Microsoft and Yahoo logos

It has recently been announced that Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed on a 10 year business plan in an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance for online search. Confirmation on the deal has been long awaited, and it was finally agreed earlier today. Yahoo! is going to integrated into Microsoft technology platforms, and Bing (Microsoft’s most recent Search Engine) is going to power Yahoo! search. Yahoo! will also be able to sell premium advertising on both Bing and Yahoo! search.

It will be very interesting to find out more about the partnership deal, and exactly what their plans are to try and capture the market share which they have slowly been losing out to Google over the past few years.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said the partnership will:

… Create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company

Hopefully this will be good news for everyone all round!

The most recent one I received really made me laugh. It was a content writing service, where they offered very low cost content writing at something like $2 per blog post! Usually these types of companies are international, and the quality of grammar isn’t going to be great. Lets face it, for $2 per post you get what you pay for! Content is one of the most important parts of your online campaign, and if it’s not up to scratch then in one way or another, your campaign will fail! So the fact that the title to the SPAM email I received was ‘content writting’ (where writing was spelled incorrectly) really made me chuckle!

Remember, there is no substitute for good SEO content writing!

In the case of Shaun Anderson, the clients title was long but not malformed, but was packed full of relevant keywords totalling around 500 characters!! Crazy, I know! When he performed a search for the website, Google actually didn’t display the title at all, only a full stop where the title should be. To anyone that does not know the website, that would appear extremely untrustworthy! Not only has the site been knocked down the rankings, but it now also looks ‘dodgy’ which will no doubt reduce the organic traffic even further.

There are a lot of people still trying to manipulate the search engine rankings through clever techniques, and it appears that as ever, Google is slowly cracking down on all of this kind of behaviour. If you’re using some page titles that aren’t properly optimised, we would recommend updating them accordingly now or risk facing the wrath of Google!

A link bait normally involves creating something on your website that is either useful, humorous, or unique in such a way that people will link to it (a bit like an online viral).

Link baiting can be a very powerful tool for creating links to your website, and although it was once considered a bad practice, it is now a completely legitimate way of naturally building links to your site. Most link baits are normally topical, for example, I’m sure there are many link baits based on Michael Jackson right now as people try to cash in. The window of opportunity for topical link baits can be small, so whatever you decide to do, you need to plan it carefully.  Here are 2 great examples of link baits that I thought were very clever:

1 - George Bush Flash game

There was an incident about 9 months ago where a news reporter took off his shoes and threw them at George Bush during a press conference. Less than 12 hours later, a Flash game had a appeared on the internet where you had to try and hit an animated George Bush by throwing shoes at him, at a cleverly named domain of sock and awe (http://www.sockandawe.com). When I viewed the game, it said that approx 5 million shoes had successfully hit George in the face. The highest possible score you can get is seemingly 99, but most people get an average of 10.  This gives you a good idea about how many visitors the site had in a short amount of time. Checking it today, there have been nearly 97 million hits to George! Looking at the site, I can see that there are 33,000 websites linking to the domain, and it has a Page Rank of 6!  This Page Rank strength is being passed onto the developer websites at the bottom of the page.

2 - Fight Night Round 4 fight prediction

The next example that I liked was by EA Games. EA produce the Fight Night boxing games for XBox 360 and PS3, and there latest game (Fight Night Round 4) was given an extra boost in PR prior to it’s release using a clever link bait on their website, and posted on video sites like YouTube. The developers simulated the fight between Ricky Hatton and Manny Pacquiao one week before the superfight, and posted it online for boxing fans to see. The fight ended with an 11th round KO of Hatton, which was very controversial for British fans. The link was sent around like wildfire which built up a lot of links, but also served to demo the game to many people that hadn’t heard of it before, showcasing the graphics and improved realistic game play.

Hopefully this post has explained what a link bait is, why it is so powerful, and the examples will give you some ideas for possible link baits of your own! To find out more about link baiting, other link building techniques or more about Elevator SEO, simply get in touch!

However, I recently tried to login into my Yahoo! account, and it would not let me progress until I provided a secondary email account which they can use in the instance that I have forgotten my password. I managed to click in and out of the site, and could access my email without having to provide this information. I don’t know why, but I simply did not want to give them any more information about me, and I’m not going to forget my password - I’ve been using it for 10 years!  Anyway, I’ve been avoiding entering this information and I’m now completely locked out of my account unless I enter in this secondary email.

This suggests to me that perhaps there may be more to the rumours than I originally thought. Sending the information to a secondary email address would resolve the issue. However, I don’t want to give them that information. Perhaps I’m just being difficult, but what if this was my only email account? Would I have to create a new account just so that I could continue using it?  The other thing I found annoying, is that there is no way to refuse to enter it or to contact Yahoo! about it. Has anyone else experienced similar issues, or can you shed some light on the issue?

Canning O’Neill also offer a whole host of other services, including:

• Search & Acquisition (Canning O’Neill will search for suitable properties based on your requirements)
• Investment Consultancy (full investment advice on the sale and acquisition of properties)
• Rent Reviews and Lease Renewals (they can reduce / negotiate your rent at the renewal stage)
• Expert Witness (their agents can act as expert witnesses at planning appeals, public enquiries etc)
• Much more…

The new website is already starting to get good feedback.  We have built it complete with a CMS so that they can manage all aspects of the site content & structure, and we have made sure that all the new pages are optimised for search engines (SEO). Over the next few months we will be carefully monitoring their traffic and rankings within the SERPs while working on the off page aspects of their campaign.  You can check out the website by visiting www.manchester-offices.co.uk.

However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot.  They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:

• Nice blog! I’m now subscribing to your feed, and I’m looking forward to your next post
• Thanks for this post, I found it really interesting
• I came across this website and I’m so glad I found it

It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.

So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help.  Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!

Many people are now talking about the relevance of Page Rank, and how important it actually it is now. The general consensus is that Page Rank is now more of a guide, and that having a Page Rank 7+ is really more SEO vanity than anything else. During analysis of a website, Page Rank is taken into consideration however you should always investigate the inbound links to the site to get the full picture. What is more important at the moment, is domain trust and domain authority. More on this to follow soon…

To provide an example, a local restaurant owner types in the restaurant name in Google, and discovers that the top 3 links in the SERPs are actually negative reviews from customers that have posted on websites. Their own website actually appears much further down the page. The owner of the business was extremely worried by this, and didn’t want potential customers to see bad reviews in Google before they got to her website.  So how do you go about protecting your reputation in this way?

Well, the first step was to improve the SEO of the restaurant website by working with a reputable SEO company so that it was ranked #1 in Google.  Ranking for the restaurant name required only minor investment as the name of the restaurant wasn’t particularly competitive. This made sure that the restaurant appeared above the reviews. The second step involved creating a number of press releases that were posted on other local websites (which had a good page rank) that appeared above the reviews, pushing them down the rankings to the bottom of page 1.

The thing about reviews, is that they tend only to be written when a customer has had a bad experience. Rarely does a customer write a review about a good experience, but this can be changed. At the end of the meal, every customer was given a card and asked to write a review on the same specific website, and there were incentives for doing so. Adding a review resulted in a discount code for a free drink with their meal on their next visit. Although these reviews could have been good or bad, the restaurant was confident that a very high majority of their customers left satisified. Additionally, in order to claim their free drink they would be a returning visitor. It’s unlikely that they would write the review if they didn’t want to go back!  The reviews on the website, diluted the current negative reviews and also lowered their ranking to the bottom of page 2 in the SERPs, as Google favours ‘newer’ content in this format.

The final push to the campaign was actually building links for lower ranked websites. This may sound surprising, but by raising their position a few places it pushed the negative reviews down to the 3rd and 4th pages of the Google SERPs. Generally speaking, most users rarely go past the 2nd or 3rd page in the Google results, so this was seen as an acceptable result.

Hopefully this example shows how SEO can be used to manage reputations effectively. Don’t fall for classic mistakes, such as writing your own reviews or getting friends and family members to write them. If you do this and you’re found out, it can be even more damaging to your reputation.

The amount of work required for each campaign will be different depending on a number of factors, which include:

• The current status of the website & current ranking
• The industry of the business
• The keywords they are hoping to optimise for
• Other specific goals or requirements

Before an accurate cost can be created, it is important to know the current status of the website and how well it is currently doing. A website could already be reasonably well optimised which means that less work would be required to the on-page optimisation, and they could already be on page 2-3 of Google for their chosen terms. Alternatively, the website may require a complete rebuild in order to address any issues and may not have been cached by search engines. Even worse, the website may have been blacklisted for using spam or black hat techniques!

Performing a competitor analysis on the chosen keywords will enable you to discover how competitive the industry you are trying to rank for is. This will also give you the crucial information about how much work is required to both the on-page and off-page SEO, which is where you will be able to work out the cost of the campaign. You may discover that the keywords selected are too competitive to realistically optimise for without considerable time and investment, so you can research less competitive long tail variations of keywords that still yield a high volume of traffic.

So as you can see there is a lot to consider before a cost can accurately be created. The total cost will be dependent on exactly how much work is required and the rate of the SEO Company. If a company has offered a price before considering these factors, ask exactly what their strategy is what you are getting for your money. There shouldn’t be any hidden costs, and if they have not created a proper strategy then your campaign is likely to fail.

SEO can be expensive. Because of this reductions are normally offered if payments are made in full at the start of the campaign, but many companies offer flexibility in monthly payment schemes. In this instance, the bulk of the work is done upfront and there is normally an ongoing cost for maintenance, link building campaigns and monthly reporting.

If you have any questions about the cost of SEO, or simply want to find out more, then feel free to contact Elevator. We also offer a free SEO initial analysis report which will help provide you with an insight to the status of your site and how much work is required for you to achieve your goals.