SEO Training

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.

Most of you know exactly what PPC advertising is.

Quickly, For those of you that don’t….

When you type in a search query into google Pay Per Click ads are the small text ads that appear to the right of the search results and sometimes as highlighted search results at the top of the page too.

In Googles system these are called Adwords.  Every time somebody clicks on one of them it costs the advertiser.  Usually this is a nominal amount like 20c, but can be as high as €2 or more depending on how high competition is for that search term.

Why use PPC advertising?

If your website is not ranking well for a search term you wish to be found for (SEO in my case), then Pay per Click advertising offers a way of jumping the queue.  You can appear on page one of google (or yahoo / bing /Ask) simply by paying for the privilege.  You only pay for when your ad is clicked on, so you are only paying for actual traffic to your site.  You can set payment caps on what you spend, so that you don’t blow a years budget in a month.

Why Not to use PPC advertising

It is expensive.  €100 a month will not get you far.  The more popular your links, the more expensive it gets for you to rank well.

Compare that to some SEO training.  SEO training can be expensive too, but the results you get from it are free.  If you are ranking well for your keywords then then Adwords become redundant for those keywords.

Ad blindness is also a factor.  Something in the region of 85% of click on ads are made by just 16% of the internet using populace.  That simply means that most people ignore the ads completely.  84% of us rarely click on pay per click adverts.

When to use Pay Per Click Adverts

1. Your site is starting off and has not yet gained any authority in the search rankings.  If your site is new it takes time to build up your rank.  SEO activities take time – something in the region of 6-12 months in general, depending on how much competition you have for your keywords.
2. One off events.  If you have a concert or other event that is a one off, then SEO is not such a good investment.  It takes too long and you will not need the links once the event is over.  In this case using Adwords (or the other PPC ad systems) makes sense.  In fact, with the exception of using social medial it is about all you can do.

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….