10 Things You Must Check When You Re-launch Your Website
8/3/2009 Re-launching a site is a crucial and often worrying time. There are many many things that can go wrong, and when they do go wrong the results are often spectacular.
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Blog Posts
The Exact Science of Hindsight and How This Helps in SEO
12/11/2008 Over the last few months I've found myself doing slightly less SEO, and in its place I've been thinking about how we can improve the SEO services we offer our clients. SEOs, I've found, tend to be quite a creative bunch, both in the type of work that gets done but also in the way that the work gets done. One of the joys of being in SEO is that the tasks that need to be done and the best way of doing these tasks is permanently evolving. The creative urges mean that often when asked to do two similar tasks a week apart, the tasks are done in a completely different way. From a job satisfaction and creativity point of view, this is fantastic; starting from scratch each time on a task means the creative juices can really flow. From a management and consistency point of view, re-inventing the wheel each time is a nightmare!
What Quantum of Solace Can Tell Us About Information Architecture
10/30/2008 I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again: in my opinion, the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I'm going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases 'site' or 'information architecture' interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)
Interviewing for SEO Jobs
10/10/2008 Earlier this year Rand did a white board friday talking about how to get an seo job. A couple of years ago Rebecca covered the SEOmoz hiring process, with a full re-cap of how Jane became a 'mozzer.
The 3 Cornerstones of SEO
9/16/2008 For the first time in a while I was let out of the office and sent to a Sales meeting. For as long as we have been running the company the typical stereotypes of coder vs salesman have been applied to Will. Taken to extremes people think that I can't string a sentence together and Will doesn't know how to turn a computer on. At sales meetings Will likes to talk in terms of the foll...
Applying On-Site SEO to Website Templates (Or Why Separation of Code and Content is a Good Thing)
8/29/2008 There are lots of people who would class themselves as a developer and would say they can code in any given language. Often the difference between a good developer and a great developer isn't anything to do with the program, how well it works, and how few bugs there are. The great developers make programs that work but they make them in a way that isolates the various components from each other...
XML Sitemaps: Guidelines on Their Use
8/1/2008 Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. ...
Information Architecture - A Site Review is Nothing Without It
7/27/2008 Will and I have a recurring argument about what should and shouldn't be in a site review. My argument has been, and remains that before you can do a proper site review you need to do keyword research, in order to validate that the site architecture is correct. I have been doing a fair few site reviews recently and one thing has stuck out. Yes, almost every site I've ever loo...
How to Turn Yourself from a Great Developer to a Great SEO
7/5/2008 The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project. The following list may not be groundbreaking but then SEO often isn't. I think the following all fall under the heading of advanced common sense...
Why Apple Isn't UK Enough for Google
6/11/2008 Did you know apple.com doesn't rank in google.co.uk with the "pages from the uk" flag checked? On further inspection this is because Apple uses Akamai which dynamically changes the dns settings to ensure the best user experience. Given that Googlebot always crawls from the US this means that the dns always returns a US based ip address, even though there are Akamai servers serving apples website in the UK.
Why a Link from a Powerful Blog May Not Be a Powerful Link
1/11/2008 Here's something I've been thinking about for a while which I'd like to get your opinion on. Let me talk through the issue as I see it and then see what you think. Lets assume that you are the lucky owner of www.website.com. After spending time building up a relationship with the owner of www.blog.com they finally agree to write a blog post with a nice juicy keyword rich link...