Winston Meets the Blender

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’m sorry to say that my demands were not met – I got a total of 10 extra followers on Twitter (well short of the 100 I asked for), so I’m afraid I had to put Winston in the blender.

I was hoping Winston would be immediately pulsed into a load of fluff – unfortunately it didn’t work out the way I hoped (hardly worth the money I spent on a liquidisor – but I suppose I could do with one anyways). So if your going to blend something in the future, I suggest not using a soft toy…

Don’t try this at home kids.

Bad Hosting

Posted by David Whitehouse

My hosting has been playing up – thankfully Anthony just informed me (otherwise I may have missed it). Basically my host is letting my site down at the moment.

I’d ask Ant to check out my page rank (it was blank so I had got worried lol – turned out its cos I was looking at a new page).

Anyways, cheers for the heads up Ant.

How to get Feedburner subscription links at the end of every post

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve had a lot of visitors for my site with the keyphrase “feedburner at the end of every post” so I thought I best write a guide on how to do it.

Firstly I want to make it clear that I am using Wordpress, if you are not using Wordpress then I suggest you do so asap.

Once you have Wordpress setup I suggest you install the Add Post Footer Plugin

Once you have this simply add some code in the plugin options and hey presto, you have a call to action to subscribe to your blog at the end of every post!

Follow me on Twitter or the teddy bear gets it

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’m not joking – I will blend my 2 year old niece’s teddy bear if I don’t get 100 more followers by the end of the week, Midnight GMT Friday 26th June 2009 (I currently have 65 followers at the time of writing).

So follow me on Twitter – or the teddy bear gets it.

Optimizing for Bing

Posted by David Whitehouse

Ok so it turns out Microsoft’s new search engine is pretty good and it is starting to steal market share (from Google or Yahoo? Who knows?) What this means for the SEO community is that we may have to consider the possibility of optimising for two sites.

Currently, probably 99% of SEO’s optimise for Google over other search engines – which makes sense as they have more search volume. But what will happen if Bing steals a lot more share of the searches? For those SEO’s that haven’t made a name for themselves – this may be your chance!

So I’m going to try and look at what different ways there are to optimize for Bing – starting with keyword choice. I’ll start with an example – check out SEO on Bing (in the US search). If you take a look it has the related searches at the side, at the time of writing these are:

  • SEObook
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • SEO Tools
  • Free SEO Tools
  • SEO Marketing
  • SEO NY
  • SEO India

So these are what Bing sees as the related searches – what this means is that they will affect the outcome of what I suppose would be called the medium tail (two word keyphrases). These search phrases are the most popular and are likely to stay that way – as the related searches will dictate this. Poeple will still search other two word keyphrases, but these will have a much greater search volume. So if you want to start optimising for Bing – start basing your keyphrases on these related searches.

How to use nofollows correctly

Posted by David Whitehouse

Ok so today I read an article by Aaron Wall about nofollows being largely a waste of time, I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about until I scrolled down on my RSS reader to find Matt Cutts had already blogged about this.

Basically, in a nutshell – no follows don’t pass page rank, but they do reduce the amount of page rank passed on by other links.

So for example, if you have a PR 10 site and 10 outgoing links, 9 of which are nofollowed, only 1 will actually pass any link juice. In this situation you might expect it to pass all 10 (minus a dampening factor), but it doesn’t it only passes 1.

So here is my advice on how to use nofollows correctly and what action you should take:

  1. Ensure you are “dofollowing” all internal links – otherwise you are just shooting yourself in the foot – don’t page rank sculpt, you are just reducing the amount of juice that stays on your site.
  2. Reduce the overall amount of outgoing links you have on your site, these might include social tagging links
  3. Dofollow all your external links, unless you see them as a direct competitor or you deem it a “bad neighbourhood”
  4. Dofollow Nofollow links from commenters – you may get a little spam, but if you keep on top of the moderation it should be fine you will be spammed!.

So far I’ve dofollowed all my internal links (that I have noticed) and removed any nofollow external links completely. I’ve also removed my social networking links on each post which were detracting the link juice through my site significantly.

On a final note, I’ve dofollowed nofollowed my blog comments – I want to encourage people to use my blog – perhaps it’ll but I don’t want to get it covered in spam (I hope not) – so feel free to comment on this post!

The plugin for Wordpress I used to use to dofollow my comments is called NoFollow Free in case anyone is interested (by the way the link is dofollowed).