By Max Brockbank
Filed under: General, LinkedIn, SEO, Services
Page updated 6:01 pm: February 17, 2009
It’s not a good time, is it? Not bread queues and soup kitchens, to be sure, but it is very hard to be optimistic.
Still. it is said that every cloud has a silver lining it seems and for SEO it may be that people are seeing Organic Search in a new light. Compared to other forms of online marketing, SEO is seen as a cheap, effective way of getting the message across. According to recruiters we’ve spoken to recently (and others with less of an axe to grind) demand for good SEO professionals is on the increase. Hooray for our side!
But the loser in this may well be Pay Per Click advertising (not that we expect Google to throw in the towel any time soon). As cheap as a well-run PPC campaign may be, some website managers look at the number of clicks which DON’T end in a sale and think of it as wasted money.
What is only partly appreciated is the link between effective SEO and PPC. In essence, web users are more likely to click on a PPC link — or indeed any brand-related link — if they associate it with good organic search results.
This is because SEO is as much about “Reputation Management” as it is about anything else. That includes quality backlinks — everyone wants to link to the “world’s favourite website”.
In other words, sites that give good attention to organic search can expect other benefits too.
It’s right that SEO is getting more attention, it simply makes sense. But treat it as a FOUNDATION of your whole SEM effort, not all of it.
By Max Brockbank
Filed under: General, LinkedIn, SEO
Page updated 9:44 am: February 11, 2009
When people think of SEO, the name that inevitably comes to mind is Google.
Around three-quarters of the world’s search traffic comes through Google and many people have it as their home page. Getting your site high on Google’s index is important, and every SEO professional claims they are best at improving your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) score.
But there is an alternative “search engine” with just as much clout as Google and which is probably more widely seen.
Google News is a regularly updated index of top stories from news sites across the Internet. Google News is still Google, but getting your site indexed by it is a much trickier prospect than ordinary search. Nevertheless, if you’re producing “news”-type items on a regular basis, it’s worth a try.
Succeed and you’ll find yourself listed on XML feeds used by some of the planet’s most-visited websites via plugins for popular CMS platforms such as Google News for Wordpress, or Google’s own targeted feed APIs.
So how do you get in? Google’s official rules for inclusion are …
- Sites that have news content that is original to the site
- Sites which do not solely promote their own activities
- Sites which are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors
Most candidates fail on that last requirement since many news blogs are one-man (or woman) bands. But if you can turn your blog into a “community of newshounds” there is hope.
Having said all this, a quick trawl through Google News throws up all sorts of sites which seemingly flout these rules.
Once again, the mystery of Google is preserved.
By Max Brockbank
Filed under: Clients, General, LinkedIn, SEO
Page updated 11:14 pm: February 10, 2009
It’s early days for the new Scene on the Net. The sad fact is that we’re not getting the level of spidering by the search engines we’d like.
The major reason for this is that the old Scene wasn’t really updated very much: we said what we needed to say and got on with making great web sites. As a result, the search engines had no need to check us over all that often because they believed that we obviously had nothing new to say.
These days, Scene is much more a platform for information, discussion and community (and the odd pitch to build you a website at a jolly nice price). That means we have included more ways to update the site, including blogging and microblogging.
We’ve been shown the way by the masterminds behind CasinoUpdate.co.uk, a site we developed for an independent casino news organisation. The good people of CUUK set out to make their web site interesting and regular, so from the very beginning they posted news items at least TWICE a day.
After just three months, CUUK found their pages were being indexed every 20 minutes or so, with stories appearing at similar intervals. That has contributed to CUUK becoming a trusted news source with a regular following inside and outside of the gambling industry, not to mention good search engine rankings, impressive PR and a popularity among advertisers.
To be honest, I’m not sure we partners at Sceneonthe.net have the time — or the imagination — to post something original and interesting every WEEK, let alone twice a day. We’ll see.
But we do hope that we can be interesting some times. We’ll try, as often as we can.
