Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

One of the features of the SEO industry I enjoy the most is that it’s different from one day to the next with lots of changes on a weekly basis. At Just Search it’s essential that we stay on top of what’s changing in SEO, online marketing and general web marketing to ensure we deliver exciting new ideas to clients. So how does a company with lots of employees stay up to date? Here’s a few tools and ideas we use.

Google Reader

I can’t praise this product enough. It’s pretty simple which is often the case with great products and ideas. All your blog and news RSS feeds go into Google Reader, each posts has a status of read / unread that way you don’t miss a post from your favourite blog.

I currently have 103 subscriptions which is around 1,693 new items a month. We also have a system so you can “share” a post, all the shared posts from multiple colleagues go into one feed know as the Best Of Feed.

Twitter

Follow each other and follow some of the industry heavy hitters. This is something we need to improve upon sharing and comparing the people we follow. Read the rest of this entry »

John Campbell

If you run a business you’ll know how important it is to be able to access critical systems 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This is why having a Blackbury or iPhone is essential for any modern day business. You can receive emails, check orders and stock all via you phone.  Can the same be achieved with SEO and if so what iPhone plugins will you need?

1. Email – In conjunction with Google Alerts
The e-mail app on th iPhone is great, it’s easy to read e-mails, sync with your e-mail account and write the odd short e-mail. Being able to have emails 24/7 means you can reply to link requests, e-mail your content supplier or developer at any time. If your using Google alearts to check inbound links and brand mentions you’ll get them all into inbox.

2. Wordpress App
If you have a blog on your site then it’s most likely going to be WordPress, being able to add new posts or pages and moderate comments on the go makes blogging slightly easier. You’ll often find yourself on the bus, train or waiting for an appointment, this ‘dead time’ can be used to add content to your site. The WordPress app for the iPhone lets you add posts and pages with pictures and moderate comments too. It also features to autosave, so if you get a call your post will be saved locally.

Read the rest of this entry »

John Campbell

One of the problems we see often with ecommerce sites is a less than ideal URL structure.  As ecommerce sites are mostly generated by creating pages from templates and populating these pages with information from the database, they need to have parameters to find the information they need. For example, the two parameters might be product category ID and a product ID.

You might end up with a URL such as: Read the rest of this entry »

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development

Just a quick blog to follow on from Sir Pumpkin Longshanks’ post about Microformats. Google have now released a neat tool to preview what pages with microformats will look like in the search engine rankings, these results are know as rich snippets.

So if you have changed your output html to include microformat you can have a sneak preview. If this works correctly you should see an increased click through rate from the result as the search result will be more enticing for the user to click on.  But it could have the opposite effect for example if you searches for what company I worked for and my Linkedin  profile page may be displayed.

Now, there is no need for you to click on the result as the rich snippet displays the company I work at. This then could apply for other information that could be included in microcards such as telephone numbers, locations etc.  Overall the click through rates and visits would drop.

Head over to the new tool to have a play and find out more about adding them to your site with the documentation about rich snippets.

John Campbell