SEO Blog

Yesterday, I received an email from Yahoo Search Marketing explaining how that if you want to target a specific country, you can now do so by selecting that country in your campaign settings.

This is a real time saver compared to the previous way where, if you were building a campaign to target the US, you’d have to select each of the individual States. I’d like to have been involved in that brainstorm.

Who says Yahoo doesn’t innovate. Well done Jerry!

Click Forensics have just released a press release highlighting the fact that pay per click fraud for Q3 2008 was 16%, a slight reduction on the previous quarter and the same period in 2007.

Pay Per Click Fraud Rate by Quarter

This data is taken from their Click Fraud Index.

Unfortunately, the UK is listed as one of the PPC fraud hot spots accounting for 3.5% of all fraudulent activity.

If you’re a pay per click advertiser, clearly you need to be vigilant with your traffic. There are professional solutions available for anyone wishing to monitor their paid traffic closely or, as reported last month, there is a simple solution if you do suspect click fraud and want to monitor your traffic.

Although Nielsen Online, the owner of Blogpulse, describe it as an “automated trend discovery system for blogs“, in my opinion, this description doesn’t do it justice.

It goes far beyond that and is a valuable tool for anyone wishing to conduct online market research.

Blogpulse tracks blog activity constantly and you can use it to search by topic, brand or even URL to see who is blogging about you, your company or a topic you may be interested in.

For site owners, this is a gold mine of data and can be used in many ways. For example:

1. Trend Research
The site has free trend analysis so you can compare one, or more, terms with another.

Blogpulse Trend Research Example

2. Conversation Tracker
This feature is a great way to pick up on the ‘buzz’; to find out the flow of conversations on a particular topic across the web.

You could use Blogpulse to stimulate fresh ideas for articles, new web pages or simply to post comments yourself on the latest hot topics. Entering a term that is relevant to you or your business will instantly uncover blog posts that have been made recently on that subject giving you the opportunity to carry out further research or even post comments on these entries to position yourself as a subject matter expert and build up the link popularity for your site.

All in all, this is a really useful site offering free online market research and a ton of useful data.

Pumpkin Tours are a specialist tour operator, offering a wide range of short breaks ranging from party tours right through to racing events.

The company approached Impact Media with the brief of maximising their visibility across the major search engines natural results pages, in order to generate a high volume of targeted enquiries and conversions from web based leads.

We are delighted to have been selected as Pumpkin Tours professional SEO provider, and very much look forward to working with them on the campaign.

Please visit our Search Engine Optimisation Services page to find out more about how professional SEO can benefit your business.

Tailored Home specialise in finding property for customers looking to buy in the UK as well as overseas; with their extensive network of contacts and relationships with all the major house builders they are able to help their clients secure the perfect property for their requirements.

We are delighted to have been appointed as Tailored Home’s professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialist, and look forward to working with them on the implementation of their campaign.

If you want to increase your presence within the search engines natural listings please visit our Search Engine Optimisation page to find out more about how we can help.

In the Search Engine Marketing Buyer’s Guide (2008) recently published by E-consultancy (September 2008), they reported that the market for spend on search engine marketing was estimated to be worth £2.75 billion this year in the UK alone.

As a UK business owner, you may not be interested in that fact but where the numbers start to tell a story is how they’re split between paid search (£2.42 billion) and search engine optimisation (£330 million).

This split is mirrored by data released by SEMPO which has the US advertisers investing just 11% of their Internet marketing spend on search engine optimisation ($1.3 billion).

As a company that helps businesses with both of these core aspects of search engine marketing, we can appreciate why there is such an investment in PPC advertising. However, we find it intriguing that search engine optimisation (SEO) is so far behind in the spend stakes being treated with the same disregard as an Icelandic bank savings account. Perhaps it suffers from the feeling some site owners have that SEO is free? The notion of free listings is valid but for any business to not be making provision for SEO in their online marketing budget is short-sighted, particularly when you review the following:

Google Eye Tracking Heat Map

This eye tracking heat map from Enquiro clearly highlights the fact that most searchers still go top-left when conducting a search.  It demonstrates that the sites occupying the top 3 slots of the natural search results will attract 100% visibility and only dropping to 50% at position 6. Compare this to the PPC adverts where the ad at position #1 only achieves 50% visibility. This falls dramatically to 10% by the time you get to the ad in position 5.

Hopefully, you’ll appreciate the value in SEO and understand why free isn’t always best.

We offer a range of search engine optimisation services and would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate how we could help your business improve its online visibility.

Further Reading:

Eyetools Eyetracking Research

Despite the general slow down in the global economy, Google continue to buck the trend with an impressive set of financial results for the third quarter of 2008.

The company reported total revenues of $5.54 billion for the quarter ending 30th September 2008. This is an increase of 31% compared to the same period in 2007.

For the UK specifically, Google reported revenues of $776 million. I’m sure that with their recent announcement to allow gambling advertising within AdWords to, ahem, “bring inline with the legal and cultural climate around this issue within the UK” that this figure will continue to rise.

Further Reading:

Google Third Quarter 2008 Results Press Release

Google have just announced a change in their policy for companies wishing to advertise gambling related services online using their AdWords pay per click advertising platform within the UK.

Google’s announcement explains that this policy change for gambling advertisers has come about “due to recent changes in UK law” and to “bring it inline with the legal and cultural climate around this issue in the UK”.

The statement goes on to say “Our review determined that, at this time, we will allow gambling ads to target England, Scotland and Wales as long as the advertiser is registered with the Gambling Commission and provides a valid operating license number.”

Any gambling site wishing to use pay per click advertising to promote their business will first of all need to create a new Google AdWords account and complete an application form for Google. They will then review the application and notify the advertiser whether they have been successful or not.

Given the competitive nature of the industry, we would anticipate pay per click costs being high for AdWords gambling advertising in the UK and would suggest that new advertisers consider using Google AdWords management services if they’re unsure how to build an optimised campaign.

At last, Google have provided its AdWords advertisers with the ability to see statistics for the search network.

AdWords Search Partner Statistics

The search network (not to be confused with the content network) includes sites such as AOL and ask.com. All good stuff, but up to now you couldn’t see the data for these sites as it formed part of the general data from search traffic generally.

With access to these stats, AdWords account owners will now be able to review the Click through Rate (CTR) and conversions from Google’s search partners and be able to make a rational decision as to whether this is good quality traffic.

Well done Google and we look forward to seeing this data available in the reports. Oh, and being able to create search partners only campaigns!

If you’re a Webmaster or site owner, this should be of interest to you! Within Google Webmaster Tools, it has been possible for a while to get a list of those pages that Google has as ‘Not found’ or 404.

First and foremost, if you have pages not found, you should take steps to fix them, e.g. if a page has been renamed, redirect the old page to the new page (301 permanent redirect).

Now though, Webmaster Tools shows you where your 404 pages are being linked from (Diagnostics | Web crawl):

Webmaster Tools Shows Inbound Links for 404 Pages

Once you analyse the inbound links to old or broken 404 pages, you can take the appropriate steps to fix the issue. You could contact the Webmaster of the site that is linking to yours and ask them to update to give their visitors a better experience or you could 301 redirect the old page to new page if there is a suitable replacement.

Whichever route you take, you should definitely keep an eye on your Webmaster Tools account and particularly your diagnostics section. Keep your site in order and you may just get rewarded for it by gaining additional traffic.

Further Reading:

Webmaster Tools Shows Crawl Error Sources
Matt Cutts Tutorial on Using Web Crawl Diagnostics