Posts on State of Search about ‘How to’

How to influence search robots in crawling your website

spiderman

Search engines depend on search robots or crawlers to find and collect all the information on the web they present in the search results. These robots however have a limited capacity and therefore simply cannot find all the available information on the web all the time. Especially for large content websites it can be a difficult task to get the most important and latest content in the index of search engines. You want to influence the way robots crawl your website to focus on the most important content. But how should you do this?

Crawling the web

First of all you need to know how search robots crawl the web. Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes. From here they start indexing and following links on these web pages. (more…)

Link Building – You Can’t Always Get What You Want

everything you want

The ever insightful Claire Carlile wrote a post a few days on the importance of understanding the answers to core questions about both your client and your goals before embarking on a link building campaign. This got me to thinking about my recent somewhat haphazard yet I’d say still successful work in this area.

1. A few disclaimers before we dig into this – I do work for a large agency and therefore work on large, big brand clients. This has both pros and cons. The sites I work on can attract links through their brand names at time, however they can also repel due to the well-known commercial aspect of said sites.

2. These are sites that I have been working on for some time so I am fully immersed in the client, their USPs, the kind of sites that may be good link targets etc. Having said that, Claire’s post did make me take a step back and review things from a wider perspective.

Tip 1: Don’t assume you know your client so well that you’ve explored all the obvious link building targets. Take a step back once in a while and get outside the box! (more…)

Technical SEO in Magento

magento

More and more ecommerce websites are being built on the Magento platform but the number of technical SEO resources remains few and far between.  There are a lot of good extensions out there, particularly from Yoast, who also has the best starter guide too so make sure you check that out.

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms around but even for simple setups there are always the inevitable head scratching moments for people who are new to the platform. This is hopefully where I come in, as I have compiled a small list (that I will update as time goes on either from experience or from the comments column) which covers some of the first stages of the techical SEO side of a campaign. This includes how to sync your Google Base account with Magento to perform product uploads, the magic of path hints for changing on page elements to implementing the EPDQ payment platform. (more…)

Monitoring your server uptime and performance

pingdom

Most of us are afraid of experiencing server downtime or loss of performance as this might result in loss of rankings, removal from the SERPs and loss in conversions.

This post aims at providing some insights tools that are available (either paid or free) to monitor your server performance and uptime. Some of them are paid, some of them are open-source and self-hosted. Each of the tools has its own characteristics and it really depends on what your needs are or what your technical experience level is to find a solution suitable for you or your company. (more…)

5 ways for a Local Businesses to grow their Twitter Followers and Business

twitter-work

Similar to Twitter’s little blue bird, time flies. It was this time a year ago that I wrote my most successful post on State of Search – 10 ways to grow your twitter followers and 10 essential tools to do it I must admit, I was surprised at how well it was received, to this date it has received 39 comments, over 400 re-tweets, 20,000 page views and nearly 13,000 visitors via search engines.

Today I want to revisit the Twittersphere but look specifically at how small local businesses can utilise Twitter to grow their followers, but most importantly their business. One thing I have noticed about Twitter is that some people are too caught up in the numbers game and try to artificially increase their followers.  Local businesses really benefit from interacting, engaging and developing relationships with users who are local, so quick fixes such the search queries below won’t help much. (more…)

How to make friends and influence people in SEO

It seems we have gone conference mad here at State of Search, and with some great conferences about – potential attendees are spoilt for choice – as Bas’ poll would probably suggest. As a conference organiser (I organise the Sascon conference in Manchester UK), I have been on both sides of the fence, as both attendee, speaker and organiser.

One of the things which came out of some recent events within the SEO community are just how many relationships are developed from sources such as Twitter, which then develop onto other social platforms such as Facebook/Skype and often then become ‘real life’ through meeting at conferences whether this be at the conference itself or indirectly via the various social forums which are often associated with these events such as Manchester SEO or London SEO.

So how do you make sure you get ahead in the game of SEO, and make the most of these opportunities …. (more…)

Google News in Universal SERPs

Somehow I’ve managed to get the ‘Google News expert’ badge by virtue of my experience with the Belfast Telegraph. In all honesty I don’t feel like a Google News expert by any stretch. I suppose it’s a case of the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. There are some truly great newspaper SEO people around like Brent Payne (Tribune, he was on our radioshow a few weeks back), Chris Moran (Guardian), and Julian Sambles (Telegraph) – compared to them I feel like quite the amateur.

But people seem to appreciate my sharing of what I learn about Google News at the Belfast Telegraph. So much so that I was asked to present about Google News on the Manchester SEO mini-conference last week. (Which was a great wee conference by the way, I had jolly good fun and met a great many wonderful people, including State of Search’s own Pete Young, Nichola Stott, and Kelvin Newman.)

One of the main points of my presentation was how simplistic the Google News ranking algorithm is when it comes to including news results on universal SERPs. I want to highlight that particular aspect of Google News a bit more in this blog post. (more…)

How to find bloggers in your niche to help you out

In my presentations I often have several slides in there which are all about using bloggers to get more visibility in search engines. Bloggers already have rankings, already have webpages which are being well indexed by Google and already have authority. Why not use that authority? The big question however is: how can you find them?

One example I gave in my presentation at A4U was about how Universal Film Studios had used only seven influential bloggers to spread their message about the new Harry Potter Theme Park they were launching. Its a good example of how to build up your brand without actually spreading the message yourself.

Another good example I give more often is the one of Sony. When launching a new LCD Television, they looked for the influential bloggers in their industry and used them to spread the word about the new television even before the TV was actually for sale. They didn’t use the press until the television was actually in the stores. They gave the bloggers previews, send them pictures and videos and had them discussing it. That made that when the TV actually was there Sony dominated the search results. Not just with their own site, because they gained a lot of links out of the use of the bloggers, but also through the bloggers-websites. They were the ‘other’ results on the page. And they were all talking about the Sony TV. Some branding that was. (more…)

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