Nick and James explain the basics of sitemaps and how to generate search friendly sitemaps online, both XML and HTML.

Nick and James explain  the basics of internal / onsite SEO as a follow up to their keyword selection video. You can visit our youtube channel to view all our videos at http://www.youtube.com/crearecomm and if your interested in web design then check out our web design video blog http://www.youtube.com/crearegroup.

Firstly, it should tell customers exactly what your company does and secondly, it should show them exactly how they could purchase your products and services online.
It is also essential that you are aware of how you can market your site effectively, making it visible to your customers in the search engines.

Online developments, particularly in relation to search engines such as Google, have meant that there is now a wide range of ways that businesses can implement a successful marketing campaign, using a variety of techniques.

Through Google’s Universal Search, consumers can search using particular specifications including, videos, articles, reviews and forums. This could potentially attract a wider audience to your site, boosting ranking in the search engines and increase your companies business.

Creating videos about your business or related to the services that you offer, not only enables you to target a wider audience but it also offers a more personal, user-friendly service for the user.

Employing an SEO strategy to your site is one way of increasing its’ traffic, professional online marketing agencies could offer the best advice as to how you can get yourself noticed online.

Search engines work in an honest and natural way. They reward those sites that have taken the time and effort to develop their web site and continue to do so through different forms of link building. This includes various forms of online content including article distribution, press releases and updating site content, as well as building links through directories, posts on forums and social media sites.

Because of the long process that reaching top positions on search engines takes, people have found that they could find ways to reach the top through unnatural link building now known in the trade as Black Hat SEO.

Spamdexing and unnatural link building means that initially the search engines recognise work is being done to help a site succeed until closer inspection. After recognising a website has been abusing the SEO system a site is then ‘sandboxed’. This refers to the childhood stage and as a site is trusted more by a search, they are then released and return to join the professional companies that have earned their listings.

It is compulsory for businesses to understand the detrimental effects that trying to cheat the system will have on a websites listings. Fortunately The Creare Group only ever use legitimate techniques for themselves and their customers and to achieve the listings they have for competitive phrases such as ‘web design’, they are proof that cheaters never prosper.

Preparation and checks would be next on the list.  A good angler would then check his equipment; rod, reel, line, float, weights, hook, bait and depending on the size of the fish, a landing net.  Next, the preparation of the water, to attract the fish, this would entail using a catapult to launch balls of fish bait to the selected target area. The next thing to prepare would be the type of hook you use (size) and also the strength (breaking strength) of the fishing line. For example it would be no good trying to catch a large fish with a small hook and a line to weak to hold it and the same principle would take affect for a small fish but in reverse.  When all preparations are in place the game or sport begins.

In many ways (SEO) link baiting is similar to this analogy where in-bound links are encouraged by preparation and hard work and maybe a little luck to entice the catch.  The next question should be what bait (bait linking) are at our disposal as a resource to lure in-bound links to a customers site. The following list could be used as a guide:

• Current news baiting - Continuous, up to date news on breaking topics with expert commentary on the topic, products and service.
• Controversial baiting - You can also say something controversial to generate discussion – introducing  debate into a topic that will  encourage  reasoned response. Check your facts and make sure you know what you are talking about or you’re going to get some serious reputation management issues to deal with.
• Resource baiting – Build authority by resources that are available to all, social media sites, directories, blog sites and create your own blogs or RSS feed. There are plenty of ways that can establish that you are an expert in your particular interest or have a knowledge that will help others to promote there product or service. And, in the process attract a whole bunch of links at the same time.
• Humor baiting- Write something funny about your industry or the people in it. Everybody needs a good laugh now and then, it alleviates stress and helps bring approachability. A little self-deprecation is great to show people you don’t really take yourself too seriously. Create a site that is purely for fun and allow the links to flow in
• Ego baiting. Create a site that allows other bloggers with a voice to express their ideas by offering them significant exposure.

To summarize Link bait - Link baiting simply put, is content that is interesting, useful, funny or otherwise so outstanding that it becomes alluring to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. It’s a good way of improving your site’s inbound links and therefore it’s value in the eyes of search engines.

So, how do you write effective web copy?

The very first thing you need to do before you put pen to paper or fingers to keys is find out your target audience. Now, if you have an established business you probably know something about your target audience already. However, if this is your first or only attempt at marketing you will benefit from asking yourself these questions.

• Are the people you want to target easy to reach?
• Can they be converted easily?
• Do you have a ‘list’ of them? – An association, club, support group etc.
• Are there large enough numbers of them to make your efforts worthwhile?
• Can you solve their problems effectively
• Do enough of them want their problems solved
• Can they pay you for your services?

By answering these questions you will soon start to get a picture in your mind as to who your target audience is. You will start to understand how you can convert them into customers, and where to go to find them.

There are many books, websites and other information, about finding your target audience, so I would suggest you do a lot of more thorough research before you launch yourself into writing your copy.

So, once you have your target audience nailed you can begin writing. As mentioned above, you need to write specifically for your target audience. Use the kind of language they use. Find out about the kinds of places they go for information. Is there an industry governing body and how do they write or ‘speak’ to their members?

Keyword Research

Again, this is a massive subject that has been covered many times, in far more detail than I am going to cover here. We have written about keywords before, here, and here…

But to get to the point of it you need to choose effective keywords. These are the ones your target audience would use to search for your products or services. This is why it is important to know your target audience first. Once you have selected your keywords you will be ready to write your copy.

Use the Inverted Pyramid

This is a metaphor used to illustrate how your information should be presented within your copy.

The top of the inverted pyramid is the largest part of is, this is your most important and interesting information. Your least important information should be close to the end, but not quite at the very end… We’ll get to that later…

This is a good way of writing online because your readers can leave the story at anytime, and still understand what has been said. They can go back for further information if they need to.

Break Your Copy Up

Use effective headings to pull your audience in, and entice them to read further. This is really very important, as a huge block of text will probably put off your potential customers before they get a chance to read what you have to say.

For SEO, it is important to put your chosen keywords in headings, as search engines place more importance to words in headings. For your readers, it is also important because they have used those words to search for you.

Put your keywords in <strong> tags

This again, tells the search engine that you are putting more emphasis on these words. It makes them stand out, and your readers will home in on them as they scan the text. So, this will help them to know instantly what the page is about, without them having to read it. This will help them decide whether or not to read on.

Call to Arms!

Make sure you end your copy with a clear, compelling call to arms. Tell your readers exactly what you want them to do. This could be to download some information, call you for further information, buy something etc. The call to arms, is incredibly important for conversion, so never leave it out.

So there you are… Writing for the web is difficult, but highly rewarding. When you gain high positions in the search engines, it is usually down the the quality of your copy. When you convert your visitors into customers, it is largely due to the copy on your site.

StoryRank basically is the value and strenght of an article which may feature on your website / RSS feed and be accepted into Google news.

So how would Google use this information?

Consider that your site is of high quality and the design reflects your industry and is usable etc. This means that users will not bounce away from your site, spend time looking at the rest of your site and also read the content increasing time on site. This then suggests to Google and other search engines that your site provide a good user experience. Google’s policy is to ensure the users search query returns the best result, so by providing a good quality site it is forfilling its promise.

This will then be directly related to your SERP. The other situation is that your sites design, usability and content is poor meaning users don’t want to remain on your site and will not spend anytime on the site.

Consideration for your target audience is vital within an online marketing campaign and listings aren’t everything, If the site isn’t up to scratch then Google will see the users opinions through the variables stated and the strenght of you site will be effected.

What have you done wrong?

Well, this is a problem that we often encounter. People do the right things for their sites, but leave out one or two vital pieces of the puzzle that makes the difference between and successful site and an unsuccessful one. A common mistake is submitting their site to the search engines that they want to list for.

Sometimes search engines need to have someone come to them and wave a flag and shout “Hey! Come here and look at the site I have made and have put on the Internet!” as you cant rely on them to pick up your site automatically.

So, how is this accomplished? Well, lets take Google for example. With Google, using their Webmaster Tools, you can create an XML sitemap and submit it to them for them to take a look at. This allows them to index your site, normally in a matter of hours. Other search engines use different methods. For MSN for example, you can go to http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx to submit your site.  For Yahoo you could use http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/free/request

These actions don’t guarantee that your site will work, but it is definitely good practice to submit them anyway.  They could potentially bring an increase in business from the very moment your site goes live.
And isn’t that worth it?

YouTube Channel = http://www.youtube.com/crearecomm

Script:

Nick: Hi and welcome to ‘what are meta tags’, my name is Nick and I am currently an SEO developer for Creare Communications, I am joined by my colleague James who is a web designer also from creare.

James: Hello

Nick: We intend to discuss the SEO, design and marketing aspects of Meta Tags.

Nick: The META element provides metadata such as a document’s keywords, description, and author. Any number of META elements may be contained in the <head> of a document.

James: So, Meta tags have various purposes, today we often see them used by SEO companies to promote keywords behind the scenes of a website. But from a design point of view, clients can often see their meta description in the Search Engine results page or SERP . This means it is important that they are legible and most importantly that they make sense.

Nick: This is an important point because often bespoke content management systems are sometimes designed to generate meta keyword and meta description tags automatically from a page titles, tags or similar, This often means that they make little sense and are not user or search friendly.

Nick: Historically Meta tags used to hold a lot of weight and were vital for internal optimisation, it was exploited by optimisers and Google had to evolve their algorithm as to prevent this from happening, Google now takes into consideration a wide range of different variables designed to keep optimisers guessing.

James: Although we are saying that meta data is no longer a vital SEO asset, we still believe its worth adding them in for alternatives to Google and as previously mentioned the description tag is shown in the search results by all search engines including Google, meaning you can use this opportunity to connect with your user and write something to attract people to click your listing.

James: We like to traditionally use the following tags:
<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” /> - <meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” /> -
<meta name=”description” content=”" /> -<meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> 
<meta name=”author” content=” ” /> - <meta name=”copyright” content=”" />

Nick: So lets concentrate on the 2 most important tags, the meta keyword and meta description tag.

James: The Keywords tag is traditionally a list of keywords that you want your site to appear for in a search query.

Nick: I think the most important aspect to consider when writing a keyword tag is to be consistent with the rest of the internal optimisation on your site, so the search engine can see that your content reflects your chosen keywords.

James: As an example is we wanted to optimise for
•    air conditioning
•    commercial air conditioning
•    conditioning maintenance
You would separate each phrases and word with a comma as shown.
“Air conditioning, Commercial Air Conditioning, Air Conditioning Maintenance, Air, Conditioning, Maintenance, Commercial”

Nick: The description tag is similar, it will include all your key words but you also have to consider the way it reads and whether it catches the publics imagination. I would suggest that you include your clients company name and even the area that they are based in the meta description, This was users can immediately see whether the company fits their needs and location.

For example is you were to use the air conditioning keywords mentioned before you would write something like:
“’Your Company Name’ provides commercial air conditioning solutions throughout the UK, We also provide a maintenance and repair service for any air conditioning units that we supply.”

James: Despite the fact they no longer hold the weight as they previously did, they should not be overlooked. Any respectable web design or Search Engine Optimisation company should use meta data to its full potential.

Nick: We will be releasing similar videos in weeks to come both on Web design and Search Engine Optimisation. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or Subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com/crearecomm. Thanks For Watching.

With this in mind, its vital that designers and seo consultants work together to ensure that the site is both seo compliant and attractive and easy to use for visitors. Some things to consider when making a site usable would be the following:-

Navigation-Is it easy to use? Can you find all the buttons? Is it the same on each page?

Colour Scheme-Are you blinded by the display of luminous pinks and greens? If you are, so are your users. Yes it might be eye catching, but if there’s a chance you could permanently blind everyone who comes to your site, why do it? Show some restraint in your colour choices.

Content-Is the content on your site up to scratch? There’s no point advertising your site as having information that the user wants, only for them to come there and find that there’s nothing useful there at all. Make sure your content is relevant and useful.

Link Destination?-Make sure that all of the links on your site take the user to the advertised section. Leading users on a magical mystery tour of the internet is unlikely to get you much sympathy. Make sure your links take the user where they want to go.

These are simple points, ones that we can all make sure that we are following, but if you want to make the user experience of your site a pleasant one, AND keep them on your page, then they all have to be considered.

Things to look for:

• ? marks in URL’s, This means that the page is a DB (database) query and can often restrict the performance of your site, Google and other major search engines do not rank these types of pages very highly. This can be fixed by converting them to permalinked (SEO friendly) extension. Most developers would provide this functionality, but otherwise it may have to be a rebuild.
• Automated Meta Data & Page Titles, If your site automatically generates Meta data via a CMS (content management system) it can often cause issues, Search engines will see them as unusable and not accurate. This can also be fixed via certain development techniques.
• Domain Age, if you have a brand new site and you want to optimise for a hugely competitive phrase you can often run the risk of the ’sandbox’. If Google thinks a site has been unnatural with its development and growth (i.e. an SEO company building pages and links) you can be removed from the search results. The older the domain the better, but nothing is impossible you just have to consider the time scales.
• Flash Websites, flash websites can look great but the content will not be correctly read by search engines, you firstly have to ensure that your flash website is coded properly and that google can find a text based version of your site, otherwise it will not find anything. Also flash websites are usually based on 1 page, meaning as far as Google can see your site has no depth or additional content.
• Frames, if you have a HTML site (not flash) and you browse through your site you can usually see the URL extension changing as you go, if it remains the root URL on everypage, the site has been set up using frames and the search engine will not be able to define your specified sitemap.
• Domain names, A keyword rich domain name is great, but a domain that is 100 characters long full of keywords isn’t.

When deciding on the ranking of a website, the amount of links coming into a site is a major factor that influences the decision that Google makes.
So, how does this work in practice? When Google uses its robots to check through the websites on the internet, it recognises links on the sites pointing to other web pages. As an example, say you put a link on your website to www.crearecommunications.co.uk .

When Google checks the sites it would notice this link and would see this link as a “vote” for this site. Simply put, the more “votes” a site has, the more relevant it is seen as, and the higher the page ranking. This is a fairly simplistic view, as there are other factors to consider, but it still holds true.
So, are all these “votes” given the same weight by Google? The simple answer is no. Links from sites that have a high ranking are deemed to have more influence. A link from www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk (a page rank of 4) to www.crearecommunications.co.uk  would not be given as much weight as a link from www.bbc.co.uk (a page rank of 9) for example.

From this you can see that the link system does have to take vote strength into account. The number of links coming into a site can still be a good indicator of the relevance of a particular page, but its important to consider that one hundred low quality links to a site may not have the same influence as one or two very high quality ones.

So, when embarking upon a programme of search engine optimisation, take these factors into account if you wish to give your site the best start possible.

The new features are designed to allow users to refine their search query, it is displayed in a ‘tool belt’ fashion down the left hand side of the search results. You can find this by clicking the ’show options’ link underneath the search box (shown Below).

Once you have clicked the ’show options’ link you get this array of options.

Lets break down each search refinement and look how the search results change according to the selection. We will use the example ‘web design’ to be consistent with query above, also we at Creare are quite familiar with the results for this search query, so it should give us a good indication to what the new options achieve for a user.

1.) Video Options

You can see that once you have selected the videos option you are then faced with 2 additional sections, ‘All durations’ and ‘Any Time’ these are designed to further refine your search and are pretty much self explanatory. As you can see the search results now only displays videos, on the first page the results include: youtube.com, Google.com, viddler.com and 5min.com.

2.) Forum Results

The forum results display communities and forums discussing web design, this is excellent for users. For example if you query ‘web design’ 75 % of the results on page 1 are companies selling web design services, Not everyone that searches for ‘web design’ actually wants to buy a website. This forum feature helps refine a users search.

3.) Reviews

I have used this feature already with a reasonable amount of success and will be used to find products, maybe not as relevant for services such as ‘web design’ but I am sure this will be one of the most used features. The search also allows you to refine your search via a time scale, this is great as you will want the most up to date review about a service or product.

4.) Images Only

I personally like this function, to allow you to see images pulled from a website. As you can see on the search results, it shows examples of the work for the web design companies.

5.) More Text

This again is pretty self explanatory and as well as taking your meta description tag, it also recalls various sections of your website to show to the user what your site is all about. Is this a chance to add that little marketing spiel that could make a user click your search result.

6.) Related Search

When you click the related searches link you get a variety of links appear at the top, these are the search queries that Google thinks are related to the initial search query. Could this be a clue for key word selection?

7.) Wonder Wheel

Similar to the related searches option, it allows a user to see their query and how it is related to other search queries and as you start to click the results the results change, displaying on the right hand side of what is now a 3 column display. The wheel relocates as you click through various search queries, this allows you to see where you have come from and return easily to previous queries.

8.) Timeline

The timeline feature allows users to see the search traffic from various sections of time, this can be refined into the past 24 hours, weeks, months and years. As you can see the demand for ‘web design’ has increased in recent years in comparison to the 90’s. This excellent tools gives a range of information that can be applied to the search industry, it shows the pattern of a phrase over a period time and then lets you refine your search down to a year, month or even week, meaning you can find press from a specific time period.

Conclusion

I was trying to imagine the implications this may have on the search engine optimisation industry, I think from a user point of view the new features are great and obviously Google doesn’t particularly like SEO. I predict a reduction in traffic for general phrases, but potentially a better conversion rate as the visitors will be interested in the product or service you office.

References:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html

The first thing that you should do is ensure Google is aware that your site exists, you can do this by submitting your URL http://www.google.com/addurl.html, Then you need to help Google find all your content, Submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools is quick and easy and helps towards all of your pages being indexed. You can generate a sitemap by using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

2.)Design and Content

You should ensure you site can be found from internal linking, Google states that every page must be reachable from a static text link, This can be done via a sitemap in the footer of your template. Offer a sitemap page which links to every page within your site, Google will also look for something named sitemap.html or similar.

Create quality content that reflects what you are trying to optimise for, you cannot perform well in any search engine if you key phrases are not mentioned within the site. Use HTML formats to emphasis your key words.

Check for broken links and make the usability as easy as possible. Domain URL’s should be as search engine friendly as possible and DB queries do not perform as well as static html extensions. i.e. services.html.

Keep links to a minimum, Google states that less than a 100 is reasonable.

3.) Technical Guidelines

Make sure your site is as readable for the search engine spider as possible, you can use Lynx to see what your site looks like to a search engine. This is worth doing if you have frames, cookies, fancy functionality such as flash and javascript.

Make use of the robots.txt to tell Google’s spider which pages, directories and content it should or should not index. You can find more information about this here: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.

Test your site in multiple browsers so that your site is accessible to wide range of users.

4.) Quality Control

Do’s:

Make pages for users and not search engines, write copy naturally, not for search engine optimisation and do not cloak any information. Avoid link building schemes to increase your PR, build links honestly through link baiting and social networks.

Don’ts:

Avoid hiding text or links, do not cloak or use re-directs. Don’t use software to query Google and don’t create pages that are irrelevant to your main content. Avoid duplicate content, meaning don not create multiple sites or sub domains with the same content on.

So, how do you check that your site is compliant with the standards? We use a tool provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group that works to ensure the long term standards of sites on the web.

http://validator.w3.org/

This page offers some simple to use instructions on how to use the tool. By typing in the website address, the tool will automatically check the site to see if its coding is up to standard.  If there are problems, the tool helpfully shows you where the problem is in the code, and also gives some brief information on how to fix it. After you have altered the code, simply re run the checker to see if the site is now up to standard.
Once the site has been checked and approved, you can add the following icon to the bottom of the web page:-

to let people that visit your site, know that you have taken the time and the trouble to provide a site that fits all the requirements for now, and tomorrow, on the World Wide Web.

Google Analytics is a free service that is offered by Google that gives detailed and comprehensive statistics on the visitors to a given website. It is able to track visitors from all the different types of referrers such as search engines and links from other sites. Users are able to track where in the world the people who visit the site are from, what phrase they used to find the site etc. Google Analytics is also able to give users a fast insight into pages of the site that are not performing, allowing them to rectify the situation at an earlier stage rather than letting the issue become worse.

Google analytics is inserted into a website by using javascript code that is supplied by Google. This relatively simple process involves the placing of the information just before the last body tag on each page that you wish information to be gathered from. By using a separate line of code, it is also possible to see how many times a PDF file has been downloaded from a site. This can be useful for checking on the relevancy of information that is being provided to the public from a site.

While Google Analytics can be said to be highly accurate most of the time, there are some issues that highlight gaps in its abilities. Some programs, such as Firefox’s NoScript addon can block the tracking code. This can lead to inaccurate results, where more people may have visited a site than is being displayed. Users deleting or blocking cookies on their systems can also have a deleterious effect.

Therefore there is a need to make your site not only looks good and performs well for the visitor it also has to be search engine friendly. In the search for good factors that contribute to good SEO practise with search engine ranking algorithms (secret formula - that search engines use to determine results page and position ranking) the following list could be used.

1. HTML PAGE title. This is probably the most important factor in an internal SEO strategy. The unique HTML title is the first friendly port the ‘search engine robots’ (crawlers or spiders) analyze. Get this right and every individual page of your website will be indexed faster resulting in higher listing.
2. Visible HTML text on the page. Content, content and more content with quality keyword density (250 to 1000 words per page with 5% target keywords).
3. Inbound links. Good quality inbound links, the more the better (helps bring authority to the site, quality over quantity).
4. Anchor text that links text internally (on site) and externally (off site) directories, topical community and social book marking sites.
5. Age of Domain. The older the site the more authority or history it has.
6. Meta tags and image ALT tags (coding see * page source - download google toolbar for firefox) can also influence the ratings.

There are of course additional factors that can influence the rankings of a site. These factors would include careful analysis and specialist SEO strategy that use a variety of resources that take time and patience to implement.

This post on how to build a search engine optimisation friendly .htaccess file and is designed as a basic piece of good practice in SEO, which helps sites with duplicate content issues and means that links which are not 100% accurate are still rated by Google.

For Example. If you have links going to /index.php and not the root this can be interpreted as 2 different pages, I have seen sites with different Page Ranks on the root/ to the index/ page.

You can stop this happening by adding a .htaccess file or similar dependent on your host / server. The following code is designed for a linux apache server and is designed to revert the following:

1. domain.co.uk >> www.domain.co.uk
2. www.domain.co.uk/index.php >> www.domain.co.uk
3. domain.co.uk/index.php >> www.domain.co.uk

To do this you require 2 sections of code to be added to your .htacess file; The first adds the www. back onto the front of the domain.

So from domain.co.uk >> www.domain.co.uk

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [R,L]

The second removes the index.php;

So from www.domain.co.uk/index.php >> www.domain.co.uk

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

General good practice within SEO if often overlooked, please add any additional servers code in the comments.

Google describes PageRank as:-
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B”

What does this mean in practice? Value the importance of links!

Not only the number, but the quality of the links to your site are of importance. 20 links from a site may have nowhere near the importance of just one link coming from a page with a higher page rank of its own. As an example, a link coming from, say the BBC News website, would be seen as having more importance than a link from a newly made personal blog site.

So, don’t only think about getting links from everywhere you possibly can, spare some time to consider where the link is coming from. Is it worth it? Is it from a well known site?

The search engines have some crucial operations that let them provide useful and relevant web results when their users try to find information, services or products by using their search engine.

Crawling the World Wide Web

Search engines run automated programs, called ‘robots’ (sometimes shortened to ‘bots’) or ‘spiders’ that use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ the pages and documents that make up the web. It is impossible to work out exactly how many web pages there are but it’s somewhere around 20 billion according to some estimates, search engines have probably crawled just under half of these.

Indexing pages and documents

Once a page has been crawled the content it displays can then be “indexed”. Indexing is basically a giant database that stores all the documents that make up the search engine’s ‘index’. This index must be managed so that the search engine can search and sort through billions of documents in fractions of a second.

Processing Queries

When a user types a search query into the search engine, the search engine can retrieve this information from it’s index all the documents that match that query. The search engines determine the match by checking if the terms or phrases used for the query are in the document. This is why keywords are important, and the placement of keywords is even more important.

Ranking the Results

After the search engine has found which results are a match for the query, the search engine’s algorithm runs calculations on each result to find the most relevant for the query. The most relevant web page will be placed at the top, and it will run down from there. This way, users can choose the site they want to visit first.

Needless to say, this all happens in no time at all – type a search query and the search engine will come back with the results almost instantly. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion!

The most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) have some of the most complex systems for finding results. Their algorithms are closely guarded secrets, that constantly change and get developed.

By taking this information and using it to your advantage, you can see that the most important thing is to get your content right. This is what the search engines’ ‘read’ in order to index your site and then use to determine your search placement. By using the keywords that your target audience would use to find your services you can gain the types of traffic required to convert users into buyers. You may want to read Content Creation for seo purposes to get some useful starting points for writing your copy.

I was thinking for someone new to SEO that they probably wouldn’t easily dissect all the information, so i thought i would do it for you….

Firstly we will look at the first set of bullet points which discuss what an SEO can offer to a website:

• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

1.) Review of your site content or structure -

This to me means that your sitemap is clear and the content reflects your main area of business, it is impossible to advertise one product and try and optimise for another. Remeber the phrase ‘Content is King’. Make Google aware of your sitemaps, both HTML and XML.

2.) Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript

Often the basics to SEO get overlooked, your website should be as lean and as search engine friendly as possible, this means externally sourcing JavaScripts and CSS where possible. Redirects and error page are designed for usability for both a user and Google bot, meaning neither can get lost and remain on your website. Hosting on a UK server is often more important than some SEO think.

3.) Content development

Most of us know that Google likes to see the regular addition of fresh dynamic content to any website, it shows Google that your content is upto date and potentially more relevant to the user. Blogs and extra pages help towards this.

4.) Management of online business development campaigns

Not all SEO concerntrate on organic listing, some internet marketers manage various other online campaigns, this could even be PPC.

5.) Keyword research

There is no point having a 1000’s of visitors to your website if none of them convert into sales. keyword research and choice is vital to a successfully SEO campaign.

6.) SEO training

This to me means that SEO should teach all they can and help their clients understand the basic principles, that way the client can help themselves where possible. i.e links from suppliers / friends.. writing content or articles.

7.) Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

This relates quite closley to keyword research and it is best if you can show your client work you have done or achieved in a previous campaign that closley relates to your clients business will prove your expertise.

The rest of the page suggests how to look for a good SEO. But this page links quite nicely to Google’s Webmasters Guidelines :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Tune in next time for discussion on the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

When choosing a company to promote your business it can sometimes be complex to understand the technological jargon that is being spoken. Sometimes it is easier to ignore what is being said so long as your site is performing and creating new business for you.

So what are Meta tags, RSS and other terms that you are being told is improving your SEO?

Meta Tags; This may be a term that you as a customer hears a lot. “Were looking at your meta tags”, or “ We’re improving your meta tags”. This in lamest terms is a piece of coding that is hidden internally behind your web site. The user does not see it, however search engines such as Google does and picks up on this and displays this in your SERP (search engine result position).

Blog; Many people have heard of these ‘blogs’  but may not necessarily know what it does. A blog is shortened from web blog and is a form on Internet communication to inform browsers of new updates or information via an RSS feed. This improves SEO by showing search engine that your site is being updated with fresh regular content.

RSS; Really. Simple. Syndication.  This is an ideal XML format to share news updates and other web content. It saves building new pages to accommodate text and displays it all in one place. Ideal for companies that have a lot of new products or services they want to promote them to their users regularly.

Caching: You consultant may have told you they are waiting till your site is cached before they will know if their amendments have made any improvement. Basically caching is a computer process that stores you web files to you computer for later access. So if changes are made, the next time it is cached the search engines will make notice and possibly re rank your site. The cached version of your site shows the last time a search engine indexed your site.

There are many other terms that are thrown around within an SEO department and all of them, fortunately, make sense to the consultants working to improve your web site. It can be frustrating to not understand some jargon that has become everyday language at The Creare Group, however we are more than happy to explain terminology and the ways in which this is beneficial to getting you to that all important top spot.

Who is your website aimed at?

Who is your target audience?

Unless you have clear and precise answers to these questions, you are setting yourself up for an almighty fall. When looking at what is your target audience, its vital to think about what types of words/phrases they are searching for.

Lets look at an example.

Jo wants to make a site selling plants online. First thing he might do, is narrow down the range of plants that he offers online. To get information about what things people are looking for online, he could use the following tool:-
http://www.google.co.uk/trends

This tool allows him to check what words people are searching for in a particular area of the world, at a particular time.

Jo finds that more and more people are searching for one specific type of plant, and decides that this is one of the phrases that he wants to target in his search engine optimisation.

This is a good start, but there are a lot of different variations in the name of the type of plant that Jo wants to optimise the site for. Which is the best one for him to pick?

This is where professional search engine optimisation consultants come in. Its our role to make sure that the keywords that a customer wants to use for their website are the most appropriate ones, and the most likely to bring in the revenue required. Costly mistakes in both time and money could occur without the benefit of professional advice, and we would always recommend that the words that a site is going to be optimised for, are discussed between both client and consultant. The last thing anyone wants to do is to put months of work into a site with little or no results.

Working with a reputable, and professional company, is the first step in achieving the results that you want for yourself, and we want to help you to achieve.

Obviously the main video network or search engine is youtube. This provides and ignites conversation regarding many different topics, I do feel however that the comment system on youtube should be monitored slightly better, i often see quite ignorant and insulting comments that don’t work towards a better social network spirit. However from a search engine point of view to see a video’s page change and regular content being added via comments, reviews and backward links will ensure that the video will perform in natural listing.

The basics in optimising your you tube video are:

• Relevant Title
• Add ‘Video’ into your title
• Add relevant Meta Data
• Get friends and colleagues to start conversation about the video
• Get your video rated
• Build backward links

You can also distribute your web site to other video sharing web sites, although these are generally smaller than youtube, they can still help to reach your target market.

List of video sharing sites:

Motion Box - http://www.motionbox.com

Blip TV - http://www.blip.tv/

Daily Motion - http://www.dailymotion.com/us

Flixya - http://www.flixya.com/

Guba - http://www.guba.com/

Jump Cut - http://www.jumpcut.com/

Metacafe - http://www.metacafe.com/

Ourmedia - http://www.ourmedia.org/

Revver - http://www.revver.com/

Veoh - http://www.veoh.com/

Vimeo - http://www.vimeo.com/

Yahoo Video - http://video.yahoo.com/

You are TV - http://www.youare.tv/

Ethics

It is important that anything you publish on the web is accessible to all users, this includes the hard of sight, hearing and non-mouse users. I have used talkr.com to automatically provides an audio version on the posts which are posted via this blog. It is easy to set up and install and well worth it.

Target Audience

If your site isn’t designed for all types of users you are narrowing the scale of your websites audience. There are lots of simple javascript text enlarger out there and can be installed to ensure that hard of sight or an elderly audience can use your website correctly by increase the text size. The other main point is to ensure that your site uses em’s as the font size, this allows software installed within browsers to easily increase the size of a websites font. (you can use cmd + and cmd - to increase and decrease the font size on this site).

Possible can be the law

Not so much in the UK, but in some states of America it can the law for large blue chip companies to have a user accessible website.

Now for the SEO benefits

Well its simple really, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are all trying to provide the user with very best result dependent on their search query, Now lets say there is a very relevant site that isn’t accessible to all types of users… It deserves to be there because of the quality of information it provides, but is let down by the build quality. This site may list well, but when a site with good content and good accessibility comes along it will lose its current listing. Google needs to future proof itself as the amount of variation in users increases. The last thing Google needs is a disabled friendly search engine taking its market share.

My advice, do all you can, look at your competitors and do some research. It is important now, but will become increasingly important in the future.

For best results in SEO you must start with a cleanly coded website. The search engine spiders will find it easier to crawl and index your site if the code is clean.

There are other benefits of validating your code, these include:

• Cross browser compatibility
• Increased accessibility
• Faster loading times

You will probably find your site will start to climb the rankings once you ensure the site complies with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards. It is important to check each page validates, and every new page you add to your website should be checked.

Validate your code

Use the W3C HTML validator to check your HTML code. The vaildator will give you prompts to help you fix any bugs it finds.

Use the W3C CSS validator to check your CSS. Again, the validator will help you fix any problems it finds.

By making sure your site validates for both HTML and CSS you are ‘future-proofing’ your site, ensuring long term success.

Many people believe that if they fill their web pages with keywords then they will ‘get to the top of Google’ – this simply isn’t true. You should ensure your keywords are placed in the correct HTML tags.

Use these guidelines to optimise your page:

• Place your keywords in the Title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta Keyword tag, and if applicable in the Alt tags.
• Place your keywords inside one h1 tag,  h2 tag and h3 tag.
• Ensure your keywords are in the first paragraph of the page – ideally this should be in the first 25 words.
• Place your keywords at the end of the page – ideally in the last 25 words.
• Make sure your keywords are in strong (bold) tags at least once on the page.
• Italicise your keywords at least once on the page.
• Put your keywords in lists.

By following these simple guidelines your site should not only read better than a page stuffed with keywords (and therefore be better at converting a browser into a customer) you are far more likely to get high rankings.

Content is, in my opinion, the most important part of Search Engine Optimisation. It is what your web visitors are looking for when they search for your site and it is what the search engines evaluate in order to rank your web site.  It is extremely important that you have excellent, compelling content on your web site. The quality of your content is directionally proportional to the likelihood of your site listing well, and more importantly, whether your potential customers are going to buy from you or employ your services.

•    Write for people NOT search engines

Search engines are machines, but they do know the difference between well written, naturally flowing text and awkward over-optimised drivel. More importantly, so do people, and people can choose to spend their money wherever they like, and if they don’t like the sound of your site they will certainly click elsewhere, and consequently end up buying from your competitors.

All the traffic in the world isn’t going to mean a thing if you’re site doesn’t make the conversion from traffic to sales, so if you have high traffic but low sales then the very best thing you can do is take a look at you’re text. Does it read well, do you make it clear what you want the consumer to do?

Make sure your content is structured with the reader in mind. Think of your site as a salesperson – albeit one that works incredibly hard - 24/7! But would you want your salesperson talking drivel to sell your products? Probably not, especially if it was all day every day. You need to answer any questions the potential customer may have regarding your product. List the benefits of your product, don’t get too slogany, give them facts and be reasonable. Ask yourself what concerns you may have if you were a consumer, and answer those questions. What is great about your product? How will it make a difference to people’s lives? By answering these types of questions you will be able to alleviate some of the concerns a potential customer may have regarding your product or service, this is guaranteed to increase your sales.

•    Keep the content current

Search engines like fresh content, so do returning visitors. Nobody likes visiting a ‘news’ page to find the last bit of ‘news’ was written in 2007. Current content is the key to maintaining listings and achieving high search engine rankings. There are many ways to achieve this, use RSS, write new content regularly, set up a forum on your site, and give your users a chance to interact with your site. It’ll pay off in the long run.

•    Avoid Duplicate content

Duplicate content is penalised by the search engines. More importantly, they don’t have the capabilities of determining who wrote the content first. To check if your site has duplicate content you can use this nifty tool copyscape to discover if your site has been copied. Copyscape give you advice on how to deal with duplicate content if you have become a victim of this.

Content written for the purposes of search engine optimisation, or SEO, is written to achieve organic rankings. Web sites with keyword-rich, naturally flowing, original content are judged by the search engines to be better web sites. By taking your content seriously (and I have had many a client who seem to think it just appears out of nowhere) you are taking your customers seriously. This could be the difference between getting sales and not getting sales, simple as that.

A final note: Check your spellings.

Online spell checker : http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm

Until very recently sitelinks were only visible on the first listings in the search page, meaning one set of links per query. This can be seen with our sister company;

Google has now introduced in-line sitelinks, meaning more than one result can have sitelinks, the sitelinks are limited up to 4 links.

The one site links have the same benefits as the original two column site links (but obviously on a smaller scale). Google uses an algorithm to determine the which links are show from the sites content / pages. It has been designed to increase the visablilty and traffic for webmasters while also improving the experience of the users. If you are a webmaster then you can restrict the a page appearing in Google’s sitelinks for up to 90 days via Google’s webmaster tools.

The use of an RSS aggregator will essencially pull your news / blog feed onto your PHP page and display the headings, dates, content, author, what ever you like really. Aggregators also have a very positive effect in terms of SEO. They will show the major search engines that your are adding fresh dynamic content to your site, providing the user with a better and more unique experience. It also means that search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN can index any new content more quickly.

My top 3 PHP RSS aggregators

1.) Simple Pie - www.simplepie.org
“SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, that puts the ’simple’ back into ‘really simple syndication’.” - Quote from simplepie.org

Simple pie is an excellent aggregator that includes just a single .inc file, this means it is pretty straight forward. It aggregates all variables within your RSS feed and is relativly easy to manipulate the way it looks on your page. I would say that using the online documentation is a must if you are a novice, as the zipped versions readme file isn’t great.

2.) Magpie RSS - http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
“MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS 0.9 through RSS 1.0. Also parses RSS 1.0’s modules, RSS 2.0, and Atom. (with a few exceptions)” - Quote from magpierss.sourceforge.net/

This is the first aggregator that i came across after installing the blog, it requires a few more files, i tend to stick them in a folder called ‘rss’ of whatever really. The feed works well, there is a delay with the updating the news, but only by an hour or so. Supports pretty good online.

3.) RSS Aggregator - www.rss-aggregator.com
“RSS-aggregator is a tool, for Webmaster, allowing to display several feeds RSS on a single page.” - Quote from rss-aggregator.com

The RSS aggregator uses magpie software, buy does so in a much more friendly way. If you are having trouble with simplepie or magipie then use RSS aggregator. It also makes aggregating multiple feeds easier.

If you have a blog attached to the back of a website i would recommend to source the feed on the homepage both for your users and search engines.

Lets start with a definition of what a basic meta tag is. A meta tag is a line of code on a website that shows certain information to the people who are looking at the page, and also to search engines that are trying to put the page in the correct place.

When looking at Search Engine Optimisation, the most important meta tag is :-

<meta name=”description” content=”A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here” />

An example of this that you might find on a website would be

<meta name=”description” content=” A Blogs plumbing offer a range of plumbing solutions in London and surrounding areas”/>

This information here would be visible when you search for a site in the SERP (search engine result positions).

If you typed “Air conditioning” into a search engine. Here’s an example of what you would see

The middle part here is the meta description. This short description shows what the company does, and what products they offer. Information like this makes it easy for search engine users to decide if they have found the site that they are looking for, as well as indicating to the search engine what the contents of the site are.

Other meta tags are also often incorporated into websites, giving the search engine different information. Examples of this can be :-

<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />
Shows the search engine that the site is to be available to anyone in the world to view.

<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” />
The content in this site does not contain adult information.

<meta name=”author” content=”Creare Communications ” />
The author of the page is the company mentioned.

If you want any more information regarding meta tags, simply drop us a comment.

So what do they say ?

• We as a company have a special relationship with Google or we are part of Google. WRONG! Google Adwords does not make you a Google affiliate.
• We can get you page 1 position 1 for your phrases and they will remain their forever. WRONG! PPC obviously only stays their for your set budget.
• Go on click your advert a thousand times, it won’t disappear! WRONG! If you click the same advert from one machine it only counts as one click, this is designed so that competitors can’t sit their clicking your listing all day. (if you think you may be involved with such a company, then ask 10 friends to click your listing and see if it remains)

So what do they do ?

• Target cheap uncompetitive key phrases on PPC (making them cheap to buy)
• Take a huge payment for the set up fee.
• Take a monthly budget, then put a set amount on Adwords, while they pocket the rest.
• Never send you reports of traffic, click through rate etc.

In essence this type of sales approach doesn’t say much for the integrity of the company saying and doing these things. It kind of like a solicitors saying that they have an affiliation or special relationship with the courts and that they can ensure that you win every case.

We had a client went with such a company and they took nearly £300 PCM for the single phrase ‘Leicester Locksmith’, can you image what the profit margin was on this campaign? I just logged into my Adwords account to get an estimate of cost and traffic. Check out the figures:

Estimated Avergare Cost Per Click - £0.00 - £2.05
Clicks per day - 0

The cost of 0 (Zero) clicks times by the average cost (lets take the upper bracket) £2.05 equals 0 (Zero).

0 x 2.05 = 0

Not a great ROI (return on investment) for the client and with no reports or communication how was he supposed to know what was going on? In the end we helped him as much as possible and he came to us with and continued his organic optimisation campaign.

I also read something on the same subject, which can be found here: http://www.oldwelshguy.co.uk/web-marketing/the-special-relationship-with-google-a-new-approach-to-selling-top-listings .

Losing clients is always sad and not a nice experience, but we have seen an increase in interest from old and new customers on how to get their most from their organic optimisation. Sometimes their organic optimisation can possible save the day and that web enquiry might just be enough to get through the tough times.

Super SEO

We have advised our clients to use all the techniques possible to self promote their sites, so when were not working on it, they are. This usually means your client will need to aquire a new skill. Setting your client up with free online marketing tools such as social networks is an excellent way for them to generate interest in their website.

What should we use to self promote?

The easiest method is to set up profiles on the following social networks.

• You Tube- Market your company, by optimising your videos.
• Facebook - An excellent opportunity for your friends and family to see your services! create a group, add an album, use your imagination…
• Twitter - Let all your followers know about new products and special offers you have on through these times of recession.
• Blog - We install blogs for article marketing purposes, but clients can also add related content.
• Myspace - Ask about, do you still have friends that use this platform? then create a profile for your company.

The list could be endless, if you look for a relevant social community, forum or blog to interact with im sure you will find it and you might start getting the odd enquiry.

Organic Optimisation

With people not physcally shopping and trying to save money, the use of internet to window shop has increased, often leading to that impulse buy and it was the optimisation that made that possible. SEO has kept both our revenue stream and our clients afloat over the last 12 months and we plan to continue to work hard and find new simple marketing techniques.

As the search engine algorithms constantly evolve more and more web site owners are losing their spots in the rankings as their competition becomes more competent on the technical side of SEO.

These tasks should be seen as stepping stones to a more advanced understanding of how search engine optimisation efforts can be enhanced.

1.    Robots.txt file
2.    Nofollow attribute
3.    Structure URLs correctly
4.    .htaccess file
5.    Mod_Rewrite
6.    Redirect non-www traffic to www
7.    Redirect with 301 redirects

1.    Robots.txt
One purpose of a robot.txt file is to prevent search engine spiders from consuming massive amounts of banwidth on your server. It can also prevent potential copyright infringements. A robot.txt file gives the search engine spiders information about which pages should be crawled and indexed and which should not. Without a robots.txt file, the search engine spiders will just assume that the entire site should be crawled and indexed.

If you sell copyrighted informational products or software on your site, then the search engines may be able to find and index your intellectual property without paying for it.  An Internet savvy user could then potentially download for free. By using a robots.txt file you can prevent this from happening. You can either stop the spiders from crawling and indexing the directory where your copyrighted product is located or you can disallow the search engines from indexing a particular file.

2.    Nofollow Attribute
Nofollow is applicable to hyperlinks, and informs search engines not to follow links. Linking to another web page can influence that page’s rankings, so if you want a link but don’t want to pass on any ‘link juice’ then use the Nofollow attribute. To apply the Nofollow attribute all you need do is attach rel=”nofollow” to the HTML anchor tag.

The Nofollow attribute was originally created to deter forms of web spamming especially comment spamming and guestbook spamming. Most blogs and guestbooks have the nofollow attribute on all their user-generated hyperlinks.
If you have many different themes within one site it is advisable to use the nofollow attribute when linking between differing topics as the search engines could see a disconnect between your pages and penalise you for it.

3.    Structure URLs correctly
By correctly structuring your URLs you may start to see an increase in both your rankings and the click-through rate. Start to insert relevant keywords into page URLs. Although the benefits of doing this aren’t as strong as they once were you should still structure your URLs in an organised, hierarchical manner. Both searchers and the search engines take URL structure into consideration when they make decisions about the relevancy of your web site.

4.    .htaccess file
An .htaccess file is a configuration file for the apache web sever. It’s purpose is to give you contro of the functionality of your server. It has many other uses, including rewriting your URLs and redirecting web traffic. It can enable you to password protect certain directories, ban visitors from certain sources, and preven bandwidth thft from image linkers. An .htaccess file is a simple text file and can be created in any simple text editor. It can be uploaded to the root directory of your server or any directories underneath it. An .htaccess file  uploaded to your images directory will take precedence over the root file. By taking full advantage of the .htaccess file you can prevent your hard work from being stolen or abused.

There is an excellent tool located at www.htaccesstools.com which allows you to generate a variety of different .htaccess code blocks. This tool can automatically generate .htaccess authentication code along with an encrypted .htpasswd file to password protect directories. You may want to protect your images with a customised .htaccess code to allow certain domains to use your images, as well as define a replacement image that appears instead of the actual image requested. This tool can also create .htaccess code to block unwanted robot traffic or traffic from certain IP addresses.

5.    Mod_Rewrite to Rewrite URLs
Mod_rewrite is an Apache Web server module. It enables you to redirect users from one URL to another without the user ever experiencing any indication that the redirect ever happened. It is used for dynamically generated web sites, made by content management systems.

To activate mod_rewrite add the txt RewriteEngine On to your web root directory’s .htaccess file.

Mod_Rewrite can be extremely complex and hard to use if you are not a skilled web programmer, Luckily there is an excellent free tool at http://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/.

6.    Redirect non-www traffic to www
You probably already know this, but you can visit most web sites by visiting www.example.com or example.com. Although the true location of the site is example.com, the most common naming is www.example.com/. Many search engines continue to index and rank both URL variations, which can cause various problems. Search engines can mistakenly penalise you for duplicate content and dilute your incoming links. This problem is often referred to as non-www / www canonical issue. You can redirect all of this traffic to one variation or the other to maintain search engine rankings and a good user experience.

This problem can easily be overcome by adding a small amount of code to your web root directory’s .htaccess file or set up a 301 redirect from example.com to www.example.com.

7.    Redirect with 301 redirects
There will ultimately come a time when you feel you need to redesign your website. Unfortunately search engines are not exactly friendly when you make web site changes. Suppose you want to move a page from the root to a new directory, if the search engines have already spidered and indexed your original URL and your web site visitors have bookmarked your page within their browsers bookmarks, you want to be sure that both your visitors and the search engine know that page has been moved. A 301 redirect can accomplish this task, so that both search engine spiders and web browsers automatically redirect to the new page. A 301 redirect will also preserve all of search engine ranking factors, which makes it extremely important and useful.

Whats the average rate?

Around 10% of new visitors to a site have found what they were looking for or make contact after using the site, we often see rather large bounce rates and for the bounce rate to be over 50% is not unusual.

If the time on site and bounce rate (measured through analytics) is extremely high there may well be something fundimentally wrong with your site i.e.

• Poorly Targeted Traffic
• Poor Usability
• Poor Content
• Poor Accessability
• Poor Design

Most web design and SEO tends to focus on the homepage, but it is important that the quality content on your site runs deep, constantly providing a user with a useful informative browsing experience. This often means that an SEO campaign is spread out across a website and that the optimised page is the correct landing page for the search query. All of which means that you are increasing the chance of conversions.

Where can i see an example?

The best modern example i have seen, which really considers what a user needs and how to get a successful conversion is the recently elected Barack Obama web site http://www.barackobama.com/index.php . The use of colours and wording is excellent and drives users to making a contribution with clever slogans like ‘Donate Now to make a difference’. He also marketed his site using social media (I touched on this in a recent article regarding the effectiveness of SMO (Social Media Optimisation) can be found here; http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news/social-media-marketing/social-media-optimisation-optimisation.html).

References:

Excellent article with further information about the Barack Obama online campaign can be found here: http://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/2008/07/23/6-lessons-we-can-learn-from-barack-obamas-online-marketing-strategy/

E-consultancy - Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice Guide.

There are a whole list of social bookmark sites out there. We have a list below, but with video communities, forums, micro-blogging and blogs, the chance to market your website is endless. Here are a few of the popular SMO’s that Creare use:

Face Book - http://www.facebook.com/

Facebook is a popular SMO site that allows you to populate your profile through adding content and friends from around the world. FaceBook.com is one of the highest traffic websites in the world and has pretty much replaced the phenomenon of myspace.com. Although, I still know people who use myspace for bands and artists, facebook provides an accessesible user-friendly way to share information with your friends and family remotely.

Twitter - http://twitter.com/home

Twitter is a free social networking service that allows you to micro-blog by sending small updates of up to 140 characters or fewer. All of the large SEO companies use this to promote their blog posts. I recently wrote an article about which SEO Twitters are worth following  http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news/micro-blogs/top-5-seo-twitters-worth-following.html

You Tube- http://www.youtube.com/

An excellent video sharing platform owned by Google that allows its users to upload view and share video clips, The addition of video clips is simple and can lead to a significant amount of exposure for your web site. Things to remember when using You Tube.

• Keyword rich titles
• Add Descriptions and Meta Tags
• Include ‘Video’ in your Title
• Link to your video
• Get users to view, comment and rate your video.

Sphinn - http://sphinn.com/

A social news web site designed around the search marketing field. You can use this social bookmark site to vote on content added to the site, allowing you to take part in online discussions. As you can see, we have a sphinn plug-in which allows users to vote for our blog posts from our site. The sphinn web site is an extension of the popular search engine marketing web site searchengineland.com.

Ensure that the technical on-site factors are well optimised. These are:

* File names
* Title tags
* Meta description tags
* Meta keywords tags

By doing this you are giving your site a helping hand from the very start of your SEO campaign.

You should also make good use of:

* Header tags
* Alt image tags
* Internal Linking

This will support your ongoing optimisation efforts. Whilst doing this make sure that you at least try to adhere to the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, as this will ensure your site is compatible across all the major web browsers.

File names

Choose correct file names for the pages within your site, as beside from the domain name this is the first thing that a search engine robot will discover when spidering through your site. Each page within your site is a different file, these can be written in HTML, PHP, ASP or any other web programming language. The file names should be a description of what the page is about, for example if the page is about search engine optimisation you may choose to call the file name ‘search-engine-optimisation.html’ or ‘searchengineoptimisation.html’ as this will give the search engines a clue, before they even open the file, as to what the page is about.

From an organisational point of view this also makes sense – if you have a site with hundreds of pages then how are you ever going to know what is in each page, if the file names are generic like, page1.html, page2html, and so on? It would be an incredibly difficult task to edit and update those pages.

Title Tags

The title tag is quite possibly the most important thing for you to consider when optimising your web pages for particular keywords. Search engines use the title tag text to determine what the page is about. The title tag is also the clickable link that typically appears on the search engine results page when your site appears on the rankings. For this reason it is very important that you not only take the search engine robots into consideration but also your human visitors too (which is after all who your site is intended for, right?).

You should limit your title tag to around 65 characters or fewer, as the search engines do not display more than this. As the title tag is shown to the user in the search engine results page you should try to make it compelling for searchers, but also keyword rich, which can be quite a difficult task. Another thing to consider is that your title tag should be closely related to the file name, as this reinforces what the page is about.

Meta Description Tags

Like the title tag, the Meta description tag is displayed on the search engine results page. The Meta description tag should contain a brief description of what your web page is about. In the past the Meta description tag has been used to stuff keywords in an attempt to trick the search engines into believing the page is more relevant than it really is. For this reason the search engines have advanced their ranking algorithms to such an extent that they don’t pay as much attention to Meta description tags as they once did. However, as the human visitors still see the meta description tag it is vitally important that you write it in a few compelling sentences to describe the page. Make sure the description is interesting enough for a potential site visitor to click on your link. As with the title tag your Meta description tag should be unique to each page to avoid duplicate content.

Meta Keywords Tags

This is now considered to be a largely redundant tag in optimisation. That is not to say you shouldn’t utilise it, as there is no knowing what benefits it may have in the future. The keyword description tag contains a list of keywords or phrases separated by commas, and should describe the subject matter of that particular page. Don’t be tempted to stuff as many keywords in there as possible as this can be seen as spamming by the search engines and your site will be penalised. Additionally, ensure each description tag is unique for each page.

Header Tags

HTML header tags can be used to apply significance to keywords or phrases within a webpage. By placing a selection of text within a header tag you are telling the search engine spiders that the text is of a certain level of importance. Search engine ranking algorithms place emphasis on header tag text when determining where the page should be ranked. The use of header tags is standard practice and should be viewed as a best-practice starting point. Header tags are organised in preset levels of importance, from h1 through to h6. Header tags can be used to organise the content of your webpage in hierarchical topics and subtopics. Don’t expect drastic increases in your rankings for keywords and phrases highlighted in header tags, but do try to use them wherever possible in your webpage wherever possible. This provides a service for both the search engines and your human visitors as it gives a visual emphasis of the importance of certain topics within your webpage.

Alt Image Tags

Some of your visitors cannot see images within your pages, so it is vitally important that you provide suitable alternative text for images. Search engine robots cannot see images either, and alt tags ensure that the robots understand what the image is about. Don’t be tempted to fill your alt tags with unnecessary keywords as they form a vital part of some visitors’ experience on your site. Those who use screen readers for example don’t want or need to hear a long list of spammy keywords every time they come across an image. You can use keywords if they are relevant to the image, and describe it correctly. Make sure that your alt tags make sense to a human before you publish them, as they are important for some web users.

Internal Linking

You should create an internal linking structure that allows search engine spiders and human visitors alike to navigate your site easily and quickly. Search engines use links to navigate the Internet, just like a human does. Although it can be difficult to control the links from outside your own website you can easily control the internal linking within your site. This may be a basic task, but it can be extremely influential to your overall search engine rankings. You should always ensure the link text (called anchor text) is descriptive. Use your keywords with anchor text and this will give the search engine robots a clue as to what the page is about.

Google, Yahoo and MSN will look for a sitemap page on your web site to allow their robots to crawl your website efficiently, the other option is to ping your site map to search engines webmaster tools.My recommendation would be to have both.

XML Sitemap Generator

There are various website which can generate sitemap for you, I like to use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ ,it is a free and extremely easy to use automatic generator, You simply add your website URL address and follow the simple online instructions. It then generates a XML sitemap that you can download to your computer. Remember that the priorty of the files within your website suggests to the search engines how important this page is and how much it is related to your content and SEO.

HTML Sitemap Generator

You can quite easily generate a manual version of this and it basically lists the pages within your site, a good tip is maybe to aggregate your RSS news feed on this page using something like simlepie or Magpie. This will mean it will update automatically. You can also use the XML sitemap generator mentioned above to create a HTML sitemap, simply download and upload to your server. It is recommended that you call you HTML sitemap something relevent, such as sitemap.html, sitemap.php etc, which will allow the search engines robots to find it easily.

TOP TIP

Getting a site fully indexed is often overlooked in SEO, but it is recommended that you keep your sitemap as up to date as possible.

You need to find out who your online competition is. Do a quick search for your keywords (you know what keywords are, right?) and the top three websites are your competition (unless your site is in the top three… if this happens then do another search for a different keyword, and so on). Next, you need to find out how many backlinks your competition has, because if they can acquire them, then in theory, so should you be able to.

The easiest way to discover your competition’s backlinks is to go to yahoo.com and type in the search box linkdomain:http://www.yourcompetitionsdomain.com and Yahoo Site Explorer will list all the pages that link to that domain.

Quality Links
You should bear in mind that not all links are equal, some links have better “Link Juice” – the page they come from has a higher PageRank, and they are relevant. Relevancy is more important than PageRank. A link from an unrelated site with a PageRank of 10 isn’t going to be as useful to you as link from a relevant page with a PageRank of 7.

The age of the domain is also a factor that Google, in particular, seems to take into consideration. Visit www.domaintools.com, enter the competition’s domain in the whois lookup search box and click search. Scroll down to Registry Data and look for “Created” this will give you the date the domain was created. Generally an older domain will carry better “link juice” than a newer one.

Another great source of links are .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. Search engines know that educational and governmental websites don’t give away links to just anyone, so, in theory the links they do give will be of high quality and high relevancy.

An additional thing to consider when examining linking partners is who else do they link to? Is it a page with hundreds of other links on? If it is then it probably isn’t worth your time and effort to obtain a link from them, as the search engines probably won’t even count the link anyway.

Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink. Often this just says, “click here”, which is as about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, as this doesn’t tell you anything about where the link is going to take you. It is always best to use descriptive text for your anchor text, for example a site about web design should have links to it called “Web Design” or “Website Design” or something else related to the subject of web design. It is also a good idea to vary your anchor text, as overuse of the same keyword can actually damage your search engine results as the search engines may see this as spamming, as it looks unnatural.

Community participation
This has many benefits, and not all of them are for SEO. By participating in your online community you will become known to other members of your online community, who are probably already ‘authorities’ in their (and your) field. You will also get the opportunity to learn and share information with these people, giving you access to a huge wealth of information.

Blog commenting
Blog comments often give you a link back to your site or blog. It is very important that you do not spam the blogs, blog moderators will just break your link, ban you or in some cases they can even report you to Google, getting your site sandboxed for a period of time. This obviously isn’t the name of the game, so when commenting, make sure you add something useful and informative, ask questions, give advice, but always ensure you stay on topic.

Web Forums
Forums are usually moderated, so, again, it is best to stay on topic. Make sure you find relevant forums to post on. Find forums that are related to your topic and make constructive responses, otherwise you’ll just be labelled as a spammer. Try to find forums with a PageRank of at least 4, and make sure that they have a lot of incoming links, this will ensure you’re efforts won’t be wasted. An added bonus of using forums in this way is that you will probably start to get traffic directly from the forums themselves, as well as increasing your rankings in the search engines.

Requesting Links
You can request links from other website owners. You will already have found a lot of sites you can target from your competition evaluation. Make sure that they are high quality sites and the links you get from them have good keyword rich anchor text. The best way of gaining a link from a website owner is to try to establish a relationship with them before asking for the link. This obviously takes time; so make sure you only target quality sites.

What i personally want to see is the big SEO companies providing snippets of high quality information for us all to read. I have done some research and thought i would put a little list together.

 And the winners are:

1.)  SE Roundtable:
Massive website and a massive twitter community following them, easily the winner. Constant updates to their quality blog posts means they are defiantly worth following.

Followers: 1502  / Updates: 4288/ PR 5 / URL: twitter.com/seroundtable

2.)  Web Pro News:
A blog site i regularly read, they always provide good quality content, their twitter account is constantly updated and well worth adding to your list.

Followers: 560  / Updates: 4378 / PR 0 / URL: twitter.com/webpronews

3.)  Big Mouth Media:
Using their twitter account to cross links to their articles and blog posts, providing mainly information based on new customers and business information. Not often giving away valuable information.

Followers: 735  / Updates: 629 / URL: twitter.com/bigmoutmedia

4.)  Just Searching:
They use this to promote both their main blog, which is easily visible from their site, but also to promote labs.justsearch….. , both of which provide content worth reading.

Followers: 84  / Updates: 273 / URL: twitter.com/justsearching

5.)  SEO Consult:
Regular use and good informative blogs mean that they are well worth a follow, the guys at SEO take time and input a lot of effort into maintaining the content of thir blog and it shows.

Followers: 112  / Updates: 72 / URL: twitter.com/seoconsult

——————————-

What i have found is that all the information they provide is just New Blog Posts: URL here, I think they have all followed suit. I currently have a personal twitter account https://twitter.com/nickrinylo which i used to promote Creare Communications blog posts (Following suit). I have just set up the official Creare Twitter account and i intend to break the current trend by providing quality info regarding SEO.

If you which to follow Crearecomm the details are:

Creare Communications:
Starting with the intention to provide information worth reading, after all we can all subscribe to the RSS of the big SEO companies blogs, which means their is no need to follow.

Followers: 6  / Updates: 3 / URL: twitter.com/crearecomm

When potential customers contact our team and ask advice on the best way to proceed with optimisation we have a policy to always listen to their concerns. The reason we do this is because we learn so much from these conversations.  For example, quite a lot of comments that are made give examples of poor service from other companies that have handled their SEO.  One of the main concerns that a site owner had when dealing with an SEO provider is (what can only be interpreted)  ‘as lack of communication’ by the provider to the customer.

One of the comments that really hammered this home to me was when that person said “I paid so much for my site, then I paid extra for Key Phrases to be added, with coding and that type of stuff which is all gobbledygook to me and on top of that I paid a monthly retainer to continue the SEO”.  This person also added that the money would have been well spent if the provider had delivered what they promised and at the very least made contact to explain what was happening with the site, but this did not happen.  So you can imagine how upset this person felt.

You would think that any service provider in the SEO field would incorporate into their standards a strategy that a customer should be contacted, at least when something is being implemented to their site.  Further to this, if analysis shows that the site is not performing then contact should be made with the customer to express your concerns and working together to make the changes that will rectify the problem.   What I have found is that there is always a way forward to promote a site’s products and services and boost business confidence.

2) SEO Chat:
This site has about 30 different SEO Tools.  Most of them are very useful.  For example if you are trying to decide what keywords you should optimize your site for, then there is a tool called Keyword Difficulty that indicates how difficult a phrase will be to optimise.  This can be used when trying to recommend phrases to a customer for a fixed budget.
 
3) BackLink Watch Check:
This is an excellent site (if you ignore the fact that it does not work with Internet Explorer).  It allows you to analyse the back links of any website.  It provides the sites name (that is linking to the site you are checking for) and the anchor text of the link which is very useful when performing competitor analysis.

I came across an excellent tool which allows me to adjust the CSS and Code of any web in real time through a firefox plugin. Brilliant! I can now solve CSS problems in half the time, speeding the efficiency of web developers and the SEO department helping them.

I hope this tool helps you as much as it has helped me..

Download Resources:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

To be indexed by Google there are certain things that Google expect to be in place. For example a video must comply with copyright standards ‘to respect the rights of artists and creators, and hope you will work with us to keep our community a creative, legal and positive experience for everyone, including artists and creators’. What I find hard to understand is the word ‘hope’ do they mean ‘desire’ or ‘trust that something is or may be the case’ or do they expect that all video makers will automatically comply. And how do you know when your video infringes copyright and who determines that this is so. The easy answer of course is to create a video that is completely original.

This would be easy to do if you are just creating a home movie or lets say an art project where you and mates want to fool about. No disrespect to art students I used to be one myself and we had ball doing this type of thing. The point I am trying make is that when you infringe copyright at corporate level it’s a different ballgame as many business have found out. There could be many reasons why this could happen. For example, you might add an audio track that belongs to record label without there permission or you might even add an image that you have seen that would be exactly right for your business campaign. The question remains do you own the rights to use. The golden rule is if something does not belong to you then you do not have the right to use it unless you get permission to use, which is right if you think about it. The only way to proceed with a creative video is use a professional service that has the knowledge and licence to promote your product.

At this I would like to point out that this person is not arrogant, he clearly is at the top of his profession and has his client’s interests come first. He also added that because of his reputation at doing such a good job, his client list was full and this had come about from word of mouth.  I know this to be correct because I am one of his clients.   With no aspect of a sales pitch I agreed that when I get the time I would spend a few minutes to evaluate the relevant optimisation and send him a report.
After loading the site I could see that the landing page looked much like one of those social sites that seem to give images of your family and friends. Which is fine if you want to make friends or promote your popularity and before you comment I know that they promote all kinds of healthy social networking and do wonders for the people who use them.  However, they not really the type of site I would like to promote any business to, even though I do use (stealth slogging) I mean blogging, occasionally.   I do prefer to submit a business to prominent directory that has the clout to give a client maximum exposure for there particular products.

The point that I am trying make is that the site was poor with no opimisation, the type of site that is so typical on the web and that I see so often when I am surfing the net for inspiration and sound technical advice.  Later I emailed him to express my concerns and when we met on my next appointment he thanked me for my comments.  If I was a salesman I could have pushed for a total redesign or refresh of his site and full optimasation as soon as possible but the fact is I am not and much prefer to leave that sort of thing to a salesperson to pitch for business.  I did recommend that he contacted our sales team for a chat so that he would fully understand the importance of having the site optimized professionally.  As yet he has not taken up the option but I am optimistic that he will eventually commit to this idea because I know that it would be so good for his business.

domain.com
domain.com/
domain.com/index.php
domain.com/default.asp
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/default.asp
www.domain.com/

You get the basic idea….

So i here you ask how do i let Google know which page is the correct version, well before you start doing any crazy 301 re-direct’s or use the canonical link element, if possible you should be consistent from the start meaning:

• Always link to the same domain
• Use a .htaccess re-write your domain
• Set up the correct domain in Webmaster Tools
• Consistent Internal Linking

If you have followed these simple steps you will have no need to use the canonical link element, however if you free you potentially have duplicate content issues with you CMS or ecommerce platform all you need to do is add the following code in your <head></head> tags.

<link rel=”canonical” rel=”http://www.yourdomain.com” />

Google will trust that you have used this correctly and unless you have made a mistake i.e. created a infinite loop. It will assume that this command is correct. This tag is only based for sites that you fear may have duplicate content issue, any other issues can be solved with 301 re-directs.

Remember also that you can only use the canonical element internally and sub domains, NOT external websites.

References:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/canonical-link-element-presentation.html

The first thing you should examine is how much traffic each keyword would generate.  From Google Adword KeyWord Tool: Web Designers received 49,500 and Web Design received 823,000 (both for Feb 09).
Another consideration is how competitive each keyword is.  Using SEOChat (Keyword Difficulty Tool) Web Design has a SEO Difficulty level of 82%, whereas Web Designers has a SEO Difficulty level of 67% meaning it’s much harder to optimise for Web Design.
Also you should consider the likely ROI (Return on Investment) for these phrases.  You can find this out over time but I would suspect Web Designers will have a slightly higher ROI than Web Design as it is a more targeted, specific keyword.  However this is countered by the fact that Web Design receives around 15 times more traffic than Web Designers.

Ultimately you will receive more enquiries if you successfully optimise for Web Design but you should bear in mind that this phrase will take longer to get listed successfully via the search engines and will also be more expensive to optimise for. 

I would overall advise the client based on their budget and expected timeframe for results.  If they wanted to achieve long term listings, and they had sufficient budget, then I would recommend the phrase Web Design.  If there budget was smaller, and they expected success a bit quicker, then I would probably recommend the phrase Web Designers.
The phrase Web Design is a very competitive phrase and your SEO company would have to be very good at what they do to achieve successful results so I wouldn’t just choose the cheapest SEO company.   

We believe you should always check with an SEO company the following – Can they achieve results for themselves because if they can’t then how can the achieve results for you?  Type Web Design into Google and you will see our sister company as the top listed company (just behind Wikipedia).  I think listing for the phrase Web Design is good proof we practise what we preach.

The site must have responsive internal links that makes it friendly to navigate and make sure there are no wasted links, each link should link to the right pages and so on.  The most important factor for internal opimisation is of course is relevant content about your product or promotion.

Article submission is available in two forms; Manual and Automatic submission. However it is advised that manual submission produces more effective SEO results because;

A)    Articles submitted manually are less prone to errors.
B)    Manual submission means you can monitor your article success after submission, flagging the sites that are most effective at producing results.
C)    Manual submission is also cost effective because there are prices attached to automatic submissions.
D)    Lastly,  manual submission allows you to rest assured your hard work is being submitted to the locations you choose, with correct links to your website.

Of course there are advantages for automatic submission, one of these being the amount of time you can save. This is ideal for people who understand they need to article market but find it difficult to take the time out to do so.

Overall, manual submission is better for gaining results, ensuring the links are correct and also for monitoring your articles. This is recommended over automatic submission for producing faster, long lasting results in all the major search engines.

I also believe that PPC click campaigns allows optimisers to take and step back and look at such important factors in terms of conversion rate and making sure that the site provides the user experience required. At Creare any issues regarding this are minimised and this is why;

Creare specialise  in marketing, web design and SEO which means that we have the required skill sets to offer a fantastic service for all out customers whatever your industry.

First of all the company informs their potential customer that they have a special relationship with Google and that because of this Google allows them to immediately get any top position, for any keyword that they want.  They then tell the potential customer that this is organic SEO and they their advert will be there at all times.

Now there are a few lies here.  First, Google does not have any companies that it allows a special SEO relationship to.  This would damage their integrity and it just would not happen.  Secondly they are using Google Adwords (where you pay for the position) and pretend that it is Organic SEO where you will have the position at all times.  They are simply buying their positions but giving the customer a very poor service as they take an unclear amount of commission to pay for this.

So what happens if you take up the offer and buy the SEO package?  Well first of all they set up your so called SEO account charging you £650 for setting up what they call an SEO Google account but what in reality is a pay per click account.  Now they don’t put too much effort into setting up a pay per click account and only set up 1 phrase for you.  This must take then around 10-15 minutes to set up so £650 is very poor value for money.

The next thing they do is charge you £1,000 a month for keeping the listing.  They then put on about £500 to the Google Adword account, pocketing £500 a month for not very much.  When the customer then notices that there advert is not their some of the time, well then they become very hard to contact…..

We are the Creare Group believe that if you give the customer a good honest SEO service that you will keep them forever, and that keeps everyone happy…..Contact the Creare Group today to get started with one of our optimisation packages.  With a customer retention rate of over 95% we believe we will have an SEO package to suit your business needs.

Examples of Black Hat SEO include:

Invisible Text: An example of this would be white text or a white background in the hope of falsely increasing the density of your keywords. 

Doorway Pages: This is a fake page that a visitor will not actually see.  It is added for the purpose of search engine spiders with the intention of tricking then into indexing the site higher. 

Keyword Stuffing: This is when a site lists a long list of keywords with no other purpose than falsely increasing the keyword density.

We at the Creare Group only use White Hat SEO techniques (legitimate, recommended SEO techniques) and would not recommend the use of Black Hat SEO.

1) Multiple domain names and multiple sites?
It might seem a natural thought.  Why don’t I have lots of sites?  These sites would all be of the same website and will surely mean that the site lists several times for the same keyword?
This set up is a definite ‘NO’.  You would have multiple sites all with the same content and Google would detect this as duplicate content.  Duplicate content is a big ‘NO’ within Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and you should under no circumstance implement a set up like this.
2) Multiple Domain Name and single sites?
Having multiple domain names that all point, via domain forwarding, to the same domain/website is an acceptable setup.  Your main domain that you want listed in the search engines should be the domain that the other domains forward to.
3) What should my main domain name be?
Assuming you don’t already have a domain name, then this should be the best keyword rich domain still available.  For example if you were a kitchen company specialising in Traditional Kitchens called, say, Williams & Son then you would want your main domain to be keyword rich rather than your company name.  The domain williamandson.co.uk should therefore point to traditionalkitchens.co.uk.  This will mean that the William & Son can advertise using their company name domain and list in Google with their keyword rich domain.  Both visitors will ultimately arrive at the same domain meaning the known and the unknown markets have found your site.

SEO Consultants:

You should have had experience in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay per Click).  We are seeking a creative, social candidate who has a track record of success in their career. You must have highly raised companies’ profits and Website traffic through SEO, PPC, traffic diverting etc and be comfortable managing small teams.

Junior SEO Consultants:

To apply SEO knowledge & experience to current link-building and SEO activities.  Specific tasks will include:-Perform proactive & targeted link-building activities
-Syndicate content to relevant websites
-Arrange and negotiate placement of content on external websites
-Maintain content on company websites
-Assist in all other areas of SEO activity as they arise

SEO Copywriter:

Experienced and dynamic SEO Copywriter executive with strong copywriting skills required.   Must have experience of writing text for company websites and an appreciation of article marketing.  Strong customer liaison skills are also required.

If you feel you are suitable for any of the above roles and have an exception work ethos then please send your CV to colin@creare.co.uk.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Colin Craig, Company Director

The second change to the Google algorithm is the introduction of longer page descriptions for each result (also known as snippits).  
We at the Creare Group are keen to find out if these changes make any real difference to search behavior and search results.

5 Ways to avoid duplicate content issues….

1. IP Address -  If you have two sites that you feel potentially can have duplicate content issues the first point of call is to ensure that the sites are hosted on seperate IP addresses, this means that Google will note the imediate differeniation between the two sites.
2. Website Build - Do not use a templated sites, i.e. a bespoke design and build will mean that imagery and CSS will have different properties.
3. SEO / Keywords - Ensure that the key phrases are not the same across the two sites. The closer the key phrases are, the more potential of the sites getting penalised.
4. Networking - Try not to network your customers sites i.e. Reciprocal links, 3 way links, links back to your company website.
5. Content - The most effective way of ensuring your sites do not get penalised is the use and writing of good quality content. You can use http://www.copyscape.com/ which is an excellent tool that searches your specifoed URL and any indexed pages in the popular search engines.

Well with any sandbox situation or whatever Google may call it internal i use the same preceedure to try and work my clients site out.

Don’t:

• Build Low Quality Links.
• Buy site wide links.
• Buy Links.
• Constantly change the content of your site.
• Over populate your site with blog posts.
• Panic

Do’s

• Build individual quality backward links
• Check your site for duplicate content
• Enhance your time on site with good design and content.
• Explain the situation your client.
• Look at on forums / Blogs for rumors of ’sandbox’ release dates.
• Ask for advice / Do your research.

I see this quite a lot when typing in customers key phrases, I have also seen it effect Creare.

When i first started to enhance our ’search engine optimisation’ listing i noticed that Google would try and point me too ‘search engine optimization‘ (notice the American ‘z’). The search has since evolved and now recalls the UK results for this phrase. I would suggest that Google will try and iron out any of the errors with such problems, but its search results can still be frustrating especially when liaising with clients.

We currently have an optimisation campaign with a client dore.co.uk. They wanted to appear for ‘ADD’ a huge phrase meaning (Attention Deficit Disorder). We have managed to successfully gain them a page 1 position in Google.co.uk, But their listing is less impressive due to Google added a ’see results for’ section in the middle of the page.

This has resulted in our clients web site being 10th rather than the actual placement of 6th. see image below:

As you can see from the search results, our client has been pushed down by a recommendation from Google that personally i think to be irrelevant.

References -

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019340.html

It talks about various variables that can easily be identified, The list below talks in more detail about the factors that Creare and others take into consideration.

Page Rank - If i site has aquired a high pank rank then it would suggest the content of the site if of a high quality and that google sees the site as a respected information source. I would personally not recommend that any links are worth buying  or sourcing if they have a PR of 0 (zero).

Outbound Links - If the site has a large quantity of outbound links then this may be easily identified by Google as selling links, this can cause the site to lose there page rank. I have seen this on tristarwebdesign.co.uk (PR7 - PR4) and seroundtable.com (PR7 - Pr4). Plus the ‘juice’ of the link is reduced.

Google Adwords or Sponsored Links -  Similar to the outbound links, if the webmaster has gone overboard with sponsored listing the quality of your link will be reduced.

Content -  Personally i think that it is vital that the content on the page reflects your industry or business in someway. This then shows Google that you have industry related websites that are willing to promote your website. Meaning that link juice is high.

These points are basic, but important. Just take some time to look at the web site you intent to buy or request links from to ensure that they will not hinder you current listings.

References:  

http://www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/link-juice-explained.html 

With the skill sets that Creare has developed over the years, we now can create visually impressive sites that perform well for extremely competitive search terms. This is down to the combination of various mark up languages along with good graphical and SEO knowledge.

Search Engine Optimisation can be implemented honestly and effectively without an impact on the quality of the content. We also have specific content writers who can ensure that the text reads freely and makes sense to both the search engines and a user.

Skills Required:

• Good Communication Skills
• Computer Literate
• Works well within a team
• Basic Understanding of SEO, PPC & Web Developments

Desired Skills:

• Comprehensive understanding of SEO, PPC & Web Developments
• Experience in managing SEO campaigns
• Experience in client interaction
• Creative thinking

• PPC Pages
• Parked Domains
• Thin Affiliates
• Hidden text & links
• Javascript Redirects
• Keyword stuffing
• 100% Frame
• Sneaky Redirects

PPC Pages - These pages contain no or very little content of any value and are often full of PPC (pay per click) advertisements. These can also look very similar to a search engine, blog or forum.

Parked Domains - Defined as a parked or expired domain these may include; a list of sponsored links or maybe a list of categories that relate to popular search terms. Usually all links are paid and there is no original content present.

Thin Affiliates - These pages or sites are designed to become affiliates of other sites. They work by attracting users to a specific page and re-direct the users to a different page or site owned by a real merchant.

Hidden text & links - The text may be hidde, therefore invisible to the human eye. This could also be that the text colour is very close to the background color and therefore intentionally not easy to spot by the human eye. Small font sizes, that can’t be seen by a user and any information that is hidden by the use of javascript or CSS.

Javascript Redirects - This is where Javascript is used to display a different web site for the user than that the search engine indexes.

Keyword stuffing - Excessive amount of keywords on a single site or page in the form of word repeats, related words and misspelling. Just be user friendly, natural wording is the best way to achieve search engine friendliness.

100% Frame -  Allows a search engine to index 2 frames of content, where as the user only sees 1 frame.

Sneaky Redirects - This is where the user is directed to a different domain or URL, but the search engine indexes the original domain, which may have different more user friendly content. Often used for pornographic content.

When first learning the science of SEO, you come across various methods that help to break down both your own sites and your competitors. These little insights are building blocks which confirm and deny any theories your may have.

Most of you will have used or at least touched upon these search queries. Google, Yahoo and MSN allows users to gain information from their search facility, but i will just look at the ones related to Google and Yahoo.

Google:

link:www.yourdomain.com
Explained : This shows all of the links that Google has indexed pointing to your domain, as most of us know the yahoo version of this is more comprehensive.

site:www.yourdomain.com
Explained: This shows the indexed pages of your site. note: if there are pages missing consider pinging your sitemap.

related:www.yourdomain.com
Explained: Industry and Company related search results.

allintitle: Keyphrase
Explained: Shows all the websites indexed by Google that have that specific phrase in the title.

allintext: Keyphrase
Explained: Shows all the indexed websites by Google that mention that phrase in the main body content of their site.

allinurl: Keyphrase
Explained: Pretty self explainiaty, but all the indexed sites that have the specific keyphrase in the domain name.

info: www.yourdomain.com
Explained: This search provides information about latest index, similar results and pages linked to your site.

Yahoo!

site: www.yourdomain.com
Explained: This shows the indexed pages of your site. note: if there are pages missing consider pinging your sitemap.

linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com
Explained: Displays all the backward links pointing towards your domain. note: Joost De Valk’s Plugin is really handy.

[www.yourdomain.com -linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com]
Explained: Provide links that display just your URL and not any keyword rich links.

These queries can be used to benefit the analysis of competitors and i am certain that there are more available. You can also apply various combinations of queries to narrow and specify your search result.

Just as a warning the figures that are giving through these queries should not be taken as 100% correct, more of a ball park figure. Any additions you have to the search engine queries would be greatly appreciated.

Resources

http://yoast.com/seo-tools/link-analysis/ 

http://lornali.com/internet-marketing/7-google-advanced-search-operators-for-seo 

These are the three search types;

Navigational Search:
A navigational search is a specified search and is successful if your product is a specific brand name. Searches like ‘Oakley Sunglasses’ means that that those websites optimising for that brand would appear above all the others so for smaller companies it is not necessarily the best way to optimise your site as it is highly competitive against other more commercial companies.

Informational Search:
This is a better way for small businesses to optimise their site. They can aim to rank highly for a simple phrase and make it more plausible.  A couple of words creating a generic phrase are far more successful than depending on brand names to get traffic to a site. Phrases such as “wood flooring Bristol” can be far more effective for businesses rather than a brand of wood flooring. The risk of using a brand is that it is likely to be supplied by big chain stores nationwide that already have a good amount of traffic to their site.

Transactional Search:
These searches are far more specific and contain a lot of words that identify what a consumer wants in finer detail. For example “companies that sell cheap, authentic, silver bracelets.”  All of the sites that contain these words will come up in the search engine results and your company may be there but the amount of people using this method of searching are fewer than the others.

It is important for any company when using search engine optimisation to understand their consumers and the methods they may use for searching the web. It is vital to ensure they optimise for this specific method to beat their competitors to page one number one.

Simple Guide To SEO 

New year, new optimisation?

Perhaps your business has changed since it was last optimised. Maybe you’ve acquired a new area, or some new products. Either way, people need to know about these changes, and what better way than by optimising your site- people will land on your site using your key phrases, and then discover everything you have to offer.

•    Blogging
Blogs- not just used by people travelling the world, blogs and RSS feeds are also a fantastic way to keep people updated on what your business is doing and achieving. Creare can help you to set up a blog or RSS feed on your site to optimise your business.

•    Article Marketing
Working in a similar way to blogging, article marketing allows you to post articles about your business areas on article directory sites. Again, Creare can help with this, providing talented writers to create articles on your behalf.

There are so many SEO techniques available to you- all it takes is one call to Creare to get your business optimisation on track.

Make it a new years resolution to optimise your website to the best it can be.

Merry Christmas and have a happy, new, fully-optimised year!

I imagine the thought process goes something like this:

• We aren’t getting many enquiries
• We are paying an arm and a leg for directories with little ROI.
• We do not have a website or we have an old website.
• We need a new site.
• We need enquiries from our new site.
• We need to market the new website.
• Introduction to search engine optimisation.
• Find for an SEO firm.

Our client base constantly sees excellent ROI from there websites, with an excellent design capability and SEO portfolio we are confident that we can make a new search engine friendly wesite work for you and your business.

So…. if you have realized you need your business on the SEO bandwagon please contact Creare.

Call Creare Communications today and see how we can change 2009 in 2008 and make sure you receive the best SEO service that your company deserves.

Popular Christmas Phrases

What do people search for around this time of year? Presents and gifts? Tickets to somewhere or something? Clothes, fancy dress outfits and other party supplies?

Creare can help you to optimise your site over the Christmas period. Certain phrases become more popular and in demand and we can help you to optimise your site to cater to this demand.
With our wide SEO skill set, we can help you to increase your search engine ranking and optimise your site to its fullest potential over this busy period that is almost upon us.

PPC - The downside of using PPC to promote Xmas offers is that the cost per click will increase with demand, the upside is that you are guaranteed results. With more and more people turning to the internet to grab Xmas bargains, i know we will start to see customers demand for listings expand seasonly.

Organic SEO - Well this all depends on the product, competitiveness of the phrase and how specific your target market is… With niche key phrases that are name specific i think that you can successfully optimise organically in a short time period. Organic SEO would work out cheaper in the long run.

In conclusion to see a good return on your investment you would need to calculate the time scales, phrases and cost on each method. To do this a good consultant is vital. If you are interested in search engine optimisation this Xmas please contact Creare.

Using Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends You can set the search result to the last 12 months to see the amount of phrases searched, so let trial it, firstly with something obvious…

So the phrase ‘great christmas presents‘ isnt searched at all from half way through january to half way through october, where as in November, December it is searched massively. see the result .

Quite an easy example, let try something else:

Present Ideas - again a fantastic example of trends… see example.

This combined with a lot of time and commitment would be an excellent marketing tool, you could research the phrases that have high search results at Xmas and prepare while there is no pressure, This would allow you to find relatively good / high search volume phrases with low competitiveness. Perfect for quick honest results.

The trends change for key phrases with each season, and for some businesses there are key phrases that can become ever so competitive around the Christmas period. This is why it is important for seasonal businesses to decide their key phrases carefully or they could be competing alongside many others all with the intention to appear first on Google.

By ringing Creare we can give advice and pricing for any phrase and any business, so you know how much some phrases will cost before you commit to anything. Ring now on 01455 55 00 62

We believe that in order for a website to work you need both Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation skill sets. 

If you only have the Web Design skill set then you will end up with a great site that never gets any visitors.  If on the other hand you only have the Search Engine Optimisation skill set then your site will get visitors but you will never get any interest.  With both skill sets your site will get found and once found you will get a good Return on Investment (ROI) from your site.

Why not give us a call to find out more about why both Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation skills are vital for a successful web campaign.

At Creare we understand the importance of going a little bit further.

• Social media marketing provides a valuable platform on which to optimise your website even more. A good place to start is to have regular articles posted on your site that are keyword-rich. Using a phrase that people will search for will increase your chances of a high Google ranking.
• Social bookmarking sites are also a way of adding links to your articles that people might not otherwise discover. They offer a great way to market your articles, they are free to join and there is no limit to the amount of bookmarks you can add.

There are also free article sites that you can submit your articles to- they work in a similar way to social bookmark sites except you post a copy of your article on them instead of just linking to it.

Creare know how to optimise your site to its fullest potential, taking social media marketing sites and using them to our advantage.

Creare understand the importance that Social Media Marketing has on the success of ranking higher on Google so go to extra lengths to ensure that they are thorough with their research of ideal article sites, social book marking sites and blogs. Generating backward links is all part of the Optimisation process and is vtial to getting a site noticed and by doing this through Social Media Marketing it can be continuous progress that maintains the success of a performing site to ensure they stay at that very important position on Google, page one number one.

Social Media Marketing is an excellent way to generate traffic to your site, through allowing other internet users to share information that you are providing for your specific industry. This way if you write a relevant article about search engine optimisation, social bookmark it and then it generates interest you have automatically generated an identity that benefits the brand of your company.

Part of social media marketing is often based on what can other users do for me? we if you know that they write blogs about your industry then this can encourage them to write similar articles and reference ones they have read previously (i.e. link to your post).

Participating in a certain activity or making particular friends that could benefit you in future, falls upon the social capital model. This may not be done consciously but does apply to the users in SMM sites.

Read more on Social Media Marketing - Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing

Read more on Social Capital - Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

So where do you start?

The first thing we thought of was the size of the text, we currently have size 12px, but this can easily be increased by using your command button plus the + & - on your keyboard.

PC - ctrl + or ctrl -

MAC - cmd + or cmd -

We then thought for the visually impaired audio would be an excellent idea, we used www.talkr.com to integrate an automated audio podcast into our news post, which is click-able at the bottom of this post.

We were so happy with this that we found a way of integrating a similar method onto the home page, search engine optimisation page and other services pages. This means from anywhere on the Creare Communications site site you can listen to the content via audio.

Less computer Literate.

It is good practice to ensure that the usability of your site is well designed, we made sure that our site has clearly labeled navigations, large heading and obvious ways of navigating throughout the site. Obvious but important techniques

If you would like to contact Creare regarding disabled friendly websites or search engine friendly websites please call one of the numbers on the top banner.

As one of the best SEO companies in the country, we know how important it is not only make our sites as optimised as possible, but also to make them as disability-friendly as we can.

UK businesses with a website have been legally obliged to make them accessible for disabled users since 1999. Currently we have optimised our site for deaf users and also the visually impaired, with a little mp3 feature called ‘Listen’ that allows a user to listen to the pages as well as reading. But what else can we do?

Businesses with accessible websites can tap into the estimated £80bn spent by people with disabilities, which leaves us with a few questions and possibilities to consider when it comes to optimising a site. Is there a standard programme to use for text sizing, for example? There is a lot to consider when optimizing a site for disabled users and at Creare we believe we are on the right track.

Links are a huge part of SEO- they can optimise websites by linking them to other industry related sites. But how can links make a website disability-friendly as well as SEO friendly?

Imagine you have a pie chart or some sort of graph on your site that gives vital information about your company. Graphs and so on can be confusing for partially-sighted people, especially with the detail and colours. A good idea to solve this problem would be putting a link underneath the image that directs the user towards another page where the information in the pie chart is given in a simple text format only. It makes it easier for the user to read and can also help your SEO; make the page of text keyword rich, and your site is also automatically optimised.

Local Business Center allows you to add your customer for a specific industry and specific area. such as a customer of ours called Hereford Tyres.

When you type in ‘Tyres Hereford’ into Google.co.uk you get this result:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=tyres+hereford&btnG=Search&meta=

Not only to they appear in the organic listings, they also appear in the Google maps section at the top. This is excellent for regional SEO campaigns and automatically gives a great listing.

It is important that your chosen SEO company understands your best interests and that it understands every opportunity to improve traffic to your site.

They were contacted via the phone by an SEO company (we will call them SEO Company X) asking them if they wanted to appear Page 1, Position 1 for the phrase ‘Locksmiths Leicester’. SEO Company X said to them that they had a special relationship with Google and that for a set up fee of £400 and then a monthly fee of £300 they would guarantee them Page 1 Position 1 for this phrase. Now some of you who know how Google and SEO works will realise what SEO Company X are doing here.

They are basically setting up a Google Click Account (in 5 minutes) with one phrase (Locksmiths Leicester) in it for £400. They are then allocating the customer’s monthly budget of £300 on this phrase knowing that this phrase will never generate enough traffic for even 20% of that. The customer pays them £300 a month, not knowing how many clicks they are paying for, and SEO Company X makes lots of money for very little. (The only downside for SEO Company X is that they lose all their customers!!)Now, as much as things like this annoy me I am pleased that they contacted Creare to advise them on what SEO Company X were doing. Our first bit of advice was to our new customer was to cancel their contract with SEO Company X.

I am delighted to say that we at Creare set up our new customer with a Google Click account with a wide and relevant range of phrases and areas with the customer only paying for the clicks that the account uses. We also introduced them to Organic optimisation with one of our popular ‘No Upfront Fee’ schemes. I am pleased to say that our once sceptical customer now achieves very good business from the web through a combination of Google Clicks and Organic optimsation. Now that is an exaple of good SEO.Why not call us now so you and your company can have the Good SEO Company Experience.

When a company has a website designed for them, the design company can set them up with Google reports- every month a report will be sent to the customer, detailing the traffic to their site, the number of visits, the keywords and the bounce rates, to name but a few.

Search engine optimisation will improve your rating in these reports.  Because SEO is about ranking as highly as possible in Google search results, a small pie chart on the ‘Analytics’ page gives you the percentage of traffic that comes from search engines; obviously you want this percentage to be as high as possible in order to show that the SEO process is working.

The ‘bounce rate’ details the percentage of people who have visited the site and clicked straight off without looking at it. The higher the search engine traffic, the more likely it is that your bounce rate will be lower. If people have landed on the site through their search choices, it is highly likely to be what they are looking for and they therefore are unlikely to leave the site straight away.

Essentially, the Google webmaster tools are there to help you view the progress of your site and its SEO.

Google Maps is only specific for regional businesses to help with customers searching for a service and location.  The purpose is also to generate more traffic towards your site as people looking for a specific service in that area. If potential customers for a regional business search for a service and an area, your company will arrive higher than those who do not invest in Google Maps.

If you are a regional business, looking to generate a higher interest for your business then Google Maps could be the way forward to bypass all of your competitors and reach that all important position of number one page one.

I know that this is not our true result so i was wondering why this happens on occasion. What i realized was that it is Google being clever. If you are logged into your Google account it recalls your site in a higher position.

It places what result it thinks you want to see first so in our case for our main phrase, we are page 1 position 1, when we are actually currently placed at the top of page 2.

SEO varies in price from one company to the next, alternately selling at both rock-bottom and extortionately high prices. But any good SEO company will not charge large, upfront prices.

When it comes to choosing an SEO company, expensive, immediate fees do not necessarily mean that this is the best company to go with. Some smaller and better companies charge lower prices- they know that they can deliver what they promise, and obviously have a lot of clients that they are forging good relationships with.

It is more important for an SEO company to have proven results than it is for them to be overly- expensive. Upfront fees are generally not a productive way to run a good business- it is the results that count.

What you mean to us!

Of course there are some businesses that have made sure they only provide the service of Search Engine Optimisation and forget about customer relations and what results they are after from having their site optimised. Some SEO company’s focus on the design of what they feel works, rather than listening to their customer and what they had envisioned. This can cause problems and the customer can pay for a service that doesn’t reflect what they and their business are trying to portray.

How are Creare different to other SEO Companies?

We here at Creare are unlike a lot of SEO companies and take a different approach to helping companies in the Coventry area. We are here to find what you had envisioned for your site but guide you all the way. We want the best for your company and that is why we guarantee that we can have your company ranking higher on Google in a shorter time than most, with a friendly and organised team of consultants and designers.

Variable Prices:

But for all of this we make sure we give you a quality service at one of the best prices available. You as our customers decide the amount you want to pay, whether that be £100’s or £1,000’s, we have everything to suit your budget.

Quality Service:

We have a team of organised and friendly staff who will maintain your site to ensure it is to the highest standard. You can be reassured that the service you require is everything and more, we are here to make sure that your site is the best it can possibly be!

1.) Yahoo Site Explorer - excellent tool which shows a comprehensive list of backward links and the amount of pages a specific site has.

2.) Google Analytics - Shows traffic, bounce rates, page view, time on site and key phrases used to generate your traffic.

3.) Google Adwords - Shows both search volume and related keywords excellent for a start of a SEO campaign.

4.) Feedburner - Burns your feed into a versatile feed for various platforms.

We have many processes using various tools to consultant and advise our customers, the key is to use all the free software out there to your advantage and be clever about it. Creare are search engine optimisation specialists.

There are endless SEO tricks that a good SEO company can provide you with, to make sure that you are getting the best out of the Internet that you can. After all, what good is a great site when no one ever visits it?

The Internet is now the fastest growing medium; using directories to search for information and services has been well and truly usurped by search engines. If you were flicking through a directory for window repairs, your eye might be caught by a smart, well-designed advert. The same is true of search engines- usually people do not bother to look any further than the first or second page, and will pick the first company they see. Your business could be value for money and a much better deal for prospective customers, but if your SEO is not up to scratch, you won’t be getting the business you could. A well-optimised site will rank highly in Google, thus getting more attention from searchers.

SEO is something you need as a company, and is definitely a well-spent venture.

I have always been under the impression that optimisation companies who deal with blue chip companies have an easier time. If a large client with global / National recognition comes to you and asks you to optimise for a keyphrases that represents there known business, then the public have already done a section of the work involved. Surely then achieving national results with small / medium unknown customers is a better achievement.

Creare have a massive customer base, ranging from 1 man bands to large corporate giants and have experience with all different scales of SEO. We have had continue success with our implementation of search engine optimisation and will continue to push our own sites and our clients.

We aim to be the most successful seo company in the UK. We are already one of the largest web design companies proving our SEO capabilities, customer satisfaction and success.

So will Creare one day be named in  the UK’s top ten SEO companies? I think so, we have an excellent skill set and are always pushing our standards and we hope to receive some recognition for our achievements by the SEO world very soon.

Since beginning my employment with Creare I have personally seen and been involved with business customers who have seen their own search engine rankings improve dramatically. This improvement is solely down to the great work we put in to every customers optimisation.

Great search engine optimisation can take time and effort, but put your trust in Creare and you will be rewarded!
Written by Gareth Joyce on behalf of Creare.

But how do you do this? It is so much more than just building a site and having a clever web design. There is serious advanced work done behind a website that makes your site become noticed.

A good Search Engine Optimisation company offers you excellent customer service, flexible costs and the guarantee of a higher ranking in Google. If a SEO business is confident of their success rate, they will surely have customer reports on their site. This is a positive way to be sure of the success of the company. If the customer feedback is excellent then you as a new customer can be assured that you will be treated with equal respect but as an individual business.

There are other aspects in the process of optimisation that contribute to a company’s success:

• Website marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Web functionality
• Internet marketing

These four skill sets all work together to produce a high flying website that is guaranteed to create more interest in your business than you could imagine.

The process of SEO is exciting, as the stages taken throughout will gradually show you results online. Your money is spent wisely and no matter what your budget, you will rank higher than anybody else that hasn’t made the investment of Search Engine Optimising their site.

It takes a little time, but you can track your progress along the way and see your company rise above all of your leading competitors.