Hobo SEO Blog

The industry seem to have turned their attention to TopSeos -  “identified as an independent authority on vendors” (by themselves apparently) and it makes for a good read.

It seems the legitimate SEO community, for the most part, finds what TOPSEOs does to be distasteful at best, a shakedown service at worst.

Apparently Top SEOS produce rankings and award badges for best seo companies in various countries (including the UK) … except folk are of the opinion you might have to pay TOPSEOS.com thousands of pounds to be considered for these industry awards.

UPDATE – I asked for Hobo to be removed from the Topseos directory, and asked the “best uk seo company in the UK” (according to Topseos) to stop bidding on our brand name with this nonsense. Generally speaking, I’m happy with that, now, both have complied with our requests. (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....

Interesting. Google Webmaster Tools now shows click though rate and position in SERPS.

I picked a term I know I have had the top 5 positions at various times, and it’s interesting to see the clickthrough rate on particular keyword searches…. and how many clicks the top position in Google gets compared to the number 3 position, no4 and no5. (more…)

We get hundreds of reciprocal link requests and link requests from seo companies  (which I usually ignore) around the world every week and I thought I’d point out I usually link back to Hobo articles that have been translated into other languages on other sites. I’ll definitely do more of this in the future too. (more…)

I was with a client yesterday and I pointed out:

1. As the site had NEVER been promoted online, even though they are a global brand who supply to blue chip companies, Google hadn’t picked up any decent hints what the site was about (keywords in anchor text links to their site) what I call the Primary Link Profile, their inbound link profile.
2. Onsite navigation consisted of “home, about us, location, product info, company info….” – not one mention of their keywords in their internal link profile – or the secondary link profile, as I think of it.
3. Each page of the site had the same page title “company name”, which meant, Google couldn’t even look at the tertiary link profile (this is how I think of page titles) to find keywords to rank the site for. (more…)

You get a free trial for 7 days of this software at www.diyseo.com.

I was asked to beta-test DIYSEO, the new seo software solution from Patrick Gavin (who is well known in the industry) designed specifically for those small business operations new to seo, and with a tiny budget.

So I did.

I quite liked it (even though I sent Patrick a long email about how it might develop).

I think it’s a good V1 of software with potential which I expect to see develop into something with might be really useful to some small business owners out there who don’t have a clue about the BASICS of SEO and too lazy to learn it all. (more…)

Google has updated it’s toolbar pagerank ‘scores’ for web pages – I see it on internal page 2 weeks old. To be honest I don’t use Toolbar pagerank as more than an at-a-glance metric, and I’ve long assumed while real pagerank is important to get as many of your USEFUL pages into Google’s main index, that’s about it. Pages with a lot of pagerank dont rank any better – they just rank. (more…)

Another question I get asked daily it seems so I thought a blog post I could point folks at was called for.

Clients send me unsolicited emails from companies that ask for “reciprocal links between their site and yours”, usually because it will “improve search engine rankings” for both websites.

I can tell you I usually ignore all reciprocal link exchange requests via unsolicited emails and recommend you do to.

I spend my time looking for quality links and believe me, I’ve not found ANY in any email. (more…)

I see a lot of reviews of this kind out there, and frankly, a lot I read, don’t seem to be coming from actual EXPERIENCE. I remember YEARS ago asking the same question – Which is Better - WordPress or Joomla?

I can give you my honest opinion as myself, and my team, have years experience with both open source content management systems.

I love Joomla when I spend time in it and WordPress too (Hobo is built with WP) , and I had a rule of thumb…. (more…)

The idea is to have one single version of a page on your site with unique text content that is written specifically for that page. This makes it easy for Google to work out your page and rank it. This is one of the pillars of good seo. Screw it up and it will look like a Google penalty. (more…)

Home Page Title Is Wrong In Google Search Results?

I often get asked “why is my page title not showing the correct title keywords in Google (and in sometimes Yahoo) search results pages?”

I thought I would list some of the more obvious reasons and just point those interested here: (more…)