Andy Blackburn - SEO Consultant» Pages with the tag: search engine optimisation – Andy Blackburn’s SEO blog

SEO in Blackburn

Andy — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:28:34 +0000

The “SEO Blackburn” article I put up received a fair amount of attention, so I thought I would actually put something productive up for those in and around the Blackburn area looking for Search Engine Optimisation services.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation can be defined as the manipulation of a website in order to increase its relevance towards a given keyword or set of keywords. However, as the online space evolves, more and more “social” elements can also have an effect on a website, its performance, and ultimately, its levels of traffic and conversions.

What can affect SEO?

Any online, and in many cases offline, promotional activity could have a positive, or indeed negative effect on a website. This includes:

Editorial – Online or offline
Advertorial – Online or offline
Other forms of press – Especially online
Social Networking Activity – Do your users, clients, staff, associates use social networks? This could impact your SEO perfomance
Blogging – As above

As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re looking for SEO in Blackburn, please leave a comment and I’m sure I can point you in the right direction!

SEO Blackburn

Andy — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:19:45 +0000

Blackburn – My Surname
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, something I did as a consultant in mainland Europe, something I now do as a full time employee of the digital marketing arm a reasonably large marketing firm here in the UK.
Blackburn – Also the name of a reasonably large town in Lancashire, England.

Not having thought of this before, imagine my surprise to find that my blog has started ranking for “SEO Blackburn“.

So, as a concious blogger who knows that people finding my site whilst searching for a Blackburn SEO might not find what they’re looking for at this blog, please leave a message here and I’ll be sure to pass your information on to someone who would be able to help with any or all of your SEO requirements!

Latent Semantic Indexing

Andy — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:48:27 +0000

Latent semantic analysis, or latent semantic indexing as it is more popularly known now, was first patented in 1988 by a number of scientists, including Susan Dumais, a Principal Researcher in the Adaptive Systems & Interaction Group of Microsoft Research, and is defined as a method by which the relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain are analysed by producing a set of concepts related to both the terms and the documents. This concept can be applied:

To find relationships between terms (synonymy¹ and polysemy²)
To compare the documents contained within an conceptual space (document classification³)
To translate a given query of terms into a conceptual space and find matching documents (information retrieval⁴)

It is the the use of LSA/I in information retrieval that really interests us here at SEO central, or wherever you may be. The fact that Google, and quite probably, but not to the same extent, the other major search engines take LSA/I into account when their algorithm performs a search can be the difference between your site ranking 1st or 101st for your specifically targeted keyword. The algorithms “know” that a page written on “baking” should naturally contain information on flour, eggs, sugar, cakes, bread, muffins, cookies, etc, etc… If you have merely blasted your page full of “baking” references, and not taken the other subjects that should at least be touched upon, then your page will be classed as overly optimised and won’t rank at all.

What this means for bloggers like you and I, is that the LSA/I segments or even subroutines of the search algorithms favour naturally written articles, that read well, and contain other relevant references, and seriously frown upon overly dense, over optimised, keyword-stuffed paragraphs that don’t read well at all.

¹The synonymic relationship between words. Synonymy is not always transitive, where a word can be a synonym of several other words that have completely different definitions. For example hot is a synonym of spicy and warm.
²Similarly, a polyseme is a word that has by definition more than one meaning. For example a mole is small borrowing animal, a skin marking, a spy or informant, the SI base unit for measuring the amount of any substance or even a large structure which is normally fabricated from stone, used as a pier or junction across water.
³The method or technique by which an electronic document is classified into one or more categories based upon the content of the document.
⁴The method by which a document is obtained or retrieved dependant upon it’s content in relation to a query.

Originally posted on this blog in July 2007, but was lost during the great blog explosion of 2008 and retrieved from Archive.Org Don’t ask why, but I’ve always missed this post and I’m glad to have it back! :)