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 …

A few months ago search engines such as Yahoo and Google announced a new method of reducing internal duplicate content called the canonical tag. The canonical tag can be placed in the head section of any web page and is used to inform the search engine which page is the ‘main page’.
An example of the canonical tag would be:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.crazyaboutseo.co.uk/" />

Adding this tag onto any internal copies of my home page would inform Google of the main location of my home page, reducing internal duplicate content. The canonical …

Like many other webmasters you may well have a website which has URLs which are not search engine friendly. You might be looking into changing your URLs to contain related keywords to your services, but are unsure how this might affect the long tail performance of your site.
Firstly it is important to remember that Google simply crawls your URLs and places them in their index, as long as they are not blocked in the robots.txt file or noindexed. Changing all your URLs will actually double your pages in Google’s …

Imagine you have an affiliate website, you have added Google Analytics so you now know where your traffic is coming from. This information is great and will help you target your marketing campaigns whether that be SEO or PPC to the areas which are generating leads for your site.
There is however one problem, how do you track outgoing links? For an affilate website this is very important. You need to know where your traffic is going to after it arrives on your site. If you started tracking outgoing links you …

Wordpress is a great tool for SEO, it is open source and has literally thousands of plugins. This makes it easy to optimise your blog posts even if you are not a PHP programmer. With the correct plugins installed all your posts will be fully optimised and help attract long tail listings to your site.
On a few occasions I have come accross a situation where I needed to install a Wordpress blog installation to an ecommerce website. The main problem here is integrating the two systems. It is often difficult …

The other day I was performing a local search query and noticed a bad review had appeared in Google Maps. The review was not legitimate so I therefore went about trying to remove the bad review from the local listing as it could be potentially damaging for the business.
Firstly the review was from an external site and not from a Google maps user. Having researched this topic it appears that Google can associate a third party review that contains the listing of the site, and then place this into Google …