SEO London, Edinburgh Internet Marketing Breeze Media

If your SEO company provides you with monthly statistical reports about your website then make sure your data has not been “ring fenced” otherwise you could have problems in the future! This article explains a practice used by some SEO and PPC companies using Google Analytics accounts to lock you into their services.

So what is Google analytics (GA) ring fencing?

Basically, its when your SEO Company registers your website on a free Google Analytics account but denies you access to that same account. Your website could be stored on a single account or a parent account with up to 50 other websites.

Here’s how it works:

Your SEO company contracts to provide you with monthly reports as part of your SEO package. They add your website to a GA account then place some Google tracking code on your website. After a week or so you receive your first report (usually by email). However the problems arise later when you ask for access to your online reports. You make your request only to be told your reports are “confidential”, “too complex” or you could “view the reports of other clients”. Hence your data has been “ring fenced”.

Why it benefits the SEO company.

This benefits the SEO company because they can lock you into their services in the following ways: 

• You can only obtain the reports from the SEO company
• You have to rely on the SEO Company for technical expertise on your data

but there are darker sides that benefit them such as:  

• They get to charge you fees for generating the (free) report
• They can threaten you with losing your historical data if you…
  • stop using their services
  • move your SEO to another company
• Tell you can lose your rankings (yes some actually say this!)

Conclusion

Any ethical SEO company should provide you with your own analytics account to which you can access your data any time. They will not charge you fees for reports but a small fee to set up the account is reaonable. They will not make claims about losing historical data or losing your rankings.The data if free and it is yours!

It is fair however to be charged for analysis of these reports and any adjustments to your website. The reports provide valuable data aimed at professionals which can be used to improve the performance of your website.

If your SEO Company is ring fencing your GA account then perhaps its time to look for alternatives.

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“Ping” blogging is basically notifying the search engines and feed crawlers when a new post is published in your blog. A “Ping” instantly notifies the relevant blog server that you have new content and because of this your blog gets indexed quicker and better. But don’t take our word for it…google wants to hear about your blog too”

In WordPress there is a feature that automatically pings any server you wish to tell about your new content, however, there is only one server listed in a standard WordPress installation so you will need to add a few more. We’ve listed a few for you use below.

To install the list go to your admin and select “Settings -> Writing” then scroll to the bottom of the page. Paste your list into the form field then click to save. Viola!

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc �

http://coreblog.org/ping/�

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt  �
http://ping.amagle.com/ �

http://ping.bitacoras.com�

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.blogg.de/�

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ �

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/�

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc�

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc�

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php �

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php�

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php �

http://ping.weblogs.se/�

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/ �
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/ �
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/ �

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2�

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/�

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz �

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2�

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.kping.com/ping/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://rpc.britblog.com/�

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2�

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

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We have recently been appointed to perform the search engine optimisation for the Silver Experience – a perthshire base handmade silver jewellery company.

Rather than write about projects after they have been completed we have deceided to write about this one as it happens so that you can see the progess of a website having no search engine presence to (hopefully) being ranked at the top of the search engines.

The Silver Experience offer affordable, stylish and collectable handcrafted pieces through a distribution channel as well as online. Unfortunately they do not rank at all on the search engines and with Chritsmas approaching it is a time when sales account for a huge proportion of their turnover.

When we were approached by the company the mandate was to get their ecommerce website listed on the search engines as quickly as possible in order to capitalise on the christmas market – the most luctrative time of year for online jewellery sales.

We produced a plan that involves the onpage SEO, the website optimisation to improve click through to conversion and also a social media marketing campaign. Added to this we have created a blog that the company will use to provide interesting articles on company news, jewellery making, fair trade issues whilst providing good links and a place for their customers to comment on their pieces.

Watch this space!

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Watson search partners are an executive recruitment company based in Aberdeen. They cater for the corporate jobs and executive jobs sectors in oil and gas sectors in Aberdeen and throughout Scotland.

They attract high quality candidates for top level positions so keyword choice had to be distinguished from mainstream job sites in Scotland 

Breeze media built a content management system so they could update the entire site. Added to this we did the on page search engine optimisation and the results have been impressive. Watson Search partners rank on page 1 of Google for the terms “Executive Recruitment” .

Another search engine optimisation success story by Breeze Media

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Many new clients ask us the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when they first come to us. There is much confusion and debate on the two terms – even by the experts, however the following should hopefully shed some light on the differences between the two terms…

So…what is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Search engine marketing is really search engine advertising or “pay per click”. Other methods exist such as buying into trusted feeds and paid inclusion to search directories like Yahoo but these are less common. 

Pay per click is the most common and takes the form of paid text adverts such as Google’s sponsored links or Yahoo’s sponsored results. These appear on the right hand side of search results pages or sometimes above the main (organic) search results. They take the form of short text adverts. These adverts are bid for and placed on the page by the search engine. The higher the bid the better the position on the page.

The advert takes the form of a few words and displayed on the sponsored links area. The advertiser is charged a fee when a visitor clicks on the advert and this is known as a click through. The advert does not incur a charge if it is only displayed on the page.

Placing PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc is very similar to placing clasified ads in your newspaper. It requires very little skills but it can be a waste of money if you don’t do it properly. It does rely heavily on understanding target markets, audiences, conversion rates and return on investments. The correct ad-writing skills also plays a vital part so this is where a professional search engine marketing company can obtain the best results for your advertising budget.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) – what’s the difference

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising the pages of a website so that they can be found in the top results of search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. These pages are optimised for certain keywords in the title, description and body text of that particular web page. This is also known as “onpage optimisation”.  However this is very basic and there are many more factors involved. Search engines use something called “algorithms” to determine the suitability of a web page to be presented in it’s results. These algorithms are extremely complex mathematical rules and they look for many criteria such as number of key words on the page (keyword density), inbound links (offpage optimisation), meta information, page length, internal links and so on. It’s the combination of getting all these things right that makes a highly ranked page. 

SEO is not rocket science but a professional search engine optimisation company can produce the best results. 

Search engine marketing pros & cons

Advantages:
Search engine marketing is pretty much instant. You can literally set up an account with Google, Yahoo or MSN and within a few minutes you can have your adverts on the front pages of search engines. You can have your adverts displayed and be taking enquiries and orders over your competitors. You only pay for a click through and you don’t need to make changes to your website.

Disadvantages:
These (in our opinion) outweigh the advantages. SEM can be very expensive. Depending on the competition of the search term you can pay as much as £5-10 per click. A click does not guarantee an order so you have to get the landing page right and make it easy to convert to sales. Another disadvantage is that of “advert blindness”. This is basically a distrust of an advert by a visitor where they are so accustomed to adverts appearing in the results that they are ignored totally. This happens with a large number of many potential customers. The other downside is that of your competitors clicking your ad or people clicking by mistake – known as click fraud and can be costly.

Search engine optimisation pros and cons

Advantages
More trust is placed on a listing that has got to the organic results on merit. Click throughs are much higher than PPC, there’s no charge when someone clicks on your link and once you’re listed it tends to stay there for long periods.

Disadvantages
A lot of hard work is required to get top level rankings. Competition at the top can be fierce. A very good understanding of the algorithims and what search engines want is required. You have to opimise your pages at code and content level. You have to do off-page work such as building links. It can be very time consuming. Professional SEO companies are often required for best results. It can take a long time to get listed.

For all the above disadvantages, SEO is much preferred to SEM as the return on investment is often much higher.

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What’s with the keyword spamming from companies outside the area? We are an Ethical Search Engine Optimisation company based in South Queensferry, Edinburgh. We believe that a big part of the SEO process for us is all about being ethical however, some of our competitors (who are not based in Edinburgh ) seem hell bent on spamming Search Engines with such key phrases such as “SEO Edinburgh and throughout the UK”. The same applies for Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen,London, Birmingham, Manchester etc., etc.

Why?  It’s clearly SEO’s trying deploying all the spammy techniques in the book to obtain SERPS domination. It’s much more productive to concentrate in good copy and the rest will follow.  Think about it for a minute. Any company using a local search is looking for a local company. The minute they click on a spammed link tey will bounce back to a local company in the listings. Edinburgh is a big city with many businesses providing excellent services so why other companies as far away as Birmingham and London spam the local search with these keyphrases can only be detrimental to the company and frustrating for the searcher.

The whole point of SEO is to be targetted for your key phrases in your key local or national area – or so we thought. Whilst we do business nationally we are an SEO company based in Edinburgh. Our national work comes to us not because we spam search engines with phrases like “SEO Aberdeen, SEO London” etc., it comes to us because we’re extremely good at what we do and we don’t need to resort to these spamming tactics.

So there’s a moral here…especially for companies doing their inhouse SEO or competitors constantly looking at our website. Just don’t cheat and don’t spam. It’s a huge big old world out there and play fair. It will reward you in the end.

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If you rank top on Google then your sales will go through the roof – right? Well, erm, yes and no…

Many SEO companies will get you to the top of Google but that’s where they claim the buck stops. Getting any site to the top of the search engines is an achievement in itself but there’s a whole lot more to it than simply positioning your website in the top results.

You’ve probably heard the expression “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. Equate this then to a high ranking website on Google that gets lots of traffic but very little in the way of sales. But how is this possible? Quite simply, SEO is only half the battle and this is where a site needs to be optimised to convert visitor traffic into enquiries and sales.

A recent new client approached us bemoaning extremely poor sales despite occupying some desirable positions on Google after having undergone SEO by another company. We examined the site and whilst the SEO was fine, it was fairly obvious why the site was underperforming interms of new sales. We advised them that there would need to be changes to the layout of pages and the way in which they would present the information to new visitors. Understandably, they were very reluctant to change their site for fear of falling down the rankings. So to ease any fears we recommended an A/B split test to dip their toes in the water and see how things could be improved. Needless to say within a matter of days the pages were attracting new orders and the conversion rates soared. One happy customer later and the rankings improved as a result of new links.

What is A/B split testing?

A/B split testing is a method of website optimisation that is very effective at increasing clickthroughs and new sales. It involves creating two or more optimised versions of a sales or landing page. These pages are then rotated for every new visitor to the website. So if there were 2 pages then a 50% of visitors would see one page and the other 50% would see the other. Whichever page has the most clickthroughs and sales can then replace the page that was performing badly. Of course it needn’t be 2 pages – it could be any number of pages but this is not really practical. 2-4 pages is a sensible number with which to obtain significant data.

A/B split testing is a very simple way of improving your website, helping your visitors and increasing potential sales.

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Today’s article describes the differences in traffic we receive between two of the key phrases deployed in our own website;

1. seo scotland
2. search engine optimisation scotland

We used to target phrase number 1 some time ago but we decided to shift our efforts towards more productive terms. SEO is an acronym for ” search engine optimisation ” and over time we discovered it was used more by geeks and other SEO’s than potential new clients.

We used to rank equally for both the above phrases and we always asked any new enquiry what phrase was used to find us.  We checked the phrases against our stats logs and saw that only 5% of phone and email enquiries arrived via the acronym based search phrase. A further analysis showed that many of the click-throughs from the “SEO scotland” search phrase were actually from the same daily visitors (IP addresses). So unless there are a whole bunch of companies too shy to contact us then it’s reasonable to assume that it’s our competitors checking us out. 

As a search engine optimisation company we want to attract “buyer traffic” as opposed to “tyre kicker” traffic and for this reason we shifted our focus onto more productive terms.  (Incidentally, we use this expertise in all our client projects no matter what the industry to ensure the traffic is targeted and productive)

This is very useful information for any company to take onboard and we strongly recommend that you keep a record of what key phrases your new customers are using and check this against your website statistics.  It could very well pay extra dividends for your business.

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We recently stumbled upon an article/competition that started in January of this year about who is the best seo company in Scotland and we discovered ourselves amongst the results.

What interested us was that we were amongst the “elite” for key phrases we have never targetted so this got us thinking. What would happen if we did target these key phrases? Would we succeed? Of course we will!

Now all this is just frivolous fun on our part and completely tongue in cheek. It’s not a dig at any other reputable SEO company in Scotland – it’s just fun – pure and simple. If anything we recognise the high quality of our competitors so let the games begin!

Firstly, the key phrases are, Regional (Scotland), UK and International accross Google, Yahoo & MSN (Although we’ll only be targetting Google)

SEO Scotland
SEO Company Scotland
Search Engine Optimisation Scotland
SEO Services Scotland
Website Promotion Scotland

For UK & International – drop the “Scotland” from the above.

So how do we go about all this? Ah…that’s our little secret! We can’t let the competition now what we’re up to after all. We’re going to quietly demonstrate who really is the best seo company in Scotland.

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We have recently completed the build and search engine optimisation for Edinburgh based Double Glazing Doctor. They provide a specialist double glazing repairs service throughout Fife and Edinburgh. They also specialise in misted window repairs and sealed glass unit replacement.

The site is built on the wordpress platform and will showcase much of their repairs case studies and success stories.

On the search engine optimisation front we have managed to have the site listed on page one of Google and the client has already reported new business through the website.

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