We were very happy to have our first Search Innovation Seminar in Birmingham on 17th May. We had great presentations on What Google Might do Next, Local Search and Performance Display, and Incorporating Social Media into your Marketing.
You can find the presentations below, and if you’ve got any questions, let us know in the comments or tweet @BrummieSEO!
What Will Google do Next?
In this presentation, we’re discussing what Google is trying to do, how they do it, and the reasons why they’ve made the recent changes like Penguin to their algorithm. Most importantly, Google seems to be demonstrating the importance of ethical linkbuilding.
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What is an XML sitemap?
An XML sitemap allows for search engines such as Google to be able to understand what is on your site and crawl it accurately.
The sitemap tells the search engines what URLS there are on a website and allows them to be crawled. This is an important step for your website as sitemaps enable search engines to find all of the pages on your site which might be missed when indexing.
Read on
Internet Marketing News
Here’s some exciting news for our SiteVisibility and internet marketing podcast fans! You can now enjoy all our fantastic marketing podcasts via audio boo!
Boo Who?
So, you might be asking yourself what’s this? boo who? Don’t cry! it’s a brilliant new audio service which ourselves and many other sites have subscribed to such as ‘Radio Player‘ teaming up with audio boo in January 2012 (a service backed by the BBC and commercial radio with 7 million listeners a month). It allows a more social distribution for our brilliant podcast where you can now leave us comments, share our podcast with friends and even follow our page for the latest in digital marketing trends.
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In this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Kelvin and Andy are going through the key message which came through during BrightonSEO. As you might imagine, what Google might do next and the changes they’ve made to Analytics was a hotly debated topic. Additionally, the future of structured data and how it will affect how people use the internet, microformats and schema.org, the importance of authors to content and how to use online PR most effectively were also some of the topics discussed at the April event.
You can read more about BrightonSEO on our blog, and you can watch our top five BrightonSEO videos as well.
If you’d like to attend the next one, you can join the mailing list so you don’t miss any announcements.
Cookies for Cookie Day
We are very excited to be launching our first fundraising activity to help us achieve our goal of raising £1600 for the NSPCC and we will be are raising funds for the NSPCC and awareness for the EU Cookie Law by baking homemade cookies for local Brighton businesses.
If you are based in Brighton and would like to show your support, and treat your office to some sweet treats on a Friday any donations are appreciated and will be going to an amazing cause.
The cookies are available in delicious chocolate chip, oatmeal, and sugar varieties, and 6 cookies will be £10 and 12 will be £15. What better way to comply with the cookie law than to get some chocolate in your mouth at the end of the week!
Cookies will be sold by half dozen or dozen with all the money raised going to towards the goal of £1600 for NSPCC by the end of 2012. Please dig deep and help us make a difference!
If you would like to place an order or more more information, please email Jamila MacLean Homburg.
Orders must be in no later than Monday 21st May by 5pm to give us plenty of time to bake up a storm! Payments can be made through our Just Giving page: http://www.justgiving.com/sitevisibilityjustgiving.
Get your order in now to avoid disappointment!
SiteVisibility and Sustainability
SiteVisibility recognises the need for sustainable development in business and continually aims to improve the social and environmental impacts of our activities to underpin a healthy, profitable and successful business.
This is not something that just comes from the top down and everyone in the company is given one day per annum to participate in either company or personal volunteering or charity activities and this year we would like to see this happen with everyone working towards assisting with something they are passionate about.
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Using webmaster tools is an essential component of daily SEO practises as it contains key information about the visibility of your website in Google. Webmaster tools will display any errors that Google finds when crawling your site so that you can address these errors and fix them to improve SEO on the site.
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On the 26th May 2011 the enforcement of DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC was deferred for one year in the UK. Many of us wondered if it would all just go away… it didn’t, and Cookie Day* is almost upon us.
SiteVisibility has written a Privacy and Cookie policy which all site visitors should read.
How the cookie law crumbles
The ‘Cookie Law’, a tastier synonym of DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC, is aimed at protecting individuals against the hitherto unregulated use of user behaviour tracking online.
In short the law means that we must now ensure that users are not just aware of the tracking information, such as cookies, that we plan to store on their computers but also that they consent explicitly to us storing that information.
Some cookies are fruitier than others
The controversy around this law stems from the fact that browser cookies are all but essential to the modern web experience, many sites simply wouldn’t function without cookies to remember certain information about the user, such as the contents of an e-commerce basket.
Read on
The time comes when you need to move your website content; this could be with a new site, a new domain or creating subdomains. It is vital that this process runs smoothly as you don’t want to lose all that SEO goodness that you have worked so hard at achieving.
In the Webmaster Central Blog Google has given some pointers on how you can use webmaster tools to assist you in your move.
As with moving house, a site move needs to be carefully planned. Good planning will remove some of the risk associated with the move. Unfortunately you can’t alleviate all risk; sometimes you can follow all of Google’s recommendations and still you lose your rankings, but being prepared as possible gives you a head start!
There are a number of key SEO considerations when moving content.
- It is essential that you use 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. This moves the history of the page, the incoming links and tells search engines which page to index. The 301 redirects should be in place as soon as the site/pages are moved. A small delay could have a detrimental effect to your ranking.
- In a small number of cases you may not be able to implement 301 redirects. If this is the case you can use cross domain canonicals; Google will then try its best to index the new version and pass the link equity.
- Update your xml sitemap and submit to webmaster tools.
- If you have moved the website to a completely new domain, make sure you inform Google of the change, using the change of address option in webmaster tools.
- Check that Google can crawl your site by using the ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ tool within Google webmaster tools.
- When you move your site from the development/testing server to go live make sure that your robots.txt isn’t blocking search engines – you would be amazed at how many times this gets forgotten during the excitement!
- Make sure the site isn’t generating loads of broken links.
- Ensure that you don’t have duplicate content; either use 301 redirects or the canonical tag.
- Geotargeting – if the site is location based select this option in webmaster tools.
- Check who’s linking to you and ask if they will change the link to the new content.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of considerations when moving a site, but following Google’s recommendations is a great starting point!
On Friday April 13, SEO experts from all over the world joined us at the Brighton Dome for BrightonSEO. The day was a huge success and a wide range of topics were discussed, yielding many new insights. Now that we’ve had some time to digest, we would like to share with you our favourite five videos of the day (in no particular order) that attracted our attention.
1. “Ask the Engines”, with Pierre Far, Dave Copin, Martin McDonald, Rishi Lakhani & Tony Goldstone
BrightonSEO kicked off with a Panel Discussion on Search Engines, with Pierre Far from Google UK, Dave Coplin from Bing, Rishi Lakhani (Freelance Online Marketing Consultant), and Martin MacDonald from Expedia EAN debating and discussing the biggest SEO issues at the moment. During the Q&A session, the audience had the chance to ask specific questions to the panel of Search Engine Experts surrounding SEO and search.
Read on
In this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Kelvin is talking with Bas van den Beld about the do’s and don’ts of international search. They’re going through the importance of remembering the differences between the search engines operating in different countries, as well as how the different markets within Europe require different strategies.
Read on
