Paul Asplin, CEO of DAS has just started writing a blog on My Telegraph. I've previously written about the power of blogging when used by corporations in order to engage directly with clients and employees alike and I think this blog is a good example of when corporate blogging goes right.

Paul writes the blog in a very personal, non corporate style which is exactly what is needed to avoid the blog being seen as just another piece of corporate literature. In doing so, he reveals himself, and DAS, to be a company with a human face behind it and improves its brand perception immesuarably.

So well done Mr Asplin, we congratulate you and hope you manage to keep up the good work!

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Wow, Search Engine Strategies was excellent last week – I’m sorry that I only made it to the final part of the three-day conference.

Although we did get a touch of Geek Overload by the afternoon: especial annoyance directed towards one bright spark who constantly interrupted the panel with thoughts and advice of his own.

“Don’t forget the robots dot txt file!” spoken in a strangulated Mr Bean-ish voice has become something of a catchphrase for me and web designer Hannah, who earned geek points of our own by taking notes on the seminars we attended.

Anyway, those notes will – I hope – be of benefit to you too, as I share some tips and tools with you over the next few weeks.

Did you know about ... Google Sets? It lets you enter search terms and look for related content/ideas. Handy for research on keywords, and maybe websites to target for building links. And how about SpyFu? Try it - you'll like it!

Hello, it’s Marie. I’ve finally got rid of Duncan and will be taking control of the SEO blog from now on … mwahahaaaahaaaah!

Well, actually he’s gone freelance and is working for us on a consultancy basis, so we’ve still got all our SEO horsepower – just with one less horse to share the carrots with.

Anyway, I’m the IceBlue copywriter – and implement lots of the SEO strategies that Duncan dreams up – so I’m going to share a tip with you once a week.

This week’s tip is brought to you by the colour blue and the word META.

And this is it …

If you don’t have time to re-write all of your meta tags, concentrate on the meta description. This forms the text that appears in search engine listings – thus it’s the thing that attracts people to click through to your site.

Meta keywords, although believed in the search-engine olden days to be very valuable, are not currently included in search engine algorithms and are not seen by searchers.

I’m making time to go to Search Engine Strategies sometime this week – see you there?

(hint: If you need to know the meaning of any word in this web page just double click it!)

A is for ALT tags, make sure you give all the images on your website a text description so that search engines and visually impaired people know what they are. The W3C has some good guidelines which tell you all about marking up your HTML.

B is for BE CAREFUL, trying to cheat or 'spam' the search engines will not pay off in the long run (probably!)

C is for CONTENT, good content is the foundation of SEO, write for your visitors, not the search engines and you'll see better long term results

D is for DRIVE TRAFFIC, once you have great content that people will link to, go tell the world about it on bookmarking sites, PR sites etc. Stumble upon is a great way to drive loads of traffic to your website relatively cheaply

E is for EVENTS, attending events such as the search engine strategies conferences in person or
visiting their websites and downloading what you can can give you a lot of good advice and is definitely worth the trip over the pond at least once a year

F is for FORUM, encourage visitors to have their say and in the process gain loads of user generated content that can be spidered by the search engines. PHPBB is an open source forum which can be simply customised to integrate with your website.

G is for GOOGLE, over 70% of UK searchers use it so this is the search engine you should really be focusing on if you want to increase your web traffic, it has some great webmaster guidelines too

H is for HEADING TAGS, use etc to break up your sites content and tell the search engines which are the important words in your text. Click here to find out more about how to use these tags

I is for Index, this is where the search engines put your pages when they have crawled them, any pages not in the index used to be included in the supplemental results or 'Google hell' as it was known until a week ago. Matt Cutts tells you all about it in his video

J is for JUMP LINKS, although a little bit outdated, they can still be used to good effect for usability and telling the search engines about the important parts

K is for KEYWORDS, finding the words that people type into the search engines to find your product or service is THE most important thing in SEO, after all, what's the point of spending 3 months optimising for 'sneakers' when everyone in the UK types in 'trainers'. Research can be done using a number of tools, an excellent one is wordtracker

L is for LINKS, the more links you have from other websites, the more successful you will be, it's probably THE most important aspect of SEO. Refer to B however when trying to obtain them!

M is for META DATA, This is the data that goes into the head area of your web page, your visitors don't see it but the search engines do and you can tell them a lot about your site by using it properly.

N is for NEW CONTENT, fresh content makes your site more relevant to users and also provides more pages for search engines to show to users

O is for OLD CONTENT, old content should be changed or deleted very cautiously as Google tends to favour older sites and send more traffic to them

P is for PAGERANK, Googles (blunt) measurement of how much it 'trusts' a particular webpage. Download it here

Q is for QUALITY LINKS, a few very good quality links from other websites can give you far more traffic and trust than lots of links from low quality / irrelevant sites

R is for ROBOTS.TXT, this is a small text file that sits on your server, search engines read this to see which pages you want them to index and which ones you don't, make sure you haven't mistakenly barred any of your pages using Google's webmaster tools or find out more about robots.txt here

S is for SPIDERS, these are the little programmes that 'crawl' around the Internet all day looking for new and updated web pages, make sure they can read your website content properly by using the poodle predictor

T is for TITLE, The title's of your web pages should all be different and explain the actual content of that page to help both visitors and search engines

U is for URL, your URL's say a lot about your websites content so make sure they're not useless strings of database fields like 'www.example.com/2333?34jherj3i3e=333endd.aspx' Give the fields a name that is related to the content on the page and your visitors and search engines will appreciated. There's a useful URL re-writing tool here

V is for VERTICAL SEARCH, which is focused on a specific niche interest or topic on the Internet. You can optimise your site to these niches to attract more targeted visitors

W is for WIDGETS, investing a little bit of time in building a successful widget can pay dividends if people start to use it and link back to your site. Learn all about them here

X is for XML, content in an XML format can be distributed and published throughout the web to give you a larger presence

Y is for YAHOO SITE EXPLORER, a great way to keep track of the number of people linking to your website.

Z is for zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, if you've read this far, you're probably dropping off to sleep by now (okay, I cheated a little on that one - just couldn't think of anything to do with SEO beginning with Z)

A few posts back now I discussed the optimisation of a molecular and cellular biology website which we've decided to use as a bit of a case study, here's an update on how it's going:

Spread the links

Due to the large amounts of keywords required for the website I decided that the best strategy was to optimise each individual page's meta data and text to give the engines a starting point in what to rank the page for and then start a general link building campaign to build up overall trust with a blog and a forum simmering away in the background to create an active community. The site was built with information in mind and so building links is fairly simple as a lot of people are genuinely interested in the site as a resource.

Next step

In building up the overall trust of the site, the next step is to crosslink throughout so that each individual page has internal links that will guide both the users and the search engines to the relevant pages.

Why?

The reason for adopting this tactic rather than attempting to gain external links is due to the pure amount of keywords necessary to bring in business as they are all pretty niche and don't have high numbers. Getting external links in for each keyword would be very costly and time consuming with not a great deal of return on their investment however, getting natural and directory links to the informative areas of the site for general keywords and then internally linking to the niche areas will still get them the results that they need.

The results so far

High resolution melting is one of the many keywords that Cadama wish to be ranked for and they're now sitting quite pretty at number 3(google UK) and 10(google worldwide). Derivatives of this keyword such as high res melting, high res melt and hi res melt are also doing pretty well in the Google charts but we're hoping to do better next year.

Overall, out of 85 keywords for Cadama which were decided on last month after research from Adwords, wordtracker and web ceo we rank number 1 in the top four search engines for 15 of the phrases, in the top 5 for 20 and the rest? well we aren't too bothered with not being ranked in the top 5.

Summary

Overall, a nice steady start to the optimisation campaign, I'll keep you updated next month with what happens.

Well the results are in...... drum roll please ........... www.web4marketing.co.uk came to the top of the google rankings for the phrase 'Who is the best seo company in the UK' as of 06th December 2007 (It was supposed to be judged on the 1st but I completely forgot, oops!

These were closely follwed by:

2. www.seocompanyuk.com

3. www.seotoday.com

4. www.seoptimise.com

5. www.seoco.co.uk

6. www.icebluemd.co.uk

Our original posting for the competition ranked 6th which wasn't too bad, well done to web4marketing for having optimised their way to the top (knowingly or not!)

The next competition is going to be for the phrase 'what is the meaning of life?" There are apparently (according to which figures you go off) around 240 searches for this everyday. At the moment the number one spot goes to wikipedia and then to some jumped up bibley type site. These aren't in the competition, just the seo company/individual who can get highest for this phrase!

I'm not too sure how long this is going to last before it gets spammed the hell out of but a massive loophole has been discovered in Google's search algorythm by our search team over the last week!

We noticed a massive surge in traffic to one of our sites overnight, from approx 50 visitors per day to over 1,500! The reason? A lone image on the site that had been labeled 'no smoking sign' and then found on Google images in number 1 position and hit time upon time. Now why would this little image be made number 1? Well, we had originally downloaded it from Google images whilst it had the title 'no smoking' and we renamed it simply adding the word 'sign' to the end to make it more descriptive.

The surge in visitors could be put down to a simple fluke, however, we tried the same with other images found on Google image search and then added to the description rather than changing it completely. The result??? Loads and loads of extra visitors.

It seems then that by incorporating a google image into your site and then adding to the description and making it more descriptive, Google will boost that image up the rankings and use your site as the one that visitors get sent to.

A handy hint I'm sure you'll agree, now go forth and use it! (until it gets banned)

Okay, I'll admit it. The state of the SEO industry in Birmingham at present is in pretty dire shape. Just by glancing through current salary levels for SEO jobs in the UK you can instantly see that the top agencies, clients and consultants are all based in London.

It grates me to say it because I love Birmingham and find that the majority of SEO consultants / agencies in London don't do or know much more than reputable Birmingham SEO companies. The main reason that I believe we're in such a poor state up here is that generally, businesses in London are far more web, marketing and yes, business savvy that companies from 'oop north' and therefore see the value in SEO which still stands for Sausage and Egg Omelet up here for most SME's.

That's not to say that all is lost for the SEO companies like ourselves from the midlands who have worked incredibly hard on results driven campaigns to impress their skeptical clients. A recent smattering of London clients have found us via the web and had enough courage and lack of north/south prejudice to become our clients. The results (needless to say or I wouldn't be writing this article) have meant serious value for money for these companies who now view us as the secret weapon in their marketing strategies.
Publish Post
The lesson? Sometimes companies from London can be so caught up with what's in the M25 that they lose out on the chance to work with genuine, talented, exceptional (and modest) people like ourselves (not to mention the chance to savor a decent pint of bitter when they pop up to visit). Choosing Search engine optimisation companies in Birmingham could be the smartest thing they've ever done!

So just how do you make retailers of laboratory equipment compelling and search engine friendly? This was the challenge set to us a couple of weeks back now by the owners of cadama .co.uk
Firstly it helped that they were web savvy and saw the value in pushing forward their web presence without expecting immediate, obvious gains.

The challenge is that the clients target audience are heavily brand conscious, peer influenced and research driven when choosing their next piece of specialist laboratory equipment which they could be using for the next 10 - 120 years or longer, therefore impulse buys are pretty much out of the window and a campaign to highlight the cadamamedical website as an information hub therefore elevating their brand awareness was decided upon as the best for long term business growth and development rather than a quick fix.

First thing was first, we took a look at their AdWords campaigns and cut out the wasteful visitors, improved quality scores and reduced average CPC's from an unhealthy £.67 to a more respectable £.13

We developed a plan which involved subtle changes to their website including increased use of calls to action and a back end molecular biology forum and molecular biology blog to get them an authoritative web presence over their nearest web rivals.

Keyword lists are being drawn, researched and completed this week and shortly after we will be able to bring keyword guidelines into their SEO strategy and lay some solid foundations for year on year growth and development.

So it all comes back to the old "quality content" "write for your visitors" solution to SEO that seems to be the stock answer from every major search engine representative and funnily enough, it's true! Unfortunately, it does take a bit of thought and perseverance and so quick fixes will always be there to tempt the SEO company however,the thoughtful approach will always save you time in the end as you won't have to keep updating your quick fix solutions to keep up with changes to the search engines.

Work that we have recently carried out on a client selling safes online has been showcased by the National business to business centre via their website and a promotional magazine. The article
shows how we have helped the business to increase sales dramatically over a short period of time and with a limited SEO budget. Publicity such as this is always appreciated, especially from such an esteemed organisation.

We are now embarking on a natural search engine optimisation campaign for needasafe to increase their sales even further.

We eventually decided to pop down to the search engine strategies conference on Friday. We were unsure whether or not to go down at first as we'd attended a lot of search engine strategy events recently and this seemed to be a bit of a last minute afterthought bolted onto the affiliates 4 u conference.

My suspicions were confirmed when we entered and found the atmosphere to be rather flat with a low attendance however, I always view this as good news as it means that there's less talented / educated competition in the SEO business for us to deal with.

Door charges were halved for us as we were only attending one day which was nice as they didn't have a specific policy

I decided to take in "the search integration conundrum" for my first lecture whilst Marie, our copywriter went to see "the changing nature of search" of which she reported back positively on, my lecture was another story however... The star of the show was the MD of bigmouthmedia who was funny, intelligent and perceptive yet her two co-presenters were coming out with the most amazing pseudo scientific buzzword laden nonsense I've ever heard (even in the US) They gave lazy, nonsensical questions which had the sole purpose of trying to make themselves look more intelligent whilst (I assume) making the MD of bigmouth appear silly. Luckily, it had the opposite effect.

The day did improve from there though - "Know Your Customer. Analysing Visitor Behaviour & Needs to Maximise Conversion" started off badly but ended up a very interesting and informative look at customers perceptions. We also went along to see a chap who we know fairly well now after bumping into him at numerous shows - James Pennington's lecture was a refreshing, down to earth antidote to the waffle coming from some of the other rooms and he delivered some good advice for the non-agency crowd at the show which is what he does successfully week in, week out at the nb2bc in Warwick.

We didn't hang around for the aftershow party as we both had prior engagements with friends in London however I don't think we will have missed out on too much. Hopefully the next LOndon event will have a bit more life in it!!

So we've decided to pop along to the search engine strategies event tomorrow at the Expo centre. Looks like a tiny line up of speakers compared to the usual but from the looks of it, it's just a small scale event that's been pinned onto the a4uexpo event.
Still, they're always good learning opportunities and a good chance to get re-enthused about SEO in general so off we go!
I'll blog an update on Monday

Well it's that time of year again when we start looking at the conferences and deciding on which ones to visit.

A must for us at IceBlue is the SES chicago event which we attended last year. It was a great event and chicago is a brilliant city to go to for the eveniong socials. The big question is whether we fork out for the London show next week too. We've been putting this decision off for a little while as we've been consistently dissapointed by the UK SEO events, they just seem ..... well, dissapointing really.

The internet is a frightening place for businesses. For those who don’t have time to keep up with its latest developments (and lets face it – who does?) it can seem like a good idea to just stick up a website and then forget about it, pretend it isn’t there and carry on as they always have.

The above approach is obviously flawed yet reflects a large proportion of businesses attitudes to the web in the UK today. MD’s and board members need to focus up on their web presence as historically, any company, large or small, that has stuck its head in the sand when new technologies arrive has been doomed to failure. It’s hard to believe now that the medium of television could once have been looked upon in the same way as the internet is now. There was a great deal of mistrust around advertising on TV and a good number of businesses took an extraordinarily long time to take the leap and reap the benefits whilst businesses that took the lead early on enjoyed lower competition and rates and a wider audience.



The flipside of all of this is that the early adopters of technologies often have a lot to gain from investing a little time and effort into adapting their businesses to suit new communication and marketing mediums, this white paper aims to be the start of your organisations adaptation of a professional, organised approach to the web arm of your business.

One of the common misconceptions regarding promoting your business on the internet is that it is expensive, time consuming and detracts from your core business activities in a detrimental way. The five activities listed in this paper, when implemented, offer your site the chance to thrive with minimal impact on your day to day operations. The value of this is that as more and more people use the internet for a growing number of activities, you and your company will be best placed to take advantage of the commercial rewards.

1 – Get focused!

What do you want your website to do?

An obvious question it seems, but when you start to dig beneath the surface, you begin to realise that your website probably has a multitude of different aims and target audiences. Does your website aim to show visitors how much knowledge you have of a particular product or service? Does it aim to show them why your company is the best / cheapest at doing something? Do you want someone to come onto the website and phone you for more information or to purchase straight from the site, if so, do you make that obvious? A good way start is to look extensively at your competitions websites and jot down what you like and dislike about them. Try to think about what your visitor wants to see and don’t make the site a vehicle for your own ego! There’s nothing that turns the web user off more than reading a company brag about its achievements in sickly marketing blurb.

Provide focus to the people who are going to be adding content to the site by disseminating your aims as widely as possible and not allowing any content that falls outside of these aims to be published, thus retaining your sites focus and ensuring its message remains undiluted.

Another area to focus up is the website’s content, just as you don’t see all of Tesco’s products stacked up in a big pile in the car park, your website shouldn’t shove all of its content in the users face as soon as they hit the “landing page”.



Like Tesco’s, you should have a clean, branded front end to the website, clear segregation of the sites contents and then further segregation within following a logical pattern. The hierarchical categories that you decide upon (the sitemap) will be very difficult to swap around should you decide to change them at a later date so it is important that you take as much time as possible carefully considering and discussing exactly how you wish to organise your site.


Golden rule – Anyone who provides the site with content should know the aims of the site off the top of their heads i.e. “professional, informative and helpful”

2 – Get organised!


You need staff to make your website work! You don’t necessarily need to hire an extra pair of hands (although having a smart, web savvy, full time member of staff to look after and develop the website would be a major advantage).

Assign responsibility for different areas of the site to existing members of staff and have regular progress meetings to ensure everyone is confident about adding to the website in an organised way. Each department from reception to manufacturing can contribute to the overall attractiveness of the website by regularly be adding news articles, blog entries, updating prices/products or services, podcasts, V-casts, white papers etc.



Once you have your meetings up and running on a regular basis, you’ll find that your websites content will start to grow and potential clients will spend longer looking at your website. A regularly updated website also has the advantage of disseminating information throughout your organisation quickly making it easier for departments to cross sell and to create a general sense of inclusiveness.

Golden rule – Update your website regularly! Find an enthusiastic member of staff who will be the main point of contact with your web company and make sure everyone knows to go to them with their web stories / updates etc.

3 – Get tracking

If you had a shop then you’d want to know how many people were coming in everyday, what they were buying, if they were stealing from you, if they were getting lost or confused in your shop and how much they were spending. Getting this information from a regular shop or business is difficult, costly and time consuming but tracking visitors to your website is very simple and can reveal an awful lot about how your website and company is perceived by clients and potential clients.
Tracking visitors to your site also helps you to monitor the progress you are making with your search engine optimisation campaigns and can tell you things such as if your visitor numbers are improving and if the visitors find your site’s content interesting. It is also a very cost effective method of customer profiling and market research, often revealing incredibly useful information about your clients.

Golden rule – Don’t rush into making changes to your site based on your tracking statistics.

4 – Give a lot – gain even more

Like it or not, the internet is all about freedom of choice and information. To get a strong web presence, you need to be prepared to give a lot away and this can be one of the hardest aspects of the internet for businesses to get their heads around.
Taking the altruistic approach to the visitors to your website will reap big rewards if you and your organisation have the patience to see it through. Giving out information in the form of whitepapers, podcasts etc or creating games or useful web applications without hounding your visitor for personal data or money will give your site a good reputation on the web both with human visitors and with the search engines too. This in turn will pay off with extra traffic to your site ultimately resulting in more leads / sales etc.

In reality, letting an employee take half an hour each day to write a blog is something that most traditional businesses would not consider good use of that employees time however, businesses that are comfortable with this concept are the ones who are thriving on the internet today and gaining incredible exposure as a result.

Golden rule – The more you give – the more you get

5 – Get professional

Whether you hire an external agency, employ a specific individual or move an existing employee into a new position, creating a position purely for the management of your web presence is a move that can pay off huge dividends depending on the individual you employ.


Not everyone is cut out to do the job but, with a little bit of research you should be able to find a company or an individual capable of co-ordinating your efforts in creating and promoting your online presence.
The e-commerce survey of businesses has reported year on year rises in both consumer and business spending online since 2000 and with greater take up of broadband and increased security, this looks set to rise even further.
Whichever way you look at it, the internet is going to become increasingly important to your business over the next decade or so and it makes sense to approach to make your approach to it as professional as you possibly can.

Golden rule – Keep up to date with the latest technologies evolving on the internet so your company can be ready to take advantage of them. A good way to do this is by subscribing to RSS feeds from informative websites.

Why do most SEO companies reside in London? The answer is pretty simple really, that's where they're most appreciated.
How do you get clients from London if you're an SEO company that doesn't reside there then and why would you want London clients?
We've found that it's worth the extra effort to take the odd trip down the M40 now and again as the clients tend to have a greater appreciation of marketing techniques in general and so are willing to part with their hard earned which allows us loads of time to spend on getting them ranked highly for competitive keywords.
As to the second part of that question - we find Adwords to be of limited value in getting London SEO clients but this blog tends to get us a steady stream why? Because a savvy marketing manager knows that when they see our blog at the top of Google for a particular keyword, th people behind the blog probably have a good chance of getting his/her site there too!
Our seo consultancy services are second to none and have turned whole organisations into profit making machines in the past!

Pay per click (PPC) campaigns and natural Search engine optimisation (SEO) have long been segregated by the search engine optimisation industry.
Search engine optimisation purists have tended to add the management of PPC campaigns as an afterthought or even avoided it alltogether when advertising their services or speaking at search engine events. This is probably due to the widely held misconception that a PPC campaign requires little skill or knowledge. This is untrue. Managing a succesful PPC campaign can involve just as much effort as managing a successful SEO campaign, reducing spend and increasing profits is an art in itself.

Despite the above statement, the two forms of online marketing have never been natural bedfellows however, a small number of SEO companies including ourselves have long realised the benefits of combining the two disciplines to potentiate the eficacy of our clients campaigns.

To show how this works I've provided three examples below, each demonstrates the typical course of the relationship between client and SEO firm. The first scenario is based on a PPC campaign, the second on a natural SEO campaign and the third on our combined approach.

Scenario 1 - PPC campaign:

The client

Typical client needs leads fast! The client is impatient for results and doesn't have the time to explore the benefits of a well managed long term SEO strategy, they want to be number 1 in Google and they want it yesterday!

The results

Client signs off the invoice wearily, not too trusting (quite rightly) of the profits he may reap but willing to try anything at this point. The campaign then goes one of two ways:

A - The clients website is a converter and gets him / her a good few leads in the first trial period, client is incredibly happy with you and asks you to keep running the campaign. A good few months down the line, the client is still doing well but the accountant isn't happy!

"What's all this money we're spending on Google then?" they ask.

By this time the client has forgotten the fact that although they're spending £X on Google, theu're actually making £XXXXX out of it. hey agree with the accountant that they should cut costs and give you a call to reduce the spend or cancel the account altogether. You oblige, sales drop off and then they think it must be because of the colour of the website so they go out and spend thousands (with another company) on getting a re-design and still no visitors. They can be heard down the pub moaning that they "tried internet marketing for a while but it didn't work out/the firm I hired stopped getting me leads/people stopped searching for my product on the internet"

B - They website couldn't convert a desperate shopaholic (as you tried to warn them subtly whilst their son/brother/cat who designed the site was sat in the meeting) and nothing happens ... que excuses of outcome A

Scenario 2 - SEO campaign

The client knows a little about search engines and how they work, they are keen to get someone to have a go at it for them but shocked at the amount of time (money) is involved in getting them to the top of Google for a competetive (profit making) keyword. They then either:

A - Kick you out of the door and go with a company down the road who promises to get them to number 1 in a week for £300 (for the highly competetive keyword "blue trainers for sale in west bromwich on tuesday afternoon".
Perversely the client is extremely happy with this and spends countless hours contacting freinds, familly, clients etc boring them to tears with how his website is number 1 in Google for "blue trainers for sale in west bromwich on tuesday afternoon" and gets cross when they type in trainers and his site ranks on page 1,567

B - They glumly agree to the campaign and spend the next three months constantly on the phone to you asking why they aren't at number one for obscure phrases or their best friends cat"s name even though you've spent hours carefully selecting profitable keywords that will shortly make them rich beyond their wildest dreams and had explained that it would take a good long time for results to show. If they do stick with you for long enough for the results to show, the increased sales are inevitably put down to the fact that they changed their profile picture on the about us page to capture their kindly aspect and not to the fact that you've spent the last few months slaving away at their on and offsite SEO using the most up to date techniques gleaned from detailed analysis of hidden codes in Matt Cutt's blog and a few sneaky secrets only you and your close companions know of.

Scenario 3 - SEO & PPC combo!

Well, if you've read the last two scenarios then you can guess where this is probably heading. For those clients smart enough to take the combined approach, the rewards are plenty. Instant traffic and leads followed up with free traffic three months down the line when they start to get fidgety at the amount they're spending on "internet advertising" something they neither know or trust even after it's made them a small fortune in increased profits and established them on the map. They early profits take the sting out of paying for the natrual SEO campaign and everyone's happy, especially us, the SEO firms as we get to use the data from the PPC campaign as real time statistics which help us immensely with creating a brilliant natural SEO campaign.

Summary

Although this post seems alittle cynical, it is intentionally so to bring a bit of light humour to an otherwise dry and frustrating subject of SEO. Of course not all clienjavascript:void(0)ts fall into the categories above and the vast majority of our clients appreciate our work. I'm hust empahasising the negative thoughts that must (reasonably) cross their minds when they hand over their website and monthly purchase orders to a firm they know little about that performs a service they know of even less.

Thought I'd try a bit of cross SE ad spend comparrison with a new campaign for one of our own companies recently and take the leap into msn's PPC model. I'd avoided it before as there was never really an easy way to transfer campaigns over and the effort taken to set one up was simply not cost effective enough for our clients. However, the promise of searchers being twice as likely to convert compared to Google compelled me to start running identical campaigns on both msn and Google, the results? ...

Too early to say I'm afraid, The site has a really low conversion rate but with high conversion values (up to £5000) so it will take a good long while to get enough information to make the experiment statistically viable however, I can say that the support and setup with msn was great (nice Irish helpesk staff who'll transfer your Adwords account seetings over in 24 hours) and the interface is relatively easy to use although seems to lack a lot of the useful features of Adwords.

In short, completely undecided! Will have to convince a client with a high conversion rate / traffic volume to give it a spin.

Designing contemporary CSS web pages can be seen by some as an art and something to aspire to however, there are those individuals out there that have taken this way too seriously.

I was recently contacted by an individual basically abusing our website! Some of the highlights of this idiots unsolicited diatribe were:

He claims that having a blog and putting your keywords in bold is black hat!

States that being ranked for "contemporary web design" is far superior to being ranked for "seo midlands" "seo west midlands" etc

I did originally publish the e-mail string but it contained quite a bit of foul and abusive language from him so I've removed it today whilst in a calmer state! It did make for funny reading though and I'll send it out to my regular readers on request.

This was a completely unsolicited e-mail from out of the blue by someone who had a real chip on his shoulder! I checked my log files after and found that this individual had spent over 1 hour and 40 minutes trawling through our site! He's obviously not too busy with clients if he's got enough time to do that on a Tuesday morning!

I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with random people e-mailing them out of the blue?

I've been reading cornwallseo.com for a fair while now and although he's a blatant link baiter, he's extremely good at it and makes a very good read!

I think where I probably differ is that I'm a director of a large group of companies and so probably approach SEO from more of a business angle which, ultimately is far less entertaining and a lot duller than the kind of things he does!

Well done Cornwall SEO for a cracking read from a beautiful part of the country!

So just which firm of SEO specialists are the best in the UK? My challenge to all the SEO firms out there in the UK is to beat this blog in getting the top rankings (only in Google please). Link baiting? Maybe ... Fun? Maybe(if you're an SEO Geek) ...

So bring it on UK SEO companies, get off facebook and Matt Cutt's blog and spend your lunchtimes doing something much more productive like knocking us off the top spot.

First prize from IceBlue for getting to number 1 for "Who is the best seo company in the UK" is an all expenses paid trip to Scarborough on a damp weekend in July (and the chance to brag about it on your website).

Winners of this competition will be notified by e-mail and given a reasonable amount of free PR, links etc.

The Winner of the free "Who is the best seo company in the UK" competition will be the company or individual who ranks number 1 in the worldwide search on Google at 1700 on December 1st ...

For more information, e-mail SEO@icebluemd.co.uk

Regular updates and leader boards will be published via my RSS feed

Good luck!

So just which firm of SEO specialists are the best in the UK? My challenge to all the SEO firms out there in the UK is to beat this blog in getting the top rankings (only in Google please). Link baiting? Maybe ... Fun? Maybe(if you're an SEO Geek) ...

So bring it on UK SEO companies, get off facebook and Matt Cutt's blog and spend your lunchtimes doing something much more productive like knocking us off the top spot.

First prize from IceBlue for getting to number 1 for "The best seo company in the UK" is an all expenses paid trip to Scarborough on a damp weekend in July (and the chance to brag about it on your website).

Winners of this competition will be notified by e-mail and given a reasonable amount of free PR, links etc.

The Winner of the free "The best seo company in the UK" competition will be the company or individual who ranks number 1 in the worldwide search on Google at 1700 on December 1st ...

For more information, e-mail SEO@icebluemd.co.uk

Regular updates and leader boards will be published via my RSS feed

Good luck!

What a week! I don't need to go into details here but you know the sort of week when Friday feels like Monday afternoon. Had half an hour to look around on the internet before the weekend though and, although not really an SEO thing, have found this site that looks and feels really good, impressed with Visa well done! And judging by its pagerank already lots of other people are probably impressed too.

Will try and add more next week but getting work out of the door has had to take priority!

Our latest batch of SEO tips that we have sent out to our newsletter readers - If you have landed on this page after reading our newsletter, please feel free to add a comment underneath the article or rate it! We'd love to know what information you'd like to see on our SEO newsletters in the future so we can keep on improving the content.

People keep talking about SEO and I don't know what it means. Please explain!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the collective term for a whole range of methods that are used to try and get a web page ranked highly in search engines for certain keywords or phrases i.e. Jd sports would want its website to be shown on the first page of Google whenever someone typed “trainers” or “sportswear” into the search box, in order to do this it would have to hire an SEO specialist.

My site's quite new and isn't being picked up by search engines. What should I do?

If another site that has been around for a while links to your site then it will eventually be picked up and indexed by the major search engines (although this can take 3 – 6 months depending on how trustworthy the site is that links to you. Whilst you are waiting, you can submit your site manually to most search engines but not all.

I think I've wasted money on paid-for links - have I?

This is a hotly debated subject! Recently, Google have asked all website owners and searchers who suspect that a website is using or paying for links to report it to them as spam! This caused a huge row amongst the SEO community as paid for links have been the norm for a while (many directories ask to be paid for inclusion – including Yahoo!). IceBlue suggest that spending money on links is only temporary anyhow so whether you get caught or not, it’s probably best to drop it as an SEO technique sooner rather than later and spend your time and money on other, more useful methods of optimising your site.

Does the writing on my website make a difference to how I rank in the search engines?

It is often considered one of the most important things on a website. Sure, it’s probably not going to get you amazing amounts of traffic on its own but when used with other SEO techniques it can be the difference between thousands and hundreds of visitors per day. We recommend between around 300 – 500 words per page keeping your keywords in mind for the first and last paragraph, headings, titles and crosslinking. Our very own copywriters blog will give you loads more tips on this.

What should I look for in an SEO company? How can I tell if they’re trustworthy or not?

Like all professions, SEO has its share of poor practitioners and, being such a young profession it can be hard to tell which companies are reputable and which are not. People often use the logic that if a firm ranks number 1 in Google for “SEO company” then they must be a good company however this logic is flawed as it only means they’ve spent a large amount of time and effort on optimising their own site and not their clients.

Being recommended an SEO company from one of their clients is great in theory but in reality, people who have found a good SEO company are loathe to disclose the information to anyone else!

Another way to find a reputable SEO firm is to go to a search engine strategies conference and hang around the stalls and meeting areas, if firms are willing to send their staff to these conferences then they must have some level of integrity and a desire to learn (tip – if you don’t want to pay the high fees for the lectures, you can pick up a ticket for the exhibition hall for around £20

There’s also good information available from Google webmasters which will give you additional guidelines for choosing an SEO company