Archive by Author
4 Free Places to Get Quality SEO Data
Posted on 08. Feb, 2012 by Richard Falconer.
There are a ton of expensive SEO tools available. Many of them do a great job but you shouldn’t forget the great data and insight that can be gleaned from free tools. These tools are often overlooked. Blekko Blekko provides a ton of amazing ranking data to SEOs but I rarely [...]
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Google sticks the knife in Bing
Posted on 15. Dec, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google recently launched markup which allows the language and country targets of similar pages to be specified. For example, a product page in different languages, potentially consolidating the inbound links and social signals of those pages whilst showing the correct version in results. The markup also allows the identification of a canonical version of the [...]
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5 Tips for killer user generated content
Posted on 20. Oct, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
At A4UExpo yesterday I spoke about user generated content, its benefits and how it can be used effectively on a site. here are the slides from that presentation and some more information on the 5 tips I provided: View more presentations from richardfalconer 1. You don’t need to be sexy and fun to be engaging [...]
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A Rich (Snippets) History
Posted on 26. Sep, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google appears to be releasing new types of Rich Snippets at an increasing rate. Rich snippets were officially launched in May 2009 and after that initial launch it was a full eight months before any new types were released (events). In the last 5 months Google has launched 4 new types of snippets based on structured [...]
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Google Launches Product Snippets in UK
Posted on 31. Aug, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google appear to have launched product Rich Snippets in the UK. They have previously only been available in the United States. In the case below for Boots’ fantastically named Smoothies Soul Soother shower gel the “in stock” information appears to be generated from information in Boots’ Google Shopping feed. The page does use structured product [...]
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Can Computers Make Better Social Media Judgements Than Humans?
Posted on 19. Aug, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
There has been a lot of discussion about services such as Klout.com and PeerIndex.net recently. I’ve read strong opinions that online influence, authority etc. can only be accurately determined by an experienced social media expert and not algorithmically. There is evidence to suggest that this assumption is not a fact and indeed the opposite is [...]
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Actually Useful SEO Tools
Posted on 12. Jul, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
There are a million and one useless SEO tools, a quick search will tend to turn up any number of Firefox plugins which will happily ruin your browser with keyword densities, PageRank and Alexa scores. Often these “tools” will slow down your browser and collect your private information, providing little actual SEO value to you. [...]
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Why Google is Testing New Result Formats
Posted on 02. Jun, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google has been extensively testing new search result displays recently. Perceived snippet length and increased prominence for the URL are the most interesting alterations. A previous study by Microsoft may give a clue as to Google’s intentions. Increased advertising revenue will make Google the big winner if the reported changes go live. Strong brands and sites [...]
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Successfully Handling a Single Domain International Site
Posted on 28. Apr, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Karoline Spiessl wrote on this blog recently about localising content for search and users. Often, a lot of that tough, expensive localisation work can be undone accidentally, often without doing much wrong. Most SEOs who have worked on international sites know how to structure domains to allow country specific pages to target the most relevant [...]
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Have Google penalised Beatthatquote.com?
Posted on 08. Mar, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Yesterday’s announcement that Google had purchased online comparison site beatthatquote.com for $37.7 million caused a bit of a stir online with numerous commentators suggesting Google would be wading further into antitrust territory with the purchase. Today Aaron Wall from SEO Book wrote an article “outing” various optimisation techniques beatthatquote.com uses which are against Google’s terms [...]
