All posts by Daniel Bianchini

SEOptimise attended this year’s SMX London, and came away with a number of amazing tips and takeaways. I have provided a list of all the takeaways that I took from the SEO, Search and Social Track.

Day 1 – From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters

The first session on the SEO track saw Chelsea Blacker, Grant Simmons, Jim Boykin and Google’s Maile Ohye talk about Authorship and how to enhance your authority in an industry. The main draw to the session was as you would expect Maile Ohye, with the hope she would give away some inside information. Unfortunately this didn’t happen, but she did confirm that a lot of what the speakers had discussed was correct. I managed to take a lot away from this session, but here are a few of the key points.

Google plus communities

If you’ve been on Google + recently, you might have noticed Google’s latest feature called Google+ communities. It’s probably too early to judge its success just yet, but based on my personal Google plus news feed (so not scientific at all) I am certainly seeing quite a lot of engagement on the platform.

The concept and the objective behind launching Google+ communities is to create a platform within Google+ where individuals, organisations, and business can meet and engage, based on shared interests and passions.

This is meant to enhance a user’s ability to find others with similar affinities or interests, and be able to connect and learn from experts. Organisations, businesses, and brands can leverage topics, interests, and causes that they’re passionate about and share them with their audience.  Thus, communities provide a place for all of these groups to converge.

During a recent analysis of a website (blog with less than 50k visitors a week), we came across some interesting factors that led to us taking a different approach to investigation.

The Problem:

  • The site faced 20-40% drop in traffic corresponding with periods in roll outs of the Panda Algorithm.
  • The site saw a loss in rankings, but no consistency across them – some keywords moved down a few positions, while others went off the first 2-3 pages of the SERPs.
  • The site is a blog, and as a result most of the content written was original and unique, and written by a single person based on their research and experience.
  • The site has been in existence for over 6 years and attracts a lot of natural links – in fact no link building to the site has ever been carried out.

From the above, this doesn’t seem like your typical target for Panda, but the dates of the traffic drops were too much of a coincidence.

Over the past few years, QR Codes have become more mainstream and can be seen in most day-to-day activities. There are examples of some very good uses of QR Codes as well as some badly thought out QR Codes.

QR Code Macys

QR Codes are great for getting offline marketing messages online quickly. Adding QR Codes to typical offline marketing material such as posters, flyers, business cards or event badges allows the user to see the message instantly.

With all these offline marketing activities being used, how can the business track what is working and what isn’t? Well, with Google Analytics and I am sure most other analytics packages, you can put tracking codes directly into the QR Code and track when users scan the code.

Below is a step by step guide to tracking QR Codes in Google Analytics.

1. Choose the URL that you would like the QR code that you are generating to return once scanned.

Over the last few months I have been trying to work on improving my time management skills, not only at work but in my personal life as well. I am forever being told that I am late or don’t do anything on time, and that is just from the wife.

So I took to improving my time management skills, and thought that I would share with you a few techniques that I am using now in my working life.

On 23rd November the SEOptimise team attended OxonDigital, a local digital and networking event that I have created in Oxford for all things digital. The focus of the latest event was Social Media and Blogging for businesses with presentations from Ali Luke and our very own Marcus Taylor.

The event was well attended, with over 40 members in the audience from various backgrounds and coming from as far as Banbury.

Ali started the presentations by talking about the basics to blogging for your business, giving away some great tips to help start or improve your business blog. Following on from Ali’s presentation Marcus discussed Social Media and ROI, providing a different angle on what ROI from Social Media could be. The presentations were followed by a Q&A session where the audience asked some interesting questions based on the presentation given, and from personal experience.

SEOptimise are proud to sponsor local events like OxonDigital and encourage those based in and around Oxford who are interested in all things digital to come along to the next event. To keep up to date, follow OxonDigital on Twitter @OxonDigital or visit www.oxondigital.co.uk

Last week Google released yet another algorithm update, and although it wasn’t Panda 2.6 or Panda 2.5.2, it has affected up to 35% of searches. The newly-named ‘freshness update’ is built on the Caffeine update that was launched last year, allowing Google to provide the very latest content.

Google’s Amit Singhal states that

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.”

This seems to be a very timely release, especially in the UK, with lots of hot topics currently trending on the web and on social media, including Frankie Cocozza being kicked off the X Factor, the England poppy fiasco and Carlos Tevez leaving Manchester. With all these topics trending across the web, the freshness update has provided us with the very latest information on the subject from the last day, hour or even minute. There has been a lot of information around about the freshness update and here is Google’s official announcement.

Last night 300 UK search marketers attended the Emirates Stadium, London for the very first UK Search Awards.

With 16 categories and over 50 nominees, including SEOptimise for best agency, best travel search campaign and best blog, the event brought together some of the best agencies in the UK.

The search awards started with a drinks reception followed by dinner, before the host – Andy Crane from the lunch time show on BBC Radio Manchester – started proceedings. With only two speeches from the all the winners who collected their awards, the ceremony went very quickly.

Last Tuesday I gave a presentation on SEO Tactics to Tame the Panda at A4U London, alongside Kevin Gibbons. The presentation was aimed at affiliates who had been hit by the Panda update although the majority of techniques that I provided could be used on any website that was hit.

Timeline

Panda first hit in the US back in February 2011, affecting up to 12% of all Google search results. Since then, there have been five iterations of the update, excluding the update that took it globally with the exception of Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

Since I started creating my deck a few months ago, there were three updates with one only days before I was about to present. In my honest opinion I don’t believe that this is over just yet, and that Google will continue to edit the algorithm and roll it out.

What Google Recommends

Google actually provide us with some advice on what to do to avoid being hit by the Panda update, as seen below.

“you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”
Google

From the paragraph above I have bolded 3 key points, that I feel you need to focus on.

As an SEO it is essential to report on the metrics that will show the progression of the project that you are working on.

These reports need to provide the client and yourself with actionable information, whilst also being able to outline your KPIs clearly. All reports should ideally include metrics from both on-site and off-site activity, providing the client with a clear understanding of what improvement has been made.

SEO reporting metrics
Image by seoinc

← Older Entries