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:

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.

Ok it has been a long day and I am tired so I may be chatting rubbish, however I was just checking some stats for some clients when I did a search for the term liquidation. The number of results it returned was 3,280,000, I took a screen print of it incase I am actually spelling it wrong or something equally stupid.

Now I made a post on the 10 of October with some of the SEO Results we had recently achieved for some sites. At that time the search term Liquidation returned 29,100,000 results. Er so what happened to the other 25,820,000.

I am not going to do any more screen shots because I am too lazy but some quick comparisons of numbers that are showing for me now.

I presume this is just a glitch in Google’s information though a few my keywords have jumped from page 2 to page 1. Again I can not be bothered looking into detail if all my sites have been affected and I am sure everything will be back to normal by tomorrow!

NorthSouthMedia have released the results from this months SEO league table. Dolphin Promotions has maintained it’s position at No.3 for the International results but has climbed up from No.7 to No.3 for the National results. This month Paul from NSM added PR/Alexa info to the list, while they don’t mean anything to the positions on the table, nor to the rankings themselves, it does provide an interesting comparison of all the sites.

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