Ranking for your name vanity or sanity?

Posted by David Whitehouse

My colleague, James Slater, and I were debating over whether trying to rank for your name is a necessity or if it is purely vanity. Dave Naylor has previously told me trying to rank for my name is vanity, but I distinctly remember him looking to see if I ranked for my own name in Google when I came to Bronco and begged for a job! Plus I know full well that Dave’s name is a distinctive brand – well known in the SEO World.

I’m currently #2 for David Whitehouse, and I desperately want the #1 slot – in my opinion Google shouldn’t ever give that to me unless I become more famous than the other David Whitehouse, but I reckon if I keep on getting linked to from the SEO community I am bound to secure it.

Damn that guy above me

Damn that guy above me

In my opinion, in the SEO community, if you are applying for a job as an SEO and you don’t rank #1 for your name, then that looks pretty bad on your part, surely?

So have any of you been guilty of trying to rank for your name? Who ranks #1 for their name?

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).

SEO Specialist – my new target term

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I’ve got bored trying to rank #1 for David Whitehouse – so whilst I’m getting on with that I’m going to play around trying to rank for a commercial term: seo specialist.

Dave currently ranks number 1 for UK SEO, and Ant is trying to rank for that one too, so I thought I’d target something else, since that base is pretty much covered (plus I reckon this one is going to be easier).

We’ll see how I do :)

Blog Setup

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve finished setting up Wordpress after following the guide on Yoast. Well worth going through by the way, I highly recommend it.

Now I’ve just got to get myself a new theme, as this one is messing up in FireFox it appears – not good. Anyone know where I can get a good theme?

Also need to remove the blog roll and start putting a post about each friend instead (sorry guys).