Hobo SEO Blog

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

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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....

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 – £950

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 from only £950 +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, Newsletter & 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…)

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.

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Granular PT – Cathartic

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.

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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…)

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…)