Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Google’s Free Tools for Online Success

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Google’s Free Tools for Search Engine Optimisation and Profit

By now, if you didn’t know who or what Google is you would have to have been living under a rock!

Not only is it the most popular search engine on the planet, but what many people don’t realise is that Google provides an array of free user-friendly tools it can turn your online presence into a money making success!

For instance, did you know you can make money directly from Google Maps?
Ah..now I have your attention.! We’ll get to that further in this post, but for now I’d like to share with you some of Google’s great tools and how they can help your online business prosper.

To access most of Google’s tools you will first need to create a free Google user account. Simply go to Google.com and in the right hand corner you will see a menu appear with iGoogle | Search Settings | Sign In. Click the ‘Sign In’ link and click on Create an Account Now.

One you have set up your account and signed in, you can then go back to that same menu in the top corner and click once on Settings and then go down the menu to Google Account Settings.
This is your own membership area where you can add a number of great Google Webmaster Tools, such as custom Google Maps, Add your business to Google Local Business, Customize your Google browsing screen with iGoogle, and manage your Gmail account, which are just some of the features Google provides.

I will go through each of the basic tools shortly, but firstly lets get to the serious stuff, how to use Google to optimise your website and get you to the top of the search engines for fame and fortune!…

Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s webmaster tools rock! Not only can they your new website to the front page of Google in a day, but they also allow you to see exactly what your competitors are up to so you can outrank them.
Google Webmaster Tools provide you with the following solutions:

Get Google’s view of your site and diagnose problems

See how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems we’re having accessing it.

Discover your link and query traffic

View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with new link reporting tools. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.

Share information about your site

Tell us about your pages with Sitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let us know how you would like the URLs we index to appear.
Adding a sitemap to your website is one of the quickest ways to get a good listing on the search engines as they use this information to
determine the structure of your website and the relevance in where your website listing belongs. Ideally both a html sitemap and an XML sitemap should be added to your website, and the xml sitemap submitted to your Google webmaster account. Once submitted it can take just a couple of hours to see a great result. For larger websites make sure your web developer installs a sitemap generator which will automatically resubmit the sitemap each time new content is added to the website.

Google’s webmaster tools also can provide information about what people are searching for and how they found your website through different keywords and key phrases. You can even compare pages by the relevance of popularity, allowing you to review these results and tweak your website for better results.

Google Trends
Google Trends is a handy tool if you are a big fan of promoting yourself through social networks, or run a news blog. Google Trends shows you the hot topics being shared on the web that particular day, allowing you to use this information and write articles about the hot topics, gaining new followers also interested in these topics.

Google Insights
But the really powerful tool for achieving maximum results on the search engines is Google Insights.
Google Insights lets you search the web for the most popular search terms either globally or by location, and will also show you the most popular similar search words people are searching for for a particular period of time. You can search Categories, Seasonality, Geographically and even compare key properties. This makes it so simple to ensure you have the best possible keywords throughout your website that people really want to search for. Use this information, submit your XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, and then finetune your keyword density and submit your website using SEO optimisation software, WebCEO. If done correctly you will get the top spots on the search engines! It’s no big secret, it’s just using the right technique and the right tools!

After all, Google provide all these great tools because they want your website on their search engine so they can make profit with Google Adwords.

Google Adwords
For those not familiar with it, Adwords has been Google’s ‘money-machine’, providing an online advertising system which allows you to create online advertisements and feature them on Google’s sponsored links and other websites using Google’s Adsense program.
Google Adwords is a pay-per-click service which allows you to set up your own advertising campaigns, targeting the exact audience you would like for your products. Be warned though, do your research first or setting up the advertisements incorrectly will see your advertising charges spiral quickly! Stay tuned…I will be doing a major post of successful Adwords campaign management in a future post very soon, which will show you how to actually beat the system and easily make more than you spend, without even needing your own product to sell!

Adsense
Adsense is a great service for those that want to make a little extra cash from their websites.
Adsense is the other end of Adwords, where you can place Adsense customers’ ads on your website. These ads are designed to reflect the content in your website, enticing people to click the advertisements, and when they do you make a profit from each click thru! Simple as that! It can also be very profitable if done well.
You simply sign up for an Adsense account through your Google account, go through a few simple steps which allow you to customize the colours, target content, size of the ads, etc and the system generates a small piece of code that you paste into your website page. You may need your web developer to do this for you if you are not familiar, but it seriously will only take them a couple of minutes.
It takes a few minutes for the script to become live, and from then on, you have a mini Google money making machine on your website!

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
As I have mentioned on a number of occasions, the key to your website achieving a top listing on the search engines is strongly due to great keywords. If you’re not sure about the best keywords for your website, Google have provided the perfect little helper, the Adwords Keyword tool, which allows you to enter gyour website, or the main keywords you think are best, and it will provide a list of alternative commonly searched keywords and key phrases to suit your website. The perfect tool to help you get ahead of your competitors websites! As the name suggests, it’s main purpose is also to help you get the best possible results in Adwords campaigns.

Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect allows you to stay in contact with friends through your website. Kind of like a mini Facebook! Once you sign up to Friend Connect you simply add the snippet of code into your webpage and as your friends sign up and add themselves, their avatar will appear on your page, making it easy to stay connected to them. This works great as a business tool as well, creating a business network with related clients/businesses.

You can also use the Google Friend Connect to integrate to Google Talk

Google Talk
Google Talk is Google’s own version of a chat app similar to MSN or iChat. again, you use your Google account, Friend Connect or Gmail account to subscribe and join friends up, allowing you to easily connect either via text, audio or video chat. You can also generate a Google Gadget to add into your webpage so people can simply start typing from your website and they can Live Chat with you. Great for attracting clients, especially if they are international. Saves on those phone calls!

Google Translate
Google offers a range of Language Tools, allowing you to easily translate your website into a number of languages without the hard work of having to actually do each page in a different language.
The benefits of this are obviously great for businesses such as tourism websites or other international relations are involved. The visitor can simply click a graphic and the website text will translate to their own language of choice.

Google Alerts
If you want to keep your ears open for information on a particular product, service, topic or business, Google has a nifty service called Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to simply set up alerts for particular keywords so when they appear, either in Google, either from a website, blog, or even Twitter, you will receive an email containing a link to that alert. Great way to track a particular industry or service, or even a news story.

Google Local Business Listing
Ever wondered how the business listings get up the top of Google’s listings next to that Google map? Well that my friends is a Google Local Business listing. To set up a Local Business Listing you obviously need a business, a physical location, and a phone (preferably next to your computer). Log in to your Google account and then click here and you will be prompted to enter your business details for the free listing. Once you have entered your details you will be prompted to enter a number on the screen, which Google will phone you with, to verify you are the actual business. Once verified you will soon appear in the Local Business section next to that map, if someone searches for a particular type of business in your local area. The key to getting a good listing in local business is to make sure when you provide a business description in your listing you add all the main keywords that people may search for for your product or service.

Google Blogs: Bloggger and Blogspot
A great way of spreading your business services and to gain new followers is to create a Blog. But without web development experience, this may be a bit daunting. Google come to the rescue again with their service, Blogger. Blogger is a simple easy to use, but very powerful, free online blogging system allowing you to set up your own blog in a matter of minutes. The great thing about Blogger is that once you get an understanding of the system you can easily customize it exactly as you would like, add extra plugins, set it up for search engine optimization, link it to Twitter, you name it! You can even add in a Google Adsense script so you can make $$$ for simply writing posts (like this one I am writing now!)

Feedburner
So once you have your blog up and running, you need to promote it. An easy way to do this is with Feedburner. Feedburner allows web blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and send them out to services such as Twitter and Facebook. This may be a little technical for those not familiar with any of the terms I have just mentioned in the previous sentence, but once you understand it, it can be very helpful in promoting your blog as it it allows your posts to be transferred to RSS feeds, which then can be picked up by other Blog sites.

Google Maps
Google Maps is one of the handiest and easiest ways to not only find a location online, but to also add a location map to your website. Again, using your Google account, you can sign in and enter your business details and create a map to add into your website with a handy bit of code provided by Google.
But did you know you can also use the Google Maps system to make money easily? Your Google Maps account allows you to make custom maps, so for instance if you have more than one business you can create a custom map with all those locations on the one map, even include your logo on each location, and then add into your website. You also have a choice to make this map Public, meaning that not only will it be seen on your website, but if someone is searching Google maps, they may find your business listings through Google Maps. So to make some money, simply sign yourself up with an affiliate based program such as Hotelclub, or Hotels Combined, and you can create maps listing all the properties for that area, giving them a description in the text window box and then your affiliate link for that particular hotel to the listing. So when someone finds your map listings and clicks on it and makes a booking, you receive a nice little commission for each booking. It’s not impossible to turn over a good weeks wage in a single day using this principal.

Google Mobile Device Webpage Translator
With more mobile devices now being used for the web, the changes are one day someone will want to find you using a mobile device.
without going to the expense of setting up a whole new mobile friendly website, the best solution is to have them view it through the Google Mobile option. This simply takes your existing website and restructures it into a mobile device format. It’s not always perfect, but better than nothing!
Failing that, tell your friend to get a better web-friendly phone!

For more on what Google is up to, visit the official Google blog. They always have something new happening!

Article by Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach
Devision Design are a leading web design and SEO company located on the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. Chris has built many of the Sunshine Coast and Whitsunday holiday accommodation websites, achieving top results on all major search engines with amny of the Google tools mentioned above. Chris also runs Web SEO Coach, a service providing personal training in SEO, turning beginners into professionals.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Turning $10 into a profitable and successful online business

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

If you have ever thought it would be great to start up your own online business but the only thing holding you back was having the cash to start it up, I’d like to share with you how you can do it for as little as $20, and with a little effort, turn it into a profitable success!

The easy way we do this is through Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing
You may or may not have heard of the term ‘affiliate marketing’ before, but basically it is when you advertise a product or sell for another company’s product through your website, and are rewarded in a commission for doing so.
Many major businesses, hotel accommodation and flight services in particular, have been operating this way for many years, but with the internet becoming an increasingly popular way to purchase products and services, online affiliate marketing has opened up the market so almost anyone can have a slice of the game!

To set yourself up to earn commission from internet marketing, basically you simply purchase a domain name or even set up a basic website and advertise products for companies on your website, and if someone buys through the advertisement or link on your webpage you make a commission on the sale.
This commission may be a couple of percent, or it could be up to 75% of the sale price. Either way, you are basically making money for almost doing nothing!
I say ‘almost’ because like any new business, you have to promote it or you won’t get the visitors, and without visitors you have no sales.
You would be surprised how many people I talk to that just think you set up a website and it becomes an instant money machine. Sorry, but it’s not that easy!
It does require a little bit of work and persistence at the start, which I will mention shortly.

So how does Affiliate Marketing work?
There are a number of forms of affiliate marketing. There is PPC (Pay Per Click ) where you are paid for the number of times that someone clicks on a text link that is promoted on your website. The most common example of this is Google’s Adsense /Adwords campaign.

The way this works is that the person wishing to advertise their product signs up with Google for the Adwords service, so when someone clicks on their link either on Google’s website or a website that has signed up to promote Google’s ads through their Adsense program, the person advertising pays for each click made. Google gets a share and the person advertising gets a share.
Depending on how you set up your webpage can depend on how many clicks the paid Google links receive, but done correctly it can be very profitable, and it is not uncommon to hear of people making hundreds of dollars a day just from Adsense clicks, though as I mentioned it does require the site to be well set up and also receiving plenty of traffic.

The other form of affiliate marketing is signing up for Affiliate programs that sell products or services through banner advertising or coded text links that are placed into your website, which can be tracked by the affiliate company and when someone clicks through and makes a purchase you are credited the commission for the sale. Unfortunately most instances you don’t receive payment for the click itself, so it can takes a few hundred clicks to make a sale, but the commission can also be quite rewarding and usually more profitable that Google Adsense. (Using both together can be even more rewarding!)

The products you can promote cover almost anything, from ebooks, holiday accommodation, flowers, lingerie, credit cards, gym gear, computers, adult products, ipods, web hosting…you name it!

Step 1: Sign up with Affiliate Companies
Simple sign up with one of the related affiliate companies such as:
Commission Junction
Clix Galore
Commission Monster
DGM Pro
Click Bank

There is no cost to sign up, however some require you have a website or at least a domain name, first, which is why the title of this article mentions it will cost you around $10.

Step 2: Set up a basic website
Purchase a hosting account through a reputable web hosting service such as Webcrowd, or Hostgator, which all give you a free domain name as well, for around $10 a month.

468x60e.gif

Make sure you choose your web name wisely and try if possible to relate it closely to the products you are selling.
For instance I have a couple of affiliate based websites, one is WhitsundayApartments.com.au, which selling Whitsunday Island holiday accommodation, and another is DreamLingerie.com.au, which as you guessed, sells lingerie.
I have others two, but these two are probably good examples as they both bring in quite good commissions. With Dream Lingerie, I receive 25% of everything sold through your affiliate link, and with the accommodation I receive around 8&, however usually the sales are bigger, and it’s not uncommon for someone to book a week or two accommodation at $300 a night, so if you do the math, it’s not bad pocket money for not having to do too much!

625x112.gif


The process of setting up a website using affiliate companies is actually quite simple.
As mentioned in Step 1, sign up with the affiliates that you think work best for your domain, and then once you are approved they provide the code to cut and paste into your website which links to the banners they provide, or the text links for the products.
Place them on your website where you think works best to attract people, and then of course test that the link works.

Step 3 – Promote your website
Unless you promote your website you probably will find it a little slow attracting visitors to the website, and without the visitors you won’t make the sales (or commissions)
So, when you set up your website, make sure you download a copy of some search Engine optimisation software , such as WebCEO, which will help you optimize and submit your website to the search engines. It will take a few weeks to see your website on the search engines so while you are waiting, a great way to get people coming immediately is by setting up a Twitter account or other social networks, and search for people that may be interested in your products. Post messages almost daily if you can, and mention your products so that you begin driving traffic to your website. You will soon find this creates a snowball effect and before you know it you have hundreds of people visiting your website every day.
My best marketing tool for DreamLingerie.com.au is the Twitter account I have for the site: twitter.com/fantasylingerie. every few days I submit new products. Each month the visitor numbers are growing, and so are the sales. I probably spend around 15 minutes of my time each day on each promoting them, so it literally is easy money, allowing you to work a ‘real’ job in the day as well.

If you would like to learn more about setting up an affiliate based website to promote extra income, contact me at Devision Design

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision and Web SEO Coach

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

The Magic Keyword Density Formula in SEO

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

A major success of any website or online advertising campaign is your search engine optimization (SEO). By researching the best keywords and ensuring you haven’t used them too much or too little is worked out by an easy, yet very effective formula:

Step 1: Firsty, count how many words you have on your page.
Step 2: Then, count up how many times you have used your keyword

Step 3: And then apply the following formula:

Your Keyword Density = ([key word count]) * 100 / (total word count]

So, for example if you have a 400 or so page or blog post about holiday accommodation, and you are optimizing it for ‘hotel’, then the total keyword count is 400, and the example of the word ‘hotel’ is 14, then:

Density of the word ‘hotel’ would equal (14 * 100) /400
So the keyword density for ‘hotel’ on that particular page is 3.5

Too much density and you can be caught out for spamming and be blacklisted from the search engines, and too little will get you nowhere at all to start with.

Now, depending on how you set up your navigation and internal page text links (this is linking from particular words or phrases which link to a related page) you can increase your overall density by using the same method throughout the entire website, which is more powerful than the density of just one single page of the site.

If your mathematics isn’t that great, and you really want to fine tune it perfectly, then I recommend using an SEO software package such as Web CEO to do the hard work for you. This easy to use software reviews your entire website and shows you exactly where you need to fine tune your site for the best results. Easy!

Keyword Density doesn’t just cover the visual text keywords. You can actually use the same principle mentioned above for your Alt Tags on your images, which appear in Google Images and a few other major search engines.

Try out this technique for yourself. You will be amazed how a quick optimization of your density followed by a resubmission to the search engines will quickly change your listing on the search engines.

And as I mentioned in a previous post on keyword density, make sure if you decide to link your website to another website in any way, that you either set up your page to tell the search engines not to follow other pages, or fully test the keyword density of the site you are linking to first. If their website does not relate directly to your keywords or they already have a poor density, or for that matter, a density that is too high, they may damage your own website. It is well worth spending the few minutes to check.

Article by Chris Bourke: Devision Design and Web SEO Coach

Tags: , , ,
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

The Importance of a Sitemap for your Website

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

So, you’ve had a great looking website designed, and hopefully your web developer has search engine optimised the website for the best possible results on the search engines. After all, what is the point in spending a pile of dollars on a nice looking site if no one can find it, right?

But sadly, while many websites have a lot of effort put into the look and functionality of the website, many website developers fail to finish it off with the essentials that play the most important role in ensuring you can be found easily on the search engines, and one of the most important (and often overlooking) is the HTML and XML Sitemaps.

There are a few types of sitemap:

HTML Sitemaps – This is usually just a link on the footer of every webpage that will point you to a page with all pages of the website listed, with links to these pages. The advantage of this is for people to find your pages easily, which is important especially in larger websites. It also plays a key role in helping search engines to trawl through your website quicker.

XML Sitemaps – The XML Sitemap cannot be seen through the main website through a browser, however hopefully your web developer or webmaster has created and uploaded this for your website as it is even more relevant than the standard HTML sitemap. The XML sitemap can be easily generated using specific software designed for this purpose.
Once the XML sitemap is created it should be uploaded to Google through their Google Webmaster Tools, which you will need to create an account for. You should also do the same for Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Siteexplorer for the best results on all the major search engines.

If you are making frequent changes to your website, or run an online shopping cart or directory, then it is important to ensure the sitemap is recreated every time these changes take place, and then your XML sitemap is resubmitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo to ensure your new pages or changes are updated.

At Devision Design, large websites have a special automatic Sitemap Generator added which allows the site owner or the team at Devision to simply push a button and the new HTML, XML and ROR Sitemaps be recreated and submitted to all the mentioned search engine Webmaster accounts, not only saving you a heap of time-consuming work, but also generating an immediate response from the search engines, so you can often see the new pages appear in the search engines in a matter of minutes.

So, if you are unsure about if your website had an XML Sitemap or an XML Sitemap generator, then I advise you to ask your web developer as you could be missing a lot of valuable visitors to your website through a poor search engine listing.

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach
We recommend Web Crowd Website Hosting Australia

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Site Promotion, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

The importance of Keyword Density on search engines

Monday, January 11th, 2010

When it comes to ensuring success on the search engines there are many important ingredients that need to go into the development of your website.

Most people are familiar with ensuring your website is well keyworded, but many do not realise the importance of ‘keyword density‘.

Adding too many keywords can see your website blacklisted for spamming, while not having enough specific keywords may not be strong enough to get you a mention at all.

Often you will notice that the highest ranking websites under most general search terms are the larger directory-based websites, while the smaller individual business websites are often following.

One of the main reasons larger websites outrank sites this way is due to the Keyword Density.

Keyword Density is quite simple to master when you know how it works…
Basically Keyword Density is the density of the priority keywords throughout the entire website. So for instance if you only have a three page website, then to get a high density you would need to use the main priority keywords that you would like to be found in the search engines very heavily throughout those three pages. The problem with this is that if you use the keyword too much you could be blacklisted!

But using the same keywords throughout a website with more pages provides a higher keyword density without overly using those keywords on each page, and the beauty of a larger website is that you can also use additional priority keywords throughout the website as well, so you have a multitude of popular search phrases throughout the website.

Where I live here on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, the main business trade is holiday accommodation. Being a very competitive market it is obviously important to ensure the accommodation websites that make it to the top have the best keyword density.

Having built a large number of Sunshine Coast accommodation websites over the past years, it was always a challenge to ensure they outrank their competitors, but with a good basic knowledge of how to correctly use keywords and keyword density it becomes quite easy once you know the correct technique.

However, there are many Sunshine Coast accommodation websites lately that are integrating the booking systems of other websites into their website’s navigation, which in theory makes it easier for them to accept bookings online. However the negative reaction by the search engines from this is that they are immediately diluting their keyword density of their own website and substituting it with the linked keywords that are found on the other website that is now integrated into their navigation. This means that if the linked website contains unrelated keywords, such as other accommodation locations (for instance, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, etc) then their density for Sunshine Coast accommodation immediately drops greatly, sending them sliding backwards down the search engine rankings ladder. Even worse, if their are replacing their own navigation with links to pages from another website then the results can be catastrophic, as the most important content of most websites, from a search engine’s perspective, is found in the top area of your web pages.

To check your own keyword density of your website I recommend a software package called Web CEO. Web CEO software allows you to review your keyword density yourself (as well as your competitors!) and allows you to change your density live yourself very easily. It will also show you if any websites directly linked into your navigation are damaging your keyword density or search engine listings.
Check out the software online at http://www.webceo.com

Using some basic techniques and knowledge of Keyword Density can get your website to the top spots in the search engines!

For a free Keyword Density report of your own website (or your competitors!) visit http://www.devision.com.au

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design Australia – Developers of the best ranking Sunshine Coast accommodation websites!

Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Website Development | Comments Off

Building a Search Engine Friendly website

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Building a Search Engine Friendly website

When it comes to building a website for your business there are many key factors you need to plan for first before developing your structure of the web site, including functionality, overall design and branding of the website, ease of use, loading time of the website, and much more. But the one thing many novice and even professional website designers fail on is the most critical aspect – search engine optimization. For those not familiar with search engine optimization (or ‘SEO’ for short), this is the part of your website that helps your site show up on the search engines when people type in either your business name, your products, services, etc, and in my views probably the most important aspect of any website, especially of you rely on your online presence to promote your business.

My own business, Devision, attracts around 85% of new business through the website. Forget Yellow Pages, forget PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing. Search Engine Optimization is king!

So if you’re planning on developing a new website either yourself or with a web design company, here are a few things you need to look at to create a search engine friendly website that will help your website to the top of the search engines:

Starting with a Good Domain name:
Having the right domain name can play a big part in the success of your listing on the search engines. For instance if you were selling Gifts for women and targeting Australian women, then the domain name ‘womensgifts.com.au’ would most likely get you to the top spot on the search engines with a little additional keywording added to the website. The name is a good length, easy to remember and it has two of the most popular searched key phrases – ‘women’ and ‘gifts’. Simple!
But what if your business name is long, such as ‘Stephens & Jones Lawyers’. Obviously ‘Stephensandjoneslawyers.com.au’ or even ‘stephensandjones.com.au’ is a mouthful and way to long for any relevance. Now some would go down the path of ‘sjl.com.au’ which is ok, but then there are no keywords in the name, making it difficult for the search engines. So probably the best choice would be ‘sjlawers.com.au’ or even ‘australianlawyers.com.au’ if you are attracting the entire Australian market place. That way if someone searches for ‘australian lawyers’ you should get top listing!

To search for available domain names visit http://devision.domainnameshop.com.au and you can search just about every combination available.

Review Your Competitors:
Before planning your own website it is a good plan to know your competition and see what they are doing to get to the top spot of the search engines. There are a few great software packages available that provide all the information on your competitors, including their keyword relevance, who they are linked to, who is linked to them, where they rank on all search engines globally and even the number of visitors they are attracting. If you want to bump them off their search engine perch, this is the place to start! My favourite software package is WebCEO. This easy to use package is designed for both the amateur or professional and not only does all of the above, but will also help you fine tune your own site to achieve great results. Click here for a free download of the software to get started.

Plan the Navigation:
Planning your navigation and setting it up correctly is very important. The search engines trawl through the pages of your website, picking up on keywords you may have included in your page names, and the content on those pages. So having your main navigation just right is essential. For example, If you were selling womens gifts and had a page on skin care, then a good page name would be womens-skin-care-gifts.html, or skin-care-women.html. Fill that page with content about women’s skin care, link to a few products and you have a very search engine friendly page!

Make sure your main navigation at the top of the page always links to your own internal pages and NEVER to an outside party as this can totally crush your search engine ranking, which is the first concern. The other concern is if the external site you are linked to goes offline or shuts down, you are left with missing page links, and the search engines penalize you hard for this, often sending you spiraling to the bottom of the search engines, which can take months to regain! Now without wanting to target a particular site (and no intended offence to the owners of the website), I need to show you an example, so have a look at http://www.coolumbaywatch.com
Apart from the homepage browser description header being over saturated with ‘Coolum Baywatch Beachside Resort Coolum Beach Sunshine Coast Queensland Australia’ (which will probably lose them brownie points!) move over the main navigation and you will find that almost half the pages go directly to another website. So this means that if the other website was to ever go offline the main website hosting that navigation would half half their content missing. If the site were to disappear completely they would probably need to pay someone to create the new pages which could be costly if they don’t have the master design files. On top of that, the search engines really don’t have as much to work with from the main website, greatly reducing their keyword density, and in effect, lowering their changes of a good page listing for their own site, but probably increasing the other companies website. So always keep your navigation linked to your OWN pages!

Set up your Graphics Correctly:
It is important to name and ‘Alt Tag’ your graphics correctly to increase your search engine ranking. Going back to gifts, if you were to name a product image ‘womens-hand-soap.jpg’ and place it on a page names womens-soap-products.html will probably do very well for your website. On top of that, create an Alt Tag (the text that appears when you move over an image in your browser) with a small description such as ‘Soap gifts for women’. and this will work beautifully. Make sure your images always load fast, and try and star away from Flash navigation..either use text or graphic navigation as it can be tagged more successfully, not to mention much easier to update!

Internal Links:
To help the search engines list your website correctly under the right categories there is a simple way to give them a little hand. On your homepage (or internal pages as well) amongst the main body of text, simply add a few links to your other pages. But don’t just add any text to any page – If you have a page called womens-soap-products.html, then on your homepage make sure you have the words ‘womens soap products’ amongst the text in a sentence and link that to the page. That way when the search engines visit your website they can not only trawl through your website much faster, but also have instance keyword relevance and can identify exactly where you should be listed on their engines. As you add new products, add some text changes and link them. The search engines love sites that are regularly refreshed or updated. But remember not to overdue it! 8 or 9 links at the most per page is ample.

Write Search-Engine-Friendly Content:
As I partly mentioned above, writing good copy for your website is very important. Make sure the first and last paragraphs contain the important keywords that you would like to be found under. But don’t write it like you are repeating your keywords constantly. You want humans as well as search engines to read the website! Just casually slip a few of your keywords found from your WebCEO search tools into your website and then run the software and it will provide you with a report on whether your keyword density is just right.

Search Engine Friendly Keywording and Tagging your website:
Once you have all the navigation, text and images in place, you then need to do the final piece to a great search engine friendly website – Adding the keyword and description tags.
Now this sounds technical if you don’t know what they are, but basically it is the initial script that the search engines use to add your site to their directories, and it is the text description that appears when you do a search for something, so getting this just right is very important.
To see if your website is set up correctly go to your browser menu and look for ‘View Source Code’ and it will show you the HTML breakdown that the search engines see.

In the top area of your page (the head tag) you should see something like the following script:

seo-script.jpg

If you don’t see a script like this one above then chances are your web site is not yet search engine optimized. If you are are familiar with website design already you can add the script in your own web editing software, or alternatively WebCEO has the tools to do it for you.

Submit your Website:
And finally, you now submit your site. to submit your website to multiple search engines I reccommend using submission software, or you can go the slower process, but just as effective and go to the submission page of each search engines. For Google it is: www.google.com.au/addur

Once that is all done you can now sit back for a few weeks and wait and then watch the visitors (and sales) start rolling in to your website!

Author: Chris Bourke is a specialist in graphic design, web development and search engine optimization at Devision Design Australia.

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »