Optimising and performing SEO from Cornwall

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of enhancing a website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

Key Components of SEO:

1. On-Page SEO:

• Content Quality: High-quality, relevant, and engaging content that provides value to the user.
• Keywords: Researching and using relevant keywords that users are likely to search for.
• Meta Tags: Including meta titles, descriptions, and header tags that help search engines understand the content of a page.
• URL Structure: Clean and descriptive URLs that include keywords.
• Internal Linking: Linking to other relevant pages within your website to enhance user navigation and distribute page authority.

1. Off-Page SEO:

• Backlinks: Earning high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to increase site authority.
• Social Signals: Engagement on social media platforms that can indirectly affect SEO.
• Brand Mentions: Being mentioned on other websites even without a direct link.

1. Technical SEO:

• Site Speed: Ensuring fast load times for web pages.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Ensuring the website is accessible and performs well on mobile devices.
• Sitemap: Creating an XML sitemap to help search engines index the site.
• Robots.txt: Optimizing the robots.txt file to guide search engines on which pages to crawl and index.

1. Local SEO:

• Google My Business: Optimizing your business profile on Google My Business.
• Local Keywords: Using location-specific keywords to attract local traffic.
• NAP Consistency: Ensuring your business Name, Address, and Phone number are consistent across all platforms.

SEO Goals:

• Increase Organic Traffic: Attracting more visitors to your website through unpaid search results.
• Improve Search Engine Rankings: Achieving higher positions on search engine result pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
• Enhance User Experience: Providing a better user experience through relevant content, faster load times, and easy navigation.
• Boost Brand Visibility and Credibility: Establishing your website and business as a credible source of information and solutions within your industry.

SEO Best Practices:

• Stay Updated: SEO is dynamic, with search engines frequently updating their algorithms. Staying informed about these changes is crucial.
• Monitor and Analyze: Regularly monitoring your website’s performance using tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to make data-driven decisions.
• Ethical Practices: Avoiding black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link schemes which can lead to penalties.

By implementing effective SEO strategies, businesses can achieve long-term growth and a competitive edge in their respective markets.

I was asked to contribute an “expert SEO” quote for one of those “top SEO speak”, type posts.

You know the type of thing.

I get about one of these requests every couple of weeks, sometimes I respond sometimes I do not. I don’t market myself as an “expert SEO”, and so not really bothered about the label one way or another.

Now let’s make clear about these lists, they are not necessarily 100% accurate and people do get on them (including me) who really shouldn’t always be on the list. But they help market your personal brand, help your incoming links and give a quick boost to the ego (not to be taken too seriously) and do help in the wider scheme of things. After all, a link is a link.

Of course, the writer is going for ego-bait, which can be a very powerful marketing tactic when trying to attract influencers. I have written quite a lot about this subject and it led me to study more seriously the neuroscience of web copy and how to influence, but let’s not get distracted from the topic at hand.

I wonder about such lists and whether or not I should even be on such a list, sharing space with people like Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz… etc. And that I wasn’t really an “expert SEO”,  or something like that. And I’m fine with that, I don’t think I should be listed next to those people either and wouldn’t ever push myself to be so.

I also don’t regard myself as an SEO, I am more a “get a website customers” type, and use whichever I think to be the best tool. Be it, content, links, social media, content marketing… etc. and of course, SEO.

But then I watched a video where Cal Newport was speaking about “Deep Work” and how for example, Steve Jobs became an expert in Eastern Mysticism on his way to building Apple and that “follow your passion”, is not always the best thing to do. And it got me thinking about what is it which allows you to attach the label of “expert” to yourself.

I first got online in 1996,  and built my first website in 1998.

Back then a domain name was £50.

I remember using a HTML program called Hotdog, later upgrading to a paid version of Dreamweaver, created by Macromedia. I wish I could get my hands on an earlier version of Dreamweaver as the current one is so bloated. I worked at that website for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for about 6 months. Completely destroying any social time with friends.

At the time the UK charged for a local call and it would have cost me a fortune, at the time I was a penniless, out of work writer, but one of the ISPs offered a free connection from the hours of 6pm to 7am. And this became my work hours. To keep me company I had purchased a £35 used TV from Portobello Road and the new, BBC rolling news and old movies, the World Service on the radio kept me company in those long hours.

It was a time of Infoseek, Excite, and Altavista. plus other flashes in the pan search engines that came and went quite quickly. One upstart was called, “Google”, I wonder what happened to them?

It was crazy fun doing SEO in those days. You could simply spam the meta tags, a lot did and they did it because it worked.

You could create a page similar to the page ranking ahead of you in the SERPS, tweak it, publish, index, and within an hour the SE would be updated with fresh rankings. This allowed you to make multiple attempts to rank and if focused enough you could rank easily, however it wouldn’t last long.

Those early days of SEO were truly the Wild West and looking back on it now I kinda miss it.

I could talk for hours about this period and places like DMOZ, where if you became an editor you had the ability to hand out links from a highly trusted source. This was where I understood that social skills still mattered when it came to getting a website ranked and that no matter how well you optimised your site with your rad SEO skills there was the site which focused more on greasing the wheels and getting people to link to you. I think that is very much the landscape right now and will always be.

After 6 months of being an utter noob at getting traffic to a website, I think I would get about 10-12 unique visits a day. I was using a stat program called, Urchin, which was very good. So good that Google bought it and relabeled in Google Analytics. I preferred the old Urchin as the new system was more about selling the Adwords system. Which made sense from Google’s POV.

After too long in front of a CRT monitor, I took a month long holiday in San Diego, staying with an arty friend who went on to design the funky stuff you see at the entrance of an outfit called Facebook.

Had a blast, visited the Salton Sea, Grand Canyon, Vegas and fell in love with the desert of South Western USA. Particularly an old mining town called Jerome in Arizona. But, let’s not make this a travel blog.

During the holiday I hung out in the SDSU computer lab and noticed my website was now getting 400 uniques a day. Well, that’s nice.

Back in London, I threw myself back into building my website.

I had great link building wins, for example, the movie, Notting Hill was being made in our street. They covered it in fake snow and the production team gave the residents a bottle of champagne for the disruption. I was able to grab video footage of Julia Roberts and use it to get more links from celebrity sites.

I learned that creating a spectacle and earning links created fantastic ROI.

My website was celebrity based and getting early with the news resulted in good traffic (this method is still powerful).

End of 1999 it was making money via an advertising system (pre Adsense) and was making more money than I knew what to do with. So did what you should do in that situation, head off to San Francisco for two years to hang out. Bagged a primo apartment in Russian Hill.

I had a ton of projects on the good, all pretty much failed.

For example, I bought a domain called, ratemyvideo.com. The idea being people could upload video and others would vote on it. An idea that was greeted with, “yeah but what if someone throws themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge, and the video gets uploaded?” The site never happened, mostly because I was not the type of person for such a project and bandwidth meant any video was a thumbnail.

Also, SF was a lot of fun and I didn’t do much work. Yosemite was a drive away and having a British accent could get you a long way with native, female population and so I mostly had too much fun.

Although I do remember the day I arrived in SF. It was exactly the same day the first bubble had burst in the year 2000. I had just taken a 4,000-mile transcontinental drive from Washington D.C. to San Francisco. Only driving on minor roads and eating at non-chain eateries.

It was a journey of a lifetime and learned that in a one-horse town in West Texas, if you pull out $50 in cash you will get told, “oh you must be from the city”. And if you go to Furnace Creek in Death Valley in February, don’t expect heat.

Because of the crash, a lot of time was spent going to auction of bankrupt companies. On Market Street (the main tech strip in downtown SF), expensive desks were dumped on the streets.

The online scene contracted.

But I was still doing ok.

I came back from SF to do a Media Coms course at Lincoln Uni.

Fast forward to 2006 and my site was now doing 30,000 uniques a day.

Not bad for someone who is not an expert in SEO 😉

However, disaster loomed.

I had been deliberately breaking the Google TOS to get traffic, it worked for 6 years but not updating the site with the proper enforcement of the Google TOS meant the site was nuked for traffic from Google. Many sites rank whilst in breach of the Google TOS and a lot of times if you followed the rules you simply didn’t rank.

The site was toast and income stream gone.

Time to pivot.

And so I started Cornwallseo.com to sell services, which quickly pivoted to selling content, links, content marketing training… etc. And local SEO services, a lot of local websites had very bad optimisation as they had been created by a web designer, who typically are more into fonts than they are to improving traffic.

Local SEO was quite easy, (and still is)  it usually takes about 15 mins to assess what was needed, and in that time you can give the advice to increase traffic by 300%+. Implementation can take a little longer but it’s really not that hard to do at the local level.. National and International sites in highly competitive areas, however,  need a different approach, but the basics are the same.

So, does 20 years of building web traffic through optimisation by millions, building optimising hundreds of websites and giving others advice on optimisation, speaking at many SEO conferences, writing about SEO for 10 years on this blog, reading thousands of articles over 20 years regarding online marketing,  make me an SEO expert?

I have no idea.

I would never call myself an SEO expert, but I understand when others do.

Does it mean I shouldn’t be asked to offer a quote to be on a top list?

Maybe, but they keep asking, ironically I got another one a few days ago.

Websites are tools of communication and persuasion. And as such should be used correctly by political parties to achieve their aims. Following best practice web design and SEO it is relatively simple to create a website that Google will love, which increases your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results pages.

Performing an SEO audit on a website is required to establish whether or not a website is following best practice and is optimised in the most effective and efficient way.

It does take a lot of time and effort to do a full audit, but I thought I would show a few examples of what an audit can pick up. As the UK general election is in full swing I thought it would be interesting to look at the two main political parties.

Due to the amount of time a full audit would have taken, we have only been able to do a partial audit and focus on a few important things

Disclaimer: I have no allegiance to any political party, am a swing voter and have approached the analysis of both websites with a completely open mind.

conservatives.com

H1 Tag

No H1 tag exists.
Not good, Google values a H1 tag, I would suggest an H1 tag which echoed the title tag. As it would seem that is the most important keyword for the site

Although there are H2 and H3 tags

<h2>Share The Facts</h2>
<h3>Why we need a general election</h3>

Missing a H1 tag is not best practice, and is an opportunity missed to highlight a specific keyword to Google that the page finds important.
<title>The Conservative Party</title>
Functional and showing what is important, but missing an opportunity to add a slogan which will be seen by many. Missing an opportunity for further communication as the title tag is listed in the search engine results pages and does get scanned. A slogan is perfect for that context.

Meta Description

<meta name=”Description” content=”The Conservative Party – Building a country that works for everyone” />

Again, very functional, very conservative. A phrase that is all about getting on with the job with little fuss. I think this works for the Conservative brand.

Canocilization

Although tricky to say, canocilization is a technical issue with the URL structure, it should follow a logical and hierachical structure, allowing Google to easily decide which of your pages you have deemed the most important.

It is crucial you are able to tell Google which is the front page to your website, as that is the one it will want to rank.

You must only have one of the following that will show in your browser, if not Google may index the duplicate URL and it will weaken your ranking potential.

• http://yourdomain.com
• http://www.yourdomain.com
• https://yourdomain.com
• https://www.yourdomain.com

The Conservative website has correct canocilization,  is correct, as only https://www.conservatives.com is available.

Duplicate content errors
Pages within the folder, “http://press.conservatives.com/archive/” are throwing up duplicate content errors. Possibly these pages should be non-indexed if not needed to rank or the con. This allows Google to know the exact pages needed to rank. Whilst not a major issue, optimising this will make the site more easier for Google to index the correct pages.

Oh, and something interesting popped up. The meta keywords tag is now redundant and yet the Conservative website has, <meta name=”Keywords” content=”conservatives, conservative, conservative party, tories, tory, david cameron, centre-right” />

Did you spot the error?

labour.org.uk

H1 tag

Very bad situation with regards to the Labour parties H1 tags.

<h1>Labour</h1>
<h1 style=”margin-bottom: 0.6em;“>We will build a better, fairer Britain.</h1>
<h1>JEREMY CORBYN’S 10 PLEDGES TO TRANSFORM BRITAIN</h1>
<h1>Labour</h1>

You only ever have one H1 tag, whilst you can have many H2 and h3 tags.
It is how Google knows to structure what is important on the page.
A website is a communication and persuasion tool, it should be constructed along best practice guidelines. It’s actually very simple and logical to do this and getting the H1 tag this wrong is inexcusable.

To a web designer or SEO this is quite shocking as the error is not a simple mistake as it is repeated a number of times. Leading me to question the methodology of those who put this website together.

My questions to the Labour party if they were a client would be:

• Who is responsible for the oversight of the website?
• Did the web designer who put this page together raise the bad practice issues?
• What processes are in place to catch such simple mistakes?

I wouldn’t lay the blame at the person who was tasked to do the actual coding, but would investigate the management and systems that allowed this to happen. As whomever is in charge is doing a very bad job.

Title tag

<title>We are Labour &ndash; The Labour Party</title>

Not quite sure of the purpose of the duplication. “The Labour party – insert slogan here“, would be better. Seems redundant and a waste of a call to action opportunity.

Meta Description

<meta name=”description” content=”We are a people-powered movement. Be part of it.“>

This tells me that the “movement”, is a movement and not a party, is powered by people. Not sure what else a “movement” would be powered by. “Be part of it”, not sure if this is telling me what to do or asking me. It certainly does not inspire a click through if seen in the search engine results page, which is the purpose of the meta description.

Canocilization

This is a complete mess.

Home

Home

Are both available to the browser.
Yes that is correct, the Labour party website does not yet have a https certificate, which enables data to be encrypted between the browser and the website. It is best practice to have one and Google is saying you should have one and Google uses it as a ranking signal. This is again a basic error which any beginner web designer or SEO would know.

Also, the front page now redirects to http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/home/splash, which means there are now 3 front pages. It is important you only have one front page to present to Google as it has to chose which one it is going to rank.

The request for contact details would have been better as being above the fold on the original front page and still have the same URL structure. Still filling the screen, but without messing with the structure of the website and its optimisation.

A quick fix would be to redirect the https page to the http page, as well as to redirect http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/home/ to http://www.labour.org.uk and get rid of the splash page.

But the best solution is to get a https certificate and then redirect all front pages to https://www.labour.org.uk

Other UK political parties are:

libdems.org.uk

snp.org

ukip.org

greenparty.org.uk

plaid.cymru

mebyonkernow.org

More information on what is important best practice:
Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google, this is a great starting guide from the people who you really should be listening to.

Blogging works well when done regularly, however it’s not always easy to keep up the momentum.

As a tool in the online marketing tool box, blogging is still very useful. Not as sexy and trendy as other techniques, but it can really help your SEO, social media and content objectives.

How do you keep up the momentum and blog regularly?

It’s a question on my mind currently as I have taken about a ten month break from regular blogging. I simply lost the taste for it and it no longer did what I wanted it to achieve.

I forgot some of the basic rules of blogging and blogged my way over a cliff.

The idea of tapping out another blog on the keyboard filled me with a loathing and I always found something more interesting to spend my time on.

Looking back over what worked and what did not I learned a few things about my own style and about what does and doesn’t work. We all have a style and it’s important you give room for it as it helps to distinguish you from your competitors.

There are a numbers mistakes I have made and I think they are common as I have seen many other bloggers do them. (I’ve made a lot more than these, but we have to start somewhere)

• When I write I over think, simplicity is the key in blogging. Complex concepts communicated simply and without fuss
• I expect others to find things interesting just because I do (no one wants to hear about the Second Punic War)
• Readers of this blog need solutions quickly and are time poor and I sometimes waffle, not getting to the point quick enough
• I forget that lessons need to be retaught and just because I wrote about a topic once, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be revisited from a different angle
• Not everyone has my humour, or my politics or my love of etymology
• Being useful is far more important than being seen as clever

Most of my failings come from a writers arrogance, I word it like that because it sounds better than “my arrogance”. But before I beat myself up too much, I think it’s quite common when you spend a lot of time studying and working hard in one sector to start to reshape your thinking about that sector.

It’s hard to work in a field for a long time and then realise and admit that you have headed off the path and into the wilderness.

it’s important for me to share, because it may have happened to you and it resonates. Or it may be happening to you right now and it can help you rekindle the fire before the dying embers go cold.

Hopefully you realise everyone goes through this and withe a little help you can keep going, so as able to reach your objective.

The golden time is when coming fresh at a subject.

There are no places not to discover, no rock which you think is not turning over and so you discover more and delight more. This fuels the desire to learn even more and to hone your craft as a blogger.

This post may well be over thinking it, although I like to call it, but hopefully I have simplified the process enough for it to engage and empathise with you the reader and blogger.

Empathy is the new black

Empathy is something I keep reading about. It is crucial in getting your message across and convincing people your words are something worth giving time for. It may be my past blog posts did not empathise enough.

I actually took an empathy test and scored quite low, although not as low as some as my other male friends. And so I now make an overt effort to show empathy in my blogging. Not in some wishy washy, overly emotional way. But in a way that shows I care about the problems of the readers of this blog and  that I am prepared to put the sack of grey mush that resides in my cranial cavity to the task.

The reality strikes me that I am hear to help you solve your problem, and not to create a blog that is for me and my own ego.

The aim is to solve problems around online marketing issues, specifically those of an SEO, social media and content nature.

Now we are here, where do we go?

For me it’s about listening to people and finding problems and attempting to solve them.
Think about doing something similar in your own sector, especially giving thought to how empathy can be integrated into your blogging as most blog posts (mine included) lack this important ingredient.
Showing expertise is as simple as showing empathy, sharing knowledge and helping solve problems that your audience want help with.

My next few blog posts will be covering this area. Come back if you find this stuff interesting.