SEO Training

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.

Design your Website with SEO in mind. It is childs play really. . . . honest.

Web design and SEO should be symbiotic. After all, there is no point having a wonderful looking site if nobody can find it.  This site, by contrast, has no design whatsoever.  It can however be found.

Am I saying that SEO is more important than Web design?  Not really.  A good web designer will incorporate basic SEO into a site as they build it.  Not having any design (wordpress default style) is not a good thing though.  While the content on this site is good (or at least I try to make it good) a lack of design leads to me losing traffic.  This shows up as my bounce rate which is high enough for me to be embarrassed to print it here.

Of course there are other factors.  My writing style could do with an overhaul most of the time for starters.  There is no getting away from the fact though, that the first impression of this site is that it is unprofessional.  Nothing could be further from the truth in reality, but it is not a warm, inviting, friendly site.

This is not because I am not a warm, friendly or inviting type of person, it is purely down to how the site looks.

SEO will get a site noticed.  It will get visitors.  Keeping those visitors requires a little extra though.  Both Web design and SEO are extremely important.  The reason this site does not have any design is because I wanted to see the effects of bad design. The wordpress theme is not necessarily bad, but it gives an impression of little effort.  It also firmly aligns itself with spam blogs (splogs) by not altering the theme.  This is because the majority of splogs do not bother altering the theme either.

When I change the theme I expect to see a change in my stats.  That will not be for a while yet though.  I am not finished collecting data on the current setup.

For me, SEO is more important than design, but it is a mistake to ignore web design.  Equally it is a mistake to ignore SEO.

Of course to really market your web site online, holistic SEO is the way to go.  Do not look at the web in terms of SEO vs Design, Adwords Vs SEO or Social Media Vs Adwords.  Look at it in terms of a marketing medium and bring in everything.  There is no more cost effective medium for marketing.  Use it to its full potential to sell your business.

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.

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.

I've heard of a fire engine, but what is a search engine?

The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Strictly speaking SEO means targeting just search engines.  It is concerned with getting your site as far up the Google, yahoo and Bing rankings for chosen keywords as possible.  Achieving that is done in many ways.

SEM on the other hand has several meanings in regular use.  Some think of it purely as PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns.  These are the ads you see on the right of the search results in search engines, and occasionally occupying the top slots.  I like to think of it as much more than that though.

When I think of SEM the word marketing takes priority.  I like to think of Search Engine Marketing as encompassing SEO but taking into account the user experience.

Let me expand on that.  A site may be extremely well optimised from an SEO perspective, ranking well in the major search engines, but that does not mean that the site is a good user experience.

It is a mistake to put SEO ahead of user experience.  I’ll give you an example. The following is SEO optimised text

Car washing by the car washing experts.  At Car Washing Ireland we wash cars all day every day.  When it comes to car washing we are the number one car washing company in Ireland.  If your car needs car washing then you have found the right site.  Contact us and one of our mobile car washing units will be dispatched to you and one of our car washing experts will have your car gleaming.  You will be so impressed with our car washing that you will return to car washing ireland again and again.

Actually, that is terrible SEO.  I have exaggerated it hugely.  The point is that SEO optimised text is not necessarily particularly readable text.  If the quality of English is high, then you use different words or phrases to describe the same thing.  This is at odds with SEO, where you want to repeat your key phrases.

The object is to achieve good legible text that a user will read, while retaining a keyword density that is reasonably high (though not much above 5% of total text).  It would be entirely better for both SEO and the user experience to write the above text with far fewer instances of “Car Washing”.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is all about S......elling!

SEM is more holistic.  It encompasses good SEO techniques for on page content (but not at the expense of the user experience).  It also covers Social Media as well as PPC advertising and even banner or button advertising.  Search Engine Marketing is about selling your site online.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of using the meta description purely to put in keywords.  Same goes for the page title.

In the case of the meta description it is fairly likely that google does not include that text in any meaningful way in its ranking algorithms.  I am not saying that you should not put keywords into the meta description or page title, but use them to better effect.

Better effect means using them to sell.  To stick with our car washing example, The title can be “Car washing Ireland”, the meta description could read “Get your car washed at home or at work.  We come to you.  Discount for online booking”.  No key words.  Just good descriptive text that helps sell the service.

The whole reason for this post was because I am writing about Social Media and somebody asked me “what has social media got to do with SEO training?”.

Well these days you can’t market your website online without at least paying lip service to social media.  And if you know your stuff (or get Social Media Training) then you can really make it work for you in a big way.  Look at what happened with the Susan Boyle clip on You Tube.  She became an overnight, international sensation, from a clip of an audition!  Wow.  That just does not happen with traditional media.

Why do companies invest thousands of euros in SEO training?  It’s all part of their marketing mix.  SEO is marketing.  Therefore, SEO is SEM and SEM includes SEO.  By the way.  I’ve just broken a rule there.  I’ve overused the phrases again (my site may pay for all this bad SEO!).  I was only playing with words, but be careful.  Remember we are dealing with dumb machines (no matter how good the algorithms are).  They do not see a bit of word play, but rather an attempt at keyword stuffing, which can hurt your ranking.

So, SEM is all about selling.  SEO is just about trying to get better ranking on Google et al.

One of these days I’ll learn to write short concise posts, but I hope that I’ve cleared up the difference between SEO and SEM somewhat.

Rewriting dynamic urls like

www.mysite.ie/information.php?page=information&id=45

to

www.mysite.ie/45/information.htm

using mod_rewrite makes sense for your users.  It is easier to read, and should somebody be good enough to give you a link then they are less likely to make a mistake ending in a 404 error.

So what is the mistake?

In two words… “Capital Letters”.

If you rewrite the previous to

www.mysite.ie/45/Information.htm it is not the same as www.mysite.com/45/information.htm.  A link to the wrong version will again lead to a 404 error.

The mistake seems to come about as a result of good coding practice.  We might right $myDetails when writing our back end scripts.  This makes our scripts easier to read and makes sense.

However when we write www.mysite.ie/45/myDetails.htm as a url it is looking for trouble.

Good SEO will remove as much user error as possible.  As soon as you use caps in your urls you are opening up a mine field.  You WILL end up with bad links, with users who can’t access pages when they try to type them directly and will eventually have to rewrite them.

Get it right in the first place.  www.mysite.ie/45/my-details.htm is a much better way of doing it.

Which leads to another question “-” (dash) or “_”(underscore)?

When you look at a raw link (no css applied) then the answer is clear. An underscore will be swallowed up in the underline that shows it is a link.  Therefor a dash is definitely the better option.

“I don’t need to rewrite my urls.  Google can read dynamic url’s just fine.”

That is true, but websites are not just for search engines.  Make life as easy for users and, from an SEO perspective, for those that will give you links, as you possibly can.

How do I rewrite a page?

Let us assume you want to rewrite the page

http://www.mysite.ie/myinfo.php?page=myinfo&id=45

to

http://www.mysite.ie/45/my-information.htm

In your .htaccess file (apache) write the following

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

You just need to write that once.  Then the rewrite code…

RewriteRule ^(.*)/my-information.htm/?$ myinfo.php?page=myinfo&id=$1

That’s it.  So what does it do?

In plain english the line says take any characters that come before /my-information.htm (in our example this is 45) and make them into a string ($1 in this case – but if there were two (.*)’s then the second would become $2). Then rewrite that to myinfo.php?page=myinfo&id=45 (it took the dynamic 45 from the regular expression (.*) and created $1  from it before adding it to the final url.

Warning.  www.mysite.ie/anything/45/my-information.htm will also be affected by this expression. Your $1 would then become “anything/45″ which would undoubtably mess with your GET statement.

Simply by changing around the page you can get around this.  There are other ways too but this is the simplest method and means you don’t have to learn as many regular expressions.

Instead of rewriteing it as www.mysite.ie/45/my-information.htm

we could rewrite it as www.mysite.ie/my-information/45.htm

The mod_rewrite would then be

RewriteRule ^my-information/(.*).htm/?$ myinfo.php?page=myinfo$id=$1

Done and dusted!

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)

There are some simple guidelines for using adwords.

You could of course hire somebody to manage your adwords campaign for you, or you could use the following advice along with some trial and error fine tuning.

Choose your keywords carefully

I made a mistake when I first discovered adwords.  I used the names of every competitor I could think of as keywords.  The logic was sound… anybody looking for a well known competitor would also see my name and have the option of clicking on it and getting straight through to my site.

It worked for two days.  Then it fell foul of Googles quality guidelines (see Ad content below).

When choosing your keywords pay attention to the following:-

1. The search popularity – how many people search for that term (this is your footfall in shop terms).
2. Keyword competition – The higher the competition the higher the price per click.  It is an auction situation.
3. Other similar keywords.  Sometimes a slightly less obvious keyword can give you a better Return on Investmient (ROI).
4. Keyword suggestion tool.  Put in what you think you should appear for and let google do the rest of the work for you.  Just tick any keywords you want to include!
5. Google Trends.  Google trends is great for analysing actual web trafic.  Usefully you can compare keywords by typing in several comma separated keywords.  This is great for showing keyword search popularity for two similar terms like “butchers” and “butchery”.  Google Trends also shows you results by region so that you can target the keywords that are most relevant to your own country.

Ad Content.

It is really very simple.  Your ad content must relate well to the page content you are linking to.  Your chosen keywords for the ad must also be relevant.  The more relevant everything is the less your starting price per click is.  You could have a keyword with low competition (which would signify a low cost per click) but if the quality of the relationship between keywords, ad content and the landing (target) page on your site is bad then that drives up the price.

If you own a Butchers, then an advert that says “My butchers, Finest meats in Ireland, Order online. Nationwide deliveries, www.myButchers.ie” should point to a page that contains all of those phrases, preferably more than once.  Your keywords must also suit the ad.  Having a keyword of “Shopping” will not fit and will cost you more.

Most SME’s in Ireland do not have an IT department. Of those that do not many of them have somebody that specialises in Search Engine Optimisation.

Surprisingly many firms still fail to see the need for any SEO services.  There are thousands of Irish business sites that do not even cover the basics of good web practice.

What I’m talking about here is conforming to W3C standards.  Check your own site now on this link http://validator.w3.org/

Just enter the url of your site (http://www.mysite.ie) and press return.  Did the screen go green and give you a congratulations message.  For most of you the answer will be no.

Some of you may be quite angry about this, having paid “professionals” to do your website for you.  It may look great but if it does not comply with web standards then it is sub standard work.

If you ask them about it they will probably tell you that it’s not important.  Too many “SEO professionals” hold this view.

Google on the other hand disagrees.  In their webmaster guidelines good code is listed as one of the many things that you should ensure your site has in order to rank well in google.

Why then do any self professed and experienced professionals in Search engine Optimisation claim that it is of little importance?

Their experience has taught them that even a site with bad coding can be made to rank well in all the search engines.  Rather than taking a holistic look at your site they concentrate on one or two activities like link building.  They even get results.

So why am I harping on about web standards?  That’s simple.  Your results could be better.  In practice you can get away with a few short cuts on any website.  But ignore too many of Googles guidelines and you will be giving your site less than a helpful start.

The other more salient point is that you have paid for a service, and should expect it to be of a reasonable standard.  If a builder leaves out your damp course and tells you “It’s not that important, sure isn’t your house still standing” you would not take it lightly.  So why would you allow a website builder to take short cuts on your business web site (unless of course you don’t like your business).

Good code is a solid foundation on which to build your online presence.  Without it you are off to a shaky start.  Pseudo web developers have been getting away with it for years because you don’t know any better.

There are no professional organisations to ensure standards.  I couldn’t call myself a doctor in the morning, but there is nothing to stop a doctor calling themselves a web developer.

Arm yourself with knowledge when you are getting your website done.  Acquaint yourself with the W3C validation tool on this post and with others that will appear as this blog develops.  Talk to more than one designer/developer.  Check the sites they have done.  Check how they rank in Google.  Find out exactly what they propose for your site.  After all, your site is your shopfront to the entire world.

Links are good for SEO.  The link text is very important.

By linking sites together you can create a loop of links, or a pyramid, or a network.

What use are these?  I actually think that they can be quite dangerous to your SEO.  Conversely they can aid your SEO efforts quite a bit.  It all depends on how you do it.

Google put a lot of time and effort into finding spam (for spam read unnatural) links.

Say I have 20 sites, all hosted with the same company.  These sites will be on the same subnet (first few groups of numbers in your ip address for the site).  A lot of links from the same subnet with the same link text is going to raise flags with google.  They will not necessarily penalise you for it…. but you won’t get the results you may expect.  Large numbers of links pointing to the same pages from one location are suspicious.  If all your sites are on the same subnet it becomes obvious that those links are an attempt to influence search results.

How to get around it.

Building domains purely for SEO purposes does not have the same effect it once had.  Domaining (buying domains for keywords) still has some clout, but not as much as it once did.

Be careful, remember, that a site that is full of nonsense will be treated accordingly.  Build each site with the purpose of making that site rank well.  Then links to your target site will carry some weight.  Same goes for blogs.  Write good information in a blog that people will reference and do not over-link to your target site.  Link to different pages on your target site and only use text that is relevant to both the blog post and the page you link to.

In short.  Keep the number of links down.  My preference is for a pyramid structure… linking from multiple domains to one domain.  I sometimes interlink the lower tier domains too – but only if it is natural for them to link.  The subject matter has to be relevant.