SEO

Hobo got talked about on the front page of Reddit yesterday. Which was nice. I try to answer some questions in this post.

Google probably uses an updated version of Pagerank like the reasonable surfer and Trusted Seeds approach. Pagerank is a measure of the popularity of a resource on the web. The simple, most practical answer to increasing Google Pagerank is to get prominent, natural links on authoritative websites in your niche.

You CAN NO LONGER display and export more than 5000 rows in Google Analytics. You used to be able to, using the hack I list below: When you select 5000 rows you will have a URL like this https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en-GB&pli=1#report/trafficsources-organic/a12346448w43910105p43958149/%3F_u.date00%3D20110101%26_u.date01%3D20130410%26explorer-table.plotKeys%3D%5B%5D%26explorer-table.rowStart%3D0%26explorer-table.rowCount%3D5000/ …once you could just change that last number from 5000 at the end of that URL … Read more

Worried about the new EU Privacy directive, cookies and what it means for Google Analytics on your website? There’s been some new clarification from the UK Government. “We talked about cookies (how could we not?) but we didn’t get hung up on them – other relevant technologies e.g. HTML5 Local Storage and web beacons came up … Read more

You’ll need: To follow Google Webmaster SEO Quality Guidelines. A website reputation for publishing original, useful and relevant content. A satisfying user-friendly page experience for visitors from search. A fast, responsive, easy-to-edit mobile-friendly website. A sensible user-friendly website architecture. High-quality prominent natural links from other websites.

Politician & MP for Inverclyde David Cairns recently visited the Hobo offices for a few hours, and during that time I pointed out to him something called Twitter. Since then, I see him in my stream clearly engaging with folks via his Twitter account, so I asked him a few questions about Social Media’s impact … Read more

How do you run a blog to get the most SEO benefit? I explore the basics of it in this blogging guide for beginners.

AS seen in Smashing Magazine! A free web design an development project plan and checklist for designers and clients.

Did Google find Atlantis? It’s being reported around the web today that Google Earth has found Atlantis :) Here’s the co-ordinates to find Atlantis with Google Earth; coordinates: 31 15’15.53N, 24 15’30.53W (600 miles west of Morocco, deep in the Atlantic Ocean) The man from the sun says yes but the man from Google says … Read more

1. Figure Out What You Want To Get Out Of Social Media. 2. Create Your Profiles. 3. Learn The Community Rules. 4. Become An Active Part Of That Community. Enjoy It.

A robots.txt file is a file on your webserver used to control bots like Googlebot, Google’s web crawler. You can use it to block Google and Bing from crawling parts of your site.

If you are serious about organic search engine optimisation, forget about using, or optimising frames and read up on the latest guidelines for SEO.

Do not use access keys. The access key attribute, introduced in HTML4.0, is intended to provide keyboard shortcuts in that they provide an alternative form of navigation. This addition allows users with limited physical capabilities to navigate the organisation’s website more easily. There are some drawbacks with website access keys, for example: functionality depends on … Read more

How to design your website for users with disabilities.

No. While Google recommends we use W3C validation, Google doesn’t rank valid html and css pages above invalid pages. If Google can crawl and render a page Google will rank the page appropriately based on how relevant it is to the query. Invalid HTML can on the other hand can cause search engines problems.