A UK SEO

Recently I’ve been advising about best practice in the layout and design of Ecommerce Websites. SEO goes hand in hand with layout and design. A good design should result in easy and good SEO.

Here are four layouts in my opinion that make for a good layout for ecommerce sites. The structure works best for site with not too many products around 50-400 products.

Home Page / Static Pages

Category

Product Lists

Product Page

For a more detailed look see this pdf.

Search Engine Rankings move, they move a lot and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it but keep on the track of building content and links which should reduce the movement.

How much can they move? Well in the matter of 12 hours my Blackpool FC blog move from 3 to 9 on the first page for the key phrase “blackpool fc“.

So happy happy, joy joy with a number three ranking, the official club site takes up number 1 and 2 spot so no room for improvement. That was about 11 last night.

This morning at 11, whammy all the way down to 9 on the bottom of the first page. I’m signed out of my Google account which can skew the results.

It’s great to see in the past two weeks channel four have updated their catch up service from using windows DRM to using flash. Which means it now works on my mac which is great. Channel four being the nice fellows that they are even have a intro video saying sorry for the on demand service being delayed for mac users.

All I need now is Chrome, this year maybe?

I’ve been looking for a way to import a csv into pages on Wordpress. So far all I’ve found is plugins to import csv’s into posts. In the past I’ve ran mySQL inserts created from spreadsheets, which do work but are time consuming to create.

I’ve found one import scrip which with a simple change will upload csv files into pages. You can download the plugin (well it’t not technically a plug in but an import script which goes in /wp-admin/import) from Zack Preble’s blog.

All you need to do is change line 292 from

= "post";

To

= "page";

That sets the new entry as a page rather than a post. Get your csv ready and upload. This is great for building new sites or transferring sites in to Wordpress as you can get the client to prepare all the data in excel first. The other useful tip is for affiliates …… product feeds……

It seems more and more tv commercials are now using the “Search for……” rather than giving out websites address. The latest is the 3D movie from Dreamwork’s Monsters Vs Aliens, I went to see the movie yesterday and have to say it was really good, especially with the 3D glasses.

Anyway, the TV advert this afternoon promoting the movie this afternoon ask the viewer to search for “MVA” which is quite precise. It’s working according to the stats from Google insight with a recent surge in traffic.

Amazingly this is the SERP you see searching for MVA.

So you get one PPC advert about the Monsters Vs Alien’s movie and the top organic spot is taken by www.mvaconsultancy.com. Nothing in the top ten is related to the movie. This type of campaign must be costing a fair amount of money for Dreamworks and maybe bringing a fair amount of traffic to www.mvaconsultancy.com.

There seems to be a little page rank update going on this weekend. As we know Page Rank doesn’t directly relate to how much traffic a site receives, sales or success but many people are hung up on what the little Green Bar says.

The last update was on News Year Eve, if you’ve gone down in Page Rank this time you’ve either lost links, links have changed to nofollow, or the sites that link to you have lost links thus not passing on the page rank they once did.

Another reason for a drop in score is Google shifting the boundaries, Google will shift the page rank boundaries up to make sure we all don’t end up with page ranks of 10.

I’ve added a plugin today to reward commentators on the blog. After five comments the nofollow link is removed from the link back to their site. Many sites have adopted this policy as it also means you can select which commentators to keep the nofollow on their links in the admin section of wordpress, thus giving your editorial control over the use of nofollow.

The plug in i’ve used called Lucia‚Äôs Linky Love.

Loving Spotify still but no new doves album but the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s album is on there. A great site has been launched in the past few months by Kieron Donoghue called www.sharemyplaylists.com.

The site works like many other of the Spotify playlists sites, you see a play list you like, click the link and hey preston the playlist is loaded up into Spotify. What makes this site slightly different, apart from the nice layout is the rating, comments and most importantly the quality of the playlists, plenty of decent indie and britpop stuff!

Head over to www.sharemyplaylists.com remember you’ll need to download spotify and have a good taste in music!

Following the release of Google Street View in the UK I’ve been roaming around Manchester the City I live in. At the moment street view hasn’t been released in South Manchester where I live but the city center down to Fallowfield is mapped and here my top drinking venues in the mapped area.

1. Jabez Clegg

2. Sinclairs

3. Trof Fallowfield

4. tv21s

5. The Old Monkey

I’ve pointed out a few sites in the past that have working black hat technique another one cropped up the other day, I mentioned it on twitter.

Showforce.com are a company that provide staff for events, promotions etc, I’m sure they are a great company but it seems that the SEO company they are using are not too great (well they are ranking in Google…). In this case plenty of key phrases have been hidden in a h1 tag at the bottom of Showforce’s homepage.

So how is this text hidden? Well the text is placed in a H1 inside a div called “SEO”, the style is set to hidden.

<div id="SEO" style="OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 1px; POSITION: relative; TOP: 819px; HEIGHT: 1px"> <a href="http://www.showforce.com">
<h1><b>event planning checklist, corporate uk, co........</b></h1>
</a></div>

Does this work? Well yes, the text is hidden and the Showforce site ranks number one at for “event staff”.

Will it work for longer? We’ll have to see. It seems that Google need to fix up and look sharp on their spam detection.