Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

The Google Analytics Individual Qualification was set up in March 2009 as a similar program to the Advertising Professionals Programme for Google Adwords. It also gave the chance for companies to become Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, currently 11 companies in the UK have this status. This bank holiday weekend with the weather being awful I set about passing the exam in one afternoon.

To start off with my level of knowledge of Googe Analytics is pretty good to start with, I know about tracking code, installing goals, filters and profiles set up. I thought there was room to improve and around 15% of the material for the test was new to me.

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John Campbell

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

There are many different types of microformat such as hCard, RDFa, eRDF. A simple hCard information is added through classes in span tags. For example:

hCard

<span class="tel">
<span class="type">phone</span>:
<span class="value">01234 56789</span>
</span>

Would create telephone information on a business website say. Read the rest of this entry »

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development

There have been problems with the UK serp results for a couple of months now and most people have already heard about it. As an SEO it can be a nightmare, it’s an easy way out of a situation to blame a website that is not performing on Google changing their algorithm. I also think its a very poor excuse and should never be used to a client. The whole job of an SEO is to be abreast of changes on the clients behalf making and suggesting changes as and when.

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Gary