As I sat mindlessly watching television on Sunday evening, the most wonderful advert appeared on my screen bringing me almost to tears. The advert I speak of is the new Google Chrome ad featuring The Cambridge Satchel Company. It summed up within a minute exactly how online marketing and viral tactics can make the most minuscule idea a colossal success. And in essence, confirmed for me that I’m on the right career path.
Insights
Super Quick PSD Button Design
Whenever I’m designing an interface for a new site, i always like to have my safe starting points to build upon. Ill do a quick design of some general elements so that they are there for me to see, then ill go about detailing everything.
Good button design can be crucial to a good usable site so here’s my 60 second button design in Photoshop to give a good base to build on.
The Anatomy of Cool
What is cool?
Cool is something that is almost undefinable yet you know it when you see it. It’s timeless and stylish. It has attitude, has no respect for authority and cares not for the status quo.
Not everybody understands it, and not everybody has it. It’s exclusive and desirable.
Bad Links Insights
As we complete more and more Insights reports we see very weird influential links within some specific industries.
So why do we see non-relevant links within some industries?
There are large number of reasons why this appears. Here are a few examples of different scenario that we see.
Viral Marketing: The Bug You Want To Catch
There are many tried and tested successful marketing techniques to gain brand awareness but what is it that makes a campaign go viral?
Firstly, you have to understand what viral is. To get straight to the point and to eradicate the negative connotations that come along with the not so sexy word that is viral, I’ll start by explaining that viral isn’t a disease which has infected the internet in a way that will make you need to approach your machine with sanitizers and a surgical mask.
I Want Google to Fancy Me
I’ve been working in the SEO industry now for just under three months. Trying to get your head round it can be a bit hard sometimes, so I try to think of a website as a living entity. Think of your site as your own body. Link building is food, on page SEO is exercise, social media is human interaction and think of the search engine as someone you would like to go out with (bear with me, it should make sense as we go on).
I’ll start with link building, you need to build your energy and sustain yourself by eating. You are what you eat and so it would be better for you to eat one healthy meal, than to eat five burgers. If we extend this analogy to link building, build a few good links and your site will have more reach and a better quality reach; build a load of poor links and this will affect the quality and quantity of traffic being driven to your site.
Hacked Website`s in the Payday Loan Industry
In my blog post this week I wanted to talk about websites that have been compromised for the purpose of increasing rankings in the search engines. (Google)
The one that annoys me the most is the Payday Loans. For the last month I have been tracking the search results on Google UK page 1. And what I have seen is not only annoying but very concerning.
There`s a bunch of talented black hat SEO`s out there using their skills to hack into well-established websites and rewrite the htaccess file`s and/or drop in anchor links to point to another website. I have been seeing that practice quite a lot recently especially in the Payday loans industry.
Patience After Penguin: The Road to Recovery
If you have a website then over the last 4 months you may have heard the word “Penguin” over and over again. The fact is that the algorithm which must not be named is not necessarily something to be feared, however it is something that you need to understand and respect.
SEO bloggers and tweeters usually post a great article once a week but since Penguin everything has slowed right down as people have tried to figure out what to do now. I literally read 80 articles last week that had been clogging up my Google Alerts Inbox, yet there are no pearls of wisdom to be found. And the Reason?