Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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Google page rank demise

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Google page rank demise

many people have witnessed the shake up over page positions in search results. Top search result positions used to belong to the website who had the highest page rank. It is this reason that link strategies played such an important role in SEO. Well looks like those days are gone and good riddens to it.

Apart from building shady business finding clever ways to buy and sell links, relentless “link to me” requests and of course blog / forum and other social networking spamming. The page rank system prevented new businesses and entrepreneurs from gaining any value from the Internet. It can take years to build a solid page rank naturally which does not really support the needs of new and small businesses.

The “welcomed” shift to content relevancy to search keywords is like a breath of fresh air. Relevancy is focused on your website’s content and meeting the needs of people searching for the content you offer.

It is too early to tell of this is a permanent change in direction or part of the Google caffeine roll out short term. But it does support trends in social networking. Most sites like Twitter, facebook etc use either “nofollow” or redirect links to avoid passing on “link juice” that would build page rank. The reason they do this is stop link spamming diluting true content with rubbish.

Social networks are vitally important. But rather than simply being a popularity contest the emphasis should be on driving traffic to your website.

So have we seen the demise of Google page rank. I hope so as it levels the playing for those just starting out as well as established website’s. Isn’t that the reason the Internet became so popular?

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SEO tips – Page titles

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

SEO tips – Page titles

Good page title tags are essential. We often find that title tags are neglected creating an “untitled page” or that the same page title is used for all pages.

Search engines use title tags to display page info in search results.

As such title tags are essential and must reflect the content of each page and use appropriate keywords.

Title tags go into your <head> section of the web page between <title></title>. i.e. <title>your page title goes here</title>

Title tags should be a short summary of the pages content and include your keyword.  When you see a list of results from a search engine the first line on each result is based on the title tag.

Title tag length should be limited to around 65 characters, including spaces, this is not a definite number but is the maximum that will be displayed so to get your message across concisely do it in 65 characters.

See also meta descripton

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SEO 2010 for business people

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

SEO in 2010 is going to be new ball game in the first quarter and throughout the year.

Google will be rolling out Caffeine which is less revolution but more evolution.  The emphasis is on speed.  This makes sense when more and more people are using mobile devices to “surf the net”.  As such website performance is going to play a major roll in where your website appears in search results.

What does this mean for your business.  If you are currently established for productive keywords you may well lose position.  The effect on your business will depend on how you much you rely on Google to generate traffic /new  clients.  If search engine positioning is not important to you then you need to do nothing at all.  For everyone else it is already too late.  Caffeine roll out has already begun but which data centres will be updated when is anyone’s guess.

The need for action is between now and April 2010.  This initial period is likely to be fairly lenient with settings hotting up throughout the remainder of 2010.

Specifically your website needs to meet a target load performance level of less than one second.  Google’s own pages load speed are circa 0.6 seconds.  But then their own pages are very basic as they are more utilitarian than a commercial website.

We took our existing website  http://www.services-web-design.co.uk , which is slow at around 2.8 seconds,  as the basis to create our new website http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk.  In this process we reduced load time from the original site of  2.8 seconds down to just to 0.56.

How did we do it?

Firstly we created clean code for the website which validates to w3c standards.  This was the starting point.  We minimised the CSS and JavaScript code by stripping out all extraneous code and white space.  We minimized images and used CSS backgrounds to fill in the blanks.  We consolidated our script’s into a single file.  Off site we enabled Apache gzip to compress the files further and finally we used server side caching to extend the cache period of larger files.  In all we improved performance by 500%.

The biggest savings came from clean code and removing redundancy.  As website become older things get changed.  This often leaves pieces of code that are no longer in use but are still being read / interpreted by a web browser creating unnecessary  baggage reducing performance.

Of course up until now performance has not really mattered.  But now it does it needs to be addressed.  Both website’s mentioned above are available to view.  Our decision to rewrite the website rather than edit the old  was a concious one.  For us it was / is partly an experiment but commercially it was quicker and cheaper to recreate rather than a trial and error approach i.e. figure out what we would break if we took something away etc.

Other website ranking issues that Google Caffeine may introduce are as yet unknown.  So watch this space for more details.  We are keeping a very close our client websites metering changes and looking for commonality to identify trends.

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SEO tips – domain naming

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

SEO tips – domain naming

Unless you are well established and/or a household name it is unlikely that the name of your business as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) / web address is going to be known to your potential visitors.

Promoting your website address is an expense that could be better spent optimising your website.  Your url should be working for you and reflect the goods, services and, if possible, location of your business.

Geo targeting is also an issue.  Simply put if you trade, primarily, in the UK then a .co.uk should be used as opposed to a non specific .com .org etc.  Newer formats such as .org.uk are not trusted by Google as yet so best avoided.

In our case the company is Winning Inch (and typing that url will redirect you) but we provide website design services in and around Cirencetser.  Hence to reflect what we do and where we do it is reflected in our domain name www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk.  The url says it all.

It is important to recognise that the source of a visitor to your web site will probably come via results from a search engine. The higher up the list of results your web site appears the more likely it is to gain individuals pro actively searching for goods and services you offer.

We highly recommend incorporating keywords into your web sites name. In doing this the chance of getting a higher page positioning is far more likely.

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SEO tips – Keywords

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

SEO tips – Keywords

Keywords drive the Internet. These are words / phrases that are entered into a search engine to find answers, goods and services.  The key is to match the keyword your goods and / or services that  those searching the Internet will find your website.

There are two primary sources to help you to discover what people actually search for when looking for the things that you supply.

Google adwords external tool. This free tool from Google will give you some useful data. But it is limited because it is “Adwords” focused. You can try it here

The industry standard is Wordtracker. This provides specific data about keywords including how competitive they are. You can get a free 7 day trial of Wordtracker here

Winning Inch provides a managed service for Keywords where we estimate both traffic and potential revenue by keyword.  This helps to target the keywords that will provide the greatest return on investment potential.

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Winning Inch SEO tips and advice

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Search Engine Optimisation tips and advice

Search engine optimisation is not about doing one thing.  If it were that simple there would be no need for Winning Inch SEO services.  This section will provide useful “bite size” chunks of information that will help.  But before anything else search engine optimisation is not a quick fix so there is no one thing you should do over anything else.  You need to do them all!

But improvements can be gained fairly quickly and as a guide to what you find in these articles here are the key topics.

SEO Preparation – These are things you should do or consider before doing anything at all

On page SEO – This relates to things you should do to the pages of your website.

Server side SEO – These are applied to your entire website and are unseen by your visitor but are seen and applied by search engines and browsers.

Off site SEO – These are things that are needed to be done away from the website altogether and principally associated with social media and link building

Search engine optimisation requires a lot of time and effort.  Professional SEO’s will take 20 hours or more to optimise a single page for a single keywords.  Research by far takes the longest chunk of time.  If you plan to do this for yourself you will need to assign a number of hours per month as it will take you considerably longer.

So be patient we will be adding tips to this section on a ongoing basis so pick one at a time and see it through before moving to next.  You can ask questions by leaving a comment and we will do our best to answer them.  Or of course you can just use the Winning Inch SEO service.

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Website validation and SEO

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Website validation and SEO

Is validation important or even a consideration to Google? No it is not. In fact Google itself does not validate. Google is only concerned with content.

So is validation important? Yes it means that your website will work and look the same regardless technology. It does not matter whether someone is using the latest PC running the latest browsers or someone using the oldest. Both will get exactly same user experience.

It also means that those who need to customise their browsers, i.e. use large fonts for easier reading, can and your website will maintain appearance.

Another major consideration is mobile devices. More and more people use mobile devices to access the Internet. To look good on theses devices your code needs to validate. If your website does not look good or is difficult to navigate visitors will just move on. This will increase your bounce rate and therefore lower your chances of being found in search results.

You can check your website pages at http://validator.w3.org/

If your page fails you will be given details on how to fix your code. If you need help we do this as part of our “optimisation service“.

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SEO tips – link strategy

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

SEO tips – link strategy

Gaining good quality links to your website is like receiving a vote for your website. This is why search engines use links to determine your page rank.

Links take a long time to as it can take quite a while for people to discover your website and find it compelling enough to want to link to it.  So it is important to have great & compelling content that is well presented and easy to link to.

Avoid paid links and reciprocal links.  These have little value and can do more harm than good.  The best way forward is to participate or to invite participation.  Contributing to an open forum that is relevant to your business / website is great.  Overtime you build a reputation and other people using the forum will begin to notice you and see you as an authority on the subject matter.  As well as that you can add a blog to your own website.  Having a blog within your domain will contribute to your overall ranking.

But having said all that and you should still be concerned with your page rank.  Page rank now has less to do with your positions in search engine results.  There is a shift to relevancy to a search keywords.  This will become clearer as Google Caffeine is rolled out in the first quarter of 2010.

What we know about Caffeine is sketchy but we do know it is to increase relevancy and load speeds.  See SEO in 2010 article

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SEO tips – meta descriptions

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

SEO tips Meta descriptions

Google, amongst others, use meta descriptions.  The meta tag is created in the <head> section of your website.  Normally it goes under your page title

To create a meta tag is fairly simple.  Just copy the code below, change the wording between the speech marks and paste it underneath your page title in your html. The meta description helps to reinforce your page title and associated content.

———————————–

<!– meta description courtesy of http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk/index.html –>

<meta name=”description” content=”Your meta description goes here” />

———————————–
Your meta description should include your keywords for each page and give a brief summary of the content of the page.

That is all you need do. This summary usually appears in search results under the page title.

There are other meta tags but mostly these are ignored by search engines with one or two exceptions but these are, or will be, discussed in other posts.

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SEO tips – duplicate data canonicalisation script

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

SEO tips – duplicate data canonicalisation script

Duplicate data will result in diluted page rank and search results positions. Google is very good at identifying duplicate data. Do do not do it. The rules are clear, every web page must be unique and original, there is nowhere to hide so avoid it.

However, there are inadvertent ways to create the problem and this relates to URL duplication known as canonicalization.

This is where you can access your website by typing in http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk and by just by typing http://yourwebsite.co.uk.

Essentially search engines see these two methods of access as two independent website with duplicated content. This was declared an issue by Google in February 2009 but is common amongst most search engines.

The way to resolve this is to adopt one method of addressing i.e. always http://www…. or http://….. But this is not really practical.

The easiest way to overcome the problem is to use a .htaccess file (which works with most unix based servers). This redirects all access to your website to a one standard.

Use a simple text editor (not word processor) i.e. editpad lite which is a free download.

Here is the code:

___________________

#htaccess courtesy of http://cirencester-website-design.co.uk/

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourwebsite\.co.uk$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

___________________

Replace yourwebsite\.co.uk and http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk with your own website details.

You will then need to load the .htaccess file to your server using an FTP product. We recommend Filezilla which is free and very good.

See the Matt Cutts, of Google, video for a detailed canonical explanation and options

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