Category: My Week in SEO

  SEO Guide to Better Website Traffic A website with no visitors (traffic) is like a company brochure which remains in its delivery box and never gets handed out. There is absolutely no point in spending time and money building, hosting and maintaining a website if no one ever looks at it. So why have…

Can you improve SEO by not doing any SEO? Like you I get many emails a week providing ‘wisdom’ on how and what to do for search engine optimization of a web site. Some of it is obviously just complete nonsense such as the ‘number 1 rankings in 7 days’ and $0 to $4000 income…

Google Mobile Search Update It is early days yet to draw any firm conclusions as to what effect the Google Mobile Search algorithm update is going to have on traffic and rankings. It has certainly been a much talked and speculated about change leading up to the 21st April which is the date Google ‘officially’…

How Often Should I Post a New Blog? Adding a Blog to your website should be an essential piece of your overall online marketing strategy in 2015. This not only helps your ranking signals with search engines by providing fresh content which (should) be optimised for searched for keywords but also provides subject matter for…

Ecommerce Website Ideas to Improve User Experience Ecommerce websites are notoriously difficult to both provide a good user experience and get good search engine rankings. One of the pitfalls I see time and time again is user drop off before the purchase is completed. If you add up the cost of getting a shopper to…

New Google Algorithm Change on the Horizon There is a really serious update coming from Google. There is just over a month to get your site ‘mobile ready’ or it looks like it is going to be punished for its rankings if it is not.   Google’s algorithm changes have a long history of seriously…

How to Improve Social Shares for Your Blog Having a Blog is all well and good but keeping it up to date with new, fresh and interesting content takes time. Investing this time needs a return. The most effective way to get this will be from social sharing of your content. This is a great…

7 Drag And Drop Plugins For Building WordPress Sites Drag and drop WordPress page design tools make life so much easier for novices and seasoned developers alike. Building pages from the ground up using styles sheets is time consuming and often limits the tasks to costly coders. I came across this article today which lists…

Search Traffic Expectations Christmas time is always a challenging time for search traffic to websites. I am regularly asked by clients why traffic has fallen away on the run up to the big day. There seems to be a level of disconnect in many people’s minds about the expectations of the Internet and websites. This…

Bad Sitemap and Googles Indexing This week I came across something quite worrying with Sitemaps and Google. This was an effect I have not seen before. Two WordPress sites I look after, on Friday were deindexed by Google. Alarm bells started ringing loudly and I immediately started looking at algorithm changes and suspected that the…

 Bad SEO Does Harm Your Rankings Putting my MBA business hat on, I find the SEO world quite unique in many ways. It is a large industry selling services to organisations in general, to help promote their on-line marketing and pull in more customers. However the ‘rules of engagement or SEO’ are critical and if…

Search Ranking Factors Something that often amuses me that is thrown around in the SEO industry is the importance of this factor against some other factor. I often wonder where this information originates from and what it is based on. Google certainly don’t give it out. As an example, there is a common one surrounding…

Link Manipulation Much is written about how search engines are working tirelessly to improve the results they serve up. You could fill a large library with all the advice that has been written on search engine optimisation. Google publicly talks about penalising or even de-indexing websites that break its rules and try to ‘cheat’ their…

SEO in 2015 from the Experts It is always a bit of fun to read ‘experts’ predictions of what the future will hold, especially when you look back at them later and see just how right or wrong they were! This article from Powered by Search lays out the thoughts of a number of SEO…

SEO Services – Smoke and Mirrors? I quite frequently hear the comment that SEO is all ‘smoke and mirrors’ from people who have tried the services of ‘SEO Experts’. Why is this? After all it is a skill like any other skill attained from training and experience. So why is the industry failing to convince…

WordPress Plugin Vulnerability It was reported this week that a WordPress Plugin -‘Revolution Slider’ has a major vulnerability in it that allows a hacker to download files from the server. This vulnerability was discovered some months ago but has been kept under wraps by the devlopers. The problem is that this plugin is often built…

WordPress Security Worries It is estimated that WordPress, the popular blogging and Content Management System, is now behind up to 20% of all websites on the Internet. Whatever the figure it is well into 10’s of millions of websites running on the WordPress platform. That in itself attracts less savoury attention for those that want…

Search Engine Optimisation Basics Search Engine Optimisation Basics – what is it all about? You have your website built and running with it proudly presenting your products and services. Now what? I speak to many people about their sites and ask what the objectives are for it and get back many differing comments. At one…

Search Engine Optimisation – Ensuring Valid and Optimised HTML Code You have built your website, your design team have ensured that it looks good, but has this been properly optimised with regard to the underlying HTML Code? There are only a few tested rules about what HTML tags to use and a good design team…

Google is On the Move Providing More SEO Challenges Google is determined to change and improve the results it is serving up to its users – Google Gives Search a Refresh – Wall Street Journalnews.google.comWall Street JournalGoogle Gives Search a RefreshWall Street JournalBy AMIR EFRATI Google Inc. is giving its tried-and-true Web-search formula a makeover…

How to Play out of Google’s SEO Bunker Google has been implementing a raft of increasingly aggressive changes to alter how websites can get top listings through a ‘numbers only game’. We have seen the complete closure of one of the top Article directories (BMR) due to it being delisted by Google. This has always…

Digging for the Answer to SEO Post Panda and Penguin SEO in the Google post Panda and Penguin era has become a real challenge. Keyword rankings are bouncing all over the place, Google is sending out warnings about bad link usage and traffic is getting hit hard in many cases. So where do we go…

Google Penguin Update Has a Lot More to Come According to recent comments from Matt Cutts, the Google Penguin Update has a lot more to come. This article from Chris Crum for WebProNews gives us some insight into what to expect in future months from Google – Google Penguin Update has a lot more to…

Twitter Wants to Measure Success Differently This is an interesting article on an announcement from Twitter co-founder, Ed Williams on how he is trying to drive through how they measure ‘success’ on Twitter. Currently this is done on the number of followers, however this metric can be massaged giving a false picture of the true…

Google Ranking Versus Traffic Do you get excited when you find your site listed in the top 2 or 3 pages of Google for a particular keyword? Well the latest study by Chitika should tell you not to bother. Even on page 1 there is a huge drop off from position 1 to position 10…

Google’s Menagerie Grows Again with Hummingbird On Thursday the 26th September, Google’s 15th birthday, Google officially announced they had rolled out a new search algorithm which they called ‘Hummingbird’. It is reputedly the biggest update they have made to how searches are returned for many years. So what is this update and how will it…

SEO Strategies You Should Not Be Using This is a great article detailing 4 ways to NOT be building your SEO on. Organic ranking in Google has become increasingly difficult as they strive to improve the way in which the results are returned so as to filter out poor and irrelevant content. These 4 points…

Ravings, musing and thoughts on what I see during my travels through a typical week in SEO I will update this with my thoughts and observations from my week in the SEO industry.