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An important part of our mission at Sunburnt is to make the power of Internet technology available to everybody. We have written the following informative articles to help improve your understanding and use of Internet technology and take better advantage of our great products.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

6 January 2012

For the last 2 years SEO Moz has conducted a survey of the SEO market, what services are on offer and how much these services cost. The results for 2011 are in, and here are some statistics which may interest you.

Hourly SEO Costs Vary Across Countries, but $76-$200/hour is Most Common
With the exception of India, over 50% of all firms had an hourly cost range of $76-$200. This price range was most common in Australia/New Zealand, followed by the US and then Canada.
By-the-Project Pricing is Popular and Most Commonly $1,000-$7,500
70.1% of respondents said they offer project-based pricing (the most common pricing system selected in the survey). 43% of consultancies were represented in the price range range of $1,000-$7,500.
Every project requires roughly one dedicated employee.
Although the smaller companies could handle a few projects per employee, the larger companies tended to have one or even two employees dedicated to each project, probably because these projects were also larger.

Click the image below to see an infographic of all the data collected in the survey.

Social Sharing Trends in 2011

16 December 2011

Here are some interesting statistics from Clearspring, the company behind the AddThis widget which we use to share content on our websites. The data is for 2011 and shows that Facebook and Twitter continue to be the favourite networks for sharing links.

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Changes At Google You Need To Know About

2 December 2011

This year was a year of big change in Search Engine Optimisation. Google particularly have made some sweeping changes to their algorithm. Google are now

listening to social network signals such as tweets, shares and likes
placing more emphasis on recognised brand names
rewarding fresh content for some search queries
penalising "low quality content" heavily
pushing their own products more agressively
hiding query keywords from webmasters

Take a look at the infographic below to see how and why these changes have been made. As you will see, SEO remains a game of cat and mouse.

Or more accurately, "500-pound gorilla" and mouse.

SEO Suicide

13 September 2011

Pop quiz: What is the easiest and quickest way to destroy your search engine rankings?

Answer: Rebuild your website from scratch!

I see this a lot. People get bored with their website and feel the need to revamp it. They're bored of it because they see it so often, but their customers, who see it much less frequently, think their website is great!

The consequences are also quite severe. When you rebuild your website from scratch with an entirely different software platform, all the incoming links to your product pages and other content break. Your links are your life in search. Lose them and you can kiss your rankings goodbye.

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Google Trends Gives Great Titles

24 June 2011

One of the biggest and simplest factors in getting good search engine rankings is having a Good Page Title and URL. But not only is your title important for the search engines, it is also vital to attract real visitors to your content. Titles are so important in fact, that many people make a living entirely out of coming up with and testing titles on the web and in print media (like newspapers for example).

So what makes a good title? Well, that's an excellent topic, but to be honest I don't have the time to write a thesis about it. I just want traffic and search engine rankings, and I want them now.

So I'm going to teach you a little trick.

Google SEO Hack - Put "Facebook" In Your Page Title

23 June 2011

Today I Googled myself. It's really interesting to see what Google are doing with social networking. The first page of results were nearly all links to my profile on various social networks I am a member of. A few years ago this was not the case.

That didn't surprise me much though. We all know that Google has been paying close attention to what people are saying on Facebook and other social websites. What surprised me though was that a page I wrote with the word "Facebook" in the title showed up in the results.

Although it only shows up on page 5, the page shouldn't be even showing up on page 50. There are no external links to this page, it isn't written in English and it doesn't even have my name on it (although I did post it).

The Importance Of Trial And Error

11 June 2011

Here's an interesting talk from the RSA society called "Adapt: Why Success Always Begins With Failure". The speaker talks about the effectiveness of trial and error and our natural tendency to avoid it. Here is the video:

Google Adwords Notes

25 May 2011

Notes from the Adwords Learning Center for the accreditation program.

Google is a search engine. Adwords offered paid advertising on search result pages and sites on Google's content network.

Terms and abbreviations:

CPC (Cost Per Click), amount charged per clickthrough on ad
CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions), amount charged per 1000 ad impressions
CTR (Click Through Rate), clicks / impressions * 100%

Google rewards ads with higher relevancy (i.e. CTR).

Search Engine Marketing Basics

22 May 2009

Search engine marketing (SEM), or just search marketing, is a form of online advertising where you pay search engine operators to show your ads on search results page and across web pages in their network. Search marketing's biggest advantage over conventional advertising is that your ads are being presented to customers who are looking to buy at the time when they see the ad. It also provides excellent statistics to determine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

What is an Internet Telephone?

9 April 2009

You've heard about people with ridiculously low telephone bills, quoting prices like 10c untimed nationally and 3c / minute internationally. Naturally, you don't believe them. How could a phone company possibly make money at those prices? Well, your friends aren't lying, they're probably just using an Internet phone. In this article we explain how they work and how you can use them to save money.

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