Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
May
03
Posted by admin
Well, its saturday morning, the sun is out, the birds are singing, and Im checking my SERPs. ahhh, the life of an SEOer - its days like this that I know why I do what I do!
No, its not because I am stuck here in front of my monitors in what I affectionately call my “SEO War Room” (my multi monitor setup makes the office seem like the bridge of a destroyer when they are all on!) its because I have just stumbled across some decent search engine rankings for a few competitive keywords I started targetting a few months ago.
When I set the website MOGmedia up, a little over a year ago, it was my intention to rank first page for some seo related terms specific to my co-location living, namely Kent and the Costa Del Sol. Well, I was surprised to find that my last post, along with the MOGmedia homepage rank 2nd and 3rd respectively for either term!
You can check the websites, and the search terms that yields their positions as follows:
SEO Kent #3 in google.com for seo kent
SEO Costa Del Sol #2 in google.com for costa del sol SEO
These updates to the SERPs appear to have only happened since the last pagerank updates so Im not seeing a huge impact on traffic yet, but with some further refinement of inner pages and their relative keyword densities along with some creative linking, I think I might see an upturn in the next few weeks.
Anyway, back of to continue my SERP searching sessions!
MM
May
02
Posted by admin
Its an often misunderstood important factor in Search Engine Optimization, “Deep Linking”.. while it sounds dark and mysterious its dead simple infact.
If you can visualise pagerank arriving at the index.xxx page of your website and being distributed downstream with each stage filtering out some more and more, until your last content pages pick up very little pagerank, deeplinking is the practice of getting outside links to “deep” within your website with a view to increasing the pagerank distribution to the rest of your website.
An example would be the blogroll link on this blog to my main site, MOGmedia well, thats just a link to the main page of my website, and google will spider the pages and assign value to them using the main page as an entry “doorway”, and in doing so it will drop a bit of pagerank there first before it moves on and values the other pages.
If I were to link to my OTHER website pages from an external site such as:
MOGmedia SEO services
MOGmedia Portfolio of SEO
UK SEO hosting
SEO Services Kent
Contact MOGmedia Staff
These links will pass on the same amount of pagerank to the inner pages of the site. Now for all intensive purposes the juice that will be passed on from this post is minimal as it will be “diluted” by the total number of outgoing links, but for an example it will do for now….
So, if you are trying to get more pages indexed in your website, choose a relevant “deep” or inner page to link to, and get link building!
anyway, Im off for another calimocho, or four!
MM
Apr
30
Posted by admin
Hey folks,
all the webmaster forums have again been alive with the buzz thats created every time google does the dance and has a pagerank update.
Well, I am pleased to say that for once my personal blog hasnt been ignored - I have just got a PR3 for the homepage of this site and it did bring a wry smile to the mouth so for that I thank you google (I actually thank you more for that nice round $1,000 cheque this month from Adsense, but thats a different story for a different post!)
All this talk of PR updates though raises the point that its awfully early for the THIRD pagerank update of the year isn’t it? Surely this one wasn’t due out till August? Will Google be changing their PR policies, well - as always with the big G (not GOD, Google!!) its impossible to say but with the amount of PR bashing thats gone on in the last six months Id say its a near certainty that major changes are being made to the algo’s. My best guess is that current pagerank calculations will have a lot more to do with the ageing of the inbound links, than the pagerank of the page that they come from.
Anyway, off to muse and check the rest of my sites…
MM
Apr
27
Posted by admin
Hey folks,
Some of you may know this trick already, but for those that dont its a great way to build up your .edu backlinks quickly. This article isnt really a discussion on whether .edu links are worth more than normal links, I have discussed that topic ad infinitum on various forums in the past, its purely a look at how you can get edu links, and most importantly for free!
Google being the source of all information is ofcourse where you are going to find the best places to get edu links - and the most effective way of doing that is by posting context sensitive comments on related blogs. To do a search all you need to do is go to google and type this in:
site:.edu +”powered by wordpress” +”add your comment”
This will then give you a list of wordpress blogs, with open comments that are hosted on .edu domains.
The best thing to do then is to sort the results by pagerank which you do with the SEOQUAKE addon for firefox and hey presto! a great big list of places to get free high PR edu backlinks!
Cheers
MM
Feb
07
Posted by admin
I have studied DMOZ links in the past somewhat (see “wizards of DMOZ“) and being a long term professional SEOer I have probably submitted more sites than most to the open directory project (DMOZ). Yesterday while checking the Alexa details of one of my sites I noticed that the description that Alexa uses had changed, to one that I did not recognise - quickly coming to the conclusion that this must have meant that I was now listed in an appropriate category at DMOZ I quickly checked.
I am happy to report that the site was indeed now DMOZ listed, and I quickly followed up with a few checks of my other sites and was pleased to find that a further two more sites had also gained that holy grail of the backlinks, an ODP listing. I did have other sites already listed in the directory so I started to delve deeper into the ramifications of having a site listed and came up with a few interesting things that I either hadnt noticed, or has recently changed.
The DMOZ link did not (does not) appear in my google webmaster tools at all, and not just for my newly added sites, also for a few sites that I own that have had a listing for nearly 10 years. To be fair there isnt much activity on those sites and not many other backlinks so Im not 100% sure if google has stopped counting DMOZ links in its webmaster tools, if so then I wonder what about the other directories that “feed” off the information dumps from the ODP, surely they will count towards backlinks.
A quick check ensued, and as an example the Alexa Directory did NOT appear as a backlink in the test sites I looked at either in Google’s webmaster tools. So this begs the Question: Has Google Now Discounted DMOZ from its algorithms?
In short I can not answer that question immediately but I will certainly do some more investigation and come back to you folks when I know more!
Anyway, off for my cafe con leche!
MM
Jan
29
Posted by admin
I have been having a discussion with a fellow SEO’er over the last few days about how he should price work for a prospective client.
I personally prefer to work within a clearly defined set of goals, that are measurable and can provide palpable results. He was suggesting that his work for this client should be done based against earnings that the client would generate from his work.
I totally disagreed with him, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is clear that many industries have high potential profits, for example, real estate (as was the actual case in point) - I know people whom have earned literally tens or hundreds of millions of dollars through good SEM (not strictly SEO), but the problem that you will encounter if you are pricing your job based on results is that there are far too many outside factors that are beyond our control as simple search engine optimizers.
Lets take an example: lets imagine SEO guy one provides a real estate office with the worlds best SEO, now their website is getting huge traffic, highly targeted towards buying properties on the Costa Del Sol, but the website is poorly designed - and thats the webdesigners fault, not the SEO professionals responsibility. Lets imagine then that the company has the worlds best converting website, and each hit results in 0.5 calls to the Realtor, well if their sales staff aren’t up to scratch then the traffic is again wasted. Even if the sales staff could close like no others, they might have no inventory to actually sell - as I am illustrating, pricing SEO work in the conventional world against sales results just isn’t an option as there are far too many obstacles between the surfer clicking and making a sale that are outside the remit of a Search Engine Marketer.
That is why my advice to him, and to any other SEO professional is not to get lured in by the promise of big bucks and bright lights (ahhh, those bright lights are sooo pretty though 
) - in the long run you are always better off clearly defining goals, and then delivering the results that you negotiate pre-contract. Examples that I use would be:
1) an increase in measurable inbound links from context sensitive sites (measured using yahoo LD)
2) an increase in total traffic yielded by certain PRE DEFINED keyword combo’s with a specified Google address (ie. google.com or google.co.uk)
3) an improvement in SERPs for certain keywords on specific google sites
4) an overall increase in traffic from all search engines, based on actual statistics for the months leading up to the campaign, above any organic growth.
Essentially, the problem is that Search Engine Optimisation as a product is quite hard to define, and unless you have it clearly mapped out in advance what your tasks are you might end up getting blamed for not providing increased sales, when you have nothing to do with the front of shop sales structure - or in other words - it always makes sense to have your customer understand what it is that you can provide, and charge accordingly.
Anyway, enough of my musings, off to have a beer!
MM
Jan
20
Posted by admin
Following on from a few other blog posts of mine this year already, it seems that the focus for SEO is moving away from that old mainstay of the SEO’er, buying links.
What does this mean in practice? Well, in my opinion its a great thing as lets face it, in the last two years being an SEO has almost become as ubiquitous as being a webdesigner, and nearly the same as saying you are an IT professional.. Heck every other person I meet these days is an SEO!! The changes that seem to have been brought about by this latest TBPR update signify the beginning of the end of the wild west period of search engine optimisation, and now it is starting to seem that your onsite content, inc0ming links and link weight as a combination are now much more important that just the incoming links that have been ruling the market for the last few years.
What does this to mean to me? Well, not much really, as I have never taken on an SEO job before for a site that doesnt have genuine relevant content - but it will mean that many of the link building based SEO’s will either go out of business totally in the next 6 months or have to learn a whole new skillset. Those of us that have been in the market for 10 years however will remember what SEO was before google placed so much importance on off site optimisation and we simply have to revert in part back to the old days of optimising.
So, to get back to this posts title: What should we concentrate on now….
1) On site Content
2) Organic link growth onto RELEVANT sites, ie. through targeted linkbait
3) Site Updates, increasing RELEVANT page yield per site.
4) W3 compliance (always important)
5) Incoming links from RELEVANT sites.
You have probably noticed a pattern with that list… Relevancy!
Basically I think that MFA sites have been dealt a huge blow in the latest update and if you want to keep SERPs over the next few months I think the only way to fully consolidate your position is to add content, content and more content. When thats done, add some more content for good luck (or should that be “goo-gle luck”!)
Anyway, off for my calimocho people,
MM
Jan
18
Posted by admin
As is normally the case around this time of year, most people should be taking stock of that this year will have to offer. This is perhaps more important this year on the Costa Del Sol and specifically Marbella than it has been any year since 1989/1990 and most people dont remember that far back, or werent living on the coast back then.
Either way its fairly immaterial as SEO didnt exist back in 1989, but lets study why search engine optimisation on the Costa Del Sol will be important this year.
Well, the coast in my opinion is headed for tough times. The last 10 years particularly the local micro-economy has been boosted by the strong pound, great economy in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, and relatively weaker local pricing on everything from Jamon to Hotels. Marbella and to a slightly lesser extent the rest of the coast has enjoyed a huge boom, with property prices going from incredibly cheap to fabulously expensive, on a world scale.
Why will SEO be important on the Costa Del Sol in 2008? Well, lets look at the last recession in the UK/Northern Europe. Well when this hit the places that got it worst overall in Europe were conversely the CostaDelSol and Mallorca - as all our money and investment comes from outside the area. We have no industry other than real estate and tourism, there are probably 100,000 empty two bed apartments on the coast right now, and as soon as a recession hits in the UK whats the first thing that goes? Not the family home, but the family HOLIDAY home.
Estate agents throughout the coast will go from making €20,000 per sale to €200 per sale, and the market will become so much more competitive that ANY advantage one agency can make over the other will be greatly magnified.
Why is this important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Malaga? Well, its time to start battening down the hatches and developing those property SEO websites now people!
Anyway, off for my calimocho,
MM
Jan
16
Posted by admin
Hey folks,
well the dust is starting to settle after this weeks Q1 2008 TBPR update, (see my previous blog entry) and I am starting to wonder whether google has finally dealt a fatal blow to the online link sales industry.
A Little history lesson, back in the old days of SEO, the onsite content, keywords, META tags and so on were all you had to worry about. That meant that you could get any site of any age to the number one position, by making sure you had the correct ratio of words to keywords. This is back in the day when it was DEC’s Altavista that ruled the search engine competition, and Lycos was second and Yahoo were just starting up (this is a long time ago by internet standards!).
When google appeared on the scene, they made it so that the on site SEO was only 20% of the equation, and the off site SEO was about 70%, and this entailed having lots of links back to your site. Google counted each link as a “vote” for your website. This created a massive industry of people selling links on their websites to other webmasters to promote their own websites search engine ranking positions, as opposed to buying traffic by way of link advertising.
Google has long made it clear that they disaprove of this practice and have started looking at ways to crack down on this practice, and it would appear that on this latest update to the toolbar pagerank ratings, that they might just have done that. What remains to be seen over then next few weeks and months is whether the current pagerank levels are just an interim update, or if this is it, and we have an all new pagerank algorithm.
If that is the case then all SEO’s the world over will have a lot of learning to redo!
Anyway, off for my coffee!
MM
Jan
14
Posted by admin
So, its time for our obligatory google dance again. The
latest update to the TBPR ranks has been going on for the last few days, and while most sites seem to have completed their move one wonders if it will be another “double whammy” update like we had in November. (for the short of memory folks there were two updates in a week, the first being affectionately known as the google slap…..)
Like most other professional webmasters I followed it with some interest, after all it does govern how much links will be worth/are going to cost for the next 3 months, so even if you place no credence in the toolbar PR then it still affects you, directly or indirectly as links are the only true currency of the webmaster these days.
What happened to my sites? Well, surprisingly little.
Sites that have stagnated have remained PR3/PR4, sites that have gained links (and in one case from 3,000 to 40,000 links) have not changed. Sites that have lost links have also not changed.
Infact, out of 130+ active sites on my books at the moment, the only changes I saw were a handful of PRn/a changing to PR Zero. All that linkbuilding, seo work, and assorted efforts, and not a single change to my sites? There is something whiffy afoot.
It has been said for some time now that google are working on ways of removing themselves from this link economy, which to be fair they created by valuing off site seo practices at about 95% of a websites overall strength. So whats happening? Well, a lot of playing about needs to be done to get a true picture as to what is going on but a fair guess would be that the algorithm’s that google use to calculate what constitutes a link has changed significantly. Also one wonders whether they have started weighting some links higher than others based on age, total page yield per site/IP, total content per site, and so on. Some of my bigger sites with tens of thousands of pages indexed have noticeably increased in the SERPs over the last week, whereas some very noticeable smaller sites have slipped. Perhaps its a sign of things to come, perhaps on the other hand we are just going to get another index update later in the week. Hopefully it will be another big fat google slap that will upset all the other link buying webmasters!!
Anyway, Im off to enjoy my nice cool calimocho,
MM