The latest news and views on what is happening in Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing
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.
This is the sort of page you will see on Chrome when it thinks there is a server 500 error
Rich snippets are all the rage at the moment because they make the way your website looks in the search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing well ﾅ a little more sexy!
If you’re not sure what Rich snippets are or how they might relate to your online shop have a read of our page on rich snippets and schema first
So how to you integrate them into your X-Cart store?
For years Google had a method for serving up advertisements on websites that used Adsense (that old favourite where you add a block of code and advertisements magically appeared).
Their method was to look at the content of the page, decide what the page was about, see who was bidding to advertise on a page about that topic and then serve up the highest bidders.
Last month I wrote about how getting Facebook ‘Likes’ doesn’t do anything for your SEO because search engines like Google know they can be purchased by the thousands.
“Yes”, said one of my clients. “But internet users don’t know that and when they come to a site with 3,000 Likes they feel confidence.”
There is a booming industry of online businesses offering Facebook ‘Likes’, Google Plus Ones, Twitter Followers and the like. These social media bookmarks are supposed to be desirable because they signal to search engines the number of internet users who genuinely like your website or your content enough to share it with their friends.
Well they used to …It was, of course, not long before the idea was hijacked by companies who made up thousands of false accounts ﾖ in Facebook, Google, Twitter, and on. From there it was easy to offer a thousand social media bookmarks or followers overnight and like with so many black hat SEO tricks before, it worked for a while.
