All posts in seo

As with selling any service, selling SEO services is an extremely challenging task. Here are my observations of two opposite ends of the spectrum of what SEO consultants often experience with selling SEO services.

Give me a two day optimisation strategy

We’ll often get contacted with the following, “We want a two day web optimisation strategy implemented.” Many neophyte consultants lick their lips and pounce on the ‘opportunity’ with alacrity. They start shooting off proposals, buffing up their hallowed methodology, and more.

A more sane, measured and customer-serving response to the request for a two day optimisation precess is, “Why?”

That always stops people in their tracks. “Why do you want a two day strategy implementation for your website and how do you know that’s the right thing for you?”

It would be fair to say that pretty much every major change to the online environment is greeted with the same two questions by the vast majority of the SEO community –

  1. What is it?
  2. How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns?

So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

I won’t go into a whole explanation of what HTML5 is now – I will leave that for the web design blogs – but the highlights as I understand them are:

  • A more descriptive set of markup tags; for example, nav, article, aside and footer
  • The introduction of Canvas element could be used for rendering graphs or images dynamically without the need for browser plugins

It is apparent from this list that there are some pretty big changes between HTML4 and HTML5. For example, I’m guessing that every SEO will spot the third bullet point – video without the need for Flash – and realise the obvious content indexing benefit this will offer as a result.

Android platform is not able to render URLs shortened by bit.ly, which include dashes in blog post titles.  To guarantee all users can read your posts via mobiles, be sure not to utilise dashes in blog post titles.

Last week, a client flagged up to us that their site wasn’t getting Android traffic on certain posts.  True, Android traffic is never high, but when it slips to 0 visits, there must be something wrong.  When the client looked into the posts, it was evident the titles of these blog posts each had a dash (-) in them. The majority of traffic to these posts comes from Twitter via Bit.ly links.

With the help of my local Orange Shop (HTC Hero Graphite anyone?), and some rigorous testing by @spamhendricks, it can be concluded that Android is not rendering bit.ly links which have dashes in certain instances.  Specifically, when a blog post title utilises a dash, a bit.ly link won’t render on the Android platform.

Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update – this is a landing page quality update, which looks at “the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”. As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn’t this sound very similar to Panda though?


At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that:

“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” asking publishers to consider, “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”

 

 

To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul.

Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine, but also to show you that knowing some of these queries will help you become better in the art of SEO.

 

6 Starter Operator Search Operator Queries

These queries are particularly helpful because they’re generally quick and easy short cuts in narrowing your search results:

Query What does it mean?
“best practice seo”  Searches for this exact phrase within “”
mobile -phone  Inclusion of – means searches for the word mobile but nothing following after phone
seo ~glossary  Brings up a glossary of information regarding that word
define:seo  Definition of that word or phrase
OR / |  Returns search queries with one of the given terms
related:  Helps list web pages related to the URL

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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

Last year, during a chat with one of the @seoptimise twitter followers, they mentioned a post on SEJ about how it is a myth that bad links can get your site penalised (a position that the author later changed after feedback) and asked my opinion on it. The strange thing was that a few months earlier I had to sort out the exact issue for one of our clients. So I thought it would be an idea to write a post it.

The background

We had been working with our client for about a year and, through a sensible link building campaign, had just managed to achieve decent rankings for some of the most competitive and highest converting terms in their industry. Then within a week their previously consistent bottom of page one/top of page two rankings (doesn’t sound great until you see their competitors) dropped to page three and four, at the same time as their link count experiencing a large and very unnatural spike.

Upon investigation of their back links we identified over 80 sites each linking back from ten different pages with exactly the same title tags (which were the same as some pages on our client site), random URLs and the same anchor text. They were remarkably easy to spot.

When we checked the sites it appeared some were adult or other spammy sites, but most of the sites were hacked WordPress sites. They had ten or so pages added that used the HTML code and content from our clients’ site. To make matters worse they had replaced some of the content with links to Viagra, casino and adult sites – not really neighbourhoods we wanted them to be associated with.

So the scale of our problem was 800+ pages linking multiple times to our client, as well as various low quality/spammy/malware sites, using large parts of our clients’ content, effectively creating duplicate content issues.

So if you have a similar problem here is what I suggest doing next…

Step 1 – Identify you have a problem

This is probably step minus one, and it is usually quite easy, but you have to be looking (if you don’t check your own backlinks regularly you should). You do not want your client to find out before you!

Just to show you how easy it can be sometimes, check out the anchor text report for one of our clients competitors – anyone would think they were an online pharmacy!

Anchor Text Screenshot

As a side note – if you have a forum or profile pages make sure they are moderated!!

It’s that time of year again, where everyone is starting to think about which UK search conferences and events to attend.

So for 2012, I’ve put together a conference calendar of search events – let me know if there’s any I’ve missed!

February:

March:

Running an SEO project smoothly and effectively requires juggling many skills:  creativity, proactivity, effective time management and organisation, to name just a few.

But I would argue that one of the most important attributes of a successful SEO campaign is communication of knowledge – within an agency, of course, but also (perhaps less obviously) with clients. Many clients have little or no knowledge of SEO, and why should they? That’s what we’re here for, after all. But it’s unfortunately a fact of life as an SEO that algorithm updates and other external factors are not the only risk posed to a successful SEO project. Without at least a minimal level of SEO education, actions taken by a client can actually be detrimental to the SEO efforts of their agency or consultant.

One of my SEO New Year’s Resolutions (more Resolutions from SEOptimise in a forthcoming blog post by Matthew Taylor) is to help clients to help us by ensuring they have enough knowledge to understand our work, its aims and methodologies, and what they can do to ensure that we’re able to get them the best results possible. So I thought I’d kick off the New Year by taking a look at the top ways in which an SEO project can be sabotaged by a client. This is not me ranting about my lovely clients by the way – it’s more a retrospective look at some of the bottlenecks I’ve encountered in otherwise smooth SEO projects over the last year or so.

1. Changing the website without telling us
Whether it’s launching a new section, rolling back to an old version of the site, rewriting copy or even a full blown redesign, it’s really important to get the SEO perspective before any changes are made, to ensure that a) new material is optimised from the word go and b) prior SEO efforts are not damaged or lost. There’s nothing worse than finding that your client’s rankings have plummeted because the site has been reverted to an old, unoptimised version without your knowledge.

The solution:  emphasise to your client the importance of liaising on potential website changes before they happen, and in plenty of time. If there’s a redesign in the offing, ensure you’re involved from the outset to ensure that the new site is structured in an SEO-friendly way. It’s much easier to make changes in the planning stages than it is to change things once it’s live.

Good project management is the backbone of any successful SEO campaign. With the right planning and execution, good management can keep the project profitable, lower stress and maintain client satisfaction. This blog post will identify three key tips to help you become a better project manager and highlight three tools which can help you along the way.

1. Communication
Communication is central to any good working relationship. It’s important at the project kick off stage to establish this relationship so that you can move forward together. Developing a friendship with your client allows you to manage their expectations.  Working in the industry, it’s often easy to forget how alien the topic of SEO can be to some people. Therefore as a project manager it is your job to educate your client on SEO and to explain the nature of SEO as a marketing tool. By improving your client’s understanding of SEO and developing a communicative relationship, you will be able to create realistic goals and will be better equipped to deal with any unexpected problems.

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