Get Google SEO Basics Ebook PDF 2009 (FREE)

You can get a FREE Ebook of our SEO Basics Checklist as from today. The easiest way to get it is to subscribe to the Hobo blog by email, or via RSS – you’ll see a link to the guide at the bottom of the mail or feed.

It is available NOW to all email & RSS subscribers 

If you want a copy, subscribe!

Worried about giving us your email? Well, there’s about  people subscribed (about 2,000 by email) at the moment, and you can see what people think of our blog/newsletter here and also 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. 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 

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I Guess We Are A Dofollow Blog Again (Sort Of…)

With the release of our new FREE wordpress plugin for comments yesterday, it appears we’re a dofollow blog again! Remember that?

Our new free plugin for WP comments released yesterday allows you to moderate exactly the comments you want to reward with link juice. That means every comment link in the comments in the Hobo site is ‘dofollow’ – no more ugly Nofollow links, as commenters below a certain number of links simply don’t get credited with a link. Of course, you can set the limit to whatever you want… my number is secret though I told Dave Naylor once

As a result of this, I’m going to police the comments even more. So, if you’re commenting, use at least half a brain cell because I will out stupid dofollow comment spammers with no panache. I’m fortunate I do have intelligent folk commenting on this blog – it took a while!

Another bonus is that regular contributers to the blog should now have BETTER links from Hobo – for free.

Why We Released Hobo Link Love Plugin

Google’s Matt Cutts says:

Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links.

I love SEO and I love blogging. I think if blog comments are moderated and you’re watching who you link to, there’s no problem. You shouldn’t be upsetting Google, and you won’t risk linking to a bad neighbourhood.

With the recent changes regarding Google Pagerank and nofollow, this plugin goes a long way in addressing nofollow worries as complained loudly about in the following posts:

• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ – Matt Cutts Of Google caused all this
• http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/matt-cutts-kills-internal -pagerank-sculpting-with-nofollow/ I chipped in
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090616-130132 – Kevin Newcomb of Search Engine Watch
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algor ithm-handles-nofollow Rand Fishkin of Seomoz chips in….
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagera nk-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow … a couple of times
• http://searchengineland.com/google-loses-backwards-compatibility-on-pa id-link-blocking-pagerank-sculpting-20408 – Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land makes his views heard
• http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/06/page-rank-sculpting-using-nofollow -clarifications-from-google/ Mani Karthik has a nice round up
• http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-06-08-n72.html Philipp Lenssen chips in
• http://sphinn.com/story/117949 Plenty of folk talking about it at sphinn
• http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/googles-operation-bendover-exposed-no follow-pagerank-sculpting Dan Thies with a funny video on the whole issue
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3925952.htm Webmasterworld folk discuss
• http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/google-deprecates-pagerank-scu lpting-paid-javascript-links.html Jordan McCollum with a good simple roundup
• http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020141.html SERoundtable with another roundup

Most of these posts are commenting on the way Google handles nofollow internally, but they include how it handles PR on your site if you run a blog with comments. The thinking is, if you have a lot of comments on a post, nofollow links to external commenter’s sites in your blog might actually be a drain on Google PR.

Andy Beard comments too here – Pageranks Sculpting & Blog Comments and another of my favourite bloggers, Sebastian, pipes in with this gem – http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/rip-rel-nofollow-funeral-party/

This plugin is one way to stop that PR drain happening – because you kiss nofollow links goodbye

Download the plugin here – It works on Wordpress 2.8, and should be backward compatible (though clearly no warranties – it’s free – use at your own risk)

Read the installation instructions on my last post

If you use the plugin, let me know how it works out for you.

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Improve Pagerank: Custom Link Love For Wordpress Comments Plugin

Recent announcements with the way Google Pagerank flows via nofollow links at Google has bloggers all a flutter. I asked Marty if he could sit down and modify a Wordpress plugin that basically rewarded regular contributers with a link, but removed the actual link from comments from those that haven’t bothered to continue participating on your blog past that first comment.

So Basically;

• Regular commentors will get a dofollow link that passes link love – with this, you really reward regular contributors
• Those with less than say 3 comments will not get a link at all (although you can modify this) but when they do hit 3 comments, hey presto, link love, and with anchor text value!
• Pagerank won’t evaporate through nofollowed links from link droppers because they won’t be links!

You can see it in action on the Hobo seo blog below once comments appear (or on any other post on the hobo site) when you comment. (see it in action on this post)

What does this mean? Well, if we’re to believe Google, this may help increase the amount of pagerank circulating on your site and indeed improve your overall Pagerank score, just by watching who you’re linking to using nofollow.

Download the plugin here – It works on Wordpress 2.8, and should be backward compatible (though clearly no warranties – it’s free – use at your own risk)

As I said, we’re using this plugin just now, so if you want a link on your comment, be sure to participate in the discussion often!

Installation is simple – just install as you would any other plugin, and go to the admin section (Settings > Hobo Link Love) and ensure in the field;

“Keep dofollow off comments less than some number of days old?” – You insert the value ‘0′.

This plugin is based on Lucia’s LInky Love so you MUST UNINSTALL THAT PLUGIN FIRST FOR IT TO WORK (if you have that installed).

This is a BETA release – we’re testing it too Any feedback very welcome

Hobo Marty is going to be making some more plugins – subscribe here for more, or visit Martin’s own site at Martin Gardner.

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A Website Design & Development Project Checklist

A (Nearly) Bulletproof Web Design & Development Project Checklist for clients and designers.

If you’re aiming to agree a fixed price for the development of the website, as we do, ensure the project goes smoothly before you start, by communicating with your client at the outset. They’ll appreciate you for it, there will be less surprises, and you may be able to start making a profit from fixed cost website design jobs again;

1. Prices can change even for a fixed cost website
   • Web Design Costs are dependent on how many hours is spent working on a design and how many times the client asks for changes to it
   • Show the client your portfolio – that’s the type of sites you build, do they like it?
   • Has the client supplied examples of the sort of site they are looking for?
   • Estimate a cost for a job, based on early discussion.
   • Ensure the client knows you can quote for a job only on the information you have available to you at the time
   • Confirm a job cost on reviewed client requirements
   • 50% of job before start, 50% on completion
   • Ensure the client knows you are costing the job by hours and you do have other clients
   • Make sure all your costs are approved before starting a job (remember VAT)
   • Ask the client to send you an email notifying his acceptance of the project scope and cost
2. It’s impossible to make a site that will look the same in all browsers;
   • Specify which Resolution / Screen Size the Website Should Be Designed to
   • Specify a fixed width or fluid layout
   • Inform the client which browser versions you support
   • Ensure the client is aware of website font restrictions or recommendations and web page download considerations
   • Ensure the client is aware websites look different than on paper
3. Content should be supplied by the client in a form easily used
   • Who is supplying the text?
   • Who is supplying the images?
   • Get the client to supply all text, photographs and content in electronic format
   • Make sure text supplied, if formatted, is in a web-ready format
   • The client should supply an example site-plan, in a bulleted list
   • The client needs to specify any specific functionality required at the outset
4. ‘Milestone’ dates for the project should be agreed
   • Communicate missing any milestone date for supplying content / adding new content will have an impact on launch commitments and costs – both of you have businesses to run
   • Agree content delivery date
   • Agree Site Architecture Freeze Date
   • Agree Site Functionality Freeze Date
   • Agree Design Freeze date
   • Agree Launch Date
5. Changes to the brief should be communicated and costs agreed / timings considered in electronic form
   • No Favours – The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the bodies of well meaning web developers
   • Everything should be charged out, agreed and accountable
     
6. Websites can go down every now and then
   • Who hosts the current site?
   • Get Contact Details
   • Hosting is a recurring annual charge
7. Domain transfers sometimes go a bit Pete Tong
   • You are at the mercy of third parties
   • Who controls current domain(s)?
   • Domains need registered every year
   • Get Contact Details
8. Emails might go down for a period of perhaps 24-48 hours
   • Who controls current email(s)?
   • Get Contact Details
   • How many email accounts to you have/need
9. Launching a website can be about pressing buttons and…. waiting
10. Websites Get Hacked
    • All CMS needs kept up to date
    • In most cases hackers seek to deface the site
    • A hacked site can mean disaster in Google
    • A site that has been hacked can be rescued
    • Who’s in charge of security / CMS updates
    • Agree maintenance fees
11. A Winning Website Is never ‘Finished’!
    • The client should keep his site up-to-date with news if he has a CMS
    • Training for the CMS should be costed if required
12. A website is subject to Laws of The Land and the client should investigate these
    • The UK Companies Act
    • UK Distance Selling Regulations
    • Website Accessibility Recommendations
13. Agree ongoing responsibilities
    • Who is responsible for the client’s email, hosting and domain management
    • Do you ‘guarantee’ a website is fit for purpose for say 1 year?
    • When will annual billing start and occur

I’m sure I’ve missed some things out, but I wanted a post on the site I could point my clients to, to educate them on some of the less talked about aspects of developing a website. I expect to modify this page every now and again.

Take responsibility, agree the scope of the project, recognise the requirements to meet the brief within allocated time-frame, and bill for your time.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Now I aim at all times to communicate with the client as much as possible to ensure any web development job doesn’t get out of control.

• 10 Reasons We Won’t Be Launching Your Website Today
• 13 Reasons Being A Web Designer F***ing Sucks in 2008

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Link Building Strategy For Beginners – A Month Of Free Tips

During the course of July I’ll be publishing simple link building tips for beginners that won’t get your site into trouble and will help your rankings improve and should deliver targeted rankings and traffic. I’ll also be publishing some linkbuilding articles from the Hobo SEO Blog archives that are still valid.

I’ll be showing you how how to get links, and how to make links, but in a responsible way. I’m not about to give other sites headaches because in the end, the more people know about certain links, the faster their worth evaporates.

Hope you find the link building tips useful

Remember to subscribe and you’ll get a free seo ebook of our Google SEO for beginners primer this Wednesday!

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10% Off Bespoke Scottish Corporate Hampers

Everybody knows at Hobo we’re proud to be a Scottish company. I tell you, we’re no prouder when we get sent free Scottish stuff and a deal for our readers!

After a heavy week writing up client strategy documents, it’s a pleasure to come into the office and find a free gift! Long term Hobo Blog subscriber Russell at Scottish Hampers sent us a corporate  hamper as a way of thanks for our free SEO guide we published last month:

Thanks very much for the seo guide! I’ve been using it on our sites and trying to take in all the information and make use of it, with good success! I thought I’d send you a little something as way of thanks

I got back to him to say thanks, and told him I’d actually like to tell my blog subscribers, and if he would be up for offering a discount on corporate gift hampers. He replied:

Hey no problem! If anybody places an order in the next 7 days (up to 3rd July 2009), tell your readers we’ll give them 10% OFF anything (including single scottish food items) from our online store at Scottish Hampers

How do you make a saving on your next corporate gift for those special clients? Just visit his online store, buy ANY HAMPER, or indeed ANY PRODUCT, and buy your hamper using the special voucher code:

“HAMPHOBOWEB” (case insensitive) – Go here – http://www.scottishhampers.co.uk/ and actually he has a very cool make your own hamper section on the site which is easy to use.

Can’t do better than that for you on this Friday 26 June!

PS (exl delivery I’m told in case you live in Outer Mongolia) PPS – Want to send me a free gift lol? If it’s good and suitable (lets stick with Scottish stuff for now like luxury hampers lol) send it on to me with a message. I will need to nofollow the page as I don’t want big G thinking these are paid for L’s. and unfortunately I’d need to say I just won’t publish any old garbage as I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to seo – I can’t guarantee I’d blog about it unfortunately.

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Google’s Guide To Search Engine Optimisation For Businesses

Here’s a presentation the Google team actually gave on what search engine optimisation is:

If you want a more detailed page, check out our own guide to SEO for beginners.

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I Spent A Year Adding Content & My Competitors Nicked My Rankings

A quick follow up to my SEO fight club article yesterday, and somewhat tongue in cheek.

I just spent a year adding original content which people have told me is really useful, getting relevant links from those in my niche, going for quality of links rather than quantity of crap links, not keyword stuffing, staying within Google guidelines, not buying links from crappy host companies in far-away-lands, nofollowing links to bad neighbourhoods, not hiding text or links, preventing Google’s index being spammed, not using my client sites to promote my own rankings.

Some of my competiors now rank above me with cheap exact match domains, regurgitated content, no relevant links, crap links, keyword stuffing, flouting Google guidelines, buying links from crappy host companies in far-away-lands, links to bad neighbourhoods, hiding text and links, spamming Google’s index, using client sites to promote thier own rankings lol

LOL OK I have 100 more times Google traffic than these guys because their terms are so narrow and their content is lukewarm, so maybe I shouldn’t complain. I’ve got a lot of real humans subscribed, too, which is very valuable to me.

But it alludes to an age old question:

What to do? Linkbuild, or Add Content?

I chose to add content because I am trying to build  a brand. THAT’s what I recommend to clients. I prefer to syndicate and network (for this site anyway) these days than linkbuild. If you play this game Google will actually send you a lot of decent traffic but you’ll probably lose ground on very focused terms to competition that are really going for them – see what I think of natural links and google seo.

PS I don’t out anybody and it’s not sour grapes – I think SEO is SEO – good luck to everyone whichever tactics and strategy they choose to employ. I am actually friendly with a lot of my competitors. Maybe I should register SEO Greenock Dot Com just in case lol.

I actually change the terms I target all the time too with this site – and I’m ALWAYS testing on site – that’s what you can do if you’ve got a lot of traffic and a little brand and  I suppose.

What are you doing just now? Adding content, networking, syndicating or linkbuilding – something else? Removing your internal nofollow links (?) even heh heh.

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Search Engine Optimisation PDF Guide

Just a quick note to let those waiting for our SEO guide for beginners in PDF format.We’ll be sending this out on Wednesday 1st July 2009 to all RSS & email subscribers and *hopefully* this will coincide with the start of a month of linkbuilding tips on the Hobo SEO blog as a lot of folks have asked me for this sort of thing.

Hope you like!

It’s a PDF of our online beginners guide to Google SEO

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First Rule About SEO Fight Club is – Don’t Talk About SEO Fight Club!

There is a reason I don’t have clients I work for plastered all over my site, or home page, even though it would probably help us make new sales.

There’s a reason I don’t take linkbacks from SEO clients from their site to boost my own sites ranking in Google even though I’m missing a big trick SEO companies use to rank their own sites. We only take linkbacks from web design clients and even then sometimes I nofollow it and usually today we use Hobo or Hobo-web as the linkback (purely because that direct link can mean sales if people like that site).There’s a reason we only host clients we design and build (or maintain) websites for, not linkbuild to, on our servers today.

There’s a reason you should never ever talk in public or private forums about getting SEO done on your site (unless it’s just that, onsite search engine optimisation).

That reason is Google. Google doesn’t owe you, or us as a bona-fide seo, anything. If Google decides you’re doing something that makes Google look stupid, you might be in trouble.

I can go on record as saying I have never bought a paid link in 3+ years for a client as Hobo (apart from Yahoo). I can consider myself white hat even if I don’t put much faith in ‘hats’, I don’t spam people’s sites, I don’t use any black hat techniques as it’s too risky for my clients. 99% of the time I think I stick to Google’s guidelines (maybe it’s actually a 100% for clients). I don’t make silly claims like guaranteed first page rankings although I usually get them with a lot of work and say it’ll take me a year. I’m not secretive which SEO techniques I use. It makes for some boring sales copy and crappy rankings for our own Hobo site sometimes let me tell you.

Why tell Google you are trying to manipulate their results, even if it is to make their index better (in your opinion lol)? Do you really want your logo on the site of a SEO company that Google identifies as breaking it’s terms and conditions (which change quite a lot these days)?

Don’t ever tell anyone you have a SEO on board. Don’t ever let a SEO company say they are fondling your results either. Ask your seo company why your seo company has a link  at the bottom of your pages, and determine for yourself the risks.

Sometimes it makes those top ten results seem a bit less, well, natural, doesn’t it (?), when someone else is telling Google they got you to number 1 for *whatever*

I may as well go on record as saying some White Hat Shock troops who say to this post “you must have something to hide” are frankly, Naive to think Google (indeed anybody) is looking after their interests – if I did have something to hide i wouldn’t post this tosh.

I just spotted a person talking on a forum about potentially hiring us. I just think that’s a bad idea that’s all, even if I am sticking to the rules.

In the end, each to his own, and maybe I should stop watching conspiracy movies and wearing tin foil over my napper

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Matt Cutts Kills Internal Pagerank Sculpting With Nofollow?

Google’s Matt Cutts is attempting to clarify PR Sculpting using Nofollow for the rest of us after the recent hulabaloo surrounding his comments at a SEO conference a short time ago.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 (some are quite large) – last April I posted this about PR sculpting:

As I have said, I’ve been playing about with rel=”nofollow” on this site for 4 months, and in all honesty, in future, I won’t be relying on nofollow to sculpt unimportant pages out of any possible link graph, just optimising those pages better, or leaving them out altogether, like I used to do in 1999. It can be a useful tool in a site redevelopment, but from here on in, I’ll be keeping nofollow for bad neighbourhoods and, pending further testing, on top level blog pages, using Andy Beard’s Nofollow Dupes (ED – actualy that’s back for now for externals) although this site is still a linky love / dofollow blog (for regular contributers at any rate). (ED As Matt Cutts said that’s OK to reward regular contributers)

In June 2008 I posted this about Nofollow and PR Sculpting:

I tested it, and as far as I am concerned, on a 300 page site at least, any visible benefit is microscopic.

A lot of SEO seem really worried about this supposed change. I’m not. I won’t be changing my blog comments, I won’t be worrying about which pages pass PR, I still think you only need a TINY amount of PR for a page to rank and then it’s down to the other stuff like link diversity and anchor text. Why should the normal guy worry about passing PR? Most sites are designed to rank, not help others.

I’m still going to link out freely, and use a blog as it’s meant to be used regardless of how Google’s changed PR (unless my rankings tank of course!). If I want to make sure pages have PR, er, I’ll link to them often in a sensible navigation structure.

Sometimes I wonder if people even ever needed to hear about Google PR nevermind the “science” LOL of PR sculpting in the first place.

Anybody who reads this blog knows I test things for myself because frankly I’m just like everybody else – I don’t know the lot, nobody does, but if you’re relying on heresay and other people’s unpublished experiements without testing yourself, you’re always going to be in the dark.

In theory PR sculpting sounds cool, in practice, it is very dissapointing. Some people think it works, and perhaps on their sites it might – who knows. I remember one SEO saying at the turn of a year it worked and showing the benefits of it in terms of Google traffic. I checked my sites over the same time and recognised a slight increase in Google traffic over the same period – without any sculpting. But you never know, do you?

What do you think?

Hard Core SEO go here

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How To Change Domain Names & Keep Your Rankings in Google

If you’ve moved your site to a new domain, you can use the Change of address tool to tell Google about your new URL. We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL. Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL. The change of address tool is safe, because only verified site owners can use it. You can check the tool at any time to see the information provided to Google about your domains.

This new tool from Google will be handy for some, though, you’ll still need to know your way about some technical aspects to use it. See moving your website to another domain.

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Google Tests Displaying Images From Google Shopping Results

I’ve never seen Google using images from Google Products (Shopping Results) in such an attention grabbing manner before.

All the more reason to submit your products to this ‘underused’ and less understood service (as if instant top rankings for the goods you sell wasn’t enough).

PS – Beginners Guide To SEO Ebook (based on our free online SEO guide for noobs)is on the way – I’ve just been so busy this last 2 weeks with all the changes in Google UK Serps and client reports. It’ll go out very shortly I promise.

If you’re using Google Products (formerly Froogle and controlled via Google Base) let me know how it’s working out for you?

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Surefire Ways To Increase Google Pagerank (PR)

There seems to be a Google Toolbar Pagerank update underway. Instead of the normal announcement, I thought I’d list what I think Google PR is actually good for because for most, it’s totally useless information. Oh, and of course, how to increase your PR if you won’t be persuaded otherwise.

For the purposes of this quick article I’m very much muddying the line between Toolbar and REAL PR – two different, unsynchronised mechanisms as I understand them.

What follows is obviously my opinion based on observations I’ve made. Years ago I used to manipulate PR quite effectively, now I don’t even bother.

First - I think you only need a high Google PR if you have a LOT of pages. Otherwise, a high PR alone is quite useless. I still think PR may be a defining entry level requirement for pages to get into Google’s main, competitive results, but that’s it. For me PR is akin to having a ticket to a party. If you have one, you’re in – if not, your out, and in the supplemental results (a sort of alternate version of Google where not all filters /requirements are turned on because they are uncompetitive terms).

A PR 5 page will not necessarily outrank a PR 0 page because in the wild, other metrics matter more. I’m basing these opinions on the notion Google is still using Pagerank in some way – just not as an important ranking measure.

1. If you have a lot of pages, a lot of PR is good if you are spreading about properly
2. Getting a link from a high PR domain is cool, but only of real use in a PR donation sense if the actual page your link is on has a decent PR (ie is well linked to itself) and doesn’t have a hundred other links on there.
3. Pages on your site which have a grey bar *might* be an indication of a potential issue or indeed G might have a problem with OR
4. It can also be a simple sign you’re not linking to pages often enough in the site structure. Then again…. it might be just a bug with the toolbar.
5. A high PR might be an indication of the popularity and reputation of a site, but then again, it might be a hijacked PR sourced by a crafty SEO who’s spotted a conduit that can be exploited.
6. A page’s high PR might be a good indication of the popularity of that page, and a 2 second test to determine the canditure of that page to get a link from, and I still use it as such

I do think Google has gone a long way over the last 18 months to radically change the way either PR is donated, or radically reduce from which pages PR is donated.

I think a lot of it is to do with click / crawl depth. For instance, forums don’t pass a lot of Pagerank these days compared to what they used to, but maybe that’s because they’re just bigger. Most low quality directories don’t seem to pass a lot of PR. Social media sites seem to suffer the same problems as forums. I don’t think blog comments pass a lot of PR either.

The fact is nobody knows how it works these days, it’s probably far removed from the original pagerank paper, and while it may still be a defining entry level requirement for competitive SERPS, it’s not an important element AT ALL when it comes to ranking pages that are already in the SERPS – there are other, much more important influences.

How To Improve Your Pagerank Score

First, if you want a particular page on your site to have PR, make sure it’s original content, and unique enough that Google would want to keep it in it’s index. For instance, a list of links often goes Grey. Pages with duplicate content, and those not linked to often enough in the site structure is also a surefire way of going grey.

1. Get links from real sites
2. Get links from pages than in turn have links to them
3. Links from articles with a few links that You are the main focus of are excellent
4. Getting a link in the Yahoo directory for instance, still looks like a great way of getting an instant PR boost, great for new sites, but it costs £199 for a year
5. Getting a link on a trusted domain’s resource page (ie for jobs, events etc) like a university or government site
6. Buy an old or expired domain, or comandeer an old domain network that has PR, and transfer PR in by way of links or 301s.

In the end, you should not be thinking about improving your Pagerank. Pagerank is an after effect.

Just get links from real sites and forget about Pagerank.

If you’re Toolbar Pagerank score is reduced this PR update, it just means the links you have are passing less PR or the links you had have been removed. That’s nothing to be worried about if you’re actively promoting your site, and it won’t have an impact on your traffic or rankings, if you have a smidgeon of PR left.

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Topsy Search Engine For Twitter Looks Cool

A new search engine called Topsy launched today, and it’s pretty cool. Here’s what it thinks of our free seo guide.

Interestingly it ranks pages by Retweet (ie when somebody likes it they pass it on or retweet it).

I wonder if search engines or Tweet engines like Topsy will usher in a great Twitter Follower Cull on accounts who realise sheer numbers isn’t the game anymore.

If they are using some sort of “influence rank” wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that somebody that follows a few hundred people and is followed in turn by a thousand or two is more influencial than someone that is followed by 50,000 and in return follows 50,000 (especially if the accounts themselves are low quality).

As with every search engine it seems, it starts with numbers, then some sort of authority needs to be calculated.

LOL What a waste of time if all you’ve done by then is to focus on numbers and forget about the quality of your Twitter followers.

More about Topsy on Techcrunch. It is a pretty good idea and it’ll be interesting to see how this sort of engine develops in 2009. Well gameable at the moment I think!

Note – I wonder why some links seem to be search engine friendly and others are nofollowed…?

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Search Engine Optimisation Vanity Fun With Google News

How’s that for some search engine optimisation vanity?

Pure Vanity

I’ve been playing about with Google news seeing as most “seo news” pulled in there is absolute low grade bollocks. If you’re running a site, Google News syndication is certainly something to mess about with.

Remember to let me know what you think of the blog

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Introduce Yourself & Let Me Know What You Think Of The Blog

We’ve nearly got 2000 subscribers on the blog. I was hoping if you’re recieving this via email, feedburner or just passing, you’d let me know any of the below;

• What you think of the blog, it’s tone and content
• What areas of Google SEO you’d like me to cover
• If this blog has helped you in any way promote your site
• What you think might be improved

I’m very very close to sending out the free SEO Guide PDF of our free search engine optimisation guide if I can get out from under my pesky client work – please bear with me

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Prevent Google Indexing Internal Search Results Pages?

Google says to do it using Robots txt.

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines. Google Webmaster Help

Perhaps it comes down to how much value these pages add to your visitors if they land on these pages from search results. I see many websites (especially big sites) that allow their internal search results to be spidered by Googlebot. Of course, if you follow Google’s advice and if people are linking to your search results pages too, and you robots.txt them out, you might be losing out on incoming link equity. Andy beard wrote about something similar some time ago- – SEO Linking Gotchas Even the Pros Make.

Search Engine Land wrote a couple of years ago about this same issue, as did Matt Cutts.

I have used various methods to manage internal search engine results pages over the last few years, but it annoys to see bigger brands ignore this Google guideline (where they benefit). Of course, they could well be screwing themselves in other ways with regards to ignoring this directive and allowing Google to crawl and return these internal serps.

I am no expert in this area. Do you prevent Google indexing the internal search results of your website and how do you do it?

Interested in learning more about Robots.txt? – check out our robots.txt beginners guide with Sebastian – the respected writer of Sebastians Pamphlets

My Twitter buddy Edward Lewis pointed me to this site for more information on Robots Meta Tags if you want to get deep

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How Google, Yahoo & MSN Handle Title Snippets If They Choke On A Page Title

I showed recently Google will use the next available Header, be it a H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 if your page title element is screwed.

The snippet below shows Google using a H6 header as the page title.

Yahoo will actually ignore the Header tags on the same page and elect to use the anchor text of incoming links

MSN / Live seems to just go for it, and index the title as much as possible (@ 75 characters?)

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Using Twitter & Tweetstats To Optimise Your Staff’s Productivity In The Office?

Do you know how much time your staff are spending on Twitter? Join in with me as I optimise a member of my web design teams productivity, and even have a say what I greet him with in the morning.

The rise of Twitter as a social networking / promotion tool is well documented, even in this blog. Tweetstats actually give you individual users twitter activity stats. I thought it would be fun to have a look at one of the young folk at Hobo to see how he was using it.

OK our young prodigy joined in august 2008 – he’s a website designer – which coincided with his Twitter usage as you can see from the graph below. Month on month, he seems to be enjoying himself and getting to be quite fond of Twitter – as perhaps his 400 followers might testify

Next up is his daily usage. Below, you can Tuesday seems to be his favourite Twitter. Monday and Wednesday close seconds. MMMM… I think the boy needs more work on Mondays, Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays…. perhaps especially Tuesdays!.

Below, you see what time of the day he does most of his Twittering. He seems to be more active in the mornings with Twitter density increasing as he heads for mid afternoon.

The below chart might be a bit clearer. He seems to a bit of a slow starter but around ten oclock in the morning, bless him, he’s pushing 72 tweets an hour. That’s a total of 1021 tweets all told up to now. Certainly, he seems to be enjoying Twitter.

What can I do with this information? Well if it’s accurate, for a start, he’s getting more work on the above days mentioned, I’ll be making sure his work diary is a bit more fuller in the mornings too. In fact I think I’m going to ride him like Seabiscuit over the next wee while

I’ll leave it up to you to determine what I say to him when I get into the office after meetings tomorrow (about 12 noon GMT).

1. Congratulations on embracing Twitter! Keep at it, it’s a valuable networking and promotion tool!
2. That must be impacting productivity. No more Twitter during work days for you my young protege I have your career to mould!
3. Congratulations on embracing Twitter. Now limit your Twitter usage and get back to work or I’m going Alan Sugar on your ass!

Vote Below, or add your comments

Check out your staff’s productivity on Twitter at Tweetstats

MMMM… added a timely post

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Twitter & The Coolest Tweet Ever, Courtesy Of NASA Astronaut

Mike Massimino recently twittered;

I’m going to put my spacesuit on, next stop: Earth Orbit!!

He’s a NASA astronaut! Now surely that Tweet at least is a bit more interesting than some of the more moronic pointless chats I’ve seen on Twitter in my time. Perhaps it is appropriate that just about two hours ago we saw the first tweet from outer space if, of course, we’re to believe Mike Massimino is not in a studio somewhere in the Nevada desert ( ha! – check out this recent post at Techcrunch)

From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!

And the chart above is not his recent trajectory.

This is Twitter’s phenomenal visitor growth chart and it’s really taking off. What you see in the chart above is U.S. numbers for April, 2009  and it shows Twitter reaching 17 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, which is an 83 percent increase from March when Twitter captured 9.3 million US visitors. Techcrunch has more.

Twitter’s a great networking tool, and most of your customers, especially in B2B are probably already using it. Maybe you should too.

Follow Hobo on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Hobo_Web

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Google Will Use H1,H2,H3,H4,H5 & H6 Headers As Titles For Page Snippet

I like finding Google’s limits. I ran a quick test to see if Google will use any Header Tag as a page title if for some reason it does not like the page title element you give it (as I thought it might).

The result was if the title element is malformed, Google will use any available Header, be it a H1, H2, H3 H4 H5 or H6 as the page title.

The snippet below shows Google using a H6 as the page title. Some other interesting observations to follow but for now check out how Yahoo & MSN handle a malformed title.

Google Using Headers as Page Title in SERP Snippet

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Online Purchasing of Goods and Services (Age Verification) Bill

We work with a lot of retailers and they might find this interesting. If a bill is approved to the next stage today, many online retailers might have to change the way the sell online in the UK. EEK.

A Parliamentry Bill which looks to regulate online sales of age restricted goods will be presented to the House of Lords today (Friday 8 May 2009) for its second reading by Baroness Doreen Massey who is the Chair of the All-Party Children’s group.

Baroness Massey’s Online Purchasing of Goods and Services (Age Verification) Bill is a call for all online retailers and organisations who sell age-restricted goods to establish a comprehensive system to allow them to determine whether or not a person purchasing the products meet the legal minimum age to actually allow them to make that sale.

Some of the main products for sale which would be affected by the Bill are:

• knives
• alcohol
• tobacco
• DVDs
• video games
• spray paints
• solvents

The provisions of Baroness Massey’s Bill are aligned with the Gambling Act 2005 which has resulted in remote gambling operators now using specialist age verification companies to carry out this verification or online databases to verify the age of the buyer in question, rather than users merely ticking a box to confirm that they are over 18, as is the common practice.

If Baroness Massey’s Bill does come into force, thousands of online retailers in the UK would need to change their practices according to Netidme.

“With the growth of Internet shopping, retailers face new challenges – they can no longer simply ask the person in front of them for identification so it is essential that a system is put in place to ensure adult goods are only sold to those who should have them.” NetIDme

I wonder what a game changer this will be if it comes into force? If you sell online you might want to check this one out.

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Top Ten Most Popular Versions Of IE (Internet Explorer) Of Last 50,000 Visitors

I *&^%*£% hate Microsoft Internet Explorer. It’s probably the single longest pain in the backside I’ve encountered in nearly ten years making websites. Ask any website designer or developer – and browser compatibility issues are still an issue. I use Firefox and may well consider using Chrome when it arrives for the Apple Mac.

This site got @50,000 visitors in the last 4 weeks or so. I was interested how many of them where still using Internet Explorer.  So here’s the breakdown at least for our, admittedly, little more tech savvy audience.

It’s good to see Firefox is the most popular browser now with over 50% of the visitors to this site, but a lot of people still use IE. That’s what a monopoly does for you I suppose.

Most Popular Browsers

In fact nearly 35% of visitors choose IE as their browser and the screenshot below illustrates:

• 70% of Internet Exporer users are using IE7,
• 20% are using IE6 and
• 10% are using IE8.

Most Popular Internet Explorer Versions

Looks like we’ll still be supporting IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8 for a while yet….. unfortunately.

Not many people at all use IE 5 any more thank god.

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Google SEO Basics – A Free Reference Guide

This is the comments page for our new Google SEO – For Beginners

I was going to update the DIY SEO Guide and my What Is SEO articles on the Hobo SEO Blog but I thought I would create a new page entirely – a starter guide for those looking to learn more about SEO. I hope it’s enough useful information for those looking to learn more about search engine optimisation.

For seasoned SEO I don’t think there will be many surprises, but I’m really looking to make the page a resource so any comments or suggestions are much appreciated and I’ll add and cite the most useful additions with a link. Add your comment / suggestion below or email me directly.

Link to: Google SEO – For Beginners

Let me know what you think!

PS – Thanks to Edward Lewis at SEO Consultants in the US for letting the cat out of the bag

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Surely Nikki Catsouras Car Crash Photos Should NOT be on Google Images?

It’s been a long day writing out reports for clients. Taking a break (!) I opened my feedreader and was was curious to find a rising trend “nikki catsouras decapitated” on Google Trends – no idea who she was so I popped over to Google Trends to see what the fuss was about:

I was NOT interested in seeing the images of the poor girl, but I was interested in seeing if Google Image Search did indeed deliver the ‘goods’ to this rising wave of obviously too-curious-for-their-own-good searchers.

Eyes squinted to avoid seeing any carnage, I searched for the girl’s name.

I was kind of shocked to see, that even with Google STRICT SAFE SEARCH on, you can still see the grisly car accident photos leaked to the press by scumbags if you search for JUST HER NAME on Google Image Search. I took a screenshot but wouldn’t dare post them here or even link to a source.

Surely it wouldn’t be that much of a hassle for Google to remove these images, and clean up the SERPS for this and related terms and give a much more sanitised SERP, promoting sites like this Nikki Catsouras page and help the family out a little. Maybe Matt Cutts knows a bod at Images.

According to Newsweek magazine, the Catsouras “accident was so gruesome the coroner wouldn’t allow her parents to identify their daughter’s body.” However, photographs of the scene of Catsouras’ death were taken by California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers as part of standard fatal vehicle accident procedures. These photos were then forwarded to others within the Department, and then spread across the Internet. WIKI

It is not Google’s fault of course, but Google IS the internet to many people and of course it’s probably not as easy as it first sounds to clean it up but this is one SERP I’d like to see hand edited. One time I would like Google NOT to deliver so well.

That’s not all Matt Cutts might be interested in -

According to trendmicro.com, a site has been optimized to appear as the first result in Internet searches for “Nikki Catsouras.” The malware contains several variants of worms and viruses.

Maybe the spam team really does need to look at this SERP!

PS – I wouldn’t suggest you search for these images. They will undoubtedly upset you.

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Greenock Based Hobo Web Designer Jack Osborne in .Net Magazine

Hobo web designer Jack Osborne was recently featured in the July edition (#189) of .net magazine.

Within the article ” Get your first job in web design ” Jack has documented the process where he made the transition from higher eduction into full-time employment. The article covers some of processes that he used and pointers that he has been given along the way.

Aspects covered within the article are:

• Creating, tailoring and maintaining your website
• Using social networks to enhance your online identity
• Making sure your cv is of standard to send away to companies.

With the recession looming large and many students looking to make the same transition this year be sure to grab your copy and get yourself ahead of the pack.

Jack’s playing with HTML 5 on his personal site (Jack Osborne) if you want to catch up with him (or follow him on Twitter – he’s always finding cool css and web design stuff).

Any budding website designers based in Greenock interested in working at Hobo, or getting a summer placement or a weeks work experience, do get in touch with us.

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Some Google Toolbar Grey Pages Do Not Pass Anchor Text Value Or PR?

First – I actively monitor Grey google toolbars on internal pages on various sites. I love it when I see a new one

Having a Google Toolbar Grey bar, (pages that look, according to Google’s toolbar for your web browser, to have no Pagerank) while it may have no apparent detrimental affect to ranking the actual page in SERPS, *might* be an indication that page is not passing anchor text value or pagerank.

I’ve tested it on a couple of pages. I can’t find a grey bar page that i can determine passes anchor text value. The same pages appear to pass pagerank, but on closer inspection, this might be because of syndication to other sites. as I monitor the phenomenon, it’s interesting to see which pages pop up with Grey Toolbar values. The last one I saw (which appeared from nowhere) was a page with sloppy internal anchor text variation to the same page, low link equity and a possible slight dupe content issue.

But what is the meaning of the Google Grey bar? If it is not a ranking penalty, perhaps it’s a sign the page isn’t passing value to other external sites?

Some other notes:

• Typically pages that have relatively less links pointing to them, but well linked to pages can have a grey toolbar too
• Pages with no Toolbar PR do rank so they must have real PR – in most cases for ‘honest’ pages toolbar grey has no detrimental effect in rankings even for mildly competitive phrases
• Obviously pages that are nothing more than manipulation or engage in shady links somewhere, or have a severe duplicate content issue, might have grey bar and will probably not be in the Google SERPS
• Some pages don’t seem to pass anchor text value, some do (although this could be because of syndication issues by scraper sites and duped and reworked content)
• Pages with a toolbar grey may still apparently pass PR to other pages (I tested this specifically a couple of months ago) with one link to a new site from a greybar page I thought might have been a 3 or a 4 – and the site got a PR 2 I think (although again this could be syndication ripples ie links from other sites that’s republished this blog’s content).
• Common problems associated with Toolbar Gray which caused the page to dissapear from Google *sometimes* seemed to suffer from dupe content issues, and another typical example was pages with just links.
• Pages with low link trust that have different anchor text links to the same destination page
• Pages with links to irrelevant sites which Google *thinks* could be paid links (which are against Google terms of inclusion)

Results? It’s buggy thats for sure – and it’s probably meant to be. You cannot make any assumption about a page with Toolbar PR grey until you look at it, how it’s linked to within the site, who it links to, where it ranks and if it’s links are passing anchor text ranking value – so this isn’t a simple check.

Some pages did seem to pass value, but on closer inspection, I found these articles republished on other sites, so there’s a chance some of these links passed on the anchor text.

Theories – I think if you have a toolbar grey page,

• the page may be either brand new and Google does not know about it
• google is ignoring it because it has a problem with it (like too much dupe content),
• the page does not have enough trusted link equity,
• Google may have penalised it for something like too little unique content
• or doesn’t like what the page links to (a paid link?),
• how the linking is set up or
• it looks like a traditional links page (which Google doesn’t like)

Of course, it also could be a bug. It sure is glitchy!

What to do

• Check if the page ranks in Google for it’s title / main keywords – if it does, it’s not penalised – maybe it just isn’t passing anchor text (although that’s not to say every page with toolbar pr passes value).
• Get more links to the page in the internal navigation and in page and see if it’s a lack of trusted links problem.
• Examine who the page links to (a possibility but I see the same type of linking on pages with PR) – I surmise a page might need a certain level of trusted links
• Is the text totally unique? Rewrite it.
• Does this page look like a links page? Change it.
• Trying to do too much with your anchor text? Change it.
• If it’s a low quality page with little traffic anyways, sometimes I just 301 Redirect it to the most relevant page on the site

Finally. If you see a grey toolbar – check to see if there’s any issues I’ve highlighted above. Sometimes it looks like a glitch, sometimes not. If it ranks and you’re not bothered about spreading link equity to other sites, don’t worry about it (for now). Remember – not every grey bar links page pass no weight!

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Go Off Topic & Get Natural Links From Trusted Sites

A lot of SEO & Internet Marketing blogs will say pump out a lot of relevant content on your blog, build a resource all around a specifc subject. Even Google says to do the same. What you won’t normally hear is to improve your traffic, improve the number and quality of your links to your website is to go off topic…. write about anything that is timely – especially when it’s even slightly topical.

While on the whole of course that’s good advice, I’ve went off topic on a number of times. Because of that I’ve been linked to by authority sites that wouldn’t link to a seo company normally.

I had a PR 9 link once because I wrote about something ‘slightly‘ off topic. Today I was linked to a .edu on a ‘slightly‘ off topic subject to an article I wrote 2 years ago. Last week this site got a home page link on what I can only determine was the Brazillion version of TechCrunch and sent me nearly 5,000 visitors on a link that was buried 4 pages in on the article (to an article that was a year old). The link was to a ‘slightly‘ off topic subject area but I rank number 1 for in the that competitive but similar niche.

When you go off topic into less competitive niches, you have a better chance of ranking on the first page of Google. If you are the number 1 link in a SERP, you wouldn’t believe the amount of natrual links you get just because you are already No1 – it truly is a self re-inforcing effect and can be a powerful way to attract links over time. The number 1 position truly is a self reinforcing position especially if there’s any semblance of a natural linking profile in that particular keyword vertical – ie tutorials, research, how-to etc.

These links from trusted sites help ranking your content – especially your new content. A natural link from a trusted site (or even a more trusted site than yours) can do nothing but help your site. I would think when a trusted site links to your site, the trust Google places in your site because of that link raises your own trust levels, and while not helping you rank immediately for your main terms, can help you when you publish new content in the future. Of course if the off topic trusted site links to you with good keywords you don’t get much better.

Now for sure, I don’t go that far off topic so my links are even better for linkbuilding purposes. Sometimes I’ll write about something we intend to do in a few months so it’s of use long term.

But certainly, going off topic every now and again, especially with a helpful article on your blog certainly gets you links, sometimes tons of traffic, some you wouldn’t normally recieve in your boring niche. And you know you can monitise anything if you can be bothered and take advantage of any page that’s been linked to heavily.

Sometimes it’s surprising the quality of links you get.

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

No this isn’t an article about backlinks beating content because we know the right backlinks keep nearly blank pages high in Google – for months at a time. It’s just a theory so feel free to discuss with me in the comments. Bit of a ramble. I’m thinking about this and looking for exceptions, or evidence against, and to start an honest discussion. i’m fed up pumping info out, I’d prefer to start a discussion on this one.

It’s about ranking in Google or not ranking. Based on observations.

Links effect rankings, more, they even PERMIT rankings. If you haven’t got the keywords in links you won’t feature and you certainly won’t rank.

Content is king, especially for humans, but that content can’t rank without links. I often wonder if Google needs the keyword you are wanting to rank for in the site’s link profile. If it’s not in this link profile for your site, you wont rank.

You get the keywords in your link profile by

• getting links from other websites (primary)
• internal navigation links (secondary)

I’m wondering if Google treats a page title as a tertiary link if the first two signals aren’t clear enough and especially if the content is well cited (but with poor anchor text)?)

The relationship between content and links is incestous and can’t be seperated. I think seo zones. To rank it needs to be in your link profile and in your content, more specifically in:

1. Links
2. Title
3. Content

In that order. Google is making it harder to rank without having the keyword in these zones. Even though the title is 2nd in my list, you can quickly see how pivotal your page title is. I mean can you even rank what’s more important out of the 3?

Adding a made up keyword to a page invites the supplementals to kick in with different rules – letting content rank without links (I think).

In normal serps you can have the word on the page but because it is not in the link profile it won’t rank. Though in a page title, it may rank, throw in an internal link or backlink, it will rank. I’m talking keywords here not phrases.

Perhaps authority sites rank because of their link profile, not the content (although, of course, they wouldn’t have that link profile without that content!) – But I am talking about the actual wheels that are play here.

I don’t think I need LOTS more content on one page, I think I need LOTS more titles and words in my link profile – the content just backs this up ( a strange thought if you think about it). So in effect for new pages you can get away with less content (more may increase long tail searches).

So it’s not content I am adding, I am adding important keywords (and diversity of these) to my link profile. More links less content – and I’m still not linkbuilding yet. You can do a lot of this via internal links on a strong domain.

So for ranking, the most important is:

1. Diversity of keywords in your entire link profile
2. Diversity of keywords in your page title
3. Content (enough to make a page relevant to the keywords it can rank for)

If you think this way you can get pages that don’t rank to rank, quite easily. and you don’t need to buy 100 crappy links from domainers (although that can work too lol).

But yes you can get to the end of this article and say so links beat content, and yes, they can, but you’ve missed the point of what I am on about or my writing has confused – sorry.

Mmmm…. I don’t think I needed this much content!

Note perhaps I am not thinking about this the right way. If someone can help, let me know and yes of course I know there are other things at play too.

PSST – Did you see our new SEO Reference Guide For Beginners? I certainly didn’t need that much content, but hey I went for it

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The Fastest Way To Get Pages Into Google?

It’s amazing how fast Google indexes and ranks pages. I’ve seen pages get into Google and rank in the top ten for a phrase in less than 1 minute and I recently tested just how fast Google publishes your content if you’re well connected.

If you have Wordpress installed (or any site with a RSS feed), you should have a feedburner plugin installed, then you can ping Google direct.

If you have done this nip over to Google Feedburner, sign up (none of my clients need to do this of course) and register your site. Ensure you have hit the Publiscise button and choose Ping Services. Make sure Google and Pingomatic are selected.

What I also do is sign up to the feed in my feedreader (Google).

Next time you write an article, Google knows about it, and depending on the quality of the article, the age / health / trust / authority of your site, you’ll be injecting content directly into Google – and fast.

This works for me. I wonder if it’s the fasted way to actually get your blog content into Google?

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Google SEO Test – Crawling & Indexing Time Trials

A Google SEO Test…. well observation. Just an idea that was in my drafts I had to document the anatomy of Google’s indexing processes. In this test I am just observing and recording what seems to happen, and what you might be able to expect when publishing content. I know generally what to expect but it’s always good to have a peak so I will check back every now and again till I got the data. I use Wordpress, RSS & Feedburner (pinging Google Blogsearch) to instantly syndicate the Hobo articles so I expect a few things to happen:

1. Get into Google serps in a few minutes
2. Dissappear for a while again
3. Come back into the serps & stabalise
4. Get Cached by Google
5. Rank

So how long did it take to index my new page when I pressed publish, and what happened to the page in SERPS:

• My Feedreader (instantly – though there can be a delay sometimes)
• Google Blog Search (15 minutes)
• Google SERPS (30 minutes – so Google knows about it)
• 1 hour UK position 25
• 12 Hours later top 10 UK
• Cache accessible within @18 hours, I can access it use using the info:command, but the cache is not available in the SERPS yet
• A few days later Google dropped it from the SERPS as expected. Today it seems to be back on page 2 of Google.
• During this period the page is not even returned in a site: command but it is using the page info:command.

This is all down to the way Google handles fresh up-to-date content – see QDF Query Deserves Freshness. If you get a handle on it, you see why online business authority and being first with the news is KEY to getting traffic out of Google. I’ve got 12,000 visits from Google alone in just over 24 hours fiddling with that – but you’ve got to be fast out of the traps.

So I would expect rankings to stabalise, and those rankings will depend a lot on the authority of this site, the relevance of my page title, the content and over time, how well linked it is within this site (which a lot of people forget about) as I don’t really expect too many incoming links to the page. Of course, rankings will depend on how well ‘optimised’ the competition is for the term.

Interesting Note - Google seems to have little issue with my blog and this is fairly common interaction. However when I fiddled about with how many posts my Feed published (ie increased from 50 to 300), I seemed to run into probs with Feedburner picking up my posts. Wonder if this slows things down somewhat? As soon as I set it back to 50 and edited the post, bang, the articles picked up immediately, as usual.

Note See here for more Geek stuff on QDF.

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Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Search Engine – Public Preview

Wolfram Alpha is a new type of search engine developed by a computer scientist called Stephen Wolfram. It’s being said it seems to be a different kind of search engine to Google – it’s a knowledge search engine (ask a question, and Wolf will give you an answer) — whereas with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a “top ten list” of sites that *might* have what you need.

Those who have seen it in action seem to think it works and  “could be a game changer” if not a Google Killer (although remember Cuil lol).

Wolfram Alpha will be launching in May to the rest of the world. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of the public preview with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard in the US.

The sold-out Public Preview event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST 8pm British Summer Time this coming Tuesday here. I’m looking forward to playing with it – though there are a few (including Danny Sulivan) at Search Engine Land who has a bee in his bonnet about the launch.

• Watch the webcast in QuickTime: http://harmony.law.harvard.edu/webcast.sdp (Note: Will not play in RealPlayer)
• Interact in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4
• Join the Berkman IRC room: irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman

Update – 17 May – Wolfram Alpha Clearly Not A Search Engine! It’s nothing like Google.

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SEO UK or UK SEO?

It’s interesting even thinking about ranking for these two terms. I think UK SEO is more a informational vanity SERP, where SEO UK is more a transactional term, and probably more valuable (for this seo company).

I think it’s a bit less spammy when linkbuilding to rank for UK SEO than the alternative especially when blog commenting (not done that for a while though I don’t really linkbuild to this site that much any more – although I have in the past tried and get the odd link from a decent website with the exact anchor text match – probably why we rank on page 1 for UK SEO). I’ve certainly had more of a focus on content the last year or so that’s a nice result.

It’s interesting when you think about it. When you break down the search and try to get into the mind of the actual searcher and understand what they do when looking for something. Did they type in SEO first, then modify with a UK to narrow the search? Probably. Maybe that’s why Google says there is more searches for SEO UK than UK SEO using their keyword tool (last time I looked)?

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Google SEO: How To Best Use Meta Tags

Someone asked me about meta tags recently – everybody who says they know a bit about seo usually starts with meta keywords speak which tells you a lot right off the bat, generally speaking about the title, keywords and description “tags”. Optimising the metatags Google looks at is still important, but not complicated.

How To Use Meta Tags Properly For Humans

Your title tag provides the caption and your meta description tag completes the call to action – together, they form the ultra-important ‘hook’ of your advertising in the search engines. They are the only meta tags you really need at this time because most search engines at least look at them. For most, those are the only meta tags you will need – these 2, and one of them isn’t even a metatag.

How To Use Meta Tags Properly For Google

• Title Element - 1-12 words max (with page keyword) – Google displays 70 characters in SERPS – I like to keep titles to within this and ensure my important keywords are within the first 55 characters. MOST IMPORTANT – Your page title is a key element when it comes to ranking in Google! I tested what you can do with the title tag some time ago.
• Meta Description – 5-24 words max (with page keyword to activate in SERPS) – Google displays 160 characters on most searches. Descriptions can be larger on long-tail searches. IMPORTANT! If you analyze the Meta description in snippets you can see a little more of how Google works, where it breaks, where it looks for another useful snippet. However, you do not need a meta description.

What about the Meta Keywords Tag? Again, not needed, and I have generally ignored this for a long time. I’ve split tested a lot and see no benefit at all in Google. It’s very hard to determine if Google is using the description when ranking – it might a little for relevance – but it clearly won’t return unique phrases found only in this region. I will write down why I think this is the case shortly.

The only other useful meta for the Google SERPS is the Robots Meta Tag (again which you do not need and shouldn’t use if you have never heard of it and have no need for it), and only to tell it wether or not to keep a page content out of Google.

For Google most other meta tags (for content purposes) are useless. You cannot control crawl frequency with any meta tag that’s for sure, and if even this is new to you, just concentrate on optimising your page titles and making them unique to every page on your website.

Note: Page Titles (or Title Elements) and Meta Descriptions should be unique to every page on your site. Don’t duplicate them or your site will suffer. If you haven’t got the time to optimise each description, I’d take it out (if you are optimising for Google of course).

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Google Profiles – How To Get Your Face On Google SERPS

Google has went all social with a new service called Google Profiles. This means when you “Google Me“, for instance, as I already have a profile set up, a picture of me features in the actual SERPS. At first it’s a vanity thing, but Google’s really getting in on the act of actual finding and giving you more user friendly information on people now possibly with an eye on the success Facebook is.

It used to be reseved for famous people, social networkers and people with websites, but now anybody can have a crack at featuring at page one in Google for their name (my first act as an seo back in the day was to see how many of the top 20 positions I could get for my name – and I think I ended up with most of them at one point). It’s not really something I am that interested in any more, but you might find it useful for your own purposes.

Search for ‘Shaun Anderson’ for instance when logged into my Google Account and my picture appears at the bottom of the SERPS.

It is working at the moment in the UK SERPS as the screenshot above shows. From a test I did, it’s clear Google is reading the whole page when coming to ranking the Google Profile so better get it optimised fully. The page itself DOES rank for your name, and DOES pass some anchor text value in the test I did too, although that’s before I changed the vanity URL (or it might not now). Google encourages you to, for instance, add your other social network profiles (probably to see who to buy next lol). Don’t be stupid and spam it of course!

I don’t think much of the vanity URL but I was lucky to have a gmail account near the beginning so my Vanity URL (which is tied to your Google Account) is www.google.com/profiles/anderson.shaun although I will think I’ll use Shaun Anderson as the text in this case.

It’s been connected to my Google Account for a while, so your actual profile page could still be one of the organic listings as well as this new feature, but Google just announced they will be making more of Google Profiles in the future – why not get yours for free. There’s more at TechCrunch.

Hey, it’s another way for people to find you. And it’s free. And it gets your face on Google. And it’s another low quality link as well, for now anyways.

Related: Search For Me On Google

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Google Toolbar Pagerank Update – April 1/2 2009

Well, it’s here. Google seems to be updating it’s toolbar pagerank scores.

What you get lol

How do I Know? This page from 2/3 weeks ago has Google PR.

• http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/the-bbc-linking-out-could -help-uk-businesses-this-recession/

Remember Toolbar Pagerank is very much the subject of debate too.

The cut off (according to my friend Dom) appears to be March 15th.

Learn more about Google Pagerank and why the Toolbar PR green bar is not as useful as it used to be.

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Illustrating Google Double Listing Ranking Strategy

Last week I mentioned optimising your site to take advantage of Google double or indented listings. Earlier I wrote about the next Google Pagerank update and I thought this was an ideal opportunity to illustrate what I meant about double listing optimisation – a very simple seo tactic.

1. Customers where asking me about the ‘pending’ PR update
2. When I was browsing my logs I noticed I was getting a fair bit of trafic from people wanting to know ‘when is the next pagerank’ too
3. I considered I could kill two birds with one stone and do a post, as I noticed I never really answered this exact query in the ranking post.

I checked Google and saw I was in fact no2 result and still getting traffic. I also noticed that if I optimised a page correctly, I’d get a double listing, and push the competitor website from 1 to actually position 3.

Here’s where I started – number 2 in Google UK:

and below is the end result – Number 1 and 2 in Google (see here). I knew if I optimised for the actual query it would pick my page and promote the original page on my domain above the ‘competitor’ page.

Now I’ll get more traffic and most of the traffic from this term until somebody does it to me.

It’s this exact scenario any site content editor can replicate, writing different pages on your site targeting different variations on a theme rather than just continuously edit one page in search of ranking nirvana (No1).

You can use the same tactic with every page on your site, although it’s far easier to optimise for a less competitive term (like the one illustrated).

Double Listings, Double The Work, Double The Return

Ok not quite double the return, but this strategy boosts targetted traffic around content you already have. Yes, unfortunately it means double the work in some cases, but it’s worth it.

Note – Not sure how many birds I am killing with this stone. I might get a double listing about double listings too. UK SERPS anyway.

Qucik tip – check your stats, see what’s bringing the traffic in, optimise more pages for those terms to increase your traffic and clickthru rate (when I see a double listing I usually think “this website talks about this topic a lot, perhaps it’s an authority on the subject” – perhaps others do to).

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When Is The Next Google Pagerank Update?

Edit – 1 / 2 April 2009 – Toolbar Pagerank Update 2009

One of the reasons I write in this blog is transparency. 3 different people asked me today when will the next Google Pagerank update happen, and when I say they shouldn’t be concerned with this, there’s always a little surprise as there is so many people in forums discussing Google PR, Toolbar PR and it’s “update”.Google exports a snapshot of toolbar PR data which in December was less than a month out of date (2 weeks?) and this data is a simplified version you can see using the free Google toolbar. People reported an update in February although I don’t think this was network wide like the December export.

There is an update due any time now – if you really want to know when it happens subscribe to the blog and you will be updated when Toolbar Pagerank… updates.

Real Toolbar PR is calculated constantly we are told, so the actual toolbar PR you see is ‘out of date’ and only an indication of your REAL PR. I think it takes @24 hours for a page to accrue real PR – as I measured it (which could be flawed of course but it does seem alarmingly accurate).

I think you only need a lot of pagerank if you have a lot of pages. I think a page only needs a smidgeon of real PR to rank. Pages have PR not domains as I understand it, although the PR you have you need to spread about your pages by linking to all the pages from pages that have PR.

I’m interested in Real PR, not toolbar pagerank. For me, the most useful aspect of the Toolbar Pagerank update is you can see a quick visualisation how your spreading your PR amongst your pages. That’s about it. Even then it’s buggy – why you should be using your own metrics. Perfectly good pages have white bar and grey bar PR. They still rank well, they have more PR than other pages on the site that do show Toolbar values.

One things for sure also in my opinion – if Google are using Pagerank these days, it’s not the same algorithm everybody cites – clearly Google tweaks this or at least the end results indicate such a change. You don’t need to know a thing about PR to make a quality site. All you need to ensure is your pages (especially important pages) are well linked to – Google will handle the rest.

Google Pagerank just doesn’t work the way it used to, it’s harder to manipulate, and results can be eratic. Google is clearly being meaner or selective with PR – links that once transferred PR now don’t (visibly at least). More a reason to forget about it especially if your site is otherwise healthy in terms of ranking and visitors.

Forget about the next Pagerank update and think about where your next link is coming from or what the next page on your website will be.

As I mentioned things change, if you’ve noticed anything of interest recently put it in the comments as I haven’t monitored it closely for months.

All link droppers that mention having a higher pr page to rank better in SERPS will be ridiculed in the comments (if not by me by someone else)…. and I will probably delete the link. Things are never equal enough for PR to be the ranking factor which you above a competitor (IMO).

PS – It’s worth noting that nobody really knows how Pagerank works these days. Not outside Google anyway.

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Google Impervious To Duplicate Content Penalties or Filters?

Duplicate content can be a nightmare for some websites. Sometimes it can harm rankings and conversions. While Google is pretty good at determining dupe content and serving up the correct page on a well put together site, even today many see duplicate content filters as actual penalties.

Actually, I’ve always considered duplicate content on one site that’s on another is an automatic penalty for one of the domains – the less authorative domain usually.

Maybe if you have mega domain authority, or a lot of organic links to both pages, duplicate content factors might be a non-issue or is that just if you are Google?.

They are very useful and free UK and US based keyword tools,  it might be a bit cheeky to complain. But I wonder if they would have those listings if they weren’t Google and how much traffic damage is that second listing doing for the 3rd in the race?

While not 100% duplicate content, the pages are remarkably similar.

What you think? Impervious or Insideous lol?

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Tilde Search Operator – 10 Second Keyword Research Tip

I don’t keyword research every post using a tool like Google Keyword Research Tool. I usually keep that for a bit more indepth analysis and exploratory work.

Most of the time when I blog I am aiming for one particluar phrase, but sometimes I will use a tilde in my search to find what Google thinks are related terms or synonyms. Google likes a page that contains original text with related terms, so it’s useful to have a peek and see what Google thinks are related terms.

It’s easy to use the Tilde Search Operator - Add “~” before your word (it’s called a tilde).

For instance, here’s the search for “~Hobo” – Without the quotes of course

You immediately see the term Tramp, History of the Book @ Oxford, & Recluse.

It really is 2 second keyword research for Google SEO, ideal for blog posts anyway.

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Finding Atlantis, Double Listings & Traffic With Google Earth

Finding the coordinates of Atlantis with Google Earth gave me an excuse to publish data that went with my recent article where I discussed how many words or phrases you can actually optimise a page for:

While i focus on how many words I can fit in 55 -70 characters, correct keyword research, a bit of topical relevancy and some luck unlocked a reasonable amount of traffic. Focusing on those 70 characters actually meant I was optimising for 139 unique relevant search queries my page was deemed suitable for.

Link:

Google Analytics Stats

With a bit of luck Google doesn’t think I’m keyword stuffing here and Google will give me the double listing I was on about yesterday.

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Add Windows Live Messenger Chat To Your Website

Might be worth checking out.

{smartads}Microsoft today released some tools to add chat facilities to Websites.

That’s a potential 320 million active Windows Live Messenger users your website could be talking to. Visitors who want to chat on Websites with the feature will have to sign up if they don’t already have an account.

I think I’ll be having a look and see what it’s like. I’ve tried these chat services before and the main reason I didn’t like them was they were ugly.

Kind of difficult to blend into some of the designs we needed a chat system (or so we thought). And it really comes down to your business model if this sort of service is useful or not.

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How To Get Double or Indented Listings in Google

Someone asked me what Google Double or Indented Listings where today, and how to get them. Simply put, it’s when you have two listings from the same website in the top ten results in Google instead of one (in normal view with 10 results).

Generally speaking, this means you have at least two pages with enough link equity to reach the top ten results – two pages very relevant to the search term. You can achieve this with relevant pages, good internal structure and of course links from other websites. It’s far easier to achieve in less competitive verticals but in the end is does come down in many cases to domain authority.

To get a double or indented listing;

1. A bit of Domain Authority
2. Targetted, relevant articles
3. Internal Linking (esp between articles)
4. The odd link from external sites (if any)

ie nothing spectacular. It’s quite simple stuff.

A Google Indented or Double Listing

Say a page is in position 1 and another page from the same site has position 8 (in a regular top ten view in Google preferences). Google will join these listings together in position 1 and two, giving you the lions share of the clicks.

This represents 20% of the Google organic listings instead of  the usual 10% – and an increase in clicks to your properties. You would be crazy not to optimise a second page if you had a page in the top ten – especially in less competitive niches.

If you want double listings (or indented listings), add relevant content on your site that meets the expectations of a searcher looking for that particular phrase and you’ll probably aquire them naturally if you have some relevant links too. If you want a more surgical approach, you’ll need at least two pages optimised for the same term and interlinked closely.

It might not be obviously apparent which page on your site is ranking 2nd if it is in the 2nd or 3td page of results but find it and then optimise it, linkbuild to it (start with internal links) and when it hits the top ten, you’ll get a double listing.

Andy Beard & Aaron Wall comments on double listings too if you want to learn more.

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BBC Linking Out Could Help UK Businesses In Recession

Just last week, I read an article on the BBC, totally generated by the PR efforts of a small company, that was the most emailed piece on the site that day. How did the BBC choose to reward the company? – with a mention of the company’s web address that wasn’t a regular clickable link.Google today counts links (and it really needs to be a clickable link direct to the company website with no fancy redirect) from such sources as the BBC as the most trusted, important links on the Web. These links are like Gold Dust, and can really go a long way to identifying real websites for Google, a means to seperate the good from the bad in the internet cesspool. If the BBC does not link out, it really is a disservice to businesses.

The BBC might be about to actually help UK businesses this recession though and in a way that will no means hurt the BBC. Erik Huggers who works for the BBC believes that the broadcaster should be using its top 10 ranking in UK internet traffic to help out other British sites and that is 100% correct. But it should be google-friendly links they use that actually cite the other website to Google, so Google can give it ranking benefits.

Huggers – who is the Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC – points out that, of the UK top-10 most visited sites, only the BBC is a UK site, and insists that the time has come to ‘aggressively’ link out to other UK sites.

“The BBC’s online presence is the only British owned presence in the top 10,” Huggers said at a DTG conference. “Everything else in the top 10 in terms of the most visited is foreign – the BBC is the only one in there. Rather than trying to keep all that traffic inside the BBC’s domain we’re going to link out very aggressively and help other organisations pull their way up on the back of the investments that the BBC has made in this area.”

I wonder if he means Google friendly links? If not, then while they send traffic to the site in question, which is of course a step forward, the BBC is still mising a trick to help us UK businesses out.

This recession it won’t hurt the BBC to link out to other sites, and it could really help UK businesses get the most out of Google, where most internet traffic is channeling through. Ha you could even hide the odd paid link in there amongst that lot

Related;

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7909561.stm
• http://www.thebabywebsite.com/article.1792.Silly_Names.htm

Got a comment on the BBC linking practices?

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The Excellent 2009 Think Visibility Leeds Conference

You might have missed Think Visibility in Leeds this year, but I recommend you keep a lookout for tickets on sale for September 2009 (I think). Congrats to Dom (spot the link!) – @thehodge – for organising the very enjoyable and successful Think Visibility conference 2009 in Leeds. What a great event packed with great speakers discussing seo, affiliate marketing, blogging, analytics and a lot more;

Andrew Burnett, Chris Garrett and Me (Chris Clarkson & DaveN can be seen in background)

I seemed to spend a lot of time with Big @ChrisClarkson (his Think Visibility write up here) and enjoyed it when we wasn’t trying to sell me cheap holidays – he is the guy to squarely blame for me and our Irish friend’s (@AMcDermott) Alastair McDermott’s hangover on conference day.

I enjoyed listening to every speaker as I sat nursing my pre -conference beer hangover though;

1. My friend the Evil Genius Tim Nash (when not hacking DaveN’s Twitter account with Dom) was using buckets and explosives to metaphor something but I was still suffering at this time in the morning – very dissappointed to miss the man in the white coat stuff at the very start
2. Al Carlton (@AlCarlton) & Kieron (@kierondonoghue) was talking affiliate marketing and although I had a very bad hangover, I really took a lot of good things from their talks – inspirational advice
3. Chris Garrett (@chrisgarrett) is a very nice guy and a pleasure to meet who has written a great book about making money blogging and did a solid presentation with 25 points about successful blogging
4. Guy Redwood (@eyetracking) did a fascinating presentation about eyetracking – I picked up a lot of ideas from this
5. Dave Naylor (@davenaylor) was talking about ranking for UK terms & crap you here from some desperate seo companies and playing about with online business authority – his! A real pleasure to meet him and his wife BeckyNaylor. Thanks again Dave for your advice about my issue in our private chat.
6. Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) gave an interesting talk on reputation management issues and solutions but unfortunately I was a little poorly by this stage to try and get 5 minutes with him and I think might have been an affiliate for brides from foreign lands or something but the room was packed, and hot, and my head was spinning by this point – I think I was actually sitting on the floor
7. I nearly never made it to Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) discussing different types of links (I’ve been thinking along those lines for a long time as well) – but I am glad I did because he gave a very relaxed professional presentation i as I expected him to do. I’d ended up at that one but dissappointed I missed Search Engine Chocolate’s (Joanna Jay Butler’s) presentation on Google Analytics

It was a real pleasure to spend time with Andrew (@andrewburnett) and Wiebke Burnett (@wiieb) and finally meet fellow Scot Paul Steven (@NorthSouthMedia) & James (@ttsjames) and forgive me if I have missed anybody out – this is taking ages) (if you tweet me or the post I will add you in!) Shout out also to Polr, to Matt and also to Zoe Piper for a magic business card!

Liveblogged here and more here and big Chris’s event analysis is worth a read too.

Will definitely be snapping up a ticket for next year and if you’re into making money online, seo and web design everybody on this page is worth following on Twitter or subscribing to their blogs.

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New Google Tip: These Results Do Not Include The Word….

I haven’t seen this before in the UK SERPS.

Now when the words don’t actually appear on the page, Google says:

“Tip: These results do not include the word”

… at the bottom of the serps.

Why are they showing these pages if the word is not on the page? Well sometimes the word omitted is not on that page, but on another on the site. Sometimes the word is on the linking page of the site that links to that page. Sometimes it is actually somewhere in the link graph of that site. Google traditionally gives you every chance possible by counting these words if you have most of the words on the page.

It would be VERY interesting if Google was reweighting links with anchor text that don’t appear on the page. It’s actually quite difficult to produce the search result, it may be that Google, when there is definitely no relevant match with the word in page titles, it ignores that last word? I am surmising.

When I checked the serps with and without the word, there where slight discrepencies in the result, too.

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In SEO How Many Words Maximum Can I Optimize A Page For?

How many words maximum do you optimize a page for? I was asked this today at a meeting and, as it’s something I have pondered for a long time, I had to come up with an answer that made sense to someone not seo-literate.

I optimise a page for as many words as I think I can get in a title that makes sense. If Google displays @70 characters in a title in SERPS, I sort of think those 70 characters are the most important, wether or not Google reads more words in the title. I also weigh this up with my theory there is a limit on the actual amount of anchor text Google will count as a link (55 characters?).

When making my titles, if I think the page won’t be linked to, I’ll use the 70 characters. If I think it’s an article likely to be linked to, I’ll also ensure my main keywords are within the first 55 characters to ensure I am getting all the anchor text ranking benefits.

So with those thoughts in mind, how many words can you fit in 55-70 characters? That is the maximum amount of key words I would optimise any one page for. Of course there could me many phrases made up with those words beyond that and you can use the content and organic links to capture for long tail searches, but on a page to page basis, seo for me revolves around those 55-70 characters.

If it’s not in the title, links and content, I don’t expect to rank high for it in competitive or saturated niches.

I always look to optimise for phrases too, not words, and always geared to satisfy the intent of a search engine user and visitor. The actual amount of text on a page for seo purposes is kind of irrelevant and totally dependant on the site and what I am aiming to achieve.

Any thoughts, please share.

Update – Here is the sort of results you get with this strategy

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Google Now Prefers Big Brands In SERPS?

Do Google’s New US SERPS Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding?

It seems Google may now be returning well known brand names in top positions in it’s SERPS. A recent thread in the forums offered the following as an example:

Keyword: Quit Smoking
#1 – SmokeFree.gov
#2 – CDC.gov

Keyword: Laptop
#1 – Apple
#2 – Dell

Keyword: High Speed Internet
#1 – ATT
#2 – Comcast

Keyword: Car Audio
#1 – Crutchfield
#3 – Pioneer

Aaron Wall also offers us some example with his post Google’s New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding offering up some examples of brands that just started ranking.

Note these are for really valuable ‘generic’ terms – still plenty of opportunity for the little guy if you are optimising your page focusing on meeting the intent of a search engine user ie to buy a specific kind of something in your location, to learn something specific about something in your location etc.

Check out our new beginner’s guide to seo.

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Atlantis Google Earth Coordinates

Did Google find Atlantis?

{smartads}It’s being reported around the web today that Google Earth has found Atlantis

Here’s the co-ordinates to find Atlantis with Google Earth;

• coordinates: 31 15′15.53N, 24 15′30.53W (600 miles west of Morocco, deep in the Atlantic Ocean)

The man from the sun says yes but the man from Google says no, though:

“Bathymetric (or seafloor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the seafloor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data,” Google said.

It’s sonar trails, if you believe everything Google says of course

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