An excellent opportunity has arisen within our Blackpool based office as a Junior SEO Executive / Online Marketer. You will be part of a small but growing team where full training will be provided.

This is an ideal position for a University graduate that looking to get a foot on the ladder. Ideally from a computing based degree though all candidates with a good technical knowledge and a passion for Internet marketing will fit the bill.

Initially the chosen individual will be an all rounder, helping out with the day to day running of the business, dealing with enquires and support calls while you get a feel of the job. Long term the candidate will be trained to be a specialist in whatever area they are strongest in though a link builder would be preferred.

Key skills desired (though not all essential) include:

• Excellent verbal and written English skills.
• Basic Programming knowledge in ASP, ASP.Net, PHP (On-Site SEO will require you to work with or around code).
• A good knowledge HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• General analytic and problem solving skills.
• Driving licence preferred though not essential

Duties will include:

• Dealing with clients and enquiries on a day to day basis, within all areas of the business (SEO, Web Design, and Networking)
• Research of clients and competitors websites, identifying strengths and weaknesses of sites.
• Monthly reporting on key word rankings, links acquired, monthly traffic etc.
• On-Site Ethical SEO including improving and expanding the content and quality of content, Improving navigational architecture, etc
• Link Building / Link Baiting
• Article Writing / SEO Copywriting / Blogging
• Setting up and managing blogs.
• Social Networking
• Managing Pay Per Click campaigns.
• Client meetings, providing face to face feedback on a campaign and identifying areas to improve on with the client.

If you have the skills other potential duties include:

• Documenting and Identifying problems within our Dolphin Management system (ASP driven CMS)
• Improving and expanding the functionality of the CMS
• Designing websites in Photoshop.
• Slicing and coding designs into valid XHTML (both your designs and our current designers)
• Coding designs for Wordpress, Joomla, etc

We don’t expect the applicant to be a master of all the above and training will be given.

Salary is negotiable and based on skills/experience/education, a pay review will be made in 6 months and will reflect your improved skill set. Normal holidays and the hours will be 9-5 Monday - Friday though working hours can be flexible.

Please email a covering letter and CV to jobs@dolphinpromotions.co.uk

The job will be located in our new offices in the centre of town which is close to the main train station and all the main bus routes.

There may also be opportunities for University Students wanting part time work on days off (1 or 2 days a week) and summer vacancies.

No agencies please. No freelancers we do not out-source. The job is strictly based from our offices.

North South Media have been doing an SEO league table over the past few months based on the rankings each company achieves within the search engines. As part of our on going SEO on our own site we have gradually moved up in the table and finally been ranked at No 1 for the UK results and No 2 for the International Results. While the league is not official or even that serious it is nice to be identified as one of the top SEO companies in the UK. Congratulations to Hobo Web and Just Searching for achieving No 1 in the Scottish and International results.

Regional results as follows:

UK National results as follows:

International results as follows:

I’m easing myself into work by doing a couple of blog posts before I start work on our clients! Along with neglecting blogging have have neglected reading Sphinn and other blogs recently. One of the Sphinn topics I noticed was by Copy Brighter on SEO techniques Google has smashed in 2007. One of the reasons I like posts like this is because I see so many SEO companies still practicing these techniques or advising their clients to use them. I have no doubt many of these companies will continue using the techniques throughout 2008 and onwards. One of the key jobs as an SEO is to actively read Blogs, Forums and other information sites in order to keep on top of the regular changes search engines make to their algorithms/rules. While it is impossible to know the exact Google algorithm it is often publicly announced when Google make an important change. Some of these changes include:

1. Reciprocal linking. This is an out of date technique still widely used by many SEO companies and webmasters and it is important to realise that it is no longer a valid technique. In May of 2007 Realtors who relied heavily on reciprocal links were hit with a -30 penalty from Google, severely harming their business. If really need to do a reciprocal link it is best not to use a links page but to embed the link within an article or news item, this makes the link look more natural. Google also say it’s the excessive reciprocal linking that is not allowed, so swapping links with select sites that have a good authority within your industry should be fine.
2. The “site: *** -sljktf” command (to show the supplemental index results). It used to be common practice to check which WebPages were in the supplemental index, as it would identify which pages needed some extra work doing to them. However Google has now merged all the pages into the regular index making it harder to identify which pages are under-performing.
3. Directory Links. Another outdated technique still widely used. During 2007 Google hit many directories with a reduction in Page Rank. Sites using the directories should not be directly affected / penalised but have the value of the links from the directories reduced.
4. Sponsored blog post networks. Google made quite a controversial move in 2007 when they penalised Bloggers who accepted payments to provide blog posts about websites, products, services and companies. Many websites had their Page Rank completely stripped away and has upset many Bloggers that generate some extra money from their Blog.
5. Paid for links / Sponsored Links. Similar to the Sponsored Blog posts Google hit many sites that sold link placements on their site. This is due to people trying to increase their Page Rank artificially by paying for links from high PR websites. This is another move that caused much upset as many sites had a big drop in PR, many of the site did not even sell links.
6. Dominating the SERPs with sub domains. Often used as a Reputation Management Technique allowing companies achieve multiple results from several different sub domains. This technique was devalued with Google making it more difficult for each sub domain after the first 2 to good achieve rankings.
7. 10 Blue Links. This is not really a penalty but Google has shifted from provided strictly 10 website search results on page 1 to a mixture of results including Images, Videos, Blog posts and News Items. Google is making a big push towards relevancy and quality of search results making it harder for websites to rank in the top ten. This will mainly effect website with little content and deliberately made for Adsense.

Unfortunately the drink and debauchery has had to come to an end and we are now back at work, though not at full capacity until Monday.

First of all I will apologise for the lack of posts recently, December is a bit of a hectic month at the best of times but we have also taken on 3 new clients, and been looking for new larger offices.

I will be trying to spend a little more time blogging over the next few weeks.

Hopefully we can also have the new offices sorted by the end of this month, but we will be keeping the postal address the same in order to avoid confusion for our clients.

I hope every one had a good break over Christmas and hope we all have a profitable year!

After a previous post regarding Tindall Marsh & Co using our design we are in discussion about resolving the situation. I have spoken to the owner and hopefully the problem will be sorted without too much incident. It would appear the situation occurred due to a rather foolish designer whom has now left the company, and the owner has expressed his apologies. So thank you for the quick resolution.

Ok I am being petty again, but I have decided that I am going to create a page dedicated to all the crap SEO spam emails we get. If I remember correctly another SEO company was listing them on their own site, so if anyone remembers the site let me know and I will give them some link love for the idea.

My main reason behind this is because it is funny how stupid SEOs make themselves look when they spam other SEOs with SEO services. I assume they are automated requests so I guess they can’t help it, but then using an automated technique is pretty stupid too.

Today WebSearchPR.Com were kind enough to take some time out of their day to send me an email. Apparently my site only has 155 links in Google, and that they used the Google link count because that is the most important.

“A higher number of links will help me achieve far higher rankings on Google.”

Really? Links are important? Why did no one tell me?

Apparently they have achieved excellent results for their clients and they have increased profits for 100’s of their clients.

Strangely enough they do not seem to have any links in Google themselves, Yahoo shows seven and MSN (+link:) shows none. Maybe they should spend more time building their own links rather than spamming other SEO companies.

Ok so I know they are not going to stop spamming but I am still going to moan about it.

Approximately 2 days every month we get an email from this seoedge.com, either through our main email or our contact form. Every single email has been regarding buying links on one of their sites or link exchanges. One email even apologised for disturbing me and they will not do it again!

One of the amusing things I noticed many of the links they were trying to sell is on their own site seoedge.com, apparently it used to be a PR6 but it now appears to be PR0. Guess no one told them selling links is not allowed in Google’s eyes.

If an SEO can not keep up to date with correct practices for their own site what hope do their clients have? I suppose the fact that their SEO packages cost $99 and $199 a month goes to show you get what you pay for. At least they do not guarantee 1000s of top ten listings within X days and they seem quite honest about the service you pay for.

SEO Edge are not the only culprit and they are probably not the worst it is just that I noticed they were repeat offenders.

While this is some what of a pointless rant it is partly due to the fact that companies like this make winning clients more difficult. Certainly in the UK, SEO is still quite an un-developed industry, there is a very mixed bag or good SEOs and awful SEOs with very little in between.

Unfortunately I find that many small firms / SMEs are quite uneducated about the industry and will go to the cheapest SEO possible. I am happy to to lose a potential client to a better SEO or at least a good SEO that undercut me/presented themselves better than me. If you are paying £50 a month and targeting a competitive industry my personal opinion is that the money would be better spent on buying SEOBook and maybe a member ship to SEOMoz and do the SEO yourself. Both them resources will probably make your more skilled at SEO than the SEO company that charges £50 a month for SEO that is way out of date.

If you are considering paying for SEO then no matter how much the company charges I think you should always read up about some of the techniques to avoid, look at the clients the company has had and the results they have achieved. If any of the techniques used on the site look suspicious then it is probably best to stay away from them. Techniques to look out for and avoid include:

1. Micro Sites / Shadow Domains that redirect to the client site. Google mentions using deceptive redirects but I would also avoid a company that uses Micro sites with a keyword rich domain name, keyword rich content and dozens of links back to the client site. It looks rubbish, and it is a bad practice.
2. Does not distinguish between paid for and organic results. You want to be the top ten in Google for No Win No Fee? Yes I can get your site to the top by the end of today. It will cost you £10 a click though and it is called AdWords.
3. Guaranteed rankings, we have all heard it before. You can not guarantee rankings for competitive terms. Yes anyone can guarantee you 100s of top ten rankings but they will be obscure terms no one searches for.
4. Hidden Text through various techniques include NoScript, White on White, CSS visibility:hidden etc. It may get good results for a while, you may see competitors having a great success from it. Sooner or later the site will be penalised and you will lose all rankings. This maybe ok for sites generating short term income from adsense etc but if your business is dependant on your company name, website, etc then I would stay well away from this technique.
5. Excessive duplicate content. Some SEOs may add numerous pages per month to the site. This is quite frequently duplicate content, it probably will not get your site penalised but it is unlikely the pages will get indexed for anything. If the content is scraped from a limit number of sites then the sites the content is scraped off could file a DMCA request and have the content removed from the index.
6. Paid Links. Again the site should not be penalised in the Search Engine Results Pages for using paid links but Google does not like it and most likely will devalue the links and possibly strip away the Page Rank of the site.
7. Reciprocal Linking, it has not been much use for a while, do not even bother with it especially it is obvious too. If the file name is has links or resources in it and there are a 1000 links on the page, it is kind of obvious that the site is using reciprocal links.
8. No FTP/Site access needed. Not really a technique, more a lack of one, but the site needs to be optimised as well as gaining links. If the SEO makes no changes to the site then the results will be limited.

There are many other things to avoid I just listed a few that came to me. There are also loads of good SEOs in the UK but unfortunately a few seem to give the rest of the industry a bad name. I hope as the demand for SEO increases the overall awareness about the techniques that should and should not be used will increase too.

Well it has been a few weeks now since Microsoft opened the Webmaster tools and also made the Link command work again and I have been trying out both of them.

Firstly the Live Search Link commands, this now works by using + in front of the command then the URL you want to check. Therefore instead of link:dolphinpromotions.co.uk it is now +link:dolphinpromotions.co.uk. Joost de Valk pointed out that Live Search appears to obey NoFollows which is pretty useful as Yahoo is quite frustrating when showing all the NoFollow links. It also groups together the sitewide links well and the tool is usable through the API. Overall it is quite good news, it appears to be more accurate than Yahoo and obviously the Google one is not very accurate.

Next up is Live Webmaster, the equivalent to Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo Site Explorer. At the moment I think it is still in Beta, while I could sign in and try to add a site the tool kept creating a validation error. On further research I had to email lswmp@microsoft.com to request my account to be activated. My first thoughts were that it is defiantly more advanced than Site Explorer. Some of the features include:

• Top 5 Pages - Not entirely sure how it evaluates the pages but it assigns a rank to them, it shows the Language, Region, Last Crawled and whether it is blocked.

• Indexed Pages - The total number of indexed pages.

• Profile - You can add your sitemap.xml etc

• Keywords - Check how well a page performs in the search results for the specific keyword

• Top Links From - Top 10 performing outbound links in Live Search.

• Top Links to - Top 10 performing inbound links in Live Search.

While there are more functions than Site Explorer, it definitely seems buggy (it is beta though). The main things I noticed were:

• Rank - Every single page it showed was ranked 5, so I am not sure if this is even working at al.

• Country/Region - All my pages apart from the home page was classed as GB, the homepage is classed as US. Though I presume this is related to which country the majority of users visit. So more people from US have visited the homepage of this blog.

• Indexed Pages - It reports 701 pages for this blog, which is defiantly not accurate, Google reports 190. The +Site command also reports 701 pages.

• Keyword Function - I am not entirely sure what this is supposed to do, the description says “Review how this page performs in search results against specific keywords.” which I would of expected to show me the position of my site in Live. However it just shows a list of my pages, I assume it shows which page performs best compared to the other pages in your site for that keyword, rather than the actually SERPs.

• Validation - Our main site www.dolphinpromotions.co.uk is still HTML 4.01 (We will change it one day!) so when I added the meta validation it created an validation warning due to the forward slash, when I removed this the site failed the validation. Granted the slash doesn’t actually create an error so I could just leave it in, and you can also authenticate the site through and XML file so it is a bit of a moot point, but the site should not really fail authentication because of that.

Overall I think there is plenty of potential there, though to be honest I do not use Site Explorer or Webmaster tools a lot. I find Site Explorer a bit crap and it does not seem to provide much benefit to my sites. Webmaster tools is definitely the best of the bunch but it has been around for quite a while now so hopefully Live will develop plenty of useful feature in the future.

After my investigation into what websites used valid markup I thought it would be interesting to check how accessible some of the sites are based on the W3C WAI Guidelines. In the UK it is, in theory, against the law to not have an accessible website as it discriminates against the Disabled.

Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) does not refer explicitly to website accessibility, but makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities. The DDA applies to anyone providing a service; public, private and voluntary sectors. The Code of Practice: Rights of Access - Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises document published by the government’s Disability Rights Commission to accompany the Act does refer explicitly to websites as one of the “services to the public” which should be considered covered by the Act.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility

While I do not think any Webmasters have been prosecuted for this I do think it is important that certain websites conform to the W3C WAI Guidelines. These would include websites for Universities and the Government.

As a quick, and not very scientific, investigation I have decided to check the Top 20 Universities to see if they conform to the W3C WAI Guidelines. As I am not an Accessibility specialist I am keeping it quite simple, I will be checking the home page of each University and running the automated checks from Watchfire WebXact. Just for reference I will also include the results from the W3C Markup validation from my previous tests.

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*Ok so either Live Writer is useless or I am a moron and can’t do posts with tables very well. I have quickly done screen shots of the info and posted that, if I get some time later I will redo it all*

So my last post was a bit of a rant about my Blog not validating and that I have decided to check some other sites around the Internet to see how popular developing websites with valid markup actually is.

My first lot of checks were Blogs from around the Internet, most of them are listed in Technorti’s Popular Blogs list however I have added several other ones that either I read frequently or I perceive to be quite big.

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