On the Fire Horse Trail I wrote an article about the impact of the continued ‘appification’ of the Internet on the SEO industry. Will there be SEO when there’s no more World Wide Web?

The Fire Horse Trail: The Death of SEO

The content contained within apps is invisible for search engines, and app builders intend to keep it that way. Content creators want to tie users in to their apps, and making sure their content is only accessible via the app is key to accomplishing that. This means that SEO, making sure websites (content) get found through search engines, is obsolete in the fully applified Internet landscape of tomorrow.

By popular demand I wrote a blog post for State of Search explaining what you can do to optimise your images to appear in Google’s Image Search:

State of Search: The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation

The filename, alt-text and caption of an image of a website combine to form an impression of what the image is showing. For maximum impact these three factors should be aligned, containing the same or similar keywords. The three factors can be seen as descriptions of the image, increasing in length.

The Death of SEO / Image Search Optimisation is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

A while back I wrote about the state of search for news. In this blog post I tried to summarise where online journalism stands with regards to SEO, and outlined some tricks SEOs could utilise to enhance their presence in Google News.

State of Search: The State of Search for News

According to data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency the biggest source of traffic for UK newspaper sites is Google, generating over 45% of all visits. This data does not distinguish between the various Google search products, but both Hitwise and my own experiences with the Belfast Telegraph website indicate that the vast bulk of that traffic originates from Google News.

Recently I wrote a blog post outlining what a solid, all-round search engine optimiser should know about search engines. Many SEOs treat the symptoms of badly optimised sites, but they don’t really understand why – because they don’t understand how search engines work. By studying IR, patents, and research papers, a good SEO can gain a greater understanding of the craft.

State of Search: Understanding Search Engines

Every search engine is in essence an information retrieval system. Information retrieval can be described as “the science of finding information contained within documents and/or within metadata about documents”. IR was around long before the world wide web was born. From the moment computer scientists started storing information in early computers, IR was needed to retrieve that information.

At the invitation of its creators I reviewed the SEO Effect software suite and published my findings on State of Search. I concluded that it was a useful and powerful tool that has a lot of promise as it continues to be developed and new features are added.

State of Search: SEO Effect Review

It’s hard to judge a suite of tools based on only two of its five modules, but I have to say I’m fairly impressed. If the three remaining modules under development will adhere to the standards of quality and robustness as set by the keyword research and trend monitoring modules, SEO Effect might well become one of the industry’s most powerful tool suites.

The Search for News / Understanding Search Engines / SEO Effect is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

It’s the World Cup and I needed ideas for a new blog post on State of Search, so I compared the SERPs for the ‘world cup’ keyword on five different search engines to see which one provided the best information.

State of Search: Battle of the World Cup SERPs

Yahoo pulls out all the stops – after two sponsored results there’s a table of recently played games with links pointing to Yahoo’s Eurosport pages. Yahoo also knows where I am and shows me results for England and the Group C where England is a part of. Up next is a plug for that monstrosity known as the Yahoo Toolbar, followed by organic results for FIFA.com with a lot of useful sitelinks.

Battle of the World Cup SERPs is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Recently I was asked to write for Search Engine People, and I wanted to make sure my first post for them was a solid one: it’s about Google News and what a publisher can do to get more visibility and higher rankings in the world’s most popular news aggregator:

Search Engine People: SEO for Google News – Ranking Factors and Recommendations

Google News is a very different animal from Google Search, and it’s vital for news publishers to have a good understanding of how Google News operates and what can be done to optimise your presence there.

I’m giving a talk at Barcamp Belfast this Saturday about the biggest mistakes web developers make that cause problems for search engine optimisation. On State of Search I shared what I wanted to talk about and asked for input from the SEO crowd:

State of Search: SEO for Web Developers

There are countless things that can go wrong with URLs containing parameters, from duplicate content issues to indexation-loops. But worst of all, search engine spiders really don’t like parameters. Yes, with Webmaster Tools you can tell Google what parameters you are using, but really, that’s like using a band-aid to fix a severed limb.

SEO for Google News / SEO for Web Developers is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

For State of Search I wrote a blog post asking some existential questions about what it means to call yourself an SEO. A good SEO is a jack-of-all-trades (and master of a few of them), so does the acronym still apply?

State of Search: The scope and limitations of SEO

Some have argued that the SEO acronym has evolved over time and now applies to much more than just optimising sites for search engines. I’m not sure I agree with that. I firmly believe that how we name things influence how we perceive them, and that we should take great care to label things as they are. SEO is an acronym with search engines firmly at its core, and when we unilaterally expand this acronym to mean much more, we are creating confusion in the marketplace.

My latest column for the Belfast Telegraph is about the hidden battle being waged between Google and some governments about who controls the private data Google collects. The core message is a question we should all ask ourselves: who do we trust more with our private data, Google or our governments?

Watching the Web: Google and privacy – more than meets the eye

We know that Google stores a lot of data about us online. What we search for, which websites we visit, who our online friends are – we know that Google knows. Many governments see this as a problem. Recently ten countries sent a joint letter to Google in which they criticise the search giant’s approach to privacy, focusing on the launch of Google Buzz which gave rise to a great many privacy concerns.

The Scope of SEO / Google’s Privacy Woes is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

It’s been a slow week as far as writing blog posts is concerned, and if it wasn’t for a sudden burst of inspiration after reading a book on poker I wouldn’t have written anything at all. The inspirational episode resulted in a post for State of Search where I draw parallels between SEO and poker.

State of Search: How SEO is a lot like Poker

Poker is a card game that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to win more money in a game than your competitors. Search engine optimisation is a profession that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to help a site rank higher than its competitors in search engine results. So both poker and SEO rely on a basic foundation of skills and techniques, complemented by a certain degree of luck. And that’s just the superficial similarity. It doesn’t end there.

The Similarities Between SEO and Poker is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Last week a fellow blogger & SEO geek pointed something strange out to me: a result on the Google SERPs did not match the actual webpage’s title tag. Up to now SEOs have pretty much assumed a page’s title tag is what search engines show in the results. However, it appears Google changes SERP headlines to make the result more relevant.

State of Search: Google helps non-optimised sites and enhances title tags in SERPs

What this means is that Google appears to be trying to close the gap between optimised and non-optimised sites. They’ve gone beyond just ranking pages for relevance, now they’ve also begun enhancing non-optimised pages’ listing in the SERPs.

Also on State of Search is a blog post I wrote about the value of keyword rankings. This metric for measuring the success of search engine optimisation efforts is rapidly losing favour in the SEO community. However, I argue that keyword rankings are still a vital part of SEO reporting.

State of Search: The value of keyword rankings

But where our sites rank on those SERPs, especially as part of a long term trend, is absolutely a vital aspect of what we do. I’ll concede keyword rankings have lost their status as the king of SEO metrics, but it’s still metric royalty. It’s still up there in the throne room, and it should get the attention it deserves.

Help from Google / Keyword Rankings is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

For State of Search I wrote a post about the multi-layered search experience. In this I tried to explain that users go through several search functions on different sites before they land on the content they are looking for. As SEOs we need to understand the full search cycle that guides visitors to our websites.

State of Search: SEO and the Multi-layered Search Experience

There is a pervasive mindset in the internet community that search engines such as Google are an entirely different class of website. Instead of a destination in and of themselves, search engines are seen as gateways to real content. The search experience as many search engine optimisers define it is limited to what users do in Google, Bing, and such.

However, I’d argue that this is a limited perspective that no longer accurately reflects how users find content on the web. Instead I would call Google and its rivals first tier search engines – the first step in a multi-layered search experience.

This next one is not about SEO but about email marketing. Over on my personal blog I vented about a rather egregious mistake made by the branch manager of a local recruitment agency when she emailed a promotion to their full database of registered job seekers.

Adamus.nl: A Beginner’s Lesson in Sending Mass Emails

But look a little closer…. That link at the top saying ’show details’, where in Gmail you can see to what email addresses the message was sent….

Surely a professional organisation like Randstad wouldn’t just put all email addresses of a mass mailing in the To: field? Surely they’d use BCC or an email marketing system?

There’s a lesson in there for email marketers: Never use the To: field.

The Multi-Layered Search Experience / Sending Mass Emails is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of research on microformats and other approaches to structured data. This inspired a post for State of Search where I wonder if the time has come for web developers and search engine optimisers to embrace structured data, or whether we’re better off waiting for a firmer standard to emerge.

State of Search: Microformats and RDF, is this the right time?

A low-level buzz in SEO that’s steadily becoming louder is the use of microformats. This article explores the problems that exist with microformats and RDF and asks if this is the right time to implement these particular approaches to structured data.

Google’s recent legal setbacks in the form of a ruling against it in Italy and strong signals that the European Commission is launching an anti-trust investigation, sparked a passionate defence of Google’s practices from one its highest profile employees, Matt Cutts.

Searchcowboys: Google: “We’re the good guys, remember?”

As Google is coming under ever increasing scrutiny and pressure, it goes ever more on the defensive. Google seems to possess an almost childish naivety about its position as a global corporate giant, and it needs to come to terms with its role as the new Microsoft.

Microformats and RDF / Google’s Self-Image is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

For State of Search I wrote a post explaining what I see as a big problem with doing tests in SEO. Many SEO professionals conduct tests and gain what they perceive as important insights in to how search engines work – but all is not what it seems.

State of Search: The Problem with Testing in SEO

The problems that exist with testing in SEO aren’t deliberate. I’m convinced that pretty much all tests performed by SEOs start with the best of intentions: to help uncover truths and add quality information and best practices to our methods. But nonetheless there are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed. In this article I try to pinpoint the issues plaguing testing in SEO and what we can do to fix it.

For Searchcowboys I dove in to the impact – or lack thereof – of Google’s Personalized Search. So far a lot has been written about Personalized Search, but what has the actual impact been?

Searchcowboys: Google Personalised Search: is it real?

Back in December of last year Google announced it would be rolling out its Personalized Search feature to all its users. Searchcowboys has written before about the pro’s and cons of Personalized Search, but what has the true impact been so far?

For a great seo company in the United Kingdom, Warlock Media is a good choice. Run by the SEO industry’s enfant terrible Chris Angus, Warlock Media uses advanced techniques to propel your site to search engine heights.

Testing in SEO / Google Personalized Search is a post from: The Great Websites Blog