It has been estimated that the Central Office of Information (COI) provided over two fifths, (£40 million) of I-Level’s revenue until earlier this year. Despite their best efforts, teaming up with top media agency, Starcom, the COI awarded the renewed, premium contract to WPP’s GroupM.

Andrew Walmsley, co-founder of I-Level, and group chief executive, Stephen Rust, have called in the help of Zolfo Cooper as administrator following a severe cash flow crisis as a result of losing out on the government contract.

Zolfo Cooper’s, spokesman Alastair Beveridge, released a statement saying that, ‘the joint administrators will be assessing the business, before gauging and evaluating the interest in the company, with their main priority being with the companies’ creditors.’

Created in the late 1990s by Charlie Dobres and Andrew Walmsley, the founders have expanded the marketing agency by taking on a further 120 employees. Furthermore, in early 2008, the firm sold a 60 per cent stake to private equity group, ECI, in a £45 million deal.

I-Level have won numerous awards and have an impressive roster of clients including: Sky, Procter & Gamble, The Sun, Macmillan, Samsung and Renault. Their marketing activities include: social media and mobile marketing, display ads and search marketing.

As of this date onwards, affiliates are not allowed to acquire links for the brands bingo site terms from any third part sites for the purpose of deep linking to their own affiliate website.  According to the two networks, any affiliates found to be breaching these new rules will have their affiliate commissions withheld.

The reasons for the rule changes, according to the networks, are so that the brand owner can have greater control over the quality of the reader experience when a user searches for their branded terms in the search portals.

The decision is understandable in terms of the brands wanting to control the user experience, but they don’t control the search engines that use their own algorithms to decide how to rank sites and the reader experience.  Perhaps a better solution for the bingo site owners is to improve their own SEO strategy for the brand, instead of trying to artificially control the SERPS.

The question on everybody’s lips now is how are the merchants going to monitor the acquisition of third party links? And does acquiring mean getting a free link because someone has read your site and genuinely links back to you? Whats stopping the affiliates brand link building and then advertising a competitor?

Test Multiple Design Formats –

If the merchant offers a variety of different banner designs then test each one to find out whether they make a different in terms of click-through rates (CTR). Research has shown that complex banners generally get the highest CTR.

Animated banners also outperform static as internet surfers are more likely to notice banners that are bright and flashing.

Positioning –

The saying   ‘location, location, location’ is none the truer than with online affiliate banners and Adsence.  Test different positions to figure out which area of your site gives you the best CTR.

Size of Banners –

Size does matter! Research has shown that banners of larger size are more likely to create click throughs’ than smaller pixel banners. When selecting a size, consider loading times and overall page design.

Banner Loading Time –

Only use fast loading banners. If you use slow loading banners, you will not only miss out on clicks but also page visitors as it will slow down how long your entire site takes to load.

Brand Name

Choose a reputable dating site to promote. People are less likely to part with their cash if they don’t trust the site. Select dating sites that are well known in the public domain such as Dating Direct, Match or eHarmony.

Payouts

Simple advice, but select an affiliate-dating program that has the biggest payouts. Consider how much traffic you expect to get on your site. Some affiliate dating programmes will pay out more when you get over a certain number of sign ups a month whereas others will have a set rate no matter how many new members you send.

Some will also pay for registrations (such as Dating Direct & eHarmony do) whilst others like Match.com will only pay for sales, but usually at a better percentage.

Cookies

Consider the affiliate programmes cookie period. Not everyone signs up to a dating site the first time they visit. The longer the cookie lasts the better the chances of you getting paid. For example, a 30 day cookie means you will get paid so long as the person signs up to the dating site within 30 days of first clicking your link or banner.

Conversion rates

The majority of affiliate networks provide conversion data. This allows you to see which dating sites are great at converting visitors into fully paying members. You can also measure conversion rates yourself by testing each dating site until you find one which works best with your website.

Its important to remember that the content of your website is going to attract a certain type of visitor and that visitor is likely to convert into a sale better on a certain type of dating / relationship website so test test and test some more!

Why do I think these could be beneficial? My research is based entirely on observations of successfully ranked sites in competitive areas. Feel free to submit others and I will add them in and link back to you.

Meta Description

The meta description tag should contain one or more sentences describing the page. Search Engines will display this under the Page Title, therefore it’s extremely important make it interesting to encourage potential visitors to click through.

Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”A description of your page goes in here.”>

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords are also used by some Search Engines although they have been written of by most people,  it is still a worthwhile cause as it could count towards an overall page Quality Score in Google and older Search Engines still use them.

Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your phrase here, another phrase here” />

Meta Robots

This tells the Search Engines what it can and cannot do on a particular page.

This can be a very good one if used correctly even if others don’t say so. Its used throughout a few of my websites to ensure the Content gets indexed. This and the use of nofollows prevents Link Juice being passed to Tag Listings etc.  So on each “Post” every internal linked is nofollowed and on each Tag listing I use the Meta Robots tag like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow,noodp,noydir,noarchive” />

Meta Robots full list of Attributes:

• Index – Index this page please Googlebot (or other search engine).
• NoIndex – Don’t index this page Googlebot
• Follow – Follow all the links on this page
• NoFollow – Don’t follow anything on this page
• Noopd – Don’t use the description from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
• Noydir – Don’t use the description from the Yahoo Directory
• Noarchive – Don’t show a cache of this page please

Meta Distribution

This tells Google who your target audience is and would usually be set to Global.

Meta Distribution Attributes:

• Global is intended for all users.
• Local – for local IP block of your website
• IU – Internal Use Only not for public distribution

Example:

<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />

Meta Author

This should contain the owner/author of the page being displayed. It is an optional tag which you may or may not want to use. I will add that most SEO people seem to have it in their header, if they do it can’t be bad right?

Example:

<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=”Anthony Shapley”>

Meta Generator

This is used to show what Content Management System is being used to Generate your website and is used by the software distributors to track the reach of their product. Whilst this is fine, I do highly encourage everyone to remove Version Numbers because if an exploit is found, it’s easy to work out if it applies to your website.

It makes no difference to your Search Results, you may or may not want to use it. Personally I would just remove it.

Example:

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 2.6.2” />

The day started with Joost’s presentation on Blogging, which was awesome. Covered some quite technical bits that some people would perhaps usually overlook (including me) so I’ve been spending sometime improving loading times which were surprisingly bad. They still aren’t great, but it was a superb presentation and anyone who wants to blog seriously needs to read Joost’s blog.

Immediately after Joost’s presentation we had Julian from the Telegraph discussing big site SEO, which was also great, covering SEO from a Newspapers perspective was a very useful.

We then had superb Judith Lewis covering Universal Search – Judith’s presentation was very insightful for anyone starting out learning SEO covering all aspects of getting in the index including, web pages, images, products, videos and beyond.

After that Joost, Judith and I decided to head back to the hotel to freshen up (I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to find it) and I’m glad I went with them because I never would have!! We then went back to watch Zoe Piper talk about the Content Network. In case you’ve forgotten what the content network is, its what us SEO’s use to find relative back links. Uh I mean its how we advertise sites..

I then met a whole bunch more people (so many) including The Hodge who organized the whole event! It really was non stop all day until the early hours of Sunday morning by which point I’m ashamed to say I’d got so drunk I ended up being rather ill.

All in all, superb day and I highly recommend everyone considers visiting the next one in 2010 – I will be there!

Directories

Every link building campaign is started with a big Directory Submission, this is the foundation. Directories don’t pass a ton of equity but they are an easy way to ramp up numbers and a good mix of unique Class C IP Links. Its also extremely cheap or if your really skint you can do it yourself. When doing directory submissions I highly recommend using a multitude of different titles and descriptions. I wouldn’t use the same one more than 10 times before moving onto something slightly different.

Articles

After laying a solid foundation of links its start building some contextual links into the mix (anchor text your phrase), write 20 – 30 on topic unique articles, not spins. Copyscape picks them up so Google sure as hell can. Submit them to follow sites such as Ezine Articles, etc. Ensure they get accepted.

Social Sites

Register on all the popular social sites, some give links away when you actively participate, more than most people care to notice. On top of that they will rank underneath your site for your Brand which is also awesome. Aim for about 50 – 100. Knowem is awesome for this if your lazy.

Press Release

Once you’ve rolled out all of that write up a Press Release announcing the launch of your new site, link back to your homepage with your Brand Name and an interrior page with the text your targetting. Maximum of three (IMO). Hopefuly it gets picked up well and you get a whole bunch of links. Use PR Web for the best results.

Big Links

Once you’ve done all of that properly, you should have a pretty strong profile, finish it off with some big juicy links aim for PR5 – PR8. You can even get good on-topic links at this sort of quality for free if you offer a unique service and good content. Alternatively be prepared to cough up some cash. If you do, make sure you do it in a contextual manner on a fairly new page.

And then repeat where you think you need it, Link Building is very much an Art, whats in today probably won’t be the fashion tomorrow.

Just thought I’d let you know that if you post more than 10 times on his blog and pass the editorial review you will get a clean link back to your site. This is a reward to those who take the time to participate in the community he has built around his site.

Another benefit of doing this is to reduce the amount of links on a page. After Matt Cutts recently announced that a Pages, PageRank is divided between all links on a page regardless of whether they’re followed or not, it makes sense to just completely remove links from comments – unless your going to do followed links. We even went as far to test if the GoogleBot would follow a URL that wasn’t linked and index it i.e. a link citation you might call it. So far all of our tests have indicated that GoogleBot doesn’t follow unlinked URLs in Content. Personally I am quite suprised by this!

I will probably implement something similar on this site shortly.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to learn SEO I would recommend starting on my SEO Guide that I am gradually writing.

Will you benefit from it?

So much is being spoken about SEO these days that goes ‘right over the head’ of so many website owners, that some of them just abandon the idea of employing SEO techniques or employing an SEO Consultant to advise them, purely because they just do not understand what all the fuss is about. But there is no doubt that almost all website owners could benefit from it, employed properly and in a manner suited to their particular business.

Do you really need it?

Many small to medium e-commerce website owners are of the opinion that ‘if my prices are lower than all my competitors, buyers can see this if they compare them, why should I need to do anything other than keep my prices competitive?’ Or, ‘if I have found a niche in the market, or am offering the general public a service that no one else is offering, I am bound to succeed’. They are overlooking one basic – that is the fact that buyers have to FIND their website first, when searching for the products or services they offer, to be able to compare their prices with others selling in the same field.

It is a fact that more referrals to your website from search engines cannot alone guarantee more sales for you. And, that there are other Internet marketing methods that can be employed to improve sales that do not involve the use of SEO. But these will usually involve a lot of work and expensive paid for advertising. Utilised properly, SEO is an effective tool for most website owners wishing to improve not just traffic to their site but resulting sales from that traffic.

White Hat –v- Black Hat SEO methods

Statements from any SEO Consultant guaranteeing you that employing them will result in your website getting top ranking in Google are to be viewed with caution. Google, along with other search engines change their ranking algorithms and will not divulge detailed information of precisely how websites are ranked with them. No detailed discussion of these Black Hat SEO methods will be gone into here, as the main object is to discuss the Benefits of SEO when utilized properly, not to provide some sort of ‘School for Scoundrels’ where Black Hat methods are concerned.

What to look for in a good SEO Consultant

The aim of a good SEO Consultant (or a White Hat SEO Consultant) should be to achieve the most prominent listing of your website possible without the employment of Black Hat Techniques, but there can be no 100% guarantees – therefore the giving of such guarantees should be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. And, they probably intend to achieve this by employing ‘Black Hat’ methods, there is a very real risk that, although short term success might be apparent, the methods they employ will probably result in your website being penalised and even blacklisted by the most popular search engines. Some very large multi national organizations have discovered this to their cost.

In other words, good SEO Consultants employ ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques. And they will take into account the size and scope of the website business they are dealing with and make suggestions accordingly. It is not one rule for all and not every website will benefit the same from the employment of SEO. SEO Consultants who promise you the earth very quickly should, in the main, be avoided.

Suffice to say, the techniques will include the basics of ensuring your site is registered with major search engines, and listed in the appropriate directory. They will assist with the writing of optimal content for your website, and recommend changes where they would be beneficial.

If you want to learn about SEO I would recommend reading these posts in order:

• How to Write Remarkable Title Tags – an SEO’s perspective
• Improving CTR with Meta Descriptions and bits on other Meta Tags
• Tracking your Inbound Links

There are several simple principles to stick to when writing that remarkable Title Text:

* Include a good call to action. This will provoke the user to click on you, over your competitors. For example:
“******* **** – Florist Sundries | Cheap Wholesale Florist Supplies”

Would be much better as:
“Get Florist Sundries Supplies at cheap prices from ******* ****”

Personally I would remove the “at cheap prices” but this shows how simply tweaking the keywords in the title creates something much more user friendly, meaning they are a lot more likely to click it.

* Whilst a Title Tag can be up to 80 amount of characters you should aim to keep it to 64 because Google and other Search Engines only display 64 characters. Missing characters of the end is not visually attractive in my opinion.

* Testing Click Through Rates. When the site is of a commercial nature, i’ts sometimes beneficial to test Title Texts use Pay Per Click, create a campaign, exact match it to your ranking term and rotate ads in order to work out the best possible text. This is measured by the Click through Rate and/or Conversion Rate of each Ad, depending on whether visitors or sales are your goal.

If you’ve managed to do all of that then you’re one step closer to a well optimised website.