could be more difficult to break into & 2 - An 'unstable' niche would be more difficult to rank and remain for.

Now, I've only just started this, and I have no idea what I might (or might not find) but I'm going to transfer this model across various niches and see what results come back:

• Are some niches more stable than others?


• What causes stability & instability?


• Are Umbrella terms less stable than the long-tail due to increased competition?


• Are more competitive niches generally stable or unstable?

First Sightings:
I know the graphs above aren't that clear but if you look closely you'll see that the top 4 positions in each niche (mortgage, debt consolidation, credit card, home insurance) are the most stable positions in the top 10!

Competitive Measure?
I'm not sure yet whethere this can be used as a competitive measure, but I suppose at the very least this type of chart could indicate entry barriers at the start of a particular campaign.

Anyway, I'm going to carry on with this research and see where it gets me . . . I'll report back when I get chance.

Free Ad sites for Link Building

Using Free Ad sites for Link Building Purposes

Coming back to the 'portfolio' approach to link building, here's a few sites that offer the opportunity to get live links back to your website.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that these site's should be abused in anyway, but the odd, well targeted advert with an internal link might provide some useful links and traffic.

Here's a few well indexed 'do follow' UK classified sites:

www.vivastreet.co.uk
www.gumtree.com
www.ukclassifieds.co.uk
www.adzooks.co.uk

The links you get back won't be anchor text, but they should bolster your overall link building campaign :)

Back to Basics SEO - Useful Resources

We all have to start somewhere and there's no better way to learn about SEO than getting stuck in and having a go!

I've worked in various forms of internet marketing & promotion for the last 5 years, but didn't really get into the SEO thing until a couple of years back.

There are two resources which I found really useful from the start:

Bruce Clay - SEO Consultants - http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm
These guys are well regarded in the industry and provide worldwide consultancy to many of the world's leading businesses. Look carefully and you'll see their site is chocca with useful information to teach you both basic & more advanced SEO techniques.

Justsearching - SEO Blog - http://www.justsearching.co.uk/
These guys have a brilliant daily blog with their inhouse search engineers offering a daily SEO tip / advice. Definitely one to get in your feed reader.

There are tons of other sites to use, but these two are a good place to start.

Personal Shopping & Online Shopping

Personal Shopping & Online Shopping

I had this idea for ages about an online personal shopping service where members of the public could ask an online shopping expert to find a particular product or service online. I went right through the idea, even wrote a business plan with some seriously intricate financials and in the end decided that it wasn't really that viable.

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that against my better judgement I found the time to set the site up and use it for a little experiment. My personal shopping site can be found at www.eenoe.co.uk and besides a slow start we're beginning to see a decent quantity of long tail traffic and ensuing product requests.

Key to the experiment is working out the average return per enquiry, which will ultimately decide whether our online personal shopping site becomes a viable business model.

Anyway, for any of you guys who have an interest in consumer searches, you might find the recent online shopping request page useful.

I'll keep you posted.

Buying Ad Pages in Ranked Directories

So we're caught between the devil and the deep blue see when it comes to directory type listings. On one hand you've got those who think it's an absolute waste of time, on the other you've got those who swear by directory listings as part of the overall link building process.

I tend to go with the latter - but with caution! Just listing your site in 100's if not 1000's of directories and not working to build links from other areas is gonna get you nadda. It's the same with all link building, concentrate on a nice steady flow of quality (and maybe the occasional not so quality) links coming back to the site. Think of it as an investment portfolio and never put all your eggs in one basket.

I recently came across a client who'd been using the services of one of the UK's most reputable search agencies, paying them a considerable monthly whack - only to find that nearly ALL the 500+ links they'd built up were directory based. Now that to me seems a little lazy - however owing to the fact that this agency seems to bulk buy directory listing from nearly all the quality directories - I'm kinda thinking that they know what they're doing, and it's not such a bad thing after all.

So what am i saying: I reckon directory listings should be part of an ongoing link building strategy - but I also reckon it's only worth sticking with the handful of well established, human edited directories - and don't bet your last dollar on those link's success!

NB - A few sites I want to check out further and gauge opinions on are:

www.pagerank10.co.uk
top100.org.uk
applegate.co.uk

Are these type of paid pages worth the bother???

Sitewide 301 Redirect

Got a new site going live next week (well new dev - domains been live for 2 years - PR5). Main job tomorrow is the (yawn) creation of a 200+ page sitewide 301 htaccess redirect.

For anyone who isn't familiar, this is a process that helps you pass the pagerank from the old site pages to the pages that have replaced them.

In our case we've totally re-written the page names and re-structured the directories to help the big G distiguish the site sections - so that's a whopping 200+ 301 redirects ;) Nifty!

See how to do a 301 redirect properly here:

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

iSnare - article submission site

$2.00 submission to network - recommended on dp forums. May be worth a punt as author of post said they got several blog writes with backlinks over a 2 week period. Go get em!

Daily, Weekly SEO Tasks

List of daily SEO tasks:

• Record previous days web stats (UV, V, Page Views, Conversions, Traffic Sources, Key Words)
• Record Days serps on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask
• Record to 10 competitor serps on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask

Weekly SEO tasks:

• Compile weekly stats (UV, V, PV, Conv, Traffic Sources, Key Words)
• Top 100 on main Google - daily movement

A Few Desktop Tools I Like to Have on Hand

Here's a list of tools I have on the desktop to keep me on my toes:

• Internet Explorer browser
• Firefox browser
• Opera browser
• Maxthon browser
• Netscape browser
• Dreamweaver
• ARELIS
• Web CEO
• Link Popularity Checker
• Back Link Analyzer
• FTP Surfer

Directory Submission

Not sure whether I consider directory submissions a necessary evil or not but directory submitter is a tool that makes it a lot easier when you want to get down and dirty with those submissions.

http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/acceptance-form

PR & SEO

The very nature of the SEO game means that PR becomes intrinsic to the success of an SEO campaign (especially the link building).

Don't forget though that for SEO purposes - PR is all about attracting a quality link back to your site! More than likely it's going to be a URL based hyperlink such as www.rock-n-roll-seo.blogspot.com, but never the less, these links still count in Page Rank terms.

I just wanted to jot down some quick ideas on online PR that I can refer back to later - here goes:

1 - PR is about QUALITY not quantity - meaning that bobbins, mass distributed sorry attempts at PR writing and distribution will probably lead to crap return on time and investment.

2 - PR Distribution - The world's going mad for PR distribution sites, but realistically, how many quality journalists are going to use those nose bag sites - best just pick the best few sites and stick to em:

• PR.com (suggested by Jenny Mattern at nakedpr.com)
• Sourcewire.com (paid)
• Private Distribution Lists (don't be lazy - build it yourself - it's not difficult)
• Jennifer Mattern's Big List of PR Distribution Sites
• RSS feeds & submissions

Something else to consider: How many of those spammy sites that take PRs from those distribution sites are going to credit your website with a link?

3 - Types of Press Release - So like the legendary Mr Branson we're now looking for as many PR opportunities as possible:

• Research Based Articles
• Company News
• Industry Comment (appoint internal spokespersons to comment on industry news)

4 - Journalists are now touting themselves in SEO - I'm now receiving CV's from trained journalists claiming to be experienced SEO's. A natural progression perhaps?

I'm sure I'll add to this,I'll be doing more and more PR over the coming months so I'm sure I'll learn a lot more.

dapper.net - RSS & Widget Factory

Looks quite interesting, not had chance to look thoroughly yet but looks as though its an automated way to make loads of RSS feeds, widgets & Google Gadgets - will have to have a look later.