After reading through a web design forum earlier today, one topic caught my interest regarding certain SEO software packages which claim to be able to achieve first page results on Google for customers websites. First of all, they can’t, simple as that. It’s a fact that for the majority of even slightly competitive keyword phrases, no automated tool will be able to cut the mustard when it comes to achieving results…

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If you’ve never heard of the term ‘long-tail keywords’, you’d be forgiven for wondering what on earth I’m talking about. It is a search engine optimisation (SEO) term which implies that you shouldn’t just target one or two extremely competitive and searched for terms, but should go for a variety of less popular keywords. It’s better to be on page one of the search engine results for four less popular keywords than it is to be on page four for a highly popular keyword phrase. An example is targeting “Web Design Newcastle” and “Web Design North East” etc instead of just “Web Design”. For the same amount of effort you’ll get much better rankings. Here’s how you can target these long-tail keyword phrases…

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This article looks at the impact of a part of the Google algorithm called Google TrustRank, on the ranking of your site in their search engine. Although no-one except those high up in Google actually know the exact formula for their algorithm, there is generally a widespread consensus between search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals as to the existence of TrustRank, especially since it was registered as a Trademark by Google in 2006. So what is TrustRank and how can I develop it?

TrustRank comprises a variety of features which can contribute to your rankings in Google, and is aimed at removing spam sites from their listings, thus increasing the quality of the results they provide. They are just a selection of criteria which are used to automatically ‘judge’ your website, effectively calculating the authority and trustworthiness of your site. The other aspect of TrustRank is a manual editorial review by Google in determining what the characteristics of high quality sites in each topic are - other sites are then compared to the benchmark ’seed’ website. In my opinion the five most important criteria for which we can influence are as follows… Read the rest of this entry »

There’s two main factors to finding your website in the search engines, the first is to verify that it is actually included in the search engine index, and the second is that even if it is included in the index, it may not necessarily rank very highly on its own. The purpose of this post is to help you establish if the reason you can’t find your website in the search listings is an indexing, or a ranking issue…

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Being in the web design industry myself, I come across a lot of website owners who pay for an all-singing all-dancing website, only to discover one year down the line that a website unfortunately won’t promote itself and are dissatisfied with the lack of visitors. As a business owner, you need to be aware of what strategies you (or your search engine optimisation (SEO) company) need to employ. Just as there are a huge variety of websites, there are also various promotion methods which suit certain website types more than others, and a combination of strategies should be used. Read on to find out what strategies will work for your website…

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After much waiting, the second 2007 Google PageRank Update is finally in progress! If you go to our multiple datacenter PageRank tool and enter your website URL, you will see that the datacentres are reporting varied PageRank values, indicative that a PageRank export has just taken place.

With the start of January 2007 seeing the last PR update, it has been expected that April would result in the next update. True to form, albeit nearly into May, the update has occurred in April, and shows that Google is still operating almost quarterly updates.

What new PageRank values have your websites received?

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As our previous post notes, we are still predicting a Google PageRank Update in April 2007, however with it now being mid-April, and all Google datacentres are still reporting similar PR values, there’s no sign of an impending update. As with all things unpredicatably ‘Internet’ we may be proved wrong, however, and the update could be in May 2007 instead.

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Webmasters who depend on Google PageRank for determining how much they can charge for people to place a link on their website hold drawn breath this month. With the last major update in Toolbar PageRank (PR) being in January 2007, we are about due the next one - hopefully within three to four weeks. Some commentators are guessing that the update is already underway but in our opinion we still have another few weeks to go. All Google datacentres are still reporting similar PageRank values, suggesting that the update hasn’t yet started.

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