As I’m sure many of you know, I do a lot of presentations and workshops for the eBusiness Programme here in the East Midlands. Well, in November I’ll be delivering a short presentation on link building advice at a number of venues. The marketing bumpf goes like this:
Top Link Building Advice for Search Engine Optimisation
Breakfast Briefing
Without doubt, the hardest part of search engine optimisation is getting links to your site, but without them, appearing high in the list for competitive keywords is virtually impossible. Obtaining links is a time consuming, ongoing process, but it can’t be ignored if you want your SEO to succeed.
This session provides a wealth of tips on generating powerful links to your website, with the latest thinking on what works and time-saving methods to help you make the most of your link building activity. From Web 2.0 sites to social media and good old fashioned directories, you will learn where on the web the valuable links can be found.
Topics include:
Directories that still provide value
How to use user-generated content sites (Web 2.0) for valuable links
Using social media to generate links
Free tools you can use to find websites to get links from
Agenda
08:30 Registration, breakfast and networking
09:00 Presentation Starts
10:00 Q & A
10:30 Networking and close
Who Should Attend?
This session will be useful to any business looking to improve their search engine optimisation and builds on the information in our Successful and Advanced Search Engine Optimisation workshops.
Event dates:
Lincolnshire 04 November 2009 Boston West Golf Club, Boston
Derbyshire 05 November 2009 Ringwood Hall, Chesterfield
Leicestershire 11 November 2009 National Space Centre, Leicester
Nottinghamshire 17 November 2009 The Village Hotel, Nottingham
Northamptonshire 24 November 2009 Freemasons Hall & Conference Centre, Northampton
Google have been busy adding new features – you’ve probably noticed the larger font in the search box for instance.
One thing you should definitely be aware of if you have a Google Maps listing (Local Business Centre) is the new Place Pages, as detailed here. It’s worth having a read of this to understand how it could affect what people see about your business if they find it through a Google Maps search (as often comes at the top of the search results if you search for a business name and/or place). There isn’t that much different from the old Local Business Centre listing, except for the addition of adverts – so you could see your competitors listed alongside your own information! This is what’s happening with some of the ads in the page below:
If you happen to search for a “hot topic”, Google’s list of which is here, you might find the graph of exactly how hot the topic is appearing in the main search results. Details are here, but sadly it only covers the US and Japan at preset.
Finally, you may notice some additional links appearing in search result pages under some website entries. These are designed to take you directly to the section of the page that’s relevant to your search, using in-page (named) anchor tags that the page’s author has included. Why Google are doing this and what it looks like is explained here, whilst what you can do to utilise this as a webmaster is explained here.
You might also be interested in this explanation of how Google handles duplicate content and why it’s not so much a penalty, as a simple outcome of the per-search algorithm, courtesy of Google’s Greg Grothaus.
Just a quick link: the SEOMoz 2009 Ranking Factors report has been published and it’s no surprise to see that external link anchor text, title tags and link popularity are seen as the most important factors by a reasonable concensus of SEO experts.
A client of mine forwarded an email (let’s be honest, spam) he received from an SEO company in the north-west last week. I thought I’d write about it here, but I’m not going to name names because frankly I can’t be bothered getting hassle from talking to a company who uses these tactics.
The email is quite long, but I shall give you an overview of my main areas of concern (which of course made me quite angry at the time, as it is effectively questioning my services to the client):
“Your website is probably underperforming in the major search engines… I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages of Google…”The email doesn’t state what search terms the sales chap was using. So, um, exactly how does he define “underperforming”? The site is in the top 10 (mostly the top 2) for all the target phrases I agreed with the client, based on solid keyword research and the client’s target market. Very misleading, but to the uninitiated, it sounds very serious.
“I ran a back-link check on your site… Your website has 2 back-links, meaning it’s not very popular.”
Riiiiight, exactly what did the sales idiot use to get this information? I’m guessing Google’s link: command, which has been broken for longer than I can remember. The only way to know what links to your site Google knows about is to use Webmaster Tools, which this guy can’t have had access to. After that, it’s Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which reports 204 links to the site in question. Way to go, salesboy… You’re scaring my client and wasting my time as I explain the real situation to them. Thanks.
“Right now, your site has only 6 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low. This can be down to many reasons which our service can help resolve.”
Um, yeah, the main reason is there are only six pages on the website, genius! Now, I agree that more content will generally help with SEO, but for this particular client it isn’t necessary (see above point about being in the top 10 for all target phrases).
As you can tell, I’m not very impressed with this “research” and these guys are frightening people and causing trouble for other reputable SEOs as a result. The email states that they’re prepared to enter into a 12-month contract at £175 per month to promote five phrases, so basically they want £2100 a year to SEO five phrases for your site. I’ll leave you to decide if that’s good value or not, considering they don’t appear to be able to do even basic SEO research properly.
If you want to see how your site will fair in Google’s next major update, have a look here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com
Google announced today its intention to re-engineer some of its workings, particularly how fast it indexes content, in an effort to improve its real-time search results, an area where it senses the market is moving and sites such as Twitter might steal a march.
Note that this sandbox preview version of Google is missing many of the niceties we’ve come to love in the last couple of years, as Matt Cutts says in the blog post, but if you notice any issues, they want your feedback using the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom – just put Caffeine somewhere in the text.
Some chatter in the ranks about Google changing the way it treats NoFollow links, in order to combat PageRank manipulation through PageRank sculpting (i.e. applying NoFollows to links on your pages to prevent them “leaking” PageRank and hence retaining more “power”).
I had an interesting email today from Parcel2Go.com, who I use occasionally to send bits of cars around the country. It seems that they’re getting into buying links in an interesting way! I wonder what Google makes of this?
Apologies for the paucity of posts recently, I’ve been very busy delivering training and consultancy for the eBusiness Programme. Presenting my new Google Analytics & Conversion workshop (four times in a week!), Analytics is very much on my mind and I spotted this on Erik Vold’s blog, relating to the previous post here about the Canonical tag and preventing Analytics from double-counting pages:
Google have been busy adding new features – you’ve probably noticed the larger font in the search box for instance.
