SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

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

One Peter Mahoney to rule them all: my Google ranking is going through the roof!

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7 days ago, I didn’t rank on Google. I had a look for myself, and gave up on page 12. Anyone else would have given up long before, or at least found a Peter Mahoney they liked the look of more. 🙂

3 days ago, I was at the top of page 3.

Today, I am fourth overall, and the first result for an actual person. This applies to a search for Peter Mahoney in google.co.uk (I’m aiming myself at the UK market).

The top two results are for Linkedin directories, which both feature me in the number two spot, and a phone directory listing.

Peter Mahoney isn’t exactly an unusual name either. The marketing director of Nuance is a fairly well known and written about Peter Mahoney. A Peter Mahoney (regrettably) committed suicide after returning from fighting in Iraq, and a Peter Mahoney in Somerset appeared in court in connection with a murder enquiry. petermahoney.com has been owned for over a decade by the same person. None of these are me.

But in seven-short days, I have gone from not featuring at all, to beating out even Facebook results. It’s the result of a lot of experimentation, research, and 16 years web experience.

I plan to bottle this. And to make it available to you.

Check your search engine rankings, a helpful little tool

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This online tool simply tells you how your site is ranked on Google, Bing and Yahoo! for the keywords you provide.

Why is this worth blogging about? Because it’s free, and the fifth such online tool I found–but the first one that worked.

It doesn’t search terribly far into the search engines, so unless you’re in the top 10 of Google or Bing, or the top 50 of Yahoo!, you won’t get a result. And clearly you need me to help you out. 🙂

via SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS @ Mike’s Marketing Tools.

Read Google’s Webmaster Tools

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Further to yesterday’s post, Google has created a entire online system to help webmasters (and web owners too, it’s important you know this stuff) improve their Search Engine Optimisation SEO).

And they’ve written it in such a way that anyone can understand it, and even if you’re not the right person to implement it (after all, that’s what you have people like me for) at least you can talk about it.

One of the great fallacies about web work is that it’s too hard for a lay person to understand. Sure, it’s technical, and the implementing things is generally pretty complicated, but look to work with web people who can explain things to you in such a way that you can talk back to them.

Look for people who can explain things like Google does. Clearly. Concisely. Understandably.

Google Webmaster Tools

The importance of original content

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This comes straight from Google themselves. It’s so important to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to have quality, human readable (i.e., makes sense to a visitor) content.

There’s a lot to be said for curated content, but of course that requires original input too.

One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.

via Little or no original content – Webmaster Tools Help.

I know a lot of people want to shy away from it, after all, writing isn’t most of our core business, but your users do care about what you have to say. That’s generally why they want to spend money with you after all.

So it’s not just SEO. It’s business. Your business.

What does your website look like to search engines?

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The short answer is “pretty bland”.

While photo recognition, and language techniques are getting more advanced all the time, the raw data most search engines (including Google and Bing) see when they do a first pass on your site is very sparse.

Text will almost always be the most important Search Engine Optimisation feature you have (buy all the link pyramids you want, but if your site doesn’t have key, unique, relevant writing you’re achieving nothing) and using software like Lynx is an excellent way to test it.

Lynx as a browser pre-dates pretty-much every browser you’re likely to have on your computer, and is the browser a lot of search engine spiders use.

You can use it on Linux easily, or save yourself the hassle as use a web based version:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Check to see that the text on your site is readable in it, that your menu structure shows (and works), and that the text it does show makes sense. That might seem odd at first, but  you’d be surprised how many sites do not make sense when viewed in simple text (i.e. they rely too much on graphics to do their talking) and search engines like to read things they can understand; that a human will make sense of easily.

It’s a little SEO tool in what needs to be a big arsenal.

petermahoney.com as it appears in Lynx

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