A friend, an SEO and a huge loss to our industry. My thoughts as are many others are with his family.
RIP Jaamit
For messages of condolence :-
“ground floor flat, 48 leybourne avenue, london, W13 9RA” via @searchmitch
Archive for SEO News
Opportunism or Branding Mishap?
During my working day I like to have the TV on, not because I am Jeremy Kyle lover, far from it. But inbetween spurts of my working genius I like to keep an eye on what`s happening in the world.
During this very fine Wednesday the usual run of commercials appeared mid-programme and one perked my attention.
It was an advertisement for “Mighty Ice Grips”, not thinking much beyond “that`s a cool idea” and “I have fell on my arse many a time”, this simple product advertised their URL as www.mightyicegrips.co.uk so I thought I would be a good little targeted customer and take a look.
To my shock and amazement the site did not exist, so my second thought was “Why would you advertise the domain without building it out first?”
Just to be clear it was definitely the .co.uk that was advertised and NOT the .com. Skip to the comments and let me know why ANY media agency would embark upon a campaign without locking down the channel to sales first?
From an organic SERP point of view a search for “Mighty Ice Grips” will yield nearly a full page of tabloid URL`s within “Reader Offer” sections. No immediately visible brand.
Go directly to the mightyicegrips.com site and it redirects to a premieredition.co.uk product page.
So within the space of about 5 minutes following on from my original tweet I thought I would see if the .co.uk version of the site was available and sure enough there it was in all its glory, ready to purchase.
Of course I bought it.
Within 2 hours I put a simple site together and got straight into amazon to grab a few “Ice Grips” products and voila the site is live!
So thank you to ONE single mistake within an agency, an opportunist has registered and built out a site that YOU forgot to register. Not only that, the 10`s of thousands that must have been spent on the TV campaign (until they correct the address & build out the .com) will benefit me.
Yes the site will eventually come down but for the purposes of lessons learned, I suspect someone is in the proverbial pile of puppy poo for this one.
SEO is an Elephant
Kinkbait
Not irrelevant, SEO is HUGE and no new shiny toy will kill it. No matter how much you try to paint it.
The way the results are being presented has been changed, not the relevancy of those results we were optimising for and still being presented with.
I hate it when people scream WITCH when something they have failed to understand is being presented before them, either that or jump back on the old “SEO is DEAD” bandwagon, for linkbait, for attention seeking kinkbait.
SEO is an Elephant! it may jump at the sight of a mouse occasionally but in the long run it`s too big of a beast with a head on it that adapts and never forgets. It`s just another opportunity to adapt.
More reading on Google Instant that you should take a look over;
Google Instant Complete Users Guide Google Instant Impact on Search Queries Thoughts on Google Instant Google Instant Search Experts View Google Instant What Now Google Instant Search What Do We Think Google Not So Instant in The UK How To Track Google Instant in Google Analytics
New Digg New SEO Opportunities?
The new Digg offers the opportunity to import your blogs RSS feed and immediately that has an increased benefit over manually submitting every new article you published in the past.
Looking beyond that and from an SEO perspective what advantages does this give me?
Well after verifying my RSS feed in the last post I went straight to the SERP`s to see if the post ranked, sure enough it did in a few seconds, it was not about the keywords I was trying to rank for, it was simply to have the feed verified first.
At first I thought yep that`s it set and forget and continue to push articles and Digg will pick them up, Simple.
Then an afterthought, OK if Digg are picking up my latest posts that obviously gives them a steady flow of fresh links and a snippet of text from the article, a quick and easy user generated content win, but what does this give me in return other than the obvious link back?
Well all of those link metric tools you use, the ones that give a more authoratitive edge if your link gets picked up in Digg, Delicious and the like, well surely the increase in backlinks alone will tilt inyour favour simply because of the verified RSS feed.
So the mass increase of UGC for Digg and the increased backlinks are surely a win win situation?
Other than that you are still getting eyes in front of your content which is what it was all about anyway and with the new social interaction Digg has put in place this can not be a bad thing because that will naturally lead to more editorial links, yeah those juicy “in content links”.
Lets see how the referrals pan out over time and I will revisit this post and let you know.
Google Parameters
If we nailed the rules to the mast or at least what we think they may be or we go to great lengths to set up seo checklists and Google stood there nodding in agreement (like they ever would), whats the chances your average joe is going to take notice?
We are in a small and still largely unheard of industry. We send out the signals that we are applying seo practices, but if we don`t do, we get stung all the same?
We look towards others for the perfectly optimized page and hope that if that`s right then the signals we are sending are as close to the money as possible. But even then there are slightly different opinions, mostly they are in agreeance. Personally i prefer this one.
Whichever way you source your information and whichever rules you want to apply to your campaigns one thing will always bug me in the back of my mind. Are all of these closely followed practices really sending a signal back to Google? Are we really being profiled though our GA accounts and anything associated with them is going to be viewed with a bit of caution?
Paranoia over.
I do not know of, nor have i seen any evidence to suggest you are going to receive the beady eye just because you apply seo best practices, if anything it should send a positive signal to suggest you are actually taking great care not to piss the googlybot off, unless of course you are really taking your time to present bots and visitors with seperate content for the sake of rankings.
Whichever methodology you apply to your SEO campaigns there is always one thing to remember, nothing is static, your campaigns and your clients business strategy towards it need constant review.
Did i mention i liked David Harry`s (@theGypsy) guide to search engine ranking factors? i did? well let me leave you with another juicy and probably not complete or even accurate (who knows for sure?) google doc with 200 Google parameters.
