I’d like to introduce Dan Horton to the Bronco SEO team. Here is his first post on DaveN.

SEO first week (Teaching you to suck Eggs but so what! We all have to start somewhere)

Ok, I admit I’m a novice, a new starter a “Seo Trainee” queue dunking stool or a bag of rocks and some loud jeers. Shhh we don’t want anyone to know there is a novice in the Bronco building.

No, seriously, how to get started?

Read, read and then read again. There are loads of SEO sites and resources out there for the enthusiastic SEO starter, but be warned as soon as you start reading it’s not easy to stop. It’s a whole new world.

I love reading the various SEO blogs out there and its interesting how daily topics change so rapidly but generate such a buzz throughout the industry. ( I was given the names of people in the know)

Equipped with my SEO Book and an internet connection I plough on, (oh and 2 monitors cool ehh)

There’s a whole community of experienced SEO bods poised ready to help and having worked in IT for a number of years it’s a different ball game here, people actively share information. – Not technical hoarders who nobody notices has gone until they don’t turn in for 3 weeks after being run over whilst trying to memorise the acronyms for the latest Microsoft accreditation.

Ok ,sometimes they seem to comment to get better search results themselves. But after you have looked through the various comments it’s soon easy to spot the self promotional types.

Beyond the Yellow brick road (or a path that leads you back to before your initial journey)

A past approach for me has been to try and hit Google as a moving target armed with no more than a limited range pea shooter of precisely edited Meta Tags and Page titles with Keywords researched.

You then hope that someday soon your clients site will rank well, well fingers crossed and all, he/she will come skipping through your office door with a wide smile saying you’re the best SEO in the world. That was last Monday, but over the weekend something’s happened to their rankings- where to turn? EXACTLY

This is what I intend to find out…..

There has to be more to it doesn’t there? It can’t be such a hit and miss approach?

First task:

Dave informs me that a well known industry (Can’t say who) needs to obtain more authority for their UK site and I need to look through currently who’s ranking on Google for certain keywords and why. The importance of quality back links is mentioned and I need to find out who’s linking to who and why.

I thought about this, put basically (fortunately for me) if you can establish credibility for your website through others who point to you it’s got to be better than self promotion hasn’t it?

I mean I could put in my Page Title: “Dan Horton SEO Expert predicts Google trends” but really that would count for bugger all, yet if other people who already had authority within the industry were saying it, (Ok they’d be deluded at this stage) but wouldn’t it be more believable?
Wouldn’t you also have more chance of your site being noticed if the web user came from a site that was also established as an authority?

Linking campaign with quality directories

This seems to be a really hot topic at the moment and I’m hardly one to comment but I think I get the gist of things: if you are going to link to other sites they need to be not only relevant to your industry but also not attempt to play with Google’s rankings or be hidden in any way. Also, SPAM sites are not a good idea to link to.

Find out who’s ranking top for your chosen keywords in Google (UK) in this case by simply typing the keywords into Google and seeing what comes up.

Patterns that occur

You soon start to notice that if sites have a high ranking on a particular keyword those sites usually have something in common, i.e. they have back links from the same sources. So in reality there must be some weight in gathering quality links from other sites.

Extracting back links, I used Yahoo Site Explorer to list those links and another back link tool and anchor text program from Jim Boykin.

Next I categorise the back links (Inbound Links). (I used an excel spreadsheet to do this.)

What are they?

Press releases?

People release fresh content on a chosen topic which of course would be RELEVANT to their chosen keywords and website. Some of these of course are total crap and purely done to try to trick the spiders not a good idea, so if you can’t write decent copy get someone who knows the score to do it for you.

Directories?

Listings of sites RELEVANT to your chosen keywords and website content.
There seemed to be oodles of these and here the page rank had to be duly noted. Simply looking through the sites which is a manual task and takes time seemed to be the best way to filter out the junk.

URL Redirects?

Making a page available under many URLs. A good idea to note these as they are likely to result in demoting your sites exposure.

Spam Sites?

Sites that are totally unrelated to your content and seem to be full of adverts. They all have a certain something in common, they don’t look quite right they are often packed with keywords and streams of text with no particular justification.

Paid links?

Paid links that pass on pagerank. Oh can of worms here . DaveN help…..

Which links have weight on the web?

I used a page ranking tool to see which sites had a high enough ranking.
Dave’s PageRank Tool

No follow attribute (Google won’t follow through to that page)

What is the anchor text for these links?

There is not really much point in having a link if it fails to trigger your chose keywords.

Once you have a categorised list you can checkout the ranking that each of these URL’s have.

The thing I’m learning here is simply not to “overdo” things, you don’t need a pickaxe for a peanut do you, so at the end of this we get a list of QUALITY, RELEVANT links that can be used for the client.

Ok, some of these links will have to be paid for and indeed press releases have a cost involved, but like anything – there’s no such thing as a free lunch is there?

Dan Horton