SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing

While searching Google earlier today I was very surprised to notice that one of the listings returned in the top 10 was an FTP site!

Digging a little deeper and I found that there are actually millions of ftp://ftp.domain.com addresses indexed in Google, all of which appear to have read access permissions granted to the folder structure. I admit that I know very little about hacking but surely having this information available is a potential security risk to webmasters?

I assume Google have always indexed FTP URL’s, just without ranking them very well in most cases so I haven’t noticed these appearing before. But seeing that they don’t index file extensions such as .exe or even .0 because these are considered as a risk to users, I would have expected the FTP addresses to be blocked too - this time as a security risk to web servers and hosting packages instead.

These FTP files have obviously been indexed because the URL has been linked to, normally as a document download from within the main site. The URL’s are certainly useful to the website users (which is why Google probably has an argument for indexing these), but webmasters should really be hosting this on an http:// address and I wouldn’t have expected Google to index these URL’s so that they are open to view for anyone searching.

I’d be interested in hearing any other thoughts about this. I expect this is something many people may already be aware of, it might also explain how some people do link building on .edu domains!

Sadly even in 2008 most SEOs fail at writing, even SEO copywriting. Reading most SEO sites is still awful although the dark ages of too obvious keyword stuffing seem to be gone. So as even I, as a SEO, barely can stand it, imagine your average John Doe search engine optimisation help seeker…

That’s why I collected here 10 most basic SEO copywriting rules you should abide by if you do not want to scare off your potential clients immediately.

1. “SEO Services SEO Company India Search Engine Optimization (SEO) India” as a title, are you kidding me? I’m not a bot, I won’t click that, use a page per keyword ideally. Especially if your closest competitors are “SEO Company India, SEO Firm, SEO India, Search Engine Optimization and Link Building Services India” and “SEO India,SEO Services India,SEO Company India,SEO Services,SEO India”
2. Do not call yourself a “SEO Expert” I won’t believe you anyways. If you’re one others will tell me.
3. Make sure to write a little about the place you’re from and the SEO market there if you insist on “Search Engine Optimization Los Angeles, SEO Los Angeles, Los Angeles Company SEO”
4. Are you offering “SEO, SEM and PPC“? So why the hell should I hire you instead of the myriad of others who offer exactly the same stuff? Offer something unique or at least use a different angle in describing it.
5. Do not overload your page/s with copy. My eyes hurt! Make it scrollable, hide and show (I don’t mean “hidden text”) on demand.
6. Use images and text otherwise I will bounce.
7. SEO, SEM, PPC, ROI, WTF? Don’t use more acronyms than the average spy.
8. Use a memorable slogan like “An SEO Services Provider You Can Trust“
9. Mention real people with real names instead of anonymous “SEO experts” or cool sounding company and brand names. People trust other people unless you are the Coca Cola of SEO.
10. Remember that SEO etc. is the means not the goal. So do not focus on what you do but what the outcome will be and try to convey the message. Btw, what is the goal of SEO? Rankings? Traffic? Conversions? Sales? ROI? It’s higher profits.

This should suffice for the beginning. I’m afraid most SEO copywriters won’t learn very fast though. So support these rules by not paying attention to those who fail to abide by them.

On a side note, if you’re looking for “SEO Company UK, SEO Firm, SEO UK, Search Engine Optimisation and Link Building Services UK” you might try as well SEOptimise

As a German SEO Consultant I worked with UK and US SEO companies and other clients on many internationalisation or localisation projects in recent months. The international sites we tried to optimise in many cases failed to compete with even much smaller local competitors. Also the SEO measures undertaken were far from sufficient due to structural limitations of these projects.

Thus I want to introduce 10 most common fatal localization mistakes English language sites face when entering other markets.

1. No local domain, instead using internationalcompany.com and having no local domain like .fr for France, .de for Germany or .pl for Poland. Thus everybody will link to the .com domain and the non-English speaking audience will bounce off it before finding the small flag in the right top corner. In the meantime a domain grabber will make big bucks off your brand.
2. Translating before doing local market research. Ever tried selling beef in India? Or freedom fries in France? Not all mistakes are that easy to spot. Nonetheless most companies just translate their sites without even taking a look at what a new market demands.
3. No local server. You need a German server to rank high in Google for Germany. The difference is substantial.
4. Translation full of grammatical and spelling errors. I’m astounded how many business sites fail at that and how bad. Nobody will trust you if you can’t even spell correctly trying to sell something. Hire a translator who is a native speaker of the language you want to localize to and actually lives there not someone living next door.
5. Setting up a completely new domain for a new country days before you enter the market. Basically you should register the most common international domains months or years before you enter the markets. It might be gone already later and you risk ending up in the Google sand box not being acknowledged as an authority and thus not ranking.
6. Being far too late on the market. I’m still amazed by the companies which need months or years to offer a product or service in Germany fisrt offered in the US. Why give away 100 million German speaking potential customers to copycats and local businesses? Coming too late (like Facebook in Germany or eBay in Poland) means you will probably never be the leader on the market.
7. Not having a local address or representation. With the rise of local search and a plethora of local websites and services that replaced directories you won’t even get a link without a proper address.
8. Not offering payment via PayPal or other locally accepted or wide spread payment methods. Unlike in the US e.g people in Germany don’t use credit cards much.
9. Broken character sets: Recently I joined several ad networks and affiliate networks and those sites which were translated had in many cases broken German “Umlauts”. In most cases I will leave such a site.
10. No local blog. If you do not have a “company interface” in a local language you won’t reach the public. You rely solely on search engine traffic but you won’t get it for the reasons above for a while. No useful localized content means no local links. Without local links you won’t rank, even as an authority domain.

Are there more issues? Yes there are, but most sites fail to implement these localization basics. On the other hand: These 10 fatal mistakes are easily avoidable.

In recent weeks someone reading about SEO probably had the impression it has something to do with punk music. All the talk about “no future” and “SEOs not dead” everywhere. Also if you look for “no future” in Google you will find “SEO has no future” right in the top 5 just behind the Sex Pistols. If there was a band called SEO pistols it would be the time when it’s front member has been declared dead.

The original Sex Pistols reunited in recent years and punk is still around like rock or pop. Now I won’t stretch this allegory too much. While the original post that started all this craze is nothing more than a short rant of somebody who is not even an expert on SEO as he himself states I was nevertheless amazed by the sheer number, length and fervor of the replies he got. I just want to let the numbers speak for themselves, as I miss them in this debate. At the same time that the “SEO has no future” has been proclaimed, in fact three days earlier, an article in the Times was published that described what’s really going on in the market. May I cite the most important part of it:

[Forrester Research] forecasts that spending on pay per click in America will increase between 2007 and 2012 by 125% to $10.1 billion (£5.1 billion), compared with SEO soaring 365% to $8.9 billion.

So next time someone tells you SEO has no future, instead of explaining in a huge post why not just point at the numbers.

Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!

Are Wikipedia’s ranking fair?
There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.

Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:

Surely people know what a holiday is!

And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?

I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.

Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.

How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?

These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this!

What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?

Search engine optimisers are often treated like the plumbers of the web. In many cases they have to clean up the mess architects and construction workers left. Also they get treated as if they do some kind of dirty work. The ensuing reputation problem comes along with a low self esteem of many in the SEO industry. Now the newly revived concept of findability can make this problem a woe of the past.

What is is findability? To be honest the current concept of findability proposed by the author of the book “Building Findable Websites” resembles simply on-page or on-site SEO best practices. There are some added novelties like Microformats which haven’t been widely adopted by the SEO industry yet. All in all findability is about website optimisation for searchers and users alike, or in other words making a website work both in search as well as from the user standpoint who already is a visitor. While there are also references to off-page factors the focus is clearly the “building” of “findable websites” like the title of the book already suggests.

There are a few great introductions into the findability concept so I won’t add another one. I want to make you aware what findability means for the SEO industry and/or community:

1. Findability, usability and accessibility are interconnected along with other facets of information architecture
2. Findability is marketed as the last missing ingredient in website design and development, it’s not as seemingly detached discipline like SEO might appear
3. There is no black hat findability
4. There is no findability reputation problem
5. The concept of findability allows others, non-SEO people, to do the groundwork

So basically the people who often for years ignored or frowned upon SEO finally will realise that they were wrong: The information architects, web designers and developers as well as the copy writers or other content creators. Findability is all about making these people do their jobs properly. Now will this make SEO specialists unemployed? It won’t. It just means the we can finally let others do the dirty work or simply groundwork as I do not really assume that SEO is dirty work. People out there do though.

SEO is a dirty word. Findability isn’t. It’s nice and clean. So offer findability along with usability and accessibility, formerly known as SEO services. This way you also don’t have to explain the acronym S.E.O over and over again as findability is a simple English term everybody has some basic understanding of just based on the well known verb to find.

So how will SEO experts survive this? SEO long ago ceased to be about making websites findable. It’s much more than that by now. SEO by now is the work of translating websites into profits, whatever it takes, be it findability, SMO or viral marketing. The SEO industry is the fastest evolving online industry. I don’t want to deal with h1 tags and image based menus. The basics must be implemented by those who are originally responsible for them, I want to do the really cool work, the link baiting, the viral videos, the blogging. Reclaim true SEO!