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

First of all welcome back to the Just Search Labs Blog.  After our summer holidays we are back with a few new authors covering a slightly wider range of subjects, to start it’s SEO to ease us back into the swing of things.

An area of websites that often have a high level of duplication are product pages, and as we know duplicating other people’s content will have a negative effect on that page’s ability to rank in the search engines.

Often SEO’s concentrate on checking that home pages, category pages and blog content is unique but often forget about product pages, in the case of ecommerce sites product pages make up the majority of the content in the site.

A problem faced by site owners is often a product comes with written technical specification or ingredients list written by the supplier / manufacturer. Re-writing content for such information is a large task and often impossible, e.g. how can you re-write an ingredients list?

However there are ways around it here are 5 options that you should consider.

1. Add your own review of the product. This should be placed above the technical specifications. If you might have a large number of product break the task down into 5 products a week, it might take a few months to get all of them written.  This then reduces the effect of duplication so the page is not 100% copied.

   Example Blacks.co.uk – Some of the products have a mini unique description.

   

2. Add customer reviews to the page. Many ecommerce sites to allow user to add their review of the product. This adds in unique content which is free. You can also use an external service to supply the customer reviews of the product although you can’t control what people put. A top tip if using your own system is to edit people’s reviews to get the key phrases mentioned correctly. E.g. “I bought the sat nav as..” would change to “I bought the tomtom 720 as..” don’t change it too much and you might want a disclaimer saying that reviews may be edited to conform to trademark names etc. To get the reviews rolling in use a reward system, 10 reviews get you a £1 off the next purchase on the site.

   Example Play.com – Plenty of reviews even for a new product all written for free.

   
   Read the rest of this entry »

John Campbell

A robots.txt file is a simple, static, file that you can add to your site in order to stop search engines from crawling the content of certain pages or directories. You can even prevent certain user agents from crawling certain areas of you site.

Lets take a real-world example and look at what you would do if you decided to set up a Feedburner feed in place of your normal RSS feed. I won’t go into why you would do this much, other than to say that you get some nice usage statistics. Once you have recoded your blog to issue the Feeburner feed you then need to stop search engines from indexing the old feed. You would then put a robots.txt file in place with the following content.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed
Read the rest of this entry »

Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development