SEO quick-fix, the DIY style: Part-2

Posted on August 5, 2011 by a_cubed

Hoping that the part-1 of this series has made some sense about what SEO is all about, let’s move on to more granularity now.

We will cover the major aspects of SEO under three broad categories: Content. Code. Links. It will be important here to note that all three of these areas are equally important. One can’t just get away with the best of content but poor code or no links!

Content

  • Find out what is key for you, or key “message” that you want to send out through your website. Borrowing the same example we had in part-1, if you are selling fishing rod, your keyword may become “fishing rod” too. If you want to stress on your own brand along with it and if the name of the brand is “magic anglers” then you can as well consider “magic anglers fishing rod” as your keyword. if it’s made up of a new alloy called “anglerate” which light yet heavy-duty, then yes, by all means, they can get included in the message!
  • In SEO terminology, we call these tags or meta-tags. So when you ask your coder to place meta tags for your website, you include words such as anglerate, light, heavy-duty, fishing rod, magic anglers. You can change their order too depending on which one you want to be more popular.
  • Contrary to what many SEO experts will have you believe, there is no sure-success magic number for keyword density. That is, by just having these words repeated meaninglessly throughout the content of the website doesn’t improve your SEO ranking and in fact can actually harm it. Make it natural. When we review any copywrite, we tend to see if it makes sense and if it flows naturally. If you use 3 paragraphs every page of your website, having them mentioned 4-6 times can be just good enough.
  • Search engines have shown evidence that if one or two main keywords or meta tags appear in the title as early in it as possible, it improves the SEO performance for the site. There is no sure rule of how many words or characters you can/should use in the title but we advise 70-80 characters or 7 to 8 words. Again, try natural. if you sell anglerate magic anglers fishing rods, we will title the website as “Buy magic anglers fishing rods made by light angelrate”. Someone once said: think of a title as a human will read it, not a searchbot!
  • Often overlooked, we have found out that adding a meta description actually improves your site’s SEO performance too. Just write out a 3-sentence gist/description of your website and hand it over to your coder for inclusion as meta description in the HTML. A typical example can be this: that is made up of world-class alloy anglerate that is only made for fishing rods to give the lightness of aluminium yet the strength of steel, your search is just over. Buy anglers magic fishing rods with 100% money back guarantee if it doesn’t satisfy you. We are based out of the lovely Lake District in England and all payments in the website are securely processed by HSBC Bank. You can call our friendly sales staff on 0870 543 9876.” /> . Keep it natural and make it in a way a human can read it. 
  • Finally, when you write the copy, please make sure you have proper headings for your paragraphs (more on this when we cover code), such as, Fishing Rods, Why Anglerate, Buy Safe, and so on. Typically inclusion of a meta in heading has shown to help. Please run it through a spell-check before you publish your content. Mis-spelled or ill-constructed copy will not rank well.

Code

[We appreciate that this section can cause confusion for someone who is not exposed to HTML coding so you can simply discuss the points with your site's developer(s).  Goes without saying that when we develop your websites these things and more are given due attention for your sites to have a better ranking.]

  • You may want the search engines to restrict some pages from indexing or stop indexing links emanating from your pages. Robots.txt  is a file that is used to achieve all this, it’s placed at the web root. You can find more explanation here.
  • Check with your server admin or the coder to see that both www and non-www URLs are pointing to same pages. That is, www.your-domain.com/try-me.htm and your-domain.com/try-me.htm must terminate on the same page!
  • Take a look at how the URLs are on this website. The page where blogged about “Why Web, Then?” is http://a-cubed.co.uk/2011/05/why-web-then/. In SEO world it’s called SEO friendly URLs. Even if you have code-related suffixes you can keep the URLs more meaningful. E.g., your-domain.com/why-use-anglerate-rod.php rather than your-domain.com/prod1.php – makes sense?
  • There is a very powerful HTML tag or attribute called ALT. It is an alternative description for something that the searchbot cannot see/view/read. For example, if you have an image, if you put an ALT for it too, the bot knows what it is for! Not to confuse with the TITLE tag though which should really be used when the image can open on a new window/page.
  • In real life we italicise a word or put it in bold font to catch user’s attention. In the same way if we italicise and bold the keywords through out your content some suggest that searchbots attend to them quicker than usual. Won’t harm anyway even if they don’t at least you know it will catch users’ attention!
  • We talked about headings in the previous section. Your developer should  use at least one H1 tag (heading) in the content. It’s easy for your readers to understand what a paragraph is going to focus on, same way for the searchbots as it tells them what the content is going to describe. Relevance is the key though, no point calling a heading Farmed Salmon when you are actually talking about a fishing rod.
  • XML sitemap has been found to be of excellent value for searchbots to take a glimpse of what is there in your website. Think of “table of content” for a large book and how that may help you understand the structuring of the content in the book, you will get the idea!
  • Get the code and CSS validated by W3C.

Links

  • Internal page-linkings, that is, linking own pages can improve your page rank. It’s like telling the searchbots what other things they should go explore in your website!
  • External page linking, done in moderation from internal pages (avoid this from home page!) to sites of similar relevance, can improve your SEO performance. What we advise is not to use same keywords as you use when you link to the external sites.
  • Check your website for broken links. Your page rank can reduce dramatically if searchbots encounter links on your website that don’t exist!  
  • Contrary to popular belief, use absolute URLs in your internal links rather than relative URLs.  
  • Do not use same content in two mirror sites and link back to each other. At the beginning of the whole SEO journey a lot of SEO-spammers tried that to boost their SEO rankings and searhbbots hate it so much now that they will actually blacklist both the sites now if you they find content is copied.

We hope the above helps you in some ways to understand what SEO is or how it works. As mentioned in our part-1, this blog is intended for the “beginners” in the subject as there are much more complicated pointers in this area and we are more than happy if you want to discuss any of these by calling us.

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SEO quick-fix, the DIY style: Part-1

Posted on August 4, 2011 by a_cubed

Will start with an anecdote. Few months back we were doing a website for a restaurant owner. We built it on WordPress. After we launched it, we had a call from the client – he sounded very worried: “my website wouldn’t open in Google”.

We weren’t sure what he meant by opening “in” Google, so we quickly tried to open the website in a few browsers while he was still on the phone and the site opened fine in all of them. We asked him to explain what exactly he was doing and we were shocked to know that this was how he always opened a website.

His browser’s homepage was set to http://www.google.com/. So whenever he needed to open a website he would type the domain name in the google search box and then click on “Google Search” button. A new site doesn’t come to Google index instantly so when he tried opening his site in the above manner, he didn’t see his website!

Imagine our hardship to make sense of this to an adult, we were telling him that his way of opening a website was wrong, that he should have really tried opening new sites using the address bar of the browser, and the natural conclusion he was perhaps drawing about us was “these guys are now trying to cover up their own mess by telling me I always did something wrong”! Duh!

The point however is that Google will not index your site same day as you go live. It can take a couple of weeks to a few months depending on how the content is written and placed, how good the site’s natural SEO features are and if you are linked from reputed websites. But before we go to the details, for our clients that are absolutely new to the concept of SEO, what is SEO?

SEO is the short for Search Engine Optimisation. Google, Bing and Yahoo are only a few examples of popular search engines. In order for them to “find” your website and “add” it to their search results (the whole process is called “indexing” by their search-robots or searchbots) you will need to optimise the content and code of your website so they spot you easy and find you worth for their audience to serve via their search results. So that in a nutshell is SEO.

It therefore is easy to appreciate that you will need to ethically enhance your content in a way that the search engines can target, assimilate and serve. We say ethically because searchbots are really tired of fake optimisations and are getting smarter to punish such fake sites. If you sell Fishing Rods from your website there is no point optimising it with content on popular fish names like “salmon” or “cod” or “haddock” just in the hope that you will get better hits! It doesn’t serve the purpose of selling rods after all.

So what happens if you have a good SEO strategy? What’s the gain? It means your site comes up before others in the search results. In SEO terms it’s “ranking” or “page rank”. So your target should be to have a higher page rank than others that compete with you so your website comes up before others when someone searches with a word or a phrase or even a sentence!

We hope this goes some way to set the scene. As always please get in touch if you have any question. We appreciate people have varying exposures to this topic and this blog obviously targets the “beginners” so to speak!

In our Part-2 we will discuss what can be done to improve SEO performance of your website. Until then, best wishes from all of us!

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Why “web” then?

Posted on May 31, 2011 by a_cubed

A curious reader wrote to us today complementing us for our post When to approach a web design company? which she found on Google on page one searching for a similar topic and raised some more serious comments about the typical RoI (return on investment) for an SME (small and medium scale enterprise) of the website it launches.

While we will discuss the various tools for calculating the tangible RoI (there will be many benefits which one will struggle to put a value to which should be included too in the calculation – that’s for another day) for your web-investment, here’s a quick ready-reckoner for young businesses to decide if or not “web” is the “way forward” for you.

  • It’s expected, it’s really the norm today. It’s the co-existence of brick-and-mortar and click-and-portal business that gains the most confidence from buyers. Think of it in terms of equipping your business for the competition in the market too, if your competitors have it, it can do your business harm if you don’t have one.
  • Three Cs – Create, Communicate & Collaborate. It goes something like this: when you get a website you create a medium to sell your products and services. It also gives you a platform to communicate in real time to your prospects, customers and suppliers. That’s however not the end of the process. They can communicate back to you too via the same medium, better they can even communicate to each other if you create an open platform like a forum, and that’s when you start a process of collaboration and great ideas start flowing!
  • Web is cost-effective: we came across many who thought of web as a necessary evil (regarding cost of course) but quite the contrary, it’s much more cost-effective. You need less printing of brochures; you can communicate via emails which is less expensive than postal letters; you can make slight changes to web at almost no cost if you run a content management system at the back-end, a domain name costs almost nothing (max 10 USD per year) and so does shared hosting for small to medium scale hostings (for further information check this out). Think of its lifetime too. When you send a printed brochure to a prospect or a customer its lifetime is determined by them throwing it to the bin. With web, they can come back and check you out whenever they want!
  • You can measure it! This is true. With smart technologies such as raw web statistics or more refined Google Analytics tools you can measure exactly how many people are visiting your websites, their demographies as well as geographies, their age group, where they found you (search engines) or even which keywords they searched when they found you. Try gathering such useful customer behavioural data from your non-web communications?
  • Faster. Wider. Cheaper. You can now target your prospects in any geography at any time at a fraction of your marketing cost using the Search Engine Marketing strategies. Just to give you an idea, a click on your advertisement on Google will set you back about 5 pence/cents – sure you never thought you could advertise globally that cheap?
  • It’s 24 X 7. Web is available around the clock. It does the work for you even when you go to bed.
  • Cost Reduction is easily achieved if you have a large workforce on the road as use of web services will reduce many manual tasks in your workflow! Saves you money, time and resources!

Ready to explore more? We are only a mouse click away to help!

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Grab yourself a BARGAIN

Posted on May 24, 2011 by a_cubed

We have teamed up with NameWithUs.com and here are some offers you can enjoy for a limited time. Do note that they have 24X7 local telephone support too. Strongly recommended.

Promotion 1:

Get your domain for £1.22 with any non-domain purchase for the first year

Promotion 2:

5% discount on orders over £25 – enter promo code 5NC25 at checkout

Promotion 3:

10% discount on orders over £50 – enter promo code 50CN10 at checkout

Promotion 4:

15% discount on orders over £100 – enter promo code 100CN15 at checkout.

Honestly, do not know of any other hosting companies giving you more generous offers than this! But hurry though – offers available for a limited time only we are told.

 

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When to approach a web design company?

Posted on May 24, 2011 by a_cubed

We have worked very closely with SME (small and medium scale enterprises) sector and often they come to us and say I need a website and we want you to do it.

Well done, your business needs it for sure, we stamp our confirmation on this without even knowing what your business does. These days having a domain registered for your business is as necessary as getting your business name registered in the company office!

What however makes it very difficult for us is your asking us to do it for you end to end.

It’s your business; no one knows better than you do who your customers are, products and services you sell and the competitors you are up against in the market. Just hiring a web designer won’t do justice unless you sit with them, explain these in great detail and let them then work with you on a design and copywrite.

Here’s a quick start guide for all SME business owners when they want a website for their business; typically this is the sort of thing we will take you through anyway when you approach us.

Plan a plan:

  1. Identify your audience; this helps our designers to conceive a design.
  2. Define the purpose of your site; this will determine if you will need a brochure website or one that can actually sell your services or products online.
  3. Create a brain-dump of what you want to see on the website; better still do a draft for each Web page. We can help you with the copywrite but for us to start from scratch will be no good to your business!
  4. Decide on a launch date and also how frequently you want to update your website. This will also tell us if you will need a static or a CMS (content management system)-backed website.

Take a tech:

Choosing the right technology is important and is generally the next thing we will discuss with you. You will hear a lot of jargons in our industry and unfortunately there are creatures that will sell you a 100-Pounds-a-month Ruby on Rails server for a 6 page static website. For usual brochure or small CMS-backed websites hosting is typically only a couple of Pounds per month so be wise to choose what is right for your needs.

From this point on, when necessary contracts are in place and you are happy to proceed with us, our design team starts working on a few prototypes for your website and thereafter get fully engaged with you in its development.

 

 

 

 

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