On this page we plan to treat any SEO question that people are asking. Why are we giving away all this information for free? Doubtless it's going to irritate some people who are selling this sort of information. But we know from running our own business that noone has the time to master everything. The information is freely available for all, but do you have the days it would take to learn it all? It's the same with plumbing. There is lots of information out there about how to do plumbing yourself. But when it comes down to it, I'd rather just get a professional in and get it done properly and quickly, rather than me doing a botched job. That is exactly how people are feeling with web marketing too.
We talk about SEF URL's first and foremost in connection with various Content Management Systems (CMS's), that often are configured by default to output long and cryptic URL's like http://www.domain.com/index.php?option=view&content=article&id=55&menu=21. Obviously this is not very easy for a human to digest, but it's not very meaningful for a search engine either. The solution often employed is to rewrite the URL's in such a way that they become a lot more descriptive, like http://www.domain.com/articles/how-to-mow-your-lawn.htm. So if you're using a CMS, SEF is absolutely an advantage.
When you market your website, don't lead everyone to your homepage and let them fend for themselves. Lead them directly to a landing page. A landing page is a page that is optimised specifically to act as the first page the visitors come to after a search or ad campaign targeting specific key words. Say that you have a company page and you have several products, among them gadget C. When you promote your gadget C on the web, giving links, send them straight to a page optimised for the relevant key words. Search engines live by producing search results that are relevant for those who search. So make your landing page as relevant as possible to those keywords you are targeting.
It is not without importance to have one (or even more) of your important keywords in your domain name, but maybe not as important as some will have you believe. If you have two websites that are equally well optimised, and one of them in addition has the keyword in the domain name, then that site will be listed above the other. But it's not worth fretting over if you don't have it. However, if you are planning a site from scratch, it is worth considering, but not at all cost. You may want to keep your domain a bit generic, and possibly use a keyword containing domain for a more specific targeted site for example.
Black hat SEO techniques is a term used for unethical search engine optimisation, which try to fool search engines into rating a page much higher than it normally should do. Among such techniques have been:
Keyword stuffing. The text consists of lots of keywords and becomes strange or comical to the human reader.
Invisible text. For instance white text on white background or black text on black background.
Doorway pages. A page that is never meant to be seen by people, only search engines.
Buying links.
Autogenerate content. Stealing content on other pages, mixing it up and representing it as own content. A variant of this is the spam-blog or 'splog'. Autogenerated blurb is posted on popular blogging sites.
PPC works much like an auctions. So the price will depend on how competitive keywords you are targeting. That's why it can be a good idea to be careful and avoid the most competitive keywords and research phrases that are a bit less common. You need to find a balance. If you're offering too much, you risk paying over the odds, and if you offer too little, you risk your ads simply not running. So keep an eye on the situation and adjust your bid price.
Writing a good adword is an art. You need to get the reader's attention, be concise (you have limited space), accurate, relevant and targeted. You must obey Google's rules for writing adwords, else your ads could be suspended. If you can't come up with good ones yourself, it could be worth paying someone to do it.
Yes, you can. One of the biggest mistakes is to choose the wrong geographical region for your adwords to run in, for example Cambridge, Massachusetts instead of Cambridge, England. Be sure you are targeting the correct area for your business.
Yes, you can choose for what languages the adwords should run, and like for geographical regions, you should only target languages you operate in, otherwise you could waste your money.
You can get a wealth of information and statistics back from Google about your adword campaign. This is to help you adjust your campaign so it can perform even beter. You should take advantage of this information, as failure to do so will result in your campaign not delivering its potential.
A link farm is a site that will put up a link to all member sites, often requiring a link back. The practice was started in order to try to exploit the fact that search engines listed sites with many incoming links higher. However, today the search engines have developed algorithms that identify the link farms, and links from such sites are basically worthless and can even harm your rankings.
Absolutely, if you can. The tooltip is the text that comes up when you hover the mouse over a link that has it. You will not be able to insert the tooltip everywhere, but if you are able to write raw HTML, here is how it works: The tooltip comes from the title attribute of the link. <a href="http://www.somelink.com/" title="copenhagen flowers for all occasions">The link text</a>. Here we can see how the title attribute is used inside the link. This is yet another good place to use keywords.
No, If you do, search engines could start to suspect that you have bought lots of identical backlinks. Get people to link back to you with differnt variations, although keeping to the same theme and using much the same key words and phrases. Say you have a page that you want to target for the three key words "wedding photographer glasgow". You could have backlinks with variations like "wedding photographer in Glasgow","Glasgow's best wedding photographer","photographer for weddings in Glasgow", etc etc
A good title is important both for human readers and search engines. It should contain one or more of the keywords and phrases you are targeting, at the same time as it's engaging. Try to avoid using 'stop' words like a, in, for, but, it, and....basically just filling words. Many search engines just ignore such words. The more proper words you can use, the better.
Keyword density is a meaure for how often a keyword occurs in a text in relation to the length of the text. High keyword density was seen as important, but if it becomes too high, it is fairly obvious to the reader and becomes a bit tedious. Good SEO programs will include keyword density checker. You will get penalised if your keyword density is too high, so the golden rule is: don't go overboard. If it becomes too obvious what keyword you are stuffing in, then you've probably used it too much.
If your target market is the UK, will it make any difference whether your website is hosted in the UK, or in the US or anywhere else for that matter? It looks like it has very little impact. So if you want to host abroad, you can go ahead and do it. It will have a little effect on how fast your site loads, but not much, if any, for your SE ratings.
