Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience
As part of the process I’ve dropped my “Welcome” link, which went back to the homepage. Users can still return there by clicking the main site title—but I’m interested to see what happens if I “squeeze” my menu to just the most important bits.
What’s the point of having a link back to the home page anyway? In my case it’s an overview, and I want people to get to the nitty-gritty, and become clients.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Most of us get inspiration for our posts from what we’re doing professionally. Recent successes, new clients, examples of our work…but what to say when not a lot has been going on?
Dave Burnett is an Essex based wedding photographer I work with, and he sent me this excellent article this morning:
What to blog about when business is slow
Understandably, it’s about the photography business. But there are ideas in there for us all.
Whatever you do, avoid the temptation to write about having nothing to write about. I enjoyed Queen’s “Greatest Hits” far more than I would have a lonely press statement saying they contractually had to release something.
David Burnett from Image Control Photography wanted an update for his site, which was based on a very well-known (but it turns out not cross-browser compatible) WordPress theme. He works in the hotly contested wedding photography market, and needed to stand out from the crowd.
I made one myself that is a lot more dependable than the one he bought off-the-shelf.
Obviously, I’m more of a red and black person and the colour scheme might not be to my personal tastes—but everything is well laid out, easy to read, fully responsive (even on Windows Mobile IE) and has a good mix of high quality photography with text.
I’m going to have a glass of wine to celebrate this one.
It’s updated to be fully responsive and looks great on portable devices like mobiles and tablets, and I like to think it’s well laid out and easy to use.
It’s actually been up for a few days as a trial, and within 24 hours I had a compliment from someone who had just come across my site for the first time, and said they found it easy to use and navigate.
What do you think?
(Oh yes, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that I can make you a site just as awesome—ask me how.)
Do what the search engines ask us to, and don’t be a sly bastard about it.
Here’s my reply. In short, I said I couldn’t match their list because it was a dishonest, shoddy practice.
My service is as described, at the price I gave. The service is that way for some very important reasons, not the least of which is that I offer a service ideologically matched to what search engines what us to do–anything else is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I would suggest considering what I’m about to tell you before choosing any SEO consultant. Here’s a quote from the firm you’re considering retaining:
“Therefore we conduct our campaigns in a white-hat manner to ensure our campaigns look natural and organic in order not to leave any footprints for Google to detect.”That is NOT white hat. Trying to conceal the way you are buying links (which is what you’d be doing) is decidedly against Google’s ethos and terms of service.
Before their Panda update I saw many people make the same claim as the above, and then what do you know, Google worked out how the links we being built (Google has said they will always work to stamp out this behaviour) and all those sites got slammed.
True white-hat, and I strongly believe the best approach, is to actually build organic content and links, not to try to trick a company who has enough computing power to detect if God Himself shifts his weight to his other butt cheek on his giant chair in the sky.
Also, on the content front, I believe the best person to write content about your service, is you. I will guide and direct, and share ideas, but ultimately any SEO company you hire to write copy for you doesn’t understand what you do; not like you do.
If you write regular, on topic content, of course it will help SEO. It will be filled with all manner of useful search terms.
But most of all, it will be USEFUL to a reader.
SEO firms write content for one purpose only–keyword stuffing. And it might well help with positions on Google. But SEO is worthless if the visitors you do get are going to be put off because the articles and posts don’t appear to show any actually insight.
Anyway, that’s just my two cents.
