January 24th, 2008 admin
Well, thought I would write a post on some of the basic ways of improving your search engine rankings overnight(well, not quite). So here goes. Some important basic SEO advice to help drive you up the SERPS. This ones about on-site SEO. I will write another on off-site SEO soon.
- Write great titles
An important attribute of any website in SEO terms in the title tag of each page. Make sure all of your pages have unique title tags and that they are descriptive in
regards to the pages content. Try not to stuff too many keywords in there as don’t forget, these titles show up in the SERPS results and if written well can mean more
clickthroughs. So if I was targeting “Dating UK” and maybe “Online Dating” keywords I could have good title that was both readable by humans and beneficial to the search engines. So the title might read “Online Dating UK - Internet Dating Just Got Easier”. Writing unique titles also helps to avoid keyword canabalization.
Normally you should try to target one search term per page but if you must have more then try to overlap your keywords within the title for maximum effect.
- Canonicalization
Ok, so www.domain.com or domain.com?? Its your choice and doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the search engine or the user, just make sure that you 301 redirect the one you don’t want to use. For example, if i want the search engines to index and rank www.domain.com I would set up a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file so that if anyone types domain.com it will be forwarded to www.domain.com and will show this in the browser address bar.
Why?. Well if you don’t do this, search engines can see both as different sites. This in effect will split page rank and rankings. So be carefull.
- Keyword rich URL’s
Another overlooked aspect of SEO is using keyword rich URL’s in your sites structure. For example, if you have shopping e-commerce site and you sell sports equipment and you are doing a page for baseball stuff, then why not structure your site something like www.domain.com/sports/baseball-equipment.html? This makes a big difference to both users navigation and to the search engines algo and rankings. Don’t beleive me? Then do a search and have a look at your search terms keywords highlighted in the search results in those URL’s.
- Internal Linking
It’s not just about linking from external sites to your own. It’s also about linking internally to your pages from other pages using the correct anchor text. So if you have a page again on our ficticious shopping site and its got other pages on different sports equipment, link to the baseball equipment page from the martial arts equipment page using he anchor text “baseball equipment” or similar, and do this from many pages on your site. These links are all valued by the search engines. It also means that you pages are less likely to suffer from keyword canabalization in the eyes of the search engines as if they do come across one or more pages with the words baseball in them, they will be able to tell which page is the most authoritive for “baseball equipment” etc.
- Keyword Density
Not so much an issue in meta data now but you should be featuring your keywords within your H1-H6 tags. These are not only good for people who scan read pages but is also good for page layout not to mention being valued quite hight by search engines. You should also use your keywords within ALT tags and title= within your a href tags when linking to other pages. You should also make sure that you feature your keywords within the pages copy multiple times. Every little helps.
Well, thats it for now. Happy SEO’ing.
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January 14th, 2008 admin
Google PageRank was invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and is only used by the Google search engine. To some(me included) it can be referred to as the web’s currency.
In its basic sense, Pagerank is the measure of global link popularity and is determined by the amount of links/backlinks that you have pointing to your sites web pages. So in general, the more back links you have pointing to your site, the more pagerank you will have which is a number from 0 to 10. This in itself though is not an accurate statement as you will see further down in this post.
Google has a theory/idea of what they call “the random surfer”. They beleive that If you were to pick a random web surfer and that person was to start at a web page and then click random links on the different pages he/she visited, the likelyhood that they would eventually hit your page is your pagerank. So if you have a page/site with a pagerank of say 9, its very likely that sooner or later the random surfer will hit your website/page.
The reason that I say page/site is that pagerank is awarded to each individual page and not to the site as a whole.
To view your sites Google PageRank you can download the Google toolbar which shows you the pagerank of every site/page you visit.
So now I hear you say. “So how do I get pagerank and do I need it?”
You don’t need pagerank unless you want to sell links on your website. Pagerank will happen naturally as you build more and more backlinks to your website’s pages. For example if you have a link to your mainpage on somebody else’s site if that page that is linking to you has a PR of 6, you and all the other sites that are being linked to will share that pagerank. Obviously its better to get a link from a page that only links to a few external sites than it is to get a link from a page that has hundreds of links on it.
There is a formula for working out pagerank distribution but it is very very technical and I will not go into it here. Just Google for it!
Some people believe that PR is a factor in ranking. Its hard to say for sure but as your pagrank is determined by the amount of links you have to your site, and the more links you have generally means that you will have good rankings, I would say that PR is just an indication is is not in itself a factor.
So there you have it, a brief explanation of Google PageRank. Keep building quality backlinks to your site and your pagerank will increase naturally.
For a detailed description of how Google ranks and index’s pages and of how pagerank works please view their original document The anatomy of a search engine. To me, this document is fascinating and gives you a real insight as to how Brin and Page think and how their search engine has developed since this document was first written.
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January 2nd, 2008 admin
Well 2008 is finally upon us. Its funny how we all have high hopes for ourselves with our new years resolutions and also hopes for a better world to live in for all of us without terrorism, war and killing but year after year these hopes are dashed in one way or another.
If you are one of those who are planning on losing weight or getting fitter in the new year. Don’t give up!! You can do it. Don’ t be one of the many millions of people who do not follow through with their new year resolutions.
All the best and a happy 2008 to all.
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January 1st, 2008 admin
Don’t know about you but I have been working like a dog this year!! Ok, Im cheating of course, we have only just begun this year but I wanted to see if you were still hung over or not?
Ive decided to start playing golf again and am thinking of having a golf holiday on the costa del sol Spain as I lived there for a few years and will give me the opportunity to not only play some golf for a couple of weeks but also will allow me to see some old friends.
I found a good site on the web which deals with Costa del Sol Golf and thought I would give them a call.
I spoke to the owner there(Stuart) who was extremely helpful and knowledgable on the whole golfing scene on the coast. They deal with dozens of courses and are also able to put you up in a number of nice hotels during your stay.
I know that the best time to play golf on the costa del sol is out of season which is around March-May and also Sept-Nov as at other times its either just too damn hot or too wet.
Anyway, thats decided then. Im off to Spain for this years holiday. Anyone for a 4 ball?
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