SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a primer

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a primer Wordpress SEO & AI Search (GEO) ExpertI’m starting a series on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to help explain a few key concepts, as well as helping guide you towards the right SEO expert. Ideally me of course, but whoever is telling you they’re an expert really should know how to cover more than the basics.

The number of people I see selling SEO services who really have no idea is appalling. (I’d say shocking, but there are a lot of opportunists out there!)

I’m going to break my series of SEO posts into the following sections:

  1. Code
  2. Site Speed
  3. Social integration
  4. Blogging
  5. Back-links and all other things link oriented

Naturally there is a lot of cross-over between them, but over the course of the series you’ll get a better idea of some key concepts, and some fairly original (but proven) ideas for their implementation.

All of course to get you more quality visitors!

I can make you an awesome, SEO’d personal online brand

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It’s true.

I spent much of last year involved in making personal brands for people to improve their search engine rankings, industry positioning, and overall getting them in more clients and more revenue.

On the back of my 17 years web development/design experience, my decade long history of helping people with their social networking, and months of testing and improving my system, I’ve created a personal branding product that will do wonders for you, your reputation, and of course your income.

Currently it’s only being offered through People Per Hour (PPH), but watch this space–when I’ve got a few more of these under my belt you can expect this package to cost over £700.

Right now it’s just £167!

Saving a search engine ranking

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A couple of weeks ago I noticed a Google UK search for “Peter Mahoney” no longer had me in fourth place. I wasn’t even on the first page.

Second page, fifth down. This sort of thing is normally an absolute disaster for an SEO expert, the sort of thing that gets them mocked on Twitter and thrown out into the void that exists somewhere between success and scrambling about in the pit of people who pretend they know what they’re talking about, but really don’t.

It’s a very full pit.

But since I’d done it on purpose, I wasn’t too worried.

There is so much information online about search engine optimisation (SEO); what works, what doesn’t, what used to but some people still does, what you get penalised for now that most people haven’t cottoned on to—basically a lot of misinformation that can harm your ranking.

This site is my sandpit. It’s where I play with things to find what works, and what doesn’t.

I can now confirm:

  • You’re best to have you’re tags on a WordPress site set to “nofollow”.
  • Have categories scanned sparingly, and certainly not by all pages.
  • Your Twitter feed is better off in your footer than your sidebar (right/left hand column).

I managed to get my ranking back of course, but not just by undoing all the tests I’d tried—I applied an optimised set of tweaks I’ve been working on, and got back the very next time Google spidered my site.

Let me know if you want me to send you up the rankings to, regardless of where you are right now.

LinkedIn; a kitten free zone.

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I’m the first to admit, I struggled with LinkedIn at first. Not that it’s hard to use or anything, in fact it’s incredibly simple. But I struggled to find its place in my social-media-life.

I’ve had my profile up there for years, and I’d fleshed it out (past jobs, current responsibilities, photo, all the things that seemed important) but I wasn’t interacting with anyone.

All my colleagues and ex-colleagues were on Facebook. LinkedIn let me post messages and share other people’s updates, but so much less then my other social profiles.

Then I started using it regularly; I just made sure I logged in a couple of times a week. Recommended a couple of people. Wrote to someone I could only find on LinkedIn that I hadn’t spoken to for a while.

Before I knew it I became a regular. And the more I used it, the more people found me. Job offers, professional queries, community discussions, they’ve all become an important part of what I do.

I’ve found even people I do communicate with elsewhere interact differently on LinkedIn. We act in the way we want to present ourselves to our workmates, bosses and clients.

The first is to post directly to it. In this case you’re just giving away your content for free to a massive company. They’ll get the SEO authority for that post, not you. And while you might plan to have a link to your site on the bottom of those posts you give them, links coming out of their website are marked as nofollow, which means they don’t get used by Google (or other major search engines) as a way of passing on authority.

Oh and of course some folks repost, posting the content on the social network and their own site. Which simply leads to duplicate content issues.

The second method is to just post a link to the article as it appears on your site. So you’re sharing a link rather than the text. The trouble again is that those links are nofollow, so you won’t get any SEO juice for it.

But social networks are generally quite protective of their own SEO authority, they’re not in the business of passing that on to anyone who posts on their platforms. SO I prefer that second option, just link back to your own site. Forget about social networks for SEO. But it’s still good to interact with people on them, and hopefully those users might follow a link to your own site – then they’re your audience.

One really positive thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn though is it’s easy to accidentally give them your SEO authority. SEO authority is a way of referring to the search engine kudos, or points you might have. There are traditionally two ways most people publish content on LinkedIn.

This is the advantage of LinkedIn. Not only can you build your online community, but you can be sure that your interactions on it are going to be framed in a professional manner, and of a higher quality. To this day I’ve not seen a single photo of a kitten on LinkedIn.

Please don’t be the first.

The five pillars for your online community success

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I work with my clients on what I call the Five Pillars, which all lead to the success of their online community.

People tend to look at most of these elements in a microcosm. “How’s your SEO?”, “Are you making the most of social networking?”.

Seeing these as separate hinders your efforts to build and strengthen your online community, which you need to care about because those are the people who will pay for your products and services.

My five pillars are:

  • Core messages
  • SEO
  • Community
  • Social Networking
  • User experience

There is a great deal of crossover between them, as there should be when you’re looking at the big picture rather than focusing on single points.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to describe each one in brief, and in the interests of pith I’ll also do a tweetinar soon, summing the whole thing up in five tweets. That’s going to be a challenge.

Fortunately, I love a good challenge.

Meta tags and building your online community

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Part of building your online community is without a doubt, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You want your tribe to be well-positioned, and desirable.

It’s just just new members either, but existing ones want to know they’re a part of something exciting, something that ranks highly. Something prestigious.

The “meta tags” in your site’s code are really important here. There’s a science behind it of course, but it’s something you want an expert like myself to help you with. They’re small pieces of code that search engines read to get a better ides of what your site is about, and what keywords it should look for.

However, here’s one of the tricks of the trade you can use yourself. This tool gives you feedback and advice regarding your meta data, helpfully colour coded for people who don’t want to worry about interpreting too much of it.

My favourite metric it returns is to check how relevant your keywords are to your content. This is an absolute must, and something to look at for all your pages.

It’s a bit technical, but the colour coding helps.

Mind you, so can I.

Meta Tag Analyzer.

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