I recently departed for a 3 month trip to Singapore on business and thought whilst I was there I should try and blog a little bit about my time here. I have done a lot of stuff in the first 2 weeks, so here is a bit of a summary of what I have seen and done. Apologies for the shaky photographs, I didn’t have a camera until today so was solely reliant upon my Blackberry!
Big thanks to my colleague Chow Wei for supplying me with a camera loan.
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A while ago now I undertook a review of a major PPC account, spending in the millions per annum across a vast number of locales and languages. The purpose of this review was two fold. I wanted to increase the efficiency of managing so many accounts, and increase the overall return on investment from PPC.
As part of this review I wanted to trial two methods of PPC management:
1) A fully outsourced management option via an agency.
2) An internal PPC bid management solution managed in-house.
After a few months of research I took the decision to run with a well known, reputable agency as the outsourced option, and Omniture SearchCenter as the in-house bid management tool.
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As many of you may have noticed in recent days Google has revamped their local business listings to show a revised maximum 7 pack at the top of the organic listings. This is down from the original 10 pack!
Here is the new Google 7 pack:
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Another nice to have in order to improve rank against a given search term is a keyword friendly domain. For example, if your target keyword is SEO then arguably the perfect URL for you would be www.seo.com.
There is significant evidence that this is of high importance when optimising for a specific keyword or variants of a keyword.
For example, a search on seo leeds on Google UK highlights a number of examples where domain name seems to be a significant bearing on a websites position within the organic rankings. seoleeds.net and leesseo.com are both located within the top 4 organic results despite having quite limited websites and under adequate link portfolio’s.
The same can be said of both Yahoo and Bing, who arguably utilise this factor within their algorithms more so than Google to determine a sites relevance to a given search term.
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I recently looked at the China search market in more detail than I have been able to do so previously. In particular I was interested in understanding more about Baidu and what drove it’s ranking algorythm.
Before I start to talk specifically about the rankings factors that seem particularly critical to Baidu, let me sum the state of search in China first.
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In this post I am going to discuss an on page ranking factor related to a websites page titles. This will specifically look at how you should format your page titles in order to maximise your chance of ranking high on a particular keyword.
The page title tag is located within the <head> section of a websites source code. An example is shown below for reference.
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Only recently have the local business listings on Google become so important to an online marketing strategy, particularly for smaller, local businesses. The local listings offer a viable solution to small businesses wishing to generate increased business from search engines on a zero/minimal budget. They require minimal technical knowledge to set-up initially and offer a cheaper solution to high visibility in the search results.
This first post in a series of local business listing optimisation posts will provide some small hints and tips on optimising your listing within Google’s business centre.
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Over the coming weeks I’ll be adding some posts onto the blog working through the various ranking factors that support search engine optimisation. The first post of the series focuses on arguably the two most important ranking factors: number of external links and anchor text of these links.
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