The RedEvo SEO Blog

The Party – Take One
You arrive at a party. People are chatting, eating nibbles, topping up drinks, laughing, looking intently at someone holding court and generally gazing round the room.

You grab a chair, stand on it and at the top of your voice shout “I sell cars! Does anybody want to buy a car!!!??”.

The room falls silent and every body thinks, who the fuck’s that idiot?

In the words of a well known Fast Show character you say “I’ll get mi coat…..” for you the party’s over.

Most people wouldn’t dream of doing this, you intuitively know it’s inappropriate and you know it’s unlikely to further your business cause.

The Party – Take Two
You arrive at a party. People are chatting, eating nibbles, topping up drinks, laughing, looking intently at someone holding court and generally gazing round the room.

You start to mingle. Seeing an open group chatting you listen in to see what they’re talking about. You comment on what people are saying, maybe throw in a joke and generally add some value to the social interactions.

The conversation dries up and seeing the ‘new boy’ some kind soul asks what you do. “I sell cars” you say.

“That’s interesting, come and meet Susan, she’s in the market for a new car and needs some advice”

Now at this juncture you may once again want to go for the hard sell whipping out your business card faster than a C-lister whips out her tits at a photo opportunity, again, slow down, don’t rush in. Give Susan some impartial advice, be genuine, don’t look for a sale, establish yourself as an honest broker of information and help.

Susan asks for your email address because she’d like to ask you some questions about cars and “….there’s no way I’ll remember all this just now…“. You’ve got a fan.

Monday morning an email arrives from Susan. In it she says …”I hope you don’t mind but I passed your details to a friend of mine who’s also looking for a car…“. You’ve got another fan.

If you’re a seasoned business networker none of the above will be news to you. You know how it works, you know how to build trust and how to get business through referrals and recommendations. Well guess what, web based Social Media, that buzz phrase you’ve heard but don’t get is just the same. You join parties, you add value, you build trust, you put something in, you listen and ultimately you get something back.

I Thought This Was An SEO Blog?
It is. Building on-line trust by participating in social media activities often results in people seeking out your on-line presence, your website. If they like what you are saying on your site, or if your site’s got some useful gadgets they’ll link to it to tell others. As links are the currency of search engine rankings these links will help your site to rank better. It’s not complex……

Social media isn’t complicated. If you participate and add value you’ll get something back, if you jump onto the chair and start shouting you’ll fall flat on your face and deservedly so.

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I was reading a well known forum this week. In the SEO section there’s thread after thread promoting and asking about link spamming techniques. There’s everything from software that automatically creates profiles on forums to offers of a 1000 PR5 links for thirty bob and a fried fish.

There are also a shed load of people who have created crap websites in the hope of generating an income from Google Adsense or from affiliate marketing. It’s all about creating crap nobody needs to generate income by doing nothing.

Google have started banning affiliate marketers from their AdWords programs and I wonder if this is the beginning of Google realising their index is in danger of disappearing up its own arse in a puff of blue smoke. Just in case Google needs a hand with this here’s my list of things Google can do right now to clean up their index….

1. Discount all links from forums
   They are 99% self promotion and spam. Sure you will kill some links that merit being counted but for the most part you won’t. Bin ‘em.
2. Discount all links from blogs comments
   Again, 99% of blog comment links are self promotion. Most people comment in blogs to generate links. There are some great blog comments out there but it’s for the greater good to simply bin them all.
3. Discount links from Article Sites
   I’ve used article marketing to good effect but the links are not based on merit so although it will hurt me I’m happy to do what’s right for the greater good. In the bin with them.
4. Discount social book marking
   This is a classic example of yet another great idea being abused out of all usefulness. Sorry but in the bin they must go.
5. Discount link farms
   If we, the great unwashed, can find these sites surely you can, so do so and bin them.

So what does that leave? Well heaven forfend we’ll have to revert back to creating something that’s so useful other site owners will want to link to it!

But seriously……. none of the above will happen even though it’s so out of hand that Google’s index is becoming increasingly irrelevant. People are going to become more reliant on old fashioned networking and referrals when looking for products and services, albeit facilitated by 21st century tools (Twitter, Facebook etc). Who knows, maybe Google with it’s new smart phone will move more and more into other areas too as it’s flagship product becomes mired in spam.

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So here we are in 2010. A new year and you are hoping for great things from your website in this new, potentially austere, decade. Utterly confused about how to make your website more effective you trawl the web looking for a silver bullet.

Here’s a simple basic SEO overview and description.

What does Google do?
Google lists websites in response to a users request for information. The request is sometimes simple such as “taxi Aberdeen” and sometimes more complex such as “luxury taxi service in Aberdeen”

How does Google do that?
Google’s software trawls the web indexing pages of information. The software tries to ‘understand’ what a page is about so it can list the page in response to a users search.

How does Google decide which page to put first?
Search results, the list of websites you see when you use Google to find something, are listed in order of relevance and importance. Relevance will depend on the content of the page, importance will depend on links to the page.

Why are links important?
Remember, Google’s search results are automated by software. The software measures the number and quality of links to a page and uses this information to ‘decide’ a pages importance. For example, if 100 pages in the Google index match the search “luxury taxi service in Aberdeen” Google’s software will use the number and quality of links to each page to ‘decide’ which is the best page, which page should be first.

What constitutes a good link?
This is a tough question. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest any link is a good link. However, as a rule of thumb the harder a link is to secure, the more value it will bring to your page.

Can you give me an example?
If you participate in an online forum and add links to your pages from your posts and forum signature these may not provide much benefit as they are not merit based links, they are simply self promotion. If on the other hand you create some very useful content and other people link to it this will often bring more search engine benefit as it’s a merit based link.

Is this always the case?
No, you can enjoy search engine success by using one of the many search engine spamming techniques. The downside to this approach is you run the risk of a sudden fall from the search results if your technique is discovered by Google. Here’s some link building advice detailing  the up and downsides of several link building methods.

Can I simply buy links?
Yes, but Google advises against it.

In Conclusion
Trying to rank your site in Google can be frustrating. When we receive requests for SEO Advice or SEO Reviews we are often told by the site owner that they ‘need to be number one in Google when people type ……………… (insert your keyword here)’. A search result is not a right, if your site is new you will struggle to rank for anything worth ranking for. If your site isn’t well structured the search engines won’t be able to ‘understand’ it. If you don’t have any links Google won’t know if it can trust it.

Work methodically and if you’ve got the budget get some help from an SEO specialist.

With new tools springing up every day to allow web site owners to spam the hell out of the Internet with article spinning, splogs and a never ending list of ways to trick Google into thinking your site is important which route are you planning to take in 2010?

Reading through online marketing blogs today throws up so many tools designed to automate the creation and submission of content in the hope of securing links. Will this continue to work in 2010? Will splogs carry on fooling Google? I have no idea.

Something I read today ranted on about automated content tools being OK arguing that’s what Google does to make it’s $$$billions (AdWords is automated advertising) so it’s fine to automate content creation. But will quantity continue to work? Won’t quality play its part?

One thing’s for sure, search results are clogged up with AdSense loaded affiliate marketing sites (Google kills Google) and if Google don’t get on top of it people will go elsewhere, it’s not uncommon to hear people moaning about Google, something that just didn’t happen a few years ago.

But will the cream rise in the coming 12 months? It’s a gamble, so where are you putting your money?

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Google recently posted the video above to advise people about personalised search results. They are now serving personalised search results whether you are logged on or not, unless you TURN IT OFF.

Overall this has to be a good thing, tailored results should mean more relevant results and a better search experience. However, if you are monitoring your site’s performance in the search results personalised results can cause premature popping of champagne corks.

Several times recently I’ve read posts in forums along the lines of, “When I search using my PC I’m number one in Google but when I used my friends PC I’m nowhere……what’s wrong with my friends PC?”

Well, nice try blaming your friends PC but the truth is Google is flattering to deceive. Because you visit your site a lot Google’s personalised search results are favouring it.

Follow the advice in the video above and you’ll be fine.

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It’s a fact that from time to time companies need to re develop their website. Perhaps they have out grown their current web provider, perhaps the business has changed and needs something better, or perhaps they just decide they need a change for change’s sake.

The one thing you want to avoid when re developing your website is the destruction of all the hard work you’ve done to date but sadly that’s exactly what many companies do.

We recently lost a client, never a good thing, but the reasons were outside our control and it was all amicable. Once the web site had flipped from our server to the new server I took a look……..

To say I was shocked was an understatement. The site was built using 1990’s technology (image swap mouseover menus etc), was aesthetically poor and to cap it all the meta was full of unrelated spam!! Now the latter smacked of something fishy and isn’t the point of this post but it could well hurt them if they don’t fix it soon, and yes, I did tell them about the issue.

Where  the site really fell down was total lack of SEO and total lack of preservation of the previous site’s rankings. So here’s a Top 5 Things to Avoid when Re-Developing Your Website.

1. Don’t move from 21st century technology to 20th century technology. Why would you do that!!
2. Research your current rankings and identify the strong pages on your current site. Make sure to 301 redirect these pages to the corresponding new pages.
3. Optimise EVERY page of your new site for your keywords and phrases. Title elements, meta elements and H elements should be unique and not site wide.
4. Make sure your new site structure can be crawled by Google.
5. Ask your new supplier how they plan on retaining your current rankings, if they waffle DON’T FUCKING USE THEM!!

Honestly people, don’t flush years of work down the toilet by working with idiots that don’t know how the web works, it’s enough to make me weep.

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It’s 23:00 on Saturday 14th November and I just noticed Google.co.uk changed. It’s removed the search button and it’s using a moo tools type effect to fade in the menu items when you mouse over the page.

Is this a blast of Caffiene?

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A subject that keeps coming up when we carry out FREE SEO Reviews or SEO Coffee Break sessions is that of buying links. Google’s pretty clear on this and the bottom line is, if you buy links to boost your site’s rankings you run the risk of getting banned from the index.

But is this the only reason not to buy links, after all Google is missing plenty of paid links and the sites who have bought them are doing very nicely thanks. I suppose it boils down to two things:

1. Will I get caught or am I comfortable doing it?
2. Will  the results last?

Well we don’t do it and it’s because of 1 & 2. With a Pagerank 7 homepage we could do very nicely selling a few links, perhaps I could buy a new car with the proceeds, I certainly would like one. But no, it’s wrong and we don’t do it.

In a world where cheating seems to be almost acceptable from the top of sport to the bottom of politics and everything in between I’d like to think the Internet could become one of the last bastions of meritocracy. Naive though this is it’s what I believe and for that reason I play by the rules.

But what of point 2? Well, I’ve been watching a few sites that rank very well for some heavy duty search phrases and they do this on the back of some really spammy links. One I can think of hasn’t budged for about 2 years! They probably wouldn’t care if they lost their rank now, they’ve made their money anyway.

But if your business is around for the duration I’d advise building it on bedrock not sand. It’s just a hunch, I may well be wrong, I may well be a naive dreamer.

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Just been watching the ITV program ‘Tonight‘ called ‘Could The Internet Make You Rich?‘ It was an interesting watch and they even interviewed an SEO. Google Analytics on mainstream tele!!

One online store owner said she’d seen a 30% increase in web traffic as a result of simply fixing  the basic SEO aspects of her site. I wonder how many other website owners will wake up and smell the coffee after watching this?

Is it time to address your own SEO? Probably.

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If there’s one aspect of SEO that causes countless arguments and pointless slanging matches it’s the subject of Pagerank. I guess if you are reading this you are looking for a definitive answer on whether or not Pagerank really is dead, well read on.

The latest Pagerank talking shop started with Google’s announcement about removing Pagerank from Google Webmaster Tools. This has been wrongly interpreted as Google no longer using Pagerank to measure the importance of pages. In Google’s own words;

“PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.”

So where does most of the confusion surrounding Pagerank come from? In my experience people cite  the simple fact that in a SERP it’s common to see a Pagerank 5 page below a Pagerank 3 page, for example. So is this evidence that Pagerank doesn’t mean anything? Yeah sure, in the same way that a Porsche 911 beating a Range Rover around a race track is proof that in all situations the Porsche is a better car.

Pagerank is ONE metric of many used by Google when ranking pages for a search. How important a metric is anybody’s guess, Google won’t tell you and nobody outside Google, and probably most people inside Google, don’t know the answer.

So let’s look at some examples:

Search Phrase – Car Insurance
Phrase Match Volume* – 3,550,000
Top Ten Results Pagerank** – 6,6,5,5,6,5,5,4,4,5

Search Phrase – Cheap Flights
Phrase Match Volume* – 5,000,000
Top Ten Results Pagerank** – 6,6,5,8,7,6,5,6,6,4

Search Phrase – City Break
Phrase Match Volume* – 74,000
Top Ten Results Pagerank** – 5,5,5,4,5,3,5,4,5,4

Search Phrase – Web Design Software
Phrase Match Volume* – 22,200
Top Ten Results Pagerank** – 9,4,9,5,4,4,5,4,4,4

As discussed above these results show low Pagerank pages performing better than high Pagerank pages. But does this mean Pagerank is dead? Not from where I’m sitting. It suggests to me that some pages Google doesn’t regard as highly as others in absolute terms have both content and a link profile that suggests they match the search criteria. It’s that simple.

By removing the Pagepank measure from WMT I think Google are suggesting website owners stop obsessing about Pagerank and perhaps even more importantly stop buying links from high Pagerank sites.

Of course, all the above is speculation, as is everyone else’s mutterings on the subject but to me it makes more sense than declaring Pagerank is dead. Pagerank is central to Google’s whole reason for being, it’s always been misinterpreted and Google are trying to address this.

*Google Keyword Tool, UK results – **Google UK search engine