MenuThe Art of Search - SEO Blog
17. Please Do NOT Feed The Robots - Thank You
Search businesses send-out crawlers and robots to learn from the Web, to find and feast upon fresh, meaningful, helpful, insightful, lean and nutritious content. Google's mission is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. A core and critical component of that mission is to identify real food and ignore artificial junk food.…
Steve Whiting - 8th December 2023
16. What Is The Best Pole Hedge Trimmer?
The best pole hedge trimmer is, in fact, not a hedge trimmer but a domestic tower. Let's assume you own a website that sells domestic towers - having an understanding how you'll sell many more domestic towers by offering reviews of the best hedge trimmers on your website, is what we know to be The Art of Search.…
Steve Whiting - 1st November 2023
15. Layman's Thinking
A Customer emailed me a question this morning, asking if it was easy to buy a handful of domain names and point them to their website. I answered yes and yes. I also said they should save their hard earned pennies because buying multiple domain names would make as much difference to their business as buying Boris Johnson a round of ice cream.…
Steve Whiting - 16th August 2023
14. It's Only Words
There are just three areas of influence available to a Search Commander effecting change to a website through SEO: content, links and traffic. Change just one of these enough and you'll notice a change in your website's rank. However, these tactics are not weighted evenly and none of the SEO tactics may be regarded as quick and easy wins. This post surfaces the experience of a Customer whose website design vision didn't include too many words.…
Steve Whiting - 12th May 2020
13. You Are Not Alone
A key message of The Art of Search is to listen to the voice of the Customer. I want to share with you the text of some DMs between me and a person who tweeted with request for a little SEO help. The framing of their question was a joy to read because their SEO questions succinctly mirrored the mental process that I routinely hear people (maybe you too?) put themselves through as they start-out getting to grips with SEO. So, in this blog, I take a sip of my own medicine and listen carefully to the voice inside their head.…
Steve Whiting - 3rd April 2020
12. You May Be On Lockdown But Your Website Isn't
Before the time of The Buddha, before what we now know as the Bible or the Quran were written or translated - one man laid down the definitive text upon how to wage warfare. That advice has now been translated from the theatre of war to the theatre of business and, during this time of lockdown, you need to know that every business owns a fighter. You need to know that you can push your website to go where you cannot - beyond the front door, beyond the frontline of your business and out into the minds of your Customers.…
Steve Whiting - 31st March 2020
11. This Is What It's All About
Imagine, for just one minute, that you are Googlebot. Your task is to crawl a webpage, to understand what it is all about, to appraise it, to see how well it is connected and, ultimately, to rank it against others. Think you can do it? Great! Got for it!…
Steve Whiting - 8th July 2019
10. Hey! Music Lover
People think they can fox Google and engineer a better search engine ranking by doing something as simple as making a change to their home page. Don't be so silly. Do you really think that a company (Google) that's making cars driverless is so dumb that it is incapable of telling a spectacular website from a lame one? Let me show you what artificial intelligence (AI) looks like as it's presently smashing-through your everyday life.…
Steve Whiting - 13th December 2018
9. Passive Aggressive
Is your website an effective online digital salesperson for your business? Most businesses would probably argue that theirs is, yet all it would take is a quick look at the website's conversion rate to either confirm or reject this notion.…
Steve Whiting - 1st May 2018
8. The Cupertino Shuffle
Listening to a six year old podcast this morning I was thrilled to learn an anecdote that proves the validity of a thought experiment I wrote about in The Art of Search.…
Steve Whiting - 28th July 2017
7. Love Thy Neighbour
It's possible to think of a fellow human as neighbour even if they do not live in a house that's adjacent to yours or in the same street. The same thinking is also applicable to Customers.…
Steve Whiting - 18th January 2017
6. Toots, Roots & Boots - Part One
It's Friday night. I jumped into my car to drive home this evening. I started the engine then said: 'Hey Siri, play me something funky'; what I heard was a story about search engine optimisation.…
Steve Whiting - 14th January 2017
5. The Queen, Google, SEO & Your Website
Today, her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II reaches 90 years of age and something very special just happened to her website. Discover what 'the website search' is and how Queen Elizabeth II can help you to teach CEOs about SEO and strategy.…
Steve Whiting - 21st April 2016
4. The Link Is Mightier Than The Title
Traditional SEO wisdom has it that the title tag of an HTML page is of paramount importance and I'm not about to disagree. However, a recent observation of the Google search engine results page illustrates why the title tag may not be as important as the anchor text inside the common or garden HTML hyperlink.…
Steve Whiting - 16th March 2016
3. The 3 Cardinal Sins of SEO
The Art of Search is a new and powerfully illustrated book about SEO and the management strategy behind a #1 rank. The far-sighted book presents a heavyweight SEO management strategy based upon ancient wisdom, from which can be distilled the 3 cardinal sins of SEO.…
Steve Whiting - 9th February 2016
2. Keywords and Sausage Rolls
So - you think keywords are only about Search and vice versa? Sorry to burst your bubble but a visit to a Luton street bar last week illustrated just how keywords are powerful linguistic shortcuts to cognitive thought.…
Steve Whiting - 1st February 2016
1. Round Table Discussion
Today, at the Digital Citizen Summit in Bournemouth, delegates will tackle the topic of communicating with the public through social media. Maybe social media's not the answer - maybe institutions just need a killer website?…
Steve Whiting - 23rd January 2016