Welcome

The ultimate blogger’s guide to seo

I am a great fan of Michael Stelzner’s website ‘Social Media Examiner’ its absolutely choc full of Social Media tips, discussion, insight and analysis. In fact along with Mari Smith he is one of the top Social experts working in Social Media in the world today. If you are a blogger, have a website or simply want to know how to get more traffic from sources that you may not have thought of then take a look at the latest post by Rich Brooks entitled ‘The Ulitmate Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation’

Rich takes us through SEO expanded in to article marketing, blogging and focuses attention of deep keyword analysis and incoming links.

Take a look at the whole article here: The ultimate blogger’s guide to seo

Oh and make sure you subscribe to Michaels site and follow Social Media Examiner on Facebook!

Nigel

How Google Panda Farmer Update has Hit Comparison and Article Sites

Google rolled out its Panda/Farmer update on February the 24th in the US and many ‘content farms’ such as Ezine and Hubpages were hit hard. The update also hit some very large comparison sites such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com.

If you are using any of these sites to place content then you need to be aware that the back links generated from article ‘farms’ have been severely downgraded in an attempt to stop large sites manipulating postions with Google search. Furthermore if you are using comparison sites such as Shopzilla then with their huge drops in traffic it will be much harder to make conversions from these sites.

I would advise anyone suffering to concentrate on the on page SEO of your own site and add content to internal blogs or blogs controlled by you. This is a real wakeup call to lazy site owners who though they could manipulate Google.

Read More Here: http://searchengineland.com/google-rolls-out-its-panda-update-internationally-and-begins-incorporating-searcher-blocking-data-72497

From the article – on April 13th Sistrex reported on the biggest losers – the top ten are listed below.

#
Domain
Change SISTRIX (before) SISTRIX (after) # KWs (before) # KWs (after)
1 ehow.co.uk -84% 218,37 35,43 381.271 139.687
2 ezinearticles.com -78% 118,45 25,65 267.785 116.644
3 twenga.co.uk -79% 98,96 20,96 153.106 72.996
4 shopzilla.co.uk -77% 99,92 23,40 156.630 89.611
5 hubpages.com -72% 96,35 26,99 206.290 95.460
6 ciao.co.uk -81% 81,01 15,43 125.173 61.286
7 suite101.com -79% 70,98 14,85 175.632 70.548
8 associatedcontent.com -82% 51,16 9,41 186.020 85.507
9 dooyoo.co.uk -80% 50,64 10,38 94.310 40.864
10 comparestoreprices.co.uk -78% 37,68 8,19 66.862 39.633

Does using Google Checkout increase conversions in Base and Adwords

I have often wondered this and have spent time and money integrating with Paypal which incidently seems to be increasing in popularity. This blog post of from a while back but it does suggest that thi smay actually be the case. I would love to hearsome comments about this because incerasing conversion is fundemental to success in retail buisnesses like ours. If anyone has any concrete data about converting with Google chckout themplease let me know! Read the article here

Canonical Tags

When your website has been up for a couple of years like ours has, somethimes the natural evolution of the site can create more than one version of the same page, what does that mean? Well for example depending on the structure of your site the URL itself maye be a string of characters, have code like icat in it or may have been altered in some way by the use of a mod rewrite, (where URL’s are changed in to Google friendly versions of the same page). Take a page such as :

1st  www.widget.co.uk/icat/category=4 

You may have a modrewrite in place that changes this to:

2nd www.widgets.co.uk/mens-widgets

As far as Google is concerned both these URL’s are duplicates of the same page content and the ranking in Google’s organic search will be negatively impacted.

By using a ‘Canonical tag’ (check out the page source of this page to see it) you are telling Google which version of the page to index. All of the ranking weight of the 1st URL will be combined with the second URL – ultimately the 1st URL will drop from Google and the weight will all be on the 2nd. The canonical code is put before the /head section in the code of both  pages – (all duplicates). For large php sites this code can be dynmically written so that it appears on all duplicate pages specfying the page that Google must index.

You can read more about Canonical Tags here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Thats my tip for the day – have a great weekend!

Google’s SEO starter Guide

Hi There,

Google has just released a starter guide mapping out all of the basics along with new sections covering mobile search.

You can download this free guide from here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

The guide covers all the usual stuff like Meta tage and Alt Tags but is really easy to read and digest. If you just followed this guide and did nothing more your site would improve its ranking in all search engines.