SEO Blog

The SEO industry doesn’t stand still. As is evidenced by the recent Google Instant update [see: Why Google Instant Won't Destroy SEO], anything can come along and shift the focus of the work done and the way in which you have to approach optimisation. For this reason your efforts to educate yourself on SEO should never stop.

Google could announce tomorrow that inbound links from sites of PR 2 or below won’t count towards your site’s overall strength anymore. As unimaginable as that is (both in the sense of the content of the announcement and the fact that Google would make it in the first place), the need to keep up with the latest thinking on the subject and amend your understanding is vital.
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You’re probably tired about reading how evil paid links are by now. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they continue to work; however, criticisms against them rarely come with any explicit examples of the negative impact they can have.

Well, how about this one? Econsultancy yesterday highlighted the case of gourmetgiftbaskets.com, who offer exactly what their name suggests [see: The $4m Google penalty]. They were making huge profits and sitting comfortably in the top couple of places on Google for all of their primary terms. Unfortunately though one day all the rankings disappeared. No word of warning, no apparent reason why, the site just wasn’t visible any more.

The culprit? Paid links of course.
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I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but Google has been throwing out some pretty odd results recently. Top of the list though is the ability to have numerous results appear for the same site within a search.

Okay, so you’ve always been able to have a few appear pages appear in SERPs, as long as they were optimised for the same or similar terms. This was particularly true for newspapers and similar news outlets. But now it appears that you can actually dominate an entire results page for one term.

Some sleuthing by Malcolm Coles found that Google are treating brand names in search terms as site: searches. True enough, they really are.
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You’ve probably been on no end of sites that proudly display the W3C compliant badge. This means that their pages are free from HTML errors and meet the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Well la-di-da I hear you saying. So what if they have clean code, all it achieves is a small little badge that they can put at the bottom of the page – hardly a way of getting more traffic. To rip off another film, ‘we don’t need no stinking badges!’

Fair point, but being W3C compliant is far more than just a badge, it is a sign that you have a site that is clear from coding errors. Even the smallest HTML issue or unused Javascript can slow down your page load time. Just as concerning, search engine spiders won’t be able to crawl your pages as efficiently; this can lead to them misinterpreting your keywords and not indexing as many pages on your site.
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Whenever people ask about SEO, they tend to just refer to improving their Google ranking. This isn’t a huge surprise, particularly as Google have a 90% grip on the UK search market, but it might be a little short sighted.

Of course SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, not just Google Optimisation. This means you are looking to increase your site’s strength in the eyes of all search engines, not just a select few, or even just one. However, each different engine employs a unique algorithm. There are numerous similarities, but there are also subtle differences.

You might get only a trickle of visitors from the likes of Bing and Yahoo, but every little counts. The danger with being entirely Google-centric is that you can often find yourself falling foul of major algorithm updates, perfectly demonstrated by the recent Mayday issue.
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There have been murmurings for some time that Google are planning to enter the world of SEO. These murmurings have recently turned into shouts, with many seeing the move as imminent.

So what threat does this pose to your rankings and to SEO professionals like myself? Well, initially not a great deal. For a start the service is likely to cost thousands of dollars each month (initial claims suggest $25,000), so it will be well out of reach for most websites.

This is a service set up for the super rich. It is supposed to help the big brands achieve the rankings they ‘deserve’ and keep them out of the clutches of companies who leach off of them. For Google, the major advantage is that they can have a better control over their rankings and ensure that they aren’t getting gamed.
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It’s all well and good getting a ranking, but if you aren’t pulling in traffic, it isn’t doing its job. More often than not, if you are below the fold of the page, you will get fewer visitors than somebody above it. If you are on page two or lower, you could well be on a hiding to nothing.

This is why it is so important that websites work towards getting top three positions in Google for their key phrases. Yes, a ranking report full of numbers is always good to see, but if they are beyond the top three then it is highly unlikely that you will see any real benefit.

That’s all well and good for me to say, so let’s turn this around. When you go out and use a search engine to find something, how often do you look beyond the first page? In fact, how often do you make it to the bottom of the page for the last result? I would be willing to suggest that the answer in most cases is ‘not very often’ at best and ‘never’ at worst.
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