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…)
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.
Image Credit: lupinoduck
A lot of times when you deal with SEO issues, these are related to URL structure, URL patterns and / or URL parameters being used. Since I’m currently doing some website restructurings for various clients, I thought I’d share some of the directives which we frequently use and which will make a lot of troubles just go away. In addition to URL handling I also added some performance related directives, as well as various access control tips. (more…)
One of the key misconceptions from website owners’ is that a website re-launch will cause a temporary, or permanent, drop in SEO traffic as the search engines switch to the new URLs. In my opinion the search engines have got far better at ensuring the migration from the old to the new website is far more seamless than before. There are, however, many areas that you need to ensure are 100% to ensure uninterrupted service.
I recently ran a migration project for a key client of MediaVision’s where we had improved organic traffic by over 600% in the last two years. Clearly the client was concerned that the traffic from organic search would drop as it was a key lead generator for their business and would definitely affect their bottom line. What was very pleasing was that not only did we preserve the current rankings but by using the strategy below we actually increased non-brand SEO traffic by 23% month on month. (more…)
Google Webmaster Tools, or Webmaster Central, is to be considered on of the more useful tools in the SEO toolkit that google is providing. Some of its features include showing how Google crawls, indexes and rank your site, the way people find your site in search result and the CTR on the clicks that follow by those result pages. Also you can find out, although limited, who is linking to you and to what pages, receive (email) notifications or alerts when your site contains malware, your WordPress installation needs an update or other issues that have been detected.
So why should you use Webmaster Tools? Some of its features mentioned earlier already indicate why it might be helpful to verify your site and look into it periodically. Let’s go into some of the features that are available and understand how they can be of help to basically any webmaster or SEO. (more…)
Today I want to walk you through and talk you through some of the interesting conversations that emerged from a panel comprised almost entirely of State of Search bloggers on Monday at a4uexpo in Munich! I joined up with Martijn, Roy, and Kelvin to discuss what the future of SEO may look like and what’s in store over the next few years.
This is not an exhaustive look nor is it necessarily reflective of what the future will look like for SEO because hey, as I’m sure Harold Camping can attest, we can’t predict the future. However, I’m going to do my best to summarise here the different viewpoints from the panel as well as the audience so please feel free to disagree, even I disagree with some of the predictions but we’ve all used our experience to try and figure out what is in the future of our quickly maturing industry. (more…)
As the last format seemed to work quite well I’m going to focus on just the top tips today. We’ve got Rich Baxter from SEOgadget, Martijn Beijk of Onetomarket (also a fellow State of Search blogger), Jonathan Hochman of JE Hochman and Associates, and finally John Mueller from Google Webmaster Trends.
Really looking forward to this one, so away we go! (more…)
Hi again folks, in an effort to get posts out as quickly as possible I’m going to stick with a “Top Tips” format for this next session. Today we’ve got Max Thomas of Thunder SEO, Mikel deMib Svendsen of deMib and Christine Churchill of Key Relevance.
As an aside may I just interject the fact that Mikel deMib Svendsen is wearing an excellent patterned suit and the cover slide of his presentation deck looks a bit like it was inspired by a GeoCities website, very excited about this one! We’ll definitely link to it once the decks go live.
A few weeks ago I read with a huge amount of interest about Rishi’s experiment around Google Suggest where he suggested it was sheer volume of mentions which influenced what was suggested. This seemed a slightly different outcome from Brent Payne who’d seemed to be influencing the suggestions by increasing search volume.
Two different theories – seemed like the perfect opportunity for a test.
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Hi Everyone! Some of you will remember that I wrote an article here on State of Search about integrating online and offline marketing efforts and as a case study I used the Hoxton Hotel’s £1 sale from January of this year (2011). Although there were a lot of positive things to say about the efforts in general – I still think it is one of the single greatest “free PR” efforts in recent times – there were some technical concerns with the site and a number of people who complained about their experience.
After the most recent installment of the sale yesterday I had a great chat with the men behind the website to get a feel for what they learned from last time, what they improved and what still needs improvement. A very big thank you to Mark McDermott (Founder) and Aidan Kane (Lead Developer) from Codegent for taking the time to speak to me about everything going on “behind the code”. (more…)
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…)
Since Google officially introduced page speed as a ranking factor in 2010 I thought I’d put together some of the things we do when optimizing a website for better performance. As a starting point (besides of actually accessing the site and get a feeling on how fast it really is) I’d usually go with the Google Webmaster Tools > Labs > Site performance tab: (more…)
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