25 Feb 2011

SEO tips to ensure a safe website relaunch

Another great article today in Search engine land about the necessary SEO steps to follow prior to and during a website relaunch (8 Necessary SEO Steps During A Website Redesign)

This ties in very well with a post I wrote last year(how to achieve a successful website relaunch) about all the work involved in updating your site.

Work with SEO in mind

What many businesses forget is that SEO needs to be at the heart of your website development, as it will influence architecture, content and navigation. Working with search engines and searchers in mind should be at the forefront of web projects, and marketing input is necessary to ensure the success of a website.

Have you recently gone through a site relaunch? what would be your main advice for businesses willing to relaunch?


16 Feb 2011

The horror SEO story of the weekend...what not to do!

As you probably know by now, I'm a little bit obsessed with link building at the moment, and the story of JC Penney in the New York Times is a great example of link building gone wrong (New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google).

Basically, JC Penney hired a 3rd party Search marketing agency to look after their SEO, and the agency bought 2,000 links across a range of websites with no relevance to the products whatsoever.
While this worked for a while and ensured they got top rankings for a lot of their products, Google has now dropped them from its rankings until they clean up their act.

While the story may not end so badly for them because they are such a big corporation and probably have bargaining power with Google, any normal business would never recover from this kind of practice.

So as I always say, when looking at link building for your website, think relevance, white hat and beware of agencies promising too much.

Have you experienced issues with paid links in the past? share your stories here


2 Feb 2011

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

The fun story of the day, Bing is apparently copying Google's results - Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results.
I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise to Google, when you're the best at what you do, people will try and copy you, it's called competitive benchmarking!
From an SEO point of view, this may help companies achieve consistent rankings in both search engines, and therefore increased traffic. it will also solve some optimising headaches.
And as a searcher, it's not really going to change my habits, I'll still keep using Google.
Are you likely to change habits because of this?