So the week started the a bottle of wine with Vanessa Fox, as i joked about her newly shaven pussy ( really Vanessa took a photo even) we sat in her beautiful home which has the sea just outside her patio, watching DR Phil … Hmmmm I thought I recognised a manly figure on the show but Vanessa told me I was mistaken. Vanessa dropped me back at my hotel leaving her a cool 2 hours to sleep and pack for Vegas ..

The Next Day I worked until around 2pm and grabbed a town car and shot into Seattle with a mission of getting secretly inside the Seomoz high security pit. I had many ideas, scaling walls kicking down doors, instead I Opted for using the intercom. Once I had gained entry the mozzers who were in total awe or surprise quickly started entertaining me, mainly by pulling the office apart !!! BTW I shot a Video with Rand for his whiteboard Fridays..

The Next day was Microsoft … its started around 9:45 in the morning and ended around 11pm, the day was a mixture of what they are doing, what they have done and my view and opinions on the 2 beta tests that I begged for, Webmaster Portal and Gatineau

DaveN

All to often here we see people worrying about their rankings on an almost daily basis, in my mind the more focus the client applies to concern over the serps detracts from them thinking about how to expand the site and make it an effective online resource with captivating content and ultimately bring in those sales.

In doing a number of SEO reports in the last week certain similarities have been occurring with websites that were constructed some time ago, perhaps without the search engines in mind.

At a pretty basic level sites lacked relevant content, whilst they were littered with keywords there were not really any calls to action on the pages. It was unclear what the websites were about, what product the person wanted to promote and indeed how easy it was to place an order.

I guess sometimes when you are so close up to a site you don’t really see the simple changes that need to be made.

The other thing I find when constructing an SEO report is that you could go on generating literally hundreds of pages of advice, what to do what not to do etc.  The key requirement when writing reports seems to be the ability to focus on areas that require immediate action and indeed the thing that I struggle with most which is consolidating advice down to steps that the client can follow in a concise fashion.

How are your report consolidation skills???

Dan Horton SEO

The initiatives from the Microsoft camp have been flooding in well before the Christmas rush. Web Analytics product Project Gatineau will likely get more focus initially in the US market then on an international level too.

Over the last few months Microsoft have been busy indeed with the adLab team in particular moving into the European market.

With adCenter there really have been some rocking changes with their biggest recent release consisting of a huge range of editorial features, default text capability built into their dynamic text insertion parameters.

Time to chomp over the champs….

Lets take a look at what Microsoft have added to adCenter since adchamps:

Campaign management has been made much easier with the welcome addition of the new feature set. This makes editorial a breeze and comes with daily budget options with the ability to do campaign imports from Adwords Editor, chuck in some default dynamic text and you will be flying.

Reporting changes within the adCentre give you the options to access recent reports and templates right from the reporting tab, why not drag and drop to re-order columns in the custom report? The feature set is extensive and with totals and averages now shown Microsoft have clearly put some thought into the adCenter line up.

Editorial updates give immediate feedback on keywords and ad, meaning when the ad is saved adCenter will verify that all required fields have been filled in, length limits have not been exceeded and the display and destination URLs are all formatted correctly.

Personally, I like the ability to view disapproved ads and keyword associations non of this fumbling about that other systems might have ;)

The revisions from the big M have indeed been fast and furious. A welcome addition to anyone managing lots of campaigns is the bulk management tool….

It even lets you bulk submit adgroups in draft

As Microsoft live services come out of Beta giving you web and desktop apps. Perhaps it’s time for us to tip our hats to the mighty big M.

Ok, the @live email folk are grumbling,  but from a business point of view what software do you use  ? Let me guess you were forced down the Microsoft route years ago? You just had to stay though didn’t you ;)

With the focus once again on social networks and actively sharing information Microsoft is a smart cookie indeed. Something is in my eye sorry, must be a Popfly-

Over the last year or so we have seen Google make a lot of acquisition’s, literally buying up ideas that will make them even stronger as a search engine in the long run.

Lets see if we can predict their next purchases or indeed next area of focus for search.

What do you think Google will buy next? Perhaps if we can collectively focus on their next move we will be able to anticipate the areas in which we as SEO’s need to concentrate and indeed be ready for an even more successful future.

Lets start the ball rolling social search…area of focus hmmmm….