Archive for January, 2010

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are currently looking to recruit an SEO executive to join our great team in Oxford!

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

Google Results on the iPhone - Bottom

This week the Twitter Friday column expands as a major Twitter SEO topic is on our agenda. Last week Technology Review published an article titled “How Google ranks tweets“.

In the TR article leading Google engineer Amit Singhal explains ranking factors for tweets.

Some of the ranking criteria are quite clear and obvious while others remain fuzzy behind Google’s veil of secrecy. There is one big surprise: Google hates #hashtags, or at least some (probably you using too many) of them.

It seems Google treats #hashtags the way it dealt with the meta keyword tag in the past: Neither do they really count nor do they count in a positive way in case they do.

In other words: Using hashtags may hurt your tweet rankings. That’s not all of course.

Ford F 150, the biggest Twiter client yet. Image by selfhatingotaku.

Twitter Friday is alive and kicking! Welcome back in 2010! The column paused for two weeks in a row simply due to the holidays taking place both on a Friday. Many people didn’t tweet during the Holiday season anyways so it wasn’t that bad, was it?

Of course plenty of things happened anyways but I want to skip them and write about something that struck me as a very important novelty. Ford goes Twitter.

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Image: Life in the Fast Lane by t3ermin4t0r.
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We all love the fast life of the SEO industry, don’t we? Each day is a challenge and the sheer diversity of tasks makes this profession so refreshing. As we have to deal with a plethora of developments, hundreds of ranking factors and daily breaking news which can make or brake a business we’re also short on time all the time.
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We’d like to do so much more during a day or the business hours but we can’t.

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Sometimes it seems that the actual time we have to perform SEO tasks is the shortest in between all the Web buzz. This will be most probably truer than ever in 2010. On such days it’s best to remind yourself that there are at least 30 fast life SEO tactics/techniques for 2010 you can sometimes make use of in minutes or a few hours.

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