SEO Blog

In my blog I never try to pull the wool over your eyes. I fully acknowledge that Search Engine Optimisation is accessible to everybody. You could start to learn today, reading through this and other sources and start building an understanding of what is involved.

Essentially it is the search engines that dictate the rules; SEO professionals like myself simply have to interpret them and implement the theories into best practice. So telling you that there is no way that you can replicate the kind of work we do would be a massive fallacy.

However, there has to be a reason why people continually choose to outsource their SEO work. The amount spent each year in the UK alone tops a billion pounds, so what is the appeal?
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Occasionally you’ll receive feedback on your website and its various elements. Sometimes it’ll be complimentary, often it will be tainted with a little constructive criticism.

Whilst nobody wants to be told that they’re doing something wrong and we all enjoy positive comments; criticism is often one of the most important pieces of feedback you’ll receive. Whilst you might want to bury your head in the sand and hope that problems just sort themselves out, the reality is that nothing is ever perfect and you need to seek to improve constantly.

So if somebody phones your customer services and says that your checkout isn’t working properly, they can’t find the product they’re looking for or to enquire further about certain aspects as the content isn’t clear enough – take action!
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It’s a difficult one this. On the one hand you have the understanding that solid links will provide authority and help you rank better. On the other, there’s a desire to have everything on your site perfectly optimised. Meta, headers, scripts, tags, links and content; get that right and you have to be on to a winner.

Of course the easy answer is to do both. If you have perfect SEO, then you should have a pretty decent ranking at the end. For me though, on site SEO has to take precedence if time and resources are at a premium.
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Even seasoned marketers tend to refer to ‘Google’ as the generic search engine. Many people focus huge attention on getting to the top of Google and treat the others as also-rans. But is this attitude out-dated?

Here in the UK, Google commands a huge percentage of the overall search market. Recent figures suggest that they receive 9 out of every 10 searches. This puts them in a commanding position and, in many respects, justifies why they receive so much attention from SEO types.

But whilst they remain the safe bet and the most likely to deliver high quantities of traffic to your site, it isn’t fair to simply dismiss the likes of Yahoo, Bing and even Ask. After all, between them they do still command 10% of the search market.
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Whilst there is plenty that you can do to improve your site under your own steam, sometimes it’s just as good getting a bit of a free ride. Finding ways of getting new links and working out what keywords to target next can be a bit of a chore, particularly when you hit a creative brick wall. So why not let your competitors do some of the legwork?

We’re all in the same boat when it comes to search engine rankings. We all want a competitive advantage and will work hard to ensure that we get to the top. Unfortunately there will always come a time where you have to find new avenues to explore and you won’t be flush with ideas. By studying a competitor’s link profile you can gain ‘inspiration’. By reviewing more competitor’s, you can be all the more inspired.

Okay, so that might sound a little underhanded, and I guess it is, but everybody is doing it all the time – your site included. Even using something freely available like Yahoo Site Explorer will give you an idea of the strong links that a site is receiving, which will allow you to find directories, blogs and websites that might be able to throw a link your way too.
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You’ve probably been on no end of sites that proudly display the W3C compliant badge. This means that their pages are free from HTML errors and meet the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Well la-di-da I hear you saying. So what if they have clean code, all it achieves is a small little badge that they can put at the bottom of the page – hardly a way of getting more traffic. To rip off another film, ‘we don’t need no stinking badges!’

Fair point, but being W3C compliant is far more than just a badge, it is a sign that you have a site that is clear from coding errors. Even the smallest HTML issue or unused Javascript can slow down your page load time. Just as concerning, search engine spiders won’t be able to crawl your pages as efficiently; this can lead to them misinterpreting your keywords and not indexing as many pages on your site.
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It might not seem like the most obvious link building tactic, but other blogs and forums provide a great opportunity to really give your website a boost.

Most will offer you the opportunity to include a link back to your site within the author’s name or indeed within the comment itself; whilst many may be nofollowed, occasionally you’ll find a site with decent PageRank that will allow the full strength of a link to be passed on. Where this happens, make sure you pounce.

But what do you write in one of these forum posts or blog comments? Well, the best thing to do is simply respond honestly. Don’t write the turgid kind of ‘completely agree’ response that offers little value or imagination. Read the post, see what the forum members say and write something that will add to the conversation, not detract from it entirely.
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Having received a request from regular reader Chad Walls this morning on the  subject, I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk a little about internal linking.

Now, in SEO we are always talking about the value of attracting links from external sites. After all, it is through these links that a site gains strength and authority in the search engines’ eyes. However, you shouldn’t overlook the important of your internal structure too.

When a search engine spider lands on your site, it generally only stays for a finite period of time. It doesn’t meander around perusing what you have to offer; it darts from page to page, following the links on each page and collecting information as it goes. To make the most of this, you have to a linking structure that is both logical and thorough.

Each page should be accessible within a couple of clicks. They should be clearly categorised and presented in such a way that visitors and spiders will instantly know the path to take. This is just good site design.

However you can use your internal linking to pass strength around the site too. Generally speaking you will often have most external links pointing to your homepage. This is purely because it is the main focal point for most sites, it is also the most likely landing page. But all that aside, the number of links it has coming in usually makes it extremely strong – often enjoying a higher PR than child pages.

You can help your other pages benefit from this strength by linking to them. This circularity of link strength allows the site to develop authority right throughout. Don’t get carried away though, you don’t want pages swamped with links just to improve rankings a little – not only will that not work, it will confuse the search engine spider and your audience.

In an ideal world – just as with external links – your page links should be in the form of an embedded text link. This means that not only will your visitors know where they’re going, but you can further optimise the keywords and relevance on the recipient page.

For example, if I wanted to point you in the direction of my SEO services page, then I would do so in the form of a text link- just as I did there. It provides a useful link and it has the context of the phrase attached to the link.

In some instances it will be logical to use an image instead. For example, each page might have the company logo in the header somewhere. This is something that most visitors will expect and is good practice. However, that image link isn’t going to do much for your relevance.

So imagine that you have a page with two links to the same page elsewhere on your site. One is an optimised text link, the other is an image. Whilst the difference might only be marginal, it is always best to use a text link purely as it is the most likely to pass relevance.

But your problem remains, so what can you do? You don’t want to have two links to the same page being followed by the spider; not only can that cost time, it can also lose keyword strength. To avoid this, simply apply the nofollow attribute to the image.

This will be entirely invisible to the human visitor and they will still be able to follow the link; however the search engine spiders won’t. This means that as they crawl the site, the spiders will have one clear path to a page and will instantly understand its context due to the keywords used.

If you are struggling to link to each page, ensure that you have a Sitemap embedded in your footer. This will have a rundown of all the pages on a site and provide links to each, allowing human and robot visitors to find their way through. This will also mean that any major page can be accessed through two clicks – obviously large ecommerce sites might not list each product.

If you have a blog, you can use that to further your opportunities for spreading links further. Embed links for optimised phrases to other pages in your site and spread your strength. Just like the human body, a site relies on good circulation. If you have dead ends or are trying to push too many links to one page, then you could suffer as a consequence.

When it comes to internal links, you really need to just be logical. If you’re stuffing in links for fun, you will just confuse your visitors and the search engines. Keep it clean and clear, avoid an overreliance on image links (make sure you use Alt tags if you have to) and try to use embedded text links where possible.

PageRank can be passed from page to page through the linking structure, but you can’t really sculpt it unless you were to nofollow every link other than the one you are really focussing on – not recommended. A site generates an overall strength, to really optimise a single page you need to do some deep linking from external sites. This will build the link profile and provide added authority (as well as new ways for a visitor/search engine spider to find you).

PageRank sculpting has been all but written off by Matt Cutts at Google. It is usually in reference to links exiting your site, rather than internal ones. By all means though, if you are linking to another site that you don’t want to pass strength on to then use a nofollow tag.

Anyway I hope that has answered your question Chad and if you, or any other readers have a question feel free to send it in and I will do my best to answer.

Analytics is like a spyglass into the world of your website’s users. It provides information that would otherwise be invisible and allows you to dissect where your site is succeeding and where it may be failing.

Here’s an example of how you might choose to use it. You’ve been targeting a keyword for months, you’ve got a decent ranking and appear to have some traffic coming through, but still you aren’t getting any conversions. What’s going wrong? What could be causing visitors to leave without making a purchase?

Well, this is where you dive into your analytics. First you look at the page’s bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave without visiting another page on the site); if the percentage is above 40% there is most likely an issue with the page. Maybe it’s the design, perhaps it is your content or it could just be that your keyword and page simply don’t tie in.
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People who are fresh to online marketing may be alarmed by just how fluid the search engine rankings can be. Small fluctuations can have a big impact on your traffic, but they shouldn’t have you pushing the panic button instantly.

Google, Bing and Yahoo are forever tweaking their search engine algorithms. Each time that they do, small changes can occur in the way they rank sites. For example Google recently made site speed a ranking factor. This was well publicised, but there is a good chance that this algorithm update could have juggled some of your pages’ positions.

Whilst not all changes are this significant, when you factor in the dozens that happen throughout the course of a year, it is inevitable that you will see some changes at some stage. So when you slip a couple, it could just be Google having a tinker.
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