Market Appeal

Archive for October, 2008

While there are plenty of general posts on local SEO, few if any have been written specifically with London in mind, so I’ve covered some local London SEO tips for you below.

1. Add your business to Google’s Local Business Listings. The easiest way to do this is to start with step two, below.
2. Create a free business listing with Yellow Pages. This helps you to get included in Google’s Local Business Listings as well as being a worthwhile place to advertise for fee in its own right. Google may have just pipped Yellow Pages as the primay source of local listings (by enquiry volume) however it’s still in a very worthwhile second place.
3. Add your business to leading local business directories including TrustedPlaces, Qype, Welovelocal, Tipped, Touch London etc.
4. Set up a locally targeted AdWords paid search account. OK, so strictly speaking this isn’t SEO, however, being able to target campaigns to a specific region, such as London, is a great way to target your customers while testing out the conversion rates for different keywords to see which ones have both a useful click volume (not just theoretically predicted search counts) and a good conversion rate, as either alone is futile.
5. Use your full London address, including street name and postcode, is on your site’s contact page, if not every page of your website.
6. Acquire links from related companies in your region. While they don’t all have to be from your town and can come from allied but non-competing companies if you prefer, matching the top level domain (e.g. .co.uk) is recommended.
7. Create content to target specific regions. For example, if you run a property website they you could create pages for each area by town (county, country or postcode) that list the properties avialable, the values of previous properties sold in that area and some interesting local information to help prospective purchasers. That way you can have targeted pages appearing for searches for properties in every part of London, a great way to cover the while city one step at a time.

For more advanced techniques for larger sites or a chat as to how we can help you to profit from local SEO contact our Head of Search Anthony Sharot on 07956 990 216 or email marketappeal@gmail.com

Ever wished that your site was accessible to people speaking foreign languages, but thought that translating it would be too much hassle?

If so, a Google Translate Gadget like the one below might be the thing for you. It allows surfers to view your site in a variety of languages.

This won’t bring the SEO benefits of translating your entire site as you’ve not actually contributed content to their indexes, however, it is great in terms usability and could even be used to translate your content in due course.

Check it out now:

Of course, if you require the benefits of a truly international website then we’d be happy to discuss how to go about multilingual SEO.

Google is so innovative that new products and services are announced on an alomst daily basis and so even it can be hard to keep up the latest news, even for full time search marketing professionals.

In order to discover the news from Google I’ve created a Custom Google news search engine (as in news about Google, not just the service Google News) which, if you’re as big a fan as I am, you may find helpful.

While there’s an ever increasing trend by worried webmasters resulting in more and more sites nofollowing all external links, it’s not necessarily necessary, or even beneficial, and probably won’t help your rankings anyway.

So, I’ve now removed the nofollow tags from the external links on my site, including blog comments, as hyperlinks are an integral part of the web. As I have a WordPress blog I used the NoFollow Free WordPress plugin, as it has some handy features and saved me the time I’d otherwise have spent hacking my installation.

Of course, I may have to reconsider this policy if inundated with spam, and will be more selective than even about which comments to allow, but rather than be cynical, I thought that I’d give it a go.

I also recently read a great article on dofollowing blogs and how (and why) to write worthwhile comments.

Dofollow blog commenting netiquette vs a barbecue party

Cheers SEO 2.0!

With all of the fuss about the Yahoo Google advertising deal and the global economic crisis it seems that one of the more interesting stories, Google Gadget Ads, has gone almost completely unnoticed.

Google Gadget Ads [widget ads] are a new hybrid ad format employing JavaScript, XML (i.e. AJAX) and Flash video to add Web 2.0 style interactivity to their ads. They are distributed over their existing Video Ads channels already available to AdWords and AdSense customers. The same ads can also be uloaded as Gadgets to iGoogle homepages with minimal modification.

While gadgets so far have tended to be fairly straightforward reporting on things such as the weather or news, really the sky is the limit and everything from games to full blown applications – which Google calls “mini-websites” – is possible. If your familiar with the range of plugins for Facebook then you probably have the right idea.

While access to Gadget Ads is currently limited to a few big spenders, due to the complexity of the ads creation, they clearly hope to widen participation in due course and so this is one to watch given that Google already controls a sizeable chunk of world wide web advertising revenues.

Also, Google has recently started running post-view advertising on some of their more popular videos, as the site’s revenue is very low considering its incredible number of page views. Google had previously made noises about wanting to create emmbedded ads, as they are rumoured to perform well, however it’s now thought that pragmatism has forced them go for a less technically challenging solution in the interim.

Gadget Ads as Video 2.0

Clearly, however, Google has a vision, along with a plan already under way. Just as flat “brochure ware” websites were once commonplace, but now web 2.0 complete with Flash and AJAX enabled interaction is all the rage, I think that in years to come “flat video” could become passée as basic editing and hyperlinking tool are embedded into phone-cams and interactive video will be the order of the day.

Don’t get me wrong, text ads will be their bread and butter for a while yet, not least due to their speed and simplicity, however, between youtube and their AdSense network and AdWords ad management platform, not to mention Google’s new ad planner, Google are well placed to lead the new video generation and, importantly, the race to monetise it too.

As I covered in a recent post widgets are great for SEO, even as cheap techniques such as directory listings are fading, largely due to the fact that they tend too offer the webmaster valuable content (news feeds, the weather etc.) in exchange for what is essentially free advertising and hyperlink or two.

Soon it seems, thanks to Google, widgets will be great for paid search advertising too. It’s early days yet, but they have the infrastructure and the potential profits of fun, engaging ads could be huge.