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How to Set Up Your Staging Site for SEO
If you are running a website, and side-by-side with that is a staging or testing site, it is important to have a strategy that stops your staging site from damaging your SEO efforts. There are a number of ways a staging site can cause you problems with SEO. For one thing, the search engines might find and index your staging site. Worse, it might actually rank better than your main site – especially if you are road testing SEO-focused technical upgrades on the staging site first. Worse still, the search engines might decide to drop the...
read moreIs the Penny Dropping at Yahoo?
I had the pleasure of seeing Carol Bartz present to the IAB last November at the Supercharge Your Brand event in London. As part of her presentation, she discussed how she has raised ad revenues by including third-party advertising on Yahoo’s log-in page. My impression at the time was that if Yahoo thinks that distracting its users with adverts while they log-in is a good idea, then they are doomed. Now Yahoo have sacked Carol Bartz – is that an indication that the penny may have dropped?
read moreAlex Beam Creates A Riot From A Tragedy
I don’t normally stray from writing about search marketing on this blog, but there are other things in my life. One of those, since I grew up in Liverpool in the 70’s and 80’s has been my love for Liverpool FC. On 15th April, 1989, following a breakdown in command by South Yorkshire police, and a catastrophic chain of planning mistakes and poor stadium design, 96 Liverpool fans from around the UK were crushed to death by sheer weight of numbers, in a disaster similar to those at the Roskilde music festival in June, 2000...
read moreLatent Dirichlet Allocation v Latent Semantic Indexing
Well, this has certainly been a remarkably debate-ridden week in the world of search. Not only have we had the death of SEO (or not, actually, if have half a brain or more!) caused by Google Instant, but also the principle of latent Dirichlet allocation has been thrust into the awareness (if not always the understanding) of the SEO community by Ben Hedrickson at SEOMoz. However, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a fairly advanced statistical concept, using complex probability maths. If you have a mathematically inclined brain, and...
read more‘Will Google Instant kill SEO, ’or ‘how to read through the nonsense’?
The has been a considerable amount of nonsense sprouted over the last few hours about the impending doom of search engine optimisation as a viable service in the wake of the roll-out of Google Instant. Naysayers claim that search engine optimisation is irrelevant now, or that the long-tail is dead. But I couldn’t disagree more. First of all, search engine optimisation is not dead. Google Instant does not change how Google crawls, indexes or ranks a website – the primary reasons for undertaking search engine optimisation in the first...
read moreMore Reasons Your Website is Failing
Last week I posted a couple of articles based on an excellent post by Ian Lurie at Conversion Marketing. Here are some more of its points, in just a little more detail. Using the Free Tools Effectively Search engines give you a remarkable array of tools to help you understand how people use your website, and how well search engines can index it. These tools include: Google Webmaster Tools Yahoo Site Explorer Bing Webmaster Tools Google Analytics Each of the above should be used in conjuction with the other three. The first three tell you a...
read moreWhy Your Website is Still Failing
Yesterday, I posted about a blog post from Conversion Marketing, listing the 59 things you should be doing but probably aren’t. I thought it was a great list but could do with a bit of expansion on why you should be doing those 59 things (and how to do them right!). Yesterday, I wrote about the first few in the list. Today, I’m going to cover a few more of the issues Ian discussed in his post. First of all, error pages. Get Your Errors Right! From time-to-time, every website has an error. Whether you’ve got a typo in...
read moreThe First Three Reasons Your Website is Failing!
I’ve just been revisiting some great older blog posts on some other sites, to give myself a bit of a nostagic overview of SEO. While doing so, I re-read this one from Ian Lurie at Conversion Marketing, so I thought I’d share it all with you and cover some of the points he makes in a bit more detail. First of all I guess I should say that I agree with every point he makes, although some of the content of the points have changed slightly in the context of what has happened in the SEO marketplace since Ian posted this. So for now,...
read moreUsing JavaScript Effectively
I just read yet another misleading article from yet another “leading” SEO writer explaing why JavaScript is bad for your navigation. And yet again (yawn) it showed a complete lack of understanding of the capabilities of search engines (quite aside from the fact that Google understands some aspects of JavaScript now, but that’s another story). The essense of the piece I read was that if you use JavaScript to “pop-up” sub-menus, then your site navigation won’t be indexed by search engines. You’ve...
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