SEO Training

SEO is not too technical. Sometimes just because things are presented in a different way they seem more complex than they really are

Search Engine Optimisation is quite technical.  After all, it all boils down to mathematics.  Search engines have their equations for working out what page is most important on any given subject.

This site is about SEO training, so therefore it is more important for that term than other sites that do not concentrate on this one topic alone.  There is also surprisingly little competition for training.  SEO in general has plenty of competing pages.

Those are just two factors though.  There are over 200 ranking factors that Google take into consideration when ranking a web page.  To make matters more complicated, nobody has the actual equations (algorithms).

So not only is SEO technical, it is blindfolded too!  Makes you want to throw your hands up in despair doesn’t it.  It’s not really that bad though. Particularly here in Ireland.  Because of our smaller population SEO in Ireland is that much easier because there is just less competition.  That said though, it is getting harder all the time, as Irish companies become more and more aware of the power of the internet.

Many people, when faced with terms like keyword density, link building, page loading speed, and domaining, just shut off.  I’m not an electrician.  When I hear people talking about amps, kilowatts and maximum loads I switch off a bit too.  It is a natural human reaction to avoid conversations that sound technical in an area we have no experience with.  I can change a plug though.  I can put in a new lightbulb.  I have learned the skills that I need to have my house functioning.

In the same way you can learn to have a functioning website that actually shows up in search results without having to have an in depth knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes.  It does not have to get too technical. You can learn to do the basics yourself, and call in a SEO consultant like me for the rest.

SEO consultants like myself can analyze your current website, and then either train you and your staff to do what is necessary to improve its performance, or do the work for you.  Sometimes a bit of a mixture is the ideal solution.

Are your pages straining under the weight of keyword density and struggling to climb the Google ranks?

Keyword density is the number of keywords as a percentage of the total text on a web page.  Too little density and the search engine algorithms will presume that the page is not important for that keyword.  Too much density and the page will get penalised for keyword stuffing.

Since nobody has access to the search engine algorithms, how do we determine what the bounds are for keyword density?  What is the correct or optimum keyword density for your page?

If you have gone searching for the answer online you will have found the answer to be stated as anything between 1% and 8% (in general).  The truth is that keyword density is old news.  It just does not matter as much as it used to.  Nobody knows for certain, so this is just my opinion.  It is an opinion however, that is based on experience and experimentation.  Here is my view on Keyword density:

Forget about Keyword Density! The only check I do around density now is to make sure I have not gone too high.  I like to stick to not going over about 6% in general.  However, if the article reads well to me, then I’ll let it slide so long as it’s under 8%.  I do not have a minimum density.

Keyword Positioning is far more important than the number of times it is repeated.  I generally have the keyword in the title, and in the H1 / H2 tags and again in the body text.  This is particularly true of text immediately after headings.  I do not always keep the same word order, or even use exactly the same words.  I want what I write to be legible for humans.

Certainly I have repeated the words “keyword density” a fair bit in this post, more so than usual.  It is just how this particular post has gone.  I find it harder to write “SEO training” in posts, simply because it does not fit into the general flow of what I write.

A word of caution.  If you have a density that is too high, it may work for you.  It may get you up there in the google ranks… but not for long.  Keyword Stuffing is bad bad bad!  It worked back in the 90’s, and many SEO consultants in Ireland are still recommending it on a smaller scale than before.  I completely disagree with this.  Keyword stuffing is outdated now to the same extent that travel by horses has been replaced by cars!  Keyword densities are a factor still, but are not something to be pushed to extremes and do not hold the same weight as they once did.

Get found online

Getting found online is not all that difficult.  It is not incredibly easy either.  Of course it depends on how much competition you have.  Why do some sites show up above others? On Google it is a combination of over 200 factors!

In general these are split into two types of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – On page (the actual website itself) and Off page (links from other sites to your site).

For On-page SEO all you need to do is follow Googles Webmaster Guidelines.  Although, there is quite a bit to that, and it may take some time and patience to work your way through it.  There are other issues too.  Try looking up information on keyword density for example.  The web is full of different opinions.  The reason that some people will tell you not to exceed 4% density (4 percent of total text on the page) and others 8% density for example, is that nobody knows exactly how many keywords will get your page flagged for keyword stuffing.

Here is the problem…..

You want your site to get found online for specific keywords (SEO training in the case of this blog for example).  In order to show that the site is all about SEO training, it is tempting to use the phrase lots.  However, if I do that, then it will look like I am trying to influence search engines and they will penalise me for it.  This is not to say that it does not work…. but eventually the chances are your site will plummet down the rankings if for keyword stuffing.  I always advise clients to stick to the webmaster guidelines rigidly.

Off site SEO is where a lot of people come unstuck.  How do you get links to your site?  How many links do you need? Should you pay for links? Does it matter where the links come from?

It is a mine field.  Get it wrong and you will pay for it!  Get it right and your site will reap rewards.  By the way NEVER pay for links! It does matter where the links come from too.  What is more, external link building should be something that is an ongoing practice.  I will be posting more on link building in the future.

If you want to get found online, then it really does pay to get somebody who knows what they are doing to either train you, or do it for you.  This saves a lot of time.  Nobody knows it all (the search engines do not release the details of their criteria) but using a SEO professional who has gained experience from spending time on research as well as experimenting and finding out where some of the limits are pays off.

Make an emotional connection with your customers . . . but overdoing it could get complicated!

SEO training rarely incorporates the word emotional.  It should.  Your website is your shop window online.  It is where you sell your products and services.  It is where you market your ideas to a much larger audience than your actual shop (if you have one).

So how does the word emotional fit with SEO?  SEO is search engine optimisation.  It is making your website accessible for robots.  Not humans.  It works too.  Get it right and you will soon gain traffic through increased search engine rankings.  SEO is cold though.  It is concerned with keyword ratios, link text, and other non-human-friendly terms.

If you want to sell to search engines then SEO is for you.

If however you want to sell to a real live human being you are going to have to make some changes.  You have to reach a human emotionally.  Let me give you an example.  I want to sell SEO training.  I’m good at it and my customers get return on their investment.  Thus my prime keyword for this site is “SEO training”.  How do I write that to attract customers but keep my SEO efforts intact?

• Keyword – SEO training
• Search engine friendly – SEO training
• Customer and SEO friendly – Holistic SEO training – taking the pain out of connecting with your customers.

There are lots of other phrases that appeal to us people on an emotional level:-

• Liberate your website with Holistic SEO training
• Learn to love your website again
• Holistic SEO, Feelin’ good online
• Website Makeover – This time it’s personal

Different to the usual “Get first page on Google” offered by most SEO trainers.  Of course I could use that too.  The point is not to lose sight of who your customers are.  You are connecting with one individual person when they land on your site.  Do you make them feel welcome or do you give them a FAB overview of your products with no feeling for them to connect with?

Web sites tend to be written by technical people.  Thus lots of websites are more like technical manuals than sales brochures.  Get your marketing department involved in your website.  If you do not have a marketing department, at least make sure you are using a web designer that understands marketing and selling.  Most of all make sure they understand people.  Every business is a people business – particularly online, where it is that bit harder to make a personal connection and build loyalty.

What relationship does link positioning on external sites have with the effectiveness of a link for delivering results to your site? (I’m just going to stop for a breather after that horrible sentence… the rest will be better… honest)

Some would argue that links are links and you take them where you can get them.  Surely though it is smarter to try and get links that are actually worth something to your site – particularly if you were about to part with cash for them.  Onwards with our SEO training – Lets take a look at how the position of the link on the external site can have an effect on how effective the link is for you and your SEO.

It is important to note that positioning is just one element in the SEO equation.  We will look at others in future posts.

Link Positioning for SEO

Banner and button links: Google does not like paid links.  Banner, Skyscraper and button links are images.  This in itself is not bad.  There is little difference between a text link and alt text in a link.

What is bad is that the positioning of these elements is just about always the same on a site.  Worse still they often come with “Sponsored links” or some other such text in their vicinity.  That is like painting yourself yellow, wearing nothing but a pink tutu, and running past Google buildings shouting “I paid for a link” while a team push flyers with the details into the hands of everybody entering or leaving the building.   Obviously it’s the algorithms you have to worry about mainly (unless you get a personal review). A link to another site from a banner is therefore only worth the number of clicks you get from it.  Add in “ad blindness” and paying for a banner ad seems to make little sense in most cases.

In truth it probably won’t do you too much harm to buy button or banner ads, but it’s not likely to do you as much good as you would like in terms of SERPS.  That said, a nice banner ad on a popular and related site could get you enough click throughs to make it worthwhile.

Footer Links: This is one for you web designers.  You put your links onto every page you design…. in the footer.  It doesn’t do you any good.  Well, it doesn’t do you any good compared to having a nice link in the middle of the page copy.  The footer is also another place where advertising is often placed.  In short, don’t expect much from footer links – they do not work well.

Header Links: Links in the header are not a lot of use either, for much the same reasons.  In general the only links you ever see in headers are paid advertising.  The search engines know it.

Positioning in the source code structure: When your page is crawled, it is the source file that will be read.  Traditionally, important content would be placed as high up that code structure as possible.  This is because crawlers used to only crawl a proportion of each page.  Using CSS you can float the main column rather than the side bar, thus it is closer to the start of your code.  It is still worth doing this for other search engines, but not necessary for Google any more.  Google can understand your page layout (providing you keep to reasonable standards).  Thus positioning in the source code is not as important as positioning on the page.

Best position on the page for a link: I love in-text links.  I think that a good relevant link in the middle of a paragraph of relevant text is the bees knees.

Surrounding Text: What about the text surrounding a link?  I think that the surrounding text is quite important.  It helps to show context and is simply a way of telling dumb machines that it is less likely to be a spam link.

Blogrolls and other Site-wide links: It depends on the site, but having the same link on every page of a site is often not as good as a few links on relevant pages.  Firstly, Site-wide links may be confused with advertising, secondly, in my experience they are just not as good in many cases.  So, if somebody offers to put you in their blogroll, ask them for a link in a few individual blogs instead.  You can ask for a few, because it will probably seem to them like they are giving you something less important.  Get some blogging training and start making great quality links for yourself.

The ideal place for a link on an external site: The perfect link position in my book is in the center of the page (in the main body of text), as near as possible to the top of the page, with relevant surrounding text and good keyword use.

Links are less useful if:-

• The link is in the header or footer sections of the page.
• The link is in a list of unrelated links.
• The page is badly formed (broken source code)
• The link is in Javascript
• It is an image link that has no alt text (makes it nearly entirely useless)

When it comes to training someone on link building, there are a lot of factors that go into what makes a good link.  The page positioning on the external site is just one of the factors that play a role in how effective your SEO is.

Search engine optimisation relies on a wide range of factors (there are over 200 elements taken into account by Google when analysing a page).  The wonderful thing about SEO is that even by paying attention to just a few you can make a positive change to your site.

Use internal links to chain your site together and make it work as one unit

One of the things I forgot to mention when I was talking about on-page SEO was internal linking.  This was very remiss of me so I thought I should cover it immediately.

Internal linking is the practice of creating links in your text that point to other pages on your site.  It is a part of SEO training that is often not covered.

Why use internal links?  After all you have a navigation menu so what use are more links to the same pages?  Navigation does not generally allow you use the keywords you would like a page to be found for.  The “home” navigation item is a prime example.  You could forgo the word “home” and put in something that relates to the actual page, but that would be at odds with good heuristics (ease of use) for your user.  Visitors to a website expect to see a home page.  So we need to give it to them.  The trouble is that the word “home” does nothing as far telling a search engine what the page is about (unless you have a property site perhaps).  The same is true with all your navigation links.  They do not give an ideal idea of what the page is about.  They are usually only one or two words long for a start.

With internal linking in your body text, because you control the website, you have total control over what text goes into those links.  Let’s look at it from a search engines point of view.  They look at links, the text in the links and the relevance of the page the link points to.  They assume that the text in the link is representative of the page you are pointing to (otherwise it’s a pointless link).  If you have descriptive text in a link, it tells the search engine a bit more about the page than it could gain from simply crawling the page itself.  You are telling the search engines that the keyword(s) you use in your link are important for that page.  The search engines take that information, and when somebody else types those same keywords into the search engine, the search engine goes, “oh, I know, This page here is about that”, simply because it has been told it is by the link text.  Link text is a prime SEO factor.

That over simplifies it a bit, but it’s all you really need to know about it for now.

How to use internal links.  Like with all areas in SEO, moderation is king.  But I thought it was content that was king I hear you say.  Well yes, but Moderation in SEO efforts is vital.  Otherwise you are stuffing.

Here is a wonderful benefit of using internal link text.  You get the benefit of the words twice.  Say, for example you have a front (home) page on your site (which doubtless you do).  On that page you want to inform visitors about the whole sites’ contents.  To do this you write text that talks about all the things you have going on in the site.  Within that text will be keywords that you want to be found for, and those keywords will relate to other pages on the site.  Make a link out of them and point them to the other pages.

By creating a link in text you are saying to both users and search engines that they can find more information on the subject of the linked text by clicking on it.  The keyword is on the page and at the same time you are pointing out that another page on your site is also related to that keyword.  Sweet.

Blogging is a prime example of where this technique is used well.  I don’t do enough of it.  I sometimes write these posts just to remind myself of what I should be doing.  Take a look at copyblogger though.  Not only do they have a fair few internal links, but they also do a great job of teaching you about writing internet copy (that’s text to you and me).  They also write nice short posts in general, something I should learn from.

A word of caution.

I have seen this done to excess.  Try not to make your pages a horrendous looking sea of links.  Remember that guidelines say that you should have less than 100 links per page.  That includes all your navigation by the way.

Also, I should point out that including several links to the same page within your text is regarded by some (myself included) as a waste of time.  There is some evidence that if you use two different keywords to link to the same page, the first keyword will be given preference and the second will be ignored.  Somebody actually set up an experiment to test it and it would seem to be the case on Google.

Make sure the keywords you use in your link are relevant to both the page you link to and the surrounding text on the page you are linking from.  This is important.

I should have given you the short version of this post really:-

Create internal links with relevant keywords and don’t overdo it!  It will do you wonders.

The 80-20 Rule for onsite/offsite optimization. Yes the 20% is that important.

Following on from the last post on On-page SEO, it occurred to me that I had not mentioned the 80-20 rule.  That’s the trouble with SEO training, there is always something that gets left out!

The 80-20 Rule is quite simple.  Only 20% of your seo ranking will be based on your on-page optimisation.  I think I can hear a collective sigh and a head or two banging against desks.  I know, I know, you thought that if you followed the advice in the last post on On-page SEO that you would be celebrating much in terms of gained rankings.

Sorry, It doesn’t work like that.  That is not to say that On-page SEO is not important.  Indeed I consider it to be the very foundations of SEO.  I am appalled by SEO’s who say they will do all of a sites SEO off page.  20% is not to be sniffed at either, it’s a significant part of 100%, and, as you will have seen from the last post it is not very difficult either once you know what you are doing.

What we are left with though is a massive 80% of our SEO work still to do.  It is the off page SEO that sorts the men from the boys, the women from the girls and the hermaphrodites from the younger hermaphrodites.  Just keep an eye on this blog and we will get there!  I would also suggest you keep an eye on Hobo and grab the SEO e-book available there. I have not got around to writing an e-book yet.

The 80-20 Rule is a myth!

It is certainly not a hard and fast rule.  Nothing much is when it comes to SEO.  Talk to too many SEO’s and you will end up feeling confused.  There is much we disagree on.  As I started out I used to take the commonly held beliefs as fact and then experiment with some of the more “out there” claims made by some SEO’s.  Ultimately I found though that much of the content on the web was out of date.

There is tons and tons of out of date material out there on On-page SEO.  You could end up with half your page being taken up with useless or at least suspect meta tags alone.  These are largely tags that once held some value but no longer do.  Some of them were only relevant to some search engines.

Should you ignore all meta tags?  Not at all. But you can probably apply the 80-20 rule to them as well.  I often don’t bother with the keywords tag.  I certainly don’t bother with things like author tags.  I do however use the Google only “unavailable_after” tag which looks like this….

<meta name='GOOGLEBOT' content='unavailable_after: 12-Jan-2010 01:00:00 GMT' />

I use it where I have pages that are set to expire on certain dates.  It is fairly good at making sure people do not reach expired pages from a Google Search.  Does it have any SEO value?  I think not.  But it is good for visitors, and let us not forget that visitors are the whole reason for this SEO nonsense in the first place.

I’ve done it again, started out with a short post that starts rambling.  I’ll leave it at that for On-page SEO for now.  If you have any queries leave a comment, or contact me through Webshed.  Indeed, if you disagree with what I have written entirely I welcome your comments.  Debate is how we all learn and no SEO is EVER finished learning.

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)

Search Engine Optimisation is more vital than ever in todays economic climate.  The purpose of this blog is to give you some tips and information if you are reasonably competent with your webserver / CMS.

The blog belongs to Ian Wortley of Webshed.  Ian is an SEO trainer.

What is the difference between SEO training and companies that offer to do your SEO for you?

It’s a matter of choice.  The ideal is perhaps to have both.