Seo | Real Web SEO

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 Some people say it’s impossible to write a book on SEO as when the book’s published it’s out of date as search engines are ever-changing their algorithms.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!
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.
The Importance of being #1 in the Rankings
Posted 09 Jul, 2010 in seo

When it comes to the first page of search results you’d naturally presume that the website in the number 1 position will gain the most traffic and you’d be right. But how important is being number one when you are say number two or three in Google?

The answer is that the number one position can bring in around 3 times the amount of traffic that if you were in the number 2 position!!

Results of click-through rates were accidentally leaked by AOL a few years ago and the findings can be found below and in the pie chart image:

Here are the results:

Position Clicks (thousands) %

1 2075 47

2 586 13

3 419 9

4 299 7

5 242 5

6 200 5

7 168 4

8 148 3

9 140 3

10 148 3

As you can see by the pie chart, the number one position is gold-dust and can create several thousands of clicks depending on how searched for the keyword is. Real Web SEO have achieved the golden number one spot for many clients including “IT support”, “duffle coats” and “web design Nottingham”. We are fighting to win the number 1 position for SunglassesSave.com which currently sits at position 6 for the huge key term “sunglasses“, that would be an incredible 9 times increase on their already bulging traffic, exciting times indeed!

If you would like to contact us about your SEO needs the the number is 0115 941 8122
PPC Verses Natural Listings
Posted 02 Jul, 2010 in seo

A surprising amount of people click on advertisements whilst searching on Google or Bing thinking that they are the information they are looking for. PPC (paid-per-click) advertising allows any website to appear highly alongside the search results but they pay a small price every time somebody clicks on the link to their site. Natural listings are free and usually require SEO or mass publicity to appear there, appearing highly in the natural listings can save companies many thousands of pounds on advertising costs through PPC. Search engines such as Google and Bing make the bulk of their earnings from these advertisements and the areas they appear can be seen in the images below:

Google Search for “SEO Nottingham“:

Google Search showing advertisement areas (PPC in red, Natural in Green):

Bing Search for “duffle coats“:

Bing Search showing advertisement areas (PPC in red, Natural in Green):

Clicking on PPC advertising can sometimes lead you to dark areas of the internet, for example “Anti-virus” type searches can lead you to malware, expensive software or even viruses when you download the “free” software. Google fight a constant battle to make PPC advertising relevant banning many Google Adwords accounts if they use practices to ‘fool’ their software. Some advertising next to search results may be useful to you, you may be looking for new pair of ‘ski boots’ for example and find a half price sale being advertised. Within natural listings will be the biggest sellers of ski boots and within the advertisements will be the best bargains or deals.

If you sell and products or services online then just relying on PPC is a dangerous thing to do and many companies do this. If you just rely on paid advertising for your website then the only way you can bring traffic to it (and make money from it) will be when you pay for advertising. The minute you turn off your PPC campaign is the minute when you stop making sales!

Another risk of solely doing PPC is the fact that you could be banned from Google Adwords (some accounts have been banned by accident) or your competitors can out-bid you and push your advert down to the second page of results. The cost of PPC is slowly rising up with reports of Google making tens of millions of pounds per day on it’s ingenious advertising platform.

SEO on the other hand is permanent and that’s what we here at RealWEbSEO.com specialise in. We use special techniques to get websites higher up in the search engines by promoting them and making the site user friendly; top rankings create masses of website traffic who enter the site 24 hours a day. Even when SEO work is halted a website can ride on the first page of Google for several weeks from the work done in the past before dropping down to the second page.

The biggest companies will use PPC and SEO to get the most custom possible, smaller companies could start testing out their product range with PPC whilst building up an online presence with SEO. Some of our most successful clients have used SEO alone such as LittleFish Support who used SEO to win the Google search result “it support”.

If you’d like to discuss SEO for your company then call us now on 0115 941 8122
Getting the most out of High PR Backlinks
Posted 20 May, 2010 in seo

When getting a backlink from another site what’s the first thing you look for?
- Google PageRank?
- Yahoo In-link Checker?
- NoFollow tags?
Many SEO workers miss out a very important statistic: The Number of Out-Going Links

Out-going links give you a good indication of how much power each link is worth, the less out-going links there are, the more powerful each link is whilst passing link power (link juice).

When Google first started out it’s algorithm was solely based on the number of incoming links to your site and the power behind each link.

Here’s a very basic example of how power is passed from page to page

If a website had 10,000 in-links to their main page then that page effectively has a voting power of 10,000.

Lets say that page had 50 out-going links on it; each link would have 200 votes towards it: (10,000 / 50 = 200)

Lets say that page had only 10 out-going links on it; each link would have 1000 votes towards it: (10,000 / 10 = 1000)

So if you create backlinks from a forum signature then it won’t be half as effective as a social network backlink.
If you manage to get a backlink from a newspaper article then you will have hit the jackpot; not only do newspapers have amazingly high page rank they rarely link out to other sites which makes each link extremely powerful!
Long Tail Keywords – The Path To Keyword Domination
Posted 15 May, 2010 in seo

kSo you want your website to rank #1 for your main keyword – who doesn’t?!

So where do you start? A lot of SEO newbies aim right towards their main keyword, let’s say they wanted to sell Umbrellas they would be optimising for the keyword “umbrellas” and expect to hit the first page of Google for that term.

Now if this is you imagine to the keyword to be like a huge mountain with the summit being #1 in Google; aiming straight for the main keyword would be like climbing up the steepest part of the mountain, a task many would give up on along the way! Why not conquer each little hill around the mountain reaching higher and higher as you go along, these would be your long tail keywords!

Long tail keywords are keywords that people type into search engines that have two or more words. Examples are specific searches such as “red, open top sports car“, questions such as “what’s the height of big ben?” or savvy internet searchers that want to find what they’re looking for quicker.

The great thing about long tail keywords is that you include shorter tail keyword within them, let’s say you were selling umbrellas again, here would be your list of keywords:

Main Keywords: umbrella, umbrellas
Secondary Keywords: buy umbrellas, cheap umbrellas
Long Tail Keywords: polka dot umbrella, rainbow umbrella, wind resistant umbrella, buy cheap umbrellas

So whilst your battling for the #1 position in Google for your main keyword win many little battles along the way with long term keywords. The best way to stumble upon lots of long tail keywords is to blog CONSTANTLY, if you keep talking about your niche subject then they’ll be lots of little keyphrases you could rank for amongst the text you’ve wrote.

If you are doing SEO for an ecommerce then winning the traffic from these smaller searches can start to generate revenue funding more SEO work for the future so go out there and win searches for long tail keywords!
New Targeting for Real Web SEO
Posted 05 May, 2010 in seo

Real Web SEO are now targetting the one word SEO in Google.co.uk. We were on page 8 four weeks ago and are now flitting between page 2 and page 4. Our ambition is to demonstrate our skillset in a tough search and improve the value of our site, drawing new business in a busy and competitve arena.

Juno Web Design are now creating a new theme for us designed for conversion with clearer information. Our current site does not represent or communicate our full offering and is long overdue a new theme.We have recently helped Juno Web Design to position 5 for the search Web Design on Google.co.uk.

To find out more about our service please call us on 0115 941 8122

Juno Web Design
'Effective Blogging for SEO' Guide
Posted 26 Apr, 2010 in seo

Blogging Guide – Real Web SEO

Blogging effectively and consistently has many advantages for SEO:
- Each blog post is a new page on your site
- Your site is alive with constant blogs (fresh content is great for search engines)
- You’ll gain more traffic through specific searches (example: you’ll never rank for “pink, polka-dot umbrellas” unless you have the words “pink”, “polka-dot” and “umbrellas” on your site somewhere!)
- People actually read blogs; if the posts are interesting then they may subscribe to your RSS feed to see what you blog about next or they could link to your blog from their site/blog/facebook/twitter etc.
Also you build up your site up as an asset; Yahoo started out as two guy’s friendly guide to the world wide web and now look! If you just paid for traffic with Google Adwords then as soon as you stop paying you lose all business.

How to blog effectively

Post Title

Each blog post should be centred around one main theme. The title of the post is of the highest important and it should mention the main keyword you want to rank for in Google. Say for example I wanted people to visit my site through the keyword “rainbow umbrella” a good title would be “Rainbow umbrellas – a colourful way to splash around in the rain”. Don’t go crazy through and create a blog post around every product you have, think of related subjects to your product/service for example “12 things to do on a rainy day” if you’re selling umbrellas for instance.

Post Image

Having an image on each blog post will be an advantage for three reasons:
1. It makes the blog look more interesting (not just a mass of text)
2. You can get extra traffic through image results on search engines
3. You can add tags to the image describing what it is, if this corresponds to the post’s theme then it gives the post a boost in SEO
If you haven’t got any images then you can re-use old ones, photoshop old ones to make them look different or even buy them from places such as istockphoto.com (around £1 for a small professional one).
Rename the image to the post’s main keyword (which should be in the post’s title) with dashes in-between words, for example “wooden-umbrella-stand.jpg”. If the image is straight off a digital camera then use some photo editing software to shrink it to around 250 pixels wide; having full definition images on your blog will really slow it down!

Insert the image into the post using the insert/upload function in WordPress:

Change these settings once up select the file and upload it:

Change these settings to give the image a margin for the text spacing (you need to click on the image to get the image options tab to appear):

Give the image vertical and horizontal space in the advanced settings:

Post Content

Now it’s time to write some content; you need to have over 200 words in your post and keep the writing focused on the subject matter. Make sure to write naturally, people like to read blogs how they would be spoken to so don’t worry too much about grammar or sentence structure just write it as you’d say it. If you keep repeating the same keyword then this can actually harm your post. Try and vary the words in your blog and don’t worry how many times you use basic words such as “and”, “the”, “a” etc. as these don’t count for keyword spam.
A great tip is to use synonyms of your keywords so you get your whole blog focused around one subject (the subject you want to rank for!). For example if one of my target keywords was “waterproof” then I’ll also be mentioning the words “impermeable”, “impervious”, “rainproof”, “sealed”, “tight” and “watertight” a lot as they are related words. If you can’t think of any then crack open a Thesaurus or goto Thesaurus.com:

Highlight your main keyword in the main body text at least one by making it bold. Simply highlight the text you want to make bold and press the large “B” button in the text editor. You can use bold, underlines, bullet points and sub headings to make your post more interesting and give it a more readable structure.
Linking to other related posts on your blog is great for SEO as it allows readers to quickly jump to similar topics. To create a link you firstly highlight text within your blog post and then click on the chain link icon:

SEO Tags

After writing the blog post you need to sort out it’s ‘meta’ data which significantly helps in search engine optimisation. These are just tags and descriptions which tell users and search engines what the blog post is all about.
Firstly you need to pick a category for the post which best describes the subject. Hopefully you’ve already set up category’s already that align with your main keywords. These category titles appear in the URL of your site so they need one or two keywords in separated by hyphens.
Next you should add 3 or 4 tags that mention the main keywords for the post. These should be separated by commas for example: “umbrellas, waterproof, rain”.

The last task is to go down to the bottom of the page and give your post’s page a meta title. Simply repeat your post’s title in the meta title situated in the “All in one SEO pack” and Google will do the rest.

Publishing Your Post

When publishing your post you can preview how it will look, save it as a draft that will not be published quite yet or you can even tell WordPress to publish it at a later date.

Instead of posting everyday you could build up two or more posts and automatically publish them day-by-day in the future. It’s good to have new blog posts consistently on your site and you’ll notice ever increased traffic when you do so.

Good luck!
Juno Web Design Page one on google.com
Posted 11 Apr, 2010 in seo

Web design is a massively competitive search phrase. We have helped our sister company Juno Web Design onto page one of google.com for the search web design. This means that if you take all of the directories on that page and leave only web design companies, they are currently the fourth highest achieving web design company in the search engines, in all of history, in all of the world.

Not a bad start…. we are aiming for number one.

To find out more about our internet marketing and SEO service and what we can do for you please contact us on 01159 418 122.

Juno Web Design
Air Conditioning, page
Posted 10 Apr, 2010 in seo

Air Conditioning as a search in Google is relatively competitive as it is lucrative for the winner. The web design is not ours although we are now managing and improving it for conversion. We are now handling the SEO with urgency as the summer is prime season for Air Conditioning business. Young Air provide high quality air conditioners, portable air conditioning and domestic air conditioning to the whole of the UK. The Ambition is to establish themselves with good service and new contracts as the UK market leaders for Air conditioning supply.

Contact the Young Air Conditioning service on:

Tel: 01684 575874

Sales@youngair.co.uk

So far Young Air has moved from Page 3 to page one of gogle.co.uk for the search Air Conditioning in a month which is fast progress. Of course we are aiming for position one which will take a little time and some hard graft.

Air Conditioning

To Find out more about our SEO Nottingham service contact us on 01159 418 122