SEO Training

In my last post I wrote about on-page search engine optimisation.  Of course that is only half the story.  Unless you are lucky enough to operate in a vertical with no competition then you are going to need to do some off-page SEO too. Understanding how google works is imperative if you want to make progress in this area.

Build links to elevate your website in Google (SEO for SERPS)

Off page SEO is where most sites fall down.

Most sites fall down somewhere in their SEO efforts.  If you are happy that your on-page SEO optimisation is up to scratch then it is time to look at off-page optimisation.

How Google rates your site in plain english.

The currency of the web is links. Every link provides important information for search engines like Google. This information is used to rank your website in terms of importance when somebody does a search.
There are some key factors in establishing which sites are most relevant for whatever has been typed into the Google search bar. In establishing how important your page is relative to others, these are some of the more important factors: -

1. How many other pages link to your page? Look at it logically.  If I find a great bit of information on something I’m writing about then I will link to it.  If it is rubbish then I will link to something else.  Therefore, the more inbound links a page has then the more likely it is to be a useful page.  That makes it more important.
2. How relevant is the content on the linking page to your page? Is the page that the link is on covering a similar topic?  Indeed is the website itself generally writing on the same topic as your page?  If it is not then your link will carry less value.  There must be relevance.
3. How important is the linking page? How well does the page the link comes from rank itself?  If that page also has a high trust and multiple inbound links to it then it will increase the value of the link to your page.
4. How many people click on that link? Think of each click as a vote.  The more people that follow the link the better.
5. What do those visitors do when they reach your page? Do they stay and read for a while and visit other pages on your site or do they just leave straight away?  If they leave (bounce rate is high) then that will devalue the link too since it is obviously not providing visitors with a good experience.

Turbocharge your links

Ideally you want keywords in the link text.  This will turbocharge your links.  This site is about SEO training, and my main site also has a page on Search Engine Optimisation on it, so linking to it like that makes sense.  It is relevant to this site and provides a further resource for people who want to have their website optimised.  Because I have used the text that I want the page to rank for (in this case “search engine optimisation”) as my link text, I am telling search engines that the page I linked to is important for that phrase.

SuperTurbocharge your links

Don’t forget to add in your title text to your links.  This is another opportunity to tell both humans and search engines more about the page you are linking to.  In this example I have used the text “SEO consultant Wicklow”.  By hovering over the link this text will come up.  The code for doing this is <a href=”http://whatever.ie/whatever” title=”SEO consultant Wicklow”>

Where can I get links to my site?

At some stage every webmaster (that’s what you are if you run a website) runs into the problem of where to get links back to their site.  Here are six ways to get links…

1. Ask for them.  Ask people who run relevant websites to link to your website.  The worst they can say is “no”.
2. Directories.  Submit your site to relevant directories.  Some of these are useless, but some still carry a little weight.
3. Submit Press releases and articles to press release sites and article sites.  Many of these have just been depreciated with the so called Google Panda update, but as a rule of thumb if you can find a suitable site easily it probably has not been affected by the update.
4. Utilise social media.  You will not get a lot in the way of useful links from the sites themselves usually (most have nofollow attributes on their links), but by getting your content out there in the social world there is a higher chance of somebody else reading it and linking to it (organically the way all links should theoretically be made!).  It is also a good PR exercise, so no excuses for not using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg etc.
5. Forums.  These really come under the social media category in some ways.  They are of limited use but can sometimes create a good stream of traffic which is never a bad thing.
6. Blog.  This is my favourite way.  Establish a good blog and it will become a resource in itself that will gain in importance.  It is a low cost way of building links for long term gain.  Commenting on somebody elses blog is less useful.  What about doing a guest blog post on someone elses popular blog?

Do NOT do this to get links!

Here are some things you should definitely avoid when building links to your site…..

1. Buying links: This is the number one thing not to do to boost your SEO.  Buying links is bad.  It goes against Google policy and you WILL be penalised for it when you get caught.  Think you won’t?  Trust your competitors not to drop you in it by reporting you when they find out how you got above them in the Google ranks?  Don’t do it.
2. Reciprocal Links: “I’ll give you a link if you give me a link”.  My next post will probably be on Reciprocal links for more information.  The short reason is that you want more links in to your website than out of your site.
3. Pay somebody else to build your links without knowing exactly what they are going to do: It may seem obvious but lots of people pay for others to build their links (I even provide that service myself), but many do not know where those links are going to come from or the methods used in getting them.
4. Go for quantity over quality: Leading on from the last point, you need quality links and quality is harder to get than quantity.  If you have many links from unrelated sites it could lower the level of trust in your site.  If you owned a search engine would you rank sites you trusted lower than sites you didn’t trust?

Link Building is not an exact science.

All your links are not going to be ideal.  What I have done here is give an overview, but there is quite a bit more to it.  There are times to break the rules and times not to.  I have paid for links because of positioning and only on specific, relevant sites.  This has been more to do with gaining traffic through them than what it will do for my own sites Organic Listing SEO.  I have never and will never bulk buy links (I learned from others mistakes there).

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How vital is on page SEO to overall SEO efforts?

Keyword Stuffing

On page SEO is absolutely vital.  On its own, on page SEO will not get you far. Without it however, your overall SEO efforts will not get far.  This  is where a lot of people make lots of mistakes though.  There is not a lot that can go wrong with link building by comparison with on page SEO.

The prime mistake by people with their on page SEO is keyword stuffing.  Lets take a look at each element of a page and see how keyword stuffing can stuff you up.

Page Elements

Page title

• The page title is the words that appear at the top of your browser when you visit a page. It is a meta tag that goes <title>some text</title> and lives in the head section of your html page.
• Try to keep it to 40 characters or so and do not repeat keywords in it (stuffing).
• That includes variations like “Jobs Dublin”, “Jobs Cork” etc.
• Try to place your keywords at the beginning.  If you must include a company name then put it at the end.

Meta Description

• The Meta Description also lives in the head section of the html page.  It looks like.. <meta name=’description’ content=’blah blah blah’ />  It is usually the text that appears below your page title in search engine results.
• This should be aimed at users, not search engines.  While Google has not ruled out that it may use the content, it is given little importance in terms of gaining rank in the SERPS. Use it to sell your page to a viewer.
• What is certain is that if you stuff it with keywords you could well find yourself penalised, while simultaneously putting off any human visitors (and these are the ones you are after).

Meta Keywords

• Meta Keywords also live in the head section of your html.  These used to be used by search engines to determine what the author thought were relevant keywords for the page. Widespread abuse in the forms of keyword stuffing and non-relevant text mean that it is quite alright to leave this section out.  I still include it, but I make sure that I only include a handful of extremely relevant keywords that are actually in the visible text of the page.

H1 tag

• This is the title of the page, and will appear on the actual page. It is found in the body section of you html page.
• I often have the h1 tag exactly the same as my page title tag.  If this does not make sense to the page then I make sure it is at least extremely similar, containing the same keywords.
• The h1 tag is the most important piece of text in the visible page.  Choose your content wisely.
• There should only ever be one h1 tag per page.

h2-h6 tags

• The rest of the h (heading) tags are also important. The higher the number, the less important.  Treat them in the same way as your h1 tag.

Paragraph tags

• Everything on your page should be contained within tags.  The text in your paragraphs needs to be relevant to your title.  Remember you are dealing with dumb machines.  If you have a keyword in your h tag then make sure it is also in your paragraph tag below it.
• Write for humans.  Do not repeat keywords too much.

How Do I know if I am Keyword Stuffing Unintentionally?

A simple rule of thumb is that if it does not read well to a human, you are probably guilty of keyword stuffing.

To avoid unintentional keyword stuffing try to keep your keywords to about 5% of your page text.  If you go too far over then you will be penalised.  If you see a competitor above you who has a higher proportion of the same keyword it is likely that they are above you as a result of off page optimisation rather than on page optimisation.

Sometimes keyword stuffing works.  I have had pages usurped by pages from competitors with tons of keyword stuffing.  The good news is that it rarely lasts.  They climb and then they drop again as a general rule.  I want to teach you how to have more stable, long term results.

SEO should not be about cheating your way to the top, it should be about working within guidelines and optimising your efforts within those guidelines.  Anything else is risky.  You may get away with it for a while, maybe even a long time, but eventually your site will suffer.  It is easy to be temped by the ‘dark side’, but it is not a good idea for a business that depends on its website.  If you have a non-critical website, then feel free to practice all the dark arts of SEO – it will teach you a lot.  Just don’t host the site on the same server as any sites you care about.

The really bad keyword stuffing practices

• Hidden text. This is where you make the text the same colour as the background so that it is not visible to humans.  This text is often smaller than 8 pixels.  It is always full of keywords.  It works – until you get caught.
• Cloaking. Displaying different text to search engines than to human visitors.  Again this works – until you get caught.

If in doubt, don’t do it.

How far can I push it?

There is only one way to find out…. and that is to push it.  You can either slowly increase your keyword ratio on the page until you lose rank, or you can put in as many keywords as you can and slowly remove them until you gain rank.

The great thing about losing relevance as a result of keyword stuffing is that you can reverse it by fixing the problem.  It can be a slow process though, since it takes days for most sites to be crawled enough for changes to be reflected in the search rankings.

Final Advice on Keywords

• Beware of having keywords (particularly long tail – several worded – keywords) in close proximity.
• Make sure that your headings relate to the surrounding text.
• Remember that on page SEO is just the start.  You need to build links too.

You have a business, you need a website.  Where do you go from there?

Prices for web design vary wildly.  You can get a website for a few hundred euros up to several thousand. So who should you pick and why?

Website design is about much more than just design.  Your site needs to sell your business.  To do that it has to be found.  So you should budget for some SEO work as well.

The wool can be pulled over your eyes in many ways.  A good website design will incorporate many elements that come under the SEO heading too.  There are far too many website designers that are happy to knock out frankly substandard work and charge handsomely for it.

Picking a web designer is a quagmire.  Here are some points that may help (or scare you off completely)..

1. Your Website should conform to standards. Use the W3C standards checker to assess sites previously done by prospective designers of your site.  Your business has standards.  So does the Internet.  Unfortunately, because most customers are unaware of those standards they are ignored by many designers.  If a designer tells you this is not important, remind them that Google webmaster guidelines say that it is important.
2. Qualifications don’t really count.  Even in our universities web standards are not top of the priority list when teaching web design.  Previous work that includes designs you like and are standards compliant are the best gauge you can use.
3. Do you need a CMS (Content Management System).  A content management system allows people with no web experience to write and edit their own content.  If you do not have personnel in your organisation that can edit a web page then this is really a must.  Otherwise you are stuck with having to get your web designer to change your site every time you need to update it (and it should be updated often).
4. Word of mouth referrals are not worth a damn.  Lots of business customers are very happy with their websites and should not be.  The site looks good to them and they have been told by the designer that it is great.  The reality may be far from that.  Looking nice and performing well are not synonymous.  Many even have basic errors like not working properly on all web browsers.
5. A web designer should not be charging extra for some forms of SEO.  SEO is essentially following standards guidelines and link building.  A good web designer will include good practice in the design.  There should be as little code on a page as possible (javascript, ajax and css all kept off page).  In english: There should not be any code on the page that does not absolutely have to be there.   There are “designers” that are still making websites in tables (It is now done through <div> and Css (Cascading Style Sheets).  That does not mean that there should be no tables on your site, just that the structure should not be made up of tables.

When you approach web designers you should find out exactly what they are offering for the money.  Get them to write out a proposal for you.  Then when you have several you are in a better position to make a choice.

Remember, Cheap is probably just a template that has been used on other sites and with no CMS or some flaws in the coding.  But… Expensive does not necessarily mean better.  You could pay over five grand and still end up with a pile of poo as far as SEO or usability are concerned.  Just make sure you know exactly what you will be getting for your money before the project commences.

The proposals are not the end of the line.  You can still go back to each company/individual and ask questions.  If you don’t understand something get it explained.  If something is included on one proposal and not the others ask the others about it.  I hope this was useful to some of you.

The text in your inbound links is extremely important.  Like with everything in SEO it is not the only factor with links that you have to take into consideration, but it is one of the ones you need to concentrate on.

The trouble with links (natural ones) is that people tend to link to your page with your site url.

If your site is http://www.jackiebrownmedical.ie and your site is about medical recruitment, then a link with the text www.jackiebrownmedical.ie is not going to do you much good.  However a link that reads Medical Jobs is far more useful.

So how do you make people use that version when they link to you?

In all probability you will not be able to (directories etc all use the site url).  The best way to control your inbound link text is to create those links yourself.

Here are some ideas of how to do that.

1. Create a blog like this one.  Every time I write I can include and links I like with whatever text I like.  The example above will not be particularly useful to Jackie Brown Medical for several reasons.  But If this blog was called www.medicaljobs.ie and the article was about medical jobs then it would certainly be useful.  You get the idea.
2. Forums.  Create a signature in every forum you use with a link that uses a keyword you want your site to show up for.  In addition you may be able to put the odd link into the text of your forum posts.  Beware though that if you abuse it you will fall foul of the forum moderators.
3. Feeder sites.  Blogs are simple, but why not create a whole site about the keyword you want to show for.  Then use that site to link to your main site.
4. Blog commenting.  Comment on other peoples relevant blogs.  Make it useful or interesting though.  Blogs get huge amounts of spam.
5. Ask for it.  Contact the webmasters of other sites and ask for links.  If they are willing to give you one then they will probably be willing to give you one with the text you want.
6. Social bookmarking. Digg, Delicious, reddit etc. Submit your pages.  You can alter the title text of your page on most of them to be your keywords. ( I always alter them a bit just because I don’t want two pages with exactly the same title if I can help it).

Search Engine Optimisation is not an exact science.  Link building is more of an art in many ways.  Experiment and try new things.  Some may work, some not, but that’s the best way to learn. (other than SEO training of course)

I am often asked which is more important, the number of links to your site or the quality of the links.

There is no short answer.  Both are important.

The more high quality links you have the better.  But what is a high quality link?

A high quality link is a link that comes from an “important” page on another site and contains relevant text to your site.  Here the TOP 5 criteria for the perfect link:-

1. The page the link is on contains content relevant to the content on your site.
2. The page the link is on is “important” (page rank is 3 or more)
3. The link contains relevant text. eg. SEO advice is better than www.seotraining.ie. This is particularly true where the domain name itself does not contain relevant keywords.  You will also notice that the title text (the text you see when you hover over the link) is missing from the second link.
4. People use the link.  Every time somebody clicks on a link it is like a vote.  The more votes you get the better your website will fare as a result of that link.  To that end the positioning of the link is also important.  People often don’t read beyond the first paragraph or two of a page.  If the page has not got their attention in that time they are gone.  If your link is at the bottom of the page it will not be seen by as many visitors.
5. The text used in the link is repeated on the landing page on your site – preferably in <h1> or <h2> tags as well as in the main body of text.

And to give balance - 5 things not to do with links:-

1. Submit a link on a link farm or any bad neighborhood.  At best your link will be discounted.  At worst there is some evidence that inclusion on link farms can actually harm your website.  Be careful where you get your links from.
2. Link from an unassociated site.  If the content is not relevant to your site then the link itself is not relevant.  A link with the text “farm live” is not going to do much good on a page about intel processors.
3. Likewise a link with text that is not relevant to your sites content is not much cop for you either.  You may have a page about farm life on your site, but if the link goes to the front page of your site where farm life is not mentioned at all then the link will do you little good.
4. Link from a page with questionable content.  Your site may be about the perils of online gambling, but linking to it from a page that contains links to online casinos and content that mentions online gambling is likely to cause you strife.  Same goes for any pages that mention viagra or any of the things that need spam to get promoted, because the search engines will not support them.
5. Do NOT get the url of your webpage wrong.  Watch out for caps and lowercase where you are using mod_rewrite on your site.  eg. http://www.mysite.com/SEOAwareness.html may not be the same as http://www.mysite.com/seoawarness.html.  One of them will give you a 404 page not found error.

It’s all very well knowing what makes a good link but how do you get them?  Stay tuned….