People are still confused as to which format to use, mainly because Google keeps changing the game plan. Therefore I have written a post about the two different choices explaining both clearly.

Reasons to use subdirectories:

1) The content in the subdirectory benefits from the link authority from your domain.

2) If you have all your content in a subdirectory, the code is in the same file storage space making it easier to edit, find, change and move the code.

3) Simpler

Sometimes it is easier to use a subdirectory – Matt Cutts loves subdirectories – he set up mattcutts.com/blog to keep things simple.

Reasons to use subdomains:

1) Different content.

A subdomain works if your site has different content for its products. For example Google has subdomains for its distinct products such as maps, news – maps.google.com, news.google.com.

2) Localised content

Companies that have content for specific langauges or local areas use subdomains. Gumtree has a subdomain for it’s cities in Australia. For example http://sydney.gumtree.com.au/  while in London, the URL would be gumtree.com/london.

3) Restrictions from hosting company

If you already have a site and want to add blogging software to your site but your hosting company will not allow you to do so.  Therefore you will use a third-party blogging platform such as wordpress, blogger or typepad.  Your blog will therefore look like blog.wordpress.com instead of yoursite.com/blog.

Matt Cutts recommends using subdirectories if you are a new webmaster until you are confident with the architecture of your site. If you have a small site just stick with subdirectories.  If your site sells different key products and you want your site to be known for those, then set up subdomains.

 
1) Integration between ppc, seo and social media
There is definitely and has been more of an integration between seo and social media last year.  From my personal experience with the panda update we did far more blogger outreach as a way of link building.  The social media team in my last agency doubled in size from mid 2010 until the end of 2011. SEO predictions for 2011

2) Local search
With the introduction of Google Places in September 2009 and then the merger of the local business centre in April last year, local search played a very important role in 2011.  A client at my last agency was keen to ensure for every store they had a Google Place.  Therefore we had to get all their stores whitelisted in order to automatically verify all the new shops.

 3) Mobile
Last year I said that people have been jumping on the mobile apps and mobile site bandwagon. I mentioned that mobile would be increasingly important in 2011 and it did.  For our clients, we had to have a mobile ppc strategy as well as a desktop strategy.  We had mobile ppc ads with our own ad groups and campaigns. 

So after reviewing 2011 predictions, we can now move onto 2012

1) Less spam

2011 we saw the Panda updates in an effort to crack down on the content farms on the web.  This will mean there will be less spam out from these content and article syndication sites and therefore they will be less important in terms of link building. Google will  continue to role out alogirthms to make sure users are getting quality search results, making sure that very low quality links to a site have no weight.

 2) SEO and Social will be one package

Link building through social media will be paramount to an seo strategy.  Blogger outreach where clients have content placed on third party authorative sites will have far more weight than using article sites.  An agency that offers seo without a social media strategy incorporated within it will find it harder to compete in the market place. Updates from Google such as Google + means seo needs to use social media if it wants to stay ahead as Google added Google+ brand pages in the search results  in December last year. 

3) Personlised and local seach

The presentations have been uploaded to slideshare:

Steve Overton’s presentation on the value of SEO:
http://www.slideshare.net/seojoblogs/the-value-of-seo

Richard Kirk’s presentation on the value of Social:
http://www.slideshare.net/seojoblogs/social-signals-seo

I have been running this meetup for more than a year and with your help and support Search London has grown from 200 members last October to now over 520 members. I am really pleased with the expansion of Search London and I hope you will join me for many more events next year.

I will be spending winter Down Under and therefore will arrange the next Search London event in spring 2012.

Hope you all have a fantastic Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The meetup “The Value of SEO and Social” will have two speakers:

Steve Overton from Searchmetrics and Richard Kirk from Performics. I am sure some of your clients may be asking what the return on investment is from seo and social and sometimes it is a bit hard to quantify. Steve will be talking about the value of SEO and Richard will be speaking about the value of social, he has recently been studying the impactof social inputs on organic search.

searchmetrics logo

Searchmetrics is the global expert in search analytics software, empowering marketers to increase visibility and market share on the world’s leading search engines.

I would like to thank everyone who has come to Search London during the year. We have had 7 meetups and the group has gone from 200 members to over 460. Please RSVP to the last Search London of 2011

Thanks to IG Index who sponsored the event, giving us a few drinks at the bar. Martin MacDonlad’s presentation of search agency side has been uploaded to slideshare.

http://www.slideshare.net/seojoblogs/search-london-seo-ppc-in-house

Check out the photos from the latest event.

http://www.meetup.com/search-london/photos/4208332/

I have also uploaded them to this site.

Click on the video below to see how the Google employees build their Google Doodle out of pumpkins.

Halloween Google Doodle

Google Halloween Doodle

Here is a post a wrote a while ago regarding the history of Halloween.

Where does it come from?
Halloween comes from the pagan festival Samhain, which the Celts celebrated on what was their New Year Eve, October 31st. Samhain marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter which brought the evil spirits. The Celts believed that on this night, the barrier between our world and the spirit world was at its weakest and the spirits would return to the earth. They built bonfires and in England carved out faces in the turnips to warn off the evil spirits. The festival was celebrated by lighting bonfires and sacrificing crops and animals. The bonfire was also believed to protect them during the winter months.

Samhaim was officially recognised as All Hallows Eve by Pope John 14th in 1006. November 1st was known as All Saints Day or All-Hollows and the following day, November 2nd was celebrated as All Souls Day to honour the dead. The three festivals together were called Hallowmans.

Why are costumes associated with Halloween?
The Celts believed the spirits of the dead would possess people’s bodies. They dressed up in scary costumes to ward off evil spirits from taking their body. When the Irish moved to America in the 1840s they brought this custom with them. And now children dress up in all sorts of costumes, from cute little fairies to blood thirsty vampires and knock on neighbours doors going “trick or treating”.

What is the history of trick or treating?
Trick or treating actually comes from a mixture of different origins. One was the Celts, who believed the devil would play tricks on the living so they gave them food when they visited their homes. The ninth-century Europeans had a custom called souling. On All Saints Day, Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes” – pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes a beggar received, the more prayers they promised to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. People strongly believed at that time that the dead remained in limb and that prayers could send the soul’s passage to heaven. Lastly, the Irish peasant practice was to go door to door to get money, cheese, eggs, butter apples in preparation the festival St Columb Kill.

With commercialism, Halloween has thrived in the United States with thousands of children trick or treating, parading about in a variety of costumes. It is now the second most popular holiday after Christmas for decorating and sales of sweets. This year I have seen the most amount of decoration in the shops, it seems to have explded

Sharon Harris, Head of Search at IG Group will be discussing the benefits of taking SEO & PPC In House. IG Group is a FTSE 250 leader servicing over 130,000 clients across 130 countries. The sheer size and scale of IG Group proved a challenging yet rewarding online platform for search integration.

IG Group encompasses IG Markets, IG Index and Nadex. IG Markets CFDs offer traders the ability to take a directional position on market movement. IG Index acts as a gateway into spread betting across a range of markets including the fast paced world of forex spreads. Nadex is a fully regulated US Exchange.

These markets offer complex derivative products yet understanding remains at the heart of IG Group. Integrating search enabled IG Group to tap into the users desire to learn at the point of inception, targeting both the newbie and professional trader. Increased online exposure across multiple keywords significantly enhanced visibility and conversion rates on a global scale.

Financial markets are fast and dynamic – Sharon Harris has fine tuned global SEO & PPC to react accordingly.

The event “SEO & PPC In House Or Agency” will take place:

When: Wednesday, October 26th, 7:00pm

Where: Theodore Bullfrog, 26 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HL

RSVP to Search London to guarantee your place

Facebook cupcake

Key Facebook Facts

There are more than 3 billion stories posted each month.

It is no surprise then, that Facebook is used as a marketing tool. Most of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major Web sites. According to Wikipedia while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),Facebook’s users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).

At the Facebook session they gave us tips on creating a Facebook advert:
- Ask questions in the ad copy
- Emphasis the offers
- Include time prompt
-Use the third person
-Include an eye catching image

Don’t
- Say to much in the advert – keep it nice and simple
- Over capitalise
-Use just your logo as the image

If you have a website with products to sell, you should start promoting your site through Facebook. It is a low CTR and you can control your budgets through bids as you did in paid search.

]]> http://seojoblogs.com/2011/10/08/optimise-facebook-ads/feed/ 3 http://seojoblogs.com/2011/10/02/google-mobile-workshop/ http://seojoblogs.com/2011/10/02/google-mobile-workshop/#comments Sun, 02 Oct 2011 10:40:36 +0000 Jo Turnbull http://seojoblogs.com/?p=1963 Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a Google Mobile Workshop and they confirmed what everyone has been saying
“2011 is the year for mobile”

Finlay from Google talked at New Year Search Club in January this year where he mentioned mobile would really take off and it definitely has.

Google Mobile Search

(Image from www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/mobile-search-tips-and-best-practices-8276/)

Mobile search queries have increased considerably from last year. Here are a few interesting stats:

Travel queries on mobile have risen from
4% (2010) to 11% (2011)

Retail queries
4% (2010) to 13% (2011)

Tech queries
5% (2010) to 10% (2011)

Entertainment
7% (2010) to 18% (2011)

Do you use your mobile while out shopping? Apparently 45 % of us do and 15% use it to compare prices.
The study carried out by Google, also found that with mobile, people always have them with them and are searching while at home and on the go. 74% of people use them at the same time as consuming other media.

53% of people use a smartphone while watching tv
49% of people use it while listening to music
26% of people use their mobile while using the internet.

Consumers are starting to purchase products on their mobile. 28% of people in the study has purchased on their smart phone, with 41% of people buying entertainment products, followed by 31% for clothing and 28% for tickets.

So what does all this mean?

You cannot ignore mobile any longer. You need to start engaging in a mobile strategy for your organisation. If you are already doing paid search, make sure you have a mobile search campaign. You also need to have an optimised mobile site so that consumers can view your site on their handset and purchase a product.

Google are there to help
There are a number of ways to advertise your site on mobile. Google have three interlinked mobile advertising platforms, adwords mobile search and GDN (Google Display Network), Admob Mobile network, and m.YouTube.com

Adwords Mobile Search & GDN
This gives a company mobile search presence using keywords – remember to set up a separate campaign for mobile. The GDN allows you to contextually target mobile content within the Google Network.
There are also adwords (as with desktop) but tailored for mobile – different volumes of search queries

Admob Mobile network
This network has a reach of 250 million unique users. You can target your ads to specific mobile users, decides ad operators, bundles they have and location as well as time of day.

m.YouTube.com
There are over 1.5 million impressions per day on mobile and this channel allows you to increase your brand awareness on mobile.

There are so many options with mobile search. Below are a couple more mobile adverts than you can choose to run
Mobile Click the Call
User taps your advert and goes straight to the call without having to dial the number

Mobile Click to Maps
User clicks to the location of the store and can easily see Google Maps.

If you have any questions about setting up a campaign, the Google account managers are always happy to help you.

]]> http://seojoblogs.com/2011/10/02/google-mobile-workshop/feed/ 0 http://seojoblogs.com/2011/09/01/search-london-seo-making-it-work-judith-lewis/ http://seojoblogs.com/2011/09/01/search-london-seo-making-it-work-judith-lewis/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:29:16 +0000 Jo Turnbull http://seojoblogs.com/?p=1958 After a summer off networking, Search London has its first networking event of the autumn.

Judith Lewis, a well known search professional in the industry and blogger at mostlyaboutchocolate.com and SEOChicks will be speaking at the event. She will be sharing her experience and learnings from seo along with the best ways to get clients to implement seo.

The event “SEO – Making it work” will take place:

When: Tuesday, September 6th, 7:00pm

Where: The Doggett’s Coat and Badge, 1 Blackfriars Bridge.

Over 60 people have RSVPed so far, so hurry and reserve your place today.

Please RSVP on meetup.com/search-london to guarantee your place

]]> http://seojoblogs.com/2011/09/01/search-london-seo-making-it-work-judith-lewis/feed/ 0