A UK SEO

So, you’ve a beginner in the SEO industry, you’ve read a few blogs and chatted to a few people they’ve probably mentioned about using tools. There are plenty of them out there but it can be pretty daunting to start off with.

If your starting to work in an SEO company ask for a list of tools from the other SEO’s but its often better to start form a fresh this way you use tools suit you. Some of the tools that I’m using at the moment will totally confuse new users so it’s best to build up the tools as you understand more about SEO.

To start, FireFox, yes some people new to SEO will not use FireFox. I’ve come across web developers who’ve never used FireFox in the past and so called SEO experts who only use IE. From there you start to understand that FireFox supports plugins so extra tools can be added to the browser.

And the first tool……. Google Toolbar, yes you may think it’s useless but there’s a good reason behind it. To use the toolbar correctly you need to sign up to a Google Account. Once you have a Google Account, then you sign up to a Google Reader account. That’s the tool that you’ll get the most out of Google Reader.

From there you can subscribe to blogs, like this one or the ones in my blog roll. This is how I’ve learned SEO and this the majority of SEO’s learn. So if your new to SEO, start off with Google Reader.

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Yahoo Site Explorer has had a face lift in the past week and there a new feature too. The old version did the job as far as I was concerned, all the tool does is give an indication on internal and external links to a page.

The new version is a little more compact than the last version but has all the same features.

The only new part I can see is the explorer button next to the listed URL’s, this means you start exploring the sites you that are linking to the site you are looking at. Head over to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com to check the new version out.

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www.warehouse-video.co.uk are another UK based company ranking in Google thanks to black hat techniques, this time using hidden text.

The site looks reputable on first look, nice design, clean, crisp and easy to use. They also are pulling in some natural traffic, e.g. number 1 for ‘dvd jewel case’ and 5 for ‘VHS Tape Packs’ but to do this the site uses a black hat technique of hiding a H1 tag at the top of most pages.

The coding is simple, a div at the top of the page called ‘top’.

<div id="top">
<h1>Wedding DVD Cases - Blank DVDs - DVD Jewel Case - VHS Tape Packs – Warehouse Video, Middlesex, UK</h1>
</div>

In the style sheet its hidden, not using the popular display none but using text-indent:-5000px. This is basically displaying the text 5000 pixels to the left of the screen.

#top h1
{
main.css
margin:0;
text-indent:-5000px;
}

If you want to see this hidden text there’s a couple of options, view the Google cache of the page, click on text only. The other way is to use the web developer toolbar plugin for Firefox and turn the css off, the text then appears.

The text appears on every page, with the text just changing depending on what the page is about. At the moment they seem have avoided any penalisation from Google most likely due to them being under the radar, not being a big enough site to get spotted. This will most likely not last, Google will catch up them which is way black hat methods of hiding text are not a sustainable way of getting rankings in Google.

There’s a little link at the bottom of www.warehouse-video.co.uk to www.castus.co.uk whom I’m guessing are responsible for the hidden text. As ever I’ll keep tabs of the site to see if they remove the text or drop out of the rankings.

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I’ve been in the SEO industry for around 2 years I still don’t fully understand what UK based company “I have a website now what” are doing. On the face of it they are a SEO company, that rank number 4-5 on “SEO”, so they know what they are doing. When you look into the website a little more they seem to have a strange way of doing SEO.

They place copies of clients sites on there own site. Links are placed at the bottom of their home page to these ‘mini sites’. (note index2.htm which is duplicate home page with different links)

Today the first link on there is sunglasses and links to an inner page called sunglasses.

<a href="sunglasses" target="_blank"><font color="#67859E">sunglasses </font></a>

The sunglasses inner page isn’t great when you get to it, it’s a splash page with a list of key phrases.

That links then to a site, all of this is located in the inner folder called /sunglasses/ but there are then some links out of the site to what I can only guess is the clients site – www.sunglasses-by-mail-order.co.uk.

So what are I have a website now what trying to do? Well they have plenty of links pointing at the home page of the site. The idea is the page rank flows from the domain to the inner pages. It’s similar to how reputation marketing works, set up a profile on a strong site, e.g. facebook and then get the ranking on the sub folder.

Is it working well, yes, search for ‘cheap cutlery’ and you’ll find one of these mini sites ranking at number 3 on Google.co.uk (the sunglasses one isn’t ranking yet so I’m guessing its new). So the client can then reap the benefits and maybe make some sales or enquirers from the incoming traffic but maybe after a bit of time on the site they 301 to the clients site to pass on the rankings and page rank.

This type of SEO isn’t black hat people can put what they want on their own site, it might be grey hat depending on you point of view. It might not yield the same results as a white hat campaign but seem to be working for I have a website now what.

I’ll be checking the site over next few month to see if http://www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk/sunglasses/ gets re-directed to the clients site!

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I”ve only been reading Joost de Valk’s blog recently and have found it immensely useful. The main topic is SEO but Joost is also a really good WordPress plugin developer. It doesn’t end there, he’s developed Firefox plugins, grease monkey scripts and SEO general tools.

Generally if your into WordPress and SEO you can’t go wrong with any of his suggestions or plugins. This site is running 3 plugins from Joost and made some changes to the architecture of the site thanks to some of his suggestions.

I have to admit from reading the articles and looking at the plugins he’s created you can’t but be jealous of his talent and expertise in SEO hence the link on the blog roll. So get over to yoast.com and subscribe.

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This is the first spam post. The idea is to clear up UK websites. I have nothing again the companies mentioned but they have websites that break the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

To start www.hammonds-uk.com from a company called Hammonds UK a bedroom and office furniture company. They’ve got a nifty little flash site which means pretty much no search engine traffic. But they’ve added some hidden text behind the flash in an attempt to bring in some search traffic.

So the text hidden behind the flash is.

<h1 class="hidden">Hammonds bedroom furniture and home office furniture</h1>
<h2 class="hidden">SALE NOW ON - Up to 20% off</h2>
<p class="hidden">Family Run Business Since 1926</p>
<p class="hidden">With 80 years experience and a 5 year guarantee you can buy with confidence! Your peace of mind is my peace of mind.</p>
<p class="hidden">Free Planning and Inspiring Design</p>
<p class="hidden">I've over 50 different bedroom and home office styles for you to choose from at the moment but I'm always looking to do something new.</p>

This is done using css setting the text as hidden.

hidden {
display: none;
}

In some instances hiding text behind flash is ok, providing the text hidden is exactly the same as the text in the flash file. If the text differs then your breaking the guidlines. If you are placing text behind a flash file, then hiding via CSS isn’t your best option, I would go with the noscript tag.

It doesn’t seem that the site is banned, it comes up for “Hammonds bedroom furniture” the hidden H1, but the hidden text method isn’t sustainable and Google will catch up on Hammonds UK.

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Next on the blog roll list is one of my favourite SEO site’s and one I’ve learnt the most from, SEOmoz. SEOmoz essentially is a company that provides SEO, but the are also committed to helping others via their blog and paid informations section.

The blog is updated pretty much every day along with YouMoz, blogs from SEOmoz members. The paid service gives you access to tools, SEO guides and most importantly the chance to ask questions to some of the SEOmoz team. The picks from the blog have to be the Thursday round up e-mail which rounds up internal and external Internet marketing news and the Whiteboard Friday Video.

So if your just starting to dable in a little SEO then SEOmoz has to be your starting point, for something a little more advanced sign up for the paid service and subscribe to YouMoz.

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Rather than just having a blog roll I’ve decided to add blogs on a weekly basis with a post about why each blog deserves to be linked. So to start the ball rolling it’s Mr Google himself Matt Cutts.

Matt is the head of the webspam team at Google, after joining the company in 2000 Matt has been at the forefront of communication with webmasters over the years coving a wide range of subjects but mostly on spam. He created the first ever version of the SafeSearch filter and now works on search quality / web spam.

Matt’s blog was the first blog I added onto my Google Reader account when I came into SEO, and if your new to SEO you should really read the achieves, you might not understand everything but it will give you a good grounding. If that gets too heavy for you then the video posts are a good place to start.

There is a the odd off topic post on the blog about Linux and his cats but overall everything that Matt posts is going to help you and generally will be understood if your new or experienced SEO. So head over to www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

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I’ll be doing a few posts about WordPress Plugins for SEO but I’ll start with the three that are essential. I’ll list them in order of importance.

All in One SEO Pack
The all in one SEO pack uses WordPress’s custom fields to create a friendlier page title and meta description and allows you to add into certain pages to reduce content duplication.

The default set up on the All in One SEO Pack seems to do the trick, for the titles and descriptions you leave the boxes blank on your post page and it will create the meta title from the blog title and take around the first 160 characters for the meta description. All you need to do is remember to try to have a good opening sentence for your blog. For example this post I’ve mentioned the title of the article again so it’s included in the description.

Google doesn’t look at the keywords tag so I keep this blank, but you can tick a box to make the plug in use the categories as the keywords.

The options to reduce internal content duplication allows you to add the noindex, follow tag to the archives, categories and tag pages. I leave the default settings so Google’s isn’t indexing the archives and categories.

Link to download

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
Not essential but helps to get some of those older blogs in WordPress cached. Each time you edit a post the site map is rebuilt, this means once you’ve set it up you don’t really need to do anything. The newer version of this plug in does all the work installation work for you creating the XML sitemap file.

Link to download

Alinks
Alink essentially is a text replace script. It will replace a word in your blog with other text. E.g. every time you mention GWT it can replace it with Google Webmaster Tools. But, it will also replace text with links, so each time you mention contact us it will replace it with contact us. This is great for creating relevant internal links to deeper pages in your site. Many blogs also use the plug in to add in affiliates links.

Really this is a time saver plug in and means content writers and clients don’t have worry about linking to the correct pages with the correct anchor text.

Link to download

So get those three plugins into your WordPress blog and you can’t go wrong!

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One of the minor problems with WordPress from an SEO point of view is the set up of the H1 and H2 tags on individual blog pages.

On individual pages the title of your blog post will be in a H2 tag. Really you want your title of your post to be in a H1 tag. To add to that your theme may also contain a blog title in a H1 in the header, which means duplicated H1 tags on individual pages.

Something like this isn’t going to cause a detrimental effect to your sites progress in the rankings, but having your title in a H1 tag may help you rank slightly higher in the search engine result pages.

So whats the change?

Step 1 – Make the blog title only a H1 on the home page.

Some people have recommended pasting the header.php into the home page of the site, index.php (sometimes home.php depending on your theme). You then edit the header.php for the inner pages making the blog title H1 a span (plain text). Then edit the code added to index.php for the home page, keeping the blog title as a H1. This method means that you have two headers, meaning double editing for the future.

A cleaner method is to keep the architecture and have a conditional check.

If home page
H1 blog title
else
Span blog title

Replace the code from the header.php with something like this.

<?php if (is_home()) {echo '<h1>A UK SEO</h1>';} else {echo'A UK SEO';}?>

Just style the span up the same as the H1

Step 2 – Change the post title on the individual pages from a H2 to a H1

The code in the single.php is change from

<h2 id="title"></h2>

<h1 id="title"></h1>

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