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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SEO and PPC consultant wanted

Published: September 28th, 2009

Due to recent growth, Blueclaw is currently recruiting for two new positions- an SEO Consultant and a PPC/Conversions Consultant. Candidates for either positions would ideally have 2+ years experience in SEO or PPC.  For more information, please see http://econsultancy.com/jobs/ppc-seo-consultant. Please do not hesistate to get in touch at info@blueclaw.co.uk if you are interested in discussing either of these positions- no recruitment agencies please.

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Ever-changing Google.co.uk results

Published: September 25th, 2009

Changes in the Google.co.uk results seem to be becoming ever-more frequent – at first we noticed big changes from one day to the next, then changes from morning to afternoon, now we are seem to be experiencing changes from one minute to the next!

I searched for a term this morning and picked out the site I wanted at the bottom of the first page. Then refreshed and it was at second from top on the second page. Then my colleague searched for the same term and it was on the bottom of the first page in his results.

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Google Jump To Results

Published: September 21st, 2009

Take advantage of better Google results by utilising anchor tags to jump to relevant sections inside your pages.

Google Jump To

Google are trying to send the searcher to the most relevant page for their search by adding Jump to links before the page description. The above shows how it is being utilised on Wordpress results, the jump to link is http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates which is content further down the page, <a name=”Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates” id=”Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates”>.

This seems to be the next step or incarnation of the page sitelinks that were added to Wikipedia and IMDb results last month. The Jump to links only seem to be on authority sites so far such as Wikipedia, Wordpress and IMDb but look out for them being added to sites with more content and less authority.

By carefully planning of your pages and creating structure within your page and HTML you can temp Google to give you a Jump to link on your larger pages, not as good as sitelinks or a double listing but still an extra link in the results.

This update can also be linked to the skip intro link that that was added to some results to allow you to skip Flash intro’s which add no value to a site, proving Google are refining there results to make sure the searcher is given the most relevant results.

So what was deemed by many to be an out-dated if not forgotten technique maybe making a resurgence in the world of search and has Google eased up on the balance of page size / weight / amount of content?

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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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