Our Blog

So I've joined BlogRush (bring on the traffic)

I received an email on the weekend, with the subject "Get insane blog traffic FREE". Of course I deleted it, it looked no different than all the other spam I receive daily. However, this morning I saw ShoeMoney's post from yesterday regarding this new service, and decided that it's maybe worth a look.

The service is called Blogrush, and it works on a principle called syndication credit. It's similar to Link-Vault and the DigitalPoint Co-op ad network, but it's based on blog posts rather than text links. I'm going to try it out and report back on the results. You can see the related posts on the right, and you can even sign up for Blogrush yourself.

Let me know what you think!

Google Analytics - Search Engines

The next report under Traffic Sources is "Search Engines". This is simply a breakdown of your search-referred traffic based on the search engine that they came from, and their respective performance. Note that this report shows you the general search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!), but does not drill down to regional search metrics, such as google.co.uk vs. google.com. Here is what the default report looks like:

We'll be back shortly

Just a quick note to all readers: I'm currently on a bit of a vacation, and will be back to blogging next Tuesday.

Why Cheap SEO is Bad SEO

Today I had the unpleasant experience of losing a prospective SEO client. Now, I would be understanding if it were lost to another reputable SEO company, with a comparably good service, and perhaps even a similar fee structure. However, it was to a web designer who claimed that they could "get them high rankings" within a few weeks (gulp!) by adding a few keywords to the site, and it would cost less than 10% of my estimate.

Google Analytics - Referring Sites

The Referring Sites report is the next in the series of Traffic Sources reports. This report essentially provides details on the different domains from which visitors have followed a link to your site. This includes other websites and search engines (they are websites after all). As opposed to the "Direct Traffic" report, this one contains quite a bit of valuable data. Here's what the basic report looks like:

How to make SEO-friendly title tags

OK, I really wanted to call this post "Title tags - the most oft misused SEO factor". But then I realized that more search using "how to" phrases when they're looking for this kind of information. At the same time, I also realize that SEO-friendly is improperly structured - it should just be SEF (or Search Engine Friendly) title tags, but quite frankly SEO-friendly just looks better! And with those disclaimers out of the way, I present to you my findings :-).

One of the services I offer as part of my overall SEO solution is that of a site analysis. I look at the content, HTML coding and tag structure, and link structure throughout the site. I provide a report to each client on what they need to or should change, and often that report is much larger than they anticipated! On almost every single report I've delivered to date, the <title> tags have been in serious need of attention.

Google Analytics - Direct Traffic

The Direct Traffic report is fairly straightforward. Most often this is a "nice to know" statistic, and in most cases it's not directly actionable. It really just tells you how many visitors arrived at your site directly - either by typing in the URL in the address bar, or perhaps clicking on a bookmark that they've created. In other words, no site is responsible for referring them to your site; there is no apparent point of origin. The report screen looks like this:

Beware of pseudo SEO companies!

SEO is more or less the hot trend in online marketing right now. Businesses are now realizing that any money spent on a website is wasted if you don't get traffic and business from it. Of course, the greatest sources of web traffic are the major search engines, and you need to be ranked high enough to be able to grab some of that traffic. This is the basic concept behind SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization).

There are two serious issues with SEO that are resulting in a lot of companies being burned on poor or fake SEO services. Considering these issues will enable you to understand how to evaluate an SEO company.