The SEO Rapper (aka the poetic prophet) is a youtube video of Chuck Lewis, a gospel hip hop rapper who really knows his stuff when it comes to search engine optimisation. For those of you that haven’t heard of him, check out this video:
This is just one of the many rap songs he’s created about SEO. How he makes rhymes and half decent song about search engine optimisation, and remains technically accurate I’ll never know. Chuck now takes parts in quite large SEO seminars, and you can purchase MP3’s of his songs or even buy his CD! His tracks include:
It’s a difficult time for a lot of companies during the economic turmoil of the credit crunch. Lots of companies are having to tighten their belts, and cut back on their expenditure and their marketing budgets. Your SEO budget however, is not something that you should cut back on. Having a good online marketing campaign can be the differentiating factor between you can your competitor, and can help you gain the vital work you need during a recession.
As more companies realise the benefits of an online marketing campaign, there has been an increase in what is commonly known as DIY SEO (Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimisation). DIY SEO occurs when an inexperienced company takes it upon themselves to optimise their own sites. This is especially true for companies that have their own in-house development teams. Many programmers believe that they can optimise a site for search engines, and it is still popular belief that simply adding keywords and meta-descriptions is enough. This simply isn’t the case, and as a result many sites find that they have missed opportunities or even been penalised by search engines. A classic mistake is to have the same keywords and meta-description on every page, using over 20 single keywords on each page, and keyword stuffing the content and ALT descriptions of the images.
If you have an in-house development team, it can be tempting to try to search engine optimise your site yourselves. After all, there’s so much information available online for free! However, finding reliable and up to date resources is a big issue. A good SEO company will actually act as a consultant for your site, enabling your in-house team to make all the changes, which can be a very cost effective option. This way you know your developers can follow clear instructions to update your site, and you won’t have to worry about potential loss of business from dropping rank or being removed from a search engine index.
For anyone serious about search engine optimisation (SEO), having the right tools is a must. SEO involves a lot of constant analysis, and so having a selection of SEO tools on the ready can save a lot of time. It is possible to develop your own SEO tools, however unless your building something very specific, the tool you need probably already exists.
We recommend using Mozilla Firefox as your primary web browser, as this allows you to install and use a number of ‘add-ons’. There is a huge of SEO tools available from the Firefox website, which are completely free! These can be great for day to day checking and analysis, and are a great feature!
Our top 4 favourite SEO add-ons are:
Web developer:
This adds a number of menus to your Firefox toolbar that have all kinds of useful web developer tools for analysing a site.
Greasemonkey:
This allows you to create simple scripts for modifying how you view the web.
Rank Checker:
A tool created by SEO Book, that allows you to quickly check the position of your keywords against your chosen domain.
Seoquake:
This allows you to investigate many important SEO parameters and information about websites shown in Search Engine Results Pages, extremely useful for quickly finding information about competitor sites.
Here at Elevator SEO, we have decided to start 2009 with a bang and have invested some time in a new style for our website. Additionally we have included some new categories in the blog, including an SEO glossary and an SEO tips and advice section. These blogs are available as a free online resource for anyone who visits the site, but also it provides a free online SEO reference for our clients.
There a lot of changes happening in the SEO world in 2009, and already some websites have started noticing some differences. It seems that Google is going to cracking down on inbound links, which is currently a popular belief following a “no comment” from SEO expert Matt Cutts. It also seems that there are going to be some considerable improvements in SEO for interactive media, such as Flash, as Google seems to be giving a lot more importance to video.
Other predicted changes include changes to the Page Rank algorithm and the way sites are ranked in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Ultimately these changes are being made so that Search Engines can provide us with the most relevant information for our search (and hopefully improve their service), but this may have some dramatic affects in competitive industries.
The one thing that we can always rely on, however, is content. If you have good quality, unique and regularly updated content then you should always do well. Remember our guidelines for SEO content writing when writing any new content for your site.
DMOZ (dmoz.org) is one of the most famous human edited directories, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is also still free to be listed in the directory, however the waiting times for inclusion are known to be very long. The DMOZ index is used directly by Google, and they are known to provide lots of other smaller, regional directories with their index.
Human edited sites are always deemed more trustworthy than a directory which accepts automatic submissions, and as such your site needs to meet the requirements or it will not be included. DMOZ has a very high Page Rank (it has a PR of 9!) and their internal pages have an average Page Rank between 4 and 6!
Getting listed on DMOZ can make a huge difference to your site, and is considered a must have link by many. If you have waited a long time and you still haven’t been listed, you can even become the editor of a particular section. There is work involved with this process, but you may be able to get your site included a whole lot faster!
We offer a free SEO website analysis report for everyone who would like to know more. Simple provide few details including your name, email and domain. Once verified we will analyse your site and send you a PDF of your report. Click for your Free Analysis
