SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

Rupert Murdoch isn’t happy with the cut of revenue the traditional news providers are getting online, and he intends to do something about it.

Thanks to the internet, the content of the old-school media powerhouses (the likes of Reuters, Associated Press and Murdoch’s News Corporation) is now available to the world for free.

Many of the same articles you buy in a newspaper can easily be found online; a quick search on a service like Google News returns literally thousands of articles.

For several years, all of the major news organisations have been wondering how they can make money online, but it’s old warhorse (and self-styled “catalyst for change”) Rupert Murdoch who has decided to take a stand.

“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright?” - Rupert Murdoch

These were Murdoch’s confrontational words earlier this year, and now he’s ramped up the rhetoric by suggesting News Corp. content could be pulled from the search engines altogether. (more…)

Page load times (how fast a website is displayed to users) have influenced Quality Scores in Adwords for quite a while now; if your site loads quickly you are rewarded (in theory) with cheaper, better placed ads.

The reasoning behind the Quality Score is that Google wants to improve the experience of its users, because if users aren’t happy they are less likely to use Google in future and their advertising revenue suffers.

Presumably working on the same logic, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed at last week’s PubCon event that load times will soon be a ranking factor for the organic listings. If your website loads too slowly, there is a chance your rankings will fall as a result.

The confirmation caused a bit of a stir in the SEO community, even though it will be only one of hundreds of ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, and probably not a hugely influential one at that. (more…)

Many folks considering search engine optimisation quite happily believe that it is a one off purchase and once the product has been bought and hung up on the wall (metaphorically speaking) all that then needs to be done is to sit back and admire it.

In our experience however, a vital part of any campaign is the ongoing services that usually fall into two broad categories, on-site and off-site. The on-site work consisting of all the general tweaks and additions that can be made to a site to make it more SEO friendly, and the off-site work consisting of organic link building techniques to improve the sites overall popularity.

Once the site has been initially SEO’d, there are almost always on-site areas that have room for improvement and, after all, without it how would you:

• Keep on top of any search engine updates – Google generally perform minor algorithm tweaks once a week and major ones twice a year? 
• Prepare suitable and measured responses to competitors SEO efforts? 
• Weed out any further niggles within the existing on-site optimisation? 
• Correct any previously hidden deeper SEO issues that may only become apparent later in the campaign?

From our experience, the best way to keep on top of all this is to have regular monthly on-site reviews to ensure that the site is as strong as it can be and as relevant to the current climate as possible. After all, if your competitors are always updating their SEO, how can you afford not to be?

Along with on-page content, links also play a leading role in search engine optimisation; this includes both inbound links from other websites and how pages within a website link to one another.

Looking at the link profile of a website helps search engines determine:

• Relevancy (what the website is all about)

• Authority (how important the website is compared to its peers / how much trust should be placed in what it says)

Image credit: Swamibu

To determine website ‘authority’ the search engines effectively do what anyone does when they aren’t sure about someone – they look for other people’s opinions.

Inbound links to a website are like votes of confidence; the more a website has from other trusted, respected sites, the higher its authority is likely to climb, increasing the probability of high rankings. Simple… (more…)