As promised, behold the redesign of my blog… Oh and can I have some Guest Posts about SEO please?

Now that it’s redesigned all I need to do is to get people to read the dang thing, and start posting more often and life will be good.

New Year’s Resolutions:

• Post more on this blog.
• Stop making promises to myself that I can’t keep.

Amended New Year’s Resolutions:

• Yes try the above, but also ask people if they can help.

Given my recent illness and my determination to keep things moving, I have decided to open up this blog and allow a select few to submit Guest Posts.  I have some pretty strict rules about which sites I am happy to link to and how good the posts have to be.

Guidelines and Rules for submitting your Guest Post

Your SEO Guest Post should:

• Relate to SEO or Web Design.
• Be completely unique no spinning allowed (that includes spinning posts on your own blog).

Reasons why Guest Posts may not be approved:

• If they link thru to sites owned by a direct competitor.
• If they link thru to sites with no inbound links; I want to be sure that you actually care about your site.
• If they link thru to sites that look unprofessional, I want to be sure that your site has a decent reason for existing.
• If your Guest Post is overly self-serving.
• Not every submission is going to be posted, don’t be offended.
• I reserve the right to delete the article from this blog at any time, especially if you break any of the rules, or are found to be doing so after the fact.
• I won’t add Guest Posts that have not been spell checked and please no keyword stuffing.

Things to ask yourself before you submit a Guest Post:

• Is the Guest Post good enough to post on this blog? (chances are if it’s not good enough for your blog it’s not going to be good enough for mine)
• Could your Guest Post be improved, is it all that it can be?
• Do your research, if the Guest Post is inaccurate, makes flimsy conclusions etc.  (This is where my opinion counts) then it won’t be included on this blog.
• Is the Guest Post formatted in the best way?
• Have I made my Guest Post exciting to the soon to be much larger readership?
• Have I read David Leonhardt’s “The Golden Rules of Guest Blogging” or “The Five Unwritten Rules of Guest Posting on Blogs” by Danny Brown?

How to submit your SEO Guest Post:

Fancy submitting a SEO Guest Post then you may want to try the following:

• If you’re nervous perhaps think about reading this blog first and submit a few comments, NB: I operate a dofollow policy but only for those who leave decent comments.
• Send your Guest Posts to info [at] JustinMarch [dot] com with the subject line set as “SEO Guest Post” include your name and contact details.

Having started up this blog only a short while back, I am still in the throes of adding quality content to get the blog up and running properly. I am enjoying the process and writing is fun but… as the floodgates begin to open, the spam starts rolling in…

Obviously this Blog is moderated and I delete blatant spam as soon as it appears, the trouble is I’m getting a lot of comments that are in between being blatant spam and being insightful.

I have therefore been struggling with the nofollow / dofollow question and whether I should apply these tags to the post comments on this Blog.

What are Nofollow / Dofollow tags?

A link with a nofollow tag will appear the same to the general web going public as a link without the tag, but by implementing the nofollow tag the Blog or Forum owner is telling the search engines that this link has not been checked (or is not from a trusted source) and that the link should therefore pass no link juice or power to the resulting page.   At least that is the official line; there is some debate as to how the tag is really being dealt with by Google and the other search engines.  Tests have been run that prove that the Search Engines at least follow the nofollow links to their destination whether the resulting pages receive any link juice is open to debate.

Nofollow tags are implemented as follows:

Visit my <a href=” http://www.justinmarch.com/cheltenham-gloucester-web-design-seo-offer/”>SEO Company Cheltenham</a> site.
Which would look like this: SEO Company Cheltenham

Applying a nofollow tag, the comment would be transformed to:

Visit my <a href=” http://www.justinmarch.com/cheltenham-gloucester-web-design-seo-offer/” rel=”nofollow”> SEO Company Cheltenham</a> site.
Which would look like this: SEO Company Cheltenham

As you can see both of the above links look exactly the same to the casual observer.

NB: There is no dofollow tag; essentially dofollow is simply a “normal” hyperlink (or the absence of the nofollow tag).

Find out more about the background of the nofollow tag here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

See David Leonhardts’ blog post for even more insight into this debate.

So what to do about Nofollow / Dofollow tags on this Blog?

I act to prevent spam as much as possible but am also willing to reward insightful comments with a dofollow link, the trouble is I’m getting a lot of comments that are in between, they aren’t blatant spam and they aren’t quite as insightful as I would like.

The problem  is it’s a trade off, I don’t want to put people off, and I don’t mind a bit of banter as it helps to humanise my Blog, on the other hand I don’t want to necessarily reward banter with a dofollow link.

Option 1:

• delete the spam
• nofollow the in-between comments
• follow the insightful comments

Option 2:

• delete the spam
• delete the in-between comments
• follow the insightful comments

Option 3:

• delete the spam
• follow in-between comments
• follow the insightful comments

Conclusion

For the moment anyway I think that option 1 is the most ideal I will just have to put up with the questions relating to why some comments are assigned nofollow where others are given normal link status.

I look forward to pleanty of insightful comments on this below…

I have been racking my brains trying to think of a truly wiz bang idea for my first official post on this blog; it suddenly occurred that too much thought = no work.  So I settled on coming up with a list of third party resources to educate and inform those who are about to hire an SEO or develop a website.

Google Webmaster Guidelines
The Google Webmaster Guidelines are a good place to start to ascertain Googles’ position on SEO and what to look for when hiring an SEO consultant.

Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide
If you want to obey all of the rules this is an excellent overview of the basics.

The SeoMoz Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation
The SeoMoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO is again an excellent overview of some of the processes used by SEOMoz a well respected company.

High Rankings Forum
Run by the famous Jill Whalen this is a great place to ask your SEO related questions.

Digital Point Forum
Another great Forum although unlike High Rankings I feel that often some of the less likely theories go unchallenged.

So there it is my first official post, more to come over the next couple of days whan I have a chance to think about some meatier topics.