Content

3 ways to take advantage of the Google updates

Published: October 1st, 2009

Google appears to be weighting some factors more heavily since the recent spate of updates – here are three that you need to take advantage of:

1. Make sure you have an onsite blog

Sites with blogs seem to be doing even better in the SERPs following the recent updates. It makes sense that Google would move further in this direction, as if you have a section onsite devoted to regularly updated content then your link strategy will appear more natural – obviously the addition of a blog is more likely to attract links to the site (be it to the blog itself or the homepage). The outcome is greater trust.

2. Make sure you have content on the homepage

Sites that have a reasonable amount of content on the homepage seem to have performed better since the updates. This content is also useful for putting anchor text links into other parts of your sites – by doing this we have noticed that you can have more influence on the ‘sitelinks’ listed in the SERPs (the links to other parts of your site underneath your listing).

3. Make sure you have some form of feed on the site

This (like the other two points) has been known to be beneficial for a long time, though weighting appears to have been altered further towards this factor. Make sure you have a feed, whether it’s a feed of a regularly updated blog, news or an RSS feed. Again this update makes sense – regularly changing content is likely to point towards a higher quality user experience and therefore a higher quality site.

Please list any of your own observations in the comments section.

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Seven Simple Steps to Onsite Optimisation

Published: September 11th, 2009

These seven steps assume you’ve been given a fully finished site to optimise and you don’t have much time! Follow them and you can’t go far wrong.

1. Decide which pages will focus on which terms

This is crucial. Choose no more than a handful of terms per page. I am a believer that landing pages are for SEO as well as PPC (those who disagree can berate me in comment section below). Ensure this strategy does not become confused, with more than one page focusing on exactly the same key phrase – focusing on longer-tailed key phrases is fine though.

2. Alter page titles

Put priority terms at the front end of the title and make sure they are written with word proximity in mind. The closer together the words within the title, the better the effect on the ranking of the phrase combining those words. For example, the title ‘One two three’ is likely to have better rankings for the phrase ‘one two’ than the phrase ‘one three’. Also, phrases that are entered after the first 60-70 characters will be far less effective than those within the first 60-70 characters.

3. Write keyword rich content

Don’t over-do it on the key phrases but make sure there are a couple of each in there. At least 250-300 words on each landing page is best, though every little helps.

4. Ensure there is no duplicate content

Make sure there is only one version of each page – use .htaccess to redirect and robots.txt to exclude where necessary. Ensure identical content isn’t elsewhere on the web with use of Copyscape or simply by copying and pasting the text into Google. Make sure there is only one version of your homepage – Google views http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com/index.html and http://yoursite.com/index.html as 4 different pages. Make sure it knows which one you prefer by using Google Webmaster Tools and the .htaccess file.

5. Insert relevant headings

Make sure there are headings on the page containing the key terms – but also ensure they do not exactly match the page titles.

6. Insert relevant meta tags

Write an interesting 120 character-long meta description mentioning relevant key terms. Ensure that the meta keywords tag does not mention anything that isn’t actually mentioned in the body of your content.

7. Upload sitemaps

Xml sitemap is vital to inform Google about your site structure and URLs. Html sitemap is useful.

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Your site needs content!

Published: July 31st, 2009

Content is king – that’s what they always say. But not many people offer a good explanation as to why – other than the flakey ‘because search engines like it’.

The explanation is simple really. Links determine the quality of your website. If you have lots of (one-way) links then a search engine will determine that you must have a high quality site. In Google, this will give you a high page rank. But content determines the relevancy. If you have loads of links but no content (copy) on your site then the search engine is unable to determine what your site is relevant to. So you will have a high page rank score with Google but you will be unlikely not appear high in the rankings for any of terms that you want.

So – your site needs content!

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Google’s view on unnatural link patterns

Published: July 24th, 2009

We have been involved with an interesting case recently with a retail site that hasn’t been ranking too well. Having conducted an investigation we concluded that the probable reason was because Google had been penalising the site for what looked to be an unnatural linking pattern.

This was because all of the links to the site’s pages contained the same word – an unnatural feature in Google’s eyes, according to our sources. However the site didn’t really have an unnatural link pattern at all – the nature of the site meant that it was hard to link to the site without mentioning that one word; especially since the domain name featured that word. So for example (i’m not going to use the actual website we worked on as I’m not sure I have permission) you have the domain www.multi-coloured-bottles.com and the site focuses on blue bottles, black bottles, green bottles, red bottles etc. How do you link to that site without mentioning the word bottles? Even just providing a standard link (without anchor text) still contains the word.

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Page file size and SEO

Published: July 22nd, 2009

A commonly ignored factor for search engine optimisation is page file size. However, those that do pay attention to it seem to be living in the past – though possibly for good reason.

Some web designers/masters/administrators show complete disregard for any thought about page file size – the result being bloated monstrosities that freeze your browser until you delete your cookies. Their consideration for such details was cast aside when the majority of their target audience started using broadband internet – making download times minute even for goliath 500k + pages.

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