SEO Company London UK

Mobile website facts – its not too late to be early!

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:48:22 +0000

Your customers are on mobile; as a marketer, you need to be on mobile, too. It’s time to use mobile to your advantage. And it’s not too late to be early.

Mobile website facts

85% of mobile phones are web enabled
Mobile search has grown 400% in the last year
125 years of Angry Birds is played every day
1 in 3 mobile searches have “a local intent”
59% visit a local store after searching for it on the mobile web
79% of large retailers do not have a mobile enhanced website

Who owns your domain?

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:45:59 +0000

Do you know if you actually own your domain name? Are you a victim of domain name theft? Could you have purchased a stolen domain name?

Here are 5 tips provided by the domaintheft org in preventing you from becoming a domain theft victim (http://domaintheft.org/prevent_domain_theft.html)

!!The advice below assumes that the domain is registered to you. If you asked your web developer to register the domain name on your behalf, ensure that it is actually in your name and not theirs. To undertake a domain name lookup – try here http://www.who.is/ If your domain name has already been stolen, or you would like to check to see if your domain name has been registered as stolen, the domain theft database http://domaintheft.org/ is freely available to use.

5 tips for domain ownership protection

Never use an internet based email account as the contact on your domains.
The #1 way in which domains are stolen is by thieves hacking-into your email account and authorizing a transfer. Free email services have many known exploits and are not secure for domain registration. Use an email address like yourname@yourdomain.com and you will thwart a large majority of attempted thefts.

Choose a secure password at your registrar.
This may seem like an obvious one but it’s amazing how many people use their address, children’s names, or birthday in their passwords. If a thief wants to take one of your names they will try passwords like this at your registrar. Use a completely random password with upper and lower-case letters and include a few numbers as well. Remember, if a thief can access your registrar they can transfer as many names as they want!

Pick a trusted registrar.
Don’t pick a tiny registrar that nobody has ever heard of. If you are buying high-value domain names you will want to keep these names with a trusted registrar that has been in business for a long time and has taken proper security precautions.

Use an Escrow Service When Selling Domains
Make sure to use an escrow service like Escrow.com whenever you sell a domain name. Avoid using Pay Pal and be weary of any buyer that will only pay using Pay Pal. One of the #1 ways that domain names are stolen during the sales process is when a buyer pays via Pay Pal, accepts the domain, and then requests a refund through Pay Pal saying they never received the domain name. Using an escrow service will ensure that the money is secured before you transfer your domain.

Remember to Lock Domains After Purchase
When you buy a domain name they will sometimes come-into your account unlocked. Make sure all of your domains are locked so that there is an additional step required should someone try to initiate a transfer.

By following the five steps above you can help keep your domains secure and prevent theft. While following the steps above cannot guarantee that your domains will not be stolen this does provide security against a vast majority of the techniques used by domain thieves.

Please be aware, it is very poor practice for a web developer/designer to register a clients domain name in their own name. There is no reason for this to occur. If the web developer needs access to the domain for administrative reasons, they can add themselves as the administrative contact.

If your web developer has registered your domain name to themselves and they are refusing to release the site to you, you are able to take legal action. There are internet specialist solicitors that can help e.g. http://www.adlexsolicitors.co.uk/.

Should you care about a validated website?

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:29:25 +0000

Most of the Web sites on the internet are not valid. This is because anyone can design a website without any knowledge of code writing. However, a lot of designers who do fully understand coding languages do not bother to validate their client sites. Most clients would not even be aware of this.

But should you care about your site being validated? According, Google, you should care about the ‘quality’ of your site, and a high number of coding errors are frowned upon.

The Official GoogleWebmaster Blog says “Why does validation matter? There are different perspectives on validation—at Google there are different approaches and priorities too—but the Webmaster Team considers validation a baseline quality attribute. It doesn’t guarantee accessibility, performance, or maintainability, but it reduces the number of possible issues that could arise and in many cases indicates appropriate use of technology.” ”Based on our testing, we’ve found the [panda] algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality.” And we know from the complaints in the Google forums, the Panda update is also ruthless in demoting or dropping sites that are considered low quality.

However, unless your site completely flounces all coding standards, it would be extremely rare for a site to be de-indexed purely due to poor coding.

So yes, do take care in ensuring your site is as valid as you can make it. It not only ensures cross browser compatibility allowing all your visitors to see your content but it shows you care about quality. But you dont need to obsess over it!

Bing Ranking low? Try Geographic Targeting

admin — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:41:25 +0000

We see it more and more on Bing blogs where people just can’t understand why their site ranks so well on Google and so badly on bing. What’s the reason? More often that not it’s down to inaccurate geographic targeting.

How to fix this?

It’s easy – just include the following in your webpage headers – obviously change to your location

Need Geographic targeting Help?

Get your geo.position here http://www.mygeoposition.com/
Language codes – use the LCD String here http://www.science.co.il/language/locale-codes.asp
Go places - http://geotags.com/iso3166/countries.html

Sub-domains – a fantastic SEO Option

admin — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:23:14 +0000

The Domain Name Crisis

There is a lot of talk around the fact that we are running out of internet addresses and so there is a growing trend of resellers buying up high relevance domain names and selling them on at extortionate prices. These companies know that search engines do look for keywords in the url as part of their ranking process.

Unleash the Power of a Sub-domain

What the vast majority of people however do not realise, and this includes web designers and most SEO ‘experts’, is that sub-domains are a great way to get the exact URL that you want completely free! This means that pretty much any old domain name will do.

Take a look at our URL for example. The site you are currently viewing is built on our core domain www.ossian.tv. When we launched Ossian SEO, we didn’t waste time or money trying to find a domain name with the word SEO in it. We know what we wanted – SEO Company London UK. So we simply used our own domain FOR FREE. This gave us the exact url we wanted “seo-company-london-uk”, but places it in front of our core domain – thus raising the relevance of those words.

How do I maintain a sub-domain?

Easy! Subdomains are simply folders in the back end of your website. For example, the url structure would look something like this http://www.yoursite.com/subdomain. But the web surfer and the search engine crawlers both see those very relevant keywords in the URL first, giving you better kudos for your domain name relevance to the search terms you are targeting. A subdomain can be created really quickly by your webhost provider, or if you have your own server or VPS by using a symbolic link – which simply rewrites the URL on the internet.

What about SEO?

Sorry, but there are no free rides here. Subdomains do give you keyword rich urls but just like any new domain, your sub-domain needs to be SEO’d separately. Very little kudos is passed down from your core site (other than the fact you may be linking to it). But once the SEO is embedded (both on page and off page), just watch the power of the sub-domain work for you.

Help – I don’t know how to create a sub-domain!

At Ossian SEO, we can help to create the subdomain. But not just that, we can also install a well SEO’d site onto that subdomain and provide you with a full off-page strategy to help to get the new subdomain site ranking and competing effectively in the quickest possible time.

So dont waste money buying up lots and lots of website names -just get one and create as many sub-domains as you like, designed to specifically target big ticket items.

Enjoy

XXX Domains – Dirty Tricks?

admin — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 09:45:09 +0000

XXX Domains (known as “dot triple-X”) is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) intended as a voluntary option for pornographic sites on the Internet. Designed as a means for identifying adult content on the Internet, the ICANN Board voted to approve the sTLD on March 18, 2011 and it went into operation on April 15, 2011. Although intended to protect internet surfers from accidentally finding pornographic sites, some argue that it will also make pornography more visible. For example, if you were to search for a legitimate brand such as say Coke, but in the listings www.coke.xxx turns up – that has increased the visibility of pornography for an otherwise unlikely phrase or search term.

However, there has been an unforeseen side effect of its introduction. Legitimate businesses are buying up their tradename versions of the XXX domain, for fear of their brand being associated with pornography causing reputational damage. According to one of the UK’s largest registrars earlier this month, four out of five businesses that have pre-registered .XXX domain names apparently have no direct connection to the adult porn industry.

There are two issues associated with this – the accidental association of your brand with pornography and the deliberate association – where a competitor buys the XXX version of your domain to hurt your business!

XXX domains don’t come cheap though at around £70 per year!

What are your views? Post below

Pingbacks & SEO

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:35:26 +0000

Pingbacks are great to notify you that someone else, with pingback enabled, has linked to your article and found it useful. However, once approving a pingback and displaying that on your blog often means that you have created a two-way link (they have linked to you and you have linked to them) thus negating the backlink.

So you may want to approve the pingback but edit out the URL that’s linking to you so you have a one-way incoming deeplink – which is great for SEO!

Video SEO Guide: The definitive collection

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:24:03 +0000

By ReelSEO

Video SEO (hosted) Tips & Tutorials for Your Website

How To Get Your Videos Ranking In Universal Search Results: A Video SEO Study
Google Video Sitemaps Best Practices – Webinar Video - Recording video & tutorial
Vimeo Video Sitemaps – How to Get Vimeo Videos Into Google – tutorial
Video SEO And PPC Strategies For E-Commerce Video Online - Presentation
Google: To All Publishers – Get Your Video Sitemaps Ready – Video w/ Matt Cuts
Reel Video SEO Strategies & Best Practices Webinar
Optimizing Video Thumbnails for Google Universal Search Presentation - tutorial
Video + SEO = Best Practices for Online Video Publishing Presentation
Website Video SEO Presentation – Video Search Engine Optimization
How to Add In-File Metadata to Video Files – tutorial
SEO Tip – How to Develop Backlinks to Your Videos
Using SWFObject 2.1 to Provide Alternative HTML Content (Part 1)
Tutorial – Using SWFObject 2.1 to Provide Alternative HTML Content (Part 2) – tutorial
Video SEO Tips for Designing Websites
Video Accessibility, Closed Captions, & Video SEO
Google MRSS & RSS2.0 for Video Sitemaps – Tips & Info
How to use Google Video Sitemaps for Video SEO – tutorial
Creating Subtitles & Captions for Video SEO – tutorial
Syndicate Video with Media RSS (MRSS) – tutorial
Video SEO Distribution Tutorial – Submit Videos to iTunes
Where to Submit Videos and Video RSS/MRSS Feeds

Video Marketing & Youtube Optimization Tips (VSEO)

Social Video Marketing Tips:

Video SEO Tips from Friends

General Video SEO Tips & Techniques

Additional Resources

Phew!

Illogical Captain! William Shatner gets banned from Google Plus

admin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:11:12 +0000

But only temporarily – he’s now back.

Continuing his tradition of going where no man (or only a privaledged few) have gone before, William Shatner has managed to get himself kicked off Google Plus before we in the UK have even been allowed to start using it. But fear not, he’s now back again.

He’s what he said

“

William Shatner - 18 Jul 2011 - Public

I am back plusers! I still do not know what happened but I will refrain from saying hello again for a while just in case. My best, Bill”

I guess it was some sort of violation!

Pandering to Panda – Googles Panda Update

admin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:35:30 +0000

A large amount of sites have been hit by the new Panda update, nearly all deserved it.

Here’s how to stay on the right side of Google:

DON’Ts!

- Do not have duplicate content. Make sure your site cannot be accessed more than one way. Don’t make duplicate sites, or replicate entire pages. If someone steals your content – dont worry, Google knows where it originated. If you republish by re-tweeting, that’s also fine. It shows popularity.

- Do not article spin. Google can now read the jumbled up content and will give a heavy penalty to that site and rightly so.

- Do not fill your pages with adverts and then supply a small amount of real content for the visit. Google now knows and will penalise the site for it. So if people are forced to scroll and scroll before getting to your real content – you’re in trouble!

- Don’t make your site too sales orientated, as Google doesn’t like these sites. Understand what is of value to your readers, and ensure that you write good information based pages. Keep the sales part to a minimum.

DOs

- Ensure the content is good so that people will want to link to it. In bound links still matter from good quality sites, whether its Google, Bing or Yahoo. It still counts – although Google Plus will start to work in conjunction with this.

- More links coming through from social media sites is really pleasing to all search engines. It shows you are active on the net, you generate fresh content and people like your site.

- Write really current up to date information in your blog articles, syndicated across the net. This shows you are active and care about fresh new content.

- Install the Google Plus tracking code, and get everyone you know to plus one you!