It would appear I was wrong all along about anchor text!

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, search

I’m currently trying out some paid directory submission services, to see what type of service is available for the ridiculously low prices our sub-continental friends charge.

Whilst I understand that directory links are probably not worth that much, at $20 for 300 submissions, I figured that that was still pretty good value. And before anybody mentions it - poor quality backlinks can’t hurt your site, if they could, I could unleash a bit of php to nuke your site into oblivion with about a million dodgy backlinks in fifteen minutes.

Anyhoo, so I’m wading through a plethora of “Confirm your submission to our directory” type emails, which generally have anything from spammy links in them to random SEO advice etc, and I come across this little gem:

Thank you! for your link submission in [directory name] Directory. If your link is approved it will be notified to you by
email. Here are some free seo tips for you. Its important that while
submitting your site to directories you must use your company name or
site name(domain name) in anchor text while giving title. Putting a
keyword in anchor text is a black hat seo and directories taking
keyword in anchor text of a link are getting penalized.

Yeah, those links with your keywords in the anchor text will get you every time!

Sheesh!

The lies some SEO’s tell prospective clients.

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, search engine, search

Been doing a little research today, having a look at what it would take to rank for the term Search Engine Optimisation Australia.

The main thing I’ve discovered is that some SEO companies either have no idea, or they are telling their prospective clients outright lies.

Let’s take a look at what the company which ranked number two in google for the above term were telling people who find their site:

Meta Tags are one of the most important factors of onpage search engine optimization. The better you define your Meta Tags, the better your search engine ranking will be. Meta Tags are lines of the html(website) which provides information about a particular web page. Meta Tags play a key role in the optimisation process. Using optimised content and Meta tagging along with other internet marketing strategies you can shoot your site up to the top of all search page listings.

And some more:

Using Search Engine Submission, the optimised web pages in your website are submitted to leading search engines, web directories and categories in such a way that they are prioritized for top placements and positioning.

Oh dear….

S is for……….

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, search engine, search

Hands up those who said S is for Sex?

Dirty bastards!

Quick SEO tip - use plurals of your keywords when writing web copy.

Let’s take the example of the keyterm Pasta Makers (one of the terms we’re targeting for our Niche site giveaway competition)

If you have the term Pasta Maker in your page copy, you have a chance to rank for the term Pasta Maker, but if you have the Term Pasta Makers, you can rank for both the terms Pasta Maker, and Pasta Makers.

Pasta Makers contains the term Pasta Maker, so you can rank for it, Pasta Maker, on the other hand, does not contain the term Pasta Makers, so you can’t.

Pretty simple really, just drop an instance or two of the plural for your main keyword, and double your chances of picking up some extra search traffic.

Free niche site giveaway update

Posted by stuart as competitions, competition, seo, search engine optimization, search

Well it’s ten days now since I launched the free niche site giveaway competition, so I thought it’d be nice to have a bit of a look at where things stand so far.

The site is now indexed in both Google and Yahoo, it took about 6 days to be listed in Google, and I discovered the Yahoo listing today .

We got our first organic search visitor today, the search term was lello pasta maker, which we’re currently ranked around number 16 in Google for.

We’re not yet ranked for either of the terms Pasta Maker or Pasta Machine in Google, which is not surprising, but here’s a few terms we are in the top 100 for:

• Pasta Machine recommendations (6)
• pasta n casa pasta machine (1)
• Kenwood pasta maker (27)
• Commercial pasta maker (36)
• Weston pasta maker instructions (6)
• Norpro pasta machine (19)
• De Longhi pasta machine (71)
• Cucina pasta machine (30)
• Cuisinart pasta machine (17)
• Lello pasta machine (25)
• Norpro pasta maker (15)
• De Longhi pasta maker (80)
• Cucina pasta maker (58)
• Cuisinart pasta maker (67)

If you’re not sure what this is all about, go visit the Pasta Machine and Pasta Maker niche site giveaway, drop a link somewhere on one of your blogs or sites (or lots of links - every link counts as an entry), and go into the draw to win the site on the first of August!

Reading logs, search referrers, and page content

Posted by stuart as site statistics, seo, search engine optimization, search

I was just going through the logs for my “Adelaide Tropical Fish” experimental site, and noticed that I was getting a little search traffic for terms which I didn’t have on the page.

These are what’s called “broad match” search referrals. The actual term verbatim is not on the page, but all the words that make up the phrase are there in some form or another.  It can be a little harder to grab the number one spot for these terms if they aren’t actually on your page, and I was ranking generally anywhere between 5 - 20 for a few of these terms.

So what to do?

Go back, re-write the content to include the exact terms, and wait for the search engines to crawl the page again.  Then check the ranking.

This was a good reminder to me that your logs are your best friend when it comes to on page SEO.