There have been rumours around for a while as to the whether capialisation may have an effect on SEO. Just doing a search on google for ‘capitalisation SEO’ returns prominent bloggers such as Jim Boykin, however its not something many SEO’s have considered really until now, myself included.

However John Hill, SEO over at E-Gain New Media alerted into this on SEO uk (or should that be seo uk). His website (both logged in and not logged in), comes in at 5th for ‘SEO uk’, and 16th for ’seo uk’.

To test whether capitalisation has an effect we have run a test on the term SEO and SEO, with some suprising effects.

SEO (uppercase)

and seo (lowercase)

seo lowercase

Originally I put this down to personalisation, having been on David Naylor’s site previously, and E-Gain’s as well. However logging out the account, also produced similar results, so such a theory has been significantly downweighted.

This is probably only likely to affect a small number of users, however it would be interesting gauging how widespread this is.

Its a conversation that has come up often in the past, but as many previous ’search only specialists’ move to a more cross channel approach are the days of ‘the search specialist really over’.

According to a recent report by search engine marketing specialists, Vertical Leap, only 12% of companies in the UK offering SEO services focus exclusively on search. The report went on to say

“Vertical Leap’s researchers analysed the top 300 pages reported by Google for the search phrase ’search engine optimisation’.

Duplicates, and any non-commercial sites were then removed and each of the remaining 217 sites were analysed for defining information including their geographical location, the services offered specifically by each ‘specialist’ and those of their parent company.

From the sample of 217 businesses, 83% (181) were UK based. Of these 19% specialised in search engine services. The rest offered web design, email marketing, display advertising and hosting among their many other on-line services. “

However it was Matt Hopkins, Vertical Leap’s Managing Director who raised an interesting question

“For me, the impact of this study is that many different companies are listing SEO as only one of their many services. But are they really capable of delivering the service? Managing and implementing an on-going, effective SEO campaign requires specialist skills and experience. It also requires the internal systems and processes to consistently deliver success for clients…I just don’t believe you can get this from someone who is providing multiple services to multiple clients.”

Its certainly an interesting suggestion from Matt and to a certain degree I can see where Matt is coming from. However working for an agency where we offer a range of online marketing disciples (such as display, affiliate, Paid Search and SEO), I also see how well all channels can work if treated as a cohesive unit.

Much of this has to come down to the level of skill of the personel involved. Certainly at Mediavest we are lucky to have Jon Myers on board, someone well respected in the search community, and are lucky to have a comprehensive ‘learning’ programme in place. Each channel has a number of specialists undertaking the service, and is certainly one of the market leading product offerings across the multiple channels out there.

There is also a process of ‘expansion’ within the search sector. Take search marketing specialists Bigmouthmedia. Not happy with their European/global expansion, they have expanded their product offering to include paid search (old news), Affiliate Marketing and more recently Display. Surely no one could doubt such search credentials despite SEO not being their primary focus any more.

However, Matt is certainly right in one thing

Managing and implementing an on-going, effective SEO campaign requires specialist skills and experience

No-one can definitely argue with that

[ This post from Peter Young's blog contains only his personal opinions. ]

Google is planning to launch a trial of branded search calls in TV ads (ala the recent I am Orange Ads) on the UK marketplace, aimed at increasing both search volumes and revenues.

Google have been approaching agencies to get involved in the new trial, which works by directing browsers of TV ads back to the search engines to type in a phrase rather than the direct URL.

According to the NMA

“It(Google) aims to use the trial to measure the uplift in search volume that’s driven by TV ads and test the effectiveness of search prompts within the ad creative.”

Its certainly an interesting move by Google particularly given the lukewarm rollout of many previous campaigns such as the afore mentioned Orange and others such as the DEFRA  campaign. I certainly think this rationale is worth pursuing for a number of reasons:

• The role of search in the decision making process
• Many people actively ’surf’ whilst watching television. It is widely accepted that TV has a significant affect on traffic following periods of TV activity.
• The use of search as a branding tool. According to a recent study by Google 71% of people expected top brands to be at the top of the search engines (paid and organic)

Watch this space…

Everyone can relax… Dave Naylor is not going to be relieving himself of his regular updates on davenaylor.co.uk any time in the near future.

For those not in with the story, Dave was considering the future of the (in)famous davenaylor.co.uk blog following some serious issues relating to the pickup of the site in the search engines.

However following some late intervention from Patrick Altoft and Josh from Jaeweb, we can now rest easy in the comfort that things will continue.

May I saw for all us SEOs (apart from some who may have been miffed following the recent Twitter debate), good to hear your carrying on (BTW the offer to blog here anytime still stands)

Its official – well at least according to Matt Cutts. Sergey Brin now has his own blog -  which can be found at:

http://too.blogspot.com/

The name “too” reflects Sergey’s additional life outside work. One of his first posts is about the fact that he might be more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older. That’s based on data from 23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Sergey’s wife Anne Wojcicki. It’s a serious reminder that healthiness is one of the top issues for anyone.

As a fellow blogger – welcome to the club!!!

I have been involved in a number of discussions as to the merits/demerits of .co.uk vs .com visibility primarily with Google. With the ongoing evolution of the algorithms, with localisation and relevancy being at the heart of it, its important to understand how this impacts on searchers. For this reason, understanding where such users are searching is very important.

Hitwise are one of the best aggregators of such data. Interestingly enough, they have recently published an overview of the leading search engines for August 2008, with the results as follows:

• Google.co.uk (Google UK) – 73.13%
• Google.com (Google Global/US) – 14.20%
• uk.search.yahoo.com (Yahoo UK) – 3.37%
• www.uk.ask.com (Ask) – 2.69%

Given many UK companies target UK customers, it is essential that your SEO strategy should at least pay reference to localisation of search. Google in particular rewards efforts to target your site to your local market by using metrics such as domain extension and hosting location to determine best fit.

If you aren’t thinking local – isn’t it about time you did.

E-Consultancy recently conducted a study suggesting the UK SEM market was due a slowdown in the coming twelve months, something I covered in the post ‘UK market set to slow‘. To recap,  the report it stated that

It estimates the £2.75bn spend this year will include £2.42bn going into paid search, which is a 23% increase on last year.

The remaining £330m comes from spend on search engine optimisation, which will increase 32% on last year.

One of the things that stood out in the report was that SEO was seeing a higher proportion increase than Paid Search, something which I have seen reflected in the interest in the SEO products both at Pavilion Communication and more recently at MediaVest/MVi.

Further to this, I ran a quick query through Google Insights for Search, comparing the following

• SEO + “Search Engine Optimisation” + “Search Engine Optimization”
• PPC + “Paid Search” + “Pay-Per-Click”

with the following results.

You will notice that despite starting significantly behind Paid Search in terms of ’searches’ in 2004, however by 2008 SEO has caught up considerably and indeed has overtaken Paid Search searches by late Q2.

Given our UK connections, we went on to run this on the UK market as well

SEO vs PPC in the UK

The result was staggeringly different. Within the more mature UK market this trend happened as early as 2007, with SEO taking the lions share of searches since thenm.

This is likely to be as a result of a maturing UK market (something that was mentioned in the E-Consultancy report), where paid search costs have meant that some markets are no cost-prohibitive in terms of any significant return on investment. In a market where SEO can provide a cost effective alternative many organisations are now moving some of their budget accordingly.

It would be interesting to see what other people have found within the sector, particularly those from SEO’s outside the UK.

According to Google’s Matt Cutts, an increasing number of people are shunning black hat search engine optimisation (SEO) in favour of more legitimate (white-hat) SEO techniques. Matt, talking to he CNET News.com, said they have seen the number of websites utilising highly aggressive SEO campaigns such as automated link generators, link networks and link farms fall in recent times – which could be partly attributed to Google’s work to combat such tactics in the form of exclusively created algorithms that close down infringing content, as well as manual approaches to offending websites.

Whilst never seen to be overly condoning SEO, Google and Matt in particular has always worked closely with many within the SEO community. The interview above follows on from his USAToday piece, where he highlighted his five top tips to getting your site positioning in the search engine (yes yes yes, very basic)

• Spotlight your search term on the page.
• Fill in your tags
• Get other sites to link back to you
• Create a post and blog often
• Don’t overdo it

You never know – we may one day get account management like many paid search couterparts do (and then again maybe not…)

The recent Google/Twitter spat that has got much coverage in the SEO community over the last couple week or so, particulary from search marketeers such Sugarrae (otherwise known as Rae Hoffman) and Michael Gray (Graywolf)

Following on from this was a post from Quadzilla over at BlackHatSEO.com examined the possibly of black hole SEO (A phrase I have to be honest I do quite like). According to the blog a ‘black hole site’ is

“A black hole site is created when an tier 1 authority site ceases to link out to other sites. If a reference is needed, the information is rewritten and a reference page is created within the black hole. All (or virtually all) external links on the site are made nofollow.

The first example of a black hole site was the wikipedia. The internal links formed a network that passed link juice from one page to another allowing obscure articles with no external links to rank number 1 in the SERPs. This #1 ranking begets natural links from external links. When a webizen wants a quick reference, they consult Google and link to one of the top results. This causes more link juice to flow into the black hole and the body’s trust becomes more and more massive over time.

1. Link juice flows in, but it can never escape.
2. External Sites lose link juice at the expense of the black hole.
3. The relative link juice mass of the black hole expands exponentially”

This to me raised an interesting scenario. I am not privy to what happened with the Twitter/Google situation however one thing is clear – that Twitter have indeed created what Quadzilla termed a blackhole. If indeed Google did ‘influence’ this decision it does raise some interesting thoughts of what it could be life moving forward.

One of the fundamental parts of Google’s algorithm is the reliance on linkage to determine relevancy and influence. Search marketeers cottoned onto this fact and subsequently used this to influence the search engine rankings. It was further to this that Google erm… highlighted the use of the nofollow attribute in order to ‘control’ the benefits potential links could pass, and give webmasters a way to control ‘webspam’. Now one may (rightly or wrongly) argue that this is a case of throwing the baby away with the bathwater, however to be honest some degree of moderation was required, and I would suggest used in moderation and in the right context (such as the one Matt Cutts uses in his nofollow post) is a highly useful tool.

I would though add that the overuse of the nofollow attribute raises a completely different concern. (There is no doubting that sites/services such as Twitter would be nothing without the general public helping raise its profile – and I would suggest many SEO’s have been central to this. However in this context I would suggest there were better ways to control the level of webspam and exploitation.) What would happen if nofollow became a standard tactic, and webmasters decided to hoard internal weighting to themselves. This potentially could have a similar effect to that of paid linkage – in terms of the inbalance created by this lack of linkage between sites. Many websites are already highly guarded regarding ‘leaking’ PR from their websites, utilising advanced redirects aimed at minimising PR loss, and subsequently influencing relevancy as a result, by not giving credit where credit is due.

Surely there is a possibility this sort of activity influences relevancy as much as paid links do?

I can’t help but feel that whilst nofollow has been effective in controlling linkspam, there is a limited timespan to the reliance on this to manage linkage. Obtaining prominent rankings within organic search results is a fundamental part of many organisations marketing campaigns, and whilst this commercial interest in natural search remains, there will be a ‘pushing’ (and stepping over) of the mark (or testing of the boundaries), in order to obtain these key commercial wins.

[ This post from Peter Young's blog contains only his personal opinions. ]

John Hill over at E-Gain New Media sent me a link to these files he found in the robots.txt file for Google.com

http://www.google.com/jsky
http://www.google.com/linux
http://www.google.com/microsoft

and of particular interest

http://www.google.com/unclesam

This got me trying a number of other iterations, with http://www.google.com/google bringing back some rather ‘different’ results

Taken from www.google.com/google

Any other intesting snapshots out there?