What do Yummie Tummie, Bingo and Driving Lessons all have in common?  Answer… TV Coverage!

There’s no doubt about it TV Coverage gets you loads of website traffic. Yet another one of our SEO clients gets its product highlighted, this time on Oprah. Yummie Tummie (Yummy Tummy) gets its debut and HerRoom should see their traffic levels peak when this goes live.  An extreme traffic peak occurred when Gaming Alerts had their Bingo site profiled on the BBC Dragon’s Den program back in October last year.

The Bronco designed Bill Plant Driving school website that offers driving lessons throughout the UK has  just seen traffic figures rise after Bill Plant himself was on the BBC News for his Spitfire Support.

The key seems to be get as much media coverage as possible, get seen, get vocal and don’t be afraid to jump into that publicity spotlight whenever the occasion arises.

Yes, I am still in the Bronco building. This last week or so I have been looking at a range of Ecommerce sites for SEO. A vast majority are pre-built templates which claim to have great SEO implementation hmmmm FOOTPRINT. Most of these wondrous shopping carts also have default product descriptions, great — so loads of dupe content floating around on the web too.

Dave pointed out loads of seo tips for the Ecommerce sites, but a great deal of these involve changing the very structure of the website and almost implementing SEO from scratch to train an gain some consistency throughout the web pages. In doing so there is of course always a risk of affecting the ranking of some products that have already gained some traction within search whilst as an SEO you need to focus on the client’s primary keywords.

I’d be interested to know what Ecommerce software anyone has found that’s near the mark? All of the Ecomm systems we use tend to be built in house with full SEO implemented and tweakable, so we tend to see things through rose tinted specs..

Dan Horton

 It’s little wonder the BBC keep scooping awards for their new site make over, especially with such catchy headlines:

We can now of course rest easy that the great tits of britain respond well to warming ;)

Ok hands up all SEO’s who target only Google? Come on,,, Chances are the search marketing world is set to change, evolve if that’s that right terminology. Some believe that Google is likely to become the next “Microsoft.”

Which is your favourite search engine, or does it vary on a monthly basis? Do you have clients who ask for specific targetting in Live or Yahoo ?

Looks like Yahoo is rolling out technology to protect it’s search users if they click on a dubious website that hosts anything like spyware or spam. Past experiences tells us that such “helpful” additions often confuse the searcher and somewhat tarnish overall usability. Let’s just see if Yahoo can do any better than Google who introduced something similar back in 2006.

Browser exploits are of course nothing new and high risk sites will always be present on the net. However, there is nothing more irritating than some over enthusiastic guidance system that you have to by-pass to get to the website you need.

TLD’s and hosting, where would you host if you wanted prominence within serps in a certain geographic area,,,? Does it make a difference. Is it just microsoft that’s focused on localisation?

Sounds like an easy answer to this one.

Search engines must put weight on hosting location and im not just talking ip address.

Dan Horton SEO

Dave TV asks the question “Are you Dave?” Personally, I think the mighty DaveN should step forward and announce himself as the one and only Dave.  Dave could already be considered the ultimate in home entertainment and is a match for any broadcast station. Perhaps he may start a TV station of his own?

Further to Dave’s post on checking backlinks maybe it’s time to make a stand on effective link building. In my eyes there certainly seems to be too much fear about who is linking to who and why. You are looking at launching an effective link building strategy yet your initial thoughts are I’m not going to bother with the lower PR sites as they wont help my website. WRONG. Starting out with this mindset won’t help your campaign.

How about thinking of site relevance and actively promoting your own website by thinking of sites that may be a valuable resource to your visitors? OK, i know that sounds like a textbook quote, but are you afraid that if you link to someone else your site visitors will suddenly decline and favour the other persons website over yours?

Seems to me there is way too much focus on how sites are ranking, also fear of approaching a competitor about links. The expression keep your friends close and your enemies closer springs to mind here.  There are of course many ways to make your site linkage effective.

Dan Horton SEO

It’s the age old problem. Explaining to clients that SEO takes time. Many watch their rankings on a daily basis, they may have dropped 3 places in Google. Our answer is always the same… How are your sales? How many people contacted you about using your services? What’s new about your site ? Have you extended your service portfolio recently?

Writing fresh content also seems to be an area that many websites struggle with, therefore promoting the companies services can be a lot harder for the SEO. I often find it difficult to understand why people who have a site struggle to tell people what service they are providing and indeed what the website is all about. Put itthis way if a website has just two sentences on your services how can you rank for that topic area?

The focus on what the SEO role is all about sometimes gets lost in building the initial foundations of the site, the really simple stuff.

Dan Horton SEO

How many of your clients watch their keyword rankings on a daily basis ? Do you get emails saying “I’ve noticed we dropped two positions on Wed, now we have dropped another today” It’s not always easy to get across the message that continuously watching the search engine results pages will eventually drive you insane.  Better to focus on creating great content for the website, establishing legitimate linking partners, and becoming an authority within your industry than sit there looking at the results. What’s the website about ? What are you trying to sell ?

High ranking without decent landing pages will do nothing for your ROI, you wouldn’t set up a prime position  market stall and have thousands of customer’s walk by an empty table would you?  Or perhaps when the customers visit your stall you tell them to go away ?  Better still, put some products on the table and cover them up so the customer’s can’t see them. You could of course direct people visiting your market stall to the next stall as their products are much better…