No, this isn’t a desperate plea from the heart of someone who believes he’s being ignored by the Internet community as a whole – no need to alert social services to my predicament just yet. This is instead an observation of many blogs on the Internet, where the owners of the blogs fail to understand why no one is reading, commenting or even visiting.

I found one such blog recently in a very niche industry. The content on the blog was updated regularly, sometimes every day, and was extremely well written. The authors on the blog were all experts in their field, and they write interesting content from a very knowledgeable standpoint.

However, nobody was reading the blog or leaving any comments. How do I know this? I know this because one of the blogs was actually about how they’re not getting any readers or comments. The blog was titled ‘Read These Blogs’ and proceeded to explain that nobody was… the author didn’t know why and was questioning his (more…)

One of the main questions my fellow SEO gurus are often asked is ‘If you could only do three things to a page to improve its SEO, what would you do?‘ It’s right there behind, ‘What the heck is SEO anyway?‘ The answers will vary slightly from expert to expert, but essentially there are three main things you can do to improve the search engine optimisation of the pages of your website.

1. Good title tags. You might be surprised, but this is the most complex task, and one that is so often found wanting on the pages of many websites. Forming a good title tag is one of the tougher SEO jobs, and one of the most important.

2. Good content. One of the hardest SEO jobs to master is simplicity. Really. Many of the newcomers to SEO careers go all out for their clients, and fail. Not because of a lack of effort, but more due to too much effort. Think of good SEO content as a (more…)

Glam-rock group KISS wouldn’t seem to have a lot to do with search engine optimisation. I have to admit, when I’m working diligently on a site’s optimisation, KISS bass guitarist Gene Simmons does frequently come to mind, but that probably has more to do with my iPod song list than the solid connection glam rock has with the world of search engine optimisation.

There is, however, a very real and definable connection.

No, it’s not that SEO pros tend to run around in elaborate costumes at conferences (wipe that mental image). Nor is it the fact that many of the successes of the industry tend to act like superstars. It’s more to do with acronyms.

‘Keep It Simple, Stupid‘ is an old stand-by of marketers and copywriters, both on and offline. It works well for search engine optimisation because (more…)

I read an article on the blog of a local Cheshire SEO company recently that advised people to avoid adding opinionated content to their websites. The blog itself was a guide on writing content for your own website, and most of what it said made good sense, except for the part where it quite clearly said to be careful about ranting on your own website because anyone can read it.

Now, while it’s true that you don’t want to publish your daily gripes and annoyances on your company’s website, by removing any opinionated content from your site you’re merely stripping your content down to the bare bones, being left with nothing more than a ‘vanilla’ flavour. This is arguably worse than adding the most opinionated, close to the wire content that you can, because flavourless, ‘safe’ content isn’t going to entice anyone into reading it – and it certainly isn’t going to (more…)