Category Archives: SEO

Search Engine Optimisation and the old, new and different opinions, techniques and advice associated with making it a positive aspect of a website.

A reminder of basic SEO from Search Engine Land and Common Craft

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A really basic introduction to SEO from Search Engine Land and Common Craft but actually, in my opinion, it covers all the necessary things that SHOULD be covered in any SEO effort, allowing you to focus on the important things within your business.

It is worth the watching as a basic refresher. It covers 5 things:

  1. Words in page
  2. Titles
  3. Links
  4. Words in links
  5. Reputation

Numbers 1 through 4 are quite easy to understand and grasp, but number 5 is a little different. Why? Well, its not actually a technical aspect of SEO in that, you cant really code something or develop a solution that makes it “work”. Its the single factor that attempts to account for the human touch in SEO and it incorporates social media and your offline and online networks in order to create something valuable that it applies to the search algorithm.

I would go so far to say that if you worry about reputation more than the other 4 aspects, then they will be forced to fall into line and will work naturally for you regardless of site code and structure.

Believe it or not, that’s what I have experienced in the past. Havent you alwasy wondered how “that site” is at number one when its obviosuly coded to the same level of quality as the site at, say, number 6 on the search results page? That is because its affected by the things you cant see in code, and that’s the “reputation” that’s referred to in the video above. Lots of SEO geeks dont like this as it removes the power they believe they have in making web pages rank well but manipulating code. Go figure.

I’m not saying you should ignore the way your site is built and how it has been coded to meet search engine criteria, but I wouldn’t get hung up on it when it can be over shadowed by forces above and beyond its reach and outside factors pointing into your site. Focus on what’s important people!

Using RSS Feeds To Generate Traffic

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Using RSS Feeds To Generate TrafficOne of the promotional tactics I’ve been working on lately is RSS. While I know RSS has been around for a long time, I’m just starting to get into it. Here are a few of the ways that I have been using it lately to generate traffic to my sites.

1. RSS Combiners (or Mixers)

There are many different sites that will take multiple RSS feeds and combine them into a single XML feed. The benefit of this is you can combine your RSS feed with other related RSS feeds and promote that RSS feed somewhere (blog, twitter, RSS feed engines, etc) and it will be a totally unique feed. My favorite RSS Mixer is RSSMix.com.

2. RSS to Twitter

Whether you have one RSS feed or 100, you can use different services to post your RSS feed updates to Twitter. This in turns will create a link back to your site. The amount of traffic you generate will depend on your Twitter account as well as your posting frequency. I’ve found that posting updates every 10 minutes doesn’t get much traffic and will cause you to lose followers. Posting 10-20 times per day seems to be the sweet spot for generating quality traffic from people interested in your link. My favorite RSS to Twitter site is Rss2Twitter.com. The site works great, but their traffic stats are WAY off.

3. RSS to WordPress

If you want to syndicate an RSS feed to your WordPress blog, then you’ll need a special plugin. There are a couple different plugins that I’ve tried, but one stands out clearly as the best, WP-O-Matic. It hasn’t been updated in nearly two years, but it still works great. This plugin will take an RSS feed and create a post (or draft) out of each item it pulls from the RSS feed. Duplicate content doesn’t usually rank well in the search engines, but if the info is relevent it can be of benefit to your readers it is worth considering.

4. Getting Links Indexed

One of the most difficult thing you’ll do as a webmaster is building links. After you start building links, you’ll realize that unless search engines know about those links, they’re useless for anything but direct traffic. One of the ways you can help search engines find your links is to bookmark them, and use that RSS feed.

Delicious offers RSS feeds for your bookmarks, so just start building your links, bookmark them at Delicious and send that RSS feed to a blog or Twitter. That’s thinking outside of the box! Here is an example feed of Delicious’ last 15 hot bookmarks. I use this method to get deep links from high PR sites indexed. Works especially well with sites like Ezilon and BOTW since the root domain is an authority, but some of the inner pages need to be indexed.

While link building is still #1 on my list of priorities, the way link building happens is beginning to change, and it’s getting easier!

Brandon Hopkins is a professional link builder who works with small and large sites to achieve #1 rankings. If you want to rank #1, contact Brandon today!

Google announces My Social Search in Results

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Well its been on the horizon for a while now and today Google announced the integration and launch (officially) of My Social Search and explained the effects and meaning of this new feature on the results pages and what you can expect to see.

Most of us in the industry knew this was coming and there was speculation as to the effect it will have on the results in both relevancy and of course with Search Engine Optimisation. Many people joined the initial google testing experiment that allowed them to gather data on social search and allowed us to see what the results where of doing various searches under different conditions, such as when your logged into your google account and when your not, different geographical locations and of course trying to account for your particular social network and the influence it will have on the results but from the information in the post I think Google have went even further. (I can see some SEO’s starting to scratch their heads right now).

Google Social Search

According to Google (and aside from suffering a minor baby boom in their offices) they have been enjoying the creation and integration of social search as they see it as a major way to increase the accuracy of results for individuals due to the trust factor involved with a social network.  For example, when you perform a search, traditionally you count on Google to return the most relevant results for that search but once that process is complete, you are basically at the “mercy” (for lack of a better way of putting it) of the resulting website, its information, content and brand.

Once you establish that the website is authentic, something we do very quickly if the brand is recognisable such as Amazon, E-Bay or similar, we continue the decision making process about the host site and whether we wish to continue the transaction, book the flight, make the enquiry or contact them by phone etc. and now social search brings a whole new aspect to this process.

Social Search Consequence

By including your own social network in the results, effectively Google are increasing the need for a good quality brand, integrity and high level of service from businesses as we can see references to the products, the recommendations, the complaints or the company name from a group of people that are on line, connected to you and whom you already know and consequently trust (to varying degrees of course) and the experiences that they have had with the subject you are searching for.

Having found someone who has already experienced something first hand, and whom you have a relationship with, you cna then gather feedback and information about the matter at hand directly and on a much more honest and reliable level.

Basically, companies (and indeed individuals) need to be on their toes now if they want to maintain standards in their every day business practices and this will mean offering much more personal, polite and direct customer service.  Not a bad thing in my opinion!

Social Search Setup

Their is no Opt in or opt out of social search it seems and Google have said that results will appear whether you are signed in with your Google account or not.  This in itself has annoyed some people as it means the standardisation of results, where the number 1 result for “Product A” is he same for both you and me, has effectively been disrupted (but not removed yet) as depending on the size of the searches social network and their activity, the social part of search will serve to produce different results for each and every individual and this cannot be managed or manipulated by any third parties in the same capacity as a website can be created and coded or grown to place for specific search terms in results.

This will in itself make for a very interesting year ahead and a very different view of search engines.

Anyway, have a watch at the video below to see what other features social search will include and if you feel like it, don’t be scared to pipe up and leave your opinions on social search and what it means in the comments below.  I would be very interested to hear another point of view.