Having multiple email addresses and websites (and having consulted for countless others) I’ve seen my fair share of  “We can rank you #1 on Google” emails.

Why though, do they continue to fill out the form on this website?

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From: jimmypalacios05@gmail.com
Subject: Increase traffic to your website

Message: We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.
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From: Jules Boven
Subject: Increase traffic to your website

Message: You do know what I do for a living right?

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What happens when you have a WordPress theme you like, but it doesn’t include a “Home” Link in the main top navigation?

Sure you can always click the blogs title, but I always feel that for usability purposes every website should have a prominent link called ‘Home” to the left of the main navigation.

And if you’re like me you do everything you can do avoid digging into those nasty php and css files.

The easy  3 step process:

1. Download the 301 Redirect Plugin, unzip it, upload it to /wp-content/plugins, and activate it in your WordPress plugins
2. Create a page called Home, and name the permalink/URL /home or /index or something like that. (www.exampleblog.com/home)
3. Scroll down the page your editing (in WordPress admin) and you’ll see an option called 301 redirect.
   
   Type your blogs homepage into this box, and set the date in the past, then publish the page. Now when you click that home link, your blog will automatically redirect your users from that blank page to your index page. No Coding!

Other uses for this plugin

• You can use this trick to link to external pages in your WordPress navigation.
• I use this plugin on my blogs to parse pagerank to pages that need it. For example when I bought this domain (seo.co.nz) it had previously had a website attached to it which had several links to its internal pages. I created duplicate pages that those links were pointing too, then redirected those pages to the homepage. Much simpler (for me at least) than mucking round with a .htaccess file.

I recently passed the Google AdWords exam which basically means this site is allowed to display a fancy Google Logo.

The exam is Google’s way of ensuring clients can trust the advice of the Pay Per Click Marketers that manage their campaigns.

I started studying a couple months ago but then got quite busy, then when I came back to the material it had all been changed and the program had been changed to the “Google AdWords Fundamentals Exam.”

I was a bit worried I’d need to learn everything again, but the word ‘fundamental’ sounded pretty easy so after a quick read over my notes I paid the nominal $50 fee and passed with 90%.

If any internet marketers are reading this post and thinking about taking the test you might find these the below notes helpful (or download here). They’re my personal study notes so don’t expect amazing spelling/grammar, but they should make your life a bit easier. Also as noted above you’ll need to brush up in the AdWords Learning Centre because the exam has changed slightly since these were written.

Click the continue reading link to read my full study guide online.

Continue reading »

Readers of this blog may have already seen my post about getting easy search engine traffic from public events.

The premise is simple, build a page around a massive event like a big sports match or in this case the Melbourne Cup. I decided to repeat the Melbourne Cup strategy as I consult for a website in the racing industry.

This time I took it a little further and put up three pages, one based around keywords for Melbourne Cup Streaming, one for Melbourne Cup Replay and one for Melbourne Cup Results. Each page had minimal text content but each did have precisly the content users were searching for.

Only the title tag was really optimised, if I hadn’t been more concerned with the horse I had money on I would have:

• Linked to the new posts from the old Melbourne Cup page
• Looked at the keywords people used to find the old page and integrated them into the new pages
• Actually made the effort to write decent textual content

In any event it worked pretty well, here are the results:

As you can imagine it went on like that for a while, in fact there were a total of 533 unique keywords for that 5 day period with 99% being related to the Melbourne Cup.

There are events like this going on every day, and although the traffic is fickle and not worth very much, it’s interesting that nobody is really trying to profit from this strategy. A website with a little authority could dominate the SERPS for public events like this every day. All you need is a little keyword research and a ‘fairly’ authoritative website.

Digg recently announced that they’re changing the way links are handled on their site. They didn’t go into much detail but what that basically means is that links within comments and profile pages, and links from stories below a certain threshold of trust won’t parse any PageRank (ignored by Google).

This is definitely a good thing, as I’ve often come across spam Digg profiles ranking for fairly competitive terms.

My problem is the way in which they announced it:

We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community.

SEO community sounds like a lovely phrase, but shouldn’t be (and generally isn’t) associated with the type of behavior Digg is trying to prevent. White Hat SEO’s like SEO.co.nz would never dream of setting dummy digg profiles, or spamming Digg with low quality content or comments.

Yet every person that reads that post sees the words SEO Community next to spam prevention.

Another problem is that site owners are swarmed with spam emails from so called SEO’s promising all sorts of golden rankings in generally broken English. Real SEO’s don’t need to spam, our clients come to us. But again the term SEO is associated with spamming. Maybe we need a new job title?

A working man works till the industry dies

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Some industries and businesses collapse because of a fundamental change in the market. Newspapers and payphones are becoming less relevant, so are video stores and bowling alleys. These represent the classic example of technology changing market demand, causing some existing and even entrenched industries to collapse.

But I think a lot of markets have failed or are beginning to fail simply because they aren’t doing anything new. As previous supporters die out, nobody steps in to fill their shoes.

One example of this is the racing industry, and specifically harness racing and greyhound racing.

For a time technology was racing’s savior. The introduction of simulcasting of race meetings meant punters could bet on any race they wanted to from the comfort of their own home – which caused handle and purses to shoot up.

The problem with this approach is that the people missed out on the thrill of the sport. That’s what you experience when you’re at the track with money on a horse coming down the home stretch, your heart pumping wildly as you slap the racetrack fence with your copy of best bets. Now, watching from home is fine with the existing customer base, they’re already hooked on the sport. But try turning the to the racing channel when you’re with someone who is indifferent to the sport and see how long it takes them to complain.

For most people horse racing is at best boring, at worst cruel, and generally agreed to be completely irrelevant nowadays. It’s space in newspapers has been steadily decreasing for decades, and the industry is currently facing what it calls a ‘wagering crisis’. Even die-hard fans are leaving the sport as Racetracks and Government try to milk a shrinking wagering dollar.

So what happened? Ask any horsemen and they’ll give you a diverse mixture of accusations. But I think that basically the public stopped caring. In New Zealand racing took off because a while back it was the only place you could drink after 6pm. This created long term fans some of which have still stuck around, but they won’t last forever.

The thing is that nothing has changed in the industry for years. There’s nothing particularly exceptional about it for media to talk about.

Parallel this to emerging web start ups:

Most people would agree that invoicing is about as thrilling as watching a bunch of horses go round a track, but have a look at the attention some of the emerging online invoicing startups are getting.  Companies like Blinksale (which I use for all my invoicing), regularly receive mainstream media and online attention, far more than their size should dictate.

The difference is that what they’re doing is new and innovative. There’s actually something there to report on, as opposed to horse racing which is stagnant.

Can anything be done about it? For the most part I don’t think there is any simple answer, at least not without big industry behind it. NASCAR  is unfathomably boring for the New Zealander’s, but they somehow found make cars going round in circles relevant to the everyday American.

The newspaper industry is the oft-cited example of a dying industry because it took them too long to realise their primary purpose had shifted from a news source to a news filter. Over the past decade newspapers faced with falling subscription revenue folded to the advertising pressure and released their content free online. The Financial Times managed to survive with it’s “Pay Wall” intact because it realized that people don’t mind paying for quality if it saves them time:

“It was pretty lonely out there for a while in paid land,” he said last week. “But it has become pretty clear that advertising alone is not going to sustain online business models. Quality journalism has to be paid for.”

…

The growth of paid online services under the Financial Times banner shows that the paper was right to maintain pay walls at a time when other media companies were yielding to the Silicon Valley mantra that “information wants to be free,” said Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the University of Kent in Britain and a former editor of The Scotsman.

“It has proved, in one niche at least, that editorial journalistic endeavor does create value,” he said.

NY Times

I guess in sum, there are no clear cut solutions. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and doing nothing is the worst option.

Sometimes SEO is too easy.

Here are the traffic stats from a newly launched horse racing blog:

Why the increase? All I did was wait until the big Melbourne Cup race was over, wait for it to appear on YouTube (about 100 refreshes ) and then I had the video posted within about 30 minutes.

The key was having the title and a little bit of content optimized around the phrase “Melbourne Cup replay.”

Here are the actual Keywords people were searching for to find the post:

My theory was that right after the race people would be searching for the most recent Melbourne Cup, but because it was so recent no authoritative websites would have the content up that quick – so Google would be ranking the outdated stuff. I through in the “2008″ to pick up some more searches as people refined their searches by using “2008″.

The blog wasn’t too closely related to the Melbourne Cup – but close enough so that regular readers wouldn’t feel the post was out of place.

In any niche there are big events that can be exploited like this. And if you don’t have much to say on the subject, a YouTube video is the easiest content you can get.

The NZ elections are coming up on Saturday the 8th of November, and while both major campaigns are marketing themselves fairly well offline, their online search engine optimisation strategies leave a little to be desired.

This post takes a quick look at the Labour and National Party’s websites.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is usually my first port of call when undertaking a website’s SEO. This is the file where the webmaster (or SEO) can dictate what the search engines can see, and what they can’t on any website.

Unfortunately, neither Labour nor National have seem to have heard of a robots.txt file:

National offers all their policies in HTML and PDF format. By not disallowing these PDFs, they’re splitting up their link juice, as some external sites will link to the two different pages. Adding the PDF’s to robots.txt is a clear indication to search engines that the HTML version of the page is the one they should rank. National should also put the nofollow tag on each internal link to these PDF.

Authority

Sitelinks are a clear sign that Google thinks a website is authoritative in it’s niche. Labour has them for the keyphrase “labour party,” but also for the more ambiguous keyword “labour.”

National on the other hand, gets no such love. One reason for this is that the sitelink algorithm favours an exact match on the title tag. By putting “NZ” in front of the keyphrase “National Party” they’re diluting the exact matches effect.

Backlinks

Labour’s website shows a total of 558 backlinks according to Yahoo’s Site Explorer. National shows 12,100. Here’s where Labour really messes up. They have redirected www.labour.co.nz, and www.labour.org.nz using a non search engine friendly 302 temporary redirect instead of the search engine friendly 301 permanent redirect. Not only that but going to http://labour.co.nz (without the www) gives a big “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname).” These failed redirections are likely the reason the Labour Party website shows so few backlinks.

Both sites offer some relatively good content to link at, such as tax calculators, but there has clearly been no concise strategy to develop links. They could do a lot better with conversational content… how about a quiz called “Are you a National or Labour voter?”

Title Tags

National has pretty straightforward title tags, generally opting for “$page name – NZ National Party.”

But again Labour is making some serious SEO errors. All of Labour’s policy pages – the main topics people will be searching for when deciding how to vote – have the exact same title tag for every page within the that section.

Next to backlinks, title tags are the most important things search engines look at when deciding where to rank a page.

Final Thoughts

I could go on as there are a few more minor issues that should be given some attention, but judging from the analysis so far the effort would be largley accademic. Both the Labour and National party have some serious SEO problems that could be fixed very easily by a knowledgeable person.

Political bloggers are saying that the internet has only played a minor role in this years election. But if the political spectrum in the US is anything to go by, getting it right is going to be far more important in the years to come.

As this is the first post on this blog, I though I’d let everyone know what’s happening with this website and what to expect in the future.

The site’s coming along nicely and is nearing completion – a few more pages need some content but in terms of front end functionality this is about it.

It’s is running on Wordpress, with the blog in separate part of the site. While out of the box Wordpress is set up to be a blogging platform, the system and community are so great you can basically set it up to do whatever you want. Even Ford’s official site runs on Wordpress.

The logo design was an interesting experience. I ran a competition at 99 designs and the eventual winner, Sima, turned out to be not only a great designer but a very patient person to work with.

Once the site’s finished I’m looking forward to posting some interesting stuff on this blog. I’ll try to cut out the fluff, and I’ll write about what I’ve been learning in the SEO/Online Marketing field.

Along that vein, expect to see:

• Info on how to configure Wordpress to function as a website
• Some Black Hat stuff (which I’ve recently been experienting with on some of my own projects)
• Extensive information on SEO for large websites (10,000 pages+). (I’ve been doing SEO for a long time for a website with 65,000 pages at last count.)
• And all the usual SEO/PPC stuff

That’s it for now, I probably won’t update this blog for a little while until I’m happy with content and functionality of this website, but since this websites starting to see a fair amount of traffic I thought I’d write a quick update on where it’s all going.