Entries from October 2009 ↓

Jack from creativemethod.com asks:

I have a quick question as I’m new to the SEO world.  I think I’m getting a handle on things but I’m curious about those city based directories full of useless information. For instance, doing a search for Oklahoma Graphic Design, the first few hits are directories (pasted below).; How do you compete with those? They are full of keywords, often in the domain.

My SEO Advice is:

There are a few things you can do to dominate here (tho the traffic is really low for this term!) the first thing is to use the term "Oklahoma graphic design" in your body text, this is a hard one to squeeze in there, but having references to this term across your website is a must to be relevant to this term a technique i often use is to tag the term as a strap-line to your identity i.e. ‘mark rushworth – oklahoma graphic design’ which you can use as text under your logo and on your footer as part of the copyright statement (gets you 2 impressions) you should also <strong> these to give emphasis…

Use the term in your title tag

And lastly, get links to your website using the term as the anchor text… if you create websites and put a footer link as a credit consider changing these links from ‘web design by company name’ to ‘oklahoma graphic design by company name’ (and just link the target term)

For some quick linkage, start some free blogs on blogger.com and wordpress.com etc and try and get oklahomagraphicdesign.blogspot.com and oklahomagraphicdesign.wordpress.com and create some articles reviewing the works of your peers tell them you’re critiquing their works in an email… they may link to your blogs which helps you get some relevancy which you can pass to your main site just put a sitewide link to your site using the anchor on these blogs.

Going to the extreme you can buy oklahomagraphicdesign.net, put your site onto it and set all your links to absolute paths using the full http://www. path to the new domain and tie up all the cross domain canonical issues to migrate your site to a non branded domain.

For what its worth I’ve put together this quick list of easy to generate links from .Gov domains. The format is pretty easy, just amend the querystring with your target link. The trick is to get links to these pages to enable them to transmit link juice. I suggest backing these up with some links from good dofollow social bookmarks and where possible try and get an internal link from the root .gov site to the internal page using blog comments or forum links etc as an orphaned link on a site is of little innitial value.

So if you want to generate 19 quick and easy links from .gov websites then here you go:

I can’t wait until my HTC HD2 arrives as im geting more and more fed up with my old 2G iPhones slow internet connection. The phone looks amazing and im looking forwards to the new HTC HD2’s bigger screen, ability to send and recieve MMS, video and camera with flash… these things dont sound like a big deal but when youve been lumped with apples abandoned G1 iPhone enoughs enough and its time to get back to a real phone.

I know the HD2 runs Windows Mobile 6.5 however due to a little app called Android On HTC, I can dual boot(ish) between the HTC HD2’s default winmo installation and a swanky android  os!

If like me you’re keen to beat the rush and need to keep your phone separate from your tarrif (saving a mint to boot) then theres a really good deal on at Amazon at the moment where you can buy a sim free HTC Touch HD2 for only £549.99 (works out at £46 pcm on a pseudo 12 month contract or £22 on pseudo 24 month contract) Its pretty pricy but then again the HTC HD2 is gorgous.

Buy the HTC Touch HD2 @ Amazon

Then again you could wait for the Sony Xperia X3 which boasts a similar spec and is Android Based.

Rand and the guys have come up with some compelling data that charts many of the possible cause and effects of getting high rankings for your websites.

They do however stress that this is all based on surface data taken from existing results and that they cannot be used as an accurate guide for predicting position based on cause and effect.

It does however make great reading and even their superficial data hints at things I’m currently validating through experimentation.

Check it out

Rand also points to some other data which again certainly provides food for thought.

Just been emailed this great little istockphoto promo code for 15% off 50 credits or more.

Simply enter the code: M155U42

Simples *squeek*

I just realised that I haven’t removed nofollow from my blog comments on this site so as of today, I’m proud to announce that all links out of this site will be dofollow (its going to take some time to go through every post but I promise to get onto it).

Why have I chosen to do this? Well as nofollow is no longer a method of containing and redistributing link juice within a site (instead the juice evaporates which is not good for anyone) I’ve decided to let the juice flow where it may.

This also means that I’m going to come down extra hard on people who try and post spammy comments. I must get 100 comments a day that say ‘good post’ with a spammy link. Even if your comment is worth while, if I find your link to be spammy i.e. NOT YOUR REAL NAME then I will edit your comment and remove your link and try and put your real name in.

You have been warned!

So, because of this re-purposing of link juice and the complete ineffectiveness of nofollow in retaining juice within a site I ENCOURAGE ALL WEBMASTERS TO REMOVE NOFOLLOW FROM YOUR ASSETS and instead pay more attention to managing bad comments and spam.

I’d like to welcome Adam to the world of blogging. After many months of saying ‘I have to start a blog’ he’s finally managed to pull his funder out and start one.

So if you have any PHP web development questions or want to read up on some advanced and not-so advanced PHP web development topics then look him up

root-servers.co.uk

I received a call from a lovely lady today who tried unsuccessfully to sell me a yell.com listing for one of the e-businesses I work on. She failed because Yell.com fails to realise that many businesses don’;t operate a bricks and mortar business, instead relying heavily on Google listings and Adwords for their custom -; a function that Yell.com’s regional directory based structure completely misses.

After a brief conversation where I vetted the ‘Google Friendly’; links that are nofollowed (yeah Google friendly… riiiight) I was passed onto a guy who wanted to sell me the Yell.com Adwords advertising service.

Here’s a quick lowdown on this service:

• You get to bid on a term in your area i.e. "beds in Honley"
• You get to specify your daily budget (wow really)
• You get a ‘landing page’ created as the target for your Adwords advert that can contain up to a massive seven bullet points, one of which can be your website address (no link) and telephone number

Anyone spot the numerous fatal flaws in this ill conceived service?

• The hits would be infinitesimally small
• No direct link to the relevant product page
• No tie with an ecommerce function
• The landing page would be completely unbranded or based on Yell’s previous efforts, completely amateurish

My advice is stay clear of this service and spend some money on a good Adwords training book or hire a team to do your PPC for you.

At least you’ll know you’re getting a better service than Yell.com

So What Should Yell.com Do?

Heres a couple of my quick thoughts to help kick start this ageing service:

• Firstly, remove the no follow from external links on their site
• Secondly re-work the site structure to make it more spider friendly
• Thirdly, recognise that lots of businesses dont have a showroom and re-work the logic of the site to operate around business type and not location
• Sack all of their customer web design team and invest in some up to date templates that can be easily themed (or just use wordpressmu)
• Completely re-think their Adwords offering and maybe tie it to some kelkoo.com style product portal so at least customers can sell items via their services (potential additional revenue stream too!)