SEO Blog

When you remove a page from your website, you can’t just walk away and hope it just goes away. That page will, in all likelihood, have a number of pages linking to it – some externally, some internally. These all need to go somewhere or you’ll lose all of their benefit.

If you are looking to create a new replacement page, you might just want to temporarily lead links towards an active page on the site – most likely the homepage. This is done by inserting a 302 redirect into the coding of the site.

This will pass traffic on safely without returning the ’404 not found page’. Good news, no visitors will be confronted with a broken page. Bad news, you won’t get any of the link juice passed through.
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The work of an SEO is never over. Not only does a site require continual development in order to stay competitive, but the techniques and best practices update with equally frequent regularity.

It isn’t something that you need to be nervous of, but awareness is certainly a benefit. Search engine optimisation isn’t a linear story. Whilst there is a beginning, the middle and end are elusive. This is why it is so important to keep your SEO fresh.

By fresh, I mean you can’t get stuck in a groove. Yes, you might have been doing some great SEO work that has always gotten you results in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have the same good fortune going forwards.

Search engines and their algorithms are changing, which in turn influences how we optimise them. Most adjustments are only very slight and won’t make a jot of difference to how you perform SEO. However occasionally these small alterations build up and create something more substantial. This is where keeping an eye on industry commentary can be a real benefit.
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The Internet plays host to thousands of directories. Some are stronger than others and as such provide more benefit for those who use them. The one thing that they all have in common though is that they provide an opportunity for businesses and website owners to promote their wares.

For websites, directories can be a fantastic source of links. Most will allow you to include company information and a URL, which in turn will help develop your local search profile and link building efforts in one fell swoop. However, even better than just offering a URL link, some also allow embedded text links.

In terms of SEO, we are all trying to optimise pages for certain phrases. This is to give the search engines the clearest possible indication what we want that particular page to rank for. Therefore, by having a link (which builds strength) within a specialist term (increasing relevance), you are increasing the benefit of this one listing.
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Whether you’re using PPC or SEO, search engine visitors have to find you somehow. Due to the way in which each individual page is capable of earnings its own ranking, there are numerous ways for people to enter your site.

This means that every page is effectively your homepage. It is the first one that a visitor sees and it should be the most relevant to their search query. But what happens when some landing pages are experiencing a high bounce or exit rate? What can you do?

Well, identifying the problem is your first issue. Use your analytics to pinpoint any areas that are potentially weak and that could be deterring visitors from venturing further into your site. If there are some pages with the aforementioned high bounce rate, that is usually a good place to start.
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An SEO blog talking about ‘shelving SEO’, that’s almost like a get rich quick site talking about giving proceeds to charity surely?! Well, bear with me. SEO is still important. Rankings can lead to traffic and therefore you need to be optimised in such a way that you can maximise this potential. But when it comes to content, it isn’t your priority.

Do your keyword research. Have those terms that people are searching for in the back of your mind. That is about all your copywriter needs to concern themselves with before beginning their writing process. The remaining 99% of their focus ought to be on the audience and, more importantly, getting visitors to convert.

The vast majority of websites are created to make money. Whether through adSense adverts, products sold or services rendered, the underlying driving force is finance. That may be ugly, but the truth often is. So your content shouldn’t be just trying to get your site further up the search engine rankings (this ought to be a bi-product), it needs to sell.
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The idea of building links is to attract visitors as well as improving your search engine credibility. Therefore it is counterproductive (or at least partially so) to leave links in places that do little to attract the attention of potential visitors.

Here, let me give you an example. It is good SEO practice to comment on blogs and other forums that allow you to leave links. Invariably many will be no-followed, but still, a link is a link – no matter how much it may have been weakened.

Some people try to exploit this. They will find blogs of little or no relevance to their site or the online space that they’re trying to promote and leave a nonsensical message. Even the token ‘Thanks for the information, great article’ response is better than some. Whether English isn’t their first language or they are just otherwise ignorant to the ideas of effective SEO, random gobbledegook isn’t going to inspire traffic.
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It’s been hard to ignore the Digital Economy Bill in recent months. This government legislation has been developed as part of the Digital Britain incentive by the department for culture, media and sport. It has been drawn up to map out the online future for the country and has certainly not been without controversy.

The Government, in close collaboration with Ofcom, will look to have greater powers to control, amongst other things, broadband speed and domains. The latter of these two could certainly have a significant bearing on future Internet usage.

Taking the regulatory power away from Nominet, the Government will have the power to remove a website or deny them a .uk domain if found to be sharing illicit material. This essentially relates to anything that is deemed to be copyrighted elsewhere or is otherwise illegal content.
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The Meta description might well be an opportunity to give your page added keyword context, but it does plenty more besides.

When somebody uses a search engine, they type in a search query and have returned to them a series of related lists on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Ordinarily, within the natural results, there will be ten competing sites; starting with the most relevant first.

Each page has a title (your Meta title in fact), which will indicate initial relevance to the searcher. However, beneath this is a short description. This is your Meta description.

By default, your Meta is often the first sentence from your page content or a mixture of text that includes highlighted keywords. Whilst this might be fine in the context of your page, it might not provide the information that will encourage a click. Ultimately, that is what you need [see: Getting More from Your Meta].
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Well, right from the outset I have to start with a slight negative. There is no way of ensuring that only the most targeted traffic ends up visiting your site. It is one of the many impossibilities created by the abundance of searches and related terms spread across the search engines.

That said, there’s no reason why you can’t try.

Traffic is good. Whether or not we want to admit it, ultimately that is usually the first metric we see for the development of any site. If you have invested time and money into SEO or any other form of online marketing, you want to have tangible statistics to back up claims of effectiveness. Search engine rankings are useful in this case, but ultimately it will be the amount of people that followed up their searches and landed on your pages that count.
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A blog is a fantastic tool for any website or company. It provides a very public mouthpiece that can be regularly updated. This generates traffic, expands your content and allows you to develop your link profile.

All of this is great for SEO. As a process that relies heavily on links and content, the more you have, the better it will perform. But there are ways that you can go over and above the standard blog; taking your SEO efforts to the next level.

First of all, if you want people to find your content, you have to give it a name that fits in with searches. Therefore you need a title that is keyword optimised, preferably with the keywords near the beginning, and fits with their enquiry. A ‘how to’, like this post, or ’7 tips for…’ are good ways of getting some attention. These provide useful information that people are likely to be looking for.
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