SEO Tips & Information

If you’ve got Adsense on your website, you might have wondered how you can increase the click-through rate and increase you earnings. I had a site that was beginning to do pretty well in SERPs and serving up a few thousand pages a day but the click through rate was awful. I had with a similar site and a similar amount of traffic but his click-through rate was 3 or 4 times mine. His earning per click was also much higher.

The main thing I noticed about the Google Ads on my website was that the ads weren’t particularly relevant to the page on which they were shown, e.g. I might have a page about DJ/ Disc Jockey software but the ads would be for generic “free software”.

By doing some research on Google I soon found some information. I also did a bit of digging around in the PHP script I’d used for my site. I’d purchased the script but after setting up my Adsense ID, spent all my time concenrating on building links and traffic.

The first thing I found in the script was that one of the Adsense blocks used google_kw:

google_kw = “free software downloads”

At first, I thought this was the cause of my problems. Maybe this ad block was making Google serve up free software ads for all the blocks on each page.

I thought I could do a far better keyword match by coding the PHP to specify relevant keywords for each page. A little more research showed though that you had to have an Adsense Premium account, serving up 2,000,000 pages a month to use google_kw. Using google_kw without a premium account a) didn’t work; b) was against the Google TOS. So I removed google_kw and expected this would help make the ads perform better. After a day or two I noticed the click through rate was still poor and the ads were still not relevant to the pages.

The next thing I tried was using special sections to highlight to Google the content to use for matching ads. I put the following around the main, meaty content on the page:


<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


Still no luck. A day or two later the click through was still poor and the ads were still mainly “free software” oriented. Then I had a thought - not only did I have to highlight the content, I had to tell Google to ignore the irrelevant content. Here’s a picture of a typical page on the site - the green rectangle shows the keyword-rich content, the red shows the content I needed Google to ignore.
To help the user, I’d put a line of links back to previous levels along the top of each page. I’d put these links in bold to make them clearer to read. It’s also a good SEO strategy to bold hyperlinks too and I wanted my home page to be reinforced with the keywords “Free Software Downloads”. By the looks of it Google was seeing the bold text “Free Software Downloads” on the link and aiming most ads at this text. So I put the following around the line of links:


<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


This did the trick, the ads were immediately more relevant to each page on the whole and the next day, the click through rate was 5 times the click-through rate before.

Adsense Optimisation Adse

You can have the nicest looking website in the world, with fantastic on-page optimisation but if you want to get found by search engines, the vital SEO ingredient you need are backlinks from other websites. Building links to a website is hard work, taking many hours. If you don’t have stamina or dedication, I’d recommend paying a profession link builder to do the work for you. If you’ve got the time though, the process of building links is relatively easy. To get quality links though takes a bit more effort.

Links have two main purposes:-

PageRank - DoFollow links are a must

A good dofollow link can raise the PageRank of your pages and make you do better in Google searches. Really there isn’t such a thing as a DoFollow link. A DoFollow link is simply a link which doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute set in it HTML href. The ideal (high-quality) link is placed on a page on the right topic, with good PR, anchor text matching the keywords you want to rank for and in the middle of a paragraph of keyword-rich text. Getting all these factors right for a link is quite hard but if you get the opportunity for such a link, take it!

Traffic - DoFollow links are a bonus

You don’t have to build links just to do well in Google searches. If a link is well-placed it can bring traffic to your site. It’s essential that the link is placed on a relevant page, e.g. a comment on a popular blog post on the same topic as your website. As long as the link has the potential to bring you traffic it doesn’t matter if it has the nofollow attribute. Who knows, maybe the link will lose the nofollow attribute in the future.

Sources of Links

You can build links posting in forums that allow dofollow signature links and submitting to directories. It’s likely that all these links wil be of very low-quality and will pass little link juice to your site but they are easy to get. If you join a forum such as DigitalPoint or SitePoint you’ll also have the opportunity to pick up SEO tips while posting.

Slightly better quality links can be made by making comments on blogs. Most blog owners moderate the comments so it’s necessary to make a good, non-spammy comment to be sure your link sticks.

You can also do a limited number of link exchanges with other websites and even just ask for a link, e.g. from a friend’s website or from your customers or suppliers.

I’ll go into more detail on the different types of link building in a later post.

General SEO, Link-building

With cheap hosting allowing multiple domains to be hosted for a few dollars a month, it can be relatively inexpensive to build up a stable of websites in different niches. Using a network of sites you can link to your key, money-earning sites to boost their performance in SERPs.

The biggest barrier to building up a network of (say 20) sites is time and effort. Each site will need content and for each site you will need to build external backlinks. The easiest type of site to create when building a network is a blog. On each blog you can post an article every day or two to build up the content to 50 or so posts. The blogs can then go into a maintenance cycle with a new post each week.

Over at forums like DigitalPoint it’s possible to purchase articles to post on your blogs. The price of an article depends on whether it’s unique or already posted somewhere else on the internet. the content for your blogs needs to be unique to avoid getting hit by a Google duplicate content penalty. Unique articles might cost $10 each, but for the same money you can purchase PLR packages containing thousands of articles in a host of niches. If you buy PLR content, you’re going to need to reword/ rewrite the articles to make them unique. In fact, even if you think you are buying unique content it’s best to check the content really is unique using CopyScape before going live.

Two other problems arise when building a network of sites:-

1. Can you interlink the sites?
2. Do you need to hide the identity of the site owner?

The answer to point 1 is yes, interlink the sites where it makes sense, i.e. the blogs are on a similar theme. However, don’t do mass link exchanges between sites, e.g. in a network of 20 sites all sites linking to one another. See this Matt Cutts interview where he recommends interlinking no more than 10 sites.

The answer to point 2 is yes, of course. Interlinking too many sites by the same domain owner is a bad idea and may result in a penalty. Don’t rely on whois or nameguard protection to hide your identity, change the domain owner’s identity - ideally purchase the domains in different names. Change the owner ID before you even begin posting content or interlinking sites.

General SEO blog network

One important factor to bear in mind when blogging is to interlink your posts. The posts on your blog’s homepage probably have the best chance of doing well in SERPs since it’s likely your homepage has the highest rank of any pages on your site. By linking from newer posts back to older posts, you can help spread a little link juice back to the posts that have slipped off the homepage.

There’s at least 3 ways or styles of linking between blog posts:-

1. Turn keywords in the body of the post into hyperlinks to older posts on the right topic.
2. Add a footer to the post. Something like “To read more, go to …”.
3. Use a plug-in such as the Similar Posts plug-in.

Each of the 3 ways has advantages and disadvantages.

Number 1 probably gives the best or most weighty link since the (hopefully) nicely worded anchor text will be surrounded by other text on the same topic.

Number 2 allows you to always make sure that the posts are truly appropriate for linking.

Number 3 lets you sit back and let the plugin do all the work for you. This can be great if you install the plugin on an old blog with many existing posts. A disadvantage of this plugin is that the posts that are linked aren’t always those you would have linked up manually - sometimes the links are a bit random.

For further SEO Tips on blogging, see:

• Improving Page Titles on BlogSpot blogs
• Improving Page Title on Wordpress blogs

Blogspot SEO, Wordpress SEO Tips

A short while ago I write a post showing how to improve page titles in Wordpress blogs using the All-In-One SEO pack. Having good, keyword-rich, page titles is one of the top SEO factors. So what happens if you have a Blogger/ Blogspot blog? You can’t use the All-In-One SEO pack on blogspot so how do you improve the page title? By default, a blogspot page title begins with the title of the blog. For example, if you have a blog with the title:

SEO Tips & News

and write a post called:

Competitive Keywords

The page title for the post will probably be:

SEO Tips & News: Competitive Keywords

This somewhat dilutes your page title since the keywords you’d really like to hit people with a pushed off to the right. Their SEO impact is reduced for the same reason since good page titles are a top positive seo factor. Also, if your blog’s title is quite long, your keywords may not get displayed since most browsers have a 90 character limit for titles. One advantage of having a blogspot blog over WordPress is that the blog is generally easier to manage - though this is mainly because there is less flexibility and fewer options to work with. To improve the page titles though, there is no point-and-click option. you have to go under the hood and edit the HTML for your template directly.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Go to your blog and click the Customize hyperlink at the top of the screen.
• Click on the Layout tab on the top left.
• Click on the Edit HTML link just underneath the Layout tab.
• Find the following text (near the top):

<title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>

• Replace the text with the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/>
</title>
</b:if>

• Then click the Save Template button to save the template.

Visit your blog and posts. The page titles of the blog posts should now no longer include the blog title.

Blogspot SEO blogger, blogspot, page titles

In terms of trust and rank, Google has two indexes in which it categorises web pages.

• The Main Index

This is the set of web pages Google ranks and trusts. These pages are those which appear in SERPS for competitive keywords.

• The Supplemental Index

Pages in this index are not trusted or have little or no rank. Pages in this index will not appear in SERPS for any but the most specific search phrases, e.g. a phrase like “yellow-feathered fish riding a bicycle” which is unlikely to appear on any other web page.

Needless to say it is better to have the pages on your website in the main index.

So, how can you tell if pages on a site are in the main or supplemental index?

Historically, there were two ways of finding whether a page was in the supplemental results. Note that neither of these two methods work any more.

• The site: operator could be used. You used to be able to type a command into Google in the format:

site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf

(replacing www.yoursite.com with the URL of the domain you wanted to check). A list of supplemental pages on the domain would then be returned.

• Google used to label supplemental pages in SERPS as “Supplemental Result” but this has now been removed. See Supplemental Results Update for more info.

So what works today?

Nowadays you still seem to be able to find the most “important” pages on a site using the command:

site:www.yoursite.com/*

You can then compare the list returned with the complete list of indexed URLs on a site returned by:

site:www.yoursite.com

Any URLs returned by the second command that aren’t returned by the first are probably supplemental.

General SEO

The following factors are thought to have the most positive effect on search engine optimisation. The factors are listed in order of importance.

Title Text

The HTML title tag for the page: <title>A Title</title>.

Use 10 to 80 characters for the title and include up to 3 search terms. The terms near the start of the tag are probably more important. Use - or | to delimit search terms, e.g.

Web SEO Tips - Web Design Tips - Basic SEO Information

By default, Wordpress doesn’t include wonderful titles for blog posts. Using plugins, a lot can be done to improve the page titles of Wordpress blog posts.

The URL

Making the URL name match a search keyword or phrase, e.g. the name of this page is top-10-seo-factors and should be more likely to turn up in a search for the phrase “top 10 seo factors“.

The keywords should be as near the start of the URL as possible.

It is probable that separating words by hyphens in the URL can makes it easier for search engines to distinguish words.

The Domain Name

For a similar reason to the URL name.

Note: Be careful in choosing a domain name that matches a phrase you think users will search for. If the emphasis of your website changes you may be stuck with an inappropriate domain name, e.g. you might have started with www dot wedding-cakes…. and then later on decide it would have been better to start with www dot .party-catering….. In this example, it might be better to start with:

www.party-catering….

and have an page on the site such as:

Anchor Text on Inbound link

When a page has a hyperlink to another page, the text associated with the link says what the vote is for. The more appropriate the link text is the better. See making a link count for more information.

Link Popularity

The number of backlinks to the web page from other websites. See PageRank for more information.

Keywords on Page

Use your keywords throughout the page. However, write the text in a fashion that looks natural to the reader. If a page has a clearly defined topic then the text on the page will naturally contain relevant and meaningful keywords and phrases in the correct proportions.

Keywords in H1, H2 and H3 HTML tags

It is important to include keywords in the titles on the page. A page should have one h1 tag near the top. The tag should include the first keyword/ phrase used in the page’s title.

Keyword use in Alt and Image Titles

This can be an important way of including variations on your keywords and phrases, e.g. the main text in the page might say “top 10 SEO factors” but an Alt might have a variation such as “top 10 factors affecting SEO”. See Using Alt and Title text for more information.

strong>Keywords in bold/ strong format

Writing keywords and phrases in bold highlights their importance to search engines. Do this once or twice but don’t bold every occurrence.

Keywords in meta description tag

Include a meaning page description. Make sure the description matches the topic on the page. Don’t include words and phrases that don’t appear in the main text of the page.

General SEO

Firstly, in relation to a website, what are Keywords?

Keywords are the words and phrases you write on a web page in an attempt to match the words and phrases people type into a search engine such as Google.

For example, if someone is looking for a holiday, and they search for “holidays”, the search engine will display results containing sites that mention holidays. The only way search engines will know whether a web page contains information about holidays is if the page contains text mentioning holidays.

Factors to consider when choosing Keywords

There are a number of factors in choosing keywords:-

• The keywords should describe the products or services you offer.
• The keywords should be ones for which people actually search.
• Hopefully, the keywords are ones people search for a lot.
• Hopefully the keywords are competitive, i.e. they are not too common.

These factors conflict. For example, if you are a travel agent you might choose holiday as a keyword because you sell holidays and lots of people will search for holidays. However, there will be so many web pages containing the word holiday that you will unlikely to appear high in any search results.

With a little more thought, you might instead choose a few more specific terms:

• greek holiday specialist
• travel agent worcester
• discount package holidays
• last minute package holdays
• adventure holidays in france

Build up a list of keywords and phrases you think people will type into search engines then include these in the text of your web pages. The best way to include the words is in a way that seems natural to the human reader.

Do not attempt to include lists of keywords for the sake of search engine matches. Try to build the text into the natural flow of the page.

In particular, do not attempt to include extra keywords by hiding the text, e.g. by making the text colour the same as the background. Such tricks can be spotted by search engines and may result in a penalty.

So far you might think:

What’s the fuss, if I’m a travel agent of course I’m going to include phrases like “adventure holidays in France”. I don’t need to think too much about keywords, I simply write about my products.

and you would be right, except that there are ways to highlight your keywords to search engines and potentially raise your pages up the search results. If one website is optimised to reinforce a certain keyword and your site is not then the odds are you will appear lower in the search results (However - see Google PageRank).

Keywords