My first job in search engine optimisation was in 1997. So much has changed - SEO is more nuanced than ever before, with every character, every comma having an effect.
In addition to writing about SEO and speaking at various conferences, I enjoy actioning it myself too. There's nothing quite like sending a client a graph showing their organic traffic skyrocketing - without them having to increase their monthly spend.
I’ve been doing search engine optimisation for 21 years now.
That means my SEO experience is old enough to legally drink through the USA, although it’s been able to drink in the UK and NZ for quite some time.
Cheers!
Heading tags are often really poorly used on the web. It’s easy to think of them as an easy way to set your font size, but you’d be making a mistake if you did.
I’ve posted a blog to Digital Kiwis about heading tags and SEO, have a read.
The tl;dr version is really simple. First and foremost heading tags should be approached with SEO in mind, but there’s nothing wrong with playing around with your font styles to make sure your key text is used as headings – even if it’s not your largest text.
What about off-site search engine optimisation?
I don’t do off-site SEO at all. Put simply, off-site SEO essentially boils down to making backlinks – they might be directory listings, or citations – in practice it’s all pretty much the same thing.
Links are helpful if they’re real – which means legitimate – someone values your post or site enough to link to it. Manipulating your link profile yourself is definitely against Google’s rules – and they’re very skilled at finding out and penalising people for the practice.
I blog about this quite regularly – you can peruse some of those posts if you’d like more info:
https://petermahoney.com/?s=backlinks
My own approach to SEO is completely Google friendly, I believe very strongly that the proper thing to do is to focus on their ethos, and fulfill all their recommendations and guidelines.
And I’m very pleased to say the data backs me up on that too.
I do have suggestions for leveraging your real-world contacts to get legitimate links – but it’s very different to just using some automated tool to create link spam.
(PS, if anyone gets the joke behind this post’s image, we should probably hang out.)
I’ve done SEO for companies around the world, and there’s one little oddity of search here in New Zealand that I’ve just not found anywhere else.
Basically, if you don’t add ‘nz’ to the end of your searches you’re likely to get a string of results from abroad, in particular Australia. This seems to happen even for really location specific searches, like hardware stores and that kind of thing.
Living in New Zealand you probably don’t even notice it because you’ve never known any different, and it’s entirely possible you already add ‘nz’ to your searches without even thinking about it. But in every other country I’ve optimised for, results are always much more local without having to add a country name.
I can’t find a good technical reason for Google to behave this way. I can’t even think of one – we know their concept of ‘location’ includes a country field, and they definitely know we’re a country.
I’ve seen their map and we’re on it.
But nonetheless, this is something to take into account with your SEO for NZ sites. Be aware that not only do you need to do all the location work imaginable, but bear in mind many searchers already assume your site will be optimised for ‘nz’ as a key term.
By 15 hours.
This image is the search engine results page for a post I made on our Digital Kiwis site, 5 minutes after I posted it. (Yes, I manage to get new or updated content live on search engines almost immediately after they’re published. Behold my SEO!)
It’s the results from a search performed in New Zealand, on google.co.nz, for an NZ hosted website about a local company.
Yet it says it was posted 15 hours previously! I’ve mentioned this at conferences before, but Google really struggles with New Zealand as a nation (for so many searches if you don’t add ‘nz’ at the end of them you’ll see Australian results) but this seems like it’s just plain lazy.