Two SEO Top Tips: Making your website rank higher in the search engines

Sometimes finding decent advice about how to rank higher in search engines is like being on an endless treasure hunt: websites contradict each other, suggest different things... I hope the below items help you in some way!

1) Identify your keywords:

When users type their search requirements into a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo!), they will tend not too specific at first - this is mostly because they do not know what they are after.

For example, if they live in London and are looking for Search Engine Optimisation help then they might enter:

London SEO - which results in nearly 14,000,000 possible websites

The first result I found when I searched this search criteria did not seem particularly relevent - not very helpful!

Making search criteria more specific helps bring down the number of results and filters out anything that that might be irrelevent. The user has decided that they would like the services of a search engine optimisation 'company' in London:

London SEO company - which now results in roughly 700,00

The use of the place 'London' ensures search engines make there results much more localised in comparisson to the whole world!

Given the problems with users and searches described above - to make sure you get people visiting your website you need to carefully analyse exactly what your website does, for, promoting and/or services it provides to discover your keywords.

This activity could actually be a very good Team building exercise. Say your company sell vending machines, get a group together and start off with the main theme. In this case it is obvious: a "Vending machine" - remember, don't forget the plural: "Vending machines" next you could state you are company status like so: "Vending machine company". This stems off into an endless wealth of different variations ("Vending operator" or "vending consumables")...


2) Page Layout/Formatting and Navigation:

This section is really all about where you have information on the page, what is looks like and how easy it is to find.

Page layout it a very complicated process. You want to show information in a pleasing way and often what we think is pleasing is the complete opposite for others. What I would suggest is the K.I.S.S strategy of: "Keep it Simple Stupid". Keep the navigation separate, do not have annoying pop-ups that interupt a users' experience of your website and stay away from putting too much text of the screen - chance are that it will not be read in that state - try and simplify it if at all possible.

Titles, Headings, Bullets, Tables are also affected by page layout and where they appear on the page is very important in terms of how much weight they are given by the search engine.

Formatting is how you have highlighted different sections such as whether text is bold/italic/coloured/combinations/fonts... what colours are in place in tables with what boarders and cell sizes.

Navigation is how easy is it to reach all pages of your site. A search engine will measure this from your homepage and a standard rule is that all pages should be accessible within 3 clicks. Another problem that programmers fall into is that they use JavaScript menus. These are invisible to a search engine. If you are insistant on using these then please ensure that you include a smaller, standard HTML text version at the bottom of the screen. The reason for this is that you may have used many of your keywords within your menu structure and this would be pointless unless search engines can see this...

I hoped that clarified these two main sections of Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation.

The Power of Outbound Linking in SEO

For those not familiar with the term; ‘outbound linking’ means placing links on your own site, which point to other websites. We all understand the power of inbound links, which help to classify and raise the search rank of your website in relation to its direct competition, but the power of outbound linking is often overlooked when we set about optimizing our website for search engines.

Just like inbound links, which suggest an individual’s confidence in the quality of content on your website, outbound links allow you to demonstrate your own confidence in the quality of content on a rival’s website. Sounds like a bad idea? Not when you factor in the power of popularity by association. Your website might not be the biggest or the best, but if it’s linking to sites with high page ranks it’ll be significantly easier for search engines to categorize and rank your site based upon the content of the popular sites you are linking to.

You can be even smarter with it too. Say you have a website which sells local groceries by delivery, quietly linking to national super market websites won’t affect your own custom, but it will tell the search engines exactly what type of service you are providing. To the search engine, your service is now associated with national food retail and becomes a priority entry whenever a customer does a search for something like ‘local produce’.

This popularity by association technique can be applied to almost any business; tattoo removal, corporate team building events organisers, car insurance, and so on. The key is to create outbound links to very large websites which provide similar services to the ones you are selling!

Give it a try on your own website! You can set up a page which you either publicise or keep quiet, but be sure to include a good handful of outbound links to relevant or competing websites, see how long it takes before that link page is mysteriously ranked more highly than other relevant pages of your site. You’ll be amazed at the power of outbound linking.

Top Ten Ways To Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

1. Make sure to include a descriptive title on your page. The title of the page should be repeated or included in a relevant way within your site or page.
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3. Your meta keywords should be relevant to your site and used throughout the site. For example, if one of your keywords is “seo london”, you should have relevant articles or paragraphs using this word in your site. A good way to utilize this tag would be to have an article all about SEO London.
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5. Utilize the spider tags such as meta content="all" name="robots". This lets the search engine no that they should crawl your site and the links contained within.
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7. Your meta description should be related to your site content.Key words and phrases in your description should be used throughout your site.
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9. Images, movies, and Flash cannot be read by the search engine without proper description tags. Be sure to include relevant and descriptive “alt” tags on all of your media, so they relate to your content.
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11. Store scripts (such as javascript) externally. These can cause messy searches, so it is better to utilize external script linking.
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13. Link to other relevant and highly rated sites. Generic links such as yahoo.com or google.com will not cause much of a boost to your ranking. Try to find other resources related to your site’s content and link to them.
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15. Try to start a link exchange with related sites. If ranked sites link back to you, this helps your ranking. It is best to contact the admin of these sites and ask if they would like to start a link exchange. But, make sure to live up to your end of the bargain.
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17. Stay under the limits! Some search engines have problems with more than 100 URLs per page and very large sites. Also, some search engines have limits on the number of characters in each meta tag. Research these specific numbers and ensure that your site is within the requirements.
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19. Use a meta tag analyzer to check the relevancy of all of your meta tags. Even free analyzers can do a pretty thorough job of giving you advice based on your current site makeup.

Pay for click vs Organic SEO. What is PPC and how does it compares to Organic optimisation?

In today's modern world, in order to become successful in any business, you have to use the internet to become known. Without doing so, you would not be able succeed as well as if you were to do so. Whether it is joining a PPC company or Organic SEO, using any of these is extremely helpful and beneficial to your business.

PPC stands for "pay per click". The "per click" part stands for the amount of clicks an ad is clicked on during the ads time on a website that accepts ads. This could mean that during someones online session, they were interested in your ad's content and decided to give it a shot and see further details of you announcement. This is a good idea, at least from what I would say in my my opinion. When activating your ad in a pay per click company and deciding to do so, you will not have to pay for every second your ad exists online in cyberspace. You will only have to pay a certain amount depending on the number of clicks your ad received. However, the amount of money that you pay depends on what you decided with the company.

Similar to PPC, there is also SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This also has to do with placing ads on the internet. This is this process of entering your advertising in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, etc. By doing so, the number of visits for your ad increases tremendously for literally millions of people use these on a day to day basis. Meaning that your ad will be seen by millions more by SEO 'ing than if you were to not do so.

You may like on more than the other. Nevertheless, they are both extremely good ways to boost the visit number to your ad, site, business, etc. In addition, you will not have to bother with all those banner stands you need to put up along with your sign. Whichever way you think about... or whichever method you choose, both are a great contribution to boosting those visits!

Using forum posts for seo links

There are many different ways to link build as has been made clear and explored in this blog. People use directory entries, they rent or buy links from private sellers on the internet, they make link exchanges. I would like to take a moment to comment on using forum posts as a link building method.

Forum post firstly are quite easy to do. If you go to a forum where you genuinely have an opinion to share, you can generally make posts quite quickly and easily. If it is in a forum where you understand what is being discussed and you genuinely want to comment, none of your posts will be flagged as spam because you really do have an opinion to share. So how does chatting about things you want to talk about help you build links?

Well, once you have made a certain amount of posts – and this does differ from forum to forum – you are allowed to add signatures. A signature is a sign off that automatically appears at the base of each and every post that you make, and you signature can contain live links. What this means is that you can have a signature that is a sentence containing several live links to sites that you would like to link to. For example, your signature may read “My pages include smart lipo, hair restoration and roller banners.”

What this means is that every time you make a post to a forum, you are in fact plugging your own website! This can work very well.

The main thing you have to watch out for is indexing. Some forum sections are not indexed, and others are indexed but do not stay in the engines for very long. So whilst the links are easy to build, they may not last long enough depending on how long it takes you to write each post.

SEO comments help!

One of the latest link building fads seem to be commenting on peoples blogs. Now personally I think this is a good idea, everyone seems to be a winner, blog want reader, SEO want link from multiple different blogs. Everyones happy. (It does tend to create a whole loads of complete rubbish conversation completely built to get post by hay no victims there)

Comment writing (nearly called it spamming there) need to be done in a very certain way to work. Here are my top tips:

1. Make sure the blog Do Follows the links: recently they has been somethign called the Do follow movement where people are declaring and advertising there blogs as Do follow. This means that they have actually turned off the no follow function on the blogs. These ones are great they will actually be counted in the search engines.
2. Make sure the blog is well indexed: The thing about blogs is the post tend to disappear fairly quickly depending on how frequently they are posted to, so you really want to post on a blog which is going to be index quite depply to make sure that your efforts are not wasted.
   
3. Comment on new posts: don't bother looking for old posts with good PR or anything. Get the new fresh posts as soon as they appear for a number of reasons, firstly your comment will appear at the top this means that their is a much higher chance that generic people will click through, secondly the search engines may not bother to reindex old posts after they have visited a post twice and it doesn't seem to have changed much they probable won't bother to update the index again. These means they will probably not take you link into consideration.
   
4. Look for blog with Comment Luv installed: Why get only one link to your homepage, when you can get a second link to your latest post all together with the anchor text the same as your blog post title. Yes there is a word press plugin that places a permentant deep link to the last blog post you have posted on a blog. This doubles the amount of links you get better links to. Look out for these guys, when they are Do followed too they are gold dust.
   
5. Put some effort into your comments: This may some simple but it's very important, on all these blogs there is a human that you need to get by to get your comment accepted. Read the actual post comment interelectally, ask questions add to the debate. Don't just do 'Wow what great post, check out my blog...' This will get deleted.
   
6. Think about your anchor text: Personally I never use anything but the anchor text that is relevant to the name of the site I'm linking to. this massively increases the chances of the link getting accepted, I storngly recommend you do the same.
   

Having said that all I just want to do a quick mshout out to a couple of my friend in the web world please check out Corporate Team Building and cyst removal. That all for now talk soon guys! Hope this has been some help.

Mince Pies

Christmas. It does not feel Christmassy. Maybe due to the fact that our household has not put up any decorations, yet. Or maybe as I am feeling too cynical about the whole season known as Christmas. But one thing that does get me in the Xmas mood are mince pies. No matter how pre-packaged or how home made they come, everyone loves mince pies. Generous relatives who can actually make them, shops that spit them from a factory or even a bakery that is in the festive spirit.

Of course today was the occasion of the first (two) mince pie(s) of the season and my, it tasted wonderful.

Ho, ho, yum!

The mince pie is a tradition that I absolutely love. And I think anyone who has experienced the British climate in and around December would have to agree. There is nothing more fulfilling that a gently warmed mince pie sinking to the bottom of your stomach topped with cream, caramel or custard. Mmm. Or how about all three for the cholesterol bursting finale of pure joy.


The tastes within the pie itself is a wonder to the palette. Although not very sophisticated, the fact that they are only served once a year makes the mince pie such a sensual dish - an appropriate word for the tastes and textures that hits the tongue.

So enjoy your first mince pies of the Festive Season. Remember that it is good to sin if you are on a diet or going to going to splash out on some Liposuction. After all, with the winds picking up and the nights now filled with frost, that extra layer of ‘cuddle’ is not just comforting for the self but also a vital piece of survival. Well, that’s the way I like to look at it. Enjoy the little delicate pieces of ‘mincemeat’ that fall from the pies as you gobble them up on your way to work. Remember that in a month's time it is back to boring old muffins and croissants. And finally, enjoy the whole aura surrounding the mince pie. For after all, Christmas comes but once a year...