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…)

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)

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…)

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…)

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…)

If you like our example HTML 5 page – Delicious it!

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…)