Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Does Backlink Text Matter?
Yes it does. There are some websites which will come up high in searches for a keyword that is not even on their website -not in any page titles, headings or body text. The reason this happens is because the website has many other websites linking to it using that particular keyword in the link text.
For example, if everyone who linked to this blog did so using the following as the link text;
<a href="http://www.seo4all.co.uk/blog/">Yahoo Stats</a>
then over time you would find that this site would come up relatively high if someone put the phrase “Yahoo stats” into Google despite that phrase, as far as I recall, not being anywhere on this website.
Consequently, if you have any input when other websites link to your site do think carefully about what you want the link text to be and use this as an opportunity to use the types of phrases you feel searchers may put into Google to find your type of website.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Is the Web 99.9% Trivia?
Having watched the quite bizarre antics tonight on Celebrity Big Brother after Davina entered the house in disguise, I quite fancied reading a psychologist’s thoughts on it. However any Google search I did brought up results from 2005, 2007 but nothing current, so much for relevancy in search results! I tried a” latest” type Google search but found nothing and then when I searched using the search terms CBB or psychology in Twitter there were just loads of “I love davina” type messages. The only semi serious tweet I found was from Ben Shepherd the daytime TV presenter who said that last night’s/tonight’s CBB was very Animal Farm and sinister.
If anyone knows of a good online write up on this year’s CBB by a psychologist then do let me know.
Using Twitter, Forums etc In Internet Marketing
How Twitter etc can help you market your website.
It increases brand awareness and improves customer relations if customers find they can get an instant response to queries.
If you look at Google Analytics for your website a quick look at the traffic source will soon confirm to you how many visits come from Twitter, forums etc. Many people feel that forum and blog comments are of no use in promoting your website as most links are nofollow however a quick look at your analytics will soon show you that forums, Twitter and blog comments are all very valuable at driving appropriate traffic to your website with a low bounce rate. People who come to your website from forums, Twitter etc are visiting because they already know a little about you so they are much more likely to stay on your website and visit a number of pages and so you should have a low bounce rate for these types of visitors. Forum and blog comments may not provide you with an incoming link but used well they can drive good traffic to your website.
To use social media to promote your website spend a week promoting your business on Twitter and join an appropriate forum and post several times a day. Try and have a couple of days promoting your products, then a couple of days promoting, let’s say, your after sales care, then try future business developments. Watch your Analytics and monitor the following;
Traffic, has it increased? Which of your topics created the most traffic? Did any one topic cause a higher bounce rate than others? Which topic brought most unique visitors to your website?
Traffic Source - which of the websites brought you most visitors, Twitter etc or forum posts? Which other websites are picking up on your Twitters etc and driving traffic to your website? Which visitor sources are creating the lowest bounce rates?
Make sure that when you receive enquiries or make sales that you always ask how the person heard about you. This way you will know which activities produce the best conversions.
Set up analytics on your Digg, Twitter etc buttons on your website, that way you can trace just who is bookmarking you.
Loyalty and time spent on your website - which traffic source is sending visitors who spend a lot of time on your website and who return often?
One of the keys uses of social media is to increase brand awareness so check in Analytics what keywords are used in searches to find your website. I, for example have noticed that I get a lot of traffic from the search term “gill seo” which shows that my local business networking is obviously effective. When you see what keywords and phrases are bringing people to your website who hang around then focus on building those keywords and phrases into your content so that you become solidly associated with those phrases.
Check your Backlinks regularly in webmaster tools to see whether the particular page of your website that you have been promoting is being linked to and by whom. Then go to those pages that have linked to you and promote them yourself using Twitter, Digg etc.
Use social media to experiment with marketing ideas. It is fast and allows you to move quickly with any current trends. Always remember however to use analytics to see what works best for you.
Duplicate Content
This is a summary of Google’s guidelines on duplicate content, for more information search the rest of the SEO Blog.
Examples of duplicate content includes:
Duplicate pages for mobile devices
E-commerce items available via multiple URLs
Printer-only versions of web pages
Multiple pages with mostly identical content
In search results Google wants to show pages with different information, which is why Google can end up dropping your page from its SERPs if it appears duplicated.
To avoid problems with duplicate content Google suggests the following.
Use 301 redirection if you have re-organised the pages in your website so that the old URL redirects to the new version. Hopefully the pageranking will also transfer however my experience is that this can take some considerable time and in some cases the PR just does not transfer so think carefully if you decide to restructure your website. 301 redirects are carried out in your .htaccess file.
Have consistent linking within your website. If you use the link http://www.site.co.uk/page/ then use that throughout your site, ie do not use http://www.site.co.uk/page and http://www.site.co.uk/page/index.htm to all direct to the same page.
Use the correct domain type ie if you are a UK company use .co.uk not .com.
If you syndicate your articles ensure that each website showing your content includes a link back to your original article and ask for a noindex meta tag so that search engines do not index the syndicated version of the article.
Use Webmaster Tools to advise your preferred domain for indexing, ie the www. or the non www.
If you have some text or legal notice on many pages of your website then just put the full article/notice on one page only and put a link on all of the other pages.
If you are setting up a new page on your website put noindex in the meta tags until the page has content on it.
Google says,
Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can’t crawl pages with duplicate content, they can’t automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel=”canonical” link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.
My post on rel=canonical
If for some reason your website is removed from the SERPs check in webmaster tools as to why, then make changes to the site and submit the website to Google for reconsideration.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Twitter Statistics - Does Twitter Have a Future?
Robert J. Moore has written an excellent report relating to statistics he has collected regarding use of Twitter. A summary of the statistics is;
There were 75 million Twitter accounts at the end of 2009.
The monthly rate of new user accounts is currently around 6.2 million new accounts per month (2-3 per second) - about 20% below July’s peak rate.
25% of accounts have no followers
About 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet.
About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times so only 20% are active Tweeters.
His conclusions are;
Twitter is still growing but the rate of new user signups has dropped from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts.
The percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months.
Twitter users who stay on the system after their first week as members show a high level of loyalty and keep Tweeting.
Those users who stay become more active over time.
With 75 million total accounts, and active users of around 20% still leaves around 15 million very active Tweeters.
Twitter recently backtracked and announced that it was not going to sell off this year as predicted but thatit was going to wait a couple of years and it is speculated that it will introduce advertising. I have commented previously on this and said that my feeling is that due to the fickle nature of the internet and its users they may be making the wrong decision. In 2 years time who know whether Twitter is still popular, something else could well have become the flavour of the month/year. No doubt Twitter is very important for social marketing but it does have some limitations which do need to be addressed.
If like me you manage a number of Twitter acounts for different businesses, it is extremely annoying to have to keep signing in and out of different accounts in order to tweet relevantly. Why do they not have a multiple account facility?
If ,for whatever reason, you wish to change your Twitter user name you can indeed do that without losing your tweets, followers etc but the main thing you CANNOT do is have your previous name redirected to your new name despite the fact that Twitter obviously knows both accounts are in fact the same. If you have built up pagerank for your old name then this is instantly lost as I found out! I have another post on Changing Twitter names.
Let’s hope they remedy these factors before another online system takes over their popularity and Twitter ends up worth tuppence ha’penny in 2 years time.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Website Design Checklist V - Using Keywords
Once you have worked out your keywords or phrases for each page ensure you have done the following.
Have I used my keywords properly?
Yes if you have;
1. Put your Keywords for that page at the BEGINNING the title of the page and have removed the word HOME from the title of the home page. Unless say you are an interior designer that word does not help your SEO one bit!
2. Put your Keywords for that page in the main heading (h1) for that page.
3. Used your Keywords for that page in Alt attributes for any images on the page.
4. Used your Keywords for that page in anchor text of internal links pointing to that page.
5. Made your page’s Keywords bold and italic within the page content a few times. Don’t overdo it.
6. Used your page Keywords the the beginning and end of the body text.
7. Used Keywords in the folder names leading to your page instead of generics like subpages etc.
8. Used Keywords in the URL for your page.
Website Design Checklist IV - Structure
1. Does your website have a robots.txt file that correctly limits the access of search engine robots to say login, search results pages etc. Have you checked the robots.txt file using Google Webmaster Tools. Ensure that any pages you do not want index have the meta tag noindex.
2. How often do you update the website content? Try to update at least a part of the website on a weekly basis, diary this to ensure weeks do not pass without the website’s content being updated.
3. How many pages are there on your website, the more pages of useful updated content the better. Visitors and search engines robots will keep coming back for more.
4. Have you constructed a sitemap and submitted it to Google via Webmaster Tools. Check with Webmaster Tools that there are no problems with the sitemap and remedy any errors.
5. Does your website have either a search facility or, a user as opposed to search engine, sitemap?
6. Is it easy for visitors to contact you, do you have full contact details on your website offering a number of options eg online form, direct email, telephone number, address etc. Remember that all businesses in the UK are obliged to provide full contact details on their website. Providing contact details will help you appear in local searches.
7. If necessary does your website have details of your privacy policy, terms and conditions of business etc.
8. Does your website have testimonials from clients, examples of your work etc to increease visitor trust.
9. Check that you are not duplicating the same content over several pages of your website, if so remove it, and check that you do not have multiple urls pointing to the same page.
10. Check your website’s page loading time under labs in Webmaster Tools, if it is too slow take measures to decrease the load speed by compressing images, CSS etc and using gzip compression if allowed by your server.
11. Look at the popularity of your website pages, not just the home page. If there are few links to inner pages try and build links to those pages.
12. Ensure that your website has links to any social media websites you participate in for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and have icons that allow individual pages to be notified to Digg or saved as bookmarks etc.
There are other posts on this blog and our main SEO4all website dealing with many of these issues.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Web Design Checklist III - Content
Content
- Content should be UNIQUE, useful and grammatically correct.
- Amount of content - at the barest minumum you need to have at least 300 words per page.
- If you have a lot of textual messages in graphics do you have a textual equivalent? Search engines and screen readers for people with sight problems cannot read the words within graphics.
- Do all graphics have alt and title attributes completed with useful descriptions but with no keyword stuffing.
- Ensure content is updated to take into account any seasonality in searches.
- Avoid using stop words where more useful words (possibly keywords) can be used instead.
- Ensure your content contains the types of phrases that people searching for your type of product might put into a search engine.
- As Google has now introduced its Answer Highlighting ensure that your website's content includes the types of questions searchers may put into search engines AND the answer.
- Check your website's content regularly to ensure a hacker has not inserted text or links.
- Do not have hidden content.
- Do not overuse keywords, no one keyword should have a density of more than 8% of the page. Use Webmaster Tools to see which words occur most frequently on your website and if these are not the words you wish then rewrite your copy.
Web Design Checklist II - Website Architecture
Website Architecture
When constructing your website bear in mind the following points and check your website out to ensure it complies with all disability requirements and that it is constructed well so that it renders well in different browsers and is easily indexed by search engines.- URL structure - do the urls use sessionids etc or are they search engine friendly, see Search Engine Friendly URLs;
- HTML structure - make sure pages are constructed using divs not tables. Tables are only used now for tabulated data. Do not use frames, avoid using Flash etc, see Search Engine Friendly Websites;
- Use external CSS and JS files;
- Navigation - is it the same on every page and is it clear. Every page on your website should be no more than 2 clicks from the home page.
- Website accessibility - test your website so that it complies with all disability and accessibilty requirements, see SEO Tools;
- Use of rel=canonical, see Using rel=canonical;
- Coding, check your HTML and CSS is compliant, see Website Tools;
Web Design Checklist I - Domains
Choosing Your Domain
1. Domain age - older domains have more credence as spamming websites are normally short-lived so older more longstanding domains are indexed better. Likewise if there is less than a year left until you need to re-register the domain consider renewing it immediately;
2. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous - serious businesses would not leave their information hidden to the public;
3. Type of domain - in this country you will find that .co.uk domains are indexed faster than .com so unless you have an international business buy a .co.uk domain.;
4. Domain past owners - if you are buying a “second hand” domain check very carefully as to how many previous owners there have been, how often did the owner change, where was the domain hosted, what business was carried out on the domain. You do not want your website to gain the poor reputation of a business previously hosted on the domain.
5. Keywords in the domain - try and have at least one keyword in the domain, separate any words using hyphens as search engines will see the domain as being made up of separate words as opposed to one long meaningless string. If you do use hyphens avoid having more than 1 or 2 in the domain name.
