SEO Tip #2

Well we had the Google update over the weekend and it's nice to see that this blog has now got a pagerank of 4, not too bad seeing as I only started it a few weeks ago really!! Tip number two is about software. There are many different SEO software tools out there, some of them free and some of them that you have to pay for. I have tried a fair few over the years and I have to say that my personal favourite is web CEO. If you're really serious about optimising your website or your companies then you won't go far wrong with this handy SEO tool.

Of course it's not perfect, no software ever is but we find it stable and easy to use and very good value for money. There are prettier looking products on the market but I tend to find that the duller and less well designed a programme looks, the more it has been written by the programmers and is therfore a lot more useful tool in the future.

SEO Tip number 1

I've decided to start using this blog as more of a tip of the day site as I realise I;ve been rambling on in the previous posts with no real coherent theme at all!

My first SEO tip is a pretty general one to start off with but the most vital one I can think of. It may be the only SEO tip that you'll ever need however it is also the one that takes the most hard work (as always!!). The tip is to write lots and lots of useful, interesting copy on your website on a regular basis. There is no better tactic to get you further up the rankings long term than to write useful copy that other people will link to from their websites. If you are a natural born writer then you're in luck, if not then maybe you could use one of the copywriting agencies on the web to write for you or place RSS content onto your site which will update your pages content without you having to even touch it. If your site/firm is big enough then employing a full time copywriter is possibly one of the best moves you could make... I'm off surfing in Devon now so the next update will be when I get back to work on Monday..enjoy your weekends!

Google say snitch on paid links fiasco

Just a quick one, now that Google are encouraging everyone to dob people in for having paid links to their site, does this mean that yell.com and thompson local are going to go out of business? After all they are essentially paid links so what exacty is the difference?

Unintentional SEO

I always find it a pleasant surprise when looking at the logs of the latest visitors to our sites and I find that someone has found the site for a keyword completely unintentionally. I was looking through the logs for www.finditinsandwell.co.uk
the other day and found that, although it has only been around for less than a month, it is now ranking in positions 4 and 5 in Google for "SEO Sandwell". I, personally have not tried to make this happen as the site is purely a business to business directory for our local area and the budget that our client gave us did not include any time for SEO (I also expected it to get really high naturaly anyway because of the ease in getting links to the free services that it offers local businesses on the site). So why did it rank so high for SEO? Well, the site gives suppliers the opportunity to add services that they offer to the site and it dynamically generates those pages with an individual minisite for that business. A lot of the earlier takers to the site have been web companies seeing the opportunity to get a decent amount of text on a future high ranking site for free (although we aren't allowing links as we need to track referalls through the site for our client). Obviously these SEO companies know the importance of getting their keywords into the text and so lo and behold, our site is now 3 and 4 for SEO Sandwell after just 3 weeks. Not bad really!

Widgets and paid links

Well, as you can see from the side of htis blog, I've been amusing myself lately with adding tools and widgets to my blog. I think that I might have gone a little overboard with them however especially providing the option of changing it into several different languages! We have mostly been into training this month after the launch of www.finditinsandwell.co.uk. trying to catch up on what we missed out on whilst our noses were firmly on the grindstone. We have a few large SEO clients on the horizon and I've been doing my preliminary keyword research using my usual SEO software alongside wordtrackers new UK database which I like more and more the larger it grows, the data it gives out seems to feel more relevant to most of my clients as they're UK based and I'm quite enjoying using it despite the poor interface. I've met the staff behind the product a couple of times now at various events and I have to say they're spot on and a lot more knowledgable than some of the other keyword research companies.

I have also had chance to go through some of my blogs since we've slowed our pace down a bit and was amused at the amount of anger that has come about for Google (I won't give them another link here as they've got enough page rank). Asking people to report sites that have paid links pointing to them has certainly raised the heckles of the SEO community and it will be interesting to hear what they have to say about it at SES Miami in June, I missed the New york event this time round due to workload so have yet to catch up on all the goings on there.

I would be a liar to say that I haven't used paid links before to get a new domain noticed a little quicker. My suggestion to Google is that if they keep on giving precedence to the older sites with DMOZ listings then people with new domains and fresh ideas using the latest languages are going to be bound to be frustrated and try to climb the rankings by any means. You only have to look at some of the ancient, horrible pages that Google regularly throws up as its results to see that it is doing its best to keep the web firmly in 1.0 by not letting the newer sites through and so the only options left for us are to buy old domains or buy links. My final suggetion on this is that if people are willing to pay to get links to their site then they obviously have spent some time and money on their site (or will do in the future) in order to retain the (expensive) visitors once they get there.. food for thought.. In the meantime I suggest a campaign against all those who start snitching on paid links!!

Finditinsandwell launch

The launch event for www.finditinsandwell.co.uk went really, really well last Friday. Everyones nerves were jangling slightly as we arrived two hours prior to the launch to set up the stands, mike, computers etc but as soon as people started to come through the doors, the whole team at www.iceblue.co.uk got a real sense of acheivement out of it and all of the hard work of the past few months seems to have paid off. Steve Massey, our main contact at the council, gave a great speech about the website and its functions and other local dignitaries stepped up to tell the crowd of 250+ all about its virtues.

The highlight of the day for me (apart from the champagne afterwards) was Sir Digby Jones' speech. It was the first time that I have actually heard him speak live and I really enjoyed it. We had invited a lot of our clients and also everyone who helped us organise and staff the event so there were lots of familliar faces around.

I was manning one of the demonstration pods towards the side of the room where I took a few people through the site, the feedback was all good and we actually managed to put over £11,000,000 pounds worth of opportunities onto the site just from the people that attended that day.

Monitoring of the site took place over the weekend with good visitor numbers and this morning they really took off due to email campaigns, press releases and word of mouth. We have started to be found already for natural search results which is great considering we've only been live for 4 days now!!

I'll post some photos up tomorrow but until then, back to work!