‘Analysis’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: Niels Bohr said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” I feel that this also applies to the field of search engine optimisation also. It is not an exact science. At best, it can be compared to economics or sociology. Data is noisy, there are lots of theories and everyone has their own opinion. It may be worse, since unlike economics or sociology, how search engines work can be changed without notice. While you cannot argue with results, there are many roads to Mecca. So how…

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Excerpt: Introduction When you are looking at a site for the first time or you need to see how your SEO campaign is going you can get an idea of the strength of a site to a indeed your competitors site using a backlink analysis program. There are quite a few out there. The basic information you need to know include: the number of links pointing to the site, the link URL, the anchor text, the number of outbound links, whether the link is followed or not. Additional useful information would include a measure of the link quality. Most use PageRank either from…

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Excerpt: You wake one morning to check the ranking of your site in Google for its top key phrases and find that you have moved down the rankings. This is the nightmare scenario for many SEOs. Your immediate thoughts are what is the cause of this? Is it an algorithmic change and the rankings will return or it something more serious? Before explaining about the penalties it is important to understand that rankings move around all the time.  There are four reasons why your site can move in the SERPs. Algorithmic change – an update in the algorithm can cause chaos in the…

A new journal has been launched called the search engine marketing journal (SEMJ). This is the first peer-reviewed journal of search engine marketing. The founder is Sean Golliher, he is also a fellow physicist and has and like myself has an interest in search engine algorithms.

Let’s hope that this journal takes off and provides some much needed coherence and basic foundations  in the SEO community. There are some prieview papers available and they are an interesting read.

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Excerpt: Topic Sensitive Search It used to be so simple. Make good titles, meta information, optimise your content, check the document outline build as many good quality links as you can. As more people become aware of the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO),  it is becoming more difficult and it could be about to get even worse with the idea of topic sensitive searches and personalised search results. Does this mean the end of traditional SEO? Can a strategy be developed to ensure your site still stays at the top of the TS-SERPs. (Topic Sensitive-SERPs) pages. How does it Work? One published algorithm…