SEO Articles

SEO Review for PriceMe

PriceMe have asked me to do a review of their site, or more specifically a SEO review. These make great case studies, so this post is probably worth reading if you are looking for real examples of how to improve SEO on a product database website. PRICEME PriceMe are a New Zealand online shopping[1] / review site, where prices from a number of different sites are compared with the lowest...

Make your customers laugh

I got the following email recently from V7N, attempting to woo me back to their SEO / webmaster forums[1] which I haven't frequented for a little while... V7N SAID... Dearest beloved Sadu We miss you. We love you. Your mother and I have been doing some deep soul searching, and we want you to come home. The member of the year thread is up in the forum lobby, and Christmas just isn't the...

Can we please stop asking Matt his opinion on paid links?

I have recently been watching a few SEO videos and reading more blogs, and are surprised to see people are STILL asking Matt Cutts what he thinks about paid links. Matt Cutts has been pretty consistent on this one - I think we all know his viewpoint on the matter. There are lot's of questions...

SmartyHost - Unresponsive, unprofessional

It's now 24 hours since I submitted a top priority support ticket to SMARTYHOST telling them my website is down. SmartyHost haven't responded, and the website is still down. FIRST, AN APOLOGY I hate to post this kind of thing on the blog (I'm mainly wanting to talk about positive things), but...

Don't use Flash unless you have to

Sorry if this seems obvious. I have just rewritten a website for City Lodge, an Auckland accommodation NZ[1] website. The new site looks almost exactly like the old site, except it's done in HTML instead of flash. When evaluating the job, I saw a nicely designed 5 page flash website, which...

Better crosslinking between articles

I was prompted by Aidan of Inkode SEO[1] the other day to place better internal crosslinking between my articles. Apparently, I have some good content on here and it's hard to find. I tend to agree. This is something I have been meaning to do for some time, and I have now finally taken a...

Google in need of SEO

I had one of the best laughs of my life recently while reading a page explaining what Google's homepage[1] would look like if they had to SEO their site like everyone else. It was beautiful, and I'm so jealous I didn't think of it first. So with that funny story firmly planted in my mind, we...

Turning bad into good

Most businesses don't have 100% customer satisfaction. Even if your service is fantastically good, there will always be people who didn't use the product as it was supposed to be used, or who weren't really the target market anyway. If, by some amazing chance, you did have 100% customer...

Movember - mid-way update

Just a quick update and a pic - mid way through Movember and I reckon the handlebars are coming along well. Still got the grey bits in them though. Comments welcome.

Duplicating content to avoid duplicate content

Here's a theory I have. I say that you might be able to avoid a duplicate content penalty by duplicating your content on another domain. Humour me for a moment, and consider the following argument before reaching for the back button. DUPLICATE CONTENT Duplicate content is loosely defined as...

Ribbing your web developer in public

My wife grabs me the other day and tells me I should contact a prominent website that she frequents about some website work. When I asked why, she said that the website owner had posted a big...

Targeting your anchor text

I think most SEOs would agree that targeted anchor text is one of the most important elements of SEO. Anchor text being the words used inside a link that points to your website. Personally, I have...

Movember

I'm joining in with Movember[1] this year, and have just given myself the first proper shave in 12 years. Movember, for those not in the know replaces the month we used to call November. The...

Catering for blind users

Many web developers don't cater for blind users very well. I'm not claiming to be a saint in this area, but it's something I have been consciously working on over the last couple of years. While...

We don't need no stinking CMS

10 years ago, having a website was cool. You paid your designer a small fortune to update it for you, which was done in Frontpage or Dreamweaver, or for the hardcore geeks, notepad. Then we...

Some notes on the PR update

I generally avoid reading blogs and forums at PR update time, because it generally turns into a sea of whining and Google hate from some, while those that are doing well get all smug and cocky. ...

WDANZ Auckland conference

I spoke at the WDANZ conference[1] in Auckland last week, and thought I might share a few thoughts with the rest of the world. It was an interesting event, and once again, I enjoyed the social...

Sticker club or chain letter?

Yesterday my 2 year old got a letter from a friend. Seeing as she can't read yet (and her SEO skills aren't developed either), I opened it for her. It's a letter welcoming her to "Sticker club"....

Spamming your own search results

I was faced with the recent challenge of adding a search facility to a medium sized directory website. I have written custom search algorithms before, and it's generally a game of cat and mouse of...

Not getting involved

A competitor of mine in a particular market has shamelessly scraped some content from a big US player. The kind of shameless scraping where they forget to find-replace (company name) with their own...
An empty inbox - several years in the making - 10 Oct 07
Can you afford to be in Yahoo??? - 9 Oct 07
Branding = powerful - 8 Oct 07
Google should discontinue toolbar pagerank - 6 Oct 07
Just because Google hates your site doesn't mean it hates your images - 5 Oct 07
Keeping up with copyright licenses - 3 Oct 07
American cheques take 12 years to clear - 30 Sep 07
SEO Blog vs SEO Forum - 25 Sep 07
Too spammy for organic, but we'll take your adwords dollar - 21 Sep 07
Where for art thou Overture? - 19 Sep 07
Avoiding sitewide links - 18 Sep 07
WDANZ Auckland Conference coming soon - 7 Sep 07
A surprise entry in Jim Boykin's forward links tool - 7 Sep 07
Content targeted image resizing - 7 Sep 07
New Zealand's anti-spam laws - 6 Sep 07
Automated titles gone wrong - 5 Sep 07
How crap content defines you - 4 Sep 07
10 ways to kill your site - 31 Aug 07
World's best password reminder - 10 Aug 07
The death of IE - 21 Jul 07