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Alec Sharratt
Alec Sharratt will be writing about his passion; the technical aspects of search. Well experienced within the IT industry, Alec has bags of knowledge on everything technical from simple spreadsheets that will save you hours right up to news and tips to make search that little bit easier.
Blog Posts, Videos and More
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- Paid Search
- 27th Jul 2011
- Comment
AdWords Settings You May Not Know About
Google AdWords is a great tool and an ever evolving beast with many hidden features tucked away in discrete menus obfuscated by un-ticked boxes. In this post I will explain a few nifty, neat and nice AdWords settings that you may not know about. Some are useful for reporting and others are just, well, useful; but they all exist in less than obvious places. Read More -
- SEO
- 20th Jul 2011
- 3 Comments
How Long Before I Get Results From My SEO Campaign?
It’s the kind of question that comes up time and time again, so I felt it was time to address the issue in a blog post. Clearly the answer will vary hugely between clients, campaigns, and industries to mention a few variables.In order to set your client’s expectations and to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, it is well worth over estimating a little. SEO white hat techniques are a long game strategy and anyone who promises or says they can deliver results within a few days or a couple of weeks are usually either lying or using black hat tactics to manipulate you into the SERPs.
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- SEO
- 14th Jul 2011
- Comment
What are White and Black Hat SEO Techniques?
In order to understand the difference between these two types of SEO techniques first we should understand a little bit about Google. Google have built their multi-billion dollar, transnational corporation on the foundations of ‘Search’. It is relevance that drives Search, by being more relevant to the searcher than the competition Google rose to the top of the pile many years ago.
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- SEO
- 6th Jul 2011
- Comment
If you own a website then in all likelihood you will suffer from the never-ending torrent of emails from SEO consultants and companies looking to snare you as a client. Emails can vary from sincere sounding to completely spammy, but there are a few hallmarks and tests which you can do to establish whether the person contacting you is genuine.I actually view this as a kind of sport or hobby and personally enjoy the ones that make huge claims or tick the “beware, potential scam” boxes. In much the same way that I enjoy arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses or Creationists when they have the misfortune of knocking my door! The below is a screenshot of the comments left through the contact form of a client site:
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- Paid Search
- 29th Jun 2011
- Comment
When it comes to outsourcing your AdWords or PPC account, it is worth ensuring that you have a keen eye on what stats you are being fed by your agency. Despite an agency giving you gospel truth data it may not be entirely relevant to your business goals. In fact, statistics can be interpreted in almost as many ways as the gospel has, with over 38,000 different denominations of Christianity! It can be easy for an agency to promote the value of one statistic in a report such as CTR whilst ignoring other statistics like conversions and conversion rate. -
- Paid Search
- 22nd Jun 2011
- 2 Comments
Tips to Improve your AdWords Account
AdWords is easy to setup and as a result many many people setup an account, throw everything on broad match (which is the default) and away you go. Fortunately (for the consultancy industry) it is not as simple as this! An un-optimised AdWords account can cost you dearly, syphoning cash out of your bank account at a rate of knots. In this post I will detail a few great ways to improve your AdWords account. -
- SEO
- 15th Jun 2011
- Comment
Hello, my name’s Alec. I’m a search specialist here at Koozai, and today I’m going to be walking you through a few basic SEO on page elements.
As you can see from the diagram behind me, I’ve a basic web page that contains all of the on page elements that you’d expect to see or could see on a web page. I’m going to walk you through what these are, how to use them, a few dos and don’ts and the relevancy of this to optimising your website.
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- SEO
- 15th Jun 2011
- 10 Comments
It all started innocuously enough last week when a colleague, Anna George, was contacted by a client whose AdWords account she manages. Read More -
- SEO
- 8th Jun 2011
- Comment
Choosing the Right Hosting Server for Your Website
Note that the title does not say “the best hosting server” but “the right hosting server”, this is because like all technology they are tools, and you use the right tool for the right job.
There are many different platforms and technologies upon which you can host your website, what one you use will depend on a number of factors detailed below. I will explain the benefits and disadvantages of each system and offer some advice on choosing the right hosting server for your website.
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- Paid Search
- 1st Jun 2011
- 2 Comments
This article is in many ways a follow up to my recent post the explored why a little bit of SEO knowledge can be a bad thing. The primary difference being that rather than just a little knowledge, I am referring to wholly incorrect knowledge. When I first got started in SEO, I had no-one to ask questions; instead I had to try and filter the credible sources from the unreliable ones. The problem with this is that without prior knowledge you just don’t know what is right and what is wrong.Millions of people can be wrong!
The only way I found to verify information was through online consensus, go with what the majority agree with. This is better than believing everything on the internet but is far from perfect; just because a lot of people say something is true doesn’t mean it is… a quick glance at Scientology will confirm the flaws in that logic (and also confirm that millions of people will actually follow a sci-fi author!).
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- SEO
- 25th May 2011
- Comment
Enough SEO Rope to Hang Yourself
Having worked in IT for many years I invariably ended up seeing the classic user who had a modicum of knowledge about computers and, using this, have destroyed their PC. The problem, I think, comes from the fact that your average PC user will generally harbour enough fear to stick to what they know and just use the applications.
Someone with a little knowledge will try to make the PC faster or attempt to fix a problem when it occurs. Often their knowledge came from fixing something before on a PC, however not all problems are the same even if they look that way on first inspection.
I have also seen this type of “basic knowledge” scenario occurring more and more in the world of SEO. Increasingly, I am seeing websites or meeting people who have decided to save some money and do the SEO work themselves. I can understand this mentality, I love learning new skills and when faced with a problem I like to think I can overcome it using my own resources. Indeed this is how I got started in SEO.