Thursday, December 31, 2009

2009 - a rocky year for SEO

With so many changes being made by Google, it's hard for SEO professionals to actually keep track about what works and what doesn't. Even if you're not trying to unfairly game the system, you still need to understand how it works in order to maximise the impact of search engine results from your potential customers.

I look forward to exploring the new algorithm - hopefully it's practical and easy to understand!

Thursday, January 8, 2009

SEO Case Study

I've just spoken to Pratish and the guys at Wonkie cartoons to confirm next steps and they've agreed for me to use them as a case study. I'm drafting a typical set of questions an SEO consultant type would ask and see how well they fare on the basics.

The questions will include:
1. What SEO related activities are you currently engaged in to promote your blog?
2. Is SEO a priority for you? What percentage of your traffic currently comes from search engines vs CPC marketing?
3. Do you use tools such as Google Webmaster and Google Analytics?
4. Do you understand what the various terms in Google Analytics mean and how to interpret them? E.g. What is the bounce rate and what kind of figure should one be targeting for that metric?
5. How do you market your blog?
6. Have you bought links in order to improve SEO? If so, have you tracked how effective your purchased were?
7. When you make posts on other blogs etc, how do you link your site to your comment?
8. What keywords do you use? What keywords do you want to be ranked for?

The step after that will be to examine their site more closely and try to determine exactly what the optimisation gaps are and what kind of benefits closing those gaps will yield. Finally, we'll make some recommendations with reasons for the suggestions to ensure that this exercise is valuable for readers of this blog.

Until next time!

Friday, January 2, 2009

New Year - New Beginnings

Hope you're all having a good start to the New Year.. mine was awesome! Diving in Mozambique and spending the Christmas on the beach... could not ask for a better start to the year!

This is really just a quick catch up blog post to wish you all well.. will write more once things settle down post the holiday season :)