I thought it would be cool to track some of the better group seo interviews on the web. It’s useful to check out what experienced seo think of different seo techniques and factors - and examine where disagreement lies and why! (more…)

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So Joomla week ends on the Hobo blog, and we’ve created a beginners guide to Joomla SEO.

If you’re creating a Joomla site, apart from creating useful content, intelligent website structure and getting links to your site with your primary keywords in them, consider these 7 on-page / on-site seo tips for Joomla; (more…)

Joomla Duplicate Content Issue

Joomla, like most if not all content management systems, creates duplicate content management issues. The sh404sef plugin alleviates some of these issues, but not all. (more…)

Insert H1 Tags In Joomla

There’s no factual based evidence that I know of (that springs to mind) that conclusively proves H1 headings on pages, or even H1-H6 headings have any benefits to high ranking in Google.

However, it is semantically correct to have one H1 on your page, the W3C says so. That’s why I like them, and I surmise that if your page doesn’t upset other Google filters first, H1 tags are useful and may well carry some positive weight in terms of page relevance; (more…)

Joomla SEO Tip - Home Page Title In 2 Mins

Your home page title tag is one of the most important title tags on your site. By default, Joomla displays the site name you specify in the config which isn’t that Google friendly, because it’s good to get your important keywords in your home page title. (more…)

OK so you have a Joomla site, your server has got .Htaccess support, you have turned on Search Engine Friendly URLS (SEF) and you’ve successfully installed and activated sh404sef so you can start automatically converting dynamically generated urls into something that is more ‘readable’. (more…)

sh404SEF is one of the best Joomla SEO plugins I have used. Make Joomla SEO friendly with this easy to install and use plugin. It’s simple to setup if you are familiar with Joomla, htaccess, and have a basic knowledge of seo. (more…)

Joomla sh404SEF Component

The sh404SEF Plugin makes Joomla SEO easy. I’ll be posting some simple Joomla seo tips to make Joomla sites work better in Google.

First up - download and install the Joomla sh404SEF Plugin (or rather ‘Component’) by siliana.com.

You can read what others say about this plugin on the Joomla forum, and the instructions to get working are printed below. (more…)

Joomla is a fantastic content management system that allows you to do, well, just about anything with your website - that’s why it is one of our CMS of choice for new clients. But when you install Joomla, search engine friendly URLs are not on by default, you need to configure it. (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

We used the Hobo blog to generate 78,452 unique visitors to this site in 2007, not bad considering we don’t pay for any links or advertising, in any shape or form, and generally we simply don’t have the resources to blog more. The vast majority of visits are from targeted sources, too.

Actually, 2008 for us will involve shorter blog posts (on the whole), and less blogging from us. It’s not because blogging doesn’t bring the visitors in. It’s the opposite. We’ve got to much work we have to get on with.

The following posts on the Hobo SEO Blog are examples of what we use our Wordpress powered blog to do, and my favourite posts.

Read more about the best Hobo posts in 2007

I’m a great fan of experienced seos like…. (more…)

I’m chuffed to reveal the first Hobo SEO UK Interview and bring the world news of Jim’s new venture! Look out SEOmoz, here comes the amazing Internet Marketing Ninja’s!

(more…)

My link structures are usually very simple - no site map needed. Sometimes it’s easy to spot pages Google doesn’t like and decides not to index. What did I do to get a page back into the Google index after I spotted it was obviously banned / filtered / penalised? (more…)

What is the SEO Magic Bullet? What is the big secret in SEO? How can you deliver it to achieve top number 1 rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN?

Many people ask me this one and there’s a simple answer. (more…)

Only a short post this week, and actually a follow up to last weeks SEO Tuesday, as a lot of that was about getting into Google, Yahoo and MSN.

How Do I Check If My Site Is In Google?

Just type your website address in the Google search box. If Google knows about your site, it will tell you. If your website doesn’t come up as a result, you need to submit your site to Google. Another way to check if a page is in either of the search engines is to lift a piece of unique text from the page, put it in a search “in quotes”. Your page should come up.

How Do You Submit A Site To Search Engines? (more…)

After looking through my Google Analytics I thought it would be useful to ensure visitors to the Hobo site got the answers they were looking for (in case individual posts didn’t quite deliver). According to our web stats, we have hundreds of visitors visiting the site looking to find out “how to” search engine optimize, so hopefully this is useful.

I also wanted a reason to tell my MD “sorry I can’t do that I need to blog today” so I thought a regular “How To” on a Tuesday was apt. So, based on analytics keyword data, typically starting with “how to” here goes. (remember you can also subscribe to this post by putting your email address in the subscribe box on this page and the Hobo posts can be delivered, infrequently, direct to your email address).

The SEO How To….. Tuesday (more…)

The last time there was a major network change in Google PR was April 2007. This is the longest we’ve ever had to wait to see the PR of a page. Traditionally it was 4 times a year, but over the past few year Google PR came to represent very little to do with the actual quality of a page. Many said it was broken or irrelevant, at least highly inaccurate.

Google PageRank Update is finally underway for the rest of us, and as I thought, it seems Google has brought a bit more “accuracy” to the green pixels with the latest update, as far as I can see. And before you start worrying, for the last few years, PR has been pure vanity, as I’ve said in many posts. It was not an accurate reflection of the quality of a site or the amount of visitors to a site.

Of course Google may be trying to change the whole perception of this much misunderstood metric. Give it back some respect. The Google Page Rank Update seems to include pages up to and including the 2 OCT 2007.

It’s very clear that, even if PR is on it’s last legs, it was still one of the reasons Google became the dominant force on the web, and still a very useful tool in sending messages to site owners about things Google frowns upon (interlinking, paid links). I think a few people have been suckered in to screaming it was a direct assault on only paid links (so often crap quality links) - it was clearly intended to be seen in this way by Google, but I don’t know who was using who in the end! (more…)

Planning on launching a new site? But you won’t have it ready for months? STOP!

The first thing you should do is let the search engines know about your new website, especially if it won’t be ready to launch for months yet. (more…)

So you’ve optimised the page beyond belief. It’s got a thousand decent links to it and a couple of very decent links. It’s very well linked to via your internal link structure. It’s linked to from your home page, it’s got a nice H1 tag, a good page title element, a unique meta description, original content, it doesn’t link out to any site other than sites that already Google trusts enough to rank no1 for certain terms….hell, it even used to be on the first page of Google for the chosen term out of 850 million results. It’s a Page Rank 6, it’s also linked to from a couple of other sites in the top pages in Google serps for the competing term.

Rankings improve, site-wide, for many different terms. The domain it’s on is a PR 7, spidered very frequently by Google. It seems solid, trusted and stable.

So why the hell, for the last month, is the page on the 13th page of the results for the key phrase in Google - ie Land Of Internet Obscurity?

That’s what we were wondering, when faced with the above situation. Something had to be wrong, but what could it be? The page was semantically correct, and cached, and should be ageing well. After a few weeks pondering the result every now and again, when I had the time (what a commodity!) I decided to give it a bit of closer inspection.

And there it was. (more…)

Only a short post this time, but perhaps one of the most valuable on this website. Fact - You don’t need to pay to get into search engines. (more…)

We recently tested “how many keywords will Google read in the title tag / element?” using our simple seo mythbuster test (number 2 in the series). And here’s the results, which are quite surprising.

First - here’s the test title tag we tried to get Google to swallow. And it did. All of it. Even though it was a bit spammy; (more…)

Which 5 sites do you visit every day to help you improve traffic to your site? Here’s mine: (more…)

SEO MythBuster Test #2 - The Title element

How many words will Google read of your title tag or Everything You ever Wanted To Know About The Title Element & SEO?

Why am I bothering to test this? Sometimes I ask myself that….but actually the title tag is perhaps one of the single most important elements you have under your control that could affect your ranking in Google, Yahoo and MSN. So my thinking is, the more knowledge I have about this “tag”, the better. I’m just choosing to share this bit of research with everybody. (more…)

“The best piece of advice I can give you is to vary your linking strategy. It’s the only way to be sure you’ll achieve good rankings, and keep them. Remember that what works today might not work “tomorrow” - so it’s worth experimenting while all the time hunting for those “quality” links.”

Surely everybody knows by now, Google, and indeed the Internet, is powered, by HTML Links. Good rankings, and success, in all the search engines results pages, eventually lies in getting links from other sites to your site. Effectively, the more the better.

Bearing in mind “Content Is King” on the web, no matter how great your content is, no matter how search engine optimised your page is, if you don’t have inbound links, you’re usually next to nowhere in the Google serps - especially in competitive markets - probably because a competitor has got in there first and generated some content and links before you.

But what is the perfect link? What is the best linking strategy? The answer is - everybody has a different view of a perfect link, and everybody has different ways of measuring exactly what a perfect link is.

Here’s my take on what I look for when i am link hunting (all, I think worth thinking about and in no particular order). (more…)

After reading a thread in a forum with some frankly crap link building advice I thought I’d give it my ten bob. (more…)

It’s thought Content IS King and Links ARE Queen. So using this simple formula by adding good content and generating lots of quality links you can reasonably ensure good ranking in Google, at least. (more…)

Well we’ve started to get some results in from our qualitative Google SEO Mythbuster Test #1 (Does Google Like Valid Code?) and the results we have….is yes! (more…)

After seeing many posts on blogs and statements on seo company websites about the factor W3C compliance (ie valid html and css) plays in Google when it comes to rank your site in it’s search engine results pages, we thought we’d try out a series of tests to try and examine the role well formed pages (or pages with invalid code) actually plays in Google today.

We also thought: “how many other seo companies have actually tested this for themselves?” (more…)

What I learned about SEO today…. (more…)

A big misunderstanding of Google and search engines like Yahoo & MSN is to view them as “one big super-computer.” In fact, they are tens of thousands of machines, located in different “data-centers” (DCs) all over the world.

And they do not get updated all at the same! Instead, changes are rolled out slowly, a few data-centers at a time, and a few machines per datacenter at a time. (more…)

Keeping up with all your competitors on the internet today can be very, very expensive. Websites can be expensive. Search Engine Optimisation is time consuming so expensive (ineffective seo is even more expensive). Google Adwords is expensive when you don’t know what you’re doing.

But you know, it’s never been CHEAPER to market your business worldwide. (more…)

1. Don’t steal other people’s copy to fill your own website. Yes, Google likes content, but it needs to be unique and original to get you to the top! (more…)
    

As a search marketer, I’m forced to trawl the web to keep up on the latest trends in internet marketing. Here’s a list of some of the best places on the web to share info and learn exciting stuff! (more…)

Yes i know - strange, eh? Normally we would NEVER tell you that, but Google says if you have a new website and you want to get into Google: (more…)

The 1 hour seo tutorial is just a snippet about how you can quickly promote your site yourself to instantly generate visitors to your site and how to turn this content eventually into good positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Writing search engine friendly content is creative but not black magic. Let’s assume you have a site that at least Google can spider, and your using Wordpress (the professional choice) for your blog. If Google can spider it, MSN and Yahoo can too. (more…)