Digital Marketing Blog Archive

Posted 1 Apr 2010  /  Written by Richard Lyne  /  Make a Comment

Wickedweb is delighted to be working with Beachcomber Tours, based in Guildford, managing their ongoing search engine optimisation (SEO).

The decision was based on Wickedweb's expertise in online marketing, especially SEO, with the added value of experience working with high-end luxury travel clients.

Beachcomber Tours are a specialist travel company and are one of the leading companies in the UK for Mauritius holidays.  The brief for Wickedweb is to achieve page 1 results in Google for the sector’s major search terms; whilst this is a big undertaking, Wickedweb are excited by the challenge and are confident that we can exceed Beachcomber’s expectations.

The first step in the project is keyword research and defining the Keyword Strategy. This will help to ensure the right phrases are targeted and maximum traffic can be achieved.

Posted 1 Apr 2010  /  Written by Richard Lyne  /  Make a Comment

On March 23rd Google’s Matt Cutts gave an interview that highlighted a few areas Google look at when ranking and indexing a website. It’s not every day that Google offers an insight into how its algorithm works, so I thought I’d share a few gems with you today. Of course, most of this isn’t new to the SEO community, but it forms the next part of Google’s drip by drip strategy, dangling the carrot in front of Webmasters and SEO enthusiasts alike!

Recently, Google introduced “Site Performance” to their Webmaster Tools platform. It therefore comes as no surprise that Google consider page download speed in their indexing criteria. However, the interesting point here is that if sites have a slow server (typically caused by cheap shared hosting), Google may cap the total number of pages it will index at any one time, limiting your site’s ability to rank better and quicker. This reinforces the view of our own Head of Development who recently published a blog about the importance of good web hosting and follows our best practice recommendations too. Well done Ian!

The number of quality inbound links to your site has always been important in terms of improving Page Rank and keyword positions. However, Google also state that the number of pages they will index is proportional to the number/quality of inbound links. So, developing content is one thing, but if you want it indexed you must develop links.

Duplicate content causes problems. Again, nothing new here. However, Matt Cutts indicated that if you link from one page to a duplicated page, this may affect your page rank. Therefore, it’s very important that if your site does contain a lot of similar content, you should limit the number of links pointing to it to avoid loss of Page Rank.

The final pearl of wisdom relates to site architecture, navigation and how best to influence the flow of Page Rank. In this instance, Matt Cutts said that the best way to flow Page Rank is to link to related and similar content wherever possible. In other words, make important content accessible at all times and recommend relevant content through good navigation structure and links. Again, this sits nicely in line with Wickedweb’s practices of accessibility and usability testing.

Posted 19 Mar 2010  /  Written by Melissa Constantinou  /  Make a Comment

Who has broken into 2010 with the biggest numbers online? No prizes for guessing that Google are number 1 for Search and Facebook are number 1 for Social Networks, but do you know the figures? In a recent report published by the Nielsen company I learnt that an astounding 8,169,550,654 searches were made using the Google search engine in January 2010: that’s 3,050 searches per second! Let’s not forget Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube; at number 6 in the list with 1,261,959,101 visits in January 2010, YouTube remains the market leader for online video sharing, and with Google’s backing I can’t imagine this will be changing anytime soon.

Nielsen’s report lists the top 100 websites visited in January 2010, of which the BBC has then defined into categories. An interactive treemap of these figures can be viewed here. Most of the figures don’t seem to come as much of a surprise, and I’m glad to see that the big internet players of the 90’s are still going strong (e.g. AOL, Amazon and Yahoo!). However what did come as surprise to me was not finding MySpace in the list. Perhaps the social networking site has finally run its course? Or is being phased out by stronger competition?

It would appear out of all of the different sectors, Social Media is the fastest evolving and it will be interesting to see where everyone is positioned and how the numbers will change in next year’s report!

Posted 3 Mar 2010  /  Written by Richard Lyne  /  Make a Comment

The search engine landscape is changing and digital marketing strategies with it. How results are generated is going beyond algorithmic data generated from indexing of the World Wide Web. Firstly, the introduction of real-time/live search has seen greater emphasis placed on news results; and more recently tweets have been taking a high profile on many page 1 results. Whilst some would argue that Google have introduced the latter too soon and without enough relevancy/authority on the tweets, the additional challenges posed to search engine optimisation lie elsewhere.

Good SEO companies have always adapted their practices and rolled with the Google punches, but effective SEM is going to require businesses to re-evaluate their online strategy.

So what is changing? How you use the internet, what search terms you typically use and what websites you visit are all adding up to a wealth of non-web metric data that will contribute to what you see in your search results. Therefore, Google’s ambition to improve relevance in their results has led to “customised search” right down to the individual’s historic web activity.

This doesn’t spell the end for search engine optimisation. Far from it; it actually puts an even greater emphasis on tying together SEO with social media marketing, pay per click advertising and other SEM techniques. OK, there’s nothing new with this, but for a while many companies have been able to focus purely on SEO for their search engine strategy.

So how can businesses respond? Setting up geo-targeted PPC campaigns could be a good starting point. If historic visits will really contribute to organic search engine positions, then PPC may help you to give your SEO activity a boost.

Visitor loyalty and user experience will also become a factor. Every SEO expert will need to review the Analytics of their site to make ongoing changes to improve the user experience and lower bounce rates as much as possible. Usability testing before website development will be crucial and web designs need to engage visitors at every level.

Search engine optimisation is definitely changing, but realistically, strategies need to be about refinement as much as realignment.