Tag: Search Engine Optimisation

SEO Through Blogs

Not yet running a blog? Then you’re missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. You guys really need to learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimisation.

Blogs, SEO, and marketing. Blogs should not be just part of an SEO play. They’re a real part of the marketing program. Importantly, they create alternative keyword media. Not just the ones you are chasing, but an opportunity to find new keywords. Allows you to extend the reach of your web communication – its marketing and SEO. Building a community deepens SEO relations. Build business or brand – connect with consumers particularly with products that address a particular issue. Any kind of marketer can enjoy the benefits of Blogs.

Lets get tactical! Things you need to think about “before” you launch. Will it be an official blog? Or a personal blog? Will it sit on a subdomain on the company’s website, or sit on its own and take on a new life. The look and feel – will it before personal, or company branded? Will it be a multi-blogger platform or a lone blogger platform? At Summit Online Marketing we’re very pro multi-person blogs.

Will it sit on WordPress or open source Drupal type platform? There are very good arguments on behalf of each.

The optimisation process – four key steps:

* Customise and optimise the CMS.
* Customise and optimise the RSS feeds.
* Conduct and apply keyword / tag research.
* Socialise the blog and create a community.

Important points

* Tweaking CSS.
* Title tag optimisation.
* Permalinks that show real titles, not the text “permalink”.
* Use a robots.txt.
* Use favicons.
* Sitemaps.
* Widgets/blidgets… stands for “blog widgets” – can be useful.
* Validate, tweak, and stay put.

Use the blog plugins! Every blog CMS has plugins for every activity – sitemaps, 301 redirecting, etc. Then – optimise the feeds. Will there be enough content to populate feed? Don’t want reader to unsubscribe. Here at SEO liverpool we like full text feeds. Increase items in feed from default 10 to 20 if the blog has frequent posts. Decide how to handle multimedia – if you have audio or video. Manage feeds with Feedburner (personal recommendation).

Tips:

* Optimise the RSS feed – use keywords in feed in title tag, less than 100 characters.
* Most readers display feeds alphabetically – helps to be an A or B.
* Write description as if for a directory.
* Use full paths on links and unique URLs.
* Provide email updates.

Process for content production.

1. Write post.
2. Review keyword research list.
3. Include a keyword in the headline.
4. Review the body of the post.

Make socialisation easy for people with buttons. Cross link your blog and website aggressively. Notify other bloggers via comments and emails. Join the blog community.

How to keep your momentum

* Develop a mindset that this is a long term, continuous effort.
* Build a battle plan to maintain quality of blog.
* Use Google Analytics (personal preference) to guide editorial choices.
* Post original material often.
* Weed out comment spam.
* Keep blog fresh.
* Build ‘blidgets’ for social media to drive traffic back to blog.

404 or 301 Your Old Pages? Which is Best For SEO?

We’ve had a bit of a discussion at SEO Liverpool about getting did of multiple subpages & not get penalised. The discussion is around the topics of using different techniques when removing or redirecting pages.

Which is better to do for SEO? Do you want to 301, redirect a page, or 404, return a not found status, a page?

I can tell you that the best SEO companies think about this fairly frequently. At Summit we take different approaches for different sites. I try, try hard, to not think only about SEO and think what would also benefit the user.

Here is my guide:

301 redirect everything you possibly can, when it makes sense. If you have a page about big blue pineapple chairs on the old site and you are moving it to the new site, 100% use a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. However, sometimes it is not that easy.

Sometimes you have a site with hundreds, if not thousands of pages, if not more. Manually redirecting each page is a huge chore. When we can, we set up logic based 301 redirects, to redirect the old URL to the new URL dynamically. That can result in thousands of redirects, but Google should handle those fine over time.

For all the pages that do not match that pattern or logic AND for sites where there is no logic (large, old, non-database driven sites), you want to manually redirect the most important pages. So make sure you have analytics installed on the previous site, way before launching the new site – this way you have the 301 redirects in place, on the most important pages, when you launch.

Then, all other pages, I typically set up a 404 page, returning a valid 404 status code, plus it is set up as a custom 404, so users who land on it, have an avenue to find the right page.

Some people have suggested that sometimes you should think about setting up what is called a “soft” 404 page. Basically, a soft 404 page, is a page that looks like a page not found page, but returns a server status of 200, meaning, the page is valid and active and should not be deleted. The only issue I see with that, is that the URL of the page will be different but the content of the page will be very similar, if not exact, to the other soft 404 pages you set up. Of course, if you are a smart coder, you can look at the Google referrer or the old page’s data and serve up contextual relevant product or content on that page, which would make the page’s content more unique.

So, like I said, it totally depends on the situation and your search engine marketing experience.

More content… really?

Content. At SEO Liverpool we’ve noticed this buzzword in the SEO space has grown to astronomical levels. As I speak with companies on a regular basis, they constantly tell me that they’ve been advised by an online marketing company to write new and unique content by the boatload — no matter the Web site or space they’re in.

It’s time we review the advantages of content, and where it may be applicable. Let’s look at a few sites that will either need heavy amounts of content or little to no content.

These sites need content:

* Affiliate sites, which typically add little to no value by simply copying from others. These sites need a specific value-add, to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

* Sites with heavy amounts of graphics, Flash, video, or any other site that may be difficult for a user requiring a screen-reading program to view.

* E-commerce sites that use a set amount of content from a massive distributor, like Ingram Micro or Tech Data. Each merchant has access to the exact same data — what makes your site different from the rest?

These sites don’t need heavy amounts of SEO-specific content:

* Sites with a large community of content contributors who spend a good portion of their time writing about the topics surrounding the subject matter of each site.

* Sites that generate content on a regular basis, such as news sites or blogs.

Instead of trying to manipulate search engines, consider providing a way for your users, distributors and/or manufacturers to give you unique and well-written content. It’s likely that they have written marketing materials that won’t make it to their standard (and usually expensive) forms of distribution. This content could add a great deal of value to products and/or services that may be offered by many other online dealers with either the same or slightly different data.

When creating content to enhance search engine placement, keep in mind that it can come in multiple forms — services, contests, games, video, and even news . It’s critical that the content is interesting and compelling, so it has the chance of being linked to by a “fan.”

It’s very important that if you offer a special guarantee, such as a price match, you honor it to any possible level. By having complicated terms that make it nearly impossible to use… you’ll wind up upsetting your client base. While you may get links to your site, it will hurt your reputation.

It’s also extremely important to have a “yes we can help” customer service attitude. Your loyal customers can be solicited to come back and write about their experience. This most important feature has helped companies such as eBay and Amazon.

The retail sector, some stores have lost this attitude. In many cases, no matter how small the request, they just say no. You wind up spending an enormous amount of time arguing with them that you’re right.

However, if you buy the same product at a sites like ASOS, with their very friendly customer service attitude, you’ll be satisfied through the entire process and come back to buy more.

7 Proven Tips That Will Get You To Number 1

Some SEO tips from the offices of SEO Liverpool company Summit Online Marketing.

Now everyone has heard that content is king. It’s really all about the text, video, images in a keyword rich environment.

* Tip 1: Get good copy to support the keyword research. If it’s an appliance part – find images and text to support it. Video too.

* Tip 2: Navigation and architecture. Ability to choose structure that the engines can index. Be careful of certain types of Javascript and other non-indexable navigation.

* Tip 3: Blogs. Another form of content. Pictures, text, images served in a slightly different manner. It’s a strategy. You don’t need to use all these strategies to dominate, but in a competitive arena, you need to deploy more and more to compete.

* Tip 4: Quality and keyword rich inbound links. Utilise keywords in link text – avoid using your company name. Helpful resources at Google Webmaster Central, and on the Thinkprofits website. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great tool to measure inbound links. The bottom line is you want links from other websites to your own.

* Tip 5: The database you install is important. Make sure the engines can index the content in your database. It’s well worth the investment to get the right database in place.

* Tip 6: Electronic press releases. There is so much we can do with PR to get sites on Google often within 24 hours.

* Tip 7: Domain name strategy. We do find many people are missing out on this. When the opportunity arises to purchase a keyword rich domain, although not always possible, if the opportunity is there – set it as primary domain. Get extra points for that e.g. LuxuryYachtCharters.com will help rank. Register your domain for a long term, because it may give you more points. Another idea is to register your keyword rich domain, and forward it to your primary site. Also assist in getting more traffic by address bar navigators.

Hope you enjoy these quick search engine optimisation tips