Advanced Ecommerce PPC

Over the last few months Google have really stepped up their ppc offering, with lots of new and exciting ways to market.  Are your campaigns up to date? 

Practise safe search…

Digital is the fastest evolution that has ever been seen. Don’t get stuck as a prokaryote, evolve into something cool like a digital bear….

I have an idea. Consider it as an SEO love glove.  Don’t worry about Panda updates, don’t worry about white hat vs black hat SEO, in-fact don’t worry about SEO… well SEO in a traditional sense.

The best way to have a site that is going to perform well is to stop creating mediocre sites.  Unless you play search every single day and you are running testing experiment, lets be honest, simply love it and have it passing through your veins. Stop thinking SEO and start thinking: 'not, what can my traffic do for me but what can I do for my traffic'.

All search engines want to do is get users to keep coming back. When users keep coming back, they inevitably click on paid adverts and search engines make their money.

If you have a site that is worth existing and content that is worth reading, these updates are great for you.  If you don’t, why are you wasting your time with your domain, why are you wasting time being online… you are fighting a losing battle.  If the content on your site is pap and your site has no value and whether it is panda 2.5 or any future update, you will loose out, evolve or give up.

SEO - How to monitor your results

In the SEO industry, openness and clarity of results are a must.  This industry went through a stage of being hounded by cowboys, who felt that because it takes time for SEO changes to be noticed they could get away with talking the talk but not walking the walk.

I do still, from time to time, get a phone call; it normally starts along the lines of “Our boss is a pure mathematician and he has broken Google’s algorithm” , or “We can guarantee you position 1 results for any of your keywords”. I have taken a couple of these callers to the cleaners, but it is just not worth the effort anymore. 

It does annoy me that these “fly by night” SEO companies are tainting our profession, but on a positive note there does seem to be a marked improvement in the levels of SEO work being done in this country.

So this leads me on to the question; How can you prove your SEO worth and not be regarded as one of these Fly by Night agencies?  Well the long and the short of it is, as SEOs we are here to improve a company’s profitability.  As SEOs we do this by improving the visibility for specific keywords obviously…

Meta Descriptions – Onsite SEO back to basics SEO optimisation

Chapter 2 - The Meta Description. The part of the series getting back to basics in:  On page SEO optimisation.


A tag that not always gets the full consideration it deserves.  Although it does little for your pure “SEO” ranking, a well formulated tag can increase a pages click through rate from the search engine results page.  The main job of this tag is that it normally forms the snippet of text in the search engine results page. (although not always)

Title Tags - Onsite SEO

This is the first chapter in a set of blog posts that are dedicated to page level mark-up for SEO.
So chapter 1 of onsite SEO:

The Title Tag.

If you know everything about the title tag, skip to the advanced usage at the bottom of this blog, hopefully there will still be some value in this post even to the most advanced SEO reading this.

Bournemouth Air Festival

Bournemouth Air Festival 2011.  It was great to get out the old digital slr and have some fun.  Quite happy with some of the pic here.

Panda update forces evolution in the SEO's job description

The Panda update forces SEOs to evolve into Business Analysts….

If you have the chance watch this great video on the replication of the Google Panda update video from the guys over at SEOmoz.

If you don't have time here is a quick synopsis:

How did the Panda update actually work?

The Panda 1.0 update was an exercise in replicating the results for a ranking questionnaire tested on a set of students.  The factors that made the students respond positively about the factors that would affect the perceived quality of a site were replicated with a computer algorithm.

What are the sorts of questions that the Panda update actually asks?

Mobile SEO

So you have looked at your analytics package and you have seen that your users are viewing your site on mobile devices, but you are not showing up on mobile search engines for your most competitive phrases... What do you do!?  This blog on mobile SEO can help!

I have split the Blog into three main sections:

1) Best practice for Mobile SEO.
2) What to do when you can’t follow best practice.
3) The future of Mobile SEO.

Mobile search engines have different indexing algorithms compared to their desk top equivalent.  These algorithms are getting more and more advanced as mobile and tablet usage increases.

SEO, PPC & Online Marketing - My Recruitment Process

How I Ensure My SEO, PPC and Online Marketing Teams are Staffed Only By The Best.

A great process, but it can feel like another job on a growing list. It is, however, one of the most fundamental and important jobs that a manager can have. 

If you have bad bums in your seats, you will have:

• Poor Quality of Work

• Bad Results

• Unhappy Clients

If you have good bums in your seats, you will achieve:

• Great Quality Work

• Great Work

• Happy Clients

• Greatness!

Martin McAndrew: Is social media dangerous or is it just something that needs to be managed?

I have contact with many professionals from many different professions in my line of work .  I recently spent the day in London with a teacher from a local school who had been nominated for a Times Educational Supplement award for a project we had worked on.

When I first started work on this 2 x BIMA award winning project I was amazed at the quality of modern schooling, It was amazing that girls of 13/14 where volunteering to stay late after school.  They were genuinely interested in project management, SEO, design, development, Ux, essentially they were so open to learning anything that was shared with them.  I was amazed at how relevant the program was at this school.  It honestly made me think in a few years when these girls enter the job market they are going to be so far ahead of where I was at their age.  Essentially if I had kid I would be doing everything I could to get them enrolled in this school and in the form of this particular teacher…  any way I digress.

The point of this blog post is looking at the dangers of social networking.

When Life After Google+ Becomes The Norm

In about six months time, after the buzz of this major shift in social media has died down, we will all find ourselves in the Google+ era.

But what will this strange circular future be like? 

Google+ Buisness Profiles are comming

Google+ seems to be the content of every single conversation i am having within my geek web circles.  Genuinely everyone seems very captivated by this new social media platform.  I think a lot of this come down to the very cleaver limited release plan drumming up a real demand for membership.