Thursday 24 July 2014

AdWords Location Extensions & Google My Business

Extensions in AdWords – particularly, IMO, Locations, are essential to improving the performance of the campaigns – they give your ads more real estate, they make it easier for mobile users to contact you and they’re free.

Google Places have lately been superseded with Google My Business – it’s okay this is a Google thing, they like to change the name of a product, this then enables the company to have a public Google+ profile.

If you use an AdWords MCC account then you have all your AdWords accounts under one umbrella – this makes it easy to keep your eye on all of your clients’ accounts without endlessly logging in to separate accounts.

Thursday 29 August 2013

Google's Reconsideration Request - Webmaster Tools

This was a pleasant surprise, I submitted a reconsideration request for one of my clients with Google Webmaster Tools and received a short list of suspect links that Google still believe are outside of their quality guidelines.

I have to say post Google Panda has weeded out a lot of so called SEO practitioners who were really only link-builders; hey ho.

So back to the reconsideration request, yes a disavow was also submitted at the same time and boy I thought I'd covered every base, but obviously not - they'd found links that Majestic SEO hadn't picked up or Google Webmaster Tools hadn't picked up - new link tool required... how many do I need?

Friday 28 June 2013

Twitter Feed Broken - Retirement of API v1.0.

Has your Twitter feed stopped working or putting it another way has it just vanished?

Mine did, but as you can see over there on the left of the Blog it’s up and running again.

The reason the Twitter feed stopped working is because Twitter retired the Twitter API v1.0. For a bespoke website like Website Consultancy and Blogspot Blog (like this one) it’s really easy to fix because you can firstly visit here:

Wednesday 13 February 2013

3 SEO Headaches Solved

There are many SEO headaches which I come across on a daily basis, I won't list them all here as I've also a job to do, so where do I start:

1. Products Pages with 2 URLs

Having product pages with '2' different URLs is really quite regular and Magento sites, or should I say developers who don't understand the intricacies of Magento sites, haven't helped the issue, for example these two pages contain the exact same content - Google would most likely call this duplicate content:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/widgets/large-widgets/blue/

and

http://www.yourwebsite.com/large-widgets/blue/

Wednesday 31 October 2012

Google Disavow – Looks Like it Could Work

I received the first notification 4 months ago in Google Webmaster Tools regarding a clients website and it’s unnatural inbound links:



Now, I was pretty well up-to-speed with these notifications because there was a lot a talk at the time of Google sending them out, so I wasn't too worried. But being diligent I checked the site's Google WMT account and yes there was a site sending a vast amount of poor quality links to it, in fact there were a couple of other sites in the same vein.

Thursday 26 July 2012

Redirect PDF With '%20' Using .htaccess

I'm so glad I sorted the re-directing of PDF files with '%20' in them and using the .htaccess file.

It seems a common occurrence that when PDF files are created the file name uses spaces, just like you'd save a word document on your computer, but the difference being a word document very seldom gets used as a document on a website, whereas a PDF does.

Friday 11 May 2012

DIV Order Optimisation

Imagine you’re a search engine spider and you're crawling through another webpage: your first stop is the website’s logo, then the menu and if it’s a behemoth of a website then there's going to be a pretty big menu to trawl through, then if you’re unlucky you’ll have a carousel of images - and you’ve still not reached the most important unique information yet!