SEO Consultant Tips

There’s a lot of talk by many SEO consultants about themed text links and how they are the ONLY text links a webmaster should be seeking. Some go as far as to state un-themed links are worthless in the search for high Google rankings!

What’s a Themed Text Link?

First we must decide what a themed link is and this causes a major problem!

I know a site about home furnishings is related to a website about kitchen accessories (related meaning the same visitors might like to see both sites), but does Google? How can Google match content that doesn’t use similar content/keywords!

This SEO question appears on most SEO forums from time to time and is another generally misunderstood SEO topic and one all SEO consultants should understand.

What’s a static HTML page?

The classic static web page is generated from an actual page ‘physically’ located on the server: so if you had a page named static-page.html somewhere on your server you could find and download this page (it exists, you could grab it via FTP).

The very first websites all used static HTML pages and so the first search engines cut their teeth on static web pages.

What’s a dynamically generated web page?

As the web developed a new way to generate websites arrived, dynamically generated web pages. They differ from static pages in that there is no ‘physical’ equivalent to the page you may be viewing on the server (so you can’t directly download it via FTP).

This is a series of SEO advice and tips aimed at new SEO consultants or those looking to learn SEO from scratch. As the owner of SEO Gold I ensure all our SEO consultants understand the importance of links to good search engine listings.

Importance of Text Links

If you are familiar with Google search engine optimisation you’ll already know text links are essential to gaining even slightly competitive SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You may have come across reference to Googlebombs such as the Miserable Failure SERP which shows the power of text links with specific anchor text**.

We offer an email based SEO Consultant advice service which includes 250 text links.

In a nut shell all the search engine optimisation advice needed to optimise a website and enough text links (PR as high as PR6) to make a new (PR0) websites home page a strong PR5 (usually enough to rank well for relevant SERPs).

Considering the 250 text links the fee we charge (around £500 a month) is on the low end of the SEO services market. We keep the price low by not offering phone support per se (if absolutely needed there’s an additional charge per call) and never meet our SEO clients (all advice by email).

With reciprocal linking you as an SEO consultant (or web site owner) have more control over the quality and quantity of the text links obtained. Unfortunately if you are starting with a low PR site finding quality reciprocal link partners is practically impossible.

Every low quality website owner and their dog seems to be the main users of reciprocal linking rather than the sort of websites you want links from.

If you’ve owned a site for more than a week you’ve had the emails “Saw your great site and thought you’d like to reciprocal link, blah, blah, blah… you sell shoes and we sell Viagra, perfect match don’t ya think” You look at the site and find your link will be part of a large directory and your link is 10 clicks from the home page on a PR0 page (wonderful, sign me up!).

Interesting title don’t you think

No I’ve not lost the plot, all will become clear as you read.

The World of Warcraft

Recently I’ve become a little addicted to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) The World of Warcraft (WOW).

My eldest son (15 years old) is to blame, he wanted to try the game out to make some money, so I bought the game and paid for a 6 month subscription, but after I played it I was hooked (it’s so addictive)!!

Now we have two World of Warcraft accounts!

Originally he planned to sell WOW gold (apparently a big industry, but against the terms of playing WOW), but changed his mind and settled on creating the site Warcraft World which is primarily a list of Free World of Warcraft Quest Guides which he compiled himself (they are very detailed).

There’s a large group of Internet users called bloggers, they spend many hours a day both reading and writing diary like web sites called weblogs or blogs.

I (actually my business) own a lot of blogs, they generate a lot of links from other bloggers who find your type of writing/content interesting. If you lack a talent for writing don’t worry, you can always do image blogs like this Picture Blog until you find a niche.

So far the images on that blog are from a cheap digital camera, all are taken by myself or my family (wife and three young lads). If we keep adding new images it will generate links, we can then link from that site to other sites that make money.

Can a blackhat SEO consultant ever go too far?

I think that was answered earlier today when the Google employee Matt Cutts SEO blog was hacked by the owner of a blackhat SEO blog.

Whitehat SEO Turns to the Dark side!

In a moment of madness the whitehat of Matt Cutts was temporarily tossed aside as he recipricated in kind and hacked the blackhat’s SEO blog

Obviously that’s not what really happened. A hackers had some fun with two site owners.

I’m sure Matt and Dark SEO Team will fix their sites quite quickly, so I took screenshots for prosperity

Text on the page:

This site have been hacked by
Dark SEO Team.
nous sommes le proprietaire de toi

There’s quite a bit of confusion over 301 redirects and how they effect SEO and a sites rankings. We’ve extensively used permanent 301 redirects on both our own and client sites and in this article I’ll explain how to use them and what you should expect SEO wise.

First some basic information for those new to permanent redirects.

What is a permanent 301 Redirect

A 301 or permanent redirect basically tells a browser (or search engine spider) that the site or page it is accessing has moved permanently. It then immediately redirects that page to the new one.

Search engines like Google will attempt to pass SEO benefit (PR and anchor text benefits) from the old page to the new page.

Was looking through the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines which used to be a great resource

Anyway, a new poster asked an excellent question regarding linking to non-cached pages (from the newsgroup thread “Re: should I reject non-cached sites?” edited version):

I run a modest linking scheme on my website and have always had a policy that we would only link to sites that are cached in Google. I’m not so fussy about PageRank at the moment as our link pages are not all ranked.

I’ve had a number of link requests from sites that look pretty well set up but the link page is not cached in Google.

A couple of months back I decided my SEO company should try selling text links via one of the text link brokers who list webmasters inventory in a searchable format allowing a potential purchaser of text links to find relevant sites. Basically saves us time dealing with site owners looking to add links to our sites (takes quite a lot of time!!).

The text link broker we tried was www.textlinkbrokers.com and this post is a review of their service from the perspective of a link seller. We are writing this review because it didn’t go well and feel we’ve wasted our time for nothing (I doubt we’ll get the money owed)!!

Although I’m an SEO consultant who deals mainly with Google (it’s THE most important search engine) until watching a recent episode of the Dragon’s Den (TV program on BBC2) I’d not come across the term Google Consultant before.

The Dragon’s Den is a TV program where entrepreneurs/inventors pitch their businesses to a group of successful angel investors hoping to secure investment for a share of their business. In this particular episode someone was pitching something called StoryCode which is basically a book review service that is able to match similar books together, making it easier to purchase similar genres of books you previously read and liked.