Welcome
Articles are organised by date. Typically, there will be a new one as and when I have the time and find a subject to talk about.
- Introduction
- Choosing Your Keywords
- Generate Keyphrases
- Putting Your Keyphrases To Use
- Incorporating Keywords Into Filenames
- Style Matters
- Accessibility
- How to Get People to Link to You
- Social Networking
- Keep People Interested
- Tracking Your Visitors
- What To Avoid
- Other Points to Consider
- Conclusion
- computer repair london
- remove virus from my computer
- fix computer virus
- repair my computer
- computer shop in london
- get rid of the bigbadbug virus
- 1.The keyphrases are not diluted by all being on a single page
- Each page can be optimised to a particular subject, so when a visitor comes a knocking through a search engine, they're getting exactly what they wanted
- earch engines mark heading content as more valuable with regards to keywords than normal paragraph text.
- Accessibility for blind and visually impaired users is increased, as speech and Braille readers use headings to break content into logical blocks.
- Future search engines could well use these other heading levels to deliver better search result text to a visitor.
- <acronym title="Search Engine Optimisation">SEO</acronym>
- image-of-Big-Ben-in-London.jpg
- image_of_Big_Ben_in_London.jpg
- Can you read the all text on the page easily?
- Are there any missing images which convey essential information which need alternate text?
- Can you navigate the page easily, or does the site rely JavaScript for navigation?
- Are headings showing as headings, or just regular text?
- Are you using colour to convey information which might be helped out by being bold or italic?
- Does the site use plugins to convey information? Can you see any indication that there are missing plugins, or is there any alternative if you cannot get the plugin?
How to Optimise Your Site for Search Engines
Contents
Introduction
In this article I hope to explain what is involved in SEO, how to do it effectively, and debunk some common misconceptions along the way. If you're totally new to SEO, then this guide should explain how to begin the process for your own site, and if you happen to already know a lot about how to optimise your site, then with any luck, this article will contain a few gems that you never knew.
Choosing Your Keywords
I'll make the assumption that you already have a site, and you wish to optimise it, and the first step is to identify what terms you want to, and should be, found with. You probably already have a rough idea, but more than likely you're either too ambitious, or not ambitious enough. One useful tool that helps find keywords on your site is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can use it to either generate some new keywords from some you type in, or extract keywords from an existing web page and work from there. The problem with the latter part of this tool is you have to analyse your site page by page, so it's not particularly good to use on large sites you already have, but for small sites and optimising only a few pages, it's very useful indeed. On the whole this tool is very handy, as it does give you keywords and combinations which you might not have though of before, although the phrases it renders are aimed primarily at AdWords users. Another tool is Wordtracker, but to use this you have to sign up. They offer a 7-day trial, after which you'll need to pay, so if you're on a budget, you should use the Google tool.
Generate Keyphrases
First, you should organise your keywords into keyphrases. Now, it's unlikely that you will be able to fit more than 2 or 3 of your chosen words into any phrase, but that's good, you want that. While you're building these keyphrases together, you should try to think what people will actually be typing into the search engines. For example, if you had a computer repair company in London that specialised in removing viruses, the people you are targeting will be using search phrases like these:
Try to envisage what sort of people you want to come to your website, and imagine what sort of scenarios might lead them to look for someone like you. Now have a think about how they might phrase their search words. The webstats I have for my own site show that on average, 4 words are used in a given search to find me, and this does seem to be about the average for most online searches, so you should try to create keyphrases around about this number of words, give or take one or two words.
Now, at this point it is important not to get too hung up on these phrases to the point that you become blinkered. These phrases are just the start of the ongoing SEO process, and will change over time.
Putting Your Keyphrases To Use
OK, so you've got your list of phrases, now you just need to use them in your site. One mistake that is made by people with little or no experience of web development is that of trying to optimise your homepage for each and every keyword, keyphrase and more. In the real world, this is just neither possible or helpful. It's actually a lot better to spread your phrases about several pages. This has two advantages:
Placement of keyphrases is key. Pick the most important one for the page you are optimising and try to work it into the <title> tag of the page and an <h1> heading. The contents of these tags score highly with the most popular search engines, and a visitor can quickly determine if the page is what they actually searched for. Also, some engines, like Google, use the title of your page as the title it displays in the search results.
For the rest of the page, use the other heading levels (<h2> - <h6>) to break content into structured blocks. This has a few benefits:
Lastly, read through your text, and decide where emphasis should be added to any part of a sentence in your paragraph text, and mark them up appropriately with <strong> and <em> tags. Avoid the <b> and <i> tags if you can, as these have less of a meaning for search engines than their newer counterparts. Marking text up in this way does not have a tremendous effect, but it has been shown to give a bit more weight to words in your page.
One thing to watch out for is keyword density. Obviously, you should use the keyphrases more than once on a page. What you should avoid is using them too much, as these can be deemed as spam. A happy medium to aim for is a ratio of around about 1:10 for your keyphrases to regular text.
Give Meaning to Your Content
Another little-known trick for adding a few extra precious words to your page is the use of <abbr> and <acronym> tags. These are used to mark up abbreviations and acronyms respectively, which means that you can use them as you wish throughout your code. For example:
Search engines treat them as the full amount of text, and have a more relaxed attitude to how many times you can use them without being penalised for keyword stuffing. For example, I write articles detailing code excerpts in PHP, and often have to use the term PHP in the page. If I used the full meaning of this acronym (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, yes, it's a recursive acronym, a programmers idea of a joke!) each time, not only would the reader be put off a little, but the search engines would think I was trying to stuff my page with the words "Hypertext Preprocessor". Using the acronym and abbreviation tags also benefits those who've never heard of the given term before, as the popular browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Konqueror) display the full meaning in a tooltip when the cursor is hovered over them.
Meta Tags
I've left the meta tags until last, as increasingly they are becoming used less and less by search engines to determine what content the page has. In the early days of search engines, meta tags were all that was used to determine page content, but people soon realised that you could just stuff the meta tags with whatever happened to be popular at the time and the search engines would put your pages in the results. Over time, search engines have become less reliant on meta tags, and instead focus on what content the page actually has. Basically, you shouldn't worry if you don't have them, but if you do include them, try to keep them accurate to what text is actually on the page.
Incorporating Keywords Into Filenames
This area has had little study, but what there has been shows that putting keywords and phrases into the names of files on your site can help give a bit more weighting to your page for those chosen keywords and phrases. As there is no harm in doing this, but some benefit to be had of doing it, then there is no good reason why you shouldn't do it.
Hyphens or Underscores, That is the Question
There is one popular school of thought out at the moment that says hyphens are better than underscores for separating words in a filename. So, of the next two examples, it is believed the first is better:
While this used to be the case years ago, it is not true any more. The reason behind this thinking was that as a hypen was used by search engines to pick results that did not contain a particular word, search engines would ignore them in filenames, treating them as if they were spaces, while underscores could be searched for as literal characters.
Search engines such as Google now treat underscores both as spaces and the literal underscore character. A quick search on Google for "php mysql result" and "php mysql_result" will show this. The top page is always from www.php.net. The results do differ for each search, as without the underscore used in the search, Google allows the words to be very far apart in the page. Searching again for "php mysql NEAR result" renders different results, but they come closer to the search with the underscore. What this indicates, if anything, is that the underscore is treated as a space by search engine spiders, so it will not matter whether you use hyphens or underscores.
The Right Image
Finally, alternate text for images. This is quite underrated, but very effective. Not only does it offer a method of describing the image for blind visitors, or those who turn off images in their browser settings, but search engines use it too. Obviously, you should avoid lengthy descriptions, as these could be deemed as spam, but you should be descriptive about the image, explaining what is in it, so that even with images turned off, people still get an idea of the content in question.
Dynamic URL's
I would just like to debunk another popular myth while I'm about it. It's been said that dynamic URL's (such as article.php?id=0123456789) are extremely bad for SEO. If this is true, someone should maybe tell the search engines, as they don't seem to have any trouble at all! How often have you searched for an answer on a particularly difficult computer problem, only to find the solution in a forum that uses these very same dynamic URL's. Whilst it may have been the case at one time, it most certainly is no problem now, and the only reason to use static pages or configure the server to rewrite your URL's is to get that little bit extra weight from keywords in the filename, which as I've mentioned before, doesn't make a dramatic difference overall.
Style Matters
As soon as search engines began ignoring meta tags and looking at page content, tricksters have been thinking up ever more ingenious ways to con them. One particular trick is to fill the page with dozens upon dozens of keywords and phrases unrelated to the actual page, and then hide them all from the visitor by using stylesheets to either hide the text, shrink it to impossible to read levels, or make it the same colour as the background. Google however, always at the forefront of search engine innovation, is able to recognise these tricks, and marks down any such pages it finds employing these tactics.
However, it is often all too easy for the unsuspecting designer to commit such a faux pas themselves, without even realising it at all. Consider a page that relies heavily on dark background images to make the page look perfect. Now, the text to go on this needs to be a light colour, to stand out, so it's set to white in the stylesheets, and the design process stops. Now, Google comes along, and having no idea what colour the image, see's white text on a default background, the default colour being white! Bad move, but not something that cannot be fixed. By changing the background colour to one of the dark colours used by the image, you make sure that Google can see your content as intended, and because the image is in place, the visitor see's that instead. This has the added benefit that those users who turn off images in their browser are also able to now read the text, whereas they would be hard pressed to read it before.
Accessibility Helps
Quite often accessibility and SEO go hand in hand, and as accessibility is a legal requirement, it can't hurt to keep it in mind when going through the optimisation process.
One of the first steps here is to view your site in a text only browser, and ask yourself these questions:
By using these points, you can cover the basics of accessibility and at the same time, you'll be benefiting your site with regards to the search engines as well. You see, a search engine is like a very simple text browser. It can get some information about colours, and a little from filenames, but the bulk of it comes from the text. If you get this right, and use semantic tags in the right places, then you're off to a good start.
Semantics
What do I mean by semantic tags? It's akin to using a flat-headed screwdriver as a chisel. Yes, it is possible, but it doesn't do a very good job, and at some point in the future, something is going to break. So, look at all the places you've styled text for a heading; are you actually using heading tags? All that italic text, have you marked it up with <em> tags, or wrapped it in <span class="style1"> tags instead? Are paragraphs inside <p> tags or <div> tags? That nice list you have, with image bullets, are you using <ul> and <li> tags, or is it all done with <img> and <span> tags? By making sure that you are using the right tags in the right places, you are killing two birds with one stone, which is never a bad thing.
Validate Your Pages
Once you've got your code to this stage, it's worth putting your site through the W3C validators. There are two you should use, the XHTML (or HTML for older sites) validator and the CSS one. Assuming all is good, you should get a page sprinkled with green headings informing you it passed and the code to insert into your page that adds the pass badge for that test. If not, then you will have to correct the errors and test again. Unfortunately, this test only works on a page by page basis, so you will need to test each page on your site.
The Theory of Relativity
OK, time to bust another myth. It's believed by some that absolute links fare better than relative ones on a site, but this is about as far from the truth ass possible. I'm not entirely sure where this myth comes from, but there almost certainly is nothing to it if there was, then nearly all the sites around would be using absolute links, rather than relative ones which seems to be the choice now. Also, the domain that the site resides on is not taken into account at this point, as the search engine already knows it, so all relative links automatically assume this.
How to Get People to Link to You
There are two types of links that people will have to you. The first is bookmarks, and you can only get people to bookmark you and come back through good content. The second type of link is from other sites to yours. These are the most valuable, as they can potentially bring in incredible numbers of people. I'm going to go through several very effective ways of getting people to link to you, all of them completely legitimate.
Reciprocal Links
The first way, which is suggested by most SEO guides is to use a reciprocal link system. Basically, this means you try to find websites which are in similar but non-competing fields, or sites that offer complimentary services, and talk to them about getting links to each other. This is a lot of work, and requests to much larger organisations may not work, but when you get these sorts of links, they are worth their weight in gold, as people visiting their site are highly likely to visit yours and be interested in your offerings.
Write Articles and Join Forums
Another way to get links, which is particularly good if you are knowledgeable about a particular subject, and your site is about the same thing, is to sign up to a forum. If you regularly answer questions posed by people, and answer them well, you will have people actively search for you. Also, most forums allow you to create a custom signature, in which you can add a link back to your own site. Not only does this make it easier for people to find you, but it also boosts your rankings, as most forums are indexed by search engines. This method also applies to mailing lists, as they are often archived online, and sometimes under more than one domain, so search engines can really get their teeth stuck in. I've recently had a bit more free time in which to do this, and over just a few days of being part of a forum, I've seen visits to my site nearly double. The important thing to remember though is, if you start this, it should be with the intention of keeping it up, as your presence on forums and mailing lists can be just as important as having a website.
Social Networking
Some SEO experts will recommend social networking as a way to get your name and web address out there among the masses. This may work in some cases, but from what I've seen and been told by people who've tried it, it's not hugely successful. Firstly, being part of a social network can require more time than making posts on a forum, or replying to a few emails on a mailing list, and secondly, it is very hard to find a social network which is suited to your site. LinkedIn seems to be a good choice for experts and business people, but isn't necessarily suited to an online shop. Facebook and Myspace are two other social networks whose name gets bandied about, but I think these have as much use with regards to SEO as a chocolate spoon. Occasionally they can be used to create groups of like minded individuals, which would be your visitor base, but this does require a lot of careful thinking, and is something more suited to a marketing campaign than search engine optimisation.
Keep People Interested
It's all very well attracting dozens or hundreds of visitors to your site each day, but if you can't keep them coming back, you're doing something wrong. One way to make them come back is to update and add content regularly. Blogs can be quite good at this, but it tends to be only the really interesting blogs, or particularly specialist ones that get return visitors. Another good way is to create articles for your site. For example, a personal website could have a regularly updated portfolio, whilst a site based on web technologies could add short articles as new developments happen in the field. Be careful with blogs though, as once you start, it looks quite bad to the visitors you do have if you stop, so if you start one, do it with the intention of keeping it up!
Be Social
You could also add a social element to your site, encouraging visitors to submit things, such as images, or allowing them to reply to blog entries or articles. By adding this into the mix, you are diversifying your content, and more people will be drawn to your site to discuss and share things.
Don't Scare them Away
The other part of keeping visitors is avoiding anything that is going to annoy them. So, making sites with any sort of message that says "This site is best viewed on..." is not a great start. Try to make your site platform agnostic. It's quite easy to do, provided you have developers who know what they are doing. JavaScript is usually the main offender, but support for that is at a level where it's easy to develop powerful applications that work on most browsers. Take Facebook for example. The entire site is an AJAX driven monster, but it still works on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror and others. Also, don't forget, if some people aren't going to be able to see the content of your site unless they use browser "X", then chances are, the search engines are going to miss seeing it all as well.
Popups are another good way to make people hate you. In the good old days, popups used to be in new browser windows, which would get in the way of everything. Along came popup blockers, which have managed to eliminate this kind of popup. Unfortunately, ever one step ahead, the advertisers are moving towards a trend of using inline popups. These are a nuisance, and disliked by most people, and they have, on occasion, been known to make visitors look elsewhere, for a site that doesn't use them.
Break Up Large Areas of Content
Web pages that run into many, many screens of content are also not a good thing, unless it happens to be a technical specification, or your site's terms and conditions. If you have pages that will span to many screens, think about breaking it up into several pages, each focusing on a particular sub-topic. As well as making sure visitors aren't intimidated by large amounts of content, with a good visitor tracking system, you can see exactly which sub-topics are most popular, and tweak the areas that aren't doing so well. Which brings me to my next topic:
Tracking Your Visitors
A good visitor tracking system will tell you almost everything you need to know about your visitors. This site is using something I've developed myself, which tracks everything from the dates and times visited, right up to what version of Flash they are using (which is something I've not seen in any other visitor tracking system.)
If your tracking system is any good, it will let you know what times and days your site is most busy, and which pages are most popular. It should let you know how many bounces (where a visitor comes in and only views the one page) you are getting and on what pages. Using these statistics, you can tweak the less successful pages so that they operate more effectively.
Another essential function your tracking system should offer is the ability to gather the search terms that people have found your site with, and which search engines people use to find you. This sort of information is all available through the referrer headings, and will often yield some surprising results. For example, I've found that a could have people have been directed to my site from Google results for a search term about lost cab drivers, all because I had one blog entry about a lost cab driver! Obviously I was not trying to target this visitor, but Google had indexed what I wrote, every word of it, and offered it up for both searches!
What To Avoid
There are plenty of things to avoid when it comes to SEO, such as those infamous spam emails claiming they will get you to the top spot within hours. These are, without a doubt, scams. SEO is not an exact science, and there are no guarantees, so any service making such claims is best avoided. Any good SEO firm will tell you this. Not only can these nasty companies con you out of money, but they can also lead to your site being blacklisted by the search engines for using nefarious tactics.
Perceived Link Farms
One other thing to avoid is a links page on your site. These seem to be a bit of a throwback from the good old days, when people had little or no idea about how the Web worked, so approached it like a book, with pages of content and an appendix of links tacked on the back. The problem with links pages, is that they appear to be quite similar to link farms, and search engines look very poorly upon these.
Going Nowhere Fast
One thing that can really annoy people, and cause problems with searches, is dead links. These usually occur when you've updated your site, and removed or renamed pages. The best way to deal with these links is to set up a proper 404 redirect for your site. Usually, these will be fairly static pages informing the user that the page no longer exists. There is nothing stopping you, however, from making it a bit more intuitive. For example, I recently worked on redeveloping a site from Coldfusion into PHP. Obviously, all of the pages written in Coldfusion no longer existed, but a quick change of the 404 error page, and I was able to redirect all the visitors.
Don't Make a Splash
This again can be represented by the book analogy. Up until quite recently, companies spent a lot of time and money on splash pages, which were all singing and dancing multimedia sensations. The companies thought this was a great idea, as the home page was the first page the visitor saw, right? Nope, totally wrong. Thanks to search engines, the first page a visitor sees on your site could be absolutely any page at all, which makes the idea of a splash page quite redundant. The only time a splash page can be used with any guarantee of success is for a microsite whose URL is only published offline so that a search engine never indexes it.
Other Points to Consider
If you know a bit about SEO, you will probably have heard about page rank. If you have, you can now forget all you know about it, because the simple truth is that the page rank you see means nothing. Google releases its page rank for a site only a few times a year, so in truth, your page rank could fluctuate quite a bit of the period of a year, and yet seem to change by only 1 or 2 in the published figures. Also, higher page ranks are normally only found in large heavy-traffic websites, which have literally millions of visitors a day. Your site will probably not have this level of traffic, but could be filling such a niche, that you are getting more visitors than you might ever expect, and yet still have a very low page rank. The point is not to get too hung up on this, as in reality, it means little unless compared with a like-for-like site. Instead, focus on your current volume of visitors and match these against your projected expectations. Webstats are particularly useful in this respect.
Lastly, you should remember that pay-per-click is not SEO. It is related in so much as it is a service offered by search engines, but, as is revealed in the name, you pay for your visitors. Essentially it is a modern targeted advertising tool, and you should not rely on it for getting visitors to your site. Whole books have been written on pay-per-click, so I won't go into the semantics here, but you should be relying on natural searches instead of paying people to look at your site.
Conclusion
Hopefully this has and will help you get those higher search results that you wanted. SEO is a fine art rather than a science, and as such, it is constantly evolving all the time, changing with the way people use and abuse search engines. If you found this article helpful, you may be interested in SEO Upkeep, which shows some of the ways you can monitor and tweak your optimisations to ensure your site is performing consistently. If you have any comments about this article, please feel free to email me or use the contact section of the website to contact me.
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