How to Search Engine Optimise a site – from scratch
May 5, 2009 | SEO
Sometimes, starting from the beginning is the best place to be. You have no mistakes or hurdles to overcome and can get stuck in.
So if I were starting a site from scratch, what would I do?
1. Buy a domain name with the search term in it as it always helps.
2. If possible have a lovely little domain name with the keyword in it that I had registered 10 years ago and never used! We believe Google looks at the age of the domain as a factor of credibility.
3. Build a keyword list using a variety of search terms, including ones which get lots of searches but mainly due to people doing research, and ones which get few searches but searches from people who are looking to buy.
4. Create a page of copy around each set of keywords, and build some bulk and content for the website.
5. Sign up to the big social media websites, create a profile and add links back to my website. Now this isn’t going to make your website bounce to the top of the listings, but it will let Google know you exist!
6. Add a blog to the site using Wordpress and start blogging every day. Again, this would increase your visibility, make the Google bot come back to your site more often to look for changes, and hopefully if the content is good, get people linking to the site.
7. Go on a major link hunt for places of authority to link to the website to start getting it ranked.
That’s it, that’s what I would do!
Now this is a very basic list and does not go very deeply into SEO strategies, but if you have one you would like to add, please add it as a comment.
Google following no follows
September 3, 2008 | Google, Link Building, SEO
No follow is very simple, at least that’s what we fought. Stick a no nofollow relation tag in a link then not only would Google not follow the link it also wouldn’t pass any Page Rank or Link Juice.
Not the case anymore. For a while we’ve heard underground stories that Google wasn’t strictly complying with the no follow rule. We’ve also began to see this in our own projects yet Google seemed to be experimenting with how to use no follow, rather than following set rules. Recently we’ve spotted some hard and fast reasons why Google is now following no follows.
Since no follow was brought out I’ve been waiting for Google to create an exception rule. After all it makes sense as it has swapped one big problem and made it into a far greater one. No follow is an attempt to purge the web of all the useless links on the web. It’s heavily open to abuse, now Webmasters wasting their time doing numerous link swaps for Page Rank purposes have to be aware of the abuse that no follow opens them up to. Despite the simplicity of no follow and the fact that it has been around for a while, there are plenty of webmasters who aren’t fully aware of it’s implications. Even then it’s a pain checking each link.
It’s no surprise Google have taken this tack. No follow goes against the very nature of the web, that is a library of related documents. It also goes against the nature of Page Rank, one link equals one democratic vote. Is it really fair to pick and choose which links your democratically voting for? A link is after all a link and if you don’t want Google to follow a link then why is it there in the first place? We now also have a new breed of marketer who’s clogging up the net with more worthless links.
In a ironic turn of events a Californian couple recently sued Google for following a no follow sign to their house and publishing a picture of it via Google Street View in Google Maps. Following No follows seems like a new trend!
The Long Tail
August 29, 2008 | Long Tail, SEO
Naturally I read a fair bit about SEO and internet marketing. Most, particulary what relates to SEO falls into three categories, it’s either:
- So fanicful it makes the Disney film Enchanted look autobiographical
- Confusing, does the writer even understanding what they’re saying let alone the reader
- Plain incorrect
There’s quite a bit I read about SEO, even popular stuff, that either comes with an agenda, makes wildly incorrect statements or covers a lack of knowledge by using confusing names that neither the reader or author seem to understand. Some things alarm me, it’s not unusual for me when speaking with a potential client to have to reinvent the light bulb by debugging their knowledge of SEO which in some cases can be nonsense. To be honest it’s people like me, that is SEO’s, who take the brunt of that responsibility. You here something said enough times, you think it must be true.
What I keep hearing most frequently is that Long Tail Optimisation is always, that’s without fail, the way to go. If someone had given me a pound, or even a dollar, for every time I heard this I wouldn’t be writing this right now. SEO’s have really caught the Long Tail bug haven’t they? It’s not hard to think why that is?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Long Tail, for several reasons the most important being that it actually simplifies SEO and it used to debunk the very thing I’m pointing out. However it’s now come full circle. Long Tail Strategies can often be the most effective strategy in not just SEO but also Internet Marketing, however if you read that statement the truth of it is in the word can and although vital in most cases (not all!) is not always the most effective strategy. I read a post in one of my favourite networking sites recently that made it sound like the first law of SEO is always long tail. Like I say often it is, but is not always the case. Ultimately it depends on many factors including who your market is, the reach, size and other details of a company.
If your new to our blog then let me introduce you to my number one rule, that is if you get the keywords wrong then you get the whole project wrong, if not it’s always good to hear it repeated and I don’t apologise for that. We’re currently building up quite a reputation for fixing messes, quite often the Long Tail is the root of this problem, I wonder if most of the problems with SEO nowadays stem from all we hear about the Long Tail. On several projects that have come in, in the last few weeks our research has told us that Long Tail keywords are not the most commercially viable to use in particular circumstances, this is not just one or two either. Issues with the Long Tail, stem from a poor understanding of what Long Tail actually means and how what it applies. I’m not going to repeat what others more qualified have said, an excellent article on the subject which is transparently clear is here, I highly recommend you read it.
Dmoz Meta Description Tag
August 18, 2008 | SEO
We looked at the meta description tag as a powerful tool to getting the right description of your site in Google’s listing. We also looked at the keyword tag and in the previous post looked at other meta tags. As mentioned in the post there is an often overlooked power in the hands of any SEO.
However getting just the description you want can be difficult at times. Google generates a description via three sources:
- The meta description tag
- The content on your site.
- Your listing in the Open Directory.
In the third case this can cause problems. Often our clients have a listing in the open directory (dmoz.org), often a listing was created before Google started using it this way and it can often be totally inappropriate for describing a site effectively. It’s a popular method for Google to use, as the description was edited by a Human, Something very rare in the world of SEO.
You can stop Google from doing this by adding this meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>
Yahoo will also use its own directory, to stop Yahoo from using this to describe your listing you use this meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir”>
Both will stop all engines from displaying the appropriate listing if you want to target a particular engine change “robots” to the relevant engine eg. <meta name=”msnbot” content=”noodp”>
HTML Meta Tags
August 15, 2008 | SEO
We looked previously at the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag. To sumarise what we learn’t the keywords meta tag is pretty much useless and the description meta tag is the opposite and is actually extremely underused.
The power of the description is in controlling how Google describes a site in it’s listings. This is actually easier said than done, when Google works out how best to describe a listing it sometimes throws a spanner in the works so in a future post will look at how you can really enhance your listing.
Here we are going to look at other meta tags. Well the simple answer is in the main these are pretty useless as well.
There are two main problems with meta tags. ultimately they are just labels. Some labels provide useful information for certain things, for example if you sign up to Google Webmasters you have to upload a file to your server or put a meta tag in your site to authenticate that you are the owner or webmaster. Ultimately visitors aren’t going to click on your source code to be viewing your meta data because it’s of no interest to them unless they’re a web designer and they’re looking to borrow some code.
For Ranking purposes all meta data is pretty useless, in fact if you have too much unnecessary clutter in your code you lower your ratio of content to code and this will have a negative effect on your rankings.
Lets look at a few of the more common meta tags.
Author meta tag
I read recently that a site can fail one of the many different coding tests if this meta tag is not in a site. I don’t remember what it was for exactly or even if this is actually true but ultimately who cares? If you have a web site your main concern is that it is friendly and attractive to your visitors. What interests me about this tag as someone who started designing web sites over 10 years ago is this tag will often tell someone that looks if the site is designed using a cms or a wysiwyg. You can often spot these a mile of by the standard of the design. What makes me chuckle is the number of web designers who actually leave the author tag in there pages which explain they’ve used something like Dreamweaver to design their sites.
Robots tag
We’ve already covered the Robots Meta Tag in some detail. Having a follow, index is pretty useless Google’s going to index your site unless you specificially ask it not to which is what this tag is for. The real power is in having a page indexed but not followed or vice versa.
Robots Revisit
Is this important? It’s a similar story. Picture the scenario. You are Google and it’s your job to firstly index the whole web effectively. Do you think all those sites that have a Robots Revisit tag that stipulates something like 7 days are going to get Google to do exactly what they have requested when Googlebot knows you’ve not changed your page for 6 months or a year? Utterly pointless.
There is however one powerful meta tag, which is a variation of the robots tag, which if you have a listing in the open directory or Yahoo’s own directory stops Search Engines using it to describe a site in it’s listing which we will deal with in a future post.
