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08 February 2010
Posted in
S.E.O
For those of you that still need some help, I have written this 10 topic guide to the building blocks of SEO. Remember, you need to start building on solid foundations. As another starting note, you will need to use analytic SEO tools to know where you stand in your area of the market, rather than just thinking you know what you’re doing.
The first topic we need to cover is keywords. Keywords play a major role in SEO. You need relevant keywords mentioned everywhere in your site, from the menus all the way through to your content, and if you can, including keywords in your URL can be of substantial help. The best place to put keywords is usually in the title tag and also in the page header. But be warned, don’t just fill these up with anything you can think of, as search engines use ‘spiders’ to trawl through websites and any site that is found to have over-stuffed their site with keywords will be ignored from that engine and labelled as a spammer. If you are labelled as a spammer, your site and your company will be viewed as untrustworthy. Once you have that reputation behind you, it will be near impossible to shake.
The second topic is Linking and anchor text. Backlinks to your site are very important in SEO. Every link is like a vote, and links from sites that have a lot of ‘votes’ have a higher ‘vote value’. You only count the ‘votes’ that are attached to anchor text that includes relevant keywords to the search term on the engine. Then multiply all of these ‘votes’ by their respective ‘vote value’ and then add it all up. The site that has the highest number of (‘votes’ x ‘vote values’) appears first on the search results page. Well, if it was really that simple you wouldn’t be reading this article, but this is just one of many algorithms used by Google, Bing, and all the other search engines. What this actually helps determine is your site’s relevancy. This is one of the most important things in SEO, but it's not the only part of a search engine’s algorithms. If you only concentrate on this then it will not get you to where you want to be, you need to concentrate on all the areas within SEO to be truly good at it. Not as easy as it sounds, is it?
Sitemaps would be the third topic of conversation. If you have a sitemap, it makes it easier for these ‘spiders’ to search your site, which means search engines can index your site quicker and easier. This means that the search engines can index a larger amount of your site by the best means possible, and do it faster. Sitemaps do not take a large amount of time to make and they are not massively expensive, either, so it's in your interests to make one, or have one created (contact us if you require a sitemap or other SEO/design needs)
Topic number four: URL’s. It is important to try and use search engine friendly URLs, as this will increase relevancy if the search engine can find words form the search terms inside your URLs. For example, ‘www.petstore.co.uk/21_gl43/m=357q?’ will not be as relevant to the search term ‘dog food’ as the URL, ‘www.petstore.co.uk/pet-food-supplies/dog-and-puppy.html’. The second URL is far better as it contains more keywords that could turn up in different search terms.
Flash, AJAX and frames are the interest of this fifth topic. To be honest, don’t use frames or Ajax at all. If you are going to use anything, use flash. But as far as SEO goes flash does nothing for search engines, it simply shows them blank areas, which they do not like. Use flash sparingly if you can, and if you have a homepage that is made entirely of flash, include some relevant text and site navigational tools at the bottom, below the fold of the flash content. This will improve your SEO, as the more you have that isn’t flash, the more of your site the search engines can see.
Now, topic number six is discussing image description. Image descriptions allow spiders to see some text describing the image. As the search engines cannot see any part of an image, it is essential that you give them a little info on what this image is. It lets them know how relevant the picture is, and better relevancy means better page rank. A relevant image title and description makes the whole article/content more relevant, which then gives you a higher page rank. See where this is going? If not then read this paragraph again until you do see where this is going, it's very important.
Possibly one of the most important of all topics, the seventh of all our topics, content. Your content is what gives you your visitors. You need to be always updating your content, all of the time. An easy way to help with the massive burden of always updating the content is to get the CEO or company director to start blogging. It helps build rapport with clients and provides a more customer-orientated feel. You also need to post new content, even if there is a blog on your website. Keep the content relevant and well written; always keep it up to date. Write articles on any related things to services/products that you offer and don’t repeatedly write very similar articles all the time as it bores people.
Social media distribution. Topic number eight. This is another of the most important parts. We don’t mean just a twitter or Facebook page for your business, oh no. We are more along the lines of at least twelve or so social networking sites, a few linking sites (Digg, mix, etc.) and maybe a few other social media sites. That’s what we mean. You need at least this many sites that your business has an account on, you need to be constantly posting links with short clips of your new content, or at least an extended title. You need to be doing this often, at least a few times a day, but not with absolutely every new piece of content, if you change six or more content items a day. It could start to annoy people.
Topic nine is about linking to other sites and relations with other sites. If you have a good relationship with another site, that has a good reputation, link their site and ask them to link back. Try asking webmasters to link your site and telling them that you will return the favour if they do this. You don’t get if you don’t ask, and this is a technique that is often used. Always check the reputation of the sites you form relations with, you don’t want to get many backlinks from a site considered to be ‘spammy’, as you will be labelled a spam site as well. Also, if you are hooked into one those ‘linking farms’, it is likely to bring you down with them, due to their bad SEO habits.
Last but not least, topic ten, reputation. You need to try to get backlinks from only reputable sites, as every link from a non-trusted, spam filled site brings your reputation down. Your trustworthiness online is based on where your backlinks are coming from. If they are mainly from trusted sites, then you are considered trusted. Likewise, if your backlinks are mainly from untrusted sites, your site will be considered untrustworthy. Your trustworthiness makes a big difference to your page rank. If you are running an untrustworthy site, there is no way it will ever have a high page rank, so cut your losses and start afresh, just learn from your past mistakes and don’t do anything stupid the second time round.
That’s all from me for today, so don’t forget to check out some of our other SEO articles to see what’s new and what’s changing in the world of SEO today!
