Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2013
I was recently asked the question, “What is the connection between SEO and PPC?”. The client asking was a little confused because SEO is supposed to be about getting organic rankings and PPC is supposed to be part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and so paid rankings. I had mentioned that we could use PPC to improve his organic rankings and it left him puzzled. So how does it work?
I’m often to be found banging on to clients about how important it is for them to manage their online reputation. I bang on because it is hard for most to prioritize this task when there doesn’t seem to be any urgency. Then one day, because you simply can’t please everybody, a negative review appears somewhere on the web and all hell breaks lose.
One of those ever popular requests I get in my email box is “Can you SEO my website?”. Yes I can but what are you actually asking? Over and over on the Website Design sites I also see phrases like “SEO built in” but does that mean you will be top of the search engines? The short answer is “No”.
Hot on the heels of Penguin 2.1 is the every frequent question from webmasters who have lost their rankings – “Has Google Penalised me?”. Almost always the answer is no, there is no penalty. I say almost – because if you have received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about unnatural links then it’s too late, you have been up to things which Google really doesn’t like and the wrist slapping has been done.
Well Google has rolled out another update of it’s Penguin Algorithm aimed at websites who have been ranking high due to poor quality links from spammy type sites (link farms, content farms, etc.). My mailbox has been buzzing with people who have seen their traffic plummet since the weekend and as this algorithm is still rolling out there may be more to come.
There was a time when webmasters were obsessed with page load time. A sure held belief that if you could reduce the period from 2 seconds to 0.5 of a second it would be the path to better rankings. There was, and still is, some truth in it. Search engines like Google want to produce a set of search results that don’t disappoint the user and pages that take for ever to display can annoy.
I’ve written before about the way websites can rank, and rank well, with no backlinks at all in my post SEO: Building backlinks doesn’t work (and that was going back nearly two years!). I did make the point there that backlinks do have their place but this does now need some clarification.
From time to time I find myself saying to a client “spend less on my SEO services and more on Pay Per Click. My fees to manage your PPC are less and it will improve your SEO”. That’s a bit of a strange one for many to get their heads around but I’ll be laying out how it works in this post.
I had only just finished my post Is Yelp a waste of time and doomed to failure when I went to check on Yelp’s own review page about itself. As usual I expected to see lots of grumbling from reviewers that their reviews had been filtered and lots of grumbling from business owners that positive reviews had been filtered after they turned down Yelp’s sales team (an accusation by the way, not proved ﾅ yet!).
Like many in the SEO world I’ve been watching Yelp’s progress over the years. So far it has burnt its way through more than $100 million and is still failing to make any profit. Some even suggest that the current business model makes profit almost impossible. Although they recently posted 69% growth in revenue most of this seems to be coming from global expansion. They grow larger, but it is the same loss making business simply on a bigger scale, driven on by venture capitalists who hope one day someone will figure out how it could actually turn a profit.
