A UK SEO

I’ve heard about Windows Live Writer and with a new Windows computer to hand I thought a test would be needed.

1. Setup

Really simple install of the program (it’s bundled up with MSN messenger download). To add in the blog all you have do is select the type of blog, e.g. WordPress and add in your log in details. It’s loads up settings, category and your theme and your ready to go in 30 seconds.

2. Ease of Use

The idea behind Live Writer is to make blog publishing easier to do this Live Writer is very similar to Word a program many people have managed to master. Lets test uploading pictures.

Very simple, just click insert, picture then brows the picture either on your computer or the web.

3. Speed

The install was quick and also the typing is quicker as you don’t have to wait few the milliseconds between pauses when WordPress autosaves. I’ll have to test out how fast it is to publish in a moment but over all it’s very quick.

Conclusion

A really nice program which I can see being very useful for when you want to blog but have no internet connection. If you have users that are unwilling to try to using WordPress this is a baby step to blogging as it’s very similar to Word.

Edit : The upload was very quick!

As this blog is about SEO I suppose I should blog about changing jobs. For the past 2 years 10 months I’ve worked at Just Search. The role at Just Search was my first in SEO and I don’t think you could get a better start in the SEO industry. Having a degree in Computer Science and also running the website odd site helped me get into the swing of things. For anyone looking to get into SEO having a Computer Science degree really helps but is not essential, some of the best SEO’s out there have hardly any qualifications.

My job role originally was SEO Account Manager but morphed into Senior SEO Advisor which was basically was doing SEO on the fly during client’s contracts, with some report writing and consultation. It was great fun and most importantly dealing with 100′s and I mean 100′s of sites really helps to build up experience.

The best part of Just Search was the people I’ve met so off the top of my head a BIG THANKS TO Neil, Paul, Gary, Dave, Martin, Caroline, Ahmed, James W, Phil, James S, Adam, Simon R, Adam L, Sadie, Sam, Mark, Rik, Will, Carl, Vip, Daz and loads others…

From Monday I’m going to be working in Manchester City for a company called Amaze.

Best update some profiles over the weekend!

To improve the speed of the site and also to get wider images into posts I’ve changed to a new theme. It’s a free theme from Woo Themes which needs a few little updates but look good so far. To help I used the theme test drive plug in is great for testing your new theme without putting it live.

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed my Blog Roll list so I’ve made a few additions tonight.

http://blog.arhg.net/ – Andrew Girdword of BigMouthMedia
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk – Dave Naylor of Bronco
http://www.searchcowboys.com/ – Search Cowboys
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/ – Blog Storm
http://www.seomad.com/ – Neil Walker of Just Search

If you have a great blog let me know in the comments, if you keep me entertained for a few months I’ll add your blog to the others.

Google recently have been working hard on developing tools and new methods to combat duplicate content. 301′s remain the best fix and prevention is best done with robots.txt blocks and nofollow, but the new tools are great if you can’t get access to redirect or block.

Duplicate content causes a split of page rank, can cause some pages to be filtered from rankings but big websites seem to not care about the issue. If the big site’s don’t care about it, why should a site for a small business concentrate on often making lengthy changes or spend time on re-directs that some sites don’t even bat an eyelid at the issue?

Let’s have a look at some examples.

BBC

On the whole the SEO on the BBC is good but they do have a duplicate content issue on the site. I first pointed this out in a post back in February. The problem seen was two URL’s for each page.

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

On top of that there is also the low graphic version of the page.

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

Facebook

Another post I did a while ago where your profile can be loaded up on two URL’s

http://www.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

and

http://en-gb.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

Also some profiles now appearing with ?_fb_noscript=1 after the URL’s. That example above isn’t indexed but these two are http://www.facebook.com/wgardner69 and http://en-gb.facebook.com/wgardner69?_fb_noscript=1 some random person!

LinkedIn

Spotted by a work colleague of mine Neil Walker (follow him on twitter @theukseo) he noticed LinkedIn had a duplication problem with two URL’s for his profile.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/neil-walker/4/41a/793

http://www.linkedin.com/in/internetmarketingoptimisation

Travel Supermarket & Virgin Media

Another spot form Neil was a very strange duplication on Travel Supermarket & Virgin Media. This time it looked like they have duplicated content on a sub domain rather than having two URL’s for one page of content.

Twitter

Can’t remember who spotted this (please comment and I’ll link) but twitter has a https duplication problem and a mobile sub domain duplicating.

m.twitter.com/johnpcampbell

https://twitter.com/johnpcampbell

Looking today there is also explore.twitter.com/johnpcampbell indexed but they have a fix in place in the form of a 301 re-direct to twitter.com/johnpcampbell

Should you still care about duplicate content?

In all these example due to the size and the power of the sites it’s not really having an adverse effect on their overall performance (like throwing a dart at godzilla! he’s not going to feel a thing). Google seems to be able to work out which is the correct URL to display. It would be nice to know the effects of correcting this as these sites have so many pages.

Just a little fix to stop duplicate content on twitter would cut the crawling time of Google allowing the search engine to spider more pages. Unfortunately we’ll never know but I’ll keep on fixing site-wide duplicate content issues.

Do you thing big companies need to sort out duplicate content issues? Add a comment

A huge part of being a good SEO is digesting news, blogs, views, reports, whitepapers and filtering out the crap. He’s a list of 25 companies in the UK offering SEO services who are publishing some content that isn’t crap. They range from the small to the large but all tend to push out good content on RSS.

Links to Site in alphabetical order

Amaze
Base One
Big Mouth Media
Branded3
Bronco
Data Dial
Distilled
Fresh Egg
Further
Green Light
I Crossing
Just Search Ltd
Lake Star Media
Latitude
NorthSouthMedia
Push On
Receptional
redsauce
SEO Consult
SEO Optimise
Site Visibility
Stuck On
The SEO Company
Verve Search

RSS Feeds in alphabetical order

Amaze
Base One
Big Mouth Media
Branded3
Bronco
Data Dial
Distilled
Fresh Egg
Further
Green Light
I Crossing
Just Search Ltd
Lake Star Media
Latitude
NorthSouthMedia
Push On
Receptional
redsauce
SEO Consult
SEO Optimise
Site Visibility
Stuck On
The SEO Company
Verve Search

Download as an OPML file to upload into Google Reader (26th bonus RSS is this blog)

Twitter Accounts – 18 account 6 missing (Branded3, Data Dial, Further, Push On, redsauce, The SEO Company)

amazeplc
baseonegroup
bigmouthmedia
bronco
distilled
freshegg
Warren_Cowan
icrossing_uk
justsearching
lakestarmedia
Latitude_Group
northsouthmedia
Receptional
seoconsult
seoptimise
SiteVisibility
StuckonSEO
LisaDMyers

Follow all in one click with http://tweepml.org/25-UK-SEO-Companies/

Missed any off ? Then please add to the comments and I’ll add them on the post if they are any good!

EDIT A few to add from comments from people

Verticle Leap – RSS @verticleleap

MediaEdge – No RSS – @MECmanchester

MediaVest – No RSS – @mediavest_leeds

Ayima – No RSS – No Twitter

Yes, yes we know that Google doesn’t use the meta keyword tag. It was mentioned in a post back in December 2007 they ignore it. Today’s video and blog post just to any that missed it.

Yoast had a great idea to get the new post ranking for meta keywords so SEO’s don’t need to answer the question from clients. We can just say “Google Meta Keyword” for an explanation.

So if you have a blog link to the post using the anchor text meta keywords. It’s at 27 in the UK rankings at the moment being out ranked by a few blogs published today mashable, searchenginejournal and malcolmcoles. So if we all link together…

The site is 1 year old today. Over the past 12 months there has been 105 posts which is one every 3.4761904761904761904761904761905 days which isn’t too shabby.

Maybe I can aim for one every other day?

The most popular question from clients to SEO’s is How Many Links Do I Have? My answer, it depends.

There’s a little more explanation to it. What seems to work well for me is to show the difference in the number of links different tools report for my Blackpool FC Blog.

There are multiple websites that you can use to get a total on the number of links your website has, I can think of six in total

Google Link Command – 6
Yahoo Site Explorer – (Inlinks, except from domain) – 1,297
Google Webmaster Tools – 197
Majestic SEO – 2,702
Linkscape – 516
Alta Vista – 319

Which is the best site to use to check links? To get a list of them all then Yahoo / Majestic SEO will give you a comprehensive report. If you need to check new links coming it’s very hard to do as you need to compare one month to another.

To get an indication of what is happening with your links you want to track the trend buy keeping a total every 2 / 3 weeks. Track numbers of all of the different tools above as you then get a good indication of the general movement.

Sometimes as an SEO you reach a point when you’ve tried everything to get a site ranking or out of a penalty. If your out of options then a good place to turn is the Webmaster Forums from Google, MSN and Yahoo.

They are great resource to get help from people who really do want to help you even though they have nothing to gain. It seems at the moment that the Bing Webmaster Forums are being used to grab a free link to a site of your choice.

You can add a link into your post or signature and it won’t have a nofollow. For example

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/647352/9532720.aspx

Most of the people who are there to help may have a link to their blog or company which is acceptable considering they are helping people. Some are taking a little further.

As expected you always get a viagra link.

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/649775/9549831.aspx

And this fella has got an advert in his sig!

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/649566.aspx

But, if you give a platform for people to add links in that are not no followed, you will get links to porn sites, it’s inevitable.

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/649539/9546835.aspx

I’m guessing the links were not in the post originally and added at a latter date. The wysiwyg editor is secure you can’t stick iframes or JavaScript in but it just means that people will start posting to get a link and not necessarily to help someone.

Hope this hasn’t ousted anyones primary source of links!