It feels like just a few days ago when in summer 2011 Laurence and I discussed his desire to move from print toward publishing online and to start his own high-end magazine. Laurence decided to leave his digital production job at Incisive Media and join us for three months to assist with online marketing campaigns. His contract was subsequently extended indefinitely, a testament to his amicable attitude, diligent nature and ability to improve everything he touched. Thanks to Laurence our presentations are prettier, copywriters better briefed and logo’s more iconic.

Laurence didn’t just work for Market Appeal. He’d been a friend for over a decade. We first met when he joined a band with Andy Berg at Southampton University. Then, in 2009, he was Best Man at Andy’s wedding, giving a speech as heartfelt as any.

Laurence made an impression on everyone he met. Even friends who had only met him a couple of times have asked to attend his funeral – or ‘celebration of his life’, as his family would like it to be known. He was never overtly religious, but always came across as someone with a generous heart and strong moral values.

Rather than splashing out on extravagant cards and ostentatious decoration, Laurence encouraged his family to celebrate his birthdays by planting trees and spending time with each other and nature. So, rather than sending large cards or cut flowers, please commemorate him by sending modest condolence cards to his family and planting a small tree, or sending them donations so that they may do the same.

Laurence recently started a health and fitness blog bitfit.org, as stepping stone towards grander plans. Its headline “Do what you love.” is a fitting epitaph, and how he’d want us to live.

We use ‘AWR’ weekly, sometimes daily, to check the ranking for our various clients. We’ve always been impressed with its functionality, and wide list of features, though not always with the layout of those features. We have been yearning for a more logical layout, and are very grateful that Caphyon Ltd. have now delivered.

The core functionality hasn’t changed too much, although updates with ongoing refinements are reliably released every few weeks to remind everyone that there are developers beavering away behind the scenes.

But we are now happy to report, that the layout is far more logical, and actually works with, rather than against out ‘flow of work’.

AWR, is still our primary site ranking application, and it also makes a great keyword research tool. Practical advantages include the wide variety of report export formats including pdf, html and .xls which can be tailored, both in terms of content and styling, to suit your company and clients requirements.

Another benefit is its ability to handle large projects. For example, some clients have several websites, each with their own keyword lists and target search engines (Google.co.uk/.com etc.). Multiply that by several clients and there are thousands of individual keyword-website-search engine combinations. Without AWR’s “update multiple projects” feature keeping tabs on everything could become tedious to the extreme.

AWR also has plenty of features, such as routing via proxy servers, that we don’t often use. No doubt a dig through their help files would remove plenty more, but at least I can say that the additional functionality doesn’t get in the way during every day use.

Speaking of which, detailed time delay options and querying via API keys is supported so that you can keep track of your rankings, while keeping the search engines onside. Some experimentation may be required to get them right, as Yahoo seems easy to offend, but on the whole we’ve had a trouble free year and so were happy to write about the software again.

To get your own copy of Advanced Web Ranking
visit: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Savoy Stewart commercial estate agents have just launched their new commercial property website.

Designed and built by Damian Lewis to our exacting specification, it offers a fresh, professional look that appeals to their clients.

Other features include an enhanced content management system and improved backend functionality enabling their staff to take control of the website.

Of course, being an SEO company, one of our priorities was to ensure that the new site helped their SEO.

The new site has now been live for a few days and we’re delighted to announce that their rankings continue to improve.

For example, they are now up to 4th place for “commercial estate agents” and rankings for other phrases are climbing too.

Finally, their staff can see how their marketing is going due to a custom combination of Google Analytics goals and Google AdWords conversion tracking, together placing actionable data at the heart of their campaigns.

Does your business need a new website and an efficient marketing campaign?

If so, you might be interested in our Guaranteed SEO challenge.

To find out more follow the link or fill in the form below.

Fill out the form below and one of our team will contact you within 24 hours.

A year or so ago I wrote a review of Advanced Website Ranking (AWR), as it was our preferred ranking tracking software at the time. Since then it’s been in use weekly, sometimes daily, to check the ranking for our various clients.

The core functionality hasn’t changed, although updates with ongoing refinements are reliably released every few weeks to remind everyone that there are developers beavering away behind the scenes.

The past year has seen plenty of changes from the major search engines including faster “real-time” search, increased personalisation and the sabre rattling between Google and Bing.

None of that has thrown AWR, which is still our primary rank tracking application. Practical advantages include the wide variety of report export formats including pdf, html and .xls which can be tailored, both in terms of content and styling, to suit your company and clients requirements.

Another benefit is its ability to handle large projects. For example, some clients have several websites, each with their own keyword lists and target search engines (Google.co.uk/.com etc.). Multiply that by several clients and there are thousands of individual keyword-website-search engine combinations. Without AWR’s “update multiple projects” feature keeping tabs on everything could become tedious to the extreme.

AWR also has plenty of features, such as routing via proxy servers, that we don’t often use. No doubt a dig through their help files would remove plenty more, but at least I can say that the additional functionality doesn’t et in the way during every day use.

Speaking of which, detailed time delay options and querying via API keys is supported so that you can keep track of your rankings, while keeping the search engines onside. Some experimentation may be required to get them right, as Yahoo seems easy to offend, but on the whole we’ve had a trouble free year and so were happy to write about the software again. We’re even hoping to receive a free copy in exchange for our (genuinely) nice words…

To get your own copy of Advanced Web Ranking visit: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Designed by Woodalls and built by Market Appeal, Woodalls new site has several case studies and animated walk-throughs showing off their handiwork, along with their latest company news.

Article marketing goes way beyond just posting $10 articles churned out by www.textbroker.com on ezinearticles.com. In addition to free ‘article sites’ there are loads of blogs and news sites out there craving quality content. Sites that run content from guest writers includewww.ukmarketingnetwork.co.uk www.creativeboom.co.uk and econsultancy.com to name a few from the marketing sector.

Sure, these posts will have to be of a higher standard, but do you really want to associate your brand with anything less anyway?

Of course, that’s fine if you have something to say, but what if you don’t?
We (www.marketappeal.co.uk) have a team of professional copywriters who can write to order. They’ve managed to make everything from tax investigations to laptop insurance sound interesting (well, almost), so can rustle up something for you too.

Similarly, we have an extensive network of publishers that we work with, and so can arrange for relevant sites to promote your content, building permanent links from popular, authoritative sites on an ongoing basis. – This is turbocharged article marketing, just like the cheap version expect that we post good content on great sites.

2. Blogs and forums – again, this is often done badly, approaching outright spamming.

A cheap trick is to simply find a do-follow blog-CMS (search for that to start off with) that’s easy to identify and prone to auto approving, and then repeat your Google search and hammer away. WordPress won’t work, unless they have a dofollow, but many lesser know platforms have simpler systems anyway.

Doing this properly is another matter. Here’s how. Speak to the site’s manager and tell then that you’d like to cut a deal. You’ll give them an exclusive new offer to promote to their customers for free, if they’ll let you post it on their website.

I’ve seen this work for www.desktoplawyer.co.uk on moneysavingexpert.com, who have 7 million visitors per month, among others. Similar approaches work for blogs too. – Approaching relevant sites with an offer of genuine interest to their readers is what matters.

Benefits for doctors, nurses and other staff and locums

While the url hasn’t changed, the site is all new and now has over 3,000 medical jobs from many of the UK’s leading employers. Additionally, the site’s functionality has been completely overhauled with improved search and CV management, not to mention six dedicated subsites, one for each major specialisation.

For doctors there’s British Doctor Jobs, for nurses British Nurse Jobs.com along with Social Work Jobs, Care Jobs, Health Science Jobs and finally Jobs for Allied Health Professionals.

So, whether you’re a GP, midwife, surgeon or psychoanalyst there’s a fair chance that they have a role for you. Along with traditional job searches, you can upload your CV to the CV database making it possible for head hunters to find you, set up custom job by email alerts or pick them up via RSS feeds.

Also, most of your life you’re not job hunting, so we’re adding some sociable elements into the mix. To start with, I’d like to you meet Ms Maria Cann, better known as the Job Doctor and the new friendly face to British Medical Jobs. She Tweets, has her own Facebook page and just formed a LinkedIn group too.

Benefits for hospitals, surgeries and other healthcare employers

The improved job search functionality should make life easy for job seekers, who are finding the site in rising numbers as we increase the number of phrases for which it has first page rankings.

Expanded paid search campaigns, social media marketing based around Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and partnership deals with other websites, along with improved SEO are all in store. Recruitment agencies and large employers will also be pleased to note that the site will soon support bulk posting via Broadbean.

As you’ve probably guessed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Rest assured that we’ll be working hard over the coming months to ensure that British Medical Jobs is one of the biggest and best medial job sites.

The main site again is: British Medical Jobs. If you have any questions or would like to get in touch for any reason please email marketing@britishmedicaljobs.com or anthony@marketappeal.co.uk to speak to me directly.

So, I thought that I’d “publish” it before everything in it goes out of date, aside from anything else.

There may also be a follow up paper or two around the corner, so, if this one’s of interest, let us know, and we might bring forward part two. In the mean time, please complete the very short from below to receive your own copy of “Free Keyword Research Secrets White Paper: Moving Beyond KEI” by Anthony Sharot.

Of course, Google denies that this is an “attack on cloud computing”, but it would have been far harder for them to hold that line if any of their accounts had been fully breached.

This is a serious matter for Google, as it’s not just their reputation at stake. In addition to being 100% behind cloud computing they hold the private data of millions of individuals, businesses and government departments, along with all of their own employees, thanks to their “eat your own dog food” policy.

Were hackers able to gain full access to their servers then everything from your personal emails to State Secrets and their magical PageRank algorithm could be at stake.

Clearly, this goes way beyond the human rights of a few Chinese protesters, as the attacks were sophisticated enough to suggest government backing, in addition to the apparent political agenda. For example, many of the attacks were launched from compromised servers in Taiwan, along with some from Rackspace for good measure. The attacks were specifically tailored to each of the target corporations, exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe PDF scripts and using phishing emails to install hidden spyware. Further, Adobe may have been targeted in order to try and find new ways to exploit their software.

Before Google became a world power – their annual revenue now eclipse the GDPs of Iceland, Jordan or Bahrain – and trustee of so much private data, the risk of having a server compromised wasn’t such an issue. Their data centres have multiple redundancy and advanced load balancing and hot switching to ensure that the outside world rarely sees any of their hardware failures (which must happen frequently, given how much they own).

Google hasn’t officially declared that it plans to leave China, however they have thrown down the gauntlet to the Government by stating that they’re not planning to censor their search results from now on, even though that probably mean it’s the end for Google.cn.

Some people including a deleted blog post from Baidu have disingenuously suggested that Google pulled out for financial reasons, however, given the huge growth of the Chinese market and Google’s growing market share that argument doesn’t hold much weight.

…the chief architect of Baidu said Google’s decision to quit was for financial reasons, rather than a human rights issue, as Google had failed to dominate the Chinese search market.

“What Google said makes me sick,” he said. “If you are to quit for the sake of financial interest, then just say it.”

First and foremost it appears that Google’s no longer willing to tolerate the risk to their data security that comes from being based in China. In addition to the attacks themselves, working out of China means complying with Government censors and storing data in local servers. It appears that Google now fears security breaches and industrial espionage more than the “almost insignificant” amount of their Global revenue currently contributed by their Chinese arm.Moreover, Google was starting to gain market share, increasing to around 31% of Chinese searches in the last quarter, so, if anything, they were looking forward to the future.

The public’s trust is key to their cloud computing dreams and so making a stand won’t do them any harm back home – North America, the UK and everywhere else where they have the lion’s share. It might also endear them with regulators at home and abroad who are increasingly intervening as they try to innovate, lobby and disrupt other industries.

Despite Google’s desire to “organise [all] of the world’s information”, “don’t be evil moto” and their desire to protect their customers’ data, investors will still be forgiven for wondering whether they have a plan, abandoning such a fast growing market at short notice.

The answer may lie in their ever growing array of additional ventures. For example, Google appears fully committed to the mobile market, having just released a new Android phone with iPhone like abilities. (Detractors complain that the iPhone is better, but that misses the point. The only phone the Nexus One is being compared to is the iPhone, suggesting that they’re already perceived to be in second place, despite being new to the game.) Factor in their Chrome browser, operating system and, soon, a netbook running their own propriety OS and a comprehensive strategy starts to emerge.

Google’s plan to pull their data centres out of China saves them from facing several future battles. For example, many Chinese people (only 20% so far are online) may end up relying on wireless connections including mobile networks and satellites for their internet connection. Google wants to be your search engine of choice, and sell you the phone and laptop that you surf with too.
China’s clumsy and ineffective Green Dam censorship software illustrates their commitment to the freedom of speech, and Google might have been anticipating pressure to adjust their new operating systems to make them work in a party-censor-friendly manner.

So, it looks like Google’s now going to redouble its efforts to make their international web properties available from within China, while working on their plans to offer secure cloud computing and internet connectivity through as many different channels as possible. If nothing else, their new policy should keep liberals, capitalists, Baidu and the US State Department happy for a while. It’s just a shame that they couldn’t please everyone.