What are content farms?

There are two slightly different definitions of content farms:

1.    Content farms are scraper sites that aggregate the content from other sources to get high rankings for a variety of long tail keywords. These sites don't have unique content and they only aggregate the content from other websites to get clicks on their AdSense ads.

2.    Content farms are websites that produce low quality content in bulk. This content is often produced by workers from low-wage countries. The main purpose of these sites is to get high rankings for as many keywords as possible to get clicks on the AdSense ads that are displayed on the site.

Sites that copy the content from other websites often ranked higher than the original site in Google's previous algorithm. That's why Google released the algorithm update.

Google's own Matt Cutts confirmed the new algorithm:

"[I mentioned] that 'we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content.'

That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week."

Less than 0.5% of search queries have significantly different results

Googles Matt Cutts also said that most surfers won't notice the change:

"This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice.

The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site's content."

The algorithm doesn't seem to be perfect yet

In an online discussion, many webmasters complained that their original sites have suffered while low quality sites still rank well:

"It doesn't matter if it is all 100% unique with tons of backlinks and really well laid out or simply an image. Everything got whacked. Our out of date non unique ad filled sites are humming along FINE. So what's the message here Google? Write an in depth article that takes 3 days to complete and is linked to by hundreds of companies and gov agencies and loose all positions sitewide while our out of date halfbaked and useless content does fine?"

Should you change your web pages?

Google doesn't like spam. If you want to get lasting rankings on Google, you have to do three things:

• Create a high quality website that you plan to keep for long time.
• Optimize the pages of your website so that both website visitors and Google and indeed all the search engines see what they want.
• Attain as many authority and theme related links as possible to show Google that your site can be trusted.

Spammy and black hat SEO techniques often deliver quick results but they only work for a short time. If you plan to build a lasting online business, then the SEO Authority can help as we focus on ethical search engine optimisation methods.

One of our key checks during a website audit and analysis is to ensure nobody is scraping your original content and using it for their own advantage, which in turn may affect your rankings.  If you have any concerns about how this Google update will impact your business and rankings, contact one of our SEO experts today.

Clicking the “This site may be compromised” link brings you to an article in our Help Center which explains more about the notice. Meanwhile, clicking the result itself brings you to the target website, as expected.

Google this week announced how it will now handle sites that have been compromised. Google says  - We use a variety of automated tools to detect common signs of a hacked site as quickly as possible. When we detect something suspicious, we’ll add the notification to our search results. We’ll also do our best to contact the site’s webmaster via their Webmaster Tools account and any contact email addresses we can find on the webpage. We hope webmasters will also appreciate these notices, because it will help you more quickly discover when someone may be abusing your site so you can correct the problem.

Of course, we also understand that webmasters may be concerned that these notices are impacting their traffic from search. Rest assured, once the problem has been fixed, the warning label will be automatically removed from our search results, usually in a matter of days. You can also request a review of your site to accelerate removal of the notice.

If you see this notification appearing on your site’s listing, please take a look at the instructions in our Help Center to learn how you can begin to address the problem. Together, we can make the web a safer place.

Following a malware attack, that has gone un-noticed for some time, you will find that your rankings will have dropped. If after the review as mentioned above, you do not recover your inial ranking, conatct one of our consulatnats whom have experience in regaining lost search engine ranking.

Why does it make sense to categorize web pages and search queries?

The same word can have multiple meanings depending on the context. Google wants to return the correct result based on the intention of the web searcher. The following example is given in the patent application:

"Cleaning Supplies," "Lawn Care," "Maintenance," and "Decorative," represent subcategories and can also reflect specific items. [...]

"Brooms," "Mops," "Vacuum Cleaners," "Rakes," "Mowers," "Flamingos," "Gnomes," reflect the specific items to which individual documents and potential search query terms are associated.

The category hierarchy could equally be defined as a list with each category including a full item description. For instance, "Flamingos" could be expressed as a list item, "Household>Lawn Care>Decorative>Flamingos."

How does Google categorize web pages?

When Google indexes a web page, Google might assign a ranking score and a category score. In this example, a web page about flamingos would be compared to other pages that contain the word "flamingos".

Depending on the other words on the web page, the page would be given a category score and a ranking score for the given category.

According to the patent, the categories for pages and queries can be created manually, through an automated process, or by a combination of both methods.

What does this mean for your website?

If you want to make sure that Google categorises your web pages correctly, you should use many different and related keywords that describe the topic of your website on your web pages.

The more different words that are related to your website topic appear on your web pages the easier it is for Google to categorise your pages.

We can help you with keyword research to ensure all of the relevant and popular terms used to locate your products/services are identified. We can then create website copy to optimise against these keyword phrases. The more pages you optimize, the more likely it is that Google will find your website relevant to that topic and that you will get high rankings for the keywords on the individual pages.

Be ready for Google changes because you can bet that your competitors are doing just that. Contact Us today.

Striking the right balance between several factors is important for many things in life. Search engine optimization is no different. If you want to get high rankings on Google, Bing or other major search engines, than you have to find the right balance between on-site factors and off-site factors.

Both influence the position of your website in the search results. Which factors are more important and what exactly should you do to improve the position of your site?

What is the definition of these factors?

1. On-site optimization refers to the factors that you can control on your web site:

• The text on your web page.
• The number of web pages on your website.
• The number of keywords and related keywords on your web pages.
• The links on your web pages to other pages of your site.
• The links on your web pages to other websites.
• The structure of your website.
• The robots.txt of your site.
• The HTML code of your web pages.

2. Off-site optimization refers to the ranking factors that are usually out of your control. The most important off-site factor are the links to your web site:

• The number of backlinks that point to your website.
• The quality of the backlinks that point to your website.
• How often your website is bookmarked on social bookmark sites.
• How often your website is mentioned on services such as Twitter.

Search engines determine the position of your website in the search results based on the on-site and the off-site factors of your website.

What is more important for your website?

Some webmasters invest most of their time in on-site optimization. Others swear that links from other websites are the only way to get high rankings on Google.

Depending on the keywords for which you optimize your website, you can achieve good results with both methods.

You will get the best possible results for your website, if you combine both factors:

You need both factors to get good results

If you optimize the on-site factors of your website than you make it as easy as possible for search engine spiders to parse your web pages.

The content of your web pages should contain the right elements and the right keywords in the right places so that search engines know what your website is about.

Links from other websites that contain your target keywords show search engines that other people also find your website relevant to a certain topic. If other people mention your website on social bookmark services then search engines know that real people like your website.

Analyze the on-site and the off-site factors of your web pages

This is something we at the SEO-Authority can help with. Its] also the reason why we offer complete seo solutions that combine the best of on-page and off-page seo techniques to sky rocket your  site to the top of the search engine rankings

Google's 200 ranking factors

Google uses about 200 ranking factors to determine the position of a web page in the search results. Unfortunately, Google does not reveal the list of ranking factors and how exactly they are weighted.

Google's ranking formula is a business secret. The problem is that your web pages must have all of these 200 elements if you want to see your pages on Google's first result page.

Which factors are important to Google?

In the past, Google revealed some factors that influence the position of a web page in Google's search results:

• the presence of a search term in the HTML title tag
• the presence of a search term in the HTML body copy
• search terms in bold typeface
• search terms in header tags
• the presence of a search term in anchor text in links to a page
• the PageRank of a page (the actual PageRank, not the toolbar PageRank)
• the PageRank of the entire domain
• the speed of the web site

These eight factors are only some of the 200 factors that Google uses to rank a website. It does not make sense to add your search terms to every element on your website. It's also important that the frequency of the search term in the web page elements is correct.

If a search term appears in every possible element on a page, it is likely that Google will penalize the page because it is over-optimized.

How to crack Google's secret ranking algorithm

The web pages that are listed on Google's first result page for your search terms obviously have all the ranking elements that are needed to get a top 10 position on Google for that search term.

If you want to be listed for the same search term, it makes sense to analyze the top ranked pages.

In which page elements do they use the search term? How many links do the top ranked pages have? How many of these links contain the search term? How often should you use the search term in the different web page elements and the links?

Analyzing the top 10 pages will help you to greatly improve the rankings of your own web pages for your search terms. THis is how we at the SEO-Authority attain page 1 listings for our clients. For help and guidance with this, please contact one of our consultants

What is Google Instant?

Google Instant is Google's new way to display search results while the user is typing the query. Google tries to complete the query during the input.

For example, when you enter "bike h" then Google will display the results for the keyword "bike helmets" because Google thinks that this is the most likely query.

Google Instant will not display the search results for the keywords "bike h", which are totally different. If you want to get the results for "bike h", you have to click the search button.

What does this mean for your website?

It's very likely that the search behavior of searchers will change. Until now, people had to think to refine their queries. With Google Instant, surfers get suggestions while they are typing and many of them will select one of the suggestions.

That means that some search terms will get many more searches than before while the number of searches for other terms will decrease.

How to get more visitors with Google Instant search

Google Instant automatically completes the search query of a user while typing. Google uses the keywords of Google Suggest to complete the query.

That means that the keywords that Google Suggest uses will get even more traffic than before. For that reason, your web pages should be optimized for the keywords that Google suggests.

If you would like help in identifying the keywords that Google Suggest offers for your keywords, please get in touch. We offer keyword research at just £149

After collecting your keyword list, optimize as many different pages of your website for as many of these keywords as possible.

This is a very important step! If you don't optimize your web pages for these keywords, you'll miss a lot of traffic!

Do not change pages for which you already have high rankings. Optimize new pages of your website for new keywords. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.

Google Instant is not a new ranking algorithm. It is just a new way in which Google displays the search results. Some keywords will now get fewer impressions, some keywords will get more impressions.

If you need any help, drop us a mail

There are several things that you can do to show search engines that your website is trustworthy:

1. Get links from seed sites or from websites that are linked from seed sites

Seed sites are websites that are manually marked as trustworthy by the search engine owners. For example, if Apple.com has been chosen as a seed website by Google then a link from BBC.co.uk will have a positive effect on the TrustRank of your website.

Of course, it is very difficult to get a link from a trusted seed site. Fortunately, the websites that are linked from the seed sites also have a positive effect on the linked sites.

If the BBc.co.uk links to website site2.com, website site2.com links to website site3.com and website site3.com links to your website then your website will still get a good TrustRank.

2. Get links from related websites

Does your website get links from related websites and does it link to other related websites?

Is your website a lonely island with no links from and to other websites or is it integrated in a network that deals with a special topic? The better your website is integrated in a network of topical sites (by different owners), the more likely it is that your website is a good resource for that topic.

3. Don't link to spam websites

Avoid links to websites of dubious quality. If a website is a known spammer, do not link to the site at all.

If you link to such a website, you show search engines that you support them and that your own website should not be trusted too much.

5. Try to get links from social networks

The more often your website is mentioned on social media websites, the more likely it is that your website is a trustworthy high quality website. The more votes your bookmarks on social media sites get, the better.

6. Offer more than just a few websites

A website that consists of only one page won't be considered an authority website. Search engines want to show good websites with good content in the search results.

If your website has many pages that contain great content about a certain topic then it is much easier to get a good TrustRank.

If search engines trust your website, it is much easier to get high rankings. If you want to find out if your website has all the elements that are needed to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines,  why try our analysis service or contact us for more information.

1. What is your website about and what's in it for the visitor?

You have only a few seconds to keep a visitor on your page. If the visitor is not convinced within seconds that your site is worth reading, he'll go away.

Clearly tell your website visitors which problem your product solves and why your solution is better than other solutions. This piece of information should be presented as prominently as possible.

2. Is your website trustworthy?

Tell your visitors who you are and don't hide your address. If possible, show customer testimonials. Show your website visitors that you are a real company and that you can be trusted.

Are you a member of an industry organization? Has your company received awards? Tell your website visitors!

3. Does your website look professional?

Another way to create trust is to use a professional website design. Avoid clutter and extreme colours. Use a clear design that makes it easy to read your web pages.

If your website displays ads, consider if they distract your website visitors too much from the real content. Your website visitors might also wonder why your site shows ads for other companies.

4. Make it as easy as possible for your website visitors

Tell your website visitors what you want them to do: "Download the free demo", "Create a free account", "Download the free white paper", "Subscribe to our newsletter", etc.

Focus on a single task. Don't ask the customer to subscribe to your newsletter or to download the demo or to request more information. Focus on a single task and tell the visitor in great detail why it would be good for the customer to complete that task. Of course, you can use different tasks on different pages of your site.

Add user instructions to every task. The less your website visitors have to think about how to complete the task, the better.

5. Make it a risk-free experience for your customers

Emphasize your respect of privacy and remove unnecessary fields from your sign-up forms. Avoid registration forms or make the forms as short as possible. The more fields a form has, the less people will fill it out.

Offer money back guarantees and other guarantees that show your website visitors that it is risk-free to complete a task on your website. Always deliver on your promises!

6. Give search engines what they want while pleasing your website visitors

The title and the major tag line on your web page should contain the main selling proposition of your website and one or two good keywords.

When a searches sees your website in the search results, the title will show the searcher that the he has found a good match. The content on your web page should confirm and clarify this with more detail.

Increasing the conversion rate of your website is an easy way to increase your revenue without increasing the number of website visitors. The more visitors of your website become customers, the more you will earn when you achieve high rankings through SEO. Please contact us for further assistance on landing page optimisation.

We are pleased to announce our new SEO Strategy creation service. 

So how does this differ from any other SEO Strategy?

We recognise that more and more and more people want to understand SEO for themselves so they can implement it whilst maintain full control over their website and business.

For years SEO Agency’s have been quoting phrases like:

 -Your site has canicalisation issues!

 -Your robots.txt file is preventing web bots from indexing your site!

 -Your meta data does not reference your keywords correctly!

 -You need multiple one way thematic links on content related sites!

All though in many cases these statements are true, these can leave you thinking that you must use an SEO Agency to implement changes for you.

Not correct.  Here at the SEO Authority, we are helping more and more website owners to DIY SEO.  Our strategy service doesn’t just tell you what is needs doing; it tells you how to do it. We will detail all the techniques, toolsets and tricks of the trade for accomplishing your SEO Strategy to agency standards, i.e. large return with minimum effort.

You may be asking why we are willing to reveal all this information, well, as it happens; many of our clients continue to work with us on certain elements of the strategy. For the link building elements of the strategy we will provide a step by step guide on how to build links against each link mechanism. Some website owners may still choose to outsource parts of this task, which we will of course be happy to help with. We are also on hand to perform landing page optimisation should this be required.

By divulging this information specific to your business, website owners can perform their own SEO at a significantly reduced cost. This allows us to focus on long term advanced SEO Strategy for your business.

This is why we are now offering this unique service that you will not get from any other SEO Agency.

Contact us today about your own bespoke SEO Strategy or find out more about our SEO Strategy Service

1. Keywords

The keywords that you choose for your search engine optimization activities greatly influence your online success. If you target the wrong keywords, all of your efforts will be in vain.

Choose your keywords wisely. It's not a good idea to optimize your web pages for general one-word keywords. Optimize your pages for highly targeted keywords that attract the right kind of people. You want buyers, not website visitors. The more targeted your keywords, the better.

2. On-page optimization

Once you know the keywords for which you want to be ranked, you have to optimize your web pages for these keywords. Optimize as many different pages for as many different keywords as possible.

Make sure that the keywords appear in the right elements on your pages and that search engines can parse your pages without problems.

Your website architecture is also an element of on-page optimization. Your website navigation should contain your keywords and all pages of your website should be linked in a meaningful way so that search engines can categorize your web pages.

3. Usability and conversion optimization

Even if your website gets hundreds of visitors per day, it still might not deliver sales because the web pages are not user friendly.

Your web pages should have an appealing design, they should be easy to use, they should create trust and they should make it easy to buy.

4. Link building

When all other elements are in place, you can start to get backlinks for your website. In general, more than one web page has been optimized for a given search term so the web page with the best backlinks will be listed in the top results on Google.

The backlinks should target the same keywords as your on-page optimization. If you want to get high rankings for "sports clothing Liverpool" then your web pages should be optimized for that keyword and the links that point to your site should also contain that keyword.

All elements must be in place and they must be in the right order

If you just have links then you won't get sales if your web pages don't convert. If you have optimized web pages, they won't help you if they are optimized for the wrong keywords.

If you have the right keywords and well optimized web pages that convert then you still need good backlinks to get on Google's first result page.

If you want to succeed on the Internet, you must do the right things in the right order

Looking for help getting it right? then drop us a mail

What is going to change?

Of course, Google hasn't revealed the details of Google Caffeine yet. However, the new index has been live on some test servers and some Google employees also talked about the next index. The following factors might play a larger role in Google's next index:

• Website speed: if you have a slow loading website, it might not get high rankings on Google.
• Broken links: if your website contains many broken links, this might have a negative impact of the position of your web pages in Google search results.
• Bad neighborhoods: Linking to known spammers and getting a lot of links from known spammers isn't good for your rankings in Google's current algorithm. The negative impact of a bad neighborhood will probably be even worse with Google Caffeine.
• The over-all quality of your website: Google's new algorithm probably will take a closer look at the over-all quality of your website. It's not enough to have one or two ranking factors in place.
  
  You'll probably need good optimized content, a good website design with a clear navigation, good inbound links, a low bounce rate, etc. The number of social bookmarks might also play an increased role.

Factors like the age of a website, its past history, authority etc. will still play a role in Google's new index. However, the effect of the different factors on your rankings will shift.

How can you adjust your web pages to Google's new Caffeine index?

Although Google's Caffeine update hasn't been release yet, there are some things that you can do to increase the chances that your website will get good rankings in Google's new index:

• Remove all spam elements from your web pages. Anything that might be considered spam can and will have a negative effect on the position of your web pages sooner or later. This includes text that has nearly the same color as the background, cloaking and fully automated linking systems.
• Check your website design and the navigation of your website. Your website should have a professional look and feel. The navigation should be easy to understand and your web pages should easily be parseable by search engine spiders.  Social bookmark links already play a role in Google's current algorithm and that role might increase.
• Check your links. You shouldn't link to websites that look like spammers. It's better to focus on quality one way thematic links instead of as many links as possible.

Google Caffeine is going to be released after the holidays. If you follow the tips above, your website will be in a good position when Google's new index will be online.

So what does this mean for SEO. The title although heavily influenced by SEO should not just be a keyword strong bunch of words

Depending on which kind of traffic you want to attract, you should use different title formats on your web pages:

1. News titles (not so good for Search Engine Optimisation)

This kind of title is often used by bloggers and news article promoters. Here are some examples:

1. How at risk is your identity?
2. Recession causes unrest in the city
3. Nominate your hero
4. Jacko King of pop dies

The problem with these titles is that they are not good for search engine optimisation. These titles usually don't contain relevant keywords and they don't look very attractive in the search results.

There won't be many people who will type " Recession causes unrest in the city" in Google's search box so it's not likely that the page will get many visitors through search engines.

2. Shopping titles (good for SEO)

Shopping titles usually contain a product name that is used by web surfers. If they also contain a call to action, you can get targeted visitors with these titles. Here are some examples:

Compaq 6400 10-Inch Black Netbook - 9.5 Hour Battery Life

Compaq 6400 - Buy it now for only £249.95

Buy a Compaq 6400 with extended guarantee

Free shipping: HP Compaq 6400 - £249.95

The first shopping title is rather descriptive because it only lists the features. The other titles contain a call to action (buy now), prices and additional benefits (free shipping).

People who want to buy a Compaq 6400 probably will click on the title with the call to action while people who are looking for product information might choose the first title.

3. Information seeker titles (good for SEO)

Information seeker titles won't attract buyers but people who are looking for information about a special topic. Here are some examples:

1. How to lose weight as fast as possible
2. How to repair a broken stool
3. 10 mistakes most parents make when choosing a school
4. How to find the perfect golf course
5. 10 ways to find the perfect partner

These web page titles are good because they will attract visitors over a long time period. People are always looking for "how to" articles and solutions to their problems and you will get long term, constant traffic with these pages.

Action plan: how to change your current web page titles

Good web page titles can make a huge difference in the number of visitors that your website gets. For that reason, you should check the titles of all web pages of your website now:

Make sure that the titles of your web pages are descriptive. It should be clear what to expect on the pages.

If possible, add a call to action and benefits in your web page title.

1. Put the most important information at the beginning of the title. Search engines might shorten the title in the search result pages and people might not see the complete text, plus the first characters / words are more highly regarded.
2. If you're not a major brand name, avoid your company name in your web page titles. People wont know who you are so use the character limit wisely
3. Do not use the same title for all of your web pages. This is a mistake that many beginners make and if across many pages and keyword heavy could be construed as an attempt to fool the search engines which may result in penalties

People judge books by their covers and search results by web page titles. If you want to get as many website visitors as possible, you should develop engaging titles for all pages of your site. Build and they will come.

Search engine optimisation is pointless if your website does not convert visitors into customers. You'll actually lose a lot of money if you don't take the time to optimise the conversion rates of your website pages.

Why is optimising the conversion rate of your website important?

Suppose you sell a product  / service for £50. If the conversion rate of your website is 1% then 1 out of 100 website visitors will buy your product or service. That means that you will sell 2 units if 200 people visit your website.

If you want to double your sales, you have to double the number of visitors that come to your website. That's usually quite difficult. So what now?

If you optimise your web pages so that you have a conversion rate of 2% then you can double your sales without getting more visitors. Increasing the conversion rate of a website is usually easier than getting more customers and obviously far more profitable.

What can you do to improve the conversion rate of your website pages?

There are several things that you can do to improve the conversion rate of your pages:

1. Drive traffic to the most relevant pages on your website.

Your website visitors should come to the most relevant pages on your website. If you advertise on Google AdWords for the search term "buy big green bottles" then your landing page should be a page about big green bottles and it should be possible to buy these bottles right on the page. The same applies for visitors that you get through your regular search engine rankings.

2. Check your website statistics for your pages with a high bounce rate.

 There are many packages out there that measure this but as a starter use Google analytics, its fast and easy to set up and best of all is free.

Analyse your analytics stats to find pages on your site that have a high bounce rate. If too many people leave your website without fulfilling the desired task then you have to improve your pages and make them more relevant to the user's query. Also check your statistics to find "404 not found" and other errors.

3. Add a call to action on all of your landing pages

Every landing page should contain a call to action. Chances are that a website visitor will see only a single page of your website. That's why all pages should contain a call to action so that your website visitors know what to do.  If you can link your call to action to your payment facility or contact form then this will increase conversation rates.

Don’t under estimate the results that on-page SEO can bring your business. Contact Us today for a no obligation discussion.

If you have already invested time in researching the best keywords for your website then you will have a list as long as your arm of words / phrases you wish to rank highly for.

With this in mind, how many keywords should your website target? Perhaps I should rephrase. How many keywords should each of your webs pages target?

Answer:

#1

You should not try to optimise one webpage for one than one keyword / phrase. The phrase can of course consist of multiple words but a different phrase will require a different page.

Why? Well it’s much better for ranking purposes  if a web page is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many search terms. If you concentrate on one keyword per page then it is much more likely that your web page will get a top listing on Google for that keyword / phrase.

You will get the best possible results if you optimise different pages of your website for different but related keywords.

How to optimise a web page for your chosen keyword

When you optimise a web page for a keyword, it's important that the right elements of your web page contain the keyword in the right frequency. In the old days simply hitting the optimum % of keyword density used to do the trick. Not any more. The only true way of measuring keyword density levels is to evaluate your top 10 competitors for that exact phrase and evaluate how much / how little they use the keyword phrase within the core elements of the website content, i.e. meta data, h1 tags, inbound links, outbound links, the content itself.. and the list goes on.

The keyword competitor analysis is a task the SEO-Authority do as part of an SEO Audit & Analysis Report, or please contact us for more information

Single keywords Vs keyword phrases

You should always aim to optimise your web pages for a very targeted keyword that consists of many words. A keyword that consists of many words is called "key phrase". This has several advantages:

1. It's much easier to get top 10 rankings for targeted key phrases because the competition is not as fierce as the competition for single word key words.

2. Key phrases attract much more targeted website visitors. People who search for "Football" might be interested in magazines, clubs or even the players. People who search for "Buy Cheap football kits" are looking for inexpensive football kits and they are ready to buy. There is little reward in optimising your website for keywords that don’t result in orders to your basket. What it  will result in is a high bounce rate of traffic from your site.

3. By optimising your web page for a key phrase, you automatically optimise your web page for the parts of that key phrase. For example, your web page will automatically be optimised for "football kits", "football" and other keywords if you optimise your page for "Buy Cheap football kits"

Optimise one web page for one keyword and introduce and optimise as many webpage’s as necessary. More is defiantly better!

If many pages of your website have been optimised for many related keywords then your website will look relevant to the topic of your keywords (in the example: "football"). If search engines think that your website is relevant to a special topic then it will be easier to get high rankings for the individual keywords.

                         Dominate Your Market With Twitter:

                         Tweet your way to business success

To avoid infringements of publisher rights (Publisher: Infinite Ideas) we can give you exclusive quotes from the book that will give you some insight into Jons Twitter research and findings, but to get the full story, yes you guessed it, you will have to buy it.

This blog post isn't about plugging the book as much as possible (did I mention its available in all good book shops) it's simply extracting some of the key points relating to SEO Strategy.

We all know the importance of back links and authority ones at that, however Twitter isn’t great for providing such links but that doesn’t mean it cant help with your SEO efforts:

Jon states:

“A <nofollow> tag is an instruction to the search engines not to follow a link to its destination and to essentially ignore it. Twitter could be a great tool for generating thousands if not millions of links, because every time you post a web address in your Tweet this could be a valuable backlink to your website... in fact lots of people are including their URLs in their Tweets for that express reason – however, what they don’t realise is that Twitter is adding a <nofollow> tag to those links essentially nullifying them from an SEO perspective.” (JS)

He goes on to explain:

“Why? Well, if links within Tweets were taken into account by search engines, spammers would immediately try to take advantage of it and flood Twitter with useless links and spam. For that reason Twitter is adding the <nofollow> tag to ensure the party isn’t ruined by spammers and abuse of the system” (JS)

So should you even bother with Twitter links?

Very much so, regardless of the <nofollow> tag, the search engine web bots may not be able to follow them but humans certainly can. Additionally if you have something informative to Tweet to your Followers then include it, after all quality content as with websites will attract a natural flow of targeted traffic.

Jon does point out that:

“Although links posted within Tweets are not relevant for search engines… Don’t forget that you are able to add a link within your profile to your website – the web page you point to on your profile does not have a <nofollow> tag so it will indeed assist with your  search engines rankings.” (JS)

Twitter Trends

Twitter is a great way to visualize trends and observe what are latest hot topics. SEO is very much related to keywords and Twitter is a great mechanism for tracking those keywords and in real-time conversations, so back links are not the be all and end all of SEO.

Jon writes:

“So, instead you can focus your attention on Twitter to see what is becoming interesting, which keywords users are using in order to create relevant articles or content. Therefore Twitter is a great way to both anticipate and to monitor interesting subjects, and to ensure that you are first to know what is already or is becoming important.” (JS)

Tip: Check out some of the TAG cloud tools such as Tweetscoop which present visual depictions of a sites content to help you quickly identify those trends.

Finally Jon talks about Twitter and SERP’s

“Twitter posts and accounts appear on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), especially if you have linked to them from other sites (like your blog or your website etc.)"

"Using Twitter regularly and including relevant keywords in your Tweets will increase your Twitter account visibility on search results, whether or not the search engine user is a Twitter user. This is a great way to drive that traffic to your website.” (JS)

Give us a tweet..

To find out more about this book and other publications from the Author Jon Smith please visit our Publications Page

On looks alone, Bing is not dramatically different from Google. There are however some visible changes:

* Bing shows a preview of the web pages in the search results when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results.

* Bing displays fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for "Facebook", for example, brings up just one result linking to the site itself.

* Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for the popular musicians "Oasis", you'll get results in the categories news, songs, movies, biography, wallpaper and downloads. In addition, the search results show images, videos and the popularity of the musician.

* Despite the background image, Bing's homepage loads very quickly in your web browser because the search box and logo load first. You can turn off the background image.

* Wikipedia searches can be displayed inline in the search results without leaving the Bing site by clicking the "Enhanced view" link.

Bing's video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine.

* Bing offers specific health, shopping and travel search engines, as well as instant answers to travel searches. For instance, the search "London hotels" displays a selection of hotels in Las Vegas, including hotel stars and prices.

* Bing's search history lets you return to your most recent searches of the last two days. This feature can be turned off to protect your privacy.

* Bing features a different background image every day. The image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information (soon advertising?) about the image.

* Some of Google's features are missing, for example, Bing doesn't seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in these cases.

How Microsoft BING differs from the LIVE / MSN searches in terms of the Algorithm will become evident following further testing. We ourselves are carrying out significant tests against BING in comparison to Google and yahoo to see if there have been any significant updates. What this space…..

There are many website analytics packages available on the market. This article isn’t about reviewing those. I will focus on how you can use the outputs of such tools to monitor and improve your SEO efforts. I will lean towards Google Analytics as a toolset as this has the lions share of market.

When first accessing Google’s Analytics tool and without customisation you are immediately presented with a summary page showing a whole host of information that can steer your SEO efforts. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the map of the world showing your visitors geographical location. We all love graphical and picture representations of data, it’s pleasing to the eye, especially when you’re tracking hits to your site. In addition to looking good, it serves an important purpose for your SEO efforts. This is called Geo targeting.

“Geotargeting” refers to using Analytics data to gain information about the geographical locations of visitors to your website.  This information is crucial in deciding whether to focus on a particular geographic location for maximising growth and whether it will be viable to increase advertising in areas where the company has less visiblity.

Geotargeting can also be used to decide if there is any value in translating your website to cater for foreign languages.  For instance, if research shows that a high number of visitors to your site are from China, it might provide fruitful to create a Chinese language version of the site to home in on this potential market. You will note that I use the words “create a Chinese language version of the site” and not use the phrase ‘translate your page’. Their are hundreds are translation software tools on the net, many free but even with the paid tools, the accuracy of language conversion is not 100%. If you are serious about targeting internationally, ensure your page is professionally translated. The equivalent of ‘Pigeon English ‘is not going to maximise on your opportunity.

Another important measurement that Analytics provides is Bounce Rate. “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

The Bounce rate of a website can be used to measure the ‘Visit Quality’ of a visitor to your website.  If the Bounce rate for your site is high, this suggest that the landing page for the visitor is not relevant or compelling enough for the visitor to explore further.

To reduce the Bounce rate, ensure that your landing pages match what was promised on the links to those pages or from links from your web ads.  A high bounce rate will significantly reduce your conversion rate and if you are adopting a Pay Per Click programme, it will be costing you money.

Looking at your traffic sources is another important factor when planning your SEO. Understanding how visitors find your site, i.e. organic search, referring sites, Pay Per Click etc is essential when calculating marketing cost and effort in each of these areas. If your highest source of traffic is via PPC, then your efforts should be focussing on Organic search with the aim of reducing your PPC costs and improving free search traffic. If your site frequently refers visitors from partner sites than its essential that your partnership / linking agreements remain in place. You can then also start exploiting similar sites to these referring sites with the aim of increasing this source of traffic.

I have only touched on 2 elements of analytics and the list of benefits goes on. Off the shelf so to speak and without customisation you are offered whole host of data you can use to plan your SEO.  If you would like assistance in interpreting your analytics data or if you would like to take it to the next level, please contact us for a no obligation discussion