A UK SEO

A little off SEO topic but I’ve come across a presentation style called Pecha Kucha. The idea is very simple.

20 slides – 20 seconds on each slides.

The slides should be pretty simple, maybe just a full screen picture without any text. It’s seems a great way to get over a topic quickly while keeping your audience’s attention. Often watching presentations online can be really boring (never mind in a stuffy office) but if you know that every twenty seconds a slide is going to change, users should stay to view all 20 slides.

I came across Pecha Kucha watching this video about building Links from the team at www.sitevisibility.co.uk

19 Ways To Build Links to Your Website – Pecha Kucha Kelvin Newman from SiteVisibility on Vimeo.

There has been lots of chatter about a recent shift in ranking by Google with US based sites ranking in Google.co.uk, seoptimise and Search Round Table reported in articles and there was plenty of tweets about the movement. It’s caused a few problems with plenty of UK sites moving down the rankings due to the influx of US based sites.

It’s hard to quantify sometimes what has shifted in the rankings has done as you don’t have before and after data of the top 20, 30, 40 rankings.

Fortunately I have a report from January the 18th 2009 for the top 40 sites in google.co.uk on a search for “commercial laundry equipment”.

I’ve then taken the top 40 websites for the same search query today and the difference is concerning with US sites ranking in the place of many good UK sites. There is also sites from Belgium, India, Spain and China ranking in Google.co.uk.

The list is big so I have added it into a Google Docs Spreadsheet which can be seen by clicking the image.

It would be great to get someone from Google to have a look over this. If anyone has seen something similar with their clients or SERP’s post the details below in a comment. Also link to your own blog with an example of the movement of US sites in the UK rankings.

UPDATE 17/06 : Fresh Egg have an article on a similar problem with the key phrase Pet Surgery. Check out the article which has a great conspiracy theory behind the US sites ranking.

Wow two nights two posts, this time a really simple guide to meta titles, what they are for and what you should do with them.

• A Simple Guide to Meta Titles

If you have request for a guide then contact me or leave a comment below

Rather than spending time on the odd blog post here and there I’ve added a SEO guide section to the site. I’ll be adding a page in there every so often about a specific subject. To start SEO Friendly URL’s which concentrates on the common problem with SEOFURL’s

Head over to “A Simple guide to SEO Friendly URL’s” to hopefully learn something new and useful.

Due to hosting issues I’ve change my domain to .co.uk, it took an hour this morning to move the blog, re-directs and webmaster tools. It took 2 hours to remember the username and password combination to my feedburner account. All should be correct now.

As I’m changing my domain from .com to co.uk sometime next week I though I’d document the process from an SEO point of view.

1. Change all internal links to point to the new domain. If you are doing this on a text server block from google until your are ready as you don’t want the new domain to be indexed containing duplicate content.

2. Add in you 301 re-direct from the old domain to the new. Make sure you also re-direct inner pages from the old domain to the new domain.

3. Re-run your xml sitemap and update the sitemap reference in the robots.txt

Sitemap : http://www.aukseo.co.uk/sitemap.xml

4. Submit a new site to webmaster tools, verify and submit the new sitemap

5. If possible point some links at the new domain this should help with the indexing of the site. If possible change any external links to point directly at the new domain, if you can’t do this don’t worry too much as the links will still have effect due to the 301.

6. Make sure you change anything that depends on your domain, analytics, feedburner, ranking software and payment systems.

EDIT : 14/07/09
7. On Google Webmater Tools verify the new site and use the change of address tool under the Site Configuration to notify Google that your changing to a new domain.

Give Google a couple of days and then check back by using the site: command in Google on the old domain. You should start to see the page reduce from the old domain to the new domain.

If you have some stragglers of pages that don’t re-direct to the new domain then use a HTML Sitemap and point links to the old url’s. This should give Google a reason to index the link. From experience this works but don’t worry too much if the old page doesn’t move over as they still will receive traffic they used to do. Once indexed remove the links from the sitemap.

Any other ideas please add to the comments below!

Google Squared has launched this evening in the UK and after a little play there are a few ideas popping inside my head for quick ways to grab data for link baiting ideas.

For example if you have a football website you can write an article looking at football stadiums ordering by capacity, cost, pitch, size.

Having all this data on screen so quickly means you can start to write an article along the lines of “the 10 biggest… “the most expensive… etc. This is nothing new but it can speed up the process of gathering data for such articles.

Google Squared is still in it’s early stages and some of the data given isn’t correct, it would also be good to see the ability to export to csv / excel and also order the data by a certain field.

Head over to Google Squared and have a go.

Slipping into TV and Print advertising in the last 6 months are requests to search online for … Asking the user to search online then means agencies can achieve almost direct conversions from TV ads. The first occurrence of such request was from mobile phone company Orange who asked people to search for “I am” so nothing too difficult for the SEO team to implement!

With no natural listings in sight they had to go with PPC paying for the traffic that followed instructions to search online for I am. The idea was good but the implementation was slated in the SEO community.

Similar to Orange computer animated film Monsters V Aliens asked people to search for MVA, with www.mvaconsultancy.com firmly holding down the number one organic spot PPC was used again to grab the traffic. I made a post with more details about MVA, the PPC campaign wasn’t well implemented and will have costed a small fortune. .

It seemed that most agencies were not getting the grasp of asking people to search online but then along come Tales of the Road from direct.gov, Think! and the Department of Transport.

The advert teaching kids about road safety asked the viewer to search online for “tales of the road”. Not to hard to remember and relatively easy to optimise for. The search result for “tales of the road” is is owned by the website with a PPC ad, number one ranking, site links, number two ranking and a video ranking.

Here a subdomain of direct.gov matches the search term. Using a sub domain then allows for site links (site links can appear for a inner page of a site but easier to gain on a sub domain) and a second listing for a inner page. Placing the video on YouTube a trusted domain then allows for the video to rank easily on the first page page.

One small point is that you can place a nofollowed html link in the description to a video on YouTube.

For any agencies implementing a “search for” campaigns then the Tales of the Road is an excellent blue print to use.

It appears that Wolfman Alpha search results are appearing Google results. This search for “search for i am” returns a number 9 position for a Wolfman Alpha search result.

But the robots.txt is currently blocking search engines form the results page such as http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Where+am+I%3F
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pirates+vs+ninjas
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+meaning+of+life%3F

User-agent: *
Disallow: /input/

So either Google is ignoring the robots rule or Wolfman Alpha have only just blocked their results as their are 71 results for a site command on http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/.

Still not found a really good use for Wolfman Alpha… still better than tonight’s Britain’s Got Talent

I’ve noticed this afternoon that Google is now pulling requirements information in the top of the search engnine results page similar to pulling the next fixtures for football teams or the population of france. For example a search for wordpress requirements shows this.

It says “No Special Requirements” as it pulls the information from http://www.brothersoft.com/wordpress-175754.html. but as people will know Wordpress requires;

* PHP 4.3 or greater
* MySQL 4.0 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module for SEO friendly URL’s

Come on Google get it sorted, the brothersoft website can hardly bee seen as trusted site with loads of adverts it says that WordPress that is shareware costing $19.95.

I’m guessing this is happening on plenty of searches so far i’ve seen it on:

phpbb requirements

Add any other examples in the comments below!