SEO Positive Ltd - SEO Tips, SEO News, Updated And Maintained By SEO Positive Ltd.

SEO Positive Achieves #1 Ranking in the UK for Website Design

Ben — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:49:11 +0000

SEO Positive, a leading innovator in ethical ‘white hat’ search engine optimisation, has been rated as the UK’s #1 agency for web design and #2 for web development. These rankings were awarded by TopSEOs, an independent authority on SEO vendors, and follow SEO Positive recent awards for its PPC and integrated search marketing services.

The top rankings for web design and web development were awarded following an extensive evaluation process by TopSEOs research team. After assessing the design quality and search marketing effectiveness of its websites, SEO Positive was judged to offer the best web design and second best web development services in the UK.

“Whilst we’re a relatively young agency, our team includes some of the SEO industry’s leading experts and innovative thinkers,” said SEO Positive’s Operations Director Ben Austin, “We’re delighted to have been rated as the UK’s leading provider of web design services and number 2 for web development in recognition of team’s expertise and the quality of our websites.”

One of the key deciding factors in awarding SEO Positive its #1 ranking was the fact that it creates websites with SEO built in from the design stage. This means that as soon as a website goes live it is already optimised to be able to achieve the highest possible ranking, and avoids the cost and complexity of a complete overhaul further down the line.

SEO Positive also provides its clients with unlimited design revisions, free submission to the search engines and a dedicated ‘techie’ to quickly resolve any issues that might arise. Due to these additional services and the speed, ease of use and accessibility of its websites, SEO Positive has a client retention rate of 97%.

Along with web design, SEO Positive also provides search marketing services (for which it is ranked in the top 5 of UK agencies), email marketing and PPC marketing (ranked #1). The agency also prides itself on providing an ethical ‘white hat’ service by dispelling the confusion that can surround internet marketing through the expertise of its rapidly growing account management team and proprietary Positive Reporting Suite.

For more information on SEO Positive’s online marketing services visit www.seopositive.com, where you can also request a free online quote. Alternately, you can contact SEO Positive directly on +44 (0)800 879 9000.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

SEO Tip Of The Month: September

Ben — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:54:05 +0000

A website that was designed with a fully customized layout using the most sophisticated of design and design techniques will be useless if it is not seen by the internet user community. Everyday websites are being created and launched and there are as many website that are being removed or deactivated. This is because of the fact that many businesses who enter the online field may have spent so much on website designers that they have not considered the fact that their website must first be seen by the internet community. Having a website design that is highly artistic will be rendered useless if there are no marketing strategies applied to it especially if such website is for business purposes. There are many business websites out there that may be targeting the same niche as yours but you will observe that even a newly launched website can rake in more income than those that have been online already for years. This is the beauty of online marketing, it gives or boosts your income through establishing your web presence. You may have established a website that is running already for how many years giving attention to your websites’ functionality and design and giving no importance to online marketing then you have already lost the battle to gaining your needed traffic and conversion.

So how do you establish web presence? There are several ways, one is through advertising, using the power of the pay-per-click method you will be able to gain so much traffic and maybe a considerable number of conversions also. The only drawback is that, the same with media advertising you will have to shell out also a considerable amount of money. That is why many people are turning into a less expensive way of establishing their web presence and this is through the use of search engine optimisation techniques. Search engine optimisation does not require much of a budget compared to that of the PPC. Although, the processes involved in SEO is quite tedious. There are several aspects to consider like your SEO plan and your focus. It is because of the fact that there are several techniques involved and many website owners lacks the technical skill in doing it they turn to SEO companies and SEO consultants for their SEO needs. Hiring the services of an SEO consultant or an SEO company is a good way to go if you would like to save time and gain traffic, conversions and income fast without interfering with your primary function and that is dealing with your customers.

SEO is truly one of the best methods in establishing web presence because aside from being cost-efficient it is also very effective, so effective in fact that the SEO industry is considered to be one of the fastest growing industries in the internet.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Augmenting Our Links

Ben — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:54:34 +0000

The latest report on Search engine algorithms is that search engines still look at links both internal and external as a good way of increasing your web pages’ page rank or even its search engine results page. With the growing population of websites being online daily there is also an increase in the competition among websites of same niche or same type of online business. Link building maybe a great way to earn page ranking but when everybody is doing it you need a new strategy or a creative strategy the will help you increase your lead in ranking with your other competitors. Link building strategies need not be totally scrapped rather it is supposed to be augmented by different styles of linking. The conventional link is that an external website will be linking to your website, this is then considered as one vote to your website. This is why many websites nowadays are trying to convince website owners with high page ranking to create a link going to their website. This may not be often attainable due to the fact that websites with high page ranking does not want to funnel its traffic to anywhere else which is done through the incorporation of an external link to the target website.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and the emergence and increasing popularity of social media networks many SEO companies and SEO consultants have resorted to utilising a technique called web referencing. This is a method where a target websites’ URL is published in the social media network, this is a classic example of the method spreading via the word of mouth but in this case via the click of the mouse. The process involves a person who has an existing account in a particular social media network will create a link to the target website by posting it into his comments page, shout out box or any features that the social media network is offering and where it allows the posting of links. With the link now published many people within the social media network can and may also recommend the same website which would then create a viral movement of the link from one individual comment box to another.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The SEO’s Mindset

Ben — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:18:38 +0000

You are reading this most probably due to the fact that you have seen the importance of search engine optimisation in your website or online business. Maybe you have learned that many people are already earning thousands of dollars due to the effects of their SEO campaign and you would also want to earn those large sums of money. While it is true that the Return of investments will double or if not more when you utilise an SEO campaign for your marketing strategy, such is also a very tedious task. It is because of this that many who have started with SEO had ended up losing more money with not one thing being improved in his or her online business. Couple that with the fact that you will encounter so much frustration in this field, it is more likely that you will have to end or terminate your SEO campaign and ultimately your online business. Therefore, before you start with any form of SEO campaign you have to display the correct mindset first. The initial mindset should be, “an SEO campaign is viewed as an investment rather than a liability”, many online entrepreneurs have been looking at SEO campaign as an avenue to spend money, while this may be true the correct mindset should be a positive mindset, that is, the expenses that you will incur is going to be your investment and it’s ROI will be greater than what you have shelled out. Second, you have to already accept at the onset of your SEO campaign that you will experience failures and frustrations. Failure and frustrations is part of your SEO campaign, the sooner you accept this fact the sooner you can move on. Many are devastated by failures especially in business and seldom will you see a businessman bounce back from such failure. Further, instead of looking at failure as a negative blow to your business treat it as a learning experience which will give you that valuable information on what not to do and thus will ultimately improve your approach on your SEO campaign. Just having these two mindsets is a very good start when you enter your SEO campaign.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tip On PageRank

Ben — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:05:17 +0000

One highly important factor in Search engine optimisation is the creation of an SEO campaign that would give you results. Unfortunately, results does not come easy, it requires a lot of work in order for your website to get that number one search engine results page ranking. One very effective way of getting that elusive SERP ranking is by taking a closer look on the algorithm of the leading search engine company, and as of today that title still belongs to Google. Google’s search engine algorithm is of course a secret to all but having satisfied several criteria set by Google, one of the criteria that you should focus on is by establishing the importance of your website. For Google the importance of a website is seen through the page ranking that it gives to the website, a page rank of zero to three is considered to be a site with very minimal link or it is a newly launched website, a page rank of 4-5 is a website that has a considerably fair number of links, a page rank of 6 is a website which is significantly popular due to the number of links connected to it, a page rank ranging from 7-10 is usually bestowed upon media brands or websites.

But what is page ranking? And why does it consider link? Every SEO company and SEO consultant knows that every website has to establish their presence or visibility and importance, establishing the latter through page ranking therefore requires your website to have a considerable amount of websites linking to your website. This means that every website outside your website should will have to create a link pointing to your website or part of it, this is because websites linking to your website is being viewed by Google as a vote to your website. But it will have to take hundreds if not thousands of websites to link back to you before you gain such importance. So how do you get that page ranking fast? Well this has been one of the endeavors that SEO companies and SEO consultants have been continuously focusing on.

Well you have to first research and look for a website that has a high page rank, one with a page rank of six (6) will do better than with a page rank of three, once you have located a site that has a considerable page rank the hard part is on how you should ask for the website owner to create a link pointing towards your site. This can happen automatically if your website content is reliable and if your site has relevant contents with that of the website that you want to link with you. It is harder to ask for a link from a website with a pagerank of six because you have everything to gain but none for the linking website. So why not ask websites with page rank of 2, 3 , 4 or 5? Well it is believed that page ranking increases in logarithmic behavior therefore a website with a page rank of three will have a difference of more than one hundred links with that of a website with a page rank of five, so if you want to get a high page rank fast then do your best to link to a website with a page rank of six.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

YouTube Starts To Gain

Ben — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:44:45 +0000

The free social video network YouTube has become a sensational hit when it first started and from then on and even up to the time of its acquisition by Google, the popularity of the social video network website has not looked back. YouTube is considered to be one of the many avenues where people or more particularly internet users can display or showcase their video and which could be watched by many people all around the globe. Due to it’s nature of being a free service YouTube has been utilised by many internet users, some have even become popular because of this, the term internet star or internet celebrity was coined after the internet users who became popular through this social video network. However, since it is a free service the websites’ ability to generate income for the company that acquired it, that is Google, has been doubted by many. This concept will soon be removed and hopefully as well as the cloud of doubt surrounding the ability of YouTube to generate income, this is because of the fact that the social video network has posted gains and increase in its income during the previous months. This can be attributed from the fact that the social video network has incorporated new advertising formats among this is the insertion of commercials before the start of an actual video, aside from this YouTube has also entered into agreement with several giant companies who will avail the services being offered by the social video network and one of such company who entered into agreement was Walt Disney Inc.

These efforts being implemented by YouTube does not only aim to acquire financial gains but also for the social video network to become a large factor in the field of online advertising and marketing which could provide a huge driving force to its partners and advertisers alike while the users are also benefitting from such gains.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Moving Away From Text

Ben — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:36:08 +0000

Content is king! This has been the motto of most Search Engine optimisation agent, referring to the text content of the website, rightly so because it is through content that most strategies can be coupled with. The content can be coupled with links that can be used to link to the target website and be interpreted by the search engines as a vote to that website thus helps in increasing the page ranking of the website or web page for that matter. Another way text content is helpful in your SEO campaign is that it gives you the opportunity to maximise the use of your chosen keywords. Integrating the keywords in the text content of the website will enable the website to give much information about it to the search engine and thus will consequently cause the increase of the websites’ ranking. With the current trend nowadays and current development in technology the use and demand for text content might be dwindling down. Innovations such as mobile internet are slowly becoming a trend nowadays and although text content may play a part in the ranking of the webpage it is the search engines’ algorithm itself where ranking will differ. This is because there are mobile phones that do not utilise the common search engines such as Yahoo, Google and Bing rather they integrate their own brand of search engine. Thus, text content may not be as important to these off-deck search engines as they have a different search engine algorithm in place. Those mobile phones that uses the Google, Yahoo or Bing search engines should not also rely so heavily on text content as because of the difference in the configuration of the mobile versions of such search engines there is the risk of interpreting the content of your website to be a duplicate with that of the indexed website by the non-mobile version of the search engine.

Another sign that text content is moving away from being the main criteria in search engines is the fact that many websites are emerging that caters mostly for videos, examples of these are videos from YouTube and it is because of this that search engines are modifying their search engine algorithm to include the crawling of videos. This is already evident with the new search option tools of Google where you can modify the rankings or links being displayed in the SERP depending on your choice and one of the options presented is the videos option. In addition to this also there are several search engines who have already introduced or incorporated an algorithm that will also recognise, gather and process data from flash based websites. Before this, flashed based websites are not being indexed by search engines and it is highly suggested that when designing a website that will undergo SEO campaign later on should stay away from developing flash based sites as it cannot index it’s text content due to the nature of the code, that however is only a thing of the past with the advent of the change in the search engine algorithm, although text content is still not an effective way to be indexed in a flash based website an alternative to that is the effective use of links in such flash based website.

There are indeed several changes that happened recently and it is because of these that SEO companies and SEO consultants should start rethinking their strategies. Content may be king now but so as meta data during the advent of online marketing in the 1990’s.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Domain Naming

Ben — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:55:00 +0000

Having a baby is a very tedious task and that task starts from researching on what to name your baby. This goes the same with your website, starting a pet project or even a full-scale e-commerce business will require you to do the tedious task on what to call your website. This is a tedious task as most of your internet marketing strategies will depend on it. Having a good website name or to be more specific a domain name will be the starting point of your Search engine optimisation strategies that is why naming your domain is a very important aspect of website development and Search engine optimisation. In order to choose a good domain name it is prudent for us to identify what are the different factors that search engines are looking for in a domain name. First, we have to take into consideration that search engines are tightening up security on spam websites as these types of websites has proliferated over the years and in order to combat this search engines has taken much consideration on a websites’ domain name and the other properties that comes along with it. For example, search engines are adamant in indexing websites that has only registered their domain name for a month or up to six months as the rationale is that if the user indeed has plans to keep the domain name for a long time then he or she should register it for at least a year but if such domain will have the nature of a spam site then it will be registered for several months as the person who registered it knows that it will be banned anyway. Second aspect is the domain’s age, if the domain is already existing for years then it is a reliable website as compared to a newly registered domain. This is why search engines heavily favors websites with several years of domain age as the longer the domain is existing the more reliable the website is.

So how do we choose the most efficient domain name? In order to have a domain name that will work to your advantage especially in the field of Search engine optimisation first thing that you have to consider is that you have to keep the domain name concise. It means that the domain name should be short but meaningful as well, this is because it allows your visitors to easily remember your domain name or your URL for that matter. Second it would also be best if your domain name is using general words instead of specific words as this will help target a larger market due to the fact that search engine users search through using general terminologies or general words instead of specific ones.
The domain name is an important and integral part of both your website and your SEO campaign that is why you have to research and observe general rules in domain naming in order for you to give your website the best domain name.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It’s More Than The Keywords

Ben — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:01:43 +0000

Throughout the past years keywords has been the center or focus of Search engine optimisation, this is because of the fact that most search engines are using the keywords as indexing marker or in other words it utilises the keywords as catalog labels for all the websites that are indexed in order to arrange millions of indexed website according to a specific location for efficient and ready retrieval. This has made the keyword to be considered as one of the most important element of a website. This has prompted many SEO companies and SEO consultants to utilise keywords as the very center of their Search engine optimisation campaign. You will find keywords scattered all around the website’s content and even within its codes from within the title tag to the alt attribute of the image tag. It is therefore safe to say that many search engine optimisation agents are keyword centered. Unfortunately keywords are utilised for the very purpose of establishing your web presence through the search engines, although gaining traffic through search engines is a good thing for your website it is still improper to utilise keywords blindly in your webpage content. This is because although search engines will be able to index the site through heavy use of keywords in its contents it is still to be remembered that people visiting your website is the reason why your website is existing in the first place. It is because of this that websites should not only be considered to have lots of keywords but rather it should have or contain information that will help your website visitors know more about your website and the products or services that you are offering. Aside from being indexed by the search engines a goal that is equally important is the improvement of a websites’ conversion rate. Raking in that much needed income stream is mainly due to the conversion of website visitors into actual clients, therefore in the construction of content and of the website as a whole you have to take into consideration your audience and or possible clients. Give them as much information as you can about your website so that they will be able to decide fully whether or not to avail of your products or services. In addition, it may also augment your SEO campaign if you could design your website in such a manner that it will be aesthetically pleasing to your users’ eyes. Remember although spider crawlers and search engines are important visitors of your website the most important visitor that you should consider are your actual audience and or potential clients.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

SEO Tip: Outline of the SEO To-do List

Ben — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:18:49 +0000

The SEO process is a combination of several strategies that is aimed at a common goal and that is to get a high search engine result page ranking. Sometimes due to the volume of work being done to the websites for optimisation purposes it takes a very long time before one strategy is being applied. This is the reason why it is best to keep a to – do list in your SEO strategy and having a concise list will help remind you on the different things or endeavors that you are supposed to undertake. The First in your list is to determine your keyword, keyword determination is a lot of work as because you have to research which keyword is relevant to your website and which is going to be a competitive keyword. Your keyword should be competitive because of the fact that such type of keyword will ensure you of a more targeted traffic if you ever reach your desired SERP ranking. Next in your SEO to do list is to create a web pages that are content rich. This is because of the fact that contents will allow you to incorporate the keywords that you have just chosen to utilise. Having the keyword in your content as much as possible without going beyond the spam criteria for keyword use will make your website noticeable and visible on that particular website. After which next in your list is to review your webpage and optimise each pages’ according to the keywords. It is here where you have to incorporate the web pages’ title and the different meta data in order to have the keyword present in the website or webpage. In addition, you have to use other HTML tags such as

to denote the header text, in addition as much as possible include the keyword every time your paragraph starts.
After which the next step is for you to incorporate the different links to your website, this should include your internal links and to further optimise such internal link add a site map for your website. This thus will link your home page to another page in your website and then back to the home page.

You will also have to create external links for your website therefore the next step in your to do list is to submit your website search directories. You can also build your external links by submitting blog posts and articles to different websites. This includes already the setting up of a link exchange and link building campaign.

Finally, if everything in your SEO strategies has been set-up you have to create a monitoring system that will allow you to monitor your websites’ progress. Such SEO strategy will allow you to identify flaws in you SEO campaign and which could then help you fix or patch up such flaw.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Why Acquire the Services of an SEO Company or an SEO Consultant

Ben — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:51:37 +0000

It has been a constant debate inside the mind of an online entrepreneur whether to hire the services of an SEO company or an SEO consultant. Due to the economic downturn many online entrepreneurs are afraid to shell out their finances especially on areas’ that they feel it could be done by someone within the company. This type of cost-cutting measures may be able to help the company to save on money, but are they missing out something when they decide to do the search engine optimisation in-house. For a company that thinks they will be saving more by using its employee to work on the search engine optimisation of their company website.

The main problem is that it will be requiring someone from the company that has experiences on the field of SEO already, if such type of employee is not found then any employee will do which poses a big problem as time is going to be consumed as well as money due to the fact that the employee is still undergoing a high learning curve. A high learning curve means a lot of studying to do and thus a lot of time is already wasted. If you want relevant traffic to enter your website and if you want to get a high conversion rate your friendly SEO company or SEO consultant are the right persons to go to. If you acquire the services of an SEO consultant you are assured of getting results due to the fact that their strategies and techniques are tempered by time and experience which make working on an SEO strategy an easy task. Truly the SEO consultant brings to the table his or her expertise and his or her experiences that was tempered throughout the years and because SEO consultants have made a living out of the field of Search engine optimisation it is through their own initiative that they attend conventions, seminars or trainings in order to keep them updated on the latest trends in the field of SEO.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

SEO Tip – Two Ways of Linking

Ben — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:41:06 +0000

Links are vital parts of a website because of its characteristic of connecting a web page to another within the website. The validity of the link further gives the website a property that makes such web page usable. It is also because of this importance that links are considered as one of the criteria that determine a websites’ page rank and even search engine results page ranking. Search engine optimisation plays a big role in making your links function according to the desired data set by the search engines. Search engines particularly gives importance to two type of links that will help determine the websites’ page rank or search engine results page ranking, the process of incorporating links for SEO campaign purposes is called link building. In link building it recognises two types of links which is also recognised by search engines. The first type of link is called the one-way link, one-way links pertains to links coming from external websites or websites that are not related to yours this is usually done through blogs, ezines, news sites, search directories and even forums, this type of link further does not require you to create a link back to the website that created a link towards your website. This type of link is heavily favored by most search engines most specifically Google as the rationale behind it is that such one way link to your website is considered as a vote to your website or to put it in perspective it is viewed as a referral from the origin website to your website thus implying your websites’ reliability and integrity.

The second type of link is the two-way link or otherwise known as a reciprocal link. In SEO this is done through formal communication with the webmaster of a website of your choice and asking such webmaster if both of you can enter into an agreement that you will create a link to the webmasters website and he or she will reciprocate by incorporating a link from his or her website to your website. But because of the susceptibility to of this type of link to abuse or over use Google and other search engines do not give much importance to this type of link. Although linking is an essential part of your website in terms of usability and web visibility through SEO it is important to know their different types as there are types that are more relevant or helpful to your SEO campaign as compared to other types of links.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

New Search Engines To Enter In The Market- Who Has The Potential?

Ben — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:44:10 +0000

Every now and then, we hear a lot of new search engines appear in the web and looking for a place in the market and aspire to become one of the “big ones”.

These search engines include Wikia search, Oparla, Cuil & Searchme, and Wolfram Alpha. The search engine Oparla looks to pay users when they search. Ever since the posts of the new search engines, we really haven’t seen some publicity to market these engines.

We’ll give you a quick look on these search engines here.

The search engine Cuill seemed to have a potential. Although the paid ads appeared to be served by Google which is a bit surprising because we thought that they may want to establish their own advertising platform to get benefits from. About the Searchme search engine, well, it would let you be redirected to Google.

The Wikia search engine is now redirecting it to Wikia Answers. This is from further investigation on the Wikipedia that seems to have ended its journey for this engine and it was only last May of this current year. Wolfram Alpha still seems to be going strong. Some say that as it was trying to load some ads, some browser tend to crash. Oparla is still going but we are not quite sure of the “getting paid by surfing” part as it was mentioned at the “about us” page.

Oparla is still going, although is a relative newcomer to the market – not quite sure how you get paid from surfing on this engine though, which is mentioned on it’s about us page.

One search engine that has a potential is named Tazoodle. It would be quite interesting if it could carve out a niche in the search market.Still it would be unlikely because of increasing competiotions in the market.

More information can be found on this SEO Blog.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google PageRank Update – 1/4/09

Ben — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:49:15 +0000

Thanks to a recent commenter for pointing this one out to me – it seems that toolbar page rank has been updated once again! Go and check all your sites!

It looks to me like google have now fallen into a quarterly first of the month update routine, I predict that the next PR update will be on July 1st, 2009. Let’s wait and see!

Happy to report that recently redesigned Lyrical Media has just gone up to a PR6 – my highest PR site ever!

Image by husin.sani

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How To: Get Your Site Indexed (Part 3)

Ben — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:08:18 +0000

This is part 3 of the ‘How To Get Your Site Indexed’ Series – You can find all the other parts here.

Last time we set up the initial page, meta content, and added some images and adsense in for good measure. Today, we’ll review the site’s progress so far and add some changes and tweaks to improve its rankings!

Current Rankings

So I suppose we should start where we usually do, and that’s an update of how our 10 selected keyphrases are ranking now, and compared to how they were previously!

* Keyphrase – Current rank (previous rank) +/- change from previous rank
** N/A = Nothing At-all in the top 300

Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104 (N/A) +196
Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85 (N/A) +215
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76 (119) +43
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77 (N/A) +223
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15 (N/A) +285
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60 (116) +56
Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – N/A (N/A) +/- 0

So a total of 1,018 ranks higher up than last time overall.. which is good, but none of the keyphrases are on the 1st page of Google yet, which is all that really matters – so there’s definitely still a lot of work to do.

Additional Rankings

Interestingly though, the site has pulled in a whole load of other keyphrases that we weren’t actually targetting, and is ranking pretty well for them. I’ve listed the top 5 below, their current rank, and how many searches (approx) those phrases get per month.

* Keyphrase – Current rank – Approx number of searches per month (keyworddiscovery)

Staffies – 11 – 390
Blue Staffies – 4 – 31
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17 – 106
Blue Staffie – 8 – 18
Blue Staffordshire Terriers – 11 – 12

Now if you compare that to the search volume of our initial keyphrases covered in part 1, that’s not bad at all. I also cross checked this list and ran it through the Google Adwords keyword tool, which seems to think that these keyphrases receive significantly (about 4 times) more searches per month.

Adapting Our Goals and Targets

Now the sign of a good SEO campaign is one that adapts to its environment, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. I’m going to swap out some of the keyphrases that are clearly going absolutely nowhere from our original list, and swap in these new phrase which we’re already doing well with, and could be seriously improved with a bit more of a push.

So here’s our new list below, the four which I’ve removed are all the ones which have been consistantly N/A since we’ve been tracking them, and I’ve added the top four new keyphrases from the above list.

* Keyphrase – Current Rank

Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104
Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60
Staffies – 11
Blue Staffies – 4
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17
Blue Staffie – 8

Changing and Tweaking The Site

At the moment, the site is actually performing ridiculously well in terms of Adsense revenue, since I launched it in October it’s made me about $100 with a clickthrough rate of 5%! (very high for adsense, average on my other sites is 1-2%).

The only problem with it is that I have a bit of a moral issue with it, I put Adsense to ‘help rankings’ not really to make money at all – and I personally hate sites like this one that are basically spam+adsense… so I fell bad poluting the internet even further. So to rectify this, I’m going to add more pages in an effort to give at least SOME value to users. In addition this should increase internal linking, which will help all pages, and increase how many pages we can have indexed.

The final thing which I’m going to do (have now done) is to convert the site to Wordpress. The reason for this is that Wordpress and Google are secret lovers, and a lot of my best ever SEO results have been from wordpress driven sites.

So here’s what it looks like now:

Notes On Wordpress

I used a free theme, no work required, and I’m only using two plugins: the all in one seo pack, and the google sitemap generator. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t need to be. The most important part is that I kept the homepage content the same, and the meta content the same. We really don’t want any adverse effects from switching the site into wordress.

I should also note that using the google sitemap generator plugin I installed Google webmaster tools, and added the sitemap URL to it.

What’s Next

Well I’ve spent far too much time on this today already so I haven’t actually added any new pages yet, but I will be getting Nikki onto some more copywriting for the site over the next few days and then we’ll check back soon(ish) to see what happens!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Interview: New Web Business

Ben — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:14:42 +0000

I was recently contacted by New Web Business to give an interview about being ‘a successful young blogger’ which I happily did for them. New Web Business is a relatively new site all about building web based businesses, there’s some really great content on there and it’s well worth a look. The interview is also now live and you can have a read for yourself by following the link below!

I don’t consider myself a full time blogger, or even a ’successful’ blogger for that matter, but it’s nice to be recognised for all the hours which I have put in once in a while!

Interview with New Web Business

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A Year In Review: 2008

Ben — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:33:00 +0000

So I’m a little bit late on the uptake with this one, most of the organised bloggers out there had their 2008 review posts done by the 15th of December and scheduled to autopost on the 31st, but better later than never! So let’s take a brief look back at what 2008 has held for both myself and EggRage.

Achievements For 2008

Well given that we only launched in February of this year I think we’ve done pretty well for 2008, though still a pale immitation in comparison to some of the bigger blogs out there.

New Job

I moved jobs in 2008 from being a full time SEO engineer at an SEO agency to being lead web designer, and head of SEO at one of the UK’s leading extreme sports experience retailers [Extreme Element]. This was a great move for me and I’m chuffed to be working in a far more relaxed office environment, as well as being a core member of a company which has got some really bright prospects for the future.

Redesign

In August I purchased my very first theme from WooThemes and applied it to this site to expand it’s range a little bit as the previous free theme which we were using was pretty basic! I’m made very little visual modifications to the theme so far but you can expect it to get a little more ‘custom’ in 2009!

Launched Other Sites

Throughout the year I’ve launched a couple of other sites that all now growing very well, and in turn link back to EggRage to provide us with more coverage and traffic.

Stunning CSS – A fresh new CSS gallery
Sinflip – A blog for musicians to help them make money from music
Digital Designer Forum – A forum for web designers and developers

Statistics

We made 42 Posts for the year – An average of 1 post per week
There are 5 Pages of static content across the site
Posts are spread across 22 Categories
There are currently 153 Tags in use
We received 266 Comments across all posts
Akismet caught 5,758 Spam Comments
We received over 20,000 unique visitors
And over 120,000 pages were viewed this year
Just under 100 RSS Subscribers
Firefox is the most used browser on this site with 61% of all traffic

Top 5 Posts (According To Traffic)

Plans for 2009

Obviously for 2009 we want to keep EggRage going as strongly as possible and keep growing our traffic figures and subscriber numbers. There aren’t any plans set in stone yet but some of the things that we’re going to be working on are listed below.

Minor redesign
Advanced SEO technique screen casts
Beginners guide to SEO E-Book
Site-wide user polls
Lots more guest posts
Some interviews with industry leaders

Thank You

To all of our loyal readers for 2008 – without you guys this blog wouldn’t exist, we hope to keep you on board in 2009 and make it an even more successful year! If you have any suggestions for topics which you would like to be covered in 2009 please get in touch and let us know via our contact page.

A further thanks to all of our advertisers for 2008, and to BuySellAds for providing such a great service allowing us to sell adspace on this site. If you are interested in advertising on EggRage for 2009 please check out our advertising page and get in touch!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google PageRank Update – 1/1/09

Ben — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:38:16 +0000

Page Rank has been pretty screwy recently! Particularly on the toolbar PR front where I had a number of sites last week jump from PR3 to PR6 and back down again within a few days of eachother.

I think now though we’re seeing a stable and global PR update as I’ve seen pretty much all my sites change across the board, and the movement seems reasonable this time.

In case you hadn’t already noticed, EggRage has once again grown in strength and has this time moved up from its previous PR4 to its new PR5!

PS. Happy New Year!

Image by husin.sani

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

5 MORE Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Company

Ben — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:43:38 +0000

This is a follow on to my original post of ‘5 Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Company‘ with 5 MORE great ways to tell if you’re getting scammed out of your cash for little or no result! There’s a lot of good work going out there in the SEO world, and I’m not knocking that – but at the same time there are some really shoddy double-glazed window salesmen out there, which is the point of this post!

1. You ask them how page titles affect search engine rankings and their eyes glaze over.

Apparently some SEO companies these days think that SEO = Link Building, god knows how they came up with that ridiculous idea but it was probably from some cult article about how ‘Google was different from all the other search engines’ that was published in the 90’s.

You cannot succeed with link building alone, and I would actually go as far as to say that you can succeed without it altogether – so what does that say about its value?

2. The office is totally silent, and people who talk are given the evil eye.

A healthy office is an office which communicates, it’s a group of individuals who are all trying to achieve a common goal together. If the office is totally silent, then it’s simply a group of individuals who happen to be working in the same place – and what the hell is the point of that?

Lack of communication within an SEO company in particular is a sure-fire way to identify a deadbeat. Lack of light-hearted talk also kills morale, and lack of morale affects client work. Do the maths.

3. They give clients advice on SEO, but they don’t actually use their own advice.

These are proabably my favourites, when you find SEO companies who advise clients to update and add to their site content frequently… but they haven’t updated their own content in about 6 months. They advise clients to blog every day with meaningful and relevant content, but they themselves have a neglected blog filled with guess what? Link building spam! Or if you’re really lucky you might find a company who advise their clients to construct dynamically generated page copy, and then replicate that copy across multiple domains – but mysteriously they aren’t too keen on implementing this practice on their own website.

4. 80% of their employees have worked there less than 2 years.

SEO isn’t exactly the most exciting of industries so it’s understandable that people may move on, but when the turnover rate is so high that the company has a full set of new faces (other than management of course) every year, then you know that something is wrong.

5. They employ a high number of ‘work experience’ students, and people with no qualifications.

How is it that you are paying premium prices for SEO but you account manager doesn’t have a background in professional website design, usability or interface consultation, internet marketing, standard marketing, or web development?

If you’re paying £500-£1000 every month for a few hours work, then how is it that the people doing the work haven’t had anything more than on-the-job training?

The Moral of The Story?

Recognise shoddy work! You wouldn’t hire a builder with a crew full of teenagers with no exerience who can’t answer your questions, so why not apply those same standards when hiring an SEO company?

Look for people and companies who are active within the industry, and when I say that – I mean actually active within the industry, writing an interesting and up to date blog and being referenced by top SEO sites. Not ponsing about because they’ve been nominated for a bunch of local business awards, thinking that this somehow makes them ‘high-profile’.

Get your money’s worth, and avoid the above! – What experiences have you had with SEO con artists? Let me know in the comments below!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Meta Content for 2,000+ Pages In Under 10 Minutes

Ben — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:26:13 +0000

Writing meta content is a chore, it isn’t fun and it certainly doesn’t stimulate the creative parts of the brain. It’s a pretty mundane task, and one that I don’t take to enthusiastically. But it has to be done, I’ve spoken previously about the importance of meta content and it really is a fundamental aspect of any SEO campaign.

How To Write Effective Meta Content For Large Websites

First of all, when I say ‘large websites’ I’m talking 250+ pages, at which point it really becomes difficult to manually go through and write niche meta content for every single page. When I say ‘meta content’ I am of course referring to the title and meta description, though the now seldom-used meta keywords can still fit into it if you really want them to.

Setting Up The Base Framework

The amount of work involved in writing meta content for a large site is immense, and as such is takes a very long time to do (no matter which way you choose to go about it). But what happens with the rest of your site while you’re writing all this content? You certainly can’t just leave it sitting there with no page titles or descriptions, so you need to insert a placeholder or at least something to do the job while you get the really good stuff written.

Enter the ‘base meta framework’ (a generic term which I assure you I invented and doesn’t have any greater meaning).

The framework itself consists of a dynamic statement, in this case in PHP and one which I have used before in my how to: SEO a forum post. (In this case the meta desciption field is used, but this can be applied to title/description/keywords easily enough)

if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
}
?>

This statement would sit directly inside your meta description tag, so something like this:

” />

Confused? Here’s The Explanation

What the statement does is simple, but clever: In the first two lines it checks to see if a static description has been set (defined by the $StaticDesc variable), this would hypothetically be a field in your admin area which you could go through and fill out page by page to write an optimal description for each page. If this static description field has some content, it places it there ‘else’ it places a new statement in the meta description tag (defined in the second half of the php statement above).

The query draws a number of variables from the database to construct a meta description by itself which will be different for every product. For a page about wooden spoons, the above statement might produce something like this:

Wooden Spoons available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other Kitchen Accessory products and Christmas Kitchenware deals! Wooden Spoons from The Kitchen Accessory Store.

It isn’t perfect, and it certainly won’t be 100% gramatically correct for all pages – but it does do the job, and it does include relevant key phrases and related content, as well as sticking (roughly) to the meta description guideline of 150 characters.

Once you have this statement in place, you will effectively have a great starting point for however many thousand pages you have, with relatively little work.

Getting Advanced

Of course if you’re any good at PHP you’ll be able to customise this even further (PHP wizards correct me if I get this wrong), and do something like:

if (isset($StaticDesc)) {
echo $StaticDesc;
} elseif $CatId = 2 {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available on the phone, call us for special deals. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ beauty products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ beauty deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
} elseif $CatId = 5 {
echo $ProductName . ‘ specialist woodword products + tools, and amazing ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
} else {
echo $ProductName . ‘ available in bulk online for free home delivery. Also view our other ‘ . $CategoryName . ‘ products and ‘ . $PromotionName . ‘ deals! ‘ $ProductName . ‘ from ‘ . $SiteName . ‘.’;
}
?>

This checks for two specific categories, which have specific meta description structures – otherwise it reverts to the default one which we defined earlier.

Now What?

Now you get your finest intern, or writer, or whoever to go through your admin area painstakingly inserting the optimal meta content to replace the dynamic stuff that’s already there. This is great because they can start with your most important (or best-selling) products, and then slowly work their way through.

Another added benefit is that as new products or pages are added to the site they will automatically have a full set of meta content generated for them without having to call in any outside help.

What Do You Think?

Have you done something similar or perhaps something more effective? Do you have a better way of constructing these dynamic statements? Tell me what you think and drop me a line in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

New EggRage Affiliates

Ben — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:50:39 +0000

EggRage has been going now for nearly a year, we started up at the end of January 2008, and I very pleased to tell you that in the last couple of months we’ve been growing at a phenominal rate! As a result we’ve just taken on our first set of mainstream affiliates and we’d like to tell you a little bit about them and offer you the chance of joining the EggRage advertising team.

iNetZeal

First up is iNetZeal who are a company (funnily enough) specialising in SEO services – as most of you will know from previous posts, I have a big problem with SEO companies who rip off their clients, so I was delighted to see that iNetZeal offer unbelievably reasonably prices for all their services, and are a very professional outfit all round. You can check them out on iNetZeal.com

Romow

We’re also very pleased to be welcoming Romow to the team, who are a very extensive and highly visited web directory. They’ve got a really great traffic rating and some extremely highly rated listings (as voted for by the users themselves, as it should be!) And are well worth checking out at Romow.com – you might even want to submit your own site while you’re there! ;)

Interested In Seeing Your Site Here?

Our advertisers help keep this site going, and we’re massively greatful to them for it! If you’re interested in joining the team then head on over to buysellads where you’ll find all our ‘vital statistics’ and prices.

We hope to see you in our sidebar soon!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

5 Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Company

Ben — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:47:18 +0000

I’ve talked before about particularly poor practices in the SEO industry, and it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that most of these poor practices are performed by poor companies. The thing is that you may already be dealing with, or even working for a total deadbeat company, and you don’t even know it yet. Want to know how to tell if they’re one to avoid? I’ve outlined ways for you to do just that starting below.

1. When speaking to clients, they use big terms like ’search engine saturation fluctuation’, and ‘the latest Google algorithm update for it’s supplementary index’

Both of the above are techy ways of saying “your rankings have all dropped and we have no idea why, but don’t you dare think about not paying us”. This is one of the mose deceiptful underhanded tactics in (rather common) use, and is purely employed to scare the client into thinking that there is no way that they could possibly understand the inner workings of SEO.

You wouldn’t hear a designer telling a client that he couldn’t use a black font on a grey background ‘due to line-height restrictions, colour combination inter-relationships, and negative space deviation’. Yet SEO companies know that if they told the truth (IE: “we have extremely limited control over where Google ranks you”) then their business model would be deadz.

2. They have lots of ‘business awards’ posters hanging on the office walls.. but all of them are about 5 years old.

This is a sure fire way to tell that an SEO company might once have been great, but they definitely aren’t any more. A business worthy of awards gets awards, they don’t just continue to be great and suddenly fail to get any recognition. This is most common for SEO companies who started out brilliantly by helping local businesses at affordable rates, but then got some ‘big ideas’, bumped up their prices, and started trying to be a corporation rather than a business.

3. When you call them you get a “he’s in a meeting” response from the person who just had you on hold.

Here’s a piece of information for you – the overwhelming majority of SEO companies aren’t big enough for someone to need to check who’s in a meeting. Chances are that everyone is in one open plan office, and you (dear friend) are being given the fob off (again).

4. Your monthly reports don’t really tell you what work has been done.

All too often (and I seriously have seen this a lot of times now) an SEO company’s idea of a ‘report’ is a whole bunch of statistics copied and pasted onto a rather lengthy and unformatted document, but there isn’t a whole lot about what work has been carried out and how long it took.

If you’re paying an SEO company, you’re well within your rights to ask exactly what work is being done and how long each piece has taken. Don’t accept positive statistics as a sign of success – I don’t SEO this blog at all and yet it’s statistics still improve every month because I put in all the hard work at the beginning!

5. They think that link building is ’specialist work’.

I’ve got news for you.. it’s not. Link building is the process of going out onto the big wide interwebz and dropping links back to a website wherever possible. Most commonly on blog comments, forums, and business directories. This work consists of typing in a title, and a url, and can be easily completed by a 14yr old with some motivation and the offer of £20 at the end of the day. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is simply lying.

I Could Go On

And I will in part two of this post, ‘5 MORE Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Compay’ next month!

SEO is a very closed industry and not rightfully so. It’s one of the few industries where it pays not to share any techniques because if your competition knew about them then they could use them – you can’t patent 301 redirects or title writing techniques.

Because of this it’s become standard to charge a lot and explain a very little – something which I personally don’t agree with. Hence the reason for this blog, to tell you exactly what works (and what doesn’t) without charging you a penny.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great and very open-minded, friendly SEO companies out there but there are a whole lot of deadbeats who only care about your money.

What do you think? Are you working for an SEO company who falls into some of the above categories? Or are you paying an SEO company and you don’t quite understand what for? Let me know in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How To: Get Your Site Indexed (Part 2)

Ben — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:27:08 +0000

This is part 2 of the ‘How To Get Your Site Indexed’ Series – You can find all the other parts here.

Last time we looked at an introduction to this case study and did our keyphrase research to start optimising our brand new site: BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk. Today, we’ll go through the initial page construction and start putting together a stategy for improving the site’s ranking.

Since last time, I actually already put together the index page of the site, and have had it live for about two weeks. Because of this, it’s already been indexed! Here’s an update of how it’s ranking so far for our selected key phrases, nothing to spectacular so far but then nothing has been done yet so it’s actually a pretty good starting point.

Staffordshire Bull Terrier (N/A)
Stafforshire Bull Terriers (N/A)
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier (119)
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy (N/A)
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs (N/A)
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures (N/A)
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (116)
Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (N/A)

Coding Up The Header of Index Page

As I mentioned last time, we’re going to keep this very simple and not focus on the design of the page at all.

The first thing which I sat down to define was the meta content, I wanted to include as many of my keyphrases (and variations/combinations there of) as possible, without coming across too spammy.

Here’s the meta content used:

Title: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
Description: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier pictures, stories and information! Loads of great blue staffordshire bull terrier help and information.
Keywords: blue staffordshire bull terriers, staffordshire bull terriers, staffies, staffy bull terriers, staffordshire bull terrier, blue staffordshire bull terrier, staffordshire, bull terrier

The title is 69 characters long, which is actually 4 characters over the recommended limit but as you can see in the screenshot above Google has indexed and does display the full title.

The description is 135 characters, which is about 15 characters below the recommended limit, I might add a little more to this later but for now it’s a good starting point.

There are on 8 keywords. So few places care about or even bother to look at meta keywords that if you want the ones who do pay attention to take any notice then you’d better be as un-spammy as possible.

The Rest of The Page

The rest of the page is quite simple, I got my partner Nikki to write up around 800 words on staffordshire bull terriers and I put all the paraphraphs in

tags, using appropriate headings and subheadings going down the page, starting with

all they way down to

. Thats it, litererally, and that got the site indexed though granted not highly – let’s move on to the changes for today.

Here’s the page as of the initial coding 2 weeks ago:

What’s Next?

Well my good friend Tony has had a lot of success putting Google Adsense on pages which he wants to be indexed quickly. This isn’t something that I’ve tried before but it makes sense if you think about it; Google want to give their advertisers exposure so it would only make sense to look on them more favourably. Either way, we’re going to give this a try so I’ve just inserted a couple of bits of adsense on the page.

Emphasising Words

You can use and tags to indicate which part of a page is important, or which part of it should be ‘emphasised’ to search engines. A lot of people go overboard with this and there’s more bold text than there is normal text! So don’t do that!

I’ve picked a couple of key phrases out of the page and put tags on them.

Images

Google is pretty clever, and while it can’t SEE images, it does value their alt attributes and it’s fair to say that Google probably knows that a page which has image is of more use to searchers than a similar page without images.

I’ve added a couple of pictures of Herbie (my staffy) with appropriate alt attributes again relating to the subject of the page and the subject of the image. More on opimising alt attributes here.

The two images (as you can see) are the same, but they have different file names and alt attributes, so it doesn’t matter, they are different enough. They are different sizes for a reason, consider Google Image Search, where google takes images size into account; I’m providing a little diversity.

Outbound Linking

This is a hot topic of debate amongst some but I am a firm and strong believer that linking out to high quality websites (with high PR) strengthens your own. So I’m going to drop some links in to places like Wikipedia and the BBC.

Installing Stats

This again is questionable, but some believe that using Google Analytics again makes Google look more favourably on your site because you’re sending them free information. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but I’ve installed it anyway (alon with Webmaster Tools) so that we’ll be able to track the site’s stats, keyphrase related and otherwise.

And finally..

Inbound Linking

Over the next few days I’m going to start grabbing a couple of decent-PR links in to the site to hopefully pass over some pagerank and additional “juice” to the site.

And here’s the page now that we’re done with it for the day:

What Do You Think?

What else do you do personally when optimising the code on a brand new site, are there any things that I’ve forgotten or that you would have done different? Let me know in the comments below!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Internet Marketing How Not-To: Facebook Feedback

Ben — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:21:21 +0000

If you caught part 1 of Marketing: How Not To then you’ll know exactly what’s coming up in this funfilled post! This time our moron-of-the-day is Facebook, who have already earned one massive strike on their record for failing to acknowledge millions of users who didn’t want the ‘new facebook’ – and all they asked for was the option to keep the old one! Well today Facebook are asking for your feedback on their new homepage, so I decided to give them some!

Here’s the new facebook hompage which has been covered all over the web today, personally I don’t think much of it, but that’s beside the point. You’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner there is a ‘Send Feedback’ link (I’ve circled it with and added a pretty red arrow for those who are a little lost right now). Being the kind soul that I am, I clicked on it to give Facebook a little feedback and wrote them a very kind concise message saying ‘I can haz old facebook?’.

Uh oh.

Let’s recreate exactly what happens when you use the new Facebook feedback form.

First

(spot the irony)

Second

Aaahhh……. good times.

Ten Minutes Later Here’s What I see

Good foresight

So What Lesson Have We Learned Today?

If you’re going to ask for customer feedback, make sure that they can actually send it to you. I wonder how long it’ll take them to notice the problem given that no one will be able to send them some feedback to let them know.

Seen any other ridiculous bloopers recently? Drop me a line in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Getting Your Latest Blog Post In Google Super Quick

Ben — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:30:02 +0000

Want To Get Your Latest Blogs Indexed At The Speed of Light?

Well if you’re using Wordpress then you’re in luck!
Traditionally your new posts and pages won’t get indexed until Google next crawls your site, which for a small site isn’t that often. The larger and more popular the site, the more frequently Google crawls to check for updates and index new pages. So what you want to do, is get links to your new posts onto big frequently-crawled sites the moment they go live.

But How?

Well I’m not going to get too technical here because frankly that’s not what this blog is about and I’ll likely get way out of my depth, but in short what you want to do is ‘ping’ an update service. Which is to say that when you post a new entry you want wordpress to tell some big social networking/rss sites that you have a new post, and that they should take notice.

How To Do it

In your Wordpress administration interface navigate to

Settings > Writing > Scroll To The Bottom > Update Services

You should see a text box filled with the default http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ which is the only service that Wordpress pings by default.

Logically, for Google to find us quicker we want to update as many of these services as possible, so here’s a list of some more that we use here (that have worked very well).

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogupdate.org/ping/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.google.com
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

So How Fast Are We Talking?

The record so far? 10 minutes.

I’ve had a couple of new blog posts who’s title I’ve Googled 10 minutes after posting and they’ve popped right up at number 1.

The Benefit?

People find your site, and they find it fast! Particularly if you blog about current events or breaking news of any kind this is a must have! I blogged the day that iPhone was released in the UK and I got indexed so quickly that I was number 1 for ‘O2 iPhone UK’ for a couple of days.

Final Notes

Typically with these posts getting indexed so quickly you may rank very highly for competitive keywords, over time though (a week or two) you should expect these rankings to drop back down to a ‘normal level’ for your site. Clever Google.

So, what’s the quickest you’ve ever had a fresh blog post indexed? Have you used any other techniques that have worked well to speed up the process? Let me know in the comments below!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google PageRank Update – 28/9/08

Ben — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:12:04 +0000

I’ve been holding off on this for a couple of hours just to be sure but I think I can say with some confidence now that we’ve just had a PR update.

I started seeing a couple of sites change toolbar-pr last night, so I ran some tests on others and found some PR changes that weren’t yet showing up in the toolbars. Thismorning however, it seems that the toolbars have now updated fully (as far as I can tell).

All good news at this end, you may have noticed that EggRage has gone from a PR3 up to a PR4 now – which is always nice to see, and all our associated sites have all gone to PR3 or higher.

So go and check your PageRank and let me know if you went up or down!

Image by husin.sani

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

5 Essential SEO Tools To Analyse Your Website

Ben — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:46:53 +0000

It’s all very well making regular changes to your site and constantly updating it to improve your search engine performance, but what do you use to track your progress? Other than benchmarking your actual rankings the answer for many people is ‘nothing’. There are however, a whole host of tools that you can use to stay valiantly on top of your site’s performance and effectiveness.

What The Hell Am I On About?

Well there’s more to SEO tracking than just you actual rankings (arguably). There’s link popularity (how many inbound links you have) and the construction of your code, as well as what directories you’re included in, DMoz for example. As well as those things you need to stay on top of exactly where your links are coming from, and whether or not anyone else is copying your content, which could (potentially) lead to a duplicate content issue.

Here’s What You Can Do

I’ve compiled a list of 5 ‘essential tools’ to help you stay on top of things such as the above.

Website Grader

In my opinion one of the number one best tools out there at the moment for diagnosing your site’s SEO effectiveness, websitegrader.com takes into account a great deal of factors including which directories your site is listed in, what it’s PageRank is, how many inbound links it has, what it’s traffic ranks are, and many many others in order to come up with a final score out of 100 for your site that generally proves to be pretty accurate in terms of how well your site is “SEO’d”.

Link Diagnosis

LinkDiagnosis.com is a tool which I have mentioned in the past, and for good reason too. I use this tool very regularly to analyse both the quantity and the quality of inbound links to my site(s). It produces a number of data charts and graphs that show the distribution of PageRank across your inbound links and gives various metrics and comparisons that can really help you asses which links are giving you the most benefit. In addition this is a great little tool for spying on where competitors are getting their links from.. and then stealing them ;)

Bad Neighborhood Link Checker

Another one which I’ve mentioned previously, this tool is (in a way) the opposite of Link Diagnosis. Rather than analysing your inbound links and which are helping you most, it analyses all your external links and flags potentially harmful sites that you’re linking to. It looks out for things like blog-spam (high keyphrase or link density) and use of adult or pharmaceutical phrases within the page copy. If you want to avoid a PageRank penalty this a good place to start. Remember, if a site get’s penalised and you link to it, then you could be too!

Marketleap

A real golden oldie, Marketleap has been around for years and still provides excellent essential data to its users. Marketleap gives you counts for both search engine saturation and link popularity, but the real winner for me is that it tracks your progress over time and produce and updated graph every time that you run a report so that you can actively track and record your number of inbound links and indexed pages over time.

CopyScape

This is the daddy when it comes to hunting down thieves. All you have to do at CopyScape is put in your URL (or any) and hit search, which enables the flux capacitor and a number of other highly secretive devices and sets into motion one of the greatest contraptions in the history of man. (not really)

CopyScape scans the web for other websites which contain your text, the search results are ordered in descending order by the number of identical words found on the page. This is both sneaky and brilliant because it doesnt just find direct rip offs, it also finds any people who have tried to copy your text and then edit it slightly. It’s tricky to explain, but give it a whirl and you’ll see what I mean in an instant.

But There’s More

So many more, but these are the most effective that I’ve found, and incidentally the ones which I use most often. What great SEO tools have you found recently? Any which should really have been included here? Drop me a line in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How To: Get Your Site Indexed (Part 1)

Ben — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:54:12 +0000

I had an idea this evening, one that might prove both interesting and useful to all my wonderful readers. On this blog I’ve talked a lot about how to do things, mostly with regards to improving your site’s SEO, but until you actually start seeing some results in person, its all very theoretical.

So I’ve decided to do a multi-part case study, I’m going to start a new (very simple and un-pretty) website, and I’m going to document every change and piece of work that I carry out on it. Along with each post, I’m going to document benchmarks of where 10 keyphrases rank, and their movement, along with traffic statistics based on organic traffic. I think this will (maybe) be both fun and educational.

Let’s Get Started

The first thing to decide is what the site is going to be about, this was relatively simple (for once) as I didn’t need to think of something particularly catchy or memorable – it’s purely meant to appeal to search engines. So, I have a very sweet Staffordshire Bull Terrier who is what’s known as a ‘blue’ variety of the breed (basically grey, the Kennel Club just make up fancy names). Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers are generally quite rare and highly sought after, so at least it’s something that I can write some interesting content about.

Step 1 – Register a Domain Name

As mentioned, I have no interest in having a short and catchy domain, and I don’t need any company branding. So I’ve gone for a nice keyphrase-full domain, and picked up: http://www.BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk

Step 2 – Do Keyphrase Research

I usually use KeywordDiscovery for my keyphrase research, but recently I’ve also found that the Google Adwords keyphrase tool has actually also proven to be quite useful. I’m going to keep it simple and only collect keyphrase data for ’staffordshire bull terrier’ and ‘blue staffordshire bull terrier’ and their derivatives. So I’ll be working from a list of about 40 and narrowing it down to 10. (Usually I’m working from a final list of 10,000 to be narrowed down to about 400, true story).

Here are the KeywordDiscovery results for “staffordshire bull terriers”

staffordshire bull terriers	1027
staffordshire bull terriers for sale	115
staffordshire bull terriers puppies	67
blue staffordshire bull terriers	57
dogs staffordshire bull terriers	54
staffordshire bull terriers puppies for sale	38
american staffordshire bull terriers	35
irish staffordshire bull terriers	25
king staffordshire bull terriers	25
staffordshire bull terriers crossed with pit bull terriers	24
dog collars for staffordshire bull terriers	24
english staffordshire bull terriers	23
staffordshire bull terriers for sale au	21
solid blue staffordshire bull terriers	20

and again for “staffordshire bull terrier”

staffordshire bull terrier	5590
staffordshire bull terrier puppies	455
camadas staffordshire bull terrier	443
american staffordshire bull terrier	310
blue staffordshire bull terrier	207
irish staffordshire bull terrier	178
staffordshire bull terrier pups	144
staffordshire bull terrier puppy	132
english staffordshire bull terrier	130
staffordshire bull terrier puppies for sale	117
staffordshire bull terrier breeders	113
staffordshire bull terrier dogs	78
staffordshire bull terrier collars	77
staffordshire bull terrier pictures	77

Interestingly, VERY skewed numbers in favour of the singular form rather than the plural. Also higher search volumes than I anticipated, this could be harder than I first imagined (oops).

Step 3 – Produce a Final List of Key Phrases

So, based on the above lists, here are the 10 which I’m going to go for.

Staffordshire Bull Terrier
Stafforshire Bull Terriers
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers
Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers

I’ve ordered them (as I always do) with the most searched key phrase at the top, and the least searched at the bottom. This works under the assumption that a key phrase which is searched for most in a month, will have the most competition for the top spot, and as such will be most difficult to rank for. The goal is to work your way up from the bottom of the list to the top.

Step 4 – Research The Competition

Obviously if I’m going to rank for any of these phrases then I need to know who I’m up against, so it’s time to google each one of the above key phrases and see what comes up.

Here are the results of the most common sites that appeared in the top 3

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
www.staffords.co.uk/
www.staffybullterriers.com/
www.sbtfun.com/
www.k9puppy.co.uk/Puppies/StaffordshireBullTerrierforsale.aspx
www.epupz.co.uk/search/puppies_for_sale.asp?area=all&st=1&breed=Staffordshire%20Bull%20Terrier
www.bluestaffy.co.uk/

K9Puppy and ePupz (as you might expect) are puppy classified sites, they rank well for pretty much every dog breed name under the sun because they have high Page Rank, and frequently updating content.

Wikipedia is going to be a tough one to beat, but luckily it only showed up on one of the 10 key phrases’ search results, but there also several positive things that we can use this page for. (more to follow)

As for the rest, they’re staffy-fansites. They aren’t well designed, they don’t have any remarkable features (or PR) and the only thing that they really have going for them is domain-name age.

I’m confident that these competitors aren’t a major concern, the ones that I’m most worried about are the money-laundering god-foresaken puppy selling websites.

Step 5 – Play The Waiting Game

The most boring part of all. Wait for your domain registration to go through, then point the domain to the right nameservers, and wait again for it to propagate. If you’re like me and you get bored and frustrated then you might like to check out this tool, which tracks your domain’s progress and sends you an email once it’s finished propagating. (Which I think is rather cool)

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll be putting together the index page and coding the html for it. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

So, do you think this is going to be a success? Or a dramatic failure? Let me know in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google PageRank Has Nothing To Do With Inbound Links

Ben — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:15:24 +0000

Or so I’ve been led very strongly to believe recently. There’s always bundles of crap floating around about how this will give you high pr and that will damage pr, and this other thing will invoke a pr penalty… but what they all boil down to is that you should get high pr links, and LOTS of em! They say that’s what you “need” to improve Page Rank.

But Do You Actually?

Case in point: My beloved and most beautiful partner (because she might read this) runs a small independent film review website, where she takes on Hollywood actors, tears them down, slaps them about a little, and gives her honest opinion on their performances and the films as a whole.

She hasn’t posted much, but what she has written has been good, solid content with general good use of keywords, which are in this case actors’ names, film titles, and directors, etc.

Today I was having a look at her site to see if there were any new reviews to read

I shall not lie to my readers

Today I was having a look at my inbound links and noticed a PR2 referral coming in from ForgottenFilm, I thought that was a little strange, and probably a mistake – so I went to the site to investigate further. But no, no mistake had taken place accoring to my trusty Firefox plugins.

So, I decided that she must have some how obtained a rather superb link somewhere and I was determined to help her get some more poach the link location and crowbar in some of my own sites.

First I ran a LinkDiagnosis on the site, and this is what I got:

This is what I like to call “fucking nothing”. Nada.

I found a couple of PR-Nothing forum links, and a couple of utterly useless PR0 links from an old crap wordpress.com blog that I’ve had for ages. To clarify, she has a total of 5 inbound links, none of them with any PageRank.

Thinking that this was strange I delved into Yahoo! Site Explorer

Once again, a nice healthy dose of NOTHING.

Same links, no page rank.

So friends, foes, and family alike – after all our collective whinging about how PR is obtained, how is it that a site with no links and an alexa rank of near 15million is able to grab a PR2 after less than 6 months of existance?

I mean I’d love to start sprouting conspiracy theories to do with Google’s new quality rating system and say that because the writing on her blog is of such high quality, she has benefitted from it. But I don’t honestly think that’s the case.

So what is it?

I’m stumped on this one, so give me a kick in the comments and tell me whats going on.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Getting Into DMoz – An Insight from a DMoz Editor

Ben — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:50:58 +0000

* This is conglomeration of part-guest-post part-my-own-writing, thanks solely to a very kind DMoz editor named Eric who got in touch today, read on for the full details. Eric has asked me to mention that the quotes provided below are the personal comments of a DMoz editor and are not official ODP statements.*

This is a good day for EggRage, and for a good reason – on July 13th of this year I posted an article about how to get into DMoz, to date it has been one of the most successful posts on this blog and has received more comments than any other article which I’ve written here.

Today, September 1st, 2008 – I logged into the Digital Designer Forum mentioned previously in my post about how to SEO a forum, to find that in a thread about submitting your site to DMoz, a new user named Eric-the-Bun had posted a rather lengthy reply to a thread linking to my original article about submitting your site to DMoz. His comments, weaved into my original post were as follows: (identified by block quotes)

How To: Submit Your Site To DMoz

Submitting a site to DMoz has long been known as one of the ”things to do” when it comes to SEO. Putting it into practice however, is something that’s often more easily said than done. People who get their sites accepted have long praised the DMoz editors, while those who have been denied entry through the pearly gates curse the editors as if they’ve done the earth some sinful injustice.

The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies).

Usually they are waiting to be reviewed (unless of course they are not really good or are sites that won’t be accepted.

Ok let’s look at the facts. About 5000 active editors and nearly 500,000 categories – however many editors only have privileges to edit in a few categories. A rule of thumb is that there are probably about 500 editors who can edit in all categories or widely enough to count(eg UK-wide). So 1 editor has a nominal 1000 categories – how quickly do you think they will get through them? Well it depends on the area and how many suggestions they get. UK/County/little_village probably gets zero a year whilst each shopping sub-category will get hundreds.

It can take from ten minutes to 2 weeks to review a site and editors are volunteers. This means when I come home from work, I see if I have the time and inclination to spare to do some editing. Generally I manage something most days most weeks – I think my average this year is adding 20 sites a week – I also spend as much time on maintenance (correcting errors, removing dead-links, moving misplaced sites, etc) and learning about things that I need to know to edit properly.

There is no short cut to get listed because either an editor is limited to a few categories and will list your site within a few months (yes there are people who join just to list their sites and don’t do much else) or they are trusted enough to gain wider permissions and are rather fanatical about preserving their trusted status.

Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

In general, the guidelines prevent this. Some categories are maintained better than others and are thus quicker to get into (geologically speaking). Different categories have different guidelines for acceptance and in some cases the expected category does not exist. A case in point is real estate where due to the huge amount of spam, extremely strict rules are applied.

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site,

Good advice – leave the http://www. off the site name else the search won’t find it. Note the search works on the RDF dump which is issued once a week (ish) so can be out of date.

it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into – and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

Good advice here and I’ll add some more.

Sort out the 1,2 or 3 places you are eligible for and suggest them in one go.

If you have an actual premises where people can expect to contact you (I think it is now the law for UK sites to list it) pick the correct locality in Regional and the best category e.g.
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/

Then determine what your site is about – the topic – as you can also suggest your site to a category under its topic if the site has a wider audience than local (i.e. a site for a pub, a lplumber, a tailor, is likely only to be listed in regional).

Lets take web design as an example (for no apparant reason). You can check the categories in http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_ … velopment/ for web design companies and see where you may fit. Let us say you are a company that is basically a vehicle for a free-lancer who is also employed elsewhere. It might go in to
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/

Now if the site is UK based, another place to look is http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Uni … velopment/ and
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/ might be an appropriate place.

Of course an editor placing the sites would be making his best guess at the appropriate place (they can’t be knowledgeable on all things) which is why the update url link is there.

For most sites the rule is to suggest once to location (if any) and once to topic (if eligible). UK sites are special as you can also suggest to a topical category under http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom if the site is eligible.

So you can suggest to 2 or 3 categories as described above if the site is eligible.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address – sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ – the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

If suggesting to Business, the title must be the company name no matter how irrelevant. Bear in mind if the category is (say) Web Designers, the type of sites within that category is already defined.
If suggesting elsewhere, the editors look for a meaningful combination of title and description. Using the website title is OK – the editor might not agree and may change it, but at least you have indicated your preference.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

“BlueShirt Clothing – Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.”

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

More or less spot on.

Descriptions will vary depending on the category. Editors read the title and description hoping it will tell them enough about the site before they enter it, so that we are confident it is in the right place and worth listing. Very few titles and descriptions survive intact.

First sentence should be who/what the site is about, second sentence what is on the site.

Remember it is not an advert, aim for dull.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Please make sure it is valid and, if using someone elses, let them know you suggested the site. If you are an SEO firm one of the worst things you can do is suggest a site with such an addresss. One SEO firm shotgun blasted an area of categories I looked after in such a way every couple of weeks. After getting a ‘?’ from the supposed suggestors, I worked out what was happening and emailed every site saying that if they had paid firm x for SEO ask for ther money back.

There are all sorts of myths about us liking/not liking suggestions from this or that type of firm/person. I personally look out for sites suggested by a number of seo and website firms because they make good suggestions. Others I look out for because they don’t. The only way I treat them differently is that for the first, I might ‘do another on before bed’ and for the second not.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site – what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included?

Check out http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/ – most of it is there.

The other place to look (albeit a bit painful) are the category descriptions. Start at the top of the section you think you belong to (eg Business) and the description will identify the sorts of sites that belong there and any vagaries the area might have. You can work downwards to see if there are any refinements but usually after a few levels down, you might find it more productive working upwards.

Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

And you were doing so well up til now
Please don’t. Your suggestion is there waiting for some editor to come along and review it (unless you suggested before the Great Crash of October 2006 when all the suggestions were lost, in which case suggest again). I’ve reviewed suggestions that were 5 years old and with the most appalling rubbish in the titles and description.

As an editor my role is to develop useful categories. To do that I need to look for suitable sites to add and can look anywhere I like – newspapers, vans, shop fronts, search engines, under the bridle of a yak in Nepal, etc. One of the places I can look is in the suggestion pool for the category. When an editor goes to develop a category, then, in most cases, all suggestons are gratefully received. Often a category will lie neglected for a long (geological) time and then have a burst of activity with all outstanding suggestions cleared.

In some categories the suggestion pool is a cesspit of spam, dread and loathing that few but the most hardy would venture into – well not quite. However in some places the ratio of good sites to poor Made for advertising sites is not very high and it is easier to find sites for yourself than relying on fishing in the pool.

This year I have listed ?600 sites of which less than 100 were suggested.

regards

PS in case your feel that DMOZ editors don’t appreciate what not getting listed means, I’d like to point out that I suggested my site to Yahoo back in 2005 and am still not listed, despite being no 1 for my keywords in most search engines, etc

And that concludes what I’ve found to be one of the most useful posts that I’ve ever come across on a forum, it may sound silly to some people but I’m honoured that Eric took all the time and effort to respond to my article in such detail and would like to thank him once again most sincerely for doing so.

For those of you who read the last article, now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! So go out there, behave yourselves, and make your site worthy of inclusion on the Open Directory Project.

And as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.