I was invited to join the SEO Dojo guys for their weekly radio podcast, to talk about linkbuilding and SEO for Google News. It was a blast and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with David and Terry. You can stream or download the podcast here (my contribution starts 40 minutes in):

SEO Dojo: SEO Dojo Radio Episode 4

In the second part of the show today we’re having Barry Adams from the Great Websites blog. He works at Visual Script in Belfast and deals with some major newspapers. As such we’ll be asking him about his (extensive) knowledge of Google News.

After seeing yet another regurgitated blog post on how we should stop doing SEO and start focusing on social media, I couldn’t hold back my frustration any longer and wrote a rant that got published on the SEO Bullshit website:

SEO Bullshit: Search and Social? Eh, no.

I don’t buy in to this social-search-coagulation. It just doesn’t compute with me. Looking at my own behaviour online, when I use a social media site I’m in an entirely different mindset than when I’m using a search engine. My ‘user intent’, if you will, is very different.

Recent Writings on SEO 7 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

(This article was originally published on the Visual Script blog.)

Sitemaps are a crucial aspect of a successful website. First, let’s make it clear what we mean with a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps: one meant for visitors of your website, and one for search engine spiders.

Sitemaps for Visitors
The first type of sitemap is probably very familiar to you. It’s a webpage that shows an overview of all the content on a website. You can see an example here of our own Visual Script sitemap.

This type of sitemap is very useful as it allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for without having to go through your website’s navigation. Especially for large websites it’s recommended to have a well-structured sitemap that is linked from every page on your site, for example in your website’s footer.

Sitemaps for Search Engines
The second type of sitemap is a so-called XML sitemap. This type of sitemap is specifically intended for search engines, and it does roughly the same: allowing search engines to find all the content on your website quickly and easily.

Why bother with an XML sitemap then, if it’s the same as a normal sitemap? Because an XML sitemap allows you to include extra information about the content on your site, such as:

• when a webpage was last updated
• how often a webpage is usually updated
• what the priority of a webpage is relative to other pages on your site
• what type of content a webage contains (text, video, etc)

An XML sitemap allows a search engine to quickly and efficiently index all the content on your website, making sure your site is fully spidered and all your content is part of a search engine’s index.

Google recommends every site includes an XML sitemap. You can create an XML sitemap yourself manually, or you could have one generated automatically – ask your site’s web developer about it, or look at Google’s sitemap help pages here.

For larger websites it’s recommended to have a sitemap created automatically, so that whenever you create a new page or update an existing page your sitemap is automatically updated as well.

You can tell Google you have a sitemap by submitting it manually in Google’s Webmaster Tools, or you can include a sitemap reference in your robots.txt file. The second option is always recommended as this way other search engines such as Bing can also find your sitemap.

Need help with sitemaps or other aspects of your website? Get in touch with us at Visual Script, an experienced Northern Ireland Web Design company that can help you with all aspects of your online adventure.

The Importance Of Sitemaps is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Learning how to be a search engine optimiser is not a particularly straightforward process. There’s no college education you can follow to become a SEO. There are precious few courses you can follow, and most of these aren’t worth the money.

So what is the best way to learn SEO and become a specialist in the field? Well, you could buy some books and dig in to them. A recently published tome called The Art of SEO is pretty solid, as is the SEO an Hour a Day book.

But these books will only give you the basics. Since many SEO problems and challenges are specific to certain (types of) websites, these books will give you a starting point but no more than that.

Reading blogs, articles, and white papers about SEO is also encouraged, though with one caveat: don’t get carried away by reports on the latest hypes and “must-do’s” in SEO. These are nearly always blown out of proportion and when chasing the latest hypes its easy to lose track of the core essence of SEO.

SEO can of course be learned by simply doing it. Learn what works for other websites, then unleash it on your own sites. The problem with this is that sometimes this can backfire and you end up harming your sites more than helping them. Still, learning through experience is absolutely essential.

So, what else is there to help you learn SEO and become a true specialist? Well, in my opinion there is no substitute for a good community. A community where you can ask questions about your specific SEO challenges and get helpful, straightforward answers. A community that shares its specialised knowledge freely and widely and isn’t afraid to spill the occasional ‘secret’ that can really prove to be the difference between a good site and a great site.

Such a community exists, and I happen to be a member of it: the SEO Training Dojo.

The Dojo boasts an impressive range of tools and resources that are useful for everyone, from newbie SEOs coming to grips with the complexities of the craft to experienced SEO gurus that have seen and done it all.

Some examples of what the SEO Dojo contains:
- Knowledge Exchange forums
- Free SEO tools
- Discounts for paid SEO tools
- Weekly chat sessions
- SEO Beginners guide
- Ranking Factors guide
- Link Builders handbook
- and much much more…

I’m very pleased to be able to offer a discount for my readers who want to join the SEO Training Dojo – use the “barryrocks” discount code when you sign up and you get 25% off any subscription plan!

This discount code is only valid for the first 25 who make use of it, so it pays to act quick! I promise you it will be worth it – the very first chat session I attended earned my whole annual subscription fee back with the incredible amount of insight and tips that I gained from it.

So if you’re serious about becoming a true search engine optimisation specialist, the SEO Training Dojo is the place to hang out.

Learning SEO is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

On the most recent edition of the Barcamp Belfast conference I did a 20-minute talk about the mistakes some web developers make when building search engine friendly websites. Much of the content in that talk came from a blog post I did for State of Search about the same topic – SEO for Web Developers. Below are the slides:

Presentation: SEO for Web Developers is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

It’s the World Cup and I needed ideas for a new blog post on State of Search, so I compared the SERPs for the ‘world cup’ keyword on five different search engines to see which one provided the best information.

State of Search: Battle of the World Cup SERPs

Yahoo pulls out all the stops – after two sponsored results there’s a table of recently played games with links pointing to Yahoo’s Eurosport pages. Yahoo also knows where I am and shows me results for England and the Group C where England is a part of. Up next is a plug for that monstrosity known as the Yahoo Toolbar, followed by organic results for FIFA.com with a lot of useful sitelinks.

Battle of the World Cup SERPs is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 21 May 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

Google seems to have a global stranglehold on the internet search market. With market shares ranging from 60% to 95%, depending on what country you’re in, Google is the preferred search engine for users from Warsaw to Hawaii.

But there are some big gaps in Google’s global dominance. Take Russia for example. A Russian company called Yandex has monopolised the Russian internet landscape for years with its own Russian-language only web portal, yandex.ru.

On May 19th Yandex launched an international version of its search engine on yandex.com. Search engine professionals around the world fell on it like sharks, trying to find faults with it. We search engine optimisers love to complain, and we were fully expecting Yandex’s foray in to Google’s territory to be buggy and flawed.

We were wrong. As it turns out the yandex.com search engine is good. Really good. The results Yandex provides are amazingly relevant, accurate, and spam-free. It easily beats Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to undermine Google’s dominance, and might even be better than Google.

Google initially came to dominance because its results were more accurate and cleaner than those of its rivals at the time. Serious internet users quickly adopted Google as their preferred search engine, and it spread virally from there.

But over the years Google has kept adding features and functionality to its engine, which have ended up cluttering and distorting their search results. Add to that the pervasive presence of ads on Google – 99% of Google’s revenue is from its advertising platforms – and you end up with a search engine that perhaps has lost a lot of its appeal.

Yandex seems primed to fill Google’s shoes as the new favourite search engine for serious internet surfers. Its results are clean and accurate and lack the clutter that has come to characterise Google.

It will take much more than just a strong search engine to overthrow Google. But I for one welcome the added choice and hope that Yandex, as well as Bing, can nibble at Google’s market share. Competition is good for everyone.

Is Google’s biggest threat Russian? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Recently I was asked to write for Search Engine People, and I wanted to make sure my first post for them was a solid one: it’s about Google News and what a publisher can do to get more visibility and higher rankings in the world’s most popular news aggregator:

Search Engine People: SEO for Google News – Ranking Factors and Recommendations

Google News is a very different animal from Google Search, and it’s vital for news publishers to have a good understanding of how Google News operates and what can be done to optimise your presence there.

I’m giving a talk at Barcamp Belfast this Saturday about the biggest mistakes web developers make that cause problems for search engine optimisation. On State of Search I shared what I wanted to talk about and asked for input from the SEO crowd:

State of Search: SEO for Web Developers

There are countless things that can go wrong with URLs containing parameters, from duplicate content issues to indexation-loops. But worst of all, search engine spiders really don’t like parameters. Yes, with Webmaster Tools you can tell Google what parameters you are using, but really, that’s like using a band-aid to fix a severed limb.

Recent Writings on SEO 6 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

For State of Search I wrote a blog post asking some existential questions about what it means to call yourself an SEO. A good SEO is a jack-of-all-trades (and master of a few of them), so does the acronym still apply?

State of Search: The scope and limitations of SEO

Some have argued that the SEO acronym has evolved over time and now applies to much more than just optimising sites for search engines. I’m not sure I agree with that. I firmly believe that how we name things influence how we perceive them, and that we should take great care to label things as they are. SEO is an acronym with search engines firmly at its core, and when we unilaterally expand this acronym to mean much more, we are creating confusion in the marketplace.

My latest column for the Belfast Telegraph is about the hidden battle being waged between Google and some governments about who controls the private data Google collects. The core message is a question we should all ask ourselves: who do we trust more with our private data, Google or our governments?

Watching the Web: Google and privacy – more than meets the eye

We know that Google stores a lot of data about us online. What we search for, which websites we visit, who our online friends are – we know that Google knows. Many governments see this as a problem. Recently ten countries sent a joint letter to Google in which they criticise the search giant’s approach to privacy, focusing on the launch of Google Buzz which gave rise to a great many privacy concerns.

Recent Writings on SEO 5 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

It’s been a slow week as far as writing blog posts is concerned, and if it wasn’t for a sudden burst of inspiration after reading a book on poker I wouldn’t have written anything at all. The inspirational episode resulted in a post for State of Search where I draw parallels between SEO and poker.

State of Search: How SEO is a lot like Poker

Poker is a card game that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to win more money in a game than your competitors. Search engine optimisation is a profession that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to help a site rank higher than its competitors in search engine results. So both poker and SEO rely on a basic foundation of skills and techniques, complemented by a certain degree of luck. And that’s just the superficial similarity. It doesn’t end there.

The Similarities Between SEO and Poker is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Last week a fellow blogger & SEO geek pointed something strange out to me: a result on the Google SERPs did not match the actual webpage’s title tag. Up to now SEOs have pretty much assumed a page’s title tag is what search engines show in the results. However, it appears Google changes SERP headlines to make the result more relevant.

State of Search: Google helps non-optimised sites and enhances title tags in SERPs

What this means is that Google appears to be trying to close the gap between optimised and non-optimised sites. They’ve gone beyond just ranking pages for relevance, now they’ve also begun enhancing non-optimised pages’ listing in the SERPs.

Also on State of Search is a blog post I wrote about the value of keyword rankings. This metric for measuring the success of search engine optimisation efforts is rapidly losing favour in the SEO community. However, I argue that keyword rankings are still a vital part of SEO reporting.

State of Search: The value of keyword rankings

But where our sites rank on those SERPs, especially as part of a long term trend, is absolutely a vital aspect of what we do. I’ll concede keyword rankings have lost their status as the king of SEO metrics, but it’s still metric royalty. It’s still up there in the throne room, and it should get the attention it deserves.

Recent Writings on SEO 4 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog