Scroogled?

by Tom Peary Blog SEO

In the news today we see one of the largest public attacks on Google from failing search engine Bing. Although Bing is a great search engine it’s always going to be difficult for Microsoft to take on the search engine giant. But their recent public slag off that Google Shopping has been corrupted by paid for results is a pretty big one.

Scroogled or not by Google Shopping?

In the beginning, Google preached, “Don’t be evil“—but that changed on May 31, 2012. That’s when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads.

In their under-the-radar announcement, Google admits they’ve now built “a purely commercial model” that delivers listings ranked by “bid price.” Google Shopping is nothing more than a list of targeted ads that unsuspecting customers assume are search results. They call these “Product Listing Ads” a “truly great search.”

We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled. For an honest search.

The truth about Scroogle and Google Shopping paid ads

Yes Google announced in May 2012 that U.S shopping feeds would not be shown within the search results unless you paid for it. That was always going to happen, I don’t think it’s a good thing for the user but for Google, hell wouldn’t you? I prefer the old way it was organic, and honest results. If I wanted to get you to find my diet drug I could now simply pay for it to appear in any low grate, low competitive category for $100 per month. So there are some pretty obvious downsides and things that should be monitored to prevent this kind of misuse.

But this new paid for ad ruling is only in the U.S

Free Google Shopping listings in the U.K

We have thousands of live product items that we optimize our clients for, who are appearing on the first page right now. We can’t disclose this on our blog but if you get in touch we’ll give you more details and live examples.

Media Spin

The media has put a completely onesided spin on this story, it’s not always as black and white as you think.

After thought

I do feel this new direction Google have taken will continue to manifest in to other areas and countries. Whether it works or not is another thing, and whether they keep to this new format well, only time will tell.

For UK businesses wanting to monetize from Google Shopping, what are you waiting for? Do it before you have to pay per click.

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Approved SEO

by Tom Peary Blog

If I can pass on just one piece of advice to anyone looking to find an approved SEO company is this.

Ask for recent evidence of their work.

You ideally want to see searches of a competitive nature and or if possible within the same industry sector as yours.

1.) Can you speak to your account manager on a daily basis?

2.) Is your account manager an SEO expert or just a salesperson?

3,)Ask for explanations in English, cut off the geek talk.

Google Approved SEO

Actually there is no such thing really. Google don’t promote any SEO companies but they do offer simple guidelines for SEO’s to follow. Now this is where we do come in to ‘Google Approved SEO’. We don’t bend the rules, no grey areas as far as we are concerned. If it can’t be done ethically and through whitehat SEO techniques then we aren’t interested. But we’ve never missed a deadline or failed to hit a first page result in 8 years. You can talk all the bull you want in this industry but when the chips are down it’s purely who can deliver real results.

We’re not the only UK SEO you’ll come across who can deliver amazing results on Google organic search, but pound for pound you won’t find any that come close. Our closest competitor has over 100 employees in London and a huge turnover. Yet week on week we compete with their clients results. The difference with us is that we’re a small SEO firm, but we’re bad ass at it. No huge overheads, we’re based in Newcastle where it’s 1972 compared to London rates. Only last week I paid for a computer with coal 😉

If you are looking for a fast and effective way to double and triple your business then contact Tom and SEO 21 now.” – Mike Squirrell Harleystreetphysiotherapy.com

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Yell.com no more say hello to Hibu?

by Tom Peary Blog SEO

Okay so we’re not the biggest fans of ageing dinosaurs such as Yell.com who’s exorbitant prices to feature somewhere that no one looks for a postage stamp sized add on the back end of a search facility that takes more time to use than reading this introduction….

Ahh and breathe!

So I heard this week that Yell.com is no more and they are re-branding to Hibu, WOW! I am no branding specialist but as far as names go this isn’t exactly pretty is it. Wasn’t Hibu the name of Aladdin’s monkey? Not sure about that one anyway.

“They think it’s all over – it is now!”

Whether you love Yell or not I think this is a pretty important moment in local marketing history.

It’s the moment that old school directories that boasted huge profits for years and years before the internet boom  finally admit it’s over.

I am really more surprised they’ve left it so long. Ifg they’d adapted to Search Engine Marketing years ago and not just waiting until there was no other option it would look more credible.

So no doubt many of you will be pestered by the minions of this fresh face new kid on the block, armed to the teeth with buzz words to juice you up in to buying more stuff that doesn’t work.

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Unlimited Website Hosting £5 p/m

by Tom Peary Blog SEO

If our recent posts about making sure your website is hosted securely and running fast enough hasn’t been the wake up call you need then hopefully this will be.

Website Hosting Comparisons

1&1 Business £9.99 p/m

  • Webspace: Unlimited
  • Monthly Traffic Allowance: Unlimited
  • Platform: Linux
  • Email accounts: Unlimited
  • MySQL Databases: Unlimited
  • Dedicated SSL Certificate: Included

SEO21 Unlimited £5.80 p/m

  • Webspace: Unlimited
  • Monthly Traffic Allowance: Unlimited
  • Platform: Linux
  • Email accounts: Unlimited
  • MySQL Databases: Unlimited
  • Dedicated SSL Certificate: Included
Not only are we almost 50% cheaper than 1&1 – we monitor our server traffic, loads and have staff onsite to maintain and repair at all times.

How does reliable website hosting help my SEO results

If your foundations aren’t solid then your search engine rankings are likely going to follow the same trend. Google more than ever wants to see people taking more ownership and responsibility for where they host they website/blog. If your site has been down mor than twice in a month and Google bot has crawled your site at that time then you might start to see your rankings suffer. We did a post on this recently see ‘Is my website hosting secure?‘

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Is your website hosting secure?

by Tom Peary Blog SEO

You may be all over your SEO in terms of quality link building etc but is your hosting looking after your reputation?

A lot of webmasters have reported their sites having been attacked and injected with malware, this is a bigger problem than one might initially thing. Not only because you are putting any user at risk who views your website. But even more importantly your reputation and rankings with Google.

A recent example of this was when a good client of ours had their site attacked. Through no fault of their own and in fact just bad luck. An old version of wordpress which had a vulnerability allowed the hacker to add some malicious script in to the .htaccess file. This then ran commands to create links within pages and even allow them to create hidden folders.

First signs that your site is being penalised for malware

Have your rankings recently dropped, even though you know it’s not down to dodgy back link building?

Then the obvious signs your site has been infected with Malware

‘This site may harm your computer’ – is a pretty clear sign that your site is infected. This by the way is what your site users will see if they try and view your website content.

Eventually if this is not fixed your pages will be removed from the index, after dropping off the top 100 results.

So if it’s not Google Penguin up to his old tricks, then maybe it’s your website hosting that’s letting you down.

More and more research is showing us that reliable hosting plays a big part in SEO success.

One of our Ebay Partner Network sites recently had a fault with a WP plugin we added (we’ve all been there) – Google saw this happen 3 times in 30 days and all of a sudden didn’t want to show us in the results as it had been for 18 months.

So again the simple logic applies: Fix, Optimize for performance and update sitemap in webmaster tools.

Bot crawls will return to as they once were very quickly, just a week or two depending on your domain authority and rankings will get back to normal.

I don’t think enough importance is put on reliable, fast, secure website hosting. But think about it, it’s the foundation of your website, SEO, everything. If that’s a bit rocky and unreliable then why should anyone (namely the Google gods) present you to it’s users as a priority?

 

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

eBay Affiliate Partner Network Approved in 24 hours

by Tom Peary Blog

Just a quick update from my first earlier today.

I have just been sent the email I was hoping for to tell me my eBay affiliate partner account has been activated.

 

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Getting Approved on eBay Affiliate Network

by Tom Peary Blog

I am a little embarrassed that I have never utilised the power of the eBay affiliate network up until now, especially as I am an experienced SEO geek. A friend/colleague recently introduced me to it and it’s earning potentials so I thought yep that sounds good I will give that a try. He had been doing pretty well with regular monthly revenues streaming in from the eBay affiliate network.

eBay Affiliate Network Application Process

For those of you not familiar with it take a minute to check out our post on eBay Affiliate Network Marketing

Applying is pretty straight forward, add your details, website, nature of business etc and submit and then wait for a response to tell you whether you have been accepted or not.

My example site: www.paistecymbals.co.uk

As a drummer I love Paiste Cymbals and wanted to use the power of the eBay Affiliate Network to promote Paiste cymbals, pretty clean site I knocked up in about 2 hours. It’s built in WordPress which is a favourite of mine and I got it indexed in 2 hours from the domain going live – “job’s a gud un” I thought.

Wasn’t spammy, had relevant content on there, at least 10 articles when I posted it (which has changed now)

I also installed statcounter so I could check what eBay looked at when they came to check out my site.

Within 24 hours eBay India had been on and looked at 4 pages for a total of 1 minute 50 seconds.

I was surprised when I received the following email:

 

Thank you for applying to the eBay Partner Network. We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your application at this time.

Like many other affiliate programs, eBay Partner Network has a thorough application vetting process to ensure a good fit between a potential affiliate and the goals of the network. There are a number of reasons why your eBay Partner Network application may have been declined. Some of these include:

  • You are not in compliance with the eBay Partner Network Agreement and/or Code of Conduct.
  • The stated website that you plan to promote us from is non-functioning or inaccessible
  • The quality of your stated website is not in line with our network standards
  • The information you submitted in your application (contact information and your description of how you plan to promote eBay Partner Network) is incomplete or unclear
  • Your business model or stated website does not appear to be one that would attract eBay buyers (the eBay Partner Network does not currently provide commissions for bringing eBay sellers or listings to the site)
  • Your business model involves re-directing traffic directly to eBay from display ad networks or paid search (no longer allowed per our Terms and Conditions)
  • Your business model involves a sub-affiliate model (no longer allowed per our Terms and Conditions)

If you feel that your application deserves a re-review, please provide any additional information that you would like us to reconsider. It is not necessary to submit an additional application with a different email address. Requests that contain no new information about your promotion methods will be reconsidered.

Regards,

The eBay Partner Network Team

I quickly went over the pages that eBay had visited and all of their terms and changed anything that I thought could be affecting my eBay Affiliate account approval and re-submitted.

A little over 50 minutes later I got this response:

Thank you for applying to the eBay Partner Network.

We have re-evaluated your application. We regret to inform you that eBay Partner Network cannot accept your application at this time.

Our application review process is updated on an as needed basis and may differ among programs. For security reasons, we do not reveal our exact criteria for accepting affiliates into each program.

Based on the details you have provided, we did not find any substantial changes to your application; therefore, you cannot be accepted at this time.

If in the future, you have any substantial changes to your application, please use this link to provide additional information that you would like our Customer Support Team to reconsider. It is not necessary to submit an additional application with a different email address. Requests that contain new information about your promotion methods will be reconsidered.

Regards,

The eBay Partner Network Team

I checked the pages visited again and this time they only looked at the home page for a total of 1 second or less.

“Let’s Just Be Friends…..”

A bit gutted that I had failed in getting approved to the eBay Affiliate Network I sat down and had a beer (it was 9pm by this point and had fully deserved it) It felt like when you like a girl and she doesn’t like you back and says ‘Let’s just be friends’

Getting Accepted on the eBay Affiliate Partner Network

So whilst having a beer I called my friend and told him my story and the next piece of advice he gave me was some of the best logic i’ve had in ages and literally saved the day.

He said: “You need to give them a site that looks informative and not just built to sell. I think eBay prefer blogs/sites that appear to be full of information and established.”

3rd time’s the charm!

So with that in mind I applied again but with another domain  I created this about a year ago spent 4 hours on it to create free on blog.wordpress.com and forwarded the domain. So I knew i’d better host it myself and get all the pages, posts and tags indexed before I applied again to the eBay affiliate network.

12 hours later, new site, new server and eBay called me to say I would have confirmation on my account in the next 5-7 days.

They didn’t do this before which I found odd so I asked the support agent at eBay, ‘Have I been accepted?’

She said: ‘I cannot give you that information but you should be fine.’

So fingers crossed I will be on my way to running a successful eBay affiliate campaign in the next few weeks.

I will let you know if and when I get approved and how the sites are doing for your own interest and hopefully it will help you to get accepted with the eBay affiliate network.

Tips on Getting Accepted to the eBay affiliate network

Once you’re accepted you can add any site you want so bare that in mind before you choose a site to apply.

  1. Apply with your most informative site
  2. Domain age appears to have a factor
  3. Avoid adding any content that appears to sell
  4. Have a beer – it helps!

If you have any questions on how to be accepted to the eBay Affiliate Network please feel free to leave a response and we will get back to you.

Good Luck!

 

 

 

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

What is the eBay Affiliate Network

by Tom Peary Blog

About eBay

Founded in 1995, eBay connects a diverse and passionate community of individual buyers and sellers, as well as small businesses. eBay is the world’s largest online marketplace with over 95 million active users worldwide. Their collective impact on e-commerce is staggering: In 2010, the total worth of goods sold on eBay was $62 billion — more than $2,000 every second.

Earn money when you drive traffic to eBay

What do I get paid for?

All eBay programs payout their affiliates using the Quality Click Pricing (QCP) payout system. Affiliates will be paid for each click that is directed to an eBay site and the price paid per click will be dependent on the quality of the traffic delivered to eBay. The only exception to this will be publishers whose business model is loyalty or cash back who will be paid out on a Cost Per Action (CPA) model.
More information on Quality Click Pricing

How much will I get paid?

eBay Partner Network has some of the most generous affiliate commissions on the web. With Quality Click Pricing, the amount paid for each click varies depending on the quality of the traffic sent to eBay — the higher the quality of the traffic you drive, the more you earn per click. However, you may earn different amounts for each program, as each local site has a slightly different payment structure due to varying market conditions in each country.
More information on Quality Click Pricing

How do I get paid?

Getting paid is very straight forward on the eBay Partner Network. You will be paid monthly on around the 25th of each month (on holidays, payments are processed on the next business day following the 25th), in one of the 5 currencies we support: US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, Australian Dollar or Canadian Dollars. We offer two methods of payment — you can choose either Direct Deposit (available in 11 countries) or Paypal. Both options are free and please note that for Paypal no premier/business account or cross border fee will apply.More Information.

Terms & Conditions

Before you sign up to become an eBay Partner Network affiliate, you will be asked to read and agree to our terms and conditions. Click here for further information.

How to advertise eBay on your site

Whatever your business model, eBay has an extensive range of tools available to help you improve your campaigns, ranging from simple creatives to putting eBay listings on your own site. To access these tools simply log in the eBay Partner Network and go to the Tools section.

As eBay Partner Network is a global program, some of eBay’s tools are geo-targeted, which means that we identify the location of a visitor to your site and redirect them to the most relevant page. For example, if a person from the UK visits your US site and clicks on your eBay Affiliate link, they will be redirected to ebay.co.uk, rather than ebay.com.
Learn more

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Google Adsense

by Tom Peary Blog

If you have a website that generates a decent amount of daily traffic then you could be missing out on your earning potential through Google Adsense.

What is Google Adsense?

Simply put it is a way of delivering pay per click ads on your website through the extended Google Ad Network.

Because you are helping Google and their customers to advertise their business/products/services you earn revenue on every ad clicked through from your website/blog.

Adsense Best Practices

I find having a niche website to prove better at getting those impressions converting in to click throughs.

For example if you have a directory that covers all UK towns then maybe you might consider inputing Google Adsense on to the content to show highly relevant local business Ads to your visitors.

Let’s try and example:

User searches ‘Plumber Leicester’ finds your web page and within the content, ideally at the top of the page content you’d present them with the Adsense ads for ‘Local Plumbers in Leicester’.

This way the user gets relevant ads that they are more likely to click on.

 

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com

Why you need Google Plus

by Tom Peary Blog Local SEO SEO Website Optimization

Google+ is one of the biggest and most important updates in Social Media and Google in years.

Better than Twitter?

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Google+ actually integrates with the organic search results. Just do a search for SEO21 and you will see my awful picture (taken pre too many burgers and beer).

We really love using this Google+ integration with blog posts and articles because it invites the user to connect with you on Google+ and helps them get to know you a bit before they even click on the website page.

Great for Local Businesses

I’m not sure if I would say better as it’s early days but I prefer the layout and functionality over Twitter. It has taken a bit of getting used to but I really love how it features ‘Nearby Posts’ so anyone in my local area can see my Google+ Posts, a great way for any local business to cast their net even wider.

Try Google+ and See for Yourself

Join me on Google+ 

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

www.seotwentyone.com