The backlink fail of the year award goes to EDIT: I have since been in contact with the company in question.  It seems they were unaware how SEO work was being conducted on their behalf by a “reputable Irish company” .  Accordingly, I have removed their name from this post.  I would have no problem naming and shaming if I was convinced it was willful, but on this occasion it appears the blunder was foisted upon them rather than directly created by them.  Business’s make mistakes, just like all of us. Something tells me they should have read this blog before they started their SEO campaign.

A while back I wrote about link building (or off-page SEO as I put it).  In that article there is a sub heading about what NOT to do when link building.  One of those things was paying somebody to do your link building without knowing what they were doing.  Today I found an example that really illustrates the dangers of outsourcing your SEO.

I was researching a clients competitor on Alexa when I came across this little gem of a backlink…

SEO Fail! No company wants to have backlinks from a fetish site made public. It's just plain embarrassing. The picture shows backlink results for a company which are freely available on Alexa to anybody.

Embarrassing for the company in question, since  recruitment and a fetish site are not really related.  Theoretically It could happen to anybody.  I have no power over who links to this site and from where they link.

However, according to my research, in the case of this particular company they have actually paid for these links.  How did I come to this conclusion?  Well, lets have a look at that fetish site and in particular where the link is (purely for professional reasons you understand)…

A spam forum profile created with links as the signature. Unethical SEO to whip/ beat / spank your competition.

The links in the case of the Fetish site are in a signature of a profile in a forum on the site.  They use two keywords as the link text directed to two separate pages on the target site.  The forum “user” has made no posts, just created a profile with the signature.

Forum Spamming

Looking at further backlinks to the to the same company using Alexa and other better tools it quickly becomes apparent that this process has been repeated across a multitude of forums with no regard to the forum topic.  In fact the number of links from completely unrelated sites far and away outnumbers the small number of relevant backlinks obtained.  I even found a post about a rival company with the links pointing to the site in question.

Another recurring theme is the location of the user being given as Delhi.  It is not a huge leap of logic to conclude therefore that this company have either directly, or indirectly outsourced a link building SEO campaign to a less than scrupulous Indian SEO company.  Edit: It turned out to be that they outsourced to an Irish company who in turn outsourced their work. I say less than scrupulous because what they are doing is forum spamming.  Spamming is rarely a clever move when it comes to SEO.  I did say rarely.  Here is why…

When is Spamming a good idea?

Spamming works.  This is how this particular company came to my attention.  Their intense session of forum spamming led to a quite radical jump in their rankings.  This makes it a good short term, if highly unethical, practice.  It is perfect if you need to promote a once off event like a concert and you don’t care if the site gets hammered by Google afterwards.

Why outsourcing your SEO to spammers is a bad idea

Search engines like Google spend a lot of resources on counteracting spam and paid links.  They brought out a set of Webmaster guidelines.  With that they are effectively saying that anything that falls outside those parameters is liable to be punished when caught.  In Google’s own words….

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

In other words, if you get caught you can expect your ranking on Google to take a huge nosedive.  It can be really difficult to recover from this too.  Removing all the offending links is not always possible, particularly if you have not kept a careful record of where they are and what your usernames and passwords are.  Until they are all removed you can find yourself on page 50 instead of on page one.

If you are in a competitive niche its an even worse idea to use black hat SEO tactics.  That is because it is so easy to report a site for breaking Google guidelines.

How to report a website for buying links

Reporting a website for buying links is really easy.  All you have to do is follow this link http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

Other problems with this particular case of outsourcing SEO

Any good SEO trainer will tell you that links from RELATED sites are important.  Links from unrelated sites carry less weight. In my experience this only becomes apparent after some time.  If I want my site to be an authority on SEO then I need to have inbound links from sites and pages that are also about SEO.

The logic is simple.  If other people are writing about SEO and pointing to what I write about on SEO within their text then I am essentially a reference source.  The more people that use what I write as a reference source the better source I must be (otherwise people would use somebody else).  Thus links from related pages carry more weight.  If I am getting links from a site on boa constrictors then it may help me rank for boa constrictor SEO (theres a concept), but will not help much for SEO, even if that is the link text.

It is the old quality vs quantity argument.  It has been shown time and time again that quality wins out in the long term.  That is why I always advise clients not to build as many links as possible but to go about link building in a methodical and logical fashion.

How to outsource SEO without the risk

If you want to outsource your SEO then there are some simple steps to take to minimise the risk of ending up in the same predicament as my hapless example:

1. Ask Questions.  Ask how the SEO campaign is to be carried out.  What methods are going to be used.  You can bet that the Irish company used in this instance said that they only practice “White hat SEO”, but they clearly don’t.
2. Insist on detailed SEO reports. Your reports should include the addresses of where links have been created.
3. Get references. Get feedback from other clients.  Ideally you want clients that have been using the services for years, not weeks or months.
4. Get informed. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines yourself.  Know what is likely to be risky and what is good practice within those guidelines.
5. Keep it local. While it is tempting from a cost perspective to go with a company half a planet away, they are less accountable than somebody who is in business just down the road.

It can seem like an impossible choice. SEO or Usability. Where is the compromise?

SEO is vital to the success of any website.  After all, if you can’t get found, then you can’t give your message.  However, once you have been found, it would be nice if people actually stayed on your site and read some of your content instead of clicking off somewhere else within seconds.  Content writing skills are extremely important.

Why are SEO and User Experience often opposites?

It all comes down to how the human mind works and how algorithms work.  Take pictures for example.  Google can’t “see” your graphics in the same way as humans do.

Despite huge improvements in search algorithms, the bottom line is that they still place a massive emphasis on original text content.

This contradicts what humans like to read.  We are the exact opposite.  We don’t really like reading online.  We like pictures and lots of them.

Heuristics – what have they ever done for us?

Jakob Nielsen is regarded by most as the father of usability heuristics (heuristics simply means that the rules are only loosely defined rather than strict).  It is worth reading through them.  What usability heuristics do is give us a rough template on how to not annoy users of both applications and websites (websites being a type of application really).

Keep Visitors Longer

By sticking to heuristic principles we have more chance of keeping our visitors for longer on our site, and of giving them an experience that in all probability they don’t particularly notice.  Not getting noticed in this case is a good thing.  We have all been frustrated on websites by not being able to simply navigate to where we want to go.  Mostly we just look for a new site when that happens.  This is the converse of heuristic principles.

This eye tracking study shows how we tend to read in a vaguely f shaped pattern online. This shows the importance of top google ranking too by the way.

How humans read web pages

We, as humans, read web pages quite differently to how we would read a book.  Broadly speaking, we scan down the left hand side of a web page, reading headings and only some of the words in the paragraphs below them.  How much depends on the level of interest the headline and the first few words invoked.

Thus, the way I wrote that last paragraph was not ideal from a heuristics point of view, since I essentially repeated the heading in my first line.  However that was ideal from an SEO perspective.  I train people to write like that.

Humans like short and snappy text, preferably backed up with pictures.  Google likes text, text and more text.  This is why content writing is such an artform.

How to please both humans and search engines with your content

I was recently working on a site relaunch for a recruitment agency specialising in Medical Jobs.  The website ranked really well for their chosen keywords within a very competitive niche market (no prizes for guessing who does their SEO!). However, the front page had a LOT of text on it that 99% of visitors would never read.

For the relaunch user experience was high on the list of priorities.  But we were faced with a problem.  A good user experience and lots of text on the front page do not good bedfellows make.

The solution was to turn to javascript and make the front page into a slideshow.  Not any javascript will do, and Ajax will not do at all.  The key to this is to make sure that when you view the source of your page, all the content is visible.  This means that search engines get to read all of your text.

Users get movement and interaction (which are plusses) while having the information broken down in such a way that they are more likely to read more of that text.

Did making a slideshow help keep visitors?

Yes it did.  Putting the information into a slideshow increased the average time on the front page of the site by 16 seconds straight away.  This means that people are actually staying to read the information, which is what you want if you have a website.

Benefits of Heuristics to SEO

Google take things like bounce rate and time on site into consideration for SEO too.  So, by providing a better user experience and keeping visitors longer through the use of heuristic principles, you are also improving your standing with the search engines.

How do I know if I should break up text on my page?

It is not always the case that text needs to be broken up for humans to appreciate it properly.  It is very simple to find out if your page needs help.  Use your analytics.  The key factor here is the amount of time spent on the page.  If it is really low on a page that has a lot of text then it stands to reason that your users are not reading it.  If that doesn’t upset you it should.  The only reason it would not upset you is if the content is really only there for the search engines.  In other words it’s spam content.  There should be nothing on your website that you do not want people to read.  Spam content can be recognised by search engines simply by measuring the time your visitors spend on your page.  If it’s too short for the amount of content, then the quality of the writing must be really bad. Thus at the very least, the page does not deserve to be ranked highly.

I don’t like slideshows (other ways to break up text)

If you have a lot of text on your page that you realise could not possibly be read in the time your analytics say people are taking to read it then you need to make some changes.  The following are ways of breaking up text in a page to make it more accessible…

• Lists.  Put your content into lists.  They are easier to read than straight paragraphs.
• Plenty of headings.  These hugely increase the chances of people reading more of your content.
• Boxes.  Place your content into bite sized individual boxes.
• Pictures. Pictures and picture captions are about the only thing that will distract us from reading down the left hand side of a page at the speed of light.  We love images.  However, stock images that we have seen before tend to be ignored.  Your pictures have to get attention too.
• Ruthless editing.  Big long sentences are bad.  Get rid of your verbose ramblings and stick to the point. (I could do with remembering that one).
• Highlight text. Using bold or italic text helps to get pertinent points noticed.

As always, remember that keyword stuffing is really annoying to users.  I don’t want to read about seo training in the latest seo training article on this seo training website.  Neither do search engines.  It may work to some extent, but it’s effect on users is to make you look bad, so don’t do it!

Build links to elevate your website in Google (SEO for SERPS)

Off page SEO is where most sites fall down.

Most sites fall down somewhere in their SEO efforts.  If you are happy that your on-page SEO optimisation is up to scratch then it is time to look at off-page optimisation.

How Google rates your site in plain english.

The currency of the web is links. Every link provides important information for search engines like Google. This information is used to rank your website in terms of importance when somebody does a search.
There are some key factors in establishing which sites are most relevant for whatever has been typed into the Google search bar. In establishing how important your page is relative to others, these are some of the more important factors: -

1. How many other pages link to your page? Look at it logically.  If I find a great bit of information on something I’m writing about then I will link to it.  If it is rubbish then I will link to something else.  Therefore, the more inbound links a page has then the more likely it is to be a useful page.  That makes it more important.
2. How relevant is the content on the linking page to your page? Is the page that the link is on covering a similar topic?  Indeed is the website itself generally writing on the same topic as your page?  If it is not then your link will carry less value.  There must be relevance.
3. How important is the linking page? How well does the page the link comes from rank itself?  If that page also has a high trust and multiple inbound links to it then it will increase the value of the link to your page.
4. How many people click on that link? Think of each click as a vote.  The more people that follow the link the better.
5. What do those visitors do when they reach your page? Do they stay and read for a while and visit other pages on your site or do they just leave straight away?  If they leave (bounce rate is high) then that will devalue the link too since it is obviously not providing visitors with a good experience.

Turbocharge your links

Ideally you want keywords in the link text.  This will turbocharge your links.  This site is about SEO training, and my main site also has a page on Search Engine Optimisation on it, so linking to it like that makes sense.  It is relevant to this site and provides a further resource for people who want to have their website optimised.  Because I have used the text that I want the page to rank for (in this case “search engine optimisation”) as my link text, I am telling search engines that the page I linked to is important for that phrase.

SuperTurbocharge your links

Don’t forget to add in your title text to your links.  This is another opportunity to tell both humans and search engines more about the page you are linking to.  In this example I have used the text “SEO consultant Wicklow”.  By hovering over the link this text will come up.  The code for doing this is <a href=”http://whatever.ie/whatever” title=”SEO consultant Wicklow”>

Where can I get links to my site?

At some stage every webmaster (that’s what you are if you run a website) runs into the problem of where to get links back to their site.  Here are six ways to get links…

1. Ask for them.  Ask people who run relevant websites to link to your website.  The worst they can say is “no”.
2. Directories.  Submit your site to relevant directories.  Some of these are useless, but some still carry a little weight.
3. Submit Press releases and articles to press release sites and article sites.  Many of these have just been depreciated with the so called Google Panda update, but as a rule of thumb if you can find a suitable site easily it probably has not been affected by the update.
4. Utilise social media.  You will not get a lot in the way of useful links from the sites themselves usually (most have nofollow attributes on their links), but by getting your content out there in the social world there is a higher chance of somebody else reading it and linking to it (organically the way all links should theoretically be made!).  It is also a good PR exercise, so no excuses for not using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg etc.
5. Forums.  These really come under the social media category in some ways.  They are of limited use but can sometimes create a good stream of traffic which is never a bad thing.
6. Blog.  This is my favourite way.  Establish a good blog and it will become a resource in itself that will gain in importance.  It is a low cost way of building links for long term gain.  Commenting on somebody elses blog is less useful.  What about doing a guest blog post on someone elses popular blog?

Do NOT do this to get links!

Here are some things you should definitely avoid when building links to your site…..

1. Buying links: This is the number one thing not to do to boost your SEO.  Buying links is bad.  It goes against Google policy and you WILL be penalised for it when you get caught.  Think you won’t?  Trust your competitors not to drop you in it by reporting you when they find out how you got above them in the Google ranks?  Don’t do it.
2. Reciprocal Links: “I’ll give you a link if you give me a link”.  My next post will probably be on Reciprocal links for more information.  The short reason is that you want more links in to your website than out of your site.
3. Pay somebody else to build your links without knowing exactly what they are going to do: It may seem obvious but lots of people pay for others to build their links (I even provide that service myself), but many do not know where those links are going to come from or the methods used in getting them.
4. Go for quantity over quality: Leading on from the last point, you need quality links and quality is harder to get than quantity.  If you have many links from unrelated sites it could lower the level of trust in your site.  If you owned a search engine would you rank sites you trusted lower than sites you didn’t trust?

Link Building is not an exact science.

All your links are not going to be ideal.  What I have done here is give an overview, but there is quite a bit more to it.  There are times to break the rules and times not to.  I have paid for links because of positioning and only on specific, relevant sites.  This has been more to do with gaining traffic through them than what it will do for my own sites Organic Listing SEO.  I have never and will never bulk buy links (I learned from others mistakes there).

If you found this useful then share it!

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Understanding How Google Search Algorithms Work in Simple English

Here is a simple version of how Google works in laymans English.  If you know how Google looks at a page then you can make sure that your content is written in a way that is complementary and therefore help you to rank higher on Google and other search engines.

At the core of Google is a set of mathematical algorithms.  Their purpose is to  try to determine the relevance of your page as opposed to other pages for a specific search term.  Imagine being given a billion pages of text in a language you don’t understand and having to give back the most relevant page for information on a word you also don’t understand.  You may know that there are pictures, but you can’t see them.  That is what it is like for the algorythm!

I am going to describe the process the Google search algorithms have to go through as if I was the algorithm.

If somebody was to do a search for “flabrat” then I am first going to look at URL’s to see if any of them have “flabrat” in them.  This is because flabrat.com is more likely to have information on “flabrat” than “globsheen.com”.  However, globsheen.com/flabrat.html is also highly likely to have some relevance.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a pages content has any relevance to its name without going and reading it.

Meta Title

The first information I will find on a page is the Meta Title.  This is the text that will be displayed in my search results.  Does this say “flabrat” in it?  If it does then I could be on the right track.

Meta Keywords

I’m going to take a cursory look at the Meta keywords too if they exist.  Not that I am going to put any weight behind them at all.  I’m just checking to see if they look spammy to me.  If they do I’m going to assume that the rest of the page is also trying to pull the wool over my eyes a bit.

H1 tag

Next comes the H1 tag.  This is really really really important.  The h1 tag is the heading for the whole page.  It is the heading that people will actually see when they view the page.  If the word “flabrat” is used in the h1 tag then there is a good chance that the page is actually about flabrat. See The importance of h tags for more information.

Other Header tags (h2, h3 etc)

These are sub-headings and should relate to the content in the text that comes after them.  They are not as important as the h1 tag but are still useful, particularly for breaking up your text and making it more readable for us humans.  The header tags used in these segments are h3 tags.

p tags

Not content with just looking at the title, like Google, I will then look at the actual content of your text contained in p tags or paragraph tags.  The first paragraph is particularly important, but if it was me I would be looking for the word flabrat throughout the entire document.

I would become suspicious if it appeared a lot though, so don’t overdo your keyword density.

Pictures

Google can’t actually see pictures.  Google can however read text associated with pictures.  For this reason your picture file names and alt text should both reflect your keywords.  Think of it as another way of getting your keywords onto the page without being overly spammy.  Without alt text in your images (img src=”images/picture.jpg” alt=”a flabrat in full bloom”) your pictures are doing precicely nothing for your Search Engine Optimisation.

Google search algorithms are a lot more complicated than that.

What I have just described is a very simplified version of what actually goes on to choose which page gets ranked highest in Google.  There are over 200 factors involved in Google’s search algorithm and nobody knows exactly what they all are or what weighting is applied to each one.

What I have done in this post is give you a foolproof method of ensuring your on-page SEO is good enough to help you get ranked higher.  Depending on what market you operate in, it could even be enough to get you ahead of some of your competitors.

On-page SEO is only half the battle though.  You will need to do some off-page or external SEO too if you want your page to rank in any but the very least competitive of markets.  My next post will be describe off-page SEO in simple terms.

On-page SEO is massively important.  It is the foundation to getting found online.  It is always my starting point.  Get it right and everything else you do will work better too.

All heading tags are important, but it is a serious offence to omit your h1 tag

I thought I’d write a little about H tags and how important they are to SEO.  This was highlighted to me recently when I was given a very small budget to do some SEO work on a site.  I would have liked to do a complete redesign, but there were very good reasons for keeping the budget low.

I love a challenge, so I thought I’d see what could be done with the site as it was.

The first thing that struck me was that there was a complete lack of H1 tags on the site.  It had been built using a CMS and the content had been written by the business owners themselves.  The second major problem with the on-site SEO was that nearly all the pages had the same title.

The coding was verbose but I could do nothing about the page structure (no access to files on the server – just the CMS).

Do H tags make a measurable difference to position on Google?

The short answer is “yes they do”.  I made several changes to the site’s content.  H tags were at the core of what I did though.

The Results

Original Position on Google for local search terms (ie. “industry locality“): Page 3 at highest.

New Position on Google for the same terms: Nearly all page 1 with some at position 2.  Those on page 2 were in the top position there.

How I went about achieveing a page 3 to page 1 jump in rank without any inbound linking.

For on-page SEO I usually start with determining a keyword or two.  This was a local business targeting the local area.  The search terms that would be most likely used to find it seemed obvious and checking with Google Trends confirmed this.

Keywords chosen, relevance must be established within the page.  What I am looking for here is continuity.

• URL : Try to get a keyword into the URL
• Page Title (Meta) : Use the same keyword in the Page title (this appears on the tab of your browser)
• H1 tag: Use the keyword here too.
• H2, H3, H4 tags: Less important, but same principles apply.
• p tag: Use the keyword in the body of your text, but not too much.  How much is too much?  As a rule of thumb, if it doesn’t read like good english then it is too much.

Basically, if you do hot have a h1 tag on your page it is like handing up a college thesis without a title at the top.  You are going to lose marks for it (or in this case SERPs rank).

Eternity Jewellery Online Shop using OScommerce

I have been working on a site for a jewellers for the last while.  I decided to go with OScommerce as the ecommerce engine.  The reason for that was that it was recommended to me by several people. I decided to check it out.  I was delighted when I saw that it was w3c standards compliant, so I dived right in.

About OScommerce Version 2.3.1

OScommerce V2.3.1 is an open source online shopping solution.  Open source software is developed by a network of developers in an open community.  Therefore it is free.  That means I can charge less to my clients than if I buy a shopping cart solution or have to develop it from scratch myself.

OScommerce runs on PHP and mysql – which themselves have tons of online support available.

OScommerce comes with an impressive feature set which you can look through here.  It seems like they have everything covered. I particularly liked things like unlimited products and multi-currency support (although I since found out that exchange rates are only automatic if the US dollar is your primary currency).

Working with OScommerce 2.3.1 (let the review begin)

Installation

Installation was straightforward and there is plenty of online help if you get stuck.  It’s not as easy as wordpress, but it is not as hard as a multisite wordpress install.

Modification

This is where things get a little less rosy.  Unless you want to use OScommerce as it is then you are going to have to make some modifications.  It will work perfectly well as it is and you can upload your store logo etc, it’s just that I have yet to meet anybody that wants their shop to look like anybody elses.

OScommerce is not a theme based platform.  There are people out there selling “themes” but these all go further than just some changes to the CSS.

Any modifications will affect future updates! This is because just about every mod requires changes to more than one file.

There are thousands of modifications available though.  Be warned.  A lot of modifications require you to upload files, overwriting the ones that were there before.  If you have made modifications already you may well find yourself overwriting some of those.  The upshot of that would be at best stopping your original modifications from working, and at worst breaking your whole site.  Backup, backup, backup!

File Structure

It’s a nightmare.  To do something simple like adding a page requires changes to 3 pages (or maybe 4 I forget).  Once you get used to the file structure it’s not as bad, but you can forget about putting in a page called something.php and just linking to it.  It will not work.  The side menus are module based.  This is great in that you can position and reposition individual modules like the shopping cart and product categories easily from the admin.  It is not so great when it comes to adding to a module (extra pages for example) or creating a new module (box).

OScommerce SEO

SEO is a foreign concept to OScommerce.  I made the stupid assumption that because they had gone to the effort of making the site standards compliant (markup, but not CSS) that they had also put some effort into SEO.  This is absolutely not the case.  Problems with the SEO include:

1. Multiple pages with the same meta title (the store name).  Products and categories have separate page titles but all the other pages default to the shop name.  I confess that I got frustrated trying to work out the structure to change this and resorted to a switch statement in the header to change the page title of the other pages based on the url of the page.  God help me when it comes to doing mod-rewrites of the urls!
2. Links to index.php.  This is one of my pet hates.  Why link to www.whateversite.com/index.php when www.whateversite.com is perfectly acceptable and removes a duplicate page issue.  A quick mod-rewrite sorted out that.
3. Canonical URLS.  that sort of goes with the above.  Again sorted with a mod-rewrite.
4. Search Engine Friendly URL’s.  There is an option in the admin to display search engine friendly urls.  The trouble is that the solution is worse than the problem. The original url to a product could be http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php?cPath=24_39&products_id=42.  Turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s makes this http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php/cPath/24_39/products_id/42.  What the advantage of that is supposed to be I don’t know.  There is no product name in there (in this case an eternity ring).  Worse than that it appears to add 4 folder levels to the url.  The further away from the home page a page is (sub folders) the less important it is. Needless to say I have turned that off.
5. There is no description meta tag.
6. There is no built in sitemap (although there are mods available).
7. There is no auto update to google et al when a new product is added.

Another issue I have is that there is no visual editor when putting in product information.  If you want to put in a list with your product then you have to code it.  No problem to me, but not nice for a client who doesn’t know html from abba.  Frankly that is a bit embarrassing.

There are SEO mods available, but you will need to install these first, before other mods since making an OScommerce site truly SEO friendly is not a simple task.  I decided not to because they mostly include stuff that is outdated or not necessary.  I’ll do it myself.

Things I don’t like about OScommerce v2.3.1

1. OScommerce allows you to add attributes or options to a product.  they were clearly thinking of options like available in red or blue.  This part of the admin is a disgrace.  Each attribute has to be added in separately.  With the Jewellery shop I was working with they had things like ring sizes.  There were 52 different ring sizes.  To individually add 52 options to each ring would take a long time and leave me with royally P***ed off clients.  I spent a day making some modifications to this page including allowing multiple selection of attributes for a product and re-ordering the lists.  They were ordered by id number from the database.  I changed it to be ordered alphabetically or I would never be able to find anything!  A search function would have been nice here too.  What you end up with is pages and pages of options and then more pages of which options are assigned to which products.  Oh, and similarly named products are a problem there too.  You can input a code for each product, but that code did not show up in the attributes page.  So two “Eternity Ring”s with different ring sizes available would get very confusing.  I had to modify that to show the product code too.  While I was at it I modified the breadcrumb trail navigation too.
2. Shipping.  There are lots of shipping methods available.  Combining them is not so easy.  My client wanted free delivery on orders over x amount, but only in Ireland.  This was achievable only by setting up two different shipping methods, one by price and the other by weight.  I further had to limit the price method to only come into effect in Ireland.  The documentation was skimpy and shipping took a full half day to sort out.  Part of the process of setting up shipping was to input the country code of every country in the list, along with the shipping price by weight.  Having a maximum of 255 characters per line in the inputs meant that I had to split one segment of countries into 4 (at the 255 character mark).  A headache!
3. Shipping part 2. If you work in lbs, then weights are not a problem.  For those of us who are metric it is not so straight forward.  The database is set to two decimal places.  So if you use kilos then you only get two decimal places of grams.  This is a problem on light goods like earrings for example.  You can change the db to reflect 3 decimal places or you can just measure everything in grams.  After trying both I went for weighing in grams.  OScommerce allows you to specify maximum weights for packages and increases overall package weight by a percentage after that to compensate your shipping charges.  From Ireland, even if it actually worked it would be inaccurate and useless.  I turned that off and just put in prices for larger weights in my main shipping section.
4. No wishlist.  I didn’t mind that so much, but my client would have liked one.  The only mod I could find for 2.3.1 to do this was on sale for $850 (which rather goes against the spirit of open-source).

Would I use OScommerce again?

Yes I would.  Now that I know my way around it, it is not a bad piece of software.  It is not nice to work with but it does what you want it to do at the end of the day, so it gets a reluctant thumbs up from me.  I only say reluctant because for a time I felt it was ruining my life!

Brian Cowen Supports Domaining for SEO.... but it's still a good idea. (he may not actually know what I'm talking about)

Does this mean we should all give up on domaining?  Not at all.

Here are 5 reasons why domaining is worth doing.

1. Domain Typos

As an example let’s say I had a site called wortley.com.  Wortley happens to be my surname.  The trouble with it is that hardly anybody on the planet can spell it properly!  In Ireland the most common mis-spelling is Worthley.  So if somebody was to try and find my site, then typing in www.worthley.com would return them precisely nothing.

So if your company name is prone to typo’s then buying similarly named domains that people may type to get to your site makes sense.  You just redirect them to the correct site.

2. Your Company Name Is Often Shortened to Initials or has the word “and” in it, or other confusing letters.

If my company name happened to be Wortley and O’Connor Ltd for some inexplicable reason, then it is not going to be readily obvious what my website is going to be.  Is it woc.com, wortleyoconner.com, wortleyandoconner.com or even wortleyoc.com?

For this reason I will never name a company in this way.  Particularly since nobody can spell Wortley in the first place and the apostrophe in O’Conner sends people into a state of utter confusion.

If I was stuck with that as a company name I would be well advised to get all versions of it though.

3. .com or .ie

If my site was wortley.ie then (assuming people have learned how to spell it) how many people would type in wortley.com first?  A lot.  People assume .com endings.  You may notice that this site does not have the .com version.  You may also be amused to note what happens if you type in http://www.seotraining.com

If you do you will notice that you are redirected to a .org domain.  (probably won’t notice that first though).

If it is possible, then getting the .com, .net, .org and .ie versions of your site makes sense.  One other good reason to do this is that nobody else can come along and set up a near duplicate site to yours.  Imagine if your business is an online shop with a .ie domain name and somebody comes along and sets up the same domain name with a .com ending.  They could make the site similar looking to yours and sell similar products.  You would lose business.

4. Keyword rich domains

If you are in Ireland and do a search for SEO training then you will find that this site comes up at the top of google.  Why is that?  Well the domain name is seotraining.ie, the subject matter is SEO training and generally you will find references to search engine optimisation creeping into nearly every post.

I am using this domain to target those keywords.  My main site http://www.webshed.ie has no reference to seo in the domain name and it would be a lot harder to make it rank for that.

I have heard a lot of “professional SEO consultants” say that it doesn’t work anymore.  Well it does for this site (and a few others I have).  Also I have not put any effort at all into link building to this site.  It is all about the content.

5. Company Rebranding

My last post was about rebranding your website.  If your company is taken over, does a merger or simply wants to rebrand what happens to your website?  You will still have visitors going to the old domains.  You need to redirect that traffic to your new domain.

Rebranding need not cost millions... but sometimes it helps!

Inspired by the very recent news that the ESB is to be rebranded as Electric Ireland I started wondering what the pros and cons of rebranding your website would be.

For starters you are unlikely to €6 to €8 million price tag that the ESB is about to incur.  But other than that is there any point?

It really depends on just how much of a rebrand you are talking about.  If it is more a restyling than a rebranding then it should not have too much effect on your SEO.  If however you have to change domains as part of that rebranding then you should be very aware of the possible implications of that.

Let’s use the ESB as an example.  Their website is http://www.esb.ie.  It has been that way as long as I can remember.  They have a LOT on inbound links to the site, google recognises the acronym ESB as standing for Electricity Supply Board and they are ahead of their competitors forcing them to make excessive use of PPC campaigns.

So what do they stand to lose by rebranding as Electric Ireland?

1. They have to start a new domain presumably (electricireland.ie since they have already bought the domain – and .com, .org etc).  Time is a factor in the ranking of websites.  Established sites that have been around for a few years have gained trust with the major search engines.  A year or two back there was much talk of the “google sandbox” where sites were not allowed rank until they had proved themselves a bit.  Whether you think this is still the case or not, there is no denying that established sites tend to rank better.
2. The new site will have a new look presumably too.  To customers that are familiar with the old look this is confusing.  It requires a great deal of advertising to get the message out there about the change.  Luckily the ESB have a regular mail shot (the bill) to customers that they can use as a vehicle for part of this re-education, but they will also need TV and radio advertising too at the very minimum.  In short, it’s going to be very expensive.
3. Goodwill.  The news of the rebranding is being widely touted as a “waste of money” at the very time when the country is in dire financial shape.  Spending that much money on something that is deemed a waste of time by customers is only going to encourage them to go to Bord Gais or Airtricity (the two largest competitors).
4. Inbound links.  These are the life blood of any website and starting up a new site as part of a rebrand effectively removes all of these.  The probable outcome is a site that ranks well below their competitors.

Those are the major problems facing a site that wants to completely rebrand.  There are only two advantages that I can think of in the case of the ESB

1. They have to do it if they want to be able to set their own prices (Big brother said so!).
2. Some people may think they are not the ESB and they may gain customers as a result. (I know that’s a bit cutting, but that’s the sort of country we live in, like it or not)

What I would do if I was the ESB

Once I had my new domain I would do all my css styling to reflect the new brand image and then take the existing ESB site and plop it straight onto my new server.

To say that in a more straight forward way, I would make sure the content on my new site matched the content on my old site but with different logos.

At the same time it would be necessary to 301 redirect (permanent redirect) all pages from the old site to the same pages on the new site. Thus anybody following a link to the old site gets to exactly the same content on the new site.

Then I would start link building like my life depended on it.  I would back that up with a ppc campaign that would put Anglo’s debt to shame.

Only after about a year and with plenty of links rebuilt, would I slack off on the PPC campaign and let the site stand on it’s own two feet.

I would start a competition (probably through facebook ads) that in some way encouraged links.  I would get out into the blogging community with it too and do the same there.

Most importantly I would cross my fingers and hope that I had not forgotten something vital.  Changing domains and branding in one fell swoop is not for the feint hearted.

WEBSHED RSS Poster. Post your Blog and other feeds to Twitter automatically

I haven’t yet fully integrated it into my site yet and it should be considered a beta version, but here is a sneak preview of a new free service on my main site….

It is an RSS feed poster that will take your RSS feeds and publish them to Twitter automatically.  More than that, it is a feed aggregator that allows you to combine up to 6 individual feeds into one feed.  Why?  Well, for example, facebook only allows you publish one feed to your notes page.  So this aggregator allows you to publish up to 6 feeds.

It is called the WEBSHED RSS poster and to use it just click Publish My Feeds To Twitter!

I’ll update you all more when I have it properly integrated into the site an prettied up a bit.  In the meantime I’d welcome any feedback or comments you have on it.

Myself and my neighbour discussed sand bags two days ago.  Having early warning is vital.  I prepared to move everything in the house to waist height.

Sure enough the winds started to pick up last night.  The rain came with the winds and it was cold enough for it to turn to sleed.  I went to bed wondering what the morning would bring.

Last nights' severe weather results in mild puddles. Put away the sand bags!

This morning I couldn’t believe it.  After battling my way through the sand bags (which had been deployed by councils in other parts of the coastline) I was confronted with what can only be described as mild puddling.  How could Met Eireann (Irish weather service) have got it that that wrong?

After the build up it was a real let-down.  It did bring to mind how people must feel when promised the earth by us SEO’s though.  DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE about SEO.  It can change your websites profile hugely.  But when people start to build up what they can do for you to biblical proportions, it is probably time to start ignoring them.  It is all too easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of vague promises.

The truth is that like the winds that circle our planet there are so many parameters for SEO to be taken into consideration that giving really accurate predictions is about as likely as Met Eireann getting the weather right.  As an SEO the best you can do is say that there is a probability of an event happening.  This ability to predict a probability based on actions results from experience.  It does not take into consideration what will happen as a result of those actions in 6 months time.  That is because the playing field will have changed by then.  Will it effect your actions now?  Maybe.  Maybe it will in a positive way and maybe in a horrifically tsunami like negative way.

So how do you protect yourself?  How do you differentiate between inaccurate forecasts and accurate ones?  Standards, that’s how.  The SEO consultant who tells you that he / she can’t guarantee you will get results, but that there is a likelihood based on past experience gets my first vote.  They get the contract if they also say that they will only operate within Googles guidelines.  If they also show you where to find those guidelines and are open about what they are going to do then you have found yourself a responsible SEO.

If on the other hand they keep their processes secret, will not talk in plain english to you and promise you the earth… well then break out your sandbags!