The search engine Google has recently announced it has entered into a deal with the Governments of four states in America to help make public government information more accessible. Google are said to be providing free consultancy and free use of software to four US states of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia.
So what is in this for Google? Google are doing this in order to resolve barriers that where hindering if not completely preventing the search engines from accessing thousands of public records covering a wide range of information.
April 30th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: google
For all of you out in blog land who are interested in search engine optimisation you will more than likely know of the pitfalls surrounding duplicate content. In a short and brief explanation duplicate content is exactly that, when a webmaster sees fit to copy your original content and use it on their website.
Not only is this a problem from the point of view of breach of any copyrights that may be in place duplicate content is deemed a ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation technique and as such penalties can be applied to websites who duplicate content.
I have just read a fantastic blog article regarding duplicate content (with some nice graphics) over on seomoz, which contains an awful lot of information, so rather than duplicate their blog on our site I urge you to please go and read theirs.
March 13th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: content strategy, copywriting, seo, spam, website development
In a recent interview, Matt Cutts discussed the new breed of search engine algorithms, personalised search. Although not something that is going to take hold and become the norm overnight, personalised search is something all online businesses should be actively researching and preparing for.
In the world where linking campaigns are seen as the answer to all SEO (something that Notcon do not believe) it has become ever harder for search engines to distinguish good strong website from the weak.
Have a read of the interview, it contains some interesting stuff!
March 6th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: content strategy, google, search network, seo
Google have recently updated their webmaster tools console to provide extremely useful backlink information. This information will benefit search engine optimisation consultants and webmasters alike. The information is far superior to that which is currently available, showing a far higher number of links than the current link: tool.
According to Matt Cutts the tool is currently not showing all backlinks Google picks up for your site but it will in the future.
Matt Cutts also makes clear that just because backlinks are showing up with the new tool does not mean that particular link is carrying any weight or helping with the off page optimisation of your website.
My opinion, the tool is great and a very useful new addition to the Google webmaster tools.
February 6th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: google, search network, seo
It is quite widely known and accepted in the search engine marketing world that duplicate content can have severe consequences in the search engines, but what does that mean?
Many people including a number of top search engine optimisation companies will tell you whatever you do, do not ever duplicate content. Well we strongly disagree, that statement is far too broad and not explained.
What’s Bad – If you go to someone’s website and copy a chunk of content and then paste it on your website and claim it as your own, you are breaking copyright laws. As such the search engines may penalise your website by applying a soft filter to lower your results or remove you from the listings entirely.
However, what if you want to quote a website? Copy that quote and on your website make sure you are making clear that text is a quote, use speech marks and more importantly after the text reference the website and author and maybe link to the website you copied the text from.
Do not be afraid of duplicating content within your own website, I once had one of the UKs top SEOs informing me how duplicating content on your own site is disastrous, however after I pointed out that on their own site the blog is duplicated about six times they realised they where mistaken. I can also back up this claim another way, take online shops for example usually you can get to the same content on numerous different physical / dynamic pages; do you see Google penalising the vast majority of online shops for duplicating their content?
The key thing to remember with website copy when it comes to search engine optimisation is make sure all your copy is well written and legible and more importantly written for the purpose of providing information to the websites end users (not the search engines).
October 10th, 2006 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: content strategy, copywriting, google, seo
