Why does SEO take so long? Technically it doesn’t but the weight passed by link building, article submission doesn’t get passed when it published. One prime example would be one of our current clients plastic cards after 3 months of article writing and link building SERPS are starting to move but links achieved in the first month have still not been accounted for.

When SEO is carried out correctly it always gets better with age, the reason for this is that all links should be permanent obviously some website do get deleted and changed but the majority will stay these over the period of months and years will pass more weight again this is down to doing SEO correctly.

Many tools are available to help locate duplicate content one of the best ways is Google itself.  Copy a string of text from a web page or word document and past it into the search bar. You will see any websites using the same copy.

Other tools are available to help with duplicate content

http://www.copyscape.com/

http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/

http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/

http://www.plagium.com/

You can’t stop all duplicate content because usually it’s beyond us, submitting a press release will often see your article being published on many websites. This doesn’t mean you will get punished just some of it will be filtered from the search engines. When writing content for a website it’s always better to start from scratch this way you can be sure to avoid all duplicate content.

Currently no other service offers such a competitive link intelligence which could possibly hinder SEO for the foreseeable future. Hopefully the functionality offered by Bing Webmasters Tools will be a solution to this problem.

Basically the tool provides information regarding on site performance and gives a comparison to other websites regarding page load speed. We all know how frustrating it can be when you reach a website and it takes over a couple of seconds to load, something which we didn’t mind in back in 1995.

With the average speed of internet connection in the UK being at least 3.6 megabits per second (Mbit/s) is there any excuses?

Below is a taken from our own website, the two high point are related to us changing the overall site and design during this we did have some downtime (but nothing to worry about). You can see that Google says our website loads 56% faster than other websites. With this amount of information being provided by Google, surely it must carry weight in terms of SEO.

What money is lost during server or hosting downtime?

Revenue
When a website is becomes unavailable the revenue stops.

PPC
Depending on the budget utilised on PPC, each visitor sent from the PPC is wasted money.

Loyal Customers
It’s no surprise that your next competitor is just two clicks away, if your competitors dispatch times, response times or general customer service is better. This is lost repeat business.

Repeat Business
You lost the conversation or sale initially could have seen your competitor benefitting from your downtime and gaining a new customer and repeat business.

SEO
Depending if you use an SEO Company to promote your website, you might be wasting your money; every time the website is unavailable this could prove as setbacks on progression in the SERPs.
Below is a simple diagram of natural traffic Vs. time with downtime.

SEO Vs Downtime

Web hosting is the most important unseen part of a website and its success. The best way to think of web hosting is relating it to a physical property or structure. If the foundations of a property or house are poor then expect problems in the future.

• www.example.com/new-page this method uses a dash
• www.example.com/new_page this method uses a underscore

When visiting websites I always find that there is a mixture of methods, Matt Cutts (Google software engineer) finally explains the correct method via his video blog. He talks about how they did look into the possibility of using underscores but at the current time he does advise using dashes.

Within the SEO industry many SEO companies promise XYZ. Just going through my inbox today I received 17 emails from “SEO experts” claiming they could get me to the top spot for any suggest keyword.

My first doubts come from the email addresses all email accounts came from yahoo.com and googlemail.com, one thing for sure if I was ranking No 1# for the keyword “SEO” I wouldn’t be emailing from a free email provider.

As most people in the SEO industry will agree, there is no guarantee whatsoever; SEO depends on many contributing factors.

What happens if the SEO Company I’m with gets it wrong? Depending how wrong they get it, your website could lose its current rankings or removed from the search engines all together. This leads back to the word guarantee if you were removed or penalized could they give back what they have lost?

Following a SEO article I read today, it takes knowledge of html to adjust a website to perform well, also link structure just to name a few important key points. Submitting to 1000’s of free directories doesn’t work anymore. It’s all about building authority within your niche.

Professional SEO Companies are usually quite open with methods and strategies, you might not be familiar or have a great understanding of what they’re doing but it all should have logical sense.

1. High Quality
2. Reputation
3. Trust
4. Authority

Simple ways to achieve high quality?

• Website look creditable?
• Spelling and grammar?
• All pages and links work?
• Fast loading and clear in navigation?

What’s your reputation like online? A few methods to building your reputation online are;

• Display your full address and contact details.
• Over deliver on your products or services.
• Provide testimonials.
• Be personable, taken interest in the customer not just the money.

Building trust do you trust me?

• Invite people to contact you.
• Show your actually real! Include photos of your workplace, yourself or staff.
• Publish a blog it’s a great way to communicate with new and past visitors or customers.
• Don’t spam your own website with adverts.

Become the King of Authority!

• If you have started working on the previous steps, this now contributes to the authority.
• Take part and use social websites such as digg, stumble upon, mixx and delicious.
• Get involved in discussions on other website and be proud of your thoughts and comments.
• Create great content which is worth a link and also reading.

OK so I’ve been a little vague with the information but this is really the basic requirement to be able to rank well with authority, if you get one factor then the others tend to follow.

Some of the most popular page rank prediction tools are down or showing errors.

Server Busy
We are experiencing high load volume right now, please wait a minute and try again. The problem should be resolved momentarily.

Does page rank carry that much weight in terms of SEO?

Personally I don’t think it does, recently we’ve been working on  SEO on a website for a new client the website has a average page rank (3) but the competition who are ranking in the top three are page rank 2 or lower. The competition for the keyword is very high with over 14 million search results. Sure I will be delighted with a increase in page rank but page rank is not everything.

Recently we’ve found a great wordpress plugin which will allow you to rename your page titles without editing the theme or manually adding it in the text editor.

We have recently installed this plugin on this website you can see it in use on our SEO page, the menu says SEO but once inside the page title is SEO Preston.

You can find plugin at the wordpress plugin directory or the authors website Page lists Plus