HTML5 and SEO

Posted by Craig on Feb 8, 2010 in Search Engine Marketing | 55 comments

If you’re in our industry and haven’t seen anything on HTML 5 yet you seriously must have been in a cave. It’s basically a new version of the core mark-up language on the web and it massively reduces the dependency on the plug-ins we are all so used to seeing.

HTML5 is already rocking the design and development worlds with people clambering to experiment with new functionality, APIs and more but we should always look at all the potential affects of such large shifts in our behaviour and this post aims to address some potential implications the new mark-up will have for SEO.

The first thing to consider is that HTML5 is still a baby really, most browsers have some level of support but few have total support and even then many functions are yet to be completed or fully tested. Because of this any SEO issues or benefits are very much speculation at this stage, while we are running multiple tests to help discover search engine reactions to HTML5 code until it is more mainstream I do not believe these will be definite.

Caffeine – Do Stupid Things Faster with More Energy!

Posted by Cat on Aug 14, 2009 in Search Engine Marketing | 11 comments

It’s been a week now since Google opened a web developer preview to collect feedback of their latest update – Caffeine. There’s not much to see when you first try out the sandbox. When asked about the update, Google’s Matt Cutts explained;

The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

So what effect is this update going to have on Google’s SERP’s?

Do Bing Users REALLY Click More?

Posted by Cat on Aug 1, 2009 in Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized | 20 comments

A new report released by the ad network Chikita, analyses traffic and click-through rates of the major search engines.

Chitika looked through 32 million ad impressions across its 50,000 strong network during a week in July to generate its findings, which has raised some eyebrows and caused a lot of discussion in the search community.

Future of SEO

Posted by Craig on Jul 29, 2009 in Featured, Search Engine Marketing | 18 comments

Hey Guys,

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Future of SEO, there has always been the “SEO is dead/going to die” side of discussions which obviously we don’t agree with, i’ve never seen a half compelling argument for this and while ever search exist search optimisation will be needed.

This isn’t to say changes are in store however, Rand did a post Friday over at SEOMoz looking at his opinion of the future of SEO and I thought I would give my professional response to Rand’s ideas as well as some of my own.

Here’s the video for you to watch first, it’s less than 10 minutes long so don’t worry about a lecture.

How to Correctly Manage Social PR Disasters

Posted by Craig on Jul 12, 2009 in Marketing News, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off

In the past year we have seen a lot of social media PR disasters. Any companies have had embarrassing thing accused about them or proven about them on sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The Dominos Pizza and RyanAir cases stick in my mind particularly well and these poor public relations can cost companies a lot.

This story is a little different however; this is about the United Airlines handling of a complaint made by a guy called Dave Carroll that UA damage his guitar while on a short internal flight. This I am sure has happened to a lot of people but guitars are particularly expensive as well as obviously fragile and the baggage handlers really should have known better.

Real Time Search :: Should SEO’s Care?

Posted by Cat on Jul 6, 2009 in Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off

There’s been a lot of buzz around real time search and indexing recently. Google buying Twitter? Bing using real time search? Friendfeed added real time search with Facebook hot on their heels.

Before I start looking at how Real Time Search will effect SEO’s, I wanted to clear up a few issues with the statement before I start – Firstly, there is currently NO real time search engine – Twitter isn’t real time, FriendFeed isn’t real time and Bing just uses Twitter – there’s still a lag between posting, crawling and appearing in search results. Secondly, a lot of these so called real time search engines are just seeking out social mentions NOT crawling the web and indexing it, more akin to buzz and trend monitoring tools than search engines.