So it’s a farewell to ranking no1 on Yahoo with exactly the type of site Google hates…. and hello to Bing (the search engine owned by Microsoft).

1. Compare Bing & Google Rankings - This tool is pretty cool for a start to check the differences between Google and Bing rankings – http://www.bing-vs-google.com/
2. I joined the Bing community too – http://www.bing.com/community/

NB – In the US, the change has already happened, and Bing provides Yahoo with results. The switchover has not yet happened in the UK to my knowledge.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Compare Bing & Google Rankings | Bing SEO Month. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

you can see the original tweet if you click the image….)

….at first I just put it down to another mad result from very quirky Google Alerts, but

• the word ‘hobo’ IS NOT on the page
• the keyword ‘Hobo’ IS in the link URL behind that Bit.ly short-link:
• That Bit.ly URL is nofollowed though, and
• Google ‘seems’ to be going through a 301 redirect at Bit.ly too, to get to that image too

Takeaways

Effectively this page is relevant for the term Hobo+Google, even though one of the words is behind a redirected nofollowed link (we already know Google has access to Twitter’s data, and it seems from this and other Tweets I have looked at, Google clearly gets access to Twitter data before nofollow and the bit.ly redirect is applied or recognised).

Or else how could Google work this ‘relevance’ out in this case?

I don’t spend much time looking at Twitter at all, but it’s kind of clear Google is treating Twitter links differently at Google Alerts level at least. Maybe this effect just won’t make it into Google SERPS, but be useful for discovery purposes (which I have heard some folk talking about but not quite like this)

Any thoughts?

It’s certainly appears as if Google ignores the bit.ly link too and perhaps just sees it as a straight link, and includes that link as keywords within the page, or is awarding relevance because of the linked image.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Quick Observation About Google, Google Alerts, Bit.ly & Twitter Links. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Replacing something that’s genuine, aged and valuable with something similar but ultimately a poor copy of what is already available is not without it’s perils.

There is plenty of stories out there about ranking woes –  if you try and force Google’s hand where it is ranking sites, Google might very well have a surprise in store for you.

I think Google likes the status quo – so much it tried to keep the link graph in 2007.

It works. It has the best search engine in the world, supposedly. The results work for most normal users.

You making a claim for a top spot IN A COMPETITIVE industry without quality links and relevant content over a PERIOD OF SUFFICIENT TIME,  in a vertical with relatively stable rankings, probably raises a flag. That’s why I like to take time to get rankings.

I’ve seen sites rise and rise and rise and when they get to the top, they get slapped back 40 places.

Sometimes I wonder when you are at the top of the results, Google takes a closer look at your site, that is, the big bad boy filter bots are let loose…. sometimes I actually worry about all of a sudden apearing near the top of results. Often, it is shortly followed by a big drop.

Is Google running other tests, rather than just click thru rates etc when we see results bouncing all over the place? Is it the spike in backlinks links that brings in the filters, or is it more analysis is forced the closer you are to top rankings these days?

Think of the processing power. Would you run every filter on every site in your index if you had a 100 billion pages?

If I bag a top ten ranking, I don’t usually push for Number 1 anymore, for fear of this. I normally concentrate on other keywords when I get into the top set of results, and building domain trust, and usually only focus on the main term if I have a solid gold linking opportunity on a site with mega trust.

How about you?

Hobo

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Getting To Number 1 In Google & Staying There. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I am a corporate seo and link builder – I am far from what I would call an expert in affiliate websites. This post is about what I think I have observed making the transition from corporate seo (my livelihood) to affiliate seo (my beer money).

When I started playing about with affiliate websites last year after getting some inspiration at THINK VISIBILITY (which I am going to again this year), it’s kind of apparent that some sites that should rank, don’t.

For Example

I built 6 NEW test sites with exact match web addresses RECENTLY.

5 of them do well in organic rankings – very well. One of them is nowhere in Google, after months, and after getting some real links to the site too. (EDIT – The same site is Number 1 in Yahoo for it’s main keyword after a few months).

The performing sites are affiliate sites, made in much the same way as the underperforming site – but notably, these sites are NOT in a crowded space.

The underperforming site is a pure affiliate site in a very crowded (seasonal) space, with uncloaked affiliate links to suppliers, and discount codes and vouchers slapped all over the place. In short, I made no effort to hide it was a 100% affiliate site.

I did think we’ve made a nice niche site though – informative and easy to navigate for the user – better, in my opinion, than the competition. There is a lot of competition in this space, mostly spammy, and from the analysis I did, I thought it would be able to break into pretty quickly. I had 200 pages of content hand written too, to make the descriptions completely unique.

It all looked so good……

Top Rankings – Then ZZap! Nothing!

Much like the mythic Google sandbox some folk go on about, the site burst into the rankings and shot right to the top of Google. Then the site virtually disappeared for months (it still is nowhere – I have purposely let it be to see what happens to it). It almost looks like there’s a rankings short circuit. It’s as if Google is ignoring page relevancy within the site, and the page that should rank, is completely ignored, and as a result, another page on the site ranks on (for example) page 15. The pages that should rank within the site, do not.

Corporate SEO

As a corporate seo, I NEVER experienced a sandbox effect, even launching new sites – obtaining credible links from trusted sites always had an impact within months if not weeks.

Affiliate SEO

As an affiliate seo, I think I see this sort of sandbox (for want of a better word) as a phenomenon in some industries.

Google believes that pure affiliate websites do not provide additional value for web users, especially if they are part of a program that distributes its content to several hundred affiliates. Because a search result could return multiple sites, all with the same content, they create a frustrating user experience.

Hmmmm… well, that is exactly the type I built lol – no matter how well I built it.

It certainly looks as though Google has reacted and:

• identified it as an affiliate site, in an already ‘spammy’ industry with products already syndicated to a LOT of websites
• penalised it, or ‘sandboxed’ it – ‘for later’

Why should Google do this? To stop seo like me just wandering into it’s index, probably. Didn’t Google recently say they don’t think a site should rank JUST because a good seo is at the helm?

More Corporate?

I’ve spent my corporate career trying to make my sites not look spammy. Perhaps affiliate sites need to look more corporate.

Maybe Google just doesn’t want another site like yours – and mine – in this space? Well, there ARE hundreds, if not thousands. IT IS a “frustrating user experience” if I take my marketer hat off and put my searcher hat on.

Wether or not this is the case, I’m certainly thinking more about making my affiliate sites different to all the competition…. easier said than done of course.

That is actually what Google wants you to do:

If you participate in an affiliate program, there are a number of steps you can take to help your site stand out and to help improve your rankings. Affiliate program content should form only a small part of the content of your site. When selecting an affiliate program, choose a product category appropriate for your intended audience. The more targeted the affiliate program is to your site’s content, the more value it will add and the more likely you will be to rank better in Google’s search results and make money from the program. For example, a well-maintained site about hiking in the Alps could consider an affiliate partnership with a supplier who sells hiking books rather than office supplies. Use your website to build community among your users. This will help build a loyal readership, and can also create a source of information on the subject you are writing about. For example, discussion forums, user reviews, and blogs all offer unique content and provide value to users. Keep your content updated and relevant. Fresh, on-topic information increases the likelihood that your content will be crawled by Googlebot and clicked on by users.

Do You Have The Wrong Type Of Site?

I see a lot of folk in forums bemoaning how their rankings are terrible, they are ‘sandboxed’, or they have lost previous good rankings. If you look at Google’s advice, you can see, Google actually warns you about building sites they, well, just don’t need any more:

Pure affiliate sites consisting of content that appears in many other places on the web is unlikely to perform well in Google search results and can cause your site to be negatively perceived by search engines. Unique, relevant content provides value to users and distinguishes your site from other affiliates, making it more likely to rank well in Google search result pages.

Do you have the exact same type of site as the current competition? Do you have the same affiliate links as most of the competition? If the answer is yes, and you want to compete for free google traffic, perhaps you need to think about the actual site you are building, rather than just the marketing of said site.

Just Get More Quality Links? Really?

I see a lot of advice from seo in forums and they seem to all mention at some time the same seo advice:

get more quality links

You know that advice on getting quality links to your website is sound, but what if Google has identified your site type as one it does not need in it’s already crowded index? What if this advice is from corporate seo, and not affiliate seo?

If this is the case, then you might be swimming upstream as far as good google rankings are concerned, and quality links won’t always rescue the site (in time for what you need it for).

It’s not as if quality links are that easy to come by these days anyways lol

For Discussion

Do let me know what your thoughts are especially if you are an affiliate seo – this is ONE site, and usually I wouldn’t blog about ONE site underperforming, but I thought it worth DISCUSSING as if Google is identifying particular types of site this aggressively, perhaps it’s a pointer of what’s to come (or is happening) in other verticals.

I have seen the arguments in this space FOR A LONG TIME. ‘There is a sandbox’. ‘The sandbox is a myth’. ‘Google hates affiliate sites’. ‘No Google hates crappy affiliate sites’. What I am saying is perhaps, in some scenarios, they are connected.

PS Check out Google’s advice on Affiliate Websites here. I’ve never really discussed affiliate websites on the Hobo blog, so I thought this might be a decent place to start….. even if I am way off with my theories, it’s probably useful to highlight what Google recommends about affiliate websites.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Google Sandbox? Or Do You Just Have The Wrong Type Of Site To Compete In Organic Results?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I added the new Tweet Button immediately (you will see it on this and other posts).

The new official easy to install Twitter button is out for your site - Search Engine People have a pretty solid tutorial on how to install it. I was immediately struck by the fact that their new Twitter button conveniently shipped WITHOUT the nofollow attribute, meaning they just bagged themselves about a billion* new search engine friendly links and more Pagerank than Google. Probably.

Kind of ironic, I thought, seeing as Twitter is so stingy with PR.

* Guestimate

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - New Twitter Tweet Button (Conveniently Without Nofollow Attribute). When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Would I host a Blog on sub-domain or a sub-folder on the main site?

For me, like a lot to do with seo, it would depend on what I had to start off with:

• Sub-domain – If I have a large site with a lot of domain authority, like a powerful brand, or a well cited organisation or institution, I’d consider a subdomain. The benefits are enormous – an EXTRA two spots in Google search results, etc, etc. After all – as a brand the site already HAS a lot of domain authority (Pr7-10). I’d be spreading that s*** all over the place if I had the resources to actually build value into the subdomain – like Google does
• Sub-folder – If I have a smaller site (Pr0-Pr7), like most of us have, I would put it on the main site (it doesn’t have to be in a folder it could be in the root), because you are LOOKING for MORE domain authority, and links generated by your blogging will help your whole site gain trust in Google and ultimately gain more trust – trusted links are a key to good rankings in google these days – though it’s worth pointing out Pagerank isn’t always an accurate measure of the amount of trust a site has

For most, putting a blog on your main site is of most benefit, if of course, you are actually going to spend time making the blog a useful destination. Neither is a quick win – both include a lot of work, but making something of value usually does.

Ultimately it’s the quality of WHAT you put WHERE, rather than WHERE you put it.

I’d never put a blog on a separate domain, and I’d never go with the even easier option of hosted blogs on domains I don’t own.

PS – I’d use WordPress, and I’d respect the license. There’s more than one way to skin a cat – What would you do?

* Someone emailed me and asked me this. So I mentioned I would blog it.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Blog – Subdomain or Subfolder? Which Is Best?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I’ve long thought it quite funny the situation between the mainstream media v Google.

Some media sites say it’s all one sided and Google are stealing their content, are putting up pay-walls, even when seo have been saying for years about how Google is falling over themselves giving them tons of trust, tons of traffic AND making their links some of the most valuable on the web.

Google uses big trusted sites like news media sites, and their links, to help them sort out the cess pool of the web.

A quick look around some newspapers websites (the top UK ones) and some of the seo efforts are shocking – they don’t even seem to know how to make sub domains rank well.

Yes, some newspaper sites HAVE cottoned on to the fact they have massive domain authority and are rolling out everything from dating sites to – jeez – low quality business directories. I would do some of that too I suppose.

I mean Google has made newspaper sites authority sites in niches like online dating. Um. Right.

A quick look around some local newspapers too and you see they don’t link out to anyone, anywhere.

Oh wait – there’s some paid link articles to personal injury lawyers lol and an advertising network of links that have clearly affected the site’s ‘trust’. Yeah – you need to know when to get out of those things before it goes t*ts up as they say in Scotland.

I don’t buy links but at the same time I don’t think it’s hypocritical to say the least that search engines frown on bloggers selling links and do little to deter newspaper sites obvious link selling tactics.

Some newspaper sites are so stupid they send out crazy link selling emails too and indeed, some folk do out them.

The fact is – only SHOCKINGLY bad – not just bad – seo will get these sites penalised in a NOTICABLE WAY – and even then – only if outed, then a discussion about innapropriate domain authority in particular niches might focus the spotlight. I don’t out seo strategies, but I wonder if it’s worth examining newspaper seo in the future. They do make a business of outing other folk. Right?

To be honest at this time, I think as a link builder, it’s more appropriate NOT to out others under just about any circumstances but it is something I think about.

It’s probably more useful to think how you are possibly going to combat mega domain authority gate crashers impact on your business, or in turn work out how you can look like a brand to Google.

Guess what – that involves newspaper websites at the moment…..

(Image Credit – http://www.dailyblogtips.com/create-your-own-newspaper-headlines/ )

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Will Bad SEO Kill The Love Affair Google Has With Newspaper Websites?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.“

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said this. Reading between the lines, I’ve long thought this is better seo advice than most of the stuff MC video blogs these days.

If you are a brand!

Open up your site. Sell stuff on it. Got a PR7 or PR8 site? Add a store and make a fortune – god I would love a crack at doing something like that.

Google wants to rank your stuff at the top because it trusts you won’t spam it and fill results pages with crap and make Google look stupid.

That’s money just sitting on the table the way Google currently awards massive domain authority and trust to particular sites – I mean, a newspaper is no2 for “online dating” in the UK and there are plenty of other examples.

If you want to be a brand?

Get links from brands that aren’t overdoing the above!

Identifying brands are pretty easy too:

• Content – most brands publish lots of it
• A brand has a lot of links
• It has links from relevant sites
• It has lots of links from other brands
• It’s KNOWN – well cited
• It’s probably got a PR7 – Pr10

Trust? That’s a different matter and at the moment – as long as it’s well cited, that’s good enough for Google it seems.

Article marketing, widget marketing, social media and directory submissions are on the whole lower quality links that will let you take small steps towards ranking better – but I am always thinking:

“how do I get links from brands to a site?”

- brands in niches can mean quality links. Easier said than done, for most, of course.

Brands are making Google search results safer and with safer comes boring search results that make it harder for the smaller business owner – though that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of opportunity at the moment if you read between the lines and take a gamble on some of the type of sites Google needs to keep in the serps for variation – think well cited exact match domains and very niche, intelligent microsites.

But the aim with your main site should always be to become a online brand. Good luck.

(image credit – http://www.zazzle.com/cmcheng – No relationship)

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Brands Are How You Sort Out The Cesspool. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

You add and control multiple site descripions and you have a team of directory linkbuilders actually manually submit your site to 100s of directories.

Adding Your Site

It’s easy using the control panel, or by uploading a CSV if you want to submit multiple sites.

You can also keep track of your submissions, and add as many as 25 descriptions to your directory descriptions and anchor text links to (importantly) mix up your link profile.

Reports

Your online control panel lets you keep track of all submissions and you can get a report of all directories submitted too.

To Finish

Well it certainly seems pretty slick. It took us a while to organise 20+ sites and test it, and so far, all sites have been submitted as per the agreement. So far it’s been a spread of PR0-PR5 sites of from questionable to decent directories. The best thing about this is YOU retain editorial control and control the rate at which your site (s) are submitted to niche directories – you’re just outsourcing the actual donkey work of visiting directories and submitting your sites.

There’s clearly better links you can get to your site than directory links, but I’m not one of those who think old-school seo techniques hold absolutely no value in 2010. There’s too much evidence plenty seo stuff works ‘when it shouldn’t’ or when we’re told otherwise. I still think IP diversity is probably useful and this is one way to achieve it.

I’ll leave it to you to make your mind up. At 14$ per 100 sites submitted – directory maximizer might well be worth a punt and let you get on with obtaining REAL QUALITY LINKS to your site from REAL SITES.

Disclosure – Affiliate links used in this post and as usual we don’t sell before we trial. We have no relationship with the providers of this service, but it’s worth advertising (we think).

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Pro Directory Submission Service Review. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Everybody in the office loves this music festival – we actually registered and handed over to T In The Park their Twitter account last year to avoid touts getting their hands on it (I nearly used it to play a prank but thought better of it), and the year before we had the lineup of TinthePark on the net before anyone else which resulted in 12,000 hits to a site from Google in a few hours which was nice to watch.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - T In The Park 2010 Tweets – Tweet In The Park. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

are currently subscribed (in fact according to Feedburner there are over 12,000 subscribers by email alone) which is fantastic and the reason I want to try and ensure the newsletter is to a high standard.

I have a few ideas which direction to take the blog – but I thought I would ask you to introduce yourself and tell me want YOU think of our little UK SEO blog?

I’m considering using some of the previous comments as little testimonials on the blog (with a link ) – and in fact will probably transfer the comments from a previous page to this post (I DID), but I’d appreciate any comments you might have, or any suggestions what you’d like to read on this blog lol?

Hope you can take a minute to leave me a comment – reader feedback is a major reason we run this blog the way we do

Shaun

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Introduce Yourself – What Do You Think Of Our Little SEO Blog?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Unless you enjoy clicking every single link on your site followed by the back button, then you’ll need to use a website crawler like Integrity!

This is a free desktop tool for mac seo and website designers that spiders your website and picks out broken links. It will also extract URLs from a website.

It’s perfect for checking a small site once complete for any broken links or missing images without having to dig through it manually.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Find Broken Links On Your Site (Free Tool For Mac SEO & Web Designers) – Integrity Review For Mac. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Does Google Count The Acronym Tag?

As usual, I look at what I rank for, in this case the following search….

…and add a modifier and see if my page is returned. I use numbers rather than words sometimes – this time a number was in the acronym tag and not on the page.

Well you can see from the SERPS my page is gone.

It’s not lost on me that acronyms are meant to be for – er – words, not numbers. Maybe a relevent acronym tag is rewarded – though I have used proper acronyms in the past plenty of times – and removed – them – and replaced them, with no apparent benefit.

Any way from observing how the test page ranks – Google is ignoring it the acronym tag in this instance.

Other observations include a keyword (number) in the;

• Link Title Attribute – no benefit passed via the link either to another page, it seems
• ABBR (Abreviation Tags) – No
• Image File Name – No
• Wrapping words (or at least numbers) in SCRIPT – No, effectively ignored by Google

It’s clear many invisible elements of a page are completely ignored by Google (that would interest us seo).

Some invisible items are (still) aparently supported:

• NOFRAMES – Yes
• NOSCRIPT – Yes
• ALT Attribute – Yes

Recent shares:

• Does Google count keywords the meta description?
• Does Google count a keyword in the URL?
• Does Google ignore meta keyword tags?

Note – It’s worth pointing out Google seems to be indexing most the invisible elements apart from keywords in the  SCRIPT & some META, as you can see for yourself using the info: operator.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Google Ignores Link Title Attributes, Acronym & ABBR Tags?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

The test page in question disappears if I add the unique keyword in the meta keyord tags to the same query (if it is not on the page and only in the meta keywords tag).

So – it appears no benefit of having a keyword in the meta keywords tag on this level, for Google, if it is not on the page.

Bing seems to work in a similar fashion to Google, however Yahoo clearly apparently still uses the meta tag for ranking purposes as the following image shows…

Recent shares:

• Does Google count the meta description?
• Does Google count keywords in the URL?

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Google & Bing Ignores Meta Keywords Tag – Yahoo Still Counting Keyword Meta Tags. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

• Q: Does Google Count A Keyword In The URI When Ranking A Page?

The anwser to wether a keyword in the URI makes a difference to whether a page ranks or not for a query, is YES.

And it’s it may be IMPORTANT from what I can see with other observations I have made.

Perhaps very important from a relevance point of view – though that is NOT WHAT MOST SEO SEEM TO THINK OF THIS – I didn’t until I looked for myself.

Think of it though – that makes sense. It’s the name of a whole document. It might be more important than the keyword on the page in plain text – that is, it might be more RELEVANT to Google. See my next screen shot.

• Observation – the keyword in the URI outranks a page with the keyword in the text content. Of course, this is just one test page, and positions can change with time due to any number of things. Why it’s important is another matter. For instance, does Google count this as a link – it IS cited on another document, albeit not in the anchor text of that link? Or is it just the keyword use itself?

Anyways – placing keywords in your URI is important as well all know, but the keywords in the URI – ie the filename of the document – don’t need to be on the page at all.

Does Yahoo count the keyword in the URI? Apparently so….

And so does Bing by the look of it……

Takeaways

• Google, Yahoo & Bing SEEMS to consistently rank a page in a search for a keyword that is only present in the file name (URL) and not present on the page itself or anywhere else, and that’s what I am seeing in a lot of places.

I’ve a few more I will publish. The aim of this is geek fun – it’s a search to find out how to make a page AS RELEVANT AS POSSIBLE so Google will rank it well, on a very basic level.

I already know how to make a page relevant, and I don’t sweat the small stuff. But I always like to keep an eye open for little hints like this observation MAY illustrate – because it is not JUST ALL ABOUT INCOMING BACKLINKS for a search engine demanding relevance.

Don’t just take my word for this or the recent meta description observation. See if this is true with your pages.

Of course – you don’t NEED to have a keyword in the URI. But search engines will count them if you do. Perhaps search engines place more emphasis on other regions of a page if keywords are not used in a URI. Who knows….?

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Does Google Count A Keyword In The URI (Filename) When Ranking A Page?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

A lot of people use gibberish words in tests so I don’t. I use unique numbers which only appear in hidden elements – and I have a lot of pages all over the place. I am only interested in what I can see and what actually helps a page rank in SERPS -

• Q: Does Google, Yahoo or Bing use the meta description as an aid to rank a page?

Does Google Use The Meta Description When Ranking A Page?

My test page comes up No1 for the keyword search. THE QUERY search result is here. It’s no1 – note that.

I have a unique number in the meta description which is not on the page.

If I search for – “THE NUMBER” + “THE QUERY” I get no results – Google says there is no single page in it’s index with those 2 terms on the page, even though there is. Query here.

These tests have been live for months and at least in this qualitative test, it certainly appears as if:

• Google ignores the meta description when ranking the page for the query - if keywords are only in the meta description and not on the page, the page gets NO Benefit in a real life search.

Google knows it’s there – you can check that using the info: operator with the same “THE NUMBER” + “THE QUERY” search and it’s clearly visible in the SERPS when the page IS retured.

BUT THIS ISN”T HELPING A TARGET PAGE RANK – AND THIS IS ALL I AM INTERESTED IN.

Does Yahoo Use The Meta Description When Ranking A Page?

Yahoo DOES use the Meta Description when ranking a page it seems….

Does Bing utilise the meta description in this way? It does not return the page. Bing seems to work the same as Google – effectively ignoring the meta description tag according to this test.

Takeaways

• Google is ignoring the meta description when the keyword is not also present on the page – which kinds of suggests Google ignores the meta description WHEN RETURNING A BASIC SEARCH RESULT TO A USER.
• Google still reads the meta description and uses it in snippets if you are using certain operators – if you want the meta description to appear as the snippet, place your keyword in it (and that keyword needs to be on the page, too).
• Yahoo does seem to still use the meta description when returning a page in this manner
• Bing is similar to Google (there’s a surprise – sarcasm) – it does not apparently use keywords in the meta description that are not on the page

It also might mean Google wants us to think it is ignoring the meta description totally – certainly, this is a good way to nulify the unique word in the meta description test, and any seo tester testing on a granular level will tell you, Google likes to nulify or muddy these kind of tests.

Which kinds of makes it hard to test things on a granular level these days.

Don’t trust me though. Test yourself, on the site you want to rank. You just need to ensure the keyword is unique to the page, and not in links or mentioned anywhere else on the site. Which is kind of hard.

Questions This Test May Not Answer?

Does Google reward a VERY RELEVANT meta description? Again, very hard to tell for sure (I’m running tests on this too).

Run your own tests and see what you can cup with, but for me, I still just try and make good pages that are as relevant to the phrase I am targeting – and IMO, you can probably always make a page more relevant. Sometimes I include a meta description sometimes I don’t. Usually, I write it for humans first, then engines.

I just thought it was worth sharing for discussion as I seem to use a slightly different method of determining things to some of my seo buddies with tests here and here.

Do add any comments or let me know if you can think of testing – I use that word loosely -  things a bit more accurately.

I’ll share some more test results for discussion later, too.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Meta Description SEO Tests – Will Google, Yahoo or Bing Use It For Ranking Pages?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Though guest blogging has really risen to the scene in 2010, I was utilising it way before everyone started talking about it. In 2009, I wrote more guest posts than any other personal development blogger (and perhaps any blogger at all?) with over 40 under my belt.

These posts drove thousands of visitors to my blog at the time (I sold it at the end of 2009) and helped me grow it to over 6,500 feed subscribers. I’ve covered the topic of guest blogging before – ranking no.1 in Google with my post on it – but there were a few things that I didn’t discuss.

At the time, I had a lot to say on the subject, but it was all based on my own experience so that’s all I could cover. I wasn’t prepared for the literally hundreds of questions I would get about the tactic. Because of that there are still things I have to say on the topic that I haven’t been able to say elsewhere

Today I want to share 4 tips about guest blogging you may not know about, to help you get the most out of your time spent writing articles.

You Don’t Need to Build Relationships

One thing many of my clients come to me about is tips on how they can connect with bloggers in the right way so that they can pitch their guest posts to them. The “secret” I share with them time and time again is this: 9 times out of 10, you don’t need to create any form of connection with the person you’re writing for.

Many blogs are just really looking for quality content so that matters far more than whether or not you’ve been in touch with the website owner before. The reason a lot of blogs accept guest posts in the first place is because they don’t have time to write for themselves, so they most probably don’t have time to engage in new connections either.

Instead of worrying if it’s the right time to pitch your post idea, why not try sending it to the blogger instead. Even if it’s your first interaction. Unless it’s a blog that is difficult to write for (this is very rare) then I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Small Varied Blogs Work Better than Large Ones

The two main benefits of guest blogging are the traffic you receive from the sites you write for and the links you can get which help with search engine rankings. Writing for a large blog versus a small one is obviously going to be better for you in terms of traffic, but it doesn’t always stay that way.

If you keep writing content for the same audience then the amount of new eyeballs you reach diminishes each time. Unless they’ve had a substantial audience growth since the last time you wrote for them. On the other hand, writing for lots of small blogs does take more work, but there’s a better chance you’re reaching a new audience every time.

SEO testing has also showed me, and many other blogs, that getting links from separate sites is far more valuable than repeatedly getting them from the same site, even if it has more authority.

Guest Blogging is Often Better Than Writing for Your Own Site

Besides worrying about how long they should interact with a blogger before pitching a post idea, many people also come to me with the question of how many posts they should write for other blogs. Following that question I usually hear something along the lines of “But I feel like the content should go on my website now that I’ve written it.”

A simple way to test whether guest blogging is a good use of your time is to not do anything. Just keep posting content on your own site and see what happens. Then, let one of your “babies” off into the blogosphere and see the effects that guest blogging can have for you. If the site you wrote for had a decent audience, you’ll soon want to write lots more.

Unless the post is amazing and wouldn’t fit on any other site, then post it on yours. But (and this really just applies to newer blogs) if it’s great and there is other content you can write for your site, it’s probably better to pass it on to another blog. The traffic and exposure you receive is great compared to what you can usually generate for a new site.

Success With Guest Blogging Is About Your Site, Not Theirs

I’ve already said that writing for a large blog is initially far more effective than writing for a smaller one, but there’s still more to it in than that. You could post 20 blog posts on 20 different, large blogs and not get much for your efforts besides a spike in traffic.

Your site must be ready to receive traffic and convert those visitors. If you haven’t posted for weeks or I struggle to find your RSS feed, what use is the relevant traffic that’s coming your way?

Similarly, how many readers do you expect to gain if you write about social science and you’re constantly writing on blogging blogs (I’ve saw this, numerous times)?

Not only that, but to get the SEO value from guest blogging you should be linking to pages on your site that are optimised around the phrase you’re linking with, and vice versa.

If you put these four steps into play, you’ll have much more success with the method.

———————— Notes From Hobo

I’ve long wondered if I should be doing guest posts as part of my linkbuilding activities. While thinking about it, I thought about the success with the tactic Glen Allsopp has had, who writes for ViperChill on the topic of viral marketing. So I pinged him an email and asked him if he’d do a guest post on Hobo about, well, guest blogging.

If you liked this post, you may also like his article on WordPress SEO – I did

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - How to Get the Most from Guest Blogging (4 Tips You Probably Don’t Know About). When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

SEM Rush - A Quick Review

My interest was renewed when I was told about the new SEMRush UK keyword database (as I am UK based obviously):

Currently indexing top 20 results on 6 million keywords across more than 6,4 million domains. 47768 users. Last update: 29 of May 2010

Well – I like it. This tool lets you see:

• which keywords seem to be popular in your niche,
• related keywords, phrases and terms you might consider weaving into your content and linkbuilding strategies
• gives you an idea (when you aggregate the data) which natural listings in Google are providing competitors unpaid traffic
• lists top ranking sites competing for those keywords
• shows you on average how much a click on this keyword is worth in Google Adwords (although it would be nice to see that in Sterling (£) rather than dollars
• illustrates how competitive this term is (in Adwords at least, by number of competition)
• how many (on average) times the keyword or phrase is typed into the UK version of Google
• you can get a cool firefox plugin as well and export research data to usual formats
• …and more

You can really do some neat stuff if you are a keyword monkey. SEM rush has databases for US, UK, Spain, Germany, France & Spain markets if you need to international.

I’m using it at the moment (or I would hesitate to actually blog about it) so here’s the aff link again – there’s a FREE ACCOUNT OPTION with limited features to give you a feel what it’s all about – Click here to find out more about SEM Rush.

I’ll be sharing more keyword research and seo tools shortly, and will review tools if asked. Note – if I don’t like them, I probably won’t blog about the tool (less it is a scam or total crap and then I just might).

If you are interested in keyword research – you might want to check out our group discussion on SEO Keyword Density.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Recommended: SEM Rush UK (SEO Tool Review/Keyword Research). When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Local links for local people! (Image - League Of Gentleman BBC)

A quality link for me is an editorial  link on a real site – a site that’s been around for years. The site in question is well linked to itself, and dooesn’t sell links – and is careful who they link to. These sites are kind of hard to get links from – but that’s the point…

Strategy? Well you live somewhere. You live in a town or a city, in a region, in a wider region. Just type these 3 regions – one at a time – into Google, and Google will return a list of potential link partners. Hundreds of them. Live in the wilderness? Look at your nearest city.

Deployment? Offer a discount, or give away free stuff (Google does this) for a mention on their site IF they don’t have any real reason to link to you.

Other sites will link to your site if you give them a reason to:

1. Your local Council – a lot of council sites have local business directories
2. Your local College or University – offer a student discount
3. Your local Chamber of Commerce – join, or offer a discount to members
4. Your local Newspaper – you should always be trying to get a mention in the local press – consider a competition
5. Local football club & supporters club – discount = mention on their site
6. Local sports clubs – there’s a ton of them in every town usually with crusty old sites – offer them a discount, donate or sponsor them for a mention on their site.
7. Local Business Directories – More often than not, somebody has built a local biz directory covering your local area. Get in there.
8. Local faith groups or other local community groups – When it comes to business, I ain’t got no denomination. Discount anybody?
9. Local charities – a link you can probably buy! Sponsor a charity site for a mention – Google would be REALLY MEAN to penalise this sort of link buying on a small scale – and anyway, their attention is probably on bigger sites.
10. Local businesses – offer a discount to staff

These links aren’t all easy to get and will take time to get (if your comparing them to how fast you can buy or get links on sites these days that offer no value to your site in the long term). See what I did there.

The EASIER a link is to get, generally speaking, the more USELESS it is in terms of Google ranking your site higher – unless you know what you are doing…..

So while your competiors are off buying links on crap third world domain hosting companies, submiting to 100,000 useless search engines, submitting to 100 useless directories, spamming dofollow blogs and forums or hiring a social media consultant to get 10,000 non-paying visitors from Digg etc etc you are picking up nice little, quality long term links on trusted sitess that probably are not being abused, and will fly right under any Google manipulation-radar, and all will help to build your domain authority and trust in Google results pages.

And all these kind of links above can be mixed and match to a national campaign if you know how to scale your efforts in a sensible manner.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Local Links For Local People. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I build a lot of microsites (and I’m building more and more) typically arranged around a main, brandable site. For example – I launched 4 exact match domains in a vertical a month or two ago, and 3 out of 4 of them are in the top ten of Google with little to no work (some light article marketing). It’s crazy to dismiss microsites – as if you are, folk like me aren’t

The opportunities Google, and all the major search engines afford exact match domains, makes it silly to discount them as part of a campaign if you are willing to put the extra time and resources into making a good microsite.

And note, I am not using these microsites for link-building – they are all independent entities. Some low quality seo companies use microsites as a low quality link building strategy back to a main domain – that stuff gets you penalised for even your brand name! Believe me – and a particular SEO company knows who I am talking about…..!

I think it all depends on how many resources you have to pump these out and manage them. I ALWAYS recommend one main brand domain – I’d never recommend (to most of the types of clients I deal with), using a generic keyword domain if you want to build a brand.

To give you an example if I had a store selling 20 products, I’d focus on one main brandable site, and 20 microsites around each product on an exact match domain. I’d then promote the s*&^ out of them in multiple channels. Then again, I have the resources to manage that of course. In another example, I don’t use microsites to sell seo services for instance for this site – well, I don’t need to.

As Google relies more on more on domain authority, it’s got to keep letting the little guy in *somewhere* and they take the easy way out by letting exact match domains in. I think quality niche sites are going to be even MORE rewarded in the years to come.

Exact match domains are AMAZING for products and some services – so they can be a good idea, all the time, and are only less effective for companies and brand building.

Vanessa knows her stuff – but Microsites, when operated intelligently, can be very valuable indeed. Horses for courses.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Microsites – A Good Idea Most of the Time (For Me). When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Shaun has a bee in his bonnet about Topseos – which is naturally ALL OPINION as this article is.

Supposedly, Topseos rank the Best SEO companies in the world – see this list. Now, they call themselves the independent authority on search vendors, and give out awards every month to the ‘winners’ but the SEO community forced an apology from topseos here.

What you are not told clearly, to win these top awards you need to PAY TOPSEOS a lot of money (aparently) TOPSEOS is a lead generation company it appears.

In fact, probably the leading authority on SEO in the UK according to Shaun, Dave Naylor, said in a recent interview Topseos was a sham and another respected UK SEO Patrick Altoft pitched in here detailing how much these things cost.

For a complete picture of this – see this site which lifts the lid on Topseos.

Now Topseos also rank the “best web design companies in the world” and whether or not they actually pay for those awards, how they operate in the SEO industry could well be the shape of things to come.

Effectively once a company pays and is awarded the top awards, these companies then PROMOTE THE HELL out of the fact they have WON these awards, using Twitter spam bots and Press releases – see this Twitter feed!

Now the SEO industry (those that aren’t just spammers! I know I know ) is trying to educate consumers to this, but I wondered what the web design industry thought of Topseos rankings for best web design companies.

I’ve picked out some of the leading and up and coming web designers I follow, with a hope to getting their views:

• Doug Bowman http://stopdesign.com/ – http://twitter.com/stop
• Jason Santa Maria http://jasonsantamaria.com/ – http://twitter.com/jasonsantamaria
• Andy Clarke http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ – http://twitter.com/Malarkey
• Elliot Jay Stocks http://elliotjaystocks.com/ – http://twitter.com/elliotjaystocks
• Tim Van Damme http://timvandamme.com/ – http://twitter.com/maxvoltar
• Sam Brown http://sam.brown.tc/ – http://twitter.com/sambrown
• Ryan Carson http://carsonified.com/ – http://twitter.com/ryancarson
• Chris Coyier http://css-tricks.com/ – http://twitter.com/chriscoyier
• Sarah Parmenter http://www.youknowwhodesign.com/ – http://twitter.com/sazzy
• Inayaili de León http://yaili.com – http://twitter.com/yaili
• John O’Nolan http://john.onolan.org/ – http://twitter.com/JohnONolan

But in a wider sense, it would be nice to get an idea of what web designers and developers think of these paid for awards and if they serve to serve anything other than getting those who pay for the awards, more unsuspecting clients.

Please leave your comments

Get me on Twitter here – Jack

(Off topic comments won’t be published on this one) – Shaun

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Topseos Rate The Best Web Design Companies In The World?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Why do seo publicly out other seo’s strategies? If it’s not for selfish competitive reasons, they are stupid. I mean, why unrinate in the well we are all drinking from?

I sometimes think Google lets you manipulate some verticals using pretty low quality methods with a view to learning how seo are doing them and preventing the effectiveness of these strategies in others verticals.

Google guidelines tell us what not to do, but the simple fact is ALL of the things Google say not to do WORK in a lot of cases. If buying links were ineffective for instance, Google wouldn’t be telling us not to do it. Same with EVERY guideline in there.

My focus is on getting quality links from real sites – I have never bought a link on a particular website I have identified a want a link on (apart from a directory like Yahoo), but many do. My other main focus is building a good site for the long haul.

I prefer defensible strategies and that DOES MEAN I follow Google guidelines a lot – but that’s just smarts, not ethics. I am no white hat shock troop – although I am probably WHITER THAN YOU, whoever you are.

Ethical SEO is a misnomer (if that’s the right word) – in fact – it’s a non-statement. Google is just an automated top ten list – there’s no *&^%$ ethics involved in getting a site listed in there.

When I see folks breaking the rules, I don’t complain about it. I learn from them. You can monitor tactics for a while and see if they incur a penalty, or if the site gets away with it. If it gets away with it, you can copy it in a better fashion, too.

I see plenty of stuff on a daily basis that works but shouldn’t – it doesn’t mean I do any of it.

Keep ‘outing’ for companies who might be a consumer scam or supports a listing that actually hurts other sites or injects malware – I have no problems with outing that stuff – but as far as outing seo for strategies (and I see a TON of them) I am firmly in the NO OUTING camp these days.

If you are outing other seo tactics – you’re a collaborator, simple as that, and this is war on a lot of fronts.

Brands will get away with stuff you can’t because Google would look stupid without big brands in their results – so dry your eyes.

(If this is beyond you – White Hats are folks who slavishly follow Google guidelines, Black Hats are those who don’t give a toss about them. What’s white today, could be black tomorrow. Black hat seo is typically short term, white hat seo is traditionally thought as as longer term).

My friend Paul Madden has a similar discussion at his blog.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - No Public Outing of SEO Tactics. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

There’s an interesting discussion at WMW.

I’ve been digging about analytics to see if I could identify a particular reason for this (as I see it on a few sites I monitor) and there doesn’t seem to be anything stand out and consistent in my analytics so I checked the source – Google SERPS.

In one example I thought was interesting enough to share – I’m looking at a 4 keyword term I am number one for (which gets a bit of traffic) drop 87.50% in traffic in the last few weeks…. AND IT”S STILL NUMBER ONE.

LOL

What do I have to thank for this PARTICULAR SEARCH?

• New 3 column SERPS layout making SPONSORED LINKS creep that further bit down the page and push organic listings further down
• NEW SERPS layout encouraging clicks away from the organic “centre’ listings – I mean, come on WTF is using that ‘wonder wheel’?? Totally distracts the user clicking into Google UK only results
• Oh, hello *&^%ing Google Shopping Results and local Business Results & &^%$ing video results and images results, PROBABLY grabbing folks attention from that coveted(?) no1 slot
• Hey lets not forget REAL TIME UPDATES & NEWS & Search Customisation Updates – the list is extensive

Oh yeah, about that number 1 slot – barely above the fold tonight as I check…. still number one though for all it matters but when you’re committed to building good solid sites for customers and aim to increase month on month traffic it’s not nice to report back:

Oh 87.50% DROP on a main keyterm traffic – Google has f*&^%$£ you. We need videos, pictures and shopping feed to feed the Google monster these days

Now – of course this is on one keyword and it’s a bit of a SENSATIONALIST TITLE I’m using, and everybody will have different reasons for drops in traffic – and plenty are moaning about THAT over the last months. I just thought this was a single, granular example of how I lost a lot of traffic on a keyterm just because of UI changes.

It’s not just what YOU do – it’s what Google is doing with those SERPS too.

In some cases, loss of traffic IS probably to do with how Google is presenting all it’s products to searchers too.

It’s reasonable to assume as Google refines it’s products, they are going to seep more and more into longer tail searches, stealing clicks when previously, you would have got them.

Whats the point of being number 1 for a term if just below or above that Google is presenting eye-catching distractions via Google Video and Google images and Google News and Google Local Business Listings?

It’s probably never been more important to make sure you are taking advantage of ALL Google channels these days because Google is – and it’s playing about with where they appear on the page.

On a seperate note I do subscribe to a lot of the long tail traffic drop theory out there at the moment too – and would probably think Google is getting better at crawling deeper and faster too, and identifying better links, which is could well be the reason if you are experiencing traffic drops.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - No1 Ranking in Google Lost 87.5 % Of Value In Last Month & It’s Still No 1. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

• get no visitors
• are not linked to very much
• are crawled less often or
• have no visible toolbar pagerank
• or can’t rank for their titles

… because then I can ask – should these pages be better optimised, and linked to more, combined or just removed from the site altogether, if totally irrelevant?

Recently I wanted to see at-a-glance the internal Pagerank of each page of a website, and it took me a while to actually find an internal PR checker that worked (Google has limits on how many pages you can check at once so most internal pr tools just don’t work anymore).

First you’ll need to grab a list of all your URLS of your site, and this little tool makes that easy – http://www.siteopsys.com/website-url-list-extractor.tool

If you want to see which pages of your site has Pagerank, this tool will show you – http://www.siteopsys.com/bulk-pr-checker.tool. It’s pretty cool and both tools are (for the moment) FREE.

The internal pagerank checker was very accurate in one sweep, and not that accurate in another – you might want to play about with it.

It only took a few minutes to get the Pagerank of a few hundred URLS I submitted.

Project Details: URL *******
Tool Name: Bulk Pagerank Checker
Project Name: Unassigned
No of URLs Queried: 684
Time Initiated: Thu May 06 00:35:30 IST 2010
Time Completed: Thu May 06 00:46:25 IST 2010
Total Time Taken: 655 Seconds
Credits Used: 10 (You can get 100 FREE credits if you register)

Up to 10 URLs – Free
11 to 50 URLs – 2 Credits
51 to 100 URLs – 4 Credits
101 to 250 URLs – 6 Credits
251 to 500 URLs – 8 Credits
501 to 1000 URLs – 10 Credits

NOTE – We’re talking Google Toolbar PR – the only clue to a web pages REAL PR we have. I think a page only needs a TINY amount of Pagerank to get into Google’s results, and RANKING is all down to a whole other set of criteria – you probably only need a lot of Pagerank if you have a LOT of pages.

Generally speaking, if you don’t link to a page via internal links very much, you are basically telling Google the page is not that important. If it’s not that important to you, Google won’t consider it that important to it either (if nobody else has bothered linking to the page – you are stuffed).

So, linking within your website from page-to-page, you should link to the pages you value most often – as you can’t just rely on links from external sites, which are harder to get (obviously) than internal links.

What you’ll probably find though, is Google does a good job of working out fairly useless pages, and slipping them into what used to be called supplemental results (a sort of back up set of results for obscure queries).

You could of course use Google Webmaster tools to see which pages are starved of internal links – that will give you an idea of your weaker pages, too, but doesn’t take into account links from external pages that introduce Pagerank to your site.

The more I think about internal links and Pagerank I think it comes down to %s rather than straight numbers – ie, which pages have the higher % of internal links – those are the most important pages on your site. Effectively, just about every site will have a % of pages that Google doesn’t need or want, so it’s probably not worth worrying about most pages without Toolbar PR too much.

And of course, just because a page has no visible Toolbar pagerank – doesn’t mean it’s not got any REAL pagerank.

Anyway, some might find these tools of use. AT LEAST THESE INTERNAL PR CHECKER TOOLS WORK.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Internal Pagerank Check Tool & URL Extractor – FREE SEO Tools. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I’ve been talking to someone recently about internal linking, pagerank, RSS & xml sitemaps – and how they all hang together -  and I thought I’d just share how I think about it – especially on sites with lesser domain authority.

Remember Google uses Pagerank, to determine “the importance of a page” so:

1. HTML sitemaps, RSS (still my favourite way of getting pages into Google results fast especially with Feedburner) and XML sitemaps may help Google discover your pages and include them in search results, but they still aren’t the best way at all of helping Google determine which of your pages to KEEP or EMPHASISE or RANK or HELP OTHER PAGES TO RANK (ie the importance of a page), as time goes by.
   While XML sitemaps goes some way to address this with the <priority> attribute (The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers – www.sitemaps.org) – I certainly wouldn’t ever just rely on xml like that….. the old ways work just as they always have – and often the old advice is still the best especially in SEO.
2. Keeping your pages in Google and getting them to rank is controlled by linking (Pagerank) – links from internal pages and from other sites to the page in question.
3. Every page need to be linked to other pages for Pagerank (and other ranking benefits) to flow to other pages – that is the traditional, and I think accepted theory, on the question of link equity.
4. Some sites can have short circuits – internal PR is prevented from filtering to other pages because Google cannot ‘see’ or ‘crawl’ that fancy menu system you’re using on deep pages. SEE here how Google sees your site.
5. If you don’t have a lot of links, have poorly optimised (ORIGINAL) content found on other websites, and if you are starving a page of internal link equity – you will probably always have ranking problems for that page.
6. The larger a site becomes, the more these problems become apparent, and you’ll probably need to start siloing content via categories & tags etc – how you interlink your pages on your site my be the first indication which pages are useful to Googlebot.
7. You can’t emphasise everything, so ensure you emphasise the pages that are of most importance to you, by linking to them a lot, especially from relevant pages on your site.

In short, rely on the ‘newer’ protocols for discovery purposes, and the old tried and trusted way of building a site to get it ranking properly over time. Let me know how you think about or visualise internal “link equity”.

Related Posts On Internal Linking

Seeing as I am doing internal linking this week, I’ll start off by giving my curent pages on internals some link love… 1. Internal Linking – Optimize Website Navigation & Site Structure

“I like to structure my site so I don’t need to “nofollow” a lot of internal links to target heat – but I have no problem using this method. …”

2. Matt Cutts Kills Internal Pagerank Sculpting With Nofollow?

“I’d long fell out of love with PR sculpting internal pages using nofollow as the results were not worth it for me on the sites I worked on …”

3. Internal Links – Only The First Link Counts in Google?

“OK – From this test, and the results on this site anyways, testing links internal to this site, it seems Google only counted the first link …”

4. Internal Linking – Link To Important Pages In Your Site – Often

“Hmmmm… while you can certainly overdo it in terms of spammy internal linking or spammy on-page seo, I don’t think you can ‘overheat’ a page on your site if …”

5. What Is Nofollow? Should I Use It On Internal Links?

“After reading all those links in your other internal link scupting post, I decided to take one of my 10 page sites and start it from scratch …”

6. Link Internal To Relevant Pages, Often, Stupid!

“I’ll lay down my thoughts on internal link optimisation later in this seo tutorial, but onpage, I link internal to relevant pages in my site …”

7. Does Only The First Link Count In Google?

“For example (and I am talking internal here – if you took a page and I placed two links on it, both going to the same page? …”

8. Get Top Ten Rankings In Google With Simple SEO

“Make a relevant, well optimised page that is well linked to in your internal site structure, and back it up with a few anchor text rich …”

9. Is It Diversity Of Keywords In Link Profile That’s King?

“Though in a page title, it may rank, throw in an internal link or … You can do a lot of this via internal links on a strong domain. …”

10. Sculpt PR – Google Pagerank Sculpting

“Should you nofollow unimportant internal pages or nofollow external links in an effort to consolidate the Pagerank you have already accrued? …”

13. Do I Need A XML Sitemap For My Website?

“The first one is a a page where it contains links to your internal pages and the second which is in the format of xml is meant to guide the …”

14. How Many Links In A Dropdown Navigation System?

“If you can’t be bothered tell Google what your most important pages are on your site via your own internal navigation structure, …”

15. Simple SEO Plan Of Action?

“not one mention of their keywords in their internal link profile – or the secondary link profile, as I think of it. …”

16. Are Self Pings Nuking Your WordPress Blog’s Pagerank?

“By now everybody knows internal linking is very important – it gives you a chance to add keywords into your link profile and lets users …”

17. SEO – What Not To Do In Search Engine Optimisation

“page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content; mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking …”

18. Links That Effect Ranking Change In Google SERPS

“Your internal links! Get your site in order before you get links. Google loves a good site structure with plenty of text links pointing to …”

19. Limit Anchor Text Links To 55 Characters In Length?

“What’s best practice when creating links – internal, or external? What is the optimal length of a HTML link? …”

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Internal Linking Versus RSS & XML Sitemaps. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Every SEO knows that they if they want a powerful, advanced SEO tool, they’ll need to pony up some cash for it.

Now, there are a number of free SEO tools out there that are very good, but they have limited capabilities, because they’re free.

So if you’re into keyword research, or looking to evaluate potential link prospects or perform competitor analysis at a higher level, you’re going to have to bite the bullet, open your wallet and pay for premium tools.

Trouble is, it’s hard to know which SEO tools are really worth the money.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 5 of the most advanced SEO tools I use in my daily SEO activities – OK, I work for the team behind one of them. These tools, though, are invaluable to my SEO efforts

Rank Tracking

I use Link Assistant’s Rank Tracker to monitor SERP listings for my clients. Now, there are a lot of keyword rank checkers on the market, but in my experience Rank Tracker stands head and shoulders above the rest. I prefer Rank Tracker because it has everything I’m looking for in a rank checking tool: speed, accuracy, ease of use and slick reporting tools.

Some of the features I love in Rank Tracker are:

• Limitless keyword tracking: you can track rankings in over 590 search engines with no keyword or domain limits
• Auto-pilot tracking: set the tracking tool once and run rank checks automatically for set dates and time
• Historical rank tracking: every time you check your rankings, Rank Tracker charts the all ranking changes for each individual keyword and your site’s overall SERP visibility

Cost: $99 for Rank Tracker software

NOTE: Link Assistant also offers a host of other tools that I’ve heard great things about but haven’t had time to test drive. But going by the quality of Rank Tracker, I’m sure these other tools are just as effective.

Competitor Research

When I’m digging up competitive intelligence for a new client or even a new keyword vertical I want to target, I always pop open the SEO Book Competitive Research Tool. For the record, the SEO Book Competitive Research Tool is powered by SEM Rush. But I’m advocating using the tool through SEO Book because, as an SEO Book member, you get access to a slew of other great advanced SEO tools and SEO training as well.

With the Competitive Research Tool, you can conduct site-wide or page specific analysis to “spy” on your competitors and discover:

• Keyword Metrics: Which keywords are competitor sites or a their individual pages ranking for
• Traffic Value: What’s the percentage of traffic that a particular keyword drives to a competitor’s website
• Related Keyword Values: What are the highest traffic and most valuable keywords related to your own target terms

For example, I’m working with a new client who owns a bridal boutique. First thing I did was to run a quick analysis on a competitor website I identified to see which keywords are driving the most traffic.

What’s interesting here is that none of the other keyword competition tools I tried identified the keyword “wedding favours” (UK spelling) as a high value keyword. Many didn’t even return the UK spelling at all. But using the Competitive Research Tool, I’ve learned it’s this site’s top traffic-driving keyword and one I should target.

Cost: $300 per month, which includes access to advanced SEO tools, a great forum community and SEO educational guides.

Link Management, Link Marketing

I’ve demoed numerous link management tools and Buzzstream is far and away the link management software on the market. Buzzstream provides a comprehensive suite of tools for link tracking, monitoring link relationships and for collecting link building intelligence.

Buzzstream also makes link building a whole lot easier with their Buzzmarker feature. This tool automates the process of researching and screening link prospects by scanning an entire website for key metrics, such as:

1. Toolbar Page Rank
2. Domain age
3. Number of inbound links

It also grabs all available contact information, from email addresses, to WHOIS info, to Twitter and Linkedin profiles.

Once you’ve reached out to a prospective link partner, Buzzstream records all your outreach touches with a prospect (be it on email or Twitter) and tracks activity on the prospect’s site to see if a link has been added to your site.

Cost: Buzzstream for link management starts as low as $29 per month for a “Solo Package.” Buzzstream offers a social media monitoring tool too, which is excellent and provides daily link and brand citation alerts.

Link Analysis

Every day, there’s another, new competitive link analysis tool coming on the market. But for my money, Majestic SEO is still the king of backlink intelligence. One of the primary reasons Majestic SEO is #1 is because it boasts the largest link data index in the world. To me, this differentiating feature is critical because if you want to outrank your competitors through link building, you need access to the best, freshest and most comprehensive link intelligence data on the Web. The recent upgrade of the Backlink History Tool lets you chart the historical link discovery patterns of competitor sites to your own.

Majestic SEO is also a great tool to monitor your own site’s link profile. Once you verify site ownership, you can obtain detailed reports on your sites:

• Proprietary backlink data
• Anchor text distribution
• Historical link acquisition data
• Top referring domains

Plus, the tool offers a “daily update” feature that provides a daily journal of new inbound links. What’s more, Majestic SEO captures data on deleted links and link redirects, so you can investigate any drop in SERP position or traffic activity if you feel it’s link-related.

Cost: A monthly subscription to Majestic SEO starts at just £ 9.99, which gives you up to ten standard backlink reports and five advanced reports to analyze hundreds of thousands of links.

Keyord Research & Content Authoring

This one’s mine – I’ve heard some search marketers describe WordStream for SEO as “keyword research on steroids,” which is pretty accurate. WordStream for SEO features a suite of really powerful keyword analysis and content authoring tools to perform:

· Keyword Research: generate keyword suggestions that are pulled from a deep database of search engine queries

· Personalized Keyword Suggestions: mine your own site data to discover relevant, proven keyword opportunities that people have used to find your site

· Keyword Analytics: instead of guesstimates based on popularity, WordStream for SEO gives you accurate visit and goal data for your keywords on a continuous basis

· Keyword Organization: with sophisticated grouping and organization capabilities, you can segment keyword lists and discover new content opportunities

Another fantastic feature in WordStream for SEO is the Firefox Plugin for blogging, which connects your keyword research with your content creation efforts.

The WordStream for SEO Firefox Plugin works alongside content management platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and Drupal) to help you generate better, more focused, search engine ready blog posts, product pages and sales copy.

The plugin also keeps a running count of each keyword phrase you use as you type, working to keep your writing “on message” after the initial research stage. WordStream for SEO is also fantastic for content topic discovery. It taps into your site’s historical search query data so you can get fresh content ideas based on proven keywords.

Cost: The WordStream for SEO suite of keyword research and content authoring tools starts at just $49 per month.

—————————————————-

Thanks for the guest post, Ken!

Just about every day I get asked which tools do I use, so over the next couple of weeks I aim to share the best ones (like my recent Clicky real time web traffic stats review).

I’ll be reviewing a few (if not all the tools above in more depth later in the month, and a few others).

Any questions, or indeed tools you like, feel free to share in the comments

PS – Disclosure – This is a guest post, no affiliates, no paid links.

If you develop seo or web dev tools and feel left out, do drop me a line about a guest post, like this useful how-to from Ken which shows interested folks in my feed what’s available out there.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - 5 Advanced SEO Tools Worth Paying For. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Me, David Cairns (MP) And Michael (Hobo MD)

Politician & MP for Inverclyde David Cairns recently visited the Hobo offices for a few hours, and during that time I pointed out to him something called Twitter.

Since then, I see him in my stream clearly engaging with folks via his Twitter account, so I asked him a few questions about Social Media’s impact this election.

This is the first time your using Twitter as a communication tool this election. How are you finding it?

Loving it. Fascinating to see people’s reactions to events as they unfold in (near) real time, as well as get sign-posted to some interesting articles and stories.

What are you using it for?

Mainly for sharing my views on whats going on and replying to constituents who ask me stuff.

For you, what is Twitter is good for?

All of the above. But it has its limits. One guy asked me to sum up my Party’s manifesto and give him reasons why he should vote for me in 140 characters. I had a go but it proved to be a ridiculous exercise – how can you reduce these massive issues to a few words without utterly trivialising or generalisng really important stuff? He was very snotty when I told him I couldn’t do it.

Do you converse with other politicians on Twitter? Who’s interesting out of those politicians?

Not really. Only my mates Tom Harris and Eric Joyce. But it just saves me texting them.

Maybe you should tell Tom to get his picture in there, lest he looks like a Twitter spam bot… Do you converse with other parties politicians on Twitter or do you keep to your own?

I converse with a few Tory and Nat bloggers but not politicians.

Twitter is all about personality and ‘the conversation’ – but politicians obviously need to be a bit more careful about what they tweet. Are you careful with what you tweet?

You better believe it! I have many journalists and opposition supporters among my followers all waiting for a gaffe.

What do you think about the Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan who was forced out because of random tweets?

What he said was offensive and silly, and if you are a candidate you are a representative of your party so you can’t get away with this stuff, as you would if you were a private citizen.

Do you promote your Twitter account in other places?

Yes, in my campaign leaflets and my website. My follwers have increased a lot though I’m still a minnow.

Are you actively trying to seek out twitter users in inverclyde or letting them come to you?

Not really seeking them out, but a few have found me.

Well you can use a Twitter directory to find folks in the area and follow them if you want to be more proactive and get your numbers up….. Are you finding constituents are conversing with you on Twitter?

A few, but far fewer than those who e-mail.

Whats the most valuable source of advertising for you? If it’s the local press, do you think social media will replace this if not now, in the future?

Local press by a long way. Local paper sells 18,000 copies a day in Inverclyde so probably read by around 45,000 people. Social media has a very long way to go to catch up, but it will in time.

You seem to be getting the hang of Twitter – A lot of social media experts have been thinking social media like Twitter will play a big roll in the forthcoming general election – what’s the most import channel to connect with voters for you?

The medium that has actually had the biggest impact in the election has been TV, with the Leaders’ Debates changing the whole nature of the campaign. Social media is growing in importance but its day has not yet come.

Are you using any other networks like Facebook?

No. I can’t quite devote the time to it.

Tell me why Inverclyde folk should choose labour over the other parties?

I will, but not in 140 characters! I grew up in Inverclyde in the early years of the Thatcher Government. I watched as the ship-yards and sugar refineries closed down. I went to a dilapidated, run-down school. A whole generation of young people were written off and our pensioners fell further into poverty. Its taken a while but Inverclyde is finally recovering from the Tory years. Everywhere you look there are signs of regeneration: new schools, new homes, new roads, new offices, new facilities and amenities. This is happeneing because we have a Labour Government that is not prepared to walk away from Inverclyde, but has invested in its people and our future. Thats why voters should reject a return to the Tory years; the only way of making sure that they don’t get back in is to vote Labour.

Thanks to David for taking a few minutes to answer my questions as I expect he’s busy this week

You can catch up with David on Twitter or drop any questions in the comments below.

(Inverclyde covers Greenock – where Hobo is based, Port Glasgow, Gourock, Wemyss Bay & Inverkip, Kilmacolm & Quarrier’s Village in case you don’t know and we’re not all on the Green Spot Whisky as someone mentioned on Twitter…)

NB – This interview was completed while David was a Member of Parliament. As Parliament has been dissolved there are no Members of Parliament until after the UK General Election on 6th May 2010.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Inverclyde MP David Cairns On Using Social Media – (UK Election 2010). When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I’m amazed at the simple things Clicky does so effortlessly. The control panel seems so much more intuitive than for instance Google Analytics. Instantly accessible.

I tried a few real time web stats analytics packages out (I like software with a free trial) and I must say, Clicky is brilliant.

1. See who is on your site AT THAT VERY MOMENT
2. See where traffic is coming from AND track outbound visitors too
3. See your valuable incoming links in action
4. See a MORE ACCURATE bounce rate for your pages
5. Too much good stuff to mention

…and best of all, Clicky might very well be FREE if you don’t have more than 3,000 page impressions a day – ideal for small businesses.

They even give you an easy affiliate link to promote the software if you like it – which I very much do (so I am using that affiliate link).

Telling you. Try Clicky PRO out FREE. Excellent analytics, and easy to install too.

Thanks, Iain

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Recommendation – Clicky Review Get This FREE Real Time Web Stats Software For Your Site. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

This one takes some beating, from a MIDDLE EASTERN NEWSPAPER:

Hello,

The (A MIDDLE EASTERN NATIONAL NEWSPAPER) is currently offering outside companies to purchase links from within our articles.

To place a bid, simply send a document with the keywords you would like to purchase, and your price bid. Feel free to search the site for yourself, to find the perfect article for you.

Since we are just starting this venture, we have no fixed price, thus you can choose the amount of links, period of time, and so on. We are allowing the first 1000 S.E.O. companies to send in their bids, without the limitation of a starting price.

We will accept lucrative offers.

Mind you, we also sell conventional links, such as:
* Link on “sites of xxxxxxxx” (footer of master page) priced @ $500 per month (6 months minimum).
* Text link on the home page priced @ $1,300 per month.
* Text link on the inner pages priced @ $1,000 per month.

Once a bid is accepted, you will be contacted by a sales representative, to process the campaign’s details.

Have a good day,
(REMOVED).

Hmmm… I looked at where some of the links are featured, and sure enough, a list of totally unrelated sites. Paid links.

Now say I see one of my competitors in there? I could just report the site for selling links and my competitors for buying them (not that I personally bother with that). Or I could out them on a public blog. Lucky then I don’t out SEO tactics is because I think outing seo tactics themselves is a little self serving, and slimey, these days.

Everybody knows selling links is against Google TOS whether you listen or not.

AND if I did buy links in footers like this (which I don’t), I wouldn’t be happy there was an email to 1000 seo companies telling THEM my clients was buying links.

Would a rival newspaper use this information against you too if they new, especially given the polarising nature of the content (again, not that it bothers me)?

If you are buying or selling links that are search engine friendly you better be doing it more covertly than this….. you need to build relationships to get decent links, even like the ones above. Start, for instance, with a private email address, and open up a conversation before you show folks what you have got?

I sent the email back with a link to this post to see what they say…..

DOH!

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - How Not To Sell Links On Your Newspaper Site. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Hobo Web readers can cash in on 12.5% OFF the regular price too – just make sure you quote: HOBOWEB001

Click here to register.

Shaun very kindly reminded me just a couple of days ago that he’d said I could post to Hobo-Web some time back – but with the busyness of business of late, it had totally slipped my mind!  And oh what an honour it is, sat amongst the likes of such contributors such as Shana Albert, Jeff Quipp, Tim Nash, Ann Smarty and SebastianX and Jim Boykin.

Now, I could be feeling pretty smug with myself at this point for reaching such a career highlight by posting on Hobo Web, but feel it’s more to do with Shaun attempting to distract me away from promoting a certain pic of a certain gentlemen struggling along with a horrific hangover some time ago…!    Haha, not forgotten (EDIT BY Shaun – I have no idea what you are on about but I hope any such obviously faked images have been destroyed )

So anyway, whilst I’m here, let’s talk SAScon…

SAScon – in 140 characters

Keeping it very Web 9.3 (or whatever we’re up to now), I’ve decided to keep this guest article short and snappy unlike my typical War and Peace posts seen elsewhere, so decided to introduce you to SAScon in just 140 characters:

SAScon is a search, analytics & social media conference organised by a co-op of UK industry pro’s for all those keen to enhance their understanding and application of the huge complexities of digital marketing and…OK, OK, OK, so it just can’t be done in 140 characters – there are just too many exciting things happening, USPs to cover off, and far too many too many awesome speakers to mention.   So let’s try again, in a little more detail this time…

Why does SAScon matter?   And will it be a success?

SAscon matters because it’s being organised as a not-for-profit event by a group of search and social marketers and managers from the UK’s North West with a vested interest in putting the talent and scale of SEO, search and social media business from this region quite firmly on the map.

BUT, it is much more than a North West / Manchester arrogance thing – much more – it is the culmination of a team of people looking to developing a truly excellent event where they can both help establish and share ideas around marketing effectively online in a format that is fun, interactive and most importantly for many, sociable.  With this in mind, we had a format for a fantastic day and night all clearly planned out and couldn’t do anything else other than put these ideas in to a reality that is happening on 28^th April 2010 – just a few days away.

Simply put: it matters because we believe it is unique, and in a format that even those veterans of conferences will find refreshing.  It will be a success because we’re all keen to learn from the most respected and have a line-up to truly learn great things from – can’t wait!  J

A few of speaking and panel highlights include: Ben Jesson, Fantomaster, Joost de Valk (Yoast), Lyndon Antcliffe, Malcolm Coles, and many more…

Why should you attend SAScon 2010 (or 2011, if 2010 sells out)?

Without wanting to pick fights with bigger boys in the playground (there’s space for all to play after all!), because it’s a not-for-profit exercise, delegates are getting a line-up and a half, for half the cost of a day ticket for SMX and SES – with loads of interaction and socialising with attendees and speakers.  Sold.

Who will be attending?

I expect there will be a number of folk from search and social agencies, but we’re seeing a number of in-house folk there too.   Digital marketers, industry professionals, drunks, marketing managers, directors – the more the merrier!  In all honesty, the idea is to send everyone away having learned something, so whoever you are, and whatever you’re doing, there should certainly be plenty of takeaways from SAScon indeed…

Networking, socialising and the odd tipple

Sadly, the legend that is, Shaun Anderson, can’t make this year’s SAScon, but rest assured there is going to be a cracking line-up for social banter and networking opportunities to launch SAScon on to the UK and international conference circuit.  If you’ve always been salivating over the opportunity to voice an opinion on a tool, service or blog post by one of the SAScon speakers or delegates, then here’s your chance to do just that!

If we do sell-out, there are rumours that the networking-do in the evening being available to those without day-tickets, but as I say these are still rumours – keep an eye on SAScon on Twitter for more information.

The best thing about working on SAScon

The plain and simple reason has been that it’s been really good fun working with such a bright bunch of folks for the greater good of the search, analytics and social media marketing industry.  Second to that, it’s given me a great topic area to write about on Just Me and My, Search Engine Journal and SEO Scoop during a very dry writing phase too! 

How many tickets are left?

We’re really not that far off from selling out now, so if you do want a ticket for SAScon make sure you get on to it today.

Also, for those freelancers out there, we have an extra special treat in-store.  SAScon are providing a number of freelance tickets for only £125+VAT available via Nicky, so please register by emailing:  nicky [at] dontpanicprojects dot com

About Ben McKay

Ben writes about managing SEO and the ever growing branches of SEO consulting on his blogs, Just Me and My and Recruit SEO; freelancing; organising SAScon; and all this whilst working as an SEO Director for MEC Interaction, WPP.  Say hello to Ben the busy bee on Twitter.

Thanks again Shaun for letting me post to Hobo Web – a truly awesome site!

Hobo Web readers can cash in on 12.5% OFF the regular price too – just make sure you quote: HOBOWEB001

Click here to register.

—————

Disclosure – Nothing. I think a lot of Ben after making mates with him online and sharing a few beers with him recently – why I contacted him. I hope SAScon 2010 is a resounding success and I am sure it will be. The speakers are stellar and if I wasn’t so busy I would definitely have been there.

Shaun

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - SAScon Manchester Last Minute Discount! – Just One Week To Go. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

It seems the legitimate SEO community, for the most part, finds what TOPSEOs does to be distasteful at best, a shakedown service at worst.

Apparently Top SEOS produce rankings and award badges for best seo companies in various countries (including the UK) … except folk are of the opinion you might have to pay TOPSEOS.com thousands of pounds to be considered for these industry awards.

UPDATE – I asked for Hobo to be removed from the Topseos directory, and asked the “best uk seo company in the UK” (according to Topseos) to stop bidding on our brand name with this nonsense. Generally speaking, I’m happy with that, now, both have complied with our requests.

As of 2010-03-31, there are 3,247 search engine optimization companies listed on TOPSEOs. Of those 3,247 SEO companies, 170 are listed in the Best Search Engine Optimization Companies category. @pageoneresults

My experience is we were ranked the 4th best seo company in the UK a few years ago, about a year just after we launched Hobo, (just above Andrew‘s team the week that they sold for £60 million or something like that lol).

Actually this is the exact email I sent to Michael when I was informed we were ranked in 2007.

“Title – 4th best seo company in the uk lol
topseos.com/option,com_rank/task,rankByCountry/country_id,2238/”

(Note the above link is now redirected – there’s no archive on the site but there is a record in the Web Archive). Actually in November 2007 we were 3rd it seems – shows how much attention I was paying.

I’m not sure if I actually submitted my seo company to be ranked or at least included in what looked like a large on-topic directory for seo companies. I honestly can’t remember. Anyway for 3 months we ranked, unpaid. Even appeared in a magazine. Then we dissappeared. (UPDATE – No, I just found out it was my MD the amateur – lucky I keep him on accounting detail these days :p !)

I KNOW FOR 100% they hadn’t contacted any of my clients at any time and nothing had changed in that 3 months since we had been ranked so I didn’t think TopSEOS was anything worth “supporting” or anything much worth promoting – that’s the only word I can remember from the communication I had with them -  other than a nice bit of linkbait (if pointless and potentially misleading from where I was standing). (EDIT – i had some sort of telephone communication with them when i (**think**) I enquired about updating my innacurate profile to see if it improved my ranking (as if!) or encouraged them to contact my current clients – which also did not happen).

So I forgot about them.

Well I would have, if I didn’t see TONS of online press releases out at the start of every month from SEO companies who claim to be the best seo companies in the UK, as voted by a company who themselves herald they have been “identified as an independent authority on vendors“.

It seems a nice merry go around if claims are to be believed. You pay. They award and then you promote the fact you’re a top seo company to customers who are looking for the best seo company. Everybody wins – even the unsuspecting customer if the seo company they get is any good lol

Here’s what one company won in the last 3 months:

• #1 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company (Canada), April 2010.
• #1 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company, April 2010.
• #1 – Best Reputation Management Company, April 2010.
• #2 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company (Australia), April 2010.
• #3 – Best Link Building Company, April 2010.
• #4 – Best Social Media Optimization Company, April 2010.
• #5 – Best Pay Per Click Management Company, April 2010.
• #1 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company, March 2010.
• #1 – Best Reputation Management Company, March 2010.
• #1 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company (Canada), March 2010.
• #2 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company (Australia), March 2010.
• #3 – Best Social Media Optimization Company, March 2010.
• #3 – Best Link Building Company, March 2010.
• #5 – Best Pay Per Click Management Company, March 2010.
• #1 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company (Canada), February 2010.
• #1 – Best Reputation Management Company, February 2010.
• #1 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company, February 2010.
• #2 – Best Search Engine Optimization Company (Australia), February 2010.
• #3 – Best Link Building Company, February 2010.
• #3 – Best Social Media Optimization Company, February 2010.
• #5 – Best Pay Per Click Management Company, February 2010.

If carlsberg made seo companies lol – the company above “enjoys a solid reputation in the online marketing services industry” according to themselves in an article, backed up with awards from an organisation who is  “identified as an independent authority on vendors” according to THEMselves.

It’s amazing to think a SEO company THAT GOOD would stop to think about looking after your little company…. perhaps Topseos can come out and detail their evaluation process and bring an end to the apparent speculation that it’s not legit.

Here’s some more interesting articles on the subject:

1. TOPSEOs – Independent Authority on Search Vendors?

“Over the years I’ve come across a variety of SEO Badges. One of the more frequent badge sightings are those from TOPSEOs.com.”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/

2. TOPSEOs Seals – Badges, Badges, and MORE Badges! SEO Badges Galore!

“TOPSEOs, an Independent Authority on Search Vendors, offer at least 20 different Best in Search Badges, 4 Membership Badges, …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/badges

3. Consideration for Rankings – TOPSEOs Media Kit for 2010

“My in depth review of the TOPSEOs Media Kit for 2010. I’ve taken the referenced pdf document (2010 Media Kit) and have extracted the …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/media

4. TOPSEOs.com SEO FFA Directory

“What does a TOPSEOs Membership mean for you? It means your listing will join the 4000+ other listings and you’ll become part of an SEO …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/ffa

5. TOPSEOs Paid Membership Statistics as of 2010 March

“These are the 22 SEO companies currently supporting the TOPSEOs Pay to Play ranking model. I’ve included the current rankings, company names …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/membership

6. TOPSEOs.com and BestAttorneysOnline.com – Independent Authorities?

“TOPSEOs.com and BestAttorneysOnline.com – what do they have in common? Both are websites that claim to be independent authorities.”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/attorneys

7. Complaints About TOPSEOS® – The Independent Authority on Search …

“In my honest opinion, The Independent Authority on Search Vendors, TOPSEOs, SHOULD NOT have these types of complaints logged against them from the same …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/complaints

8. Is Matt Cutts Moonlighting at the TOPSEOs Knowledge Zone?

“Did you know you can contact Matt Cutts via TOPSEOs.com? When did Matt Cutts start moonlighting at the TOPSEOs Knowledge Zone?”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/articles

9. You Have Been Ranked By TOPSEOs.com – Pay For Rankings

“TOPSEOs.com sends this Congratulations email out to SEO Consultants and/or SEO Firms alerting them that they have been RANKED by TOPSEOs.com …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/ranked

12. Visibility Magazine – SEO Buyers Guide from TOPSEOs

“Did you know that TOPSEOs.com have a magazine for the Internet marketing industry? Did you know that magazine offers an SEO Buyers Guide with over 4000 …”
www.seoconsultants.com/topseos/visibility

More here:

1. http://sphinn.com/story/146009
2. http://searchmarketingwisdom.com/2010/03/one-more-complaint-against-to pseos-are-they-a-shakedown-operation-or-legitimate-service/
3. http://www.seobook.com/topseos-com-review-top-seos-paid-rating-service
4. http://nickwilsdon.com/sem-industry-revolt-topseos-com/
5. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021947.html
6. http://www.netmagellan.com/why-i-dont-display-my-numerous-topseos-awar ds-811.html
7. http://www.vizioninteractive.com/top-seos-my-rant-continues/

I think it would be nice if TopSeos stated which SEO companies WERE ACTUALLY EVALUATED FOR RANKING AWARDS each month and listed those that are NOT EVALUATED for the awards – like Hobo  – for whatever reasons. My opinion (this whole article is purely opinion) is that’s not going to happen though, is it.

PS

My opinion – I don’t think the seo community needs any body to govern it, if the seo community governs itself. I don’t think these awards are of as much value to customers looking for a seo company as they are to the marketing department of a seo company who is awarded them. I think most awards and badges out there on the net are either fun linkbait, bollocks or plain innacurate and often misleading. Some are a total scam.

If you are looking for a seo company, I hope you are lucky. It’s a minefield at the best of times. At the moment, we are VERY CAREFUL with the projects we take on to make sure they suit what we are good at and we deliver for our PAYING clients. Chances are, we won’t take you on as a new client if you are thinking of hiring a seo at the moment especially if you have not been referred to us by a current customer – we’ve said NO to the biggest of the biggest international companies because they didn’t fit our small agency.

If you are a small business you might want to check out our free seo guide to get an idea of just what’s involved.

We’ve never asked anybody for work, or sent out a spam email, or paid for leads or used CPC to get leads in 4 years and we won’t ever (we don’t have a sales team)  and I bet there are a good few companies out there in the exact same position you won’t ever hear about EXCEPT from folk you know.

We’ve learned over the last 4 years you can’t win all the rankings, you can’t be the best at every aspect of internet marketing and your better sticking to the type of projects the team enjoy and have experience in and so get better at them. Our business model is in total transition at the moment as we move more and more into affiliates and pay-per-performance with long term clients we already have a good relationship with becuase if you do SEO you know it’s a long term commitment to get good rankings.

A lot of the change in direction for Hobo is to do with me talking to people like Chris Clarkson at http://www.sunshine.co.uk/ and Paul Madden at http://www.seoidiot.co.uk/ and Andy at http://www.firstvehicleleasing.co.uk/ and others at Think Visibility – a cool conference in Leeds i go to run by Dom.

What do you think? Do you trust Topseos? Their apparent lack of transparency is really getting the SEO community heated up… is there a reason they are not transparent?

Or are you a fan?

UPDATE -

• An informative new twist in the Topseos Awards, lead generation and accused copyright infringment (of article content) saga – opinion from Alan Bleiweiss on  TOPSEOs Deceptive Practices – An Interview with Jeev Trika
• Topseos APPOLOGISE to “SEO industry” – http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/04/prweb3934014.htm – “SEO industry” not amused it seems.
• Topseos APPOLOGISE to “SEO industry” – Alan’s response – http://searchmarketingwisdom.com/2010/04/topseos-apologizes-legit-or-m ore-deceptive-business/
• Update – more on Topseos here and here.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Topseos.com Awards For Best SEO Company Not Transparent Enough. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I picked a term I know I have had the top 5 positions at various times, and it’s interesting to see the clickthrough rate on particular keyword searches…. and how many clicks the top position in Google gets compared to the number 3 position, no4 and no5.

Obviously, this is just one example – it will take a while to look into the new data and look at an average – but it shows a number 1 getting nearly 30% more of the clicks than a no2 ranking. You might find some useful nuggets of information at Google Webmaster Tools for your own site…..

Of course, click through rate can be skewed by any number of factors – the nature of the query  or how compelling your call to actions are in your title and your meta description, to name just a couple.

This info might prove interesting once aggregated.

EDIT – There’s plenty of discussion on the web about this data now – and how it doesn’t quite tally up with other Google sources (surprise suprise) and some even claim this info might have been published by mistake lol

1. http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-webmaster-tools-2.html
2. http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/new-google-webmaster-tools-keyphra se-data-is-70-useless/
3. http://www.holisticsearch.co.uk/2010/04/15/webmaster-tools-now-showing -clickthrough-data-lines-blurring-with-ppc/
4. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4115916.htm
5. http://www.seobook.com/google-serp-ctr-data-search-rank

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - How Many Clicks Does A No1 Ranking In Google Get Compared To No2, 3, 4 & 5?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

If, for instance, you were to translate all or part of our search engine optimization tutorial (and cite the original document on the Hobo site) to your native language on a page on your site, I’ll probably be compelled to link to your translated version of our creative commons content and send traffic to your site. Because it’s useful.

I think this is a pretty good link opportunity for seo companies and freelance language translators (in fact a lot of websites especially if you are just starting out) to get links (and not just from me – that content is frequently linked to from forums etc). I see lots of other folks willing to trade links for translations.

PS…

Do NOT JUST use an automatic language translator because you will WANT the translated page to rank in Google on it’s own merit for your own benefit, surely?

I’d certainly be using this tactic if I was familiar with other languages but as you may have noticed I have more problems than not with English as it is.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Translate English To Other Languages & Get Links. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

1. As the site had NEVER been promoted online, even though they are a global brand who supply to blue chip companies, Google hadn’t picked up any decent hints what the site was about (keywords in anchor text links to their site) what I call the Primary Link Profile, their inbound link profile.
2. Onsite navigation consisted of “home, about us, location, product info, company info….” – not one mention of their keywords in their internal link profile – or the secondary link profile, as I think of it.
3. Each page of the site had the same page title “company name”, which meant, Google couldn’t even look at the tertiary link profile (this is how I think of page titles) to find keywords to rank the site for.

Google is also looking at page content on some level too, but I think it’s ranking those pages by looking in those link profiles above (and looking for trusted citations in that primary profile).

The type of website above is often what I am presented with (by even good web designers) who have little experience what Google is looking for or understand how Google goes about identifying relevant content and reward it with rankings – ie, by examining links, primarily. Then again, that’s not really the web designers remit is it, it should be the client.

Google can’t determine what a page of good content is ON ITS OWN, so just having a good copywriter do articles for you and hope it’s good enough to get picked up on social networks is simply not a economically viable solution for brands who aren’t famous online, or do not have famous product champions.

This is where Google’s algorithms are trying to help your content, but you got to give it some simple hints!

Google seems to be looking for keyword hints in (primarily) the above zones (add a bit of keyword rich / keyword diverse / related keyterm content to the page for good measure), and Google, once it knows about your site, will rank your pages better than those who haven’t bothered, and will rank your page against others based on the amount of trust Google has in your site and page overall / and or how much domain authority your site has as a result of this.

I like to address all of the above, and I am careful not to OVERDO it in any specific area, then I go and get decent links from real sites to my client sites. That’s because it’s my job to get websites relevant traffic from Google. I’m not manipulating things. I don’t obsess too much over no1 rankings or ranking reports but the simple fact is Google will give you tons of free traffic if you do certain things right over a certain period of time. Now, I never think this should be a replacement for a good product or a good service.

I am just trying to figure out why Google is rewarding some sites with top ten rankings, and try to emulate that for the sites I work on. It’s all there to research and work out.

I don’t see search engine optimization as a replacement for good design, good content or good marketing either – I don’t think designers should carry the can on their own for bad SEO or SEO carry the can for crap content (unless it’s keyword stuffed!).

Where To Begin?

If you are just starting out with SEO, I’d consider:

1. Keyword Research – Identify the top, (e.g.) 50 terms driving traffic using Google keyword tool as a start point, and look at the traffic you are already getting to your website
2. Create (e.g.) 50 page titles for Google (70 characters or less) based on these 50 keyterms – now you have a plan of the content you need to go in your pages
3. Create (e.g.) 50 pages of content, each page focused on the keyword phrases in it’s page title you are looking to rank for (I use about 300 words per page to make sure I’m using synonyms / related terms for good measure but there is no limit to the amount of text on a page you need for Google – it depends on your domain authority/competition for the term how little original content you can get away with – try to make your pages AS RELEVANT AS POSSIBLE TO YOUR PAGE TITLE, because that’s what you will be ranking for! I like to ensure my CMS is plugged into Google, too.
4. You already have your keyword list and content with good page titles, so just link them in your internal navigation with the narrow keyword terms you are looking to rank for. I shy away from large navigation systems and prefer to interlink my text in content.
5. Take that keyword list again – those keywords can be used as links in articles point to your site using various linkbuilding methods (e.g. article submission and social media sites) – how many you need is dependant upon how much the competition is pumping out.
6. Now get the marketing team involved to get some quality links from real sites Google trusts (newspapers (!), librarys, universities and partners/suppliers/clients websites – even url links (like http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/) will do from REAL quality sites as this is where you are mining for domain authority and trust…

…. and that’s about it for a lot of sites in especially less competitive verticals.

Good SEO is about giving Google what it wants – not spamming – I think social media should be the responsibility of the marketing department, and the designer can get on with making a good design, now the navigation and content has been laid out by the SEO.

This is not rocket science, is it. If you follow the recommendations above you don’t NEED to know that Pagerank decays or any other nonsense.

Some might claim a secret sauce to seo but a seo focused content strategy like the above will probably slap those seo in the rankings given time – seo who claim to have a secret sauce are talking bollocks…. and it’s totally white hat, with NO MANIPULATION OF GOOGLE INVOLVED, in fact you are giving Google exactly what it wants in 2010 – and a lot of the competition are still not doing it.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Simple SEO Plan Of Action? A Strategy For Beginners. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

You get a free trial for 7 days of this software at www.diyseo.com.

I was asked to beta-test DIYSEO, the new seo software solution from Patrick Gavin (who is well known in the industry) designed specifically for those small business operations new to seo, and with a tiny budget.

So I did.

I quite liked it (even though I sent Patrick a long email about how it might develop).

I think it’s a good V1 of software with potential which I expect to see develop into something with might be really useful to some small business owners out there who don’t have a clue about the BASICS of SEO and too lazy to learn it all.

www.diyseo.com is certainly no substitute for having an experienced SEO managing your organic seo campaign. It’s not meant to be a replacement either, but software like this, that has a nifty little update email system which reminds you what you need to do, might very well sit nicely with those who might not be as comfortable with, for instance, Aaron Wall’s more advanced seo training or the SEO Dojo, or from a more geeky book like our free seo ebook, up to the heavy duty Art Of SEO, for instance – and it’s no replacement either for powerful seo tools like Raven SEO Tools but I don’t think it’s meant to be.

It’s designed for small businesses to get you started. You get a free trial for 7 days at www.diyseo.com.

It costs buttons to (effectively) organise some of the the paint-by-numbers aspects of SEO (page titles, local business registrations  etc). Not much to lose. If you don’t like it you don’t need to buy it.

PS – I am using the most affiliate links I have ever used in this article. No comments in this post either as it’s more of an advertisement for products I like the look of than ‘discussion’. If you want to discuss, I will open a new thread.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - DIY SEO Software For Small Business | Free Trial At DIYSEO.com. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Some recent analysis I carried out seemed to suggest Google pagerank wasn’t a factor in ranking at all (other than get you “in”) and I actually had my pagerank toolbar turned off for the last 3 months – which was quite liberating and forces you to look at other factors when looking at links.

I did however see a pagerank penalty for a network of sites (I don’t own but was using for ranking ability) – I believe SEOIdiot might have been screwing about with too lol. That’s private stuff though

The trusted network in question WAS NOT following Google’s advice about selling links on their site and Google have obviously responded by lowering their toolbar PR (probably in case the network was using pagerank as a selling tool). As I said I wasn’t using the network for toolbar pagerank.

The sites where trusted and the types of redirects they where using where transferring real pagerank & ranking ability from a trusted site to even brand new sites. On the surface the site looked as if it was following Google’s advice, but it wasn’t blocking the outbound banners they had sold using either nofollow or robots.txt, which was a nice side effect of buying sitewide banners on their sites. Tsk tsk.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Google Pagerank – Toolbar Update April 2010. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Another question I get asked daily it seems so I thought a blog post I could point folks at was called for.

Clients send me unsolicited emails from companies that ask for “reciprocal links between their site and yours”, usually because it will “improve search engine rankings” for both websites.

I can tell you I usually ignore all reciprocal link exchange requests via unsolicited emails and recommend you do to.

I spend my time looking for quality links and believe me, I’ve not found ANY in any email.

It’s actually against Google TOS to do this type of reciprocal link building:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include……

• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Now I suppose that’s rich advice coming from a seo (whose supposed to be manipulating search engines if you listen to some of the bollocks some big name web designers linkbait with these days), but reciprocal link exchanges like the one I mention above offer NO REAL SEO benefit to YOUR site (especially when they are on link partner pages) and Google says it might NEGATIVELY impact your rankings. So why manipulate in this amateur manner?

IF YOU TAKE A SECOND AND VISUALISE in your head the link scheme in place and the relationship between pages via links in the reciprocal links hub scenario, you can see how easy it is to do so. Google can probably compute and identify that one a lot faster than you can its so obvious.

99.9% of the time I IGNORE ALL SPAM EMAILS ASKING FOR RECIPROCAL LINKS especially if they are from some company who sells something totally unrelated to my site. I honestly can’t even remember the 0.1% I’ve responded to but I assume I did at least once back in the day – I know I asked for them when I started out 10 years ago but that’s when recip linking was of some use.

Note – Usually they will put your link on a “useful links” page. Now, Google hates these kinds of pages because they are just there to manipulate rankings. A useful links page out to unrelated sites on a low quality domain is just spam to Google and more often or not the pages your links are on will just be ignored by Google so there is no point getting a link from these pages.

Unrelated Sites

• Should you reciprocate links with irrelevant unrelated websites? NO – It’s a waste of time and possibly damaging.
• Should you link out to other unrelated sites at any other time? OF COURSE YOU SHOULD BUT NOT JUST TO MANIPULATE SEARCH RANKINGS. If the page is relevant to an article on your site, then it’s a good link. These types of links are the currency of the web!
• Should you worry if unrelated sites link to you? Of course NOT.

Linking is the foundation of the web, without links, there would be no web as we know it, no Google even, so never be scared of linking to good sites or pages – in fact, Google WANTS or at least EXPECTS you to do this and will thank you for it at some level…. probably. Bear in mind reciprocal links with a website tell google your two sites are related. Do you want that?

Related Sites

• Should You Reciprocate Links Related Websites? Perhaps, but ideally not on “usful links” pages, unless the page itself only links out to useful related sites. Here’s a good example of a useful links page I don’t mind linking to. But then, a seo can tell this sort of thing I suppose.

But if your INTENT is to SCREW with Google, Google might very well SCREW with you, depending on the vary nature of your intent, or the intent of others you now associate yourself with because of their intent and that reciprocal link you did.

Should You Ask For Reciprocal Links?

Of course, you should ALWAYS be ASKING for links. just not reciprocal links. One-way links are better for search engines though as they indicate editorially approved links from other sites, to yours. And that’s the best kind of links you can get.

I am working with a client at the moment in a global market who makes something amazing a lot of blue chip companies pay a lot of money for. Their website has a very poor link profile. We are currently asking for them to contact all these big brand companies and ask them for a link on their websites to the client website because this COULD NEVER HURT ANY OF THE SITES INVOLVED and links from these big brand websites who have bought their products – ie testimonial links from REAL sites that dont just link to anybody,  are good quality links.

We’ll probably reciprocate those links (if they ask us) but only AFTER Google sees the big brand sites linking to us first (thats a habit) – I use a few methods to ensure this is the case. The aim is to get the BRAND websites to VOTE for our site FIRST, so OUR search engine rankings improve, because Google now TRUSTS our site because of these new quality links on sites it already trusts. The brand websites don’t need our links for search enigne purposes – all we need to ensure is we are linking out to their sites in a more appropriate manner that is probably more useful to them….

I think all Brand managers would like another good-news-page in the SERPS, so creating a case study for their brand, on your website, is probably better than a link on a links page google will probably eventually ignore. So we’ll probably do that.

This post is a lot longer than I thought it would be.

PS I used  the very cool http://www.wordle.net/create to create the cool text image on this page.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Reciprocal Links With Unrelated Websites Who Email You Out Of The Blue? No Thanks.. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I can give you my honest opinion as myself, and my team, have years experience with both open source content management systems.

I love Joomla when I spend time in it and WordPress too (Hobo is built with WP) , and I had a rule of thumb….

• building a big document depository? Use Joomla.
• building a site you just want to update with company news and the like? Go with WordPress.

Both are great systems (for FREE) and both can do what the other does, but I think Joomla takes too much time to configure (especially with CLIENTS in the mix), too much time to troubleshoot conflicts, especially when your interested in SEO (!) – and shouldn’t every website owner be? Of course, both systems leave a lot to be desired when it comes to seo – especially search engine friendly URLS and canonicalisation issues / duplicate content woes.

Of course, I am not denying you can build a great site that ranks well with both cms (content management systems) but when it comes down  to it, I prefer WordPress, and it’s what we’ll be focusing on from this point on.

Joomla, for us, simply costs too much money and time in the long run, even with experience, in comparison with WordPress. This has got to be acknowledged.

Too many times are we editing Joomla sites thinking “we wish this wordpress” as more often than not, adding new components seems to totally screw with the SEO component – so much so I think the guy who made it must have been pulling his *&^%ing hair out….. like we have in the past.

Even though we built, what I think, is the perfect ecommerce platform with Joomla for SEO purposes, we decided to scrap it AT THE LAST MINUTE and redo it in WordPress, just so we wouldn’t have component problems in the future.

Advice – Just starting out? Choose WordPress, not Joomla….

Have you experience with both? Or even Drupal? Let me know….

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Joomla Or WordPress For SEO? Which CMS Is Best?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Bad Duplicate Content

If you have duplicate content on many pages of your site, Google will have trouble choosing the page you want to rank. If that exact same content is on other pages you are often screwed.

If you are trying to compete in competitive niches you need original content that’s not found on other pages in the exact same form on your site, and EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY ON OTHER PAGES ON OTHER WEBSITES.

Duplicate Content Will Give You Ranking Headaches

Google isn’t guaranteed to rank your duplicate content – in the end it depends whos got the most domain authority or most links coming to the page. If it kills your page, you may find that another page ranks for the the term you are targeting, and that page might not be focused on that term, so it drops down the rankings – sometimes out of site.

Don’t unnecessarily compete with these dupe pages by always rewriting your content if you think the content will appear on other sites (especially if you are not the first to ‘break it’).

Good Duplicate Content?

Is there such thing as good duplicate content? Not really, but there is decent if a bit dubious NEAR duplicate content strategies. But they are reserved for long tail, supplemental verticals where the top ten rankings is already crammed full of the stuff and the SERPS are shabby – certainly not competitive terms.

There’s not a lot of traffic there in those results per keyword per say, but sometimes it’s worth exploring if using near duplicate content with geographic modifiers for instance on a site with some domain authority. Near-duplicate content can be useful accross TLDs too. A bit spammy, but if the top ten results are already a bit spammy…

If essentially duplicate content is performing well in the top ten of an existing long tail result – then it’s worth exploring – I’ve considered it in the past, even though I’m full aware it’s against Google TOS to actually create a lot of pages with the same content. In the end though, if it meets the need of a search engine visitor and is better than whats there in those long tail searches at present, who’s complaining?

Stick To Original Content Specially Written For That Page

It’s a band-aid of course – and not exactly best practice seo is it.

Stick to original content, found on only one page on your site, for best results – especially if you have a new/young site and are building it page by page over time… and you’ll get better rankings and more traffic to your site (affiliates too!).

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Good Duplicate Content & Bad Duplicate Content & SEO. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I often get asked “why is my page title not showing the correct title keywords in Google (and in sometimes Yahoo) search results pages?”

I thought I would list some of the more obvious reasons and just point those interested here:

Reasons Google Shows Wrong Page Title In SERPS & How To Fix

• If you’re totally new to this, Google will look in your page <title></title> tags in the HEAD for your page title information, to display as the link to your page in search results (SERPS)
• If you’ve made changes recently to optimise your page title for search engines, it might very well be just that Google doesn’t know yet, because it’s not visited your page since you made the change. So give it time. Check the Google CACHE link under your listing in search engines to see which page Google is “supposedly” using for your page (it’s usually accurate).
• If this is clearly not the case, it might be because it is using Open Directory Project (ODP) data (the DMOZ directory) to replace your title with your directory listing data – that is, it’s using the link on that directory to replace your title because it thinks its more relevant to a specific query. If this is a possibility, add <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” /> and <meta name=”robots” content=”noydir” /> – for the same issue in Yahoo – to your home page and once Google visits the page again, the problem should be resolved See – NOODP & also NOYDIR.
• If you are not in DMOZ or the Yahoo directory, it may well be your title element <title>My Title</title> is malformed in someway – I’ve shown before how search engines can choose to use a Header ‘tag’ as a Page title, or ignore the page title completely if you’re a spammer in the making – so ensure your Page Title is properly marked up and starts with <title> and ends with </title> and is in the HEAD of your document – and there is only one :p
• Another reason is you may be confusing Google in some way from getting to the correct page title, and/or from displaying it in results, using directives in your meta tags or Robots.txt. When Google knows about the page because other pages it CAN read link to your page with descriptive keywords, it might very well use these links on third party pages to determine what that page title should be if it decides to include the URI in it’s listings, and you CERTAINLY don’t want that. For questions about Robots.txt I go to Sebastian. No doubt he’ll tell me if I have worded that correctly.

Obviously having an intelligent, well formed page title, that is relevant to the page, and not duplicated on other pages of your site, is just about the most important single thing you can do to ‘seo’ a page on your site.

You can still it seems fit a maximum of 70 characters in it as the test pages below seem to confirm…

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fhow manycharacters%2F

(and 157 characters seems to max out the meta description in one or two keyword searches too in that example. That little test also shows you what happens if Google ignores your page title too).

PS – This is another part of my social media & syndication / status update test….using Google Docs to publish to my WordPress blog.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Home Page Title Is Wrong In Google Search Results. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I wanted to syndicate my content and notify my social sites automatically. The studio’s too busy to build me something so I played about with a few free sites to see if I get get some useful syndication between Google Docs and my network, including my blog…. there may be smarter ways of doing it but for the purposes of testing this will need to suffice.

I wanted to publish my articles once which notified all my social networks something like:

• Google Docs, WordPress, Feedburner, Twitter, Google Buzz, TwitterFeed, Ping.Fm, Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr, Posterous, Friendfeed, Delicious & any other networks i use

Google Docs to WordPress

I wanted to write my articles in Google Docs so i could start spell checking, but then publish to my self hosted WordPress blog at Hobo, direct from Google Docs;

1. Go To Google Docs
2. Create Your Article
3. Close it and go back to main Google Doc screen
4. Select the article I want to publish to WordPress
5. Select MORE ACTIONS > PUBLISH
6. You get a chance to configure your blog settings here and you’re ready to publish your Google Doc directly to WordPress
7. UPDATE – API – I am using the MetaWeblog API as I was having a problem with article titles not appearing in my WP post
8. REMEMBER – you can use Google docs to edit the actual HTML of the page (for instance if you want to add hidden elements in your article html like a page break) although beware – Google Docs seems to have some issues with certain formatting elements it seems…. so check the end result….

WordPress To Google Buzz
I’m considering using Google Buzz as my primary social network (tho I use Twitter at the mo) so I obviously want my WordPress blog to post the article automatically to my Google Buzz account – see here – http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/documentation/#connect and here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=14991d6d4220449 1&hl=en and http://www.google.com/buzz/bradfitz/PPjHXDhANAC/Want-to-connect-your-b log-or-some-other-feed-to how to do that but basically all you need to do is add a

<link rel=“me” type=“text/html” href=“http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username”/>

and then your article appears on my Google Buzz account (hopefully)

My blog rss feed is syndicated through Feedburner which has the option to automatically Tweet a feed post, so I could choose this option to notify Twitter, but as (I think) Socialize service only supports Twitter and no other, I’ll leave this option out to avoid duplicate tweets. UPDATE: Actually, no for some reason Ping.fm is not playing nice with Twitter, so I WILL use FEEDBURNER TO NOTIFY TWITTER…

RSS Feed To TwitterFeed to Ping.fm

I took my Feedburner RSS feed URI and signed up with Twitter Feed

… which lets me push my article automatically to Ping.fm

… which of course will let me syndicate my article to a lot of other services i might want to add to control later  – I’ll use Ping.fm to POST TO TWITTER (for a test I will also post to the Hobo Tumblr blog – I had to make sure my Tumblr blog wasn’t cross posting to Twitter in my Tumblr settings – and Posterous but that’s all)

Ping.fm to Twitter & Other Services

and

and the *new* Hobo delicious account where I bookmark my blog posts for my network as well as other sites i find of interest

Syndicating My Tweets

So that’s when I blog sorted out. And at some point along the chain (VIA Ping.fm Feedburner) what I posted finds it’s way to Twitter.

As at the moment Twitter is the main channel I use, I want my Tweet to sync with social media sites too, but I don’t want to create a lot of duplicate noise or create any type of spammy syndicated content loop.

As I don’t want to create pointless noise, I’ll let my Twitter account (updated either by myself when I tweet or via Ping.fm ‘FEEDBURNER / PUBLICIZE / SOCIALIZE’ when I blog) notify various other services

will update the new Hobo Facebook page

using RSS Graffiti,

i’ve already connected my Linkedin account with Twitter at Linkedin for my connections

and I have done the same with my Friendfeed account.

This post is actually a test post I wrote in Google Docs to see if it posts correctly to WP and works as expected with the social media sites I browse. There’s other ways of setting this chain up but this one suits my intentions. I don’t expect to use Twitter any more than I do already which is not much at all…so noise hopefully isn’t a problem.

As this is a test post, some things might not work as expected, and I will update the post with probs/fixes and other syndication possibilities…

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Publish Google Docs To WordPress To Twitter & Facebook ETC. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I wanted to share some thoughts about SEO and how I think about it. A lot of it comes down to trust in my book.

• Use common sense – Google is a search engine – it is looking for pages to give searchers results, 90% of it’s users are looking for information. Almost all websites will link to relevant information content so content rich websites get a lot of lnks – especially quality links. Google ranks websites with a lot of links (especially quality links) at he top of it’s search engines so the obvious thing you need to do is ADD A LOT INFORMATIONAL CONTENT TO YOUR WEBSITE.
• I think ranking in organic listings is a lot about trusted links making trusted pages rank, making trusted links making trusted pages rank ad nauseum for varous keywords. Some pages can pass trust to another site, some pages cannot. Some links can. Some cannot. Some links are trusted to pass ranking ability to another page. Some are not. YOU NEED LINKS FROM TRUSTED PAGES
• Google engineers are building an AI – but i’s all based on simple human desires to make something happen or indeed to prevent something. You can work with Google enginners or against them. They need to make money for Google but unfortunately for them they need to make the best search engine in the world for us humans as part of the deal. Build a site that takes advantage of this. What is a Google engineer trying to achieve with an algorithm – it was an idea first. What was that idea? Think like a Google engineers and give Google what it wants. What is Google trying to give it”s users? Align with that. What does Google not want to give it’s users? Don’t look anything like that. THINK LIKE A GOOGLE ENGINEER & BUILD A SITE THEY WANT TO GIVE TOP RANKINGS.
• Googe is a links based search engine. Google doesn’t need content to rank pages but it needs content to give to users. Google needs to find content and it finds content by following links just like you do when clicking on a link. So you need to first make sure you tell the world about your site so other sites link to yours. ACCEPT LINKS FROM ANYWHERE – JUST DONT RECIPROCATE JUST ANY. But don’t worry about reciprocating to more powerful sites or even real sites – I think this adds to your domain authority – which is actually better to have than ranking for just a few narrow keyterms.
  
• Everything has limits. Google has limits. What are they? How would you go about observing them or even testing, breaking them or benefiting from them or being penalised by them? It’s not a lab setting – you can’t test much, if anything, 100% accurately, but you can hypothisise based on the sensible approach bearing in mind what a Google engineer would do, and what you would do if Google was yours.
• The best way for Google to keep rankings secret ultimately is to have a randomness to it while keeping somethings stable – surley the easiest way for it to prevent a seo finding out how it works. Well I think that anyway. And I think this randomness manifests itself in many ways. What will work for some sites might not necessirly work for your sites – not exactly the same anyway. Perhaps no two sites are the same (the conditions are different for a start for any two sites) and I’m actually thinking about how to test this for a bit of fun.
• Google may play dice with the Google multi-verse so be ware of that. It uses multiple results and rotates them and serves different results to diferent machines and browsers even on the same computer. Google results are constantly shifting – some pages rank at the top constantly because they are giving Google what it wants in a number of areas or they might just have a greater number and diversity of more trusted links than your do.
• Google has a long memory when it comes to links and pages and associations for you site – perhaps an infinite memory profile of your site. Perhaps it can forvige but never forget. Perhaps it can forget too, just like us, and so previous penalties or bans can be lifted. I think (epending on the site because Google can work out if you have a blog or a ecommerce site) Google probably also looks at different history versions of particular pages even on single sites WHAT RELATIONSHIP DO YOU WANT TO HAVE WITH GOOGLE? Onsite, don’t try and fool Google – we’re not smart enough. Be squeaky clean onsite and make Google think twice about bumping you for discrepencies in your link profile.
• Earn Google’s trust. Most of our more lucrative accounts come from refferals from clients who trust us. Before clients told them of us, they didn’t know about us. ok, they might have heard about us from people in turn they didnt trust that much. Upon the clients testimonial, the refferal now trusts us a lot more. These refrrals automatically trusts us to some extent. That trust grows when we deliver. The referral now trusts us very much. But it’s un uphill struggle from that point on to continue to deliver that trust and earn even more trust because you don’t want to dip in trust – it’s nice to get even more and more trusted. Google works the exactly the same way as this human emotion, and search engines have tried for years to deliver a trusted set sites based on human desire and need. MAKE FRIENDS WITH GOOGLE
  
• Don’t break Google’s trust – if you’re friend betrays you, depending on what they’ve done, they’ve lost trust. sometimes that trust has been lost altogether. If you do something Google doesn’t like like manipulate it in a way it doesnt want, you will lose trust, and in come cases, lose all trust (in some areas). For instance, your pages might be able to rank, but your links might not be trusted enough to vouch for another site. DON”T FALL OUT WITH GOOGLE OVER SOMETHING STUPID
  
• YOU NEED TO MAKE MoRE FRIENDS AND ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO ARE FRIENDS WITH GOOGLE.
• When Google trusts you it’s because you’ve earned it’s trust to help it carry out what it needs to carry out in the quickest and most profitable way. You’ve helped Google achieve it’s goals. It trusts you and it will reward you by listing your contribution in order of the sites it trusts the most. It will list friends it trusts the most who it knows to be educated in a particular area at the top of these areas. IF GOOGLE TRUSTS YOU IT WILL LET YOUR PAGES RANK AND IN TURN VOUCH FOR OTHER FRIENDS GOOGLE MIGHT WANT INFORMATION ON.
• Google can be fooled and manipulated just like you can but it will probably kick you in the gonads if you break it’s trust – as I probably would. Treat Google as you would have it treat you. REMEMBER IT TAKES TIME TO BUILD TRUST

I of course might be reading far too much into Google and trust….I consider trust to be a pyschological emotion Google is trying to emulate using algorithms based on human ideas.

If you do all the above, you’ll get more and more traffic from Google over time.

If you want to rank for specific keywords, you’ll need to be a big brand, be picked out by a big brand and linked to, or buy links to fake that trust, or get spammy with it in an intelligent way you won’t get caught.

I suppose Google is open to the con just as any human is, if it’s based on human traits….

If you like this you might like:

• What Is SEO?
• Hobo Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Non-Technical Google SEO For Dummies (No, Really). When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Q – Which keywords do I use to linkbuild with?
A – Look at your analytics.
Use keywords (and synonyms) that already drive traffic that you are not already no1 for (in anchor text in articles). Write 50 articles with 50 of the anchor text variations below (going to the relevant page that Google already thinks enough of to rank and send traffic to) and syndicate.

Virtually no chance of a penalty, either. Of course, I’m assuming you’ve built a decent site (the site below has 50 pages on it - if you are subscribed you would have got even more info

Scenario – New site, optimised, solid architecture, unique content and  3 months worth of traffic….

CLARIFICATION – The aim of course is to get MORE traffic of the type Google is ALREADY giving your shop. By linkbuilding to the positions Google is already giving you traffic for, you’ll quickly improve the amount of traffic to your site via these terms -  your site will rank naturally for SOMETHING – so focus on improving those terms at the beginning, instead of JUST going for the most competitive terms. It looks more natural.

I’ll often throw up a store and see what Google gives me, then link build to these longtail terms to capture quick positions via simple article syndication. Then go for the money keyterms over a realistic timescale. For instance, with the example below, I will happy to be no1 for the single keyword (+ plural term) in 6 months…. but I want to improve relevant traffic now.

This is a linkbuilding tip for a new ecommerce shop for example. I thought it might be of more use than:

get links from the bbc

Using Analytics of course you can quickly identify the most valuable traffic you are already getting…. and improve that traffic first….

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Ecommerce SEO – Linkbuilding To Your New Online Shop. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

First – What is trust?

comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another - Rousseau

an individual’s belief in, and willingness to act on the basis of, the words, actions, and decisions of another – Lewicki

The need for trust arises from our interdependence with others. We often depend on other people to help us obtain, or at least not to frustrate, the outcomes we value (and they on us). As our interests with others are intertwined, we also must recognize that there is an element of risk involved insofar as we often encounter situations in which we cannot compel the cooperation we seek. Therefore, trust can be very valuable in social interactions.

Trust has been identified as a key element of successful cooperation, information sharing, and problem solving.

Google may use trusted sites to point out other trusted sites through links – that’s why i think a few links from trusted sites are more valuable (and will only get more valuable in the coming months and years) than hundreds of links from untrusted sites.

If you want to find out more about Trust and then think of how Google might be trying to determine such a human emotion – check out:

http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/trust_building/

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - In Google We SEO Trust. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

You can get a FREE Ebook PDF of our SEO Basics Checklist , as cited in Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable, as from today. The easiest way to get it is to subscribe to the Hobo blog by email.

“the Best SEO Guide I think I’ve ever seen… simple to the point, no fluff”.

Our free seo training guide is available FREE TO DOWNLOAD NOW to all email subscribers

Some of it’s fact. Some of it’s tips or tactics. A lot of it is theory. If you want a copy, subscribe!

Worried about giving us your email? Well, there’s over 10,000 people subscribed already (about 12000 by email alone according to feedburner) at the moment, and you can see what people think of the Hobo SEO blog & newsletter here: comments confirm I don’t really use this to sell services – and I don’t spam ever. This blog and newsletter is all about Google SEO & web stuff you can use on your own site, or I don’t put it in. I do not give your email to anyone else.

So, subscribe and get a FREE copy of your seo training tutorial. I will keep it updated – but only with practical quick and easy to digest tips that will improve your site’s ranking in Google.

PS – Matt Cutts of Google liked it enough to give the guide a thumbs up at Sphinn (along with a lot of other respected peeps in the industry), which was nice. See here.

Warranties

If you have any complaints about the guide feel free to send me your postal address and I will send a few boys around with a bat. It’s free, based on the infomation I try and discuss on this blog. There’s no warranties – it’s opinion, not advice. Take it or leave it. Hope you find it useful.

It’s a SEO Guide aimed at beginners – hopefully everybody can get something out of it or the links it points out 

Click HERE and Subscribe For Free if you’d prefer to subscribe to Hobo via your Feedreader.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - FREE EBook – Google SEO Training Guide For Beginners. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Number 1 Ranking In Google. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Some time ago I was asked to participate in another group interview of 30 linkbuilders discussing backlink analysis on Search Engine Land. If you read this blog at all, you’ll realise the all importance backlinks still have when it comes to ranking in Google results.

We asked 30 link building experts 9 questions about backlink analysis… and got 20,000 words of response. This article is part 1 of a 3 part group interview series on backlink analysis. Part 1 covers how backlink analysis – of your site and your competitors’ sites, as it applies to link building campaign design.

It’s another great article you’ll probably pick some stuff up from. It’s in 3 parts:

• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1
• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 2 (TBA)
• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 3 (TBA)

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - When To Perform Backlink Analysis?. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

Unfortunately I was too busy actually doing this stuff at the moment lol to take part in Wordstream’s neat group interview – The Ultimate Guide To Keyword Competition (essentially, determining how competitive a keyword niche is), but it’s neat stuff nevertheless and worth a read and bookmark if you’re drawing plans against a particular keyword vertical.

Before targeting a new keyword vertical, it’s imperative to evaluate the difficulty of the market. This is done through competitive keyword analysis. Search marketers estimate how much time and effort it may take to achieve top rankings for particular keywords or search terms. But the question is, how do you  judge keyword competitiveness? What are the factors involved in gauging keyword competition effectively? Is there a specific keyword tool or tools you can use to analyze the competitiveness of keywords?

I might have a go at posting my tip here, later on in the month…. as it’s different from what I see published.

Still, great article

Note – Check out our article on keywords density and it’s importance in SEO for Google.

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Identifying How Competitive Competition For A Keyword / Market Is. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I’m not going to publish an article just because it’s timely, or just to get my traffic stats up. I’m just going to do my own thing, hope it’s useful, and hope it continues to satisfy the @8,000 of you who have subscribed.

Upcoming Posts I am considering:

I’ll be publishing the following in the coming week or two…

1. Can You actually Identify On Page/On Site Ranking Factors?
   
2. How & Where Can I start Link Building To My Ecommerce Site To Improve Positions & Traffic NOW?
   
3. Non Technical Google SEO guide: Google & Trust
4. Anatomy Of A Real Live Number 1 Ranking Site In Google

Hope you like…

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Upcoming…. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush

I’m working with Roddy McKenna, the A&R guy who first discovered the Stone Roses in the late 80s and he told me yesterday:

I think this version is great!!!

I asked Richard Thomas the artist behind the stone roses for piano how this came about…

Richard said:

Well i was and still am a massive roses / ian brown fan and i was at spike island in 1990 with my sister (who was also at blackpool and to my lasting regret i didnt go); i have been playing the roses songs on my piano at home for years; when i started youtubing “spike island” there was nothing filmed there either from the gig or since; so i had the idea to take my camera and just make a film at spike island to show what it was like now; then i decided to dub my made of stone onto the film and uploaded it ; within a month it had thousands of views and loads of people were asking me what i was recording next;  i did “supersonic” in liverpool next and then recorded some songs for my Oasis for Piano album which i released on itunes last year;  however i had more and more interest in the stone roses song so i spent most of november recording 10 stone roses tracks in my little home studio ; i abandoned some of them as they didnt work out (for example she bangs the drums didnt sound right at all on piano) and then chose the 7 that appear on the Stone Roses for Piano album.

i worked them all out by ear , as i know almost every stone roses song off by heart (including most of second coming) ; before i finished the project i checked the keys i had used to see if they were the same as the Roses versions – the only one different was “waterfall” which i played in G major, the original is in F sharp (quite a difficult key to play; i think John Squire used a capo on that track);i contacted an online distribution company who gave me advice about registering with the PRS (performing rights society) in order to pay proper royalties to the publishers in case i made any money out of the sales ; i must say that im not really doing this at all to make money, its just my passion for these amazing songs and the interest of friends to record them;

i must say what i noticed with a lot of the roses songs is that the melodies are so amazing - made of stone for example is a really  beautiful and haunting track when you strip it to the melody and chords; also another favourite is where angels play, which has an amazing john squire outro that i tried to capture on the piano;  the biggest challenge was the coda of i am the  resurrection – not sure if i pulled it off, but i had a good go;

what next?  i love the old roses b sides like mersey paradise, going down, standing here so might record some of them later in the year;  ten storey love song also sounds amazing on piano

Mersey Paradise is my favourite Stone Roses song! Can’t wait to hear the Piano version…. I’ll make do what I can get on Itunes at the moment

SO – If you want to buy Stone Roses For Piano – Buy at Itunes.

Amazing stuff…

PS – I did notice I’m not the first Roses fan (or SEO) to think the tracks are brill either…

If you're one of the hundreds of recent new subscribers to the Hobo SEO Newsletter - WELCOME!. I hope you found our free ebooks you received when you signed up useful. You might want to check out our online beginner guide to search engine optimization too, or visit the site and leave a comment on the latest post - Stone Roses For Piano by Richard Thomas – Friday Fun. When you make ten comments on our blog, if approved, they become search engine friendly links back to your site. Trackbacks are seo friendly too, so if you link to our blog from your blog, we'll link back to you (if editorially relevant).
Shaun.

SEO Tools

Here's a collection of best of the SEO tools I've reviewed recently:

• Directory Submissions - Directory Maximizer
• Real Time Website Stats - Clicky
• Keyword Tracking Tool - Advanced Web Ranking
• Keyword Research Tool - SEmRush