Google caffeine will be live “soon” according to Google.

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given. Google

This might be a bit (or a big) shake up for a lot of (or some) seo and website owners as well. It was interesting to see the developer preview of Caffeine while it was available and no doubt some will be happy with the changes and some will not be.

Shout out to SEJ for spotting it

Anyway don’t be surprised to see your sites rankings dance around a while – that’s Caffeine coming

Indeed.

What is Google Caffiene? Well, it’s supposed to be a faster more improved version of how Google works (under the hood) not necessecarily a new immediate way of ranking sites according to some sources – though in the analysis I completed some websites did seem to have improved/dropped rankings in SERPS (but this might have been because of a number of factors).

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

As a “web developers and power searcher” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of changes coming in the next few months when it’s confirmed live. Find out more here.

Update – Matt Cutts says -

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays (I don’t think you’ll see Caffeine on multiple data centers before January)

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Note – This is a mash up of information originally provided by Google itself

Google Local Business listings get your business featured for various keyword phrases in your local area, as well as your business name, including a map to your business and contact details. It’s FREE, so your crazy not to do it.

Optimising for Google Local Business – In my experience, giving Google as much information as possible about your business is just about the best policy. Get listed in as many local business directories as possible.

Best Practices (From Google)

• Guidelines – Only business owners or authorized representatives may claim their business listings on Google Maps.
• Guidelines – Use a shared, business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
• Guidelines -If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.hobo-web.co.uk, a matching email address would be me@hobo-web.co.uk.

{smartads}

Submit Your Free Listing:

1. Submit your information, from basic contact info to photos and video. Visit the Local Business Center.
2. You will need a Google account – click here to go straight to the sign-up page.
3. On the Local Business Center homepage, click Add new business.
4. Fill out the basic information about your business. This includes:
   • Company/Organization: This is the official/registered name of your business.
     • GUIDELINE – The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.
     • GUIDELINE -Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business into the business name.
     • GUIDELINE -Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
   • Address (required): The address should look exactly the way you’d write it on a paper mailing envelope. If your business services several areas, you can create one listing under a PO Box.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
     • GUIDELINE – PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
     • GUIDELINE – Businesses that operate in a service area as opposed to a single location should not create a listing for every city they service. Service area businesses should create one listing for the central office of the business only.
     • GUIDELINE – Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
     • GUIDELINE – The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
     • GUIDELINE – A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.
   • Phone Number (required): Be sure to include your area code with your phone number.
     • GUIDELINE – Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
   • Website: This can be a maximum of 255 characters.
     • GUIDELINE – Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not provide URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
5. Click Next. You’ll now have the opportunity to provide the following information about your business:
   • CATEGORIES: Enter several categories to describe your business, to make it easier for others to find when they search Maps. Google will automatically suggest categories as you type. You can enter up to 5 categories for your business. I THINK THE FIRST ONE NEEDS TO BE FROM GOOGLE’S CATEGORIES, THE REST BE SURE AND USE VALUABLE KEYWORDS RELATED TO YOUR BUSINESS (Or CUSTOM CATEGORIES)
   • HOURS OF OPERATION: Select your hours of operation using the dropdown menus. If would prefer not to specify your hours of operation, keep the radio button selected next to ‘I prefer not to specify operating hours.’
   • PAYMENT OPTIONS : Select the checkboxes next to the payment methods that your business accepts.
   • PHOTOS: Use the photo uploader to add a photo from your computer, or specify a URL to add a photo from the web. You can add up to 10 photos to your listing. To learn more about adding photos, check out this section of the User Guide.
   • VIDEO: To add a video, upload it to YouTube and enter its URL. You can add up to 5 videos to your listing. For help with uploading your video to YouTube, read the article on how to upload in the YouTube Help Center.
   • ADDITIONAL DETAILS: Use this section to add your own information fields to your listing. For example, parking availability, or whether your business allows pets.
     • GUIDELINES – Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.
     • GUIDELINES – Please see this page of the LBC User Guide for examples of acceptable custom attributes.
6. You can see your listing as it will appear in Maps on the right side of your screen, and new information will appear as you enter it. When it looks the way you want it to, click Submit at the bottom of the page.
7. Choose how you would like to verify your listing and click Finish.

Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll be asked to verify it before it goes live. Google allows a maximum of 100 listings per account for manual verification. For more information on verifying your listing, check out this section of the User Guide.

You Need To Verify your listing by PHONE or POSTCARD

You’ll have to:

• verify a new business listing,
• or to verify phone number or address changes in an existing listing.
• You can verify your listing by phone call or postcard.
• Keep in mind that if you don’t want to verify your listing right away, you’ll see your verification options in your listing status when you return to your Local Business Center home page.

Verification by phone

• Verify your listing this way & you’ll receive an automated phone call
• During this call, you’ll be given a unique PIN that can be entered into your Local Business Center account.

Verification by postcard

• Once you’ve received your PIN on a Google postcard, you can then use it to verify your business listing in the Google Local Business Center.
• It generally takes 10 business days for a PIN mailer to arrive.
• If you’ve been waiting longer than this, visit the Local Business Center to request a new mailer.
• Keep in mind that only one PIN mailer is valid at a time, so requesting a new mailer will make the previous mailer invalid, even if you do end up receiving it.
• Note that you can only receive a PIN at the business address you’ve submitted to Google Maps. This way, we can verify ownership of a business in part by validating who received the PIN at the business address.
• DANGER DANGER – If you enter an incorrect PIN 5 times, you’ll receive a message indicating that your verification failed, and you will no longer be able to verify the listing.
  • When this happens, you’ll need to delete that listing from your Local Business Center account and start the process again, creating a brand new listing.

Wait for your listing to appear in Google Maps. In most cases, it shouldn’t take more than 12 hours.

Once it is submitted it will be in one of the next stages:

Status – What Does It Mean?

Status	What it means
	This means that your listing is publicly available by searching on maps.google.com and through google.com. If you’re unable to find your business right away, try performing a search for [ your business name in your city, zip code ].
	This means that the listing you’ve submitted needs to be verified. Until you do, your listing won’t be displayed in Google Maps. You may verify by phone or mail. To find out more about verification, go to this section of the User Guide.
	If your listing is Flagged, it has been selected for additional review before it can appear on Google Maps. This might be because there’s something in the content of your business listing that isn’t allowed on Google Maps. Perhaps you’ve used certain ‘trigger words’: these can be ‘bad words,’ or simply trademarked words that you don’t own. WHAT GOOGLE MISSES IS THAT YOU NEED TO CHECK YOUR LISTING! SOMETHING ISN”T QUITE RIGHT – CHECK YOUR DATA AND YOU MAKE THE CHANGES. NOBODY AT GOOGLE GIVES A S^%$ – THEY WONT BE CHECKING IT
	If your listing is suspended, it means that you have chosen to remove it from Google Maps. Click Resume display on Google Maps to make it visible again.
	The means that your listing is verified and has passed our content check, but it is awaiting our next data push. It should be live within two weeks, but may take up to four.If your listing has been ‘Awaiting Next Update’ for over a month, we recommend verifying this listing manually by phone or PIN Mailer (note that you can’t verify listings in bulk. A listing that was uploaded as part of a bulk feed will have to be verified individually). If you uploaded a a bulk listing, it could be that there was no information in it that isn’t already on Google Maps. If this is the case, then we don’t add the bulk feed to our index.

Google local Statistics

You can get cool stats from GLB too (some below)

As i said, especially if you are a small business or a brand new business just starting out, you should claim your listing – it’s 100% free and gives you a measure of increased visibility on Google if folks are looking for your type of business in your area.

Useful external posts about GLB

• Report Spam on Maps. Google gives people the option of outing you!
• Request Reinclusion if your Local Business Center account has been suspended.
• Request Verification for your bulk upload.
• Check out the Google local business Help Forum.
• Compare Past & Current Google Local Business Guidelines side by side
• Google Targets Spammers With New Local Business Listing Guidelines

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Google have just launched Google Commerce Search – which “is nothing short of an all-inclusive e-commerce software package” for retailers.

There’s been some excitement on various news blogs.

Google Commerce Search is hosted in the cloud, meaning it lives online, so e-commerce sites can get up and running quickly. Using a cloud search tool will also help site owners meet the rise in demand from the holiday rush without having to devote extra time or resources to worrying about their capacity or infrastructure. Online retailers are free to focus on their business, while Google focuses on search, and shoppers can find what they need faster. GOOGLE

and

When combined with Google Checkout — as shown in the introductory video (also embedded below) — this is nothing short of an all-inclusive e-commerce software package, SearchEngineLand says.

and

Leveraging Other Google Products: Google promises integration with other Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search. Product Search (formerly Froogle) was blends shopping results with Google search, TechCrunch comments

Looks promising.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Here’s a list of the Wordpress plugins I use on this Hobo SEO Blog. Some plugins are permanent, some are being tested. Some are heavily modified, too. 1 or 2 although installed are not active yet.

Wordpress plugins add functionality to the core wordpress CMS we create, design and develop web sites with, if you don’t know.

Active Plugins

  • Hobo WP Custom Link Love 0.9 Beta
» Shaun Anderson / Martin Gardner of Hobo SEO (url)
Custom Variation of Lucia LinkyLove to conserve Google Pagerank, Instead of adding rel=”nofollow” we wont Link to the Authors URL at all until they have contributed a number of intelligent comments.

  • Remove Links from Home 1.0 Beta
» Shaun Anderson (url)
This plug-in removes links from the posts on the front/home page only.

  Akismet 2.2.6
» Matt Mullenweg (url)
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

  All in One SEO Pack 1.6.7
» Michael Torbert (url)
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. Options configuration panel | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist

  cforms 11.0
» Oliver Seidel (url)
cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more. Please see ____HISTORY.txt for what’s new and current bugfixes.

  Comment Approved Notifier 2.2
» Yakup Gövler (url)
Send an e-mail to your commenters when you approve their comments.

  Cross-linker 1.4.3
» Jan Hvizdak (url)
A plugin which allows you to set-up words which are automatically hyperlinked to desired URLs

  Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 3.15
» Dagon Design (url)
Generates a fully customizable sitemap

  FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1
» FeedBurner (url)
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

  Force Word Wrapping 1.0.0
» Jim Wigginton (url)
Prevents long sentancesconstructedlikethis from horizontally stretching the page. Ported from the phpBB MOD of the same name – Force Word Wrapping. For support / comments / whatever, visit the support forums.

  Lifestream 0.99.9.2
» David Cramer (url)
Displays your activity from various social networks. (Requires PHP 5 and MySQL 5)

  No Self Pings 0.2
» Michael D. Adams (url)
Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

  Ozh' Better Feed 2.2
» Ozh (url)
Your feeds, on steroids. Add a feed footer with a copyright, “Add to delicious”, the number of comments… Add anything to your feed. For WordPress 2.8+

  PagerFix 1.1 for WP 2.1
» Jaimie Sirovich (url)
Makes the paging in WP more SE-friendly.

  Post-Plugin Library 2.6.2.1
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins. Make sure you have the latest version of this plugin.

  Recent Posts 2.6.2.0
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Displays a highly configurable list of the most recent posts. Instructions and help online. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

  Related Posts 2.02
» Alexander Malov & Mike Lu (url)
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.

  Robots Meta 3.2.2
» Joost de Valk (url)
This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

  RSS Footer 0.9.6
» Joost de Valk (url)
Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.

  Smart Ads 2.2
» John Kolbert (url)
Automatically adds advertisements before and after your post’s single page content based on word count or post age. You can also ad custom ads using the built in shortcode. Just type [smartads] into your posts to display the custom ad.

  What Would Seth Godin Do 1.7
» Richard K Miller (url)
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

  WP-PluginsUsed 1.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  WP Super Cache 0.9.7
» Donncha O Caoimh (url)
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.

Which are your best Wordpress plugins? Have I missed any?

Note – This page should automatically update with new / deleted plugins using the cool WP-PluginsUsed 1.40.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Kalena Jordan at Search Engine College is doing a neat offer for free SEO (and SEM) training course for registered charities. Best be quick and register your interest.

We’d like to extend an invitation to any registered charities interested in taking online marketing training (regardless of global location) to get in touch. We’ll choose up to 25 charities and send them a coupon for one of their staff to take a self-study course of their choice. When contacting us, please use the phrase “charity training” in your email subject line or comments field and include your charity registration number if you have one.

Courses are available in the following disciplines:

• Copywriting for PPC
• Search Engine Optimization
• Article Marketing
• Link Building
• Web Site Copywriting
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Web Site Usability

So – Run a registered charity? – Want FREE sem/seo training? Ask Kalena

PS – Do pass it on to anyone you think might find this seo/sem training useful.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Well I’m seeing some sort of Google Toolbar Pagerank update on some pages if you are interested

Some new sites have PR. Some have stabilised. Some the same PR. Internal Pages with new PR….

Now that that’s done my advice would be to forget about it – it’s not a metric I use on any of my sites…. ranking and traffic are much more important!

Question – Will Having a Higher Toolbar Pagerank Improve My Ranking? NO!!!

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Can you take 2 seconds and complete this poll for me? I just want to get an idea of the numbers and types of folk who’s reading the Hobo blog to give me an idea of the audience I should be writing for.

Cheers

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

We’re going to send out a FREE Link Building Tips PDF (@100 pages) to all our subscribers (ONLY via email EARLY November 2009) – and only for Hobo subscribers. At the moment, this will be a one time mail out.

Hope you like it and find it useful – it’s based on some content from the Hobo SEO blog for those that prefer to read it in a PDF Ebook format – there will be a post or two where to get links (in a responsible way) that’s not at this time available on the blog

If you’ve not subscribed by email – it’s 100% free of course so just add your email in the box on the right or below (you do of course get our FREE Google SEO Guide For Beginners (150+ pages) as standard) when you sign up and you’ll get a free copy of the updated version next year when i get around to updating it.

Shaun

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

With HTML 5 in the news via Ian Hixie, I decided that now was the time to bring it back to the forefront and play about with HTML 5.

I’ve decided that I’d mark up a typical Hobo blog post with these new elements and then document how everything was achieved. Obviously the page will still look the same as any other blog post but one look under the hood will show you that everything is different. If you’re interested in checking on how I got on you can view the page here.

Any questions (or even tips) please let me know in the comments or catch me at my personal blog – Jack Osborne

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Tried out Friendfeed yet? Feel free to connect with me at – http://friendfeed.com/hoboweb

Shaun
Hobo

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I’d love to share the back story to this but unfortunately I can’t. Anyway, I’ve been asked to recommend a seo to somebody who’s looking to compete in a spectacularly competitive niche. After twenty minutes tying myself in knots I thought – sod it -  I need to get this down on paper… well sort of.

EDIT – Forgive me for this a lot of it is kind of cobbled together but that is how my brain works – better out than in (probably).

Knowing what I know? How would “I” choose (or even recommend) a seo?

Would “I” find them on Google? Totally IRONIC, but no.
I don’t want a seo who ranks top in Google ONLY OR MOSTLY because it has links from client sites (even though they might, at last, be blogging now). EDIT – I mean lets face it every seo co has links from some clients, even us, but it makes up a minuscule amount of our link profile. We don’t take links from SEO clients though – only web development jobs – EDIT. They ( a seo company who ranks just because of links from client sites) won’t be able to bring those guns to bear for my site… ever. Probably. Of course there are seo companies there in Google that deserve to be there too – which makes it a minefield for me. EEK – and stay well clear of Google News!

“I” wouldn’t go with a traditional ad agency who does seo. I used to be an in-house seo (the only one) for an ad agency (who was at the time no1 in Google for ad agency terms of course). I remember staying up for 3 days straight once…. ah I have fond memories of noscript abuse before I read Google’s guidelines. Generalisation of course – there will be good seo working for ad agencies (wonder where they will end up?)

“I” wouldn’t go with a web development company that ‘does’ seo because frankly making good websites is about 5% of the job done. Of course, while a good site is incredibly important, in a competitive niche it’s all about link building and/perhaps rather website promotion. Making an seo friendly site in 2009 has never been easier with all the free seo advice published online, why every body offers it. Of course, we are a seo co who does web design and development. It’s a tad of a dichotomy. It’s hard to work out which is which. A seo friendly website should be a bog standard in 2009 – but it still isn’t.

“I” would avoid like the plague a seo company who cold called me (do ethical seo companies cold call these days?) We are burst to the gunnels with work, and we’ve never asked anybody ever for work. some might defend cold calling – fair enough. Show me the testimonials from clients that say ” I was cold called by this seo company and I am thrilled with the results” and I will change my mind. (I’m not just talking about the guy starting out either of course – where it MIGHT be acceptable).

“I” would avoid unsolicited emails offering seo services as little better than confidence trickster spam. Even Google says this is what to do. There’s little satisfaction in any guarantees in this game.

What If the SEO has big brands as clients? Big Brand SEO is far, far different from in the trenches seo for clients who don’t have any links to begin with. For my mind it’s EASIER (if the brand in question has a lot of domain authority just waiting to be unleashed (or partner sites) – but of course that’s a generalisation – depends entirely on the site in question and the competition. Be prepared to get your wallet out though to feed that cash cow. I might might change my mind in the future, but i don’t plaster my clients all over my home page because simply – I don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry to know who they are, or be seen as responsible for their entire link profile.

What If “I” can’t find them at all on Google? I’d question if they know enough about generating decent links to compete in the wild wild west of the seo keyword terms vertical. If they are nowhere on that, they haven’t taken the opportunity to prove their mettle in an obvious competitive arena. Hey, I know the mantra – “we’re too busy to go for our own terms using white hat methods)”. What – you’ve always been too busy? You have no terms? You have a crap website? No authority at all in Google for any term? You don’t have one person in your agency that’s passionate about SEO to write a blog? Or get involved in forums helping people out? That’s what passionate seo peeps do in my experience – share it. So I personally would need some semblence of passion on their own site.

What about looking for SEO in Forums? Some of the people who shout loudest in forums are those looking for business. Sure, there are good folks in there, and I won a client 2 years ago in a forum who I have still got, worth nearly £xx,xxx.xx to me, but i had to get involved in an inane, petty and bitter catfight to win it – sod that. Now I only spend time in forums to help folks out to frankly to build our brand and mind share. In fact, I’ll be spending my time in the next month at the SEO Dojo where I receive no compensation at all and wouldn’t take any.

…and that’s the GOOD advice in forums. Some tell you to check Google, some tell you to actually type into Google “the best company in the UK”. Hmmm, no that’s just because somebody with a trusted site has written a post about that term. There’s no way anybody can say they are the best seo company anywhere without looking like total fools.

What about SEO who criticised other seo in private? I’d be wary of any seo who claimed to be better than anybody else, or privately criticised another seo company because frankly, most seo companies don’t know the workings of any other seo company. It’s a sign of desperation for me. So is publicly outing a competitors strategy, just for the out. That comes with experience though i think.

What about those SEO who are acclaimed best? See above point. I’d prefer experienced at any rate but nobody knows how much pressure these top seo guys are under at any one time.

What about paid membership sites? I’d only get involved in these as a paying customer if I was serious about doing the work myself or had someone I trusted or employed to action the advice in these forums. SEO and LINKBUILDING is hard work and all the tools in the box doesn’t make you a carpenter.

What about seo companies with excellent reviews on review sites? Hmmm… dig down past those excellent reviews and nearly all the time you’ll find exactly why they needed those good reviews. (No, honestly)

Would I go for pay-per-performance seo linkbuilding? Well, you might think that will get me working, but my priority will always be with the clients who drop a cheque on my door mat every month. I wouldn’t ask a plumber to install a shower and expect him to get paid after I have ten showers. A seo should be able to give you some form of real testimonials – and you should make contact with these people. I am willing to ‘take a flier’ on some projects – but I have enough of them at the moment – a lot with clients i have worked with over the years too -  to consider any more.

If I typed something (kind of obscure) into Google and got an exact match domain back with the exact same search as my query I’d skip past the first couple as its far easier to rank an exact match domain in most sectors – you don’t even need to be a seo to do this.

What about SEO Bloggers? Hmmm… that’s me. Being a seo blogger doesn’t mean your a good seo. I know plenty of good seo who don’t blog. I blog simply for content for my site, to connect with like minded folk, for sales, and because if anybody thinks i don’t know what I am doing they can hold me to task right here (and I learn something) and I build a site and community (can I say that?) of folks with a passion for marketing online. I think blogging is the best creative form of social media and may always will be. The blog is important to me – in fact, my subscriber count is probably the one thing online metric I care about these days (apart from natural – or nearly natural – links).

What about Pay-Per-Click or sponsored results? Well, “I” wouldn’t ever use some of the companies listed there. Of course, it’s an advertising channel (one we never use) and it’s an easy way to drum up business. I just prefer to somehow validate clients – they should find us. I don’t want to use the scatter-gun approach in this sector. I’d rather try and build a brand and let them come to us… Of course, time will tell if that is a naive strategy.

SO What Should You Do?

First educate yourself and make sure you have reasonable expectations. SEO is about billable hours, not £100 per month programs. The more budget you have, the more hours you will get. A first phase SEO strategy can be conceived in a few hours but need 100 hours to deploy it. If I was spending thousands of pounds I’d spend weeks researching any potential seo (which is why recommending one is not so easy for me).

“I” would try and identify Passion in a seo – corny as it seems, and not just because it’s in the copy of their home page. Anybody needing SEO (or rather LINKBUILDING) in a competitive niche needs to understand nobody knows how Google works (although the basic recipe for seo success have been the same for years). I’d go for a small company and work with them for at least a year (assuming early indications are positive) but there are risks even here. I would ask for references.

SEO is so different these days. in fact, SEO is so 2003. It truly is about search engine marketing these days and the more than ten ways free ways to get into Google results. It’s not just about getting better positions on narrow terms, though sometimes it is depending on what you’re getting paid to do.

I’d spend time trying to find those in the industry with a passion for seo, and of course, to correctly identify those, you might even need to be a geek in it. Even then, those who are social in the seo world don’t necessarily make the best seo (but who you know in seo land can get you links and advice – just as in the real world).

OK so I’ve probably insulted everybody in that round up and I didn’t even particularly mean to (maybe even myself in a couple of cases). I hope I’ve got the tone of this post correct because I am certainly not try to tarnish anyone. But this was a post borne 100% out of me trying to tell someone how to identify a good seo.

And while I have a few peeps in mind i may contact…

Knowing what i know (and if I didn’t?)

I’m glad I’m not looking for a seo company.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

One of my clients was linking out to real and trusted sites from pages on his site and added rel=nofollow to the links because he thought this was helping his site. This is folly.

There’s no reason to put nofollow on editorially approved links.

If you write a blog post and nofollow the links on it your blog for no other reason that to conserve pagerank or think linking out to irrelevant sites will hurt your site, in my experience, you’re misinformed at best.

Google doesn’t penalise you for linking to irrelevant sites if both pages in question are relevant to each other.

Use nofollow only if you don’t want to vouch for the page you’re linking to. I often surmise Google might be taking in the quality or accuracy of your outbound links in some minor way to measure the strength of your trust, so don’t miss out because you are effectively not linking to anybody.

Also consider, the link you make might be the link that heps another REAL site get traffic from Google and satisfy Google’s users – that’s not a bad thing for anybody.

I don’t even use nofollow on blog comments (using the free hobo wordpress plugin for comments) because I editorially and manualy approve all blog comments, and only approve the link after a number of comments from trusted users and if the site in question is a real site of any value.

I have little reason for nofollow these days. I don’t use it to sculpt pagerank, and I don’t use it in any arena where editorial moderation is in play.

I only use it for sites that don’t deserve the link to be search engine friendly and in 99% of the cases if I don’t have any reason to trust a site, I won’t make the link a link at all.

Pet hate – web sites where every outbound link is nofollowed. They aren’t suckers, they’re amadans.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Is it just me or do you find that less and less blogging folk linking to other blogs these days? When i started blogging  properly (at the start of 2008) it seemed it was a free for all when it came to links. Now it seems only the very best stuff (or most obscure stuff) picks up the natural links from the linkerati.

It used to feel like bloggers actively showed support by linking to posts, now it seems they Twitter their approval and the next second move onto something else leaving the average blogger with a % of the links they would have got back pre-2007.

I’m picking up BETTER QUALITY links these days, but LESS overall I think. How are you finding it?

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I had intended to stay out of the recent debate on seo being a con, or seo being spammers, but it irks me when people with an audience misrepresent SEO. So many folk already comment on the seo ‘industry’ (yawn) and news I often can’t be bothered. But it has sparked some healthy debate here in the Hobo studio so…

First, to illustrate my point, here’s a an everyday small business client site we took on in July (I’ve consulted with the client in the past on other projects).

They had a FANTASTIC little ecommerce site (@1,000 products) – very well designed and built by another web dev company). Unique well written content. Unique page titles. Absolutely nothing wrong with it.

But – NO TRAFFIC from Google for (more than) 6 months!

The customer asked us SEO to get involved.

Here’s what the same customer made in the last 4 WEEKS with that rise in relevant traffic.

Not including a pretty penny from reffering sites

If you listen to Paul Boag (who’s obviously a talented designer), hey all my client needed is a copywriter and all seo is “manipulative”. Google wants great content – that is correct, but how does it rank content? Yes, via links. He misses this totally out in his podcast.

Mmmm….. I’d love to see that strategy alone at work for (just about any ecommerce site) and in any competitive niche industry where people use a myriad of strategies including seo, linkbuilding, social media, pr networks, paid links oh AND that copywriter, to rank for terms. Look out you don’t walk around a corner into any gun fights with that knife you have there.

By the way, original “compelling content” – so easy to create isn’t it – on a site with no links and no audience and no online business authority is as useful as boring, useless content. It won’t be FOUND and won’t be READ and won’t be ACTED upon. Googlebot is stupid – it cant tell if content is good or not unless other pages links to it.

If my client listened to Derek who can rank for Derek my client wouldn’t have called a seo company to identify why he got no Google love.

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing.

He’d have been worried we’d have taken his money and buggered off to finance our international drugs & arms smuggling operations with our seo scamming and hacking buddies.

Generalisations are of course, the foundation of intelligent debate of course, as we all know.

Generalisations make for excellent link bait though.

Anyway how did we achieve these results for this particular client? It was obvious there was nothing wrong with the site or the content….

1. We quickly identified this site had no REAL pagerank = no trust, no authority, no ranking ability. That’s a side effect of having a weak link profile by the way.
2. MOST IMPORTANTLY – We had to identify some trusted sites we could get links from that transferred trust and ranking ability. We did.
3. A few Press releases to tell the world about the site
4. A relatively small ongoing article submission and directory linkbuilding program

There was no need to examine the linkbuilding competition in this case – though often there is. No need to buy any crap links – I don’t. No need for any new content. No need for any fancy Google xml integration. No need to redesign the site.

A copyrighter would have been as useful as a solar powered flashlight in this case. Building a good site was a mute point.

IT WAS LINKS FROM TRUSTED PAGES THE CLIENT SITE NEEDED.

Fact is – Every single site is different, sits in a vertical with a different level of competition for every keyword or traffic stream, and needs a different strategy. There’s no one size fits all magic button to press to get traffic to a site. Some folk have a lot of domain authority, some know the right people, or have access to an audience already – indeed, all they might need is a copywriter – or indeed, some pap to write or drone on about today.

They, however, are in the minority of sites. Most of the clients I work with have nothing to start with and are in a (sorry! lols) boring industry few write about.

Fact is. It’s not a seo’s fault Google is a links based search engine. In one respect, Google doesn’t even CARE what content you have on your site (although it’s better these days at hiding this). Humans do of course so at some point you will need that content so that’s why we are a creative, content focused search marketing agency. I am an SEO in that mix.

Fact is – a successful website needs good people working on every aspect of the site. The client needs to deliver. The web developer. The copywriter. The seo. The linkbuilder. The host. – everybody. You need good folk from every industry and there’s plenty of them. I’d never say you don’t need ANYBODY or rule out an entire industry. The more good people you have on your team the more likely you’ll win.

Not only me either who was bemused by the debate:

• http://www.seobook.com/seo-scam
• http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/detox-your-web-development-team/
• http://searchengineland.com/an-open-letter-to-derek-powazek-on-the-val ue-of-seo-27680
• http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/11-reasons-why-you-dont-need-seo-ht-powaz ek.html
• http://www.ask-kalena.com/seo/thank-you-derek-powazek-but/
• and many more….

Maybe designers should stick to talking about design, and let seo talk seo – we find enough to argue about amongst ourselves without outside ‘help’.

Right – back to work. I have a client with an excellent site who’s going to phone me shortly to ask why his excellent, pretty and well structured site, with original content isn’t top ten for his Christmas terms yet.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

The BNP (British National Party) as featured on the UK BBC Question Time last night, use Alexa traffic rank badges on their site as a metric for success against all the other political parties – basically proclaiming that their website is more visited than all the other political parties in the UK – I wish my clients were happy using alexa traffic rank data as a metric and I hope the BNP get their other statistics from more reliable sources

Alexa Traffic rate is well screwed and innacurate. The MORE POPULAR YOUR SITE IS ON SOCIAL NETWORKS, in my experience, hurts your alexa ranking. Yes, I know. It’s as if Alexa penalise successful social media savvy sites, while rewards sites with traffic Alexa obviously values more – ie search engine visitors.

How do you increase your alexa ranking? By getting more search traffic and staying away from sites like Stumbleupon, Digg and other social network sites, who are frankly easier to manipulate than, for instance, Google. And that’s leaving out the pointless Alexa Toolbar and the fact if you write for a more tech savvy audience, you may very well have a higher Alexa rating..

On a side note, the Hobo site is tanking the BNP in Alexa rank - maybe we should start a political party

Of course, they’ll undoubtedly generate a lot of traffic – controversy always does – but I don’t know of any (respected) professional search marketer that uses Alexa Rank as a measurement of ranking success above others (although I am open to debate on the subject).

Why the BNP is using it, I’ll leave up to you

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I’m going to be spending a little more time at the SEO Dojo, a private seo community run by my fellow SEO geek David Harry.

There’s already some really good content in there, and plenty of advice from experienced SEO on hand to help.

“If you are a search or marketing professional, a webmaster or enthusiast, there is something for you. It was founded on the belief that greater amounts of wisdom could be collected and shared to create better optimizers.”

It’s a (very affordable) pay-for-access private forum (so we can get to chat about some things that might not quite be suitable for public broadcast), but there’s plenty of folk with experience in a lot of different areas in search marketing. Come along and join us if your serious about seo and/or just starting out http://www.huomah.com/dojo/

See you there.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Did you know that linking to us will help your rankings lol? Yeah right. But getting links from other sites will help YOUR rankings – no arguement there.

First, there’s probably no PERFECT link request email. but here’s how I do it (for the Hobo site, every so often).

• I don’t send that many out – just a few a month.
• I keep the email short and to the point
• I use a title like “Organisation Website Name” Website
• I never automate them – each one is crafted personally and (much like the blog) in a laid back manner.
• I CORRECTLY IDENTIFY the exact PAGE I want a link on (after identifying it’s a good page (and yes, Pagerank comes into it regardless of what others say but I also look to see if that page ranks high, gets traffic and is itself internally (at least) well linked to.
• It’s never JUST a links page with no content I want my link on, and it’s never on their home page.
• I also correctly IDENTIFY if they have a habit of linking out to relevant articles.
• I NEVER ask them to link to my home page.
• I always provide them with the URL I desire them to link to
• I ALWAYS have a piece of content that’s of value and WORTH linking to – after all, I wouldn’t link to pap.
• I NEVER specify anchor text that should be used.
• I NEVER even mention reciprocal links
• I only contact them once

Most importantly – I am honest about why I want a link. I don’t tell them it will help them, I tell them (usually) it’s more up to date information than they currently link to and it will help us and might be useful to their readers. And it is. I don’t tell them it will help their rankings, or that I was “browsing the web and came accross their site”.

I’m not exactly sure what above is the ‘killer’, but this method works more often than not.

Lastly, if I spot something amiss on their site, I’ll point it out in a friendly manner, and tell them to contact me if they need any assistance in the subject of what I do – SEO.

Not exactly rocket science is it.

Edit – This post was set to publish today – but I noticed Julie Joyce had a good recent article on the subject of link request emails too. For me, link requests are from dead, you just need to be relevent, linkworthy, polite and honest!

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Knowem is a cool little tool I’ve known for a while that can help you check and secure your brand name accross all social networks, or (sometimes even more usefully) search social networks all at once to see if a particular brand is available so you can prepare to build that global brand of the future.

Check it out – even as a free tool Knowem is very useful, and for a moderate price, you can get them to do the registration work.

There’s a write up today at Techcrunch if you want to know more.

New to social media – check out the beginner’s guide to social media.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

For beginners running an ecommerce shop, with product pages can compete on price, this is one of the easiest tweaks you can make to your site to increase click through rates from search engines.

I find that having a price (or a SAVING) in your page titles (if it’s a good price compared to the competition) attracts clicks even from way down the rankings – WAY down.

I’m often surprised (!) when I look at stats and see the product was featured on page 3 in Google and still got a click. The only thing that makes it stand out from the competition? Price in the page title. Hey, they’ve checked the competition already and can see at a glance you’re cheaper.

It’s a simple tweak that can reap big gains.

Edit – Terry Van Horne of http://www.internationalwebsitebuilders.com/ makes a very good point in the comments below:

Ecommerce players need to realize that in this day and age users are often using SE’s for price discovery.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

This is a great article from Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media you should have a quick read about promoting your website online (or rather, promoting good content you have on your website, when you get around to adding it).Part of actually successfully promoting your brand / website online is finding conversations by tracking brand mentions – in which Lisa has provided another easy to understand “how-to”.

This sort of social media stuff is corner stone seo these days (for getting you links from real sites if not the social media sites themselves) and can make seo and linkbuilding campaigns all the more successful. Check out Shana Albert’s still great introduction to social media on the Hobo blog too if you’re new to all this.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

US based Aaron Wall is quite probably my favourite SEO blogger, and has been since long before I started blogging myself.

I pinged Aaron and asked him if he would take me through the basics of keyword research for those readers of the blog who are just starting out, and help me create a beginner’s guide to keyword research, as it’s one area I’ve not really touched on.

For the complete novice, what is it ?

In the offline world companies spend millions of dollars doing market research to try to understand market demand and market opportunities. Well with search consumers are telling marketers exactly what they are looking for – through the use of keywords. And there are tons of free and paid keyword research tools out there to help you understand your market. In addition to those types of tools lots of other data points can be included as part of your strategy, including:

1. data from your web analytics tools (if you already have a website)
2. running test AdWords campaigns (to buy data and exposure directly from Google…and they have a broad match option where if you bid on auto insurance it will match queries like cheap detroit auto insurance)
3. competitive research tools (to get a basic idea of what is working for the established competition)
4. customer interactions and feedback
5. mining and monitoring forums and question and answer type websites (to find common issues and areas of opportunity)

Just how important is it in the mix for a successful SEO campaign?

Keywords are huge. Without doing keyword research most projects don’t create much traction (unless they happen to be something surprisingly original and/or viral and/or of amazing value). If you are one of those remarkable businesses that to some degree creates a new category (say an iPhone) then SEO is not critical to success. But those types of businesses are rare.

The truth is most businesses are prettymuch average, or a little bit away from it, with a couple unique specialties and/or marketing hooks. SEO helps you discover and cater to existing market demand and helps you attach your business to growing trends through linguistics. You can think of SEO implications for everything from what you name your business, which domain names you buy, how you name your content, which page titles you use, and the on page variation you work into page content.

Keyword research is not a destination, but an iterative process.For large authority sites that are well trusted you do not have to be perfect to compete and build a business, but if your site is thin or new in a saturated field then keyword research is absolutely crucial. And even if your website is well trusted then using effective keyword strategy helps create what essentially amounts to free profits and expanded business margins because the cost of additional relevant search exposure is cheap, but the returns can be great because the traffic is so targeted. And since a #1 ranking gets many multiples of traffic that a #3 or #4 ranking would get, the additional returns of improving rankings typically far exceed the cost of doing so (at least for now, but as more people figure this out the margins will shrink to more normal levels.)

Where do you start?

What kind of ambitions do you have? Are they matched by an equivalent budget? How can you differentiate yourself from competing businesses? Are there any other assets (market data, domain names, business contacts, etc.) you can leverage to help build your new project? Does it make sense to start out overtly commercial, or is there an informational approach that can help you gain traction quicker? I recently saw a new credit card site launching off of the idea of an industry hate site “credit cards will ruin your life”.

After they build link equity they can add the same stuff that all the other thin affiliate websites have, but remain different AND well linked to. Once you get the basic business and marketing strategy down then you can start to feel out the market for ideas as to how broad or narrow to make your website and start mapping out some of your keyword strategy against URLs. And if you are uncertain about an idea I am a big fan of launching a blog and participating in the market and seeing what you can do to find holes in the market, build social capital, build links, and build an audience – in short, build leverage…once you have link equity you can spend it any way you like (well almost).

And (especially if you are in a small market with limited search data) before you spend lots of money on building your full site and link building it makes sense to run a test campaign on AdWords and build from that data. Doing so can save you a lot of money in the long run, and that is one of the reasons my wife was so eager to start a blog about PPC. Her first few campaigns really informed the SEO strategy and she fell in love with the near instantaneous feedback that AdWords offers.

What does keyword research involve?

Keyword research can be done in many different stages of the SEO process – everything from domain name selection, to planning out an initial site map, to working it into the day to day content creation process for editorial staff of periodical content producers. And you can use your conversion, ranking, and traffic data to help you discover

• new topics to write about
• ways to better optimize your existing site and strategy
• anchor text to target when link building

One of the more ambitious keyword strategies I have seen mentioned publicly is how Brent Payne does SEO for the Tribune company. Keyword research helps define everything from what site hosts the content, to the page title, right on through to what anchor text to use when cross linking into hot news.

Which tools can be used to create a successful keyword list spread?

There are so many great keyword tools that it is sorta hard to keep track of it all. I try to list most of the general keyword research tools I like here and we have a keyword tool which is powered by Wordtracker which also cross-references a lot of other useful keyword tools.

Google has the best overall keyword data because of their huge search market share. Their (fairly) new Search-based keyword tool is awesome, but for some odd reason sometimes Google will skip showing some related keywords that you would expect them to show, unless you search for exactly those words. Due to that selective and random filtering of Google’s data, it also makes it important to use other keyword research tools to help fill in the gaps. This is where tools like Wordtracker and WordStream’s keyword tool shine.

In addition, many search engines recommend search queries to searchers via search suggest options that drop down from the search box. We have an SEO site planner tool for our paying members which helps them grab this data from multiple sources and use it to help plan out their site structure. Such search suggest tools are typically driven by search query volume with popular keyword variations rising to the top.

Six other ways to build (or expand) fairly large keyword lists are our keyword list generator, broad or phrase matched bidding on Google AdWords, looking at your web analytics data, competitive research tools, viewing link anchor text of competing websites, and any sort of structured data (like a Google News RSS feed, a Twitter feed, top seller lists on Amazon.com, a Delicious tag list, etc.).

How much keyword research do you do on a project?

It depends on how serious of a commitment the project is. Sometimes we put up test sites that are start off far from perfect and then iteratively improve and reinvest in the ones that perform the best.

If we know a site is going to be core to our overall strategy I wouldn’t be against using 10 different keyword tools to create a monster list of terms, and then run that list through the Google AdWords API to get a bit more data about each. On one site I know we ended up making a list of 100,000+ keywords, sorted by value, then started checking off the relevant keywords.

Do the keywords change as the project progresses?

Yes and no. Meaning as your site gains more link authority you will be able to rank better for broader keywords that you might not have ranked for right off the start. BUT that does not mean that you should have avoided targeting those keywords off the start. Instead I look for ways to target easier keywords that also help me target harder higher traffic keywords. For example, if I aim to rank a page for “best credit cards” then that page should also be able to rank well (eventually) for broader keywords like “credit cards.”

You can use a tool like SEO for Firefox to see how competitive the search results are and if you have enough resources to compete for a particular phrase.

You can think of your keyword traffic profile as a bit of a curve (by how competitive the query is and the number of keywords in the search query). This type of traffic distribution curve starts off for new sites far to the right (low competition keywords with few matches in the search index that are thus easy to rank for based on on-page optimization, often with many words in each search query) and then as a site builds link authority and domain authority that curve moves left, because you are able to compete for some of the more competitive keywords … which often have their results determined more based on links-based metrics.

Can you give me an example how you would keyword research a specific niche – the steps you’d normally take?

Everything is custom based on if a site exists or is brand new. And if it exists how much authority does the site have? How much revenue does it have? There is not really a set normal.

Sometimes while doing keyword research I come to the conclusion that the costs of ranking are beyond the potential risk-adjusted returns. Other times there is a hole in the market that is somewhat small or large. Depending on assets and resources (and how the project compares to our other sites) we might have vastly different approaches.

But a general starting point for a general website is discussed in our site architecture section of our training materials, and here is a graphic for sorta an example of how we would map out keyword permutations and modifiers against URLs.

How would you deploy your keyword research in 3 areas – on page, on site, and in links

The above image sorta highlights our site building strategy. As far as on page optimization goes, in the past it was all about repetition. That changed around the end of 2003, with the Google Florida update.

Now it is more about making sure the page has the keyword in the title and maybe sprinkled a bit about the page content, but also that there is adequate usage of keyword modifiers, variation in word order, and variation in plurality. Rather than worrying about keyword density try to write a fairly natural sounding page (as though you knew nothing about SEO), and then maybe go back to some keyword research tools and look at some competing pages for keyword modifiers and alternate word forms that you can try to naturally work into the copy of the page and headings on the page.

As far as links go, it is smart to use some variation in those as well. Though the exact amount need depends in part on site authority (large authoritative sites can generally be far more aggressive than smaller lesser trusted websites can). The risk of being too aggressive is that you can get your page filtered out (if, say, you have thousands of links and they all use the exact same link anchor text).

There is not a yes/no exact science that says do xyz across the board, but generally if you want to improve the ranking of a specific page then pointing targeted link anchor text at that page is generally one of the best ways to do so. But there is also a rising tides lift all boats effect to where if you get lots of links into any section of your website that will also help other parts of your site rank better – so sometimes it makes sense to create content around linking opportunities rather than just trying to build links into an unremarkable commercial web page.

Is there anything people should avoid when compiling keyword research?

I already sorta brushed off keyword density. In addition, many people worry about KEI or other such measures of competition, but as stated above, even if a keyword is competitive it is often still worth creating a page about it which happens to target it AND keywords that contain it + other modifiers (i.e. best credit cards for credit cards).

Don’t look for any keyword tool to be perfect or exact. Be willing to accept rough ranges and relative volumes rather than expecting anything to be exactly perfect.

A huge portion of search queries (over 25%) are quite rare and have few searches. Many such words do not appear on public keyword tools (in part due to limited sampling size for 3rd party tools and in part because search engines want advertisers to get into bidding wars on the top keywords rather than buying cheap clicks that nobody else is bidding on).

Once you start getting feedback from ranking data that is THE BEST data you will ever get because…

• it is actual market data (no estimations required)
• it is unique to your site (which means not everyone else has access to it)
• it tells you what is already working (so you can look for ways to do more of it)

An example of that third point is to take your traffic and/or earnings data by keyword from your analytics and plug those keywords into a rank checker. Look for high earning or high traffic keywords that do not rank #1 and try to think of how you could improve those rankings (like changing page titles, creating new content based on those keywords, and/or link building).

Thanks Aaron!

So there you have it. Keyword research for beginners from somebody who knows what he’s on about

Make sure you visit Aaron at SEO Book – it’s one of my regular destinations and subscribing to his feed should be a pre-requisite if you do SEO in any shape or form.

PS – If you enjoyed, you might be interested in these other interviews on the Hobo Blog

1. Sebastian of Sebastian’s Pamphlets Beginner’s Guide to Robots.txt files
2. Tim Nash – How Stumbleupon Works
3. Ann Smarty – Linkbaiting Introduction
4. Lyndon Antcliff – Linkbait tutorial
5. Jeff Quipp – Linkbuilding On A Small Budget
6. Jim Boykin – Linkbuilding To Your site For Beginners
7. Shana Albert – Social Media For Beginners

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Google is a truth engine to some, but Google’s reliance on trust and domain authority (while good for those who understand how to leech leverage traffic from such sources) delivers some weird search terms.

For instance, if you search for a baker in Google UK at the moment, you get plenty of results, and not one of them is for a baker. Bing at least has 1 result for a baker and Yahoo is as helpful as Google.

The search for bakers is a bit better but no1 is the dog food company which is quite funny.

Of course, this term is so generic – but I would have thought at some point some diversity filter would have kicked in and provided at least a local business result for the local baker.

Maybe being a baker is a dying breed or bakers just don’t know how to promote themselves online 

Note – a lot of folks have been complaining about the state of Google serps in the UK, and with good reason in some cases – it’s a mess.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

A UK OfCOM report discovered that 32% of 12- to 15-year-olds believed Google & other major search engines rank pages in the results by their “truthfulness”. In short, a truth engine.

While two-thirds of children aged 12-15 (66%) make some kind of check when visiting new websites, a sizeable minority (25%) do not tend to make any checks. Both of these measures are unchanged since 2007. One in five 12-15s who use search engines say they do not know how results are ordered (18%), and one in three thinks that the most truthful are shown first (32%). Ofcom

Magic. Here I thought it was about having an exact match web address and firing links from other websites at it.

Though when you think about it, that’s what Google WANTS to be. Google wants a user to believe the top ten results it provides out of millions of pages are THE most relevant 10 pages on the net about your query. Google needs users to trust IT so it needs sites IT TRUSTS to provide these results. For those not in the know it’s a pretty simple concept to understand about long term SEO.

Google determines results by analysing a websites content for relevance and testing backlinks to the website to identify trust and authority among websites. Once you get trusted or midly authorative, you can unlock that trust by pumping relevant content into Google to increase traffic and rank high in longer tail, less competitive searches related to your business.

That’s why getting a site as trusted as possible should be the main aim for a lot of online businesses and you do that by getting other trusted websites to link to your site.

It’s interesting to think how many kids think they DO KNOW how Google ranks pages if only 1 in 5 claim say they don’t know and how many of those have a good idea.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I was so impressed with local Port Glasgow commercial photographer Michael Laverty (0794 386 5557) (fresh out of Reid Kerr College) with the work he completed for us as part of his HND course at Reid Kerr, that we created a quick site for him to promote his new photography business.

I also thought I’d do a quick post for him on the blog in case any readers had the need of a professional photographer in the Greenock, Paisley and Glasgow area (he’s actually based in Port Glasgow but he’s hoping to pick up clients throughout Scotland and the UK).

As part of his commercial photography course, he had to secure a work placement at a professional company :p and accomplish various creative photography tasks. I have always had a passion for getting students to do free work for me helping talented students in the local area get a start in their career, knowing myself how hard it is so he came to us with an idea to do our corporate photography for our new brochure we’re developing (which has turned out brilliant and tongue in cheek).

Shortly, we’re going to help him out, and show him how he needs to promote his new business online but if you need a very hard working professional commercial photographer who can even make my motley crue look good then give him a call.

Note – He’s becoming quite the specialist in commercial and corporate photography, but is working with individuals too (wedding photography and portrait) for instance and I asked him if he’s willing to travel to win work and the answer was yes.

I’ve got him doing ALL my photography as of shortly after we met (including the uncredited staff photography on this site) – so if that’s not a recommendation I don’t know what is.

Get Michael on 0794 386 5557 or visit http://www.mrlphotography.co.uk/

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

A useful post and advice from Google how to handle duplicate content:

“We now recommend not blocking access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods” John Mueller

John also goes on to say some good advice about how to handle duplicate content on your own site:

1. Recognize duplicate content on your website.
2. Determine your preferred URLs.
3. Be consistent within your website.
4. Apply 301 permanent redirects where necessary and possible.
5. Implement the rel=”canonical” link element on your pages where you can. (Note – Soon we’ll be able to use the Canonical Tag accross multiple sites/domains too.)
6. Use the URL parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Tools where possible.

They have not updated their webmaster guidelines on duplicate content as yet.

Consider blocking pages from indexing: Rather than letting Google’s algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file. Google

Here’s some recent official Google advice for duplicate content accross multiple sites (and some internal advice):

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Welcome to Hobo – A UK SEO Company

You can get a FREE Ebook PDF of our SEO Basics Checklist , as cited in Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable, as from today. The easiest way to get it is to subscribe to the Hobo blog by email, or via RSS – you’ll see a link to the guide at the bottom of the mail or feed.

“the Best SEO Guide I think I’ve ever seen… simple to the point, no fluff”.

It is available NOW to all email & RSS subscribers

Some of it’s fact. Some of it’s tips or tactics. A lot of it is theory. If you want a copy, subscribe!

Worried about giving us your email? Well, there’s nearly 6,000 people subscribed already (about 5,300 by email) at the moment, and you can see what people think of our blog/newsletter here and also here: comments confirm I don’t really use this to sell services – and I don’t spam ever. This blog and newsletter is all about Google SEO & web stuff you can use on your own site, or I don’t put it in. I do not give your email to anyone else.

So, subscribe and get a FREE copy. I will keep it updated – but only with practical quick and easy to digest tips that will improve your site’s ranking in Google.

PS – Matt Cutts of Google liked it enough to give the guide a thumbs up at Sphinn (along with a lot of other respected peeps in the industry), which was nice. See here.

Warranties

If you have any complaints about the guide feel free to send me your postal address and I will send a few boys around with a  bat. It’s free, based on the infomation I try and discuss on this blog. There’s no warranties – it’s opinion, not advice. Take it or leave it. Hope you find it useful.

It’s a SEO Guide aimed at beginners – hopefully everybody can get something out of it or the links it points out 

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Be careful checking Google and Twitter (in fact everyware) looking for an invite to Google Wave.

No1 in Google UK for the moment for Google Wave Invite is a nasty page of sorts (a compromised site perhaps) and I’m seeing plenty of stuff happening on Twitter too – wonder if Matt Cutts and co are aware of all this… it was bound to happen of course and real time search results makes the SERPS an even more dangerous place.

So be careful looking for those invites (and don’t believe anyone who asks for your details in return for a Google Wave invite. We’ll all get one soon enough I’d imagine….

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Have you heard about Google Wave? From what we’ve seen, this could very well revolutionise development and co-operation for techie folks and today Google begins to roll out Google Wave to more developers, just as they did Gmail.

Google will widen access to its innovative communications platform Wave, offering 100,000 new invitations to use the service. Many of these people in turn will be allowed to invite others to join as well, reminiscent of how GMail propagated. (It’s wise for Google to allow these new users to invite friends and family because you effectively can’t use Wave without contacts on the system.) Those who will gain full access tomorrow will apparently be developers, early users who provided feedback and some Google Apps customers. SEL

How do you get an invite? Google Wave will be rolled out to various folks – the chances of getting an invite is pretty limited!

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave. Google

I have big hopes for this thing when I get access to it (whenever that is!). Many think this will be a direct competitor to Facebook and Twitter communications… we’ll see.

PS – Feel free to send me a Google Wave invite if you get one lol

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I was talking to SEO Idiot (a very cool chap) at the very cool Think Visibility and one of the things we discussed was getting banned by Google from it’s Adsense advertising program and getting your account reinstated.

If you do get banned for “invalid click activity”, it’s not necessarily the end.

In my case (some time ago now) I had a  good case – decent content rich sites and no funny business going on whatsoever, and when I pointed this out to Google, I got back in quite easily and quickly.

Here’s the response from Google:

Hello Shaun,

As you know, Google treats instances of invalid click activity very
seriously. We have reviewed your circumstances and have reinstated your
account, effective immediately. However, there will be a delay before ads
start running on your website. It may take up to 48 hours before all of
our servers are informed of the change.

Based on the findings of our investigation, we have deducted xxxxxxxx from
your account. This amount represents the earnings previously credited to
your account from invalid clicks. The deduction should occur in your next
scheduled payment.

If, in the future, you suspect that invalid clicks may have resulted from
a visitor to your site, we suggest that you review your site’s logs for
any suspicious activity and notify us with your findings at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_ clicks_contact.
This information can help us in resolving any issues, although as outlined
in our Terms and Conditions (https://www.google.com/adsense/terms), Google
will use its sole discretion when determining instances of invalid clicks.

If you need help logging the traffic on your site, please try these Google
search terms:

Webmaster resources
Website tracking and logging
Site traffic analysis

For your reference, you can also find tips and guidelines for keeping an
AdSense account in good standing by visiting our Help Center at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

I see a lot of people complaining about getting booted out of Adsense, and some wondering if it’s common practice. Google wants partners for a long time and if you are trying to stay within the guidelines you shouldn’t have a problem.

If you do get banned by Adsense, it is worth appealing. If you’re not screwing about, you can get your account reinstated and funds returned. Just don’t do anything stupid.

And be lucky, perhaps.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I’ve tried a lot of ways to check rankings in search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo and Bing) over the years and generally speaking I’ve been dissappointed with most if not all of them.

So much so, that we’ve resorted for many clients to manually checking them / and or developing our own tools to ensure the results we get are what the customer is seeing too. The problem with this type of rankings check is how much time it consumes in the studio. The problem with a lot of automatic website rank checkers of course is that they could well be software packages that violate Google webmaster guidelines for instance.

I’ve been testing out the rank check tool AWR Website Ranking on a small personal site (after being advised it does not break Google’s guidelines)

First of all, I would like to put one thing aside. There is no way that Google or any other search engine can ban you for using our software.  And this is because for Google, AWR looks like a regular web browser. We send the EXACT data web browsers send. There is no way for Google to find out that you are using a tool like AWR.  And even if they knew, they have no way of knowing your website domain. AWR sends queries that only contain the Keywords, NOT the URL. It then searches the URLs in the results Google sent back.  This means they have no way of making a connection between the IP address of your computer, where AWR runs from, and your website.  If this was possible, then I could fake this information to look like my competitor domain and then get him banned!

…and the results seem pretty cool. That is to say, it does what I need it to do.

It automatically runs a ranking report checking keyword positions in Google, and automatically sends me a keyword rank check report via email with details of each keyword position (and over time, this generates a cool graph of ranking activity).

It’s a pretty comprehensive tool and it certainly seems to perform very well, with a good support forum too to ask any questions (although there seems to be quite a bit of moderation needed in that forum, quite a lot of spam in it at the moment guys)!

A very neat feature if you run one site is the sheer number of search engines you can can track your rankings on too (thousands of them from what I can see) – not that I bother with search engine submission at all these days of course.

The keyword position reports too are quite comprehensive and you can run as many search engine ranking reports and projects (multiple websites and rank checks) as you wish.

It’s fairly intuitive and easy to set up and use after you play about with it, although trialing it I found I’m having a few problems sending email reports (although I think that may be just me and the way I have it sending emails out).

The software also can check your pagerank and alexa rank too (if either of them are important to you) and can keep an eye on competitiors rankings too.

If you want to trial it free for 30 days, you can download it here. It’s available for Mac & PC and is desktop based.

Note – I’m still not that obsessed with individual keyword rankings – I’m much more interested in creating good content on a site and aquiring backlinks as naturally as possible – and then unlocking that domain authority by publishing even more content, but in competitive sectors where the linkerati seem to be thin on the ground, for specific keyword phrases, linkbuilding is still a must of course.

Check out our  SEO for beginners and our linkbuilding tips tutorial if you’re interested in finding out more.

Do let me know if:

1. You obsessively check your rankings in search engines
2. What tool you use (if any) to monitor your keyword rank positions

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has been playing about with it’s logo in a way that’s proving mysterious. Normally Google changes it’s logo (called Google Doodles) to mark an important date in history like a famous person’s birth like the Charles Darwin Google logo, or to commemorate a momentous moment in history, a special day or special event like the first man on the moon or 09/09/09.

Normally, it’s for one day only, but this time Google has changed it’s logo a few times and not really let on what it’s actually commemorating and this has the web buzzing with all kinds of speculation including a move premier, a new Google product, a video game… the list goes on.

Originally I thought it might be something to do with the BOUCHERCON 40 year mystery convention (I’ll not expand on how I managed to come up with that lol) but after Tweets from Google and blog posts on (I think) the Korean Google blog clues seem to point to HG Wells’ birthday:

Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent County, England

Pretty cool viral stuff at any rate. Guess we’ll find out on Monday 21st September if H.G. Wells is the guy the Google logo commemorates.

Note – This is probably the best discussion I’ve read on the whole debacle and if you want to see more Google Doodles, check out this site.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

My Drink Visibility pal Tim Nash will be running a seminar on Profiling website users on the Friday before Think Visibility and I’ll be going to hear what he’s up to.

Looking at life cycles and a huge pile of tricks and ideas to get the most out of your users. Want to know if colour effects genders differently? Want to know how to estimate gender in website visitors?

Then you should be attending Tim’s FREE Behaviour Modelling Seminar seminar!

Free to Think Visibility atendees it takes place on Friday September 11th, 1pm onwards in Leeds so buy a Think Visibility ticket at £99 and use this coupon HOBOWEB to get a discount if you haven’t got a ticket – better do it quick though these tickets will dissappear this week and it’s a great gettogether!

Go here to confirm your attendance at Tim’s behaviour modelling seminar and I’ll see you there for a beer afterwards.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Google scores a perfect 10 out of 10 at Google Trends (which monitors the hottest searches on Google) after the search engine’s email (GMAIL) went down today

1. gmail down
2. gmail outage
3. gmail not working
4. gmail problems
5. gmail down september 1 2009
6. what s wrong with gmail
7. gmail server error
8. gmail status
9. gmail crash
10. gmail blog

Not seen that before – lot of angry folks out there (especially with Twitter down too at one point)

I never even noticed with all the work I had on today. I suppose you get what you pay for…..

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

BS 8878. The web accessibility code of practice via BSI (Building accessible experiences for disabled people) is coming soon and it should be interesting reading for all those who want to build their websites so the majority of people can access them:

It gives guidance on process, rather than on technical and design issues, including recommendations for:

• involving disabled people in the development process
• using automated web accessibility tools to assist with accessibility testing
• the management of the guidance and process for upholding existing accessibility guidelines and specifications.

The new British Standard BS8878 for accessible websites is based on PAS 78 and is due out late 2009. Any time soon hopefully!

Other Reading

If you want to procure, or design and build sites with accessibility in mind in the UK, you’ll find the following documents useful:

• PAS 78: A guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites
• BS 8878: Web accessibility. Building accessible experiences for disabled people. Code of practice
• Delivering Inclusive Websites
• PAS 124:2008  Defining, implementing and managing website standards: A statement of best practice
• Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (SENDA 2001)

…and of course, accessible website design begins with validation – you can validate your html and validate your css using W3C tools and we have a selection of links to the best website accessibility tools.

With any web accessibility guidelines, I like to cut through the soup and see what the folks at Accessify Forum think of each implementation – there’s a lot of passionate accessibility folk who hang out there who are only to ready to help with useful accessibility tips. Check it out.

I do wish the folks responsible for making these documents are available would stop shunting this stuff about. Over the years they don’t even bother redirecting users to where the new files are kept or even leaving a link to the new location – sometimes you need to be a SEO to find the flaming documents. Hows that for accessibility? Whatever happened to cool URI don’t change?

For web developers and those resposible for procuring an accessible website, it’s considered by some on the know that WCAG 2.0 level Double-A (AA) is a solid technical foundation to base a website on, but you are also going to have to test your website with USERS before you can say your site is accessible.

It’s worth noting that it’s still, in late 2009, practically impossible to design a site that will comply with the UK DDA as the UK DDA does not refer to WCAG and it does not lay down a specific level of accessibility for all websites. The purpose of the UK DDA is to legislate against unreasonable discrimination, and to require reasonable adjustments in cases where discrimination occurs for those accessing websites – but that discrimination would obviously have to be determined by a court, and that hasn’t happened in the UK to my knowledge. Of course, building your website to standards like WCAG shows at least you are attempting to make your websites accessible on some some level.

Actionable Tips

• Build your website to W3C WCAG 2.0 level Double-A (AA)
• Validate Your HTML & CSS
• Make it simple for visitors to your website to contact you
• Make reasonable changes to your website if asked to by someone who has difficulty accessing the information on it
• Have a culture of inclusiveness in your whole organisation!
• Learn more about web accessibility because this article is opinion and clearly NOT LEGAL ADVICE.
  

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

If you want to make your website more accessible (and generaly more interoperable between browsers) then validating your website HTML and CSS at the W3C  is a good first step.

Edward Lewis AKA pageoneresults decided to test seo companies’ websites and call out those seo whose websites failed validation after reading Aaron Wall’s article about, essentially I thought, companies who touted validation as a necessary SEO service.

As you can see from Edward’s article, the Hobo SEO company site passed (although I stil think there’s big improvements that can be made to inner pages of our site to improve rendering and page load speed, interoperability and accessibility).

It is interesting just how few seo companies actually seem to consider basic validation important on their own sites considering it’s required by LAW in many countries for websites to meet basic accessibility requirements.

Never mind if it helps you move from rank no 143 to 142 in Google, in the UK, web managers have a legal responsibility to consider within the UK DDA where relevant to websites.

Note – It’s widely considered W3C technologies would be cited if a case ever got to court in the UK.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I am going to go to the Think Visibility Conference in Leeds at the Alea Casino Conference Area on 12 September 2009.

Think Visibility is a series of conferences on “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process“. The conferences feature well known speakers, new talent and great networking opportunities.

I don’t like conferences that much but this one in the North of England is a great meetup on a Saturday of all days – which, actually brings the proper geeks out not the sales people -  and there is some great speakers this year again (although I will need to keep clear of speaker Chris Clarkson if I am to make an early appearence at that time on a Saturday morning to listen to Joost).

Last years TV conference was excellent, so I just got my ticket.

GET £20 Off Your Ticket

AND if you want to go, you can use the code HOBOWEB to get £20 off the already bargain price of £99 cost.

Tickets will be gone before you know it so make sure you don’t miss out… – GO HERE

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

We’ve updated the Hobo search engine optimisation tutorial with a few links and some more information on seo and linkbuilding.

As well as our SEO tutorial we’ve pulled together our linkbuilding guide for beginners on one page.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I’m intending to take part in Google Webmaster Forum a bit more but I chipped in an answer the other day about how many links in a dropdown are best:

The question was:

Building a new site with over 5000 product pages. Trying to get visitors to a product page directly from the homepage. Would prefer to use a two-level drop-down on homepage containing 10 brands and 5K products, but I’m worried a huge source code will kick me in the pants.Also, I have no idea how search engines treat javascript links that can be read in HTML. Nervous about looking like a link farm.

I answered:

Hobo – I’d invest time in a solid structure – don’t go for a java script menu it’s too cumbersome for users. Sometimes google can read these sometimes it cant – it depends on how the menu is constructed. You also have to remember if google can read it you are going to have a big template core code (boilerplate) on each and every page vying alongside flimsy product information – making it harder for google to instantly calculate what the indicidual products page is supposed to rank for.

I would go for a much reduced simple sitewide navigation in the menu array,

Home page links to categories > Categories link to products > Products link to related products

when you go to category links the links relevant in that category appear in the menu. Don’t have all that pop down in a dropdown – not good for users at all. Keep code and page load time down to a minimum…

JohnMu (Google Employee) + 2 other people say this answers the question:

I thought seeing as somebody from Google agreed, it was worth posting on my own blog as I don’t really touch on navigation systems in this way.

The most important thing for me when designing website navigation systems is:

1. Make it easy for the user to navigate
2. Make it easy for Google to get to your content and index your pages

Many will go on about what is the best way to create a site structure (which comes in the main from your sitewide navigation) – use categories etc.

In terms of navigation from a landing page (all your pages are potential landing pages) what do you think the benefits are of giving people 5000 navigation options. Surely if the page meets their requirements, all you need is two buttons. Home, and buy now!

in terms of site structure – to be honest – I do not think categories in a site structure (on anything but the largest site) helps your product pages OR BLOG PAGES rank BETTER (I mean, where is the evidence for that, really although every seo in the land tells you that? I have TESTED THIS OVER AND OVER AGAIN – note i don’t have categories on this blog but all my pages rank very well – it’s far more important JUST TO GET AS MANY OF YOUR SITE PAGES INDEXED AS POSSIBLE and RANKING HIGH IN GOOGLE OVER AS MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE – forget about making your 1,000 products rank better via an internal navigation system by making them more relevant by passing through category or tag pages, just get them to rank with the keyword phrase you want to rank for in your navigation system). Be aware how Google might treat links with a first link priority.

Once you realise getting your product pages indexed is the key, don’t go for a mega-menu just because you think this is a quick way to solve your indexing problem. Again, if you look at the Hobo site, I go for a minimal sitewide navigation system and prefer to use contextual links (links within my content) and links to related pages as a way Google can find content. Using this system I keep over 600 pages indexed in Google all with good pagerank.

The tree system I mentioned above is a good quick and easy system of getting a site like a ecommerce website indexed but never use a mega menu – you don’t need to (why do you want to obscure your content either at any time with a drop down menu?). I’ve considered in the past too that obscured links in drop down tags (<li>or <dd>) could well be devalued by Google (it’s an easy way to hide uninportant links). I’ve not had time to test that thoroughly though.

With a site structure, it’s all about getting your content indexed. That’s it. Depending on how much pagerank you have, you might need to ensure you are linking to your product pages you NEED to rank in Google OFTEN FROM MANY PAGES WITH PR to ensure these pages have enough Pagerank to GET INTO GOOGLE’S MAIN INDEX. Think about that. If you can’t be bothered tell Google what your most important pages are on your site via your own internal navigation structure, why should Google bother ranking it at all or assigning it pagerank?

I test a lot with this site, but that’s not to say it’s perfect. I’m aware too, I have a decent amount of real PR to play with which many wont. I don’t think there is a perfect system, just a sensible one.

For instance, I know I need to make my call to action button clearer, and i’m not satisfied with how I bring to attention the amount of information on this site. I have a few ideas (like my seo page for beginners) but unfortunately I’m too busy to implement at the moment.

PS – A basic HTML site map is an old friend.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Ulitzer.com (and sub domains) seems to have gone the way of the dodo in search engine Google. I can’t find any of the site in Google, and it’s a Toolbar PR of 0 (Toolbar Grey).

Some call it content syndication, some call it scraping. Farewell for now at least guys….

After digging about it seems yes – they did to some degree.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

SEOmoz just updated a cool group consensus of search engine ranking factors. From that study, here’s a quick rundown on the most ‘agreed’ search engine tanking factors:

• Cloaking
• Link Aquistion from known link sellers
• Server downtime
• Hidden text
• Links to bad neighbourhoods
• Keyword Stuffed Text
• “Excessive Repetition of the Same Anchor Text in a High Percentage/Quantity of External Links to the Site/Page”

Search Engine Tanking Factors – Algo v Human

It might have been interesting to isolate the algorithm from the human element AKA the Google Web Spam Team. I seeing a lot of old seo tricks like keyword stuffing getting past the G maths that ’shouldn’t’ which would not pass a human review – that is, pages ranking successfully because of individual strengths in particular/other areas even though they might be for instance, keyword stuffed to high heaven – the latter is the whole reason I wouldn’t use it for clients, not the algo.

The algo can weigh you and measure you and think you’re no1 yet when a human reaches your page all you get is keyword stuffed nonsense and that’s without cloaking anything.

I’m looking at one example of that now in a competitor audit for a customer.

Pure crap hat seo which Google loves enough to rank a particular site no1 for a keyword worth £3K for a sale which I need to circumvent in some way. It’s obvious (but not apparent) this competitor site has done something RIGHT, it’s no1, but it’s done EVERYTHING ELSE SO BADLY it will not pass a human spam review site – it’s an embarrassment to Google as it stands.

I think it’s safe to say seo tactics that are violations of Google TOS in Google webmaster guidelines might very well …er, work lol, as long as you don’t get caught (by the algo or the web spam human reviewers). OR they wouldn’t be in there.

A lot of the SEOmoz report is standard seo Google tells you not to do, but the whole report by Rand Fishkin is a great idea (one of the best in SEO Land) and so well presented it’s worth a good look over.

Be sure and chack out these other great seo group interviews.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Sometimes it’s hard to explain to people what a quality link is but in simple terms this is how I describe a site you want a link from:

• It doesn’t have to be relevant to your industry
• It doesn’t have to be an authority in it’s niche
• It doesn’t have to be the same links as your competitors

It can be totally unrelated to your site, too.

What it has to be is a site that wasn’t built SOLEY to provide links to other sites because generally speaking, it takes a lot of authority for Google to like such sites (social media sites, directories etc).

That’s the sort of links I go for anyway and the more authoratitive the site, the better.

• You don’t want it on a useful links page
• You don’t want it on a page with other sites as to make it look like a paid link wether it is or not

You do want it on a page that’s in Google’s index, ranks for it’s title somewhere and does not have a Google grey bar toolbar value (although this can change).

If you want to increase Pagerank, you better make sure the pages that link to you have PR, can transfer it and are making your link the focus of the article.

Do the stuff above (and a lot of it) and you’ll have a natural link profile as is possible that will probably stand the test of time.

I don’t use that many tools for linkbuilding website promotion because I don’t really want the same links as my competitors for my clients – you just need Google, your brain, and I find a script being able to identify Nofollow comes in useful (I use SEO For Firefox but that’s about all I use it for).

Of course there’s many ways to SEO the cat (and I don’t IGNORE competitor research) but if I was a linkbuilder picking through a competitors backlinks instead of trying to think a bit more creatively about building a brand online I think I would shoot myself in the head.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I just did a test on another site to see if I could identify a sweet spot in the amount of times a keyword is repeated. From other tests I have looked at I think a local keyword density sweet spot is clearly a myth. but keyword prominence/repetition/stuffing is clearly – not.

I got the idea when I was looking at a slide by Google employees where they mention in simple terms how Google ranks a page and I quote:

How well it matches—How often keywords appear

Is it really “easier than you think?”

My test consisted of

• 15 pages of text
• 2 keyword phrases (real words, not made up)
• On each consecutive page I removed an instance of the word and introduced a new word (so I could do the same test backwards in case any document date modified came into play)
• I waited for Google to spider, and searched for my 2 different terms

The results (I can’t illustrate this one)

Google picked the 2 keyword stuffed pages at either end of the test to rank for the desired terms (and ranked them number 1). By the way, the KD of those pages for the phrases were 18.64% just to let you see there’s clearly no optimal keyword density.

No wonder keyword stuffing is against Google guidelines – it works.

I wonder if different keyword verticals (loans, injury claims, online betting) have different boundaries that can be breached and penalised.

Keyword stuffing is cleary against Google guidelines – so I wouldn’t recommend you do it. I repeat – be careful. I do prefer to keep it as natural as possible because ultimately it’s about your incoming backlinks and your domain authority.

Just make sure you’re aware of one thing Google is looking for:

How often keywords appear

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I am working with a new client who wants to know why, after being no1 for years, their site is now no.2,3 or 4 for some of their most valuable terms. Looking at the competitors backlinks using Yahoo site explorer for 30 seconds I quickly identify the problem.

Your competitors are actually picking up some very decent amazing ninja links from trusted sites with excellent anchor text

Very quickly in my head I had a strategy to assimilate these links and add them to my client’s link profile while all the time sourcing my own decent links – links that can’t be so easily cloned.

Then I thought:

Why hasn’t these guys bothered to try and hide their link profile – even a little? It’s as if they’ve sat back and patted themselves on the back for getting, to be fair, excellent link drops.

The only problem is that these links are right at the top of Yahoo site explorer! I am going to go in and pick off these links with no work at all using nothing more that site explorer (which conveniently sort of  lists pages by the number of links pointing to them ie perhaps stronger pages).

It’s virtually impossible to not leave a footprint when linkbuilding but what you don’t want to do is have your good links sticking out like sore thumbs especially if they are ninja link drops that any sod can recreate.

While you won’t stop a dedicated link hound with a passion to take you out of the top spot at Google, you will make it harder for the inexperienced linkbuilder to pick of your good links by muddying your link profile.

The easiest way I know how to do this is by commenting on popular blog posts. Either comment, or via trackbacks if you want to be lazy and do it en-mass. Comment on 50 popular blog posts – nofollow links will do – (you’ll know how stong they will be by the number of comments on the post) and hey presto.

You just made it that bit harder for the average joe to find your links in 10 seconds using Yahoo site explorer.

If people are farming your links and using old hat competitor research tools, you at least want to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible to identify those links, no matter what tool they use.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I don’t do that much blog commenting these days, and I certainly don’t do dofollow list commenting anymore.  I spent nearly 2 hours making one comment on a VERY TRUSTED (PR 8 ) site for a client a couple of months ago because I knew the link I would get would be GOLD – and it was.

I’d already determined the site was passing anchor text value, but there seemed to be heavy moderation going on so the comment itself would need to be stellar for them to leave my links intact and not look like some blog commenting scumbag.

The comment I left was actually as much as a full blog post as a comment. I researched the topic, tested out the actual blog platform (the blog platform was unfamiliar to me and I needed to see how it handled HTML formated links) and in the end pulled together some really valuable advice and dropped a link to my client site with spot on anchor text.

It took two hours to make that comment, but now one of the most trusted sites in the world links to my client with the exact anchor text we need to get to the top of Google and I didn’t piss anybody off (even Google!).

Spot the difference between that type of comment and the no-mark dofollow link-droppers that leave “great site!” in your blog comments.

Yes, they might do 100 comments in the time I did one comment, but mine is 100 times better.

If you have a good opportunity to get a link – take all the time in the world – all night if necessary – in fact, come back next week. Don’t screw up a perfectly good chance to drop a top quality link just because you can’t be arsed to create a useful comment.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Get links from related sites. Don’t link out to irrelevant sites. Don’t get links from unrelated sites. Sitewide links don’t count. Some SEOs Mantra

More Google seo bollocks, polluting through the web, and by SEO, of all people! If you think that’s controversial….

Google used to say something along the lines of getting links from sites relevant to your website (now Google says tell the world about your site)You see it doesn’t matter if your site has earned links from some industry respected, related by theme, sites around the world:

A crap site with no related links and keyword stuffed text and links ENTIRELY from IRRELEVANT client sites can easily outrank your original content with organic links (you know, the kind Google says is the best links) in SERPS.

In the SEO related rankings anyway.

The site below ranks no3 in Google for a sought after seo related term, and has just about 100% of it’s links from, totally unrelated, client sites….

I guess that search engine optimisation company is giving Google what it wants. Focused keyword rich text links from real sites no matter the relation in terms of industry.

But what can this tell us from a seo point of view?

I surmise and theorise:

1. Links from REAL but unrelated sites are still EXTREMELY valuable, no matter how you look at it, I don’t see google Caffeine sorting that out.
2. Google doesn’t give two £$%^ about the SEO vertical and will let manipulative strategies work, no questions asked
3. On a limb here – The seo community links suffer from some sort of inbred link rot which makes them less valuable (!) links because of all the interlink love going on

Inbreeding is breeding between close relatives, whether plant or animal. If practiced repeatedly, it can lead to exposure of recessive, deleterious traits….

For me when linkbuilding, it’s links from REAL sites that count, regardless whether related or not. The more popular the real site, the better.

I constantly ask myself:

Just how important are UNRELATED links?

In the seo vertical, very.

I also ask myself…

Should I take backlinks from all my SEO client sites?

Defo works, just as well as it did in 2001, it seems lol

You can spy on your own backlinks and some of your competitors links using the Yahoo Site Search while it’s still available

Getting links from related sites is cool, but links from unrelated sites obviously have a part to play too – big time.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

An exact match domain name is a web address with the same EXACT words in it that make up a popular search. As an example, I have these two (at the moment, I use for nothing more than testing)

• www.seoscotland.eu (before I got to the top for that last year and realised there was no traffic lol thanks Paul)
• www.searchengineoptimisation.tv (domain looked cool, so i bought it – one of the new boys at Hobo is playing about with geting something on there)

OK – you can forgive search engines for thinking a 100% relevant web address might be indication of a site’s relevance to the term – or well I did in 2005. I honestly thought the top search engines would have got smarter when it came to exact match domains.

I’m looking at some results in Google, Yahoo and Bing that are frankly shocking – a bit of an embarassment to the search engines. Exact match domains with no authority ranking above much better sites. Even spammy sites ranking with exact match domains, and it got WORSE with the recent Google UK SERP update a lot of people where complaining about.

If you are lucky enough to have an exact match domain for your website, well done. All you seem to need is a lot of crap links (linkbuilding to an exact match domain is so easy), some relevant copy, and you’ll get into the top ten in every major search engine within a year. (And from what I see in some places, that’s some seo companies entire ranking strategy just unveiled, and for clients too! :p )

I can’t believe I am writing that in 2009.

An exact match domain name with low quality spammy links and keyword stuffed text will outrank a real site with thousands of natural links for that term. That is a fact.

OK – so what if you are a normal company with an actual brand that’s not a desired keyword or phrase? Well, that’s us too actually. I have no intention changing my domain name.

Having an exact match domain is no substitute for having a brand in my opinion, and while an exact match domain might help you rank for that term, if you want thousands of visitors a day, you need a breadth of keywords to keep a business running, not just one keyphrase and a few variants – in the end, it still comes down to content, and the quality of it, how much traffic you get these days.

Just get used to seeing exact match domains in every sector – no search engine seems to be able to deal with them appropriately enough.

What do you think? Exact match keyword urls work as they should or do the search engines love them too much?

(Aaron Wall does a good job explaining exact match domains and their value to Google and searchers)

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Republished as some discussion on it – Originally published on: Feb 25, 2008

I asked some of the world’s top seo people and bloggers what they thought about Keyword Density after talking privately with;

Tedster

Hi Shaun, Did you catch my little provocation in the SEOmoz interview? My point of view may not be the majority opinion among webmasters, but I came to it by studying data from the SERPs (there’s quite a wide variation in keyword density) and by reading the search engine patents of recent years. That especially includes Google’s six phrase-based indexing patents, as we discussed on WebmasterWorld

And now for some history. In the 90s this idea caught fire that there was a movable “sweet spot” in the rankng algorithms for keyword density. The idea was that the dial would get turned all the time, especially at AltaVista – which was the “do or die” place to rank in those days. Some early SEO software attempted to reverse engineer the various theoretical sweet spots in the algorightms on a monthly basis – for density, prominence, occurence and other factors.

That was the 90s, with search engine algorithms that were dumb as a doorpost. Whether any of them really used keyword density as a direct metric I can’t say with certainty – but I even doubt that. At any rate, today’s algorithms handle keyword stuffing abuses almost as a side effect of the many elements they are processing. They don’t even NEED to take a direct measurement.

This doesn’t mean that a density tool can’t give a webmaster some useful feedback. It can alert you when you go way overboard and don’t realize it. Likewise, you’ll get a wake-up call if you overlook having even a single use of your target keyword in text.

With so many keyword density tools online to attract eyeballs, this idea seems to be a myth that will not die. Many webmasters swear by it and just assume that density is somehow a sophisticated SEO tool that they must use to succeed online.

But among professional SEOs, you won’t usually hear such talk. For example, Rand Fishkin and I see eye to eye on this. Check out this article on SEOmoz, where he surveyed 37 prominent SEOs about search engine ranking factors. The word “density” is not even on the page!

Brett Tabke

Like everything in search – it has evolved. I think the old kw density calc is the new proximity calc.

• If the keyword isn’t on the page – it isn’t going to rank well (or at all) for that keyword.
• If the keyword isn’t in the title of the page, it is going to be tougher to rank for that keyword.
• If the keyword isn’t in the url, the task becomes more difficult.
• What about in a big header on the page?
• What about high on the page, or strategically spaced throughout the document?
• Offsite density? Anchor text is another type of density.

I think keyword density needs to be changed to proximity density. It is closer heat map today than the pure numbers game of old.

Rand Fishkin: ‘Modern Search Engine’s Have Never Used Keyword Density‘

Shaun – the truth is simply that modern search engines have never used keyword density. Look through any intro to information retrieval course in any university on the planet and you’ll see that it’s been debunked as a high-cost, low return metric. Instead, they use term weight – TF*IDF – check out some good work on the subject from Dr. Edel Garcia (one of the few information retrieval scientists whose crossed over into seo):

• Keyword Density – Revisiting An SEO Myth
• Keyword Density SEO And The Deception War
• Keyword Density Optimization
• Term Vector
  
• Term Weight & Glasgow Weight vs. Keyword Density
• Admitting I Was Wrong
• Great Site For Learning About Term Weight

Aaron Wall; ‘Keyword Density is an Over-rated Concept’

I think keyword density is an over-rated concept. Even with similar keyword densities one page may rank while another does not. And that’s true even if they have the same link profile. That in and of itself should show the (lack of) value of keyword density.

To explain how that concept works, consider a page that uses the exact same keywords at the start of the page title, at the start of their h1 tag, and in all their inbound anchor text. It may get filtered for being too closely aligned with the target keyword. Now imagine that the same page is redone, shifting word order is some spots, shifting singular to plural in some spots. Now the same page may not get filtered even if it has the same or similar keyword density.

Keyword density also has two toxic side effects. Some people write what ends up sounding like robotic copy. Others, in an attempt to increase keyword density, end up editing out important keyword modifiers and semantically related phrases, which not only lowers their traffic (since they took many relevant words off the page), but also makes their page look less like other top ranked pages.

Ruud Hein; ‘The idea of keyword density has the attractiveness of the flat earth argument: it “just makes sense” and “everyone can see it for himself!’

It seems common sense that a document about Google will use the word Google more often while a document about Yahoo will use the word Yahoo more often. It also seems common sense that there should be some kind of cut-off point after which things don’t become more relevant upon repetition but instead become spam.

In other words: there must be an optimum ratio of keywords:words. Keyword density! Ta-da!

The idea: if you are within a certain range, the “sweet spot”, you’re relevant. Under it and you’re irrelevant. Over it and it’s spam.

There are some clues we can use to figure out if our “well, it must be so” observations are correct or not.

A very compelling clue is that search engines are in the science of information retrieval — and that in the science of information retrieval keyword density doesn’t play a role. Apart from academic “proof of (non) concept” models, there are no information retrieval models based on keyword density, certainly not commercial ones. This should be more than a clue to us. It should be an annoyingly loud alarm bell: if I reason with the theory of keyword density but the very science behind search engines doesn’t give that theory any credibility … am I still on the right path?

Another clue comes from thinking about the words we use. One document has a keyword density of 3.25%, another a keyword density of 0.05%. Which one would be in the relevant keyword density range? … Now what if I were to tell you that the 0.05% keyword is mataeotechny (an unprofitable art or science… like keyword density), a word that appears 55 times on the web (56 times now…)? Some words “weigh” more, “mean” more simply because they’re less used than others. The theory of keyword density as a prediction model of relevancy fails terribly here, giving enormous weight to commonly used words and hardly any to rare words.

Yet another clue is the formula to arrive at “relevant” keyword density. That formula goes “number of keywords on words” then some magic happens “is relevant or not”.

If keyword density were to be used to provide some kind of cut-off point, some kind of spam filter…. how would the cut-off point be calculated? By calculating the keyword density of every document, then taking the means of that? But what about our mataeotechny example? Oh, you would like to account for words that appear less often in the index? You just left the keyword density building and crossed the street into term weights.

If your gut keeps telling you this just has to be true, I recommend reading and rereading the articles by Dr. E. Garcia until you either “get it” or can show for yourself where he blunders.

Tim Nash:

Shaun – Repetition of keywords seems to have at least some effect on the rankings for those terms, particularly when combined with other factors such as the use of heading tags and title tag. However the effect is quickly lost if you stuff the keywords.

If you imagine that the glass can only contain a finite amount of liquid and your keywords are separate glasses, the more keywords the more glasses how you divvy up the liquid is almost irrelevant as you still have only a certain amount of liquid to start with.

Lyndon Antcliff; ‘I don’t do it mathematically’

Yes and no. I don’t do it mathematically, but I make sure the keyword is there, and in the title and h1 tags ect.

I guess I have done it long enough I don’t really think about. I think the antonyms and synonyms are more important than density, in fact there are a number of factors which are.

But I think it’s best not to obsess and concentrate on a natural feel , if that is achieved correct keyword density will come naturally.

Sebastian; ‘Optimal keyword density is a myth’

Oh well, I thought that thingy was beaten to death already. “Optimal keyword density” is a myth.

Todays search engines are way to smart to fall for such poor optimization methods.

Even a single inbound link with a good anchor text can boost a page lacking the keyword in question so that it outranks every page with tuned keyword density.

Paul Stevens

Focus more on writing good relative content, proper page structure and decent link building than keyword density. I remember when I first started in SEO, I had an Desktop Software Application checking my pages and telling me that I was short in my keyword density. So I stuffed more keywords in till the application was happy.

Then I released it into the search engines. The page never really ranked that highly. What was worse the client wasn’t too happy that his page read crap as well. I’ve never looked at keyword density since.

Barry Welford; ‘Keyword density gets less and less relevant all the time…’

Hi Shaun – Happy to get involved. Keyword density gets less and less relevant all the time, at least for Google with Latent Semantic Analysis, Personalized Search, etc., etc.

Most results come from the ‘long tail’ of combinations of keywords. What counts is conversions to sales, if that’s your real business objective. Poorly executed SEO may even work against conversions if it turns off human prospects.

John Carcutt; ‘Natural language seems to fare just as well if not better’

Ask around; what is the best keyword density for a web page to rank well for a given term? Searching on the internet I found answers ranging from 2% to 12% and one as high as 20%. The interesting thing is they could all be right.

The one thing many people fail to take into consideration when looking for this magical number is the idea that it changes based on factors related to the page or search term. Additionally, its importance in the algorithm may also fluctuate based on external influences. Instead of hunting for that perfect density, it may help to better understand what part keywords play in getting a page ranked.

I shouldn’t have to say it, but unfortunately I do; a keyword or phrase needs to be on the page in order to rank well for the term. Can a page rank if the term is not on the page? Sure if it has inbound links using the terms, but it’s not going to rank very well on those alone. Using the keyword or phrase in a variety of ways throughout a page will greatly increase the chances of showing up higher in the rankings for that term.

Now back to density… Proper keyword density is a moving target. Two main factors are the total amount of words on a page and the competitiveness of the phrase in the engines.

When there are very few words on a page 6% density is a tough target to hit and make the copy readable. However, when the page has a large amount of copy 6% is much more manageable. When analyzing a page 6% of 1000 words may seem much less “spammy” than 6% of 100 words. The optimal keyword density of a page will change based on how many total words are on the page.

If a keyword phrase is unique and the competition in the search engines is low, a much lower or much higher keyword density may work just fine. The overall effect density has on search results is much broader when there is little or no competition. As the competition for a phrase increases, the keyword density target becomes more critical. Ironically, the density also plays a smaller and smaller part in ranking as the competition for a phrase increases.

To be fair, I tell people on a regular basis to target a 4% keyword density on a page. I do this primarily to get them thinking about how to use keywords on a page. I find having a set target is a good motivator and really helps a webmaster or site owner to understand the importance of targeting a page to a specific phrase or set of words.

The hunt for the perfect keyword density is slowing down as more people realize natural language seems to fare just as well if not better in the search engine results. If you understand the fundamentals of targeting a page for a phrase, there is no reason to worry about keyword density. Just write good copy.

Brendan Picha

Keyword density plays a significant role in ranking but like your meta data, domain age, backlinks, anchor text, or any other aspect of your page and domain, how your page ranks is always determined by the sum of its parts. Surrounding content and the amount of times in which your keyword phrase appears says a lot about the page and what it means. In fact, it should be obvious that it’s one of the most important indicators.

Using simple techniques such as bolding your phase or placing it within H2 tags will stress the importance of this phrase when your page is being crawled. Other things to consider would be placement within the page’s URL, title, description, and linking your phase to a site that also speaks to the content you’re creating. Be sure not to over-do-it however. If you’re keyword stuffing and it looks spammy to you then the chances of it looking spammy to a bot are probably pretty high. After you create your page you can use a simple density checking tool like http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html to see how often your phrase is showing up.

Bill Slawski; ‘more likely folklore than fact’

Shaun – Just for a different perspective, I took a look at the USPTO database, which only goes back to the early 2000s, and at Google Scholar.

There are 15 granted patents and 48 patent applications that use the phrase “keyword density.” None of those are from Google or Yahoo, and only a very few are from Microsoft and IBM, which also work in enterprise search. A number of the patent filings were applied for by Overture around the time of their acquisition by Yahoo, but focus upon paid search, referring to keyword density as something that non paid search may be using.

Google Scholar reveals 208 instances of the phrase “keyword density,” and none of the documents listed appear to come from anyone working at a major search engine, though a 2006 paper from a Lycos researcher suggests the use of keyword density.

I’ve always considered keyword density to be more likely folklore than fact. I don’t think that will change.

Jim Boykin; ‘not a good metric for SEO’

“keyword Density” (using a ratio of keywords to the total text on a page) is not a good metric for SEO anymore.

Yes, your keywords should be on the page…but beyond that, writing “naturally” is better SEO than worrying about keyword density.

Shana Albert; ‘I don’t use a calculator’

Personally, I don’t use a calculator… nor do I don’t count the words in my post, but I am careful about the keywords I choose and I do eyeball my posts to see how long it is roughly. I’ve been a Webmaster enough years now that I don’t need to calculate the amount of words in my articles to know roughly how many keywords I would need to make the keyword density about right.

I have found that if I worry about the amount of times that a keyword or key phrase needs to appear throughout one of my posts or articles then my writing doesn’t flow very well. And, if my articles don’t flow well…. I’m going to lose my readers. If the people arriving on one of my sites don’t enjoy reading my work it doesn’t really matter if readers can find my in the serps or not….. they won’t be sticking around long enough to finish reading my choppy, non-flowing article. So, I try to worry less about keywords and more about content.

Don’t get me wrong…. I still think about keyword density. It’s just not my main focus….the content is. I come up with the keyword(s) I want to focus on in my post and then write. If I need to tweak my post with more or less keywords once it’s written…. I do so then.

Tad Chef; ‘I stopped “measuring” keyword density years ago’

I stopped “measuring” keyword density years ago. Instead I concentrated on keyword placement on the page using a rule of thumb stating that 3 instances of a keyword in the page copy is the minimum plus one for each 100 additional words you write makes sense. So I focused on the “where in the copy” using the keyword in the first sentence of the of the first paragraph etc. A year ago Google introduced the “Google bomb filter” which in practice checks if a page that is linked with a certain anchor text also contains this keyword.

At the end of 2007 I could test this as a client of mine was unable to grant me access to his site for internal reasons and I had to start with off site optimization first. He did not rank at all for the keywords I did link building for as long as the pages I linked did not contain the keywords.

So it is obvious that you still have to tell Google on the page what it is actually about. So you might want to check out which terms or words are the most used on your page. On the other hand you should always think of the user first as some terms just aren’t suitable to be repeated too much. Google does an increasingly good job at identifying
synonyms, acronyms and different spellings as one and the same term. So try to sound natural above all as otherwise the engine will find you but your visitors will bounce. Btw. Yahoo does not like high keyword density at all.

Matt Ridout; ‘I never calculate the keyword density’

This is a topic I’ve heard a lot about from all corners of the web and everyone seems to have a varied opinion on it. I can only base by answer on my personal experience and my clients experience.

Is it a myth – no. If you want to rank for a keyword it obviously needs to be visible on the page, this should be a common understanding. Not just in the body copy but tagged appropriately and in the page title, description etc.

I never calculate the keyword density at all, it’s like saying to an artist you have too much red on your canvas, use a calculator to work out how much more to add or subtract from the painting. If you follow simple seo guidelines and do good keyword research you should be fine. At the end of the day it’s about the user experience on your site that you should be concentrating on, and stuffing a page full of keywords will just take something away from their experience and could harm your brand.

Bill Hartzer; ‘I don’t spend a lot of time measuring keyword density’

At this point in the game, in 2008, I don’t spend a lot of time measuring keyword density. I believe that, overall, there are a lot of other factors that weight in just as much–if not more–than keyword density.

If you feel that you need to measure it, I would take a look at the current search results pages: measure the keyword density of the top 5-10 pages that are ranking well and get an average. I wouldn’t go too much higher or too much lower than what the average keyword density is on those pages that are already ranking well.

But again, I recently overheard a search engineer say, “keyword density is the biggest myth out there right now.”

Hamlet Batista; ‘two fundamental flaws’

I don’t believe modern search engines use keyword density as one of their query-dependent ranking factors. Keyword density, as we know it, has two fundamental flaws:

1. Keyword density is only a local weight. The fact that a word appears many times on an specific page doesn’t help much in telling what is the page about when comparing it to other pages in the index. For example, what if the word that repeats the most is “www”? Google counts 21,940,000,000 documents with that word. That is probably not what most of those pages are about.
2. Keyword density is easily manipulated by enough repetition.

I believe, as explained by Dr Garcia, that what search engines really use is term/keyword weights. Term weights don’t have the same flaws keyword density has.

Keyword weights are computed by : KW = Local* Global * Normalization.

1. Keyword weights consider both local and global weights. A phrase that appears many times in a document but also appears in many other documents should have less weight than one that doesn’t appear as often. We can call this “rarity”. The only way search engines can tell documents apart is by paying attention to what words make them different. This is possible thanks to the Global component of that equation.
2. Keyword weights are normalized. In order to avoid the difference in document sizes and repetition issues, weights are normalized. That is, their values are replaced by corresponding (directly proportional) values between 0 and 1.

The vector space model is one approach that has been explained as a way to measure the term weights. The cosine similarity is a very interesting concept that if/when current search engines implement it, we will see search results where the keywords do not appear in the content of the page or the text in the links pointing to the page. I personally don’t think vector space model is currently in use in modern search engines. The size of the vectors to make such computations at query time is simply too big. PageRank computation uses matrices of massive size, but PageRank is query-independent and it is pre-computed before any query is performed.

From the SEO point of view, I do see some limited use for keyword density, though. Let’s say for example, when you are simply comparing a single page to another for a very specific keyword you are targeting. Remember that when search engines compute the weights they are trying to determine the relevance of each page; but when we see the page ranking we already know that. So, we only need to determine why the search engine deemed that page important for that particular phrase. Assuming off-page factors are the same/similar, the keyword density can be useful in figuring that out as the term weight will be directly proportional.

Comparing top ten pages, averaging their values and thinking about a perfect keyword density of x% is definitely a waste of time.

Kevin Heisler; ‘Is Keyword Density Shite?’

hmmmm….. Is “keyword density” shite? I love that term. Write shite in exactly 2.5 percent of the total words in your post and you’ll rank number one for “shite.”

That’s the basis for keyword density. Obviously, every document has a specific keyword density for any given keyword. That doesn’t mean that Google has weighted each word so that tweaks in word number would always improve rankings.

The best any SEO can do? Test, make a hypothesis, test again. Even with multiple reiterations, the test would still only provide anecdotal evidence KD matters. Plus, there’s no way to isolate KD – or any element – from all the variables of a test, as well as the dynamic natural search landscape. Do your seo competitors have zero impact on your SEO tactics?

The effectiveness of optimizing metadata elements always stimulates great debates. What’s unique about KD? Keyword density ostensibly has an “optimal” percentage. That’s one reason why the KD theory is so often ridiculed.

The most-cited debunking of the myth, The Keyword Density of Non-Sense, was written by Dr. Edel Garcia (Orion), whose good friend, Mike Grehan, asked him after SES New York (2005) to do something about the unproven KD theories swirling around.

You can find the study in Mike Grehan’s newsletter, then co-authored with Christine Churchill, CEO of Key Relevance.

Garcia wrote an analysis combining IR (information retrieval), semantics and math but “no conclusion so readers could draw their own.”

Nacho Hernandez brought this article to Rand Fishkin’s attention in the Search Engine Watch Forums. Rand’s reaction here. Rand was 90 days into developing a keyword density tool to measure on-page term weight. After reading Orion’s article, he concluded “only an extraordinary budget and very talented programmer could build such a thing.”

There’s a grain of truth in keyword density theory: Google does look at keyword density in spam reduction, setting an undefined upper limit on keyword stuffing. Michael Gray has even debunked that concept with anecdotal evidence, showing how insanely high keyword density can rank high.

Sexy SEO; ‘Snake Oil SEO’

Keyword Density? Why don’t you ask about meta tags or submit robots instead? Do you think I am ancient enough to remember that mouldy question of early 90ies? Well, believe me I am not! But I have something to say, but only if you ask. Honestly, it’s a great gimmick of all those snake oil SEOs who hit their customers and run away with their dollars. Yes, the concept is easy to grasp and even the dumbest of the dumb will see that you are doing some work on their site. Yes, it might possibly push the page in question 10 positions up in SERPS from page 2000 to page 1999. Your customer will even see the result this way. Ugly, dirty, but it works. Great concept.

Now seriously, if 10 years ago it might have been one of just about a dozen factors counted by SE in their ranking algos, nowadays they’d become a way more sophisticated. Certainly it never harms to have your target keywords in the text of your page and preferably not in one sentence, but that’s ABC of SEO. It sometimes helps to have one keyword of a pair to be repeated much more often than the second one. And no doubts you should use your target keywords in URL, Title, meta tags etc but that’s not even KD proper.

How would you see the degree in which on-site optimization decreased over the past 10 years? Now how about on-page optimization? Well, the importance of KD as a ranking factor decreased proportionally, and even if some might find this fact to a bit inconvenient for their sales tactics, it’s still stands as a fact.

No time-wasters next time please!

Wiep Knoll; ‘better to focus on keyword presence’

Instead of looking at keyword density, I think it’s better to focus on keyword presence. Make sure that you’ve put the keyword(s) you’re targeting in your page’s title tag, meta description and in the content part.

Don’t stuff in extra keywords just to get that magic 3,22% or 7,08% keyword density (or whatever percentage you’re aiming to get), but make it look natural in stead.

If you let someone else read the text and he or she thinks it’s a good read ánd can explain exactly what the page is about, you’re probably ok. The anchor texts of incoming links and the surrounding text of those links will do the rest…

Brian Clark; ‘KD a non-factor’

As far as I’m concerned, keyword density is a non-factor. I’m not saying the algorithms don’t take it into account at all, but I am saying it’s a bit fruitless to even worry about. Plus, in this day and age of the link and conversion mattering most, worrying about keyword density when you should be focusing on clear, actionable copy seems to be beside the point.

Keyword frequency matters to a certain degree, one would think. But again, if your writing comes off stilted and awkward, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Pay attention to titles and subheads, and creatively make the keywords and copy flow at those crucial points. Then go back and read the rest afterwards.

If your keywords and a few choice synonyms didn’t show up naturally in the body text, you’re probably not covering the topic all that well.

Brian Turner; ‘Do I use keyword density? No’

Re: Keyword density: It’s always important to properly utilise keywords on a page in such a way as to describe

1. the meaning of the page,
2. the uniqueness of the page, and
3. the action required for users (if any) on the page.

Google & co have published various pages over the years that show that:

1. they understand that there are linguistic relationships between certain types of words, whether between individual keywords or even acronyms, and
2. block analysis should be presumed to be already in play, so work as though search engines can determine the meaning not simply of paragraphs, but also of individual blocks of text.

Page copy should ideally look to justify the keywords in the titles, headers, and further links by directly referencing these in the text, plus related keywords as required, and all in a format that enhances readability for human users in the relevant text areas of a page.

Do I use keyword density? No – I think the aim is to write intelligent copy and it’s important to bear in mind the impact of major ranking factors such as domain authority, page titles, and links (on-page and off-page).

If non-SEO’s try to focus on keyword density I think they are more likely to both overlook these, and additionally treat keyword density as nothing more than a way to reduce useful pages into unreadable spam that denigrates the user experience, have little or no ranking impact, and prevent the page from converting as intended.

However, if a really good seo copywriter uses any particular method in their craft, I’m not going to denigrate it – the most important thing in my opinion is simply a successful outcome, regardless if any part of the process may seem esoteric to outsiders.

Hobo

I don’t think I’ve tested it since 2001, if it’s in the links, anchor text, title and on the page that’s good enough. I never calculate keyword density, I never use keyword density tools or density checkers – if I have time to calculate this I should have time to look at more rewarding areas of site optimisation or authority building.

I expand my thoughts about keyword density here but feel free to add your comment below.

Hmmmm I wonder if I used ‘Keyword Density’ enough in this blog post (Insert%)

Andy Beard:

It is not really my thing because with blogs, if you have a keyword in the title, your keyword density changes depending on comments and trackbacks including the words.

If you don’t use a description, and even when you do, you quite often end up with the text for a trackback appearing in the snippet.

If you really want to maintain density, you can use a commenting system such as Disqus, but then your comments are hosted on a different domain, and you lose the benefit of the long tail and update frequency.

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

I was intending to take a break for a while – and focus on some of the excellent seo jobs we have on at the moment. However….

We’re working with a web development company just now who wants to charge the client for the expensive bespoke CMS creating unique page titles. WTF? It’s 2009. My response was:

They want to charge YOU for creating dynamic titles? You should be charging THEM for telling them how to build websites properly.

A website design company is not responsible for getting you trafic to your site, but I wonder if they are liable or responsible for preventing you getting the traffic from Google you deserve, and Google wants to give you? After all you are paying a lot of money for a online shop for instance and Google tells people how to build a basic site it will like:

Create unique, accurate page titles – GOOGLE STARTER GUIDE

Here’s a list of the most common problems I encounter when customers approach us and ask us to audit their site:

1. Duplicate Page Titles – Every Page on your site should have a unique page title and a unique meta description – a site killer for sites with low link equity, large in pages, and thin on page content.
2. Duplicate Meta Descriptions – Every Page on your site should have a unique meta description – not a site killer, but useful. (Addition – I’ve added this, while not a killer mistake, it’s indicitive of autogenerating/generic population of things the site should not be doing) – Tip, if you can’t be bothered putting a meta description in yourself, leave it out. Don’t autogenerate stuff like this. Meta descriptions are for humans, not Google, IMO.
3. Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is problematic – ensure every page is necessary and only primary content is spidered (ie not the PDF or text only version of a page)
4. Building A Navigation System Google Cant Follow – Make sure Google can read your navigation system and so your content – Flash websites for instance can cause big problems in Google, even today.
5. Building A Site Structure That Does Not Emphasise Important Content – Create a site structure for your website eg Home/ Categories/ Subcategory / Products Google can spider – Don’t make a linear navigation route to content that means you have to click 6 times to get to a product page
6. Sloppy Interlinking causing canonical issues – Google can screw up a bit if you are giving it canonical woes and even have went as far to support a canonical tag to help
7. Building A Site with A Lot Of Fancy CSS, the result being a lot of what Google will determine ‘Hidden Content’ and actually penalise un-trusted sites

The client is responsible for getting links to a website, which makes it rank, and is responsible for adding keyword targetted content to the site to make it a valuable resource, but I wonder if you would agree a website design company that professes to know little about SEO should know these basic 7 things that could really help a client’s website succeed without pricey seo to fix basic ‘errors’.

Lordy! Pity too, the web design company in question has build a solid site, but basic google-unfriendly woes will nuke it in rankings. So what is the point?

There’s plenty of free advice out there, including the free seo guide for beginners we publish.

ADDED – Here’s another 7 deadly sins of web dev companies – a slightly different slant – a user perspecive. This is a cool article too about the seven deadly sins of seo.

Right, back to work…..

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

Some free link building tips to market your website (for beginners) in a way that won’t get your site into trouble with Google and will help your rankings improve and should deliver very targeted  traffic. I’ve also re-published some linkbuilding tips from the Hobo SEO Blog archives that are still valid.

A Basic Quick Linkbuilding Intro

• If a site wants to link to you from a page with 100 links on it you can basically forget it as the strength of the link is shared by, well, 100 others!
• You should try to get your website into the good ‘neighbourhoods’ of your industry. Try and get links from the neighbourhoods at the top of Google for your key phrases after all Google likes these sites enough to rank them! Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from and get involved. Don’t worry too much about “theme” of websites linking to you though – as this is well, a bit, unproven. Good for traffic though!
• See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or pay money to have their link replaced with yours lols
• Use Yahoo and type “link:yourcompetitors.com” and see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer – making it one of my most used seo tools.
• Join Social Networks, not for the links themselves, but to get your content noticed so real sites link to you!
• A link is a link. If someone, anyone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (may negate the value of the link ) and could see your site lose trust. Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ’shady’ backlink profile.
• It doesn’t hurt to get a link from a low or high Google Page Rank page. Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar Pagerank is out of date.
• So if you have a site about Dogs you might want to link out to Crufts or the Kennel Club or Wiki a good one. Naturally, you should also get relevant sites to link to you. If you have a costume website, find a costume website you can add your url to for free. Again though, this is a bit unproven – and hard to prove! Good for user satisfaction though!
• Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from (although it manly is!) it’s who you link to – this is thought to be the measure of the trust of a site and seems fairly reasonable to me. Link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.

Obviously I assume you have a blog with original content on it! And remember it’s quality of links not quantity. If I was to sum it up, i’d say – get links from real sites.

I’ve got some articles that might illustrate how to get links, and how to make links, but in a responsible way. I’m not about to give other sites headaches because in the end, the more people know about certain links, the faster their worth evaporates.

Remember to subscribe and you’ll get a free seo ebook of our Google SEO for beginners primer.

Linkbuilding Strategies & Opinion

1. Should You Buy Links To Improve Rankings In Google? Short answer – it’s against Google TOS – so watch out!
2. Link Building Is Easy When You Have Content Worth Linking To It’s all about content these days – on your sites and others!
3. Link Pages Suck! Google hates links pages!
4. Stop Building Crap Links Content! Content! Content! Don’t build links to crap sites
5. Get Links From Universities Easy way to get authority links if you are a real company
6. Tell The World About Your Site But Don’t Ask For Links Read between the lines when Google gives advice about linkbuilding!
7. Limit Anchor Text Links To 55 Characters In Length? There might be a limit on the actual amount of words you can use in a link – keep it short.
8. Get Quality Back Links The Top Competition Has A simple strategy to get decent links the competition has already
9. How I Got 500 Real Backlinks Quickly A quick tip illustrating a strategy I used.
10. Finding Suspended Websites & Link Opportunities With Google
11. Reciprocal Links – Good Or Bad – One way links might be better, but reciprocal linking between websites is often natural
12. Syndicate Your Content Via RSS! Ensure your site is syndicating your content properly.
13. Buying Old Domains & Redirect Them to keep good google rankings
14. Links From Unrelated Sites Are’nt All Bad
15. Getting Links From Directories – pretty low quality if you ask me
16. Do Article Submissions & Press Releases Still Work? Depends largely where you submit to….
17. Links That Effect Ranking Change In Google SERPS A list of the type of links you should be aiming for….
18. Online Press Release Advice For Your Business – V Cool if you can get them syndicated to Google News
19. Commenting On Dofollow Blogs For Beginners – Don’t be a moron spammer
20. Ranking No1 In Google For Various Terms
21. 1 Blog Comment, 2 Hours Work to get one link but it was a quality link)
22. Hide Your Links & Muddy That Link Profile to stop the casual competitor cherry picking your best links!
23. Get Links From REAL Sites (IE Sites That Aren’t Just THERE To Link To Other Sites)
24. What Is The Best Linking Strategy? It’s…..

Reminder: I’ve also had to be careful obviously – the more people know about actualy WHERE to get quality links, the less value they quickly become!

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!

If you like our DIY seo guide, Del.icio.us it! A sort-of-beginners-guide to on-site and on-page seo FAQ. I think you could read these (about) 30 posts and go away and create a successful site. I deliberately steered clear of things that might be a bit gray, and I assume you’ve done your keyword research – I might go into that shortly. I just wanted to stay largely onsite seo for the duration of the tutorial, and lay down actual seo advice you could use. I knocked them out with no little planning – so forgive me if the advice is a bit all over the place. I will be checking the information again, after a break. Feel free to comment

SEO FAQ

You may want to read our What Is SEO and of course, get to know each search engine specific guidelines for inclusion.

1. Optimise Page Titles
2. SEO Meta Descriptions
3. Optimal Keyword Meta Tags
4. Robots Metatag
5. H1 Heading Tags
6. How Many Words To Rank
7. Optimal Keyword Density
8. Link Internal To Relevant Pages
9. Link Out To Related Sites
10. Redirect Non WWW To WWW, Google
11. Optimize ALT Tags
12. Search Engine Friendly URLs
13. Keywords In Bold & Italic
14. Absolute / Relative URLS
15. Directories / Files
16. PHP, HTML or ASP
17. Valid HTML & CSS
18. 301 Old Pages
19. On-Site Duplicate Content Issues
20. Fix Broken Links
21. XML Sitemaps
22. Nofollow Internal Links
23. Only The First Link Counts?
24. Link To Important Pages
25. Bonus – Put your keywords early in page copy – like high up in the code.
26. Bonus 2 – Read Google Webmaster Guidelines

There’s a few things I won’t go into on this site. Unlike some, I won’t discuss blackhat seo on this blog at the moment at least. Nor promote specific tactics that would cause another site issues even if I do find a social network that with a few posts you can swamp Google results. I won’t talk about specific on-site seo test I might do – as Google could easily give me the information they wanted (Tin Foil Hat On of course). I have a few processes and an order of optimisation I’m not quite ready to post yet, but I will probably. I’ve got loads of little tests going on in various corners of the web testing one thing or another – I love that sort of thing. I a not looking how to break Google, more how to work with it. I’ll share the info once I get the results but hey it’s free advice, worth every penny paid. I’ve certainly tried to keep readers right. I don’t really surmise a lot on this blog – not as much as I would like to anyways.

Hope you enjoyed the posts and thought they were of use – I’m taking a small break for a while to go play in the social networks – see you about Now, you should be linkbuilding or linkbaiting. Check out our beginners guide to linkbuilding. NOTE – Our DIY SEO guide has been updated: Go to Google SEO – Learn Search Engine Optimisation Basics

Republished – Originally published on: Aug 10, 2008 @ 12:00

Get Your Free Guide To Google SEO EBook!

The Hobo SEO PDF EBook can be downloaded FREE, NOW :) Hope you find it useful!