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’m often amazed when I look at the source code of web pages, because creating a page that’s optimised for the search engines is so straightforward – yet so seldom done. I’ve said repeatedly: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not a black art, so don’t let anyone tell you it is. All you need to [...]
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I received a question through my Dear Martin page the other day from someone who was asking how backlinks affected page rank, and how the ‘nofollow’ tag affected backlinks, therefore affecting page rank. Here’s the response I offered: The first thing I’d say is don’t get hung up on Page Rank and all that other [...]
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Here’s a question I saw in a forum this week: is it better to have a good page rank or lots of visitors to your site. The person in question had a site which was focused on design and design services, so my opening response was that what they really wanted was lots of visitors [...]
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I read a post today from someone who’s experienced the frustration of focusing on the Search Engines for their website traffic. The problem is – the search engines keep changing their algorithms in order to improve the relevance of their results and to block loopholes the black-hatters find. And this can really blow your search [...]
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I just saw an interesting question in a forum: how does a blog help with SEO? Here’s the answer I offered: An active (and that’s important) blog is attractive to a search engine for three primary reasons: It’s updated with new information regularly Through the mechanism of tags and categories (or labels on blogger), its [...]
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