Last week, at an SXSW panel called ‘Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better’, Matt Cutts of Google and Duane Forrester of Bing answered a question about what search engines do to help ’Mom and Pop’ sites compete against companies that spends thousands on SEO agencies. You can hear the full audio from the panel below, thanks Barry Schwartz at SE Round Table for posting it. Danny Sullivan was also fielding questions and is the third voice in the audio. Skip to around a third of the way in to hear Matt Cutts talking about the update.
The main questions on the ‘Mom and Pop’ topic were:
How does a small site with limited resources compete against a large company?
How does a White Hat SEO compete against a Black Hat SEO?
What are search engines doing about market saturation thanks to SEO?
As a result of these questions we gained a great insight into what Google and Bing plan to do this year with their algorithms regarding SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.
Don’t forget that BrightonSEO will soon be upon us! We hope to get a great insight into SEO in 2012 from the many speakers on the day. We are proud to be sponsoring the event this year so come to our stand to say hello if you have tickets. If you missed out (tickets sold out in 13 minutes!) then read our blog post on how to get the last few BrightonSEO tickets.
Google Search in 2012 – Over Optimisation Penalties
In an unprecedented move by Google, Matt Cutts announced a future algorithm change. This never happens, we normally receive an official update long after people have noticed the changes.
Asked what Google are doing to combat over optimisation, Cutts said:
Normally we don’t pre-announce changes but there is something we’ve been working on and in the next couple of months or so we hope to release it. The idea is to level the playing field for all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimisation or overly doing their SEO compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive and we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, who throw too many keywords on the page or exchange way too many links or whatever they’re doing to go beyond what a normal person would expect. It is an active area where we have several engineers working on that right now.
Coming after recent changes which have seen personal and local search results become default on Google, this announcement is unlikely to go down well with a large portion of the SEO community – notably those who like it easy.
This guest post is from fellow Brighton business FDM. Digital marketing analyst Jonathan Verrall writes about his Top 5 Tools for SEO. Jonathan’s opening sentence also works in reverse: You may have the best SEO tools on the planet, but unless you know what you’re doing or why you are using them they will be useless. Combine the tools with strong SEO knowledge gained on our SEO Training course for search success and then attend our Social Media Workshop for a powerful skill set for internet marketing.
I believe a good search engine marketer is only as good as his tool-kit. My conclusion is based on one factor, admission to data! You may be the best SEO on the planet, but unless you’re able to access data about a given market, competitor or website you are currently optimising for, you may as well be taking a stab in the dark.
Each search engine marketer uses a different array of tools depending on what they originally learnt to use or what they feel are the most appropriate for the job.
Unfortunately, SEO tools don’t come cheap – this makes search engine optimisation rather difficult for freelance SEOs who don’t have a huge budget to spend on research purposes.
Fear not! There is an arsenal of FREE tools out there to help search engine marketer’s drive their online marketing campaigns forward without having to part with a single penny! Read the rest of "Top 5 Free SEO Tools"
Our favourite SEO conference – BrightonSEO – is back! Bigger and stronger than ever before, BrightonSEO (April 13th 2012) sold out in under 13 minutes this year. But don’t fret! You can still get tickets by attending a BrightonSEO Workshop. Book now before all the places run out.
We always enjoy attending, participating in, and writing about BrightonSEO. This year we have decided to go a step further and sponsor the event!
As well as attending, we will be manning a stall at BrightonSEO so please come find us for a chat about search or to enquire about our training! We run many courses that would be advantageous to your marketing efforts, including our iPhone App Training and Android App Training courses. Mobile marketing is something that every digital marketer should get involved with, but few have the right skills.
BrightonSEO 2012
This year BrightonSEO is bigger and better than ever before – Kelvin has outdone himself. The event has moved to the Brighton Dome, upping the capacity to 1000 eager search marketers looking to learn from the search experts.
As well as the 16 talks there are also 5 workshops before the conference and a trip to the pub after.
Great writers have different styles and different methods. However, when writing for the internet (especially when starting out) there are some standards you should aim to follow to improve the quality of your content and increase readership. Famous authors may be able to get away with a very personal style and a dependence on alcohol but your blog isn’t going to last very long if you don’t make it internet friendly. If you are serious about starting a popular blog then we recommend our Blogging & Content Marketing course to get you started. We also have WordPress courses if you would like to delve deeper into creating blog sites and SEO training and Social Media training to ensure your blog posts are searchable and shareable.
This article is written by McKinley Plowman, accountants in Perth, who provide business and personal financial advice.
Written communication remains one of the most important skills for a person to possess. Writing has allowed us to communicate precise ideas that are able to be digested by the reader at their own pace. Most importantly, writing has given man the ability to communicate outside of their mortal life. It has, in a way, pushed mankind into a post-human state.
With this said it is disturbing that a lot of the population write poorly. I’ll run through some ways you can improve your writing and will focus specifically on writing in a business setting.
Use smaller words if possible
Large words sap energy from a piece of writing. Many people believe that using a big word will make them appear more intelligent to the reader and hence improve their status. This is partly true but influence doesn’t come from convincing people you are smart, it comes from making people like you. Read the rest of "How to Improve Yourself as a Writer"
This guest post looks at an overview of follow and nofollow links, sparked by Google Search Plus Your World which is struggling to realise its potential as social networks are usually all nofollow. This prevents Google from adding their data to Search Plus Your World and severely limits its use. This returns the debate as to how you should use NoFollow links on your site…
NoFollow links are not new by any means, but they are receiving more attention recently with Google’s introduction of “Search Plus Your World.” At the center of the debate is whether Google is abusing its position as the world’s primary search engine by integrating social search in a way that favors its own social network, Google+. Because of NoFollow, Google is prevented from fully indexing Facebook and Twitter. Until this summer and prior to the launch of Search Plus, the Twitter Firehose provided a special feed to Google. When the deal expired, Twitter elected not to renew its agreement with Google, but other search engines still have access to the Firehose. This has become a complex business dispute that everyone seems to have an opinion on, but it has also reignited a discussion about the SEO implications of NoFollow.
DoFollow/ NoFollow – What are you on about?
NoFollow Links: Not like sheep
In case you didn’t know, DoFollow is the default for links and does not require specific code; rel=”nofollow” is code you insert that tells a search engine spider to index the text it encounters but not the link attached. It was originally conceived to combat spam in comment sections by preventing untrustworthy sites from having outbound links indexed, which could in turn increase the page rank. Eliminating the incentive for cluttering comment sections with spam was sound in theory. Also, by designating necessary but not particularly interesting links that appear on multiple pages such as “About” and “Contact” as NoFollow, you could ensure that your link juice was not diluted and only divided between important links. Unfortunately, this reallocation of link juice lead to the SEO practice of PageRank or link sculpting – which Google looks down on.
Prior to 2009, designating links as NoFollow meant that if there were five links on a page and one was NoFollow, then each of those links would receive 25% of the site’s link juice. Google, however, quietly changed the way it treated NoFollow links and, when no one seemed to notice, it actually made a point of announcing its reversal in June 2009. Now, with the same scenario, those four outbound links would receive 20% of your site’s link juice and that NoFollow link would still receive none. You are no longer redistributing link juice, but actually throwing some of it away. The intention was to undermine unethical link sculpting practices that were attempting to game the system, but it also complicated the reputable practice of link building. Read the rest of "SEO Implications Of NoFollow Links: A Nuanced Approach Is Best"
We have now added Content Marketing to our Blogging Training course to create the mighty Blogging and Content Marketing Training course, so you can get a head start on your internet marketing endeavours.
It can be tough to get your brand, company or website noticed on the big World Wide Web. Fierce competition for search engine rankings and SEO dominance is rife between websites gunning for the same keywords and with the same general target audience; so what can you do to get yourself to stand out from the crowd?
Currently, one of the most effective methods of generating interest from users and building up back links to appease the search engine lords is content marketing. This form of marketing has many advantages and uses which should be explored by anyone looking to extend their website’s visibility, outreach and exposure.
Why should I do it myself?
The internet is made of content. It’s what people use it for; to find useful information, tips and entertainment. By creating your own content you can write about the topics your website, blog or company specialise in from as many angles as you can think of. Doing this not only gives you more searchable content to be found via search engines it also gives you the opportunity to stamp your authority on a subject, working your way into becoming an expert in your field that people will look to for knowledge, answers and cutting edge info.
However, if you aren’t ready to put yourself forward as an expert just yet, content marketing still has some valuable other uses which when used properly will help improve your site’s traffic and exposure to new users.
In a move to provide its users with more customised and personal search results, Google have launched their new “Search Plus Your World” feature to their enormously popular search engine.
The new features, which are currently only available on google.com in English but are being rolled out globally, takes a far more social stance on the search, offering custom search results which displays content from your Google+ network as well as global results. You can use Google Search Plus Your World by logging into your Google+ account and clicking ‘go to Google.com’ link at the bottom of the search page if you are not in America. You then see a personalised results page (shown below) and can switch between personal and global results using the toggle switch at the top right of the page. This is a dramatic update that potentially could change the face of Search Engine Optimisation and the way we receive our search results.
Through deeper integration with Google’s social network, Google+, the new search feature will allow you to discover your own information, photos and content as well as content that has been shared and +1′d with you within your network, all within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). These results aim to give you far more personal results based on:
posts from your friends on Google+
private/limited content which has been shared with you on Google+
full web listings
full web listings which have been modified through your personal behaviour
fell web listings which have been modified due to your social network connections
The implications of these changes are that you can receive more meaningful results which match what’s going on in your life, giving you more of an indication of what the members of your online world are sharing, doing and saying. Read the rest of "The Google Update – Search Plus Your World"
In an astonishing move, the Google Webspam team, headed by Matt Cutts, have demoted the Google Chrome download page for violating Google’s quality guidelines. Here’s the SERP for the query ‘browser’:
As you can see, Chrome no longer appears in the natural results, with Firefox, Opera and Safari taking the lead. However, Chrome does still appear due to a paid listing and the fact that everyone is writing about Google Chrome forcing the story into the Google News snippet.
Google were quick to respond to many SEOs (headed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book) noticing how they seemed to be running a link building campaign – directly against their own code of conduct. In fact, the campaign was created to get people to watch a video about Chrome not to build links. The video itself gave no link juice to the Chrome download page and only one of the two dozen or so posts actually linked to the download page – this was at the blog author’s own discretion so is actually closer to a natural link than a paid link.
Our SEO Training course only teaches white SEO techniques that won’t come back to haunt you in future. Why spend loads on an SEO company without knowing yourself what their efforts are for? While many SEO companies are great, the are just as many that promise you instant success but will really damage your rankings when Google catch on. So come on our SEO Training course in Brighton and learn how best to direct your SEO efforts yourself. We also offer in company training if you want to ensure your digital marketing team is completely up to scratch with the latest, best SEO techniques.
The fact that the Google Webspam team have demoted a Google product for a single paid link may seem strict and anybody in a similar situation who got banned for 60 days for one link would not be happy. However, Google have released a statement highlighting the fact that they have taken a stricter stance than usual because it was their own guidelines they violated.
In an unprecedented move by Google, Matt Cutts announced a future algorithm change. This never happens, we normally receive an official update long after people have noticed the changes.
We always enjoy attending, participating in, and writing about 
Great writers have different styles and different methods. However, when writing for the internet (especially when starting out) there are some standards you should aim to follow to improve the quality of your content and increase readership. Famous authors may be able to get away with a very personal style and a dependence on alcohol but your blog isn’t going to last very long if you don’t make it internet friendly. If you are serious about starting a popular blog then we recommend our 
Through deeper integration with Google’s social network, Google+, the new search feature will allow you to discover your own information, photos and content as well as content that has been shared and +1′d with you within your network, all within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). These results aim to give you far more personal results based on:
Google were quick to respond to many 
