Your Search Engine Optimisation Expert – Sheldon Nesdale

I just passed two Google Adwords exams:

1. Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam
2. Search Advertising Advanced Exam

Look at this cute little certificate Google gave me as my reward!

And here is my profile page at Adwords.Google.com offering my services

Now you know who to talk to if:

• You have an Adwords account but you want to get a better return on investment
• You want to try Adwords for the first time

… me!

Cheers,

Sheldon.

Everyday I get a “link exchange request” email. My clients get them too, and probably so do you. So, should you accept the invitation?

To help you decide, answer these questions:

• Will the link improve your users experience? Will the link add value?
• Are the links relevant to your industry? Or are the links completely random and unrelated? (eg you sell shoes, but the link goes to an life insurance website)

If they are completely random, don’t do it.

Recently, I was curious about what an Indian based SEO company would do as a free trial for one of my clients. All they did was add a link to my clients website to their own websites which already have hundreds of irrelevant links. Not useful. Not valuable. Not effective. Here is one of their websites.

And if these spammy link farm websites are tricking Google at the moment and are actually getting decent rankings themselves, what will Google do when they take a closer look? They’ll delete them from the Google index, that’s what.

Here’s what Matt Cutts from Google has to say on the subject:

Matt Cutts from Google answers this question:

In summary: no.

I just noticed that my list of Google Adwords Promotional Vouchers are about to expire (end of March 2010).

So I better give them away.

To you.

They only work on new Adwords accounts that are less than 2 weeks old.

Just add your details below (include the website you will use it for so I can have a peek).

You may already know that “internal hyperlinks” are good for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

• Definition for “Internal Hyperlinks“: Linking from one webpage on your website to another

When your webpage is quite long, it can be useful to provide “jump-to” links a.k.a. “named anchors”, or “within-page links”, to help users jump down the page to the section that is of interest to them.

This technique is often used on FAQ pages (Frequently Asked Questions), like this.

Today, for the first time, I saw these named anchors appearing in Google’s Search Engine Results for one of my websites:

Interestingly, Jacob Nielson (web usability guru, who I follow very closely), advises not to use “within-page links” because users expect hyperlinks to go to a different webpage and they can be disorientating.

But I think if you put a small heading like “On this page:” above the list, and wrap a border around the list to distinguish it from your content, I think they are usable.

Give it a try.