Roundup: Beginners guides to SEO and Online Marketing

April 23rd, 2007

Taking over as Head of Online Marketing here at zoomzoom has very much been a case of landing at a full sprint - organising outstanding sales, updating clients.. and interviewing for a new trainee online marketing consultant have all had me tied up, along with keeping up with industry news from SES New York.

Anyway, I’d like to introduce Jason who comes to us fresh from the freelance side of web development to be subjected to a gruelling training regime which will turn him from an SEO beginner to a rankings king. I thought I’d take the time to hunt around for some great resources and share them here - the following links are highly recommended reading to those new to the industry.

  • SEOMoz Beginners guide to search engine optimisation - I’ve yet to see a clearer introduction to some of the fundamental basics of building an accessible, well optimised site. Essential reading for those new to SEO.
  • SEO Book Search engine marketing glossary - Stumped by the meaning of a ‘301′? ‘Long tail’? ‘TrustRank’? If you wanna play the game, you have to know the lingo ;)
  • zoomzoom Guide to Online Marketing - Ok ok, so we’ll blow our own trumpet - our guide was designed to give new clients a basic overview of the various areas of online marketing, and so is worth a read so that you’re aware of the various methods of marketing your site
  • SEOmoz Search engine ranking factors V2 - Now that you’ve learnt the basics, you’ll want to know what’s most effective with SEO, right? SEOmoz brought together some of the biggest names in SEO to give feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
  • Stuntdubl SEO Playbook - A great ‘advanced beginners’ guide and a wealth of links onto further reading on various aspects of SEO.

There you go Jason - that should keep you busy for a day or two! :)

Posted by admin
Filed in Research & Trends, Search Engine Optimisation
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SEO experiments

March 14th, 2007

It’s not often these days that an SEO company/consultant releases their private experiments with SEO for public consumption, so it’s great to see theGooglecache blog in reply to a post on seoMoz with answers to some of the unsolved questions in SEO.

Here’s the link to the original post, and my (hopefully simplified) explanations of the points.

1. The Diminishing Value of Anchor Text

If page A has 2 links to page B, and each of those links uses different link text, then the first link text will be considered by Google as more authoritative.

2. How Far Does Synonymy Go?

Take a search for ‘Bryan Gumbel’ - Google assumes you mean ‘Bryant Gumbel’ (American sports presenter) and gives higher weight to those pages that rank for the correct spelling than you might expect. What is worthy to note though, is that this only applies when the misspelling is a shortened version of the correct one - a search for ‘Brian Gumbel’ weights the misspellings much more. This is probably Google’s way of easily dealing with plurals and contractions.

3. Can Link Removals Hurt Rankings?

If you have a page without many links, and you gain and then subsequently lose an important link, you’ll be worse off than if you never had the link at all. This negates any benefit from sneaking your link onto a high ranking page if the owner then removes it (eg Wikipedia pre no-follow), and should also act as a warning against buying links (if you’re buying them for short periods of time)

4. Does Sharing Registrants with Spammers Hurt You?

Basically, the advice here is that you shouldn’t use the same personal information to register a blackhat domain that you use for whitehat domains.

5. Text Placement Weighting

Text that’s at the top of the source code is given more prominence than that at the bottom. Google has got good at judging what elements of your site are navigation and what is content, but there’s still more than enough evidence about that you should minimise navigational code at the top of your page, and put the most important content at the top. The example given for this is to put the ‘tags’ for an article at the top.

6. Higher links = more weight

If you have 6 links on a page, the one at the top is given more weight than those at the bottom. The perfect example of this is the ‘five seo excuses’ SERPs (Not current any more) which show that a company was able to list subdomains in order to spell out a marketing phrase by having a list of links in preferred order.

five-seo-excuses.jpg

Posted by admin
Filed in Research & Trends, Search Engine Optimisation
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Missing Overture bid tool? Try our essential keyword research links!

February 12th, 2007

It seems as if the tool has been very shakey in the last couple of weeks but is now down for good.

I have compiled a list of alternate keyword research tools to ease the pain:


Google based tools:

    Google Keyword Tool
    Provided free by Google AdWords. Shows basic search volumes and related terms.
    Google Suggest
    As you type, Google will offer suggestions. Good related keywood search.
    Google Trends
    provides useful insights into broad search patterns across the world.



Yahoo! based tools:

    Yahoo! Buzz
    Statistics of Top Searched Terms on Yahoo! by Category.



MSN based tools:

    MS AdLabs Search Funnels
    You can use the adCenter search funnel tool to help you visualize how people search by entering related keywords in certain sequrences and analyze these search behaviors.



Other keyword research tools:

    Nichebot Classic
    A 3 in 1 keyword suggestion tool: keyword discovery, overture and wordtracker.
    NicheWatch.com
    Find exactly which competitors there are in your niche.
    GoLexa Search Tool
    The Search Tool with Complete Page Analysis for each Result and much more.
Posted by ChrisZZ
Filed in Research & Trends, Search Engine Optimisation
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GAAC - Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program

February 12th, 2007

I was doing the usual rounds in Google Anaytics last week and spotted a little thumbnail with the text “Analytics, authorised consultant“.home_3b3.gif Clicking on the image produced a page of Authorised Google Analytics consultants and a short description of the scheme. The page invites you to “locate a partner” and displays the company’s information including a text link to their website (which happens to be on a PR7 page from the domain www.google.com!). Naturally my instant reaction was, “I want me some of that!!”

Anyway after rummaging through the help and FAQs, I couldn’t find any information on how to apply to become a GAAC so I dropped Google an email. This is the (very prompt) reply:

Hello Chris,

Thank you for your interest in becoming a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant. The following is an overview of the requirements of the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program; other conditions may apply.

* Proven background in Analytics and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
* In business for 1 year
* At least one dedicated person for Google Analytics support
* Must provide full service i.e. setup, support, training, and consultation for Google Analytics
* Must have an online ticketing system that Google can access
* Must provide support for both Google Analytics and Urchin software
* Must have a web site of sufficient Google Analytics/Urchin content and quality
* Must have at least one Google AdWords Certified employee
* Must attend training sessions at a Google office - usually once per year.

As expected, I didn’t think it was going to be a walk in the park to get on the home page of Google anayltics and it certainly is not! Although we satisfy most of the requirements there are some which may prove to be interesting such as, “Must have an online ticketing system that Google can access” and “Must attend training sessions at a Google office - usually once per year.” The second point is very interesting seeing as our “local” Google office is about 400 miles away in Ireland!!

There are only three authorised partners in the UK it seems, so hopefully there will be room for one more! Watch this space!

Posted by ChrisZZ
Filed in Research & Trends, Search Engine Optimisation
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Find all inbound links with new Google tool

February 6th, 2007

Rather out of the blue, Google has added a neat new feature to Webmaster Console. For the sites you have verified and added to your console, there is now a shiny new links tab:

Clicking on this tab gives you a list of all internal and external links into your site and the option to directly download this list. Nice one, Google! :)

edit: Matt Cutts adds this:

  • The backlink tool doesn’t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet, but I expect the number of links that are available to grow.
  • In particular, for my site I was easily able to see more than 10x more links in this new tool than the link: command gave me. The link: command has always returned a small fraction of the backlinks that Google knows about, mainly for historical reasons (e.g. limited disk space on the machines that served up “link:” data).
  • You can download the backlinks in a really nice CSV format, suitable for slicing and dicing and other analysis. I believe you can export up to a million backlinks if your site has that many backlinks. :)
  • Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.
Posted by Mark
Filed in Search Engine News, Research & Trends, Search Engine Optimisation
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