A UK SEO

The credit crunch is hitting us all (well internet marketing seems to be doing well) Google is trying to help business by promotion some of their products which help you do more with less.

Now, it’s great that Google are trying to help business by pointer people to their “free products” but at the end of the day it all comes back to them generating more money through advertising. I sometime forget that they are all geared up for people spending money on adwords. The IPA warned today that Google rising ad costs could make some business reduce budgets or look to spend on other networks.

Although that might make a slight dint products like Google Insight, Webmaster Tools, Analytics as useful as they are for SEO are also set up with the goal of getting you to spend more money on ad words.

It will be interesting to see if Google releases credit crunching products over then next few months that deep down will drive more traffic to AdWords.

Reading .net magazine today (had a secret SEO article didn’t learn anything new) and came across www.rankedhard.com. It’s a fantastic blog with SEO comics which actually made me chuckle.

In the past few weeks I’ve been playing around with twitter and I must say I’ve been converted. I signed up for the site a few months ago for another site of mine but there’s not much twittering about Blackpool FC.

The basic concept seems to be write and post interesting stuff, get followers and then you pull traffic to what you post. Hopefully some of that traffic will link to some of the stuff you post. So it’s a great tool for SEO. Also you might be able to in contact with ‘influential’ people, which again can help you gain links.

It seems to help having an iPhone so you can post on the go helps, but I’ve not done any drunken twittering yet which might not be helpful.

Something that I spend a lot of time doing at work is finding content management and e commerce platforms that create duplicate content. It’s generally generated from print views, pdf’s, differences in URL generation or clients ripping off other sites.

It can lead to big problems if it effects your entire site. Often getting these problems sorted out can lead to a good increase in long tail traffic by 10 to 20 percent. I noticed in the past that the BBC site does spurt out duplicate pages. For example.

Andrei Arshavin signed today for Arsenal, the BBC have a nice article with a video at the top. The URL for that page is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/7831046.stm

You also have a second URL, the difference it’s in the folder sport2 and not sport1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/7831046.stm

That URL 302 re-directs to the 1st one, but Google does cache the second URL. This can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/bdsj3q.

Thats not it, soon the low graphics version will get cached.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/low/football/teams/b/blackpool/7831046.stm

And under the sport2 folder

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/football/teams/b/blackpool/7831046.stm

So it’s duplicate content, Google says that you should try to make sure that you only have one version of a page on your site. The reasons why you should sort this out are pretty simple.

- Splits the flow of link juice
- Splits the possibility of inbound links
- Search engines spend time caching pages it’s already seen rather than picking up your new pages

So should the BBC block Google from caching the duplicates? Well, yes, but for a site of that site and the speed that Google caches the content and the inbound links that generate it’s not going to cause a problem.

If you see similar problems in new sites then you do need to get fixes in place. 301 the pages that have been cached already and then block the search engines!

So you’ve bought a domain and hosting, how long does it take for your new site to get indexed by Google? Well it could take minutes or it can take days. To give your site the best chance try to follow these points.

- Verify with Google Webmaster Tools
- Create a XML sitemap
- Submit the XML sitemap to the Google Webmaster Tools accounts
- Link to the XML sitemap from the robots.txt
- Submit the site to google http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
- Submit your RSS feed to Google Blog search http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
- Subscribe to your RSS feed from a Google Reader out.

and the most important

- Get external links, so here’s links to a new football shirt website that I’ve made.

The Shakira song goes “You know my hips don’t lie” but in the case of Google there is a bit of confusion over hips, are they Home Information Packs or are they the hips that Shakira can shake so well?

This is a screenshot from a Google.com search, all Home Information Packs relevant results in the paid and natural results but there are four images of lovely ladies hips!

Interestingly when searching from the UK the images don’t show. For any American readers out there HIP’s are packs of information required for when you sell your house. Google tries to show relevant content according to your search and also your location. It looks like in this case it’s almost got it correct.

In business not everyone gets along, generally in SEO were a friendly bunch but I’ve been in the middle of arguments between clients and ex-web designers. The disagreements are usually about payments, missed deadlines or lost contracts.

I’ve seen on three occasions web developers get their own back by making little changes to stop sites ranking in Google.

So what can you learn, give all third parties a temporary FTP access to the site, when they finish work delete the account. Check after work your htaccess file and for any Google Webmaster Tools verifications (either a html file or a meta tag in the home page).

The only way to avoid any problem is not to be a dick and annoy web masters or SEO’s!

There’s been a a few screen shots recently of a new looking Google SERP which splits the universal search results from the organic results. So pictures, Video, and ads are placed on the right sidebar where paid ads usually appear.

This screen shot from Search Cow Boys shows the result page for the search “Zen buddhist temple” from Google Korea.

It’s not know yet if this is an experiment which is going to be rolled out across Google, if it’s hoax! If you see any results get them screen shotted up and get in contact via a comment below.

Well the new year has seemed to bring plenty of SEO predictions so I thought I’d list some from a UK point of view.

1. More and more business will be looking to invest in SEO, as we know business who invest in marketing during a recession generally come out of the period stronger compared than those that make cuts, but…

2. Business looking to invest in SEO will go for the cheaper option, it will mean quite a few getting their fingers burnt as you get what you pay for. The companies that know what they are doing will pay for a quality service.

3. Google will continue to try and personalise trends and keywords tools to help UK business target local search.

4. Companies in the UK will start to take notice of the opportunities that advertising on social networks. Sites like facebook, MySpace and Bebo allow you to precisely target your key demographic.

5. More UK companies will look into ‘company blogging’ rather than general content generation. Similar to ‘company blogging’ some UK companies will start to use and publish information on twitter.

6. Due to the increase of personalised search hopefully SME will understand that SEO isn’t all down to achieving ranking on one key phrase.

7. Dedicate mobile sites will cease as the UK starts to move over to newer generation of phones which can handle full browsers, as a result….

8. More UK companies will be trying to ensure their website work on not only all browser but on mobile browsers, iPhone, Blackbury, Nokia I95 etc etc.

9. Firefox usage in the in UK will continue to grow with IE reducing, also Chrome will start to increase to around 5-10 % share.

10. Companies will start to shift old style link building to paying for links on other blogs, either paying bloggers or going onto content networks.

So there are the ten, if there are any UK predictions please add them in below in a comment!

It’s a new year and a good New Years Resolution is to upgrade any software running on your site. Before Christmas Wordpress 2.7 was released with a lot of hype due to the major changes to the administration section. Although many have been happy with the upgrade many Wordpress users have had problems with the new release.

The general chat and forum posts (e.g. tin68) seemed to pin point the problem not with Wordpress but with web host or plugins not compatible with 2.7.

So if your planning an upgrade or have upgraded here are a few tips.

Before doing anything take a backup of your entire MySql database and all files that Wordpress uses.

If you have done the installation and Wordpress 2.7 is running slow switch off all your plug ins and try the back end.

If it’s still not working install a second version of Wordpress 2.7 add some posts into the blog. Try the backend, if it works the problem might be corrupt database on your original blog, try exporting articles from the old blog into the new installation. If the second installation doesn’t work at all then it looks like your host is the problem. Your now going to have to get in contact with your hosting company, but before that open a thread at http://wordpress.org/support with a link to a php info file uploaded on your site.

If your still not having any luck after a post on Wordpress you might want to get in contact with your host to ask if they are running the latest version of PHP.

So if you are planning on a upgrade, Good luck, and if you have upgraded and your having problems then you might want to check out the old versions of Wordpress.