By
Carolyn Hughes, on May 4th, 2010
On Wednesday, I went to SAScon, which is a new search marketing and analytics conference in Manchester at Bridgewater Hall. There’s so many search marketing, digital and social media companies in Manchester it’s important to show the world we don’t need to go to London for events like this. It was incredibly successful, apart from the Bridgewater Hall hadn’t anticipated the influx of geeks and their broadband crashed pretty quickly!
There were some great speakers, some even flying in from Europe, and the key note speaker was Bruce Daisley, from You Tube. Considering the video streaming company is only five years old, they have grown in size and influence beyond belief.
He said video is now one third of all traffic, but by 2013 it’s predicted to be 90%. In terms of marketing, video is already massive and is only going to get stronger. However, with more and more content being added,
Continue reading SAScon
By
Chris Norton, on January 22nd, 2010
Real-time search is now integrated into Google and Bing’s search results, so it is important for companies to know when people are mentioning their brands online, where these citations are being found and to understand their context and the sentiment behind them. SEO should be utilised in conjunction with social media to ensure the right keywords are being used in tweets from company twitter accounts as it is possible for these comments to appear above traditional natural listings albeit for a short period of time. If conversations are happening and these comments are appearing above your organic listing for searches on your brand name, then it surely pays to be involved in these conversations.
The imminent release of Google’s Caffeine update (so named because it is intended to sharpen up the relevance and speed of the returned results) is widely expected to take the context and sentiment of conversations about your
Continue reading SEO in 2010 and Beyond
By
Ivor Perry, on September 19th, 2009
By
Julian Brailsford, on July 22nd, 2009
Following on from the WonderWheel post, Google is now showing search results by date (TimeLine), which used to only be available in the labs.
Again, click on the "Show Options…" link in the results banner to try it.
By
Julian Brailsford, on July 18th, 2009
Google has released a new search feature — the "Wonder Wheel" that shows related search terms to the current searched query, with the aim to enable the user to explore relevant search terms.
It shows what it thinks are related search terms in a visual way, allowing you to navigate to them and update the search results accordingly. So, it acts a bit like a mind map.
Need to understand a bit more about the mechanism but one theory is that it first checks to see if the search volumes of the related terms meet a minimum threshold; if not it then looks for more general terms related to the top pages found for that search.
This may mean it exposes keywords that may help with SEO: i.e. a better definition of what your site should be about to help you rank
Continue reading Google Wonder Wheel – A Visual Search Navigation Tool With SEO Possibility
By
Tunde Cockshott, on June 30th, 2009
The interaction we have with a search engine such as Google is not a passive one. This is obvious but we often downplay the role we take in getting the right results. Google is dormant until we make a search. Of course it’s churning away indexing and crawling for pages but until we make a search it can only use the page ranking as a measure of the importance of a page. It knows nothing of the significance of the content. It knows that some word combinations are statistically rare and therefore may be of more value, but this only becomes apparent when someone searches for those combinations. I know it uses other weightings, but fundamentally the value in Google is not solely provided by Google but by our interaction with it. When I search it uses its indexes to return results but then there is the crucial step. Once
Continue reading Google Needs Us
