The Online Home of Peter Claridge

October 19th, 2007

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Pagerank. It’s a little green bar that can mean the difference between your site earning thousands of pounds a month and nothing. Well, that has been the story up until now. An entire link buying industry has sprung up around the little green graphic.

Google was “supposed” to update the pagerank of all the sites in mid July. Now, 3 months later and there is still no sign of this happening. Pagerank is not being updated.

Further research has led me to conclude that Pagerank as we know it is dead. Google has constantly stated that it doesn’t rank websites according to pagerank (it’s a very common misconception that higher pagerank automatically means higher rankings), and Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, has said that pagerank is not a big deal in Google and exporting the data to the toolbar is seen as a none event.

There’s no official word from Google as of yet on the status of Pagerank and it’s future, so it might not be officially dead, but they’ve never taken this long to update the toolbar before.

Still, pagerank had it’s uses. You could gauge the level of popularity of a website if it had a high PR and determine whether it was worth getting those valuable backlinks. Now that PR is dead (but certainly not forgotten) it leaves webmasters and internet marketers to rely on other sources, namely Alexa and Compete.

Both of these sites try and estimate the level of traffic to a site and quite frankly, both of them do a rubbish job. They take their sample data from users that have installed their toolbar. This means that if a site gets 100,000 visitors a month but none of them have the toolbar, and another site gets 1,000 visitors a month and 10% of them have the toolbar installed, the latter website would be ranked higher.

So what are we left with now to determine the value of a link or advertising on a website? It’s very difficult. Say what you want about Pagerank, but it was an exceptionally useful tool for determining the cost of a link or advertising.

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September 26th, 2007

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I’ve just signed up to a new SEO service that promises to build hundreds of one way links back to your site. I’m always more than a little bit dubious about such claims so I went out on a limb and signed up. It was only $10/mo for 100 links so I thought it was worth it just to get a concrete answer on whether it works or not.

The website is called One Way Link Exchange

The site that I am optimizing is HYIPJunction. The site is doing really well in Yahoo for various search terms, but not so well in Google and Live Here are the current rankings, as at 26th September.

So, one month from now, I’m hoping that my rankings in all the search engines will have improved from using this One Way Link Exchange service. If not…then we know that buying links from this company sucks

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September 12th, 2007

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On one of the forums I visited recently someone asked what was the perfect website design for SEO. It got me thinking because although I have a good idea what makes a perfect (or at least a best guess perfect because who really knows how the search engines work) design, I’ve never sat down and created one.

What’s more, I don’t have any evidence to suggest that a search engine optimized layout will do any better in the search engines than a normal HTML layout. Using an SEO layout could be wishful thinking for all I know.

With that said, here are the ingredients that in theory make up the perfect SEO website layout.

1. The code has to be as clean as possible. This means using tableless CSS to define the layout rather than tables because it makes the website much ‘lighter’ and the content becomes the dominant factor rather than the table dividers, rows, font attributes etc.
    
2. The should be as little text and or code from where the body starts to where the content starts. Again, this is the case for using tableless CSS as you can virtually have the content be the first thing the spider reads as it crawls your site while still maintaining an attractive design
    
3. Your H1 and H2 tags should be as close to the beginning of the code as possible. This is to make sure the spider reads it first as the H1 tag is often given a lot of prominance in the search engine rankings. It’s like a big neon sign that says “this page is about ABC”
    
4. Make your content appear before the menu in your code. This makes sure the spider doesn’t get distracted by all the other keywords in your menu and indexes all your content before it moves on to another page
    
5. Use the title attribute in your h1, h2, a and img tags. The title attribute enables you to add a few more relevant keywords about the page and increase the keyword density of the page
    
6. What ever method you use to code the website (HTML/XHTML) make sure it is valid code. It is often said that Google will rank a valid code website above a non-valid one, however, I don’t have any evidence to support this. But hey, it can’t hurt, right?

Using the pointers above, i sat down and attempted to create my first XHTML/tableless CSS valid website that was extremely optimized for the search engines. Here’s what I came up with…

(more…)

Posted in Articles, Design, SEO | 4 Comments »

August 13th, 2007

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Link directories are becoming (if not become) the number one way for webmasters on a budget to get hundreds, sometimes thousands of one way links. The vast majority of these directories are free to list your site but many offer a paid upgrade with premium options like deep linking to some of your pages.

With so many directories to choose from, how can you know which directories are the best ones to part with your hard earned dollars?

Well, here’s run down of what I consider to be the top 5 paid directories…

#5 Alive Directory
Cost: $49.95 (per year) or $74.95 (per year)
PageRank: 6
Page Strength: 7.5
Alexa Traffic Rank: 16799
Alive Directory has just had a facelift (about time) and is run by dedicated owners who ensure timely approval of submitted links. However, as with most paid directories their standards are high so don’t go submitting knock off adsense sites! Expect to be approved within 24-48 hours.

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July 28th, 2007

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When most people think of search engine optimization (well ok, only those that are actually nerdy enough to know what it is of course!) they immediately think about meta tags, keyword density and doorway pages.

Like many things when it comes to SEO, what once worked no longer does.

Take meta-tags for example. Way back when the internet was still a baby, meta tags were introduced to help search engines (at the time the big search engine was AltaVista…Google hadn’t even been invented) work out what the site was about. It wasn’t long before people started abusing the Meta Tags and when the next generation of search engines came about the importance of the meta tags diminished forever.

There are some self styled gurus that will tell you that you need the optimum keyword density to rank well in the search engines. The truth is, if there were an optimium density then it would be very easy to rank in the search engines. The best thing to do is to keep your writing natural and focus on the reader first, search engine second.

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