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How The Panda Update Has Changed SEO [INFOGRAPHIC]

Doug — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:00:05 +0000

SEO can be a difficult business at the best of times, but with Google’s recent Panda updates, many people have seen significant drops in their search engine rankings and subsequent website traffic. As a result, many people are looking to improve their online marketing techniques in order to stay on the right side of Google’s algorithm.

So how has the Panda algorithm update changed SEO? How can you alter your SEO campaigns in order to ensure you not only avoid ranking drops, but improve your overall search visibility?

Well now you can find out exactly how to do just that, with a recent infographic published by Custard Media:

Top Tips For Improving Your Site Speed

Steve — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:57:01 +0000

The loading speed of your website is a crucial element to the overall popularity, traffic and subsequent conversions of your site, for numerous different reasons. The speed of a website is an important SEO element, as Google (and other search engines) are reluctant to reward slow-loading sites with high rankings.

So your site speed can affect the amount of traffic your website receives, particularly from search engines, but what about when users reach your website? Research has shown that a significant percentage of people will click away from a website that takes too long to load, with the vast majority of those users never returning to the website after that one negative experience.

Even if a user is patient and waits for your content to load, it’s unlikely that they will wait for every page to load, and if you’re an ecommerce site they’re far more unlikely to trust your site with their credit card details if it’s slow loading.

With such an impact on the perception and usage of your website, you can see why a site with a low speed should be addressed as quickly as possible. So how can we go about improving our site speed? Here are some top tips for doing just that:

1. Find out your current site speed
You’ll need to figure out how fast your site is compared to other websites before you start addressing any potential issues; whilst general checks are a good way to judge generally, a lot of it could be related to your internet connection so you’ll need to use an external tool that can give you far more specific information.

The best tool for this is the site speed section in Google Webmaster Tools, as this is provided by Google and gives you an accurate idea of your site speed compared to the majority of other sites.

2. Combine and externalise CSS files
Your website is far more likely to load quickly if it can reference one external cascading style sheet (CSS), rather than a difference CSS file for each page. Combine them all into one and minimise the source code as much as you can.

3. Compress your content
HTTP compression can be an excellent method for reducing your site speed, as it combines all of your website data into one file, rather than needed to request and reference numerous different files.

4. Optimise your website images
This is an important element in improving your overall site speed and can have a surprisingly notable impact. Different file formats (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, etc) have a varying impact on site speed, with some file extensions causing a substantial increase in file size. Know when to use the correct formats and optimise your images with site speed in mind (for example, GIF files tend to load quicker than JPEG or PNG files).

5. Put your Google Analytics code in the footer or at the bottom
If your GA code is at the top of your HTML document, then the browser will load this information before anything below, giving the impression that the site is loading slowly. Move your GA code to the footer or lower down the HTML body to ensure that browsers load your page content before the analytics, making the page seem much faster to users.

Using Social Media Links To Better Your SEO – An Infographic

Freya — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:26:02 +0000

Search engine optimisation (often referred to as SEO) is a tricky game at the best of times; throw in a new algorithm update and an increased reliance on social media, and it’s extremely easy to quickly find yourself lost.

Two of the major search engines operating in the UK – Google and Bing – have both confirmed that they’re using social media signals as part of their ranking algorithm, meaning you need to start putting a greater emphasis on social media activities during your ongoing SEO campaigns.

So how are social media links considered by search engines? How can they impact on your overall rankings and subsequent organic traffic?

Rather than write an extremely long post on using social media links to better your SEO, I came across the following infographic that explains the whole thing rather well:

Useful SEO Tools and Resources

Doug — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:00:24 +0000

SEO can be a difficult and extremely involved task; it’s particularly time and focus intensive and can often be very frustrating. You need to be able to keep track of your rankings (which can often run into hundreds of keywords), perform backlink checks, ensure your keyword research is accurate, find sources of links, etc. However there are numerous tools, websites and resources – both paid and free – available to help make your life a little easier. So to give you an idea of what’s out there and how you can improve your SEO output, here’s a handful of the more useful tools we’ve come across:

Keyword Research

The most obvious place to go for keyword research is the Google Adwords Keyword tool; which is free and is widely used by SEO’s across the world. You’ll need a Googlemail account to sign in, which will also come in useful when signing up for Analytics and Webmaster tools. The tool is extremely easy to use, but can present misleading information if you’re unsure how to use it correctly.
You can search for as many keyterms as you like, simply seperate each phrase by pressing return. Then click on ‘advanced options’ and ensure you’re searching in the correct country, and that you have ‘ideas containing my keywords’ ticked. You can then click search, and when you’re returned results scroll down the page and you’ll notice a small box on the left of the page with boxes entitled ‘broad’, ‘exact’ and ‘phrase’. Make sure that ‘exact’ is the only one ticked and you’re ready to use the information presented to you.

The accuracy of Google’s keyword tool is currently being debated by SEO’s, but it is the most widely used tool for general keyword research and will give you a good idea of the level of competition and searches per month for each term.

A lesser known tool is the excellent Spy Fu, which allows you not only to complete in-depth keyword research but also allows you to complete research on your competitors. You can find out exactly what they’re ranking for, what PPC keywords they’ve targeted, how their PPC budget has increased or decreased over time as well as a wealth of other information. The main drawback with this service is that it’s quite expensive, with the cheapest UK service coming in at £49.95 per month and rising to £159.95 for both UK and US information. You can use the basic service for free though, so it’s well worth checking out.

Link-Building

Link-building is an integral and ongoing part of the SEO process, which is why there are numerous online tools and software packages available, all designed to increase the success and output of your link-building campaigns.

Guest blogging is one of the most effective SEO link-building techniques, but it can often be tough to find suitable blogs to try and publish your guest posts (particularly ones that will allow you commercial links in the copy or bio). That’s assuming you can write high quality, unique content in the first place. Ideally, you’ll be able to write expert articles in the industry your business is based, although you can always outsource the work to a freelance copywriter if you’re struggling. To help you find suitable blogs to publish your articles, you can make use of a site such as MyBlogGuest, which puts blog owners looking for content in touch with people who have articles to publish.

Another effective approach to link-building is article marketing, which allows you to build considerable numbers of links through ‘spinning’ articles. This refers to the process of producing an original article and then re-writing each sentence in order to produce hundreds of technically unique articles, all with links back to your site. There are quite a few article marketing sites out there, although probably the best ones are Article Ranks, AMA and SEO LinkVine. All of these sites require payment in order to publish articles, although if you’re desperate for a free account you can sign up for one at Free Traffic System.

Blog comment placement is another technique widely utilised by SEO’s; the main issue with this approach however is that is takes time to find blogs with DoFollow comment links. To help with this, you can use Fast Blog Finder, which has both paid and trial versions available.

Checking Rankings

Checking your rankings in the search engines can be a long-winded exercise, particularly if you’re checking them manually. If you are checking each keyword manually in Google, you can make your life a little easier by adding &num=100 to the end of the search URL. This will provide you with 100 results per page rather than 10, making it easier to look through several pages of results quickly. You should also make sure you’re signed out of Googlemail and that you add &pws=0 to the end of the URL too, which will ensure your results aren’t personalised.

There is an excellent website available if you don’t want to scroll through pages of results manually for each keyword; the brilliant SeoSerp. You can only search for one keyword at a time, but the results seem to be fairly accurate.

If you’re looking to track lots of keywords for several different sites, you might want to consider signing up to MyWebPosition, although you’ll need to pay for the service. The site isn’t too expensive however, and allows you easily track huge numbers of keywords for numerous different URL’s.

5 Useful DIY SEO Infographics

Tanya — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:40:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation is a necessary but extremely involved practise, and whilst doing it yourself can save you a lot of money, it’s very easy to get lost in the sea of SEO tactics.

As an art, SEO is constantly changing as major search engines constantly update their algorithms and indexing activity, whilst engineers spend their time trying to decipher how pages are ranked and which approaches are the most successful in terms of increasing rankings for a specific website.

So in order to help with your chances of running a successful DIY SEO campaign, here is a collection of useful SEO infographics:

1. SEO FAQS GUIDE

2. SEO CHECKLIST

3. PAGERANK EXPLAINED

4. THE SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECT

5. SEO VS PPC

Google Search Tips and Tricks

SEO – 10 Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Builds

Doug — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:48:42 +0000

“Ground-Up” SEO – 10 Top Considerations for Search Engine Friendly Web Builds

Implementing SEO recommendations shouldn’t be an after-thought; it should be at the forefront of every web developer or webmaster’s mind. Here guest author PackNet examines some of the most important SEO considerations to make when developing a new website.

Due to unawareness, ignorance or perhaps just lack of consideration when developing new websites, a lot of companies seem to be missing the fundamental basics in terms of search engine optimisation. Implementing search engine friendly ‘best practice’ guidelines is much easier in the initial stages of a project, and even better if they can be done during the development phase.

Features such as page/URL structure shouldn’t be governed by guess work, but should be the result of an in-depth analysis of the opportunities available within a sector. If all new websites took the ‘right’ approach to ensuring the development was done in a search engine friendly manner, then there would be a lot more higher ranking pages for authoritative websites than there currently are.

Below are 10 top SEO considerations to make when developing a new website.

1.Page Structure/Hierarchy – As mentioned above, the structure of a website should not be guess work. Keyword, competitor and industry research should be carried out at the planning stage to understand how users are searching for the data they require, and whether there are any uniformed approaches that you should be taking. Visualise the page structure on paper and then portray this on to the website from the beginning. Having a well-thought out and logical page hierarchy allows the search engines to crawl your content much more efficiently.

2.URL Structure – As with the page structure, considerations have to be given to the structure of the page URLs within a website. For example, a bad URL structure could be:
www.example.com/page/index.php?2312312312

Whereas a much better URL structure would be:

www.example.com/service-type/service
A logical and hierarchical page URL (reflecting the structure) provides both users and search engines with a clear indication of what the content is about. It is also beneficial to include keywords within the URL structure wherever possible.

3.Content Strategy – If you are rebuilding a website, or building it for the first time, then there is a great opportunity to attract a number of users through targeted content which is centred on key phrases (derived from keyword research). Through a content strategy you can understand which pages would benefit most from quality (and quantity) of written content, and can also give you ideas of how to best-cater for visiting users.

4.Internal Linking – A large challenge in optimising a website can be getting all of the content found – especially within larger websites. Links to a website are essentially like ‘votes’, which help to increase the visibility and authority of a specific page – and internal linking works in a similar way. Through the use of internal linking between pages with specific and relevant anchor text, you can boost search engine visibility for each of the core pages on a website.

5.Sitemaps – Sitemaps on websites are a useful way for both search engines and users to see a complete list of all of the pages on a website, especially if there are a lot of them. An XML sitemap should be created and submitted to Google, Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools. The XML sitemap doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to from your actual website (except for the in robots.txt file… which we will cover shortly). Along with an XML sitemap, a HTML (or ‘static’) sitemap should be created and linked to from your website (usually in the website footer). This HTML copy of the website is something that should be styled to fit in with the rest of the website theme, and is a place where users can visit to see a complete list of pages.

To be continued…

Yes, this is the point where we leave you all hanging. Part two in our series of ‘ground-up’ SEO will be available very shortly, including more considerations to make when developing a new website with ‘search engine friendliness’ in mind. In part two, we will be looking deeper into the more specific recommendations for on-page optimisation, to improve search engine rankings and visitor retention.

Author: PackNet – A leading provider of VoIP phone systems and VoIP reseller solutions, and have recently redeveloped their existing website with search engine optimisation fundamentals in mind.

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Get Guaranteed Search Engine Placement in the UK

Brian — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:37:11 +0000

Guaranteed Search Engine Placement for the UK market can be obtained through a combination of Internet marketing SEO services and careful selection of terms targeting your audience. But a good strategy is necessary. Your target audience will be found with the right keywords when you have the right strategy.

Better Guaranteed Search Engine Placement with the following ideas
1: Identification of Audience
2: Design
3: The Write Stuff
4: The Maintain Game

1: Identification

Identifying the type of people that would invest in your company is the first step in developing a solid strategy for the UK market. To properly select and balance keywords, an SEO specialist must know the target group, and that’s a question for you to answer. By doing so, you will ensure that your pages land in the top 10 search engine positions on phrases that are searched for by those who are interested in what you have to offer. It does no good to bring people to a web site that has nothing to do with their interests.

2: The Design

Design a site to be friendly to the major search engines. Even in the PPC market where it’s not a top priority, it makes a difference. Sites that work well with MSN, Google and Yahoo do much better than those that don’t work with those major search engines. For natural placement, this is vital for success.

3: Right Writing

Now that search engines can handle your site, the people have to be able to read it. It is important to establish a good balance between search engine content and content for your viewers. A good SEO company will be able to assist you in this, along with the technical and tracking services you will require meeting long-term goals.

A web site is built on the written word. Remaining competitive in the UK market requires good language and good keywords in order to attract an audience and a Guaranteed Search Engine Placement

4: Maintenance

The last step is maintaining the site. When changes are made the search engines judge their relation to older content. Your strategy must be followed when new content is added.

By utilizing these four aspects, you can achieve the guaranteed search engine placements you desire in the UK and allow you to use the full power of the natural and PPC market to drive sales.

Google becomes user generated

Doug — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:27:38 +0000

Google has provided a unique tool that will let you tweak the search engine ranking positions of sites.

Google’s searchwiki shows up an arrow for promoting your favorite website, a cross for deleting them and a speech bubble for adding your own personal comments. The new scheme which was officially announced at the end of last week is designed to give the global search engine a more personal touch. Google will now let users completely re-shuffle the results in the search engine so their own favorite websites can get top positions and their least favorite websites get deleted all together!

Spokeswoman Marissa Mayer said that while the revisions won’t change the way that Google naturally ranks website they are not ruling out that if it does become really popular then it may change how they shape their search algorithm.

Is this truly the end for SEO?

The Flash approach to SEO?

Doug — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:29:32 +0000

Recently we have discovered that Flash is becoming just as powerful through search engines as html code. Search engine optimization is the one of the most popular subjects when Flash is current in conversation. Does google index my swf file? There are normally three answers to this recurrent question, ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’. Each person will give you a different explanation as to why they think that flash content is indexed or why it isn’t.

However, through our experience working with search engine optimization we have noticed that more and more flash files are becoming more powerful with search engine results. We have run numerous experiments on flash sites and content on the site normally gets cached within Google which is great. Yet there is one area that remains vague for flash and SEO and that is whether Google has the power to index each frame within a swf file. If you know flash then you will know that building a site on the program will require you to use separate frames. On each frame there is content. Does Google have the algorithmic power to index each frame?

Usually we have noted that Flash sites which are spread across numerous html pages are more powerful because it is not asking Google to explore the depths of the swf file. This is only our opinion of course, what do you think??

SEO – Most powerful marketing tool?

Doug — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:19:08 +0000

Results of a new poll have suggested that search engine optimization (seo) will take first place in the ever-growing industry of marketing. The survey was conducted among 400 marketers and about a third of the people said that search engine optimization would be their preferred mode of marketing business online. Pay per click advertising was not that far behind as 26% of the people doing the survey voted for it.

The research carried out elaborates on these findings and displays that marketers realize the strength and potential of online Internet optimization. The pure financial potential of business through the internet cannot be measured.

Advertising online has never been so valued and search engine optimization can change a businesses performance. SEO is surely set to be one of the most influential forms of advertising and marketing.