Category Archives: Search Engine Marketing

Digital Branding and Social Media Fraud

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With more and more companies embracing digital and social media as a marketing tool, it is more important than ever to control your digital identity because chances are if you’re not, someone else is.

There have been numerous examples of digital identity fraud in recent months e.g. Phil Spector was allegedly Tweeting from his jail cell; Tony La Russa, manager of baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, successfully sued Twitter for an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation; Kanye West wrote an amusingly irate blog entry about being misrepresented on Twitter. Continue reading →

Sitemaps Become More Important

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Hey Guys,

We all know creating sitemaps is an essential part of any webmasters jobs these days but as time goes on they become more and more important. Aside from just supporting them Google made a series of changes last week (here’s their post) to give you even more reason to use them.

The most important update is that Google now support a much bigger sitemap than before, the previous 1,000 child limit has been raised to 50,000. That means size is no longer an excuse for not submitting! Continue reading →

When will ‘Google Suggest’ Adverts?

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At the end of May Google announced plans to integrate paid adverts into their Suggest functionality and ever since then I have been keeping a close eye on the suggestions offered to me when I search. That will sound really geeky to most of you but this new strategy could have a significant impact on the way that paid advertising on Google works, so to ensure that we stay ahead of the game we need to make sure that we know about such changes as soon as they are implemented. Continue reading →

Facebook offer ‘vanity urls’

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Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, has announced they will start issuing “vanity urls” which will replace the old random numbers.

If you would like your own Facebook vanity url you will need to log on for 12.01.a.m EDT Saturday 13th June where you will be able to choose your url on a first come, first serve basis.  For companies that use social networks as part of their ongoing SEO campaign this is great news. Continue reading →

Firefox 3.5 Preview Release

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On Monday, Mozilla released the preview version of their new browser for download – Firefox 3.5 – so I dutifully downloaded it myself to have a nosey.

Three of the new features which stood out for me were:

Its geo-location capabilities

Google announced in April that it would become the default location provider service in Firefox 3.5, which means that users will be able to update their location from their web browser without having to install extra plugins or programs through Google. IE isn’t far behind them though with Google having released an update to it’s toolbar which includes the same location detection service as Firefox will – although you’ll still have to download the plugin. Continue reading →

Choosing the right CMS

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Having spent a sizeable chunk of my time this year working with content management systems I thought I’d give a few tips on the right path to take..

Research!

An obvious one to most, but maybe not for some – make sure you research different options before you begin the project. As a lot of the development time will be spent learning and integrating the system, it is vitally important you have chosen the right one. Continue reading →

Search Engines, Knowledge Engines or Decision Engines

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The last couple of weeks has been exiciting for search engines with the launch of Wolfram Alpha the “knowledge engine” and Microsoft’s new search engine or as Microsoft are referring to it “decision engine” Bing.

Wolfram Alpha markets itself as being the “first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systemative knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.  Continue reading →

Live Search Becomes “Bing”

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Hello again everyone.

You may have already notice but the faceless giant that is Microsoft this week rebranded it’s mediocre search brand to “Bing“.

Microsoft have gone to pretty big lengths to promote their new baby, they have totally redirect Live.com (very brave) and are using the branding on their MSN network pages. They have also been running a big promotion drive including press releases, promotional gear and have a reported $80-100 million dollar budget for taking on current search giant, Google. Continue reading →

How to do a Redirect and Why

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Hey Guys,

Today I’m going to cover something that’s asked about a lot but is, in actual fact, quite easy to do. It’s the subject of redirects.

First things first though. What is a redirect and why would you want one?

Well “redirect” can refer to a few things but in this case we are referring to a server side redirect and specifically one controlled by htaccess on linux based servers.

Windows based server control redirects with IIS and while they can be easy too we will cover that in another tutorial.

A redirect is essentially a command that makes an end user or client go to somewhere other than the place they first requested, this can be for a huge range of reasons such as older pages, broken pages, site moves or more but essentially it lets you control a users behaviour. Continue reading →