Patrick Altoft's Blog

Trying to improve the rankings of a site that offers very little value to its visitors is a short term strategy that is likely to come unstuck the first time Google carries out a manual review of the site.

Affiliates and small companies are ideally placed to react quickly to algorithm changes but how can big brands do the same?

Search engine optimisation isn't a subject that sits well within the marketing departments of most large brands.

A lot of websites have news sections where company employees are tasked with writing about the latest industry news as well as news from within the company itself.

Sometimes the news is published because the writer is passionate about the subject and sometimes it is churned out by somebody who seems to be bored by the industry.

To see large companies wanting to learn about how to behave and interact on the web is very exciting for consultants, but the answers we give are not always as exciting for the client.

Keeping your finger on the pulse is very important in internet marketing and reacting to changes is key to maximising the effectiveness of your campaign.

Getting a top organic ranking in Google can drive a huge amount of customers to a website, resulting in large profits.

Break the rules and this traffic stream can be turned off overnight.

Keyword research is one of the most tempting parts of a search engine optimisation campaign to outsource.

My advice to UK SEO consultants and webmasters is to be very careful.

Most large companies are scared of blogging and yet they have quite a good news section.

My belief is that the two are not really that different.

For some time now, Google has been including more and more elements into its search results. These extra elements are called Universal Search.

StumbleUpon has the ability to drive a huge amount of traffic (up to 20,000 visitors for popular articles) to your website and can be a very valuable marketing tool.

It is a thriving community of over 4.4m users who rate and categorise web pages before sharing them via the StumbleUpon toolbar.

This guide will help you make the most of it without the risk of upsetting the community.