SEO Experiments, PR and Trolling Microsoft

We conduct little tests and experiments all the time as it gives us a feel for the sensitivity of things. They're not double blind scientific results or anything, but are often are useful, in keeping us amused at the very least, and some of our favourite little tricks have come from experimenting.

At the moment we're looking at PR amongst other things, and have used a recent tongue in cheeky blog post of ours about whether Google would ban Microsoft as a little experiment to show what we see over and over again with regards to SERPS and PR.

We posted on the Blog and pinged it. Then we put it on David's TIP SEO forum then we Sphunn it.

The Results a couple of days later?

# 1 Sphinn PR6
# 2 TIP Forum PR3
# 3 Original Blog PR2

..anyone surprised by this? stepped down in PR order, and in reverse order to their indexing order too.

We were unfortunately possible not very complimentary about MS Free Website product too, and fairly surprised and amused to find our lowly review up on the front page of Google with MS themselves. Still showing at # 8-10

..Whoops, wonder how long before the MIB's turn up? :)

This last screenshot chuckled us too, it seems we truly are an authority site on this MS Free Website subject at the moment, up there front page for with Microsoft, for their own product name, being uncomplimentary, and in fact ranking above answers.yahoo.com with their mighty Pagerank value.. .. possibly proving that sometimes, maybe pagerank just is dying..?

Whoops, no, I just looked properly, its a PR Zero page, surprise surprise. ;)

Wow its not often you get to troll Microsoft twice in one week :)

SEO Demo Case Study Update - Pagerank Lives ?

Is our SEO Demonstration Experiment showing Pagerank is alive and well?

The Search SEO Demonstration which we are targetting as announced in the SEO Case Study here, and blogged about a few posts ago, has, as hoped in our initial studies of the term, we believe is also now showing a realtime look at the relationship between PR and relevance.

This is continuing to back up our feelings that PR, as ever continues to be of importance. If anyone can explain what is wrong in our logic or reasoning with this example, please do let us know. In the Google Search - SEO Demonstration <<~~try it and tell me if things change? We get this screenshot today:





Unsurprisingly, the top spot is still held by Youtube's Master SEOs Taekwondo Demonstration. (PR6) But at least it does actually have the words in the title and heading, so fair enough.

But you can also see that we have now been overtaken by our own blog (this one and PR2) for this search, which is exactly what we would expect, because for similar content, higher PR generally gets it.

We believe this view is further backed up by the fact that a significant amount of the "SEO Demonstration" Anchor Text IBLs pointing into seoibiza.com are pointed from here to there, and none at all are using that anchor text on seoibiza.com and pointing here. So all IBLs that way, and this site shows higher. ...Hmm, now why could that be? (PR2 vs PR0) :)

Also an interesting perspective on outbound links vs inbound? loads out here, fewer in, and still winning the phrase war? And one final thing to consider if you still cant see this as truth, is that this page:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/css/menus/vertical/ has just jumped into the fray, and started occasionally ranking above us. I defy you to find the phrase SEO Demonstration in it at all.

..It's PR4 by the way, dont know if that makes any difference? ;)

More SEO Design

SEO Design in Action.

1) Use SEO @ Design to build & rank the holding page for a new site in development:

CPM Ibiza - Specialist Building & Construction Project Management in Ibiza, Spain

2) Get it indexed quickly ... ^^^^ ;)

3 Get it first page before the full website is even ready to launch. ...Watch us fly :)

Will Google Ban Microsoft for Selling links?

Ok, it's a sensationalist headline, possibly even a little tongue in cheek, and maybe not strictly true, ..as we don't know if MS took any money for these yet.. But, here's a thought along the lines of the Google Business Partner Links story a couple of weeks ago reported in a few places and responded to by Matt Cutts himself..

www.conversionrater.com/google-selling-pr7-links-for-$ 10000

But if you didnt hear, or didn't care, Microsoft announced a few weeks ago they were giving away free websites, domain, hosting, the lot, and they have a few samples of customers usage of their free website technology up on their site, with links to the sites, and some very amateur looking sites with a hefty PR5. A look through their link profile shows 5 links on Yahoo, the top 4 of which are shown here.

..So, when these customers take up MS's kind offer, and start paying for their inclusion into MS PPC style adwords scheme as they're bound to (and supposed to do, in Microsoft's business plan we are sure) when the sites wont perform - apart from if you get the PR6 link of course..

..then presumably, these are then Microsoft Paid Links ?? and they're not nofollowed.

Will Google then have to ban Microsoft, or turn down their Toolbar PR too? ...anyway we're off to sign up right now and see if we can get a quick PR 5 site out of it before all you lot work it out too :)

SEO @ Design Case Study & The poor man's revenge on Microsoft!!

Just a quick post to announce to ou SEO @ Design Case Study is now up, looking at a little of what's going (and gone) into the launch and SEO & SEM of our own brand new SEO Demo site up until now. We know some of you are studying it, (we can see you :) ...hope you enjoy.

And if you're the guy from Canada who spends 23.5 hours a day on the "SEO Packages" page, please click the TALK TO US LIVE FEATURE or we will have to filter your IP shortly to stop the bell going every time you leave and then click straight back in ;)

And as a final thought before we get some sleep, at the time of writing this, a visitor just clicked into the site, from this referral search from the search link below. We didnt ever even target this search seriously at all yet ;) but are quite amused to find our humble blog ranking at Number # 9 out of 18 million pages as of 03.38 am Jan 27th 2008 for Microsoft's Free Websites :)

We wrote a quick blog post about them here Microsoft's Free Websites basically not really feeling their vibe, and doubting their motives.

It amuses us greatly that the opinion of a small SEO company like this currently appears on the same page, Page one as #1, the mighty Microsoft Empire, for their own new product in this search :)

Google Unpersonalised Search for Microsoft's Free Websites ..Take that Microsoft for all those Windows crashes we had to endure for all those years...

Most irritatingly, we cant get the whole screen length pic through the blogger import without losing quality, so we've linked to the screenshot in full hosted @ SEOIbiza for prosperity, as it's possible the search result may not stay like this that long, especially if an MS employee were to see this blog :)

..Who says we're not an authority site? ;)

SEO @ Design by SEO Ibiza

We have been fortunate to work with a local property and real estate broker in Ibiza on optimising their site across 3 languages, and in preparation for a major sales push this year, for a stunning new Luxury Development in Puig den Valls Ibiza.

The Development is comprised of 58 stunning luxury apartments, duplexes, townhouses and lofts designed by the acclaimed architect Jaime Serra Verdaguer.

The Development is Sa Olivera del Molino and promises to bring a hitherto unseen level of light and space to this kind of development in Ibiza. The full interactive 3d website launch is in heavy development and due to launch in a few weeks.

SEO Ibiza have been commissioned to do our stuff with regards to SEO Design as shown on our SEO Demonstration Website and our goal is to have this site ranking top 5, ideally #1 for "Sa Olivera" in 6 weeks.

We do not forsee too much problem with this, this position is currently held by either our Client OWBalearic (who are the exclusive agents for Sa Olivera) or their company blog. We are pretty confident we can have the new holding site top 5, (and ideally a strong number #1 - as long as we havent put OWBalearic too strongly into the number One slot :) by the time the beautiful new interactive 3d walkthrough site is released.

Then it will just be a matter of correctly 301 redirecting old to new and the hopefully the new site will be proudly at the top of Google worldwide (G.com. G.co.uk & G.es) for it's own name from the very first day it's launched. Watch this space... ; )

That's SEO @ Design by SEO Ibiza

SEOs & Web Designers - Compare and Contrast.

Web design and website search optimisation, although fundamentally linked (pardon the pun) are in fact 2 very different occupations. Although SEO consultants and Web designers work with the same medium, ie. a website, and there is some technical crossover as far as software usage is concerned, ie. both need to be competent in HTML editing, FTP transfer of pages etc, even whilst using the same tools, both professionals are doing very different jobs.

POST EDITED 20-07-08 - we are experimenting with duplicate content and the ability to swap over results from different sites in the SERP and so need to interupt and place this link.

We also need to make it as relevant as possible and so will chat a little about the new Ibiza web design post we're working on that references this post, its here Web Design Ibiza - Free Advice - ..but in there we link to the duplicate content version instead of this original post and so we need also to link to it from here compare and contrast web designers & SEOs

make sense? :) ok, sorry back on track....

Good web designers are a special blend of business acumen, creative skills and technical knowledge, and the ability to blend all three skills into a website package that performs well as far as visitor usability and conversions. All three attributes are of importance, if a website is not visually appealing with interesting content, it will fail because the visitor will leave through a lack of interest.

Equally if it looks nice, but does not work very well due to lack of technical skill on behalf of the web designer, or layout issues that visitors may also exit before being converted to customers.

For websites that have to both attract new customers, and sell to them, i.e. convert a visit into a sale or an enquiry phone call (rather than just being a cyberspace e-brochure as so many websites these days, and the only people who are ever going to go there already know your web address, and are already considering your services before visiting) then the last of the three skills, business acumen is arguably the most important.

It is crucial to understand that if a website has to sell, it should include appropriate business flow processes into the design, and funnel visitors through proven effective routes and methods to your ultimate goal of shopping cart sale, or email / phone call enquiry etc. You cannot just stick a collection of pretty pictures up on a business website and a phone number and expect it to just happen.

Unfortunately there are a good amount of web designers around, who maybe having come from a graphic design background have managed to acquire a little technical knowledge and are able to build websites for their customers and friends, using perhaps their own imagary and designs and then subcontracting the more technical work, Flash programming, database back-ends etc out to others and then putting these sometimes poorly thought out, and in some cases barely (business) functional websites live.

This is where the SEO Consultant comes in. As previously stated, even good website designers ae a very different breed to SEOs, because as good designers have strong creativity, SEO is more grounded in the world of maths and rules, and maybe even statistics. It's certainly a technical overview of a website with a different set of criteria from the creative design people.

Beyond the "standard" SEO ruleset which most with even a vague interest understand these days, there is room for some creative manoevering in SEO but it's generally much more akin to business analysis than to the more creative aspects of web design.

From an SEO perspective some website designers are a dream to work with, we were in email contact yesterday with a Spanish Company who make the most beautiful Flash websites as well as XHTML sites who we will be plugging in a big way when the time comes.

There is also another company with whom we cannot help but to contrast this experience with. For the sake of anonymity we will just call them "Flash Ibiza." (because they build mainly flash sites, for customers in Ibiza) whom having demonstrated that they have no clue about SEO nor business website design principles, by building several poorly performing Flash websites for their clients, and who having admitted to us they have no clue about SEO by email whilst chastising us for approaching "their" clients with regards to SEO work, have then spent the xmas holidays trying to work out exactly what we do and how we do it (unsuccessfully, as search results will of course show very quickly ;).

They went as far as actually cutting and pasting our code whole, and just swapping our pagelinks for theirs (as demonstrated by their forgetting to remove one of our links and linking back to us by mistake :) and are now happily re-approaching all their previous customers again themselves for a second time (and payday) and attempting to offer a solution to their previous mistakes, but then delivering substandard, incomplete and ultimately ineffective SEO work through a basic lack of understanding of what they are trying to do.

Its an (un) fortunate fact that analytics and analysis will demonstrate very quickly whether a website is effective in it's given task, and whether an SEO knows what they are doing, and this company have obviously yet to learn this. For their customers sakes I hope theyre offering money back guarantees, (but we would wager they are not) particularly as they are attempting to (re) supply services that they ultimately cannot deliver, ..some might say for a second time.

The lesson here is that web designers should design, SEOs should optimise websites, and the two should work together in harmony for the sake of customers wherever possible. Then after that its an SEO's job to continue to optimise it, and a web designers job to design new websites. The processes involved in Marketing a Website are a world away from creative design, and only a very few web design professionals are truly good at both.

Here is a rare exception to this rule, and a truly nice guy, if you are in the market for a decent website in Ibiza we would thoroughly recommend talking to Pete @ www.kiwi-designed.com

This is why SEO Ibiza maintain an SEO demonstration website for all to see, please do visit visit, and try our searches. This site went live mid November 07 and so is brand new as far as the age and trust factors in Google, our keyword searches are available at the click of a link on the SEO testimonials page, and see for yourself see our first page presence in our target searches.

In the same way as hiring yourself a fat Personal Trainer would not be very confidence inspiring, we believe any serious web professionals, be they web designers or SEOs should be able to prove their abilities on their own sites before asking for your money to work on yours.

SEO Ibiza - Pagerank dead? - Wanna bet your SERPS on it?

We missed this too, so thanks to the Search Engine Blog for posting about it and to HTML4SEO for doing the research in the first place. If you don't want to read the paper in full it basically says that having conducted a six-month audit involving tracking PR and SERPS results across thousands of searches in latter 2007 that PR is, after all the noise from the experts for so long now, in direct correlation to SERPS results.

This is Toolbar PR we're talking about, as obviously they wouldnt have been able to see Google's real PR scores. The forum bandwagon jumping has been enormous in recent months, with people regularly saying things like "Toolbar PR is unrelated to real PageRank" just forget about it etc, but we have not really been able to agree from our view of things.

Without doubt PR is a definite indication of how Google views that site, nobody would seem to argue with that? You can probably trust the information to be better in a PR 6 site, than a PR 0 site, would you not agree? We have been thinking for some time along the lines that G have been purposely downplaying Toolbar PR, spinning that it isnt really too related to SERPS and not to worry about it too much.

..Playing it down as much as they realistically can do without raising too much suspicion, to try to quieten down the link buying & selling sectors as much as possible before having to start getting nasty, which they've done recently anyway. You can kind of see their point, if Pagerank belonged to me, I wouldnt want other people getting rich from selling it, but then again perhaps if I were as rich as Google I may not care so much :)

Now of course, linkbuilding these days is much more complicated than just getting high PR links inbound, its about your anchor text, page positioning and relevancy, the link should be natural, i.e. in context from within relevant text.

But, assuming all else is equal, is a link from a PR7 site is still greater than a link from a PR2 site? ...Of course it is. ..Ok its not the whole picture, far from it, but does anyone believe that if all else were equal relevancy-wise between 2 pages in a search, that the higher PR site would not win in the SERPS?

..You'd have a hard job convincing us of that, particularly as Google seem to be fretting enough about people about selling PR-flowing links to go to the trouble of pretending to impose penalties on offenders to discourage it. Particularly in the light of this, see http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015953.html ..concerning a recent slip up by Google showing what looks like it could still be the *real* (Toolbar) PR for penalised sites.

Andy Beard said of it:

It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.

It would look as though G are manually adjusting toolbar PR to make it look like they've penalised people, but rankings and traffic didnt change. - Now that we can see that actually, neither did the PR, it possibly all makes a little more sense?

Everybody else can forget about PR all they want to, we are still of the opinion that even Google's (propaganda) PR score gives us more clues than no feedback information from them at all would, and studies like the one linked at the top of this post give us a whole lot more besides.

Toolbar PR is as ever an SEO validation tool, Google's own weapon to use against offenders, and an object of (possibly more covert these days) desire to SEO's and the website owners alike. Yes, of course, get on and build the best website you can, but we think its a little early yet to be disregarding PR altogether.

Search Engine Optimisation and Small Business Blogging, what's that all about then..?

cartoon from www.cartoonchurch.com :)

Over the last year we have set up quite a few Client's Blogs for SEO reasons and we are often asked "but what do we need a Blog for?"

Apart from reintroducing people to their long-lost inner writer, there are excellent business and SEO reasons for putting time and effort into producing a really good blog. The blog will raise awareness of your company online, allow you to interact on other related blogs, comment, even lead people to your business via your competitors blogs. If done properly your blog will also likely start to rank in organic searches alongside your main site, and lead people to you that way, effectively doubling your internet presence in the SERPS.

The Vertical response team sum it up nicely HERE , Excerpts used below.

A blog is simply a website you publish in conjunction with your corporate website where you become the expert in your field and provide important information about your industry or your product/service that your readers or customers might find useful.

It also provides a "voice" of the company as well as a way for your readers to comment back on what you provide. It works in conjunction with your company website

Blog providers: TypePad, WordPress, Blogger

Why Blog?

Search Engine Rankings

Backlinking - The more you link back to your corporate domain you could get ranked higher in the search engines. Search engines like "backlinks" (for now anyway). Make sure you link from keywords that are meaningful in your posts. For instance if one of your keywords is "red lipstick" then link back to a page on your site from that keyword.

Categories - Flag each post or "tag" them with a popular keyword(s) or categories for the search engines to key on as well. Notice the (s) above? Put your posts in multiple categories so they can have multiple tags. The more the merrier.

Customer Feedback

Polling - If you need a quick answer to questions, throw up a poll on your blog. Through polling we not only found that our users would attend events we throw, but Vizu, the polling provider we use actually tells us where in the world (on a Google map) these people actually are. Great for event planning.

Comments - Moderating comments in general is a good idea because of spam commentors who just want to get their link on a well-trafficked blog. You will get many great comments either supporting or disagreeing with your POV. It's wonderful to get customer opinions on certain topics, but better yet, have them comment on each other's comments. It facilitates a really great dialog, plus you're on the pulse of how they feel about you.

Content

Selling vs. Not Selling - Avoid too much "shameless self-promotion" if you can, unless that's what you want your blog to be. People are less likely to link to your blog if it's more about you and less informational. So although a blog should be used as a marketing tool, it should be more information than marketing.

Search Engines - The more content you have on your blog about your specific topics, the more the search engines will pick up keywords on your blog. It's both a quantity/quality game.

PR

Establish Yourself as an Expert - Whenever our PR folks gets a request from a publication about a topic to write about, they consult the blog first to see if there's anything already there. This proves to be a great time saver. If they do find something, they forward the blog post to the publication writer. In some cases that's all the publication needs for a reference, in others it's used as an example of the types of topics we can be interviewed, quoted and published on.

Reusable Content - From time to time our PR folks will use our content as the idea for a story that a publisher might find interesting.

RSS

Use RSS to publish feeds of your last few blog posts strategically on your site. It can support what you sell if your readers think you're the industry expert. This can also drive traffic back to the blog so that your readers can get more information.

Try using email marketing to drive traffic directly to the blog giving your users helpful information. Then use Google Analytics on the blog to find out which posts most readers are interested in.

For what we consider good examples of SEO blogs, check our SEO Ibiza Links & Blogs page. Then get onto Google, Technorati, Yahoo etc and find the best blog in your marketplace. Read it, study it, absorb it, and see what makes it as good as it is. Then find 4 more you like, and repeat.

Now attempt to make your Blog as good as theirs in all their winning ways, but this is the most important part, add in your own unique personality and add your own spin or humour to it, to make it even better.

It's also important to try to blog regularly since the search engines seem to be responding very positively to fresh input of late. I'd recommend no less than 2x a month. Write down any topics you want to blog about as soon as you think about them, send yourself an SMS of it to remember if you need to, and come back to them later when you have the time.

SEO Content for Small Businesses who want to raise their internet profile by blogging but don't know how to write effective SEO Content for Small Business Blogs can always contact a professional for some content if they need help getting started.

As time passes and you get more adept at blogging start looking for more interesting or new things to blog about, anything you may have thought about in your industry, but havent seen written about yet, and you may well have a very good start to your next linkbait campaign.

All you need is one quality original piece of work or thought to catch the notice of the bloggosphere and you can be front page news with thousands of new Inbound links in a day, and many thousands in a week. Static Websites do not offer this unique "web 2.0" marketing opportunity, Blogs do.

Thats why you need one.

Clever Marketing and SEO.

SEO has it's uses but there are always other ways of getting noticed. This caught my eye this week, as use of a clever marketing awareness tactic.

SEO, unless you are working at the highest levels or are into high-tech GoogIllegal Black Hat tactics is not is especially complicated in any one area, but as there are a lot of simultaneous factors to be taken into account, it can be notoriously difficult to explain as a whole approach, to perhaps not-so computer-literate customers.

Matt McGee from www.SmallBusinessSem.com demonstrates clever marketing in his field by using his understanding of his area and his ability to deliver an easy to understand overview of SEO in diagram form, shown below.

It's cleverly designed so that you can see the titles of the boxes on the web, but not quite make out what is in them, leaving you wanting to read more of it, and then (luckily :) there is a poster size downloadable pdf available on his site, and although it blatently has another SEO Firm's details all over it, we will be hanging this on the wall of our office and just have to trust in working very hard to make sure our customers dont go and see Matt instead.

If we didn't, they would probably already have SmallBusinessSem.com subliminally implanted in their minds by this point :)

Nice one Matt.

Marketing your Business in Ibiza

Hi.

This is an Ibiza-Specific post for small business owners with businesses in or based on Ibiza.

Firstly thanks to all who have emailed. We are quite busy currently with the rush of everybody wanting their businesses showing by the start of summer booking season but will respond to everyone in the next few days.

..But we have had a several enquiries regarding getting a website written and ranking by summer and I wanted to discuss this generally. Ibiza small business owners without websites often think that getting a website is some kind of magic pancea that will make everything right. Unfortunately this is rarely the case.

Each business should be thoroughly analysed for the best solution before committing to a website, as your time and money (especially in Ibiza :) may be better spent in other areas, and sometimes these days, that is not your own standard 5 page website, with just your (slightly) different text to all your competitors.

With the advent of Web2.0 a lot of Ibiza small business owners may be better off starting and running a blog, to begin with especially. It's free, it's easy to constantly add and update content, and you can get it to rank for whatever you want it to generally, because you write the content, and can therefore adjust and add to it as necessary, whenever you like, with no maintenance charges from your web designer etc.

You can still get your own domain name if you want to, and you can build up trust from the engines in the domain name and work your way up to a real website when the business justifies it. With a little bit of preparation (the content etc) you could also be live, up and running and showing First page for your keywords in Search targetted adverts in less than 2 hours!

is that fast enough for you? :)

More SEO Design..

I meant to post 2 these links in the last post, theres two more good articles about SEO Design here.

The first is for site owners and web designers not familiar with SEO and gives a good overview of the big no-no's Top 5 SEO Design Mistakes.

The second article Picking an SEO Friendly Web Designer deals with tips on finding a web designer to work with an SEO, and how in an ideal world it could all be so perfect. :)

SEO Design for New Business Websites.

If you are starting a new business it is very important to get a website holding page up as early as you can in the proceedings. Aim to get your main keywords and phrases for your new site covered and indexed by G as soon as you can. just a few paragraphs of text, keywords and phrases written into natural reading copy, with targeted titles and h1 s will get you started.

..Obviously knowing a little about what your intended customers might type to look for you can help you phrase relevant content, but of course we know what our keywords are from the research, dont we? If we dont we shouldnt be building a website at all.

If we do, all we are looking to do is build a relevant, well-written website (collection of targetted pages to be precise) on our target topic/s. Then over time, you have to tweak and refine it to try to make it into the site that Google think is most relevant for our target words and phrases.

This may take a little longer.. :)

But one carefully keyword crafted holding page with your researched keywords can easily start the ball rolling and may even start ranking, this one is #15 for *Maltese Properties* in this google search (when I checked) - the domain is only 3 months old, and looks like the title below in the search link above ^ and has virtually no backlinks.

Property sales and rentals in Malta & Gozo

What's more, this particular page wasnt "carefully crafted" at all, it wasnt even researched, I literally just wrote the first thing that came into my head, as it was only ever supposed to be up a few days then the owner changed his mind about the name and bought another domain.

As time is important (age of domain is still a factor, although our own site proves it doesnt have to be insurmountable) the quicker you get the website into the race, the sooner it can win.

As a rule of thumb, SEO-ing a site to a first page ranking for your target keywords generally will take you quite a while from a brand new domain, in even only a mildly competitive niche, therefore the sooner you get it up and indexed, the sooner (some point down the line) it can start to pull it's weight.

So the lesson is that SEOing of a site is not a "write it and forget it" process. In our observations fresh changes to the site on a consistant basis are a big factor in the engines rankings algorithyms, and it's ok to not have the site absolutely *SEO perfect* when it first goes up, as the tweaks and improvements made to it as you go along help in both refining and tuning your keyword search terms, and in keeping it fresh.

Once your new site is up and running, unless you get your hand into your pocket for Google Adwords immediately, you can expect a few months with not much traffic. This is the time to be getting relevant links and natural traffic (as opposed to search sourced) from the kind of places your customers are likely to be hanging about in.

These will slowly start to help you in the SERPS and the analytics package you have installed will show you accurately how the visitors use your site, and start to reveal other keywords and phrases you should probably be targetting. At this point you you can go back and add in fresh page/s with carefully targetted keywords to catch this traffic if the research justifies the need.

With all that said, this is an example of an SEO starter site, live from approx 11pm this evening, belonging to a friend who is emigrating in a few months and starting a company called Maltese Property Finders doing guess what? Finding Properties in Malta and Gozo :)

..Now we dont claim this is the nicest website in the world by any means, but we are very confident of it's search engine indexing and SEO friendliness. The site can and will be transferred into a nicer better looking framework in a few months, but in the meantime it can already start it's long climb upwards..

by the time their beautiful new Site goes up and they need it to actually start working for them, guess what? ...it will already be doing that, and we will have several months experience and tweaking and honing in hand.

That's SEO Design by SEO Ibiza.

2008 begins in earnest...

So a matter of a few days into 2008 and from an SEO perspective it's getting interesting already with a couple of things this week worth a mention. i wrote only a week or so ago about SEO scare tactics and the hardsell that invariably follows big money around, and SEO is huge business these days

One of our clients received a call from a London SEO company's sales team, following a request for an approximate quotation for a Google No 1 placement on their competitive search terms. The saleperson, and that's what he was, although calling himself an SEO consultant clearly didn't have a scooby, and proceeded to try to scare and hardsell our client by:

* Slating our recent and (very successful) work on their site (and our own brand new website) over the phone.

* Informing them that by having our link on their site (permission granted of course) they were "draining away their pagerank" :) Anyone trying to use Google Toolbar Pagerank scare tactics is clearly clueless, it has little to do with the real pagerank system G use to work the SERPs, and lags by about 3 months. It's there for idiots like this to look at, who can't assess how good a site is by it's content and structure.

..Yes, well... :) ...that will be why they (my Client) have gone from not being listed at all, anywhere, to Google second page in the competitive Real Estate search terms we're targetting, and we are predicting we will have breached the first page by early February at the latest.

We cannot of course guarantee this, but having gone from Position 168 on their toughest keywords, to pos 11-19 (11 was the highest so far, late last night - 19 the current position, so we are fairly confident we'll be on that all important front page for their hardest keywords pretty soon.

This company then quoted our Client £5000 GBP, 50% upfront, and a year's work, for a (not guaranteed) front page placement. Thus far we haven't even billed €1000 (Euros) yet and have so far been active on their SEO for just over 8 weeks. ..Clearly we're not charging enough or way over-delivering :)

What is really funny about this, is that I know this particular company have made great use of doorway pages with some of their clients, and currently have one client in particular at the top of their searches using this method.

Hahaha. They have engineered themselves into a situation where they (or rather their clients) are vulnerable to, if not at the mercy of a well-informed spam report and yet they hire pushy sales types to slag off other companies honest ethical work to get their next sale.

There is also another interesting and very funny SEO dodgy tricks type-situation ongoing that I would love to write about at length, but am going to wait to see how it all pans out before doing so, to give them a chance to redeem themselves morally and ethically first. ...If not all the juicy details, screenshots etc will be forthcoming shortly, and it's a funny one, I promise ;)

And one last inside tip, (non SEO related for a change) one of our clients is about to start publishing his secret recipes monthly on his new Catering in Ibiza Blog, and although that may not sound so much, when you consider this client is one of the world's great chefs, and has a diamond-studded celebrity client list, it gets a bit more exciting :)

Check it out La Grande Bouffe Catering in Ibiza Blog

Happy New Year

SEO Ibiza would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. ..Lets make 2008 one to remember, as 2007 has been :)

We've been busy over the holidays getting the permanent site up and running and have added most of the new pages and content we've been wanting to, as below. The rest will follow over the next couple of weeks. we hope you like it.

The new pages are here.

• Small Business Search Engine Marketing
• SEO Ibiza - Recommended Free SEO Tools
• SEO Ibiza Links, Sites, Blogs & Resources
• SEO Ibiza Search Engine Optimisation by Design
• SEO Ibiza "Onsite" Search Engine Optimisation