Majestic SEO Blog

British and Dutch Prime Ministers come to Science Park

Believe it or not, Mark Rutte (The Dutch Prime Minister) and David Cameron (The British Prime Minister) were in Faraday Wharf at Birmingham Science Park Aston  last week as they recognised the first network “node” in Cisco’s Virtual Incubator.

Majestic – whilst being a British company – has Dutch backing, but as our Dutch investor wasn’t in the building that day and the Marketing Director (that would be me) was “marketing” with Miss Chile at Pubcon in Las Vegas, we didn’t mind that the two prime ministers didn’t get a chance to say hi.

Our founder – Alex – doesn’t take cold calls.

In all seriousness – when Majestic SEO chose its offices, we looked long and hard to find offices in England’s second city where we would feel comfortable as we developed what we hoped would be a reputable brand that would be respected throughout the world – albeit in our niche market. For not one but two Prime Ministers to come to the science park shows that we chose wisely in that regard. We are in a building with some of the UK’s most innovative startups and as they are almost all in the technology sector, we feel that we are in great company.

You can see more about the Prime Ministers’ visit here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yahoo Site Explorer’s demise will not affect Majestic SEO

Today we are seeing Yahoo Site Explorer coming offline. This will not affect Majestic SEO’s operations in any way at all.

Yahoo Site Explorer was launched in September 2005 to mixed acclaim but became the main source of link analysis data in the world for several years. It is now being retired as we speak and its architect, Tim Mayer laments its demise.

Majestic SEO does not – and never has – used Yahoo’s data. Whilst we expect an increase in the Free services that Majestic offers as a result of this closure, we have already planned for this eventuality within our infrastructure and see no issues in handling the increased traffic to our site.

Majestic crawls the web independently of any search engines and we surpassed Yahoo’s data set many years ago.

We would like to say thank you to Yahoo for Yahoo Site Explorer’s contribution to Internet Marketers everywhere.

Majestic facelift for 2012

We think you are going to like this. MajesticSEO.com is making the huge usability leap that so many people have wanted – starting with a major overhaul of the site theme, navigation and layout. From today you will be able to find functionality that you never knew existed and at the same time we have added some tools and functionality and overhauled others.

Majestic SEO last had a major overhaul just over a year ago, in October 2010. We were happy with the positive feedback received, but are not one to rest on our laurels. Our last website update involved a shift in technologies from bespoke PHP to off the shelf with Perl / Catalyst. This time we have focused on the front end, in particular the look and feel, with a little tidying in one or two areas.

We have tried to avoid second version syndrome by taking a pragmatic approach to the delivery of this project, with many exciting features still waiting on our TODO list.

Our homepage demonstrates the philosophy with this project – we have tried to reduce the complexity of the presentation of some of our content, and adopt a clearer, more consistent feel across the website. After much experimentation and discussion between Dixon, and the project team, we adopted a slightly retro feel, which helped facilitate more colour and vibrancy in the site.

The facelift travels from the homepage, as does the use colour, and addition of icons – we have heard from customers that they liked our site, but found the number of panels in shades of grey a little more prevalent than they would have liked. We have strenghtened the iconisation of our reports and tools, as illustrated in the “Site Explorer Ships Wheel” seen in the background and upon the tools menu to the right of the screen.

We have started to take baby steps towards re-organising our menu structure for our reports and tools section. As we have added more tools, space has started to become a premium, and hence after studying usage, some tools have been moved off of the main banner menu to a additional dropdown. Joining these tools is our new comparator tool – providing an alternative view of data of multiple sites or pages.

Our project team had at its core two undergraduate students from Wolverhampton University School of Technology and Wolverhampton School of Art and Design working on the design and implementation – Savvas taking responsibility for designing images and layout, with Harpreet taking the role of coder and implementor. Dixon took the role of internal client, with our development team providing mentoring and support to them during this project. Whilst Harpeet and Savvas had not worked together prior to this project, they formed a good team based on dialog and a respect for each others knowledge and experience. We feel they have delivered a good product and look forward to continuing to work with them as we further enhance the site.

What’s New at Majestic

Majestic SEO is about to get a new makeover and I think you will find the changes stunning. Last week at Pubcon Vegas I had the opportunity to show delegates some of the developments at Majestic over 2012 and the show used the new look website. Just flick through the presentation below to get a sneak peak at the site.

The presentation also covers some of the recent developments at Majestic SEO – including the announcement that we are opening up our system through the launch of “Majestic OpenApps“.

We’ll tell you more about the philosophy behind the new site designs after launch.

How Majestic SEO Builds Links

At Pubcon, my presentation revealed much of Majestic SEO’s own link strategy. This post covers that presentation.

If you were one of the many hundreds of people that gave us your card for a free Majestic trial, I am afraid you will need to wait until at least Tuesday, when I get back to the UK, before I can get someone to sift through them all. We have a SLIGHT suspicion that some of you may have been more interested in the T-Shirts and the Majestic Girls than the actual trials! Not that we didn’t want our stand swamped! We are all really grateful for everyone’s kind words throughout the presentations and in the bars.

Here is the presentation – with the salient points beneath.

Real World, Low risk High Reward Link Building. (This text follows the “slides”)

Here are my details.

Risk: Here follows a strategy with many links but not much ongoing traffic…

Some site can create many links from HUGE websites but the longevity or quality of traffic is short-lived.

The REAL secret for Link building is Re(a)lationships. I suggested ten link building ideas in last year’s presentation and this year wanted to show how I personally have applied have a do zone of these ideas in Majestic SEO’s own marketing strategy.

1. Last year I suggested offering testimonials. That very strategy generated a great marketing boost through our partnership with Raventools.
2. I suggested arranging or getting involved in meet-ups. This years Majestic has sponsored events all over the world and often enjoyed links as a result. Our next two events are in Manchester and Israel by the way.
3. Last year I recommended sending samples out for reviews. In Majestic’s world, this translates really to being able to give out free trials – although as a principal we have only given trials out to people attending conferences, although route would be by joining SEMPO.
4. Last year I talked about going to conferences and speaking in your niche. The best example I can show here of why this works is the relationship I personally have with Rand Fishkin as why both try to tame this untameable industry. This means at times even competitors need to work together.
5. Even tactics like running a good cause website are being used in a way at Majestic.

I then went on to talk about how we went about launching our Majestic Millions and Badge widget earlier in the year, which is demonstrated in the slides by the timeline of events.

So that’s a narrative of the slides – ending on the reaffirmation that Majestic’s entire strategy depends on developing relationships – with our customers, with our suppliers, and aiming to turn them all into our advocates. We constantly look out for mentions of Majestic SEO online – whether in a good or bad context and try to react as best as we can as fast as we can. Even two of our booth staff were unpaid! In fact they are our clients!

I do admit, though, that the models weren’t free.