Optimising for Multiple Keywords and Long-Tail Search Terms
At the recent BrightonSEO event, Peter Handley from Vertical Leap made an interesting point that it’s often easy to overlook. When optimising our websites for search engines many of us will focus on ranking highly for one search term. This has often been the technique of black hat SEO too, with the method of embedding as many repeated search terms in a website as possible, often at the expense of quality.
But professional SEO Peter Handley has a different perspective:
Why using multiple key phrases works
“You can increase the traffic of a website far more effectively by increasing the number of phrases driving traffic to a website and they are much more likely to convert as a result” – Peter Handley
Read on to discover why you should use long-tail keywords and how you can find out how popular certain keywords are.
We’ve discussed the importance of links in our post How Do I Get Links to My Site? but did you know that the majority of links you leave around the Internet will be nofollow? In other words, they’ll count for nothing when it comes to improving your search engine position in Google. If you want to discover more about search engine optimisation, check out our SEO Training and Social Media Training courses.
Whether it is submitting to a directory, buying links, reciprocal links or commenting on a blog it is useful to know whether a link to your website will be nofollow or not.
Read on to learn how you can spot nofollow links, and our list of “dofollow” websites and blogs that will help you move your way up through Google. Read the rest of "How can I get dofollow links?"
Google handles 80% of European web searches, according to ComScore, compared to 65% in the US. Does this give Google a Monopoly over search and more importantly the advertising revenue that search engines attract?
This week there has been a enquiry by the European Commission into three separate allegations that Google’s ‘so called’ democratic style seach is being adapted by Google who they claim are demoting competing websites in faouvour of their own services in the search results. Google will sometimes insert links into results offering its own own specialist services – news, price comparison, maps or book search. Competitors claim this diverts traffic away from rival services.
The commission has sent out questionnaires seeking information about complaints from a British vertical search company called Foundem, a French legal search engine called eJustice and the shopping site, Ciao, which is owned by Microsoft.
Many SEO and Search companies will be rejoicing in the fact that the commission is taking the issue seriously. This enquiry should shake up Google who will be aware that the commission has previously levied huge financial penalties on Microsoft and Intel in recent years for using tactics to squash competing software.
Google is claiming that the attack has been orchestrated by Microsoft, which recently merged its search business with Yahoo’s in an effort to challenge Google. They have pointed out Microsofts interest in Foundem which is part of a trade grouping sponsored by Microsoft called the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, and their ownership of Ciao. Read the rest of "Google Monopoly questioned by the European Commission"
If you haven’t already heard, Google released a new Social Media offering called Buzz, a hybrid love child of Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.
Buzz is still in its infancy, one of the easiest ways of jumping on the Buzz wagon is to have your tweets buzzed automatically, which is fairly straightforward. Buzz supports all the same# tags and @ mentions, so your twitter tweets work the same in Buzz.
But in my opinion this is a total waste of time. Buzz is many different things and it may seem similar to twitter but its not! Buzz should be used in a way that plays to its different strengths. I see it as a new tool in the social media armory of the local business (find out how your business can benefit from Social Media training here).
Buzz is many things to a small business, read on and find out what…
The recent BrightonSEO event was a great opportunity to hear more about the booming SEO industry, an industry often talked about but rarely in the public arena - let alone in a Brighton city centre pub! Want to learn more about SEO? See our Social Media & SEO training courses.
Many have noticed how online media such as Twitter and Facebook are the first to break news events, and we even wrote a recent blog post on this which received some interesting reader comments. Newspapers are already attempting to harness the power of social media, such as the New Zealand Herald, but how viable is this in the long-term? Doesn’t it simply reinforce the growing dominance of social media and the attraction of real-time news?
Newspapers now need to defend what they stand for – news that is unique, substantial and stimulating. Whatever standpoint we take it’s clear that they need to do something differently.
As the afternoon came to an end the conversation turned to the controversial Blackhat v Whitehat SEO argument.
So what’s the difference between a Black Hat and White Hat? For those who are new to the world of online marketing, namely Social Media and SEO, our training course may be of use to you.
Here, Jeremy Spiller from White Hat Media talks about the e-mails we all receive promising top ranking in Google – most likely via Black Hat techniques, as opposed to the White Hat approach he advovates:
The Black Hat: The Black Hat is the villain or the bad guy, the word being derived from western films where the “baddie” dons his black hat to contrast to the hero’s white one. But for our purposes – and very broadly speaking – the Black Hat will use SEO tactics such as spamdexing – attempting to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service. This ’so-called’ black area is a reality of SEO, and those that do get caught out – such as WordPress and Yahoo – can soon recover. Read more about the Black Hat tricks of the trade.
The White Hat: So surprise surprise, the White Hat is the hero or the good guy. In SEO this means someone who will produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are up to. Not sure which side of the fence you’re on? This blog post lists some of the associated techniques.
These terms are of course stereotypical – the Black Hat SEO brings to mind a certain ex-car salesman who’s just “in it to feed the family”. But these generalisations are dangerous and those Mad Black Hatters aren’t necessarily the baddies – buying links happens, as was repeated many a time at the BrightonSEO event.
In contrast to spending time building links and creating quality content, when it comes down to it SEO is either “effective or not effective”. At Silicon Beach Training we were advised that some of our SEO activity could have been interpreted by Google as dubious. With Google informing the SEO community that algorithms were being updated all the time to identify companies using Black Hat techniques, we decided to clean up in order to be seen as squeaky clean by the Google bots. The result? An instant loss in traffic and ranking that has taken some time to regain.
Link building and buying is an enormous industry and there are very few industries of its size (“a $3 billion a year industry”) that we don’t talk about; like prostitution and drugs, it’s considered a dirty industry that we don’t acknowledge. There’s a certain “fear of Google” and like it or not White Hatters and Black Hatters alike are out to get what they can from Google.
You can read Peter Handley’s review of BrightonSEO here – and we’ll be posting more from the event on this blog later in the week. Silicon Beach Training offer a complete range of Web Design Training and Social Media Training courses.
Here’s our summary of what Cookies are – along with a clip of Nikki’s demonstration.
What is a Cookie?
A cookie is a small text file sent to your computer via your web browser when you visit some websites. They store information about you like where you went and what you clicked on, which is used when you revisit the site.
What do Cookies do?
Cookies can do many things – for example:
Remembering purchasing information
Recording your viewing preferences
Storing results of online quizzes
Once downloaded by your browser, a cookie will sit on your hard drive until the next time you visit the same website.
Without the cookies the web server would have no way of knowing that you had been to the site before unless you logged in with a username and password.
* Cookies allow web servers to remember you.
How do cookies work?
Here Nikki from Fresh Egg explains how Cookies work at BrightonSEO with a little help from her friends.
If you Twitter and Flickr you will probably like to update your twitter account with your new images. I have been looking around for an easy way to integrate Twitter and Flickr this is the simplest way I have found using twitter feed.
Optimising for Multiple Keywords and Long-Tail Search Terms
Why should you find dofollow links?
Google handles 80% of European web searches, according to ComScore, compared to 65% in the US. Does this give Google a Monopoly over search and more importantly the advertising revenue that search engines attract?
If you haven’t already heard, Google released a new Social Media offering called Buzz, a hybrid love child of 
If you Twitter and Flickr you will probably like to update your twitter account with your new images. I have been looking around for an easy way to integrate Twitter and Flickr this is the simplest way I have found using twitter feed.
