SEO Blog

The expected launch day for the Hobo SEO Dashboard is end of April 2024. Register your interest for the Hobo SEO Dashboard Presale by adding your email. Presale members typically can expect 25-50% (50% for Very Early Birds) discounts, and then I do not discount any product after the Presale.

QUOTE: “The system that Shaun has created is simply superb. The level of information is fantastic, but the way it is organised quickly highlights areas of priority and provides genuinely actionable insights. This, and the fact that the information is coming directly from Google, has provided me with the confidence to progress a number of […]

Hobo SF Multi-Site for Google Sheets is a complete SEO auditing system built in Google Sheets, that uses Screaming Frog files to prioritise your web development tasks and predict your budget spend and estimated timescales. It’s perfect for web development teams to manage multiple sites, using Screaming Frog. Hobo SF for Google Sheets costs only […]

In this free SEO course for beginners and professionals alike, I take you through exactly what you need to focus on to improve your traffic numbers from Google through search engine optimization best practices.

Register your interest for the Hobo SC (Search Console) for Google Sheets Presale. The Hobo SC (Search Console) for Google Sheets is a complete SEO Auditing suite directly in Google Sheets. Expected Launch-Date – March 2024 Want to outsource your SEO reporting? Want to avoid the hassle of self-managing your website reports? Check out Hobo […]

Screaming Frog is my favourite website development tool. It’s the best website crawler available at the cost, in my opinion, at least. The tricky part of working with Screaming Frog (which you will have purchased separately) is just managing the files it produces, and prioritising that list in a time-efficient manner. Hobo SF for Google […]

Meet the Hobo SEO Checklist: Public version (free). Pro version with training course (£49). Premium (£180).

The Premium SEO checklist is a collection of SEO checklists available online through Google Sheets you can purchase.

This tutorial is available for you to access as a free checklist in Google Sheets.

Chatgpt cant do a lot of things you hear about on Social Media. Chatgpt is effectively emulating the function you think it is doing. It isn’t counting those words you are writing, it isn’t spell-checking your writing, it isn’t grammar-checking your copy. It cant check your website’s SEO (search engine optimisation), and it cannot SEO your website. If you use Ai to produce sloppy content, Google will have an algorithm cooking for you.

This guide provides a beginners guide to learning SEO, starting with the basics.

Learn YouTube SEO with this free guide. Learn about keyword research, video optimisation, video promotion, and more. Boost your YouTube rankings today.

This simple step-by-step tutorial simplifies SEO for beginners, covering the basics from keyword research to link building and rank monitoring.

This guide provides an introduction to SEO, its importance, and how it can help businesses increase their online visibility and reach their target audience. It covers the basics of SEO, including keyword research, on-page optimisation, and link building

Discover the best SEO tools that can help optimise your website. From keyword research to backlink analysis, these tools are essential for improving visibility and traffic.

Improve your website’s user experience by understanding and avoiding intrusive interstitials and dialogs. This guide provides insights into creating unintrusive dialogs, using banners effectively, and avoiding common pitfalls.

This guide provides insights into Google’s page experience, covering aspects like Core Web Vitals, secure page delivery, mobile-friendly design, and ad placement. Learn how to evaluate your site and deliver a good page experience.

Explore the best search engines of 2023. From privacy-focused platforms to those offering rewards programs, discover a range of options tailored to meet your specific search needs.

The free SEO checklist is a 100+ point reference of Google’s own recommendations on how to rank your site on Google. If you ignore these defacto rules, you are demoted in Google search. You do not recover past traffic levels until you address these quality issues on your site, and you certainly do not want to introduce any of these website quality issues to your site.

Keep ALT Attribute text on web pages to between 80-125 characters maximum for accessibility purposes. Expect Google to count a maximum of 16 words (approximately 125+ characters) as part of your ALT text that will be a signal used to rank your page for a relevant query.

If you are a website manager or business owner who wants to check if your website is listed in Google or find out how to submit your website to Google this article is for you.

If you are an SEO, a website developer, a content manager, or a designer looking for an SEO checklist for headings, here is a checklist straight from Google webmaster guidelines. This checklist takes you through the basics of using headings in your content.

Here are some notes I have collected for those optimising a website built with Javascript and the challenges with Javascript in terms of search engine optimisation.

Check how your site performs on the most popular mobile, desktop and tablet internet browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Samsung Internet, UC Browser, Opera, IE, Edge

This article discusses modern link-building tactics and strategies. It is focused on the beginner who wants to understand the benefits and risks of link-building. This article focuses on legitimate link-building tacts and strategies, not black-hat link-building tactics.

This article provides an overview of browser statistics and also best practices for designing websites for mobile and desktop screens. It is intended for web designers and developers who want to create responsive, user-friendly websites that perform well across different devices and screen resolutions.

This is a 300-point in-depth SEO checklist for in-house or outsourced website developers and managers (with limited technical jargon) on reviewing your website to ensure it meets Google Search Quality Evaluator ratings.

If you are a website owner, marketer, or developer learning about the benefits of a fast website, this article is for you. This article investigates the latest research and makes a case for why you should focus on improving your website download times.

This is an in-depth SEO checklist for in-house or outsourced website developers and managers (with limited technical jargon) on managing video SEO (search engine optimisation) on a website. This professional-level checklist goes beyond the standard video SEO advice.  It includes many recommendations from Google itself on how to manage video on your web pages to […]

This professional-level checklist goes beyond the standard international SEO (search engine optimisation) advice.  It includes many recommendations from Google itself on how to manage multi-regional and multilingual sites in Google Search.

This article discusses optimising internal links on your website to maximise indexation and ranking in Google.

The SEO Checklist in Excel is an excel spreadsheet to help you manage your SEO (search engine optimisation) project from both a site-wide level and a page-level perspective.

The latest version of Hobo Premium SEO Checklist in Google Sheets with OpenAi (the emerging technology behind ChatGpt) integration is now configured with some automation to save you time analysing pages. This Key Page checklist is a tool for you to quickly analyse any web page to guidelines Google has set out for webmasters to follow.

On July 1, 2023, older Google Analytics properties will stop processing new hits for your website. You must upgrade to Analytics 4 before this date; the sooner, the better. Everything you need to migrate to Analytics 4 before the deadline is included in this checklist.

If you are the website developer, manager or owner of an online store looking to improve Google traffic to it, the Hobo Google SEO checklist for eCommerce stores is made for you.

If you are a website developer, SEO (search engine optimiser) or website manager and you need a Technical SEO audit checklist for your website, look no further. This SEO audit checklist is ideal for webmasters tasked with managing an SEO auditing project.

This is a clear example of the length of time it takes sometimes to achieve number 1 rankings on Google. John Mueller from Google has been saying this for a long time. SEO (search engine optimisation) takes time. QUOTE: “Making significant quality changes across a site takes time to be picked up & reflected in […]

This is an SEO checklist for web page copy editors & copywriters (with no technical jargon).

SEO copywriting is the art of writing high-quality content for search engines on-page in copy, in page titles, meta descriptions, SERP snippets and SERP featured snippets. It is not about keyword stuffing text.

This is also known as keyword cannibalisation.

If you are a developer new to SEO (search engine optimisation) and looking for the best SEO tools you can use to optimise your website, this article is for you. This article lists a number of SEO tools you as a beginner can instantly derive value from.

QUOTE: “We’ve been working with HOBO for around 2 years now, and in that time the performance of our site has gone from strength to strength – considerably outstripping our expectations. They have provided timely, considered and expert advice which has always proved beneficial, and have also been proactive in suggesting new tactics and strategies […]

QUOTE: “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors…” Google SEO Starter Guide, 2021 SEO (search engine optimisation) is modifications to a web page that help make a page more relevant to a query. Assuming you “only publish high-quality 100% unique content to your site” then […]

This paid-for SEO checklist in Google sheets is designed to be all website managers need to edit a mobile website to align with Google’s webmaster guidelines and so rank optimally in Google.

This is a website migration SEO checklist for in-house or outsourced website managers, designers, and developers to manage the migration process. The professional website migration SEO checklist is now available as part of the Hobo SEO Premium SEO checklist.

This paid-for SEO checklist in Google sheets is designed to be all website managers need to edit a Hotel website to align with Google’s webmaster guidelines and so rank optimally in Google. Know that if you do not follow these guidelines, your website is demoted in Google search results.

I can help you develop an SEO strategy and manage your SEO team as they implement it. Contact me for more information.

Students of Google SEO can download the Hobo Web free SEO Ebook.

Google recommends you ‘qualify outbound links’ using the link attribute ‘nofollow’: Use rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” for paid links. Use rel=”ugc” or rel=”nofollow” for user generated content links. Use nofollow on widgets, themes and infographic links. Don’t use nofollow on every external link on your website. Don’t use nofollow on internal links.

Return a 404 if the product is permanently out of stock. Return a 200 if the product is temporarily out of stock. Return a 301 to equivalent content if the product is expired but you have reason to preserve SEO Benefits.

Make sure Google can crawl your website, index and rank all your primary pages by only serving Googlebot high-quality, user friendly and fast loading pages to index.

Many SEO experts have agreed for over a decade there is no single best keyword density to rank high in Google or Bing. Optimal keyword density differs from page to page, phrase to phrase. Write naturally and include the keyword phrase once or twice on-page. Avoid demotion in Google by avoiding repeating keyword phrases in text content. Focus on creating high-quality engaging content instead.

This is a beginners guide to writing effective meta tags for Google SEO. By Shaun Anderson, an author with 20 years experience of Google SEO.

QUOTE: “Keyword Stuffed” Main Content Pages may be created to lure search engines and users by repeating keywords over and over again, sometimes in unnatural and unhelpful ways. Such pages are created using words likely to be contained in queries issued by users. Keyword stuffing can range from mildly annoying to users, to complete gibberish. Pages created with the intent of luring search engines and users, rather than providing meaningful MC to help users, should be rated Lowest.” Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines 2017

How to do an seo audit quickly and simply with SEMRush.

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO. But do you know what makes it so significant? Or how to do it? Or which tools to use? This post is a guide for beginners.

Only add unique hand-written content to your web pages. Don’t add content to your pages that is found verbatim on other pages on the web. Do not ‘spin’ text on pages on your site. Don’t create thin-pages with little value add to users. Implement the rel=”canonical” link element on all pages.

A review and walkthrough of a new website crawler tool that helps you manage your seo efforts.

For students of SEO, a collection of my notes on potential Google ranking factors and quality rating signals.

Is Google censoring autocomplete suggestions for Hillary Clinton?

I’ve focused on surfacing the top advertising agency sites in the world, based on search engine marketing and social media signals – the top ad agencies in the world based on SEO performance.

Many new into SEO today think old school seo was spam. Today’s narrative encourages them to think like that. I do miss that old style seo which – of course – was a lot simpler to deploy. I miss the cavalier approach to seo, and the quick results to be had from it. There was fun to […]

Hobo got talked about on the front page of Reddit yesterday. Which was nice. I try to answer some questions in this post.

If you are a WordPress site owner, designer, or developer looking to maximize the number of leads from your website using pop-ups, this plugin is for you.

Google probably uses an updated version of Pagerank like the reasonable surfer and Trusted Seeds approach. Pagerank is a measure of the popularity of a resource on the web. The simple, most practical answer to increasing Google Pagerank is to get prominent, natural links on authoritative websites in your niche.

You CAN NO LONGER display and export more than 5000 rows in Google Analytics. You used to be able to, using the hack I list below: When you select 5000 rows you will have a URL like this https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en-GB&pli=1#report/trafficsources-organic/a12346448w43910105p43958149/%3F_u.date00%3D20110101%26_u.date01%3D20130410%26explorer-table.plotKeys%3D%5B%5D%26explorer-table.rowStart%3D0%26explorer-table.rowCount%3D5000/ …once you could just change that last number from 5000 at the end of that URL […]

Worried about the new EU Privacy directive, cookies and what it means for Google Analytics on your website? There’s been some new clarification from the UK Government. “We talked about cookies (how could we not?) but we didn’t get hung up on them – other relevant technologies e.g. HTML5 Local Storage and web beacons came up […]

You’ll need: To follow Google Webmaster SEO Quality Guidelines. A website reputation for publishing original, useful and relevant content. A satisfying user-friendly page experience for visitors from search. A fast, responsive, easy-to-edit mobile-friendly website. A sensible user-friendly website architecture. High-quality prominent natural links from other websites.

Politician & MP for Inverclyde David Cairns recently visited the Hobo offices for a few hours, and during that time I pointed out to him something called Twitter. Since then, I see him in my stream clearly engaging with folks via his Twitter account, so I asked him a few questions about Social Media’s impact […]

How do you run a blog to get the most SEO benefit? I explore the basics of it in this blogging guide for beginners.

AS seen in Smashing Magazine! A free web design an development project plan and checklist for designers and clients.

Did Google find Atlantis? It’s being reported around the web today that Google Earth has found Atlantis :) Here’s the co-ordinates to find Atlantis with Google Earth; coordinates: 31 15’15.53N, 24 15’30.53W (600 miles west of Morocco, deep in the Atlantic Ocean) The man from the sun says yes but the man from Google says […]

1. Figure Out What You Want To Get Out Of Social Media. 2. Create Your Profiles. 3. Learn The Community Rules. 4. Become An Active Part Of That Community. Enjoy It.

A robots.txt file is a file on your webserver used to control bots like Googlebot, Google’s web crawler. You can use it to block Google and Bing from crawling parts of your site.

If you are serious about organic search engine optimisation, forget about using, or optimising frames and read up on the latest guidelines for SEO.

Do not use access keys. The access key attribute, introduced in HTML4.0, is intended to provide keyboard shortcuts in that they provide an alternative form of navigation. This addition allows users with limited physical capabilities to navigate the organisation’s website more easily. There are some drawbacks with website access keys, for example: functionality depends on […]

How to design your website for users with disabilities.

No. While Google recommends we use W3C validation, Google doesn’t rank valid html and css pages above invalid pages. If Google can crawl and render a page Google will rank the page appropriately based on how relevant it is to the query. Invalid HTML can on the other hand can cause search engines problems.