SEO (and many people might hate me for saying this) is not a black art, its not witchcraft, its not even really difficult.

Its about getting the basics done first, and then refining things.

By the basics I really mean the following, which EVERY website should adhere to:

1) content. make sure your site has good, original content. without content you will never rank well.
2) page structure. make sure each one of your pages is well structured, that it has the required title tags, <h> tags, keywords and so on.
3) site structure. make sure that your site is easy to navigate for a human being. if it is, then guess what, it will be for a search engine spider as well.
4) make sure you fill in all the required bits, like title tags, anchor text and so on. Without those a search engine doesn’t know things about your site that it should know to rank well.
5) links: try and get as many links as you can, as long as these conditions are met: a) they are from sites in the same topic, if not they are 90% worthless, b) they contain good anchor text, without that google doesnt know what the link is for.

As far as the basics are concerned, well, thats it. It really is that simple - but so many people fixate over one thing or another and dont look at the picture overall.

Dont get me wrong, there are another 500+ considerations to make your website “perfect” but in reality, no website is ever perfect and there is always room for improvement.

good luck with your optimizing folks!

MM

well, its happening.  After months of hearing about the new versions of google that were just around the corner with integrated data sources that were dependant on the search topic, and further integrated news, images, video and product feeds integrated into search - its FINALLY HERE.  well.  Almost.

Google today added this page to public view: http://www.google.com/experimental/ where you can see a few proposed ideas that google have got for how we will all be searching in the upcoming months and years.

There are three different beta tests going on at the moment, and you can join any one of them and give your feedback etc.

They are;

Alternate Views:
You can now get alternate information on your search result, for instance see things by timeline, on a Map, or additional miscellaneous information, depending on the search type

Keyword Suggestions:
in a very ask.com AJAX type fashion, google is now suggesting the keywords that you might be searching for, to help you find what you want quicker.  One cool addition they have made to this is the ability to see the search yield for any particular term (really really useful on an SEO perspective)

Keyboard Shortcuts:
and the prize for the BEST addition to google since the elmer fuddish language (you have seen that havent you?) is this new keyboard shortcut addon.  Basically it allows you to choose certain results based on the key you press.  examples are:

So - there you have it, three new ways to search google, so get involved, be a beta tester, take a look round, and just remember, you read about it here first!

MM

A) On site Optimization: This couldn’t be easier, its the basics that everyone (should) know. Your content (ie. the bit of your page that has normal sized text, in the example of this webpage, this very paragraph would be considered “content”) should be 100% on topic as to your chosen subject that you wish the search engines to rank you well for. As an example I now should not start wittering on about goldfish or sunbeds, as thats not ON TOPIC for the subject matter that Im approaching.

Once your content is nicely on topic with a relevant amount of keywords (%, and you can check this using any number of SEO tools so just google it) the next thing you need to look at are your titles, this is everything from your title meta tag, to your H1, H2 and H3 texts. If you dont know what these are, then the best thing to do is check up at an html knowledgebase, because you really do need to know what they are! Anyway, ALL of these titles should be optimized to the content text that you are targeting. Ie. if you are targeting Search Engine Optimisation in Kent (I am) then relevant titles are:

Search Engine Optimisation in Kent

as your h1 text

a look at optimising your content for search engines

is good h2 text

in depth analysis of search engine optimisation within kent websites

is appropriate h3 text

Basically whats happening there is that the h1 through h3 text has descending importance for keyword density, and it allows you in each case to bring on a few more keywords, each of which should be repeated in the content of the site as well by the way, otherwise google may see it as meta spamming.

b) Off site Optimization: off site is a bit tougher to optimize - if you aren’t familiar with Google webmaster tools you will find it even harder as well. The best thing to do is analyze your off site link anchor keywords. You havent got any off site links? Well, it doesnt matter how well you perform the first step of on site optimization, your site will just never rank well for competitive keywords as its 80% off site in importance these days Im afraid.

What you need is a link building strategy to attract links from websites that are of a similar niche, or at least have a page that is of a similar niche to yours. If you remember back a few years ago most sites had an “exchange links with us” link, which has, by and large, now died out - reciprocal links have gone out of favor with google, and therefore with webmasters in general. What you need to do is provide good enough content on your site for other people to voluntarily link to it, thats the best way, failing that there are plenty of other ways to obtain links, you just need to be creative in your thinking!
c) adapting your on and off site optimization to the competition; now this is where you will gain a serious advantage against your competitors, as this is the step that is missed out on 99.98% of the time (note: statistic is most likely rubbish, I just made it up ;)) What you need to do is analyse the top 3 positions of the search term that you are trying to target, and work out certain things: the other sites keyword density, is yours similar to them? if not make it so, the other sites link weight, do you have comparable strength in your backlinks? if not carry out another round of link building until you DO have similar strength, or ideally, better strength in your backlinks. Finally, take a look at the competitions other contributing factors, now these are all topics themselves for future blog posts, but they would include, internal link structure, robots.txt, sitemaps, indexed pages, external links, edu backlinks, w3c compliance, quality of coding and many many more smallish factors that all contribute to your sites overall strength.

Once you have these three things in order, you can rank highly for the most competitive of terms, its worth remembering that every site started somewhere, and you can be #1 for any search term, with enough work and enough time to dedicate to it!

anyway, thats enough from me, go check your sites!

MM

As the whole arena of search engine optimization services is relatively new to most people, a lot of the time you hear or see discussion going on about seo that should be sem, or ppc being labelled seo and so on.  Well, they are relatively easy to differentiate BUT given the close correlation between the different “disciplines” of the subject many people confuse them.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation (or optimization if you are US based!) is the art of making sure that a website is as optimised as possible for search engine spiders to correctly gather all of the data that the site contains, and trying to ensure that the relevant pages on the site are returned when a search is displayed.  Having your site optimized for search positioning is of absolute importance, as a site with poor optimisation it would be akin to a great brochure for your company, but no distribution.  People will not find your companies website if it is not well optimized (hence positioned well) for search engines to spider correctly.

PPC - Pay Per Click Advertising, is the methodology of promoting your company on search engines and web portals, by means of paying for the results that the advertiser produces, ie. directly paying for a “click” or a person actually visiting your site. Pay per click advertising is the number one revenue stream for all search engines today, and in the UK google have for the first time in 30 years usurped ITV1’s positioning as the number one advertising revenue generating company, which is a true reflection on the maturing of the internet advertising industry.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing, is either pure SEO, PPC, or more often a combination of the two disciplines to give an overall “marketing” or means of achieving good search engine positioning, using the whole range of ways that a search engine can bring you exposure.

So, next time you use the acronyms, you should know which is which!

off for my cafe con leche!

MM

all to often to I hear “but my site doesnt have duplicate content” to then take a look at a given website and find that there are up to 10 variations on essentially the same page.  For instance, does your site have PDF downloads of information otherwise available? Do you have a printer friendly page? Do you have a “send this page to a friend” link on your content pages?

Any of those functionality aides will often result in the same page being repeated many times over, and google will not catalog these individual pages, which isnt necessarily a bad thing, but what is a massive penalty to your website is that the spiders will miss out on other genuine content pages as they have spent their alloted time for your websites strength, filtering out duplicate material that neednt have been there!

In extreme cases google may penalise the whole site and in some instances I have seen websites not ranking for their domain name or their brand name, down to google interpretting masses of duplicate content as spam.

How can I avoid this? Well, a structured approach needs to be taken to your site but duplicate content can be avoided in a number of key ways.  The first and most important of which is to have an up to date robots.txt file.  This is an often misunderstood piece of seo “black magic” but it neednt be,  the most basic application of a robots.txt file will be to disallow google from indexing certain folders on your site, for instance if you DO have pdf copies of relevant content on your site, then you would use your robots.txt file to prevent the spiders from recording any information in your /pdf/ folder.

In some cases the content isnt however stored in an ordered environment, but you need to disallow certain pages from being indexed, an example of this would be if you have a shopping cart on your website, and you can sort by php your products.  If you have 10 products sorted by price, and then a link to sort them alphabetically, your sorted page will look like duplicate content to google.

The best way to avoid this kind of duplicate content is to add a rel=noindex tag to your link on the sorting page, that way only the first page will get indexed.

Duplicate content is an issue for all sites of all sizes, and its something that is liable to get you “google slapped” so check out your sites cache in google now (by searching for site:www.yoursite.com) and see what the search engines have recorded for your site, you might be surprised!

anyway, off for my calimocho!

mm

No, its not because I am stuck here in front of my monitors in what I affectionately call my “SEO War Room” (my multi monitor setup makes the office seem like the bridge of a destroyer when they are all on!) its because I have just stumbled across some decent search engine rankings for a few competitive keywords I started targetting a few months ago.

When I set the website MOGmedia up, a little over a year ago, it was my intention to rank first page for some seo related terms specific to my co-location living, namely Kent and the Costa Del Sol. Well, I was surprised to find that my last post, along with the MOGmedia homepage rank 2nd and 3rd respectively for either term!

You can check the websites, and the search terms that yields their positions as follows:

SEO Kent #3 in google.com for seo kent

SEO Costa Del Sol #2 in google.com for costa del sol SEO

These updates to the SERPs appear to have only happened since the last pagerank updates so Im not seeing a huge impact on traffic yet, but with some further refinement of inner pages and their relative keyword densities along with some creative linking, I think I might see an upturn in the next few weeks.

Anyway, back of to continue my SERP searching sessions!

MM

UPDATE:
ranked 4th and 8th for SEO kent in google see here
ranked 2nd and 3rd for SEO costa del sol see here
ranked 1st and 3rd for SEO rochester Kent see here
ranked 2nd for Kent SEO see here
ranked 4th and 5th for seo medway kent see here
ranked 9th for Search Engine Optimization Kent see here

If you can visualise pagerank arriving at the index.xxx page of your website and being distributed downstream with each stage filtering out some more and more, until your last content pages pick up very little pagerank, deeplinking is the practice of getting outside links to “deep” within your website with a view to increasing the pagerank distribution to the rest of your website.

An example would be the blogroll link on this blog to my main site, MOGmedia well, thats just a link to the main page of my website, and google will spider the pages and assign value to them using the main page as an entry “doorway”, and in doing so it will drop a bit of pagerank there first before it moves on and values the other pages.

If I were to link to my OTHER website pages from an external site such as:

MOGmedia SEO services

MOGmedia Portfolio of SEO 

UK SEO hosting 

SEO Services Kent 

Contact MOGmedia Staff

These links will pass on the same amount of pagerank to the inner pages of the site.  Now for all intensive purposes the juice that will be passed on from this post is minimal as it will be “diluted” by the total number of outgoing links, but for an example it will do for now….

So, if you are trying to get more pages indexed in your website, choose a relevant “deep” or inner page to link to, and get link building!

anyway, Im off for another calimocho, or four!

MM

all the webmaster forums have again been alive with the buzz thats created every time google does the dance and has a pagerank update.

Well, I am pleased to say that for once my personal blog hasnt been ignored - I have just got a PR3 for the homepage of this  site and it did bring a wry smile to the mouth so for that I thank you google (I actually thank you more for that nice round $1,000 cheque this month from Adsense, but thats a different story for a different post!)

All this talk of PR updates though raises the  point that its awfully early for the THIRD pagerank update of the year isn’t it? Surely this one wasn’t due out till August?  Will Google be changing their PR policies, well - as always with the big G (not GOD, Google!!) its impossible to say but with the amount of PR bashing thats gone on in the last six months Id say its a near certainty that major changes are being made to the algo’s.  My best guess is that current pagerank calculations will have a lot more to do with the ageing of the inbound links, than the pagerank of the page that they come from.

Anyway, off to muse and check the rest of my sites…

MM

Some of you may know this trick already, but for those that dont its a great way to build up your .edu backlinks quickly.  This article isnt really a discussion on whether .edu links are worth more than normal links, I have discussed that topic ad infinitum on various forums in the past, its purely a look at how you can get edu links, and most importantly for free!

Google being the source of all information is ofcourse where you are going to find the best places to get edu links - and the most effective way of doing that is by posting context sensitive comments on related blogs.  To do a search all you need to do is go to google and type this in:

site:.edu +”powered by wordpress” +”add your comment”

This will then give you a list of wordpress blogs, with open comments that are hosted on .edu domains.

The best thing to do then is to sort the results by pagerank which you do with the SEOQUAKE addon for firefox and hey presto! a great big list of places to get free high PR edu backlinks!

Cheers

MM

I am happy to report that the site was indeed now DMOZ listed, and I quickly followed up with a few checks of my other sites and was pleased to find that a further two more sites had also gained that holy grail of the backlinks, an ODP listing.  I did have other sites already listed in the directory so I started to delve deeper into the ramifications of having a site listed and came up with a few interesting things that I either hadnt noticed, or has recently changed.

The DMOZ link did not (does not) appear in my google webmaster tools at all, and not just for my newly added sites, also for a few sites that I own that have had a listing for nearly 10 years.  To be fair there isnt much activity on those sites and not many other backlinks so Im not 100% sure if google has stopped counting DMOZ links in its webmaster tools,  if so then I wonder what about the other directories that “feed” off the information dumps from the ODP,  surely they will count towards backlinks.

A quick check ensued, and as an example the Alexa Directory did NOT appear as a backlink in the test sites I looked at either in Google’s webmaster tools. So this begs the Question:  Has Google Now Discounted DMOZ from its algorithms?  

In short I can not answer that question immediately but I will certainly do some more investigation and come back to you folks when I know more!

Anyway, off for my cafe con leche!

MM