Optimising and performing SEO from Cornwall

Alfonso the Coffin Makers Guide to Link Building
Who would have thought there would be similarities with coffin making and link building? [Read more…] about The Amazing Wednesday Linkfest

Ally McBeal popped my cherry. Myself and others put together a celebrity stock market game website, it was pretty sweet, and I threw up a few celeb biogs, pics and stuff. Pretty much forgot about it. This was back in 1999 and I didn’t even know you could get into search engines then, I thought it was all very weird, it took a while to get my head around it all. I’m not really techy, more a word geek than a gadget geek.

I was living in London at the time, a place called Notting Hill which used to be a cool, working-class, riot-torn, arty-farty place, now it’s all trust fund brats and arsewipe media types. I thought I would take a break. I nipped over to San Diego for a month to hang with Barbara who was doing her PHD at SDSU at the time. I would go sit in the University computer room and go online checking stats and then.

Bang!

Ally Mcbeal hit number one, wow, how the hell did I do that.

I was all excited, so after a month with Barb, I nipped back to London and implemented a strategy which now has a name, “the long tail”. You take a celebs name and stick bikini after it, you make another page and stick “hair” after the celebs name. Rinse and repeat. Pretty soon I had a few thousand pages, 30k uniques a day and a lot of wonga. I had a weird affiliate set up at the time which I won’t go into. It was all legal, just weird. Those days it was like the Wild West.

I decided that ten years in London was enough and Notting Hill no longer had the downbeat, scruffy attraction after all the pubs had been turned into trendy wine bars and Starbucks had moved in. So I went to live in San Fransico for two years, a place called Nob hill, which of course everyone back in blighty thought hilarious. I made the mistake of not building on success and instead of nose to the grindstone I had one hell of a time. So thanks, Google and Ally.

Brian Clarke has an informed post about Linkbait. The term is considered sleazy by some people, which is a misunderstanding of how the technique is used generally. The problem I have is how people use it to encapsulate a number of supporting techniques. I find the term limiting, it’s not yet ground it’s way into everyone’s brain to be able to use it without everyone having their own interpretation. [Read more…] about People say Linkbait when they really mean Linkbait

General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord said,

“I divide officers into four classes — the clever, the lazy, the stupid and the industrious. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the high staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest commands. He has the temperament and the requisite nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be removed immediately.”

[Read more…] about What has General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord got to do with each other?

When I look at my stats, the most important one to me is my comment stats
Having a lot of comments means I have been successful in my goal. It’s not that I don’t care about traffic, it’s just as a metric it does not give me the vital information I need.

As a metric in social media optimisation, web traffic is the least important metric. [Read more…] about Traffic as a Metric is less important than Comments

I’m looking at the BMW website and I cannot believe it. They don’t seem to know to have unique and descriptive title tags for each page. Who is doing BMW SEO? I have no idea whether it’s in house or out house, but for a few quid I could advise them a little better. [Read more…] about Why are corporates so crap at SEO