Acronyms I Have Learnt From Work

Alright, so I’d like to share all the acronyms I have learnt from work to date. It’s pretty interesting how these work jargons influence your daily language/writing to the point that sometimes people don’t understand what you’re talking about.

Some of them obviously I probably already know from before but thought I’d just add it to the mix anyway.

Acronyms

AFAIK – As Far As I Know

ASAP - As Soon As Possible

BAU - Business As Usual

B2B – Business To Business

B2C – Business To Consumer

COB – Close Of Business

EOD – End Of Day

EOW – End Of Week

ETA - Estimated Time of Arrival

FMCG – Fast Moving Consumer Goods

FY - Financial Year

FYI – For Your Info

KPI - Key Performance Indicator

OH&S – Occupational Health & Safety

PNL – Profit And Loss

QA – Quality Assurance

RFP – Request For Proposal

TBD – To Be Determined

YTD – Year To Date

Anyway, I might’ve missed some but I’m keen to hear what other acronyms you’ve heard of out in the business world?

IAB Awards 2011: First Rate wins SEO category

Just wanted to share with you all that the company that I work for, First Rate, has won the IAB award for search marketing – organic search (SEO). We were competing against Mediacom and Outrider in this category.

You can see the full list of winners and finalists at the IAB Australia Awards website.

Special thanks to our team here at First Rate for their hard work and enthusiasm, and also thanks Focus Property for allowing us to submit our work with them!

You can read our press release on our company blog.

4 Important Reasons for SEO 301 Redirection

When it comes to making URL structural changes to your website, it is very important to ensure you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new URLs. Common cases of doing this are migrating between pages on a site or migrating between sites.

Doing 301 redirects for migrations has SEO and usability impact and if not followed correctly, may cost your site valuable organic traffic and rankings.

4 reasons why you should and must 301 redirect your old URLs:

1. Search engines (such as Google) most likely have crawled and indexed your site on the SERPs. If a user then queries and finds your site organically on the SERPs, it would be poor user experience if the link found lead to a 404 page.
2. Search engines may recrawl your site via the old URLs and if stumbles upon a 404 page, will most likely drop you out of the SERPs if they can’t see the association to the new URL. This is also because of poor user experience as search engines place high importance on ensuring users find what they’re looking for.
3. You will lose link juice from external sites as these trust & authority juices aren’t flowed from the old URL to the new URL. Loss of link juice means your site will lose authority & trust: 2 important factors in SEO.
4. If you did not update your internal links to point to the new URLs, you will have a lot of broken links too which will negatively affect your internal PageRank flow.

You’d be surprised but I have seen websites lose 50%+ organic traffic due to this oversight. Imagine if you ran a multi-million dollar e-commerce site. What are the implications of not doing this?
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Track SEO Organic Rankings with Google Analytics

In April 2009, Google announced that they were making some changes to how the referral URL would look like on their search engines.

One of the key information that’s provided here is the listing’s organic ranking (cd parameter). This can be found in the referral URL property (or document.referrer when referring to the DOM).

It’s been more than 1.5 years since the announcement so I figured that the gradual roll out would be almost complete (I still see instances of the old referral URL being used though) so I decided to implement a filter for Google Analytics that will pull in the organic ranking data and show it in the keyword reports.

Before we get into it, there’s something important to know about the cd parameter. Traditionally in SEO, we’ve always known the SERPs to contain 10 organic listings (as shown below).
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I Like It On Facebook Status

You may be wondering what on earth is happening on Facebook with your female friends making sexually suggestive updates like ‘I like it on the floor’ and ‘I like it on the dining room chair’, as featured above. I certainly did and I got curious.
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