One of those I’ve seen getting used more and more is to put a set of links in a div attach a JavaScript link onto the whole div so that if the user clicks you get taken to page a. Under this you place a set of links – all to the same domain with some nice anchor texts and link these back to the specific pages – so that the search engine can read and index all of the links.

UX is completely different from what SX (I just made that up but by SX I mean Search eXperience I was going to use the acronym for Search Engine eXperience but I didn’t fancy getting adult filtered). there is no way that a user can click the link – unless they have JavaScript turned off of course.

What was more kinda surprising that I’ve came across a big brand doing this – not a small company. I guess they know if Google catch ‘em nothing will happen. Too big to be banned I guess.

TBH I’m kinda impressed at this but also dissapointed if the search engines can’t algorithmically see it. Oh well. Let me know if you find any pages hosting this kinda stuff. Interested to see how widespread it is.

I can’t say I’m overly surprised as I had the same issues a couple of years ago (excluding the PPC hassles he seems to be accruing) – but yell stealing his brand as his research appears to show is taking the whole thing too far. Has anyone else had similar issues with Yell?

Have I been cursed or is anyone else getting the same problems?

• WP Themes Free – Ronseal website (it does what it says on the tin) and gives you loads of free WordPress Theme which is lovely. My first attempt at a theme can be found here. I keep thinking about building one of these but can never find a wordpress theme that’ll give me the flexibility to do it in an elegant way.
• Our Cool stuff – a  link developer I know has launched hiw own directory (is about a week old) – get in quick and get your links close to the home page for more Pagerank.
• Elegant Resorts – Nice looking website built by the guys @ Equator.

Have fun this weekend.

I’ve always used link directories. They’re quick and cheap ways to get links. But that’s the problem – if they’re cheap, easy and quick that means the links they deliver are usually of really low quality. Unless you’ve got a reasonably old website with a bit of good history, some decent back links and a reasonable chunk of PageRank they do very little. All they do is add to the keywords that are pointing to the domain – which helps with search engine positions but not a great deal unless you already have some PageRank etc.

You can use a company like Directory Maximizer to do the submissions for you – but you’ll limit the number of keyword rich anchor texts to about 5. Which runs the risk of overloading your website with keywords which could trip a filter over @ Google. Also your links are only going to go to your homepage – which is a bit useless as your homepage can only do so much to help.

To test out how many people are actually using link directories as a core link development tactic and how they operate, from a management perspective, I’ve stuck one up @ http://www.solis3.com. Andy’s stuck one up at Our Cool Stuff too so we can have a comparator. Neither have PageRank yet, They have very few links in them and they’ve not been spidered yet. Solis 3 was spidered in a previous incarnation but I got bored of it when the server crashed and couldn’t find enough time until recently to get it up and running. If you fancy some free links get submitting (there’ll be more categories added in coming weeks so if you want a category that’s not listed just let me know).

I’ve also just stuck a brand new website with 6 pages into Directory Maximizer and going to do nothing else with it for 6 months to see if it brings any benefit what so ever to the domain.

I know some of you will be sitting rattling the future pagerank stuff @ SEO chat for the next couple of days and probably end up crashing it. If you are checking PageRank so often it harms your social life and your relationship with your partner I suggest you take a valium and chill out while the wee green bar changes value in front of your very eyes.  And remember that SEO has no future anyway so worrying about PageRank is useless .

L8r

Search Engine Optimisation Results

Major Fashion Retailer Starts to Kick Ass

Over June and July me and the guys have been developing links like no ones business. Not in terms of quantity but in terms of quality. So far we’ve managed to increase the terms generating traffic by about 600 in under a month. Leading to more than 25% increase in sales and more than 20% growth in revenue YOY (word to the wise keep selecting your keywords based upon the user intention and you’ll get even better financial results).

Zero to Hero for Movie Blog

I love movies and I love comics so what better way to mess around than to start integrating the two loves. Duly I’ve been involved with the Watchmen Film Blog for a wee while now. We’re now upto over 2,000 uniques a week which shows the growth that can be achieved within specific niche markets. If you want to have a look at how the films starting to shape up you can see the Watchmen Film Trailer Here.

Caravans Still Selling this Summer

God I hate being an affiliate – I feel so dirty every time they send me a cheque :p Anyway this Summer has been OK this year. I’m still waiting for an account manager at BuyAt to send me new links for the Butlins programme – as they changed their tracking links which killed the dynamic booking component I developed. But all in all its looking pretty good. Visits are up, CTR is up, sales are up and by expanding the range of merchants its all going pretty well.

Anyway hope everyone is enjoying their Summer – its like the South of France up here in Scotland just now: excepting the girls are all orange or seriously pale. But as I jet out to Greece for a week I will no doubt have time to plan a new set of strategies for when I get back. See you when I get back.

Bugger and before I forget Colin (who used to work at Equator) has moved to Drive Business. Ok so he left me in the lurch and you know how hard it can be to get experienced SEO staff these days but Andrews now developing links like no ones business. On which subject check out andrews fashion blog here I love his post on Cheap golf Chic.

1. SEOmoz Develop Cheat Sheet : SEOmoz is an SEO place that I generally just swing by but this cheat sheet made me sit down and think about it. Its simple , elegant, fots onto an A3 printout really easily and has became one of the SEO posters at my desk next to an old Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationship Chart. Anyway it gives a heads up on stuff like redirects, canonicalization etc and its great just to have so when someone asks how to do that redirect stuff in .htaccess files I can just recite it. big shout out to SEOmoz.
2. The SEO Guide to Information Architecture : got this in the RSS feed from Dan Theis website, SEO Fast Start, and it rocks. You know all those niggly little things that you slap .net developers for on a daily basis and that IIS just seems to do in an attempt to mess with all the work you’ve done. Well its probably going to be found in this list and its a good long post which is worth reading if you have any interest in SEO from a website architecture point of view (should send some usability the link it they may even agree with it).
3. Guide to Advanced Operators in Google : when I started out messing about with search engines one of the most powerful things you can do is limit/specify your search based upon certain parameters. This nice little cheat sheet allows you to find all those small things that make life simpler like finding results based upon date, filetype etc. Once you start messing about with these you’ll find that you’ll be searching for some strange things and more often than not find them.

So there’s our list of our favourite cheat sheets and we’re sure you’ll find at least one little thing in each of them that changes something you do online.

Social Network – Ning

At Ning you can set up your own social network- woo hoo. Who cares these things are mostly rubbish and have no traction and no way of ‘leveraging’ the traffic that you get. Its all fine and well getting traffic but if it doesn’t go where you want it to why would anyone invest in it.

So having set up a network on Ning and started doing all the things you should I started to find that people joined it. OK we’re upto about 10 now – but thats nine people I never connected with before. thats nine people who have now given me links to a website and nine people who are saying nice things about the things we do @ the social network and we’re starting to get some traction. The traffic this is delivering isn’t great but I can directly attribute 200 IBL from related websites/blogs to the core website gained through this network – oh and the target site got a mention in an email newsletter (which has generated a decent set of clicks). And its only taken about 2 hours to get up and running. Normally to get 200 good links would take longer than this and the quality/relevance would be a heck of a lot lower. And these links keep growing. If I blog about something these guys are interested in the site gets more links.

Social Network – Bebo

When I sat through the recent Omniture Summit the dude speaking was talking about how social networks help to influence buying decisions and the websites we all visit. If someone we trust on a social network gives us an opinion – and we trust them – we’re likely to take the opinion on board. I went to my brothers Bebo page and was reading his comments – and someone had posted something about a website selling collars (leather/rubber collars in an S&M stylee). I have no interest in this particular product (or any related products) but I clicked on it. Here was someone I don’t know reccomending a website I have no interest in but I went and had a look at it.

Social Networking – What is it good for?

So here’s the problem. Can you use/leverage/abuse social networks to get your site traffic and sales. I’ve been reading for ages about how you can do X, or to try Y on a social network and you’ll get the benefit. And most of its baloney. The truth is to get the most out of it you need to be building relationships. If you have a blog on a topic let the community guide you on which content to write – if they’re talking about it, they’ll read it and then they’ll link to it and they’ll tell their online friends about it – getting you links and traffic at the same time (think of it like targetted link baiting). And remember, as with all blogging, to link out. don’t hoard your links people will use your site as a conduit and if you link out well people will trust your links. the more trust you get the mroe you can ‘frmae’ debates rather than just ‘follow’ them.

So have fun networking online – don’t take it too seriously and make it easy for people to come to you.

Lo and behold their new SEO company, the one cheaper than I was, have started to spam inbound links from Text Link Ads to the site – call it a guess as sone idiots call the div id where the ads appear as being “TLA”.

Every ad uses the same UL Li system with exactly the same inline formatting on every link.

My first impulse is to go to Google and do a spam report. Second impulse is if this gets tracked back and we lose other work from this client. The SEO company they now use are a big SEO company and I am of the opinion that they are at fault rather than the client for these things.

I think I’m going to build a wee spider that hacks sites to search for Text Link Ads code and where it finds it automatedly reports the links to Google. Does anyone think that Google will pay any attention to a mass of report. Unfortunately my base instinct is that they wont really care all that much unfortunately. Oh well will see how we get on