Search Engine Optimisation Services

Most people work really hard on their website or blog to get it to represent themselves or their brand well on the internet. This can be especially vital for people who deal in ecommerce. The thing is, you can work really hard, get great content out there and represent yourself or brand really well but no one is taking notice. This happens to many great web pages or blogs. You don’t have to worry; search engine optimisation (SEO) can help you.

In its simplest form, SEO is a tactic you can use to enhance your website or blog’s appearance in search engine result pages (SERPs) such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. This improved appearance in result pages is a great way to get more visitors to your site or blog.

When the search engines crawl all internet websites, they look at many factors on the webpage to decide how relevant the web page is to the search engine user’s search query. The better the relevancy, the higher it will place your web page in their search results. The first thing a webmaster should do is to make sure their website or blog is optimised for these key factors that the search engines use to determine relevancy.

Although it isn’t 100% known just what these search engines look for, research and tests done by the many SEO-ers out there manages to give us a good idea of some things that do make a difference. Keywords help determine how relevant a website or blog is to any particular search query. Where these keywords are placed is crucial. So first you have to decide on the best keywords that will describe your website and then place them in your website or blog in a correct manner.

The main areas where search engines look for relevancy seems to be in page titles, meta descriptions, and any written content. It may be tempting just to cram your keywords into these places but search engines can penalise websites and blogs that use this kind of ‘keyword stuffing’. So finding the right balance is always important.

If it is your own blog, you may be able to read up on a few basic SEO techniques and optimise it yourself but if you have an ecommerce site where the visitors and conversion is really important, it may be beneficial to contact a digital marketing agency or SEO specialist.

In the digital marketing agency where I work, they offer a wide range of opportunities for businesses such as Web Design, Web Development, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and of course their very own SEO.

The Search Engine Optimisation services they offer are done by a dedicated team with many years of experience, working on many different clients from various business sectors.

Jerry Yang has quit Yahoo, the company he co-founded with David Filo in March 1995. His resignation is effective immediately just weeks after Yahoo had announced Scott Thompson as their new CEO.

Yesterday Yahoo announced that Yang had resigned from the Board of Directors and all other positions within the company. Yang had been on the Board of Directors spanning nearly 17 years. 

In 2007, Yang replaced Terry Semel as CEO but stepped down from the job a year later. This led to Carol Bartz becoming the CEO in 2009 but 2011 seen Bartz ousted from the position and was eventually replace by Scott Thompson.

Thompson said of Yang “I am grateful for the warm welcome and support Jerry provided me during my early days here. Jerry leaves behind a legacy of innovation and customer focus for this iconic brand, having shaped our culture by fostering a spirit of innovation that began 17 years ago and continues to grow even stronger today. Jerry has great confidence in the future of Yahoo!, and I share his confidence in the enormous potential of Yahoo! in the days ahead.”

Jerry Yang had this to say about his time at Yahoo “My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.”

Yang still owns 3.6 per cent of the company.

Bing has become the number 2 search engine in the United States for December 2011 according to the latest figures released by comScore.

Bing was first launched by Microsoft in 2009 and landed just over 8 per cent of the search engine market share. Bing user numbers have steadily increased over time and the search engine now holds a 15.1 per cent of the search engine market share.

Google not only continues to lead the way in terms of market share, it also increased its share to 65.9 per cent. Yahoo has seen its share drop to third with 14.5 per cent of the market share. This is nearly a 4 per cent decrease from numbers in November where it had a 15.1 share.

Ask remained at 2.9 per cent while AOL also remained at 1.6 per cent.

The folks at Google have been busy again, this time revamping their advanced search page. The page has been redesigned with most of the functionality staying the same however some of the search options have been renamed or removed.

The removed tools include the ability to ‘Find pages similar to the page’ and ‘Find pages that link to the page’. 

Although the ‘Find pages that link to the page’ option has been removed, entering the command “link:yourdomain.com” into the Google search bar still works.

It has been coming. We had been informed that Yahoo would be winding down their Site Explorer tool a while ago but the day has finally arrived. Yahoo Site Explorer will close down today.

Yahoo’s announcement on their official blog:

Yahoo Site Explorer was a very useful tool for website owners and SEO professionals to find out link data for websites. It was particularly useful because it was data coming straight from a search engine.

If you were a user of the Yahoo Site Explorer then there’s no need to threat, the Bing Webmaster Tool will have the Site Explorer functionality. Many other third party tools offer link data such as Majestic SEO or SEOmoz.

A couple of days ago, there had been sightings of Google testing out a new “sources” box on the right hand side of the SERP’s. This box gave information about your search without having to click through to the website. Google have also started showing a box full of information in Google’s local search results.

The new results page seems to pull in all the information available in Google Places about your search query and displays it on the right hand side of the page, similar to the “sources” box. What this new box shows depends in your search query? For example, if you were searching for a restaurant, the new results can show a map, a link for directions, pictures, opening hours, reviews and even a menu.

This is a great new feature for user experience but could be harmful to businesses and marketers as users might be able to get the information they were looking for without ever clicking through to the business webpage.

After several months of testing, Google have officially announced that they would begin showing Adwords at the bottom of their search engine results page.

According to Google, the testing has shown that these ads at the bottom of the search results performed better than ads on the side of the page as they fit better with the way a user views the page scanning from top to bottom.

Having ads on the bottom of the page will give marketers more chances to get their ads appear on the first page of results rather than on the second page.