Google has changed it’s own rules and lots of people are complaining that they have lost traffic and revenue. Tough. Google doesn’t charge to list your site and if you read their documentation they make no promises to even add your site to the index. So a bit of realism needs to entered into the [...]

Posted in March 2011

When the internet was young and innocent, finding things was difficult until advent of the search engine. There were many early models, alta vista, yahoo, lycos and others but Google set the benchmark back in 1998. From the beginning Google was all about providing the best results for each search. The mantra ‘do no evil’ [...]

Posted in January 2010

In addition to the SEO link building scam there is the Adwords scam. I have no problem in calling it a scam because that’s what it is. They are taking money on false pretences and delivering a wholly unsuitable product. Adwords is free. If you follow the many tutorials and articles you can set up [...]

Posted in August 2009

Link building isn’t easy. It takes time and effort to research and create the links that will make a difference to your ranking. And it’s not the number of links that matter, it’s the quality of those links. Much better to have one link from a respected site than 1000 inbounds from spammy free-for-all directories. [...]

Posted in August 2009

There’s this amazing new restaurant, it’s  local, has  good prices, atmosphere and excellent food. The only problem is the marketing. They advertise in Australia when the business is in England. And the cook lives in Peru . You may snort with derision and say that nobody is that stupid but this is exactly what people [...]

Posted in August 2009

There has been some debate over the length of page titles. The predominant search engine, Google, displays 60 characters but what happens if you go over the limit? To test the theory I added some made up words to my contact page: www.aerin.co.uk/contact.htm. The words are: skriqgy, korziklr and qasdcvgyuh. Google has indexed the page [...]

Posted in January 2009

For ages and ages google advised that you should submit your site to DMOZ, yahoo and industry related directories. This guidance has gone from the google webmaster pages. So all of you that spent hours and hours seeking out directories as part of your link building strategy were wasting your time.

Posted in October 2008

I like being outside in the fresh air. In fact most of my holidays are spend wandering various countries around the world. But there are occasions when I need to communicate with the rest of the world. And a mobile phone or a PDA helps. The problem is, many websites don’t work too well on [...]

Posted in June 2008

There are certain topics and concepts that keep cropping up during discussions about search engine optimisation (SEO). One of these is the use of metatags. Let’s get one thing clear, there is no SEO advantage in the use of metatags – the search engines may index their contents but they won’t help to improve your [...]

Posted in May 2008

Without really trying I have managed to achieve a very good ranking for the keywords ‘website navigation guidelines’ and it’s variants. I was quite pleased with my achievement until I carried out some analysis on the site. Despite the great ranking, most of the traffic arrives via a strange mix of search terms. Which has [...]

Posted in May 2008