Month: October 2008

If you want a quick way to check what backlinks a site has, go to the Yahoo search engine, and type the following into the search box: linkdomain:www.domaintocheck.com -site:www.domaintocheck.com where domaintocheck.com is the domain you are checking backlinks for. the -site:www.domaintocheck.com removes any internal links, so you check only for external backlinks.

Found this post on the UK Business Forum, and thought it was worth sharing. Although SEO moves quickly, and the article is quite old, looking through it there is some good info in it, so it is definitely still worth a read. seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Feb 2015 – Update – I’m afraid this link is no longer active

I was at an SEO seminar recently and was told of some research the speaker had done to determine how page rank was distributed and how it could be managed within your site. In a very simplified version, here is what he said. Page rank will basically filter down from pages linking to your site, so in simple terms, if a page rank 8 site has 1 link from it, the site it is linked to will also be given a page rank 8, 2 sites linking & they will both get PR4 etc. However if you use the nofollow tag on internal links, these links will not pass PR, and the rank will be distributed exclusively to other links from the page. See the diagram below: Thus by using nofollow links to less important pages internal links can be built to favour your most important pages from a PR perspective. Interesting, I thought.

I came across a very useful tool yesterday designed to answer just this question. If you can’t see your website, you need to know is the server down, or is it just you who can’t access it (maybe due to connectivity problems). Here is a very simple tool for checking this: www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com Simply enter the domain you want to check & click the link & the system will tell you if the website is down, or whether its “Just you”

Following yesterdays post, I decided to check a couple of the forums listed to see if they did use nofollow, and in fact some of them did. So if you find that others are no longer not using the nofollow tag, please feel free to post a comment to the effect. My research suggests that Site Point & Webmaster talk do not use nofollow, but others (including Search Engine Round Table) do now use this tag in their signatures

Found this thread on the Digital Point Forum and though it was interesting enough to share. A recent discussion on Digital Point Forum raises the question “why do we as marketers take the time to post on Forums?” I believe that one good reason for posting on forums is to help to generate backlinks, and thus support your Search Engine Optimisation as part of your web marketing efforts. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with this motivation. Assuming you have something intelligent and relevant to say, when you take the time to browse forums and offer answers to questions, you are rewarded for your time by the forum delivering a good backlink to your site. However increasingly forum & blog owners are starting to use the NoFollow tag in signature links, depriving posters of valuable backlinks. The post I found listed forums that do not use the nofollow tag, so I thought I would share it: * Digitalpoint Forums * v7n Forums * SitePoint Forums * Harmony-Central Forums * Search Engine Round Table * Submit Express Forums * Start Ups * Webmaster Talk * Comic Book Resources Forums * Web Design Forum * Marketing Chat * Earners Forum * TriPHP Forums * 360 Gamerscore * Acorn Domain Name Forums * Book and Reading Forum * Ableton Forums * The In Place * 6Pins * IQ69 * Hot4’s Forums I can also add a UK specific one to this list: * UK Business Forums This last one is a very active forum, with some good discussions. I should also point out that we do not use the NoFollow tag in our comments signatures

Link building is (or should be) top of the agenda for anyone who is serious about SEO these days. With this in mind, I thought it would be worth highlighting a recent article in the e-newsletter from the site searchenginewatch.com. It gives some interesting tips on how to track down potential sources of links using your competitor sites. Read the Full articles on SEO link Building Fundementals

A questing which comes up regularly on SEO Forums is “Where should I host my site if I am targeting the UK?” Although I would always advise UK hosting for many reasons, the SEO issues with overseas hosting are now less significant as Google will allow you to tell it which country you are targeting your site at. This is done through Google Webmaster tools. Accessed through the My account page on Google, once you have an account, the webmaster tools offers some great stats & info on your site, and importantly lets you set the Geographical target. To do this, go into the webmaster tools for your siet, and select Tools -> Set Geographic Target . This will allow you to associate your .com domain with a specific country. Note this is only necessary for .com domains, as it will automatically associate .co.uk domains with the UK. If you are new to Webmaster tools, you can access it via the following link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

A question I have been asked recently is “how do you get keywords to display in your Adwords Adverts?”. The answer is actually quite simple. Within the Google Adwords system, there is the facility to use a variable “Keyword” in the ad text. The syntax is: {Keyword:Default text} if the keyword that triggers that ad is too long to fit in the advert, the system will use the default text (which must be shorter than the max length of the line). Full details of how to use the Keyword variable can be found in the following Google help page: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74996