Category Archives: SEO

Google profile

Being the blatant self publicist that I am, I was very interested to learn of Google’s new profile maker when you have a Google account. You can enter profile information for yourself, places you’ve lived at, companies you’ve worked for and such like.

Why is this important? Well, you can create links to your own websites, websites that you like or even pages such as your Facebook or LinkedIn pages. These links are hosted on the Google domain, which could well have some bearing on your SEO. Also, by creating your own profile page you’re helping with your own personal reputation management, as the pages are indexible, and will rank for your own name in the SERPs.

Whether you’re an outrageous self publicist, or just someone interested in SEO, it’s worth checking out the Google profile maker.

Google PageRank update kicks me again

If I cared about PR (which I don’t) I’d be annoyed that this site has once again received a mauling from Google in terms of PageRank and has been reduced to a PR2.

As I said, I don’t care about PageRank… but, it is bloody annoying considering this site should be a PR5, if it were not for the penalties received in the last 12 months for various activities.

But I don’t care about PageRank, so it’s all good.

Besides, traffic and PageRank are completely unrelated, as rankings within Google have remained unharmed (and in many cases improved) and thus traffic is also high, higher than it’s been for some time. PageRank is purely an ego thing where people like to brag about how much green is in their toolbar. As you know I’m a modest guy (shut it) so don’t care about PageRank.

Unfortunately some advertisers still do though (because they’re imbeciles) and only want PR4 or PR5 minimum sites to promote them.

That’s another story though, and one that revolves around education of online marketing. Plus, did I mention that I don’t care about PageRank?

How to become an authority website in Google

Ever wondered how to become an authority website in Google? No? Ah, I was kinda counting on you actually wondering that. Oh well, I’ll tell you anyway. I did an Interview for .Net magazine a while ago on the subject, and the whole article has just been published in full on Net Imperative.

The article starts off with the intro:

Natural SEO isn’t just about editing tags on your website, inserting some well chosen keyphrases and building up links. The most successful websites on the Internet, the ones Google consider authorities in their fields, all have similar things in common. Many of them don’t even use conventional SEO practises, yet they rank above seemingly better optimised websites for relevant searches.

Then it proceeds to tell you just how to do it, in five simple steps. Have a read and see what you think; it works too 😉

How to increase the size of your ePenis

From the Urban Dictionary: “Measure of a man’s power and stance on the Interweb.”

Your ePenis is your online reputation, how other Internet users perceive you and the respect they have for you. If you have a truly massive ePenis you are a colossus on the Internet and wield huge power and sway over other Internet users. What you say carries weight, what websites you use matters to others and what forums you belong to is a cause for much interest.

Who cares about all of this? Well for one, you should. If your online reputation is sufficiently high enough you’ll have the ability to launch a new website and instantly flood it with traffic, just because you’re the one who has created it. You’ll be able to write an article on a website and have thousands of people read it, without any effort, because your name carries that level of power.

When a new website launches, what you think about it can make or break it.

For the man (or woman, it’s not gender specific) with a huge ePenis, Internet Marketing is made all the more easier.

Here are ten tips to increasing the size of your ePenis, in no particular order:

  1. Ensure that all ten results on the front page of Google are actually for you when you Google your name. To have a truly massive ePenis you must at the very least be the most dominant person on the Internet with your own name. Any threat to your online reputation from another person with your name must be stamped out.
  2. Write a blog. Without your own blog you have no voice, no presence and no reputation. Naturally the software you use for your blog also reflects on the size of your ePenis. For the ultimate kudos boost you should hard code your own blog from scratch, because coders are hardcore and obviously gain huge respect from their peers for their coding skills. Failing that use the industry standard blog software WordPress. Using anything else will cause you to be mocked from afar.Also the number of subscribers to your blog is a measure of your ePenis. Use Feedburner to monitor your blog’s subscribers, and if it’s in the thousands put a badge on your blog telling everyone how popular you are.
  3. Use Internet acronyms wherever possible to show your knowledge of the language. Terms such as ROFLMAO should be second nature to you. If you don’t know what it means then you have a tiny ePenis.
  4. Post on forums relevant to your industry or interests and quickly amass enough posts so you are not classed as a n00b. They are newcomers to websites and should be treated with disdain by those with large ePenis’, namely you! The size of your ePenis increases in direct correlation with your post count. The more posts you make, the bigger your ePenis.Ideally you should start your own forum; then it becomes the number of members on your forum rather than your post count that reflects the size of your ePenis.It is also important to mention that the size of your forum signature should be at least 4 times larger than your average post. Those with the biggest ePenis’ tend to post just a few words for each forum post, but in stark contrast have a signature that takes up 75% of the available screen, utilises many fonts, colours and features massive animated images.
  5. Use social networking websites, but use them dismissively. The sole purpose for you using them should be to amass friends. Anything less than 50,000 isn’t worth shouting about, and you should not actually know any of them! Your use of sites like MySpace should not in any way be used for you to communicate with people you actually know, to do so is to tow the corporate line and that’s not what the Interweb is all about – and thus reduces the size of your ePenis.MySpace is a tool to spread your legend, nothing else.
  6. Your online friends should outweigh your ‘real world’ friends by a ratio of at least 8-1. On the Interweb, a ‘friend’ is NOT someone you have physically met. They can be other forum users, people you have emailed or contacts on your MSN/Yahoo messenger. Knowing their real name isn’t important either, you should know them by their Usernames. For example, Specimen-17 should be used to address an online friend instead of his real name, Colin.
  7. Not only should you have never met at least 80% of the people on your MSN/Yahoo messenger contacts list, you should actually not be aware of who 50% of them even are. You have too many contacts to keep track of who any of them are; friends are a numbers game on the Interweb.
  8. Own your own name as a domain name. This one is a must; if you don’t own yourname.com or at the very least yourname.co.uk you have no business on the Interweb.
  9. Never go more than 12 hours without being online; even if this involves connecting wirelessly through your phone while you’re in the pub. While you’re not online, you have no presence. The more hours you spend online per day, the bigger your ePenis. Ideally you should respond to emails with 20 minutes, no matter what time of day they were sent, but be impossible to get hold of by phone.
  10. You create blog posts that are top ten lists in order for others to link to them!

Following these steps will help you grow your ePenis to a massive size, allowing you to perform your Internet marketing effortlessly.

Obviously increasing the size of your ePenis is a time consuming practise, which is, by its very nature, the whole point. If you have time for other things in your life then you have, by default, a small ePenis.

Just Search

StuckOn - SEO company based in Cheshire

I usually put up posts when companies I work for launch new designs for their websites, but for some reason completely forgot to add this when Just Search updated their site. I must have been concentrating too hard on work and completely overlooked it.

Anyhow, if you haven’t seen the new design for Just Search, which is all white and stylish, then have a look at the site here: www.justsearching.co.uk.

The best bit too, it was designed in-house!

This the is second redesign since I’ve been at Just Search, and it’s by far the best looking the site’s ever been. I may be slightly biased too, but I think it’s the best looking website for an SEO company in the UK.

😉

Number one on ‘The Google’

Anyone in the SEO industry who’s had to speak to a client who knows nothing about SEO will know it’s much better than speaking to a client who knows a little. This video from YouTube is a classic example, albeit intentional, of a client who knows a little SEO.

He wants to be number one on ‘The Google’.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Anyone actually had clients like this? Betcha have!

Universal Search for Michael Jackson

I wrote an article recently for a media publication on how to optimise for Universal Search within Google. universal Search is relatively new within SEO circles and had been fully utilised by Google of late. When you search for something in Google, and it’s a popular search term with a lot of media, you may get videos, images and news results appear on the front page.

This makes regular SEO much harder, because you’re competing with other factors for first page placement. For example if your website used to rank at #8 on Google for your main keyword, and that keyword now shows results from Universal Search, you’ll be pushed down to the second page.

Ah, the horror!

However, it does open up new opportunities in SEO (as I wrote in the article) as SEOs are now able to optimise for Universal Search specifically, with the use of images, video and even Google News.

An example of this is one of the key phrases I’ve been receiving a lot of traffic for recently, ‘michael jackson thriller costume’. Not very competitive, but with Halloween not that far away it will start bringing in the numbers. Searching for this phrase in Google shows up some images on the front page, with my own personal Thriller jacket there too.

You can see Google’s SERPs for ‘michael jackson thriller costume‘ here.
Michael Jackson

Universal Search is something worth experimenting with if you haven’t already. You can see my original post, the one that ranks in Google’s Universal Search, here.

I’m in this month’s issue of dot Net magazine

dot NetFar be it for me to boast, but I’m in this month’s issue of .Net Magazine with an interview about how to make your website an authority site within Google. It’s quite a good read, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. The golden rule is content, content and more content.

It’s one of the reasons that this website ranks for so many different phrases and gets traffic for the most unlikely of search terms. If you write about it, they will come (simply building it is no longer effective enough).

Anyway, you can see the magazine on the .Net website here.

Here’s a shot of the extract, but to read it properly you’ll need to buy the magazine 😉

dot Net

You can read more tips like this at Just Search’s website, which features a daily blog about SEO and Internet Marketing.