SEO: Trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?

Making a silk purse

Remember all those lovely metaphors our parents trotted out when we were kids? “A bad workman blames his tools”; “It’s an ill wind that blows no good”; “If you don’t want the whelks don’t much them about” (or was that just my family?); and “Look at that! Mutton dressed as lamb!”.  Of them all, the…

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Google latest: User experience and authority take centre stage

SEO

It’s Google update time again!  With Penguin 2.0 around the corner, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, has released the latest pointers for website developers and owners on what to expect in Search Engine Optimisation over the next few months (you can see the original video on Matt Cutts’ blog).  This morning he also…

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Why SMEs still value paid advertising – whatever eBay says

Paid Search

eBay put the cat among the pigeons last week when they published academic research on the effectiveness of paid advertising for their brand. Their results showed that “brand-keyword ads have no short-term benefits……resulting in average returns that are negative”.  By pulling their Google paid ads and analysing ‘before and after’ traffic, they concluded that organic…

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Top SEO sins for small businesses to avoid

SEO

There are many articles on the web that give you good advice about Search Engine Optimisation – ensuring that your website has every chance of ranking well in search engine (mostly Google’s) results. Yet we still see small business websites that employ poor or even ‘black hat’ techniques in an attempt to rank above their competitors.  So,…

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