Is SEO ruining the internet?

I regularly check a number of forums for the sake of learning, good humour and general banter. Having done this as a means of killing spare time over the past few years, I can’t help but notice the constant increase in the number of worthless posts that are being added. For example “This is a good thread, thanks for that.” or “I agree” or “I think this is a good topic”. These guys clearly add nothing to the debate and have nothing original or worthwhile to say, so why are they posting? The answer is clear when you glance down at their signature; packed with links and promotions to company web sites.

What am I doing right now? Rambling in a blog that no-one ever reads! Why? Well because I can do this: Uk Hosting | Film Forum

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t created this blog solely for the purpose of SEO, but I don’t think I would have started one without this alterior motive. And if I had, it wouldn’t have been packed so full of links if it wasn’t for the backlink algorithm!

Then we’ve got article directories that clog up the net with worthless crap and promotions. A small percentage of those articles are mine – although I do try to at least contribute something more than worthless crap – I regularly fail though. I’m not a writer!

Don’t even get me started on link exchanges and link farms!

Someone needs to come up with a new search algorithm that doesn’t rely so heavily on backlinks. Cuil.com have tried; they don’t seem to have succeeded (yet) and Microsoft’s answer was an algorithm that takes into account the amount of time someone spends on any given web site and ranks them accordingly. Great, now we’ve got facebook and other social media sites dominating search results. God knows what kind of SEO tricks will be implemented as a result of this algorithm!

I’m a moaner today, sorry for that. But it’s true. When you start to look out for it, you really can see it – SEO I tactics I mean!

Have a nice day! By the way, if anyone wants a link exchange, contact me…I could do with more traffic

Higher ranking in google.com than google.co.uk

Another quick post for today because there seems to be a common problem for us Brits in that our sites are ranked higher in google.com than google.co.uk. I have been reading that the same may be true for other territories aswell, although I can’t backup these claims.

So here are a few of my tips to improve your local ranking as opposed to .com ranking:

a) Set the geographic target location of your website to UK. To do this you need to have an account registered at google, login to your account and in the ‘webmasters tools’ section you can navigate to ‘tools’ and then ‘set geographic location’. See screenshot below:-

b) Try to gain links from .co.uk websites, rather than .com websites hosted in US. You can find several free and paid directories, websites from where you can get back links. A simple google search will be enough to find plenty of these directories. You could also try submitting articles to UK-based sites.

c) Exchange few links ( If you do not want to go for paid links) from high ranking websites within your business niche from UK. Try emailing a few sites that are similar to yours where linking is mutually beneficial. If you try and do a link-exchange with a site that is four hundred times the size of you then the chances are they will not be happy with the exchange.

d) Include this tag in the head section of your HTML pages:-

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-GB” />

en-GB means English from United-Kingdom.

Follow these tips and within a couple of months you will see higher rankings from Google.co.uk as opposed to .com.

Good luck with it!

I lost one hundred links….

So, I can now attribute the recent drop in search engine rankings to be due to losting approximately 100 backlinks – I’m still yet to find out which links I have lost but I feel much happier knowing that there is a reason for it.

On the plus side, we have moved back up to 15th for the Film Forum search phrase thanks to a recent spate of backlinks from other areas. So we’re back on track.

It’s really quite impressive how Google have practically sprung from nowhere (10 years ago) to overtake Yahoo! as the “top trump” search engine. It just goes to show that to be successful in a venture, you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel, the results are just as impressive if you do something better in an already established marketplace. Google are now the search engine everyone wants to get into because they know search better than anyone else…It’s as simple as that.

Getting to the top page on Google is similar to having your shop on Oxford Street in London…You know that at any point in time you will have potential customers iin your “shop”. Being in the right place is sometimes more important than the actual product you sell or the service you offer, which is a frustrating thought for web developers because it means that it isn’t necessarily the best sites that are the most successful – it is the most visible (ie. those that have been promoted).

What is also frustrating is that once a site starts to achieve “a-list” status (by a-list I mean in the top ten for a specific search term) it is like a snow ball that grows and grows and as it picks up speed and thus ever increasing the gap between those that aren’t A-listed and those that are. SEO is a very valuable business area right now – it can mean the difference between success and failure.

In my next article I will write about some of the tools that Google offers to web developers to help improve their web sites in terms of visibility and operations.

Bad day at the office…

Well actually, just a bad day at home. I have been doing my usual work on the site only to notice that we have now fallen approximately 10 rankings in the Google search for the search phrase – Film Forum.

It is normal for the results to fluctuate frequently, but it’s quite disappointing all the same.

On the plus side, I managed to achieve a click through rate of 0.16% on my Google adwords experiment for not a large cost. This has driven a good number of visitors to the site over the last few days, so I will be doing further tests in a while.

Only a short entry for today, as am knackered. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better news for the site!

Paul

Article Writing – Resource boxes

Quick update SpittinFlicks.com is now up to 17 position for the tags “Film Forum” on google.com which is a good result – an especially good result as this time last week we were down in the 23rd spot.

This article will be really quite short – the purpose is to ensure that you, as authors, make the most out of the resource box at the bottom of each of your articles.

Before you create a resource box, you need to decide exactly what keywords you are going to promote for your web site. At SpittinFlicks.com we decided to plug two search terms : “Film forum” and “Film Reviews”. Both search phrases return somewhere in the region of 25 million results in Google.com and therefore are very competitive.

Determining what keywords to plug could be essential to the success / failure of your web site. You ideally want something that is a common search phrase (you can use Google trends to compare search term frequencies – more about this in a future article) but also something that isn’t already over-competitive.

Now you have decided on phrases you wish to plug, you can now create your resource box.

Here is my resource box for SpittinFlicks.com articles:-

“SpittinFlicks.com is a new Film Forum and Film Reviews site that is trying to bring together a community of film lovers.”

Many article directories will allow you to have multiple URL’s in your resource box. As you can see in the above example, I have plugged the site name along with the two key search phrases. Make sure that any words / phrases you wish to promote are anchored to a URL.

I have seen many authors who simply link the site name in their resource box. This is a big mistake – if I did that then my site would only be shown if a user typed ‘spittinflicks’ into the search engine, which is highly unlikely. The search phrases you think people will type into the search engine must be linked!

I have had amazing success from simply submitting two or three articles a week using the above technique. I hope that you do, too!

Keep at it folks, site promotion takes time!

Article writing

So I am now up to 21st in google for the search phrase “film forum“, so happy days. Hardly the first page (top half of first page even) that I desire but I’m sure that will come with time.

So one of the ways to increase your web traffic is through writing articles. For a site like mine, ie. one that is majorly content-based, it is the perfect way of achieving backlinks, which as I’m sure you’re aware is key to achieving a good search engine position in Google.

The concept is really quite a good one. You can submit your article to ‘article directories’; these articles can be about anything you want to write about. I have submitted a good number of articles that review the latest films.

Once you have written your article, you have the opportunity to add something called a ‘resource box’. This is where you can write who you are and, of course, link back to your site.

Should you article be reviewed, it will appear on these article directories (with the resource box, so immediately you already have one backlink), but on top of that other webmasters can take the articles that you have written and publish it on their web site. However, anyone who publishes your article must also make sure that he/she includes your resource box! So now you have one backlink from a high PR page in the article directory and an unlimited amount of backlinks from whoever wants to publish your article.

Therefore it is a good idea to write great articles that other people will want to publish!

What’s even more beautiful is that when you submit your articles to these free article directories, you don’t give that directory unique rights to the content. Therefore you are free to submit to other article directories. You can easily see how the potential for backlinks can build up extremely quickly.

In my next feature article I will tell you how to specify your resource box correctly so that you achieve the best possible status in the search engines….