Paul Myers - Profile

Paul Myers

Forum titleSEO bore
JoinedAug 2012
Posts55
Thanks20
Thanked38
Latest activity 8th Oct 2012 1:49pm  


Recent Posts
JJB Sports on the ropes 8th October 2012 1:38 PM
Yes, local parking is key. Once upon a time councils saw this as a way to get some extra cash, but it is now back firing badly, as what they gain in parking there have lost many times over in loss of business rates from empty retail units.

Believe it or not, Surrey was going to 'equalise' all villages/towns by insisting on no more 'free parking' in any shopping location! It was over turned by public outrage. They should be doing the reverse, creating MORE free parking, in our local town they needlessly painted yellow lines (no obstruction or issues where they did) just to force people into the paid bays. Free parking does need to be limited to a couple of hours or 4 hours, in most places though to stop hogging by rail commuters and local office workers.

I doubt free parking would have helped JJB though, as the majority of their stores are based on retail parks where parking is free.

With JJB, it was more a case of they didn't have a market and didn't know where to go with the brand.

JD have captured the designer sports gear market, Sports Direct are totally dominant in the cheap sports gear market. JJB tried to fit in the middle, but failed badly. They didn't have the prices to beat SD and they didn't have the trends or the designer name of JD. They where looked upon as a bit of an inbetweener that no self respecting teenager would visit, and with prices no one with any sense would pay as they would go to SD.

They couldn't win.

Unfortunately, the few remaining stores did well in the closing down sales. As there prices where so reduced, it became interesting.

I have to say, I visited, and picked up a golf bag for less than half price. If it wasn't on sale, i'd have gone to SD.
DMOZ Submission 8th October 2012 1:30 PM
DMOZ is a virtually a dead service in my opinion. As far as I understand is no longer valued by Google (Mention of DMOZ & Yahoo directory was dropped from Google Webmaster guidelines at least a year ago) I have not heard of any one getting successfully listed for around 2 years.

Don't loose sleep over it.

I'd tend to agree on DMOZ - seems like a total waste of time as nothing seems to get listed, but I still find myself strangely drawn to submit regardless!

On the Yahoo front - this is still worthwhile. I ran some tests a couple of months back, which I think I put in another post on the forum.

Anyway, I basically submitted one site to the directory and performed no other work, and omitted a very similar site from the directory whilst doing other work.

Measured the results over a period of time, and the site with the Yahoo listing did well, increase in in both PA and DA, whilst the other site with ongoing 'SEO' work, stayed static.

I've since done this a few more times, with similar results - the site with the Yahoo listing performing better.
Guest Posting 8th October 2012 1:26 PM
. I think guest blogging can be effective though

It can be, even more so now its 'back to basics' where Google is concerned I.E. generating natural links by getting great content out there.

Difficulty it - how do you get your content out-there once you have created it?

Guest posting is one option - how have you guys approached this ?

Would love to get a discussion on the go, with some ideas.
I'm afraid. Didn't understand what now I do? Previous I doing link building according to below process:

Title: Exact match Keyword (As my targeted)

Description: Same as my site meta description.
Keyword/tag: Keyword

But from now how I doing Link building?

Hi,

Search has evolved much in a short time. We no longer look to target one or two exact match terms on our sites with the aim of improving ranks. We now revert back to what Google has always been saying before the results pages where gamed so badly. We focus on what's best for our websites visitors.

This means no more exact match titles, as clearly an exact match title is for the search engines - so change this to reflect what you are offering.

For example we target the term 'web design liverpool' and structured out title tag 'web design liverpool | Webrevolve'. And where ranked 5th for a long long time. We changed the tag to be a little less stuffed to:

'Webrevolve - The No 1 Web Design & SEO Agency in Liverpool' - with no other work performed whilst we measure what the result of this change would be, if any.

In 6 weeks we where no1 - and have stayed there. Plus, having the No1 text in the title and actually being no1 in the results looks great!

We have also tried similar things on lower ranking inner pages and also seen decent gains in terms of positions site wide. And tried the same on client sites with the same good outcomes.

In the description tags you must remember you wont gain any ranking benefits from stuffing keywords. Think about description tags as an advert - what could you put in this to grab attention? Whats your USP? What could you put here to stand out and increase CTR?

The next step - content. Create great content. Don't spew out tons of average stuff. Spend time developing smaller amounts of really great stuff. Post it on your blog, promote the blog, and if its good enough (it has to be great mind), it will develop links.
How to increase Page Rank? 5th September 2012 8:46 AM
Pagerank is a measure of authority that an individual web page has. If a page has a rank of say, 5 or 6 then you guarantee that there are some pretty heavy duty URLs linking to it. Those URLs are in turn are passing their authority to the other page.

A link from a page with PR 4 is always going to be worth way more than a PR 1 link but if that page has been spammed to death (a blog post for example) then you might as well ignore it. The keys to post penguin link building are diversity, contextuality, variation and low out bound links.

I think the point here is that we have suggested PR is not a good measure to use to gauge a sites authority, as its at any point, 90 - 120 days out of date.

So, who is to say that your pr6 site today isn't in reality a pr1 after being bashed by panda et al and vise-versa?

There are simply better, more regularly updated measures to look into. And focusing on PR has been shown to do nothing for your actual rankings, which is why you can see a PR1 site in 1st place, and a pr5 on the 3rd page (assuming those measures are up to date!). Its just too uncertain to bother focusing your efforts on.
Social media does work, and works very well. The key is building a relationship with your followers.

Hi,

Indeed, but its a difficult thing to do or so i've found. How do, or would you suggest methodologies for building this relationship? I see your twitter account is new, how do you intent to build a solid and valuable following that would add to the business? Sorry to ask directly, but the social side of things is not my Fort
Mobile Website? Any Advice? 4th September 2012 3:36 PM
Hi Lee,

There are several posts on here that do a good job of explaining why you could use a mobile site, so I won't run over the same ground.

I run a successful SEO team plus a couple of my own ecommerce sites and one of the areas we look into on a regular basis are our analytics programmes.

Over the last two years and in particular the last year we have been paying close attention to the mobile side of the data.

We have seen significant increases in traffic delivered to websites derived from mobile devices, on average we see 19.8% of traffic now coming to sites from mobile devices - that's an average. Some sites we look after see over 25%, which is a fair chunk of traffic when you consider the traffic volume maybe in the hundreds of thousands.

Now, clearly for a client receiving this volume of traffic it would be unwise to ignore and and not tap into it by presenting their site in a version that was accessible to mobile devices.

Some static sites simply go for a trimmed down, fast loading version which works well. It gets a bit more technical for our ecommerce clients that wish to develop sales on mobiles, but done correctly adds positively to their conversion rates.

Do you run any analytics software? It would be a good idea to look at the data and see what traffic you currently receive from mobile devices, this may sway your thoughts.
yippie kay yay itunes
Yep, it would be good to know why you ask the question - are you looking at embarking on some sort of activity to promote your own business via SM?
Amazing how many people there are around with more money than sense.

I think you would have to be nuts to invest heavily in social platforms, or literally have more money than sense. Look at the history - they blow up to massive sizes, millions of users, their share prices rise, people buy in, then the next development comes along and your investment has gone.

Myspace, Digg, Delicious and there are many more that have lost massive amounts off their value. Why should Facebook be any different. Loads of once avid users I know are no longer that interested in it, and if they ever move to a paid service like was mentioned a while back then I can see loads of users dropping off.