So that’s what we are offering: Whoever recommends the candidate that is successfully employed by Verve Search Ltd as Senior SEO get’s a Ipad Mini. 

So, if you know anyone that are looking to move roles please pass on the following  Senior SEO job spec

The job in a nutshell: Senior SEO, minimum 2 years experience (and yes I do call that senior), up to 35k per annum + bonuses (plural). The job is based in Surbiton (must work from our office), it’s only 20 min from Waterloo (heck of a lot quicker than commuting IN to central London).

Image source: apple.com

T&C’s: We are giving away 1 ipad mini only. The ipad mini will be given to the person that recommends or passes on the details of the successful applicant for the Senior SEO position (posted on June 3rd on the Verve Search blog). Successful Applicant = person that get’s hired. 

We are giving away an iPad Mini in our hunt for a Senior SEO is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Verve Search is a rapidly growing SEO & Content Marketing agency, in fact in the last year we have grown from 8 to 18 people, in what seems like a blink of an eye. We are really passionate about SEO, and are proud to say we are an award winning SEO agency (this year we have made the shortlist in 4 categories at the European Search Awards).  We are are not your bog standard SEO agency, we don’t say yes to all clients that come our way, and although we want to grow we really believe that quality is essential. We take great pride in our approach and creativity and don’t have any sales or new business department. What we do is digital growth, in terms of traffic and conversions, using the mediums and creativity it takes to be ahead.

We also believe strongly in individual people, people makes agencies after all, and we treat ALL our employees with the respect and care they deserve. At Verve you will not be expected to work overtime, you are very unlikely to have to ASK for a pay-rise. You will also get to go to events, and conferences, blog, tweet etc We believe creativity and a rested mind is crucial for making a good SEO/Traffic Grower/Inbound marketer/Ninja, or whatever you want to call yourself, and to be the best agency, we need people that will do their best and are happy in their job.

Enough about us and how great we are, about you:

- The person we are looking for needs to have at least 2 years’ experience in SEO, whether that’s in house or agency side.

- Proven search engine rankings results (+ traffic and conversions)

- You need to have solid understanding and ideally experience dealing with all technical SEO areas; from diagnosis to documentation and how to fix it. From server errors, canonicalisation and pagination to dealing with best practise for international SEO.

- Knowledge of HTML/CSS

- You must also be experienced in working in a team, managing projects as well as dealing with clients.

- Solid Google Analytics knowledge (from setting up, using analytics for reporting  as well as more advanced analytics like using filters, advanced segments and so on

- Be Awesome with Excel

- Knowledge of leading SEO tools (Moz, Linkdex, Brightedge or similar)

- Be Creative and have a sense of humour

- Ideally have seen Star Wars (At least The Empire Strikes Back, and no, the new series does not count). Obviously this is not a must, or is it?

NB! Yes we are based in Surbiton (which is 20 min from Waterloo), not Shoreditch, Soho or Charlotte Street! If you got offered a seat on a rocket ship, would you ask; “where does this rocket ship take off from?” Heck no, you would care about where it’s going!

If I still have your attention, here’s the numeration details:

Salary: up to 35k per annum
Extras: Company Bonus Scheme (profit based)

Interested? Please send your CV, along with a covering email/letter to jobs@vervesearch.com

**********************PLEASE NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES*****************************

We are recruiting; want to be a Senior SEO Consultant with Verve? is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

A PR 4 website may look perfectly fine, but don’t be fooled. I only came across this while searching how to “fake Google page rank” myself, but it can be done. What webmasters do is set a redirect to another high PR link until Google announces a PR update. Guess what—your new PR n/a blog just went to a PR 7 in a few months. I’m sure Google will find a way to fix this bug, and I’m also sure that blackhats will find a way to get around it again. But that’s not the point.

The point is that you shouldn’t judge a website by its PR alone. There are also ways to spot a fake PR website.

1. Matt, a colleague of mine, introduced me to Wayback Machine. This handy tool shows you how a webpage appeared to look like in the past. Authoritative websites have more frequent archives, like every month or so. If you come across a PR 5 whose earliest archive is a month ago, and it looked like absolute crap, then there’s something fishy going on.

2. Do a site search to find how many pages are being indexed. A PR 4 blog will definitely have more than 10 posts. Google search “site:” followed by the website URL, as shown below:

3. Check the age of domain. If a blogger is doing everything correct, it isn’t impossible to achieve a PR 4 within a year, but definitely improbable. A PR 4 domain registered in February 2013, however, is obviously fake.

4. Check other metrics. Open Site Explorer shows you the MozRank, MozTrust, and Domain Authority of pages. Although these can be faked as well, i.e. the amount of outbound versus inbound links, they are still a better judge of a website quality.

5. I believe that social interaction has more influence than it ever has, especially after Penguin 2.0. I can guarantee that a PR 4 and above has some sort of community built around it, or is part of something bigger. You will find that authoritative travel bloggers know each other, regularly comment and interact as if it was natural. Well, it IS natural. A PR 4 website with no social links, no comments, no community, just post after post is most likely fake.

By combining these checks, you can identify 99% of websites that are faking their PR. For link building purposes, this can definitely save your client’s rankings. It may look good in a report, but it isn’t doing any good for SEO in the long-run.

Don’t Judge a Book by Its PageRank… is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Regardless of whether you are selling shoes or a marketing agency, the foundations of your success lie here, in the keyword research.  The keyword search is the one tool that determines what people are searching for and how it relates to your brand. In SEO it is an invaluable tool to help you discover what your customers are searching for. Today any site owner who hasn’t done any keyword research, is really going to miss out! Do you rank for the keyword that is pivotal for your business?

Ranking for the right keyword is the make or break for many companies, Keyword research cuts out a lot of the detective work that will help you discover what people are searching for. Not only does keyword research give you an idea of what people are searching for but actually the language they are using to search as well. A very useful insight when it comes to including these words on your site or blog.

Here’s how to get the best from your research:

• Identify the landing pages. This is your first port of call when searching for a keyword. Once you have identified what your homepages are then the next step is simple.

• Rough Keyword Research, this is where you will discover the simplest form of keywords that people will be searching for. Don’t forget to search for the long tail keywords. If somebody is searching for ‘dress’ then you can safely assume they are just browsing. However, if they searched for ‘Stella McCartney Saskia dress size 8’ – here is a customer desperate to buy, as a retailer this is not an opportunity you would want to miss! Long tail keywords are pivotal when it comes to discovering what consumers are looking for, imperative as these days more and more businesses are online and a faster pace of life and the ‘I want it now’ attitude of today’s consumers see online shopping at an all-time high.  If you can find the right search terms that your buyers are using then you have hit the rankings jackpot.

• Place each keyword in a system such as Google Keyword Checker; this will give you a guide as to the popularity of the keyword chosen. Once you have established the search volume of each keyword then you need to start to weed out the lower volume search words. You can also find out the words that Google ‘hint’ might be a valuable option for you to use as a keyword.

• The next stage is combining list #2 which consists of all these valuable keywords and establishing who the competition is and where they stand in terms of searches. Look at a list of competitors and search their Meta titles and landing pages for search terms that you haven’t discovered yet.

• By putting these words through the keyword search again and you can finally draw up a final list of keywords with a good search volume and then checking them against the level of competition and here you have your final list and the start of a successful campaign!

Searching for realistic search terms is as important as discovering the keywords themselves. If you can add a ‘human voice’ to the keywords then this automatically makes them sound more trustworthy, something that a consumer will believe. Without this valuable tool then your site will never gain the ranking you need to be successful. No savvy SEO would neglect the keywords. To get a true impression of what key words you need you have to have an understanding of your site and test and retest the keywords. Be realistic and never forget the power of the long tail keyword and believe in the terms you are searching for. This is the only way you can really get a taste of the true value of a search.

How To Find The Keywords For Your Research is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

We are shortlisted in 3 categories with our client Miinto (Denmark, Norway & Sweden) for SEO services which we named “The Organic Viking Invasion” :

“Best Use of Search Retail”
“Best Pan European Campaign” and
“Best SEO Campaign”

The last category we have been shortlisted for is “Best Low Budget Campaign” four the “Eyes of the World” Social/SEO campaign for Taxiadvertising.com,

The last year has been very exciting for Verve Search and we have seen an immense growth, both in terms of employees and clients. We are very lucky to work with some awesome brands and truly brilliant in-house teams.

We are looking forward to the awards in Barcelona and crossing our fingers we come back with several awards.

European Search Awards 2013 – Verve Search Shortlisted in 4 categories is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

I promised I would share my slides ASAP, so here they are. I covered a topic sometimes omitted at SEO conferences, giving a mix of strategy insights and quick wins. So, without further ado…

I also wanted to thank everyone for being so supportive as this was my first speaking gig!

International Web Analytics – my slides from ISS London 2013 is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Looking directly at the code – which you can do by selecting “View Source” from your browser menu of simply by pressing “Control-U” on a PC or “Command-U” on a Mac – we discovered a huge block of apparently random text: almost 193,000 characters in total. Mary Had A Little Lamb in Base 64This was Base 64 code which is used to represent binary data in ASCII format so that it can be securely stored and transferred. Actually, Base 64 is often used by hackers to embed code into a website in the hope that it is not picked up by website security scanners.

In total, this block of characters contributed almost 200Kb to the weight of the HTML file, or around one third of the code on the page. Since the ideal size of a web page is said to be less than 100Kb (a figure quoted in Google’s old “Best Practise” guide) that poses a real problem.

What is worse, this chunk of “useless” code was placed towards the top of the HTML, and we all know that “search engines only spider the first 10% of any page”.

Readers with experience of asp.net will by now have realised that we’re taking about ViewState here.

ViewState is used by asp.net to “remember” the status of web forms and widgets on page refreshes or post backs in the same way that other programming languages like PHP use Cookies. ViewState is turned on by default in asp.net and usually encodes the data from every control on the page, regardless of whether it is actually required.

Several Issues

There are other issues too. Some sloppier programmers have taken storing sensitive or private information in ViewState but since Base 64 is far from secure (there are many Base64 “Decrypters” available online) the data, if intercepted, can easily be decoded.

But the problem for discussion here is: Does a huge hidden ViewState affect SEO?

Certainly, good SEOs will always advise that …

• Page sizes should be kept as small as possible (and preferably less than 100Kb) to speed download
• All the vital information on the page, including the spiderable text and the primary keywords, should feature as far up the page as possible.
• Never include anything in the page code that isn’t needed, including unnecessary JavaScript libraries, directly-accessible sensitive data and useless hidden text which is storing data for no purpose.

On this basis, large ViewState fields might be said to break all three rules; however, as SEOs we soon learn to realise that all rules are made to be broken.

Firstly, the idea that Google and its rivals can’t get beyond the first 100k is a bit of a myth, and it was possible to see this by examining the text of the page in question: bits of the text well down below the massive ViewState field were there in the Google index. This especially true of hidden fields like ViewState which the bots recognise and skip over anyway.

Obviously, even if ViewState did contribute a 200Kb block in the way of the good stuff, GoogleBot simply skipped over it, allowing a good scout around even before hitting the mythical 100Kb limit.

In fact, Google WebMaster Trends Analyst John Mueller says he can’t remember any crawling, indexing, or ranking issues with regards to ViewState on asp.net sites: “We can crawl pages a few megabytes large, so even large ViewState values generally wouldn’t block that”.

ViewState could also be seen as a way of passing information between pages without “cookies”, and thereby a way to circumvent the EU Cookie Directive. In practice, the Cookie law has proved to be less of a drag that was feared and we’ve all become used to clicking away a pop-up to say we accept the use of cookies on a web site. In any event, the low security of Base 64 means it’s no good at preserving a lot of information anyway.

Steps to Take

There is a real problem, however, and that is file size. With the world now getting used to lower and lower bandwidth and download capacity – and by that I mean anyone using a mobile device – huge page sizes are bad news. Anything that can be done to reduce page size and thereby make downloads more reliable is worth doing.  Google has explicitly stated that download speed is a ranking factor.

For asp.net developers that should mean switching off ViewState wherever possible on a per-control, per-page, or server-wide basis using the Control.ViewStateMode property (There’s a full technical description of this at The Microsoft Developer Network see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.control.viewstatemode.aspx). This is now what the client has done, based on our recommendations.

Yet if you believe ViewState is absolutely essential – and I really can’t think why – it should at the very least be moved to the bottom of the code and try to reduce its size and scope.

ViewState: SEO killer or simply a hidden menace? is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Speed

I thought that I’d share some observations about online marketing and speed: basically, the relationship between the two and how you can inject speed into your daily process. Speed matters.  If you’re not getting things done quickly then your content isn’t getting online quickly and those blind search engine spiders aren’t going to find the great new stuff you’ve done. Remember, planning, brainstorming, blue sky thinking are all an important part of your process, but once you’ve found your challenge and decided upon how it should be resolved then, my friend, you need to put down your skinny latte and get on with it!

Enough with the Facebook status updates, this is important!

Identifying change

There are many different aspects of your website that need checking and monitoring and I’m not going to bore you with all the tools and apps that can alert you to changes. Change happens, and as SEOs or online marketing people you already know how important it is to react to change. It might be a PR Tweetstorm or a change in ranking for one of your key terms, either way you should already be using tools and applications to spot trouble as it happens, if not before.

Technical challenges need to be properly identified and the source of the issue highlighted fast. You need to know that you’re dealing with the underlying problem, not just its results. Try to get to the nub of the matter fast and stop whatever is occurring from continuing. Kludges, workarounds and sticky plasters are all well and good but they are seldom permanent solutions and the original issue may come back to bite you.

Creating something new

Once you have identified that change has happened you might want to do something about it. This is where Google Analytics or Twitter or a.n.other tool comes into its own, allowing you to identify what exactly has happened and build a response. This might be responding to negative publicity or rectifying a simple bit of code on a website, either way you need a process in place to get it done sharpish.

This is where the ‘process’ needs to be thought through. You have identified the problem, who do you need to implement the change and who do you need to inform that you’re going to make a change? Can this change get to the front of the queue? SEO changes are important and in bigger organisations this is sometimes lost in translation, even when you saying change ‘this’ to get more money, don’t change ‘this’ and lose money and your competitors will pick up the bit you have left behind.

Change can be difficult for some to accept but luckily change is sometimes out of our hands. There are three people in any SEO relationship: the SEO, the client and the search engine. And one of the three is deaf, dumb and blind (it’s the search engine, maybe not dumb, but they don’t give much away).

Once you have the backing of your client and they realise that change needs to happen, great things can happen. You can become like Usain Bolt, you can speed to make changes, you can update content and change code and you can make things better for your end user, you can ‘sell more widgets’.

Change for changes sake

The one thing that all great tools and applications give you is data, and data can tell stories. All life is a story and everyone understands that if explained properly, you’re making changes to result in a happy ending to the story. SEOs never make changes for changes sake, they make changes because they can see a bad ending and they want to make things better. The great thing about online marketing is that you can see results really quickly, so if you do ‘fail fast’ you can get on and correct things.

There is a lot of forecasting that happens in the SEO industry and some big long complicated algorithms that need to be applied and worked on to try and predict outcomes to changes, but the one thing that keeps me interested and keeps me coming back for more each day is no one ever gets it licked, some may get close but you’re never done.
Some Ideas for adding speed to your workflow

• Good monitoring. Make sure you have someone monitoring stuff like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Also consider a big ass application like Linkdex because when it all kicks off you want to have all the information in one place. There are also some automated applications that will ping you messages when you have multiple accounts to look at, like Robotto
• Find problems fast. Screaming Frog is always my go to application when I need information fast.

Meetings

• Stand up meetings are great. No one wants to stand for too long so everyone gets on with what they need to say.
• Massive white boards. Sometimes explaining things to people needs something visual, get a massive white board and write ‘Do this NOW’ on it, or draw a picture of what you’re going to do. Seems to get people’s attention and helps everyone understand why.
• No coffee, no biscuits. Just wastes time, you could be making changes to the live site instead of bleating on about biscuits from your childhood.

Communication

• You need the key peoples’ phone numbers to hand, have them on your mobile, have them on Skype.
• Only copy people into your email who need to be CC’d. Remember, it’s speed, not broadcasting.

Embrace your change and enjoy speed, its exhilarating once you get going!

Speed: How it can improve your working life is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

In order to not go crazy, it´s useful to follow some tips that will help the new SEO writer to adapt his content to the online world. And one more thing: it will also help journalists to put away the idea that SEO involves stuffing keywords into their articles at the expense of good writing.

1. The Inverted Pyramid: Emil Dovifat theory has been used by the classic School of Journalism in order to structure the information. It says that facts have to be displayed from most relevant to less important. In this sense, the online world works in the same way. We need to gain the reader but also the search engine. It’s because of that, we need to remind ourselves that the internet is the biggest information kiosk ever! If our article doesn’t catch people’s attention, there will be another that will.

2. The language: Writing for the online market is different from the way we would do in printed publications. We need to modify the way we work with the language and this means we have to avoid complicated language and expressions that maybe we would use while writing an article for a newspaper section (It doesn’t signify that we have to post a piece using colloquial language). People don’t really appreciate the writer’s style (Let’s leave the literature for the e-books) but they look for useful content, which must be offered through a clear language.

3. Titles and the body of the article: Anyone that wants to write a post needs to ask themselves: How do people look for the information I want to offer in my article? In this sense, it´s important to use titles such as “5 tips….”, “Top ten websites…” (Even if they start with a number, which can be a bit painful at first).  Another important tip is to organise the text by paragraphs and do not include more than one idea per each. Last thing but not less important is to write not very long posts. Leave 1,000 word articles for newspapers!

4. Hypertextuality: We understand by “hypertextuality” a text displayed on a computer display or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. In the digital world we have the chance to add relevant information to our message. This is achieved by “linking”, and this must be done in a specific way, as the engines discover how pages are related to each other and in which ways.

5. Social sharing: The good news for the online planet is how easy it is to spread the word. After writing a post you have the power to share it through social services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google + and many more. But it is also possible the other way round: Readers can also share and retweet your post, which can be a good way to get feedback on your content.

This is how journalists can benefit from the online world. Be smart, make people find you on the server and remember that relationship between Journalism and SEO doesn’t have to be unhappy.

SEO for Journalists: From Paper to Screen is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

Regardless of what industry you are in, what type of goods you sell or what services you offer, there is one rule every business should follow: tell the customers that you care. Let them know that you value their opinion—that they are more than just another e-commerce transaction that will be stored in the depths of your analytics. We are blessed to have the power of social media for customer feedback. A few years back, companies relied on focus groups, mailed surveys and other costly methods of communication.

Social media has opened a gateway for businesses to efficiently communicate with their customers. There has been an increase in frequency, volume and quality of customer feedback through every business sector of an ordinary company. Social media reports such as FB Likes and Re-tweets have started become an indicator of success, too. Analysing social media signals is a good way to judge whether a website is worth getting a link from. The main benefit of increased communication between a company and its customers is the influx of user-generated content. Businesses can finally say that “we value your opinion” and mean it.

Having weekly guest posts to fill in your blogs, product reviews for more on-page content and a wiki for user-generated FAQ’s sounds great, doesn’t it? All you have to do is sit back and watch your traffic peak as your website fills in with words from individuals all over the world. But we all know that nothing is that clear-cut. So how much is too much? When does user-generated content go too far?

1) When you have to scroll to find your name. If you are looking all over your blog to find the last time you posted something, then you have gone too far. It’s easy accepting guest posts left and right when all you have to do is copy, paste and hit publish. But is it really your blog anymore? Do your fans and readers control what you post now?

2) When you can’t locate your website name. Customers, fans and readers do not try to actively promote your brand. Your business/blog is your beloved significant-other that you have spent years building up to get to this point. But have you lost control of it? External content posters will hardly —if ever —mention your blog name or internally link to appropriate sections.

This does not mean that user-generated content is bad.

If you play your cards right and aren’t a complete idiot about it, user-generated content can be quite useful. Here are a few guidelines you should keep in mind if you plan on making the most out of it.

1) Research – go to the source of your content and make sure it’s credible and authentic. Take some time to research the authors of your guest posts. Are they legit writers or is it written by someone outsourced in the Philippines for 50p/article? Do they credit images? Do they cite their sources? Is it unique content?

2) Have a content schedule – user-generated content can be addictive but you have to concentrate on your initial brand strategy. Having a community that interacts, shares and comments without your help can tempt you to take your foot off the gas. Use external resources only to improve your already-existing content.

3) Exclusivity – making something VIP and for ‘special occasions’ gives it value. If you’re publishing guest posts day in, day out then your blog will seem spammy, repetitive and unappealing. Keeping it exclusive will also raise the quality of the content you’re receiving.

There’s no going wrong if you plan carefully and manage a blog/website that has a good balance of external and internal content. I can’t give you a percentage, or tell you how many posts to publish per week—all that changes from blog to blog. Be smart about your approach to show your readers, fans and customers that you care, but at the same time maintain a strong brand presence.

Is User-Generated Content THAT Great? is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency