Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “SEO”
In a recent forum discussion someone asked what looked like a valid question. He said, ﾓif I go to a mechanic and ask him to fix my car he will give me a price, but if I go to an SEO specialist and ask him or her to rank me top of Google, he or she can’t give me a concrete cost ﾖ what kind of industry is this?ﾔ There then followed lots of alternative analogies from said SEO specialists such as ﾓSEO is more like surgery, you are told a price but then asked to sign a disclaimer that …
Today I’m going to ﾓcoin a phraseﾔ and explain how the future of SEO is going to look because the rapidly changing landscape of this industry is highly misunderstood by many web-masters. Internet User Optimisation is the name I am giving to a new aspect which will play an ever more important role in where a page or site ranks. I’ll be telling you what it is and how it fits into site optimisation.
There is a common misconception that, if you practice SEO, you need to get on forums so that you can create links (usually in the signature line that shows below each post) because SEO is all about link building. The truth is that in terms of link building those shown on forums have a very small significance but they can have a much greater value in another way.
With Google displaying reviews in an ever more prominent way both in Google shopping and in its’ organic search results this is obviously becoming an increasingly important factor in SEO. It’s not so much that good reviews effect your rankings directly (although this can be true in Google Shopping and Google+ Local) but that some nice yellow stars attract internet users to click through to your site.
Most now accept that the old idea of swapping links with other websites in an attempt to make search engines believe you were popular (because you had lots of lovely links) are over. In the world of SEO such activities are referred to as Reciprocal Links and you won’t find many search engine optimisers promoting the idea for at least the last 18 months.
From my own mailbox, the forums and sites like Yahoo answers there is a constant stream of people looking for websites with ‘Do Follow’ links because they think that getting a backlink which is marked ‘No Follow’ counts for nothing. In this they could not be more wrong.
The longer an industry survives and the more rapidly it evolves, the more opportunity there is for myths to breed like rabbits. Many people make their living from those who believe in a myth so it is very much in their interest to keep a particular legend going. I see this a great deal in the link swapping and link building businesses but it is also rife in other areas.
Just because a keyword or phrase is searched regularly on Google does not mean it is worth chasing. There is a misconception that high end keywords (words or phrases searched in large volumes every month) are the most desirable but it’s not always the case.
I hear and read a great deal about people who use Google’s Keyword Tool to define the words and phrases they will pursue, finally rank for them, and see only a dribble of traffic. But it is like any other tool – you have to know how to use it so you don’t end up slaving away to optimise for something that will do you no good at all. So what do you need to know?
What Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer sometimes report as a 500 server error is actually misleading. If you have a situation where Firefox works but Chrome shows a message like the one pictured to the right and IE simply says it cannot display the page (suggesting you might no even be online) then your issue may not be with your server.
