Receptional Blog

Welcome to the Receptional Blog where you can read the latest insights by Receptional on various aspects of the internet marketing industry.

Adobe terms and conditions

17/06/2010 - 15:48

Let's face it, you'll never read the latest terms for adobe flashplayer 10.1. Here's a potted summary of why. 1: The terms are 280 pages long and you need a PDF reader to read them, which means you've already agreed to their terms before you've read them, which they can amend, so they had your soul before you started. 2: I have no idea how many... Read more...

Google World Cup Logo

08/06/2010 - 08:55

I noticed a sneaky world cup related logo appearing on Google this morning - not in the usual location for many of the Google doodles, but (as has happened with previous sketches) within the page links at the bottom of results when searching for [world cup]: Quite like the fact it's keyword sensitive, and fairly subtle with it! Seems to only... Read more...

Google Webmaster Tools SERP Clickthrough Data Unreliable

11/05/2010 - 12:41

Last month, Google significantly revamped the "Top Search Queries" section of Webmaster Tools which put some very interesting data at the fingertips of webmasters and search marketers. It shows the keywords and keyphrases for which a site has been returned in Google search, the number of impressions (the number of times a SERP with a result for... Read more...

New Look for Google

06/05/2010 - 12:15

Google are today rolling out the first major overhaul to the appearance of their search engine for a number of years. The main change is the addition of a left column, a little like that which has been used for image search for a few months, or the layout of Yahoo's Search. It also sees some style tweaks with a richer usage of CSS and the... Read more...

Google AdWords Professional Qualification Changes

28/04/2010 - 14:30

Google AdWords Profesional Company One of the ways that Receptional remain industry leaders in online marketing is by moving with the times. Ensuring that all of our client's PPC accounts are managed by Google Advertising Professionals as a minimum is just one part of that. The news that Google are to raise the bar for AdWords certification comes... Read more...

Google Altering SERP URLs - to Increase Clickthrough Rate?

22/04/2010 - 19:15

As any self-respecting SEO does, I make an effort to canonicalise all URLs that I deal with. As a preference, this is always with a server-side redirect, with a 301 status code. This applies to both individual files and also to entire domains. For instance, Receptional owns a number of TLDs other than .com which map to this website. Historically,... Read more...

When is a Google Alert not a Google Alert?

22/04/2010 - 16:49

Google Alerts are great... mostly... but they do go wrong if your brand name is made up of generic words. One of the reasons we stuck with "Receptional" over the years is that it was at least relatively unique. So I wonder what the relevance is to Receptional in this Google alert? It's very frustrating. Can you fix that Google, please? Read more...

Link Building Presentation in Jerusalem

19/03/2010 - 09:48

Last week I was lucky enough to join Rustybrick and many others for a conference in Jerusalem. Now Jerusalem really isn't what I expected - it was generally much calmer and really pleasant... I spent a very happy day in the old city with Natala Menzies, Vanessa Fox and our fantastic tour guides - Branko and Charlie - wandering around a city that... Read more...

Bing, Ad, Decide

11/03/2010 - 16:36

Some time ago Microsoft launched its 'new' search engine, Bing, in an admirable attempt to take back some of the colossal search engine market share currently held by Google. To support this goal they have recently launched a new, multi-million pound TV advertising campaign in the UK which will run extensively until June 2010. Here's the first... Read more...

1 Other Unique PPC Mistake

22/02/2010 - 16:24

There are so many signs of poorly managed PPC campaigns, from incorrect pricing in ad text and sloppy use of keyword targeting, to even more expensive oversights such as missing action tracking and non existent landing pages. The indicator that we've noticed in this instance is a result of something that should be every PPC account managers friend... Read more...

IPA Search Certificate

19/02/2010 - 14:57

I have recently read an article from 'New Media Age' which has been talking about a very interesting professional search marketing qualification which is coming out from The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) which will be the first of its kind! The qualification has been backed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and will no doubt... Read more...

SES London Link Building Fundamentals Presentation

19/02/2010 - 14:38

A big thanks to all those that attended Dixon's presentation, 'Link Building Fundamentals' at SES London. Link Building Fundamentals As promised you can view the presentation below: Linking Basics Ses London2010 View more presentations from Dixon Jones. Dixon would like to give special thanks to the follwing for attending: Dan from Eskdale,... Read more...

Be Wise with Your PPC Budget – Smarter Pay Per Click Spending

18/02/2010 - 17:01

I often feel that ad scheduling, and in particular the bid adjustment feature, are undervalued tools and certainly have not been used to their full potential in a number of PPC Health Checks that I have recently been involved in. The logic in spending your PPC budget more effectively on the days of the week, and hours of the day when your visitors... Read more...

The Google Analytics IQ Exam

18/02/2010 - 15:37

In November 2009, I became the second member of the Receptional team to gain the Google Analytics Individual Qualification having ‘graduated' from Conversion University, passing the exam with a very respectable score of 88%. In this post I thought I would share my experience with those of you thinking of taking the plunge as I believe it to be... Read more...

Common PPC Mistakes

12/02/2010 - 15:13

Over the past 8 months our pay per click team have been offering a free, no-obligation PPC'health check' and this week we decided to share our findings with you! Our senior consultant's uncovered unacceptable levels of wasted budget in campaigns with very poor structure, and very little evidence of best practice PPC management. Whether this was... Read more...

Google Search Partners Performance- Looking at the overlooked!

09/02/2010 - 14:57

When setting up a new campaign within AdWords we are faced with several options as to where we would like to display our ads. Within the campaign settings of AdWords there are several options in terms of where we choose to display ad text for each and every ad in that particular campaign. These include the following: To select ‘Search partners'... Read more...

Welcome the Apple iPad!

28/01/2010 - 11:08

Apple Co founder Steve Jobs unveils the new iPad which is set to revolutionise the mobile and notebook market which is currently dominated by his own products, Mackbook Air and the iPhone. It merges the two best sellers with a very lightweight and thin design much like the new iPhone 3G and will have the same functionality. (above) Steve Jobs... Read more...

Improving The Quality Of Yahoo Pay Per Click Campaigns

25/01/2010 - 10:28

Over the past couple of days I have been analysing the impact that blocking certain Yahoo partners from the Yahoo Network has had on my client campaigns and it certainly looks as though the quality has improved significantly and many campaigns are acquiring traffic at a much more profitable rate. Towards the back end of last year, Yahoo finally... Read more...

70% of Journalists Use Social Media

20/01/2010 - 16:46

Today I found a recent survey from late last year done by PRWeek which states that 70% of Journalists now use Social Media for assisting in reporting which is up from 41% in the previous year. This is a huge increase of journalists now finding the content that they can call on at the drop of a hat, 24 hours a day. For news and breaking stories the... Read more...

How Many Backlinks Do You Need?

18/01/2010 - 09:51

How Many Backlinks Do You Need? It's quite obvious to most people how important links are to your website. But how many is enough? I can't give you an exact amount, there is no exact amount, this is for the same reason that I try not to offer an exact amount of how many I'll build a client at a sales pitches. The reason is that it depends on a... Read more...

Google Considering Withdrawal from China

13/01/2010 - 11:45

Google's official blog was updated with a controversial article last night, detailing recent hacks on their servers originating from chinese IPs. "First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance,... Read more...

Changing your Twitter handle

07/01/2010 - 11:18

Recently, Microsoft beat Google to the announcement that they had made a deal with Twitter to incorporate live search result into the SERPS. It looks like Google - in a rather silly attempt to get their own back - integrated Live Twitter results into its results without its usual thoughtful user testing. The result poses problems for brands... Read more...

Opinion: Google Personalised Search

09/12/2009 - 10:38

Google's newly launched personalised search has attracted little fanfare outside the SEO community, however it has the potential to be significant to every internet user: The way we use search, the way we use the internet in general, and it could even have a significant impact on the fortunes of many businesses and organisations. This update is... Read more...

Internet Marketing Interview With Our Very Own Dixon Jones

04/12/2009 - 15:32

Receptional's very own Dixon Jones was Interviewed while speaking at Pubcon in Vegas recently. Dixon gives a very good insight into the current situation of Internet Marketing and how it is performing, now and in the future. To have a listen to the full interview have a look at: http://www.tmprod.com/blog/2009/dixon-jones-online-marketing-expert... Read more...

Site Performance & Page Speed Report in Google Webmaster Tools

03/12/2009 - 12:04

Following Google's recent announcement that they will evaluate site/page loading times in 2010 as part of their ranking algorithms (view Google's blog post), a new feature has appeared in Google Webmaster Tools. Under the labs option of the left-hand menu, a link has appeared to a new page named "site performance". Put simply, the tool generates... Read more...

How to Rank in Google Using Boilerplate/Placeholder Text

01/12/2009 - 16:01

"Boilerplate" text is repeated generic text of the kind that search engines understandably don't like. Obvious examples are copyright statements and "placeholder" text on in-development pages. But can you rank pages that contain purely this type of unhelpful text? I liked the W3C's recent redesign, which I felt was clean and modern. I was a little... Read more...

Bing & News Corp. – Search Engine Exclusivity

26/11/2009 - 13:58

What happens when two of the world's largest corporate powerhouses get together to take on Google, free content and change the whole way content is potentially distributed online? Paying for Online Content The answer is a possible collaboration between Bing and News Corp - the publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch's empire whereby the content from News... Read more...

Twitter drops bit.ly

20/11/2009 - 11:04

***Please read Edit beneath original article*** In the midst of a busy afternoon and evening yesterday, I didn't have the opportunity to get a blog out about my new find on Twitter, not even a blog as short as this. I noticed yesterday while posting a couple of stories from our website on Twitter, which Twitter no longer auto-shorten your URL's,... Read more...

Use Social Media to improve Customer Service

19/11/2009 - 16:22

While Dell are living on a reputation of “Making $3,000,000 from Twitter” which is frankly somewhat overhyped in my opinion, they are only one of many companies using Twitter for customer service purposes. As customer’s estimations of customer service have dropped substantially in recent years, not helped by outsourcing abroad to countries that... Read more...

Google testing breadcrumb navigation in SERPS

17/11/2009 - 12:57

(Via WebmasterWorld) Google are currently running a limited-user test on a new SERP feature - instead of the result URL displayed in green under a listing, there is a "breadcrumb trail" style navigation. Here's a fairly generic search where the Independent have a small breadcrumb trail: Note that green URLs are not usually linked in Google SERPs... Read more...

LinkedIn Add NoFollow Tag, YouTube Remove It

16/11/2009 - 13:45

It has been commonplace for big social networking sites to add nofollow tags to users profile links over time and now LinkedIn has gone the same way by adding a nofollow tag to the links you are allowed to post to your profile. This is disappointing news for link builders, as these were easy-to-build links that did pass some small amount of link... Read more...

Pubcon Link Panel Presentation Slides

14/11/2009 - 22:42

Pubcon in Las Vegas was a huge conference given the economic climate and was a blast! But more importantly, the interest in MajesticSEO's link map was staggering and our partnership with the world's largest commercially available link map was in strong evidence. As promised, here is our presentation slides on "Real world, high value, low risk link... Read more...

Users Of Twitter At Work Cost Economy £1.38Bn, Is this Really True?

26/10/2009 - 12:27

I have been hearing a lot about this today since this new report from IT and Technology firm Morse which claims that office workers in the UK are wasting up to 40 minutes a week using Social Networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and that this is costing the British economy up to £138Bn. I think personally this figure is a little inflated for... Read more...

Guardian Advertising Summit 2009 - Highlights

22/10/2009 - 09:46

It's been a couple of busy days since the conference but I really wanted to tell you all about the Guardian Changing Advertising Summit 2009. I attended the Guardian Changing Advertising Summit 2009 on Monday the 19th of October which was held at the Hilton Tower Bridge hotel in London. The event itself was stacked with an impressive board of... Read more...

International Search Summit November 2009

20/10/2009 - 13:37

The annual International Search Summit is nearly on us again. The event is now in its 4th year and the summit promises to be bigger and better than ever before. On November 19th the leading lights, and in many instances the founding fathers, of the SEO industry convene to discuss a broad range of search engine related topics. SEO Talks from the... Read more...

Google can't locate its own sites in 61% of cases

16/10/2009 - 12:40

Via SERoundtable I got a heads up on something going wrong with Google results for its own sites. If you search (for instance) for Google Ireland, you'll actually get google.nz (Google New Zealand) as the top result. I tested 162 regional Google sites for their ranking and, shockingly, in 61% of cases Google was unable to return the correct... Read more...

SEO is evil. Again.

16/10/2009 - 09:41

There's a pervading theme in some sections of the web development community to slate SEO, and every 6-12 months, there's a flood of blog posts on the matter. So what's all the fuss about? The most recent article to come on my radar is "Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists" by someone called Derek Powazek. It's the usual ranting, with blanket... Read more...

SEO bookmarklet: bypass Google's query expansion

15/10/2009 - 11:56

Most SEOs and many casual searchers will have noticed something Google do when you search, often called query expansion or query rewriting. At its best, this is a useful feature that overcomes poorly contructed or ambiguous search queries. At worst it is a major annoyance, returning imprecise and irrelevant results for well-crafted and precise... Read more...

Link building presentation @A4U

15/10/2009 - 11:03

Thank you to everyone that gave me such a very warm welcome during my presentation on link reclamation at Press Releases at the A4Uexpo. I usually do enough to get invited again, but this time I was delighted to get told by more than one person that I had made their conference fee worthwhile. Even a Googler came up to me and gave me some praise,... Read more...

Dixon Jones Live Panel at A4UExpo London 2009

02/10/2009 - 15:26

The first day of the 2 day A4UExpo event in London starting off on the 13th of October at the ExCeL Centre London is kicking off with a very exciting Affiliate 'Doctors Live panel'. The panel will include Receptional's own MD Dixon Jones and other leading Affiliate industry experts who will offer their frank advice for companies on Affiliate... Read more...

When On-Page SEO Goes Wrong: Auto Trader

01/10/2009 - 14:20

My colleague, Nick Andrews pointed out to me that one of the largest sites in the UK car industry recently updated its design - Auto Trader. Of course, being an SEO type, I couldn't help but cast a professional eye over it, to see how well they'd incorporated search optimisation techniques. A new design or development should be the perfect... Read more...

Link Building Myths

01/10/2009 - 09:06

While link building is an important part of any website, there are plenty of myths and misconceptions when it comes to what works and what doesn't. Hopefully my previous posts have improved your knowledge, while this blog aims to dispel any false claims to successful link building that you may have come across in your time. The Myths Devaluing... Read more...

Display bug in Google sitelinks?

21/09/2009 - 12:22

At the moment, I'm seeing some strange quirks in Google's sitelinks display, most noticeably, odd replacement of English characters with (at a guess) Japanese characters, e.g. with the following for a site with sections for UK regions: I'm not sure of what type of programming bug could result in this happening, but I wonder if this tells us... Read more...

Up Coming - Guardian Media's 'Changing Advertising Summit' 2009

17/09/2009 - 13:50

Here at Receptional we like to keep up to date and current with all the recent news, information and networking opportunities in the field of digital and Internet Marketing. This is as important for anyone in a company, as well as the obvious IT and marketing department, as you will be able to gain firsthand knowledge of the current market and... Read more...

'Teens Dont Tweet' - Or Do They?

16/09/2009 - 12:54

Some of you will remember the previous 'Teens Don't Tweet' Blog post from last month, although something that happened today in regards to Twitter has made me think that it maybe isn't the case. Top trending topic today was 'Happy Birthday Nick'. I was curious to see what this was about and when I found out that it was in relation to Nick from the... Read more...

Blog Commenting for Links

14/09/2009 - 14:59

This certainly isn't the most advanced topic I've ever discussed, but it is a grey area to many out there who are new to link building or don't have an in-depth understanding of it. I thought I'd take a few minutes to share my opinions on how commenting on other people's blogs won't directly build you any good links. Nofollow More often than not... Read more...

Reciprocal Link Building is Still Strong

02/09/2009 - 12:39

Link exchange appears to be a dying trend in the link building industry, at least according to Google Insight figures. This could be due to the increase in searches for "link building" in recent times or some of the misconceptions about reciprocal link building. However, exchanging links is still a strong form of link building. The Myths... Read more...

Why Invest in Pay Per Click During A Recession

28/08/2009 - 12:54

With the global financial crisis that has seen many businesses go under, many redundancies made and that holiday to New York you were dreaming of go out the window, it is no wonder some people around us are panicking. But panicking is a mistake you should avoid. People are cutting back on advertising spend thinking they will save money. But... Read more...

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