What I was wearing: h&m black and white striped sweater, Pieces
black pants, Primark bag, Primark shoes and DKNY black and gold watch.
Monday 14 October 2013
The Italian Jewellery
There is no country in the world that produces jewellery like Italy. It doesn’t matter if it’s hand- or machine-made or a combination of both, jewellery makers produce a seemingly endless variety of pieces that combine superb artistry and craftsmanship.
But despite its international reputation for excellence, recent
years haven’t been kind to the Italian jewellery industry. A combination
of the global economic downturn, the spike in the price of gold and the
high cost of quality labour, has left the industry in despair.
“Things have been very bad,” one exhibitor confided in me. Especially for gold jewellery,” which the Italians do best.
VicenzaOro may have marked a turning point. Approximately, 1,200
Italian and foreign brands from 30 countries presented their jewellery
interpretations to more than 18,000 buyers (10,879 from Italy and 7,160
from 111 other countries).
Show officials were particularly excited about the “return” of some
Italian retailers, seeing it as “an encouraging sign considering the
much-desired end of the most critical phase of the recession.”
Thursday 3 October 2013
Creating and Implementing a Full SEO Strategy
Creating and
implementing a full SEO strategy can be a lengthy process. It often
starts out with a detailed website health check and background
research, which (when done properly) can take up a lot of time. This can
seem counter-productive, as it delays carrying out changes and fixes
that can actually start making a difference to your overall site
performance.
This low-hanging fruit could really boost your link juice! The
outside world may be linking to your site using both www. and non www.
versions of your URLs, but in the eyes of the search engines, these are
effectively different pages, so the value from these links could be
diluted.
Google is less likely to rank a website highly if a large number of
the pages that appear in its results simply direct visitors to error
pages. These error pages also leak value, as they are usually caused by
URLs that have not been redirected properly. As such, any value that
they may have been built up in the past – through content and links – is
lost, rather than redirected to an equivalent, or similar page on the
website.
This one requires a bit of knowledge in Google Analytics, so once
again, if you don’t have an account set up then get one, as this is
another place to get some extremely useful stats, figures and
information about the performance of your website.
Throughout the life of a website, things change, from the look and
feel, to page URLs or even the domain name itself. Link reclamation is
the process of reclaiming links that were added to third party websites
in the past, that now link to dead pages on your website, due to URLs
not being redirected to their new locations. By identifying these broken
links, you can set up redirects from the old pages to the new, and
therefore pass on the value from the linking source that would otherwise
have been lost.
Keyword research is an important process for any online marketing
strategy, but nowadays there is a great deal of competition in most
online industries, so aiming for the most competitive keywords can seem
like an impossible task.
However, not everybody chooses the most obvious search terms when
performing a search, so this is where the long-tail keywords can help.
Tuesday 3 September 2013
Google Patents Anchor Text Snippets & Creating and Implementing a Full SEO Strategy
Somewhere out there is a universe that looks exactly like this one, and appears to run exactly like this one. Except something’s a little different. A little off. It’s as if search engines took a left turn instead of a right turn, back in the early 2000s. Instead of using only using meta descriptions and possibly body text from web pages for descriptive text, or snippets, for those pages in search results, they learned a new trick. Imagine that the content surrounding anchor text in a link to a page was collected and evaluated based upon a quality score, and that this associated and usually descriptive text was used to generate snippets instead?
My thought on the possibility is that often anchor text doesn’t do
the best job of describing a page, and often links to a page are from a
third party who might not have the same interest in writing text that
might make a good snippet for a page. But, Google filed a patent for
such an approach back in 2003. And it was granted this week – so they
pursued what was described within the patent for over a decade as well.
The patent does mention that headings on pages might also be used as
potential snippets for pages, and provide the following example:
“Computers > Algorithms > Compression”. But that’s a small part of
the patent. They don’t limit it to anchor text that a site might
provide itself, like in breadcrumb trail navigation for a page.
There’s also a part to this approach that recognizes that many pages
have more than one link to them, so a choice would need to be made as to
the best “snippet” to show.
