Links to your site

Getting links into your site are key to getting it noticed. You can check how many links you currently have, and how valuable they are, by creating a free Majestic SEO account

Screenshot of Majestic SEO in action

If you’re looking for some suggested things to try to get a few quality incoming links, here are some ideas:

• Ask for a link from your suppliers, customers, etc
• Make good use of social networking – Facebook, Twitter or YouTube
• Get yourself listed in a couple of directories
• Have a look at your competition’s links for inspiration
• Find out where your audience hang out, and join them online
• Make contact with people in your field, and ask them for a link
• Don’t buy links, and remember that you’re after links from relevant sites – it’s quality, not quantity

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a very important tool – it helps the search engines to find each page on your site, especially the pages that the likes of Google may not be able to find.

Here are a few links on the subject:

• An example of an HTML webpage sitemap: Our  Sitemap 
• An example of an XML (Google compliant) sitemap: XML Sitemap
• Online Sitemap Generator: XML Sitemaps (will only find crawlable pages)
• Two applications for your computer:  Sitemap Generator (free download), or Site Map Pro (paid download)

SEOMoz

We also took a very quick look at SEO Moz – This is a great tool for tracking your SEO progress, but it’s not cheap, and unless you do SEO for a living, this might not be a good investment for you – however, if you have the budget, this is a top tool for managing all things SEO, with lots of nice automated reports.

A screenshot of a SEOMoz Campaign

Next Steps

Thanks to everyone who attended the course – there was a lot to squeeze in, and hopefully everyone found a few things to take away and start working on.

If you’re bitten by the bug, the Maximising Your Website course should be running on the 20th of February. Take a look at the course summary, and if you’re interested, call the college on 01702 220400 to book a place.

Related Links

• SEO Course Week 1 (Jan 2012)
• SEO Course Week 2 (Jan 2012)
• SEO Course Week 3 (Jan 2012)
• Southend SEO Course

South Essex College in Southend-on-Sea runs an evening and weekend course aimed at those looking to set up, run and manage a blog, and can provide valuable insight into the art of “Blogging For Business“.

Course Details:

This is a hands-on course that is designed to show you how to create a blog, target your audience effectively, manage your content on a blogging platform, promote your blog, and monitor its performance.

Next course: Saturday 17th March  2012

Topics covered include:

• Why start a blog? An introduction to the basics
• Setting up a blog from scratch
• Adding Content
• Tailoring content to your audience
• Promoting your blog
• Social Marketing
• Subscriber Management
• Measuring Performance
• Tips and Tricks

The course runs for three weeks on a Saturday morning, start time 10am. Evening courses with a 7pm start time are also available. The price for the course is £65.

Courses are run in a friendly and relaxed environment. There is no exam, and no entry requirements. The course is aimed at those who have at least a basic knowledge of the workings of a website, and although it’s titled as a course for businesses, those looking to set up a blog for personal use, or for a hobby, will also find the content valuable.

For those of you that are technically-minded, we’ll be using WordPress as the blogging platform, and the course will include integration of web stats, setting up basic XML feeds for blog subscription, and the basics of integrating a blog to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Note that this site is created using the WordPress blogging platform.

Attending The Course

To find out when the next course is planned, or to book a place on “Blogging For Business, please call South Essex College on 01702 220400.

If you have a question about the course content, please add a comment below, or contact us

If you’re looking for details of the course, and to sign up for a future SEO course, please see our Southend SEO Course page.

SEO Course – Week One

In the first week, we discuss the basics of web marketing and SEO.

• Google Analytics
• Example of AW Stats
• SEO Terms Glossary

Further reading:

• The Search Engine Optimisation Basics
• Web Stats Explained
• See the summary of the January 2012 Week 1 Session

SEO Course – Week Two

Now that the basics of SEO have been covered, and you’re comfy with Google Analytics, it’s time to look at ways to rank your website.

• PR Checker – Check your Google Page Rank (use as a guide only)
• Alexa Site Info – Check your Alexa Rank, Reach and traffic stats
• Check Domain Analysis – Check other site metrics

Further reading:

• See the summary of the January 2012 Week 2 Session

SEO Course – Week Three

For week three, we look at the tools provided by Google for webmasters, then dive into on-page optimisation:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Meta Tags Example Page

More on Week 3′s topics:

• GWT Impressions and Clicks
• Using Robots.txt and Tags
• Meta Tags Explained
• Summary of January 2012 Week 3 Session

SEO Course – Week Four

In the final week of the course, we move from on-page SEO, to off-page SEO, and cover link building, site optimising and some other hints and tips.

• Majestic SEO – Backlinks Checker – who links to you?
• SEOCentro – Collection of handy tools and checkers
• Examples of sitemaps: HTML Sitemap & XML Sitemap
• Sitemap generators: XML Sitemaps (online), Sitemap Generator (free download), or Site Map Pro (paid download)

Wrap-up

If you’ve enjoyed the course, you may want to consider the Maximising Your Website course, which includes other ways to get more from your website

What is a Meta Tag?

These are typically found in the source code of a web page, in between the <head> and the </head> tags. Remember, to see a page’s source code, right-click on the page and select “View source”.

Here is is a screenshot of a chunk of meta tags, from our Example Page:

A sample set of Meta tags from a site's head section

Some of the tags here are not relevant to SEO, but for the sake of consistancy, we’ll look at each one individually:

The TITLE Tags

There are two here, although using just the first one will be fine. These define the title of the web page, and typically appear in two places – On the web browser’s title bar, and in the Google results. Try to keep the title fairly short, closely related to the content on the page, and containing your keyword or phrase. For example. “Essex Max Homepage” is not as good as “Website optimisation in Essex from Essex Max”

Title Tag in a web browser Title Bar

I tend to favour using a capital letter for each word.

The Title Tag in Google Results

The DESCRIPTION Tag

This is very important tag for SEO use, and it’s where you can use a couple of sentences to describe what the contents of the page is all about. You’d write this as you’d write a normal couple of sentences, for example “We explain what a meta tag is, how to use it, and why it is so important in the world of SEO. Friendly advice from Essex Max.”

The description tag is frequently used by Google in the description field when you see a list of sites. It is therefore important that the text is relevant and encourages the searcher to click on the link. Here is an example of  Description text in a Google search:

Description Tag in Google Results

The KEYWORDS Tag

This tag is largely redundant these days. Google no longer use these, but some other search engines might. If you’re going to use them, aim for no more than 10 words or phrases, and have them all lowercase, e.g. “southend, southend search engine, search engine course”

Content Type

Nothing to do with SEO, this is saying that the page contains HTML text, using a Western character set.

The ROBOTS Tag

This tag is an instruction to search engines. If set to “noindex,follow”, the search engine is instructed not to add the page to the search index, but to follow (i.e. “go to”) any links on the page. More info on this: Robot files and tags explained

The STYLESHEET Tag

Nothing to do with SEO. In this example, the tag is being used to tell the web browser where to find information about how to display the page (font sizes, colours, etc)

The REL = Canonical Tag

This is used as a tool in the fight against duplicate content. Let’s use the example of this website. We own the .co.uk and the .com – The way our site and the web works, is there can be multiple web addresses that all point to the same page, for example:

• essexmax.co.uk
• www.essexmax.co.uk
• www.essexmax.co.uk/index.php
• essexmax.com
• www.essexmax.com
• www.essexmax.com/index.php

These will all take you to the same page, and happen as a result of the way web addresses work. You may find that you have pages on your site that look like duplicates, but in fact they aren’t. In these cases, you can use the CANONICAL tag to tell search engines which web address is the definitive one for a page.

This only needs to be used on pages where there may be another address out there for the same page.

Checking Your Meta Tags

It’s well worth checking your site in Google Webmaster Tools to check that there are no errors or problems with your meta tags.Look under the “Diagnostics” section for your site, and look at the “HTML Suggestions” to see what Google has to say. Here’s an example of what you might see there:

Google Webmaster Tools Diagnostics Meta Errors

The tools are free, and you can get access from  www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• Robots.txt
• The Robots Meta Tag
• The Rel=nofollow Tag

The robots.txt file

This is a plain text file that you insert in the root of your website. In this text file, you give instructions to the various search engines that may come sniffing around your website. Typically, you can use a robots.txt to “Disallow” crawling and indexing.

Let’s say we didn’t want Google to index three things: our “contact us” page (as it has an email address we don’t want spammed), our “privacy info page” (as it’s boring and we don’t want to try to rank for this), and a folder of “work in progress” pages (under development and not ready to be shared or indexed yet). In the robots.txt file, we’d add:


User-agent: *
Disallow: /contact.html
Disallow: /privacy.html
Disallow: /work-in-progress/

Once the robots.txt file has been uploaded, search engines such as Google should obey the command to ignore those two pages, and the work-in-progress folder.

Robots Meta Tag

This is a Meta tag that lives in the <head> section of a web page. Here is an example of the Robots tag in situ:

There are two parts to the tag, separated by a comma:

• Index / Noindex: This tells the search engine whether they should index the page, or keep it out of their search results
  
• Follow / Nofollow: This tells the search engine whether they are allowed to go to all of the links on your page, or not visit any of the links it finds on the page

The Robots meta tag option is a per-page option. Unless you use this tag, it’s assumed that any page is “index” and “follow”, so there’s no read need to add “index,follow” to a page.

Rel = Nofollow

There may be times when you have a webpage that contains links, but you don’t want a search engine to follow some of the links. Again, this could be a “Contact Us” page, or a link to competitor or advertiser that you’re not keen on Google to go to. For this, you can use the rel=”nofollow” tag. This sits in the code for the link, and looks something like this:

Hopefully, that explains the basics of the three ways that you can instruct search engines such as Google and Bing on what parts of your site they’re ok to visit, and which pages, folders and links they should stay away from.

Any questions? Please add a comment below.

It’s generally accepted that if you want a page to rank well, it needs to be well-written, original content, and not a copy of another page with a few words changed.

A question

Mark, one of the attendees of our SEO Course, posed an interesting question for us:

“I have a question. One of the websites that I showed you on the first week of the course, a UK courier company, has multiple front pages that are very similar, and yet still rank first page in Google. For  example, type “courier e8″, “courier sw1″,  or “ebay courier loughton” and the company in question appear on the first page with similar pages. There are many more, all near identical pages. Any idea how this gets past the duplication rule for Google?”

Checking for Duplication

There are several tools out there that can help to check whether two pages look like. My favourite is www.duplicatecontent.net – I typed in two of the examples that you provided, and it confirmed that the “e8″ and “sw1″ pages were very similar.

Using an online Duplicate Content Tool

As you’ll see above, the page layout is almost identical in both cases, but the main body text has been changed a little, and the second page is only 88% identical to the first.

At first glance, you’d be right in being surprised that such a clearly near-duplicate can rank at position 6 in Google – in theory, it should do far worse, as it’s not offering much in the way of fresh, unique and relevant content, compared to similar pages from the same company.

In cases like this, it’s worth looking at the other results in the front page listings. Just about every listing on the front page is for either a directory service (such as Yell.com), or a rival London courier firm who’s doing the same thing (I can see two on the first page). In the example you’ve provided, I’ve looked through the first 30 results, and I’m struggling to find an entry that deserves top spot – i.e. that offers something unique and relevant that is not a near copy of another page, and that explains what you’re seeing.

Google will always return some kind of result – even if it’s for a page that’s not brilliant. In the example you’ve given, there doesn’t seem to be a site that deserves top spot, and so Google has made a decision based on some of the other factors that define a site’s position. In this case, Yell.com and 192.com come out well for London couriers, as they’re respected and trusted directory services. Should a company come along that offers unique content related to “couriers in London E8″, and that site ticks the other criteria Google’s looking for, they may find it fairly easy to overtake some of the duplicated entries that have filtered up to the top.

Although having duplicate content on your site can in many cases hurt your rankings, a well respected site can still do well with duplicated content if there’s nothing to better it. A good example here is the old “how to escape a bear” theory. If you’re with a group of people being chased by a man-eating bear – you don’t need to be able to run faster than the bear, just run faster than the slowest person in the group!

We touch on site reputation, which can make a big difference to performance, in the next week of our course.

Hope that shed a little light…

Google Webmaster Search Queries

Google supplies some information to webmasters explaining how well (or badly) a webmaster’s search phrases are performing.

In Google Webmaster tools, this is under the “Your site on the web” menu option as “Search queries”. Here’s a screenshot of what’s shown:

Search Query Stats in Google Webmaster Tools

For each of the search phrases shown in the above screenshot, there are eight items in the column. Let’s take a closer look:

Impressions

This is the number of times that Google has displayed a link to your site in response to some searching using that key phrase.

As an example, if I search the phrase “Essex Max”, Google returns a page of results, including one for this site. The entry for this site is one Google impression – i.e. for that search term, Google has displayed a link to me once. Here’s a screenshot:

An example of an "impression" on Google's Search Engine

Clicks

In the above example, you should be able to see a single impression. Just because Google has shown an entry in its search results, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the person doing the searching will actually click on it.

Google Webmaster tools shows you how many times your site was shown for a given search (“impressions”) and how many times it was clicked (“clicks”)

CTR

This stands for Click Through Rate, and is expressed as a percentage. If your site is seen 100 times (impressions), but only clicked on 10 times, that would be 1/10, or 10%.

The higher the CTR, the better. A poor CTR could indicate that the entry is very low down the results, or the META tags for that page are not doing your webpage justice, and no-one wants to click on it.

Ave Pos

This is the average position that your site shows up in the results. In the example screenshot above, when searching for “Essex Max”, this site comes up as the third entry. If Google Webmaster Tools reports an Average Position of 3 for that phrase, the website is, on average, shown at position 3 in the list.

Change

With all four of the types of information shown, there is a “Change” field, showing the percentage that the result has increased (green) or decreased (red) in the date range specified.

That’s it – any questions, please add them in the comments below…

The third week of the course sees us step up a gear and shift from discussing theory, to looking at real webpages, and how to address what’s called on-page optimisation. Week 2 of the course was held on Monday the 23rd of January, and kicked off with a session on Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools

The importance of this service from Google should not be understated – this is where Google tells you what it thinks is wrong with your site and how your site is performing in Google’s search results. It also has a few controls to let you tweak how Google views your sites.

If you’re not signed up, do so free, immediately, at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

The Google Webmaster Tools Main Screen

Here’s a high level summary of what GWT has to offer:

• The ability to check the performance of your keywords and look at top ranking search queries for your site
• The ability to check your sitemap (more on this in Week 4)
• Tools to check that your robots.txt file is blocking the files you want to block (more on this below)
• The ‘URL Parameters’ tool – handy for removing duplicates that may be been created (e.g. www.abc.com?id=hello)
• A tool to see which sites Google think link to you the most
• Crawl errors – Vital. If Google thinks bits of your site are broken, or there are some “pages not found”, you need to fix the problems
• HTML Suggestions – Vital. Duplicate or missing Meta Titles and Subscriptions can be a big SEO problem. Google tells you what’s wrong, and suggests fixes

If you’re not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, it pays to spend some time in the “Diagnostics” section, and see what Google’s telling you needs to be fixed

 Webmaster Tools Impressions and Hits

I noted that there were some questions about the terms Impression, Hits and Ave Pos in the Webmaster Tools interface. To try to help explain this, I’ve created a quick summary page. See our Guide to Google Webmaster Impressions and Clicks

Robots.txt

There was lots of discussion around the use of robots.txt in the session. To help out, I’ve added a summary page: Blocking search engines with Robot files and tags.

META Tags

Again, another big subject, and a large talking point.  I’ve created a page that explains the subject in a littlemore detail – Please see Meta Tags Explained for more.

Book Recommendation. One attendee asked if I was able to recommend a good book ont he subject of SEO – I’ve tried a few, and my personal favourite is Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin.The book is now in its third edition, and is available on the Kindle as well as in good old paper format. Well worth a read, my mini-review can be found on this site’s SEO recommended reading page.

To the course attendees reading this, please add a comment or a question in the box below, and it’ll give me some guidance on anything I need to wrap up with on our final session together next week.

Update: Thanks to Mark for an interesting question on duplicate pages on sites – See: Issues with Duplicate Content

As a reminder, the Maximising Your Website course should be running in February. Take a look at the course summary, and if you’re interested, call the college on 01702 220400 to book a place.

Related Links

• SEO Course Week 1 (Jan 2012)
• SEO Course Week 3 (Jan 2012)
• Southend SEO Course

All eight students returned, which is a good sign, and we had quite a lot of content to squeeze into this week, which takes us neatly to the halfway point in the course.

Material covered

Hopefully, by the end of the first week, everyone’s on board with the basics of how a search engine works, and an idea of the goals and aims of everyone’s sites. This week’s session is about information gathering and use of various stats and ranking tools, specifically:

• Use of AWStats and Google Analytics for checking visits, popular pages, common keywords and incoming links
• Definition of Google Page Rank
• Use of sites such as Alexa and Compete to check on publicy-available information about your site, and your competitors

Alexa

Lots of discussion in the course about Alexa this evening.For those not familiar with Alexa, it’s a free site that offers information about any site’s visibility and popularity, with a fair amount of other information that you’d be hard pushed to find anywhere else. Alexa is operated by Amazon.

Normally, a website’s stats and traffic information is confidential, but Alexa lets you take a peek at how other sites are doing, what keywords get those sites traffic, and how they’re performing generally.

Screenshot of Alexa Rankings for a website

So, how does Alexa get its data? Mostly though the Alexa toolbar. Millions of people around the world have installed the free Alexa toolbar, and this sends information about what sites those users visit. That information is used to collate a picture of site usage, and the information is freely available. There are question marks around the accuracy, especially for smaller sites. Given that the vast majority of surfers don’t use the Alexa toolbar, then the data collected is from fairly small sample of users. Nonetheless – the data is there, and it’s free. If nothing else, it’s worth taking a look at how Alexa sees your site, and noting the key information shown there – then check back in a few weeks or months to see if things have improved.

To check your site, or to install the Alexa toolbar, go to www.alexa.com

Progress so far

Hopefully, everyone’s up to speed with where we are on the course so far. Week 3 will take us into the heart of SEO, where we look at page and site optimisation. I’ve asked everyone to try to get themselves set up with a Google Webmaster Tools account for next week, and to use this service to add their site. This will allow us to start looking at how a search engine such as Google sees their sites. The address for Google Webmaster Tools is www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

The Google Webmaster Tools Main Screen

If any of the course attendees are reading this – please feel free to add a comment or a question in the box below, and it’ll give me some guidance on what I should kick off with next week.

Related Links

• SEO Course Week 1 (Jan 2012)
• SEO Course Week 3 (Jan 2012)
• Southend SEO Course

This is now the third time that I have run the SEO Course in Southend as part of South Essex College’s Weekend and Evening team, and it was great to see so many people on the course this time around. Thanks to Helen, Nieves, Mark, Russ, Mark, Amanda, Paul and Peter for attending the first week, and showing such a strong interest in the subject.

Material covered

The first week of the course is an attempt to get everyone on the same page, and to understand the basic concepts of how to promote a website. This includes:

• Understanding that people search in ways you don’t expect
• That it’s important to understand what your site is for, and who your competition is
• That the rules have changed – You need to have a site that is interesting for the audience, and is written for humans, not for search engines
• That not everyone’s search results are the same, due to personalisation and filtering
• That there are ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ SEO people out there, and more so than ever, it pays to play by the rules, and do the right thing, now that Google’s engines are smarter than ever, and in a post Panda world
• That there are a lot of people out there making rash promises about optimising an existing website in return for money, and you need to be careful

Some interesting discussion points were raised, my favourite being what’s become known as the Internet Filter Bubble.

Living in a bubble

Websites such as Google and Facebook have a lot of information about us, and can use it to personalise and customise what we see when we’re online. It can make for more accurate searches, but there’s an associated risk. The YouTube clip that I referred to in my lesson, does a far better job of explaining how it works, and the risks. Here’s the clip of Eli Pariser, talking at TED.com about the Internet Filter Bubble:

Web Stats

We started to touch on the subject of web stats, and surprisingly few of the eight people in the class know how to access their own stats – something that I believe is key to understanding your audience, and working out how well your site is working.

For a summary of web stat basics, see Web Stats: Understanding Your Audience

Other Topics

There was much discussion about “relevance” in respect to SEO – How to make sure your site is relevant to the audience, incoming links are relevant, and about keeping the site fresh and current.

Social Networking, in particular Facebook and Twitter, was other hot topic. I expect that “social signals” will be the theme of 2012 for SEO, and that it will become increasingly important to have Twitter and Facebook integrated into your site at some level – If real-world people like you, then the search engines can see that, and may decide to like you too (Plug: Follow us on Twitter please!)

Other topics included use of multiple domain names pointing at a single site (often a no-no), and site localisation.

All-in-all, an interesting evening – I’m looking forward to Week 2, and I’ll be adding more notes on the course progress shortly.

Related Links

• SEO Course Week 2 (Jan 2012)
• SEO Course Week 3 (Jan 2012)
• Southend SEO Course