So how do you establish web presence? There are several ways, one is through advertising, using the power of the pay-per-click method you will be able to gain so much traffic and maybe a considerable number of conversions also. The only drawback is that, the same with media advertising you will have to shell out also a considerable amount of money. That is why many people are turning into a less expensive way of establishing their web presence and this is through the use of search engine optimisation techniques. Search engine optimisation does not require much of a budget compared to that of the PPC. Although, the processes involved in SEO is quite tedious. There are several aspects to consider like your SEO plan and your focus. It is because of the fact that there are several techniques involved and many website owners lacks the technical skill in doing it they turn to SEO companies and SEO consultants for their SEO needs. Hiring the services of an SEO consultant or an SEO company is a good way to go if you would like to save time and gain traffic, conversions and income fast without interfering with your primary function and that is dealing with your customers.

SEO is truly one of the best methods in establishing web presence because aside from being cost-efficient it is also very effective, so effective in fact that the SEO industry is considered to be one of the fastest growing industries in the internet.

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Another sign that text content is moving away from being the main criteria in search engines is the fact that many websites are emerging that caters mostly for videos, examples of these are videos from YouTube and it is because of this that search engines are modifying their search engine algorithm to include the crawling of videos. This is already evident with the new search option tools of Google where you can modify the rankings or links being displayed in the SERP depending on your choice and one of the options presented is the videos option. In addition to this also there are several search engines who have already introduced or incorporated an algorithm that will also recognise, gather and process data from flash based websites. Before this, flashed based websites are not being indexed by search engines and it is highly suggested that when designing a website that will undergo SEO campaign later on should stay away from developing flash based sites as it cannot index it’s text content due to the nature of the code, that however is only a thing of the past with the advent of the change in the search engine algorithm, although text content is still not an effective way to be indexed in a flash based website an alternative to that is the effective use of links in such flash based website.

There are indeed several changes that happened recently and it is because of these that SEO companies and SEO consultants should start rethinking their strategies. Content may be king now but so as meta data during the advent of online marketing in the 1990’s.

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So how do we choose the most efficient domain name? In order to have a domain name that will work to your advantage especially in the field of Search engine optimisation first thing that you have to consider is that you have to keep the domain name concise. It means that the domain name should be short but meaningful as well, this is because it allows your visitors to easily remember your domain name or your URL for that matter. Second it would also be best if your domain name is using general words instead of specific words as this will help target a larger market due to the fact that search engine users search through using general terminologies or general words instead of specific ones.
The domain name is an important and integral part of both your website and your SEO campaign that is why you have to research and observe general rules in domain naming in order for you to give your website the best domain name.

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The main problem is that it will be requiring someone from the company that has experiences on the field of SEO already, if such type of employee is not found then any employee will do which poses a big problem as time is going to be consumed as well as money due to the fact that the employee is still undergoing a high learning curve. A high learning curve means a lot of studying to do and thus a lot of time is already wasted. If you want relevant traffic to enter your website and if you want to get a high conversion rate your friendly SEO company or SEO consultant are the right persons to go to. If you acquire the services of an SEO consultant you are assured of getting results due to the fact that their strategies and techniques are tempered by time and experience which make working on an SEO strategy an easy task.  Truly the SEO consultant brings to the table his or her expertise and his or her experiences that was tempered throughout the years and because SEO consultants have made a living out of the field of Search engine optimisation it is through their own initiative that they attend conventions, seminars or trainings in order to keep them updated on the latest trends in the field of SEO.

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The second type of link is the two-way link or otherwise known as a reciprocal link. In SEO this is done through formal communication with the webmaster of a website of your choice and asking such webmaster if both of you can enter into an agreement that you will create a link to the webmasters website and he or she will reciprocate by incorporating a link from his or her website to your website. But because of the susceptibility to of this type of link to abuse or over use Google and other search engines do not give much importance to this type of link.  Although linking is an essential part of your website in terms of usability and web visibility through SEO it is important to know their different types as there are types that are more relevant or helpful to your SEO campaign as compared to other types of links.

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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!

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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!

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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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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!

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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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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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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!

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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!

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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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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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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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Social Media is one of the fastest growing marketing formats in the entire world, and is miles ahead of the competition with the way it can target mass groups of specific market demographics. ‘How?’ you ask?
You have (most likely) at some point filled more information on the internet than a market research company could ever ask for, and you did it out of free will!

In case you’re still wondering…

What is Social Media?
Social media is Facebook, social media is MySpace, its Bebo, its Hi5, its Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Sphinn, Slashdot, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, Simpy, Newsvine, Furl, Spurl, MyJeeves, Google Bookmarks, and many, many more. Social media is absolutely everywhere, social media is any site where users congregate and interact with each other.

So How Does Social Media Triple Your Traffic?
Pretty easily. On a social media site; you register, you fill out your profile, and you start interacting people. The type of site that you’re on dictates the type of interaction that you have with the other site users. On Facebook for example, you create your profile and keep in touch with your friends, organise events, and share stories and photos. While on Digg you submit news articles and the rest of the community vote on them based on whether or not they are ‘news-worthy’. While finally on twitter, you post constant 150 character messages on your profile telling the world what you’re doing at that moment in time, and anybody who is interested enough to care that you are eating beans on toast yet again can tune in to your ‘twittering’.

Essentially, all these sites are ways of getting links back to your site, and not just random links, but links on pages that are already getting a high amount of traffic, so you have a higher chance of some of them clicking through to your site.

My previous post on How To Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 hours highlighted just how powerful Digg can be, I would estimate based on experience that I generated the BBC over half a million page views based on my submission that day.

When I submitted my own article talking about how I got the 3,000 Diggs to this very site, it went mad on Stumbleupon, and I started getting 100-200 unique visitors a day. (not bad for a blog that was only 3 weeks old at the time) and so far just from that article this month I’ve generated over 1,600 visits and just under 4,000 page views.

Here are my stats for the first 10 days of March, 90% of which was down to Stumbleupon referrals.

My RSS Subscribers also jumped up by about 400% and have held pretty steadily since then. The best part is that since the large spike in traffic above, I’ve seen a consistently higher level of day to day traffic as well.

I should note in closing of this section that social media did not triple my traffic. It multiplied it by a factor of about 12.

So How Do You Get Started With Social Media?
Its quite simple really, if you don’t already have a MySpace or Facebook account, then go and get one! My personal favorites are Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. You will notice that I have all of these in a ‘Social Bookmark This!’ link at the bottom of all of my blogs. If you want this for your blog you can download the I Love Social Bookmarking plugin for Wordpress.

Remember though, if you use social media just to spam your links, you will get nowhere. Social media sites are picky and choosey and they hate spam, so involve yourself in the community and you will reap the rewards, but you have to put in the time and the effort.

What have your experiences with social media been thus far? Got any great social media sites that I’ve missed here? Drop me a line in the comments!

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You want to rename /portfolio.htm to /wedding-photographer-portfolio.htm but currently your indexed page in Google links to /portfolio.htm and if you delete this page, anyone who finds you in a search engine will simply be given a 404 (not found) error when they click on your site. You can’t leave the page in place and set the new one live as well, or the old page will never be un-indexed, and the new one will never be indexed for the first time because it has the same content.

So what do you do?

You use 301 Redirects.

What is a Redirect?

Redirects come in two main forms, a 302 redirect (temporary), or a 301 redirect (permanent). Essentially a redirect tells any traffic to the url you specify to move on to a new page, it ‘redirects’ it. (see how that works?).
In the case of a 301 redirect, users are automatically taken to the new page, whereas search engines are informed that this page has moved to a new location, and that they should re-index the new URL.

How do I use a 301 Redirect?

There are many ways of implementing 301 redirects, from using server side scripting (eg php headers), Meta Refresh headers, Javascript Redirects, Frame Redirects, Redirect Loops, or my personal preference, which is the server side scripting in the form of an .htaccess redirect (for Apache) and http.ini redirect (for ISAPI).

If you’re using a Linux based server then setting up a 301 redirect is probably a lot simpler than you might imagine.

• Create a new blank file, and save it as .htaccess
• Then in the first (or any) lines of the file write:

### 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

The first line is simply a comment, so you can structure your .htaccess file when it’s getting full of things.

The second line consists of the following elements:

• Redirect 301

Tells the server what type of rule this is

• /oldpage.htm

Tells the server which page you are moving

• http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

Tells the server where the page is being moved to

Considerations

It should be noted that in order to comply with HTTP web standards, the location of where the page is being moved to must be an absolute URI (ie. it must have http://www.example.com/newpage.htm – and not just /newpage.htm)
Some browsers will let this slide if you forget to do it, but others will display a warning message to the user.

That’s all!

So if you want to get cracking with renaming some of your files to make better use of key phrases but don’t want to lose your indexed pages in Google – you now have your solution! Get to work!

Got any nifty 301 Redirect tricks? Drop me a line in the comments!

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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’t change a single thing without having to rebuild the whole site.

If you’ve never had a client quite that bad, consider yourself lucky!

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 – 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.

But for the times when you do have control over whether or not to take on a prospective client, consider the following points:

Do they have a content management system?
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.

The worst of the bunch by far though, is the home made content management system – 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!

(Side note – 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)

Does their site use tables, javascript navigation, or frames?
If it does, you may want to forget them altogether. Tables are the least bad, they just make content difficult to crawl – you will need to convert the entire layout to CSS, which will take a fair amount of time.

Javascript navigation is in the middle, search engines can’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.

The worst (unsurprisingly) is frames, which don’t display the full source code, and as such don’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.

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.

Does their server have ISAPI / MOD rewrites enabled?
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’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 – it gets pretty painful pretty fast. Check this beforehand.

Do they need SEO?
I have a real problem with doing SEO for clients that don’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’s just one example, but if your client’s product or services aren’t directly available to the public, then why do they need to rank in search engines?

You may be thinking, ‘well why not?’ and that is a fair question, I would like to say something fitting like ‘to preserve the integrity of Google’s search listings and maintain the ongoing quality of search results provided the general public’… but I won’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 ‘cabbage farm’ 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.

Do they care?
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.

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 ‘why not’ and the reason is the same, when they don’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.

Finally…
I should make it clear that I am not advocating that you ‘duck out’ 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’t just ineffective for your client’s business, it affects your reputation to. So play on your strengths!

Had any nightmare client sites of your own? Got any questions? Drop me a line in the comments!

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Google Page Rank is a very clever creature, it works on numerous algorithms that Google are happy to tell you about – provided you sign a contract agreeing to your instant death thereafter. A proposition that many webmasters tearing their hair out have probably considered quite seriously.
Page rank has the ability to make or break a site, good PR and it can give your indexed pages that extra bump they need to get into the top 5, and the maximum click through rate, while having poor PR can ensure that your competitors overtake you that bit more easily, and bump you down to page two; where the number of click throughs you’re likely to get is akin to the number of bikini clad supermodels you’re likely to get at the north pole.
That said however, PR is not the be all and end all of SEO, there is absolutely no point in focusing all your efforts on link building and PR campaigns if your meta content has not been optimised, or your site lacks decent content. Like anything else in the SEO world.. its just another one of the many bricks you need to lay to build your website big and strong.

From the previous article, we’ve established the basics of how page rank works, and as such I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions about how you can improve your page rank. Today, we look at how to avoid the penalties that we looked at in the last article too.

As mentioned, your PR is affected negatively if you are linking to sites of poor quality. This is not the only thing that it is affected by, but when it comes to PR penalties this is the most prominent cause.

The problem comes if you have a relatively big website, perhaps even a link directory – it becomes difficult to keep track of, and remember all the sites you link to, and check them on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are still of high quality and they haven’t slipped at all. Of course, there are dedicated content management systems that will take care of all your links and scan for reciprocal links back to you, page rank, and various other elements.. but these dedicated software solutions cost top dollar, and aren’t a generally suitable solution for the average webmaster.

Thankfully, there is a free alternative, which I discovered through SEOLand – ‘what is this free madness you speak of?!’ i hear you cry.

Read on.

The Bad-Neighborhood tool is a stunning little web application developed to solve the problem of keeping track of your outbound links. Essentially what the tool does, is scan your site for outbound links, then, when it finds them, it scans all those sites for dubious content, further outbound links, blatant spam, and keyword stuffing.

If it finds any of the elements listed above, it alerts you to where they are located, and where the link to that page is located. This way you can not only tell if you’re linking to poor quality sites, you can also tell if the sites you are linking to are linking to poor quality sites.

The results look like this

As you can see I’ve linked to flickr for one of my images (under the creative commons license) and because that page has a high density of hyperlinks in the page copy it has been marked as blog spam. You have to bare in mind that this tool uses relatively simple programming for analysing these pages, so of course it will sometimes flag up things as spam that aren’t. Use your common sense and you’ll be fine.

I find this tool an absolute joy to use, if you notice a drop in PR (in my experience) 9 times out of 10 it has something to do with one of the sites you link to, and this little tool highlights problems quickly and easily.

It should be noted however that while the tool produces good results, it does not go very deep into the site, so you may want to run the scan on you root domain, your blog, and large subcategories, etc.

Have you got a better tool? What do you think of this one?

Drop me a line in the comments!

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Page Rank operates on a scale of 0 – 10 and is basically an indicator of the ‘importance’ of your site in Google’s eyes. The next immediate questions, obviously, are how do you know what your page rank is, and how does Google determine whether or not your site is important?

Read on.

To find out what your page rank is (and everyone else’s) simply download the Google Toolbar for FireFox, or explore any other of the FireFox plugins that will do the same thing.

Your Page Rank is determined by a number of factors, the first and (to an extent) the most important of which, how many sites link to you. So, ebay, facebook, and myspace all have a pagerank of 7-9 because literally hundreds of thousands of sites link to them. A small (or new) site will likely only have a PR1 or 2, because it has not yet established many inbound links. Your ‘link popularity’ as discussed in my previous post about SEO Stat Packages, will give you a number, for how many sites are linking to you, and give you a comparison of other sites similar to yours and how you rank amongst them in terms of inbound links.

Now so far this sounds pretty basic, more links = more page rank, but it goes much deaper than just that little equation.

Page rank is passed on from site to site, so for example site1.com links to site2.com which links to site3.com

Site1.com has a PR7, so Google knows that this is an important site, because site1.com links to site2.com Google thinks site2.com is important too (ebay wouldn’t just link to any old little website, it links to other important sites like bbc and .gov websites). So if a PR7 site links to anther site, it passes on some of its PR. So site2.com which would ordinarily be a PR3 is boosted up to a PR5. Site2.com links to site3.com and puts it at a PR3.

But, if site2.com turns out to be a hacker/spammer website, using poor SEO techniques and Google finds out then it implements a penalty. Site2.com is marked as a dodgy site, and its PR is pretty much shot, but the buck doesn’t stop here, it affects the whole network. Site1.com is a big important site, and its linking to a bad site, this looks very bad, so it’s PR is also penalised and it drops to PR6. Similarly site3.com is no longer getting an inbound link from an important site, because as it turn out, site2.com is not an important site at all, so it no longer receives any PR benefit from site2.com and drops back down to a PR2 – but it is not penalised any further because it has not done anything wrong.

Obviously people have tried to cheat this system, building up high PR sites and then selling links to benefit other people’s PR, but as of December 2007 Google have penalised pretty much every paid directory out there.

It used to be the case that your home page was considered your primary source of PR, and generally PR would drop by one for each subdirectory/subcategory of the site, nowadays however, page rank is assigned very much on a page by page basis, and its not uncommon for a single page of a site to have higher PR than the root index.

Page Rank is updated sporadically, so don’t expect to see it change on a daily or even weekly basis – generally there are PR updates that happen every few months, but even then it can be questionable as to how many sites actually get an update.

Page Rank is a tricky beaver, but you definitely should not focus too much on it, many people try too hard to get a higher Page Rank, when in reality it isn’t affecting their rankings that much. PR is supposed to be a natural thing, thats how it was designed, so if you focus making the site as good as it can be, then people will naturally link to it, and you will see the benefits in your own PR.

What experience have you had with PR? Have I missed something major? 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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The alt attribute’s use, as many will already know; is to describe the image, because search engines and screen readers cannot see what the image is of. Leaving out alt attributes from your image tags, or leaving them empty, means that search engines are missing some of your content.

For example on the product page you may have the title of the product in the Meta title, and the H1 of the page, but not in the page copy, because the page copy may be talking about the product without actually referring to it by its specific model name. If you have an image in the page copy with another instance of the product name located in the alt attribute, this can provide some further reenforcement to search engines as to the relevance of your page.

When I first learned to build websites, I would create my site layout in photoshop, then slice the layout up and present it in a table. I would then overlay my actual textual content with an absolutely positioned div (some of my old sites are still using this layout!). The benefit of this method was of course the very small amount of coding time, and the reasonable result. The downside however, was the need for image maps for links, javasccript for rollovers, and absolutely positioned divs, which aren’t the most flexible of creatures.

How does this relate to alt attributes? Well when I used this type of layout, i would have between 9 and 18 images that were simply the background of the site – there was no real appropriate alt attribute because they would have just had to have been ‘background image1, 2, 3′ etc. The option some people take of course is to use this to their advantage and put a different key phrase in every image’s markup, but if you think that search engines don’t know that trick, then you’re stuck in the 90’s.

That said, you don’t want your alt attributes to be too bare either, ‘my product, from my company name and my services’ will always be more effective than ‘my product’, if you catch my drift. There’s a fine balance, and unlike Meta content, there is no set limit as to how many characters search engines will accept. There are however, general guidelines that you can follow; if you have trouble reading it, you’ve tried too hard. If you feel like you’re reading an advertisement, you’ve tried too hard, and finally, if you find yourself reading a list of words rather than a very short sentence, you’ve tried too hard.

I’ll be honest, I don’t like alt attributes. As a FireFox user I rarely ever see them, and I like it that way. Thought I will admit that they are useful for SEO purposes, and definitely should not be overlooked.

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So lets get started!

After running all my reports from the previous post I move swiftly on to (and from) Google Analytics. I say swiftly because it is just that, generally speaking not a lot of time is spent on Google Analytics just because it provides a lot of basic information that is available in more detail from other stat software. If you don’t do any other stats, Analytics is a great one to have because it does give you a very good general overview. I find though, that the information is too basic (at least for my needs).

Where Analytics comes into its own though, is with ecommerece tracking. Analytics provides a really great overview of online sales, revenue generation, adsense campaigns, and conversion rates from both key phrases and specific search engines. If your site has an online shop, the value of having Analytics installed multiplies by a factor of ten. Make sure when installing though that you use the new ga.js not the old urchin.js – especially when wanting to set up ecommerce tracking.

Once I’ve had a brief skim over Analytics I move on to the part of SEO statistics analysis that I hate most; error reporting. This is basically checking for parts of the site that are either not there, or not functioning correctly, and are causing the search engines problems when spidering. Needless to say, fixing these problems nine times out of ten is just as big of a headache.

Sometimes websites just go wrong, pages disappear, dynamic scripts are executed wrong, and databases re-arrange themselves before shooting off to the pub for a quick pint. There’s no real way of stopping it from happening, so the best thing to do is accept that its going to happen, be ready for it, and check for these errors on a regular basis to catch them out early.

Our first stop on error reporting will be with Xenu. When search engines look over a site, they send out a spider. Its called a spider because it follows the web (the world wide one) and explores all the links it finds and follows them too, clever eh? So a spider is basically a script that tests every link on your site.

Xenu is a free program (windows) that is your own personal spider, you can fire it up, tell it what site you want it to look at, and off it goes with its 8 furry little spider’s legs. Xenu reports any broken links or images found, so basically any tag with an src or href attribute. Once its finished munching on flies and other such spidery things, it offers you a report, which will tell you where all you’re broke links are, and where they’re coming from. That was the easy part, now go fix them.

The second part of error reporting consists of using Google Webmaster Tools, which is possibly my favorite SEO statistic tool.

Hit the diagnostics tab and have a look at any errors that are coming up. Xenu looks at broken links to your site that are inside your site, Webmaster Tools looks at broken links to your site across the entire internet. This is done when Google ‘crawls’ the net. If a spider whisks round one website then a crawl is basically a really big slow version that does ALL the websites. As such you have to wait for these errors to come up, you cant test for them using independent software.

Errors will come up most frequently in this context when a page on your site no longer exists, now, if this is a product that you no longer sell then thats fine, just leave it and eventually Google will realise that the page is gone, and stop trying to find it. If its a page that has changed name though, you need to fix it.

For example, mysite.com links to yoursite.com/you.htm but a few months later you decide that you want to change that page name to you-are-great.htm – you upload the new file, and delete the old one. The new url for that page is yoursite.com/you-are-great.htm – but I don’t know that, and neither do the 6 million other sites that are linking to that page, so you need to apply a 301 redirect to tell Google where to go. More on 301 redirects at a later date.

Now that the error reporting is done, we can get on to the slightly more interesting side of Webmaster Tools, statistics!

Webmaster Tools gives you 2 little tables that I could not live without. ‘Top Search Queries’ and ‘Top Clicked Queries’.

Which basically tells you; out of all the searches that your site ranks for, what terms are searched for most often. (your most valuable key phrases to target) and which search terms that you rank for get clicked most often. If you’re ranking number 1 for a term that gets searched for a lot, but your site is never getting clicked on – you need to go and find out why that is! I could spend hours writing another post on this alone!

But for now, we will keep it just about the stat packages, and I may explore that avenue here at a later date. (I feel like I’m using the words ‘at a later date’ rather a lot at the moment!)

Was this helpful to you? Have I missed any stat packages that you’d recommend? Drop me a line in the comments!

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