Wordpress SEO Expert

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

I love SEO

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I love SEO Wordpress SEO ExpertIt’s true. I love search engine optimisation.

That might seem an odd statement, because surely SEO is just background processes that help bushinesses get an edge, right?

No, as a matter of fact. It has that effect, which is incredibly useful to anyone with an online presence. But it also helps create a “cleaner” world wide web. It helps streamline the internet, making things easier for every one.

SEO helps make sure your site is found by people actually interested in what you’re selling. From that person’s perspective, it’s made their time online easier.

It also helps force us to make better websites, and better content. You need to be writing for the web properly, you need to be as concise as possible without coming across as terse, and most of all you need to communicate carefully, thoughtfully and strategically.

SEO makes the web a better place. And done well, it makes you more money as well.

Buying backlinks

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a.k.a. Why it’s best to follow my advice. 🙂

I talk a lot about the importance of doing SEO properly, and not trying to cheat the search engines.

Of all the tricks out there, the most tempting by far is buying backlinks.

Google wants lots of sites to link to us, right? So let’s just get some and get moving up those rankings!

Terrible, terrible idea.

A client of mine bought some from a seller claiming to be Google safe, Panda safe, Penguin safe, PR10, quality links.

But you can’t be Google-safe. All that will ever mean is they haven’t caught you (or the system being used to generate your links) yet. But they’ve been promising for a decade that they will, and more often than not, they do.

The image above is a bit small, but I’m sure you can pinpoint when they bought the so-called “safe” links.

Their sales fell proportionately.

A plea

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I explained my services and pricing to a potential US-based client recently. He came back with a list of things another firm over in the States had offered him, and asked if I could match their list, and name my price to do so.

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.

Blocking the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive

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Have you come across the Wayback Machine?

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!

Taking my own advice

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As you’d expect for someone obsessed with SEO I regularly check my own ranking on Google and the other major search engines.

But when I did my regular search today on Google I found myself in number two. 2! I’ve been first for months, and now there’s a pesky LinkedIn directory above me.

My first thought was, “But I haven’t changed anything!” and of course, that’s the problem.

I’ve only blogged a few times in the past four months. I used to keep a regular schedule of three times a week, and Google loved me for it. It got their SEO juices flowing. But now, I’m falling – and it’s totally because I’m not generating enough content.

Content really is king for SEO. Yes there are all sorts of things you can do behind the scenes (and as a WordPress SEO expert – those are my specialty) but ultimately SEO is about reinforcing your core content; key messages, what you’re all about – that sort of thing.

After the sort of work I do the next most important thing to keep Google, Bing – all the search engines happy -is to have regular, topical, original content on your site. And there’s almost no better way to achieve that than blogging. It doesn’t need to be called a blog of course – you can call that section Update, or News – whatever creates an area in your site where you’ll be posting regularly.

It’s ironic in one way (and not in the Alanis sense, but something that actually fits the definition of irony) in that I write to at least two clients a day extolling the virtues of blogging. I’ve been so busy preaching the blogging gospel that I haven’t had the time to do it myself.

Well, all that changes today. Thrice a week, you’ll see me writing. And you’ll see me back at number one as a result of those efforts.

And I won’t feel like such a hypocrite when delivering my SEO sermons.

Does Google use meta keyword tags?

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Here’s a brief history of keywords. There’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there.

When search engines first came out (pre-Google), the idea that they could read a whole website was out of reach. It would take too long, require they store too much data, and generally there needed to be a quick, simple approach to scanning a website. The simplest of the simplest techniques was “meta keywords”.

This was a small piece of code that lived behind the scenes of a site, that listed all the keywords a site owner wanted their site to rank with. The list was delineated by a comma, so looked something like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, search engine optimisation, WordPress” />

This method was open to huge amounts of abuse on the part of a website owner. There was nothing stopping someone using keywords which were known to rank well, but didn’t even appear in their website. We started seeing tens of thousands of search results which were really a bait and switch, and it was eroding from the quality of the internet.

Google came along, and was one of the first search engines to really have a strong ethos behind it, in that they wanted to find a way to keep the internet useful, and digitally clean & tidy.

The solution was to index every site’s entire contents, scanning all the text that a real human could actually read, and working out based on sentence structure, density of nouns etc what a website was really about.

The next step was to start overlooking the meta keyword tag entirely.

And that was about a decade ago. Other major search engines followed suit, and as a result that list of keywords has been defunct and totally ignored for the best part of a decade.

Unfortunately for a host of reasons (many SEO “experts” don’t actually keep ahead of best practice, or are too happy to just do whatever their clients ask without explaining the process, or just that keyword lists entered the collectively consciousness at a formative time in the internet’s history) people still think they’re going to be useful.

One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress actually says next to the “Use keywords?” field, “I can’t think why you’d want to know. The search engines don’t”.

Sadly a lot of people get caught up on these, and their focus disappears from what is important to something that absolutely is not.

It’s not helped by the number of places that lists of words and phrases ARE still used, like Google Adsense for example. We also track our website’s analytics based on what search queries people found us with, etc.

I prefer to call these things “search terms”, or occasionally “key terms”. I try to steer clear of the (possible) synonym “keywords”.

So what I do in this regard is to look at your site as Google et al try to, (pretty well) as a human being. I read your site to see what it’s really about. I then run tests just like they do to see what words and phrases you use most often, and check that those do a good job of describing what your site is actually about. Most of the time, as long as someone has written their website from their own knowledge and experience of their industry or topic, these match just fine.

Occasionally I find someone thinks they have a site about, say, “window fitting”, but really it comes across as being about “buy my product”. You can imagine how that might happen, but it’s not want the search companies want to see so it’s not what we want to give them.

If I come across a discrepancy like that, I let my clients know that they need to rethink their content asap.

As long as they do match, I make sure I reinforce those terms everywhere we know Google et al want to see them. In image tags, in the description tag, in the page titles.

So, the short answer to a long history is let me take care of that–if I need to alert you to an issue I’ll let you know, and please don’t be surprised if you look at your site’s code when I’ve done and there is no outdated “keywords” code.

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