Central Perk: SEOptimise

vineri, 4 noiembrie 2011

SEOptimise

SEOptimise Wins Best Blog at the UK Search Awards 2011

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 04:53 AM PDT

Last night 300 UK search marketers attended the Emirates Stadium, London for the very first UK Search Awards.

With 16 categories and over 50 nominees, including SEOptimise for best agency, best travel search campaign and best blog, the event brought together some of the best agencies in the UK.

The search awards started with a drinks reception followed by dinner, before the host – Andy Crane from the lunch time show on BBC Radio Manchester – started proceedings. With only two speeches from the all the winners who collected their awards, the ceremony went very quickly.

The speech of the evening came from Majestic SEO's Dixon Jones who simply said "Majestic SEO is f****** Good!" and walked off, but you have to agree with him, as it’s a tool that is used widely throughout the industry.

The first UK search awards event will go down as a success, and hopefully will inspire more agencies and in-house teams to get involved in future awards.

A full list of the awards and winners are below.

Best Integrated Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has achieved outstanding results through an integrated campaign using a variety of both online and offline activity.

Winner
• Fast Web Media – Coors Light – Closest to Cold

Best Local Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign based around a specific geographical location that has delivered outstanding results or visibility in search engines.

Winner
• Adido – The Colbornes Group Dominance of Google Locally

Best Use of Search – Retail:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the retail sector.

Winner
• Fast Web Media – Bravissimo

Best Use of Search – Travel:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the travel sector.

Winner
• Further Search Marketing – Richardson's Boating Holidays; Book Direct

Best Use of Search – Finance:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the finance sector.

Winner
• Koozai – Payday Power Organic Search (SEO)

Best Use of Search – Leisure:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in the Leisure sector.

Winner
• Further Search Marketing – Richardson's Boating Holidays; Book Direct

Best Mobile Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has a successfully enhanced the visibility of a website or web page in mobile search engines.

Winner
• Found/Autoglass – Smashing the Glass Repair Market on Mobile

Best Blog:
Recognition of an outstanding industry blog.

Winner
• SEOptimise – Search Marketing & SEO Blog

Innovation:
Recognition of search innovation in the development or use of a campaign or platform.

Winner
• Stickyeyes – Stickyeyes Search Dashboard

Best PPC Management Software:
Recognition of the development of an outstanding management software package that successfully manages and enhances pay per click marketing campaigns.
Winner
• Marin Software

Best SEO Software:
Recognition of the development of an outstanding software tool that successfully manages and enhances an organisations search engine optimisation efforts.

Winner
• Majestic SEO / Receptional – Majestic SEOs Site Explorer

Best PPC Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has achieved outstanding results through PPC advertising.

Winner
• Fuse8 / Persimmon Homes – Intelligent Internet Landing Pages with Brains

Best SEO Campaign:
Recognition of a campaign that has achieved outstanding results in search engines in natural, free or organic listings.

Winner
• Verve Search – SEO Services for Yale Door

Best In-house Team:
Recognition of an outstanding in-house team or practitioner that demonstrates consistently great understanding and use of search.

Winner
• www.just-eat.co.uk

Best Agency:
Recognition of an outstanding agency that demonstrates consistently great understanding and use of search and / or PPC.

Winner
• Fast Web Media

Search Personality of the Year:
Recognition of talented and inspiring practitioner who has revolutionised the UK search industry.

Winner
• Lisa Myers

Grand Prix:
Recognition for being the best of the best with a grand prix award to be selected from the previous categories.

Winner
• Fast Web Media

Is Reading Level a Google Panda Algorithm Factor?

Posted: 03 Nov 2011 10:07 AM PDT

I had a thought earlier today, funnily enough whist interviewing copywriters, which led me to think how important is the quality of writing as a ranking factor following the panda update?

Obviously the panda update has had a negative impact to website’s which have low-quality content – but, from the other way around, how has this impacted high-quality content? Forgetting completely about links for now and assuming all things are equal, does higher quality written content now have more of a positive impact to search rankings?

Well I thought I’d do a few tests with Google’s reading level search filter to compare the differences between how content ranks which is either basic, intermediate or advanced.

How is the reading-level split between Google SERPs?

I wanted to get an idea about how the reading levels of content is spread between content which ranks on the first page of Google. Does content have to be well-written, or is the fact that it’s unique sufficient enough? Here’s an example query, with the reading levels highlighted in red – please note, not all listings are classified with reading levels.

So what can we read into this (no pun intended!)? Well, looking at these results, it’s interesting to see that no advanced content ranks at all for this query, despite the split between indexed content being very evenly spread across the three categories. In fact I didn’t find a single “advanced” piece of content listed at all in Google’s top 100 results at all!

But what about individual sites?

Ralph Fiennes said earlier in the week that Twitter is to blame for dumbing down the English language and making people use shorter words:

Ironically this was written in the Daily Mail, whose overall website reading level has an advanced score of less than 1%!

So is reading level a factor?

Based on the results I’ve seen so far, I would have to say no. And if it is, it’s not rewarding advanced content – in actual fact the opposite effect is taking place if anything. These results aren’t very fitting with what the panda update was intended to achieve – and I’m actually quite surprised by this. It does make a large assumption that all things are equal with link profiles (which of course is never true), but even so I’d expect to see Google varying the results between different reading levels to a wider extent.

Perhaps it’s something they are (or will be) looking at though – we haven’t even got to panda 3.0 yet!

So what factors is the panda update looking at?

Myself and Daniel Bianchini presented at a4uexpo a couple of weeks ago on this subject – and there’s a wide range of factors we believe to have affected this. Dan goes into more detail in his panda algorithm update post, but to summarise a couple of key points – here’s what I think are the main things which need to be addressed.

Unique content
The biggest success stories so far have been from sites who have really cleaned up their act and removed low-quality content. Those who had thousands of pages and have now trimmed this right back to ensure that it’s only the top quality content that is indexed and visible to Google. Or splitting content across several domains or subdomains.

User intent and bounce rate
Do Google monitor bounce rate? In my opinion, yes of course they do. Maybe not from Google Analytics directly, but if you’ve clicked a search listing in Google and bounced straight back out to visit the next site, it’s not a good sign of quality.

They’re likely to test things like this all the time, for example what’s the user intent behind the query “Apple”? Are you looking for the fruit or an iPod? Only bounce rate can really tell Google the user intent behind this – and it’s probably the main reason why the fruit industry is in ruins after the success of Apple, Blackberry and Orange!

But what is high-quality content?

Based on the results of this, I’m not sure it is writing standard. Or at least it’s not a huge factor. I’m sure Google will be aware of sites with spelling mistakes and perhaps poorly written content or grammar, but whether they are being penalised in any way, I’m not so sure.

I’ve recently heard stories of how some SEOs have tried buying old newspapers from the 1960′s off of eBay, scanning them and uploading each article as a unique webpage. The theory being that it’s a professionally written level of content, and because it was published well before the internet era, it’s also likely to be unique content once indexed. I have to admit, I was very impressed by that idea – with the theory being that you should be able to rank highly for these terms – and even if you’re just doing it to collect affiliate ad revenue via Google AdSense, it sounds like it should be a very effective strategy. But it is forgetting about one key thing…

Links!

Personally, I think the biggest losers from the panda update are those which have low volumes of links to internal content. If you’ve been hit by panda, try asking these questions:
- How much long-tail traffic do you get vs head of tail? How has that changed?
- How many links do your internal pages have vs your homepage?
- How many pages do you have indexed vs pages which are generating search traffic?

If can analyse the detail of these, then you can get a clearer idea about what content you need to either tidy up, remove or build links to. And from most experiences I’ve seen so far, it’s not a quick process – it will take gradual steps towards building the recovery back up. But if you have content that can naturally attract direct, deep links – then you’ve got much more chance of coming out of this the other side with a large spike in traffic – just in the right direction this time!

Would be great to hear from anyone else’s experiences in this? Especially if they’ve seen a change in rankings across different quality of writing standards.