August 19, 2009 – 11:50 am
Projections are one of the most important things that an SEO will ever do in a campaign. They tell clients what we think we can give them as a return on their investment. Which is nice. The problem is that if you’re not careful when doing projections you can often portary scenarios that may never arrive – just to make the numbers look even better.
If you think about it the client relies on us to give them an accurate portrayal of what we think is achievable on a specific budget. And it is encumbent upon us to be realistic rather than just give them the numbers they want to get back. Below are a couple of things to make sure you actually do projections and do not prophesize what will be delivered.
Read More »
How do. quick post on some nice bits and pieces I’ve seen today.
Over at Equator the Flash monkeys have been beavering away (can monkeys beaver? – answers on a post card please to the usual address) on some cool little sites for HTC – you’ll have seen their advert on the tv for the HTC Magic I’m sure.
Anyway here’s a list of sites they’ve been doing:
(my hand is now sore with cutting and pasting – Ctrl+c/Ctrl+v – must be getting old)
Alongside this the guys at Flock (my second favourite browser after Chrome) who I follow on Twitter were mentioned over at CNN alongside some other browsers – including the Kid Rocket Web Browsers (designed for weans – which I’m going to try out on my own little bundle of energy later this week).
Also thought I should say I was messing about with a Personality Test – am little bit spooked by my results.
I’m sure my link to content ratio is a touch on the high side but hey I cant please the Google gods every day.
L8rs
It seems like so long ago I got to post as Mr Happy 
but I’ve managed it – at last.
I thought I’d break my self in nice and easy with a quick link rolling post – where I’ll bung up some links to some cool/not so cool/funny/ interesting things I’ve seen on the old interweb in the last couple of weeks.
- Terminator Salvation Film Review – one of the most scathing reviews of the new terminator film – ternimator salvation – that I’ve read so far. From what I gather it’s pants and no one should waste their time or effort on going to see it. But hey I’m a sucker for crap movies so will probably go and see it. On a similar note Transformers 2 is a it naff – Megan Fox aside.
- No Follow Post by Matt Cutts – not as cute as Megan Fox but equally interesting post by Google Guy about WTF Google actually see nofollow as being and WTF they do with links that are nofollowed.
- Falkirk take on Vaduz of Lichtenstein in the Europa Cup – YAY. But I cant get to the away leg. Minor disaster. but getting to Europe is a great step forward for my – almost relegated – fitba team.
- Susan Boyle Kicking Hollie Steele – nuff said. snick snick.
Song of the week – Beaver Patrol by Pop Will Eat Itself (inspired by Nick)
Right promise to post something serious soon.
March 27, 2009 – 12:29 pm
I go out the office for one day – don’t check all my RSS feeds and miss the fact that Google has update its algorithm. Anyway thought I’d do a quick overview of the changes here.
What are the changes?
- Keyword/Conceptual Relationships: You’re all probably bored when I talk about using keyword relationships to improve content and anchor texts in links but guess what for once I may have been a little bit ahead of Google. Basically they’ve updated the importance of relationships within results – if you do queries with a couple of words you’ll start to see that the related searches have changed to include more related words So we can get more info in the things
- Longer snippets under Titles: Snippets under the title of a page (the clickable bit) have traditionally been two lines of content – generally the meta description from the page, the Dmoz description or some relevant section of onpage content. Now they’ve extended this in some cases to include longer exceprts.
What does this mean for you?
If you do website content writing, link development or are incharge of a website development project you may want to take it into account when you start making changes to a website:
- Write good meta descriptions when you write the on page content: title/meta description/meta keywords/navigation./body content are all parts of trhe on page content so when you write them write with related keywords (find these by querying google with a ‘~’ in front of the keywords – bolded words in results are the related words). Take every part of your page content into consideration and mark it up correctly (hx tags, content tags etc)
- Use these related keywords in your anchor texts where possible : internally and externally.
- Create a glossary which includes sensible use of related keywords and link back to other pages within this page : enhancing anchor text and domain relevance.
Three wee tips, nice and simple. If you want more info have a look at the Google Blog and ask any questions that you may have in the comments below.
February 25, 2009 – 3:45 pm
Welcome to Equator Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
January 30, 2009 – 1:53 pm
Select All
Hit f7
Now the spell checker is running!
Yay
January 22, 2009 – 4:22 pm
As a quick post I thought I’d talk about furry handcuffs. With Valentines day almost upon us I thought of what all the mad online folksies would be looking for and for some reason it came to me that they were probably looking for furry handcuffs: not exclusively pink fluffy handcuffs but certainly furry handcuffs.
This got me thinking what kind of handcuffs do people really look for in the search engines: those for pleasure and those for law enforcement purposes.
So a wee rummage in WordtTracker later and I found:
- handcuffs – 171 searches
- james parker hancuffs – 38 searches
- furry handcuffs – 35 searches
I have no idea about james parker handcuffs and neither does google – anyone know why people would be searching for this?
Anyway, cheers to fi for raising this idea in my head – she forwarded http://www.agentprovocateur.com/love-me-tender.html onto me earlier on – which kinda raised the idea of handcuffs initially.
More details on the female model in the ad can be found @ tokyito post about Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
November 6, 2008 – 1:36 pm
After squeezing my smiley faced stress ball half to death this morning – I had a web ex to attend and the lag was a wee bit annoying. Anyway for the first time I think I thought I’d post something about what I’ve been messing about with lately rather than the usual ephemera.
WordTracker
We’ve been using WordTracker in the SEO team for quite a while now – purely because I’d have killed someone if I had to wait any longer on getting data from Overture (how often can one system timeout in a day – go to Overture and have a shot). Wordtracker is a great way to get mass results quickly for your keyword research. Allows for pretty acute modelling and when the data is fed into some of our systems we can get really accurate models for campaign performance over the longer term. That said getting a good long tail model is kinda hard. But help is at hand – esp for bloggers. There is now a wordtracker lab where you can find questions asked in search engines about products – so if you blog at a corporate level, are an affiliate or just want more traffic get these questions in your posts and away you go. See what people are asking about in relation to SEO.
CoreMetrics
I’ve spent about four hours this week being trained in CoreMetrics by Colby Hanks so we can get even better results than before on our online marketing efforts for Peacocks.co.uk (I was going to load that link with keywords but for once thought better of it!). As ever with these WebEx things it was a hell of a lot to take in at one time but well worthwhile. Have already found some nice little nuggets for the SEO guys to ladle into and get some more sales. Watch out ASOS we’re coming to get you!
Google Analytics
After whining about the fact that I didnt have access to some of the nice new functions in Google Analytics that I’d seen videos of on youTube and read about online I was finally given them in my control panel. The new reporting options and the ability to switch between tailored views has really helped me get a better understanding of who’s buying & who’s browsing – and getting a far larger understanding of modelling intent from keywords so we can tailor onsite content to match the psychology of the user. Further to that some of it just looks cool, (always useful with analytics as some of it can be pages of stats – nothing like little coloured dots changing size and color to improve things).
As a quick aside here’s some links that folks may find interesting that’ve came in my RSS digest this week:
- Eric Ward talks about link building
- Some companies just don’t get SEO
- Google Stops Hiring – is this the new indicator of economic performance?
October 31, 2008 – 3:54 pm
As part of our annual calendar @ Equator Halloween stands out as one of the days when things generally end up a bit messy. Everyone gets dressed up – paying a fine to charity if they do not indulge in the costume merriment et al.
Here is this years team shot – and yes its Scotland and its perishing
October 16, 2008 – 2:14 pm
Everyone has guilty little pleasures (please tell me they do – it’ll make me feel better). Anyway I know everyone has songs they really like – but never admit to. by the way of brinkmanship I thought I’d show you mine if you show me yours was the best way to go. As an aside this is 100% truthful and is not intended to be ironic, post modern or any of those big words that people hide behind.
Read More »
