Page Titles - Cramming or Spamming

Individual SEO companies have various different techniques when approaching the page title of an optimised web site or page.

The question is which is the correct way to implement key phrases into a page title? As we know we are restricted to limited number of characters within a page title, The page title being an essential part of the internal optimisation and with such precious space how do you approach it?

If you are optimising for x amount of phrases on a individual page then you have 2 different options. These two techniques have been tested and both have seen results:

Cramming - Grammatically not correct, mentioning a larger volume of phrases only once.

Spamming - Repeating the same keyword various times in a single title.

Which works best?

The answer is that you need to find a happy medium. The page title has to be descriptive and not just designed for search engines, This means do your research and find out the competitiveness of all the key phrases and organise accordingly.

Each optimised web site is individual to the specific phrase and performance of the phrases can depend on competitiveness of the phrase and even the techniques implemented into your competitors sites.

For more information regarding search engine optimisation please contact our qualified staff at Creare Communications where we will be happy to help.

So with search engine optimisation becoming more competitive throughout the UK, do you ever wonder whether SEO is simple enough to do yourself?, maybe your a computer literate individual who learns fast. With the expansion of our business over the last 4 months, more training has commenced and this has been a great opportunity to see the ease of optimising a site both internally and externally.

Internal optimisation as a strategic process

We can all read a set of instructions and we have all build something in our lives using a method and a set of guide lines. Does this mean that anybody can successfully optimise a site without a marketing background? Well……

In search engine marketing campaigns it not just about throwing resources and a basic list of optimisation standards at a site, its about understanding your customers target market, checking the competition, advising  your customer accurately on how spend their money, Consulting them, working along side them to make them money.

We understand that each marketing strategy is individual to your company, we have the experience, resources, results and  commitment to helping you succeed.

For more information about search engine optimisation and search engine marketing please contact us.

The web log’s abbreviated form is known as a Blog. With the popularity graph of internet and web based services rising day by day, The Blog has become the most familiar and popular term among internet users around the globe.

Usually websites which maintains information in a chronological order is called a Blog. A Blog carries diary type information that is frequently updated. The topics for Blogs can range from personal to political. It may focus on a single subject or can handle a variety of subjects in different domains. The participatory aspect of the blog is the unique selling point of it.

A Blogging site contains articles on a specific topics or variety of topics which are listed in a chronological order, with the newly updated article appearing first. An archive of previous articles can also be saved for future reference. A facility for the user to post his comments on a particular article is also provided. This makes the blog more of an interactive place where ideas are exchanged and comments are made which results in the general improvement of the site.

As the marketing businesses around the globe focus on the internet with aggressive marketing strategies, blogging sites have gained much importance than ever. Online marketing proves out to be successful when your optimised document gets indexed and ranked by a popular search engine.

This can drive huge traffic to your website and there by increasing its popularity. As a channel for cost effective marketing, a blog can be used within the overall Online marketing mix. If optimisation of content is taken seriously, huge benefits can be reaped from it. If the content is categorized according to themes, it makes your content understandable for the search engine. Meansing you will have a better chance of getting high ranks on the specified topics.

Providing an uncomplicated URL makes good way for search engine spiders to notice your content. Compared to websites, blog provides more free links to other sites. Any form of media, audio, video, images or text files can be made easily be posted in a blog. The presence of this kind of media can attract a huge number of incoming links. Traffic rates can be increased using RSS feeds. Among all these, the only thing which can make your website stand out in the crowd is fresh content. Yes, fresh content can force search engines to pay more visits to your sites. Providing fresh content can result in incremental increase in site traffic too.

Besides all the above mentioned advantages, the blog is very much vulnerable to spams. Spam Blog, popularly known as ’splogs’ capitalize on the network communication features like low cost, easy accessibility and flexibility. As part of the get-rich-quick schemes, slpogger make use of splogs to make money by getting the user to click on the ads displayed on the site. The slpogger gets paid every time someone clicks the ad. Using these methods for increasing traffic to your site may drive you into deep trouble.

First Search SEO is proud to anounce the arrival of our sister site www.onlineshopdesign.co.uk,

Online Shop Design offer experienced e-commerce solutions and with the search engine optimisation experience of First Search SEO, Online Shop Designs e-commerce marketing team is one that will strive to get your e-commerce shop to the top.

How important is it to have a good domain name? and what effects does google put on extensively long domains or new domains.

Right in this post i am going to use a customer of First Search SEO as an example.

Our client has a less than 6 month old domain name and currently comes up for very little of the ‘Key Phrases’ that we have optimised the site to appear for. Now we think they may be many reasons that the site may not be working and a couple are relevant to the domain name.

Issues concerning the domain and are as follows:

• The domain has been ’sand boxed’ due to being a young domain and is trying to compete with older more established domains.
• The second idea is that the domain name is too long.

Now both these ideas are grey areas in search engine optimisation and no-ones sure whether domains can actually get sand boxed etc.

 Young Domains?

If the domain is new, i personally do not see the problem this would have when listing with search engines as i do not think this would matter and the results of this theory of often inconsistant. At First Search SEO we have seen both new domains do well and badly as in this case.

Long Domains?

Now we all know that the search engines rate domain names highly in terms of importance, is there a restriction of this? as if i have a specific search result i wish to come up for i could buy that exact domain.

for example:

Wood floor lining cornwall

so i could buy : www.woodfloorliningcornwall.co.uk

Also i have seen this happening across the world of SEM and am now wondering if the search engines have picked up on it and are penalizing extremely long domains?

The customer in question:

Absence Management - www.absencemanagementlimited.com

If you have any Questions or would like to answer any of our posts please visit our forum!

Search Engine Optimisation Forum 

The term frequency is a weighted measure of how often a search terms appears in a document or in our case a web site. Does Google and other search engines rate the importance of this as much as we think?

Most optimisers understand the concept that search engines ignore common words, such as ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘a’ ‘the’, so they have this in mind when writing a web page. These words hold no great value to the reader or valve of the page itself.

The Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) theory says that key phrases that are in a limited number of documents are more likely to tell you about the sites purpose, rather than key phrases scattered throughout many documents.

Have you checked your key phrases density lately? Do you think that your site could be classed as spamming?

This is a neat little tool, check it out
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing

As in previous posts, we are going to look at positive strategies for increasing traffic to your web site. In this brief article we will look at the areas of concern and the separate sections of your web site which need to be optimised.

* In site Optimisation
* External Backward Links
* RSS Feeds
* News Articles
* Forums

- In Site Optimisation -

1. This area covers internal key phrase rich links to pages within your web site, you should link key phrases to the page your working on, a related product page, external related sites and contact pages.
2. Headings are also important and should replicate you page title almost, Only one H1 tag on each site is also important.
3. Meta Tags (description, Keywords) should be individual for each optimised page and removed from un-optimised pages.
4. The content within you site is highly important and remember that ‘content is king’.
5. Layout out within sites is also very important, use div classes if possible and replace images with classes where possible.

- External Backward Links -

1. Create Key phrase rich backward links from your customers as you probably have control on the phrases returned more than ever.
2. Directory sites, whether this be in a general directory site or one specific to your industry.
3. Related sites - this could be a product manufacture that your company supplies, they usually have larger PR and will be glad to have a distribution center for their products linked on their site.

- RSS Feeds -

1. RSS feeds offer the chance for interested users to subscribe to the content that you post on your web site.
2. Also provides search engine friendly articles that can be traced back to your site.
3. Give the user something worth reading and they will read it, again content is king, if they like what they read then they will return time after time.

- Forums -

1. Forums are a great way of sharing industry news, with colleges and other industry buffs.
2. A way for starters in an industry to ask questions of the professionals and also gives a sense of realisum for the web site user, not just a robot.

Search Engine optimisation & search engine marketing by First Search SEO

Web 2.0 has had many success stories as the integration between web content and user interaction becomes evermore seamless. However, the most popular of this new series of web technologies is blogging – a means whereby users can post articles and opinions on any topic of their choosing on their own web space. The result of this is an online community where posters and readers can post comments, and more importantly, hyperlinks. As a SEO strategy, this can be a very effective method of communicating not only the existence, but the significance of your website in the industry, especially if corresponding blog posts speak favourably of your site. The major benefit is that blogs can reach very wide audiences if implemented and promoted correctly.

Imagine a situation where everytime you had an idea to share, 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it in your blog. The majority of those 5,000 people also write blogs in your field or related fields. Some of those bloggers may frequently mention your site on their blogs, and they themselves could have thousands of subscribers. Within a short space of time your blog could have the attention of hundreds or even thousands of users. Where people go search engines follow, so if many users link to your blog, it will also boost the search engine ranking for other parts of your site.

It is important however that your blog postings avoid ‘commodity status’, which includes short comments on somebody else’s work, and simply posting for the sake of generating optimised keywords. Posts must maintain quality, originality, depth and have its content driven by the user’s expertise in order to acquire popularity amongst web communities. I have studied in-depth, the work of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, and I have found an interesting article of his; Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, which encapsulates this matter perfectly. He asserts that leadership (or prevalence of the poster’s expertise) in blog postings, blog-post variability and regularity are of high priority in gaining trust and recognition. I believe he wants to encourage you to personalise your posts, by giving your own opinions and judgements on your subjects to provoke interest and even raise debate.

He also points out however, that if the content isn’t the main concern for your site, and you simply want to communicate simple answers to your user’s questions then “you should comply with the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks.” These guidelines all fall nicely into the standard Search Engine Optimisation requirements. I believe it is therefore essential that blog postings for SEO manage to achieve a balance where expertise and content usability can work together simultaneously to bring the right users to your site.

One of the chief objectives of Web 2.0 and web logging is to make the Internet a more community-based entity, and by using the blogging practice in the most effective way for your website, you can take advantage of this. This doesn’t just mean writing articles on your chosen topic and leaving it there, but it means interacting with the wider community. Quoting and linking to other popular bloggers, leaving useful comments on other related blogs, writing articles for other blogs and actively soliciting & replying to comments can really push users towards your blog.

With RSS feeds also enhancing the likeliness of your articles being noticed and linked to, it will only improve your website’s probability of being picked up by Search Engines, making blog posting a valuable resource for optimisation.

Reference:

Wall, A M (2007). Search Engine Optimisation Book. California: Aaron Matthew Wall. 87-91.

Jakob Nielsen (2007) Write Articles, Not Blog Postings [online] available from <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html> [15 January. 2007]

You may be asking yourself, as we have been here at First Search SEO, ‘why does my site rank brilliantly one week then not the next?’

Continually updating your site content may be recommended to a lot of web masters, this may be so if done a certain way. For example, from the experience of the search engine optimisers at First Search SEO, we have found that Google disagrees with the constant changing of optimised key phrases.

The best way to constantly update your site is through a content managed news systems or a RSS feed, these can still cause problems, as if you have script re-calling the articles and the titles are or aren’t key word rich to your chosen optimisation, this can also effect you Google standings.

The name “Google Dance” has often been used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google’s index update occurred on average once per month. This have now changed and Google crawls the web constantly for updates, but does this still have a similar effect as the previous method?
Google’s search engine pulls results from more than 10,000 dedicated servers, now it’s not possible to update the index on these servers at the same time, so one by one they will be updated.
Now does this explain the reason why an unchanged site can drop severely in Google’s rankings or even disappear all together?
Could the search specific to your site be determined by which Google server your search is being processed by this week or month? Maybe, and it would explain these strange behaviors shown by standings.
This week my site has been cached by a Google server that has yet to be updated with the backward links obtained and the newly gained importance of the site, meaning that my site have gone from being top 40 to the bottom end of 200?
If this is true, then only time will allow us at First Search SEO to determine the time scale that this happens over and whether the site in question returns to its rightful place once all the servers have been updated.
Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing from First Search SEO.

You may be asking yourself, why do i position well in yahoo and msn, but not in Google?

Well your probably getting penalized for something that you have implemented into the search engine marketing of your site. Different search engine use different algorithms and each search engine weighs different parts of a site differently.

• Google are the primary UK & US search engine, Google focuses on the sites age and link based authority and popularity, they are the industry leaders and seem to have the best system for determining the Good sites from the poor sites, spammers and aggressive optimisers.
• Yahoo! focuses more on the page content side of thing, but while still relying on a large decent link base.
• MSN is easier to manipulate, by using low-quality links, aggressive anchor text and high population of keywords, getting a higher position becomes more possible.

Tweaking a pages internal optimization is very time consuming and the effect is mostly un-noticeable once a decent standard has been set, your better off trying to research quality links that have value and are from a industry site related to you.