Search Engine Land

Search is not like AdWords, where you can simply tell Google to show this ad in this country

Continue to work hard on writing page titles which draw people in

There are still over 200 factors which determine where your website ranks in Google. However, the most important three remain well worth an investment of your time and money.

There's nothing stopping you from being creative, however unglamorous your products might be. The designers who produced your rather uninspiring website? You might be surprised what they can do, given the opportunity.

This is another experiment from Google which we all need to know about. It might not change the marketing world (a number of previous Google experiments have quietly shrivelled up and died) ...but it could be important.

There's plenty of chatter about the amalgamated opposition (Yahoo! and Microsoft's Bing) putting up increasing resistance, but although this may be the case in the United States, we're not seeing it in Europe.

There are many good sources of advice on writing for the web, but when you’re knocking out copy for your site, it’s not practical to keep referring to checklists. You need the right way of doing things to be second nature. Sadly, the only way this is going to happen will be if you regularly read articles on online copywriting, so I shall regularly point out good ones here, in the hope that you’ll have time to read them and the suggestions will begin to sink in. Ten Copywriting Tips… Read MoreKeep reading the copywriting tips until they sink in »

Following on from my discussion about Google AdWords advertising, the inevitable follow up from one or two readers was “Can you recommend a company which can do our AdWords advertising then?” The answer is (in the UK at least), no. If you’d like a recommendation for a search engine optimisation consultancy, or someone to write online content, I know some great people. I know a great web design company. But someone to manage AdWords (sometimes known as Search Engine Marketing agencies)? I work on recommendations, and nobody’s ever told me… Read MoreCan you recommend a company to do our AdWords? »

If you hadn’t heard, Google introduced a highly significant enhancement to its service a week or so back, called SearchWiki. This enables users to edit their search results – that is, reorder, remove, or add web pages to the results for any query. You can add notes to listings too. There’s a good summary of the implications of this in Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide on Search Engine Land which you might like to read. If that looks daunting, I’ll highlight the bits you need to know, before any… Read MoreControl your own Google »

This is quite an advanced article today, but it’s the sort of thing you’ll be taking in your stride after you’ve been on our Insider Programme for a while (and please think about joining, it’s a genuinely great investment). In Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search, Search Engine Land takes you past elementary “optimisation” of a website for search engines, and looks at the things many people continue to get wrong even after they think they’ve got their site all sorted. Likely errors include not having… Read MoreHappy with your site? Think again. »

A good article on Search Engine Land, called Why You Need To Know SEO Basics, Even If You Outsource, is something you should read if you’re planning to improve your company’s web site performance but know you’ll be subcontracting the task. SEO is the specific science of “search engine optimisation”, but the principles in the article apply to other aspects of web site and online marketing development. You can only give a task to someone else if you actually understand what the task involves – we all know that – so education should be your priority at the moment.Read MoreUnderstand what you subcontract »