Posts by Simon Davies

Once a site reaches a certain level, there is certainly a case for not bothering with optimising it any more. Once the sheer weight of links reaches a certain point canonicalization issues, heading tags, keyword density, friendly URLs and Meta tags don’t seem to make much of a difference.

You only really need to look at supersized sites like Amazon that have hundreds of validation errors on each page, canonical issues left, right and centre and some of the worst URL and page duplication issues on the web to see that once you reach a certain size you have enough links and PageRank there is little point spending out on an SEO campaign.

I would, however, argue that input from an SEO would be useful. And while I’m sure there is a reason for having a 260 character URL for the movies category for example, surely they would be so much better with long tail results for individual movies and categories if these were cleaned up a bit.

Matt Cutts recently reviewed Google’s SEO performance in his blog and he was pretty horrified by what he found; 404 links, duplicate content, incorrect or missing Meta descriptions and titles, plus canonical issues.

While I realise this sort of thing is hard to keep on top of as a site grows as fast as Google’s has, but surely the company that pretty much wrote the rule book should be keeping tags on this?

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer

We all know that mobile devices are becoming increasingly important to searches. For some businesses, optimising your site for a mobile device can lead to an increased amount of traffic and sales.

So how can we look at optimising a site for a mobile device?

One thing to note about the more recent mobile devices is that they will automatically localise search results. A search on some mobile devices for “pizza” will return much more localised results than it will on a desktop. The idea behind this is that you are more likely to want a local business on a mobile device.

It’s therefore a great idea that you submit your business to Google Local, and if you have several branches, submit them all. It only takes a few minutes to do and in some cases means you can get your site on the 1^st page for a lot of local searches that would normally have been far too competitive to consider.

It’s also vitally important you keep the details on the local search up to date. If your phone number, address or contact details change, be sure to update them as soon as possible.

Give your site a mobile style sheet or mobile version

Using a mobile style sheet or user agent sniffing, you can style a page differently according to your mobile device. Slimming down the site is a good idea, allowing for the smaller screens and incomplete standards compliance.

But as always, it’s important to block robots from caching the mobile version as a duplicate of the original, and make sure there is a way for users to visit the full version of the site if they so wish.

Simon Davies,
SEO Programmer