SEO Tips & Information

Lately it’s been highlighted to me what the difference is between internet marketing and SEO or search engine optimization. It all started as I’ve got a lot of work piling up for the next two or three months so I contacted an SEO company to see if they could build a few links for one of my sites.

In the past couple of months, the SERPs performance of one of my sites has been dropping slightly, mainly because a lot of the links are from forums and blogs. Over time these kinds of links tend to be devalued so you need a regular top-up of links. Continually adding links can be time-consuming so I wanted to subcontract the effort.

I guess I should have expected a big sell in response to what I though was a simple request - just build me some links please! However, the guy I contacted gave me a useful kick with respect to the way I’ve been looking at my website and sales strategy. His advice highlighted the difference between internet marketing and SEO to me.

I’ve come across people who sold themselves as SEO experts before. Most of the SEO people I’ve dealt with have been highly professional but a small number are somewhat unscrupulous. With some SEO people, a client consultation usually starts with “what keywords do you want us to aim at?”. A price is then quoted, say $300 a month, and away the SEO people go doing what they do. I’m betting a lot of the time, the keywords people choose in such a consultation are so easy to rank for the SEO involved is non-existent. All the SEO people need to do is put the phrase in the homepage title tag, mention the phrase a couple of times in the web copy and hey presto the site is on page 1. After that they get $300 a month for doing nothing but playing on the client’s paranoia about losing rank if the SEO stops.

The internet marketing consultant I’m dealing with now though is taking a longer look at the whole way I’m tryng to sell products via my website. Here are the key points he looking into …

Improved, Extra Keywords

He’s choosing new, extra keywords and agreeing them with me. The keywords aren’t easy either - 30,000,000 or more results. Then he’s coming up an appropriate set of web pages and optimised web copy. 301 redirects are being planned where URLs need to be changed to improve medium to long term performance.

Writing Web Copy that Sells

He’s looking at the selling aspects of my existing web copy. Am I highlighting in the text the key selling features I talk about when he quizzes me? If not, let’s plan a change. As it turns out, I’m not highlighting the key selling features. I’ve fallen into the trap of achieving a certain level of performance with my site then leaving the site alone instead of continuing to add and tweak the content.

Improved Product Pricing Strategy

He’s looking at the sales and pricing strategy for my products. Am I charging the right price? Unexpectedly perhaps, he’s saying I should raise prices to avoid an association between low cost and low quality. This increases my paranoia about increased price = reduced sales, so he’s showing balls in giving me the advice.

Strategies for Adding Content

He’s coming up with good tips about how to keep the site growing, e.g. by adding a section to which I can periodically post articles or through my customer testimonials page. As people write testimonials, I get good, indexable content for free so why not make the most of it, perhaps by adding testimonials to the home page.

These and other tips I’m being given highlight that SEO is just one of many marketing tools that can be used for an online business. You can optimise all you like but your overall marketing and sales strategy need to be clear before you begin so that you are optimising the right content in the first place.

General SEO

If you browse webmaster forums like DigitalPoint or SitePoint you’ll sooner or later come across people stating that “web copy must be semantically balanced” or “web copy must bear in mind latent semantic indexing” principles if you want to do well in SERPs. The reality is that using the word “semantic” just makes things sound more scientific and complicated than they need to be.

To strip “latent semantic indexing” back to something simple and understandable, the first thing to do is note that the word “semantic” has the meaning “meaning“. So when an SEO expert says web copy should semantically flow, he really means you write about a single topic on a web page. For example, if you are writing a paragraph about expensive italian leather shoes, don’t put in a little story about how your dog was sick on the carpet this morning: keep the theme consistent.

The second thing to note about the need for decent semantic balancing or flow is that in a lot of ways it boils down to the old advice about not indulging in keyword stuffing. When you write web page copy, don’t keep repeating your chosen keywords so many times that the copy reads unnaturally. If the text reads OK to you and your friends it’s going to be OK to the search engines.

The whole idea behind the major search engines like Google moving towards a latent semantic indexing alogrithm was to improve the quality and accuracy of the search results. For example, if someone searches for “cuddly toy animals”, Google might also include pages about “cuddly toy gorilla” in the results since the phrases have similar meanings. I could have said that “cuddly toy animals” and “cuddly toy gorilla” were semantically related but that would have just have sounded too complicated.

Of course when optimising a web page for keywords - either in the on-page web copy or in the off-page links and anchor text - it doesn’t hurt to give the search engines a helping hand, so build a few links on “cuddly toy animal”, a few for “cuddly toy gorilla” and a few for “cuddly teddybear” if you have a page about cuddly toy animals.

Ultimately, search engines like Google want to give the best results they can to searchers so write web pages with a decent amount of textual content and a decent number of variations of your chosen keywords. Remember to keep your web copy reading naturally and take the opportunity of using alt tags for images to provide variations. Apart from the advice on alt tags, you’d get the same advice if you took an evening class in essay writing or creative writing: like human readers, the search engines like well written text.

General SEO, Keywords

One of the often repeated myths about Google PageRank is that these days it has no effect on the performance of a website in the SERPs. Today Google is supposed to treat content as king and in some ways this is true. Type a search phrase into Google and look at the results. As you go down from position 1 to 10 you’ll find that the PR of the sites in the better positions isn’t always higher than the PR of sites in the lower positions. Sometimes sites with a PR of 0 will outperform pages with PR 5 for a particular keyword. If you write a program to analyse the top 50 results though you’ll usually see a general trend towards lower PageRank values as you go further down the results.

With a little thought it should be pretty obvious that PageRank alone can’t determine the position of a website in the SERPs. Simply because two pages contain the same keywords and have the same pagerank doesn’t mean they’ll appear next to each other in the search results. Read my top 10 SEO factors post for more information on how non-PageRank factors affect the performance of a page in SERPs.

There is one way in which PageRank can have a BIG effect on the performance of a website though. Pages in the supplemental index are unlikely to turn up in the SERPs except for very obscure keywords. The best - if not the only - way of pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get backlinks from pages with decent PR. The higher the PR of the pages you can get links from the better. With smaller websites that have only 10 or 20 pages, a home page with a PR of 2 or 3 and a half-decent internal linking strategy, most of the site’s pages will be in Google’s main index.

However, with large database-driven sites that have thousands of pages, usually the only way of improving the performance of the site and pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get some high PR links to the homepage and to node pages within the site. Node pages are pages which link to lots of other pages in the site. In a site like a web directory, an example of a node page is a category page. For large sites, getting links from pages with PR 6 and above are ideal.

You can find the supplemental index ratio for a site using the site: command. First type the following into the Google search box to find the number of pages in Google’s main index for a website (replace www.dowebseo.com by the URL of the domain you want to examine). Note the number of results returned.

site:/www.dowebseo.com

Then type in:

site:www.dowebseo.com

and again note the number of results returned. The ratio of these numbers gives the supplemental index ratio for a site. For a large site with 30,000 pages and a homepage PR of 3 or less it’s fairly common to get a ratio of 0.075 meaning that less than 1% of the pages on the site regularly turn up in the SERPS. Getting some good links from high PR pages should pull more pages out of the supplemental index within a few weeks. For tips on link-building and ideas on where to find high PR pages, see link-building using dofollow blogs and link-building using dofollow forums.

General SEO, Google PageRank, Link-building

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

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