I have a great respect for the tried and tested SEO techniques that everyone uses to make sites rank more effectively. We’ll always use them as they’re are useful at achieving relevance. However rankings aren’t the be all and end all of SEO. Natural search is a marketing channel - it is not for just [...]

I was reading through the terms and conditions of some affiliate programs the other night. During this I noticed that if you’re an affiliate on the H Samuel or Ernest Jones programs you’re not supposed to be targeting misspellings of the brands . Why strong highstreet brands such as H Samuel and Ernest Jones [...]

After having already disrupted the Web Position gold ability to scrape results Google has now thrown another spanner in the works. Results are now server within H3 rather than H2 tags. Not a big change I grant you - but as everyones scraper is set up to look for these when analysing the pages they’ll [...]

For the last two months I’ve not been posting here at all, work and other commitments . Anyway I’ll be back up and running again next week. I’ve just moved servers and need to get some backendy stuff and plugins working again. This may mean that some of the stuff aint working yet. If you find [...]

Getting your pages cached by Google can be a nightmare at times. You’ve updated a web page and then you sit back and wait, wait some more and after more waiting GoogleBot decides index and cache your updated web page. It’s a problem that Dunkin’ Donuts had recently. They had a free iced coffee day [...]

From what I’ve been reading over the last week or two it would appear that following  the puchase of IndexTools by Yahoo! IndexTools is going to be made free! Soon you should be able to get an enterprise analytics package for your website and for at the best price you’ll get online - absolutely nothing [...]

I’ve been hearing lots of good things about Woopra lately. It looks nice - from the screenshots I’ve seen. Unfortunately I’ve been waiting an absolute age to get ahold of an invite - its like the wait that happened for Google Analytics before they got their act together. If anyone has a spare Woopra invite they [...]

Checking your SEO rankings in multiple data centres can be a useful thing to have a look at. Showing you how your rankings are in variuos Google data centres (DC) at the same time. As Google does a rolling update of its data taking DC into and out of their active configuration to be [...]

I was just chatting to Nick Duddy @ Equator and he was telling me about the ‘Gmail Grimace‘ thing going on over at the Email Standards Project. I’ve recently been getting more and more into Email Marketing as a way to generate sales and have been amazed at the difficulties that email marketers are having [...]

The first rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club. The third rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club. Are you a member of Fight Club? So you want to make money online. [...]

Over the weekend I started to see a spike in traffic one of my sites was receiving from Google Image Search in Google analytics. Unfortunately when I start to dig deeper into it I find that Google Analytics won’t show me what the queries were that drove all the traffic to the site. I love Google [...]

I don’t need to go on about the importance of links in relation to your natural search positions. We all know that having great links leads to great positions. One of the things that I’d heard could be affecting your natural search performance is whether these great links you’ve been out link baiting, link spamming or [...]

I’ve been reading quite  a bit lately about peoples WordPress blogs being targetted by everything from Malware Redirects to BlogRoll Spam. I thought I’d stick in some bits and pieces to help you get your WordPress blog toughened up and make your blogging safe. If you have a bog hosted over at wordpress.com rather than [...]

This is a plea to anyone who can help us here. We’re looking at building a Facebook widget - purely for vanity. We’ve had a look through the web and found various video tutorials about developing these but so far I’ve not been able to find one which has a step by steo guide for [...]

For a while I’ve been thinking more and more that Matt Cutts, aka Google Guy,  blog is becoming less relevant to me. It’s became a mecca for lots of non-seo noise that is starting to block out the good stuff that he used to post about Google and SEO. In the past he posted some really [...]

Having a well organised work station is great: in tray, out tray, worklist etc all help manage my work flow (kinda). But I often find that my file system gets out of control. So recently I started using Folder Marker - which allows you to change the colour of folders within windows. So now I have [...]

Oddbins is a great retailer. They’re staff have always been great at helping me out whenever I want wine, whisky or rum and have often directed me to new and exciting drinks that I’ve come to love - and my drink cabinet is rarely without. However on there website they’ve made a bit of a mistake [...]

One of the things we’ve been working on at IMJUK is to devise some added value extras: we’ve messed around with google maps and have given away a spreadsheet to help monitor the progress of internet marketing campaigns - we’re now looking at providing some free templates for Pligg, Wordpress etc. Linking to .zip files could [...]

I’ve posted before about how great FeedBurner is for getting your feed subscriber stats. However I do feel that it has a major failing - it doesn’t give you your link love back. And as someone who loves the free links that you can get from using your RSS feed appropriately having a feed in [...]

Woo Hoo. Just when Microsoft are making tools useless for Firefox  users a new version of the worlds greatest browser is available to download. And as Internet Exploreris rubbish this has brought a warm feeling into my soul. You can download the new version of Firefox (called Firefox 3 Beta 1) online and give it a [...]

After trying to get into the Microsoft webmaster tools, again, and clearing all my cookies and clearing my cache I was getting really frustrated with it. The I had a brain wave what if I use Internet Explorer to try and get in. No way that Microsoft would make a website that webmasters who didn’t [...]

I just saw today that Microsft have launched their equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. I was really interested to have a look at this. Unfortunately if you try to add a site all you get is: yep another genius idea from Microsoft and another example of something that doesn’t work - its so IE…

In my daily RSS digest from over the weekend, which on a Monday takes a bit of digging through, I found a mention of RSS Hugger by Killer Startups. Free is good but this one looks like it could deliver stronger links than many of the free RSS sources. Its a piece of kit which aggregates [...]

I love the growth in these ’social websites’ - I’m never too sure whats considered as being social media these days. Everything that can be used to leverage traffic - sorry I mean friends - seems to be within this field. Here are some that I really like <a href=”http://www.carpentermunn.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/heyasda.html”>Blogs are Pish</a> Quick Ribbon I hate websites that [...]

I’m not a designer. Thats for sure . If you’ve ever seen my affiliate websites you’ll know that for a fact. One of the things I’m most rubbish at is the which fonts are used within images. I can tell it’s a serif or sans serif font but any further than that I’m kinda screwed. [...]

Hmm. I’m not overly convinced by this but according to comscore the last month has seen MSN start to catch up with Google in the United Kingdom in terms of reach. I’m happily ensconced in a little UK Google Bubble and this may be why I’ve missed the surge of traffic coming to my sites [...]

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a wee trend emerging at Google. In the run up to christmas they seem to mess about with their algorithm. This could be completely normal and just the way that the dice fall on the Search Engine craps table or these dice could be loaded in favour [...]

Have been writing a post for a couple of days about the Google PageRank update that has been getting the goat of so many people just now. I have to say I haven’t seen any change apart from a small drop here and a small drop there but nothing on the scale I keep hearing [...]

But god I wish I could Over the last couple of months a couple of clients, or their internal representatives known as account managers, have been saying things that get on my nerves. Some of these have kinda got to me. Its got the stage where I’ve been wishing I could just say this or just [...]

Sometimes the mind just boggles when you’re doing some competitive research. The more you look at some backlinks the more it doesn’t make sense. Today while doing some backlink analysis for a large power generating and distribution company in the UK I took an interest in the backlinks generated to uSwitch. High up in site explorer [...]

Colin + Beer + Joomla CMS = Equator Live Store Les, from Equator, is renowned for his quotes some of which are just genius. They’re so damn good they’re available to buy online. Fantastic insights into the mind of a designer. Available quotes include: ‘This croissant tastes like fish’ ‘Tryin tae say a monkey wouldnae eat a green [...]

Discovering new places to get your RSS feed syndicated is an exciting business. I can hear you laughing from here! If you can find someone willing to syndicate your content, especially if the syndication source is ‘on topic’, you could have constantly developing links, pointing to your new pages when they go live, and you [...]

I was just wandering through the web, I can’t even remember what I was looking for (I hate it when that happens don’t you), and came across some stuff from Dan Theis on Building Website Structures. He was talking about using ‘nofollow’ on links to funnel PageRank onto specific pages within a site structure. Is [...]

This weekend we developed the Beta Version of the IMJUK Internet Marketing Maps Mashup. For those who havent seen the previous post we’re building a wee site that shows where your company is geographically(in a Google map) and combines this with your RSS feed listing to give you some free links to say thanks for [...]

As part of our testing process over here at IMJUK we’re currently developing a little mash up for Internet Marketing Companies in the United Kingdom. What we propose to do is geoposition your Internet Marketing company on a Google Map mash up and then link through to a page listing links generated from your RSS [...]

Every day I find new and exciting stuff on the Internet to do with marketing. The majority of the cutting edge stuff is in search engine optimization. SEO guys are getting bigger, faster, stronger and better every day and since the advent of web 2.0 and the growth in communities that have started its getting [...]

Last night - when I couldn’t sleep - I started wandering around MyBlogLog.Lots of blogs that we visit have the MyBlogLog plugin on i. So I thought I’d take a wee trip around it and see what I could find. Stuff I found in MyBlogLog in first ten minutes Dolphin Post on 301 redirects - Good post, [...]

All the Best SEO Companies are in Scotland How can we all be so good at SEO? As a Scot I may show a slight bias here but it would appear that many of the UKs best SEO companies, and SEO experts are in Scotland. We have a large number of large companies based in Glasgow and [...]

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one of the web technologies that is often mentioned as being a way to market a website.If used correctly RSS can be a good stepin moving towards creating improved search engine positions and improving your dialogue with consumers. Whats is RSS? In simple terms RSS is a stripped down version of your [...]

I love doing real conversion focussed copywriting. Its one of my small pleasures. Was one of the biggest eye openers when I moved away from writing copy to drive traffic through natural search to writing copy to drive traffic that also converts. The first day that someone started talking about financial targets for a website [...]

Google must have been having some down time in the office lately and have developed a flight sim for Google Earth instead of maintaining their search engine. Must be the lack of share holders forcing the company to kick some employees into working harder. Instructions for the flight sim ‘easter egg’ hidden in Google Earth can [...]

Two days ago we changed our RSS link, I’m sure the eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed :p We’re now running using feedburner pro. The feed in Wordpress is great, it requires no thought at all and bang its up and running. With Feedburner we can now get statistics. I never knew I could [...]

Web traffic analysis is a good place to start understanding how your website is being discovered and used. It will tell you where your website traffic is coming from and what it does when it reaches your website. Getting the correct analytics package, the software that gives you the statistics which you analyse, for your [...]

Affiliate marketing is a simple concept. The affiliate gets clicks to a merchants website. If these clicks convert to a sale within a predetermined time frame a commission is paid by the merchant to the affiliate. Often the merchant will employ an agency, a network or both to act as an intermediary between them and [...]

OK the first stage on any Internet Marketing strategy - and don’t leave this up to your agency - is to know what you want to achieve. Before you know what you want you need to know what you have - you need to know where you are before you can plan how to get [...]

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows us all to exchange information easily. You and I can exchange emails, we can surf the web, have discussions in forums, argue in blogs and chat in real time over messenger services. With this right their is a responsibility – understand that everything [...]

One thing that kills me in in RSS feeds are links. Link are a fantastic addition to any RSS feed they help me get to the original source of the story (if there is one), point me to related information and allow me to get a grip on the ideas expressed within the post. Absolute links [...]

The BBC website is one of the biggest UK website there is. Updating website content every moment of every day with stories ranging from Sports to Finance to Travel they’re often at the forefront of online news provision. Today I noticed they’re making a move into social bookmarking. Social Bookmarking on the BBC When I was catching [...]

After much deliberation, consternation and thought we’ve moved our blog - we could previously be found at http://justmarketing.wordpress.com. So to everyone that’s been there in the past - welcome to our new look blog. To all others we hope you enjoy the blog. If I’ve lost anyone from my blogroll let me know in the comments below. [...]