SEO Blog

There’s a perceived logic amongst some that somehow having more domains will improve your chances of gaining traffic. Well, theoretically yes, there is some truth to that. The only issue comes when you have numerous domains hosting the exact same site.

This means the whole structure, all the content, even the design is the same, the only difference is in the URL. In terms of traffic, the only real benefit this carries is if somebody should actually stumble upon the site by entering your address directly. Not only is that highly unlikely, but it could be doing more damage than good.
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We all do SEO to improve online visibility and reap the rewards of increased targeted traffic as a consequence. But it is an ever-evolving field. You constantly have to test, apply and reapply changes to help eke out those extra few. But understanding what works and how your site has developed over time can be critical – not only to future work, but to confidence too.

Obvious metrics, like rankings and traffic levels, are a good place to start.  These will help you to work out whether any dips are seasonal or if changes that have been made to the site have had a positive or even negative effect. All of this can prove vital in ensuring you stay on course to achieve your ultimate goal – search engine dominance.
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There are two sides to every story. When you outsource your SEO to an agency or individual, you entrust them with your site and its ability to perform online. If they let you down, you are the one who will take the hit.

But in the same regard, your SEO agency will need your cooperation too. If they’re making suggestions and providing content for you to upload to the site, you need to be making sure that it is being properly implemented. Essentially, you shouldn’t be looking to make it difficult for them to succeed.

So what can you do?
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One of the most important aspects of SEO is developing a decent stream of incoming links. This means having to find a variety of sources prepared to host a link to you as well as relying on natural links to build as a result of your site’s content.

You can spend hours trying to find a decent directory or emailing countless people in the vain hope of securing a link. So why not speed it all up a bit? Write one decent article, submit it to a range of decent directories and have it syndicated to sites across the Internet. Bingo, you’ve got dozens of links in a very short period of time.

But if only life were so simple. The theory is great, the practice though can be a little different. So let’s have a look at a few of the pros and cons of this SEO technique that polarises many in the industry.

First up, the pros:

Links, links, links – It’s an obvious one, but every link has the ability to add good strength to your site. So by submitting your article to dozens of sites and including an embedded link in each one, invariably you will earn links as a consequence.

As already mentioned, you’ll get even more links when other people choose to republish the article on their own sites. So you can even end up in the hundreds if you are particularly successful.

It’s free – Unless you use special syndication software, it shouldn’t cost you a penny to submit an article. Even top sites like Ezine Articles won’t charge for the privilege of hosting your content.

It’s easy – Just write an article, sign in and publish – nothing too complicated about that.

Now though, the cons:

Duplicate content issues – the more astute of you will probably have noticed a reasonable flaw in all of this. If your content is exactly the same and plastered across numerous different sites, surely that will trip a duplicate content penalty from Google. Well, most probably, yes.

It isn’t always easy to measure, but if you are just going to focus solely on distributing one article to hundreds of sites, it is likely that you will only really get long-term benefits from a handful. The links aren’t worthless, but they aren’t likely to propel you to the top any time soon either.

Measuring success – The issue of how exactly to measure the success of an article has plagued the industry for some time now. A unique article title will certainly help; this way you can just put that in quotations and see what the search engines throw back. But then of course determining the strength of links and traffic can be difficult to gauge.

Spam by any other name… – These mass produced articles are everywhere, and whilst the measurability of effectiveness is still challenged, much of the regurgitated content is clogging the Internet. Some see it as entirely unproductive, unless of course you have something new and interesting to say. In the most part though, it is usually content not good enough to put on your own blog – so what does that say?

For what it’s worth, if you are struggling to get links, weak or otherwise, then article marketing is a great way to add some instantly. They won’t necessarily be the best referrals, but they will at least start building your profile.

If you’re smart about where you submit to and how you choose to promote your articles, there are benefits to be had. But when you just dump them wherever will take them without any real thought, you could just be doing extra work without any of the benefit.

So it’s not worth discounting entirely, but you should certainly be looking to attach article marketing to a more sustainable link building programme built on relevance, variety and strength.

As a follow up to my earlier post – Getting More Meat in your Meta – I thought it would be a good idea to explore some of the opportunities it presents. Whilst the obvious temptation is to just cram keywords in there and hope for some SEO benefit as a consequence, there are far more creative ways to deal with Meta.

Before going any further let’s look at why Meta is important. Well, first and foremost the content in both the description and title appear in the search engine results pages. This means that when somebody uses your targeted search terms, it will appear as the entry point to your site (assuming you appear at all of course). Herein lies your opportunity.
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As you know, a website is basically a maze of inter-connecting pages. Each page has a number of links coming in and going out. This is what adds the fluidity to a user’s pathway through a website. It also helps search engine spiders to crawl through your site with greater efficiency.

Ensuring that each page is accessible to both users and spiders is vital to a site’s success. Reaching deeper pages can take time though, which may lead to indexing issues and visitors leaving. What’s the solution to this problem? A Sitemap of course.

Your site can benefit from two different types of Sitemap. Firstly there is the XML Sitemap which can be uploaded through the Webmaster Tools of any search engine. This will provide a mapping service for the spiders to crawl and should improve the rate at which your pages are indexed.

The second is a HTML Sitemap. This actually appears on the site itself and can be used by both search engine spiders and visitors to track down deep pages. Ideally this should be located in the footer of each page, thus ensuring that anybody can visit any page from any page with only two clicks.

But the Sitemap shouldn’t just be a vessel for transporting people from A to B, it has the potential for so much more.

As we have discussed previously, anchor text is a great way of providing added context to the destination page. So why not use the Sitemap as an opportunity to use your site’s keyword (most likely the title of each page) as the link.

Now don’t get carried away and start using nonsense terms for each page. That’ll just confuse visitors and look like spam. Just use the main term you’re targeting, usually your H1 header for each page, unless of course it is too long or inappropriate; in which case, just use the most relevant page phrase.

As intimated earlier, an XML sitemap can have a real impact on the speed with which pages can be crawled. Rather than just being able to do a couple of hundred in each hit, you could be looking at thousands instead. Of course, the more your site is indexed the better its chances of earning rankings – assuming of course the pages are all optimised. So the more pages you get indexed, the better your chances are of getting a shot at the top spot.

There are numerous Sitemap generators to help you with both the XML and HTML varieties. Of course you want to make sure that they stay up to date too, so make sure that however you create it you ensure you then don’t forget to update it. If you’re managing it through a CMS it should be automated, but it never harms you to check.

So there you have it, a Sitemap can provide a wealth of value to your website. Not only can you further optimise each page, improving links in and out, but you can also improve the speed and amount of pages crawled. All of which is good SEO.

Webmaster Tools, just like a good analytics package, can help you to see your site through the eyes of a search engine. It won’t tell you when if your design is ugly or content is poor, but it will give you a heads up when errors start to creep in.

So, on the day that Bing released their revised Webmaster Tools programme, I thought it would be worth discussing some of the benefits for your site and SEO efforts.
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If you’ve ever done any research into your competitors you will probably have found that some can have thousands of links, even hundreds of thousands of links, but yet they still aren’t top. The reason for this is that all links weren’t created equal.

For example, you could produce one piece of content and distribute it to dozens of sites. Each individual domain probably won’t pass on much strength in its own right, then you have to factor in penalties for duplicated content, which probably leaves you with a handful of meaningful (if weak) links.

Equally, you could sign up for an inordinate amount of free directories (there are thousands out there) and get a small link from each. Again, the likelihood is that the site itself has very little in the way of strength and what it does have is diluted by the high volume of outgoing links.
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It doesn’t matter if your site is brand new and has only a handful of external links or it has over a decade of domain age and is optimised throughout, the likelihood is that someone will above you for some keywords. As frustrating as that may be, it’s no reason to be disheartened.

Search engine rankings are calculated using an advanced algorithm that basically indexes sites based on their respective relevance for each search term and the strength of that page. So essentially you need some decent content to target the required terms and a fair few inbound links to provide the bulk of the necessary strength.
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So you’ve optimised your content, you have a decent link infrastructure and your Meta is all up to scratch. The one thing that might be missing is your URLs.

It sounds simple enough, but making sure that your page URLs reflect the key terms of each unique page can make a huge difference. Search engines extract a great deal of information out of all elements of the page, including the somewhat unassuming contents following ‘http://’. Therefore ignoring URLs could end up confusing visitors and losing vital SEO authority.

So what do I mean by optimising URLs?
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