Webhelp SEO Blog

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Following my previous post about my plan for NZ SEO - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

This post has been the most difficult for me. Having to start over and over again, which is one of the reasons why this has taken so long to do.

“Good SEO” is up for interpretation. Over the last few years content management systems have become more search engine friendly and means it’s possible to have a well “on page” optimised site quickly and easily. What we usually see is a select handful of sites in their own niche dominate groups of searches for their niche.

On top of all that I consider results/performance as being a major factor in determining the success of a sites SEO. From a percentage of sales referred from organic search engine traffic, or the number of visitors received from organic search results.

Anyway as Google places more emphasis on local websites when searching in NZ, here’s something that’s of interest:

Trademe

As NZ’s most popular site it was hard to overlook Trademe.  Now I am not using trademe as the perfect example, because to be honest like most sites theres room for improvement. But one thing you come to notice about trademe is the reach that it has in search engines. Performing many searches in Google can bring trademe up in the serps. From a user point of view, trademe is used to buy new and used goods easily via an auction process. Many of the serp listings are for products that have been put up for auction, a big problem as most of these product results are expired/dated listings.

In the upcoming bad and ugly posts, it’s hopefully going to be a bit easier to nail out.

Feel free to spin your view on any Good examples of SEO in New Zealand.

Looks like google is playing with the idea of using latest posts as sitelinks

Following the comments from my post yesterday. I have been thinking about how to structure my shakeup of SEO in New Zealand. I want to be sure I don’t step on anyones toes, nor do I want to post some basic boring post that I wouldn’t want to read myself.

Here’s the plan.

Over the next few days i’m going to do an individual post for Good SEO, Bad SEO and Ugly SEO in NZ.

• Good SEO
  Examples of plain run of the mill whitehat SEO that gets good results and respect from search engines.

• Bad SEO
  Examples of sites with no thought about SEO whatsoever.

• Ugly SEO
  Examples of implementation of spammy blackhat optimisation.

The purpose of these posts will be to enlighten readers of the state of SEO in New Zealand. I hope that no one takes offense.

I look forward to reading the comments.

With it being the start of another month, I took some time this morning to review the daily adwords budgets for my client accounts.

In the past I have disregarded the suggested daily budgets as they are usually off the mark when it comes to client budgets and expectations. Anyway this morning I clicked the view recommended budget for one of my client adwords accounts and I was pleasantly surprised with the page being displayed. It is quite a bit different from the expected text “increasing your daily budget to $xxx.xx will result in xx% more impressions.

Now you’re prompted with a cool graphical representation of how your daily budget would have effected the performance over the last 15 days.

Very cool!

Yahoo has teamed up with McAfee setup searchscan and displays information within the search results.

Now from a user point of view this is a good thing, it adds an extra safety net to their everyday internet usage. Making the end user aware of any issues regarding a particular search result.

When it comes business, its another precaution step that you take for your everyday workings. You need to make sure that you don’t get flagged within these results, especially when the reason is to do with your business and the services offered. (see image below)

If you’re wanting to check your own website you can go to McAfee Siteadvisor and perform an analysis report like this one for webhelp.co.nz

Logging into Google AdWords this morning i was prompted with this message:

Whats the improvements?

Basically the dashboard now gives you an overview of clicks, impressions, search click through rate, content click through rate, conversions, conversion rate and amount spent.

Don’t worry the interface is now tabbed allowing you to view budgets and if possible modify budgets.

 read more on google’s blog

Just launched in beta is week and month views on the data. So glad for this as it was something I had asked some of the Analytics team that I met with last year.

Here’s a screen shot

According to Google the change in display URL policy was meant to come into effect on the 1st of April 2008. Now its the 4th of April and I am still seeing ads with an invalid display url.

In New Zealand and searching for plumbers

When clicking through this ad it takes you to “http://sites.yellow.co.nz/site/tricklebanks/”

The display url is missing the .nz, allowing them to run multiple ads for the one keyword. This is what the policy change was to eliminate, wasn’t it?

I’d like to hear your views on this.

I was doing some competitor research the other day and while I was searching the competitors domain in Google I found many serps that included pages from multiple website stats packages.

Clicking through it was obvious that these sites were victim of referrer spam. With links to porn and gambling sites. Sites like these exploit the stats package to generate backlinks to their site for free and without the site owner knowing about it.

If you are running some server stats package be sure to restrict access to the folder containing these stats. It doesn’t look good if your domain is associated with these bad neighbourhoods