There are so many exciting projects forth coming and with a new concentrated effort on lead generation through our larger sites, something had to give and consultancy, as well as a few other projects are, at least for the time being, not being offered as a separate service to the main core businesses.

The SEO training programme set up last year, will now be re-launched, as we constantly have communications from smaller businesses that just cannot justify or afford the cost of  an SEO campaign, where their local markets are not large enough for a reasonable return from the investment. As you know, we always give clients honest advice and we we don’t think you will get a return on your investment, we will tell you so. Often the solution is for that small business to do their own SEO in house, so we offer SEO training for these situations. This training will occur at the Wilton Centre near Middlesbrough, easy to get to from most locations in the North East.

There has always been demand for this training, but previously other priorities meant we did not have the flexibility to set key dates in the diary that matched those wanting training, we now intend to get this right with regular monthly  dates planned.

As we mentioned earlier, lead generation is key to the FOKM core business (again for those where their own SEO  campaign  by themselves can be too expensive). Leasebam the car lease lead generation website is going from strength to strength and with new projects planned that include skip hire, mortgages and solicitor leads, (and a whole load we cant mention here) you can see there is much growth planned.

FOK Marketing don’t have these issues in house as we only do SEO, but clearly when working with sites that have been developed by other people, the same issues arise if not greater. Clearly communication between people is the key, but when someone does not understand why flash can harm SEO, or why the size of images can affect load times and also rankings, it can become challenging.

So clear instruction and priority setting with everyone working to the same goal, even if personal artistic preferences are out on the shelve, is key, as the client is obviously a priority and without customers they often have nothing. We have also had these challenges, but fortunately we have now a network of developers who work within our guidelines, so many of the challenges stated in the conference, we do not suffer any more.

People I met ranged from someone who has started a network of 75 intro branded sites, to on page marketing consultant, a lead generation company in Spain for the education sector an a Google reputation specialist, which is right up my street.

Google reputation is critical for good sustained rankings, so to find out that 95% of what I do is just what others are doing, was good news, but it was the 5% that was the most interesting, and  how external links strategies have changed recently. In short it was  where the outgoing links went to, with authority sites now being just too common. Linking out to good sites, which are different to the norm, is good providing it directly relates to the subject matter in hand.

The pan is to do some blogging as it occurs, some after the event, I won’t be revealing everything, but hopefully some information that will be useful.

For the search professional it has been a year of mixed opinions and results. For many the implementation has shown no change and rankings have remained constant throughout, but for a small proportion of webmasters certain algorithm changes have been a nightmare to overcome. There are certain areas that have become more sensitive, especially relating to IP addresses and links from the same server.

It is astonishing how much information Google can handle in any one second, if a web page was a paper page of information stacked on top of each other, Google  would process 3 miles of paper each second. The job of any seo company is not to find ways around Google for a quick win. but to work within Google’s guidelines that benefit the user, so speed is not a ctical factor on the new algorithm

But when it comes to inner pages, Google has started to add twitter comments and quiet a lot of adwords stuff, making the search results more cluttered than we had been used to. the new design offers more information, but changes in fonts and what they call the “Search Options Panel” offers more information in a neater presentation.

The challenge for Google was the sophistication of searches now being used every day on Google and hoe to represent many different options to that search result, form images, to books, and results that are related but not necessarily directly relevant. the conclusion is search results that delivers relevancy through the main page, but many other options on the “Search Options Panel” to the left.

Apparently this change has evolved since 2006 with many different designs being trialled, we presume it has been implemented to coincide with the huge hardware update called Caffeine, where there is still no confirmation that the roll out is complete across all data centres. SEO Companies are trying ascertain how this affects the performance of commercial websites and what they can do to enhance visitor experience through these changes.

Customers are drawn to the service, because it delivers several quotes from filling in one form and the prices are presented in a way they can compare, as well as look as previous feedback and vehicle supplier details. The car lease suppliers are drawn to Leasebam, because the cost of receiving a lead is considerably cheaper than doing it themselves.  Some sources claim it can costs £200 to gain a customer in the motor trade, so even with a poor conversion rate, Leasebam will cost only a fraction of that, making the service a no brainer for contract hire companies needing more business.

This type of site, requires a huge amount of SEO and constant work to deliver customers and is more likely to do this with specific search terms, rather than the basic “car lease”  generic terms that attract window shoppers. Most people, who are looking for car lease, know what they what in terms of makes and models, so the research prior to the sites creation was critical.

There are other projects in the pipeline and as they are delivered, we will update with our news section here at FOK Marketing

The changes are related to speed. How fast is delivers results and how fast it indexes new data? We have been told that searches will not be affected but us search masters cannot see how results can remain static after such a huge change. In better words, a website that cannot be spidered quickly may find itself being thrown out of the SERPS. As pages are indexed quicker, then surely search results will alter as new links and new content is found.

We are sitting here, thinking remove all java script all videos or anything that will slow down the Google spider or suffer on Google. For those bloggers out there, this could be good news, ensuring your content is found straight away must be good for them. Here at FOK marketing we have found certain news items on our blogs being found by Google in minutes and now we know these were probably trial algorithms.

It si possible that is some of the technology is already there, that the impact is smaller that we are expecting, but Matt Cutts has stated that Caffeine will not be launched until after Christmas and then only one data centre as a full roll out.

One ting is sure, that Google data centre will get some usage as SEO gurus around the world will be tapping in to compare search results.

Gary has finished the Leasebam videos which is car lease lead generation site developed by FOK marketing and is currently going through a trial period with 5 car lease companies. Anyway this week has been dedicated to bring some videos and some pages of life with content and a greater explanation of what we do.