Mark Rushworth - SEO Leeds» Work Related Archives – Mark Rushworth UK SEO and Web Design Leeds

Stolen Samsung Laptop in Halifax (Red)

Mark Rushworth — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:44:19 +0000

Friday morning I woke to find that my car had been broken into and amongst some other things such as my sat-nav, cagoule and ‘Glastonbury’ sunglasses the dirty Ba#@rds stole my laptop.

If anyone in Halifax (UK) gets approached to buy a red Samsung laptop like the one shown below please let me know (of if you see it in cash-converters or some place like that)

Not had a good weekend.

p.s. if its still in a black laptop bag check the pocket for a brown stripy woolly hat.

A Pragmatic Keyword Research Tool

Mark Rushworth — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:09:08 +0000

You can all thank Blueclaw’s Senior SEO consultant, Monica for this.

The blueclaw team hold weekly internal presentations where a member of the team stands up and talks at length and in great detail about a specific topic. Todays was a talk on Keyword Research by Monica which covered a lot of information about the tools, types and formats of keywords in best-practice usage.

As part of this presentation a slide was put up that showed a keyword research tool that I hadn’t seen before and I thought that in addition to the Google Link Wheel, provides a more lateral insight into the terms Google ring fences around a core topic. This tool is the Think Pragmatic Keyword Suggestion Tool.

It basically allows you to capture the live suggestions that Google displays as a search term is entered into the standard search box.

Nice!

SEO Stats 2010 by EConsultancy

Mark Rushworth — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:21:32 +0000

Heres some interesting SEO Statistics for 2010 as compiled by Econsultancy (link at the bottom).

PPC Conversion rates are set at 2.03% compared to an average of 1.26% from organic. THis is a great benchmark to identify whether your website is converting above or below par and definately a key demographic to watch.

Out of 1.5 million searches only 10% are ‘transactional’ in nature with 80% being identified as research based. Basically theres a lot of window shopping and fact finding going on so ensure that your website caters for this market – this should also help your site overcome Googles bias towards non-commercial content.

More than 60% of ecommerce sites perform SEO without optimising langing pages or thinking about customer egnagement.

SEO originated traffic achieves 200% more conversions when compared to banner, affiliate and social shopping referals.

When a customer is closer to the point at ahich they intend to buy the search pattern switches from broad match to branded terms so make sure your site is optimised for long tail brand terms and that your products by brand etc pages have content and feed directly into the sales funnel. The conversion metric for this type of search is almost 10%!

Approximately 26% of businesses spend between £10,000 and £50,000 on SEO per year. 30% spend under £5,000 and 44% spend over £50,000

92% of people searched across the first three pages of a search result.

98% of people browse organic listings with 95% using the sponsored listings at the top of the page and onlu 31% looked at sponsored listing in the right hand gutter.

Theres so much information in the full document and if you’re in the SEO industry its certainly worth a dig through.

Src

Dadi Awards Finalists Announced

Mark Rushworth — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:56:25 +0000

Today we received some great news, Blueclaw have once again been shortlisted as finalists in the prestigious DADI Awards. Now unfortunately I cannot claim to have been involved in any of this as I’ve not been working there for very long but it’s always nice to see the team doing well.

So far we’ve been nominated for the following categories:

Best PPC
Best Ecommerce

Unfortunately we missed out on being entered into the DADI Awards Organic SEO category despite submitting what I believe was a really great case study (with SERPS that are better now than when originally submitted), but since we won this last year we are prepared to give someone else a chance.

Great Work Guys!

If you want to see more of the DADI Awards shotlist then you can see it here.

DIY SEO Guide by Blueclaw

Mark Rushworth — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:39:20 +0000

As I’m now SEO Manager at Blueclaw I thought it only right that I help promote the work of the team starting with an SEO Guide created by Monica our Senior SEO consultant. This guide is aimed at people who are new to SEO and contains practical guides and information on the SEO process and how to impliment key elements of success.

This is refreshing as many of the guides and e-books out there simply spout the same old un-practical and out-of-date rubbish that does no one any good.

The SEO Guide is available as a free PDF download and will soon be published as an active document which will form the basis of a knowledge-share like SEO Bible.

If you have anything to contribute let me know.

Now SEO Manager at Blueclaw a Leeds Based SEO Company

Mark Rushworth — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:51:53 +0000

I’m proud to announce that as of the 19th July 2010 I will be taking up the position of SEO Manager for the award winning Leeds based creative studio and SEO Company, Blueclaw.

I’m really looking forwards to the change of pace and getting back to being part of a close-knit team, dealing with a large number of clients across multiple industries.

What attracted me to Blueclaw was their openness, impressive client list and passion for SEO which reminded me of the days when I owned my own studio.

I hope to add my own blend of innovation, dedication and ferocious thirst for success which, fingers crosses, should help the business achieve even greater success.

So brace yourself Leeds, here I come

For more information on Blueclaw’s SEO and web design services visit the website blueclaw.co.uk

Install Magento on Heart Internet

Mark Rushworth — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:27:38 +0000

Installing the Magento ecommerce platform on Heart Internet is a complete pig of a thing to do. However I’ve discovered some great tutorials and tips to make sure your installation goes smoothly:

Step 1. Upload all of the files to your web server (took me the best part of 1/2 a day).

Step 2. Create a mySQL database in the Heart control panel

Step 3. Contact Heart Internet support and ask them to allow ‘CREATE TEMP TABLE’ permissions on the database (turned off by default for security reasons)

Step 4. Turn on PHP5 in the Heart Internet control panel

Step 5. Set up file permissions thus…

777
/public_html/var/.htaccess,
/public_html/app/etc
/public_html/var,
/public_html/media (and all folders under media)

755
/public_html/index.php
/public_html/

Step 6. Edit /public_html/.htaccess and add:

#############################
## For heart internet
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 5
php_flag short_open_tag on

Step 7. Create a file called php5.ini in /public_html/

Step 8. add the following line into the php5.ini

php_flag short_open_tag on

Step 9. Go to the site and begin installation. It usually errors on the first page but press F5 and it will continue.

Step 10. You will need to skip domain authentication and turn on SEO friendly URL rewriting in the wizard on the page where you enter the mySQL information

Step 11. Log in to the back end.

Step 12. Now download this file which will re-set the permissions for your back office which fixes a lot of issues people have

Step 13. the end (or beginning as the case may be).

Thanks to SolarPolar and Pixel

SEO Leeds

Mark Rushworth — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:08:15 +0000

Why are people putting all of their effort into becoming #1 for SEO Leeds? I remember a post by Dave Naylor saying to an upstart who was gaming their way to the #1 spot for UK SEO (Daves throw-away term) that in terms of traffic and conversions its a non starter.

A couple of Leeds based SEO agencies are plugging away at the term… but for what?

Ive added the term SEO Leeds into the title of the blog and i hold a top 5 spot and the traffic is under 50 unique hits per month… I don’t get it.

Sagepay… Did You Know?

Mark Rushworth — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:59:42 +0000

I love sagepay (formerly protx) as a payment gateway. For small businesses it provides a really simple way of providing secure payment and at a cost of just £20 per month with no set up fee for up to 1000 transactions per month, its a bargain too.

But did you know that on one sagepay account you can use up to five domains? This means that if you’re attempting to dominate the SERPS with micro -sites its going to cost you almost nothing to make these additional domains stand alone sales platforms!

Great news indeed.

FREE SEO Advice: How Can I Improved My Site?

Mark Rushworth — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:30:18 +0000

I have a friend from a while back who’s recently become an in-house SEO for a niche retailer who has asked if i could help provide an independent eye on the project with the view to creating some workable actions because he’s been thrown in at the deep end and can’t see the wood for the trees. Always eager to spread the knowledge, I took a few hours the other night to go through the site and produce some ideas for him, a list that I think might be useful for someone else who’s site is stuck in a rut.

Note: I’m having to be ambiguous as I haven’t had the go-ahead to promote the domain and I hope the genericness of this post will help broaden its reach and help you identify with the issues without the relevancy to a foreign product.

1. Choice of Keywords

This site ranks for many of its niche terms however there are some big hitters that could help drive more traffic, namely the use of “[keyword] equipment”. In addition the home page was wasting one of the title terms having targeted the term “[keyword] wear” when this should be “[keyword] jacket” which should attract 500% visitors and should help with conversion as its more niche. These terms should be adopted as the default names for these sections and as a result the clothing section of the site should be brought to the front, putting these titles as category headings on the sites global menu system.

2. Off Topic Content

The site has lots and lots of completely off topic content accessed through globally available ‘Help’ pages etc. These pages need re-working to at the bare minimum contain descriptive text, possibly in the form of prompts and user guides, to help with relevancy. Also consider changing the access structure to a more wiki style menu (in content links) which will:

Make users read the texts
Allow people to follow a train-of-thought to fine the content they need

It would also be advisable to try removing these from the sites navigation and/or META noindex,follow the content (as opposed to using robots.txt) to see if this will improve relevancy.

3. The first link is followed rule

Look through each page of the site with a view to the first link rule. This is the rule that Google only uses the first link to a pages anchor text when indexing a site. so second and third links to the target page on the same source page are irrelevant. In this case, the first link rule was applicable to menus and out of content links> I suggested re-working the site so that the HTML was re-formatted to put the in-content links first resulting in more relevant anchors.

4. Querystrings

The site has a number of links from the home page that target filter/search pages. These target pages have loooooong querystrings that are nonsensical. These need cropping back or better URL rewritten using .htaccess to still pass the same values but be more search engine friendly. In addition the title tags of these pages repeats the search query, it would be better if these were more keyword rich.

5. Design

The site is an old one, created by a developer who didn’t fully understand SEO and worse, has become an obstruction to the sites ongoing development stating that the code is in escrow and that my friend cannot have access via FTP to make changes. The site had many usability issues and a management team that are reluctant to move from the current system for fear of losing their existing rankings. As it’s my friends new job I suggested creating some micro sites aimed at niches with a view for these to out-rank the main site. not only will this demonstrate his ability unhindered, but also provide additional revenue stream and most importantly show what can be done quite quickly when your hands aren’t tied behind your back. To make these as effective as possible buy on-topic domains, get them hosted on different servers and registered under different names and addresses and use something like Magento as an ecommerce solution which already has some attractive templates and is reasonably SEO optimised.

6. Page Load Speed

The page runs lots of javascript for no apparent reason, as a result even the home page takes 20+ seconds to load. I’ve suggested using Google Page Speed to look at optimisation of images etc and suggested that these javascripts are removed to help speed things up.

6. Hosting

The site is hosted in the USA. I suggest moving it to a UK based host which should further help improve download speed.

7. Multilingual SEO

The site sells goods overseas but has no multilingual presence. I’ve suggested adding in key multilingual landing pages to the site targeting non English languages and providing information on what users can expect.

8. Home Page Links

Throughout the site and the micro sites being used the anchor/alt text/attributes should be optimised to help focus the sites home page on its target terms. Don’t foerget to apply the First Link rule here too!