Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Search Engine OptimiSation or Search Engine OptimiZation

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SEO is SEO, but when you’re advertising the different forms of English can get in the way.

I work with people all around the world, but there’s quite a bit more to achieving that than you might think.

Being able to sell services around the world from the comfort of your own office is fantastic. But for those of us with geographically ambiguous spellings it raises a few issues.

I speak (and write) British English – or as we like to call it, just English. So naturally I list my services using that spelling; in this case Search Engine Optimisation. But a large proportion of people around the world will be spelling that last word with a Z rather than an S.

Google’s John Mueller has tried to say it doesn’t make a difference but I rather think he’s over-simplifying the issue.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1100684747565686784

We can see in Google Search Console variants based on language are reported as different stats. I simply don’t believe Google’s system is allowing different spellings of words interchangeably. Searching for “Search Engine Optimisation” is much more likely to find my site than the American spelling precisely because I use it more often in my text.

There are ways I try to work around this. When I sell my services on specific service marketplaces (like PeoplePerHour) they have the option to include ‘tags’ behind the scenes – users don’t see those but they help support the sites’ fairly rudimentary search functions. So that’s a nice way of making sure I’m found for both spellings there.

But the second part of John Mueller’s reply is the most interesting. Let’s imagine Google did have some magic way of knowing everything all language variations were referring to and would show results regardless of those differences. The meta information displayed isn’t going to change. I could be found for Optimization but the information in front of the user will still say Optimisation.

That slight language difference could put a potential client off.

The better approach would be to allow different meta settings for different languages. But even that is fraught with technical and other issues – really there is just no simple fix for this.

I’ll continue to sell my SEO services around the world, but predominantly to the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Purely for technical reasons – because when it comes to delivering awesome SEO I can do that for anyone, anywhere.

Backlinks are great for SEO but only if they’re legitimate

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All off-site SEO basically comes down to is creating backlinks.

Directory listings, local citations, they’re all much the same when it comes to it.

Backlinks help if they’re legitimate – which means someone likes your site and has a proper reason to link to it. Any attempt to manipulate your own link profile goes against Google’s guidelines – and they’re adept at catching people and penalising them for it.

I’ve blogged about this a number of times – you can read some of those if you’d like more information.

My approach to SEO is entirely Google friendly; I very much believe the best approach is to match the search engines’ approach and fulfill their guidelines and recommendations.

This is sort of a catch-22, because while you shouldn’t fake links you do want them. My usual advice is to make use of your real life contacts to get some – ask suppliers or related sites to link to you, that sort of thing.

I should add too when people DO get links without properly asking people they really know for them – they tend to get extremely low quality ones. Too many low quality links hurts rather than helps. For example, every single person I’ve ever seen selling a BBC, Apple or Huffington Post link are actually just creating user profiles on those systems and sticking URLs in the bio section of those profiles.

That’s not really a proper link on the BBC! People think they’re going to get something in a news article, but more often than not they’re on pages Google doesn’t even index. The effect is people buy a back link on a ‘high quality domain’ but don’t get any SEO authority for it at all.

The people selling these links aren’t even doing it manually. There are automated tools they use to create hundreds of links in a few minutes. Google is smarter than this.

Because Google says explicitly that trying to manipulate your own link profile is against their terms there is no such thing as paying for Google safe links. It’s an oxymoron.

Trust the WordPress SEO Expert to advise on your WordPress SEO

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No one should be surprised to hear blogging is good for SEO.

I had an unexpected email interchange with a client a few minutes ago.

I’d been recommending blogging to him for months. He keeps making excuses why he can’t; lack of time, what would be write about – the usual string of things. But I kept pushing because as we all know unique, topical, regular content is great for SEO.

It’s important to point out that while I call it blogging really it can be news, updates – whatever – just as long as you get well written topical content on your site regularly.

Here’s what you want from a blog post:

  1. Unique
    • It needs to be original content to avoid any possibility of a duplicate content issue.
  2. Topical
    • The copy needs to be related to your business. You can’t just write about your recent holiday if you’re trying to sell greeting cards. Having said that if you went exploring a variety of greeting card shops while abroad – that might be enough to make it on topic. (It wouldn’t be easy to do well though.)
    • Included in this is it needs to be interesting information, authoritative and useful.
  3. Regular
    • Posting something every week, or even better twice a week, is ideal. Search engines learn to come back and rescan your site for new content often, and it’s great if there’s something new for them to index every time. What’s no good is if you post just a few times a year at fairly random intervals; it’s better than nothing, but not by much.

This client thought he really had me on the issue today when we said he’d checked with his developer (not another SEO expert, just the person that pieced together his site) and he said not to bother. Because if you search for anything online you’ll very rarely see a blog post on page one.

He’s half right. You do rarely see blog posts on page one. But everything else there is wrong.

Just because a blog page might not rank highly on its own merit doesn’t mean it’s not adding to your overall domain authority. In fact it’s definitely adding to it. There’s a reason sites with lots of well written content tend to have homepage’s that rank more highly than other sites.

If everything in SEO was purely on a page-by-page basis it would be enough to have a single page website that ticked all the boxes and expect it to rank in the top spot. But we all know in industries with any competition that’s simply not going to happen.

Good content on your site all adds up towards the overall SEO authority of the domain. Those weekly blogs might not be found a lot, but they’re a large part of the reason your homepage is.

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