search engine placement

Gympie SEO Course

This post interrupts our SEO series of articles (they will be continued next time), to bring you a summary of the seminar held in Gympie today.  The “E-Commerce” seminar sponsored by the Dept. of Employment, Economic Devlopment and Innovation was delivered by Peter Dowse of Marketplan and focussed on SEO and delivered good advice on basic search engine optimisation for small busineses.

In a nutshell, this seminar emphasised the importance of:

• selecting the right keywords for your domain name and website content
• having Title and Description metatags for each page and that they include your keywords; and
• continuing to build your website to enhance site value for your potential customers and Google.

To summarise the presentation;

1. You should have your own domain name and website – a single page website in someone else’s website is only really of value to that site owner.
2. Your website should be developed in “Open Source” e.g. standard HTML or WordPress for Content Management Systems (Do not lock yourself into a developer who uses a proprietary system like Microsoft Dotnet as you will have major problems and costs if you need find someone else to help with your website or even change hosting.  Ask your developer what system he uses and whether you can engage others to help you with the site if required)
3. Your domain name should include your main keyword where practicable and it may be worthwhile including a geo-location e.g. a domain name like www.gympiewebsites.com.au informs people that the business is about building website in the Gympie region.
4. Register additional keyword rich domains and redirect these to your website – I strongly disagree with this stategy as various sources write that Google does not index redirected domains. Redirected domains present duplicate content in the index and probably won’t be listed unless the domain owner does more work obtaining backlinks to, and promoting the redirected domain URL.
5. You can use free tools Wordtracker and Google Keyword Tool to identify keywords to develop your website. Google Suggest is also useful for obtaining ideas for new relevant articles to build into your website.
6. Attract customers by using the right keywords in your website contenet – focus on “buyer” keywords rather than broad match keywords e.g. “wordpress website developer in Gympie” instead of  “website designer“
7. Write content to outline benefits (incorporating your kewyords) rather than product features
8. Make your order/contact process easy – have your phone number and email address on each page
9. Search engines look at text and code only – they can’t “read” images, Flash or frames sites.
10. Use keyword anchor text and have “deep” links to internal pages in content
11. Create HTML and XMl sitemaps and submit to Google
12. Title Tag and Description requirements
13. Website success requires work – the addition of new pages (not just updating content on existing pages) will result in more frequesnt searchg engine indexing and better placement in search results
14. Review site statistics to identify search terms p[eople use to find your site (use Google analytics).
15. Use keywords in anchor text for backlinks to your site and internal links in content to other content pages

Conclusion

The presentation gave a reasonable overview of basic SEO steps that a site owner can implement to enhance seach results positioning.  The simple message is identify your market and use keywords they would use to find your website/products in a search engine and then continue adding new pages based on the keywords to your website.  However, the seminar did not cover all on-page factors and page structure but we had this scheduled for our next article which shouldn’t be far away.  It must also be remembered that the presentation was limited to SEO and did not include the more important aspects of Search Engine Placement through website promotion apart from touching on submitting your site to free directories and asking site owners who have mentioned your business for backlinks.  We will cover link building startegies in a later article.

We strongly recommend using WordPress as a content management system for your website as it takes care of a lot of the above issues and makes adding new SEO optimised pages and content easy.  There is some knowledge and work required in setting up the initial wordpress website with optimal plugins but once the site is done, the owner can just login and add a new content within the SEO optimised framework.

Contact us at admin@cooloolabusiness.com if you would like a quote on converting your current website to WordPress.

PS we will continue with the second part of Gympie SEO article series (On page fators and page structure) in the near future and in the meantime, you should check your website against the advice above and make sure your website has individual title and description tags relevant to the content on the respective page.

search engine placement

What is SEO

We have seen many changes in website design practices over the last 10 years and we have seen many new designers enter the market place in recent times.  One thing that hasn't changed is the requirement for good search engine rankings. Without good rankings, especially in Google, a website is not easily found by searchers therefore limiting its success and usefulness. While implementation of good SEO design practice wasn't that critical in the early days, it is now and we have seen new sites published by other designers of late and are somewhat dismayed at the lack of implementation of basic SEO principles in some of these designs.

For unwary site owners, this can mean paying good money for a website that has inbuilt design barriers that limit potential for Google indexing.  What may look good on the surface might have design omissions or worse still, use design practices like frames and iframes (inline frames) that can cause real problems for Google spiders.  To assist those site owners, we would like to provide some basic information on how to check your site for these barriers to proper indexing.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving ranking in search engine results (search engine placement).  SEO seeks to improve the quantity and quality of visitor traffic to your website from "organic" search engines like www.google.com.au (versus SEM – search engine marketing which deals with gaining traffic through paid advertising e.g. banners and Google Adwords).

In this series of articles, we will focus on SEO and organic rankings and leave paid SEM for another series.

In simple terms, SEO practice involves an assessment of how search engines like Google work, what people are searching for and then making changes to a website to increase its relevance for the particular search term (keyword) and ensure that the website can be indexed "crawled" by search engine software known as "spiders"

As you can see, there are a lot of factors that come into play in SEO and the most difficult one is how search engines work. We have a basic understanding of the factors that they use in ranking websites through our membership of Jerry West's SEO Revolution but how these factors are rated in their "algorithms" is kept in absolute secrecy.

The main factors that Google uses in their search ranking process are broken down into on-page factors and off page factors.

The most important on-page factors are:

• Page structure and content – is it visible to Google spiders?  Page content can be blocked inadvertently via a robots.txt file or content may not be available due to the use of frames or have content embedded via the use of an "iframe" or Flash files.  It is hard enough to get rankings, why make it harder due to poor design practice or a lack of knowledge?
   
• DTD Statement – page code should have this Document Type declaration to indicate what coding standard has been used in developing the site.
   
• Content Type – metatag to assign the character set used in the page design
   
• Page metatags – "Title" – the title tag is the most important metatag in your page design code.  This tag is used by most search engines and is usually returned as the title of the Google search result.  There are specific recommended parameters for this code to maximise vlaue in Google indexing.
   
• Page Metagtags – "Description" – this is the 2nd most important tag and assist in where to place a site in the index.   The description is also usually returned in the Google search results as the text description.
   
• Page Metatags – "Keywords" – this tag is not used in ranking factors by Google due to past abuse, however it is still used by Yahoo and Bing and therefore should be included in your page design.

The DTD Statement is included at the top of the page code and Metatag information in the HEAD section of the page code which is not visible to visitors.  There are other metatags but these are not important for SEO purposes.

As they are not visible, most website owners do not know whether they have been included to properly enable Google to crawl and spider your website.

If you have a website, I strongly recommend that you check that these codes are included in your design.  You can do simple checks by:

1. Go to your home page and select View >> View Source from your browser menu.  The top of your page should look something like:

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
   <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   <head>
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
   <title>Your Website Title.</title>
   <meta name="description" content="Your website description.">
   <meta name="keywords" content="your website keywrods separated by commas.">
   </head>

   There is likely that to be additional lines between the <head> and </head> codes but they are not that important for SEO purposes.

   OR
    

2. Use an online checkers that will simulate Google spider software and metatag analyszers.  Visit this site and check your website to see if it has been designed correctly for Google

   http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/index.php

We have also added an online tool here to make it easier to check your site:

Spider Simulator Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

 

If you are having trouble checking your site, we can undertake a free analysis for you – just send an email to Allan on admin@cooloolabusiness.com

Stay tuned for Part 2 – we will look at the other important on page factors (and we might even do a quick site analysis on a couple of other new Websites in Gympie).