At North South Media we have been popping in and out of various search marketing niches to arm, not only ourselves, but also our readership, with a far better understanding on how the various fragments function. Our latest offering is Social Media and for this interview we got together with one of Scotland’s best and highly vocal social profiles online today : Andrew Burnett. We thoroughly enjoyed our talk and hope you do as well, here’s how it went …
A recent eCommerce project brought about the challenge of re-designing the URL involved with the internal pages of the site. Straight away, my internal thoughts said, “Keywords present, dashes seperated, lowercase, nice clean URL’s. Simples!” But this nagging feeling inside, wouldn’t go away. I wanted to make sure what I had read and practiced was actually the best way to proceed in today’s forever changing search environment.
Ask.com has brought back their popular man-servant ‘Jeeves’ as part of a UK facelift to entice more searchers to use their search engine instead of Google et al.
Jeeves, himself looks confident in his new look, displaying the thumbs in his jacket lapels displays a very assured look, indeed. Not only, has Ask brought out Jeeves from a 3 year retirement, they’ve also let him loose with their Twitter account (although, their pushing everything through the Hootsuite Toolbar, so expect ads very soon) and also bundled a Facebook profile with him as well, which should be fun.
Ask are hoping the new look will help bump up the numbers of the search engine : they claim it has 15 million monthly UK users.
For those of you who manage and run feeds through Google Base then you will have noticed that Google has been busy adding additional functionality to the admin control panel. The new tab called, Data Quality, allows you to oversee any problems you might have with your feed identifiers.
I remember when life used to be simple, not anymore. Jings, its even getting tough for me to rank #1 for SEO Ayrshire! Myself and Boydie (Colin Boyd) used to slug it out for the coveted prize, although to be fair I don’t think Boydie was ever really aware I was trying to topple him. He’s got Ayrshire in his domain, makes it a wee bit tougher. Any whoo, Boydie, sorta gave up the ghost on his blog, for a bit, leaving the door open for your’s truly to take the mantle and then … whack! Google and Dave Naylor, pull the rug from my feet.
Google has recently begun serving up local results for generic terms. I first noticed the change on Sunday the 5th of April, but plenty have witnessed the change earlier on different datacentres. So, what does it all mean? Well generic terms are one or two word search queries such as ‘plumber’ or ‘bingo halls’, which are semantic noun searches. Now when I type into Google, ‘plumber’ or ‘bingo halls’, I am given a local business map result along with my organic and paid search placements.
