Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

TheJim an SEO failure

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

So after an SEO review of thejim.me.uk it would appear it’s a rather big disappointment.Where’s my frontpage SEO ranking google? Did you forget about me, or do you just not care? I’ll be investigating your blatant and treacherous googlism!

I have a domain name containing “thejim” and also “thejim” appears in the title of all pages and is the textual content of the <h1> tag. So one would think with all these markings of “TheJim-inism” I’d have a rather higher pagerank.

The peculiar thing of course being that the current google pagerank for TheJim is 3, not great, but hell of a lot better than other places which appears on pages 1-4 of the google search results. (n.b. pagerank is NOT which page you appear on in a google search!)

A quick google search for “thejim” shows that even a wallpaper site makes it higher in that rankings than me, The Real Jim Shady.

So, it made me wonder; does the suffix of “.me.uk” on TheJim had anything to do with it. Perhaps google doesn’t  consider any “.me.uk” to be  an authoratitive domain for information on the subject title? It would appear not. A quick scan of the “thejim” in google search revealed that google appears to have a preference for .org , .com , and .co.uk, quite a few sites of which don’t contain The Jim in their URL link. Yet has no favour with little ol’ “.me.uk”.

So, what to do? Well you’ll all be seeing this Jim VERY soon, very soon indeed!

It seems there are a lot more Jims out there than just this Jim… Beam me up Jimmy!

How to get a better Google snippet description

Friday, July 11th, 2008

I suspect you’ve always wondered how google gets the snippet information that it displays with the link to your site in it’s SERPs. Well I have too, and now i’ll let you in on the secret http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve -snippets-with-meta-description.html

“We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content.”

So it seems that google does care about meta descriptions after all…

How do we apply this to dynamically generated products then I hear you ask. Well firstly I’m going to imagine that you have your product information stored in a database or flat file format and you know your SQL/parsing queries that will pull the relevant tags.

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Usability and Readability Tidbit #1

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

This is part 1 of my quick guide to readability. Personally, i’m an Evangelist for semantics and usability, and the man you should all pay attention to is Jakob Nielson. He invented usuability (well almost) on the internet, and defined a lot of standards that ideally should be followed. He backs up all his “suggestions” with practical measured studies and you can find his website at useit.
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Sowing SEO seeds

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Like the seeds that sow the perfect harvest, search engine optimisation (SEO) requires a trained hand and keen eye. Mass farming your content doesn’t reap the maximum return, but then that’s what you would expect from a lower quality content grain. As they often say, “you reap what you sow”, and to that effect I feel I should highlight some important SEO aspects of copywriting.

Content is the fruit of a labour of love

Don’t just write content that utilises the same generic keyword over and over. It’ll sounds like the drum of the combine harvester pulling up the roots of all your finest fruit terminology. Get yourself a tangy tongue and wrap your grubby SEO farmer’s hands around a thesaurus. Look for synonyms, and related words, and soon you’ll find that you are no longer producing prepackaged supermarket grub, and instead are hand-picking the freshest organic rankings, listening to the jolly whistle of the Google™ farmer as he ploughs potential click-throughs into your website.

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