The 10 Rules of Search Engine Optimisation

Often when we meet a new client we are asked about search engine optimisation. We do our best to educate customers that SEO is all about intelligent work and not just adding ad hoc keywords and registering to all directories possible. I’m writing this article to reach to the search engine optimisation customers and to help them to distinguish the amateurs from the pros. Some website design firms will be experts in SEO as well as being skilled designers, but do not assume that this is true.

1: No Top Ranking Guarantees

The only formula to increase your search engine rankings is by sticking to the rules and hard graft. If your SEO promised you “Top rank in the leading search engines in fourteen days” then you should search for a new SEO. There are no shortcuts. High ranking in the natural search results will take time. Hard work is vital, particularly for the content on your site and building links to your web site.

2: Rating is not always the goal

Ask yourself what will a top ranking achieve? Most business sectors are concerned with growing revenue on the internet or repeated web traffic. Ranking for the correct keywords is important There are SEOs who would attempt to display high rankings for keywords that are irrelevant to your business or ones that will not convert into sales.

3: Know your competition

“Rank” is relative position and more so in the SEs natural outcomes. How good you do in the SE result is a result of how much effort you’ve put into evaluating the competition. Evaluate keywords, back links and keyword density. But make sure to never imitate your competitors.

4: Use a search engine friendly design

A search friendly website design is essential for any productive site. Be sure you have search engine friendly domains and don’t use extended URLs with query strings. You should also make sure that your programmers and designers stick to worldwide coding criteria.

5: Choose the right keywords

You must search for the correct keywords prior to targeting. There are tools that can help you with this. It’s crucial to know the number of hits for a keyword in the last a few days, previous month and last six months. One should also check the number of online pages that are targeting this keyword. It’s suggested to begin a campaign with keywords with limited competition and sufficient search volume.

6: Write good articles

Even if your site is technically flawless for search engine crawlers, it will not give you any benefit unless you also fill it with good content. Informative articles result in repeat visitors and increases the probability of sales conversions. Informative articles are factual and attracts the target buyer. The page should have desired action integrated in the articles. You must ensure that the content is fresh. Keep adding and changing the content regularly.

7: Exercise a good hyper linking scheme

You should hyperlink in the correct context within the site and to the additional sites. Use relevant anchor text when linking to internal pages in your site and make sure that there are no dead links.

8: Write separate meta description and keyword tags for each page of your site

Whilst not infuencing the rankings, meta description tags are important because they are used in the search engine results pages to summarise the subject of the website page. Well written meta description tags can increase conversion rates.

9: Add links that point to your website

The most important factor in search engine rankings is the amount and quality of links that you have pointing to your website. Over a period of time, you should be constantly building new links to your website by submitting to website directories, article directories and blog websites.

10: Ask the experts, if you need to.

If you’ve the aptitude there are two ways to learn. Gain knowledge from your own errors and learning form other’s errors. If you have the time and can wait for the online revenue do it yourself. If you wish to get on track now it’s perhaps useful to consult the SEO experts.

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Confessions of A Web Designer

Introduction

When I decided I needed a website for my business I had no idea of the very many processes involved. Like most people, I thought web design meant deciding on the graphics and the look of the pages and then by some magic it would all happen.
I have a friend who is in the business of web design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so I approached him for a quote. As a complete novice who is computer literate up to a point, I was amazed at the depth of initial questioning required to find out exactly what my requirements were.

I had no idea about the various aspects and the structure of the site and I found it mind blowing when I learned about the amount of work involved. So I thought other people would be interested to know more about this complicated process and I have asked my friend to supply the technical information for this article.

Stages in the Process

Target Audience

Before building a website there are important questions to consider. I was asked who would be my potential audience. Who are my customers likely to be? Would they be children, businesses, home owners, sales people, parents or teenagers and so on?

The objective of the website

Then I was asked, what was the purpose of my website? Did I want to sell services on line or use it to market my business and get more leads for possible customers? Maybe I would want to use it as an online brochure to showcase products. Another possibility was to use the website to foster a community so that I was in contact with other like-minded people, with chat rooms, online discussion and being supported by advertising on the site.

I hadn’t quite realised the scope of a website but as I was asked these questions it became clear that a lot of careful thought went into the preparation before building a website.

How to be Found on the Web

One of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Do you want it to be found by Google the main search engine?’ If I did then there was a whole process of establishing Keywords. So finding the best keywords are vital if you want to be found in Google. Generally most users only look at the first page of results so you will also want to promote your website to get on this page for your chosen keywords. By using a keyword research tool you can find the single most popular keyword for your industry.

Your Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is often quite a challenge because every name you initially come up with will almost certainly have been taken. Domain names ending in .com are by far the most popular and internationally recognised; the snag is that it’s very popularity means that the majority of the shorter names have already been registered.
So looking at names with endings such as .net; .co.uk or .info may be able to provide you with the domain name you are after.

We were lucky with the latest Dryzone specific company domain name because we had sought advice about registering it ages ago and got one with the word Dryzone in it, which also happens to be really relevant to our business.When choosing your domain name it is very important to include one or more of your keywords if possible as this can apparently help with search engine rankings. So although the name of your business is the obvious choice for a domain name, it is not necessarily the only option.

Creating a Site Map

As with any project you must have a plan, the better the plan the better the project turns out. A site map for a web site is part of the plan for the site. The importance of creating a site map is to get it clear in your mind of all the pages you will have on your website so you can prepare the content for each page and begin to design the flow through the website, such as when a user adds a product to their basket, then enters their delivery and billing address and makes the credit card payment in the correct order.

The aim is to make the site as simple to use as possible so that there are no barriers to getting into the website. For that reason often user name and passwordz are set for the customer so that they are not put off making a purchase by having to register.
For a non e-commerce site things are simpler with a contact form which allows you to receive enquiries by email without publishing your email address on the website, thus avoiding junk email.Web forms can also validate the information before you receive it, so ensuring that the phone number provided does not contain words, and that the email address is in the correct format, for example. These things may sound very technical to us lay-folk but I assure you everything has to be decided in advance before starting on the construction of the site.

Copy

The next stage is preparing the copy. This is not the design of your website – just the words and visuals you want to have one each of the pages.Having gathered all the previous information you will need to decide what imagery you want to use within the website content. As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words and remains in people’s memory far longer than just words.For each image you could also have a caption, as the caption of an image is the next ‘most read’ words on the page after the page title. Images and their captions need to be clickable. When you click on a picture it should take you to the next stage of the process such as the sale page or placing an enquiry if your website is for lead generation.

Navigation

Another important aspect when building a website is how you want your navigation to work. You can have links within the content of your website, in the text, so there are not just links from the menu. You will need to decide whether the links will open into a new window, retaining your original page open. Next time you go online, you will realise how much thought has gone into the way in which a website works.

Website Design

Finally we come to the design of your website. I asked my SEO friend about the design stage he says it is one of the most difficult stages of the process because it’s subjective.

What one person might like, another person might not like. If you are setting up a website for yourself alone then you will probably have some idea of what you want to see on the site. But if, as so often happens, the website is for a large corporation there will be inputs from many people or departments and you can be sure that they will never all agree!

There are a number of ways to approach web design but ultimately you need to create a design brief for the designer(s) to work from. Look at other websites and your competitor’s websites to find out what you like or dislike. The design brief should give reference to the logo, any existing brand guidelines or schemes and fonts and colour schemes, and should also detail which pages of the website that the designer is being tasked with creating visuals for.

The very best results will be achieved by using a graphic designer, and beware – not all graphic designers are the same. A graphic designer who designs specifically for print is working in a different discipline than a graphic designer who designs for screen and specifically the web. So choose your designer carefully, look at other work that person has done and determine whether or not you like their style.

If you are working in the big time and budget allows, use multiple graphic designers who have all been given the same design brief and request three concept designs from each designer. If the client themselves also do a graphic design, even if it’s a back of the envelope scribble, you will then have 10 concept designs. The next step is to get them all together and select the preferred elements from each design. Then give the work to the preferred graphic designer to work up as the final artwork.

The artwork should be finalised and agreed on by everybody before construction of the site begins.

Production

Finally the preparation has been done and the site is ready to be built. Now for the more technical stuff! You will need to have decided which programming language to use to build the website. There are two main types for developing a website, one is Unix based, and the other is Windows based. Each one has pros and cons. If you are starting from scratch then it probably won’t matter, so you can go with the preference of your professional doing the work. My website is built on the Unix platform (apparently!) which is the same as many of the more well known websites such as Ebay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Also your website hosting must be compatible with the development language with which your website is built.

Accessibility and Compliance

The website has to meet the current standards for website coding and doing so insures that disabled users, such as the visually impaired, can still access the entire website if they are using a Braille web browser.

Website Development

The best way to develop a website is on the web Server where the site is going to live. This way, those involved in reviewing the work can see work in progress and provide comments throughout the development.

Unforeseen items

There are always some things that arise in any project which you suddenly realise you have forgotten, so no matter how well the website designer prepares and asks the right questions, there will always be a last minute change or addition. The main aim is to minimise the number of glitches that might arise because they aren’t calculated in and they could cause extra costs and delays on the date of the web site going live.

Publishing Your New Website

The moment of excitement comes when your site finally is published to the internet and you see the results of all the thought that has gone into the whole process. We put in a lot of work collaborating on the website texts for our new website at http://www.spikedrunningshoes.com with the design agency and when the site went live it was a real feeling of achievement.

Reporting and Monitoring

Once your website is up and running, you will want to know how many people visit your website and from that number how many actually buy the products or place an enquiry. From these statistics you can work out the ratio of visits to sales and gradually make changes to improve the ratios. There are some reliable statistics packages such as Google Analytics or Web-Stat.com which allow you to collect and review website visitor data in near real time. All you need to do this is to have a small block of code inserted into each web page on your site.

Another useful service that Web-stat.com provides is to monitor the website and warn you by email or text message if the site is offline. Google Analytics doesn’t yet provide a comparable uptime monitoring service, maybe they just decided it was too much of a headache as it is an intensive service checking a website every 5 minutes to make sure it is still responding and indeed web-stat do promote this difference as one of their unique selling points but it is pretty hard to compete with free. In fact Google Analytics is not quite free, which makes it an even better marketing decision for Google because sometimes it is harder to give things away for free than it is to sell them! Google Analytics is a free service available to Google AdWords advertisers, you don’t actually have to have any AdWords campaigns running but it will cost you a one-time activation fee of £5 (or similar in your local currency) to open your AdWords account, but once you have done that you can go on to use Google Analytics for as many websites as you like.

Marketing

Once the website is live there are lots of things you can do to market your product or service. The first step is to submit it to the search engines and at the same time write articles, and press releases. Getting links to the site from forums, blogs and other social networking spaces are other options. For more on this subject ask your designer about SEO

Conclusion

Wheww. What an amazing amount of work! I hadn’t realised when I started the process of getting a website up and running, how complicated it all is and how many factors you have to consider before even designing the website. The word web design is really a misnomer, as people often think it’s just about the graphic design on the home page, and the branding of the product. Unless you are a computer buff, most people have no idea how much goes into designing and building a website and the systems that support the work you want it to do. I hope that this article will give readers an understanding and insight into the whole process of website development from start to finish.

Is Article Marketing An Effective Internet Marketing Strategy?

Articles now prove to be a very helpful marketing tool when publicized all over the Internet. It launches your company as a specialist in the industry as you circulate information to the intended audience by means of well-written articles. Then again, a writer should be clever enough not to endorse your website directly, or turning these articles into a sales page. No more than the services from a professional SEO Company as well as their pool of writers is the only way one can be certain about the success of their internet marketing campaign.

The Advantages of Article Marketing

There are lots of advantages which the article marketing services made available:

1. Reliability of the online business – Imparting information by means of articles gives readers the impression that you have vast familiarity about the industry. This builds a good opinion from your readers and raises your brand awareness. Thus, the people will put their complete trust in the services and products that you are offering on your website.

2. Boost in inbound links – the expert SEO company/writer will forward your articles to directories online, a resource box is also provided at the last part of the article which gives details about your online business and sends the readers to your exact website as your website’s link is written in this resource box. Aside from this, there are webmasters out there who gather informative articles from directories and then post it on their own website and at the same time gives appropriate credit to your company for the said article, thus boosting your inbound links.

3. Higher ranking in search engine – While the inbound links of your website continue to rise, this affects the search engine rankings of your site. Plus, the publicity of your articles to other sites from article directories along with social bookmarking sites such as the facebook and digg.com, increase the number of pertinent traffic received by your website, which once more improves its place in SERPs.

Always remember that a well-written, original, and informative article is a must in order to obtain these benefits of article marketing. To view the confirmation of the success of your article marketing campaign, you can just type the title of any of your publicized article in the search engine and then look into the number of results that have come into view. Do this checking after at least a month or two from the date of the article’s publication.

You will see that even if your articles were forwarded to just a few websites by the experts, but the total of websites that publishes them has significantly multiplied. There are even some websites that lists your articles together with your resource box from various other online sources.

In addition, the details of article submission are also supplied by a professional SEO Company. When you take on the reasonably priced SEO services for article writing and syndication, you can go for a certain packages for a small number of articles or get a monthly subscription article service package, you can save a lot of money with these options. So, make your internet marketing business be known and shine, and watch your profits shoot up. 

Article Generating Reviews – Best Article Writing Software

There’s no doubt about it that article marketing is a force to be reckoned with, not only does it give your site a great deal of free exposure and traffic, it delivers a lot of oneway links targeting the keywords for your web site which obviously raises your search engine rankings.

If you’re a affiliate marketer, then you’ll be able to promptly source an affiliate product, pen a few articles and post them to the top article directories linking back to your associate web page to pick up those much deserved commissions.

Nonetheless, there’s a problem if you are trying to bring about a lot of unique articles rapidly, particularly if you don’t have the finances to out source your work.

So what is the alternative? You need masses of unique articles quickly, or you might need to rewrite plr articles that are hidden on your disc drive, you want to get your hands on some effective article generating software, something that will save you masses of time and all the same produce articles that actually make common sense.

You are able to also obtain article software that will turn one article into scores, if not hundreds of related articles at the press of a button, which is known as article spinning software.

But which article software will suit you? There are numerous very good programs and services out there, but there’s a whole lot of totally awful ones that are just a pure waste of time and money.

Get on over to our article writing software review for a indepth review of some of the best article writing software and services available.

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