Often, people running websites have a unique interpretation of who their online competitors are. Depending where you do your SEO, you will have seen this manifested in a variety of ways: In house - Director asking "Why don't we rank number one for BMW instead of BMW.com? We sell models of BMW cars" Agency - Chances are you've held back giggles as a new business prospect suggests they are competing with a major site like Amazon/YouTube/eBay.

St. Valentine's Day has become one of the biggest events in the retail calendar. Second only to Christmas, it is a huge money maker for brands, with 32% of gifts being bought online . In America, it is expected that a whopping $3.5billion will be spent on jewellery alone . Men are the biggest spenders, buying all sorts of gifts for their loved ones, from flowers, to chocolates, to dinners out and weekends away - and they are more likely than women to buy elaborate gifts.

Rome wasn't built in a day - and similarly )if on a somewhat smaller scale!(, building up a successful blog doesn't happen overnight. As with anything, it takes hard work, determination and commitment to get a blog on its feet, and even more to build up a readership through earning the trust and respect of your audience. Here are some top tips on how to build up a successful blog for your business.

Over the past few years, QR Codes have become more mainstream and can be seen in most day-to-day activities. There are examples of some very good uses of QR Codes as well as some badly thought out QR Codes . QR Codes are great for getting offline marketing messages online quickly. Adding QR Codes to typical offline marketing material such as posters, flyers, business cards or event badges allows the user to see the message instantly.

As with selling any service, selling SEO services is an extremely challenging task. Here are my observations of two opposite ends of the spectrum of what SEO consultants often experience with selling SEO services. Give me a two day optimisation strategy We'll often get contacted with the following, "We want a two day web optimisation strategy implemented." Many neophyte consultants lick their lips and pounce on the 'opportunity' with alacrity.

As I have found out the hard way, Facebook ad production is extremely labour-intensive. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate an effective ad production workflow to best utilise your time. Here are eleven tips I've been able to come up with over the past few months. Account structure In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, 'account' is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user's Facebook account.

Android platform is not able to render URLs shortened by bit.ly, which include dashes in blog post titles. To guarantee all users can read your posts via mobiles, be sure not to utilise dashes in blog post titles. Last week, a client flagged up to us that their site wasn't getting Android traffic on certain posts. True, Android traffic is never high, but when it slips to 0 visits, there must be something wrong. When the client looked into the posts,

It would be fair to say that pretty much every major change to the online environment is greeted with the same two questions by the vast majority of the SEO community - What is it? How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns? So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

Once again, we are proud to be a blog partner for the SMX Advanced London 2012 conference. The event takes place on 15-16th May 2012 at Chelsea Football Club - Stamford Bridge. In order to receive a 15% discount, just enter the code SEOPTIMISE012 when signing up online . There are different packages available and the prices go up after 30th March so it's best to book early! For coverage of previous events,

Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies . The main changes are that: Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy. Information you give Google's various different services can be combined. Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn't announced that it's collecting information it wasn't before,

My Foursquare Experience so far' Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below. I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging. To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those "Foursquare specials" and "Sharing with your friends".

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user's network of Google+ circles.

Over the last few months I have been trying to work on improving my time management skills, not only at work but in my personal life as well. I am forever being told that I am late or don't do anything on time, and that is just from the wife. So I took to improving my time management skills, and thought that I would share with you a few techniques that I am using now in my working life.

Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update - this is a landing page quality update, which looks at "the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result". As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn't this sound very similar to Panda though? At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that: "If you have ads obscuring your content,

'Build websites for users, not search engines' is the advice continually propounded by insiders at Google. As SEOs, we're used to looking at websites and analysing how they would be viewed by a search engine. In actual fact, though, there's a fairly big overlap between what's helpful for a user and what's helpful for a search engine, and the user and search engine experiences can often mirror each other.

We've been quietly working away on a few things here at SEOptimise during the last couple of months, so it's probably about time we made a couple of announcements! Firstly, you may have noticed that in December we opened a new London office in Paddington. Alongside this, we recruited two new SEO execs - Gillian Cook and Pak Hou Cheung - both of whom have written some great posts on the SEOptimise blog already.

So you're advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There's a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost! Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads.

To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul. Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine,

* Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year. If you haven't made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends. Content Creation I will create less shallow content and more quality " one of a kind " pieces of content.

In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms. In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday's big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search .