Last weeks blog we looked at 10 simple tips to get you started on your onsite SEO. If you are serious about SEO it would pay to make sure you understand all the points in last weeks blog. To move forward here are a few more suggestions:

• Make sure you use the links within your site to make use of your keywords. For example if your keyword is “SEO” then link to SEO, and not “to find out more about SEO click here”
• Following on from this, make sure you include title tags to your links. Title tags will appear when you hover your mouse over a link. Don’t spam these with keywords, but make them descriptive from a users perspective, for example “click here” wont mean anything to a user or search engines but if you have “to find out more read our SEO blog” with a title tag of “search engine optimisation blog” you give the link more value.
• While we are on links, check that your homepage links throughout your site link back only to the domain and not www.yourdomain.co.uk/index.php. If your external links are pointing to www..yourdomain.co.uk and your internal links point to /index.php you are splitting your links and they are therefore not effective.
• If you have a new site it can often take some time to get indexed through submission to Google. If you can get a link from another good quality site it is likely you will get indexed much quicker.
• Make sure your site is easy to use, navigation reflects the pages it points to, links are easily identifiable from regular text, and that they are easy to click.
• Alt tags for images are there for the visually impaired, they wont be able to see the image, but a screen reader will be able to pick up what the alt tags say, allowing the user to make sense of the site. If you images are relevant for your site then you can make use of them for SEO but don’t abuse them, a brief descriptive alt tag in your coding will mean you image will get indexed by search engines and serve it’s intended purpose.
• We create sitemaps for users, and for search engines we need to create an XML sitemap. To learn more have a look at James and Nick’s video blog.
• My last tip of the day is utilise Google’s wonderwheel for long tail keywords you can integrate into your copy and blog posts. This will give you some ideas of what Google considers relevant to your selected keywords, and support your content.

If I have missed anything please let me know, I’m sure my colleagues will be able to point out a vital element they think I have over looked. If you can get to grips with my last two blogs you have set your self up with the basics to get started. Make yourself a check list, and tick things off as you work your way through, that way you always have something to refer back on and reflect on room for improvement.

Make the most of your news feed and see the benefits for your SEO.

Really simple syndication (RSS) allows you to receive regular updates from sites you are interested in. This means instead of you having to bookmark your favorite sites and remembering to check them, subscribing to a blog allows you to fine tune your online experiences. From a user perspective this means you can keep up to date with local news, track prices on Amazon, discover new recipes from your favorite chef, whatever you are interested in there is someone out there willing to expand your knowledge on the subject.

How does this relate to SEO?

There are numerous factors that influence your search engine rankings. Among these, regularly updated relevant content, time spent on site, number of backlinks, and amount of search engine traffic your site receives will positively influence your rankings. A news feed will help tick all the above boxes. RSS feeds more likely to be indexed faster, as Google will realise it contains consistent relevant content.

You might wonder why this is important… It gives you a clear advantage over your competitors, for example if you were a plumber at the time of the government announced its boiler scrappage scheme, and your site is regularly updated and therefore indexed first (unlike the rest that are still being indexed monthly), it doesn’t take a genius to work out who takes advantage of the first listings.

Last week I mentioned that 1/5 internet users are uncomfortable buying online, building a ‘relationship’ with clients and suppliers will install that trust to buy. From an SEO perspective using RSS feed as a communication method we are able to generate keyword-rich content and support those all important long-tail keywords, at the same time allowing for on going communication with clients and suppliers, this in turn builds trust and an established reputation.

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Blog, This week we are going to consider click through rates or CTR?

Most of the time when discussing click through rates it’s based on the information given by Google Adwords or other paid advertising services.

But, Google’s webmaster tools also has a click through rate feature which illustrates the clicks for your organic positions, when reviewing our own websites both crearecommunications.co.uk and crearedesign.co.uk displayed some interesting information.

Lets have a look at the facts and figures from webmaster tools..

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So you can see that the difference between just one position causes a dramatic change in the click through rate.

So what does this mean to your organic SEO campaign?, well..  we all knew it was important to be in the top 3 positions to get an effective return, but this also illustrates that users are most likely to click the first listing that they see.

We believe that as the SEO industry becomes more competitive, clients are will be demanding position 1 for their websites. This also relates directly to Google’s ethos, as the algorithm increases in intelligence, the less a user will have to filter out unrelated results, finding the desired result at the top of the page.

Thanks for watching.

[Visit the SEO Encyclopedia - Click Here]

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we have been working on an user driven knowledge base over the last few weeks, which is now ready for launch.

The idea is to allow SEO experts, webmasters, social media experts and anyone interested to add and edit original content. All content is moderated to stop spamming and duplicate content being added, but hopefully, with your help, we can help provide a web resource that will help newcomers and existing SEOs expand their knowledge.

The SEO encyclopedia is on www.crearecommunications.co.uk/seo-encyclopedia/, there is also a link from the homepage. The tutorial this week is a simple demonstration of how to use the software and get started.

Okay if you go to crearecommunications.co.uk/seo-encyclopedia/ your greeted by the welcome page.

There are a few options down the left hand side, search functionality to search a specific article or topic.

Or you can go to browse all, to see all the submissions within the encyclopedia.

If we click the browse all button, you will see I have added 4 main categories, SEO, internet marketing, social media and PPC.

Of course you can add categories and sub-categories. These links represent sub categories within main category and the list represents an article within that category.

So if we look at a specific article, it looks like this with the side bar remaining consistent.

You can browse the content whether your a registered user or not, anyone can see the content within the encyclopedia.

If you want to then added or edit your own content, you can register.

simply click the register button and fill out the form.

Once you have filled out the form you will get a verification email and it gets approved by the encyclopedia webmaster.

Once you have been activated, you will get another email saying you can go in and edit or add new articles.

login by clicking the login button, it says now your logged in, so you can edit you profile with your website address and username, submit a new article or browse the existing content.

If you click the browse all tab again and go through to an article. The relevance of SEO, then national and regional SEO campaigns.

You now have the option to edit this article, the page name you cannot edit as this is controlled by the person who created the article.

Using the simple WYSIWYG editor your can edit and remove content.

Once you update, the alternation comes through to the webmaster to moderate. It specifies that we will moderate your page suggestion and set it live if it is consistent with the guidelines.

To submit a new article, click the submit article link on the left hand side.

There a few details to fill out page name, which is referenced on the encyclopedia, also you can edit the Page title for SEO purposes.

You can select or add a new category and the same for sub-categories.

Then just add the article to the WYSIWYG editor, be sure to add the meta data information to help cross compatability for different search engines.

Then click save which sends the article for moderation.

Thanks for watching, is you find any problems with the SEO encyclopedia, either leave a comment on the supporting blog post or email us at info@creare.co.uk.

Script:

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, following on from the ‘web design’ video blogs from the last couple of weeks on the benefits of top level domains (TLD’s), so this we are going to look at methods of Geotargeting.

We mentioned previously if you are targeting a particular country, then having a country specific domain .co.uk, .fr. .de helps Google to assign your site with that particular country. We also mentioned if you are targeting the UK search with a .com or .org that it is worth hosting the site on a UK IP address to assist google in identifying your target country.

A colleague of mine recently found a tool that identifies the IP address location from your URL.

It can be found at http://www.81solutions.com/server-location.html, you can see that it pin points your IP location.

We also found out this week that you also specify Geotargeting via websmaster tools and we will show we how to do this in this weeks tutorial.

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Thanks for watching if you have any questions of comments please leave them on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html