Search Engine Marketing & SEO Blog

Recently I’ve read one of those awfully misguided anti-SEO posts. It linked to another blog post called SEO FAQ. It wasn’t an actual SEO FAQ though. It was just another awfully misguided blog post from a guy I have never heard of before and who only reveled in the attention he got from displaying his ignorance. People got angry as usual in such cases of blatant provocation and disregard.

Sadly the Google algorithm still sometimes prefers those who raise hell instead of those who provide useful resources.

So that completely useless SEO FAQ ranks at #2 for SEO FAQ in Google.com and misleads lots of people looking for answers to most basic SEO questions.

Thus I decided to provide a new SEO FAQ. I want to outrank this fake resource. Also I want you to copy these questions and to provide your own answers on your own blog.
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Image: Happy Beaver by stevehdc.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Yesterday many people on Twitter cried out in outrage about a misled tweet from @vodafoneuk – in it some apparently tweeting under the influence employee made a badly spelled comment about the hygiene of homosexuals.

Then the person also threatened to hunt for beavers!

This is indeed outrageous! As you probably know beavers are an endangered species and have been extinct a few years ago in the UK. Hunting them just to vent your anger is the last thing to do. Continue Reading »

This blog post is a bit of fun that might give you some idea of the sorts of  thing that cannot be tracked by your web analytics system…

1. Odysseus Off-Site

Image from Litmuse on Flickr

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To be honest: I hate all the Apple hype. I hated it on Digg and I hate it on Twitter as well. Twitter has been flooded with iPad tweets in such a manner that you can’t find the real news anymore.

The real news this week for us is that Twitter changes its recommended users list.
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Installing the Google Analytics code is pretty easy – usually nothing goes wrong, and it is simply a matter of copying and pasting the code that Google provides you with. However, there are some cases where you might want to change the default code:

• Tracking visitors across different domains
• Changing the session timeout
• Setting keywords or referrers to ignore

Google provides clear instructions for these tasks but nobody is perfect so sometimes errors will be made and nothing will be tracked. Normally it would take you 24 hours to realise this, 5 minutes to fix what you thought was the error and then 24 hours to find out that you hadn’t actually fixed anything. Repeat this cycle until you give up or get it sorted. Here is my guide to help speed this process up and make it less likely that a small typo in your Google Analytics code will take a week to fix. Continue Reading »

As a search marketing agency, we make sure our we keep up-to-date with all things search by attending the top UK conferences. And at the top of the list for the last few years is SES London.

Image credit: SESConferenceSeries on Flickr

Last year I wrote 5 reasons to attend SES London and these really haven’t changed. In my opinion it’s one of the few must-go-to search events in the UK and this years line-up of speakers is very impressive, most notably with a keynote session from Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik.

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This week’s Twitter column comes a day late. I think it doesn’t matter when I post my weekly Twitter post. The important fact is that I do at all and the the quality of the post makes it worth reading. So from now on I won’t be that exact anymore. The weekly Twitter column will stay though. It might appear earlier or later in the week, depending on breaking events for instance.

This week I want to speak about Twitter arrests.

It seems Twitter is exempt from free speech and arrests for Twitter usage become commonplace.

I know this is a business blog and we write about Twitter topics relevant for businesses but this is an issue that should matter for all of us.
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Wicked by xlorddashx.

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.
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We are currently looking to recruit an SEO executive to join our great team in Oxford!

Image credit: Flickr

“We are currently looking to recruit for a full-time position in our natural search team. Candidates with a minimum of 1-2 years experience in a search engine marketing role are preferred, with a competitive salary offered based on experience.

The SEO Executive job role will involve working within the search team, assisting with SEO activities, search marketing strategy and client projects.”

More information can be found on the job description page and we look forward to hearing from you!

I don’t have an iPhone. Most of the SEM community are early adopters so many of you will already be using smart phones and many of you will already be aware of what I am about to tell you. I’ll put the important information in bold just here so that it is easy to spot:

When searching on Google using the iPhone…

• There are only 2 sponsored results above the organic listings
• The remaining results appear right at the bottom of the page NOT to the side
• There are only 5 ad slots available

Google results on the iPhone - Top of the page