The focus of my SEO activities of recent months has been two sites, one focused on role-playing games. The other Herge's Tintin and the new film that is being made of his adventures.

The role-playing games site is on the surface a blog about role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of the work on this has gone into building a good relationship with other bloggers through comments and communal activity. This has been successful and generated us a page rank of 3 and a steady supply of traffic from search engines and links. However the real focus of the site is Fantasy Miniatures.

One side of playing tabletop RPGs is the use of pewter miniatures to mark out movement and combat. Collecting and painting these miniatures is a hobby all by itself and there is a large overlap between the world of wargaming miniatures and fantasy miniatures. Targeting miniature related keywords has been harder. There are a large number of suppliers on the web and many have been activate for several years. This has given them a solid base of links and PR that will be hard to shift.

As an SEO side project I have been helping a friend launch his own RPG site. This is not a blog but a site for software that helps players run their game. The first tool is a free monster generator for D&D. This has been a lot simpler SEO project as though there have been lots of generators and tools in the past, none have ever developed a strong position in the search engines. In just a couple of weeks of launch, the site was number one in Google for our primary, each-to-reach target but had also scrapped into the top ten of the our long-term target keywords.

This just shows that SEO is an unpredictable business and rapid gains can be made with planning, a lot work and a bit of luck.

My site about Tintin has done very well in attracting visitors. I was quick off the mark in creating the site after the film was announced, allowing me to grab a good Tintin Movie related domain. (Just a side note, if you are going to create a site about a film, then always include the word 'movie' in your domain name rather than the world 'film' as it is substantially more often used in searches). I've been number one on my initial keywords practically since the site was created and I'm now the authoritative site on the subject.

As well as a steady flow of traffic from the search engines, I have seen large spikes in traffic whenever there is an announcement. When it was revealed that Jamie Bell would be playing Tintin I saw a quadrupling of my traffic for the next couple of days. This gives a taste of what will happen when the film opens.

Blogstorm has a interesting article on how people accidently search for URLs. For example, searching for www.google.com instead of typing the URL into their browser's navigation bar. Its an interesting approach and I'm sure it gets traffic but it is from the Get Rich Quick side of the SEO industry.

Real wealth comes from a firmly established domain built on quality content. Using this trick will get you the occasional click of an advert but it won't get you links, it won't get you a readership and it won't get you a good reputation. This is a technique anyone interested in SEO should know about and choose not to use.

Blogstorm: How I use URL Search to get thousands of visitors

Web design and SEO go hand-in-hand though a good looking design doesn't mean good SEO it at least means that visitors will find your site appealing. Smashing Magazine have done a survey of top blogs to see what sort of design trends can be spotted. It well worth the read for design tips because these sites, with 10000's of visitors every set the style for everyone else.

1.4. Width of the fixed layout?

As we have observed a strong trend toward fixed, pixel-based design layouts, we have decided to take a closer look at these layout and try to detect common attributes of such layouts. In particular, we have considered the width of the fixed layout which usually corresponds to the width of #container or #wrapper. Apparently,

• 9% used ≤ 800px
  (PostSecret, Seth Godin, Google Blog, BeppeGrillo.it),
• 15% used 801 – 900px
  (Neatorama, Kottke, DailyKos, Perezhilton, TUAW, Yanko Design, Scobleizer),
• 20% used 901 – 950px
  (Huffington Post, BoingBoing, TreeHugger, Dooce, Blogoscoped, SearchEngineLand),
• 56% used 951 – 1000px
  (ars technica, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, ProBlogger, A List Apart, TMZ, Wired, GigaOM, Joystiq, Zenhabis, Copyblogger, Consumerist, Slashfilm).

Conclusion: one can identify a clear trend toward wide fixed layouts of the width 951 – 1000px.

A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs

It never ceases to amaze me how many web sites are badly designed, not just for SEO but for usability and graphical impact. Even big, expensive sites make basic errors in commonsense design such as having text overlaid on a graphic making it hard to read. The subject of SEO web site design is very much on my mind as I'm currently working on a new web site, 6d6 Fireball , a role-playing games site. I'm having to deal with all the normal design issues of making a large site site attractive and usable.

On the SEOmoz blog, they have a good article on how good graphical and usability design is as vital for success as designing for SEO:

There are a limited number of variables that search engines can take into account directly, including keyword placement, links and site structure. However, through linking patterns, the engines make a considerable number of assumptions about a given site. Usability and user experience are "second order" influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect, but measurable benefit to a site's external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. This is also called the "no one likes to link to a crummy site" phenomenon.

SEOmoz has a great round-up of tips for doing SEO on an existing web site.

Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO - This allows analytics to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how your work has positively affected their site.

Evaluate the visual design of your client's site - If the site drives people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks terrible, find well designed sites in your client's niche.

Check compatibility between browsers - Visit your clients site using Mozilla Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your client's website renders correctly and won't drive away users.

"What is Google's strategy? To provide their users with the best, most relevant results to their queries.If your business doesn't align with Google's strategy, then Google doesn't want to help you."

From: essons from the Domain Roundtable.

The message is clear. If you want to optimize your web site, learn to create quality content.

One of the basic premises of Friendly Affordable SEO is that unless you have something on your web site worth visiting, any SEO is wasted. I'm not the only one who thinks this.

The bottom line is that you or your company need to become an expert on the topic of your site, and you need to put it out there in some unique fashion that has not been done before (or at least not many times before). There are many schemes used by people who try to avoid this burden.

For example, the term linkbait arose from the notion of developing content for the sole purpose of getting links. My discomfort with the term arises because it was interpreted by many to mean that the content's relationship to the topic matter of the site did not really matter that much. Note: I am NOT saying that everyone means the term that way! But, for example, you could develop an article solely for the purpose of promoting it on Digg, even though you would never otherwise put it on your site.

This may be a viable strategy in the short term, but it will not stand the test of time.

Hello and welcome to my new web site and blog all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is seen by many as a black art, expensive, difficult and only usable by large corporations or evil spammers trying to trick Google. Nothing is further from the truth. SEO is easy to do, it costs nothing (though investing a little in your web site can help) and it benefits anyone with a web site. Its not even about making money. If you have a blog, a fan site or an online support group, you want people to find you. People who are interested in your subject. This is what SEO is all about. Making sure that those people who are searching find what they are looking for.

This is why I created Friendly Affordable SEO. I wanted to create a web site that was free, friendly and gave good advice on SEO so that the hundreds of thousands of people with blogs and web sites can get the visitors they deserve. It is also a big Thank You gift to the internet. In learning SEO I have read hundreds of articles and quizzed experts on forums and not once did I pay anything for that help. I cannot say thank you to the countless people who have help me but I can in turn help others.

So please come in. This blog covers news of SEO and general updates about the site. The nitty, gritty, how-to-do-it advice can be found in this selection of free SEO articles.