There are armies of people with nothing better to do than argue about which software is better. One company who have had great success with WordPress will swear by that and another whose Joomla website is ranking well will argue Joomla is better.

For me you can use Joomla, WordPress, Drupal or any number of other great systems to build a website. So long as they allow editing of Title, Meta and H elements on a page by page basis along with sensible human readable URL’s they are fit for purpose.

Of course it’s always worth checking for any added functionality you need as Joomla for example may offer readily available tools that will solve your problems as might WordPress for another scenario.

Ultimately your content and the way you promote your site will dictate the success it enjoys or the failure it endures. An all singing and dancing website with all the latest gizmos and wonder tools will fall flat on its face if your content is pants and nobody is looking for it.

Sweat your content not the trivial stuff like software.

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However, this seems beyond the reach of many people, old and young, so a whole industry has built up to help people control their weight. Special food, special treatments, detox this, crash diet that. It’s mostly a load of bullshit and my less cakes plus moderate exercise formula is all you really need.

So what of SEO? Well in much the same way as fatties all over the world are being ripped off so companies are similarly being relieved of cash under false pretences. There are a dazzling array of get ranked quick schemes being offered by a dazzling array of snake oil salesmen but if you fall for one you only have your self to blame, just like people who eat too many pies paying for magic fat shedding remedies.

Wise up, stop looking for short cuts and get your metaphorical trainers on.

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In the first example my advice would be to revisit or actually do some research to establish phrases worth ranking for. To the uninitiated this is known as keyword research and its objective is to figure out what people who might buy from you actually search for.

In the second example my advice would also be to carry out some keyword research. “How come Dave?” I hear you say. As previously stated the purpose of keyword research is to establish a list of phrases potential customers use when searching. You then use these phrases in your web pages in the hope of attracting visitors. There’s a bit more to it but that’s it in essence. However, finding a phrase doesn’t automatically mean you should optimise a page on your website for it. Let me explain.

Let’s say you start a business selling car insurance. The phrase car insurance attracts over 4 million searches a month, according to Google, and being on page 1 in the search results would guarantee your business boomed. Unfortunately the chances of your new site appearing in the first 100 results let alone the first 10 is zero. Your site has no chance of ranking for the search car insurance.

You might find a snake oil SEO company who will happily take your money and guarantee results but you’d be as well using the money to place a bet on Aberdeen lifting the league cup, it’s not going to happen.

What you need to do is more keyword research in the hope of finding a phrase you can rank for. Admittedly the phrase will attract less searches but if you work at it you at least stand a chance of securing some of that search traffic.

When it comes to SEO you should pick your fights carefully. SEO is time consuming and spending time and or budget chasing the impossible dream should be left to song lyrics and dreamers, in the real world be realistic about your website’s potential to rank for competitive search phrases.

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I got back to the office and Hazel gave me a message. A Mr ‘Smith’ had phoned and wanted some into about SEO. I called him and was asked to call back in half an hour.

I called back and the guy said “How much is SEO?”. I politely asked him what he specifically wanted. “How much does it cost to be on page one of Google?”. I started to explain even though I realised I was on a hiding to nothing. The guy stopped me and advised he was actually walking out the door but would call back later.

Here’s hoping he doesn’t……

I’ve got all the time in the world for people who are confused about SEO. I’ll explain in very simple language what it is, how you do it and how to make a website perform better. In fact that’s what we do, free of charge, during an SEO Coffee Break session, we give free seo advice.

Don’t be like Mr ‘Smith’, tap into our expertise and let us help you to get more from your website.

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On the face of it you might think, fair enough, people need a fixed price. Well, you’d be wrong and here’s why.

To give a fixed price you need, and I mean NEED, a fixed scope of work. If you don’t get a fixed scope but give a fixed price you are on a road to nowhere. Businesses giving fixed prices against variable scopes go bust very quickly. You need to know exactly what’s needed and exactly what you are going to deliver. Where websites are concerned this is often just not possible as clients rarely know exactly what they want, things change as the project progresses and people start to ‘get it’.

Fixed prices on variable scope projects result in the agency rates being degraded to the point where they are no longer making a profit. You start out at £50 an hour, for example, for 10 hours = £500. The scope creeps, the fee doesn’t and suddenly you’ve done 20 hours of work for £500 = £25/hr. With a break even to run your business profitably of £40/hr you are now losing money and tensions start to run high, both you an the client start to get tetchy and things spiral out of control.

That’s not to say some parts of a project can’t be fixed price whilst other parts are left variable. For example, if a client doesn’t know exactly how many pages a website is going to have it’s impossible to give a fixed scope of work. In this case the design and build would be fixed but the content work would be variable. It’s just common sense.

The only way to give a fixed price against a variable scope is to price the project way over the top to cover the worst case scenario, this doesn’t give clients good value for money in my opinion.

This problem gets even more acute where SEO is concerned. Here’s another quote from a client, a different client. “How much to get our site onto page 1?”. Well, how do you answer that. You start by saying you can’t guarantee to get a site onto page 1, then continue with an outline of the work required to make a site the best it can be. SEO never stops because making a site the best it can be and better than its competitors is a never ending task. The best approach is to adopt the tack taken by PR companies and charge a set monthly rate in return for time spent improving the site.

The alternative is to do the work yourself, it’s that simple. The work needs doing and someone is going to have to do it.

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To cut a long story short we were approached by a very large publisher who has a number of web properties offering article space in return for a fee. Each article presented a link building opportunity and the links were not NO FOLLOWED.

The web properties in question are already heavily monetised but the publisher – a well know and large organisation – has realised the value of links and decided to cash in. In short these greedy bastards don’t give a damn about the ethics or Google’s clear statements about not selling links that pass pagerank.

This once again begs the question of what Google can do about situations like this and I wonder if they can do anything at all. Apart from me and the link pimp nobody would have known any cash changed hands and as such no proof the link had been purchased.

Sure enough the page itself clearly states the article to be an advertorial (heaven forfend anyone should confuse link spam as quality journalism) but will Google’s spiders make that distinction.

I’ve ranted many times about link spam even referring to it as Internet Cancer but even I was almost seduced by this latest offer, it’s just so easy, hand over some cash, write some words, get some links.

Anyway, this close scrape has re-enforced my commitment to stay on the right side of the line where link building is concerned sticking firmly to the ethical SEO approach we have always adopted. So far as our clients are concerned we are very happy to point them at link spammers if they don’t see things our way.

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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.

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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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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