Wearing a white hat in SEO
Posted by Alex | Filed under General, Google, MSN, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Yahoo!
SEO is often regarding as a bit of a black art. There is a belief that you need an in-depth technical understanding of web design and Search Engine Algorithms in order to get your site ranked under relevant terms for your website, blog or business. Thankfully for for those of use that aren’t uber SEO geeks - this simply isn’t the case.
However. There is another way to get ranked on search engines. By backward engineering and deciphering how the search engines work you can manipulate your ranking in order to achieve good results under certain terms. These methods are Black Hat. Googles Webmasters guidelines states :
Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
A post on Seoroundtable talks about different shades of SEO consultants :
Dark inky black, Charcoal, Dark gray, Slate gray, Gray, Light gray, Off-white, White, and Luminescent pearly white.
At 1upSearch we always where Luminescent Pearly White hats when carrying out SEO work. As our primary objective when working with clients is always to improve the number of visitor conversions - and the only to achieve that is by making sure that a given page is the most focused and on-message that it can be. Ensuring it has just the right combination of keywords, title, links, and so on, is really at its base simply a matter of making that page the best web page it can possibly be. The page that will rank the best in the search engines is also the page that will make the most sense to the human visitor.
The Dark Arts may pay in the short term but for long term success concentrate on making your website the best it can be.
More Inward links on MSN & Yahoo than Google?
Posted by Alex | Filed under General, Google, MSN, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Yahoo!
I’ve often wondered when investigating how many inward links our clients have why Google always shows less than MSN & Yahoo. You can check how many links a site has by using a link: command.
e.g. link:www.alexdigital.com
Yahoo uses a linkdomain: command.
If you run the commands on all 3 search engines you’ll probably find quite a difference in the results. I decided to do a little research to find out what was going on..
If Googles main criteria for a good search result is links isn’t it a little weird that it doesn’t index all your precious inward links?
It turns out that Google purposely doesn’t list all links pointing to a particular page. They do this because they feel by giving webmasters this information they may be able to use it to manipulate search results. This implies that Google still know they’re there and includes them while calculating PageRank (PR).
Another discovery is that Google unlike the others only shows the links to a particular page so running a “link:” on your domain will only includes sites point at the homepage. The others show all links to all pages.
So keep an eye on your inward links but don’t be disappointed if they don’t all show up in Google. They’re probably being counted, just not being acknowledged.
5 Quickest SEO Tips - EVER
Posted by Alex | Filed under General, Google, MSN, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Yahoo!
Ok. I’ll set myself a small challenge. Quick fire tips on SEO straight from my Mind in less than a minute…..
1) Content is King ! - Make sure you copy and images a relevant to the page and more importantly your potential visitors. Make sure your copy and images are based on your keyword Research. Use Alt Tags.!!
2) Link Building ! - Have a link building strategy and stick to it!
3) Good hosting ! - It has never been more important to have a Great hosting company
4) SPAM = BAD! - Never ever ever ever SPAM search engines.
5) Patience - Success doesn’t happen over night…
More details on all these points coming soon!
Phew, took me about a minute and half….
