We’ve all seen it on our travels when browsing the web. Pages that have been stuffed with keywords to supposedly help “increase ranking” have become an all too often occurrence. It’s evident that many SEO’s and webmasters are constantly looking for ways to squeeze every last ounce of SEO out of their pages, but sadly, they are living in the past.

Keyword stuffing went out with the square wheel and by inserting too many occurrences of targeted keywords within your page copy, your page becomes ugly and completely unreadable to your visitors. Boy, what a turn off!!

The key is to use synonyms. The reason being is that Google and other search engines have become so sophisticated that they have an excellent understanding of the relationships between different words.

If you go to Google for example and enter into the search box “~property” (without the quotes) and then hit search, you will notice that within the search results Google highlights certain words in bold. You will notice that there are many bolded synonyms for example “estate agents”, “homes” and “real estate” that Google deems to be related and which have a semantic relationship.

So that you can view all of the synonyms that Google is aware of for this particular word try something like “~property -homes -estate agents -real estate. Each time you find new ones, write them down and then append another -word to the end of the search. You will notice that the number of search results reduces each time.

So now you know which words Google associates with others, you can look at replacing some of your keywords and internal anchor texts with their synonyms which will ultimately make your sites content more readable and look well….less spammy!

Until next time..

The idea behind it is that you write an informative article on your topic/niche, and put it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Then at the bottom of the article (or sometimes within it), you will have the option to add your little bit of self promotion and link to your website via the resource box.

Article marketing is a real opportunity for you to establish yourself as an authority within your field, although judging by a lot of what gets placed onto most article directories, this is not always the case!

There has been much comment in the past as to the value of article marketing with some citing that “you may as well put the articles on your own site” or “it’s going to be seen as duplicate content if you distribute it to lots of websites”. Although both of these are valid points, there are a number of benefits to article marketing that I would like to mention, including:-

Presenting Yourself As An Expert

Let’s face it, when looking for information we want to read something that is concise, interesting, and is well researched. By writing well crafted articles, you establish yourself as someone who is a trusted expert and source of quality information.

Helping To Build Links

By placing articles on some of the better directories such as Ezinearticles and Buzzle,  you will find that your articles not only rank well (if optimized correctly) but also inherit page rank, which in turn “bleeds” page rank back to your site through your link.

While many believe that distributing articles to more than one website constitutes duplicate content and therefore will not pass any real SEO value, it must not be forgotten that its not JUST about SEO. Distributing your article to hundreds of websites gives your website greater visibility and hopefully, more visits and natural links.

Obtaining Click Throughs

Another obvious benefit is click throughs. By placing information within the resource box at the bottom of your article, you are offering the reader the ability to investigate your services or products further, after all, if I have just read a great article I will be really interested in reading more content from this author or website.

Establishing Trust

Trust is vital, not only in SEO, but in business. By writing good content you are showing the world that you are an expert within your field and what you say is worth listening too. The fact also that a lot of top article directories will only approve quality articles, also adds to your trust brownie points.

So there you have it. A number of reasons why article marketing is still a valuable method for SEO and why you should be using it to establish yourself as a trusted resource.

So what does pagerank really mean in terms of ranking and SEO?

Pagerank is a Google algorithm that was named after Larry Page one of the two Google founders and is supposed to represent and indicate to a sites visitor the overall link popularity of a page or an indication of the amount of citations/votes (links) there are too that page. Although this is partly correct and it must be stated that this is a rather simplistic view of pagerank, it still does not reflect the true meaning of pagerank and what bearing it has on our sites performance.

If you want to see an example of a site that has massive pagerank on almost all of its 479,000 pages then take a look at http://www.doaj.org/. This was recently highlighted by Eric Wards post titled “Where trust lives”.

As you browse through the site, ask yourself why does this site have so much pagerank?

Ok finished? Well although the site is relatively new (2003) it actually has over 10,000 links from .edu domains (normally highly trusted by Google as they are academic sites) and over 250 links from .gov domains (govermental sites) that are trusted even more by Google and the other search engines.

This brings me onto my next point. In the above paragraph you will notice that I used the word “trusted”. This my friends is what it is all about.

In a web full mostly of crap and spam its even more important that you obtain links from trusted resources and this will only come if you HAVE a trusted resource yourself that people are happy to link too. You see, its not about pagerank, its about “TrustRank”. The more you are trusted by the engines and other sites (links) the better you will fair and the more successful you will become.

If you want to be trusted more, you need to build a site that is easy to navigate and more importantly is full of authorative content within your field that people will find of great use and interest and at the same time will be happy to link to in some way. If you don’t have any interesting or link worthy content on your site, you are fighting an uphill battle, as you won’t have anything of any real value to market and promote.

So don’t be a cowboy. Differentiate yourself from the competition in terms of the value and experience you add to your users lives and eventually you will build more trustrank and in turn better rankings and traffic. Get inside the minds of your users, find out what they really want or the answers to the questions they are looking for and give them just that!

Oh and forget about link building so much. People will do that for you “naturally” the more they see you and your brand as a source of trustworthy and informative content.

For more information on the pagerank formula take a look at the paper written by Brin and Page while at Stanford University http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Its an old doc but is a great read.

What is clear, is that at the outset of any search engine optimisation agreement or contract, the client MUST be made fully aware of the following:-

1. The competitiveness of their niche

2. The demographic of their potential customers

3.  What they want their visitors to do in terms of actions on the webiste, IE, buy a product, contact them about a service or signup for a monthly newsletter etc.

4. How long it will take to rank for their most competitive search terms.

5. How likely their site is to actually convert any visitors into paying customers.

6. The advantages of SEO over other forms of advertising and promotion.

This is 6, but I am sure I could come up with a few more.

The 4th entry is the one I wanted to bring your attention to and is the subject of this post. How long will it take to rank and receive traffic?

To answer this question we need to understand that not all industries are as competitive as others. Some industries such as real estate, finance, credit cards, mortgages, gaming, hotels and pharmaceuticals are very competitive with a greater return on investment than say a small local plumber. Wherever there is a great potential to make lots of money, you will find plenty of competition.

For a business with limited online competition, for example 50 competitors, the site can ranking well possibly within the first month or two and start competing at the outset of the SEO campaign. The same cannot be said for the more competitive industries.

When you have for example 500 websites competiting for the same keywords and business, its not possible to compete at the outset with organic SEO due to different things including search engine crawling, ageing of links and a sites authority etc which all take time and is not influenced by money. A lot of the competitors will have been established for possibly a number of years and to think that you can compete instantly with them is totally un-realistic.

With a very competitive industry you will normally be looking at around 12 months or more to start seeing good levels of traffic.

“Patience” is definately the watch word with SEO. Slow and steady wins the race as acquiring links too quickly looks un-natural to a search engine and can lead to penalties which is obviously a blow to any online business.

In the long run though, the return on investment for an organic SEO campaign is far greater than using adwords or other forms of advertising.

You need to look at any SEO campaign as a long term investment. Its like growing a tree from a seed. It takes time(keyword research and analytics), a lot of nurturing(on-site optimization) and lots of feeding(links and money).

An oak tree doesn’t grow over night, and neither will your websites online presence and visibility.

I get quite a few enquiries from clients looking for a new website, either they do not have one or their previous “designer” screwed up in some way and are now looking for a revamp or a new site all together.

One thing that is common though, is that clients have this vision of an all singing and all dancing website design with flash, rockets, animated graphics and all sorts of other “distractive” features!

People, get real! Your visitors do not want this, YOU DO! Are you trying to sell or entertain? Let me give you an example of a simple but effective website design. The google homepage. Do you think they will put lots of flashy images, movies and banners ads all over their homepage? Of course not.

Believe it or not, Google does keep the page to a very minimum(something like 28 elements/words) but makes very very subtle changes that most people do not even notice, but these changes are effective. Take a look at their post on search experiements back in August. Wow, no flashy content there eh?

It’s words and user experience that sell! Copywriting and call to action should be the main focus for your site, NOT fancy images and flash animations. For example, if you have a real estate site(of which there are many), what do you think your visitor wants? Some flash animation or the ability to search and locate a selection of properties painlessly? You got it, the painless information retrieval wins every time.

It’s about content and user experience and not so much image. Not that I am saying you should build a crappy website, just that the website should be focused on your goals and conversions, whether thats getting somebody’s email address, selling a product or service, or having someone signup to your newsletter. Its all about giving them what they want, which is:-

A Website That Is Easy To Navigate

Don’t make your visitor search too hard for what they are looking for. If you are selling property make sure your listings are easy to find and that if the search boxes are not on the homepage, make sure there is at least one link that is visible to that search page. You only have a few seconds to capture that user, make sure you use those three seconds well.

You also want to make sure you structure your site well, ie not too many deep directories. Keep the structure as flat as you can and your most important content(for users and bots) nearer to the top of the structure.

Good Internal Linking Structure

Make sure that you interlink your pages well by creating hyperlinks where neccessary back to other pages using keyword rich anchor text.

Nice, clean URL’s

If you are not using a content management system(CMS) try to make sure that your urls are keyword rich. for example mysite.com/cars/reviews/porsche-boxter.html

This makes the urls easier to remember, more descriptive for the visitor and will help with rankings as well.

If you ARE using a CMS system such as Joomla then get yourself the SEF plugin or something similar and get those urls rewritten using mod_rewrite.

Keep Your Images Small and not too much fancy flash

Once again, not too many oversized images and flash animations. They can be a bit of a turn off and in other instances become a real distraction. When you have someone in that sales funnel on your site, keep it simple and get them to that checkout asap. No distractions, no excuses.

Set Up A Blog

Blogs are a great way of telling your visitors about changes to your business and website. If its any good people may even subscribe to the blogs feed so that they can see your posts as soon as you create new ones. They are also good for internal linking and SEO so set one up. Wordpress only takes a few minutes to set up so set one up today and start posting on a regular basis.

Good Use Of Page Headings

Its a fact that people “skim” text when visiting websites, looking for that indicator as to what they have been searching for. Its a bit like when people read a newspaper. They SCAN the paper for appealing titles and headings that catch their attentions. The same goes with websites.

Make sure you use good H1 and H2 header tages to format your pages correctly using your main keywords within these tags.

Clear Contact Information

Its amazing that sometimes you visit a site and it seems to take forever to find your contact info. Generally you want to have it on the home page somewhere that is visually accessible very quickly, for example top left or top right. Wherever you put it, make sure it can be found quickly. This is very frustrating for a visitor who needs to contact you quickly.

Well there are a few. There are in fact many changes that you can make to your site in order to make it more appealing and effective.

Don’t overlook the most obvious features of your new or old site. User experience NOT search engine friendliness is the most important aspect(and thats coming from someone who mainly deals with SEO). Its no good spending loads of money on SEO, PPC or any other marketing for your site if the users experience is not going to be up to scratch.

In terms of business size, bigger isn’t always better. There are some definite advantages to staying small in the business world that in my mind far outway some of the advantages of going BIG. Some of the advantages of remaining small include:

1. More control over the day to day runnings so that you can keep track of whats happening in your business. Just look at some of the most recent news such as Barings and other banks finding out that their traders have been losing billions behind their backs with supposedly nobody knowing a thing about it. Wow, if only I had billions to lose!!

2. The ability to move quickly to the changing market, this cannot be said of larger companies who have a hierarchy and systems in place to make changes to the simplest of things. Being small means that you can make strategic changes within your niche quickly that way staying one step ahead of those big boys.

3. In terms of SEO , you can target the less competitive keywords which may not receive so many searches but are more focused to the services and products that you offer. This means that you can rank quicker and get more “relevant” and “convertable” visitors to your site. Oh and you will not need the same budget that the big boys need to spend to compete with the “broader” search terms.

Take me for example. My industry is extremelly competitve. For me to target “search engine optimization” or “SEO Company” is not realistic as I am a one man band who does not have a team of SEO’s working on their marketing or a larget budget to play with. But hey thats fine, as I target keywords and search terms that are more relevant to my niche, ie spain and the costa del sol. That way I can work at owning my niche area. Yes I get less traffic, but the traffic I do get is more focused and local which helps me to convert more visitors to clients. You can do this too!!

4. Another great thing about staying small is the personal touch. Many customers love the idea of being able to speak to the “main man” when they have questions on a personal level rather than “submit a ticket” or have to go through some chain of command in order to speak to some who “might” no what your talking about or worse still explain your problem too half a dozen different people. I love the fact that working mostly on your own means that the buck stops with me. I am responsible and like the fact that I can have a close and interactive relationship with my clients.

5. You save moneyand that money saving aspect is passed onto your clients which for them represents better value as the cost of SEO is reduced meaning that their ROI (return on investment) is even greater. With the current financial crisis, customers are looking for even greater value and this is something you can provide by staying small and keeping your costs down in order to pass on your savings to your customers. Hell how do you think some of the small airlines run and compete or some of the low cost retailers in the UK such as Primark? They keep the costs down and pass on that saving to the consumer.

So there you have 5 benefits to remaining small. I am sure you can think of many more.

Organic SEO is a great long term strategy that you can implement to help you compete with your larger competitors. Many businesses feel that they are unable to compete or that the market is flooded with competitors but this does not matter. Be creative and there is always an angle you can find in order to work you way into the market.

SEO does not have to cost the earth. I work on an hourly rate so the client always knows how much of my time they will get each month. It doesnt matter if you can only afford 10 hours per month. The main point is that you are consistently investing into your website over the long term and gradually giving your site more exposure and thus getting better ranking and traffic in your targeted niche market. I have a number of clients in different niches including alternative cancer treatments, Spanish Property, Property in North Cyprus, property in Cape Verde, Marbella property and Holiday Rentals. All are competing with some of the major players in their niches.

You can do it!! Its been done before and MANY have prospered! You can to!

Remember, big isn’t always better. Its not the length of the sword, its the swordsman!

Well, unless you have been living on the moon for the past few months, you will have realised that the world is pretty much experiencing a global economic recession. The purse strings have tightened and most individuals and businesses are starting to feel the pinch with lots of major companies reporting much lower profits.

So where does that leave you as a small to medium size company with an online presence? How does it affect you? and should you reduce your marketing spend?

Well the answer (as history has shown in many cases) is NO!

History has shown that companies that have marketed their websites and businesses more aggressively during an economic downturn have not only done better than the competition during the recession, but in many cases have reaped the benefits a couple of years out of the recession period as well, as stated in the following excerpt from Ed Clark

Over the years hundreds of studies have been conducted to prove companies should maintain advertising during a recession. In the 1920’s advertising executive Roland S. Vaile tracked 200 companies through the recession of 1923. He reported in the April 1927 issue of the Harvard Business Review that the biggest sales increases throughout the period were rung up by companies that advertised the most. ….The findings of six more recession studies to date by the group present formidable evidence that cutting advertising in times of economic downturns can result in both immediate and long-term negative effects on sales and profit levels. Meldrum & Fewsmith’s former Senior VP, J. Welsey Rosberg reports “ I have yet to see any study that proves timidity is the route to success. Studies consistently have proven that companies that have the intelligence and guts to maintain or increase their overall marketing and advertising efforts in times of business downturns will get the edge on their timid competitors.

The other thing pointing out is that generally in an economic downturn, advertising costs are cheaper due to a lack of companies spending, meaning that you get more bang for your buck. The other obvious advantage of marketing more during a downturn is that your getting more visibility, as often is the case your competitors have shut up shop. This is not the way to go about increasing your visibility online or anywhere else for that matter.

The great advantage of continuing with your SEO campaign during these lean times is that you are not only giving your business greater visibility while a lot of your competitors have folded, you will also be building your SEO rankings during this period which means that when things do eventually pick up, you will have a head start on a lot of the competition. This is not marketing BS, its a fact.

SEO is a long term strategy, so calls for patience just like an economic market downturn. If you can keep plugging away when your competitors are having a siesta, you will find that you will be in an excellent position when the economies do stabilize again. And when I said earlier that you need to be aggressive during this time, I don’t mean throw money at it left right and center. Being aggressive with your marketing means sniffing out those advertising bargains which might mean doing a little bartering and also learning to be creative in your approach to giving your business maximum exposure. SEO is a fabulous marketing method but isn’t the only form of marketing.

If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs…..get the point?

]]> http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/the-right-time-to-invest-in-your-website/feed/ 0 http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/google-now-able-to-index-scanned-pdf-files/ http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/google-now-able-to-index-scanned-pdf-files/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:47:20 +0000 admin http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/?p=71 It was announced yesterday on the Google blog that the search engine giant is now able to crawl and index scanned documents that are saved in the Adobe PDF(portable document format) format.

Wow, the mind boggles at the power that Google has in its quest to make the worlds information available to all.

So if you have any sensitive scanned docs in pdf format somewhere on your site that you would rather Google didn’t show the world, beware, as they are just a crawl away from being available to all.

Internal Contextual Linking

Internal linking is not thought about by a lot of webmasters and SEO’s. If you want to see how linking internally should be done, take a look at wikipedia.org.

This is a top example of contextual internal linking. This kind of linking has the most value in terms of SEO benefits. Unlike site wide navigation or footer links these are treated differently by search engines as they are wrapped by relevant contextual text rather than just sitting as a single link next to a whole bunch of other links on a page.

Linking this way looks most natural to a search engine and is why they just love blogs, as these kind of links look more like a natural citation to another site. The search engines can also get a better idea of the links topic, by looking at the text surrounding the link.

This obviously will only work if you have content on your site. The more content you have, the more opportunities you will have to link internally more effectively. Having more content also gives you more options when targeting the long tail, but thats for another post.

So there you go. Start thinking more about interlinking as many of your pages as possible. This will give you better rankings and also make it clear to the search engines exactly which pages are targeting which search terms.

Anyway, on to part 2 of my “6 On Site SEO Tips To Rank Better On Google”.

In my previous posting I mentioned the importance of using your title tags effectively in order to rank better and to get more user click throughs.

Today I wanted to touch on URL’s and how important they are for many reasons.

A url can take the form of www.seoservicesspain.com or something like http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/6-on-site-seo-tips-to-rank-better-on-google/. They can also sadly take the form of www.mysite.com/directory/index.php?type=45&value=5674&proparea=iraq&propid=2345. You get the picture.

Now, all of these are valid urls. They will ALL be crawled by google and other search engines despite the crap you may here from people in forums saying search engines do not like long url strings. Bull!! A few years ago maybe, today, not a problem. Trust me, I check pages that are indexed on Google and other search engnines every day and some of the urls are incredibly long with many many parameters which kind of lays this theory to rest.

Anyways, with some sites that have CMS(content management systems) or pull page content from a database, you can quite often see these long complex urls with multiple parameters. Like I say, these are crawlable by search engines but are not practical for users.

A url should be descriptive. As an example take the following url

www.myrealestatesite.com/directory/index.php?type=45&value=5674&proparea=iraq&propid=2345

1. This is hard for a user to remember

2. Its not very descriptive and doesn’t tell us much about the linked to page

3. Is just to damn long winded

The ideal url would be

www.myrealestatesite.com/property/villas/iraq/2345/

Now doesn’t that look better?

1. Easier to remember

2. Easier to type in

3. Is more descriptive(users get an idea of what this url is about)

4. Easier to link to

5. Less open to someone linking to the wrong url by getting a & or ? out of place.

If you have a CMS system which uses a lot of dynamic urls you may want to learn about mod_rewrite for apache. By editing your .htaccess file on your web server you can rewrite these horrid urls into nice clean urls. Take a look at this mod_rewrite tutorial.

URL’s are also valued by search engines so it makes sense to place your keywords in the urls. Just search on google for something and notice how those words are highlighted in the SERP’s(search engine results pages). You will notice that the keywords that are found in the urls are also highlighted which is showing that the search engines generally value this more.

So if you have a gardening website and the sub page is targeting landscaping services in kent an ideal url would be

www.mygardeningsite.com/landscaping-services-kent.html

Clean, descriptive and keyword rich.

Another thing to remember is to keep your most important pages closer to the top of your sites structure or close to the root directory/domain as possible. So try not to have an important page at

www.mygardeningsite.com/services/kent/foo/landscaping-service-kent.html

Search engines don’t crawl new sites deeply to start with. This only comes with time, trust and links.  So make sure that your most important pages sit at the top of the hierarchy and not at the bottom.

Thats it for today’s rant. Join me soon for Part 3.

Back to work for me!!