This is a series of articles on Search Engine Optimisation.
I don’t spend hours sweating the infinite details of Search Engine Optimisation, and I don’t analyse every algorithm change that comes out and rush off to re-calibrate my sites.
Google alone releases between 400 and 500 algorithm changes a year – that’s nearly 2 a day. If I tried to keep up with that lot I’d never do anything else. And then there’s Bing and Yahoo to consider.
Trying to write for the search engines is absolutely the wrong focus – you don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of keeping up!
Because the web is changing all the time the search engine algorithms are changing all the time too. Quite simply: what works today quite likely won’t work tomorrow.
But there are straight-forward, common sense SEO steps you can take, both on-site and off-site, that will greatly improve your site’s performance in the search engines.
More importantly, getting these steps in place and then focusing on producing well-researched, detailed, well-written articles, will do more to protect you from being penalised by an algorithm change than fiddling about with keyword density ever will.
That’s what these articles focus on.
Click the headline to read the full article and if you have any questions either leave a comment under the article or contact me here.
I see an awful lot of bad advice in some of the forums I visit – advice that, at best, will deliver no benefit and at worst may be harmful. One such is on the question of keyword density, and the advice I see so often is to have a density of anywhere between 2% [...]
{ 2 comments }
I spent some time analysing my Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors this week and tidied up some of those pesky 404’s that keep showing up. There was a time when I had zero 404 errors on this site, and very proud of it I was too. But my pride was misplaced. As this site has [...]
{ 0 comments }
This video is designed for people new to both WordPress and to working online. It covers the basic SEO details that you should fill in for each new WordPress post and page you write, in order to get more search engine traffic. I use the Thesis theme, so the screenshots are Thesis screens, but the [...]
{ 2 comments }
Interesting question in the Warrior Forum from someone who had recently set up a new website and was worried because it had disappeared from the search results. So here’s the thing: initially, new sites often do appear quickly in the natural search results. But then they bounce up and down a bit, going from maybe [...]
{ 3 comments }
Interesting question in the Warrior Forum today: How do you set up internal linking on your site correctly? The questioner explained that they had currently set up their site by linking each page back to the two previous pages via a link entitled ‘recent articles’. While that would link all the pages together, it would [...]
{ 5 comments }
For the everyday webmaster (as opposed to SEO academics) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has changed a lot in the last couple of years. There was a time when we sweated over keyword density, what to put in our title tags, how many keywords to use and so on. And the result was often a page [...]
{ 4 comments }
A while ago I wrote about activating Gzip to speed up your page load time. But speeding up your page load time is about a lot more than 1-shot answers – whether it’s activating Gzip, installing a caching plugin or anything else. This graph shows an interesting (and encouraging) trend: It’s from my Google Webmaster [...]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
With Google now including site load times in the factors it uses to rank sites for the natural search results, a recent article on the SEOmoz blog giving 7 ways to speed things up caught my attention. Some of them I was already using but one that I wasn’t was Gzip compression, so I dived [...]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
