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SEO: How can you help yourself?
Everything you need to know about SEO is here on this page!
Now as you may be aware there are companys out there that charge hundreds of pounds for Search Engine optimisation (SEO as I will call it from now on). But as a client with CandyFloss Design our goal is for you to manage your own site and with our CMS you can now accomplish yourself what ever a specialilsed SEO company can do.
Difference between search engines
Lets begin
SEO is a long drawn out process with many factors affecting it. There are various different search engines out there and although the principle of the operation is the same they each have seperate algorithims to read the data and sort the search thus variating the results given.
If you want to master the search engines you need to optimise carefully.
One of the basic facts about SEO is that you could do everything that you need in order to try and raise your site through the ranks of the search engines results but it DOES NOT automatically guarantee you top ratings. However if you do neglect the basic rules it willc ertainly affect you.
We need to set some realistic goals now. The likelihood is that you are not going to get to the top spot of your chosen search engine in the near future. So lets try for the top 30 spot for a particular keyword. This will at least help you feel more satisfied with your hard work and effort.
SEO is not advertising! It helps to increase your page rank and where you appear on the search results. SEo is to aim for top placement because of content relevant to the search term not because you have paid.
SEo can be a 15minutes task or a constant activity that you undertake. Sometimes just doing generic SEO to appear high in search results if you have rare keywords not found or searched for often is enough to appear in a satisfying position. More likely is though if you want to be seen anywhere near the top you will have to put the time and effort into it.
So if you are going to go the whole hog or just use basic SEo you need to know how search engines work and which items are important in SEO.
We have a lot to get through, so make yourself a coffee and sit back and enjoy. (Mines with milk and sugar).
How do search engines work?
Search engines are not people. Sorry to state the obvious but that is the case. They cant read a nice picture with your price lists on, or an image of your address, they read text.
Most of the aspects in SEO involve text. This is because search engines read the webpages as chunks of text. This is why SEO is often names copyrighting. Your website will be created with SEO in mind and will have all text based applications. Naturally this is so the spiders can read even the fancy parts of your new website.
Firstly the search engine will CRAWL the web. This is done with software called a spider, or a crawler.
Spiders / Crawlers follow links from one page to another saving all the information, indexing everything that they see on the way.
ASsume that there are 20million webpages out there today, sometimes your website may not be crawled for days, weeks or even months at a time regardless of what you do to it in the meantime. So you just have to be patient and sit tight. No one said this would be a quick task!
After your website has been crawled it will then be indexed in a giant database for retrieval when needed. This is essentially placing your site in the right catagory for keywords used.
After the search engine has been called with a queery it will pull all the pages from its database finding the websites that are relevant to the search.So its very likely that hundreds if not thousands of pages are found, this is when the search engine starts to calculate the relevancy of each page and when the search engine rankings come in.
All engines have different ways of calling results. Each has its own algorithms and relative weights for common factors like meta tags, keywords, link density etc. This is why your search results will never look the same when you use a differetn search engine and type the same queery.
To make things more intresting search engines like to periodically change these algorithms so if you wan to keep on top of SEO you need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is a good reason (other than your competitors) why you should spend permanent efforts into SEO if you would like to be around the top.
Search Engine spider simulator
(Input a website here eg. http://www.yourwebsite.com)
Difference between search engines
There are lots of differences between the major search engines out there. For instance Bing and Yahoo! take on page keywords as primary importance whilst Google inbound links are extremely important, the more your site is linked to by established well ranked sites the more important it must be. Also Google like old established websites, the older the better. Yahoo! however has no expressed preference towards domain names and websites alike. Because of this you may need longer to rise to through the ranks in Google than with Bing and Yahoo!
Your SEO Checklist
Keywords
if you are usure of what keywords are best to use to promote your product, visit the website below and type in what you offer and chose your country from the drop down box. This is a quick and easy way to see what your competiton use and what keywords are favoured.
- Keywordfinder - find related keywords for any search
Keywords in the <title> tag +3
This is the title that appears in the top of your web browser, this will have already been set up for you!
Keywords in the URL +3
These are the keywords in your website address.
Keywords density in the document text +3
These are the keywords in your web page text. 3-7% for main keywords and 1-2% for minor. you do not want to over crowd your page with keywords as it looks like keyword stuffing and you can get penalised for that! So write your content adding your keywords so that you end up with a good percentage. Dont forget secondary keywords! (see below).
Check your website keywords density here.
(Input your website here eg. www.yourwebsite.com)
Keywords in anchor text +3
Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular. example the text that links to your site has one or more keywords in it.
Check the keywords in the links pointing towards your website.
(Input your website here eg. www.yourwebsite.com)
Keywords in headings +3
A place where keywords are important. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword. You can edit this via your CMS.
Keywords in the beginning of a document +2
Also counts but not as much as headings and anchor text. When we say beginning of a document it means the beginning where you can start to edit in your CMS.
Keywords in the ALT text +2
Search engines can not read images so you need the images to be correctly headed. This will be set up already for you so no need to worry about this one.
Keywords in metatags +1
Can be edited via your CFCMS+ under site details (only applies to CFCMS+). This is less and less important these days with Google but Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them.
Keywords Proximity +1
measures how close your keywords are together in the text and then decides how important they are from there. Example would be website design The two keywords are more important when placed next to each other without words between them than if they were a paragraph apart.
Secondary Keywords +1
this can be a fantastic way of getting traffic to your site. Find the keywords that applies to your product or company but are not as widely used and work on them.
Keywords Mistypes 0
If you spell your keywords incorrectly then they are going to be useless to the spiders and crawlers.
Keywords Dilution -2
If you are optimising for too many keywords this can affect your ranking. Your major keywords could get lost in the all others with the spiders not knowing which ones are to be classed as more relevant than others.
Keywords Stuffing -3
Any keyword with other 10% density is classed as spamming or keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from the search engines.
Links - internal, inbound, outbound
Keywords in anchor text +3
Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular. example the text that links to your site has one or more keywords in it.
Check the keywords in the links pointing towards your website.
(Input your website here eg. www.yourwebsite.com)
Origin of inbound links +3
Its not useful having 100 links to your site from low ranked unused websites. (Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.)
Links from similar sites +3
Links from other sites which are similar to yourself is VERY useful! it shows that the competition is voting!
Links from .edu and .gov sites +3
These websites are classed as more reputable than other generic extensions
Number fo backlinks +3
Generally the more backlinks that you have pointing towards your website the better however the reputation of the wesbites is even more important. Correct anchor text is also very important, have your name and even your product in the link text pointing towards you if possible.
Check which websites are linking back to you.
(Input your website here eg. www.yourwebsite.com)
Anchor of internal links +2
this also helps but not as much as the anchor to the external links (links to your website)
Around-the-anchor text +2
The text around your link also matters as it indicates the relevance of the link so its not just a link thrown in.
Age of inbound links +2
The older the link the better it indicates that you are not just buying lots of links.
Links from directories +2
This can be great but it depends which directories. Just getting links in PRO directories is useless and can be classed as link spamming.
Here is a list of some useful directories to place your link.
DMOZ - The most important directory on the web.
InfoServe
Thomson Local
Yell.com
Scoot
Touch Local
City Visitor
A1 web directory.
Amfibi
Net insert
Active search results
info Listings
Genius Find
Acoon
Scrub the web
Entire Web
Search Site
Number of outgoing links to the pages that link to you +1
The less the better, this way your link looks more important.
Many outgoing links -1
try to keep the outbound links down to a minimal, no more than 75 per page!
Outbound links to bad sites -3
Dont get drowned linking to bogus websites and cheap links selling companies. Dont link back to poorly page ranked directories etc. This will hurt your rankings!
Cross-linking -3
Dont cross link, for example have 5 sites and link a-b b-c c-d d-e e-a etc. This looks like link spamming. A reciprocal link is fine though!
<Description> metatag +1
CFCMS+ users can change this in the settings of the CMS. Although metatags are becoming less and less useful, some search engines such as Yahoo! still use them. Use this to add a description of your page.
<Keywords> metatag +1
CFCMS+ users can change this in the settings of the CMS. 10-20 keywords at most, seperated by a comma. This is quote useful for all search engines.
Content
Unique Content +3
Having relevant content which is defferent to other sites is a real booster to your site ranking.
Frequency of content change +3
Changing and adding to the content frequently is very popular, changing only slight parts is also good but not as favoured.
Keyword and Font Size +2
Use your Headings format to emphasize keyords in your titles and pages.
Keywords formatting +2
Bold, italic and underline emphasise certain keywords so use them. (not over the top)
Age of page +2
Recent pages or at least recently updated pages are favoured.
Keywords formatting +3
Bold, italic and underline emphasise certain keywords so use them. (not over the top)