Compare a car launches…
I’ve just launched compareacar.co.uk, a new site dedicated to car news, articles and hopefully a new place to research and compare cars. We’re currently building a comparison system from a large database of UK car spec data.
It’s throwing up some interesting stuff right now like the fastest cars for under £20,000 and pretty much anything is possible with the data, so watch this space for news on its launch. We’re posting a few articles over there relating to this data up until launch, so expect a few tidbits of trivia like the fastest 4×4s, the slowest cars that cost more than £30k, and a few other bits we can find.
Google reader update…more time spent
I spend a couple of hours every day ploughing through my RSS feeds for marketing/seo/web-design news and inspiration. I sometimes think that I’m wasting my time reading other people’s output every day. However, on reflection, it’s definitely time well spent keeping up and staying up to speed with the fast moving digital industry.
Good news today then, that my experience with my favourite RSS reader has now been upgraded with a cleaner interface, and a few UI extras. Hopefully it’ll speed a few things up and save me a few minutes each day haha! Time is money as they say…
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/12/square-is-new-round.html
Google Customises Search Listings
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html
Google has launched some enhancements to their results pages whereby you can boost, delete and comment on the listings. Take a look over on the Google Blog to check it out.
Despite, Google has said that it won’t affect rankings for other users, I don’t see why this data in the future could be used to give a little extra weighting to pages with more “boosts” than others.
Also I noticed that when I boosted a website, I noticed that there is a total number of “boosts” next to mine, so even if initially these attributes aren’t used to rank sites, it might influence CTRs for certain search terms, particularly if a page in position 1 has no boosts, but a page in position 2 has 56. Unless I’m wrong, (and I probably am!) it seems like it’s a good way to distribute clicks throughout the Search Results Page, and stopping the number 1 position being so dominant in its click-throughs by introducing another factor…
The start of the SEO Project
Over the next few weeks and months we’re going to be starting our own SEO project from scratch to run through some SEO techniques and how to launch a website business from scratch. Hopefully those following will find it useful for future reference, and I’m sure we’ll publish the whole story for easy reading at a later date.
This isn’t a new idea or concept, but ultimately we wanted to demonstrate that with a decent business idea and a niche in the search market, you can be successful.
We’ve already started putting some plans into action, so we’ll be updating the blog shortly with the story so far…
Peanut Butter on Toast Recipe
I’ve posted my favourite breakfast/lunch/dinner/supper….in fact yes, delicious any time of the day! Feel free to comment, although the measurements are slightly erratic.
Check it out:
Measuring SEO success - The more Search Traffic the better?
Whilst measuring the % of search traffic to a site I’m currently working, a thought struck me about measuring the success of SEO. Simply increasing the % of traffic, does not mean that you’re doing better at SEO. There are many other factors that you may not be considering.
- You always need to compare the % of search traffic with your total visit data. This is because your % of search traffic could go up, when in fact, your visit data has gone down. This more than likely means that your search traffic has remained at the same level, whilst the number of direct visitors and referrer traffic has dipped. Ensure you use search traffic visit data rather than the %.
- Be aware that people searching for your brand keywords are people that have heard about your site elsewhere, or are repeat visitors looking for your site. You should really ignore this Search Traffic from your SEO report, as they are merely looking up your URL rather than giving you a lead. Ideally your brand would never leave the #1 spot.
- Are you excluding your own search traffic from repetitive testing?
So what’s the ideal scenario for SEO success?
This may sound obvious but if your search traffic % stays the same AND your visit data goes up, this is great. This will of course mean that your search traffic visit data will be heading the right way. By maintaining a steady search traffic % rather than having it increasing will mean that the growth of your site is healthy, and you’re are ensuring that you are building visitor loyalty. It also means that you won’t be relying on search traffic which could be bad in the long run.
Hopefully, the visitors that found your site through search, will come back again without using search. That, I believe is the ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about leads, and although it may take a couple of visits perhaps from a search engine, you can gain that user as a regular visitor. If you are unable to achieve this, perhaps rather than pursue heavier optimisation techniques to attract volume, work with the traffic you are getting and ensure that you make the best use of that traffic through a great user experience.
You should be able to see this happening with repeat visitor numbers, and keeping the % of search traffic steady, whilst the overall site volume grows. This will definitely vary depending on the type of site, but should stand true with most media/content websites and commerce websites.
SEO for your landing pages
Hamlet Batista has written a great article about how to optimize your landing page:
http://blog.advaliant.com/2008/09/how-to-optimize-your-landing-page/
The thing I like most about it, is that it’s concise and breaks SEO into steps. Outlining timeline steps to carry out SEO work makes it so much easier to understand. Research, create/promote and track progress.
Static URLs vs dynamic URLs - all cleared up?
Google posted on their webmaster blog in an attempt to clear up the discrepancy between using static URLs, and “dynamic” urls. Cutting a long story short they have said that neither make a difference in its ability to crawl pages.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
In most of the comments, people are tending to say “great news”, but there are many other aspects of having a decent URL structure to just SEO. Having a carefully chosen URL structure is great user experience, because people can easily link to a shorter logical URL, and it’s a half-decent navigation aid for users of the site.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Eagle has landed…
Ok, not 100% sure it’s an eagle, suggestions welcome!
This little guy landed on the window ledge just next to me on our London BBC Media Centre building. He then went for a flight up and down the concourse! Scrambling for my camera phone was hard work though, it never quite loads up as fast as you’d like on a phone! I’ve cropped it down for some blog viewing pleasure.
The Eagle has landed - BBC Eagle
** Update: This has now been featured on the BBC Green blog about natural pest control **
There’s no such thing as Search Engine Optimisation!
I thought I’d break down Search Engine Optimisation into its constituent parts to highlight the fact that you get the best results from SEO when it’s thought about and planned from the start. Also, I thought I’d write a perfect bit of linkbait since this is a relatively new blog, and wanted some links, so please accept my apologies!
There’s always cases where a section or area of a site has been developed, content written, and put live. It’s a typical situation where I’m sure you are all familiar with, where the search engine optimisation was not considered at the beginning, and only as an after thought. Unfortunately we can’t target a wealth of keywords because all the content had already been created, and can’t alter this content, money has been spent!
The most annoying part is that the perception is still that we can target keywords without creating content to do that. It was assumed that we could ‘add them to the meta tag’ in the page to “SEO-up” the pages, something that might have worked a long time ago.
In order to get round these pitfalls, you can plan SEO into your next new content project by breaking it into separate parts:
