Saturday, August 16th, 2008 SEO 7 Comments »

I’ve just seen a fascinating Orange advert, not fascinating for the sentimental tripe as the lead declares “I am” everyone who ever helped them in life, but fascinating for the final screen. It’s fairly obvious that this campaign must have a website, an assumption proved with their site I Am Everyone. However, instead of declaring this website, or even the official Orange website on the final screen, they tell the interested viewers to “search online for i am”. See the grab (badly edited screen grab from their site):

So, is there a crack team of SEOs at Orange HQ ensuring that their website appears top for such a generic phrase? If I whack in “I Am” into Google and excitedly push the “I’m feeling Lucky” button, will Orange pop up first? Sadly, no. Depending on whether you search the web or UK, you will find either “I Am Bored“, a website full of games, humour and the like or a company simply called “I Am“, a branding agency (with a cool website, I must say!). Whoops.

It’s even worse at Yahoo and MSN where they can’t even be found on the first page! They’re also not on the first page of Cuil, but who’s searching there? :P

However, they do appear top of the ads on the big three search engines, effectively the first listing. So they have paid for a massive TV campaign, a dedicated website and now they have to pay because they’re practically telling people to click the PPC ads to find their site. Granted, their domain probably isn’t perfect for customers to try and remember or for the voiceover guy to tell you “i dash am dash everyone dot co dot uk”.

But here’s another thought - I’m no PPC expert but the Google Keyword Tool tells me it’s roughly 40p a click for top three positioning. I’m sure Orange has an affiliate program; Affiliate Bounty says it’s on DGM and Tradedoubler but a) I’m not an affiliate of DGM, b) I find the Tradedoubler interface impossible to work with and c) Affiliate Bounty is apparently way out of date. But if they do have a program, have they added “I Am” to their list of words you can’t bid on? And if not, what are your thoughts if you are a PPC affiliate?

Just something I found interesting.

Tags: Orange
Posted in SEO | 7 Comments »

Monday, February 4th, 2008 C'est Moi, SEO 3 Comments »

Last year, two friends and I took part in the Student Brakeaway, a rally to the south of Spain. It’s like the Gumball Rally but just for students and with much, much cheaper cars! It was a phenomenal holiday, overtaking drunk students on a French motorway in a battered Nissan Micra (yes, really!) by day and drinking in a different town by night. The guys at Student Brakeaway have released the route for this year, a1900 mile trek through France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. Needless to say, I really want to go again.

Herein lies the issue. The ‘holiday’ is actually quite expensive. There’s the car and it’s servicing, accessories, petrol and insurance; the holiday itself and associated expenses such as food and (lots of) drink; accomodation for the drive back and finally, the hidden expense of last year, the bloomin’ plethora of toll roads. The majority of other cars on the route had sponsors and accessories paid for by businesses (including a sex doll, bizarrely). We had some electrical hazard tape slapped on the roof and our team number printed out on colour A4 and sellotaped to the back window. Proper students!

Obviously, we pay for the holiday and holiday expenses ourselves but I really want sponsorship or a nice slush fund paid for by fundraising to help accomodate the other costs of the trip ie. the car, petrol, tolls etc, with a substantial percentage going to charity as that’s part of the reason the rally runs. So far, the event has raised £75,000 for several charities including Teenage Cancer Trust.

How do I raise the funds, then, and will people sponsor me? I have a few ideas, and I’d like your advice on whether you think you they’re decent ideas, and whether you’d be willing to put forward a quid or two!

I was thinking about setting up a site/blog for our ‘team’ to detail the event, have a shop with stuff other drivers will need, details of last year’s event; that kind of thing. My idea is to place some kind of “sponsor a mile” bit, where you put forward £1 for a mile. Each pound gets a link back to your site, almost like the Million Dollar Pixel Page. That’s 1900 miles with the last few miles being sold for a bit more than £1 if it works out. If I could get around 500 miles sponsored, I would start taking the idea to the press releases and see if I can then get it filled that way.

However, Google obviously isn’t going to like 1900 links but perhaps I could separate these onto other pages e.g. a page for England, a page for Belgium etc. Also, I don’t have a strong domain with which to really interest potential ‘link buyers’ or sponsors. My strongest is Hanlor, a shopping portal which is currently being massively redeveloped. It has no backlinks (that I’m aware of), is almost 2 years old but has a PR of 2 with pages one level down with PR1. Our team name last year was don’t tell my mom (long story) and I have that domain which is also 2 years old but due to it being redirected incorrectly and having no content, it has no PageRank. I also have about 13 other domains, most of which aren’t yet developed but I’m open to sponsorship requests.

So other than the ’sponsor a mile’ idea, I could simply sell adverts on the new ‘team’ website or hope that this affiliate marketing takes off and I raise enough money regardless of sponsorship. Most students took the normal route of selling space on their cars, something which I would be very happy with, but I don’t know who would sponsor the car.

What do you think? And more importantly, do you fancy sponsoring me to drive to Croatia and back?

Posted in C'est Moi, SEO | 3 Comments »

Sunday, January 27th, 2008 SEO, Tips and Tricks 9 Comments »

One of the most common items in a list of things to do when SEOing your site is to create good backlinks from related sites, and in particular, blogs. Thousands of SEO guides recommend leaving relevant comments on a related blog post to your site with a link and good anchor text.

But before you rush out onto the world wide web writing hundreds of comments on blogs that talk about the widgets you sell, don’t forget that the vast majority of blogs, like this one, are built with WordPress. Whilst this is no bad thing - I recommend WordPress to the hills and back - it’s worth noting that they have automatically included ‘nofollow’ on comment links and that you have to download a special plugin to remove it.

This means when you make a comment on a blog about widgets with a nice anchor link back to your site, you’ve not actually accomplished much because Google won’t follow the link and won’t give you any link juice from that site. You may get a few extra visitors but no backlink and no juice. As it says in the Google blog:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

This can really suck because this isn’t really mentioned in the download nor is it visible in the code templates, so many blogers simply won’t know about it or be bothered to remove it. I personally have removed nofollow from this blog with this plugin but when you go out there on your link building campaigns, don’t forget to check the source code of the page. If a previously posted comment looks like this:

<a href=‘http://www.thediscountblog.co.uk’ rel=‘external nofollow’>
phil</a> posted this on January…

you won’t get a backlink and you certainly won’t get any juice.

Tags: backlinks, blogs, Google, PageRank, WordPress
Posted in SEO, Tips and Tricks | 9 Comments »

Sunday, January 6th, 2008 SEO, Tips and Tricks 2 Comments »

I found out a quick trick the other week for researching keywords simply by using Google search results which also has the Google seal of approval for being contextually relevant. Say you have a website about “inks and toners”.

Google search results can tell you how much competition you’re facing and by looking at the top few results, you can see what on page optimisation they have. But try searching for “~inks and toners“. That squiggle at the beginning is the important bit.

The search results bring up pages with the keyphrase “inks and toners” in bold as usual, but also with contextually relevant alternatives in bold aswell! So for this example, we can see “refill toner”, “cartridge”, “inkjet” and so on also in bold. This suggests that Google conceives these keywords to be related to “inks and toners” and therefore your website will be relevant if you use these phrases too. Search for “~coffee” and you’ll see definitive proof that Starbucks is synonymous with coffee. Cool, eh?

OK, so it’s not the most advanced tool in the world and you probably already knew about it, but hey. I’m easily impressed.

Tags: Google, Keywords, Search
Posted in SEO, Tips and Tricks | 2 Comments »