Search engine optimisation » Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Get links over time not all at once

Sean — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:45:02 +0000

Getting to many links all at the same time can harm rather than help you in the search engines, not only does it not look natural to Google to have a ton of new links suddenly appear to a site that the month before was not getting any links or whose link acquisition has been steady for a period.

There can be legitimate reasons for a sudden increase in links such as the launch of a new site or new product or something that has been picked up by the news media or bloggers sphere that has been discussed a lot and commented on.

This needs to be taken advantage of and the link spike needs to be continued so that the level of links coming into the site remains high but the spike flattens off.

If this is done properly with links pointing deep into the site the number of pages that Google will list in the index for your site will increase and not drop as pages fall out of the Google listings.

The more pages you have in the listings the more chances you have of ranking well for a variety of key words related to your business and there for the more chances you have of attracting visitors to your site.

Not all links are created equal

Sean — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:38:03 +0000

You may all ready know that in search engine optimisation and on-line marketing one of the most important things is to to have links pointing back to your site.

These are seen as votes by the search engines and one website should only link to another if the information on that website is going to be of interest or value to the visitor.

As a website owner you want to promote your website and get it found in the search engines so you need to make other website owners aware that you have great content on your site that their visitors will find useful.

So you now have the whole internet to choose from to get links from, the problem is that there are so many websites and you just do not have time to contact them all and tell them about your site, so reducing the number of sites you need to talk to is vital.

The first thing to do is look at relevancy, you can dismiss large numbers of sites as not relevant to the topic you are discussing, the next is quality, would you recommend this site to a friend of yours? If not do not get a link from them.

The links that are going to be of most value when you are working on your search engine optimisation strategy plan are the ones you find relevant and from sites that you would recommend to others.

How you can learn from your competition

Sean — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:33:15 +0000

When it comes to marketing there are very few new ideas and this is the same in internet marketing and website promotion as with any other form of business promotion.

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.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) better than PPC?

Sean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:55:45 +0000

This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

Robots txt your questions answered

Sean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:50:19 +0000

It is important to have robots txt on your site, this allows you a degree of control over where the search engine spiders visit and what they report and store in their index about your site, this allows you to keep them away from commercially sensitive material or out of member only information if you have a membership area on the 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 and SEO

Sean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:25:21 +0000

No we are not talking about the Caffeine that fuels so many offices and comes in cups of lovely warm coffee, instead this is Googles latest change to there algorithm, the program that helps them rank websites on the internet and allows them to pull the correct results from the data base when you search for a term.

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.

Keyword research not something that stops

Sean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:44:14 +0000

Keyword research is not something that should ever stop, it needs to be something that you continue through out the life of your website.

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.

Are directories and link exchanges a waste of time for search engine optimisation?

Sean — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:41:56 +0000

Asking if directories and link exchanges a waste of time for search engine optimisation is quite a big question, not all directories are created equal, DMOZ and Yahoo are two excellent directories and getting into either of them should defiantly help your positions in the search engines, however there are also a large number of directories that are not worth looking at.

Link building for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is more about the quality of your links than the quantity, it is easy to build links back to a website by trading them with other site owners and filling out directory listings, but you need to consider where is the value in this.

The main search engines employ very sophisticated software to calculate the importance of links, the relevance how difficult it was for you to get it. If link does not have a lot of relevance, is of low importance and was easy to get then you get a low value score for that link, if however the link is very relevant, has importance and was difficult to get then that link receives a higher score.

In a perfect world all your links would be of excellent quality and you would get a great SEO score from the search engines, but you do not get this in the real world and so you need to aim for as high a score as you can get but at the same time not get too obsessed with just the quality.

So a link from a relevant directory may be more valuable to you than one from a site that has no relevancy, the same is true for a traded link, so long as not all your links are swapped or traded and you have some quality along side the relevant but lower scoring links that is a good combination.

So as not all directories are created equal so not all links are equal either.

What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

Sean — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:14:52 +0000

What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.

SEO Job in Wiltshire and Dorset

Sean — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:13:26 +0000

SEO Job in Wiltshire and Dorset

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

Proven SEO track record

Good all round SEO knowledge

Ability to demonstrate what good on-page SEO is

The ability to describe what makes a good link

Understanding of what makes a poor link

Where / how would you go about getting the good links

Skills that would be an advantage

Good working knowledge of social media for SEO

Video for SEO

Pay Per Click experience

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