A Change of Scenery
I love England and have yet to find a better country than Old Blighty in my travels, but it’s always nice to get a change of scenery once in a while. I’ve therefore decided to move over to the US for a bit, to help Tony with the expansion of Ayima US. Having already visited Raleigh in North Carolina several times, I’m really looking forward to the new challenge.
Ayima US has already built a strong customer base and revenue stream, which we’re now looking to expand and build upon. With New York just an hour away and good connections from RDU to the West coast, I’m also looking forward to taking a more active role in US conferences and meet-ups once again.
This is not a permanent move and I’ll be travelling back to the UK regularly, with the next trip back planned for Think Visibility in September.
If you’re an SEO based in North Carolina, I look forward to meeting you at some stage (if there isn’t already such a gathering, expect LondonSEO.org to make an appearance in Raleigh 
). Also if you work for a medium-to-large sized company based in the US, feel free to contact me if you’re interested in becoming a client of Ayima.
New Q&A Site: Search Marketing Talk
I noticed some time ago that there’s no simple way to get answers to marketing questions online any more. Forums have become bloated with random chatter and social cliques and news sites are one-way conversations. I wanted to bring back signal with as little noise as possible and I see Yahoo Answers as the closest model to achieving this.
I would therefore like to introduce you all to Search Marketing Talk, a Q&A website for your SEO, PPC, Social, Domainer, Affiliate, Development and Analytics needs. To summarise:
- Ask and answer any on-topic question for free
- Vote questions and answers up and down
- The person who asks the question can choose the best answer
- Earn points for answering questions and extra points for giving the best answer
- The more points you earn, the more exposure you get
- Gain business referrals by being seen as the expert in your niche – promo yourself in your profile
The main rules are:
- No self-promo in questions or answers
- No link dropping – that’s what your profile is for
- No being a dick
I hope you find it useful and I appreciate any help in spreading the word via Twitter, Facebook, Email or Carrier Pigeon.
Rob
SEO Consultant Job
Ayima is in the final stages of hiring its next SEO Consultant, to join our unbeatable team of experts. If you’d like to join the growing Ayima family, we’d love to hear from you. So if you’re currently a freelance, agency or in-house SEO looking to work on some of the world’s biggest SEO accounts, drop us an email with your CV as soon as you can!
===== UPDATE =====
This role has now been filled. For other SEO Consultancy Jobs, check out SEOGadget.co.uk
Gaining SEO Value From Your Affiliates
Overview
Recessions are a time for belt-tightening within companies and most in-house SEOs have probably already been approached by their CMO / Marketing Director, asking for ways to cut costs and make better use of existing resources. There’s only so-many pages you can tweak or site architecture issues you can fix before SEO comes down to one thing – links.
Links are costly, whether you buy them, ask for them or bait them – time is money and links take up valuable time and resources. If your company is like the many that I’ve worked with, you’re probably already attracting links in the form of display advertising and affiliate links, but these add nothing to your site’s authority or rankings. Ad tracking systems such as Doubleclick block search engines from following their links and most affiliate systems and providers send crawlers through a slurry of ugly redirects. read more…
Ayima Launches In America
As I write to you from my hotel room in Australia, I can’t help but reflect on how crazy the last few months have been. The week before MJ, Mike, Jane and I flew out for SMX Sydney, our long time friend Tony Spencer came to visit the Ayima office. After a number of chats with the corporate Mikes, Tony agreed to join the Ayima family and launch our new US office. I’ve known Tony since SES San Jose 2006, chatting in-between the dozens of Tequila shots that Ekky plied me with in an effort to recruit me into PartyGaming. It’s a fantastically exciting move for our company and I’m really looking forward to working with him again after our time at PG.
I’m so proud of what Ayima has achieved in such a short time, having some of the UK’s largest companies on our client list after just 2 years in business. It just goes to show what happens when you have a solid strategy and proven results in the toughest of markets. I’m positive that our US operation will be as successful, probably more so, as our UK business.
It was also great to visit Australia for the first time, I’ve met some wonderful people and caught up with old industry friends. Congratulations to Barry, Lisa and Dave for making SMX Sydney a must-attend event in the conference calendar, which rivalled and in many ways outpaced a lot of the major US conferences.
Running dozens/hundreds of websites can be an expensive business, hosting alone can cost upwards of $250 a year for each site. SEOs will often look to host each website on a different IP range or in a totally different country. You may want to host country-specific sites in their target country, but not want to have to replicate your CMS or custom platform on every hosting server. A slightly darker reason for spreading your sites across different hosts would be to manage micro-sites that appear independent and use them to point link juice into your website.
read more…
Should You Be Ranking For [SEO]?
Do you rank for the term [seo]? If not, why not?
I used to hear this question from prospective clients around 3 years ago whilst heading up the SEO department at a London based marketing agency. The question was usually asked by SMEs, in the belief that either Google recommended the agencies in the top 10, or that a #1 ranking for [seo] meant that their website could also get a #1 ranking for a completely different search term with ease. This myth was happily spread by those already ranking for term, many of which were using very dubious link acquisition tactics to keep their sites on the first page at the time (and most have since dropped).
read more…
Ask The Monkey Something…
OK, so I haven’t posted anything since the end of last year. After getting de-listed from the TopRank Big List for not posting enough and getting taunted by esrun (who now has more visitors to his blog than me), I’ve decided to try and make more of an effort.
I do have an excuse for not blogging recently though… almost everything SEO related boils down to either client work or affiliate projects for me – neither of which I can really talk about.
So, I’m going to put an offer out on the table – if you have an Internet Marketing question or problem and don’t mind it being discussed publicly, send me an email and I’ll try to help you out by posting up a solution on this blog. I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer everyone (and don’t expect me to do a full site audit for you), although I’ll try to get through as many interesting topics as possible. If you’re after the darker stuff, I can withold your domains if requested.
If you need a guaranteed answer to a question, I can highly recommend the SEOmoz Pro Membership.
Taking Advantage of Offline Advertising
I love those “full service ad agencies” that try to specialise in everything and excel at nothing. My favourite are those that try to embrace online marketing/conversion through offline advertising and getting it oh-so-wrong. As an affiliate, these lapses in judgement can become a big money maker if used and abused correctly.
Have you ever seen an advert for an online product/service on a train, tube, bus or plane that hardly even mentions the web address? As I now live in the sunny beach resort of Southend, I travel for 50 minutes into London each day, surrounded by advertising that everyone ends up reading (it’s the only way to avoid eye contact and social interaction on public transport). I then travel for a further 5-10 minutes into Farringdon on the Underground, where the Ayima office is based. In the train carriages, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the ad posters are looking for people to convert online. This makes sense as 99.999% of people travelling into/out-of London will use the internet regularly and most likely go online within minutes of leaving the train, at either work or home.
The part that the ad agencies get wrong, is the emphasis on brand and slogans over URLs and contact details. They take for granted that the brand they’re promoting has a strong SEO and PPC presence, as a badly constructed ad will result in people Googling the slogan or brand, rather than recognising and responding to the URL. If an affiliate notices an offline ad early enough and reacts to it immediately, big money can be made.
In the UK, many slogans and marketing messages aren’t trademarked as they’re too generic or it’s seen as a waste of budget. This leaves affiliates open to use them for their own means. Is the slogan and brand variations registered as a domain? How many links does the brand have with these phrases in the anchor text? How many links with the right anchor text would it take to compete with the brand for their own brand terms and marketing messages?
If Acme Co. created a “widget” and then launched an offline marketing campaign of “got widgets?” and a discrete web address of www.acme.com/widgets, imagine how many searches there would be for “got widgets”! Imagine if you got in early and registered gotwidgets.com (or any other gTLD) and then set-up an affiliate site on that domain to sell Acme Co’s products. If you bought enough links with the right anchor text in, you could easily outrank the main brand site and also get direct traffic thanks to Acme Co’s ad agency spending $$$’s promoting the term that you rank #1 for. You’d be surprised how well it can work and how many ad agencies are continuously getting it wrong.
Can’t wait for your new domain to rank naturally? I usually do a nice PPC campaign for their brand terms during the weekend until I get good listings. Because commuters will recognise the slogan in your domain, you’ll get massive clickthrough and conversion rates.
You may find this a little sketchy on the legal side of things though, so make sure you consult a lawyer before using any of these ideas.
I’ve been moaning to people about this for a while, although as it still hasn’t been fixed I thought I’d shout a bit louder.
I’ve recently bought a house in mighty Essex and currently pondering over whether to buy a car or not (I never needed one when living in Central London). As a result, I’ve been running searches for terms like [mortgages] and [cars]. For both of these terms, Google Universal kicks in and displays news results, which is totally understandable. What I don’t get is why they insist on showing US news for searches that clearly require domestic information.
Google already knows that if I’m searching for these terms, I’m only going to be interested in information relevant to me – so why bother showing me stuff that I’m never going to click on? I don’t want news about Bush screwing up the US economy even further, or that the Hummer now comes in Lavender Blue. I do want to know what’s happening to the Bank of England base rate and that I should hold off from buying a Mini until a new model is released in the UK next year.
Please stop showing me news results from New York Times or Wall Street Journal; I’m on a UK IP address, with a en-GB browser and searching via Google.co.uk – why on earth would these sources be of interest to me on these terms? It’s understandable for terms such as [poker], where global news is more relevant, but at least stick in a filter that thinks before it sticks “Paulson Says Housing Woes to Worsen” on the first page of UK mortgage results.
