A decade ago, keyword analysis would have meant little to your marketing budget. The internet marketing industry was still a toddler compared to its sophisticated demeanour nowadays, so this tool was not being fully exploited – though it really was a worker at the frontier of the world wide web.

Most people know that when they are search engine optimising their online presence, that keywords are the information that links a website to a search engine results page (serp) – a business to its customer. It is one of the frameworks used by search engines like Google and Bing to decide whether or not to rank a web page in its results. This means that judicious and informed use of keywords can make a business website visible on the internet, or render it invisible if poor choices have been made.

There are a great many tools available for businesses to check out the keywords for their industry and sector. Choice of keywords appears to be based on common sense – for example, a company selling sheepskin boots might use the key terms “sheepskin boots”.

Unfortunately, because there are so many other companies selling sheepskin boots, using this key term might not yield the desired results. Aha – suddenly, the e-commerce landscape becomes more complicated! Still, often businesses can’t work out why they are not achieving high serp rankings and attracting more customers.

It’s important to remember that keywords are just one framework used in an internet marketing campaign to achieve success. They should be chosen to maximise serps and made to work in tandem with other elements, such as link building and pay-per-click (PPC).

An internet marketing agency with the know-how can radically turn around keyword success and raise the profile (visibility) of a website within a short time frame, attracting and driving in quality traffic (paying customers).

The ‘key’ to choosing the best keywords is in analysis and diagnosis. This shouldn’t be a tight-focus appraisal of the specific business or industry, but takes into consideration other essential data. An agency that knows what it’s doing will do a thorough assessment and use this to inform its marketing plan.

Improved keyword choices and their part in the marketing mix guarantee to improve a website’s visibility and encourage a better return on investment, making sure budgets are used to target customers in a way they didn’t do before.

There’s a neat little history of SEO right here, for those of you who are interested, which includes profiles and interviews with the first pioneers of search engine optimisation. There’s another one, this time an overview, here.

By Ehsan Rahmatulla

Yesterday (June 6th) Google made a slight alteration to the way in which it displays search results, by moving the URL up so it sits just beneath the website title tag.





Not everyone can see this yet: Google tends to roll its changes out incrementally – for example, a colleague’s browser is still displaying the link as being right at the bottom of each listing, while I am happily viewing the new layout.

What does this all mean? It may be the search engine’s way to freshen up the page, or an experiment to see if people prefer this layout: this is the company, don’t forget, which tested dozens of different shades of blue on users to gauge which hue would encourage them to click through more than all the rest.

Other small changes include the disappearance of the Cached link and the Similar Pages options. Will we miss these? It might be a case of you need it most when it’s been thrown out!

By Jackie Yeadon


Webmasters can get more help from search engines with the launch of a new collaborative initiative, schema.org.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! have joined together to create Schema. In long-hand, it is a “common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages”.

To ordinary people this means that Schema, a project led by the major search engines, will improve the information search engines process by getting webmasters to sharpen up their tagging.
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