The latest news and views on what is happening in Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing
There has been plenty of concern over Facebook since it’s recent flotation with much speculation surrounding it’s ability to survive financially. I’m surprised at yet another multi-billion dot com affair but this aside I see FB’s problem as two fold – it is being eaten up by spam accounts from within is one half and the damage that has been done to the brand by the IPO is the other.
Google’s Semantic Search will probably be the biggest shake up of how we find things on the net that we have seen for years.
It will fundamentally change the SEO landscape and for the most part we are actually pretty blind as it takes place, and it has already started taking place.
Many of my clients, on first contact, are interested in what we can do for them when it comes to link building.
That’s not surprising, there is no end of content around the web about how important links are and most people receive regular spamy type emails offering ’50 links for $20′ or the like. It all makes link building sound vital.
It’s obviously a question I am asked almost daily. The other one is ‘Can you put my website in the top 3 of Google?’
I understand why it is such a rampant enquiry – there are no end of renegade SEO companies that promise such results.
So is it possible? Yes and No…
The idea of Google Panda was to try and remove poor quality sites that were clogging up the search engine results pages (SERPs). The plan was to kill off duplicate content or content that was no more than a bunch of links.
But why have so many innocent people seemingly been caught in the cross fire? And are they really innocent?
Black Hat is Search Engine Optimisation work that crawlers like Google, Yahoo and Bing would ban your website for if they realised what you were up to.
And they most certainly are getting better at this. Many sites that relied on copied content (content farms) or were nothing more than directories containing links (link farms) have seen themselves disappear from search results or moved so low in the rankings that they may as well not be there.
VevoCart is the asp.net offering for an online shopping cart and it was recently bought to my attention by a client.
In terms of usability I have never applied it to a website because it is so poorly reviewed. You can read some stories of woe here: http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/carts/VevoCart.aspx.
Blogging starts easily but doing it effectively can be hard word (Image: Alex Hughes)
“Start blogging and it will help your SEO” are the words I so often see on forums or hear in conversations but many people try it out and never find the promised land of high rankings. So do blogs really help?
In essence blogs can be effective but only when carried out properly.
There are plenty of SEO companies pushing the link wheel solution at the moment. Have you lost your position in the search results because you were using link farms? No problem, use link wheels instead because Google sees these as natural.
Being a growth industry, SEO is full of cowboys who see optimising websites as ideal ‘get rich quick’ fodder even if they don’t actually produce results for the client.
I’ve sometimes followed these people through the system and it goes a bit like this:
