And after experimenting, researching, listening to White Hats, Black Hats and an entourage of other SEO guru’s I’ve come to the conclusion that now-a-days effective “SEO” has become pretty simple. Not necessarily easy, but it is simple. The 3 steps below are my ‘secret’ formula which has worked well, for instance most of our business leads for The Artists Web come from natural search and our advertising budget is practically zero.

Step 1. Get a high Page Rank

This is more important than anything else and also significantly more difficult than the following steps. I’m sure you already know what Page Rank is – and that getting a high PR is basically down to how many quality incoming links you have. In essence what the rest of the internet is doing is more important than what you do on your own site.

In my opinion, the most effective long term ways of getting incoming links are

• Have a regularly updated interesting website/blog
• Create a great web service
• Create some viral content
• Make lots of friends

Step 2. Know your target subject and keywords

Your website has a theme, and you have a target audience you wish to attract. Obviously the theme and the search terms your target audience use must align. Moreover use keyword tools to find out the specific language most commonly used – for example is which term is most searched “sell artwork” or “sell paintings”?

Step 3. Create a high PR page for the subject/keyword in question and apply a few simple techniques

Finally you create a page on your site, give it as much page rank as you can and make sure you are using the keywords appropriately. These techniques will help, but they are no silver bullet – really the without the first step (getting the high page rank) any SEO ‘technique’ is going to be of limited use.

• Link to the page from every page on your site, or at least from your higher PR pages e.g. the home page. This ensures you are allocating as much page rank to the page as you can.
• Put the main keywords in the page title
• Write a compelling Meta Description, the meta description is often used on the search results page, this is your chance to write some compelling copy which encourages people to click on your link. Don’t worry about keywords, consider it similar to writing the copy on a paid search advert.
  
• Phrase your copy to natuarlly include search phrases. This is the only ‘trick’ that I use, just bare in mind your target search phrases. e.g. for the phrase “sell paintings”:

  Okay

  Selling paintings online is easy with our service.

  Better

  Our service helps you easily sell paintings.

• Use appropriate keywords in the url e.g.
  Bad

  /page.php?id=1232

  Good

  /how-to-sell-paintings

Surely it’s not that simple?

Well actually I think it is. Basically google (for now english language search is pretty much all about google) has some of the best brains and technology continually working to ensure it has the most relevant, useful and authoritative results. It’s therefore simple enough to presume that long term the most relevant, useful and authoritative results will tend to feature first, so really all you have to do is be relevant, useful and authoritative – simple, but not necessarily easy. Yes there are plenty of other techniques and factors (HTML validation, link anchor text, page cachebility) but none of them will make a significant difference unless you have and interesting an respected website.

Finally, don’t cheat

And don’t be tempted to go for any ‘black hat‘ SEO technique – do not run the risk of being penalised. Think long term and focus on quality.

The post My Secret Voodoo SEO Technique appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

Firstly, one needs to understand what “excellent keyword search results” actually means. And of course (as I’m sure you’re wise enough to know without being told), they refer to the most amusing results.

Top 10 Keywords, Sentence Game, January 2009

amazing!

5 steps to success

1. Start a simple word game website
2. Wait for ‘mature’ males to start playing
3. Stand back and watch the endless reams of nonsense and toilet humour amass
4. Soon google will have enthusiastically sucked up all your “original” content
5. Success! long term page 1 ranking for “spastic porn”, “frotage” etc.

Conclusion

Now-a-days, having retired from fortune acrued of the tens of $0.01 google adsense clicks each month, I spend most my days idling on the deck of my San Tropez yacht being fed organic grapes whilst simultaneously being massaged and bathed in goats milk.

Further reading check out the sentence game.

The post How to get excellent keyword search results appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

Google have included what is known as an “Easter egg” (a “hidden” facility in the application) within Google earth. The flight simulator can be accessed by getting a download of the latest version of Google earth and then holding down the “ctrl” “alt” and “a” key simultaneously.

It is not clear whether the flight simulator is available on all versions of Google earth or whether you need Google earth pro or Google earth plus versions. I got a download of the most recent version and couldn’t get t to work… if anyone unearths (excuse the pun) how to do this please let me know.

Anyway looks pretty cool addition to the standard functions (map, zoom etc.) that are available. Check it out on youtube here: google earth flight simulator

The post Google Earth Flight Simulator appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

Hi All,

Just to let you know that there is a new report within Google that gives you visibility on all search queries that have resulted in a click. Its called Search Query Performance and its in the reports section.

I have already noticed that a phrase where we aren’t bidding on any component, is being displayed for my client… and it is a competitor brand!

On a more practical note this will give you guidance on long tail exact match keywords to add to your accounts.

Interesting…

adwords support article on Search Query Performance

The post Google Adwords Search Query Performance appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

From my first recce, it seems to be an open source extension for your webrowser that acts as a local server for caching, storeing and serving resources – I see it as a local proxy to for web applications. Seems like it would involve a certain amount of re-writing of your application, but sounds very interesting…

The post Google Gears Beta appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

In particular I noticed that for japanese keywords e.g. オフィスレンタル (office rental) that it also reported high volumes of traffic for the same words reversed レンタルオフィス (rental office), whereas intuatively I’d have thought the order of the words very important. Perhaps they need to be exact phrase matches i.e. enlosed in quotes, however the keyword tool doesn’t seem to allow this.

Anyway I’m not alone on this train of thought!

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-research-tool-accuracy
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum81/5459.htm

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