Articles by topic: SEO blog

New Google Webmaster Tools interface

A lot of you  may have noticed the “We’re changing - check out our new look” link when you sign into your Google Webmaster Tools (or GWT to those in the know!).  Google have decided it is time for a Spring update and have been busy working on a new user interface.  A lot of the new features are mentioned in the video (see above), but some of our favourites include:

  • Improved Dashboard
  • Grouping sections together onto the same page for easy reference
  • More information on inbound links
  • More information on internal links
  • Easier / improved usability on functionality

I look forward to seeing the finished version later this year, and also everyone else’s reaction to the updates.

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The importance of SEO and online marketing

During a client meeting today, I was suprised when one of our more ‘technical savvy’ clients said they didn’t know what SEO (search engine optimisation) was. Maybe when you become so engrossed in the minor details of a skill like SEO, and speak daily to 100’s of experts worldwide, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of people simply haven’t heard of search engine optimisation. More importantly perhaps, is that they don’t know the potential benefits!

So I talked more with the client, and discovered that they had a website which was getting direct traffic, only from people that knew of the company (as such they were averaging around 1-2 hits per day). I explained proper keyword analysis and optimisation, and the difference in traffic between being ranked in the top 3 and being on the second page of Google SERPs for these keywords. At this point their interest in the subject had increased, but they still didn’t fully see the advantage to additional traffic. This is because they currently didn’t get any business through their website, and had it simply because they felt they needed to because they were a professional company. This then lead to a much more interesting conversation around developing an online strategy for their business, but at the end of the meeting I realised I assume a certain level of knowledge for most clients which they don’t have. Don’t get me wrong, these guys are super intelligent in their own field but just haven’t been exposed to SEO and online marketing before.

After the meeting they talked briefly about marketing budgets and possibly replacing traditional methods with online marketing based on it’s effectiveness. Some people may find this surprising, but I actually completely disagreed with this approach. Online marketing shouldn’t replace traditional methods, in fact, it should compliment it. Online marketing can be much more cost effective and is very easy to measure it’s effectiveness and ROI, and during difficult times like a recession, a lot more people have been choosing it invest in it. However, it should play a large part of your overall marketing strategy. I would not recommend using only traditional online or traditional marketing techniques on their own, because you will be using an incomplete strategy.

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The dangers of buying links

I get a lot of emails from companies wishing to partner with Elevator SEO, or offering their services as an outsource - normally at a very cheap price. A lot of these companies are based overseas, and their offering is almost always the same. They offer to write blogs, register domains with directories and you can buy links to your domain in the 1000’s for a very small monthly investment. Because of this, it’s easy to see why inexperienced companies who know ‘a bit of SEO’ and decide to do it themselves can make mistakes (see our article on DIY SEO). Also, companies claiming to be SEO consultants outsource to these companies to maximise profit, again in most cases this is through inexperience.

Some specialist broker websites allow you to purchase temporary inbound links to your website at a monthly cost.  As soon as you stop paying for the links, they are then removed.  This has been an acceptable practice for many years with some SEO companies, although it has always been frowned upon, as it really defies the purpose of the link.  A lot of the links that get purchased all come from the same server, the sites look very similar and often have just simple colour changes to the site design, and are created with the simple purpose of linking to other sites. In a worst case scenario, some of the links may even originate from ‘link farms’.

Google is cracking down even more on sites that purchase inbound links to raise their rankings. Google knows if a website has an unnatural spike in links to a domain, and in some cases websites have been heavily penalised for this. Additionally, it also knows which sites are known link providers and the algorithm will be looking more closely at purchased links. Because of this crack down, some websites may find that their rankings drop suddenly in the not so distant future. Additionally, a lot of SEO companies may find that a lot of their clients may also start dropping out of the rankings!

Buying links is not the only way to get good inbound links. There are lots of good strategies you can employ to build inbound links naturally. To find out more, why not contact Elevator?

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Tweets and tweeting shouldn’t substitute good content

Before I write this post, I must stress that I do actually like Twitter (can you see where this is going?). However, today I have must have been on about 5 different websites that have integrated Twitter and have a huge archive of their Twitter posts (or ‘Tweets’) on their homepage. As such, I had absolutely no idea what the purpose of their site was about until I clicked on through to different pages. The homepage content, which is so important from both a usability and Search Engine Optimisation perspective is now a collection of tweets, general ramblings and in some cases, just garbled messages and API key messages from Twitter.

I can see the benefit of integrating Twitter into a website, but I think it should have a section of it’s own, or at the most be simply part of the blogroll. Having it as the main content of the homepage may confuse many visitors or simply turn them away from the page which will increase bounce rate and lower the site conversions, which seem to heavily out weigh the advantages of constantly updated content.

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Wolfram set for May 2009 release

wolfram
Stephen Wolfram (pictured) believes that his new search engine could be as important as Google

Wolfram is a new eagerly awaited search engine, that has been promising to be ‘as important as Google’ and is set for a May 2009 release. It is one of the research developments of the company ‘Wolfram Research’, named after it’s founder Stephen Wolfram (a British born scientist). The alpha version of the search engine (or knowledge engine) is available from the following link:

Wolfram Alpha 

So what’s so different about Wolfram compared to all the other search engines out there? Well there is certainly a lot of search engines out there, but Wolfram is very different from what currently exists. Wolfram claims that this system can understand questions given to it by a human user, and then actually compute an answer. This is very different to how search engines currently work, which is by referencing search terms against web pages saved in their index, and then displaying them for you ranked in their chosen order of importance. Wolfram said,

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that. I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

Wolfram claims that by using extensive and extremely complicated algorithms and techniques, they have devised a method to “curate all data” from the millions of available web pages so that it is immediately computable. Then, in order to interact with the system they have started devising a system that can handle and understand natural language.

Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.

Wolfram believes that with combined efforts of human experts they have made a breakthrough into actually making it work. The first stage of the process “Wolfram alpha” is released in May 2009, although Wolfram says that it is a project that will never end. It will be very interesting to see how it is used in the early stages, and could signal a new way of using the web.

I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web. That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!
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