3 lazy tips for those who can’t be arsed to hire an SEO

 blogging, seo  13 Responses »
May 192007
 

SEO advice good or bad 

We all know that if we want to get lots of visitors and expect to get them from search engines then unless we apply a little SEO knowledge, we’ll never get past page 25 for our target keywords.

But is there a quick way to get off the ground? Especially if we don’t know where to start and can’t be fussed with what seems to be a torturous process of trying to work out who to employ or what to apply and in what way.

There’s a lot of stuff out there on SEO. Lots of it, page after page after page of opinion, speculation and hogwash.

When SEO is discussed for example what do they mean when they say

You need a few meta tags here and there?

Your title tags need to be looked at and changed?

Your copy needs to be rewritten?

Do they mean that you need to restructure everything and throw in lots of bold tags, links, H tags, blockquotes, off site links, nofollow links, url rewrites, increase keyword densities?

What do they mean when they begin to talk in terms of your pagerank or alexa score or external link building campaigns that-will-use-a-combination-of -social-and-historical-methods and yeah… wtf exactly does that mean even.!

 Most would be forgiven for taking the conclusion of, this SEO stuff is  a little confusing to say the least!

Just hire a professional SEO

I’d advise anyone who is serious about their website and clueless on SEO to go and hire an individual or firm who know what they are doing. Ask them for references, don’t buy any BS about monthly submission fees or ‘get you on 1st page of google in a week’ promises as you may as well just send it to my beer benevolent fund and let me drink it for you, I can promise you the same you know :D

I’m a tightwad, I’m smart I can do it myself thanks, just gimmee a tip!

Ok, so you wish to persist on your own and want to have a little play around yourself . Ok, without further ad0 here are 3 little tips that you wouldn’t go too far wrong applying..

  1. Create something that is good – Kick arse with your content, do it better than everyone else.Have an idea or product that is good!If your website is crap, then improve it, add value now, before it goes down the tubes.

    Add a blog, use social mediums to drive it forward, ask yourself lots of questions and be honest with your answers. Would you want to buy your product from your website? Is your site the best at what it does? If the answer is no, then it’ll pay to think that the search engines might think the same too. If thats the case, then you could be stuffed pretty quickly. Can you afford to be so?

    The web is powered by links and in lots of ways, the words contained within those links. You need to get people to link to you in all manner of themed ways, to different areas of your site from as many different sites as possible. This is the juice that will power you up the ranks. If you don’t have it, then it will be very difficult to rank without it.

    Link juice will be very difficult to obtain if what you are selling or saying is nothing but a lot of old rubbish or same old same old. It takes hours of effort to manufacture artificial link popularity. Your time could be better utilised on improving your product. By creating something that is useful or buzz creating, you will get people talking about you and what you do.

    Use your blog to communicate with your visitors. Discuss your latest innovations or deals. Feedback to people who are enquiring of what you do. Show them a human side to your organisation/business/personality. Give them what they need.

    Ping the various social connecters out there – get active in your sphere, create excitement in your marketplace, stimulate your visitors, give them a reason to return. Give them the tools to talk about you in earnest.

  2. Use established site structuring techniques and good effective copyYou’d be amazed at the number of pages that fail at the very first hurdle of production.Go and read up about basic good page structureUse the title tag effectively.

    If your site has pages that say “Company name: about us section” or “Company name: our product section” then you really need to think about that and ask yourself what the value in that is. The short answer is there is very little.

    Everypage of a website should be different. Everypage should have a unique title tag that suitably heads up that page. If a page is about a Sony Vaio Ar21 then those words should come first within the tag.

    It sounds elementary and obvious but you’d be amazed at the amount of people out there who miss this singley important factor. Trust me <title>Sony Vaio Ar21 Laptop – Buy your Sony Vaio Ar21 Laptops here – read Sony Laptop reviews and more</title> works infinitely better than <title>Company name: Our Laptop products</title>.

    Use headings to head up your content and apply logic to what it is you are discussing.

    If a page is about the Sony Vaio AR21, then put those words in your H1 tag. Do not expect to just stick an image or a flash movie in there and expect it to do well. You have to tell both your visitors, and the search engine spiders that you would like to index your pages, what it is that your pages are about. Spiders cannot deduce meaning and context from that which they cannot see. Images and Flash movies and videos are more or less useless as they offer little means for either.

    Use words, and emphasise important words such as your product name – use related language to describe what you are selling or trying to promote. If you don’t want to take the time to look at your SERPs for examples of how this works, then go hire an SEO copywriter, ask to see examples of their work and look to see how these people are ranking.

    Use good link navigation throughout your site. Consider using breadcrumb trails throughout. Page > Subpage> Product name

    Clean your urls so they read nice. Read up on modrewrite and get rid of those session id’s and variable parameters.

  3. Discuss one topic or product per page. If you are selling products on your site then you need to have individual pages for individual products. Unless you are a craigslist or an Amazon or a dealtime or an ebay perhaps, you just will not rank for a product on a page that contains 20 other items.If you want to have any chance of ranking for individual keyword items, then you must seriously consider creating a separate page for each.

    If you have 100′s or 1000′s of products then invest in a database or spreadsheet and read up on dynamic page creation. It really isn’t too difficult, and will save you hours of editing and fannying about opening up separate files to do this that and what have you. Template design is where its at.

What you expected more? Sorry, maybe some other day :D

Search Marketing Services Holistic Search
 Posted by robwatts at 7:40 pm

Most directories suck and could do a whole lot better

 directories, promotion, seo, smo, web 2  22 Responses »
May 052007
 

My friend Lyndon was talking about SMO (Social Media Optimisation) and directories the other day and pissed a couple of people off. He was damn right too.

Most directories are useless rubbish

Bog standard web directories are not worth a cold cup of ****. A directory that sells on the basis of PR is asking for its link-pop-pass on ability to be stripped away.
See, for me, the whole get links from lots of directories on different IP’s thing is so frickin 2003 its not even funny any more! Most can be knocked up in two seconds flat and then populated with a dmoz script or Y! scrape. Most if not 99.9% of them offer very little value at all othe than the ability for joe bloggs to be able to drill down and find or add a site in an area they want to. Usually they are plastered with adsense adverts in the head of the document, designed to attract the users eye and take them away from the people who have paid to list. Funny.

Continue reading »

 Posted by robwatts at 2:36 pm

Can the power of blogs remove ranking restraints?

 ranking, seo  3 Responses »
Apr 192007
 

I’m looking for people who would be prepared to participate in a ranking experiment, with the specific aim of determining whether blog power can unshackle domains that have sat with ranking restraints over a prolonged period of time.

The minus 31 penalty is the phenomenum whereby a site doesn’t rank for its site name, url and cannot rank for any keywords before page 4 or position 31 in the Google SERPs. Sites affected by this cannot rank for their target keywords however obscure. Unless it has no competition whatsoever, sites affected by this just cannot rank, not even for a complete unique title string.

There are various accounts from people afected by it. Some have recounted that they were told by Google that they had no penalty and to gain more ‘quality’ links. Others are of the view that its a manually applied filter, whereas some believe that its purely algorithmic. I myself have a site affected by this too, so know the frustration associated with this thing.I’d like to test to see if blog power really can shift a site out from such a malaise.

The more participants the better, but it would be cool to have say 50 bloggers prepared to put a site wide link in their blog rolls or footers.

Of course, participants will be expected to stay quiet about it too, else those pesky sharky search engineers who surf these waters will see what we are up to and the game will be up. So if you want to play, ideally you will have a blog or a series of blogs across different IP’s and ranges. You’d be expected not to blog about it, even after the event, at least not specifically.

Proposed methodology

Its very simple really. Links in numbers from different domains with different authorties, with different keyword anchor text.

Each participant will get a 2 or 3 kw string to place in their blog roll, or footer or sidebar, linking to a particular page on a particular domain. The domain to be used will be clean in the sense of it won’t be porn or pills or anything decidely iffy.

I’d aim to start this once I get 50 responses and run it over a 12 week period, gradually introducing links week by week. Some people will need to run the links for the duration, others for shorter periods.

Hopefully, participants will come from a range of platforms and blogs. This will mean that links will be varied and not too samey with the added bonus of coming from multiple unique IP addresses.

I have a domain in mind we can use, but am up for suggestions from others if they have a similarly affected domain.

What do you get out of it?

Well, at the start of the test, I’ll get the current ranking figures for the targetted keywords and phrases for the page to be targetted. During the weeks of the test, I’ll be doing weekly monitoring and recording the results.

All participants will get access to a private post which will detail specifics relative to bot activity, ranking metrics and other interesting stuff built up over the weeks as the test progresses.

If you are in the business of getting websites ranked for your clients, this could offer very useful and valuable insights.

If you are interested, then send me an email with ‘blogpower’ in the subject line to watts_rob@hotmail.com. You would be expected to declare that you don’t work for any search engines and wouldn’t disclose participation to any other party either. If you can do this then, well, great – I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers

 Posted by robwatts at 7:23 pm

Bait and switch a legitimate traffic building tool?

 301s, marketing, redirection, seo  5 Responses »
Feb 282007
 

Lyndon wrote a good post today talking about bait and switch or as he called it “switchbait“. I’m glad he did, cos I was in one of those ‘shit, what shall I blab about today’ moods.
The method is as old as the hills. Build a domain, get the visitors, move them on to somewhere else. At least thats a quick and dirty interpretation.

Some of you seasoned SERP watchers might recall the days when highly tuned cloaked content found its way into search engine indices. Titles were carefully crafted to grab the users attention and get them to click on through. When the user clicked the result, the domain then redirected them on to some affiliate site that paid the redirecting site a referall fee. It still happens, but its not as endemic.

The search engines hated that of course. They weren’t interested in the line of thought that said “where’s the harm, everybody wins” as ultimately they wanted to control or at least give the allusion that they did, the make up of their results pages. To allow cloaked content to stay within their indices unchallenged would give credence to the view that they were easy to game and simple to manipulate. No fortune 500 company really wants to give out those kinds of signals as if such a view gained momentum it might snowball and overspill onto other core products. Weakened confidence in the technology, doesn’t take too long to equate to reduced uptake and use. The house of cards could quickly implode, seriously affecting revenue models and streams.

The engines today seemed to have gotten a grip on traditional sneaky redirects. I haven’t seen a meta refreshed, or unescaped obfuscated javascript redirect for quite some time. Ive seen the odd 301 or 302 redirect, but with these its more dificult to ascertain intent.

The javascript redirect using window.location.href can redirect a javascript enabled browser to new content. Search engines don’t really like this method as historically they didn’t read javascript too well, especially when it was disguised as var1=lo var2 = ca var3 = ti etc etc. The bot would see the keywords and markup and score the page as it would most others, but the search engine user would never see it. The page author preferring them to see some money paying page instead.

Its a similar scenario for the meta refresh too, albeit slightly different in that a meta refresh actually equated to a 302 server header, or temporary redirect. Temporary redirects are used in all manner of ways to say that the content that was once here has now gone and has moved elsewhere, but may be back at some point. Not everyone has always had access to server side redirects a la header (“Location: fullyquailifiedurl”); so the meta refresh tag was a handy method for achieving the same, which was, moving the user on to somewhere else.

301′s and 302′s are in tech circles, a recognised way of redirecting users and their agents on to new locations (urls) Domains change hands, content is altered, urls change too. There needed to be a legitimate way of letting people know, without just plonking the old page before them and embedding a big fat THIS CONTENT HAS MOVED TO message.

The knowledge of how search engines interpret such things can be used in all manner of ways. At best it can be used to legitimately move a user on as described previously. At worst it can be used to trick or deceive; in the worst extremes it’s the user who is deceived, referred onto something heinous or unrelated – and at best the search engine, deceived into believing that spidered content was what would be showed to its users.

How far away is Lyndons example from what is described prior? Lyndon proposes to build a domain, create leverage and authority and then subsquently apply it to a 3rd party.Is this any differrent from showing the various stakeholders say Technorate, Digg, Y! or Google one thing only to subsequently move the goalposts and move it all on?

To my mind, no not really. Unless Lyndon had told us his intent we’d never have known. Domains are bought and sold and change hands everyday. Its called business. What if Lyndon had done exactly as described, yet told no one, or simply redirected/moved the blog/domain to a directory on his clients/affilaite sites. Perfectly legitimate of course, yet to announce the intent to do this for manipulation purposes suddenly puts it all in a different light.

The bottom line is that its quite one thing to create stuff for the technology and traffic providers and use it to your better advantage, but do so in a way where they can decide or determine that your intent was one of use and abuse and you might well find your efforts were wasted. Do it a way that is elegant and sophisticated as described by Lyndon and no doubt used and applied daily by 100′s of other savvy marketers, and you’ll be on to lots of sure fire winners.

 Posted by robwatts at 1:10 pm

Using search engine query strings to optimise your content.

 content delivery, personalisation, seo  2 Responses »
Feb 222007
 

First off a word of caution: This method could get you into trouble so watch yourself. A competitor could scream cheater! Fact is, its not cheating its not cloaking either, its using the referer string in combination with the query string to deliver content.

Many long tail searches often land on pages that don’t really cut the mustard for the query. This is lose lose. You lose in terms of outputting a page that isn’t really relevant to what the user was looking for and the user loses by having to hit the back button.

Lets say for example sake that you have a high authority page that ranks for practically everything. You might have a sentence within your copy that matches what a user has entered into a search engine; yet your page isn’t really about what the sentence refers to. The sentence just happens to fit in amongst the context of 3 or 4 hundred other words, but doesn’t really apply to what the user is after – net result, one disappointed user, x kb’s of wasted bandwidth.

You could therefore, offer these users an option by way of an optimised representation that catered for this deficit. I’ll keep it simple here and assume that you have a site or a blog that concentrates on a particular set of core products. Lets assume that you run a small niche power tool website. You sell things like drills, sanders, planes and other related items. You blog daily on various products and methods and talk at length about all sorts of aspects relative to DIY or general maintenance.

The code below looks at the query string entered by the user at the refering search engine. It then checks that string against a selection of predefined words and delivers a message based upon those words.

“Welcome visitor from refering search engine your query contained the word predefined word a page containing predefined word products from query string can be found here > linktowhereever”
[php]

$queryurl = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$refer = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
$refer= $refer['host'];

if(strstr ($refer, ‘yahoo’)){
ereg(‘p=(.*)’,$queryurl,$match);
}

else{
ereg(‘q=(.*)’,$queryurl,$match);
}

$qstring = str_replace(‘+’,’ ‘,$match[1]);

if(stristr ($qstring, ‘drill’)){
$optilink = “http://www.yackyack.co.uk/products/power-drills”;
$message = ‘Welcome visitor from $refer your query contained the word drill a page containing drill related products can be found at this link <a href=$optilink>$qstring</a>’;
}
if(stristr ($qstring, ‘planes’)){
$optilink = “http://www.yackyack.co.uk/products/power-planes”;
$message = ‘Welcome visitor from $refer your query contained the word planes a page containing power plane products can be found at this link <a href=$optilink>$qstring</a>’;
}

if(stristr ($qstring, ‘sanders’)){
$optilink = “http://www.yackyack.co.uk/products/power-sanders”;
$message = ‘Welcome visitor from $refer your query contained the word sanders a page containing power sander products can be found  at this link <a href=$optilink>$qstring</a> ’;
}[/php]

By adopting this approach you could deliver the message via a floating layer, or pop up window on exit. You could even output it at the start of the content and place it within a little paragraph.

[php]

if($message){

echo”$message”;

}

//continue with the rest of the content

[/php]

The search engines would rather that they decide what pages to return based upon their calculations of relevancy.

The fact is that sometimes they do a pretty crap job at it and could do with a little help. Besides, we should be able to decide what we do with our visitors. Its not for the search engines to dictate to us. My view is, that provided its related and adds value to the user, then there is no real harm in giving them that little bit more. Its a not a cut and dry case of smoke and mirrors cloaking with sneaky redirects or any of that stuff, its just taking things one step further and deciding to help out a little.

If you consider that some websites have pages that change daily, if not hourly then the reasons to employ such methods becomes even more apparent. How many times have you visited a page, only to find that what you were looking for was not there? I have, and in those cases I often had to go to the search engines cache to see what it was. That or I have to embark on a site search at my destination to find what I was after. Methods as proposed would reduce instances of those scenarios.

 Posted by robwatts at 9:00 am

Is Jason Calacanis a link baiting troll asshat idiot retard?

 digg, jason calacanis, linkbaiting, seo  14 Responses »
Feb 092007
 

A few folks at  TW happen to think that some guy named Jason Calacanis is a bit of a Troll  Asshat idiot   Retard…I can’t comment as to whether he is or not as I really dont know the guy well enough to make such an assessment.

Apparently he thinks that 90% of SEO’s are evil/slime and that 10% are not. I do wonder how he arrived at that figure, no seriously I do. Who are these magical 10% where are they even?

Did he not learn a thing from his last little escapade? Perhaps he did, and  he probably thought, wow! Look at all that traffic, all that interest, all those links! No publicity is bad publicity and all that jazz.

I am susrpised at those threadwatchers though. Surely they can see that he is using a classical link baiting hook, the be-a-contrary-bastard hook, aka the insult-as-many-people-as-you-can and see if you can get away with it scott free hook.

What gets me is the people in numbers who react to this stuff, but hey, who could resist, he knows it too.

It seems that SEO’s tarnished rep train is just quietly trundling along like it always has.

Danny Sullivan, a respected search engine commentator recently drew the wrath of the digg community. He wrote a little article entitled  Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason over at searchengineland.com. The article got  ‘dugg’ and then subsequently got buried by a lot of churlish digg commenters. Danny felt moved to blog on the reaction and cited a number of responses to his experience.

It was kind of nice to see the article make Digg. I’d actually joked with someone that if I wanted to really try and educate many on Digg about mistaken notions of SEO, I’d need to redo the article next week into 25 bullet points. Then it became popular and I thought wow — maybe people at Digg will actually read it.

Clearly not. Clearly from the comments, it was a case anger toward an industry — much of that due to ignorance and misunderstanding — getting in the way of getting closer to the truth

If you read some of the comments he responds to its very clear that practically all of them didn’t even read what he had to say and just went straight into bash mode. Perhaps these people have drawn some association with SEO being seen as part of the whole blogosphere comment spam and trackback spam daily waste of time and effort parade.

Its a shame really as they really should look beyond the end of their noses, they might just learn a thing or two. Mr Calacanis would certainly be advised to review his 90/10 split, a reverse of positions might be a good starting point, hell maybe he could even do an ‘I saw the SEO light post’ just think of all the links he’d get then?  Maybe those diggers would agree too. :D

As for Digg itself, I’m not even sure if they publish any kind of demographic of their typical users. Maybe they should consider publishing them, just so we can see how John in Nebrska aged 171/2 has used his considerable life experience to arrive at his well considered conclusions.

As for Mr Calacanis , is he a  link baiting troll asshat idiot retard? He’s certainly making good use of the be-an-ass-and-get-links hook so he passes the 1st test with flying colours, unfortunately I don’t know him well enough to affirm one way or the other as to his resemblance to the latter, perhaps messrs Hochman Agerhart and Groove could supply a definitive answer.

 Posted by robwatts at 12:00 pm

Google Backlinks

 google, search engines, seo  7 Responses »
Feb 072007
 

Matt tells us all about the new Google backlinks feature in the webmaster console.

I had a little look at this and must confess, think its pretty cool in an ‘ooh this is interesting kind of way’.

The numbers aside, what I really liked was how it enables you to drill down to individual pages and see the number of external links pointing to each URI.

If you have a good site with lots of different types of content a thing like this is a handy feature. If there are a high number of links to a certain page, then it could mean that this page is adding lots of value to lots of different people, which could be interpreted as a do-more-of-this type-of-thing signal. Sure, you could find out similar stuff from logfile analysis too, but it might take a little longer to identify such specifics.

I’m not going to say too much on this as much of it has already been said. What I’d like to see in addition would be a few extras like.The ability to identify what types of links these were; eg were they nofollow, what is the makeup of the anchor text, what were the dates these links were 1st encountered/registered, what is the pagerank of these external in links, how do my pages rank for their target terms. Sure, again, I could go out and look at these things myself, Google could make it all a bit easier though. Maybe someone could make a little app that enabled people to plugin their csv datasets and obtain such a report.

Anyone for a spot of cURLing?  ;)

 Posted by robwatts at 9:42 am

Will a long Blogroll flush your site down the search engine ranking toilet?

 blogging, blogrolls, google, links, search, seo, social media  10 Responses »
Jan 232007
 

Brad wrote an interesting piece today which got me thinking about the topic of linking out, authority scores, pagerank leakage and all those old chestnuts.

Lots of papers out there on PageRank and theories and counter theories on how linking out can effect your PR adversely/positively and all that, so I’m not going to rehash any of those arguments.

I have to confess, there was a time when I was kinda obsessed with the whole SEO PR leakage thing too, worring about ‘bleeding’ precious PR and all that jazz, however I do think the ‘game’ has moved on a little, in terms of the SE algo’s have matured to a more considered examination of what is and what is not a good or a bad page worth ranking. Why do I think this? Well just go and look at a few well ranking sites and see how they link out. One immediate one that springs to mind is Wikipedia, although their recent decision to stick a nofollow tag on their outbounds may come back and bite them ( I hope) ;) .

Continue reading »

 Posted by robwatts at 10:35 am

Social Media Marketing, Baiting and SEO

 linkbait, seo, social media, widgets  Comments Off
Jan 192007
 

I read a very good blog post this morning from the old linkmeister himself NickW.

He talks about linkbaiting generally, what makes for good vs what makes for bad and touches on its newly born cousin ‘widgetbait’, a term I heard for the 1st time yesterday in a private discussion with Lyndon . More on widgets further on.

Anyways, getting back to Nick. For those of you who don’t know him or have never had the pleasure/displeasure to encounter his often acerbic wit, he’s the guy responsible for setting up Threadwatch , Performancing and the recently launched click influence and is generally credited with coining the phrase Linkbait. He’s a good egg, who tells it like it is.
Besides damn hard work a big aspect behind Nick’s success with these ventures has been his ability to stimulate debate amongst the community by writing interesting content that actually has something to say.

 

He gets people talking about stuff. Simple huh? Very rarely will you read a longish blog from Nick that doesn’t have something to add to the mix. He wins, we win. He gains links and kudos, we learn a little and maybe grab an idea or get incentivised to modify or adapt or use whatever it is he might be talking about. Does he hit it everytime? No, of course not, he’s human like the rest of us, but he’s certainly worth some closer scrutiny…

Continue reading »

 Posted by robwatts at 4:02 pm

I’m an SEO expert, no really I am, trust me, you have my word

 disinformation, Pagerank, rant, seo  12 Responses »
Jan 122007
 

I’m watching Ugly Betty, but only half heartedly, just can’t get into it, so i start flicking through the wordpress tag link in the control panel of this install. I came across this site entitled “Do You Want to Double your PR for the Next Update“.
Anyhow,I almost felt moved to comment and say, well no actually mate, that’s a lot of old tosh, but upon reflection thought nah, what’s the point he’ll either get miffed at my audacious brass neck daring to question his ‘expertise’ and the like, and either delete what I say, or just try and argue black is blue.

Continue reading »

 Posted by robwatts at 10:47 pm

SEO – Brain surgery? Perhaps not, but its not so far off!

 google, html, php, search engines, seo, sql  2 Responses »
Jan 112007
 

Reading this blog here from oilman got me thinking about SEO and how people value their worth in terms of what they charge for their services and how some of what he is saying about others and their denigrating what we do can impact upon us negatively.

Putting to one side all those idiots who say they will submit your site to the search engines for a one off fee of $100 solicited by way of some awful looking spam email or adsense ad somewhere. Those tosspots really don’t help the situation as they help paint a perception that there really is nothing to what people like me do, when the obverse is so blindingly obviously true!

Continue reading »

 Posted by robwatts at 12:00 pm

Watch your CMS – it could be getting you into trouble

 blogging, google, seo, spam  1 Response »
Jan 082007
 

Graywolf blogged about some Disney Blog getting  de-indexed for hidden text.

Seems that some blogging platforms/cms’s have issues that could get your site removed  for web spamming by inserting text  that is hidden.

One commenter there had this to say:

Some freely available WordPress templates (specifically from blogthemes.com)contain hidden links from the designer linking to certain cancer websites. I am sure most people do not see that as it is kind of sneaky.

I do wonder why they don’t just ignore  such aspects for ranking purposes. If its identified as hidden algorithmically then it can be ignored as a ranking factor too…no? Or am I missing some bigger picture here.

 Posted by robwatts at 1:10 pm
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