SEO Tips & Information

Whenever you ask for advice on SEO for a website, the main advice you get given on webmaster and SEO forums is to keep building links. This is usually closely followed by advice to keep adding fresh content. Link building is an essential part of SEO - having great content is good but nothing beats a nice set of links from high PR pages.

As far as adding new content regularly, if your site ISN’T a blog, I’ve never found that adding lots of fresh content has significantly improved the site’s ultimate performance in SERPs.

What I mean is that if your site is selling a particular product or service it’s usually optimised for a specific set of keywords. If I have a page optimised for a specific keyword then the performance of that page in SERPs doesn’t seem to improve a great deal just because I add extra pages to my site on a similar topic. The extra pages might start to do well for the keywords they target but the older pages on my site remain pretty static in SERPs unless I go and get more incoming backlinks. The hard part about adding new pages is to make the pages work as well as your existing pages. After all there’s likely to only be a smallish set of keywords that are worth attacking in SERPs.

I’ve come across some people who were a bit overkeen on adding new content to their websites. I’ve seen sites almost turned into article directories where they add a new page containing a short article every couple of days. As more and more articles get added, the article contents gets increasingly irrelevant to the main topic of the site. The articles will pick up long-tail traffic but the traffic will be mainly junk as the visitors will land on a page with little relation to the main purpose of the site. Some people put in more effort and try to write more and more  landing pages for different keywords. Often they end up falling into the same trap as the pseudo-article directory approach, the keywords on each page get less and less relevant and although the number of visitors increases, the visitors are less and less likely to stay on the site and buy the goods on offer.

Some tactics for adding fresh content can have a negative effect on SEO and should be avoided. Never be tempted to add a directory (like a PHPLd directory) to your site expecting that as people submit listings your content will grow and improve your SERPs performance. Directories are unlikely to be looked on favourably by Google.

In most of my site’s niches my main competitors have very static sites with homepages that change very infrequently - sometimes not for months. This doesn’t seem to harm them and their position in SERPs is very stable.

Of course, regularly adding fresh content (new pages or additional or altered text on existing pages) does have advantages. If your site is updated often, Google will reindex your site more often, meaning that any changes you make will be reflected in the SERPS more quickly. For example, if Google reindexes your homepage every day, you can try out a new title tag with new keywords one day and see how you do in the search results the day after. If Google only reindexes your site every couple of weeks, you’ll only be able to see the effect on SERPs of a change once every two weeks.

So, does adding fresh content improve SERPs performance? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and “maybe”. Yes, fresh content helps if you have a blog and you just want to attract visitors and readers - who might be tempted to click on some nicely placed Adsense. If your site is selling a product, if the new content is highly relevant to the product and written to encourages sales, fresh content is very useful. It can be a lot of effort to come up with great new content though. Don’t worry though if you can’t keep coming up with new content, your old content will still keep on working for you.

General SEO, Keywords, Link-building

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

Google provides a really handy keyword tool to help find search volumes each month for specific keywords. The most obvious use of the tool is to find the best keywords to optimise your website for. All you need do is type in a possible keyword, e.g. “small business software” that you think people will search for then press the Get Keyword Ideas button to get a list of volumes for your keyword plus similar variations. Often you’ll find that the variations will have higher traffic volumes than the one you originally entered.

By picking keywords with higher traffic volumes, the theory is that you will get more visitors to your sites. In practice though, high volume keywords often have a lot of competition and getting your site into the coveted Google page one of SERPs can be difficult. The trick is to pick keywords which have a reasonable balance between search volumes and competitiveness so that you can get a decent amount of traffic without doing too much optimisation such as link-building. Finding this balance between search engine traffic and competitiveness is quite a difficult exercise. Although the Google Adwords Keyword Tool gives good figures for search volumes, it only gives a very rough guide to the level of competition. See the picture below: you get a nice number for the number of searches but only a roughly-scaled green bar for competitiveness.

A second use of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is as a research tool when thinking of a new market or product to attack. For example if you were thinking of designing a new fishing float and wanted to see how big the potential market was, you could look at the search volumes for words like “fishing float”. If the search volumes are low this can tell you either that the market is very small or that running a business selling ONLY fishing floats will be very difficult. Only recently, I’ve been asked for advice on internet marketing by a company who had invested thousands in developing a product for which there was no significant market. The product is excellent and worth patenting but with a little research it’s obvious that they need to develop a whole range of matching products to have a viable business.

Keywords

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