A common assumption made in the SEO world is that links are a key ranking factor (and they are). But Jon Cooper thinks through the assumption, with some useful thought-bytes from industry luminaries. (And BTW good to be reading a blog post from Jon again – it’s been a while.) From his conclusion: Tomorrow is not a guarantee. As we’ve seen, Google can move very quickly. With that...
From Aaron Wall at SEObook: Consensus bias is set to an absurdly high level to block out competition, slow innovation, and make the search ecosystem easier to police. This acts as a tax on newer and lesser-known players and a subsidy toward larger players. Eventually that subsidy would be a problem to Google if the algorithm was the only thing that matters, however if the entire result set...
It’s strange to see Google’s card results being so out of date. As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, here’s an example of a search on the term ‘austrade ceo’. The current Austrade CEO Bruce Gosper has been at the helm since February 2013. And yet, Google shows this ‘card’ for Peter Grey (who retired in November 2012). What’s even stranger though...
The following graph shows the daily traffic for a quality consumer information site (I was brought in to analyse the issue this week): The pain starts in early May and then turns to heartbreak as traffic declines over the following month. From almost 20K visits to under 2K visits daily. That’s a 90% drop in traffic. And for this site – where the business model revolves around...
It’s been a week now since Google Instant hit the news desks of IT blogs everywhere. I’ve started getting a few questions from clients and friends about it, so I thought I’d put together a simple collection of recommended links, and finish off with some of my thoughts. There’s been tons of discussion of course, but for a good summary of the main points, the following 4 or 5 posts will...
Just realised I hadn’t posted this presentation I gave at the NSW.NET event last month. I was lucky enough to be presenting after Mark Vozzo who gave an excellent introduction to SEO, so my session on SEM flowed on nicely. In the SEM presentation (embedded below) I went through the following main points: How SEO and SEM work together (and covered the various definitions of SEM) Why you should...
Seriously, how would businesses survive if it weren’t for Excel? :-) Excel is perfect for analysing analytics data in a variety of ways (eg using Pivot tables and Conditional formatting) and it keeps getting better. I’m loving Office 2010 and Excel 2010 in particular – it’s just beautiful to use. In this post I want to highlight one of the ‘tiny’ new things in Excel 2010 that I...
I’m excited to be presenting with Mark Vozzo (<- SEO guru) at this month’s NSW.NET meeting. It’s on this coming Thursday morning, June 24. You can register here. The event is in two parts. Mark will be covering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for 30 minutes, and then after breakfast I’ll cover Search Engine Marketing (SEM). To give you a quick introduction to the event, consider the...
It’s good to see the Bing Webmaster Center Blog picking up. I’ve been following Rick DeJarnette’s posts more closely lately – he’s putting out some good stuff. I thought it worth highlighting a few examples: SEO for Silverlight SEO Site Review tips – Part 1 SEO Site Review tips – Part 2 Chasing the Long Tail with Keyword Research It’s not all good though – try to avoid any posts...
How time flies :-) I’ve been meaning to post these for months now – they’re sessions on SEO and WordPress I’ve presented at various User Group meetings this year. First off, here’s the notes from my IIS SEO toolkit presentation at SWUG back in February. The slides are pretty simple, so I recommend reading my complete review of the IIS SEO Toolkit (from my XEN SEO site). [drain file 15...