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.

We have written about the benefits of quality over quantity links ad nauseom over here at Creare, but I do still think it is a subject worthy of discussion.

As Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist at Google says in his recent blog post: Quality links to your site, published on Monday – a quality link is always going to be worth much more than a hundred ’spammy’ links. So, how does a person determine which links are ‘quality’ and which are not?

Well, I think a lot of this comes down to experience, when I first started dabbling in SEO a few years ago, (and, my, how the discipline has changed since then!) I know I fell into some pretty easy traps and pitfalls when it came to link building. One thing that I do know about link building is that it isn’t easy. Whichever way you come to look at it, ‘easy’ is not a word I would use to describe it, not that it’s technically very difficult, of course, just that it’s time consuming and requires patience, dedication, and to some extent a certain amount of luck.

So, what pitfalls and traps could a green SEO newbie easily find themselves slipping down?

Lets start with Rubbish Directories – when I started my first SEO Campaign (many moons ago now) I seem to remember spending hours (literally hours) submitting my site to a gazillion directories. Some were ok, and I would even go so far as to say I would use them again today, some, however were absolutely diabolical.

What do you look for in a good directory then? I hear you ask – and because I am feeling generous I’ll let you in to a few little secrets I’ve picked up the hard way…

1. Is the directory relevant? At the very least it should have a relevant category
2. Does the directory provide SEO friendly links (by this I mean, make sure the links aren’t PHP forwarders or other such uselessness)
3. Is the directory active?
4. Look at the page you want to link from, does it have a lot of other links? - The fewer the links the better
5. What is the PageRank of the directory?
6. Are the Links Follow or Nofollow (not that Nofollow links should always be discounted, just if the site asks for an administration fee then bear this in mind)

This seems a good place to add in a comment on Kaspar Szymanski’s blog that caught my eye:

Zack Pike said…
Kaspar - Very relevant artice. I lead the SEO strategy for a Fortune 200 company and I get cold calls on quick turn linkbuilding all of the time, it gets especially frustrating when someone above my pay level catches wind of “linkbuilding” and how this “great” new strategy can get you to the top of Google. It takes a lot of time educating my internal stakeholders that the key to generating quality links, that are going to have any effect, is great content and interaction with our consumers and KOLs online. I’m glad you wrote this post so I can reference it in my presentations… Straight from the source. Thanks!

Kaspar Szymanski goes on to say in  his blog post that your site’s content is extremely important to gain quality backlinks through natural processes. Well, I tend to agree with him, and this is why I say that link building isn’t easy.

To continually come up with unique and interesting content for your site is an ongoing and arduous task. It’s important to weigh up the value a page one listing will have over the time you spend on this task. If you know that the time spent on such things is worthwhile then invest your efforts there.  If it’s not going to make commercial sense then look to other online marketing activities such as email marketing or PPC Advertising and invest your time and money there instead. But, this isn’t the place for such discussions, we’re and SEO blog, and SEO is what we’re all about, so… If you have decided that it’s worth your while developing you content, then look outside the box. There are many forms of content besides plain old text, though text is still extremely important (and will remain so for as long as Google uses text as fodder).

Think about including a web video  to your pages. This will add value to you users, can increase the time spent onsite (I think this is a Ranking Factor), and generally gets you noticed. If you employ Video Optimisation techniques then your videos will even start to appear in the SERPs and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that videos are much more likely to get clicked than text. You’ll also find that your videos will get distributed and linked to by others within your community.

I would say, if it’s lasting effect you are after then humour will have it’s down side – the benefits are often short-lived. You will get a spike in traffic, but it will always remain just this – a spike. For lasting effects add something your users will want to return to regularly and will find useful in the future.

Kaspar also talks about Social Media. I have to confess, this is an area that I feel a little out of my depth in, however, with a strategy behind it I think it can be very powerful. It’s just about leveraging what you want from it (like pretty much everything else in life, eh?). His tip of making sure you provide a link to Twitter or Facebook is a great and simple one to implement. It’s just about making it easy for non-techy folk to share online content.

Finally – Look at your competitors – where have they got links from? Could you get links from similar industries? If it works for them, it could well work for you too. Don’t copy, obviously, but use your competitors for ideas. You never know where it may lead.

Starting at the beginning because without search engines there would be no SEO. Google was founded by two Stanford University students in 1996 as part of a doctoral research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The hypothesis for their search engine was derived from the process of academic research. In order to come to a conclusion you would first have to research and cite other academic research to build upon and support your theory. Any book you open and any piece of published writing will have a list of references that were key to that theory being advanced.

Page and Brin took the idea of referencing and went about creating a search engine that could “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, and so Google was born. They believed the best way to establish which websites contained the most relevant information was to index the entire web and establish who links to each other. In other words the websites with the most references (links) from other highly relevant websites must return the relevant results for the user.

This is an incredibly simplistic overview of how Google’s algorithm actually works, however it is this basic foundation that has separated Google from its competitors making it the prefered search engine of over 60% of the population. As users do you need to know the technicalities of how a search engine works, I don’t think you do. As a business owner who is interested in having a website, without a basis understanding of how search engines work and without using this knowledge to make the most of SEO techniques you will be the desert in the oasis of opportunity!

How external links can help your Page Rank

As a Search Engine Optimiser Page Rank (PR) is one of the aspects of a website that I pay particular attention to when looking at a clients internet marketing. Google page rank which can be seen using the Google toolbar is one way to assess how Google ranks your website.

You can download the Google toolbar from here:

http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ff/index.html

A websites page Rank is a measured score calculated by Google and based on the internal and external links that a website has. Here I am going to look at external link building and how the page rank and quality of the website you are linking from have an effect on this score.

External Linking

When looking at building external links which will point to your site to help build page rank the first thing you need to keep in mind is that you need quality over quantity.
This external linking that you build for your site, contributes to a large part of the calculation of your website’s page rank.

Your websites PR will gain greater effects in a positive way by linking from a site with a good page rank as this in Google’s eyes counts as a vote for the quality of your site from a site they have already deemed as having a certain level of quality itself.

Therefore a link from a site with a PR5 is worth more than a link from a site with a PR 2.

A secondary influence on the quality of each of these links is how many outbound links the page that your link will be on already has. This can have a big effect tipping the balance of the strength of a link for example a PR 5 with 50 out bound links wouldn’t then necessarily be a stronger link then a PR3 link which only has a few outbound links.

When asking for an external link to you site it is important to determine which page your link will be on as even if the index page has a PR5 the sub page that your link will be on could be a PR0.

It is very tempting to build links from anywhere you can get them to ensure that you have as many links as possible but be aware that certain links wont be counted by Google if they deem them as poor. Certain links that you build can cause your site to be penalized if that site links to already penalized site so investigate the sites a little before creating a link partnership.

An example of how the PR linking works is if Page A gets a link from page B which has a high page rank this will act as a vote for page A which will effect page A’s PR in a positive manner.
If there was then Page C and Page D who both had a PR2 and page A had a link from them it wouldn’t really effect the PR in a negative way but the positive effects would be minimal.

It is also very important to receive links from sites that have a similar industry or theme and typing your keywords into Google is a good way of finding these sites within the top 5 pages. Finding quality links is all about investigating the websites you are going to request a link off and making sure the link partnership will be one of quality.

Another point to mention is that when you make requests to web masters for these links you should ensure you consider which page on your site you are asking them to link to. If all you links you build only point to the index page of your site then your internal pages wont gain as much benefit. The sub pages however do gain a slight knock on effect of the index pages PR over time but creating direct quality links to important pages for your site will also be beneficial.

Before contacting web masters from high page rank sites requesting a link for your website, you must always bear in mind that a site of that statue will only want to link to non-spammy sites which have quality content that people will want to read. If you want a site to become a vote for your site they will only agree if your site is worth voting for.

In SEO, internal linking is connecting two website pages, it’s all about usability. Not only from a human perspective, but also for the search engine robots. If we start off looking at it from a users perspective and leave you pondering what the heck search engine robots are?

A website should allow the user to fulfill their need quickly and easily. If they can find what they are looking for, they are more likely to make a purchase or contact you about your services, if they cant they will hit the back button and you have lost yourself a sale! Looking at it objectively the best place to start is the home page you have two perfect opportunities; your navigation and your footer. Both should have keyword rich page names relevant to what you are optimising that page for. A sitemap is often over looked, however a good website should never be without an easily navigated list that can quickly point a user to the products/services they want. If you are optimsing for milk chocolate, white chocolate and dark chocolate, and you decided you want a whole page on each (and who could blame you) if you happen to mention dark chocolate on the milk chocolate page link it back to the milk chocolate page. But why….? This is where the search engine robots come in to the equation!

You may have heard of a search engine robot or spider that “crawls” your site and takes the information back to the search engines database. Everyone seems to have their own way for describing how these robots work. The metaphor that struck a chord with me was when they were described as an explorer ant, leaving their colony with one thought on their mind: Food. Except it is not actually ‘food’ they are looking for it is HTML text, and to get to it they need to travel along well planned out, obstacle free paths, these obstacle free paths just so happen to be your links. The happy ant then returns home with all its food (text) after a successful mission and stores it in the anthill (search engine database). If the path is not clear, the ant gives up and goes somewhere else as there is no food and returns with nothing.

Next time you sit down to carry out a search, remember in that few seconds you have sat their impatiently tapping your fingers, that the search engine has sifted through its database, sorted the millions of results into a list of the most relevant sites hopefully containing a match to your exact search criteria. Keeping those robots happy and well fed, and channeling your potential clients in the right direction will not only help your SEO listings but it will increase your revenue.