To Blog Or Not
May 20, 2008 | SEO
To Blog or not?
Today I wrote an article for real business magazine on some tips and tricks entrepreneurs can use as a blogging strategy. To read the article, click here.
The key point to remember is that blogging is just as much about the search engines as it is about writing good content!
ALT Tags – how to use them
May 20, 2008 | SEO
In the old days of search engine optimisation, the wild, wild, west, alt tags were very important.
They were, and still are, a way of coding descriptions behind the pictures on your site. This was great for the old gun slinging spam merchants, as they could stuff as many keywords into the coding of the page as possible. Because of this the search engines reduced the importance they gave to these tags. It is still good practice to have them, but there is a far more strategic use.
Google is moving towards a blended search result. It is not uncommon to see search results now with Google blogs, news, video and pictures included. So that’s where the strategy comes in. If someone does a Google image search, you must describe the pictures so they will appear. In a service industry this may not be so important, but if you sell a product, this is essential. When someone searches for a product that you sell, you want a picture of it from your website to appear.
Go and do a Google image search and see what pops up!
Search engine friendly websites
May 16, 2008 | SEO
1. Don’t use JavaScript and Flash unless you really have to - they make the valuable part of your site, the content, invisible to search engines.
2. Don’t use dynamic pages, query strings to a programmer, for the average Joe they have a “?” in the page name followed by some gobledy gook.
3. Sign up to Google and yahoo Webmasters and add a sitemap to each. Also add a html sitemap page, these will help the engines find your content.
4. Add fresh content via blogs, articles, forums, etc. regularly. This will encourage Google to spider your site more frequently.
5. Spam is evil, not only do we hate it, the search engines hate it too. So creating spammy links, keyword stuffing, spamdexing or whatever you call it at best doesn’t work and at worst it will get your site penalised.
6. Have your site content centric not image centric.
7. Add value by targeting your content to browsers. By aiming solely at search engines you won’t be able to benefit from the traffic that search engines can bring.
8. Participate. Many of the new elements of the web like social networking, bookmarking and blogging require you to give as well as take. Those that just take are seen as social spammers.
9. Search Engines love you to tell them in plain black and white what they can or can’t do - your robots.txt file does this.
10. Broken links not only ruin the user experience, they also bugger up your rankings!
Better Page Rank
May 15, 2008 | SEO
Getting Better Page Rank: 10 things you (probably!) didn’t know about page rank
1 - Page Rank is on a logarithmic scale. That simply means if you go from a PR1 to PR2, it’s bigger jump to PR3.
2 - Page Rank is rounded down so if your a fraction from getting a PR 5 you’ll still show as a PR4.
3 - Live Page Rank is not the same as toolbar Page Rank, which can be several months out of date
4 - Page Rank is now not a major factor in getting ranked in Google!
5 - Page Rank is generally updated on the last few days of each month.
6 - Page Rank pages can often be 0, usually because of links that are invisible so Search Engines can’t see them
7 - Google see this same page as four seperate pages and so will dilute PR:
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/index.html
http://example.com
http://example.com/index.html
8 - The average of every page on the web is PR1
9 - Links with no follow in them don’t pass PR on, however, apparently recent research has highlighted this may not be true
10 - Page Rank sounds important, but it is really a pun, named after it’s inventor Larry Page!
SEO - SEM - What an earth are they?!
May 14, 2008 | Pay Per Click, SEO
Today I was speaking for a Vistage group, which is a group of business owners who meet monthly with a facilitator/mentor to hear a leading speaker and share issues they are facing in their business. Today I was a groups speaker.
One of the members asked me to explain the difference between SEO and SEM
SEO stands for Search engine optimisation. SEM stands for Search engine marketing.
SEO is the process of raising a website up the natural listings of Google or any other search engine. This is commonly the results on the left hand side. This optimisation occurs through a process of editing the writing of the site, the coding of the site and generating incoming links into the site.
SEM is the process of paying for adverts which appear on the search engines, in Google’s case, adwords which show up on the right hand side.
Each have their own merits, and I believe for a successful campaign, both are needed.
