Top reasons why SEO is so important

January 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

1.People know who you are.
2.They know how to find you.
3.They find what they need when they go to your site.
4.They spread the word and return.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a method used to get your website listed in the top results of a general search. Google and Bing are among the top two search engines and results can go on for pages and pages. The goal and overall purpose of SEO is to be on the first page, if not in the top ten, of the results returned to the person searching “vegan pigfeet.”

It’s very important to reuse keywords to let search engines know how much more relevant your URL is in comparison to the million other websites vying for the potential consumers attention. For instance, if you’re site is about shoe strings made of laminated spaghetti noodles it may rank low in a search for shoes and high in a search for recipes. And nobody wants shoes on their dinner table.


Social media is your very best friend. Say it with me, “social media is my friend.” Posting regularly on social media sites is the best, and probably the only, way for SEO to work. So set some time aside from knitting and create profiles on Facebook, twitter, google plus, Pinterest, Myspace, LinkedIn, and any other social media site you can find that has more than two other users. Don’t be shy. Get your name out there and promote your brand!

When you post on these sites, try to keep it short and sweet. Most sites limit post in character count anyway. Twitter alone only allows 140, including spaces. I know. It’s unfair but trust me, it’s for your own good. Hashtags (#) work wonders on #Twitter. Take advantage of them, even on Facebook where it doesn’t actually do anything. At the very least, it hints at keywords to search for if your Facebook friends also have  twitter. So it may look silly, and you may get annoying comments from friends who are fed up with the Facebook hashtag but it’s not completely useless.

Also be very careful not to mix business with pleasure. Keep your personal account separate and by all means do not promote your business and post food porn of last nights Lo Mein on the same twitter account.

Search Engine Optimization makes you popular in the cyber world. So unless you want to be the kid who sits bench side in a game of dodge ball, I suggest you become a SEO master. If you need further assistance feel free to consult with a local Chicago search engine optimization company.

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Basic Search Engine Optimisation

November 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I will start the post with the bare essentials to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). There are two parts on-page SEO and off-page SEO in the HTML coding of the website, do not confuse this with off-site optimisation which is something different which I can cover in a later post.

Keyword Research

Before you dive straight into the website optimisation I highly recommend you do your research for which keywords you want to target. Some will be more competitive than others but two things I use to select a good key phrase. a: low competition and b: high search rates. One such tool I use for the keyword research is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool is to be used as a guideline as some phrases you will just have to use your common sense on!

Lets start with the On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the physical changes you need to make with your site and their are two parts:

HTML Coding changes
You need to be concerned with three tags: Title tag, Meta Description and *Meta Keywords (don’t spend too much time tweaking this tag as it is rarely used by the Search Engines anymore). It is important to get your main keywords in those tags. See below for a quick overview of how this information is utilised by the Search Engines, my example is using Google.co.uk.

The blue Link in the Google Search Engine Rankings is your Title tag, the small description is your Meta Description and you won’t actually see your Meta Keywords at all, this is just mainly for the spiders and don’t forget that Google, Yahoo and Bing don’t even use Meta Keywords as a factor in rankings anymore, but bare in mind that the smaller Search Engines do.

Now you can see why it is important to get your keywords in the right places in order for your site to rank well for whatever your phrases may be, now lets look at how to structure these tags and what the do’s and dont’s are:

Title Tag

I recommend you use no more than 100 characters, keep in mind the more focused your title tag is the better that pa. Other people will have different opinions about this but in my experience so long as you don’t go over 100 characters you will be fine. The more focused a title tag is the better it will work for you and I would also use Regions / Town names as part of the title tag because of the way the Smart Phones / IPhone use Google to search.

Search Engine Friendly title tag 
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Free Advice and Help in Bolton and Manchester
Notice with the above I don’t use to many commas because Google and the other Search Engines find it spammy to have more than three commas. You may notice some webmasters use these symbols to separate keywords: (> | – ) I highly recommend using nothing else but commas. The more the title tag seems like a well written sentence the better it will sit with the Search Engines. Again all therory but my past 2 years of an SEO consultant with constant testing 7 days a week has proven me right!

Meta Description

The Meta description is used to help the Search Engine pick up what your about and if written properly it can also increase visits, so make sure yours stands out from the rest of the competition. I would recommend using well written English with basic usage of grammer and what I mean by that is don’t go overboard because it doesn’t sit well with the Search Engines.

SE Friendly Meta Description

Meta Keywords

This tag just contains your keywords that some Search Engines pick up I personally wouldn’t waste too much time with this tag. Make sure all your keywords are lower case and are separeted by commas and DO NOT exceed 25 keywords as the Search Engines class it as spam.

Meta ODP/NOYDIR tag

This tag needs adding just under your Meta keywords tag. What it will do is stop the Search Engines picking their own information for title tags and Meta descriptions from their directories, like they have done in my screenshot above, by not adding this tag you will have less control over what you rank for. The tag looks like so:

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP/NOYDIR”/>

On-page Search Engine Optimisation

On-page optimisation is relative to your visible content, if you don’t have alot of content then seriously think about adding content because this is what is going to get you noticed by the Search Engines as they use content to determine what you are about.

Keyword Density

Don’t over-do this but you have to make sure your content is saturated enough for the Search Engine Spiders to know what your page is about. Usually mention your keyword 3 – 4 times or use this calculation:

(Number of Keywords X Total Words) / 100 = total keyword density ideally you want to hit 3%.

Do not sacrifice well written content for just ramming a few extra keywords in, it will do more harm than good!

Internal Links

Make sure some of your main phrases are linked to other relevant sections of your site, this will help build the pages authority with the SE’s. Also try to get additional relevant pages linking to your main optimised pages as well as it all builds importance.

Images

Its easy to forget about your human users / readers and solely build a website just for the Search Engines. Don’t forget its not about more traffic etc you have to keep people interested and convert them into a sale once they hit your site and one way to put any human user off is a wall of content, so split up your content with related images it will help.

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Back Link Building

December 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

One major components in anyone’s SEO strategies should be obtaining backlinks from relavant, high page ranked sites.
Before requesting the backlink, you need to check the following:

•    Check who’s in their linking neighbourhood by using the majestic or any other backlinks checker  you prefer. As the Search Engines take a disliking to Link Farms.

•    Check they are relevant to your industry

•    Check they are not a direct competitor as they can steel you potential customers. I see this all too often!

Once all the checks have been made above, send an email to them requesting a link exchange. Try to personalise the email to give you the best chances of obtaining the link. Each backlink is not guaranteed as it is entirely up to the person your asking the link from whether they exchange or not.

DoFollow / Nofollow Links

DoFollow means the site you have the link on will pass you some value of their page rank and also vouches for you in terms of trust.

NoFollow: Means that the Search Engines won’t follow the link and you won’t get any ranking value increase. BUT what everybody forgets is that the NoFollow links can also get you potential traffic / enquiries. Just because the Search Engines don’t follow the links it doesn’t mean the human users won’t follow it either.

Which is why it is important what comments you leave on blog posts. i.e. “Buy shoes online Now, Check out my site”. Is not likely to get approved by Admin because your trying to sell something. If your more careful in the way you word the comment you will have a higher success rate of obtaining these links.

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Introduction to Choosing Good Keywords – Part 1

November 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Once known, the keys to web site optimization are simple to understand but strenuous to apply.

Keywords used to be chosen by the spiders depending on how many times a certain word was repeated on the web page being indexed and whether it was towards the top of the page or the bottom of it. But these days keywords are chosen by far more than how many times they appear on a page. In fact there are two aspects to choosing keywords:

1. You, choosing keywords to target in your optimization;
2. The Search Engines, choosing keywords to rank your website for.

If you optimize your website wisely, you will be choosing the correct keywords and you will be targeting in the correct manner both on and off your website so that the search engine will choose the very same keywords to rank your website for. You also need to choose keywords that serve one of the following purposes: Drive Traffic or Build Publicity.

There are numerous tools that will show you how many times a certain keyword was searched over the past month or so. Some of them average it out on a daily basis. You must remember that a by saying “keyword” and SEO firms refers to a single word or a group of words (key-phrase) that are relevant to the industry that your website falls under. Therefore “keyword” = “single or multiple word phrases”.

The key to choosing the right keywords is to set the right expectations. If you have a brand new website and you try to rank for a keyword with 3 million competitors, it probably will not happen in a timely manner to save your business from falling through.

By choosing a keyword that brings in 10,000 visitors a month that will take at least nine months for your brand new website to to get rankings for, whereas you could have chosen a keyword that you could get ranked for within 3 months but get only 3,000 visitors a month from. You will be losing out on 6 months of traffic form the easier-to-get keyword which equals to 18,000 visitors.

That could make your business enough money to last while you are working on getting rankings for the harder keywords. Another important factor is the relevancy of the keywords to what you offer. For instance, if the keyword “clothing” brought in 10,000 visitors a month to your “baby clothing online store” it would not be as good of a Return On your Investment (ROI) as a keyword like “baby clothing” with much less traffic. The reason is that not everyone who is looking for clothing is looking for baby clothing which is what you offer.

Therefore it is very important to choose a group relevant of keywords for optimization rather than a few high traffic ones. The following is an example of a ordinarily successful way of choosing a group of keywords:

1.    Foundation: These would be keywords that you can get high ranking for, in the shortest period of time possible. They will also lay the groundwork and create the click through needed to rank for the next group.

2.    Means: These would be keywords that would take longer than the previous group to rank for, but mostly produce higher traffic. They are also the means of getting the click through and other smaller factors to rank for the next group.

3.    Goal: These are the ultimate keywords that take the longest to achieve but produce extremely high traffic and usually induce a lifestyle change on the website owner once the results are achieved due to increased revenue or popularity.

And of course there are always a few extremely high traffic, yet generic keywords which take a lot of time and effort to achieve but they are always a nice accomplishment for SEO firms such as us. Such words are usually only achieved, if your website has been qualifying for high rankings by the search engines for a lengthy period of time, and not only search engines but also your visitors look at your site favorably and deem it an authority in the industry.

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New Webmaster Tools

October 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

After completing your basic Search Engine Optimisation it is a good idea to familarise yourself with the Webmaster tools. An exciting development from Google is the newly developed webmaster tools that now allows you access to alot more information including impressions and click throughs, which kind of acts like a mini version of Google Analytics. If your unsure how to install Google’s Webmaster Tools onto your site follow these easy steps:

1) Google “Google Webmaster Tools” or visit this link.

2) Once you sign up to this tool, if you already have a Google account just log in to that account when you want to access your webmaster tools. If you now look at your main dashboard you should see an icon for your webmaster tools.

3) You will need to verify your site with your Webmaster tools account before you have access to useful tools and data about your site.

You can either upload a Google verification file using FTP access or implement a Google verification Meta tag into the head section of your HTML coding structure. If you’re not comfortable with coding the Google file upload is your best option.

That’s it you have Webmaster tools installed.In this post I am only referring to the newest feature of Webmaster tools and not a full guide to submitting your site to Google, that I will cover in another post, under SEO > Basics.

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Choosing the Right Hosting Company

September 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Your Hosting Company is where the server that hosts your website is located. There are a lot of great deals on the market today when it comes to web site hosting, however remember that most of the time one gets what one pays for.

The three most important aspects of web hosting are: Speed, Availability and Control.
Some of these hosting companies have so many web sites on one system that it is constantly clogged and your website is served at a very low speed to the visitors. If you are going to be saving money at the price of speed it is not worth it. If your site won’t load or is slow because of bandwidth problems, you will have a real hard time selling products, and even search engine spiders might time out before indexing your website fully.

Availability refers to the fact that some cheap hosting companies do not maintain their hardware well enough. In other words they do not use preventive methods, but only bring in the cure after something goes wrong to save more money. This means there would be numerous lengthy hours every year when your website would be literally not accessible over the internet. This will not only prevent visitors form using your website but also a search engine spider might try to hit it while it is down and think that the website was removed and drop it out of the index.

And Control is important so that you can modify your website and use tools and programming languages at your own command. So that you can create the best possible experiencing for your visitors, as well as have advanced efficient methods of statistics tracking.

Ponder the following, before choosing a web hosting company:

•    Large Bandwidth, so that your website visitors would not have to wait in line to use the website.
•    Large Bandwidth Usage Allowance, so that you have room to grow without have to pay hefty sums of money as penalty of growth.
•    Safety features such as SSL, PGP and others to serve the needs of your customers and employees.
•    Reliable and available customer service, so that you can have issues taken care of as they rise.
•    Customization capabilities, in case you find yourself in need of a something custom.
•    Thorough Statistics and other Visitor Tracking Software, so that you can gauge the outcome of your efforts in getting visitors to your website and getting them to purchase your services or goods.

And of course anything else that your particular website might need. We are specialized in Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, however we have abundant means of providing our SEO clients with reliable hosting most of the time at little or no cost to them.

And if we can not accommodate you, we will not hesitate in researching and finding you the best solution possible form a different company. After all, your website’s success is our success.

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Google Instant and what it means for your SEO

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Google Instant is a fantastic new development by the Google labs which basically predicts the keyword your going to type into the Google toolbar. There is a lot of speculation about this new feature and what it means for your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Some people’s views of Google Instant
“I feel that for technical people it could be a waste of time as you tend to focus more on the phrase derivatives as opposed to what you was actually typing in, thus you spend more time searching blar bla”.

“I feel that the tool is really useful as it gets you results your looking for faster”.

My Take on Google Instant
After hours of continuious testing on Friday, personally I found the feature very useful as (in general) it basically speeds up the process of finding what your looking for in Google and also finds you possible alternatives to what would have been a really broad phrase and/or subject.

i.e. if I type “cars” Google predicts “cars for sale”, “new and used cars” etc.

What will Google Instant mean for SEO?
I think in time Google Instant will change the way Webmasters optimise their websites as the phrases you optimise them for will need to be run through the Google Instant tool to see what Google predicts then hopefully if you optimise the website for them predictions you should hopefully see some more enquiries and the phrases might be ones that you would of thought of before, which all adds to the fun of SEO.

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Link Farms and why they harm your site’s ranking

September 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Link farms are specifically aimed at getting your page rank increased in a short space of time. This is frowned upon as it goes against Google’s term of conditions. When your site is found to be part of a Link Farm your site will be banned from the Google index.

What is a link farm?

A link farm is a network of websites, blogs etc that all link together to give each other a boost in rankings. It may work for a while until the Search Engines pick up on this kind of activity.

Trust me it isn’t worth it do back linking the proper way.

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Choosing a Good Domain Name

August 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Every web site must have a domain name. It acts like the name of a store. It is easier to find the “Widget-for-less” store in your city than the address “234 store Street”. In the same manner, websites are found, identified and referred to by a domain name rather than their IP address.

Choosing a domain name with your keywords in it used to be a key point in achieving high rankings, but these days that is only a spam method which is useless. However, the correct domain is a far more valuable asset these days in that it can help you capture more clicks than sometimes even higher ranking competitors. In general domain names must be geared more towards being easy for people to tell others about than for search engines.

However, since major engines such as Google show every occurrence of a keyword in the SERP (SE Results Page) in bold text. Having a keyword in your domain can help attract the attention of the searcher.

However, choosing the right domain name goes much further than that. Some key points are.

•    Be short and to the point.
•    Avoid Superlatives such as best or others, since they make the visitor think you are trying to lure them in falsely.
•    Use one of the top words of your industry in the name if possible, since it builds instant credibility and helps you get more clicks.
•    Avoid hyphenation if possible.
•    Also avoid tricky methods such as “cheaper-than-my-competition.com” since it will not only make you lose out of potential clicks but could also bring up other complaints.
•    People respond better to generic phrases relevant to the industry, but right out of the dictionary. Unless of course you have a different marketing standpoint.

These rules do NOT apply to every situation. As part of our guaranteed SEO services, we offer free help in choosing the best domain name for your situation if you do not have one already.

Overall, choosing the correct domain name can help you get as many clicks as someone ranking above you for a key-phrase, if not more.

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