admin | Real Web SEO

Using Google PageRank to avoid un-trusted websites
Posted 30 Jul, 2010 in google

Websites are like friends, if you hang out with the wrong crowd then you can soon find yourself in trouble!

What other websites are linked to yours either by you linking to them or them linking to you? Are you part of a spamming network of interlinking spam sites or selling links?

We have seen a shocking amount of SEO companies use spam blog sites to gain backlinks; usually a blog is made and blog posts are “hired” out to several different clients linking to there websites. These blogs usually have cheaply written or copied text within them and seem to contain posts on several different subject from property websites all the way to weight loos pill sites.

Looking at Google’s page rank score quickly gives a clear indication of a website’s worth. If you see a site with masses of content which has been around for over 4 months then check it’s Google page rank. If it has a score of zero or one then it’s clear that the site has done something against Google’s terms making it an untrusted site.

Dealing with un-trusted websites will in turn make your site less trusted by Google; this effect is incredibly significant when you link OUT to un-trusted websites. Allowing DoFollow blog comments on your blog may seem like a good idea to bring in more traffic but it can have a negative effect on your site if you’re linking out to Viagra or Porn sites!

This also bring up the reciprocal linking debate, if you swap links with someone then you may be linking up with an un-trusted site, it’s a practice I urge you never to do.

It does help SEO to link out to relevant information from your site, check out Wikipedia for great examples for instance it makes your site more useful to visitors and that’s what Google wants. The best practice is to use Google itself to find the relevant information yourself, if it’s a popular topic then trusted websites will always appear highly in the search results. If you’re un-sure who to link out to then check out their PageRank firstly, alarm bells should ring if it’s low and you may not want to link to them or use the recommended NoFollow tag.
Different spellings of the same keywords
Posted 29 Jul, 2010 in random seo

How many different ways can you use the word “Amaze”? You could have “Amaze”, “Amazed”, “Amazing” and “Amazes”.

Do any of your main keywords have alternative spellings? If you sold “fridges” online for example then “refrigerators” would be an example.

Missing out on alternative spellings of your main keyword could lower your traffic levels. On-site SEO should include the main variations of keywords; Google seems to count the multiples of words as the same word so for example “tent” would be counted equally as “tents”. Major differences such as “camp” and “camping” will not be considered as the same keyword as the words could have different meanings, “camp” could be used to describe a personality trait for example.

If you sold “fridges” online then you may miss out on all the people who type in the word “refrigerator” into the search engines if that word never appears on your site. Regular blogging usually solves the problem with different spellings, if you keep writing about your website’s main subject then you’ll eventually hit on all sorts of keywords that you may have missed with 4-5 static sales pages.

The main page of your website is usually the one that has the most Page Rank and therefor appears in Google’s search results more often. Make sure your main keywords appear at least 2-3 times on the main page with all the different variations of spellings to make sure you get every bit of traffic possible!

Unfortunately many spell checks and coding practices prefer American English instead of UK English. If you run an international site then it may be best to use both American and English spellings of words, for example “optimized” and “optimised” are two different spellings of the same word. If your site is UK only then please stick to the English spellings, not only does it look more professional to readers, Google’s language centers may add a little more SEO power on the site for UK searches.
How to use the Meta Description tag
Posted 28 Jul, 2010 in Web design

The Meta Description tag isn’t there just for the search engines to read, in fact Google pretty much ignores the content in the description tag altogether.

What it should be used for is enticing people to click on your listing in the search engine results. Let’s look at a typical Google search result for this site using the keyword “SEO Company”:

The Meta Description tag is shown in the Google listing, if you are unsure what the code looks like for the description tag then it is shown below:

<meta name=”description” content=”Real Web SEO offer high end Search Engine Optimisation Services with Web Design | Nottingham based SEO Company | Conversion and Result driven.” />

This mini advert can gain a lot more clicks from search engine results if it’s written well. The best way to write the description is to simply describe your business and include your main keyword(s) within the text.

Any keywords within the Meta Description are automatically made bold which make them more likely to get clicked on by the average searcher.
See the example above for the search “SEO Company”, you can see the keywords are bolded by Google for both the Meta Title tag and the Meta Description tag.

Bing, Yahoo and Ask put more SEO weight upon the Meta Description tag, if you want to rank highly in a competitive market on these search engines then it is essential you optimise the Metas for every key page on your website.

What happens if you don’t use a Meta description tag?

Google ‘plucks’ out related content that is found on the page it’s displaying and uses these “snippets” to create a dynamic description. Sometimes this is the best option as long-tail keywords will be brought into the description if they are within the text and become bold-type font. The blog posts here on Real Web SEO don’t use Meta description tags for this very purpose, they can more easily win search results that rarely get searched for.

How long should the Meta description tag be in character length?

Google can hold around 150 characters before the content spills out of the search result boxes and becomes shortened by three dots (…). There is no actual limit to how long or short the Meta tag can be, if you put in too many characters then expect Google to chose the favorite parts or just the first 150 characters. A too small description can be a bad thing as you only take up one line in the search results instead of your allotted two; this may be harder to spot by users and will certainly contain less keywords that could be highlighted.

So go ahead and tweak your homepage’s Meta tags, it could make a significant difference. You can always look at tags from professional websites by viewing their source code, perhaps sticking along the same lines will bring the best results for your site but make sure not to copy them word for word.
Twitter as an SEO tool
Posted 27 Jul, 2010 in random seo

People are tweeting at an exponential rate and Google now indexes Twitter in real time using it’s new Google Caffeine software.

Twitter comprises of short messages that are under 150 characters long, any big gossip, news or viral gets ‘tweeted’ by thousands and quickly spreads across the globe. Twitter is mostly used for self-promotion due to the fact that you can stick advertisements and links directly into the feeds of people that follow you.

Twitter can be used as an SEO tool, but beware, some SEO companies are using Twitter alone for SEO which isn’t right. For starters you can only get NoFollow links from Twitter which don’t pass hardly any SEO power to the sites linked to.

When you create a post on your blog then tweet about it, you’d be surprised how many people search twitter for the latest tips or information and may find your blog. Here at Real Web SEO we tweet every blog we make – take a look at our twitter profile here. Choosing the best text to add next to you blog link is crucial, a boring title could never get clicked on whereas an exciting title like for example “10 ways to instantly make you life more exciting” may get hundreds of clicks!

So don’t use Twitter for the search engines, use it to drive traffic to your unique content. It’s a social tool and if you have a creative skill then you could reach out to people worldwide with your talent.

Following people in your niche is the way forward too, about 30% of the people you follow will follow you back and they will see whenever you announce anything within their feed. If you convince people in your niche to follow you then they may be truly interested in your latest project or news, what a wonderful PR tool Twitter can be!

The website TweetMeMe show you how many people have tweeted with a link to your website, it has a great plugin for WordPress and quickly shows you which posts you created have got picked up by the general public. Real Web SEO’s record is currently 18 re-tweets, and our average post receives around 4 natural links from external sources.
Backlinks from mutliple IP addresses
Posted 26 Jul, 2010 in search engine optimisation

How many different sites link to yours… 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000?

SEO is a numbers game, but the number of backlinks you have isn’t the only thing you should aim for. You could simple get one footer or blogroll link on a popular site and get tens of thousands of links from every page they have. These tens of thousands of links may look impressive but you could still be beaten by a site with say 30 backlinks in Google’s results.

Getting all of your links from one source isn’t the best SEO strategy, all the search engines look at the number of unique IP addresses linking to any one site and of course the more you can get the merrier.

If you ran a website all about “dog training” for example then gaining links from every dog related site you can find would be hugely beneficial, not only would you have a wide a range of IP address linking to you but you will also have related content links which the search engines also add positive weight to.

Another bad thing about gaining many links from one site is what may happen in the future. The site may have a re-design or decide that all of your links should be NoFollowed links killing your SEO power in one fell swoop. Gaining backlinks from forums or social media sites such as Yedda have this inherit risk, one day the signature link in your 1000+ forum posts could be banned or depreciated with the NoFollow tag and you’ll be in the dark.

So how do you gain backlinks from multiple IP addresses?

The best way is to contribute to related sites with techniques such as blog commenting, sponsored blog posts or forum posts. If you help out the company then they may be happy to add a site-wide link to you within a blog roll or footer link. As well as giving out free unique content you can try creating useful tools or flash games that they may use, backlinks can be easily added to Java or Flash applications that Google, Yahoo and Bing can read. Some people create multiple sites that focus on specific areas of their niche, you could have one out-going link to the main content shifting the entirety of link juice power to it.

The idea is to get your site well known in as many places as possible (hopefully alongside related content), so get out there and promote your site!
I wrote an amazing blog post and all I got was one lousy backlink!
Posted 23 Jul, 2010 in viral marketing

Real Web SEO has hit a few milestones this week including our 100th post yesterday and over 250,000 recorded in-links according to Website Grader (150,000 on Yahoo)!

We thought it’s time again to get viral online, our last viral attempt achieved a few hundred backlinks and there are so many other avenues we can explore.

Viral marketing can achieve the highest levels of natural SEO, if you create something amazingly funny, interesting or shocking then that viral can go global overnight. Top viral campaigns such as the one for the film “Blair Witch Project” generates a self-growing “buzz” online, people spread the news to friends and they spread the news again to their friends, the results are exponential and have an incredible reach. It’s not difficult to get people to link to the source of viral material, the web address can be mentioned in a video, linked to within a Flash movie or the viral material could be on the site itself.

So how do you start a viral campaign? Real Web SEO has firstly created a network around this blog and we’re stepping up efforts on our twitter page, this has resulted in several retweets of our blog posts and hopefully massive exposure when we finally launch a web viral. Contacts are key to getting something off the ground online, blogging regularly and gaining a mass of social links is a great way of finding new sources of followers.

Failing to promote your own blog or twitter profile will mean that your voice won’t be heard in the mass of information online. Writing an amazing blog post isn’t enough despite what Google used to say, build up your fan base and become more and more involved in your niche, then when you speak… people listen.

If you have limited resources or time then buy yourself a cheap video camera and get passionate about your niche on YouTube perhaps. With digital hard disk cameras it really isn’t hard to get your own video online these days, some cameras even can upload to YouTube automatically. There’s lots of other video sites to upload to such as Vimeo, Google Videos or Viddler so get spreading your know-how and you’ll build up legions of followers if you persist and keep quality levels high.

Watch this space…
How to Learn SEO
Posted 22 Jul, 2010 in seo

Learning SEO can be a minefield of myths, misleading information and techniques that may actually harm your SEO rather than help it.

So where can you go for advice or help whilst learning SEO? The first port of call we recommend is a simple book on the subject! Some people say it’s impossible to write a book on SEO as when the book’s published it’s out of date as search engines are ever-changing their algorithms. This is false, the main ranking factors from 3 years ago in Google for instance are still the same today, the principles behind ranking factors are the same and it’s getting harder and harder to bypass them with sneaky “black hat” techniques. Make sure to buy a book published recently though as social media has come into play quite a lot recently and some great free resources for SEO have popped up in the last few years that you may miss with an old book.

The most important things to ask yourself when learning and performing SEO are:

1) Is what I’m doing useful to people online?
2) Am I trying to cheat my way to the top of the rankings?
3) Is all the content on my website easy to find by search engine spiders?

Stealing content seems to be the most common newbie mistake, this adds nothing new to the ‘wealth’ of information online and in a way tries to cheat the search engines by adding related content onto your site. Google can spot this technique a mile off; a new blog post for example will get crawled within seconds because it automatically pings Google saying it’s been published.

Learning old SEO methods that used to work is still common-place too. Techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text and multiple internal links with keyword anchors can be seen left, right and center on new sites (non of which rank highly for any keywords). If you surfed online 15 years ago with Yahoo then some awful results came up with site using these techniques, it DID work but now search engines are far, far smarter luckily.

When you start learning about SEO it becomes apparent that Google, the most used search engine, ranks websites higher if they have more backlinks (links from other websites). Gaining these links on other people’s sites can be a hard task and many people end up trying to cut corners on all the work needed. Paying for links is frowned upon by Google unless it’s from a reputable search directory such as Yahoo. Some people out-source the SEO work which can either be a good option or a disaster depending on the SEO company’s techniques implemented. Some companies just add your links on to large “link farms”, sites that interlink in a network which are purely created to promote sites up Google’s rankings. These links have little value and possibly even a negative effect if done on a mass scale so do your research on any company if you outsource.

Once you have learned the basics of SEO it’s time to move on to more advanced techniques, learn from the experts such as SEOMoz but beware that many people will call themselves an “SEO Expert” when they don’t know much at all. You can find some gems in forums such as ‘DigitalPoint’ or the ‘Warrior Forum’.

Why not create a dummy website and try out techniques whilst you learn, if something goes wrong then you can just move on to another domain. Aim low to begin with, perhaps a 3 word keyword such as “kitchen knife set”, something that will receive a decent amount of traffic. You have to be very persistent with performing SEO, the content writing can take many hours and the link building can take months to take effect but trust me the reward at the end is worth it!
Improve your landing pages to improve your SEO
Posted 21 Jul, 2010 in google

People searching with Google may click on a search result, not like the look of the site and then go back to Google again to visit another site on the search results. If this happens regularly then the first site in the results isn’t as useful to surfers and it will lose some ranking power in Google.

Google are on a never ending mission to provide the best results for any keyword searched for by their users. Naturally a site that many people bounce off (a site they enter and exit without viewing a second page) shouldn’t rank as highly as one that people interact with.

Analytical tracking tools should be installed onto your site such as the free Google Analytics program. This allows you to see which pages on your site aren’t performing well; most websites have a majority of the search engine traffic enter the homepage so that should be the first page you should optimise.

If you use Google Analytics then enter the profile of your website and then check the stats on your biggest keywords. Websites can rank for all sorts of strange terms so we want to filter the results for people who hit the most popular page on your website with your favorite keywords you want to rank well for. Results of bounce and exit rates from random keywords shouldn’t matter, what is important is how visitors you want to attract interact with your site.

Below are the steps needed to find the stats for each keyword on Google Analytics:

Step 1 – Find the “Top Content” tab:

Step 2 – Select the most viewed page on your website (the home page is usually represented with a forward slash “/”):

Step 3 – Sort out the stats on your most visited page with the keywords people entered it:

From my experience any exit or bounce rate over 60% shows that improvements can definitely be made to keep more people on the site. The best bounce rate I have ever seen is around 12-18% for one of our clients for their top 5 keywords as it is focused heavily one one product.

This is only a small ranking factor in Google but improving the site design can have a huge effect on the bottom line too, if another 20% of people stay on your website then you can expect to make around 20% more money from it!

Our web designs partners Juno recently updated their web design and it’s well worth checking out their blog to see the latest results from it.
Check your broken links for search spiders
Posted 20 Jul, 2010 in seo

Every search engine (apart from search directories) uses programs called “spiders” to crawl whole websites and grab all the relevant data they can from each page.

The spider will enter the homepage of a website and then follow every link it comes across in the code after saving the content. It will then crawl each page linked from the homepage and keep repeating the process until it has found every single page on the entire website.

An XML Sitemap is a good way to tell the search spiders exactly where all the pages of content are located which should be linked within your robots.txt file.

The problem with search engine spiders is that they can get stuck or lost.

PHP websites like one’s built in the Magento e-commerce software can re-write urls based on old urls. One slip in the code could create a never-ending loop of subfolders as shown below:

- /product/ links to /cart/

- /product/cart/ links to /product/

- /product/cart/product/ links to /cart/

- /product/cart/product/cart/ links to /product/ etc. etc. etc.

Also some spiders have difficulties with web programming languages such as JavaScript, Flash or even CSS. A Flash or JavaScript navigation bar could spell disaster for a search engine crawler, luckily major players like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. can handle these most of the time.

Broken links can also stop spiders from crawling further into your website, many web spiders have timeout thresholds that if they run into trouble then they won’t spend all day crawling one site. If a spider keeps finding broken links on your site then it may quit and move onwards, thus only displaying half your site on it’s index.

Your code should be clean and clear for users and search engines but also should be your links. There are free tools to check for broken links on any site, if you have a Windows PC then I suggest you use Xenu link sleuth which was made by a Windows employee and if you have a Mac then try Integrity which does exactly what it says on the tin.
Why links take time to Mature in Google
Posted 19 Jul, 2010 in google

According to trusted SEO sources links can take between 2-6 months to fully mature in Google, but why?

The time it takes SEO to take effect can be frustrating but it holds back some very clever techniques to maximise profits from SEO and also people who want to run tests on Google’s algorithm.

IF links worked instantly then imagine how much money you could make by say hacking a news website and linking to yourself in the footer? The PageRank power of those links would be immense as most news websites have a large PageRank and rarely link out. Whatever site the hacker linked to would highly rank for it’s main keywords and money could easily be made! Luckily these links take time to mature and the hacker would be spotted within a small period of time.

Another technique that could be used if links didn’t need time to mature would be inter-site linking. You could create one main site to perform SEO on and then once it had gained high PageRank start creating micro-sites and linking towards them. If you had two micro sites then they would receive half the page rank of the main site and easy rank for targeted keywords within the domain name and content. That would be 3 revenue streams for one set of SEO work, not bad! Luckily as links take 2-6 months to mature this technique would take years to keep rolling out on micro sites, a technique I’ve seen done literally millions of times in the casino industry way in the past.

SEO enthusiasts love to test out Google’s algorithm by creating their own keywords, it’s like poking a mysterious beast with a stick and seeing what happens. A famous example is Britney Spears Physics Lectures where Google was tested to see how it’s algorithm worked with the made up keyword involving one of the most searched for women in the world at the time. Link maturity has also put an end to testing, well actually it’s made testing a very long process to do and by time you get the results Google has made a few hundred changes to how it ranks websites, oh well.

So if you create a new website then start your SEO a.s.a.p, a holding page will do the trick whilst the site is being built which you can link to. Expect to wait a few months before you win over the natural search results, perhaps advertising on Adwords is an option to create revenue or just good old fashioned PR.