Search Engine Optimisation

Why it’s important to be a good guy in the SEO industry

Published: July 25th, 2011

The SEO industry as a whole is changing almost on a daily basis and I’m not just talking about search metrics!

Whilst I have not been in the SEO industry as long as many of my peers I have certainly noticed a few changes over the past few years. When I first started in SEO there seemed to be an unwritten code within SEO-ers that you don’t ‘tell on people’. Ok you might do things to sabotage the competition, for example there was Google bowling, firing porn backlinks at the competition and more recently rainbow tables. But let’s take all that out of the equation as this all very black hat SEO.

play nice in SEO

In the past if someone were to implement an SEO strategy which impacted on your SERP rankings then you would merely add it to your strategy rather than try to take them down.  I know what you’re thinking ‘where’s the fun in that’. The thing is, if you spend your time attacking an individual website SEO strategy, you could be investing that time making your own natural search presence stronger. So in a competitive sector it is pretty pointless implementing anti SEO tactics on rivals. Unless money is of cause no option.

‘All’s fair in love and war’, which let’s face it SEO is?

Over the years I have found 1000s of dodgy things being done by the competition and although sometimes it has driven me wild I’ve always come back to the same conclusion. Good for them!

I have found large Russian hubs, which to this day I still have no idea how many people they must have had employed to produce that amount of spam.

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How to supercharge your search campaigns- long-tail love

Published: July 22nd, 2011

Search marketers often advise clients- particularly large ecommerce companies- on strategies to maximise long-tail traffic to their websites as a way to boost sales. For SEO campaigns this means focusing not just on the top 10 or 20 “head” terms but optimising site structure and content for category  and product pages to help visitors find your products, as well as building links to these pages, to attract “long tail” search traffic. The conventional online marketing wisdom states that somebody searching for “womens shoes” – although higher  in search volume- may be in the research phase, collecting information and comparing prices whereas somebody searching “blue size 6 high heels” for example has a pretty good idea of what they want to buy and therefore has a higher chance of converting. I thought it would be interesting to test these theories looking at the data from the last month for one of our ecommerce clients.

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How to Quickly and Effectively Check your SEO Using Webmaster Tools

Published: July 21st, 2011

The world of SEO is full of various tools to make all our jobs easier, which are perfect for thorough, in depth analysis. However, to quickly unearth any onsite issues and how best to fix them; there’s no need to look any further than Google Webmaster Tools. Here’s a quick rundown of how to quickly get a good insight into the Search Engine compatibility of your website.

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£16.50 SEO Services – taking the Pi&S?

Published: July 6th, 2011

I searched ‘seo company‘ today in Google.co.uk and the top sponsored ad below caught my eye:


I thought to myself £16.50 for SEO services, wow now that’s a bargain!

I decided to click on the ad to find out more (approx £2.00 paid to Google from the £16.50, £14.50 left)…

The deal for £16.50 is as follows (20% off with promo code, so my maths tell me £14.50  - 20% = a healthy £11.60 left in the kitty):

The icing on the cake…  I also get 500k  directory submissions and links throw into the mix. Bloody hell, that’s incredible,   it’s a deal I simply can’t resist. I shall let you know how I get on. I’m sure Google won’t notice what’s going on here, I’ll take the risk.

Now I challenge SEO companies out there to devise an SEO offering to compete with this mighty £16.50 deal, the answer to all our SEO prayers.   Feel free to comment below…

Fresh thinking indeed….

 

 

 

 

 

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Why we should all stop being lazy with our content

Published: June 27th, 2011

It has happened more times than I can count, you find an article that looks likely to be interesting and useful then actually, 500 words in, you realise it is just keyword stuffed sentences strung together to shoehorn in an anchor text or populate a blog. Not only is this tedious, but as an SEO consultant I don’t want to just fill the web with hogwash.

Previously, keywords in titles, keywords as the first word in the text and links in the first few lines were the given method to ensure your content was optimised for your keywords. However, these practices are now dated, scream spam signals and are ultimately unnecessary.

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