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50 Shades Of SEO

Shocked yet thrilled by SEO it became a singular erotic task. For all the trappings involved with Google success for our clients multinational businesses, our own wealth, we find ourselves tormented by Google and consumed by not being controlled.

Chameleon embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair of discovery to find Google secrets and we explore every dark desire.

We scowl with frustration at Google results in the monitor. Damn the results just won’t behave, and damn to Google as this is making us all ill and we feel hate towards Google for subjecting us to this ordeal. We should be spending time with family, yet we find ourselves working all hours in an attempt to improve results and the final keystroke is a submission.

We must not sleep until we have completed certain tasks,  we must not sleep until all factors that make Google happy are completed. Reciting this mantra several times, we attempt, once more, to bring the Google dance under control with the latest SEO factors. We roll our eyes in exasperation and gaze at the latest rankings, up and down with daily shifts that are too big for our clients to understand, and they want to give up. Our only option is to restrain our clients and make them understand Google in hope that we make a presentable effect on the results and educate clients that SEO takes months not days until such a time that we hit page one of Google and grow to the number one spot.

A new day and we must visit a potential new client, our destination is the headquarters of Mr. Grey’s global enterprise. On arrival we are presented with a a huge twenty-story office building, a beautiful curved glass and steel finish which is an architect’s utilitarian fantasy, with the words GREY HOUSE written discreetly in steel over the large darkened glass front doors. It’s a quarter to ten when we arrive, greatly relieved that we are not late due to morning rush hour traffic in Birmingham as we walk into the impressive, enormous—and intimidating glass and steel lobby with white sandstone tile floor.

Sat behind the solid sandstone desk is a very attractive, perfectly groomed, blonde young woman who smiles pleasantly at us as we approach. She is wearing a charcoal suit jacket and white shirt with her hair twisted into immaculate perfect curls.

“Morning, we are here to see Mr. Grey. Ian and Mark from Chameleon Web Services.”

“Ok, let me check.” She arches her eyebrow and flicks her hair as we stand self-consciously before her. Ian is beginning to wish he’d ironed his shirt rather than taking the time available in the morning to eat a bacon and egg sandwich. We have made an effort and worn nice suits and a tie but the shirt is letting us down. For us, this is smart as we are geeks and geeks do not care about fashion. We stand in wait and pretend she doesn’t intimidate us.

“Chameleon is expected. Please sign in here, Ian. You need to take the last elevator on the right, press for the tenth floor.” She smiles kindly at us, amused no doubt, as we sign in.

She hands us a security pass that has “visitor” very clearly stated on the front. We can’t help but smirk. Surely it’s obvious that we are just visiting. We don’t fit in here at all. We inwardly sigh, thanking her and proceed to walk over to the bank of elevators and past the security man who is far more smartly dressed than us in well-cut black suits.

The elevator whisks us at terminal velocity to the tenth floor and the doors slide open. We enter another large lobby all glass and steel with white sandstone tiles. We are confronted by another desk of sandstone and another amazing young blonde woman, this time dressed impeccably in black and white, who rises to greet us.

“You must be Chameleon, could you wait here please?” She points to a black leather seated area.

A door opens and yet another elegant, flawlessly dressed blonde comes out of the large door. What is it with all the immaculate blonde’s?. Taking a deep breath, we stand up.

“Chameleon?” the latest blonde asks.

“Yes,” Ian croaks, and clears his throat. “Yes.” There, that sounded more confident.

“Mr. Grey will see you in a moment. May I take your jacket?”

“Oh, no thank you.” the unironed shirt will not deliver the right impression here.

Moments later the blonde returns “please follow me”, we are led to a huge directors office we dark wood furnishings and leather with a over sized flat screen monitor hanging on the wall, “please be seated, Mr Grey will be with you shortly”.

We take a seat and carmly start up our laptop and review our paperwork portfolio, the door opens and in comes Mr Grey, we shake hands firmly and all sit down.

“Thank you for coming today!, now I want to be top of Google for my keywords, and you have got my competitor in the top spot”. We think quickly and explain we only work with one company in each sector and then get told “I just explained, I want to be top of Google for my keywords”.

Ian stands up “thank you for your time Mr Grey, we are loyal to our clients and we work for a competitor of yours so sorry we cannot do business” and we then leave feeling we have the upper hand.

To be continued…

 

SEO Site Advice from the Experts

If you are wondering what to do with regards to SEO and moving your website forward we recommend watching this video.

Google I/O 2010 - SEO site advice from the experts

This is video is titled “SEO Site Advice from the Experts” and is provided by Matt Cutts, Tiffany Lane, Greg Grothaus and Venessa Fox (former Google employer) and this video was produced in May 2010.

They compare over a 1 hour websites and this explains many thing including why Google do not trust meta keyword tags.

Matt starts buy going over a website with no text and explains how websites need text as text is what Google uses for keywords.

Matts simple advice was “Put Text On Your Page”.

He explains you can use the Adwords Keyword Tool to find what keywords people are using to find things.

He explains how text needs to be added and explains how using comments is a way to get content added without your doing it.

Matt explains about having one site and put a lot of work into this rather than building lots of sites.

He covers many things that are important for everyone who uses Google.

SEO Advice: URL Canonicalisation

Chameleon SEO Advice: URL Canonicalisation

If you have been told you have a canonicalisation problem with your website you will be asking yourself why no one else has told you this and is this really important?

What is a canonicalisation URL error?

Everyone spreading the word about your website will use different variations and as the Google spider goes around the Internet finding all the these links it will be collecting data and storing it into its database. But what is the chosen URL for the website so that Google can collect all this data for one website and add all the value being added to the website all in one place instead of various places.

If you are now confused we will explain, a website without a canonicalisation fix will have 4 landing pages as below:-

Now what we need is to funnel all this into one place. Also technically the web server setup may return different content for the URLs depending on the configuration.

Imagine that Google collects the data for the website as follows:-

If you configure the canonicalisation and then you will have all the value to one place. So the example above would be a total of 3360 inbound links to www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk if this is the chosen domain for Google to use.

We hope all this makes sense so far. If it does you will be wanting to do this change now so how do you do it?

Apache Web Hosting

If you have Apache web hosting you can setup a .htacess file as below:-

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^chameleonwebservices.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.html HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/ [R=301,L]