Mr Happys online journal

At SES one of the topics that came up over a few pints was negative SEO – using nefarious SEO techniques to get competitors pages/sites removed from the Google index. Anyway the first thing that came into my mind was Spy Vs Spy…

Which side are you on?

Organic search has changed over time, it keeps evolving, and unlike the evolution that happens in the natural world there is no freak traits that remain over time and provide a base for future generations. Instead the organic search section of the results at all the main search engines is constantly being adapter to give you an I an ‘improved search experience’. With improved search experience appearing to actually mean more ways for people to intercept the organic listings.

Before search engines…

Such a time did exist within the world wide web and the three ways to discover a page were:

1. Know it existed and type the URL into your browser
2. Get an email with a link where someone told you about a page of content that they’d found
3. Use directories to navigate through lists of information until you found a listing that looked appropriate

That was pretty much it.

Then along came search engines – I loved AltaVista, Yahoo! and WebCrawler initially (WebCrawler had the best result set for Lemonheads records that I’d seen at the time) so I plodded away with these easily spammable meta crawlers and life went on for a while. All the sites were a mess (think Yahoo! just now with a lack of any editorial control).

Then along came Google…

Yep thats how it used to look over at Google.com

And when you did a search you got ten little blue links.
That was it 10 Links.

Then came PPC – which stole the organic real estate.

The came image search – which stole some more real estate.

Then came YouTube videos and everything started to unravel.

Now when you optimise for the organic part of the page of Google you were optimising pages of content, images, video, shopping feeds, maps and building links to everything.and generally the user experience is worse for it… if you’re a traditional SEO.

Developing content and getting some links just doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead to be an SEO you need to have a holistic view of the opportunities that the organic listings offer you. If you’re doing travel do more Google Local optimisation, if you’re selling products have a look at maximising your rankings on Google Product Search and if you’re selling posters have a look at image search.

I know it sounds simple and you’re all probably thinking it’s an obvious evolution for you and I as SEO ninja. But some of the SEO padawan seem more defeated by the changes than elated at the opportunity. I guess thats what seperates the black belts from the white belts in online marketing

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.

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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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Susan Boyle Kicking Hollie Steele – nuff said. snick snick.
5. 
   Song of the week – Beaver Patrol by Pop Will Eat Itself (inspired by Nick)

Right promise to post something serious soon.

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?

1. 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
2. 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:

1. 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)
2. Use these related keywords in your anchor texts where possible : internally and externally. 
3. 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.

I was just reading some of the other blogs on Equatorlive and saw that none of us really talked about what we do here at Equator. So I thought I’d do some stuff on what us Search Engine Optimisers are upto here at Equator.
If you’ve not heard of Search Engine Optimisation, or are scared by it, don’t worry. Its not a black art – and those who tell you that SEO is are lying. All SEO entails is ensuring that you give search engine evidence that your website is relevant for a users query.
In simple terms we make sure your web pages use the relevant words in the appropriate ways and get other people to talk about you and show search engines why your website is relevant for a query. As our SEO is focussed around generating sales for clients all these query are business related and designed to drive traffic which is likely to convert into a sale.
SEO folk are geeky – but the good ones will help you understand the whole process without getting into horrendous language such as “keyword co-occurance theory” (which I find interesting but know that only a few others do) or Link Velocity tracking.
Its you SEO companies job to monitor these – and keep you abreast of developments without bombarding you with ‘geek speak’.
At the moment here at Equator we’re doing some cool work, and driving great results, for a number of companies throughout the UK including:

• De Vere Hotels
• Ramada Jarvis Hotels
• Scottish Hydro
• Southern Electric
• Swalec

Over the next couple of months we’re kicking off more work for some great UK based brands from our Glasgow based HQ which has got us all really excited.

If you’d like to find out more give us a call on 0141 299 1800.