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.

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.

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.

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.

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