Now Google Chrome is available I thought I'd follow up on my blog earlier this week about the performance of Google's new browser.

Google's big claim on the launch of their Chrome browser is that it's fast when browsing the web, and it certainly is that. It's a very light browser with none of the normal tool bar options you get in Internet Explorer and Firefox which makes it easier to run however, there's currently no Java plug-in built into the browser and when trying to load a Java plug-in I was told there was no add-on available, so there are limits in the websites you can view with Chrome.

In addition, all of the SEO tools that we use in Firefox, that give great SEO functionality to Firefox aren't available yet. However as Chrome is a Open Source browser I imagine that it won't be long until at least some of these SEO tools are available.

I find the clean interface of Chrome easy to use and the start page that shows recently browsed websites in thumbnails is also good. Like Firefox, Google Chrome allows you to have a Bookmark Toolbar where you can store your most frequently used websites so you can access them without having to pull up a menu to do this.

Similarly to Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, Google Chrome also allows you to run multiple websites in tabs. However, Chrome does run each tab as a separate process, meaning that if a website crashes the whole browser doesn't crash.

Matt Cutts of Google, has addressed a number of issues with Chrome that people are asking and reassured us that from Google's point of view they still support Firefox and aren't using the development of their browser to gather more information about people's behaviour and their most commonly used websites.

Given time and some more developments including plug-ins like Java and some of the SEO tools we use I think Google Chrome will be a really good Browser.

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

Recently, Google made a change to the HTML that displays the search engine results. A side effect was that a lot of the automated ranking checkers broke (as did the autonumbering of search results much to our temporary dismay).

However, an interesting offshoot was the amount of buzz in the blogosphere about whether ranking reports were important or not. Now I’d seen this before - SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin famously commented some time ago that “rank checking is so 1999”.

But it is something that is easy for clients of an SEO company to understand, and generally, something they request. However, ranking reports don’t tell the whole story, and that seems to be the main problem. Here’s a great defence of ranking reports and another, talking about how they are an essential part of the analysis because without them you don’t have the whole story either.

Interestingly, the author of that last link also wrote a couple of great posts that are almost counter arguments, but actually illustrate the potential abuse and misunderstanding of rankings reports, including the excellently titled “If a Ranking Falls on the First Page, But There is Nobody Around to See it, Does it Still Make Any Difference?”
 and one on working out if the rankings actually matter.

So, fascinatingly, there is an element of interpretation that a good SEO brings to ranking reports. Here at Vertical Leap we automate some of this with Apollo’s Search Analytics which we have been using for the past 3 years to quantify whether a ranking is worth keeping. Apollo alerts us if a ranking is not “pulling its weight” – we take care that the keywords we are targeting are ones that will bring traffic to a client’s website, it is one of the things that in central to the way that we manage a campaign.

I obviously agree with Stoney deGeyter’s views on evaluating rankings, because here is yet another post of his I enjoyed whist reasearching this blog post where he talks in detail about working out how much a ranking is worth.

Rankings are a long way from being the only SEO metrics that we look at, the size of the long tail is a great measure of SEO success for instance. But it is also important for us to understand what the KPIs are for a customer and to not forget that we need to find out what is important to a customer about their search engine rankings to make sure that they are receiving the value that they need for their business to grow.

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

On Monday Google announced that they are launching a new browser called Chrome.

The browser will be available in 100 countries from Tuesday and is billed by Google as being a competitor to both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser will be cross platform working with Windows, Mac and Linux and is the first software release for Linux that Google has released. The developers at Google who have been working on this new browser started with a blank page - looking at what the guys at Google would ideally like a browser to do, having spent so many hours on the internet.

The Chrome browser is aimed at both making the internet easier for user and also to drive innovation on the internet. Designed to be clean and easy to use it's focussed more on the experience of browsing the web. Their tabbed browsing will run each tab as an isolated instance meaning that if a website crashes the browser won't shut down as with IE and Firefox, just that one tab. As a result of their user focus Google are aiming to make their browsing experience much faster and user-friendly.

We've commented a lot on the good SEO plug-ins that are available for Firefox but we have yet to hear if any similar functionality will be available in Google Chrome.

Google Chrome is only being released as a beta version and will be constantly improving and building on the stability of the product.

We wait to see if the new Google Chrome browser lives up to the hype when it's released later today and once I've had a play I'll let you know what I think!

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

Many e-commerce website tools now come with SEO add-ons to enable you to make them more SEO friendly but one thing there still seems to be problems with is duplicate content issues.

A number of the e-commerce packages available provide the option to produce HTML versions of the product catalogue on the site, which sound great to many companies as an extra way to promote their products, however this is a great way of duplicating content for every product on the site, so where possible avoid this or if it is pushed then the containing folder could be disallowed in the Robots file to stop Search Engines from crawling these pages and penalising the site.

In addition many e-commerce websites have a http and https site for secure payments. If the https site is crawled and indexed by Search Engines you will also suffer from Duplicate content issues as the https site may not just contain the check out and payment pages but also the rest of the site.

If you manage the SEO on an e-commerce website you can use Google's webmaster tools to stop the https site from being crawled and indexed. Once you have set up the main http site in Google webmaster tools and verified it with Google you can then add an additional site with the same URL but https at the beginning - so your main site is www.yourcompany.com and the additional site is https://www.yourcompany.com - your verification file for the www.yourcompany.com site will verify the https://www.yourcompany.com site. Using the Tools menu under the https site select remove URLs and remove the entire https site - making sure it's the https and not the main site you are removing and submit the removal request.

Doing this should ensure that the duplicate content issues on the site are removed.

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

I've worked on lots of sites where I've taken over the SEO from a previous encumbent. The actual SEO techniques that are employed vary from company to company – some do the on-page changes in a similar fashion to how we would do these, others have a very different style.

One frequent (legacy) complaint from clients who have fired their previous optimiser is the poor the communication the relationship suffered from. It often doesn’t matter how good results are achieved in an SEO campaign like this, primarily because the clients don’t appreciate what levels of improvements have been achieved.

This is something that we try really hard to not let happen with our clients. The solution to this is really quite simple – Talk to your customers!

The first conversation that I would normally have with a client isn’t just about looking at the types of keyword that they want to be ranking for. Instead, its about trying to understand the goals that they have for employing your services in the first place. With some campaigns, this does mean talking about rankings for specific keywords, but in most cases its about looking to grow a business, increase leads, increase brand awareness etc.

Once you understand the reason that a company is using your service for, it’s much easier to devise a strategy to look at helping them to achieve this. It also helps to set everyone’s expectations of what we can achieve and likely timeframes for achieving this, although obviously it’s nigh on impossible to guarantee particular results in this arena.

Communicating the reasons for the changes that we make to websites is also an important way of how Vertical Leap works. Ok – not every client wants to know the precise reasons for everything that we do, but explaining the concepts and reasons for some of the techniques in the long term pays dividends, because the next time content is added, if they’ve listened, it will be a much simpler task to optimise it.

It also helps both ways… as sometimes we need clients to tell us things when they change. We weren’t told recently about some threatened legal action involving one of the keywords we were optimising for a client.

Once we knew about the problems, it only took about an hour to remove any sign of this from Google’s index. If we had been told after the initial contact, it may have been possible to head off any further complications. Hopefully that issue should now be simplified somewhat.

So, in short – communication between client and SEO is probably the most important aspect of the whole campaign. Make sure your SEO company is able to communicate effectively with you!

Pete Handley
Campaign Delivery Manager

We've been asked by a few clients recently for a formula for calculating ROI for their pay per click marketing campaigns. 
I've always found that ROI is one of those terms that has been over-used and abused by so many people and as such, there is confusion on how best to calculate it.  Personally, I like to use the following formula when we are discussing the ROI for any PPC campaign:

    ROI = [Contribution] / [Cost]

So to calculate Contribution for a PPC campaign:

    ([Your average profit per sale] x [Estimated number of Conversions]) - [PPC Spend]

To demonstrate more fully, let's take the following example:

   Monthly PPC Spend:                    £1,500
   Average Profit per Sale:                 £50
   Number of Conversions (Sales) per Month:  75

and so the Contribution to Margin of the PPC campaign is:

   (£50 x 75) - £1500 = £2,250

and your ROI would be:

   £2,250 / £1500 = 150%

Phew!  But there is an easier way.   We have just created an ROI estimator / calculator spreadsheet that you can now download for free.  We hope that it will be a useful tool for you when reviewing your PPC campaigns.

If you are interested in downloading, please visit our new PPC ROI Estimator page now, download it, and let us know what you think.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

Many years ago, a man called David Siegel (the man who invented the “transparent one pixel gif trick” in web design) wrote a book called 'Creating Killer Websites' and in it, he advocated a site design that looked a bit like this: 

The reasoning behind it at the time (if I recall correctly) was that it gave the user the satisfaction of seeing they had got into the site without the big overhead of loading all the graphical and other elements associated with a home page. This was in the days of modems, so it made sense at the time.

Then, as time went on and modems got faster, and then we switched to broadband, and the splash page became either a long flashy intro, or got eliminated in favour of getting people straight to where they wanted to be, as the page with the main navigation made a much better landing page.

But now event the search engines have got in on the act and Google gives you a link direct from the search page to skip the introduction page. An interesting one for them to algorithmically detect, and designed to enhance the user experience/relevance, which is always Google’s goal.


From an SEO point of view, a splash page is always something to be eliminated – it is usually the “strongest” page on a site and to squander it by only linking to one internal page is a dreadful waste of link juice.

So it is good to know that SEOs and usability specialists and Google all agree that the splash page is soooo 1990s.


Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

Over the past six months, we've been implementing more PPC capabilities into our SEM campaign management software called Apollo.

Apollo helps us run campaigns better - by providing campaign intelligence, process management, and a totally unique rules-based engine that ensures that all campaigns are meeting our client's goals and that every client is getting the most comprehensive search marketing service available. 

For the past few months, we have been enhancing the capabilities that Apollo provides to both our internal PPC team and our clients.  Recently, we implemented a full integration with Google Adwords, PPC campaign/client goal management, and additional business rules to ensure that all PPC campaigns are performing at the highest levels possible.

We are now pleased to announce the same capabilities for our PPC campaigns based on the Yahoo advertising network (formerly Overture).  This now means that clients will be able to see summary information across both PPC platforms in one place - Apollo.  

Congratulations to our development team for this great enhancement and I am looking forward to the plethora of new features scheduled for release over the coming months.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

We received this wonderful client testimonial by email the other day:

Knowing the importance of good search engine rankings to generate business nowadays, and knowing the difficulty of achieving this without outside assistance, I started making enquiries in 2006 into finding a reliable company to help my company, Trent Pottery Ltd, with this venture. I invited several companies to quote for this service, and explain their methods to me. After much consideration I chose Vertical Leap because their approach to us seemed the most honest without big promises of instant results, rather saying that they would work hard to advance consistently.

As my colleagues and I are busy running the company I was pleased how quickly we made progress without the need for too much input from our side. Over two years the impact of Vertical Leap's SEO  has been more than significant. Our campaign is controlled by the same individual at Vertical Leap who is always available and helpful and has worked very hard to achieve impressive results for us. Over the last twelve months our Company has gained higher and higher search engine rankings for the keywords that are important to us and this has had a noticeable positive effect on our business.

I wholeheartedly recommend Vertical leap as an SEO Company, from my experience it is that rare thing - a Company that really delivers on it's promises.

Its so nice to hear how our proactive, trust-based approach to SEO really does impact our clients and their businesses.  

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

We've talked about this before, and it recently came up again, after reading Hubspot's blog about asking other people for inspiration.  what to blog about. The long tail is a valuable resource for blogging, you can find unusual keyword phrases, perhaps a local variation that you haven't optimised for (like our SEO Portsmouth example).

Measuring the size (length?) of the long tail is also a good metric for working out the success of your SEO campaigns, it is one of the KPIs that we use in-house to monitor the progress of a campaign over time.

So if you look at your long tail results, you should find something that you can blog about. It doesn't matter if you use long tail keywords from a PPC report or an SEO one, either can be used as a source.

So here are a few interesting ones I have picked out of our long tail - I especially like the question ones as they create something that is answerable in the blog format.

What can I constantly do to improve search engine rankings?

What results should I expect from blogging?

Which is better SEO or PPC?

Why agency should partner with SEO company?

How to submit to Google Local?

How long does it take for page rank to transfer?

How many keywords are maximum for optimisation?

How to get top ranking on Live Search?

What is a SERP?

You'll also find a few real oddities, which will make you laugh if nothing else, and they can make fun blog topics in themselves. For instance someone has come to the Vertical Leap site recently looking for "yellow pages advert slogans" - not something you'll likely find on a search engine marketing blog!

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

There are quite a few companies offering a full SEO service for less than £100 per month, which might sound like a great deal but there are lots of reasons why spending less on your SEO won't help you in the long run.

Your SEO campaign is a key element in your marketing and ensuring you get a good quality SEO company will ensure you don't loose out in the race for conversions.

1. Full SEO service - optimisation of your website is not a one off job and is not something that can be done just on the landing-page of your website but the whole site. A full SEO service, which will cost you more than £100 a month, will include the ongoing optimisation of all pages on your site, including new pages.
2. Monitoring - a good quality SEO company will regularly monitor your website and it's performance, the keywords that you have selected and make recommendations for any changes that need to be made. Again this optimisation and monitoring is for the whole site and not just your landing-page.
3. Full reporting - some cheap SEO companies just offer overview documents telling you where you are for a keyword at the end of the month. This isn't as helpful as the full reports that a more expensive SEO company will offer. Reports should show where things have gone in the last month, what keywords are driving traffic to your site, what off-page work they have completed for you and as such will give you a full overview of what your website is doing and what is working for your site. They will also be able to track conversions and tell you if a particular page is performing well, or badly in the search engines.
4. A Dedicate campaign manager for your website who you can call whenever you have a question or concern - having a friendly voice on the end of the phone is key to a good SEO company. Your contact will enable you to know what's going on, will discuss changes to the site and it's performance with you and will let you know why things are being done, what the benefits are and help you to understand the SEO process. A good SEO contact will also call you to let you know what is happening on the campaign and to ask if you have any areas you wish to focus the marketing to search engines on.
5. SEO is a specialist service, like a driving instructor or a plumber - you wouldn't go for a cut price service in these things as paying for the qualifications and skills of one of these people guarantees good service. SEO is the same.

So if you are looking for a good SEO company take into account how much time they can spend on your site for the money you are paying.

Remember, your website is part of your marketing team and getting a good SEO company will help this element of your promotion to more people in search engines and help drive more traffic to your site. Choose wisely and see the conversions come to your site.

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

Google's search engine results pages (SERPS) are increasingly becoming more localised.  If you wanted to see the results that people in Australia get on google.com.au when searching for terms like "SEO" then you simply accessed the regional site.  But now, the results you get from any regional site are adjusted slightly to reflect your current location. 

There is a way to tell Google that you want the same results that others see in a given location.  I blogged about this approach a bit back in January (see How to see Google.com USA results from a different country), but I wanted to follow up and highlight some additional parameters that you can use to be even more specific.

Perform a search in Google and then look at the URL of the Google results.  You will notice that there are some parameters in the URL that tell Google what you are searching for.  For example, a search for "pizza" will have a URL like this:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza

Where the "q" is the query/question and "pizza" is the search request.

By adding some additional parameters to the URL of this search, we can tell Google that we want to see results as would be seen by users in a specific geographic location.  These parameters are:

    gl = Country code (see full list)
    gll = Lat & Long
    gr = Worldwide region code (see full list )
    gcs = City (Note that "gr" must be set to to a relevant region for this to work -- see full list )
    gpc = Zip code (USA-only)
    gm = Metropolitan areas of US (see full list )


And so, let's day that we wanted to modify our search to see what results would appear if we were located in Dallas, Texas (USA) - my hometown.  We would modify the URL as follows:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza&gl=US&gm=623

Note that "gm=623" is the Metropolitan area for Dallas.

Google provides a tool for Adwords advertisers to preview their ads as they would appear in different locales called the Adwords Preview Wizard - www.google.com/adpreview.   

You can use this tool to select the geolocation and then simply view the source of the HTML frame that is created at the bottom of the page... and extract the URL that is being used to display the results. 

All you need to do is specify the search term, engine, and region and then hit search. Then click on the frame properties (right click - "This Frame" and "View Frame Source" in Firefox).   Once you have the HTML open, copy the GL,GM,GR, & GCS params out of the URL and paste onto the end of your search.

The main problem is that this seems to work fine for previewing Adwords Ads and works fine for Organic listings on Google.com in the USA (with US-based params)... but does not seem to have been implemented properly on Google.co.uk for the UK terms... too bad as this could be very handy indeed to better understand the performance of search campaigns with a local emphasis.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

When you perform searches in sophisticated search engines such as Google, you would think that similar queries would yield similar results... but this is not the case at all.  Plural forms are wildly different from their singular forms and simply changing the order of two terms can have a dramatic effect.  For example, our own site ranks well for "Portsmouth SEO" but does not for "SEO Portsmouth". 

The strange thing about this is that you would think that two nouns used together could be swapped around without too much impact to the searchers intent... its almost more of a preference than any sort of prioritisation.  To me, there is no difference between these two phases - "Portsmouth Boats" and "Boats Portsmouth"... but the results are clearly different.

This is an important point to keep in mind when you are implementing Local SEO.  You need to ensure that your content matches variations of your localised terms more exactly than you would think would be logically required.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

Over the past year, I’ve blogged several times about Local SEO including looking at top local search queries.

As I said before local search engine optimisation in the UK is still lagging behind the US. Even though Mobile Search is still a big topic, especially with the coming of GPS enabled mobile phones, very little of that has spilled over into the recognition that this means your site needs to be found locally.

However, I see keywords on a daily basis that are locally intended, and the common ones follow quite a definite pattern., which is useful for SEO.

These are the common ways which a local search is formatted

Keyword in Town

Town keyword

Keyword Town

Keyword in County

County keyword

Keyword County

Additionally, people in the UK may search by the first part of the postcode; this is particularly true in larger metropolitan areas, particularly London. So people search for

Keyword NW1

Keyword in NW1

In London, borough names are also popular, and people also search by their general area e.g. “central London”. I’ll be blogging about this in more detail later because it is a topic on its own of interest to SEOs and companies.

In extremis, people use odd search terms if they can’t find what they are looking for, like using the telephone “01983” for the Isle of Wight.

If you are optimising for local traffic, it is important that you target pages to the area in which you are located. Don’t make me guess which area you are in or what area you serve. If local traffic is important make sure your title tags contain the town and county information. Even if you think local is a small part of your business, put the geographical information in your contact page title and description so that you have at least one page that is geo-targeted for SEO.

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

A while back Matt blogged about Google releasing their mobile search interface. It's been 7 months since that release, so after a bit of bedding-in now is a good a time as any to look at optimising for mobile search- focusing on techniques for optimising mobile websites for search.

3 differences
A good place to start is in understanding what users want and expect from mobile search, and mobile websites. The three key differences are browser technologies, screen size and search intent.

Mobile browsers have come a long way but they all latterly they share one thing, they need well formatted XHTML in order to work properly. There has been a shift in the way content is delivered too. Once WAP was the order of the day, but now there is more reliance on delivering http via call networks and Wi-Fi. These factors mean that it is easier to build mobile websites by importing practices from ‘regular' website design and development.

Even the biggest screened mobile device's/PDA's have limited screen real-estate- e.g. iphone's 480x320 on a 3.5 inch screen or Nokia's N810 with 800x480 on a 4.13 inch screen is never going to rival a desktop. Therefore the site that you build for mobile should be a different animal from your regular site.

When people search on a mobile device they're (usually) looking for a solution to a short-term problem; where is...?, how much is...?, what time is...?, can I book...?, can I download something specific to my device etc. etc.? Compare this with the broader searches that people use lap/desk tops for and you can quickly comprehend that mobile users want live data, and they want it now- they're less likely to be scoping out an e-book, or researching the best tumble dryer.

Mobile Search In Action
If you're new to mobile search or haven't bothered to see how it compares with regular search there are a couple of tools you can use from your desktop. This first one is from Opera, showing how its mini browser works. The other is an online example of how Google mobile works. Using the Opera tool enter the URL of a favourite site and notice the difference in how it's presented. Now, using the Google Mobile tool look at the difference in search results- these clearly show how sites and results behave in a different environment.

Search Optimisation for Mobile
Currently a common problem in optimising for mobile search is avoiding duplicate content, and the ranking penalties that it can incur. This mostly applies to Google, but there is some Google mobile advice to help you remedy any problems. The biggest issue seems to be in specifying which is your mobile content, and which isn't.

In part 2 of my mobile SEO blog I'll cover optimisation techniques in detail and offer advice on how to get the best from mobile search.

Joe Bursell
Campaign Delivery Manager

If you website is not ranking or has dropped down the rankings, have a look at this guide to some of the common mistakes that might be costing you rankings and consequently sales. Making sure you look out for these items will help the SEO of your site.

Keywords

Are you using keywords throughout your site? Are these keywords included in both the meta tags and content throughout your site? Making sure there is a relevant level of content matching your keywords (just an optimised homepage) will help you rank for them, it's no good having "speaker system" as a keyword if your site is about Kites! Conversely, if you are using your keywords too many times that can also hurt your SEO. It's OK to mention Kites a few times but if the references to Kites are every other word on a page then you will be penalised. Search Engines look for good readable content, and they look at the content a visitor to the site can see - so if your copy doesn't read well this will have an effect on your rankings. Additionally don't hide keyword related content in your page (e.g. white text on a white background) as you will be penalised for this too.

Code

When building a website it's great to use some funky Java Script to make the site perform as you want it to, such as with drop down menus. However make sure the JavaScript content on the site is not all in the pages of your site. The SEO effectiveness of your site will be greatly impacted if Search Engine Crawlers have to trawl through reams of JavaScript code to get to the actual website content. JavaScript can be easily loaded into your site via a link in your template.

URLs/Addresses and Navigation

I recently posted about the importance of navigation but it's important enough to mention again here - don't bury good quality keyword rich pages so deep into your navigation neither visitors nor search engines can find it!

With many cart or CMS driven websites it is easily to suddenly find some of the content on your site is available using more than one URL - duplicate content, different address. When the Search engines crawl your site they look out for duplicate content - which can harm you. Look at the URL structure of your site and make sure you can't access the Trick kite page on 4 different URLs, or you may find duplicate listings in the search engines, and may face penalties for spamming a search engine with the same content on multiple pages.

Remembering these three points when working on your website can improve the chances of your site being well ranked on search engines. If you are working with an SEO company insure they are advising you about these items too.

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

This week Google are focussing on 404 error pages as an important part of any site's SEO.

Google have stressed the importance of returning a 404 header status when delivering a 404 message so that when the search engine crawlers reach a broken link they are able to tell that this is a broken page and not a page to be indexed on your site. This will help with your SEO particularly if you use them in conjunction with 301 (permanently moved) redirects on pages from your site.

There are a few issues with 404 error pages that need to be considered. The first relates to the standard non custom 404 message that is generated by a server. This is a server error page that may look like the below image.

This standard error message must be set up to return a numeric 404 header status code. 404 header codes are what inform the search engines that the page could not be found. A normal working page on a website will return a 200 header code, informing the search engines that all is OK on the page they are accessing. When working on your website the 404 header code must be set up to return for the error page on your site on the server. Many websites make the mistake of returning a 200 error on the 404 page of their site which won't help their search engine rankings at all!

The next step is to set up a custom 404 page.

Custom 404 pages have added benefits as they tell a visitor to the site that what they are looking for could not be found in a user friendly way, removing the "tech speak" of a server error message. Customising the 404 page to look and behave like your website will enable a visitor to move away from the error page and find other things on your site. It is good to include a polite message to users regarding the fact that a page could not be found but to also include links to your main site pages and site map to help them to find what they are looking for on your site. Our custom 404 page is shown below, as you can see it offers the standard site navigation along with some links to the key pages on our site.

However it is still important to implement 301 redirects on pages you have moved. This is an important step for the SEO of your site as you are telling the Search Engines that they should no longer look at the original page URL as it has permanently moved to a new location. The 301 header status and redirect works both to redirect the user and search engine but also to give the search engines the news about the permanent change to the URL.

Checking the 404 page on your site is easy - just type your URL followed by /errr for example our 404 page can be found here www.vertical-leap.co.uk/errr. Once you have the 404 error page in your browser you can easily see if the page returned when a broken link is followed is useful for the SEO of your site and your visitors.

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

I came across this great little online tool today called wordle.  It creates "word clouds" from text... or from RSS feeds from any source and so I tried it with our blog - and here's what it came up with:



Pretty neat right?

As you can see, over the past dozen or so blogs we don't really seem to talk too much about SEO.  Google is obviously very prominent.. but so are terms like "flash", "website", "keywords" and so on.   This is not a bad thing .. although SEO and PPC are our main services - we help our clients with marketing and promoting their websites sometimes in ways beyond traditional SEO.

I think this is a great tool to see if you are getting the "theme" or topic of your blog correct... you could check your blog feed periodically to make sure that the key topics/messages are there... for me, I'd like to see words like marketing (search, online, and so on), optimisation (search but also landing page), and conversion to be more prominent.  But these are things we can work on and check back from time to time much easier with a tool like wordle.

Is your blog's "word cloud" representative of your main theme?

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

I’ve previously mentioned Google Alerts and how useful they are for tracking mentions of your company. However, you can also use them to monitor inbound links to your site or blog.

This means that you are notified when Google picks up a new link to your site.

1.    Go to the Alerts page in Google:  http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en and sign in if you aren’t already.

2.    Type in the usual link search context:  e.g.  link:http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk:

3.    Select the type of Alert… (comprehensive, blogs only, etc)..

4.    You should start getting emails straight away whenever Google picks up a new incoming link to your site.

If you like to comment in blogs that give you a mention, or return the link love, this is a great way of helping to keep on top of all of that information. Or it is a great addition to your online reputation management programme if you have one.


Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

A lot of search marketing companies produce their own SEO Tools, like geolocation tools, backlink checkers, header checks and various page evaluation tools using multiple data sources like Website Grader or SEOMoz's new Trifecta tool. However, some of the most valuable are those created by the search engines themselves.

Google has led the way for some time, with the excellent Google Webmaster Central, but also ones that are not site specific such as Google Trends and Google Zeitgeist and the latest update to the Adwords Keyword suggestion tool, which adds actual search volume data. Then there is the “invitation only” Google AdPlanner, which identifies sites by demographics and other data.

Yahoo also has a number available such as Yahoo Site Explorer – where the link: command is the most comprehensive source of backlink data that SEOs have. Plus there is ability to check what pages are indexed, and useful page removal tools. There was also the detection of intent in search done by Yahoo Mindset which now appears to be offline. Of course, historically, the Overture keyword tool was a defacto source of keyword data for everyone.

Microsoft has also done its share of research, with the Microsoft AdCenter Labs - there are a few tools here if you can get past some of the technical language used. MS do have a commercial intent tool available.

But now, the search engines are themselves raising the bar in what they are providing to webmasters. Yesterday, Google launched the excellent Google Insights for Search (there’s a good article on how to use this data intelligently on Search Engine Land).

And today, Microsoft have launched a major update to the Live Webmaster Center, giving crawl errors and fuller backlink data. Whilst this is still lagging behind Google’s offering, it is a major advance in helping SEOs troubleshoot clients’ indexing problems.

SEO isn’t going to go away any time soon, and these tools assist us to help the search engines find, sort and classify sites to provide the most relevant results to their users. And that is what a search engine is about after all.

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager