Engage Web July 2009 - Engage Web

How writing off topic articles can harm your SEO

Posted on July 31, 2009

Writing regular content for your website helps your site to be indexed more regularly by the search engines, but it’s vital that your content is relevant to the themes of your website. Writing content that is off topic for your website will have the adverse effect, and cause your site problems in the SERPs.

Try to think of it as a giant catalogue with an index. Your website exists on one of the pages of the catalogue, and can only be found by the categories in the index. If your website writes about your industry it will show up for searches relating to that industry. If your website writes about numerous different, unrelated things, it won’t show up for anything because it won’t be targeted enough. You won’t have a nice big, bold index listing because your site is impossible to categories by Google.

Keep your content relevant and keep it interesting and regular. By writing about every facet of your industry you’ll ensure that your site becomes an authority for your industry, which will mean better rankings and more links.

Posted by Cheryl Mathews

SEO is a recession beater

Posted on July 31, 2009

With the current financial climate causing many companies to cut back on their expenses, one area that doesn’t seem effected is in Internet marketing, or search engine optimisation to be specific.

Staffing costs can be expensive, offline advertising is costly and business trips can break the bank, but the low cost of SEO compared with the very high returns means that SEO is flourishing in an otherwise floundering economy.

According to Aaron Kahlow, the chief executive at this year’s Online Marketing Summit conference, because of the recession companies are looking for (more…)

Posted by Cheryl Mathews

Microsoft to stop forcing Internet Explorer down users’ throats

Posted on July 30, 2009

ie_logoAs someone who had to buy a new laptop recently, one of the worst aspects of a new computer is having to re-install all of your own software. You need to find all of your own discs, the serial numbers and download all of the programs that you need before you can start working. It can take the best part of a day to do all of that.

Then of course you’ve got the problem of Microsoft insisting that you use Internet Explorer as your default browser, unless you tell it otherwise. This has been a bone of contention for years as Microsoft has included IE in its various bug ridden guises over the years, refusing to bundle other, better, browsers with the Windows OS such as Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and now Google Chrome.

Things are about to change though as the powers that be at Microsoft have finally relented and will allow other browsers to be included with the new Windows 7, which goes on sale later this year.

During the install of the new Windows 7 users will be offered a choice of which browser they want to install, rather than being forced to use the dreaded IE.

Microsoft did intend to sell Windows 7 in Europe without any browsers, including Internet Explorer, but that idea was criticised by (more…)

Posted by Matt Jones

Bill Gates quits Facebook amid scores of Friend Requests

Posted on July 29, 2009

bill-gatesEveryone who joins Facebook for the first time goes through the same initiation ceremony of being inundated with request to ‘find the name of your next love’ or ‘battle it out with ninjas v pirates’. Depending on whether you’re an absolute chav from MySpace or not depends on whether you accept and add every single one of these applications to your Facebook profile, making it the undecipherable behemoth that it becomes.

You’ll also be inundated with ‘friend requests’ from people you may know, people you work with and people who you’ve never met. Again, if you’re an avid MySpace user you’ll add all of them thinking that the more friends you add, the more popular you are in real life.

You’re not alone in this though, as Microsoft supremo and possibly the most famous nerd in the world, Bill Gates, also gets inundated with spam on Facebook, so much so that he’s (more…)

Posted by Carl Hopkinson

Using Google Alerts to find topics for your content

Posted on July 28, 2009

Finding news and information to write about for your website can be a time consuming process. You can look in offline media such as newspapers and magazines, and you can use the Internet to find news and information as well. Search engines are the best port of call, naturally, because they index websites that have content (that is after all what you want them to do for your own website).

Still, even if you spend time going around different websites it can take a long time. Luckily you can use Google Alerts to gather information quickly and easily. Whenever you perform a search on Google News you have the option of signing up to receive emails with results from that search periodically. This is useful because if you wanted to write articles about SEO, you could receive emails from Google whenever news items are posted online about SEO. You can then save the emails and write the articles at your leisure.

You can even target specific areas by adding ‘location:uk’ or ‘location:london’ after your search to receive news about that area. This ensures that you’re not sent news that caters only to the USA or other countries.

Posted by Matt Jones

Facebook comments get teacher suspended

Posted on July 28, 2009

Facebook has a long and illustrious history of getting people into trouble for posting comments on their profile. It’s got people the sack, split up relationships and even caused divorce in its short time in existence. This time though it’s not the curse of Facebook profile and its public nature (that everyone seems to forget) that has claimed yet another victim, it’s the private discussion section of the website; something that should remain private.

Sonya McNally is a teacher and she was discussing her class with another teacher over Facebook, making the comment:

By the way, (class) 8G1 are just as bad as 8G2.

This seemingly innocuous comment caused offense to Kirsten Allenby-Moore, who reported her to the council. She wrote in a complaint letter:

I found the comments personally insulting as the (more…)

Posted by Cheryl Mathews

ITV to make 90% loss selling Friends Reunited

Posted on July 27, 2009

friendsReunited-hiresITV made what is regarded as one of the biggest mistakes in Internet marketing history when they purchased the once useful Friends Reunited for £175 million four years ago.

Shortly after buying the website, Facebook emerged and started the mass exodus of Friends Reunited’s members to a website that was better, easier to use, offered more features and was, most importantly, free. It took Friends Reunited far too long to work out that while they offering a poor service at a cost, Facebook offered a better one for free. Only recently did Friends Reunited become free to use, but it was much too little, too late.

ITV’s efforts to enter the social networking arena were disastrous, much worse that Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace which followed the same pattern: purchase by a television network and an attempt to run it like a TV network with intrusive advertising resulting in the loss of members.

Now Friends Reunited is worth somewhere in the region of £15 million, 90% less than ITV paid for it. Some analysts believe that Friends Reunited could be worth up to (more…)

Posted by Matt Jones

Is there such a thing as keyword density?

Posted on July 26, 2009

When writing content for your website it’s important that your content is relevant to your website. If your content is irrelevant, you can’t expect to receive any relevant traffic from Google that converts into sales.

However, just how do you establish relevancy and is there an ideal density for keywords to appear in your articles?

Some SEOs believe that by featuring your specific keyphrases in your articles so that they make up between 5% and 10% of the article copy you’ll be performing good quality SEO. That’s not necessarily the case though, as frequency of keywords isn’t really that important for a strong, long term SEO strategy. Semantic SEO is more important for Google, and that will gain you better rankings and traffic in the long run.

For example, if your website is an SEO website, selling SEO as a service, using the words SEO and search engine optimisation several times per article isn’t the way to go. Instead you should mention things that are relevant to your industry, such as Google, Yahoo, websites, online marketing etc.

Don’t keyword stuff your articles, just keep them relevant.

Posted by Matt Jones
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