Search Engine Optimisation Advice

This week’s quick fire seo tips session covers how to link your website internally to make sure your high page rank pages let the page rank flow through to your deep pages through the use of sitemaps.

That’s right people; sitemaps is a plural which means more than one! You wouldn’t believe the number of new websites that are out there without both an XML and HTML sitemap. If you pick 10 websites at random you are almost guaranteed to find at least 50% of these sites have only one version of the sitemap (believe me I have done this).

Why are Sitemaps Important?

For those who need reminding or educating here is why sitemaps are important. When a new website is launched there will be a point in time when a search engine will visit your website for the very first time. Wherever the search engine spider lands is irrelevant, (homepage, contact page, it doesn’t matter) the spider will move on throughout your site via the html links that are available on that page.

Here is where the problem lies. If you look at your website files as a directory structure, your homepage and other main pages will be the top level folders which are all accessible via the main navigation of the website. Most websites will have a sub navigation of pages which are only accessible through links on a main page, e.g. subcategories list on a category page. There is also a scenario where there maybe another level of pages (sub sub) that are again only accessible from links found on its respective father page.

This means if a spider lands on one of the main category pages it can take a very long time for a spider to eventually work its way down to the lowest level of pages, by caching the page at hand, leaving, revisiting the cached page and moving onto one of the links found on the cached page.

In real terms this means that some pages are never found by search engine spiders and never cached to be available in the search engine results. This could be for many number reasons; the anchor text for the page is very vague and therefore is never followed, the page is buried so deep in a website etc.

This is why the sitemap is so important – it contains all links to your pages in one place for the search engine spiders to find.

HTML Sitemaps

Now you may ask “what happens if the spider never finds my sitemap?” well this is why it has become almost a web and web user standard for the sitemap to be present on the footer of every page. This means that every page your website visits it has the ability to follow your sitemap link. It can also be speculated that search engine spiders will purposefully follow any sitemap link they find as they know that they will find a rich index of the website.

XML Sitemaps

There is also a XML sitemap to talk about. XML sitemaps are made so that they can be submitted to search engines such as Google directly, thus cutting out the middle man, the search spider. This is a very useful tool and should always be checked frequently to make sure that it is up to date and no errors exist (a common problem as most XML sitemaps are auto generated).

To submit your sitemap to Google all you need to do is log into your webmaster tools account and go to the sitemap link, following the instructions on the screen.

As part of the quick fire seo tips series we are going to discuss the importance of images.

Images are one aspect of search engine optimisation that are often missed by web developers and are an integral part of the modern day search engine and search engine user. Here are the key bits of information you need to remember when designing or optimising your website.

Image Name

Search engine spiders are now capable of reading the name you give every single image on your site and by utilising keywords in the image name will not only keep the keyword focus on the page high (which aids search engine optimisation) but engines such as Google will also include these images in their Google images search results – a great way to generate more traffic to your site.

Alternate Text

The Alt text attribute is an important element required to give accessibility to users. Giving images a descriptive alternate text allows people aiming to optimise their website an additional way to introduce secondary keyword text. The goal is not to spam the page with additional, repetitive keywords but instead to give the reader and search engine spiders a way to describe the contents of the picture.

The other important element to the alternate text attribute (which most web developers forget about) is that for a web page to be W3C compliant all images require the alternate text attribute. Even though the alternate tag is required to be present it does not always need to be populated e.g. alt=“”.

For presentational images there is no added benefit from providing a descriptive alternate text, this is only really required for other images. In practical terms this means a background image does not need the alternate tag of “blue shaded background image” where as an image of an Audi A3 would best be suited with an alternate tag of “black Audi A3 turbo diesel”.

In order to make sure your search engine aspirations are not just a flash in the pan, you need to make sure that you put a proper search engine optimisation plan in place.

As already discussed in previous articles the first step for any seo work is keyword research, this is an integral part which will help you map out what goals you will set and how much work will be required to get to your goal.

Generally the next stage requires website seo, onsite work that will improve how search engine friendly the code and content is. In every single website I have ever reviewed, not matter how new or old there has always been work required at this stage. It is very important to go through your website code and content with a fine tooth comb to make sure that all the work you do to get search engine spiders and visitors alike to the site is not in vain.

Once you are happy that the website has the correct format, structure and content the real work begins… building your website’s online profile. This stage of the work is where the long term element comes in. Depending on the keywords you have chosen to optimise for, you will need to generate new inbound links to your website steadily over a long period of time to gain the trust of the search engines and improve those search engine rankings.

The main method of generating new links to your site is through article creation and syndication. This is where most people have difficulty, each article needs to be planned around the keywords and themes you are aiming to rank well for and ideally consist of 300 words plus. Once you have your article written you can choose to publish it first on your own website before syndicating it around the internet on other sites. I personally prefer this method where possible as the page, if written well enough, will begin to rank in its own right and bring in its own traffic.

The time needed to plan, write and syndicate articles on a regular basis each month is quite high, some businesses do not have the time or internal resources to dedicate to link building which is why they look to outsource to companies who provide article creation and link building services. Loud SEO provide such services to a number of clients, some who utilise both elements of the service and some who write their own articles and outsource just the link building process.

Most existing websites of 12 months or more can benefit from a range of quick changes to improve their search engine visibility and crawl ability. Here are my top website seo tips to make a quick impact on your existing rankings.

1) Keyword research – first things first, review the content of your key pages (homepage, main subpages etc) and make sure that your chosen keywords are actually being searched for. If you discover that this is not the case then do some additional research into what is being searched for.

2) XHTML validity – is your XHTML W3C compliant? Make sure all those images have alternate text tags and all other XHTML elements comply with the document type you have specified in your page header.  If not then you are running the risk of the search engines not interpreting your code correctly, errors and broken links will only lead to search engine spiders leaving your site.

3) XHTML Tags – make sure that you are using the correct XHTML tags to highlight the importance of your keywords. Google and the other search engines look at certain HTML elements more favourably.

4) Meta Tags – meta tags play an important part for both search engines and users, the meta title and keywords tags are good guidelines for the search engines to use as to what a page is about, but also the meta title and description tags are very powerful tools that can be used to make your site stand out in the search engine listings and entice the user to click through.

5) Content – make sure that the pages you are targeting to rank well have enough content. As the old adage goes, “Content is King”. You want to aim for at least 300 words per page that make sense to your reader but also carry the theme of the page well so the search engines have no doubt what the page is about. This is not always easy to accomplish but remember, when in doubt write for your audience, not the search engines, after all you want your readers to become customers.

As part of my job I talk daily to people who are either just joining the online revolution or are already a member but commonly have something in common… the distrust or dislike of online advertising and promotion.

The main argument that comes back is “I have all the promotion I need for my business, my sales team tell people daily about our website and we have lots of print media out in the marketplace with our website address on it”.

Now this argument could almost seem like a reasonable statement at first glance, but we need to stop and think about what effect traditional advertising and promotion has when used for online purposes.

Established businesses with large sales teams and large print media advertising budgets certainly do tout their online wares quite well through the papers and magazines as well as other forms. Many times I have seen some interesting looking two door vans whizzing around the streets of Dublin with their brand name and website address splashed across the side of the vehicle. But can I honestly say I can name one website I saw off the side of that van, or even what service they provided? No not really. The main reason is that unless I am looking for a person to trim my hedges or power wash my drains at the time those vans advertising those service drove by then I am more than likely going to be a potential customer that slipped through the net.

New technology such as a website cannot be efficiently utilised with old style advertising and promotion techniques. The evolution of the internet has allowed hundreds of millions of people to search for information, products or services in real time from their homes or offices. This introduces the question, why spend money on an advert in a newspaper which may be in only 5% of people’s homes who are looking for that particular product or service when you can advertise online only to people who are actively searching for that product or service right now?

The power to tailor how and when your advert is shown makes a small budget go a long way online than it would through traditional means, usually with a much higher return on investment.

There will always be a place for traditional forms of advertising for online products and services, especially in niche markets but as long as someone can successfully target a product or service to a customer on a shoe string budget and make a profit there will always be a need for online advertising.