SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. Do Not Be Frightened.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation can conjour images of the black arts and voodoo medicine, I have previously said SEO is Easy, in a kind of Hitchhikers Guide / Don’t Panic way.

Hopefully I can be a little more constructive here and give some pointers on how to get majour Search Engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask et al to notice and rank your site in a more positive light.

SEO from a proper Search Engine Optimisation company should never be ignored as a possibility but for many hobbiests and low turnover companies it can be an expensive excersice. Try some of the below SEO tips and hopefully you can get your site attracting the Search Engine bots and making a shave more money so you can afford professional SEO.

Step 1: Do Your Homework (Keyword Research)
The keywords you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services are not always what they do use? A keyword or more precicly key phrases should be investigated with a fresh view.

Make a list of 20-30 keywords or phrases you believe your users might use, or ones that seem prominant onn your competitions websites.

Group them into sections or categories that can be directly reflect to pages on your site. Take the words / phrases and plug them into the google keyword tool. Copy the (popular) words into a text file or spreadsheet tab, save and name related to the appropriate section / page on your site.

You should build up a library of popular keywords and now you are ready to look at your current website content

Step 2: Web Copy
Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases you have listed on step 1 need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince those search engines that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. Repeat a couple of times but make sure the end text is READABLE to a human

Tips of best places to use your chosen keywords

• Page title, both the TITLE tag and the H1 page headings

• If you can the URL of the page, can you see SEO mentioned in your URL bar above?

• Keywords Phrases and Key messages should occour more at the top of the page. Helps with both SEO and generating interest with users.

• STRONG Bold or EM italicise your chosen phrases

Remember, you are doing this for all key pages, start at the index page, and work out.Search Engine Optinisation is about ALL pages not just your default.

It’s also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.

Step 3: Links. Aka Off Site SEO
Relevant links from relevant external (not your) web pages are as key as the content.

Hundreds of directories are out there and it is often simple to get links back from these, but relevant links are best. These should be thought of first. Industry specific directories can be good, but link exchanges with relevant sites may be good.

If you sell blue widgets only and you know another website selling red widgets only a link swap might be hugely beneficial. If someone sells the same thing as you you might want to rethink asking for a link exchange as it might be a conflict of interests for both parties.

List the websites and contact details for all likely candidates for a link swap. Put a link to them on your website then ask politly for a link back.

Keep An Eye On What Happens

Make sure you are using a  statistics program to collect data about who if visiting your site, how they are using it, where they came from (site link, search engine etc) and what keywords they used if visiting from a search engine.

React to this. Keep a log, when you make a major change see if visits improve compared to the same page in the last few months, be wary of seasonal products though as there may be seasonal variation, expect a christmas tree sales page to drop traffic in January, if there has been a change work out why, what have you changed? What may have changed? Is this a seasonal product?

A package like the excelent and FREE Google Analytics can tell you all this.

Remember, make a change, see what it changes, if for the better keep the change, if not roll back to a previous version of the page.

March 28th, 2010 Posted by admin | SEO | one comment

SEO It Is Easy

Onsite SEO, was once seen as a real black art.
But the simple truth is that a the few guidelines that make good onsite search engine optimisation have not changed since spiders first infested the web.

The first key point is USE QUALITY CONTENT. This rule has never changed and if it is not obvious why textual quality content is important read on.

The textual content is the most important thing in SEO. Getting the words on the page. It is the words that spiders pick up on and build the search engine’s database with. Write content. Make it appealing to the reader, make it relevant. Yes SEO gurus will say about constructing the text with keyword density at a level of 2% - 4%, sneeking in word variaitions etc. This is all well and good, but if you produce a quality article, there should be that mix of ‘long tail‘ keywords and other key phrases any way. Plus if it is interesting and doesn’t look like it has been written by a robot it will attract interest and links in.

Yes use H1 tags to convey your key subject / article title. and use H2 tags to outline other sections, important to the visitor.

Use an interesting and relevant meta title. Again use keywords, but also make it snappy and draw the user in.

Meta descriptions and keywords are still used, but are a very small part of what needs doing.

Key messages in BOLD, again this helps readability, you only have 1/2 a second to draw the reader in. Also Search Engines have been known to pick up these words and weight them more for the article.

Use ALT tags on images, search engines still cannot read images (though I bet google is working on this)

Add new stuff to your site, new articles, more textual content. Keep the Search Engines interested as well as the visitors. 2 articles a week should be minimum for a blog.

Linking structure on your website is key. Every page should have consistent navigation linking to the home page and other major sectios of your site. Blogging Software and Content Management Systems are fantastic for this.

So will you take advice from this site? Not one for rules, this is a blog site, free flow of thought. Maybe you are better off buying a Search Engine Optimisation book, with their rules, formulas, systems and black magic (hmmm chocolate).

March 11th, 2010 Posted by admin | SEO | one comment

New affiliate tool in development.

Scifind Ltd and Keith Bond are currently developing an affiliate tool. Should be a fantastic device for monetizing domains , existing sites and using as landing sites for PPC campaigns.

This simple little script will produce an online store from a product feed in 10 minutes. Utilising SE friendly urls, caching and is extreamly easy to drop into any existing website template or site design.

Currently we are finishing the search function which is not present on the following examples.

SITE EXAMPLES:

www.mensdesignerunderwear.co.uk

www.nexdayflowers.co.uk

http://fishing.changewebsites.co.uk

We have just started the first round of external testing and we should be able to build on feedback soon.

We would like to hear from affiliates with any ideas of how we can improve this script.

We will keep you posted on progress.

April 8th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized, affiliate marketing, affiliate, SEO, beta test, product feeds, datafeeds | 3 comments

Which Dragon Has The Best Website

Ok this is another post about BBC 2’s Dragon’s Den and we have only had one episode to date.

Having a look at the official website for Dragon’s Den (www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden) I had the idea to write a review on each of the ‘Dragon’s’ official Websites. After seeing Keith Bond’s post about SEOmoz I decided to use this to assess which of these official Dragon’s sites are the best.

Deborah Meaden

http://www.deborahmeaden.com/ 

Page Strength: 0.5 / 10

Duncan Bannatyne

http://www.bannatyne.co.uk/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10

Peter Jones

http://www.peterjones.tv/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10 

Richard Farleigh

http://www.farleigh.com/

Page Strength: 3 / 10

Theo Paphitis

http://www.theopaphitis.com/

Page Strength: 2.5 / 10

So there we have it Jones and Bannatyne tie first followed by Farleigh, Paphitis and finally Meaden. To be honest this is probably the order I would rank these in, only in a general webpage sense, the fact is that these people’s websites are carried by the people - brands. This sort of ranking tool is much more useful for you and me, affiliates especially.

Want to know your sites page Strength - see http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

February 12th, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, webdesign, Dragon's Den | no comments

Affiliate Toolbox Part 2 - Web Design and Doing it right.

CSS Layout Generators

http://www.ibdjohn.com/csstemplate/ - OK but seems to be a little buggy in producing the CSS code

http://www.csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php This is the best little free utility to produce a basic CSS template that I have found online. This is nice and easy to use - with a really sweet colour slide to select colours. The CSS produced is spot on aswell.

As with all of these things you are left with a skeleton with which there will be alot of work in notepad / dreamweaver etc to get the site looking as you want. Once the template is finished the next step is to check that the site is working as it should.

The most obvious way to do this is check in a browser, in fact as many browsers as yo can find.

Then validate the code:

Start point is http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

The way the web is going valid css xhtml is more and more important. I am one person who still uses tables, but I am slowly weening myself into the world of DIVs, SPANs and CSS

Next thing is to validate the site.

I have found that http://sitescore.silktide.com/ is fantastic for this. Not only does it validate your code, it checks for incomming links, checks your title tags and gives you a full report and score out of ten for your site. There are 130 tests performed on the site!

Results are cached for 30 days - so you cannot check, change, check every few hours when tweeking a site. You can register for an account - as a registered user you can generate reports at smaller time intervals,

This site is very strict so FOLLOW it’s advice.

January 31st, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, Web2.0, webdesign, css, valid html, xhtml | no comments