Archive for the 'SEO' category
Friday, October 29th, 2010
People wanted more pictures of their favorite SEO's. For Day Two, we have many more pictures of the SEO's for you. Alas no dancing firebreathing girls today, just a night at the pub.
Personally I found Day Two to hold more surprises and insights in terms of SEO practice. The big highlight for me was Martin MacDonald's hands-on talk on how he rescued a thin content site which had been wiped out in Google's MayDay update.
Sam Crocker, Ben Hendrickson, Andy Davies and Jane Copland all offered actionable insights which you wouldn't easily learn from just keeping up with published SEO material. Rand Fishkin and Will Critchlow's faceoff on big budget linkbuilding covered big picture issues which stimulated long term thoughts on SEO, picking up where Dave Naylor's presentation on Google left off.
ProSEO branding 105
Russell Smith BBC Data Journalism 106
Keep reading ProSEO Seminar in London Day Two Photos
By Alec
SEO |
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Great first day at the ProSEO 2010 Seminar in London with SEOmoz and Distilled. Wonderful to see old friends again. Here are just a few pictures from the day and some more of the superb night which Lynsey Little organised for us at the opening night party.
These are just a few selects, uncorrected and uncropped. Distilled will have many more photos of the speakers in their own coverage of the seminar.
Click on any picture to enlarge with Lightbox.
The Day
Rand Fishkin
Caitlin Krumdieck
Keep reading First Day at ProSEO seminar with Distilled and SEOmoz
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Many sites whose new posts were previously indexed in one day have found themselves waiting 7 day to have their posts indexed. If you are depending on AdSense revenues for visitors clicking on topical recent posts, this is a big problem. I'd imagine that would be about a 60% income drop for your site overnight.
What's causing this issue?
Longtime rogue SEO Michael Martinez is bandying about the theory that the issue is using WordPress SEO plugins. And running around every forum in town shouting it from the rooftops.
Let me reiterate my opposition to the use of "All In One" and other SEO plugins - they are not helping any blogs with search engine optimization. They are bells and whistles, busy working gadgets....
A typical default WordPress installation does a perfectly fine job of allowing you to configure your page titles, URLs, and content. You don't need to embed "Keywords" in meta tags and your autogenerated descriptions will be no better than whatever a search engine would provide (and the search engines will ignore meta descriptions in many queries anyway)....
There is a LOT of confusion over what you need to do with a WordPress blog. The less you burden it with so-called "SEO friendly" features, the less likely you'll screw up your site in the search results.
If you don't know enough about search engine optimization to do it yourself, then you're really in over your head when you depend on a theme or plugin to make the decisions for you.
Installing an SEO plugin will not damage your SEO.
- Having custom handwritten descriptions can increase your clickthrough 50% or more.
- Including a good short keywords section with the 5 or 6 top tags for your post can help with Yahoo still.
- Writing a second structured title for search can really help (your article header should be written for the reader and not for search, i.e. with wordplay and puns and spin and short forms are good. Like a newspaper headline but the page title must include keywords)
So an SEO plugin can really help your SEO with minimal time and trouble.
Keep reading Google 7 Day Indexing Delay: WordPress All in One SEO Plugin
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz opens day two of SEO Pro Training in London
Keep reading Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two
By Alec
SEO |
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Will Critchlow Rand Fishkin welcome the world to London for SEO Expert Training
Introduction
As an owner of both SEOmoz Basic SEO Training DVD and the SEOmoz Advanced Training DVD, I knew that the speakers knew their stuff and they looked like a fun crowd to boot. So I decided to attend the SEO Expert Training live conference in London on October 19 and 20.
Was the trip to London worthwhile?
Definitely yes, but…
Let’s start with the program which Distilled and SEOmoz organised for us. In a word, superb. The program included dedicated sessions on:
- link building
- site structure
- social campaigns
- SEO tools
- content strategy
- conversion techniques
- SEO team management
- Google penalties and penalty filters
- Google analytics
For the most part this partial list of topics is a dreamlist of issues which I’d like to hear about in depth.
Keep reading Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day One
By Alec
SEO |
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
It's no secret we are seriously into WordPress SEO. After the otherwise brilliant John Godley's Headspace killed a few too many websites on us, we decided not to use any extra WordPress SEO plugin but just use appropriate core WordPress functions for our SEO.
What we did was use the excerpt field for descriptions and tags for keywords.
KISS WordPress SEO: now retired since version 2.7
Our KISS WordPress SEO was great until WordPress 2.7 when suddenly the excerpt field no longer existed in the page editing interface. Thanks Automattic! Our perfect workaround was now a pain in the butt.
We gave the UrbanGiraffe Headspace 2 another look, but alas it was still taking our sites down. I know Headspace 2 can work but it just didn't seem to like our core plugin install.
Keep reading What's wrong with WordPress All-in-One-SEO Plugin
By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
If you are already an SEO insider, you sure know SEOmoz. And if your steps are heading into the SEO world just right now, you will hear about SEOmoz many times more. These guys are among the leaders in the world of search engine optimization. Within the last decade they have created hundreds of articles, tools, guides, studies and held many conferences and seminars.
Rand Fishkin: Thinking like a search engineer
One of these seminars became the core of The SEOmoz Video Training Series. Since this DVD is quite expensive for a blind purchase, we have written short review for you. What can you expect for your investment of several hundred dollars?
Since the subtitle is SEO Basics (there is also Advanced version offered), it’s supposed you are a rookie. Maybe web designer, who finally recognized the importance of SE optimization, small online business owner, who doesn’t want to spent fortune on professionals; or CEO of a large company, who doesn’t understand why site promotion department asks for funds whoever you are, this training will lead you step by step into the world of SEO.
Keep reading Review: SEOmoz Video Training Series DVD
By Alec
SEO |
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
One of the leading experts in search engine marketing offers another interesting piece for you. Recently, we have reviewed their two-disc video labeled Basics. That was a good starter for their next release. SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series DVD is hidden in four discs, asking for almost 12 hours of your time. Eight gentlemen and three ladies will guide you in sixteen different chapters through the world of expert SEO.
Panel discussion linking out strategies
This time there are no introductions, we go straight to the action. I have to say most of the speakers are experienced and know how to tell the message to the audience. Especially Rand and Stephan grab your attention immediately. Unfortunately, two or three speakers will remind you boring hours spent with old professors on college (especially Duncan Morris), some others (Danny Sullivan) are trying to act like on TV show so much that it's on the edge of being annoying.
Keep reading Review: SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training DVD
By Martin
SEO |
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
One of our Typepad to WordPress clients would really like to rank higher with her nice new WordPress weblog. She is hosted at Bluehost.com. Her IP number is 66.147.242.185. I ran a quick check to find out what other websites are on that IP.
Here is just a partial list of her neighbours:
Keep reading WordPress SEO and Dedicated IP's
By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
Friday, December 19th, 2008
We've just had to move another client's old site to a new one.
There are lots of inbound links but the page URL structure has completely changed for the better.
The client wants to rank right away.
What do we do?
301 the old site is the traditional answer.
Not so fast says Eric Ward who is one of the masters of link building, having built links by hand for longer than almost anyone else on the internet and for more large corporate clients than any individual I know (there are some SEO companies working fairly stealth with portfolios of almost 100 big names):
I wouldn't 301 it yet. First I'd run a backlink analysis on the old site and then visit each site linking to the old site, and for those that look exceptionally trustworthy and legit, ask them personally for a hand edit to change the link from the old site to the new site.
Painful.
Slow.
Tedious.
Effective.
Frankly for a website with thousands of backlinks, that's just not a realistic option. Well for Walt Disney or some of Eric's other clients perhaps it is. But what should the rest of us do?
Keep reading How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings
By Alec
SEO |
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
We have some campaigns out there on Google AdWords for which we now have some very nice organic rankings.
At the end of each month we like to calculate the number of sales of PPC versus organic for a Canadian life insurance client.
Most of our PPC results have a gclid parameter in them so it's clear as day. It's almost certain that a clean result like this one is organic:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=canadian+life+insurance
While this is definitely PPC:
http://lsminsurance.ca/calculators/canada/term-life.php?PPC-ON-ripped&type=search&keyword=life%20insurance&adid=984186361&placement=&gclid=CLmk9Iruk5YCFQhdswodiCp_FA
What about this one with &rlz= in the URL parameter?
http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBS_enCA248CA248&q=greatwest
I couldn't tell. The long strange string smelled like PPC to me.
It out to be nothing of the kind. &rlz= is the string that Google uses for identifying users of Google Chrome:
Keep reading &rlz= in Google referrer: Organic traffic or AdWords?
By Alec
SEO |
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.
Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.
As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.
Most websites publish their images like this:
<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">
Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.
Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:
Keep reading SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images
By Alec
SEO |
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
The best single website on the internet is the Wikipedia. There is more useful information and less disinformation there than on any other single substantial site.
No surprise Google puts Wikipedia in the top ten for almost everything.
Somewhat of a surprise then that Google has decided to create a pseudo-Wikipedia by the name of Knol.
Right now, it's an expert authors by invitation affair. But they plan (rather foolishly in my opinion) to open it up to free for fall (think the fall of Squidoo).
We are looking at David vs. Goliath, with Wikipedia in the David corner as the innovator facing off against massive Google. It's Netscape - Internet Explorer all over again, but this time Google is in the black outfit.
Unbelievably enough, despite being first to the party with great technology and a loyal userbase, Netscape eventually lost round one of the internet wars.
I wonder if Wikipedia will do better.
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, October 26th, 2007
He talks about the same old tired question of ecommerce websites badly organised for SEO with:
- image navigation
- image text
- badly formatted URLs
- session-cookie dependent content
- no content
All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.
The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.
Standard tabbed Web 2.0 product page
Keep reading Web 2.0 Product Pages Done Right
By Alec
SEO |
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
Rand Fishkin pleasantly knocked the wind out of the sails of a the crowd of SEO pretenders with a quick ten question SEO quiz.
Rand believes that anyone selling SEO should be able to answer these questions:
- What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
- Explain the concept - "the long tail of search."
- Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
- How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
- What resource and query can you use to determine which pages link to any page on SEOmoz.org and contain the words "monkey" and "turnip"?
- What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of "nofollow"?
- What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
- Why is Alexa an inaccurate way to estimate the traffic to a given website?
- Name four types of queries for which Google provides "instant answers" or "onebox results" ahead of the standard web results.
- Describe why a flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than a deep site architecture.
- BONUS (Answer this one and I'll be very impressed): Name twelve unique metrics search engines are suspected to consider when weighting links and how each affects rankings positively or negatively.
I was able to answer all of them apart from local link popularity and global link popularity and managed ten of the twelve metrics quickly.
Of course concerning link popularity I know the concept, but think of it as topical links rather than local link popularity.
How did you do? Check your own answers here.
By Alec
SEO |
