To be brutally frank, people piss me off when they say that applying Search Engine Optimisation is easy.  I see it alot on forums and in blogs about how “simple” it is to get to number 1 in Google and make money online.  People are being approached all the time with marketing focused on their need and greed with blasé statements like  ” Become a millionaire in 24 hours!” or “Make 100,000 dollars a month online”, “Number 1 in positions guaranteed” and “”all for 5 dollars a month!”. These unscrupulous marketeers only serve to feed the flames of misinformation regarding the whole concept that is taking a website and making it work on a search engine with the aim of reaching a number 1 position, the true meaning of Search Engine Optimisation. Funny how it sounds rather similar to running a business don’t it?

SEO Search Ranking Factors

The next time you meet someone who says its easy and cheap, ask them to explain this SEO Search Ranking Factors post on SEOmoz, one of the most prominent reliable sources of Search Engine related information on the web.  Based on the opinion of 37 proven  SEO experts they have created a rated list of what`s important and what’s not so important in creating an optimised website.

In total, there are 53 individual points covered and rated.  YES thats 53 points and yes I counted them.  These points all add up towards creating an optimitised website for search engines based on what they speculate are Googles ever changing requirements.

Yes, they SPECULATE.  Let me say it again “SPECULATE“. Get it?  Even the experts who have proven and successful track records cannot definitely say what it is that makes a website work really well in Google and reach that desired number 1 spot or at least they cannot reach a uniform and united consensus.

Take a little time to read through it the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors article Its not easy to understand, and you will see quite clearly that they differ in their opinions throughout the points covered. Thats also why I say continually that people who profess to be Search Engine Experts are only practising, much the same as doctors and lawyers are always practising their profession as new develops or changes are continually being discovered and implemented… just like SEO.

Really the point is this.  Search Engine Optimisation is not easy or cheap.  Its not quick either and its not defined.  Its something that needs to be studied, analysed, tested, applied and implemented to every facet of a website and it all needs to be done consistently and in-line with the requirements (and demands) of good old Google and your visitor (because they can change the way they search to…or didn’t you know that?).

And that’s only the start of it, after that you have to have the design studied, analysed, tested, applied and implemented to suit the traffic you are getting and ensure that you are benefiting that traffic to the greatest degree, otherwise the effort will have all been wasted.

After all, whats the point of marketing your shop to the number one position in the highstreet if when people are coming in to browse and purchase you have all the stock in boxes, in the back store room, which is locked and bolted, and has a key which happens to have been lost under a rock somewhere in Canada… Much better to have the right stock in the right place and available for the right people, because I can guarentee you they wont wait around… would you?

*the sarcastic bit now*
All this adds up to a really cheap and easy package that anyone can do obviously.  No seriously it does, I mean I would do all of this for 5-99 a month in about 2 seconds cause I have a contact at Google.. seriously  I do! Who cares that he works in the canteen.

…yeah right. I have tried to explain some of the simple complexities in my previous post on SEO Marbella or SEO Spain but I still think most people just wont get it and if you think this is me going of on a rant, just dont get me started.  There will be much more to come.

In general many of the people commenting where impressed that the post was in a number one position for what they considered to be an important term for anyone practicing SEO while applying localisation to define the scope of the service and encourage traffic and visitors who would be interested in that service and yet the post was NOT an SEO company but rather a post promoting a book about getting to “number 1 Google”.  The term was SEO Marbella and the post, at that time , in the number one position, was a blog all about Nueva Andalucia.

While the idea is completely correct in regards the point that really any self respecting practitioner of SEO services and advice and more specifically any practitioner offering SEO in Marbella really should consider positioning themselves at this number 1 spot to show their ability, even though in reality its not actually where you should be focusing on as quite frankly the returns are not worth the effort, if you simply go by the numbers, but what the hell, who am I to make everyone a number.

Reaching Number 1 for SEO Marbella or SEO Spain

Being at trhe number one spot for SEO Marbella basically seems a waste of time due to the almost non existant traffic enquiring after that term, hence the reason that it would not be any great challange to get there and paradoxically no lose at all if you are not but it is still a small base that needs to be covered. Here lies the conundrum.  What should any SEO business be targetting (Or any other business for that matter, this example holds true for them all)?

Should it be so local as to mention the town or village you are based in, such as SEO Marbella or SEO Puerto Banus or the nearest major city such as SEO Malaga or SEO Seville, or should you go a little further and aim for an area or provenince that covers your local such as SEO Costa Del Sol or SEO Andalucia.  Maybe you should just go all out and aim for the whole country and target a term such as SEO Spain.

The simplest answer is that every single one of these terms is important in reality but the question is how much effort can you afford and how much effort should you legitimately focus on reaching the number 1 in Google spot for each individual term.  That is what proper keyword research is supposed to answer but only in practice can the actual results be measured in value as in marketing who ever told us that 1 means 1 was lying.

In the meantime I think will just keep targeting the keywords that I know will matter to me ( And no im actually not that bothered about SEO Spain now that you mention it).

The post I commented on was here:

Are SEO consultants worth the money?

My reply is posted but I have included it below for reference.

Hi kmknight.

I do SEO myself and web design and anything else web related that comes along I suppose. I agree about the rates on SEO being surprisingly high and understand exactly what you are saying about doing it yourself to save money but I will raise a few points for you to consider and maybe this will go towards understanding why the rates can be like this.

1. Target keyword competition
2. changes in requirements
3. Linking quantity of quality
4. Navigation and usability
5. Social networking

1. Getting to the top of the listings for a specific targeted keyword is not easy if the competition is high. The standard method is the long haul of building good quality content over the long term and aiming towards a specific keyword by the end to generate more traffic, visits and return. Its all market dependant and if you check the PCC rates some high target keywords can be as much as 12 dollars A CLICK.

2. Google likes to change and adapt. If your running a business then you wont have the time to stay on top, so a dedicated “SEO specialist” should be on their game and aware of these upcoming changes and be ready to adapt to them. One prominent change coming is the localisation Google is implementing and this will affect many sites and their rankings (again). Business owners will always be looking for reliable people to outsource specific works hence the reaon for the existance of marketing companies, PR firms, designers, developers, builders, suppliers etc. Its all about the service.

3. Getting loads of links may be good. But it might be bad. SEO specialists should be able to find and obtain quality links rather than bulk loads of junk. One decent quality link may take 6 months to obtain but could be worth 1000 junk links. Would a business owner have the time or know how in acquiring this? No. The SEO Specialist should though.

4.SEO is on-site and off-site. Like you mentioned its ok getting 10,000 visits at the end of the day but if they are not buying then the site has something fundamentally wrong. SEO specialists should be able to manipulate the functionality and presentation of the site to ensure that those visits are being maximised to the greatest degree. I have always said I would prefer 100 visits and 90 purchases to 10,000 visits and 90 purchases. It all eats away at the ROI of the business in unseen costs such as bandwidth etc.

5. Blogging and branding are the way forward it seems in the social networking world and carefully structuring a brand around a product takes time and patience. Bad SEO practitioners will use every trick in the book to make a fast buck and eventually be removed or detested because of this. Building a respectable name and reputation is never easy.

For example, on your blog are you using the No follow attribute? Is this comment going to benefit me in any way because it is benefiting you. No follow is one small example of a bad idea that is automatically implemented and has to be removed by the user. Based on the theory that it would deter spam it hasn’t actually worked out like that and actually discourages people from interacting in the web 2.0 environment. I believe that a “real” comment should receive some benefit. It will encourage me to come back and read more on your blog and you gain a loyal visitor who will help grow your blog via interaction. Why shouldn’t the commenter be receiving some “link juice” as repayment for the time they are putting in?

Add all this together and you have a serious amount of variables to consider to adapt to, analyse and develop and while every man and his dog claims to be an SEO expert it is only the very few who have the ability to implement and apply all the required aspects of a Search Engine Optimisation specialist. How much would you value that person if they where helping you to make a serious income?

The biggest problem is the idiots out there who take people for money and deliver nothing or very little in return. (of course some clients expectations are totally unreasonable as well but that’s a different story for a different day).

Plenty of simple ways are available to check the backlinks to your site and the results you get while performing a backlink check can vary greatly and hence can cause some confusion as to their significance.

To complete a backlink check we can use three different methods to complete the process.

Google Backlink Checker

- Open www.google.com
- in the search bar type in:
- link:http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink check result

The information here tells me that I have 6 other sites and pages linking to my full website address. But by clicking the option along the bottom of the page where it says:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 6 already displayed.If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

The new results tell me there are 11 links pointing to my site. The problem is quite are few of these links are my own pages linking to other internal pages and thus wont be generating me alot of traffic but these do help the traffic when it arrives by offering ways of navigating to other relevent content.

Yahoo Backlink Checker

So lets try the yahoo.com backlink checker. Follow the same process as for www.google.com in the Yahoo search bar.

- Open www.yahoo.com
- in the search bar type in:
- link:http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink checker result

Results are telling me I have 119 backlinks and 427 “inlinks”.

And finally lets go to the MSN backlink checker. Or rather lets not. MSN.com doesn’t allow you to do a “link:mysite.com” query at the moment as apparently they where being spammed by “bots”. Oh Dear.

iwebtool.com Backlink Checker

Now lets ask a third party. Lets use the backlink checker tool on iwebtool.com:

- Open http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
- in the text bar type in http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink checker result

The information here is totally different to the google result as it tells me I have backlinks totalling 322. A handy little feature here is also the pagerank display showing each of these pages and how “valuable” they are in the backlink hierarchy.

Now the problem is, who do I believe? What information is relevent to me and my site?

All of the information provided by these backlink checkers is relevant in my opinion. The reason that the results differ will be down to each backlink checkers method of obtaining the results. For example, Google may only consider a backlink from a ranked page that has a Google PR of 1 or more (this isn’t fact is just to illustrate the point) so all the pages linking back to me are valuable in there own way according to Google.

Yahoo will follow the same format, but Yahoo does not employ the Page Rank system so will use a different method of establishing the links from other sites and may have different filters in place to return the result of backlinking pages.

The iwebtool.com backlink checker is exactly the same as both Yahoo and Google having set parameters against the results returned.

The best advice that can be given then is to review all three of these backlink checkers regularly and simply keep active on the internet, searching for relevant and quality websites related to your information specifically. Also the backlinks will occur naturally as you progress as other people will choose to link to your content (always nice) if they value it and believe it is relevant to them. The process can be long winded but the current internet based algorithms seem to like it and want it to continue.

Until that is they decide that some other method should be used…

– > Download Pixresizer

In regards using Pixresizer there are two main options. Firstly is the resizing of a single image but it also supports batch/multiple images so here is a quick guide on how to process both types.

Pixresizer single images.

Starting at the top:
1. Select the tab “Work with one file”
2. Load the picture into Pixresizer
3. Select the select button or the custom size option if you know the dimensions you want
4. Ensure “Maintain Aspect Ratio” is check to automatically maintain the proportions of the image
5. Select the type of file to be output. (a photo will be a JPEG, Gifs are for FLAT colour images like logos)
6. Select Save picture to resize and save the image on your computer.

Multiple or Batch Image Resizing with Pixresizer

A little more preparation is required here but following these steps will ensure you get the most out of the software.

**NOTE: Are you aware of the difference between a portrait image and a landscape image? Pixresizer IS NOT! If you instruct it to resize all the images to a certain width then all images will have this criteria applied to them meaning that some may end up becoming disproportional. Separate the images into different folders beforehand.**

Starting at the top:

1. Have your folder of images ready
2. Open the folder and inside create a new folder and call it “small/resized/web/thumbnails” or similar
3. Select the tab “Work with multiple files”
4. Select “Source” and find the folder with all your images
5. Select “Destination” and choose the folder you created inside the original folder
6. Use the slider bar to dictate the size of the images you require
7. Again, select the file type (probably JPEGs if they are photos)
8. Select “Save Pictures”
9. Watch the small bar above this button process your images
10. Open the folder of resized images

As i mentioned, quick, simple and easy. If more people used this tool (or something similar) it would save so much heartache as 5 MB images are not exactly the ideal thing to be emailing across the internet!

If you want more information regarding the Pixresizer tool the website address is:
http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm

Have you got a list of websites that you visit regularly? If so then the Speed Dial plugin simply allows you to set up your home page to include as many shortcuts as you require to specific pages you allocate in a simple and attractive graphical interface.

The end result is that your home page will look something like this:

Each screen shot can be allocated a web page easily by clicking on the settings button on the top right of each tab and adding in the URL of the web page you want to insert via this interface:

And all the options can be edited to suit your preferred layout allowing you to add in columns and rows, dictate whether or not its in a new home page or when you open a new tab and how many tabs are available overall. Heres an example of the options screen:

Grab the speed dial plugin here.

Remember Minority Report? Tom Cruise happily interacted with a semi-transparent computer display to manipulate the information presented by waving his hands around and “twisting” the data via fluxations in the hands position to display the information as he required. Fantasy? No way.

Seems Oblong Industries have already worked on making this system a reality. Check out the video to see this amazing technology in action and then think how this type of technology would affect each and every single aspect of our life’s if it became available. I don’t think “g speak” is so far away either as the technology is already in a huge number of homes across the world.

Dont know what I mean?

Think Wii…

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

This wont affect rankings (yet) but I can see it having an effect once this gains momentum and popularity with users and may act as some kind of “vote” helping websites rank higher when more users have them personalised at the number one position within their own accounts, however I´m simply speculating about this at the moment!

For more detailed information about this check out the Official Google Blog here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html

It was with a little trepidation I downloaded this PDF and began to read as I wasn’t sure what surprises where in store for me. 20 minutes later and with a sigh of relief, I’m happy to say, I have been completely spot on in the advice I give and follow myself in regards the creation, development and discipline according to Google for good SEO practices.

I will be following on with this handbook to my clients as its simple, straight forward and to the point with little technical jargon so making it a valuable document to pass to clients and potential clients alike. The most important point being that its straight from the horses mouth and no one will be able to argue with that!

Heres the official post from Google Webmaster Central Blog and the PDf of the Official Google SEO handbook is right here.

With that in mind I have sourced a small selection of resources containing Wordpress Themes for Free:

Wordpress Theme Central

Revolution Two

Smashing Magazine 2007

Smashing Magazine 2008

Massive Press

If you cant find a theme in this list then you are in trouble!