Andy Moore

I know the answer, I’m just taking the time to write it up and document a new challenge in the hope it helps new users who are starting out on the internet and need to grasp some founding SEO logic. It’s really all about relevant content and building links to entice users then search engines to your site.

I’m Andy Moore, therefore the waste of cyberspace that is this website (www.andymoore.info) should be returned on Google when searching for my name, alas not.

The original site I had up here may have been funky and filled with scriptaculous effects but the loading sequence called for the body tag to have a style=”display:none” value rendering the page invisible to robots or anyone browsing without the use of JavaScript.

Anyone visually or physically challenged who was viewing with screen reading software or a text browser before would have had a user experience that left a lot to be desired.

Great visual effects and flashy JavaScript libraries can be dreadful for search engine optimisation. It’s simple really, crowd your page with stuff that’s hard for a robot to understand and you can’t expect your content to be spidered by the engines or included in the search results.

That said Yahoo list me at number 18 but they have some of the planet’s best JavaScript engineers there so if anyone can build a spider that can read it it’s them.

How can I remedy this? Firstly I dropped the old site, it wasn’t important, nor is it today in the grand scheme of things. The old site (pictured above) has been replaced by this, a self-hosted Word Press install. I could have easily taken off the display:none style on the body but it was still hard to update and manage, Word Press simply won for ease of use and extendibility.

The old site was never updated, no fresh content was ever added so it was in no way interesting to the reader or the robots. I mean, hell I was bored with it and there was nothing to compel users to visit the site again.

Setting the display of the body to none did it no favours. Now this site is much simpler and free from complicated JavaScript effects it can be read by spiders and humans, the code for it validates and it is updated, or at least I hope it will be, often.

Validation is one of those things that you should strive towards but in reality doesn’t mean jack to SEO. I’ve known ugly looking sites with broken code pull in 15,000 organic visitors daily.

Writing markup that validates is good practice and easier to maintain, just don’t expect results for that reason alone.

19th January 2007 - the mission is on. How long to get into the Google results, today I’m not in the top 100 on the .com or the .co.uk

Now this site is online, I need links pointing to it so users and robots can find me. It’s the links that are the road signs to tell visitors how to find me. I’m hoping first to pull in real humans and not worry so much about the engines, I need humans here now more than robots.

I’m lucky that I’m pretty active online and can build a little nest of links up quickly, if you’ve not got such an opportunity you need to find sites to link to you, if possible without you having to link back but reciprocal linking still builds links. Email the owners of relevant sites to yours and request a link. It’s easy, boring as hell, tedious and frustrating but simple enough.

I’m a moderator over at Dev Shed WAP Forums and have over five hundred posts there carrying my signature which has now been updated to link back here.

The ringtones and mp3 downloads forum I manage over on my ringtones site has a growing number of posts from me too so I’ve changed signatures there to link here.

I’ve also changed by signature of on the Site Reference Forums where I hang out quite a bit. It’s a nice community and some great interesting things get discussed there.

My girlfriend Caroline plays the bells in the Carillon Tower in Loughborough so I built her a site. I get a mention on there as the developer so that’s another link.

From zero links pointing here to over a thousand links pointing here in no time, only on a limited number of sites but there are now signs pointing here. These links will be read and any users clicking on them will know what they will find.

So what if my linking to where I’m getting links from makes links reciprocated, a link is a link and if it has the right anchor text it holds value.

All these links have my name in them as the words used in the link, I’m called Andy Moore so that’s what my links need to say about me to be most effective.

Example:

Andy Moore links to my personal site and has value.
Me links here too but has none as it’s text isn’t relevant.

If a user can read a link and know what to expect when they click it the same rule will apply for search engine spiders and robots as they journey around the web. If the spiders can read your pages you’re well on your way.

The final tip and this one is as juicy as they come. Use Google Adsense on your website, it’s contextual advertising so Google has to send a spider to read your page. If it doesn’t do that they can’t be contextual in their ad serving. It’s the quickest way to get a digital representative reading your page. It pays in more ways than money alone.

The race is on now. How long to get inside the top 100? How long to do top 10?

I’ll feel a complete tit if six months pass and I’m still not included in results but I know this theory and logic is sound as I’m using it on other sites I work on get top ten listings on very challenging keywords with over 100,000,000 results.

Time will tell but right now I’m going to stick some Adsense on my site.

And here it is: