A couple of weeks ago we were invited along to celebrate the launch of the bag designed  by fashion blogger Emily Johnston of Fashion Fois Gras, in collaboration with leading American luxury brand Coach. It's interesting to see such a huge shift in the industry with brands increasingly not just keeping an eye on bloggers but collaborating with them. With Bip Ling becoming the new face of Forever 21 and Susie Bubble working on the Topshop 'Edited Project', it was only a matter of time before luxury brands came on board too. The bag has been designed to meet the needs of a busy blogger. The oversized tote has different compartments for a large SLR camera, a spare pair of flat shoes, an IPad and a phone - it's a bloggers dream bag! The event was a huge success with a great turn out (more than 100 people) and it was good to see so many familiar faces and fellow bloggers come to support Emily including Disney Roller Girl, Mademoiselle Robot, and Freak Deluxe . It was also...

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Google's recent decision to remove the ads from the right-hand side of the search results' pages has raised a few eyebrows among the search community. Google maintains that its main consideration is to improve the user experience and relevance of the results page and, at first glance, it would seem that this change is one that actually isn't driven by increasing profits. How could they possibly benefit from shrinking the advertising space from 11 potential clicks to six? Well, firstly, Google isn't doing away with all the ads on the right hand side. The official announcement said: "Ads that have previously shown to the side of the results may in some cases appear below them." We can assume that Google will judge the impact on paid traffic for each keyword, much in the same way that it has assessed the need for a Top three ad box in the first place. If total paid search click-throughs fall drastically for high-volume terms, you can bet your daily budget that the side...

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"It's complicated." I'm sure you've heard that a few times, particularly since Facebook launched. I've heard it a few times in the context of agencies and consultants having difficulties detailing the quality of a site's reputation and the impact of link-building strategies. But if the vast majority of top natural (earned) positions are highly dependent on the quality and diversity of inbound links and social signals then surely it's a difficulty worth overcoming? And, thinking about it, surely it can't really be that complicated? Perhaps it's made complicated because that serves certain interests. I wonder what many clients would think if they were provided with coverage books detailing links secured, the context of those links, the domain authority of the referring sites etc. I wonder what many of those coverage books would look like. I wonder how confident those same clients would be if it was really clear where they were getting links from and how many of...

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The headline might be a bit dramatic but when browsing online a number of sites seem to have increasingly psychic powers, knowing what we want, or at least what we are more likely to want. Search engines, social media sites, news sites, etailers... everybody's at it and with good reason. Search engines The search engines are always striving to provide the results that we will want to click on. This is both to provide the best possible user experience possible and also to generate more revenue if that click happens to be on a paid search result. Google personalised search is an effort to improve relevance. Search engines provide personalised search results by collecting data on our usage and behaviour as well as many other factors such as our location and the device we're searching on. Social media sites Social media sites guess what we're searching for, who we might want to connect to, who we're going to want to chat to and see updates from etc....

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Halloween is just around the corner and Google has unleashed another scary Quality Score update. Or has it? This month, Google announced an update to its ads quality algorithm that increases the weight given to landing page relevance and quality in determining quality score and paid search rankings. This move is preceded by testing in Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Then and Now: Before this change, landing page quality was included in quality score but was only viewed as a negative factor. This meant that if you were running poor quality landing pages you might expect to see a low quality score (QS) or that you could see your landing pages rejected altogether. Either way, having a fantastically relevant, unique and authentic landing page would have had no positive impact on QS. Now, landing page quality will have a more positive impact on QS weighting it more strongly versus the usual factors of Click Through Rate and Keyword Relevancy. What Does It...

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It's been two weeks since I spoke about search marketing at the ABTA Travel Convention and I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I learned in Palma. We attend the Travel Convention to listen rather than talk (although it was nice to be invited to talk too this time) and here are three areas that got me wound up: There are far too many senior people that continue to talk about 'online' as if it's something new. In their defence, some people only just seem to be getting used to computers, nevermind the web. I met one delegate who told me his company had only just (last year) implemented a computerised booking system.  I can't say I'm too surprised by this, particularly when it comes to some of the smaller agents. But I was amazed to hear some senior people from big organisations talking about 'online' as if it's a recent thing. I heard a couple of people talk about prioritising the online opportunity as if this put them ahead of the curve. The truth is that for...

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We've had a number of interesting conversations with both clients and potential clients recently about how to maximise sales through international SEO.   So here's an attempt to massively simplify what is a complex area that can make or break a business! Assuming that you already have an English language .com site, there are a number of things that you need to consider before making the international plunge, outside of the extremely obvious such as the appeal of your products to an international audience.   If you're a retail business, then you'll need to consider: Whether the size of your business and the potential opportunity justifies a local language site Changes probably required to your customer database to take into account international addresses Local hosting of foreign language sites Whether you have or need an in-market sales/marketing team and whether you work to a centralised search strategy Multi-lingual customer service queries Consistency of...

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Last week, Google started serving up a new (massive) version of organic site links. Site links are the extra links that you can see beneath search listings in Google SERPs and they're there to provide shortcuts that help people quickly find the information that they're looking for. Site links in one form or another are now commonplace in both paid and natural search results. So far, these 'jumbo' site links are only appearing against branded searches, where Google is pretty certain that the searcher is looking for that site. Whether you're a brand owner, interested in protecting high converting brand traffic, or a reseller that relies on traffic from your product brand terms, it's important to take notice of this change, which has the potential to significantly impact your traffic from natural and paid search. Are they relevant or are they the ones that you want? The first thing to check is whether you're lucky enough to have the new site links enabled. If you are...

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We've had three weeks or so now to get used to Google's latest foray into the world of travel - Google Hotel Finder and it feels like a good time to reflect on what it could mean for the hotel industry. What is it? Google Places started out as Google Local in September 2004, which was then combined with Google Maps when that went live five months later. Listings started out as three local business listings and a map for queries that included a location, expanding to ten (the “10 pack”) in January 2008 (finally becoming the “7 pack” in October 2009). The renamed “Places” went live in June 2009, with individual Place Pages for Google Maps rolling out in the following September. This update also expanded the Places listings to include not only businesses but transport networks, landmarks and importantly, hotels. The expanded interface for registered users meant opportunities for optimising their listing with categories (i.e. keywords) and service...

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Working as a PR consultant in a SEO agency, I get sent requests from journalists on a daily basis. These requests for stories, products or just general information can often result in fantastic (linked) coverage for our clients on high-profile websites such as Handbag.com and Guardian.co.uk but recently I've noticed more and more requests coming in from, shall we say, less traditional media outlets... Retailers! In the past few weeks alone, I've spotted Boden seeking contributions for its 'new community blog' and Dune looking for 'fabulous products, across all luxury lifestyle sectors for placement in the Dune Loves grid'. It's refreshing to see - because at long last it means that fashion retailers are recognising that in such competitive online selling spaces, product alone is simply not enough to bring traffic to your website, engage shoppers and convince them to buy. Product alone won't keep them coming back either. But quality content will. Take a look at...

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