Well, it’s official. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, has declaratively stated that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not spam. Of course, those of us in the industry have known this for as long as we’ve been interested in SEO, but the overwhelming perception of SEO by the everyman is that it is directly proportional to spam. Watch the following 4-minute-long video of Matt Cutts addressing the question, “Does Google consider SEO to be spam?”
Between that video and Google’s official SEO beginner’s guide, I’d say the case for legitimate SEO has more than been made from the search juggernaut.
But just in case you need some extra coaxing, I recommend reading this post of mine from last year where I made a case for the legitimacy of SEO. In it, I note not only Google’s stance on SEO, but Microsoft’s as well, what with their own SEO team and SEO toolkit. The post is as applicable today as it was a year ago.
So, yes, while SEO has plenty of black hat practitioners who spam the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it also has innumerable white hat practitioners who create added value for Web sites, search engines, and people. But in and of itself, SEO does not equal spam.
By Stephen Chapman
This blog is designed to give regular tips on the latest things that we are finding important with SEO.
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Tuesday 18 October 2011
5 untapped SEO resources you need to know about!
SEO Tips by: Stephen Chapman
It’s no secret that the SEO industry is chock full of blogs and resources — all ranging from horribly misinformed to incredibly prolific — but there are a handful of true gems that I’d like to share with you today. I have way too many favorites to call these 5 my absolute favorites of all time, but I find myself frequenting them the most these days and I’ve a feeling most of you have never heard of them. Even if you’re a seasoned SEO pro who would rather have your butt kicked than to add yet another SEO blog/resource to your list, I urge you to check out any of these you’ve not heard of. And now, in no particular order of importance:
1 - Advanced Google Querying: For those of you who keep up with my “Search Ninja” series (see: part 1 and part 2), you know how much I love to use advanced Google querying to unearth great content. Well, true to form, the query that I link to below was birthed out of my desire to find SEO-related documents residing on .gov Web sites. It’s not as refined as I would typically make a query before presenting it to you fine readers out there, but it definitely gets the job done. Either way, the moral of the story here is that Google is an incredible resource that remains largely untapped by most people, even to this day. I don’t know about you, but scoping out SEO-related documentation on .gov Web sites sounds like an interesting venture to me! And just to give you something else to check out after this query, I wonder what you might find if you use site:google.com instead of site:gov in the query below…
Link: “Search Engine Optimization” site:gov filetype:pptx | filetype:ppt | filetype:pdf | filetype:doc | filetype:docx
2 - Esrun’s Blackhat SEO Blog: I know black hat SEO methods are frowned upon within the industry, but I’m always incredibly intrigued by them. No, it’s not the same old boring spammy tactics that intrigue me, but rather, guys like this Esrun individual who take things to the next level and actually create their own tactics. Even if you don’t like them or agree with them, you owe it to yourself to read first-hand from someone who is willing to show you just how easy it is to game search engines and Web sites. My only complaint is that I wish he would post more! Highly recommended reading.
Link: Esrun’s Blackhat SEO blog
3 - SEOrisk: SEOrisk is a new endeavor that seeks to strip the black/grey/white hat labels from the SEO industry and simply assess SEO methods individually by their level of risk. What a simple but marvelous concept! Now, although I, personally, don’t mind the various hat labels, I think this type of approach to SEO methods is sorely needed. As noted, it’s a new venture, so the site is very much a work in progress. Your participation and support will help it flourish, so if you like the idea, go check it out!
Link: SEOrisk
4 - Reddit’s SEO Community: Hands down, this is one of my all-time favorite SEO communities. The individuals who contribute their advice and opinions are well-informed and plenty of fruitful discussion takes place as people post, either seeking answers to their SEO questions or looking to share some bit of news or advice they found/have to offer. It’s a small community, despite Reddit being as popular as it is, but it’s perhaps the only SEO community I actively take part in these days.
Link: Reddit’s SEO subreddit
5 - SEO Meetup Groups: One more for the “resources” side of things, meetup.com has a section of the site solely dedicated to locating SEO/Internet marketing groups around the world. These meetups are great for hearing from local people who are actually down in the trenches, getting their hands dirty with real SEO work. This helps to ground and counterbalance the things you read from the talking heads of the SEO community. Additionally, as I noted in a previous post, going to local SEO meetups is a great way to find someone local to do SEO work for you. So go check out the official SEO meetup.com page and see what all it has to offer you.
Link: Meetup’s SEO section
6 (Bonus) - SlideShare: Touching back on a facet of the first point I covered, there’s a lot of great SEO-related information residing inside of documents and presentations on the Web. While Google is one way to find them, so is SlideShare. It’s arguably the most popular presentation-sharing Web site out there and it’s the preferred site of some of the industry’s finest to store their presentations, such as Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz, and more. But aside from those, there are some real gems posted there from individuals who give SEO presentations at corporate events, conferences, and other events completely unrelated to popular industry events. It’s the juicy presentations with secretive tactics that are given to private parties that I love finding the most. Starting this journey is as simple as visiting the site and searching for “SEO,” as I’ve provided in a link below. Play with the search terms and don’t forget about advanced functionality, such as sorting results by latest, etc.
And with that, I’ll go ahead and wrap up this post. I really hope you find some combination of the resources above a valuable addition to your SEO repertoire. Likewise, I encourage you to share any similarly unorthodox resources, methods, or blogs in the comments below! Thanks for reading.
It’s no secret that the SEO industry is chock full of blogs and resources — all ranging from horribly misinformed to incredibly prolific — but there are a handful of true gems that I’d like to share with you today. I have way too many favorites to call these 5 my absolute favorites of all time, but I find myself frequenting them the most these days and I’ve a feeling most of you have never heard of them. Even if you’re a seasoned SEO pro who would rather have your butt kicked than to add yet another SEO blog/resource to your list, I urge you to check out any of these you’ve not heard of. And now, in no particular order of importance:
1 - Advanced Google Querying: For those of you who keep up with my “Search Ninja” series (see: part 1 and part 2), you know how much I love to use advanced Google querying to unearth great content. Well, true to form, the query that I link to below was birthed out of my desire to find SEO-related documents residing on .gov Web sites. It’s not as refined as I would typically make a query before presenting it to you fine readers out there, but it definitely gets the job done. Either way, the moral of the story here is that Google is an incredible resource that remains largely untapped by most people, even to this day. I don’t know about you, but scoping out SEO-related documentation on .gov Web sites sounds like an interesting venture to me! And just to give you something else to check out after this query, I wonder what you might find if you use site:google.com instead of site:gov in the query below…
Link: “Search Engine Optimization” site:gov filetype:pptx | filetype:ppt | filetype:pdf | filetype:doc | filetype:docx
2 - Esrun’s Blackhat SEO Blog: I know black hat SEO methods are frowned upon within the industry, but I’m always incredibly intrigued by them. No, it’s not the same old boring spammy tactics that intrigue me, but rather, guys like this Esrun individual who take things to the next level and actually create their own tactics. Even if you don’t like them or agree with them, you owe it to yourself to read first-hand from someone who is willing to show you just how easy it is to game search engines and Web sites. My only complaint is that I wish he would post more! Highly recommended reading.
Link: Esrun’s Blackhat SEO blog
3 - SEOrisk: SEOrisk is a new endeavor that seeks to strip the black/grey/white hat labels from the SEO industry and simply assess SEO methods individually by their level of risk. What a simple but marvelous concept! Now, although I, personally, don’t mind the various hat labels, I think this type of approach to SEO methods is sorely needed. As noted, it’s a new venture, so the site is very much a work in progress. Your participation and support will help it flourish, so if you like the idea, go check it out!
Link: SEOrisk
4 - Reddit’s SEO Community: Hands down, this is one of my all-time favorite SEO communities. The individuals who contribute their advice and opinions are well-informed and plenty of fruitful discussion takes place as people post, either seeking answers to their SEO questions or looking to share some bit of news or advice they found/have to offer. It’s a small community, despite Reddit being as popular as it is, but it’s perhaps the only SEO community I actively take part in these days.
Link: Reddit’s SEO subreddit
5 - SEO Meetup Groups: One more for the “resources” side of things, meetup.com has a section of the site solely dedicated to locating SEO/Internet marketing groups around the world. These meetups are great for hearing from local people who are actually down in the trenches, getting their hands dirty with real SEO work. This helps to ground and counterbalance the things you read from the talking heads of the SEO community. Additionally, as I noted in a previous post, going to local SEO meetups is a great way to find someone local to do SEO work for you. So go check out the official SEO meetup.com page and see what all it has to offer you.
Link: Meetup’s SEO section
6 (Bonus) - SlideShare: Touching back on a facet of the first point I covered, there’s a lot of great SEO-related information residing inside of documents and presentations on the Web. While Google is one way to find them, so is SlideShare. It’s arguably the most popular presentation-sharing Web site out there and it’s the preferred site of some of the industry’s finest to store their presentations, such as Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz, and more. But aside from those, there are some real gems posted there from individuals who give SEO presentations at corporate events, conferences, and other events completely unrelated to popular industry events. It’s the juicy presentations with secretive tactics that are given to private parties that I love finding the most. Starting this journey is as simple as visiting the site and searching for “SEO,” as I’ve provided in a link below. Play with the search terms and don’t forget about advanced functionality, such as sorting results by latest, etc.
And with that, I’ll go ahead and wrap up this post. I really hope you find some combination of the resources above a valuable addition to your SEO repertoire. Likewise, I encourage you to share any similarly unorthodox resources, methods, or blogs in the comments below! Thanks for reading.
Tuesday 11 October 2011
What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO and how can Click Submit Help?
Put simply SEO is a process where using certain techniques you are able to move your site above of others sites on the natural, non-paid for listing on Google.
Lots of people make SEO more complicated than it actually is.
We simplify it and focus on two main areas that we know are the most important.
1. Content. This is important as it tells the search engines what keywords and phrases are the most relevant to your website. For example if you had a website selling cars in Nottingham you my gear your site towards certain keywords surrounding car sales in Nottingham. You would need to have page titles, content and meta tags that reflected these keywords.
2. Link building. This is now considered the most important part of an SEO campaign. Your ranking across all the major search engines is based on the number of one directional inbound links to your website form other websites. This tells the search engines how popular your site is. The more popular your site is the higher search engines regard it’s relevance and therefore you will appear higher when searched for.
Our strategy is simple, easy to understand and has been proven to get good results.
1. Keyword and on-site optimization. During sign up you would be asked to enter up to 5 keywords and phrases. We will then run our own spiders, similar to those used by the search engines, in order to score your site’s relevance against your chosen keywords and phrases. All suggested changes are purely text based and would take yourself or your web designer no more than 1 hour to complete. Once this is done we then know that you’re site will be picked up and indexed by the search engines on the correct keywords and phrases.
2. Search Engine submission. We submit your site to over 150,000 search engines, this means that we know your site will be picked up and index by every search engine in the world.
3. Link Building (Backlink Creation). Once your site is correctly optimized and indexed we then focus in on link building which will in turn improve your ranking. We do this by submitting your site to over 200,000 directories and link pages that we have an agreement with to list links that we submit to them. When we submit your link it will be added to a relevant category which will therefore meant that the link looks more relevant to the search engines. We will repeat this process every 3 months and not every month in order to build the optimum number of Backlinks to you site without any chance of being blacklisted by any of the main search engines.
Lots of people make SEO more complicated than it actually is.
We simplify it and focus on two main areas that we know are the most important.
1. Content. This is important as it tells the search engines what keywords and phrases are the most relevant to your website. For example if you had a website selling cars in Nottingham you my gear your site towards certain keywords surrounding car sales in Nottingham. You would need to have page titles, content and meta tags that reflected these keywords.
2. Link building. This is now considered the most important part of an SEO campaign. Your ranking across all the major search engines is based on the number of one directional inbound links to your website form other websites. This tells the search engines how popular your site is. The more popular your site is the higher search engines regard it’s relevance and therefore you will appear higher when searched for.
Our strategy is simple, easy to understand and has been proven to get good results.
1. Keyword and on-site optimization. During sign up you would be asked to enter up to 5 keywords and phrases. We will then run our own spiders, similar to those used by the search engines, in order to score your site’s relevance against your chosen keywords and phrases. All suggested changes are purely text based and would take yourself or your web designer no more than 1 hour to complete. Once this is done we then know that you’re site will be picked up and indexed by the search engines on the correct keywords and phrases.
2. Search Engine submission. We submit your site to over 150,000 search engines, this means that we know your site will be picked up and index by every search engine in the world.
3. Link Building (Backlink Creation). Once your site is correctly optimized and indexed we then focus in on link building which will in turn improve your ranking. We do this by submitting your site to over 200,000 directories and link pages that we have an agreement with to list links that we submit to them. When we submit your link it will be added to a relevant category which will therefore meant that the link looks more relevant to the search engines. We will repeat this process every 3 months and not every month in order to build the optimum number of Backlinks to you site without any chance of being blacklisted by any of the main search engines.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Don't be too image heavy!
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a process which relies heavily on the proper application of keyword rich, relevant and descriptive original text. This makes sense given that search engine users type words into the search engine in the first place and it is these words that the search engine crawlers root out.
Having a site plastered with the most glorious images that the eyes will ever be lucky enough to see, won’t help you at all to appear in the search listings for a relevant keyword topic. If you want to be represented within the search results for a particular range of keywords, the only way to do so is to use search engine optimisation techniques focussing upon these keywords and key phrases. Even image searches are performed using keyword sets.
But let’s face it, we’re not in the 90’s anymore and nobody wants to visit a site and be greeted by unforgiving columns of text and absolutely nothing else. Thankfully, you needn’t sacrifice all of the fantastic images on your site in order to improve your SEO performance; it is simply recommended to improve the context and relevance of these images by supporting them with keyword rich, descriptive text.
Images can rank within relevant search engine results based on the keyword text that surrounds them on the page. So, in order for an image to demonstrate good SEO, think about applying a keyword relevant heading, caption or description to the image.
An internet without pictures would be a dull place to surf, but a picture without plenty of supporting text based context is unlikely to be found by a search engine user who isn’t already acquainted with your brand, company name or products.
So basically your site can have plenty of images but these must be backed up by good quality copy and also image alt tags.
Having a site plastered with the most glorious images that the eyes will ever be lucky enough to see, won’t help you at all to appear in the search listings for a relevant keyword topic. If you want to be represented within the search results for a particular range of keywords, the only way to do so is to use search engine optimisation techniques focussing upon these keywords and key phrases. Even image searches are performed using keyword sets.
But let’s face it, we’re not in the 90’s anymore and nobody wants to visit a site and be greeted by unforgiving columns of text and absolutely nothing else. Thankfully, you needn’t sacrifice all of the fantastic images on your site in order to improve your SEO performance; it is simply recommended to improve the context and relevance of these images by supporting them with keyword rich, descriptive text.
Images can rank within relevant search engine results based on the keyword text that surrounds them on the page. So, in order for an image to demonstrate good SEO, think about applying a keyword relevant heading, caption or description to the image.
An internet without pictures would be a dull place to surf, but a picture without plenty of supporting text based context is unlikely to be found by a search engine user who isn’t already acquainted with your brand, company name or products.
So basically your site can have plenty of images but these must be backed up by good quality copy and also image alt tags.
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