Hobo SEO Blog

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…)

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....

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…)

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 *****

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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 HTML5 page – Delicious it!

I’m continuing to study up a bit on the new version of HTML from the W3C – HTML5. Here’s some research what a page written in HTML 4 will look like rewritten in the new HTML5.

The most obvious question to ask is;

what are the main differences between HTML5 & HTML4?

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…)

It amazes me more people don’t use the search engine friendly 301 Redirect (Moved Permanently) 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.

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** 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…)