Tag search: SEO
Branded3′s round-up of the top SEO stories that have caught our eye from the last week.
Uh Oh!
I know what you’re thinking; here comes another evangelical SEO nonsense post which is only written about theory and never actually put into practice…..well it’s not, stay with me! It will however, be a useful insight into leveraging your business aims with your SEO, with a few bad jokes thrown in here and there for good measure.
There have been plenty of stories recently in the SEO industry about websites p-p-p-picking up a penalty (bad joke #1) and being punished by Google’s family of animal updates. However, I still find it amazing just how many brands fail when it comes to offering value to their consumers with outreach, and in turn, the number of brand managers who don’t seem to enforce their culture in any form of SEO work. Thirdly, and most shockingly, I’m bamboozled (panda – bamboo, get it?) by those ‘brands’ which seem totally unaware of who their consumers are.
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Recently, Branded3 has been getting a feel for Google+ and we also love posting about new things in the SERPs. So, whilst doing some work for a client, I came across this interesting little result and thought you might all like to know. As we know, the SERPs are always changing, so only time will tell if these new listings will remain as they are.
Greeted by stacks and stacks of bacon sandwiches when I arrived at the Think Vis conference at Leeds’ swanky Alea casino, all my expectations were instantly surpassed. What can I say? I’m easily pleased (and was horribly hungover). So after chowing down on some much-needed grease and plying myself with three cups of tea (and, er, a couple of naughty biscuits), we were called into the top room by our convivial host, Dom Hodgson.
A while ago I blogged about the way that Google loves to make changes and tweaks to its algorithm and the style and layout of their search results, in a constant quest to improve results for users. It can be quite interesting to see what sort of changes Google is making and to try and work out how this might affect our clients. Although not all changes get a permanent place in the Google results, some do stick, so we need to understand how they might have an impact.
Here at Branded3, we love WordPress. It is a brilliantly easy-to-use CMS, based on industry standards making it easy to develop for. It’s also very powerful, going beyond the ‘blog’ moniker that made it famous originally.
WordPress is used to power a very large variety of websites, including sites for: eBay, Yahoo!, Ford, Sony, Samsung and Mozilla Firefox – to name only a few. Whilst these big brands aren’t necessarily running their main websites on the platform, they do entrust it to power microsites and blogs that support their site.
Recently, the demand for creating a good user experience has been growing; with many people realising that SEO alone doesn’t increase those all-important conversion rates.
But whilst a heavy focus on user experience is essential to a successful website, there are still some web users with needs that are being ignored.
Although websites cater for specific target audiences, they also need to remember to cater for users of varying abilities and impairments.
Our .NET development team have worked with quite a few CMS platforms over the past years and it seems like a new one is released each month, but recently there seems to be a few that are stealing the limelight and offering that little bit more than the others.
In this article I’m going to take a look at some of the top CMS platforms we’re working with, and the pros and cons they all bring.
We know the importance of keeping up with all the latest SEO developments here at Branded3, because it’s one of those things where if you don’t move with the times, you get left behind. We’re constantly experimenting with new techniques and ways in which we can help our clients achieve better results and gain more traffic share.
As such, each year we pay close attention when one of the biggest SEO resources in the world; SEOmoz; ask all of their friends, followers, and subscribers to contribute to their ‘ranking factors.’ These ‘ranking factors’ are effectively a straw poll of some of the best SEO’s in the world (including our very own Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice – who have been asked for input this year) on what factors they believe are the most important reasons why websites might rank highly in the search results. And this year we’ve seen some pretty interesting results…
Here at Branded3, we track thousands of keywords for our clients on a daily basis and we regularly see Google making many changes, not only to the algorithm that produces the search results, but also to the search results themselves.
We find that Google will tweak results, alter portions of their algorithm, and change the look and feel of the results pages to try and make the user experience as good as possible. In that way, you as users continue to return to them and use their search engine in preference over the other available options.
Whilst doing an internal site audit for our own site http://www.branded3.com, we began to notice some strange outcomes with the search results.
We wanted to check where our site ranked for certain keyphrases. As this was going to take a while, and we had no idea where we might appear, it made sense to check for 100 results at a time.
The approach of many companies is to separate web development and SEO between two specialised agencies, sometimes even going somewhere different for the design; but what we’ve found here at Branded3, is that this method is deeply ineffective.
We’ve pioneered an approach here which integrates all aspects of web development; and its results speak for themselves. In this post I’m going to explain why the traditional method of so many is flawed, and why an integrated agency can produce seamless, effective results.
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