A few days ago Google announced a major change to its search results for local based search queries. Google have now decided to integrate the local results into the main organic search results. This change emphasizes Google’s stance on local search, they have even stated that more than 20% of all searches on their search engines are related to location
The below screenshot shows a current local results in Google UK for the search term ‘dentists in Manchester’

Here you can see the following changes

1. Only two Organic listings at the top
2. …

Link building is the dark art of search engine optimisation, without the right types of links your site will struggle to compete especially in competitive markets. The difficult tasks is discovering what type and how many links you need, to achieve this you will need to analyse your competitors link profile.
The first thing to note, is that there are many types of links including:

Blog Comments
Directory Submissions
Article Submissions – Writing unique articles for links using services such as ezinearticles, articlebase.com etc
High PR links – Links with high Page Rank
Authority links – …

On the 8th of September Google announced a new update to the way they display their SERP results called ‘Google Instant’. As you are all probably aware Google instant will try to predict your keyword search be predicting what you are searching for, as you type more letters into the search box the search results will change.
The whole new update is all about giving users results quickly. It seems speed is something that Google has been working on heavily in recent times, first they introduce the site performance tool in …

Obtaining quality back links is a key factor in your sites rankings in the search engines. There are many ways to obtain back links to your site to improve your rankings, they include:
Directory Submissions – Submission to relevant directories
Press Releases – Press releases of your products and services
Article Submissions – Writing relevant articles and submitting them to high quality article sites
Guest Posts – Completing guest posts on related sites
Contacts – Utilize your contacts to get some quality links
Authority links – Links from magazines or high PR sites
Blog comments – …

Google Analytics is a great program to track visitors and content to your website, but by default Google Analytics can only track visits on a single domain or sub-domain. There are however many circumstances where you may wish to track visitors, between your main domain and sub-domain, they include:

Shopping Cart – Your shopping cart maybe on a sub-domain, and you may wish to track traffic from your site into your shopping cart in one report profile. You may also want to set up goal tracking and funnels all in one …

I have been using Google Analytics for years and access the software nearly everyday as part of daily job. The Google Analytics package has undertaken many development changes in that time including moving from the urchin tracker to the new asynchronous tracking code that they have recently migrated.
I consider myself to be quite advanced in Google Analytics so therefore decided to take the Google Analytics test, where you have to get over 80% to pass. I went through all the tutorials on the Google Analytics Conversion University to familiarize myself …

The Google Analytics system allows users to view traffic data when a user physically views a particular page on their website. One problem users can have with Google Analytics is that they are unable to track other actions such as flash animations, downloading on PDFs, or the playing of a particular video.
To achieve this you have a choice of two different features in Google Analytics they are:

Virtual Pageviews
Event Tracking

Below I have detailed the different methods of capturing this data within Google Analytics
1. Virtual page views
The first method of tracking such …

Most larger companies will run both a paid and a natural search campaign through Google. Paid search can either be run in house, or if you don’t have the resource or knowledge you can use a search agency. It is however a great idea to run both your PPC and SEO campaigns with the same agency, this way they can use the data within the paid search campaign to aid their natural campaign and vice versa.

One great tool to discover new SEO keywords from your PPC account is the …

Last week I attended Internet World one of the UK’s leading digital marketing event in Earls Court London. I spent two days at the event and spoke to many potential clients including some well known brands, as well as other internet marketing experts, it was great to see what they had to say. It was also interesting to meet and speak to some competitors, and there were many!
Our stand was in a great position and was busy for most of the day which was great. On day three of …

At the end of 2009 Google added advanced filters to Google Analytics. This addition allows users to quickly filter data using a set of parameters, it even supports regular expressions to help you remove lots of irrelevant data quickly. The new filter can be found at the bottom of any content report. Simply drag your mouse to the bottom of the content report and you should see the filtering options (see image below)

This tool makes it easy to filter unwanted data from your content report. It achieves this …