SEO vacancy advertised in a robots.txt file

Where better to put a job advert for an SEO position?

The SEO Rapper

The SEO Rapper teaches us how good design improves rankings and consequently conversions.

Did you ever imagine you'd hear the lines

"do your layout with divs make sure that it's aligned
please don't use tables even though they work fine"

 or

"when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker"

in a rap song?  If you enjoy absorbing SEO information through the format of rap then you can also try his other masterpiece Pagerank or perhaps his battle with the PPC MC


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The 'Reasonable Surfer' patent

Google's recent patent, dubbed the 'Reasonable Surfer' is making the SEO community re-evaluate the way internal and external linking is carried out on a site.

For more information see SEO by the Sea and SearchEngineLand

insurethebox on YouTube

Optimising for the most popular video platforms on the web is more about social networking rather than traditional SEO.   YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion have the largest share of this market with 82%, 9% and 4% respectively.

I'll be using insurethebox's videos to illustrate where improvements can be made and where the optimisation is working well.

insurethebox | Fitting the Box

The first things to consider are the standard SEO factors of title, description and tags.  insurethebox are a car insurance company selling a more hi-tech type of insurance policy which involves fitting a telematics box in each car which through the use of GPS and accelerometers can record how far you drive and how well you drive.  The title in this case should read something along the lines of

"insurethebox car insurance | Fitting the Box"

The description should ideally be 2 or 3 sentences, roughly 20 words and the tags should include somewhere between 5 to 10 words.

insurethebox | Fitting the Box

After title, description and tags, the next most important aspect of ranking well on YouTube involves all of the social media factors such as likes/dislikes, views, shares, subscribers, embeds and comments.  This video has 13 comments and nearly 9,000 views which will  help with the rankings on YouTube and also in the Google search engine.

insurethebox | Miles

This video has no description or tags, but does have 3 likes and nearly 7,000 views.  With a more optimised title and added description tags, it would probably become the company's most popular video on YouTube.

Driver of the Year 2011 at Rockingham | insurethebox

This video, despite being the most visually exciting that insurethebox have posted on YouTube, only has 240 views, however overall their YouTube channel has approaching 30,000 views across all the videos which means using YouTube they have reached out to a large number of potential customers.

Over the next few weeks Fuse will be working on the video optimisation to see how we can further promote and improve the optimisation on these videos and future videos in the pipeline.  We'll keep you updated.


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Google's Webspam Team is Run by Stick Men

Matt Cutts asked his followers on Google+ to suggest what he should wear for his halloween costume.  One follower suggested the black hat stick man from xkcd. 

Google Analytics in Real Time

How can you not be impressed with Google's real time analytics

A truly staggering free offering from Google

Google algorithm update affects 35% or websites

Google announced "a significant improvement" to their ranking algorithm at the weekend.  They predict the change will affect 35% of websites.  The aim of this latest change, currently known as Google Freshness,' is to determine when to serve up 'fresh' search results for users who are looking for information on hot topics or recent events and when to present older results where they are more relevant to the users search query.

The change appears to give more weight to pages with recent timestamps. This means website owners would be well advised to re-visit the frequency of blog posts and how rss feeds are syndicated.

For more information watch Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz discussing the change with Mike King from iPullRank.