Google have announced on their Analytics blog this week that they have been working on a plug-in for browsers where visitors to your website can opt out of sharing data with Google Analytics. This new opt-out option will enable people to visit your website and their visit not to show in your Google Analytics Account. [...]

Argh. How frustrating are error pages on IIS? Very frustrating. Indeed. Spent ages faffing about switching custom error handling on in Plesk and creating the customer error file and uploading and then tested the stupid page using an http header status check page and what status do you think was returned. HTTP/1.1 200 OK Rant, rant, rant. But the day was [...]

The 301 redirect is a really important tool in a search engine marketers kit. Redirects are required whenever a page or URL needs to be moved, and you want to tell a search engine, or users that have bookmarked that page about the change in this address, rather than them confusing just reaching an error page. There [...]

So Google Street View now covers 95% of UK road. Like any self respecting vanity searcher, I downed my Search Engine Optimisation tools and spent 5 minutes (ish..) looking up my house, then my old house…. then the one before that… and then the one my parent live in. I can report one of my old [...]

An important tool in the testing of any website is the development site which allows you to test new tools or pages on your website before sending them live to ensure that things are working right before presenting them to your visitors or the search engines. If you have a development site it’s important to know [...]

Blogs, news, products, customer reviews, buying guides, articles – regularly adding fresh content like this to your website can give your SEO campaign a big boost. Here are 3 ways content marketing can help your website: 1. Freshness If search engines spiders see that new content has been added regularly since they last indexed your site, they are [...]

With the impending demise of FTP publishing for Blogger, we have been looking around for any other Blogging services or software that allows FTP publishing. Why FTP publishing? Well it’s particularly good for websites with no server side scripting facilities. Ideally we would get a nice Wordpress blog going on a website – but this isn’t [...]

To be somewhat encompassing, content marketing covers the creation of content to engage both current and potential customers. Essentially, content marketing is custom-made media, appealing to an intended audience by distributing relevant and informative content, without the hard-sell .  Instead of flooding your potential client with sales patter that they can easily ignore, content seeks [...]

I noticed recently that Google has at least 3 very similar pages listed in their index. They pages I saw are: http://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=mac&hl=en-GB http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux&hl=en-GB If you have a quick look at the pages, you’ll see that they are very similar. All have the same page title tag: Google Chrome – Get a fast new browser. For PC, Mac and Linux And the [...]

If you are going to perform SEO on your website there are a number things that will make the process of doing this a lot easier Regardless of whether or not your website has a CMS the following things will help you ensure that all aspects of your website are as SEO friendly as possible. 1. Every page [...]

Following my recent blogs about Google Chrome extensions for SEO I‘ve been asked to do a review of a new extension for Chrome called SEO Site Tools.  Keen to get the most from Chrome following my issues with Firefox last week I’ve installed this plugin and used it whilst working yesterday to see how it [...]

We talk about measuring and tracking conversions a lot on this SEO blog it seems, but I want to have a waffle too. I’ve been looking at various Google Analytics account recently, and the goals often seem to be ignored or not configured to show anything very useful. Here are the absolute basics of tracking conversions [...]

It’s easy to find visits by day, month or year to your website in Google Analytics. But sometimes it can be useful to find out at what time of day people are visiting and using your site. Especially if you need to take the site offline for any reason. Here’s how to find out visits by hour [...]

Following a bit of a nightmare time with Firefox last week I’ve been using Google Chrome  to do my SEO work for a week now and I thought I’d write an update about how it’s going. The first thing I’ve noticed is that Chrome doesn’t seem to slow down once you’ve installed extensions to it, which [...]

I attended and presented at the BrightonSEO mini conference organised for SEOs last Friday, which was a great day of exchanging knowledge amongst local SEOs from the nearby communities and was a great afternoon full of fun and learning. There were 8 presentations from web designers and SEOs which were all entertaining, but a 9th session, [...]

Reading a blog on SEOmoz surrounding the idea that great content is not always necessary to boost search rankings got me thinking… I always strive to write good, audience-specific content with punchy titles and a bit of personality mixed in there for good measure, but is this really needed? After reading the blog a number of [...]

Following on from Tom’s blog the other day, a few more things spring to mind that a good SEO Agency needs to consider when doing keyword research. Perhaps not such neatly defined concepts but certainly things that are well worth considering. 1. How is the website currently ranking for these keywords. It’s all very well coming up [...]

TFM & A (Technology For Marketing & Advertising) is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and all indications point to yet another successful year.  Recently voted “Best Trade Event” for 2009 the show sees over 200 exhibitors showcasing their wares to over 8 thousand visitors. The show includes  latest industry and market insights, trends and developments [...]

A lot has been written about the importance of having a dedicated IP address to achieve search engine rankings and Matt Cutts has confirmed the following statement by Googles Craig Silverstein still to be true; “Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP [...]

What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion? Dynamic keyword insertion is a pretty funky bit of script that will call upon keywords within your ad campaigns and add this as the Title of your advert on the sponsored links part of the search engine. It is a must have tool for all of us PPC Managers out there… Let [...]

Google have just rolled out an analysis toolbar across the AdWords user interface to allow advertisers to easier analyse and segment AdWords data when optimising AdWords accounts. The new toolbar incorporates the following functionality which was previously available in different parts of the AdWords UI; View – View All, All enabled, All but deleted campaigns or ad [...]

Last year I blogged quite a bit about the Google Chrome browser which was newly launched and although I found it to be a quick browser which did speed up the browsing experience Chrome was limited for the SEO work I do on a daily basis as there were no plugins or extensions to help [...]

A few weeks ago, the blogging platform Blogger announced that it was ending support for the FTP publishing method via its control panel. This is because only 0.5% of their users used this service, but servicing these used a lot more resources than 0.5%. It also coincides with a change in Google’s infrastructure that would [...]

Using benchmark keywords to track your rankings and build authority and relevancy for your website is essential for any SEO campaign. Here are 3 things to consider when choosing your ‘benchmark’ keywords. 1. Traffic Do some investigation to make sure your keywords are actually likely to drive traffic. There are quite a few keyword tools out there [...]

With a change in buyer attitudes moving toward the credibility of content to help them make informed purchasing decisions and away from standard advertising methods, it is important for companies of all sizes to embrace good content strategies. ‘Good’ being the operative word as customers are more in control of what they read and know [...]