A lot of people simply assume that to have a successful website, when it comes to search engine optimisation, you need to target only the high traffic, high volume, keywords. That's a great theory if you can manage to get top rankings for those "short tail" keywords, but for many smaller websites, the chances of that happening are slim, to non-existent. Let's face it, a small business website will have a lot of trouble ranking for … read on »

A lot of online marketing focuses around getting visitors now, right now! The theory is simple enough, get as many people to your website as possible, and hopefully they will convert into paying customers. So how does this relate to SEO? Well, search engine optimisation is not about getting visitors in the door as soon as possible. Good SEO is about building the foundations for long term traffic. Search engines play one of the most … read on »

If you've never heard of Majestic12, then you've obviously never played Deus Ex (a great game, by the way). Back to SEO land, Majestic12 is basically a distributed search engine, that hopes to outgun the "Big G" (Google) in terms of its raw spidering and indexing. It's an interesting project, and I'm increasingly seein their bot in my server logs. Something that many people won't know is that they regularly give out statistics (you can … read on »

Now I'm not going to name names, but lately I've observed that many Australian targeted websites are still using black hat SEO techniques to achieve higher search engine rankings. Sure there is always the usual amount of spam/splog based websites, but what is most disturbing is that sites which appear to be completely "white hat" are actually using black hat techniques. First and foremost, these sites are not really using black hat techniques when it comes to … read on »

I recentley got an email from someone offering SEO services. I wasn’t really interested, but decided to check out their website anyway (no the email wasn’t spam). Now I’ve worked with this mob before, but only for their pure web development skills. And low and behold, I check out their website, and it’s a textbook example of how to write for a search engine only, and forget that most humans are, … read on »