Jim Seward

I am a hard working, good looking, technically competent, forward thinking, modest SEO who has been in the SEO industry professionally for about 5 years, prior to this I was a web designer with an SEO interest for about 3 years…I’ve been working on the internet since 1995, during this time he has seen a lot of changes and a lot of miscommunication. SEO is seen as a dark art and it really shouldn’t. It’s seen as using some sort of trick to game the search engines, something that really annoys me as SEO is no different really to any other form of marketing. In it’s simplest terms. SEO is about making something that should be exceptional and then sharing it and marketing it to other people, although web skills are important, more important is a methodical nature with a creative flair for doing things that draw attention. I’m starting this blog to firstly to finally give myself a voice in the SEO industry, something I’ve been remiss for not doing but also to address a lot of the SEO myths and legends that I’ve seen spread about mostly by people who are quite happy for SEO to remain a dark art in order to game money off people. Jim is currently working in-house for Advanced Computer Software Group plc and is responsible for the rankings for the entire group which of course are excellent. I was going to apologise for the disco theme….but you know what, I actually kinda like it

A video project I made in 1999 – Check it out!

Published February 9, 2012 |

By Jim Seward

This was a video project I made in either 1999 or the year 2000. At the time, I was working as a web designer for Cheshire County Council and I was asked to make a video montage of an art exhibition by local teenagers.

Anyway, long since forgotten, after a tweet by @searchmartin about archive.org (a site I’m very familiar with) – I went looking and the whole wmv file was on there for download which really surprised me. This was made (if my memory is correct) on a Pentium 200 running Adobe Premiere with a Pinnacle breakout box and winamp

I truly wish I can take credit for the music, one of the best version’s of Pachabel’s Canon I’ve ever heard (and was done before Canon Rock before anybody points it out)

Anyway….enjoy

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How to sell out a large concert tour

Published February 9, 2012 |

By Jim Seward

A step away from my usual SEO rantings and I can’t take credit for this list, credit goes to Kennyvader on the The Digital Fix

I was reminded of this as the ladies in my office are going crazy wanting tickets for the upcoming Madonna concert, where you can buy a preorder pass allowing you to buy tickets before they go on sale for the generous price of £15 (which they’re thinking of doing).

Standard large tour ticket selling tactics:-

Announce 2-3 nights only
Announce presale to fans / mobile phone / credit card customers … sometimes you can even get them to pay for the privilege … sell them all the less than ideal tickets that will be hard to sell in the real sale a few days later, maybe scatter the odd front row seat in there so that they don’t smell a rat
Open public sale, only put a few hundred tickets on sale for each night, grab newspaper headlines by claiming to be the fastest sellout ever.
Meanwhile sell all the best front block seats to legalised touts that regularly book blocks and pay in one go so minimal credit card costs
If really daring and uncaring, cut out some of the legalised tout companies and set aside all the decent tickets into “hospitality packages” and sell them yourself for fan-rapingly insane sums of money
Announce more “extra” nights by popular demand even though it’s literally impossible to book extra venue nights, lights, sound, staff, insurance, licence, transport etc without days or weeks of negotiations. Again only release a few hundred tickets for each one to maintain “sellout”
Repeat (6) every couple of hours or days until gullible public’s appetite finally slows
Enjoy having public’s money in the bank for best part of a year or more
Release all the remaining seats in a quiet steady trickle or in blocks whenever the talent is in the newspaper or appearing in some chat show
If the last tickets are proving hard to sell once the tour start nears, then use “new seats available due to stage plan having now being finalised” as being the excuse for loud public announcement of loads of seats being available for supposedly sell out gigs.

The general public seem to fall for this time after time…What happened to first come first serve ticket buying that still happens for the theatre.

Posted in Jim talks shite, Personal stuff | Tagged concerts, tours |

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90% of quality links are paid links…full stop

Published January 19, 2012 |

By Jim Seward

I’ve been thinking which is always a dangerous things to do and I’ve come to an earth shattering conclusion….

90% of quality incoming links are paid links.

Let me explain. Back in the olden days when Google was starting out and it first started looking at the linkscape, I would say that 95% of the links coming to any site were completely natural which was why Google’s algo worked so well. People did things for the love of doing them, created content for the love of it. Someone came across it, thought “hey, that’s cool” and linked to it. What a great idea and what a lovely innocent time.

Fast forward to 2011 and what I’ve realised is that the linkscape that affects people’s rankings now is 90% bought. I’m not talking in the somewhat callous “Here is £300 for a link on your mozrank 8 website homepage” although obviously that can be a very effective way of link building for some but if you consider the amount of time and money that goes into proper outreach and link building. Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Search Engines | Tagged guest blog posting, infographics, paid links |

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“Here comes the girls” – Here comes blatant sexism – Boycott Boots campaign

Published December 15, 2011 |

By Jim Seward

Now I don’t usually go off on one, but this has been winding me up for a long time now.

For the last 12-18 months, high street store Boots has been targeting women in it’s advertising campaigned using the slogan “Here come the girls”, fine, whatever. What I object to is just how much their advertising relies on portraying men as dumb, stupid, “rubbish”, lazy and hypochondriacs. Their advertising is blatant sexism towards men.

There’s no doubt that a similar advertising campaign with the gender roles reversed would have been banned by now for being sexist and perpetuating gender stereotypes, so I have to wonder why such advertising is seen as acceptable when men are the target of the sexism? Continue reading →

Posted in Personal stuff | Tagged boots, boycott, here comes the girls, sexism |

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Incoming links from spammy websites can harm your rankings. #seo

Published November 16, 2011 |

By Jim Seward

There’s a lot of talk on the internet that you are judged by the company you keep, the concept of being involved in a bad neighbourhood would harm your rankings, may even get you banned from Google. There’s talk of roving gangs of marauding black hat SEO’s threatening to Googlebowl your site by linking to it from thousands or millions of bad neighbourhoods. So the question is, is this a truth or a myth, can other people harm your website simply by linking to it? Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Search Engines |

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What exactly is worthy of being called #awesome

Published November 15, 2011 |

By Jim Seward

In the SEO world, the word “awesome” is thrown around like Charlie Sheen throws round coke and hookers, I’m guilty of it myself especially at the recent Searchlove conference (using the word awesome, not the coke and hookers before anybody suggests otherwise) but recently I’ve been wondering whether we use it too much in SEO. I was reminded of this Eddie Izzard bit: Continue reading →

Posted in Jim talks shite, Personal stuff, Search Engines |

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Gamification by @richardbaxter from #searchlove

Published October 25, 2011 |

By Jim Seward

I’ve been lucky enough to see Richard speak before, so I’m looking forward to his session on Gamification or getting other people to do all your work for you. In all honesty, I’m just hoping I can keep up with this one, but here goes.

We’re starting with a story

Kevin Richardson invented the speed camera lottery

Persuassion is a more powerful motivator than compulsion

If you’re in the speed limit, you get put into a lottery to gain the money generation by the speed camera by all the people who went over it.

It decreased the average speed from 32kmph to 25kmph Continue reading →

Posted in Events |

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Competative Link Analysis by @wiep #searchlove

Published October 25, 2011 |

By Jim Seward

Looking at link analysis and how to do it in under 2 hours….awesome

No matter what, it can work.

On the other hand “That will work” doesn’t work

The fun part is trying tofigure where the line is for you without crossing it.

A link analysis can help with lots of things and it looks a bit chaotic. With structure it looks much better. Allows you to do stuff rather than make the reports and do nothing.

Make your own tools, because you know what you like. Which is great if you have the time to.

No link building process is the same.

1. Competitor Identification

Find out who your competitors are
Searching is wrong. A lot of large sites are help back by technical issues. They’re out there but you don’t see them yet.
To find out the stuff below the surface, make your own tool
Allows you to spend more time

PPC
client input
similarsites.com
alexa related sites
social sites
industry publications
related searches
realted operator in Google
Google suggest

2 Gathering & Processing

Do your own thing, use pretty tools or the more industrial approach which can be overwhelming
Let machines do the dirty work

Basic information sheet

Import filtered OSE .csv exports
Switch to dashboard worksheet

Charts alone don’t do anything, you need to interpret it

Spot the extremes, Is it helping them, is it worth it, is it worth the effort/risk to try it out yourself.

4. Start analysing

It is your job to find out why these charts are not the same

Look at what’s different about the links and investigate what’s different and if something they’re doing is working, replicate it. Look at other signals too, social, anchors and relevancy.

You can rank without getting the right anchor text. How relevant is the link, are the keywords I’m targetting in the title tags of the page that’s linking.

Look at link pattern growth and whats causing so many websites to link to them

Look at quality spread (page authority)

Take a look at the top 10 anchor texts, shows where people are focusing, even if they’re ranking well in your niche, they could be targetting other places

Only analyse the required elements, don’t just finish a checklist

pretty charts are nice, action points are much better

Awesome, we’re being given the dashboard….sorry to people not here who won’t get it

The charts are not the important bit, it’s the action

Posted in Events, Search Engines |

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Personalisation, Profiles & Privacy by @ciaranj #searchlove

Published October 25, 2011 |

By Jim Seward

A wise man once said, if you’re not paying anything, you’re the product being sold. What a great quote!!!

Starting off with the history of Google but more about the results than the homepage.

We’re looking at personalisation of the results and just how much it changes and search has evolved from a 2d search (keyword and time) to a 4d search (keyword, user profile, time and location) Continue reading →

Posted in Events |

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