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A Guide to Getting into Google News : SMX Advanced London - Live Blog

Published: May 17th, 2010

A good guide to getting your content on Google News by Rob Kerry (@robkerry). It’s a great way to make the first page of Google for a very competitive keyword, even if it is only in the short term. In the long term, you benefit from indexed content and hopefully ranking for long tail keywords. Rob also suggests that instead of panicking about Personalised Search and how that is going to affect SEO, think instead that if you get a high CTR from your Google News item that your webpage will be counted favourably towards each visitor’s “personalised” search result. Also try to take advantage of your visitors through strong Conversion Optimisation.

1 - You need a unique URL. WordPress is recommended as it takes all the legwork out of making sure each and every URL is unique.

2 - There has to be at least 3 numbers in your unique URL. These can no way resemble a date.

3 - Suggested permalink structure: /%postname%-001%post_id%.html

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SEO Leeds

Published: March 31st, 2010

Or Why domain names are important.

Having a descriptive domain name is one of the easiest ways to get an important keywords in your URL. However, there is a constant debate between using your brand name in your URL (e.g. www.blueclaw.co.uk) or say, a descriptive, keyword rich URL (e.g. www.seoleeds.biz) Either way, there are a few more ranking factors that you should take into account. For example, I don’t think www.replacebrokenwindowsglassglazerglazingemergencyglaziers.info will be ranking very well. Two words - keyword stuffing.

Some other ranking factors to think about for your domain are:

  • Age of domain - the older the better as it will naturally become a more authoritative site.
  • Great content on site
  • What anchor text links you get to your site - this counts for far more than using keywords in your domain name.
  • And finally, probably the most important factor of all, the quality of links pointing to your website. Don’t think bulk, think relevancy and authority.
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How Important are Meta Information?

Published: March 8th, 2010

Best Practice SEO dictates that you need good meta information as it is essential for SEO. Two tags to focus on are title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure they are descriptive and most importantly, relevant to the content on the website.

If you do have duplicate meta descriptions on your website, you will most likely get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Take this as a gentle nudge towards getting into the good habit of having a unique description for each page. After all, this is the summary snippet underneath your link on the search engine results page. The rule of thumb is to keep these under 150 characters in order to have the full sentence visible on the SERP.

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Breadcrumbs vs Sitelinks

Published: February 25th, 2010

Last year Google rolled out the use of Breadcrumbs in their Google Search Results. Some people felt that having Google essentially “rewrite” their URL was a bit out of order. However there are some benefits from the breadcrumbs.


In this ebay example for the search term “buy golf clubs“, their link show their result as a Golf Clubs Buying Guide. However, there is also a breadcrumb link of “Buy” which brings you to the ebay search page. It also shows a link to

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The Google and Wikipedia Link

Published: February 17th, 2010

Yesterday, Jimmy Wales tweeted that Google was donating $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. The question that then popped up in everyone’s minds is, Why Google would support Wikipedia when they came out with their own (almost) direct competitor, Knol.

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