Search Engine Optimisation Services Manchester - Blog

Onsite Optimisation - Offsite Optimisation

By Jon | July 2, 2008

In a recent post I talked about keyphrase analysis; you must have been thinking ‘What do I do with these keyphrases?’. Here is where you find out.

There are endless ways that you can use these phrases, mainly through search engines.

In future posts I will cover the majority of web marketing strategies. In this post I will cover the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO can be split into 2 main categories: Onsite Optimisation and Offsite Optimisation.

Onsite Optimisation is letting search engines know what your website/company is about. Obviously this is where you use your keyphrase analysis so can include phrases that people are searching for when they look for your products or services.

Offsite Optimisation is external link building. You don’t have to search for links yourself as your website will build links naturally but if you do you will see quicker and better results. I like to think of Offsite Optimisation as a method of voting. People vote for your website using the text that they deem fit (this is explained under Offsite Optimisation) .

How do Search Engines Work?

You can spend so much time reading about how search engines work and end up knowing useless information about how Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked in a garage and PageRank is actually named after Larry but what you really want to know is how can you use search engines to your advantage? Forget about algorithms, spiders, PageRanks etc… Just think about it logically. Google and other search engines are just looking for an efficient way of allowing people to search for information on websites and get the most relevant results for what they type in. So if your website has the phrase they type in all of the correct places in your code and you have links into your website from external websites using these phrases then you are basically optimised.

Onsite Optimisation

So where do you put the keyphrases to let search engines know that they are important to your website? You need to strategically place the phrases in the correct places but at the same time don’t go overboard. I recommend that you place the keyphrases in the following places:

Title Tag: This is a key factor in Onsite Optimisation. I recommend that you do not exceed 80 characters for this. Have your main phrase at the start of the title tag. Use your homepage for overall phrases for your website. For example if you are sell used books don’t use specific book titles for the homepage use a more general phrase such as ‘Used Book Shop’ or ‘Used Books’. So your title tag could then be : <title>Used Book Shop | Used Books - Seymour Books UK</title>. Use a good relevant title tag because although this is in the code it is displayed at the top of the browser and will be the link that people see in the search engines.

Meta Description: This will be displayed in the search engine listings below the title tag link. Keep this to less than but close to 25 words, try to have the main phrase in this text two or even three times. However I recommend that you do not repeat any one word more than three times.

Example:

See more books at Seymour’s used book shop. A wide range of used books including
comics, thrillers and classics . Seymour’s used book shop Est  1980.

Meta Keywords: Although keywords used to be valuable but are quite useless now I recommend that you follow the rules and keep these in your website. Include the phrases that are in your title, description and on page text. Again I recommend that you do not exceed 3 repetitions of any one word.

Example:

used book shop, used books, seymour books, used books, uk

On Page Text

The on page includes 4 main parts:

Headings: Headings are similar to those in word documents. Heading 1 is simply <H1></H1>, heading 2 is <H2></H2> etc… I recommend having one H1 that includes the keyphrases. You can have as many of the other headings as you like and if you can include the keyphrases in these heading then this is great.

ALT Text: This is text to let people and search engines know what an image is about. It is the text that you see if you hover over an image. If possible include the keyphrase in 2 Alt texts.

Inner Page Links: These links are links to other pages on your website. Try to include 2 links with the keyphrases.

Body Text: Search engines only view text so this is what we give them. I recommend a minimum of 300 words of text. In 300 words of text I would have the keyphrases mentioned approx 4 times, not including the H1 tag. If you can make the keyphrases bold and large or either then this helps.

These are the main changes to make to the homepage to include the keyphrases on your optimised page.

Link Building

There are two types of link building Internal Link Building and External Link Building. I will explain external link building below for Offsite Optimisation but internal link building is simply using the keyphrases on other pages on your website to link to the optimised page.

For example my homepage is optimised for Search Engine Optimization Services so for these links I have used the text Search Endine Optimization Services to link to my homepage.

Remember: This is only the basics and there are many other Onsite Optimisation key factors that will be discussed in further posts to improve on this.

Offsite Optimisation

This is basically external link building. When link building you are looking for websites to link to you. The more relevant and stronger the website is the better. You obviously know if a website is similar to yours or relevant.

There are two main factors to take into account when getting an external link. The first is the strength of the page that is linking to you. Google have made this easy for us, simply check the PageRank of the page (the Google toolbar has this feature) . The other is how many links are on the page that is going to link to you. The fewer the better.

When you get these links use the same rule as when linking internally. Use one of your keyphrases as the link text (link text is also called ‘title’ and ‘anchor text’)

Where do I get links from?

There are 3 main categories of links that you should use.

Directories

There are a wide range of free directories on the web. From the amazing DMOZ.org (this is the one that Google uses for it’s directory) to many more business specific directories. Simply add your website to these directories in the usual way by finding the relevant category for your business then clicking ‘Add your website’, ’submit URL’ or something similar.

Forums, Blogs, Article

Get out there, chat to people in forums and blogs and help people that need information or need to find your service or products. Many forums and blogs will allow you to add links to website while you chat so add your website using the keyphrases as link text where possible.

There are also a lot of places such as the legendary Gumtree where you can write articles to promote your business or just let people know your thoughts.

Suppliers, Clients and Customers

They all have websites, simply email them and ask them to link to you. A lot of the time you will have to link back (reciprocal linking). This is not as good as just an incoming link but it’s good.

Back To Thinking Logically

Think about it. By putting the keyphrases in the correct places on your website you are stating to search engines ‘This is what this company does’. Then when someone links to your website they are saying ‘Hey search engines, he’s not lying. This is what he does!’

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Topics: Off-Site Optimisation, On-site Optimisation, Web Marketing |

Search Engine Optimisation

By Jon | June 3, 2008

One of the main methods for users to find your website is by search engines. So if your website has good rankings on search engines for relevant and searched for phrases you will have increased traffic.

Of course we all want good rankings for relevant phrases and simply submitting your website to search engines will not achieve this. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is used.

SEO is basically a method of not only being included in search engines but letting search engines know what your website is about. There are many aspects of SEO that will be explained in future posts

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Topics: Web Marketing |

Free Keyphrase Analysis Help

By Jon | May 28, 2008

SEO Keyphrase Analysis

If you speak to any SEO professional they will tell you that keyphrase analysis is one of the key factors in Search Engine Optimisation. This is an obvious truth. If you optimise your website for the wrong phrases then you will attract the wrong customers. This sounds like common sense but you might be surprised by how often people get this wrong

Most people think that they know exactly what the keyphrases are for their company before performing keyphrase analysis. Most people are wrong.

An important aspect of keyphrase analysis is to be able to separate yourself from your business. This sounds easier than it is and this is why it is a good idea to perform a full keyphrase analysis.

Let’s break down the keyphrase analysis:

The Competitors

A good start is to see what phrases your competitors are using.

First I recommend looking at the competitors’ title tag, meta description and meta keywords. Although the meta keywords are not as significant as they used to be I recommend having a look at them.

To look at these, simply go to the website in question, go to View, then Source.

This will show you the code of the website.

The title is as follows:

<title>Title is here</title>

The meta description is as follows:

<meta name=”description” content=”Keyphrases are here“>

The meta keywords are as follows:

On a website these are normally the first blocks of information that the search engine will view.

The title tag is the most important part of the on-site optimisation.

If your competitor is optimising their website for search engines these are what they will change first.

Another important aspect to look at is how often these phrases are on the page. Have a look through the page to see how often they have repeated these phrases.

When you look through these I recommend making a note of all of the phrases that they use.

Make your own list

After looking through competitors websites you will have more of an idea of what to optimise your website for. I’m sure that you now have a better idea about phrases than you did before. This is the time to make your own list, use your competitors phrases along with your own knowledge of your company to make a large list of phrases that can be used throughout your website. We will call this list “freephrase list”.

What if your competitors have got it wrong?

The truth is that they might have… This is why we have created the freephrase list. It is basically a foundation. Now we need to find a system that works. For this there are 2 methods. Either can be used but for better results I recommend using both.

Use a search term suggestion tool

The first method is to use a search term suggestion tool. There are a lot of tools that you can buy or even get for free if you are willing to look for them. Here are two good ones http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ and http://www.wordtracker.com/. There are many others out there though.

Basically these tools will show you how many times a phrase is searched for per month (although sometimes the time periods differ). This is when you use your freephrase list. Type each of the phrases into the tool to see how many times each phrase is searched for per month. These tools will also show you alternative phrases that people search for. These phrases can be very useful and may (and most of the time do) replace your original phrases.

Now you have your phrases: the Suggest list

Use Google Adwords

This is a good way to find keyphrases and have them work for you at the same time. You can either use Google Adwords for your freephrase list (this can be expensive) or you can use Google Adwords for the suggest list which makes more sense.

I recommend using this for at least a month, then view the impressions and “click throughs” that you get.

Now you will have some true evidence to show you the better keyphrases: you will have your very own Keyphrase List.

Keyphrase Competition

Now that you have the Keyphrase List that you want you need to be realistic when using these phrases in your website. This is a simple task.

Type the phrases into Google, Yahoo and MSN (the top 3 search engines). Or because Google is the main search engine you might only want to use Google for this.

Log the number of competing pages for each phrase and store this in the Keyphrase List. So you will now have all of the standard data that you need. You will know that the phrase is relevant to your website, how often the phrase is searched for and the competing pages.

Now you can decide which phrases to optimise your website for. (The more a phrase is searched for and the less competition the better).

More advanced elements of keyphrase analysis will be explained in future posts.

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Topics: Key phrase analysis, On-site Optimisation, Web Marketing |

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