Geeky But Good: See what happens when Google's parents leave town

See what happens when Google' parents leave little G at home fro a house party.

Fab vid from the guys at cracked.

No time for bloggin'

Oh yeah . . . We're off on one at the moment. I've always had trouble keeping blogs up to date, and I'm not one to spout rubbish for no reason. . .

I'm stuck right in to a massive SEO project, the kind that can have a real impact, and I'm absolutely loving it. We've got a great team, great management behind us and we're really going for it.

At times like this, you have to let some things slip, and sometimes it'd inevitably the blog that has to go.

I'm going to make a concerted effort to get back on to this . . . but remember what those guys at Bruce Clay recently said . . . something along the lines of 'stop wasting time talking about it, just get on and do it!'.

List of Financial Directories

There are some kind people out on those forums. I was looking for a list of Finance Specific Directories and someone very kindly posted this little number for me :)

Finance Specific Directories

Good Link? Bad Link? . . . Ermmm . . . Good Link!!!

Us search engine folk get so wound up about all this linking business it's a wonder we ever get any work done. I came across a post today by a lady who always speaks a lot of sense and it put it all back into perspective for me. In-fact . . . it's exactly the encouragement I needed after a long day of link research and article promotion.

So, more for me than for you, here's a link to that very post so I can hit the ground running first thing tomorrow:

http://searchengineland.com/080114-132615.php

Watch out links! I'm coming to get ya!!!

New Blog - Money Stuff

Just fired up a new finance related blog. I'm not in it for the money (hence no Adsense), just thought it would be fun to see what's going on on the other side of the fence:

http://money-stuff.blogspot.com/ - go get it :)

Debt SEO Research

Just getting into the UK debt market and having a look at what's going on in the serps. Trying to pin down why a couple of sites in particular aren't doing anything. Think it could be a case of 'too much SEO, not enough natural growth'.

We're looking at about 10 debt related terms in total, a couple of nice little sites. Think we'll be working on the content quite a bit, getting some RSS going and updating the content regularly.

Been checking out Google trends quite a lot, seems there a clear difference between the UK market in that 'debt management' seems to be a lot more popular than 'debt consolidation'. Closely followed by 'debt advice', 'debt help' & 'debt solutions'.

I wonder if this signifies a larger trend in the US to go for a remo rather than tackling the debt head on with a debt management plan?

Tune of the Day: Radiohead - Creep

Radiohead - Creep

Yippee 2 Weeks & Indexed - PR1

I have to confess - I'm not really one to go in for this PR malarkey (as in getting all het up about it). Yes, it's important to get some green but we shouldn't let our whole SEO ethos revolve around it. (Should we?)

Er herm . . . so why the hell am I getting excited over indexation and PR1? Well, it's because I tried something new on the SEO front and it seemed to have worked. True . . . it may never work again . . . but then that's the way the SEO game goes ;)

Just thought it was worth a mention.

In House SEO: Get in First

Just came across this post by another in-house SEO person. Some excellent points made and well worth a read. I'm not really in to blogging off other peoples posts - so just get over there and read it:

Where SEO Belongs in the Website Development Cycle

Food Testing Top 10

Please to say that within 3 days of the new design going live our 'food testing' site has gone top 10. The site hadn't been crawled by Googlebot since October, so I'm pleased to see how quick the sitemap ping and couple of links we dropped took effect.

Okay . . . so we'll expect to see some flux, but we'll keep going forward and hopefully go top 10 across the board . . . eventually :)

Iggle Piggle Done Good this Christmas

Some may see this as a little bizarre, but this Christmas was my first foray into the world of Affiliate marketing. Sure, I'm well familiar with the industry, how it works and what it's all about, but I've never bothered trying to make any money out of it.

Anyway, with a little help from my good friend Iggle Piggle i've had a bash! With my 'experimental' site eenoe, I got started and got some quick ranking in the Serps for various terms:

Radley Handbags
In the night garden
Singing Iggle Piggle
Pink GHD Hair Straighteners

It's been fun, and I DID make a little bit of pocket money, but unfortunately there was a problem.

Unbeknown to me - Iggle Piggle was out of stock everywhere in the country - so none of my bloody affiliates could honour a sale - all that hard work gone to waste :( Many 100's of UV's came straight through eenoe only to find we couldn't actually give them what they wanted.

Lesson learned? - Only SEO for products your merchants can deliver!

Alas it now seems we've been sandboxed, so I'm making squat anyway - lol

Food Testing & Laboratory Services SEO

Just a favor for a friend I'm doing some basic SEO on their Food Testing & Laboratory Analysis website.

They've done nothing for at least 6 years so I rattled up a quick look and feel plus some new copy to see if we could get some Google love.

As we went live, the only listing they had was for 'food testing' in Google and that stood at No. 12. Now let's see if the new design & structure has a positive impact on that . . .

And yes . . . I know there's lots of work still to be done - but a favor's a favor - and I'm a busy boy :)

Quick Site Map:

Food Testing & Laboratory Analysis
Microbiological Laboratory Analysis
Chemical Laboratory Analysis
Nutritional Laboratory Analysis
LIMS

Link Building Prompts

Yeah, yeah we get it . . . paid links are bad! Of course they are! They manipulate the organic serps and jeopardise the relevancy of results (which let's not forget is why Google have 80% plus search share in the UK).

Anyway - we still have to network with other websites and try to build cross content and back links - that's just the way it goes. So as long as we're not breaking the rules what could we do to get other webmaster's on our side:

• Offer bespoke content?
• Offer prizes as incentives for requesting/using content?
• Build dedicated content resources for other webmasters?
• Offer reciprocal links in a stand alone, industry specific directory?
• What else?

Any other ideas?

SEO Track of the Day: The Enemy - Had Enough

Getting down to a serious stint of CKF and search scape analysis on a new market, I really needed a quality tune to kick me off. I must have listened to 'Had Enough' by 'The Enemy' about 20 times today. Good times!

Competitor Keyword Frequency - Assessing a New Search Scape

When you take on a new project trying to assess the search scape for a particular industry can be a daunting task. I found myself in this situation today. Thrown right in at the deep end, I've got a seriously competitive market to get to grips with, and not so much time to do it in.

There are a few different methods I'll use to find my way around (many of which you'll know about already), but there's on I thought I'd share as I developed it myself and you might find it useful.

Competitor Keyword Frequency

The competitor keyword frequency tool is a simple spreadsheet which I use to identify the leading websites across a competing set of keywords (the same keyword set I intend to target myself) in a particular industry.

Once identified, I can take the top 10-15 sites and dissect them bit by bit to get a clearer picture of how the particular search scape is working.

This is how it works:

1 - Open up your favourite spreadsheet package and divide like so:

COLUMN A - sites
This is where you'll list the domains of the top 20 sites for each keyword.

COLUMN B onwards

In the following columns you'll need 2 columns per keyword. One entitled 'position' and one entitled 'points'. It should look something like the picture below.

2 - Decide on your keywords (I tend to go with five or six, one & two word umbrella key words) and then transfer the top 20 results into the spreadsheet.

3 - Against each result state it's position (1-20) and distribute the points (position 1 scores 20 points, position 2 scores 19 points, position 3 scores 18 points and so on)

4 - Once you've assigned points and positions by keyword, sort the spreadsheet alphabetically by site and transfer all the position & point details so that any pages with listings across multiple key words are copied onto the same row in the spreadsheet.

5 - After sorting the rows so there is only one row per page, add up all the points for each page across the whole keyword set.

6 - Those with the highest scores are the sites who are most successful across your chosen keyword set, and the ones you probably want to take an extra special look at.

I hope that all makes sense, it's really more for my own records than anyone else's, but if you can use it and you find it useful, please feel free to try it :)