‘Who are you?’

As has already been stated, we’re a small but hard working group of SEOs who’ve been in the business for quite a few years who would rather go un-named. To be honest, even if you were told our names they probably wouldn’t ring any bells.

This is because we’re far too busy actually doing it and bringing in enormous quantities of traffic for our employers or clients. We don’t really have time for this silly site but it came out of a drunken evening of shaking our heads about the amount of dis-information and people eating out on free dinners off the back of pedalling duff information.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE

So we’re doing it – rather than haemorrhage with rage about bullshit nonsense we see daily, we’re cathartically putting our annoyances here – we don’t mean any harm, we’re just pissed off with it all – so rather than seething in silence, we’ll find stuff, and try to carefully explain why it’s shit.

Happy?

SEO-001

‘If you’re so good at SEO why have you got hyphens and stop words in your URL?’

Ok, so first of all lets explore why she’s asking us this question.

Most SEOs might consider that hyphens in a URL are a Bad Thing because there’s been indication from some Search Engines that too may hyphens are a sign that the site isn’t really very good.

Some SEOs might consider that having Stop Words in the URL are bad because they .. oh dear… ‘dilute the keyphrase density’ of the URL, gosh, such poncy language. All theyre suggesting is that if you want to rank for a particular term you should use it in your domain.

Nonsense on both counts

Choosing a domain name is immensely important, but there’s actually very little SEO in the decision. The hyphens / keyphrase arguments are completely moot and is easily disprovable with many examples.

Choosing a domain name

So, http://www.your-seo-is-shit.com would be a terrible domain name if you were targeting it at normal people, or having to explain it over the telephone ‘the hyphen is at the top right of the keyboard, yes that’s it, no you don’t need to press shift, yes, yes it’s just like a minus sign’ or were expecting less able users to have to enter it. We’re not, and we dont care. We also don’t really give a shit about the length of the domain we’re using. There are lots of reasons to try and use the shortest domain as you can, and that’s all fine.

But not a lot of this is an SEO decision, may be it falls more into branding and usability? Luckily, the good SEOs these days are able to advise on both branding and usability as well as SEO.

A big thing to watch is to make sure you’re only running one version of your site. Some people run two without even knowing it, this is called, guugh, the canonical problem, which mostly jsut means your site is available on the www and non-www version. It’s easy to fix with a bit of redirecty stuff, just pick either the non-www or the www and redirect one to the other. Go check your site now, type in http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com and see what happens – getting your content delivered on both? That’s not great.

Yes, by conventional thinking, our domain name might be shit but:

• It made us laugh
• It’s fairly memorable
• We don’t care what anyone thinks
• The audience we’re aiming at isn’t a conventional audience
• The structure of any URL has little to no ranking factor

Do you REALLY think a couple of hyphens in a domain name is gonna stop Google indexing a site?

It’s not 1998 anymore. Grow up.

SEO-001

We’re playing as we go along with it, we’ve never used wordpress before and it has some limitations. Som of which we’ve fixed, some of which are being fixed, and some of which will never be fixed.

Mostly, this site is just a chassis. Imagine being asked the question

‘So have you ever seen a site which does …example… very well?’

and having to keep a catalogue of sites in your head, because not one site does everything perfectly – well.. we’re having a go, but none of us wanted to hand code a site from the ground up (we don’t have time) so slapping WordPress into some webspace became the obvious answer.

Some things we’re currently having some problems with include:

Over-riding auto generated meta descriptions
A nice 404 page
Recent searches

for example

Anyway, we’re getting through the list as best we can.

This post is a category pinch-point as well

Go to the Your SEO is shit hompage