Hobo SEO Blog

A (Nearly) Bulletproof Web Design & Development Project Checklist for clients and designers.

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…)

We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....

Everybody knows at Hobo we’re proud to be a Scottish company. I tell you, we’re no prouder when we get sent free Scottish stuff and a deal for our readers!

After a heavy week writing up client strategy documents, it’s a pleasure to come into the office and find a free gift! Long term Hobo Blog subscriber Russell at Scottish Hampers sent us a corporate hamper as a way of thanks for our free SEO guide we published last month: (more…)

Here’s a presentation the Google team actually gave on what search engine optimisation is:

If you want a more detailed page, check out our own guide to SEO for beginners.

A quick follow up to my SEO fight club article yesterday, and somewhat tongue in cheek. (more…)

There is a reason I don’t have clients I work for plastered all over my site, or home page, even though it would probably help us make new sales.

There’s a reason I don’t take linkbacks from SEO clients from their site to boost my own sites ranking in Google even though I’m missing a big trick SEO companies use to rank their own sites. We only take linkbacks from web design clients and even then sometimes I nofollow it and usually today we use Hobo or Hobo-web as the linkback (purely because that direct link can mean sales if people like that site). (more…)

Google’s Matt Cutts is attempting to clarify PR Sculpting using Nofollow for the rest of us after the recent hulabaloo surrounding his comments at a SEO conference a short time ago. (more…)

I’ve never seen Google using images from Google Products (Shopping Results) in such an attention grabbing manner before. I was searching for carports and this is what I got…. (image below)

All the more reason to submit your products to this ‘underused’ and less understood service (as if instant top rankings for the goods you sell wasn’t enough). (more…)

There seems to be a Google Toolbar Pagerank update underway. Instead of the normal announcement, I thought I’d list what I think Google PR is actually good for because for most, it’s totally useless information. Oh, and of course, how to increase your PR if you won’t be persuaded otherwise.

For the purposes of this quick article I’m very much muddying the line between Toolbar and REAL PR – two different, unsynchronised mechanisms as I understand them.

What follows is obviously my opinion based on observations I’ve made. Years ago I used to manipulate PR quite effectively, now I don’t even bother.

(more…)

A new search engine called Topsy launched today, and it’s pretty cool. Here’s what it thinks of our free seo guide.

Interestingly it ranks pages by Retweet (ie when somebody likes it they pass it on or retweet it). (more…)