Welcome back, yesterday we looked at why Google does not hate your website it is just that they do not understand what the site is about as you have not provided them with enough information or peer approval in the form of quality links.

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.

The number of people I have spoken to over all my years of on-line marketing the one reoccurring theme seems to be, Google hates my website or my business is different and the search engines down grade my site because there are well known names in the same market.

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

It may sound a little unrealistic but it is something we have accomplished and we continue to accomplish for our Search engine optimisation clients.

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.