Search Engine Optimisation

Content is for PEOPLE not search engines

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:48:00 GMT

Not surprisingly everyone seems to be an expert in SEO. I will say that there are many brilliant people far more skilled than I in the area providing professional SEO services but there are also too many playing on the naiveté of the market. It is important to optimise your site around keywords drawn from research but I would issue a word of caution here. The content in your site is written for people to read!

Your website is a marketing tool that exists for the purpose of primarily converting visitors to business opportunity. As to how direct you make that conversion process will depend on a number of factors however, it is people who are reading your content and if your content fails to support your branding and lead to visit to an action then you are wasting your time.

Optimising page content is all about the degree of use of keywords and phrases within your page. It is also about how these same keywords and phrases are applied to hidden elements of your page content such as Meta tags. It is however about balance within that content written to be read by your site visitors. You must aim to optimise your content in such a way as to ensure that it reads well, provides information required by your visitors and totally supports your brand. It must market will promote the benefits and alleviate any concerns of your business.

Remember, at the end of the day, you never sell product or service. You are there to provide a solution to your customers' needs which invariably presents itself as a problem they have and seek a solution to. Be it a product or service that you offer; only when you can demonstrate that you have the solution to their problem will you have any chance of making a sale. You must ensure that you understand your market, its needs and concerns, and deliver a solution to this otherwise whatever you might say in your content is a waste of time and will only be seen as such by those visiting your site.

At the end of the day be sure you're optimised content also delivers on your marketing needs. This can only be achieved if those reading your content can make sense of it, can easily identify the messages you are trying to convey and that all such content is relevant to their needs. Achieving this invariably involves the use of skilled copywriters who not only understand how to write optimise content but also how to deliver clear and strong marketing messages that lead your visitors to a desired outcome by way of some action that you want them to take.

Getting to the top of page 1 on Google

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:21:00 GMT

A practical exercise in how you can get to page 1 ranking in the space of 3 weeks. I am posting this article to illustrate that you don't always have to wait months and spend a whole lot of effort to get to the top of search engine rankings. Carefully pick your subject matter, identify the best keywords and write the content in a way that it is optimised around those keywords.

I read an article that explained the core concepts of Google's algorithm for obtaining high rankings. It made good clear sense and I decided to write my own article with some additional material I had available. That was on the 28th June. Just 3 weeks later I happened to be doing a search and I keyed in both the search terms "Google's algorithm" and "Google ranking algorithm".

To my own great surprise I found my blog article showed up right at the top of Google's natural search results on page 1 at the 3rd position down.

Why am I not disappointed that I was at position #1? Well for 2 reasons.

a) The first 2 preceding positions were held by Google themselves which is what you might expect and b) I came ahead of SEOMOZ and Stanford University.

This was out of a total of 25 million results. Is this of use to me? Well some 4,400 people search on this term monthly and if I pick up a small fraction of those as click thru's then I have just improved my exposure to my market and increased my chance of picking up some new business.

Remember, in this game it is about picking up lots of small lead opportunities. I don't expect many of those 4,400 searchers to actually read my blog article let alone approach me for business but imagine if I pick up just 1 and I repeat this sort of process across another 20 key search areas. That is 20 possible leads a month.

It was also interesting that on searching for "google algorithm" I get a similar result but dropping 2 places.

What does this show us and what are the lesson's to be learnt?

Choose your keywords very carefully
Research your topic, the market's level of interest
Write original content
Optimise that content around the keywords you have selected.
Repeat the process on other areas

You can achieve the same in your own business. It is not about direct selling. It is abut establishing your credentials as the expert on a subject matter and drawing traffic. Lastly, repeat the process and then review the results.

I will add this footnote. Be careful when people say they will get you Page 1 ranking or if they are bragging about have page 1 ranking. Your first reaction must immediately be to ask - "On what search term?". This will separate the sheep from the billy goats.

Google's Search Engine Ranking Algorithm

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:37:00 GMT

Google are very smart about their search engine. Everyone is trying to get to the top of the search results and everyone says they know how to do it yet Google keep the algorithm behind it all about as secret to the formula for Coca-Cola. And why would it not be - it is after all patented.

Very few organisations really know the whole truth and no sooner than you might know it than Google will change the algorithm. They have to in order to deliver more meaningful results and deal with all the “black hat” techniques used into fooling the search engines.

This is not to say that us mere mortals cannot be successful at improving web site rankings in the search results it is just that it is an ever persistent activity you have to keep working at and keeping abreast of the general principals of being successful.

I would say that not a month goes by that I don’t hear of what is Google’s current approach to their search engine algorithm. How much is truth and how much is conjecture I can’t be certain but there however some general principals that one can follow and still gain considerable success. As to how you implement the initiatives to deliver to these principals is another matter.

In understanding the basic principals of Google’s Ranking Algorithm however will go a long way towards what you can do as a web master or website owner to improve your search engine ranking for your website.

While reading CopyBlogger I came across an article which discussed the components of Google’s search engine ranking algorithm – the basis of how Google decides on where and when to rank a certain webpage.

In this article I have also included 2 charts that were provided by SEOMoz. SEOMoz is a great source of information on various SEO tactics.

So what is important? The answer (for today but I will come back to that) is shown below in the following graphic. So what does this all mean? Read on and you will understand what each component means.

I must say here and now, I do not know the basis of these results by way of any kind of testing or experimentation SEOMoz conducted to establish these result however (for the most part) it reflects what my understanding has always been and further corroborates the general opinions I hear from SEO “experts” whose opinions I respect.

So what do each of these sectors represent or mean?

1. Domain authority: This is by far the most important variable in the ranking algorithm. If you have a trusted domain with a lot of visitors, content pages and inbound links, you can actually get a junky, unimportant page to rank for very competitive terms. In essence you can actually beat many other low authority websites using this technique even if they have spent a lot more optimizing that page for the search engines. It is for this reason that Wikipedia ranks between position 1 and 3 for extremely competitive generic keyword phrases which other companies would spend thousands to rank for.

The lesson here is that Google loves long-term assets. If you can somehow turn your website into an authority domain, you can rank at the top of Google for very competitive phrases without a lot of effort. The problem however is the time and energy it takes to develop an authority domain.

2. Link popularity of the page: By this we mean the quality AND the quantity of inbound links to that page. You can have thousands of junky links to a page but it will never help in the long-run. The idea here is to strike a balance between link popularity and link quality. Many successful SEOs can manipulate this factor (and the factor mentioned below) in order to get ranked for competitive terms. New webmasters usually have a hard time attending to this point properly either because they use too many junky links or they do not vary their anchor text a lot (among other factors).

3. External anchors to the page: This is the third most important factor. You can optimize the web-page for as many terms as you want but unless you get the right anchors from quality sources, you will never rank for your keyword term. Why? Simply because Google does not know where to rank you unless you have anchored links coming into your page.

4. On-page keyword usage: I must admit, this is not always easy. To write a page of content that has high utilisation of a series of keywords and keyphrases and still make sense to the reader. Interestingly, I have seen many webpages ranking for keywords which were not even mentioned on that page. As a guide and if you want to play it safe and cover all bases, aim for a keyword density of 1%-2.5% and limit the number of keywords you are optimising on in each page.

5. Registration & hosting data: By this they mean the domain registration stats. A domain which is registered for 10 years might be weighted more by Google because spammers will NEVER register a domain for more than a year. Also, .info domains might be devalued and find it harder to rank because they are cheap to buy and have been exploited by spammers. With the price of domains these days this however has less significance than it used to if at all. By the hosting data they might been the bandwidth, the down-time of the website as well as any bottlenecks while accessing the website. So in essence, there are many different factors to look out for.

6. Traffic & click-through data: there is a good argument that this component deserves needs more weight. I say that because I have seen many websites ranking between position 2 and 5 for competitive keyword terms however the problem was, the info on them was not targeted which led to visitors instantly hitting the back button on their browser. The result? Those websites now rank #100-150. I feel that a horrible score on this factor can lead to a quick decrease in rankings even if all the other factors are adequately catered to. So make sure that you get good traffic and that you have a low BOUNCE% for your site.

7. Social graph metrics: Google is slowly (but surely) incorporating the social aspects into the ranking algorithm although my personal opinion is that with all the spam in the social sites this may change. Until then, it means that you need to start using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and websites like Digg, Propeller etc to gain traction for your content. Google knows when your content is liked by the masses and will give you a boost in rankings when that happens. The sad part is, I have only just started using this factor to my benefit as it takes much more time and the results are a little uncertain.

If you want your webpage to rank high, you have to do much more than what most people do. SEO takes time but it can give you free traffic if you do it right.

Now I did say in the beginning something about this being the algorithm for today right? Take a look at the following chart which plots the relevance of the above factors over time. This illustrates my earlier comment about Google changing the algorithm. So whatever we do today and where we put our effort might be a good idea now but tomorrow it may all prove to be a waste of time and effort. I will admit however that the chart is a little old and today you would probably have to say that social metrics are on an ever increasing curve (for today…)

So just how important is your PageRank?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:57:00 GMT

So just how important is PageRank?

Let me firstly say that PageRank (PR) is not the be all and end all to your SEO objectives and secondly this is a Google only scoring facility for web pages. That aside, you should aim to get as good PR score for your web pages and to be sure that you don’t give your PR score away unnecessarily.

You must understand that it is the web page that gets the PR score – not your web site and more PR is better then less PR. You can still rank in search engine results with a low or zero PR score but with a higher PR score your suture for search engine results will be improved.

How do you get a PR score? Quite simply it is followed links that determine your PR score and how you set those links will impact how your PR score is shared around.

Your PR score is determined by Google examining the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ links that exist on your site. In simple terms, when someone links to your site they ‘push’ a portion of their PR score to your page if they have a followed link to your page. You can also look at this as you ‘pulling’ PR score from them. Similarly when you link to some other page you are ‘pushing’ your page’s PR score to those pages. This includes pages internal to your site as much as it refers to external links.

Simple? Yes it is but let us look at what this all means. Receiving links to your site as backlinks is paramount to good optimisation of your site and this therefore is what we are after. Preferably we want get links form pages that have a good PR score already and the fewer links from that page the better.

Now here is the rub! Every time you have a link to another page you give away a portion of your PR score to the other site. Your score doesn’t diminish but you share that score evenly across all pages to which you link. For instance, if you currently link to 4 other pages then each link receives 25% of your score however if you now link to 5 pages then each link only receives 20% of your score.

This is why we want to limit the number of outbound links you have and more importantly why you want to obtain inbound links from pages with a good PR score and few outbound links from that same page.

SO you are still with me? We need to manage who we link to and who links to us to obtain the best PR score for our pages. The disciplines of this are the subject of another blog I will write for another time.

What we do need to watch and to make use of ourselves is a neat trick around the use of NOFOLLOW. You may recall earlier I mentioned ‘followed’ links form other pages to your page. HTML code supports an attribute you can set on any hyperlink known as NOFOLLOW. Now before you run off because we are talking technical I will ask that you stick with me because understanding this is significant to all your hard work or all the money you may be paying to someone to supposedly create backlinks for you in optimising your site. NOFOLLOW is a powerful feature that tells the Google search engine that a hyperlink should NOT influence the target’s page ranking in the Google index. And guess what. Many of those blogs you have inserted comments in to build your backlinks and improve your PR have NOFOLLOW set on the link to your site so you are not getting any PR benefit at all.

With good use of the NOFOLLOW attribute you are able to ensure that you only share your PR score with those worthy of receiving it. You still have the ability to link to them but you now control who you share your PR score with. More importantly be sure that as I pointed out above, sites with whom you share links under some form of reciprocal arrangement do not set NOFOLLOW on their hyperlinks back to you, particularly when you are sharing your PR with them.

For the technically savvy, a nofollowed link looks like this:

<a href=”/yourpage.html” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text Here</a>

Effectively applying keywords and keyphrases to your content

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:57:00 GMT

Selecting the right keywords for your web site optimisation will be critical to the success of your site being found by the correct market segments. When defining your internet marketing campaign it is most important that you have clearly defined your market position, your market segments and your product alignment strategies. Only after you have completed this should you research your keywords. This article does not attempt to keywords research – this is covered a future article. For now we assume you have found the keywords that work best to your internet marketing strategy.

You should have 2 or 3 key search phrases and possible 10 or so other related keywords. These will have been determined form statistics on search engine trends around your products and market. You now need to determine where you can make best use of these throughout the content of your pages.

Each page that you are optimising will require you to identify the keywords and phrases appropriate to that page. This is important to understand – you optimise each key page in your site, sometimes refwerred to as "landing pages". Most commonly people optimise their home page and then possibly the top level page for their products or services.

Search engines consider words that appear in the page heading and sub headings to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some developers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a mistake. Make sure your developer specifically defines these H1, H2 and H3 tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)

Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You should not artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it. Other places you might consider including keywords would be in ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags, though few search engines give these much if any weight. Google also pays attention to your last paragraph in any page so once again be sure to include your key search phrases and keywords within the last paragraph of text.

Search engines are always on the lookout for indicators to the focus of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as “internet-marketing.htm” - another clue for the search engine.