Archive for the ‘Technical SEO’ Category
SEOs….Create Something
Creativity summed up
Okay, a thought just came to mind and I felt compelled to share it with you in this blog post….It revolves around the act of creativity and how it influences the minds and emotions of people to think, be inspired and/or take action. The recent buzz around content marketing as the ‘new SEO’ has its foundation on creativity. Whether you put together a slide-deck, shared your thoughts visually on an Infographic OR record a podcast, you were involved in the process of creating something you felt would resonate with a target audience.
The New Face of SEO: How SEO Has Changed [INFOGRAPHIC]
Over the past 18 months, SEO processes as well as SEO strategy has immensely changed. Whilst SEO is still very much rooted as a technical discipline, a significant degree of SEO is verging more and more towards a creative and marketing mindset that touches the nerves of humans OR an audience that search engines are getting better at understanding. SEOs are starting to think about their audience first with engaging content before optimisation for search engines.
I quite like the direction the industry is headed at the moment and have put this infographic together that details both the OLD Vs. NEW approaches to SEO. It should hopefully shed better light as to where SEO is headed and give you an idea on how to align your digital marketing activities with these changes. Read More »
Dodgy Mass Directory Submissions Results to Negative SEO
You have probably heard of directory submission services that promise to submit your website to a hundreds or thousands of directories and search engine indexes. Well, I like to assume you’d have figured that if something sounds too good to be true, then it most likely isn’t true. Dodgy mass submission directory services have been long established to be a low value and in many cases a negative activity but we never had it confirmed by Google, until today.
Just yesterday, Google’s Webmasters Trend Analyst John Mueller strongly advised against directory submission services by implying that the activity is likely to spark an unnatural link flag against your website to Google, which would result in a significant drop in rankings. Here is a quote from John,
These services are not needed and can even be counter-productive (if they create unnatural links for your site, which would be against our Webmaster Guidelines). Read More »
Google’s Disavow Links Tool: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread?
Site owners & webmasters that received the “Unnatural Links” Notification, all celebrated when Google launched it’s “disavow links” tool. Here is what Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the web spam, had to say about it and read on to learn more about it.
How It Works
You can access the tool here, as it is currently not linked within Webmaster Tools. Initially it will ask you to select a website and your screen should look like this: Read More »
Organic Google Results Differ based on Search Location
As Google strives to provide the most relevant results to searchers, it seems to have taken an even bolder step to serving different organic results (yes organic) based on the location of searchers. We saw the need to explain this as a client of ours recently asked “How come the ranking report does not match with what I see on my computer?” Well, the answer is that there are many factors that affect the SERPs you see.
#1 Location
The first and most obvious factor that affects the SERPs. Our little experiment showed that the organic results for exactly the same term differ depending on your location. Have a look at our examples:
Was Your Site Hit by Google Penguin Update OR the Unnatural Link Penalty?
The Google Penguin Update and Google’s Unnatural Link Penalty some would argue have very similar symptoms, and as a result stirs up quite some confusion about their differences. This post is intended to distinguish the differences between the two. So here goes…
Negative SEO: 10 Ways To Mess Up Your Google Rankings
You know how to do SEO right, just follow the best practices and you’ll be fine, but what if you want to go against the flow … you know, do something differently and leave your mark on the world. Well, here are some tips that would help you go against SEO and totally mess up your rankings!
HowTo: Structure UI Layout Design for SEO Content
In a recent SEO audit we undertook on a client’s website, one of the highest priority issues that our findings brought to light was the sites lack of text content.
Our client was an interior design business and had a very design oriented site, with hardly any text content on it.
I did understand their viewpoint from a brand consistency and visual impact perspective but putting on an SEO hat, felt the need to press on adding more text content because with little or no text content on a web page, Google hardly has any content to store in its index about the web page and so ranking that web page would be quite a challenge (if not impossible) for long tail keywords. Even well tagged images can only take your SEO so far i.e. on image search results – the real value is in mainstream stream text based search, which unfortunately is still heavily reliant on text content as an on-page SEO metric.
Is Google Really Against SEOs?
In some ways it seems as if Google and SEOs have an antagonistic relationship. Reading comments like those posted by a Google employee at Hacker News could lead you to believe that while Google are trying to give their users valuable, relevant content, SEOs are trying to find loopholes in the system to get bad or irrelevant websites higher than they should be.
The Google employee who goes by the pseudo name of jrockway on Hacker News said:
If the social features are relevant, though, then users are getting a better experience. And that’s a good thing, even if individual pages get less traffic from Google. Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.
