SEO Tips & Advice | Social Media Strategies & News

OK, so as mentioned in the last podcast, I was going to make a post about determining your true SEO competitors. Thought it would be easier to show with a few images too.

Right, so your competition – if you’re a business or you have a client that is a business, they will have some companies they see as competition. If a they originally operated offline, they will have some competitors that were also running their business offline and these are the guys they tend to want to gun for. Thats fine, the chiefs are happy as they are getting one over their old rivals.

Honestly though – are they your SEO competitors? Unlikely. Even if they are doing SEO, are they going after the same keywords? Apart from the obvious high level generic words, you just don’t know what keywords they are aiming for. So if you’re going after a particular term and outrank them, does that really mean anything? No – they could be working on something completely different.

So what next? Why not pick a search term, put it into Google and see who ranks in the top 10. They’re your competitors because they rank aren’t they? Again – unlikely. You might be thinking I’m going a bit bonkers with that statement but hear me out on this one.

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Popularity: 37%

Welcome back everyone. I hope you all had a fantastic new year celebration and are ready to hit 2010 with all you’ve got!

Towards the end of the year, I posted about Why Being a Snob Can Hurt Your Rankings with regards to the use of nofollow links. If you missed it, I suggest you check it out, as you may be one of those snobs

This time I want to focus on another snobby behaviour with regards to linking, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore – especially with how the search engines are starting to shape up with how they look at links.

One of the most important SEO factors at the moment (and has been for a looooong time) is the quality and quantity of links pointing to your pages. This really helps when it comes to ranking, but how/why? Well the search engines see links pointing to your pages as “votes” or “approval”.

So how does it help you rank for specific keywords? Well – to keep it very quick and simple (for this post) – you link to your pages with keywords in the anchor text (the text that is clickable). So rather than using “click here”, or “more info” – you would use anchor text such as “Blue Widgets”, or “Dog Training” – whatever keywords you want to rank for.

So – it stands to reason to get as many links as possible using those keywords and yes it does work! So that’s great stuff – all you need to do now is blast a load of links with perfect anchor text at the pages and you’re cooking on gas! No. Not true.

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Popularity: 40%

This is part one of my “Don’t be a Snob” series. How many parts will there be John? I hear you say. Well – I don’t know! Definitely 2 – maybe more

I hear it all the time – through forums, through conversation and all sorts of other channels.

Oh, I don’t want that link – it’s a nofollow

It’s exactly this type of mentality that can actually go against you and hinder your rankings. Why? Well the search engines know about link building, I mean come on – it’s part of their algorithm for choosing who should rank and where. It’s an important part of Search Engine Optimisation, one that I personally always stress that if you could only choose one SEO factor, I would recommend link building.

So how are nofollow links any use? After all – they don’t pass any link value, so why bother?

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Popularity: 60%