Blogged thoughts, is our web blog. Expect views, opinion, rants and tirades about everything and anything 

Just noticed this last night, my site doesn’t appear in the ‘in Ireland’ results on Yahoo.co.uk nor does it appear in the ‘Only from Ireland’ results on search.msn.ie it does however appear in the ‘pages from Ireland’ results on Google.ie.

Here’s a little secret - my site is actually physically hosted in the United States however its IP blocks are registered to Shannon, County Clare so this seems sufficent to ‘fool’ Google, but not Yahoo and MSN. I would have thought it would have been the other way around.

It probably actually doesn’t make much of a difference to me in terms of visitors but I would like to know how this works, perhaps Google being a domain name registrar looks at where akamarketing.com is hosted and checks the registered address of the host. no? What gives?

In the last post I talked about the various things which you could do to optimize Wordpress for the search engines without actually changing any code, so it was all simple stuff really and kind of general. In this, the promised followup post (I’ve changed the title around for SEO purposes) I will get a little bit more technical and make use of what’s known as Wordpress conditionals. Wordpress conditionals are tags which can be used to tell Wordpress what content should be outputted on its various pages. The idea with Wordpress conditionals is exactly the same idea as conditionals in standard programming logic, for example ‘if something is true do this, else do this’ or conversely ‘if something is not true so this, else do this’.

In terms of search engine optimization Wordpress isn’t bad ’out of the box’ and therefore no use of code conditionals is actually required however like many other web systems there is always room for improvements here and there, often it is these little improvements which make the difference between 1st page and 2nd page listings for your posts in the Google, Yahoo and MSN SERPS (search engine results pages) so I definitely do recommend implementing these changes in the fullest manner possible.

You should know that all the following code modifications for SEO purposes are done to the file header.php (which is in the themes folder), if you are planning to implement any of my suggested changes I strongly recommend you make a backup copy of this file first.

To begin then lets have a look at how we can improve the keyword density of the main blog page and the main category pages by using the is_home() and the is_category() conditionals. By default on the main page Wordpress will simply start outputting your posts one after another, however if you have a look at this blogs main page you will see I have an introductionary paragraph which not only allows me to improve keyword density itself but also allows me to have my keywords closer to the top of the page than otherwise would have been possible. To do this I added code similar to the following at the very end of my header.php file:

if(is_home()) { echo “keyword rich blog description here“; }

The above line basically means that if the current page is the blog homepage then output the text in bold. Next up is the category pages, what I propose doing is writing a keyword rich introductionary paragraph for each category on the blog. The idea is the same as the one on the homepage except rather than an overall description these descriptions will be specific to the category page being viewed. As of yet I haven’t implemented these changes myself but am planning to get around to it depending on what my rankings are like in a month or two (after the redesigned site is fully spidered).

To continue then if you have a look at the official conditional tags page you will see that the is_category() tag can be used in a number of ways depending on what condition you want to check. I suggest using the is_category() tag parameterized by an ID corresponding to a certain category on your blog. To view the IDs of your categories go to the ‘Manage’ page in your admin interface and then go to the ‘Categories’ page, you should see all your categories listed out one after another with their corresponding IDs on the left.  Armed with your all your category IDs you can now make use of the is_category() tag by using code similiar to the following:

if(is_category(’3‘)) { echo “keyword rich category description here“; }

This code should be placed at the very end of the header.php file (well actually placing it above the is_home() tag is OK too, but make sure it appears after all of header.php’s original content) and will check if the archive page for the category with an ID of ‘3′ is currently being viewed and if so will output the text in bold. In the case of this blog, the category with an ID of ‘3′ is the SEO category so the bolded text above would probably read something like ‘Search engine optimisation related blog postings. Learn how to improve your rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN, learn about the Google Sandbox, learn all about Wordpress search engine optimization……‘. The idea is to provide a fairly specific description of what’s actually on that page, that means mentioning the titles or a rewording of your titles. Google and the other search engines like to see keywords spread out over the page, older posts would of course be nearer to the bottom of the category archive page and thus their related keywords would be concentrated in that area so by having your post titles or rewordings of your post titles in the category archive description you should improve your chances of ranking well. Obviously you can’t cater for all posts in a category so I’d suggest that you give your older ones priority.

Next I’ll move onto optimizing the title tags of the various Wordpress pages. As you most likely know what’s contained within the title tag of a page has a major influence on how Google and the other search engines see that page so it’s quite important that Wordpress is optimised to the max in this respect. I’ll be making use of the is_home() and is_category() conditional tags again but I will also be using the is_single() tag too.

I have already implemented these changes which I’m about to recommend and thus I can’t exactly show you before and after examples on this blog, so that is why I will make reference to another Wordpress blog which is unoptimized (but which still ranks well due to large numbers of incoming links). The blog is a very high profile blog run by Google employee Matt Cutts blog and is located at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

In terms of the actual blog posts themselves by default Wordpress places the name of the blog first then a ‘»’ and only then will it output the actual title of the post currently being viewed, for an example of this see Matt’s post entitled ‘Review: Winning Results with Google AdWords‘. Notice how the title of the post only comes after the name of the blog ‘Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO’. It is well known that words which occur near the start of the title tag have more weight with the search engines so obviously this default set up must be changed for maximum optimzation, this is done by having the title of the blog post appear first in the title tag, this can then by followed (if desired) by the name of the blog. The is_single() conditional tag can be used for this, this tag checks if any single post page is currently being displayed.

The title tag section of unoptimized Wordpress blogs should look something like this:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

To reorder the title tag to make it more appealing in terms of SEO, the above code needs to be changed to the following (now is the perfect time to make that backup if you haven’t already done so):

if ( is_single() )
{
?>
<title>
<?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ » ‘; } ?>
<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>
</title>
<?php
}

The code first checks if any single page is being currently being displayed and if so enters the inner code section. In this section the wp_title() tag outputs the title of the current page and then sets the separator (which gets prepended to the bloginfo(’name’) variable) before outputting the name of the blog. Since the above code only deals with single pages it is of course part of a set of ‘if’ and ‘else’ conditional checks but that’s the actual post pages themselves taken care of, lets look briefly at the code to display the homepage title then (to be pasted below the above code):

else
{
if(is_home())
{ ?> <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> SEO Blog | Irish / Ireland Technology Blog | Search Engine Optimisation blog<?php wp_title(); ?></title>
<? }

The text in bold is the only real change from the default homepage title here, I have added these words because the name/title of my blog (blogged thoughts) is not keyword rich so these should help in the SERPS. As for category page titles Wordpress is not the best it could be as it once again places the name of the blog before the name of the category which hampers search engine optimisation. In this case though I recommend more than a simple reversal of blog name and category name, I recommend ditching the blog name altogether and simply describing the current category in keyword rich terms (for your most important categories anyhow). In the code below I ditch the category name too, this might effect usability and thus whether you do this or not is up to you.

elseif (is_category(’3′))
{ ?> <title>SEO Blog | search engine optimisation | Google optimization blog</title> <?}
elseif (is_category(’8′))
{ ?> <title>Irish technology Blog | Ireland IT news | General Irish blog</title> <?}

At this stage the code should be kind of self-explanatory but if not, the code checks if the current page being displayed is the category page corresponding to an ID of either ‘3′ or ‘8′ and displays the appropriate keyword rich title. Click into the archive pages for either the ‘SEO‘ or ‘Ireland‘ categories on this blog and you will see the above titles, however the code so far only deals with single post pages, homepage and two specific categories, finally I need to provide some default code which will cover all other pages including category pages which I have not explicitly handled in the above code. This code goes below the above code and is as follows:

else 
{ ?> <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title> <? } } ?>

It outputs the name of the blog followed by the title of the currently being viewed page. Well there you have it, by using the above code you should be able to increase the rankings of your blog and its posts on the major search engines. Remember though as I mentioned in an earlier post that onpage optimization is only really a small part of what can be and has to be done to improve your rankings so be sure to also apply offpage optimisation methods to your blog and its posts also. As usual I appreciate your thoughts and comments on this post. I think I’ll cover some non SEO stuff for the next few posts.

Blogs can bring in a lot of visitors to your website via the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN if they are updated regularly and of course are properly optimized for these search engines. Although I haven’t been using Wordpress for that long I’m pretty sure that I’ve maximised the various settings and features available in terms of search engine optimization. Now when I say settings and features I basically mean standard options which are available within the various Wordpress interfaces by default, I’m not talking about editing the code in your blogs theme files, I will talk about that in a follow up post. You might have guessed then but this post (the first of two on Wordpress optimisation) will provide you with some tips for optimizing your blog and its posts in a non code modifying way.

Some of this stuff will be fairly basic but for the sake of completeness I will cover it anyhow. To begin then, the title/name of your blog is most likely not up for change as perhaps you already have an established blog which is known throughout your community but if it’s at all possible to include some keywords in your blog title be sure to do so. If for example your blog is about gardening then call your blog ‘Joe’s Gardening Blog’ or ‘The Gardening Guide Blog’ as opposed to something like ‘The Gnomes View’ this will help your blogs SEO chances by having occurrences of your blogs main keyword(s) in practically all your wordpress page titles and it should also help you due the keyword rich links which you will get (hopefully) from other bloggers and webmasters who link to your blog using its ‘official’ title/name. I suppose I could have followed this advice with my own title and called it something other than ‘Blogged Thoughts’, the reason I didn’t though is because my situation is a bit different as my blog is not only about SEO, it’s also about the Internet, technology and certain Irish issues which catch my fancy so I didn’t feel comfortable with anything too specific.

The next item refers to customizing permalinks. Permalinks are direct URL references to your blog posts. Wordpress allows you to customize these URL’s to make them static looking and keyword rich thus making them more appealing to the search engines, Google and MSN in particular though. The permalinks interface is available from the options menu in Wordpress and I suggest you make use of it. I have chosen the custom structure option and my syntax is “/%post_id%-%postname%.html” which produces URLs for each of my blog posts with the id of the blog post and the name of the post in them. You of course can use any structure you like and an excellent reference page is available at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. After saving your structure Wordpress attempts to write Apache mod_rewrite code to your .htaccess file (if none exists a new one will be created) to allow your URLs to be rewritten according to your chosen structure, this of course means that permissions of 666 or greater will have to be applied to your .htaccess file and the directory it exists in (the main wordpress directory).

Next a paragraph about Wordpress categories. It should be no surprise to you that I recommend naming each of your categories in the most descriptive way possible, if you have space try and use more than one word I know though this is not always easy to do. Also in relation to categories be sure that you make use of the description field available when editing or creating a category as these are inserted into the title attributes of all category links and many search engines provide relevancy points for keywords in title attributes nowadays. Make your description keyword rich of course but don’t go overboard, remember the real intended purpose of the title attribute is to improve accessibility.

In terms of boosting the rankings of your actual posts, well the permalinks option which I discussed above will certainly help, this works best though if you have chosen the title of your post wisely. A common concept of search engine optimisation applies here again, be descriptive as possible and be vauge and general as little as possible. This means that when your entering your blog titles you should try and avoid fancy journalistic type ploys like alliteration, puns or metaphors as much as possible and simply tell it as it is. If your post is about emmm lets say…. Wordpress search engine optimization well then be pretty darn sure you include ‘Wordpress search engine optimization’ somewhere in the title of your blog post, preferabely near the beginning. Being descriptive as possible when titling your posts will mean that your main keywords will be included, this in turn will provide for keyword rich URLs (via permalinks), keyword rich heading tags and keyword rich title attributes on your blogs main page, relevant category and archive pages and the page of the blog post itself of course.

When choosing the category of a new post try and place it in as many relevant categories as possible (within reason of course). Often many posts will overlap two or more topics and could/should be placed in multiple categories because of this. Imagine a post about the Google sandbox… this post could go into categories called ‘Google’ and ‘SEO’, next imagine a post about hosting in Ireland… this post could go into categories called ‘Hosting’ and ‘Ireland’, well you get the idea. The advantage of placing posts in all relevant categories include the fact that the end post itself is linked to from more places on your blog and thus gets found easier by Google, Yahoo and MSN. In addition to this, if your posts get picked up by any syndication sites such as www.irishblogs.ie they will often archive your post snippet (and link back to the original blog post) in all the categories which it was placed in on your blog. To get a clearer idea of what I mean simply visit www.irishblogs.ie and notice how many of the posts are listed ‘in’ multiple categories, click into at least two of these categories and notice how the post snippet (and the link back to the original blog post) is present in all of them, this means that again your posts are easier to find but also that Pagerank (perhaps only a small amount though) will be passed to them. Irishblogs.ie is of course only applicable to certain blogs but I have noticed that most syndication sites work in the same way, so the advantages of multiple categories are there to be had no matter what your blog is about.

Well that’s really all the optimisation which can be done with Wordpress without getting your hands dirty with actual code modification. I mentioned above that this post was the first of two on wordpress optimisation and folks I don’t lie so check back on Wednesday or Thursday for the second part in which I will cover (or at least try to) the use of Wordpress code conditionals to optimise eh… Wordpress.

Offpage optimization is now the main focus of many a webmaster and search engine optimisation expert when it comes to trying to boost the rankings of a website in the leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Offpage optimisation is all about getting as many valuable links to your website as possible in the most natural way (or at least in a way which will appear natural to search bots) possible. 

This week I started to do a bit of offpage optimisation for the SEO tools section of the website, this is only a new section which was put live in mid May with the overall site relaunch and thus it does not have pagerank or any links pointing to it yet. Considering all this then it’s not surprising that for the term ’seo tools’ the SEO tools section of the akamarketing.com website is currently ranked 68th on Google and nowhere to be seen on either Yahoo or MSN, now I know that with time the rankings would have improved, but I decided to do offpage optimisation anyhow as I know this term is competitive. I’m guessing I will have to wait for three or four months though before I can reap any rewards in terms of higher search engine rankings.

OK so let’s continue with what I actually did. My method of offpage optimisation was to submit one of my articles to a couple of sites which regularly publish my work as well as submitting that same article to a couple of other sites which I found through my old friend Google. Most of you reading this will know that the main advantage of publishing your articles on other webmasters sites is the fact that you will be allowed to include a link back to your website via the resource box which comes at the end of the articles. Often this link can be keyword rich which has HUGE benefits in terms of search engine optimisation. 

After submitting my article to the sites which regularly publish my work I began the search for fresh sites to try and expand the reach of my article. I found sites which would potentially publish my work by performing certain special searches on Google, examples of these include; “internet marketing intitle:submit your article” , “search engine optimization intitle:submit your article”, “internet marketing inurl:submitarticle”, ”online marketing intitle:addarticle”, “seo articles intitle:articlesubmit”. These are just a handful of the different variations of searches which I performed. I basically used the inurl: and intitle: advanced search syntax along with keywords related to the article which I wanted other webmasters to publish on their sites. The words in bold are samples of the keywords I used, these words do of course change based on the topic of the article.

Run any of the above queries in Google yourself and you will see a load of sites which could potentially publish your article, this is what I done. After scanning each result for a second or so I visited any of the decent looking ones to try and submit my articles. The various search queries which I used were so specific that a large percentage of the results would indeed allow me to submit my article, excellent.

Simple enough stuff from here in really, I basically just copied and pasted my article (along with one of my resource boxes) into a load of different websites form interfaces and hit the submit button. The only thing I really had to think about was what resource box I was going to use. Let me continue, basically I had four resource boxes, the reason I had four resources boxes was not to do with the normal text as such but it was to do with the actual linking text back to my site (or more specifically the seo tools page located at http://www.akamarketing.com/seo-tools/). One of the resource boxes had a standard issue link to the seo tools section while the other three contained different keyword rich links to the seo tools section. Finding out whether or not a site will allow HTML resource boxes (and thus keyword rich backlinks) can be done by simply looking at other articles which are already on the site or pressing the preview button (which many sites have) and seeing if a keyword rich link comes out correctly, if it does you can be almost certain that HTML is allowed in the resource box.

One of the resource boxes then is for sites that don’t allow HTML, but why did I need three HTML keyword rich resources boxes. Well the reason I had three keyword rich resource boxes is to allow my incoming links to appear as natural as possible (remember I mentioned this near the end of the first paragraph?). Imagine Google indexed 30 new incoming links to my SEO tools page all with the exact string ’seo tools’ as the anchor text, it certainly won’t appear natural as different webmasters will of course use different variations of words to describe the same page, it’s very unlikely that all 30 webmasters would use the exact same string to describe what’s on the other side of the link so if Google sees something like this it will perhaps discount or even discard a whole load of links as something unnatural (like effectively ‘paying’ for a link with an article) is going on. This is the reason I used three different HTML resource boxes.

The different anchor texts I used in my resource boxes where ’seo tools’, ’search engine tools’ and ’search engine optimization tools’. When I submitted my articles I simply alternated my resource boxes so that the backlinks I would gradually acquire (as Google finds its way around all the sites which published my article) would appear just as if a webmaster had chosen the link text himself or herself thus making the link text more ‘believable’ and valuable.

In terms of results so far, well as mentioned above I only submitted my article earlier this week and I was quite conservative in relation to the amount of sites I submitted to but already a couple of pages which have my article on them have been picked up in Google and MSN (Yahoo is a good bit slower I believe). The title of the article was “How to create content that will get you loads of links“ and an exact string search for it on Google and MSN returns 157 and 34 results respectively. Have a look through some of the results and notice that there’s a good mix of the various anchor texts which differentiate all my resource boxes from each other.

Well there you have it, I’m sure you will agree that my efforts earlier this week constituted a simple enough method of offpage optimisation, I can confirm though that it is one of the most effective methods and yes I am speaking from experience. Be sure to check my rankings for ’seo tools’ in a couple of months (after all these new pages with my link on them have ’settled’ in the index and have obtained some pagerank), I’d be very surprised if I’m not in the top 20 or so results. Any questions about anything in this post please don’t hesitate to drop me a comment.  

The Google sandbox is Google’s much loved (oops, did I actually say that, I meant much maligned) filter mechanism which keeps new sites from ranking really well or even moderately well for their chosen keywords and keyphrases for up to a year (sometimes longer). These new sites can be found when searching for their exact names or URLs, but for anything more generic than that they are likely to appear lower than 100th position.

As far as ways of avoiding the Google sandbox go, it is generally accepted that it cannot be avoided altogether but that there are certain things that can be done which should minimize the time that a site has to spend in the sandbox. Emphasis is placed on the ’should’ as you can see, this is because nobody except the engineers working on the Google algorithm really know how the sandbox works, how it can be beat, how its effect can be minimized etc. The webmaster and SEO community can only try and make some really good guesses based on such things as experiments, research, academic type white papers, filed patents, etc.

Anyhow I’m a member of the webmaster and SEO community so here’s some of the things I believe may help with the effect of the sandbox. These are things which should be done before the site is ‘launched’ proper. Firstly the idea of the sandbox filter is to prevent spam sites appearing in the results pages, now spam sites by their very nature are ‘come and go’ type sites which aim to ‘get in and get out’ as quickly as possible, with their spam/scam generated profits of course. Therefore these sites generally only register domains for one year as anything else will just be a waste as the domain will most likely be blacklisted (and thus become useless to the spammer) within that first year of registration. It is for this reason that I believe that registering a new domain for long periods (say maybe 5+ years) appears to tone down the likelihood of that domain becomming a spam site which will deteriorate the quality of Google’s search results.

Now we know Google has access to domain name registration data as it became a registrar in early 2005 and then when they filed ‘United States Patent Application 20050071741‘ (highlight ‘domain’ with your Google toolbar and get reading) my mind was made up that somehow Google had to be using domain name registration/expiration dates to add or subtract relevancy points for websites. Spammers would clearly not register domain names for longer than a year, two at most, but legitimate websites which are in for the long haul would. One comes to the logical conclusion then that Google would see sites with longer registration periods as less likely to be spam sites and thus place them in the sandbox for a shorter period of time. I’d therefore recommend registering new domains for at least 5 years. To prove that I practice was I preach, check out the record expires date on akamarketing.com’s whois entry. The akamarketing.com website was of course not in the sandbox at this time but it does prove that I believe in the whole domain data being used thing.

The next point is one I touched upon in an earlier post about SEO podcasts and it is this; as soon as you know what domain you want for your new site register it, as soon as you register it put something up on the web. Do this regardless of what stage the sites design, development or funding is at, all you basically need is three or four pages of half decent content. These few pages should have no regard for design, layout or aesthetics and should contain only the content itself and then links to the other pages in keyword rich text. A discounted host is fine to use if you don’t want to be paying standard prices for the hosting of a skeleton site while your ‘real’ site is still perhaps four of five months away from completion

After the three or four raw content pages are up head on over to our Google sitemap generator and create an XML sitemap for your site and then submit it to Google sitemaps located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps. Google has of late been very quick to index new sites through their sitemaps service. Keep an eye on your account and as soon as anything is returned for a site:www.yourdomain.com search the countdown to when you will ‘leave’ the sandbox has begun. This means that when you finish your ‘real’ site (complete with full design, development and proper content) a couple of months of your ‘parole period’ in the sandbox will have elasped, that can’t be bad.

A final method which should help you minimize your time in the sandbox is to get links for your site. The difficulty here of course is that your ’site’ is not really a site yet, it’s only a couple of plain pages put up so Google had at least something to spider and because of this people will not want to exchange links with your site and directories like dmoz will certainly not want to give you one of their precious listings either. A solution to this then in my opinion to post often on some popular webmaster forums such as www.sitepoint.com and forums.digitalpoint.com making sure to leave your keyword rich signature which points to your domain in every post. This is a slow but steady way of building up links and should help (you might learn a lot along the way too). Of course if you happen to already own a network of established sites it is a good idea to link into the new domain as soon as the ’skeleton’ version is up, avoid what’s known as excessive crosslinking though and keep it as natural looking as possible.

In closing then a couple of things I recommend to do before your website is ready which should shrink your time in the sandbox are; registering domain names for longer periods, putting your domain live with very very basic content and submitting a Google sitemap for it (pretty much as soon as you register it) even if it’s not finished (any content at all will do at this stage really, just give the Googlebot something to eat) and when you get a break from designing and developing your new site participate in some busy forums which allow signatures. Adding content to your site and getting incoming links are of course still very useful when your ‘real’ site is launched and is in the sandbox because when the dreaded filter finally lifts these type of things will allow you to have the best possible chance of ranking well for your keywords and keyphrases. Anyhow that’s it for another day, I’d appreciate your comments and if you disagree with me, don’t just tell yourself, tell me.

Although blogging seems to be the way of things these days, other new sources of information such as podcasts must not be overlooked. Podcasts are basically radio type broadcasts which can be downloaded and listened to whenever someone wants as opposed standard broadcasts which must be tuned into to when they are on, with standard broadcasts if you miss the exact timeslot you miss out.

Don’t let the name podcast mislead you into thinking they can only be played on Apple’s Ipod. They are in fact usually just plain MP3 files which can be played on PCs, Macs and of course all kinds of MP3 players. I’m not sure why these type of files ended up being called ‘podcasts’ but presumably it was to do with the popularity of Ipods at the time. Wikipedia’s podcasting page has more information for those that are interested.

Many useful search engine optimisation podcasts are available for download over the Internet. A good place to start looking for podcasts is Yahoo Podcasts, for this post though I have picked out four podcasts which I think are quite helpful.

The first two podcasts are published by Joe Balestrino, the self proclaimed Mr-SEO. The first of the two broadcasts covers how to avoid the sandbox or indeed minimise the amount of time spent it it and is about 22 minutes in duration (although the sandbox talk only lasts for about 14/15 minutes). I like how Joe Balestrino suggests that pretty much as soon as you get your domain name throw it up there on the web, with say even just three or four pages of raw content with no regard for design, layout or aesthetics. The point being that when you have finished your design/development and launch your site for ‘real’ you will spend less time in the sandbox. It is located at Mr SEO, how to avoid the sandbox.

The second podcast from Joe Balestrino located at Mr SEO, listener questions lasts over 45 minutes in duration. In it Joe takes listener questions which cover issues such as linkbaiting, domain registration, articles as duplicate content and more. Good stuff from Joe, not so sure about the very cheesy intro to his podcasts though, oh well nobody is perfect.

The third and fourth podcasts of interest include interviews with none other than Matt Cutts. Cutts is the guy that works in Google and is the person many of us webmasters turn to for the latest ‘inside scope’ on the Google algorithm.

The third podcast is as mentioned above an Interview with Google engineer Matt Cutts. It’s about a year old, but don’t let that put you off as there is some pretty good information to hear which is helpful to both the newbie and experienced search engine optimizer. Matt talks about how the net judges your content, why targeting small phrases initially is the way to go, keyphrase density and some other issues too. It is located at Matt Cutts Interview #1 and lasts just over 13 minutes.

The fourth podcast is another and later interview with Matt Cutts, where he again talks about a varierty of issues. Matt talks about duplicate content, the Google sandbox, hiring SEO companies and a couple of other things. This podcast is almost 24 minutes long and is located at Matt Cutts Interview #2.

Hopefully you find the podcasts interesting and helpful. I personally think it’s a nice change to be able sit back and listen to all the information rather than constantly be reading through all the search engine forums and blogs out there. If you would like to save a podcast rather than listen to the streaming version be sure to right click on the podcast link and click ‘Save Target As’. Saving the podcasts one by one has the advantage of allowing you to a) listen to them offline and b) to put them onto your portable MP3 player so you can listen to them pretty much anywhere.