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How long should SEO take before you see results?

When you hire a professional SEO company to optimise your website, naturally you expect results. You expect your rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) to improve, your traffic to improve and subsequently your sales or leads, meaning your ROI (return on investment) to also improve.

But how long should this take? How long before your investment in SEO starts to yield results and your site starts to move up the rankings?

First off, this depends on a number of factors:

The competitiveness of your industry
As with any form of business, if your industry is very competitive online then you’ll have to do more, and wait longer, to see any results. If your industry is in finance, personal injury, medical or adult then you’re competing with some very large companies with even larger marketing budgets. You won’t be able to set up a loans company and compete online without a (more…)

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Filed under: Google,SEO — Written by Carl posted on September 30, 2009 at 7:45 am

Bank error ends with Google deactivation

Last week we reported how Google was once again in court, this time because of the Rocky Mountain Bank who were taking legal action to get Google to reveal the identity of the owner of an email address to which they had mistakenly sent details of 1,325 customers.

In the financial crisis we’re currently in the middle of, this really fills you with confidence in the banks doesn’t it?

In a monumental error, the bank emailed details, including tax ID numbers and loan details, of 1,325 of its customers to someone’s email address; the wrong email address to which they should have been sending something else anyway.

Events like this call for a strong reputation management strategy to minimise the (more…)

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Filed under: Google,Reputation Management — Written by Matt posted on September 29, 2009 at 7:45 am

Sad pug becomes Internet phenomenon

Viral marketing is one of the most powerful forms of Internet marketing. It can reach millions of users in a matter of minutes, exploding your website’s traffic and your customers overnight. Viral marketing is also very cheap to do, as you’re harnessing the power of the Internet to market for you, without having to pay expensive advertising costs.

However, viral marketing is very much a ‘suck it and see’ form of marketing because there are no guarantees that something will go viral. In fact it’s very difficult to do because you need to create something that users want to share, want to spread, and most forms of advertising do not fall into this category.

This photo of a pug, taken outside a café in San Francisco, certainly has all of the qualities of going viral, and it has done just that. This photo, and more like it, was uploaded to Flickr by a snapper who spotted the little dog while out walking and has become an Internet phenomenon. It has been voted the (more…)

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Filed under: SEO Advice,Social Media — Written by Cheryl posted on September 28, 2009 at 7:52 am

Dodgy websites showing as referrers in analytics

When you run your own website and you engage in Internet marketing activities such as SEO or PPC, it’s crucially important that you check your website’s statistics regularly to see where your traffic is coming from and whether you’re getting a good ROI (return on investment) from your Internet marketing.

Google Analytics is a good tool for this because it gives you detailed stats and it’s free to use.

If you do check your stats regularly, one part of your stats you should particular attention to is your referrers. This is a list of the websites, or rather specific pages on those sites, that have sent you traffic. You will receive traffic from websites when that site has linked to you. It could be an advert you’re paid for, a link that you have built, a natural link because they found your site interesting or perhaps you’re even being discussed on a blog or forum.

However, sometimes you’ll see sites like the ones below listed as (more…)

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Filed under: Analytics,Black Hat — Written by Carl posted on September 26, 2009 at 11:42 am

Justin Timberlake wins role in Facebook The Movie

justin_timberlake_recordIn a news story that seems to weird to be true, singer, songwriter and Michael Jackson dance impersonator Justin Timberlake is set to star in the upcoming Facebook movie.

The news has emerged from Variety, a movie trade paper, which reports that Justin will play the role of Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook. Timberlake is known for his singing, dancing and removing of his shirt, but are his acting skills up to scratch? As the film is being directed by David Fincher, of ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Se7en’ fame, you can be sure that this will be an ‘acting’ movie, so Justin will need to get some practice in.

Timberlake has appeared in films before, starring in The Open Road, but hasn’t been in anything with as much (more…)

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Filed under: Facebook — Written by Matt posted on at 9:25 am

Why Microsoft will never challenge Google

The Microsoft and Yahoo deal was supposed to make the two into one huge giant capable of taking on the might of Google. At least, that was the plan. However, the reality is that anything Microsoft related in the world of online publishing is never, under any circumstances, going to challenge Google, or even get noticed by it.

hotmail-newsFor example, only yesterday this screen grab was taken from inside Hotmail, where Microsoft presents the big stories of the day. The stories shown here reference Karren Brady being hired by Sir Alan Sugar, dive-master Ronaldo scoring for Madrid on his debut, news about the Oasis split, a kidnap story and news of the girl murdered in a lorry.

What do these stories all have in common? They’re WEEKS old! Hotmail, powered by the online publishing genius of Microsoft, isn’t even able to present stories from that week, never mind (more…)

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Filed under: Microsoft — Written by Matt posted on September 25, 2009 at 8:22 am

Rocky Mountain Bank emails customer data to wrong person

It seems that Google just can’t keep out of court, even when it hasn’t done anything itself. In a monumental blunder, an employee of Rocky Mountain Bank in the USA was supposed to email loan documents to a customer’s email address, but somehow (and we really don’t know how this could happen) managed to email the confidential details of 1,325 customers to a different email address – a Gmail address.

This prompted the panicked bank to request that the owner of the email delete the file without opening it, but naturally they received no response.

The confidential details on the customers contained information such as loan details and (more…)

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Filed under: Google — Written by Cheryl posted on September 24, 2009 at 9:40 am

Should you have a links page on your website?

While reading around some SEO blogs this week we noticed that some SEO companies are still advising clients that they feature ‘links pages’ on their websites. In some ways this is worrying, but in others it’s good to know that not every SEO company has quite caught up with the changing face of SEO, even though links pages are from around the year 2000 and should have stayed there.

The idea, albeit misguided, behind links pages is that your website will gain credence with search engines (we say search engines, but obviously we mean Google) by linking to other high ranking, relevant websites. This idea has been thrown about for many years in the SEO community, with some people believing that it works and some people believing that it doesn’t.

In truth, it does work, but how you do it is of huge significance. Creating a page of links on your website and linking to other websites is the way that we saw one SEO company advising people on its blog, and this is NOT the way to do it. Google isn’t stupid, and a page of links on your website will not convince it that you’re a trusted site and should be ranked higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages). You’ll be merely announcing to Google that you have a page of links, reminiscent of a link farm… how nice.

No, a much better, more intelligent, natural and effective way to do this is to (more…)

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Filed under: Content,SEO Advice,SEO Mistakes — Written by Carl posted on September 23, 2009 at 7:45 am
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