A good mate, Steve, asked me a question today about a previous blog post I'd written. I was talking about SEO, for a change, and he said the post made it sound like SEO wasn't cheap and it was far from guaranteed to work. His point was, if, as a digital marketing agency, we wanted to attract clients why would I be so brutally honest.
Every week we have conversations with potential new clients that don't go anywhere. The reason for this is, primarily, cost. They think hiring us is going to cost circa £150/month when the reality is our SEO services start at 10 times that amount. There's no meeting halfway with this kind of differential.
www.net.tutsplus.com have provided an extremely useful and exhaustive list that identifies a variety of factors that are likely to impact positively on the worthiness of your website as an attraction both to search engines and to “human” visitors.
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.
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.
In the crazy world of SEO it's rare that a genuine player, not one of the self appointed gob shites that seem ever present, but a genuine player gives such a no nonsense overview of SEO. Google's Matt Cutts delivers a great, entertaining but importantly comprehensive SEO talk in this unmissable video.
Joomla creates great search friendly web sites right out of the box. This simple video shows you how we do it.
Further to my last post/rant/moan/wine/whinge/ (delete as applicable) I've created a video (which became two videos thanks to YouTube's 10 minute rule) to help SEO newbies cover the basics of on page SEO.
If you think a website is like a brochure where you can just set it and forget it you would be better off to just forget it and save yourself the effort of the 'set it' part.
This post is really only for the SEO newbie, SEO magicians can safely ignore it.......or can they?
How many home pages have you got? No I'm not talking about canonical issues, I'm talking about how many home pages your site has.
OK, the long and the short of linking is this. To rank for a competitive term you need links. Links are like votes and votes win seats, or in this case search engine positions. Setting aside all the follow, no follow, pagerank blah blah blah, links are the life blood of the search engine algos. The problem is, the market for link building is so established that it's simply getting harder and harder for the algos to figure out what's a good link and what isn't.
I love people who tell it like it is. Not people who tell you they tell it like it is in a "I'm a straight talking guy and I'm going to offend you" no, not them, they are arse holes. The people I'm talking about are people who give straight seo advice.
You could let a web designer take the lead on your web development project but if you did you'd be making a big mistake. Don't get me wrong, I love web designers, I employ web designers, you NEED web designers but you should NEVER let them lead a web project.
When you've invested in a new website and put in a lot of work you may feel like you have a right to be at the top of a Google search for your chosen keywords. If only it were that simple. The truth is, it's all but impossible and any company telling you they can build you a new site and get you to the top of the search engines for competitive phrases in a short time are telling fibs, even if they claim to have a special relationship with Google......
