SEO Tips & Advice | Social Media Strategies & News

You know the drill. You want to set up a website, you get all excited with the ideas and the concepts and are really happy you managed to get the domain name you were after. But now what? It’s time to check out where and how you are going to host your new website.

Thankfully web hosting is much cheaper than it used to be several years ago, so as far as price is concerned, there isn’t an awful lot of difference. However, performance counts when it comes to trying to get your site to rank.

The three kinds of hosting are shared, dedicated and VPS. Let’s take a look at the hosting options in more detail:

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Hey Guys,

This post is a follow up to Why Google’s Electricity Bill Affects Your SEO.

Well much later than planned, but as promised, I put together a video explaining further about duplicate content.

The amount of sites I audit, and I see this time and time again. It appears to be (not sure why) a very common thing, so it’s worth checking out to see if you are suffering the same problems with regards to duplicate content.

This is a bit of a killer for your rankings, so make sure you fix it!

Check out the video below!

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What’s that? Electricity usage can affect SEO? Have you gone mad John? My question to you – have you only just noticed I’m mad?

Right, before I jump into this crazy post, I want to update you about the Podcast. It will resume, so don’t worry. I am due to be interviewing someone very soon, so wanted to hold onto waiting for a confirmation date. Really looking forward to conducting my first interview.

I will keep you guys posted via Twitter and email for when the interview is due. If you haven’t subscribed to my email list – please do! You’ll get a free SEO webinar and of course, updates as to what is happening!

So, where were we? Thats right – electricity bills and SEO of course!

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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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Hey Guys,

This week is something different for the podcast. Rather than cover this week’s SEO and Social Media news, I wanted to share something with you that has been bugging me.

I post to outline the content of this podcast will also be put live in the next few days with more detail.

Until then, enjoy the podcast!

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Have you felt the same frustrations? Let me know!

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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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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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Well I did it,

Conducted my first ever webinar! I’d like to say thank you so much to the people who shared the experience with me. It wasnt without it’s faults though!

Thank you again for your understanding and patience when it came to the audio dropping out and not only that, but my laptop just deciding to shut down!

I re-recorded the whole webinar today so for those of you wanting to watch it again, you won’t get any glitches, and for those guys who missed out, you can get access to the full recording by clicking on the image below.

This won’t be the last webinar I will be holding. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I was very pleased you found it all useful and informative. I used the service DimDim.com which does appear to be a good service. There were some audio issues – but that might be down to my upload connection as it’s not the fastet. I will give it another attempt and see how it pans out from there.

I am currently in the process of uploading the downloadable files for the webinar. Currently you can watch it online now, and I’m uploading the avi file so you can save it to your computer. I will also be uploading a version that you can put on your iPod or other device that supports mp4 format.

If you would like to download the webinar, be sure to register by clicking on the image below and you will get notified once the files are available.

Until then, I hope you enjoy the webinar! I’d love to hear your feedback, so please stop by with some comments.

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Hey there,

Like it or not – the internet is still growing and your business needs to be visible. People don’t use other mediums like the used to. The phone book is not as popular as it once was, and local newspapers are also seeing a decrease in readership.

One of the most telling signs is when Nielson.com reported that 81% of people use the internet first to find out more about a company? Pretty big number hey?

Well check out this video I did today, explaining to you just how important it is to be visible – as well as something you can do right now to check out if you will appear to the majority of people searching for your services.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. I would love to hear your opinions.

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Hi Everyone,

Well I’m finally holding my first webinar! Looking forward to this!

There is a maximum capacity of 20 people so spaces are limited, and please only register if you are able to attend, as I would hate for people to miss out.

Anyway, below you will see a widget with all the details of the webinar and you can sign up.

Please note – the time and date indicated below is for your time zone

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