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	<title>SEO Positive Ltd - SEO Tips, SEO News, Updated And Maintained By SEO Positive Ltd. &#187; Miscellaneous</title>
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		<title>Getting Into DMoz &#8211; An Insight from a DMoz Editor</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/getting-into-dmoz-an-insight-from-a-dmoz-editor/</link>
		<comments>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/getting-into-dmoz-an-insight-from-a-dmoz-editor/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[* This is conglomeration of part-guest-post part-my-own-writing, thanks solely to a very kind DMoz editor named Eric who got in touch today, read on for the full details. Eric has asked me to mention that the quotes provided below are the personal comments of a DMoz editor and are not official ODP statements.*
This is a [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>* This is conglomeration of part-guest-post part-my-own-writing, thanks solely to a very kind DMoz editor named Eric who got in touch today, read on for the full details. Eric has asked me to mention that the quotes provided below are the personal comments of a DMoz editor and are not official ODP statements.*</em></p>
<p>This is a good day for EggRage, and for a good reason &#8211; on July 13th of this year I posted an article about <a href="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/how-to-submit-your-site-to-dmoz/">how to get into DMoz</a>, 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&#8217;ve written here.<span id="more-60"></span></p>
<p><a href="http://dmoz.org"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99" title="dmoz" src="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/dmoz.jpg" alt="dmoz" width="540" height="195" /></a></p>
<p>Today, September 1st, 2008 &#8211; I logged into the <a href="http://www.digitaldesignerforum.com">Digital Designer Forum</a> mentioned previously in my post about <a href="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/how-to-seo-a-forum/">how to SEO a forum</a>, 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)</p>
<p><strong>How To: Submit Your Site To DMoz</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/picture-1.png"></a>Submitting a site to DMoz has long been known as one of the &#8221;things to do&#8221; when it comes to SEO. Putting it into practice however, is something that&#8217;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&#8217;ve done the earth some sinful injustice.</p>
<p>The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it&#8217;s nature and as such some really &#8216;good&#8217; sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies).</p>
<blockquote><p>Usually they are waiting to be reviewed (unless of course they are not really good or are sites that won&#8217;t be accepted.</p>
<p>Ok let&#8217;s look at the facts. About 5000 active editors and nearly 500,000 categories &#8211; 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 &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>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 &#8211; I think my average this year is adding 20 sites a week &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>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&#8217;t do much else) or they are trusted enough to gain wider permissions and are rather fanatical about preserving their trusted status.</p></blockquote>
<p>Well today hopefully I&#8217;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!</p>
<p>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&#8217;s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Let&#8217;s Get Started</strong></p>
<p>So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site,</p>
<blockquote><p>Good advice &#8211; leave the <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www/">http://www</a><!-- m -->. off the site name else the search won&#8217;t find it. Note the search works on the RDF dump which is issued once a week (ish) so can be out of date.</p></blockquote>
<p>it&#8217;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.</p>
<p><strong>Selecting Your Category</strong></p>
<p>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&#8217;s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it&#8217;s something really special.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/picture-2.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49" title="picture-2" src="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/picture-2-300x225.png" alt="dmoz categories" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into &#8211; 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.</p>
<blockquote><p>Good advice here and I&#8217;ll add some more.</p>
<p>Sort out the 1,2 or 3 places you are eligible for and suggest them in one go.</p>
<p>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.<br />
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/">http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/</a></p>
<p>Then determine what your site is about &#8211; the topic &#8211; 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).</p>
<p>Lets take web design as an example (for no apparant reason). You can check the categories in <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/">http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_ &#8230; velopment/</a><!-- m --> 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<br />
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/">http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/</a></p>
<p>Now if the site is UK based, another place to look is <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/">http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Uni &#8230; velopment/</a><!-- m --> and<br />
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/">http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/</a> might be an appropriate place.</p>
<p>Of course an editor placing the sites would be making his best guess at the appropriate place (they can&#8217;t be knowledgeable on all things) which is why the update url link is there.</p>
<p>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<!-- m --> <a class="postlink" href="http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom">http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom</a><!-- m --> if the site is eligible.</p>
<p>So you can suggest to 2 or 3 categories as described above if the site is eligible.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>The Submission Screen</strong></p>
<p>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):</p>
<p>Title, Description, and Email Address &#8211; sounds simple doesn&#8217;t it? Let&#8217;s tackle them one by one.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/picture-3.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-50" title="picture-3" src="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/picture-3-300x225.png" alt="dmoz submission screen" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Title</strong><br />
Let&#8217;s not get fancy, if your company&#8217;s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be &#8216;BlueShirt&#8217; &#8211; the furthest that you could stretch would be &#8216;BlueShirt Clothing&#8217; but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam <em>free</em>.</p>
<blockquote><p>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.<br />
If suggesting elsewhere, the editors look for a meaningful combination of title and description. Using the website title is OK &#8211; the editor might not agree and may change it, but at least you have indicated your preference.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Description</strong><br />
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</p>
<p>&#8220;BlueShirt Clothing &#8211; 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.&#8221;</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s break that down a bit further, &#8216;offers&#8217; is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I&#8217;ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I&#8217;ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I&#8217;ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.</p>
<blockquote><p>More or less spot on.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>First sentence should be who/what the site is about, second sentence what is on the site.</p>
<p>Remember it is not an advert, aim for dull.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Email Address</strong><br />
Doesn&#8217;t matter whether you&#8217;re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.</p>
<blockquote><p>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 &#8216;?&#8217; 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.</p>
<p>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&#8217;t. The only way I treat them differently is that for the first, I might &#8216;do another on before bed&#8217; and for the second not.</p></blockquote>
<p>Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that&#8217;s it!</p>
<p><strong>Final Things To Consider</strong></p>
<p>This is where a lot of people trip up, so you&#8217;ve found a category, and submitted your site &#8211; what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included?</p>
<blockquote><p>Check out <a class="postlink" href="http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/">http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/</a> &#8211; most of it is there.</p>
<p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn&#8217;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 <em>easy</em> 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&#8217;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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>&lt;meta name=&#8221;robots&#8221; content=&#8221;noodp&#8221; /&gt;</p>
<p>If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you&#8217;ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!</p>
<p>And don&#8217;t get downhearted if you don&#8217;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.</p>
<blockquote><p>And you were doing so well up til now <img title="Crying or Very Sad" src="http://www.digitaldesignerforum.com/images/smilies/icon_cry.gif" alt=":cry:" /><br />
Please don&#8217;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&#8217;ve reviewed suggestions that were 5 years old and with the most appalling rubbish in the titles and description.</p>
<p>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 &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>In some categories the suggestion pool is a cesspit of spam, dread and loathing that few but the most hardy would venture into &#8211; 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.</p>
<p>This year I have listed ?600 sites of which less than 100 were suggested.</p>
<p>regards</p>
<p>PS in case your feel that DMOZ editors don&#8217;t appreciate what not getting listed means, I&#8217;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</p></blockquote>
<p>And that concludes what I&#8217;ve found to be one of the most useful posts that I&#8217;ve ever come across on a forum, it may sound silly to some people but I&#8217;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.</p>
<p>For those of you who read the last article, now you have it straight from the horse&#8217;s mouth! So go out there, behave yourselves, and make your site worthy of inclusion on the Open Directory Project.</p>
<p>And as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!</p>


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		<title>All Traffic and No Conversion</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/all-traffic-and-no-conversion/</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:58:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Copy Writing]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[** This is guest post by Wizely of VividCopy focusing on the importance of optimising your site for visitors as well as search engines, because after all, it doesn&#8217;t matter how many people click on to your site if not a single one of them wants to stay there and browse it! &#8211; Hopefully more [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/waldo4/742738583/" target="_blank"><img class="alignright" style="margin: 5px; float: right;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1430/742738583_345cedcdc7_m.jpg" alt="by Waldo#4" width="252" height="181" /></a><em>** This is guest post by Wizely of <a href="http://vividcopy.co.uk">VividCopy</a> focusing on the importance of optimising your site for visitors as well as search engines, because after all, it doesn&#8217;t matter how many people click on to your site if not a single one of them wants to stay there and browse it! &#8211; Hopefully more posts from Wizely and other guest writers for EggRage to follow! -John **</em></p>
<p><strong>So:<br />
</strong></p>
<p>There&#8217;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&#8217;s aimed at real human beings. Robots don&#8217;t yet do our shopping so why write for them?</p>
<p>Sadly the robots seem to be winning. How many web pages do you see that are bland waffle plastered with <strong>repeated</strong>, <strong>repeated</strong>, <strong>repeated </strong>words in bold? Make you want to read through, let alone buy from or sign-up to it? Of course not, it&#8217;s nothing more than spam and who trusts spammers?</p>
<p>Real SEO wouldn&#8217;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!</p>
<p><!--sizeo:3--><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 100%;"><!--/sizeo-->Top 5 ways &#8216;writing for SEO&#8217; ruins your copy<br />
<!--sizec--></span></strong><!--/sizec--><span id="more-51"></span></p>
<ul>
<li> The aforementioned plague of bold and spamming your keywords and phrases</li>
<li> Sterile and mechanical non-style — nothing more than filler for robots</li>
<li> Trading powerful headlines for &#8216;&lt;h1&gt; robot fodder&#8217;</li>
<li> Forgetting a call to action — robots never click &#8216;buy&#8217; do they?</li>
<li> The shotgun approach with writing aimed at robots, missing every human visitor</li>
</ul>
<p>Turning the tide in this war against machines means understanding a simple truth – real SEO shouldn&#8217;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.</p>
<p><strong><em>Real SEO doesn&#8217;t mean making sacrifices.</em></strong></p>


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		<title>Real SEO: Is User Optimisation</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/real-seo-is-user-optimisation/</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2008 10:59:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Real SEO]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[* This is part 2 of the &#8216;Real SEO&#8217; series, you can read part 1 &#8216;Real SEO: Is NOT Spam&#8217; here.
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 &#8216;optimise for search engines&#8217; [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>* This is part 2 of the &#8216;Real SEO&#8217; series, you can read part 1 &#8216;Real SEO: Is NOT Spam&#8217; <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/notsogoodphotography/545295803/">here.</a></em></p>
<p><img class="alignright" style="float: right; margin: 5px;" src="http://www.cognetics.com/services/design_services/images/services_design_testing.jpg" alt="Image courtesy of Cognetics.com" height="220" />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 &#8216;optimise for search engines&#8217; when you don&#8217;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.</p>
<p>The similarities between elements that are important to search engines and elements that are important to users, are strikingly obvious.</p>
<p><strong>Let’s take a look</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Titles and Meta Content
<ul>
<li>Search engines: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and rank it accordingly.</li>
<li>Users: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and decide whether or not to use it.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Header Tags
<ul>
<li>Search engines: Use them to assess what the main bodies of text are about, and rank the page accordingly.</li>
<li>Users: Use them to quickly see what the main bodies of text are about.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Anchor Text
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Users: Use it to understand what the page that is being linked to is about.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Alt Attributes
<ul>
<li>Search engines: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Page Copy
<ul>
<li>Search engines: Use this to establish which search queries this content is relevant to.</li>
<li>Users: Use this to establish if the content is relevant to what they are looking for.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Strong Tags
<ul>
<li>Search engines: Use this to pick out important key phrases within the copy.</li>
<li>Users: Use this to scan the copy and pick out the most important words.</li>
</ul>
<p>I could go on all afternoon, but I won&#8217;t because I&#8217;m sure you get the general idea by now.</p>
<p>So many people go crazy when trying to &#8216;SEO&#8217; their sites, they think &#8216;right, here are some techniques to use, lets apply them to absolutely everything&#8217;. Which unsurprisingly, doesn&#8217;t work.</p>
<p><strong>Real SEO is User Optimisation because&#8230;</strong></p>
<p>Think about the techniques you&#8217;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.</p>
<p><strong>Here are a couple of examples</strong></p>
<p>You add 35 key phrases to your page copy, and but them all in strong tags.</p>
<ul>
<li>Users say: I can&#8217;t read it, it looks terrible.</li>
<li>Search engines say: Its spam</li>
</ul>
<p>You use clear anchor text throughout your site that is relevant to the page which is being linked to.</p>
<ul>
<li>Users say: This is really easy to navigate, I like it.</li>
<li>Search engines say: The anchor text is relevant to the page content.</li>
</ul>
<p>Again, I could go on, but I won&#8217;t. The jist of it is that if you&#8217;re pissing off your users with your &#8216;optimisation&#8217; attempts, then you&#8217;re probably annoying the hell out of search engines too.</p>
<p>Write your site, your code, and your content for your users. It doesn&#8217;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&#8217;ll see a nice correlation to your rankings too.</p>
<p>SEO does <strong>not</strong> mean tricking search engines for ranks.</p>
<p>Search engines work by looking for the <strong>best</strong> sites to rank.</p>
<p>SEO means <strong>IMPROVING</strong> your site until it’s good enough to rank.</p>
<p>More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow…</li>
</ul>


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		<title>Marketing: How Not To</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/marketing-how-not-to/</link>
		<comments>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/marketing-how-not-to/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:39:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Other]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[how not to]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet Marketing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[keyboard firmware update]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.eggrage.co.uk/?p=40</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This isn&#8217;t specifically internet marketing related, but it popped up on my computer today, and I laughed so much that I didn&#8217;t want to pass up the opportunity of sharing it with you.
Apparently Apple don&#8217;t have a very big budget when it comes to hiring writers.
Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0
The Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update will [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This isn&#8217;t specifically internet marketing related, but it popped up on my computer today, and I laughed so much that I didn&#8217;t want to pass up the opportunity of sharing it with you.</p>
<p>Apparently Apple don&#8217;t have a very big budget when it comes to hiring writers.</p>
<p>Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0</p>
<blockquote><p>The Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update will update the keyboard firmware on your aluminum Apple Keyboard.</p></blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-41" title="FAIL" src="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/picture-3.png" alt="" width="474" height="365" /></p>


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>5 Reasons To Subscribe To Your Clients&#8217; Blogs</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/5-reasons-to-subscribe-to-your-clients-blogs/</link>
		<comments>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/5-reasons-to-subscribe-to-your-clients-blogs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:30:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Customers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet Marketing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Search Engine Optimisation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Media Marketing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blogging for clients]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[client blogging]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[client writing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[monitoring clients]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[subscribing to client rss]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.eggrage.co.uk/5-reasons-to-subscribe-to-your-clients-blogs/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m going to be really &#8216;naughty&#8217; here and break the trend of the thousands and thousands of April fools blogs that have gone up today. This has absolutely nothing to do with April the 1st!
Increasingly blogs are sold to companies not just as a part of their website, but as a legitimate SEO tool to [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>I&#8217;m going to be really &#8216;naughty&#8217; here and break the trend of the thousands and thousands of April fools blogs that have gone up today. This has absolutely nothing to do with April the 1st!</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the spirit of this, here are 5 reasons to subscribe to your clients&#8217; RSS feeds!</p>
<p><strong>1. To See If They Use Their Blog At All</strong><br />
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&#8217;t touch the damn thing then they won&#8217;t be getting much benefit at all. I have a dedicated folder for my clients&#8217; blogs and when I see that a week has gone by and their name hasn&#8217;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!<br />
<strong><br />
2. To See If They Use Their Blog Correctly</strong><br />
I actually once had a client with a band website who on occasion would blog about the weather&#8230; Don&#8217;t even ask. Because I wasn&#8217;t subscribed to the feed, I didn&#8217;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&#8217;t expect them to know exactly what to write just because it&#8217;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.</p>
<p><strong>3. To See If They Are Using Internal Linking</strong><br />
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&#8217;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&#8217; blogs.</p>
<p><strong>4. To Asses The Current Affairs For Your Client</strong><br />
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&#8217;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&#8217;s industry (provided that they are following #2)</p>
<p><strong>5. To Capitalise On SEO Opportunities Right Away</strong><br />
Sometimes I&#8217;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 &#8211; hell I could write and entire other entry on blog titles alone! (and I probably will). Make sure your client&#8217;s titles are catchy, clickable, and use keywords, and if they&#8217;re missing any of those things then get in there and edit them!</p>


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		</item>
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		<title>Avoid Nightmare SEO Clients, Website Checklist</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/avoid-nightmare-seo-clients-website-checklist/</link>
		<comments>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/avoid-nightmare-seo-clients-website-checklist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:25:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Customers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Search Engine Optimisation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bad clients]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bad seo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cms seo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[frames seo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[javascript seo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nightmare seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.eggrage.co.uk/avoid-nightmare-seo-clients-website-checklist/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
If there is one thing that really gets to me about SEO, its when you find yourself stuck with a client that you wish you had never taken on in the first place. Their site uses tables for absolutely everything, sometimes even just to add an extra space between words, their navigation is all images [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img src="http://www.eggrage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/jesus.png" alt="jesus.png" hspace="0" vspace="10" align="absmiddle" /></p>
<p>If there is one thing that really gets to me about SEO, its when you find yourself stuck with a client that you wish you had never taken on in the first place. Their site uses tables for absolutely everything, sometimes even just to add an extra space between words, their navigation is all images with javascript, and their content management system means you can&#8217;t change a single thing without having to rebuild the whole site.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;ve never had a client quite that bad, consider yourself lucky!</p>
<p>Of course its not always avoidable, sometimes, especially working for a company rather than for yourself, where it is not you who gets to decide what clients to say no to &#8211; you get landed with these sites and there is not a lot you can do. In which case my advice to you is to asses how bad it really is, do what you can, and then get out of there.</p>
<p>But for the times when you do have control over whether or not to take on a prospective client, consider the following points:</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold">Do they have a content management system?</span><br />
If so is it open source, home made, or a company-build ? Open source will always be the easiest to work with, with something like Drupal or Wordpress there is a lot you can do with regards to applying an SEO skin to the site. A company-build content management system is where their web design company built them a content management system specifically for their site, these are usually a lot more difficult to work with, relatively closed, and the company in question are generally very sour about giving you access or permission to change their code.</p>
<p>The worst of the bunch by far though, is the home made content management system &#8211; where the client has a freelance web designer who has built them an admin area, and made a complete mess of it. In these cases the web designer will most likely be only to happy to let you into his code and tell you how great it is, but ask him how you are going to implement custom meta information for each specific page, and he will suddenly become very stand-offish. Steer clear!</p>
<p><span style="font-style: italic">(Side note &#8211; if you must take on a client like this, at least ensure that you have FTP access so that you can hardwire in any changes that you need to)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold">Does their site use tables, javascript navigation, or frames?</span><br />
If it does, you may want to forget them altogether. Tables are the least bad, they just make content difficult to crawl &#8211; you will need to convert the entire layout to CSS, which will take a fair amount of time.</p>
<p>Javascript navigation is in the middle, search engines can&#8217;t follow JS navigation, the easy way around this issue is to replicate the navigation in a set of plain-text base links that search engines can follow.</p>
<p>The worst (unsurprisingly) is frames, which don&#8217;t display the full source code, and as such don&#8217;t let search engines in, you will definitely have to convert a site like this to CSS and PHP includes, which will take the longest out of all of them.</p>
<p>These types of sites are the ones that keep me awake at night, not out of worry, out of sheer manic frustration. God help you if you have a combination of Frames, Javascript, AND Tables.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold">Does their server have ISAPI / MOD rewrites enabled?</span><br />
One of the biggest elements of my initial SEO skin for any site is doing file name changes, and URL rewrites. Now obviously these require 301 redirects, and server rewrite rules. It&#8217;s all well and good quoting a client to have this work done, but when you come to upload your .htaccess or httpd.ini file and it nukes the whole site &#8211; it gets pretty painful pretty fast. Check this beforehand.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold">Do they need SEO?</span><br />
I have a real problem with doing SEO for clients that don&#8217;t need it. A cabbage farm for example, DOESNT need SEO. They are the wholesaler, they sell to the retailer, and the retailer sells to the consumer. The consumer uses a search engine to find the retailer, but the retailer does not use a search engine to find the wholesaler! That&#8217;s just one example, but if your client&#8217;s product or services aren&#8217;t directly available to the public, then why do they need to rank in search engines?</p>
<p>You may be thinking, &#8216;well why not?&#8217; and that is a fair question, I would like to say something fitting like &#8216;to preserve the integrity of Google&#8217;s search listings and maintain the ongoing quality of search results provided the general public&#8217;&#8230; but I won&#8217;t. Its simply because everyone without exception, wants SEO, because they want traffic, and if they are paying you for SEO, they expect to see traffic. But number 1 for &#8216;cabbage farm&#8217; will still yield no traffic because no one is searching for it, so the client gets frustrated, and you get frustrated. Save yourself the headaches.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold">Do they care?</span><br />
Some clients are a dream come true, you tell them that SEO is an ongoing process and it requires a lot of their input, and they step up to the plate and get everything done that you ask them to. Others, can be downright rude, refusing to co-operate with any of your requests, and expecting to see results without them having to lift a finger.</p>
<p>Make sure your client understands what is required of them BEFORE taking them on, if they are not willing to do any updates then there is no point in selling them a blog! You may again think &#8216;why not&#8217; and the reason is the same, when they don&#8217;t see results (due to no fault of your own) they will ask where all that money went that they gave you. Save yourself the aggravation, and set up the blogs for clients that will actively use them.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold">Finally&#8230;</span><br />
I should make it clear that I am not advocating that you &#8216;duck out&#8217; of any projects that seem like they might be more difficult than others. I am simply saying that you should asses the above points before taking on a client, or you may find yourself putting in many more hours than you had intended, or been paid for. Having sites that are near impossible to optimise isn&#8217;t just ineffective for your client&#8217;s business, it affects your reputation to. So play on your strengths!</p>
<p>Had any nightmare client sites of your own? Got any questions? Drop me a line in the comments!</p>


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		<item>
		<title>Managing Client Expectations</title>
		<link>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/managing-client-expectations/</link>
		<comments>http://www.eggrage.co.uk/managing-client-expectations/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 23 Feb 2008 15:01:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Customers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[clients]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[managing clients]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[managing expectations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[managing seo clients]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.eggrage.co.uk/managing-client-expectations/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Managing client expectations with regards to Internet Marketing can be a rewarding experience, but more often than not its a painful up hill crawl to get them to see that, what they want, and what they need, are two entirely different things.
Most often, this comes in the form of what key phrases clients want to [...]


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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Managing client expectations with regards to Internet Marketing can be a rewarding experience, but more often than not its a painful up hill crawl to get them to see that, what they want, and what they need, are two entirely different things.</p>
<p>Most often, this comes in the form of what key phrases clients want to rank for, one of my clients for example is dead set on ranking for &#8216;designer clothing&#8217; &#8211; which, as prestigious as it may be, doesn&#8217;t really benefit him or his business at all. Why, you ask?</p>
<p>Read on.</p>
<p>A few months ago, said client called me up because he had dropped from the number 2 spot to number 3 in Google (for &#8216;designer clothing&#8217;). He was, and I quote &#8220;very concerned about the ongoing success of his Seo campaign due to the significant recent drop&#8221;. Ironically of course, the opposite was true, while he had dropped one place for &#8216;designer clothing&#8217; he was actualy up 36 positions overall from the previous month, and most of the gains were in longer (3 to 5) word terms. What I explained to him, is something that all Internet Marketing clients should ready have explained to them before they are taken on.</p>
<p>Short key phrases (for the most part) do not convert into sales.</p>
<p>While it makes you look pretty big and impressive to rank for &#8216;designer clothing&#8217; &#8211; when it comes down to it if someone is actually doing a search with the intent to buy, they will be much more specific about what they search for.</p>
<p>In this case, &#8216;buy mens bench jeans&#8217; was converting at an awesome 15%, while comparatively &#8216;designer clothing&#8217; although drawing a reasonable amount of traffic, was converting at less than 1%. Of course sometimes 1% of a lot of traffic is still more money than 15% of very little traffic, but you have to weigh up the pros and cons. Spend all your time trying to rank for one high traffic, poorly converting term? Or spread your time over 10 lower traffic terms converting excellently?</p>
<p>My personal preference is always the second option.</p>
<p>So how does this relate to managing client expectations? Well often a client will have an idea in their head of what will make them more money online, and they expect you to do all the work and make it happen. This is of course so ridiculous that most of us don&#8217;t even take it into consideration.</p>
<p>In reality however, clients need a detailed explanation of what <em>they</em> need, and how this ties in with their own ideas. They also need it to be made clear that there is only so much you can do, this their business, and they need to promote it.</p>


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