t: +44 (0)1285 643 496

e: found@searchpath.co.uk

SearchPath RSS Link Feed It!

SearchPath Blog

SearchPath Internet Marketing Blog - Thoughts, ideas, humour, information and more ...

Friday, May 09, 2008

What is a natural listing worth?

A recent study has shown that 60.5% of search engine users select a natural (organic) listing over paid results. For Google searchers, this figure rose to 72.3% choosing a natural listing as the most relevant search result.

This bears out previous research that natural listings are clicked far more than paid, and hence the importance of ensuring that your site is 'optimised' to gain good visibility in the natural listings.

Furthermore, anohher study showed that 60-70% of users trust organic results, while just 30-340% of users trust paid results. Natural listing are therefore giving you more traffic and more trust.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

Google Tries to Tap Into the Hidden Web

The web is vast. Incredibly vast. Some estimates put the searchable web at around 11 billion pages. it would take lifetimes to view all that content. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the searchable, Google oriented web is massive amounts of content not available to search engines; this is called the hidden, or invisible web. Some estimates put the amount of data that is hidden to search engines at 15 billion + pages; much larger than what most people would normally call the web.

Pages can be hidden from the search engines for a number of reasons: the content could be unspiderably dynamic; the content could be unlinked; the content could be limited access; the content could be in an image or video or the content could be only accessed by a form. Since the early days of the web the search engines have wanted to gain access to this uncharted realm of information to enhance their reputation as having the biggest index available to surfers.

Last month Google announced in their Webmaster blog that a technological breakthrough had been made to gain access to hitherto inaccessible web content. In the past few months Google has been experimenting with using their spider (Googlebot) to fill out HTML forms in order to gain access to hidden content and URLs to index for Google users. Google's blog comments:

"Specifically, when we encounter a form element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML."

If Googlebot deems the content to be valid and interesting, it includes it in its index.

Danny Sullivan lauded Google's new technology. "The move is potentially good for searchers, in that it will open up material often referred to [as] being part of the 'deep web' or 'invisible web' as it was hidden behind forms...It should be noted that Google's not the first to do something like this. Companies like Quigo, BrightPlanet and WhizBang Labs were doing this type of work years ago." Google is the first major search engine to do this kind of exploration, though.

SEO's and webmasters need to remember that content that a form previously hid is now potentially accessible; steps need to be taken to block Googlebot using robots.txt or the no index tag. Google says these steps will still be respected.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Top 10 Criteria for Assessing the SEO Value of a Link

When doing SEO, and specifically link building, it is vital to have a procedure to follow when assessing links for their SEO value. As a link builder, you have got to equip yourself with all the best tools available to decide whether a given site is worth linking to, or worth gaining a link from. The following list covers the main things I look for when assessing a site for link-worthiness:

1. One of the most important factor to consider when looking at site's potential is to see whether it is relevant to your website's industry. Remember to think quite broadly in terms of whether a site is related to your site e.g. if your site ia a luxury travel company, look at luxury lifstyle and leisure sites, as well as purely travel based sites.

2. Look at the PageRank (PR) of the site and page in question (the former will usually be higher than the latter). Download the Google toolbar to use the PageRank indicator when assessing sites in this way. Try to lean towards sites witha a PR of 2 or above.

3. The look, feel and content of the site. This is very important - does the site look professional? Is the content well written? Does it have useful linkbait/tools for users? The knack for quickly scanning a site quickly to see whether its worth linking to/from is one that all link builders pick up with experience.

4. No. of links coming from the page where the link comes from. Every extra outgoing link on, say, a links page of a given site decreases the PR given by the site to each link. In other words, a site offering a link on their links page with hundreds of links on it is probably not going to be worth much in terms of "link juice". It may, however, provide traffic, so don't rule it out straight away.

5. Whether or not you will get an anchor text link or a URL link. Go for anchor text links wherever possible, as Google values them highly in terms of ranking for a given phrase. Don't be scared to accept a URL link though if thats all thats available. It will make your link profile look more natural if you have a mixture of anchor text links and URL links. And natural is good.

6. Where the site ranks for your industry keywords. Put a few of your main keywords into Google, look to see whether the site you are assessing has any sort of ranking. Obviously the higher up the site in question ranks for your keywords, the better a linking candidate the site is.

7. Age of domain. You trust your oldest friend more than a guy you've just met in the street; in the same way, Google generally values older sites more than newer ones. Because of this, it's a good idea to check the age of a domain when link-assessing it. Type "who is" into Google to find a site that will check a .com domain's age; use Nominet for .co.uk domains.

8. Age of site. The age of a site could be completely different to the age of the domain. Use the wayback machine as a good assessor as to how long the site has been in existence.

9. Link placement. A link from the body content of a main page is worth more than one tucked away in the footer somewhere.

10. The site's link profile. Check with Yahoo Site Explorer or a tool like SEO Elite. Look at the quality and quantity of sites linking to the site you are investigating. Often link profiles can be a few hundred lines long, so just scan the profile if you are pushed for time.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, April 21, 2008

Directories and SEO

A traditional staple in the link builder’s armoury since the early days of the web, directories have decreased in importance in recent years due to their overuse and the ease to which links can be gained from them. Despite this, there still is some good SEO value to be obtained from submitting to them. The two essential directories that every link builder or website owner need to submit their site to are DMOZ (The Open Directory Project) and the Yahoo Directory.

There are a few reasons for this: they are human edited, meaning they are valued more highly by the search engines than your common-or-garden directory that has no criteria for entry. Both DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory have been going since the very early days of the web so have added respect from the search engines for that. Google feeds its own directory results from DMOZ indicating that it values it highly.The Yahoo directory charges for submission ($299), which the lower grade spammy sites are not likely to pay. Because of this, the quality of sites in the Yahoo Directory is generally higher than the average free directory. Thus the search engines value the Yahoo Directory highly. The paid/human edited principle can be applied to other good quality paid directories such as Gimpsy and Best of the Web.

The only other directories worth looking out for are the ones specific to your sector or vertical. Finding such directories is easy - just type your keyword(s) and "directory" into a search engine. Simple!

At SearchPath we specialise in researching and submitting to all the best general and vertical directories. Contact us on 01285 643496 for more details.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, April 08, 2008

SearchPath Moves to New Offices

Last Friday, we finally moved to our new offices in Cirencester, located near to the Market Place at Swan Yard.

Our new offices now enable to us accommodate all of the staff who have joined us in the past year and give us scope for further expansion.

Our offices are also pretty special - in a lovely Grade 2 listed building with vaulted ceilings and a balcony overlooking the Parish Church. When you're next in Cirencester, drop in and we'll show you around!

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, March 25, 2008

76% of SMEs Investing in Search Marketing Campaigns See an Increase in Sales

So says an independent report commissioned by the PPC arm of Microsoft, AdCenter. The report, released in November last year, also highlights the fact that British businesses are wasting over £3 billion on websites hidden from customers. It describes how although some 2.79 million small businesses have an online presence, a staggering 62% are not investing in search marketing campaigns to help potential customers find them online; the equivalent of owning a shop hidden down a side street and not advertising its whereabouts.

The research, which questioned 400 UK SMEs, reveals 44% of SMEs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated. However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales. We at SearchPath see this time and time again: how PPC campagns, when managed by us, provide quality, targated leads consistently for our customers.

Peter Scargill, IT Chairman for the Federation of Small Businesses said: “A well-known website can allow a small business to compete on an equal footing with larger competitors. But that only works if the site can be found by potential customers. Having an online presence is something that more and more small businesses are using to drive growth in the future but they will be wasting their money if they don’t make people aware of it.”

SearchPath specialise in PPC campaign management, and we aim to maximise the revenue from each marketing pound. Call 01285 643496 for more information.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

Increased Online Marketing by Big Brands

General Motors has announced, in what could signal a no-look-back shift to digital marketing, that half of its $3 billion marketing budget will move to digital marketing in the next three years. GM will use several online methods including gaming, search, mobile and a broad array of interactive applications. As the US's third largest advertiser, GM’s switch may signal a tipping point in the marketing strategies of the automotive, and other industries.

Other car makers are also upping their online spend; Hyundai will double its online spending in 2008 over 2007.

Like many firms, GM and Hyundai are increasingly finding out that the buying process starts, and often ends, online. They are realising that unlike traditional forms of marketing (print, radio, TV), online marketing allows campaigns to be much more targeted to their current and prospective customers. This very often results in a lower cost per acquisition rate than traditional marketing, meaning your budgets stretch further.

At SearchPath we specialise in all forms of online marketing, be it PPC, SEO, email marketing or web analytics. Contact us to see what we can do for you.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Google Adwords Adding Page Loading Time to Quality Score

Google is about to add 'page loading time' as a factor in calculating PPC Quality Scores.

Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.

Quality Score is important as a lower Quality Score means you could pay higher click charges and vice cersa.

See Inside Adwords for more information.

Google is making this change to improve the 'user experience' - people don't want to wait for slow website pages to load, so Google will penalise site owners for this with higher click charges.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

Changes to Google AdWords' URL Policy

Google is preparing to crack down on advertisers who use AdWords ads to re-direct visitors to another website.

From April 1st, the domain displayed in the AdWords ad must be the same domain as the one the customer lands on after they click the ad. You will no longer be allowed to use redirection to move people to a different website. People abusing this rule will have their ads suspended.

For instance, if your display URL is website.com, you can't then send visitors to website.co.uk.

Sub domains are still ok, so long as the visitors end up at the same root domain. eg keyword.website.com. Visitors can be sent to website.com, but again not website.co.uk or keyword.website.co.uk.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Microsoft adCenter Editor

While on the phone to Microsoft resolving some upload issues the operator let slip that adCenter will have its own editor soon, similar to that of the Google AdWords Editor.

As the adCenter interface can be unreasonably slow at times it will be more efficient if we are able to download entire accounts, make changes then hit the upload button. This will result in better management of adCenter accounts and probably more advertisers on the adCenter search engine.

Definitely a step in the right direction as far as we’re concerned, if only Yahoo would follow suit!

We'll keep you informed.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, January 28, 2008

Google's Webmaster Tools Rolls Out Content Analysis

Google's Webmaster Tools now has more tools to help website owners to find SEO problems on their pages.

The new Content Analysis feature will list any problems Google finds when incdexing a site's pages. Google will specify the problem and link to the age so you can correct the errors.

Content Analysis focuses heavily on title tags, addressing missing, duplicate and non-informative title tags.

It also has a long title tag and short title tag notification. A title that's too long gets chopped off the search result listings, which looks bad and reduces the number of people who're likely to click on your listing. A title tag that's too short doesn't give Google enough to work with, forcing them to grab your title from somewhere else, like your DMOZ listing. In our experience, the ideal title tag is at least 20 characters and not more than 65.

Content Analysis will also alert you if your meta descriptions are too long or short.

Finally there is a non-indexable content alert, if Google can't find anything on a page to index eg if the page is wholly flash, if spiders can't access a page r if the page is blank.

For more information, please call SearchPath on 01285 643 496.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

Google and Sub Domains

Until recently, Google has been treating subdomains of sites as virtually independent websites (ebay has been a master at dominating rankings with subdomains). In the past, Google's policy was to show a maximum of only two results from each subdomain of a domain name. By using multiple subdomains, it was possible to control a vast majority of the first page of search results.

Google has now lessened the ability for subdomains to rank separately for keywords and take up more positions in the SERPS for any one company. However, they have not and will not do this for brand related searches. If someone searches for your company name or brand, they're still likely to see your various subdomains.

This is all good for those looking to get good search positions - fewer positions will not be taken up by multiple listings from the same site.

From a branding persepctive, you should still be using subdomains for brand protection and marketing. If you need advice on this, call SearchPath on 01285 643496.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, January 21, 2008

Memorable Advertising Design

We're always interested in innovative and creative ideas and design. Recently we came across some fantastic memorable and fun advertising...take a look for yourself on our viral advertising page.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Merry Christmas from SearchPath

We would like to wish all out clients and site visitors a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2008.

Instead of traditional Christmas cards, we prefer to donate the money saved to charity. Once again, we are supporting Breakthrough Breast Cancer with a donation.

To help you get in the festive spirit, we have created a jet-powered Santa who needs to deliver his presents to the orphanage without getting splattered by the Christmas puddings. Are you up to the challenge? We have a bottle of champagne for the winner!

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

Christmas Shopping Online Booms

Nine out of ten shoppers plan to do at least some of their shopping online this year. An Amex report found that for 71% of consumers, price is the most important reason for shopping online, while 82% wanted to avoid crowds.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, December 04, 2007

SearchPath launches new site for Perry Bishop and Chambers

SearchPath is proud to announce the launch of the new website for Perry Bishop and Chambers, the leading estate agent in The Cotswolds.

SearchPath created the new site's design and built a fully search engine friendly content management system (CMS). We also integrated feeds from Property Pro and CFP, the systems used by Perry Bishop and Chambers to update property details. For the property search functionality, SearchPath implemented a postcode based system to provide results as accurately as possible for visitors, based on their criteria.

Other advanced functionality includes a user area, enabling visitors to save favourite properties, to send properties to a friend, to save their searches and to book viewings online. Property details include pdfs, room sizes, multiple images, distance from centre of search area and location map linked to yahoo.

We're really pleased with the result - take a look for yourself at www.perrybishop.co.uk.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, November 12, 2007

E-Commerce Sites Hard to Use?

A survey by market research firm, Harris Interactive, has found that many e-commerce sites gives their visitors a bad user experience. Their findings include:


  • 90% of users have experienced problems online

  • 30% finding sites difficult to navigate

  • 25% of people had difficulty signing onto a site

  • 30% had been put off by insufficient or confusing information

  • 30% were unable to complete a transaction because they were stuck in an endless loop


Is you website difficult to use? Do you have a large number of visitors that fail to buy anything from your site? If the answer is yes, or you don't know, then we can help. We will analyse your site, find out where your problems lie and implement solutions that will increase your website's profitability. Call SearchPath now on 01285 643 496 for more information.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, October 29, 2007

SearchPath launches new site for Mrs Crimbles

SearchPath is proud to announce the launch of the new website for Mrs Crimbles, Britain's fastest growing wheat, gluten and dairy free cake and biscuit company - once endorsed by Fanny Craddock herself!

SearchPath created the new site's design, and implemented a full standards-compliant xhtml static website.

We're really pleased with the result - now try their cakes, they're even better!

The new site can be found at www.mrscrimbles.com.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, October 16, 2007

AJAX and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

AJAX has a bad rap in SEO, for obvious reasons – it makes for pages that can’t be indexed. Most AJAX articles relating to SEO mention that you need unique URLs (but not too many), and the back button needs to work. Well, that’s only half the story, AJAX content itself cannot be indexed by Google because it doesn’t exist until after the page has been displayed.

So what can you do about it? Well the simple answer is to not let AJAX run the whole web site; AJAX is best used to enhance the user experience. Here are some simple rules to follow:
  • Is the content critical? If yes, don’t use AJAX.
  • Is the information useful, and dynamic? Use AJAX.
In essence Google (and any other search engine) does not click on links. This is very important to realise, Google simply follows any content within ‘href’ attributes. This means if there is nothing in an href, Google will not find it. This has ramifications for .NET applications too, since they often rely on postbacks which Google will not perform.

In essence all important content should be static on the page, while superfluous yet useful functionality and information should be AJAX. If a piece of content falls between these two extremes, try using straight JavaScript. By having a hidden div, the content is still on the page, but not visible until necessary. Don’t over-use this latter technique; otherwise Google may think you’re hiding content with the intention of gaining ill-gotten rankings.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

WordPress and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The WordPress blogging system is a great tool and very easy to use. However, to get the most out of it for search engines, you need to tweak its default settings.

Using the default settings, you will have bad titles, bad URLs, duplicate content...and more.

The good news is that this can all be rectified and we know how! We can setup permanent links, modify the post slug, optimise the page titles, minimise the duplicate content, prevent feed crawling and advise on the best plug-ins to use.

If you're using WordPress and haven't modified the settings in any way, give us a call and we'll help you get the most benefit from your blog.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Thursday, October 11, 2007

Google Dominates Search

According to new research by comScore, shows that Google powered more than half of all search requests carried out around the world in August.

The study showed that more than 61 billion searches were performed by more than 750 million users in the month.

Users performed more than 37 billion searches via Google, more than all the other major search engines combined.

Yahoo was the second most used engine, followed by Baidu, the Chinese language search engine, the report said.

"Seeing Asian search engines like China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon," said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets at comScore, in a statement.

The Top 5:
Google sites 37 billion searches
Yahoo sites - 8.5 billion
Baidu (Chinese) 3.2 billion
Microsoft sites 2.1 billion
NHN (Korean) 2 billion

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, October 09, 2007

New Sites and Google Rankings

We're often asked by clients how soon we can get them decent rankings for their brand new website with its brand new domain and they're usually suprised (and disappointed!) when we say 6 months minimum.

Their next question is usually, "So why is it easier to get good rankings for an older site than a new site?"

For Google, it's all about trust and it will take time to work out whether it can trust you and your site. It wants to know that you're not a spammer hoping to make some quick money before Google you them from its search results.

So, as the owner of a new site, what can you do? Do the right things that any website owner should do - start with the right keywords, optimise your pages so Google knows what your pages/site is about (but always write with your visitor in mind), attract links to your site (natural not spam links), register your domain for 10 years (for a .com). Then, the most crucial thing is to have patience...and consider a good Paid Advertising campaign until (and after) your search rankings have kicked in.

More for information regarding search engine optimisation, please call SearchPath today.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, October 01, 2007

Google meta description

Google recently released guidelines on its webmaster central blog for meta descriptions, the snippet of text sometimes used by Google in the search results. They advise that meta descriptions can be useful for increasing the number of clickthroughs a search engine listing gets. They also say what has been suspected by us for a while: that the meta description does not affect Google's rankings, and should only be used to improve clickthroughs.

They advise of some good meta description strategies:

1. Use different descriptions for different pages. Google advises: "You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages."

2. Include clearly tagged facts in the desciption. Product pages might have key information such as age, price and manufacturer unavailable on the page content so it would be an ideal opportunity to use the meta description tag. Google deems this meta description not desirable: (opening and closing brackets left out due to formatting issues)

meta name="Description" content="[domain name redacted] : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré"

Google outlines various reasons why this tag is not desirable, including the duplication of information within the tag and the fact that none of the information in the tag is identified: who is Mary GrandPre?

The blog post identifies the following as a much better meta description:

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"

"What's changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site."

3. Programmatically generate descriptions, but make sure they're not "spammy". Use these for larger database driven sites with lots of dynamically generated pages.

4. Use quality descriptions. Google advises to "make sure your descriptions are... descriptive." A little work on the meta description can increase the amount and quality of your site traffic.

At SearchPath we utilise the above techniques to achieve quality search engine optimistation results. Contact us today on 01285 643496 to see how we can help your business.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Google AdWords Conversion Optimiser; an Advertisers Dream?

Google has announced yet another AdWords tool, the “Conversion Optimiser”.

Still in beta, this is effectively Google’s version of the many big management tools already available. It promises to automate the process of “monitoring and adjusting your cost-per-click (CPC) bids in order to get more conversions for a lower cost”.

The algorithm works by considering several factors each time an ad is eligible to appear. These include:

1. The search query itself. Perhaps people are more likely to      convert on more specific terms?
2. The location of the user. Do people in London have a higher      conversion rate than those in New York?
3. The conversion history of sites. Do certain websites within site      targeted campaigns convert more often?

While this tool claims to take the effort out of running effective PPC campaigns, we are more sceptical. The Conversion Optimiser is after all just an algorithm, meaning human judgment and preferences cannot be taken into account.

In addition, Google has been making increasing efforts to claw back control of PPC campaigns over the past year with different bid options that place the search engine in control.

This utility appears to be Google’s answer to improving advertiser’s returns. However, to truly maximise your ROI there is no alternative to the experience, knowledge and flexibility offered by SearchPath’s Pay per Click service.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

PDF Optimisation

Do you have PDFs on your site? Have you considered the SEO potential of these documents and optimised them accordingly? A useful recent article on Search Engine Land covers some of the SEO techniques that can be used with PDFs, but are often neglected. The article offers tips on PDF optimisation for high search engine rankings. I will cover some of them here:

1. Write good, keyword rich content in the PDF. This follows on from one the basic techniques in standard SEO, and ensures the search engines will find your PDF for the keywords you have chosen.

2. Make sure your PDF's are text based. When the PDF is made using images, the spiders can't read it.

3. Complete the "title" document property. The equivalent of the HTML title tag, this is the line of text that shows up in the search results. Often it is left blank, with the title of the PDF showing as "pdf". This is unlikely to get clicked. To specify a PDF title, go to File>Document Properties.

4. Pay attention to the version. The article comments: "While search engines do “read” and index PDFs, search engines’ capabilities tend to lag new versions of Acrobat. Although Acrobat 8 is out, for now you should save your PDFs as version 1.6 (Acrobat 7) or lower to ensure search engines can index the content. Not only is saving PDFs at a lower version good for the search engines, it’s also good for users. Not everyone has the latest versions of Acrobat Reader. Accordingly, I’d recommend saving PDFs as version 1.5 or lower. This way it will be good for search engines and most readers.

5. Keep you PDF's a manageable size. Not only is this annoying and unnecessary for site visitors, it’s also burdensome for the search engines. If it’s too big, the search engines may abandon the PDF before even getting access to its content. Using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>PDF Optimizer to “right-size” the document.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Thursday, September 13, 2007

Facebook and Brand Management

Just read a very interesting article in NMA about how Facebook and other social networking sites are influencing big brands. The full article can be read on NMA.

Essentially sites such as Facebook are increasingly sending large volumes of traffic to websites - in August 2007, over 1,900 retailers received traffic from Facebook. Data from Hitwise shows the site is an increasingly important source of traffic for online retailers like Amazon, ASOS, Ebay and Play.

The influence the sites has is illustrated by this comment in the article: "Wherever consumers congregate they inevitably talk about brands, and Facebook is no exception. Companies can't have their own page on Facebook, but communities can be created around brands. The effect can be negative, as when HSBC was forced to change its student banking policies due to pressure from Facebook users. More positively, Cadbury's recently made the news by announcing the reintroduction of its Wispa bar following a grass-roots internet campaign that drew support from over 100 'Bring back Wispa' groups on Facebook."

Primark is particularly popular on Facebook, and this year the fashion retailer has seen a 64% increase in the amount of traffic its website receives from the social network. In the UK, Facebook ranks 20th in terms of delivering traffic to retail websites.

Online brand management is an increasingly important area for companies, in interacting with & influencing consumers, and also in managing any negative feedback.

If you would like to know, call SearchPath on 01285 643 496.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Monday, September 10, 2007

No.1 on Google - We've Done it Again!

We don't brag too often, but this time it is worth it!

Our latest Internet marketing campaign, for Classic Lawns, has successfully achieved its target of the no. 1 spot on Google for the term 'lawn mower'! (Out of 3.4m competing results).

We can't divulge what this means in terms of traffic but, as you can imagine, our client is delighted with the results!

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Friday, September 07, 2007

The META keyword tag

We still get lots of question about this META tag and what value it still has. Well... most of the top search engines now totally disregard the tag and have done so for a good while. Why? Well just like e-mail used to be a nice thing, so did the keyword META tag (many year ago now though) and then along came SPAM and like a shot something that had its uses is not either not worth using anymore or just a lot more annoying.

Basically, people would just spam the tag with long lists of, mainly, the same words to try to get listed for that term. It didn't really matter if the pages were good or really that relevant so search engines decided, understandably to be a little bit smarter.

So should you still use it? Well we do (old habits die hard)... There are still some search engines who look at it (albeit partially), so our advice is still use it but don't spend too much time on it.

There have also been lots of questions over the years about what format to use. Well we mainly go for...

meta name="Keywords" content="internet marketing, web marketing, search engine optimisation"

i.e. self closing tags with the keyphrases (not words) separated by a space and comma.

It is also a good ways of keeping tabs on the actual keyphrases you are using on the page both direct and long tail.

So, in essence, still use the META keyword tag but don't spend too long over it and don't abuse (even if it is just for old times sake!).

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Thursday, August 23, 2007

A Programmer's Plea!

Any programmer will know what we’re talking about here!

More often than not we take on a new client and examine their existing website from an SEO perspective. Now while we do not expect other programmers to necessarily code well for search engines, we would really appreciate indented code.

Indenting code correctly should not only be something that all programmers are taught from the beginning, it is also good practice and good manners. Carrying out this good practice will make it easier for all programmers who take on existing projects, whether website or software related.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home

SearchPath Adds Internet Marketing Glossary to its Website

Are you an SEO professional looking to check the defintion of a certain term? Are you a website owner looking to broaden your web marketing knowledge before you select an SEO firm to work with? The the SearchPath glossary could be what you are looking for.

Written by experienced SEO professionals here at SearchPath, the glossary covers terms ranging from "algorithm" to "SERPS", giving clear, concise defintions and explanations in common sense language. As a practical guide, it is in its infancy in terms of size: we expect it to grow significantly over the coming weeks and months, so do come back to see the new entries as they are updated. Also feel free to contact us with any comments/additions, we welcome your input.

The glossary is available now! Please click this link Internet Marketing Glossary to take a look. Also, if you have any words or abbreviations you are not sure about regarding Internet or web marketing, just drop us a line. We will send you an explanation and add it to the glossary.

Share It!

Click here to return to blog home
Bookmark It!