On Page SEO

This is part 4 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about On Page SEO!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation as Im sure you know if you are already reading this blog. On Page SEO is basically the changes you can make to your site to make more Search Engine & User friendly; so lets dive right in.

Titles

Titles are extremely important for many factors, firstly they are a key tag to tell search engines and users what a site or particular webpage is about. The key is to keeping these unique for all pages of your site and trying to keep them actually relevant to what the page is about so if you do rank for the term on search engines you are getting targetted traffic and not completely random traffic to your site (who wants that?). Keep it unique, short and sweet. Put your brand name in their on the homepage but I personally remove it for this blog on content pages.

Meta Keywords & Descriptions

These carry little importance compared to how they used too. Gone are the days where you ranked for whatever keywords were in your meta keywords. Although they are of little importance, they should be added as dont forget; descriptions are the content that searchers see when your website appears on the search results. Try to make the text interesting and inviting so that people click through from the search engines onto your website.

Linking Structure

Theres many reasons why its a good idea to have a good linking structure throughout your site. Firstly it helps the flow of PageRank (linklove) spread throughout your website. Secondly it allows pages of your site that may be ‘deeper’ in terms of levels than other pages to be found and spidered, therefore indexed and another potential traffic point for your website. The easiest way to link to all the pages on your site is to create a sitemap, if you have more than 100 links / pages on your site then try to have a couple of these and use them as ‘index’ pages.

301 Redirect / Robots.txt

Try not to have too many versions of the same page, such as a normal version and a print version. Its better to block of the one that you probably wouldnt want to rank (the print version I assume) by adding a rule to your robots.txt file so theres no duplicate content issues within your site. Next I would recommend re-directing the non-www version of your site to the www version. This is something I do with all my sites and all my clients as I truly believe it works well and helps links spread throughout the site better; dont forget that you can set your preferred version in Webmaster Central.

Have it finished

I hate seeing pages that have ‘under construction’ on them, imagine having a few of these pages then remember that they are all going to have the same content. Dont setup or ‘link’ to pages that arent finished, have little content or are under construction. This could be the same saying for having friendly-URL’s so instead of having /page1.htm you could have /on-page-seo.htm. This adds more keywords to the site and can tell both users and search engines what a page is about before they even visit it.

Get these things in place and you are on your way to having setup a well optimised website. What are you waiting for?

5 Comments / June 14th, 2007 / Marketing, SEO

Top 5 Search Engine Spammers

This is partly for the project over at ProBlogger and partly because I think it will make an interesting post. So as the title says heres a look at the top 5 Search Engine Spammers

5. Blogspot

Thats right, Google owned Blogger / Blogspot are reported to have 80% of their blogs being pure spam.

…14 of the top-15 doorway domains have a spam percentage higher than 74%; that is, 3 out of 4 unique URLs on these domains (that appeared in our search results) were detected as spam. To demonstrate the need for scrutinizing these sites, we scanned the top-1000 results from two queries – “site:blogspot.com phentermine” and “site:hometown.aol.com ringtone” – and identified more than half of the URLs as spam easily.

4. Affiliates

Im not going to generalise them, as I dont think they are ‘bad’, I actually think they are good at getting their Affiliate pages ranking in the top results of Google more than the original website who has the offer. Spam?

(Click The Image Below)

3. Paid Link Buyers

Thats Right! If youve ever bought a paid link in order to help you with Search Engine Rankings then you are now officially a Search Engine Spammer.

And well you could argue if you’re signing a ton of guestbooks really fast, or you’re doing a ton of trackback or referer spam, you know that almost does get towards the denial of service attack, but this is the first time where you could actually go to a court of law and you can say, “look, here’s my account, I got hacked, here’s all the stuff.”

And on some level, it is almost kind of a silver lining, in that for the first time you could go, and you know, you could actually get an SEO convicted of doing something like this. - Matt Cutts of Google

2. 5 Billion Indexed Pages

Comon these guys had to be up there, They even made it on the front page of digg getting over 5 billion of their pages indexed and ranking highly in Google, impressive to any blackhat. Caught by a DigitalPoint Member

1. Roger Webbe

Sorry Roger if your reading this and think we have the wrong end of the stick, dont worry we are going to explain. In the eyes of an SEO who is the best Search Engine Spammer? Then It has to be Roger Webbe. This guy gets his sites to rank for terms they dont deserve to rank for with Blackhat techniques and then trys to openly teach spammesr why what they are doing is wrong:

“I want these SEOs to comply with guidelines and made the site to cause controversy to get people to listen,” he said.

3 Comments / May 12th, 2007 / SEO

10 SEO Tips Ill Take To My Grave

Everyone is an SEO ‘n00b’ at one time or another and for me it was about 18 months ago. Whilst learning you hear certain things over and over again making you believe that they are true, however as I soon found out many of them wernt. You may think im stupid having 10 SEO Tips that Ill never change no matter what anybody says, but hey thats just me and I go by what Ive seen work with my own eyes and my own tests so here they are:

1. Keywords in the Title Tag, get your main keywords for that page in the title tag
2. non-www to www 301 Redirect. OK so you can tell Google which one you prefer but I would rather not have too and kill two birds with one stone
3. Keywords in the Footer. I always believe having a small section of text in the footer with the keywords that you are optimising for is important as its the ‘last thing the Spider sees’
4. Great Navigation. This includes a Sitemap, good footer navigation and deeplinks to other pages in your site from some of your main and more ‘authoritative’ pages
5. H Tags. Im not sure how long these will be effective but Im still seeing results with them. It kind of helps me in terms of the design purpose setting h1 at the top of the page and h2 as sub headings
6. Be Involved in the Community. What? Didnt expect this one? Well I value it very strongly. If you are going to get big in your niche you must be an active member in your community to get people to notice and respect you, even give you a little link love.
7. Follow the Web. I cant give any better SEO Tip then to stay active on SEO Forums and Read SEO Blogs then to actually do that. Remember that not everyone gives great advice so test things out for yourself.
8. Backlinks. Of course you expected this one to come up, or did you? No matter how good the ‘AI’s’ get for noticing quality content backlinks are still going to show what people are talking about or caring about on the web. Even if the bar does get raised in terms of their quality guidelines
9. Good Content goes a long way. Ill always believe in content, its what people remember, learn from and even link too if your lucky. Its what the web is revolving around and what people use to make money. Content is content and content is king.
10. Do Nothing for the SE’s. OK maybe I should expand this a little. I put my titles in <h1> tags in order to hopefully show a little more importance but I dont do it for them, I do it for me to rank higher and get more traffic ;). Keep your real website visitors in mind at all times and you cant go far wrong

Leave a Comment / May 7th, 2007 / SEO

Explaining to SEO Clients (Results)

Of course, nobody in this industry can or should guarantee rankings for any keywords, or a certain amount of traffic coming via the Search Engines, so how do you bring trust into your Search Engine clients? Well I guess its something I’ve learn over the years as sadly a lot of people still see SEO as a ‘dark art‘ and less about the technical work done (that 5%). Therefore clients should be assured that:

• You wont perform any actions that might get them banned from Search Engines
• You will work to only increase Search Engine Rankings and not the other way around
• You will respect their brand in the process
• You wont allow competitors to know their SEO Company (for some clients)
• You will give them the option to leave at any time if they arent seeing results after X months

Although these may sound a little rediculous, its sometimes all the client needs to hear instead of them putting the words in your mouth. Tell them upfront what they need to hear, its not a sales pitch its actually what WE and YOU should do with your SEO Clients. Remember they may think highly of their brand and feel they are risking it in the hands of another business, let them know how you will ensure brand reputation is kept  and how your work will be insider only. Tell them!

6 Comments / April 14th, 2007 / SEO

14 Things Google Should Do

This is a small-ish list out of a huge list of things that I wish Google would do or / change.

1. Google reader show the exact number of feeds to read rather than (100+)
2. Allow Searching in Google Reader
3. Stop asking whether a user meant the search term with a z in it when searching from the UK (Optimisation / Penalisation etc)
4. If somebody refers to an article with a similar title, allow the source to rank higher
5. Stop Ranking Digg pages higher than the actual source or reference
6. In Google Reader stop marking read items as new multiple times
7. De-Index all SEO companies that guarantee Top 10 Results in Google
8. Put back the option to turn off personalised results from the Search Page
9. Show all known links with the ‘link:’ command
10. Give Matt Cutts a pay rise
11. Stop reading email content just in order to show targetted ads (do that by the sites I visit if you so wish)
12. Allow the changing of Gmail Usernames
13. Remove the Google logo from Adsense Ads
14. Look at your own results for the likes of ‘Buy Viagra’ to find the heart of spam

Have more? Leave them in our comments and if we agree well add them to the list

Leave a Comment / March 30th, 2007 / SEO