Search Engine Optimisation Comment and Solutions
Despite the fact all comments on this blog are pre-moderated we still get huge amounts of spam posting attempts, and all the emails are annoying the hell out of me.
So I’ve disabled all comment posting.
So to all you spammers… go away and stop wasting your time!
A great video here that’s we’ve embedded from Seomoz which has Tom Critchlow from Distilled giving a step by step guide how to carry out a SEO site review:
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-SEO Site Reviews Step-by-Step from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
The tools that are mentioned are:
- SEOmoz SEO Tools
- Live HTTP Headers
The Google keyword research tool used to be a bit coy about the results it gave, there were no acual hard figures, just comparative levels.
Well today the tool has been update and gives much more exact visitor numbers from June 2008 onwards.
Keyword research just got much, much, much more simple!
See https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
I have been an avid watcher of videos posted by well known SEO’s ever since they started appearing. Until recently I only watched them embedded into people’s pages. Yesterday I thought “hmm, there must be more of these on YouTube” as YouTube is where all the SEO’s host their embedded videos.
When you view the videos on YouTube you obviously see the number of watches these videos have had, I was expecting tens of thousands of people to have watched these videos, but I got rather a shock, some of these videos have had incredibly few views, some less than 100!
What’s going on?! These videos are in the main excellent, and they quite often contain better snippets of info than textual articles. People are really missing out a great deal by not watching these videos. Get out there and discover them!
Here’s some to get you started:
Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org explains geotargetting
Barry Schwarz of seroundtable.com gives a roundup of the weeks search engine news (week ending July 4th 2008)
Gary Beal (A.K.A. GaryTheScubaGuy) giving tips on link building at the 2008 Online Marketing Show London.
When you are looking for the services of an SEO it’s because it’s a service you can’t do for yourself (usually). However we all know that SEO done badly can cost you dear, either you will get a poor service that does very little and achieves nothing, or an SEO company who use black hat tactics that can lead to your website being banned, or worse, they are both!
Google have now posted advice for anyone looking to hire in SEO services, it tells you what to look for in a good SEO company and how to identify a poor SEO company. Read the full article here.
Ever wondered how much traffic a competitors website gets? Well now there is a way to find out. Google Trends has been extended to now cover traffic data for individual websites with Google Trends for Websites.
You can now see trend for daily unique visitors for any website with a reasonable amount of traffic that Google indexes. If you login to your Google account you will also see actual figures so you can actually see that in the last month wikipedia was getting around 25 million unique visitors a day for example.
As well as visitor trends you can also find where a websites visitors are coming from geographically, what other sites they visited and the search terms they used.
A fantastic new research tool from Google!
We’ve recently noticed that we are getting lots of comments received on blog posts at this site. Most of it seems to be down to the fact that we follow our links in comments and this has been noticed and publicised, and now we are getting flooded with one line comments by people wanting to gain a backlink.
We follow links in our comments as we want to reward good quality comment posts, however we do not want to become a link spam site. So from now on we are going to be much much more selective in the comments we allow through moderation.
One line comments saying “great post” or “awesome blog” will not be published. Only comments that add something to the post will be accepted, a good post will give an example to either back up (or argue against) the idea proposed in the article. It must add something to the conversation.
As an incentive to the commenter any anchor text can be used for your name as long as it is not offensive and the link does not point to a gambling, adult or pharmacy site.
So please everyone, post comments that have meaning, or don’t post them at all.
There has long been speculation that Google would enter the affiliate sales market, and it’s first foray would appear to have shown itself in the past few days.
A search for “secured loans” on Google.co.uk http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=secured+loans&btnG=Google+Search&meta= Shows a very interesting feature at the top of the paid search results:
Clicking through you are presented with a comparison table of suppliers with “get quote” buttons as the call to action. Clicking”get quote” you will be asked for your name, email, phone number and best time to call. We are presuming that the suppliers listed are paying on a per lead basis. A qualified lead with a phone number is likely to earn Google more than a click through on a standard ad.
More details on the scheme are available from Google at http://www.google.co.uk/help/merchantsearchbeta/compare.html
We’ll be watching closely to see which markets Google extend their affiliate reach into.
You’ve spent hours and hours coming up with great META DESCRIPTIONS for your pages, thinking that you’ve got the right hooks in there to pull people in. Then Google comes along and decides it’s going to pull what seems like some random text from the body of the page and completely ignores your description.
Well it’s easily solvable, all you need is to add the following meta tag to your page:
<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”>
This simply tells Google not to use a snippet, Bob’s your uncle!
Microsoft has dropped it’s bid to buy Yahoo as the two companies cannot agree on a price for the internet firm.
Microsoft claim to have increased their offer by $5bn to $47.5bn whereas Yahoo were after a minimum price of $53bn which was more than Microsoft were prepared to offer.
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said ‘After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Mircrosoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal’. Ballmer has told his employees that Microsoft will continue towards the same goals without Yahoo, just at a slower pace.