If your website violates Google’s Webmaster Guidlines, then Google may penalise you with a filter (certain keywords will not rank), or ban the site altogether.
Two ways of checking whether you have been penalised are:

Type in site:www.domainname.com into a Google search – If there are no pages indexed on your site, and the pages are not blocked by Google by robots, JavaScript etc then you may have an issue
Copy some content for your site and search for it in Google – You should always appear first in Google for your content …

You may have spent many years building up a strong reputation for your business, then you notice a negative comment on the internet that has tarnashed your hard fought reputation. It only takes one or two negative comments to detract business from your site and punish your brand.
This negative comment can come in many forms, from a negative review for one of your products, or a blog from a old disgruntled employee, it could even be from your competitors trying to gain the upper hand on the internet and snatch …

When a user requests a page on a website that has been removed most web servers will present a 404 page to the user. The 404 page will indicate to both the users and the search engines that the page no longer exists.

Webmasters should always customise their 404 page so that a user can easily see that they have arrived on a page which does not exist, the page should also include a sitemap so the user can easily navigate around the site. Logging into Google Webmaster tools you …

Google have recently announced that they will now be displaying site hierachy in the search results on certain search queries. For the full information from Google please go follow this link.
Google believes that including the breadcrumb trail in the search results will mean users will understand what section of the site they are entering when they click on the link. The below image shows how the new hierarchy looks in the Google Search results:

I am not sure about this change by Google, if their search index is relevant then there …

As you are probably aware Google has brought YouTube for a substantial amount of money. The reason Google spent so much money on YouTube is they understood how important videos could become in search.
Google even now include videos in their universal search, with many YouTube videos appearing in the natural search results. Videos are popular for users as they are much more interesting to click than the tradition text adds.
But how do you generate the most traffic from your videos? Below I have given a few tips:

Tip 1 Add some …

All SEO’s know that backlinks are are very important way to gain listings in the search engines. A backlink is a kind of vote of confidence in your site. Tailoring your backlinks to ensure they contain the appropriate anchor text will aid your listings, especially if the site that is linking to you is trusted, relevant and has some listings and reputation itself. Getting backlinks however can be a very time consuming and long winded process.
One great simple tip for obtaining natural backlinks is to ask your clients for …

Localised search is becoming a more and more important aspect of your search engine optimisation campaign. Google is even starting to display local results based on your IP address without you including a location. Google does occasionaly get this wrong at the moment on and this is something they are working on. Below is a screenshot for a search for ‘restaurants in Manchester’.

Getting into Google local can be very important for your business, especially if you are a local business or a hotel chain. But how can you get your …

When a users requests a page from a website each page is returned with a header response, these header responses include:

200 – OK
301 – Moved Permanently
302- Temporarily Moved
400 – Bad Request
401 – Unauthorised
403 – Forbidden
404 – Not Found

In SEO the header response is very important, and needs to be checked. A great tool to achieve this is the live HTTP headers plugin for firefox.
Once installed you can check the headers of any web page request by clicking on the following logo and ensuring the captcha tick box is checked.

Some …

I have recently returned from the SEOmoz training seminar in London, it was great to listen to different ideas and tips from fellow SEO professionals. The seminar provided me with lots of different insights as to how other SEO’s analyse websites and their SEO strategies.

Although I am very familiar with keyword research and online strategies for large businesses the seminar provided me with even more tips and tricks from fellow SEO’s. I will endevour to implement some of these ideas into my day to day work to improve our …

As many of you would have already noticed Google has removed PageRank data from their Webmaster Tools service. For a long time now Google have been informing people not to focus too much attention to the PageRank of their site. And it now seems Google have gone one step further by removing information about PageRank in one of their most used programs.
I speak to clients each and very week who often question why they have dropped PR, or why their PR has not increased. I find myself answering the …