DIY SEO

I just found this new video from Google’s Matt Cutts, it was released in May this year and he talks about what Google is likely to do this year, he does start off by saying that plans are constantly evolving, so it could change, but certain things like the upcoming Penguin update which they call Penguin 2.0 are very unlikely to change, he also says this is going to be a significant update and probably will have a bigger impact than the previous one! He also mentions a clamp down on advertising which passes PR, and says that any kind of paid  [...]

Just a quick one today. I’ve had a couple of people recently ask me about the accuracy of the Google Adwords Keyword tool data, and while I couldn’t possibly comment on it’s technical accuracy myself, I would be quite surprised if Google made a tool like this available to us but then fed inaccurate information back. After all, wouldn’t it be easier to just take it offline instead? That being said, there are a couple of common user errors which can mean the information you receive back is very misleading. The first and very widely  [...]

New Google Webmaster Guidelines for 2012 At long last Google have updated their guidelines for webmasters (seo’s, internet marketers and anyone else who owns or manages a website), it’s been a long time coming but now they have there is much clearer explanation on most points, and a much better description of Rich Snippets. If you haven’t seen the new information it can be viewed here. There is a lot to read so make yourself a coffee, sit back and wade your way through it. The bit I found somewhat confusing (as if it isn’t a  [...]

Be sure you get the SEO basics right There are a number of fundamental basics of SEO which apply to virtually every website on the internet, they are not always adhered to, however they do exist and have remained constant for many years. Search engines and Google in particular are often making changes to the algorithms they use to rank websites, when these happen many website owners and often also their optimisation companies can’t understand why the sites have dropped, it’s usually because they haven’t followed the following basic  [...]

There have been a lot of changes in the effective methods of optimising a website in the last 8-10 years. There was a time that you could put a site up, cram it with keywords, stuff the alt tags and meta tags with that same word and, hey presto, there you were in top position in Google, fortunately things have moved on somewhat these days, so I decided to do a quick post about some of the things that really don’t help any more. Whilst many of these factors will not actually do any harm (keyword stuffing excepted) they can waste a lot of your time,  [...]

Why Buy Tomorrow When You Can Buy Today Are you considering setting up your first website, or perhaps you already have one (or more) and are toying with the idea of another one. If so, why not have a look for the new domain name now? There are certain benefits to doing this. The search engines seem to prefer aged domains, this is probably because so many spammy websites are set up, they use unethical SEO practices and are soon banned from the search engines, the site owners just let them expire and move on to their next site. So as a result, part of  [...]

Website Design and SEO This is the second part of our DIY SEO series, so if you missed the first part have a look at DIY SEO Part 1 first, as this explains some of the basic principles to consider before you get started on the design. This article assumes that everything is being done from scratch, so refers to creating various tags etc, although it can equally be used to go through the various page components of an existing website to make sure they are all done right. So, you should now have a list of keywords, some copy for the pages and an objective  [...]

Firstly, just to be clear, the title tag is a line of text in your website which is no visible on the web page, but is seen in many search engines if you do a search, it will appear as the title of the web page, followed by some text and then the sites URL. It also appears in the blue bar at the top of your web browser window. It’s commonly thought of as the single most important seo factor on a specific web page. The title tag should be kept to under 70 characters as this is all that will usually be displayed in search results. A keyword rich, but  [...]

The aim of this do it yourself seo guide, is to help those who want to “give it a try” and make sure you avoid a few of the classic pitfalls. There are many ways you can start to optimise your own website for very little, or even no cost at all. However, dependent upon the competition in your particular niche or region (if you are targeting regionally) you may or may not be able to achieve a high position for your specific keywords without some kind of investment over and above hosting. Speaking of keywords, this is the first step in SEO, you  [...]