I want to take this opportunity to say I recently attended a social event after one of the days at SES London 2008 – minding my own business chatting away to fellow SEO enthusiasts I noticed a guy (Mr X) standing rather close to me at the bar – in a patronizing tone he “wanted to get to the bar“. No please, no thank you just annoyance that I was slowing down his drinking ability.

Through the night I saw this guy sucking up to the Google and MSN representatives (that looked utterly bored with Mr X) as he proceeded to tell them how to do their jobs and how great he was. One of my friends proceeded to tell me that Mr X was infact head of SEO for a well known Online Casino company. This information immediately clicked in to place as to why this guy had been swanning around for the last 3 hours believing he was only one step away from the big man himself.

Back to my point, I was by no means stalking Mr X – please bare this in mind! Outside I heard him boasting to some other disinterested people how he only used “Blackhat all the way” to get the “best results“. I did at that point want to “whitehat “his ass fairly sharpish.

Instead I found out what the exact URL was and started my analysis of the site (the next day). The site had keyword stuffing all over the place, their backlinks were so obviously all paid for, the anchor text did not change at all – 100% one phrase and where was this douche ranking? Well 2nd of course (grrr), as many of us bloggers and site owners keep receiving penalties from Google for the occasional “suspicious” link or two – sites that must make hundreds of millions of pounds can get away with it by the looks of it (old news I know)!

I’m not blaming Google but when the evidence against a site looks so obvious, why doesn’t Google do something about it?

Anyway, not to be outdone by Mr X, his site has been reported for every Blackhat evidence I could find – bit “snitchy” I know but all this could have been avoided by saying one word – “please”. Google get to work PLEASE!

Being asked to take part in Hobo Web’s discussion based around keyword density got me thinking about this blog post idea. As I mentioned in the discussion I don’t believe in keyword density, too many times I have seen competitors with barely any visible on their pages. So what is important with keywords?

Well some of the basic seo rules apply here and just by following them, usually gives you the edge over a competitor that doesn’t.

I performed a search for “Link building methods” on Google UK and the following results were displayed:

As you can see my page is top, for the following these three rules:

1. Include the important keywords at the beginning of your page title
2. Include the keyword in the first line of the body, or in your page description
3. Include the keyword in your URL

I did the search again for my Yicrosoft Directory contest entry:

My Entry:

I have used this method for a while now and although it’s a common understanding to include the keyword in the URL, I see bad keyword usage in the title tags and in the page copy a lot of the time. Making the search engines understand that your page is relevant to the search query is key!

I have been looking closely at the relation between new blog posts along side my primary targeted keywords, even if they are not directly related. It’s safe to say that if you right about a subject i.e. “Page Rank” then for a week or two you might see some temporary search engine position increase for that keyword.

What I have seen over the last few weeks is that if you write a popular blog piece then non direct related keyword phrases can also achieve a boost. On the 4th of February I wrote a successful piece of link bait – 25 websites all SEO’s should know. I received plenty of additional backlinks and got around 8k unique visitors as a result.

The week that followed I naturally saw an increase of organic traffic as a result of the post, but surprisingly I found myself at position 6 on Google for the phrase “SEM blog”. Since that discovery the position has since moved down a bit (to the second or third page). In that time frame I received around 600 unique visitors for that term alone. That phrase is not mentioned at all in the original post and the backlinks I received did not use the phrase as an anchor – so why an increase in a keyword phrase that has not been targeted?

As well as an increase in backlinks and blog posts the post was heavily visible on social networks, bookmarking sites, which lead to an overall increase in my blog traffic. By writing a post on a related (although not directly associated) topic can lead to your blog/website achieving an overall increase in search positions. My total organic traffic increased by around 30% for a period of 2 weeks.

To me this just adds to my argument that websites in 2008 should use the blog platform more than ever to help with organic listings.