Microsoft Yahoo Deal - No Takeover

Microsoft appears to be throwing in the towel with regards to the hostile takeover of Yahoo. In a public email transmitted to CNN and picked up by Search Engine Land too, Steve Balmer of Microsoft sent Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang the following message, ending the attempt by Microsoft to buy Yahoo to take on the number 1 search engine in the world, Google.

In a letter Saturday to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer formally withdrew the software giant’s proposal to acquire Yahoo. - CNN

As ever, Search Engine Land was quick to pick up on the news…. (more…)

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Google Page Rank Update - Tue 29 April 2008

We’re getting reports of a Google Page Rank update today, Tue 29 April 2008, happening across certain data centers. (more…)

Yup, since January 01 2008 the Hobo site has been visited by no less than 100,000 unique visitors, from all over the world. For a small business that’s no mean feat considering we have never spent one penny in traditional advertising. We’ve not bought one link, even from Yahoo (although I might one day). (more…)

If you’re aiming to agree a fixed price for the development of the website, as we do, ensure the project goes smoothly before you start, by communicating with your client at the outset.

They’ll appreciate you for it, there will be less surprises, and you may be able to start making a profit from fixed cost website design jobs again; (more…)

Simple seo is just that. Simple. You can get top ten rankings in the SERPS in many industries just by following some very basic (on the whole, onsite) seo tips, and I’m going to share with you how.

It’s worth pointing out that you *typically* have three chances to tell Google what a page is about, and how important the page is.

1. On Page - The actual text content of the page
2. On-Site - In internal links to the target page
3. Off-Site - In links to the target page from other websites

(more…)

Designing and launching a website can be a pain, even when managed correctly.

Here’s 10 reasons your site won’t be launched today….. (more…)

I loved being a web designer and developer. I love the thought process and the finished product, but there are so many other factors out-with a web designer’s control that make being a web designer in 2008, suck! (more…)

I’ve long considered Google Pagerank, and the, some great, PageRank Sculpting discussions around the net, to be akin to an idea of wealth and cashflow - i.e. should you save what little money you have, cut out the unnecessary expenditure and spread it about to make ends meet, or do you go out and get yourself a better job with more cash? - DaveN touched on the subject of nofollow scultping with Matt Cutts recently and Matt offered up a similar analogy.

Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.

Should you nofollow unimportant internal pages or nofollow external links in an effort to consolidate the Pagerank you have already accrued?

Or should you spend your time getting other quality links pointing to your site to increase the PR you have to start off with (how you get Pagerank). (more…)

Small Business Website, Design & CMS - £750

We have had a lot of small businesses ask about our very competitively priced Edit Yourself Small Business Website Design Package, so I thought I would post on the blog what you actually get for only £750 +VAT.

1. Free Domain Name or Free Domain Name Management.
2. Email Accounts For Website. You can add as many as you like (if you want us to manage your email).
3. 1 Years Free Hosting, then £100pa.
4. A Full Content Management System (CMS) so you can edit the site yourself, add pages, change structure, add text, add plugins… you can do anything with it.
5. A Design For Your Website based on open-source templates and, for instance, your logo.
6. Latest news, Newlsetter & RSS Feeds & Subscription.
7. A seo-friendly website design and website structure.
8. Basic Ad Hoc Optimisation Based on a few select keywords YOU supply.
9. We’ll get you listed in Yahoo, MSN and Google.
10. We will supply a users guide to the CMS that we deliver.
11. We’ll launch the website with your text and images in place, then you take it from there, with our continued support if you wish.

This small business website design package is designed to give you a fully functional website you own and control 100%, an editable website where you can easily publish and unpublish pages and news. We’re a seo company, so we know how to build websites that search engines like. (more…)

After ‘winning’ the regional (Scotland) Top SEO Company competition held by NorthSouthMedia last year, it appears we have been voted the 4th best seo company in the UK (2nd month in a row), by top SEOs.

Shaun doesn’t put much truck in such awards, especially ones that don’t list him first, but it’s better than being ignored, or on a crap seo company list.

Shaun’s more excited by the recent conference speaking we did at the Irish IWTC and is especially excited at presenting at the upcoming SEOClass in Edinburgh in June 2008. I am considering going, but not sure if I could put up with two whole days of ninja seo geek fights!

It must be awards season because this SEO company been put forward for and/or asked to enter a number of awards in the few weeks, too. (more…)

As if we need any affirmation that linking to “bad neighbourhoods” can cause your rankings in Google to nosedive, but here’s an interesting quote from the Official Google Webmaster Blog ;

Q: I’ve cleaned it up, but will Google penalize me if the hacker linked to any bad neighborhoods?
A: We’ll try not to. We’re pretty good at making sure good sites don’t get penalized by actions of hackers and spammers. To be safe, completely remove any links the hackers may have added.

(more…)

I confess I’ve not been that much of a fan of article syndication the last couple of years. Apart for reputation management exercises and for a bit of PR for smaller sites, I’ve learned to live without it. I still think the place for your articles should be on your own blog, on the whole, to attract traffic and links.

But I’ve always found article syndication useful for finding the odd trusted site willing to link to your content, albeit on a more trusted domain than your own. (more…)

Wordpress Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin chewed my site in Google in the worst possible way! Invisibly! It’s currently causing a major indexing problem for Googlebot when indexing this site:

Update - There is now a fix, apparently at Bloke.

(more…)

I took a break from blogging in March to focus on some of the projects we’ve been lucky to land recently, but even so, we had more visitors to this blog in the first three months of 2008 than we did the whole of last year (nearly 80,000 visitors).

For a small company like us, that’s a lot. Perhaps I should write less (more…)

SEO Class Edinburgh, Scotland

• Monday, June 23, 2008
• Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I will be presenting a seo workshop at the two-day session SEO Class Edinburgh, now run by Jim Boykin’s We Build Pages and Internet Marketing Ninjas. Guaranteed, if you’re looking to attend the best seo training classes in Scotland this year, this will be it.

In a great lineup you’ll also hear;

• Ammon Johns (Black Knight) independent marketing consultant and search marketing expert (currently at Fresh Egg).
• Barry Lloyd, founder and CEO of MakeMeTop, and search marketing expert.
• Brian Turner (iBrian) Director of Britecorp, Ltd., and search engine optimization expert.
• Jim Boykin, President and CEO of We Build Pages and link building expert.

These presentations will feature as part of Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninja program. (more…)

The answer is a resounding no!

Taking the analogy of a Horse Race, even if you know where the finish line is, even if you have spent ages examining the competition, and even if you have ‘fixed’ the race so that every other jockey is in on it……what if happens if your horse falls at the second last fence? What happens if it breaks a leg? What happens if it drops dead? What happens if another faster horse enters the race at the last minute from left-field? You’re No2.

And if you’re caught cheating - you won’t even be allowed to race.

Google is like a horse race, with hundreds of potential participants. It’s a horse race where; (more…)

So readers of the blog will know that Michael and I were invited to attend and speak about SEO (search engine optimisation) at the Irish IWTC Conference in Dublin on Friday 29 March 2008, and we really enjoyed ourselves - at the conference and during the following 12 hours (until 5AM) we spent in the Dublin Temple Bar area doing… er… research on the national tipple
A big thanks to Martha Rotter at Microsoft Ireland for the invite and to Director Barry Alistair of IrishDev.com (with a special shout out to Support Services Manager Patricia McGill who organised things for us when we got to Ireland). My only regret was that we couldn’t attend earlier sessions in the week on subjects like web accessibility and blogging, both of which I have a keen interest in. (more…)

I asked some of the world’s seo people and bloggers what they thought about Keyword Density after talking privately with;

(more…)

Today I’m seeing new Google Sitelinks for a lot of my clients, and indeed the Hobo Web site. (more…)

Do you spend hours looking at your site, your client sites, searching the internet for new resources and tools to give you that ‘missing insight’, reading the latest blogs to see if you’re *finally* going to get a bit of useful information to give you a lead on the competition? (more…)

After a busy year this obsessive Search Marketer kicks back at the amazing T In The Park, Scotland’s biggest and best music festival.

When do t in the park tickets go on sale to the public in 2008?

The line up for T in the Park 2008 will be announced to the world on Friday 15th February with tickets going on sale on Saturday 16th February at 9am. (more…)

A round up of some the better seo articles on the net today. (more…)

So after my recent posts weren’t appearing immediately in Google’s main web search, I thought I’d post a quick article just to test if my latest article would indeed appear in minutes as was the case up until the beginning of February 2008. Matt Cutts confirmed some time ago this is how Google was working these days. (more…)

So after months of posting information on this blog that instantly appeared in the Google serps, it has transpired this week that this blog no longer seems capable of injecting fresh content directly into Google. I don’t normally publish sensational headlines but it is a very clear phenomenon I am witnessing. I don’t expect this post to appear but perhaps Google will (hopefully) embarrass me and prove me incorrect in my analysis….
*** Edit - We ll it got in a lot faster than my last post, a couple of hours I think. Will see what happens tomorrow or Monday with a fresh post *****

(more…)

Hobo has been invited to speak SEO at the Microsoft sponsored IrishDev.com IWTC conference in Dublin, Ireland on February 29th 2008 from 13:30pm.

In a 75 minute presentation, I’ll probably bring the audience up to speed with the simple and the complicated of SEO (search engine optimisation) including good content, search engine discovery, local search, keyword optimisation, site authority and site architecture optimisation. I might even mention Google Pagerank, Matt Cutts and Paid Links. (more…)

Google has been a joy to work with recently but over the last few days I’ve spotted a disappointing trend, at least with this seo blog and one other I publish on.

After months of posting original content virtually directly into Google via the Hobo Wordpress blog (on average appearing in Google SERPS 2-9 minutes after I published), it seems it just hasn’t been the case especially the last couple of days. (more…)

Quoted by Times Magazine, quoted in The Sunday Times recently, a shameless linkwhore, a self publicist with a sharp wit with an online avatar the Communist Party would be happy with, Lyndon Antcliff (AKA Lyndoman of Cornwall SEO) is one of the best linkbaiters and SM players in the UK (although he’ll probably consider that an insult).

He was an obvious choice when I wanted to pick somebody’s brain about this thing called Linkbait.

Everybody in the search marketing industry knows the value of quality links to your website. Links to your site from other sites boosts traffic, brand awareness and rankings in search engines (especially Google) and while I’m far more comfortable with the idea of blog spamming Ninja Linkbuilding to appropriate links, I’ve been toying recently with linkbait - the art of creating content on your site that other sites will link to - naturally. (more…)

I’m continuing to study up a bit on the new version of HTML from the W3C - HTML 5. Here’s some research what a page written in HTML 4 will look like rewritten in the new HTML 5.

The most obvious question to ask is;

what are the main differences between HTML 5 & HTML 4?

For example, visualise a simple blog front page with a header at the top, a footer at the bottom, a couple of entries, a navigation section, and a sidebar, as shown in the following code; (more…)

Now anybody with a sense of humour will find this funny. Recently (after a bit of fun me and Tim Nash had with a hapless link-spammer) I highlighted a story I found funny, about outing an ‘apparently’ ‘numpty-like’ seo company. As a result of this, here’s the SERP for ‘clueless numpties‘ in Google; (more…)

It amazes me more people don’t use the search engine friendly 301 Redirect to capture top positions, especially when they control satellite sites for particular keywords, that rank well, or even are in the top ten serps.

I see satellite sites all the time ranking for good keywords, but the actual satellite sites themselves are often garbage and usually outdated - sometimes not exactly a compliment to the main brand site.

(more…)

** Edit - We just updated this article here at What Is The Difference between HTML 5 & HTML 4?

Doing a bit of research on the new flavour of HTML from the W3C - HTML 5. One of the most visible differences to a coder is the lack of one time necessary DIVS in the style of a page. Yup, that’s right, no more need for CSS DIVS for the CSS web designer.

DIVS will still be ‘there’ for the css designer to use, but new elements added to the framework It looks so much cleaner, here’s an example for a web page in HTML 5; (more…)

Tim Nash wrote a nice post about just how most (if not all) search engines can’t tell the difference between (for instance) Apple, Apple and Apple.

Of course, Google will try and use assistive techniques such as looking at other words on the page, or in text links pointing to the page, that might help it like Mac, Malus Domestica or The Beatles, but you can see from this paragraph, it’s easy to confuse the Googlebot through word sense disambiguation. (more…)

With the rise of the social media over the last couple of years, everybody’s thirsty for the latest advice or tips to get one-up on the competition, but some of the ‘advice’ I rely on, on a day to day basis, when it comes to seo and website design, is years old. It’s still in electronic form. It works. It’s aged well and with a bit of experience you can learn what’s still very relevant. It’s never let me down any way.

Even though the articles might be older than your kids, it’s guaranteed you can still learn a whole lot - an awful lot in fact - from the old sources.

For instance - Want To Build A Successful, Usable Website that ranks well in Google?

Surely, the internet being such a fast moving maelstrom that it is, any such advice would be so outdated to make it obsolete? (more…)

I was with a potential customer (now a client) the other day and they had been cold called by a sales rep from another search engine optimisation company.

The same customer also recalled a time when a seo tuned up on his business doorstop and cohersed him next door for a presentation the guy was giving saying there was space for him. The presentation consisted of the rep hailing the need for seo, without giving the audience any help whatsoever with their own search engine marketing, saying to tell them, he’d need to ‘kill them’. (more…)

As a crap seo company, we’re not passionate about seo. We don’t have staff that stay up at night looking at a site in Google SERPS wondering ‘why’. Our passion is sales. Making money selling a service that at first, can be quite intangible, and lastly, has no real benefit in Google because frankly, it’s 1999 seo.

Why do we do SEO? We want your money! That’s why we do it. (more…)

Don’t Be First to Stumble, Digg, Sphinn or Mixx Even Your Best Content - Wouldn’t you rather an actual power user ‘Stumbled’ or Dugg your page? Power users are the lifeblood of these social networks and are always on the lookout for quality content and tidbits of interest. Power users control the traffic at these social media networks. If a social media power user discovers your site, you get a lot of brand building traffic. If you do it, you probably won’t, and your name will be sh*t in these networks. (more…)

It’s a sad fact that, even in 2008, it’s widespread and normal practice to commission and develop a website design that may discriminate against those with disabilities - in the UK at least.

I, along with many others, certainly had high hopes that PAS (Publicly Available Specification) 78 would have done a lot more to raise the issue of accessible website design.

It’s clear it’s not penetrated the larger population as a whole, because no client has ever asked me to build a site to PAS 78 recommended standards. It is always me that raises the issue with them. More About Accessible Website Design In The UK

Project: Online Reputation Assassination……Cancelled. Never ever, ever spam a seo interview. (more…)

The awards season is (nearly) over. The good behaviour and backslapping is over….. it’s time to get back to what we do best. Spamming Google and Link-Bait Fights.

I don’t normally comment on this sort of thing…..

Read More About SEO Meltdown Day

*** Edit - In the spirit of Good Karma I accepted an apology from the erstwhile ’spammer’ / padouan ninja linkbuilder. As promised I removed the seo company’s name from this post to give him back his Google listings and save his online reputation. ***

A Rant? I must be reformed. Not only have I stopped spamming blogs I have no interest in, just for link-juice, now I am outing those who still do.

Yes, I’ve dropped by sites I’ve targeted specifically for a link. Isn’t that how every link-builder starts? I normally have quite a threshold for this sort of crap innovative linkbuilding, as I’m a forgiving ex-comment-spammer, but come off it ***** SEO Services, India, this commenting did not impress. And I’ve seen better from the automatic spam Akismet and Spam Karma nuke.

Perhaps it was because I was with a client today, telling them how to play nice in the blogosphere, what i’ve learned about how to join in and get involved in an online community, when these email notifications started alerting me to your shady ninja linkbuilding. It was quite funny actually. Basically this was a timely and clear example how NOT to get links from related sites. Well themed, poorly actioned, and punished in a way that hurts.

Here’s what I saw in my comments moderation panel today; (more…)

Google Page Rank Update Confirmation - January 2008 - See also PR Update April 2008

It’s clear there has been another Google Page Rank Update over the last few days, with pages on the Hobo site being updated. The cut - off for the last pages to acquire Page Rank seems to be the last week in December 2007. I don’t normally agree a PR update is in progress until I see it on sites I monitor - and it is clearly visible.

I certainly don’t give two hoots about Google PR these days, and neither should you, either. It’s ‘an indication’ of the quality of a site some time ago, but there are better indicators.

Read More About Google PR

It’s been an interesting 2008 so far. Recent Hobo blog posts proved to be popular in the search marketing world, and a secondary benefit was that all of a sudden this site was was getting ‘Stumbled‘ (it is still).

As a one time prolific ‘link-whore’, of course I had heard of StumbleUpon, used it, enjoyed it and I think abused it in the very early days (isn’t that what every seo is supposed to a newly popular network?) but it didn’t hold my interest as much as my first love, Google. I did always like the Toolbar, though. As that I have thousands of visitors currently stumbling the Hobo blog, I wanted to know more about this swarming visitor phenomenon, and what to do with all those peepers on my site.

I surmised, perhaps there was a Stumbleupon Guru, willing to let me assimilate all his knowledge, (much in the same way I successfully assimilated all of Jim Boykin’s link-building nous and all of Sebastian’s Robot’s txt knowledge recently) and educate me in the art of Stumbling.

Only one guy sprung to mind. That guy with the friendly Avatar…. Tim Nash, of Venture Skills! His reply to my Sylar-like approach was…..

“Sure what would you like to know ”

This interview would be easy and save me a lot of time…. Read The Tim Nash Interview

StumbleUpon Frenzy Rattles Our Website!

A few of the articles on this site have proved popular in the search marketing industry network this week, the result being a lot of traffic to our seo blog. (more…)

Hobo - Right Sebastian! What do you think you are doing calling me out on a slight bit of “misinformation” on a post I made for a bit of branding. Just who do you think you are spamming my content with useful, original and interesting content?

Don’t you realize that @ 1,500 stumblers and Twitters visited my site as a result of this slapping?? You trying to discredit me?

Sebastian - Howdy Shaun, - I’m so sorry that I discredited you, that was really not my intention. (more…)

My recent post on how SEO experts started their authority seo blogs proved popular when submitted to Sphinn by Marty at Aimclear (thanks!) and came at a time where frankly I was preparing to give up blogging for a short time to get on with work! (more…)

Congratulations to veteran link-building specialist Jim Boykin, who I interviewed recently for the Hobo blog, (more…)

Ladies and Gentlemen of the SEO/SEM/SMO class of 2008

Add Good Content

Read More About Good Content

HA!

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

You know a lot of poeple type mispellings into Goolge - it is a source of traffic - and in order to rank for these common mis-spellings you’ve got to have them on your pqae or in links pionting to your page. Seemtmios it’s good to scerw things up, but hardly professional search engine optimizaion.

(more…)

I thought I would elaborate on my thinking about seo “heat” and try to unify how I visualise seo and the art of search engine optimization. Disclaimer: Not How Google Works, More How I Visualise & Explain SEO To Prevent Madness. It’s based on observations I’ve made over the last few years. What’s this all got to do with Viagra? You’ll find out.

Visualizing Neighbourhood “Heat”

All the major search engines rely on links to tell them about sites and pages and to help them determine what a site is about.

Yes, content will always be king (especially in the future) but without links, content can be a mute point.

You can have the best content in the world, but if you don’t have links pointing to it from other sites, it may lose out to better optimized content on ‘hotter’ sites, even if that content is of poorer quality.

To properly visualise this “seo heat” analogy, you’ve got to accept success in search engines for competitive terms is down to links - the number of links, the number of right links, the number of ‘hot’ links.

Read More About This Heat Analogy

When considering buying seo services, be careful. We may have been voted one of the best seo companies in Scotland on results across the 3 major search engines but nobody at Hobo or any of the other seo companies anywhere in the world ‘knows conclusively how Google works‘.

Consider this quote from a Google employee; (more…)