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.

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.

Google has announced changes to its customised search function, affecting all users.

Previously users who were signed into their Google accounts and had their web history enabled would have had their search results customised, however now all users will find that their web history will affect the search results they get, with their favourite websites ranking higher in the search results from now on.

Google say the reason for this change is to provide a better service to its users and will also be able to precisely target ads further by building a profile based on the user’s web activity.

As search results now will start to vary from user to user, it poses the question whether this will make life harder for search engine optimisation specialists to get the results required.

The only change i can foresee with these changes is that the focus needs to put on the importance of converting impressions into clicks even more, in order to make your website one of the few visited websites in the search results (thus reinforcing the websites ranking). This can mainly be done by making sure your meta description is made as enticing to click on as possible.

The one challenge the new changes will pose will be the ability to accurately analyse a websites ranking as this data will change from user to user. The good news is that this functionality can be turned off via the opt-out option in your Google settings, so double check those rankings your SEO guy shows you – he might just be bending the rules!

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.