Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog

Google agrees animated advertising deal

Marketing Guy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:10:17 +0000

Google has agreed a new advertising deal that will see animated video clips distributed throughout its AdSense network.

The search engine giant’s latest digital marketing venture has been launched in conjunction with the creator of adult animated comedies, Family Guy and American Dad, Seth MacFarlane.

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BBC ‘overspends on web portal’

Marketing Guy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:48:39 +0000

The BBC has spent more than it should have done on its web portal bbc.co.uk, according to a new report.

Figures from the BBC Trust, which aims to ensure the broadcaster uses its licence fees wisely, reveal an overspend of 48 per cent on the baseline budget allocated for the service.

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Q: Are keywords in your domain name an important ranking factor?

Marketing Guy — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:33:43 +0000

Keywords in domain names have very little importance in actual ranking calculations - that’s been the case for years now. The positive effects people see are a consequence of sites linking to the domain using the URL as anchor text - link text containing keywords is what helps the domain rank, not the actual appearance of the keyword in the domain name.

It’s a common mistake SEOs make - differentiating between “direct” ranking factors and “indirect” ranking factors is very important. People just tend to make the wrong assosciations - they optimise a keyword domain site and see it rank for the keyword and assume that this is down to the keyword in the domain. It isn’t.

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SEO Q&A Session - fire away!

Marketing Guy — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:08:32 +0000

I’ve got a number of posts in the works that I can’t really be bothered finishing off right now, so I thought I’d start a quickie SEO Q&A session. Feel free to post a comment with any questions you want answered.

Scott

Removed some comments on the Bigmouthmedia post

Marketing Guy — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:11:01 +0000

I’m not usually in the habit of removing comments from a post (regardless of what they say), but I removed a series of comments from the Bigmouthmedia post made over the weekend which really didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t the content of the comments or the angle - it was loads of little things that led me to believe the poster either:

Was a Bigmouthmedia employee trying to turn the focus of the thread into a more favourable light and /or discredit competitors.
Was a Bigmouthmedia competitor trying to fuel the flames.

Either way I don’t care. Anonymous posting is lame, particularly when there’s no good reason to be anonymous (i.e. when disclosure would actually mean your comments carried more credibility). I humoured the comments with replies for a while but after I thought about it over the weekend I didn’t see any real value in leaving a basically fake conversation live on the post.

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The importance of disclosure and managing client expectations

Marketing Guy — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:37:51 +0000

Zero Strategy report today that Business Green have noted that the Advertising Standards Authority (UK) is currently launching an investigation into claims of “greenwashing” amongst advertisers. “Greenwashing” is process of exaggerating the environmental benefits of a product in order to sell it more “effectively”.

Sound familiar?

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Staff got some time on their hands? Here’s some SEO related bits n’ pieces they can handle

Marketing Guy — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:34:06 +0000

Someone asked me the other day what their staff member could be doing to help with SEO as they had some spare time on their hands. While there isn’t really a perfect answer that will fit any business, these tips should be useful on the whole (not in any particular order)…

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April fool’s - Alltop.com from Guy Kawasaki

Marketing Guy — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:47:24 +0000

I’ve got to say that I was suckered on this one - didn’t really pay attention to the date today! :) A scraper site posing as a new venture from one of the top blokes in SEO - classic!

Scott

When does local SEO targeting become doorway page spam?

Marketing Guy — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:17:22 +0000

I’ve been keeping an eye on several SEO related discussions on small business forums lately, and to be perfectly honest some of the “advice” being dished out by self proclaimed experts is somewhat disturbing.

I’ve chipped in my 2c from time to time on the recent discussions, but having read back even a week or two I see small businesses being advised to do some pretty ridiculous stuff. Its nuts - people are being advised by “experts” to churn out thousands of pages (one per town) just to target different locations.

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AOL buys Bebo for $850 million from Yahoo!

Marketing Guy — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:06:52 +0000

The BBC are reporting today that Time Warner’s AOL have bought Bebo from Yahoo! for $850 million. Not a bad price tag for a site with 40 million members, but surely Yahoo! could have made better use of the traffic? I would have thought that Bebo would have tied in quite nicely with MyBlogLog.

Perhaps they needed to free up some funds?