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The ultimate blogger’s guide to seo

June 8, 2011 By 2 Comments

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

Filed Under: On Page SEO, SEO

How Google Panda Farmer Update has Hit Comparison and Article Sites

April 14, 2011 By 3 Comments

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
Filed Under: News, On Page SEO, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Canonical Tags

January 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

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!

Filed Under: On Page SEO Tagged With: , , ,

SEO is a Scam

November 13, 2010 By 2 Comments

I go to Total Fitness in Altrincham every couple of days for a swim, in an attempt to keep fit. There were a couple of guys in the changing room chatting about business, one of them was an electrical retailer - “You wanna get that SEO for your business mate”, one said to the other, “Nah - I’ve heard its all a scam” , said the second guy. “No really I’ve got a mate that does in for companies” and there ended the brief conversation. So what lead the second guy in to thinking that SEO is a scam?

Well to me its pretty obvious – I can’t tell you how many emails I get every day telling me this or that company has done ‘thorough‘ research in to my company and that my website is not on the front page of Google for the most searched for terms. I have given up replying and telling them that they know absolutely nothing about my company, now I just delete them. 90% are sent by lazy idle idiots who are trying to drum up business by sending out ridculous faux scary emails like this and what’s the result? Its just given SEO a bad name. Sure there are bound to be scam companies out there, ripping people off by charging them the earth for not delivering but there are also some cracking companies doing a great job.

My advice to anyone looking in to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation),  is to get the basics right yourself, do some research in to the most common keywords for your business, if you are using Google Adwords then there is a nifty keyword tool that comes free with the package and its dead easy to use. Look at say the top 5 keywords and make sure that your site is peppered with them:

Simple on page SEO 

  • Site Title and Page Titles – Use Keywords and make sure every page is unique – Google hates duplication
  • Site and Page URl’s – Use Keywords in the URL’s, no one wants to see coded URL’s and Google hates them.
  • Site and Page Descriptions – Make them readable and pepper them with Keywords make them unique.
  • Bolded H1 tags in the body of the page, even going down to H2 and H3 (header tags) Google loves them.
  • Image names and Alt tags – use Keywords as the names of images and USE the Alt tag.
  • Hyperlinks between pages THROUGH the keywords.
  • On page copy – USE Keywords.

These really simple steps will ensure that your website increases it Google rank – don’t pay people to do this, do it youself and you will notice your site rising in Google for the Keywords you have used. When you have gone as far as you can with this and need more THEN and only then consider getting external help with link building, article writing, Social Bookmarking, Hubpages, Squidoo and other forms of external SEO.

There is an article on Hubpages here for further reading:  http://hubpages.com/hub/On-Page-Search-Engine-Opimization-SEO

Have a great weekend!

Filed Under: On Page SEO