More Traffic is Not Always The Answer

This is a guest post by Dan Taylor, founder of SEOwned and currently working for Moneysupermarket. Like this post? Let us know!

As an SEO one of the most common statements from clients has always been “we need more traffic to our web site’. I am not saying that this is the wrong tactic to take; in fact the stats below show that delivering more traffic to a website will produce the same overall results as the methods I am going to recommend. However, the effort required to increase traffic to an under-performing site is akin to shovelling snow whilst it is still snowing. If we work on getting our site in better shape, and better performing in future the best thing for the business will inevitably be to increase traffic. … Continue Reading

Open Source Ecommerce Platforms – No Such Thing as A Free Dinner

This is my first post here at State of Search, so I’ll start by saying how pleased I am to be part of the clan!

I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about something that’s been on my mind for some time; open source ecommerce platforms and what you need to consider from an SEO point of view. Getting ecommerce SEO right is no mean feat; there are so many challenges involved that can quickly spiral out of control and become the thing of nightmares. So how come there are so many open source platforms available for very little investment that claim to be ‘SEO friendly’ to the point where you won’t need outside help?

This post really isn’t supposed to be a rant, it’s more about laying out some practical advice for anyone considering using a free or low cost ecommerce platform as an alternative to paying a developer to build a bespoke site to your specifications. There are plenty of people that choose to run ecommerce sites as a part time business perhaps grown from a hobby, and as such the start up budget often won’t be enough for a bespoke build teamed up with advice from a top SEO agency. You can bet your bottom dollar that the successful ‘cottage industry’ style ecommerce businesses are the ones where the owners had the foresight to make some SEO considerations at the very start of their projects. … Continue Reading

SEO for Ecommerce

On November 24^th I gave a talk on SEO for Ecommerce at the annual SAScon mini-conference. Below I will expand on some of the points I made during that talk, and my slides are embedded at the end of this post.

Focus on the money

While for many sites a solid long-tail SEO strategy is important, budgets are often tight and we need to make decisions about where to spend our efforts. For ecommerce sites this is a relatively straightforward decision: focus on the keywords that bring in the biggest rewards.

So you need to identify your top earning keywords and make sure your on-page optimisation and linkbuilding efforts are directed there, aiming for top rankings and a maximum share of search volume. … Continue Reading

Matt Cutts Explains how Google Determines the Canonical Source

Google has always been struggling to find out where content has originally been written. In his latest of his famous Webmastervideos Matt Cutts now explains some of the signals Google uses to figure that out. There is a part which you can help Google on yourself, for example by ‘pinging’ the search engines, but Google also looks at some ‘simpler’ elements. Like Pagerank: a higher Pagerank often indicates the source lies there.

Then off course there is rel-canonical which is a huge indicator, but other elements like rel=author also play a big role. Cutts ends with explaining that there are a lot of signals, but that ‘even’ Google messes up sometimes.
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To Build or not to Build

This is a guest post by Richard Shove, who is SEO Specialist at OMD UK. Richard has a strong opinion on the industry and wanted to share his view on whether or not we should all be learning code to become a good SEO.

Before I get started, I apologise in advance as this post may initially come across a little negative. It’s not intended to offend or criticize, I’m Scottish and it’s in my nature to be sarcastic and angry. Bear with me though, there is a meaning to the rant.
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SEO killed the hyperlink

The current web was built around links, or in the case of the world wide web: hyperlinks. ‘The intention in the design of the web was that normal links should simply be references, with no implied meaning.’ (Quote by Tim Berners-Lee).

Of course links to other documents always have an implied meaning, mostly to refer to related information, further readings or to mention an original source, but always to be of help to the user. At least that was the original purpose of the hyperlink. … Continue Reading

Panda in detail

This is a Guest post by Peter van der Graaf. Peter is a big fan of behavioral psychology and mathematics. He mainly helps his clients with their internal SEO evangelism, link building strategies and international SEO effort. The scale in which he and his partners perform search algorithm tests has the potential to give great insights.

I was surprised to find out how much is written about the Google Panda update and how little information is shared so far about what is really happening. … Continue Reading

8 Development Mistakes to avoid when migrating a website

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. … Continue Reading

Why you should keep your robots.txt clean!

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. … Continue Reading