Archive for April, 2007
published by Gary in SEO
An effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign is like running a bricks-n-mortar promotional campaign for your business. Things happen one step at a time and more often than not, one step cannot supercede the other.
The search engines take their own time
Once you’ve uploaded your website or if you’ve made some changes to your existing web pages they will not show in the search engines unless the search engines have crawled and then indexed the new/updated pages. Crawling can happen any day — even the next hour — but indexing takes lots of time. You need lots of patience during the SEO testing phase because after every change you’ll have to wait for the search engines’ response.
Relevant content needs to be generated continuously
The more relevant content you have, the more convinced the search engines are about your expertise. And if you do it for a prolonged period, it conveys that you are very active on this subject and always finding out new things to write about. You can either spend lots of money leasing content or getting it written by expert writers to add scores of pages in a day, or you can go the slower way of adding one or two pages everyday. The better way is, add few pages, everyday, for a long time, at regular intervals.
Link building takes time
It’s not that from day one hundreds of webmasters are going to put your links on their websites (they might, if you are a celebrity or a notoriety). This takes lots of time and effort. First of all, as already mentioned above, you need to have lots of relevant content because only high-value content makes people link to you. Then you need to create awareness. This can initially involve buying link spaces on other websites or using Google Ads. But the best option is to continuously interact with people on various online forums and blogs. Create the right buzz and encourage people to come to your website on their own. And of course this cannot happen overnight.
Continuous optimisation
You need to continuously keep track of your various pages appearing in the search results. The moment they start moving away from the first page it’s time for you to re-double your efforts. This may involves quickly adding more pages or changing the content of the existing pages. And this can go on and on.
Search engine optimisation is a continuous process because even if you have managed to reach the first page, you have to make a lot of effort to remain there because of your competition. Your competitors want to be at your place or ahead of you. And there are scores of such competitors on the Internet. So patience, plus strategic hard work is the name of the game when it comes to SEO.
Popularity: 12% [?]
published by Gary in Social Media
The Internet these days is primarily driven by two forces: business and social media. Since your website being a commercial website doesn’t create much impact on your SEO efforts (it can, though), in this post I’m going to focus on the social media. Social media optimisation, as the term goes, is a great way of getting highly targeted traffic to your website. But what exactly is social media optimisation?
The web is currently brimming with social media websites such as Digg, Netscape, MySpace, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and YouTube where almost all the content of these websites is generated, or submitted by the users. That’s why whatever appears on these websites is often termed as “user generated” content.
Now, most of these websites are used to recommend interesting links. People find links with interesting content — text, videos, images — and then submit these links to these social media websites where others can find them. So basically, social media optimisation means creating content for your website people find worth linking to. You can get tons of targeted traffic from social media optimisation (I’m assuming you’ll be creating content relevant to your field). Here are a few steps you can take to optimise your website for social media websites.
Create link-worthy content
Continuously create content people would love to link to. Make sure your content has a quality to grab attention. It should be at least one of the following
- Informative
- Entertaining
- Extremely funny
- Educational
- In high demand
- First of its kind
- Unique and highly valuable
Participate in interactions
Actively take part in online conversations and strike up relationships that are mutually beneficial. By encouraging active conversations you create a buss about your link and prolong its visibility. Leave productive comments on various blogs and social media websites and even online forums.
Make it easier to link to you
Prominently display all your important links such as your linkbait articles and RSS feeds. Encourage people to bookmark your website using websites like del.icio.us.
If you search around you’ll get scores of more steps but they are basically the repetitions. Follow the above steps and you’ll surely notice a surge in your relevant traffic. It may take some time, as some initially visibility needs to be created, but once you cross a certain threshold, it’s a highly rewarding website.
Popularity: 18% [?]
published by Gary in Black Hat SEO
Black hat search engine optimisation is primarily defined as techniques and tricks that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. Actually every search engine wants to give the most relevant information to its users and the black hat SEO tricks portray the page as something they are not. Black hat tricks — sometimes — can get you at the top of the search results, but they get your website banned as soon as your tricks are noticed by the search engines. There is no SEO like white hat SEO. Given below are some black hat SEO tricks you should avoid for the longevity of your rankings and SEO efforts.
Avoid keyword stuffing
Have you ever encountered pages that nonsensically contain long arrays of keywords and key phrases at the begging of the page and at the end of the page. They are trying to trick the search engines into believing that they contain lots of relevant information about those keywords. This trick used to succeed for a few days but it no longer works and it is now a sure-shot way of getting your website banned for six or seven months.
Don’t make mirror websites
People erroneously think if they have many websites selling the same thing, sooner or later at least one of them will start appearing at the top of the search results. This is precisely the reason why of late the search engines have started penalising web masters for hosting duplicate content.
Avoiding cloaking and doorway pages
Cloaking and doorway pages are specifically created for the search engines and not for the users. Search engines loath such pages because after tricking the search engine into displaying your cloaked page you can redirect the user to any page of your choice. This is the highest kind of deception and lots of search engine resources go into locating the cloaked pages and banning the associated websites.
Don’t stuff keywords in your title
Your title is meant to make things clearer, not to confound your visitors and search engine crawlers. Use clear language in your title. There is no need to use twenty keywords there. Just use one or two most important keywords and construct a pithy sentence out of them and then use that sentence as the title of your page.
Don’t use hidden text
Some webmasters create lots of text using the same color as the background of their page, thinking that text is no longer visible. They don’t understand that the search engine crawlers strip the text of all the formatting and then read it. No matter what color you use, the search engine crawlers can easily read it.
Avoid automated search engine submissions
All the major search engines don’t accept automated submissions and all the search engines that do, are mostly spam related websites specifically run to collect your email addresses. Inbound links created by automatic submissions can adversely affect your search engine ranking.
Avoid senseless link exchanges
There is a reason why the search engines use inbound and outbound links to gauge the popularity of your website. Inbound links from quality websites validate your content. Similarly, by providing quality outbound links you tell the search engines that you link to important information on the Internet. The senseless exchange of links can drastically reduce your link popularity.
In conclusion I’d say always stick to legitimate SEO practices as their affect is long-lasting.
Popularity: 23% [?]
published by Gary in SEO Tools
Different Search Engine Optimisation tools hold different meanings for different web masters and bloggers, and it is really difficult to compile a list of “the best SEO tools�. Still, most of the SEO requirements are generic in nature, and there is an excellent post on Phoenixrealm regarding SEO Tools that will both enhance and ease your SEO efforts.
Popularity: 13% [?]
published by Gary in Keyword Research
If your online business depends on search engine optimisation and relevant traffic from search engines then it is highly important that you optimise your website for the right keywords. The fundamental problem with the majority of web masters is that they quickly assume what keywords people would use to find them. This is a big mistake.
Do you know companies that are very serious about their SEO efforts spend thousands of pounds just trying to find out what keywords and key phrases can fetch them maximum business from the search engines? It’s very critical that relevant keywords are used when writing your web copy and the headings so that not only you focus better, but your visitors too have a rewarding experience at your website.
Finding the right keywords can be very easy, and very difficult: it depends on the nature of your business and the kind of competition you have. Listed below are a few methods you can apply for finding the most accurate keywords for your web pages and enhance your search engine optimisation.
Use the good old search engines to research keywords
Search for the keyword, let’s say on Google, and observe how many results are being returned. By studying the websites that come at the top of the results you can make out whether they appeared for the right keyword or not. If they offer the same service that you do, then you are using the right keyword and you too should optimize your website for that keyword. If they don’t offer the same service, then you should search for the alternative keyword. Keep doing this until the desired websites begin appearing. Then start jotting down all the keywords and phrases that bring up the right websites. They are your keywords.
Use the online thesaurus to research keywords
Yes, a thesaurus is a good source of alternative keywords. Make a list of synonyms you can find and then try them on various search engines. See what sort of results are returned. If right websites appear for your synonyms then you know that your competitor are using those synonyms to optimise their websites.
Use free and commercial keyword research tools
Some of the free keyword research tools are:
Professional Search Engine Optimisation companies such as Doublespark-SEO also utilise paid for keyword research tools such as KeywordDiscovery. Athough these can cost many thousands of pounds per year, they do provide the ultimate in detailed professional keyword research analysis.
Study your log files
Your log files/traffic stats tell you what sort of visitors you attract from various search engines. You log files will also tell you what keywords bring visitors to your website. A careful study can help you decide what keywords to discard and for what keywords to optimise.
Popularity: 20% [?]
0845 838 7448 
