SEO Advice

SEO Advice: What are 10 Things I can do to Increase my Search Rank NOW?

May 17, 2009, by No comments yet

Seattle based UKIT on www.qbn.com asks

“What are ten things I can do to increase my search rank NOW?”

My SEO Advice:

  1. Revise your page titles based on your analytics data
  2. Revise your headings to reflect your new titles
  3. Use Adwords Keyword Research Tool to expand the topics on your site
  4. Revise your internal link structure weeding nofolllowing off topic links
  5. Use canonical rel tags to remove dupe content due to query strings
  6. Add more content to each page
  7. Visit all existing links to your site and ask to revise the anchor text to something on-topic
  8. Start blogs in your niche on different class C’s and link into your main site
  9. Ask all suppliers/customers to link to your site using supplied code
  10. Submit Google sitemap
  11. Create a really detailed Froogle feed
  12. Sign yourself up to Google local and attract more local custom

I know that’s 12 but what the hey the last 2 are really juicy :)

SEO Advice: What are 10 Things I can do to Increase my Search Rank NOW?

SEO Training for Satvinder

December 26, 2008, by 1 comment

Big changes are a foot, I can’t say much more right now however I have been helping Satvinder, an ex-work colleague to get a foot hold in SEO as an aid to his marketing degree.

Part of this has led me to find some interesting articles that will help old-skool SEO-ers and n00bs a like to brush up on some fundamentals, as this industry never stays still (great innit!)

Sample Freelance Contracts

http://www.core77.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/001184.html

Free Business Courses

http://educhoices.org/articles/12_Universities_Offering_Free_Business_Courses_Online.html

How to manage social profiles

http://mashable.com/2008/10/13/how-to-manage-social-profiles/

JQuery for absolute beginners

http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/

How to get clients to say yes

http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/12/18/how-to-get-clients-to-say-yes-to-your-designs/

PPC Primer

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/11/20/starting-from-scratch-a-paid-search-primer/

The art of the SEO proposal

http://www.seobook.com/art-seo-proposal#32805

Getting started with PHP from scratch

http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/25-resources-to-get-you-started-with-php-from-scratch/

How i became a DIGG power user

http://aszx.net/how-i-became-a-digg-power-user-with-a-75-popular-ratio.html

10 free brand monitoring tools

http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/

SEOmoz – Low Hanging Fruit

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-christmas-present-for-seos-10-tips-to-pick-the-low-hanging-fruit

A guide to semantic Web Patterns

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_patterns_a_guide_redux.php

And finally, to blog off some tension and give your brain a rest…

Old Skool Games

http://amog.com/tech/gaming/oldschool-videogames/

SEO Training for Satvinder

Barcamp Leeds 2008

August 17, 2008, by No comments yet

I’d like to thank everyone for putting on such a good event this year, tho maybe trying to fill 2 days was a bit of an error (I expect the open street map guys thought it was ace), I thoroughly enjoyed both days, learned lots of new stuff and met some great people.

I’ll start in reverse with the end of day 2 if that’s OK as its fresh in my memory – Schedule is here.

Day 2

  • Introduction to Textmate - An apple based text editor that’s code centric and has some brilliant features. Luckily for us PC boffins there’s a PC version called E Text Editor which is a faithful port of the Mac version and works just as well. Seriously, if like me you spend 99% of your time out of Dreamweaver in a more code based editor (I use the bog standard Notepad) give this a go… it could change your life.

     
  • Secret Stuff - A discussion from a geek chick about the ‘secret’ goings on at BAE, namely true UAV’s that fly around without human direction. I apologise for making wise cracks about ‘when is Sky Net going live as i plan to find somewhere safe to hide’ and my general geekyness about new aircraft as I closely followed the x-prize between Boeing and Lockheed when it came to pitching for the Joint Strike Fighter.

     
  • Surreal Presentations – Basically pick a topic, Google for a Powerpoint about it and present your findings in a funny way – great fun!

     
  • Business 2.0 – Basically a brain-storming session about how a more business focused, support based forum could be generated on the Geekup/Barcamp template where business owners can get together to discuss and get help with sticky situations. I thought this was a great idea and will happily share my 8 years experience in running a small studio with anyone who participates.

     
  • Ask The Hodge – 2 questions, How and Why… Don’t think Dom got around to answering either (probably called me a smart arse)

     
  • Breakfast - Yum, I hadnt had time to eat

Day 1

  • Games, Beer and Pizza – (drink, drink, eat, eat) Whoah… think I should be going home now.

     
  • Startup Mistakes
  • Build an Iphone App in 20 mins
  • Affiliates 101
  • Lazy web
  • Link Building for SEO
  • Design Vs Usability
  • SEO Is Evil

Famewhore images: Me, Me. Mopre soon as people post them up to Flickr

Barcamp Leeds 2008

Amazon Ecommerce (Webstore) and SEO TSK!

August 11, 2008, by No comments yet

Just discovered 2 Amazon services that I think would work well in the armour of the average commercial SEO consultant. The first is Sell on Amazon, a service that enables you to add and sell your products in the standard Amazon framework… nice!; The second is Amazon Webstore, their own ecommerce solution. For those who are intreagued:

Sell On Amazon

$39.99 (£20.00) monthly fee plus 6% – 20% commission on sales

Amazon Webstore

$59.99 (£30.00) per month plus 7% commission

Ive just one concern about Amazon Webstore…

When you check their SEO functions you get this image:

meta Amazon Ecommerce (Webstore) and SEO TSK!

All I have to say is TSK! TSK! …just how long has it been since Meta Tags were actually useful for SEO? C’mon guys. If you’re serious about this service then pay some attention to post 1999 SEO practices!

Amazon Ecommerce (Webstore) and SEO TSK!

Barcamp Leeds 2007 – My SEO Talk

November 18, 2007, by No comments yet

I was really nervous about yesterdays Barcamp in Leeds as I’d been called out by The Hodge after slating his SEO presentation at a previous GeekUp and asked to co-present an SEO critique session with him. In addition it wasnt until around 8:30 yesterday morning that i realised that the event was an all day thing and not a 7pm start as GeekUp usually is which meant I had to rush to get there.

For those of you who havent been to a BarCamp yet (theres loads all over the world) its a strange format thats basically ‘web2.0′ only in human form with everyone opting on the day to do presentations on something they know about and its all worked out on post it notes on a board so you can see who’s scheduled to talk about what in each room. Althgether it workded really well (apart from anything that relied on technology *cough* The Hodges live linkup with Barcamp Toronto *cough* :)

With time-slots being roughly 20 mins, many people opted to simply introduce a product or service and there were few actual practical sessions which was something Ive been striving for.

…so I attended seminars on:

  • Futurology (we came up with a dog version of Match.com based on the cryptic connections between a dog and disposeable camera)
  • Drupal (which everyone agreed was too hard to get into and customise)
  • Case study on a social loan company who’ve set up a whisky distillary based on community monies
  • Case study on some interesting nodal tagging for the BBC

…and lots more.

Our presentation on SEO went well, tho I found the touch sensitive digital whiteboards a complete nightmare to work with and couldn’t really figure out how to jump into wordtracker etc to give some real impacting feedback so I opted to talk to interested people on a 1-2-1 basis afterwards. Read an impartial review here and SEOMOZ.org has a nice document that supports my comments on link juice and control of your websites internal link structure.

Loads of beer didn’t turn up due to someone not ordering it in advance. And the pub we all ended up in smelt like an armpit lol.

So will I go to the next one? Hell yeah!

Oh and I won an iPod lol!

Barcamp Leeds 2007 My SEO Talk

Googles SEO Trainer Tells SEO’s Not to Attend His Classes

September 7, 2006, by No comments yet

In the US Google is offering SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) courses for just $30. Wow, amazing you might think, but actually you’d be wrong.
Googles’ own SEO trainer, Adam Lasnik, has posted on webmasterworld.com (login required), that the training on offer covers very basic seo techniques.

“I think that the generally very-tech-savvy WebmasterWorld audience would be disappointed with the depth and focus of information presented. The primary emphasis will be on accessibility, not ranking, and the needs (and limitations) of government sites are often quite distinct from those of for-profit sites.”

So despite the advertisement of SEO, what they’re actually teaching is how to design a better, more functional and usable website, nothing to do with SEO / SEM at all!

So the general census is that you should all save your $30 and spend it on Adwords!

Googles SEO Trainer Tells SEOs Not to Attend His Classes