The Lost Knowledge Blog for Web Design » Search Engines

Dash or underscore on URLs?

Alan Fair — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:18:37 +0000

Well this is one of those questions I get from a lot of our customers who have their own Content Management System.

Ultimately it’s best to go with the dash as it acts as a seperator where underline joins the terms together, but I thought I would let Matt Cutts from Google (yes an actual Google person) explain the difference in the video below if you’re interested in knowing why.

Getting back links to a site!

Alan Fair — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:56:19 +0000

Building backlinks to your pages is an essential part of SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) for two reasons. The first reason is that it helps your pages get indexed faster, which is very important because you want the search engines to find them as soon as possible and crawl them regularly. The second reason is that it helps your pages get higher search engine rankings for the keywords of your choice. The more backlinks you have, the better. Period.

However, building backlinks can be a time-consuming, boring process. You can outsource the process to an agency and pay a lot of money… Or you can do it yourself with SocialMonkee! SocialMonkee is an instant backlink builder allowing you to build 25 unique backlinks, every day, FREE! All links are on unique C-Class IP addresses and domains. Imagine being able to create 25 unique backlinks every day, with the click of a button, FREE! Well, you can stop imagining…

So, 25 unique backlinks every day… That’s a total of 175 backlinks every week, 750 every month. If you upgrade, you will be able to build 100 uniques backlinks, 3 times a day! That’s a total of 2,100 backlinks every week, 9,000 every month! The good news is… you can get a Premium Account, FREE! All you need to do is to refer 12 members, and your account will automatically be upgraded. If you’re not really into referral marketing, you may upgrade right now for a low one-time fee.

Submitting a page to SocialMonkee via the members area takes under two minutes, but there’s an even faster way! They created a Firefox plugin that allows you to submit your page to up to 100 sites in just a few clicks, using nothing else than Firefox! If you have a Premium Account you will also get access to link reports and RSS feeds, which are great to keep track of your backlinks and get them indexed fast. Submitting your RSS feeds to RSS submitters is actually a very important step in link building.

So what are you waiting for? Join SocialMonkee now while it’s still free!

http://www.socialmonkee.com/index.php?af=7163

It’s all about the funnels

Alan Fair — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:06:37 +0000

So there’s a new set of reports for Adwords called search funnels, aparently it will make you understand the true value of a keyword in your ads.

Below is a video that explains it quite well and if you want to read more head over to googles own blog to get the details http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-in-adwords-search-funnels.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FtRaA+(Google+Analytics+Blog)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Google Dispel SEO Myths

Alan Fair — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:53:46 +0000

Today I thought I’d share with you this video and site as it should help anyone at the beginning of development and SEO for their own site.

Here is the link to the video and the rest of the article on Googles own blog.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-seo-resources-for-beginners.html

Alan

Free Target Traffic directed from your own niche

Alan Fair — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:08:57 +0000

Ok the jury is still out on this one as I’m still testing it, but I figured that if more of us tested it then we might all be able to tell each other what seems to work well or not, are you up for it?

No – ok thanks for reading you can now take the blue pill and go about your day as normal.

Yes – ok reach for that glass of water, swallow and get ready.

Download this file and have a read at it then go to one of the links in it.

I’m not going to lie I didn’t write it (some good info though) and there is a sort of affilite link scheme going on with it, but as you will see with a free account it’s not really a big deal and the potential to get lot’s of targetted traffic I think is worth trying out at least.

If you do sign up please keep in touch as I would like to compare notes and hope that if this does work we can all benefit from each other.

Google Analytics – Intelligence Engine

Alan Fair — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:41:26 +0000

*EDIT 1: It has been brought to my attention that not all accounts have this option yet, but it should appear soon*

*EDIT 2: I’ve noticed some accounts with the Intelligence section now added to UK accounts, so you should now be able to take advantage of the information below*

Ok so you’ve got Google Analytics and you know generally how to use it. Well Google have added a new feature called the ‘Intellegence Engine’, here’s what google have to say about the subject.

Analytics Intelligence: We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.

Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.

If you’re not sure about all that here’s a nicely described video of the features it has.

Check for your social media name across over 340 sites in one go!

Alan Fair — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:23:47 +0000

I had a previous post that had a site that checked for over 80 social media sites for your name. Now this was great and saved a lot of time and effort.

Imagine my surprise when I came across this site that has over 340 websites you can check in one go!

So without any further delay here is the link http://knowem.com

Oh my, this should be interesting! Google to have tweets in it’s searches

Alan Fair — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:45:29 +0000

Now this is an interesting turn of events, especially after my post showing how searches and social media is part of a food chain. This has the potential to change that slightly.

For your tweets to appear in google is a crazy idea given how much rubbish is on twitter, but I guess if there is any company out there with the resources to make it work it’s Google.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html

So you ask what does this mean for me and how can I take advantage of this new marketing opportunity when it comes?

I’ll be writing a blog post once there is more details, but for now just think of the possibilities:

You own a hotel and a guest who is really happy with the service and tweets to that affect.
Someone online is looking for a hotel to stay in and searches in google.
You show up because you’ve been doing lot’s of good Search Engine Optimisation and have worked on the conversion rates of your website, but you’re maybe only 5th or 6th on the google listing, but hold on you have a tweet testimonial that no one else has and it’s a good one, it’s very likely that the person searching for a hotel to stay at is going to click on your link instead of the one above it.
Job done, you just got a click that other hotels didn’t. They might also have tweets, but they won’t be able to control them either.

Of course this can work the other way, so a bad tweet can cause you to lose business, but let’s assume that you are customer focused so that will never happen.

What this effectively means is that small businesses are probably going to have even more cost effective option to go up against the bigger companies, all you need to do is leverage the technology.

If you aren’t sure or just don’t have the time to be doing all of that (and it will suck up a lot of time at the begining to find your way around everything) then get in touch with us, we’re doing a free 20 min consultation with anyone wanting to look into social media or search engine optimisation.

Protect your Social Media Name using Namechk

Alan Fair — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:23:42 +0000

So you’re about to sign up to all the popular social media outlets on the web, but you want to be consisent with your username so you don’t have to remember all the different ones you have, wouldn’t it be handy to be able to check all of them at once?

Well someone has thought of this problem and solved it

http://namechk.com

Now if you think to yourself “I’m not going to use social media” don’t discount doing it then regret later that you didn’t at least sign up to the big ones to protect your name or business. Take one sign up each day it will only take 10 minutes at a time, it’s worth doing just in case you change you mind.

Regards

Alan Fair

Social Media – How does it all relate to your own website?

Alan Fair — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:20:31 +0000

How does Search Engines, Social Media, Blogs, Directories, SEO, Articles, Video and Podcasts, Networking, Link Building, Newsletters (the list goes on) all relate to your own website?

I’ve had lots of clients that are confused by it all as they can’t figure out how it’s all related to each other. I have also attended a couple of network meetings that had some talks on the subject, these highlighted to me a need for a simplification of the concept. So I thought I would make a visual representation of the most popular abstract concepts.

The image below shows the main/popular methods and essentially how they can relate to your own website. There are many more options that could be added, but these are the ones mostly talked about by my clients.

One of the biggest realisations of the visual below is that Social Media is fast becoming it’s own form of a people and content search engine outside of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Why don’t you make a comment on the post and I’ll try to update it if there is space or I’ll create a second one to cover the others, like say traditional marketing media (flyers, brochures etc…).