by Dave Foy on March 2, 2011
It’s the age old story all over again. Site owners create sites, try to do what they can, maybe they even read Google’s webmaster guidelines. Everything seems to be working for a while. They get comfortable even. Happy. Ecstatic as the money rolls in.
Then Google takes action against spammers or against some other perceived problematic aspect of their SERPs. And inevitably, some of those otherwise innocent site owners watch as their sites take a nose dive. Money lost. Hearts broken. Chaos ensues…
via The Farmer Update Harmed Codependent Site Owners.
It’s a now age-old, oft-repeating story. Google makes a significant change to their ranking algorithm, rankings fluctuate wildly, search engine professionals whip themselves up into a tizz…
We’ve avoided commenting on the ‘Farmer’ algorithm update, mostly because it’s impossible to really see the effects until the changes have taken hold and settled. No point in speculating.
For our own internal project sites and our clients’ sites, nothing appears to have really changed (except a few have seen significant ranking increases—but that may well just be due to the work we’ve been doing).
However, we have heard from a few friends, particularly with e-commerce stores, that rankings appear to have been hit pretty badly. Our speculation: because this algorithm change targeted content rather than backlink sources, stores using the standard manufacturer’s product descriptions have been dropped like a stone. These product descriptions will appear on thousands of other e-commerce stores selling the same products, so sites bearing the same content could be seen by Google as holding less worth for search engine users.
Whatever the reason, it does appear that many perfectly innocent sites have been affected. The Farmer Update Harmed Codependent Site Owners is a great article that looks at this in more depth. Worth a read.
by Dave Foy on February 25, 2011
Today is the day I wave goodbye for 3 months to my esteemed business partner, good friend and one half of Woof, Mr Gareth Hanson.
He’s heading off to live in Singapore for a while due to his girlfriend heading out to work there. I’d love to say he’s busy setting up the Woof Singapore office, but that wouldn’t quite be true…
In any case, one half of Woof will be missed! Thanks to the wonders of email and Skype, it’ll be pretty much business as usual for the next 3 months anyway, we’ll just be catching up at opposite ends of the working day.
London, New York, Paris, Munich, Singapore, errr… Hull!
by Dave Foy on February 4, 2011
Late last year Nielsen predicted that smart phones will be the dominant device by the end of 2011, so there’s certainly a reason to be taking this area more seriously.
via Smart Insights Digital Marketing.
If you’ve been wondering about QR codes, there’s a great article here from Smart Insights explaining what they are, how and when you should use them.
by Dave Foy on February 1, 2011
Today, search engines are getting smarter and distinguish different kinds of links and their relative value. So the low hanging fruit like link exchange or second-tier directories will not help you much in terms of ranking. You need high-quality links from relevant pages. And here, you need your writing skills again. The best link building methods are all about writing.
via SEO Is a Writer’s Profession Now | Search Engine Journal.
Absolutely spot on.
No hidden secret ‘method’ is going to bring sterling results in SEO and online marketing these days except sitting your behind in the chair and writing and communicating with your audience.
Sure, there are ways of ‘leveraging’ your time and efforts, and a good keyword focus is always a good idea. But keeping a blog, writing articles, answering questions, being active in your market—all these are the ‘secrets’ of online marketing success.
by Dave Foy on February 1, 2011
This beauty of a post by Ian Lurie is so true, it hurts:
Internet marketing in under 300 words.
Show up. Communicate. Connect.
No tricks. It’s true. And most people simply don’t do this.
by Dave Foy on January 31, 2011
What exactly you put into your title ultimately depends on what you decide is best — not what I personally think is best, not what John Gruber personally thinks is best. No one will know your site and your visitors better than you (assuming you’re a diligent publisher). Advice can be good, but advice from afar can also lack specific insight.
via Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing.
Most websites could improve their search engine rankings and traffic a fair bit just by improving their title tags across the site. Not only will a well-written title tag increase the chances of ranking well for a given keyword, but search engine users will be more likely to click through to your site too.
I haven’t seen a more thorough examination of what makes a good title tag than this article over at searchengineland.com. Well worth a read.
by Dave Foy on January 31, 2011
Cracking list of SEO tactics to avoid from SEOMoz here.
We get asked about this sort of thing all the time – whether it’s ok to do this or that, or frowned upon to do something or other. While this list of shame is pretty much common sense, you’d be very surprised at how many times we see people doing these things again, and again, and again…
by Dave Foy on January 26, 2011
Gareth and I are really looking forward to talking at the Hull Digital Developer Group tonight:
http://www.meetup.com/Hull-Digital-Hull-Open-Coffee/calendar/15797272/
Rather than the usual couple of speakers talking for 40 minutes or so each, this one’s a little more novel. There’s an open invitation to anyone to come and talk for 10 minutes each (maximum) about what’s exciting them about the coming year and what they’re working on right now that’s pushing the envelope (for them at least).
While we’re not developers, we’ve so dramatically changed our approach to online marketing these last few months that we eagerly snapped up the invitation to talk about where we’re going, why we’ve changed things around so much, and how our methods can be carried out by anyone (including all you developers rolling out new apps that need promoting!).
Sure we can cram all that into 10 minutes…
If you’re hopping along, see you there! Fudge Cafe, Princes Avenue, Hull, 6:30pm, 26th January 2011.
by Dave Foy on January 18, 2011
Anchor-text rich links are attention markers indicating to search engine spiders what website is best for a user’s search. As a website is linked to more and more, it gains ranking in the SERPs. These links are essentially votes. The incorporation of Social Media into ranking means that anchor-text links are just one way to vote. Now people are able to vote with Facebook likes, tweets, retweets, etc.
via Social Networking and SEO: Why Engaging Boosts Rankings | Search Engine Journal.
Market leadership and engagement with potential customers is absolutely becoming vital to SEO success. It’s good marketing practice anyway (don’t ever rely simply on traditional SEO to drive business) but it’s turning out to be a major factor in ranking too.
We’ve significantly altered and adapted our processes here at Woof to take account of this.
by Dave Foy on January 18, 2011
We hadn’t heard of Google Refine until A.J. Kohn‘s recent post, but I’m very glad we did.
Google Refine is a new downloadable app that makes managing messy data really easy.
Here’s why it’s useful: let’s say you have a long list of potential keywords. You know which of the higher traffic keywords you want to target, but also want to easily spot natural ‘long tail’ versions of these keywords, and quickly see groupings that would lend themselves to being promoted together at the same time.
Google Refine makes it so easy. Check out the post over at Blind Five Year Old for details.
