Chris Mann | Search Marketing Specialist, Web Developer

Faster Redirect Mapping with Excel Fuzzy Lookups

14 06 , 2019 No Comments

The mapping of 301 redirects is an essential albeit often time-consuming SEO task. If you fail to compile and deploy a comprehensive redirect map during a site migration, then the results can be nothing short of catastrophic from an organic traffic / visibility perspective.

Working with large enterprise clients, it’s not uncommon for such websites to features tens of thousands of pages. Such page counts can often be further inflated if an organisation operates internationally across numerous territories and provides content in multiple languages.

In this post I’m going to detail how using Microsoft’s Fuzzy Lookup add-in for Excel could save you significant time (and your sanity) when compiling large redirect maps.

Web Performance Glossary

08 07 , 2019 No Comments

Web performance, specifically site speed is critical to the success of a website. A slow website not only reduces usability, but increasingly impacts traffic delivery. From an organic perspective, following the Google “Speed Update” announced in July 2018, site speed is now a confirmed ranking factor. From a PPC perspective, page speed continues to form part of the Google Ads Quality Score.

In order to optimise web performance it is crucial to understand the many abbreviations, definitions and tools available to help achieve this increasingly complex task.

SEO Indexation Control Fundamentals

05 07 , 2019 No Comments

Earlier this week Google announced effective from 1st September, it will no longer observe unsupported and unpublished rules in robots.txt files. One notable example of this is advisory that Google will no longer support inclusion of the noindex directive within a robots.txt file. Google advised the decision to discontinue support of such unsupported and unpublished rules was to maintain a “healthy ecosystem” and prepare for potential future open source releases ahead of the open-sourcing of Google’s production robots.txt parser.

In this post I’m going to explore alternative more optimal indexation control methods and more crucially which methods are best suited to specific scenarios.

SEO Forecasting…The Holy Grail

30 06 , 2019 No Comments

I’m going to be completely upfront; this post isn’t going to provide you with a 100% guaranteed method for estimating your organic gains. So why continue reading? What this post is going to do is arm you with the knowledge as to why SEO forecasting is inherently difficult and the potential hurdles which await you. This knowledge will enable you to better navigate such difficulties and detail respective caveats to include alongside your forecast.

How to Start Ranking in China with Baidu

28 06 , 2019 No Comments

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. It is estimated, Baidu currently has a 65% share of the search engine market in China. The other two major search engines in the market are Haosou formally known as 360 and Sogou.

For any organisation wishing to target the Chinese market, optimising for Baidu is a necessity. While it’s important to keep Haosou and Sogou in mind as well, both are relatively new search engines that have only recently emerged in the Chinese market.