Content is King, it is something many marketers will say, and its also something many SEOs will say. Some over-rate it however by saying that if you “just” put up enough content, you will be fine.
Content will remain one of the, if not the, important elements in optimizing. This infographic looks at why content is important for SEO. (more…)
There have been a few blog posts doing the rounds recently about what makes a good SEO, and what needs to be done to ensure new entrants in to the industry pick up the required skills and know-how quickly and accurately.
I’m not shy about jumping on bandwagons (nor falling off of them for that matter), so allow me to add my own insights as to what I believe make a good set of foundational skills every (beginning) SEO should possess: (more…)
There always tends to be a little bit of an “us vs them” attitude between SEOs and developers. A lot of developers think SEOs = spammers and a great deal of SEO’s don’t understand enough about architecture, language and data structures to have a meaningful conversation about development. So when things do go wrong it’s very easy to point the blame at the other party.
The aim of this post is to hopefully bring us a little closer together and provide a checklist for a site migration, if you avoid these issues you will go a long way to not destroying your clients search performance followed by that dreaded phone call. I personally consider these to be in the remit for both developers and SEOs and they should definitely be checked on the testing environment. (more…)
Links are widely considered to be one of the, if not the most important ranking element. Getting the right links is hugely important. But also the links within your site play a big role. It is an indication
Pageranksculpting is a way of making sure your internal structure is in order. But the question is: is this important? Matt Cutts answered a question about this: “If we add more than one links from page A to page B, do we pass more PageRank juice and additional anchor text info? Also can you tell us if links from A to A count?”. The important part in this video is to watch Matt Cutts’ fingers. And in the first part he is quite open for his standards.
There is one thing I see happening over and over again: Cutting out inbound link-juice by miss-using robots.txt directives. So what does it mean: Well simply put it means that you’re wasting (massive) juice flowing into and / or within your website. So stay with me and I’ll show you how to fix this in a bit. (more…)
It is one of those tiny little factors when optimizing your website: the meta description. Is it a ranking factor? Some disagree, but you can definitely say it is worth optimizing, after all, it is somewhat of an advertisement for your website. When people spot your site in the SERPS, your meta description is what makes them click on your link, right?
In my basic seo training sessions I always explain that the meta description is at least useful for the searchers to distinguish what is on your page and why they should pick your page in stead of another. And that you should always explain to people what they can find on that specific page. However, when I ask them to write down in about 150 characters why their website should be ranked number one they mostly write down how important it is for their business. Not thinking like a searcher people!
Getting your meta description in order is important for that final click. To persuade searchers to click your result in stead of the one above or below yours. But recently it has become more important and more difficult with it. A few changes by Google make that it now is REALLY time to take a look at your meta descriptions. Of every page. (more…)
It’s one of the many rankingfactors within Google: your urls. One of the talks I have a lot is whether people should use dashes or underscores in their urls because many sites have underscores. The answer is dashes off course. But why? Matt Cutts explains it in this video. Over at Searchengineland Matt McGee extracts the differences in behavior when it comes to dashes and underscores between Google and Bing.
Google has done many webmasterhelpvideos, some of which were published also here on State of Search. They now decided to extend these videos more into tutorials. Which simply means thy are longer and go a little bit more in depth 
.
In this video Matt Cutts answers a question of himself: Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? His answer seems simple: no. But there are some ‘buts’. For example don’t 301 one page too much. Google might not follow all of them.
My personal interest in mentors and mentoring was sparked a few years ago when a casual interest in SEO that I’d harboured for years turned into something else, an all consuming passion bordering on obsession.
At the time I was employed as a generalist marketing manager for a small business, lived in wildest westest Wales (still do) and was desperately looking for the training and learning infrastructure that I was sure would be provided had I been able to be a part of an SEO agency, or had there been a long established vocational path for aspirant SEOs. (more…)
In the words of La Whitney Houston “I’m asking you ‘cos you know about these things.”
In the general course of business, I will ask clients, trainees and others how they currently approach keyword research and am told time and again that level of competition is a key consideration; and that choosing less competitive keywords means you can rank highly, easily.
I take issue with this.
I can not see why competition (and to be clear I’m talking about the level of competition not specific competitor research) should ever be a consideration in term selection. Surely competition is an environmental factor outside of our control? It is nice to have insight to the level of competition only insofar as it can inform our rate of progress against objectives; however I’m yet to come up against a keyword research project where this should inform consideration to term selection. (more…)
I am constantly surprised by how often different term sets and query types are either ignored, or their role in a user-journey, misunderstood. All too often, run-of-the-mill keyword-research advice leads with an emphasis on relevance, volume and competition; ignoring the vital supporting role of e.g. “brand” terms – or the interplay between product/transactional terms and brand/navigational terms.
Brand SEO is often overlooked, as let’s face it – it’s pretty easy to dominate a good few pages of any search engine with your company results (whether on your owned and operated properties, or whether {your content} on social network and sharing sites), which means it’s not so sexy. However when it comes to Ecommerce, it is brand visitors that drive the revenue, often at a far greater contribution to overall revenue than what we may understand to be “transactional” terms. In order to get at the “why” we need to get out of our “doing” mindset and think about brand SEO from a user perspective and to do that, we need to revisit Information Retrieval and query-type classification. (more…)
Some clients….
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