Tim Gregory » SEO

More SEO for ‘Tim Gregory’ – SEO for Google image search

Tim — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:26:21 +0000

It’s been called ‘the last SEO frontier’ for SEO because it’s frequently ignored, but for those in the know and who take the time to optimize their images for search engines, it can be a rich source of traffic.
And for those who want a high position for their own names (like me), it’s important to get an image or 2 into the top 5 so that you’re more likely to appear on the front page of the Google SERPs. It will take a while before I rank for Tim for a first-name only search, but it’s not impossible to get onto the first page for that either.

So here is a photo of Tim Gregory that has never been placed online before to see if I can get it to rise up through the SERPs for image search.

Let’s see how that ranks for an image search for Tim Gregory. From what I’ve read, the crawlers take a long time to crawl images, so I may have to wait a while for results.

There is a fair amount of advice out there on SEO blogs on optimizing for placement in Google image searches, but much of it is contradictory and almost every list of tips has it’s own unique take on the subject.

I’ve tried to assemble some of the pointers that made the most sense to me, and where there was some agreement between the SEO commentators.

Use a suitable page title and headline
The title and main headline on the page should line up with the image name.
In the case of this blog post, I’ve used Tim Gregory in the title, headline, and image name.

Use Alt and Title tags
Make use of alt and title tags within your img tags. Don’t stuff them with keywords, but use a few relevant words or a short key phrase that describes the image

Post relevant caption text
Place some text describing the image close to the image with the keyword/words you are trying to associate with the image.
Some commentators say that putting the image and caption inside the same div, span or table cell will help the Google bot connect the image and the caption.

Name your image correctly, and choose a suitable file type
Use your keywords delimited by hyphens inside the image name. Keep the total number of words used below 5. Create the filename in the format “word1-word2-word3.png”
Use .png if possible, followed by .jpg and .gif

Link to your images
Link to images with keywords in the anchor text and a suitable title

Anyone else tried ranking for images and have some advice on the subject?

Top 3 positions in Google SERPS for my name “Tim Gregory”

Tim — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:09:27 +0000

I haven’t blogged for ages but decided to take a quick look today to see how my SEO efforts for my name ‘Tim Gregory‘ as a search term was doing, and I’m pleased to see that early efforts have paid off – I’m now occupying the top 3 positions for my name on a Google search.

Not exactly a high-value, hotly contested SEO term, but I hadn’t paid any attention to this in the past and a couple of actors and photographers had kept me out of the top couple of spots.

Be nice to get a couple of pics into the image listings too – anyone know how SEO for image listings works?

The Google Sandbox AKA ‘Ageing Filter’

Tim — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:15:17 +0000

Every day is a schoolday when it comes to the weird world of search engine optimisation.. it seems that in my aggressive haste to climb to the top of the heap of Tim Gregory’s out there on the internet, I’ve been given the equivalent of a Google yellow card.

I decided to start blogging last week, and got started on a WordPress hosted blog. After a couple of days I realised how limited the platform was without being able to install WordPress plugins, and decided to register a vanity domain and start blogging on my own WordPress installation. I registered this domain on the weekend and started blogging right away.

Of course, there were already a couple of posts on my WordPress blog, so I cut them down to synopsis length and linked through to my new blog. I’ve also got a 24.com blog that I don’t really maintain, but it’s useful to put up a couple of links now and again to help the crawlers find new sites you might own. I went over to my 24.com blog and started using it to link in to my new WordPress blog hosted on my own domain.
All good so far, and nothing too ‘black hat’ going on (in my opinion).
By Wednesday this week I was ranking at between position #6 and #11 in a Google search, and at position #1 for my name plus any of the following words – ‘SEO’, ‘agile’, ‘scrum’.

I thought I was doing very well until I checked tonight, and couldn’t find myself listed on the first couple of pages of results in Google for my name. I’m certain that I’m not being blacklisted completely because it’s still possible to find some pages from my site through Google like my ‘About’ page and particular blog posts, but my front page has dissappeared and I no longer show up for the terms were previously ranking me in the #1 position.

Looks like I’ve fallen foul of Google’s ‘ageing filter’, also known as ‘the sandbox’. The very existence of the sandbox is disputed, but the general idea is that when Google comes across a newly registered domain that suddenly starts getting lots of inbound links, it temporarily penalises the site in an effort to combat spammers and overly aggressive SEO efforts.
New domain? – check!
Aggressive linking – check!
Blog getting syndicated to weird corners of the internet? – check!

A bit of internet research turns up the following info:

SEO people started noticing the Sandbox effect around March 2004
Websites launched after this date would not rank well for a few months, in spite of optimisation, good page rank, and good inbound links
Newly launched sites seem to be affected most, but established sites that suddenly get 1000′s of inbound links can also find themselves in the Sandbox
The length of time that sites spend in the sandbox varies from 1 month to 6 months+, with around 3 months being the norm
The time in the sandbox appears to be related to how competitive the particular targetted keywords are – in my case I may be in the clink for a long stretch for the words I’ve chosen
This effect appears to be a Google-only thing, and is not observed on other search engines

So what can be done to mitigate the effects of the Sandbox?

Not a lot it seems, beyond waiting for the Sandbox to time-out naturally.

The advice given is that whilst stuck in the Sandbox, one should keep adding keyword-rich pages to your site and continue to build incoming links.
It seems the best way to avoid the sandbox effect is to ensure that your domain has ‘aged’ before sending too many new links to it. This can be done by purchasing an existing domain for use in new projects, or by launching a preview/temporary site as early as possible with some relevant content in it to start building a few months worth of history on the site before use.
The advantage of continuing to build links while in the Sandbox is that the ‘new link’ penalty Google imposes on fresh incoming links is incurred whilst in the Sandbox and won’t affect the site once it’s released.

I’ve come across a couple of references to the sandbox effect online, like the one at seomoz.org, although some like seoibiza.com claim that the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

Anybody else experienced this or seen it in the wild?

SEO Update #2

Tim — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:28:45 +0000

Google search for my name only ranks this site around 6 – 11th position.
Searches for all these terms return my blog in the #1 position:

tim gregory blog
tim gregory seo
tim gregory scrum
tim gregory agile
tim gregory web

Not bad for my 5th day online with this domain.
Bing doesn’t rank me very highly at all, but from the reading I’ve done around SEO for Bing it places a lot of weight on the age of the domain.
So I’m clearly going to lose Bing mojo with my sparkly new site.

The other interesting thing has been the automated syndication of particular posts – my post on Federated Identity was picked up by planetidentity.org and idmjournal.com and sent some traffic my way. I have no relationship with these sites, so I’m assuming someone either reposted the story or it was picked up by a feed scanner based on content.

Anybody woking on Bing SEO and has some tips to share?

SEO and your personal brand

Tim — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:13:56 +0000

I am currently studying for my MBA through Henley Business School, attached to the University of Reading in the UK.
Right now I’m working through the ‘Strategic Marketing’ module. During the course of our module workshop, Professor David James spoke a bit about ‘Personal Branding’, the process of marketing people and careers as brands.
He got a mixed response from the group… some thought it was a practice bordering on deception. His pitch was that it’s important to present the elements of your professional and personal life that were most important in a consistent, understandable and marketable way.

It struck a chord for me, and I started to look more critically at my own personal brand online.

To date, I’ve done a terrible job… I’ve been online for 14 years, a professional in the Internet and Web Publishing industry for 12 years, and yet a Google search on Tim Gregory turns up:

Tim Gregory the actor on IMDB
Tim J Gregory on Facebook
Tim Gregory, the New Spaces host from Ohio
Tim Gregory ,the Associate Director at the Catholic University of America
Tim Gregory, the amateur photographer from the UK

And so on….
You get the picture – despite the opportunity I’ve had, I’ve not tried to ensure that I own my name online and shape the content associated with it.
An even more alarming case than my own of an individual who failed to actively manage his personal brand comes from RJ van Spaandonk, of the Core Group.

Now the Core Group has recently been under fire for their high prices and their public attacks on parallel imports of Apple products through their ‘stopgrey.co.za’ website. Instead of engaging meaningfully with his customers, RJ van Spaandonk launched a bizarre campaign of Twitter posts that made him look like a raving lunatic.

This campaign backfired horribly – his posts were picked up and reposted throughout Twitter and blogs, and further entrenched his reputation as an arrogant monopolist out of touch with his customers. It seems he thought social media was somehow still a one-to-many medium, and he could actively manage his convoluted campaign without anyone responding to the conversation he had started online before he was finished speaking. You can see his actual Twitter posts preserved at The Mac Blog
The result was predictable… the prolific bloggers and SEO experts that he “sought to engage with on their own territory” simply had to repeat his misguided utterances, and now a Google search for “RJ van Spaandonk” returns his regrettable statements in all their glory.

Google search for RJ van Spaandonk on 5 July 2009

Perhaps his first mistake was assuming that “journalists” were somehow different from “bloggers and twitterers”? RJ, a tip – as I’m sure you’re learning, it’s all the same thing on the internet.

In case I have to spell it out for you, Mr van Spaandonk has lost control of his personal brand online, and he’s going to have a tough time reclaiming it. And instead of showing some humility and seeking to open the conversation with his critics on more positive terms, he chooses to alienate them further, claiming that he “overestimated the wit and sense of humour” of his audience. Poor RJ.
For examples of people doing an excellent job of creating and maintaining their personal brands take a look at Google searches for my colleagues Brendan McNulty and Matthew Buckland. Most of the first page of results for these guys is all about them. Brendan goes as far as buying Google Adwords for his own name, which I imagine costs him very little as I suspect the bidding activity around the search term ‘Brendan McNulty’ is pretty low.

Moving on… So what am I doing about my own poor showing online?

Registered a vanity domain (tim-gregory.com)
Started blogging again. It’s about time I stood by my own thoughts and utterances
Applied some basic SEO techniques, like using dashes in my domain name to show the search engines that those are separate words
Leverage online profiles and social tools – follow Tim Gregory on Twitter, view the Tim Gregory professional profile on LinkedIn and the Facebook profile for Tim Gregory.
Continue to build a strong network of relevant industry professionals through LinkedIn
Start contributing across the ‘blogosphere’, leaving relevant comments against articles for blog posts where I have some industry expertise – most of them allow you to link your own site when you enter your name and email address against a comment. (Can get you some traffic, but not great for SEO because of the ‘nofollow’ command usually given to the search engines in comments)
Set SEO targets – it’s my ambition to knock the actor, host, and amateur photography off the top positions for MY name online
Look for media mentions where possible

If you have any interest in this SEO and personal branding experience, and would like to see whether an outsider can overtake established personal brands in search engine results, please link to my blog using my name, or simple post a link to this article. Feel free to drop comments about your experience maintaining your personal brand online.

If you have a website and would like to help me claim my name, please insert this into your site somewhere:

Tim Gregory Blog

Thanks!

Updated: Marcia Netto sent me a good link – Searcher Behaviour Research Update – “What about the branding aspect? The study found that 36% believe that companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top companies in their field.” Can we can infer from this behaviour that the top-ranked individual for a given name/term is regarded as a leader?