A UK SEO

Well the new year has seemed to bring plenty of SEO predictions so I thought I’d list some from a UK point of view.

1. More and more business will be looking to invest in SEO, as we know business who invest in marketing during a recession generally come out of the period stronger compared than those that make cuts, but…

2. Business looking to invest in SEO will go for the cheaper option, it will mean quite a few getting their fingers burnt as you get what you pay for. The companies that know what they are doing will pay for a quality service.

3. Google will continue to try and personalise trends and keywords tools to help UK business target local search.

4. Companies in the UK will start to take notice of the opportunities that advertising on social networks. Sites like facebook, MySpace and Bebo allow you to precisely target your key demographic.

5. More UK companies will look into ‘company blogging’ rather than general content generation. Similar to ‘company blogging’ some UK companies will start to use and publish information on twitter.

6. Due to the increase of personalised search hopefully SME will understand that SEO isn’t all down to achieving ranking on one key phrase.

7. Dedicate mobile sites will cease as the UK starts to move over to newer generation of phones which can handle full browsers, as a result….

8. More UK companies will be trying to ensure their website work on not only all browser but on mobile browsers, iPhone, Blackbury, Nokia I95 etc etc.

9. Firefox usage in the in UK will continue to grow with IE reducing, also Chrome will start to increase to around 5-10 % share.

10. Companies will start to shift old style link building to paying for links on other blogs, either paying bloggers or going onto content networks.

So there are the ten, if there are any UK predictions please add them in below in a comment!

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The BBC iPlayer videos are now showing in Google results with a thumnail of the video. For example a search for “Have I Got News for You: Series 36:” will return episode 8 of the last season.

This is done by using Video sitemaps which can be submitted to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap contains information such as length, title, description, rating, views, publication date etc etc. So if you are publishing video content on your own site and not using a site such as Vimeo or YouTube then get a video sitemap created. More information over at Google video sitemap page.

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So Woolworths have gone bust and there are many reason for it. A lack of direction, a lack of online marketing maybe? The number of search for Woolworths has gone through the roof as it always does at this time of year.

So search volumes are going through the roof, you have a 50% sale on to get rid of the remaining stock and what happens. Your site goes down.

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I’m a big fan of Google Webmaters help, it’s great for learning new SEO techniques, keeping on top of algorithm changes and also have a laugh at the odd person who wants help but doesn’t help themselves.

The forums have moved last week getting a new url http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en for the UK users. Theres a slight change to how things work with now the use of the answered button, so if you think that the questioned as been answered you can hit the button. Stats will show up for how many answers and questions made by each member.

Look out for posts from seo101, Phil Payne, John and Google employees. I’m posting under the name aukseo.

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A few days without a post as I spent the weekend in the lovely Birmingham, it rained. Since the last post Google has released Search Wiki, it’s being doing the round on labs and it’s now been rolled out onto Google accounts.

The simple explanation is you can now move rankings up and down, add comments to rankings and this data can be used to present ‘better’ results to you and other Googlers logged into Google accounts.

Now ‘better’ is placed in bold there due to the face that most people have started to spam the hell out of it. The best exampled form Dave N. It looks like SEO’s will big up their own clients and dismiss competition. This has already confused one client who removed all the competition from the top serp’s in his industry and then wonder why there was no increase in traffic as he was now number 1.

In terms of does this change anything in your standard SEO, not much it just places more preference on having a user friendly site and having a good service. As the saying goes if you offer a good service not many people will recommend you, have a bad service or product then 10 people will let friends, colleagues know etc. Doesn’t have to be be 10 but that sounds like a good number…

So really Search Wiki seems to be more to do with reputation management that SEO, that is providing Google doesn’t unleash the product onto the main search??

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I noticed today a slight change in Google handling 302 re-directs. I’ve seen in the past site still rank even if there was a re-direct from the domain to an inner page or folder. For example.

www.domain.com -> 302 -> www.domain.com/inner

What would happen is Google would still rank the www.domain.com in the listings, not the inner page www.domain.com/inner. But today the home page dropped out of the rankings, even out of the index. As no page rank is passed to the inner page www.domain.com/inner and internal links pointed to the root of the site the inner page wasn’t stronger enought to rank.

The lesson here, you should never have a 302 re-directs, always re-direct with 301. To check if you re-directs are done correctly use a http server header checker.

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Google is celebrating 10 years as search engine and as a little treat they’ve released their index from 2001!

It’s fully search able and it’s interesting to see which sites ranked ten years ago when the algorithm wasn’t as advanced.

- The results for SEO have nothing to do with SEO as we know it knower days.

- http://www.search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/ ranked number 1 for search engine optimisation, that now re-directs to Receptional.

- Best of all Wikipedia was just starting, and didn’t rank number 1 for wikipedia never mind any other key phrases.

So head over to www.google.com/search2001.html for a little play.

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