Search Engine Optimisation Advice

There are many ways to generate links to your website, some better than others. It is important to say straight away that not just any links will not do when link building, you only want to attract and build links from reputable websites with some kind of tie to your own site, e.g. they offer the same types of products, services or information.

So now we know what types of websites we want to get links from, how do we get them?

1 – Just Ask

First things first just ask the owner or webmaster of the site that you would like to have a link from. You would be surprised by the number of website owners who are willing to give a link for free or in exchange for a reciprocal link back to their own site. If you don’t ask you will never get!

2 – Pay

Target a number of websites you feel are very valuable to your business and be willing to pay to have a link on them. The website might be a valuable one if it has a high page rank or is a site frequented by your key demographic. If you don’t have a budget available then try to offer your services as payment for the link.

3 – Blog

Blogging is a great way to introduce new links to your website. Webmasters are often looking for interesting and useful articles to use on their own websites or use as a reference for their own discussions. By creating good quality articles you will be linked to as a good information resource, over time 1 article can be responsible for dozens of incoming links.

4 – Current Customers

Don’t overlook your current customer base for generating links. You may have already performed a service for a customer who has a website that you could automatically get a link for free. You may also have provided a client with a testimonial that they are using on their own site that is not currently linking back to you.

5 – Social Internet

Get on to web forums and help provide information to people or solve their problems. Being an active forum member means that your replies can be viewed by hundreds of people. By adding a signature to your user profile with your web address on means that your link will be present on dozens on web pages as well as being viewed by a new audience.

Loud SEO are pleased to announce that Giftmaster have recently established themselves as one of the major 1^st page Google companies for Irish Gifts and Presents.

Giftmaster approached seo company Loud SEO looking to increase their online visibility to customers and to get ranked on the 1^st page of Google for their key products. Having been an online business since 2006 Giftmaster had already gained a great reputation for quality of products and speed of service but was not getting the traffic they knew they could get from the 1^st page of Google.

Working with Loud SEO, Giftmaster took a step back and re-analysed what their priorities were for keywords and what would drive profitable business to their online store. Through keyword research they selected a range of keywords that were highly profitable and very well targeted to their products on offer.

Next Loud SEO performed a range of website optimisation changes to the website code and content, making it fully optimised and focused. With these changes Giftmaster were able to increase their existing search engine rankings and obtain a solid 1^st page presence on Google.

Giftmaster plans for the future are to continue with the search engine optimisation campaign for a whole new range of keywords which will help them expand and grow their business.

Giftmaster have also embarked on email marketing campaigns using HTML emails. These were optimised by Loud SEO and tracked using specially designed links for tracking in Google Analytics. This has given Giftmaster a great feel for their ROI on certain product lines and campaigns.

Giftmaster have 2 more branches of their online business.

Yankee.ie and Casinoshop.ie are both very successful online stores, specialising in the sale of yankee candles and poker chips, poker tables and other poker accessories.

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.

A business man asked me this morning “How can I find out what Google’s secret Authority websites are and how can I get links from them to my website?”.  When I asked him what he would do with such a list if he could get his hands on it, I quickly received the response I was expecting “I would contact all of them and try and get as many links as possible back to my site”.

I spent the next half an hour educating my new friend along the following lines…

It is more important to think about what would be regarded as an “Authority” site in relation to your business rather than what does Google regard as an “Authority” site.

For example Google may think that the Barney the dinosaur website is a great website and is one of it’s secret “Authority” websites. Knowing this does this mean you should get a link by any means from this website? Many people would say yes, personally unless your business is related to children’s entertainment my answer would be no.

There are 2 main reasons for this.

1) How likely is it that someone looking at the Barney website is going to be interested in your products and services if they click the link and come to your website? Link building should be about bringing in quality traffic no just increasing your rankings.

2) In my experience Google looks for patterns and themes. If your website is linked from 100 websites, all from different business sectors with no common theme how is Google meant to know what you are all about as a website? Having good anchor text can help but it would be much better to be linked from 50 websites that are related to your business in some way, giving Google a better understanding on what you are all about.

I would look to get some good links from PR 3 or 4 websites that are in your industry rather than chasing the big PR 6 and 7’s that have nothing to do with your sector.

How do you know if your website is a success in the eyes of Google and the other main search engines and do you have the tools to tell you why?

Is traffic the one and only metric that determines whether your website is performing well? The question really is what type of traffic will make your website a success.

Many part time (and some full time!) SEO’s believe the art to search engine optimisation is to get links from any source possible to build up the traffic the website receives. Links are very important for a websites traffic and page rank but generating links from all types of websites diminishes the quality and can sometimes generate penalties from Google for linking to tasteless or black listed websites or servers.

As with most things SEO quality should always come before quantity. By sourcing the right types of websites, blogs and web directories you can build you business online profile correctly, creating a focused, on topic theme for Google to take notice of.

Before delving into the world of link building you need to first work out what keywords these websites & directories should be linking to you with through the anchor text of the hyperlink – this requires keyword research.

The key to keyword research is to gain a list of keywords that have:

• A sufficient amount of traffic
• Are specific and not ambiguous
• Least amount of competition as possible

By generating a strong keyword list you can then use this as the foundation of all your search engine optimisation efforts. You can adapt your websites internal linking structure, generate new content specifically based on keyword themes, optimise link building activities by utilising keywords in the anchor text amongst many other uses.

It is to be noted that keywords with time can become more popular or lose popularity, with this in mind you should continue to monitor the traffic and competition generated by existing keywords and keep a look out for the new up and coming keywords.

Many people do not realise that purchasing a domain is no different to purchasing something else important like a car. The majority of people would not hand over their hard earned money for a car without at least checking whether the car has been in any accidents and checking the service history.

The reason behind this is that it gives you a sense that the car we are buying is exactly what we think it is. So why should buying a domain be any different? After all your domain is part of your reputation as a business, if the domain is already known for something negative by general consumers or by the search engines then you are already purchasing a bad reputation in the online world – which can easily extend into the offline world if you have a bricks and mortar business.

An important step for anyone thinking about purchasing a domain is to do some research into its past using the waybackwhenmachine. The waybackwhenmachine is an internet archive of website caches dating back to 1996, by going to http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and searching for the domain you are interested in, you can see whether the domain was once used for anything suspect e.g. the adult industry or gambling content etc. If you find that the domain was once used for such a reason then it is highly recommended that you look for an alternative domain as Google and the other search engines will have a historical record that this domain was once used for something that is not in their eyes seen to be positive and could therefore be on a black list.

Domains play a big part in search engine optimisation as they are in an ideal world the first indicator of what the website content is going to be about. This article aims to help people understand the basics of what to look for in a domain to allow any search engine optimisation to be functioning at its best.

Search engine optimisation should always be in the back of your mind when looking to purchase a new domain name. The structure and content of the domain name can give your site an edge if you select wisely.

For this example we shall pretend that we have setup a new business called Smith & Brothers Ltd who sell solar panels.

Step 1 Content:

The content of the domain name can play a big part in brand/product recognition as well as improving ranking potential for certain keywords.

Where most business make the mistake is to obtain the domain name of their business, in this case something like www.smithandbrothers.co.uk and use this as their primary domain for the website. There is no harm in obtaining this type of domain name to protect your brand identity but it shows no use in product recognition and gives no benefit to search engine optimisation.

It would be much more useful to look for a domain containing the words “solar panels” e.g. www.solarpanels.co.uk. This domain would tell both users and search engines what your site is about without even having to visit which should result in a higher organic click through rate and a boost when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Step 2 Structure:

In our example the domain www.solarpanels.co.uk may have already been registered and in use which means that we have to get creative to get the keywords that are important into the domain name. This would leave us with options of names like:

www.smithssolarpanels.co.uk / www.smiths_solar_panels.co.uk / www.smiths-solar-panels.co.uk

All three options above incorporate the keywords we want in the domain name with the added bonus of having some of the business name branding as well, however each version has a very distinct style, two of which are not ideal for seo.

The 1^st version is not in an ideal format for users and search engines alike. With this particular example you would expect a reasonable percentage of users to type in the domain name incorrectly due to the presence of two s characters next to each other, some people will try to spell it with just the one. From a search engine point of view the words are all concatenated with no spaces meaning that we are relying on the search engine to be clever enough to separate these 3 words in order to gain the boost of having keywords in the domain name. Although search engines are always getting smarter there is no guarantee that all of them will be able to do this, missing out on potential traffic.

The 2^nd version has split the 3 keywords out by using an underscore. This makes it easier for the user to type and reduces the potential mistakes that could be made but unfortunately the underscore character is not recognized by the search engines as a valid spacing character and is therefore ignored, meaning from a search engine point of view we are left in the same situation as the 1^st version we have already discussed.

The 3^rd version is the optimum version of presenting a complicated domain name of 3 or more keywords. By using the hyphen character as the spacing element it reduces the mistakes made by users and is also recognized by the search engines as a spacing character resulting in a keyword boost.