With technology moving so quickly it doesn’t take a lot to fall behind in understanding the latest products, services or tools used to promote a business. Of course it technology that people are using to search for products and services and it is companies who are looking for new business marketing techniques to stay a float within this economic downturn.

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.

When looking to optimise any site, this is the most important thing to consider.

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.

An excellent way to generate and drive traffic to your video is via social networks such as Facebook , Twitter, Myspace and many more (I’m sure you all have a list of social networks that you use). With most social networks you can create a company profile and then add your videos to this profile, this allows your followers / friends and users to see the videos that you have published.

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/

Web accessibility is important for many reasons, but one that often gets overlooked is the importance of accessibility within search engine optimisation. First we will look at the general importance of web accessibility.

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.