Free SEO This is your FREE SEO GUIDE in order for you to create a SEO friendly website. Use the advice and tips in this article to better your website. According to a GVU user s survey, 84% of Internet users are using search engines to find websites. Statistics show that if your site does not appear in first three pages of search results, potential customers are very unlikely to find you. Therefore only 4% of searchers go beyond the third page of a search result. That means that 96% of searchers look at the first 3 pages of a search result. It is imperative that your website appears on the first page. The chances are that hundreds or thousands of Internet users per month use search engines to look for what you offer - so achieving a good ranking is a crucial step to maximising your online business. Searchers need to find your website to click on it and search engine optimisation techniques can do that for you. The other eye is us. Your web marketing agency Figures recently released by web monitoring firm Hitwise show that Google continues to dominate the search market in the UK, executing more than three quarters of all British searches. Yahoo powered 8% with MSN and Ask bringing up the rear, each with a 5% share. Therefore these four companies between them control a whopping 93% of the UK search market. This article answers these questions: 1. Meta Tags: they must be enticing for both search engines and visitors? 2. Link Popularity: you must link to as many sites as possible and you find out how many sites are linking to you? 3. Google Page Ranking: How is your overall presence rated by Google? 4. Social Media Likes: an additional ranking methodology by Google? Page 1
About Meta Tags To perform on search engines, a website should contain basic elements called Meta Tags. These tags are not always shown to visitors. They offer information to search engines, effectively allowing you to suggest the search terms you wish to appear against. The most important tag is the TITLE tag. This tag is a great place to put desirable search terms that is visible both to human visitors and search engines so it must be carefully balanced to appeal to both. You can see if your Meta Tags are present by selecting Source from the View menu in Internet Explorer. This shows you the underlying code which forms your site. The three most important tags are detailed below: Title Tag: - Considered as the most important single element to a website Must be concise, enticing and informative to interest search engine users Usually appears as the title of your search engine listings Defines the title of the browser window when viewing your site Defines the name for your site when added to favourites or bookmarked. The title of the webpage is in BLUE. Website owners have 65 characters available to design compelling, attractive and clickable words for their websites. To express the website name in the title of the home page is a waste of SEO real estate as is shown above. This is better. Page 2
Description Tag: Must be enticing and informative to interest search engine users Some search engines use this for the description of your listing A good place to insert your target search terms Keyword Tag: Suggests search terms to some search engines Ideally should include about 25-35 search terms Search terms may contain more than one word Search terms are separated by commas Some repetition of search terms in different forms is desirable Sample Meta Tags. See below for an example of the three main meta tags in their proper format. Meta tags are included in the HTML code which forms your site. <title>uk Online Marketing, Website Promotion, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Promotion</title> <meta name="description" content="offering a free website analysis, website promotion, internet marketing advice, website design, banner campaigns, domains, hosting and more."> <meta name="keywords" content="uk,internet marketing,marketing,meta tag,website,web site,search engine,website promotion,ranking,submission,design,banner,search engine,search engine promotion,search engine submission,website marketing,website submission,online marketing,online promotion,internet promotion"> About Link Popularity When many other websites publish a link to your site, most search engines (including Google) give you a higher profile. If you can provide useful free advice or information on your site, other site owners may even link to you spontaneously. Once these links have been established it is necessary to get them crawled and indexed by Google. It should be Page 3
noted that not all links are equal and that some links are no follow : meaning you get no link juice from them. However, website owners seeking links often invest significant time to negotiate link exchanges with other sites and gradually build their profile. It is of course possible to buy links from sites with a high profile to give yours a temporary boost. The practice of buying links is not recommended. About Google Page Ranking Google keeps a "Page Ranking" score for every individual web page it has indexed. The higher your Page Ranking score (PR) the greater your potential for top positions against any relevant search. Google s PR scale ranges from zero to ten. A PR of zero means the web page is unlisted or even blacklisted, and only a handful of sites worldwide have reached PR 10. Your PR is determined by Google alone and depends on many factors or algorithms. The most important factors are: age of your website, the unique content, the quality and amount of the content, and quality of links to your website from other sites. Building your PR up can be a lengthy process; it can take some time before your PR changes even after you have built up a good base of links. About Your Website As a good practice, and on a regular basis say monthly, we recommend reviewing these tags for your website keywords against what your competitors. Your TITLE is the most important tag used by search engines to index your site and should be readable, enticing and contain popular relevant search terms. It should contain from 6 to 10 words in total, and maximum of 65 characters. Your DESCRIPTION should contain a human readable and enticing description up to 30 or so words, and a maximum of 155 characters. Your KEYWORDS should contain about 25-30 search terms separated by commas only (no spaces), all text should be lower case. Note now Google does not read the Keyword Meta Tags since the beginning 2011 but other search engines do. So complete it. Page 4
Your Content should contain a strong emphasis on keywords. But don t over do it. Whilst writing strong, search engine friendly Meta Tags is an important part of the optimisation process, making sure your chosen keywords are used correctly within the viewable text on your web pages is equally important. Professional search engine optimisation also involves making changes to the code of your website to ensure that search engines are provided with every opportunity to index your site for the correct keywords. Your Link Popularity: You should consider increasing the number of external links to your site in order to improve your Page Rank score. A page ranking of 5 is generally accepted as being the minimum you should achieve in order that your site is seen as a major source of information by search engines. Directory Submissions service may also be helpful to you to increase your page rank. A Blog is also a useful page rank technique for higher rankings. Getting others to comments via your website shows some interaction on social media levels. Get ahead of your competition with Performance Listings With Performance Listings marketing teams and agencies pays search engines to send you quality targeted visitors. Using search terms directly related to your products and services they give you a steady stream of quality visitors for the duration of your contract. By using managed Performance Listings service companies bid on keywords relevant to your site, so that when a user searches for those keywords you appear in the top few listings. This is similar to pay per click campaigns (PPC) and Google Adwords. In 2012 the bids on keywords have increased substantially and you can pay a few US Dollars, British Pounds or Euros for each click to your website for your chosen keyword. You should bear in mind that the average conversion rate is around 1% for a professionally managed Adwords campaign. That means for 100 clicks you might pay 300 USD, GBP or Euros and make 1 sale or a profit of 30 USD, GBP or Euros (this Page 5
depends on your cost structure). You must calculate the cost of clicks versus the profit generated for your particular market space. END Page 6