Search Engine Marketing & SEO Blog

A few months ago one of my clients has changed platforms. The new platform changed almost everything we’ve optimized on-site for years. It even messed up the obvious SEO basics like title tags and we’re struggling with them to this day as the platform maker insisted that title tags “get assigned automatically” in their system.

While title tag optimization is the daily bread of every SEO, for many people, like

1. software vendors
2. content creators
3. business leaders

title tags appear to be completely random and negligible. They assume that

title tags won’t get even really seen by the average user so why bother with them at all?

They forget that title tags get displayed in search results on Google and elsewhere and that it’s still one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
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Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don’t know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web.

Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics.

It’s about

• usability
• conversions
• branding

among others. Continue Reading »

This is a guest post from Rob Hillyard at Return on Digital.

1. Create a brand new campaign for Remarketing. This will enable you to monitor how everything is doing much easier than running it within an existing campaign.
2. You need at least 500 people in your target list before Google will start to show your ads. Depending on how much traffic your site gets and who you are targeting, it could take a couple of days before you see any traffic.
3. Image ads work best. Make sure you include all the possible image sizes to allow your ads to receive the largest amount of impressions possible.
4. Use a different message than your standard ads to bring the users back to your site. This is your second chance to convert the visitor into a customer. Special offers / discounts work well.

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Grumpy Face by ellie.

I’m blogging all day. Most of the time at work I spend blogging. I write for four flagship blogs. Plus I have a private Tumblr blog as well. Two of the flagship blogs are about SEO, this one here and my own blog. The other two are client blogs covering two different topics. So basically I have to be up to date about at least three subjects, industries or niches. This is not an easy task although one person alone can handle up to 5 flagship blogs at the same if you ask me.

As I enjoy blogging very much I never experience the so called “writers block”. The contrary is the case, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things I want to write about. I do basic research for 5 to 10 postings and write only one of them after deciding which one to write.

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On July 19th I noticed that I could us the AdWords Bid Simulator tool at the ad group level rather than at the keyword level as is normal. I thought this was a very useful feature so I tweeted:

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July has been another busy month at SEOptimise – and seeing that we are currently writing around the web, I thought it would be a good time to share these posts with SEOptimise readers and recap on the top posts we’ve written here on the blog.

Plus I have been confirmed as a speaker at a4uexpo London in October, this is on the “20 Social Media Tools & 20 WordPress Plugins Boost Your Performance” day two session. We also sent out the latest installment of the SEOptimise newsletter yesterday – signup here if you haven’t already!

SEOptimise around the web…

For those who do not follow my writing on Econsultancy or Search Engine Watch, here are the latest posts from July – plus an interview on State of Search:

• Ten ways to advertise your business on Facebook
• Ryanair: marketing genius or reputation madness?
• 10 Top Tips to Secure Social Media Success
• 7 Golden Rules for Paid Search Copy
• A summer interview with… Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo): “now is the time to be thinking about Bing”

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Chess by Alejandro Fernandez

Everybody seems to agree with the “content is king” mantra. At the same time most articles, blog posts in and outside the SEO industry seemed to ignore it. Not anymore: Content SEO and marketing resources are ubiquitous in 2010.

SEO blogs used to deal with other aspects of Web strategy. Content has often been taken for granted and thus on page optimization, web design, usability and link building took center stage all the time.

Good, great or even killer content for flagship blogs isn’t there automatically.

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This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed raise awareness on how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.

Image credit: Flickr

It’s essential that the different elements of your marketing reinforce one another if your budget is going to generate the highest possible returns.

Search marketing, traditional marketing and PR cannot happen in isolation from each other, or you will inevitably end up spending more than you need to on a less-effective campaign.
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Time flies by. It’s more than two years by now that I write the highly popular “30+” list blog posts to get links and traffic for SEOptimise. I’ve often tried to abandon them, to write tutorials or other types of postings but list posts with around 30 items still rule. They get the most

• shares on social media
• links
• attention
• traffic

for several reasons.

This year some of the big guys in the SEO blogosphere started doing 30 something lists as well, SEOmoz does them, SEL compiles them. They even surpass my lists in some cases as they spend obviously more time on them than I do. Their success with this technique has just confirmed to me that 30+ lists work. That’s why I will tell you how to write them.

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Following my BrightonSEO presentation yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to use one of the WordPress plugins I recommended, Blackbird Pie, to recap the top tweets from the day: