Wordpress SEO Expert

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

Know your stats

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Know your stats Wordpress SEO ExpertThere are all sorts of metrics we can use to measure our online success. Certainly the bottom line is return-on-investment (ROI) but there are all sorts of markers that can help guide us to that final success.

It’s so easy to get bogged down by it all. How many people signed up for your mailing list? Are you split testing? Does Google Analytics need to look so complicated?

All these things are worth knowing, and learning.

But then you need to use those to plan and strategise. And that’s an art-form unto itself—I’ll post more about that another day.

In the short term though, start looking at your web statistics. See if they’re going up or down—the first step really is that simple. And if you start by looking at the simple stuff, it will lay the foundation for you to understand the seemingly more complicated bits later.

Personally, I do use Google Analytics, and a few other metrics, but the one I check most often is the simplest, I have AWStats installed. I can see very quickly if visits are up or down, and therefore if I’m building or breaking my online community.

Ultimately I want to see a good return on ROI, but I know what I need to achieve to get that—and the first step is—are people coming to my website, are they reading it, and are they coming back for more?

If you’d like some help understanding your web stats, or what to do with that information, let me know.

But at the very least, know not to be fooled by “hits”—they can be the most misleading metric around. More on that later.

10 Youtube URL tricks worth knowing

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So often when I’m embedding a Youtube clip on a website for a client, I’m asked to customise it somehow. Now there are a variety of ways this can be done, from removing the “related videos” at the end (which I always do for schools, at the American School in London we must have done this a hundred times a month!) to overlaying images on top of the video entirely, (see danielwagner.com for an example).

But like so many things online, as long as you know the basics yourself, there’s a lot you can do with those.

Just adding little bits of code to the Youtube URL for example can have a big effect.

Example:

4. Hide the search box

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

Here’s a great list of 10 tricks worth knowing.

Saving a search engine ranking

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A couple of weeks ago I noticed a Google UK search for “Peter Mahoney” no longer had me in fourth place. I wasn’t even on the first page.

Second page, fifth down. This sort of thing is normally an absolute disaster for an SEO expert, the sort of thing that gets them mocked on Twitter and thrown out into the void that exists somewhere between success and scrambling about in the pit of people who pretend they know what they’re talking about, but really don’t.

It’s a very full pit.

But since I’d done it on purpose, I wasn’t too worried.

There is so much information online about search engine optimisation (SEO); what works, what doesn’t, what used to but some people still does, what you get penalised for now that most people haven’t cottoned on to—basically a lot of misinformation that can harm your ranking.

This site is my sandpit. It’s where I play with things to find what works, and what doesn’t.

I can now confirm:

  • You’re best to have you’re tags on a WordPress site set to “nofollow”.
  • Have categories scanned sparingly, and certainly not by all pages.
  • Your Twitter feed is better off in your footer than your sidebar (right/left hand column).

I managed to get my ranking back of course, but not just by undoing all the tests I’d tried—I applied an optimised set of tweaks I’ve been working on, and got back the very next time Google spidered my site.

Let me know if you want me to send you up the rankings to, regardless of where you are right now.

Facebook groups error

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It happened to me.

I logged into Facebook yesterday to find the list of groups I was a part of was huge. Well over a hundred, some I left years ago, some I barely recognised (short lived in-jokes from 2007) and others I wish I didn’t remember.

I was suddenly a member of every group I’d ever joined, even ones that had been deleted years ago.

Further proof that Facebook really does remember everything we do—forever.

To make matters worse, groups I set up, and had needed to remove people a few people from over the years (for unacceptable behaviour) had all the offenders and their content reinstated.

Facebook have admitted there was a mistake, which on the one hand is positive, at least they’re standing up to say an error was made.

I don’t think they’re being honest about how many people it’s affected. Everyone I’ve interacted with over the past 24 hours has had it crop up. But my main concern is simply that an error like this was able to happen. People who had left groups, private, closed groups, were now able to see all the content since they left.

It was a mistake sure, but mistakes of this magnitude shouldn’t be happening in a company the size of Facebook. I’m beginning to wonder if I test the online communities, sites and systems I’m involved with more rigorously.

After all, I’ve never had a privacy scare. Not one. 🙂

When all is said and done though, and statements are issued and emergency fixed made, here’s my final take on the whole thing:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/petermahoney/status/274091747422916608″]

LinkedIn; a kitten free zone.

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I’m the first to admit, I struggled with LinkedIn at first. Not that it’s hard to use or anything, in fact it’s incredibly simple. But I struggled to find its place in my social-media-life.

I’ve had my profile up there for years, and I’d fleshed it out (past jobs, current responsibilities, photo, all the things that seemed important) but I wasn’t interacting with anyone.

All my colleagues and ex-colleagues were on Facebook. LinkedIn let me post messages and share other people’s updates, but so much less then my other social profiles.

Then I started using it regularly; I just made sure I logged in a couple of times a week. Recommended a couple of people. Wrote to someone I could only find on LinkedIn that I hadn’t spoken to for a while.

Before I knew it I became a regular. And the more I used it, the more people found me. Job offers, professional queries, community discussions, they’ve all become an important part of what I do.

I’ve found even people I do communicate with elsewhere interact differently on LinkedIn. We act in the way we want to present ourselves to our workmates, bosses and clients.

The first is to post directly to it. In this case you’re just giving away your content for free to a massive company. They’ll get the SEO authority for that post, not you. And while you might plan to have a link to your site on the bottom of those posts you give them, links coming out of their website are marked as nofollow, which means they don’t get used by Google (or other major search engines) as a way of passing on authority.

Oh and of course some folks repost, posting the content on the social network and their own site. Which simply leads to duplicate content issues.

The second method is to just post a link to the article as it appears on your site. So you’re sharing a link rather than the text. The trouble again is that those links are nofollow, so you won’t get any SEO juice for it.

But social networks are generally quite protective of their own SEO authority, they’re not in the business of passing that on to anyone who posts on their platforms. SO I prefer that second option, just link back to your own site. Forget about social networks for SEO. But it’s still good to interact with people on them, and hopefully those users might follow a link to your own site – then they’re your audience.

One really positive thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn though is it’s easy to accidentally give them your SEO authority. SEO authority is a way of referring to the search engine kudos, or points you might have. There are traditionally two ways most people publish content on LinkedIn.

This is the advantage of LinkedIn. Not only can you build your online community, but you can be sure that your interactions on it are going to be framed in a professional manner, and of a higher quality. To this day I’ve not seen a single photo of a kitten on LinkedIn.

Please don’t be the first.

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