SEO for YouTube

Putting video onto YouTube is very simple to do; getting people to watch the video can be a little tricky.

You could help yourself my making your video easier to find through Google or YouTube search, here are some of the techniques you could try to get your video to the top of the rankings.

Remember that YouTube is the second most popular search engine and is owned by Google and they want to ensure that the right videos are shown in results for the right queries.

Video Title

When YouTube first started, the best way to get your video on top of the search results was to stuff your keywords into the Title and Description; things aren't as easy as that anymore, Google takes every effort to ensure that their YouTube search results are as good as their primary search engine results.

The video title is where it all starts - you need to ensure that you have a good, clear Title that has your keywords in it.

Description

Again, in plain English describe your video using your keywords.

If you typed out a script to follow then cut and paste that in here too.

Many site also benefit from having the URL of their website right at the top of the Description – try it out, every single benefit needs to be exploited.

Video Name

Use your keywords actually within the name of the video before you upload it; lots of video production software create default filenames (i.e. MOV0001.AVI), this isn't very informative to Google about what the video is about – “10_Secrets_To_Weightloss.avi” is a little more descriptive!

The viewer of the video will never see this filename, but it does appear that at the moment you upload it to YouTube and it could give you a small relevancy credit.

Engaging Content

YouTube should be seen as any other website, and in that case CONTENT becomes the most important part.

Like any other website, Google gives credit when someone watchers your video, the more of it they watch the more credit they will give you - the basic principle is that if they watch it all then it must be good, so keep your videos entertaining and engaging.

Closed Caption

YouTube provides a Closed Caption (or Subtitle) functionality, as a default it uses voice recognition software to determine what is been said and converts it to text, so when a viewer wants to watch a video with Closed Captions the automated text shows.

Unfortunately it isn't 100% accurate (I've actually never known it more than 50% accurate!).

As Google can't understand the actual content of the video you have made, it uses this Closed Caption information to get an understanding of what the content is about – if it doesn't do a good job on recognising the spoken word then you don’t stand much of a chance of getting credit for the content.

Luckily YouTube provides the ability to amend the Close Caption text – looks for the “CC” button in the bottom right hand corner of your video when you are logged in.

From here you can go through all your scenes correcting the text – remembering to add your keywords of course.

This is probably one of the most important factors and YouTube will always rank better a video that has proper CC than one that hasn't.

Authoritative YouTube Channel

As I mentioned earlier, YouTube is just a like any other website, and like any other website your fresh new channel will not have any authority when you first start out, so Google will need to know about it and you will need links to it.

Ensure that you provide a link to your video or YouTube channel from your website or other social media account.  Also to build authority of your YouTube account you need to undertake a link building campaign just like you probably do for your website.

Social Triggers

Google will take some social engagement triggers to help decide how liked your videos are, if viewers like them, they will Favorite them, Like them and Subscribe to your channel.

The more of these activities that take place, the more respect you’ll get from Google/YouTube and the better your ranking.

If you struggle to get these Social Triggers then drop me an email letting me know what you want to achieve and I can provide a quick quote to get you YouTube Favorites, Likes and Subscribes.


Hope you found this small article insightful, a small comment will always cheer me up :-)

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Twitter doesn’t use Twitter and Facebook social signals to rank pages

Matt Cutts (Google's head of search spam) yesterday explained this in a video (see below) that whilst the Google algorithm doesn’t treat social sites any differently to aid (or otherwise) webpage ranking, where they can they do still crawl and index the page like they do for any other website.

What does this mean in practice for website owners and brand managers that currently undertake social media in order to gain improved rankings? Simply don’t stop what you are doing!

Whilst the fact that you are engaging with your market doesn’t explicitly mean that your rankings will improve, some of this engagement will lead naturally to users taking a look at your site and offerings; this traffic is highly desirable.

The fact that Google does crawl and take notice of social channels does mean that a well crafted and themed channel presence could still rank well in the Google index or be seen as having a good amount of authority and any links back to your webpages become more influential in your own rankings.

In the future think about your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ page as being more of a microsite for your business and brand.

Great content

The learning to take from this video is that we should all continue to do what Google have always recommended and that is we develop great content that visitors will want to read and share through their social channels and other web properties.

Future

There is no doubt that in the future things may change, especially as Google become more adept at understand the value and authority that a particular author may have. If for example Matt himself comments on someone else’s SEO themed blog post then it is unlikely to change anything about their ranking; when Google fully understand that the Matt Cutts who just commented on that blog post has some authority in SEO, then it could affect ranking.

In Summary

Continue to do what you do in Social Media, do not ignore the content, don’t expect great leaps in ranking though your social engagement.

The Full Video

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SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

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Social Media for Ranking

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

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Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

• Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
• Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
• Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
• Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
• Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
• Etc etc

Off Site Factors

• Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
• Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
• Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
• Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

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Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database.  Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use. 

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more. 

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context. 

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings. 

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings! 

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site. 

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this? 

Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right. 

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates. 

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs. 

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve. 

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

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Pay By Results SEO (Risk and Reward)

I've done a lot of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for a lot of businesses in the past, but I rarely know the specific ins and outs of the business that I do the SEO for; I obviously understand the basics – I understand what they are selling and how they prefer to sell it, I understand the market they want to sell into and more importantly I spend time trying to understand the market, but I often don’t know the ins and outs of how they run their business.

The point is I don’t need to know, I only need to know how to get the best from their website, and determine how best to get traffic (the right traffic) to their site; it’s the owner of the businesses role to understand their business end to end; and that’s why businesses sometimes need SEO ‘experts’ (I would never personally class myself as an expert!).

We take away the stress of getting pages to the top search engine rankings; we do the strategic thinking, we look at and determine the best keywords (often in partnership with the business), we then go out to other sites on the world wide web and try to get links back to the clients site (the best way to improve search engine ranking btw).

So when people say, “You don’t need an SEO expert or consultant” – I sometimes think they are wrong; sometimes businesses do need help in this area.

One area where I do agree with these people is that often, these SEO companies are just after your money, they aren't bothered about your ranking – they just want you to pay them a monthly or one-off fee and that’s it.

What businesses do need is an SEO person that understands that they are putting a lot of faith and trust in their site and their brand, and that they do not want to may a lot for no/little results. Payment should only be made if you get A, B, and C pages on the first page of Google (top 10 results) for X, Y and Z keywords. That SEO person is me.

I will only charge you if I get the results that you want. Contact me for more information andrew@andrewscaife.com

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Search Remains First, Social Second For How People Find Websites

In an interesting report by Forrester Research they highlight that the majority of consumers still find websites through natural search (Google, Bing etc) rather than through Social Media (Twitter, Facebook etc); which to those of us that have been around search, SEO and Social Media for more years than we often care to remember doesn't surprise us.

Even the larger Retail businesses who originally set out to capture lots of web traffic from social media have given up on it and instead use social to influence their search engine rankings and thus bring in more traffic through natural search.

Remember that Google loves it when consumers love your brand, in their eyes, if consumers really love your brand then thy probably want to see your in the results when they try searching for you. 

Social channels is a excellent place for Google to try to understand how much love the market has for you, so if you engage with your social media Followers and Friends, Google will pickup this signal and improve your search rankings.

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Panda and Penguin updates from Google

Lets first of all remember that Google simply loves sites that users love, they want us all to create sites that people love to share with their friends, post of social media sites, bookmark and come back to time and time again, so over the coming months Google is planning a number of updates to it Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to help then serve up great sites.

Panda was introduced in 2011 to weed out sites that have a low quality content (scraped or stolen from other sites or just not useful enough); Penguin was rolled out in 2012 to weed out sites that got links from dubious sources (usually link farms, low quality sites/forums/blogs etc).

Panda

Looks like Google is trying to soften the edges of what they class a poor quality site, certainly some sites with little content (mainly because volumes of copy are not necessary) did get hit by Panda, but in the near future Google will be using some new Authority signals to address this.

These changes to the Authority signals routine should improve the ranking for smaller sites that have a single theme, and has a decent number of good authoritative links.  Better for the smaller sites than the big boys.

Penguin

Google learnt a lot from the original Penguin updates and they did manage to find and destroy a lot of spammy sites that did well in rankings because they got their links from link farms and other low quality sites; they now have a deeper understanding of this murky areas of SEO; so with this extra knowledge they are updating their link analysis algorithm to capture more spammy linked sites.

They will also look to reduce the cluster of results from a single domain on page one of their SERPs.

All in all it looks like some good changes for webmasters that just want to create a decent site for their visitors and are not interested in gaming Google.

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Real Basic SEO Tips

10 very basic SEO tips for you today ....

1. Understand what a user might type into a search engine to find your products/services - these are your keywords/keyphrases.
2. ALWAYS use ALT & TITLE TAGS on everything - ensure that your keywords are in these tags.
3. NEVER have a link that reads "click here" or "for more info" the link should read something like "For my tips on SEO click this link" - simply because you need to get a keyword in that link text.
4. Use HTML Tags like H1, H2 etc - these are not only useful from a usability perspective but thet also help search engines prioritise and understand the information on your page.
5. Use Google Webmaster Tools to help understand if Google has any problems with your site. Verify the website and install Google Analytics
6. Add your website to as many search engine indexes as you can
7. Backlinks are important but remember that a backlink from a large, respected website is worth hundreds of backlinks from unknown/low user websites.  So concentrate on popular sites for backlinks.
8. Image names should be present and relevant "picture 1" means nothing, "Picture of the Batman leaping from car." will be indexed by search engines and is useful if anyone tries viewing your site using an audio reader.
9. A sitemap is important for SEO - make sure you have one.
10. Keywords and Meta Tags should be concise and unique on each page - concise means concise!  Limit yourself to no more that about 8-10 keywords

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Are you the Betamax of SEO!

Some things become old hat over time, one moment they have their day and they are good for you, the next, they are definitely bad for you and like the old Betamax videocassette, you really shouldn't be seen dead with them!

Some SEO tactics are now so old fashioned that they will soon start to cause your site problems if you continue use them.

Article Submissions – so very yesterday; there once was a time when submitting an article to a directory could bring you some decent traffic and also be great in the eyes of Google; but those days are now long gone, Google will penalising you for submitting content somewhere in the simple hope of providing a dodgy link back to your site.

Reciprocal Linking and Link Exchanges – a fantastic tactic to use at the turn of the millennium, many sites got lots of links from them and plenty of Google kudos with this tactic, not any more; search engines now detect these links easily and know that your site is simply after cheap, useless links and they won't thank you for it.  If you provide great content, other sites will naturally start linking to it!

Thin Content – providing scant copy on a page just to try to get a few more keywords on your site, is not only a very poor SEO habit (and always was), but also provides absolutely no value to your visitors whatsoever; if you employ this tactic then it is definitely time to move on (after all, we are in the 21st Century now). We already know that great content can drive great links.

Ignoring Design – once upon a time, design didn't matter, you had a site and by hook or by crook, visitors managed to find what they wanted and were somewhat happy! Those times have long gone my friend.

Picture a tatty shop on a typical High Street, dirty windows, paint peeling from the sign, inside the store isn't any better with products placed all over the place, poor internal signage means you can't find what you want and there is no shopkeeper to help you find what you want – chances are you wouldn't enter this shop in the first place, but if you did, I bet you wouldn't want to buy anything from it. 

This High Street shop is like a badly designed website; it's unlikely that anyone would enter a site like this in the first place, but if they did, I'm sure that they wouldn't stay around for long!

Don't settle for or ignore your website design. Your visitors won't!

Summary

Be the Betamax of SEO if you dare; if you do, I can guarantee that Google won't like your site, and if they don't like your site then they won't send anyone your way!

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10 Fabulous Traffic Ideas for your Blog

Blogs are an incredibly popular ways to create an online presence for businesses today; they can be free to set up and you can start creating content almost immediately.

But, is there any point to having great content if no one is ever going to read it, so here are ten ideas to bring traffic in to your blog.

Remember that thousands of blogs have failed over the years; they are like running any type of business in that unless you are willing to put the time in and treat it seriously, you won’t be blogging long.

Most new bloggers really aren’t prepared for the work that goes into creating a successful one. Just building the blog doesn’t mean that people will necessary come to you. You pursue the audience and give them a reason to see what you have to say.

1.         Fresh Content – Apart from the fact that the major search engines love sites to have fresh content, no one wants to visit a blog day after day and see the same posts. You really need to update your blog content at least twice a week. This will be easier if you write several posts ahead of time and upload them at the appropriate times – which is what I do.

2.         Article Marketing – whilst traditional article marketing used to help rank your site better in Google isn’t worthwhile anymore, it is still useful to write some of your articles so that they can be posted on article directory site to help bring in more visitors.

3.         Social Networking – these sites are everywhere. Allowing visitors to share your post via social media (look at addthis.com) and promoting your posts via Tweets etc is a great viral way to help promote your posts.

4.         Viral Marketing – this is where you spread the word about your blog. Talk to friends, family and even strangers. Give out business cards that have your blog address on them.  Add it to your email signature, promote it within forums, talk about it and share it at every opportunity.

5.         Use RSS Feeds – RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Readers can subscribe to your feed and get email updates when your new content is posted. It is an incredibly easy way for them to keep up with your blog.

6.         Submit Blog to Search Engines – a lot of people forget to do this, but submitting your blog to search engine directories will allow it to be ranked in search results. Search engines don’t necessary need you to do this anymore, but it is worth doing.  Please note that submitting your blog to search engines doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get a high ranking.

7.         Joining Forums – as a blogger you are a budding entrepreneur. Your main job is to market yourself and your blog. Become a member of related business forums, work at home forums and others to meet new people and share ideas. Remember that you should add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can easily find you.

8.         Visit other blogs – visit other blogs and leave positive comments; add a link back to your blog in your comments or there is also usually a “website” field that will link your name to your blog automatically.

9.         SEO Marketing – whatever you write, use relevant keywords. Ensure that you mention these keywords enough times throughout your blog posts but not too much; aim for about a five percent keyword density to help search engine rankings  Base your keywords on a research you do to find the most popular words used in search engines for your niche.  If you are unsure about keywords and how to get them into your content correctly then talk to a copywriter.

10.       Social Bookmarking – submitting your posts to social bookmarking sites allows others who are members of those sites that don’t know about your blog to visit you.

Using any of these ideas will start the traffic moving in your direction. It takes time but you will build the readership you want.

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Five Tips to Search Engine Success

Tip 1 – You can’t outsmart Google

It’s a fact that if you try to beat Google by trying the latest way to force your pages into the top of the rankings then you will get found out!  Site owners that were spanked by Google's most recent updates (Penguin or Panda), will testify to the fact that you have to bide your time.

A spammy approach to gaining good ranking will hurt you and your business in the long run.  There is no automated way to the top, no quick win – only and effort will get you there.

Tip 2 – Normal business rules apply

If you owned a ‘bricks and motor’ store then I'm guessing that you wouldn't expect to attract customers for free; the internet is exactly the same, it isn't free nor easy to attract visitors to a website.

Invest time and effort and you’ll do well.

Tip 3 – ensure your site has a good infrastructure

It stands to reason that your site won’t survive for long if it had a poor design.  To get ranked well you need a fast loading site filled with pages with great content and pages that link to all the other pages within your site (needed so that search engines spiders know where all your pages are.)

If you're serious about your website, don't use the cheapest web host or designer. Slow poorly designed pages can influence the rankings of your web pages.

Tip 4 – Take Control

Stop searching for gurus or secret tricks that promise to make your site number one in Google (or any other search engine for that matter), they don’t exist.

Work with a search engine marketing professional, ideally someone who understands business and how search engines work.

With their assistance discover what your unique selling proposition is

Identify your audience and make a plan.

Create a great website with valuable content (if visitors like your site word will get out)

Advertise your site (use SEO, paid advertising, even traditional advertising to promote it)

Step 5 -  Act Now

There is always something is your business that’s more important that promoting your website (or so you think), talk to someone today (talk to me) about improving your search engine rankings.

SEO is not necessarily about getting backlinks. It's also not necessarily about getting high rankings on Google. It is about getting sales. It is about improving your business.

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The 5 myths of Search Engine Optimisation

SEO and SEM is a extremely competitive industry - and there are lots of people out there and many more agencies who promise you the earth when it comes to web site placement in search engines and deliver nothing if you're not careful. We have seen it, we see what they say and we don't like it, it makes us all look bad!

Here's a list of five most common myths and false promises that might not deliver the results promised.

1. Overnight Results

No-one, and we mean absolutely no-one, can guarantee good organic search results within 24 hours for agreed keywords. It's the staple sales message of so many poor SEO agencies out there.

The reality is that Google is pretty slow when it comes to understanding and showing results for new sites - a new site will struggle to rank properly for weeks. In most cases, to achieve anywhere close to a site's full potential will take months of work building good quality links and/or an extremely loyal customer base.

Most of the time, these guys just pick a random (but related) phrase that isn't currently indexed well on Google and get you indexed on that. To show you how simple it is, check out Google for "fuzzyalarmzip"! 

Yay, look at me, not only are we number 1 on Google, but I do not have any other competition either - OK it's true that no-one will ever search for me by using that term, but a poor SEO agency will claim that they have done what they said they would do and demand to be paid!

If they don't use these techniques then they might send your URL to link farms (even Google's own guidelines suggest you do not do this), or they might just SPAM blogs and other social media sites. These two approaches might get you a spike of visitors, but it will not bring you customers; also the Yahoo! and Google algorithms are so advanced that they can spot this activity and are likely to get you banned or delited quickly.

In short, if you want to get traffic to your site (and who deosn't!) - don't look for the quick and dirty fix, there is no instant gratification. Work with an agency that will play the long game instead; take your time and reap the rewards. 

2. Placement Can Be Guaranteed

The same guys that guarantee you overnight listing can also guarantee particular placements - regardless of the competition out there or indeed the quality of your web site. Oh yes they guarantee that you too can take your place on the front page of results.

Again, this is ridicuous, as I hope we now know, it takes time to improve search engine rankings, there is never any guarantee of placement on the first page. It is what we all strive for, and often we do get first page results for many of our clients, but even we can't guarantee it!

You have already seen with our "fuzzyalarmzip" example, easy number 1 positions in Google can be easy for keywords that aren't competitive, but if they don't bring in traffic, what's the point!

Good organic traffic starts slowly and grows with the site.


3. Meta Tags

Even now, nearly a decade after the likes of Altavista, Lycos etc were all the search engines we needed, some SEO consultants still cling to the myth that <meta> tags to boost site rankings.

It has been demonstrated often that the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN etc) will largely ignore the content placed there, and instead rely on the actual content of the page, and the quality of the sites that link to yours.

Whilst they are still of use for search engines, and it is usually worthwhile adding them to your pages, laboring over them as though your site's existence depended upon it is really misguided.

Keyword Stuffing (stuffing lots of keywords into your <meta> tags) will hurt your rankings badly, our advice is to simply list a few of your main keywords and write a short and well-written description, and use those on the <meta> tags.

One place where care should be taken is the <title> tag - this is used very extensively by all the major search engines, and it will prove critical to SEO success. Increasingly, though, the <meta> tags are being left behind, and will most likely lose all meaning in the near future.

In summary, if a real visitor can't see it, then as a general rule of thumb, search engines aren't interested in it!


4. Submitting to Search Engines

'We will submit your site to over 8,000+ search engines'. Does this type of pitch sound familiar to you? Of course it does - site submissions to search engines and directories is bread and butter for your average SEO.

The trouble is, that the search engine market is very much focused on one principal player - Google - and a few subsidiary search markets (MSN, Yahoo are the foremost). These big 3 will probably account for about 99% of all searches to your site - the other 7,997 will barely get a mention in your referrer logs.

I have tried their services, keen to see if they work. It was £100 wasted, and our server logs showed us that all the traffic just came from Google anyway! The other sites never sent us any other visitors!

A good SEO agency will take the time to understand your web site and the behaviours of your potential customers, and then recommend the very best search engines and directories, and then hand submit them - taking time, effort and care in ensuring that the job is done properly.


5. More Links > Good Links

When I first started in SEO, many moon ago, I knew all I need to do was get lots of links from lots of different web sites and I would rank well!

How things have changed. Major players in the maket (like Google) really understand (as we do) that it's not just about getting links, it's about the quality of those links. We know that the importance of ranking well if to provide the web site visitor with a good journey.

Someone looking to buy a car, wouldn't expect to find a link on a care sales web site for computer memory! Neither would we, and neither would the top search engines, so they pretty much ignore these type of links.

The term 'relevancy' in linking is thrown around often and it is sometimes misunderstood, but it essentially means that it is quality links in the relevant sector that contribute far more to search engine rankings than broad quantities of unrelated links. Having bad links will negatively effect your ranking.


Conclusion

SEO is very rarely quick fix, sometimes it is possible to do exactly the right thing in the right way and it's rewarded with a good listing very early, but most of the time it can take months to see really tangible results.

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5 Top Tips for improved search engine ranking

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo! or MSN, etc. isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are our latest tips to help get you started.

Optimise for your Visitors!

It sounds like common sense, but very few businesses actually do it. Many businesses optimise their site for search engines, putting in keywords and phrases that are commonly used in search engines rather than actually researching what customers actually search on.

Search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their search box. If this person searching the internet is typing in search words that relate to what your site actually offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience.

You need to optimise your site to meet their needs. If you don't know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide the relative information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

Research keywords

Research your keyword phrases extensively, and never give up, the smallest of tweaks in the right direction can make a huge difference to your ranking.

The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect.
To find the very best phrases to optimise your site for, use research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or any Google or Yahoo Search Marketing data you can lay your hands on.

Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page.
Never shoot for general keywords such as "parties" or "cars" as they are rarely indicative of what your site is really about.

You are aiming for a list of just ten good keywords or phrases, then start your optimisation.

Labels

It’s great coding too, but remember to label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible.

Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (i.e. the anchor text) to help them understand what they're going to find once they click-through.

Don't make them guess what's at the other end with links that say "click here" or other nondescriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site.

The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes is that you can be as descriptive (and relevant) as you want to be, and try to include some of those keywords too.

Copywriting

Great web site copy is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to get you ranked well on the major search engines.

Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market's needs, and make sure it's copy that the search engines can "see".

This is a crucial component to having a successful web site. The search engines (i.e. Google and Yahoo!) need to read keyword rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site.

This copy shouldn't be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash or as coding comments. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor.

There are no magic number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy, just do not use too many or too few! Try aiming for between 5 percent and 15 percent keyword density and you should be OK.

The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn't going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

Linking

Make sure your site is "link-worthy."

Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimisation campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site's overall link popularity.

You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site is poor, why would anyone want to link to it?

On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without you even asking.

The jury is out on where it is fine or not to simply trade links, the approach of black and white marketing is to get as many one way links for our clients as possible because we know that this is the very best linking approach to take; but it does take time.

When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

Conclusion

There are some things that you can do to your web site to help you get a better search engine ranking, but it takes time (a long time), it's hard work, and lots of people think its boring, I actually enjoy doing it!

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