There have been some major changes to Google over the last few months.
Firstly, there was the so-called Mayday update (funnily enough at the beginning of May!) which has totally changed long tail search – and not for the better. Secondly, at the beginning of June, the Caffeine rollout was finally completed.
Now, if we take Matt Cutts at his word then the caffeine update was a change in the infrastructure so shouldn’t have any impact on SERPS.

However, a personal site of mine was getting a lot of traffic through long tail search, and the Mayday update didn’t affect the site in the slightest. In fact, I saw a steady increase in traffic. On June 4th my traffic took a massive hit.

I use the website php.net to refresh my knowledge of various php functions from time to time, and I have noticed that when searching for a phrase such as “php strstr function”, the php.net site is not showing up within the first 50 results of the SERPS. There is a subdomain of pear.php.net showing up in the 2nd and 3rd spots but the standard site is not.

The www.php.net version of the site still has over 80,000 pages indexed so it’s not a case that someone’s accidentally blocked Googlebot from visiting the site.
This leads me to believe that whether this has been caused by Mayday or Caffeine, Google has an error in their algorithm. For a site as well respected as php.net to be nowhere in the SERPs is clearly wrong.

I will therefore be holding off making any changes to my own site in the hope that Google fix this very quickly.

It seems like Bing isn’t ready to do battle with Google just yet.

Bing seem to be going down the route of providing information to the user without taking them to external websites.
For example, if you were to search for “audi a3 spec”, Bing would actually show you the Audi A3 spec and just provide a link to the website it got the information from.
Obviously, this works well for the user for something that is black and white, but not when you are searching for opinions.

This is a great feature for users, but not for website owners. A lot of websites generate income from placing adverts on their site. Bing potentially removes the need for the user to visit an external website if the information is shown within Bing. Less visitors to a website means less money for website owners, and less money for website owners may mean less websites. Less websites may mean we are just left with the dross – made for adsense sites and such like.

Does this mean that Microsoft will be concentrating on getting people to pay for advertising rather than concetrating on organic search?

I applaude Microsoft for trying to find a different angle for search (although the concept is not that different from the Wolfram Alpha search engine) but I don’t think that alienating the very people that are providing the content (for free) is going to work well as a business model.

It is a well known fact that the search engine optimisation industry has a somewhat poor reputation – sometimes this is justified, but mostly it is not. I along with many other SEO professionals offer a service which is based on doing a lot of research and reading to ensure we have as many facts about improving website positions as possible.

It can get a little irksome therefore when someone takes on an SEO job without knowing what they should be doing. Yes, this will harm the SEO industry.

Many people who dabble in websites think they know what is needed to boost a website to the dizzy heights of position 1 in Google…then fail because they just do not have the required knowledge. Even worse, they can harm their website profile.
Many people will know that backlinks are an important factor for ranking in Google so they may well go out and buy links without understanding the profile of the website they have just got a link from.
Many people will have heard of keyword density and will overuse the keywords they want to rank for.
Many people will still cloak content because they don’t understand the implications of what they are doing.

Ten years ago it was easy. Choose your keywords and use them in your title and meta tags. Job done. There were far less websites on the internet as well.

Over the last few years, the number of websites being created has got to epic proportions – just look at the number of results when you perform a search! Google have had to refine the way they rank websites to try to ensure they can pick the most relevent out of the 8 million results that have beem returned. That means that there are many factors at play for ranking a website, and things are constantly evolving.
Someone who performs SEO day in and day out will obviously have a much better understanding of what works for ranking well and what doesn’t, than Joe Bloggs who does his SEO when he has a spare five minutes.

If you are serious about getting good rankings for the right keywords for your website and you don’t have the time to learn in more than just basic SEO, you really should consider an SEO professional or agency to help you. Don’t expect them to tell you their secrets because there is no manual – every website is different.

Remember, just because you bought a book on SEO last week, it was written at least a year ago – one year is a long time in SEO!
To really understand SEO takes a lot time and patience – anyone can do it if they are willing to put in the time.

Firstly, apologies for the lack of blog posts lately, but hopefully I will be able to sustain more entries in the future!

Today I would like to talk about the fact that Google seem to be becoming the thing they seemed to despise in the beginning, when they famously used the slogan “Don’t be evil”.

This blog post at SEOmoz shows how Google are increasingly using personalised search to give you what it considers are results more relevant to you. Now, I suppose on the face of it, it sounds like a good idea right? Who wouldn’t want to see 10 listings all relevant to the search you’ve just made?
But the truth of the matter is that personalised search results can limit your view of the web. If Google is constantly trying to second guess what you want to see returned, we are not seeing true search listings.

Signing out of your account appears to not help, and presumably, Google is now tracking IP addresses and matching them to Google accounts and that’s how they can show personalised results when logged out of your Google account.

Personally Google, I want to see the 10 best results that match the phrase I have typed in – not results based on what I’ve typed in and combine it with my search history. I find it commendable that you want to make the internet easier to use, but I would prefer to have the choice of viewing standard or personalised results.

Hits on your website are not everything.

I worked for a company where the goal I was given was a measurement of unique visitors per day but I disagreed with the goal.

I understand the reasoning – more hits means more potential customers right? Not necessarily. Targeted traffic is much better as those visitors are more likely to be interested in your product.

If you are a new business starting out, my advice is to concentrate on the longer tail keywords as you need to use your website to either provide sales or leads. Concentrating your time on targeting generic keywords may mean a lot of time is spent on promoting your website to an audience who are not likely to buy anything from you.

Let’s take an example of a ficticious used car dealer in Essex. Would the phrase “used cars” be worth chasing? Granted it will be a massive search term, but if someone in Cornwall was looking for a used car, are they going to drive all the way to Essex just because it tops the search engine? It would be very unlikely.
So, optimise for the longer tail phrases such as “used cars in Essex”, “used cars in Colchester”, “used cars in Chelmsford”, “used ford essex”.
Think about your customers and how they will search, and based on that information you should choose your keyphrases.

A used car dealer that get’s hits to their website from all over the UK loses a massive chunk of their visitors because they are not close enough to the car dealer in Essex. Therefore the number of website hits is misleading because they will not be able to convert a lot of those visitors to customers, and by ignoring the longtail phrases that are more likely to convert to customers, the used car dealer can be losing out on potential customers.

So, in summary, it is important to understand where your website hits are coming from and whether that traffic can be proffitable to you. If it isn’t, it’s time to consider if you are targeting the right keyphrases.

How do you decide what keywords you want to target? Do you even consider whether those phrases are used by your customers to find you?

As an example, I did some work for a caravan company selling new and used caravans. When I started, the phrase preowned caravan was all over the website as it was felt that it gave a better impression than used caravan. Traffic immediately rose when I changed the phrase to used caravan as people tend to use used rather than preowned.

Who is your customer?

The first thing to consider is who your customer base is. If you are a B2B company then your customers are more likely to use the same industry terminology that you do, while if you are a B2C company, your customers are more likely to use simple search terms and possibly even slang words.

What are your search terms?

The next thing you need to do is to create a list of the search terms you want to target and then use one of the many tools available to check which terms will generate the most traffic, and more importantly, the most targeted traffic. Once you know what terms you are targeting, you can write your content to reflect that.

By not researching your keywords, you could end up targeting phrases that are barely searched and so bring very little traffic. You also run the risk of losing focus when writing your content.

To most people this doesn’t mean a thing, but over the last few days Google appears to have rolled out a Page Rank update.

Most of my sites have stayed static, while one site saw an increase, and another site saw a decrease. But does it really matter?

In a word, yes, page rank still has a bearing on the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions), but it is one of many factors. If your website is beating all the competition for your targeted search terms then your page rank is irrelevant. However, if your website has been well optimised, then it could be that your offsite SEO needs work. This is where you can use your page rank as an indicator of your offsite SEO.

If you have a page rank of 0 or 1 then you still have a lot of work to do as far as building links back your website.

I know a lot of people get hung up on their page rank, but it should be used in the same way as the Alexa rank is used – as a guide to give you an idea of the current state of your website.

Most people I talk to think that getting to the fabled number 1 position in Google leads to untold wealth!
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case!

The web is a vastly different place to the one that existed 10 years ago, when all the big online brands made their name – there was very little competition.
Of course, if you get your site to number 1 in Google, then you have the chance to dramatically increase your sales, but it will not happen if your site is not to your customer’s tastes.

Creating a website that converts visitors to customers needs to be designed and developed with your customers in mind, while also being technically correct to please those pesky search engine spiders.

If you are serious about your website, the days of throwing up a site that your friend’s son has built for £20 are gone. There is more to a website than any one aspect – a good website that works will encompass good design, good development and a good user experience which will automatically help with your SEO process.

Within the last week an argument has raged about the existence of search engine optimisers and whether they are scammers or a legitimate profession.

The argument started out as a blogger decided to make a rather wild statement accusing anyone calling themselves a search engine optimisation specialist, a scammer.

The post was really quite immature in the way it was written, but the gist of it was that if website developers did their jobs properly, then search engine optimisers wouldn’t be needed. This is actually true. If every website was built following the basic principles of web design then the search engine optimisation industry wouldn’t need to exist. But not every website has been built by a professional web developer – some small business owners build their own site, and unfortunately, not all developers understand how to make a website SEO friendly.

The very fact that there are websites out there in the big wide world web that have basic errors that the website owners don’t know about means that there is a very real need for search engine optimisers – legitimate ones anyway!

If you’ve only just started thinking about setting up your website, you may have heard the term ’seo’ bandied about.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is what can help catapult your to the top of Google if done correctly.

The SEO industry seems to have got itself a bad name because the world and his wife thinks they know what SEO entails, and the problem is that there is no one way to get to the top of Google.
Many companies come unstuck because they don’t understand what SEO entails and so they don’t want to pay a lot for it. But consider this. You may have the best looking, best working website in the whole world, but unless it gets visitors, it is a waste of money.

It is also important to remember what SEO is supposed to achieve. Asking your SEO to get you to position 1, 2 or 3 on Google is not the most important thing – targeted traffic is. The aim to generate sales or leads from your website and not massage your ego over your Google positions.

In addition, rankings tend to bounce around a bit – Google has thousands of servers and you won’t always get the same results as those servers get updated at different times.

The upshot is that you should consider how important your website will be to generate leads or sales for you, and so you should give your website a budget to match that importance.
It is also important to find an SEO you trust. I always try to make sure my clients understand why I am doing what I am doing, but it is important to remember that SEO can be a timeconsuming practice, so don’t expect miracles if you are not prepared to pay for ethical search engine optimisation.