SEO Prank “How to kill Anthony Shapley”

Posted by David Whitehouse

Apparently this was nothing new, as people had been searching for “Kean Richmond is gay” before I came up with this idea:

Basically I got a load of people to click through to anthonyshapley.co.uk after visiting this page, so that it got into his Analytics:

Anthony Shapley's Analytics

Anthony Shapley's Analytics

Anyone else heard of any other good SEO pranks? I guess Google Suggest is probably a popular one…

David Whitehouse is really hard to rank for!

Posted by David Whitehouse

So after my previous rant about how hard my name is to rank for I decided to try and rank for Anthony Shapley – to prove how hard my name is to rank for. Fortunately I have succeeded in ranking for my name in Google.com – but I’m still having problems in Google.co.uk (I need to switch my hosting).

So, here are the results:
In Google.com I currently rank #8 for David Whitehouse, for Anthony Shapley I rank #4

Rank #4 for Anthony Shapley on Google.com

Rank #4 for Anthony Shapley on Google.com

In Google.co.uk I currently rank #64 for David Whitehouse (awful), for Anthony Shapley I rank #6. To be fair, Ant actually ranks higher than me for my own name!!! Although I’ve switched my settings to target the UK in Google Webmaster Tools, so hopefully this will change over the coming weeks.

I will keep you informed of any changes!!!

Why is David Whitehouse so hard to rank for?

Posted by David Whitehouse

It’s true, my name is hard to rank for. I’ve got a whole site with a domain name containing my name, and most of the <title> tags also contain my name. So how come I’m not up top?

Many people have a bit of a dig, since I’m in the SEO industry, but my blog is only a few months old. To prove the fact that my name is hard to rank for, just take this into consideration. I’ve done one post on Anthony Shapley and that post is ranking #12 on Google.co.uk, whereas I am currently ranking #51 for David Whitehouse!

So if any of you out there would like to give me a hand, I would much appreciate it! I’ve got some BBC correspondent with the same name as me!

Here is the code (to make things easier for you all):
<a href=”http://www.david-whitehouse.org”>David Whitehouse</a>

Thanks in advance for your support, I’ll keep you updated on my progress!

Feedburner – the answer to my email marketing dreams!

Posted by David Whitehouse

For those of you who know me, you will know that I’ve had a health problem that has prevented me using the net as much as I like over the years – so you’ll understand. For the rest of you, please bare with me if I regurgitate old stuff/ideas – I’m still playing catchup!

I’ve recently discovered the power of Feedburner after seeing that Seth Godin uses a similar service called FeedBlitz. so I thought, if it’s good enough for Seth, it’s good enough for me :)

Anyways, it’s great, I’ve been harping on at Anthony Shapley all week about it. It’s a great way to “save” all those visitors who visit your blog and then bugger off. Blogs have the worst bounce rate of any other type of website, because people tend to be interested in just one post, so it is important to keep them coming back via a feed subscription or an email subscription. It is probably best in encouraging everyone to sign up to Feedburner at the end of every post – with a call to action (I guess I best put this on my list of things to do now I said that)!

You can see on my sidebar that I have my feed link (as per standard) but I’ve also added receive blog updates by email. Now I much prefer this way of receiving blog posts – mainly because I tried Google Reader once and I hated it, plus I can’t be bothered to keep checking back.

Anyways, if you want to follow my blog via feedburner you can do so by clicking here.