Posts tagged Search Engine Optimisation
The Keys to Freedom: When Will Google Remove My SEO Penalty?
Mar 18th
Google SEO penalties are more common than you might realise. They also happen to well-meaning website owners more often than you might realise! Google’s algorithms are designed to catch actions, not intentions, and so there are many honest webmasters out there currently serving time behind Google bars. It can be frustrating not knowing when your sentence will end, though – today we explore Matt Cutts of Google’s advice about how and when SEO penalties are removed. More >
SEO by Stealth – 3 Tips for Writing SEO Content That Sounds Natural
Nov 22nd
We often hear people say “Oh, I don’t want to ruin my website with SEO! That sort of content sounds horrible!”.
SEO doesn’t ruin websites … however, poorly conceived attempts at creating optimised copy can quite easily do so! Ever encountered a website like this?
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5 Website Essentials for Most Effective SEO
Nov 10th
SEO is an essential tool for the success of your website (unless you’re Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg!). Yet while SEO ‘gets them there’, your website has to ‘keep them there’. If your ultimate goal in undertaking an SEO strategy is to make more money for your business, make sure that your site has these five essentials in place while you’re undertaking your SEO campaign! More >
5 Important Questions About Link Building Answered
Aug 11th
Much like building a house, when you are trying to build a link popularity profile for SEO purposes, speed isn’t the only determinant of success. A house that goes up fast, but falls down around the owner’s ears is obviously pretty useless! So today we’re shelving the ‘more and faster is better’ approach, and looking at the ‘other’ things you need to know about link building best practices.
Speed of link acquisition
One very important caveat to the advice you’ll read about gaining links is that faster is not better … in fact, gaining links too fast can get you kicked off the search engines, and destroy your search engine optimisation campaign thus far. Your links should be built:
- Slowly at first – perhaps 2-3 links per day in the first month
- Faster as the site ages
- Faster as your Pagerank increases
Mirroring external with internal growth
It is also important to mirror any link popularity growth you make externally with internal linking for the health of your SEO campaign. There are several options for creating a platform for constantly updated, fresh content:
- Having an on-site blog, where you can cross-link both to pages of the main site and to earlier blog posts
- Having a News or Press section of the website
- Create a Local Events section if appropriate to your niche
- Create a ‘What’s New’ page; especially useful for e-commerce sites.
This internal growth helps re-assure the search engines that your outside link popularity growth is natural, and also provides a greater variety of content that people may want to link to without any encouragement … doing your SEO work for you!
Choose your anchor text carefully
The anchor text for your links was at one stage a couple of years ago, the major factor in Google’s site ranking algorithm. It has since been downgraded – but it is still very important for your search engine optimisation to control your anchor text to reflect your most important keywords – those with the best mix of high popularity and low competition.
Balance between one-way and reciprocal links
When you link to a site, then they link to you, that link has less weighting in the Google algorithm than if the link was one-way. However, one of the major link building strategies in a long term campaign is to link out to other pages … so how do you reconcile this dilemma? The same way you do every other difficult decision … with compromise. Dammit! Link out – but be selective about it. Don’t bother linking to Wikipedia all the time, they won’t link back – select other sites and bloggers that are likely to notice and return the linking favour.
Link building can actually be a little tricky … but there are always SEO experts around to help you!
PPC VS SEO part 1
Jul 7th
There has been very intense disagreements between which of Pay Per Click(PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more effective for a company.
PPC offers many advantages such as near instantaneous flow of traffic, pay on performance, precise keyword targeting, budget control and time control just listing a few. Since results are instantaneous, most SEO companies tend to keep using PPC. Since there are more people using PPC, costs have risen considerably as there are more competitors bidding for the same keyword.
SEO requires more planning and if conducted well, minimizes cost significantly. SEO can be a timely process and may cost a significant initial cost, usually in the form of link buying. SEO can also improve your websites value. A good example is imagining your website as a property such as your house. With an SEO targeted approach, you would purchase land or other houses around it out expand your existing business. On the other hand, PPC could mean renting the land around you.
By 2013, a CNN report suggests, internet advertising will grow from USD$9.1 billion in 2007 to USD$21 billion. Surprisingly, out for the billions spent on advertising, only 11% is from SEO and 87% from PPC.
In determining which approach suits best depends on your business or the product you’re trying to sell. For example, if it’s a seasonal item, and the popularity is only during this period of time, you would want instant results, thus PPC would be the better option.
The image bellow shows the distribution of clicks by internet users in the US. You can see that most people click on the organic search section compared to the Paid, ‘sponsored’ area. 
You decide which is better? Or you can consult an Internet Marketing expert regards to whether SEO or PPC is right for you.
Good Tutorial about the basic concepts of SEO
Jul 6th
This is a very good youtube video outlining the main concepts of SEO. It really shows you the jist of what search engine optimization is all about.
4 Mega SEO Mistakes!
Jan 28th
SEO is one of the most popular subjects on the internet … alongside that other ubiquitous three-letter word that starts with ‘se…’! This prevalence of information often leads people to believe that SEO is quite a simple task – one that they can do effectively themselves if they read a few blogs. While you are often in a good position to do much of the legwork (writing press releases and website copy, helping with keyword research, etc), there are some common DIY SEO mistakes that really do NOT help your web marketing campaign! We look at the top 4 today.
Using Black Hat Techniques
You don’t have to be an evil Google manipulating monster to fall for what seems like an easier way to get search engine rankings … and which might anger the giant of web search! A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing when DIY-ers use what looks like an easy way out. These quick-fixes are almost always considered black hat, and will get your site banned or penalized in Google when caught.
Meaningless Meta Tags
Many, many people that write their own meta tags don’t realize that this is the only piece of text that search engines display alongside your main website title. It should contain your keywords – if only to tell searchers that the page is relevant to what they were looking for.
Correlating Content
Aside from on-page SEO, including your keyphrases in your site copy helps reassure visitors they have come to the right place, and helps tone down bounce rates (percentage of visitors that leave within a few seconds).
Ignoring the Power of the Address
Your URL is one of the most powerful weapons in your SEO arsenal – use it! You should spend at least as much time brainstorming and refining your URL ideas as you do on your entire site content.
Corporate SEO: How it differs from SME Web Marketing
Jan 8th
In business, the difference between a large company and a small company is not simply a matter of employee numbers and profit. The same holds true for SEO for large businesses as opposed to small ones; they are as different as night and day! Today we are looking at how SEO differs for the Goliaths of the business world, as opposed to the Davids.
Does size matter? The obvious differences
There are several obvious differences between big business sites and small business sites. These contrasts can be seen in all sorts of business activities, and are also prominent in SEO:
- Bigger companies often have bigger marketing budgets (meaning that paid search can be a good place to start building a visitor base).
- The value of the pre-existing branding in a digital world is immense. Even if no search engine optimization has been done on the site, it likely has plenty of trust with Google already.
- Big business usually means big everything; the website itself can be quite large and difficult to manage.
The Technical Differences in SEO for Big Sites
- The advent of Google personalized search means that if a person has visited a site before, it is pushed up the rankings for its keyphrases. This is a natural advantage for large corporations.
- On-page SEO for large corporate sites generally accounts for about 80% of the search engine ranking. For smaller sites, it can be as little as 20%.
- Changes to existing pages on a large corporate site can have a major impact on your exposure on search engines, and your traffic. Make changes slowly, and have your SEO company check on the impact on the changes.
- On-site content is a large part of the equation, but changing it may incur lower SERPs.
- Site structure changes can incur similar penalties
What can small businesses learn about SEO from the large ones?
There are a couple of guidelines you can use for getting the benefit of big company web marketing (although perhaps, without the budget!), even for smaller businesses.
- Establish your website domain name as soon as possible, to gain more Google trust.
- Spread content onto a larger number of pages (within the bounds of reason!), and do plenty of internal linking.
- Make minor changes to your site and then test the effects, rather than changing everything at once.
Remember, even the largest business giant was once a tiny baby … just the zygote of an idea in its founder’s brain! Internet marketing is a vital step in that road from idea to giant, for modern businesses.
The Impact of Social Networking on SEO
Jul 23rd
The path to business success is a long and torturous one; filled with deep trenches and potholes that create numerous complications. Every so often, you would stumble upon a roadblock that will make you reconsider your pursuit. That’s normal when you’re starting out. At its early stages, one can expect fewer returns on business efforts. Needless to say, launching a business is tough. But building it is tougher. Though it may be a slow rise to fame, you’re not required to settle with being ignored just because you are new to the online industry. If you have a way of getting your business out there then you should take advantage of it. Being overlooked is not a given especially if you’re striving to be on top. With so many competitors, you have to be aggressive in promoting your own product and services, if you don’t want to be overshadowed. With an unpredictable playing field such as the internet, you should make the effort to stand out. This will demand patient search engine optimization on your part.
Now, SEO may take as short as six months or as long as a few years to produce results. It may involve link building and article submissions, among many others, to help divert traffic to your site. More traffic usually means higher ranking and higher ranking means greater visibility. If you’re seeking to improve the number of business transactions you get, then you must be visible to the public first. In doing so, you need to build up an identity over the net and make your presence known. On this area, social networking sites are of big help. With an abundance of users, you easily get to reach your target consumers. Sites like Twitter and Facebook serve as fertile grounds for launching internet marketing strategies that help increase your website’s visibility and, consequently, the visits you get and the profits you make. With the social networking sites, the task of driving more traffic to your site becomes less tedious and more interesting.
The contribution of social networking sites to search engine optimization has been very valuable in recent times. Now, online entrepreneurs have everyone in the world right at their fingertips. However, this convenience does not imply a decreased responsibility in making quality posts and blogs. The same SEO principles still apply on networking sites. The only difference they have with other sites is the number of users. So you still have to create quality web marketing strategies.
Professional SEO Tips to Learn (Part 1)
May 7th
Articles about SEO tips are the most researched stuff in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. This event only means that there are lots of people, most probably internet marketers, who want to learn more about SEO and its industry. Just to be of a little help to those information hungry people, let me enumerate some SEO tips.
(a) Mutual linking or link exchange is not already encouraged due to its potential to abuse the privilege on links. However, this can be beneficial if the two parties linking to each other are related. To make this strategy work, you must do link exchange only with industry related websites.
(b) Search engines love text and more information. Thus, you must satisfy them with informative text. It is not enough that your storefront, which is your website, contains the image and description about the product. You must also include information about what benefits it can give and the instruction in order to let the customers know on how to maximize its use. You may include history if necessary.
(c) Keywords are the keys for visitors to get to your site. That is why keyword research is very important. It is not enough to use only competitive keywords that keyword tools suggest; you have to think like an internet shopper. That way, you can think of what possible words or phrases are most likely keyed in the search bar of search engines.
…continue reading here: More SEO Tips to Learn (Part 2)