SEO-Ward
Jim Seward – SEO Myth Buster
90% of quality links are paid links…full stop
Published January 19, 2012 | 
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
Incoming links from spammy websites can harm your rankings. #seo
Published November 16, 2011 |
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
What exactly is worthy of being called #awesome
Published November 15, 2011 |
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
Competative Link Analysis by @wiep #searchlove
Published October 25, 2011 |
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
Head to Head Give it up at #searchlove
Published October 24, 2011 |
You shoulda bought a ticket!
I’m not sharing this Awesome!!!! They’re really giving up some awesome shit
Psych!!!
Build Content, Build Links by @wilreynolds #searchlove
Published October 24, 2011 |
Could be the best one of the day but my battery is low, so if I lose it, I apologise!!!
Wil doesn’t believe that social is having the impact people believe. Have to say I agree
Social does nothing to help rankings, great anchor text centric links are a much better rankings
Google has owned feedburner for 5 years, it sees lots of data and it doesn’t use them, they should be using these quality metrics to clean up the crap.
SEO ANCHOR TEXT!!!! FTW!!!! Continue reading
The modern SEO’s Toolkit by @willcritchlow #searchlove
Published October 24, 2011 |
Marketing with computers!
If you’re not learning the technical things, your job’s in danger from the upcoming kids who are
Our ability to use APIs, scrapers, multiple tools is going to be super-critical.
Will’s going to be talking not about tools, but about the skills that you need and how you can by them and how you can use them to be better at your job, very much about the toolkids and not the tools.
“Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet, unknown program” Doug Mcllroy – Basics of unix philosophy
Will’s going to describe an SEO challenge and the tools that they used to do it….Awesome!! Continue reading
Big Business SEO with @tomcrithclow #searchlove
Published October 24, 2011 |
Starting withe the first dilbert of the day
Think visionary with your projects – Big companies laugh at small ideas. They’re just not interested in small investment/small ideas. So think big and you’ll likely get further.
Justify the budget with pilot projects.
Make sure you have something that shows the ROI before you go in, start with a smaller project and scale up. People in big companies like to win, They want the vision but you have to justify the vision and ROI Continue reading
Using dynamic keywords in Google Adwords landing pages to increase clickthrough, quality score and reduce CPC.
Published October 10, 2011 |
Now, before I start this post, let me make it perfectly clear. I am not a PPC expert, I am through and through an Organic SEO but occasionally I end up setting up the odd PPC campaign or two and I think this is probably one of the coolest things you can do with adwords so I thought I’d share.
It’s possible to create dynamic Google adverts containing your keywords, this is fairly common knowledge but let’s go over it just so we all know we’re on the same page.
The syntax for Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion is {keyword: }
You can also use the following capitalisation on the work ‘keyword’ to get different effects:
- keyword – no capitalisation
- Keyword – First word is capitalised
- KeyWord – Every Word Is Capitalised
- KEYword – EVERY letter in first word is capitalised
- KEYWord – LIKE Above But With Each Word Capitalised
- KEYWORD – EVERY LETTER IS CAPITALISED
Make sure you put a generic “catch all” phrase after the : so make sure it shows something if your keyword string is too long for example {keyword:Jim Is Awesome}.
Now, here’s the very clever part and what separates the PPC men from the boys or the PPC Women from the girls.
Posted in Crazy code snippets, Google, PPC, Search Engines | dynamic landing pages, pay-per-click, ppc | 
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Leave a commentHaving a #sitemap and submitting it to #Google improves your #rankings
Published October 7, 2011 |
I received a tweet this morning from @neha_pandkar from a link to a blog telling me how to submit a sitemap to Google and learn about SEO, I’ve never heard of this person and looking at his twitter feed, he’s sent the same tweet to multiple people so I’m imagining it’s automated.
The blog in question has made it onto my list of world’s worst SEO blogs, a short article on how to log into Google webmaster tools (YAWN) and submit a sitemap surrounded by lots of advertising but it’s this wonderful opportunity to look at another in my myths and legends series. Google sitemaps come up a lot so does having a Google sitemap and submitting it to Google do anything to increase your rankings.
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