Hobo - A Top UK SEO Blog

What Does Google Mean By A Level Playing Field?

By Shaun Anderson

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people […]

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SEO

Verdict: A ‘Prolonged, Sustained’ Sin Bin For Google Manual Actions On Artificial Links

By Shaun Anderson

The penalty box (sometimes called the sin bin, bad box, or simply bin) is the area in ice hockey, rugby league, rugby union and some other sports where a player sits to serve the time of a given penalty, for an offense not severe enough to merit outright expulsion from the contest. If… Google identifies you have unnatural links pointing at your site, and a […]

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Link Building Tips

Matt Cutts Debunks Google Plus Votes as Important Ranking Factors

By Shaun Anderson

Do Google +1′s Improve rankings in Google natural SERPS? There’s a lot of strange seo news about at the moment. Mostly down to ‘correlation’ studies showing Google Plus votes correlation with high rankings. That observation may well be true – but important ranking factor it does not automatically make them, and that’s what a lot of […]

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SEO

Unnatural Links Warning? Your Backlinks Will Need MANUALLY Checked

By Shaun Anderson

There’s no one tool out there I trust more than myself to identify problematic links in a backlink profile. A tool can work out obvious spammy sites but no link analysis tool can determine out overall intent of every site or every link, on every occasion. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have […]

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Link Building Tips

The Simplest White Hat SEO Tip?

By Shaun Anderson

Somebody asked me about this and I thought what was probably the most simple thing anyone can do. The chart above illustrates a reasonably valuable 4 word term I noticed a page I had didn’t rank high in Google for, but I thought probably should and could rank for, with this simple seo technique. I […]

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SEO

About This Blog...

We were one of the first UK seo companies to make blogging the centre of our search marketing strategy, and I am glad we did. We get about a hundred thousand visits (per month) to our search marketing and link building blog, most of which come from Google. I always aim to deliver to readers honest, useful and in-depth advice, based on my own experience. Please let me know if I am achieving this.

We get a lot of traffic for a tiny and passionate company based in Greenock, near Glasgow, in Scotland. Google sent this seo blog around 150,000 visitors in January and Febuary in 2014 - bringing the total amount of traffic Google has sent our website to over 3 million visitors since 2006. Over a million people have read our newsfeed, too, with over 20,000 currently subscribed by email to our newsletter. A couple of hundred thousand people have downloaded my free training ebook.

The frequency of my blogging varies. I blogged just 15 times in 2013. In my spare time, when I'm not running my seo company, or building my tools, I'm building a collection of (frequently edited) public notes about website optimisation. I'm a great believer that if you help others achieve their goals, over time, you get help to achieve your goals. Google loves that as a marketing strategy, too, as it meets the needs of a vast amount of people that use Google to find the best information on a topic, product or service.

Most of my advice about search engine optimisation revolves around creating something actually useful or informative. If you help satisfy the majority of Google's users... the folk looking for in-depth information about a topic... you satisfy Google, and make them look good. Make Google look good often enough, and Google will send you a lot of free traffic. This blog touches on most of the seo tactics I used and use to promote my own site and those of customers I work for. You can use the same tactics too, to promote your site. Anyone can.

This is not a black hat blog - this is not even a grey hat one, any more. To succeed in Google in 2014 webmasters are going to have to be much more sophisticated when it comes to keeping Google legitimately satisfied - and that means maximising white hat tactics. That balance is very tricky to find, and is designed, by Google to take some time to find, and take effect, but getting it right unlocks a lot of very valuable, and unpaid for traffic. That's my aim when I do it, and that is the scope of this blog.

COMMENTARY - As far as the industry goes, I generally keep my involvement minimal. I usually do not discuss anyone else's marketing strategy on this blog. I don't believe in outing other optimisers - not on a public forum. My aim for this blog is to keep it professional and focused on building a good resource for beginners that can act as a vehicle to sell our services. I am going for the win-win.

ADVERTISING - I don't really do that much advertising on this blog - or even marketing my own services, that much. I may have the odd affiliate link (which I always aim to mark clearly as affiliate links. I do not sell links on this blog, and I do not buy links for it, either. If something is paid for I aim to highlight it (and mark it up) appropriately. Feel free to contact me if you feel you have something my audience might be interested in.

USER GENERATED CONTENT - Guest posts on this blog are BY INVITE ONLY. By all means, send me an article and if it is of high quality, I might publish it (but nobody yet has impressed enough). All comments are moderated and will have the nofollow link attribute in place. Feel free to use any text on my blog, if you clearly credit it for me, but please do not republish full articles of my blog elsewhere.

EXPERIENCE - I only write about things I have some experience of. My areas of expertise are technical seo and wider strategy - basically - what I am interested in is how to get more valuable traffic from Google (going up month on month) and doing it in a way that Google won't class as spam 6 months later. The advice on this blog reflects that.

Our site is one of the top seo blogs in the UK in terms of traffic, readership and followers. The most popular posts on the blog are my guides for beginners to search engine optimisation, my link building tutorial and search engine submission how to guides - all of which I try and update every year or so to keep it as fresh as possible - and all of which are based on my actual experience.

SEO has changed a LOT in the past 3 years. Since Google Panda, and then Google Penguin - both algorithmic updates that, between them, impact most if not all (once successful) strategies - and it absolutely killed cheap tactics. The content on my blog has changed over time to reflect this - I'm not comfortable publishing content that could lead to a frustrating user experience, as judged by Google, or to give people outdated advice, that could cause more harm than good.

My search engine optimisation blog is a labour of love. It's basically just a public journal with notes i took as I learned more and more about the art of seo and building links. It can be pretty nerve-wrecking publishing to the world what you know about how well to do your job - but ultimately it can be very rewarding, too, when it comes off. If you are thinking about starting blogging I would still highly recommend it, even in 2014.

HIRE US - If you want to hire my uk seo company for a one off project, enquire about our affordable packages, get some general advice or talk to me about any aspect of my blog, feel free to contact me. My team of SEO specialists are vastly experienced and have worked together for over 5 years at this agency.