So when you see another website above yours in the rankings what can you do about it?

The first thing is to prepare a Search Engine Optimisation strategy plan and one of the best places to start this is to identify your competitors and see how they are outranking you at the moment, you need to analyse the structure of there site, what keywords have they targeted, how have they used the keywords on the page what links to they have coming back to them and which of these links is producing the most benefit for them.

You then need to prioritise the work that needs doing so you can get the most benefit from it in the shortest time.

The keyword research is the key to this and once you have this solid base you can more forward from there to take advantage of the other things you have learned about your competitors site.

Matt Cutts a leading engineer at Google has produced a video that explains the robots txt in more detail and and answes some questions such as

Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?

How do I make that url disappear from Google?

The video can be seen on Matts Blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

This is going to be be of interest to any one who needs to know how to sculpt the page rank of their sites to ensure they are getting the most from the search engines.

This is an important part of search engine optimisation and implementing these changes on your site in the appropriate manor can help your rankings in the search engines.

One word of advice, do not go too over board with the robots txt file or you might find you have stopped the search engines indexing some important parts of your website and this will see you fall in the rankings rather than rise.

Caffeine, which is new technology that improves the indexing infrastructure is according to Matt Cutts of Google due to go live some time after the holidays, I have consulted my American to English dictionary and I believe this means in January.

Matt Cutts comments that this is so web developers can enjoy there holidays with out worrying about what effect the changes will have on their sites, although from the initial testing we have seen a well optomised and site with content that adds value to the internet as a whole will benefit rather than suffer when these changes take full effect.

The changes are designed to give a better experience to the user of Google and so if you have a search engine optimisation plan that is not spammy and that adds value to both your site and the whole of the web then you should be looking forward to the introduction of Caffeine.

The key words are the life blood of your website and ensuring you have enough relevant and commercially economic phrases to look at in the future will ensure you do not get to a point here you are unable to grow and your site becomes static.

There are a number of tools available to help with your keyword research, among them is Googles free keyword research tool, it gives good general information about suggested words to target, the levels of visitors and some idea of what you would expect to pay for a Pay Per Click campaign.

The number of keyword research tools is growing and the only limits are your budget, most good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies subscribe to 3 or 4 paid for services that can cost several hundred pounds a month, but as the research is important this is not a cost that should be scrimped on. >

Looking at the keywords and phrases that your competitors are ranked for is a good way of learning the phrases you need to consider and using some of the more advanced features of the paid software you can drill right down into this information to give you the competitive advantage you need.

Pay Per Click is a great way of getting an instant boost for your company, getting the traffic in through the doors when the site is new so that you can test to see how popular the products or services you are selling are going to be, using relatively mall amounts of just a few hundred pounds you will be able to gage if people are interested in what you are promoting.

Once you know they are interested you can begin your marketing in full force, increasing your Pay Per Click budget and bringing in SEO for the site, Search Engine Optimisation is a longer term strategy than the PPC, but it does have the advantage of continuing to run even when you have stopped paying for it, although if it is stopped prematurely in a competitive market you can see the good positions drop quickly.

You are a little limited with the terms you can promote for with PPC as budget is always a concern, but with SEO you can promote for as many phrases as you like and you will find you are being found for phrases you did not even know were of interest to your visitors.

Rather than using PPC or SEO you should be using a combination of the two so that they complement each other as you move your marketing efforts forward, testing new markets with the PPC and promoting your site into the profitable niches using SEO.

Cravenplan computers the Salisbury web design company are looking for a talented and experienced individual to join their existing SEO team.

If you are interested in joining the team and have an excellent knowledge of search engine marketing or search engine optimisation contact Sean on 01747 858002 or sean@cravenplan.co.uk.

The following are considered essential for the successful candidate

Skills that would be an advantage

The salary is excellent for the right candidate, so if you think you fit the bill and are interested in working on the Wiltshire / Dorset Border, just outside of Salisbury send your CV along with a covering letter and salary expectaations in a PDF format to sean@cravenplan.co.uk

The salary is excellent for the right candidate, so if you think you fit the bill and are interested in working on the Wiltshire / Dorset Border, just outside of Salisbury send your CV along with a covering letter and salary expectaations in a PDF format to sean@cravenplan.co.uk

We kindly request that no agencies, or companies that do the same or a similar job to agencies contact us about this as I will not be polite and I will think you are very rude for not taking into account my asking you nicely not to contact me please.

Thank you

Sean

The increase in quality links combined with targeting the correct keywords and what you will learn today will; give you a firm footing on the clime up the search engine rankings.

So our next topic is

Use of keywords on the site

When you have your keywords for your site you have to use them so the search engines know what your pages are about.

You should try and use just 1 or 2 phrases for each page on your website, make the keywords relevant to the information on that page.

The keywords or phrases should be used in the title of the page, the description and the meta keywords tags, you should use appropriate alt text on any images, try to describe the picture in the alt text, the internal links should also contain the keywords so the search engines can see what each page is about.

You should have text on the page for the search engines to go through, it is also good for your visitors as you need to describe what the products or services are that your website is discussing, 300 + words is normally good but in that text you need to use your keywords, not too often as it will sound false and your visitors will not understand what you are trying to say.

Flash based site design

Flash can look great on a site and many people use this however the search engines can have problems searching through these sites as they are made of images and there is no text for the spiders to pick up on, avoid using too much flash and ensure you have text for your visitors that is not part of an image.

There are many other issues that cause the search engines to not rank a site but generally if you follow the simple guidelines here you should find the love returning from the search engines.

These are pretty serious things to claim and when ever I hear them I like to dig a little deeper into why the site owner feels this lack of Google love, the answers are as common as the moans, the reason the search engines don’t rank you well is one of several reasons but they all come down to poor SEO, some of the more common issues are

Poor keyword research

If you have a small budget you are being unrealistic to think you can compete with people in the mortgage or insurance markets, at least for the broad terms, the big players in these markets have some advantages, they have contacts in the media who write storeys on them and this gets them some very nice authority links from places like the BBC and you will find it hard to do the smae thing.

However if you are in this market and do not have contacts and money to go after the broad terms you need to look at the keywords you can compete for, and there are loads, the time spent doing keyword research can seem long and tedious but it is worth money in the bank when you find the correct combination of high searches and low competition.

Poor link quality

Too many people seem to think that the more links back to their site the better, this may have been true in the past but now it is defiantly quality that counts over quantity. You need to look at different elements when you are link building, these include,

Relevance of the page your link is from – why would a site about cars link to a site about tables, it is much more likely that a site about cars would link to one about caravans.

One-way links, the links should be just pointing to your site not you giving them a link and them giving one back to you, link swapping is an old and out of date technique.

Too many links too quickly, we have all seen the offers in our email of 5,000 for $49 this is just going to start alarm bells ringing at Google HQ and there is every chance you will get slapped with a penalty. Link building needs to be steady and something that happens naturally over a period of time.

Paid links, this is something to avoid as Google especially dislikes people forcing their way to the top through the weight of their wallets.

Anchor text, this is the part of the link that is underlined, so instead of using terms like click here use the keywords such as Salisbury web design this allows the search engines to understand what the page you are linking to is about.

Tomorrow we will look at the use of keywords on the site and Flash based site design issues

Imagine what that would mean for your business, if you are getting 2,000 visitors a month we can multiply that number up to 28,000 visitors a month and if everything else stays the same that means that your sales and profits should also rise by 14 times.

But keeping everything else on the website the same will not help you make the most of this extra traffic so we will also look at the site to determine if we can increase the number of conversions you get and we have had some amazing successes with increasing conversions including one example where we changed just 1 thing on a website and that resulted in a 60% increase in conversions overnight. I made this change on a Wednesday afternoon and on the Thursday the site got 60% more conversions and the great news is that the increased level of conversions has continued to this day.

To get your business more visitors and more conversions complete the form on the right hand site of the page now.

One of the key elements of SEO are links, you want to get links pointing back to your site, however not all links are the same and you want the best sort of links coming back to your site rather than any old rubbish.

The best sorts of links are ones from sites that contain similar content to your own, so if you have a fishing site you would like to see lots of links coming back from other fishing sites, you may be thinking that at this point you know you can not get lots of these links because the companies like yours are your competition and they are not likely to help you get better rankings than them.

This is where planning comes into play, you need to think about what would make a potential rival want to give you a link from his site, what do you have that he values more than a link? If you are thinking at this point that you will link back to him in exchange for his link then you would be wrong, this used to be a trick used to fool the search engines but they are onto that one and the two links would be given a very low score.

Rather than swapping links you could offer the other site an article that would be of interest to their visitors, in this article you could include a link back to your site for more information.

Now you may not be able to do this with your closest rivals but if you can do it with similar but not directly competing sites this is a very good way of getting links, however writing all the articles and contacting all the sites can be a very time consuming process so to ensure it is done effectively and correctly you should use a SEO company to get the most from your linking.