SearchEngineOptimisation.com, only one way up

When it comes to search engine optimisation you have to accept that your typical web users are going to be impatient and far from the conventional type of reader. They have limited attention spans and scan pages rather than read them word for word. Taking this into account how can you appeal to these word skimmers to begin with?

Work On Your Headings

One of the first things you need to get the hang of is getting the headings right. There are many things to consider but you’re off to a winning start if you write an effective heading. It can draw in a reader and attract those all important customers.

Here are some key considerations that need to be made when working with headings and how you can use them to boost your SEO.

The First Few Words are Everything

When writing your heading regardless of whether your content is an information article, a ‘How to’ guide or a news blog consider it carefully. It needs to describe succinctly the content of the article. It has also been found following a study looking at eye tracking that the first few words must be able to grab the readers attention – particularly when the heading is a long one.

Keep Your Promises

The function of headings is not that dissimilar to that of links on the web. They are primarily there to entice web users to read on and to achieve this the heading must deliver what it promises in the rest of the content. In the case of links they are there to tempt users to click onwards to access further content again ensuring that what it promises they will find is there.

In effect these are signposts that should not mislead or cheat users in any way. If you do any level of trust you have earned will be destroyed between your readers and your website. If you deliver consistently what you promise you will soon build up a following of loyal readers who will come to see your site as an industry authority. Avoid over promising on headings and you will start to see readers returning.

Heading Formats

As a rule of thumb don’t have headings any longer than eight words long. Take time to look at the headings on Google News for example and you’ll see most are eight words or under.

Avoid Marketing Clichés

You need to afford your readers a healthy level of respect. Readers are marketing speak savvy and won’t thank you for content drenched in advertising clichés. This does not mean you can’t build in some actions, just avoid cheesy headings. You may find them catchy and clever but they could turn a reader off double quick.

Be Direct

Sometimes we can get wrapped up in trying to clever rather than getting to the point. Keep things clear and simple. Avoid any headings that are obscure or vague as this will only put readers off continuing to read. The heading should describe the article in a succinct and concise way.

At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we can help with all your search engine optimisation campaigning and are experts at website content.

An ongoing SEO news topic has been the introduction of personalised search into Google’s SERPs. Personalised search is being hotly debated on SEO blog sites and throughout the search engine optimisation industry – so what is personalised search exactly and how is it established? Has there been a significant impact since its introduction?

Personalised Search

Personalised search is when the search engine takes note of what you tend to click and the sites that you favour. Through the course of time Google will then apply a ranking to your favourite sites to boost them – just for you. An example of this in action is if you select eBay frequently you will see more eBay listings in your results in place of perhaps Amazon.

How Does it Work?

Personalised search is driven by several elements and caries from one search engine to another. Some of the possible factors include when you search, past web history, the IP address of your laptop or PC and any stored cookies. Although other search engines do carry out personalised search, Google does it on a much wider basis than most. The personalised search on Google also caries depending on whether you are signed in to Google or not. When you sign in to Google your search history will date back indefinitely or to a point where you removed it. When you are logged out, your search history spans a maximum of 180 days. This obviously has a great impact on search results.

Bing however operates in a different way. It also records your search history but holds data for only 28 days. One feature that does stand out from Google is Bing’s ability to suggest search terms based on your web history.

The Impact

For most users there is no real impact and many won’t notice the difference. However, for SEO professionals and website owners it’s important to understand how it works. It can affect your keyword analysis significantly and as a website owner you can use personalised search to your advantage.

You should be aware that rank checking as a consequence is less accurate on a universal level now. If you are at the top of your results and you dominate your niche market, you are most likely to reap the rewards of this new addition to Google. It also makes it more important than ever to ensure your user has a great experience when visiting your site. As ever this makes it critical to find the balance between making the site friendly to search engines and appealing to users. If a user finds your site irrelevant or difficult to use they won’t come back and you won’t be ranked as a favourite.

Take care when carrying out keyword analysis. If your keywords relate to topics that you personally have no interest in the personal search will probably not affect your results. However, to be on the safe side switch personalised search off to keep estimates accurate.

At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we offer up-to-the-minute search engine optimisation news to keep you at the forefront of the industry.

Once Upon a Time

In the beginning, man created the Internet. Man created search engines to present content on the Internet to users, and the potential was there for everything to run smoothly. But websites found that if they didn’t appear near the top of search results, they weren’t getting the traffic they wanted.

Jealous publishers began to eat of forbidden fruit in their lust for high rankings. They started tricking the search engines into ranking them, and search engines and Internet users reacted angrily. Search engines built robots to travel far and wide on the Internet and report back on what they found.

Unscrupulous specialists went to war with the robots, devising ever more ingenious means of getting onto results pages through the back door, but eventually these SEO experts in black hats were defeated. All but a few of them disappeared from the Earth. They had found they were no match for the mighty search engines, with their constant development and relentless dedication to providing users with relevant results. The robots won the war.

What came about was a situation whereby sites had to earn the respect of search engines before being listed, and thus white hat SEO was born. White hat SEO consultants entered the world of the Internet to help sites get the rankings they need, and theirs was a difficult task as the rules of the game kept changing. Never again would the search engines allow black hat SEO to succeed.

In this short piece we’ll examine the evolution of SEO, from its beginnings to the modern, professional SEO services that we use today.

The SEO of the Past

As we attempted to convey in our little introductory story, SEO was born of a desire to get sites onto results pages. While it seems natural to us to give search engines due respect these days, that wasn’t always the way people operated. In the early days of search engines when the possibilities of the Internet were exploding around us, there seemed almost to be no rules. It came to be presumed that if you weren’t playing the system you were losing out to websites that were. Thus SEO, in its early stages, was about getting one up on the competition and appearing on results pages at any cost.

Methods popular at that time included disguising websites by filling pages with keywords that weren’t actually relevant to the actual content of the site. It was this ‘cloaking’ that led to the phenomenon whereby any search at all, even one for ‘ice cream Sundays’ could present users with sites offering gambling services or worse. This led to an awful situation whereby the Internet gained a reputation as being unsafe.

The SEO of Today

These days, SEO is very different. There are now very few SEO consultants who would advocate the unethical methods that now belong in the past. If nothing else, this is for the very simple reason that those methods no longer work. The Internet is no longer in its infancy, and users expect a lot better than to be directed to useless, irrelevant sites. They expect search engines to filter the junk from the Internet and that’s precisely what they do. In ever more sophisticated ways search engines develop their algorithms and their software so that sites that get listed deserve to be there.

These days your search for ice cream Sundays should take you directly to your sweet desserts.

SEO today is involved in ways to enhance sites according to the guidelines laid down by search engines and the best estimates of how they actually work. Instead of getting sites in through the back door, modern SEO is concerned with the best ways of opening the front door as fast as possible.

The Future of SEO

The place in history where we find ourselves today is very interesting. Social media is taking over the world and computing seems always to be on the cusp of a new and revolutionary trend. Times are changing and SEO is changing with them. In the last few years online reputation management has come to play a phenomenal role is search engine optimisation. The necessity for a social media campaign has emerged, as social media optimisation has become a valuable service in itself.

SEO will continue to change for the better and to adapt. As long as there are search engines there will be experts to help guide sites onto their results pages.

Whatever the scope of your business, local listings offer great exposure for your business and will help your ranking on results pages. Unsure why? We’ve compiled a list of tips to help guide you.

First, let’s take a moment to think about local listings. They’re usually respected as authoritative because they’re used for reference and not blatant advertising. The beauty is that whatever the service you provide, it’s probably useful to someone. To be listed in local directories is to be available and to be extant. Through appearing in listings you become available to a great number of users who would never think to search for you directly.

While professional SEO services can give you great advice about the finer points of appealing to search engines, there are some practices that are good marketing and good SEO at the same time. These are free SEO tools and you’d be mad not to take advantage of them.

1.    Create a professional profile. However beneficial you think local listings are going to be to your business, be sure and take the time to create profiles that present your company in the most fitting way. You might be surprised at how many people see your listing eventually!

2.    Be present on as many local listings sites as possible. It’s quite reasonable to appear on listings for other areas, if your service or product might usefully be searched for.

3.    Make it graphic. Include whatever logos or pictures you think will improve your profile. Remember to name pictures properly for indexing by the search engines. A picture named 1234.gif will tell search engines nothing about its content whereas rareblues1234.gif will tell them a lot.

4.    Check for inconsistencies. Remember that inaccuracies spread as quickly as any other form of information on the web and double check every detail of your listings wherever they appear.

5.    Have a working e-mail address on every listing. This might stand to reason, but it’s surprising how many companies neglect to include this. If you have a special inbox for queries, make sure it’s checked regularly.

6.    Feature a local telephone number. While this may be impractical for some international suppliers listing on local sites for exposure reasons, it does add a personal touch that’s very much appreciated by many clients. Give it careful thought. If it’s practical to include a telephone number then do so. Being accessible is good for SEO because it’s good marketing.

7.    Get listed with as many local directories in the same region. If a locality has two competing directories, feature in both.

8.    If you’re a company with different outlets, try to have a different homepage for each. The benefits of this are far-reaching. In the context of local listings and SEO, the more different homepages there are for a product the more SEO links there will be.

9.    Get advice from SEO consultants while professional SEO services are optimising your pages. As part of a more general consultation about search engine optimisation, an SEO agency should advise about methods specific to local listings.

10.    Welcome feedback. Our last tip is potentially the one that will earn you the most kudos. Feedback is a very useful tool from an SEO point of view. Invite ratings and comments about the service or product you provide and you invite links and good exposure. Oscar Wilde asserted that there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about. He had a very valid point. Comments, even (heaven forefend) negative ones can be good publicity. Be active in leaving feedback too. This provides a good opportunity to be pro-active when it comes to linking. You can leave reviews that are informed and sincere with a view to getting visitors to your site and useful links.

Good search engine optimization requires constant attention to detail, extensive research, implementing changes and sometimes even overhauling an entire site. It usually involves consulting an SEO agency with trained SEO experts. With something that requires so much dedication, it will be normal to find publishers who ask the legitimate question, “Is SEO really necessary?”

The simple answer is no – if it doesn’t matter to you whether users visit your site. If it is important to you that traffic reaches your site, and quite frankly it’s difficult to imagine anyone for whom this isn’t the case, then SEO is indispensible, and we’re going to look at some of the reasons why.

SEO Gets You onto Results Pages

Thinking of the Internet as a giant marketplace is quite easy, because that’s essentially what it is. If you set up a stall at a real market there are some considerations that would come to you automatically. You’d want to get a good place to set up your stall, and that would mean somewhere in full view and not hidden in a place where people are unlikely to see it. You’d want to display the goods you’ve come to sell in such a way as to make them visible, available and appealing. Once you’ve accomplished these things, you can feel confident that you’ve done what you can to have a good day trading, as customers start to come your way. It’s the same with the Internet. The only difference is in the specific things you should do to be seen. Getting exposure on the Internet means appearing on search engine results pages for keywords entered into searches. Appearing on results pages is what SEO is concerned with, and it’s a complex science.

SEO Connects You to Robots

The first thing to understand about SEO and getting onto results pages is that it doesn’t happen automatically. It’s a process with several crucial steps, and one of the first is transparency. Search engines use software to find out what’s out there on the web. They send pieces of software called robots to travel the Internet via links and report their findings. This makes sense if you take a moment to consider the vast amount of information there is to see. Robots don’t view sites in the same was as people do, and creating or adjusting a site so that it’s open and accessible to them is one of the most important functions of search engine optimization.

SEO Helps You Stay Competitive

It’s reasonable to ask what business can afford to be without a presence on the Internet these days. Appearing on results pages means more than attracting users, it means status. For a company with a stable customer base and a good reputation to uphold, the Internet provides more than a platform for sales. It’s where to connect with consumers on every level. These days Internet reputation management allows companies to manage their image online. Social media marketing allows for the creation of an online community based around a product or service. Appearing on results pages is much more important than numbers of visitors or even revenue, it’s the difference between opening up for the day and remaining closed.

SEO Encourages Good Marketing

Good SEO is about good marketing, and vice versa. Most of the things you do to optimize a site for search engines make for a better user experience. SEO consultants advise that you make every effort to maximize good link building in a site. Featuring plenty of links within a site makes it much easier for users to navigate it. They’ll tell you to feature good quality original content. That is just the kind of content that users appreciate. In essence, SEO is about doing the things you need to do in order to maintain high standards. Without the need for SEO, it’s likely that everyone’s standards would slip.

In conclusion, there are reasons why SEO is a challenge some would rather not have to face.  Life would be much easier for publishers if their site went straight to the top of results pages for their chosen keywords without them having to do anything dedicated to that cause. The marketplace is competitive though, and there is no shortage of sites who desire the same rankings as you. SEO is your friend because it helps you to get onto the results pages. Instead of asking if it’s necessary, be thankful it’s here and that it’s on your side!

It could be that you know the importance of search engine optimisation and feel you have the skills necessary to optimise your website and get to the top of results pages by yourself. Avoiding employing SEO consultants would save money, and there can be no doubt that cutting back on spending is desirable from any business standpoint.

Most businesses see search engine optimisation as an endeavour too critical to their business to be left to chance. Employing a good team of specialists and involving yourself in what they do, learning for future maintenance, and following good advice generally gives publishers peace of mind that’s worth the cost of employing experts. This is especially true if a company’s website has been doing badly in terms of results. Bad ranking can really cause sleepless nights, if there’s a good site going unseen and products on your shelves waiting to be sold

One good reason for employing a reputable SEO agency is that there are many things that can go wrong when you go it alone. Good search engine optimisation is about finding a balance between the needs of a website and the needs of SEO. If you go it alone you could find that you’ve destroyed what was good and kept what wasn’t working.

We’ve compiled a list of five tips on how to avoid common mistakes when publishers go it alone with SEO.

1. Don’t get carried away with link building. Good link building is about getting good quality links to and within your site. Armed with a little bit of knowledge, some publishers make the mistake of assuming that the importance of links lies in their quantity. If you are going it alone and see an advertisement for 1,000 instant links, you might well think “why not?”. You’d be making a big mistake, because search engines are now very sophisticated when it comes to judging the relevance on links to your site. A lot of irrelevant links appearing suddenly informs the search engines that you’ve probably bought them, ergo your site is not genuinely of interest. Search engines are free to penalise practises aimed at improving rank undeservedly. If you get carried away by reckless linking, you could find your SEO efforts working against you.

2. Don’t abuse keywords. In just the same way as you can get carried away by getting many links, keywords are useful free SEO tools that it’s often tempting to overuse. Just the same as with links, over-inclusion of keywords is perceived as bad practice and you can be punished.

3. Don’t feature keyword tags that look unprofessional. We’ve all seen sites on which the keyword tags leap out as us and tell us that the page looks cheap. Spend some time and effort making appropriate tags that will be useful to users if you want to get ahead where search engines are concerned.

4. Don’t get it wrong with your anchor text. While anchor text ought to include keywords for maximum benefit, it’s not true that it needs to feature the entire description of a page. Too many publishers get this wrong and the results can be tiresome. Ineffective anchor text amounts to a wasted opportunity.

5. Don’t believe everything you read. Much is written about SEO and not all of it is true. Reading the latest SEO news might be an interesting pursuit, but failing to separate the wheat from the chaff can be disastrous. One of the benefits of employing an established team of SEO consultants is that they’ll have experience of what works and what doesn’t, which will translate well to the latest fads in the marketplace.

There are countless other ways in which things can go wrong when you go it alone with SEO, but we hope that the ones listed here will give you some idea of the ways in which mistakes are most commonly made. Going it alone might be a very noble endeavour. The information about good SEO is in the public domain. Sadly, it mingles with much misinformation and hearsay. Judging what to believe might take up a lot of time in and of itself.

As a businessperson, it is assumed that there are a great many demands on your time. Going it alone could get you into something that will take up time you can’t afford. SEO from experts involves a lot of input from you. Beware of taking on more than you can chew!

These days, SEO consultants worth their salt know there are probably over 200 factors that search engines take into account when ranking sites for results pages. It’s their job to try to take all of them into account when they give advice. For businesses trying to take advantage of the tremendous benefits that a good rank can bring, it’s tremendously important.

If you ask a group of SEO consultants what the top five ranking factors are, the answers tend to be quite uniform. Since there are some ranking factors that everyone agrees on, it’s worth learning about them yourself so that you can have a hand in always working towards improvement. In order then, these are what we consider the five most important factors.

Using Keywords as Anchor Text from External Links

Having asserted that SEO consultants agree anchor text needs to feature your keywords, beware of using the same ones over and over again. Up to date link building services will tell you that it’s important to be subtle when search engines are so much on their guard for anything that hints at spam. This advice assumes that you’ve done the necessary research when it comes to the keywords you use. Featuring extremely popular keywords can be a risky business, and you should have put a lot of long hard thought into the ones you’re using.

Popularity of External Links

The importance of good quality links to your site from others is undisputed. You need links from reputable and popular sites that feature keywords and show that you’re serious. How you get these links is an essential feature of your overall marketing strategy. These days sites need to be adept at garnering support from every source possible, and that sometimes means pleasing everyone all of the time.

Links from Diverse Sources
Within a framework of relevant link building it’s extremely important to be linked to from a variety of good sources. Think about targeting a range of sites for back links. RSS promotions, blog commentaries, article sites, educational sites and government sites are useful and show that your appeal is strong and far-reaching. Be careful not to inadvertently include links from disreputable sites in your enthusiasm for diversity.

Featuring Keywords in the Title Tag
Experts agree that this is extremely good SEO. The title tag itself appears on results pages and exists to inform the robots of the nature of your site. SEO consultants agree that this is probably the most important on-page SEO feature.

Have a Good Domain
Search engines pay a lot of mind to the trustworthiness of any given domain. How they determine the trustworthiness of a domain is a matter for debate. It seems natural to assume that they respect older domains by default, since they’ve been around longer and are likely to be what they purport to be. Trust of this kind is something that can be passed to your site. Just as mud will stick to you from bad sites you link to, so having links from good sites will reflect well on you.

Other Factors
Having listed the five most important ranking factors as we see them, it’s worth noting that there’s still a degree of speculation about them, and that you’ll find SEO consultants who are devoted to other factors too. Some of them can usefully be discussed here as a footnote.
Some experts strongly advocate the inclusion of a keyword in the domain name itself. This is not always a possibility, but when it is and it’s achievable it presents a formidable SEO feature.

Linking internally using keywords as anchor text is a good way of improving on page SEO, as virtually all experts agree.
Using keywords in the first 50 to 100 words of HTML text on a page is an extremely popular candidate for indispensable SEO tactic.

Finally, the speed at which pages on a site physically load has an important bearing on rank, as most experts agree.

In conclusion, the most important factors in SEO are clearly ones over which you have direct control. Exercise that control by beginning optimisation today. Whatever your site and whatever you market, results pages should be well within reach if you follow some of the basic rules about what search engines look for.

Get advice from experts but remember that you need to use common sense too. If something’s glaringly obvious as good SEO, don’t spend time wondering why but change it as quickly as you can.

Marketing a website takes work. There are many parts that you need to do before you are ready to start marketing your website and, if you are not happy with the website that you are working on, you can find professionals who can help you. Working with search engine optimisation companies can be a great way to build a better website and find the customers that you need online. These companies can help you with many different areas of building a website including SEO, links and marketing. When you need to see what you can be doing to improve your website, there are professionals that can help you.

Working with SEO can take a lot of time and if you have tried to figure out how to use it but are not sure that you are using it correctly, you may want to consult with the professionals who can help you. The more that you are able to use SEO in your website, the better your business is going to be online. You can find that search engine optimisation companies can work with you to not only improve the SEO that you are using, but also to help you learn what search engines are looking for.

Being able to reach your customers online is one of the ways that you are going to be able to build your business. If you cannot find a way to target the groups of people that you need and if you do not have a good website to market, you are not likely going to do well online. If you take the time when you are creating your website to use SEO and learn the tools that can help you build a better website, you are able to develop a great marketing plan for your business.

The search engine optimisation companies specialize in working with websites to help them do better online. You need to know what the search engines are looking for if you want people to see your website. If you are able to use SEO and market it, you can find a lot more customers and you can start to see the people on your website. This does take some work and, if you are not sure how to get started, let the professionals help you.

You can also learn how to have the information that search engines are looking for. This information is using SEO in the content that you have on your website and the links that you post online. When you submit a link to the search engines, they need to be able to easily find what they are looking for on your website. If they are able to find the SEO they will be able to index the website. If a search engine does not index a website, it is not going to appear anywhere on the search results. This means that people are not going to be able to see the link when they are doing a search. You need to make sure that your website is appearing at the top of the listings if you want to get more people to your website.

Building a business online takes work and you need to know about SEO and how it can affect your website. If you need to get more information on how to use it and what kind of SEO you should try, you can find what you need online. Working with search engine optimisation companies who are able to go through your website and help you determine what you need to improve can really help your business do better online. You can also learn more about all of the ways that you can market your website by posting links and reaching the target groups of people that you need. The more that you work with SEO, the more you will be able to see improvements in your business and on your website. You can also learn how the tools that are available can really help you to have a better website and start building a business online. If you are ready to do better with your website and you want to reach more people with the links that you are posting, there are services online that can help you find what you need to do better.

There are many tools that you can use to help make your website better, but few of those tools are more effective than learning how to use a simple but effective strategy. SEO services are not only affordable, they are also one of the best ways that you can easily improve the website that you have and the business that you can do online. When you are able to market the website to different groups of people, you are able to create more contacts online and also find the customers that you need. SEO can be a great way for you to see the improvements that you need for your business and allow you the ability to market the products that you have.

Use SEO with Content on the Website
Create content – when you are going to create content for the website, you need to find information that is related to what your business is. You also need to add in as much content as you can that is interesting and will give your readers something to enjoy while they are on your website. Content can be in articles, blogs or other features that you can have on your website and allow your customers to learn more about the business that you have online.

Find More Markets with SEO
Find Markets – finding the markets of people that you need to reach is also important. You need to be able to find people online that are going to be interested in buying your products and going to your website to learn more about what you do. You can find markets by knowing where your customers are online, what they are interested in and what they are going to be searching for.

Use SEO to Create More Links
Create links to your website. Links are a way to market the website and your business and they are easy to create. You can create links to anything that you have on the website including content and articles or blogs. Once you have the content created, you can use that to post links to other websites online that will allow people to see your website.

Use SEO as a Marketing Tool
Market through SEO – learning about SEO and how you can market your website with it takes some time but, if you invest the time into learning how it works, you will be able to see it give you the success that you need. SEO can be used in the keywords that you choose, the content that you write and the links that you create. Find other websites that are similar to yours and see how they are using the SEO. You can also search for resources online that can help you learn more about it as a marketing tool.

Find the Right Tools and Keywords
Choose keywords – keywords are necessary for you to create a website that more people will see and that you can use to build a business. You can create the list of keywords based on the products that you have and the content that you are writing. The keywords that you choose should be related to the website and they should also be performing well in the search engines.

Add tools to your website that can help you interact with your customers and provide a good place for your readers to post any feedback or comments that they have for you.  If you need to find the kinds of features that are available, you can go online and find them. There are SEO tools available that will help you build your website and that you can use in tracking the ads and links that you place. You can find a number of free or affordable tools that you can use to monitor how each of the links are doing that you have placed online.

Find More Groups to Join Online
Join groups online to help get more contacts and to help find the markets that you are trying to reach.  Find other groups of professionals that have a similar business to yours and see if you are able to join them. You can find more customers and create a better marketing strategy for your website when you are approaching websites to post links on. There are a number of groups that you can join to be able to reach more customers online.