UK SEO based in Leeds with 11 Years Experience in Web Design and Online Marketing

Heres a quick tip for you, when searching for directories to submit to think about the following:

1. If you sell sofas instead of submitting to shopping>home>lounge consider >shopping>antiques and collectables as chances are theres fewer out bound links from that page i.e. think latterally and source a related folder with fewest outbound links – Googles search suggestion tool will help you identify the appropriate latteral terms.
2. Look at MozRank instead of PageRank as PR is all whack at the moment (how down with the kids am I lol).
3. Take advantage of the description box and max it out as it will increase the pages relevancy to your term (this works even better if you’re submitting multiple micro/feeder sites to the same directory location).
4. Dont spam the title box.
5. Dont bother with Meta information, its not used often.
6. If you can add an article to a category do the same with a good title and looooong description.
7. Try and adapt your link title to match the folder’s name i.e. a category about Furniture has my link with the anchor “Antique Furniture Sofa and Chairs”

Enjoy!

I’ve been having a play with a nice little tool from bad-neighborhood.com which goes through a page on your site and checks if your site is linking out to a bad neighborhood.  When used as one of your qualifying metrics in a link building campaign you can quickly appraise a link source and determine if you’re going to receive a penalty.

For a freebie tool its pretty good, it shows you sites that are ‘blog spam’, has a 1-5 metric of severity and a tick and cross indicator showing if the sites clean or not.

Give it a try.

Binaryday.com has published their review of the leaked Google internal SEO report card produced for all Google assets. Its a nice find as it reaffirms some of the guesses that SEO’s have made as to how to best optimise a site.

Their review is great, but there’s some missed opportunities that could be worthwhile exploiting.

Google are playing up the importance of ‘descriptive’ title and meta description tags.

• Make title tags 60 characters in length as this is the default size
• Keep keywords to the front as later terms may have ‘less weight to words after a certain point’
• Add in what the product does, who it targets and what the main features are
• Use the noodp meta tag to override Googles default use and add in your own meta description snippet

Google advocate having your brand as the first part of a title – this may help with brand recognition and the implementation of Site Links with your listing?

Google reinforces the fact that meta keywords and descriptions do not benefit your search position, instead the meta description tag can be used to support your listing making it more inticing

To get Site Links…

• Use a heirarchal site structure (is Google using folders to define Site Links?)
• Use descriptive anchor text for links (I suggest keeping anchor texts uniform across all pages and inbound links with the exception of using plurals to further determine relevancy)
• Avoid deep nesting of content behind many sub directories (keep your site structure 1 or 2 tiers deep)
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to remove irrelevant terms

Google are highlighting issues with their multi-path site structure which sees google.com/foo google.com/foo/ google.com/foo/index.html www.google.com/foo www.google.com/foo/ www.google.com/foo/index.html foo.google.com foo.google.com/ foo.google.com/index.html all directing to the same page and all accessible in their own rights or being re-directed via 302 (temporary redirects). To combat this they suggest using 301 redirects on all non standard versions of the URL’s to either foo.google.com or google.com/foo.

Its also important to make sure your internal links and external links under your control follow this procedure to avoid further indexing of these ‘broken’ URLs.

Make sure any logo links back to your sites home page have descriptive alt text and not just a repetition of the brand name.

Remove all ‘click here’, ‘learn more’ and other generic links with more descriptive (keyword rich) texts.

Here’s a great little tip from RAND that I’m sure to use in many projects to come.

Instead of using rel="nofollow" or worse robots.txt to remove entries from Google, use the meta tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

…instead as it still stops the page from being shown in Google (which by all accounts robots.txt doesn’t guarantee) but lets the page pass juice so there’s no dead juice flow within your site.

Great stuff, guys, its advanced tips like this that keep me interested in SEO.

I’ve recently had to move machine whilst Microsoft figure out how the last Windows update has crippled my computer causing it to run slow and lockup/reset every 100 minutes (very annoying). The up-shot of this is that I am now working on a Windows Vista computer instead of my souped up XP configuration and as a result I am no longer able to access my standard suite of cross browser testing apps that are XP only.

I’ve tried to use online services but theyre slow and not very interactive however I recently came across a free solution that comes direct from Microsoft.

By using Microsofts free Virtual PC application you can quickly and easily run virtual machines preconfigured to combine versions of Internet Explorer and various operating systems. So with little effort, I am able to run a virtualised Windows XP with IE6 and IE7 preinstalled.

It works brilliantly.

One thing to note is that the virtual machines are time limited meaning that every so often you will have to download a new version.

It seems that even the Dilbert crew get befuddled with SEO… it seems you have to loose your soul to understand and impliment SEO… lol.

I love getting free stuff, and my latest freebie of some letraset takes me back to my days at college. A few months ago i snagged a link on qbn.com to an offer on image library specialists, Veer.com’s website where registered users could get some free letraset as part of a special promotion.

And mine arrived today

The packaging is great and really well thought out (im a sucker for orange and mid tone grey.

Ok, so my re-created blog has been live for around 2 weeks now after the deletion of the original site and I have to say that since I moved to Wordpress I’ve never encountered so much spam. I’m running at over 100 spam messages in just a few days… starting with an influx from day 1. It seems that spammers out there are targeting the Hello World post trying to get around sites without Askimet running… If you’re running Wordpress and have a significant spam issue then I suggest choosing another platform as, like I said, Wordpress is a Spam Magnet!

I’m now into my second year at Distinctive Chesterfields/Click 4 Beds and I’ve just realised that I’m now chasing my own performance from last year… in effect I have a ghost car to race against just like in a game where last years performances are now being used as a benchmark for this year…

Love it!

Just discovered a great article on the BBC website outlining how Neville Brody’s Research Studio crafted the new website design.

It’s a great article because it goes into read depth about some of the decisions made and shows how difficult issues such a stext overlays on top of images were managed.

Simply inspirational for everyone.

Mr Brody was a twat when I met him a few years back… just goes to show you should never meet your heros.

Poached from QBN.com