Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience
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.
Heck, I get these calls regularly myself. I enjoy challenging the people on the other end of the line, and very quickly one thing becomes clear.
They’ve no idea what they’re talking about.
SEO, sadly, isn’t a regulated industry, and because of the level of investment people put into their online presences it’s very easy to frighten them with bogus information.
The people emailing and calling are sales people; often for firms that with a bit of digging, you can find myriad horror stories about online.
My favourite examples of their spiel include, “Your site doesn’t have keyword tags” (search engines don’t actually use them) and “Your site isn’t W3 compliant” (Google has made it clear this has no effect on a site’s ranking).
The latter is particularly nefarious, because although a W3 compliant site is certainly best practice–very few sites do tick all the boxes.
It’s scaremongering at its worst.
Remember, when you get a call out of the blue, or emails that by rights should go straight to your spam folder, always check with a known professional, someone you trust. And if you are considering working with a new company, ask how many sales people they have compared to actual SEO experts on staff.
Do some checking, to make sure what they’re telling you is true.
It’s been around for some years, and aims to be an archive of the internet—forever.
I do enjoy having a brose and seeing how far some sites have come, as well as looking back at sites I made years ago.
However, just because it’s fun to browse doesn’t mean you always want your site on it. Now, once a cached version is there there’s not a lot to be done, however you can stop it indexing your site in the first place.
Just add this to your site’s robots.txt file:
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
That tells the Internet Archive to ignore your site when it’s indexing the internet.
Easy!
I need to moan. I’ve spent most of this week undoing the issues other “SEO professionals” made for some new clients.
One company was charging £400 a month, for six months, and supposedly never noticed that the robots.txt file was blocking all search engines from visiting.
Another set up a CNAME redirect for a site–and naturally Google was marking everything as duplicate content!
I wish this industry had fewer cowboys. A slick website and lots of promises does not a good company make.
