Wordpress SEO Expert

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

I can make you an awesome, SEO’d personal online brand

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I can make you an awesome, SEO'd personal online brand Wordpress SEO ExpertIt’s true.

I spent much of last year involved in making personal brands for people to improve their search engine rankings, industry positioning, and overall getting them in more clients and more revenue.

On the back of my 17 years web development/design experience, my decade long history of helping people with their social networking, and months of testing and improving my system, I’ve created a personal branding product that will do wonders for you, your reputation, and of course your income.

Currently it’s only being offered through People Per Hour (PPH), but watch this space–when I’ve got a few more of these under my belt you can expect this package to cost over £700.

Right now it’s just £167!

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.

Free wordcount tool, aim for 300 for SEO

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important part of building your online community.

A good guideline is each piece of content you create (be it a page, or blog post) on your site should have at least 300 words of original content.

Here’s a helpful tool—copy and paste your text in it, and find out instantly how many words you’ve got.

Those people using WordPress have a word counting system built in already, but the other advantage of this tool is is works out and lists the keywords your text is best suited for. So if the results there aren’t what you’d like, tweak your copy until your see your targeted keywords in the top few spots.

300 words can be harder than it seems. You don’t want to waffle and just pad it out. More often than not verbosity and writing for the web are not good friends.

So I challenge you to never take the easy way out, but rather to work hard to get at least 300 words of targeted (effective keyword use), interesting, well structured content.

Word Counter.

Let it snow!

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Well, in truth I’m cold enough here as it is. November 16, and I’m still fighting the urge to turn the heating on in my office.

My hands are so chilly that I’m starting to fear for my typing skilsl thgouhg. 🙂

I spent the past hour putting some snowflakes on one of my private client’s WordPress sites, check it out, they look 3D…and very cool.

It’s a nice little trick that shows people you mean more than just business. It’s not exactly new, but it’s the first time they’ve done it so their online community is in for a treat.

I am going to suggest we replace it with a nice warm fire as we get closer to Yuletide though! And maybe a virtual glass of whiskey to warm our bellies too.

Professional language translation services.

Transparent WordPress theme

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Here’s a transparent WordPress theme, it’s called “petermahoney”, and it’s yours to use, free.

I loved the screenshots I saw for this theme, but it doesn’t seem to be available for download anymore. So I set about making my own.

I admit this site doesn’t necessarily capitalise on it as much as it could, “petermahoney” lends itself really well to large, beautiful, vibrant background wallpaper images. What can I say, I have a visual identity I try to stick to, and it happens to be black, white and red. 🙂

It’s a child theme for twentyten, but you install it in the usual way (as long as twentyten is also installed you’ll be fine, and as of today that theme still ships with all new WordPress installations).

There’s a readme.txt file that contains the few extra bits you need to know. However, for convenience, they’re also right here:

Installation notes:

Activate the “petermahoney” theme
Remove the “Header Image” entirely from /wp-admin > Appearance > Header
Upload your “Background Image” from /wp-admin > Appearance > Background
Upload your own 16×16 px favicon.ico to /wp-content/themes/petermahoney/favicon.ico
Upload your own 50×50 px logo to /wp-content/themes/petermahoney/images/header_logo.png
Edit style.css, replace “color:red” with “color:{your own colour}”

Release information:

Theme Name: petermahoney
Description: Child theme for the twentyten theme, for petermahoney.com.
Author: Peter Mahoney
Author URI: https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com
Version: 1.0
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Template: twentyten

Do check back here relatively often for new versions, as I’ll be updating it quite a bit.

Enjoy!

Interacting with nerds, #1

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Firstly I suppose I am a nerd myself. I’m slightly more than geeky when it comes to tech, and I’ve been wearing these huge glasses way before hipsters first picked them up.

However, there are a few things about me that separate me out from the nerd crowd. And one of the biggies is…I can communicate, with you, in a way you’ll understand. In fact a few of my clients about a decade ago took to calling me “The geek who can speak”. At the time I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered or flummoxed. I’m still unsure.

Anyway, quite famously, when you seek advice from a nerd they’re likely to respond “Have you tried turning it on and off again”, and for good reason—it usually works.

I had an interaction with a support helpdesk this morning; one of their WordPress themes was playing up and I submitted a support ticket, knowing that it would take them at least 24 hours to get to it, so I was hoping for a helpful reply.

“Have you upgraded to the latest version?” was all I got back. Fullstop. It’s the software equivalent of hitting the power button twice, because it is, to most developers mind’s, the most likely thing to fix the problem.

The other thing it has in common with making use of the on/off switch, is it’s the path of least resistance. Now, personally I take offence when asked by anyone, in any situation, “Have you done the least thing you possible could without having done nothing?” and this situation is no different.

Anyway, I’m sharing this to give some practical advice. When writing to support lines about online products, use this easy to follow formula:

To whom it may concern,

I have updated my software to the latest version as available from your website, but am still finding that {insert rest of issue here}.

I replied to the less-than-welcome response I got of course, just a few minutes ago. And now I’m going to wait the inevitable 24 hours for the follow-up.

I just hope for everyone’s sake that they don’t come back asking me to restart the web server. I’ve had these giant glasses a long time, and I’m not afraid to use them.

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