It looks to me like google have now fallen into a quarterly first of the month update routine, I predict that the next PR update will be on July 1st, 2009. Let’s wait and see!

Happy to report that recently redesigned Lyrical Media has just gone up to a PR6 – my highest PR site ever!

Image by husin.sani

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Last time we set up the initial page, meta content, and added some images and adsense in for good measure. Today, we’ll review the site’s progress so far and add some changes and tweaks to improve its rankings!

Current Rankings

So I suppose we should start where we usually do, and that’s an update of how our 10 selected keyphrases are ranking now, and compared to how they were previously!

* Keyphrase – Current rank (previous rank) +/- change from previous rank
** N/A = Nothing At-all in the top 300

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104 (N/A) +196
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85 (N/A) +215
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76 (119) +43
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77 (N/A) +223
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15 (N/A) +285
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60 (116) +56
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – N/A (N/A) +/- 0

So a total of 1,018 ranks higher up than last time overall.. which is good, but none of the keyphrases are on the 1st page of Google yet, which is all that really matters – so there’s definitely still a lot of work to do.

Additional Rankings

Interestingly though, the site has pulled in a whole load of other keyphrases that we weren’t actually targetting, and is ranking pretty well for them. I’ve listed the top 5 below, their current rank, and how many searches (approx) those phrases get per month.

* Keyphrase – Current rank – Approx number of searches per month (keyworddiscovery)

• Staffies – 11 – 390
• Blue Staffies – 4 – 31
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17 – 106
• Blue Staffie – 8 – 18
• Blue Staffordshire Terriers – 11 – 12

Now if you compare that to the search volume of our initial keyphrases covered in part 1, that’s not bad at all. I also cross checked this list and ran it through the Google Adwords keyword tool, which seems to think that these keyphrases receive significantly (about 4 times) more searches per month.

Adapting Our Goals and Targets

Now the sign of a good SEO campaign is one that adapts to its environment, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. I’m going to swap out some of the keyphrases that are clearly going absolutely nowhere from our original list, and swap in these new phrase which we’re already doing well with, and could be seriously improved with a bit more of a push.

So here’s our new list below, the four which I’ve removed are all the ones which have been consistantly N/A since we’ve been tracking them, and I’ve added the top four new keyphrases from the above list.

* Keyphrase – Current Rank

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60
• Staffies – 11
• Blue Staffies – 4
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17
• Blue Staffie – 8

Changing and Tweaking The Site

At the moment, the site is actually performing ridiculously well in terms of Adsense revenue, since I launched it in October it’s made me about $100 with a clickthrough rate of 5%! (very high for adsense, average on my other sites is 1-2%).

The only problem with it is that I have a bit of a moral issue with it, I put Adsense to ‘help rankings’ not really to make money at all – and I personally hate sites like this one that are basically spam+adsense… so I fell bad poluting the internet even further. So to rectify this, I’m going to add more pages in an effort to give at least SOME value to users. In addition this should increase internal linking, which will help all pages, and increase how many pages we can have indexed.

The final thing which I’m going to do (have now done) is to convert the site to Wordpress. The reason for this is that Wordpress and Google are secret lovers, and a lot of my best ever SEO results have been from wordpress driven sites.

So here’s what it looks like now:

Notes On Wordpress

I used a free theme, no work required, and I’m only using two plugins: the all in one seo pack, and the google sitemap generator. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t need to be. The most important part is that I kept the homepage content the same, and the meta content the same. We really don’t want any adverse effects from switching the site into wordress.

I should also note that using the google sitemap generator plugin I installed Google webmaster tools, and added the sitemap URL to it.

What’s Next

Well I’ve spent far too much time on this today already so I haven’t actually added any new pages yet, but I will be getting Nikki onto some more copywriting for the site over the next few days and then we’ll check back soon(ish) to see what happens!

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I don’t consider myself a full time blogger, or even a ’successful’ blogger for that matter, but it’s nice to be recognised for all the hours which I have put in once in a while!

Interview with New Web Business

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Achievements For 2008

Well given that we only launched in February of this year I think we’ve done pretty well for 2008, though still a pale immitation in comparison to some of the bigger blogs out there.

New Job

I moved jobs in 2008 from being a full time SEO engineer at an SEO agency to being lead web designer, and head of SEO at one of the UK’s leading extreme sports experience retailers [Extreme Element]. This was a great move for me and I’m chuffed to be working in a far more relaxed office environment, as well as being a core member of a company which has got some really bright prospects for the future.

Redesign

In August I purchased my very first theme from WooThemes and applied it to this site to expand it’s range a little bit as the previous free theme which we were using was pretty basic! I’m made very little visual modifications to the theme so far but you can expect it to get a little more ‘custom’ in 2009!

Launched Other Sites

Throughout the year I’ve launched a couple of other sites that all now growing very well, and in turn link back to EggRage to provide us with more coverage and traffic.

• Stunning CSS – A fresh new CSS gallery
• Sinflip – A blog for musicians to help them make money from music
• Digital Designer Forum – A forum for web designers and developers

Statistics

• We made 42 Posts for the year – An average of 1 post per week
• There are 5 Pages of static content across the site
• Posts are spread across 22 Categories
• There are currently 153 Tags in use
• We received 266 Comments across all posts
• Akismet caught 5,758 Spam Comments
• We received over 20,000 unique visitors
• And over 120,000 pages were viewed this year
• Just under 100 RSS Subscribers
• Firefox is the most used browser on this site with 61% of all traffic

Top 5 Posts (According To Traffic)

1. How To Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 Hours
2. 7 Reasons Why You Don’t Need SEO
3. Google PageRank Has Nothing To Do With Inbound Links
4. 5 Essential SEO Tools To Analyse Your Site
5. 5 Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Company

Plans for 2009

Obviously for 2009 we want to keep EggRage going as strongly as possible and keep growing our traffic figures and subscriber numbers. There aren’t any plans set in stone yet but some of the things that we’re going to be working on are listed below.

• Minor redesign
• Advanced SEO technique screen casts
• Beginners guide to SEO E-Book
• Site-wide user polls
• Lots more guest posts
• Some interviews with industry leaders

Thank You

To all of our loyal readers for 2008 – without you guys this blog wouldn’t exist, we hope to keep you on board in 2009 and make it an even more successful year! If you have any suggestions for topics which you would like to be covered in 2009 please get in touch and let us know via our contact page.

A further thanks to all of our advertisers for 2008, and to BuySellAds for providing such a great service allowing us to sell adspace on this site. If you are interested in advertising on EggRage for 2009 please check out our advertising page and get in touch!

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I think now though we’re seeing a stable and global PR update as I’ve seen pretty much all my sites change across the board, and the movement seems reasonable this time.

In case you hadn’t already noticed, EggRage has once again grown in strength and has this time moved up from its previous PR4 to its new PR5!

PS. Happy New Year!

Image by husin.sani

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1. You ask them how page titles affect search engine rankings and their eyes glaze over.

Apparently some SEO companies these days think that SEO = Link Building, god knows how they came up with that ridiculous idea but it was probably from some cult article about how ‘Google was different from all the other search engines’ that was published in the 90’s.

You cannot succeed with link building alone, and I would actually go as far as to say that you can succeed without it altogether – so what does that say about its value?

2. The office is totally silent, and people who talk are given the evil eye.

A healthy office is an office which communicates, it’s a group of individuals who are all trying to achieve a common goal together. If the office is totally silent, then it’s simply a group of individuals who happen to be working in the same place – and what the hell is the point of that?

Lack of communication within an SEO company in particular is a sure-fire way to identify a deadbeat. Lack of light-hearted talk also kills morale, and lack of morale affects client work. Do the maths.

3. They give clients advice on SEO, but they don’t actually use their own advice.

These are proabably my favourites, when you find SEO companies who advise clients to update and add to their site content frequently… but they haven’t updated their own content in about 6 months. They advise clients to blog every day with meaningful and relevant content, but they themselves have a neglected blog filled with guess what? Link building spam! Or if you’re really lucky you might find a company who advise their clients to construct dynamically generated page copy, and then replicate that copy across multiple domains – but mysteriously they aren’t too keen on implementing this practice on their own website.

4. 80% of their employees have worked there less than 2 years.

SEO isn’t exactly the most exciting of industries so it’s understandable that people may move on, but when the turnover rate is so high that the company has a full set of new faces (other than management of course) every year, then you know that something is wrong.

5. They employ a high number of ‘work experience’ students, and people with no qualifications.

How is it that you are paying premium prices for SEO but you account manager doesn’t have a background in professional website design, usability or interface consultation, internet marketing, standard marketing, or web development?

If you’re paying £500-£1000 every month for a few hours work, then how is it that the people doing the work haven’t had anything more than on-the-job training?

The Moral of The Story?

Recognise shoddy work! You wouldn’t hire a builder with a crew full of teenagers with no exerience who can’t answer your questions, so why not apply those same standards when hiring an SEO company?

Look for people and companies who are active within the industry, and when I say that – I mean actually active within the industry, writing an interesting and up to date blog and being referenced by top SEO sites. Not ponsing about because they’ve been nominated for a bunch of local business awards, thinking that this somehow makes them ‘high-profile’.

Get your money’s worth, and avoid the above! – What experiences have you had with SEO con artists? Let me know in the comments below!

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How To Write Effective Meta Content For Large Websites

First of all, when I say ‘large websites’ I’m talking 250+ pages, at which point it really becomes difficult to manually go through and write niche meta content for every single page.  When I say ‘meta content’ I am of course referring to the title and meta description, though the now seldom-used meta keywords can still fit into it if you really want them to.

Setting Up The Base Framework

The amount of work involved in writing meta content for a large site is immense, and as such is takes a very long time to do (no matter which way you choose to go about it). But what happens with the rest of your site while you’re writing all this content? You certainly can’t just leave it sitting there with no page titles or descriptions, so you need to insert a placeholder or at least something to do the job while you get the really good stuff written.

Enter the ‘base meta framework’ (a generic term which I assure you I invented and doesn’t have any greater meaning).

The framework itself consists of a dynamic statement, in this case in PHP and one which I have used before in my how to: SEO a forum post. (In this case  the meta desciption field is used, but this can be applied to title/description/keywords easily enough)

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
}
?>

This statement would sit directly inside your meta description tag, so something like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php //some dynamic statment here ?>” />

Confused? Here’s The Explanation

What the statement does is simple, but clever: In the first two lines it checks to see if a static description has been set (defined by the $StaticDesc variable), this would hypothetically be a field in your admin area which you could go through and fill out page by page to write an optimal description for each page. If this static description field has some content, it places it there ‘else’ it places a new statement in the meta description tag (defined in the second half of the php statement above).

The query draws a number of variables from the database to construct a meta description by itself which will be different for every product. For a page about wooden spoons, the above statement might produce something like this:

Wooden Spoons available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other Kitchen Accessory products and Christmas Kitchenware deals! Wooden Spoons from The Kitchen Accessory Store.

It isn’t perfect, and it certainly won’t be 100% gramatically correct for all pages – but it does do the job, and it does include relevant key phrases and related content, as well as sticking (roughly) to the meta description guideline of 150 characters.

Once you have this statement in place, you will effectively have a great starting point for however many thousand pages you have, with relatively little work.

Getting Advanced

Of course if you’re any good at PHP you’ll be able to customise this even further (PHP wizards correct me if I get this wrong), and do something like:

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} elseif $CatId = 2 {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available on the phone, call us for special deals. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ beauty products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘  beauty deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
} elseif $CatId = 5 {
echo $ProductName . ‘ specialist woodword products + tools, and amazing ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
}
?>

This checks for two specific categories, which have specific meta description structures – otherwise it reverts to the default one which we defined earlier.

Now What?

Now you get your finest intern, or writer, or whoever to go through your admin area painstakingly inserting the optimal meta content to replace the dynamic stuff that’s already there. This is great because they can start with your most important (or best-selling) products, and then slowly work their way through.

Another added benefit is that as new products or pages are added to the site they will automatically have a full set of meta content generated for them without having to call in any outside help.

What Do You Think?

Have you done something similar or perhaps something more effective? Do you have a better way of constructing these dynamic statements? Tell me what you think and drop me a line in the comments!

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iNetZeal

First up is iNetZeal who are a company (funnily enough) specialising in SEO services – as most of you will know from previous posts, I have a big problem with SEO companies who rip off their clients, so I was delighted to see that iNetZeal offer unbelievably reasonably prices for all their services, and are a very professional outfit all round. You can check them out on iNetZeal.com

Romow

We’re also very pleased to be welcoming Romow to the team, who are a very extensive and highly visited web directory. They’ve got a really great traffic rating and some extremely highly rated listings (as voted for by the users themselves, as it should be!) And are well worth checking out at Romow.com – you might even want to submit your own site while you’re there! ;)

Interested In Seeing Your Site Here?

Our advertisers help keep this site going, and we’re massively greatful to them for it! If you’re interested in joining the team then head on over to buysellads where you’ll find all our ‘vital statistics’ and prices.

We hope to see you in our sidebar soon!

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SEO shouldn’t be an industry, it shouldnt even be a business, it should be a standard. Google should release documentation telling the public what things will help them get ranked, and as such it should be public knowledge. The best sites will always shine through because they are the best sites and deserve to rank highly.

Here are 7 genuine reasons why you don’t need SEO

1. You don’t need ‘link building’, you need great content which people want to link to all by themselves.

Stop creating spam (you know what I’m talking about!) and add to your site with some decent relevant content. Do you honesty think that top ranking sites do so well because they spam links everywhere? Think about that.

2. You don’t need ‘content optimisation’, you need a great writer for all your site’s copy. (a copy writer)

So a user finds your site because your page copy is full of bold keywords, then what? I’ll tell you then what, your bounce rate goes through the roof is what – what’s the use of ranking highly if no one wants to read your spammy content? Write for users not for search engines and chances are that you’ll get linked to (see above) and your content will still be relevant to search engines!

3. You don’t need ‘viral content creation’, you need a head of marketing who’s read Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’

For anyone who hasn’t read Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’ – Go any buy it, it’ll change your entire outlook on running a website and any business. For anyone who’s already read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

4. You don’t need ‘internal link analysis’, you need a web designer who codes your navigation right the first time.

You shouldn’t need to pay someone to convert your navigation from javascript to html and css… you should have it done right the first time! and if it’s not done right, get your developer to go back and damn well fix it!

5. You don’t need ’server side rewrites for keyword optimisation’, you need a web developer who knows his stuff and understand what will work best for the end user.

Again, server side rewrites are pretty standard these days, they should be implemented up-front during the site build. Not afterwards at double the price by some snooty SEO company who claim to be greater than the earth itself and God’s gift to Google.

6. You don’t need ‘alt attribute and header tag implementation’, you need a web designer who codes semantic markup and adheres to modern web standards.

This is such an easy one! You don’t actually even need a web designer (though it helps) you can pretty easily go through an site an add alt attributes to the images, once again, it isn’t specialist work – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

7. You don’t need ‘landing pages’, you need enough content on all your existing pages to talk about all the different aspects of your industry.

Anyone who tell’s you that you need ‘landing pages’ is talking nonsense – what you need is an in depth website with lots of content! How? Start a blog! Write on it every day and you’ll soon have lots of fresh content for search engines to crawl.. trust me, it’s easy.

What Did I Miss?

Give me more reasons that you don’t need SEO below and if there are enough I’ll put up a follow up post on 7 MORE reasons why you don’t need SEO!

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1. When speaking to clients, they use big terms like ’search engine saturation fluctuation’, and ‘the latest Google algorithm update for it’s supplementary index’

Both of the above are techy ways of saying “your rankings have all dropped and we have no idea why, but don’t you dare think about not paying us”. This is one of the mose deceiptful underhanded tactics in (rather common) use, and is purely employed to scare the client into thinking that there is no way that they could possibly understand the inner workings of SEO.

You wouldn’t hear a designer telling a client that he couldn’t use a black font on a grey background ‘due to line-height restrictions, colour combination inter-relationships, and negative space deviation’. Yet SEO companies know that if they told the truth (IE: “we have extremely limited control over where Google ranks you”) then their business model would be deadz.

2. They have lots of ‘business awards’ posters hanging on the office walls.. but all of them are about 5 years old.

This is a sure fire way to tell that an SEO company might once have been great, but they definitely aren’t any more. A business worthy of awards gets awards, they don’t just continue to be great and suddenly fail to get any recognition. This is most common for SEO companies who started out brilliantly by helping local businesses at affordable rates, but then got some ‘big ideas’, bumped up their prices, and started trying to be a corporation rather than a business.

3. When you call them you get a “he’s in a meeting” response from the person who just had you on hold.

Here’s a piece of information for you – the overwhelming majority of SEO companies aren’t big enough for someone to need to check who’s in a meeting. Chances are that everyone is in one open plan office, and you (dear friend) are being given the fob off (again).

4. Your monthly reports don’t really tell you what work has been done.

All too often (and I seriously have seen this a lot of times now) an SEO company’s idea of a ‘report’ is a whole bunch of statistics copied and pasted onto a rather lengthy and unformatted document, but there isn’t a whole lot about what work has been carried out and how long it took.

If you’re paying an SEO company, you’re well within your rights to ask exactly what work is being done and how long each piece has taken. Don’t accept positive statistics as a sign of success – I don’t SEO this blog at all and yet it’s statistics still improve every month because I put in all the hard work at the beginning!

5. They think that link building is ’specialist work’.

I’ve got news for you.. it’s not. Link building is the process of going out onto the big wide interwebz and dropping links back to a website wherever possible. Most commonly on blog comments, forums, and business directories. This work consists of typing in a title, and a url, and can be easily completed by a 14yr old with some motivation and the offer of £20 at the end of the day. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is simply lying.

I Could Go On

And I will in part two of this post, ‘5 MORE Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Compay’ next month!

SEO is a very closed industry and not rightfully so. It’s one of the few industries where it pays not to share any techniques because if your competition knew about them then they could use them – you can’t patent 301 redirects or title writing techniques.

Because of this it’s become standard to charge a lot and explain a very little – something which I personally don’t agree with. Hence the reason for this blog, to tell you exactly what works (and what doesn’t) without charging you a penny.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great and very open-minded, friendly SEO companies out there but there are a whole lot of deadbeats who only care about your money.

What do you think? Are you working for an SEO company who falls into some of the above categories? Or are you paying an SEO company and you don’t quite understand what for? Let me know in the comments!

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Last time we looked at an introduction to this case study and did our keyphrase research to start optimising our brand new site: BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk. Today, we’ll go through the initial page construction and start putting together a stategy for improving the site’s ranking.

Since last time, I actually already put together the index page of the site, and have had it live for about two weeks. Because of this, it’s already been indexed! Here’s an update of how it’s ranking so far for our selected key phrases, nothing to spectacular so far but then nothing has been done yet so it’s actually a pretty good starting point.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier (N/A)
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier (119)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (116)
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (N/A)

Coding Up The Header of Index Page

As I mentioned last time, we’re going to keep this very simple and not focus on the design of the page at all.

The first thing which I sat down to define was the meta content, I wanted to include as many of my keyphrases (and variations/combinations there of) as possible, without coming across too spammy.

Here’s the meta content used:

• Title: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Description: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier pictures, stories and information! Loads of great blue staffordshire bull terrier help and information.
• Keywords: blue staffordshire bull terriers, staffordshire bull terriers, staffies, staffy bull terriers, staffordshire bull terrier, blue staffordshire bull terrier, staffordshire, bull terrier

The title is 69 characters long, which is actually 4 characters over the recommended limit but as you can see in the screenshot above Google has indexed and does display the full title.

The description is 135 characters, which is about 15 characters below the recommended limit, I might add a little more to this later but for now it’s a good starting point.

There are on 8 keywords. So few places care about or even bother to look at meta keywords that if you want the ones who do pay attention to take any notice then you’d better be as un-spammy as possible.

The Rest of The Page

The rest of the page is quite simple, I got my partner Nikki to write up around 800 words on staffordshire bull terriers and I put all the paraphraphs in <p> tags, using appropriate headings and subheadings going down the page, starting with <h1> all they way down to <h6>. Thats it, litererally, and that got the site indexed though granted not highly – let’s move on to the changes for today.

Here’s the page as of the initial coding 2 weeks ago:

What’s Next?

Well my good friend Tony has had a lot of success putting Google Adsense on pages which he wants to be indexed quickly. This isn’t something that I’ve tried before but it makes sense if you think about it; Google want to give their advertisers exposure so it would only make sense to look on them more favourably. Either way, we’re going to give this a try so I’ve just inserted a couple of bits of adsense on the page.

Emphasising Words

You can use <em></em> and <strong></strong> tags to indicate which part of a page is important, or which part of it should be ‘emphasised’ to search engines. A lot of people go overboard with this and there’s more bold text than there is normal text! So don’t do that!

I’ve picked a couple of key phrases out of the page and put <strong></strong> tags on them.

Images

Google is pretty clever, and while it can’t SEE images, it does value their alt attributes and it’s fair to say that Google probably knows that a page which has image is of more use to searchers than a similar page without images.

I’ve added a couple of pictures of Herbie (my staffy) with appropriate alt attributes again relating to the subject of the page and the subject of the image. More on opimising alt attributes here.

The two images (as you can see) are the same, but they have different file names and alt attributes, so it doesn’t matter, they are different enough. They are different sizes for a reason, consider Google Image Search, where google takes images size into account; I’m providing a little diversity.

Outbound Linking

This is a hot topic of debate amongst some but I am a firm and strong believer that linking out to high quality websites (with high PR) strengthens your own. So I’m going to drop some links in to places like Wikipedia and the BBC.

Installing Stats

This again is questionable, but some believe that using Google Analytics again makes Google look more favourably on your site because you’re sending them free information. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but I’ve installed it anyway (alon with Webmaster Tools) so that we’ll be able to track the site’s stats, keyphrase related and otherwise.

And finally..

Inbound Linking

Over the next few days I’m going to start grabbing a couple of decent-PR links in to the site to hopefully pass over some pagerank and additional “juice” to the site.

And here’s the page now that we’re done with it for the day:

What Do You Think?

What else do you do personally when optimising the code on a brand new site, are there any things that I’ve forgotten or that you would have done different? Let me know in the comments below!

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Here’s the new facebook hompage which has been covered all over the web today, personally I don’t think much of it, but that’s beside the point. You’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner there is a ‘Send Feedback’ link (I’ve circled it with and added a pretty red arrow for those who are a little lost right now). Being the kind soul that I am, I clicked on it to give Facebook a little feedback and wrote them a very kind concise message saying ‘I can haz old facebook?’.

Uh oh.

Let’s recreate exactly what happens when you use the new Facebook feedback form.

First

(spot the irony)

Second

Aaahhh……. good times.

Ten Minutes Later Here’s What I see

Good foresight

So What Lesson Have We Learned Today?

If you’re going to ask for customer feedback, make sure that they can actually send it to you. I wonder how long it’ll take them to notice the problem given that no one will be able to send them some feedback to let them know.

Seen any other ridiculous bloopers recently? Drop me a line in the comments!

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Well if you’re using Wordpress then you’re in luck!
Traditionally your new posts and pages won’t get indexed until Google next crawls your site, which for a small site isn’t that often. The larger and more popular the site, the more frequently Google crawls to check for updates and index new pages. So what you want to do, is get links to your new posts onto big frequently-crawled sites the moment they go live.

But How?

Well I’m not going to get too technical here because frankly that’s not what this blog is about and I’ll likely get way out of my depth, but in short what you want to do is ‘ping’ an update service. Which is to say that when you post a new entry you want wordpress to tell some big social networking/rss sites that you have a new post, and that they should take notice.

How To Do it

In your Wordpress administration interface navigate to

Settings > Writing > Scroll To The Bottom > Update Services

You should see a text box filled with the default http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ which is the only service that Wordpress pings by default.

Logically, for Google to find us quicker we want to update as many of these services as possible, so here’s a list of some more that we use here (that have worked very well).

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogupdate.org/ping/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.google.com
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

So How Fast Are We Talking?

The record so far? 10 minutes.

I’ve had a couple of new blog posts who’s title I’ve Googled 10 minutes after posting and they’ve popped right up at number 1.

The Benefit?

People find your site, and they find it fast! Particularly if you blog about current events or breaking news of any kind this is a must have! I blogged the day that iPhone was released in the UK and I got indexed so quickly that I was number 1 for ‘O2 iPhone UK’ for a couple of days.

Final Notes

Typically with these posts getting indexed so quickly you may rank very highly for competitive keywords, over time though (a week or two) you should expect these rankings to drop back down to a ‘normal level’ for your site. Clever Google.

So, what’s the quickest you’ve ever had a fresh blog post indexed? Have you used any other techniques that have worked well to speed up the process? Let me know in the comments below!

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I started seeing a couple of sites change toolbar-pr last night, so I ran some tests on others and found some PR changes that weren’t yet showing up in the toolbars. Thismorning however, it seems that the toolbars have now updated fully (as far as I can tell).

All good news at this end, you may have noticed that EggRage has gone from a PR3 up to a PR4 now – which is always nice to see, and all our associated sites have all gone to PR3 or higher.

So go and check your PageRank and let me know if you went up or down!

Image by husin.sani

Related posts:

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What The Hell Am I On About?

Well there’s more to SEO tracking than just you actual rankings (arguably). There’s link popularity (how many inbound links you have) and the construction of your code, as well as what directories you’re included in, DMoz for example. As well as those things you need to stay on top of exactly where your links are coming from, and whether or not anyone else is copying your content, which could (potentially) lead to a duplicate content issue.

Here’s What You Can Do

I’ve compiled a list of 5 ‘essential tools’ to help you stay on top of things such as the above.

Website Grader

In my opinion one of the number one best tools out there at the moment for diagnosing your site’s SEO effectiveness, websitegrader.com takes into account a great deal of factors including which directories your site is listed in, what it’s PageRank is, how many inbound links it has, what it’s traffic ranks are, and many many others in order to come up with a final score out of 100 for your site that generally proves to be pretty accurate in terms of how well your site is “SEO’d”.

Link Diagnosis

LinkDiagnosis.com is a tool which I have mentioned in the past, and for good reason too. I use this tool very regularly to analyse both the quantity and the quality of inbound links to my site(s). It produces a number of data charts and graphs that show the distribution of PageRank across your inbound links and gives various metrics and comparisons that can really help you asses which links are giving you the most benefit. In addition this is a great little tool for spying on where competitors are getting their links from.. and then stealing them ;)

Bad Neighborhood Link Checker

Another one which I’ve mentioned previously, this tool is (in a way) the opposite of Link Diagnosis. Rather than analysing your inbound links and which are helping you most, it analyses all your external links and flags potentially harmful sites that you’re linking to. It looks out for things like blog-spam (high keyphrase or link density) and use of adult or pharmaceutical phrases within the page copy. If you want to avoid a PageRank penalty this a good place to start. Remember, if a site get’s penalised and you link to it, then you could be too!

Marketleap

A real golden oldie, Marketleap has been around for years and still provides excellent essential data to its users. Marketleap gives you counts for both search engine saturation and link popularity, but the real winner for me is that it tracks your progress over time and produce and updated graph every time that you run a report so that you can actively track and record your number of inbound links and indexed pages over time.

CopyScape

This is the daddy when it comes to hunting down thieves. All you have to do at CopyScape is put in your URL (or any) and hit search, which enables the flux capacitor and a number of other highly secretive devices and sets into motion one of the greatest contraptions in the history of man. (not really)

CopyScape scans the web for other websites which contain your text, the search results are ordered in descending order by the number of identical words found on the page. This is both sneaky and brilliant because it doesnt just find direct rip offs, it also finds any people who have tried to copy your text and then edit it slightly. It’s tricky to explain, but give it a whirl and you’ll see what I mean in an instant.

But There’s More

So many more, but these are the most effective that I’ve found, and incidentally the ones which I use most often. What great SEO tools have you found recently? Any which should really have been included here? Drop me a line in the comments!

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So I’ve decided to do a multi-part case study, I’m going to start a new (very simple and un-pretty) website, and I’m going to document every change and piece of work that I carry out on it. Along with each post, I’m going to document benchmarks of where 10 keyphrases rank, and their movement, along with traffic statistics based on organic traffic. I think this will (maybe) be both fun and educational.

Let’s Get Started

The first thing to decide is what the site is going to be about, this was relatively simple (for once) as I didn’t need to think of something particularly catchy or memorable – it’s purely meant to appeal to search engines. So, I have a very sweet Staffordshire Bull Terrier who is what’s known as a ‘blue’ variety of the breed (basically grey, the Kennel Club just make up fancy names). Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers are generally quite rare and highly sought after, so at least it’s something that I can write some interesting content about.

Step 1 – Register a Domain Name

As mentioned, I have no interest in having a short and catchy domain, and I don’t need any company branding. So I’ve gone for a nice keyphrase-full domain, and picked up: http://www.BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk

Step 2 – Do Keyphrase Research

I usually use KeywordDiscovery for my keyphrase research, but recently I’ve also found that the Google Adwords keyphrase tool has actually also proven to be quite useful. I’m going to keep it simple and only collect keyphrase data for ’staffordshire bull terrier’ and ‘blue staffordshire bull terrier’ and their derivatives. So I’ll be working from a list of about 40 and narrowing it down to 10. (Usually I’m working from a final list of 10,000 to be narrowed down to about 400, true story).

Here are the KeywordDiscovery results for “staffordshire bull terriers”

and again for “staffordshire bull terrier”

Interestingly, VERY skewed numbers in favour of the singular form rather than the plural. Also higher search volumes than I anticipated, this could be harder than I first imagined (oops).

Step 3 – Produce a Final List of Key Phrases

So, based on the above lists, here are the 10 which I’m going to go for.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers

I’ve ordered them (as I always do) with the most searched key phrase at the top, and the least searched at the bottom. This works under the assumption that a key phrase which is searched for most in a month, will have the most competition for the top spot, and as such will be most difficult to rank for. The goal is to work your way up from the bottom of the list to the top.

Step 4 – Research The Competition

Obviously if I’m going to rank for any of these phrases then I need to know who I’m up against, so it’s time to google each one of the above key phrases and see what comes up.

Here are the results of the most common sites that appeared in the top 3

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
• www.staffords.co.uk/
• www.staffybullterriers.com/
• www.sbtfun.com/
• www.k9puppy.co.uk/Puppies/StaffordshireBullTerrierforsale.aspx
• www.epupz.co.uk/search/puppies_for_sale.asp?area=all&st=1&breed=Staffordshire%20Bull%20Terrier
• www.bluestaffy.co.uk/

K9Puppy and ePupz (as you might expect) are puppy classified sites, they rank well for pretty much every dog breed name under the sun because they have high Page Rank, and frequently updating content.

Wikipedia is going to be a tough one to beat, but luckily it only showed up on one of the 10 key phrases’ search results, but there also several positive things that we can use this page for. (more to follow)

As for the rest, they’re staffy-fansites. They aren’t well designed, they don’t have any remarkable features (or PR) and the only thing that they really have going for them is domain-name age.

I’m confident that these competitors aren’t a major concern, the ones that I’m most worried about are the money-laundering god-foresaken puppy selling websites.

Step 5 – Play The Waiting Game

The most boring part of all. Wait for your domain registration to go through, then point the domain to the right nameservers, and wait again for it to propagate. If you’re like me and you get bored and frustrated then you might like to check out this tool, which tracks your domain’s progress and sends you an email once it’s finished propagating. (Which I think is rather cool)

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll be putting together the index page and coding the html for it. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

So, do you think this is going to be a success? Or a dramatic failure? Let me know in the comments!

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1. How To: Get Your Site Indexed (Part 3) This is pa
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But Do You Actually?

Case in point: My beloved and most beautiful partner (because she might read this) runs a small independent film review website, where she takes on Hollywood actors, tears them down, slaps them about a little, and gives her honest opinion on their performances and the films as a whole.

She hasn’t posted much, but what she has written has been good, solid content with general good use of keywords, which are in this case actors’ names, film titles, and directors, etc.

Today I was having a look at her site to see if there were any new reviews to read

I shall not lie to my readers

Today I was having a look at my inbound links and noticed a PR2 referral coming in from ForgottenFilm, I thought that was a little strange, and probably a mistake – so I went to the site to investigate further. But no, no mistake had taken place accoring to my trusty Firefox plugins.

So, I decided that she must have some how obtained a rather superb link somewhere and I was determined to help her get some more poach the link location and crowbar in some of my own sites.

First I ran a LinkDiagnosis on the site, and this is what I got:

This is what I like to call “fucking nothing”. Nada.

I found a couple of PR-Nothing forum links, and a couple of utterly useless PR0 links from an old crap wordpress.com blog that I’ve had for ages. To clarify, she has a total of 5 inbound links, none of them with any PageRank.

Thinking that this was strange I delved into Yahoo! Site Explorer

Once again, a nice healthy dose of NOTHING.

Same links, no page rank.

So friends, foes, and family alike  – after all our collective whinging about how PR is obtained, how is it that a site with no links and an alexa rank of near 15million is able to grab a PR2 after less than 6 months of existance?

I mean I’d love to start sprouting conspiracy theories to do with Google’s new quality rating system and say that because the writing on her blog is of such high quality, she has benefitted from it. But I don’t honestly think that’s the case.

So what is it?

I’m stumped on this one, so give me a kick in the comments and tell me whats going on.

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This is a good day for EggRage, and for a good reason – on July 13th of this year I posted an article about how to get into DMoz, to date it has been one of the most successful posts on this blog and has received more comments than any other article which I’ve written here.

Today, September 1st, 2008 – I logged into the Digital Designer Forum mentioned previously in my post about how to SEO a forum, to find that in a thread about submitting your site to DMoz, a new user named Eric-the-Bun had posted a rather lengthy reply to a thread linking to my original article about submitting your site to DMoz. His comments, weaved into my original post were as follows: (identified by block quotes)

How To: Submit Your Site To DMoz

Submitting a site to DMoz has long been known as one of the ”things to do” when it comes to SEO. Putting it into practice however, is something that’s often more easily said than done. People who get their sites accepted have long praised the DMoz editors, while those who have been denied entry through the pearly gates curse the editors as if they’ve done the earth some sinful injustice.

The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies).

Usually they are waiting to be reviewed (unless of course they are not really good or are sites that won’t be accepted.

Ok let’s look at the facts. About 5000 active editors and nearly 500,000 categories – however many editors only have privileges to edit in a few categories. A rule of thumb is that there are probably about 500 editors who can edit in all categories or widely enough to count(eg UK-wide). So 1 editor has a nominal 1000 categories – how quickly do you think they will get through them? Well it depends on the area and how many suggestions they get. UK/County/little_village probably gets zero a year whilst each shopping sub-category will get hundreds.

It can take from ten minutes to 2 weeks to review a site and editors are volunteers. This means when I come home from work, I see if I have the time and inclination to spare to do some editing. Generally I manage something most days most weeks – I think my average this year is adding 20 sites a week – I also spend as much time on maintenance (correcting errors, removing dead-links, moving misplaced sites, etc) and learning about things that I need to know to edit properly.

There is no short cut to get listed because either an editor is limited to a few categories and will list your site within a few months (yes there are people who join just to list their sites and don’t do much else) or they are trusted enough to gain wider permissions and are rather fanatical about preserving their trusted status.

Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

In general, the guidelines prevent this. Some categories are maintained better than others and are thus quicker to get into (geologically speaking). Different categories have different guidelines for acceptance and in some cases the expected category does not exist. A case in point is real estate where due to the huge amount of spam, extremely strict rules are applied.

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site,

Good advice – leave the http://www. off the site name else the search won’t find it. Note the search works on the RDF dump which is issued once a week (ish) so can be out of date.

it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into – and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

Good advice here and I’ll add some more.

Sort out the 1,2 or 3 places you are eligible for and suggest them in one go.

If you have an actual premises where people can expect to contact you (I think it is now the law for UK sites to list it) pick the correct locality in Regional and the best category e.g.
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/

Then determine what your site is about – the topic – as you can also suggest your site to a category under its topic if the site has a wider audience than local (i.e. a site for a pub, a lplumber, a tailor, is likely only to be listed in regional).

Lets take web design as an example (for no apparant reason). You can check the categories in http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_ … velopment/ for web design companies and see where you may fit. Let us say you are a company that is basically a vehicle for a free-lancer who is also employed elsewhere. It might go in to
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/

Now if the site is UK based, another place to look is http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Uni … velopment/ and
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/ might be an appropriate place.

Of course an editor placing the sites would be making his best guess at the appropriate place (they can’t be knowledgeable on all things) which is why the update url link is there.

For most sites the rule is to suggest once to location (if any) and once to topic (if eligible). UK sites are special as you can also suggest to a topical category under http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom if the site is eligible.

So you can suggest to 2 or 3 categories as described above if the site is eligible.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address – sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ – the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

If suggesting to Business, the title must be the company name no matter how irrelevant. Bear in mind if the category is (say) Web Designers, the type of sites within that category is already defined.
If suggesting elsewhere, the editors look for a meaningful combination of title and description. Using the website title is OK – the editor might not agree and may change it, but at least you have indicated your preference.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

“BlueShirt Clothing – Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.”

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

More or less spot on.

Descriptions will vary depending on the category. Editors read the title and description hoping it will tell them enough about the site before they enter it, so that we are confident it is in the right place and worth listing. Very few titles and descriptions survive intact.

First sentence should be who/what the site is about, second sentence what is on the site.

Remember it is not an advert, aim for dull.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Please make sure it is valid and, if using someone elses, let them know you suggested the site. If you are an SEO firm one of the worst things you can do is suggest a site with such an addresss. One SEO firm shotgun blasted an area of categories I looked after in such a way every couple of weeks. After getting a ‘?’ from the supposed suggestors, I worked out what was happening and emailed every site saying that if they had paid firm x for SEO ask for ther money back.

There are all sorts of myths about us liking/not liking suggestions from this or that type of firm/person. I personally look out for sites suggested by a number of seo and website firms because they make good suggestions. Others I look out for because they don’t. The only way I treat them differently is that for the first, I might ‘do another on before bed’ and for the second not.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site – what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included?

Check out http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/ – most of it is there.

The other place to look (albeit a bit painful) are the category descriptions. Start at the top of the section you think you belong to (eg Business) and the description will identify the sorts of sites that belong there and any vagaries the area might have. You can work downwards to see if there are any refinements but usually after a few levels down, you might find it more productive working upwards.

Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

And you were doing so well up til now
Please don’t. Your suggestion is there waiting for some editor to come along and review it (unless you suggested before the Great Crash of October 2006 when all the suggestions were lost, in which case suggest again). I’ve reviewed suggestions that were 5 years old and with the most appalling rubbish in the titles and description.

As an editor my role is to develop useful categories. To do that I need to look for suitable sites to add and can look anywhere I like – newspapers, vans, shop fronts, search engines, under the bridle of a yak in Nepal, etc. One of the places I can look is in the suggestion pool for the category. When an editor goes to develop a category, then, in most cases, all suggestons are gratefully received. Often a category will lie neglected for a long (geological) time and then have a burst of activity with all outstanding suggestions cleared.

In some categories the suggestion pool is a cesspit of spam, dread and loathing that few but the most hardy would venture into – well not quite. However in some places the ratio of good sites to poor Made for advertising sites is not very high and it is easier to find sites for yourself than relying on fishing in the pool.

This year I have listed ?600 sites of which less than 100 were suggested.

regards

PS in case your feel that DMOZ editors don’t appreciate what not getting listed means, I’d like to point out that I suggested my site to Yahoo back in 2005 and am still not listed, despite being no 1 for my keywords in most search engines, etc

And that concludes what I’ve found to be one of the most useful posts that I’ve ever come across on a forum, it may sound silly to some people but I’m honoured that Eric took all the time and effort to respond to my article in such detail and would like to thank him once again most sincerely for doing so.

For those of you who read the last article, now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! So go out there, behave yourselves, and make your site worthy of inclusion on the Open Directory Project.

And as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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So this is going to a be a semi-informational and semi-rant type post for today I’m afraid, I’m sure you’ll learn something about SEO but most of all you’ll learn something about business ethics.

SEO is a coveted industry, it’s a bit like Formula 1 in a way… everyone is trying to achieve the same thing but no one wants to tell eachother what works and what doesn’t because everyone else is the competition. As a result (and as I’ve said many times before) the SEO industry is secretive and very often dishonest, which is what I’m going to touch on today.

This blog isn’t specifically geared to teaching SEO techiniques, it’s meant to cover all the bases whether you’re providing SEO yourself, or whether you’re a small company considering taking on a company to perform SEO work on your site – as such this is really an article for everyone to take note of, not just the techies.

SEO has a nice little foothold compared to other web-services, there are no REAL measurable results, there is no definition of what it is, and almost no one understands it. How brilliant is that? Companies are charging thousands and thousands of pounds (a MONTH) for an invisible service! Which reminds me a little too much of a certain emperor with new clothes.

The problem with this is that it makes it incredibly easy for SEO companies to rip off their clients, after all, how can a client question the quality of the service which they receive when they neither understand nor know what it is? – I for one really hate this mentality, I’m not in business to make money by ripping people off, and the proof is in the pudding – 90% of the enquiries that I get to my web design and internet marketing business are based on word of mouth recommendation.

So enough preamble, how are SEO companies ripping people off?

Well talk to any SEO company and they’ll likely tell you that the work they carry out consists of an ‘initial’ SEO evaluation of the site, followed by a monthly ‘maintenance’ fee for ongoing specialist work. The truth however, is a little further from this pretty picture that they paint for you.

The initial fee, regardless of the sometimes astoundingly high price, is almost always justified – the evaluation of a site down to the last detail takes a LOT of work and all of the work carried out and the documentation provided takes specialist knowledge and skill. The biggest benefit that any site will get is in it’s initial SEO work, which really is an all-encompasing list of changes that need to be made in order to improve the site.

The monthly maintenance crap on the other hand, is exactly that, crap. You are generally charged £250-£25,000 per month (depending on how many hours work you want done), and the companies will happily tell you that this is necassary to ‘maintain’ your high rankings in the search engines.

Well I’m going to tell you exactly how YOU can do that, without paying them!

All that ‘monthly maintenance’ work consists of is link building, and quite often in the form of spam which is more likely to hurt you in the long run than help you. For those not familiar, link building is the process of acquiring as many links as possible all over the internet coming back to your site; this is done by posting comments on blogs, posting on forums, starting additional spam blogs which only exist for the purpose of link building, and using YOUR money to pay other sites to link to you.

This is NOT specialist work, anybody can do this and you could pay a 16yr old schoolkid less than minimum wage and he would probably do a better job than most SEO companies (who do it so much that they are bored to tears and only put in a half-hearted effort anyway).

The only monthly fee that can be justified is a consultation, a small review of the site each month to track it’s progress and offer further advice to the site owner about what THEY can do to keep improving it.

The second you hear anything about a 12-month contract or fees based on rankings achieved – run for your life from the scammers!

Here’s what YOU should be doing on a monthly basis

• Update your site – as often as possible, daily is best.
• Start a blog, and USE it, this contributes mostly to the above point, and also to the next one.
• Add content, add user reviews, add articles, add detailed hand written product descriptions.
• Actively seek to get reviews of your products from other sites, send out freebies if you have to.

Doesn’t look like much does it? That’s cause there’s not much too it! It’s really a case of time rather than effort, you just need someone who will actively do all these things for you.
Bare in mind that starting a blog and NOT using it is generally worse than not starting one at all, so think long and hard before you do, and assess whether or not it’s something that you will have the time and resources for, but know that if you do, the rewards are plentiful.

And finally

Reputation management is something that is becoming more and more popular (and important) these days on the web, you should regularly scan for sites linking to you.

Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and type in your url, this will give you a full list of all the sites linking to you.

You don’t want contentious or sites with a bad reputation linking to you, both for branding reasons and for SEO reasons, as in the long run all the people who try to cheat the search engines get found out, and penalised.

So

I hope you’ve learned something, remember the true form of SEO is honest and consists of improving a site to make it rank better, not gaming search engines or trying to rip off clients for services that don’t do anything.

Don’t agree? Or feel you’re being ripped off right now? Drop me a line in the comments and tell me what you think!

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The some clever cookie thought up things like dynamic meta descriptions

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ . $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName; ?>” />

Now the actual php there might not be perfect, I’m not a php wizard (yet) – but you get the idea. As such it’s now also possible to put in a blanket dynamic rule to cover all your bases on large sites, and then you can go back and overwrite any important products with static handwritten content.

<?php
if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName;
}
?>

Again, just to give you an idea – any php wizards reading please leave me a comment if any code amendments should be made!

A forum is one of the largest types of site in terms of pages that you can apply an SEO skin to, and a forum is also potentially an extremely valuable SEO resource because visitors build up hand written content for you every single day.

So Let’s Get Started

For specific examples I’m referring to phpBB3 – as that’s what I’m working with on the newly launched Digital Designer Forum pictured below.

The first and foremost concern for any forum is the url structure. By default all the forum applications that I know of are set to domain.com/forum.php?id=4 or similar – which obviously isn’t much benefit in terms of targetting keyphrases. Ideally we’d like to have domain.com/forum-title.htm and domain.com/thread-title.htm etc.

Setting Up URL Rewrites

Now, phpBB-SEO.com offer some really great tools to help you with this – the first one to have a look at (in the downloads section in the left hand navigation) is the Advanced phpBB SEO mod rewrite package, which you can download directly from the site, and contains a full set of instructions for modifying existing files, or, if you haven’t modified any of your phpBB3 files then you can simply overwrite your existing files with the premodified ones in the package.

This is a really really great module, once installed you get a whole new tab on your admin interface which allows you to control exactly how you want your url’s to be rewritten (though obviously mod rewrite needs to be enabled on your server, which it usually is by default). Once it’s all set up it will dynamically generate your .htaccess file which you can simply copy, paste, save, and upload. Though it’d be nice if they included a feature like wordpress where it updates itself as long as your .htaccess file is writeable.

Once that’s all done you should have nice clean URLs like domain.com/my-first-forum-f1.html the f1 on the end is the forum code and can’t be changed, it’s used as the ‘trigger’ to actually find the correct page!

But now we have a problem, domain.com/forum.php?id=1 and domain.com/my-first-forum-f1.html are both accessible….. duplicate content!

Setting Up 301 Redirects

Thankfully phpBB-seo.com being the clever cookies that they are, and very much up to scratch on their SEO Skillz have realised this problem – and provided a solution.

With a few more clicks (and a couple of code modifications of your existing forum files) you can install the phpBB SEO Zero Duplicate module, which will redirect all unrewritten URL’s to their appropriate rewritten counterparts. The module also recognises when forums/threads/posts have changed name/url and updates appropriately, though this is not something I’ve tested yet.

Sort Out Those Page Titles

I don’t think that I need to preach any further about how important page titles are, so let’s just get right to it: phpBB-SEO offer two ways of doing this, one is a dynamic meta content generator that puts together content based on the frequency of used words on the page to analyse what the page is about. This sounded a little too vague and inhuman to me so I opted for option B on Digital Designer Forum, which is the ‘Optimal Titles’ module.

Essentially all that it does is strip out all the useless stuff that phpBB puts in there by default; ‘view forum’ and ‘view thread’ being the most common culprites, it instead leaves you with clean (almost too clean) page titles that reflect the name of the forum/thread and will also add page numbers appropriately to cut down on duplicate titles.

One thing that this module doesn’t do is provide you with an adequate homepage title, though you can edit this yourself by doing a sitewide search for ‘Index Page’ which should bring up root/acp/common.php where the index page title is defined – just change it to whatever you like and you’re set.

Get A Working XML Sitemap and RSS Feeds

Having an XML sitemap that’s validated by Google Webmaster Tools is one of the best things that you can do for your site. The GYM Sitemaps module, again by phpBB-SEO.com, is very nice little badger that generates a valid XML sitemap for your forum AND keeps it fully updated with every new forum and thread that gets updated to your site.

This same module also adds a series of RSS feeds to the footer links of your site, so that your visitors can subscribe to a main feed or any of the corresponding individual forum feeds! – VERY handy.

In Conclusion

That’s pretty much it really, just keep doing the obvious, name all the forums relevant things and add the usual canonical URL issue resolution to the .htaccess file.

Any more tips for optimising phpBB3 or your own experiences – drop me a line in the comments!

If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets – all you have to do is click on the link once and you’re done!

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So:

There’s a war on people and at stake are customers not just visitors. When people chase search engine rankings the first casualty is effective web copy that’s aimed at real human beings. Robots don’t yet do our shopping so why write for them?

Sadly the robots seem to be winning. How many web pages do you see that are bland waffle plastered with repeated, repeated, repeated words in bold? Make you want to read through, let alone buy from or sign-up to it? Of course not, it’s nothing more than spam and who trusts spammers?

Real SEO wouldn’t stand in the way of customers at the expense of visitors and neither should your web copy. You see, not only is usability and legibility important but so is trust and copy that actually sells!

Top 5 ways ‘writing for SEO’ ruins your copy

• The aforementioned plague of bold and spamming your keywords and phrases
• Sterile and mechanical non-style — nothing more than filler for robots
• Trading powerful headlines for ‘<h1> robot fodder’
• Forgetting a call to action — robots never click ‘buy’ do they?
• The shotgun approach with writing aimed at robots, missing every human visitor

Turning the tide in this war against machines means understanding a simple truth – real SEO shouldn’t mean sacrificing the power of words. Of course it can be a bitter pill to swallow and the choice is yours… You take the blue pill and the story ends — you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. All I am offering is the truth, nothing more.

Real SEO doesn’t mean making sacrifices.

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The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies). Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site, it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into – and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address – sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ – the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

BlueShirt Clothing – Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!)

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site – what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included? Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

Please leave me a comment and tell me of your success or frustrations with DMoz!

If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets – all you have to do is click on the link once and you’re done!

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You may be confused by this one, possibly even a little surprised and angry that the world has been lying to you for so long telling you that you need to ‘optimise for search engines’ when you don’t need to at all. The underlying aspect of search engines that we always forget is that, not only are they programmed to act like users, but they were also created, and are controlled, by users.

The similarities between elements that are important to search engines and elements that are important to users, are strikingly obvious.

Let’s take a look

• Titles and Meta Content
  • Search engines: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and rank it accordingly.
  • Users: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and decide whether or not to use it.
• Header Tags
  • Search engines: Use them to assess what the main bodies of text are about, and rank the page accordingly.
  • Users: Use them to quickly see what the main bodies of text are about.
• Anchor Text
  • Search engines: Use is to understand what the page that is being linked to is about, and rank that page according to its relevance to the anchor text, and the quality of the inbound links.
  • Users: Use it to understand what the page that is being linked to is about.
• Alt Attributes
  • Search engines: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing.
  • Users: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing. Particularly disabled users, and people who browse with images turned off.
• Page Copy
  • Search engines: Use this to establish which search queries this content is relevant to.
  • Users: Use this to establish if the content is relevant to what they are looking for.
• Strong Tags
  • Search engines: Use this to pick out important key phrases within the copy.
  • Users: Use this to scan the copy and pick out the most important words.

  I could go on all afternoon, but I won’t because I’m sure you get the general idea by now.

  So many people go crazy when trying to ‘SEO’ their sites, they think ‘right, here are some techniques to use, lets apply them to absolutely everything’. Which unsurprisingly, doesn’t work.

  Real SEO is User Optimisation because…

  Think about the techniques you’re using to rank higher, and now ask yourself this: Would a user appreciate it? If the answer is yes, then the chances are that a search engine will too.

  Here are a couple of examples

  You add 35 key phrases to your page copy, and but them all in strong tags.

  • Users say: I can’t read it, it looks terrible.
  • Search engines say: Its spam

  You use clear anchor text throughout your site that is relevant to the page which is being linked to.

  • Users say: This is really easy to navigate, I like it.
  • Search engines say: The anchor text is relevant to the page content.

  Again, I could go on, but I won’t. The jist of it is that if you’re pissing off your users with your ‘optimisation’ attempts, then you’re probably annoying the hell out of search engines too.

  Write your site, your code, and your content for your users. It doesn’t MATTER how many people find you in Google if your content is worthless to the visitors. Create your code and your content for users and you’ll see a nice correlation to your rankings too.

  SEO does not mean tricking search engines for ranks.

  Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank.

  SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank.

  More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow…

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So where do you start?

Well there are a number of ways that you can go about recovering, but most of them depend on how badly you’ve been affected.

If you’ve noticed a couple of pages drop positions then it may just be a general penalty. The first thing to do here is review your link strategy, do your best not to link to any sites more than 2 page ranks below you, and do not link to anything that is PR1 or lower. (The exception here is a PR of N/A as the site has not yet been through a PR update)

Once you’ve (hopefully) cleaned up your outbound links, you can apply for ‘reconsideration’ in your Google Webmaster Tools account in the form pictured below, whereby you promise to be a good boy/girl from now on.

If you’ve received a manual ban from Google, then it may be best to try the ditch ‘n dash method;

To do this you simply apply a 301 redirect from your site, to all your content on a new domain, this way you keep your PR and power, even your users – but your site is associated with a new domain and not affected by the ban. A word of warning though, if your site was manually banned, then it was for a reason… and Google will see straight through this old trick if you haven’t cleaned up your act!

What exactly is ‘cleaning up your act?’

Well, you’ve been penalised for a reason (intentional or otherwise) and you need to ensure that you not only resolve the initial issue, but also remove anything else on your site that is even slightly dubious.

Here are some points to get started with

• Key phrase saturation – check how many times you’re using key phrases throughout titles, descriptions, meta keywords, page copy, navigation, and baselinks. Too many = spam, and as you may have figured out, Google is not a fan of spam. You can use a keyword density checker to assess whether or not your site is overkill in the key phrase dept.
   
• Hidden elements – are you using css display:none on certain things? or matching any text to the background colour? (you have to be a really special kind of stupid to do that second one) Or maybe you think you’re being really clever by using javascript to mask certain elements of your site, or having different content served to bots vs users. You may think you’re tricking Google, but chances are that you’re really not. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, real SEO is not spam, and real SEO is not an attempt to trick search engines. So don’t do it!
   
• Inbound links – have you set up a massive network of sites (or social media platforms) that all link back to your site? If so, consider trimming that right down. Overkill on inbound links is the quickest (and most obvious) way to get yourself a penalty. Instead of trying to build thousand of backlinks yourself, write some decent content that people will WANT to link to.
   
• Outbound links – what sites are you linking to? If you’re linking to a site that has just received a PR penalty then it could well have filtered down to you. You need to be meticulous about only linking to high quality sites – as linking to a ‘questionable’ site can seriously damage your reputation amongst the Google spiders.
   
• Still confused? – If you still have no idea why this has happened and to your knowledge, your site is squeeky clean; review Google’s terms of use. They have some pretty detailed information as to what is and isn’t ok, and you should be able to get yourself going in the right direction.

And finally, if you’re still stuck – you’ve done everything you can think of and you still don’t know how to get out of this big hole that you’ve dug for yourself.. drop me a line in the comments and I’ll see if I can help.

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Apparently Apple don’t have a very big budget when it comes to hiring writers.

Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0

The Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update will update the keyboard firmware on your aluminum Apple Keyboard.

Personally I thought the title was pretty self explanatory without having to be told that a keyboard firmware update, will update the firmware on my keyboard.

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I’ve already talked previously about how Google page rank works and yes, this is based on linking. What I also said, (but probably not clearly enough) is that links do NOT equal positions. So many people think that in order to optimise their sites, they need to go out there an sign up to every social network imaginable and spam them to hell with links back to their site. Not only does this not help with search engines, but it hinders you with traffic, as you will become known for being ‘yet another spammer’ – causing people to ignore/block you altogether.

Having links will NOT get you positions, if you are already ranking for a key phrase based on other SEO elements, then yes PR may help you that extra little bit from Google’s point of view because you are considered to be an ‘important’ site, but again this cannot be achieved through spam links.

Where’s The Pitfall?

If you are doing the SEO, then the pitfall is that it will get you nowhere, you won’t see much benefit from it in the short run, and in the long run it may get you banned from certain sites, blacklisted, or even penalised by Google themselves depending on how extreme you get. If you are paying for the SEO, then the pitfall is that you are paying for a service that a 14yr old could accomplish, dropping links into random sites, and it still isn’t helping! Link building is NOT SEO.

What is Linkbuilding Then?

Linkbuilding is just that, building links. It should be named as no more or less than acquiring links from other sites, you should not charge or pay a premium for this service as there is no skill, knowledge, or qualification required!

But Then… What is SEO?

SEO is clean code, SEO is using the correct code, SEO is key phrase research, SEO is targeting your online marketing demographics through specific pages on your site, SEO is usability for both users AND search engines, SEO is coding and designing your website how it should have always been in the first place.

SEO does not mean tricking search engines having you rank highly.

Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank highly.

SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank highly.

More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow… here

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The title of your page, be that a blog or any other web page, is the key factor to your SEO effort’s and the page’s popularity.

Take my article on how to get lots of diggs,

I could have titled it

• How I was successful on Digg
• Get 3000 Diggs
• Methods for Increasing The Number of Diggs on a Submission
• Get Dugg Fast!

None of which are particularly bad titles, but none of which are particularly good either.

When deciding on a title (or anything else for that matter) its important to look at the market trends and learn from other people’s mistakes. There’s no need for trial and error when it comes to internet marketing, everything has been trialled, all you have to do is research what worked and what didn’t. Based on this we know that the most popular title elements are

• How To
• Top 10
• Top 7
• Top 5
• Learn To

So lets take a look at the Title I used and break it right down

How To: Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 Hours

What I needed to do was appeal to my two most important markets, Google, and Social Media Website users. Google likes key words, social media users like tabloid headlines.

‘How To:‘ is the ‘category’ of the article, it describes what type of article it is, and it appeals to both of the above markets, hundreds of thousands of Google searches each month start with the words ‘how to’ because many many people use the internet primarily to figure out how to do new things. It appeals to social media traffic because of the content which follows it, ‘How To: (insert something that social media website users want)’.

The next part of the title is the actual ‘body’ of the title, it quite simply defines the subject of the article and what it’s about. ‘Get 3,000+ Diggs‘
In this element I am appealing to Google with ‘Get Diggs’ as this is a valuable search term, and to users with ‘Get a Large Number of Diggs’ which is what all Digg (and stumble) users want! Adding the plus after the number is an important consideration, I could have said ‘over 3,000′ or ‘more than 3,000′ but I didn’t want to make the title too long. (You have about 5 words with which to capture your reader’s imagination before they get bored and stop reading, harsh, but true.)

The final part of the title is the sweetener, the extra little bonus that the reader will get from your article, and the little element that makes your article different from the rest. So in my case this was ‘in 24 Hours‘. The sweetener is purely for your users, Google has no interest in this as a key phrase of any relevance. What this does is set the article apart from all the other articles about ‘getting lots of diggs’ because I’ve added that extra variable of doing it in the space of a day. This adds and element of intrigue. When writing titles, ALWAYS think to yourself – if I saw that title on Digg (or similar) would I want to click on it? If the answer is maybe or no, then you need to rework it. You’ll notice that most of the popular articles on social media sites are really provocative, suggestive, and sometimes just downright wrong. This is because people want to know what content is behind the title!

The example that I’ve used is with a blog title, but you can do the same thing with the title attributes of your website – as they are what appears in the search engine results, and again, need key phrases, and to be ‘clickable’.

A Tip For If You Get Stuck

Pick up a copy of the trashiest magazine you can find, in the UK something like Heat or Zoo magazine is perfect. (these are very cheap women’s lifestyle and celebrity gossip magazines)
Have a look at the titles of the articles, particularly the ones used on the cover – take some inspiration, and apply to your own article/page.

These magazines don’t sell because they have great content, and they don’t sell because they have a ‘limited edition’ mascara brush attached to the cover. They sell because these companies are VERY good at writing titles that people want to know more about.

You may have noticed that this article has absolutely nothing to do with ‘7′ tips for writing killer titles – I lied, but you’re still here reading, and I still presented you the information relevant to the title.

Make your titles spurious to benefit you, just keep them on topic.

Got any other great title ideas? Drop me a line in the comments!

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EggRage will be down this evening at 9PM for approximately 30 minutes as we upgrade the site to Wordpress 2.5 – after which everything will be back online and fully accessible again.

Thanks for understanding!

- John

All done now, we are sucessfully running Wordpress 2.5 and so far nothing has broken!

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Increasingly blogs are sold to companies not just as a part of their website, but as a legitimate SEO tool to be added on to their website and bring them additional traffic and positions. In order for this to happen however, they do need to actually use the blog, and use it well.

In the spirit of this, here are 5 reasons to subscribe to your clients’ RSS feeds!

1. To See If They Use Their Blog At All
Its all very well telling your client how much they are going to benefit from having a blog and how much traffic it will bring them, but if they don’t touch the damn thing then they won’t be getting much benefit at all. I have a dedicated folder for my clients’ blogs and when I see that a week has gone by and their name hasn’t turned bold in my list (an indicator that a new story has been published) I start sending emails. This may seem like more hassle to you than to them, but if you want to upsell them a higher SEO maintenance package in the future then you need to ensure that you get them results NOW!

2. To See If They Use Their Blog Correctly
I actually once had a client with a band website who on occasion would blog about the weather… Don’t even ask. Because I wasn’t subscribed to the feed, I didn’t realise until about a month later. Make sure your clients are using the right content for their blogs, remember, writing is not their strength and its not what they were hired for, so don’t expect them to know exactly what to write just because it’s their company. Ideally their posts should be an authority on their industry, and not sound too much like a press release, nor a personal opinion, rather an objective concise article employing a journalistic writing style.

3. To See If They Are Using Internal Linking
Too often clients will happily blog away like little rabbits, only for me to come along and find that they have not linked to a single one of the pages on their site. One solution to this (for wordpress) is to use the A-Links plugin, which automatically inserts a link when it detects the use of keywords that you specify. I’m not a fan of this technique as it can often make a good blog post look very spammy, but done correctly it can work ok. Clients often forget to even use their keywords in blogs, let alone links, so its a great thing to check for when you get a popup notification from your feed reader for one of your clients’ blogs.

4. To Asses The Current Affairs For Your Client
When it comes to doing monthly maintenance for a client, it always involves at least a small amount of external link building. Often finding a subject to write about or to link from can be a pain, especially if your client’s industry is one that you are not actively involved in. Being subscribed to their blog means that you will always have a fresh set of up to date news on what’s going on in your client’s industry (provided that they are following #2)

5. To Capitalise On SEO Opportunities Right Away
Sometimes I’ll see a really good blog by one of my clients come into my feed reader, really well written, great content, great images, and very social media friendly (diggable, if you will). Then I look at the title and my computer-screen-damaged eyes drop in dismay, another crap title! The title of a blog entry is SO important, probably more so than any other factor – hell I could write and entire other entry on blog titles alone! (and I probably will). Make sure your client’s titles are catchy, clickable, and use keywords, and if they’re missing any of those things then get in there and edit them!

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1. 7 Reasons Why You Don’t Need SEO All you SE
2. Real SEO: Means Not Scamming Clients * This is

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